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https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/hacking-a-solar-inverter-rf-interface/ | Hacking A Solar Inverter RF Interface | Danie Conradie | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"2.4ghz",
"RF",
"security",
"telemetry",
"uart"
] | One of the main advantages of cheap wireless modules is that they get used in consumer electronics, so if you know what’s being used you can build your own compatible hardware. While investigating the RF interface used in a series of cheap “smart” solar inverters [Aaron Christophel], created an
Arduino library to receive inverter telemetry using a $2 RF module
. See the demonstration after the break.
[Aaron] bought the inverter and ~40 euro USB “Data Box” that allows the user to wirelessly monitor the status of the inverter. Upon opening the two units, he found that they used LC12S 2.4Ghz modules, which create a wireless UART link. With a bit of reverse engineering, he was able to figure out the settings for the RF modules and the serial commands required to request the status of the inverter. He doesn’t delve into the possible security implications, but there doesn’t appear to be any form of encryption in the link. It should be possible for anyone with a module to sniff the messages, extract the ID of the inverter, and hijack the link. Just knowing the status of the inverter shouldn’t be all that dangerous, but he doesn’t mention what other commands can be sent to the module. Any others could have more severe implications.
Sniffing the wireless signal flashing through the air around us is a regular topic here on Hackaday. From
testing the security of WiFi networks with an ESP32
to
monitoring SpaceX launches with an SDR
, the possibilities are infinite. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354324",
"author": "dingodreams",
"timestamp": "2021-06-06T12:45:01",
"content": "Hi, nice job. Can I ask what the brand and model of micro inverter you are using?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6354994",
"author": "... | 1,760,373,064.661116 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/riding-mower-repair-uncovers-miniature-culprit/ | Riding Mower Repair Uncovers Miniature Culprit | Tom Nardi | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"lawn mower",
"limit switch",
"linear actuator",
"microswitch",
"repair",
"right to repair",
"tractor"
] | Most people would be pretty upset it the lawn mower they spent $4,000 USD on had a major failure within the first year of owning it. But for [xxbiohazrdxx], it was an excuse to take a peek under the hood and
figure out what brought down this state-of-the-art piece of landscaping gear
.
It should be said that, at least technically, the Husqvarna TS 348XD in question was still working. It’s just that [xxbiohazrdxx] noticed the locking differential, which is key to maintaining traction on hilly terrain, didn’t seem to be doing anything when the switch was pressed. Since manually moving the engagement lever on the transmission locked up the differential as expected, the culprit was likely in the electronics.
Testing the dead actuator.
As [xxbiohazrdxx] explains, the switch on the dash is connected to a linear actuator that moves the lever on the transmission. The wiring and switch tested fine with a multimeter, but when the actuator was hooked up to a bench power supply, it didn’t move. Even more telling, it wasn’t drawing any power. Definitely not a good sign. Installing a new actuator would have solved the problem, but it was an expensive part that would take time to arrive.
Repairing the dead actuator seemed worth a shot at least, so [xxbiohazrdxx] cracked it open. The PCB looked good, and there were no obviously toasted components. But when one of the internal microswitches used to limit the travel of the actuator was found to be jammed in, everything started to make sense. With the switch locked in the closed position, the actuator believed it was already fully extended and wouldn’t move. After opening the switch itself and bending the contacts back into their appropriate position, everything worked as expected.
A tiny piece of bent metal kept this $4,000 machine from operating correctly.
As interesting as this step-by-step repair process was, what struck us the most is [xxbiohazrdxx]’s determination to fix rather than replace. At several points it would have been much easier to just swap out a broken part for a new one, but instead, the suspect part was carefully examined and coaxed back to life with the tools and materials on-hand.
While there’s plenty of folks who wouldn’t mind taking a few days off from lawn work while they wait for their replacement parts to arrive, not everyone can afford the luxury. Expedient repairs are critical when your livelihood depends on your equipment, which is why
manufacturers making it harder and more expensive for farmers to fix their tractors
has become such a
major issue in right to repair battles all over the globe
. | 62 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353984",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T20:27:28",
"content": "Best article ever. Anyone seen a good film recently?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353992",
"author": "zvanstefan",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,373,065.045118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/home-automation-controller-uses-chalk/ | Home Automation Controller Uses Chalk | Chris Lott | [
"home hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"Chalk board",
"display technology",
"home automation"
] | Responding to the
Rethink Displays
challenge of the
2021 Hackaday Prize contest
, freelance design engineer [Rick Pannen] brings a retro look to
his DIY home automation controller
. You could be forgiven for not even realizing it is a controller at first glance. [Rick] built this using a magnetic chalk board and installed all the control electronics on the back. The main processor is a Raspberry Pi 400 running Raspian with IOBroker and Node-Red. Panel lettering and graphics are done free-hand with, you guessed it, chalk.
The controls on this panel are an eclectic hodgepodge of meters, switches, and sensors that [Rick] scored on eBay or scavenged from friends. We are curious about the simple-looking rotary dial that sends a pulse train based on the number set on the dial — this seems to have all the functionality of an old phone’s rotary dial without any of the fun.
But [Rick]’s design allows for easy changes — dare we say, it encourages them — so maybe we’ll see a salvaged rotary dial added in future revisions. Also note the indoor lighting ON/OFF switch that must be a real joy to operate. We wonder, is there any way the controls could be magnetized and moved freely around the board without permanently attaching them? Maybe an idea for version 4 or 5.
This design has a lot of possibilities, and we look forward to any upgrades or derivative versions of this unique home automation controller. Let us know in the comments below if you have any suggestions for expanding upon this idea.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353964",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T18:38:28",
"content": "It could be interesting to have a camera pointed at a blackboard and you draw what you want to do and let object recognition change the settings accordingly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,373,064.944867 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/shakealert-promises-earthquake-early-warning-of-about-10-seconds/ | ShakeAlert Promises Earthquake Early Warning Of About 10 Seconds | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"disaster",
"earthquake",
"earthquake warning system",
"earthquakes",
"natural disaster"
] | Earthquakes are highly destructive when they strike, and unlike many other natural disasters, they often hit with minimal warning. Unlike hurricanes and floods, and even volcanoes to an extent, earthquakes can be very difficult to predict. However, in recent decades, warning networks have proliferated around the world, aiming to protect affected communities from the worst outcomes in the event of a large tremor.
ShakeAlert is the name of the earthquake monitoring project run by the United States Geological Survey,
which has just announced that it now offers early warning services to the entire west coast of the United States.
Let’s take a look at how earthquake monitoring works, how that feeds into early warnings, and how this can make a difference in the case of a major quake.
Seconds, Not Minutes
When an earthquake begins at a geological fault line, it produces a variety of types of waves, known as primary waves (P-waves), secondary waves (S-waves), and various types of surface waves. P-waves travel at roughly 5-8 kilometers per second, around 1.7 times faster than S-waves, and rarely cause major damage. Surface waves are typically slower again. Thus, by monitoring seismographs for characteristic P-waves, it’s possible to get an advance warning that nastier shakes are coming.
ShakeAlert works by detecting faster-travelling P-waves from an earthquake, before the more damaging S-waves hit. It can then send out warnings via phone, radio, and TV, and trigger automatic safety shutdowns across affected areas.
Depending on the distance from the seismograph to the quake’s epicenter, the warning time can be anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two at most.
In the case of ShakeAlert on the West Coast of the United States
, the USGS estimates the system will provide up to ten seconds of warning to users’ phones in the event of a magnitude 5 quake or greater.
This time is based on the proximity of cities to the fault lines themselves, with shorter distances to the quake epicenter providing less time for the P-wave to get out ahead as an early warning for the coming S-wave. This contrasts with the early warning system set up in Mexico City; with the population center much farther from the epicenter of typical quakes,
past tremors have seen citizens given from 20 seconds to 2 minutes of warning prior to the arrival of the stronger-shaking S-waves.
A Few Spare Seconds Make a Big Difference
Official authorities recommend the following steps in the event of a quake – drop to the ground, find cover, and hold on. Simple measures like these can prevent huge numbers of injuries across a city affected by a quake.
Ten seconds may not sound like a lot of time, especially given that most users will receive warnings via smartphone. However, in many cases, it’s still enough to make a valuable difference. It only takes a few seconds to climb down off a ladder, switch off dangerous machinery, duck away from windows, or crouch in an emergency exit and hang on to the wall. These simple measures alone can save thousands of injuries across a city affected by an earthquake. It’s similar to the unfairly maligned Duck and Cover method from the 1950s, designed to help minimise casualties in the event of a nuclear blast. Simply getting low to the ground and avoiding falling objects and breaking glass in the event of an earthquake can leave you feeling far happier in the immediate aftermath of the event.
Footage from the 1989 San Francisco earthquake shows people reacting with confusion and delay when the rumbling starts.
A ten second warning, combined with the knowledge to drop, find cover, and hold on, would have made a significant difference to many.
Earthquakes have sadly claimed many lives on the West Coast, with the 1989 Loma Prieta quake being one of the worst events in recent memory. It’s hoped that prior warning might save lives in future.
A further boon of the system is that it can be set up to automatically take preventative actions in the event of detecting an earthquake. Earthquakes can cause havoc to infrastructure, with violent shaking cracking water and gas pipes, and even jamming doors shut at fire stations and other emergency facilities. At best, this adds frustration in an already difficult time; at worst, it puts lives at risk and exponentially increases the damage bill racked up by the quake. With a properly configured warning system in place, however, this can be avoided. Since the first systems were installed in the US in the early 2000s,
they’ve been used to automatically open doors and raise sirens at fire stations
, as well as set up to switch off valves in gas and water lines to prevent leaks and damage. In fact,
one of the first ever earthquake warning systems in the world was UrEDAS
, or Urgent Earthquake Detection and Alarm System, used by Japan’s railways to slow down high speed trains in the event of an earthquake detection. This was the first system to use P-wave sensing for earlier warning of pending earthquake events.
ShakeAlert won’t be able to prevent all the negative impacts of future earthquakes. It will still take time to detect quakes, so the places nearest the epicenter will still face damage without warning. However, it should serve as a capable tool that does help reduce the overall pain and suffering of earthquakes on the West Coast on a grander scale. With similar systems already proving their worth in Japan and Mexico, expect them to become a regular fixture in earthquake-prone regions around the world. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353948",
"author": "chris",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T17:26:38",
"content": "I wonder if our alert system is up to the task. My wife and I often observe that one of us will get an amber alert message on one phone, and then hours or most of a day later the other will get it. Not sur... | 1,760,373,065.310013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/hackaday-podcast-121-crazy-bikes-diy-flip-dots-ev-mountain-climbing-and-trippy-tripterons/ | Hackaday Podcast 121: Crazy Bikes, DIY Flip Dots, EV Mountain Climbing, And Trippy Tripterons | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss a great week of hardware hacks. Two delightful mechanical hacks focus on bicycles: one that puts a differential on the front fork, and the other a flywheel between the knees. Elliot was finally impressed by something involving AI — a machine-learning guitar pedal. You’ve heard of a delta bot? The tripteron is similar but with a single rail for the three arms. After a look at flip dots, tiny robots, and solar air planes we close the show geeking out about racing electric vehicles up a hill and stories of the hardware that has made closed captions possible.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(55 MB or so.)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 121 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
Tell us your answer for this week’s “What’s that sound?”
. Next week on the show we’ll randomly draw one name from the correct answers to win a limited-edition Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. (How limited? So far, limited to three. But I’m sure we’ll make another in a couple weeks.)
New This Week:
New Part Day: RP2040 Chips In Single Unit Quantities
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
3D Printed Flip Dots
GitHub – larrybuilds/flip_dot_display: A modular 3D printable flip dot display
Trippy Tripteron Kinematics Brainteaser
RepRap DuoRail (More of a Shelbyville Idea) – Two Rail Tripteron – YouTube
Dawn Of The Tripteron 3D Printer
Tiny PCB Motor Robot Is Making Its First Wobbly Moves
Living Robots: Revisiting BEAM
Neural Networks Emulate Any Guitar Pedal For $120
Elk Audio OS · GitHub
Crazy Bikes:
All-Wheel Drive Bicycle Using Hand Drill Parts
Bicycle Flywheel Stores A Bit Of Energy, Not Much
Solar Plane Is Like One Big Flying Solar Panel
Tacking Against The Sun: Flying A Batteryless Solar RC Plane Is Almost Like Sailing
Solarflieger
AMAZING RC SOLAR PLANE WITHOUT BATTERY SELFMADE FLIGHT DEMONSTRATION – YouTube
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks
Retrotechtacular: The Drama Of Metal Forming
Reviving Old Recipe For Faraday Wax Keeps Vacuum Experiments Going
This ESP32 Bluetooth Page Turner Can’t Get Any Easier
Elliot’s Picks:
A Look Back On The Oroville Dam With Practical Engineering
Speech Recognition On An Arduino Nano?
Samsung Releases Minimum Viable Galaxy Upcycling
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Electric Vehicles Do Battle On Pikes Peak
History Of Closed Captions: Entering The Digital Era | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6354002",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T21:39:29",
"content": "You got the hillclimb problem slightly wrong: electric cars are generally limited in their power to weight ratio and actually lose in that regard to ICE vehicles – where they gain is putting that power down... | 1,760,373,064.753525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/give-3d-printed-plastic-a-well-worn-metal-look/ | Give 3D Printed Plastic A Well-Worn Metal Look | Roger Cheng | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"how-to",
"post-processing",
"print finishing",
"print smoothing",
"sanding",
"smoothing parts"
] | Affordable 3D printers let us turn ideas into physical reality without a big expensive workshop, but with their power came some disadvantages. The nature of FDM printers impart layer lines and nozzle ridges in the parts they produce. They can be minimized with optimized print settings, but never eliminated. [Emily Velasco] loves the power of 3D printing but not how the parts look. So she put in the effort to
make 3D-printed plastic look like distressed metal and showed us how she did it
. (Video also embedded after the break.)
This video is a follow-up to
her Pet Eye project
in response to feedback on Twitter. She had mentioned that the salvaged metal box for Pet Eye wasn’t quite big enough to hold everything, so she had to extend its internal volume with a 3D print box on the back. It fit in so well that the offhand comment surprised many people who wanted to know more about how it was done. So she designed a demonstration cube covered with mechanical characteristics, and gave us this walkthrough of its transformation.
Similar techniques can be found in other fields like fine scale modeling. But historically those fields did not have to deal with the challenge posed by layer lines and ridges of 3D printed plastic. In any case we love seeing this cross-pollination: just as 3D printed parts are used to customize fine scale models, we can incorporate well-aged metal finishing techniques to 3D printed parts. It’s another tool in our box for
3D print finishing
alongside
tools like heat
and
even salt
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353928",
"author": "Eric Cherry",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T15:34:01",
"content": "I recommend using toothpaste instead of petroleum jelly. Does the same job and washes off a whole lot easier!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,373,064.857798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/this-week-in-security-ransomware-welock-and-amazon-arbitration/ | This Week In Security: Ransomware, WeLock, And Amazon Arbitration | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Amazon Echo",
"This Week in Security"
] | Another week of ransomware, and this time it’s the beef market that’s been shut down, due to a crippling infrastructure attack out of Russia — but hold up, it’s not that simple. Let’s cover the facts. Some time on Sunday, May 30,
JBS USA discovered a ransomware attack
against their systems. It seems that their response team did exceptionally well, pulling the plug on affected machines, and starting recovery right away. By Wednesday,
it was reported that most of their operations were back in action
.
The FBI has officially attributed the attack to REvil, AKA Sodinokibi,
in a brief statement
. REvil provides ransomware as a service, so it’s very possible that a different actor actually launched the attack. So far the details are scarce on how the initial infection happened. While the implication seems to be that JBS did not pay the ransom, I haven’t seen that confirmed either.
And if that isn’t enough ransomware news for you for the week, it’s being reported that
Fujifilm has also been attacked
, and is recovering their networks. I can’t confirm that it’s related, but when researching, I discovered that
fujifilmusa.com
was down.
WeLock Unlocked
The We.Lock system of locks
has a problem
. Namely, a very insecure API that is still being supported. The good folks at Critical Security discovered the problem and attempted to report it in January of this year, and were met with deafening silence. Just over a week ago, the WeLock mobile app was updated, introducing a new, more secure API, but so far the legacy system is still running.
So how bad was the old API? To start with, the message data is encrypted with 3DES, which
in itself is considered insecure
. The real problem there is that 3DES is a symmetric encryption scheme, and every instance of the app uses the same hard-coded key. Worst of all, this key also serves to authenticate API calls. So how does a Bluetooth unlock request go? The app makes an API call, specifying the phone number associated with the account, and the API returns the details of each smart lock on the account, including each of their Bluetooth unlock passwords! A simple BLE packet containing this password will unlock any lock on the account. In short, all that’s needed to unlock a We.Lock smartlock in person is the phone number on the account.
Amazon Echo, Recordings, and Arbitration
There’s a strange story
brewing around the Amazon Echo
. Amazon Alexa devices are always listening for their “wake word”, and in practice this means that these devices are sometimes recording spontaneously. An example of those recordings being used is in criminal cases,
where the recordings are subpoenaed
. The idea of Amazon storing your private conversations on their servers might not sit well with you, and it might be illegal in a few states. The obvious solution might be a class-action lawsuit, but Amazon Echo’s terms of service specifically prevented class-action suits, and instead compelled arbitration.
What you might not realize is that when a company forces a customer into arbitration, case law and some state laws push the financial burden to the company. Put simply, Amazon forced me into arbitration, so they get to pay for it. That fee isn’t much for one or two people, but when 75,000 users all request arbitration at once, it’s expensive enough for even Amazon to notice. The ToS have dropped the forced arbitration language, but that change has no impact on the legal action already initiated. This approach has been used successfully against
DoorDash
,
Patreon
, and
Uber
.
Unpickable Locks?
The problem with building an unpickable lock is that lock pickers are clever, and don’t care that a design is “unpickable”. This week, we have a collaboration between [Stuff Made Here] and [LockPickingLawyer], where a pair of such unpickable locks were pretty quickly defeated. What’s interesting is that along with defeating each of the custom designed locks, our lawyer friend sent along suggestions for fixing the flaws he used to get in. We might get a followup attempt that fixes the identified flaws.
The trick to just about all of the unpickable designs is that they are designed to be very difficult to tension and manipulate the pins at the same time. In both of the locks in question, this is accomplished by a mechanism that locks the pins in place, as the lock rotates. The pins are no longer accessible when they actually interface with the locking mechanism. The trick to picking them? For the first lock, move the pins as far up as they will go and use a small hammer to bump them into position. The second lock is a bit trickier, requiring a mechanical bypass to put tension directly on the real core, at which point it is easily picked.
One Shots
This week also brings a healthy set of short stories, like
the release of Kali Linux 20221.2
. This update to the penetration and forensics focused Linux distro includes the normal package updates and bug fixes, but introduces some interesting changes. Among those are full support for the Raspberry Pi 400, to get your cyberdeck on; disabling privileged ports, so you can run a tool that binds to a low-numbered port without becoming root; and the addition of Kaboxer, a containerized application system built on Docker, that integrated well into the
apt
package manager.
The
gstreamer
framework recently fixed
a pair of bugs
in its matroska support. One of the bugs has already been demonstrated to be exploitable by playing a demonstration media file, so make sure you update to version 1.19.1 of the
gst-plugins-good
package.
The WordPress plugin
Fancy Product Designer has a critical vulnerability
that’s being exploited in the wild. It’s a file upload issue, where an attacker could bypass safeguards and upload executable PHP files to the site. If you manage a site running this plugin, make sure it’s updated to 4.6.9 as soon as possible, and check carefully for possible compromise.
If you ever find yourself with an obfuscated binary that needs to be examined, consider Python’s
angr
.
[NapongiZero] steps us through the process
of setting up the library to look for the right information, in this case a secret key. It’s a neat tool to have in your kit.
And finally, HaveIBeenPwned has
released part of their backend code as open source
. [Troy] has previously announced that he plans to make the entire operation open source, but comments here that it was a bigger task than expected, to package up his one-man project into an open source project. The .NET Foundation has stepped in to help, and
there is now source code to show for their efforts
. The first element to be released as FLOSS is Pwned Passwords, which is fitting, since many of us were too paranoid (rightfully so) to punch a password into the web form, and trust that everything was being done correctly to check it. Well now you can examine the source, and even run the entire service offline. | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353970",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T19:01:24",
"content": "The real problem lies with coders these days. They focus to much on getting the task complete rather than thinking outside the box and checking for things that should never be done. For example, writing code... | 1,760,373,064.807239 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/soldering-iron-plus-camera-gimbal-helps-cancel-out-hackers-hand-tremors/ | Soldering Iron Plus Camera Gimbal Helps Cancel Out Hacker’s Hand Tremors | Donald Papp | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"assistive",
"gimbal",
"soldering iron",
"stabilizer",
"tremors"
] | Soldering requires steady hands, so when [Jonathan Gleich] sadly developed a condition called an
essential tremor
affecting his hands, soldering became much more difficult. But one day, while [Jonathan] was chatting with a friend, they were visited by the Good Ideas Fairy and in true hacker fashion, he ended up
repurposing a handheld camera stabilizing gimbal to hold a soldering iron
instead of a camera or smartphone. Now instead of the gimbal cancelling out hand movements to keep a camera steady, it instead helps keep a soldering iron steady.
While the inner workings of the cheap gimbal unit didn’t need modification, there were a couple of things that needed work before the project came together. The first was to set up a way to quickly and easily connect and disconnect the soldering iron from the gimbal. Thanks to a dovetail-like connector, the iron can be safely stored in its regular holster and only attached when needed.
The other modification is more subtle. The stabilizer motors expect to be managing something like a smartphone, but a soldering iron is both lighter and differently balanced. That meant that the system worked, but not as well as it needed to. After using some small lead weights to tweak the mass and center of gravity of the soldering iron — making it feel and move a bit more like an iPhone, as far as the gimbal was concerned — results were improved.
The soldering iron stabilizer works well enough for now, but we don’t doubt that [Jonathan] already has further tweaks in mind. This is a wonderful repurposing of a consumer device into an assistive aid, so watch it in action in the short video embedded below.
Is reimagining supportive or assistive technology something that gets the gears in your head turning? Good news, because that is
one of the challenges in the 2021 Hackaday Prize
, so get thinking! | 39 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353887",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T11:46:14",
"content": "Would have thought the extra weight and distance from the wrist would make it harder to manage – I’d have been thinking something that looks more like a delta printer for the motion control – you still ... | 1,760,373,065.252397 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/04/an-exercise-in-firmware-dumping-with-the-greatfet/ | An Exercise In Firmware Dumping With The GreatFET | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"firmware dump",
"GreatFET",
"logitech",
"NRF24LE1",
"python",
"reverse engineering"
] | Looking to hone his hardware hacking skills, [James Chambers] recently set out to reverse engineer a common cheap wireless keyboard: the Logitech K360. The chipset it uses has already been fairly well explored (and exploited) by security researchers, but the goal here was more about gaining some practical hands-on experience than it was breaking any new ground.
The first post in what we’re sure will be a fascinating series
deals with dumping the board’s firmware using the GreatFET. We actually haven’t seen too many projects that showcase the capabilities of this
highly capable open hardware multi-tool
, so the post serves as a nice demonstration of how one goes about writing the necessary Python scripts to put it to work in a practical scenario.
Some promising bytes.
Of course, even with the best of tools, there’s always a few stumbling blocks. After identifying what was clearly some kind of programming header on the K360’s diminutive PCB, it took a few failed attempts at reading the firmware before [James] realized he needed to tap into more pins on the keyboard’s nRF24LE1 microcontroller. Once everything was physically wired up, he wrote some code for the GreatFET that would perform the proper incantations on the chip’s
PROG
and
RESET
pins to enable its programming interface.
[James] goes on to explain how you can pull some extended chip information out of the hardware and verify the contents of the firmware dump with Gihdra, but any more advanced analysis will have to wait until the next post in the series. In the meantime, if you like reading about hardware hacking from this “over the shoulder” viewpoint, you should
check out some of the fantastic work
that
[wrongbaud] has sent in over the last year or so
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353874",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T08:34:50",
"content": "that’s going on my watch list! More of this please.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6353920",
"author": "none",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T14:55:1... | 1,760,373,064.712284 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/lamp-sheds-light-on-air-quality/ | Lamp Sheds Light On Air Quality | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"air quality",
"particulate matter",
"particulates",
"pm10",
"pm2.5",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Zero W"
] | It can be difficult to appreciate when the air quality is decent and when it’s poor, unless conditions are so bad that you can literally see the smog hanging in the air. Rather than try to digest a bunch of air quality numbers, [guillaume_slizewicz] built Canari —
a lovely lamp that sheds light on the air pollution problem by taking local air quality data and turning it into light patterns
.
Canari is of course named after the brave birds that once alerted miners to dangerous air conditions before they were forced to switch to carbon monoxide sensors. This bird has a Raspberry Pi Zero W that gets air quality data from a public API and controls the lights with a PWM bonnet based on the concentration of particulates in the air. The more particulates, the dimmer the LEDs are, and the faster they fade in and out.
The main piece of data that Canari grabs is the amount of particulate matter, and the display can switch between representing the level of PM2.5 (particulate matter with diameter less than 2.5 micrometers) in the air and PM10. Check out the demo and setup video after the break.
More of a numbers person?
All you really need is a microcontroller, an air quality sensor, and a display
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353853",
"author": "ROB",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T06:49:05",
"content": "Hi, please step into this room. The air is 100% carbon monoxide but as it has no particles of PM2.5 or above, it has a high “air quality”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,064.89693 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/gdbdiff-diff-ing-a-real-rp2040-mcu-against-an-emulated-mcu/ | Gdbdiff: Diff-ing A Real RP2040 MCU Against An Emulated MCU | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"emulator",
"gdb",
"gdbdiff",
"rp2040"
] | What to do when developing an RP2040 emulator but validating the emulator instruction by instruction is a slow and tedious process? Why, automatically compare it against the real hardware if you’re [Uri Shaked], of course. This is the purpose of
gdbdiff
. This project uses the GDB remote serial protocol via OpenOCD to run test firmware step by step.
During a livestream (video linked via the above link), this allowed [Uri] to find a number of instruction bugs in the emulator this way. These issues involved issues such as incorrect flags in the APSR register and an edge case in the LSRS register. This gdbdiff livestream is part of
an entire series
of live-coding sessions during which [Uri] writes an RP2040 emulator from scratch.
We applaud [Uri] for creative thinking here, and assume that this way the livestream was probably more entertaining to watch than when doing instruction-level debugging purely by hand :) | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353814",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T03:20:14",
"content": "Why would anyone need an emulator for a product that costs $5.00 ? Just buy the dam thing and try it for real.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "635383... | 1,760,373,065.359945 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/radio-build-goes-outside-the-box/ | Radio Build Goes Outside The Box | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"art",
"chaos",
"enclosure",
"maple",
"radio",
"receiver",
"SI4732",
"stm32"
] | It’s easy to get caught up in a build and forget that the final version usually needs some sort of enclosure, especially things with sensitive electronics in them. The [Director of Legal Evil] at the LVL1 Louisville Hackerspace notes as much in his recent radio build. It seems as though the case was indeed an afterthought, but rather than throwing it in a nondescript black project enclosure
it was decided to turn the idea of a project enclosure itself inside-out
.
The radio build is based on an SI4732 radio receiver which is a fairly common radio module and is easily adaptable. It needs a microcontroller to run though, so a Maple STM32 platform was chosen to do all of the heavy lifting. The build includes a screen, some custom analog controls, and a small class D audio amplifier, but this is the point it begins to earn its name: the Chaos Radio. While playing around with the project design in CAD, a normal design seemed too bland so one was chosen which makes the radio look like the parts are exploding outward from what would have been a more traditional-style enclosure.
While the project includes a functioning radio receiver, we have to complement the creator for the interesting display style for this particular set of hardware. It can get boring designing the same project enclosures time after time, so anything to shake things up is often welcomed especially when it puts all of the radio components on display like this. In fact, it’s reminiscent of some of [Dmitry]’s projects, an artist known for
deconstructing various common household appliances like this CD Player
.
Thanks to [Jose] for the tip! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353798",
"author": "Jon",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T00:58:16",
"content": "It’s more of an exclosure then?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353808",
"author": "Queeg",
"timestamp": "2021-06-04T01:47:04",
... | 1,760,373,065.402671 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/air-extractor-automatically-gives-ac-a-boost/ | Air Extractor Automatically Gives AC A Boost | Stephen Ogier | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"air conditioning",
"arduino nano",
"attiny85",
"current sensing",
"fan",
"hvac"
] | Portable air conditioning units are a great way to cool off a space during the hot summer months, but they require some place to blow the heat they’ve removed from your room. [VincentMakes] got a portable AC unit for his home, but he found that the place he wanted to put it was too far from the only window he could use to dump the hot air. Having too long of a duct on the hot air exhaust increases the back pressure on the fan which could cause it to prematurely fail, so
[Vincent] used an extractor fan to automatically give is AC unit’s exhaust a boost on its way to the window.
Because his AC can operate at low, medium, and high speeds, he chose an extractor fan that also supported multiple speeds and took care to match the airflow of the AC and extractor fan to avoid putting too much strain on either fan. He designed a system to automatically set the speed of the boosting fan to match that of the AC using a Hall effect current sensor to measure the AC unit’s power draw and an Arduino Nano for control. A custom PCB interfaces the Nano to the Hall Sensor and control relays, and we have to applaud [Vincent] for keeping the +5V DC and 230V AC far, far away from each other. In addition to this fine electronics work, [Vincent] also built an enclosure for the fan controller that allows the fan to be mounted on top at an angle, which helps avoid having hard bends in the exhaust duct.
If this has you thinking about smart air conditioners to keep cool this summer, check out
this ESP8266-powered smart AC system
, or
this Raspberry Pi-based system that controls both AC and blinds! | 39 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353737",
"author": "punkdigerati",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T20:18:08",
"content": "I’ll just leave this herehttps://youtu.be/_-mBeYC2KGc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353782",
"author": "Stevebn",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,065.479533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/miss-the-predictive-text-from-your-old-nokia-build-your-own-t9-keypad/ | Miss The Predictive Text From Your Old Nokia? Build Your Own T9 Keypad | Danie Conradie | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"keyboard",
"keypad",
"numpad",
"predictive text"
] | Do you miss the mind-blowing typing speed of your old Nokia brick with predictive text turned on? Well, so did [Guy Dupont], so he created a
USB keypad with T9 predictive text built-in
to turn typing into a one-handed affair. Video after the break.
T9 was the first predictive text technology to gain widespread use in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The goal was to minimize the number of keypresses required for typing on multi-press keypads by matching key sequences to a dictionary of the possible words. It prioritizes words based on the frequency of use and can adapt to user preferences. [Guy] implemented T9 in Circuit Python, mainly for the RP2040 microcontroller used on the Raspberry Pi Pico, which will appear as a normal USB keyboard when plugged into any device. The dictionary is stored in the flash memory and can be updated using a tool also created by [Guy]. It can also change modes for old multi-press typing, numeric pad, or macro pad.
We would be interested to see just how fast it’s possible to type one handed with T9, and what application our readers can imagine. It doesn’t look like this implementation can learn the user’s preferences, which we think would be a worthy feature to add.
We’ve covered several unique custom keyboards recently, some more practical than others. On the silly side, these include a
grenade-shaped function pad
, a
five-button chording keyboard
, and a
tiny two-key keyboard
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353714",
"author": "rok",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T19:20:43",
"content": "Soon the script kiddies will need one core per key.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353731",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2021-06-... | 1,760,373,065.634679 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/how-to-get-into-cars-ice-racing-mods/ | How To Get Into Cars: Ice Racing Mods | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"car hacks",
"cars",
"ice",
"ice racing",
"snow"
] | Typically, when it comes to inclement weather, ice is the worst of the worst of driving conditions. Regular tyres have little to no grip in such situations, and accidents are common. However, some choose to laugh at such challenges, and take to racing out on frozen lakes and rivers. The sport of ice racing can be a demanding one, though, so you’ll need to prep your car appropriately. Here’s how.
Ice, Ice, Baby
The highest tier of ice racing is the Andros Trophy, conducted in France each year. Competitors in the top class compete in mid-engined V6-powered cars with AWD and four-wheel steering.
Ice racing is largely limited to colder climates where lakes, rivers, or even actual racetracks freeze over in the winter. While some limited ice racing does occur indoors on skating rinks, it’s largely limited to motorcycles and ATVs because such facilities are just too small for cars.
The weather-dependent and esoteric nature of ice racing means that it exists at the fringes of organised motorsport, with most events being community-run at the grassroots level. Often, new competitors will start in a “run-what-you-brung” class, with unmodified street cars competing in limited or no-contact events, such as time trials or drag races. Higher tiers then generally necessitate more serious preparation and safety equipment, such as rollcages and fire extinguishers, and competitive door-to-door racing on larger tracks. However, some professional competitions do exist, running bespoke tube-framed cars built for purpose.
The most notable of these is the Andros Trophy,
held in the French Alps and run by the namesake jam company.
Tyres
Ice is slippery, which is both what makes ice racing so challenging and also so incredibly fun. Keeping the car pointing in the right direction, or, conversely, sliding it in the right way around the corners, is the name of the game here. To best achieve this, you’ll want tyres that can provide grip in these conditions.
For entry level racers in street vehicles, a studless snow tyre is a popular choice, such as the Bridgestone Blizzak. These tyres come in a variety of sizes, and were designed in Japan in the 1990s to deal with snowy conditions without causing excessive road wear. Special rubber compounds are used that remain pliable at low temperatures, rather than becoming stiff and hard like summer tyres. Tread patterns are designed to dig into and compact the snow, while many small grooves, called sipes, are cut into the tyres to add more edges that can dig into ice for added traction. Dedicated snow tyres have seen much development over recent decades, and have come a long way in that time.
Building a set of custom studded tyres is a rite of passage for the new ice racing enthusiast.
However, for serious players, studded tyres remain the gold standard. Unlike studded tyres for road use, however, tyres are often custom builds, studded by hand with vicious spikes well over 5 mm or 10 mm in length. Often,
off-the-shelf snow tyres are modified by drilling holes and installing screws or bolts through the tread
, followed by a layer of tyre sealant to ensure the resulting assembly can hold air. More serious racers will use hardened steel studs specially crafted for the purpose. Regardless of the exact design, aggressive studded tyres will make a huge difference in performance, sticking into the ice surface and pulling the car forwards, greatly reducing the likelihood of wheel spin.
Ice racing events will generally have separate classes for competitors with studless and studded tyres, as the difference in performance is steep. Regulations on the exact size and type of studs used are also common. Races that take place on icy tarmac may ban studs entirely, as they can severely damage the track surface as the ice wears away over the duration of the race. Paying clear attention to the rules of the event and the tyres used by seasoned competitors is key to success.
Wipers
Side-window wipers are one of the cooler innovations from the ice racing community.
With all the snow and ice kicked up by the tyres of your fellow competitors, you’ll want a rock solid set of wipers to keep the windshield clean. For older cars, this may necessitate a fresh set of blades, as well as a replacement of tired old wiper motors that don’t have the same muscle they used to. Washer nozzles will likely be of little help, as spraying water onto a windscreen in freezing conditions usually just makes things worse.
For those competing at higher levels, sliding sideways around corners is key to shaving seconds off each lap. In such situations, it’s just as important being able to see out of the side windows as it is straight ahead.
Top-tier cars competing in the Andros Trophy actually fit wipers to the side windows to maintain good visibility.
For those building their ice racer at home, it’s not difficult to imagine some inventive linkages and junkyard parts assembled into a similar arrangement. It could be the competitive edge that nets you the trophy at the end of the day.
Performance and Other Considerations
Ice racing is highly accessible. Street legal classes usually require little more than a set of tyres and a fire extinguisher to compete.
As far as other considerations go, much of what is applicable to other motorsports also makes sense here. Adjustable suspension will allow you to dial in your car to suit the course, and be a big improvement over stock dampers and springs. Being able to adjust ride height higher for bumpier surface conditions will be a huge asset, as well as being able to set things lower if the course permits. Obviously, some proper race engineering is the key here. Getting the car set up right for the circuit will net gains through both improved grip and greater driver confidence. More power can also be a good thing, though only if you’ve got the grip to use it. Top-tier Andros Trophy cars top out at 350 horsepower; any more than that is likely wasted on ice.
Beyond this, often the greatest performance improvement comes from seat time. This can be difficult enough to get in normal motorsport disciplines; ice racing being a winter-only sport makes things even harder. Thus, it’s important to make the most of all practice sessions available in the events you compete in, and take any other opportunities available to learn the requisite driving skills. Many a budding enthusiast earned their stripes doing snownuts in an abandoned parking lot, though obviously local ordnances and law enforcement may not make this an option in your particular locale.
Conclusion
Ice racing can provide huge thrills with a lower bar for entry than many more traditional motorsports, and its strong grassroots focus can make it highly appealing to the beginner. It also teaches driving skills that are of great use in the real world when conditions head south in the winter. Of course, the best time to start building your ice racing car is at the end of winter, giving you the maximum time to prep before next season. If this sounds like the sport for you, it’s time to get going! And, as always, happy wrenching! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353706",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T18:16:25",
"content": "The most fun you could ever have in your winter car on the St. Claire river and 4 55 gallon drums to mark the course.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,373,065.529111 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/retro-useless-clock-eventually-shows-you-the-time/ | Retro Useless Clock Eventually Shows You The Time | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"doomsday clock",
"ESP32",
"QR clock",
"qr code",
"useless machine"
] | It’s true; hackers like clocks. And hackers like useless machines. But would they like an intersection of the two? We’re thinking yes, probably, though
we would argue that this QR clock was at no point fully useless
. Yes, a QR clock as in, whip out your phone and, ignoring the conveniently-available phone time, open the bar code reader so you can check the time on this thing. So, it’s semi-useless. But at least it doesn’t detect cameras and then hide the QR code. That would be evil.
This project started life as a display piece for the hex wall down at [megardi]’s hackerspace, but, state of the world being what it is, [megardi] hasn’t made it down there yet. And meanwhile this little guy was looking cuter and cuter, so [megardi] decided to make him more useful and freestanding. The ESP32 inside gets the official time from NIST and displays it on the 1.5″ OLED screen. It also has a single alarm now, along with some other non-QR code clock faces that display the time in various ways.
We really like the look of this clock. Honestly, with those uniform tics around the edge, it sort of reminds us of
the doomsday clock
— you know, the ‘minutes to midnight’ quarter clock face that shows the current perceived threat level of how close we are to destroying the world with the technologies we’ve created. That clock is kind of cute, too, which is a little bit weird considering what it represents.
Speaking of our delicate planet,
here’s a gorgeous little Earth clock that casts a shadow on whatever slice of the planet is currently shrouded in darkness
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353691",
"author": "Pinhead",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T17:09:52",
"content": "Fail ! It doesn’t show the correct time.Where I live, it is now 19:08, but that clock stubbornly displays 17:54….What time zone is this ???",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,065.573874 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/mariner-4-our-first-up-close-look-at-mars/ | Mariner 4: Our First Up-Close Look At Mars | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Mariner 4",
"nasa",
"photography",
"space probes"
] | In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t all that long ago that the entire body of knowledge of our solar system was built solely with Earth-based observations. Turning first their naked eyes to the heavens, and then a succession of increasingly complex and sensitive optical and radio telescopes gathering light from all across the spectrum, our astronomically curious forbears did a commendable job working out the broad strokes of what’s going on in the neighborhood.
But there’s only so much information that can be gathered by instruments operating at the bottom of a roiling ocean of air, so when the opportunity to send instruments to our planetary neighbors began to be possible some 60 years ago, scientists started planning how to accomplish it. What resulted was the Mariner program, a series of interplanetary probes launched between 1962 and 1973 that performed flyby missions of the inner planets.
The list of accomplishments of the Mariner program is long indeed, and the number of firsts achieved by its ten spacecraft is impressive. But it is Mariner 4, the first flyby mission of Mars, which set the stage for a lot of the science being done on and around Mars today, and the first mission where NASA wisely took a “pics or it didn’t happen” approach to planetary science. It was the first time a TV camera had traveled to another world, and it was anything but a sure bet that it would pay dividends.
First Steps to the Stars
Given that we were still climbing the earliest and steepest part of the spaceflight learning curve in the late 1950s, it was pretty audacious to start thinking about reaching out to our neighboring planets. But by the change of the decade, the broad outlines of what would come to be known as the Mariner program were already worked out. They were designed as limited-scope missions — as opposed to
the “Grand Tour” missions
that were soon to come — of the inner planets.
Pinpuller from Mariner 9, an updated design of the pyrotechnics used to deploy Mariner 4’s solar panels. The two redundant squibs that drive the piston to retract the pin are seen top and bottom. Source:
Technical Memorandum 33-502
While each of the ten Mariner missions had specific scientific goals in mind, and each spacecraft was custom built for the purpose, there was an overarching theme: learn how to explore outer space. At the time of Mariner’s conception, Russia and the United States had flown precious few missions, most of which were either suborbital or into low Earth orbit. Given the exigencies of the Cold War, a lot of those missions were devoted to one-upmanship and proving that one nation or the other had captured the high ground, and with relatively short-shrift paid to planetary science, very little was known about how to get to outer space and how to operate there.
Mariner was also designed to take advantage of the new Atlas rockets, the first intercontinental ballistic missile in the US fleet. When paired with the Agena second stage, the stack was capable of lifting larger payloads and achieving Earth escape velocity. The Atlas-Agena combination would launch the first five Mariner probes, with more successes than failures — Mariner 1 and Mariner 3 were both lost due to guidance issues and payload fairing damage respectively.
All the Mariner spacecraft were designed around a more-or-less common bus, either hexagonal or octagonal, which was designed to maximize the use of space inside the Agena payload fairing. The probes were all solar-powered, with the number of panels depending on which way they were going — two if heading sunward to Venus or Mercury, or four for the Mars-bound missions, to soak up more of the weaker sunlight. The solar panels were built from extremely light aluminum panels, corrugated for rigidity, and each was adorned with 7,056 fantastically expensive solar cells. The four panels on Mariner 4 were stored folded under spring pressure; they were deployed once in orbit with pyrotechnic squibs that pulled out a retaining pin.
Mariner 4. Note the solar vanes on the ends of the solar panels; they were intended to use the solar wind for attitude control, but ended up not working well. Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech
And a Star to Steer Her By
The Mariner probes were also the first spacecraft designed to take advantage of communications infrastructure offered by the growing
Deep Space Network
, with large dish antennas that could be pointed toward Earth. This raised the problem of accurate attitude control — constant contact with the DSN would require precision positioning in space to a degree that had yet to be achieved.
Prior to the Mariner program, navigation and attitude control of spacecraft was a relatively simple task. Keeping an Earth-orbiting spacecraft pointed in the right direction involved little more than detecting the biggest, brightest thing in the sky — the Earth itself. There were subtleties, of course, but they were nothing compared to the challenges of interplanetary travel, especially since the task had yet to be tried.
The Mariner spacecraft would all require a two-position fix in space to maintain the correct attitude. The sun was an easy target, especially since keeping the solar panels more or less oblique to the sun was critical to maximize power production. Sun sensors on the sun-facing upper deck of Mariner provided inputs to the central computer and sequencer (CC&S), the controller for the entire spacecraft, that activated nitrogen jets located around the spacecraft to control its pitch and yaw.
Mariner’s second fix, which would control the roll axis passing through the waveguide of the dish antenna, was based on the star Canopus. Located in the southern constellation of Carina, Canopus is the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius. It has been an aid to navigation since antiquity, and its characteristic brightness, as well as its position well below the plane of the ecliptic, make it perfect for interplanetary navigation.
Canopus star tracker from Mariner 9, which is electro-optically similar to Mariner 4’s tracker. Source:
NASA Technical Memorandum 33-681 – Mariner Mars 1971 Attitude Control Subsystem
Mariner 3 and 4 were the first spacecraft to include Canopus star trackers. The task of picking one particular star out among a field of thousands isn’t trivial. The Canopus tracker consisted of an optical telescope with light baffles to keep stray light from the detection electronics, which consisted of a special vacuum tube called the image dissector. This was essentially a scanning photomultiplier tube that could look at a small slice of space as the spacecraft slowly performed a search maneuver around its roll axis. The light from any star coming into view produced a signal proportional to both its intensity and its location, as determined by where in the image dissector’s scanning field it was spotted. When a star matching the intensity of Canopus was found, the tracker sent a roll-error signal to the reaction control jets, which then kept Canopus locked in view.
The Canopus star tracker took a bit of time to get working properly on Mariner 4. While it was able to lock onto Canopus, intermittent bright signals would appear unexpected in its field of view, causing the tracker to lose lock on Canopus and start another cycle of “star hopping”. Flight controllers puzzled over this for a while until determining that a cloud of dust particles and paint flecks whizzing along through space with Mariner 4 was the likely culprit — even something tiny that close to the tracker could appear to be as bright or brighter than Canopus. The problem was fixed by turning off a CC&S routine used to protect the star tracker from Earth-shine, as Mariner was by then far enough away from home that the star tracker could ignore it.
Mars TV
A heavily cratered area south of the Amazonis Planitia region on Mars. [via
NASA
]
The seven scientific instruments Mariner 4 carried were mainly concerned with capturing data about the electromagnetic realm between Earth and Mars. It would be the first time a spacecraft had a chance to sample the interplanetary medium, and so the instrument suite included a magnetometer, a cosmic ray telescope, radiation detectors, a plasma probe, and a cosmic dust collector to measure micrometeoroid impacts. This science loadout would serve as a model for the scientific payloads of many subsequent interplanetary probes.
While all these instruments were important, Mariner’s designers recognized that stimulating the public interest was an important soft goal of the mission, and in the early 1960s, there was no better way to win the public’s hearts and minds than television. And so well in advance of the mission, a special television camera was designed to take pictures of Mars as Mariner sped past.
The design of the camera, which centered around a special vidicon tube, was outlined in a film hosted by “Mr. Wizard” himself, Don Herbert — a move further calculated to capitalize on the power of television.
The original plan for Mariner’s camera was to keep it covered until just before the Mars flyby started. But with the experience of the dust cloud interfering with the Canopus tracker, controllers decided to jettison the camera’s lens cap early, to give any debris a chance to disperse. The camera worked flawlessly, capturing 22 narrow-angle photos of the surface from about
10
9,800 km altitude. The pictures revealed well-defined and numerous craters, putting to rest any remaining hope that Mars still had a thick atmosphere and liquid water.
Mars by the numbers. The first “photograph” of Mars, hand-colored with pastels on strips of paper printed from Mariner 4 telemetry. Source: NASA/JPL/Dan Goode, public domain.
While Mariner 4’s up-close look at Mars was disappointing to some, especially those who still harbored visions of lush vegetation crisscrossed with ancient canals, it was proof that Mars was a far more foreign and interesting place than our home planet. And Mariner 4 had proved that not only could the interplanetary space be navigated safely, but that it was possible to send instruments there and do useful science, even across the yawning gulf of space. In a very real way, the Mariner probes set the standard for planetary science, and paved the way for us to reach out to Mars and beyond.
[Main image:
Mariner 4 Image of Mars
via
NASA
]
[Thanks to Noel for the idea to dive into this topic.] | 51 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353653",
"author": "Rok",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T14:07:16",
"content": "Another article about Mars (seen from USA) and still nothing about the Chinese rover Zhurong successful Mars landing ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,373,065.732971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/auto-aiming-nerf-gun-to-give-you-the-edge-in-battle/ | Auto-Aiming Nerf Gun To Give You The Edge In Battle | Danie Conradie | [
"Toy Hacks",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"3dprintedlife",
"nerf",
"opencv",
"steppers",
"turret"
] | Ever wished for some robotic enhancements for your next nerf war? Well, it’s time to dig through the parts bin and build yourself a
nerf gun with aimbot built right in
, courtesy of [3Dprintedlife]. (Video, embedded below.)
The gun started with a design borrowed from
[Captain Slug]’s awesome catalog of open source nerf guns
. [3Dprintedlife] modified the design to include a two-axis gimbal between the lower and the upper, driven by a pair of stepper motors via an Arduino. For auto-aim, a camera module attached to a Raspberry Pi running OpenCV was added. When the user half-pressed the trigger, OpenCV will start tracking whatever was at the center of the frame and actively adjust the gimbal to keep the gun aimed at the object until the user fires. The trigger mechanism consists of a pair of microswitches that activate a servo to release the sear. It is also capable of tracking a moving target or any face that comes into view.
We think this is a really fun project, with a lot of things that can be learned in the process. Mount it on a remote control tank and you’d be able to wage some intense battles in your backyard. All the files are available on GitHub.
You are never too old for a good old nerf battle. Whether you want to be a
sniper
, a
machine gunne
r, or a
heavy weapons specialist
, there’s a weapon to build for every role. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353636",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T13:10:01",
"content": "…because Googly eyes makes even killing your opponent better!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6353637",
"author": "RubyPanther",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,373,065.932032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/03/adding-a-laser-blaster-to-classic-atari-2600-games-with-machine-vision/ | Adding A Laser Blaster To Classic Atari 2600 Games With Machine Vision | Dan Maloney | [
"Games"
] | [
"atari 2600",
"blaster",
"laser",
"machine vision",
"opencv",
"pistol",
"Xavier"
] | Remember the pistol controller for the original Atari 2600? No? Perhaps that’s because it never existed. But now that we’re living in the future,
adding a pistol to the classic games of the 2600
is actually possible.
Possible, but not exactly easy. [Nick Bild]’s approach to the problem is based on machine vision, using an NVIDIA Xavier NX to run an Atari 2600 emulator. The game is projected on a wall, while a camera watches the game field. A toy pistol with a laser pointer attached to it blasts away at targets, while OpenCV is used to find the spots that have been hit by the laser. A Python program matches up the coordinates of the laser blasts with coordinates within the game, and then fires off a sequence of keyboard commands to fire the blasters in the game. Basically, the game plays itself based on where it sees the laser shots. You can check out the system in the video below.
[Nick Bild] had a busy weekend of hacking. This was the third project write-up he sent us, after
his big-screen Arduboy build
and
his C64 smartwatch
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353619",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T08:34:06",
"content": "Is this Nick Bild-a-day?Not that I mind. It’s interesting to see what he has been bilding.I’ll get my coat.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6353638",
... | 1,760,373,065.869669 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/commodore-inspired-watch-puts-basic-on-your-wrist/ | Commodore Inspired Watch Puts BASIC On Your Wrist | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"basic",
"commodore 64",
"firmware",
"Lilygo",
"smart watch"
] | Ask a smart watch owner what their favorite wrist-mounted feature is, and they might say it’s having all their daily information available at a glance, or the ease with which they’re able to communicate with friends and family. If they
don’t
mention knocking out a few lines in their wearable BASIC interpreter, then you know you aren’t talking to [Nick Bild].
His “C64 Watch” firmware for the LILYGO T-Watch 2020
not only takes some visual inspiration from the Commodore 64, but also lets you relive those early computing glory days with a functional BASIC environment.
Originally [Nick] used a teeny tiny onscreen keyboard to tap out his BASIC programs, but finding the experience to be uncomfortably like torture, he switched over to using USB. Just plug the watch into your computer, open your favorite serial terminal, and you’ll have access to the customized version of TinyBasic Plus running on the watch. To make things even easier, he’s looking at implementing a web-based terminal over WiFi so you don’t need to plug the watch in.
When you aren’t running BASIC you’ll be treated to a Commodore-themed watch face, complete with the classic
READY.
prompt. A small battery indicator is hidden up in the top-right corner, and tapping on the rainbow colored “C” will launch the menu. It’s pretty simplistic, but of course what else would you expect given the source material?
Looking ahead, [Nick] says he’d also like to implement a C64 emulator into the firmware so the watch could run original software. We’re a bit skeptical about how practical that would actually be, but we’ll reserve judgement until we see it in operation. He’s also hoping other Commodore aficionados will chime in with their own improvements and new features for the watch.
You might think that a Commodore 64 emulator on your wrist would be the most outlandish way to run your old games and software, but we’d say
playing
Turrican
in a virtual reality microcosm of the 1980s takes the cake
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353734",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T20:12:27",
"content": "If he really wants to impress people he should load programs off a 1541! But really I can’t wait to see it run C64 games.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,373,065.826552 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/optical-microscope-resolves-down-to-40-nanometers/ | Optical Microscope Resolves Down To 40 Nanometers | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"Metamaterial",
"metamaterials",
"microscope",
"microscopy"
] | Optical microscopes depend on light, of course, but they are also limited by that same light. Typically, anything under 200 nanometers just blurs together because of the wavelength of the light being used to observe it. However, engineers at the University of California San Diego have published their results using
a hyperbolic metamaterial composed of silver and silica to drive optical microscopy down to below 40 nanometers
. You can find the
original paper online
, also.
The technique also requires image processing. Light passing through the metamaterial breaks into speckles that produce low-resolution images that can combine to form high-resolution images. This so-called structured illumination technique isn’t exactly new, but previous techniques allowed about 100-nanometer resolution, much less than what the researchers were able to find using this material.
The technique requires a conventional microscope along with a 1-watt laser and a fiberoptic collimator. A digital camera collects the optical data for processing. While a laser used to be exotic, these days a 1W laser isn’t especially hard to acquire. If you could figure out how to get or make the metamaterial, this looks like something you could possibly replicate in your basement.
The university has been doing work in this area for a while. In 2018. they showed similar methods
resolving down 80 nanometers
. Sure, a scanning electron microscope can resolve around 10 nanometers, but having to put your specimen in a vacuum chamber and irradiate it poses difficulties for some kinds of samples.
While it might not have the same resolution, your 3D printer can
become a microscope
. Or if you want to really image atoms, try building an
atomic force microscope
. | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353606",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2021-06-03T07:13:21",
"content": "I know this was pretty old news, but seeing it again gets me thinking about it. Perhaps it might be possible to obtain an even greater resolution. If a material could be created that had relatively long po... | 1,760,373,065.984181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/trials-begin-for-lozenge-that-rebuilds-tooth-enamel/ | Trials Begin For Lozenge That Rebuilds Tooth Enamel | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"nano-hydroxyapatite",
"peptide",
"tooth enamel",
"toothpaste"
] | For all the cool regenerative tricks the human body can do, it’s kind of weird that we only have one shot at tooth enamel with no way to get it back. That may be about to change, as researchers at the University of Washington have developed
a lozenge that rebuilds this precious protective coating a few microns at a time
and are taking it to the trial stage. Could it really work? It’s certainly something to chew on.
The lozenge uses a genetically-engineered peptide (a chain of amino acids) derived from a protein that’s involved in developing enamel in the first place, as well as with the formation of the root surface of teeth. Inside the lozenge, this peptide works alongside phosphorus and calcium ions, which are the building blocks of tooth enamel. It’s designed to bind to damaged enamel without harming the gums, tongue, or other soft tissues of the mouth.
The researchers have already verified the efficacy on teeth extracted from humans, pigs, and rats, so the trials will largely revolve around comparing it to other whitening methods and documenting their findings.
One added advantage is that the new enamel the lozenges produce is really white, because it’s brand new. These lozenges sound like an all-around great solution, especially compared with traditional whitening techniques that often make enamel weaker. The researchers are also developing an over-the-counter toothpaste and some kind of solution for hypersensitivity, which is right up our alley.
We are skeptical of course, because nothing in history thus far has been able to regenerate enamel. Then again, yours truly uses toothpaste with nano-hydroxyapatite, which is touted as a non-toxic version of the same mineral that makes up teeth and bones.
Skepticism abounds with that stuff, too
, although my grill looks better to me.
But why settle for new enamel when you could regrow entire teeth?
Main image by
Eric Moreau
and thumbnail image by
Kevin Bation
via
Unsplash | 48 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353550",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T23:24:05",
"content": "I always thought it was weird that the answer to a hole in a tooth is to remove even more irreplaceable tooth. I’m glad to see some incentive to remedy that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,373,066.087436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/arduino-variometer-in-a-mint-tin/ | Arduino Variometer In A Mint Tin | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"altitude",
"arduino nano",
"BMP180",
"pressure sensor",
"variometer"
] | While humans have done a pretty good job of figuring out how to fly with various mechanical contrivances, the fact remains that our natural senses aren’t really well suited to being off the ground. For example, unless you have a visual reference point, determining which way is up is quite a bit harder than you might think. Which is why pilots rely on instruments such as the variometer, that determines the current rate of climb and descent, to guide them when their eyes can’t be trusted.
It’s also a very handy thing to have when paragliding, which is why [mircemk] decided to
build a hand-held version using the Arduino Nano and a BMP180 pressure sensor
. Since you don’t want to be staring at a little screen in mid-air, the device conveys changes in altitude with audio tones. A rising tone means you’re moving upwards, while a lower tone indicates downward travel. In the video below, you can see that it only takes a meter or two of vertical movement before the device picks up on the change.
Looking for a simple yet rugged enclosure for the device, [mircemk] found a metal mint tin that would hold the microcontroller, sensor, buzzer, and the 9 V battery that powers it all. We know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry; holes have been popped in the sides to make sure there’s no pressure difference inside the tin. There’s plenty of room to replace the alkaline battery with a rechargeable pack and associated charge controller, but we imagine there’s a certain security in tossing in a fresh new primary cell before slipping the surly bonds of Earth.
If you’re in interested DIY instrumentation for a glider or other aircraft that actually has a proper cockpit, this
sunlight readable flight computer made from a Kobo e-reader would be a great start
. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353521",
"author": "Neolker",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T21:08:21",
"content": "Remember me laggy variometers 7 years ago. These days everyone use accelerometr for instant respons and high resolution up to 10 cm otherwise it is useless for flying on paraglider with long delay and res... | 1,760,373,066.16783 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/make-your-desoldering-easier-by-minding-your-own-bismuth/ | Make Your Desoldering Easier By Minding Your Own Bismuth | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bismuth",
"braid",
"desolder",
"eutectic",
"lead",
"phase diagram",
"solder",
"tin"
] | Any video that starts with a phase diagram has instantly earned our attention. Admittedly, we have a pretty low bar for that kind of stuff, but eye candy aside, [Robin Debreuil]’s
quick outline of his technique for desoldering with the help of bismuth
is worth watching.
Aside from its use in those
pink gloopy solutions
one takes for an upset stomach, bismuth has a lot of commercial applications. For the purposes of desoldering, though, its tendency to lower the melting point of tin and tin alloys like solder is what makes it a valuable addition to the toolkit. [Robin] starts with a demonstration of just how far a little bismuth depresses the melting point of tin solder — to about 135°. That allows plenty of time to work, and freeing leads from pads becomes a snap. He demonstrates this with some large QFP chips, which practically jump off the board. He also demonstrates a neat technique for cleaning the bismuth-tin mix off the leads, using a length of desoldering braid clamped at an angle to the vertical with some helping-hands clips. The braid wicks the bismuth-tin mix away from the leads along one side of the chip, while gravity pulls it down the braid to pool safely on the bench. Pretty slick.
Lest leaded solder fans fret, [Robin] ensures us this works well for lead-tin solder too. You won’t have to worry about breaking the bank, either; bismuth is pretty cheap and easily sourced. And as a bonus, it’s pretty non-toxic, at least as far as heavy metals go. But alas —
it apparently doesn’t machine very well
. | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353502",
"author": "Shirley Marquez",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T18:53:56",
"content": "One caution: it works perhaps too well for solder with lead. The melting point of a tin-lead-bismuth alloy can drop well below 100C; low enough that operating temperatures in some circuits will ca... | 1,760,373,066.480997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/know-audio-start-at-the-very-beginning/ | Know Audio: Start At The Very Beginning | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"home entertainment hacks",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"audio",
"ears",
"hearing",
"hi-fi"
] | A lot of our projects make noise. It can be something as simple as a microcontroller driving a small speaker or a truly ambitious Hi-Fi project, but common to all of them is the desire to get that sound out in as audible and high-quality a manner as possible. We’ve been known to make fun of the more preposterous side of the Hi-Fi world at times, but behind it all there’s a basis of solid and provable audio engineering that can be brought to bear on almost any project involving sound and electronics. Perhaps it’s time to devote some time to a series exploring the topic, and what better place to start than the ultimate destination for all that sound. Any Hi-Fi is only as good as the ears of the person listening to it, so in out journey through the world of audio that’s where we’ll start.
The Most Beautiful Piece Of Audio Equipment You Own
The human ear. Lars Chittka; Axel Brockmann,
CC BY 2.5
.
A diagram of the three main zones containing the inner workings of the human ear will no doubt be familiar to any Hackaday reader who has sat through a high school biology class. There’s the outer ear which we’re all used to seeing in the mirror, behind that is the middle ear, and further inside the inner ear.
The outer ear and canal are more than just an odd-shaped bodily accoutrement, instead they’re a sound reflector designed to catch sounds and channel them to the ear canal which channels sound to the middle ear. They have a frequency response all of their own, resulting in a peak for most people somewhere around 3.5 kHz. At the end of the ear canal is the tympanic membrane, a diaphragm that vibrates with the sound and transmits it to the structures in the middle ear. Behind the tympanic membrane are a set of three small bones that form a lever system which transfers the vibrations through another membrane to the liquid-filled inner ear. Their function is described as impedance matching, ensuring that the vibrations are transmitted to the liquid at the correct amplitude. A system of muscles in the inner ear act as a gain control, allowing the ear to desensitise itself and protect the inner ear from very loud noises. Finally in the liquid-filled inner ear are a set of spiral tubes with nerve endings that sense the pressure changes of the sound, and transmit the information to the brain.
This is the tympanic membrane of my left ear. Taken with
my inexpensive Chinese USB otoscope
.
This beautiful and intricate mechanism has to last a lifetime, and over that time it suffers from both ageing, and whatever wear and tear life throws at it. When I was a youngster I could hear the 15.625 kHz whine of a 625-line CRT TV set in operation or the squeak of bats catching insects on a summer’s evening, but now I can’t. As I’ve aged, my tympanic membrane and other ear parts have become stiffer, meaning that like almost everyone over the age of about 20, I can’t hear those high frequencies any more.
Similarly, any ear damage from loud noises or disease affects hearing performance, so if you had a fondness for live heavy metal, then your hearing has probably suffered. I’m fortunate as someone who was in the right place at the right time do sound and light engineering at more than a few raves back in the day, that I had the sense to wear those little foam ear plugs. My generation’s version of the old 1960s joke is that if you can remember 1990 you weren’t really
there
man, but at least my ears can’t remember it and I don’t have to live with tinnitus.
How Much Listening Pleasure Has Father Time Taken Away?
A frequency response graph for my hearing. The Y axis is the sound intensity of my hearing threshold at a given frequency
The point of all this is that while a five-year-old with no hearing problems has near-perfect hearing, those of us who are old enough to pursue Hi-Fi are not so lucky. Age has degraded our hearing, but the question is, by how much? It was time to characterise my ears, and for that after fooling around with a signal generator for a while I found
a much better way to do that using recordings of sound at gradated amplitude intervals
. It allows a graph to be generated showing the minimum audible sound level at a given frequency, and while the results should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt because they rely on uncalibrated equipment they do at least give a useful picture of hearing bandwidth.
The lowest frequency I could hear at all with the signal generator was around 30 Hz, while I had difficulty in hearing much above 16 kHz. This is pretty normal for someone of my age, and it seems those foam ear plugs saved me from too much damage at the hands of The Shamen, KLF, or Human Resource. It shows how those bats around 20 kHz and above that I could hear as a youngster are now an impossibility to hear. The curve backs this up, with a few lumps and bumps in the middle that may reflect my headphones as much as me.
The Point Of All This Aural Musing
Talking about ears is very interesting stuff and I’d like to invite you all to plot your own response curves in the same way, but the real reason for going through all this is to remind readers that the best audio equipment in the world is not going to improve the listening ability of their ears. Unless you are a five-year-old child, the weakest point in any listening chain is located on the side of your head, and once that has been understood then the process of audio design becomes one of presenting your ears with the best quality audio within their parameters rather than trying to give them something they simply aren’t capable of resolving. Something to bear in mind, should you fall too far down the Hi-Fi rabbit hole.
All that sound has to reach those ears somehow, so to continue this series we’ll be looking at the next link in the chain. Loudspeakers are the single component that can bring out the best in an inexpensive audio set-up or ruin the sound of a good one, and we’ll be examining their design and construction from a tech perspective to help you you discern the good from the bad, and to make your own creations as good as they can be. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353477",
"author": "SPD",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T17:17:27",
"content": "Question is that graph for both ears? Have you thought about doing the ears separate?I had a ear infection in one ear, and my I can’t hear high freq in that ear well. The differenceis quite stark.",
"pare... | 1,760,373,066.332759 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/full-size-3d-printed-wind-turbine/ | Full Size 3D-Printed Wind Turbine | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"blade",
"energy",
"generator",
"qblade",
"sla",
"turbine",
"wind",
"yblade"
] | Wind energy isn’t quite as common of an alternative energy source as solar, at least for small installations. It’s usually much easier just to throw a few panels and a battery together than it is to have a working turbine with many moving parts that need to be maintained when only a small amount of power is needed. However, if you find yourself where the wind blows but the sun don’t shine, there are a few new tools available to help create the most efficient wind turbine possible, provided you have a 3D printer.
[Jan] created this turbine
with the help of QBlade, a piece of software that helps design turbine blades. It doesn’t have any support for 3D printing though, such as separating the blades into segments, infill, and attachment points, so [Jan] built YBlade to help take care of all of this and made the software available on
the project’s GitHub page
. The blades are only part of this story, though. [Jan] goes on to build a complete full-scale wind turbine that can generate nearly a kilowatt of power at peak production, although it does not currently have a generator attached and all of the energy gets converted to heat.
While we hope that future versions include a generator and perhaps even pitched blades to control rotor speed, [Jan] plans to focus his efforts into improving the blade design via the 3D printer. He is using an SLA printer for these builds, but presumably any type of printer would be up to the task of building a turbine like this. If you need inspiration for building a generator,
take a look at this build which attempted to adapt a ceiling fan motor into a wind turbine generator
. | 29 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353461",
"author": "Paul LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T16:14:41",
"content": ">> if you find yourself where the wind blows but the sun don’t shineOK, I’m pretty sure there’s a joke in there somewhere…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,373,066.545615 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/fueling-up-for-fusion-masts-super-x-jets-deuterium-tritium-experiments-for-iter-and-more/ | Fueling Up For Fusion: MAST’s Super-X, JET’s Deuterium-Tritium Experiments For ITER, And More | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"fusion",
"ITER",
"jet",
"mast",
"nuclear fusion",
"plasma physics",
"wendelstein 7-x"
] | We’ve had nuclear fission reactors in operation all over the world for ages, but nuclear fusion always seems to be a decade or two away. While one cannot predict when we’ll reach the goal of sustained nuclear fusion, the cutting edge in test hardware is advancing at a rapid pace that makes us optimistic. Beginning as soon as this month and extending over a few years, we’re living through a very exciting time for nuclear fusion and plasma physics.
The Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) got a big upgrade to test a new cooled divertor design. JET (Joint European Torus) will be testing the deuterium-tritium fuel mixture that will be powering the ITER (the research project whose name began as an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor but has since been changed to just ITER). And the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is coming back online with upgraded cooled divertors by next year.
Here the MAST Upgrade’s Super-X divertors have so far shown a
ten-fold decrease
in the temperature which the divertor is exposed to while carrying thermal energy out of the tokamak reactor. This means a divertor design and ultimately a fusion reactor that will last longer between maintenance sessions. On the stellarator side of things, Wendelstein 7-X’s new divertors may allow it to
demonstrate
the first continuous operation of a stellarator fusion reactor. Meanwhile, JET’s fuel experiments should allow us to test the deuterium-tritium fuel while
ITER
is working towards first plasma by 2025.
Nuclear Physics on Hard Mode
The reason why we figured out how to use nuclear fission in a commercial setting so quickly can be essentially summarized as it being a process that easily happens by itself. The difficulty with nuclear fission is more with controlling the nuclear chain reaction, requiring a balance between neutron moderation and absorption in the case of thermal neutrons and the common light water reactors (LWRs).
On the other hand, nuclear fusion is a completely different game. Instead of using some of the heaviest isotopes around and lobbing some neutrons at them to convert a part of them to energy, nuclear fusion uses the lightest isotopes (hydrogen isotopes) possible and attempts to fuse them. This is obviously not a process that easily happens by itself, unless you happen to take a very large amount of hydrogen and allow immense gravitational pressure to kickstart the fusion process, as is the case in stars.
A 2016 drawing of the different sections of the ITER fusion reactor which is currently being constructed.
While on Earth we can find the remnants of natural fission reactors today from a time when there was more natural uranium-235 around, fusion has obviously remained limited to stars, including our Sun. As a result, the only way that we are going to accomplish nuclear fusion in a sustained reaction on Earth is by creating the right pressure, temperature, and other conditions that will allow hydrogen isotopes to conquer their fear of the
Coulomb barrier
and fuse so that they can release a lot of energy in the process.
This is in short the reason why it has taken
over a hundred years
now since the first discovery of the
nuclear fusion
process. A hundred years of careful experimentation and the use of new materials and analytical technologies to improve our understanding of high-temperature plasma physics and our ability to create and sustain the conditions for fusion in such a contained plasma.
Going for Break-Even
An essential metric in determining how well a nuclear fusion reactor design works is through the Q-factor. This is the ratio between input and output energy. In order for a fusion reactor to start operating, it has to literally warm up which costs energy. Sustaining these operating temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius or more requires a certain energy input; preventing the cooling of the plasma is one area of the research.
Ideally the reaction becomes self-sustaining, in which the fusion reaction provides the energy required for sustaining the plasma temperature and fusion reaction. Yet even with some input energy required, the Q factor must be over 1 to result in any actual energy output. This basically means more energy output than what is required by the reactor’s magnetic field generator and other elements.
With next month’s JET
deuterium-tritium fuel experiments
the goal is to see whether the energy output can be boosted through these fuel mixtures. Currently JET has achieved a Q of 0.67 which it hopes to improve on. It’s
projected
that ITER’s successor (DEMO) would need to hit a Q of at least 25 to make the economic case for fusion reactors. ITER is slated to hit a Q of 10.
Schematic description of a proposed divertor module for the planned Korean K-DEMO fusion reactor.
The Super-X
divertors
that are being tested by MAST Upgrade could be helpful here with improving efficiency of the fusion reaction. One of the purposes of these divertors is to purify the plasma by removing unwanted elements, such as the helium atoms that are produced as a result of the fusion process. Keeping the plasma stable and pure are two essential factors in making a fusion reactor work efficiently.
Even so, the magnetic fields in these tokamak designs that contain the plasma continue to form a source of constant headaches, as the plasma isn’t content to keep moving in simple, predictable patterns. Between
kink instability
and banana orbits (
neoclassical transport
) the plasma tends to show sudden movements away from the center of the magnetic field. Effectively dealing with this is still a major concern, also because it can result in fuel being lost as it escapes the magnetic field.
This is one area where the stellarator design may have a leg up on the tokamak design.
Cool Flow
Interior of the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator during maintenance.
Compared to the simple, round tokamak design,
stellarators
seem quaint at the best of times, but this is a result of these fusion reactors following the plasma behavior instead of seeking to control it. The almost organic-looking magnetic coil configuration is the result of modeling of the plasma to find a configuration which essentially works with the super-heated plasma instead of against it.
As a modern stellarator design, the
Wendelstein 7-X
(W7-X) incorporates all of the know-how about these complex devices. Since
first plasma in 2015
, W7-X’s performance has been essentially flawless, so that in 2018 the next round of upgrades began. This involves among other changes the installation of the water-cooled divertors.
In ten curved double strips, the divertor plates follow the twisted plasma inside the Wendelstein 7-X. (Credit: IPP)
With the uncooled divertors operational time was limited, but the goal with the new and improved W7-X is to perform a continuous run for up to 30 minutes. Considering that for tokamak designs a run-time for more than a minute is considered a pretty good length, this would be a major achievement.
Although the W7-X is not intended to produce more power than is put into it, it serves the important function of demonstrating that the stellarator fusion reactor design is at least as capable as the tokamak design. This makes the next series of experiments rather exciting. Unfortunately, due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that has kept the world occupied for over a year now, the W7-X upgrades have been delayed, so that the resumption of experiments likely won’t take place until next year.
A Lot to Look Forward To
Much about nuclear fusion reactors has been an intense and rather unforgiving course in plasma physics and other elementary areas of physics. When the optimistic assumption that was made in the 1950s about nuclear fusion being ‘only a few years away’ was snuffed out harshly when Z-pinch designs proved to be unworkable, the field seemed to fade away in the public’s opinion for many years.
Fast-forward countless scientific papers over many decades later and it appears that we may now cautiously consider ourselves to be on the cusp of truly workable nuclear fusion reactors. While it’s not quite a ‘within the next few years’ kind of deal, ITER and related tokamaks such as China’s
CFETR
give us hope for tokamak-style reactors. Meanwhile, W7-X’s progress forms an alternate approach that may work as well, worse or better than tokamaks.
With ITER’s deuterium-tritium fuel plasma still at least fourteen years away, we have a lot to look forward to with these current tokamak experiments at the JET and MAST laboratories. When we get the first experimental results from W7-X in the coming years, perhaps they will be promising enough to kickstart a stellarator version of ITER. Whatever the case may be, this decade looks to be one in which nuclear fusion is slowly shuffling back into the limelight. | 38 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353441",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T14:43:27",
"content": "“fusion has obviously remained limited to stars”Err, and hydrogen bombs?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353447",
"author": "PeaceFox",
... | 1,760,373,066.414912 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/how-to-run-a-first-generation-cell-phone-network/ | How To Run A First-Generation Cell Phone Network | Zach Zeman | [
"Phone Hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"cellular network",
"cellular phone",
"LimeSDR",
"osmocom",
"retrotech",
"sdr",
"usrp"
] | Retro tech is cool. Retro tech that works is even cooler. When we can see technology working, hold it in our hand, and use it as though we’ve been transported back in time; that’s when we feel truly connected to history. To help others create small time anomalies of their own, [Dmitrii Eliuseev] put together
a quick how-to for creating your own Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) network
which can bring some of the classic cellular heroes of yesterday back to life.
Few readers will be surprised to learn that this project is built on software defined radio (SDR) and the
Osmocom-Analog
project, which we’ve seen before used to
create a more modern GSM network at EMF Camp
. Past projects were based on LimeSDR, but here we see that USRP is just as easily supported. [Dmitrii] also provides a brief history of AMPS, including some of the reasons it persisted so long, until 2007! The system features a very large coverage area with relatively few towers and has surprisingly good audio quality. He also discusses its disadvantages, primarily that anyone with a scanner and the right know-how could tune to the analog voice frequencies and eavesdrop on conversations. That alone, we must admit, is a pretty strong case for retiring the system.
The article does note that there may be legal issues with running your own cell network, so be sure to check your local regulations. He also points out that AMPS is robust enough to work short-range with a dummy load instead of an antenna, which may help avoid regulatory issues. That being said, SDRs have opened up so many possibilities for what hackers can do with old wireless protocols. You can even
go back to the time when pagers were king
. Alternatively, if wired is more your thing, we can always recommend
becoming your own dial-up ISP
. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353417",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T12:31:03",
"content": "Quote:“primarily that anyone with a scanner and the right know-how could tune to the analog voice frequencies and eavesdrop on conversations.”That was the reason that a particular company made a scram... | 1,760,373,066.719157 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/02/diy-usb-microphone-seems-overkill-is-surprisingly-in-depth/ | DIY USB Microphone Seems Overkill; Is Surprisingly In-Depth | Erin Pinheiro | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"digital microphone",
"diy",
"MEMS microphones",
"microphone",
"stm32",
"STM32F4",
"work from home"
] | Those of us who have been working from home through video calls for the past year can attest to the rising demand for conferencing gear such as webcams and microphones. Not wanting to spring for a boring off-the-shelf solution, serial hacker [Andy Brown] decided to
design his own USB solution from scratch and show us the process from start to finish
.
Deciding to go for a full digital design for the circuitry, the peripheral is based off of a MEMS microphone and an STM32 microcontroller doing the heavy lifting between it and a USB connection. [Andy] notes that MEMS microphones are very delicate and you have to design the PCB around the hole where the sound enters, which is why he went with a breakout board which has the component already soldered onto it.
As for the MCU, he reasons that since this is a off-one project which won’t be produced in large numbers, the 180 MHz ARM core shouldn’t be seen as overkill, since it also gives him more than plenty of headroom to do signal processing to make the sound clearer before sending it through to a computer by the USB audio device descriptor.
Once the components are chosen and the board designed, [Andy] goes into detail explaining the firmware he wrote for the STM32 to translate the PCM samples from the microphone’s I²S interface into a format better suited for the computer. He also describes how it then processes the audio, applying a graphic equalizer to reduce noise and then ST’s own Smart Volume Control filter, which works more like a compressor than a simple amplitude multiplication.
Finally, all files for the project, including board gerbers and the STM32 firmware are available at the bottom of his post, and to boot, a video demonstrating the project which you can check here after the break. [Andy]’s choice of microcontroller for this project is no surprise to us, given he’s already made
his own development board for the STM32 G0 series
. But if this digital microphone project is a bit too modern for you, why not try your hand at
building a ribbon microphone
instead? | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353429",
"author": "jwrm22",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T13:12:38",
"content": "Very cool project. I can imagine him in a call with his bad quality audio, signing off, building the module, signing back in a month later, and asking ‘can you hear me now?’.I like it how accessible it has... | 1,760,373,066.586705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/tiny-gasoline-engine-fitted-with-a-custom-billet-waterpump/ | Tiny Gasoline Engine Fitted With A Custom Billet Waterpump | Lewin Day | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"johnnyq90",
"machining",
"pump"
] | We don’t typically use gasoline engines smaller than 50 cc or so on a regular basis. Below that size, electric motors are typically less messy and more capable of doing the job. That doesn’t mean they aren’t cute, however. [JohnnyQ90] is a fan of tiny internal combustion engines,
and decided to whip up a little water pump for one of his
so it could do something useful besides make noise.
The pump is built out of billet aluminium, showing off [JohnnyQ90]’s machining skills. The two pieces that make up the main body and cover plate of the pump are impressive enough, but the real party piece is the tiny delicate impeller which actually does the majority of the work. The delicate curves of the pump blades are carefully carved out and look exquisite when finished.
The pump’s performance is adequate, and the noise of the tiny gasoline engine makes quite a racket, but it’s a great display of machining skill. If so desired, the pump could also do a great job for a small liquid delivery system if hooked up to a quiet electric motor, too. The aluminium design has the benefit of being relatively leak free when assembled properly, something a lot of 3D printed designs struggle to accomplish.
We’ve seen [JohnnyQ90]’s micro engine experiments before, too —
like this small generator build
. Video after the break. | 31 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353068",
"author": "macona",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T17:54:30",
"content": "No, its made from bar stock, billets never leave the foundry. /rant",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353070",
"author": "Hirudinea",
... | 1,760,373,066.655832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/a-look-back-on-the-oroville-dam-with-practical-engineering/ | A Look Back On The Oroville Dam With Practical Engineering | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Oroville Dam",
"Practical Engineering"
] | Back when it first happened, we covered
the Oroville Dam near-disaster
. Heavier-than-expected rainfall in California back in early 2017 led to running the dam’s primary spillway at much higher-than-normal levels. February 17, 2017, the operators noticed something odd about the water flow down the spillway, and when they turned off water flowing down the spillway, it was made obvious that they had a major problem on their hands. Several chunks of concrete were missing, and the water had begun gouging into the earth beneath the spillway. It would need repairs before it was properly up to the task of discharging water, but it was still raining.
The rising water level in Lake Oroville put operators in a tricky situation, as they needed to discharge water in the least damaging way possible. They decided to use the emergency spillway to keep water levels at safe levels. Unfortunately, the secondary spillway began to deteriorate even more quickly than the primary had, and continued use could compromise the structure of the entire dam. The difficult decision was made to evacuate downstream residents, and sacrifice the primary spillway to drain the lake to 50 feet below the nominal full level. It worked, and effectively destroyed the bottom two-thirds of the spillway over those 3 months.
With the water at a safe level,
the spillways could be repaired
, a monumental nearly-2-year process in itself. We’ve covered all this before, but you may be left with the nagging question, what went wrong? [Grady Hillhouse], of the Practical Engineering channel,
breaks it down for us in the video embedded below
.
The short answer is that the dam was designed and maintained with the assumption that the spillways were built on bedrock — even though it was discovered during construction that reality was not that simple. Cracks in the concrete allowed water to seep between the individual slabs, and that water slowly worked against the structure. Some of the safeguards built in to the spillway were installed incorrectly, and the state-of-the-art has advanced significantly since the dam was built in 1961.
The report Grady pulled information from
is freely available, so go check it out for yourself for all the details. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353038",
"author": "Doc Searls",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T14:45:41",
"content": "I just finished reading Floodpath, by John Wilkman. It’s a very comprehensive history of the St. Francis Dam disaster, which in lives lost was the second largest in California history. Highly recommend... | 1,760,373,066.766494 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/thin-coatings-require-an-impressive-collection-of-equipment-and-know-how/ | Thin Coatings Require An Impressive Collection Of Equipment And Know-How | Dan Maloney | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"anti-reflective",
"coating",
"optics",
"physical vapor deposition",
"PVD",
"reflective",
"silver",
"Thermal",
"vacuum"
] | Let’s be honest — not too many of us have a need to deposit nanometer-thick films onto substrates in a controlled manner. But if you do find yourself in such a situation, you could do worse than following [Jeroen Vleggaar]’s lead as he builds out
a physical vapor deposition apparatus
to do just that.
Thankfully, [Jeroen] has particular expertise in this area, and is willing to share it. PVD is used to apply an exceedingly thin layer of metal or organic material to a substrate — think lens coatings or mirror silvering, as well as semiconductor manufacturing. The method involves heating the coating material in a vacuum such that it vaporizes and accumulates on a substrate in a controlled fashion. Sounds simple, but the equipment and know-how needed to actually accomplish it are daunting. [Jeroen]’s shopping list included high-current power supplies to heat the coating material, turbomolecular pumps to evacuate the coating chamber, and instruments to monitor the conditions inside the chamber. Most of the chamber itself was homemade, a gutsy move for a novice TIG welder. Highlights from the build are in the video below, which also shows the PVD setup coating a glass disc with a thin layer of silver.
This build is chock full of nice details; we especially liked the technique of monitoring deposition progress by measuring the frequency change of an oscillator connected to a crystal inside the chamber as it accumulates costing material. We’re not sure where [Jeroen] is going with this, but we suspect it has something to do with some hints he dropped while talking about his experiments with
optical logic gates
. We’re looking forward to seeing if that’s true. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353006",
"author": "daveboltman",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T11:48:51",
"content": "Could be useful for those that grind their own telescope mirrors, too.An old friend in another city which whom I’ve lost touch, ground a 14″ mirror out of Pyrex glass, and sent it to some company to h... | 1,760,373,066.876896 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/a-chainsaw-gives-this-winch-some-grunt/ | A Chainsaw Gives This Winch Some Grunt | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"chainsaw",
"machining",
"winch"
] | For a satisfying Youtube watching session there is noting like some quality machine shop work, and that’s exactly what [Made In Poland] supply with
their conversion of a small 12V winch to power from a chainsaw
. The finished product contains not much more than the gearbox and shaft components from the original, but the mesmerising sight of rusty steel stock being transformed into dimension-perfect components which come together to form an entirely new assembly is as always a draw.
The conversion starts with the removal and disassembly of the motor to reveal its shaft and the locking mechanism for the drum. The shaft is then turned down and a collar manufactured to couple it to the drive spline on a chainsaw. We’re pleased to see that the chainsaw isn’t modified in this build, instead the blade is simply unscrewed and the winch attached in a reversible process. Finally, the original drum is deemed too small for the application, so a new drum is fabricated. We see the result on a Polish farm, happily participating in some forestry work and even pulling their pickup truck when it became stuck.
This is by no means the first time we’ve featured [Mad in Poland] in these pages, not least with
this electromagnetic circle cutting jig
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352986",
"author": "Merlin",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T08:27:23",
"content": "‘made in Poland’ – not ‘mad in Poland’.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352995",
"author": "yetihehe",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T09:... | 1,760,373,066.826627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/smartphone-app-for-leftover-vaccinations/ | Smartphone App For Leftover Vaccinations | Chris Lott | [
"News"
] | [
"Covid-19",
"public health",
"smartphones",
"vaccination"
] | South Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency
launched a pilot program yesterday
to minimize vaccination waste using a nationwide smartphone app. People who are over 30 years of age can search for leftover doses on their smartphones. If any are available, they can book an appointment immediately within the app, and then get to the medical center within hours to receive the injection. One can tag up to five nearby inoculation centers to receive an instant message when a dose becomes available.
These leftover doses arise from people who have missed their appointment, but also just as you would expect when considering the short shelf life of the opened vaccine, the number of doses per vial, and modulo arithmetic. Within hours of the program rolling out, people began complaining about server problems and the lack of available doses. But this is a pilot program, after all, so some glitches are to be expected.
The full program is supposed to begin on June 9th, although it isn’t clear how it will be different from the pilot project, other than presumably having fewer bugs. The lead picture above shows the availability of leftover vaccines in central Seoul this morning — zero (the symbol 없음 means “none”). But the system does indeed work and
people received vaccinations yesterday utilizing this program
.
Technically speaking, this isn’t a new app, but rather, it is integrated into the two most popular South Korean portal sites. Anyone already using KakaoTalk or the Naver portal on their smartphone can use this leftover vaccination service with just the press of a few icons. Are the health authorities in your region utilizing smartphone apps or online reservations sites to distribute these leftover doses, doses that would otherwise be discarded? Let us know in the comments below. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352948",
"author": "e",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T05:24:38",
"content": "The Australian federal government has cleverly avoided the issue of wasted doses by being a bit slow to deliver sufficient quantities of vaccine to date in their rollout.They have been able to get away with thi... | 1,760,373,067.770792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/better-solvents-could-lead-to-cleaner-greener-perovskite-solar-cells/ | Better Solvents Could Lead To Cleaner, Greener Perovskite Solar Cells | Dan Maloney | [
"News"
] | [
"DMF",
"GBL",
"GHB< GVL",
"organic",
"perovskites",
"photovoltaic",
"solar",
"Solvent",
"toxix"
] | Regardless of appearances, almost all scientific progress comes at a price. That which is hailed as a breakthrough technology that will save the planet or improve the lots of those living upon it almost always comes at a cost, which sometimes greatly outweighs the purported benefits of the advancement.
Luckily, though, solving these kinds of problems is what scientists and engineers live for, and in the case of the potentially breakthrough technology behind perovskite solar cells (PSCs), that diligence has resulted in
a cleaner and safer way to manufacture them
. We’ve covered
the technology of perovskites
in the past, but briefly, as related to photovoltaic cells, they’re synthetic crystals of organometallic cations bonded to a halide anion, so something like methylammonium lead tribromide. These materials have a large direct bandgap, which means a thin layer of the stuff can absorb as much solar energy as a much thicker layer of monocrystalline silicon — hence the intense interest in perovskites for cheap, easily manufactured solar cells.
The problem with scaling up PSC manufacturing has been the need for volatile and dangerous solvents to dissolve the perovskites. One such solvent, dimethylformamide (DMF), commonly used in pharmaceutical manufacturing and often a component of paint strippers, is easily absorbed through the skin and toxic to the liver in relatively low concentrations. Another common solvent, γ-butyrolactone (GBL), is a precursor to γ-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), a common recreational club-drug known as “liquid ecstasy”.
In a recent paper, [Carys Wrosley] and colleagues at Swansea University showed that γ-valerolactone (GVL), a far less toxic and volatile solvent, could be effectively substituted for DMF and GBL in perovskite manufacturing processes. One of the most promising features of perovskites for solar cells is that the solution can be easily applied to transparent conductive substrates; the use of GVL as a solvent resulted in solar cells that were comparably efficient to cells made with the more dangerous solvents.
[Featured images:
Swansea University
,
Solliance Solar
] | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352932",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T04:02:47",
"content": "> Regardless of appearances, almost all scientific progress comes at a price.The LHC was almost free to construct.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,373,067.072008 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/hackaday-links-may-30-2021/ | Hackaday Links: May 30, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"anomaly",
"bipedal",
"bitcoin",
"cryptocurrency",
"Ethereum",
"hackaday links",
"Ingenuity",
"led",
"liquid nitrogen",
"mars",
"mining",
"NVIDIA",
"quantum mechanics",
"robot",
"stairs",
"uav"
] | That collective “Phew!” you heard this week was probably everyone on the Mars Ingenuity helicopter team letting out a sigh of relief while watching telemetry from
the sixth and somewhat shaky flight
of the UAV above Jezero crater. With Ingenuity now in
an “operations demonstration” phase
, the sixth flight was to stretch the limits of what the craft can do and learn how it can be used to scout out potential sites to explore for its robot buddy on the surface, Perseverance.
While the aircraft was performing its 150 m move to the southwest, the stream from the downward-looking navigation camera dropped a single frame. By itself, that wouldn’t have been so bad, but the glitch caused subsequent frames to come in with the wrong timestamps. This apparently confused the hell out of the flight controller, which commanded some pretty dramatic moves in the roll and pitch axes — up to 20° off normal. Thankfully, the flight controller was designed to handle just such an anomaly, and the aircraft was able to land safely within five meters of its planned touchdown. As pilots say, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, so we’ll chalk this one up as a win for the Ingenuity team, who we’re sure are busily writing code to prevent this from happening again.
If wobbling UAVs on another planet aren’t enough cringe for you, how about
a blind mechanical demi-ostrich drunk-walking up and down a flight of stairs
? The work comes from the Oregon State University and Agility Robotics, and the robot in question is called Cassie, an autonomous bipedal bot with a curious, bird-like gait. Without cameras or lidar for this test, the robot relied on proprioception, which detects the angle of joints and the feedback from motors when the robot touches a solid surface. And for ten tries up and down the stairs, Cassie did pretty well — she only failed twice, with only one counting as a face-plant, if indeed she had a face. We noticed that the robot often did that little move where you misjudge the step and land with the instep of your foot hanging over the tread; that one always has us grabbing for the handrail, but Cassie was able to power through it every time.
The paper
describing how Cassie was trained is pretty interesting — too bad
ED-209’s
designers couldn’t have read it.
So this is what it has come to: NVIDIA is now
purposely crippling its flagship GPU cards
to make them less attractive to cryptocurrency miners. The LHR, or “Lite Hash Rate” cards include new-manufactured GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti cards, which will now have reduced Ethereum hash rates baked into the chip from the factory. When we first heard about this a few months ago, we puzzled a bit — why would a GPU card manufacturer care how its cards are used, especially if they’re selling a ton of them. But it makes sense that NVIDIA would like to protect their brand with their core demographic — gamers — and having miners snarf up all the cards and leaving none for gamers is probably a bad practice. So while it makes sense, we’ll have to wait and see how the semi-lobotomized cards are received by the market, and how the changes impact other non-standard uses for them, like weather modeling and genetic analysis.
Speaking of crypto, we found it interesting that
police in the UK accidentally found a Bitcoin mine this week
while searching for an illegal cannabis growing operation. It turns out that something that uses a lot of electricity, gives off a lot of heat, and has people going in and out of a small storage unit at all hours of the day and night usually is a cannabis farm, but in this case it turned out to be about 100 Antminer S9s set up on janky looking shelves. The whole rig was confiscated and hauled away; while Bitcoin mining is not illegal in the UK, stealing the electricity to run the mine is, which the miners allegedly did.
And finally, we have no idea what useful purpose this information serves, but we do know that it’s vitally important to relate to our dear readers that
yellow LEDs change color when immersed in liquid nitrogen
. There’s obviously some deep principle of quantum mechanics at play here, and we’re sure someone will adequately explain it in the comments. But for now, it’s just a super interesting phenomenon that has us keen to buy some liquid nitrogen to try out. Or maybe dry ice — that’s a lot easier to source.
Yellow LEDs turn green when immersed in liquid nitrogen!
https://t.co/gTguQd90Ws
— Tube Time (@TubeTimeUS)
May 28, 2021 | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352912",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T00:41:34",
"content": "Yellow LEDs turn green in LN2? Did you watch the video?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352931",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp... | 1,760,373,067.184803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/virgin-galactics-long-road-to-commercial-spaceflight/ | Virgin Galactic’s Long Road To Commercial Spaceflight | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"commercial space",
"reusable",
"rocket engine",
"space tourism",
"spaceplane",
"suborbital",
"Virgin Galactic"
] | To hear founder Richard Branson tell it, the first operational flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo has been 18 months out since at least 2008. But a series of delays, technical glitches, and several tragic accidents have continually pushed the date back to the point that many have wondered if it will ever happen at all. The company’s glacial pace has only been made more obvious when compared with their rivals in the commercial spaceflight field such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, which have made incredible leaps in bounds in the last decade.
Richard Branson watching
Unity’s
test flight.
But now, at long last, it seems like Branson’s suborbital spaceplane might finally start generating some income for the fledgling company.
Their recent successful test flight
, while technically the company’s third to reach space, represents an important milestone on the road to commercial service. Not only did it prove that changes made to Virgin Space Ship (VSS
) Unity
in response to issues identified during last year’s aborted flight were successful, but it was the first full duration mission to fly from Spaceport America, the company’s new operational base in New Mexico.
The data collected from this flight, which took pilots Frederick “CJ” Sturckow and Dave Mackay to an altitude of 89.23 kilometers (55.45 miles), will be thoroughly reviewed by the Federal Aviation Administration as part of the process to get the vehicle licensed for commercial service. The next flight will have four Virgin Galactic employees join the pilots, to test the craft’s performance when loaded with passengers. Finally, Branson himself will ride to the edge of space on
Unity’s
final test flight as a public demonstration of his faith in the vehicle.
If all goes according to plan, the whole process should be wrapped up before the end of the year. At that point, between the government contracts Virgin Galactic has secured for testing equipment and training astronauts in a weightless environment, and the backlog of more than 600 paying passengers, the company should be bringing in millions of dollars in revenue with each flight.
A Promising Predecessor
There’s no question that aerospace engineering is difficult and exacting work, doubly so when your destination is the vacuum of space. But even still, it was assumed that Virgin Galactic was going to have a leg up on its competitors thanks to the fact that the SpaceShipTwo spaceplane and its carrier aircraft were direct followups to the vehicles that which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.
SpaceShipOne Diagram by Kaboldy
The SpaceShipTwo is roughly twice the size of the three passenger SpaceShipOne, and features a sleeker design reminiscent of a futuristic private jet, but otherwise the two craft are remarkably similar. Both are air launched from their purpose-built “motherships”, and accelerate to roughly Mach 3 under the power of a hybrid rocket engine that burns a solid fuel combined with nitrous oxide for approximately 70 seconds during a near-vertical ascent. Lacking the necessary velocity to achieve orbit, the craft coast their way through a suborbital ballistic trajectory with an apogee of at least 80 km (50 miles), during which passengers experience around four minutes of microgravity.
The flight profile up to this point is not unlike that of the North American X-15 from the 1960s, albeit with a considerably slower maximum speed. But now comes the tricky part, atmospheric reentry. Even at the relatively low velocities of a suborbital flight, it’s a dangerous operation that can go catastrophically wrong. This risk is why Burt Rutan gave SpaceShipOne a secret weapon: the so-called “feathered configuration”, in which the rear half of the vehicle folds upwards. This creates a high-drag, aerodynamically stable layout that has often been compared to a shuttlecock and essentially makes reentry an automatic process. The increased drag keeps the speed low, while the folded shape ensures the craft maintains the appropriate attitude. After slowing to subsonic speeds, the wings fold back down and the craft glides to a runway landing like the Space Shuttle.
VSS
Unity
reenters the atmosphere in its feathered configuration.
The elegant simplicity of the feathered reentry is arguably what allowed SpaceShipOne to win the Ansari X Prize, and its inherent reliability makes it well suited to commercial spaceflight. It’s little wonder that scaling up the proven design of the SpaceShipOne was seen as a fast track to developing a practical spaceplane for suborbital space tourism. So what happened?
Engine Trouble
Tragedy first struck the development of SpaceShipTwo before the craft had even been publicly unveiled. In 2007, while testing the new oxidizer system required by the vehicle’s larger and more powerful engine, a tank pressurized with 4,500 kg (9,900 lb) of nitrous oxide
exploded and killed three employees of Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites
.
The hybrid rocket engine design would continue to give the team problems for years, though thankfully without further loss of life. It originally burned the same solid hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) and nitrous oxide mixture as the original 88 kN (20,000 pound) thrust engine used on SpaceShipOne, but this combination was found to be unstable during long burns. Despite making several flights using this engine, in 2014 Virgin Galactic announced they were developing a new engine would burn a different fuel. This required helium and methane tanks to be added into SpaceShipTwo’s wings, a considerable modification that the original design simply didn’t account for.
VSS
Unity’s
engine
being installed in November 2020
.
After experimenting with different fuels and engine revisions, Virgin Galactic eventually returned to using HTPB as a fuel. The new engine, which was built in-house rather than through a subcontractor, is reportedly capable of generating 310 kN (70,000 pounds) of thrust, and is fully reusable. Unfortunately, the years spent on engine development difficulties would pale in comparison to what came next.
Ad Astra Per Aspera
During a test flight on October 31st, 2014,
VSS
Enterprise
broke up over the Mojave Desert just seconds after engine ignition
at an altitude of approximately 15 km (50,000 feet). While seriously injured, pilot Peter Siebold was able to parachute to safety and survived. Unfortunately, copilot Michael Alsbury was killed in the crash.
Wreckage of the VSS
Enterprise
in 2014.
As this was the first in-flight test of a new fuel mixture, early theories from industry insiders placed blame on the engine. But this idea was quickly put to rest after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), conducting its first-ever investigation into a fatal mishap aboard a spacecraft, recovered the engine and associated tanks largely intact. With the help of vehicle telemetry, cockpit recordings, and evidence from the wreckage itself, the NTSB eventually pined the loss of
Enterprise
on its defining feature: the feathered reentry system.
The NTSB concluded that Alsbury, potentially due to stress or confusion, unlocked the vehicle’s feathering mechanism far earlier than was indicated in the flight checklist. With the mechanical locks no longer in place, the aerodynamics of supersonic powered flight in the atmosphere overwhelmed the actuators, causing the wings to fold up on their own. Switching into this high-drag configuration while traveling at more than Mach 1 was like flying into a wall; analysis of the flight data determined that within 1.7 seconds of Alsbury unlocking the feather mechanism,
Enterprise
was ripped to pieces in mid-air.
Onwards and Upwards
After the fatal breakup of
Enterprise
, Virgin Galactic made a number of changes to the then under construction
Unity
. Chief among them were physical and operational measures to prevent the feather mechanism from being unlocked or deployed prematurely. The NTSB recommended more thorough crew training for emergency situations, especially in the use of the automatic parachute and supplemental oxygen systems, but ultimately deemed the design and operation of the vehicle to be satisfactory.
As of January 2020
, the currently unnamed third and fourth SpaceShipTwo craft were still under construction, with the former nearing the point where final integration and ground testing could begin.
Considering the wide-reaching impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
, it’s likely that work on these craft was considerably slowed since then. As such, assuming commercial operations begin in 2022, the primary bottleneck will be the amount of time it takes to turn
Unity
around between flights.
To that end, Virgin Galactic announced in March that they’re
simultaneously working on a new class of vehicle known as SpaceShip III
. Outwardly very similar to SpaceShipTwo, the next-generation VSS
Imagine
and VSS
Inspire
are designed with modularity and ease of maintenance in mind. With a reduced turnaround time between flights and a fleet of at least five spaceplanes, the company hopes to eventually perform as many as 400 commercial flights per year from Spaceport America alone.
The first SpaceShip III class vehicle, VSS
Imagine
.
It’s a bold goal, but considering the company has yet to carry a single paying passenger after more than a decade of research and development, it should probably be taken with a grain of salt. That being said, if the history of Virgin Galactic has taught us anything, it’s that they certainly won’t give up without a fight. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353222",
"author": "Grawp",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T14:26:29",
"content": "IMO this should NOT be called spaceflight when it’s suborbital. It does not do justice to “real” (orbital) spacecrafts and is very misleading to general public (portion of which is already dumb enough to th... | 1,760,373,067.419838 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/not-all-spacex-software-goes-to-space/ | Not All SpaceX Software Goes To Space | Roger Cheng | [
"Software Development",
"Space"
] | [
"Crew Dragon",
"dragon",
"factory",
"Falcon 9",
"Software Engineering",
"Space Software",
"SpaceX",
"Starlink",
"starship"
] | SpaceX has always been willing to break from aerospace tradition if they feel there’s a more pragmatic solution. Today this is most visible in their use of standard construction equipment like cranes in their Starship development facility. But the same focus on problem solving can also be found in their software parts we don’t see. Recently we got two different views behind the scenes. First, a four-part series about “
software in space
” published by StackOverflow blog, followed quickly by an
Ask Me Anything (AMA) session
on SpaceX Reddit.
Some of the StackOverflow series cover ground that has been previously discussed. Mostly in the
first part
dealing with their workhorse Falcon and Dragon vehicles, and some in the
second part
discussing Starlink whose beta program is
reaching more and more people
. Both confirmed that spaceflight software has to meet very stringent requirements and are mostly close to the metal bespoke C++ code. But we receive fascinating new information in
part three
, which focuses on code verification and testing. Here they leverage a lot of open source infrastructure more common to software startups than aerospace companies. The
fourth and final component
of this series covers software to support SpaceX hardware manufacturing, which had been rarely discussed before this point. (Unfortunately, there was nothing about how often SpaceX software developers copy and paste code from StackOverflow.)
The recent Reddit AMA likewise had some overlap with the
SpaceX software AMA a year ago
, but there were new information about SpaceX work within the past year. There was Crew Dragon’s transition from a test to an operational vehicle, and the aforementioned Starship development program. Our comments section had a lot of discussion about the practicality of touchscreen interfaces in real spacecraft, and here we learn SpaceX put a lot of study into building something functional and effective.
It also showed us that essentially every Sci-Fi Movie Interface was unrealistic and would be unreadable under extreme conditions.
In the course of this research, they learned a lot of pitfalls about fictional touch interfaces. Though to be fair, movie and television spacecraft UI are more concerned about looking cool than being useful.
If the standard AMA format is not to your liking, one of the contributors compiled all SpaceX answers alongside their related questions
in a much more readable form here
. And even though there’s an obvious recruiting side to these events, we’re happy to learn more about how SpaceX have continued to focus on getting the job done instead of rigidly conforming to aerospace tradition. An attitude that goes all the way back to
the beginning of this company
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353201",
"author": "Mbc",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T11:40:00",
"content": "I wish that there was more like this, a focus on the people doing amazing things at SpaceX rather than Musk. Nothing against him, but it would be great if he stepped back and let the spotlight shine on the a... | 1,760,373,067.231667 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/new-part-day-rp2040-chips-in-single-unit-quantities/ | New Part Day: RP2040 Chips In Single Unit Quantities | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers",
"News",
"Parts",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Paspberry Pi Pico",
"raspberry pi",
"rp2040"
] | Since the launch of the
Raspberry Pi Pico
back in January the little board with its newly-designed RP2040 microcontroller has really caught the imagination of makers everywhere, and we have seen an extremely impressive array of projects using it. So far the RP2040 has only been available on a ready-made PCB module, but we have news today direct from Eben Upton himself that with around 600k units already shipped, single-unit sales of the chip are commencing via the network of Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers.
This news will doubtless result in a fresh explosion of clever projects using the chip, but perhaps more intriguingly it will inevitably result in its appearance at the heart of a new crop of niche products that go beyond simple clones of the Pico in different form factors. The special ingredient of
those two PIO programmable state machines
to take the load of repetitive tasks away from the cores raises it above being merely yet another microcontroller chip, and we look forward to that feature being at their heart.
The Broadcom systems-on-chip that power Raspberry Pi’s existing range of Linux-capable boards have famously remained unavailable on their own, meaning that this move to being a chip vendor breaks further new ground for the Cambridge-based company. It’s best not to think of it in terms of their entering into competition with the giants of the microcontroller market though, because a relative minnow such as the RP2040 will be of little immediate concern to the likes of Microchip, ST, or TI. A better comparison when evaluating the RP2040’s chances in the market is probably Parallax with their Propeller chip, in that here is a company with a very solid existing presence in the education and maker markets seeking to capitalise on that experience by providing a microcontroller with that niche in mind. We look forward to seeing where this will take them, and we’d hope to eventually see a family of RP2040-like chips with different package and on-board peripheral options. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353166",
"author": "yetihehe",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T07:14:54",
"content": "Shouldn’t that link be “two pio programmable state machines”? Or did they made a new version?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353173",
"a... | 1,760,373,067.304079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/teaching-a-machine-to-be-worse-at-a-video-game-than-you-are/ | Teaching A Machine To Be Worse At A Video Game Than You Are | Dan Maloney | [
"Games",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"fps",
"hdmi",
"machine learning",
"opencv",
"RF",
"usb",
"USB dongle",
"Valorant",
"video capture",
"wireless",
"YOLO"
] | Is it really cheating if the aimbot you’ve built plays the game worse than you do?
We vote no, and while we take a dim view on cheating in general, there are still some interesting hacks in
this AI-powered bot for
Valorant
. This is a first-person shooter, team-based game that has a lot of action and a
Counter-Strike
vibe. As [River] points out, most cheat-bots have direct access to the memory of the computer which is playing the game, which gives it an unfair advantage over human players, who have to visually process the game field and make their moves in meatspace. To make the
Valorant
-bot more of a challenge, he decided to feed video of the game from one computer to another over an HDMI-to-USB capture device.
The second machine has a YOLOv5 model which was trained against two hours of gameplay, enough to identify friend from foe — most of the time. Navigation around the map was done by analyzing the game’s on-screen minimap with OpenCV and doing some
rudimentary path-finding
. Actually controlling the player on the game machine was particularly hacky; rather than rely on an API to send keyboard sequences, [River] used a wireless mouse dongle on the game machine and a USB transmitter on the second machine.
The results are — iffy, to say the least. The system tends to get the player stuck in corners, and doesn’t recognize enemies that pop up at close range. The former is a function of the low-res minimap, while the latter has to do with the training data set — most human players engage enemies at distance, so there’s a dearth of “bad breath range” encounters to train to. Still, we’re impressed that it’s possible to train a machine to play a complex FPS game at all, let alone this well. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353165",
"author": "starhawk",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T06:58:33",
"content": "LOL @ ‘former’/’latter’ flip.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6353212",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T12:41:26",
"co... | 1,760,373,067.602364 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/building-fallouts-super-sledge/ | Building Fallout’s Super Sledge | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"fire",
"propane",
"sledgehammer"
] | The Fallout series of games has a variety of ridiculous weapons, not least the Super Sledge — a rocket propelled sledgehammer that looks about as dangerous for the wielder as it does for the opponent. [JAIRUS OF ALL] decided he had to recreate this build in real life, risks be damned.
Unwilling to go the single-use, solid rocket route for his build, [JAIRUS] instead elected to go with an electric ducted fan, supplemented with a propane supply for added flames. It’s not really a rocket of any form, and it’s unlikely the burning propane adds any real thrust, but it does shoot huge flames out the back and it is terrifying. The EDF idle speed can be set by a potentiometer on a servo tester hooked up to a speed controller, while there’s a valve for adjusting propane flow. A switch can then be used to boost the EDF speed higher and increase the propane flow, increasing the violence of the flow out the back of the hammer.
Notably, [JAIRUS] doesn’t actually demonstrate swinging the hammer at anything in particular. We’re kind of glad, as we suspect it might end with a sizable explosion, or burns at the very least. Nonetheless, it would easily be the most terrifying prop weapon at most any Halloween party you took it to.
It’s in a similar vein to the fire vortex cannon [JAIRUS] also designed
. Video after the break. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353151",
"author": "DrewTheMachinist",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T04:16:56",
"content": "I’ve seen it in person several years ago. It was very cool, but…underwhelming. It did not actually add any to the swing of the hammer. It definitely had intimidation factor though.",
"parent_... | 1,760,373,067.560522 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/handheld-multimeter-converted-for-bench-top-use/ | Handheld Multimeter Converted For Bench Top Use | Chris Lott | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Aneng Q1",
"bench tools",
"conversion",
"multimeter"
] | A few years ago [Mechatrommer] got one of the low-cost Aneng Q1 multimeters and has
converted it into a bench top meter
. He first tried and failed to do an LCD modification and set it aside. It remained in a storage box until he needed another meter to repair his rubidium frequency standard. Finding that off-the-shelf bench multimeters were literally off-the-shelf — they were too deep for his bench — he decided to take matters into his own hands.
He dug out the dismantled an Aneng Q1 and undertook a more drastic modification than before, slicing the multimeter into three pieces and mounting each piece in a new enclosure. The power-draining back-lit display of the Q1, problematic in a battery-powered handheld meter, isn’t an issue in a bench top design. [Mechatrommer] replaced the battery pack with a mains powered supply. Next he reconnected all the signals which had been interrupted by the bandsaw, and now the meter lives again.
The resulting meter is pleasing enough (ignore the sideways input jacks) and looks like a typical piece of home-brew test gear. The enclosure has a lot of empty space, which he uses to stow test leads and sandwiches (we saw a similar storage compartment in [Dave Jones]’s recent
teardown of a portable Fluke 37
multimeter). Kudos to [Mechatrommer] for coming up with this unusual conversion project.
We’ve written about
the differences between these low-cost and more professional multimeters
before if you want to learn more.
Thanks to [Adrian] for the tip. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353123",
"author": "Lee",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T23:15:05",
"content": "Not bad, and it’s battery powered too.I would of just bought an old Keithly or something if it were me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6353125",
"au... | 1,760,373,067.658343 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/31/emilys-eerie-educational-electric-eyeball-entertains/ | [Emily]’s Eerie Educational Electric Eyeball Entertains | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"arduino",
"CdS cell",
"eye",
"eyeball",
"game",
"Joystick",
"photocell"
] | Like many of us, [Emily’s Electric Oddities] has had a lot of time for projects over the past year or so, including one that had been kicking around since late 2018. It all started at the Hackaday Superconference, when [Emily] encountered the Adafruit Hallowing board in the swag bag. Since that time, [Emily] has wanted to display the example code eyeball movement on a CRT, but didn’t really know how to go about it.
Spoiler alert: it works now
.
See? It’s educational.
Eventually, [Emily] learned about the
TV out library for Arduino
and got everything working properly — the eyeball would move around with the joystick, blink when the button is pressed, and the pupil would respond visually to changes in ambient light. The only problem was that the animation moved at a lousy four frames per second. Well, until she got Hackaday’s own [Roger Cheng] involved.
[Roger] was able to streamline the code to align with [Emily]’s dreams, and then it was on to our favorite part of this build — the cabinet design. Since the TV out library is limited to black and white output without shades of gray, Emily took design cues from the late 70s/early 80s, particularly the yellow and wood of the classic PONG cabinet. We love it!
Is Your Pet Eye the worst video game ever, as [Emily] proclaims it to be? Not a chance, and we’re pretty sure that the title still rests with
Desert Bus
, anyway. Even though the game only lasts until the eye gets tired and goes to sleep, it’s way more fun than Your Pet Rock. Don’t miss the infomercial/explanation/demonstration video after the break. If one video is just not enough,
learn more about [Emily’s] philosophy of building weird projects from the Supercon talk she presented
. It’s also worth mentioning that this one fits right into the
Reinvented Retro contest
.
Why are eyeballs so compelling? We can’t say for sure, but boy,
this eyeball web cam sure is disconcerting
.
Thanks for the tip, [Jake_of_All_Trades]! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353099",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2021-05-31T20:22:21",
"content": "Oh man how i miss the eyeballs extension in mac system 6…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357853",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,067.702491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/adding-in-game-reset-to-classic-playstations/ | Adding In-Game Reset To Classic Playstations | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"controller",
"emulator",
"hardware",
"optical drive",
"optical drive emulator",
"original",
"playstation",
"ps1",
"reset",
"solder"
] | The first Playstation is quickly approaching three decades since its release, and while this might make some of us who were around for that event feel a little aged, the hardware inside these machines isn’t getting any younger either. Plenty of people are replacing the optical drive in the original hardware with an optical drive emulator as they begin to fail, and with that comes the option for several other modifications to the hardware
like this in-game reset mod
.
In-game reset is a function that allows a console to be reset via a controller button combination rather than pressing the console’s reset button directly. Especially for
devices modified with either the XStation or PSIO drive emulators
, this can be a handy feature to have as this method can more easily take the user back to the emulator menu as well as physically reset the device. The modification is a small PCB which attaches to the controller port and, unlike previous versions, only requires a single pin to be soldered to the Playstation’s control board.
If you’re someone who enjoys playing games on original hardware rather than a patchwork of emulators, this could be an excellent addition to your PS1 that still allows most of the original feel and experience the PS1 offered. The drive emulator can greatly expand the range of the hardware as well,
much like this NES cartridge
which similarly expands the capabilities of that much older system. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353483",
"author": "jonmayo",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T17:28:41",
"content": "I’ve been on the fence on getting a PSIO and thus displacing my vintage Mod chip. Plus they’re a bit spendy, but I do have a pretty significant PSX library that I still enjoy from time to time. “Binders f... | 1,760,373,068.380291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/algae-gene-gives-blind-man-some-light-based-sight/ | Algae Gene Gives Blind Man Some Light-Based Sight | Kristina Panos | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"algae",
"blindness",
"chrimson"
] | What are single-celled organisms good for, you may wonder? Science has found a wonderful new use for one of them —
restoring partial sight to people with inherited forms of blindness
. More specifically, they took a gene from algae that responds to light and moves toward it in order to replace dead or defective photo-receptor cells that lie between the human pupil and the optic nerve.
When light enters the eye, it triggers photo-receptor cells that in turn send signals to nerve cells called ganglions. These add information about motion and send the complete picture to the brain via the optic nerve. The researchers basically hacked the ganglion cells and turned them into photo-receptors. First they used a virus to get light-sensing molecules called chrimson into one of the retinas of the lone volunteer they’d managed to train before the pandemic. He’d been wearing the goggles out on walks and told them he could see the stripes of the crosswalk.
They were able to get him into the lab in summer 2020
, where he donned a pair of goggles that register light changes and send amber light into the eye whenever that happens. He also wore a cap full of electrodes so the researchers could see what parts of his brain lit up when the goggles do their thing. With the goggles on and ready to fire, the man was able to distinguish whether a black cup was in front of him, and was even able to count multiple cups correctly most of the time. Although this is not a full restoration of vision, it’s an excellent development in that direction, and we’re excited to see where it goes.
In the future, the researchers hope to slim down the goggles into something more fashionable.
Combine them with these camera-enabled shoes
, and accessibility goes way up.
Thanks for the tip, [foamyguy]! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353360",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T03:44:45",
"content": "Wow! Seeing anything from seeing nothing is huge. Medical advancements are often very hacky, and I love it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6353374",
... | 1,760,373,067.820708 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/disposable-rocket-stove-keeps-you-fueled-in-the-wild/ | Disposable Rocket Stove Keeps You Fueled In The Wild | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"bike chain",
"camping",
"coffee",
"fire",
"rocket stove"
] | Don’t know about you, but we can’t start the day without coffee and a shower. If you were to drag us on some overnight trip into the wilderness, we could probably forego the shower for a day, but we will be a grumpy trail mate without some kind coffee, even instant.
Yes, if you were to get us on an overnight outdoor adventure, we would insist on bringing along a couple of these
little disposable, self-destructing rocket stoves
, if for no other reason than that we can have some coffee without having to forage for a bunch of firewood and build a whole regular-sized campfire. Don’t worry — we’ll share the water because there’s plenty of time built in. Per [smogdog], these Swedish torches will boil water in 20 minutes and burn for 60 — that’s enough time to make a coffee, a bowl of soup, and toast a single marshmallow before the fire consumes the scrap wood.
We love the use of bike chain as a burner to raise up the pot for fire ventilation. But our favorite bit has to be the dual-purpose packaging. It’s nice-looking, it’s informative, and it’s paper, so you can use it as a fire starter. Failing that, [smogdog] has a backup fire starter system — rubbing alcohol in a small spray bottle. Unwrap a protein bar and check out the demo video after the break.
Tired of the same old, boring trail foods?
How about flat-pack pasta that morphs into fun shapes when you boil it? | 55 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353318",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T23:31:01",
"content": "Ok, but instant coffee?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6353345",
"author": "AwD",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T02:14:57",
"conte... | 1,760,373,067.914344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/arduboy-on-the-big-screen/ | Arduboy On The Big Screen | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"Arduboy",
"fpga",
"vga"
] | We’re big fans of the Arduboy here at Hackaday, but we’ll admit its tiny screen isn’t exactly ideal for long gaming sessions. There are some DIY builds of the open source handheld that use a larger SPI OLED display, though you’re relatively limited on what kind of changes can be made to the hardware before the games start balking.
But as [Nick Bild] shows with his Arduboy home console
, hacking the core system library opens up a lot of interesting possibilities.
Games written for the Arduboy make use of a common library that handles all the low-level hardware stuff, which includes a
display()
function to push the graphical data out to an SPI-connected OLED display. What [Nick] has done is re-write that function to instead output to a custom VGA generator running on the TinyFPGA BX. He had to delete support for the Arduboy’s RGB LEDs because he needed the extra pins, but that shouldn’t cause much of a problem in terms of software support.
This does mean that games need to be recompiled against the modified library to work on his hardware, but as the vast majority of Arduboy software is open source anyway, that’s not much of a problem. We particularly like the Super Game Boy style border you get around the display at no extra cost.
At this point the hardware looks less like a
console
and more like a breadboard filled with jumpers, so we’re interested in seeing this project taken to its logical conclusion. A custom PCB, enclosure, and possibly even support for using the original NES controllers would turn this into proper system worthy of any hacker’s game room. You could even
put the games on custom cartridges if you wanted
, though a
flash chip that holds the system’s entire library
would be quite a bit more convenient. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353375",
"author": "Jameswilddev",
"timestamp": "2021-06-02T06:24:56",
"content": "I’ve actually been tinkering with a ATmega based console recently and I think given the low cost of the microcontrollers a cartridge based design should just put the ATmega in the cartridge – in bulk... | 1,760,373,067.955533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/anti-gravity-time-travel-and-teleportation-dr-hamming-gives-advice/ | Anti-Gravity, Time Travel, And Teleportation: Dr. Hamming Gives Advice | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interviews",
"Lifehacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"bell labs",
"career",
"hamming",
"lecture",
"research",
"richard hamming"
] | You may not know the name [Richard Hamming], but you definitely use some of his work. While working for Bell Labs, he developed Hamming codes — the parent of a class of codes that detect, and sometimes correct, errors in everything from error-correcting memory to hard drives. He also worked on the Manhattan Project and was a lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate school.
Turns out [Hamming] has an entire class from the 1990s on YouTube and if you are interested in coding theory or several other topics, you could do worse than watch some of them. However, those videos aren’t what attracted me to the lectures. As the last lecture of his course, [Hamming] used to give a talk called “You and Your Research” and you can
see one of the times he delivered it in the video below
. You might think that it won’t apply to you because you aren’t a professional academic or researcher, but don’t be too quick to judge.
Turns out, [Hamming’s] advice — even by his own admission — is pretty general purpose for your career or even your life. His premise: As far as we know, you have one life to live, so why shouldn’t it be a worthwhile one by your definition of worthwhile.
Along the way, he has an odd combination of personal philosophy, advice for approaching technical problems, and survival skills for working with others. If you are in the field, you’ll probably recognize at least some of the names he drops and you’ll find some of this technical advice useful. But even if you aren’t, you’ll come away with something. Some of it seems like common sense, but it is different, somehow, to hear it spoken out loud. For example:
If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you’ll do important work.
One piece of technical advice? Don’t waste time working on problems you have no way to attack. He points out that anti-gravity, time travel, and teleportation would be very lucrative. But why work on them when there appears to be no way to even remotely accomplish them today. Well, at least when he said that. There has been a little progress on a form of teleportation, but that wasn’t what he was talking about anyway.
While not a hack in the traditional sense, examining your life, career, and technical research to improve your own effectiveness is something to take seriously. We were hoping he would throw in a joke about error-correcting your career, but unless we blinked, no such luck.
Hamming’s work on block codes was followed about ten years later by
the Reed-Solomon code
which is found nearly everywhere now. Hamming is also associated with the term “hamming distance,” something we talked about when discussing
Gray code
. | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353267",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T17:54:51",
"content": "More like simulate the effects of anti-gravity than actually making gravity into a repulsive force.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6353268",
"a... | 1,760,373,068.33457 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/satellite-communications-hack-chat/ | Satellite Communications Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"downlink",
"Hack Chat",
"satellite",
"sdr"
] | Join us on Wednesday, June 2 at noon Pacific for the
Satellite Comms Hack Chat
with Paul Marsh!
All things considered, space isn’t that far away; you could drive the equivalent distance in an hour or two, with time for a couple of stops on the way. Of course, getting to space isn’t as simple as a Sunday drive, and yet despite the expense and trouble, we’ve still managed to fill our little corner of the solar system with an astonishing number of satellites.
Almost every single one of the spacecraft we’ve put in orbit represents a huge capital investment, both in terms of building something that can withstand the extreme environment up there and as far as the expense involved in getting it there. So once it gets there, it needs to start producing results, and for the most part that means sending some kind of messages back down to Earth. And those communications can be tempting indeed to hardware hackers.
Monitoring messages from on high is what the satcom radio hobby is all about. Learning how to do it properly can be tricky, though. What frequencies does one use? What are the modulation schemes? What kind of antennas would someone need? And what about tracking these birds as they whizz overhead?
To answer these questions and more, Paul Marsh from
UHF-Satcom
will stop by the Hack Chat. Paul has been interested in satellites since the early 1990s and coupled with his background in infosec and pentesting, he has uncovered a lot about the ins and outs of satellite snooping. Stop by the Hack Chat and learn how to sniff in on what’s going on upstairs.
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 2 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 | [] | 1,760,373,068.121138 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/01/trippy-tripteron-kinematics-brainteaser/ | Trippy Tripteron Kinematics Brainteaser | Chris Lott | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"kinematics",
"tripteron"
] | [JK Lee] has been experimenting with a
monorail tripteron motion control system
(video, embedded below) and trying to improve performance with varying tweaks to the design and with varying degrees of success. But [JK] is enjoying this project — he was inspired by an idea that maker [Nicholas Seward] proposed —
building a tripteron on two rails
(video), or even
building one on a single rail
(video). He is making good progress, most recently working on solving a vertical bounce issue. He is focusing on the middle arm, as this arm carries most of the weight. You can see a
brief video explanation of the kinematics
of the monorail tripteron that [JK] made (he warns us that English is not his native language, so focus on the equations and diagrams and not the grammar).
If you’re not familiar with the tripteron,
it was conceived, along with the quadrupteron
, at the Robotics Laboratory at Université Laval in Canada and
patented
by their researchers back in 2004. We wrote about an
early implementation of a tripteron by [Apsu] back in 2016
. These recent experiments, reducing the mechanism down to a single or double rail, are interesting.
Other than cool projects for makers like [Nicholas] and [JK] who enjoy tinkering, are there any applications of tripterons and/or quatrupterons in the real world? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks to [Littlejohn] for sending in the tip. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6353245",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2021-06-01T16:03:42",
"content": "I’ve seen there’s at least one project trying to use this mechanism for a 3D printer.The problem with ay multiple joint arm robotic mechanism is wobble at the end of the arm(s). That pretty much kills it... | 1,760,373,068.267225 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/retrotechtacular-the-drama-of-metal-forming/ | Retrotechtacular: The Drama Of Metal Forming | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"die",
"drawing",
"extrusion",
"forging",
"forming",
"metal",
"retrotechtacular",
"rolling"
] | It may seem overwrought, but
The Drama of Metal Forming
actually is pretty dramatic.
This film is another classic of mid-century corporate communications that was typically shown in schools, which the sponsor — in this case Shell Oil — seeks to make a point about the inevitable march of progress, and succeeds mainly in showing children and young adults what lay in store for them as they entered a working world that needed strong backs more than anything.
Despite the narrator’s accent, the factories shown appear to be in England, and the work performed therein is a brutal yet beautiful ballet of carefully coordinated moves. The sheer power of the slabbing mills at the start of the film is staggering, especially when we’re told that the ingots the mill is slinging about effortlessly weigh in at 14 tons apiece. Seeing metal from the same ingots shooting through the last section of a roller mill at high speed before being rolled into coils gives one pause, too; the catastrophe that would result if that razor-sharp and red-hot metal somehow escaped the mill doesn’t bear imagining. Similarly, the wire drawing process that’s shown later even sounds dangerous, with the sound increasing in pitch to a malignant whine as the die diameter steps down and the velocity of the wire increases.
There are the usual charming anachronisms, such as the complete lack of safety gear and the wanton disregard for any of a hundred things that could instantly kill you. One thing that impressed us was the lack of hearing protection, which no doubt led to widespread hearing damage. Those were simpler times, though, and the march of progress couldn’t stop for safety gear. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352686",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T23:16:03",
"content": "You don’t have to imagine what can fo wrong, look on YouTube for “rolling mill cobble”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352694",
"author"... | 1,760,373,070.276831 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/reviving-old-recipe-for-faraday-wax-keeps-vacuum-experiments-going/ | Reviving Old Recipe For Faraday Wax Keeps Vacuum Experiments Going | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"colophony",
"faraday",
"flux",
"pigment",
"rosin",
"sealant",
"sealing",
"vacuum",
"wax"
] | Science today seems to be dominated by big budgets and exotics supplies and materials, the likes of which the home gamer has trouble procuring. But back in the day, science was once done very much by the seats of the pants, using whatever was available for the job. And as it turns out, some of the materials the old-timers used are actually still pretty useful.
An example of this is
a homemade version of “Faraday Wax”
, which [ChristofferB] is using for his high vacuum experiments. As you can imagine, getting a tight seal on fittings is critical to maintaining a vacuum, a job that’s usually left to expensive synthetic epoxy compounds. Realizing that a lot of scientific progress was made well before these compounds were commercially available, [ChristofferB] trolled through old scientific literature to find out how it used to be done.
This led to a recipe for “Faraday Wax”, first described by the great scientist himself in 1827. The ingredients seem a little archaic, but are actually pretty easy to source. Beeswax is easy to come by; the primary ingredient, “colophony”, is really just rosin, pretty much the same kind used as solder flux; and “Venetian red” is a natural pigment made from clay and iron oxide that can be had from art suppliers. Melted and blended together, [ChristofferB] poured it out onto wax paper to make thin strips that are easily melted onto joints in vacuum systems, and reports are that the stuff works well, even down to 10
-7
mbar.
We love this one — it’s the perfect example of the hacker credo, which has been driving progress for centuries. It also reminds us of some of the work by [Simplifier], who looks for similar old-time recipes to push his work in
DIY semiconductors
and
backyard inductors
forward.
[David Gustafik] dropped us the tip on this one. Thanks! | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352656",
"author": "somebody",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T20:26:15",
"content": "This is great!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6352661",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T20:39:08",
"content": "I suspect he t... | 1,760,373,070.169586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/robot-moves-in-any-direction-on-ball-wheels/ | Robot Moves In Any Direction On Ball Wheels | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"james bruton",
"Omnidirectional Robot"
] | The ability to move in any direction and turn on the spot is a helpful feature on robots that operate indoors around other objects. [James Bruton] demonstrated one possible solution in the form of a robot chassis that can
move in any direction with three ball-shaped wheels
.
The video after the break is part two of this series.
Part one
covered the ball wheels themselves, consisting of a pair of half-spheres that can rotate independently with a small roller in the center of each and a driven shaft through the center of the sphere. Three of these are arranged at 120° intervals around the center of the robot, with the main shafts driven by geared DC motors using belts. To move in a straight line some basic trigonometry is used to calculate the required relative speed of each wheel. An Arduino Mega is used to do the necessary calculation when receiving input from the wireless controller.
The motion is remarkably smooth, and we’d be interested to see how it compares with
Mecanum
and
Omniwheels
. It seems like the perfect platform for [James]’
Really Useful Robot
. He hinted that he might mount a trash bin on it in the future. We would love to see an automatic trash-catching robot, similar to
[StuffMadeHere]’s robotic basketball hoop
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352639",
"author": "mark g",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T18:30:48",
"content": "That’s a really cool mechanism. Seems like it could benefit from a lower CG by moving the motors to the sides of the legs rather than the top, and possibly putting the battery down in the bottom of the cen... | 1,760,373,070.046512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/living-robots-revisiting-beam/ | Living Robots: Revisiting BEAM | Elliot Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"analog",
"beam",
"newsletter",
"nostalgia",
"robots"
] | You’re hit by the
global IC shortage
, reduced to using stone knives and bearskins, but you still want to make something neat? It’s time to revisit
BEAM robots
.
Biology, electronics, aesthetics, and mechanics
— Mark Tilden came up with the idea of minimalist electronic creatures that, through inter-coupled weak control systems and clever mechanical setups, could mimic living bugs. And that’s not so crazy if you think about how many nerves something like a cockroach or an earthworm have. Yet their collection of sensors, motors, and skeletons makes for some pretty interesting behavior.
My favorite BEAM bots have always been the solar-powered ones. They move slowly or infrequently, but also inexorably, under solar power. In that way, they’re the most “alive”. Part of the design trick is to make sure they stay near their food (the sun) and don’t get stuck. One of my favorite styles is the “photovore” or “photopopper”, because they provide
amazing bang for the buck
.
Back in the heyday of BEAM, maybe 15 years ago, solar cells were inefficient and expensive, circuits for using their small current were leaky, and small motors were tricky to come by. Nowadays, that’s all changed. Power harvesting circuits leak only nano-amps, and low-voltage MOSFETs can switch almost losslessly. Is it time to revisit the BEAM principles? I’d wager you’d put the
old guard
to shame, and you won’t even need any of those newfangled microcontroller thingies, which are out of stock anyway.
If you make something,
show us
!
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
! | 40 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352625",
"author": "Rumble_in_the_Jungle",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T16:52:54",
"content": "Not gonna lie, another art was stolen to collection ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352631",
"author": "Dave",
"ti... | 1,760,373,070.584078 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/solar-plane-is-like-one-big-flying-solar-panel/ | Solar Plane Is Like One Big Flying Solar Panel | Lewin Day | [
"green hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"radio control",
"solar",
"solar plane",
"solar power"
] | Solar-powered plane concepts typically focus on high-efficiency glider-type designs, so as to make the best possible use of the limited power available from the sun. [rctestflight] wanted to try a different school of thought,
instead building a relatively inefficient plane that nonetheless packed a huge amount of solar panels on board.
The plane consisted of a pizza-box style design, with a simple foam rectangular wing that was absolutely covered in solar panels. The plane was controlled with an off-the-shelf autopilot, and fitted with cheap, no-brand MPPT modules to handle charging the batteries. The plane faced difficulties in flight, most often with stability, which led to the autopilot getting the plane lost on one occasion. However, one flight was achieved with a full one hour and thirty minute duration, indicating the solar panels were helping to extend flight times beyond what was capable with batteries alone.
Further research on the ground showed that the cheap MPPT modules were wasting power, and there was more to be had. A better MPPT module was subbed in and showed that the panels could generate up to 5 amps under good conditions, while the plane only needed roughly 4.2 amps to fly. This would allow for indefinite flight in sunny conditions, though probably would not allow enough energy to be banked to fly 24 hours round the clock due to the lack of power at night.
We’ve followed [rctestflight]’s solar plane experiments for a while now
, and can’t wait to see the next iteration. Video after the break. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352586",
"author": "Chris Snyder",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T11:38:48",
"content": "wow pizza box flyer thats a new one to me",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352595",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-0... | 1,760,373,070.220502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/3d-printed-flip-dots/ | 3D Printed Flip Dots | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"eletromagnet",
"flip disc",
"flip dot display",
"h-bridge",
"multiplexing"
] | Displays have come a long way in the last few decades, but none can deliver the mesmerizing visual and audio experience of a large flip dot display. Both old panels and new panels can be expensive and difficult to source, so
[Larry Builds] made his own flip dots with the help of 3D printing
.
Flip dots are driven by a pair of electromagnetic posts that attract or repel a magnet embedded in the dot, and [Larry Builds] version is no different. For the electromagnets, he used M3 threaded rod with enamel wire wound around them using a drill. At first, he used a large magnet in the center of the 3D printed dot, but the magnetic field was large and strong enough to flip the surrounding dots in an array. He then changed the design to a small 4 mm diameter magnet in the edge that aligns directly with the electromagnets. This design looks very similar to those used by
Breakfast for their massive installations
. By modifying electromagnets and adding spacers around the magnets, he was able to reduce the operating current from 2 A to below 500 mA. [Larry Builds] also breadboarded a basic driver circuit consisting of H-bridges multiplexed to rows and columns with diodes.
We will be keeping a close eye on this project, and we look forward to seeing it evolve further. It’s definitely on our “things to build” list. We’ve embedded multiple videos after the break showing the progress thus far.
We’ve covered several interesting flip dot projects, including a
water level indicator that doesn’t use any electronics
and another that is
crocheted
.
Thanks for the tip [Baldpower]! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352583",
"author": "Chris Snyder",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T11:06:53",
"content": "The problem with the magnets losing their magnetic field is the heat from the iron exceeding the Curie temp",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "63... | 1,760,373,070.63201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/build-a-new-zx81/ | Build A New ZX81 | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"retrocomputing",
"sinclair zx80",
"sinclair zx81"
] | [Retro Shack’s] ZX81 died, and while he tried to figure out the fix, he
decided to build a new one
. Of course, building a circa-1980-something computer from new parts is a bit daunting. Unless you
start with an existing design
that has it all ready to put together.
The PCB looks great and we like that the silkscreen shows acknowledgments of projects that helped the designer, [Alejandro Sebastian]. The case is, of course, 3D printed. At first, the power LED didn’t work, but voltages looked correct and the board powered up.
The little box can actually read cassette tapes for the original, which allowed it to load 3D Monster Maze. We aren’t sure why the power LED didn’t work, but we are guessing it is backward or it — or the dropping resistor — didn’t make a good connection.
This looks like a fun project and would be a great way to get a reasonably authentic-looking ZX80 or ZX81 without having to work too hard. All the files you need are on [Alejandro’s] website and it looks like the majority of the work would be sourcing all the components.
Of course, you can always go
the FPGA route
. If you build one and want to learn assembly for it,
check this out
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352553",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T05:20:15",
"content": "Yes you can build a new one using new parts, even 74HC. Last year we built some using Martin’s ZX81 plus 38 design. See:https://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/503174It worked quite well. I also built a proper... | 1,760,373,070.107693 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/neural-networks-emulate-any-guitar-pedal-for-120/ | Neural Networks Emulate Any Guitar Pedal For $120 | Adam Zeloof | [
"Machine Learning",
"Musical Hacks",
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"audio",
"effects",
"guitar",
"machine learning",
"raspberry pi",
"vst"
] | It’s a well-established fact that a guitarist’s acumen can be accurately gauged by the size of their pedal board- the more stompboxes, the better the player. Why have one box that can do everything when you can have many that do just a few things?
Jokes aside, the idea of replacing an entire pedal collection with a single box is nothing new. Your standard, old-school stompbox is an analog affair, using a combination of filters and amplifiers to achieve a certain sound. Some modern multi-effects processors use software models of older pedals to replicate their sound. These digital pedals have been around since the 90s, but none have been quite like the
NeuralPi project.
Just released by [GuitarML], the NeuralPi takes about $120 of hardware (including — you guessed it — a Raspberry Pi) and transforms it into the perfect pedal.
The key here, of course, is neural networks. The LSTM at the core of NeuralPi can be trained on any pedal you’ve got laying around to accurately reproduce its sound, and it can even do so with incredibly low latency thanks to
Elk Audio OS
(which even powers Matt Bellamy’s synth guitar, as used in
Muse
‘s Simulation Theory World Tour). The result of a trained model is a VST3 plugin, a popular format for describing audio effects.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen some
seriously cool stuff from [GuitarML]
, and it also hearkens back a bit to some
sweet pedal simulation in LTSpice we saw last year
. We can’t wait to see this project continue to develop — over time, it would be awesome to see a slick UI, or maybe somebody will design a cool enclosure with some knobs and an honest-to-god pedal for user input!
Thanks to [Mish] for the tip! | 62 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352874",
"author": "Daniel Dunn",
"timestamp": "2021-05-30T21:02:10",
"content": "Can it emulate the satisfying feeling of unboxing more crap instead of practicing? The ten minutes period where you think this new pedal is the one that will finally make you good before you realize... | 1,760,373,070.504548 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/bicycle-flywheel-stores-a-bit-of-energy-not-much/ | Bicycle Flywheel Stores A Bit Of Energy, Not Much | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"flywheel"
] | Kinetic energy recovery systems have often been proposed as a useful way to improve the efficiency of on-road vehicles, and even used to great effect in motorsports for added performance. [Tom Stanton] decided to build one of his own,
outfitting a simple bicycle with a flywheel system for harvesting energy.
(Video, embedded below.)
The system consists of a 300 mm steel flywheel mounted in the center of the bike’s frame. It’s connected to the rear wheel via a chain and a clutch which [Tom] assembled himself using bicycle disc brake components. The clutch is controlled by a handlebar lever, allowing the rider to slow the bike by charging the flywheel, or to charge the flywheel to maximum speed by pedalling hard with the clutch engaged.
The actual utility of the flywheel is minimal; [Tom] notes that even at its peak speed of 2200 RPM, the flywheel stores a small fraction of the energy content of a AA battery. Practical demonstration shows the flywheel is only able to deliver a small push to [Tom] when riding the bike, too.
Despite the lack of performance, it’s nonetheless an interesting project and one that demonstrates the basic principles of flywheel energy storage. The underwhelming results perhaps serve as a solid indication of why it’s not something we use particularly often, on bicycles at least.
We’ve seen [Tom]’s bike experiments before, too.
Video after the break. | 49 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352820",
"author": "Jerry",
"timestamp": "2021-05-30T17:10:45",
"content": "Cool experiment.. The large flywheels on the rear of trucks and manual transmission vehicles, store energy in the same fashion. Spinning a flywheel in an effort to power a device, has been a frustrating thi... | 1,760,373,070.714656 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/aircraft-compass-teardown/ | Aircraft Compass Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"aircraft",
"avionics",
"binnacle",
"compass",
"teardown"
] | We didn’t know what a
C-2400 LP
was before we saw [David’s] video below, but it turned out to be pretty interesting. The device is an aircraft compass and after replacing it, he decided to take it apart for us. Turns out, that like a nautical compass, these devices need adjustment for all the metal around them. But while a ship’s compass has huge steel balls for that purpose, the tiny and lightweight aviation compass has to be a bit more parsimonious.
The little device that stands in for a binnacle’s compensators — often called Kelvin’s balls — is almost like a mechanical watch. Tiny gears and ratchets, all in brass. Apparently, the device is pretty reliable since the date on this one is 1966.
The brass compensation device was stripped, but you can still buy the unit for about $80, so it was possible to repair the device. [Dave], however, put a more modern compass in his cockpit. Of course, these days you don’t actually need a floating magnet to make a compass.
Turns out, the Earth’s
magnetic field isn’t a stationary target
, and — eventually — the poles are going to flip again, or at least that’s what scientists say. These days you can get a compass with other instruments all in
one little package
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352813",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-05-30T16:13:18",
"content": "Of course, these days you don’t actually need a floating magnet to make a compass.Aircraft still need magnetic compasses that do not require power to operate. The regulations:No person shall conduct a take-o... | 1,760,373,070.407136 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/tiny-pcb-motor-robot-is-making-its-first-wobbly-moves/ | Tiny PCB Motor Robot Is Making Its First Wobbly Moves | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"brushless motor",
"Carl Bugeja",
"pcb motor",
"robot"
] | [Carl Bugeja] has been working on his PCB motors for more than three years now, and it doesn’t seem like he is close to running out of ideas for the project. His latest creation is a tiny Bluetooth-controlled robot built around two of these motors.
One of the main challenges of these
axial flux PCB motors
is their low torque output, so [Carl] had to make the robot as light as possible. The main board contains a microcontroller module with integrated Bluetooth, an IMU, regulator, and two motor drivers. The motor stator boards are soldered to the main board using 90° header pins. The frame for the body and the rotors for the motors are 3D printed. A set of four neodymium magnets and a bearing is press-fit into each rotor. The motor shafts are off-the-shelf PCB pins with one end soldered to the stator board. Power comes from a small single-cell lipo battery attached to the main board.
The robot moves, but with a jerking motion, and keeps making unintended turns. The primary cause of this seems to be the wobbly rotors, which mean that the output torque fluctuates throughout the rotation of the motor. Since there are only two points of contact to the ground, only the weight of the board and battery is preventing the central part from rotating with the motors. This doesn’t look like it’s quite enough, so [Carl] wants to experiment with using the IMU to smooth out the motion. For the next version, he’s also working on a new shaft mount, a metal rotor, and a more efficient motor design.
We look forward to seeing this in action, and also what other application [Carl] can come up with. He has already experimented with turning it into a
stepper motor
, a
linear motor
, and a
tiny jigsaw motor
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352767",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-05-30T11:29:32",
"content": "Hmm, nice one, pertinent video, well done,Thanks for posting :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6352791",
"author"... | 1,760,373,070.761107 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/30/small-swedish-stores-are-miniature-oases-in-a-national-food-desert/ | Small Swedish Stores Are Miniature Oases In A National Food Desert | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"bodega",
"food desert",
"grocery store",
"shipping container",
"small town logistics"
] | It all started one night in 2016 after [Robert Ilijason] dropped the last remaining jar of baby food in the house, breaking it. On the 20-minute drive to the nearest supermarket, he had an idea:
what if there were small, 24-hour convenience-level grocery stores
that could fill the glaring need for access to basics across the country?
Sweden has lost a few thousand smaller grocery stores in the last 25 years or so, mostly in rural areas. For many people living outside the cities, the nearest place to buy milk is several miles away, at a huge supermarket that’s either in a city, or close to it. After [Robert] built Sweden’s first 24-hour unmanned convenience store, the idea received quite a bit of media attention.
Five years and a pandemic later, the concept is still going strong. A chain of 30 of these bite-sized bodegas have popped up all over Sweden, run by a company called Lifvs.
They have no staff at all, not even a cashier
. Instead, shoppers unlock the door with their phones. They scan all their barcodes into an app, which provides a bill every month and is linked to both their bank account and national identity system. Beyond that, security is in the form of a single camera.
Because these tiny stores are staff-less, the prices can be kept relatively low
. The only problem is that the technology is a bit of an issue for some older residents. Back in 2016, [Robert Ilijason] was trying to figure out another way for customers to unlock the door, but it doesn’t look like Lifvs has solved that problem yet.
One thing you can’t complain about with a store like this is the selection. We have to wonder if shoppers are more or less likely to encounter
fasciated fruit amongst the produce
. | 47 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352741",
"author": "ouieg",
"timestamp": "2021-05-30T08:04:37",
"content": "In Poland a shop like this would be emptied in one night because of how lawless the country is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352876",
"au... | 1,760,373,070.845254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/spell-checking-your-programming-from-the-linux-command-line/ | Spell Checking Your Programming From The Linux Command Line | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"programming",
"source code",
"spell checker",
"spellchecker"
] | For most of us who didn’t do well in high school English class, spell checkers are a real game-changer. Sure, you can still swap a “to” and a “too,” but a spell checker will catch a lot of typos. But what about in your source code? You usually don’t spell check source code and even if you did, the rules are funny. After all, “my_proejct” is a perfectly fine variable name, but you probably meant “my_project.” That’s where
a program called typos
comes in. It aims to be a spell checker for source code that is fast enough and with a low enough false positive rate that you can run it against changed code and reject spelling problems.
Sure, if “my_proejct” is a one-time typo, the compiler or interpreter will probably catch it. But it won’t catch comments and it also won’t catch something you spell wrong consistently. For that you need something like typos.
You can include a custom dictionary and also per-language dictionaries. It is aware of camel case and snake case and knows to ignore hex codes. The only thing we saw it doesn’t handle well is C-language escapes.
There are apparently other checkers out there and we learned about them from this project’s comparison grid. There’s
misspell
,
codespell
, and
scspell
. This is the tool we didn’t know we needed, but probably do.
If you are writing bash scripts and want to check their correctness there is
shellcheck
, which sounds like spell check but has a whole different function. If you want to brush up on your spelling, you can always hack a
Speak ‘n Spell
. | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352724",
"author": "doragasu",
"timestamp": "2021-05-30T06:09:19",
"content": "I usually enable spell checking in vim, and it only checks for typos in comment blocks (that is the only place where most of the times you want to check).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,373,070.949013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/chainsaw-cuts-more-than-timber/ | Chainsaw Cuts More Than Timber | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"chainsaw",
"concrete",
"grinder",
"machine",
"machine shop",
"metal",
"saw",
"welding"
] | We often take electricity for granted, to the point of walking into a room during a power outage and still habitually flipping the light switch. On the other hand, there are plenty of places where electricity isn’t a given, either due to poor infrastructure or an otherwise remote location. To get common electric power tools to work in areas like these requires some ingenuity like that seen in this build which
converts a chainsaw to a gas-driven grinder that can be used for cutting steel or concrete
. (Video, embedded below.)
All of the parts needed for the conversion were built in the machine shop of [Workshop from scratch]. A non-cutting chain was fitted to it first to drive the cutting wheel rather than cut directly, so a new bar had to be fabricated. After that, the build shows the methods for attaching bearings and securing the entire assembly back to the gas-powered motor. Of course there is also a custom shield for the grinding wheel and also a protective housing for the chain to somewhat limit the danger of operating a device like this.
Even though some consideration was paid to safety in this build, we would like to reiterate that all the required safety gear should be worn. That being said, it’s not the first time we’ve seen a chainsaw modified to be more useful than its default timber-cutting configuration,
like this build which turns a chainsaw into a metal cutting chop saw
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352711",
"author": "BobbyMac",
"timestamp": "2021-05-30T03:17:56",
"content": "What is the cost benefit of this conversion compared to buying one directly?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352713",
"author": "Dr",
... | 1,760,373,070.895295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/web-assembly-music-synthesis-and-the-beauty-of-math/ | Web Assembly, Music Synthesis, And The Beauty Of Math | Al Williams | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"emscripten",
"math",
"music",
"synthesizer",
"webasm",
"webassembly"
] | The electronics hobby has changed a lot since the advent of the microprocessor. Before that — and with the lack of large-scale integrated circuits — projects in magazines tended to be either super simple or ultra complex. However, one popular type of project dealt with music synthesis. Fairly simple circuits could combine to make a complex synthesizer so it was sort of the best of both worlds. Nowadays, you are more likely to tackle a music synthesizer in software like [Tim] did when he created
Abelton
in Web Assembly and C++. Along the way, he learned a lot about the relationship between math and music.
[Tim] covers what he learned about the Nyquist theorem and how to keep synthesis data flowing in real time with buffers. However, there are some problems trying to do all this in a cross-browser context. The
AudioWorklet
class appears to have widespread support, though, and [Tim] managed to get that working.
If you ever wondered if you could use a formula to compute MIDI tones to frequency instead of a table, the answer is yes. Using emscripten allows easy compilation, but integrating into rollup.js — a JavaScript framework — was a bit of work, and you’ll find the process documented in the post.
If you want to know more about
WebAssembly
, check out our earlier post. We’ve seen
emscripten
do interesting things on the Web before, too. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352551",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T04:51:16",
"content": "And nobody complained that the complicated projects were too hard. They dud want simoke projects, but they didn’t say “let’s not see complicated projects until some device can be invented that does... | 1,760,373,071.057793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/jtag-hat-turns-raspberry-pi-into-a-networked-debugger/ | JTAG Hat Turns Raspberry Pi Into A Networked Debugger | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"debug",
"jtag",
"level shifter",
"microcontrollers",
"openocd",
"SWD"
] | Over the last year or so we’ve noticed a definite uptick in the number of folks using OpenOCD on the Raspberry Pi. It’s a cheap and convenient solution for poking around with various microcontrollers and embedded devices, but not always the most elegant. Looking to improve on the situation somewhat,
[Matthew Mets] has been working on a purpose-built JTAG Hat
to clean things up a bit.
Onboard level shifters allow you connect to JTAG and SWD interfaces from 1.8 to 5 V, and if you power the target device from the Pi itself, there’s even support for measuring the voltage and current. To connect up to your target, the open hardware board features a “legacy” pin header perfect for jumper wires, as well as a dedicated 10-pin Cortex Debug Connector. Whether you spin up your own or buy one assembled, it certainly looks like a tool worth having around if you often find yourself working with the appropriate chips.
In addition to the design files for the hardware, [Matthew] has also provided some nice documentation on how to get the software side of things up and running. Starting with a blank SD card, it walks you through the initial setup of the Raspberry Pi all the way through the installation and configuration of a patched version of OpenOCD designed to support the JTAG Hat.
If you spend more time working with 8-bit AVR chips, don’t worry. Last year we covered a similar project to turn everyone’s favorite Linux SBC
into an all-in-one microcontroller development powerhouse
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352533",
"author": "jcamdr",
"timestamp": "2021-05-29T01:15:43",
"content": "OpenOCD is versatile but is bloated by the TCL scripts architecture, different for every target families. Also the reset handling framework is unable to reliably work ultra deep sleep of some targets and m... | 1,760,373,070.995109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/3d-printing-a-centrifugal-water-pump/ | 3D Printing A Centrifugal Water Pump | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"PLA",
"pump",
"water pump"
] | Once upon a time, 3D printing was about churning out tiny Yodas and Pikachus, but these days, useful things are regularly 3D printed too.
A great example is this centrifugal water pump that can really deliver the juice, courtesy of [Connor]
.
The pump’s housings and impeller are all 3D printed in PLA, as well as the inlet which is designed for a 2L soda bottle to screw into. Gaskets are printed in pliable TPU to help seal the housings. There are a few ball bearings inside to allow the impeller to spin nicely, too, with hex head fasteners used to hold everything together and a long bolt used as the main impeller shaft. Notably, no shaft seal is included, so the pump does leak a bit, but it’s not a major concern assuming you’re just pumping water and don’t mind spilling a bit of excess. Turned with a drill at 1800 rpm, the pump is able to achieve a flow rate of 13 litres per minute, or a maximum head of 1.2 meters.
The design is on Onshape, for the curious.
It’s a great example of how 3D printing can allow the creation of machines with complex geometry without the need for advanced machining skills. Instead, all the hard work is done on the CAD side of things. We’ve seen 3D printed pumps put to real work before, too,
like this fertilizer dispenser.
Video after the break. | 43 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352477",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T20:08:34",
"content": "It’s fun making stuff, but a self contained pump with magnetic coupling can be had for very little. So I salute this build and it’s orangeness :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,373,071.458537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/put-apis-to-work-wth-this-arduinojson-walkthrough/ | Put APIs To Work Wth This ArduinoJson Walkthrough | Dan Maloney | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"api",
"application programming interface",
"ArduinoJson",
"Deserialization",
"JavaScript Oject Notation",
"json",
"parsing",
"serialization"
] | One of the things this community is famous for is the degree to which people will pitch in to fill an obvious need. Look at the vast array of libraries available for Arduino as an example of how people are willing to devote their time to making difficult tasks easier, often for little more than a virtual pat on the back.
One level up from the library writers are those who go through the trouble of explaining how all these libraries work in real-world applications. [Brian Lough] recently rose to that challenge with
a thorough explanation of the use of the ArduinoJSON library
, a very useful but often confusing library that makes IoT projects easier.
The need for an ArduinoJSON explainer no knock on its author, [Benoît Blanchon], who has done excellent work documenting the library; it’s more of a realization that the nature of JSON itself means a library that works with it is going to be complex. [Brian]’s contribution here is sharing his insights into getting ArduinoJSON up and running in a real-world ESP32 example, and dealing with the potential pitfalls of parsing a human-readable text file that can be used to represent almost any data object using the limited resources of a microcontroller. Along with the basics, we found the warning about how pointers refer back to the dynamic JSON document object particularly helpful; the bit about using filters to winnow down a large data set was useful too.
Thanks to [Brian] for taking the time to put this valuable information out there. Here’s hoping this encourages others to share the wealth of hard-earned knowledge in a similarly clear and concise manner. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352461",
"author": "WereCatf",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T18:55:52",
"content": "I’ve used ArduinoJSON for a while and I think it’s a great library, saves me a lot of work. I don’t use it for parsing some APIs from some random service, though, but instead I use it to pass sensor-data... | 1,760,373,071.501296 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/the-many-levels-of-autonomous-motoring/ | The Many Levels Of Autonomous Motoring | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous cars",
"cars",
"SAE",
"self-driving"
] | For years now we have been told that self-driving cars will be the Next Big Thing, and we’ve seen some companies — yes, Tesla but others too — touting current and planned features with names like “Autopilot” and “self-driving”. Cutting through the marketing hype to unpacking what that really means is difficult. But there is a standard for describing these capabilities, assigning them as levels from zero to five.
Now we’re greeted with the news that Honda have put a small number of vehicles in the showrooms in Japan
that are claimed to be the first commercially available level 3 autonomous cars
. That claim is debatable as for example Audi briefly had level 3 capabilities on one of their luxury sedans despite having few places to sell it in which it could be legally used. But the Honda Legend SENSING Elite can justifiably claim to be the only car on the market to the general public with the feature at the moment. It has a battery of sensors to keep track of its driver, its position, and the road conditions surrounding it. The car boasts a “Traffic Jam Pilot” mode, which “
enables the automated driving system to drive the vehicle under certain conditions, instead of the driver, such as when the vehicle is in congested traffic on an expressway
“.
Sounds impressive, but just what is a level 3 autonomous car, and what are all the other levels?
It’s All In The Levels
The SAE have produced
this handy char
t explaining the different levels.
The Society of Auto Engineers, or the SAE as they are colloquially known, act as a standards body for the automotive industry. You’ll probably be familiar with them if you have ever changed the oil in your car and noticed on the can that it has a viscosity rating of something like SAE 10W-40. Their standards underpin much of what goes in to a motor vehicle, so it’s hardly surprising that when a self-driving car is mentioned it’s their level system by which it will be defined.
Driving automation is defined by
SAE J3016
which has six levels numbered from 0 to 5. Level 0 is a normal meat-controlled car with few automatic safety features, and 5 is the steering-wheel-free auto-taxi from dystopian science fiction.
The first three levels require the driver to be on the case with increasing levels of assistance such as adaptive cruise control and lane centering only aiding them. Level 1 provides helper technologies while requiring the driver to remain in control, while level 2 can allow the driver to take their hands off the wheel but requires them to keep their attention on the road.
Meanwhile, the final three levels allow increasing full autonomy for the vehicle, with level 3 cars such as the Honda allowing fully autonomous driving in some circumstances with the driver able to take their attention away from the road, but with the car requiring them to take control again in some circumstances. The final two levels offer full autonomy, with level 5 going as far as not requiring any human driving controls to be present.
The Current Generation Doesn’t Have As Much Self-Driving As Marketing Hype Wants Us to Believe
The important feature of the new Honda being at level 3 is that it’s the first time a car has been put on sale to the general public which has a mode in which the driver is not required to have their attention on the road. As a comparison the much-publicised
Tesla Autopilot
remains at level 2, and has so far required the driver to stay alert ready to take over.
Even the California carmaker’s upcoming ‘Full Self-Driving’ technology is still also at level 2
, bending the limits of misleading language to breaking point. We’ve all read stories involving Tesla self-driving going wrong, but these have invariably involved drivers who failed to respect this. So Honda have stolen a march on their competitors, but given that many countries still prohibit level 3 cars or restrict them to testing only, it’s more of a PR victory than a commercial one.
The SAE
have produced a handy chart to show the subtleties of the different levels
, and it does a pretty good job of explaining them. Perhaps it will be a while before we see the higher levels in the real world, but at least it should help bust the sales jargon when we do. | 40 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352448",
"author": "turtle-z",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T18:04:41",
"content": "Will we also need many levels of autonomous motoring insurance?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6352454",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,373,071.739985 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/hackaday-podcast-120-chip-shortage-vga-glitching-truly-owning-roku-and-omniballs/ | Hackaday Podcast 120: Chip Shortage, VGA Glitching, Truly Owning Roku, And Omniballs | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount a week of awesome hacks. One you might have missed involves a Roku-based smart TV that was rooted and all secrets laid bare for the sole purpose of making an Ambilight setup work with it. We take a look at a creative blade-tracking system for a scrollsaw CNC project, and a robot arm that brings non-flat layers to 3D printing and envisions composite material printing. There’s a great template for video glitching using inexpensive VGA to CGA converter boards, cleanly squeezed into a nice enclosure. We are a bit giddy for the omniwheel robot designs [James Bruton] has been showing off. And we finish out the show with a great conversation happening this week on Hackaday: people from throughout the community share how the chip shortage is affecting their projects.
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
(Weighing in around 55 MB.)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 120 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
We had two correct answers, it was the hard drive click of death.
Congratulations to [Jon] who was chosen with a coin flip from the correct responses and sent a Hackaday Podcast shirt.
New This Week:
Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network
#Hackaday channel on Kiwi IRC
New Part Day: ESP32-WROOM-DA
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Perfecting A 3D Printed Camera Motion Control Rig
Pan Tilt Slider / PanTiltSlide-nodeJS · GitLab
DIY Motion Control Rig – Rotary Plate – grbl ESP-32 – YouTube
3D Printing Omni-Balls For Robot Locomotion
Mechanical Design of “Omni-Ball”: Spherical Wheel for Holonomic Omnidirectional Motion
Testing Ball-Shaped Wheels on an Omni-Directional Robot – YouTube
Three-Wheeled Turret Car Looks Like It Should Be Orbiting Thunderdome
RAM Fiddling Turns VGA Converter Into Video Synth
Scanimate Analog Video Synths Produced Oceans Of Motion Graphics
YOVOZOL – YouTube
Optical Sensor Keeps Eye On Wandering Saw Blade
CNC Scroll Saw Makes Promising First Cuts
Robot Arm Adds Freedom To 3D Printer
3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM
3D Printing Without Support Material Thanks To An Additional Axis
Roku TV Hacked To Run Philips Ambilight Setup
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
NeoPill Is The NeoPixel Emulator You’ve Always Wanted
Ground Effect Drone Flies Autonomously
A High Power Wood Rocket In 5 Days
Mike’s Picks
Simple MicroPython Game Is A 30 Minute Game Dev Course
One Instruction To Rule Them All: C Compiler Emits Only MOV
Terminal Magic With Notcurses
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Getting Started With Aluminum Extrusions
How To Build Anything Out Of Aluminum Extrusion And 3D Printed Brackets
Ask Hackaday: How Is The Chip Shortage Affecting You? | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352440",
"author": "Tyler",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T17:17:47",
"content": "I can’t believe I missed the click of death. I spent 8 hours plus a couple weeks ago getting all my data off and external drive that kept clicking…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []... | 1,760,373,071.292503 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/3d-printed-mars-rover-smiles-for-the-camera/ | 3D Printed Mars Rover Smiles For The Camera | Tom Nardi | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"3d model",
"digital photography",
"mars rover",
"nasa",
"Perseverance"
] | You’d be forgiven for thinking these pictures of NASA’s
Perseverance
Mars rover were renderings of the real deal on the Red Planet, if it wasn’t for the golf ball tucked in for scale, anyway. What you’re actually looking at is a 3D printed model
made by [Alex Givens] that he brought out to the desert for a photo shoot by his friend [Josh Jalil]
.
[Alex] printed the parts for the model on the Ender 5 Pro, while [Josh] snapped the shots using a Canon EOS 90D. The realism of the final shots serves as a testament to how well they’ve honed their respective tools, but credit for the 3D model itself has to go to the good folks over at NASA.
The highly detailed
Perseverance
model came from
the space agency’s extensive “3D Resources” collection
, which has models for an incredible array of present and historical spacecraft. They’ve also got models for a number of interesting astronomical objects, just in case
you’re in the market for a 3D printed asteroid or two
.
We know, this isn’t exactly a hack in the traditional sense. But it’s a fantastic reminder of a great resource from NASA, as well as a practical demonstration of how
high quality photographs can really bring a project to life
. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352424",
"author": "TM32",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T15:11:02",
"content": "If that’s a golf ball, where are the dimples?!?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352432",
"author": "Henry Kowalski",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,373,071.380643 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/this-week-in-security-m1racles-the-full-half-double-and-patch-gaps/ | This Week In Security: M1RACLES, The Full Half-Double, And Patch Gaps | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Patch Gap",
"ransomware",
"Rowhammer",
"This Week in Security"
] | We occasionally make fun of new security vulnerabilities that have a catchy name and shiny website. We’re breaking new ground here, though, in covering
a shiny website that makes fun of itself
. So first off, this is a real vulnerability in Apple’s brand-new M1 chip. It’s got CVE-2021-30747, and in some very limited cases, it could be used for something malicious. The full name is
M1ssing Register Access Controls Leak EL0 State
, or M1RACLES. To translate that trying-too-hard-to-be-clever name to English, a CPU register is left open to read/write access from unprivileged userspace. It happens to be a two-bit register that doesn’t have a documented purpose, so it’s perfect for smuggling data between processes.
Do note that this is an undocumented register. If it turns out that it actually does something important, this vulnerability could get more serious in a hurry. Until then, thinking of it as a two-bit vulnerability seems accurate. For now, however, the most we have to worry about is that two processes can use this to pass information back and forth. This isn’t like Spectre or Rowhammer where one process is reading or writing to an unrelated process, but both of them have to be in on the game.
The discoverer, [Hector Martin], points out one example where this could actually be abused: to bypass permissions on iOS devices. It’s a clever scenario. Third party keyboards have always been just a little worrying, because they run code that can see everything you type, passwords included. The long-standing advice has been to never use such a keyboard, if it asks for network access permissions. Apple has made this advice into a platform rule — no iOS keyboards get network access. What if a device had a second malicious app installed, that did have Internet access permissions? With a covert data channel, the keyboard could shuffle keystrokes off to its sister app, and get your secrets off the device.
So how much should you care about CVE-2021-30747? Probably not much. The shiny site is really a social experiment to see how many of us would write up the vulnerability without being in on the joke. Why go to the hassle? Apparently it was all an excuse to make
this video
, featuring the appropriate Bad Apple!! music video.
Half-Double’ing Down on Rowhammer
A few days ago,
Google announced the details of Half-Double
, and the glass is definitely Half-Double full with all the silly puns that come to mind. The concept is simple: If Rowhammer works because individual rows of ram are so physically close together, does further miniaturization enable attacks against bits two rows away? The answer is
a qualified yes
.
Quick refresher, Rowhammer is an attack first demonstrated against DDR3 back in 2014, where rapid access to one row of memory can cause bit-flip errors in the neighboring row. Since then, there have been efforts by chip manufacturers to harden against Rowhammer, including detection techniques. At the same time, researchers have kept advancing the art through techniques like Double-Sided Rowhammer, randomizing the order of reads, and attempts to synchronize the attack with the ram’s refresh intervals. Half-Double is yet another way to overcome the protections built into modern ram chips.
We start by specifying a particular ram row as the victim (V). The row right beside it will be the near aggressor row (N), and the next row over we call the far aggressor row (F). A normal Rowhammer attack would simply alternate between reading from the near aggressor and a far-off decoy, rapidly toggling the row select line, which degrades the physical charge in neighboring bits. The Half-Double attack instead alternates between the far aggressor and a decoy row for 1000 cycles, and then reads from the near aggressor once. This process is repeated until the victim row has a bit flip, which often happens within a few dozen iterations. Because the hammering isn’t right beside the victim row, the built-in detection applies mitigations to the wrong row, allowing the attack to succeed in spite of the mitigations.
More Vulnerable Windows Servers
We talked about CVE-2021-31166 two weeks ago, a wormable flaw in Windows’
http.sys
driver. [Jim DeVries] started wondering something as soon as he heard about the CVE. Was Windows Remote Management, running on port 5985, also vulnerable? Nobody seemed to know, so he took matters into hiis own hands, and confirmed that yes, WinRM is also vulnerable to this flaw. From what I can tell, this is installed and enabled by default on every modern Windows server.
I finally found time to answer my own question. WinRM *IS* vulnerable. This really expands the number of vulnerable systems, although no one would intentionally put that service on the internet.
— Jim DeVries (@JimDinMN)
May 19, 2021
And far from his optimistic assertion that surely no-one would expose that to the Internet… It’s estimated that there over 2 million IPs doing just that.
More Ransomware
On the ransomware front, there is an interesting story out of The Republic of Ireland. The health system there was hit by Conti ransomware, and the price for decryption set at the equivalent of $20 million. It came as a surprise, then, when
a decryptor was freely published
. There seems to be an ongoing theme in ransomware, that the larger groups are trying to manage how much attention they draw. On the other hand, this ransomware attack includes a threat to release private information, and the Conti group is still trying to extort money to prevent it. It’s an odd situation, to be sure.
Inside Baseball for Security News
I found a series of stories and tweets rather interesting, starting with the May Android updates at the beginning of the month. [Liam Tung] at ZDNet does
a good job laying out the basics
. First, when Google announced the May Android updates, they pointed out four vulnerabilities as possibly being actively exploited. Dan Goodin over at Ars Technica took umbrage with the imprecise language, calling the announcement “vague to the point of being meaningless”.
Shane Huntley jumped into the fray on Twitter
, and hinted at the backstory behind the vague warning. There are two possibilities that really make sense here. The first is that exploits have been found for sale somewhere, like a hacker forum. It’s not always obvious if an exploit has indeed been sold to someone using it. The other possibility given is that when Google was notified about the active exploit, there was a requirement that certain details not be shared publicly. So next time you see a big organization like Google hedge their language in an obvious and seemingly unhelpful way, it’s possible that there’s some interesting situation driving that language. Time will tell.
The Patch Gap
The term has been around since at least 2005, but it seems like we’re hearing more and more about patch gap problems. The exact definition varies, depending on who is using the term, and what product they are selling. A good working definition is the time between a vulnerability being public knowledge and an update being available to fix the vulnerability.
There are more common reasons for patch gaps, like vulnerabilities getting dropped online without any coordinated disclosure. Another, more interesting cause is when an upstream problem gets fixed and publicly announced, and it takes time to get the fix pulled in. The example in question this week is
Safari, and a fix in upstream WebKit
. The bug in the new AudioWorklets feature is a type confusion that provides an easy way to do audio processing in a background thread. When initializing a new worker thread, the programmer can use their own constructor to build the thread object. The function that kicks off execution doesn’t actually check that it’s been given a proper object type, and the object gets cast to the right type. Code is executed as if it was correct, usually leading to a crash.
The bug was fixed upstream shortly after a Safari update was shipped. It’s thought that Apple ran with the understanding that this couldn’t be used for an actual RCE, and therefore hadn’t issued a security update to fix it. The problem there is that it is exploitable, and a PoC exploit has been available for a week. As is often the case, this vulnerability would need to be combined with at least one more exploit to overcome the security hardening and sandboxing built into modern browsers.
There’s one more quirk that makes this bug extra dangerous, though. On iOS devices, when you download a different browser, you’re essentially running Safari with a different skin pasted on top. As far as I know, there is no way to mitigate against this bug on an iOS device. Maybe be extra careful about what websites you visit for a few days, until this get fixed.
Via Ars Technica | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352414",
"author": "mathman",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T14:41:41",
"content": "“…and the glass is definitely Half-Double full…” , thanks that really made me laugh!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6352427",
"author": "Mog",
... | 1,760,373,071.792876 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/worlds-first-rp2040-qwerty-computer/ | World’s First RP2040 QWERTY Computer | Chris Lott | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"devkit",
"IPS display",
"qwerty",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rp2040"
] | Independent hardware developer [bobricius] is at it again, making what he claims is the world’s first Pico RP2040 QWERTY + IPS development kit — the
PICOmputer
. This is a palm-sized computer of sorts. It integrates a keyboard made from tactile push button switches, a TFT IPS display, and a RP2040 Pico computer module. At 100 x 65 mm size, it is slightly bigger than your typical ISO-7810-ID-1-sized credit card, and slightly smaller than an A7 piece of paper.
One of [Bobricius]’s goals for this project was to minimize the number of external components, thus maximizing the use of the RP2040’s internal features. And if you peruse the schematic posted on his
GitHub repository
, you can agree he’s met this goal for sure. There’s a filter capacitor for the optional LoRa module, and two MOSFETs and three resistors to drive a speaker and the TFT backlight. Aside from connectors, the switches, and the submodules themselves, that’s all of the external circuitry.
The arrangement of two USB connectors, type C for power and micro-USB for data, is an interesting aspect of the connector / module placement. He plans to add an Ethernet module in the future, and issue some more revisions to fix small errors and to make the front panel fit more sizes of displays. We wonder if a battery module add-on is in the works, as well.
If you recognize [bobricius], that’s because his previous
ARMACHAT handheld LoRa messenger project
was among the Hackaday Prize Community Vote (Bootstrap) winners last year. We think tiny keyboards may be an obsession for him — indeed, he freely admits to being blinded by his own enthusiasm. Check out his
mini (Pi)QWERTY USB keyboard
from 2018, for example. Thanks to [Itay] for bringing this project to our attention via the
Hackaday tip line
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352376",
"author": "BEN",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T11:21:26",
"content": "This would make a great LoRA messaging terminal – really neat!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352388",
"author": "John",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,373,071.897846 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/28/can-you-hot-swap-flash-chips-in-a-consumer-router/ | Can You Hot-Swap Flash Chips In A Consumer Router? | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flash",
"nand",
"NAND flash",
"router"
] | Sometimes, you mess up when toying with the firmware of an embedded device and end up “bricking” what you were working on. [Chris Bellows] had done just that with a consumer router, corrupting the onboard NAND flash to the point where recovery via normal means was impossible. Armed with a working duplicate of the router,
he wondered if the corrupted NAND flash could be substituted into the working router while it was running, and reflashed in place – and decided to find out.
Key to achieving the hack was finding a way to remove the existing NAND flash in the working router without crashing the system while doing so. This required careful disconnection of the chip’s power lines once the router had booted up, as well as tying the “Ready/Busy” and “Read Enable” pins to ground. With this done, the chip could carefully be removed with a hot air tool without disrupting the router’s operation. The new chip could then be soldered in place, and flashed with factory firmware via the router’s web interface. At this point, it could be powered down and the chips swapped normally back into their own respective routers, restoring both to full functionality.
It’s a neat hack, and one that shows that it’s sometimes worth taking a punt on your crazy ideas just to see what you can pull off.
It also pays to know the deeper secrets of the hardware you run on your own home network. | 29 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352360",
"author": "Someone",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T08:19:27",
"content": "That’s a really cool hack",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352375",
"author": "twiister",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T11:15:46",
... | 1,760,373,071.661283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/tndlpt-brings-tandy-sound-to-any-dos-computer/ | TNDLPT Brings Tandy Sound To Any DOS Computer | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"parallel",
"parallel port",
"SN76489",
"tandy 1000"
] | The Tandy 1000, among other contemporary computers and consoles of the 1980s, used the Texas Instruments SN76489 for its sound and musical output. This venerable sound chip can now be used on virtually any DOS machine, as long as it has a parallel port –
thanks to the TNDLPT adapter!
The adapter consists of the SN76489, hooked up to the parallel port so that it can be addressed by the host computer via a DOS Terminate and Stay Resident program acting as a driver. With the TSR loaded, classic DOS games can be used with the TNDLPT sound output by simply selecting the Tandy 1000 soundcard at install. It can also be used in a variety of other ways, such as with the TNDY tracker for music creation, or the SBVGM soundtrack player.
For those eager to hear the soaring 3 voices (and one noise channel!) of the SN76489 once again, this is a great way to do it,
with kits available on the Serdashop site for those wishing to solder up their own.
Alternatively,
get a different vibe with the OPL2 instead
. Video after the break. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352357",
"author": "Mirko Alessandria",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T07:54:18",
"content": "Sounds great!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6352368",
"author": "dave",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T10:26:00",
"content": "…and ... | 1,760,373,071.836492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/deep-learning-enables-intuitive-prosthetic-control/ | Deep Learning Enables Intuitive Prosthetic Control | Lewin Day | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"arm",
"CUDA",
"deep neural networks",
"machine learning",
"neural networks",
"prosthetic",
"Prosthetic arm"
] | Prosthetic limbs have been slow to evolve from simple motionless replicas of human body parts to moving, active devices. A major part of this is that controlling the many joints of a prosthetic is no easy task. However, researchers have worked to simplify this task,
by capturing nerve signals and allowing deep learning routines to figure the rest out.
The prosthetic arm under test actually carries a NVIDIA Jetson Nano onboard to run the AI nerve signal decoder algorithm.
Reported in a pre-published paper,
researchers used implanted electrodes to capture signals from the median and ulnar nerves in the forearm of Shawn Findley, who had lost a hand to a machine shop accident 17 years prior. An AI decoder was then trained to decipher signals from the electrodes using an NVIDIA Titan X GPU.
With this done, the decoder model could then be run on a significantly more lightweight system consisting of an NVIDIA Jetson Nano, which is small enough to mount on a prosthetic itself. This allowed Findley to control a prosthetic hand by thought, without needing to be attached to any external equipment. The system also allowed for intuitive control of
Far Cry 5,
which sounds like a fun time as well.
The research is exciting, and yet another step towards full-function prosthetics becoming a reality. The key to the technology is that models can be trained on powerful hardware, but run on much lower-end single-board computers, avoiding the need for prosthetic users to carry around bulky hardware to make the nerve interface work.
If it can be combined with a non-invasive nerve interface
, expect this technology to explode in use around the world.
[Thanks to Brian Caulfield for the tip!] | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352315",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-05-28T03:04:44",
"content": "” If it can be combined with a non-invasive nerve interface, expect this technology to explode in use around the world.”We just may get the bionic man.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,373,071.949414 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/investigating-a-new-chip-in-a-minimalist-led-lamp/ | Investigating A New Chip In A Minimalist LED Lamp | Danie Conradie | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"bridge rectifier",
"circuit design",
"LED driver",
"reverse engineering"
] | Teardowns of cheap electronic devices can produce results that are interesting, horrifying, or both, especially when mains power is involved. [bigclivedotcom] gave a
minimalist LED lamp his reverse engineering treatment
, and discovered a new chip that requires only four additional passive components to run LEDs on AC power.
The chip in question is a Joulewatt JW
B
1981, for which no datasheet is available on the internet. However, there is a datasheet for the JW1981, which is a linear LED driver. After reverse-engineering the PCB, [bigclivedotcom] concluded that the JW
B
1981 must include an onboard bridge rectifier. The only other components on the board are three resistors, a capacitor, and LEDs. The first resistor limits the inrush current to the large smoothing capacitor. The second resistor is to discharge the capacitor, while the final resistor sets the current output of the regulator.
It is possible to eliminate the smoothing capacitor and discharge resistor, as other LED circuits have done, which also allow the light to be dimmable. However, this results in a very annoying flicker of the LEDs at the AC frequency, especially at low brightness settings.
As always, this is a very informative video from [bigclivedotcom], and it was all done based on a single picture of the PCB sent in by a viewer. He also mentions that the lifespan of the lamp would likely be increased by swapping out the current setting resistor for a larger one.
We’ve covered several [bigclivedotcom]’s videos, covering topics from
self-powered wireless switches
to
filling up fake capacitors with electrolyte
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352288",
"author": "Le-Bastion",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T23:34:00",
"content": "i saw this componen last year in power supplies from television decoder DVB TNT. the two pins spaced from the 6 others seems to bi the imput power",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,373,071.992553 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/this-esp32-bluetooth-page-turner-cant-get-any-easier/ | This ESP32 Bluetooth Page Turner Can’t Get Any Easier | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"human interface device",
"page turner",
"pedal"
] | Commercial Bluetooth pedals, designed to allow musicians to flip pages of sheet music on a tablet, have the sort of inflated price tag you’d expect for a niche electronic device. Rather than forking as much as $100 USD over for the privilege of hands-free page flipping,
[Joonas Pihlajamaa] decided to build his own extremely low cost version
using an ESP32 and a cheap foot pedal switch.
In terms of hardware, it does’t get much easier than this. All [Joonas] had to do was hook the pedal up to one of the ESP32’s digital pins, and plug the microcontroller into a USB power bank. From there, it became a software project. With the
ESP32-BLE-Keyboard
library, it only took a few lines of code to send
RIGHT_ARROW
or
LEFT_ARROW
depending on whether the pedal was quickly tapped or held down for a bit; allowing him to navigate back and forth through the pages with just one button.
[Joonas] mentions that the ESP32 development board he’s using is too large to fit inside the pedal itself, though we wonder if the bare module could get slipped in there someplace. Of course you could always
build your own pedal with a bit of extra room
to fit the electronics, but for less than $2 USD on AliExpress, it’s hard to go wrong with this turn-key unit.
Looking for an alternate approach?
We covered a Bluetooth page turner last month
that doubled the inputs and packed it all into a handsome wooden enclosure. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352256",
"author": "Sean",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T20:31:30",
"content": "Yes, this is good.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6352284",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T22:29:51",
"content": "Master, wha... | 1,760,373,072.130928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/finite-element-analysis-vs-real-world/ | Finite Element Analysis Vs Real World | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"finite element analysis"
] | In advanced engineering circles, the finite element method — or, more commonly, finite element analysis — is a real staple. With the advent of more powerful home computers, though, even your home projects can benefit. The technique itself is very general, but you usually see it used for structural analysis. However, you might wonder how well it corresponds to reality. That is if analysis shows a segment of your part is weak (or strong) does that hold true when you actually build the part? [Fiveohno] wondered the same thing and decided to
do some testing
, which you can see in the video below.
Of course, like any simulation, the accuracy will only be as good as your data input and model. But if you work carefully, it should match up pretty well to the real world, so it is interesting to see the results of a real-world test. In fact, a video from Solidworks that shows a similar part points out — inadvertently — what not to do. For example, the force used in that analysis was too low and at a point where the part was at relatively low stress instead of at the maximum stress.
In general, the finite element method deals with solving differential equations. It is a complicated topic, but in a nutshell, you break up a part into many small pieces (a mesh) and then work with simple equations that represent just that small piece. In the case of the experiment, the model was for a suspension rocker link for a bike that receives a lot of stress.
The actual experiment is nearly 11 minutes in. Enough stress causes the part to break. Then looking at the analysis, you can see the physical damage matches pretty closes to the simulation results.
We love seeing real life compared to virtual simulations. If you want to learn more about finite-element analysis and you weren’t at our Remoticon, you can
catch the replay
. If you want to apply the technique to your
infill patterns
, we’ve seen it done. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352232",
"author": "Salvador Limones",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T19:32:30",
"content": "The whole point of FEM is to avoid solving differential equations. You solve a [rather large] system of linear equations.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,072.08066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/history-of-closed-captions-entering-the-digital-era/ | History Of Closed Captions: Entering The Digital Era | Chris Lott | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"BD",
"closed captions",
"dvd",
"eia-608",
"eia-708",
"laser disc",
"line 21"
] | When you want to read what is being said on a television program, movie, or video you turn on the captions. Looking under the hood to see how this text is delivered is a fascinating story that stared with a technology called Closed Captions, and extended into another called Subtitles (which is arguably the older technology).
I covered the difference between the two, and their backstory, in
my previous article on the analog era of closed captions
. Today I want to jump into another fascinating chapter of the story: what happened to closed captions as the digital age took over? From peculiar implementations on disc media to esoteric decoding hardware and a baffling quirk of HDMI, it’s a fantastic story.
There were some great questions in the comments section from last time, hopefully I have answered most of these here. Let’s start with some of the off-label uses of closed captioning and Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) data.
Unintended Uses of VBI Data
While I was immersed in the world of VBI data and closed captions for several years, I kept discovering applications that were not related to the intended use.
Newsroom channel monitors
Back in the day, I discovered a small company called
SoftTouch, Inc.
, “innovators in the obsolete” according to owner Doug Byrd. They made various niche market CC products, and in fact, I still have several of his products today. Most prized are two
CCEPlus
line 21 generator cards, the only full-length ISA cards I’ve ever owned, which have given me an excuse to keep a fully working Gateway 2000 486DX2-66V in my lab for over 15 years.
Full Length ISA Card Closed Caption Decoder
I enjoyed my phone calls with Doug over the years. He is quite a character, a great story teller, and I learned a lot about the captioning industry from him. While his niche products were used in all kinds of systems, one that sticks in my mind is in news rooms. Imagine a system designed to monitor a wall of televisions (or just tuners) equipped with CC decoders feeding the RS-232 text to a computer which is programmed to look for various key words and alert the staff when found. In fact, we wrote about a
similar project on Hackaday
about ten years ago.
Real-time translating from Spanish
Popowich and McFetridge at Simon Fraser in 1998
One surprising application I stumbled upon was a small set top box designed to translate the English dialogue for Spanish speakers who liked to watch US daytime soap operas. This was an interesting project on two fronts. Researchers Fred Popowich and Paul McFetridge at Simon Fraser University developed a “shake and bake” machine translation algorithm
which could be implemented in hardware of the day
. It was about 80% accurate, but they discovered something interesting. Eighty percent worked just fine for people who only spoke Spanish, but bilingual speakers were annoyed by the mistakes.
Dictionary lookups from DVD captioning
I was discussing closed captioning and DVD subtitles with some Korean engineer friends one night over soju, and learned there was a Korean company who made a specialized DVD player. What made this player special was it had a built-in OCR engine to read the subtitles (not the captions) and offer translations and definitions to the user — it was intended as a language educational product. It did not do real-time OCR translations, instead doing the OCR when the user pressed PAUSE in order to query the machine for help.
Weather radar data distribution
While teletext was primarily used in Europe, the WST standard included a variation for NTSC countries — The North American Broadcast Teletext Specification (NABTS) known also as EIA-516. Both CBS and NBC experimented with teletext service, but it wasn’t popular. However, the data broadcasting ability did find some traction in other ways. I discovered one surprising application while learning about VBI signals back in the early 2000s. I was talking to an engineer at a local weather radar company in the US, and found out they were broadcasting weather data and radar images over the VBI for the benefit of various emergency preparedness groups. He even lent me an NABTS receiver which I installed in my PC and could monitor the real time data from my desk. To my surprise, he told me that television stations were renting out the VBI lines. In crowded markets like New York City, for example, there might not even be any empty lines available.
Datacasting Weather Radar Data over the VBI
Financial Data
Electra Teletext Sample
It wasn’t just the weather radar data folks using the VBI, either. A number of datacasting services sprang up which used the VBI to distribute financial information such as stock and commodity prices. Several networks were in operation, some since the late 1970s. They included
DTN Real Time
,
Electra
, and Tempo Text. By the mid 1990s, all these services had shut down, the internet having taken over the role of time-sensitive datacaster.
VBI Data Receiver
Extended Data Services
The closed caption standard was eventually amended to include what’s called extended data services, or XDS. This auxiliary data was carried in the field 2 VBI and included information like time of day, V-chip rating, station ID, and basic programming information. Some early electronic program guides (EPGs) like Guide Plus were sent over the VBI. There was also an emergency alerts portion of the XDS, which could announce all kinds of weather and other emergencies, down to the state and county region, and for a specified duration.
Making a Line 21 Decoder Today
As I mentioned in
my article on analog closed captions
, making an analog closed caption decoder in the 21st century is best done without relying on specialized all-in-one ICs. There are three functions required in such a receiver:
Syncing to the video signal
Slicing / thresholding the data
Processing the protocol
Surprisingly, syncing to the incoming video was a real challenge. It was because of the Macrovision copy protection scheme. Wild pulses are inserted in the VBI, ostensibly to prevent making a tape recording (these pulses mess up the VCR’s AGC circuitry). Of course, people who want to make copies just built or bought a Macrovision suppression box. But if you want to reliably sync to Macrovision-ladened video, it’s not simple.
I considered making my own, but there are a lot of special cases. There were also some legal considerations at play, but I was in touch with the Macrovision engineers and wasn’t too worried about that. In the end, I went with a sync separator that was Macrovision tolerant, and had been designed and tested to work in a much wider variety of Macrovision scenarios than I could hope to reproduce in my testing.
Build Your Own CC Decoder Project
There are various ways to slice the line 21 data. I successfully built several boards based upon a clever open source project. Richard Ottosen and Eric Smith
published a nice design
using a Microchip PIC16F628, which was subsequently expanded on by
Kevin Timmerman
. These designs make good use of the PIC’s internal comparators: one as a peak detector and the other for data thresholding. Check these out if you are interested in making your own decoder.
Processing the data once you get it from the decoder can be hairy, depending on how accurate you want your design to be. Reader [unwiredben] commented on the previous article how fun it was to recently write a ground-up implementation. I wholeheartedly agree. One issue is that the requirements are spread out among various documents. Some of them were almost unobtainable back in the year 2000, and yet they make up the official, legal requirements expressed in the FCC regulations.
I particularly remember having a very tough time getting a required report from PBS and another from the National Captioning Institute. It wasn’t because they weren’t cooperative, but because the reports were so old they couldn’t find them. (I eventually got the reports, and also a real Telecaption II caption decoder on which many of the final specifications were based.)
Telecaption II External Decoder Box
One incident I recall is trying to buy a set of CC verification tapes. Supposedly they were available from WGBH Boston, but when I called it seemed that nobody had asked for them in years, and they weren’t sure any existed anymore. They eventually found one remaining set and shipped it to me here in Korea, where it almost got destroyed in customs due to some obscure law prohibiting the import of prerecorded media. One point to consider — if you simply want to extract text for analysis, the processing will be a lot easier than if you also want to properly display and position the text on-screen.
It is possible to build a digital CEA-708 (see below) decoder. If this is something you’re interested in, I’ve put a couple of links in the comments section below.
The Making of Captions
The process of making the caption text is too complicated to cover here. In brief, the dialogue has to be transcribed into digital format. In the case of real-time captions like for news or sporting events, techniques, skills, and equipment have been brought over from the world of court reporters. In the case of pre-recorded programs, the process can be aided by scripts. But they still have to be checked against what was really said by the actors. Next, any additional cues are added, and then the dialogue has to be broken up into chunks which need to be correctly positioned on-screen and timed with the audio track.
If you’re interested in learning more about this,
check out Gary Robson’s website
. Not only does he discusses the process of making captions, but Gary has been in the caption industry for a long time and written several excellent books on the subject. I’ve read all of them and sought his advice on a few occasions — a very nice and knowledgeable guy.
Captions and Digital Video
So far the focus has been on analog closed captioning which was used for over-the-air broadcasting, and more or less for cable television broadcasts as well. But what about other ways we view programs? In the case of VHS tapes, it was fortunate, if not anticipated by the designers, that line 21 signals could easily be recorded and played back by videotape equipment. Then along comes digital video in formats like Laser Disc, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, and streaming, and the world of captioning falls apart — for awhile, at least.
Transition to Digital
First we have the Laser Disc. They stored and played back captions in both NTSC and PAL formats. No big issues here, but just wait. Next comes the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), and things begin to get murky for closed captioning — a situation that persists more or less to this day with DVD and Blu-ray Discs (BD). The DVD specification calls out a user data packet specifically to store the digital pairs of caption data (as digital data, not encoded in a video line). Although I’m not aware of any technical reason why a PAL DVD couldn’t do the same, only Region 1 (North America) NTSC discs can store the caption data and still be compliant with the specifications.
Most DVD players use this data to generate an analog line 21 signal on the video output signal(s), which can then be decoded by your TV set’s internal CC decoder under viewer control.
Composite video output
S-Video output:
on the Y/Luma signal
Component video output:
on the Green/Sync signal if RGB
on the Y-channel if Y/Pb/Pr
There are a very few players that can actually decode the caption data and overlay this onto the output video as open captions, but these players are the exception rather than the norm.
We Have a Problem…
You may see where this is leading — there is a hidden assumption with Line 21 closed captions. By definition, they are only defined to exist on interlaced standard definition video (480i in the case of NTSC). While there is no technical reason not to, there isn’t any agreed upon standard to send the data over the VBI for any other video timing. Nobody thought about it back in the 1970s.
This led to upset consumers who purchased HD televisions and DVD or BD players, only to find out that they couldn’t view the closed caption data unless they watched the program in 480i mode. But still, if you use closed captions, live within NTSC DVD Region 1, and are content to watch programming in 480i standard mode. Everything is good? Not quite.
For some reason I still don’t understand, not all pre-recorded DVDs contained closed captions, even if captions existed for the movie and were available on VHS tape releases by the same studio. This seemed to be random with one exception — Universal Studio DVDs never had closed captions. Don’t worry, DVD technology offered a “new” solution to this problem — subtitles. Remember those from the early 1900s?
Because everything was now digital, DVDs and BDs could offer the old style hard-baked subtitles, but with a twist. The user could turn them on and off, and could often select from a wider variety of languages (CC was typically limited to two languages, if that, and those from a narrow choice of languages). The freedom to design subtitles was almost boundless — as they were just pictures with a transparent background, they could contain anything. It wasn’t uncommon to see both English and English CC subtitles on some discs.
Despite lots of sources claiming the contrary, BD discs can and do carry line 21 captioning. I have used BD and BD players for testing line 21 signals over the past ten years with no issues. But the catch is the same as with with DVD, they are only generated at 480i standard definition analog outputs. And the dearth of captioned discs is even worse than DVD — I would estimate that less than one third of BDs have captioning. I mentioned above very few DVDs have internal CC decoders. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a BD player with one.
Digital Television
The industry working group responsible for closed caption standards realized something needed to be done to bring captioning into the digital era. The group developed a new version of closed captioning, addressing many of the concerns of the community of analog captioning users. Recall that the analog standard was EIA-608. The new standard is called CEA-708 (CEA was spun out of the EIA when it closed down in 2011). Some features that were added, aside from a format that was compatible with ATSC digital broadcasting, include:
true multi-language support
different font sizes
different font styles
can be repositioned on-screen
legacy EIA-608 capability
As digital television broadcasts became the norm, TV sets were replaced with those capable of decoding the new 708 style captions. Your TV set probably has this ability today.
Baseband Digital Video and Captions
The quality of our TV and monitor displays increased rapidly. HD analog component signals were soon replaced by high speed, digital differential signalling. Various standards exist, but HDMI has become the de-facto digital video interface for consumer video. Our television sets are receiving HD digital programming and are able to decode and display new style captions. All is right with the world. Well, not so fast.
One would surely expect a brand new standard such as HDMI, designed from the ground up to support all current and conceivable kinds of communications between consumer A/V devices, to handle the trivial bandwidth and format of the closed captioning signal. Well, you’d be disappointed — somebody did not get the memo. From the start, HDMI has not carried the closed captioning signal. One could be forgiven for thinking it was an intentional decision, as the standard has been updated numerous times and HDMI cables still can’t carry closed captioning.
The explanation from the industry was that with change to digital meant that caption decoding must now be performed in your set-top box. This might not have been too bad of a choice if these boxes also provided an ATSC-modulated RF channel output with EIA-708 captions, akin to the Ch 2/3 outputs of old computers and VHS players. As it is, consumers who rely on closed captions now have two or more decoders to fool with: one in the TV’s HD digital receiver, one in a cable set-top box, and perhaps a third in their DVD/BD player.
FCC Saves the Day?
With the shift from prerecorded media to streaming, the situation really got out of hand. The FCC stepped in and solved the situation, kind of. You might think that with a well established, existing standard like EIA-708, something already being used in TV sets and mandated by the FCC for all broadcasters, the reasonable answer would be to require streaming services to use EIA-708 also. And maybe encourage the HDMI organization to carry closed captioning information as well. Alas, that was not the decision. Instead, the FCC ruled that streaming services can use any captioning technology standard they wish, as long as they can deliver captions.
I feel that this state of affairs is less than ideal. Looking back at all the neat and unintended uses of analog closed captions, I wonder how many novel innovations are we missing out on by this lack of a uniform captioning standard. Or rather, our intentional decision not to apply the existing captioning standard uniformly. That said, I don’t want my grumbling about technical details to distract us from the big picture here. The true goal of these regulations, providing captions to the deaf and hard of hearing community, is being applied across all methods of program delivery. That’s wonderful, indeed. | 42 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352194",
"author": "steelman",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T17:29:05",
"content": "Then along comes digital video in formats like Laser DiscNo, LaserDisc was not a digital format.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352248",
... | 1,760,373,072.22211 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/one-inkscape-plugin-collection-to-rule-them-all/ | One Inkscape Plugin Collection To Rule Them All | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"inkscape"
] | Inkscape is an amazing piece of open source software, a vector graphics application that’s a million times more lightweight than comparable commercial offerings while coming in at the low, low price of free. The software also has plenty of extensions floating around on the Internet, though until now, they haven’t been organised particularly well. The MightyScape project aims to solve that,
putting a bunch of Inkscape plugins into one useful release.
The current MightyScape release has a whole bunch of useful stuff inside, for tasks as varied as laser cutting, 3D printing, vinyl cutting, as well as improvements on areas where Inkscape is a bit weak out of the box – like CAD, geometry and patterning. The extensions are maintained and working, albeit with some bugs, and are intended for use with Inkscape 1.0 and above.
The aim is that by creating an overarching collection, the MightyScape project will help inspire the community to come together and actively maintain Inkscape plugins rather than allowing them to wither and die when forgotten by their original creators.
That’s the benefit of open-source, after all
– you can do whatever you want with the software when you have the code to do so! | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352168",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T15:38:21",
"content": "Just make certain there’s some kind of security so the repository doesn’t end up as a vector for bad people.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "63532... | 1,760,373,072.411487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/electric-vehicles-do-battle-on-pikes-peak/ | Electric Vehicles Do Battle On Pikes Peak | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"car",
"car hacks",
"electric vehicle",
"ev"
] | When we think of electric cars, more often than not we’re drawn to the environmental benefits and the smooth quiet commuter drives they’re so ideally suited for. However, EVs can also offer screaming performance, most notably due to their instant-on torque that gives them a big boost over internal combustion vehicles.
In recent years, this has led to a variety of independent and manufacturer-supported efforts taking on some of motorsport’s classic events. Today, we’re looking at a handful of recent entries that have tackled one of the most gruelling events in motorsport – the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb.
History
For those unfamiliar, the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, also popularly nicknamed The Race To The Clouds, is an event run on the highway leading up the mountain of Pikes Peak in Colorado. The 12.42 mile course is a twisted ribbon of tarmac that climbs over 14,000 ft above sea level. (The road was formerly dirt before environmental concerns led to it being gradually paved in recent decades.) The course is known for its treacherous dropoffs that have claimed multiple lives over the years, as well as the famous
Climb Dance
short film
that depicts Ari Vatanen climbing the mountain in the 1988 event in his turbocharged Peugeot 405 T16.
The first competitor to run a sub-20 minute time in an electric car was Katy Endicott, in a converted Honda Civic Shuttle in 1994.
The relatively short distance of the hillclimb suits electric vehicles, which are less capable at longer events involving multiple laps, due to the limitations of battery storage. The tight, winding course also allows EVs to make the benefit of their low-end torque advantage and, in most cases, lack of need to shift gears. It’s thus possible to build a relatively lightweight EV with just enough range to complete the Pikes Peak course on a full charge and be competitive with the times set by internal combustion rivals.
There’s a long history of electric cars competing at the event, with one of the first entrants being Joe Ball in 1981, completing the course in just over 32 minutes in a Sears Electric Car – though well over double the time taken by typical gasoline-fuelled competitors. The first electric entry to break the 20 minute barrier was a Honda Civic Shuttle-based entry, piloted by Katy Endicott in 1994 with a time of 15:44.710. Legendary driver Nobuhiro Tajima was the first to break the ten minute barrier on the now-paved run in 2013, with a time of 9:46.530 in his custom-built E-RUNNER Pikes Peak Special.
Rhys Millen won in 2015 in the eO PP03, custom built for the Pikes Peak event, though it would be a few years before an EV set the overall course record.
In more recent years, the competition has heated up significantly as electric vehicle technology has progressed to the point of posing a real challenge to internal combustion rivals. With highly efficient motors, batteries capable of delivering huge currents, and charging technology able to keep a car running all day, the tide at Pikes Peak began to turn.
The race was first won by an electric car in 2015, with Rhys Millen behind the wheel of a custom electric racer, but it would be several more years before the outright course record was broken by an EV. The time came in 2018, when Romain Dumas piloted Volkswagen’s I.D.R to a scorching 7:57.148 run up the mountain, eclipsing the 8-minute barrier for the first time. Pikes Peak stands today as one of the first major motorsports events to fall to the march of the electric vehicle.
What It Takes
Volkswagen set the course record on Pikes Peak in 2018, the first time ever by an electric vehicle.
Running a competitive Pikes Peak entry is no mean feat, whatever the powertrain involved. There’s plenty of race engineering that goes on in terms of getting the correct suspension setup, aero balance, and to make sure tyre temperatures are optimised for the track surface and ambient conditions. Combine those with a world-class racing driver and you might have a shot at the title. But, when it comes down to running an electric vehicle, there’s a few unique challenges to overcome.
Special insulating gloves are used when plugging in the high-voltage, high-current connector used to charge the ID.R at competition events.
Pikes Peak is a mountain, after all, and not particularly well equipped to deliver huge gobs of electric current to bespoke racecars with empty batteries. Thus, teams must find a way to provide their own electricity.
In the case of a car like the Volkswagen ID.R,
a giant generator was used
, running off glycerol for cleaner emissions to avoid spoiling the environmental credentials of the exercise. Charging is done at rate of up to 90 kW, and completes in 20 to 30 minutes. This quick charging capability is necessary for a car competing at Pikes Peak, due to the potential short turnaround time between competitive runs. To avoid the batteries overheating, the batteries are actively cooled by fans in the pit area. Starting a run with hot batteries can compromise their current output, so it’s key to performance to keep them cool.
The Palatov D2EV finished ninth overall in the 2019 event, plagued by weather and initial handling issues that stymied its attempts at a faster time.
It’s also important to carefully consider the size of batteries on the vehicle. Unlike a liquid-fuelled car, which can be fuelled heavier or lighter depending on the exact amount of fuel needed for a run, an electric car has to carry the full weight of its batteries all the time.
Swappable or modular packs are possible, but can come with efficiency penalties due to power lost in connectors. Ideally, the pack will be sized just large enough to complete a single run before running too low on charge, to avoid the car having to carry excess weight which negatively impacts performance. A great example of the battery weight dilemma is the Palatov D2EV, which ran in the 2019 event. Set up for a 300-mile range on the street instead of pure performance on the 12.42 mile hillclimb,
the car had to carry an extra 500 kg of batteries up the mountain, hurting the handling and dulling the acceleration.
Other problems faced on the mountain affect all racers more equally. Rain, snow or high winds are perilous for any vehicle on the course. There’s also the ever-present threat of simply sliding off the mountain, as guard rails are few and far between. Racers have faced these dangers for decades however, and electric vehicle or not, they’re not going away anytime soon.
Conclusion
It’s a simple fact that the torque delivery of electric vehicles is a huge advantage in performance situations. The main thing holding back electric vehicles from dominating more forms of motorsport is the limitation of battery technology, stopping them from competing on longer events like rallies or circuit races consisting of many laps. However, take that hurdle away, or simply race somewhere it doesn’t matter, like Pikes Peak, and suddenly the electric vehicle comes to dominate the legendary internal combustion engine of yore. As technology continues to improve, expect to see the same story told across the world of motorsport. | 61 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352152",
"author": "Pekka",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T14:18:50",
"content": "Was that picture of Katy Endicott’s Honda Civic taken by the author? If not, what’s the source? It’d do well on the wikipedia page for the event (licence permitting).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,373,072.629801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/samsung-releases-minimum-viable-galaxy-upcycling/ | Samsung Releases Minimum Viable Galaxy Upcycling | Roger Cheng | [
"Android Hacks"
] | [
"samsung",
"smart home",
"smartphone",
"smartthings",
"upcycling"
] | It’s a tragedy every time a modern smartphone is tossed into e-waste. We prefer to find another life for these bundles of useful hardware. But given all the on-board barriers erected by manufacturers, it’s impractical to repurpose smartphones without their support. A bit of good news on this front is Samsung testing the waters with a public beta of their “
Galaxy Upcycling at Home
” program, turning a few select devices into SmartThings sensor nodes.
More devices and functionality are promised, but this initial release is barely a shadow of what Samsung promised in 2017. Missed the announcement back then? Head over to a “How it started/How it’s going” comparison from iFixit, who minced no words starting with their title
Galaxy Upcycling: How Samsung Ruined Their Best Idea in Years
. They saw a bunch of Samsung engineers at Bay Area Maker Faire 2017, showing off a bunch of fun projects reusing old phones as open hardware. The
placeholder GitHub repository
left from that announcement still has a vision of a community of makers dreaming up novel uses. This is our jam! But sadly it has remained a placeholder for four years and, given what we see today, it is more likely to be taken down than to become reality.
The stark difference between original promise and actual results feel like an amateur Kickstarter, not something from a giant international conglomerate. Possibly for the same reason: lack of resources and expertise for execution. It’s hard to find support in a large corporate bureaucracy when there is no obvious contribution to the bottom line. Even today’s limited form has only a tenuous link of possibly helping to sell other SmartThings-enabled smart home devices.
Ars Technica was
similarly unimpressed
with launch functionality, but was more diplomatic describing the beta as “a very modest starting point”. XDA-Developers likewise
pinned their hopes
on the “more devices will be supported in the future” part of Samsung’s announcement. Until Samsung delivers on more of the original promise, we’ll continue to be hampered by all the existing
reasons hacking our old cell phones are harder than they should be
. Sometimes an idea can be fulfilled by
helpful apps
but other times will require hacking into our devices
the old-fashioned way
. | 30 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352128",
"author": "Ricardo EA4GMZ",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T11:47:31",
"content": "Wishing to hear suggestions for old phones. In the meantime Lineage is useful for some Galaxies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6352187",
... | 1,760,373,072.528224 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/wifi-penetration-testing-with-an-esp32/ | WiFi Penetration Testing With An ESP32 | Danie Conradie | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"deauth attack",
"ESP32",
"wifi"
] | WiFi is one of those technologies that most of us would have trouble living without. Unfortunately, there are several vulnerabilities in the underlying 802.11 standards that could potentially be exploited. To demonstrate just how simple this can be, [
risinek
] developed the
ESP32 Wi-Fi Penetration Tool
that runs on cheap dev boards and can execute deauthentication and Denial of Service attacks, and capture handshakes and PMKIDs.
The main challenge in this project is to implement these attacks while using the ESP-IDF development framework. The closed source WiFi libraries of the ESP-IDF block specific arbitrary frames like
deauthentication
frames. To get around this [
risinek
] used two different approaches. The first is to bypass the declaration of the blocking function at compile-time, which is borrowed from the esp32-deauther project. The second approach doesn’t require any modifications to the ESP-IDF. It works by creating a rogue access point (AP) identical to the targeted access point, which will send a deauthentication frame whenever one of the devices tries to connect to it instead of the real AP.
WPA/WPA2 handshakes are captured by passively listening for devices connecting to the target network, or running a deauth attack and then listening for when devices reconnect. PMKIDs are captured from APs with the roaming feature enabled, by analyzing the first message of a WPA handshake. ESP32 Wi-Fi Penetration Tool will also format the captured data into PCAP and HCCAPX files ready to be used with Wireshark and Hashcat. To manage the tool, it creates a management access point where the target and attack type is selected, and the resulting data can be downloaded. Pair the ESP32 with a battery, and everything can be done on the go. The project is part of [
risinek
]’s master’s thesis, and the full
academic article
is an educating read.
None of these attacks are new, they have been running on Raspberry Pis for a while. The
Pwnagotchi
is a popular example, which can run on the Pi Zero. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352119",
"author": "rok",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T10:14:49",
"content": "Oh, can´t wait to read the usual offended whining comments “But this is illegal, it is not responsible for HaD to publish something about thiiiis”. They likely prefer security by obscurity and no testing ever... | 1,760,373,072.458466 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/obsessively-explaining-the-visual-effects-in-flight-of-the-navigator/ | Obsessively Explaining The Visual Effects InFlight Of The Navigator | Zach Zeman | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"cgi",
"filmmaking",
"movie",
"props",
"scale model",
"special effects",
"stop motion"
] | [Captain Disillusion] has earned a reputation on YouTube for debunking hoaxes and spreading a healthy sense of skepticism while having some of the highest production value on the platform and pretending to be some kind of inter-dimensional superhero. You’ve likely seen him give a careful explanation of how some viral video was faked alongside a generous dose of sarcastic humor and his own impressive visual effects. VFXcool is a series on his channel that takes deep dives into movies that are historically significant in the effects industry. For this installment, [Captain Disillusion]’s “intern”, [Alan], takes over to
breakdown how filmmakers brought a futuristic spaceship to life in 1986’s
Flight of the Navigator
.
Making a movie requires hacks upon hacks, and that goes double in the era when the technology and techniques we now take for granted were being developed even as they were being put to film. The range of topics covered here is extreme: from full-scale props to models; from robotic motion control rigs to stop motion animation; from early computer graphics to the convoluted optical compositing that was necessary before digital workflows were possible. The tools themselves may be outdated, but understanding the history and the processes allows for a deeper insight into how we accomplish these kinds of effects today. And, really, it’s just so… cool.
[Captain Disillusion]’s previous VFXcool is all about the
Back to the Future
trilogy
, and it’s a little shorter with more information on motion control rigs. We also love seeing
how people make DIY effects in their own homes
. LEGO actually seems like
a pretty popular option for putting together whole scenes
in amateur filmmaking. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352082",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T06:22:28",
"content": "I love the ingenuity in “older” movie VFX.And the total chaos, too. Go watch documentaries about the making of the first Alien movie, or Apocalypse Now. Totally insane!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,373,072.75754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/yet-another-rigol-ds1054z-viewer/ | Yet Another Rigol DS1054Z Viewer | Chris Lott | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"free pascal",
"linux",
"pyvisa",
"Rigol 1054Z",
"screen capture"
] | Tired of squinting at the small numbers on the oscilloscope display, [Alfred] aka [Gaze@] decided to take matters into his own hands and
wrote yet another tool
to remotely view images from a Rigol DS1054Z. At least that was the initial idea. But, it grew unexpectedly — as [Alfred] says, “the more the project turned out to be fun, the more it got out of hand”. We know the feeling well.
In addition to being able to simply view and export the screen, the program implements waveform measurements (we’re not sure if it is using the measurement ability of the ‘scope, or actually performing measurements in the program). And as you can see in the animated GIF of the program in operation over on
the GitHub repository
, the numbers are certainly clear and legible. His problem of squinting at the small screen has indeed been solved.
This is coded in Pascal (FPC Lazarus), but we weren’t able to browse the program because [Alfred] hasn’t posted the source code yet. It is written only for Linux, and he has tested it on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Manjaro. The project relies on Python, PyVisa, and gtk2, and talks to your DS1054Z over USB or LAN. The installation instructions are well documented, but as [Alfred] himself warns, if you encounter trouble arising from subtle dependency version conflicts, you may need to be a nerd and/or a pensioner with unlimited time on your hands to solve them. There is no users guide nor extensive help according to [Alfred]. However, simple hints might be found in hover text or by pressing F1. Disclaimers aside, this looks like an interesting project to try out.
As [Alfred] notes, there are many other tools available to fetch data and images from your Rigol oscilloscope. [Jenny List] wrote a
two-part series on using Python to control your test instruments
, and here’s an example of a
simple Python script that does a screen grab
. Do you have a favorite way to remotely operate your oscilloscope? Let us know in the comments below. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352048",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2021-05-27T02:37:05",
"content": "I use labview/GPIB at work and python/GPIB at home; one advantage is I buy (at home) test instruments with damaged panels that nobody else wants and can run them via remote just fine. (Sometimes yo... | 1,760,373,072.816023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/speech-recognition-on-an-arduino-nano/ | Speech Recognition On An Arduino Nano? | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"alexa",
"artificial intelligence",
"cortana",
"digital signal processing",
"echo",
"privacy",
"siri",
"spectrum",
"speech recognition"
] | Like most of us, [Peter] had a bit of extra time on his hands during quarantine and decided to take a look back at speech recognition technology in the 1970s. Quickly, he started thinking to himself, “Hmm…I wonder if I could do this with an Arduino Nano?” We’ve all probably had similar thoughts,
but [Peter] really put his theory to the test
.
The hardware itself is pretty straightforward. There is an Arduino Nano to run the speech recognition algorithm and a MAX9814 microphone amplifier to capture the voice commands. However, the beauty of [Peter’s] approach, lies in his software implementation. [Peter] has a bit of an interplay between a custom PC program he wrote and the Arduino Nano. The learning aspect of his algorithm is done on a PC, but the implementation is done in real-time on the Arduino Nano,
a typical approach for really any machine learning algorithm deployed on a microcontroller
. To capture sample audio commands, or utterances, [Peter] first had to optimize the Nano’s ADC so he could get sufficient sample rates for speech processing. Doing a bit of low-level programming, he achieved a sample rate of 9ksps,
which is plenty fast for audio processing
.
To analyze the utterances, he first divided each sample utterance into 50 ms segments. Think of dividing a single spoken word into its different syllables. Like analyzing the “se-” in “seven” separate from the “-ven.” 50 ms might be too long or too short to capture each syllable cleanly, but hopefully, that gives you a good mental picture of what [Peter’s] program is doing. He then calculated the energy of 5 different frequency bands, for every segment of every utterance. Normally that’s done using a
Fourier transform
, but the Nano doesn’t have enough processing power to compute the Fourier transform in real-time, so Peter tried a different approach. Instead, he implemented 5 sets of digital bandpass filters, allowing him to more easily compute the energy of the signal in each frequency band.
The energy of each frequency band for every segment is then sent to a PC where a custom-written program creates “templates” based on the sample utterances he generates. The crux of his algorithm is comparing how closely the energy of each frequency band for each utterance (and for each segment) is to the template. The PC program produces a .h file that can be compiled directly on the Nano. He uses the example of being able to recognize the numbers 0-9, but you could change those commands to “start” or “stop,” for example, if you would like to.
[Peter] admits that you can’t implement the type of speech recognition on an Arduino Nano that we’ve come to expect from those
covert listening devices
, but he mentions small, hands-free devices like a head-mounted multimeter could benefit from a single word or single phrase voice command.
And maybe it could put your mind at ease
knowing everything you say isn’t immediately getting beamed into the cloud and given to our AI overlords.
Or maybe we’re all starting to get used to this
. Whatever your position is on the current state of AI, hopefully,
you’ve gained some inspiration for your next project
. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6352015",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T23:11:59",
"content": "I judged high school science fairs in the 1980s. One kid showed up with a functional speech recognition system running on a Sinclair ZX-81 with no other hardware other than a microphone. It could recognize... | 1,760,373,072.881857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/all-wheel-drive-bicycle-using-hand-drill-parts/ | All-Wheel Drive Bicycle Using Hand Drill Parts | Danie Conradie | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"all wheel drive",
"bevel gear",
"bicycle",
"differential"
] | A skilled mountain biker can cross some extreme terrain, but [The Q] thought there might be room for improvement, so he
converted a fat bike to all-wheel drive
.
The major challenge here is transferring pedal power to the front wheels, especially around the headset. [The Q] solved this by effectively building a differential from the parts of a very old hand drill. Since the front wheel needs to rotate at the same speed as the rear, one long chain loops from the rear wheel to the headset, tensioned by a pair of derailleurs. This front sprocket turns a series of spur gears and bevel gear arranged around the headset, which transfers the power down to the front wheel via another chain.
It would be interesting to feel what the bike rides like in soft sand, mud, and over rocks. We can see it has some advantages in those conditions but were unsure if it would be enough to offset the penalty in weight and complexity. The additional chains and gears certainly look like they’re asking to catch foliage, clothing, and maybe even skin. However, we suspect [The Q] was more likely doing it for the challenge of the build, which we can certainly appreciate. With the rise of e-bikes, adding a hub motor to the front wheel seems like a simpler option.
We’ve seen several interesting bicycle hacks over the years, including a
strandbeest rear end
,
3D printed tires
and an
automatic shifter
. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351973",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T20:24:17",
"content": "well. the main problem will be that of friction. the ride will be a lot tougher. you already see him pushing really hard at the pedals even on almost horizontal ground.but a nice try anyway. although me... | 1,760,373,072.946462 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/esp8266-adds-wifi-to-a-433-mhz-weather-station/ | ESP8266 Adds WiFi To A 433 MHz Weather Station | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"433 mhz",
"ESP8266",
"GnuRadio",
"reverse engineering",
"weather station",
"weather underground"
] | There’s no shortage of cheap weather stations on the market that pull in data from several wireless sensors running in the 433 to 900 MHz range and present you with a slick little desktop display, but that’s usually where the flow of information stops. Looking to bridge the gap and bring all that local climate data onto the Internet,
[Jonathan Diamond] decided to reverse engineer how his weather station worked
.
The first phase of this project involved an RTL-SDR receiver, GNURadio, and a sprinkling of Python. [Jonathan] was able to lock onto the signal and piece together the data packets that reported variables such as temperature, wind speed, and rainfall. Each one of these was a small puzzle in itself, and in the end, there’s still a few bits which he hasn’t quite figured out. But he at least had enough to move onto the next step.
Tapping into the radio module.
Now at this point, he could have pulled the data right out of the air with his RTL-SDR. But looking to push his skills to the next level, [Jonathan] decided to open up the base station and isolate its receiver. Since he already decoded the packets on the RF side, he knew exactly what he was looking for with his oscilloscope and logic analyzer. Once he was tapped into the feed coming from the radio, the final step was writing some code for the ESP8266 that could listen on the line, interpret the data packets, and push the resulting variables out over the network.
In this case, [Jonathan] decided to funnel all the data into Weather Underground by way of the Personal Weather Station API. This not only let him view the data through their web interface and smartphone application, but brought their hyperlocal forecasting technology into the mix at no extra charge. If you’re not interested in sharing your info with the public, it would be a trivial matter to change the firmware so the data is published to a local MQTT broker, or whatever else floats your proverbial boat.
If you’re really lucky,
your own weather station may already have an ESP8266 onboard
and is dumping all its collected data to the serial port. But if not, projects like this one that break down
how to reverse engineer a wireless signal
can be a great source of inspiration and guidance should you decide to try and crack the code. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351956",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T18:41:47",
"content": "“There’s no shortage of cheap weather stations on the market that pull in data from several wireless sensors running in the 433 to 900 MHz range and present you with a slick little desktop display, but t... | 1,760,373,072.996456 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/flat-pack-pasta-like-ikea-furniture-without-the-weird-wrench/ | Flat-Pack Pasta: Like Ikea Furniture Without The Weird Wrench | Kristina Panos | [
"cooking hacks",
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"flat pack",
"flatpack",
"pasta",
"PDMS",
"transient morphing"
] | When it comes to food packaging, there’s no bigger scam than potato chip bags, right? People complain about the air (nitrogen, actually) inside, but it’s there for a reason — nitrogen pushes out oxygen, so the chips live in a state of factory-fresh dormancy until you rip open the bag and release the gas. If you want flat-pack chips, there’s always those uniformly-shaped potato slurry wafers that come in a can. But even those usually manage to have a few broken ones.
On the other hand, no one complains about the extra space in their box of fusilli — that would be silly. But seriously, successfully shipping fragile foods requires either flat packing or a lot of extra space, especially if that food comes in a myriad of fun 3D shapes like pasta does. Everybody knows that 3D pasta is superior to flat pasta because it holds sauces so much better. The pasta must be kept intact!
The great thing about pasta as a food is that it’s simple to make, and it’s more nutritious than potato chips. Because of these factors, pasta is often served in extreme situations to large groups of people, like soldiers and the involuntarily displaced. But storing large quantities of shapely pasta takes up quite a bit of space. And because of all that necessary air, much of the packaging goes to waste.
So what if you could keep your plethora of pasta in, say, a filing cabinet?
A research team led by the Morphing Matter Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to make flat-pack pasta that springs to life after a few minutes in boiling water.
Just a few of the fun shapes they created. Image via
Morphing Matter Lab
This probably goes without saying, but they were inspired by IKEA’s packaging MO and sought to apply that flat-pack principle to food. The team has spent the last few years experimenting with 2D films of cellulose, protein, and starch to make them morph into 3D shapes as they absorb water. However, their method required additives, which likely wouldn’t fly with consumers or pasta manufacturers. So they came up with a way to do it by stamping the pasta, which they call “
groove-based transient morphing
“. Sounds to us like the one thing that can supplant lo-fi/hip-hop beats to study/relax to.
Why Didn’t We Think of This?
We love the simple utility of this so much. It’s like kerf-bending wood, or running a scissor blade along grosgrain ribbon in order to curl it. It would be dead simple to recreate this experiment at home with 3D-printed stamps, as long as you used food-safe mold release like the researchers did.
In order to find a suitable morphing mechanism for pasta, the team turned to PDMS, a silicone that is widely used to study kinetic behaviors. They experimented with groove types, weighing cuboid-shaped square wave grooves against frustrum-shaped Kit Kat side-view grooves, and found that the frustrum-shaped grooves maximized the curvature of the bent PDMS. With the morphing mechanism sorted, the researchers traded their lab coats for aprons and got to work applying it to dough.
The team starts with simple sheets of pasta made the traditional Italian way, with nothing but semolina flour and water. The dough is rolled out flat and cut down into shapes as normal, although most of them are new and exciting. Finally, they stamp the dough with pieces of plastic they designed and 3D printed, using a food-safe mold release in between. They started out with hand stamping, and as you can see in the video below, they ended up using a four-axis gantry for more precise impressions. Then it’s business as usual: boil the pasta for 7-12 minutes depending on shape and thickness, and watch the morphing take place. It takes longer to soften where the grooves are, and they don’t expand as much as the smooth parts. One team member took a matchbox of flat-pack pasta on a hike and cooked it over a fire to prove its utility.
Juicier Than Square Watermelons
A bit of quick research reveals that
MIT had the same idea a few years ago
. So why hasn’t the idea taken off? Obviously, someone needs to make a Kickstarter and stand up a flat-pack pasta company.
Squares save space. Image via
Red Duck Post
The question is, how much more would this pasta cost to consumers? It wouldn’t have to be much, right? We were neither business nor industrial design majors, but how much could the overhead be on a company like that? Surely flat-pack pasta is an idea that wouldn’t go limp, like square watermelons.
Growing watermelons inside of cube molds was supposed to be a refrigerator space-saving initiative that would make stacking a breeze. In reality,
they cost $100-$200 each
because they don’t all grow with perfectly vertical stripes or fill the mold. And because each must be picked before they’re ripe, they’re basically inedible and mostly used for decoration.
We imagine that if flat-pack pasta became a thing, it wouldn’t be perfect — there would probably still be a few broken ones just like those flat-pack potato wafers. But who cares? They’ll still hold sauce. | 46 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351934",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T17:32:10",
"content": "Instant noodles are pre-cooked and dried by deep frying. They can be cook in minutes or eaten as is. I have a few saved for blackouts with my penny stove. Nothing beats a hot meal when the heat and ... | 1,760,373,073.08592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/voidstars-vitals-visualized-for-video/ | Voidstar’s Vitals, Visualized For Video | Kristina Panos | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"emotibit",
"ESP32",
"heartbeat",
"hexagon",
"hexagonal display",
"pulse oximeter"
] | Great news for fans of [Voidstar Labs] — [Zack] is going to be streaming future builds live on YouTube instead of trying to keep up with a grueling and limiting schedule of releasing a build video every week. The only problem is that the wall behind him is totally blank and boring, which matters quite a bit for pretty much any streamer that doesn’t broadcast from a hot tub. Well, not anymore!
Now the wall has twenty square feet of rainbow hexagons
, because blinkenlights.
But these aren’t just any blinkenlights. They’re informative. They dance to the beat of [Zack]’s bio-metrics, or in other words, they are visualizing how sweaty and anxious [Zack] may be at a given moment, and turning that information into art.
At the heart of this build is a brand-new bio-metric board called the EmotiBit which boasts sixteen sensors in a small package, including a pulse oximeter. The EmotiBit sends vitals to [Zack]’s PC, which is running an oscilloscope app to interpret the signals. Then they are sent over Open Sound Control to an ESP32, which runs the light show.
Like [Zack] says in the video after the break, this isn’t a terribly difficult project, but the construction takes time. [Zack] used aluminum extrusion meant for under-cabinet lighting and ran forty strips of fourteen DotStar LEDs each. The nodes are printed in carbon-fiber PLA and hold the lights away from the wall so it looks cooler. Worried about the current draw? It’s okay, because the brightness and number of lit LEDs at any one time is limited. Add in the fact that none of the LEDs are ever turned off — they fade by one percent each loop — and you have some really cool animations. Check them out after the break.
Want some localized blinkenlights to wear about town?
Wear your heart on your sleeve and show them how hard you’re crushing the elliptical at the gym
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351940",
"author": "thantik",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T17:55:05",
"content": "Lots of flack from the peanut gallery on a really awesome project that’s documented pretty nicely for anyone who wishes to replicate it. Does Hackaday not like these things now or are we all just grumpy ... | 1,760,373,073.134601 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/teardown-radica-i-racer/ | Teardown: RADICA I-Racer | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Teardown",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"head mounted display",
"lcd games",
"mirror",
"virtual reality",
"vr"
] | Long before the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive came along, some of the biggest names in gaming tried to develop practical stereoscopic displays. These early attempts at virtual reality (VR) were hindered by the technical limitations of their time, and most never progressed beyond the prototype stage. Of the ones that did make it to retail shelves, none managed to stick around for very long. The best known example is Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, which ended up being a financial disaster upon its release in 1995 and some regard as the gaming giant’s greatest blunder.
Despite these public failures, Radica still felt compelled to throw their hat into the ring. Best known for their line of relatively simplistic LCD handheld games, the company produced several rudimentary stereoscopic stand-alone titles in the late 1990s to try and cash in on the VR fad. Among the later entries in this series was 1999’s NASCAR i-Racer, which at least externally, looks quite a bit like modern VR headset.
Featuring a head-mounted stereoscopic display, a handheld controller, force feedback, and integrated headphones, you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking the i-Racer was ahead of its time. But its reliance on the primitive LCD technology that put Radica on the map, combined with the need to keep the game as cheap as possible, keeps the experience planted firmly in the 1990s. But perhaps there’s something we can do about that.
Start Your Engines
As a general rule these teardowns aren’t meant to be reviews, but given the rather unique nature of the i-Racer, I think we can spare a few paragraphs to talk about what it’s actually like to use this twenty-two year old budget VR headset.
Turning left never felt so real.
The first thing you notice when putting on the headset is that its surprisingly comfortable. For one thing, it’s far lighter than you would assume given its size. But more importantly, there’s quite a bit of adjustability built in. Presumably Radica wanted to make sure children as well as adults could play the game, so you can push, pull, and twist parts of the headset to make it better fit your face. It even has a nice soft rubber nose pad to keep you comfortable during extended sessions.
That said, you certainly won’t be playing this game for long in 2021. It’s not that there’s a problem with the stereoscopic effect, in fact, that works quite well. It’s just that the i-Racer looks like every other Radica LCD game from the 1990s, except this one is literally being smashed into your face. A handful of graphite-colored cars flash in their predetermined static locations, a few bar graphs blink away to indicate things like RPM and vehicle damage, and there’s a generous helping of seven-segment digits to show the current speed, time, lap number, etc. To try and convey a sense of speed the lines on the track march towards you, and stadium bleachers will occasionally zip by on the right side. For some reason, a mountain pops up on the horizon from time to time.
To be fair, Radica did try and enhance the experience in other ways. If you crash or hit the side of the track, red LEDs located just outside of your peripheral vision blink and the handheld controller starts to vibrate. Calling it immersive might be a stretch, but it certainly makes for a more engaging experience than the LCD alone could manage.
Taking the Wheel
All of the buttons and switches for the i-Racer, as well as the batteries, are located in the vaguely steering wheel shaped controller. Outside of the single transistor that’s being used to spin up a small brushed motor with an offset weight to provide vibration, the controller’s PCB is home to only passive components. Because of this, the thick cable running up to the headset has a whopping thirteen conductors. Today we’d expect to see some sort of digital communication between the hand unit and the headset, but 1999 was a simpler time.
The most interesting element of the controller is probably how it interprets the steering wheel input. Before opening it up, I expected to find some kind of potentiometer, but in fact it’s all done with specially shaped pads on the PCB. A metal contact is attached to the wheel, so that when the player turns left or right, the pads are shorted together in different combinations. While a clever solution, it does speak to just how low the target cost must have been for the i-Racer.
But that’s not the only cost saving measure to be found. It appears that Radica went on to reuse the controller’s injection molded shell for a number of racing wheel accessories they marketed for the PlayStation 1 and 2 under the name
Gamester
. These controllers have more buttons and delete the battery compartment from the i-Racer version, but the overall design is largely unchanged.
Sharkie Gamer
reviews the Gamester Formula Racer
Get Your Head in the Game
After removing five screws surrounding the i-Racer’s eyepieces, the front of the headset neatly slides off and reveals what it easily the most cyberpunk looking piece of hardware we’ve yet run across. If nothing else, this thing would be a perfect base for a cosplay prop or Halloween costume.
Unfortunately, as gorgeous as the traces on the PCB and that massive ribbon cable might be, we’re also confronted with something quite ugly indeed: the
dreaded black epoxy blobs
. I was really hoping there would be some identifiable chips inside the headset, but given its lineage, this was always the most likely outcome. Still, take a look at those spring loaded wire tensioners that make sure everything remains tight as the user adjusts the headset. The i-Racer certainly wasn’t a high end piece of hardware, but it can’t be said that Radica didn’t put in some effort.
Note the two small PCBs for the red “crash” LEDs.
Removing three screws allows you to take the clear plastic cover off of the top of the optics, under which we can find the color transparency sheet and the transparent LCD. My research tells me Radica made at least one other game utilizing the same hardware, and with this design, you can see how easily the overlay and LCD could be swapped out. Incidentally the top cover is clear because a bright external light source needs to shine through the LCD for the i-Racer to work,
similar to the VTech “Whiz Kid” luggable we looked at back in 2020
.
Another Go Around the Track
It might seem like the case is closed on the Radica’s NASCAR i-Racer. After all, even the most dedicated NASCAR fan wouldn’t last more than a few laps with its dated display tech and limited gameplay. But while the electronics inside this turn of the millennium virtual reality headset may be effectively worthless in 2021, the headset itself and its relatively competent optics could easily be repurposed as a cheap head-mounted display.
As a proof of concept, I put my phone over the opening at the top of the headset and played a few videos using YouTube’s VR mode. It actually looked quite nice, though the alignment was a little fiddly. The 45° mirror inside the headset allows the display to be closer to your eyes,
making the whole thing considerably more compact than the traditional Google Cardboard clone
. Of course you wouldn’t be limited to just using a phone, a modern LCD could easily be installed in place of the original panel for a more permanent solution.
In fact, it looks like a pair of ILI9341 2.2 inch LCDs would fit almost perfectly in the approximately 52 x 37 millimeter openings in the top of the headset. The resolution on those panels is admittedly pretty low, but it should be enough to get started. An interesting first project might be turning the carcass of an Radica i-Racer
into a stereoscopic Arduboy of sorts
, like an 8-bit Oculus. That’s what I’m planning on doing with mine, anyway. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351912",
"author": "AnonyClone",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T15:36:02",
"content": "Or a clone of Nintendo Virtual Boy..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6351932",
"author": "Virtual Man",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26... | 1,760,373,073.499739 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/disguising-the-ps5-with-a-custom-wood-and-carbon-fiber-enclosure/ | Disguising The PS5 With A Custom Wood And Carbon Fiber Enclosure | Danie Conradie | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"Carbon Fibre",
"custom enclosure",
"diy perks",
"PlayStation 5",
"wood"
] | The PlayStation 5 has a very distinctive enclosure that some love and others hate. Its design certainly does not lend itself to lying on its side, even though this is a more practical orientation for putting on a shelf in a TV console. [Matt] from [DIY Perks] decided to address this and built a custom
wood and carbon fiber PS5 enclosure
that looks good in any orientation.
He started by disassembling his PS5 and taking out only the main electronics unit, fan, and power supply. These were mounted on a carbon fiber baseplate using hexagonal threaded standoffs. The sides of the enclosure were constructed from dark walnut, with holes cut in the front and back for connectors and airflow. A long recess was cut in the front hole and covered with an ingenious carbon fiber cover which opens if you press it at one end and acts as the power button if you press it at the other end.
Matt paid close attention to the airflow routing of the original enclosure and copied it to the new one. Like the original, he used adhesive foam strips to direct the air through the heat sinks. The top cover is also carbon fiber, with an elegant honeycomb hole pattern with wood inserts for the air intake.
This is not [Matt]’s first custom PS5 enclosure. The other was a significantly more flashy
brass incarnation
of the original. Other custom enclosure he’s made include a
wood PC case
and a
brass encased USB-C monitor
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351870",
"author": "kc8rwr",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T13:21:43",
"content": "Ewwww. That’s my reaction to the original case, not the wooden one. I know everyone hates a plain beige box these days but I’ll take one over something so awkward as that any day.The wooden case is beauti... | 1,760,373,073.23705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/26/neopill-is-the-neopixel-emulator-youve-always-wanted/ | NeoPill Is The NeoPixel Emulator You’ve Always Wanted | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"emulator",
"neopixel",
"ws2182b"
] | NeoPixels and other addressable LED strings are a technology that have made vibrant, glowing LED projects accessible to all. Of course, it’s nice to be able to simulate your new glowy project in software before you actually set up your LED strings in practice.
[Randy Elwin]’s NeoPill simulator can help with that!
The NeoPill consists of an STM32F103 development board, into which one simply hooks up a NeoPixel data line. The microcontroller then decodes the data using a combination of its onboard timers and SPI hardware. This data is then passed to a PC over the onboard USB serial connection, where it’s decoded by a custom Python app. The app takes the data and displays the pixels on screen, so you can verify they operate as expected before you hook up a single real LED.
It’s a great tool, one that costs very little and yet does the job well. It can even be used with LEDs in circuit to verify if problems are related to the data output or the hardware itself. [Randy] demonstrates the software working with strings of up to 256 LEDs at once; we’d love to see how far it can be pushed before breaking.
Code is available on Github for those keen to get their own NeoPill operational.
It’s not the only NeoPixel simulator out there
, but it is the first one we’ve seen that can be used to debug actual signals from real hardware, and that’s an incredibly useful thing to have in your toolbelt. Video after the break. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351808",
"author": "edwin",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T08:24:12",
"content": "this is awesome",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6351877",
"author": "rpavlik",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T13:47:40",
"content":... | 1,760,373,073.185029 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/25/high-voltage-gives-metal-balls-a-mind-of-their-own/ | High Voltage Gives Metal Balls A Mind Of Their Own | Tom Nardi | [
"Science"
] | [
"fractal",
"high voltage",
"Plasma Channel"
] | Have you ever seen something that’s so fascinating you’re
sure
there has to be some kind of practical application for it, but you just can’t figure out what? That’s how we feel when watching tiny ball bearings assemble themselves into alien-like structures under the influence of high voltage
in the latest
Plasma Channel
video from [Jay Bowles]
.
Now to be clear, [Jay] isn’t trying to take credit for the idea. He explains that researchers at Stanford University first documented the phenomenon back in 2015, and that his goal was to recreate their initial results as a baseline and go from there. The process is pretty simple: put small metal ball bearings into a tray of oil, apply high voltage, and watch them self-assemble into “wires” that branch out in search of the ground terminal like a plant’s roots looking for water.
With the encouragement of his 500,000 volt Van de Graaff generator
, the ball bearings leaped into action and created structures just like in the Stanford study.
With the basic pieces now in place, [Jay] starts to push the envelope. He experiments with various oils to see how their viscosity impacts the ball’s ability to assemble, finding that olive oil seems to be the ideal candidate (at least of those he’s tried so far). He also switches up the size and shape of the tray, to try and find how far the balls can realistically stretch out on their own.
In the end we’re no closer to finding a practical application for this wild effect than the good folks at Stanford were back in 2015, but at least we got to watch the little fellows do their thing in glorious 4K and with the exceptional production value we’ve come to expect from
Plasma Channel
. That said, [Jay] does hint at his ongoing efforts to
turn the structures into works of art by “freezing” them with clear resin
, so keep your eyes out for that. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351770",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T05:38:50",
"content": "Ah ha, radiating, reminds me of various claims high voltage & pulsed magnetic fields could offer gravity perturbations, with an altered directional vector oriented suitable h... | 1,760,373,073.562181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/25/ptychography-shows-atoms-at-amazing-revolution/ | Ptychography Shows Atoms At Amazing Resolution | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"atoms",
"electron microscope",
"electron microscopy",
"ptychography"
] | Cornell University enhanced electron microscopy using a technique known as ptychography in 2018. At the time, it allowed an electron microscope to resolve things three times smaller than previously possible. But that wasn’t enough. The team has now
doubled that resolution
by improving on their previous work.
The team says that the images are so precise that the only blurring is due to the thermal motion of the atoms themselves. This could mean that you won’t see a further improvement in resolution in the future.
Ptychography works by scanning material in different overlapping areas and measuring the reflected pattern. By comparing the reflections from overlapping areas, an algorithm can reconstruct what the structure was that created the pattern. The team’s leader, [David Muller], likens it to the speckles laser pointer pet toys make. Paradoxically, the electron beam is slightly defocused to capture more data. After data processing, the resolution is down to a picometer.
Currently, the method is time-consuming and requires large computers, but we all know that computers get faster every year, so in a decade your wristwatch will probably be able to do the number-crunching required. The
actual paper
is paywalled, but if you have access to the kind of equipment you need to do this, you probably also have access to Science or won’t mind spending a little coin to read the paper. If half of the current resolution is sufficient, you might like reading the
older paper
, too. | 34 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351740",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T03:01:02",
"content": "Well, I’m glad we got that resolved. 😆",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6351751",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2021-05-26T03:54:14",
"co... | 1,760,373,073.397335 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/25/putting-leds-in-motorcyle-tail-light-shows-how-trivial-becomes-tough/ | Putting LEDs In Motorcyle Tail Light Shows How Trivial Becomes Tough | Donald Papp | [
"LED Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"incandescent",
"led",
"LED replacement",
"motorcycle",
"tail light"
] | [Maarten Tromp]’s
replacement of his motorcycle’s tail light with LED equivalents
is a great example of something that every hacker learns sooner or later: interfacing to and working around existing parts can turn a trivial-seeming task into a much bigger job than expected. The more one has to work within the constraints of an existing system, the more opportunities there are for roadblocks and surprise issues to stall progress, and this project is a great example of that.
[Maarten]’s 1999 Honda ST1100 Pan European motorcycle had no aftermarket options for an LED rear light assembly, and he wasn’t too keen on just installing a generic module to replace the original. Instead, he resolved to purchase and disassemble a used factory assembly, and replace the incandescent lamps with some equivalent LEDs. Replacing bulbs with LEDs sounds easy, but doing the job right took [Maarten] almost two weeks in the end.
Problems started early with simple things like how to open up the light assembly itself. The unit isn’t user-serviceable and isn’t intended to be opened, and the parts are sealed shut with a waxy substance. Fortunately, heat does the trick. Another early hitch was the curved base of the light assembly, which made mounting flat perfboard or veroboard a challenge. In the end, [Maarten] settled on a triangular grid of high-brightness LEDs, driven with LM317 regulators configured as constant-current supplies, mounted on some protoboard cut to fit the unique curve of the assembly. The result accepts the wide voltage range of the motorcycle’s battery (from 10.5 V to 14.5 V) and can still function even if some individual LEDs stop working.
The project has one more example of how working around existing hardware can be a pain. [Maarten] had originally intended to swap out the turn signal lamps for LEDs as well, but there is a glitch. The motorcycle’s turn signal relay will do a fast blink pattern if burnt-out turn signal lamps are detected. Since LEDs consume considerably less current than the original bulbs, the relay will remain stuck in the fault condition. There are a few different ways around this, but it’s a problem for another day. For now, the tail light LED replacement is a success.
Working around existing hardware
frequently brings unexpected challenges
, but when safety systems (such as lights on a vehicle) are involved, it’s extra-important to make sure things are done right. | 57 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351702",
"author": "Ergotron",
"timestamp": "2021-05-25T23:19:06",
"content": "Appreciate the effort he put in, but honestly, I would have just gotten the aftermarket LED bulbs. If his concern is really reliability, this homebrew solution seems far more likely to fail in the middle... | 1,760,373,073.703454 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/25/3d-printed-joystick-using-spherical-flexure-joint/ | 3D Printed Joystick Using Spherical Flexure Joint | Danie Conradie | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"3D printable",
"compliant mechanism",
"Joystick"
] | One of the many advancements brought about by 3D printing is the rapid development of compliant mechanisms and flexure joints. One such example is [jicerr]’s
joystick
, which uses a pair of
spherical flexure joints
recently developed by
researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands
, See the videos after the break.
Both flexure joint designs make use of tetrahedron-shaped elements, allowing an object to pivot around a fixed point in space like a ball-and-socket joint. One of the joints, named Tetra 2, is perfect for printing on a standard FDM printer, and the 3D files were
uploaded to Thingiverse
by [Jelle_Rommers], one of the researchers. [jicerr] took the design and created a base to mount an HMC5883 3-axis magnetometer a short distance from the focal point, which senses the rotation of a small magnet at the focal point. An Arduino takes the output from the magnetometer, does the necessary calculation, and interfaces to a PC as a joystick. Demonstrates this by using it to rotate and pan the design in Solidworks. One thing to keep in mind with this design is that it needs a fixed base to prevent it from moving around. It should also be possible to integrate the design directly into the housing of a controller.
Another amusing application is to turn it into a
pen holder with a chicken head
on the front, as demonstrated by [50Pro]. If you have any ideas for other applications, drop them in the comments.
Compliant mechanisms have a number of interesting applications, including
harmonic drives
,
dial indicators
and
thrust vectoring mounts
.
Thanks for the tip [Keith Olson]! | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351674",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-05-25T21:29:15",
"content": "Is there a nuts and bolts version of this, or is this some very special FEM modeled thing that needs to be done just so?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,373,073.905935 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/25/robot-arm-adds-freedom-to-3d-printer/ | Robot Arm Adds Freedom To 3D Printer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"arduino",
"carbon fiber",
"reinforced",
"robotic arm",
"six-axis",
"strength"
] | 3D printers are an excellent tool to have on hand, largely because they can print other tools and parts rapidly without needing to have them machined or custom-ordered. 3D printers have dropped in price as well, so it’s possible to have a fairly capable machine in your own home for only a few hundred dollars. With that being said, there are some limitations to their function but some of them can be mitigated by
placing the printer head on a robot arm rather than on a traditional fixed frame
.
The experimental 3D printer at the University of Nottingham adds a six-axis robotic arm to their printer head, which allows for a few interesting enhancements. Since the printer head can print in any direction, it allows material to be laid down in ways which enhance the strength of the material by ensuring the printed surface is always correctly positioned with respect to new material from the printer head. Compared to traditional 3D printers which can only print on a single plane, this method also allows for carbon fiber-reinforced prints since the printer head can follow non-planar paths.
Of course, the control of this printer is much more complicated than a traditional three-axis printer, but it is still within the realm of possibility with readily-available robotics and microcontrollers. And this is a hot topic right now: we’ve seen
five-axis 3D printers
,
four-axis 3D printers
, and even some clever slicer hacks that
do much the same thing
. Things are
finally heating up in non-planar 3D printing
!
Thanks to [Feinfinger] for the tip! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351681",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-05-25T21:52:14",
"content": "Logical extension I guess, time will come I think we’ll have an upper torso human like robot with greater articulation of limbs then the limited human skeletal arm movements.... | 1,760,373,073.609307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/25/getting-started-with-aluminum-extrusions/ | Getting Started With Aluminum Extrusions | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"8020",
"aluminum extrusion",
"extrusion",
"Misumi",
"structural framing systems"
] | T-slot extrusions used to be somewhat mysterious, but today they are quite common thanks to their use in many 3D printers. However, it is one thing to assemble a kit with some extrusions and another thing to design your own creations with the material. If you ever had a Play-Doh Fun Factory as a kid, then you know about extrusions. You push some material out through a die to make a shape. Of course, aluminum extrusions aren’t made from modeling clay, but usually 6105-T5 aluminum. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be an official standard, but it is so common that there’s usually not much variation between different vendors.
We use extrusions to create frames for 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC machines. But you can use it anywhere you need a sturdy and versatile frame. There seems to be a lot of people using them, for example, to build custom fixtures inside vans. If you need a custom workbench, a light fixture, or even a picture frame, you can build anything you like using extrusions.
Why Extrusions?
Hackaday’s own Roger Cheng shows the versatility of aluminum extrusion and
shares a wealth of tips he developed
for his
Sawppy the Rover
project.
If you are handy enough, of course, you can build all of those things without resorting to aluminum extrusion. After all, it isn’t hard to build a box out of wood or even aluminum stock. But having stock inexpensive aluminum is both strong and convenient. In general, all you need is a way to cut the extrusion square (or, buy it in the lengths you want) and a way to drill holes in the relatively soft aluminum. In some cases, you may want to tap some holes — either that already exist or those you freshly drilled.
However, what you do need is a lot of special parts. There are brackets and special nuts and a variety of accessories. You can think of it as something akin to an adult Erector set. One thing that has made working with extrusions easier is that you can 3D print just the bracket you need in many cases instead of buying an exotic bracket or having to stock a lot of different items. A fantastic example of this are all of the brackets and retaining parts Roger Cheng covered in his guide
How to Build Anything Out of Aluminum Extrusion and 3D Printed Brackets
.
Extrusion Geometry
A typical 2020 profile
There isn’t just a single kind of extrusion, but they all share some common features. In general, the extrusion will be like a square or a rectangle. The most basic extrusions are square and there will be a central hole and one or more T slots for attaching things. If you are making something you want to be attractive, you might not want the T slot on all sides, but usually, with a 3D printer or other machines you’ll have a slot on all sides.
Some extrusions are metric and some use inch measurements. It is common to call a square profile by its measurement as in a 20×20 profile (20mm on each side).
Some of the profiles available on the Misumi website
More complex extrusions will usually repeat the pattern so a 40×20 extrusion appears like two 20×20 extrusions joined together. Of course, they aren’t made that way —
it is one solid extrusion where they’re squeezed out like Play-Doh
, a fascinating story that Dan Maloney dove into last year. However, there are other extrusion shapes, such as those with a radius or those shaped like triangles for special purposes.
There are two things you’ll need to do: join extrusions together securely and affix things to the extrusions. For example, if you are making a table, you’d want to build a frame to hold the desktop that has four legs. You’d attach a laminate tabletop to the frame and put leveling feet in the legs. Of course, you could get a lot fancier like [Evan] and [Katelyn] did in the video below.
Extrusion Connections
Rod holders mounted to a piece of extrusion.
In many cases, attaching accessories like a foot or a bracket to an extrusion has a lot in common with how you join multiple extrusions together, so let’s attack that first. The trick is to use special nuts that fit inside the T slots. You have several options. Square nuts can slide into the slot if they are thin enough. You can put a tension spring on the nut to hold it in place while you tighten the bolt into the nut. However, usually, people just thread the bolt on and slide the whole thing into the slot.
The downside to this is that you have to have access to the open end of the slot. If you want to add something between two other nuts or if the slot is blocked with a bracket, you will have to tear everything apart to get the new nut in. This is a type of preset nut, and they also make rectangular nuts known as T nuts that serve the same purpose.
A Raspberry Pi 4 in a 3D printed case attached to some extrusion. The black bolts affix to the T-nuts in the slot. (Model:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2581565
)
If you were, for example, affixing a stepper motor bracket with two mounting holes to your frame, you’d either insert the nuts or thread them loosely on the bolts inserted into the bracket and then slide them into the slot. When you have the assembly in the right position, you simply tighten the bolts.
The only tricky part is the length of the bolt to use. You need a bolt that will go through the bracket and just go into the nut without coming out the other side and touching the extrusion. If the bracket were, say, 10mm thick and the nut is 6mm thick, you might use a 15mm long bolt to leave a millimeter margin. If the bolt is too short, the joint won’t be sturdy.
If you need to add something to the middle of an extrusion where you can’t access the entrance to the T slot, you’ll need a special kind of T nut. These are the least secure attachment but are often good enough. These nuts have an elliptical shape so that when they rotate 90 degrees they get stuck in the slot. There are also nuts that have springs or set screws so you can put them in the slot at an angle and then rotate the long edge to compress the spring, allowing the nut to clear the slot. When you let go, the spring pushes the nut into the edge of the slot, locking it in place. These are sometimes called drop-in or roll-in nuts.
You can also get T head bolts where the bolt head fits into the slot instead of the nut. These look like T nuts, but have a threaded bolt instead of a threaded hole. They also make T nuts that have multiple threaded holes. For example, a corner bracket — something we’ll talk about shortly — might have three holes spaced every 20mm, and there will be a corresponding nut with 3 holes with the same spacing. Of course, you could always just use three regular nuts.
Joining Extrusions
Just a few of the bracket types in the McMaster-Carr catalog.
You can attach a stepper motor bracket or a cabinet slide using T nuts and bolts. But you can also attach a bracket to two or more extrusions to join them together. They make these brackets in aluminum, steel, or polymer, of course, but you can also 3D print them. However, you need to be careful. Usually, the brackets only constrain the extrusions in two dimensions, so you’ll want to use a second method to overconstrain the joint.
Most brackets are exactly what you’d think — they are shaped somewhat like an L or a T or a plus sign but there are a
dizzying array of options
. There are also corner connectors for making boxes that have an XYZ configuration. However, you can also get inner brackets that look like two T nuts in an L shape. A set screw holds each leg of the L in place. Some have an angled set screw to help align the connection in which case, you have to use a different type of inner connector depending on which way the connector faces. You’ll usually use these in pairs to hold both sides of the extrusion, although that’s not always necessary. You can see an example of a simple inner connector in the video below.
Sometimes you want to just join two extrusions end-to-end. A linear connector can do that. It is just a strip of metal that fits in the slot and has a few holes for set screws. You can also get brackets that will let you put a piece of extrusion in as a diagonal brace for extra strength.
There is also a simple way to connect two extrusions without using a bracket at all. It is more work, though, but uses fewer parts. Suppose you want to join extrusion A and B at a right angle. Your first step is to tap the central hole (or holes) in extrusion A. Then you drill a normal hole through extrusion B big enough to get a hex key for your bolt through the hole. You thread a bolt into the threaded hole, but before it is tight, you slide the head of the bolt into B’s T slot. The hole in B is positioned so you can finish tightening the bolt.
Accessories
There are many things made to work with extrusions you can get from the same place you buy them. There are cover plates, feet, and casters. You can get springs that hold sheet material like acrylic in the T slot. There are wheels, doors, handles, and hinges all made to fit into T slots.
If you browse any of the 3D printing sites like Thingiverse, you’ll find there are many designs for things like
spool holders
, filament guides, tool holders, and lamps that will fit in a T slot either as a friction fit or by mounting with nuts. Just remember that if you want to add something later and it needs screws, you’ll probably want some kind of drop-in nut.
Where to Get Extrusion
The cheapest way to buy extrusion is to get it surplus in whatever lengths you can get — usually leftovers — and cut them to the size you want yourself. If you do cut it yourself, you’ll want to be sure to make a clean and square cut so that the extrusions square up when you attach them together. You’ll want to use a metal cutting blade, of course.
However, if you buy new extrusions you can usually get them cut very precisely to whatever size you need. This may also cut down on expensive shipping for long pieces that you’ll cut anyway. In addition to cuts, you can often get the material in different colors or metal alloys. You can also ask for holes on one or both ends to be tapped if you prefer not to do that yourself.
There are many places you can buy extrusions and related items.
Misumi
is a common option as is
8020
. The big suppliers like
Grainger
,
Fastenal
, and
McMaster-Carr
carry a lot of this sort of thing, but they are often pretty expensive.
The 3D Printing Connection
Plastic printed extrusions with metal T nuts. Note the ball spring on the leftmost uninstalled nut.
You can 3D print a lot of
brackets
(including one that is apparently the
world’s best
) and
accessories
and if you want to model something, you can even 3D print
extrusions
, although you need your print tolerances pretty tight. There are many designs for
plastic T nuts
that take a normal nut for threading and a plethora of brackets of all descriptions.
There are a few things to watch out for, though. First, use common sense. plastic brackets and extrusions won’t be as strong as those made of metal, although we’ve seen people
go overboard with the idea
. Also, not all extrusions are exactly the same, so a design for a nut that fits brand X might not fit the ones you have. As always with 3D printing, you’ll need to tweak and adjust.
If you want to get fancy with your designs and maybe even use
3D printed holders for cheap nuts
. Either way, if you are building a desk, a machine, a robot, or nearly anything else you can imagine, aluminum extrusions are a great thing to have in your toolkit. | 64 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6351598",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2021-05-25T17:19:30",
"content": "Nice summary; thanks! Can we get a compare and contrast on extrusion versus channel strut? (I have one thing in my house Frankensteined together from both metric extrusion and imperial channel strut…) DIN r... | 1,760,373,074.038082 |
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