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https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/stepper-motor-analyzer-reveals-all/ | Stepper Motor Analyzer Reveals All | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"stepper motor",
"stepper motor analyzer"
] | In theory, you really don’t need much to work with electronics. A scope ought to do everything. However, for special purposes, it is handy to have meters, logic analyzers, and other special-purpose instruments. If you work on motion systems like 3D printers and CNC machines, you ought to have a way to look at stepper motors. You don’t? [Zapta] has a great
Simple Stepper Motor Analyzer
and [Teaching Tech]
has a great video
(see below) that shows some of the great things it can do.
What can it do? It analyzes the motor in place and can visualize what’s happening during stepping, microstepping, and other operating modes. Connecting the instrument is easy since you just use a four-pin pass-through connector.
The video has a good explanation of how steppers work including looking at a motor torn down, which is interesting all by itself. Watching the drive waveform for microsteps is a good way to show off the use of the tool.
The tool looks quite useful for setting stepper drive current and the video shows doing that both with a manual adjustment or using G-code, including some thermal images of hot drivers.
Overall, this looks like a useful tool if you run steppers. The CPU driving the machine is a STM32 “
black pill
” and there’s a TFT display, obviously. A EEPROM and two current sensor chips round out the bill of materials. The FAQ mentions that since device has a USB serial port, so with some changes to the firmware, you could remove the display and just operate from a host computer if you wanted to simplify the project. If you want to learn more about the art of driving steppers, grab
a PAL and a 555
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342358",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T10:16:23",
"content": "Nice one thanks for post :-)We need to be alert to developing improved metrology across so many disciplines so we can examine the details at least and discover new opportunit... | 1,760,373,109.253402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/visual-raspberry-pi-with-node-red-and-tensorflow/ | Visual Raspberry Pi With Node-Red And TensorFlow | Al Williams | [
"Machine Learning",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"nodered",
"raspberry pi",
"tensorflow"
] | If you prefer to draw boxes instead of writing code, you may have tried IBM’s Node-RED to create logic with drag-and-drop flows. A recent [TensorFlow] video shows an interview between [Jason Mayes] and [Paul Van Eck] about using TensorFlow.js with Node-RED to create machine learning applications for Raspberry Pi visually. You can see the video, below.
The video doesn’t go into much detail since it is only ten minutes long. But it does show how easy it is to do things like identify images using an existing TensorFlow model. There is a
more detailed tutorial available
, as well as a
corresponding video
, which you can see below.
As a concrete example, [Paul] uses a simple sensor to identify his cat and then rings a doorbell to frighten the cat off the table. In a more topical example, a system sprays down anyone not wearing a face mask.
Perhaps a more practical example shows a garage door opener that identifies a car by its license plate number. We aren’t sure if it would open for a piece of posterboard with the license plate number written on it, or a picture of the plate. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342315",
"author": "Greg Chabala",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T05:55:20",
"content": "> If you prefer to draw boxes instead of writing codeNope, precondition failed. I’ll pass.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342354",
"... | 1,760,373,110.073125 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/make-your-own-variable-inductor/ | Make Your Own Variable Inductor | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"inductor",
"variable inductor"
] | Inductors are not the most common component these days and variable ones seem even less common. However, with a ferrite rod and some 3D printing, [drjaynes] shows how to
make your own variable inductor
. You can see him show the device off in the video below.
The coil itself is just some wire, but the trick is moving the ferrite core in and out of the core. The first version used some very thick wire and produced an inductor that varied from 6 to 22 microhenrys. Switching to 22 gauge wire allowed more wire on the form. That pushed the value range to 2 to 12 millihenrys.
What can you do with an inductor? For this type of inductor, you are usually interested in resonating a capacitor either for an oscillator or a filter of some kind. You see big roller variable inductors in antenna matching circuits, but it is doubtful that these inductors would be suitable for transmitting unless it was with very low power.
There are many ways to measure inductance, especially so today. The video shows an LCR meter and network analyzer. But it is easy enough to use a simple LC oscillator and measure the output with a scope or use a
grid dip oscillator
if you happen to have one. In the vein of making things easier, though, we really wanted to see [drjaynes] build a
coil winder
if he plans to make many of these. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342291",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T02:23:44",
"content": "Variable inductors are easy. Wind the coil on a coil form, and then a core of something moves up and down. So the coil form might be threaded, and a powdered iron core (threaded on the outside) g... | 1,760,373,109.527376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/heating-a-home-with-sunlight-and-water/ | Heating A Home With Sunlight… And Water | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"dutch",
"geothermal",
"heat",
"home",
"pipe",
"rooftop",
"solar",
"Thermal"
] | The sun is a tremendous source of energy, and while photovoltaic panels are an easy way to harvest some of that energy especially now that prices for them are incredibly low, there are plenty of other ways to tap into that free energy as well. [Engelbert] was looking for alternative ways to heat his house since traditional methods were prohibitively expensive, and ended up
building a heat exchanger using solar-heated water to cover his home heating needs
. (
Google Translate from Dutch
)
The system uses several large roof-mounted hot water heating panels. The heat captured by them is then pumped into an underground pipe network which is able to warm up a large area of earth in the summer. In the winter, that heat is able to be extracted back out of the earth and used to heat his home. The system includes almost three kilometers of pipe which are buried two meters below grade, so this will probably not be a weekend project, but it still cost much less than the €80,000 to install gas heating in his home.
[Engelbert] is able to use this self-built system to keep his home and another smaller building at a constant 23°C all year. He actually overbuilt the system slightly and has since disconnected almost half of the pipes, but we certainly understand the desire to over-engineer things around here. The only problem he has had is with various government entities that are slow to adopt energy-efficient systems like these.
Perhaps the Dutch government can take some notes from the Swiss
when it comes to installing geothermal systems like these.
Thanks to [Jero] for the tip! | 64 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342245",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T23:11:24",
"content": "I can relate to his woes with the government – I wanted to do something as simple as putting hydronic inslab heating in my workshop shed when it was built and the inspector just couldnt get his head aroun... | 1,760,373,109.355954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/turn-on-your-lights-with-a-wave-of-a-magic-wand/ | Turn On Your Lights With A Wave Of A Magic Wand | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth low energy",
"DA14531"
] | Smartphones and voice assistants are the typical way most of us interact with our smart devices around the home, but it doesn’t have to be the only way. [Sam March] wanted things to feel a little more magical –
so built a wand to do the job instead.
The wand relies on a DA14531 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) system-on-chip, and is paired with what appear to be smart plugs running on the same hardware. With an accelerometer in the wand, it’s able to detect waving motions, and then signal the smartplugs over Bluetooth to switch outlets on or off. As far as the magic side of things is concerned, [Sam] took his lead from [Arthur C. Clarke], who famously stated “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Thus, efforts were made to miniaturize the electronics down to a single tiny PCB, allowing it to be secreted inside a turned wooden wand that’s wrapped in leather.
The end result is a fun project that’s also probably useful when [Sam] wants to turn the lights off without getting out of bed. We could imagine that, configured properly to work on a room-by-room basis, it could be useful for guests who don’t know where the light switches are.
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard from [Sam] before –
with his great DIY smartwatch build.
Video after the break. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342215",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T20:09:35",
"content": "Remember… “Swish and flick”… Lumos …. or…… Nox to turn the lights off. 🧙♂️",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6342216",
"author": "Garth Bock",... | 1,760,373,109.475225 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/librevna-is-a-quality-open-hardware-vector-network-analyser/ | LibreVNA Is A Quality Open Hardware Vector Network Analyser | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"LibreVNA",
"Vector Network Analyser",
"vna"
] | There was a time when a Vector Network Analyser or VNA was the type of instrument that cost as much as a very fancy car or even a small house. The advent of commodity semiconductors that perform at high RF frequencies coupled with microcontrollers powerful enough to handle the data acquisition and processing might not yet have put those high-perfomance instruments within reach, but at our end of the market it’s opened the possibilities for some useful yet affordable devices. A fresh contender comes from [Jankae], whose
LibreVNA
tops out at 6 GHz and shows some significant attention to design detail that puts it above some of the budget offerings.
At its heart is the versatile Si5351 multi-way clock generator, accompanied by a pair of MAX2871 phase-locked-loop chips for the higher frequency local oscillators. A switched bank of low-pass filters take care of local oscillator harmonics, and in the receive chain there are ADL5081 mixers feeding a dual conversion IF running at 70 MHz and then 300 kHz. Finally the ADCs are Microchip’s MCP3313, and all is kept in sync by an FPGA and an STM32G431 microcontroller. The main data proccessing is offloaded to a host computer, with a software package and GUI able to be compiled on Windows, Linux, and OSX.
The PCB shows the attention to detail, not least in the power supply arrangements, with every major component receiving its own regulator to ensure no RF makes it down the power rails. It’s clear that a properly made LibreVNA won’t be as cheap as some of its rivals, but we think the corresponding performance hike would make the extra cost worthwhile.
If VNAs are new to you,
we covered an introduction from [W2AEW] a while back
. | 39 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342181",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T18:31:49",
"content": "That circuit board should be made large enough for children to play cars on!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342419",
"author": "CW",
... | 1,760,373,109.768723 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/hands-on-with-pinecube-an-open-ip-camera-begging-for-better-kernel-support/ | Hands-On With PineCube: An Open IP Camera Begging For Better Kernel Support | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"Allwinner",
"ip camera",
"Pine64",
"PineCube",
"s3",
"Sochip"
] | When the PineCube was announced by the Pine64 project in 2020, it created
a fair bit of interest
. Most of this was due to the appeal of a single-board computer (SBC) in a network-based (IP) camera form factor with integrated camera module, for a mere $29.99. Add an enclosure to it, and you would have a neat little package combining a 5 MP camera module with 100 Mbit Ethernet and WiFi. As a bonus, the system could be powered either via an optional battery pack as well as passive PoE, in addition to MicroUSB.
A few weeks ago
I bought two of these boards
, as part of a client project, and set out to use it for a custom IP camera implementation. With existing Linux-on-SBC and MIPI (CSI) camera experience on my end ranging from the Raspberry Pi to the Odroid, Orange Pi and Banana Pi boards, I felt fairly confident that I could make it work with minimal fuss.
Unfortunately, my experiences were anything but positive. After spending many hours with the PineCube, I’m not able to recommend it for those seeking an IP camera. There are many reasons for this, which I’ll try to explain in this article.
First Impressions
The front of the PineCube, with the lens cap removed.
Ordering these two PineCube boards (PineCubes?) was a somewhat curious experience, even if one is used to ordering hardware online. After clicking through the dialogs in the Pine64 Store and paying for the order (selecting standard shipping), I got a confirmation email. There was no estimated shipping date, but after waiting for a few weeks and wondering whether I would ever get an update, I got a notification that my order had shipped, along with a tracking link.
This tracking ended somewhere at the customs office, so that one day I suddenly was handed the parcel with the PineCubes. Inside the plain cardboard box were the two small white boxes, each containing a PineCube board in a little baggy. During the unboxing I was concerned about tearing off some wires or flex cable while extracting the contraption from the soft baggy.
The enclosure for the PineCube which one cannot get. Yet.
The speaker module is dangling at the end of its two rather long wires, and I felt it necessary to check the flat flex which connects the two boards that make up the system (is Dual-Board Computer a term yet?), in case it had become dislodged. It does not feel like the kind of board you want to handle too often, like one would a Raspberry Pi or similar. It feels fragile and you wish that you could put it into an enclosure right away to keep it safe, with no truly stable orientation to put it down on a desk.
Since the
PineCube Wiki
page contains a link to what should be an STL file of the case that would be put later on sale – according to
a recent blog post
– I had figured that I’d print a copy on the 3D printer I have standing around here before the boards got here. Unfortunately, as people in the comments to that blog post noted, no STL files were posted, but proprietary SolidWorks CAD files. Three months later still no STL files are available (
Update
: a “quick and dirty STL conversion” was added between writing and publishing this review). No enclosure is available for sale yet.
EoL Sensors and Linux Support
There is a GPIO header that provides a UART, SPI, I2C and such as well.
With the enclosure just being a ‘nice to have’ detail in the bigger picture (pun intended), I then focused on the functional parts of the hardware which I had received. It is rather disappointing to see the camera is an
OV5640
, a roughly 9-year old sensor that has been End-of-Life for a while now. It makes the PineCube’s future seem rather dubious and probably short-lived.
On the bright side, this also means that support for it under Linux is no problem, with Video4Linux (v4l) happily accepting it as an input source when setting up an RTMP stream using ffmpeg. This is quite different from the situation with the GPU in the S3 SoC, however. As one can see on the ‘
Linux mainlining effort
‘ page over at Linux-sunxi, Linux kernel 5.11 is the first to list S3 support as having been merged. S3 support in kernel 5.10 is done via the V3s SoC support, as one can tell when looking at the hardware overlay file in
Armbian for PineCube
, which is using kernel 5.10. The S3 and Allwinner V3 SoCs are derived, so some compatibility there makes sense.
A look inside the PineCube. Notice the easily damaged wires.
At this point in time, Video Encoding is still WIP (Work In Progress). This means that ffmpeg, gstreamer, or whichever graphics framework one uses for video encoding has to do all of this in software, using the single Cortex-A7 CPU core and NEON vector processing extensions. With a simple RTMP stream from the camera, this seemed to be sufficiently performant.
The PineCube also has a speaker, as mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, this cannot be used currently, with no audio device being registered. It appears that support for this may arrive with the next Armbian release, however, courtesy of an improved hardware overlay fix that was
recently contributed
.
Use as a Camera
In general use, the PineCube is much like any other SBC. You download the image for the target board, write it to a MicroSD card and insert it into the board’s MicroSD card reader before turning the system on. Since the PineCube has no video outputs, interaction methods are limited to either a serial connection, or SSH (if hooked up to Ethernet). After establishing a console connection using either method, logging into Armbian is as simple as 1234. (That’s the default root password.)
Once logged into Armbian, getting to the point where it’s possible to set up an RTMP stream takes little more than installing media-ctl (package v4l-utils) and ffmpeg, before running the following commands to set up a 640×480 FLV-encoded stream to an RTMP server:
$ media-ctl --set-v4l2 '"ov5640 1-003c":0[fmt:UYVY8_2X8/640x480@1/15]'
$ ffmpeg -s 640x480 -r 15 -i /dev/video0 -vcodec flv -f flv rtmp://<rtmp_server>/live/pinecube
After running this command and connecting to the RTMP server with a player from a desktop system, the video from the PineCube can now be observed in glorious 640×480 at 15 FPS, with a few second delay. The FPS can be increased to 30 FPS at 1080p, but without hardware encoding support, this may result in stuttering and glitches.
While setting up the system, I noticed that it would reliably hang while downloading some resources via HTTP and only resume again after the HTTP download timed out. When I kept
top
open in another SSH terminal, I could see that the system load went up to 12 and beyond, as the system’s 111 MB of RAM (out of a total of 128 MB) filled up, along with the swap.
This same pattern repeated when I tried to set up an RTMP stream which added more local processing (h.264 encoding) and a custom security layer (encryption). Without hardware encoding support, I could see system load skyrocket until the system stopped responding. Sending Ctrl+C via the SSH terminal eventually worked after about a ten-minute delay.
The S3 SoC
The S3 SoC can be spotted deep inside the PineCube stack.
When I compare the PineCube to other SBCs I have worked with, the S3 SoC on this particular board seems to be the main limiting factor, and in particular the low amount of RAM and ongoing lack of hardware support. It seems to be first and foremost an SoC aimed at low-cost IP cameras, which means that trying to exceed the limitations that come with that focus will come with repercussions.
In that regard it is fascinating to see that Olimex are also planning to release an S3-based board this year, in the form of the
S3-OLinuXino
. Perhaps that having more open source boards like this around helps with increasing the support for these more obscure SoCs. What is clear to me is that without full hardware support, particularly for video encoding, the uses of these platforms will be limited.
Wrapping up
For the more casual user, I might compare the $30 PineCube with the above considerations, and something like the Raspberry Pi Zero W ($18) or
Banana Pi M2 Zero
(Allwinner H2+ SoC, $25), along with something like the
Raspberry Pi V2 camera
module with Sony IMX219 8 MP camera module ($25). For less than $50 one would have a board with more RAM (even the RPi Zero has 512 MB), a better camera, as well as the option of ready to buy or print enclosures (including with camera module).
Both the Allwinner H2+ and Raspberry Pi Zero’s BCM2835 SoCs have had mainline Linux support for years, including things like video encoding. All of this leads one to wonder just what exactly the
raison d’être
of the PineCube is, along with that of the presence of the S3 SoC in more general settings.
As for the more specialized setting for which I bought these PineCube boards, I’m fairly confident that it can be made to work, and very likely most lingering issues and gaps in hardware support will be resolved over time. After this experience, I do however feel that it is not the right platform for anyone who does not feel inclined to put in significant amounts of time to make even basic things work. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342170",
"author": "macegr",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T17:48:59",
"content": "“Significant amounts of time to make even basic things work” is pretty much PINE64’s brand. The products are cheap at least, and the draw of collaborative hacking is fun, but dragging something out of gong... | 1,760,373,109.426275 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/24/fail-of-the-week-mistaking-units-for-values/ | Fail Of The Week: Mistaking Units For Values | Jenny List | [
"Fail of the Week",
"Parts"
] | [
"fail",
"SN65220",
"units"
] | Usually when we post a Fail Of The Week, it’s a heroic tale of a project made with the best of intentions that somehow failed to hit its mark. The communicator that didn’t, or the 3D-printed linkage that pushed the boundaries of squirted plastic a little bit too far. But today we’re bringing you something from a source that should be above reproach, thanks to [Boldport] bringing us
a Twitter conversation between [Stargirl] and [Ticktok]
about a
Texas Instruments datasheet
.
The SN65220 schematic
The
SN65220
is a suppressor chip for USB ports, designed to protect whatever the USB hardware is from voltage spikes. You probably have several of them without realising it, the tiny six-pin package nestling on the PCB next to the USB connector. Its data sheet reveals that it needs a resistor network between it and the USB device it protects, and it’s this that is the source of the fail.
There are two resistors, a 15kO and a 27O, 15k ohms, and 270 ohms, right? Looking more closely though, that 27O is not 270 with a zero, but 27O with a capital “O”, so in fact 27 ohms.
The symbol for resistance has for many decades been an uppercase Greek Omega, or Ω. It’s understood that sometimes a typeface doesn’t contain Greek letters, so there is a widely used convention of using an uppercase “R” to represent it, followed by a “K” for kilo-ohms, an “M” for mega-ohms, and so on. Thus a 270 ohm resistor will often be written as 270R, and 270 kilo-ohm one as 270K. In the case of a fractional value the convention is to put the fraction after the letter, so for example 2.7kilo-ohms becomes 2K7. For some reason the editor of the TI datasheet has taken it upon themselves to use an uppercase “O” to represent “Ohms”, leading to ambiguity over values below 1 kilo-ohm.
We can’t imagine an engineer would have made that choice so we’re looking towards their publishing department on this one, and meanwhile we wonder how many USB devices have gone to manufacture with a 270R resistor in their data path. After all,
putting the wrong resistor in can affect any of us
. | 93 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342720",
"author": "JW",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T17:15:22",
"content": "k for kilo is lowercase. Uppercase K is Kelvin.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342726",
"author": "DZK",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T17:3... | 1,760,373,109.656694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/24/hack-the-cloud/ | Hack The Cloud! | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"api",
"flexibility",
"future",
"hackers",
"newsletter",
"open",
"the cloud"
] | The obvious rants against software or services “in the cloud” are that you don’t own it, your data isn’t on your own hard drive, or that, when the interwebs are down, you just can’t get your work done. But the one that really grinds my gears is that, at least for many cloud services, you just can’t play around with them. Why does that matter? Well, as a hacker type, of course, I like to fool around, but more deeply, I feel that this invitation to play around is what’s going to grow up the next generation of hackers. Openness matters not just for now, but also for the future.
Of course, it’s unfair to pin all of this on the cloud. There are plenty of services with nice open APIs that let you play around with their systems as much as you want — witness the abundance of amusing things you can do with Twitter or Twitch. Still, every day seems to bring another formerly-open API that gets bought up by some wealthy company and shut down. I built a nice “is it going to rain today” display out of a meter-long WS2812 strip and an ESP8266, but
Dark Sky API got bought up by Apple and is going dark
soon (tee-hee!) leaving me thinking of how I’m going to get easy weather data in the next few months.
Or take my e-mail annunciator. I wrote a little script that, when I have new mail that’s work related or from my wife (read: important), it displays the subject line on a VFD that I have perched on my monitor. This works with Gmail, which I have to use for work, because they support IMAP so at least I can do cool things with the mail once it reaches my server. But can I do anything with Google Groups, which we use for the
Hackaday Tip Line
? Fat chance!
So there’s good “cloud” and there’s bad “cloud”. Good cloud is open cloud. Good cloud invites you to play, to innovate, and to come up with the right solutions for yourself. Good cloud gives you access to your data. Good cloud is hackable cloud. Let’s see more of that.
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
! | 33 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342707",
"author": "Cbob",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T15:36:42",
"content": "Google Groups is still a thing? LOL",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342708",
"author": "Bryce Schroeder",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T15... | 1,760,373,109.925093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/24/taking-reverse-engineering-to-the-skies-cheap-drone-gets-px4-autopilot/ | Taking Reverse Engineering To The Skies: Cheap Drone Gets PX4 Autopilot | Stephen Ogier | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"Autopilot",
"autopilot board",
"PX4",
"quadcopter",
"reverse engineering",
"STM32F405RG"
] | Sometimes bad software is all that is holding good hardware back. [Michael Melchior] wanted to scavenge some motors and propellers for another project, so he bought an inexpensive quadcopter intending to use it for parts. [Michael] was so surprised at the quality of the hardware contained in his $100 drone that he decided to reverse engineer his quadcopter and give the autopilot firmware a serious upgrade.
Upon stripping the drone down, [Michael] found that it came with a flight management unit based on the STM32F405RG, an Inertial Measurement Unit, magnetic compass, barometric pressure sensor, GPS, WiFi radio, camera with tilt, optical flow sensor, and ultrasonic distance sensor, plus batteries and charger! The flight management unit also had unpopulated headers for SWD, and—although the manufacturer’s firmware was protected from reading—write protection hadn’t been enabled, so [Michael] was free to flash his own firmware.
We highly recommend you
take a look at [Michael]’s
10 part
tour de force of reverse engineering
which includes a man-in-the-middle attack with a Raspberry Pi to work out its WiFi communication, porting
the open-source autopilot PX4
to the new airframe, and deciphering unknown serial protocols. There are even amusing shenanigans like putting batteries in the oven and freezer to help figure out which registers are used as temperature sensors. He achieves liftoff at the end, and we can’t wait to see what else he’s able to make it do in the future.
Of course,
[Michael] is no stranger to hacking imported quadcopters
, and if you’re interested in PX4 but want something quieter than a quadcopter, take a look at this
autopilot-equipped glider. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342672",
"author": "Boost-dead boards",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T12:56:32",
"content": "If only someone could work their reverse engineering wizardry on the boosted boards battery and esc firmware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,373,109.697729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/24/wspr-may-hold-the-key-to-mh370-final-position/ | WSPR May Hold The Key To MH370 Final Position | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"big data",
"MH370",
"wspr"
] | The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 after an unexplained course change sent it flying south over the Indian Ocean in March 2014 still holds the mystery of the wreck’s final location. There have been a variety of efforts to narrow down a possible search area over the years, and now we have news of a further angle from an unexpected source. It’s possible that the aircraft’s path could
show up in radio scatter detectable as anomalously long-distance contacts using the amateur radio WSPR protocol
.
WSPR
is a low-power amateur radio mode designed to probe and record the radio propagation capabilities of the atmosphere. Transmit beacons and receiving stations run continuously, and all contacts however fleeting are recorded to an online database. This can be mined by researchers with an interest in the atmosphere, but in this case it might also provide clues to the missing airliner’s flightpath. By searching for anomalously long-distance WSPR contacts whose path crosses the expected position of MH370 it’s possible to spot moments when the aircraft formed a reflector for the radio waves. These contacts can then either confirm positions already estimated using other methods, or even provide further course points. It’s an impressive demonstration of the unexpected data that can lurk in a trove such as the WSPR logbook, and also that while messing about on the airwaves the marks we leave behind us can have more benefit than simply bragging rights over the DX we’ve worked.
If this WSPR business intrigues you, then
have a read of the piece in our
$50 Ham
series about it
.
Header: Laurent ERRERA from L’Union, France,
CC BY-SA 2.0
.
[via
Southgate ARC
] | 53 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342636",
"author": "Grumpy",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T09:29:35",
"content": "Sensational news! We found the wreckage!! Oh, no… It’s just a twitter sized speculation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6342639",
"author": "Saa... | 1,760,373,110.018984 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/building-a-gas-powered-pressure-washer/ | Building A Gas-Powered Pressure Washer | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"pressure washer",
"sprayer",
"workshop from scratch"
] | While you can always buy the tools you need, there’s something to be said for the satisfaction gained when you pick up a tool you built yourself. [Workshop From Scratch] has built a following out of building his own gear,
the latest of which involved putting together a gas-powered pressure washer
.
The key to the build was to keep things completely self-contained. All the consumables – water, soap, and wax – are kept onboard the washer to avoid having to run hoses and so on. A small gas engine is the heart of the build, hooked up to a high-pressure water pump. It even comes complete with a starter motor, making it a certified luxury garden tool. It’s also hooked up to two tanks holding cleaning solutions for car washing purposes, which feed into the pump via an auxiliary port for mixing. It’s all assembled on a custom steel frame welded together from rectangular hollow sections.
It’s a build that demonstrates how you can use your skills to build tools that suit your workflow, rather than just putting up with whatever is available off-the-shelf. We’ve seen his work before, too –
building other tools like this motorised plasma cutter.
Video after the break. | 23 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342622",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T07:34:56",
"content": "Nice job. Not cheap. Definitely do not want one. I’d never get any sleep since my wife would have me washing everything in and around the house. Now just need a way to refine your own gas or use some othe... | 1,760,373,110.474192 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/debug-arm-virtually/ | Debug ARM Virtually | Al Williams | [
"ARM"
] | [
"arm",
"arm cortex",
"qemu"
] | With the advent of super powerful desktop computers, many developers make use of some sort of virtual or psuedo-virtual machines (VM). We run Windows in a VM and do kernel development in a VM, too. If you are emulating the same kind of computer you are on then the process is simpler, but it is possible to run, say, ARM code on an x86 (or vice versa) but with possibly slower performance than running natively. QEMU is probably the best-known program that allows a CPU to run code targeting a different CPU, but — by default — it targets desktop, laptop, and server-class machines, not tiny embedded boards. That’s where
xPack QEMU Arm
comes in. It allows you to run and debug embedded Cortex-M devices in an emulated environment on a host computer.
The tool supports boards like the Maple — which means it should support
bluepill
, along with popular boards such as the Nucleo, some discovery boards, and several from Olimex. They have plans to support several popular boards from TI, Freescale, and others, but no word on when that will happen. You can see a decidedly simple video example from [EmbeddedCraft] of blinking a virtual LED in the video below, although you might like to mute your audio before playing it.
Of course, there are limitations. You don’t get floating point M4 instructions, for example. The interrupt handling is reportedly not very high-fidelity. You can write debug messages to a UART, but you can use semihosting to write to a file descriptor on the host computer.
The code is made to work with Eclipse, although we bet it will work with
other IDEs
, too. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342604",
"author": "MOS 6502 A:00 X:C0 Y:00 SP:BD PC:0000 P:16",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T03:55:54",
"content": "Not the only time we have been working on rebuilding transistor level simulation virtually though this is more hardware emulation. Though the 6502 isn’t exactly running ... | 1,760,373,110.332437 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/modding-a-hot-wheels-car-into-a-radio-controlled-drift-weapon/ | Modding A Hot Wheels Car Into A Radio Controlled Drift Weapon | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"R/C car",
"radio control",
"radio controlled car",
"rc"
] | Hot Wheels are some of the most popular diecast toy cars worldwide. The car bodies are faithful recreations of the real thing, though the models are mere stationary playthings. That wasn’t good enough for [Jakarta Diecast Project],
who set about modifying a little BMW E30 M3 into an awesome radio-controlled drift car
.
The build starts by disassembling the original car, and pulling out the original wheels. The baseplate is then modified to accept a new rear suspension and axle assembly. A small DC motor is mounted to the assembly to drive the rear wheels. A set of front steering knuckles are then installed up front, with their own suspension and hooked up to a tiny servo for steering. Everything’s controlled by a compact off-the-shelf RC receiver, which even features a gyro to help keep the tiny car straight under acceleration. The bodyshell is then stripped of paint, and given a sweet bodykit, before receiving a lurid orange paint job and decals. It’s reattached to the car’s baseplate via magnets, which make taking the car apart easy when service or modifications are required.
While the build doesn’t go into the nitty gritty on some of the harder parts, like the construction of the incredibly complex front knuckles, it’s nonetheless a great guide to building such a tiny and well-presented RC car. In looks and performance, the result trounces typical commercial offerings in the same scale, as you’d expect from such a hand-crafted masterpiece.
It may not be the smallest RC car we’ve featured
, but it is one of the coolest. Video after the break. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342589",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-04-24T01:41:25",
"content": "I didn’t think I was going to hang around to watch the entire video.But, I was wrong.That is a cool build.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342601",
... | 1,760,373,110.524713 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/ooohhh-that-smell-arduino-monitors-air-quality/ | Ooohhh, That Smell: Arduino Monitors Air Quality | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"air pollution",
"air quality",
"arduino",
"nova pm sensor",
"pm10",
"pm2.5",
"pollution"
] | According to [Dr. Tom Lehrer’s] song
Pollution
, “Wear a gas mask and a veil. Then you can breathe, long as you don’t inhale!” While the air quality in most of the world hasn’t gotten that bad, there is a lot of concern about long-term exposure to particulates in the air causing health problems. [Ashish Choudhary] married
an Arduino with a display and a pollution sensor
to give readings of the PM2.5 and PM10 levels in the air.
The sensor uses a laser diode and a photodiode to detect and count particles, while a fan moves air through the system. If you aren’t up on pollution metrics, PM2.5 is a count of very fine particles (under 2.5 microns) and PM10 is a count of particles for 10 microns. You can find a
datasheet
for the device online.
One thing to note is that the sensor has a finite lifespan. The datasheet claims “up to” 8,000 hours. If you ran the sensor continuously that’s not quite a year, so you might want to be judicious about how often you light up the device.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this
particular sensor
. If you want to find the exact source of a pollutant, consider
this build
. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342527",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T20:58:46",
"content": "Use an SPS30 instead. PM1, 2.5, 4 and 10 in one, certified package.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342605",
"author": "RÖB",
"timest... | 1,760,373,110.588779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/pi-based-spectrometer-puts-the-complexity-in-the-software/ | Pi-Based Spectrometer Puts The Complexity In The Software | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"diffraction",
"laser",
"optics",
"Pi Cam",
"python",
"raspberry pi",
"spectrometer",
"spectroscope",
"spectrum"
] | Play around with optics long enough and sooner or later you’re probably going to want a spectrometer. Optical instruments are famously expensive, though, at least for high-quality units. But a useful spectrometer, like
this DIY Raspberry Pi-based instrument
, doesn’t necessarily have to break the bank.
This one comes to us by way of [Les Wright], whose
homebrew laser builds
we’ve been admiring for a while now. [Les] managed to keep the costs to a minimum here by keeping the optics super simple. The front end of the instrument is just a handheld diffraction-grating spectroscope, of the kind used in physics classrooms to demonstrate the spectral characteristics of different light sources. Turning it from a spectroscope to a spectrometer required a Raspberry Pi and a camera; mounted to a lens and positioned to see the spectrum created by the diffraction grating, the camera sends data to the Pi, where a Python program does the business of converting the spectrum to data. [Les]’s software is simple by complete, giving a graphical representation of the spectral data it sees. The video below shows the build process and what’s involved in calibrating the spectrometer, plus some of the more interesting spectra one can easily explore.
We appreciate the simplicity and the utility of this design, as well as its adaptability. Rather than using machined aluminum, the spectroscope holder and Pi cam bracket could easily be 3D-printer, and we could also see how the software could be adapted to use a PC and webcam. | 43 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342489",
"author": "julian martinez",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T19:13:50",
"content": "nice HW/SW project and very well explained",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342516",
"author": "Les Wright",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,373,110.414124 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/paper-bottles-for-your-fizzy-drinks-and-bottle-rockets/ | “Paper” Bottles For Your Fizzy Drinks (And Bottle Rockets) | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Interest",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"bottle",
"drinks bottle",
"packaging",
"paper bottle",
"pet"
] | A story that passed almost unnoticed was that
the Coca-Cola company plan to run a limited trial of paper bottles
. Wait, paper for a pressurized beverage? The current incarnation still uses a plastic liner and cap but future development will focus on a “bio-based barrier” and a bio composite or paper cap tethered to the vessel.
Given that plastic pollution is now a major global concern this is interesting news, as plastic drinks bottles make a significant contribution to that problem. But it raises several questions, first of all why are we seemingly unable to recycle the bottles in the first place, and given that we have received our milk and juice in paper-based containers for decades why has it taken the soda industry so long?
Plastic soft drink bottles are made from Polyethylene terephthalate or PET, the same polyester polymer as the one used in Dacron or Terylene fabrics. They’re blow-moulded, which is to say that an injection-moulded preform something like a plastic test tube with a screw top fitting is expanded from inside in a mould by compressed gas. As anyone who has experimented with bottle rockets will tell you, they are immensely strong, and as well as being cheap to make and transport they are also readily recyclable when separated from their caps.
The Perfect Product Turns Out To Be Less Perfect To Get Rid Of
Used plastic bottles collected for recycling. That’s a lot of space for not a lot of plastic. Radulf del Maresme,
CC BY-SA 4.0
So if plastic bottles are such a handy products, why are we seemingly so bad at recycling them? At fault is their low density, there’s very little plastic in a typical drink bottle for something that takes up quite a lot of space even when crushed. Handling them requires significant infrastructure, and as a result in many cases they end up either discarded as litter or entering the regular trash stream. In Germany they take a different approach to the recycling problem by applying a deposit to each bottle and re-using them, thus German plastic bottles are much thicker-walled than those in use elsewhere. This however requires both the political will to mandate it and a nationally-organised bottle handling industry to service it, something few nations are likely to embrace.
PET bottles suffer from one problem though that isn’t shared by their glass equivalents, they are gas-permeable. I learned this to my cost when I was much younger, when I made a batch of cider in plastic bottles it turned into vinegar over a few months as small quantities of air were able to make it through the plastic. If you leave a carbonated drink for long enough in its bottle it will eventually lose its fizz, so there’s a lower limit on the thickness of their plastic that doesn’t apply for short-shelf-life products in Tetra-Paks such as that milk or juice. So whatever paper bottle the soft-drink giant comes up with must be gas-tight enough to preserve the fizz as well as robust enough to survive transport and hold the CO2 pressure from the drink.
Paper with a Plastic Lining
The bottles they’re evaluating come from a Danish company,
PABOCO
. They promise a sustainable polymer vapour barrier and a wood pulp bottle shell strong enough to take the knocks, and we suspect that the “
Mobile connectivity to engage consumers to understand and ensure an afterlife
” will probably be a QR code to connect with the bottle spirit world.
Right now that’s just a promise from the company. The current revision of the container technology uses a “a preliminary plastic barrier film”. Given that existing paper-based cartons can present a significant recycling challenge due to their inseparable composite nature, we hope that one recycling problem won’t simply be replaced with another.
However, the plan is to further develop the technology and replace that plastic barrier:
The first-generation concept will be partly renewable and fully recyclable, but it is the next and following paper bottle generations barriers that will create a truly sustainable alternative.
We’re looking forward to the first paper bottles reaching a retail shelf so we can have a look for ourselves. | 144 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342449",
"author": "lol",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T17:23:04",
"content": "or just use aluminum?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342481",
"author": "tiranno",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T18:43:35",
"conte... | 1,760,373,110.818049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/hackaday-podcast-115-ai-is-bad-at-linux-terminal-puppeting-pico-in-python-3d-scanning-comes-up-short/ | Hackaday Podcast 115: AI Is Bad At Linux Terminal, Puppeting Pico In Python, 3D Scanning Comes Up Short | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams pull back the curtain on a week of excellent hacks. We saw an awesome use of RGB LEDs as a data channel on a drone, and the secrets of an IP camera’s OS laid bare with some neat reverse engineering tools. There’s an AI project for the Linux terminal that guesses at the commands you actually want to run. And after considering how far autopilot has come in the aerospace industry, we jump into a look at the gotchas you’ll find when working with models of 3D scanned objects.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(~60 MB)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 115 Show Notes:
New This Week:
The Wright Stuff: First Powered Flight On Mars Is A Success
Ping-Pong Ball Makes Great PID Example
Mike built a PID balancer but needs to rethink the sensor
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
LED Hack Teaches DJI Mini 2 Drone New Tricks
Camera Hack Peels Back Layers Of Embedded Linux
flashrom
Rizin
Bridging The PC And Embedded Worlds With Pico And Python
AI Makes Linux Do What You Mean, Not What You Say
Code Your Own Twitch Chat Controls For Robots — Or Just About Anything Else!
Adjustable, Piston-Damped Hammer
A Superheterodyne Receiver With A 74xx Twist
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks
A Faux BBS Gets Software On To Your Vintage Machines
Detergent DRM Defeated On Diminutive Dishwasher
The Beat Goes On With This ESP32 Page Turner
Elliot’s Picks
DOOM On A Bootloader Is The Ultimate Cheat Code
Kitchen Bump Bar Plays Doom Between Orders
E.T. Video Game Gets Re-Imagined In 10 Lines Of BASIC
Inside A DEC Hard Drive
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Crew Dragon’s Short Hop Begins The Era Of Valet Parking At The ISS
Can passenger jets land by themselves?
What’s It Doing Now?
The Role of Automation Dependency in Aviation Accidents
What To Expect From 3D Scanning, And How To Work With It | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342572",
"author": "redFrik",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T22:47:24",
"content": "vl53l0x sensor… make sure to remove the thin film lens protection.(been there, done that)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6343725",
"author": "Ta... | 1,760,373,111.040248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/an-anamorphic-lens-adapter-for-very-pretty-video/ | An Anamorphic Lens Adapter For Very Pretty Video | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"anamorphic lens",
"lens",
"lens adapter"
] | Anamorphic lenses are a great way to shoot in widescreen, but they’re prohibitively expensive on digital formats. Enthusiasts have experimented with using anamorphic adapter lenses from old projectors, but focusing can be a chore and results sub-par.
[Andrew] found a way to use these cheap old anamorphic adaptors on a modern camera without sacrificing too much functionality.
Pretty, no?
Anamorphic filming techniques came about in the era of film. The aim was to record cinema-style widescreen footage on 3:2 aspect ratio 35 mm film. The way this was done was by using a lens that squeezes a wide aspect ratio to fit the format, and then a corresponding lens to squeeze it back on the projector. This allows for higher resolution than simply letterboxing onto the 35 mm frame and wasting the extra space.
Adam’s hack involves 3D printing a lens housing that pairs an anamorphic projector adapter lens with a Sony E-mount taking lens. Gears are set up so that both lenses can be focused together, rather than typical adapter setups that require the user to juggle multiple focus rings at once. This makes the rig much more
usable
in real shoots where there’s no time for messing about.
It’s a useful hack, and one we could imagine quite a few low-budget filmmakers will be rushing out to replicate.
Files are on Thingiverse for the eager.
Consider whipping yourself up a camera slider while you’re at it for really boss shots
. Video after the break. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342457",
"author": "Leonard",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T17:46:39",
"content": "A very general instruction about very specific parts. Great work!I don’t see me replicating this though, as I probably can’t get hold of these specific lenses.Don’t let me hold back anyone to do this, I l... | 1,760,373,110.639174 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/this-week-in-security-namewreck-signal-hacks-back-updates-and-more/ | This Week In Security: NAME:WRECK, Signal Hacks Back, Updates, And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"pfsense",
"project zero",
"This Week in Security",
"Wireguard"
] | NAME:WRECK is a collection of vulnerabilities in DNS implementations,
discovered by Forescout and JSOF Research
. This body of research can be seen as a continuation of Ripple20 and AMNESIA:33, as it builds on a class of vulnerability discovered in other network stacks, problems with DNS message compression.
Their
PDF Whitepaper
contains a brief primer on the DNS message format, which is useful for understanding the class of problem. In such a message, a DNS name is encoded with a length-value scheme, with each full name ending in a null byte. So in a DNS Request, Hackaday.com would get represented as
[0x08]Hackaday[0x03]com[0x00]
. The dots get replaced by these length values, and it makes for an easily parsable format.
Very early on, it was decided that continually repeating the same host names in a DNS message was wasteful of space, so a compression scheme was devised. DNS compression takes advantage of the maximum host/domain length of 63 characters. This max size means that the binary representation of that length value will never contain “1”s in the first two digits. Since it can never be used, length values starting with a binary “11” are used to point to a previously occurring domain name. The 14 bits that follow this two bit flag are known as a compression pointer, and represent a byte offset from the beginning of the message. The DNS message parser pulls the intended value from that location, and then continues parsing.
The problems found were generally based around improper validation. For example, the NetX stack doesn’t check whether the compression pointer points at itself. This scenario leads to a tight infinite loop, a classic DoS attack. Other systems don’t properly validate the location being referenced, leading to data copy past the allocated buffer, leading to remote code execution (RCE). FreeBSD has this issue, but because it’s tied to DHCP packets, the vulnerability can only be exploited by a device on the local network. While looking for message compression issues, they also found a handful of vulnerabilities in DNS response parsing that aren’t directly related to compression. The most notable here being an RCE in Seimens’ Nucleus Net stack.
Browser Updates
Another round of browser updates is upon us, and there are a few interesting notes. In addition to the normal security fixes,
Firefox has opted to remove support for opening FTP links
in the browser. The reasoning seems twofold. First, one less protocol to support means one less attack surface to worry about. The second stated reason is that this move allows Firefox to drop support for an unencrypted protocol.
Google Chrome has had an interesting few weeks, with a
pair of
bugs
being announced
on Twitter. In each case, the bugs were called 0-days, but that’s not precisely true. A 0-day is a bug that is used or released in the wild before the software vendor is aware of it.
What seems to have happened here is that researchers discovered the bugs, and privately reported them to Google. Google pushed the fixes to their V8 engine, and displaying some very good security practice, wrote a test case for each, and pushed it to their test suite. Their public test suite. Yes, Google themselves leaked these vulnerabilities before fixing them in Chrome, by writing and publishing a PoC. Ouch.
WireGuard, FreeBSD, and pfSense
There has been a slow-moving trainwreck that concluded about a month ago, but I was reminded of it this week, and it’s worth covering. Ars has done a great job
covering the story
. To Start with, pfSense is a popular FreeBSD-based router distro. It’s sponsored and supported by Netgate, who maintain a great community edition, as well as sell hardware with the commercial version. Netgate also employs at least one of the FreeBSD developers. To be clear, Netgate seems like a great outfit, but as we’ll see, a couple bad calls has landed them in hot water.
It was decided that Wireguard would be a great addition to pfSense, and the best way to accomplish that goal was to contract a developer to add a Wireguard driver to the FreeBSD kernel. The effort went sideways as soon as [Matthew Macy] got started, and turned down assistance from [Jason Donefeld], who just happens to be the author of the WireGuard protocol, and lead developer of the official implementation. It got worse when the FreeBSD port was completed, and the code checked in without proper review. This got Donefeld’s attention, who took a look at the implementation, and started a 10 day code sprint along with a couple other developers, to try to fix the worst of the problems before FreeBSD released its 13.0 final release. While the extra attention certainly improved the code, the kerfluffle attracted the attention of the FreeBSD security team, who made the call to pull the code before release, giving plenty of time to fully fix it.
We talked to Donefeld
this week on FLOSS Weekly
, and this story came up. Check the link and go to 37:40 to catch his comments on the matter. It seems like the situation turned into a turf war, and while the right thing was done in the FreeBSD kernel itself, it seems that pfSense shipped a release with the broken and vulnerable code. If nothing else, this is a lesson in how the best of intentions can turn very bad without sufficient review and oversight. Be sure to check out
the official Netgate response
to hear the other side of the story.
Signal Hacking the Hacker
There are a few personalities who, when their name is mentioned, you know it’s going to be a good story. Among people like Cliff Stoll and Kevin Mitnick, I suggest Moxie Marlinspike should make that list. He’s been involved in security for years, and is most recently known for his work on Signal. Signal, of course, is an end-to-end encrypted messaging application that has gained a big following over the years. It’s used by journalists, researchers, political dissidents, and criminals.
With a userbase that interesting, you can imagine how many people are interested in trying to break Signal’s security. One of those companies is Cellebrite, a security company that specializes in offensive and forensic security for government and law enforcement. While Cellebrite can’t read Signal messages over the network, they do produce a forensic kit that can pull messages off a phone, given physical access to it. Through presumably devious methods,
Moxie procured one of their kits
, and did a full analysis of the device. I don’t know how exactly he got his hands on it, but the least credible explanation (and one that is not meant to be taken seriously) is that it “fell off a truck”.
By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite.
Moxie found some particularly interesting things in the included software, like libraries that were multiple years out of date, not to mention Apple libraries that were probably being illegally distributed. Those out-of-date libraries contain quite the collection of vulnerabilities, and included in Moxie’s post is a demo of the Cellebrite software getting exploited when trying to read a file off a phone. The post ends with a very tongue-in-cheek, thinly veiled warning about “uninteresting” files that will be stored by Signal, and rotated over time. The unspoken promise is that these files are traps, and will launch exploits on any machine running the Cellebrite software that tries to pull Signal data off a phone.
This threat isn’t simply to annoy Cellebrite, it’s to render useless any Signal data recovered via Cellebrite tools. If Cellebrite is known to be vulnerable to this sort of compromise, any data it recovers would be automatically suspect, and potentially inadmissible in a trial. It’s a clever strategy, and time will tell if it bears the fruit intended.
Project Zero Rule Changes
Google’s Project Zero has made a name for themselves for primarily two things: First, they do some amazing security research. Secondly, they tell you when they will release vulnerability details to the public, and they stand by that no matter what.
That’s why, when
they announce a change to that policy
, it’s kind of a newsworthy surprise. Now to be fair, it wasn’t a big change. The old policy was 90 days, with a possible 14 day grace period if a fix was forthcoming. The vulnerability details were released at 90 days, unless the grace period was in play, in which case details became public upon release of the fix. The new policy adds a 30 day adoption period. Now, so long as a fix is released within the 90 (or 104) day window, the vulnerability release happens 30 days later, so a potential maximum of 134 days after private disclosure. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342411",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T14:49:24",
"content": "Cliff Stoll is a great story teller, I highly recommend his book, Cuckoo’s egg!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6342413",
"author": "some guy",
"... | 1,760,373,110.861668 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/this-esp8266-dev-board-has-a-surprising-story-behind-it/ | This ESP8266 Dev Board Has A Surprising Story Behind It | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Parts"
] | [
"development board",
"ESP8266",
"industrial automation",
"ir receiver",
"max232",
"relay"
] | If you’re looking to get started with the ESP8266, there’s no shortage of development boards out there to select from. But we don’t think you’ll find one with
a more unique a backstory than the open source ME-ESP8266
. That’s because Malouf, the company that makes the $20 USD board, is a home goods company better known for their pillows and bed frames.
So how do you go from mattress toppers to microcontrollers? Well, as unlikely as it might seem, the missing element is Toys R’ Us. Or more specifically, the liquidation of Toys R’ Us. A Texas distribution center Malouf purchased from the iconic toy retailer included an automated conveyor belt system to move product through the gargantuan building, but unfortunately, they couldn’t get it to work with their existing system. The company decided to use their in-house team of engineers to solve the problem,
and the ME-ESP8266 was born
.
It turns out that an ESP8266 board developed to move bedding around an old Toys R’ Us warehouse has a lot of useful features for hackers and makers. It’s got an integrated relay, 16 MB of flash storage, an IR receiver, beefy screw terminals, and a 2.54mm-pitch GPIO pin header. There’s even a MAX232 on the board so it can talk to RS-232 devices. The hardware is compatible with the standard Arduino IDE as a “Generic ESP8266 Module”, so you’ll have no problem using existing libraries and example code.
Now under normal circumstances, the public would never know about this sort of behind the scenes engineering. But instead of keeping their new ESP board to themselves, the team at Malouf got the go ahead from the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to release it as an open source project. Even more impressive, they got the company to put the board into production so it could be sold to the public. So today we not only learned that bedding companies have CTOs, but that they can be
exceptionally
open-minded.
Our hats off to the engineers at Malouf and the forward thinking brass that green lit production of the ME-ESP8266. It’s not the first
interesting development to come from the liquidation of Geoffrey’s kingdom
, but it just might be the most useful. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342370",
"author": "sebastian",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T11:49:44",
"content": "Nice.I wish more companies would be like that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6342383",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2021-04-23T1... | 1,760,373,110.926642 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/woofer-based-parts-cleaner-bounces-to-the-beat/ | Woofer-Based Parts Cleaner Bounces To The Beat | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"amp",
"parts cleaner",
"subwoofer",
"vibratory",
"woofer"
] | Is there anything more satisfying than building a useful machine from mostly junk? We think not. [ke4mcl] is a big fan of reusing and repurposing things before settling for the recycle bin, and was in the market for a vibratory parts tumbler to quickly clean off old, rusty bits and bobs in the course of repairing old electronics. For just $10, most of which went into a new tube of RTV silicone,
[ke4mcl] built their own tumbler and came away with a reusable amplifier setup in the process
.
We’ve all seen speaker cones dance, and they are definitely our favorite way to observe non-Newtonian fluids. This old woofer can still move, so it’s got a second life shaking sand and screws around until they’re somewhat shiny. The ideal woofer for this purpose has a rubber surround — that’s the ring that connects the speaker cone to the frame. [ke4mcl]’s foam-surrounded woofer works just as well, though it may not last as long.
After scrounging a container with a screw-top lid that fits the woofer perfectly, [ke4mcl] joined them together with a bead of RTV silicone. Since there weren’t any amplifiers lying around, [ke4mcl] spent a few bucks on a class D amplifier board and found a spare laptop brick to power it. An old phone with a tone generator app gets the sand churning with a friendly sine wave, which you can see in the videos after the break.
We think it’s particularly nice to keep things like fire extinguishers out of the landfill. If you don’t need
a parts tumbler
, why not
use one to make your own refillable, re-pressurizable solvent container? | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342142",
"author": "CH",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T16:32:06",
"content": "That’s pretty cool. Does raise some thoughts on high frequency polishing mixed with lower frequency movement finding the optimum frequencies for cleaning based on type of media.The amplifier and audio is too e... | 1,760,373,111.187256 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/the-fascinating-world-of-fasciation/ | The Fascinating World Of Fasciation | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"abnormal growth",
"fasciation",
"mutant plants",
"strawberries"
] | The other day, I saw
this gigantic mutant strawberry on reddit
that looked like it had either been growing in a radiation zone, hitting the gym regularly, or sprinkled with magic dust. I immediately felt more than mildly interested in this phenomenon, which is called
fasciation
.
As it turns out, fasciation is fairly rare occurrence that nonetheless occurs in a wide variety of vascular plants. These mutant strawberries may be a bit unnerving to look at, but they are totally safe to eat. The only problem is that you’re more likely to come across a fasciated dandelion or daisy out in the wild than a strawberry or pineapple at the grocery store because the so-called ugly produce tends to be weeded out.
Fasciation is essentially unregulated tissue growth that occurs when the apical meristem, better known as the growing tip of the plant strays from shooting upward in cylindrical fashion and instead splays out flat, resulting in ribbon-like plant stems, elongated or multiple flower heads, and semi-circular strawberries.
Regular and fasciated mule’s ears from
Wikipedia
Although fasciation tends to present as a flattened main stem, the phenomenon can occur nearly anywhere in the plant — the root, stem, leaves, flower heads, or fruit. It can be localized to just one area, or it affect the entire plant.
Fasciation gets compared to cancer because it has a number of causes and ways of expression, but it’s not quite as harmful or scary. Some races of plants exhibit extreme expression of fasciation. While it’s not fatal, it’s also not ideal, because the condition can result in broken tissues, distorted organization, and a decrease in fertility.
Fasciation: How does it work?
One absolute unit of dandelion. Image via
Wild Yorkshire
Fasciation has many causes both internal and external. Internally, it happens because of a hormonal imbalance in the growth cells, a bacterial or viral infection, or a random genetic mutation. There are also environmental causes, like chemical exposure, cold and frost exposure, or fungi, mite, and insect attacks.
The wonder of fasciation knows no geographical, climatic, ecological, or taxonomical bounds among vascular plants. It equally affects annuals, biennials, and perennials; woody and herbaceous plants; shrubs, trees, and vines. Although fasciation can occur in any vascular plant, it is quite common in the rose (includes
strawberries
), legume, sunflower, and cactus families, and is often found among dandelions and snapdragons.
Some vascular plants are prone to fasciation and prized for it, like the cockscomb (
Celosia cristata
) flower. A few fasciated flora have even become objects of reverence, like the Virgin Mary appearing on a slice of toast. There was once a fasciated pumpkin vine growing in South India. The twenty-foot-long fasciated portion drew huge crowds of people to worship it, believing the vine to be an incarnation of King Cobra or Naga Sarpa, messenger of the god Vishnu.
This spring, I’ll be looking high and low for abnormal dandelions and daisies. I’ve already started scouting the produce at the grocery store for giant strawberries and found these two in the same box. Won’t you join me? We’re probably more likely to find fasciated fruits or flowers than
four-leaf clovers
. | 45 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342089",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T14:07:47",
"content": "Some “races” of plants? Surely that should be species?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342094",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,373,111.3263 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/tr-109-picorder-2-really-nails-the-star-trek-aesthetic/ | TR-109 Raspberry Picorder 2 Really Nails The Star Trek Aesthetic | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"tricorder"
] | Star Trek
famously showed its medical staff using a multifunctional device by the name of the tricorder. While no such devices are regularly used by current medical staff in this timeline, the concept is nonetheless appealing to fans of the show. [directive0] is one such person,
and built himself a replica by the name of the Picorder 2
.
Picorder 2 is inspired by the tricorders from
Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The name is an indication that this isn’t a first attempt;
it builds upon an earlier project based on the models from the original series.
It’s built with a nifty 3D printed case that folds in half, just like the real deal. Plenty of attention to detail has been invested in the decals and backlit controls to really complete the look.
Inside, a Raspberry Pi Zero W runs the show, paired with a bunch of sensors and accessories to get the job done. The human interface is via capacitive touch, and data is displayed on an ST7735 LCD display for output.
The graphing software [directive0] built
does a great job of creating a Trekesque aesthetic, displaying data from various in-built sensors, such as temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. There’s also a low-resolution thermal imaging camera – and it’s hard to get more sci-fi than that.
While we’re a ways off from medically-useful tricorders, it’s nonetheless fun to see replica props that have some life and functionality built into them. The tricorder remains a popular build –
we see them pretty regularly!
– and we can’t wait to see where the fandom takes them over the next few years. Video after the break.
[
via Tom’s Hardware
, thanks to Itay for the tip!] | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342049",
"author": "damfle",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T11:45:47",
"content": "In this timelime we have smartphones and IOS/Android (although they does have tablet in StarTrek).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6342050",
"auth... | 1,760,373,111.371423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/22/faux-stained-glass-effect-with-3d-printing-and-epoxy/ | Faux Stained Glass Effect, With 3D Printing And Epoxy | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Art"
] | [
"3d printed",
"alcohol ink",
"art",
"epoxy",
"resin",
"stained glass"
] | Like the looks of stained glass, but not the amount of work, skill, and materials involved? Well, [Northern Geometry] shows how to sidestep all that nonsense and use a 3D printed frame, epoxy, and some alcohol-based inks to
create a pretty good fake stained-glass effect piece of art
.
A smooth polypropylene board is the key to a glassy smooth back.
[Northern Geometry] has played with this idea before, but shares some refinements and tips on getting the best results. One suggestion is to begin by securely taping the 3D printed frame to a smooth polypropylene board as a backer. Giving the cured resin a smooth surface is important to get the right look, and since resin will not bond to the polypropylene, it can be used as a backer to get that done.
Once the frame is mounted, pour a small amount of epoxy into each cavity and ensure it gets into every corner, then let it cure. The thin bottom layer of resin will seal things as well as create a glassy-smooth backing that is the perfect foundation for finishing the piece with colored resin as needed.
Once that is done, and everything has had plenty of time to cure fully, just pop the piece off the board. Check it out in the video embedded below, where [Northern Geometry] shows the process from start to finish.
In the video, the piece still does put up a wee bit of a fight during the removal process. Perhaps there’s some way that the release can be made a bit easier, but it all seems to work out in the end.
If faux stained glass is giving you ideas, be sure to
check out this alternate method
. And if doing the real thing is something you’re already comfortable with? Step it up a notch by
adding LEDs to your stained glass
.
[via
Reddit
] | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6342011",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T08:16:53",
"content": "I have the reverse issue, I enjoy the work and process of making stained glass, but don’t really like the end result ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,373,111.243771 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/gorgeous-6502-celebrates-craftsmanship-of-the-early-homebrewers/ | Gorgeous 6502 Celebrates Craftsmanship Of The Early Homebrewers | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"aluminum",
"homebrew",
"PERSEUS",
"retrocomputing"
] | The days when a computer had a front panel bristling with switches and LEDs are long gone, and on balance that’s probably for the better in terms of ease of use, raw power, and convenience. That’s not to say there aren’t those who long for the days of flipping switches to enter programs, of course, but it’s a somewhat limited market. So unless you can find an old IMSAI or Altair, chances are you’ll have to roll your own — and you could do a lot worse than
this aluminum beauty of a 6502 machine
.
The machine is named PERSEUS-8 by its creator, [
Mitsuru Yamada
]. It follows earlier machines bearing the PERSEUS badge, all of them completely homebrewed and equally gorgeous. The PERSEUS-8 would have been an impressive machine had it come along 45 years ago — the 2 MHz version of the 6502, a full 16-bit memory address space, and 16 kB of battery-backed RAM. But the mechanical and electrical construction methods and the care and craftsmanship taken are where this build really shines. The case is fabricated out of aluminum sheets and angles and looks like it could have come from a server rack. The front panel is to die for — [Mitsuru] carefully brushed the aluminum before drilling the dozens of holes needed for the toggle switches and LEDs. And the insides are equally lovely — socketed chips neatly arranged on perfboard with everything wired up using period-correct wirewrap methods. Even the labels, both on the front panel and even on the motherboard, are a joy to behold.
Builds like this are the ones that really inspire us to take the extra steps needed to make our projects not only work, but also to be beautiful. We’ve seen this kind of craftsmanship from [Mitsuru] before — recall
this serial terminal that never was
, or
the machine that came before the PERSEUS-8
. | 36 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341969",
"author": "Eric Pooch",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T05:47:45",
"content": "I love how he built the chassis – so simple and elegant. I shelved a project thinking I needed a sheet metal brake to bend up the case. I will try this technique for sure. I really like the look of all... | 1,760,373,111.493624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/compute-like-it-is-1975-6th-edition-unix-reborn/ | Compute Like It Is 1975: 6th Edition Unix Reborn | Al Williams | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"RISC-V",
"unix",
"V6"
] | If you crave experiencing or reliving what computing was like “back then” you have a lot of options. One option, of course, is to load an emulator and pretend like you have the hardware and software you are interested in. Another often expensive option is to actually buy the hardware on the used market. However, [mit-pdos] has a different approach:
port the 6th edition of Unix to RISC-V
and use a modern CPU to run an old favorite operating system.
It isn’t an exact copy, of course, but Xv6 was developed back in 2006 as a teaching operating system at MIT. You can find resources including links to the original Unix source code, commentary on the source code, and information about the original PDP 11/40 host computer on the
project’s main page
.
In addition, you might find the
book about Xv6
of interest. We know you probably don’t want to use 1970’s-era Unix as your daily operating system, but you can learn a lot by even reading either the original code or the more up-to-date Xv6 source. It also isn’t a bad way to understand RISC-V internals.
Several computer science operating system classes use Xv6 in one form or another. You can see one of several lectures about it from Harvey Mudd College, below. We’ve
covered RISC-V
for a while because we like its openness. Not to mention, the CPU
doesn’t have to be complicated
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341947",
"author": "Bruce Perens",
"timestamp": "2021-04-22T03:10:55",
"content": "Version 6 was especially fun in that it did not have FSCK. Checking and repairing a filesystem was a good deal more diffiicult and required training. Reconnecting a detached directory had to be done ... | 1,760,373,111.418421 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/build-your-own-bluetooth-notification-ticker/ | Build Your Own Bluetooth Notification Ticker | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"pen plotter"
] | Stock tickers were telegraph-based machines from the 19th century, and quickly fell by the wayside with the advent of computer replacements from the 1960s onwards. However, there’s something charming about small machines that deliver us paper strips of information –
as demonstrated by this notification ticker from [DIYprojects]
(Russian language,
Google Translate link
).
The heart of the build is an Arduino Mini, which receives the text content of smartphone notifications via a Bluetooth module hooked up to its serial port. The machine mounts a small roll of paper strip, which is pulled along by a stepper motor fitted with a rubber earbud for added grip. The pen is moved along the paper by a servo using a Lambda mechanism to allow it to move nicely perpendicular to the paper’s direction of travel. Instead of moving the pen up and down, the paper is pushed into the pen by a solenoid mounted underneath.
It’s a fun little project, and one we can imagine being great for educational purposes. It teaches skills required to work with steppers, servos, solenoids and Bluetooth, all at once.
It’s a little different from some other pen plotter designs,
but the ticker format has a certain charm that’s hard to replicate any other way. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!] | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341912",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T23:45:19",
"content": "Hmm, dot matrix. I was expecting stroke writing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341974",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2021-... | 1,760,373,111.650122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/a-hot-swappable-battery-grip-keeps-the-camera-rolling/ | A Hot-Swappable Battery Grip Keeps The Camera Rolling | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"18650 battery",
"battery grip",
"camera"
] | There’s nothing worse than being in the middle of an important shot, only to have the camera’s batteries die on you. The losses can be very real, so it’s best to avoid them entirely. In an effort to do so,
[funkster] built himself a battery grip for his Canon EOS M
.
The hack is based around the venerable 18650 battery, packing 3.6V of lithium-ion goodness into a compact metal can. [funkster]’s build has slots for two of these cells, powering the camera off of one and keeping the other in reserve. The cells are monitored by a STM32 microcontroller, which switches from one battery to another as they run out or are removed. This allows batteries to be swapped while the camera is on – a highly useful feature. There’s even an OLED display to keep an eye on the state of charge of each cell.
The manner in which power is connected to the camera is rather amusing. An original Canon battery that slides inside the camera was gutted and turned into a simple adapter for the battery port. The battery grip, which wraps around the camera body, connects to this via pin headers that pass through a hole drilled in the camera’s case. It’s a permanent mod, but one [funkster] is happy with for the added usability – especially as doing it this way still provides easy access to the SD card slot.
Keeping a camera juiced on the go can be a headache without the right gear. [funkster] demonstrates that if you can’t buy it, you can always build it yourself. If your problem isn’t battery power, but your camera is overheating,
you can of course fix that too.
Video after the break. | 14 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341895",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T21:56:43",
"content": "I like this! I’m going to have to do something similar for my Samsung NX500. It’s getting a little long in the tooth but still works great, but the batteries are losing capacity.Where do you get qualit... | 1,760,373,111.592085 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/ferrofluid-dances-in-custom-bluetooth-speaker/ | Ferrofluid Dances In Custom Bluetooth Speaker | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"dancing",
"equalizer",
"ferrofluid",
"msgeq7",
"music",
"speaker",
"visualization"
] | Ferrofluids, as the name implies, are liquids that respond to magnetic fields. They were originally developed for use by NASA as rocket fuel but are available to the general public now for anyone who wants to enjoy their unique properties. For [Dakd Jung], that meant building a special chamber into a Bluetooth speaker that
causes the ferrofluid inside to dance along with the rhythm of the music
.
This project isn’t quite as simple as pushing the ferrofluid container against a speaker, though. A special electromagnetic device similar to a speaker was used specifically to manipulate the fluid, using a MSGEQ7 equalizer to provide the device with only a specific range of frequencies best tailored for the fluid’s movement. The project includes two speakers for playing the actual music that point upward, and everything is housed inside of a 3D-printed case. There were some additional hurdles to overcome as well, like learning that the glass needed a special treatment to keep the ferrofluid from sticking to it.
All in all it’s a unique project that not only brings sound to a room but a pleasing physical visualization as well. Being able to listen to music or podcasts on a portable speaker, rather than the tinny internal speakers of a phone or laptop, is the sort of thing you think you can live without until you
get used to having higher quality sound easily and in every place you go
. And, if there’s a way to improve on that small but crucial foundation with something like a dancing ferrofluid that moves with the music the speaker is playing, then we’re going to embrace that as well. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341838",
"author": "SPD",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T20:01:29",
"content": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a3JiGTE9sc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341890",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T21:48:... | 1,760,373,111.54387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/hacking-an-air-assist-for-the-ortur-laser/ | Hacking An Air Assist For The Ortur Laser | Al Williams | [
"cnc hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Laser Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"air assist",
"laser",
"laser cutter",
"laser engraver",
"ortur"
] | Getting great results from a laser cutter takes a bit of effort to make sure all of the settings are just right. But even then, if the air between the material and the laser source is full of smoke and debris it will interfere with the laser beam and throw off the results. The solution is to add air assist which continuously clears that area.
Earlier this year I bought an Ortur laser engraver/cutter and have been hacking on it to improve the stock capabilities. last month I talked about
putting a board under the machine and making the laser move up and down
easily. But I still didn’t have an air assist. Since then I found a great way to add it that will work for many laser cutter setups.
I didn’t design any of these modifications, but I did alter them to fit my particular circumstances. You can find my very simple modifications to other designs on
Thingiverse
. You’ll also find links to the original designs and you’ll need them for extra parts and instructions, too. It is great to be able to start with work from talented people and build on each other’s ideas.
A Breath of Fresh Air
By the end of the last post, I had installed an air assist system but cut the air hose off of it because I never did get around to boiling some water to bend the air tube. However, it did let me move the laser head up and down easily, which is very useful.
This wasn’t the first air assist design I’d tried. If you look at Thingiverse, there are many different takes on this. Some have
3D printed nozzles
that take an air needle or a 3D printer nozzle. Some just direct fan air at the part.
I found some just didn’t fit or didn’t work well. Others would interfere with the X stop or interfere with the Z motion of the laser which, admittedly, wouldn’t have been a problem on a stock machine. One of the designs had a custom top plate for the laser that had a little hose guide and even though I didn’t keep that air assist project, I didn’t remove the custom top plate and that turned out to be lucky, as you’ll see.
I had really been interested in putting an air assist on ever since I saw [DIY3DTech’s] video on how
it improved cutting
. I had even bought a small air pump for the purpose before the laser even arrived, but it mostly sat, unused, for lack of a good way to direct the air.
The Solution
Finally, I found [DIY3DTech’s] design that is very quick and simple to print. A bracket circles the laser head and mounts a small tube holder. You can adjust the angle and a 3D printer nozzle is wedged into the end of the tube. It is a simple design, but very adjustable.
The air assist bracket is held with tape.
Of course, there’s one small problem. If your laser head doesn’t move, the bracket is no problem. But if you can slide the laser up and down, the bracket needs to clear the big acorn nuts that hold the laser to the X carriage.
At first, I tried putting some washers to move the laser body away from the housing, but that didn’t seem like a great idea — I worried it might not be very stable if there were too many washers and I would have had to fish up some longer bolts. Instead, I did some surgery on the bracket and cut away the offending part, leaving it shaped like a U with the sides about 3cm long. Of course, that removed the fixing screw and made it not grip very well. However, a little double-stick tape nicely holds it on. You could probably also use some hot glue.
You can see the 0.8mm M6 nozzle from a 3D printer directing air at this cut.
A nylon bolt — which could probably be shorter — holds the black hose module to the white bracket. It also grips the tube, so don’t tighten it all the way or you’ll pinch the airflow off. A nylon nut locks it in place. Placing the nozzle in the tube is a bit of a challenge. You might heat the hose a little, but I didn’t. I just used needlenose pliers to stretch the tube in both directions and threaded the nozzle into the widened tube. I didn’t seal it, but a blob of hot glue or silicone might be a good idea.
The only other part of the air assist isn’t strictly necessary. I had
a top plate
from another air assist attempt still mounted to the laser and it had a little feed tube for the air hose that works well with this design, so I kept it. It keeps the hose lined up nicely and you can also bundle the hose with the rest of the wires if you want to keep it from flopping around everywhere.
Does it Work?
Magnified view of test cut.
Does it work? It does! Cutting out thin plywood takes only a few passes now and seems to make cleaner cuts. The accompanying picture shows a small test piece on 2mm plywood. Using 2 passes of the laser cut the outline perfectly and — looking close up — it appears I could even cut the engraving power down. Without magnifying it, though, it looks fine.
By the way, these cuts were with what Ortur calls a 15 W laser and using the standard lens. Keep in mind, though, the 15W number is the input power. The actual output power is probably just north of 4W.
Another side effect of the air blowing from the right? You can see all the smoke now hangs to the left side of the machine.
Ventilation
The top plate isn’t necessary but helps with managing the hose.
Speaking of smoke, you do need ventilation and that’s one thing I’m not finished working on. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do. A vent hood or an enclosure with an exhaust seems ideal but a pain to set up. For now, I have an open window with a dual window fan set to blow out.
Wood doesn’t smell too bad, but leather does. I understand, too, that some glue in plywood and some tanning chemicals in leather produce very nasty fumes, so this is one downside to these machines. If you think printing ABS smells, you aren’t going to enjoy an open laser cutter very much.
For now, though, I’m pretty satisfied with the results this modest machine can provide. If you really need a laser cutter for commercial purposes, you are probably going to look elsewhere. But if you want to spend about what a fair 3D printer costs and add a lot of capability to your workshop, you could do worse than one of these inexpensive engravers. | 13 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341795",
"author": "JKCalhoun",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T18:40:58",
"content": "Looks like 5.5W is basically what all these solid-state laser cutters can swing.Anyone know of something closer to 10W without going CO2?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,111.706995 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/bmw-pushing-hard-for-solid-state-battery-tech-plans-demo-by-2025/ | BMW Pushing Hard For Solid-State Battery Tech; Plans Demo By 2025 | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"battery",
"battery technology",
"bmw",
"car",
"car hacks",
"cars",
"solid-state battery"
] | Plenty of development is ongoing in the world of lithium batteries for use in electric vehicles. Automakers are scrapping for every little percentage gain to add a few miles of range over their competitors, with efforts to reduce charging times just as frantic as well.
Of course, the real win would be to succeed in bringing a bigger, game-changing battery to market. Solid state batteries fit the bill, potentially offering far greater performance than their traditional lithium counterparts. BMW think there’s merit in the technology,
and have announced they intend to show off a solid-state battery vehicle by 2025.
What Makes Solid State Batteries Special?
A diagram of a solid state battery. Instead of gooey liquid or gels acting as the electrolyte, the entire battery would be made of solids instead.
Solid-state batteries, as their name might suggest, replace liquid electrolytes with solid materials. The hope is that by using a solid electrolyte instead,
multiple factors will allow gains in performance that have been impractical to implement with conventional designs
. One of the major areas of interest is whether solid state batteries would
allow the possibility of using lithium metal anodes, which would provide far higher energy density
— 2 to 3 times greater than that of current designs. This would allow for longer range, or simply lighter batteries, than the current status quo. Liquid electrolytes are also behind the high flammability of current lithium batteries. By replacing them with solid compounds of lower flammability, electric cars could be safer. The batteries could also be run at higher temperatures with less risk, reducing the need for cooling, and potentially allowing for higher performance and faster charging times.
However, success with solid-state batteries remains elusive. Hurdles are everywhere, as researchers try to find the magic combination of materials and design that will produce a battery of greater energy density that can hack it in the demanding automotive environment. Current proof-of-concept devices struggle in multiple ways. There are issues with the solid electrolyte changing size over charge and discharge cycles, leading to damage and fracturing, or making poor contact with other battery components, leading to lower performance. Higher numbers on paper aren’t enough; a market-ready solid state battery needs to tick every box, being as or more reliable than its predecessors over timescales of a decade or more.
BMW is Jumping in Just as Fisker Bailed Out
For some, the struggle is too much,
with early proponent Fisker recently announcing they’ve abandoned a technology they once hoped to ship in 2018
. Other automakers are still in the game however,
including VW, who are working with QuantumScape towards a deadline of 2024
— who, incidentally,
recently settled a lawsuit with Fisker over the technology
. Not to be left out,
Toyota are also investing into research as well.
There’s clearly four-dimensional chess games going on up and down the industry, which hints at the potential value of success in this area.
BMW have invested heavily into EV technologies, bringing several vehicles to market. Future BMW EVs are hopefully as daring as existing models like the i8.
BMW are working towards a similar timescale, hoping to have a tech demonstrator out by 2025. If past BMW concepts,
or even their electric road cars are anything to go by
, expect a swoopy vision of the future, complete with wild and likely impractical styling features. The company expects that the technology won’t be production ready for some time after that, expecting models to ship closer to 2030. This time scale is not uncommon for new automotive technologies. It provides for multiple years for BMW to undertake long-term testing, to determine the performance of the new batteries in all conditions — from Arctic cold to desert heat. Automakers routinely put millions of miles into development mules for even regular vehicles to try and shake down problems; a moonshot battery technology would require just as rigorous attention before launch.
While the announcement is exciting, and a positive sign for the solid-state battery future, it remains likely that we won’t see much in the real world for another 5 to 10 years, if ever. However, if research into solid state batteries does pan out and the technology lives up to the claims, expect them to quickly clear house once production lines get up to speed. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341748",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T17:23:26",
"content": "They can put out a demo by 2025 but if the past is a guide, it’s more likely that solid state batteries will be ready in 2030. It’s a fantastic technology that I’m looking forward to but rushing science i... | 1,760,373,111.801608 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/auto-ball-launcher-will-be-your-dogs-new-best-friend/ | Auto Ball Launcher Will Be Your Dog’s New Best Friend | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"ball launcher",
"dog toy",
"esc",
"fetch machine",
"proximity sensor",
"RC motor",
"servo"
] | If there’s one bright spot on the blight that is this pandemic, it’s got to be all the extra time we’re spending with our pets. Dogs especially love that we’re home all the time and want to spend it playing, but sometimes you need to get stuff done. Why not head outside with your laptop and keep the dog happy with an automatic ball launcher?
This is a work in progress, and [Connor] plans to publish a BOM and the STL files once it’s all finished. For now,
it’s a working prototype that shoots a ball into the air and about 25 feet away
, from the looks of it. Far enough to be fun, but not so far that it goes over the fence.
All [Connor] has to do is drop the ball in the top, which you know is going to lead to training the dog to do it himself. A proximity sensor detects the ball and starts up a pair of 540 R/C motors, then a servo drops the ball down the internal chute. The motors spit the ball out with great force with a pair of profiled, 3D-printed wheels that are controlled by a Turnigy ESC and an Arduino Nano.
In the future, [Connor] plans to print a cover for the electronics and enlarge the funnel so it’s easier for the dog to drop in the ball. Check out the brief demo and build video after the break.
All dogs should be able to get in a good game of fetch as often as they want,
even if they happen to be blind
. | 22 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341694",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T16:09:39",
"content": "Loop:FETCH ballGOTO loopdoesn’t seem that smart compared to a cat :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341786",
"author": "Bernie... | 1,760,373,112.08719 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/iso-8601-ending-the-date-wars-and-confusing-everyone-equally/ | ISO 8601: Ending The Date Wars And Confusing Everyone Equally | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"decimal time",
"epoch time",
"ISO-8601"
] | There’s a document I had to sign to wrap up a community responsibility in rural Oxfordshire. At the bottom, dotted lines for signature and date. My usual illegible scrawl for a signature, and scribble in the date below it. Then there’s the moment when the lady handling the form scans it with a puzzled face for a minute, before accepting it with a smile. She’s just been ISO’d!
I’m telling you, you’ve got Pi Day wrong. Evan Shelhamer,
CC BY 2.0
.
Where I come from in England, it’s the norm to represent dates in ascending order: day, month, year. Thus the 4th of March 2021 becomes 04/03/2021 when written down on a form. This is entirely logical, and makes complete sense given the way a date is said aloud in English and other languages.
Meanwhile in America it’s the norm to represent dates in a different manner: month, day, year. Thus March 4th, 2021 becomes 03/04/2021 when written down on a form. This is also entirely logical, and makes complete sense given the way dates are pronounced in American English.
As someone whose job entails crossing the Atlantic in linguistic terms, I am frequently confused and caught out by this amusing quirk of being divided by a common language. Is 03/04/2021 the 3rd of April or March 4th? “Why can’t Americans use a logical date format!” I cry as in a distant transatlantic echo I hear my friends over there bemoaning our annoying European ways. It’s doubtful that this divergence has caused any satellites to crash, but it sure can be annoying.
Confusing Everyone For Over Three Decades
So I took a stand. A couple of decades ago I adopted
ISO 8601
in writing dates, an international standard that’s been with us for well over three decades. It too is
an entirely logical way to express time
, but unlike the two mentioned earlier it’s not tied to any linguistic quirks. Instead it starts with the largest unit and expresses a date or time in descending order, and extends beyond dates into time. Thus the date on my form that caused the puzzlement was 2021-03-04. I’m guessing that here at Hackaday I’m preaching to the choir as I certainly won’t be the only one here using ISO 8601 in my daily life, but while we’re talking about alternative date formats within our community it’s an opportunity to take stock of the situation.
Just in case you thought UNIX time wasn’t practical,
take a look at this epoch clock
.
UNIX time is probably the most instantly recognisable of all our measurement schemes, being a count of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch of 1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 UTC. Coincidentally this is also an auspicious date for many readers,
as it’s our birthday
. If I’d written the 4th of March on that form as 1614816000 though I would have been met with complete incomprehension, so aside from the occasional moment of coming together to observe a rollover it’s not something we use outside coding.
But it does lead neatly to another question: since UNIX time is most often expressed in text as a base-10 number, why on earth does our clock time work in base 60 for seconds, base 12 or 24 for hours, and then base 12 for months? Why don’t we use a base 10 metric time system?
It makes sense for our annual calendar and the length of our day to be derived from Earth’s orbit, as we use dates as a measure of season and times as a measure of the daily progress rather than simply elapsed periods. We owe our twelve-hour days and nights to the ancient Greeks and our 60 seconds and minutes to the ancient Babylonians, while our twelve months come from the ancient Romans. It’s clear that a 365.24-day year with four seasons doesn’t divide neatly into ten months, so we’re at the mercy of our own set of celestial bodies when talking about dates. But surely we could move on from ancient Greece and Babylon when it comes to the time of day?
Liberté, Égalité, Ponctualité!
A 10-digit Revolutionary French clock. DeFacto,
CC BY-SA 4.0
Probably the most famous attempt at a decimal calendar came in the aftermath of the French Revolution; the French Republican calendar perhaps wisely stuck with twelve months but made each of them of three 10-day weeks, and then split the day by 10 hours, with each further subdivision being by base 10. The months each had 30 days, with the remaining 5 days (or 6 in leap years) being public holidays.
It came to an official end when the revolutionary government that had introduced it was replaced by that of Napoleon. Unlike other French Republican measurements such as the meter, it evidently didn’t provide enough advantage for its popularity to outlive its political origins.
There’s an interesting parallel in the decimalisation of British currency in 1971. Previously, a pound was 20 shillings, each of which were 12 pence. Afterwards, a pound became 100 new pence, and that’s stuck. Despite some people’s lingering nostalgia for the old system, the utility of decimialisation was self-evident.
The moral of the French time-decimalization story was that people simply use a calendar and time system to tell the date and time. When you need to do frequent arithmetic, as is the case with currency, distance, or weights, this is made significantly easier through decimals. But when nature hands you four seasons, you’re pressed into twelve months. Perhaps when we slip the bonds of Earth, we’ll use decimal
Stardates
, but in the mean-time, ISO might just be the way to go.
Header: Rama,
CC BY-SA 2.0 FR
. | 215 | 40 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341618",
"author": "Skip Flem",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T14:06:09",
"content": "Do anybody really know what time it is?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341623",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T14:... | 1,760,373,112.770329 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/mythbusting-tidals-mqa-format-how-does-it-measure-up/ | Mythbusting Tidal’s MQA Format – How Does It Measure Up? | Lewin Day | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"audio format",
"audio formats",
"compressed audio",
"digital audio",
"flac",
"lossless",
"mqa",
"tidal"
] | MQA is an audio format that claims to use a unique “origami” algorithm, promising better quality and more musicality than other formats. At times, it’s been claimed to be a lossless format in so many words, and lauded by the streaming services that use it as the ultimate format for high-fidelity music. With the format being closed source and encoders not publicly available, these claims are hard to test. However, [GoldenSound] wasn’t born yesterday, and set out to test MQA by hook or by crook.
The results were concerning.
(Video, embedded below.)
To actually put the format through its paces, the only easy way available was to publish music to the Tidal streaming service, which uses the format. [GoldenSound] went this route, attempting to get some test files published. This hit a brick wall when the publishing company reported that the MQA software “would not encode the files”. The workaround? [GoldenSound] simply cut some audio test content into the middle of an acoustic track and resubmitted the files, where they were accepted without further complaint.
Testing with the content pulled from Tidal, [GoldenSound] found concerning evidence that the claims made around MQA don’t stack up. Significant amounts of added noise are often found in the MQA-processed files, and files served from Tidal are clearly not lossless. Additionally, MQA’s “blue light” authentication system, designed to guarantee to listeners that they’re listening to a identical-to-studio release, is demonstrated to be misleading at best, if not entirely fake.
Upon writing to MQA to get a response to his findings, [GoldenSound]’s test files were quickly stripped from Tidal. The company eventually disputed some of the findings, which is discussed in the video. The general upshot is that without open, transparent tools being made publicly available to analyse the format’s performance, it’s impossible to verify the company’s claims.
We’ve had fun looking at audio formats before, from
the history of MP3
to
musing on digital audio at truly ridiculous sample rates
.
[Thanks to Chris for the tip!] | 117 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341582",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T11:51:12",
"content": "Audio encoding seems to be a lot like cryptography in the respect that every so often, someone comes on to the scene, touting a “breakthrough technology” that’s orders of magnitude better than the c... | 1,760,373,112.517432 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/incandescent-7-segment-displays-are-awesome/ | Incandescent 7-Segment Displays Are Awesome | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"7-segment display",
"filament bulb",
"seven segment display"
] | When we think of 7-segment displays as the ubiquitous LED devices that sprung into popularity in the 1970s. However, numbers have existed for a lot longer than that, and people have wanted to know what the numbers are for quite some time, too. Thus, a variety of technologies were used prior to the LED –
such as these magnificent incandescent 7-segment displays shown off by [Fran Blanche]
.
The displays are basic in concept, but we imagine a little frustrating in execution. Electronics was tougher back in the days when valves needed huge voltages and even a basic numerical display drew a load of current. Built to industrial-grade specifications, they’re complete with a big heatsinking enclosure and rugged gold-plated connectors. [Fran] surmises that due to the likely military applications of such hardware, the filaments in the bulbs were likely built in such a way as to essentially last indefinitely. The glow of the individual segments has a unique look versus their LED siblings; free of hotspots and the usual tapered shape on each segment. Instead, the numerals are pleasingly slab-sided for a familiar-but-not-quite aesthetic.
[Fran] demonstrates the display running with a CD4511B BCD-to-7-segment decoder, hooked up with a bunch of 3904 power transistors to get the chip working with filament bulbs instead of LEDs. It’s a little fussy, but the displays run great with the hardware sorted.
We’d love to see these used on a very heavy ridiculous watch;
nixies aren’t the only game in town after all.
If you do happen to make one,
be sure to let us know.
Video after the break. | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341343",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T15:55:32",
"content": "And then,Numitrons",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341344",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T15:56:55",
"content"... | 1,760,373,112.023181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/a-look-at-the-most-aerodynamic-cars-ever-built/ | A Look At The Most Aerodynamic Cars Ever Built | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"aerodynamics",
"automobile",
"car",
"car hacks",
"drag",
"drag reduction"
] | Whether gasoline, diesel, or electric, automakers work hard to wring every last drop of mileage out of their vehicles. Much of this effort goes towards optimising aerodynamics. The reduction of drag is a major focus for engineers working on the latest high-efficiency models, and has spawned a multitude of innovative designs over the years. We’ll take a look at why reducing drag is so important, and at some of the unique vehicles that have been spawned from these streamlining efforts.
Boo To Air Resistance
A graph showing the rise in aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance as speed increases. Note the much higher contribution of aerodynamic drag, particularly at highway speeds.
Whether you’re looking for lower fuel economy or just trying to get as many miles as possible out of your battery, drag is the enemy. Pushing a car through the air takes work, and the faster you go, the more the air pushes back. Rather unfortunately, drag is proportional to the square of velocity, so as speed doubles, the drag force quadruples. Above roughly 20km/h (12.4 mph) or so, aerodynamic drag is the biggest force working against the car, eclipsing rolling resistance as speeds increase.
Measures can be taken to reduce this drag, of course. Creating a car with a smoother profile helps, one that delicately splits the air at the front and lets it gently recombine at the back. Reducing the size and number of protuberances helps, as does reducing the overall frontal area of the car. With careful attention to these factors, it’s possible for automakers to reduce drag considerably, with attendant benefits to efficiency.
The slipperiness of a car is often talked about in terms of the coefficient of drag, or C
d
. This is a dimensionless coefficient that quantifies the amount of drag a given object generates as it passes through a fluid, such as water or air. In some analyses, it’s also important to consider C
d
A – the drag coefficient multiplied by the frontal area of the vehicle. Two vehicles can be equally streamlined in design, but if one is bigger than the other, it will naturally experience more drag.
Drag coefficients of various basic shapes. Note that the way the air comes back together around an object is important, not just the front-on profile.
As a guide,
a flat plate trying to force its way through the air would post a C
d
of 1.28
, while a bullet at subsonic velocity might come in at 0.295. Typical modern sedans and coupes have drag coefficients around 0.25 to 0.3, with SUVs often posting higher numbers of around 0.35-0.45 due to their higher, boxier designs. Sportscars built with a focus on downforce naturally feature higher C
d
numbers due to induced drag from aerodynamic elements.
The 1999 Honda Insight, an early hybrid car, came in at the bottom of this range, claiming a C
d
of 0.25, a number considered class-leading at the time. Newer competitors in the space have further improved on this, however. The Mercedez Benz S 350 BlueTec came in at 0.24, as did the Tesla Model S at its launch in 2012. Since then, the new Porsche Taycan has a C
d
of just 0.22, with the new-for-2021 Tesla Model S claiming a figure of just 0.208. The latest Mercedes EQS pips both, however, with a figure of just 0.2.
It’s Not Just How You Look
It’s interesting to note that while early hybrids from the 1990s adopted obviously swooping, streamlined designs, modern cars have eclipsed these numbers without going for such formless egg shapes. Often, aerodynamic gains can be found by carefully shaping the flow in subtle ways, rather than focusing on the macro shape of the car as a whole. Other gains can be had by virtue of technological progress; electric cars have eliminated large radiators up front and thus feature much more streamlined bumpers, for example.
Streamlined designs are common on efficiency-focused concept cars like the GM EV1 and VW XL1. Covered rear wheels are one of the most common choices to attempt to cut down on obvious sources of drag, albeit at the expense of easy tyre replacement.
Production cars are naturally limited in their design choices, however, which forces automakers to compromise where streamlining is concerned. Some optimisations are easy, such as swapping out whip antennas for low-profile sharkfins, or adding aerodynamic covers to wheels. Others are more difficult — regulations state that side mirrors are mandatory in most jurisdictions, while many automakers push for cameras to be adopted to shave off the protrusions to minimise drag. Even seemingly minor rules, such as headlight-to-ground distance or hood height regulations, can have a major effect on a design. Customer expectations around interior comfort and luggage space can be a problem, too. Thus, some of the lowest drag numbers posted have been from experimental, concept vehicles.
The
General Motors EV1
of 1996 stands out for a stunningly low C
d
of just 0.19. It was GM’s attempt to build a real, usable electric car for the masses. The vehicle attracted a die-hard fanbase amongst participants in the limited lease program, but was hamstrung by its limited range and two-seater interior. The cars were recalled at the end of their leases and the vast majority were crushed. Similarly, the Volkswagen XL1 matched the EV1’s C
d
of 0.19 upon release in 2013. Designed to a tight brief from chairman Frederick Piech to wring 100 km out of one liter of diesel. Fitted with a 35kW two-cylinder engine and a 20kW electric motor, the production version managed 0.9L/100km in real world testing. Limited to a production run of just 200 units, the vehicle featured no side or rear vision mirrors, and no rear windscreen. Passengers sit in tandem, one behind the other, rather than side by side, to minimise the frontal area for maximum efficiency. Taking things even further,
vehicles such as those entered in the World Solar Challenge
are designed for optimal performance to make the most of their limited solar power. The Sunraycer entry from 1987 featured a streamlined body posting a C
d
of just 0.125,
necessitating the driver to lay almost supine in the car.
Similarly, entries in the Shell Eco-marathon follow much the same philosophy, with 2018’s Eco-runner 8 coming in at a slippery 0.045.
The 1930’s Were a Great Time for that Swooped Look
The Schlörwagen (also known as the “Göttinger Egg”) was a design concept far ahead of its time, based on a rear-engined Mercedes chassis and built in the 1930s.
However, the history of streamlining cars far predates the post-1973 fuel crisis that saw Americans start buying compact cars in droves. The basic aerodynamic concepts behind making objects slip through the air were being applied long ago, with the streamlining craze of the 1930s touching everything from trains to cars to toasters. The
Tatra T77A
was one of the first cars designed with a focus on aerodynamics, but more advanced designs also came to fruition.
Perhaps the most extreme design of this early era was a car known as the the Schlörwagen, named for its designer, Karl Schlör. The prototype, built on a rear-engined Mercedes chassis,
reportedly posted a C
d
of 0.15.
It achieved this with design choices considered wild at the time; the entire car was shaped in a single, smooth egg shape with minimal protrusions, scoring it the nickname the “Göttingen egg”. It entirely enclosed not just the rear wheels, but also the front, necessitating a 2.10 m wide body that was considered ridiculously oversized for the time. Windows mounted as flush as possible to lessen any disturbance to the air, giving the car a futuristic look far ahead of its time. However, the car was never seriously considered for production, despite its impressive design.
Overall, it’s likely we’ll see future models from major automakers continue the downward trend in drag numbers as the battle for mileage heats up in the electric car space. Plenty of gains are still left on the table as regulators move slowly on rules surrounding mirrors and other technologies that could improve numbers further. With that said, consumers will continue to demand minimum standards of comfort, space, and safety that mean we’re unlikely to be driving around in pointy teardrops anytime soon. | 77 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341303",
"author": "andrej",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T14:14:02",
"content": "For Tatra T87 (successor of T77) check the great Jay Leno’s reviewhttps://youtube.com/watch?v=c2XyLgv-UQYwith unique look at the bottom side of the car.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,373,112.298139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/led-hack-teaches-dji-mini-2-drone-new-tricks/ | LED Hack Teaches DJI Mini 2 Drone New Tricks | Tom Nardi | [
"drone hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"DJI",
"drone",
"dropper",
"h-bridge",
"payload",
"PIC18F26K40",
"quadcopter",
"release"
] | Despite its diminutive proportions, the thrust to weight ratio of the DJI Mini 2 is high enough that it can carry a considerable amount of baggage. So it’s no surprise that there’s a cottage industry of remotely controlled payload releases that can be bolted onto the bottom of this popular quadcopter. But
[tterev3] wanted something that would integrate better with DJI’s software
instead of relying on a separate transmitter.
As explained in the video below, his solution was to tap into the signals that control the RGB LED on the front of the drone. Since the user can change the color of the LED at any time with the official DJI smartphone application, decoding this signal to determine which color had been selected is like adding several new channels to the transmitter. In this case [tterev3] just needed to decode a single color to use as a “drop” signal, but it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could be expanded to trigger several different actions with a few more lines of code.
Examining the LED control signal.
[tterev3] wrote some software to decode the 48 bits of data being sent to the LED with a PIC18F26K40 microcontroller, which in turn uses an L9110H H-Bridge to control a tiny gear motor. To get feedback, he’s using a small magnet glued to the release arm and a Hall-effect sensor.
Concerned about how much power he could realistically pull from a connection that was intended for an LED, he gave the release its own battery that is slowly charged while the drone is running. You could argue that since the motor only needs to fire up once to drop the payload, [tterev3] probably could have gotten away with not recharging it at all during the flight. But as with the ability to decode additional color signals, the techniques being demonstrated here hold a lot of promise for future development.
Folks have been
strapping additional hardware to commercial quadcopters
for years, but modifications like this one that actually let the craft release its payload and fly away hold particular promise for environmental monitoring and
building mesh communication networks
. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341265",
"author": "k1708834studentskatyisdorg",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T11:38:17",
"content": "nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341410",
"author": "david hudgins",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T19:00:00",
... | 1,760,373,112.889973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/ai-makes-linux-do-what-you-mean-not-what-you-say/ | AI Makes Linux Do What You Mean, Not What You Say | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial intelligence",
"bash",
"GPT-2",
"linux",
"openai",
"shell"
] | We are always envious of the Star Trek Enterprise computers. You can just sort of ask them a hazy question and they will — usually — figure out what you want. Even the automatic doors seemed to know the difference between someone walking into a turbolift versus someone being thrown into the door during a fight. [River] decided to try his new API keys for the private beta of an AI service to
generate Linux commands based on a description
. How does it work? Watch the video below and find out.
Some examples work fairly well. In response to “email the Rickroll video to Jeff Bezos,” the system produced a curl command and an e-mail to what we assume is the right place. “Find all files in the current directory bigger than 1 GB” works, too.
Of course, like most AI projects, it can get confused easily. “Generate an image of three giraffes” creates a blank image. Asking it to download some files seemed to confuse it, too, for some reason. Having it suggest what hard drive to format spooked us a little. At least it waited for you to confirm its guess.
Because of the licensing and cost, you can’t really duplicate this exactly, although if you are savvy enough with deep learning models, you might be able to get close. However, we can’t help but think there are better ways to approach this problem.
Not to mention, shell commands aren’t that hard. We like regular expressions, but based on how many times we have to write one for someone else, maybe an AI to
make them easier would be interesting
. There again,
we have a different approach
. | 30 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341234",
"author": "gftt",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T08:07:05",
"content": "hello computerhello….?hm… not workingI must using keyboard myself?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6341248",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,373,112.361762 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/adjustable-piston-damped-hammer/ | Adjustable, Piston-Damped Hammer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"brass",
"damper",
"dead blow",
"deadblow",
"hammer",
"lathe",
"leather",
"machine",
"tool",
"wood"
] | When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a constant quest for an even better hammer, as the popular saying goes. At least, that seems to be [Ebenisterie Éloïse]’s situation.
She wanted a deadblow hammer
that not only had an aesthetically pleasing wood and brass construction, but also one that included adjustable dampers to make sure that each hammer swing is as efficient as possible.
For those unfamiliar with specialty hammers, dead blow hammers typically have some movable mass such as sand or lead shot within the hammer head. This mass shifts forward when the hammer strikes an object, reducing rebound of the hammer off of the object and transferring more energy into each strike. This hammer omits a passive mass in favor of four custom-machined brass tubes, each of which holds a weighted fluid, a spring, and brass weight. Each piston acts as a damper in a similar way to a shock absorber on a vehicle, and a screw and o-ring at the top of each one allows them to be adjustable by adding different weight fluids as needed. Some detailed testing of the pistons shows a marked improvement over any of the passive mass varieties as well.
Not only is this an incredible amount of detail and precision for a tool that is often wielded in a non-precise way (at least among those of us for who aren’t skilled craftspeople), but it is also made out of wood, leather, and brass which gives it an improved look and feel over a plastic and fiberglass hammer that is typical of most modern deadblow hammers. It even rivals this
engineer’s hammer with its intricate custom engraving
in craftsmanship alone.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341210",
"author": "Martin",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T05:20:53",
"content": "And I was naive to think that hammer is just a simple peace of iron. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341220",
"author": "Phil",
... | 1,760,373,112.831819 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/inside-a-dec-hard-drive/ | Inside A DEC Hard Drive | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"DEC",
"Digital Equipment Corporation",
"Disk drive",
"pdp8",
"retrocomputing",
"RS08",
"teardown"
] | A lot of technology from the not-so-distant past doesn’t resemble modern versions very much. For a case in point, look at the DEC RS08 disk drive meant to pair with a circa 1970 PDP-8. Paired with an RF08 controller, this was state of the art, holding 262K 12-bit words with a blistering access speed of almost 63K/second unless you were plugged into 50Hz AC when it was closer to 50K/second. [Uniservo] had the disk unit, but not the controller. Someone else had a controller, but no disk drive. So [Uniservo] is shipping the disk to its new owner in a move worthy of a Reeses’ Peanutbutter Cup. The problem? The disk is super fragile and shipping is risky, so he decided to remove the platter for separate packing. Good thing for us, because we get
a peek inside
.
The nickel-cobalt platter looks like a thick LP record with heads underneath. As you might guess from the data transfer specification, the motor was just a common AC motor that rotated the platter against the head.
It wasn’t unusual to wear out the platter and flip it over to use the other side. There’s no telling what a replacement platter would cost. The device was the first drive DEC developed themselves. Unlike a modern disk, the heads actually made contact with the platter.
Because the heads are on the surface, disassembly was tricky. There’s a chance that crud on the platter could scrape the surface if the platter were to move. Once the platter is out of the way, you can see the many heads. There were 128 data tracks and six timing tracks (three were spares). These mount on springs, and at first glance they look like Molex connectors with tiny coils within.
In a day when gigabytes can fit on your keychain and are virtually free, it is amazing to contemplate the engineering and cost that went into a device like this. You can only imagine what people in 50 years will think of our disk drives.
We enjoy the PDP-8, although
our version
doesn’t need a physical disk drive. If you ever wonder what all the
lights and switches
are for, we can help. | 40 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341160",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T02:07:24",
"content": "Any useful data on that drive?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341203",
"author": "Definitely not John",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20... | 1,760,373,112.965684 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/smart-pet-feeder-is-well-engineered/ | Smart Pet Feeder Is Well Engineered | Anool Mahidharia | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"cat",
"cat feeder",
"cat food",
"pet bowl filling",
"pet feeder"
] | Having pets can sometimes be more demanding than raising kids. Pet owners obviously love and adore their pets, but anything that can be done to reduce their “chores” can be a welcome relief. One big pain point is feeding them at the right time and in the right amount, especially when it comes to cats. As the saying goes, “Dogs have Masters, Cats have Staff! ”
[Sebastian] had had it with his cat [Strachu] nagging him at odd hours for food. Luckily, [Sebastian] is a skilled maker, and his
IoT Cat Feeder
is not only practical, but also extremely well engineered. He designed and built it from scratch, and the beautiful, final version shows the effort he put in to it. His requirements were quite straightforward. It had to integrate with his home automation system, had to dispense food based on a regular schedule, send him a notification at other times of the day when the feeder detected the cat so he could decide if the cat deserved a special treat or not, and allow him to manually dispense cat food. Finally, he also wanted it to be easy to take apart so he could wash the parts that are in contact with food.
For the electronics, [Sebastian] designed a custom board to hold the ESP12F module and all the other associated parts. Everything, other than the stepper motor is mounted on the PCB. A PIR sensor is used for cat detection. A piezo buzzer lets the cat know that food is ready. A push button can be used to manually dispense food when required. The ESP8266 is flashed with
ESPhome
which allows control via simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through the
Home Assistant addon
. If you’re interested in taking a look under the hood, [Sebastian] walks through some of the key code blocks on the ESP side, as well as the various configuration and setting options for the Home Assistant.
But by far the most effort he needed was in getting the mechanical design perfected. He had to go through several rounds of prototype iterations – after all, his cat deserved the very best in feeder design. The basic parts of the design are simple – a stepper motor drives an auger that pushes the cat food from the main container and deposits it in the bowl. Check out the detailed assembly instructions and pictures on his blog. The best part of his design is how easy it is to take it apart the feeder for cleaning. The stepper motor is held in place by a snap fit end piece without using any screws. The main body then just slides out from the top of the electronics box. Check out [Sebastian]’s cat feeder video after the break for details.
If this design makes you hanker to make one for your cat too, head over to his blog post and provide your mail address and [Sebastian] will send all the files for the project.
If your cat isn’t satisfied with dry food nuggets, you probably ought to build this
Automated Cat Feeder That Handles Wet Food With Aplomb
. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341131",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T23:11:53",
"content": "If it were a Smart pet feeder it wouldn’t need to do anything.A Smart Pet should be able to feed itself!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341136",
... | 1,760,373,113.026242 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/pistorm-brings-modern-muscle-to-the-amiga/ | PiStorm Brings Modern Muscle To The Amiga | Lewin Day | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"cpld",
"raspberry pi"
] | The Amiga, well known as the best and greatest computer ever designed, is nonetheless a platform of yesteryear. Its 68K, and later PowerPC, architectures have both been abandoned by the mainstream, and its attractive grey industrial design no longer graces store shelves. That doesn’t mean the platform is dead however,
with diehard shredders like [Claude Schwarz] working hard to keep it alive with projects like PiStorm.
PiStorm is a Motorola 68K CPU emulator, running on a Raspberry PI 3A. The Pi uses its GPIOs to interact with a CPLD chip, which acts as the logic glue to allow the modern single board computer to emulate the Amiga’s original processor. However, it’s more than just an easy way to replace or upgrade a CPU. It also offers additional features, like retargetable graphics acceleration, SCSI disk emulation, and the ability to run whatever Kickstart ROM you so desire.
While the initial work has been done on a Pi 3A,
[Claude] has also demonstrated some of the basic functionality running on a Pi CM4 too
. The benchmarks are more fierce than a Beyoncé Super Bowl half time show, so if you need grunt on your classic Amiga, this could be the way to go. As a bonus, files to build your own are readily available on Github,
which should make it a mite more accessible than other Amiga accelerator boards.
We wonder whether this accelerator could be used to hook the Amiga up to Spotify,
a la this previous build.
Likely, time will tell. Video after the break.
Small video showing latest PiStorm 68k Emulation in action.
All runs on a stock A500+ (ECS,1MB Chip), just plugged in PiStorm and a USB HDD holding the HDD Image as HDF. CPU is set to 68EC030, RTG at 720p/16Bit , 128MB Fastmem.
#Amiga
#raspberrypi
https://t.co/giTjdoiG4w
pic.twitter.com/HsPu47JrnT
— Claude Schwarz (@Claude1079)
February 19, 2021 | 40 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340883",
"author": "steves",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T09:28:54",
"content": "If only we could spend a half as much time living in the present as what we do living in the past then we would be spending considerably more time living in the present and with perhaps some spent looking... | 1,760,373,113.104885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/diy-wireless-serial-adapter-speaks-true-rs-232/ | DIY Wireless Serial Adapter Speaks (True) RS-232 | Donald Papp | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"adapter",
"bipolar locig",
"bluetooth",
"bridge",
"rs-232",
"rs232",
"serial",
"vintage",
"wifi",
"wireless"
] | There is a gotcha lurking in wait for hackers who look at a piece of equipment, see a port labeled “Serial / RS-232”, and start to get ideas. The issue is the fact that the older the equipment, the more likely it is to be a bit old-fashioned about how it expects to speak RS-232. Vintage electronics may expect the serial data to be at bipolar voltage levels that are higher than what the typical microcontroller is used to slinging, and that was the situation [g3gg0] faced with some vintage benchtop equipment. Rather than deal with cables and wired adapters, [g3gg0] decided to design
a wireless adapter with WiFi and Bluetooth on one end, and true RS-232 on the other
.
The adapter features an ESP32 and is attached to a DB-9 plug, so it’s nice and small. It uses the
ST3232
chip to communicate at 3 V logic levels on the microcontroller side, supports bipolar logic up to +/-13 V on the vintage hardware side, and a rudimentary web interface allows setting hardware parameters like baud rate. The nice thing about the ST3232 transceiver is that it is not only small, but can work from a 3 V supply with only four 0.1 uF capacitors needed for the internal charge pumps.
As for actually using the adapter, [g3gg0] says that the adapter’s serial port is exposed over TCP on port 23 (Telnet) which is supported by some programs and hardware. Alternately, one can connect an ESP32 to one’s computer over USB, and run firmware that bridges any serial data directly to the adapter on the other end.
Design files including schematic, bill of materials, and PCB design
are shared online
, and you can see a brief tour of the adapter in the video, embedded below.
RS-232 on serial interfaces was around for a long time, so we’ve definitely not seen the end of projects like this. [g3gg0]’s board would sure have made it
easier to IoT-ify this old LED signboard
. | 80 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340841",
"author": "bigredlevy",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T05:10:56",
"content": "*DE-9 not DB-9D-subminiature 9 pin connector size E.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-subminiature",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6340881",
... | 1,760,373,113.35006 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/exploring-op-amp-loading/ | Exploring Op Amp Loading | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"capacitive load",
"capacitive loading",
"op-amp"
] | Op amps are generally pretty easy to apply, but there are some practical nonideal behaviors you have to keep in mind. [EEforEveryone] takes a test board with some 2X amplifiers on it and — after some fiddling around with the scope probes — demonstrates
the effect of capacitive loading
on the output of an op amp. (Video, embedded below.)
The op amp in question is the OP07. In fact, there are two identical opamps looking at the single input. The output of one op amp feeds directly to the scope probes. The second one passes through a bipolar transistor buffer consisting of an NPN and PNP transistor. Both outputs have optional capacitors that can be jumpered in or out of the circuit.
With no capacitance, everything works as you’d expect. The signal goes in and both outputs produce a perfect replica at twice the amplitude. Adding capacitive loading distorts the output signal and, as you might expect, the more capacitance on the output, the worse the distortion. The buffer does help, but there is still distortion.
The narrator mentions he probably should have used a worse op amp to accentuate the problems with trying to drive high capacitive loads, including instability. But even with the high-performance op amp, you can see that adding the buffer is definitely desirable. There’s no free lunch, though, as you do lose some output voltage range with the buffer in place. In the end, you can see an example of trimming the op amp, as well.
If you prefer to do your experiments virtually,
you can do that
. If you do, don’t forget to try
all the simulations
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340827",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T04:05:39",
"content": "It seems the video just shows low-pass behavior due to the output impedance. With some opamps, it becomes much more unstable with even a small capacitive load:https://jpa.kapsi.fi/stuff/pix/stable.png(unfortu... | 1,760,373,113.396585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/hackaday-links-april-18-2021/ | Hackaday Links: April 18, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"enigma",
"hackaday links",
"health",
"helicopter",
"Ingenuity",
"InSight",
"mars",
"mild steel",
"Perseverance",
"pi zero",
"RF modulator",
"safety"
] | More bad news from Mars this week, and this time not just from Perseverance. Last week the eagerly anticipated first flight of the helicopter Ingenuity was delayed for a couple of days after failing a full-speed spin-up test of its rotors. That appears to have been
a bigger deal than initially thought
, as it required a significant rewrite of the helicopter’s software. That meant testing, of course, and subsequent upload to the UAV, which at 174 million miles away takes a bit of doing. The good news is that they were
able to complete the full-speed rotor test
without the full program upload, so we’re one step closer to flight, which may take place
as early as Monday morning
.
Meanwhile, over at Elysium Planitia, the Mars InSight lander has troubles of its own. The geophysical laboratory, which has been trying to explore the inner structure of Mars since landing in 2018, entered
an “emergency hibernation” state this week
because of a lack of sufficient power generation. Unlike the radioisotope-powered Perseverance rover, InSight relies on a pair of solar panels for its electricity, and those panels are being obscured by Martian dust. The panels normally get blown clean by Martian winds, but things have been calm lately and the dust has really built up. If this seems like deja vu all over again, it’s probably because
a planet-wide dust storm is what killed the plucky Opportunity rover
back in 2018. Here’s hoping the wind picks up a little and InSight can get back to work.
Funny what crops up in one’s newsfeed, especially when one is responsible for putting out content that populates others’ newsfeeds. We recently took
a look at the dangers of “zinc fever”
, a flu-like illness that can crop up after inhaling gasses produced by molten zinc. That resulted in stumbling across an article from last year about
mild steel welding fumes being classified as a human carcinogen
. This comes from the Health and Safety Executive, a UK government agency concerned with workplace health issues. The release is an interesting read, and it suggests that mild steel fumes can cause not only lung cancer but kidney cancer. The announcement is mainly concerned with British workplaces, of course, but there are some interesting tidbits in there, such as the fact that welding fumes make dust particles so small that they can reach down into the very lowest reaches of lungs, the alveoli where gas exchange occurs. It’s enough to make one invest in
PAPR
or some kind of fume extractor.
For those of a certain vintage, our first computer was probably something that bore little resemblance to a PC or laptop. It was likely a single-board affair or something like a C64, and acquiring the essential bit of hardware usually left little in the budget for a proper monitor. Little 12″ B&W TVs were a dime a dozen, though, and easily — if grainily — enlisted into service as a monitor by way of an RF modulator. To recreate a little of that magic with modern hardware, Hackaday contributor Adam Zeloof came up with
the PiMod Zero
, an RF-modulator hat for the Raspberry Pi Zero that turns the component video into an NTSC analog signal. He’s open-sourced the design files, or there’s a CrowdSupply campaign for those who prefer to buy.
And finally, if you somehow traveled back in time to the 1940s with a laptop, how long would it have taken you to crack the Enigma code? Longer than you think, at least according to Dr. Mike Pound over at Computerphile, who released
a fascinating video
on how Enigma worked and what it took for Turing and the gang at Bletchley to crack the code. We knew some of the details of Enigma’s workings before seeing this video, but Mike’s explanation was really good. And, his explanation of the shortcut method he used to decode an Enigma message made the whole process clearer to us than it’s ever been. Interesting stuff. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340804",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T00:09:05",
"content": "I like the PiMod Zero rf modulator, just a couple of questions, how hard is it to get higher VHF channels and the same for PAL? Oh and if you want to play with old encryption machines there is a website... | 1,760,373,113.450016 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/shapeshifting-streetlights-are-the-future-we-want-to-live-in/ | Shapeshifting Streetlights Are The Future We Want To Live In | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"street lamp",
"street light",
"streetlamp",
"streetlight"
] | Regular streetlights are all well and good, bathing us in the glow of their sodium, or more increasingly LED, lamps. They’re mostly rigid metal contraptions installed primarily for public safety purposes. They could be so much more, however,
as the Bloomlight demonstrates.
The light consists of a flexible main stem, which can be pulled in different directions by six steel cables controlled by stepper motors. At the top, it has a shroud made of wooden slats and fabric that can bloom like a flower around its central lamp, thanks to a 3D printed mechanism. LIDAR is used to detect approaching humans, at which point the Bloomlight leans over towards them and begins to bloom open, showering them with light.
It’s a beautiful art piece from the Dutch design firm [Vouw], and one we’d love to see in person. The design reminds of
this useful tentacle design
. With that said, it could grow emotionally exhausting having to repeatedly ignore plaintively waving streetlights that crave human attention as you walk on through the night. Anthropomorphizing anything is usually a double edged sword.
Perhaps the neatest streetlight hack we’ve seen is way back from 2013 –
using a laser diode to shut off a streetlight from a distance.
Video after the break. | 32 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340755",
"author": "Lee Studley",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T20:32:52",
"content": "These are Simon Stålenhag -esque streetlights. Would fit right in.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6340757",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp... | 1,760,373,113.700287 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/this-pineapple-keyboard-is-the-bomb/ | This Pineapple Keyboard Is The Bomb | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"grenade",
"macro keyboard",
"macro keypad",
"macro pad",
"pineapple",
"QMK"
] | Now why didn’t we think of this? While building a dactyl manuform — a semi-ergonomic split keyboard — [dapperrogue] had the life-changing epiphany that keyboards can be any shape or size, as long as there is room for wiring and a microcontroller inside. [dapperrogue]’s first foray into the world of fictional ordnance came in the form of an F-bomb — a round macro keeb made in the classic round explosive shape and covered with function keys. Building on the explosive feedback from that, [dapperrogue]
built this bomb of a pineapple keeb
,
the only anti-personnel factor being the clickiness of the key switches.
This groovy grenade has 25 keys total, 24 of which are in a 4×6 grid around the body. The 25th key, the best one, is hiding under the lever and you bet it can only be actuated by pulling the pin first. We love the use of the lever because it makes us think of Morse code keyers, which might be what we would use that switch for.
Inside is an Arduino Pro Micro running QMK and some skillful wiring. The entirely 3D-printed enclosure is in two main pieces that are connected with M3 screws, plus the top. If you want to pack one of your own,
the STLs and firmware are out on GitHub
. Just don’t take it to the airport.
Be sure to check out the demos after the break — in the stock firmware, every key types out a different onomatopoeic boom-type sound. Are you more of a pacifist when it comes to macro pad design? That’s understandable.
We have plenty of different builds to admire
.
Via
r/mk | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340725",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T17:51:56",
"content": "Just don’t try to fly with it. The TSA have zero sense of humor about such things.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6340748",
"auth... | 1,760,373,113.628804 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/bridging-the-pc-and-embedded-worlds-with-pico-and-python/ | Bridging The PC And Embedded Worlds With Pico And Python | Stephen Ogier | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"gpio",
"i2c",
"i2c interface",
"micropython",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"spi",
"ssd1306"
] | Although protocols like I2C and SPI are great for communicating between embedded devices and their peripherals, it can be a pain to interface these low-level digital interfaces to a PC. [Alexandre] typically used an Arduino to bridge between the PC and embedded worlds, but he got tired of defining a custom serial protocol for each project. Inspired by MicroPython’s machine module, [Alexandre] has developed
u2if—an implementation of some of MicroPython’s machine module for PC
—using a USB-connected Raspberry Pi Pico to bridge between a PC and low-level digital interfaces.
u2if consists of two parts: the PC portion is a Python implementation of a portion of the MicroPython machine module, and the Raspberry Pi Pico receives some custom C++ firmware. Thus far, [Alexandre] has implemented functionality for the onboard ADCs, I2C, SPI, UART, and GPIO lines as well as additional support for I2S sound and the WS2812B addressable LED.
In addition to the u2if package, [Alexandre] has designed a PCB to break out all of the Raspberry Pi Pico’s interfaces in a handy 3×3.9″ board. We especially like that multiple headers are supplied for I2C, including one with enough space to mount an
SSD1306 OLED display
.
We think this could be an incredibly useful tool, and what makes it even more impressive is that it uses a board many of us already have laying around. If you want a dedicated device for interfacing with low-level digital buses,
you may want to check out the GreatFET. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340690",
"author": "ConsultingJoe",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T14:08:29",
"content": "Nice, a how to video would be great to see this in action 🎬👍",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6340692",
"author": "Mike Donovan",
"tim... | 1,760,373,113.547336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/easy-usb%e2%80%91c-power-for-all-your-devices/ | Easy USB‑C Power For All Your Devices | Anool Mahidharia | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"ATtiny 816",
"optical programming",
"STUSB4500",
"UPDI",
"USB C",
"USB-C PD"
] | [Mansour Behabadi] wanted to harness the high power capability of USB-C using as simple a hardware design as possible. After some research and experimental prototyping, he designed the
fpx — an easy to use USB‑C power delivery board
. The fpx is an improved follow up to his earlier USB PD project
fabpide2
which we featured some time back. However, practical implementation of the USB PD protocol can be a bed of thorns. Negotiating power delivery usually requires a dedicated PD controller coupled with a micro-controller for user control.
With USB PD, a USB-C port can be configured as either a source, a sink, or both and allows connected devices to negotiate up to 100 W (20 V, 5 A) of power. The fpx is based around the popular STUSB4500 PD controller, which does most of the PD heavy lifting. To program the STUSB4500, he used an ATtiny 816 micro-controller, whose UPDI programming and debugging interface consumes lower board real estate.
However, what’s a little bit different is the way the fpx is programmed — by sending binary black and white flashes from any device that can display a web page. Using light isn’t a particularly new way of programming. We’ve seen it used almost a decade back by
WayneAndLayne
for their
Blinky PoV
projects, and later by the
Electric Imp’s BlinkUp app
. The fpx uses a similar method to read flashes of light from a screen which are picked up by a photo-transistor connected to the ATtiny. The ATtiny then communicates with the STUSB4500 over I
2
C. This eliminates the requirement for special software or an IDE for programming and doesn’t need any physical cable connection. Check out [Mansour]’s blog post where he walks us through the details of how he managed to wrangle the optical programming challenge.
Many of the commercially available USB PD decoy/detector/trigger boards use either solder jumpers or a switch with an RGB LED to adjust Power Delivery Output (PDO). [Mansour]’s method may be a little more robust and reliable. The STUSB4500 can store two separate PDO values and can negotiate with a source according to its capability. If the source cannot offer either of these options, the fpx can either request for a minimal 5 V / 100 mA setting, or disable the output. The fpx is an open source project, accessible on
Github
. Check out the video after the break for an overview of the fpx.
Thanks for the tip, [Lacey] | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341581",
"author": "Fallen",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T11:48:40",
"content": "This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6341601",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T13:1... | 1,760,373,113.765706 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/battery-analyzer-puts-alkaline-cells-to-the-test/ | Battery Analyzer Puts Alkaline Cells To The Test | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"battery analysis",
"battery tester",
"current sensor",
"INA219"
] | We know, we know. Generally speaking, you should try and switch your household devices over to rechargeable cells rather than using disposable alkaline batteries. But while they might seem increasingly quaint in the lithium-ion era, features such as a long shelf life make it worth keeping a pack of disposables around. So which ones should you buy? That’s what
[Moragor] wanted to find out with his personal battery analyzer
.
Designed as a shield for the Arduino Mega 2560, the analyzer combines a small programmable electronic load with a INA219 current sensor, OLED display, and SD card reader. The user selects the cutoff voltage and discharge rate before the test begins, and once it’s running, data is collected every second and saved to the SD card for later analysis. Once the battery voltage reaches the predetermined value, the test is over and you’re ready to put a new cell through its paces.
After testing 27 different brands of batteries, [Moragor] tabulated all the data and produced some helpful charts to illustrate the results. With few exceptions, the performance level for most of the batteries was remarkably similar. If anything, the test seemed to show that higher tier batteries from companies like Duracell and Energizer actually performed slightly worse than the mid-range offerings. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that, when the per-cell cost was factored in, the local cheapo batteries provided a better value than anything else in the test.
While the selection of battery brands may be different from where you live, the data [Moragor] collected is still a fascinating even if you don’t recognize some of the names on the chart. Of particular note is the confirmation that lithium batteries handily outperformed any of the Alkaline cells tested when it came to high-drain applications.
We’d still rather they came in rechargeable form
, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. | 61 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341524",
"author": "Englund",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T05:32:46",
"content": "Another nice resource, albeit a bit old, ishttps://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/CommonAAcomparator.php",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6341527"... | 1,760,373,115.864904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/a-useful-macro-pad-for-microsoft-teams/ | A Useful Macro Pad For Microsoft Teams | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"microsoft teams",
"stream deck",
"streamdeck"
] | Working from home has now become
de rigeur
for many more people around the globe. With it, has sprung up a desire for better controls for streaming and conferencing software. There are plenty of streamdecks on the market, of course, but this isn’t BuyADay, it’s HackADay.
Thus, you’ll want to check out this great build for Microsoft Teams by [Build Comics].
The build consists of a series of Cherry MX Silent Red key switches in a 3D printed housing, dedicated to muting audio, switching video, and making and hanging up on calls. Naturally, they’re marked with their individual functions and lit with RGB LEDs for obvious feedback. The keys are read by a Raspberry Pi Pico, which handles USB communication with the PC. AutoHotKey is then pressed into service to make the final link to the Microsoft Teams software. [Build Comics] also worked on a 3D-printed busylight that indicates when they’re on a call; however, thus far it isn’t quite working properly.
Jump into the conversation on Github
or comment below if you’ve got insight on the problem.
It’s a build that likely saves a lot of hassle when you’re on several calls a day. The mute button is a sure-fire jobsaver on some occasions, and it’s better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it. We’ve featured work from [Build Comics] before, too –
like this excellent vintage meter restoration.
Video after the break. | 15 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341509",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2021-04-21T03:43:56",
"content": "This one is all you need for anything from Microsoft:http://www.visualjokes.com/pics/keyb3.jpg",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6342719",
"au... | 1,760,373,115.60951 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/no-nixie-nixie-clock/ | No-Nixie Nixie Clock | Chris Lott | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"IPS display",
"nixie clock",
"nixie tube",
"nixie tube alternative"
] | Over on [Techmoan]’s YouTube channel
he’s excited about a new gadget
that finally arrived after months of waiting — the EleksTube IPS fake Nixie tube clock. This is a re-imagining of a Nixie tube clock using six 135×240 pixel IPS display panels. They are mounted like tiny billboards, each one inside glass bulbs to mimic that retro look. Based on [Techmoan]’s measurement of these displays, it appears they are the same 16:9 IPS displays used in the TTGO ESP32 modules. The effect is quite impressive, and the fact that each digit is a complete display leads to quite a bit of flexibility. For example, if you don’t like the Nixie look, you can select from a suite of styles or make your own set of custom digits.
Additional digit styles are provided
Custom Digits
While this is a finished product put out by EleksMaker, the concept is clearly adaptable to DIY projects as well. One beneficial side effect of having all these display is that changing the settings of your clock is no longer a cryptic experience — the displays are used to show and select options in clear text. This is a selling point for many people, as this device doesn’t require a phone app for control. We wish more products would follow this trend. Thanks to [IanS] for the tip.
Menu settings and options made easy
This isn’t EleksMaker’s first attempt at a Nixie tube replacement. This
earlier plywood-based clock
uses edge illuminated acrylic digit panels to mimic the Nixie tube effect. Back in 2019 we covered the
FIXIE (faux-Nixie) project
which used OLED screens in a similar manner, but wasn’t quite as compact as this IPS panel approach. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341462",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T23:37:17",
"content": "YouTube is getting very good at predicting future HaD posts.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6341473",
"author": "Steve L",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,373,116.028521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/you-wont-believe-how-much-tech-is-hiding-in-this-desk/ | You Won’t Believe How Much Tech Is Hiding In This Desk | Kristina Panos | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"minimalism",
"pc",
"pc case",
"scanner",
"thermal printer"
] | Say what you will about office life: there were definitely some productivity perks, but the coffee is much better at home. Like many of us, [Pierre] has been working from home for the last year or so. And as much as he might enjoy spending so much time in his small Parisian apartment, it lacks many of the amenities of the office such as a scanner, printer, and, you know, a reasonable amount of space in which to work.
Inspired by another build,
[Pierre] set out to build his dream desk that is maximum PC power in minimum space
. It is chock full of easily-accessible cavities that hide everything you’d expect, plus a few things you don’t, like a flatbed scanner, a printer, a router, and a wireless charging pad. One cavity is dedicated to I/O, and another has three international power sockets. The only thing it doesn’t hide is the 22″ pen display that [Pierre] uses for sketching, signing documents, and occasionally as a second monitor.
A home-brew jig makes consistent dowel drilling much easier.
This desk may look like solid wood, but the top is a veneer that’s glued on to a custom-cut 1mm steel sheet. The inside frame is made of hardwood and so are the legs — one of them has a hidden channel for the only two cords that are even somewhat visible — the power and Ethernet cables. He joined all the frame pieces with dowel rods, and made a 3D-printed and metal-reinforced drilling jig to get the holes just right.
[Pierre] started this build by planning out the components and making meticulous notes about the dimensions of every piece. Then he sketched it and modelled it in FreeCAD to get all the cavities and cable runs correct and ensure good airflow through the desk. After that it was on to woodworking, metalworking, and PCB fab for relocated and hidden display controls and a custom-built amplifier.
It’s obvious that a lot of thought went in to this, and there’s a ton of work appreciate here, so clear off that inferior desk of yours and check out the build video after the break. Wish you had a PC desk? [Pierre] is seriously considering a Kickstarter
if enough people show interest
.
Are you into minimalism, but don’t want to build something of this magnitude?
There’s more than one way to get there
. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341434",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T21:05:29",
"content": "Any accomodation of obsolete “paper” based technology should include an inkwell and a stand for a whale oil lantern. Perhaps a blotter and a wax sealing kit, and some 2 cent stamps.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,115.382489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/camera-hack-peels-back-layers-of-embedded-linux/ | Camera Hack Peels Back Layers Of Embedded Linux | Tom Nardi | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"decompile",
"Embedded Linux",
"flash storage",
"Ghidra",
"network camera",
"reverse engineering",
"security camera",
"spi"
] | Embedded Linux devices are everywhere these days, and sooner or later, you’re going to want to poke around in one of them. But how? That’s where posts like this one from [Felipe Astroza] come in.
While his work is focused on the Foscam C1 security camera
, the techniques and tools he outlines here will work on all sorts of gadgets that have a tiny penguin at their core.
Rather than trying to go in through the front door, [Felipe] starts his assault with the nuclear option: removing the SPI MX25L12835F flash chip from the camera’s PCB and dumping its contents with a Raspberry Pi. From there he walks through the use of different tools to determine the partition scheme of the chip and eventually extract passwords and other interesting bits of information from the various file systems within.
Getting ready to remove the flash chip.
That alone would be worth the read, but things really get interesting once [Felipe] discovers the
FirmwareUpgrade
program. Since the Foscam’s software updates are encrypted, he reasons that reverse engineering this binary would uncover the key and allow for the creation of custom firmware images that can be flashed through the stock interface.
Further investigation with Ghidra and friends identifies an interesting shared library linked to the executable in question, which is then disassembled in an effort to figure out how the key is being obfuscated. We won’t ruin the surprise, but [Felipe] eventually gets what he’s after.
This isn’t the first time
[Felipe] has played around with the firmware on these Internet connected cameras
, and we dare say it won’t be his last. For those who are really into tinkering with these sort of devices,
it’s not unheard of to install a socket for the flash chip
to make software modifications faster and easier. | 18 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341398",
"author": "mschweini",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T18:39:11",
"content": "Why wont companies that use linux firmwares give us root access? I reckon that at CCTV company that is hacker and maker friendly would become quite popular. Maybe do it like Chromebooks, which usually h... | 1,760,373,116.087336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/20/what-to-expect-from-3d-scanning-and-how-to-work-with-it/ | What To Expect From 3D Scanning, And How To Work With It | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d modeling",
"3D Printering",
"3d scanning",
"cad",
"part design",
"Photogrammetry"
] | 3D scanning and 3D printing may sound like a natural match for one another, but they don’t always play together as easily and nicely as one would hope. I’ll explain what one can expect by highlighting three use cases the average hacker encounters, and how well they do (or don’t) work. With this, you’ll have a better idea of how 3D scanning can meet your part design and 3D printing needs.
How Well Some Things (Don’t) Work
Most 3D printing enthusiasts sooner or later become interested in whether 3D scanning can make their lives and projects easier. Here are a three different intersections of 3D scanning, 3D printing, and CAD along with a few words on how well each can be expected to work.
Goal
Examples and Details
Does it work?
Use scans to make copies of an object.
3D scan something, then 3D print copies.
Objects might be functional things like fixtures or appliance parts, or
artistic objects like sculptures.
Mostly yes, but depends on the object
Make a CAD model from a source object.
The goal is a 1:1 model, for part engineering purposes.
Use 3D scanning instead of creating the object in CAD.
Not Really
Digitize inconvenient or troublesome shapes.
Obtain an accurate model of complex shapes that can’t easily be measured or modeled any other way.
Examples: dashboards, sculptures, large objects, objects that are attached to something else or can’t be easily moved, body parts like heads or faces, and objects with many curves.
Useful to make sure a 3D printed object will fit into or on something else.
Creating a CAD model of a part for engineering purposes is not the goal.
Yes, but it depends
In all of these cases, one wants a 3D model of an object, and that’s exactly what 3D scanning creates, so what’s the problem? The problem is that not all 3D models are alike and useful for the same things.
3D Scanning Makes Meshes, Not CAD Models
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of 3D models: CAD models, and meshes. These can be thought of as being useful for engineering purposes and artistic purposes, respectively. Some readers may consider that a revolting oversimplification, but it is a helpful one to make a point about how 3D scanning, 3D printing, and CAD work do (and don’t) work together.
Hackers designing parts are typically most interested in CAD models, because these represent real-world objects that get modified in terms of real-world measurements. But 3D scanning will not create a CAD model; it will create a mesh.
Typical CAD model editing example, showing a model as a solid object, altered in terms of geometric features and real-world measurements.
A typical mesh editing operation. The object is a network of points connected into a mesh, which can be manipulated and deformed.
Meshes
can
be used for engineering purposes —
.stl
files are meshes after all, and are practically synonymous with 3D printing — but a mesh cannot be modified in the the same ways a CAD file can. With a mesh, one does not extrude a face by a specific number of millimeters, nor does one fillet a corner to a specific radius. Meshes can absolutely be modified, but the tools and processes are different.
To sum up: 3D scanning makes 3D models from real-world objects, but the models that come out of the scanning process aren’t necessarily suitable for engineering purposes without additional work.
Options for the Home-based Hacker
At the beginning of this article I selected three typical intersections of 3D scanning, 3D printing, and CAD work to illustrate the various imperfect fits between them. Now I’ll go into those three use cases in more detail, and provide ways for the average hacker to use 3D scanning to make a project easier.
Using 3D Scanning to Create Copies
Photogrammetry is an accessible way to create 3D models, and free as well as paid options exist. Generally, the smaller and more complex an object, the harder it will be to obtain a result that preserves all the features and details.
Photogrammetry uses multiple photos of an object taken from a variety of different angles, and software interprets these photos to create a point cloud representing the surface of the object. A mesh 3D model representing the object can then be generated. Some cleanup or post-processing of the model is usually required, depending on the method and software.
This blog post
from Prusa Research walks through how to get the best results with
Meshroom
, a free option for 3D scanning using photogrammetry.
OpenScan
(and
OpenScan Mini
) is a DIY project by [Thomas Megel] aimed at using photogrammetry to scan small objects with high accuracy.
RealityCapture
is non-free software with a number of useful features and well-made tutorials. Notably, they have a license model option aimed at occasional use and small quantities. Since most software subscription models rarely make sense for hobbyists and one-off projects, it can be worth a look.
Creating a CAD Model from a 3D Scan
Since 3D scanning will not generate a CAD model, it’s not a direct alternative to designing a part in CAD. Most CAD programs allow importing a mesh, but the imported mesh remains a mesh, which cannot be modified in the same way as other CAD objects. It might be useful as a guide for a new design, however.
A mesh converted to a solid will become an object made up of collection of triangular faces, identical to the ones that made up the original mesh. This is rarely what a novice CAD modeler expects.
One may wonder if it is possible to convert from one format to another. It is, but the conversion may not be what one expects. Converting a CAD model into a mesh is simple enough, but converting a mesh into a CAD solid is less straightforward.
If a mesh is not too complex, it can be transformed into a solid (
here is one way to do so by using MeshLab and FreeCAD
) but it still won’t be a “normal” CAD object, and the image here demonstrates why.
If one’s goal is to use 3D scanning to make the creation of a CAD model easier and the conversion result shown here won’t do the trick, the next best thing is to use the 3D scan as a master and model a new part around it to match, using the imported mesh as a guide. One project that uses this approach is
this custom trackball designed around a molded ergonomic prototype
.
Some professional software suites have the ability to export to CAD, but the essential workflow is the same, with a scanned mesh being used as the reference for a new design.
3D Scanning to Digitize Inconvenient or Troublesome Shapes
This scan of a laser cutter’s panel is obviously only part of the whole machine, but the important part is present.
Sometimes an accurate 3D model of a shape is needed, and that shape isn’t easily modeled or measured by hand. The same photogrammetry tools mentioned earlier are useful here, but their purpose is different. Instead of modeling the object from top to bottom to make an accurate copy, often only part of the object is needed.
For example, modeling the shape of an equipment panel or dashboard requires only the relevant section to be scanned successfully. A person’s head can be scanned to ensure a precise fit for a helmet or mask, and there’s no need to get a full scan of the entire body. In general, fewer pictures are needed and post-processing and model cleanup is easier because there is a smaller area of interest. A size reference must be included somehow for scaling later, because most 3D scans do not intrinsically create 1:1 models.
An excellent example of this approach is
this project to design a custom control panel
intended to fit an existing piece of equipment. Unlike when scanning a whole object with the intent of duplicating it, there’s no need to capture difficult-to-reach places like the bottom or back. This makes both scanning and model cleanup easier.
Professional Scanning
Another option is to pay for a professional scan. Fancy scanners and software suites costing thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars and aimed at engineering applications exist, and while they are out of the reach of the average hacker, paying for a company to do a scan or two might not be.
Accuracy and resolution can be beyond what’s possible with photogrammetry, and some of the professional software suites have fancy features like aligning multiple scans, accurate size references, or the ability to generate CAD models based on scan results.
A 1:1 model from a professional 3D scanning tool, the product of aligning and merging multiple separate scans from different angles to get a complete model. It is still a mesh, but it accurately represents the original in both features and scale.
Shown here is the model of a part I had professionally scanned with a
Creaform HandySCAN Black 3D
scanner, according to my invoice. It is an old wood grip from an antique firearm. The scan still created a mesh, but it was an accurate 1:1 model of the original that I was able to use to print replacements on an SLA 3D printer.
When getting a quote for professional 3D scanning, be sure to ask about fee structure and be clear about your needs. In my case, it was cost-effective to scan multiple similar objects under a single setup fee.
Know What 3D Scanning Can (and Can’t) Do
3D scanning is getting better and more accessible all the time, but the fact that it generates a mesh means it doesn’t always fit smoothly into a 3D printing and CAD part design workflow. That doesn’t mean it can’t be useful, but it does mean that it’s important to know the limitations, and how they will affect your needs.
Of course, one can always dig out the calipers and manually model a part in CAD, but not all parts and shapes are easily measured or reverse-engineered. 3D scanning is a great alternative to modeling complex, real-world objects that would be impractical or error-prone to create by hand.
Have you successfully used 3D scanning to make a project easier, or have a favorite method or tool to share? We definitely want to hear all about it, so please take a moment to share with us in the comments. | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341364",
"author": "Eric R Mockler",
"timestamp": "2021-04-20T17:15:41",
"content": "I’ve scanned things on a flatbed scanner -> svg –> CAD -> STL.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341371",
"author": "Jon H",
... | 1,760,373,115.555283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/large-format-lego-camera-is-a-bit-near-sighted/ | Large Format Lego Camera Is A Bit Near-Sighted | Zach Zeman | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"film camera",
"film photography",
"large format camera",
"large format photography",
"lego"
] | Photography doesn’t have to be expensive, something that’s especially true in the realm of film photography, where the imperfections of the medium can be half the appeal. There are many DIY plans and kits available for analog cameras, but [bhiga143] had couple spare components and a pile of small, colorful bricks lying around, so he decided to
build a functional 4×5″ film camera out of Lego
.
Details are light for this build, but with
a little knowledge about camera structure
we can guess at what’s going on inside. Simplicity makes for robust design, and what we have here is in effect a box with a lens on one side and photographic film on the other. The center section of the front, which actually supports the lens, is capable of sliding in and out to adjust focus. On the far side (not pictured) is a slot just wide enough to insert a standard film holder.
The camera really is a hack. [bhiga143] stayed true to the “Lego” part of Lego camera, so there is no glue, no black paper lining, and no frills. The tripod is whatever stack of books lay underneath it. The lens is, quote, “barely functional”. There are light leaks galore, and it can’t focus beyond about 3 feet (1 meter). But every one of those points just makes us love it more. Every nugget of imperfection is a few words added to the story each picture tells. And we honestly can’t wait to see more pictures.
Other Lego cameras we’ve seen have been smaller and less colorful, but
using a simple pinhole lens can reduce the overall cost
. Of course, you’re not limited to Lego if you want to
build your own pinhole camera
. Although, the ubiquitous plastic bricks can also
be useful in later stages of the film photography process
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341093",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T20:38:15",
"content": "LEGO(always capitalized, never pluralized)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6341109",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T21:52:5... | 1,760,373,115.436277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/a-superheterodyne-receiver-with-a-74xx-twist/ | A Superheterodyne Receiver With A 74xx Twist | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"74xx",
"am",
"demodulator",
"discrete",
"IF",
"LC",
"local oscillator",
"mixer",
"radio",
"shortwave",
"superheterodyne"
] | In a world with software-defined radios and single-chip receivers, a superheterodyne shortwave radio might not exactly score high on the pizzazz scale. After all, people have been mixing, filtering, and demodulating RF signals for more than a century now, and the circuits that do the job best are pretty well characterized. But building the same receiver using none of the traditional superhet trappings? Now that’s something new.
In what [Micha] half-jokingly calls
a “74xx-Defined Radio”
, easily obtained discrete logic chips, along with some op-amps and a handful of simple components, take the place of the tuned LC circuits and ganged variable capacitors that grace a typical superhet receiver. [Micha] started by building an RF mixer out of a 74HC4051 analog multiplexer, which with the help of a 2N3904 phase splitter forms a switching mixer. The local oscillator relies on the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) in a 74HC4046 PLL, a chip that
we’ve seen before
in [Elliot Williams]’ excellent “Logic Noise” series. The IF filter is a simple op-amp bandpass filter; the demodulator features an op-amp too, set up as an active half-wave rectifier. No coils to wind, no capacitors to tune, no diodes with mysterious properties — and judging by the video below, it works pretty well.
It may not be the most conventional way to tune in the shortwave bands, but we always love the results of projects that are artificially constrained like this one. Hats off to [Micha] for the interesting trip down the design road less travelled. | 32 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341056",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T18:50:34",
"content": "Few decades ago it was illegal to listen to abroad radio in my country. Radio receivers on the market were restricted to local bands. It was even illegal to posses parts needed to build such unrestricte... | 1,760,373,115.676502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/the-wright-stuff-first-powered-flight-on-mars-is-a-success/ | The Wright Stuff: First Powered Flight On Mars Is A Success | Dan Maloney | [
"Current Events",
"drone hacks",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"helicopter",
"Ingenuity",
"jpl",
"mars",
"Mars 2020",
"mars helicopter",
"nasa"
] | When you stop to think about the history of flight, it really is amazing that the first successful flight the Wright brothers made on a North Carolina beach to Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon spanned a mere 66 years. That we were able to understand and apply the principles of aerodynamics well enough to advance from delicate wood and canvas structures to rockets powerful enough to escape from the gravity well that had trapped us for eons is a powerful testament to human ingenuity and the drive to explore.
Ingenuity has again won the day in the history of flight, this time literally as the namesake helicopter that tagged along on the Mars 2020 mission has successfully flown over the Red Planet. The flight lasted a mere 40 seconds, but proved that controlled, powered flight is possible on Mars, a planet with an atmosphere that’s as thin as the air is at 100,000 feet (30 km) above sea level on Earth. It’s an historic accomplishment, and the engineering behind it is worth a deeper look.
The Long Deployment
Ingenuity is what’s known as a “technology demonstrator,” which is essentially an ancillary mission that tags along with the main scientific payloads supporting the primary mission. In many ways, tech demonstrators are afterthoughts, forced to fit into odd nooks and crannies and to impact the primary science missions as little as possible. Still, Ingenuity was afforded a considerable slice of the resources offered by the Perseverance rover, and a large chunk of mission time — 30 sols, or Martian days — to complete everything it could.
While it seems like 30 sols would be plenty of time to deploy, test, and fly Ingenuity, it’s actually a pretty tight schedule — nothing is easy when you’re doing it on Mars, after all. With that in mind, NASA front-loaded Perseverance’s schedule with Ingenuity operations, planning to knock out everything that the Ingenuity team had planned before proceeding onto the main mission of exploring Jezero crater for signs of ancient life.
The first thing Perseverance had to do was deploy Ingenuity onto the Martian surface.
We’ve seen footage of the deployment tests
, which gave the impression that birthing the helicopter onto the surface would be the work of a few minutes at most. But again, nothing about exploring another planet is easy, and with only one chance to get the first flight on another planet right, the Ingenuity team took no chances and made the deployment a painstaking process that took more than three weeks to complete.
Job one was to jettison the debris shield that cocooned Ingenuity during its ride across space and onto the surface of Mars. Once cameras confirmed that the cover had dropped off cleanly and that the aircraft had suffered no visible damage, Perseverance drove a considerable distance to the designated drop-off area. The flight team was obviously very picky about the terrain in the flight zone, as rocks could cause a problem for the helicopter while landing autonomously.
Once a suitable area was located, the long process of deploying the stowed helicopter to the surface began. Ingenuity was shipped on its side, with two of its four landing gear folded up. The aircraft was released from its locks and swung down into a vertical position, partly under the force of gravity and partly with the help of a small motor. After locking into the vertical position, the two folded legs were released, springing down into position thanks to the shock-absorbing mechanisms attaching them to the hull of the aircraft.
Finally, when the team was sure that everything checked out and the drop zone was clear of obstructions, the command was sent to deploy Ingenuity to the surface. It dropped few inches and landed cleanly on the surface on April 6. This was a big moment for the flight team — Ingenuity was now on its own, untethered from the power and data connections to Perseverance. The tiny aircraft would now have to survive solely on the power generated by its small solar panel and stored in its batteries, and have to prove that it could keep itself warm enough during the harsh Martian nights.
While the Ingenuity team was doing these checks, the rover moved about 4 meters away, exposing the helicopter’s solar panels to the sun for the first time. And like any tourist, Perseverance took a selfie with its former passenger in the background before heading off to its designated overwatch location, which is on a small rise about 60 meters from the drop-off location.
Since deployment, Ingenuity has been busy running system tests to make sure it’s ready to fly. The test results, including unlocking the rotor blades and doing a low-speed rotation test on April 8, were promising enough that NASA announced that the first flight would occur sometime on April 11, pending one final test — the full-speed rotor spin-up. While the rotors did manage to spin up to full speed on April 9, the flight software on the helicopter tripped a watchdog timer while trying to switch from pre-flight mode to flight mode. This caused a delay in the first flight attempt, at first by just a few days.
But as the new date for the first flight came and went, it was announced that a rewrite of the flight software would be necessary. Of course, this required extensive testing and subsequent upload of the new software to Ingenuity. While waiting for the bandwidth to accomplish these tasks, the flight team was able to complete the full-speed spin-up test, allowing them to schedule the first flight attempt for the early morning hours of April 19. The flight plan was very modest — take off, rise slowly to an altitude of 3 meters, hover in place for 30 seconds before yawing, and touch back down in the same place it took off from.
First Flight
For as exciting as the first flight of Ingenuity was, the coverage of it was somewhat anticlimactic, mainly due to the fact that the flight had already occurred, and all that was left was waiting for the data to pour in. So there was a fair amount of waiting around as the team stared at their screens. But eventually enough data came back to show that Ingenuity has spun up, ascended, hovered, descended, landed, and spun down without any incidents.
Things got more exciting when the plot of altimeter data came in, showing that Ingenuity had gotten up to just over three meters above the surface for a few seconds. But then the first images rolled in. A single black and white still from the down-looking navigation camera showed the shadow of Ingenuity cast onto the Martian surface, neatly framed by Perseverance’s wheel tracks. And shortly thereafter, images from the cameras on Perseverance came back, clearly showing the whole flight.
Now that the goal of proving that controlled flight on Mars is possible has been met, Ingenuity still has a host of experiments to conduct. MiMi Aung, project manager for Ingenuity, said that after the first flight, longer, more complex flights would be undertaken. There are hard limits to those flight profiles, of course — Ingenuity won’t be buzzing over to where Perseverance is parked, for example. But the helicopter will fly higher and farther than its first flight, testing the limits of the aircraft.
JPL engineers attach a swatch of muslin from the 1903 Wright Flyer to Ingenuity. Source: NASA/JPL
And while it wasn’t explicitly stated, it was certainly implied that at some point, Ingenuity may just end up crashing due to the flight operation team exceeding the limits of what the aircraft can handle. That’s fitting, in a way — Ingenuity was always on a one-way trip into the history of flight, and finding out what the limits of operating in the Martian atmosphere are is probably as good an end as any for the first Martian aircraft to meet.
Still, it might be nice if Ingenuity finishes its final flight with a nice touchdown, ready to be picked up by some future explorer and placed in some future Martian air and space museum, like the Wright Flyer is displayed today. If that happens, the circle will be complete, because tucked away aboard Ingenuity, wrapped around a cable under the solar panel, is a tiny swatch of muslin from the wing of the Flyer. | 59 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341034",
"author": "Crawford",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T17:36:26",
"content": "Awesome accompishment! Congratulations to the Ingenuity team!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6341037",
"author": "Timo Birnschein",
"timest... | 1,760,373,115.962558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/avr-reverse-engineering-hack-chat/ | AVR Reverse Engineering Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"arduino",
"assembly",
"AVR",
"datasheet",
"Hack Chat",
"ide",
"microcontroller",
"pico",
"rp2040"
] | Join us on Wednesday, April 21 at noon Pacific for the
AVR Reverse Engineering Hack Chat
with
Uri Shaked
!
We’ve all become familiar with the Arduino ecosystem by now, to the point where it’s almost trivially easy to whip up a quick project that implements almost every aspect of its functionality strictly in code. It’s incredibly useful, but we tend to lose sight of the fact that our Arduino sketches represent a virtual world where the IDE and a vast selection of libraries abstract away a lot of the complexity of what’s going on inside the AVR microcontroller.
While it’s certainly handy to have an environment that lets you stand up a system in a matter of minutes, it’s hardly the end of the story. There’s a lot to be gained by tapping into the power of assembly programming on the AVR, and learning how to read the datasheet and really run the thing. That was the focus of Uri Shaked’s recent well-received
HackadayU course on AVR internals
, and it’ll form the basis of this Hack Chat. Then again, since Uri is also leading a
Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040 course
on HackadayU in a couple of weeks, we may end up talking about that too. Or we may end up chatting about something else entirely! It’s really hard to where this Hack Chat will go, given Uri’s breadth of interests and expertise, but we’re pretty sure of one thing: it won’t be boring. Make sure you log in and join the chat — where it goes is largely up to you.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, April 21 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. | 10 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341058",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T19:04:04",
"content": "The irony is, what’s going on inside the AVR is in the end quite simple and easy to understand once you have a look around. The Arduino ecosystem manages to obfuscate that to the newcomers by saying essentia... | 1,760,373,115.490955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/8-bit-computer-addresses-leds/ | 8-Bit Computer Addresses LEDs | Bryan Cockfield | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"8 bit",
"addressable",
"array",
"computer",
"display",
"gate",
"led",
"logic",
"ram",
"rgb",
"ttl"
] | Homebrew 8-bit computers tend to have fairly limited displays, often one or more seven-segment displays and an array of LEDs to show the values of RAM or perhaps some other states of the computer. [Duncan] is in the process of building just such an computer, but wondered if there was a way to create a more visually appealing display while still keeping the computer true to its 8-bit roots. With some interesting TTL logic he was able to
create this addressable RGB LED display
to some remarkable results.
The array works by controlling the WS2812B LED strips with a specific timing cycle which was pioneered by [Tim] for a different project. [Tim] was able to perform this timing cycle with some simple Assembly code, which means that [Duncan] could convert that code into TTL gate logic relatively easily. Using 74LS02 NOR chips gets the job done as far as timing goes, and the pulses are then fed into a shift register and support logic which then creates the signal for the LED strips.
When everything is said and done, [Duncan] has a fully addressable 16×16 RGB LED array as a display for his 8-bit computer without violating any of his design principles and keeping everything to discrete TTL logic chips and a stick of RAM. It’s a unique method of display that might go along really well with any other homebrew computer like
this one that’s also built with 74LS chips
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6341119",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T22:22:21",
"content": "I’ve been contemplating something similar but with a long chain of serial to serial shift registers, maybe 64 or 128 bits each, then selecting between two clock speeds. A slow clock for filling the registe... | 1,760,373,116.127296 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/space-propulsion-separating-fact-from-science-fiction/ | Space Propulsion: Separating Fact From Science Fiction | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"faster than light",
"FTL",
"ion thruster",
"rocket engine",
"space propulsion",
"warp drive"
] | An unfortunate property of science-fiction is that it is, tragically, fiction. Instead of soaring between the stars and countless galaxies out there, we find ourselves hitherto confined to this planet we call Earth. Only a handful of human beings have ever made it as far as the Earth’s solitary moon, and just two of our unmanned probes have made it out of the Earth’s solar system after many decades of travel. It’s enough to make one despair that we’ll never get anywhere near the fantastic future that was seemingly promised to us by science-fiction.
Yet perhaps not all hope is lost. Over the past decades, we have improved our chemical rockets, are experimenting with various types of nuclear rockets, and
ion thrusters
are a common feature on modern satellites as well as for missions within the solar system. And even if the hype around the
EMDrive
vanished as quickly as it had appeared, the
Alcubierre
faster-than-light drive is still a tantalizing possibility after many years of refinements.
Even as physics conspires against our desire for a life among the stars, what do our current chances look like? Let’s have a look at the propulsion methods which we have today, and what we can look forward to with varying degrees of certainty.
Rulers of Low Earth Orbit
RS-68 rocket engine under test at NASA Stennis Space Center in 2000.
When it comes to getting things into orbit around Earth and keeping them there, we are doing pretty well. Since the early days of the rocket engine in the first half of the 20
th
century, we have come up with numerous improvements and new technologies. We have developed new solid and liquid fuels and learned to use
hypergolic
as well as cryogenic fuels. This has made the process of launching new satellites and new probes into orbit around the Earth and on inter-planetary transfer orbits practically a matter of routine.
Once out of Earth’s gravity well, or safely in orbit around the planet, a propulsion method capable of less brute force suffices as the gravitational pull of the Earth is no longer a concern. This is where ion thrusters shine: using relatively small amounts of propellant and the electricity from solar panels or other sources like RTGs, they manage to generate significant amounts of thrust in the form of ion beams. Because ion thrusters have very high
specific impulse
, they are very efficient in their fuel usage, yet they come with the disadvantage of having very little thrust.
This gets us to the core of the issue with rockets and space-based propulsion: balancing performance between energy required and fuel spent. Whereas a chemical rocket can be easily scaled up to use more fuel for more thrust, its specific impulse is pretty atrocious, meaning that for every unit of fuel burned, most of the energy contained in the fuel is wasted, i.e. not used for the purpose of propulsion.
Specific impulse (I
sp
) is defined in seconds, where the indicated value specifies for how long the rocket engine or equivalent device can provide thrust to the rocket using the available propellant. This determines the duration of thrust and thus the total acceleration. In addition, chemical rockets get lighter as they use up their propellant, causing the acceleration for the same thrust increases over time. The
thrust-to-weight ratio
thus determines how well a rocket performs.
As a direct comparison, a chemical rocket such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 with
Merlin 1D (full thrust) engines
has an I
sp
of 311 seconds in a vacuum, and 282 seconds at sea level. Meanwhile the I
sp
of an ion thruster is measured not in seconds, but in weeks or even months to years. This despite the ion thruster in a satellite or probe having only a fraction of the propulsion that a chemical rocket has. Meanwhile, the ion thruster has a very low thrust-to-weight ratio which prevents it from lifting as much as a sheet of paper out of Earth’s gravity well.
Beyond Earth orbit
Exhaust side of NASA’s Evolutionary Xenon ion Thruster (NEXT).
Using these chemical rockets and ion thrusters we can get and keep satellites as well as the International Space Station in orbit, even when they are in lower orbits where atmospheric drag is an issue. And
as recently demonstrated
by the US, China and UAE by getting the
Hope
(
Misabar Al Amal
) &
Tianwen-1
(Q
uestions to Heaven
) orbiters around Mars, as well as the Perseverance rover on Martian soil, we’re getting pretty good at traveling to at least one of our nearest neighbors in the solar system.
Most of travel within the solar system makes use of orbital mechanics, with the current ESA
BepiColombo
mission a prime example of this. Instead of traveling in a straight line from Earth to Mercury, this mission spans seven years, during which BepiColombo will use gravity assist: essentially using the gravity of various planets and the Sun of our solar system in order to both gain and lose speed, as well as changing its orbit around the Sun so that it can ultimately align itself with Mercury and park itself in its orbit.
This also shows that another important factor here is one of time. Without the consideration of how long traveling within the solar system or beyond may take, using gravity assist from the Earth and other planets is a valid and very efficient way to travel around in space. The
Voyager
probes have made it successfully out of the solar system this way, taking only around forty years for this. Of course, outside of scientific missions, discarding the time factor is only an option when one begins to consider something like
generation ships
.
Much like on Earth, we prefer to travel faster and waste less time. After all, who wants to be stuck in a sailing ship at the Cape on a months-long sailing trip when one can just take an airplane to the East, for example? Similarly, we are looking for ways to travel faster in space.
Going Nuclear
There are a few possible destinations which we would like to travel to faster: one is of course Mars, but other planets in our solar system are also of interest, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa. Here we run into a big issue with both our chemical rockets and our ion thrusters: one cannot provide thrust for long enough, and the other doesn’t provide enough thrust. A possible solution here dates back to the 1950s, in the form of nuclear propulsion.
Many are probably
aware of DARPA’s Project Orion
, which saw the use of
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion
as a way to fly to Mars and back in the span of four weeks. While that project never got off the ground, new NPP-based concepts have been worked on. Here much of the most recent research focuses on the use of nuclear fusion in some way to create high-speed exhaust. We see something similar in the general scope of
nuclear thermal rockets
of which NPPs are a part, where the focus has shifted away from fission and towards fusion. Some, like the
Direct Fusion Drive
, can be thought of essentially an improved ion thruster.
PFRC-2 device during a magnetic field pulse at Princeton in 2016.
The DFD along with others are some of the concepts which NASA is currently
looking at
to slash travel times to Mars and other destinations, including for
Orion
(the spacecraft). The DFD uses findings from the Princeton field-reversed configuration (
PFRC
) experiments to provide continuous thrust at significantly higher levels than today’s ion thrusters. This would make it suitable for interplanetary travel, with a travel time of four years predicted to travel to Pluto at the edge of our solar system.
Of course, none of this would make interstellar travel outside of our solar system significantly easier.
Making Light of Things
In this universe there are only a few things which are certain. One of which is that space is very big, not to mention very empty. Another is that objects have mass, and yet another being the speed of light (c) exists. The latter two combined dictate a very real limit to how much an object can accelerate. This is problematic in light of challenges such as getting a human being to the nearest star system (
Alpha Centauri
, 4.37 light years) within that person’s lifespan.
As the most distant human-made object, Voyager 1 is traveling at 1/18,000 of the speed of light, which would mean that it would be capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in approximately 80,000 years. Yet as we’ll see, the solution here is not simply to accelerate more, as this creates two new problems. The first is one of sheer kinetic energy, as the energy required to accelerate to an appreciable fraction of light speed is larger than one could hope to produce with any kind of current or future propulsion method.
Astronauts on the International Space Station experience time 0.01 seconds slower per Earth year than people on Earth’s surface.
The second problem is defined by general relativity (
GR
). Simply put, if an object experiences acceleration, then the reference frame of the object and that of any outside observers begin to drift apart. This
gravitational time dilation
effect in a visual representation means that to an outside observer, a clock held by an accelerating object slows down, while vice versa an outside observer’s clock will seem to move faster than the clock which they are holding.
Although the effect of this time dilation are relatively minor around Earth (e.g. astronauts in the ISS versus people on Earth), the brutal truth here is that we do not want to accelerate significantly at all. That is, unless we wish to deal with situations where the people onboard a spaceship traveling at 0.6c will themselves experience weeks passing during a mission, while back on Earth decades will have passed. This renders even fraction-of-c space unmanned probes relatively pointless.
A potential solution here lies in the concept of a warp drive, also known as the Alcubierre drive and its derivatives. This method essentially allows someone to travel effectively faster than light (FTL), without changing their effective gravity and thus their reference frame. This also avoids the need for enormous amounts of energy.
Physical Warp Drives
The ‘Phoenix’ warp-capable ship from Star Trek, built around a converted ICBM.
FTL drives are pretty much a staple of science fiction, and take on many forms. Of these, the
warp drive
is one of the rare few which is both based on scientific theory and which has seen a few decades of study and refinement. At its core the principle is simple enough: the ‘warp drive’ establishes (warp) a shell of space time around the object (‘warp field’), which can then move without having to increase its kinetic energy. Its effective speed would be limited by how rapidly it can warp space time.
A recent addition to the literature on this topic is
Introducing Physical Warp Drives
by Bobrick et al., which works through the past decades of literature, while creating a classification system for the different warp drive types imaginable.
Most importantly, it covers how an assumption made with the Alcubierre drive — in that it requires a large amount of negative mass — was merely based on a lack of understanding of the underlying theory. Effectively, this means that the negative mass requirement can be reduced or even fully eliminated, and that within the realm of physics there is so far nothing to stop humanity from constructing actual, physical warp drives and embark on FTL trips through the galaxy and beyond.
Space: The Final Frontier?
It would appear then that at least some part of science fiction could within the near future become science fact, with the
starships
portrayed in the original Star Trek series (
TOS
,
TNG
and
VOY
) on the side of the
Federation
providing a tantalizing template for what humanity’s future could be like. Interestingly, in the Star Trek universe it’d take until
2063
for an
inventor
to test the first warp drive.
What our own timeline will look like is still up for grabs, fortunately. Whether we truly will be able to build warp drives in another forty years from now or not, and what we will find out there if we do are all still open questions. As we find ourselves
reminiscing about Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight into space sixty years ago
, it’s exciting to look ahead, to what the next decades may bring. | 102 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340938",
"author": "Sam Ochi",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T14:17:37",
"content": "What is so bad about going at fraction of light and realize that where one spends weeks in travel, the folks at home spends decades waiting. So a round trip will cause one to see his great grand kids — ... | 1,760,373,116.321558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/power-supply-uses-thin-form-factor/ | Power Supply Uses Thin Form Factor | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atx",
"power supply",
"tfx",
"upcycle"
] | We’ve seen lots of power supply projects that start with an ATX PC power supply. Why not? They are cheap and readily available. Generally, they perform well and have a good deal of possible output. [Maco2229’s] design, though,
looks a lot different
. First, it is in a handsome 3D-printed enclosure. But besides that, it uses a TFX power supply — the kind of supply made for very small PCs as you’d find in a point of sale terminal or a set-top box.
Like normal PC supplies, these are inexpensive and plentiful. Unlike a regular supply, though, they are long and skinny. A typical supply will be about 85x65x175mm, although the depth (175mm) will often be a little shorter. Compare this to a standard ATX supply at 150x86x140mm, although many are shorter in depth. Volume-wise, that’s nearly 967 cubic centimeters versus over 1,800. That allows the project to be more compact than a similar one based on ATX.
The project is nicely documented and has features including colorful meters and USB ports. An import buck converter module give you a lot of options on output voltage.
The original build had a top and bottom plate made from plywood, but the current design files have STL files for those parts, in case you prefer to print them. Be prepared for a long print though. [Maco2229] says that even though he prints between 100 and 120 millimeters per second, printing at 0.28 layer height took about 14 hours.
We’ve seen plenty of ATX builds. Some
modify the power supply
while
others don’t
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340981",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2021-04-19T15:35:30",
"content": "“As well, this is not laboratory power supply. I don’t know the level of noise or any other parameters which is required for lab PSUs, so don’t even think about this thing that way.”At least this designer w... | 1,760,373,116.366205 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/toggle-switch-puzzle-boggles-the-mind-opens-the-box/ | Toggle Switch Puzzle Boggles The Mind, Opens The Box | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"9V battery",
"DPDT",
"lock box",
"solenoid",
"spdt",
"toggle switch"
] | We all have too much stock of one component or another. Maybe you have more audio pots than you know what to do with, or maybe it’s zener diodes. For [technologyguy], that thing is a pile of toggle switches. Fortunately he’s always wanted to build
a locking box with a binary code that’s laid out in switches
— as in, find the right code, and a solenoid unlatches the box. This lovely parts bin special only responds
to two combinations out of a possible 4,000+, so anyone who tries to open it should probably block out the afternoon.
Inside you’ll find two 9 V batteries, a home-brew metal latch, a solenoid, and the undersides of four DPDT and eight SPDT toggle switches. If you just picked this thing up and had no idea what was going on, you’d be so screwed as to what to do first. The box needs power, so you’d have to figure out which switch is which. But it’s so much harder than that, because the bottom left switch selects between the two paths that result in an unlocked book-box.
The next two toggles in from the left are on/off selectors for code A and code B, so not only do you have to have the right path chosen, you have to power it, too. The only progress indicators are the LEDs — there’s one for main power, and the other lets you know that the box is unlatched. What a fun conversation piece for the
coffee table
Zoom-viewable area!
Want to do something far less useful with your throng of toggles?
How about a complicated useless machine? | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340681",
"author": "bruce",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T11:36:50",
"content": "I believe the Radio Shack game was called “Which Switch”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6340713",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2021-04-1... | 1,760,373,116.181475 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/18/heads-up-smart-glass-multimeter/ | Heads Up: Smart Glass Multimeter | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"ar",
"augmented reality",
"bluetooth",
"google glass"
] | Sometimes it is hard to probe a circuit and then look over at the meter. [Electronoobs] decided to fix that problem by making a
Google Glass-like multimeter
using an OLED screen and Bluetooth module.
The custom PCB doesn’t have many surprises. A small board has a controller, a battery charger, a display, and a Bluetooth module. One thing he did forget is a switch, though, so the board is always on unless you arrange an external switch.
The CPU was pulled from an existing Arduino module which, we suppose, has the virtue of having a bootloader already set up, but we’d probably just use a new chip if we were building it. The optics require a mirror and lens so you can see the display in focus. Paradoxically, the display is in the back, allowing you to focus on it easily.
If you haven’t used the Bluetooth modules before, this is a good introduction project and shows two ways to connect the modules together.
We should mention, the project took inspiration from a similar project by [Alain Mauer] over on
Hackaday.io
. We’ve seen plenty of designs for these glasses-mounted displays, including
a good one by a 13-year-old
. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340666",
"author": "mmm",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T10:25:49",
"content": "This version:https://hackaday.com/2016/10/05/hackaday-prize-entry-head-up-for-high-voltage/looks (and propably works) better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,373,116.933241 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/dos-gaming-pc-gets-necessary-updates/ | DOS Gaming PC Gets Necessary Updates | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"486",
"custom",
"gaming",
"mini",
"pc/104",
"retrocomputing",
"sound blaster",
"x86"
] | PC-104 is a standard computer form factor that most people outside of industrial settings probably haven’t seen before. It’s essentially an Intel 486 processor with lots of support for standards that have long since disappeared from most computers, but this makes it great for two things: controlling old industrial equipment and running classic DOS games on native hardware. For the latter, we turn once again to [The Rasteri] who is improving on his previous build with an even smaller DOS gaming rig,
this time based on a platform even more diminutive than PC-104
.
The key of a build like this is that it needs native support for the long-obsolete ISA bus to be able to interface with a SoundBlaster card, a gold standard for video games of the era. This smaller computer still has this functionality in a smaller package, but with some major improvements. First, it has a floating point unit so it can run games like Quake. It’s also much faster than the PC-104 system and uses less power. Finally, it fits in an even smaller case.
The build goes well beyond simply running software on a SoM computer. [The Rasteri] also custom built an interface board for this project, complete with all of the necessary ports and an ISA sound chip, all while keeping size down to a minimum. The new build also lets him give the build a better name than the old one (although he phrases this upgrade slightly differently), and will also let him expand some features in the future as well.
Be sure to check out that first build
if you’re new to this saga, too. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340656",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T08:20:28",
"content": "I find this outdated-looking stuff beautiful. Thank you!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6340663",
"author": "macona",
"timestamp": "2021-04... | 1,760,373,116.7988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/guide-to-mastering-openscad-costs-roughly-the-same-as-openscad/ | Guide To Mastering OpenSCAD Costs Roughly The Same As OpenSCAD | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"openscad"
] | OpenSCAD is a fantastic free tool for 3D modeling, but it’s far less intuitive to use for non-programmers than mouse-driven programs such as Tinkercad. Powerful as it may be, the learning curve is pretty steep. OpenSCAD’s own clickable cheat sheet and manual comes in handy all the time, but those are really more of a reference than anything else. Never fear, because [Jochen Kerdels] had quite the productive lockdown and
wrote a free comprehensive guide to mastering OpenSCAD
.
[Jochen]’s book opens with a nice introduction to OpenSCAD and it’s user environment and quickly moves into 10 useful projects of increasing complexity that start with simple stuff like wall anchors and shelf brackets and ends with recursive trees.
There are plenty of printing tips along the way to help realize these projects with minimum frustration, and the book wraps up by covering extra functions not expressly used in the projects.
Of course, you could always support [Jochen]’s Herculean effort by buying the print edition and forcing yourself to type everything in instead of copy/pasting, or give it to someone to introduce them to all the program has to offer.
Need help mastering OpenSCAD workflow?
We’ve got that
. Just want to make some
boxes
or
airfoils
? We have those in stock, too.
Main and thumbnail images via [
Devlin Thyne
] | 36 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340649",
"author": "Daniel Dunn",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T07:30:35",
"content": "Such an awesome project! It looks great for those who enjoy the code-based workflow.However, I hope nobody chooses it primarily because it’s free and open. If that’s your main reason, look at realth... | 1,760,373,116.875726 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/pedaling-away-under-the-cover-of-your-desk/ | Pedaling Away Under The Cover Of Your Desk | Matthew Carlson | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"exercise",
"exercise bike"
] | [Wayne Venables], like many of us, found himself sitting more than usual the past few months. Armed with a Bluetooth-enabled under desk exercise bike, he quickly found the app to be rather sub-optimal and
set about reverse-engineering the protocol of his bike
.
Custom GUI for the exercise bike
The first step was to use some apps on his Android phone to reveal the profiles on the bike, which showed his particular machine used a Nordic Bluetooth UART. This meant the only work would be decoding the stream of bytes coming off the wireless serial port. Using Wireshark and Bluetooth logs on his phone, [Wayne] was able to correspond the various commands to points in the video. There were still a few bytes that he wasn’t able to identify, but [Wayne] had enough to whip up a quick .NET app that can start a workout and log it all to a database. The code for
his app is on his GitHub
.
While [Wayne] doesn’t specifically name the bike he uses in this project, we tracked down the image he shows on his writeup to the Exerpeutic 900e. It appears to be discontinued but the reverse engineering approach should be usable on a range of Bluetooth-connected machines. This isn’t
the first bike we’ve seen liberated by reverse engineering
here at Hackaday. And we have a feeling it won’t be the last. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340632",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T03:14:41",
"content": "Maybe it’s a big galoot thing, but I never found a desk or table I could do more than raise my heels a couple inches off the floor before my knees hit, so find the idea of pedaling underneath it rath... | 1,760,373,116.640998 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/kitchen-bump-bar-plays-doom-between-orders/ | Kitchen Bump Bar Plays Doom Between Orders | Dan Maloney | [
"Games",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bump bar",
"doom",
"fast food",
"food service",
"KDS",
"kitchen display system",
"restaurant",
"Solitaire",
"X-DOS"
] | For as much as we love reverse engineering projects, we have to admit that we almost passed up on
this “kitchen bump bar” hack
. Having never had the privilege of working in the food-service industry — well, there was that time working at Chuck E. Cheese’s, but that only lasted for one shift — we were unaware of what a bump bar is, and the whys and hows of hacking one to the point where it can play Doom.
We’re glad we stuck with it, though, because [Kiwa]’s hack is pretty cool, and we got to learn a little about the technology of the modern commercial kitchen. Most fast food and family casual restaurants have what’s known as a “kitchen display system”, which relays orders from the wait staff to the kitchen. You’ve probably seen parts of the KDS, like the touch screens used by the wait staff to enter orders, or the screens dangling in the kitchen that display the pending orders.
A bump bar
is a small terminal used by the kitchen crew to review orders and move them around in the queue, or “bump” them, as needs dictate.
The bump bar [Kiwa] dug into appears to be
a model from the early 2000s
and very sturdily built, as anything used in a kitchen would need to be. Hooked up to a monitor and a keyboard, [Kiwa] discovered that it booted right into an OS with all the familiar trappings of DOS. After a detour for a teardown and dumping the flash contents, [Kiwa] was able to boot it up and run Doom, albeit somewhat slowly. It also looks like he’s got a couple of different Windows versions running, and even played some Solitaire.
It’s always fun to see what will run Doom —
an NES
,
an oscilloscope
,
a thermostat
, or even
a bag of potatoes
.
Thanks to [Fritnando] for the tip. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340618",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2021-04-18T00:19:15",
"content": "I just saw a YouTube video where a guy took apart one of these and found a Pentium clone (https://youtu.be/BdSJgoP2a88) so I’d be curious what this is using that it can only run Doom kinda slowly….",
"par... | 1,760,373,116.683648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/a-halo-of-leds-for-every-ear/ | A HALO Of LEDs For Every Ear | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"Art",
"hardware",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"animation",
"audio reactive",
"earrings",
"led",
"microphone",
"stm8"
] | Few things get a Hackaday staffer excited like bunches of tiny LEDs. The smaller and denser the better, any form will do as long as we can get a macro shot or a video of a buttery smooth animation. This time we turn to [Sawaiz Syed] and [Open Kolibri] to deliver the brightly lit goods with the minuscule
HALO 90 reactive LED earrings
.
The HALO 90’s are designed to work as earrings, though we suspect they’d make equally great brooches, hair accessories, or desk objects. To fit this purpose each one is a minuscule 24 mm in diameter and weighs a featherweight 5.2 grams with the CR2032 battery (2.1 g for the PCBA alone). Functionally their current software includes three animation modes, each selectable via a button on device; audio reactive, halo (fully lit), and sparkle. Check out the documentation for
details on expected battery life
in each mode, but suffice to say that no matter what these earrings will make it through a few nights out.
In terms of hardware, the HALO 90’s are as straightforward as you’d expect. Each device is driven by an STM8 at its maximum 16MHz which is more than fast enough to keep the 90 charliplexed 0402 LEDs humming along at a 1kHz update rate, even with realtime audio processing. In fact the
BOM
here is refreshingly simple with just 8 components; the LEDs, microcontroller and microphone, battery holder and passives, and the button. [Sawaiz] even designed an exceptionally slick case to go with each pair of earrings, which holds two HALO 90’s with two CR2032’s and includes a magnetic closure for the most satisfying lid action possible.
As with some of his
other work
, [Sawaiz] has produced
a wealth of exceptional documentation
to go with the HALO 90’s. They’re available straight from him fully assembled, but with documentation this good the path to a home build should be well lit and accessible. He’s even chosen parts with an eye towards long availability, low cost, and ease of sourcing so no matter when you decide to get started it should be a snap.
It was difficult to choose just a few images from [Sawaiz]’s mesmerizing collection, so if you need more feast your eyes on the expanded set after the break.
HALO 90’s in their cases, ready for a night out
Even the panel is aesthetically pleasing | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340566",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2021-04-17T18:23:01",
"content": "They’d make terrible broaches. Nowhere near sharp enough. Brooches, on the other hand… :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6340592",
"auth... | 1,760,373,116.75228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/junkbox-confidential/ | Junkbox Confidential | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"junk",
"newsletter",
"rotary phone",
"space mouse"
] | Thomas Edison famously quipped “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Amen, brother. My personal junk pile (ahem, collection of pre-owned electromechanical curiosities) is certainly a source of spare parts, but also a source of surprise and wonder. Sometimes the junk itself spurs the imagination, but sometimes junk is just junk.
There are pieces of used gear that I bought for some particular plan, maybe a decade ago?, and totally forgot. While it’s fun to rediscover them — I bought six used super-soaker pump assemblies, and summer is just around the corner — the sad truth is often that the forgotten pieces were forgotten for a reason. Whatever kooky idea I had at the time has faded, and the parts are all that’s left.
But among these miserable creatures, there are some absolute gems. Parts that continually call out to be used. Bits that would fire even Thomas Edison’s imagination. Unforgetable junk.
Mostly, it’s their physicality that calls out to me. I have a stack of old 5″ hard drive platters, gutted, and converted into essentially a rotary encoder. For years, I used it as a USB scroll wheel on my desk, but most recently it has made reappearances in other goofy projects — a music box for my son that played notes in a row depending on how fast you spun it, and most recently a jog wheel for a one-meter linear motion project that hasn’t really found its full expression yet, but might become a camera slider. Anyway, when I needed a nice physical rotary encoder knob, the hard drive was just sitting there waiting to be used.
An old rotary dial phone also falls in this category. It ends in a barrel jack instead of an RJ45, so it’s easy to incorporate into other projects. Previously, it’s been the interface for a USB dial-a-password device, but it got supplanted by software that takes up less desk space. I’m sure I’ll come up with something else for it to do.
The undisputed kings of my unforgettable junk, that I haul out year after year, are two
Magellan Space Mice
. They are the old serial port kind, speaking 9600 baud to any microcontroller, and are easy to interface with. They put out six axes of control plus a few buttons, and they’re frankly a technological marvel. These have been used for remote control cars, and even once for a ride-on vehicle, but only briefly because it was too dangerous. I’ve never managed to use more than four axes at once, but that implicit challenge is part of their charm.
In the strangest turn of events, the maintainer of the
Linux Spacenav driver project
, John Tsiombikas, pulled the serial Space Mice into the code base in December. So now I’m using both of them for their intended purpose — manipulation of 3D designs in CAD/CAM software — one in the office and one in the workshop. Not a hack!
It was great to have the Space Mice in the junk box; they were truly inspirational. On one hand, being promoted into everyday use is the ultimate goal, I guess, but it still leaves a hole in my heart. I’ll be keeping my eyes out for a couple more, I think. The junk box hungers.
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
! | 42 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340533",
"author": "12AU76L6GC",
"timestamp": "2021-04-17T14:16:06",
"content": "Just keep in mind it’s not junk if it is has an inventoried part number, a price and is listed for sale on the internet. It’s inventory.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,117.135913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/e-t-video-game-gets-re-imagined-in-10-lines-of-basic/ | E.T. Video Game Gets Re-Imagined In 10 Lines Of BASIC | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"2600",
"atari",
"basic",
"contest",
"e.t.",
"games"
] | Most people would recognize
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
for the Atari 2600 by its reputation as one of the worst video games of all time. We’ll have more to say about that in a moment, but
E.T.
was nevertheless chosen as the inspiration behind
[Martin Fitzpatrick]’s re-imagining of the game in ten lines of BASIC code
for a contest that encourages and celebrates
games written in ten lines of BASIC
, or less.
Ten lines of BASIC is a big limitation, even when getting clever by stacking multiple statements into a single line, so [Martin]’s game has a much narrower scope than the original Atari 2600 version. Still, the core elements are present: E.T. must find and gather all the parts of the phone in order to contact his ship, after which he must meet the ship in time to escape. All the while, FBI agents attempt to interfere. The game was written in SAM BASIC, used by the
SAM Coupé
, a British Z80-based home computer from the late 80s with
an emulator available for download
.
Now, for lovers of “um,
actually
” topics, do we have a treat for you! Let’s take this opportunity to review a few things about
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
. That it was a commercial flop is no doubt, but the game itself is often badly misunderstood.
Way back in 2013 we covered an extraordinary effort to patch improvements into the binary
for the 2600 game, and in the process there’s a compelling case made that the game was in many ways far ahead of its time, and actually quite significant in terms of game design. You can jump right in on
an analysis of the hate the game receives
, and while reading that it’s helpful to keep in mind that In 1982, many of its peers were games like
Space Invaders
, with self-evident gameplay that simply looped endlessly. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340505",
"author": "Mbc",
"timestamp": "2021-04-17T11:24:44",
"content": "Yeah, I got that game new for Christmas one year after Toys-r-us closed a bunch of stores and we’re selling copies in piles out of kiddie pools. Pretty sure my mom paid a buck or less for it.Anyways, there w... | 1,760,373,117.307505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/17/replacing-an-esp8266-clone-with-the-real-thing/ | Replacing An ESP8266 Clone With The Real Thing | Tom Nardi | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"clone",
"ESP8266",
"home automation",
"IoT",
"smart light",
"tasmota"
] | The first time [konbaasiang] ordered some ceiling LED lights from Tuya, he was pleased to find they contained an ESP-12F that could easily be flashed with a different firmware. So when he ordered 30 more of them at a cost of nearly $900 USD, you can understand his frustration to
find that the popular WiFi-enabled microcontroller had been swapped out for a pin-compatible clone
that Tuya developed called the WB3L.
Some people would have just chalked this one up to bad luck and used the Tuya-supplied software to control their new lights, but not [konbaasiang]. Since the new chip was outwardly identical to the ESP8266, he decided to take the nuclear option and replace them with the genuine article. With a comfortable spot to work from and a nice microscope, he started on his desoldering journey.
Now it would have been nice if he could have just dropped in a real ESP-12F and called it a day, but naturally, it ended up being a bit more complex than that. The WB3L apparently doesn’t need external pull up and pull down resistors, but [konbaasiang] needed them for the swap to work. He could have come up with some kind of custom adapter PCB, but to keep things simple he decided to run a pair of through hole resistors across the top of the ESP-12F for GPIO 1/2, and use a gingerly placed SMD resistor to hold down GPIO 15.
[konbaasiang] reports that all 30 of the lights survived the transplant and are now running his own homebrew firmware. While this story had a happy ending, it’s still a cautionary tale. With a growing trend towards
replacing the venerable ESP8266 with cheaper and less hacker-friendly silicon
, buying IoT hardware with
the intent to replace its firmware
is likely to get riskier in the near future. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340488",
"author": "Manuela",
"timestamp": "2021-04-17T09:44:52",
"content": "So he didn’t even open the clones metal can to show us the contents? I’m outraged to be honest. All my respects to the good sir though for his dedication to fix it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,373,117.193992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/three-ways-to-detect-the-silver-ball/ | Three Ways To Detect The Silver Ball | Kristina Panos | [
"Games",
"how-to"
] | [
"ball bearing",
"cardboard",
"conductive tape",
"maker tape",
"pinball",
"pinbox 3000"
] | We speak from experience when we say that making pinball targets is harder than you might think. The surface area of the part of the ball that touches is oh-so-small, and you really need to have gravity on your side for best results. Luckily, [TechnoChic] did the work for us and came up with these
three versatile sensor designs
that would be good for any game, not just pinball. They all use fresh, pristine cardboard from the Bezos Barn and a conductive fabric tape made by Brown Dog Gadgets
that they call maker tape.
With the possible exception of not being solderable (can you solder it? ours hasn’t showed up yet), maker tape is seemingly superior to copper tape because it is designed to be conductive in the Z-direction, and if you’ve ever laid out a copper tape circuit, you know that tape overlaps are pretty much par for the course.
First on the list is the track switch, which we think is pretty much necessary. After all, what fun is a pinball machine without at least one pair of rails to ride? Might as well score some points at the same time. This one looks to be the trickiest since the rails have to be consistently spaced, otherwise the ball will fall. The drawbridge target uses a cardboard hinge and the weight of the ball to force two pieces of tape together to complete the circuit.
The flappy hole target is probably our favorite because it’s the most adaptable. You could use it for all kinds of things, like getting the ball to a basement level of a pinball game, or if you want to be evil, set it up in the drain area and deduct points every time you lose the ball, or just use it to trigger the next ball to drop. This one would also be really good for something like Skee-Ball and would really keep the BoM cost down compared to say, IR break-beam targets or
coin slot switches
.
You can check out these sensors in a brief demo after the break, and then see how [TechnoChic] put these ideas to use in this
winter-themed pinball machine
we showed you a few weeks ago. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340467",
"author": "Sooner Boomer",
"timestamp": "2021-04-17T06:17:37",
"content": "Not meaning to be overly critical, but wouldn’t the copper foil tape used in Tiffany-style stained glass work just as well? And, yes, it’s solderable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,373,117.250843 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/the-imperfect-bipolar-transistor/ | The Imperfect Bipolar Transistor | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bipolar",
"bipolar transistor",
"saturation",
"theory",
"transistor"
] | We like to pretend that our circuit elements are perfect because, honestly, it makes life easier and it often doesn’t matter much in practice. For a normal design, the fact that a foot of wire has a tiny bit of resistance or that our capacitor value might be off by 10% doesn’t make much difference. One place that we really bury our heads in the sand, though, is when we use bipolar transistors as switches. A perfect switch would have 0 volts across it when it is actuated. A real switch won’t quite get there, but it will be doggone close. But a bipolar transistor in saturation won’t be really all the way on. [The Offset Volt] looks at how a bipolar transistor switches and why the voltage across it
at saturation is a few tenths of a volt
. You can see the video below.
To understand it, you’ll need a little bit of math and some understanding of the construction of transistors. The idea of using a transistor as a switch is that the transistor is saturated — that is, increasing base current doesn’t make much change in the collector current. While it isn’t perfect, it is good enough to switch a relay or do other common switching tasks.
Then again, you can do better.
FETs can work much better
and while there was a time when you still had to use a bipolar device for its current handling, low cost, or due to the switching frequency, FETs now can handle nearly any job a bipolar transistor can.
Still, good to understand the theory behind these devices and they still have their place, too. After all, there are quite a few
options when you need a swtich
. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340440",
"author": "ERIC A GUNNERSON",
"timestamp": "2021-04-17T03:24:54",
"content": "MOSFETs of course have their own rules. In the ideal world they just work, but in the real world you need to worry about having enough gate voltage to turn them on and if you are switching them o... | 1,760,373,117.358584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/ambitious-spot-welder-really-pushes-the-amps/ | Ambitious Spot Welder Really Pushes The Amps | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"electrode",
"metalwork",
"microwave oven transformer",
"MOT",
"spot welder",
"welder"
] | On the face of it, a spot welder is a simple device. If you dump enough current through two pieces of metal very quickly, they’ll heat up enough to melt and fuse together. But as with many things, the devil is in the details, and
building a proper spot welder
can be as much about addressing those details as seeing to the basics.
We haven’t featured anything from our friends over at [Make It Extreme], where they’re as much about building tools as they are about using them to build other things, if not more so. We expect, though, that this sturdy-looking spot welder will show up in a future video, because it really looks the business, and seems to work really well. The electronics are deceptively simple — just rewound microwave oven transformers and a simple timer switch to control the current pulse. What’s neat is that they used a pair of transformers to boost the current considerably — they reckon the current at 1,000 A, making the machine capable of welding stock up to 4 mm thick.
With the electrical end worked out, the rest of the build concentrated on the housing. A key to good-quality spot welds is solid physical pressure between the electrodes, which is provided by a leverage-compounding linkage as well as the long, solid-copper electrodes. We’ve got to say that the sweep of the locking handle looks very ergonomic, and we like the way closing down the handle activates the current pulse. Extra points for the carbon-fiber look on the finished version. The video below shows the build and a demo of what it can do.
Most of the spot welders we see are further down the food chain than this one, specialized as they are for
welding battery packs and the like
. We do recall one other
very professional-looking spot welder
, though. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340419",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T23:30:37",
"content": "I feel impelled by the narrative to mention that my own spot welder is a very old commercial unit that I put a 555 timer in…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,373,117.57294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/the-beat-goes-on-with-this-esp32-page-turner/ | The Beat Goes On With This ESP32 Page Turner | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth keyboard",
"ESP32",
"guitar pedal",
"hands free",
"page turner",
"woodworking"
] | Looking for a hands-free way to page through sheet music on an iPad,
[The_Larch] came up with this simple Bluetooth input device based on the ESP32
. The microcontroller just needed to have two switches wired into the GPIO pins, in this case the same heavy-duty plungers you’d find on a guitar pedal, and a USB bulkhead pass-through to provide power. Thanks to the excellent
ESP32-BLE-Keyboard
library, it only took a few lines of code to fire off the appropriate key strokes when the left or right button was pressed.
While undeniably a simple project from an electronics standpoint, the wooden enclosure [The_Larch] built is an interesting change of pace from the 3D printed fare we normally see around these parts. It started life as strips of oak reclaimed from an old kitchen table, which were laminated together to make a solid block. A large spade bit was then used to bore into the block to make a void for the electronics, and a second flat piece of oak was fashioned into a front panel.
Creating Bluetooth input devices with the ESP32
is so incredibly straightforward that we’re honestly a little surprised we don’t see the trick used more often. Especially when you
consider all of the custom made keyboards
that have
graced these pages over the last couple of years
. The tools are available for anyone who wants them, so you have to wonder if hackers just aren’t fond of using Bluetooth for something as important as a keyboard? | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340403",
"author": "Dean",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T22:23:48",
"content": "Next step: batteries?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6340450",
"author": "Feinfinger (still terribly undercaffeinated)",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,373,117.405441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/new-whitest-paint-might-help-fight-climate-change/ | New Whitest Paint Might Help Fight Climate Change | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"climate change",
"paint",
"white paint"
] | It’s hot! Hotter than it used to be, and too hot for things to remain nice in the future. The sun keeps beating down, and as our greenhouse gas emissions continue to blanket the earth, more of that heat is trapped, leading to the steady uptick in global average temperatures. Reducing these emissions can help, but there’s other possibilities too.
A team of researchers with a new
very
white paint think it might be of some use in solving the problem.
Thermal imaging shows the white paint’s ability to cool a surface below ambient temperature, by radiating away excess heat.
The new “whitest white” paint comes to us from Purdue University in the US. It’s capable of reflecting 98% of sunlight reaching its surface, a big step up over the typical 80-90% of conventional white paints. Additionally, it doesn’t absorb UV light, and can also radiate out heat in infrared wavelengths that pass out of the atmosphere. This allows the paint to cool surfaces below ambient temperature. The paint achieves these feats by using barium sulphate as a pigment, which doesn’t absorb UV like conventional titanium dioxide white pigments do. The paint also uses a lot of pigment – 60%, versus 20-40% in a more typical paint.
This is similar to techniques used in producing Vantablack, the blackest black acrylic paints.
The hope is that by painting roofs and walls of buildings with white paint, more sunlight will be reflected back out into space, and buildings will be naturally cooler with less reliance on air conditioning, helping to reduce emissions. This could go a long way to
solving the heat island effect in many major cities.
Municipalities around the world have already begun adopting the technique, from California, to
New York
and
Ahmedabad
. It’s an easy thing to do, with few drawbacks, so we expect to see the practice grow more popular in coming years. While it won’t solve the climate crisis on its own, the world could surely use every bit of help it can get. | 69 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340329",
"author": "Skip Flem",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T18:37:28",
"content": "I had worked here we had an ice freezer; the white steel remained relatively cool in the sun, however that‘hammered aluminum door’ easily burned my hand. Probably designed by the power company.",
"p... | 1,760,373,117.51271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/the-false-alarm-that-nearly-sparked-nuclear-war/ | The False Alarm That Nearly Sparked Nuclear War | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"cold war",
"ICBM",
"infrared",
"missile detection"
] | The date was September 26, 1983. A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces sat at his command station in Serpukhov-15 as sirens blared, indicating nuclear missiles had been launched from the United States. As you may have surmised by the fact you’re reading this in 2021, no missiles were fired by either side in the Cold War that day. Credit for this goes to Stanislav Petrov, who made the judgement call that the reports were a false alarm, preventing an all-out nuclear war between the two world powers. Today, we’ll look at what caused the false alarm, and why Petrov was able to correctly surmise that what he was seeing was an illusion.
Detecting Missiles By Infrared
Stanislav Petrov pictured at his home in 2016.
Petrov was in charge of monitoring the Oko early warning satellite network, which consisted of a series of satellites in highly elliptical
Molniya orbits
. This orbit was cleverly chosen by Soviet scientists to allow the Oko satellites to have a grazing view of the continental United States, which presented the biggest threat of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack at the time. By glancing across the Earth’s edge with their infrared sensors, rather than gazing down upon it, the infrared energy from hot missile exhaust could easily be spotted against the cold background of space, rather than the Earth’s surface. The aim was to cut down on false positives from phenomena such as wildfires and oil rig burnoffs, while also providing good coverage without requiring a large number of satellites.
On that fateful night in September, however, the unique orbit of the Soviet satellite was to cause a major problem. The Oko system raised an alarm shortly after midnight, indicating that a single missile had been launched from the United States.
As the sirens were going off around him, Petrov almost froze
. The political climate at the time was fraught, with all-out nuclear war a constant threat.
The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.
The initial alarm was followed by further alerts, showing five missiles in total. Despite the indications that all hell was about to break loose, Petrov didn’t immediately pass the alert up the chain of command.
Is This Thing Broken?
With only minutes to react to a strike, time was of the essence, but things didn’t add up. Starting a nuclear war with just five missiles didn’t strike Petrov as a believable strategy, and satellite radar operators were unable to report detecting any launches. The Oko satellites were also new and relatively untested thus far. Thus, rather than report that a nuclear strike on the USSR was underway, Petrov elected to go with his hunch and report that the system was malfunctioning.
Twenty-three minutes later I realised that nothing had happened. If there had been a real strike, then I would already know about it. It was such a relief.
A diagram indicating the rough relative positions of the sun, the Oko satellite, and and the US missile field it was tasked with monitoring.
Petrov’s gut feeling turned out to be on the money, and the dogs of war were kept on a leash that evening. It was indeed a false alarm, rather than American missiles, that had caused the warning. The date of the incident happened to be right around the autumn equinox. Due to the position of the sun and some high-altitude clouds, sunlight was reflected onto the satellite’s infrared sensors,
triggering the satellite to report multiple missile launches
. The incident led to the Soviet Union creating a complementary geostationary satellite system in order to corroborate any indications of missile launches from the USA.
Stanislav Petrov was never rewarded, or particularly admonished for his decision. Eventually, he was demoted on a technicality for not filling out his diary while tangling with the agonising decision as to whether the Earth should burn in nuclear fire on that cold September night. He lived out the rest of his life in Russia,
passing away at the age of 77 in 2017.
Disaster was thus averted by Petrov’s actions; in the hair-trigger military environment of the time, it’s likely that USSR officials warned of incoming US missiles likely would have given the order to launch, causing untold devastation. Instead, we’re left with a great story and an even more poignant lesson. Redundancy is always key in systems that deal with matters of life or death, and it’s even more polite to ensure that when said lives (or deaths) can be measured in the millions or billions. That, and that sometimes you’ve got to err on the side of caution, particularly when nuclear war is involved. | 54 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340297",
"author": "jonmayo",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T17:26:38",
"content": "“we’re left with a great story”Decades later it still gives me watery bowels thinking about it. I am very much against going back to the good old days of mutually assured destruction, but it looks like we... | 1,760,373,117.746831 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/hackaday-podcast-114-eye-is-watching-you-alien-art-cnc-chainsaw-and-the-galvie-flu/ | Hackaday Podcast 114: Eye Is Watching You, Alien Art, CNC Chainsaw, And The Galvie Flu | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the hacks that surfaced over the past week. An eye-popping webcam hack comes in the form of an animatronic that gives that camera above your screen an eyeball to look around, an eyelid to blink with, and the skin, eyelashes, and eyebrow to complete the illusion (and make us shudder at the same time).
Dan did a deep dive on Zinc Flu — something to avoid when welding parts that contain zinc, like galvanized metals. A robot arm was given a chainsaw, leading to many hijinks; among them the headache of path planning such a machine. And we got to hear a really awesome story about resurrecting a computer game lost to obscurity, by using one of the main tools of the copyright office.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(~60 MB)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 114 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Sixty Years Ago Today: Yuri Gagarin Becomes The First Human In Space
Space Shuttle Program: 40th Anniversary Of The First Launch Of Columbia
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
CNC Chainsaw
Scratch-Built Robot Arm Looks Like Something Off The Factory Floor
Alien Art Drawn With Surprisingly Simple Math
countercomplex: Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code — how and why?
Eyecam Is Watching You In Between Blinks
Keep Coffee Warm Through Induction Heating
LED Brightness Adjustment Uses Itself As Sensor
An LED You Can Blow Out, With No Added Sensor
Low-cost Sensing And Communication With An LED
Laser Command Game Uses Laser For Control
Exhuming An Ancient Game From A Government Warehouse
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Taking A Peek Inside The Newest Echo Show 10
Is It A Lawnmower? Is It An RPi IRC Server? It’s Both!
Hamster Goes On Virtual Journey
Mike’s Picks
BEAM-Powered, Ball-Flinging Beam Has Us Beaming
Compute Module 4 NAS With Custom Carrier Board
A Fresh E-Ink Newspaper Delivered Every Morning
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Zinc Fever: A Look At The Risks Of Working With Hot Metal
Field Guide To Shipping Containers | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,117.637228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/unmasking-the-identity-of-an-unusual-nintendo-ds/ | Unmasking The Identity Of An Unusual Nintendo DS | Tom Nardi | [
"Nintendo DS Hacks"
] | [
"bootleg",
"counterfeit",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo DS",
"refurbished",
"taobao"
] | The Nintendo DS family encompasses a dizzying array of portable game systems released over a span of 17 years. The original DS received several refreshes and special editions, and when the next generation 3DS came along, it spawned a whole new collection of spin-offs. But even among all those machines there’s a name that even Mario himself would never have heard of: the Nintendo DS ML.
In a recent video,
[The Retro Future] says he discovered this oddball system selling for around $25 USD
on Chinese shopping site Taobao and bought one so he could get a closer look at it. Externally the system looks quite a bit like the refreshed DS Lite, but it’s notably larger and the screens look quite dated. That was already a strong hint to its true identity, as was the placement of its various buttons and controls.
Note the conspicuous absence of Nintendo’s name.
But it wasn’t until [The Retro Future] cracked the system open that he could truly confirm what he had on his hands. This was an original Nintendo DS, potentially a new old stock unit that had never been distributed, which was transplanted into a custom enclosure designed to look like one of the later upgraded models. As for what this seller meant by calling this chimera the DS ML is anyone’s guess, though one of the commenters on the video thought “Maybe Legal” had a nice ring to it.
Now assuming these really are brand new systems that were simply installed in fresh cases, $25 is arguably a good deal. So long as you aren’t concerned with playing the latest titles, anyway. But at the same time its a reminder that you get what you pay for when dealing with shady overseas sellers. It’s just as likely, perhaps even more so, that these were used systems that got spruced up to make a quick buck.
Fake components are everywhere. In fact there’s an excellent chance most of the people reading this site
have received some fake parts
over the years, even if
they didn’t realize it at the time
. When there’s fly by night companies willing to refurbish a nearly 20 year old Nintendo handheld for $25, what are the chances that Bosch actually made that $2 temperature sensor you just ordered on eBay? | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340262",
"author": "abvv",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T15:39:28",
"content": "ml probably means mario luigo",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6340270",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T15:59:11",
... | 1,760,373,117.794486 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/this-week-in-security-pwn2own-zoom-zero-day-clubhouse-data-and-an-fbi-hacking-spree/ | This Week In Security: Pwn2own, Zoom Zero Day, Clubhouse Data, And An FBI Hacking Spree | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"BleedingTooth",
"cisco",
"Clubhouse",
"fbi",
"This Week in Security",
"worm",
"zoom"
] | Our first story this week
comes courtesy of the Pwn2own contest
. For anyone not familiar with it, this event is held twice a year, and features live demonstrations of exploits against up-to-date software. The one exception to this is when a researcher does a coordinated release with the vendor, and the update containing the fix drops just before the event. This time, the event was held virtually, and the attempts are all
available on Youtube
. There were 23 attacks attempted, and only two were outright failures. There were 5 partial successes and 16 full successes.
One of the interesting demonstrations was
a zero-click RCE against Zoom
. This was a trio of vulnerabilities chained into a single attack. The only caveat is that the attack must come from an accepted contact. Pwn2Own gives each exploit attempt twenty minutes total, and up to three attempts, each of which can last up to five minutes. Most complex exploits have an element of randomness, and exploits known to work sometimes don’t work every time. The Zoom demonstration didn’t work the first time, and the demonstration team took enough time to reset, they only had enough time for one more try.
BleedingTooth
We first covered BleedingTooth almost exactly six months ago. The details were sparse then, but enough time has gone by
to get the full report
. BleedingTooth is actually a trio of vulnerabilities, discovered by [Andy Nguyen]. The first is BadVibes, CVE-2020-24490. It’s a lack of a length check in the handling of incoming Bluetooth advertisement packets. This leads to a buffer overflow. The catch here is that the vulnerability is only possible over Bluetooth 5.
The next of the trio of bugs is CVE-2020-12352, AKA BadChoice. It appears to be a logic error, where an obscure code path assembles a Bluetooth error packet that includes uninitialized memory. This information leak is important for using the other bugs to build a true exploit. The last vulnerability is BadKarma, CVE-2020-12351. This one is a simple type confusion.
The catch here is that the type confusion bug has a tendency to panic the kernel before the exploits can trigger. It seems like a problem, but in fact, an attacker can simply request a change in channel mode to avoid the crash. The three bugs together allow an attacker to write a payload to memory, leak enough information to overcome kernel randomization, and then finally re-use another function as an jumping point to get code execution. Check out the link for the hairy details.
Cisco Hardware Out of Support
A handful of
Cisco routers have a serious problem
, a CVSS score of 9.8. CVE-2021-1459 is a remote code execution in the web interface of the routers. The bug is pre-authentication, and since the routers are normally used as VPN endpoints, most of the installs are probably vulnerable. The real kicker? The routers are past their end-of-support date. The official word is that there are no updates, and no workarounds. So maybe go poke around in your office’s network closet, and look for a RV110W, RV130, RV130W, or RV215W. Find one, and send the Cisco advisory over to whoever handles IT or security. If that’s you, then it’s time to buy a new router.
Clubhouse Leaks
Remember the Facebook leak that went public last week?
Clubhouse seems to have the same problem now
. A public API exposes a bunch of information that is somewhere between public and private. Rather than implement a technical limit on API scraping,
Clubhouse simply included a line in the TOS about data scraping
. As should be obvious, the Terms of Service don’t stop anyone from grabbing data, and a database of 1.3 million users is now available online.
Source Engine Vulnerability
Source Engine Games on Steam have a problem. It’s possible to send a malicious invite, that once accepted, leads to code execution.
Two years ago, secret club member
@floesen_
reported a remote code execution flaw affecting all source engine games. It can be triggered through a Steam invite. This has yet to be patched, and Valve is preventing us from publicly disclosing it.
pic.twitter.com/0FWRvEVuUX
— secret club (@the_secret_club)
April 10, 2021
The strange bit about this vulnerability is how old it is. First reported June 5 of 2019, the bug is a vanilla buffer overflow, and considered a 9.0 severity. As of April 12, 2021, the bug still works in CS:GO. Now imagine a worm that sends malicious invites to all your friends. Yep, it’s a wormable flaw in the most widely installed video game launcher in the world, unpatched for nearly two years.
The Bad List
Every once in a while, we cover some really bad behavior from big companies. When a researcher finds a vulnerability and reports it privately, rather than doing an anonymous dump online or selling on a forum, it’s nice to get a “thank you”, or even better, a bug bounty. Sometimes though, researchers get hit with a threat of legal action instead. This has the predictable effect of ticking the entire community off, putting the guilty parties on a metaphorical “bad list”. A recent effort has
turned this into a literal list
. Know of similar bad behavior that hasn’t made the list? Go make a pull request.
Android Worm
An odd combination of quirks in the Android OS and the WhatsApp application
were leveraged to create a new malicious worm
. The application in question was FlixOnline, an obvious attempt to look like the official Netflix app. The app requested overlay and notification permissions. The ability to interact with notifications gives an application a broad reach into everything, now that in-notification replies are a ubiquitous feature. To add insult to that injury, the overlay permission was used to make uninstalling the app next to impossible for the average user. It spread through auto-responding to incoming messages with a spam message and a link to install from the play store. Thankfully Check Point Research caught the app before it was widely installed, and Google has de-listed it from the store. It was a clever-yet-infuriating collection of tactics, and a reminder that a bit of paranoia is warranted regarding what permissions you give to an app.
The FBI Probably Breaks the Law
The news broke on the 13th that
the FBI had begun taking an unprecedented action
in response to the widespread MS Exchange attacks. Armed with a court order, the FBI began using the vulnerability to break in to compromised servers, and
remove a particular strain of remote access malware
. Notably, this action didn’t include installing the patch to fix those servers, so many of them may be re-infected in short order.
This action is rather stunning to many, particularly because there doesn’t seem to be any legal justification for modifying the contents of private computers en masse. I’ve seen arguments both for and against the aggressive action. Let us know your thoughts on this potentially controversial decision. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340249",
"author": "Yet Another Danny",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T14:46:57",
"content": "Suppose that I owned a home, and it caught fire. If someone “trespassed” by running across the lawn to extinguish the fire, I wouldn’t be mad. That’s how I see the FBI’s actions. As long as t... | 1,760,373,117.84495 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/detergent-drm-defeated-on-diminutive-dishwasher/ | Detergent DRM Defeated On Diminutive Dishwasher | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cartridge",
"detergent",
"dishwasher",
"drm",
"eeprom"
] | Has it really come to this? Are we really at the point that dishwashers have proprietary detergent cartridges that you’re locked into buying at inflated prices?
Apparently so, at least for some species of the common kitchen appliance. The particular unit in question goes by the friendly name of Bob, and is a compact, countertop unit that’s aimed at the very small kitchen market. [dekuNukem] picked one of these units up recently, and was appalled to learn that new detergent cartridges would cost an arm and a leg. So naturally,
he hacked the detergent cartridges
. A small PCB with an edge connector and a 256-byte EEPROM sprouts from each Bob cartridge; a little reverse engineering revealed the right bits to twiddle to reset the cartridge to its full 30-wash count, leading to a dongle to attach to the cartridge when it’s time for a reset and a refill.
With the electronics figured out, [dekuNukem] worked on the detergent refill. This seems like it was the more difficult part, aided though it was by some fairly detailed specs on the cartridge contents. A little math revealed the right concentrations to shoot for, and the ingredients in the OEM cartridges were easily — and cheaply — sourced from commercial dishwashing detergents. The cartridges can be refilled with a properly diluted solution using a syringe; the result is that each wash costs 1/75-th of what it would if he stuck with OEM cartridges.
For as much as we despise the “give away the printer, charge for the ink” model, Bob’s scheme somehow seems even worse. We’ve seen this technique used to lock people into everything from
refrigerator water filters
to
cat litter
, so we really like the way [dekuNukem] figured everything out here, and that he saw fit to share his solution. | 71 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340192",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T11:04:24",
"content": "This is the kind of commercial disobedience I can fully support.Well done! (and thank you for your efforts)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,373,118.201677 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/16/doom-on-a-bootloader/ | DOOM On A Bootloader Is The Ultimate Cheat Code | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"barebox",
"baredoom",
"bootloader",
"doom",
"embedded",
"hardware",
"port",
"Universal"
] | Porting DOOM to run on hardware never meant to run it is a tradition as old as time. Getting it to run on embedded devices, ancient computers, virtual computers, and antique video game consoles are all classic hacks, but what DOOM ports have been waiting for is something with universal applicability that don’t need a bespoke solution for each piece of hardware.
Something like DOOM running within a bootloader
.
The bootloader that [Ahmad] works with is called Barebox and is focused on embedded systems, often those running Linux. This is the perfect environment for direct hardware access, since the bootloader doubles as a bare metal hardware bring-up toolkit. Now that DOOM runs on this bootloader, it effectively can run anywhere from embedded devices to laptops with minimal work, and although running it in a bootloader takes away a lot of the hard work that would normally need to be done during a port, it may still need some tweaking for specific hardware not otherwise supported.
For those already running Barebox, the bareDOOM code can be found on
[Ahmad]’s GitHub page
. For those not running
Barebox
, it does have a number of benefits compared to other bootloaders, even apart from its new ability to play classic FPS games. For those who prefer a more custom DOOM setup, though, we are always fans of
DOOM running within an NES cartridge
.
Photo:
AntonioMDA, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340180",
"author": "Steven",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T08:19:53",
"content": "Hahaha, this is so awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6340183",
"author": "dave",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T09:41:12",
"content": "…o... | 1,760,373,117.933486 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/tightly-packed-raspberry-pi-tricorder-impresses/ | Tightly Packed Raspberry Pi Tricorder Impresses | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"hand wired",
"Pi Zero W",
"RTL-SDR",
"sensor",
"star trek",
"The Next Generation",
"tricorder"
] | We’ll say upfront that we don’t have nearly as much information about this 3D printed
Star Trek: The Next Generation
tricorder as we’d like. But
from the image galleries [Himmelen] has posted
we know it’s running on the Raspberry Pi Zero W, has a color LCD in addition to a monochrome OLED, and that it’s absolutely packed with gear.
So far, [Himmelen] has fit an NESDR RTL-SDR dongle, a GPS receiver, an accelerometer, and the battery charging circuitry in the top half of the case. Calling it a tight fit would be something of an understatement, especially when you take into account all the wires snaking around in there.
But as mentioned in the Reddit thread about the device
, a custom PCB backplane of sorts is in the works so all these modules will have something a little neater to plug into.
There are a lot of fantastic little details in this build that have us very excited to see it cross the finish line. The female USB port that’s been embedded into the top of the device is a nice touch, as it will make it easy to add storage or additional hardware in the field. We also love the keyboard, made up of 30 individual tact switches with 3D printed caps. It’s hard to imagine what actually typing on such an input device would be like, but even if each button just fired off its own program or function, we’d be happy.
Judging by the fact that the LCD shows the Pi sitting at a login prompt in all the images, we’re going to go out on a limb and assume [Himmelen] hasn’t gotten to writing much software for this little gadget yet. Once the hardware is done and it’s time to start pushing pixels though,
something like Pygame could be used to make short work of a LCARS-style user interface
that would fit the visual style of
The Next Generation
. In fact, off the top of our heads we can think of a few turn-key projects out there designed for creating
Trek
UIs, though the relatively limited computational power of the Pi Zero might be a problem.
We’ve seen several projects that tried to turn the iconic tricorder into a functional device. Some have focused on
the arguably more recognizable
Next Generation
style such as this one
, and others have targeted the
more forgiving brick-shaped unit from Kirk and Spock’s era
. The Wand Company is even working on a officially licensed tricorder that will supposedly be as
close to we can get to the real thing with modern tech
and a $250 USD price tag, though we’d wager COVID has slowed progress down on that one. In any event, whether you build it or buy it, the tricorder seems destined to become reality before too long. | 22 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340167",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T05:11:08",
"content": "Awesome! Kudos for that! :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6340173",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T05:53:38",
"cont... | 1,760,373,117.99371 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/3d-animation-for-all-thanks-to-google-ai/ | 3D Animation For All Thanks To Google AI | Al Williams | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3D modelling",
"animation",
"computer graphics",
"google",
"monster mash"
] | Google rarely fails to impress with technology demos. Their latest — Monster Mash — is aimed at using artificial intelligence to allow the creation of
simple 3D animations
without a lot of training or trouble. We’ll warn you: we aren’t artists so we didn’t get the results the demos were showing, but then again, if you are even a little artistic, you’ll probably have better luck than we did. You might want to start watching the video, below.
There’s also
a research paper
if you are more interested in the technology. The idea is to make simple line drawings in 2D. Then you inflate the object to 3D. The final step is to trace out animation paths.
It sounds simple, but there are a few things you need to know. The object’s main body needs to be a closed stroke. After that, you can draw open shapes to cue the system that they are body parts. Drawing with a right click puts objects behind existing objects and double-clicking a shape creates a symmetric copy (for example, a right and left leg).The inflation step has some high-power math behind it, while the final step is to create control points on the model and deform them to produce the appearance of movement.
The project had contributors from the Czech Technical University, ETH Zürich, and the University of Washington. The code is
open source
, too. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340149",
"author": "To get a jolt from my electrodes",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T02:30:06",
"content": "If the animated human has, uhh, two heads, what is animatable there? I guess both can be asymmetric?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,373,118.299229 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/programming-pals-in-2021/ | Programming PALs In 2021 | Chris Lott | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"GAL",
"GALasm",
"Minipro",
"pal",
"PALasm",
"TL866A",
"WinCUPL"
] | The [IMSAI Guy] has
posted a follow-up video with all the details
of how he programs GAL22V10 chips in the modern era. We noted that this was missing from
his stepper motor project
a few days ago, and before we could even ask him, he answered. And no, you won’t have to dig that old Intel 486 DX2-66 out of the closet and search eBay for working floppy drives. It turns out the answer is easier than you’d think.
Microchip now owns WinCUPL through its acquisition of Atmel in 2016, and offers WinCUPL as a free download from the Microchip website. This runs only in Windows, although some users report success running under Wine on Linux. This tool will compile the design, but you still need to program the chip. If you’ve done any EEPROM programming lately, chances are you have one of the TL866A MiniPros laying around — this programmer can handle CPLDs, PALs, and GALS as well as EEPROMS. [IMSAI Guy] walks you through the programming procedure, and if you’ve programmed EEPROMs before, the process will be familiar.
For those who prefer the Linux or Mac environment, there are some alternatives. We’ve seen
GALasm
used on several projects such as [Ken Yap]’s
8085 Minimax
. The
GitHub repository for
GALasm
states that commercial use is strictly prohibited, so take note if this applies to your project. As for controlling the TL866A, there is a
Linux port called
minipro
available on GitLab
. The remaining hurdle if you want to experiment with these programmable logic chips it to actually get them — many are now obsolete. But it looks like you can still buy Lattice and Microchip (Atmel) ones from various sources. Happy Programming. | 35 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340128",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T23:07:49",
"content": "I was surprised to see that there’s still a large number of New Old Stock 26V12 GALs purchasable between Arrow and Rochester.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comm... | 1,760,373,118.376303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/virtual-reality-gloves-aim-to-improve-interactivity/ | Virtual Reality Gloves Aim To Improve Interactivity | Lewin Day | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"finger tracking",
"glove",
"hand tracking",
"haptic",
"haptic feedback",
"haptics",
"VR glove"
] | Virtual reality is a slow-moving field in some respects. While a lot of focus is put on optical technologies and headsets, there’s a lot more involved when it comes to believably placing a human being in a virtual environment. So far, we’ve gotten a good start at the visuals and head tracking, but interaction technology is still lagging behind a lot.
[Lucas] is working in just that area, iterating heavily on his homebrew VR gloves
.
The gloves consists of potentiometers, fitted with spools and attached to the tip of each digit on a wearer’s hand by a string. As the user curls their fingers, the potentiometers turn and the position of the fingers can be measured. The potentiometers are all read via an Arduino, which communicates back to a PC via USB. A custom driver is then used to interact with Valve’s SteamVR software, allowing the glove to be used with a wide variety of existing software.
Thus far, the system is merely tracking finger position, but the spool and string based design is intended to support motors down the line for each finger to create resistance, so the user can gain the feeling of touching and interacting with virtual objects. The project has the potential to be a cheaper, more accessible alternative than current off-the-shelf solutions.
We’ve seen other hand-tracking gloves before, too
– though none that track the spread of a wearer’s hand as well as the finger extension. If you’re working on precisely that,
please do drop us a line.
Video after the break. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340102",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T20:37:08",
"content": "I was wondering why go through the effort instead of using existing kapton flex sensors, then I checked the prices on Sparkfun. Ohh, that’s why. They’re about an order of magnitude more expensive t... | 1,760,373,118.250324 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/heavy-metal-cyberdeck-has-an-eye-towards-expansion/ | Heavy Metal Cyberdeck Has An Eye Towards Expansion | Tom Nardi | [
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"aluminum extrusion",
"cyberdeck",
"cyberpunk",
"hand wired",
"mechanical keyboard",
"modular electronics",
"raspberry pi"
] | Whether we’re talking about Gibson’s Sprawl or our increasingly dystopian reality, one of the defining characteristics of a cyberdeck is that it can be easily customized and upgraded over time. While a few of the builds we’ve covered over the last couple of years have focused more on style than substance, we really appreciate the designs that embrace the concept of modularity to make sure the system can evolve to meet the changing demands of hacking on the go.
To that end, the
M3TAL from [BlastoSupreme] is a perfect example of what a cyberdeck should be
. Naturally it’s got the cyberpunk aesthetics we’ve come to expect, but more importantly, it’s designed so modifications and repairs are as quick and painless as possible. The trick is the use of a 2020 aluminum extrusion frame, which allows external panels and components to be attached anywhere along the length of the deck using T-Nuts. Similarly, by mounting internal components to “sleds” that ride between the pieces of extrusion, the electronics can easily be removed or swapped out as complete modules.
The M3TAL is currently outfitted with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a pair of 26650 batteries.
Furthering the idea of expandability, [BlastoSupreme] included an authentic 3.5 floppy drive on the M3TAL that allows him to pack an incredible 1.44 MB onto each rugged and portable disk. OK, so maybe the floppy drive isn’t
terribly
impressive compared to 2021 tech, but it does seem oddly appropriate for a cyberdeck. On the opposite side of the deck there’s a RetroCART slot, which
cloaks modern USB devices in clunky faux cartridges
. This provides a unified physical format for everything from removable storage to microcontrollers and software defined radio receivers.
[BlastoSupreme] also put quite a bit of time and effort into the input devices on the M3TAL. There’s a mechanical keyboard onboard, as is something of a tradition for cyberdecks, but this one is notable for the meticulous hand-wiring and Teensy 2.0 microcontroller hiding underneath. Next to that is a small joystick intended for the Nintendo Switch which has been converted to USB by way of an Arduino Pro Micro.
Looking at the M3TAL, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that this isn’t the first custom cyberdeck [BlastoSupreme] has built.
Last year we covered his gargantuan
NX-Yamato
, and it’s interesting to see the evolution of his technique. Clearly this isn’t a maker who’s content to rest on his laurels, so we’re eager to see what he’s got in store for his next project. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340067",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T19:00:42",
"content": "Design reminds me of some point of sale terminals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6340077",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-0... | 1,760,373,118.555607 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/the-50-ham-a-simple-wspr-beacon/ | The $50 Ham: A Simple WSPR Beacon | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"digital",
"joe taylor",
"propagation",
"The $50 Ham",
"weak signal",
"WSJT-X"
] | I was having a chat recently with someone, and it surprised me that she had an amateur radio license. I suppose it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise; after all, getting a ham radio license is a pretty common rite of passage in the life of a hardware hacker. I guess it surprised me because she’d never mentioned it in our past conversations, and as we talked about it, I learned why. “I got my license because I thought ham radio was about building radios, ” she said. “But it’s not.”
In a lot of ways, she is right about the state of ham radio. There was a time that building one’s own gear was as central to the hobby as getting on the air, and perhaps more so. Now, though, with
radios as cheap as $30
and the whiz-bang gear that can make reaching out across the planet trivially easy, building your own radios has slipped down a few notches. But homebrewing is far from a dead art, and as we’ll see in this installment of “The $50 Ham”, a WSPR beacon for the HF bands is actually a fun and simple — and cheap — way for the homebrew-curious to get a taste of what it’s like to build your own transmitter.
A Minimalist Approach
In
the last $50 Ham installment
, I talked about how the Weak Signal Propagation Mode, or WSPR, is used to explore propagation conditions across the world. The concept is simple: a transceiver connected to a WSPR client program, such as the one built into
WSJT-X
, listens for the FSK-modulated signals that are being transmitted by other stations. The low-bit-rate signals encode a minimal message — the transmitting station’s callsign, Maidenhead grid location, and the transmit power — into a digital signal that takes nearly two full minutes to send. The receiving station then reports the decoded message to a central WSPR database, which keeps track of the contacts and can display a map of paths between stations.
On the receiving end, most of the magic of WSPR lies in the software, particularly in the digital signal processing that pulls data from the oftentimes weak and degraded signal. But the transmitting side is another story; there, the software needed to encode the minimal message is pretty simple, so simple that not much more than a microcontroller is needed to do the job. Really, all that’s needed is an oscillator capable of generating a signal at a fixed frequency, and varying that frequency under software control to encode the message.
There are a lot of ways to go about this, including
using the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi to generate the RF signal directly
. In this case, though, I decided to follow the lead of a lot of other hams and use an Si5351 clock generator breakout board and an Arduino Nano. The clock generator board sports a three-channel PLL-controlled oscillator that talks I2C and has a well-supported library, making it easy to implement a simple oscillator for just about any band.
I decided to make my WSPR beacon for the 20-meter band, for no real reason other than I’ve always had good luck making WSPR contacts on that band during the daylight hours, which is when I spend the most time in my shack. I also decided that for at least my first pass at this project, I’d strip out all the bells and whistles that are so easy to add to an Arduino project. WSPR transmissions need to be carefully synchronized to start at the top of every even-numbered minute, so many of these projects include elaborations such as a GPS receiver or an NTP client to take care of timing. I figured it would be a lot quicker and easier for me to simply watch the clock and press a button to start the WSPR transmission cycle at the proper time.
To that end, I searched for “minimal WSPR transmitters” and found a number of designs that would work for me, including
this one
by Peter B. Marks. He adapted the code from Jason Milldrum’s (NT7S) examples in his excellent Etherkit library for the Si5351 — we all borrow from each other. My only addition to the code is support for a button to kick off the transmitter. The code simply takes my callsign, grid square, and transmit power, encodes it into a WSPR message, and tells the Si5351 to send the sequence of four different FSK tones that make up the 162-symbol-long message.
/*
* Minimal WSPR beacon using Si5351Arduino library
*
* Based on code:
* Copyright (C) 2015 - 2016 Jason Milldrum
*
*
* This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
* the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
* (at your option) any later version.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
* GNU General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
* along with this program. If not, see
* https://gist.github.com/NT7S/2b5555aa28622c1b3fcbc4d7c74ad926.
*/
#include "Arduino.h"
#include "si5351.h"
#include "Wire.h"
#define TONE_SPACING 146 // ~1.46 Hz
#define WSPR_CTC 10672 // CTC value for WSPR
#define SYMBOL_COUNT WSPR_SYMBOL_COUNT
#define CORRECTION 94674 // Determined experimentally -- parts per billion?
#define INPUT_PIN 7 // pushbutton
#define TX_LED_PIN 13
Si5351 si5351;
JTEncode jtencode;
unsigned long freq = 14097100UL; // Transmit frequency
char call[7] = "N7DPM"; // Callsign
char loc[5] = "DN17"; // Grid square
uint8_t dbm = 10; // Transmit power
uint8_t tx_buffer[SYMBOL_COUNT];
int val = 0;
// Global variables used in ISRs
volatile bool proceed = false;
// Timer interrupt vector. This toggles the variable we use to gate
// each column of output to ensure accurate timing. Called whenever
// Timer1 hits the count set below in setup().
ISR(TIMER1_COMPA_vect)
{
proceed = true;
// Serial.println("timer fired");
}
// Loop through the string, transmitting one character at a time.
void encode()
{
uint8_t i;
Serial.println("encode()");
jtencode.wspr_encode(call, loc, dbm, tx_buffer);
// Reset the tone to 0 and turn on the output
si5351.set_clock_pwr(SI5351_CLK0, 1);
digitalWrite(TX_LED_PIN, HIGH);
// Now do the rest of the message
for (i = 0; i < SYMBOL_COUNT; i++)
{
uint64_t frequency = (freq * 100) + (tx_buffer[i] * TONE_SPACING);
si5351.set_freq(frequency, SI5351_CLK0);
Serial.print("freq = ");
Serial.println(tx_buffer[i]);
proceed = false;
while (!proceed);
}
Serial.println("message done");
// Turn off the output
si5351.set_clock_pwr(SI5351_CLK0, 0);
digitalWrite(TX_LED_PIN, LOW);
}
void setup()
{
Serial.begin(115200);
Serial.println("setup");
// Use the Arduino's on-board LED as a keying indicator.
pinMode(TX_LED_PIN, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(TX_LED_PIN, LOW);
// Initialize the Si5351
// Change the 2nd parameter in init if using a ref osc other
// than 25 MHz
si5351.init(SI5351_CRYSTAL_LOAD_8PF, 0, CORRECTION);
// Set CLK0 output
si5351.set_freq(freq * 100, SI5351_CLK0);
si5351.drive_strength(SI5351_CLK0, SI5351_DRIVE_8MA); // Set for max power
si5351.set_clock_pwr(SI5351_CLK0, 0); // Disable the clock initially
// Set up Timer1 for interrupts every symbol period.
noInterrupts(); // Turn off interrupts.
TCCR1A = 0; // Set entire TCCR1A register to 0; disconnects
// interrupt output pins, sets normal waveform
// mode. We're just using Timer1 as a counter.
TCNT1 = 0; // Initialize counter value to 0.
TCCR1B = (1 << CS12) | // Set CS12 and CS10 bit to set prescale
(1 << CS10) | // to /1024
(1 << WGM12); // turn on CTC
// which gives, 64 us ticks
TIMSK1 = (1 << OCIE1A); // Enable timer compare interrupt.
OCR1A = WSPR_CTC; // Set up interrupt trigger count;
interrupts(); // Re-enable interrupts.
pinMode(INPUT_PIN, INPUT);
}
// wait for button press at the top of any even-numbered minute
void loop()
{
val = digitalRead(INPUT_PIN);
if (val == LOW)
{
encode(); // transmit once and stop
}
}
Cleaning Up the Signal
Like any good ham, I tested my tiny transmitter before putting it on the air.
The simple dummy load
I built back near the beginning of this series came in hand for that, since I was able to hook it up directly to the SMA connector on the breakout board. I connected my oscilloscope to the output and fired up the code. The Si5351 is supposed to generate a square wave; it ended up looking more like a sawtooth wave, but either way, the signal was loaded with harmonics and would need to be cleaned up before going on the air.
Cleaning up harmonics from the Si5351. Yellow trace is the raw ouput from the dev board; green trace is output from the low-pass filter.
Luckily, low-pass filters that take care of this important bit of spectral hygiene are pretty simple. You can buy them, but this is all about homebrewing, so I spun up a
Charlie Morris (ZL2CTM) video on filter design
, ran through his math, and came up with values for the capacitors and inductors needed for a filter that cuts off everything above about 14.2 MHz. I used
this toroid calculator
to figure out how to wind the coils, soldered everything up on a scrap of PCB that had pads cut into it using
a cheap plug-cutter bit from Harbor Freight
, and tested it using my NanoSA spectrum analyzer.
Having never built a filter like this before, I was surprised how well it did cleaning up the harmonics. The waveform on the scope was a nice, smooth sine wave, and the spectrum analyzer showed a marked decrease in harmonics. The second harmonic, which at 42 MHz is well up into the VHF band, was attenuated by 35 dBm. That’s exactly the kind of spurious a responsible ham wouldn’t want to be spewing around, so I’m glad I built the filter.
Si5351 spectrum before…
…and after the low-pass filter
On the Air – Sort Of
Doesn’t look like much of a transmitter, but I’m on the air.
Once I was confident that my little transmitter was putting out a clean signal, I checked to make sure it was putting out signal that was both on-frequency and properly encoded. The Si5351 dev board isn’t exactly a lab-quality signal source — while it holds the set frequency pretty well, it may or may not output the programmed frequency. So the board needs to be calibrated, which is normally a simple matter of tweaking a correction factor in code while monitoring the output on a frequency counter. Sadly, there’s no “NanoFrequencyCounter” in my tiny test suite — yet — so I had to get creative.
My approach was to tune my HF rig to the desired frequency of the WSPR transmitter — 14.097100 MHz — and slowly adjust the transmitter’s frequency while transmitting into a dummy load. This produces an audible beat frequency which pretty much disappears when the two frequencies match. I wasn’t able to completely eliminate the beat frequency, but I did get it down to a couple of Hertz, which I considered close enough.
I next checked for a decodable signal by firing up WSJT-X and “broadcasting” to my HF rig. Even with the dummy load connected, I was getting a very strong signal on the waterfall display, and could clearly see the FSK-modulated signal. And I was very pleased to see that WSJT-X cleanly decoded my message.
Decoding my own signal, to make sure everything is working. The range was only a few meters and the power was only 13 mW, but it worked!
Better Luck Next Time
Encouraged by these successes, and knowing that plenty of people have made transcontinental WSPR contacts with less power than the 13 mW my little beacon was putting out, I tried getting on the air for real. I hooked the beacon up to my end-fed half-wave antenna and pushed the send button at the appointed time. Sadly, though, I was never able to get any other station to decode my signal. I’ve tried dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times in the last week or so, but I don’t appear to be getting through.
I know my signal is properly encoded, and I know I’m on frequency, so I’m pretty sure the problem is either my antenna or my low-power signal. Given the nature of this series, I’m more inclined to address the latter with a simple power amplifier build. I’ve got a couple of designs in mind for that and I’ve ordered some parts, so we’ll look at that in the next installment and see if I can unlock this particular achievement. | 27 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340050",
"author": "Setho",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T17:13:42",
"content": "Cool Dan – a really nice and enjoyable write up! I too have played around with the arduino / si5351 – hacking my own software together to make it play, but I ended up taking a short cut on the filter by bu... | 1,760,373,118.495726 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/portrait-of-a-digital-weapon/ | Portrait Of A Digital Weapon | Anool Mahidharia | [
"Art",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"16 segment display",
"3d printing",
"Adafruit Feather",
"arduino",
"build",
"Concept",
"Countdown to Zero Day",
"Cyber Art",
"Cyber War",
"electronics",
"Guilded",
"leds",
"microcontrollers",
"Military Portraiture",
"portrait",
"Portrait of a Digital Weapon",
"Segment Display",
"S... | Over the years, artists have been creating art depicting weapons of mass destruction, war and human conflict. But the weapons of war, and the theatres of operation are changing in the 21
st
century. The outcome of many future conflicts will surely depend on digital warriors, huddled over their computer screens, punching on their keyboards and maneuvering joysticks, or using devious methods to infect computers to disable or destroy infrastructure. How does an artist give physical form to an unseen, virtual digital weapon? That is the question which inspired [Mac Pierce] to create his latest
Portrait of a Digital Weapon
.
[Mac]’s art piece is a physical depiction of a virtual digital weapon, a nation-state cyber attack. When activated, this piece displays the full code of the
Stuxnet
virus, a worm that partially disabled Iran’s nuclear fuel production facility at Natanz around 2008.
It took a while for [Mac] to finalize the plan for his design. He obtained a high resolution satellite image of the Iranian Natanz facility via the Sentinel Hub satellite imagery service. This was printed on a transparent vinyl and glued to a translucent poly-carbonate sheet. Behind the poly-carbonate layer, he built a large, single digit 16-segment display using WS2812 addressable LED strips, which would be used to display the Stuxnet code. A bulkhead USB socket was added over the centrifuge facility, with a ring of WS2812 LEDs surrounding the main complex. When a USB stick is plugged in, the Stuxnet code is displayed on the 16-segment display, one character at a time. At random intervals, the LED ring around the centrifuge building lights up spinning in a red color to indicate centrifuge failure.
The 16-segment display was built on an aluminum base plate, with 3D printed baffles to hold the LED strips. To hold the rest of the electronics, he built a separate 3D printed frame which could be added to the main art frame. Since this was too large to be printed in one piece on the 3D printer, it was split in parts, which were then joined together using embedded metal stud reinforcement to hold the parts together. Quite a nice trick to make large, rigid parts.
An Adafruit Feather M0 micro-controller board, with micro SD-card slot was the brains of the project. To derive the 5 V logic data signal from the 3.3 V GPIO output of the Feather, [Mac] used two extra WS2812 LEDs as level shifters before sending the data to the LED strips. Driving all the LEDs required almost 20 W, so he powered it using USB-C, adding a power delivery negotiation board to derive the required juice.
The Arduino code is straightforward. It reads the characters stored on the SD-card, and sends them sequentially to the 16-segment display. The circular ring around the USB bulkhead also lights up white, but at random intervals it turns red to simulate the speeding up of the centrifuges. Detecting when the USB stick gets plugged in is another nice hack that [Mac] figured out. When a USB stick is plugged in, the continuity between the shell (shield) and the GND terminal was used to trigger a GPIO input.
Cyber warfare is here to stay. We are already seeing increasing attacks on key infrastructure installations by state as well as non-state actors around the world. Stuxnet was one of the first in this growing category of malicious, weaponized code. Acknowledging its presence using such a physical representation can offer a reminder on how a few lines of software can wreak havoc just as much as any other physical weapon. Check out the brief project video after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340151",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-04-16T02:32:30",
"content": "Further supporting evidence that I will never understand Art.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6340154",
"author": "Alan Kilian",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,373,118.422194 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss/ | Crew Dragon’s Short Hop Begins The Era Of Valet Parking At The ISS | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"commercial space",
"Crew Dragon",
"international space station",
"iss",
"nasa",
"SpaceX"
] | They weren’t scheduled to return to Earth until April 28th at the earliest, so why did NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, suit up and climb aboard the Crew Dragon
Resilience
on April 5th? Because a previously untested maneuver meant that after they closed the hatch between their spacecraft and the International Space Station, there was a chance they weren’t going to be coming back.
On paper, moving a capsule between docking ports seems simple enough. All
Resilience
had to do was undock from the International Docking Adapter 2 (IDA-2) located on the front of the
Harmony
module, itself attached to the Pressurized Mating Adapter 2 (PMA-2) that was once the orbital parking spot for the Space Shuttle, and move over to the PMA-3/IDA-3 on top of
Harmony
. It was a short trip through open space, and when the crew exited their craft and reentered the Station at the end of it, they’d only be a few meters from where they started out approximately 45 minutes prior.
The maneuver was designed to be performed autonomously, so technically the crew didn’t need to be on
Resilience
when it switched docking ports. But allowing the astronauts to stay aboard the station while their only ride home undocked and flew away without them was a risk NASA wasn’t willing to take.
What if the vehicle had some issue that prevented it from returning to the ISS? A relocation of this type had never been attempted by an American spacecraft before, much less a commercial one like the Crew Dragon. So while the chances of such a mishap were slim, the crew still treated this short flight as if it could be their last day in space. Should the need arise, all of the necessary checks and preparations had been made so that the vehicle could safely bring its occupants back to Earth.
Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary.
The autonomous relocation of Crew Dragon
Resilience
went off without a hitch
, and SpaceX got to add yet another “first” to their ever growing list of accomplishments in space. But this first relocation of an American spacecraft at the ISS certainly won’t be the last, as the comings and goings of commercial spacecraft will only get more complex in the future.
Unprecedented Activity
During the Space Shuttle years NASA didn’t have to worry about relocating their spacecraft, as there was never more than one of the winged orbiters in space at the same time. But since the Shuttle was capable of simultaneously carrying seven crew members and an incredible amount of cargo, this wasn’t a problem. All of NASA’s operational needs on the ISS were more than met by a single vehicle.
Of course, all that changed when the Shuttle was retired in 2011. NASA began making deals with its international partners,
and eventually even commercial companies
, to bring crew and cargo to the Station on a wide array of smaller and more operationally nimble spacecraft. Today these vehicles, in addition to Russia’s Soyuz and Progress spacecraft, occupy most of the available docking and berthing ports on the ISS at any given time. In the coming years even more commercial spacecraft are expected to be brought online, meaning traffic is only going to get worse at the orbiting outpost.
All of the spacecraft docked to the ISS as of April 9th, 2021.
With the US segment of the ISS now busier than ever, NASA is faced with a logistical challenge that their Russian counterparts are already well accustomed to. This may have been the first time an American spacecraft had to be relocated to another docking port during a mission, but to date, 19 Soyuz capsules have had to make similar treks; the most recent of which having
just occurred a few weeks prior on March 19th
.
A Complicated Dance
Given that
Resilience
ended up moving to a docking port that’s only a few meters away from where it was originally, it’s easy to think the whole thing was some kind of experimental proof of concept. Perhaps as a test for future, more complex maneuvers. But in fact, the two International Docking Adapters are currently the only spots on the ISS where commercial vehicles such as the Crew Dragon, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, and eventually Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spaceplane, can attach. In short, while the destination will alternate, port relocations for US spacecraft will always be a short hop.
But why? What difference could a trip of such a short distance make? The answer lies in the unique design of the Dragon’s Cargo variant, which is able to carry large bulky objects in the hollow “trunk” behind the pressurized capsule. Generally speaking cargo brought up in the rear of the Cargo Dragon is intended to be mounted to the outside of the Station, and is retrieved from the spacecraft using the orbiting laboratory’s robotic arm. As it so happens, this is how both IDA-2 and IDA-3 were delivered to the Station in 2016 and 2019.
The trick is, Station’s arm can’t reach into the trunk of the Dragon if it’s docked to
Harmony’s
forward port. That’s not a problem currently, as
Resilience
isn’t carrying any external cargo. But it will be in June, when a Cargo Dragon delivers a new set of deployable solar arrays for the Station as part of the CRS-22 mission . To further complicate matters, another four astronauts are slated to dock with the Station at the end of April aboard Crew Dragon
Endeavour
.
A rendering by
Raffaele Di Palma
illustrates the limited reach of the Station’s robotic arm.
That meant
Resilience
needed to move to PMA-3/IDA-3 so
Endeavour
can dock to PMA-2/IDA-2 at the end of the month. Then once
Resilience
leaves, the upper docking port will be free to accept CRS-22 in June so the solar arrays can be removed from its trunk with the robotic arm. After CRS-22 departs,
Endeavour
will need to make its own “up and over” hop to PMA-3/IDA-3, as a Boeing Starliner needs to dock at PMA-2/IDA-2 as part of its first test flight to the Station in July.
Sound complicated? That’s because it is. But unfortunately for NASA,
unless plans for a commercial expansion to the International Space Station go through
, this is the orbital game of “musical chairs” they’ll be forced to deal with. With only two viable docking ports available for current and future spacecraft, the United States should quickly catch up with their Russian counterparts when it comes to the fine art of spacecraft juggling. Except now those relocations will be autonomous. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6340066",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T18:54:01",
"content": "Put a multi-dock extension on the docking port, problem solved.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6340110",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
... | 1,760,373,118.621095 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/3d-printing-a-long-range-nerf-blaster/ | 3D Printing A Long Range Nerf Blaster | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"blaster",
"nerf",
"nerf blaster"
] | The modified Nerf scene used to be about getting the absolute maximum performance out of Hasbro’s off-the-shelf foam dart blasters. The community quickly found the limits of plastic parts made down to a price, and an underground market for heavier springs and CNC-machined upgrades sprung up. Eventually, however, the advent of 3D printing and cheaper home machine tools led to a rise in popularity of bespoke blasters. [Zach] has long advocated for their supremacy, and has
made a long-range blaster aimed at newcomers to the hobby
. (Video, embedded below.)
The blaster is built around the popular Caliburn spring-powered design, originally created by [Captain Slug]. Modifications by [Zach] involve a longer barrel, relocated side-feeding magazine port, and other modifications designed to suit the long-range sniping role. There’s even a special “rifled” stabiliser on the end designed to reduce the effects of muzzle blast from disturbing the dart as it leaves the barrel.
It’s a design that very much builds on the efforts of the wider Nerf community, and is all the better for it.
[Zach] has shared files
and
links to parts bundles
to help get enterprising builders up and running with a minimum of fuss. We’d love to take the long blaster out for a round or three ourselves – it may just be time to fire up the 3D printer! | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339981",
"author": "mmx",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T13:12:06",
"content": "I remember I read in an article a while back that the nerf guns were designed so that an accidental shot to someone’s eye wouldn’t cause major injury or blindness. The key factor was limiting the energy of th... | 1,760,373,118.669292 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/15/wifive55-more-than-a-smart-555-replacement/ | WiFive55: More Than A Smart 555 Replacement | Stephen Ogier | [
"hardware",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"555",
"ESP-01",
"ESP8266",
"solid state relay"
] | “You could’ve done that with a 555 timer.” But what if all you have on hand is an ESP8266? [TechColab] needed to control a solenoid valve with a short pulse via a solid-state relay (SSR) but found that the trusty 555 timer was tricky to set properly. Additionally, they wanted to add features, such as fixed pulse length, that were difficult to implement—even with multiple timers. Still wanting to keep things cheap and accessible, [TechColab] has created
the WiFive55, a 555 replacement based on the ESP-01 ESP8266 board.
[TechColab] began by investigating existing ESP-01 solid-state relay boards but found that
many of them momentarily enable the output on startup
—a risk [TechColab] deemed unacceptable. This was resolved in the WiFive55 by adding an RC filter to the SSR output, eliminating the output glitches at the cost of slowing switching time to around 20 ms—an acceptable trade for many SSR applications.
Since they were going to design a new PCB to support this improved ESP-01 SSR controller, [TechColab] decided to go all-out. To support loads of widely varying sizes, the PCB supports an optoisolator that switches up to 1 A, a MOSFET that switches up to 2 A, and an on-board relay or SSR that can switch up to 3 A. For heavy loads, it includes connections for an off-board SSR, which allow it to switch whatever current the SSR can handle (easily over 50 A). Because the ESP-01 is slightly more capable than the 555, the WiFive55 supports control via WiFi, GPIO, serial, and push-button. Keeping with the WiFive55’s original role as a 555 replacement, it even includes a header exposing a 555-like trigger and output interface!
We always like seeing inexpensive boards like the ESP-01 being used to their full potential, and we can’t wait to see what software [TechColab] cooks up for this! If you’re interested in getting started with the ESP-01, you might consider starting with
this guide to blinking an LED over WiFi. | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339945",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T09:24:14",
"content": "Calendar check. Nope, not April 1st. Okay then: this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6339946",
... | 1,760,373,118.746971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/14/a-faux-bbs-gets-software-on-to-your-vintage-machines/ | A Faux BBS Gets Software On To Your Vintage Machines | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"bbs",
"bulletin board",
"bulletin board system",
"macintosh",
"macintosh garden"
] | Back in the golden age of modems and phone lines, bulletin board systems, or BBSes, were a great way to find new software from the comfort of your own home. Most have shut down over the past few decades, as the Internet took over as a more flexible method of
cat picture
software distribution. [equant] was a fan of browsing for warez through a text interface however, so recreated the experience in a way that’s useful today.
The result is RetroBridgeBBS.
The software runs on a modern PC, ideally a Linux one that runs Python 3 and has a serial port. Then, you can hook up your old retro computers via serial using a null modem cable. Fire up appropriate terminal software on the retro computer and you’re rewarded with a BBS-like interface. From here, you can search selected online repositories for software, and download what you like. The host PC parses requests from the retro PC over the serial link, and shuffles back the requested files downloaded from the Internet. Currently it’s set up primarily for Macintosh users, with some useful features to avoid downloading StuffIt archives of the wrong version – a perennial frustration in the 90s. Future plans involve expanding the system to suit more platforms.
It’s
technically
anachronistic, but it
feels like
a period-correct way to get software onto a vintage computer. It’s also a great way to do so when you’re lacking appropriate floppy hardware, hard disk emulators, or network cards – all of which can be expensive and in short supply. There’s other ways to go about it, too, of course –
you can do some nifty things with an ESP8266, don’t you know
! Video after the break. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339918",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T05:19:31",
"content": "Here you have a chicken and egg problem of how do you get the ZModem/transfer software on in the first place without a SCSI drive, localtalk, or other era mac that can write 800K disks if 1.44 is not... | 1,760,373,118.810627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/14/morrowind-rebooted-the-original-xbox-without-you-ever-noticing/ | Morrowind Rebooted The Original Xbox Without You Ever Noticing | Lewin Day | [
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"Elder Scrolls",
"morrowind",
"xbox"
] | The original Xbox was well-known for being based on basic PC hardware, and among developers, well known for having just 64 megabytes of RAM which even at the time wasn’t a lot to be working with. In a recent podcast, [Todd Howard] of Bethesda related an anecdote from the era, claiming that
Morrowind
occasionally invisibly rebooted the Xbox without user’s knowledge in order to free up RAM. [Modern Vintage Gamer] wanted to determine if this was true or not,
and began an investigation.
The investigation begins with the aid of an Xbox Development Kit. Noting that the original anecdote mentioned the reboots occurring during the loading process, the devkit Xbox was soft rebooted after executing a load. Rather than going back to the title screen of the game, it kicked straight back into the loading screen and brought up the last save game instead. This suggested that the game was indeed capable of rebooting in the midst of the loading routine.
[Modern Vintage Gamer] had a hunch that this was being achieved with the use of a routine called XLaunchNew Image, a piece of the Xbox API that could be used to soft-reboot the console and start an executable. Upon decompiling
Morrowind,
a call was found that fit the bill. Further analysis showed that the game was indeed calling XLaunchNewImage upon loading and launching a new game, and was confirmed by finding an *.ini file that contained flags to enable this behaviour.
Presumably, the reason for this behaviour was that it was simpler to boot the game fresh when loading a save, rather than trying to unload all the game assets in memory from the current game. It’s a neat trick that likely made the development team’s lives much easier once they implemented it.
We don’t often talk about
The Elder Scrolls
series around here,
though we’ve seen someone modify an exercise bike to work with
Skyrim.
Video after the break. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339911",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2021-04-15T03:30:11",
"content": "On a Linux box I think this would be a kexec, the whole memory space is being replaced with another executable, but I’m not sure if the processor would really be reset or not.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,373,118.8611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/14/remote-controlled-car-gets-active-suspension/ | Remote Controlled Car Gets Active Suspension | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"active suspension",
"arduino",
"ESP32",
"mpu6050",
"rc",
"servo",
"suspension",
"truck"
] | Active suspensions are almost a holy grail for cars, adding so much performance gain that certain types have even been banned from Formula 1 racing. That doesn’t stop them from being used on a wide variety of luxury and performance cars, though, as they can easily be tuned on the fly for comfort or improved handling. They also can be fitted to remote controlled cars as [Indeterminate Design] shows with this
electronic servo-operated active suspension system for his RC truck
.
Each of the four servos used in this build is linked to the mounting point of the existing coilover suspension on the truck. This allows the servo to change the angle that the suspension is positioned while the truck is moving. As a result, the truck has a dramatic performance enhancement including a tighter turning radius, more stability, and the capability of doing donuts. The control system runs on an Arduino with an ESP32 to enable live streaming of data, and also includes an MPU6050 to monitor the position of the truck’s frame while it is in motion.
There’s a lot going on in this build especially with regard to the control system that handles all of the servos. Right now it’s only programmed to try to keep the truck’s body relatively level, but [Indeterminate Design] plans to program several additional control modes in the future. There’s a lot of considerations to make with a system like this, and even more if you want to accommodate for
Rocket League-like jumps
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339871",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2021-04-14T23:33:06",
"content": "An eccentric cam should give more travel range for the servo.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6339889",
"author": "Indeterminate Design",
... | 1,760,373,118.909792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/14/logic-chip-teardown-from-early-1990s-ibm-es-9000-mainframe/ | Logic Chip Teardown From Early 1990s IBM ES/9000 Mainframe | Maya Posch | [
"hardware",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"bipolar transistor",
"es/9000",
"ibm",
"ken shirriff",
"tcm"
] | The 1980s and early 1990s were a bit of an odd time for semiconductor technology, with the various transistor technologies that had been used over the decades slowly making way for CMOS technology. The 1991-vintage IBM ES/9000 mainframe was one of the last systems to be built around bipolar transistor technology, with [Ken Shirriff]
tearing into one of the processor modules
(TCM) that made up one of these mainframes.
A Thermal Conduction Module from an IBM ES/9000 mainframe.
Five of these Thermal Conduction Modules (127.5 mm a side) made up the processor in these old mainframes. Most of note are the use of the aforementioned bipolar transistors and the use of DCS-based (differential current switch) logic. With the already power-hungry bipolar transistors driven to their limit in the ES/9000, and the use of rather massive DCS gates, each TCM was not only fed many amperes of electricity, but also capable of dissipating up to 600 Watts of power.
Each TCM didn’t contain a single large die of bipolar transistors either, but instead many smaller dies were bonded on a specially prepared ceramic layer in which the wiring was added through a very precise process. While an absolute marvel of engineering, the ES/9000 was essentially a flop, and by 1997 IBM too would move fully to CMOS transistor technology.
Over the years we’ve featured a lot of [Ken]’s work,
perhaps you’d like to know more about his techniques
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339830",
"author": "D00med",
"timestamp": "2021-04-14T20:40:00",
"content": "Was wondering when this would show up (I knew he requested a few dies from Dave Jones a while back.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6339835",
... | 1,760,373,118.96183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/14/sv-seeker-is-recycling-batteries/ | SV Seeker Is Recycling Batteries | Jonathan Bennett | [
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"batteries",
"recycling",
"SV Seeker"
] | SV Seeker is a home-made boat currently being built by [Doug Jackson] just north of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s a bit different than what you might imagine as a typical DIY boat, though. You see, Seeker is a 75 ft steel boat, intended to work as a research vessel. Doug and his crew proudly refer to Seeker as “The boat the internet built”, and he’s our kind of people. We’ve covered them before, the
first time way back in 2013
. Doug’s
Youtube channel
does double duty, both teaching the rest of us all the skills he’s learned while building, and also serving as the eventual user and repair manual for the boat.
Building such a big project, and none of it contracted out, has presented its own challenges. Today’s topic is batteries. Even with a diesel power plant, and a couple generators on board, a boat like this has to have a battery bank for daily operations. They have a reverse osmosis water maker to make fresh water, 120 and 240 volt power, and several other systems that all run off their battery bank. The first iteration of the design was to re-use a set of Edison batteries, AKA nickel-iron batteries. Those didn’t work out, so they’ve decided to bite the bullet and go with Lithium-ion. Just buying a pre-built kit is anathema to their maker ethos, not to mention the project’s minuscule budget, so they’re improvising. The idea is to collect a boatload of old 18650 cells, found commonly in the battery packs for laptops and cordless tools. When those packs die, it’s commonly just a single cell that has gone bad, meaning that an enterprising hacker can harvest the good cells for another project.
I anticipate seeing a video on the making of the big battery bank in another couple months, but until then think about sending some old lithium-ion packs their way. Better hurry though, because Seeker is scheduled to launch from the Tulsa Port of Catoosa on August 21st. If you have a battery or five to donate the effort, mail them to:
42Fab LLC
941 West I35 Frontage Road Ste. 116 #540
Edmond, OK 73034
Include a return address, and you even get a keychain made from the steel offcuts sent back to you. | 38 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339808",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2021-04-14T19:21:11",
"content": "By no means an expert on the topic, but of the few 18650 packs I’ve dissected with at least one dead cell, virtually all other cells were close to trash also. As far as I’m concerned, used battery packs are eit... | 1,760,373,119.263692 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/04/14/history-of-closed-captions-the-analog-era/ | History Of Closed Captions: The Analog Era | Chris Lott | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"analog video",
"closed captioning",
"line 21",
"NABTS",
"ntsc",
"pal",
"subtitles",
"teletext",
"VBI",
"WST"
] | Closed captioning on television and subtitles on DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming media are taken for granted today. But it wasn’t always so. In fact, it was quite a struggle for captioning to become commonplace. Back in the early 2000s, I unexpectedly found myself involved in a variety of closed captioning projects, both designing hardware and consulting with engineering teams at various consumer electronics manufacturers. I may have been the last engineer working with analog captioning as everyone else moved on to digital.
But before digging in, there is a lot of confusing and imprecise language floating around on this topic. Let’s establish some definitions. I often use the word
captioning
which encompasses both closed captions and subtitles:
Closed Captions:
Transmitted in a non-visible manner as textual data. Usually they can be enabled or disabled by the user. In the NTSC system, it’s often referred to as Line 21, since it was transmitted on video line number 21 in the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI).
Subtitles:
Rendered in a graphical format and overlaid onto the video / film. Usually they cannot be turned off. Also called open or hard captions.
The text contained in captions generally falls into one of three categories. Pure dialogue (nothing more) is often the style of captioning you see in subtitles on a DVD or Blu-ray. Ordinary captioning includes the dialogue, but with the addition of occasional cues for music or a non-visible event (a doorbell ringing, for example). Finally, “Subtitles for the Deaf or Hard-of-hearing” (SDH) is a more verbose style that adds even more descriptive information about the program, including the speaker’s name, off-camera events, etc.
Roughly speaking, closed captions are targeting the deaf and hard of hearing audience. Subtitles are targeting an audience who can hear the program but want to view the dialogue for some reason, like understanding a foreign movie or learning a new language.
Titles Before Talkies
Intertitles from the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
Subtitles are as old as movies themselves. Since the first movies didn’t have sound, they used what are now called intertitles to convey dialogue and expository information. These were full-screens of text inserted (not overlaid) into the film at appropriate places. Some attempts were made at overlaying the subtitles which used a second projector and glass slides of text which were manually switched out by the projectionist, hopefully in synchronization with the dialogue. One forward-thinking but overlooked inventor
experimented with comic book dialogue balloons
which appeared next to the actor who was speaking. These techniques also made distribution of a film to other countries a relatively painless affair — only the intertitles had to be translated.
This changed with the arrival of “talkies” in the late 1920s. Now there was no need for intertitles since you could hear the dialogue. But translations for foreign audiences were still desired, and various time-consuming optical and chemical processes were used to generate the kind of subtitles we think of today. But there were no subtitles for local audiences — no doubt to the irritation of deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons who had been equally enjoying the movies alongside hearing persons for years.
Television
Malcolm J. Norwood
As television grew in popularity, there were some attempts at optical subtitles in the early years, but these were not wildly successful nor widely adopted. In the United States, there was interest brewing in closed captioning systems by the end of the 1960s. In April 1970, the FCC received a petition asking that emergency alerts be accompanied by text for deaf viewers. This request came at a perfect point in time when the technology was ready, and the various parties were interested and prepared to take on the challenge.
It was at this time that deaf bureaucrat
Malcolm Norwood
from the Department of Education (then HEW) enters the story. He had been working in the Captioned Films for the Deaf department since 1960. Today he is often called the Father of Closed Captioning within the community. He was the perfect leader to champion this new technology and he accepted the challenge.
The FCC agreed in principle with the issues raised, and in response issued Public Notice 70-1328 in December 1970. Malcolm and the DOE brought together a team in 1971 which included the National Bureau of Standards, the National Association of Broadcasters, ABC, and PBS. They held a
conference in Nashville
(PDF) in December of 1971, which we can say was the birthplace of closed captioning.
First Captioned TV Program in 1972,
The French Chef
hosted by Julia Child. These were Open Captions and could not be turned of by the viewer.
It turns out that the technical implementation of broadcasting captions built on existing work. Over at the the National Bureau of Standards, engineer Dave Howe had been
developing a system
called TvTime to distribute accurate time signals over the air. This system sent a code over a video line in the VBI, using a method which eventually morphed into the CC standard. They had been testing the system with ABC, PBS, and NBC. ABC had even begun using this system to send text messages between affiliate stations.
Another system presented at the conference by HRB-Singer altered the vertical scanning of the receiver so that additional VBI lines were visible, and transmitted the caption text digitally, but visually, in those newly-exposed lines. This caused some concern among the TV set manufacturers, and thankfully the NBS system eventually won out.
After a few promising demonstrations, in 1973 PBS station WETA in the District of Columbia was authorized to broadcast closed captioned signals in order to further develop and refine the system. These efforts were successful, and in 1976 the FCC formally reserved line 21 for closed captions.
Adapting Broadcasts for Line 21
This is an index card that kicked around in my briefcase for many years. Can you spot the error?
In its final form, the signal on line 21 had a few cycles of clock run-in to lock the decoder’s data recovery oscillator, followed by a 3-bit start pattern, and finally two parity-protected characters of text. The text encoding is almost always ASCII, with a few exceptions and special symbols considered necessary for the task. Text was always transmitted as pair of characters, and has traditionally been sent in all capital letters. Control codes are also byte pairs, and they perform functions like positioning the cursor, switching captioning services, changing colors, etc. Because control codes were so crucial to the proper display of text, parity protection wasn’t enough — they were usually transmitted twice, the duplicate control code pair being ignored if the first pair was error-free.
Summary of Line 21 data
Basic Rate
503.496 kBd (32 x Horiz freq)
Grouping
2 each 7-bit + parity bit characters / video line
Encoding
ASCII, with some modifications
Services
odd fields: CC1/CC2, T1/T2
even fields: CC3/CC4, T3,T4, XDS
Specification
EIA-608, 47 CFR 15.119, TeleCaption II
Today we are accustomed to near-perfect video and audio programming, thanks to digital transmissions and wired/optical networks. Adding a few extra bytes into an existing protocol packet would barely give us pause. But back then, other factors had to be considered. The resulting CC standard was fine-tuned during lengthy and laborious field tests. The captioned video signal had to be robust when transmitted over the air. Engineers had to address and solve problems like signal strength degradation in fringe reception areas and multipath in dense urban areas.
Pop-On CC Demo Frame from Felix the Cat
As for the captioning methods, there were a few different types available. By far the most common styles were POP-ON and ROLL-UP. In POP-ON captioning, the receiver accumulated the incoming text in a buffer until receipt of a “flip-memory” control code, whereupon the entire caption would immediately appear on-screen simultaneously with the spoken dialogue. This style was typically used with prerecorded, scripted material such as movies and dramas. On the other hand, with ROLL-ON captioning, as its name implies, the text physically rolled-up from the bottom of the screen line-by-line. It was used for live broadcasts such as news programs and sporting events. The text naturally must be delayed from the audio due to the nature of the live speech transcription process.
The Brits Did it Differently, and Implemented Teletext in the Process
Across the pond, broadcast engineers at the BBC approached the issue from a different angle. Their managers asked if there was any way to use the transmitters to send data, since they were otherwise idle for one quarter of each day. Therefore they worked on maximizing the amount of data which could be transmitted.
The initial service worked like a FAX machine by scanning, transmitting, and printing a newspaper page. Eventually, the BBC adopted an all-digital approach called CEEFAX developed by engineer John Adams of Philips. Simultaneously, a competing and incompatible service called ORACLE was begun by other broadcasters. In 1974, everyone finally settled on a merged standard called World System Teletext (WST) adopted as CCIR 653. Broadcasters in North America adopted a slight variant of WST called the North American Broadcast Teletext Specification (NABTS). Being a higher data rate than CC, teletext is less forgiving of transmission errors. It employs a couple of different Hamming codes to protect and optionally recover from errors in key data fields. It is quite a complex format to decode compared to line 21.
British Radio Equipment Manufacturer’s Association,
Broadcast Teletext Specification
As for the format, teletext services broadcast three-digit pages of text and block graphical data — conceptually an electronic magazine. Categories of content were grouped by pages:
Example of Teletext Magazine Page
100s – News
200s – Business News
300s – Sport
400s – Weather and Travel
500s – Entertainment
600s – TV and Radio Listings
These text in these magazine pages are an integral part of the packet structure. For example, the text of line 4 in page 203 belongs in a specific packet for that page/line. Since the broadcaster is continuously transmitting all magazines and their pages, it may take a few seconds for the page you request to appear on-screen. NABTS takes a more free-form approach. The data can almost be considered a serial stream of text, like a connection of a terminal to a computer. If you need a new line of text, you send a CR/LF pair.
Summary of Teletext Data
Basic Rate
6.938 MBd
Grouping
360 bits/line, 40 available text characters
Encoding
Similar to Extended ASCII, with code pages
Services
Multiple page magazines, 40×24 chars each page
Specifications
Europe: WST ITU-R BT.653 (formerly CCIR 653)
North America: NABTS EIA-516
The Hacks That Made It All Work
Most of my designs were for use in North America, but I needed to learn about European teletext for a few candidate projects. In Europe, page 888 of the teletext system was designated to carry closed captioning text. This page has a transparent background and the receiver overlays it onto the video. The visual result was practically the same as in North America. But it posed some problems regarding media like VHS tapes.
The teletext signal couldn’t be recorded or played back on your typical home VHS recorder. To solve this, many tapes were made using an adaptation of the North American line 21 system, but applied to the PAL video format. This method was variously called line 22 or line 25 (the confusion being that PAL line #1 is different place than NTSC line #1), but was basically the same. A manufacturer who has a CC decoder in their NTSC product can easily adapt it to work in PAL countries.
How did I get PAL VHS tapes? I asked an engineer colleague at Philips Southampton if he could send me some sample tapes for testing. His wife bought some used from a local rental store and sent them to me. This was before the days of PayPal, so I sent her an international money order for $60. This covered the price of the tapes and shipping, plus a few extra dollars “tip” for her trouble. Some weeks later, I got an email from him saying that “you Americans sure give generous tips”. His wife had received my money order for $600, not $60! It took many months, but eventually the post office caught their mistake and she returned the overage.
The Author Troubleshooting a DVD Closed Caption problem at LG in 2003
In South Korea, a colleague was involved in the captioning industry back in the late 1990s. He was asked to participate on a government panel considering the nationwide adoption of closed captioning. The final result was comical — instead of CC, the committee decided to provided extremely loud external TV speakers free-of-charge to people with hearing difficulties. Fortunately, the conventional form of closed captioning has since been adopted with the advent of digital television broadcasting.
Designing on the Trailing Edge
By the year 2000, almost all televisions had CC decoders built-in. As a result, there were a variety of ICs available to extract and process the line 21 signal. One example was from Philips Semiconductor (which became NXP and is now Freescale). As a key developer of teletext technology and a major chip supplier to the television industry, they offered a wide variety of CC and teletext processors. I developed several designs based on a chip from their Painter family of TV controllers. These were 8051-based microcontrollers with all the extras needed for teletext, closed captions, and user menus. They had VBI data slicers, character generators and ROM fonts, all integrated onto one die.
Philips Saa55xx
datasheet (page 91)
I still remember discovering the Painter chip buried pages deep in an internet search one day. When I couldn’t find any detailed information, I called the local rep and was told, “You aren’t supposed to even know about this part number — it’s a secret!”. Eventually the business logistics were resolved and I was allowed to use the chip. That was the only masked-ROM chip I ever made. I can still feel the rumbling in my stomach on the day I delivered the hex file to the local Philips office. The rep and I were hunched over the computer as we double- and triple-checked each entry on their internal ordering system. Once we pressed SEND, the bits were irrevocably transmitted to the factory and permanently burned into many thousands of chips. Even though we had thoroughly tested and proven the firmware in the lab, it was nevertheless a stressful day.
Philips Painter Chip
As I developed several other designs, it became clear that these special purpose chips should be avoided if any reasonable longevity was needed. The Painter chips were being phased out, several other options were disappearing as well. The writing was on the wall — digital broadcasting was here to stay, and the chip manufacturers were no longer making or supporting analog CC chips. I decided that future CC projects had to be done using general purpose ICs. I plan to delve into that in a future article along with unexpected applications of CC technology, the process of making captions, and how captioning made (or didn’t make) the transition to digital broadcasting and media. | 46 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6339774",
"author": "ameyring",
"timestamp": "2021-04-14T17:13:35",
"content": "Interesting history! I’ve been using closed captioning for my hearing loss since the 1980s and still have my old fake-wood sticker-covered metal captioning device. Used it until I got a new TV in 2000 wi... | 1,760,373,119.356554 |
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