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https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/a-smart-light-bulb-running-doom-is-a-pretty-bright-idea/ | A Smart Light Bulb Running Doom Is A Pretty Bright Idea | Dan Maloney | [
"Games"
] | [
"doom",
"ikea",
"QSPI",
"Smart Bulb",
"tradfri"
] | A light bulb might seem like an unlikely platform for gaming, but we’re living in the future now, so anything is possible. And with enough know-how, it turns out that
an RGB light bulb can indeed be modified to run Doom
.
[Ed note: The project pages and video got pulled right when this went to press. Nicola received a takedown notice. We’ll let you know more when we do. The main link has been updated to the Wayback Machine.]
That’s not to say that the Ikea TRÅDFRI light bulb is the only thing [
Nicola Wrachien
] needed to accomplish the hack. But the bulb, specifically
this addressable GU10 RGB LEB bulb
, donated the most critical component, a Silicon Labs MGM210L wireless microcontroller, with enough processing power to run vanilla Doom. Added to the microcontroller was a TFT display, a controller made from a handful of buttons and a shift register, and a few odds and ends to stitch it all together. Some more memory was needed, though, so [Nicola] used an 8 MB QSPI flash memory and a couple of neat tricks to reduce latency and improve bandwidth. There are a lot of neat tricks with this one, but the coolest thing might just be that the whole footprint of the build isn’t that much bigger than the original bulb. Check out the surprisingly smooth gameplay in the video below.
This is a nice addition to the seemingly neverending “Will it Doom?” series. We’ve seen the classic game ported to everything from
a GPS
to
a kitchen “bump bar” computer
and even to
an oscilloscope
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ybybf4tJWw | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356991",
"author": "Gav",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T11:03:51",
"content": "Video unavailable and link to hackaday.io is broken. Shame as I was quite interested in this…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6356995",
"author": "Ex... | 1,760,373,052.902093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/spam-caught-in-a-tin-of-spam/ | Spam Caught, In A Tin Of Spam | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"orangepi",
"Pi-hole",
"spam"
] | We’ve seen many inventive enclosures for single board computers over the years: some are decorative, others utilitarian, and yet more tailored to an application.
This one from [Daniel Hepper] manages to be all three:
a practical enclosure for an OrangePi Zero LTS running the PiHole web spam filter, enclosed in a seemingly unopened Spam tin.
The inspiration came from an out-of-date tin of Spam, a souvenir that had lain around for a decade. It had a paper label that could be carefully removed, after which a Dremel was used to cut an aperture in the reverse of the tin. The tasty-but-expired luncheon meat could then be scooped out, and a 3D-printed carrier for the OrangePi slid in. The label reattached, it looks for all the world like an unopened tin of Spam with a PoE cable emerging from its behind.
The constant war on spam has seen many creative attempts at a solution from within our community, and it’s certain that
PiHole
is one of the better ways to deal with its web-borne variants. It is however
not unknown for a Hackaday scribe to play a part in delivering it
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356977",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T08:49:35",
"content": "In Korea you can buy SPAM with a plastic lid. I got 2 cans just for the lids. In Korea SPAM is a big deal. You can also get a SPAM gift set.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,052.957759 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/z80-family-reunion-discovered-in-old-pos-card-swiper/ | Z80 Family Reunion Discovered In Old PoS Card Swiper | Chris Lott | [
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"card swipe",
"embedded board",
"goodwill",
"vfd",
"z80"
] | [Ben Heck] found an old card-swipe point-of-sale box at the Goodwill store, took it home, and
tore it down to see what was inside
. He found a completely serviceable single board computer based on the Z80. In fact, there’s a whole family of four Z80 chips: the CPU itself, the DART chip (dual UART), the PIO chip (parallel input/output interface), and the CTC chip (counter/timer circuit). That’s not all — there’s a landline telephone modem, a real time clock, 32K of RAM and UV-EPROM. The second PCB of this assembly holds a hefty sixteen-key keypad and a sixteen-character vacuum fluorescent alphanumeric display. All this for the bargain price of $2.99.
Surely [Ben] will dig into the Z80 system in the future, but in this video he tries to make the display work. An OKI Semiconductor controller drives the VFD. After tracking down the data sheet, [Ben] wires it up to an Arduino and writes a quick program. Only a few YouTube minutes later, he conquers the display, drawing sample text anywhere he wants on the screen with any brightness he desires.
You never know
what you may find lurking inside old equipment like this
. You might find a proprietary ASIC with no documentation, or like [Ben] did here, you could find a fully functioning embedded computer. If [Ben] can whip up a RAM-based emulator to replace the 32K UV-EPROM, he’ll have a perfect evaluation board for Z80 projects.
Let us know in the comments if you have found any treasures like this. Also, how would you use this board if you had found it? Thanks to reader [Nikša Barlović] for sending in the tip. | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356941",
"author": "Ethan Dicks",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T05:12:27",
"content": "Found? That credit card terminals use Z-80s isn’t news. CP/M was running on one at VCF Midwest seven years ago.http://randomvariations.com/2014/09/19/cpm-running-on-a-credit-card-terminal/",
"pa... | 1,760,373,053.104492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/smooth-3d-prints-with-alcohol/ | Smooth 3D Prints With Alcohol | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"layer lines",
"polysmooth",
"print smoothing"
] | There was a time when most 3D printers used ABS, which is a great plastic for toughness, but is hard to print with since it tends to warp. Worse still, it stinks and the fumes may be bad for you. Most people have switched over to printing in PLA these days, but one thing you might miss with this more forgiving plastic is vapor smoothing with acetone; a smoothed print doesn’t show layer lines and looks more like plastic part that didn’t go through a nozzle.
[Major Hardware] likes the look of vapor smoothed parts, but doesn’t like working with ABS and acetone fumes,
so he’s started using Polysmooth
. As you can see in the video below, the results look good, but be warned that the filament is relatively pricey. Plus you need to use a $300 machine that atomizes your alcohol into a mist. We feel certain you could do the same thing for less since it appears to just be like a humidifier, but we’d also suggest being careful putting flammable substances in a consumer-grade humidifier and certainly don’t use a vaporizer.
The filament sounds like it is on par with PLA for ease of printing. The material has a higher glass temperature than PLA but less than ABS. The tensile strength and Young’s modulus (a measure of stiffness) numbers are comparable to ABS. Although all smoothing has some imperfections and you probably need to experiment with times and other parameters. The smoothing did fuse some movable joints, so anything that moves or fits together is probably a bad candidate for this process. We’ve also heard that thin-walled parts can get soft in water due to alcohol residue, but you can dry or soak the part clean to avoid that.
If you want to try your own hand at making a mist, this
might get you started
. After all, if it can handle acetone, we imagine alcohol isn’t any worse. While it isn’t as easy to handle as alcohol, we hear the solvents such as THF or ethyl acetate can smooth regular PLA.
Heat guns and open flames
are popular, too. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356916",
"author": "Edward Nardella",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T02:19:54",
"content": "> soak the part clean to avoid thatSoak in what, water? Doesn’t alcohol displace water? Isn’t it used by pros to help dry things!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,053.580203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/friendly-webcam-robot-keeps-an-eye-on-privacy/ | Friendly Webcam Robot Keeps An Eye On Privacy | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"eyeball",
"privacy",
"servo",
"webcam"
] | Wouldn’t it be nice if every webcam had a hardware switch? Especially for those built-in webcams like the one in your laptop. Since they don’t have switches yet, we’re just stuck trying to remember to turn them off or re-apply the sticker after every meeting. [Becky Stern] was tired of trying to remember to blind the all-seeing eye, and
decided to make a robot companion that would do it for her
.
Essentially, a servo-driven, 3D-printed eyelid covers the eye’s iris and also the web cam directly underneath. At first, we though [Becky] had liberated the business parts of a cheap webcam and built it into the eyeball, but this is far less intrusive. The eyeball simply sits atop the monitor, and [Becky] can control the eyelid two ways: she can set a timer with the potentiometer to close it automatically after some number of minutes, or else do it on demand using the momentary button. We’d love to see it tied directly to Zoom and or whatever else [Becky] uses regularly. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break to see it in action.
We love this cute and friendly reminder that the camera could be watching us. It’s way less creepy than
this realistic eyeball webcam that looks around and blinks
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356896",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T23:34:38",
"content": "I don’t know if it’s any better than a piece of tape but it’s a hell of a lot cuter (or is that creepier)! I just want to know where the eyelashes are?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,373,053.047031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/custom-firmware-teaches-usb-relay-board-new-tricks/ | Custom Firmware Teaches USB Relay Board New Tricks | Tom Nardi | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"attiny45",
"custom firmware",
"relay",
"usb"
] | If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to control a few devices from your computer, a cheap USB relay board might be the ideal solution. These are fairly simple gadgets, consisting of little more than a microcontroller and a handful of relays. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement, and as [Michał Słomkowski] recently demonstrated,
flashing these boards with a custom firmware allows the user to modify their default functionality
.
In his case, [Michał] wanted to build a power strip that would cut the power to any devices plugged into it once his computer went to sleep. Unfortunately, he couldn’t just check to see if there was 5 V on the line as his motherboard kept the USB ports powered up all the time. But with some modifications to the relay board’s firmware, he reasoned he should be able to detect if there was any USB activity by watching for the start-of-frame packet that goes out every millisecond when the bus is active.
Wiring up the ATtiny45 for flashing.
Now [Michał] isn’t claiming to be the first person to come up with a custom firmware for one of these boards, in fact,
he credits an existing open source firmware project
as an inspiration for his work. But he did create an entirely
new
GPLv3 firmware for these ATtiny45 powered devices, which includes among other improvements the latest version of V-USB. As it so happens, V-USB includes start-of-frame packet detection out of the box, which made it much easier to implement his activity detection code.
With the new firmware flashed to the relay board’s chip, [Michał] put it in an enclosure and wired up the outlets. But there was still one missing piece of the puzzle. It seems that Linux won’t actually send out the start-of-frame packets unless its actively communicating with a USB device, as part of the so-called “selective suspend” power saving feature. Luckily there is support for disabling this feature for specific devices based on their Vendor/Product ID pair, so after a little udev fiddling, everything was working as expected.
We love custom firmware projects here at Hackaday. Not only do they keep proprietary software out of our devices, but
they often unlock new and expanded capabilities
which
otherwise would be hidden behind artificial paywalls
. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356867",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T21:20:16",
"content": "So Michał decided that they were set up the Hong Wei and needed to be fixed?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6356880",
"author": "Tom Hargrav... | 1,760,373,053.517686 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/digital-x-ray-scanner-teardown-yields-bounty-of-engineering-goodies/ | Digital X-Ray Scanner Teardown Yields Bounty Of Engineering Goodies | Dan Maloney | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"acrylic",
"laser",
"light pipe",
"medical",
"photomultiplier",
"PM",
"Radiography",
"scanner",
"scintillation",
"x-ray"
] | We’ll just go ahead and say it right up front: we love teardowns. Ripping into old gear and seeing how engineers solved problems — or didn’t — is endlessly fascinating, even for everyday devices like printers and radios. But where teardowns really get interesting is when the target is something so odd and so specialized that you wouldn’t normally expect to get a peek at the outside, let alone tramp through its guts.
[Mads Barnkob] happened upon one such item,
a Fujifilm FCR XG-1 digital radiography scanner
. The once expensive and still very heavy piece of medical equipment was sort of a “digital film system” that a practitioner could use to replace the old-fashioned silver-based films used in radiography, without going all-in on a completely new digital X-ray suite. It’s a complex piece of equipment, the engineering of which yields a lot of extremely interesting details.
The video below is the third part of [Mads]’ series, where he zeroes in on the object of his desire: the machine’s photomultiplier tube. The stuff that surrounds the tube, though, is the real star, at least to us; that bent acrylic light pipe alone is worth the price of admission. Previous videos focused on
the laser scanner unit
inside the machine, as well as
the mechatronics needed to transport the imaging plates
and scan them. The video below also shows experiments with the PM tube, which when coupled with a block of scintillating plastic worked as a great radiation detector.
We’ve covered a bit about
the making of X-rays
before, and a few of
the sensors used to detect them
too. We’ve also featured a few interesting X-ray looks inside of tech, from
a Starlink dish
to
knock-off adapters
.
Thanks for the heads up on this one, [Adrian]! | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356837",
"author": "Mads Barnkob",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T19:27:54",
"content": "Thank you very much for featuring some of my work :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6356939",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,053.408376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/building-blocks-relating-mechanical-elements-to-electronic-components/ | Building Blocks: Relating Mechanical Elements To Electronic Components | Adam Zeloof | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"differential equations",
"electronics",
"fundamentals",
"mechanical engineering",
"physics"
] | Ask any electronics hobbyist or professional what the simplest building blocks of electronic circuits are, and they’ll undoubtedly say resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Ask a mechanically-inclined person the same question about their field and the answer will probably be less straightforward. Springs would make the list for sure, but then… hmm. Maybe gears? 80/20 aluminum extrusions?
As it turns out, there are a handful of fundamental building blocks in the mechanisms world, and they’re functionally very similar, and mathematically identical, to the Big Three found in electrical engineering.
Mechanical Equivalents
Before we look at the components themselves, let’s step back a moment and think about voltage and current. Voltage is a potential difference between two points in a circuit, sometimes called electromotive force (EMF). It turns out that EMF is an apt term for it, because it is roughly analogous to, well, force. Voltage describes how “hard” electrons are being “pushed” in a circuit. In much the same vein, current describes the rate of electric charge flow.
Now that we’ve got that squared away, let’s break down what each of the three popular passives actually does, starting with the humble resistor. Resistors convert voltage to current — that is, the
voltage potential across a resistor is proportional to the current flowing through it, and vice versa. To put it in terms we discussed above, the flow of electrons traveling through the element is proportional to the force that it exerts back onto the circuit. It
resists
the flow of electrons by pushing back harder when they flow faster.
There’s a mechanical element that behaves in exactly the same way — the dashpot or damper. A dashpot is often a fluid-filled cylinder with a piston the liquid can flow past, and it pushes back harder the faster it is compressed. Your car suspension has a damper and a spring on each wheel — as you go over bumps, the springs let the car bounce a bit, and the dampers keep it from bouncing forever. The faster the car bounces, the harder the dampers push back. If you didn’t have dampers to dissipate the extra energy, much in the same way resistors dissipate energy in a circuit, you would be in for a rough ride.
Next up is the capacitor. Capacitors store and release energy — a voltage across a capacitor causes it to accumulate charge, which causes the current to drop until the device is fully charged, and the current
has fallen to zero. If the voltage across the element increases, the current will pick back up momentarily as the charge continues, and if the voltage across the element decreases, then the current will reverse, as the capacitor discharges until it reaches equilibrium with the applied voltage. The rate that voltage changes is proportional to the current passing through the device.
Again, let’s think about this mechanically. We have a device that stores energy and pushes back when force is applied, and then releases that energy when the force is removed: a spring! The speed at which a spring is compressed determines the rate at which it’s “push back” increases, until the “push back” is equal to the driving force — just like a charging capacitor. Your car’s shocks are a single-pole RC lowpass filter, but there’s one more element in the system to talk about.
Inductors are kind of the opposite of
capacitors: in a capacitor, the rate of voltage change is proportional to the current, while in an inductor, the rate of current change is proportional to the voltage across the device. Additionally, capacitors store their energy in an electric field, while inductors store their energy in a magnetic field.
Differences aside, the two are quite similar, but inductors are bit more difficult to conceptually reconcile into a mechanical element. What device has an acceleration proportional to applied force? Everything! Everything with mass, that is. Good ‘ol
states that force is proportional to acceleration, so mechanically, an inductor can just be though of as, well, a brick.
It’s a cruel trick of fate that the physical spring, the analog of the capacitor, is drawn the same as the electrical resistor, the analog of the dashpot. Worse, the inductor looks more like a spring than either of them. Make sure you keep them straight.
Time For Some Differential Equations
Now that we have a conceptual understanding of how these elements are related, let’s take a deeper dive into the math behind the components to show that they really do behave identically. If you’re content with the mostly math-free discussion we’ve had so far, feel free to skip ahead to the example below. By convention, we’re going to think about velocity and acceleration as the first and second time derivative of position,
and
.
Looping back to the resistor-dashpot relationship, let’s look at the equations that govern each. The resistor obeys the all-too-familiar relationship:
While the dashpot, relating force and velocity, operates as:
Comparing these formulae, it becomes clear that the resistance
is analogous to the damping factor
.
Taking a glance at the equations that describe the “motion” of capacitors and springs, we can note a similar resemblance. For a capacitor:
And for a spring:
These equations sure do look similar, and much the same as before we can see that the capacitance
is “equivalent” to the reciprocal of the spring constant
. Those of you familiar with springs already may have raised an eyebrow at this one though, since it doesn’t follow the classic form
, but bear with me here. If we solve the differential equation and rearrange a tad, we can put it in a much more comfortable form:
Ah, that’s better, and now the equation even accounts for the initial displacement
.
One more to go! Here’s the differential equation that governs the behavior of an inductor:
And as you’ve come to expect, here’s a suspiciously-similar-looking equation for the motion of a mass:
Which is, of course, the old classic
. Much like before, we can see here that the inductance
has the same effect as the mass
.
Example Time
Now that we’ve defined a bunch of equations, let’s stick them all together in an example! The old classic here is a cart connected to a wall by a spring and a dashpot. We can even take that and model it as an electric circuit. Our example doesn’t show this, but its worth noting that springs in parallel and series behave just like capacitors in parallel and series, and the same goes for dashpots and resistors. Here are our two equivalent models of the system:
Time for some analysis. Much like the Kirchhoff Voltage Law says that the voltages in a closed loop must sum to zero, the forces in a closed system must also balance out. I’ll spare you all of the math, but the equations work out to:
Alright, these look a tad different, but remember when we talk about current, we’re really talking about the rate that charge
is passing by a point. If we rewrite the second equation with that in mind, it’s relationship to the first is much clearer:
Building Blocks
Let’s bring all this math into reality. Are masses, springs, and dampers the building blocks of mechanical engineering? Well everything has mass, so I guess we’ve got that one covered. As for the other two, it really depends.
Personally, I often use springs in my designs, and I’ve yet to use a dashpot anywhere that isn’t a controls problem set from back when I was in school. There are also many different kinds of mechanical engineering. Structural engineers, for example, have a very different idea of what “building blocks” are than what thermal engineers do. Thermal engineers use the idea of “equivalent resistance” in an entirely different way, to describe heat transfer.
For dynamics problems, the mass, spring, and damper are unarguably the core components but there are a ton of other interesting mechanisms and devices out there that are ubiquitous in other subfields of mechanical engineering and design that we can explore in future articles. For now, at least we know how to analyze simple electric circuits by building a mechanical system. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356810",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T17:23:06",
"content": "Physics is physics.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6356813",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T17:43:51",
"content": "Hmmm… ... | 1,760,373,053.166433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/todays-challenge-is-all-about-work-from-home-life/ | Today’s Challenge Is All About Work-From-Home Life | Mike Szczys | [
"contests",
"home hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"work from home"
] | You sure do learn a lot when life suddenly makes it impossible to go into the office and asks that you instead do the same work remotely. Sure, there are the obvious challenges like needing a device to do the work on and an internet connection that’s not going to melt down when family or roommates are trying to Zoom at the same time as you one-on-one with the boss. But there’s way more to it.
The Refresh Work-From-Home Life challenge
takes this on as the next phase of the Hackaday Prize gets under way this morning.
If the global pandemic caused you to find yourself working from home, I’m sure it’s been quite a ride. Maybe you learned what your spine feels like after hunching over a MacBook in bed for 40 hours. Others discovered that the commute had been silently serving as a power-down sequence for your “work brain” — without it you never stopped thinking about, or more likely worrying about, work. And without that change in venue, it’s far too easy to feel like you were now living at work. So let’s invent the things that can make us productive from home while maintaining physical health and preserving our sanity.
Ten entries in this challenge will be awarded with $500 and ushered into the final round where the grand prize of $25,000 and four other top prizes await. What kind of things are we looking for? The best ideas are the ones we haven’t had yet, but I can spitball a bit to get things rolling.
Mirror with a bracket turns a laptop webcam into an overhead project for Zoom classrooms
Furniture and other infrastructure can be a real sore-spot when not a good fit. We’d love to see your design that uses a single sheet of plywood (I know, those cost a bazillion dollars these days but just go with it) to build an adjustable workspace that fits your chair height and needs. Bonus points for one that folds away at quitting time to reassure you that work is done!
Office interruptions from co-works sometimes feel like a distraction. But without them you might not get your body moving for hours on end… not good for you! Design an assistant that watches for your poor sedentary habits and sasses you until you take some time to stretch your old bones. Or show off the gadgets that make living the digital nomad life easier like
the awesome document camera hacks
we saw from teachers when classrooms were closed last year.
Show off your proof of concept by starting a project page on Hackaday.io and using the dropdown in the left sidebar to enter it into the 2021 Hackaday Prize. You can continue to update it until judging begins at the end of July.
We’re already living in the future. Working or learning remotely is a big part of that. Let’s bend our homes and our habits to find a better way to do it!
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356815",
"author": "Home Forever",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T17:48:28",
"content": "The only work at home challenge I have to solve is how to convince the boss to make it permanent.I’m not a natural morning person. Hours are still the same here at home but cutting out the commute me... | 1,760,373,053.457778 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/alexa-bring-me-a-beer/ | Alexa, Bring Me A Beer! | Jenny List | [
"Beer Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"alexa",
"beer",
"beer delivery",
"beer robot"
] | Voice controlled home assistants are the wonder of our age, once you’ve made peace with the privacy concerns of sharing the intimacies of your life with a data centre owned by a massive corporation, anyway. They provide a taste of how the future was supposed to be in those optimistic predictions of decades past: Alexa and Siri can crack jokes, control your lights, answer questions, tell you the news, and so much more.
But for all their electronic conversational perfection, your electronic pals can’t satisfy your most fundamental needs and bring you a beer. This is something [luisengineering] has fixed, an he’s provided the appropriate answer to the question “
Alexa: bring mir ein bier!
“. The video which we’ve also put below the break is in German with YouTube’s automatic closed captions if you want them, but we think you’ll be able to get the point of it if not all his jokes without needing to learn to speak a bit of
Deutsch
.
As he develops his beer-delivery system we begin to appreciate that what might seem to be a relatively straightforward task is anything but. He takes an off-the-shelf robot and gives it a beer-bottle grabber and ice hopper, but the path from fridge to sofa still needs a little work. The eventual solution involves a lot of trial and error, and a black line on the floor for the ‘bot to follow. Finally, his electronic friend can bring him a beer!
We like [Luis]’s entertaining presentational style, and the use of props as microphone stands. We’ll be keeping an eye out for what he does next, and you should too. Meanwhile it may not surprise you that
this is not the first beer-delivery ‘bot we’ve brought you
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356808",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T17:07:20",
"content": "OK. Next language on Duolingo is German. If Alexa delivers beer when commanded in that language, well worth it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "635683... | 1,760,373,053.001548 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/rhisotope-addressing-poaching-by-making-rhinoceros-horns-radioactive/ | Rhisotope: Addressing Poaching By Making Rhinoceros Horns Radioactive | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"poaching",
"Rhinoceros",
"rhisotope",
"wildlife conservation"
] | There is no question that poaching has become an existential threat to the five species of rhinoceros alive today. Even the wildlife reserves where most rhinos live struggle to provide protection from the wanton and cruel poaching of the world’s last remaining rhinos.
Poachers are generally looking to sell the horns which consist of pure keratin, the same material that makes up our fingernails and hair. Rhino horns have seen a big rise in demand the past decades, with a black market in Vietnam representing the
biggest buyers
, primarily for use in fever and other medicines, as well as for processing into carved trinkets. This has contributed to a further rhino population collapse. Statistics from 2017 show about 18,000
white rhinos
and fewer than 5,500
black rhinos
remaining. Recently, the
northern white rhino
population in Africa went effectively extinct with the death of the last known male individual.
Clearly, if we wish to prevent extinction, we need to deal with poaching.
The latest suggestion here is part of the Rhisotope project
. This would make rhino horns radioactive, but how exactly would doing so prevent poaching? Let’s take a look.
Preventing Poaching
A rhino de-horning in progress. No horn means no poaching. (Credit: WildLifeAct.com)
The act of
poaching
is defined as ‘the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals’. In modern day this mostly refers to the illegal killing of endangered species. The driving force behind much of the poaching in African rural areas is that of poverty. With a kilogram of rhino horn valued at around $60,000 on the black market, even if the poacher gets only a fraction of this from a roughly three kilogram horn, it’s still a highly profitable risk to take despite the increasing security in wildlife reserves.
These high stakes have led to an escalating war between well-armed poachers and security forces, tragically leading to deaths on both sides. Poachers who are brought to justice face prison sentences of up to 25 years. An attempt to reduce the demand in 2013 by
literally poison rhino horns
to make consuming them dangerous was ultimately cancelled. So far,
de-horning rhinos
without harming them has been the most effective poached deterrent.
Yet obviously removing the horn from every rhino is not an ideal approach, as they do use their horns for marking their territory and in courtship. Ideally rhinos could keep their horns while also making them unsuitable or impossible to get for buyers in the black market. This is where the Rhisotope project comes into play. Not only will it make the horns easy to track using existing radiation detectors at airports and harbors around the globe, it should not affect the animals themselves.
The Rhisotope Project
In a collaboration between by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (WITS), Russian nuclear energy corporation Rosatom, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), and Colorado State University (CSU) along with international scientists, the Rhisotope project has a number of goals:
Demand reduction and horn devaluation
Education
Community social uplift and investment
Research on rhinos
Despite rhinos having been around longer than humans by a few million years, we still know precious little about these last remnants of Earth’s mega fauna. In order to better protect these animals, scientists from WITS, CSU, and other universities are seeking to learn more about rhino physiology. This will also help the education goal, which seeks to make it easy for teachers and others to incorporate educational programs that teach younger generations about why we need to protect rhinos from extinction.
As a largely poverty-driven problem, fixing the poverty problem should go a long way to reducing the willingness of the local population to poach. To illustrate the scale here, if say a local farmer were to assist in the poaching of a rhino, they might get 10,000 South African Rand for it, which converts to roughly $726 USD. Not a lot, one might think, but for the truly poor, this could mean the difference between slow starvation and living like a king for years.
This then leaves the proverbial elephant in the room, with the first point about horn devaluation. While local poachers are part of the problem, there is an international network of crime organizations and black market trading that involves not only rhino horns and elephant tusks, but also other illegal and highly profitable goods. The idea is to make rhino horns unattractive for these organizations, thus reducing demand.
This is where the radioactive isotopes come into play.
From Criminal to Terrorist
Stable isotopes being injected into the horn of a rhino. (Credit: Rhisotope project)
As detailed on the
Rhisotope project Facebook page
, the first steps towards injecting radioactive isotopes (radioisotopes) into rhino horns have commenced, with the injection with first stable isotopes. The goal of this is to see how these materials behave when in the horn.
As a research project, it brings together the expertise and know-how from both wildlife experts and experts on radioisotopes to answer a few basic questions:
How stable is any isotope in a rhino horn?
Which radioisotope might be most suitable?
How can it scale from a handful of rhinos to tens of thousands?
The radiation from these would not be enough to cause any harm to the animal. But smuggling the horn through illicit channels becomes immensely more difficult as the tell-tale radioactive signature would be hard to hide.
Presumably the radioisotope that would be picked would be a Gamma or Beta emitter, as these are significantly harder to block than Alpha (large helium atoms) radiation. This radiation would make the horn, and any shipping container it would be placed into, light up light a Christmas tree on any of the radiation detectors used at borders and ports around the world.
Essentially this would make smuggling these radioactive horns as appealing as smuggling enriched uranium or plutonium through checkpoints. Checks for radioactive material has become much more intense since the 2001 terrorist attack in the US as detailed in this
PDF document
from 2002 by Interpol, Europol and the IAEA on the detection of radioactive material at borders.
No Simple Solution
Solving the problem of poaching is not easy. While the multiple targets of the Rhisotope projects should give it a pretty good shot at fixing a lot of the problems at hand, ultimately we’re talking about tackling both poverty and international criminal organizations. Neither of these are problems that are new, let alone easy to solve.
Perhaps the idea of strapping the radioisotope equivalent of a GPS tracker to every single rhino horn will make smuggling them unattractive. But it’s something that is incredibly hard to predict.
The demand for horns seems to be increasing. When The Conversation
asked people in Vietnam
about buying and using rhino horn-based products, it was quite clear that current approaches to deter people from buying these products aren’t effective. In general, the buyers did not care about the plight of rhinos, nor did they buy into the fact that consuming rhino horn is as medicinal as gnawing on your own fingernails. To them, the luxury status and general benefit of these products are larger than those facts.
Time is Running Out
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the Rhisotope project is that it may be our last attempt at saving these animals from extinction. With experts predicting a whole-scale African rhino population collapse within a decade, this is not an issue where we can check back in a couple of years to see whether things have gotten better. This means not only dealing with poaching, but also finding ways in which human and other animal populations can peacefully co-exist.
Rhinos find themselves running out of habitat, and threatened by poachers as well as trophy hunters. It might only be a matter of years before we find ourselves saying not only farewell to the last rhino, but also the
last African elephant
, the
last giraffe
, and many other iconic animals.
For today’s generations, this might be the moment where one has to think about what to tell one’s children and grand-children when asked why we let all of these animals go extinct. We may have years, maybe decades at most, but looking at the plummeting population numbers there can be no mistake that extinction is inevitable for these species unless we act today.
(
Heading image:
Dr. William Fowlds comforting a rhino as part of the Rhisotope project. Credit: Rhisotope project) | 52 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356769",
"author": "Todd3465",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T14:26:06",
"content": "“Presumably the radioisotope that would be picked would be a Gamma or Beta emitter”Interesting, So Rhinos are immune to the effects of these radioactive emissions?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,373,053.851511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/game-boy-macro-build-retains-ds-compatibility/ | Game Boy Macro Build Retains DS Compatibility | Tom Nardi | [
"Nintendo DS Hacks"
] | [
"game boy advance",
"Game Boy Macro",
"Nintendo DS"
] | Building a so-called “Game Boy Macro” is a great way to salvage a Nintendo DS that has a broken hinge or top screen, as the system only needs the lower display to play Game Boy Advance games. Naturally, DS games that were designed to use both screens would no longer be playable. Or at least, that’s what we thought. But as [Facelesstech] shows,
it’s actually possible to play DS games on a Game Boy Macro if you do a little extra soldering
.
It turns out that there are two test points on the original DS motherboard where you can pick up the signal for the top and bottom screens respectively. With just three wires and a simple switch, you can select which signal gets fed into the bottom screen in real-time with no image degradation. Now, this won’t do you any good on games that make constant use of both the top and bottom DS displays, but for many titles, the bottom screen was used for little more than a map or inventory display that you only need to glance at occasionally.
Installed screen switch. Note USB-C upgrade module.
With the ability to switch between them at will, a large number of DS games are perfectly playable with just one screen. Interestingly, the touch panel still works the same regardless of which video feed is being pipped in; so if you memorize which areas need to be touched to perform different actions, you don’t even need to flip the images. In the video below, [Facelesstech] demonstrates the concept with
New Super Mario Bros
, which would otherwise be unplayable as the action usually is shown on the top screen.
This hack is only possible because the two displays on the DS are identical beyond the touch overlay, which
as we learned during a previous deep-dive into the technology behind this revolutionary handheld
, was a trick Nintendo used to squeeze as much performance as they could out of its relatively meager 3D hardware. Unfortunately, it seems like the modification is much harder to pull off on the DS Lite,
so it wouldn’t be compatible with the slick
Game & Watch
styled Game Boy Macro we covered recently
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356788",
"author": "Charles",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T15:28:38",
"content": "I passed along my original red DS long ago, but this is exactly the sort of hack I would have been interested in. I even saw a GB Macro being sold in a used game shop last week, I love the reuse of the h... | 1,760,373,053.716891 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/14/recore-hacks-the-hidden-microcontroller-for-3d-printing/ | Recore Hacks The Hidden Microcontroller For 3D Printing | Chris Lott | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printer controller board",
"Allwinner A64",
"klipper",
"Octoprint",
"OpenRISC"
] | No stranger to the world of 3D printers, [Elias Bakken] from the [Intelligent Agent] workshop has released a new
controller board called Recore
. The typical 3D printer has a dedicated controller which handles the real-time aspects of driving stepper motors. Many setups also have a second computer, often Linux-based, which is dedicated to supporting tasks like running an Octoprint server and interfacing to a digital camera to monitor print progress remotely. [Elias]’s design merges these together into one compact 12 x 12 x 4 cm package.
The Recore board is powered by an
AllWinner A64 system on chip (SoC)
which packs four ARM Cortex-A53 AArch64 cores running Debian Linux. The applications include
Klipper
, a project we
wrote about
when it was first introduced, and the
OctoPrint
print server. “But Linux is not a real-time operating system”, we hear you cry, “and controlling stepper motor drivers from an A64 SoC is just asking for trouble”. [Elias] could have addressed this problem by putting a secondary microcontroller on the board, but he found an even more elegant solution instead.
It turns out that there is already a secondary microcontroller hidden in plain sight, integrated into the A64 itself. See that small box labeled
AR100
at the top of the block diagram? Meet the
AR100
, a controller originally intended to manage low-power operations of the A64. It is an
OpenRISC
32-bit
OR1k
processor. But the AR100 is extremely underutilized, and [Elias] takes good advantage of this by repurposing it to those real-time tasks associated with a 3D printer controller. Watch the short video down below to learn how he solves a few of the nitty-gritty implementation details such as timers and communicating with the Linux processors. You might learn some tips from the other short videos in the series featuring some interesting debugging and problem solving sessions. There is a project
GitHub repository
and a
Wiki
full of good information and testing results.
[Elias] has a long history of building printer controllers. While his last one had to be abandoned because of manufacturing issues, he learned from that experience. Manufacturability was a top priority in the design of the Recore. We’re jealous of the well-appointed [Intelligent Agent] facility in Norway, but even more so of the nomadic lifestyle that [Elias] appears to enjoy — in his videos, he can be seen working from far-flung locales such as a tropical island resort and a laboratory floating in high Earth orbit. We’ve featured [Elias]’s projects in the past, including the
Replicate 3D printer controller
, a
semi-automatic liquor cabinet
, and the
dog-operated treat dispenser
. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356704",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T08:58:34",
"content": "“We’re jealous of the well-appointed [Intelligent Agent] facility in Norway, but even more so of the nomadic lifestyle that [Elias] appears to enjoy — in his videos, he can be seen working from far-flung loc... | 1,760,373,053.943203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/you-have-about-four-months-to-find-a-lost-satellite/ | You Have About Four Months To Find A Lost Satellite | Jenny List | [
"Space"
] | [
"anniversary",
"Black Arrow",
"Prospero",
"satellite",
"space"
] | In the annals of technical achievement originating from the United Kingdom there lies a forgotten success story that should have led to greater things but instead became a dead-end even before it had happened. We’re referring of course to
Prospero
, a British satellite that holds the honour of being the only one to have been launched on board a British-developed satellite launch platform. On the 28th of October 1971 it was launched aboard a Black Arrow rocket from the Woomera launch site in Australia and successfully entered orbit to complete its mission. When it was launched the Black Arrow program had already been canceled by the British government, with the launch proceeding only because rocket and satellite were by then already on the pad.
A never flown Black Arrow rocket and the Prospero flight spare, in the Science Museum, London.
So the Brits became the sixth nation to develop a satellite launch capability, and promptly canned it. Prospero was a success though and remains in orbit, and was even re-activated periodically as late as the 1990s. With its fiftieth anniversary approaching in October we think it’s worth looking for to mark the occasion, and so would like to remind you of its existence and the impending anniversary. If any community can find a lost satellite, hear its call if it is still transmitting anything, and maybe even wake it up, it’s you lot. Hackaday readers never cease to amaze us with their talents, and we know that among you will be people with what it takes to find Prospero.
To help you along your way there’s a lot of information about the satellite to be found online,
including the details of an unsuccessful attempt to contact it a decade ago
for the anniversary in 2011, and
a real-time tracker to help you find its position
. Maybe some of you have a decent enough telescope to take a snap of it as it passes over, but if a radio signal could be retrieved from it that would be particularly impressive. Watch out though, you might find yourself hearing an
Orbcomm
satellite on the same frequency.
So if any of you fancy firing up your SDRs and pointing an antenna skywards over the next few months, we’d like to hear about your progress. It’s possible that the craft may by now be incapable of life, but if anything can be found it’s worth a try.
This isn’t the first satellite rescue attempt documented here on Hackaday. A few years back we
put out the call to
rescue ICE/ISEE-3
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356661",
"author": "Stephen Walters",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T05:39:46",
"content": "Found it!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UYPB2fplOEOK, not me…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6356673",
"author": "behle",
... | 1,760,373,053.632773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/gesture-detecting-macro-keyboard-knows-what-you-want/ | Gesture-Detecting Macro Keyboard Knows What You Want | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"ESP32",
"gesture control",
"oled",
"tensor",
"tensor flow"
] | [jakkra] bought a couple of capacitive touchpads from a Kickstarter a few years ago and recently got around to using them in a project. And what a project it is:
this super macro pad combines two touchpads with a 6-pack of regular switches for a deluxe gesture-sensing input device
.
Inside is an ESP32 running TensorFlow Lite to read in the gestures from the two touchpads. The pad at the top is a volume slider, and the square touchpad is the main input and is used in conjunction with the buttons to run AutoHotKey scripts within certain programs. [jakkra] can easily run git commands and more with a handful of simple gestures. The gestures all seem like natural choices to us:
>
for next media track,
∧
to push the current branch and
∨
to fetch and pull the current branch,
s
for git status,
l
for git log, and the one that sounds really useful to us — draw a
C
to get a notification that lists all the COM ports. One of the switches is dedicated to Bluetooth pairing and navigating menus on the OLED screen.
We love the combination of inputs here and think this looks great, especially with the double touchpad design. Be sure to check out the gesture demo gif after the break.
Gesture input seems well-suited to those who compute on the go, and a
gesture glove feels like the perfect fit
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356645",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T03:57:12",
"content": "Just call it, “How to tell people you’re a programmer without telling people you’re a programmer”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6356741",
"auth... | 1,760,373,054.734485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/hackaday-links-june-13-2021/ | Hackaday Links: June 13, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"altium",
"AT command",
"autodesk",
"eda",
"hackaday links",
"hayes",
"Kickstarer",
"MEMS",
"modem",
"NFC",
"polysilicon",
"sensor",
"siloxane"
] | When someone offers to write you a check for $5 billion for your company, it seems like a good idea to take it. But in the world of corporate acquisitions and mergers, that’s not always the case, as
Altium proved this week when they rebuffed a A$38.50 per share offer from Autodesk
. Altium Ltd., the Australian company whose flagship Altium Designer suite is used by PCB and electronic designers around the world, said that the Autodesk offer “significantly undervalues” Altium, despite the fact that it represents a 42% premium of the company’s share price at the end of last week. Altium’s rejection doesn’t close the door on ha deal with Autodesk, or any other comers who present a better offer, which means that whatever happens, changes are likely in the EDA world soon.
There were reports this week of a massive explosion and fire at a Chinese polysilicon plant — sort of. A number of
cell phone videos
have popped up on YouTube and elsewhere that purport to show the dramatic events unfolding at a plant in Xinjiang province, with
one trade publication for the photovoltaic industry
reporting that it happened at the Hoshine Silicon “997 siloxane” packing facility. They further reported that the fire was brought under control after about ten hours of effort by firefighters, and that the cause is under investigation. The odd thing is that we can’t find a single mention of the incident in any of the mainstream media outlets, even five full days after it purportedly happened. We’d have figured the media would have been all over this, and linking it to the ongoing semiconductor shortage, perhaps erroneously since the damage appears to be limited to organic silicone production as opposed to metallic silicon. But the company does supply something like 17% of the world’s supply of silicon metal, so anything that could potentially disrupt that should be pretty big news.
It’s always fun to see “one of our own” take a project from idea to product, and we like to celebrate such successes when they come along. And so it was great to see the
battery-free bicycle tire pressure sensor
that Hackaday.io user CaptMcAllister has been working on make it to the crowdfunding stage. The sensor is dubbed the PSIcle, and it attaches directly to the valve stem on a bike tire. The 5-gram sensor has an NFC chip, a MEMS pressure sensor, and a loop antenna. The neat thing about this is the injection molding process, which basically pots the electronics in EDPM while leaving a cavity for the air to reach the sensor. The whole thing is powered by the NFC radio in a smartphone, so you just hold your phone up to the sensor to get a reading. Check out
the Kickstarter
for more details, and congratulations to CaptMcAllister!
We’re saddened to learn of
the passing of Dale Heatherington last week
. While the name might not ring a bell, the name of his business partner Dennis Hayes probably does, as together they founded Hayes Microcomputer Products, makers of the world’s first modems specifically for the personal computer market. Dale was the technical guru of the partnership, and it’s said that he’s the one who came up with the famous “AT-command set”. Heatherington only stayed with Hayes for seven years or so before taking his a $20 million share of the company and retiring, which of course meant more time and resources to devote to tinkering with everything from ham radio to battle bots. ATH0, Dale. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356611",
"author": "Gary",
"timestamp": "2021-06-14T00:31:59",
"content": "“We’re saddened to learn of the passing of Dale Heatherington last week”.,Me too,But ” ATH0, Dale”.,That’s a little harsh!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,373,053.760817 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/sawdust-printer-goes-against-the-grain-by-working-with-wood-waste/ | Sawdust Printer Goes Against The Grain By Working With Wood Waste | Kristina Panos | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"Additive Manufacturing",
"binder jetting",
"cellulose dust",
"glue",
"lignin",
"sawdust"
] | Wood-infused filament has been around for awhile now, and while it can be used to create some fairly impressive pieces, the finished product won’t fool the astute observer. For one thing, there’s no grain to it (not that every piece needs to show grain). For another, you can’t really throw it on a fire for emergency heating like you could with actual wood.
But a company called Desktop Metal has created
a new additive manufacturing process for wood and paper waste called Forust
(get it?) that gets a lot closer to the real thing. It might be an environmental savior if it catches on, though that depends on what it ends up being good for.
The company’s vision is to produce custom and luxury wood products — everything from sophisticated pencil cups to stunning furniture, and to take advantage of the nearly limitless geometry afforded by additive manufacturing. Forust uses the single-pass binder jetting method of 3D printing to lay down layers of sawdust and lignin and then squirt out some glue in between each one to hold them together.
Although Desktop Metal doesn’t mention a curing process for Forust in
their press release
, post-processing for solidity and longevity is the norm in binder jetting, which is usually done with ceramic or metal-based materials.
Let’s talk about
those wood grains
. Here’s what the press release says:
Digital grain is printed on every layer and parts can then be sanded, stained, polished, dyed, coated, and refinished in the same manner as traditionally-manufactured wood components. Software has the ability to digitally reproduce nearly any wood grain, including rosewood, ash, zebrano, ebony and mahogany, among others. Parts will also support a variety of wood stains at launch, including natural, oak, ash, and walnut.
Beauty and workability are one thing. But this will only be worthwhile if the pieces are strong. This is something that isn’t too important for pencil holders, but is paramount for furniture. Forust’s idea is to ultimately save the trees, but how are they going to get sawdust and lignin without the regular wood industry — they want to be circular and envision recycling of their goods at end-of-life into new goods
We wondered if the wood waste printer would ever become a thing. You know, there’s more than one way to print in sawdust —
here’s a printer that stacks up layers of particle boards and carves them with a CNC
.
Images via
Forust | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356576",
"author": "Matt Cramer",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T20:43:35",
"content": "I have real misgivings about the strength too. This sounds like printing particle board. And particle board has so many ways to fail that there is only one reason I don’t believe Satan invented it in ... | 1,760,373,054.12965 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/macro-model-makes-atomic-force-microscopy-easier-to-understand/ | Macro Model Makes Atomic Force Microscopy Easier To Understand | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"AFM",
"atomic force microscope",
"coil",
"MEMS",
"microscope",
"nano",
"probe"
] | For anyone that’s fiddled around with a magnifying glass, it’s pretty easy to understand how optical microscopes work. And as microscopes are just an elaboration on a simple hand lens, so too are electron microscopes an elaboration on the optical kind, with electrons and magnets standing in for light and lenses. But atomic force microscopes? Now those take a little effort to wrap your brain around.
Luckily for us, [Zachary Tong] over at the Breaking Taps YouTube channel recently got his hands on a remarkably compact atomic force microscope, which led to
this video about how AFM works
. Before diving into the commercial unit — but not before sharing some eye-candy shots of what it can do — [Zach] helpfully goes through AFM basics with what amounts to a macro version of the instrument.
His macro-AFM uses an old 3D-printer as an X-Y-Z gantry, with a probe head added to the printer’s extruder. The probe is simply a sharp stylus on the end of a springy armature, which is excited into up-and-down oscillation by a voice coil and a magnet. The probe rasters over a sample — he looked at
his 3D-printed lattices
— while bouncing up and down over the surface features. A current induced in the voice coil by the armature produces a signal that’s proportional to how far the probe traveled to reach the surface, allowing him to map the sample’s features.
The actual AFM does basically the same thing, albeit at a much finer scale. The probe is a MEMS device attached to — and dwarfed by — a piece of PCB. [Zach] used the device to image a range of samples, all of which revealed fascinating details about the nanoscale realm. The scans are beautiful, to be sure, but we really appreciated the clear and accessible explanation of AFM. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356365",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T02:52:16",
"content": "I didn’t realize that a modern AFM has been shrunk down to nearly a handheld device. Most of the AFM has been made using MEMS, which is pretty cool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,373,054.170497 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/hacking-the-lidl-home-gateway/ | Hacking The Lidl Home Gateway | Jenny List | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"lidl home gateway",
"router",
"router hacking",
"zigbee"
] | For years, Europeans have been browsing the central aisles of the German Aldi and Lidl supermarket chains, attracted by the surprising variety of transitory non-grocery bargains to be found there. There are plenty of temptations for hackers, and alongside the barbecues and Parkside tools at Lidl last year was a range of Zigbee home automation products. Every ZigBee network requires some form of hub, and for Lidl this comes in the form of a £20 (about $28) Silvercrest Home Gateway appliance. It’s a small embedded Linux computer at heart, and [Paul Banks]
has published details of how it can be hacked and bent to the user’s will
.
Under the hood is a Realtek RTL8196E MIPS SoC with 16Mb of Flash and 32 Mb of memory. Gaining control of it follows the well trodden path of finding the bootloader, dumping the firmware, and re-uploading it with a known password file. If you’ve done much hacking of routers and the like you’ll recognise that this quantity of memory and Flash isn’t the most powerful combination so perhaps you won’t be turning it into a supercomputer, but it’s still capable enough
to be integrated with Home Assistant
rather than the cloud-based services with which it shipped.
There was a time when repurposing routers as embedded Linux machines was extremely popular, but it’s something that has fallen from favour as boards such as the Raspberry Pi have provided an easier path. So it’s good to see a bit of old-fashioned fun can still be had with an inexpensive device.
If you fancy a bit more German budget supermarket goodness,
feast your eyes on an Aldi stick welder! | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356234",
"author": "cdilla",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T17:22:18",
"content": "The Battle of Lidl & Aldi springs immediately mind :-)https://youtu.be/cL7jyXCQ2Zc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6356271",
"author": "Erb"... | 1,760,373,054.286677 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/what-every-geek-must-know/ | What Every Geek Must Know | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"cryptonomicon",
"Cthulhu",
"Culture",
"dune",
"newsletter",
"star trek",
"star wars",
"starcraft"
] | How is it possible that there’s a
geek culture
? I mean, it’s one thing to assume that all folks of a nerdy enough bent will know a little Ohm’s law, can fake their way through enough quantum mechanics to at least be interesting at a cocktail party, and might even have a favorite mnemonic for the resistor colors or the angles involved in sine, cosine, and tangents. But how is it that we all know the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
Mike and I were podcasting a couple of weeks back, and
it came out that he’d never played Starcraft
. I was aghast! Especially since he’s into video games in general, to have not played the
seminal
3-way-without-being-rock-scissors-paper game! My mind boggled. But then again, there was a time in my life when I hadn’t actually read all of
Dune
or
Cryptonomicon
, which would have left Mike’s jaw on the floor.
Whether you prefer Star Trek or Star Wars, the Matrix or the Hobbit, it’s even more surprising that we have so much in common! And thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that exactly our interchange is the reason — it’s a word of mouth culture thing. Some folks at the hackerspace are talking about Cthulu, and chances are you’re going to be reading some Lovecraft. An argument about the
plausibility of the hacks in The Martian
has sent at least a couple of geeks to the cinema or the library. And so it goes.
So do your part! Share your geek-culture recommendations with us all
in the comments
. If you were stranded on a desert island, with a decent bookshelf and maybe even a streaming video service, what’s on your top-10 list? What do you
still need
to see, read, or hear?
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
! | 176 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356190",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T14:16:36",
"content": "My recommendation is a series of SciFi books by James White, about his Hospital General, a multi-species space hospital. White is one of the few optimistic and pacifist SciFi writers, and the medical dram... | 1,760,373,054.552476 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/raspberry-pi-zero-takes-the-wheel-in-miniature-fighting-robot/ | Raspberry Pi Zero Takes The Wheel In Miniature Fighting Robot | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"battle bot",
"battlebots",
"bluetooth",
"combat robot",
"L298N",
"pi zero",
"python"
] | Looking to capitalize on his familiarity with the Raspberry Pi,
[Sebastian Zen Tatum] decided to put the diminutive Pi Zero at the heart of his “antweight” fighting robot,
$hmoney
. While it sounds like there were a few bumps in the road early on, the tuxedoed bot took home awards from the recent Houston Mayhem 2021 competition, proving the year of Linux on the battle bot is truly upon us.
Compared to using traditional hobby-grade RC hardware, [Sebastian] says using the Pi represented a considerable cost savings. With Python and
evdev
, he was able to take input from a commercial Bluetooth game controller and translate it into commands for the GPIO-connected motor controllers. For younger competitors especially, this more familiar interface can be seen as an advantage over the classic RC transmitter.
A L298N board handles the two N20 gear motors that provide locomotion, while a Tarot TL300G ESC is responsible for spinning up the brushless motor attached to the “bow tie” spinner in the front. Add in a Turnigy 500mAh 3S battery pack, and you’ve got a compact and straightforward electronics package to nestle into the robot’s 3D printed chassis.
In a Reddit thread about
$hmoney
, [Sebastian] goes over some of the lessons his team has learned from competing with their one pound Linux bot. An overly ambitious armor design cost them big at an event in Oklahoma, but a tweaked chassis ended up making them much more competitive.
There was also a disappointing loss that the team believes was due to somebody in the audience attempting to pair their phone with the bot’s Pi Zero during the heat of battle, knocking out controls and leaving them dead in the water. Hopefully some improved software can patch that vulnerability before their next bout, especially since everyone that reads Hackaday now knows about it…
While
battles between these small-scale bots
might not have
the same fire and fury of the televised matches
, they’re an excellent way to get
the next generation of hackers and engineers excited
about building their own hardware. We wish [Sebastian] and
$hmoney
the best of luck, and look forward to hearing more of their war stories in the future. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356175",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T11:49:26",
"content": "Be more fun if it was ‘autonomous’ – there’s easily enough grunt in the zero to run opencv and simply identify what isn’t arena and attack it.. I’ve never seen arena hazards in anything so lightweight..... | 1,760,373,054.23024 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/magnets-how-do-they-work-on-3d-printers/ | A 3D Printer With An Electromagnetic Tool Changer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"change",
"core xy",
"electromagnet",
"magnet",
"printer",
"tool"
] | The versatility of 3D printers is simply amazing. Capable of producing a wide variety of prototypes, miscellaneous parts, artwork, and even other 3D printers, it’s an excellent addition to any shop or makerspace. The smaller, more inexpensive printers might do one type of printing well with a single tool, but if you really want to take a 3D printer’s versatility up to the next level you may want to try one with an automatic tool changing system
like this one which uses magnets
.
This 3D printer from [Will Hardy] uses an electromagnet to attach the tool to the printer. The arm is able to move to the tool storage area and quickly deposit and attach various tools as it runs through the prints. A failsafe mechanism keeps the tool from falling off of the head of the printer in case of a power outage, and several other design features were included to allow others to tweak this design to their own particular needs, such as enclosing the printer and increasing or decreasing the working area of the Core-XY printer as needed.
While the project looks like it works exceptionally well, [Will] notes that it is still in the prototyping phase and needs work on the software in order to refine its operation and make it suitable for more general-purpose uses. It’s an excellent design though and shows promise. It also reminds us of
this other tool-changing system we featured a few months ago
, albeit with a less electromagnetic twist. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356148",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T09:32:14",
"content": "Such a cool product!! when can I buy one?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6356164",
"author": "Mart",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T10:58:21",
... | 1,760,373,054.340052 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/tv-ambient-lighting-built-for-awesome-performance/ | TV Ambient Lighting Built For Awesome Performance | Lewin Day | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"ambilight",
"hdcp",
"hdmi",
"raspberry pi",
"television"
] | [AndrewMohawk] had seen all kinds of ambient lighting systems for TVs come and go over the years, and the one thing they all had in common was that they didn’t live up to his high standards. Armed with the tools of the hacker trade,
he set about building an Ambilight-type system of his own that truly delivered the goods.
The development process was one full of roadblocks and dead ends, but [Andrew] persevered. After solving annoying problems with HDCP and HDMI splitters, he was finally able to get a Raspberry Pi to capture video going to his TV and use OpenCV to determine the colors of segments around the screen. From there, it was simple enough to send out data to a string of addressable RGB LEDs behind the TV to create the desired effect.
For all the hard work, [Andrew] was rewarded with an ambient lighting system that runs at a healthy 20fps and works with any HDMI video feed plugged into the TV. It even autoscales to work with video content shot in different aspect ratios so the ambient display always picks up the edge of the video content.
With 270 LEDs fitted, the result is an incredibly smooth and fluid ambient display we’d love to have at home. You can build one too,
since [Andrew] shared all the code on Github.
As an added bonus,
he also gave the system an audio visualiser
, and tested it out with some
Streetlight Manifesto
, the greatest third-wave ska band ever to roam the Earth. The Fourth Wave still eludes us, but we hold out hope.
We’ve seen plenty of hacks in this vein before;
one of the most impressive hacked a smart TV into doing the video processing itself
. Video after the break. | 36 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356129",
"author": "bung",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T05:24:07",
"content": "Whats wrong with Hyperion ? Mine runs at 30fps no problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6356135",
"author": "AndrewMohawk",
"timest... | 1,760,373,054.626833 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/balloon-antenna-doesnt-need-a-tower/ | Balloon Antenna Doesn’t Need A Tower | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"antenna tuner",
"balloon",
"BPSK31",
"ham radio",
"PSK31",
"radio"
] | What do you do with floral wire and balloons from Dollar Tree? If you are [Ham Radio Crash Course],
you make a ham radio antenna
. Floral wire is conductive, and using one piece as a literal sky hook and the other as a ground wire, it should do something. He did use, as you might expect, a tuner to match the random wire length.
The first attempt had too few balloons and too much wind. He eventually switched to a non-dollar store helium tank. That balloon inflates to about 36 inches and appears to have plenty of lift. It looks like by the end he was using two of them.
One of the difficulties with the wind was that the line kept tangling on other antennas. But if you really wanted to use a balloon antenna, we’d guess you don’t already have some large antennas in the way. We do hope, though, that the utility lines you can see behind the yard are further away then they look. Tangling in those would be detrimental to your health and your radio.
It looks like the antenna did a good job, although using PSK31 can cover a multitude of sins since you don’t need a lot of signal to make contacts with that mode.
We’ve seen
emergency antennas lofted by kites and balloons
, especially for the military. Not the first time one of those
helium canisters
has shown up, either.
400 | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356119",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T03:40:20",
"content": "Seems like a waste of helium to me. Wire is heavy, and the balloons are tuned to just be buoyant enough to float. Many years ago when I was in college there was a restaurant that had gigantic margaritas tha... | 1,760,373,054.689879 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/translate-your-cp-m-code-to-8086-and-leave-the-1970s-behind/ | Translate Your CP/M Code To 8086, And Leave The 1970s Behind! | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"8088",
"CP/M",
"ms-dos",
"pcjam"
] | “Bring our home computing out of the 1970s and into the 1980s and beyond” is the irresistible promise made by the creator of
8088ify
, a piece of software which translates CP/M executables from their 8080-based originals to assembler code that should run on an 8088 under MS/DOS. How can we resist such a futuristic promise here in 2021, even though the code wasn’t written to the sound of Donna Summer or the Village People back in the day but here in 2021 for
PCjam,
a celebration of the original IBM PC’s 40th anniversary.
As the writer of this code [ibara] points out that Intel intended the 8088 to be a ready upgrade path for the 8080, and designed its instruction set while not directly compatible, to make translation between the two a straightforward process. There was commercial software for the task at the time, but to this day there remained nothing with an open-source licence. It’s written in ANSI C for portability across platforms and compilers, and can even be compiled under CP/M itself.
PCjam is well worth a look, and if any of you fancy a go at writing for the earliest MS-DOS machines we’d like to suggest you create something for it. Meanwhile if you’d like to explore CP/M,
you can run a bare metal emulator on the Raspberry Pi
.
Header: Thomas Nguyen,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356506",
"author": "JWhitten",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T17:33:54",
"content": "I remember CP/M quite well– not certain if it’s “fondly”, but I certainly used it long enough. Does anybody still use CP/M these days for anything non-hobby related? Are there still pockets of commercial... | 1,760,373,054.802212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/roller-skating-wile-e-coyote-style/ | Roller Skating, Wile E. Coyote-Style | Kristina Panos | [
"Transportation Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"jet engine",
"jet pack",
"jetpack",
"oled",
"Radiofruit",
"roller skates"
] | They say you learn something new every day, and they’re usually right about that. Today’s tidbit is that just anybody (including [Ian Charnas]) can exchange money for jet engines, no questions asked. Scary, huh? So once [Ian] secured the cutest little engine, he took a poll regarding possible uses for it.
Jetpack rollerskating won, that’s obvious enough
. So let’s get into those details.
[Ian] procured this particular jet engine from an outfit called CRX Turbines. It tops out at 98,000 RPM and 30 kg (66 lbs.) of thrust. Essentially, he is pulsing the engine’s ECU with PWM from an Adafruit RadioFruit and controlling it with a pair of stripped drills that are just being used for their convenient grips and switches. One is wired as a dead man’s switch, and the other controls the throttle signal.
In order to run the thing and test the thrust a bit before strapping it on his back, [Ian] went about this the smart way and welded together a sliding stand. And he didn’t use just any old Jansport backpack, he welded together a frame and roll cage for the engine and attached it to a full-body harness. There’s also a heat shield to keep his backside from catching fire.
At first he tested the jet pack with shoes instead of skates to make sure it was going to behave as he predicted. Then it was time to bust out the roller skates. [Ian] achieved a top speed of 17 MPH before losing his balance, but he knew it could go faster, so he invited some roller derby skaters to try it out. One of them went over 30 MPH! Be sure to check it out in the build and demo video after the break.
If you’re at all familiar with [Ian]’s videos, you know that he usually raffles off the build and gives the money to charity. Well, not this time! That wouldn’t be prudent. Instead, he’s going to choose the best suggestion for what to attach it to, build it, and raffle that off. Hopefully, he
stays away from airports with that thing on his back
. | 36 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356479",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T15:06:32",
"content": "Never did catch the roadrunner.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6356516",
"author": "Ian Charnas",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T18:05:... | 1,760,373,054.916966 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/mickeys-big-timer-makes-glider-competitions-better/ | Mickey’s Big Timer Makes Glider Competitions Better | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"glider",
"led matrix",
"scoreboard",
"stm32",
"timer"
] | There’s plenty of obscure sports in the world. Many of them could benefit from bespoke equipment like scoring displays, but are too obscure to support commercial efforts in this regard. Radio controlled glider competitions fit into just this category.
This led a man named [Mickey] to develop what he calls Mickey’s Big Timer, to aid in the running of such events.
Glider events run outdoors in full sunlight, so the system uses big bright LED matrix displays to show its timing information. The system, built around the STM32 Discovery platform, uses several of the microcontroller boards to drive several displays as well as the main controller which handles timing. It also packs in an audio system for issuing instructions to competitors. It can also display pilot names as well as instructions such as when competitors should land at the end of a heat.
Some code is available on Github for those interested in how it all works
. Word around the RC forums has it that [Mickey] built several systems, some of which ended up as far afield as New Zealand where they helped run many successful glider contests over the years.
We’ve seen plenty of scoreboard projects over the years;
a little portable one could be useful for adding some spice to your pickup neighbourhood games
. Video after the break.
[Thanks to quploid for the tip!] | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356468",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T13:50:01",
"content": "Wow ! This is a fantastic build !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6356512",
"author": "David Braam",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T17:56:25",
... | 1,760,373,054.842547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/13/super-mario-bros-35-lives-again-with-a-fan-made-server/ | Super Mario Bros. 35Lives Again With A Fan-Made Server | Jenny List | [
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"game server",
"Mario Bros",
"Nintendo Switch",
"reverse engineering"
] | If you liked playing
Super Mario Bros. 35
, the unique multiplayer battle royale
Mario
game that Nintendo released last year on the Switch to celebrate 35 years since the original NES version of
Super Mario Bros
, then it’s likely that you have been disappointed since April. The gaming giant ended support and removed the game’s servers once their 35 year celebrations were over, leaving the game’s players hanging. Happily there’s a solution, because [Kinnay] has presented
a reverse-engineered Nintendo game server replacement
along with a game patch, that should keep gamers in multi-Mario fun forever.
While it’s a boon for fans of this particular game, the real value here is in introducing us to
the reverse engineering work on those Nintendo servers
. We learn about their various foibles over several generations of console, and perhaps most importantly we learn something of their inner workings.
Usually when a game server is turned off it’s because the platform it supports is so ancient as to have hardly any users. This time-limited game on an up-to-date platform is unusual then, but since it was made available to subscribers to Nintendo’s online service for free it’s less of a surprise.
Certainly not in the same class as the loss of servers for an entire platform
.
Thanks [Digiaap] for the tip.
Header image: Elvis untot,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356421",
"author": "Eric Chapin",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T08:53:30",
"content": "I’d play em a lot while it’s up, Nintendo’s lawyers are probably foaming at their mouth over another “illegal” stuff behind Nintendo’s back.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,054.980032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/waterslide-decals-for-wingding-keycaps/ | Waterslide Decals For Wingding Keycaps | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"custom keycaps",
"keycap legends",
"keycaps",
"water slide decals",
"waterslide decals",
"wingdings"
] | We know this feeling all too well [YOHON!] spent $340 building, lubing, and filming a custom keyboard and it still wasn’t perfect until they got the keycaps sorted. They bought blank ‘caps because they’re awesome, but also because they wanted to make their own custom ‘caps for all those painstakingly lubed and filmed Gateron yellows. At first [YOHON!] thought about doing it DIY dye-sublimation style with a hair straightener and polyimide tape, but that is too permanent of a method. Instead, [YOHON!] wanted room to experiment, make changes, and make mistakes.
Eventually, [YOHON!] learned about waterslide decals and settled on doing them that way
. Every step sounds arduous, but we think it was way worth it because these look great. Since [YOHON!] wanted the keyboard to be weird, they designed a cute little symbol for each key which gives it a cryptic-but-accessible Wingdings feel.
We think these pictograms are all totally adorable, and we particularly like the owl for O, the volcano for V, and of course, the skeleton for X is a solid choice. Oh, and there’s a tiny fidget spinner knob to round out the cuteness. Designing and applying the keycaps took longer than the entire keyboard build, but you can check out the sped-up version after the break.
Want to just throw money at the keycaps problem? You may not want an entire keyboard full of cheeseburger and hot dog keycaps, but
one or two fun keycaps are pretty cool to have
. If you want to make your custom keycaps more permanent and don’t like the dye sublimation trick, try
3D printing them
.
Via
KBD | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356387",
"author": "Raniz",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T05:19:11",
"content": "If you need to coat it in varnish for it to stick, why not just use transparent sticker paper and varnish instead?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "63... | 1,760,373,055.153468 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/bungee-and-cam-assisted-actuator-for-opendog/ | Bungee And Cam Assisted Actuator For OpenDog | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bungee cord",
"james bruton",
"OpenDog",
"robot actuator"
] | One of the challenges of many walking robot designs is the fact that they draw current just to stay upright. This was exactly the case for one [James Bruton]’s quadruped robots, where the knee motors were getting too hot to touch. Adding springs to take some of the load is not as simple it might seem, so [James] created a
bungee assisted cam mechanism to do the job
.
For a normal spring-loaded lever, force is proportional to how much the spring is stretched, which will require the actuators to draw more and more current as it lifts the leg higher. For the spring force to remain constant throughout the range of motion, the length of the lever arm must become continuously shorter as the knee is bent. [James] did this by stretching a bungee cord around a cam. The added bulk of the cam does however cause the knees to knock into each other in some scenarios, but [James] plans to adjust the robot’s gait to avoid this. He didn’t get around to actually measuring the current draw reduction, but the motor temperature has dropped significantly, only being slightly warm after a test run.
These tests were done with
OpenDog V2
, but [James] is already working on the design of V3, which will use 3D printed
cycloidal gearboxes
. At the moment, that build is still being delayed thanks to the
global component shortage
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356373",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T03:50:02",
"content": "It looks like a job for calculus of variations. At least for an approximation, because bungees are not conservative like a spring.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,055.208762 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/12/3d-print-an-entire-pc-case/ | 3D Print An Entire PC Case | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"mini-itx",
"pc case"
] | With laptops having become a commodity item and single-board computers having conquered the lower end for our community, building a PC for yourself is no longer the rite of passage that it once was; except perhaps if you are a gamer. But there is still plenty of fun to be had in selecting and assembling PC hardware, especially if as [makerunit] did,
you design and 3D-print your own case
.
This is no motherboard in an old pizza box, but instead a highly compact and well-designed receptacle for a reasonable-performance gaming machine with an ITX motherboard. The chassis holding all the parts sits inside a slide-on textured sleeve, and particular attention has been paid to air flow and cooling. The GPU card is a little limited by the size of the case and there’s no room at all for a conventional hard drive, so a PCIe SSD board takes that role.
We’d hazard the opinion that were this case cranked out by the likes of Apple it would be hailed as some kind of design masterpiece, such is its quality. It certainly shows that there’s so much more to building your own PC than the normal rectangular tower case.
Over the decades we’ve brought you so many PC cases, a recent-ish one that’s worth a look is
this Lego Minecraft one for an Intel NUC motherboard
.
Thanks [Baldpower] for the tip. | 33 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356312",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T23:10:10",
"content": "“Entire PC Case” yeah, all 20cm of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6356326",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2021-06-13T00:14... | 1,760,373,055.277452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/open-source-method-makes-possible-two-layer-pcbs-with-through-plating-at-home/ | Open-Source Method Makes Possible Two-Layer PCBs With Through-Plating At Home | Dan Maloney | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"Chemistry",
"copper",
"electroless",
"palladium",
"pcb",
"plated-through",
"PTH",
"via"
] | If the last year and its supply chain problems have taught us anything, it’s the value of having a Plan B, even for something as commoditized as PCB manufacturing has become. If you’re not able to get a PCB made commercially, you might have to make one yourself, and being able to
DIY a dual-layer board with plated-through vias
might just be a survival skill worth learning.
Granted, [Hydrogen Time]’s open-source method, which he calls “Process 01”, is something that he has been working on for years now. And it’s quite the feat of chemistry, which may require you to climb a steep learning curve, depending on how neglected the skills from high school or college chemistry are. But for as complex as Process 01 is, it’s actually pretty straightforward, and the first video below covers it in extreme detail. It starts with a drilled double-sided copper-clad board, which after cleaning is given a bath in palladium chloride. A follow-up dunk in stannous chloride leaves a thin film of palladium metal over all surfaces, even the via walls. This then acts as a catalyst for electroless copper plating in a solution of copper sulfate, followed by an actual electroplating step to thicken the copper plating.
After more washing, photoresist is applied to define the traces as well as to protect the now-plated vias, the board is etched, and a solder mask layer is applied. The boards might not be mistaken for commercial PCBs, but they’re pretty darn good, and as [Hydrogen Time] states, Process 01 is only a beginning. We expect this will be improved and streamlined as time goes by.
Fair warning, though — some steps require a fume hood to be performed safely. Luckily,
we’ve got that covered
. Sort of. | 39 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356097",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-06-12T00:11:30",
"content": "Impressive. It does make me wonder how it might be possible to modify other photoresist application methods to accommodate this process. I really like the laser printer based photoresist method since it’... | 1,760,373,055.525932 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/recreating-the-intercom-from-ferris-buellers-day-off/ | Recreating The Intercom From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"film",
"intercom"
] | Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
is a pop culture classic, and remains one of the standout teen films of the era. Notably, titular character Ferris was somewhat of a hacker himself, with the movie showcasing several contraptions the teenager used to get out of a day of school. Among them was the intercom,
which [Aaron] faithfully recreated with modern technology.
For those who haven’t seen the film, the intercom was hooked up to a cassette player to feign a believable response to anyone that visited the house while Ferris was away. Rather than do things the old fashioned way, [Aaron] built his replica using an ESP32 fitted with a sound chip instead. When visitors ring the intercom, it plays back sound clips from the movie, while also signalling another ESP microcontroller inside [Aaron]’s house to let him know he has visitors.
The build is a charming tribute to the classic film, and all the more fun for [Aaron’s] efforts to make it look the part as well, choosing to build it inside a period-correct intercom housing. To avoid confusion for those who haven’t seen the film, however, he’s been careful to place a sign up to clarify the intercom is not as it seems.
We’ve seen other movie replicas in the same vein before –
like this great Star Trek build
. Video after the break. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356084",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T21:26:28",
"content": "Ferris Bueller schemed. I’m not sure he’s an inventor. I’d think he’s more the type to talk someone who could do it into doing it for him.They use people the moment they realize they can get somet... | 1,760,373,055.353161 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/recycling-a-laptop-screen-into-a-portable-folding-monitor/ | Recycling A Laptop Screen Into A Portable Folding Monitor | Lewin Day | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"laptop screen",
"lcd",
"lvds",
"monitor"
] | There’s plenty of times we’ve seen a laptop fail, break, or just become too slow for purpose despite the fact that it’s still packing some useful components. With all the single-board computers and other experiments lurking about the average hacker workshop, it’s often useful to have a spare screen on hand, and an old laptop is a great way to get one.
This recycled display build from [Gregory Sanders] is a great example of how to reuse old hardware.
The build doesn’t simply package a laptop monitor in the same way as a regular desktop unit. Instead, [Gregory] designed a custom 3D printed frame with an arch design. The laptop screen is installed onto the frame using its original hinges, and [Gregory] designed in standoffs for an laptop LCD driver board to run the display as well as a generic frame where single-board computers can be installed.
The result is a portable monitor that can be folded up for easy transport, which is also self-supporting with its nice large base. It can also be used with other hardware, as it has a full complement of DVI, HDMI and VGA inputs on board. Of course, while you’re tinkering with laptop displays,
you might also consider building yourself a dual-screen laptop as well. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356054",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T18:53:38",
"content": "I agree, they are useful. I didn’t write my build up because it’s not much of a hack. My teen age daughter spilled a drink all over the keyboard of her laptop and left it soaking for several days. Ne... | 1,760,373,055.579242 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/circuit-vr-arduino-virtually-meets-analog/ | Circuit VR: Arduino Virtually Meets Analog | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"arduino",
"cosimulation",
"falstad",
"simulation"
] | There was a time when building electronics and building software were two distinct activities. These days, almost any significant electronic project will use a CPU somewhere, or — at least — could. Using a circuit simulator can get you part of the way and software simulators abound. But cosimulation — simulating both analog circuits and a running processor — is often only found in high-end simulation products. But I noticed the other day the feature quietly snuck into our favorite Web-based simulator,
Falstad
.
The classic simulator is on the left and the virtual Arduino is on the right.
Back in March, the
main project
added work from [Mark McGarry] to support AVR8js written by [Uri Shaked]. The end result is you can have the circuit simulator on the left of the screen and a Web-based Arduino IDE on the right side. But how does it work beyond the simple demo? We wanted to find out.
The screen looks promising. The familiar simulator is to the left and the Arduino IDE — sort of — is to the right. There’s serial output under the source code, but it doesn’t scroll very well, so if you output a lot of serial data, it is hard to read.
Nothing is Perfect
I love just about everything about the Falstad simulator and having an Arduino cosimulation is great. But there is one really important issue that may get resolved eventually. Normally when you draw a schematic you can save it as text or encoded in a link. If you click the link or import the text, everything is back to the way it was when you saved. I use that in a lot of Circuit VR posts so you can click on a circuit and see it live.
However, the simulator does not save the source code in the virtual Arduino. You have to do that yourself. That means if you have everything working, save your circuit, and close your browser you’ll have to recreate your Arduino code next time. Luckily, I tested this out before I lost any work. There should be a big red warning on the page, though.
What that means, though, is that I can’t give you a link to follow along with examples. Here’s what you can do:
Have a look at the
source code
.
Open the
simulator
.
Copy the text from the top of the source code comments and paste it into the simulator (detailed instructions in the comments).
Just don’t forget to save your source code changes. If you make changes to the circuit, you’ll want to export them to text and copy them into the source code so you can save everything together.
An Example
Test schematic.
I wanted an easy example that showed the benefit of using cosimulation. I settled on looking at some alternatives for doing an analog to digital conversion using successive approximation. A virtual potentiometer provides an input voltage. There’s a comparator and a buffered PWM output. Here’s the schematic:
Input/Output
There are three interface points to the Arduino. The PWM output is set as an external voltage using the “Inputs and Sources” components (remember, the output from the Arduino is the input to the circuit). Conversely, the comparator output and the connection to the Arduino’s analog converter (A0) are labeled nodes from the “Output and Labels” menu. The names are significant, including the spaces.
The Code
In theory, the code is pretty simple. You guess a voltage and read the output of the comparator to see if you are right. There are two methods in the code and you can switch between them by setting the
convert
define to
convert0
or
convert1
.
On every pass through the loop, the code calls one of the convert functions to manage the successive approximation process through a different algorithm. It also updates the PWM output on each pass.
The first approximation algorithm is very simple but not very efficient. It guesses each output voltage starting at 0 and moving up 1/255 V on each pass. When the comparator goes from false to true, you know the input voltage must be less than the current voltage but more than the previous voltage.
The second algorithm is smarter and works like a binary search. The first guess is 128/255. That voltage is either higher or lower than our target. If it is lower, we remember that the bit should be on and, either way, move to the next bit. In other words, the second test will be either 64/255 or 128/255 + Simulide64/255. Again, the new value is either high or low and will determine the state of the next bit.
The first algorithm could finish fast or it may have to count all the way to 255 to find the answer. The second algorithm always takes 8 measurements. There’s no way for the comparator to tell us our reference voltage is exactly equal to the input even if we could define what that means for an analog signal. So we have to measure each bit and decide if it should be on or off.
The output appears in the serial terminal. The first number is the result of the conversion and the second is the value from the built-in converter for the same voltage.
Voltage Reference
Generating the reference voltage is the key. It would be possible to use 8 output bits and an R2R network to generate an output voltage quickly, but that eats up a lot of pins. Instead, I used one pin to generate voltages using PWM. This isn’t as fast, of course, because you have to allow the RC filter time for the voltage to reach its desired value.
Pin 9 generates a PWM signal using a time-honored technique. Suppose you want to generate 20/255 (about 8% duty cycle). You take an 8-bit accumulator and add 20 to it repeatedly. The PWM output is the carry out of the top bit. You can find a
spreadsheet
with the logic, but you’ll have to imagine the output waves are squares since the spreadsheet helpfully draws straight lines between points.
This spreadsheet models the PWM output logic.
To do this right, the code should run on a precise interrupt and equalize the time between outputs. However, for this quick demo, I’ve assumed the time for calling the main loop will be regular enough. I considered doing it on an interrupt, but — honestly — I’m not sure how faithful the simulator is, how time-accurate it is, and it doesn’t appear you can easily add libraries to it, so you’d almost certainly have to manage the interrupts at the register level.
The output signal gets smoothed by an RC filter. The values here are interesting and it is fun to watch the scope as you vary the parameters in this part of the circuit. You want a noise-free reference signal. So that implies a big capacitor. However, a big capacitor takes more time to charge and discharge, so the voltage will take longer to settle. It is a classic trade-off. Do you want a noisy fast response or a clean slow response?
In this case, the pot probably doesn’t change very fast, but in real life, the input signal might be changing all the time and you might even consider a sample and hold on that input to make sure it doesn’t change while you are in the middle of guessing.
Tuning
Obviously, you can change the RC values easily in the simulator. It is even possible to add sliders to set the values graphically while the simulation is running (the pot is set up to do this already). Changing the code, however, requires a stop and restart.
In the code, you can change the number of loop cycles the convert routines wait to allow a new PWM value to settle (
SETTLELOOPS
) and how long to pause between readings (
SAMPLOOP
). The interactions between these numbers and the RC values are critical. Larger RC time constants require more time to produce correct results. Smaller RC numbers will require less time, but the noise will introduce errors. Take your pick.
PWM signal with 2uF capacitor.
PWM signal with 47uF capacitor.
The Verdict
This is a toy example. The PWM generation suffers from some issues and PWM isn’t a great idea for a conversion reference. Still, it shows a good bit of what is possible with the cosimulation available with Falstad. I am really looking forward to the next time I need some exotic signal fed into a circuit. Just using the Arduino as a function generator will have its uses.
I do wish you could add libraries and save an entire project more easily. Still, there are many what-if scenarios you could simulate quickly and easily using this tool. Since it has only been in the code base for a few months, I’m hopeful some of these issues will work out over time. Add debugging to the mix, and it would be a real winner.
Tinkercad
allows you to simulate Arduino, but not with the circuit sophistication of Falstad. It does require an install, but we are always surprised we don’t hear more about
Simulide
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356066",
"author": "StephaneAG",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T19:26:10",
"content": "Hi there !Being a fellow Falstad user, I have some update for other users: we had the option to create subcircuits for a while, yet there’s also the possibility of using “external javascript” to toggle... | 1,760,373,055.40398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/hackaday-podcast-122-faster-than-wind-travel-sisyphish-alu-desktop-calculator-and-mice-in-space/ | Hackaday Podcast 122: Faster Than Wind Travel, Sisyphish, ALU Desktop Calculator, And Mice In Space | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the awesome hacks from the past week. We had way too much fun debating whether a wind-powered car can travel faster than the wind, and whether or not you can call that sailing. Low-temperature desoldering was demystified: it’s the bismuth! And we saw a camera gimbal solve the problem of hand tremor during soldering. Ford just wants to become your PowerWall. And the results are in from NASA’s mission to spin mice up in a centrifuge on the ISS.
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
(around 55 MB)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 122 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
We had twenty correct answers, it was the sounds of Starcraft.
Congratulations to [Omer] who was chosen with the roll of a D20 from the correct responses and sent a Hackaday Podcast shirt.
Check out this strange D20 from Elliot’s wife’s dice bag.
New This Week:
Intel’s ATX12VO Standard: A Study In Increasing Computer Power Supply Efficiency
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Sailing Faster Than The Wind Itself
DDWFTTW – Directly Downwind Faster Than The Wind
Aquarium Plotter Shows Sisyphish’s Submerged Sand Stripes
Sandify
An ALU As A Desktop Calculator Has Stunning Style From Days Gone By
2001: A Space Odyssey
Soldering Iron Plus Camera Gimbal Helps Cancel Out Hacker’s Hand Tremors
Comment about “Steadyrest”
A Hacker’s Guide To Getting Old
DIY SMD Twofer: Manual Pick-and-Place And The Beak
Triangle Tiles Form Blinky Networks Using Clever Interconnects
Local Hacker Discovers Card Edge Connectors
Make Your Desoldering Easier By Minding Your Own Bismuth
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
An Emulator That Only Plays One Game
Cerberus 2080 — Three-Headed Retro Computing Project
An Open-source Scientific RPN Calculator
Do Wristwatches Get Any Better Than A Cuckoo Clock?
Mike’s Picks:
Ryobi Power Packs As Ebike Batteries
Teach Your Air Compressor To Blow Eggs
Adding A Laser Blaster To Classic Atari 2600 Games With Machine Vision
Can’t-Miss Articles:
ISS Artificial Gravity Study Shows Promise For Long Duration Spaceflight
Electric Vehicles Could Be The Grid Storage Solution We’ve Been Dreaming Of | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356053",
"author": "HappyNapalm",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T18:50:41",
"content": "On the 12 volts, I am pretty sure that most fans and cooling systems on a modern PC use the 12 volt like from the ATX power supply.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,373,055.631368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/12-arduino-orchestra-plays-star-wars-fanfare/ | 12-Arduino Orchestra Plays Star Wars Fanfare | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"midi"
] | Back in the early days of the musical synthesizer, some designers who wished for polyphony in their instruments would simply build multiple tone-generators for as many notes as they wished to play. [Kevin] took that same approach with his Arduino orchestra,
and set about having it play the closing number from
Star Wars: A New Hope.
The build consists of twelve Arduino Nanos, each wired up to power, a speaker, and the same MIDI cable. The MIDI cable carries note data for each Arduino on a separate MIDI channel, allowing each to play its own role in the orchestra. [Kevin] then set about arranging the Star Wars music into a MIDI file suitable for the Arduinos, roughly setting six voices to high parts and six voices low. The Arduinos play the notes received using the simple tone() function. The result is a very chiptune rendition of the end of the fourth episode of the world’s most famous space opera.
It may not be neat, tidy, or efficient, but it certainly is fun. Twelve Arduinos bleeping away with their flashing LEDs and cute little speakers makes quite the conversation piece.
It’s a similar approach to the Floppotron, which plays more notes by adding more floppy drives.
We’ve also seen the same thing done with SEGA sound chips.
Video after the break. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356015",
"author": "Steven Gann",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T15:32:09",
"content": "This is very nice, and pretty encouraging.I’ve been trying to almost the same thing, except 4 Arduino nanos running Mozzie for PWM-based synthesis and then mixing their signals together for a single o... | 1,760,373,055.456667 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/this-week-in-security-alpaca-an0m-recovering-ransoms-and-more/ | This Week In Security: ALPACA, AN0M, Recovering Ransoms, And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"AN0M",
"ransomware",
"This Week in Security"
] | Let’s talk Alpacas. More specifically, “
Application Layer Protocol Confusion – Analyzing and mitigating Cracks in tls Authentication
“. Although this is definitely a case of someone wanting their name to spell ALPACA, the research itself is pretty clever.
It’s a way to Man-In-the-Middle an HTTPS connection, without actually needing to break the encryption. There are two primary observations at the core of the attack. First, multiple subdomains will often share the same TLS certificate. Secondly, TLS is regularly used to protect more than just HTTPS. So what happens if an HTTPS request is redirected to an SFTP server run by the same company? The TLS handshake will complete successfully, but the data returned by the server is not at all what the browser expected.
The specific details are a little light on this one, but the authors identified three broad categories of attack. The first is an upload attack, where the attacker has privileges to upload files to an FTPS server. From what I can tell, an attacker initiates an FTP upload over SSL, using the control port, and then redirects the victim’s connection to the data port on that server. The entirety of the HTML request is then saved, decrypted, on the FTPS server. This request could contain session cookies and other secrets.
The second identified attack is the opposite, the attacker uploads a malicious file, initiates a download, and then redirects a browser’s request to the FTPS data port. The malicious file is grabbed and the browser may interpret it as code to be run. The third is a reflection technique. This one’s a bit different. Essentially the attacker sends a request for
DoBadThings();
, and then connects the victim browser to the data port. The response is sent,
Cannot find file: DoBadThings();
and the browser might just execute the script fragment. This isn’t one of those attacks that are going to be applicable to just every server, but in just the right setup, it could lead to problems.
VMWare Flaw Exploited
There is a serious
VMWare flaw under active exploit
right now. It’s apparently in the VMware vCenter control program, and exploiting it is as simple as six
curl
commands. The flaw is pre-authentication and only requires access to HTTPS port 443. At least one researcher has already seen his VMware honeypot attacked and observed the web-shell the attacker installed. This one looks like a big deal, so make sure you’re up-to-date if you run VMware.
That Time the FBI Ran a Darknet
AN0M was a popular encrypted communication tool for the underworld, really a network consisting of locked down mobile devices with a specialized app running on them. The reality was a bit different, though, the tool was actually being run as
Operation Ironside
, a join operation by the FBI and the Australian Federal Police (AFP). The story is a weird one, and really raises some legal and ethical questions, so buckle up.
First off, things got started back in 2018 when
Phantom Secure CEO Vincent Ramos was prosecuted for RICO charges
, related to his company’s work on secure phones. They specialized in taking Blackberry phones, yanking out all the IO hardware, like camera, microphone, and even GPS chips, and then installing encrypted communication apps. In short, very similar to AN0M. Phantom Secure was walking a very thin line between being a legitimate provider of secure hardware, and actively supporting criminal enterprise. When Ramos told an undercover FBI agent that his phones were specifically for drug smuggling, it became obvious that he had strayed far onto the wrong side of the law. He and many in the company were charged for related crimes.
One employee already had drug charges on his record, and agreed to cooperate with the FBI in exchange for avoiding further charges. That developer had already been developing his own device, which he called AN0M. The deal he cut with the feds was to turn over his work for immunity. A scheme was hatched, apparently over beers between agents, to complete the development of AN0M and distribute the devices, but to include a complete back door for law enforcement. This is actually very similar to what was done with Crypto AG, under
Project Rubicon
.
The turned developer distributed the devices to his contacts, and law enforcement agencies around the world got involved, quietly helping to make them popular. The devices served their purpose of providing messaging to all recipients. It just wasn’t known at the time that law enforcement agents were BCC’d on every message. It’s not clear what triggered the raids and announcements, but this was definitely a coordinated action.
There is a lingering question, however. Namely, do law enforcement really have the legal authority to develop and distribute a malicious device and application? Did a warrant actually cover this? Can it? There is sure to be much consternation over such questions in the months to come. Just imagine that WhatsApp is eventually revealed to be an app secretly developed by the Chinese government, then how would you feel about it?
Ransomware and Bitcoin Seizure
And in another major victory for the FBI, The majority of
the funds paid by the Colonial pipeline have been recovered
. It’s not entirely known how the recovery happened, but you can read the FBI Affidavit that describes the path the Bitcoins took. There’s a strange little statment at the end of that document. “The private key for the Subject Address is in the possession of the FBI in the Northern District of California.” One has to wonder a couple of things. First, how was the FBI able to track those bitcoins? And second, just how did they happen to end up in a wallet that they knew the key for? Could The AN0M story be related?
The private key for the Subject Address is in the possession of the FBI in the Northern District of California
Now here’s another angle to this. Colonial was given the choice,
to pay in Bitcoin or Ethereum, and they chose Bitcoin
, even though there was a 10% extra fee for that currency. They had their networks mostly back up, and they knew the decryptor wouldn’t be very helpful. They were working with law enforcement, and they still paid. This raises the very real possibility that the payment was made specifically to trace the Bitcoin transactions.
Next, remember how proud JBS was of their incident response? Now we find out that
they did indeed pay an $11 million ransom
. However, that was in cooperation with federal officials, and was not necessary to recover files. Oh, and paid in Bitcoin. Sound familiar? At this point, it’s a fair guess that the FBI or another agency helping them has an angle on tracing Bitcoin transactions. AN0M is one possibility. Another is that the FBI is running a “mixer”, essentially a Bitcoin money laundering service. (Shoutout to @MalwareJake for that idea.) Regardless, there seems to be a more serious stance taken towards ransomware as a result of the high profile hacks of the last few weeks.
Rocket.Chat Goes Boom
Running a Rocket.Chat instance?
Go update it!
This popular Open Source messaging platform uses a NoSQL backend for managing users. If you thought getting rid of SQL means you don’t have injection vulnerabilities, think again.
The MongoDB database backend passes requests and data in a JSON-like format. The first attack is to stuff a regex pattern into that JSON, and leak the password hash one character at a time. The second vulnerability uses the
$where
operator in MongoDB in a clever way. Rather than try to leak information directly, they used error messages to get information out. Put both together, and you can go from simply knowing a user’s email address to a shell on the hosting server in seconds. All in all, it’s an impressive hack, and the video demonstration of it is worth the watch:
Agent Smith Takes Over The Matrix
Include Security found an interesting bug in the Unity engine,
where a malicious game object can run arbitrary code
on the machine running the engine. It’s the sort of thing that game designers don’t think too much about until it’s a problem. I couldn’t help but think of VR Chat, a multiplayer experience that allows players to upload their own avatars. It’s built in Unity, and uses game objects for those avatars. I haven’t been able to confirm whether it has this vulnerability one way or another, but I’m very much reminded of Agent Smith copying himself onto all the other citizens of the matrix. If VR Chat does indeed have this problem, it would be rather trivial to build an avatar worm to do the same thing. Life imitates art.
Don’t Use a Password Manager?
And finally, one of the hallowed bits of cybersecurity wisdom gets challenged by [Tavis Ormandy] of Google project Zero fame. His take?
Don’t use a password manager
! Well, actually, it’s that you shouldn’t use a password manager that is a browser extension, because websites can actually interact with the hooks that make them work. There’s more to his argument, and his conclusion is simple. Use the password manager built into Google Chrome. Or Firefox, if that’s what you use. His argument is rather compelling, that many of them aren’t as secure as they claim to be. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6356001",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T14:23:38",
"content": "Good thing FF removed FTP support.https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/16/firefox-90-to-remove-browsers-built-in-ftp-support",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,373,055.79651 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/a-massive-modular-smartwatch-to-match-your-sci-fi-fantasies/ | A Massive Modular Smartwatch To Match Your Sci-Fi Fantasies | Danie Conradie | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"smart watch",
"vfd display",
"voidstar lab",
"zack freedman"
] | Modern smart watches have some incredible features, but they still don’t stack up to what science fiction promised us, both in size and capabilities. Fortunately, [Zack Freedman] has set out to change that with the
Singularitron
, a modular wearable computer that is less Apple Watch and more Pip-Boy.
The most striking features of this monstrosity is its size and the out-of-production
four-line VFD display
. The inputs consist of a row of large RGB-illuminated buttons and a rotary encoder mounted at an angle to curve around the wearers arm. On the inside are a pair of PCBs with an integrated Teensy 3.2, BLE module, motion processing module, haptic driver and power circuitry drawing from a removable 18650 battery. The armband is from a commercial wrist mounted barcode scanner which attaches to the Singularitron with a quick-detach mount.
A major feature of the Singularitron is its modularity. Arrayed around its edges are four slots with spring-loaded contacts for add-on modules. Modules have access to the SPI and I2C busses, two GPIO pins, 3.3 V and 5 V lines. Each module also contains an EEPROM chip to store the module’s ID and any configured settings, allowing modules to be hot swapped and automatically recognised. [Zack] has created a number of modules, like a laser pointer, environmental sensor, OLED display and a Teensy 4.0 to blink an LED. When a module is plugged or inserted, a series of randomly generated status messages flash across the display, thanks to an
awesome little library
which we are absolutely copying for our own projects. Ironically, keeping the time is one of the Singularitron weak points, since [Zack] wasn’t able to fit a backup battery inside, so the time needs to be reset when the battery dies. Maybe a module with an RTC and backup battery is the perfect solution.
The Singularitron is the upgraded version [Zack]’s original
SmarTwatCh
, which had the same chunky aesthetic. His other projects are a regular feature here on Hackaday, and include everything from
Nerf sniper rifles
to
head mounted eye-trackers
. | 15 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355967",
"author": "Mark Miller",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T12:13:31",
"content": "I just love it. VFD so nicely set. It makes my imagination happy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355970",
"author": "Doc Oct",
"times... | 1,760,373,055.853067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/11/vga-library-for-the-raspberry-pi-pico/ | VGA Library For The Raspberry Pi Pico | Chris Lott | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"retro game console",
"vga",
"video"
] | [Miroslav Nemecek] really pushes the limits of the Pico
with his PicoVGA project
, which packs a surprising number of features. His main goal with this library is to run retro games which can fit within the limited RAM and processing power of the Pico, but the demo video below shows a wide array of potential applications.
The library provides a whole slew of features, including frame buffering, sprites, overlays, and resolutions up to 1280×960 in either NTSC or PAL timings. A PWM-driven audio output channel is also included in the package. His library takes full advantage of the programmable I/O module functionality and uses the second core which is dedicated to video processing. However, with care, the second core can perform application tasks in certain circumstances. The VGA analog output signals are provided by resistor ladders, and pixel color is 8-bit R3G3B2 format. To be clear, [Miroslav] does cheat a little bit here in one regard — he overclocks the processor up to 270 MHz to meet the timing demands in some of the resolutions.
[Miroslav] has developed these tools using ARM-GCC on Windows, but he lacks the experience to make a Linux build. He welcomes help on that front from anyone familiar with Linux. And stay tuned — there may be more coming from [Miroslav] in the future. He notes that the PicoVGA library was created as part of a retro gaming computer project which is still under development. We look forward to hearing more about this when it gets released.
A couple of weeks ago we wrote about a
monochrome VGA version of Pong for the Pico
by [Nick Bild]. It’s exciting to see these projects which are exploring the limits of the Pico’s capabilities. Have you seen any boundary-pushing applications for the Pico? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks to [Pavel Krivanek] for sending this project to our tip line. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355926",
"author": "Mahyar",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T08:08:05",
"content": "This is incredible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355932",
"author": "WallyHulea",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T09:25:31",
"content": "Can ... | 1,760,373,055.905212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/a-dual-monitor-setup-for-the-c64-and-yes-its-vga-compatible/ | A Dual Monitor Setup For The C64, And Yes, It’s VGA Compatible | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"commodore 64",
"display",
"vga"
] | Few in the 1980s were too fussed about their home computer only supporting a single monitor; indeed, most were satisfied enough by the brand new capabilities on offer at the time. That said, it’s many decades hence, and we really do deserve more. Fear not,
for [Ryan Brooks] is here to help with his VG64 VGA Card for the Commodore 64.
The card sits in the cartridge slot of the Commodore 64, and packs a Xilinx CPLD which is responsible for generating the video output signals. It’s hooked up to an SRAM chip which acts as a frame buffer for the video output. Programs can then be loaded on the Commodore 64 which write to the frame buffer, that can then be sent out to an attached VGA monitor hooked up to the cartridge.
It’s not the most useful cart at the moment, as it’s only capable of working with software designed specifically for the hardware. Additionally, it could prove difficult to shift enough data to it to do any kind of fast animation or updates. With that said, it’s an awesome example of just what can be achieved in terms of expanding the Commodore 64, and we’d love to see how far work in this space can go. We’ve seen similar work before, too,
albeit with a somewhat smaller 16×2 character LCD.
Video after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355963",
"author": "tyju67ujui",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T12:00:29",
"content": "I dream about macintosh se mac os 7 on new lcd, better cpu (meybe 32MHz !) and moving step by step firmware and system to open source. (similar haiku os)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,373,055.951529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/ham-radio-traffic-logger-using-a-bug-in-baofeng-electronics/ | Ham Radio Traffic Logger Using A Bug In Baofeng Electronics | Danie Conradie | [
"News",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"baofeng",
"ESP8266",
"google sheets",
"ham radio"
] | A Baofeng radio is often one of the first purchases a new ham radio operator makes these days due to the decent features and low price tag. They are far from perfect, but with a bit of creative inspiration, it’s possible to make the quirks work in your favor. By taking advantage of a loud pop on the earphone outputs whenever the LCD backlight turns on, [WhiskeyTangoHotel] built a
radio traffic counter
using an ESP8266.
Whenever there is a transmission on one of the frequencies the radio is tuned to, the backlight turns on. Connecting the audio output to an oscilloscope, [WhiskeyTangoHotel] measured a 5V spike whenever this happens. Using a pair of diodes in series to drop the voltage to a safe level, the ESP8266 detects the voltage spike and updates a Google spreadsheet with the timestamp via IFTTT.
This gave [WhiskeyTangoHotel] empirical data on how much traffic passes through the local VHF repeater, but we wouldn’t blame them if the hack itself was the real motivator.
Of course, this would also be a perfect application for the
RTL-SDR
, which should allow you to do the above and much more, all in software. Add a bit of AI and you can even
extract the call signs
. The RTL-SDR is also a good tool for learning about
RF modulation
.
UV5-R image via
PE1RQM | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355881",
"author": "Lee Studley",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T02:34:53",
"content": "It’s probably a spike from the amplifier being turned on and the bypass coupling cap, or a small class-d amp kicking on. Not so much a bug.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,056.07794 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/redox-redux-split-keeb-gets-a-num-pad/ | Redox Redux: Split Keeb Gets A Num Pad | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino pro micro",
"cherry mx",
"cherry MX green",
"ergodox",
"ergonomic keyboard",
"numpad",
"redox",
"split keyboard"
] | What’s the worst thing about split keyboards? If they have one general fault, it’s that almost none of them have a number pad. If you can fly on that thing, but struggle with using the top row numbers, you will miss the num pad terribly, trust us. So what’s the answer?
Design your own keyboard, of course
. [ToasterFuel] had enough bread lying around to cook up a little experiment for his first keyboard build, and we think the result is well done, which is kind of rare for first keebs.
This design is based on the Redox, itself a remix of the ErgoDox that aims to address the common complaints about the latter — it’s just too darn big, and the thumb clusters are almost unusable. We love how customized this layout is, with its sprinkling of F keys and Escape in the Caps Lock position. Under those keycaps you’ll find 100% Cherry MX greens, so [ToasterFuel] must have pretty strong fingers to pound those super clackers.
Everything else under the hood is pretty standard, with a pair of Arduino Pro Micros running the show. [ToasterFuel] had to wire up the whole thing by hand because of the num pad, and we’re impressed that he built this entire project in just three weeks. And that includes writing his own firmware!
Already found or built a split you love, but still miss the num pad?
Why not build one to match your keyboard? | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355873",
"author": "Nobody",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T01:28:19",
"content": "I found using mx clears vs browns to significantly reduce accidentally hitting 2 keys at once, So on a downsized ergodox, I could definitely see heaver sittings being a boon. Though, I am trying to work my... | 1,760,373,056.014916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/a-self-driving-bicycle-is-something-to-marvel-at/ | A Self-Driving Bicycle Is Something To Marvel At | Lewin Day | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"reaction wheel",
"self balancing"
] | One of the most annoying things about bicycles is that they don’t stay up on their own, especially when they’re stationary. That’s why they come with stands, after all. That said, if you had plenty of advanced electronic and mechanical equipment fitted to one, you could do something about that,
and that’s just what [稚晖君] did.
The video of the project comes without subtitles or any translation, but the gist of it is this. A reaction wheel is fitted to the seat tube, along with a motor which can turn the handlebars via a linkage attached to the head stem. There’s also a motor to drive the bicycle forward via a friction drive to the rear wheel. Combine these with an inertial measurement unit and suitable control system, and you have a bike that can balance while standing perfectly still.
The performance of the system is impressive, and is even able to hold the bike perfectly upright while balanced on a fence rail. Thanks to an onboard camera and LIDAR system, the bike can also drive itself around with no rider on board, which is quite a spooky image. Find a way to do the same while hiding the extra mechanics and you’d have one hell of a Halloween display.
Similar projects have been attempted in the past; we featured
a self-balancing bike
built as a university project back in the distant past of 2012. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Jumy Elerossë for the tip!] | 44 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355810",
"author": "Mike Giles",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T20:18:19",
"content": "It’s like riding …itself.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355811",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T20:21:05",
"content": "... | 1,760,373,056.247346 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/an-explanation-of-a-classic-semiconductor-riddle/ | An Explanation Of A Classic Semiconductor Riddle | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"transistor"
] | Back in 1996, Bob Pease posed an experiment in an April Fools column. “Take an ordinary NPN transistor, ground the base, pull the emitter up to 12 V with a 1 KΩ resistor and measure the collector voltage referenced to ground.” Do the experiment, and you might be surprised to find a small negative voltage present on the collector. [Filip Piorski] has always loved the riddle,
and has explained how it works in a Youtube video.
The key to the trick is the breakdown voltage of the transistor; normally somewhere around 7-8 volts for a typical small NPN transistor. At this point, where the base-emitter junction enters the breakdown regime, it begins to emit light. This light actually travels through the silicon lattice, where it reaches the base-collector junction, which acts like a photodiode under the right conditions. This generates the negative voltage seen at the collector under these conditions.
[Filip] goes on to try the experiment with a TO-3 transistor with the top cut off so he could visualise the effect in action. His photos, taken in a dark room, show tiny flecks of light appearing at spots on the silicon die. If you’ve got more insight on the effect in action, drop a comment below.
It might seem like a simple curiosity,
however silicon junctions and their light emissions are an area of active research in semiconductor physics
. Video after the break. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355802",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T19:28:32",
"content": "Back in the dark ages of CCD image sensors (eighties), it was common to find an odd elevation of signal in spots in a darkfield image. It’s supposed to be uniformly dark, with a bit of leakage current noise... | 1,760,373,056.300753 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/robot-clings-to-ceiling/ | Robot Clings To Ceiling | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"robot",
"suction",
"wall climbing"
] | Imagine you are at the movies and you see a Roomba-like robot climbing a wall or clinging to a ceiling. How would that work? If you are like us, you might think of suction cups or something mechanical or magnetic in the wall. Then again, it is a movie, so maybe it is just a camera trick. The robots from the
Bioinsipired Robotics and Design Lab
at UCSD are no camera trick, though. As [Evan Ackerman] mentions in a post on
IEEE Spectrum
, “It’s either some obscure fluid effect or black magic.” You can watch a video about the bots, below.
It turns out, the answer is closer to a suction cup than you might think. According to
the paper
from the lab, a small flexible disk vibrates at 200 Hz. This generates a thin (less than 1 mm) layer of low pressure air in between the disk and the underlying surface. The robot can resist a force of up to 5 newtons from the suction from the disk.
The disk is only 14 cm in diameter, so somewhere around the size of a common saucer. This seems like something that would be simple to replicate with your own robots. The biggest problem is noise. At 200 Hz, you will hear this robot coming. It also looks like scaling up or down could be a problem. Too small, and the motor that drives the eccentric weight eats up too much space. Larger, you have more to support. We wondered if a piezoelectric disk would work.
We are looking forward to seeing a homebrew robot based on this technique. We have seen other
wall climbing robots
, of course. Some can even
fly
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355623",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T05:20:45",
"content": "Maybe it could be scaled up by using many saucer sized disks connected in a lattice of some sort. With enough disks to have redundancy, a robot could transition across different height and angle surfaces, m... | 1,760,373,057.112416 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/old-phone-becomes-midi-controller/ | Old Phone Becomes MIDI Controller | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"midi",
"midi controller",
"phone"
] | MIDI controllers come in all shapes and sizes. Commercial products based on keyboards or matrixes of buttons are popular, but there’s nothing stopping you from whipping up your own creations out of whatever strikes your fancy. [Kevin] has done just that,
turning an old telephone into a working MIDI device
.
The phone in question is a Doro X20 wired landline phone. Being surplus to [Kevin’s] requirements left it ripe for the hacking. A Raspberry Pi Pico was wired in to the phone’s keypad,
slimmed down with a hacksaw in order to allow it to neatly fit inside the original enclosure.
Then it was a simple matter of whipping up some code to read the buttons and output MIDI data via the Pico’s serial output.
Later, [Kevin] brought the design into the modern world,
setting it up to talk USB MIDI using the Pico’s onboard USB hardware.
This makes using it with a computer a cinch, and lets [Kevin] control a DAW using the handset controller.
It’s a fun build, and one that shows how you can easily build your own MIDI hardware using nothing but a soldering iron, some buttons, and a modern microcontroller. From there, the sky really is the limit. Whether you like
big knobs
,
easy playing
, or have your own personal tastes, you can build what you like to suit your own style. When you do,
drop us a line!
Video after the break. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355606",
"author": "Col_Panek",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T02:05:15",
"content": "Oh. … I thought “old” = rotary dial. Now that would be a challenge.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355754",
"author": "Steve",
... | 1,760,373,056.345138 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/restoring-a-vintage-tube-tester-to-its-former-glory/ | Restoring A Vintage Tube Tester To Its Former Glory | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"recapping",
"repair",
"restoration",
"tube tester",
"vacuum tube",
"vintage hardware"
] | It can be difficult for modern eyes to make much sense of electronics from the 1960s or earlier. Between the point-to-point soldering, oddball components, and the familiar looking passives blown up to comical proportions like rejected props from
“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”
, even experienced hardware hackers may find themselves struggling to understand what a circuit is doing. But that didn’t stop
[Cat0Charmer] from taking the time to lovingly restore this Hickok Cardmatic KS-15874-L2 tube tester
.
The good news was that the machine had nearly all of its original parts, down to the Hickok branded tubes in the power supply. Unfortunately it looks like a few heavy handed repairs were attempted over the years, with a nest of new wires and components intermixed with what [Cat0Charmer] actually wanted to keep. The before and after shots of individual sections of the machine are particularly enlightening, though again, don’t feel to bad if you still can’t make heads or tails of the cleaned up version.
Hiding new capacitors inside of the old ones.
As you’d expect for a machine of this age, many of the original components were way out of spec. Naturally the capacitors were shot, but even the carbon composition resistors were worthless after all these years; with some measuring 60% away from their original tolerances.
We particularly liked how [Cat0Charmer] hollowed out the old capacitors and installed the new modern ones inside of them, preserving the tester’s vintage look. This trick wasn’t always feasible, but where it was applied, it definitely looks better than seeing a modern capacitor adrift in a sea of 60’s hardware.
After undoing ham-fisted repairs, replacing the dud components, and installing some new old stock tubes, the tester sprung to life with renewed vigor. The previously inoperable internal neon lamps, used by the tester’s voltage regulation system, shone brightly thanks to all the ancillary repairs and changes that went on around them. With a DIY calibration cell built from the schematics in an old Navy manual, [Cat0Charmer] got the tester dialed in and ready for the next phase of its long and storied career.
We love seeing
old hardware get restored
. It not only
keeps useful equipment out of the scrap heap
, but because
blending new and old technology
invariably leads to the kind of
innovative problem solving this community is built on
. | 38 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355533",
"author": "Alex99a",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T20:34:16",
"content": "Can’t make heads or tails of it??? Kids these days.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355541",
"author": "haxtormoogle",
"timestamp": "2021-06... | 1,760,373,056.657307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/improved-technique-for-resistive-divider-keypads/ | Improved Technique For Resistive Divider Keypads | Chris Lott | [
"hardware",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"current mirror",
"keypad",
"matrix",
"resistive divider"
] | [Lauri Pirttiaho] from the [Swiss Knife of Electronics] channel
explains how to simplify your resistive divider keypad design
on Hackaday.io.
The usual method involves building a resistive ladder that gives unique and equally spaced voltages for each keypress. If you have just four or five discrete buttons, it isn’t terribly difficult, but if you have a 12- or 16-keypad matrix, things get complicated. [Lauri] looked into the past to come up with a better way, specifically a 646 page, 1 kg textbook from 1990 —
Analogue Ic Design: The Current-Mode Approach
by Toumazou, Lidgey, and Haigh. He learned that sometimes what’s hard to do in the voltage domain is easy in the current domain.
Normally you’d throw in some resistors to form different voltage dividers depending on which key is pressed, and read the resulting voltage off of a voltage divider with an ADC. But that means using the voltage divider equation, and the difference in voltage between keys can get very small. Dropping the voltage divider and measuring the current through a current mirror generates a linear voltage across its output load resistor that can be easily read by your microprocessor. And [Lauri] has posted an example of just such a program on
his GitHub repository
for an Arduino.
Heavy analog electronics, for sure, but something to keep in mind if you’re reading more than 12 keys. Do you have any examples of solving problems by looking into old and/or less-common techniques? Let us know in the comments below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQMzIPOyPKk | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355502",
"author": "davidelang",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T18:43:25",
"content": "I’m actually interested in the flip side of this. Car steering wheel buttons tend to use this mechanism, is there a good way to interface to this with a microcontroller to generate the input to a volta... | 1,760,373,056.520203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/historical-hackers-ctesibius-tells-time/ | Historical Hackers: Ctesibius Tells Time | Al Williams | [
"clock hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"alexandria",
"ancient greek",
"clepsydra",
"clock",
"ctesibius",
"greece",
"greek",
"water clock"
] | People are obsessed with the time and the weather. We’ve talked about the weather since we were all cave dwellers hunting with spears. But the time is a different matter. Sure, people always had the idea of the passage of time. The sun rising and setting gives a natural sense of days, but daylight and dark periods vary by the time of year and to get an accurate and linear representation of time turns out to be rather difficult. That is unless you are a Greek engineer living in Alexandria around 250 BC.
Legend has it that and engineer working in his father’s barbershop led him to discover not only the first working clock, but also the pipe organ, launching the field of pneumatics in the process. That engineer was named Ctesibius and while his story is mostly forgotten, it shows he has a place as a historical hacker.
You might think there were timekeeping devices before 250 BC, and that’s sort of true. However, the devices before Ctesibius had many limitations. For example, a sundial can tell time, but only if the sun is shining. At night or during a storm it is worthless.
The Problem with Water Clocks
One early way to measure time was the clepsydra. This is essentially a pot with a spout near the bottom that you can close with a bung. The Greeks used these for, among other things, giving lawyers on both sides of a debate equal time. A timekeeper would fill the clepsydra to a mark and remove the bung. Your time ran out when no more water came through the spout. If there was a recess, the bung could pause the timer.
If you visit Yellowstone park, you might see a geyser named the Clepsydra Geyser. It was named after the Greek water clock because, prior to a 1959 earthquake, it erupted every three minutes.
This kind of clock has been around for many years and in many ancient cultures. China may have had them as early as 4,000 BC and India possibly around 2,500 BC. Egypt developed them somewhere around 1,400 BC.
The problem with the clepsydra is that more water comes out when it is full than when the pot is nearly empty. So while it works to make sure everyone gets the same amount of time, you couldn’t, for example, time three people by letting one clepsydra fill a cup with water. The first cup would fill faster than the last cup due to the changing water pressure in the vessel.
Ctesibius worked in his father’s barbershop — that’s the modern parlance since we don’t know what they were really called in 200 BC Alexandria. Apparently, there was quite a bit of dripping water in the shop. The dripping water gave him an idea and the result was a series of clocks that would remain the most accurate clocks in the world until the pendulum clock appeared in 1656.
How it Worked
While a normal clepsydra has a fixed amount of water, Ctesibius’ version had a larger source of water above it. It would fill the lower vessel faster than the spout drained water. In addition, the lower vessel had an overflow sluice so that excess water would runoff.
Because the top vessel fills the lower vessel faster than the water exits, the lower vessel stays full all the time — at least as long as the upper vessel isn’t empty. Because the lower vessels’ pressure stays constant, the flow of water from the spout also stays constant, meaning you can measure time linearly. For example, collecting the water from the spout in a third vessel with a float will tell you how long the clock has been running. If the float takes 10 minutes to rise 1 inch, then an hour is 6 inches.
While these clocks were considered accurate in their day, they weren’t by modern standards. In particular, the viscosity of water affects the accuracy of the clock. Water’s viscosity can change a few percentage points with each degree of temperature change. Freezing water won’t work at all. There’s no evidence that ancient water clocks regulated their temperature, so the clocks were probably not very accurate. However, these clocks were reset when refilled — a common occurrence — so at least the errors did not accumulate. You can presume they were reset to something like the sunrise or a sundial.
Lost to Time
Ctesibus apparently understood something about water pressure and also worked with compressed air. But the depth of his understanding and resulting inventions is a mystery. The very little we know about Ctesibus is through mentions of him in other works by Vitruvius, Athenaeus, Hero, and others. His works were mostly lost, probably in the fire at Alexandria.
Want to try your hand at making ancient clocks? Try the video below. Or try a more
modern take on the water clock
. If you want to see how far we’ve come, [Bill] has a good explanation of
atomic clocks
which are about as far from a clepsydra as you can get. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355481",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T17:47:02",
"content": "No mention of hourglasses? I haven’t googled it, but would have thought they were also an early “invention”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355... | 1,760,373,056.575737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/3d-printed-calipers-work-like-clockwork/ | 3D Printed Calipers Work Like Clockwork | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"caliper"
] | Most of us use calipers when working with our 3D printers. Not [Albert]. He has a
clockwork caliper design
that he 3D printed. The STL is available for a few bucks, but you can see how it works in the video below. We don’t know how well it works, but we’ll stick with our digital calipers for now.
The digital readout on this caliper is more like a sophisticated watch. A window shows 10s of millimeters and two dials show the single digits and the number after the decimal point.
While we can’t validate its accuracy and we imagine it would depend somewhat on your printer’s abilities, we can say it looks pretty amazing in operation. This would be just the thing to be in a movie about an alien or post-apocalyptic machine shop.
Like a real set of calipers, there is a depth gauge, although watching it spin through the measurement is a lot more entertaining than the usual measurement. Towards the middle of the video, you can see the parts involved. As you’d expect, the main part is a rack with pinions driving gears that move the numbers and pointers.
Probably not very practical, especially when a reasonable set of calipers doesn’t cost very much anymore. But great fun and would make a nice show project for your 3D printing skills.
We have to admit that these calipers would be easier on batteries than the pair we use every day, but then again there are other ways
to solve that problem
. If you want a crash course on how to use calipers to
reverse engineer mechanical parts
, we can help. | 31 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355460",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T16:11:59",
"content": "Very interesting take on dial calipers, I can see this being useful in a future situation where the vernier has got lost.. or you didn’t know you would need one but do have the ubiquitous 3d printer – p... | 1,760,373,059.002546 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/what-is-ultra-wideband/ | What Is Ultra Wideband? | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Radio Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Apple AirTag",
"DWB1000",
"ultra wideband",
"UWB"
] | If you’ve been following the world of mobile phone technology of late, you may be aware that Apple’s latest IPhones and AirTag locator tags bring something new to that platform. Ultra wideband radios are the new hotness when it comes to cellphones, so just what are they and what’s in it for those of us who experiment with these things?
An Apple AirTag being paired with an iPhone.
Swisshashtag, CC BY-SA 4.0
.
Ultra wideband in this context refers to radio signals with a very high bandwidth of over 500 MHz, and a very low overall power density spread over that spectrum. Transmissions are encoded not by modulation of discrete-frequency carriers as they would be in a conventional radio system, but by the emission of wideband pulses of RF energy across that bandwidth. It can exist across the same unlicensed spectrum as narrower bandwidth channelised services, and that huge bandwidth gives it an extremely high short-range data transfer bandwidth capability. The chipsets used by consumer devices use a range of UWB channels between about 3.5 and 6.5 GHz, which in radio terms is an immense quantity of spectrum.
The real trick up the sleeve for UWB comes not in its data transfer capabilities but in location services, because it allows the synthesis of extremely short RF pulses on the order of a fraction of a nanosecond by combining frequencies across that wide bandwidth. These pulses can be used for extremely accurate time-of-flight measurements between transmitter and receiver, allowing for the distance between them to be determined to an accuracy of a few centimeters. In a system such as Apple AirTags where a tag is likely to have visibility to more than one UWB-equipped Apple product, it can then be used for triangulation with several sources, and thus for accurate 2D and 3D positioning.
The block diagram of the DW1000 UWB chip.
Happily this technology is not just for mobile phone manufacturers, and since commercially available UWB chips have now been on the market for quite a few years, there are now development boards that can be had for affordable prices. I was able to look at a board a friend of mine picked up on AliExpress for somewhere just over $20, which probably represents the current state of cheap UWB modules. It’s
an AI-Thinker NodeMCU-BU01 board
, and it has on board an STM32F103 microcontroller and a B&T BU01 UWB module
which contains a Qorvo DW1000 UWB transceiver IC
and has a very distinctive UWB antenna on-board. The DW1000 is pitched as an indoor positioning chip rather than a data transfer device, though with a 6.8 Mb/s data rate it’s not exactly a tortoise in that field. Sadly I’m not in a position to have a play with it myself, but he’s bought it with the intention of experimenting with his own AirTag-style locator tags.
It looks as though UWB devices are likely to be on the cusp of widespread availability, and if
a hacked AirTag
isn’t your choice for experimentation there are other perhaps more accessible devices which are only likely to become cheaper and more numerous. It may be about to gain an association with privacy-invading mesh networks from Big Tech companies, but behind that there have to be a lot of interesting possibilities for this type of location ability in our field of interest. Watch out for new boards, and start thinking of things you’d like to do with it! | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355431",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T14:28:11",
"content": "I could see this applied to social distancing.https://www.tdk.com/en/featured_stories/entry_018.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355498",
... | 1,760,373,058.753109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/survey-of-simple-logic-simulators/ | Survey Of Simple Logic Simulators | Chris Lott | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Roundup",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"digital design",
"logic simulator"
] | A few months ago, a
tweet
by [Ken Shirriff] asking about simple digital simulators caught my attention. The topic came up again in May when a
repair video
by [CuriousMarc] featured one such simulator called
Logisim-evolution
. It made me want to take a fresh look on what’s out there and which features set the different simulators apart.
So today, let’s take a quick survey of a few such simulators that I found. I’m focusing on plain logic simulators, analyzing ones and zeros using Boolean logic. They are not doing SPICE-like analog analysis of transistor logic gates, but they’re still quite handy for proofing out designs.
Logicsim
Logicsim
from 1983 is the oldest one on our list, developed by Wun Chin Kau and Douglas Jones in support of computer science lab classes at the University of Iowa Computer Science department. It is a text-based simulator, open source for personal and research use, and
written in Pascal
. As recent as 2008,
one user was able to compile it
using FreePascal.
TKGate
Next is
TKGate
, developed as a project by undergraduates in 1987 at the Carnegie Mellon University. It is written in C and Tcl, last updated in 2016, and maintained by Jeffery Hansen
here on Sourceforge
. Of all the simulators I found, this is the only one which contains a hidden pancake recipe.
Logisim
The next one is
Logisim
(note the missing ‘c’), developed by Prof Carl Burch in 2000 for his students at the College of St Benedict and St John’s University in Minnesota. Written in Java, it is open source and is
available on Sourceforge
. He changed focus in 2013 to develop a follow-on program called
Toves
, also
open source on Sourceforge
, but written in C#/Mono. It appears both projects have been abandoned, though are still available.
Logisim
seems to have been quite popular among colleges and universities
There are a number of forks of
Logisim
which popped up to fill the void when Prof Burch stepped aside. Among these are:
Logisim
fork
by Joseph Lawrance of the Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston.
Logisim-evolution
out of the Institute of Reconfigurable & Embedded Digital Systems (REDS), Yverdon-les-Bains Switzerland. UPDATE: Since writing this article, [CuriousMarc] has posted a
tutorial video
on how to get started with
Logisim-evolution
.
Digital
, a simulator Inspired by
Logisim
, but built from scratch by Prof Helmut Neemann in Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University, Germany
Logic Circuit and a Few Others
Logic Circuit,
developed in 2016, is
open source
written in Visual Studio for Windows.
Missing in action is a program called
logic-sim
by Richard Reid of Michigan State University. We found this one explained in great detail in a
computer science course syllabus
at Emory University. Alas, the program itself is either proprietary or lost to internet digital rot.
Here are a few more from the replies to [Ken]’s tweet:
Chipmunk Open Circuit Design
Anitra Development Tools
Labcenter VSM for Proteus
SmartSim (on Raspberry Pi)
Antares Digital Circuit Learning Platform
EDA Playground
Open Source Quantum Development
Multisim Live
Autodesk Tinkercad
CEDAR Logic Simulator
Logic.ly
iCircuit 3D
Simulator.io
Circuitverse
Logic Friday
I was surprised by how many simulators are out there, although I was expecting more text-based command line tools like
Logicsim
. We’ve written about some of these logic simulators in the past, including the textual
LogicEmu
and a
Javascript TTL Simulator
. Do you use any of these simulators in your projects, or can you recommend one? And what’s your take on textual vs GUI interfaces for these tools? Let us know in the comments below. | 30 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355778",
"author": "Dr Cockroach",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T17:39:28",
"content": "Logisim is still my go to for testing out my various logic projects.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355837",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
... | 1,760,373,058.933892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/final-weekend-for-display-challenge-of-the-hackaday-prize/ | Final Weekend For Display Challenge Of The Hackaday Prize | Mike Szczys | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize"
] | This is the final weekend to
enter your display-related project in the 2021 Hackaday Prize
. The good news is, pretty much anything that has a display on it fits the bill here.
The goal of the “Rethink Displays” challenge is to envision interesting ways to visualize data. How many times an hour do you reach for an unlock a smartphone just to get a small bit of data — current temperature, upcoming appointment, the next street to turn on, or how much time is left on your soufflé. There must be another way!
The newspaper is an eInk display that hides in plain sight among non-dynamic framed artwork.
That’s where you come in! Show off us a clever way to convey meaning by choosing a display that makes sense for the type of data and power budget available. Maybe it’s
an ePaper display that camouflages itself as wall art
, a set of
analog meters for the current weather
, or a way to
upcycle old displays
to live on after their portable lives have ended.
This doesn’t need to be a final product. Ten entries will be selected to receive a $500 prize and move on to the final round at the end of October. So if you spend this weekend pulling together a proof of concept, and do a superb job of telling the story of what you’re building, you’ll be firmly in the running! Finalists will have plenty of time to work on completing the designs.
Have a great idea but no time to work on it? Let people know it’s up for grabs by sharing the concept below.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355862",
"author": "Zach Frew",
"timestamp": "2021-06-11T00:39:13",
"content": "I’m really excited about this! This will be my first year participating, and I think the Rethink Displays challenge will coincide well with the kinetic art kick I find myself on.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,373,058.795546 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/automatic-chessboard-lets-online-players-move-the-pieces/ | Automatic Chessboard Lets Online Players Move The Pieces | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"chess",
"chess board",
"chess set",
"ChessBoard"
] | Playing chess online is all well and good, and opens up a whole world of competitors that would otherwise be unavailable in one’s local area. But there’s something to be said for playing over the board, which comes up often enough for many players that they refer to it with the acronym OTB.
[Carlos] built an automatic chessboard by the name of Phantom, intending to bridge the disparate worlds of chess, from cyberspace to meatspace.
The Phantom board in action.
The basic idea is a chessboard that a player can use in the typical way, moving the pieces on the board as normal. The opposing pieces are then moved automatically to reflect an opposing player’s moves as received from an online chess server.
The board outwardly appears normal, with little to suggest anything is amiss. Only the metallic gleam at the base of each piece gives the game away. Pieces are moved by a SCARA arm hidden inside the board, which uses a magnet to drag them around from position to position. It’s quite something to watch the pieces glide around as if by magic, even more so when one is dragged off the board in a combat situation.
As for the control system, an Arduino Nano 33 IoT handles online connectivity to fetch game data from the Lichess chess server, while an ESP32 is responsible for all the motors, and a regular Arduino Nano scans a matrix of Hall effect sensors responsible for locating pieces on the board.
The system allows for seamless play, detecting when pieces are moved by the player via the Hall effect sensors, and reporting back to the chess server online. Similarly, when the game state is updated, the SCARA arm steps in to move the relevant pieces reflecting the moves of the distant player.
It’s a fun project, and one that will surely light up the many chessheads in the Hackaday community. We’ve seen other automated chess builds before too,
like Trap Chess, in which pieces can suddenly fall from the board at any time.
Video after the break. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355763",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T16:08:34",
"content": "This is way cool. Beats chess by mail or by video chat.(Now from my twisted mind)… How about applying it to an internet connected Ouija Board. You have friends over for a party…. you have a hidden vidc... | 1,760,373,059.205133 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/injection-molded-glass-breakthrough-shatters-ceiling-of-work-methods/ | Injection-Molded Glass Breakthrough Shatters Ceiling Of Work Methods | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Current Events",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"glass",
"injection mold",
"injection molding",
"PEG",
"PVB",
"silica"
] | Glass is one of humanity’s oldest materials, and it is still used widely for everything from drinking vessels and packaging to optics and communications. Unfortunately, the methods for working with glass are stuck in the past. Most methods require a lot of high heat in the range of 1500 °C to 2000 °C, and they’re all limited in the complexity of shapes that can be made.
As far as making shapes goes, glass can be blown and molten glass pressed into molds. Glass can also be ground, etched, or cast in a kiln. Glass would be fantastic for many applications if it weren’t for the whole limited geometry thing. Because of the limitations of forming glass, some optic lenses are made with polymers, even though glass has better optical characteristics.
Ideally, glass could be injection molded like plastic. The benefits of this would be twofold: more intricate shapes would be possible, and they would have a much faster manufacturing time. Well, the wait is over.
Researchers at Germany’s University of Freiburg have figured out a way to apply injection molding to glass
. And it’s not just any glass — they’ve made highly-quality, transparent fused quartz glass, and they did it at lower temperatures than traditional methods. The team used x-ray diffraction to verify that the glass is amorphous and free of crystals, and were able to confirm its optical transparency three ways — light microscopy, UV-visible, and infrared measurements. All it revealed was a tiny bit of dust, which is to be expected outside of a clean room.
Polymers Make it Possible
This is exciting news for two big reasons: injection molding opens the door to complex shapes, and it’s also less energy-intensive than traditional glass forming methods. The team began this journey in 2017 by hacking a 3D printer to squirt glass paste instead of plastic. To do this, they made a printable powder from silica nanoparticles and a UV-curable polymer. While it certainly worked for making complex shapes, printing and curing was a slow, one-at-a-time process.
But now they have upgraded the process to work with injection molding. So what’s the secret? More space-age polymers. They started again with silica nanoparticles and added polyethylene glycol (PEG) and polyvinyl butryal (PVG). This produced a paste which they fed into an extruder, and the extruder squirted the plasticized glass into small intricate molds shaped like tiny gears, discs, and rooks.
Once they come out of the mold, the pieces hold themselves together thanks to the
van der Waals interactions
that occur between silica particles. These are weak electrostatic forces that bind molecules to one another. For a more permanent bond, the researchers first soak the pieces in water for several hours to wash away the PEG. Then they fire the pieces in two stages — once at 600° C to burn away the PVB, and a second time at 1300° C to fuse the silica particles together. At this point, the plastic is gone, and all that remains is glass.
Dr. Frederik Kotz, one of the researchers and group leader at materials startup
Glassomer
had this to say about their discovery:
We see great potential, especially for small high-tech glass components with complicated geometries. In addition to transparency, the very low coefficient of expansion of the glass also makes the technology interesting. Sensors and optics work reliably at any temperature if the key components are made of glass.
A New Class of Fast Glass
Although injection molding is faster than the team’s printing-and-curing process from a few years ago, there’s one catch: washing away the PEG has to be done over a number of days to keep the glass from cracking. Surely someone will come up with a way to do it faster. Maybe even before the next time the world needs
glass vials for billions of doses of a new vaccine
.
Images via
Glassomer | 36 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355719",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T14:16:13",
"content": "Presumably there is a shrinkage to account for? (As there is with the some of the print-then-bake 3D printing metal filaments, and that other process where a silica paste is sintered at high temperatur... | 1,760,373,059.393301 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/turning-the-virtual-boy-into-a-handheld-console/ | Turning The Virtual Boy Into A Handheld Console | Tom Nardi | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"classic gaming",
"IPS display",
"nintendo",
"portable console",
"virtual boy"
] | The Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s most infamous failure, was plagued by several issues. The most glaring problem was the red monochrome stereoscopic display technology which gave many users a headache after even a short time playing, but it’s sky-high price and extremely limited library of games kept many prospective buyers at bay as well. There was also the issue of portability: unlike the Game Boy it was named after, the Virtual Boy barely qualified as a portable system due to the fact it needed to be set up on a table to use.
But now, thanks to the tireless efforts of [Shank], at least a few of those issues have been resolved.
He’s built the world’s first
truly
portable Virtual Boy
, which swaps the system’s troubled 3D display for a modern IPS LCD panel. The custom handheld, designed to merge the Virtual Boy’s unique aesthetic with the iconic styling of the Game Boy Advance, looks like it came from some alternate timeline where Nintendo decided to produce a cheaper and less cumbersome version of the system rather than abandoning it.
While the work [Shank] has put into the project is unquestionably impressive, it should be said that it took the efforts of several talented hackers to create the handheld Virtual Boy. The key component that made the modification possible in the first place is the
VirtualTap by [Furrtek]
, which not only provides the VGA output that’s driving the LCD panel, but fools the system’s motherboard into believing the servo-actuated stereoscopic display is still connected and active.
It’s also using the open source power management board that
[GMan] originally developed for his own portable N64
, [Bassline] chipped in to cast the custom buttons and D-pad in translucent resin, and [Mitch 3D] put an untold number of hours into printing and reprinting the system’s multicolored enclosure until it came out just right.
All the little details of the final system, which [Shank] calls the Real Boy, put this project into a league of its own. Special combinations of button presses allows the user to change the color of the display, should you get sick of the infamous red-tint. The buttons also have RGB LEDs behind them that correspond with the color scheme of the display itself, for that extra bit of gamer cred. He even made sure to include the system’s original link port, despite the fact that no officially released game ever made use of it.
Our first run in with [Shank] was
when he demoed a portable Wii built into a mint tin
. It made for a pretty pitiful gaming experience, but the project demonstrated his dedication to seeing a project through to the end.
Watching his skills improve over the last few years has been inspiring
, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.
[Thanks to NeoTechni for the tip.] | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355688",
"author": "Phillip",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T12:26:42",
"content": "I love it! Hopefully someday we see a Rev2 featuring a stereoscopic display, but either way this is mad geek cred :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,373,059.153852 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/sand-hack-boosts-power-on-insight-mars-lander/ | Sand Hack Boosts Power On InSight Mars Lander | Zach Zeman | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"InSight",
"mars",
"nasa",
"solar power",
"space exploration"
] | We love that part in
Apollo 13
where the NASA engineers have to fit a square carbon dioxide filter in a round hole. We love basically every scene of
The Martian
where Mark Watney hacks together any piece of hardware he can get his hands on to survive on a hostile planet. What we love even more is watching actual NASA engineers trying out a hack and ordering
the InSight lander to scoop sand on itself to increase the power from its solar panels
.
InSight, which recently had
its two-year mission to study the interior geology of Mars
extended, has been suffering from a buildup of dust on its solar panels. This dust is only adding on to the expected power loss which occurs as the red planet approaches aphelion — the maximum distance from the Sun in its orbit. Attempts to shake the panels clear by pulsing their deployment motors were unsuccessful. Other solar-powered missions have experienced a cleaning effect from the Martian winds; however, despite seeing plenty of gusts, InSight has not seen any significant improvement.
Counterintuitively, operators instructed the lander to slowly trickle more dust and sand from its scoop close to (not on top of) one of the solar panels. As the wind blew, larger particles were carried by the breeze across the panels and bounced off the surface, carrying away some accumulated dust. While that may sound like a minuscule effect, the experiment resulted in about 30 extra watt-hours per Sol. Margins are still thin, and science instruments will still need to be disabled to conserve power. But this boost alone was enough to delay the powerdown for a few weeks.
There are so many
exciting missions operating on Mars
right now. Though, it’s also fun to take
a look back at some of the earliest probes
. And we’re always amazed at
the resources NASA makes available for us to have some DIY fun
. | 78 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355639",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T08:32:06",
"content": "Where are the micro cleaning robots they promised?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355640",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
... | 1,760,373,059.573869 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/tiny-mechanical-keyboard-powered-by-pi-pico/ | Tiny Mechanical Keyboard, Powered By Pi Pico | Donald Papp | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Gherkin",
"keyboard",
"pi pico",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | For some applications, smaller is better and that is precisely the thinking behind a diminutive keyboard like the
PiPi Gherkin
, which is designed to use the Raspberry Pi Pico as its controller. This keyboard may have only 30 keys in total, but they are full-sized for comfort and don’t let the scant layout mislead you. It has more functionality than it would seem to at first glance; the entire bottom row acts as dual function tap/hold keys, allowing the keyboard to shift layers on the fly.
This keyboard definitely has a a thoughtful layout, and we’re not just talking about the tap/shift functionality. We especially like the way the Pi Pico is tucked neatly underneath the main PCB, taking up very little room while exposing its USB connector between two standoffs for easy access without requiring an adapter, or wiring a separate plug.
If the Gherkin sounds familiar, we’ve seen it before as
part of this lunchbox cyberdeck
build, where the small size allowed it to take up impressively little room. The shifting might take a little getting used to, but it’s a clean design that uses full sized keys, so when it comes to small keyboards one could certainly do worse. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355657",
"author": "Alina",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T09:33:03",
"content": "Adding a spacebar is not a bad idea",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355667",
"author": "poiuyt",
"timestamp": "2021-06-10T10:57:57",
"cont... | 1,760,373,058.854973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/linux-fu-databases-are-next-level-file-systems/ | Linux Fu: Databases Are Next-Level File Systems | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"database",
"linux",
"sql",
"sqlite"
] | It is funny how exotic computer technology eventually either fails or becomes commonplace. At one time, having more than one user on a computer at once was high tech, for example. Then there are things that didn’t catch on widely like vector display or content-addressable memory. The use of mass storage — especially disk drives — in computers, though has become very widespread. But at one time it was an exotic technique and wasn’t nearly as simple as it is today.
However, I’m surprised that the filesystem as we know it hasn’t changed much over the years. Sure, compared to, say, the 1960s we have a lot better functionality. And we have lots of improvements surrounding speed, encoding, encryption, compression, and so on. But the fundamental nature of how we store and access files in computer programs is stagnant. But it doesn’t have to be. We know of better ways to organize data, but for some reason, most of us don’t use them in our programs. Turns out, though, it is reasonably simple and I’m going to show you how with a toy application that might be the start of a database for the electronic components in my lab.
You could store a database like this in a comma-delimited file or using something like JSON. But I’m going to use a full-featured SQLite database to avoid having a heavy-weight database server and all the pain that entails. Is it going to replace the database behind the airline reservation system? No. But will it work for most of what you are likely to do? You bet.
Abstraction
If you think about it, the file system is nothing more than an abstraction over the disk drive. We normally don’t know or care where exactly
hello.c
is stored. We don’t even care if it is encrypted or compressed. It could be fetched over a network or all the pieces of it could be scattered randomly across the disk. We don’t usually care. What if you abstracted the filesystem itself?
That’s pretty much the idea of a database. If I have a list of, say, electronic components, I could store them in a comma-delimited file and read it with a spreadsheet. Or I could use a full-up database. The problem with databases is that traditionally it requires some server software like MySQL, SQLServer, or Oracle, for example. You can abstract the database interface, but it is a pretty heavy solution compared to just opening a file and using it normally.
However, there is a frequently used library called SQLite that provides a pretty robust database that can live in a single file with no external server or maintenance. There are limitations, of course, but for a lot of simple programs it can bring the benefits of a database without the overhead and expense.
The Right Tool for the Right Job
Of course, there are limitations. However, if you are rolling your own file format for something, you might want to consider switching to SQLite and handling it as a database. According to the project’s website, doing so may actually
save space and increase access speed
. Plus, once you get the hang of it, it is just easier. It is also easier to scale later if you decide to switch to a real database.
If you are storing huge databases (like terabyte-scale) or you need many concurrent users — especially writing to the database — this might not be for you. The SQLite website has a good page about
what uses are good and which are not optimal
for the library.
One other advantage: There is a command line program (and some GUI variations like the browser in the accompanying image) that let you work with SQLite databases without writing any code. So you can do things like populate your data or examine your database without having to write SQL at all. For a custom file format, you’d probably have to do everything yourself or populate and debug data with a generic tool that doesn’t know about your specific data.
My Task
I don’t want to develop an entire application in a post, nor do I want to teach SQL — the structured query language that most databases include SQLite use. But I want to show you how easy it is to get a start on a simple electronics database using C. The C code will turn out to be the least of our problems. The two things you’ll want to understand most are how to structure the data — the database schema — and how to populate the initial data. Even if you want to have your program add data eventually, it is nice to start with a little data initially to get your program working.
Database Fundamentals
A modern relational database has one or more tables. Each table has rows of data. A row has one or more columns and each column has a data type. For example, you might have a text column for serial number, a real number value for test point voltage, and a boolean for pass/fail.
Each table has some unique ID per row. The database will provide one for you if you don’t, but usually, you’ll want to provide this unique ID yourself. The database will help you by automatically incrementing the number and ensuring it is unique for each row.
If this is all there was to it, there wouldn’t be many advantages over a comma-delimited file. But we can do a lot of things better once we have this organizational structure. For example, it is easy to ask the database to sort items or pick the highest three voltages out of the table.
However, one of the biggest advantages of a database is being able to do joins. Supposed I have a list of components: a PC board, a resistor, a battery holder, and an LED. I have a table that has one row corresponding to each of them. Now suppose I want to have a table of assemblies that are made up of components.
I could take a simple approach:
Table Component
ID Name
===========
1 PCB
2 Resistor
3 LED
4 Battery Holder
Table Assembly
ID Name Components
============================
1 Blink1 PCB, Resistor, LED, Battery Holder
2 Blink2 PCB, Resistor, LED, Resistor, LED, Battery Holder
That's ugly and wasteful. A better approach would be to use three tables:
Table Component
ID Name
===========
1 PCB
2 Resistor
3 LED
4 Battery Holder
Table Assembly
ID Name
=========
1 Blink1
2 Blink2
Table Assembly_Parts
ID Component Quan
=======================
1 1 1
1 2 1
1 3 1
1 4 1
2 1 1
2 2 2
2 3 2
2 4 1
Using a join operation, you can bind these tables together to generate what amounts to the first table without duplicating lots of data.
For my toy database, then, I’m going to create three tables:
part
will contain the parts I have. The
partnums
table will hold types of parts (e.g. a 7805 vs a 2N2222 or a CDP1802. Finally, a
locations
table will tell me where I store things. There are other ways this could be structured. For example, there could be a table to store types of footprints: a 2N2222 can be in a TO92 or a surface mount,. In addition, I’m going to create a view that shows everything unrolled like in the first example. A view is something that isn’t stored but acts like a table for convenience. In reality, it is just a query on the database that you can work with.
There’s a lot more to it, of course. There are inner and outer joins and a lot of other details and nuances. Luckily, there’s plenty of material to read about databases on the Web including
the SQLite documentation
.
Just Enough SQL
For our purposes, we are only going to use a handful of SQL statements:
create
,
insert
, and
select
. There is an executable,
sqlite3
, where you can enter database commands. You can provide the name of the database on the command line and that’s the easiest way to go. Use
.exit
when you want to exit.
You can probably figure out the SQL syntax since is pretty verbose:
create table part ( id integer not null primary key, name text, partnum integer, value text,
units text, quantity integer, photo blob, data text, location integer, footprint text);
create table partnums (id integer not null primary key, partnum text, desc text);
create table locations (id integer not null primary key, location text, desc text);
create view full as select part.id, name, partnums.partnum as part_number, value, units,
quantity, data, locations.location as location, footprint from part
inner join partnums on part.partnum = partnums.id inner join locations on locations.id=part.location
I just made those calls in the sqlite3 command line program although I could have used the GUI or — if I wanted to — I could make my C program execute those commands. I also used the command line to insert a few test records. For example:
insert into locations (location,desc) values ("Shop - storage II","Storage over computer desk in shop");
insert into partnums(partnum,desc) values("R.25W","Quarter Watt Resistor");
insert into part(partnum,quantity,location,value,units) values (2,111,1,"10K","ohms");
To get data back out, you’ll use the select command:
select * from part;
select partnum, quantity from part where quantity<5;
If you want to know more, there are plenty of
SQL tutorials
on the web.
Programming!
So far, none of this has required programming. Assuming you have the
libsqlite3-dev
package or its equivalent, you don’t need much to add database functions to your C program. You’ll need to include
sqlite3.h
. If you can’t find it, you probably don’t have the development files installed. You’ll also need to link with
libsqlite3
. For a simple single file project, this makefile will probably get you started:
CC=gcc
CFLAGS+=-std=c99 -g
LDFLAGS=-g
LDLIBS+=-lsqlite3
edatabase : main
main : main.c
The code itself is straightforward. You need to open the database file (
sqllite3_open
). Instead of a file, you can pass “:memory” to get an in-memory database that won’t last beyond the life of your program. The call will give you a handle back to your database. Next, you have to parse or prepare the SQL statement you want to execute. This could be any of the SQL we’ve executed through the interface or lots of other SQL statements. In my case, I want to pull the data from the full view and display it, so I’ll parse:
select * from full;
Finally, you’ll call
sqlite3_step
and while it returns
SQLITE_ROW
, you can process the row using calls like
sqlite3_column_text
. At the end, you finalize the database and close it. Here’s the code with error handling removed:
#include <sqlite3.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
sqlite3 *db;
sqlite3_stmt *sql;
int rv;
rv=sqlite3_open("parts.db",&db);
rv=sqlite3_prepare_v2(db, "SELECT * from full", -1, &sql, NULL);
do
{
rv=sqlite3_step(sql);
if (rv==SQLITE_ROW)
{
printf("%s,",sqlite3_column_text(sql,0));
printf("%s\n",sqlite3_column_text(sql,2));
}
} while (rv==SQLITE_ROW);
sqlite3_finalize(sql);
sqlite3_close(db);
return 0;
}
Or, have a look
at the full code
. In a case where you didn’t care about stepping through rows, you might have called
sqlite3_exec
. Even the documentation admits this is just a wrapper around a prepare, a step, and a finalize so you can just pass in a string and expect it to work.
Of course, there are
many more calls
. For example, you can call
sqlite_column_int
or other calls to get particular types. You can bind parameters to SQL calls to set values instead of building a string. But this shows you just how easy it can be to do a simple SQLite program.
So next time you find yourself inventing a new file format, think about using SQLite instead. You’ll get free tools and once you learn SQL you’ll find there is a lot you can do without writing any actual code other than different SQL commands. You can even use
Git-like branching to keep versions of your database
. Then again, some people use
git as a database
, but we don’t suggest it. | 63 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355123",
"author": "Karl Ramboz",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T17:18:47",
"content": "Your idea of stagnation is my idea of stability.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355183",
"author": "ehrichweiss",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,059.105288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/cold-war-code-breaking-manual-teaches-impossible-puzzle-solving/ | Cold War Code Breaking Manual Teaches Impossible Puzzle Solving | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"cryptodiagnosis",
"cryptography",
"cypher",
"nsa"
] | Cryptologist [Lambros Callimahos] was a victim of his own success. He wrote a trilogy of books called Military Cryptanalytics covering code breaking in 1977. The first two volumes were eventually published, but the NSA blocked the public release of the third volume back in 1992. But last December,
it finally saw the light of day
.
Of course, some parts of the book are redacted, including parts of the table of contents. That’s pretty bad when even your chapter headings can be classified. [Richard Bean] over on
Phys.org
has some notes about the book along with some examples of hard-to-solve crypto puzzles.
One key part of the book, apparently, is cryptodiagnosis which is the approach to solving a message encrypted using an unknown method. In other words, while it is hard to break, say, an Enigma message, just knowing it is an Enigma message is a pretty big hint. If you get some random encoded message, where do you start? The answer is in the book.
We always think it is interesting that looking at what’s in a book that has been released can give you clues about what is still secret, just like smoke might show an invisible being by highlighting where they are not. However, we imagine the intelligence community has the same thought and throws some red herrings in just to confuse us.
Of course, one easy way to break codes is to
break the machines people use to create them
. Then again, sometimes the best encryption is to simply
hide in plain sight
. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355097",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T16:07:13",
"content": "Generally the easiest way to break encryption is not to break the machines people use, but to break the people. [obligatory XKCD reference]Of course, it’s even easier if you build the machine yourself in the ... | 1,760,373,059.457574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/iss-artificial-gravity-study-shows-promise-for-long-duration-spaceflight/ | ISS Artificial Gravity Study Shows Promise For Long Duration Spaceflight | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"centrifuge",
"gravity",
"human spaceflight",
"international space station",
"iss"
] | The International Space Station is humanity’s most expensive gym membership.
Since the earliest days of human spaceflight, it’s been understood that longer trips away from Earth’s gravity can have a detrimental effect on an astronaut’s body. Floating weightless invariably leads to significantly reduced muscle mass in the same way that a patient’s muscles can atrophy if they spend too much time laying in bed. With no gravity to constantly fight against, an astronauts legs, back, and neck muscles will weaken from disuse in as little as a week. While this may not pose an immediate problem during spaceflight, astronauts landing back on Earth in this physically diminished state are at a higher risk of injury.
Luckily this problem can be largely mitigated with rigorous exercise, and any orbiting vessel spacious enough to hold human occupants for weeks or months will by necessity have enough internal volume to outfit it with basic exercise equipment such as a treadmill or a resistance machine. In practice, every space station since the Soviet Union’s Salyut 1 in 1971 has featured some way for its occupants to workout while in orbit. It’s no replacement for being on Earth, as astronauts still return home weaker than when they left, but it’s proven to be the most practical approach to combating the debilitating aspects of long duration spaceflight.
Early NASA concept for creating artificial gravity.
Of course, there’s an obvious problem with this: every hour spent exercising in space is an hour that could be better spent doing research or performing maintenance on the spacecraft. Given the incredible cost of not just putting a human into orbit, but keeping them there long-term, time is very literally money. Which brings us back to my original point: astronauts spending two or more hours each day on the International Space Station’s various pieces of exercise equipment just to stave off muscle loss make it the world’s most expensive gym membership.
The ideal solution, it’s been argued, is to design future spacecraft with the ability to impart some degree of artificial gravity on its passengers through centripetal force. The technique is simple enough: just rotate the craft along its axis and the crew will “stick” to the inside of the hull. Unfortunately, simulating Earth-like gravity in this way would require the vessel to either be far larger than anything humanity has ever launched into space, or rotate at a dangerously high speed. That’s a lot of risk to take on for what’s ultimately just a theory.
But a recent paper from the University of Tsukuba in Japan
may represent the first real steps towards the development of practical artificial gravity systems aboard crewed spacecraft. While their study focused on mice rather than humans, the results should go a long way to codifying what until now was largely the stuff of science fiction.
An Imperfect Comparison
Perhaps the most interesting element of
“Transcriptome analysis of gravitational effects on mouse skeletal muscles under microgravity and artificial 1 g onboard environment”
is that the researchers didn’t originally set out to study artificial gravity, per se. The goal was to simply learn more about muscular atrophy in mammals at the molecular level as it pertains to long duration spaceflight. Traditionally, this sort of research has been done by sending one group of mice to space for a week or two and then comparing their muscle tissue to a group of control mice that stayed on Earth. But the team realized early on that such an experiment was fundamentally flawed.
The
Shuttle’s AEM gave mice a place to stay
, but no gravity.
When there’s a control group and an experimental group, the idea is to have both groups exposed to the exact same conditions
except
for the one you wish to study. In that way, you can be reasonably sure that any changes you observe were caused by that one missing element. But with the classic approach to studying rodents in space, this simply isn’t possible.
Consider for a moment the journey our experimental mice face. To start with, they’ll be shot into orbit on a rocket. Not exactly an everyday occurrence for a mouse. While in space they’ll be living in an environmental microcosm artificially maintained by the spacecraft’s life support systems, and even with shielding, will be exposed to a certain degree of cosmic radiation. At the end of their stay they get packed back into a returning spacecraft and sent hurtling through the atmosphere, only to end their ordeal by getting dunked into the ocean. Meanwhile, the control group has just been sitting in a cage in some laboratory the whole time.
These are hardly comparable experiences. Some of these elements could certainly be simulated on Earth for the control group, but not with the degree of accuracy that would be necessary to completely cancel them out. There are simply too many variables at play to exclude the possibility that they’ve impacted the results of the experiment. What the researchers realized they needed was some way to have the control group experience all the same aspects of spaceflight as the experimental group, with the exception of spending time in microgravity.
Leveling the Field
Their answer was the Multiple Artificial-gravity Research System (MARS). By utilizing a small centrifuge, the Mouse Habitat Unit (MHU) aboard the International Space Station is able to spin up half of the mice to a speed fast enough to approximate Earth gravity. The rest of the mice live in the bottom of the unit, which is otherwise identical except for the fact that it doesn’t rotate. In this way the researchers could be sure that all of the mice in the unit were exposed to the same environmental conditions, minus the presence of gravity.
Even still, the paper explains the comparison isn’t perfect. The control group still spends some time in microgravity, as there’s no provision for providing artificial gravity while they are traveling to and from the ISS on the SpaceX Dragon. There’s also a certain amount of processing time before the mice can be removed from the Dragon and moved to the MHU when they first arrive.
That said, both the control and experimental groups go through the same process. So while the control group is exposed to a few relatively brief periods of microgravity that they wouldn’t have gone through on Earth, it’s still an environmental condition that’s shared with the experimental group.
The results of the experiment, which was actually conducted back in 2016, fall exactly in line with what scientists have believed for decades: the mice kept under artificial gravity during their stay on the ISS did not experience the same muscle loss as those in microgravity. Further, the muscle’s gene expression was found to be different between the mice in the control and experimental groups. This strongly suggests that it was the absence of gravity that caused the change, and not space radiation as was previously theorized.
There was little question that generating artificial gravity aboard the ISS was possible, and the fact that it prevented the degenerative muscle loss experienced in weightless conditions was similarly predictable. However, this experiment provided the concrete evidence demanded by the scientific method. More experiments will of course be necessary to further expand our knowledge in this field, but for the time being, it’s safe to say that spinning a spacecraft will indeed prevent mammalian muscle loss during long trips in space.
Exploring New Frontiers
While scientists can use a centrifuge to study the effects of gravity beyond 1 g here on the Earth, there’s no way to
reduce
the influence of gravity in the lab. But since the ISS is already experiencing weightlessness by virtue of its location in orbit,
a centrifuge can be used to produce artificial gravity between 0 and 1 g
. This puts MARS in a very unique position as it could allow researchers to simulate the gravity on the Moon or Mars, giving us a glimpse at how long-duration stays on those bodies would impact human physiology.
This is critical information to have if humanity is ever to
establish a permanent outpost on the Moon
or conduct crewed missions to Mars. The only knowledge we have about human adaptability to lunar gravity comes from the relatively brief surface stays during the Apollo program, and we have almost no idea how the human body would respond to months or perhaps even years on the Martian surface.
The research could also have an impact on future space stations. What if you only need to simulate some fraction of Earth’s gravity to keep muscle atrophy at bay? Determining the minimum amount of gravitational force necessary to slow or even halt the damaging effects of long duration spaceflight could make producing artificial gravity much easier than is currently assumed.
At the close of the paper, the researchers hint that this is precisely the sort of experimentation they hope to conduct in the future:
Although the current study was made possible by state-of-the-art devices that implement an artificial 1 g onboard environment in the ISS, future studies of mammals will validate the effect of long-term habitation under gravitational forces weaker than 1 g, which is meant to simulate the gravity of the Moon and Mars, known as partial gravity. As experiment methods for space biology continue to develop, future studies may more conclusively identify the underlying causes and offer strategies to prevent muscle atrophy. | 105 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355061",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T14:30:59",
"content": "Interesting how it turns into an even bigger gym.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355062",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T14:32... | 1,760,373,059.873053 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/the-epic-saga-of-hacking-knights-of-the-round/ | The Epic Saga Of HackingKnights Of The Round | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"arcade game",
"assembly",
"Capcom",
"Motorola 68000",
"ROM hack"
] | For the uninitiated,
Knights of the Round
was a hack-and-slash arcade game released by Capcom in 1991 that rather loosely followed the legend of King Arthur and the eponymous Knights of the Round Table. In it, up to three players make their way from stage to stage, vanquishing foes and leveling up their specific character’s weapons and abilities. But [Sebastian Mihai] was looking for a new way to experience this classic title, so he decided to
reverse engineer the game and create his own version called
Warlock’s Tower
.
Those familiar with the original game will no doubt notice some of the differences right away while watching the video below, but for those who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Arthur’s digital adventures, the major changes are listed on the project’s web page. Among the most notable are the removal of cooperative multiplayer and stage time limits. This turns the game from a frantic beat ’em up to a more methodical adventure. Especially since you now have to compete the game in a single life. If we had to guess, we’d say [Sebastian] prefers his games to have a bit of a challenge to them.
Even if you aren’t interested in playing
Warlock’s Tower
yourself, the story of how [Sebastian] created it is absolutely fascinating. He started with zero knowledge of Motorola 68000 assembly, but by the end of the project, was wrangling multiple debuggers and writing custom tools to help implement the approximately 70 patches that make up the custom build.
The hundreds of hours of work that went into creating these patches is documented as a sort of stream of consciousness on the project page, allowing you to follow along in chronological order. Whether it inspires you to tackle your own reverse engineering project or makes you doubt whether or not you’ve got the patience to see it through, it’s definitely worth a read. If you’re a
Knights of the Round
fan, you should also take a look at the
incredible wealth of information he’s amassed about the original game itself
, which honestly serves as an equally impressive project in its own right.
Modified versions of classic games
, known colloquially as “ROM hacks” are
fairly common among serious fans
who
want to see their favorite games improved over time
. While they aren’t always as ambitious as
Warlock’s Tower
, they all serve as examples of how a dedicated community can push a product well beyond the scope envisioned by its original creators. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355006",
"author": "Jacek",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T11:06:01",
"content": "is possible to create a program from this?mem creator == I can write a sentence and it show it in specific location and creature/hero.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,373,059.616461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/tractors-and-the-right-to-repair-its-going-global/ | Tractors And The Right To Repair: It’s Going Global | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"Agco",
"drm",
"farming",
"john deere",
"NFU",
"right to repair"
] | For more than a few years now, we’ve been covering the saga of tractors from the larger manufacturers on which all components are locked down by software to the extent that they can only be replaced by officially sanctioned dealers. We’re thus pleased to see a couple of moments when the story has broken out of the field of a few farmers and right-to-repair geeks and into the mainstream. First up:
a segment on the subject from NPR
is worth a listen, as the US public radio station interviews a Montana farmer hit by a $5k fuel sensor on his John Deere as a hook form which to examine the issue. Then there is
a blog post from the National Farmers Union
,
the body representing UK farmers
, in which they too lay out the situation and also highlight the data-grabbing aspects of these machines.
(At publication we incorrectly attributed the blog post to the British NFU, when in fact it came from the American organisation of the same name. Thanks commenters for pointing it out.)
The last piece is particularly interesting, as not only does it break the story out of the USA, but also because the NFU are the largest farmers’ body in the UK and represent farmers across the whole range of British agriculture. Their leverage as a political pressure group is not inconsequential, so if this is a subject they’ve taken up, it could result in it being heard in the corridors of power
.
Most of the coverage of this has centred upon John Deere tractors, but it extends beyond the familiar green and yellow machines. At its root is the vast majority of larger-scale tractor manufacturing lying with a very small number of multi-national companies who are each pursuing similar problematic software-based paths. Legislation to curb their extent is one route out of the problem, but perhaps another is for it to become an opportunity for a market entrant to seize an edge. An acquaintance of Hackaday in the fork lift industry recounted the tale of a Far Eastern manufacturer who gained market share by using similar ease of parts replacement as a selling point, perhaps it’s time for the same to happen in the field of agriculture. If it takes one of the more recent breed of large Chinese tractors arriving in a field in Kansas to catch Deere or Agco napping, they will have only themselves to blame.
Read some of our past coverage, on
the soaring price of older machines without DRM
, and
an attempt to curb the practice in Nebraska
.
Header image: AGCO-Fendt,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 65 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354985",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T08:43:04",
"content": "Can you replace an ECU with an aftermarket on on a BWM car?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6354986",
"author": "Bleugh",
... | 1,760,373,059.717873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/an-emulator-that-only-plays-one-game/ | An Emulator That Only Plays One Game | Matthew Carlson | [
"Games",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"emulator",
"gameboy",
"gameboy color"
] | [Ben Smith] had previously implemented a GameBoy Color emulator but decided to
make a new emulator that to play just one game called pokegb
. The game is, of course, the popular blue edition of Pokemon. While this emulator could play other GameBoy games, the way it was implemented was to support only the opcodes and features that Pokemon Blue used. What’s perhaps even more amazing is that this full emulator is just 582 lines of C++ (using SDL for graphics and input). There is also an obfuscated version that comes in at just 68 lines and in the shape of three Pokeballs. All
the code for pokegb can be found on GitHub
.
[Ben] goes through a detailed listing of each opcode of the processor, memory, the graphics unit (PPU), and how it interacts with a modern operating system. We love the idea of implementing each opcode one by one and gradually seeing the emulator make it farther and farther through the ROM. The only feature that’s noticeably absent is sound, which would require a significant amount of code to emulate properly.
If you’re interested in a deep dive into the audio chips inside a Gameboy Color, [Ken Shirriff]
has already done the research for you
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355277",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T02:02:02",
"content": "Kudos!I think this is amazing! ^_^Congratulations on a job well done!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,059.942143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/at-mit-clothing-fiber-watches-you/ | At MIT, Clothing Fiber Watches You | Al Williams | [
"Science",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"fiber",
"smart fiber",
"textiles",
"Wearables"
] | [Yoel Fink] and his team at MIT have announced their
creation of a fiber
that can sense and store data. In addition, they can use data from a shirt made of the material to infer the wearer’s activity with high accuracy. The fiber contains hundreds of microscale silicon chips into a preform used to create a polymer fiber that connects the chips using four 25 micron tungsten wires. You can read the paper directly in
Nature Communications
.
The fiber contains temperature sensors and enough memory (24CW1280X chips) to store a short movie for two months without power. It also contains 1,650 neural network elements, which means the fiber can train to infer activity itself without additional help.
This sounds imaginative, but perhaps not yet practical. Right now, the fiber can survive being washed at least ten times and requires an external device and — presumably — external power. However, perhaps it is a glimpse of things to come.
Even if you aren’t interested in wearables, the creating of an ultra-tiny serial bus is interesting. It is also interesting to note that they use CNC milling to form the preform with the wire channels and other necessary features. We doubt too many Hackaday readers will want to try producing something like this, but we could see a lot of people wanting to purchase it and use it for different wearable projects.
We wonder if, one day, your clothes will have something like this in them for control and
muscle fabric
to allow them to reconfigure themselves. If sewing isn’t your bag, you might try
3D printing your electronic enclosures
on your clothes. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354952",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T04:19:48",
"content": "AI/ML Clothing = Creepy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355042",
"author": "Rog77",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T13:28:41",
"co... | 1,760,373,060.087017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/flat-transformer-gives-this-pcb-tesla-coil-some-kick/ | Flat Transformer Gives This PCB Tesla Coil Some Kick | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arc",
"coil",
"epoxy",
"high voltage",
"load",
"primary",
"resonant",
"secondary",
"streamer",
"tesla",
"transformer"
] | Arguably, the most tedious part of any Tesla coil build is winding the transformer. Getting that fine wire wound onto a suitable form, making everything neat, and making sure it’s electrically and mechanically sound can be tricky, and it’s a make-or-break proposition, both in terms of the function and the aesthetics of the final product. So
this high-output printed circuit Tesla
should take away some of that tedium and uncertainty.
Now, PCB coils are nothing new — we’ve seen plenty of examples used for everything from
motors
to
speakers
. We’ve even seen a few
PCB Tesla coils
, but as [Ray Ring] points out, these have mostly been lower-output coils that fail to bring the heat, as it were. His printed coil generates some pretty serious streamers — a foot long (30 cm) in some cases. The secondary of the coil has 6-mil traces spaced 6 mils apart, for a total of 240 turns. The primary is a single 240-mil trace on the other side of the board, and the whole thing is potted in a clear, two-part epoxy resin to prevent arcing. Driven by the non-resonant half-bridge driver living on the PCB below it, the coil can really pack a punch. A complete schematic and build info can be found in the link above, while the video below shows off just what it can do.
Honestly, for the amount of work the PCB coil saves, we’re tempted to give this a try. It might not have the
classic good looks of a hand-wound coil
, but it certainly gets the job done. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355387",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T11:11:40",
"content": "Cool build, but I don’t think I’d test it next to a bunch of test gear like that!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355430",
"author": "Bre... | 1,760,373,060.138264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/09/old-dslr-lens-becomes-useful-soldering-magnifier/ | Old DSLR Lens Becomes Useful Soldering Magnifier | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dslr",
"magnifier",
"soldering",
"soldering microscope"
] | Soldering tiny stuff is hard, if not impossible, without some optical assistance. [Ad_w00000] was having just this problem,
so built himself a soldering magnifier to help.
The magnifier uses a variety of components [Ad_w00000] had lying around. For the optical side of things, an old Canon DSLR zoom lens was pressed into service as the main magnifying element. The lens was then fitted with an old laptop webcam, which was glued into an old lens extender to avoid modifying the main lens itself. The webcam is hooked up to an Asus Tinkerboard fitted with a touchscreen display to show the images. The whole lens assembly is then fitted onto an old TV stand to enable it to sit far enough above the work surface to focus properly.
The build is a great example of building something useful out of whatever you have on hand. Sometimes, that’s cheaper and quicker than spending money and waiting for something to ship. It also has the bonus that you’ll learn useful skills along the way.
We’ve seen other great soldering hacks recently, too,
like this gimbal to help steady hand tremors
. If you’ve got your own coming together,
be sure to let us know! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355376",
"author": "B-Rock",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T09:54:41",
"content": "Canon FD mount lenses were for SLR cameras not DSLR’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355424",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T13:... | 1,760,373,059.987163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/nintendo-ds-transformed-into-gameboy-macro/ | Nintendo DS Transformed Into Gameboy Macro | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"console mod",
"game boy",
"nintendo"
] | Nintendo’s Game Boy line were the world’s most popular handheld gaming systems, but did have their drawbacks. Most notably, the Game Boy didn’t receive a backlit color LCD until the Game Boy Advance SP launched in 2003. Of course, you can always build your own Game Boy that rectifies this and other shortcomings,
and that’s what [JoshuaGuess] did with this Gameboy Macro build.
The build ends up like a bigger version of the Game Boy Micro, the final release in the Game Boy line.
The build is based around a Nintendo DS Lite, one of Nintendo’s later handhelds featuring dual screens. In this build, the top screen is removed and discarded entirely. The motherboard is then hacked with a resistor on some test points to allow it to still boot with the top missing. The shell of the bottom half is then cleverly modified with epoxy clay and paint in order to hide the original hinge and give a clean finished aesthetic.
The final result is essentially a larger version of the Game Boy Micro, the final handheld in the Game Boy line. It also has the benefit of a bigger, brighter screen compared to virtually any Game Boy ever made. The only thing to note is that the DS hardware can only play Game Boy Advance games, not the earlier 8-bit titles.
It’s a fun build, and one that goes to show you don’t have to throw a Raspberry Pi in everything to have a good time.
That can be fun too, though.
If you end up building the Game Boy Nano or Game Boy Giga,
please let us know.
Be sure to include measurements to indicate how it’s scaled in SI units relative to the Game Boy Micro itself. | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355322",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T05:32:50",
"content": "this is seriously rad.Literally hacking (off unnecessary pieces)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6355390",
"author": "RetroGamingXP",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,060.038091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/printer-uses-algae-to-print-live-structures/ | Printer Uses Algae To Print Live Structures | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"algae",
"bioprinting",
"delft",
"tudelft"
] | There’s a famous scene in the movie version of Frankenstein — but not in the book — where the doctor exclaims: “It’s alive!” We wonder if researchers at TU Delft had the same experience after
printing living structures using algae
. Of course, they aren’t creating life or even reanimating it. They are simply depositing living cells in artificial structures using a bio-compatible substrate. According to the paper, the living cells or bio ink can build up layers in a 3D printing fashion and the structures are “self-standing.”
There are some advantages, for example that the algae get their energy from sunlight. Of course they also have to eat, so unless you provide some snacks, your print will die off in about 3 days.
The prints are bacterial cellulose with living microalgae placed at millimeter-scale locations. The primary use is to make artificial leaves that can convert water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy in the form of sugars.
We expect this will be at best a niche application, although the paper speculates on using it in a variety of situations. The biggest draw to this method appears to be that the substrate is mechanically robust and allows for photosynthesis. None of this seemed out of reach to a reasonably well-equipped biohacker, and the hardware was a conventional
3D printer
with a few do-it -yourself mods.
We’ve seen
cheap printers rebuilt
into lab gear before.
More than once
, in fact. | 18 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355284",
"author": "Michael CHERNOFF",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T02:26:28",
"content": "Can you print a coral reef next?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6355297",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2021-06-0... | 1,760,373,060.19454 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/custom-num-pad-does-double-duty-as-macro-pad/ | Custom Num Pad Does Double Duty As Macro Pad | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"atmega32u4",
"AVR",
"macro keyboard",
"macro keypad",
"num pad",
"USB C"
] | Why buy a num pad or a macropad when you can build something new and beautiful, open source that bad boy, and be a hero to the community? We think that should be all the justification you ever need to build instead of buy, even if you think your thing is
Just Another Keypad [JAnK]
as [Clewsy] claims.
At first glance, JAnK appears to be a standard number pad with four macro keys across the top. But when you roll your own ‘board, all the keys are programmable. [Clewsy] took advantage of this by adding a second layer that’s accessible with (what else?) the Num Lock key. This switches JAnK over to 21-key macro pad mode.
[Clewsy] rolled their own PCB for this and used the venerable ATMega32u4 because of its HID and USB host capabilities. Every key is backlit, and these LEDs are driven by an MP3202 LED driver and PWM from the AVR. [Clewsy] was able to build a prototype by sawing the num pad off of a stainless steel key switch plate from another build, but eventually ordered JAnK its own custom, laser-cut, stainless steel plate. The lovely enclosure is made of spotted gum wood and an acrylic base.
Putting it all together proved to be a bit problematic. [Clewsy] soldered up the minimum viable components for testing and discovered that the ATMega’s VCC and GND pins were both shorted. This killed the AVR programmer, but not the chip itself, and [Clewsy] happened to have a spare. To add insult to injury, the Num Lock light didn’t work, but [Clewsy] was able to simply reverse the LED instead of ordering a new pile of boards.
Check out the detailed write-up
with code and tons of pictures over on [Clewsy]’s personal site.
One of the awesome things about this build is that [Clewsy] was able to re-use the code from
macr0, which began life as a proof of concept for scanning key matrices, and retired to become a music and media controller
. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355285",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-09T02:33:57",
"content": "Interesting. I just saw a usb numeric keypad in the dollar store for ~$3. I thought about buying it and making a macro pad out of it, but then I thought, “a macro pad with no little screens on each of the ke... | 1,760,373,060.328354 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/arduino-compatible-ir-blaster-keeps-tvs-at-bay/ | Arduino Compatible IR Blaster Keeps TVs At Bay | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"infrared",
"ir blaster",
"remote control",
"tv-b-gone",
"USB to serial"
] | The TV-B-Gone is a well known piece of kit in hacker circles: just point it at a noisy TV in a public space, hit the button, and one of the hundreds of IR remote codes for “Power Off” that it blinks out in rapid succession is more than likely to get the intended response. Unfortunately, while a neat conversation starter, its practical use is limited to a single function.
But not so with this programmable IR development board
that creator [Djordje Mandic] describes as a “TV-B-Gone on steroids”.
Sure you can point it at a random TV and turn it off with a single button press, but you can also plug the board into your computer and control it directly through the serial connection provided by its CP2104 chip. Using a simple plain-text control protocol, the user can modify the behavior of the device and monitor its status. [Djordje] imagines this feature being used in conjunction with a smartphone application for covert applications. To that end, the device’s support for an onboard battery should keep it from draining the phone during extended operations.
Of course you could do something else entirely with it simply by firing up the Arduino IDE and writing some new code for the device’s ATmega328P microcontroller.
As with the IR-enabled ESP8266 development board we looked at a few months ago
, there are plenty of applications for an all-in-one board that allows you to communicate with the wide world of IR devices. | 39 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355190",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T20:17:14",
"content": "Make one for Car Audio! I was thinking to het a Car pioneer Remote and amplify the IR emitter.Just to silence those subwoofers around.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,060.443947 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/cerberus-2080-three-headed-retro-computing-project/ | Cerberus 2080 — Three-Headed Retro Computing Project | Chris Lott | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"AVR",
"educational",
"retro",
"z80"
] | For seven months, [Bernardo Kastrup] at [TheByteAttic] has been realizing his childhood dream of
building his own computer
. It was this dream that steered him into the field of computer design at the age of 17. After thirty years in the industry, he finally has some time to design the computer he dreamt about as a kid. His requirements are ambitious: fully open design, gate-level details, thru-hole or PLCC for easy hacking, well-established processors with existing tool chains, low-cost development tools for CPLDs, no FPGA, standard ITX case compatible, and so on. He quite reasonably decides to use more modern electronics for video (VGA), keyboard (PS/2), and program storage (flash drive). Along the way, he chooses to put three processors on the board instead of one:
Zilog Z84C0010 (Z80)
WDC W65C0256 (6502)
AVR ATMEGA328 (RISC Controller)
When coming up with the concept and requirements, [Bernardo] had a fictitious alternate history in mind — one where there were follow-ups to the ZX80, PET/CBM, or TRS-80 from the late 1970s that were extensions to the original systems. But he also wanted a clean design, without cost-cutting gimmicks, in order to make it easier for learners to focus on computing itself — a didactic architecture, as he describes it. Turn the crank for seven long months, and we have the Cerberus 2080. [Bernardo] has put
the design on GitHub
, and made a video series out of the whole process, of which the introduction video is below the break. There’s even an
online emulator
developed by retro hacker [Andy Toone].
We wrote about
the 6502-based ERIC-1 project back in 2014
which shared the bus with an ATMEGA simulating ROM.
The Minty Z80 project from 2019
also uses a similar technique. Thanks to [Frédéric] for sending us the tip. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6355151",
"author": "Thomas Brusehaver",
"timestamp": "2021-06-08T18:49:06",
"content": "Ohio Scientific had the Challenger III systems. A ZIP for CP/M, a 6502 for OS65U and 6800 for why not?http://www.technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/mcsele/hobby/ohio-scientific-computers-challenge... | 1,760,373,060.369992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/teach-your-air-compressor-to-blow-eggs/ | Teach Your Air Compressor To Blow Eggs | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"air compressor",
"blowing eggs",
"easter eggs",
"PVC"
] | As fun as it is to decorate Easter eggs, the road to a hollow hen’s egg is a gross and gooey avenue. Trust us, it sucks to blow out eggs, and it’s hard to get it right. Plus, you know, there’s that whole salmonella thing.
[Phil] decided to speed things up this year by using an air compressor to do the dirty work
.
Of course, one must approach this problem delicately because eggs are fragile. It would be nice to drill the egg instead of poking the end with a needle, but how are you gonna pull that off without breaking it? As it turns out, all you need is a bench vise, the right piece of PVC, a bit of rubber to keep the egg safe, and some hose clamps to keep the business part together.
[Phil] built a two-stage contraption that serves both purposes — the bottom cup safely cradles the egg for drilling, and the identical top cup connects to the air compressor, which blows the goo out of the bottom hole. [Phil] might have used negative pressure instead, but doesn’t have a vacuum pump or hose. Be sure to check out the brief demo video below.
Don’t want to mess around with real eggs? There are tons of ways to beautify fake eggs, but
few of them are as cool as lasers
. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354889",
"author": "ID",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T23:08:38",
"content": "I’d think that a dremel at 30k rpm with a PCB drill bit would have no problem and not even require support. A food-safe vacuum pot would be useful in removing the contents.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth... | 1,760,373,060.504134 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/hi-fi-combines-best-of-60s-and-90s-technology/ | Hi-Fi Combines Best Of 60s And 90s Technology | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"amp",
"amplifier",
"audio",
"custom",
"hybrid",
"preamp",
"tube"
] | The 90s were a dark time for audio equipment, literally and figuratively. Essentially the only redeeming quality from the decade of nondescript black plastic boxes was the low cost. Compared to the audio equipment of the 60s, largely produced in high-end enclosures with highly desirable tube amplifiers, the 90s did not offer much when it came to hi-fi stereo sound. However, those cheap black boxes from the 90s turn out to be surprisingly perfect for project enclosures for other amplifier builds,
such as this 60s-era tube amp recreation
.
This mesh of the best of two distinct decades comes from [Alvenh] and begins by preparing the old enclosure for its new purpose. This means a lot of work fabricating a custom metal face plate for the new amplifier and significantly modifying the remaining case. After the box is complete, the amplifier build began. It uses a tube-based preamp and a solid-state power amplifier since [Alvenh]’s experience suggested that the warm tube sound was generated mostly in the preamp. This means that his design is a hybrid but still preserves the essential qualities of a full tube build.
The build also includes a radio module that has the ability to cover the 2m and 70cm bands popular in ham radio. This module also has been found to have much better audio quality than the standard AM/FM receiver typically used in projects like this. With the radio module added to the custom enclosure, as well as a phono amp and a power supply, [Alvenh] has an excellent audio amplifier in an inexpensive case which preserves
the tube sound from the true hi-fi eras of decades past
. | 55 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354814",
"author": "qwert",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T20:13:49",
"content": "Uncomfortable truth: Hi-fi is all about the watts you can get before clipping, nothing else really matters",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6354822",
... | 1,760,373,060.663862 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/portable-digital-scoreboard-goes-anywhere/ | Portable, Digital Scoreboard Goes Anywhere | Kristina Panos | [
"Games",
"LED Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"blue pill",
"ESP8266",
"outdoor fun",
"scoreboard",
"stm32",
"ws2812"
] | It’s that time of year in both hemispheres — time to get outside and play before it gets unbearably hot (or cold). No matter what your game, don’t keep score in your head or with piles of rocks —
make yourself a portable, fold-able scoreboard
like [LordGuilly] did and be on the bleeding edge of display technology. It’s really more roll-able than fold-able, which is awesome because you get to unfurl it like a boss.
All you need is a place to hang it up and you’re good to go. This thing runs on a beefy 10,000 mAH USB power bank, and [LordGuilly] says that it’s easy to read even on really sunny days. As you may have guessed, those are WS2812 strips and they are set into rectangular PVC bars. The bars are set equidistant from each other in a frame made from modified version of cable tracks — plastic chain links for cable management.
Good looks aside, we especially like that there are two controller options here. If you want to assign a dedicated scorekeeper, there’s a handled version that uses an STM32 blue pill and is wired to the display. But if you’re short on people, use the ESP8266 version and update the score with the accompanying app. Check out the demo after the break so you can see it in action.
We’ve seen a few scoreboards over the years, including
this beauty that’s meant for indoor games
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 22 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354780",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T18:47:38",
"content": "Super cool. I think it would be more readable, though, with the addition of a piece of black cloth behind it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,373,060.723807 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/intels-atx12vo-standard-a-study-in-increasing-computer-power-supply-efficiency/ | Intel’s ATX12VO Standard: A Study In Increasing Computer Power Supply Efficiency | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"Slider"
] | [
"atx",
"ATX12VO",
"psu"
] | The venerable ATX standard was developed in 1995 by Intel, as an attempt to standardize what had until then been a PC ecosystem formed around the IBM AT PC’s legacy. The preceding AT form factor was not so much a standard as it was the copying of the IBM AT’s approximate mainboard and with it all of its flaws.
With the
ATX
standard also came the ATX power supply (PSU), the standard for which defines the standard voltage rails and the function of each additional feature, such as soft power on (PS_ON). As with all electrical appliances and gadgets during the 1990s and beyond, the ATX PSUs became the subject of power efficiency regulations, which would also lead to the 80+ certification program in 2004.
Starting in 2019, Intel has been promoting the ATX12VO (12 V only) standard for new systems, but what is this new standard about, and will switching everything to 12 V really be worth any power savings?
What ATX12VO Is
As the name implies, the ATX12VO standard is essentially about removing the other voltage rails that currently exist in the ATX PSU standard. The idea is that by providing one single base voltage, any other voltages can be generated as needed using step-down (buck) converters. Since the Pentium 4 era this has already become standard practice for the processor and much of the circuitry on the mainboard anyway.
As the ATX PSU standard moved from the old 1.x revisions into the current 2.x revision range, the -5V rail was removed, and the -12V rail made optional. The ATX power connector with the mainboard was increased from 20 to 24 pins to allow for more 12 V capacity to be added. Along with the Pentium 4’s appetite for power came the new 4-pin mainboard connector, which is commonly called the “P4 connector”, but officially the “+12 V Power 4 Pin Connector” in the v2.53 standard. This adds another two 12 V lines.
Power input and output on the ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR, an ATX12VO mainboard. (Credit:
Anandtech
)
In the ATX12VO standard, the -12 V, 5 V, 5 VSB (standby) and 3.3 V rails are deleted. The 24-pin connector is replaced with a 10-pin one that carries three 12 V lines (one more than ATX v2.x) in addition to the new 12 VSB standby voltage rail. The 4-pin 12 V connectors would still remain, and still require one to squeeze one or two of those through impossibly small gaps in the system’s case to get them to the top of the mainboard, near the CPU’s voltage regulator modules (VRMs).
While the PSU itself would be somewhat streamlined, the mainboard would gain these VRM sections for the 5 V and 3.3 V rails, as well as power outputs for SATA, Molex and similar. Essentially the mainboard would take over some of the PSU’s functions.
Why ATX12VO exists
A range of Dell computers and server which will be subject to California’s strict efficiency regulations.
The folk over at GamersNexus have covered their research and the industry’s thoughts on the topic of ATX12VO
in an article and video
that were published last year. To make a long story short, OEM system builders and systems integrators are subject to pretty strong power efficiency regulations, especially in California. Starting in July of 2021, new Tier 2 regulations will come into force that add more strict requirements for OEM and SI computer equipment: see
1605.3(v)(5)
(specifically table V-7) for details.
In order to meet these ever more stringent efficiency requirements, OEMs have been creating their own proprietary 12 V-only solutions, as detailed in GamersNexus’
recent video review
on the Dell G5 5000 pre-built desktop system. Intel’s ATX12VO standard therefore would seem to be more targeted at unifying these proprietary standards rather than replacing ATX v2.x PSUs in DIY systems. For the latter group, who build their own systems out of standard ATX, mini-ITX and similar components, these stringent efficiency regulations do not apply.
The primary question thus becomes whether ATX12VO makes sense for DIY system builders. While the ability to (theoretically) increase power efficiency especially at low loads seems beneficial, it’s not impossible to accomplish the same with ATX v2.x PSUs. As stated by an anonymous PSU manufacturer in the GamersNexus article, SIs are likely to end up simply using high-efficiency ATX v2.x PSUs to meet California’s Tier 2 regulations.
Evolution vs Revolution
Seasonic’s CONNECT DC-DC module connected to a 12V PSU. (Credit: Seasonic)
Ever since the original ATX PSU standard, the improvements have been gradual and never disruptive. Although some got caught out by the negative voltage rails being left out when trying to power old mainboards that relied on -5 V and -12 V rails being present, in general these changes were minor enough to incorporate these into the natural upgrade cycle of computer systems. Not so with ATX12VO, as it absolutely requires an ATX12VO PSU and mainboard to accomplish the increased efficiency goals.
While the possibility of using an ATX v2.x to
ATX12VO adapter
exists that passively adapts the 12 V rails to the new 10-pin connector and boosts the 5 VSB line to 12 VSB levels, this actually lowers efficiency instead of increasing it. Essentially, the only way for ATX12VO to make a lot of sense is for the industry to switch over immediately and everyone to upgrade to it as well without reusing non-ATX12VO compatible mainboards and PSUs.
Another crucial point here is that OEMs and SIs are not required to adopt ATX12VO. Much like Intel’s ill-fated
BTX
alternative to the ATX standard, ATX12VO is a suggested standard that manufacturers and OEMs are free to adopt or ignore at their leisure.
Important here are probably the obvious negatives that ATX12VO introduces:
Adding another hot spot to the mainboard and taking up precious board space.
Turning mainboard manufacturers into PSU manufacturers.
Increasing the cost and complexity of mainboards.
Routing peripheral power (including case fans) from the mainboard.
Complicating troubleshooting of power issues.
Internals of Seasonic’s CONNECT modular power supply. (Credit:
Tom’s Hardware
)
Add to this potential alternatives like
Seasonic’s CONNECT
module. This does effectively the same as the ATX12VO standard, removing the 5 V and 3.3 V rails from the PSU and moving them to an external module, off of the mainboard. It can be fitted into the area behind the mainboard in many computer cases, making for very clean cable management. It also allows for increased efficiency.
As PSUs tend to survive at least a few system upgrades, it could be argued that from an environmental perspective, having the minor rails generated on the mainboard is undesirable. Perhaps the least desirable aspect of ATX12VO is that it reduces the modular nature of ATX-style computers, making them more like notebook-style systems. Instead, a more reasonable solution here might be that of a CONNECT-like solution which offers both an ATX 24-pin and ATX12VO-style 10-pin connectivity option.
Thinking larger
In the larger scheme of power efficiency it can be beneficial to take a few steps back from details like the innards of a computer system and look at e.g. the mains alternating current (AC) that powers these systems. A well-known property of switching mode power supplies (SMPS) like those used in any modern computer is that they’re more efficient at higher AC input voltages.
Power supply efficiency at different input voltages. (Credit: HP)
This can be seen clearly when looking for example at the rating levels for
80 Plus
certification. Between 120 VAC and 230 VAC line voltage, the latter is significantly more efficient. To this one can also add the resistive losses from carrying double the amps over the house wiring for the same power draw at 120 V compared to 230 VAC. This is the reason why data centers in North America generally run on 208 VAC according to
this APC white paper
.
For crypto miners and similar,
wiring up their computer room
for 240 VAC (North American hot-neutral-hot) is also a popular topic, as it directly boosts their profits.
Future Outlook
Whether ATX12VO will become the next big thing or fizzle out like BTX and so many other proposed standards is hard to tell. One thing which the ATX12VO standard has against it is definitely that it requires a lot of big changes to happen in parallel, and the creation of a lot of electronic waste through forced upgrades within a short timespan. If we consider that many ATX and SFX-style PSUs are offered with 7-10 year warranties compared to the much shorter lifespan of mainboards, this poses a significant obstacle.
Based on the sounds from the industry, it seems highly likely that much will remain ‘business as usual’. There are many efficient ATX v2.x PSUs out there, including 80 Plus Platinum and Titanium rated ones, and Seasonic’s CONNECT and similar solutions would appeal heavily to those who are into neat cable management. For those who buy pre-built systems, the use of ATX12VO is also not relevant, so long as the hardware is compliant to all (efficiency) regulations. The ATX v2.x standard and 80 Plus certification are also changing to set strict 2-10% load efficiency targets, which is the main target with ATX12VO.
What would be the point for you to switch to ATX12VO, and would you pick it over a solution like Seasonic CONNECT if both offered the same efficiency levels?
(
Heading image
: Asrock Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR with SATA power connected, credit:
c’t
) | 99 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354715",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T17:14:52",
"content": "For anyone else wondering, 208v power is different from your 240v power plug you may have in your house. The US power grid tends to run as 3 phase power. House power is a single phase of 240v wit... | 1,760,373,061.022148 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/led-matrix-hack-chat/ | LED Matrix Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"addressing",
"cartesian",
"coordinate",
"display",
"Hack Chat",
"led",
"light emitting diode",
"matric",
"modules",
"neopixel",
"rgb"
] | Join us on Wednesday, June 9 at noon Pacific for the
LED Matrix Hack Chat
with
Garrett Mace
!
It’s pretty amazing how quickly light-emitting diodes went from physics lab curiosity to a mainstream commodity product made in the millions, if not billions. Everything about LEDs has gotten better, smaller, and cheaper over the years, going from an “any color you want as long as it’s red” phase to all the colors of the rainbow and beyond in a relatively short time. LEDs have worked their way into applications that just didn’t seem likely not that long ago, like architectural lighting, automotive applications, and even immense displays covering billboards, buildings, and sporting venues with multicolor, high-resolution displays.
It’s that latter application that seems to have provided a boon to electronics hobbyists, in the form of cheap and plentiful LED matrix modules. These are easily sourced at the usual places, and with their tightly packed pinpoints that can show any color at any intensity, they have a ton of fun and useful applications for the hacker. But how exactly do you put them to use? Usually the electronics end is pretty straightforward, but some of the math involved in figuring out how to address all these LEDs can be a little mind-bending.
To help us sort all this out, Garrett Mace will drop by the Hack Chat. You’ve probably seen Garrett’s cool LED matrix shades, which have gone through a ton of revisions and are a much-copied fashion accessory among the cool hackers. They look simple, but there are tricks to making them work right, and Garrett will share his secrets. Come with your questions on putting LED matrix modules to work, especially those odd-size modules and strange arrangements that defy simple Cartesian coordinates.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, June 9 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,060.821094 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/triangle-tiles-form-blinky-networks-using-clever-interconnects/ | Triangle Tiles Form Blinky Networks Using Clever Interconnects | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"art",
"led",
"led tile",
"nanoleaf",
"neopixel",
"sk6812",
"spring contact",
"TILE"
] | We love to see LEDs combined in all shapes and sizes, so we were especially ticked when we caught a glimpse of [Debra Ansell]’s (also known as [GeekMomProjects])
interlocking triangular TriangleLightPanel system
glowing on our screen. This unusually shaped array seemed to be self supporting and brightly glowing, so we had to know more.
The TriangleLightPanel is a single, triangular, light panel (refreshing when everything is in the name, isn’t it?). Each panel consists of a single white PCBA holding three side-firing SK6812 LEDs aimed inward, covered by transparent acrylic. When the LEDs are doing their thing, the three-position arrangement and reflective PCB surface does diffuses the light sufficiently to illuminate each pane — if not perfectly evenly — very effectively. Given the simple construction it’s difficult to imagine how they could be significantly improved.
The real trick is the mechanical arrangement. Instead of being connected with classic Dupont jumper wires and 0.1″ headers or some sort of edge connector, [Debra] used spring contacts. But if you’re confused by the lack of edge-plated fingers think again; the connectors are simple plated strips on the back. There is a second PCBA which effectively acts as wires and a surface to mount the spring contacts on, which is bolted onto the back of the connected leaves to bridge between each node. The tiles need to be mechanically connected in any case, so it’s a brilliantly simple way to integrate the electrical connection with the necessary mechanical one.
All the requisite source files are available on the
project’s GitHub page
and the original Tweets announcing the project are
here for reference
. We can’t wait to see what this would look like with another 30 or 40 nodes! Enterprising hackers are already building their own setup; see
[arturo182]’s 24 tile array glowing
after the break.
Unfortunately, I ran out of screws and nuts, with 4 needed per leaf, they go faster than I anticipated. Ordering more soon 😅
Either way, my leaves are growing :) 🌿
(Powered by the RP2040 Stamp + Carrier)
pic.twitter.com/rOWOojFnDa
— arturo182 (@arturo182)
May 22, 2021 | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354691",
"author": "Bob A.",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T15:54:13",
"content": "That is so very nice. Thank you GeekMom for a wonderful hacker class project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6354697",
"author": "Shannon",
"... | 1,760,373,060.783471 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/electric-vehicles-could-be-the-grid-storage-solution-weve-been-dreaming-of/ | Electric Vehicles Could Be The Grid Storage Solution We’ve Been Dreaming Of | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"car",
"car hacks",
"electric car",
"electric vehicle",
"grid battery",
"grid storage",
"powerwall",
"storage"
] | As nation states grapple with the spectre of environmental and economic losses due to climate change, we’ve seen an ever greater push towards renewable energy sources to replace heavier polluters like coal and natural gas. One key drawback of these sources has always been their intermittent availability, spurring interest in energy storage technologies that can operate at the grid level.
With the rise in distributed energy generation with options like home solar power, there’s been similar interest in the idea of distributed home battery storage. However, homeowners can be reluctant to make investments in expensive batteries that take years to pay themselves off in energy savings. But what if they had a giant battery already, just sitting outside in the driveway? Could electric vehicles become a useful source of grid power storage?
As it turns out, Ford wants to make their electric trucks double as grid storage batteries for your home
.
If You’ve Got A Big Battery, Why Not Use It?
The Ford F-150 Lightning, the company’s first electric pickup truck, has plenty of power sockets on board and can even keep a house running for three days from the power in its batteries.
Ford have already made waves with the generator on their F-150 Hybrid, capable of delivering up to 7.2kW in service. Many used the pickups to power their appliances during the recent Texas blackouts.
The technology is based around the Ford Charge Station Pro, an 80 amp bidirectional charger for their new electric pickup, the F-150 Lightning. The charger allows the pickup’s battery to power a user’s home in the event of a blackout, for up to three days of typical use. It requires professional installation, and is outfitted with proper isolation safeguards to avoid backcharging the grid which can be dangerous for line workers undertaking repairs. It builds on the great press Ford received earlier this year
during the Great Texas Blackout
, when owners of F-150 Hybrids
were able to keep appliances running for days thanks to the vehicle’s onboard battery, generators and inverters
.
Beyond Emergencies
Where it gets really interesting is when Ford roll out their Intelligent Power upgrade for the system
. This will use the pickup’s battery to supply energy to the home during peak periods when power prices are highest — such as during the afternoon or early evening. Then, it will charge the car back up at night when prices are lower. It essentially uses the vehicle as a home battery, akin to products like the Tesla Powerwall or
homebrew batteries we’ve seen before.
The functionality will only be available on the Ford Charge Station Pro, which will have the smarts to manage power flows both into and out of the grid. Users of more basic home charging solutions won’t be able to use the technology.
Tesla’s Powerwall is one of the more popular home battery solutions thus far, but requires an expensive one-off investment for the hardware.
There’s no reason the system couldn’t monitor live power prices and compare with the car’s use schedules in order to charge at the cheapest possible time, while still maintaining the battery at a minimum charge level to avoid the user getting stuck without transport. Of course, to make the most of this capability, careful implementation will be key. It will only take a few horror stories of users waking up to a dead car battery, or dropping range over time, for public opinion to turn against the practice. Software must be optimised to always leave a driver with range in the battery when they need it, and to maximise the lifespan of the vehicle’s battery. Despite a decade of mainstream availability of electric cars, we haven’t heard too many horror stories of batteries dropping dead, but it remains a potent fear in the broader community.
The Smartest Electrical Gear in Your Home
The charger will require professional installation into a home’s electrical wiring. However, this is typical of most serious electric vehicle charging solutions. With drivers demanding more range per minute from their chargers, fast charger and 220V installations are becoming par for the course with electric vehicle purchases.
Storage will become increasingly important to healthy power grid operation over time as renewables start to make up a larger share of the overall power mix.
Some jurisdictions have already faced issues as huge influxes of solar power on bright days make it difficult to keep traditional baseload generators online without overloading the grid.
Having huge swathes of storage distributed across the grid could help with this. In the aforementioned scenario, electric cars attached to smart chargers would note the dropping power price as solar energy flooded in to the grid on a sunny day, and switch into charging mode to store the cheap energy. If the sun temporarily goes behind a cloud, rather than the grid voltage crashing, smart chargers could detect the dip and instantaneously respond by letting battery power flow back into the grid.
It’s similar to the operation of large grid battery projects like the Hornsdale Power Reserve
, only distributed across thousands of individual homes.
The benefit of using EVs for grid storage is that those who buy compatible electric vehicles don’t just get a car that’s cheaper to run and kinder to the environment. They can also play an active role in maintaining grid stability and making the most out of the renewable energy available on Earth every day. With thousands of EVs purchased every year, if properly equipped, they could become the grid storage revolution that the world has been looking for. | 157 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354648",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T14:05:20",
"content": "It’s not a bad idea having a UPS in the garage. Might have even helped some Texans.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6354701",
"author": "P... | 1,760,373,061.495869 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/an-alu-as-a-desktop-calculator/ | An ALU As A Desktop Calculator Has Stunning Style From Days Gone By | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"74181",
"ALU",
"calculator",
"hexadecimal"
] | Those of you with an interest in microcomputer history will know that there is a strong crossover between the path of electronic calculator evolution and the genesis of the integrated CPU. Intel’s 4000 was famously designed for a calculator, and for a while in the 1970s these mathematical helpers were seen as the wonder of the age.
[Simon Boak]’s calculator
is a curious throwback to that era, as it’s not a decimal calculator as we’d know it but a hexadecimal device that simply computes using the functions of the famous 74181 ALU chip.
An ALU, or to give it its full name an Arithmetic Logic Unit, is a component of a CPU with two inputs and one output that can perform any of a range of binary functions upon the two inputs and return the result on the output. This calculator has two of them for eight bits of raw adding power, with a hexadecimal keypad for setting the inputs and a set of 7-segment displays for showing the results. It’s housed in an achingly retro folded sheet metal console case with wooden end pieces that would have graced any engineer’s desk with pride back in about 1975. We may not need one, but we
really
want one!
If the 74181 is a mystery to you then fear not, because chip master [Ken Shirriff]
has produced some handy explanation work on its operation
.
Thanks [Ted Yapo] for the tip. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354600",
"author": "Dagobert",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T11:38:25",
"content": "Beautiful!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6354646",
"author": "Voja Antonic",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T13:59:56",
"content": "A small t... | 1,760,373,061.072429 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/07/ryobi-power-packs-as-ebike-batteries/ | Ryobi Power Packs As Ebike Batteries | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"ebike battery",
"ryobi"
] | By now, the process of creating custom lithium-ion battery packs is well-known enough to be within the reach of most makers. But it’s not a path without hazard, and mistakes with battery protection and management can be costly. Happily for those who are apprehensive on the battery front there’s a solution courtesy of a group of engineering students from the University of Pittsburgh.
Their project was to convert a pedal bicycle to electric assisted power
, and in doing so they didn’t make their own pack but instead used off-the-shelf 40V Ryobi power tool packs.
The bike conversion is relatively conventional with the crank replaced by a crank and motor assembly, and a pair of the Ryobi packs in 3D-printed holders on the frame. The value in this is in its reminder that these packs have evolved to the point at which they make a viable alternative to a much more expensive bike-specific pack, and that their inclusion of all the balancing and protection circuitry make them also a much safer option than building your own pack. The benefits of this are immense as they bring a good-quality conversion within reach of many more bicycle owners, with all parts being only a simple online order away. Take a look at the video below the break for more details.
Those Ryobi cells
certainly seem to have carved themselves a niche
in our community! | 42 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354564",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T08:18:33",
"content": "Nice post, thanks :-)Have few older Ryobi packs with that extended 3 pin comparatively awkward charger connect unlike the flatter one shown here. Quite a few of them were dis... | 1,760,373,061.195728 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/aquarium-plotter-shows-sisyphishs-submerged-sand-stripes/ | Aquarium Plotter Shows Sisyphish’s Submerged Sand Stripes | Brian McEvoy | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"aquarium",
"caridina",
"fish",
"neocaridina",
"Shrimp",
"Sisyphus",
"Sisyphus table",
"Taiwan bee shrimp"
] | Sisyphus is cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Pet fish generally content themselves to swimming the same lap over and over in a glass tank. Perpetuity can be soothing, so long as you’re not shouldering a boulder.
[Zach Frew] wants to integrate and automate the boulder on a smaller scale and one that can benefit his aquarium full of colorful Taiwanese bee shrimp. Instead of an inert rock and a Greek, Sisy
phish
uses a magnet and servo motors connected to a microcontroller to
draw Spirograph-style shapes in the tank’s sand
.
There are a couple of gears beneath the tank to trace the geometric patterns but they’re clear of any water. One gear rotates about the center of the cylindrical tank while the other holds a magnet and adjusts the distance from the center. Pilots, and select nerds, will recognize this as rho-theta positioning. Despite the uncommon coordinate system, the circular plotter accepts G-code. We love when math gets turned into gorgeous designs, and shrimp love when those tasty microbes get shaken from their gravelly hiding places.
We adore the
dry sand plotters
that came before, and
Sisyphus himself appeared in a LEGO format
that made us question our proficiency with the blocks.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/PerspectiveDither-1.m4v | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354568",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T08:34:04",
"content": "Shiny",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6354891",
"author": "rpavlik",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T23:19:49",
"content": "That is r... | 1,760,373,061.921963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/automated-sentry-turret-for-your-secret-lab/ | Automated Sentry Turret For Your Secret Lab | Danie Conradie | [
"Kinect hacks",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"Kinect",
"servos",
"turret",
"unity"
] | There are few things as frustrating when you’re trying to get some serious hacking done than intruders repeatedly showing up without permission. [All Parts Combined] has the solution for you, with a
Kinect-based robotic sentry turret
to keep them at bay.
The system consists of a Microsoft Kinect V2 connected to a PC, which runs an app to do all the processing, and outputs the targeting information to an Arduino over serial. The Arduino controls a simple 2-axis servo mount with an electric airsoft gun zip-tied to it. The trigger switch is replaced with a relay, also connected to the Arduino.
The Kinect V2 comes with SDKs that really simplify tracking human movement, and outputs the data in an easy-to-use format. [All Parts Combined] used the SDK in Unity, which allows him to choose which body parts to track. He added scripts that detect a few basic gestures, issues voice commands, and generates the serial commands for the Arduino. The servo angles are calculated with simple geometry, using XY coordinates of the target received from the SDK, and the known distance between the Kinect and turret. When an intruder enters the Kinect’s field of view it immediately starts aiming at the intruder’s heart, issues a “Hands Up!” command, and tells the intruder to leave. If the intruder doesn’t comply, it starts an audible countdown before firing. [All Parts Combined] also added a secret disarming gesture (double hand pistols), which turns the turret into an apologetic comrade. All it needs is a Portal-inspired enclosure.
It’s a fun project that illustrates how the Kinect can make complex computer vision tasks relatively simple. Unfortunately the V2 is no longer in production, having been replaced by the more expensive, developer focused
Azure Kinect
. We’ve covered several Kinect-based projects, including a
3D room scanner
and a
robotic basketball hoop
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354531",
"author": "zombodotcom",
"timestamp": "2021-06-07T04:13:12",
"content": "i made one of these using a haar cascade for smiling.It would shoot nerf darts at you,I called it the Motivator bot. OpenCV python",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,061.11514 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/hackaday-links-june-6-2021/ | Hackaday Links: June 6, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"amazon",
"audacity",
"CLA",
"clouds",
"cryptocurrency",
"Doge",
"echo",
"electric vehicle",
"Ethereum",
"ev",
"gpl",
"hackaday links",
"mars",
"ring",
"sidewalk",
"Stack OverFlow"
] | There are a bunch of newly minted millionaires this week, after it
was announced
that Stack OverFlow would be acquired for $1.8 billion by European tech investment firm Prosus. While not exactly a household name, Prosus is a big player in the Chinese tech scene, where it has about a 30% stake in Chinese internet company Tencent. They trimmed their holdings in the company a bit recently, raising $15 billion in cash, which we assume will be used to fund the SO purchase. As with all such changes, there’s considerable angst out in the community about how this could impact everyone’s favorite coding help site. The SO leadership are all adamant that nothing will change, but only time will tell.
And speaking of trouble in the community, if you thought Audacity’s troubles had passed, think again. It appears that Audacity’s new owners, Muse Group,
are now making contributors to the open-source audio project sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA)
in order to contribute code to the project. The stated reason is that Muse wants to change Audacity to a GPLv3 license, which it can’t do for the existing code written under GPLv2. They say the CLA and subsequent license change will allow them to distribute Audacity on platforms where they currently aren’t welcome, like Apple’s AppStore. It all sounds perfectly reasonable, but after
the ill-conceived attempt to bake telemetry into the code
, the community isn’t having any of it. They have a point — if a CLA can be used to change license terms, there’s nothing stopping it from changing to a completely closed source license.
From the ever-expanding surveillance state department: don’t forget that as of this publication,
you have less than 48 hours to opt out of Amazon’s new Sidewalk feature
, if you so choose. All of those doorbells, cameras, thermostats, and smart speakers will automatically be included in Sidewalk on June 8, with the intention of creating one big mesh network that extends connectivity into a wide-area network. The upshot of this is that you’ll be sharing your bandwidth with any and all comers to your neighborhood, and if you don’t like it, after June 8 there’s not much you can do about it. You’ve been warned.
Time for a palate cleanser: how about
that picture of the shining clouds on Mars
? The image — or rather images, as this is a composite that’s been stitched together and color corrected to match what the human eye would see on Mars — comes from Curiosity, the rover that’s been peacefully exploring Gale crater for years now. While the iridescent clouds, probably of dry ice crystals high in the thin Martian atmosphere, are spectacular, we’re really taken by the rocks. This looks like a place you’ve seen before, either driving through Arizona or New Mexico. Heck, it kind of looks like the place where they filmed all those on-location shots in the old Star Trek episodes — you half expect a guy in a rubber lizard suit to be peeking out from behind those rocks. The point is, unlike a lot of pictures that come back from planetary exploration, these really make it clear that Mars is a place, somewhere that although it is very foreign and hostile, is also familiar enough to relate to.
The electric vehicle market is starting to get crowded, so anyone wanting to play in it is going to have to have some kind of edge over the competition to survive. And what better edge than
a car with the potential to pay for itself while it’s parked
? That’s the idea behind the Daymak Spiritus, a three-wheeled EV that looks pretty futuristic. The two-seater is slated to launch in 2023, with mining hardware and a crypto wallet built-in. The car is billed as solar-powered, but judging by the small PV arrays on the dash and back deck, we’d think it’s more likely that owners will be turning grid power into Ethereum and Doge than sunlight. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354477",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T23:22:21",
"content": "Regarding Amazon Sidewalk, as it happens there will be nothing from my two Amazon devices on it. (Although I can’t see how a smart outlet could help, and an Echo Input wouldn’t want to either.)",
"pare... | 1,760,373,061.666295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/qmesh-lora-mesh-networked-voice-communications/ | QMESH: LoRa Mesh Networked Voice Communications | Danie Conradie | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"LoRa",
"mesh network",
"stm32"
] | LoRa is great for sending short data packets over long ranges but is not normally suitable for voice communications. [Dan Fay] is looking to change this with
QMesh, a synchronized, flooded mesh network protocol for ham radio applications
.
In a flooded mesh network every node repeats every message it receives. This has the theoretical advantage of making the network self-healing if a single node stops working, but often just means that the nodes will interfere with each other. Thanks to some characteristics of LoRa, [Dan] is using several tricks to get around this packet collision problem. LoRa network can make use of the “capture effect”, which allows a receiver to differentiate between two packets if the power level difference is large enough. This is further improved by adding forward error correction and slightly changing the frequency and timing of the LoRa chirps. QMesh also implements TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) by splitting transmission into time slots, and only transmitting every third slot. This means it is operating on a 33% duty cycle, which is much higher than the 0.1%-10% allowed on license-free ISM-bands, which legally limits it to the ham bands.
On the hardware side, [Dan] has been using the STM32 NUCLEO-144 development boards with F4/L4/F7/H7 microcontrollers and a custom shield with a 1 W LoRa module and OLED screen. While [Dan] wants to eventually build handheld radios, he plans to first develop small FM repeaters that encode voice as codec2 and use QMesh as a backhaul. QMesh is still under development, but we would love to see the results of some long-range testing, and we are excited to see how it matures.
If your interested in a more basic LoRa-based human-to-human messaging system, take a look at
Meshtastic
. It’s been going very rapidly over the past year. To learn more about LoRa and other digital modulation schemes, check out the
crash course we did with an SDR
a while back. | 32 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354431",
"author": "Dan Fay",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T20:24:20",
"content": "I’m Dan Fay, the creator/developer of QMesh. I’ll be monitoring the comments, so feel free to ask me any questions you might have.Thanks for the shoutout!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,373,061.565929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/sailing-faster-than-the-wind-itself/ | Sailing Faster Than The Wind Itself | Jenny List | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"land yacht",
"laws of physics",
"sailing",
"wind power"
] | If you search the outer reaches of the internet you will find all sorts of web sites and videos purporting to answer to free energy in the form of perpetual motion machines and other fantastical structures that bend the laws of physics to breaking point. We’d love them to be true but we have [Émilie du Châtelet] and her law of conservation of energy to thank for dashing those hopes. So when along comes a machine that appears to violate a fundamental Law of Physics, it’s reasonably met with skepticism. But the wind-powered vehicle built by [Rick Cavallaro]
looks as though it might just achieve that which was previously thought impossible
. It’s a machine that can move with the wind at a speed faster than the wind itself.
A fundamental law of sailing boats is that when they are sailing with the wind, i.e. in the same direction as the wind, they can’t sail faster than the wind itself. Sailing boats can go faster than the wind powering them by sailing across it at an angle to create lift from their sails, but this effect doesn’t work as the angle tends towards that of the wind.
The vehicle in the video below the break is a sleek and lightweight machine with a large propeller above it, which we are told is not the windmill power source we might imagine it to be. Instead it mimics the effect of a pair of sailing boats sailing across the wind in a spiral around a long cylinder, and thus becomes in effect a fan when turned by the motoin in the craft’s wheels. The drive comes from the wind working on the craft itself, and thus as can be seen from the motion of a streamer on its front, it can overtake the wind. It seems too good to be true at first sight but the explanation holds water. Now we want a ride too!
For fairly obvious reasons, the fantastical world of pseudo-physics isn’t our bag here at Hackaday. But if something might hold promise we’ll at least give it a look.
Not all such things we cover turn out to change those Laws of Physics
, though.
Thanks [Feinfinger] for the tip. | 136 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354378",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T17:09:04",
"content": "“But the wind-powered vehicle built by [Rick Cavallaro] looks as though it might just achieve that which was previously thought impossible. It’s a machine that can move with the wind at a speed faster tha... | 1,760,373,062.712301 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/differential-drive-doesnt-quite-work-as-expected/ | Differential Drive Doesn’t Quite Work As Expected | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"BLDC",
"cycloidal",
"differential",
"gear",
"gearbox",
"high speed",
"planetary",
"prototype",
"testing",
"two motors"
] | Placing two motors together in a shared drive is a simple enough task. By using something like a chain or a belt to couple them, or even placing them on the same shaft, the torque can be effectively doubled without too much hassle. But finding a way to keep the torque the same while adding the speeds of the motors, rather than the torques, is a little bit more complicated. [Levi Janssen] takes us through
his prototype gearbox that attempts to do just that
, although not everything works exactly as he predicts.
The prototype is based on the same principles as a differential, but reverses the direction of power flow. In something like a car, a single input from a driveshaft is sent to two output shafts that can vary in speed. In this differential drive, two input shafts at varying speeds drive a single output shaft that has a speed that is the sum of the two input speeds. Not only would this allow for higher output speeds than either of the two motors but in theory it could allow for arbitrarily fine speed control by spinning the two motors in opposite directions.
The first design uses two BLDC motors coupled to their own cycloidal drives. Each motor is placed in a housing which can rotate, and the housings are coupled to each other with a belt. This allows the secondary motor to spin the housing of the primary motor without impacting the actual speed that the primary motor is spinning. It’s all a lot to take in, but watching the video once (or twice) definitely helps to wrap one’s mind around it.
The tests of the drive didn’t go quite as planned when [Levi] got around to measuring the stall torque. It turns out that torque can’t be summed in the way he was expecting, although the drive is still able to increase the speed higher than either of the two motors. It still has some limited uses though as he notes in the video, but didn’t meet all of his expectations. It’s still an interesting build and great proof-of-concept otherwise though, and if you’re not clear on some of the design choices he made there are some other builds out there that
take deep dives into cycloidal gearing
or even a
teardown of a standard automotive differential
.
Thanks to [Kelvin Ly] for the tip! | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354348",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T14:10:37",
"content": "i coulda toldja that! but it is awesome that his fabrication skills (and the general state of the art of fabrication) are at the point where it’s possible to learn that directly by making prototypes!",
... | 1,760,373,061.61208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/is-32-bits-really-dead/ | Is 32-bits Really Dead? | Chris Lott | [
"ARM"
] | [
"32-bit",
"64-bit",
"arm",
"cortex-a"
] | While some of us are still clinging onto our favorite 8-bit microprocessors, ARM announced they will be killing off the 32-bit architecture in 2022 and/or 2023. Over on the GaryExplains YouTube channel, [Gary Sims]
posted a great review of the current 32- vs 64-bit state-of-affairs
— not just for ARM but for Intel and AMD processors as well. And it’s a dismal outlook for you 32-bit fans.
ARM
announced last Fall
that there would be no more 32-bit support as of 2022, then
this March they made a similar announcement
but with a 2023 deadline. [Gary] tries to parse these statements, and takes an educated guess at what the disparity means (spoiler alert — he predicts that one more 32-bit core will soon be released).
[Gary] clearly breaks down the 32-bit situation by operating systems such as Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS, and how all of these have been transitioning to 64-bits over recent years. He does a thorough job, and concludes that the transition is already well underway. And while Linux and Windows have not completely dropped 32-bit support, the writing is on the wall.
Take note, however, that this discussion regards the Cortex-A family of cores found in smart phones, tablets, computers, and powerful embedded applications like autonomous vehicles. The popular 32-bit Cortex-M family of low-cost / low-power cores that are used in so many embedded system designs will remain 32-bits for the foreseeable future.
After watching [Gary]’s presentation, if you want to learn more,
check out the writeup
that [Maya Posch] did on the details of the latest ARMv9 ISA a few weeks ago. Also watch this
8-bit vs 32-bit presentation
by our Editor-in-Chief [Mike Szczys]. Despite being from five years ago, it is still quite applicable today. What about 16-bit MCUs — the old Intel/AMD embedded 80186 processor, the 8051 follow-ons like the 80C196, 80C251, or 8051XA, the 6502 follow-ons like the 65C816, Zilog’s Z8000, the Renesas M16C, etc. — is anyone using them anymore? If so, or if you’re using a 4-bit MCU these days, let us know in the comments below.
Thanks to reader [Feinfinger] for the tip. | 101 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354320",
"author": "Hal H",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T12:17:44",
"content": "My company is still using Pic24s for a few math intense tasks that an 8bit (like a pic18 series) would have struggled to do. Sure 32bit processors are here, and becoming the defacto for most things over 8 b... | 1,760,373,061.80517 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/baby-c-17-sends-imaginations-soaring/ | Baby C-17 Sends Imaginations Soaring | Roger Cheng | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"Air Force",
"cargo plane",
"miniature",
"miniatures",
"scale",
"scale plane replica",
"us air force"
] | The C-17 Globemaster III is a military cargo jet that can carry what their commercial counterparts can’t, to places those other planes can’t go. The people who keep these planes flying are proud of their capable airlifter, but it’s hard to show them off. Solution: build
a scaled-down version
more suitable for driving off base for a parade down Main Street and other
community events
.
While the real thing was built under an expensive and contentious military procurement process, the miniature was built with volunteer labor using castoff materials. The volunteer force included maintenance crew whose job is to know the C-17 inside and out. Combined with fabrication skills that comes with the job, the impressive baby plane faithfully copied many curvatures and details from full-sized originals. (Albeit with some alteration for its cartoony proportions.) Underneath are mechanicals from a retired
John Deere Gator
utility vehicle. They usually resemble a large golf cart except with a cargo bed and more rugged suspension. Basically they are to golf carts as a C-17 is to a 767. Amusingly, the little plane has its own rear loading ramp, superficially preserving the cargo-carrying capacity of the original Gator chassis.
Interior features continue, though the official picture gallery doesn’t show them. There is a flight deck with control panels and various sights and sounds to keep visitors entertained. Enough details were poured into the exhibit that some people had to ask if the little plane can fly, and the answer is a very definite no. The wings, and the engine pods mounted to them, are only for show carrying
The Spirit of Hope, Liberty & Freedom
. It is quite a long official name for such a short stubby thing.
We always love to admire impressively put-together miniatures, and not all projects require skill of aircraft mechanics. Like this very approachable
miniature forklift
project. But there are plenty of other projects whose skills put us in awe, like this
remote-control car powered by a miniature V-10 engine
.
[via
The Museum of Flight
] | 17 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354311",
"author": "Canoe",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T10:12:56",
"content": "What a letdown. I thought it flew…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6354374",
"author": "Feinfinger",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T16:49:5... | 1,760,373,061.863557 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/enterprise-helm-commands-the-entertainment-center/ | EnterpriseHelm Commands The Entertainment Center | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"furniture",
"Interactive Furniture",
"prop",
"star trek",
"Star Trek: TOS"
] | Many a young geek wished they could get a chance to sit at the helm of the USS
Enterprise
, wildly tapping on unlabeled technicolor buttons with the self-assured confidence of a proper Starfleet officer. For most of us it was a dream unrealized, but right now somebody in the Seattle, Washington area is getting to do exactly that in their media room. We won’t deny being jealous, but at least our collective egos can take some comfort in the knowledge that they had to
outsource the construction of their replica helm to the fine folks at [Blackmouth Design].
There’s not a lot of technical details to be had, but considering the page for this project is only meant to show off the company’s design and fabrication skills, we can’t blame them too much. If we were in the business of selling these things, we’d probably keep some of the juicer details under wraps too.
But we do know there’s “Arduino technology” under the hood that fires up different light and sound effects depending on which of the vintage rocker switches has been flipped. The red momentary buttons lined up on the right side of the coffee table sized panel are tied into the home media center to do things like turn off the lights and lower the projector screen. Check out the video below for a brief demo.
In a post on Reddit
, one of the engineers behind the project explains that the top surface of the helm is 3/16″ powder coated aluminum, with the plywood that makes up the base laminated in the classic
Original Series
color scheme of red, grey, and black. The artwork for the astrogator was created from scratch, backlit with LEDs, and placed behind a 1/4″ acrylic panel for protection. We imagine the fact that it’s parallel to the ground means it’s supposed to be a space to place your drinks or popcorn, though if it was in our house, nobody would be bringing food or drink anywhere near it.
In all honesty, while Hackaday is decidedly more about building than buying, we can’t fault anyone for forking over their hard earned cash for craftsmanship of this caliber. After all, we’ve had our eyes on that
officially licensed tricorder replica for quite some time now
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354284",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T06:15:00",
"content": "I’m waiting for the first post to discuss how sacrilegious this might be for not following the original bridge design down to the last detail.I wouldn’t do this, but I am a bit envious of somebody havin... | 1,760,373,061.975397 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/do-wristwatches-get-any-better-than-a-cuckoo-clock/ | Do Wristwatches Get Any Better Than A Cuckoo Clock? | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"cuckoo clock",
"cuckoo watch",
"wristwatch"
] | There are few better ways of asserting your independent spirit as a hardware hacker than by creating your own special timepiece. Even more so if the timepiece is a watch, particularly in this era of smartwatches. Few home-made timepieces though have come as near to wristwatch Nirvana as
the cuckoo clock wristwatch
from [Kiyotaka Akasaka], which we would venture to name as having won wristwatches. Nobody will top this one in the field of home-made clocks!
Superlatives aside, this is an electronic cuckoo clock on the wrist, with an LED ring dial and a motorised cuckoo, all clothed in an authentically rustic tiny wooden cuckoo clock case. It communicates via BLE with a smartphone, and even has a sound channel for a cuckoo sound. Frustratingly there’s little in the way of detail about the electronics themselves, but we’re guessing that almost Bluetooth-capable microcontroller could be pressed into service. Take a look at the video below the break.
So we’ve established that it’s a cuckoo clock wristwatch, and that we like it, a lot. It is however
not the only novelty cuckoo clock we’ve brought you
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354261",
"author": "Sylvain",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T02:26:26",
"content": "Just the other day I was wondering if someone could create a cuckoo watch as a curiosity. I wasn’t envisioning a small cuckoo clock though. I was thinking something that look normal but with a figurine th... | 1,760,373,062.048569 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/huge-hand-wired-ortho-is-a-beautiful-battleship-keyboard/ | Huge Hand-Wired Ortho Is A Beautiful Battleship Keyboard | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"battleship",
"battleship keyboard",
"duplex matrix",
"hand wired",
"hot glue",
"ortholinear"
] | There are all sorts of reasons to build your own keyboard, and we would argue that the more custom the layout, the easier it is to justify the time and expense. At least, that’s what we’re going with for this post about [GoldenSights]’ big, beautiful custom ortholinear called Nearer, as in nearer to perfect.
Just look at this battleship!
[GoldenSights] has long wanted a mechanical keeb, but has never been into any of the commercial offerings. That goes double since none of them seem to have a vertical Home/End cluster, which [GoldenSights] has become quite attached to thanks to a space-saving Logitech rectangle keeb. But if you’re going to make your own keyboard, you should go all out, right? Right. So [GoldenSights] started by adding another 12 F keys and making it ortholinear. Then things got personal with an extra Backspace where Num Lock usually lives, and dedicated keys for switching between English, Korean, and Chinese.
[GoldenSights] wanted USB-C and so they used an Elite-C microcontroller, but there’s one big problem — it only has 24 pins, and according to the matrix math, the board needs 27 total. Rather than using an I/O expansion chip or a second microcontroller, they wired it up as duplex matrix. This is an alternative way of wiring up a matrix so that it’s closer to being square by doubling up the rows and halving the number of columns.
We don’t think [GoldenSights] gives themselves enough credit here. They say that they lean toward calling it assembly rather than a build, but we disagree with that assessment. [GoldenSights] broke in this giant keeb with giant write-up of the build, so go see for yourself. There’s a ton of build pictures and a fair amount of hot glue, so be warned.
Let’s talk about those keycaps for a second. The space bar was supposed to be black PBT like the others, but the keycap manufacturer didn’t have a 6u space bar in black and sent a gray one instead. Honestly, we like the way it looks. And we love that [GoldenSights] painstakingly laid out the keys on foam board before committing to a laser-cut metal switch plate.
Want a space-saving ortholinear that doesn’t feel too cramped?
Check out this wafer-thin keyboard that’s designed to squat over your inferior laptop keys
.
Via
KBD
and
r/mk | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354241",
"author": "AwD",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T00:34:19",
"content": "I’m kind of tired of the super minimalist thing in the mech world – I love seeing these monstrosities when they pop up!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,373,062.104661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/a-commodore-64-as-you-have-never-seen-one-before-game-boy-form-factor/ | A Commodore 64 As You Have Never Seen One Before: Game Boy Form Factor! | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"game boy"
] | It’s now nearly four decades since the iconic Commodore 64 8-bit computer saw the light of day, and the vintage format shows no sign of dying. Enthusiasts have produced all kinds of new takes on the platform, but it’s fair to say that most of them have concentrated on the original style keyboard console form factors. A completely different take on a Commodore 64 comes from [UNI64] in the form of
the Handheld 64
, a complete Commodore 64 in a Game Boy style form factor that uses the original 64 chipset.
It achieves this improbable feat by sandwiching together several PCBs, with a tactile switch keyboard and LCD display at the top. It appears to bring the 64 ports out to headers, and the ROM cartridge port to an edge connector socket at the top of the device. A departure from the 1980s comes in using a Raspberry Pi Zero to emulate a 1541 floppy drive though.
Sadly unlike a Game Boy there’s no onboard battery, but don’t let that take away from the quality of this feat. A forum post from [3D-vice] has
a set of decent-quality pictures
, and even if you don’t have a handy 64 chipset lying about we’re sure you’ll still appreciate them. If home made 64s are your thing, take a look at
how you can build one without Commodore parts
.
Thanks [pbuyle] for the tip! | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354206",
"author": "heatgap",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T20:58:36",
"content": "It’s a work of art.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6354217",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T21:51:39",
"c... | 1,760,373,062.36114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/an-open-source-scientific-rpn-calculator/ | An Open-source Scientific RPN Calculator | Jenny List | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"calculator",
"reverse polish notation",
"RPN",
"RPN calculator",
"Scientific Calculator"
] | Why reach for a bland, commercially available calculator when you be using a model that employs RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) in its calculations and be a custom build all at the same time? The kids may have colour TFTs and graphing functions, but your keyboard has no equals sign, and that
means
something.
Unfortunately for RPN enthusiasts, the RPN calculator is a little on the rare side. Since classic models from the 1970s and ’80s are rather pricey,
[
Anton Poluektov
]’s just build his own called the OpenCalc
. This glorious specimen is an open hardware RPN calculator with more than a nod to the venerable Hewlett Packard HP42 in its design.
At its heart is an STM32L476 low-power ARM processor and a Sharp Memory LCD, all on a PCB clad in a 3D-printed case you’d have been proud to own in the 1980s. It runs from a CR2032 which is more than can be said for some modern styles of calculator, and it gives the user everything you could wish for in a scientific calculator. The key legends are a set of printable stickers, which when printed on self-adhesive laser film prove durable enough to last. All the resources can be found
in a GitHub repository
, so if RPN is your thing there’s nothing to stop you building one for yourself.
If RPN interests you,
it’s a subject we’ve looked at in greater detail in the past
. | 69 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354155",
"author": "pac",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T17:21:29",
"content": "… what?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6354156",
"author": "Me",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T17:25:00",
"content": "I love RealCalc on my Andro... | 1,760,373,062.88487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/wreck-your-mail-before-you-check-your-mail/ | Wreck Your Mail Before You Check Your Mail | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"email",
"hosting",
"newsletter"
] | Every five years or so, I think it’s time to review my e-mail flow. (Oh no!) I run my own mail server,
and you should too
, but this means that I get to figure out managing and searching and archiving and indexing it all by myself. (Yippee!)
And I’ll be honest — sometimes I’m a bit of a luddite. I actually, literally have been using Mutt, or its derivative
NeoMutt
for maybe fifteen years, after a decade or so of mouse-intensive graphical mail readers. If e-mail is about typing words, and maybe attaching the occasional image, nothing beats a straight-up text interface. But what a lot of these simple mail clients lack is good search. So I decided to take that seriously.
Notmuch
is essentially an e-mail database. It’s an e-mail searcher, tagger, and indexer, but it’s not much else. The nice thing is that it’s
brutally
fast. Searches and extraction of tagged subsets are faster than sending the same data back and forth to the Big G, and I have a ton more flexibility. It’s awesome. Of course good ol’ Mutt can work with Notmuch. Everything can. It’s Linux/UNIX.
But I wanted an e-mail client that would take the tags-instead-of-folders flow seriously, and make searching a first-class navigation strategy. Mutt is from the 1990s, when e-mail was in its teenage years. I ended up with
Astroid
, and am currently in the honeymoon phase, still configuring things so that they work
just right
, but all in all enjoying the change. Of course some of the keymapping is different, so if you get an e-mail from me that’s clearly intended for someone else, well, you know what happened.
So here I am, with auto-tagging scripts that fire off MQTT messages to my home automation system when certain mail comes in, and with a tag system that distinguishes
between importance and urgency
as well as along defined topics. It doesn’t spy me out, track links I click on, or
record every online purchase I make without asking my permission
either. It basically fits me like a glove, and I’m pretty happy now.
And all it took? A whole freaking afternoon of tedious work, trying out different software packages, and tweaking configuration scripts. All in all, it’s a mind-numbing effort that I’ll be happy to not repeat until we’re all composing e-mails directly with our neural implants. But how many of you out there are actually happy with your e-mail setup?
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
! | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354119",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T14:35:28",
"content": "Wonderful article Elliot, especially the encouragement of others to run their own mailserver. I’ve been doing the same for the last 20 years and controlling your own E-Mail destiny is panacea. I’m a fan ... | 1,760,373,062.779441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/a-vacuum-battery-made-for-looks-and-learning/ | A Vacuum Battery Made For Looks And Learning | Danie Conradie | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"18650 battery",
"etching",
"machining",
"plating"
] | Looks and RGB LEDs are usually not a priority in tool batteries, but [Oleg Pevtsov] decided
the battery for his DIY vacuum cleaner needed to be different
. In the process, he learned some lessons in chemical etching, plating, machining, casting, and electronics. See the video after the break for the build compilation.
The core of the battery is just five 18650 cells in a 3D-printed holder with a BMS, but the real magic is in the external components. The outer body is a brass tube with the logo etched through the 0.6 mm wall. Getting the etching right took a few tries and a lot of frustration, but he eventually found success with a solution of sulfuric acid and nitric acid in a magnetically stirred container. For etch resist he sprayed lacquer on the outside and filled the inside with silicone. The inside was then coated with clear epoxy by allowing it to cure while spinning. The final touches were nickel plating, then gold plating, and a high polish.
The silver-plated connector on one end consists of a machined copper tip and ring, epoxied together for isolation. The tip has a multi-start external thread, allowing the female side of the connector to securely connect with a single twist. A set of RGB LEDs were added to the core to light up the battery from the inside. We have to hope the vacuum this is supposed to attach to is equally impressive.
This being Hackaday, we see a lot of custom power banks for all the custom electronics. These range from
a small power bank for on-the-go soldering
to a
heavy metal beast with a built-in inverter
. | 34 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354107",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T13:37:39",
"content": "i also have a totally alright dust buster with a dead nimh battery i’d like to replacei will not be doing this much work though :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"c... | 1,760,373,062.433731 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/05/3d-printed-scale-model-of-perseverance-rover-seems-as-complicated-as-the-real-one/ | 3D-Printed Scale Model Of Perseverance Rover Seems As Complicated As The Real One | Dan Maloney | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"bogie",
"Curiosity",
"mars",
"model",
"nasa",
"Perseverance",
"rover",
"scale"
] | Sometimes the best way to figure out how something works is to make a model of it. 3D-modeling software makes it possible to do the job
in silico
, and sometimes that’s enough. But to really get inside the designer’s head, executing a physical model, like
this quarter-scale RC-controlled Perseverance rover
, is a great way to go.
If you’re looking for cutting-edge tech or groundbreaking design, this build will probably not light your fire. But a closer look will show not only great details about how JPL designs robots that can operate on Mars, but some great design and 3D-printing tips too. [Dejan]’s modeling process started with the 3D renderings of Perseverance available on the NASA website, which went into SolidWorks via Blender. [Dejan] was intent on capturing all the details of the rover, even those that ended up just for looks. But there’s plenty of functionality, too — the running gear looks and functions just like the six-wheel double-bogie design used on Perseverance, as well as Curiosity before it. This revealed an interesting fact that we didn’t previously realize — that the hull is suspended from a single pivot point on each side, while a linkage across the deck both prevents the body from pivoting and provides differential control of the drive bogies on either side of the rover.
The video below shows both the impressive amount of 3D printing needed to make all the model’s parts as well as the involved assembly process. It also shows the Arduino-controlled model being piloted around via radio control. There’s a lot to learn from this model, and [Dejan]’s craftsmanship here is top-notch too. We’ve seen such builds before from him, like
this 3D-printed SCARA arm
,
a CNC hot-wire foam cutter
, and
an automated wire bender
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354091",
"author": "Rpol",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T11:25:38",
"content": "Impressive. Most impressive…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6354111",
"author": "Michel",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T14:12:59",
"content": "... | 1,760,373,062.978479 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/dreamcast-homebrew-gets-boost-from-sd-card-cache/ | Dreamcast Homebrew Gets Boost From SD Card Cache | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"cache",
"doom",
"dreamcast",
"homebrew",
"sd card"
] | While it might have been a commercial failure compared to contemporary consoles, the Sega Dreamcast still enjoys an active homebrew scene more than twenty years after its release. Partly it’s due to the fact that you can burn playable Dreamcast discs on standard CD-Rs, but fans of the system will also point out that the machine was clearly ahead of its time in many respects, affording it a bit of extra goodwill in the community.
That same community happens to be buzzing right now with news that well-known Dreamcast hacker
[Ian Micheal] has figured out how to cache data to an SD card via the console’s serial port
. At roughly 600 KB/s the interface is too slow to use it as swap space for expanding the system’s paltry 16 MB of memory, but it’s more than fast enough to load game assets which otherwise would have had to be loaded into RAM.
A third-party
Dreamcast SD adapter
.
In the video below, [Ian] shows off his new technique with a port of DOOM running at 640×480. He’s already seeing an improvement to framerates, and thinks further optimizations should allow for a solid 30 FPS, but that’s not really the most exciting part. With the ability to load an essentially unlimited amount of data from the SD card while the game is running, this opens the possibility of running mods which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. It should also allow for niceties like saving screenshots or game progress to the SD card for easy retrieval.
[Ian] says he’ll be bringing the same technique to his Dreamcast ports of Quake and Hexen in the near future, and plans on posting some code to GitHub that demonstrates reading and writing to FAT32 cards so other developers can get in on the fun. The downside is that you obviously need to have an SD card adapter plugged into your console to make use of this technique, which not everyone will have. Luckily they’re fairly cheap right now, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the prices start climbing. If you don’t have one already, now’s probably the time to get one.
To be clear, this technique is completely separate from
replacing the Dreamcast’s optical drive with an SD card
, which
itself is a very popular modification
that’s helped keep Sega’s last home console kicking
far longer than anyone could have imagined
.
[Thanks to cass for the tip.] | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354145",
"author": "Alex Rossie",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T16:11:14",
"content": "Dreamcast is an excellent modding platform.Often the piracy is blamed for its downfall but in fact SEGA simply had a succession of mismanaged launches and ended their career as console makers.The DC h... | 1,760,373,062.933902 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/old-textbooks-galore/ | Old Textbooks Galore | Chris Lott | [
"downloads hacks"
] | [
"expired copyright",
"pdf",
"reference books",
"technical manuals",
"textbooks"
] | This
collection of public domain books
proclaims to not be about survival, but for survivors. It is a extensive collection of text books, manuals, etc., in over 150 categories from Accounting to Woodworking. Because of the copyright duration laws, most are around one hundred years old.
You might not want to have your appendix removed by someone who has only learned surgery from reading Dr John Sluss’s 1908 tome, “
Emergency Surgery for the General Practitioner, with 584 illustrations, some of which are printed in colors
“. But some knowledge is timeless. And much is of historical interest as well, helping us get a better appreciation of what bodies of knowledge people had in the beginning of the last century. There are books on farming, forging and casting, steam engines, clockmaking, telegraph and telephone, and even back issues of Scientific American and 73 magazines, just to name a few.
Here’s a random sampling of a few illustrations from electronics-related books.
High speed electrons from “
Inside the Vacuum Tube
” by John F. Rider, 1945, a relatively modern book from this collection. This book alone is worth downloading just to see the excellent illustrations.
Mr Rider
wrote so many technical books that he formed his own publishing company.
Using triangles from “
Mechanical Drawing, Prepared for the Students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
” by Linus Faunce, 1898.
The Weidemann system of wiring lamps, from “
Electric-Wiring, Diagrams and Switchboards
” by Newton Harrison E.E., published in 1906, complete with “one hundred and five illustrations showing the principles and technics of the art of wiring”. This system employed equal lengths of wires between each lamp in a (failed) attempt to make the voltage drop the same for each bulb.
Do you have any timeless reference or text books you like to use? Let us know down below in the comments. And thanks to [David Gustafik] for the tip. | 41 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354036",
"author": "Experienced Experimenter",
"timestamp": "2021-06-05T02:31:35",
"content": "Another oldie but goody spot for public domain and other freely distributable licenses:http://www.freeinfosociety.comProject Gutenberg has plenty of good non fiction:https://www.gutenberg... | 1,760,373,063.057922 |
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