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https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/retro-recreations-hack-chat-with-tube-time/ | Retro Recreations Hack Chat With Tube Time | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"audio",
"Hack Chat",
"isa",
"mca",
"pc",
"peripheral",
"retro",
"reverse engineering",
"sound blaster",
"video"
] | Join us on Wednesday, March 17 at noon Pacific for the
Retro Recreations Hack Chat
with
Tube Time
!
Nostalgia seems to be an inevitable consequence of progress. Advance any field far enough into the future, and eventually someone will look back with misty eyes and fond memories of the good old days and start the process of turning what would qualify as junk under normal conditions into highly desirable collectibles.
In some ways, those who have been bitten by the computer nostalgia bug are lucky, since the sheer number of artifacts produced during their period of interest is likely to be pretty high, making getting gear to lovingly restore relatively easy. But even products produced in their millions can eventually get difficult to find, especially once they get snapped up by eager collectors, leaving the rest to make do or do without.
Of course, if you’re as resourceful as
Tube Time
is, there’s another alternative: build your own retro recreations. He has embarked on some pretty intense builds to recapture a little of what early computer enthusiasts went through trying to build useful machines. He has built replicas of early PC sound cards, like
an ISA-bus AdLib card
, its
MCA equivalent
, and
the “Snark Barker”
— or is it the “Snood Bloober”? — which bears an uncanny resemblance to the classic Sound Blaster card from the 1980s.
Tube Time will join us for the Hack Chat this week to answer questions about all his retro recreations, including his newest work on a retro video card. Be sure to bring your questions on retro rebuilds, reverse engineering, and general computer nostalgia to the chat.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 17 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. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331730",
"author": "CodeReclaimers",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T22:32:18",
"content": "I swear I thought the title said “hack chat with Time Cube” and I was looking forward to a very 2000+2021 kind of discussion.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,155.020147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/theres-a-fungus-among-us-that-absorbs-sound-and-does-much-more/ | There’s A Fungus Among Us That Absorbs Sound And Does Much More | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"acoustic panels",
"convoluted foam",
"fungi",
"hyphae",
"mycelium",
"soundproofing",
"sustainability"
] | Ding dong, the office is dead — at least we hope it is. We miss some of the people, the popcorn machine, and the printer most of all, but we say good riddance to the collective noise. Thankfully, we never had to suffer in an open office.
For many of us, yours truly included, home has become the place where we spend approximately 95% of our time. Home is now an all-purpose space for work, play, and everything in between, like anxiety-induced online shopping. But unless you live alone in a secluded area and/or a concrete bunker, there are plenty of sound-based distractions all day and night that emanate from both inside and outside the house. Headphones are a decent solution, but wearing them isn’t always practical and gets old after a while. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to print your own customized sound absorbers and stick them on the walls?
Image via
Fraunhofer Institute
Sure, you can already buy prefabricated panels, or make your own out of fiberglass and fabric, or even just staple some egg crate foam to the wall and call it a day. But the problem is that most modern sound-absorbing materials like mineral wool, cellulose, fiberglass, and convoluted foam aren’t sustainable, nor are they easy to recycle.
A research institute in Germany is working to develop fungal-based sound absorbers that are entirely organic
. The concept is based around mycelium, the wide-spreading underground root network of various fungi that is made up of fine, filament-like fibers called hyphae.
The team is led by Julia Krayer, a project manager at the Fraunhofer Institute in Oberhausen, Germany who has long been working with biomaterials. Julia and the team grow their own hyphae in the lab, and mix it with a plant-based substrate that’s made of straw, wood, and food production waste.
The mixture is 3D printed in the desired shape, and then the hyphae go to work, spreading throughout the substrate and solidifying the structure in the process. Once the hyphae start poking through the surface, the print is dried in a kiln to kill off the fungus. The resulting material has open cell walls that absorb sound just as well as their synthetic counterparts, and may potentially surpass them in the future given the nature of 3D printing.
There’s No Ceiling to the Flexibility of Mycelium
Okay, so printing your own hexagonal or other fun-shaped sound absorbers might be a bit far off, unless you have access to a kiln or can dedicate an oven to drying your home-brewed acoustic panels.
Mycelium begins to decompose around 435 °F (225 °C)
, so a regular kitchen oven wouldn’t be completely out of the question. But you probably wouldn’t want to use it for food after that.
As we’ve seen over the years, mycelium is quite the multi-purpose material. It can be used as an
alternative to fiberglass insulation
in walls and attics, or
molded into canoes
that can still produce fruiting bodies. And companies like
Adidas are trying to use mycelium as a cruelty-free and sustainable alternative to leather
.
A company called Ecovative Design are taking things a bit further by
making biodegradable alternatives to plastic
and
packaging
as well as
leather, cosmetic sponges, insulating material for gloves, and foam for footwear
. Would you wear mushroom leather shoes or warm your fingers in a fungal fashion statement? They might grow on you. Let us know what you think in the comments. | 36 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331554",
"author": "Arthur Mezins",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T17:09:21",
"content": "So, Jules Verne and Arne Saknussemm were ahead of their time?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6331571",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,154.802948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/cricut-decides-to-charge-rent-for-people-to-use-the-cutting-machines-they-already-own/ | Cricut Decides To Charge Rent For People To Fully Use The Cutting Machines They Already Own | Jenny List | [
"cnc hacks",
"News"
] | [
"cnc cutter",
"cricut",
"subscription"
] | UPDATE:
Hackaday was contacted by a PR company claiming to represent Cricut. They clarified that machines are not deactivated upon resale, but the new owner will need to set up their own online account.
UPDATE #2 (3/21/21):
In the wake of this controversy,
Cricut have announced that they will not move forward
with the upload limit for customers who are not paying subscribers.
In our community we like to think of ourselves as pioneers in the field of domestic CNC machinery, with our cheap 3D printers. But there’s another set of people who were way ahead of us, and they’re a rather unexpected one, too. Crafters were using CNC cutting machines well before we were, and while some may deride them when used for sparkly greeting cards sold on Etsy, they can be an extremely useful tool for much more than that. Probably the best known brand of cutter comes from Cricut, and that company has dropped a bombshell
in the form of an update
to the web-based design software that leaves
their now very annoyed users
with a monthly upload limit of 20 new designs unless they sign up for a Cricut Access Plan that costs $9.99 on monthly payments. Worse still, a screenshot is circulating online purporting to be from
a communication with a Cricut employee
attempting to clarify matters, in which it is suggested that machines sold as second-hand will be bricked by the company.
Also, soon we will be making changes that affect members who use the free Design Space app without a Cricut Access plan. Every calendar month, these members will be allowed to upload up to 20 personal images and/or patterns. Members with a paid Cricut Access plan will have unlimited uploads.
We’d like to think that given the reaction from their online community the subscription plan will backfire, but unlike the world of 3D printing their market is not necessarily an online-savvy one. A crafter who buys a Cricut from a bricks-and-mortar warehouse store and uses it with Cricut cartridges may not balk at being required to pay rent to use hardware that’s already paid for in the same way a member of our community with a 3D printer would. After all, Cricut have always tried to make their software a walled garden.
However if the stories about second-hand models being bricked turn out to bear fruit that might be a different matter.
There are of course plenty of alternative CNC cutting machines (The favourite in ones that have made it here
seems to be the Silhouette Cameo
) that don’t come with this type of baggage, and the online Cricut community are busily raising their profile in the wake of this news. Probably because of their restricted functionality there have been very few hacks here using a Cricut machine, but all of this leaves us wondering whether the machines themselves could be exploited to take less restrictive firmware.
Header image: Factorof2 (
CC BY-SA 2.0
) | 272 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331531",
"author": "realjesuschrist",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T16:09:35",
"content": "Next week on hackaday.com “cfw for cricut cnc machines bypasses subscription and stops remote bricking”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "633... | 1,760,373,155.400327 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/injecting-bugs-with-an-electric-flyswatter/ | Injecting Bugs With An Electric Flyswatter | Stephen Ogier | [
"hardware",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"embedded hardware security",
"emp",
"injection",
"spark gap"
] | Hardware fault injection uses electrical manipulation of a digital circuit to intentionally introduce errors, which can be used to cause processors to behave in unpredictable ways. This unintentional behavior can be used to test for reliability, or it can be used for more nefarious purposes such as accessing code and data that was intended to be inaccessible. There are a few ways to accomplish this, and electromagnetic fault injection uses a localized electromagnetic pulse to flip bits inside a processor. The pulse induces a voltage in the processor’s circuits, causing bits to flip and often leading to unintentional behavior. The hardware to do this is very specialized, but [Pedro Javier] managed to
hack a $4 electric flyswatter into an electromagnetic fault injection tool
. (Page may be dead, try
the Internet Archive version
.)
[Pedro] accomplishes this by turning an electric flyswatter into a spark-gap triggered EMP generator. He removes the business end of the flyswatter and replaces it with a hand-wound inductor in series with a small spark gap. Pressing the power button on the modified flyswatter charges up the output capacitor until the developed voltage is enough to ionize the air in the spark gap, at which point the capacitor discharges through the inductor. The size of the spark gap determines the charge that is built up—a larger gap results in a larger charge, which produces a larger pulse, which induces a larger voltage in the chip.
[Pedro] demonstrates how this can be used to produce arithmetic glitches and even induce an Arduino to dump its memory. Others have
used electromagnetic fault injection to corrupt SRAM
, and
intentionally glitching the power supply pins
can also be used to access otherwise protected data. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331519",
"author": "x3n0x",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T15:36:50",
"content": "Great Idea! Now, make the coils pluggable, and you can make various coils for specific purposes easily swappable! EMF/EMP effects are fun to experiment with, and sometimes, can tell you a great deal about... | 1,760,373,154.535312 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/rocket-lab-plans-larger-neutron-rocket-for-2024/ | Rocket Lab Plans Larger Neutron Rocket For 2024 | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"commercial space",
"electron",
"Falcon 9",
"neutron",
"reusable",
"Rocket Lab",
"SpaceX"
] | When Rocket Lab launched their first Electron booster in 2017, it was unlike anything that had ever flown before. The small commercially developed rocket was the first to use fully 3D printed main engines, and instead of pumping its propellants with traditional turbines, the vehicle used electric motors that jettisoned their depleted battery packs overboard during ascent to reduce weight. It even looked different than its peers, as rather than a metal fuselage, the Electron was built from a lightweight carbon composite which gave it a distinctive black color scheme.
Packing so many revolutionary technical advancements into a single vehicle was a risk, but Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck believed a technical shakeup was the only way to get ahead in an increasingly competitive market. While that first launch in 2017 didn’t make it to orbit, the next year, Rocket Lab could boast three successful flights. By the end of 2020, a total of fifteen Electron rockets had completed their missions, carrying payloads from both commercial customers and government agencies such as NASA, the United States Air Force, and DARPA.
Rocket Lab’s gambit paid off, and the company has greatly outpaced competitors such as Virgin Orbit, Astra, and Relativity. In fact Electron is now the second most active orbital booster in the United States, behind SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Considering their explosive growth, it’s only natural they’d want to maintain that momentum going forward. But even still, the
recent announcement that the company will be developing a far larger rocket they call Neutron to fly by 2024
took many in the industry by surprise; especially since Peter Beck himself had previously said they would never build it.
Leveling the Playing Field
If Rocket Lab is developing a second booster, it stands to reason that they’re looking to take some of the market that’s currently being served by their only real competition, the Falcon 9. Even in its upgraded form, the Electron can only carry 300 kg (660 lb) to low Earth orbit. While there’s a market for these small payloads, their overall operational efficiency would be improved by a larger rocket would allow multiple customers to be served on each launch.
Electron, Neutron, and Falcon 9 to Scale
Indeed,
in a recent investor presentation
, Rocket Lab specifically lists the Neutron as a “direct alternative to SpaceX Falcon 9”, and claims that the rocket’s target payload capacity of 8,000 kg (17,600 lb) to low Earth orbit (LEO) would be sufficient to carry 98% of the satellites currently manifested to launch through 2028. While that may technically be true, the Falcon 9’s 15,600 kg (34,400 lb) LEO capacity puts it in an entirely different league than the Neutron. Calling the two boosters direct competitors would be overly generous to Rocket Lab’s offering, to say the least.
Northrop Grumman’s Antares
Rather, the Neutron is an exceptionally close match for Northrop Grumman’s Antares. Both stand approximately 40 meters (130 feet) tall, use the same LOX/RP-1 propellants, have identical LEO payload capacities, and are expected to use the same launch pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia. The renders of the Neutron even bear a strong resemblance to Grumman’s booster, though to be fair, the rocket equation doesn’t allow for much in the way of artistic license.
It would be far more accurate to say that Rocket Lab is building the Neutron to directly compete with the Antares, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Antares is only used to loft resupply missions to the International Space Station. Neutron will instead serve as a general purpose booster for commercial and government satellites, and the ISS is unlikely to be on its list of potential destinations. Put simply, while the rockets are all but identical on paper, they serve two very different purposes.
Back to the Drawing Board
These are early days, and in the grand scheme of things, we know very little about Neutron. The closest thing we have to hard data are some rough dimensions and a handful of renders from the investor presentation. This does seem somewhat troubling for a rocket that will supposedly be flying in three years, but it’s presumed the development of Neutron will be considerably accelerated thanks to the work that already went into Electron. For example,
Beck says the avionics system will be largely identical
between the two rockets. But even with only a few scraps of information, it’s clear some big changes are on the way.
The most obvious difference is that the fuselage is no longer black, a sure sign that Rocket Lab is moving away from carbon composite construction and switching over to a metallic structure. We can only surmise why they’re making the change, but it seems a safe bet that the cost and difficulty of producing these much larger composite components was more than they were willing to take on. Additionally, as Neutron is being designed with reuse in mind, it could be that a metal structure was seen as easier to inspect and repair between flights.
The investor presentation revealed nothing about the engines that Neutron will use, but we can be sure it isn’t the same
3D printed Rutherford engine that powers the Electron
. The smaller rocket has nine engines on the first stage, but in the render we can see Neutron has between three and five nozzles. That means a new, and far more powerful, engine will be used. It would seem that the development program for this engine must already be underway if the company has any chance of meeting their 2024 deadline, but if it is, Rocket Lab isn’t talking.
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
Finally, we can see that Rocket Lab has been taking close notes on SpaceX when it comes to reusability. Not only are the landing legs on Neutron all but identical to those on the Falcon 9, but the company’s website claims the first stage of the rocket will be recovered after making a propulsive landing on a platform in the ocean.
It’s worth noting that, unlike the Falcon 9, there’s no obvious sign that the Neutron will use deployable grid fins for terminal guidance. As Rocket Lab has demonstrated
they can guide the first stage of Electron back down without them
, that’s not necessarily unexpected. But Neutron is a far larger vehicle, and it will be interesting to see if Rocket Lab is able to perform accurate landings without these additional control surfaces, or if they’ll have to augment the design as they refine their recovery efforts.
History Repeats Itself
Rocket Lab was founded on the idea of building tiny rockets that were cheaper and more agile than their competition, and marketing them to customers who weren’t content with being second or third rate cargo on traditional boosters. The official line was that they wanted to keep things as simple as possible. But just a few years after starting commercial flights, the company is telling investors they’re building a rocket far larger than its predecessor and even hinting that it might eventually get certified for human flight. There’s an excellent reason that Peter Beck makes a show of literally eating his own hat in the Neutron reveal video.
Falcon 1
But still, this situation isn’t without precedent. Just like Rocket Lab, SpaceX got their start with a small booster designed to carry payloads as cheaply as possible. But it wasn’t long before the company realized there was far more money to be made by carrying heavier communications satellites. By 2009, SpaceX had ended flights of the diminutive Falcon 1 rocket so the company could focus their development efforts on the Falcon 9. The rest, as they say, is history.
With the announcement of Neutron, Rocket Lab seems to have reached the same conclusion. Electron has been successful for them, but with the market for satellite constellations rapidly growing, they need a more capable rocket to keep up. The only question now is whether or not Rocket Lab will stay true to their roots and operate both vehicles side-by-side, or if the more capable Neutron will end up making its smaller sibling redundant. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331502",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T14:50:04",
"content": "“While there’s a market for these small payloads, their overall operational efficiency would be improved by a larger rocket would allow multiple customers to be served on each launch.”Didn’t we have a re... | 1,760,373,155.135737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/photorender-your-3d-models/ | Photorender Your 3D Models | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"3d rendering",
"cad"
] | Of course, you’ll want to take your latest 3D design and print it so you’ll have a physical object. But in some cases, you’d like to have a rendering of it. If you use OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, or most other CAD programs you can get a simple rendering of your object, but what if you want something that looks real? [Teaching Tech]
shows how you can use a website
, Vectary, to get realistic photo renderings of your 3D models. (Video, embedded below.) The free plan has a few limits, but nothing that should bother most people.
Vectary is sort of like a super version of TinkerCad with a lot of options for realistic modeling and augmented reality. Some of the more advanced features are behind a subscription plan, but for what [Teaching Tech] is showing, you can use the free plan.
Not being especially artistic, we plugged in a table leg extender and got fair results. However, if you have a knack for lighting and textures, you can make it look good like the ones you see in the video. So the tools are there, but a paintbrush doesn’t make an artist. To get some of the best results, [Teaching Tech] did have to resort to some of the advanced settings.
We couldn’t help but think this might be nice for
PCB renders
, too, some of which are
pretty convincing
. You might think that a plain render is good enough, but it does make a difference, as you can see below. As the video points out, you can also add other assets to put things in context like the room at the end of the video.
Original Render (OnShape)
Vectary Render | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331454",
"author": "Mog",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T12:01:59",
"content": "Maybe this is my inner graphics programmer showing through, but the image used for the “Original Render” screenshot doesn’t look like a render at all, or at least not in the parlance that an actual 3D artist ... | 1,760,373,154.727261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/13/balanced-design-and-how-to-know-when-to-quit-optimizing/ | Balanced Design And How To Know When To Quit Optimizing | Elliot Williams | [
"cnc hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"6040",
"6040 mill",
"cnc",
"design",
"machine",
"optimization",
"stepper motors"
] | I got a relatively inexpensive 6040 CNC machine, and have been spending most weekends making the thing work, and then cutting stuff, learning the toolchain, and making subsequent improvements. Probably 90% of my machine time has been on making improvements. It’s not that the machine was
bad
— I got the version with ballscrews and a decently solid frame — but it’s that it somehow didn’t work together as a whole. It’s just an incredibly unbalanced design.
Let’s start with the spindle motor. It’s a 2.2 kW water-cooled beast that is capable of putting tons of work into a piece and spinning at very high speed. Yet to keep up with the high speed spindle, the motors that move it around would have to be capable of high speeds as well — it’s a
feeds and speeds
thing if you’re not a CNC geek. And they can’t. Instead, the stepper motors that came with the kit are designed for maximum force at low speeds. Which can make sense for some machines, but for one with a slightly flexible X-axis like this one, that’s wasted as well. The frame just can’t handle the low-end grunt that the motors are capable of, so it can’t take advantage of the spindle’s power either. The design is all over the place.
Over the last two months’ of weekends, I’ve been going through this iterative procedure of asking “what is my limiting factor right now?”, working on fixing that thing up, running it some, and then asking the question again. And it’s a good general procedure, and I believe that it’s getting me to the machine I want at the minimum cost of time, money, and effort.
At first, it was the driver hardware/software with its emulated USB parallel port, so I swapped out the controller for an Arduino running GRBL, soldered directly to the DB-25 that comes out of the back. At least it can put out pulses fast enough to order the motors around, but they would still stall out at high speeds. Swapping the stepper motors out for a high-speed pair only cost me €40, which makes you wonder why they didn’t just put the right motors on in the first place. The machine now travels fast enough to make use of the high-speed spindle, and I’m flying through plywood and plastics without leaving burn marks. It’s a huge win for not much money.
The final frontier is taking big bites out of aluminum. The spindle can do it, but I fear I’m up against the frame’s rigidity on the X-axis. For whatever reason, they went with unsupported rods on the X, which are significantly more flexible than an axis that’s backed up by more metal. And this is where the limiting factor may actually be my time and patience, rather than money. I just can’t bear to disassemble and reassemble the thing again. So for now, it’s going to be small nibbles, taking advantage of the machine’s speed, if not yet the spindle’s full horsepower.
But it’s odd, because this machine
is
a bundle of good parts. It’s just that they haven’t been chosen to work together optimally; the frame doesn’t work with the stepper motors, which don’t work with the spindle. If they went through my procedure of saying “what’s the limiting factor?” they could have saved themselves €100 by just shipping it with a wimpier spindle, which would have been a balanced, if anemic, machine. Or they could have built it with the right motors for more speed. Or supported rails for more grunt. Or both!
I’ll never know why they quit optimizing their design when they did. Maybe they never got past the slow USB/parallel port speed? But I’m near the end of my path, and I can tell because the limiting ingredient isn’t a simple upgrade, or even mere money anymore, but my own willpower.
How can you tell when you’re at the top of a mountain in a dense fog? A step you take in any direction would lead you downhill. How can you tell when you’re satisfied with a project’s state? When you don’t have the need, or desire, to undertake the next most obvious improvement.
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
! | 59 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330916",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2021-03-13T15:48:29",
"content": "Try taking multiple shallow passes, instead of single big one when cutting. Much easier on the machine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6331405",
... | 1,760,373,154.975509 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/13/times-almost-up-for-the-frankenfms-the-impending-switchoff-of-analog-tv/ | Time’s Almost Up For The FrankenFMs: The Impending Switchoff Of Analog TV | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"analog tv",
"frankenfm",
"ntsc",
"tv",
"VHF TV"
] | In a time when multi-channel digital TV is the norm it’s a surprise to find that a few low-power analog stations are still clinging on in some American cities. These are sometimes fill-in stations for weak signal areas, or more usually the so-called “FrankenFM” stations who transmit static images or digital patterns and derive income from their sound channel lying at the bottom end of the FM band to form unintended radio stations. Their days are numbered though,
because the FCC is requiring that they be turned off by July 13th
. There’s a way forward for the broadcasters to upgrade to low-power digital, but as you might expect they’re more interested in retaining the FrankenFM frequency from which they derive income.
The industry is represented by
the LPTV coalition
, who have requested permission to retain their FM frequency alongside their digital service. This has faced stiff opposition from other broadcasters, who see the very existence of the FrankenFM stations as a flagrant flouting of the rules that shouldn’t be rewarded. The FCC have yet to make a ruling, so there remains a slim chance that they may win a reprieve.
The sad tale of the few lingering analog TV stations in the USA is a last flickering ember of a once-huge industry that has been eclipsed without anyone but a few vintage technology geeks noticing, such has been the success of digital broadcasting. But analog TV is
a fascinating and surprisingly intricate system
whose passing however faint is
worth marking
.
Header: Tiia Monto,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 30 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330878",
"author": "Michael Morlan",
"timestamp": "2021-03-13T12:43:05",
"content": "I, for one, welcome my digital overlords. As a video producer and sometime engineer who had to deal with NTSC waveforms, color bars and calibration, I don’t miss it at all. Color television was alw... | 1,760,373,155.08185 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/13/motorcycle-needs-custom-latching-switches-for-turn-signals/ | Motorcycle Needs Custom Latching Switches For Turn Signals | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"cam",
"latching",
"microcontroller",
"motorcycle",
"resettable",
"turn signal"
] | While modern cars have been getting all kinds of fancy features like touch screens, Bluetooth, crumple zones, and steering wheel controls, plenty of motorcycles have remained firmly in the past. Some might have extra options like a fuel gauge or even ABS if you’re willing to spend extra, but a good percentage of them have the bare minimum equipment required by law. That equipment is outdated and ripe for some improvements too, like this
ergonomic custom turn signal switch built with custom latching switches
.
Since motorcycle turn signals don’t self-cancel like car signals the rider has to cancel it themselves, usually by pushing an inconveniently tiny button. This assembly consists of four separate switches, two of which control the left and right turn signals. Since both can’t be on at the same time, they include circuitry that can detect their position and a small motor that can physically de-latch them if the other one is pressed. The entire assembly is 3D printed, including the latching mechanism, and they are tied together with a small microcontroller for the controls.
The truly impressive part of this build is the miniaturization, since all four buttons have to be reached with the thumb without removing the hand from the handlebar. The tiny circuitry and mechanical cam for latching are impressive and worth watching the video for. And, if you need more ergonomic improvements for your motorcycle
there are also some options for cruise control as well
, another feature often lacking in motorcycles. | 42 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330857",
"author": "jibé",
"timestamp": "2021-03-13T09:30:31",
"content": "I guess the writer of this article lives in some remote country with an outdated motorcycle industry and no knowledge about the rest of the world…My first bike in 1976 was a Yamaha RDX125, it had a self-canc... | 1,760,373,154.876932 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/13/battery-of-the-future-now-buildable-yourself/ | Battery Of The Future, Now Buildable Yourself | Bryan Cockfield | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"capacitor",
"Chemistry",
"conductive",
"electrolyte",
"ionic liquid"
] | In theory, batteries and capacitors are fairly simple. One stores energy chemically and the other stores energy in an electric field. In practice though, building an energy storage device that has a practical amount of energy density is delicate, complex work. But if you have access to a few chemical compounds it’s actually not too difficult to
produce useful batteries and electrolytic capacitors with the use of ionic liquids
.
Ionic liquids are conductive liquids with a few other important qualities. Almost all of the ones shown can be built with relatively common compounds, and most of the products have advantageous physical qualities, making them stable and relatively safe for use. With some equipment found in a chemistry lab it’s possible to produce a wide variety of these liquids without too much hassle (although one method outlined uses an inert gas chamber), and from there batteries and capacitors can be built by allowing the ionic liquids to be absorbed into the device.
The video below shows the production of several of these devices and then illustrates their effects by running a small LED light. While they’re probably not going to be used to create DIY electric cars anytime soon, the production and improvement of
atypical energy storage devices
will be the key to a large part of the energy needs of society now and into the future, especially aluminum batteries like these. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330986",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2021-03-13T20:48:53",
"content": "In a world where you can make a battery out of a potato and two coins…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6331048",
"author": "Garth Bock",
... | 1,760,373,154.579647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/a-discrete-logic-word-clock/ | A Discrete Logic Word Clock | Chris Lott | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"7400",
"Clocks",
"ttl logic",
"word clock"
] | Self-acclaimed computer nerd [Kevin Koster] was tired of designing new TTL-logic clocks before finishing his previous designs. So he finally buckled down and completed
this unique word clock
, which uses only a handful of TTL chips. We can’t disagree with his friends who complained that they can’t read [Kev]’s handwriting, so perhaps this diagram will make it clearer.
Besides being a nice logic-only project, this will give an example to younger folks how much effort went into things which are so simple to implement today. We don’t see a Karnaugh map on the project page for sorting out the logic diodes driving the minutes LEDs. If [Kev] did it on the fly, as the rat’s nest of diodes on the schematic would suggest, we’re not sure whether to scold him or be impressed (he does redraw that logic very neatly on a separate sheet).
No worries about high speed wiring on this project. The main oscillator derives time from the 50 Hz AC transformer power supply, and outputs a reference clock signal of 16.7 mHz (not MHz), or once per minute. This is divided down to 3.3 mHz for the 5-minutes counter and again to 277 uHz for the hour counter. If you live in a 60 Hz power mains country, you’d have to modify the oscillator section. Or you could contact [Kev] on his site, as he is considering making this available as a kit worldwide. If you like word clocks, we’ve covered quite a few of them before, including
this crazy-complex rear-projection one
. | 26 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330860",
"author": "Tom G",
"timestamp": "2021-03-13T10:06:22",
"content": "“No worries about high speed wiring on this project. The main oscillator derives time from the 50 Hz AC transformer power supply, and outputs a reference clock signal of 16.7 mHz (not MHz), or once per minu... | 1,760,373,155.465379 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/a-different-kind-of-3d-printer-desktop-holograms/ | A Different Kind Of 3D Printer: Desktop Holograms | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Crowd Funding",
"Laser Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"desktop hologram",
"hologram",
"hologram printer"
] | Holograms aren’t new, but a desktop machine that spits them out could be available soon, presuming
LitiHolo’s Kickstarter
pans out. The machine will have a $1600 retail price and fits in a two-foot square. It can generate 4×5 inch holograms with 1mm hogels (the holo equivalent of a pixel).
The machine allows for 23 view zones per hogel and can create moving holograms with a few seconds of motion — like the famous kiss-blowing holograms.
Of course, you’ll also need a special self-developing film and a way to get 3D images into the printer such as software or a camera set up to do a 3D scan. In the 4×5 size, the film runs about $13 a plate which will create one hologram.
Since 5 inches is 127 mm the hogel resolution of the result is about 101×127, and the samples on the website and the video below certainly don’t look like they are in HD.
Will people pay $1600 for low-resolution holograms? More importantly, is there a market for grainy holograms that would let you earn back the investment? Maybe not, but that hasn’t stopped us from buying 3D printers and other workshop toys. Plus, if this catches on, what will be available in ten years time?
Of course, if you have the laser gear, you can already
make your own holograms
. You can even get kits that have
most of what you need
. | 38 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330808",
"author": "Daniel Dunn",
"timestamp": "2021-03-13T03:23:44",
"content": "Thank goodness for early adopters! This could be really cool someday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6330825",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
... | 1,760,373,155.763988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/scratch-built-rolling-tool-cabinet-is-a-metalworking-skill-builder/ | Scratch-Built Rolling Tool Cabinet Is A Metalworking Skill-Builder | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"CNC plasma",
"metalworking",
"tool cabient",
"tools",
"welding"
] | Yes, rolling tool cabinets in every conceivable shape, size, arrangement of drawers, and even color are readily available commercially, and you probably shouldn’t build your own. But as [Bob] from “Making Stuff” points out, where’s the fun in that?
Still, we can think of plenty of reasons to
make your own rolling tool cabinets from scratch
. Aside from the obvious benefits of practicing your metalworking skills and putting your tools to good use, rolling your own means you can get exactly what you want. Almost every tool cabinet we’ve purchased has ended up being just a bit sub-optimal in some way — too wide for the available space, or perhaps with drawers a touch too shallow to fit that one oddball tool. Being able to create your own cabinet means you can hit the specs exactly, and as [Bob] shows, it’s not even that hard if you have the right tools.
The build starts on [Bob]’s CNC plasma cutter,
a shop-built machine
that’s seen several upgrades over the years. The plasma cutter makes quick work of cutting the drawer blanks from sheet steel, complete with slots to make forming the sheets into drawers easy. The frame of the cabinet is steel tubing, which is welded up and filled in with more sheet steel. Full-extension ball-bearing slides are added to the sides to support the drawers; we have to admit that welding what appears to be zinc-coated steel makes us nervous, but we assume [Bob] took precautions against the potential for toxic fumes.
The video below shows the whole build process and shows off the very sharp-looking final product. It also puts us very much in the mood to build our own plasma cutter. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330797",
"author": "Ivan Svrcek",
"timestamp": "2021-03-13T02:15:29",
"content": "“we have to admit that welding what appears to be zinc-coated steel makes us nervous”.There is nothing to be nervous about. If there is sufficient ventilation for running that plasma cutter in the sho... | 1,760,373,155.811507 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/keep-cool-with-this-open-source-avr-fan-controller/ | Keep Cool With This Open Source AVR Fan Controller | Tom Nardi | [
"hardware"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"AVR",
"avr-gcc",
"DS18B20",
"fan controller"
] | We’ve all got projects kicking around that we haven’t had time to document for our own purposes, let alone expose to the blinding light of the Internet. There are only so many hours in a day, and let’s face it, building the thing is a lot more fun than taking pictures of it. It took [Matthew Millman] the better part of a decade to combine everything he’s learned over the years to finally
document the definitive version of his open source intelligent fan controller
, but looking at the final result, we’re glad he did.
At the heart of this board is an ATmega328P, but don’t call it an Arduino. [Matthew] makes it very clear that if you want to hack around with the code for this project, you’re going to need to not only have a programmer for said chip, but know your way around AVR-GCC. He’s provided pre-built binaries for those content to run with the default settings,
but you’ve still got to get it flashed onto the chip yourself
. The project is designed to use the common DS18B20 temperature sensor, and as an added bonus, the firmware
can even check if yours is a bootleg
(spoilers: there’s an excellent chance it is).
Arguably the most interesting feature of this fan controller is its command line interface. Just plug into the serial port on the board, open your terminal emulator, and you’ll have access to a concise set of functions for querying the sensors as well as setting temperature thresholds and RPM ranges for the fans. There’s even a built-in “help” function should you forget a command or the appropriate syntax.
Originally [Matthew] developed this project as a way to control multiple fans inside of a PC case, but naturally,
things have changed quite a bit since those early days
. While today there’s no shortage of fancy controllers that can handle throttling an array of fans based on the internal temperature of your rig, there’s still something to be said for rolling your own solution. More importantly, there’s certainly
other potential uses for a fully open source programmable fan controller
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330754",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T22:00:47",
"content": "another way PIC is better than AVR. PICs are so power-efficient they don’t need a fan to cool them",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6330769",
... | 1,760,373,155.515356 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/rip-lou-ottens-developer-of-the-compact-cassette-and-more/ | RIP Lou Ottens, Developer Of The Compact Cassette And More | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"cassette",
"cd",
"Lou Ottens",
"phillips"
] | It’s with sadness that we note
the passing at the age of 94 of the long-time Phillips engineer Lou Ottens
, who is best known as the originator of the Compact Cassette audio tape format that was so ubiquitous through the later decades of the 20th century. Whether you remember cassettes as the format for 8-bit software, for teenage mixtapes on a Walkman, they began life at his hands in the early 1960s at the Phillips factory in Hasselt, Belgium.
Through a long career with the Dutch electronics company, he was responsible either directly or in part for a string of consumer electronic devices that we would see as ubiquitous over the latter half of the century. Before the cassette he had developed the company’s first portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, and in the 1970s while technical director of their audio division he led the team that would develop the CD. He was reported as saying that his great regret was not beating Sony to the development of the miniature cassette player that would be sold as the Walkman, but we’d suggest that the Walkman would not have been possible without the cassette in the first place.
So next time you handle
a cassette tape
, spare a thought for Lou, an audio engineer whose work permeated so much of the last half-century.
Thanks [Carl] for the tip.
Images:
Lou Ottens by Jordi Huisman
CC BY-SA 4.0 and “An early Phillips cassette recorder”
by mib18
CC BY-SA 3.0 | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330723",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T20:06:01",
"content": "And then there’s the video 2000.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Ottens#1979-1984:_Director_of_Philips_Video",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "633073... | 1,760,373,155.688659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/historical-hackers-hero-builds-vending-machines/ | Historical Hackers: Hero Builds Vending Machines | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"greek",
"hero",
"Hero of Alexandria",
"hero's engine",
"Heron",
"Heron of Alexandria"
] | We tend to think of mechanical contrivances as products of the industrial revolution and true automation as something computers handle. Yet even before computers, automation existed — using timing motors and cams and other mechanical contraptions. But it might surprise you to know that there was actually some sophisticated automation going way back. Really way back, invented in a world without computers, CAD software, or even electricity. For example, around 50 AD an inventor named Hero — sometimes known as Heron — built machines powered by steam and wind. His inventions included vending machines and music players.
It is hard to imagine what kind of music player or, indeed, vending machine you could build in 50AD. Some of Hero’s inventions were used in temples to, for example, dispense holy water. Others were used in theater to do things like automatically lighting a fire or creating thunder effects. There was even an entirely automated puppet show that used knotted ropes to put on a ten-minute production with no human assistance.
About Hero
Hero was either Greek or Hellenized Egyptian. Most of his writings we know of are actually lecture notes for courses he taught at the Musaeum, the home of the Library of Alexandria. While some of the inventions credited to Hero may have existed already, he applied them with such great success that his name is bound to them as well as the devices and mathematics that he developed.
Given how long ago Hero lived, there is some uncertainly about the years he worked and much of his writing has been lost or diluted. Hero quoted Archimedes and was himself quoted by Pappus so that narrows the possible years down. However, Hero describes a lunar eclipse in great detail and this allowed Neugebauer to calculate that the observation occurred in 62 AD.
His most famous writing
Pneumatica
has many surviving copies, but the oldest is from the 13th century. Another text,
Mechanica
, is only known through an Arabic translation from around 865 AD.
The image to the right shows a page from
Automata
where a figurine dispenses wine and milk through a series of hidden pipes and tanks. However, Hero wasn’t just an inventor, he was also a mathematician. Most famously, he devised a formula for computing the area of a triangle, showed an iterative way to compute square roots, and articulated an important principle in optics.
Controversy
Given how long ago Hero lived, it is hard to know if he was a genius or just someone good at adapting ideas from others. For many years, only the
Pneumatica
was known. It is a very practical description of machines and some of the material is from another source. Worse still, most of the machines were frivolous amusements or parlor magic. There were exceptions, such as a working pump for fire fighting, but most of the items were automated musical instruments, animated animal puppets, and other impractical devices. Apparently, the book is also poorly organized.
Because of this, many scholars dismissed Hero as a frivolous inventor. However, texts found later show that Hero was quite educated and worked with serious technology for his day. Perhaps the toys were examples, much as we might write a textbook today with software to flash an LED or play Tetris to teach students how to program.
Today it is generally accepted that Hero was an inventor ahead of his time. He understood how to harness wind, steam, and gravity. He also understood mechanical advantage and a variety of simple machines. He didn’t necessarily invent all of these, but in true engineering fashion, he did put them to good use.
Puppet Show
The
Automata
, or Automatic Theater, describes two different automated puppet shows. One moved of its own accord and shows a temple in which a fire is lit on an altar. The god Dionysus pours out wine while figures dance about him to the sound of trumpets and drums.
Another puppet show was immobile but had doors that opened and closed to set off each scene. The performance tells the myth of Nauplius whose son was killed by Ajax. A ship is built and launched. The ship crosses the sea, passing leaping dolphins. Nauplius lights a false beacon to lead the crew astray and the ship is wrecked. Finally, Athena destroys Ajax with thunder and lightning. You can see a computer recreation of the device in the video below.
The puppet theaters used a heavy lead weight on a pile of grain that would escape slowly through a hole. The weight pulled a rope that would spin an axle. Almost all the machinery used strings and drums controlled by the axle. There were no springs or cogs, so it was a very simple machine with very complex effects. You can see a physical recreation of the moving theater that shows some of the working details in the video below.
The rope and pegs are reminiscent of pre-computer automation schemes using timing motors, cams, and microswitches.
Famous Inventions
One of Hero’s more famous inventions was a mechanical fountain. That doesn’t sound like much today, but with no electricity, pumping water is a big task. The fountain is a lesson in applied hydraulics. There are three vessels stacked one atop another and connected by pipes. The top basin is initially empty. The middle basin contains water and the bottom container holds air. The bottom two containers must be airtight. Water falling from the middle container to the bottom creates pressure that a pipe carries to the top of the middle container, forcing water up another pipe to the top container.
Confused? Grab some bottles and straws along with some common tools and watch the video below. At about 5:20, [Dave] explains the operation very clearly. While it might seem like the fountain will never stop, it does as soon as the water levels reach a certain point, so no ancient perpetual motion machine here.
However, one of Hero’s most famous inventions is one he probably didn’t actually invent. The
aeolipile
was a crude form of steam engine. A vessel of water has two L-shaped jets pointing opposite directions. The vessel is free to rotate and a fire underneath boils the water. As steam comes out of the jets, the vessel will rotate.
You can make one of these easily
out of a soda can
, as
demonstrated by Hackaday’s own Steven Dufresene
on his RimstarOrg channel. It would probably work better if the can had proper jets, but it clearly works well enough.
Hero used these, although they had been written about earlier. However, he didn’t appear to use it for anything very practical. With his understanding of steam and hydraulics, he was very close to inventing a proper steam engine.
There were other inventions including one that used the weight of a coin to tip a basin of holy water. The tilt would eventually cause the coin to slide off stopping the flow of water. This could be the first coin-operated vending machine. While a wind-powered organ might have been a bit more practical than some of his inventions, it still wasn’t a revolutionary work-saving device. Some think it was, however, the first wind-powered machine.
Oddly…
It does seem odd that for all of Hero’s use of steam, wind, and gravity, there doesn’t appear to be much practical use of the technology until much later. Although the Chinese had windmills, for example, possibly as early as 400 AD, it would be the 9th century before Persians used a sort of horizontal windmill to grind grain and draw water. Imagine a Greek-led industrial revolution 2,000 years ago.
We have to wonder what technology we have under our noses today that we aren’t taking advantage of. Meanwhile, making replicas of Hero’s devices is great sport. We’ve seen engines using
a lot more than soda cans
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330724",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T20:07:55",
"content": "“We have to wonder what technology we have under our noses today that we aren’t taking advantage of. ”Another Hackaday contest in the works?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,155.869869 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/hackaday-podcast-109-cars-that-suck-a-synth-packed-with-555s-x-ray-letter-reading-and-pecking-at-a-ps-2-keyboard/ | Hackaday Podcast 109: Cars That Suck, A Synth Packed With 555s, X-ray Letter Reading, And Pecking At A PS/2 Keyboard | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams riff on the week’s most interesting hacks. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect piece of art than an original Pong circuit board mounted in a shadow box and playable along with some tasty FPGA tricks to capture the original look of the screen. You could make a synth with a 555 timer, but what about using 20 of them for perfect polyphony? We ogle an old video showing off a clever toothed-disc CNC machine for cutting pastry with a water jet. And the episode wouldn’t be complete without looking at the strange tech that goes into making a fan car.
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 109 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Allan McDonald’s Legacy And The Ethics Of Decision-Making
Ethics In Engineering: Volkswagen’s Diesel Fiasco
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Decoding The PS/2 Keyboard Protocol Using Good Old Fashioned Hardware
3D Printing 90° Overhangs With Non-Planar Slicing
3D Printing Without Support Material Thanks To An Additional Axis
3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM
X-Ray Defeats Letterlocking — Unfolds And Reads Letter Sealed Since 1697
Letterlocking – Wikipedia
Letterlocking: XMT scan animation of 10 letters from the Brienne Collection – YouTube
Peek Into This Synth’s Great Design (And Abandoned Features)
Framed PONG Is Picture Perfect
Waterjet-Cut Precision Pastry
Polar Platform Spins Out Intricate String Art Portraits
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks:
Explore The Cosmos With This DIY Digital Telescope
Give Your Smart Home A Green Thumb With MQTT
99% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration, And 99% Collaboration
Elliot’s Picks
This Dual Extrusion System Rocks
High-Altitude Balloon Tracker Does Landing Prediction With Pi Pico
Is That A Cat Or Not?
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Sea Level: How Do We Measure Global Ocean Levels And Do Rising Oceans Change That Benchmark?
The Rise And Fall Of The Fan Car | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330732",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T20:32:23",
"content": "I heard “…start bit, stop bit, and a parody bit…”But yeah, I remember back in the day when you were writing a game in BASIC, you would use the INKEY$ function to read the keyboard buffer every iteration of y... | 1,760,373,156.051303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/diy-telescope-courtesy-of-ikea/ | DIY Telescope Courtesy Of IKEA | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Space"
] | [
"astronomy",
"dobsonian",
"portaball",
"portabowl",
"telescope"
] | Some of the most expensive hobbies have some of the more ingenious hacks on display, generally to lower the cost of entry to various parts the hobby itself. Amateur astronomy has expensive, necessary equipment such as telescopes and other optics, but also has a large group of people willing to build their own gear out of some surprising materials rather than buy pre-built equipment.
One of the latest telescopes from [The Amateur Engineer]
uses several bowls from IKEA to build the mirror mount
. It’s a variation of a
Portaball telescope
, which is similar to a Dobsonian telescope except that it is much easier to adjust and point in any direction. This “Portabowl” telescope uses two bowls epoxied together and weighted at the bottom as the core of the build. The mirror mounts inside the ball, and some supports are attached to it to hold the eyepiece and mount. With some paint and some minor adjustments it’s ready to go stargazing.
There are a few improvements to this build planned for the future, such as the creation of a larger ball that will make operating the scope easier. All in all, though, it’s an excellent example of amateur astronomy even
without needing to go as far as grinding one’s own mirrors
. | 39 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330665",
"author": "Andrea Console",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T16:44:51",
"content": "I made a 300mm ballscope based on an Ikea lamp.https://youtu.be/s16wwMrLlEA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6330741",
"author": "Hir... | 1,760,373,156.00644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/this-week-in-security-apt-targeting-researchers-and-someone-watching-all-the-cameras/ | This Week In Security: APT Targeting Researchers, And Someone Watching All The Cameras | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Dependency Confusion",
"exchange",
"Patch Tuesday"
] | Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday just passed, and
it’s a humdinger
. To add the cherry on top,
two seperate BSOD inducing issues
led to Microsoft temporarily pulling the update.
Among the security vulnerabilities fixed is CVE-2021-26897, another remote code exploit in the Windows DNS server. It’s considered a low-complexity attack, but does require local network access to pull off. CVE-2021-26867 is another of the patched vulnerabilities that sounds very serious, allowing an attacker on a Hyper-V virtual machine to pierce the barrier and run code on the hypervisor. The catch here is that the vulnerability is only present when using the Plan 9 filesystem, which surely limits the scope of the problem to a small handful of machines.
The most interesting fixed flaw was CVE-2021-26411 a vulnerability that allowed remote code execution when loading a malicious web page in either IE or pre-chromium Edge. That flaw was actively being exploited in a unique APT campaign, which we’ll cover right after the break.
Targeting the Researchers
A group, thought to be state-sponsored actors from North Korea,
ran an impressive misinformation campaign
, establishing a convincing-yet-fake security research group. To construct a convincing facade they created not only a bogus blog, but also fake Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn accounts. Their next step was to reach out to legitimate researchers, and invite them to cooperate on research projects. The “research project” was actually a series of malware 0-days. Microsoft’s coverage of the events back in January identified ZINC, AKA Lazarus, as the actors behind the attacks.
One of the 0-days that was used
was just fixed this month, the last CVE discussed above. Once each machine had been compromised, the malicious activity seemed to be limited to surveillance and snooping through the file system. Let’s theorycraft for a moment. Why would a North Korean APT team use a 0-day to target security researchers? Probably to obtain more 0-day vulnerabilities, discovered by the targeted researchers.
Big Companies Behaving Badly
Last week it was Xerox, abusing a legal threat to shut down a virtual conference talk. This week it was Apple, seemingly taking advantage of a security researcher’s work. [Jai Kumar Sharma] discovered a big loophole in the AppleID password change procedure. To change that password, you first have to verify that you are indeed the account owner by signing back in with your password. He discovered that you can sit down at a logged-in Mac, and instruct it to logout of the AppleID account. Once again, the dialog prompts for username and password first. The catch is that once you fail the password prompt three times,
you’re simply invited to set the new password
.
You might point out that this isn’t an RCE, and shouldn’t be considered a high priority problem, because it requires logged-in physical access. Yes, that’s correct. It also misses the point. Apple’s response was that this wasn’t a bug, but a few months later, they fixed it quietly, without even crediting the reporter.
One more entry in this category,
an unnamed company is going after researcher [Rob Dyke]
for finding and reporting a public GitHub repo with private keys and passwords in the clear. He got a “thank you” for reporting the findings, shortly followed by an official notice of legal action. After getting some quick attention from other researchers, he has raised enough cash to retain a law firm that understands security research, so hopefully this particular story will have a happy ending.
Watching All the Cameras
Verkada offers a comprehensive security solution, built in the cloud to be accessible from any browser. Among other things, their platform aggregates live surveillance camera feeds for off-site monitoring. What could possibly go wrong?
Someone compromised the web interface and was able to access all the camera feeds. The guilty group provided
proof of their misdeeds to Bloomberg
. Apparently access was gained through the simplest of methods, an administrator username and password exposed on the internet. This sort of exposure usually happens through something like a GitHub repository that was never intended to be made public, or even the unintentional exposure of an internal document storage server.
From a security perspective, the most alarming element of the story is the note that this account gave attackers the ability to run code on the cameras themselves, meaning an instant foothold on the networks that host the cameras. This is a case of “Why is there a button that does that?”
Updates and Errata
I’m not sure if [Alex Birsan] knew the security storm he was unleashing when he let the dependency confusion attack loose on the world. We have covered this technique a few times, but something new has been confirmed —
it’s being used in real attacks
. Researchers from Sonatype discovered packages that were designed to send a copy of the
/etc/shadow
and
.bash_history
files back to the attackers.
The Silver Sparrow malware campaign was speculated about recently, with many of us suspecting that it was produced by a nation-sponsored group. ESET took a close look at the campaign, and
has a very different opinion on what is going on
. They point out that the potential payload would be distributed via an Amazon s3 bucket, which does not support delivering different content based on IP or geolocation. All told, their conclusion was that it’s likely just another adware campaign.
The Exchange hacking campaign we talked about last week has really exploded, with
estimates putting the number of compromised machines at 30,000
. Now that the vulnerabilities have been discovered and patches made available, it seems that attackers have abandoned a limited scope. Instead, the current campaign appears to be scanning the entire ipv4 address space, and trying to attack every Exchange server that’s found. As some servers seem to have been attacked multiple times, there is a possibility that other groups are now targeting the vulnerability as well.
I’ve heard sysadmins asking for help in cleaning their servers after being compromised. There is a recommended set of steps for responding to an attack like this. Unplug the network cable, power off the server, put the hard drives in a sealed bag. Put a new drive or drives in the machine, and install your OS from scratch, and start restoring known-good backups. Then, look very closely at everything else on your network to see if other devices have been compromised. Sound paranoid? Just remember, this isn’t Grandma’s computer that has bad browser extensions. This is an email server that probably runs your business, and it’s been attacked by a nation-backed APT group. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330643",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T15:39:49",
"content": "” One more entry in this category, an unnamed company is going after researcher [Rob Dyke] for finding and reporting a public GitHub repo with private keys and passwords in the clear. He got a “thank... | 1,760,373,155.927792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/e-ink-laptop-first-steps/ | E-Ink Laptop, First Steps | Chris Lott | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"e-ink",
"IBM Thinkpad",
"laptop"
] | [Alexander Soto] prefers the reduced eye-strain of an e-ink display, but he doesn’t have a portable solution to use at different work stations. The solution?
Make your own e-ink laptop
. Once you see his plan, it’s not as crazy as it sounds.
[Alexander] got his inspiration from an earlier Dasung Paperlike Pro teardown that
we covered back in 2018
. His plan is to shoehorn the e-ink panel into a “headless” Thinkpad T480 laptop. This particular model ES133TT3 display is 13.3 inches (about 40 cm) with a much-better-than-normal laptop resolution of 2200 x 1650 pixels. It is driven over HDMI and is perfect fit for the Thinkpad enclosure.
Unfortunately, these displays haven’t gone down in price since 2018. They’re still in the $1000+ price range, more expensive than many laptops. But if you really want the reduced eye-strain of e-ink in a laptop format, you’re going to have to shell out for it.
It’s a pretty ambitious project. We’re looking forward to following his progress and see how the finished laptop goes together. Do check out the extensive list of e-ink references on his project page, too. If you want to experiment with a less expensive e-ink project, have a look at the
PaperTTY project
for your Raspberry Pi. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330644",
"author": "Rxvt",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T15:40:19",
"content": "I swapped a laptop display to e-ink some years ago so I could use it outdoors in sunny weather. Worked great except it turns out sun bathing is more relaxing than using a computer once you are finally outdoo... | 1,760,373,156.106814 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/16/mini-hygrometer-packs-e-paper-display/ | Mini Hygrometer Packs E-Paper Display | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"hygrometer"
] | Historically, display technologies have always been power thirsty things. In the past, CRTs and incandescent bulbs sucked down electrons like they were free beer. Eventually, LEDs and LCDs came along and lowered this significantly, but the king of low power display technologies remains ePaper and eInk displays. Only requiring power when refreshing the display, they can be left off indefinitely, drawing little to no current. This is great for
low-power builds such as [Andrew Lamchenko’s] miniature hygrometer
. (Video, embedded below.)
The build runs on an nRF52811 microcontroller, hooked up to a 1.02″ ePaper display sourced for just $7. A SHT20 temperature and humidity sensor is then queried to sample the ambient conditions, and the results displayed on the screen. The benefit of this is that the device can be powered from a coin cell, and set to update at infrequent intervals – say, once per hour. It can then be checked by the user without having to turn on.
The low-power design means it would be the perfect device for leaving in a guitar case or humidor for months at a time. As a bonus, it’s also capable of Smart Home integration thanks to the Bluetooth capabilities onboard. It would likely be trivial to upgrade this into a tweeting humidor,
the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2009
! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331969",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T16:33:47",
"content": "Nice!Though I wish the Title Photo showed them with a banana for scale.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6332038",
"author": "Andrey",
"... | 1,760,373,156.153222 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/16/design-solutions-for-the-heat-crisis-in-cities-around-the-world/ | Design Solutions For The Heat Crisis In Cities Around The World | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"cities",
"City",
"city planning",
"climate change",
"climate emergency",
"global warming",
"playground"
] | It was 1999 when Smash Mouth dropped the smash hit
All Star,
stating “The ice we skate is getting pretty thin, the water’s getting warm so you might as well swim.” Since then, global temperatures have continued to rise, with no end in sight. Political will has been unable to make any grand changes, and the world remains on track to blow through the suggested hard limits set by scientists.
As a result, heatwaves have become more frequent, and of greater intensity, putting many vulnerable people at risk and causing thousands of deaths each year. This problem is worse in cities, where buildings and roads absorb more heat from the sun than natural landscapes do. This is referred to as
the heat island effect,
with cities often being several degrees warmer than surrounding natural areas.
It’s significant enough that experts are worried some cities could become uninhabitable within decades.
Obviously, that’s highly inconvenient for those currently living in said cities. How bad is the problem, and what can be done?
The Heat Has To Go Somewhere
In 2013, Australia added pink and purple colors to its heatmaps to mark ever-higher summer temperatures.
Cities like Sydney, Australia are starting to face ambient summer temperatures of up to 50°C, which can be unbearable to exist outside in for more than a few minutes. Worse, surface temperatures can far exceed this level.
It’s often too hot to play outside in the summer in many cities, particularly as playground equipment can deliver painful burns.
Bitumen roads and carparks can hit 80°C, which among other things, makes it very hard to walk back to your car at the beach. Playgrounds have seen even higher surface temperatures, potentially causing burns to unsuspecting children out on a hot day. With temperatures this high, simple solutions like fans fail to make much difference; powerful air conditioning is the key to surviving summer. Many elect to visit shopping centres for extended periods if their homes aren’t suitably equipped.
However, it’s not a problem that can simply be air-conditioned away. The power grid isn’t always up to the strain, particularly in developing countries, and the increased energy use only further drives carbon emissions into the atmosphere, potentially exacerbating the problem. Instead, cities must look to deal with the excess heat in other ways. There are two main ways to attack the problem — reducing the temperature level, and adapting the city to better deal with excessive heat.
Reducing Heat Through Building Materials and Green Spaces
Traditional dark-coloured roofs absorb a lot of heat from the sun. Modern alternatives include lighter colors and special treatments to reduce heat absorption.
Reducing the temperature level can be done with simple techniques, but achieving a large effect is difficult. Covering roofs with lighter colored or more heat-reflective materials can make a difference, by reducing the amount of heat absorbed by a building and thus re-radiated into the surrounding environment. California has already taken steps in this area, through its Title 24 code that mandates minimum requirements for new roofs and renovations. This has the added benefit of keeping the individual building itself cooler, reducing the load on air conditioning, too.
Research is ongoing to develop coatings to reduce the heat absorbed by roads, too.
Other mitigating measures involve increasing green space in cities. Trees and grasses can have a cooling effect on their surroundings, however, they must be properly irrigated to do so. With space at a premium in many modern cities, architects are experimenting with ‘green’ buildings covered in plants. Maintenance can be difficult, though,
and the plant life can come with a risk of pests.
These measures are all useful, but modelling suggests the gains are modest — only bringing down ambient temperatures by a couple of degrees. Surface treatments and greenery could be enough to stop you burning your feet when you run outside to get the mail, but it won’t solve the broader issue.
Designing for Hotter Conditions
During week-long heatwaves, pools can become useless as a way to cool off as the water acts as a heat sink, sitting at over 34 degrees even at night.
Bringing out the bigger guns involves adapting cities to be more livable at higher temperatures. This can involve a broad spectrum of measures. It could be something as small as building shaded shelters at train stations to keep passengers out of the sun, or as extreme as building housing and commercial buildings underground to keep them cooler.
There’s precedent for this, in the Australian town of Coober Pedy. Founded as an opal mining town in 1916, it regularly faces temperatures over 45 °C (113 °F). As the opal boom subsided,
many former underground mines were turned into homes, hotels and shops.
Buildings underground can be
10-20 degrees cooler than the outside ambient temperature
, a major gain with the tradeoff of little to no natural light and more complex construction. It’s unrealistic to expect to sink entire existing cities beneath the Earth, but there are simpler measures available too. Installing efficient air conditioning and good insulation can go some way to making existing buildings more livable, albeit at the expense of higher energy costs.
Regardless of the measures taken, none are cheap or a silver bullet. Some cities will rise to the challenge, while others will see population outflows as residents seek comfort in more liveable spaces. Humanity has abandoned cities to ruin before, and it will likely happen again — but for an altogether new reason this time. | 75 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331928",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T14:31:10",
"content": "Ahh swimming pools… I remember swimming at the motel at Stovepipe Wells back in the seventies.All the chlorine was long gone, due to the heat, and most of the swimming pool was filled with long strands of gr... | 1,760,373,156.27357 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/16/jet-powered-go-kart-built-with-rc-gear/ | Jet Powered Go Kart Built With RC Gear | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"gokart",
"jet",
"jet engine",
"jet kart",
"jetkart",
"kart"
] | Turbine cars never quite came to be, despite many experiments in the 20th century. Despite their high power output for their size, they’re just not well suited to land transport applications; even the M1A1 tank has been much maligned for its turbine power plant. That didn’t stop [Warped Perception] for throwing a jet on the back of a kart though,
and it looks like a whole lot of fun.
(Video, embedded below.)
The build starts with a garden variety gokart, with the piston engine and all associated running gear stripped off in haste. The RC-sized turbo jet is then mounted on an elegant aluminium bracket, neatly welded on to the back of the car. It’s hooked up with its electronic controller, with throttle controlled by an RC transmitter. It’s not ideal trying to steer one-handed with another on the stick, but these are the sacrifices made when parts don’t arrive in time.
Early testing revealed issues with air ingestion into the fuel line over bumps, but overall performance was impressive. Future plans involve a top speed run which we can’t wait to see. Of course, if it’s not outrageous enough for your taste,
consider [Colin Furze’s] pulsejet build
. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331907",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T11:57:52",
"content": "Given that the top speed of this is limited by aerodynamic drag rather than engine performance and gearing, I sincerely hope he gives it a good once-over for high-speed operation, particularly tires. T... | 1,760,373,156.326075 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/16/the-raspberry-pi-pico-as-an-sdr-receiver/ | The Raspberry Pi Pico As An SDR Receiver | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"gnu radio",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"sdr",
"software defined"
] | With the profusion of cheap RTL-SDR devices and the ever-reducing prices of more capable SDRs there might seem to be little place left for the low-bandwidth devices we’d have been happy with a decade or more ago, but there’s still plenty to be learned from something so simple. It’s something [Luigi Cruz] shows us with
a simple SDR using the analogue-to-digital capabilities of the Raspberry Pi Pico
, and since it works with GNU Radio we think it’s rather a neat project.
CNX Software have the full story
, and and quickly reveal that with its 500k samples per second bandwidth it’s not a machine that will set the SDR world on fire even when pushing Nyquist’s Law to the limit.
So with the exception of time signals and a few Long Wave broadcast stations if you live somewhere that still has them, you’ll need a fliter and receive converter to pull in anything of much use radio-wise with this SDR. But a baseband SDR with a couple of hundred kHz useful bandwidth and easy hackability through GNU Radio for the trifling cost of a Raspberry Pi Pico has to be worth a second look. You can see it in action in the video below the break, and if you’re at a loss for what to do with it take a look at
Michael Ossmann and Kate Temkin’s 2019 Superconference talk
. | 30 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331870",
"author": "Ruhan",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T08:17:51",
"content": "“will set the SDR world on fine” -> “Fire”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6331876",
"author": "Rok",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T08:46... | 1,760,373,156.589995 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/raspberry-pi-pico-adc-characterized/ | Raspberry Pi Pico ADC Characterized | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"adc",
"analog to digital",
"pico",
"raspberry pi"
] | [Markomo] didn’t find much useful information about the Raspberry Pi PIco’s analog to digital converter, so he decided to do some tests to characterize it. Lucky for us,
he documented the findings and shared them
. The results are in a series of blog posts that cover power supply noise, input-referred noise, signal to noise ratio, and distortions.
There are some surprising results. For example, the Pico’s low noise regulator mode appears to produce more noise than having it set for normal operation. There also appears to be a large spike in nonlinearity around certain measurements.
The finding about the nonlinearity is especially surprising. The converter uses successive approximation to convert an analog voltage into a digital quantity. That’s the method where you generate a voltage using a DAC and compare it to the unknown voltage. In a normal circuit, the DAC would use resistors, but resistors are notoriously low quality on an integrated circuit. What is very high quality is the ratio of capacitor values. In other words, two capacitors might not always have the same value because of variations in silicon dioxide layer thicknesses. But the plate sizes will be right on every time and all the capacitors on the same chip will have the same silicon dioxide thickness. So we might not know that C1 is 100 nF or 220 nF, but if we know that C2 has twice the area of C1, we know the ratio of C2 and C1 very precisely. [Markomo] simulated the circuit and tried varying values until the simulation matched the measured data. The conclusion is that the capacitors on the circuit do not have the right values and are off by just a small bit.
It appears there are a few more posts planned in the series that will cover the input bandwidth, aperture jitter, and the power supply rejection ratio. You’ll want to stay tuned for those.
We’ve been
talking about the Pico
a lot lately so it is good to see some detailed analysis. We’ve seen
other devices on the Pico dissected
, too, and we are sure there will be more to come. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331816",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T03:16:07",
"content": "Beware the Ides of March!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6331819",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T03:30:19",
... | 1,760,373,156.444903 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/playstation-unlocked-with-new-software-hack/ | PlayStation Unlocked With New Software Hack | Tom Nardi | [
"Playstation Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"buffer overflow",
"copy protection",
"drm",
"exploit",
"playstation"
] | The original PlayStation might be pushing 30 years old now, but that doesn’t mean hackers have given up on chipping away at it.
A new exploit released by [Marcos Del Sol Vives] allows users to run copied games
on all but the earliest hardware revisions of this classic console, and all you need to trigger it is a copy of
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
.
Aptly named tonyhax, this exploit uses a classic buffer overflow found in the “Create Skater” mode in
Tony Hawk
2, 3, and 4. When the game sees a custom character saved on the memory card it will automatically load the name field to show it on the screen, but it turns out the developers didn’t think to check the length of the name before loading it. Thanks to this oversight, a long and carefully crafted name can be used to load an executable payload into the console’s memory.
The name contains the memory address of the payload.
That payload could be anything, such as a homebrew game, but in this case [Marcos] went all in and developed a simple tool that unlocks the console’s optical drive so it will play games burned to CD-Rs. Once the tonyhax exploit has been loaded, you simply swap the authentic
Tony Hawk
disc for whatever burned title you want to play. So far every game tested has worked, even those that span across multiple discs.
[Marcos] is providing not only the save files ready to load on your PlayStation memory card (either through a PC tool, or with the help of a hacked PS2), as well as the complete source code for tonyhax. This opens the door to the exploit being used to load other tools, emulators, and indie games, but as the PlayStation homebrew scene is relatively limited when compared to newer consoles, the demand might be limited.
Compared to the traditional physical modifications used to play copied games on the PlayStation,
this new software approach is far more accessible
. Expect to see memory cards with this exploit preinstalled hit your favorite import site in the very near future.
[Thanks to NeoTechni for the tip.] | 43 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331751",
"author": "hgerger",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T23:30:59",
"content": "it’s not “pushing 30 years” quit yet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6331825",
"author": "Cuvtixo",
"timestamp": "2021-03-16T03:55... | 1,760,373,156.525913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/15/resilient-ai-drone-packs-it-all-in-under-250-grams/ | Resilient AI Drone Packs It All In Under 250 Grams | Tom Nardi | [
"drone hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous aircraft",
"autonomous drone",
"Google AIY",
"MultiWii",
"quadcopter",
"quadcopter frame",
"TPU"
] | When it was first announced that limits would be placed on recreational RC aircraft heavier than 250 grams, many assumed the new rules meant an end to home built quadcopters. But manufacturers rose to the challenge, and started developing incredibly small and lightweight versions of their hardware. Today, building and flying ultra-lightweight quadcopters with first person view (FPV) cameras has become a dedicated hobby onto itself.
But as impressive as those featherweight flyers might be,
the CogniFly Project is really pushing what we thought was possible in this weight class
. Designed as a platform for experimenting with artificially intelligent drones, this open source quadcopter is packing a Raspberry Pi Zero and Google’s AIY Vision Kit so it can perform computationally complex tasks such as image recognition while airborne. In case any of those experiments take an unexpected turn, it’s also been enclosed in a unique flexible frame that makes it exceptionally resilient to crash damage. As you can see in the video after the break, even after flying directly into a wall, the CogniFly can continue on its way as if nothing ever happened.
With the help of a level shifter, the Raspberry Pi can communicate directly with the quadcopter’s flight controller over UART. A
Python library developed by the CogniFly team
allows the Pi to give commands to the flight controller using MSP (MultiWii Serial Protocol), which when combined with the other onboard sensors to detect altitude and relative motion, means there’s little left for a human pilot to do.
3D printed TPU connectors
The CogniFly is wrapped up in a unique frame that not only protects all of its high-tech gear, but makes sure the spinning propellers are kept far enough away from the edges that they won’t hit anything (or anyone) in a crash. Rather than make it out of something entirely rigid, the team came up with a clever construction technique that combines flexible TPU connectors with carbon fiber rods.
The TPU pieces can be printed flat on an inexpensive 3D printer, and then folded into position for assembly. Should any of the frame components break in a particularly energetic impact, it can be quickly and easily repaired in the field with a small stock of spare parts.
Looking ahead, the team has designed the frame in such a way that the CogniFly will be able to land on a rotary battery changer when it needs a fresh pack. There’s not a whole lot of prior art for
automatic battery swaps in the hacker and maker ecosystem
, and given how ambitious their concept is, we’re very interested to see how this element of the project progresses.
The CogniFly is a particularly compelling platform for anyone looking to experiment with autonomous flying, and the fact that it’s light enough to sidestep most drone laws is huge for the hobbyist crowd. You might think that by 2021 we’d already seen every kind of quadcopter imaginable, but occasionally
new designs still pop up that prove there’s still plenty of room for innovation
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6331651",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-15T20:33:12",
"content": "Using the same connect-a-straw kit, this 3 year old built an F-15 ;-)https://www.scolart.ca/assets/documents/cart/product/pictures/big/000002_3213.jpg",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,373,156.766103 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/12/growing-the-worlds-largest-snowflake/ | Growing The World’s Largest Snowflake | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"crystal",
"deposition",
"freezer",
"growth",
"hexagonal",
"ice",
"peltier",
"prism",
"snow",
"vacuum chamber",
"vapor"
] | Plenty of areas around the world don’t get any snowfall, so if you live in one of these places you’ll need to travel to experience the true joy of winter. If you’re not willing to travel, though, you could make some similar ice crystals yourself instead. While this build from [Brian] aka [AlphaPhoenix] doesn’t generate a flurry of small ice crystals, it does generate a single enormous one in a very specific way.
The ice that [Brian] is growing is created in a pressure chamber that has been set up specifically for this hexagonal crystal. Unlike common ice that is made up of randomly arranged and varying crystals frozen together, this enormous block of ice is actually one single crystal. When the air is pumped out of the pressure chamber, the only thing left in the vessel is the seed crystal and water vapor. A custom peltier cooler inside with an attached heat sink serves a double purpose, both to keep the ice crystal cold (and growing) and to heat up a small pool of water at the bottom of the vessel to increase the amount of water vapor in the chamber, which will eventually be deposited onto the crystal in the specific hexagonal shape.
The build is interesting to watch, and since the ice crystal growth had to be filmed inside of a freezer there’s perhaps a second hack here which involved getting the camera gear set up in that unusual environment. Either way, the giant snowball of an ice crystal eventually came out of the freezer after many tries, and isn’t the first time we’ve seen
interesting applications for custom peltier coolers
, either. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330595",
"author": "RBMK",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T10:53:00",
"content": "There is some mention of “Ice transistor” in this document.https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mobilities-of-charge-carriers-in-ice_tbl1_235191013Can you check electrical properties, please? Thank you.",
... | 1,760,373,156.861975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/raspberry-pi-hitches-a-ride-in-a-1989-bmw-dashboard/ | Raspberry Pi Hitches A Ride In A 1989 BMW Dashboard | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"car hacking",
"classic car",
"OBD",
"pi zero",
"touch screen"
] | It probably won’t surprise you to find out that a 1989 BMW 325i doesn’t have much in the way of electronic gadgetry onboard. In fact, what passes for an in-dash “computer” in this vintage Beemer is just a digital clock with a rudimentary calendar function. Not content to waste his precious dashboard space any longer,
[Ryan Henderson] used his time in quarantine to replace the clock module with a Raspberry Pi
.
Nestled in a custom laser-cut housing is a touch screen LCD module that connects directly to the GPIO header of a Pi Zero. Combined with some Python code, this provides a very slick multipurpose interface for pretty much anything [Ryan] wants. Right now he’s got it hooked up to a GPS receiver so he can figure out things like speed and acceleration, but the only real limit on what this little drop-in upgrade can do is how much code you want to sit down and write.
Thankfully, it sounds like [Ryan] has done a lot of the hard work for you. He’s put together a Python library that allows the user to easily draw analog gauges on the screen. The faces are parametrically sized, and even have custom minimum/maximum marks. Of course
if you’d rather just throw some text and images
on the screen, that’s
accomplished easily enough with existing libraries such as PyGame
.
[Ryan] says he’s also working on some code to better integrate the Pi into the vehicle’s systems by way of a Bluetooth OBD2 adapter. In the most basic application that would allow you to throw various bits of engine data up on the screen, but on more modern cars, you could potentially
tap into the CAN bus and bend it to your will
.
While the physical size and shape of this particular modification is clearly focused on this model and year of BMW, the general concepts could be applied to any car on the road.
[Ryan] has recently started a GitHub repository for the project
and hopes to connect with others who are interested in adding a little modern
complexity
convenience to their classic rides.
The reality is that cars become more dependent on their onboard computers with each passing year.
Already we’re seeing Tesla owners struggle with cooked flash chips
, and things are likely to get worse before they get any better. While undoubtedly there are some that would rather keep their daily driver as simplistic as possible, we’re encouraged by projects like this that
at least let owners computerize their cars on their own terms
. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330579",
"author": "[skaarj]",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T08:00:00",
"content": "This is awesome!!I have to upgrade my own project – it is using cathodic ray tubes instead of touch LCD but your idea is amazing. The car is no longer safe to drive, it will go to scrap soon – but anothe... | 1,760,373,156.819067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/getting-on-the-air-with-a-10-minute-ish-ham-transmitter/ | Getting On The Air With A 10-Minute-ish Ham Transmitter | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur",
"ham",
"one-transistor",
"QRP",
"radio",
"RF",
"transmitter"
] | Artificially constrained designs can be among the most challenging projects to build, and the most interesting to consider. The amateur radio world is no stranger to this, with homebrew radio designs that set some sort of line in the sand. Such designs usually end up being delightfully minimalist and deeply instructive of first principles, which is one reason we like them so much.
For a perfect example of this design philosophy, take a look at
[VK3YE]’s twist on the classic “10-Minute Transmitter”
. (Video, embedded below.)
The design dates back to at least the 1980s, when [G4RAW] laid down the challenge to whip up a working transmitter from junk bin parts and make a contact within 15 minutes — ten for the build and five for working the bands. [VK3YE] used the “oner” — one-transistor — design for his 10-minute transmitter, but invested some additional time into adding a low-pass filter to keep his signal clean, and a power amplifier to boost the output a bit.
Even with the elaborations, the design is very simple and easy to understand. Construction is the standard
“ugly style”
that hams favor for quick builds like this. There are no parts that would be terribly hard to find, and everything fits into a small metal box. The video below shows the design and build, along with some experiments with WebSDR receivers to check out range both with and without the power amplifier.
Seeing these kinds of builds really puts us in the mood for some
low-power action
. Could something like this pop up in
“The $50 Ham” series
? Quite possibly yes. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330538",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T03:42:15",
"content": "Peters Hacking is somewhat ledgendary in the Amature radio world (At least in VK) just take a look at that key he is using. Pure Gold ;)Keep up the good work Peter",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,373,156.991712 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/building-an-led-etch-a-sketch/ | Building An LED Etch-A-Sketch | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"etch a sketch",
"led",
"toy"
] | The Etch-A-Sketch was a toy that demanded mastery. Some grew capable of creating masterful artworks, while others struggled to do more than a jumbled mess of angry, angular lines. The inherent limitations of being able to only draw a singular, connected line are all part of the fun, of course,
and [gatoninja236] recreated that in a modern, LED form.
The build uses a Raspberry Pi to run the show, with a 64×64 LED matrix hooked up to the GPIO pins serving as a display. Two encoders are used to recreate the famous Etch-A-Sketch interface, hooked up to an Arduino Nano that then communicates encoder data to the Pi over I2C, due to the limited GPIOs available. There’s also an MPU6050 accelerometer board, used to enable the intuitive shake-to-clear functionality.
The final result is a fun LED toy that, unlike a real Etch-A-Sketch, you can play in the dark. We’ve seen other sneaky hacks on the classic toy before, too –
like this Samsung TV cleverly hidden in a lookalike shell
. Video after the break. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330519",
"author": "Spencer",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T01:47:00",
"content": "No comments? Wtf, this is an awesome project!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6330521",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T02:00:14",
... | 1,760,373,156.913984 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/nrf52-weather-station-gives-forecast-with-style/ | NRF52 Weather Station Gives Forecast With Style | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ble",
"bme280",
"environmental monitor",
"nRF52",
"weather station"
] | We’re no strangers to DIY environmental monitors around these parts, in fact, it seems like that’s one of the most common projects hackers take on when confronted with the power of a modern Internet-connected microcontroller. But among such projects, this
miniature nRF52-based weather station built by [Andrew Lamchenko]
is among the most polished we’ve seen.
Externally, this looks as though it could easily be a commercial product. The graphical interface on the ePaper display is very well designed, delivering plenty of data while still looking attractive enough to hang in the kitchen. The enclosure is 3D printed, but [Andrew] poured enough elbow grease into sanding and polishing the front that you might not realize it at first glance.
Internally it uses the popular BME280 sensor to detect temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, though the custom PCB is also compatible with the similar SI7021 and HTU21D sensors if you want to switch things up.
That said, you really want the ability to measure pressure, as it allows the firmware to do its own basic weather forecasting. All the collected data is beamed out over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), where it can be collected by the open source MySensors IoT framework, but we imagine it wouldn’t take much work to integrate it into your home automation system of choice.
As excited as we might be about the
prospect of repurposing things such as electronic shelf labels
, we’re happy to see the prices for general purpose electronic paper screens finally dropping to the point where projects of this caliber are within the means of the hacker crowd. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330543",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2021-03-12T04:07:40",
"content": "I have an idea how to make a Covid-19 tester. OK, not really Covid-19, but air quality tester with carious sensors such as occupancy sensors, IR, noise. To determine if the air and surround is potentially... | 1,760,373,157.110139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/decoding-the-ps-2-keyboard-protocol-using-good-old-fashioned-hardware/ | Decoding The PS/2 Keyboard Protocol Using Good Old Fashioned Hardware | Mike Szczys | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"595",
"keyboard",
"PS/2",
"serial",
"shift register"
] | 1987 was a glorious year. It brought us the PS/2 keyboard standard that’s still present on many a motherboard back panel to this day. (It also marked the North America/Europe release of The
Legend of Zelda
but that’s another article.) Up until this point, peripherals were using DIN-5 and DE-9 (often mistakenly called DB9 and common for mice at the time) connectors or — gasp — non-standard proprietary connectors. So what was this new hotness all about? [Ben Eater]
walks us through the PS/2 hall of fame by reverse-engineering the protocol
.
The PS/2 connector in all its glory
This is a clocked data protocol, so a waveform is generated on the data pin for each key pressed that can be compared to the clock pin to establish the timing of each pulse. Every key sends a unique set of encoded pulses and voila, the whims of the user can quickly and easily be decoded by the machine.
This is where [Ben’s] dive really shines, we know
he’s a breadboarding ninja
so he reaches for some DIP chips. A shift register is an easy way to build up a parallel PS/2 interface for breaking out each data packet. There are a few quirks along the way, like the need to invert the clock signal so the shift register triggers on the correct edge. He also uses the propagation delay of a couple inverter gates to fire the 595 shift register’s latch pin slightly late, avoiding a race condition. A second 595 stores the output for display by a set of LEDs.
Beyond simply decoding the signal, [Ben] goes into how the packets are formatted. You don’t just get the key code, but you get normal serial interface error detection; start/stop bits and a parity bit as well. He even drills down into extended keys that send more than one packet, and a key-up action packet that’s sent by this particular keyboard.
This is the perfect low-level demo of how the protocol functions. On the practicality side, it feels a bit strange to be breaking out the serial to parallel when it would be very easy to monitor the two signal lines and decode them with a microcontroller. You might want to switch it up a bit, stick with the clock and data pins, but
connect them to a Raspberry Pi using just a few passive components
. | 29 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330468",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T20:37:37",
"content": "As I recall, the original “IBM PC”used a 595 to get the serial keyboard signal into parallel.It was a later iteration that used a microcontroller to handle the serial keyboard.Tye keyboard always us... | 1,760,373,157.061499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/rex-wasnt-really-a-pda-it-was-the-first-great-digital-rolodex/ | Rex Wasn’t Really A PDA, It Was The First Great Digital Rolodex | Chris Lott | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"Citizen",
"Franklin",
"hp200lx",
"Kahn",
"organizer",
"PCMCIA",
"pda",
"Rex",
"Rex3",
"Rolodex",
"starfish"
] | Back in the 1990s I was fascinated with small computers. I used the HP200LX palmtop computer for almost ten years, which I
wrote about back in December
. Naturally, the Franklin Rex 3 PCMCIA-sized organizer caught my attention when it was released in 1997. Here was a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) the size of a credit card that could fit not just in your pocket, but in your shirt pocket.
Viewed today, it was an interesting paradigm. The screen takes up almost the entire front face of the device with a few buttons for navigation. But isn’t it a deal-breaker that you can’t enter or edit contact info on the device itself? This was long before cellphones were pervasive, and if you had the option to connect to the internet a telephone or Ethernet cable was involved. The ability to have a large data set in your pocket viewable without slapping a brick-like laptop on a table was pretty huge.
I think the killer feature was the PCMCIA interface. I challenged myself to reverse engineer the API so that I could sync data outside of the
Wait, What’s a Rolodex?
The Original Rolodex
Some of us might remember the Rolodex, a once-popular paper version of today’s contacts databases we all have on our phones and computers. The Rolodex, a portmanteau of “rolling” and “index”, was
patented
in 1956 by Hildaur L. Neilsen of the Zephyr American Corporation in New York City. The frame of a Rolodex holds specially notched index cards which snap onto two rings, allowing the user to find a desired contact by rotating the whole stack of cards using one of the big wheels on either side. Contact information can be written or typed on blank cards, or special sleeve cards can be used to hold business cards. Despite being featured in museums these days, the Rolodex company is still around and selling both frames and cards; even offering downloadable templates so you can make your own cards at home.
In some professions like sales and journalism, one’s Rolodex is a treasured possession, containing years of accumulated contacts which is literally or figuratively lugged from job to job. With the advent of personal computing, these lists have shifted to electronic form. While putting a contact list on your computer was straightforward and very useful, being able to carry your list around in your pocket was even more so (remember, this was before most people had a cell phone, much less a smart phone). In the 90s several small, electronic Rolodex-like products were introduced, but none became very popular.
Awkward Attempts at Digital Replacements
As the computer age dawned, companies scrambled to become the replacement for the original Rolodex. Some were just like computers, others more like pocket calculators.
Franklin Ace 100
Franklin Rolodex RF400
The Franklin Computing company released a pair of Apple II clones in early 1982. You might not be familiar with the Franklin Ace 100 or 1000, but their legal battle with Apple sent ripples throughout the software community that we still feel today. The United States Court of Appeals
ruled in 1983
that a computer’s operating system and the associated binary code were both copyrightable.
This pushed Franklin’s focus away from computers to hand-held electronic devices such as the Spelling Ace pocket dictionary, the Language Master pocket translator, and the
eBookMan
. Prior to making the Rex, Franklin also made a few small pocket organizers and had an exclusive license to the Rolodex trademark.
Across the ocean the Japan CBM Corporation, part of Citizen Watch, was making electronic calculators, pocket television receivers in the 1980s. They also had a family of small “Memory Bank” devices. These were credit card sized, but had a limited memory capacity and a small display.
The Rise and Fall of Rex
The Rex was different. It was like a piece of your desktop computer that you could take with you. But most importantly, it was easy to keep it up-to-date.
The story of Rex hinges on a familiar name. Anyone into computer programming at this time has no doubt heard of
Philippe Kahn
, the inventor of
Turbo Pascal
and founder/CEO of the software giant
Borland
. Although he was very publicly ousted out by the board in 1994, he was allowed to take Borland’s Sidekick and Dashboard products with him to his new company,
Starfish Software
. Starfish focused on synchronization IP and software, and teamed with Franklin and Citizen to introduce a new pocket-sized organizer.
The Rex3 PCMCIA Pocket Organizer
The name Rex is a diminutive of the name Rolodex, quite appropriately as the form factor itself is a physical diminutive of the real thing. Previous electronic Rolodexes sacrificed display size to make room for a barely functional set of input keys. Kahn’s Rex took the opposite approach, forgoing any input method and maximizing the display area. This wasn’t as bad an idea as it might seem, if you concede that the device was going to be used just for reference and would be updated from your computer. And while the form-factor was (and still is) certainly eye-catching, from Kahn’s perspective, his new synchronization technology TrueSync was the real star of the show.
The one-way transfer of data from your PC to a small organizer might seem simplistic, but that was just a small subset of TrueSync. It was created to provide wired and wireless data synchronization between your devices, a task which required not only solving the technical issues but taming the Tower of Babel represented by the many different and incompatible data exchange formats of the day. TrueSync spawned SyncML and an industry group which standardized the exchange of data and device management.
Making a Splash
Not surprisingly, the catchy design and size of the Rex made a big splash when it was introduced in 1997. The Rex-3 had a whopping 256 kB of storage (there was a very short-lived Rex-1 with only 64 kB, so elusive that collectors aren’t even sure it was ever sold on the market). But only a year later, things began to unravel. Starfish was sold to Motorola and Franklin reported a devastating loss for which they blamed the Rex. The whole business was sold to Xircom in 1999, and they in-turn sold it to Intel the following year. Intel finally killed the product in 2001.
StarTAC Clip-in Rex
A few iterations of the design and model names happened during all this reshuffling of owners. The Rex Pro/Rex-5000 model was introduced in 1998 which added a modest input ability, and doubled the memory to 512 kB, and had a faster processor. A version was even made which snapped on to a Motorola StarTEC flip phone. Xircom did a complete overhaul, releasing the Rex-6000 in 2000. They kept the form-factor, but replaced the guts with a Citizen DataSlim-2. This was a surprisingly capable and extensible PDA, with a well-established community of Japanese developers. But it was too late — consumers had turned their attention to easier-to-use Palm Pilots.
Hacking the REX Interface: HP2REX
When I got my hands on a Rex and I couldn’t stop thinking about interfacing it directly with
the HP200LX that I featured in a recent article
because it has it’s own PCMCIA slot. While it could sync over RS-232.
Alas, the interface specs were not available for either interface. Just as I was about to give up, I discovered a group of people in Germany who were investigating the Rex format. I decided that I would build upon their efforts and make a program to sync the HP-200LX personal organizer data to the Rex3.
There were two layers of obfuscation to contend with. The memory of the Rex consisted of a number of 1K memory blocks. A contiguous flat memory space was made up of a number of these blocks which were in a big, doubly-linked list. Adding to the fun, all blocks weren’t necessarily full. This was done no doubt to make the job of inserting and deleting data fast, without having to shuffle around blocks of memory needlessly.
Once you grasped the lower layer, there were others formats to tackle, one for each kind of data — phone contacts, calendar appointments, memos, to-do lists, time zones, and preferences. Each kind of data resided in different sections of this flat memory space. I spent months decoding these formats in order to fill out the missing fields from the German group’s efforts. I still recall that decoding the different kinds of repeating appointments gave me not only headaches but an appreciation of the complicated logic involved in what would seem to be a simple thing.
I supposed one could have written a single do-it-all app, but instead I took the piecemeal approach. Unlike the Rex, the PIM formats on the HP200LX were not secret. Several tools already existed to import/export the native format from/to CSV files. I enlisted the help of fellow HP Palmtop developer
Mack Baggette
to write the PCMCIA interface code for me, since he already had experience talking to that port. My program HP2REX utilized these tools to perform the transfer of PIM data from the HP200LX and to the Rex, so it only focused on the translation algorithms. It was bundled inside an example script file to give the convenience of a single-command operation. In everyday use, there was really no synchronization going on, since the Rex3 didn’t have editing abilities. Every time you synced to the Rex, I basically blew away the contents and wrote a fresh copy. But reading data from the Rex was possible, indeed essential, for cracking the formats.
The latest release from 2001 is
posted on Github
for the curious.
Where Are They Now?
The
Rolodex
company is still around and still selling the famous index frames and paper cards. After a merger and relocation to Hong Kong, the newly-named
Franklin Electronic Publishers
company manufactures small pocket-sized reference devices to this day.
Citizen
still makes calculators, and their discontinued Dataslim-2 PDA still has a niche following.
Philippe Kahn is perhaps the most interesting member of the Rex team. The subsequent purchase of Starfish/TrueSync by Motorola suggests he correctly foresaw data synchronization as the real problem, not the hardware. But even before grass began growing on the Rex’s grave, Kahn was off on another invention spree. He is credited with the sending the
first cell phone snapshot
of his daughter’s birth from the maternity room to 2000+ friends (check out the re-enactment video at the end of that Spectrum article). Time magazine selected this photo for their
The Most Influential Images of All Time collection
.
First Camera/Phone Photo Sharing Solution
His fascination with sending photos by phone led to the start of
LightSurf
in 1998, a multimedia messaging solutions provider. Ever restless, in 2005 Kahn created yet a fourth company,
Fullpower Technologies
, which focuses on sensors and IoT. He seems to have finally settled down, having stayed with Fullpower until the present day.
As for the Rex? Well, except in the hands of a few collectors and the curious, I’d have to say the Rex is dead. But if you think about it, all the core aspects of the Rex, except for its tiny size, live on in today’s smartphones. If you ever used one of these credit-card sized devices, share your story in the comments below. | 32 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330440",
"author": "Nik",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T18:22:15",
"content": "I have one Rolodex. I have sold some on eBay. What a cool device was back then, but Intel killed it. I believe intel wanted the developers, not the product.Also I had the Xircom Rexhttps://www.youtube.com/wat... | 1,760,373,157.188034 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/3d-printer-air-compressor-is-a-wankel/ | 3D Printer Air Compressor Is A Wankel | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"compressed air engine",
"rotary engine",
"Wankel",
"wankel rotary engine"
] | We wonder if mechanics are as annoyed when we say “engine” as we get when someone talks about a “computer” or a “radio.” Sure, you know what all three of those words mean, but there are many different kinds of radios, computers, and engines. In [3DprintedLife’s] case, he made a compressed air engine of the Wankel style.
The Wankel — a rotary engine — is most famous for its use in some Mazda cars. If you’ve done a lot of 3D printing, you know that creating an air-tight piston on a 3D printer is no mean feat. Of course, he didn’t do it right off the bat. It took what looks like a number of iterations to get it going, and he shares some of what he learned doing this project.
The engine isn’t particularly efficient and you can see it spins for a while and stops, but it is a great demo, especially when he replaces the 3D printed cover with a clear plastic one. Getting the tight tolerances you need can be a real challenge. One thing that helped was printing on a raft so that the bottom of the parts were flat instead of matching the slight tilts in the printing bed.
We were impressed with the two-part design and the 3D printed springs and valves. Even if you don’t want to build a Wankel, you can pick up some tips on creating mechanical parts with filament 3D printers.
This isn’t the first
3D printed Wankel
we’ve seen. The
technology has its fans and detractors
if you can go by the Hackaday comment history. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330414",
"author": "Ok, fairly sure this is more of a detractor reply",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T16:36:33",
"content": "I guess it’s a bit more more widespread and publicly acceptable of a term if you don’t inadvertently use the letter r instead of the letter l?Anyway, mostly not s... | 1,760,373,157.25635 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/ask-hackaday-whats-your-favourite-build-tool-can-make-ever-be-usurped/ | Ask Hackaday: What’s Your Favourite Build Tool? Can Make Ever Be Usurped? | Ben James | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"build",
"cmake",
"compiler",
"make",
"makefile",
"ninja"
] | What do you do whilst your code’s compiling? Pull up Hackaday? Check Elon Musk’s net worth? Research the price of a faster PC? Or do you wonder what’s taking so long, and decide to switch out your build system?
Clamber aboard for some musings on Makefiles, monopolies, and the magic of Ninja. I want to hear what you use to build your software. Should we still be using
make
in 2021? Jump into the fray in the comments.
What is a Build Tool Anyway?
Let’s say you’ve written your C++ program, compiled it with g++ or clang++ or your compiler flavor of the week, and reveled in the magic of software. Life is good. Once you’ve built out your program a bit more, adding code from other files and libraries, these g++ commands are starting to get a bit long, as you’re having to link together a lot of different stuff. Also, you’re having to recompile every file every time, even though you might only have made a small change to one of them.
People realised fairly early on that this sucked, and that we can do better. They started to make automated software that could track compilation dependencies, track which bits of code were tweaked since the last build, and combine this knowledge to automatically optimise what gets compiled – ensuring your computer does the minimum amount of work possible.
Enter: GNU Make
Yet another product of
the famous Bell Labs
,
make
was written by [Stuart Feldman] in response to the frustration of a co-worker who wasted a morning debugging an executable that was accidentally not being updated with changes.
Make
solves the problems I mentioned above – it tracks dependencies between sources and outputs, and runs complex compilation commands for you. For numerous decades,
make
has remained utterly ubiquitous, and for good reason: Makefiles are incredibly versatile and can be used for everything from web development to low level embedded systems. In fact, we’ve already written in detail about how to use
make
for development on
AVR
or
ARM
micros.
Make
isn’t limited to code either, you can use it to track dependencies and changes for any files – automated image/audio processing pipelines anyone?
But, well, it turns out writing Makefiles isn’t actually fun. You’re not adding features to your project, you’re just coercing your computer into running code that’s already written. Many people (the author included) try to spend as little of their life on this planet as possible with a Makefile open in their editor, often preferring to “borrow” other’s working templates and be done with it.
The problem is, once projects get bigger, Makefiles grow too. For a while we got along with this – after all, writing a super complex Makefile that no-one else understands does make you feel powerful and smart. But eventually, people came up with an idea: what if we could have some software generate Makefiles for us?
CMake, Meson, Autotools et al
Yes, there are a sizeable number of projects concerned only with generating config files purely to be fed into other software. Sounds dumb right? But when you remember that people have different computers, it actually makes a lot of sense. Tools like
CMake
allow you to write one high-level project description, then will automatically generate config files for whatever build platforms you want to use down the line – such as Makefiles or Visual Studio solutions. For this reason, a very large number of open source projects use
CMake
or similar tools, since you can slot in a build system of your choice for the last step – everyone’s happy.
Except, it’s really quite hard to tell if everyone is happy or not. As we know, when people selflessly spend time writing and maintaining good quality open source software, others are very kind to them online, do not complain, and do not write passive-aggressive blog posts about 27 reasons why they’re never using it again. Just kidding!
What I’m getting at here is that it’s hard to judge popular opinion on software that’s ubiquitous, because regardless of quality, beyond a critical mass there will always be pitchfork mobs and alternatives.
Make
first appeared in 1976, and still captures the lion’s share of many projects today. The ultimate question: is it still around because it’s good software, or just because of inertia?
Either way, today its biggest competitor – a drop-in replacement – is Ninja.
Ninja
Examples of popular build tools at different abstraction levels
Ninja
was created by [Evan Martin] at Google, when he was working on Chrome. It’s now also used to build Android, and by most developers working on LLVM. Ninja aims to be faster than
make
at incremental builds: re-compiling after changing only a small part of the codebase. As
Evan wrote
, reducing iteration time by only a few seconds can make a huge difference to not only the efficiency of the programmer, but also their mood. The initial motivation for the project was that re-building Chrome when all targets were already up to date (a no-op build) took around ten seconds. Using Ninja, it takes under a second.
Ninja makes extensive use of parallelization, and aims to be light and fast. But so does every other build tool that’s ever cropped up – why is Ninja any different? According to Evan, it’s because it didn’t succumb to the temptation of writing a new build tool that did everything — for example replacing both
CMake
and
Make
— but instead replaces only Make.
Source: The Meson Build System – A Simple Comparison. Apache 2.0
This means that it’s designed to have its input files generated by a higher-level build system (not manually written), so integrates easily with the backend of CMake and others.
In fact, whilst it’s possible to handwrite your own
.ninja
files, it’s advised against. Ninja’s own documentation states that “
In contrast [to Make], Ninja has almost no features; just those necessary to get builds correct. […] Ninja by itself is unlikely to be useful for most projects.”
Above you can see the differences in incremental build times in a medium-sized project. The two Ninja-based systems are clear winners. Note that for building the entire codebase from scratch, Ninja will not be any faster than other tools – there are no shortcuts to crunching 1s and 0s.
In his
reflections on the success and failure of Ninja
, Evan writes that:
“The irony of this aspect of Ninja’s design is that there is nothing preventing anyone else from doing this. Xcode or Visual Studio’s build systems (for example) could just as well do the same thing: do a bunch of work up front, then snapshot the result for quick reexecution. I think the reason so few succeed at this is that it’s just too tempting to mix the layers.”
It’s undeniable that this approach has been successful, with more and more projects using Ninja over time. Put simply, if you’re already using
CMake
, I can’t see many reasons why you wouldn’t use Ninja instead of
make
in 2021. But I want to know what you think.
Over to you
It’s impossible to write about all the build tools around today. So I want to hear from you. Have you switched from
make
to Ninja? Do you swear by Autotools, Buck or
something else
? Will
make
ever go away? Will there ever be a tool that can eclipse them all? Let me know below. | 48 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330381",
"author": "Alice",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T15:10:48",
"content": "WAF best, smallest",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6330394",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T15:46:52",
"content... | 1,760,373,157.350474 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/monitor-spacex-rocket-launches-with-software-defined-radio/ | Monitor SpaceX Rocket Launches With Software-Defined Radio | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur",
"antenna",
"Falcon 9",
"HackRF",
"ham",
"radio",
"RTL-SDR",
"satellite dish",
"SpaceX"
] | The amateur radio community has exploded with activity lately especially in the software-defined radio (SDR) area since it was found that a small inexpensive TV tuner could be wrangled to do what only expensive equipment was able to do before. One common build with these cards is monitoring air traffic, which send data about their flights out in packets over the radio and can easily be received and decoded now. It turns out another type of vehicle, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 spacecraft, reports data via radio as well and with some slightly upgraded hardware
it’s possible to “listen in” to these flights in a similar way
.
Reddit users [derekcz] and [Xerbot]
used a HackRF module to listen in to the Falcon 9’s data transmissions during its latest launch. While the HackRF is a much more expensive piece of equipment compared to the RTL-SDR dongles used to listen in on aircraft, it is much more capable as well, with a range from 1 MHz to 6 GHz. Using this SDR peripheral as well as a 1.2 m repurposed satellite dish, the duo were able to intercept the radio transmissions from the in-flight rocket. From there, they were recorded with GNU Radio, converted into binary data, and then translated into text.
It seems as though the data feed included a number of different elements including time, location information, and other real-time data about the rocket’s flight. It’s a great build that demonstrates the wide appeal of software-defined radio, and if you want to get started it’s pretty easy to
grab a much cheaper dongle and use it for all kinds of applications like this
. Go check out [Tom Nardi]’s piece on
the last seven years of RTL-SDR
to get caught up to speed.
Thanks to [Adrian] for the tip! | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330355",
"author": "Hans",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T13:05:05",
"content": "Goodbye data, next launch will be encrypted because of this. I’ve been logging these for a while now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6330408",
... | 1,760,373,157.403252 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/11/drone-boat-sails-seattle/ | Drone Boat Sails Seattle | Lewin Day | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"ardupilot",
"boat",
"lake",
"washington"
] | Thanks to the availability of cheap, powerful autopilot modules, building small autonomous vehicles is now well within the reach of the average maker. [rctestflight] has long been an enthusiast working in this space, and has been attempting long range autonomous missions on the lakes of Washington for some time now.
His latest attempt proved to be a great success.
(Video, embedded below.)
The build follows on from earlier attempts to do
a 13 km mission with an airboat,
itself chosen to avoid problems in early testing with seaweed becoming wrapped around propellers. For this attempt, [Daniel] chose to build a custom boat hull out of fiberglass, and combine both underwater propellers and a fan as well. The aim was to provide plenty of thrust, while also aiming for redundancy. As a bonus, the fan swivels with the boat’s rudder, helping provide greater turn authority.
After much tuning of the ArduPilot control system, the aptly-named SS Banana Slug was ready for its long range mission. Despite some early concerns about low battery voltages due to the cold, the boat completed its long 13 km haul across the lake for a total mission length of over three hours. Later efficiency calculations suggests that the boat’s onboard batteries could potentially handle missions over 100 km before running out.
It goes to show that, even with an off-the-shelf autopilot and mapping solution, there’s still a huge amount of engineering that goes into any successful long-range mission, whether
land
,
sea
or
air
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330334",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T10:46:27",
"content": "DIY Narco subs ahoy",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6330337",
"author": "tim",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T11:12:09",
"content":... | 1,760,373,157.451088 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/playing-youtube-videos-at-incredibly-low-resolution-on-leds/ | Playing Youtube Videos At Incredibly Low Resolution On LEDs | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led",
"Raspberry Pi 3",
"youtube"
] | Since the high-definition era, screens with many millions of pixels have become commonplace. Resolutions have soared into the stratosphere, and media has never looked clearer or crisper. However, [gatoninja236] decided to go the other way with this build –
an LED matrix capable of playing Youtube videos.
The execution is simple. A Raspberry Pi 3, with the help of a Python script, downloads a Youtube video. It then runs this through OpenCV, which parses the video frames, downconverting them to suit a 64×64 pixel display. Then, it’s a simple matter of clocking out the data to the 64×64 RGB LED matrix attached to the Raspberry Pi’s IO pins, where the video is displayed in all its low-resolution glory.
Is it a particularly useful project? No. That doesn’t mean it’s not without value however; it teaches useful skills in both working with LED displays and video data scraped from the Internet. If you simply must have more pixels, though,
this ping pong video wall might be more to your liking
. Video after the break. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330304",
"author": "𝖟𝖔𝖒𝖇𝖎𝖊",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T07:18:29",
"content": "That could have been a hard coded demo.Come on!Give us at least Marvin the Martian!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6330326",
"author": "Tho... | 1,760,373,157.604707 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/boxes-py-has-your-lasercut-box-needs-covered/ | Boxes.py Has Your Lasercut Box Needs Covered | Elliot Williams | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"custom enclosures",
"enclosures",
"laser cut box",
"laser cut boxes"
] | I needed something to test out a low-power laser cutter, and thought that some small cardboard boxes would fit the bill nicely, so off I went to scour the Interwebs for a quick-and-dirty finger-joint box generator. And
the best of the best
was to be found, drumroll please, on Hackaday.io. [Florian Festi]’s
boxes.py
not only has a sweet web interface, covers an absurd number of box styles, and includes
kerf tests
to ensure that your joints are tight, but it’s also written in easy-to-extend Python for when you have
really
particular needs.
But you won’t need to design anything of your own. There are already
boxes with living hinges
,
boxes that fit 19″ racks
,
Eurorack skiff boxes with laser-cut mounting rails
, and even a
generic electronics project box with mounting ears for your PCB
.
Console2
has integrated clips on the rear service hatch.
You need a
pentagonal prism with a round opening
? What size? I guess a
complete arcade-style console
is
technically
a box. Naturally, there are also
geartrains
and even a
robot arm design
. Wait, what?
Each of the box designs is fully customizable, so it’s easy to make something like
a box with customized dividers
, where the different compartments are specified in a sweet text markup. [Florian]’s example box set for the game Agricola is amazing.
Underpinning the code is a LOGO-like finger-joint drawing routine. This makes it relatively easy to draw your own funny shapes, and have the hard work of thinking through the joining fingers taken care of by the computer. [Florian] seems open to taking pull requests for new box shapes, but I haven’t thought of one yet.
I can’t say enough about how cool boxes.py is, and most of the demo applications are worth a look on their own. This was an entry in the Hackaday Prize back in 2017, and it’s been growing and improving ever since. Way to go, [Florian] and Co. | 19 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330302",
"author": "Ginja",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T06:45:01",
"content": "Nice! Anyone know of something similar for cardboard boxes?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6330311",
"author": "imval",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,373,157.817709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/cyberdeck-running-on-apple-silicon-though-an-a12-not-m1/ | Cyberdeck Running On Apple Silicon, Though An A12 Not An M1 | Michael Shaub | [
"Cyberdecks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"cyberdeck",
"cyberpunk",
"dongle",
"eink",
"ipad mini",
"keycaps",
"linear slides",
"magic trackpad",
"pi zero",
"raspberry pi",
"split keyboard",
"vintage computer"
] | [Alta’s Projects] built
a two-in-one cyberdeck
that not only contains the requisite Raspberry Pi (a zero in this case) but also eschews a dumb LCD and uses an iPad mini 5 for a display.
We need to address the donor case right away. Some likely see this as heresy, and while we love to see
vintage equipment lovingly restored
, upcycling warms our hearts and
keeps mass-produced plastic out of landfills
too. The 1991 AST 386SX/20 notebook in question went for $45 on an online auction and likely was never destined for a computer museum.
Why is Cupertino’s iOS anywhere near a cyberdeck? If a touch screen is better than an LCD panel, a tablet with a full OS behind it must be even better. You might even see this as the natural outgrowth of tablet cases first gaining keyboards and then trackpads. We weren’t aware that either was possible without jailbreaking, but [Alta’s Projects] simply used a lighting-to-USB dongle and a mini USB hub to connect the custom split keyboard to the iPad and splurged on an Apple Magic Trackpad for seamless and wireless multi-touch input.
Internal USB Wiring, Charging Circuit, and Pi Zero
The video build (after the break) is light on details, but a quick fun watch with a parts list in the description. It has a charming casual feel that mirrors the refreshingly improvisational approach that [Altair’s Projects] takes to the build. We appreciate the nod to
this cyberdeck from [Tinfoil_Haberdashery]
who’s split keyboard and offset display immediately sprang to mind for us too. The references to an imagined “dystopian future” excuse the rough finish of some of the Dremel cuts and epoxy assembly. That said, apocalypse or not, the magnets mounted at both ends of the linear slide certainly are a nice touch.
Magnetic End-Stops for the Linear Slide
That could be a complete project, but [Alta’s Projects] added a Pi with access to I/O ports for future hardware hacks. VNC provides a simple way for the iPad to share the keyboard, trackpad, and display with the Pi when that is powered up. The Pi also provides an opportunity to have an auxiliary eInk display, able to show system information or graphics even when the system is powered down. The other display is a 7-segment style battery charge indicator that counts down from 100%, useful when working untethered as neither the Pi nor the iPad could report the status of the nine 18650 cells.
We like that this cyberdeck is easily upgradable with a newer tablet and given that the iPad is connected with a quick release magnetic mount, it can easily be removed for other uses. And, speaking of upcycling, when this iPad dies we fully expect the
display to find a new life
too. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330287",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T04:32:20",
"content": "Hm. I hope no one will be offended, but it seems like “cyberdecks” are starting to look like point-of-sale terminals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,373,157.6641 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/put-more-scoot-in-yer-scooter/ | Put More Scoot In Yer Scooter | Brian McEvoy | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"esc",
"escooter",
"governor",
"scooter",
"skate",
"speed restriction",
"transportation",
"Xiaomi M365"
] | We have a scooter hack that is odd for a couple of reasons. First, the vehicle in question is a Doc Green EWA 6000, a German clone of a Xiaomi M365, so Country stereotypes be darned. Second, it is about increasing the performance, and when we think of scooters, we get hung up on
scoot
. The link between these peculiarities is the speed limiter Germany requires on all scooters, which the Chinese model lacks. Despite the law, [Nikolaj] wanted a
higher top speed and Bluetooth
connectivity. Wireless unlocks advanced features, like cruise control, which are absent in the stock model.
The mainboard is responsible for speed control, but that is merely a component, and you can find third-party replacements. [Nikolaj] found a new part with a German forum member’s help, then recorded his work in English for our sake. The speed boost is nice, but the Bluetooth functionality is a massive improvement by itself. If you live in an area where the law doesn’t allow this sort of thing, think before you upgrade. Aftermarket parts aren’t always drop-in replacements, and in this case, the controller and display needed some finessing to fit, so measure twice and buy once.
If tearing into a brand new scooter isn’t for you, consider
breathing new life into a retiree
, and don’t forget that
stopping is the other half of the battle
. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330028",
"author": "Nikolaj",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T06:44:10",
"content": "OP here. This hack was very satisfying to get working even though the replacement parts were tricky to fit in. The scooter is far more practical with a higher speed and Bluetooth (which functions similarl... | 1,760,373,157.869823 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/laser-focus-made-easier-with-ir-filter/ | Laser Focus Made Easier With IR Filter | Al Williams | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"filter",
"focus",
"laser",
"laser cutter",
"laser engraving"
] | If you’ve used a diode laser engraver or cutter, you know that focus is critical. You’d think it would be relatively simple to get a sharp focus, but it isn’t that simple. [Makers Mashup] shows in a video how to use an
adjustable IR filter
to cut out all the light bleed to get a sharp image to make focusing simpler.
The filter he shows adjusts from 530nm to 750nm and is made to screw into a 72mm lens, but it works fine with your eyeballs, too. [Makers Mashup] says he’ll eventually make a stand for it so he can look through it with both hands free.
The laser isn’t a point source and the focus isn’t a sharp dot. Even so, observing the laser at low power shows a bright spot encircled by slightly less bright spots. It can be difficult to figure out the exact smallest point.
We’ve noticed before that using a black target helps and one pair of laser goggles we have cuts out the fringe better than the other pair, so it isn’t surprising that a properly tuned filter would make things easier.
A laser that isn’t focused well won’t engrave with maximum resolution and will lose power when cutting. This topic comes up
every once in a while
. We’ve even seen the focus done, not optically, but
with springs
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329993",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T03:52:27",
"content": "I wouldn’t have thought you wanted the focal point at the surface on thicker materials, but a little below it. I’d have been likely to use the schoolboy with sun plus magnifying glass method though, ... | 1,760,373,157.924751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/diy-furnace-smelts-magnetite-sand-into-an-impressive-chefs-knife/ | DIY Furnace Smelts Magnetite Sand Into An Impressive Chef’s Knife | Mike Szczys | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"blacksmithing",
"charcoal",
"furnace",
"magnetite",
"making steel",
"smelting",
"steel"
] | Some people order their raw materials from a factory, missing out on 99% of the fun… or suffering, we’re not sure which. To make that call, you need to look in on the process [IllyriaD] used to
collect magnetite sand and turn it into a wicked-looking chef’s knife
.
This began by collecting 150 pounds (!) of magnetic dirt from dry lake beds while hiking using a magnet pickup tool with release lever that he got from Harbor Freight. Several repeated magnetic refining passes separated the black ore from non-metallic sands ready for the furnace that he built. That is used to fire up the raw materials using 150 pounds of charcoal, changing the chemical composition by adding carbon and resulting in a gnarly lump of iron
known as a bloom
.
From there, it’s just a matter of beating the iron bloom into submission over at the anvil. [IllyriaD] details the process of flattening it out to a bar shape, then folding it over. Seven total folds are made for 128 layers, and in the gallery there’s a fantastic image that captures the striation when viewed on end. After being sharpened and polished, you can see where the bevel descends through those layers.
It’s delightful to see people working through the old ways and proving you don’t need a factory, as long as your true goal is to explore the process itself. Does this leave you wanting even more? [IllyriaD] left some insight about the process in the comments of
the reddit thread
. You probably also want to check out
the tile-roofed hut built by [PrimitiveTechnology]
without any modern tools. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329960",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T00:45:40",
"content": "It can also be used to building space age fabricators and housing.https://subnautica.fandom.com/wiki/Magnetite#Uses_in_Crafting",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,373,157.991339 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/got-oxygen-future-mars-missions-are-relying-on-the-moxie-of-perseverance/ | Got Oxygen? Future Mars Missions Are Relying On The MOXIE Of Perseverance | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"fuel",
"mars",
"moxie",
"nasa",
"oxygen",
"oxygen generator",
"Perseverance"
] | The rule of thumb with planetary exploration so far has been, “What goes up, stays up.” With the exception of the Moon and a precious few sample return missions to asteroids and comets, once a spacecraft heads out, it’s never seen again, either permanently plying the void of interplanetary or interstellar space, or living out eternity on the surface of some planet, whether as a monument to the successful mission that got it there or the twisted wreckage of a good attempt.
At the risk of jinxing things, all signs point to us getting the trip to Mars reduced to practice, which makes a crewed mission to Mars something that can start turning from a dream to a plan. But despite what some hardcore Martian-wannabees say, pretty much everyone who goes to Mars is going to want to at least have the option of returning, and the logistical problems with that are legion. Chief among them will be the need for propellants to make the return trip. Lugging them from Earth would be difficult, to say the least, but if an instrument the size of a car battery that hitched a ride to Mars on
Perseverance
has anything to say about it, future astronauts might just be making their own propellants, literally pulling them out of thin air.
Living Off the Land
MOXIE being installed in
Perseverance
. Source: NASA/JPL
Even with the resource constraints placed on the Perseverance rover’s design by the full suite of science experiments planned for the mission —
the sample caching system
alone requires two dedicated robots and occupies almost all of the belly of the beast — JPL designers and scientists still found a way to squeeze two technology demonstrations into the rover. This is not without precedent; the
Sojourner
rover included on the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 was a proof-of-concept design that led directly to the remarkably successful
Spirit
and
Opportunity
rovers and eventually to
Curiosity
and
Perseverance
. Pathfinder also demonstrated the feasibility of using airbags to land payloads on Mars; while not useful for big payloads, we expect to see landings use the method again in the future.
While
the
Ingenuity
helicopter
seems to have captured the lion’s share of the general public’s attention, the Mars 2020 technology demonstration we find most interesting is the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment, or MOXIE. It’s not often you encounter nested acronyms, but that only serves to illustrate the complexity of the experiment. ISRU stands for “in situ resource utilization,” and refers to the extraction and use of materials found in space or planetary environments. Rather than shipping raw materials all the way from Earth to space, ISRU seeks to exploit what’s already out there. Other than stretching the definition to include harvesting solar energy with photovoltaics, we’ve done very little in the way of ISRU so far; NASA recognizes the need to change this model, and MOXIE is very much a step in this direction.
The Secret’s In the Ceramics
If an alien space probe were to come to Earth, it wouldn’t face much of a challenge to extract oxygen from the environment. Our atmosphere is roughly 21% oxygen, which makes it easily separable from the air. It’s also abundant in the water that covers our planet, and separating oxygen and hydrogen from water is easily accomplished with electrolysis.
Mars, however, is nowhere near as blessed with water as Earth. We’ve yet to find significant reserves of liquid water there, and while there may be enough water there to create an ocean that could cover the entire planet, most of it is locked away in the north polar ice caps and other frozen reserves that are out of reach. Recovering sufficient water for electrolysis would be energetically difficult. There is, however, an essentially unlimited source of oxygen on Mars: its atmosphere. While there’s only a trace of oxygen, 95% of the thin air is carbon dioxide. MOXIE is designed to extract oxygen from this abundant local resource, using something called solid oxide electrolysis.
SOXE schematic, showing where each reaction occurs. Note that the solid dielectric was originally planned to be yttrium-doped zirconium (YSZ), but was switched to scandium-doped (ScSZ) for the flown experiment. Source: Meyen, F. E., Hecht, M. H., & Hoffman, J. A. (2016).
Thermodynamic model of Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE). Acta Astronautica, 129, 82–87.
doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2016.06.005
Like the electrolysis of liquid water, solid oxide electrolysis relies on electricity to break a molecule down into its component elements. But there’s much more to it, and it all revolves around the special characteristics of the ceramic materials at the heart of the machine. Certain ceramics — in the solid oxide electrolyzer (SOXE) cells inside MOXIE, the material is zirconium oxide stabilized with a small amount of scandium, and is known as ScSZ — behave like electrical conductors for oxide ions, which are just basically oxygen molecules with a couple of electrons stripped away. That property (along with other general properties of ceramics like heat resistance, high strength, lightweight, and workability) makes ScSZ the perfect material for solid oxide electrolysis.
Cutaway view of a scroll compressor tested for MOXIE. Another model by the same company was eventually chosen. Source:
AirSquared, Inc.
The oxygen-production cycle in MOXIE starts with a simple air compressor and some dust filters. Rather than a more traditional piston compressor or a diaphragm pump, MOXIE includes a scroll-type compressor, where two scroll-shaped elements are nested together. One, the stator, remains fixed, while the rotor element revolves in a tight orbit within the stator without rotating on its axis. This creates a narrowing space between the two elements that forces gas from the perimeter of the compressor body to the center. Scroll compressors have a lot of advantages for applications like this, with oil-free operation being chief among them. MOXIE’s scroll compressor (and the BLDC motor that powers it) is its only moving part, and is capable of boosting the pressure of the thin Martian atmosphere to about the same pressure as the Earth’s atmosphere — about a 100-fold increase.
Since solid oxide electrolysis requires high temperatures — on the order of 800°C — the compressed process gas is next passed over a series of 3D-printed heat exchangers. A large part of MOXIE’s power budget goes into heating the gas; MOXIE is so power-hungry that a single 2- to 4-hour cycle requires more power than the rover’s radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) produces in a single sol. This means MOXIE uses must be scheduled carefully, as nothing else on the rover can be drawing a significant amount of power.
Act Like a Tree
The heated process gas, which is about 98% carbon dioxide, then enters a stack of SOXE cells. Each cell is a sandwich of porous metal electrodes on each side of a thin piece of ScSZ acting as a solid-phase electrolyte. A current is applied across the cell as gas infiltrates the cathode; there, a combination of thermal decomposition and the catalytic action of the metal causes the following reduction reaction:
The oxide ions (2
O
2-
) are ionically attracted to the ScSZ electrolyte. They are pulled away from the carbon monoxide waste product and unreacted process gas left in the porous cathode and into the electrolyte, where they then hit the boundary with the anode. The positive charge of the porous anode causes the oxide ions to be oxidized:
Sensors will monitor the electrolysis process and test the oxygen the SOXE stack produces for purity and flow rate, which is expected to be up to 12 g/hr using the maximum current of 4 Amps. Once the analysis is complete, all gasses are vented into the atmosphere — there’s no sense in saving it, at least not yet, since MOXIE is only a proof-of-concept. Scaled up approximately 200 fold, though, a mega-MOXIE could potentially produce and store the estimated 30 metric tons of oxygen needed to put a Mars ascent vehicle into orbit for a trip home. Sending that much liquid oxygen from Earth would mean lifting at least 10 times that mass, meaning MOXIE might someday save four or five heavy-lift launches to Mars.
The chemistry of MOXIE is pretty simple, but as always, there are complications and practical considerations, particularly with unwanted reactions clogging the porous cathode with metal oxides or even solid carbon. But perhaps the biggest practical consideration is that, like the mission’s entry descent and landing (EDL) phase and much of the terrain navigation the
Perseverance
rover will do, MOXIE will have to run its experiments autonomously. If something goes wrong, there won’t be anyone to push a button or purge a line. Like the astronauts who will depend on MOXIE’s someday big brother to get them home, the experiment is on its own, and will have to get its job done no matter what Mars throws at it. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329926",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T22:08:55",
"content": "I hope at some point we actually try to restore the martian atmosphere. There is plenty of material just waiting on Venus that we could compact into a frozen ball and shoot to where Mars will be. It woul... | 1,760,373,158.270837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/roomba-gets-alexa-support-with-an-esp8266-stowaway/ | Roomba Gets Alexa Support With An ESP8266 Stowaway | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"Amazon Alexa",
"Belkin WeMo",
"home automation",
"irobot",
"roomba",
"serial port"
] | The modern home is filled with plenty of “smart” devices, but unfortunately, they don’t always speak the same language. The coffee maker and the TV might both be able to talk to your phone through their respective apps, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the two appliances can work together to better coordinate your morning routine. Which is a shame, since if more of these devices could communicate with each other, we’d be a lot closer to living that
Jetsons
life we were promised.
Luckily, as hardware hackers we can help get our devices better acquainted with one another.
A recent post by [MyHomeThings] shows how the ESP8266 can bridge the gap
between a Roomba and Amazon’s Alexa assistant. This not only allows you to cheaply and easily add voice control to the robotic vacuum, but makes it compatible with the Amazon’s popular home automation framework. This makes it possible to chain devices together into complex conditional routines, such as turning off the lights and activating the vacuum at a certain time each night.
The hack depends on the so-called Roomba Open Interface, a seven pin Mini-DIN connector that can be accessed by partially disassembling the bot. This connector provides power from the Roomba’s onboard batteries as well as a two-way serial communications bus to the controller.
By connecting a MP1584EN DC-DC converter and ESP8266 to this connector, it’s possible to send commands directly to the hardware. Add a little glue code to combine this capability with a library that emulates a Belkin Wemo device, and now Alexa is able to stop and start the robot at will.
We’ve
seen this sort of trick used a few times before
to add
backdoor Alexa support to various gadgets
, and it’s always interesting to see what kind of unusual hardware folks are
looking to make an integral part of their smart home
. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329934",
"author": "Alan Kilian",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T22:26:36",
"content": "Is connecting directly to the Roomba batteries going to give you over-discharge protection or not?I would be worried that this will deeply discharge the battery pack and that can lead to poor lifetime... | 1,760,373,158.043298 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/amazing-starg%e1%90%b0te-with-dhd-and-infinity-mirror-wormhole/ | Amazing STARGᐰTE With DHD And Infinity Mirror Wormhole | Anool Mahidharia | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"animatronic",
"DHD",
"Dial Home Device",
"model",
"prop",
"prop making",
"stargate"
] | The Stargate Universe franchise has spawned numerous movies, serials, books, comics and games since 1994, and has been a favorite among science fiction fans. Prop makers and hackers often try building their own Stargate replica – the Einstein–Rosen bridge portal that allows almost instantaneous travel between two distant locations. Building an authentic looking prop requires a lot of attention to detail, and [Kristian]’s
The Stargate Project
is an amazingly well built rendition of the portal.
[Kristian]’s Stargate is mostly 3D printed and features a symbol ring, with chevrons that lock and light up when engaged. When the correct address has been dialled in, the wormhole is established, via an infinity mirror effect that uses 122 RGB LEDs. The Dial Home Device (DHD) is a replica of the original pedestal shaped computer, with two concentric sets of 19 buttons and a central activation button.
The Stargate ring is assembled from multiple 3D printed in sections, and measures 390 mm across. The seven Chevrons move along 3D printed rack-and-pinion gears, driven by geared micro-motors. The symbol ring is driven by a separate NEMA14 stepper motor. A Raspberry Pi with three piggy backed motor hats controls the various motors and LEDs. A USB sound card and a powered speaker provide audio effects while dialling. Once a worm hole is established, random audio snippets are played. The wormhole is maintained for 38 minutes, after which the Stargate powers down.
The Dial Home Device is built around a custom, circular PCB which holds the keypad buttons, LEDs and an ATmega 32u4 micro-controller which connects to the Raspberry Pi via USB. The 39 LEDs are APA102C’s so they only need two GPIO pins. For the keyboard, four banks of nine buttons and another bank of three are connected via a resistive ladder to the analog GPIO’s. This allows all 39 buttons to be connected via five analog inputs and was probably done to simplify PCB track layout. The back lit button key caps were printed in two parts. The translucent bases are covered with the opaque symbol caps.
Making a prop like this look like the real deal requires a lot of effort in painting the various parts, and this shows in [Kristian]’s final result, right down to the stone platform on which the Stargate sits. The one improvement we would like to see is a wireless DHD, just like it’s supposed to be. Doing so shouldn’t be too difficult, and losing the USB tether between the Stargate and its DHD would be a great upgrade to this amazing project. Check out the videos after the break, and there are many more on [Kristian]’s project page.
And if you are a fan of the franchise, then the amazingly
Droolworthy Animatronic Stargate Horus Helmet
is an excellent companion project to this Stargate.
https://thestargateproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DHD-dialing_404.mp4
Thanks for the tip, [Martin Schuster] | 49 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329873",
"author": "JanW",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T19:37:33",
"content": "Damn, what a nice build! The details are just crazy!BUT, and hear me out: The troll are coming!!! This thing ticks all the right boxes: Replicating something? lame! 3D-printed? Come oooooon! Arduino? Are you... | 1,760,373,158.129092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/credit-for-clever-corner-clamp/ | Credit For Clever Corner Clamp | Brian McEvoy | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"bench cookie",
"biscuit",
"carpentry",
"clamp",
"corner",
"corner clamp",
"vise",
"woodworking"
] | We love this design’s simplicity, but its mundane appearance is deceptive because a lot is going on here. [Bas van Hassel]’s
clamp looks like a bench cookie
or maybe a compressed hockey puck, but one pie piece-shaped quadrant extends on dovetails to form a right-angle channel, perfect for holding your ninety-degree joint while your glue dries. Opposing disc edges are flat, so your clamp won’t slip. Divots on the top and bumps on the bottom keep your stacks nice and neat when you put them away. All around, we have no trouble believing this designer has spent a lot of hours in the woodshop.
As long as your wood pieces are the same thickness, it seems like a practical use of printer filament, but if you have different sizes, you can always pull the dovetail out of its groove. Thanks to the scaling feature built into slicing programs, we expect some precision makers to utilize this in projects like dollhouses and model airplanes. If you have a high-resolution printer, you could make some miniature tools to construct a flea circus set. At that point, you may need to
make some smaller clamps
.
Print orientation for the puck is straightforward as it is a print-in-place design, but sometimes it isn’t always clear, so
listen to those who know
better and don’t be afraid of
gears in your vises
. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329830",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T17:18:45",
"content": "“looks like a bench cookie”Has someone been hanging around a Rockler store lately?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6330010",
"author": "Dron... | 1,760,373,158.194313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/supersized-weather-station-uses-antique-analog-meters/ | Supersized Weather Station Uses Antique Analog Meters | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"api",
"arduino",
"data",
"display",
"meter",
"microcontroller",
"weather",
"weather station"
] | For most of us, getting weather information is as trivial as unlocking a smartphone or turning on a computer and pointing an app or browser at one’s weather site of choice. This is all well and good, but it lacks a certain panache that old weather stations had with their analog dials and stained wood cases. The weather station that [BuildComics] created marries both this antique aesthetic with modern weather data availability,
and then dials it up a notch for this enormous analog weather station build
.
The weather station uses 16 discrete dials, each modified with a different label for the specific type of data displayed. Some of them needed new glass, and others also needed coils to be modified to be driven with a lower current than they were designed as well, since each would be driven by one of two Arduinos in this project. Each are tied to a microcontroller output via a potentiometer which controls the needle’s position for the wildly different designs of meter. The microcontrollers themselves get weather information from a combination of real-world sensors outside the home of [BuildComics] and from the internet, which allows for about as up-to-date information about the weather as one could gather first-hand.
The amount of customization of these old meters is impressive, and what’s even more impressive is the project’s final weight. [BuildComics] reports that it took two people just to lift it onto the wall mount, which is not surprising given the amount of iron in some of these old analog meters. And, although not as common in the real world anymore, these old antique meters have plenty of
repurposed uses beyond weather stations as well
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330227",
"author": "rok",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T21:49:52",
"content": "It´s a nice work interfacing all those analog meters, but unfortunately it just looks like “threw a bunch of meters on a rectangular wooden frame” and would look way better if it was more organized and labell... | 1,760,373,158.322491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/3d-printed-lenticular-lens-makes-3d-display/ | 3D Printed Lenticular Lens Makes 3D Display | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d display",
"lenticular"
] | [Bitluni] has been experimenting with resin printing lenses — in particular,
lenticular lenses
. You’ve probably seen lenticular lenses before in 3D greeting cards or children’s books. By presenting a slightly different image at different angles, your eyes perceive stereo vision giving the illusion of depth. You can see his results in the video below.
Honestly, even if you don’t want to make a display like this yourself, the demonstration of how a lenticular lens works using a laser is worth watching. Sure, you know in theory what’s going on, but seeing it visually exposed is great.
The display isn’t going to replace special effects in the next science fiction movie, but it is still pretty cool. A grid of 138 lenses and some software give a fairly credible 3D effect, at least as far as we can tell watching it on 2D YouTube and listening to his excitement upon trying it.
The final product fits in a cover that fits over a smartphone which drives the display. We were interested in the use of straight-up resin to make the back surface flat, which is an interesting trick.
Last time we looked at lenticular lenses, it was to
make things invisible
. We’ve also covered how they can make sort of
holograms
. | 32 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330203",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T20:54:43",
"content": "Don’t think I’ve ever seen such small and functional optical elements entirely 3d printed.. Not perfect, but I have to admit better than I expected as far as the video can show at least..",
"parent_... | 1,760,373,158.49544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/allan-mcdonalds-legacy-and-the-ethics-of-decision-making/ | Allan McDonald’s Legacy And The Ethics Of Decision-Making | Maya Posch | [
"Biography",
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Space"
] | [
"profiles in science"
] | The Space Shuttle
Challenger
disaster
on January 28, 1986 was a life-altering event for many, ranging from people who had tuned in to watch the launch of a Space Shuttle with America’s first teacher onboard, to the countless people involved in the manufacturing, maintenance and launching of these complex spacecraft. Yet as traumatizing as this experience was, there was one group of people for whom their dire predictions and warnings to NASA became suddenly reality in the worst way possible.
This group consisted of engineers at
Morton-Thiokol
, responsible for components in the Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters (SRBs). They had warned against launching the Shuttle due to the very cold weather, fearing that the O-ring seals in the SRBs at these low temperatures would not be able to keep the SRB’s hot gases from destroying the SRB and the Shuttle along with it.
Allan McDonald was one of these engineers who did everything they could to stop the launch. Until his death on March 6th of 2021, the experiences surrounding the
Challenger
disaster led him to become an outspoken voice on the topic of ethical decision-making, as well as a famous example of making the right decision, no matter how difficult the circumstances.
What Should Never Have Been
Allan J. McDonald was born on July 9, 1937, and grew up in Billings, Montana. He grew up the son of a grocer but did not follow in his father’s footsteps. After graduating from Montana State University with a degree in chemical engineering, he began to work for Morton-Thiokol in 1959. This company had made a name for itself in the production of solid rocket boosters (SRBs) and was contracted in the late 1950s for the
Minuteman
ICBM program.
As the Shuttle program got under way, Morton-Thiokol was contracted to produce the SRBs for the Space Shuttle in August of 1972, which saw McDonald among the engineers in charge of the Shuttle SRB program. By that time SRBs were familiar technology, and had its share of
opponents and proponents
. Boeing was among those who argued for liquid-fueled boosters, while even SRB proponent McDonnell Douglas stated in a 1971 report that they saw case burn-through, where hot gases escape along the side of the SRB, as a fatal scenario without recovery possible.
Diagram of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster field joint assembly. From the Rogers Commission report.
When comparing liquid-fueled and solid rockets at the time, it was found that SRBs overall were more reliable, which was a major concern with the manned Space Shuttle program. The issue of burn-through was thought to be sufficiently solved by using two O-ring seals at each joint between SRB segments. Unfortunately it was later found that flexing of the segment casing could occur during ignition, where the pressure inside the SRB would cause a gap to form between a seal and the segment.
This ‘joint rotation’ problem was seen as an issue by NASA engineers, who would write to the manager of the SRB program, George Hardy, to note their concerns. Despite this, the first Space Shuttle missions used this joint design, even after STS-2’s SRBs showed clear signs of the O-rings being eroded from hot gases passing by them. Since these SRBs were reusable, they were inspected after each recovery, with the SRBs used with the 1984 STS-41-D mission showing both the primary and secondary O-ring being degraded. With 1985’s STS-51-B mission (also flown by
Challenger
), it was found that hot gases had escaped past both O-rings, much like they would a year later.
Despite these joint issues and hot gas blow-by during launches being a well-known issue at NASA and Thiokol, no measures were taken to improve the design, leading to the fateful
Challenger
launch on that cold January 28 in 1986.
Guilt
The Space Shuttle’s SRBs were rated to launch in temperatures down to 4 °C (40 °F), yet temperatures on the targeted launch day were considerably below that, at a predicted −1 °C (30 °F), with overnight temperatures down to 18 °F (−8 °C) . On January 27, during the launch preparations of
Challenger
‘s tenth mission (STS-51-L), Thiokol engineers — including Allan McDonald — and managers discussed the weather conditions with NASA and Marshall Space Flight Center.
At this point Thiokol engineers were well-aware that the O-ring joint solution was far from ideal, and they pointed out that they could not guarantee the joints would even seal properly at temperatures below 54 °F (12 °C) as the rubber became less flexible and thus less able to seal the segment joints at those low temperatures. They argued for the launch to be postponed until temperatures increased.
The explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, seconds after the accident.
What happened next is unfortunately all too well-known. NASA managers continued the launch after Thiokol management relented and overrode the guidance from their engineers. These engineers, including lead engineer Allan McDonald,
Bob Ebeling
, and
Roger Boisjoly
thus found themselves watching the
Challenger
launch the next day, praying that nothing would happen, while dreading the worst.
During the Shuttle’s ascent, everything appeared nominal, with the Shuttle performing its normal maneuvers. It almost seemed like nothing would go wrong. Then within seconds Challenger disintegrated, with the two SRBs spiraling away from the remnants of the Space Shuttle and the main tank. For those watching on from the ground, there was nothing that could be done to save any of the seven souls onboard.
For the Thiokol engineers who had tried to warn NASA, this was devastating. For Ebeling, who had written a desperate memo about this issue in 1985, the grief and feelings of guilt
never went away
.
Not a Unique Case
During the subsequent investigation it was found that much like with previous launches, one of the seals had failed, and hot gases made their way outside of the SRB, near the struts holding it to the main tank. Initially a seal made of aluminium oxides from the SRB’s burned propellant sealed the gap, but after a sudden wind shear rattled the SRB, this temporary seal failed and the escaping hot gases were free to finish their destructive work. This is just what Thiokol’s engineers had feared, and something for which they had seen strong warnings on previously recovered SRBs.
President Reagan formed the
Rogers Commission
in June of 1986 to investigate the incident. The commission’s findings were that the O-ring design flaw lay at the root of the accident, while strongly criticizing the decision to launch. Their report concluded that:
… failures in communication … resulted in a decision to launch 51-L based on incomplete and sometimes misleading information, a conflict between engineering data and management judgments, and a NASA management structure that permitted internal flight safety problems to bypass key Shuttle managers
McDonald and Boisjoly were two of the Thiokol engineers who testified as witnesses for the commission. Their truthfulness led to McDonald being demoted at Thiokol, while Boisjoly resigned from his position at Thiokol. However, members of Congress learned of McDonald being sidelined and
threatened
Thiokol with exclusion from future NASA contracts. Thiokol management relented, resulting in McDonald being promoted to vice president, and put in charge of the redesign and re-qualification of the SRBs for future Shuttle missions.
None of this explains exactly why NASA was so adamant to launch, even if communication between engineers and upper management was poor, as found by the Rogers Commission. Especially after decades of clear concerns about the joint seals and clear evidence of pending disaster. For a situation where the safety of those involved should be paramount, one could call this decision to launch a callous disregard for human life.
The Price of a Life
The inside of Apollo 1’s capsule after the fire.
Sometimes the price of progress comes at a cost, as with
Apollo 1
, which saw unfortunate design decisions lead to the death of three people. Such accidents stand in stark contrast with accidents like the
Challenger
disaster, however. In hindsight, the Apollo 1 design was flawed, but mostly as a result of the rushed development during those days of the Space Race against the Soviet Union, unfortunate shortcuts were taken and painful lessons learned.
In the case of Challenger, there was no rushed development, but a supposedly finished orbiter with active sister spacecraft and many years of mission data that would — and did — reveal the weaknesses in the design. As the Rogers Commission concluded, the Space Shuttle
Challenger
disaster was ‘rooted in history’, with NASA subsequently trying to cover up having ignored the objections from engineers.
None of this is exclusive to the space industry either. As we have seen recently with the
Boeing 737 MAX
, and in the past with cases like the
Ford Pinto
and
Therac-25
radiation therapy machine, wilful and unethical decisions. By rushing a product to market, cutting corners to save costs, or by omitting certain testing or design elements, a situation is created in which people are likely to get injured, or even killed.
The Way Forward
Allan J. McDonald’s book on the Challenger disaster.
Both Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly would spend a lot of their time after the
Challenger
disaster telling people about what happened, and especially the circumstances that led up to the disaster. McDonald’s book on the disaster titled ‘Truth, Lies, and O-rings’ from 2009 goes into depth on what happened.
Both of them would speak at seminars and other events, to impress on people the need to do the right thing and make the right decisions, or as
McDonald put it
: ‘do the right thing for the right reason at the right time with the right people’. Regret for the things which one did are tempered by time, whereas the regret for things we did not do will always remain.
During the decades after the
Challenger
disaster, McDonald had to deal with the feelings of guilt over those lives that were lost, but came to realize that he had no reason to feel guilty. He, along with his fellow engineers had after all done the right thing, at the right time, with the right people.
Even though their pleas and objections fell on deaf ears, the guilt and responsibility was not theirs to bear. He, along with those who went ahead, now have left the responsibility to do the right thing with the next generations. All so that in the future there shall be no more engineers watching on as the disaster they feared unfolds in front of their very eyes. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330167",
"author": "Will",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T18:37:30",
"content": "“During the decades after the Challenger disaster, McDonald had to deal with the feelings of guilt over those lives that were lost, but came to realize that he had no reason to feel guilty. He, along with hi... | 1,760,373,160.551023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/perlin-noise-helps-make-trippy-typographic-art/ | Perlin Noise Helps Make Trippy Typographic Art | Donald Papp | [
"Art"
] | [
"generative",
"Perlin noise",
"processing",
"vector art"
] | Perlin noise is best explained in visual terms: if a 2D slice of truly random noise looks like even and harsh static, then a random 2D slice of Perlin noise will have a natural-looking blotchy structure, with smooth gradients. [Jacob Stanton]
used Perlin noise as the starting point for creating some interesting generative vector art
that shows off all kinds of different visuals. [Jacob] found that his results often exhibited a natural quality, with the visuals evoking a sense of things like moss, scales, hills, fur, and “other things too strange to describe.”
The art project [Jacob] created from it all is a series of posters showcasing some of the more striking examples, each of which displays an “A” modified in a different way. A few are shown here, and
a collection of other results is also available
.
Perlin noise was created by Ken Perlin while working on the original
Tron
movie in the early 80s, and came from a frustration with the look of computer generated imagery of the time. His work had a tremendous and lasting impact, and was instrumental to artists creating more natural-looking textures.
Processing
has a
Perlin noise function
, which was in fact [Jacob]’s starting point for this whole project.
Noise
, after all, is a wide and varied term. From making
generative art
to a
cone of silence for smart speakers
, it has many practical and artistic applications. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330132",
"author": "Jacob's Perlin Code End Point?",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T16:33:34",
"content": "So what was Jacob’s end point for this whole project? Open source code? Also it’s pretty clear what is more likely censored rather than simply not described.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,373,160.40731 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/our-curious-relationship-with-caffeine/ | Our Curious Relationship With Caffeine | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Lifehacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ADHD",
"caffeine",
"club mate",
"coffee",
"red bull"
] | If you were to paint a few stereotypes surrounding our community, where would you start? Maybe in apparel habits: the t-shirt from a tech conference, or the ubiquitous hoodie. Or how about leisure pursuits: gaming, or even D&D? There’s one thing I can think of that unites most of us, we have a curious affinity for caffeine. Is it a propensity for working into the dark of the night that’s responsible, or perhaps those of us with ADHD find the alertness helpful, but whatever it is we like our coffee and energy drinks. Rare is the hackerspace without a coffee machine and a fridge full of energy drinks, and I have lost count of the times I have been derided by the coffee cognoscenti among my peers for my being satisfied with a mug of mere instant. Deprived of my usual socialisation over the festive period by the pandemic, and contemplating my last bottle of Club-Mate as I drank it, I took a while to ponder on our relationship with this chemical.
The plant we most associate with caffeine, Coffea Arabica. Francisco Manuel Blanco (O.S.A.),
Public domain
.
Caffeine can be found as a constituent of a variety of plants native to tropical and sub-tropical regions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, in which it evolved as a chemical defence against pests. We were evidently not considered through their evolution to be pests as some insects or other plants are, because for us it’s a psychoactive stimulant in anything but extreme doses. Thus our ancestors who were first to chew a coffee bean, a kola nut, or a yerba maté leaf set our species off on a love affair with it that will probably last for millennia.
What Does Caffeine Do To Us?
In chemistry terms it’s a methylated xanthine, at its centre a figure-of-eight composed of both a six membered and a five membered ring joined together, each with two nitrogen atoms in their structure.. The exposed carbon atoms on the six membered ring each form a ketone group with an oxygen atom, and two of the nitrogen atoms on the six membered ring and one on the five membered ring each have a methyl group attached.
The chemical structure of a caffeine molecule. Vaccinationist,
Public domain
.
Caffiene’s similarity to the structure of adensosine — a substance that relaxes blood vessels — makes it bind to the adensosine receptors in our brains. Where adenosine is involved in inhibiting the brain’s activity as part of tiredness, the caffeine has the effect of causing alertness.
Reading research papers on its effect on the brain
(Paywalled paper) makes it appear as though this is just one of a scatter-gun of chemical effects, boosting dopamine production and also increasing electrical activity in the brain. We feel up to anything on caffeine not only because we are more alert, but also because our brains have become more capable while under its influence.
In my case I’m aware that
my affinity for caffeine has in part the function of self-medicating ADHD
. I have the characteristic extreme difficulty in concentration that can play havoc with my ability to get my work done, and having a significant quantity of caffeine in the morning transforms my productivity. It’s likely more than a few readers will share this, it seems the condition gives us a naturally low dopamine level to which the caffeine provides a boost. Were I to ask my doctor I could access
a range of stronger medications including members of the amphetamine family of compounds
, but for now a few cups of coffee or a Club-Mate when I can get it does the trick.
A Cup A Day, Or Is That Too Much?
As someone who in effect medicates using caffeine I thus have an acute sense of the relative strengths of different concoctions containing it. I know that a cup of instant coffee is less potent than one of brewed coffee, and which energy drinks do more than others. But how much caffeine do they really contain, and how much caffeine is too much caffeine? The last question is easy enough to answer, though it varies from person to person. Over a gram of the stuff is likely to make you feel pretty sick, and ten times that figure is likely to kill you. But few of us will carefully weigh out pure caffeine powder, so it’s better to start at the other end of the scale.
This British-market Red Bull can even carries a health advisory warning over its caffeine content.
There is no standard cup of coffee, but my cup of instant is likely to give me around 50 mg of caffeine and I can expect about twice that from an equivalent cup of a typical brewed coffee. Meanwhile a can of Coca-cola has 34 mg, while its caffeine-enhanced cousins have about 80mg per can, as does the slightly smaller can size of the UK version of Red Bull. Our favourite Club-Mate isn’t quite as strongly caffeinated as other energy drinks at 20mg per 100ml, but its larger 500ml bottle contains 100mg of caffeine.
So to do myself harm I would have to drink ten Club-Mates or drink ten cups of strong brewed coffee, but the reality is that even at the most laser-tinged evening at a hacker camp or the trendiest coffee bar I’m not going to manage that. It’s a surprise that a cup of a strong blend of brewed coffee will contain more caffeine than the energy drinks, but evidently it was a triumph of marketing that I believed otherwise. My three, maybe four instant coffees a day barely tip the scales at under 200mg, making me a relative lightweight in the caffeine stakes rather than the serial abuser I worried I might have become.
In my investigation of my culture’s most socially acceptable psychoactive addictive chemical I’ve discovered a few things I didn’t know about it, and taken a critical look at how I use it. That I’m addicted to it and that ADHD means I probably couldn’t do my job without it is beyond doubt, but like many in our community I think the benefits outweigh any other concerns. Now my biggest annoyance is that I can no longer stock up on imported energy drinks at my hackerspace due to the pandemic.
Coffee bean header image: MarkSweep,
Public domain
. | 109 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330099",
"author": "Ethan Waldo",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T15:19:07",
"content": "So what’s curiously not mentioned is caffeine is often a chemical doctors suggest be eliminated with some diagnosed medical conditions. If it takes so much to not be harmful, why is caffeine such a c... | 1,760,373,160.75339 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/high-altitude-balloon-tracker-does-landing-prediction-with-pi-pico/ | High-Altitude Balloon Tracker Does Landing Prediction With Pi Pico | Donald Papp | [
"gps hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"balloon",
"gps",
"HAB",
"high altitude balloon",
"landing",
"landing prediction",
"landing site",
"payload",
"pico",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | [Dave Akerman]’s ongoing high altitude balloon (HAB) work is outstanding, and we’re all enriched by the fact that he documents his work like he does. Recently, [Dave] wrote about
his balloon tracker based on the Raspberry Pi Pico
, whose capabilities brought a couple interesting features to the table.
In a way, HAB trackers have a fairly simple job: read sensors such as GPS and constantly relay that data to someone on the ground so that the balloon’s location can be tracked, and the hardware recovered when it ultimately returns to Earth. There are a lot of different ways to do this tracking, and one thing [Dave] enjoys is getting his hands on a new board and making a HAB tracker out of it. That’s exactly what he has done with the
Raspberry Pi Pico
.
Nothing builds familiarity like actually using a part, and the Pico had some useful things to contribute to a HAB tracker application. For one thing, the Pico has an onboard buck-boost converter that allows it to be powered from a relatively wide voltage range (~1.8 V to 5.5 V), so running it directly from batteries is both possible and desirable from a tracker perspective. But a really useful feature was possible thanks to the large amount of memory on the Pico: dynamic landing prediction.
[Dave] does landing prediction prior to launch based on environmental conditions, but it’s always better if the HAB tracker can also calculate its own prediction based on actual observed events and conditions. A typical microcontroller board like an Arduino doesn’t have enough memory to store the required data upon which to do such calculations, but the Pico does so easily. [Dave]’s new board transmits an updated landing site prediction along with all the rest of the telemetry, making the retrieval process much more reliable.
Want to see a completely different approach to HAB recovery?
Check out a payload guided by steerable parachutes
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330295",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2021-03-11T05:41:17",
"content": "Fascinating project! Seems like a very useful tool, I’ve always wanted to launch a weather balloon for near space photography but in the highly populated area I live recovery would be the most stressful asp... | 1,760,373,160.073056 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/10/esp8266-powered-receipt-printer-puts-restful-api-on-dead-trees/ | ESP8266-Powered Receipt Printer Puts RESTful API On Dead Trees | Mike Szczys | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"receipt printer",
"REST API",
"RESTful",
"thermal printer"
] | Taking his digital information into the real-world, [Davide Gironi] has
built his own note transcriber from a point-of-sale receipt printer and an ESP8266
.
You’ve seen these receipt printers at the order window of restaurants. A server puts in an order from any of the machines throughout the restaurant and a paper summary spits out for the chef line to start in on (and even cuts itself off from the roll). Why shouldn’t we have this convenience in our own lives?
The printer communicates using a variant of the Epson Standard Code for Printers, for which [Davide] has written a library and thankfully shared the code. Adding an ESP8266 using a couple voltage regulators and some passive components makes this wireless, except for power. It has all the fun bells and whistles to set up the WiFi credentials and once running, just push the button on the base and it’ll spit out your data.
But wait, where is that data coming from? The web-based settings page lets you configure a URI to the RESTful source of your choosing. (XKCD has one, don’t they?) It also lets you configure header, footer, error messages, and of course your
company
hacker logo.
One of our favorite receipt-printer moments was when Hackaday editor of yore [Eliot Phillips] brought a selfie receipt printer to Supercon. We couldn’t find any pictures of that one, so we’ll leave you with the excellent hack [Sam Zeloof] pulled off by
cramming one of these into a Polaroid camera
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6330179",
"author": "Eliot",
"timestamp": "2021-03-10T19:50:21",
"content": "Mike’s just to humble to post a sweet photo of himself on the main blog.https://twitter.com/szczys/status/1058533860261036033",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,160.02785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/teardown-go-warmer-usb-rechargeable-hand-heater/ | Teardown: Go Warmer USB Rechargeable Hand Heater | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"18650",
"battery bank",
"hand warmer",
"heater",
"microcontroller",
"usb power bank"
] | Under normal circumstances, if an electronic gadget in your pocket suddenly became hot to the touch, it would be cause for alarm. But not so with the Go Warmer. This lozenge shaped device is not only a USB power bank that can keep your mobile devices topped up, but is also doubles as a miniature heater that the manufacturer claims can bring its surface temperature up to 48 °C (120 °F) for several hours. You can hold in in your hand, put it in your pocket, maybe even sit on it if you’re particularly daring. The possibilities are endless, at least until the 4,000 mAh battery runs down.
For $14.99 USD, the Go Warmer certainly isn’t much of a deal when compared to other battery packs. Even if it does come with a swanky velveteen carrying pouch. But is it a good deal for one that can heat itself up
without
exploding? Let’s crack this metallic egg and find out.
Under the Skin
Since the whole point of this device is for it to get warm to the touch, I was glad to see they had the presence of mind to clad the Go Warmer with metal. But make no mistake, at just 0.5 mm thick, the two-part metallic outer shell isn’t structural. In fact, I’m sorry to say that there’s really no way to get inside the unit without doing unsightly damage to the easily bent plates and breaking off a few of the locking tabs.
With the case open, we can see the first of the heating pads.
Unfortunately, things don’t get much easier once you have the metal panels off. The red injection molded plastic frame is ridiculously strong, and the two sides are held together with eight clips that simply do not want to release. In the end I had to cut away some of the plastic to get the process going, and curse my way around the rest of the clips. After it finally popped open, I realized they’d even applied a liberal amount of glue for good measure. Seriously, if you don’t have an excellent reason to take one of these things apart, don’t.
Packed With Power
Poking and prodding at the frame of the Go Warmer was made all the more stressful by the assumption that on the other side of that bright red plastic was a lithium polymer pouch cell just looking for an excuse to blow up in my face. Each time a tool slipped, I was sure a spicy pillow was about to awaken on the workbench.
Note the adhesive on the top of the cells.
But thankfully, it turns out the Go Warmer is powered by a pair of 18560 cells put together into a neat little package. With proper insulation on the side of the cells and relatively beefy wires connecting them to the PCB, we might even allow ourselves to believe that whoever designed this little fellow actually knew what they were doing.
I was also pleased to see that the advertised 4,000 mAh figure appears to be legitimate, assuming the cells are halfway decent. To that end, forums are full of references to purple SZNS cells being a common sight in laptop battery packs and the like. Weighing in at the appropriate 45 grams per cell, I’m relatively sure these aren’t fakes and would potentially be worthy of salvage should you find a good deal on Go Warmers come Spring time. Though it does depend on how much work you’re willing to put into liberating them.
Two Brains in One Body
So we’ve got some metal side panels, a couple of little heating pads, and a pair of 18650s. Sure, wire those up with a simple switch and you’ll get something plenty hot. Thankfully, the Go Warmer is a bit smarter than that. Holding the button on the side cycles through the heater and power bank modes, and quick presses let you set the heat level. But how does it work?
Of the three chips on the PCB, only one has its markings intact: the
IP5305 by Injoinic Technology
. This is a complete power bank System-On-Chip that handles everything from driving status LEDs and the charging of the cells to the boost conversion up to 5 VDC.
As an all-in-one solution, the IP5305 only needs a single inductor and a handful of passives to get up and running. This seems like a handy enough chip that it might actually be worth salvaging from the board, though if you don’t mind waiting a month or two, they can be had for pennies on AliExpress.
But what about the two unmarked chips? We can surmise one is a voltage regulator based on the pin count and the fact it’s sitting between the battery and the rest of the board, so it stands to reason that the final 14-pin IC must be the microcontroller in charge of the heater aspect of the Go Warmer. After following some traces and a bit of buzzing with the multimeter, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out which pin was used for what.
There are a few interesting things to note here. Since the IP5305 was designed as a stand-alone device and has no provision for interfacing with other chips, the MCU is employing a bit of a hack by listening to two of its LED output pins to determine what the current battery and charge status is. Also note that the physical button on the Go Warmer is directly connected to the MCU, and the signal is only passed onto the
KEY
pin on the IP5305 when the software deems it necessary. This allows both chips to be controlled with a one button.
Even though both heaters are controlled simultaneously with a single pin connected to a MOSFET on the other side of the board, each one has its own independent NTC. Perhaps it’s taking an average temperature of both heaters, or maybe this is a safety feature so the power can be cut if one of the heaters starts getting hotter than expected. Snooping the sensor data and comparing that with the duty cycle of the MOSFET would give us a better idea of how everything is related, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the particularly bored reader.
Style Versus Substance
From a practical standpoint, the Go Warmer is fairly lacking. With a capacity of just 4,000 mAh it’s not a very good power bank, and the tiny heating pads used to warm up the metal casing seem far too small. Even with the device cranked up to its maximum output, it only felt lukewarm to the touch. Arguably it would be better than nothing if you were out in the cold, but that’s hardly a rave review.
On the other hand, the internals ended up being far more interesting and well put together than I anticipated. The proper 18650 cells were a pleasant surprise, and the designers pulled off a rather clever hack by slipping their own MCU between the device’s physical controls and the off-the-shelf power bank SoC. Previous hybrid gadgets we’ve seen
struggled to get their various functions working together in harmony
, so the team behind the Go Warmer should be commended for executing it so well; even if the concept itself was a bit hokey to begin with. | 31 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329796",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T15:31:37",
"content": "I admire the use of the word “hokey” in the last sentence. Nice write-up. And I’ll pass on getting one of these. (Not that I was feeling any overwhelming urge to start with).",
"parent_i... | 1,760,373,160.825537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/peek-into-this-synths-great-design-and-abandoned-features/ | Peek Into This Synth’s Great Design (And Abandoned Features) | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"555",
"dfm",
"KiCAD",
"kit",
"music",
"openscad",
"oskitone",
"polyphonic",
"synth",
"synthesizer"
] | [Tommy]’s
POLY555 is an analog, 20-note polyphonic synthesizer
that makes heavy use of 3D printing and shows off some clever design. The POLY555, as well as [Tommy]’s earlier synth designs, are based around the 555 timer. But one 555 is one oscillator, which means only one note can be played at a time. To make the POLY555 polyphonic, [Tommy] took things to their logical extreme and simply added multiple 555s, expanding the capabilities while keeping the classic 555 synth heritage.
The real gem here is [Tommy]’s writeup. In it, he explains the various design choices and improvements that went into the POLY555, not just as an instrument, but as a kit intended to be produced and easy to assemble. Good DFM (Design For Manufacturability) takes time and effort, but pays off big time even for things made in relatively small quantities. Anything that reduces complexity, eliminates steps, or improves reliability is a change worth investigating.
For example, the volume wheel is not a thumbwheel pot. It is actually a 3D-printed piece attached to the same potentiometer that the 555s use for tuning; meaning one less part to keep track of in the bill of materials. It’s all a gold mine of tips for anyone looking at making more than just a handful of something, and a peek into the hard work that goes into designing something to be produced. [Tommy] even has a short section dedicated to abandoned or rejected ideas that didn’t make the cut, which is educational in itself. Want more? Good news!
This isn’t the first time we’ve been delighted with [Tommy]’s prototyping and design discussions
.
POLY555’s design files (OpenSCAD for enclosure and parts, and KiCad for schematic and PCB) as well as assembly guide are
all available on GitHub
, and STL files can be found on
Thingiverse
. [Tommy] sells partial and complete kits as well, so there’s something for everyone’s comfort level. Watch the POLY555 in action in the video, embedded below. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329724",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T12:33:07",
"content": "I gotta say it, for fear no one will: Coulda done it with 556’s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6329748",
"author": "Jimbob",
... | 1,760,373,160.272899 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/09/full-diy-a-unix-clone-on-ttl/ | Full DIY: A UNIX Clone On TTL | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ttl",
"TTL computer",
"unix",
"UNIX clone"
] | Making a CPU or indeed a whole computer system from scratch using discrete logic chips is by no means an unusual project, but it’s still one that requires quite a lot of technical ability and understanding of how computers work. Similarly, writing a UNIX-like operating system from scratch is something that’s been done more than once, but which definitely puts the author in an exclusive breed. Creating a CPU and computer system from discrete logic and then writing a UNIX-like OS for it? That’s definitely something new, but here’s [RobotMan2412] with both
CPU
and
operating system
to prove it!
The GR8CPU as he calls it is an 8-bit design with a 16-bit address space, making it equivalent to a typical mid-to-late 1970s 8-bit chip. He’s on revision 3 of the processor, and even makes the bold suggestion that it might be the most complex breadboard CPU ever made. That’s impressive enough, but to add a UNIX-like operating system makes it special.
While he has a real GR8CPU, it appears he’s also written an emulator with access to a disk filesystem, and it’s on this that he shows us the OS running. Don’t expect an all-singing all-dancing desktop OS here, instead it’s a kernel and very basic command line that’s just about able to run a Hello World. The kernel is hand-coded in assembler and is about 5 kB in size.
We look forward to seeing more of this project, and hope maybe he’ll one day soon publish the source. As a reminder that this is a perfectly capable platform for the job, here’s
the original UNIX running on a vintage DEC PDP7
. | 27 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329678",
"author": "Duncan",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T09:35:46",
"content": "Wow! This is a impressive achievement, hats off to [RobotMan2412]!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6329679",
"author": "nu2eivuB",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,160.47046 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/arduino-micro-pushes-animal-crossings-buttons/ | Arduino Micro Pushes Animal Crossing’s Buttons | Stephen Ogier | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro micro",
"atmega32u4",
"button pusher",
"Nintendo Switch",
"video game automation"
] | Repetitive tasks in video games often find a way of pushing our buttons. [Facelesstech] got tired of mashing “A” while catching shooting stars in Animal Crossing, so
he set out to automate his problem away
. After briefly considering rigging up a servo to do the work for him, he recalled a previous effort that
used an Arduino Teensy to automate a bowling mini-game in
Zelda: Breath of the Wild
and decided to use a microcontroller to catch stars for him.
[Facelesstech] programmed an Arduino Pro Micro to fake controller button presses. It starts with a couple of presses to identify itself to the Switch, before generating an endless stream of button presses that automatically catch every shooting star. Hooking it up is easy—an on-the-go adapter allows the Switch’s USB-C port to connect directly to the Arduino’s Micro-USB port, even supplying power!
[Facelesstech] also designed a compact 3D-printed case that packages up the Arduino Pro Micro along with an ISP header for easy updating. The case even lets the Arduino’s power LED shine through so you know that it’s working!
If you, too, need to automate video game button-pushing, [Facelesstech] has kindly uploaded the source code and 3D designs for you to try. If you’d prefer something a little more low-tech, perhaps you might try a
mechanical button pusher
. | 21 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329708",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T11:47:41",
"content": "This really screams there is something horribly wrong with game design…Two of these projects on HAD in almost no time…If the game requires that level of pointless spam ‘A’ is it actually a ‘game’ – you ... | 1,760,373,160.605067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/laser-zap-that-mosquito/ | Laser Zap That Mosquito | Al Williams | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"laser",
"mosquito",
"opencv",
"pest control",
"raspberry pi"
] | When we first heard of [Ildar Rakhmatulin’s] plan to use
OpenCV on a Raspberry Pi to detect mosquitos and then zap them with a 1 watt laser
, we thought it was sort of humorous. However, the paper points out that 700,000 people die each year from mosquito bites — we didn’t verify that, but according to the article that’s twice the number of people murdered each year. So the little pests are pretty effective assassins.
It looks as though the machine has been built, at least in a test configuration. A galvanometer aims the death ray using mirrors, and with the low power and lossy mirrors the mosquitos can only be a small distance from the machine — about a foot.
Even so, the paper claims they could neutralize two mosquitos per second. We wonder how many of them survived but were blinded. There were several different detection algorithms in Python but even the best algorithms didn’t track 100% and the actual kill rate of mosquitos was quite low, topping out at 15%.
Clearly, this has some work to do, but if you decide to tackle it, the research will be invaluable. There was talk of using a different camera lens to get a larger volume of detection and, of course, a more powerful laser. If the tracking algorithm could be pushed to a smaller controller, the system could be light enough and power efficient enough to fly on a drone. However, we were unclear how you’d protect non-mosquitos from being hit with the laser of death. While a 1-watt laser might not kill you, even a 1 mW laser can produce effects on your eye
greater than staring into the bright sun
.
This could be more human than the last method we saw for
exterminating the pests
. Of course, as any time traveler will tell you, the best time to
stop an assassin is before they are born
. | 98 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329598",
"author": "Drew",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T03:29:39",
"content": "The problem with this isn’t the laser. The issue is seeing the mosquitos against any background that isn’t white, and at a distance of more than a few feet. I built a turret that could easily point at a mosq... | 1,760,373,160.202908 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/one-ring-light-to-fool-them-all-into-thinking-youre-well-rested/ | One Ring Light To Fool Them All Into Thinking You’re Well-Rested | Kristina Panos | [
"LED Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"lighting",
"RGBW",
"ring light"
] | We know you’re beautiful, but maybe that cheap web camera from 2007 doesn’t always project your best image. Although web cameras are starting to come back down from the pandemic price gouging days, you could just
build yourself a ring light and go from there
, because better light may be all you need to look great.
Of course, this isn’t going to be cheaper than just buying a ring light, but if you already have a Circuit Playground and 3D printer lying around, you’re about halfway to owning one that’s much cooler than anything you can buy. The only other major hardware is the RGBW LED ring, the slide pots that adjust the light color, and the clicky little button that exits out of Zoom calls.
The business part is made to mount right over the camera, so the only part that has a footprint is the control box. No need to make space for a tripod or another boom. If you’re worried about staring into a bunch of lights, there’s a diffusing ring among the print files. We think this setup looks great, especially since [Southern Fried Science] built a light guide into the enclosure so those LED on the Circuit Playground don’t go to waste.
Do you just wish you had a more satisfying way to leave Zoom calls? If there’s a stud near your desk,
it doesn’t get much more satisfying than a pull chain
. If the only stud around is you, then
use a giant mushroom button
.
Via
adafruit | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329669",
"author": "tilk",
"timestamp": "2021-03-09T09:01:14",
"content": "One thing missing here is using a more useful color space than RGB to control the light’s hue. Using RGB for manual control is quite bad, as changing any single parameter messes up every sensible property yo... | 1,760,373,160.87221 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/a-soyuz-space-clock-replica/ | A Soyuz Space Clock Replica | Chris Lott | [
"Space"
] | [
"Clocks",
"reproduction",
"retro",
"soviet",
"Soyuz"
] | If you like the retro look of old Soviet space hardware, then this
replica of the model 774H Soyuz digital clock
by [David Whitty] might be the perfect accessory for your desk. Forgoing the original stack of ten jam-packed circuit boards, [David] used an Arduino, a GPS receiver, and a handful of other common parts to create a convincing reproduction.
Out with the old, in with the new
He also made some functional changes to make it better suited as an ordinary clock for us earthbound folk. If you want to take on this project yourself, be prepared for some real metalwork. No 3D printing filament was harmed in building this project. It’s based on a pair of heavily modified Hammond cast aluminum enclosures, with over 1 kg of lead ballast added to give it the appropriate heft of the original. The GPS patch antenna is cleverly hidden on the rear interface connector, but a discrete hole for a USB connector gives away the secret that this isn’t an original. The software (free for non-commercial use) and build notes are available on his
GitHub repository
.
We covered [Ken Shirriff]’s fascinating dive into the guts of a
real Soyuz digital clock
back in January. If old space hardware is your thing, you should definitely check out
this teardown
by [CuriousMarc] of the 653B, the 1960s-era electro-mechanical predecessor to the 774H. Thanks to [CuriousMarc] for bringing this project to our attention. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329534",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T22:31:36",
"content": "Reading the front page blurb “Forgoing the original stack of ten jam-packed circuit..” I was wincing as I came in thinking I was going to read “arduino” but let go a sigh of relief when I saw it at l... | 1,760,373,160.929086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/framed-pong-is-picture-perfect/ | Framed PONG Is Picture Perfect | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"chips ahoy",
"fpga",
"pong",
"TFT display",
"TTL chips"
] | How cool would it have been if arcade cabinets had acrylic panels all along that let you gaze upon the field of TTL chips within? When [Jürgen Müller] scored the innards of an original 1972 PONG machine, that’s exactly what the plan was:
build a suitable cabinet that re-imagines PONG as a sleek and stunning work of art
.
Instead of trying to cram a CRT in that nice mahogany cabinet, [Jürgen] opted to use an 8″ TFT screen. But get this: [Jürgen] built a Spartan 6 FPGA-based upscaler to adds the scan lines, blur, and afterglow that make it look like the classic PONG experience.
[Jürgen] also built an interface board that amplifies the sound, splits the video out into sync and brightness for the upscaler, and provides 5 V to the PONG circuit board. [Jürgen] decided to circumvent the board’s native voltage regulator in the name of keeping things cool.
[Jürgen] says the project’s web page is in a preliminary stage right now with more information to come. We sure hope that includes a video of it in action. For now, you can check out the files for the interface PCB, the FPGA board, and a list of the fonts.
Should you ever get tired of classic PONG,
try playing it in one dimension
.
Thanks for the tip, [Anonymous]. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329504",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T19:47:12",
"content": "Preserving history and interactive art, sweet!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6329511",
"author": "RB",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T19:54:44"... | 1,760,373,161.054674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/what-can-a-30-usb-spectrum-analyser-do-for-me/ | What Can A $30 USB Spectrum Analyser Do For Me? | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"LTDZ",
"spectrum analyser",
"USB spectrum analyser"
] | As mildly exotic silicon has become cheaper and the ingenuity of hardware hackers has been unleashed upon it, it’s inevitable that some once-unattainably expensive instruments will appear as cheap modules from China. The LTDZ spectrum analyser on the bench today covers 35 MHz to 4.4 GHz, and has a USB interface and tracking source. It has been available from all the usual outlets for a while now either as a bare PCB or in a metal box about the size of a pack of cards.
We’ve already taken a look at the $50 VNA
, and this time it’s the turn of the $30 spectrum analyser, in the form of a little device that I succumbed to while browsing Banggood.
I ordered one, along with an attenuator and RF bridge for SWR measurements, and after the usual wait for postage my anonymous grey package arrived and it was time to give it a look and consider its usefulness. It’s a design derived from one published in Germany’s Funkamateur (“amateur radio”) magazine early in the last decade, and unscrewing the end plate to slide out the board from its extruded enclosure we can see what makes it tick.
How Much RF Test Equipment Hardware Does $30 Get you?
Its operation is surprisingly simple, in effect a very wideband radio receiver and signal source that can sequentially check signal levels across its range under the control of a microcomputer. On the board is an STM32F103 microcontroller that drives a pair of
ADF4351
PLL frequency synthesisers for tracking and receive local oscillator respectively, an
IAM-81008
receive mixer, and an
AD8307
logarithmic amplifier to measure the received level. It’s reported as having a receive bandwidth in the region of 150 kHz, but I lack the instrumentation to measure that. On the rear edge of the board is a micro-USB socket, a couple of LEDs, and a “Key” switch to enable the tracking oscillator, and on the front are a pair of SMA sockets for RF input and output.
This product has caused [DL4JAL] something of a headache, we’d like to ask you don’t add to that if you use it.
Hardware-wise all seems in order, but it’s a different tale on the software side.
The history is related by [VMA’s Satellite Blog]
, and is a salutary tale of how cheaply cloned hardware can have unfortunate consequences. The WinNWT and LinNWT software used by the original Funkamateur design came from [Andreas Lindenau, DL4JAL], and was available from his website. The Funkamateur design was improved upon by other radio amateurs around the world, including a Chinese amateur [BG7TBL] who produced the design I have on my bench. When this was taken up by manufacturers and sold in volume, [DL4JAL] found himself fielding unsustainable levels of support queries. He thus withdrew the original NWT4 software from his website.
If you buy one of these you will almost certainly be offered a download from the vendor. In my case I couldn’t find a Linux version, and tried the NWT4000 software which worked with my spectrum analyser despite claims to the contrary. To respect his wishes we’ll not put a link to his website here, but if you use his software of whatever version on one of these units we would like to request that you do not trouble him for support. Happily the [DL4JAL] software isn’t the only game in town, with both
VMA Simple Spectrum Analyser
and
SNA Sharp
being readily available alternatives. They are however both Windows-only, and the former requires a paid activation key for long-term use.
When You Have A Spectrum Analyser, Everything Is An RF Source
The not-very-crowded FM broadcast spectrum of rural Central England.
Once I had my device plugged in and detected by the software, it was time to calibrate it. This process simply generates a record of the device’s performance while directly reading its tracking generator, allowing the software to create a flat baseline. Calibration involves running a scan first with tracking source connected to the input through an attenuator, then directly. Once this has been done it is then possible to read a flat line across the frequency range without any test devices connected. To my shame, it took me a while to realise that pressing the “Key” button was necessary to enable the tracking generator.
So, I have a spectrum analyser here on my bench, what next? Of course the first thing was to plug in an antenna and take a look at the off-air spectrum. I could home in on the FM band and see all the local stations that you’d find in a small British town, and I could see the TV multiplex transmissions, the home WiFi, and my mobile phone when I made a call. Having a new toy sends you scurrying around the house in search of radio sources, so I can confirm that variously a UHF remote, a DECT handset, and my Baofeng handheld radio all produce satisfying spikes on the graph.
Only one of these spikes is supposed to be there in any quantity.
It’s all very well to have a spectrum analyser to look at the pretty spikes, but it’s time to do something useful. The most obvious thing to try would be to characterise an antenna using the RF bridge, but sadly with most of my radio stuff in storage I don’t have a suitably narrow-band antenna to measure.
Instead I can check the spectral purity of my Baofeng transceiver, and for that all I need is the attenuator. The procedure is simple enough, connect the Baofeng’s antenna output through the attenuator to the spectrum analyser input, and take a spectrum reading. My back-of-the-envelope reckoning tells me that with the transmit power on the 100 mW “low” setting, the 20dB attenuator should be enough to reduce the level so as not to harm the analyser, and its input resistor should be capable of taking 100 mW for a short time. Setting it up in this way and pressing the transmit button, I could instantly see why there is some concern about the filtering on these cheaper radios. It has quite a few spurious spikes in the space between the 435 MHz fundamental and the first harmonic, then particularly strong subsequent harmonics. You get what you pay for in a transmitter.
So for $30, I seem to have picked up a useful little instrument that’s more than a toy and that can do some useful RF tasks on my bench. The $30 price tag makes itself felt though in that it has nowhere near the sensitivity and selectivity of its more expensive brethren, and its 35 MHz lower limit is too high for investigating noise emissions. Meanwhile the software has some availability issues over which we sympathise with its author, and we can’t help wishing that it had an open-source option available. For $30, it was worth it, but for much more I’d have to ask myself whether I would think the same. Perhaps for the lower frequencies in particular,
a TinySA
might be a better purchase. | 36 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329492",
"author": "dlcarrier",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T19:06:28",
"content": "The 4.4 GHz max is impressive, but at 150 KHz of bandwith, there’s not much worth looking at, in those higher bands.A $20 RTL2832U based SDR, on the other hand, usually has a 1.76 GHz max, but with mult... | 1,760,373,161.007736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/decapping-components-hack-chat-with-john-mcmaster/ | Decapping Components Hack Chat With John McMaster | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"chemical",
"decapping",
"delayering",
"die",
"Hack Chat",
"ic",
"lapping",
"reverse engineering",
"silicon"
] | Join us on Wednesday, March 10 at noon Pacific for the
Decapping Components Hack Chat
with
John McMaster
!
We treat them like black boxes, which they oftentimes are, but what lies beneath the inscrutable packages of electronic components is another world that begs exploration. But the sensitive and fragile silicon guts of these devices can be hard to get to, requiring destructive methods that, in the hands of a novice, more often than not lead to the demise of the good stuff inside.
To help us sort through the process of getting inside components, John McMaster will stop by the Hack Chat. You’ll probably recognize John’s work from Twitter and YouTube, or perhaps from his
SiliconPr0n.org
website, home to beauty shots of some of the chips he has decapped. John is also big in the reverse engineering community, organizing the
Mountain View Reverse Engineering meetup
, a group that meets regularly to discuss the secret world of components. Join us as we talk to John about some of the methods and materials used to get a look inside this world.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 10 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. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329450",
"author": "zombie",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T17:12:40",
"content": "> If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.Just use UTC and on weekends GMT if you want to confuse your readers!That’d make life easier for all evryone!",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,161.099323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/a-scientist-made-an-artificial-black-hole-in-the-lab-and-you-wont-believe-what-happened-next/ | A Scientist Made An Artificial Black Hole In The Lab, And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next | Dan Maloney | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"acoustic",
"black hole",
"gravity",
"hawking radiation",
"laser",
"phonon",
"photon",
"quantum physics"
] | OK, that was a little click-baity, but then again, so was the announcement this week that
a scientist had confirmed Hawking radiation with a lab-grown black hole
. It sure got our attention, at least.
As it turns out, the truth is both less and more than meets the eye. The article above was eventually edited to better reflect the truth that, alas, we have not yet found a way to create objects so massive that even light cannot escape them. Instead, physicist [Jeff Steinhauer] and colleagues at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed an acoustic model of black holes, which is what was used to observe the equivalent of Hawking radiation for the first time. Hawking radiation is the theoretical exception to the rule that nothing makes it out of a black hole and would imply that black holes evaporate over time. The predicted radiation would be orders of magnitude weaker than the background radiation, though, making it all but impossible to detect.
That’s where [Steinhauer]’s sonic black holes come in. In these experiments, phonons, packets of mechanical vibrations that stand in for photons, are trapped in a fast-moving stream of fluid. The point in the stream where its speed straddles the local speed of sound is the equivalent to a real black hole’s event horizon; phonons inside that boundary can never escape. Except, of course, for the sonic equivalent of Hawking radiation, which the researchers found after 97,000 attempts.
When we first stumbled upon this story, we assumed a lab-grown black hole, even an acoustic analog, would take a CERN’s-worth of equipment to create. It turns out to be far simpler than that; [Steinhauer], in fact,
built his black hole machine singlehandedly from relatively simple equipment
. The experiments do require temperatures near absolute zero and a couple of powerful lasers, so it’s not exactly easy stuff; still, we can’t help but wonder if sonic black holes are within the reach of the DIY community. Paging
[Ben Krasnow]
and
[Sam Zeloof]
, among others.
[Featured image credit: Nitzan Zohar, Office of the Spokesperson, Technion] | 53 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329424",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T16:24:03",
"content": "Just think if Hawking radiation could be tapped as a power source.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6329472",
"author": "Shannon",
... | 1,760,373,161.200897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/sea-level-how-do-we-measure-global-ocean-levels-and-do-rising-oceans-change-that-benchmark/ | Sea Level: How Do We Measure Global Ocean Levels And Do Rising Oceans Change That Benchmark? | Adam Zeloof | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"altitude",
"global warming",
"mars",
"moon",
"ocean research",
"oceanography",
"sea level"
] | Every summer you go down the shore, but lately you’ve begun to notice that the beach seems narrower each time you visit. Is that the sea level rising, or is the sand just being swept away? Speaking of sea levels, you keep hearing that they rise higher every year — but how exactly is that measured? After all, you can’t exactly use a ruler. As it turns out, there are a number of clever systems in place that can accurately measure the global sea level down to less than an inch and a half.
Not only are waves always rippling across the ocean’s surface, but tides periodically roll in and out, making any single instantaneous measurement of sea level hopelessly inaccurate. Even if you plan to take hundreds or thousands of measurements over the course of weeks or months, taking the individual measurements is still difficult. Pick a nice, stable rock in the surf, mark a line on it, and return every hour for two weeks to hold a tape measure up to it. At best you’ll get within six inches on each reading, no matter what you’ll get wet, and at worst the rock will move and you’ll get a damp notebook full of useless numbers. So let’s take a look at how the pros do it.
Expensive Rulers
As it turns out, measuring sea level with a ruler isn’t that far off — but professional oceanographers have really nice ones called
tide gauges
, which live in aptly-named tide houses. The simplest tide gauge is a long tube sitting in the water, anchored in place. The tube has small openings below the water level that allow water to flow in and out. Also referred to as a stilling well, this device averages out small movements and waves, allowing for a much more calm and accurate measurement against a series of graduations inside the tube.
An old-fashioned tide house, courtesy of
NOAA
Of course, manually making all these measurements is tedious work, and today there are computerized methods for recording tide levels. Even so, some tide houses had automated recording systems as early as 1830. These systems consisted of a float in the stilling well, which moved a “pen” by way of rope and pulley. Every six minutes, the pen would mark the tide level on paper, much in the way an old seismometer works.
Over the years, the stilling well has evolved into the sounding tube — rather than a float on a rope, the sounding tube sends an audio pulse down the tube and measures the time it takes for the pulse to bounce off the water surface and return to a sensor. Recently, NOAA has developed a new system that uses microwave radar to measure the water level. Microwave sensors don’t need a stilling well- they can be mounted to a structure that sits above the water. This is a massive advantage, because servicing the sensor is much easier if you don’t need to don a wetsuit and air tank. In the coming years, NOAA is planning to transition it’s acoustic measurement stations to this new microwave technology.
So, if you can measure sea level without ever touching the water, from how far away can you measure, exactly?
Send In The Satellites
As it turns out, you can take measurements from pretty far away — about 830 miles away, to be exact.
Courtesy of
NASA/JPL
In 1992, an Ariane 4 rocket hurtled up from the Guiana Space Center to deliver the
TOPEX/Poseidon satellite
into orbit. The satellite carried an impressive array of instruments including two radar altimeters, a microwave radiometer, GPS receivers, and a laser retro-reflector array. The GPS system was able to pinpoint the satellite’s location to within an inch, and was the first system to demonstrate that GPS satellites could be used to locate another spacecraft rather than only terrestrial targets.
The TOPEX/Poseidon system was groundbreaking for a number of reasons. Not only was it able to measure sea level to an incredible degree of accuracy (1.5 inches), but it was the first mission to map the Earth’s tides. It mapped currents across the ocean, and gathered valuable data that improved our understanding of climate change, weather, and even the Earth’s gravitational field.
Although the satellite was shut down in 2006 after malfunctioning, its mission was taken over by Jason-1, which was launched in 2001 to supplement TOPEX/Poseidon’s measurements. Jason-2 followed, and in 2016 the mantle was taken up by Jason-3.
We know that these satellites do a great job of measuring the sea level, but what exactly are they measuring it against?
So Is Sea Level Zero?
Well yes… and no. It depends on your reference point. If you look on any topographical map, you’ll notice that elevations are reported in height above (or occasionally, below) sea level. Pilots often report altitudes in AMSL, or Above Mean Sea Level. Mean sea level is obtained by time-averaging the still water level (SWL) to remove cyclical effect of daily tides. SWL is simply what can be measured with a tide gauge, the water level with sea motions such as wind waves smoothed out. This works well enough for measuring the elevation of things that aren’t, well, the ocean, but we run into a problem if we try to measure the ocean in terms of itself. This is where we need other references to measure against.
The satellite-based instruments report sea level with respect to the WGS-84 Reference Ellipsoid, defined by the
TOPEX/Poseidon Data User’s Handbook
as the “the first-order definition of the non-spherical shape of the Earth as an ellipsoid.” This is also the baseline GPS receivers use to convey elevation data. Another helpful reference surface is the geoid — the theoretical shape that the Earth’s ocean would make if it were free from the external influences of the Sun and other celestial bodies, only acted upon by the gravity and rotation of the Earth itself.
Does Mars Have a “Sea Level”?
This is all well and good for Earth with its vast oceans, but how is elevation measured on Mars (or other planets, for that matter) where there is no sea to reference?
If you want to measure a mountain on Mars, you better bring a barometer and a calculator. Zero elevation is defined as the isobar where the atmospheric pressure is equal to 610.5 Pa (for reference, “sea level” on earth has an atmospheric pressure of 101.5 kPa). Though seemingly selected at random, 610.5 Pa is the triple point of water on the red planet — that is, the pressure at which water can exist in its solid, liquid, and gaseous states simultaneously. From that, and a reference ellipsoid similar to the one we use for the Earth, the elevation of various geographic features is measured by laser altimeters affixed to an orbiting satellite such as the Mars Global Surveyor.
Let’s take a look at the Moon now, where the “atmospheric” pressure is effectively zero (okay, there’s some gas there but the pressure is around
Pa). The Mars method won’t work here, since there’s no atmosphere to speak of. To establish the Moon’s reference ellipsoid, scientists determined its average diameter and set that as the zero. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter then can measure the relative altitude of the lunar surface with respect to that datum.
Back To The Beach
So, back to our initial quandary — what exactly is causing that receding shoreline you notice year after year? On average, the global sea level rises annually by about 0.14 inches, so while global warming is a very real concern you probably aren’t noticing its effects on the shoreline one year to the next. That leaves coastal erosion — the gradual removal of sand, rocks, and soil by the ocean. It’s a good thing then, if much of the coastline is so unstable, that we have tide houses and satellites to accurately track changes in the global sea level. That rock you tried to measure against is all but guaranteed to move. | 34 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329401",
"author": "tomkcook",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T15:26:05",
"content": "Coastal erosion is in fact not the biggest influence on perceived sea level and waterline location; estuary silting and the sea washing material up onto the coast is increasing land area faster than sea ... | 1,760,373,161.713498 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/3d-printing-90-deg-overhangs-with-non-planar-slicing/ | 3D Printing 90° Overhangs With Non-Planar Slicing | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"3d model slicing",
"non-planar 3D printing",
"non-planar layer FDM"
] | When slicing a model for 3D printing, the part is divided into a stack of flat, 2D layers. But there’s an alternative in the form of non-planar slicing, where the layers can follow 3D curves. [Rene K. Mueller] took this a step further and successfully used
non-planar slicing to print 90° overhangs on a normal Cartesian FDM printer
.
Non-planar layers
have been around for a while, but were generally limited to creating smooth curves without layer lines. The idea of using the technique for overhangs had been floating around in [Rene]’s head for a while, and he was spurred to action after seeing the
rotating tilted nozzle printer
featured here on Hackaday. The idea is only to have the outer edge of each layer overhang, by making each layer slope downward toward the overhang. [Rene] programmed a conic slicer algorithm for this purpose, which splits the model into dome-shaped layers, like an onion.
He did a lot of testing and documented the results in detail. Conical slices were compared with tilted slices, which are also used for belt 3D printers. Both have some geometric limitations. Tilted slices can only print the overhang in one direction, but conical slices can do this in all directions, allowing it to create a mushroom-like shape without any support. The limitation is that it can only print inward or outward from a central point. More complex geometry must be segmented, and each sub-volume sliced separately. The slicing angle is also limited by the shape of the print head, to avoid it crashing into the print.
We think this technique has a lot of potential for widespread use, especially since it is compatible with most existing FDM printers. It is still a work in progress, but support has already been added for Slic3r and
Prusa Slicer
. We look forward to seeing how it develops and gets adopted. | 28 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329368",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T12:47:14",
"content": "Do you use OpenSCAD to simulate g-code? :-) Cool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6329429",
"author": "Rene K. Mueller",
"timesta... | 1,760,373,161.772221 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/08/avr-configurable-custom-logic-as-a-frequency-divider-at-4x-chips-clock-speed/ | AVR Configurable Custom Logic As A Frequency Divider At 4x Chip’s Clock Speed | Mike Szczys | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"AVR",
"AVR128DA28",
"ccl",
"frequency divider",
"microchip",
"programmable logic"
] | What a time to be alive when you can find inexpensive microcontrollers that come with programmable(ish) logic that can operate independently of the system clock. [David Johnson-Davies] recently built a proof of concept using the Configurable Custom Logic (CCL) that is available in some of the newer AVR microcontroller designs. It’s a simple implementation,
a set of frequency dividers that blink three LEDs with up to a 90 MHz input signal
. But the simplicity is the reason to love his write-up — you can wrap your head around it right away.
There are four lookup table (LUTs) used to form the frequency divider. Think of these like a NAND or XOR gate, but you get to decide how the output truth tables will perform. The output is fed into a sequencer which can be configured as a D/JK flip-flop or a D/RS latch, plus you can specify the signal edge, and of course define the clock source. An interesting trick here is to hold the G input of both D flip-flops high by feeding them LUTs set to all ones. Note that the output of the first divider (PA3) is feeding the external input (PD2) of the second divider.
While the CCL is configured using the C code you flash to the microcontroller, it’s a hardware peripheral capable of operating independent of the chip’s system clock. The AVR128DA28 that’s used here tops out at 24 MHz (double that if you use the PLL) but [David] got reliable results from his clock divider feeding a signal as high as 90 MHz to the input pin. Of course you have the option of feeding internal clock signals to the CCL, but that wouldn’t seem nearly as interesting here. For the demo, [David] is actually toggling an IO pin which is connected to PA2 as the external input for the logic. Make sure you click through to his write-up linked above as he does an excellent job of walking through the sample code (just a couple-dozen lines to set this all up). Here’s
the datasheet for this chip
(PDF, page 447 for pertinent registers) and for a deeper dive
the appnote on CCL
(PDF).
So what is this all good for? We already saw an answer to that question back in January when
[SM6VFZ] used the CCL peripheral to build a software-defined switch-mode converter
. How awesome is that? | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329335",
"author": "Alex Rossie",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T10:16:39",
"content": "I’ve never utilised this and it always seemed easier to achieve the task in software but between this and switch mode power supplies this is pretty handy.I’ve skipped this section in the datasheet for... | 1,760,373,161.635164 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/a-tiny-tube-amp-for-not-a-lot/ | A Tiny Tube Amp For Not A Lot | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"guitar amp",
"headphone amp",
"tube",
"tube audio"
] | At the extreme budget end of tube audio lie single-tube amplifiers usually using very cheap small-signal pentodes. They’ve appeared here before in various guises, and a fitting addition to those previous projects comes from [Kris Slyka].
It’s a classic circuit with a transformer output
, and it provides enough amplification to drive a pair of headphones or even a speaker at low levels.
The fairly conventional circuit of the tube amplifier.
Most tube enthusiasts will instantly recognize the anode follower circuit with a transformer in the anode feed through which the output is taken. The tube works in Class A, which means that it’s in its least efficient mode but the one with the least distortion. The transformer itself isn’t an audio part, but a small mains transformer taken from a scrap wall wart. It serves not only for isolation, but also to transform the high impedance output from the tube into a low impedance suitable for driving a headphone or speaker.
The HT voltage is a relatively low 24 V, but it still manages to drive headphones acceptably. Speaker levels require a pre-amp, but even then it’s likely that this circuit is pushing the tube beyond what it’s capable of with a speaker. The more it operates towards the edge of its performance envelope the more distortion it will generate and the worse a sound it will produce. This isn’t such a problem in a guitar application as here, but hi-fi enthusiasts may find it to be too much. It would be interesting to subject it as a headphone amplifier to a series of audio tests to evaluate the effect of a mains transformer over a dedicated audio one.
Last year we took
a very in-depth look at the commonly-available Chinese kit pre-amps
that use a similar anode-follower circuit but without the transformer. We’ve also seen
a similar amp that uses an op-amp as an impedance converter
, as well as a novel take on the idea
whose unusual biasing allows it to run from only 3.3 volts
. These circuits can be so cheap to get started with that we’d suggest anyone give them a try. | 49 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329312",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T08:05:13",
"content": "Forgive me my absolute beginner question: how would one wire the transformer?I have one of these cheap Chinese kits and I have a few scrap transformers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,373,161.576706 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/head-lamp-gives-glowing-creature-comforts/ | Head Lamp Gives Glowing Creature Comforts | Kristina Panos | [
"Art",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"blinkenlights",
"leds",
"pixelblaze controller"
] | What can we say? It’s 2021, and we could probably all use a psychotic glow worm lamp in our lives about now to lighten the mood and/or provide a new focal point for sitting and staring. Tired of dragging out that creepy little Elf
on the Shelf every holiday season?
[LiabilityLabs]’ Head Lamp is slightly less terrifying and far more functional
. Really, the options are limitless.
The brain of this scare snake is an Electromage Pixelblaze LED controller, a powerful Wi-Fi enabled little board with a live web editor. [LiabilityLabs] recycled 20 milky plastic containers and their lids to help diffuse the light and avoid hot spots by holding the LED strip in the center of the tube. There’s a momentary button on the glowy guy’s tail that lets [LiabilityLabs] cycle through different color patterns with ease.
Whether you need a mascot for your stream channel, a confidant, or a refreshing rainbow rubber ducky of problem solving, Head Lamp is flexible. Feast your eyes on some brief animations after the break.
Want the glowies without the willies?
This mesmerizing fiber optic lamp is an easy build
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329259",
"author": "BobbyMac99",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T03:05:26",
"content": "The first thing I thought of was the song “Carpet Crawlers” by Genesis from the Lamb Lies on Broadway album. This is a bit creepy…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,161.819726 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/hackaday-links-march-7-2021/ | Hackaday Links: March 7, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"cons",
"contest",
"fellowship",
"gas station",
"hackaday links",
"ice",
"Keysight",
"OHSWA",
"roomba",
"SpaceX",
"starship",
"summit",
"test equipment"
] | It’s March, which means Keysight is back in the business of giving away a ton of test gear.
Keysight University Live
starts on March 15, with daily events the first week followed by a string of weekly live events through April. We always enjoy these Keysight events; sure, they’re clearly intended to sell more gear, but the demos and tutorials are great, and we always learn a lot. There’s also a feeling of community that feels similar to the Hackaday community; just a bunch of electronics nerds getting together to learn and share. If you’re interested in that community, or even if you’re just looking for a chance to win something from the $300,000 pile of goodies,
you’ll need to register
.
There’s another event coming up that you’ll want to know about:
the 2021 Open Hardware Summit
. Because 2021 is the new 2020, the summit is being held virtually again, this year on April 9. Tickets are on sale now, and we’re told there are still plenty of
Ada Lovelace Fellowships
available to those who consider themselves to be a minority in tech. The Fellowship covers the full cost of a ticket; it usually covers travels costs too, but sadly we’re still not there yet.
Once we do start traveling again, you might need to plan more carefully if cities start following the lead of Petaluma, California and start
banning the construction of gas stations
. The city, about 40 miles (64 km) north of San Francisco, is believed to be the first city in the United States to ban new gas station construction. The city council’s decision also prevents gas station owners from expanding, reconstructing, or relocating existing gas stations. The idea is to create incentives to move toward non-fossil fuel stations, like electric vehicle charging stations and hydrogen fueling. Time will tell how well that works out.
Go home Roomba — you’re drunk. That could be what Roomba owners are saying after
an update semi-bricked certain models of the robotic vacuum cleaners
. Owners noted a variety of behaviors, like wandering around in circles, bumping into furniture, and inability to make its way back to base for charging. There’s even
a timelapse on reddit
of a Roomba flailing about pathetically in a suspiciously large and empty room. The drunken analogy only goes so far, though, since we haven’t seen any reports of a Roomba barfing up the contents of its dust bin. But we’re still holding out hope.
And finally, if you’re not exactly astronaut material but still covet a trip to space, you might luck out courtesy of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. He’s offering to pay the way for
eight people from around the world
on a planned flight to the Moon and back in 2023. Apparently, Maezawa bought up all the seats for the flight back in 2018 with the intention of flying a group of artists to space. His thinking has changed, though, and now he’s opening up the chance to
serve as ballast
join the crew to pretty much any rando on the planet. Giving away rides on Starship might be a harder sell after
this week’s test
, but we’re sure he’ll find plenty of takers. And to be honest, we wish the effort well — the age of routine civilian space travel can’t come soon enough for us. | 13 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329235",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-08T00:42:55",
"content": "“Once we do start traveling again, you might need to plan more carefully if cities start following the lead of Petaluma, California and start banning the construction of gas stations. ”So, queues for... | 1,760,373,161.868736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/the-b-2-bomber-those-who-forget-history-are-doomed-to-reverse-engineer-it/ | The B-2 Bomber: Those Who Forget History Are Doomed To Reverse Engineer It | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"Air Force",
"b-2",
"b-2 bomber",
"b2",
"reverse engineering",
"stealth bomber"
] | The Drive had an interesting post recently, about someone noticed a procurement from the U. S. Air Force to
reverse engineer the B-2 bomber’s Load Heat Exchanger
(whatever that is). You’d think if the Air Force wanted to reverse engineer something, they’d be looking at another country’s aircraft. What can this mean?
Presumably, the original plans for the system have been lost, or maybe the company who made them is long gone and the tooling to create new ones along with it. Then again, maybe the assembly needs parts that you can no longer get. The Drive has another interesting speculation: perhaps the plans were so secret that were accidentally destroyed.
You don’t hear much about the B-2. There are only 20 left of the 21 built, at least that we know about. Original plans in the 1980s called for 132, but the end of the Cold War spelled the end for the stealth bomber. They get an overhaul every nine years. The Drive also speculates that this may be part of the Air Force’s desire to digitize spare parts and use 3D printing, but — honestly — it doesn’t sound that way to us. Especially since the fleet will retire no later than 2032, so whatever is replaced is only needed for a decade.
If you think you want to have a go, here’s the
help wanted ad
from the Air Force. If you read the text, it’s pretty clear they have some defective units that need replacement and it sounds like no one knows how to do it with existing materials. Not many of us get to design things that are still working nearly three decades later. Keeping a supply of parts and even know-how for something built in the 1990s isn’t trivial. Something to think about if you design something with a long service life.
The B-2 is a stealth bomber and while one did crash, it wasn’t shot down. The F-117A — the stealth fighter —
was shot down against all odds
, though. While the B-2 appears to be quite a plane, we prefer our bombers
a little bit older
. Still, you might enjoy the video below about the B-2’s chief engineer, although he doesn’t mention the Load Heat Exchanger. | 82 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329160",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T21:15:07",
"content": "“Presumably, the original plans for the system have been lost, or maybe the company who made them is long gone and the tooling to create new ones along with it.”Or maybe they no longer have a tape reader... | 1,760,373,161.990093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/give-your-smart-home-a-green-thumb-with-mqtt/ | Give Your Smart Home A Green Thumb With MQTT | Michael Shaub | [
"green hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"automated plant care",
"capacitive sensor",
"ESP-32",
"low power",
"moisture sensor",
"mqtt",
"soil moisture sensor",
"soil sensor",
"Wifi module"
] | We have all been stuck inside for too long, and maybe that’s why we have recently seen a number of projects attempting to help humans take better care of their housemates from Kingdom Plantae. To survive, plants need nutrients, light, and water. That last one seems tricky to get right; not too dry and not drowning them either, so [rbaron’s] green solder-masked
w-parasite wireless soil monitor
turns this responsibility over to your existing home automation system.
Like this
low-power soil sensor project
and the
custom controller for six soil sensors
, [rbaron’s] w-parasite uses a “parasitic capacitive” moisture sensor to determine if it’s time to water plants. This means that unlike resistive soil moisture sensors, here the copper traces are protected from corrosion by the solder mask. For those wondering how they work,
[rbaron]’s Twitter thread
has a great explanation.
The “w” in the name is for WiFi as the built-in ESP-32 module then takes the moisture reading and sends an update wirelessly via MQTT. Depending on the IQ of your smart-home setup, you could log the data, route an alert to a cellphone, light up a smart-bulb, or even switch on an irrigation system.
[rbaron] has shared a string of wireless hacks,
controlling the A/C over Slack
and a
BLE Fitness Tracker that inspired more soldering than jogging
. We like how streamlined this solution is, with the sensor, ESP-32 module, and battery all in a compact single board design. Are you asking yourself, “but how is a power-hungry ESP-32 going to last longer than it takes for my geraniums to dry out?” [rbaron] is using deep sleep that only consumes 15uA between very quick 500ms check-ins. The rechargeable LIR2450 Li-Ion coin cell shown here can transmit a reading every half hour for 90 days. If you need something that lasts longer than that, use [rbaron]’s
handy spreadsheet
to choose larger batteries that last a whole year. Though, let’s hope we don’t have to spend another whole year inside with our plant friends.
We may never know why the weeds in the cracks of city streets do better than our houseplants, but hopefully, we can keep our green roommates alive (slightly longer) with a little digital nudge. | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329126",
"author": "Mr Laneous",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T18:26:25",
"content": "I think switching the update interval to 1-6 hours would be a better way to extend battery life.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6329299",
... | 1,760,373,162.073514 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/this-dual-extrusion-system-rocks/ | This Dual Extrusion System Rocks | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"dual extruder",
"ender 3",
"mechanism",
"proper printing"
] | Dual extrusion systems for 3D printers have been around for quite a few years, but the additional cost, complexity, and hassle of printing with them have kept them off the workbenches of most hackers. [Jón Schone] from
Proper Printing
has now thrown his own hat in the ring, with a
custom dual extrusion rocker system
that can swap extruders without any additional actuators.
The two extruders are mounted on a spring-loaded rocker mechanism, which holds the inactive extruder up and away from the printing surface. Extruders are swapped by moving the carriage to either end of the x-axis, where the v-wheel rolls a ramp and pops the rocker over, putting the new extruder in the center line of the carriage. There are 3 wheels at the top of the carriage, but only two are in contact with the rail at any time. While this system is more complex than simply mounting two extruders side-by-side, it reduces the chances of the inactive nozzle oozing onto the parts or scraping across the surface. The height of each extruder can be adjusted with a screw, and any horizontal offset between the nozzles is checked with a calibration procedure and corrected in the firmware. See the full video after the break.
[Jón] is offering the design files and modified firmware
to perform this mod on your own Ender 3 Pro (though he notes other Creality printers should be compatible), but you’ll still need to source a control board with the additional stepper driver and heater output for the second extruder. This is yet another in a long list of hacks he’s performed on this popular entry-level printer, such as a modification that
allows you to fold the machine up and take it on the go
.
Thanks for the tip [BaldPower]! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329093",
"author": "doragasu",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T16:11:22",
"content": "It’s really cool, but I do not see how that is lowering the “additional complexity” part",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6329097",
"author... | 1,760,373,162.129811 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/the-digital-radio-era-partially-ends-in-ireland/ | The Digital Radio Era (Partially) Ends In Ireland | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"DAB",
"ireland",
"radio",
"RTE"
] | It’s commonly agreed that the future of broadcast radio lies in the eventual replacement of AM and FM analogue transmissions with digital services. A wide range of technologies exist to service this change-over, and for much of the world the most visible of them has been Digital Audio Broadcasting, or DAB. This VHF service has slowly increased in popularity to the extent that in some countries the FM or AM switch-off process has already happened or is well under way. It’s thus a surprise to hear a piece of news from a country that’s going the other way, as
the Irish broadcaster RTÉ is about to turn off its national DAB multiplex
.
The reason cited is cost-effectiveness, the take up of DAB in the Republic by listeners is low (Northern Ireland having the UK multiplexes instead), and that the broadcaster is the only one maintaining a national multiplex. Our Irish friends tell us that as in other parts of the world the rural coverage can be patchy, and with only RTÉ and no commercial stations on offer it’s easy to see why the allure of a DAB set is lacking.
In case anyone is tempted to prophecy the demise of digital broadcasting from this news, that’s not the real story. This is simply an abandonment of DAB. Plenty of Irish people listen to the radio through digital media just as anywhere else, this is simply an indication that they’re choosing not to do so via DAB. The Irish DVB television multiplexes carry the same stations and more, and meanwhile, the inexorable rise of online listening through smart speakers and mobile phones has eaten DAB’s lunch. But it does raise the point for other places: when your mobile phone delivers any radio station or streaming service you desire and is always in your pocket, why would you want a radio?
For more on DAB including some of its shortcomings,
a few years ago we took an in-depth look at the system
.
Thanks [Laura] for the header image. | 96 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329041",
"author": "sshg",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T12:06:29",
"content": "I wonder how mobile phones will work in case of earthquake, terrorist attack on GSM towers or simply mugging by armed bandits. Radio is there, always.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,373,162.266204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/07/tetris-on-split-flap-go-brrr/ | Tetris On Split-Flap Go Brrr | Kristina Panos | [
"Games"
] | [
"python",
"split flap",
"split-flap display",
"tetris"
] | It hardly seems possible, but engineer collective and split-flap display purveyors [Oat Foundry] were able to build a working implementation of Tetris on a 10 x 40 split-flap display in the span of a single day. Check it out in the video after the break.
This project is a bit understaffed in the details department, but we do know that [Oat Foundry] started with [Timur Bakibayev]’s
open-source implementation of Tetris in Python
and modified the
draw
function to work on a split-flap display. As you may have guessed, the biggest obstacle is the refresh rate and how it affects playability — particularly during those tense moments when a player rotates a piece before dropping it. Split-flaps flip quickly from on to off, but flipping back to on requires a full trip around through all the other characters.
We think this is nice work for a one-day build. Should they go further, we’d like to see the same things implemented as [Oat Foundry] does: a high score tracker and a preview of the next piece.
Don’t have a split-flap display? Yeah, us either, but we do have televisions. Turn on the tube and
check out this Nano-scale Tetris
.
Via
reddit | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329048",
"author": "Opa Fred",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T12:52:03",
"content": "-1 for playing music over the magnificent sound of a split flap display.nice build, but -1 for presentation",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "633022... | 1,760,373,162.503778 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/is-that-a-cat-or-not/ | Is That A Cat Or Not? | Jenny List | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"because cats",
"Raspberry Pi Zero",
"tensorflow"
] | Pandemic induced boredom takes people in many different ways. Some of us go for long walks, others learn to speak a new language, while yet more unleash their inner gaming streamer. [Niklas Fauth] has taken a break from his other projects by creating a very special project indeed. A cat detector! No longer shall you ponder whether or not the object or creature before you is a cat, now that existential question can be answered by a gadget.
This is more of a novelty project than one of special new tech, he’s taken what looks to be the shell from a cheap infra-red thermometer and put a Raspberry Pi Zero with camera and a small screen into it. This in turn runs Tensorflow with the
COCO-SSD
object identification model. The device has a trigger, and when it’s pressed to photograph an image it applies the model to detect whether the subject is a cat or not. The video posted to Twitter is below the break, and we can’t dispute its usefulness in the feline-spotting department.
[Niklas] has featured here more than once in the past.
This is not his only pandemic project, either
.
Inside is a Pi zero running tensorflow with the COCO-SSD model.
pic.twitter.com/otlFaZyjir
— Niklas Fauth (@FauthNiklas)
March 3, 2021 | 37 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6329005",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T06:10:30",
"content": "Does it work?https://static.parade.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/atchoum-twitter-screenshot.pngWell? t3h interwebs has been waiting 5 years on this one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,162.341423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/the-ieee-builds-a-smart-watch/ | The IEEE Builds A Smart Watch | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"clock hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"smart watch",
"smartwatch",
"watch"
] | It used to be that building your own watch was either a big project or it meant that you didn’t really care about how something looked on your wrist. But now with modern parts and construction techniques, a good-looking smart watch isn’t out of reach of the home shop. But if you don’t want to totally do it yourself, you can turn to a kit and
that’s what [Stephen Cass] did
. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, he took a kit called a Watchy and put it through its paces for you.
Watchy is an
open source product
that uses an ESP32, an E-ink display, and
costs about $50
. The display is 1.5 inches — good enough for a watch — and it has a real time clock, a vibration motor, an accelerometer, and four buttons. The whole thing runs on a 200 mAh lithium polymer battery. The charger is microUSB and you can also upload software to it using the usual Arduino tools.
However, [Stephen] found that none of the examples he tried would work at first. He found problems with the Mac software, but he also had problems under Windows. The answer? Switching to a Raspberry Pi seemed to work and once the watch was wiped clean, the Mac tools would work, too. It sounds like this isn’t a common problem, but he has to erase the watch with the Pi before each programming cycle.
Unlike a normal Arduino program, all the work in a typical Watchy program happens in
setup()
so the watch can mostly sleep and it updates the 200×200 typically just once a minute. As an example, [Stephan] wrote a watch face that uses an old Irish alphabet to tell time. He plans to add code to grab online data, too, and the phone has support for connecting wirelessly and parsing JSON to make tasks like that easier.
We always thought the
EZ430-Chronos
was a good-looking watch, but its screen is dated now. You can also pick up a lot of cheap import watches
that can be hacked
. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328983",
"author": "neotechni",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T03:55:59",
"content": "Makes me miss my Pebble (the screen died)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6329053",
"author": "Muxer",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T1... | 1,760,373,162.698438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/waterjet-cut-precision-pastry/ | Waterjet-Cut Precision Pastry | Elliot Williams | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cake",
"cnc",
"gears",
"kinematics",
"machine"
] | We need more high-end, geometric pastry in our lives. This insight is courtesy of a fairly old video, embedded below,
demonstrating an extremely clever 2D CNC mechanism that cuts out shapes on a cake pan
, opening up a universe of arbitrary cake topologies.
The coolest thing about this machine for us is the drive mechanism. A huge circular gear is trapped between two toothed belts. When the two belts move together the entire thing translates, but when they move in opposite directions, it turns. It seems to be floating on a plastic platform, and because the design allows the water-jet cutting head to remain entirely fixed, only a small hole underneath is necessary, which doubtless simplifies high-pressure water delivery and collection. Rounding the machine out are cake pans make up of vertical slats, like on a laser- or plasma-cutter table, that slip into registration pins and let the water pass through.
The kinematics of this machine are a dream, or perhaps a nightmare. To cut a straight line, it does a cycloid-shaped dance of translation and turning that you simply have to see in motion. Because of this intricate path, the cake-feed speed varies along the way, so this machine won’t be perfect for all applications and relies on a thin kerf. And we can’t help thinking how dizzy the cake must get in the process.
Indeed, the same company put out a
relatively pedestrian two-arm motion cutter
(another video!) that poses different kinematic problems. It’s essentially a two-arm plotter with a moving table underneath that helps increase the working area. Details are scarce, but it looks like they’re minimizing motion of the moving table, doing the high frequency small stuff with the stiff arms. Presumably someone turned the speed on the previous machine up to 11 and spun a cake off into the room, causing them to rethink the whole move-the-cake-around design.
Of course, watercut pastry isn’t limited to exotic CNC mechanisms. This (third!) video demonstrates that a
simple Cartesian XY bot can do the job as well
.
If you think about it, using high-pressure pure water to cut foodstuffs is a win on many levels. We’d just miss out on licking the knife. Thanks [Adam G DeMuri] for the awesome comment that lead us to a new world of watercut edibles. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328958",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2021-03-07T00:09:30",
"content": "Seems like it’d be even better if they could use high pressure sugar glaze.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6328973",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
... | 1,760,373,162.980774 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/x-ray-defeats-letterlocking-unfolds-and-reads-letter-sealed-since-1697/ | X-Ray Defeats Letterlocking — Unfolds And Reads Letter Sealed Since 1697 | Jenny List | [
"Science"
] | [
"Letterlocking",
"science",
"x-ray",
"x-ray imaging"
] | Over recent years we’ve been treated to a series of fascinating advances in the world of x-ray imaging, as researchers have developed their x-ray microtomography techniques and equipment to the point at which they can probe and then computationally reconstruct written material within objects such as letters or scrolls in museum collections whose value or fragility means they can’t be opened and read conventionally. There is more to this challenge than simply extracting the writing though, in addition to detecting the ink the researchers also have to unpick the structure of whatever it was written upon. A particular challenge comes from letterpackets, the art of folding a letter into its own envelope, and
a newly-published
Nature Communications
paper
details work from a team of academics in the USA, the UK, and the Netherlands in tackling it.
Letterpackets were more than a practical method of packaging a missive for the mail, they also had a security function often called Letterlocking. A packet would be folded in such a way as to ensure it was impossible to open without tearing or otherwise damaging the paper, and their structure is of especial interest to historians. The researchers had a unique resource with which to work;
the Brienne collection
is a trunk full of undeliverable mail amassed by a 17th century postmaster couple in Den Haag in the Netherlands, and now in the possession of
the Beeld en Geluid museum
in that city. In it were a cache of letters including 577 never-opened letterpackets, and the x-ray technique promised a means to analyse these without compromising them.
A letter imaged using the technique.
The researchers have developed an entirely computational technique for the virtual unfolding process. Starting with a 3D volumetric x-ray scan of the unopened packet they then identify the various layers of paper and the bright spots which denote the ink. Their algorithm has to cope with areas in which two or more layers are tightly in contact, for example when multiple levels are folded, and then unpick the resulting 3-dimensional mesh into a 2-dimensional sheet. Their process for mapping the crease pattern involves applying a colour map representing the mean curve radius at a given point. The final section of the paper looks at the multiple different methods of letterlocking, and attempts to categorise them all including a security rating for each. It’s evident that this could be a highly personalised process, indeed they give as an example a letter from Mary Queen of Scots that used
an intricate spiral folding technique
to identify its sender.
It’s clear that this technique will reveal many more fascinating historical documents as it is both refined and extended across the many more collections of further artefacts that have lain waiting for it. As they say, individual letters do not necessarily contain earth-shattering historical discoveries, but taken together they shed an important light on the social history of past centuries.
One of the names on the paper is [David Mills],
whose work has featured here before
. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328926",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T21:40:34",
"content": "Wonder if the NSA would be able to read our mail using this technology?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328938",
"author": "Foldi-One",
... | 1,760,373,162.815626 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/nasas-perseverance-rover-makes-its-first-martian-tracks/ | NASA’s Perseverance Rover Makes Its First Martian Tracks | Zach Zeman | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"mars",
"Mars 2020",
"Mars 2020 Rover",
"nasa",
"Perseverance"
] | There’s a special kind of anxiety that comes from trying out a robotic project for the first time. No matter the size, complexity, or how much design and planning has gone into it, the first time a creation moves under its own power can put butterflies in anyone’s stomach. So we can imagine that many people at NASA are breathing a sigh of relief now that
the Perseverance rover has completed its first successful test drive
on Mars.
To be fair, Perseverance was tested here on Earth before launch. However, this is the first drive since the roving scientific platform was packed into a capsule, set on top of a rocket, and flung hundreds of millions of miles (or kilometers, take your pick) to the surface of another planet. As such, and true to NASA form, the operators are taking things slow.
This joyride certainly won’t be setting speed records. The atomic-powered vehicle traveled a total of just 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in 33 minutes, including forward, reverse, and a 150 degree turn in-between. That’s enough for the mobility team to check out the drive systems and deem the vehicle worthy of excursions that could range 656 feet (200 meters) or more. Perseverance is packed with
new technology
, including an autonomous navigation system for avoiding hazards without waiting for round-trip communication with Earth, and everything must be tested before being put into full use.
A couple weeks have passed since the world was captivated by
actual video of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing
, and milestones like this mark the end of that flashy, rocket-powered skycrane period and the beginning of a more settled-in period, where the team works day-to-day in pursuit of
the mission’s science goals
. The robotic arm and several on-board sensors and experiments have already completed their initial checks. In the coming months, we can look forward to tons of data coming back from the red planet, along with breathtaking pictures of its alien surface and what will hopefully be
the first aircraft flown on another world
. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328869",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T18:27:16",
"content": "“Perseverance is packed with new technology, including an autonomous navigation system for avoiding hazards without waiting for round-trip communication with Earth, and everything must be tested before b... | 1,760,373,162.747551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/99-inspiration-99-perspiration-and-99-collaboration/ | 99% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration, And 99% Collaboration | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"collaboration",
"eureka",
"inspiration",
"newsletter",
"perspiration",
"skating"
] | I was watching an oldish
TEDx talk with Rodney Mullen
, probably the most innovative street skater ever, but that’s not the point, and it’s not his best talk either. Along the way, he makes a claim that ideas — in particular the idea that a particular skateboard trick is even possible — are the most important thing.
His experience, travelling around the world on skateboard tours, is that there are millions of kids who are talented enough that when they see a video demonstrating that a particular trick idea is possible, they can replicate it in short order. Not because the video showed them how, but because it expanded their mind’s-eye view of what is possible. They were primed, and so what pushed them over the edge was the inspiration.
On the other side of the street, we’ve got Thomas Edison and his “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” routine. Edison famously tried a bazillion filament recipes
before settling on tungsten
, and attributes his success to “putting his time in” or “good old-fashioned hard work” or similar. So who’s right?
The inventor of Casper Slide and the phonograph are both right. Rodney is taking it for granted that these kids have put their time in; they are skaters after all, they skate. He doesn’t see the 99% perspiration because it is the natural background, while the inspiration flashes out in Eureka moments.
Similarly, Thomas E.
way
underestimates inspiration. He’s already fixated on this novel idea to take an arc lamp and contain it in a glass envelope — that’s what he’s spending all of his perspiration on, after all. But without that key inspiration, all he’d be is sweaty.
And they’re also both wrong! They’re both missing a third ingredient: collaboration. Certainly Mullen, who spent his life hanging out with other skaters, teaching them what he knows, and learning from them in turn, wouldn’t say the community of skaters didn’t shape him.
Even in the loner’s sport of skating, nobody is alone
. And Edison? His company profited greatly from broader advances in science, and the scientific literature.
Menlo Park
existed to take bright, well-trained minds and put them all in one place, sharing, teaching, and working together. It embodied the idea of collaborative innovation, and that’s where some of his best work was done.
So I’m with Isaac Newton, “
standing on the shoulders of giants
“. Success is 99% collaboration. This leaves us with one problem: the percentages don’t add up. But that’s alright by me.
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
! | 52 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328835",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T15:24:14",
"content": "“Even in the loner’s sport of skating, nobody is alone.”Who inspired that first “wheel” guy?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328841",
"au... | 1,760,373,162.915785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/lost-a-lightweight-quadcopter-here-are-the-best-ways-to-find-it/ | Lost A Lightweight Quadcopter? Here Are The Best Ways To Find It | Donald Papp | [
"drone hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"aircraft",
"drone",
"LosT",
"lost and found",
"multirotor",
"quadcopter",
"tracking"
] | Lost aircraft are harder to find when they are physically small to begin with. Not only are they harder to see, but the smaller units lack features like GPS tracking; it’s not normally possible to add it to a tiny aircraft that can’t handle much more than its own weight in the first place. As a result, little lost quads tend to be trickier to recover in general.
Fluorescent tape adds negligible weight, and will glow brightly at night under a UV light.
The good news is that [Eric Brasseur] has shared some
concise tips on how to more easily locate and recover lost aircraft, especially lightweight ones
. Recovering aircraft is something every aircraft hobbyist has had to deal with in one way or another, but [Eric] really has gathered an impressive list of tricks and techniques, and some of them go into some really useful additional detail. It occurs to us that a lot of these tips could apply equally well to outdoor robots, or rovers.
Even simple techniques can be refined. For example, using bright colors on an aircraft is an obvious way to increase visibility, but some colors are better choices than others. Bright orange, white, and red are good choices because they are easily detected by the human eye while still being uncommon in nature. Violet, blue, and even cyan on the other hand may
seem
to be good choices when viewed indoors on a workbench, but if the quad is stuck in dark bushes, those colors will no longer stand out. Another good tip is to consider also adding a few patches of fluorescent tape to the aircraft. If all else fails, return at night with a UV lamp; those patches will glow brightly, and be easily seen from tens of meters.
Some of the tips are used while the device still has power, while others don’t depend on batteries holding out. [Eric] does a great job of summing up those and many more, so take a look. They might come in handy when test flying
quadcopters that are little more than an 18650 cell, motors, and a 3D-printable frame
. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328808",
"author": "NiHaoMike",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T13:10:10",
"content": "No mention of embedding a BLE beacon into the aircraft?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328818",
"author": "wanderer_",
"timesta... | 1,760,373,163.14158 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/06/print-chess-pieces-then-defeat-the-chess-playing-printer/ | Print Chess Pieces, Then Defeat The Chess-Playing Printer | Brian McEvoy | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"2-player",
"3d printer",
"3d printing",
"chess",
"chess piece",
"chess robot",
"computer chess",
"Creality Ender 3 Pro",
"game",
"Raspi",
"repurposed",
"retrofit",
"robot",
"tactile",
"two-player"
] | Chess is undoubtedly a game of the mind. Sadly, some of the nuances are lost when you play on a computer screen. When a game is tactile, it carries a different gravity. Look at a poker player shuffling chips, and you’ll see that when a physical object is on the line, you play for keeps. [Matou], who is no stranger to 3D printing, wanted that tactility, but he didn’t stop at 3D printed pieces. He made parts to
transform his Creality Ender 3 Pro into a chess-playing robot
.
To convert his printer, [Matou] designed a kit that fits over the print head to turn a hotend into a cool gripper. The extruder motor now pulls a string to close the claw, which is a darn clever way to repurpose the mechanism. A webcam watches the action, while machine vision determines what the player is doing, then queries a
chess AI
, and sends the next move to OctoPrint on a connected RasPi. If two people had similar setups, it should be no trouble to play tactile chess from opposite ends of the globe.
Physical chess pieces
and computers have mixed for a while and probably claimed equal time for design and gameplay. There are a couple of approaches to automating movement from lifting like [Matou], or you can
keep them in contact with the board
and move them from below. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328833",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T15:22:26",
"content": "wow. i designed a chess set where i thought i had reduced the pieces to their abstract geometric ideals but at least i used cones and spheres. i had no idea it could be taken so much further!",
"paren... | 1,760,373,163.072858 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/buttonpusher-automates-animal-crossing-tasks/ | Buttonpusher Automates Animal Crossing Tasks | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"automate",
"button",
"button pusher",
"joy-con",
"Nintendo Switch",
"servo"
] | Press button, wait, press button again, repeat. There must be a better way! If that kind of interaction drives you nuts, you’ll probably appreciate [Tommy]’s
buttonpusher
, which has only one job: automate away some of the more boring parts of Nintendo’s
Animal Crossing
. On one hand the job the device does is very simple: press a button on the Nintendo joy-con in a preprogrammed pattern. There’s no feedback loop, it just dumbly presses and waits. But there are still quite a few interesting bits to this build.
Rigid mounting combined with interfacing the actuator to the servo horn (instead of to the servo shaft) were the keys to reliable button pushing.
For one thing, [Tommy] discovered that the little 9g RC servo can reliably exert enough force to press the button on the joy-con with the right adapter. He had assumed the servo would be too weak to do the job without a greater mechanical advantage, but a simple hammer-style actuator that attaches to the servo horn easily does the job. Well, it does as long as the servo and joy-con are held rigidly; his first version allowed a little too much wiggle in how well the parts were held, and button presses didn’t quite register. With a 3D-printed fixture to rigidly mount both the servo and the joy-con, things were fine.
In the process of making buttonpusher, which uses
CircuitPython
, [Tommy] created a tool to automate away another pesky task he was running into:
circuitpython_tools
was created to automatically watch for code changes, convert the .py files into (smaller) MicroPython bytecode .mpy files, then automatically deploy to the board. This saved [Tommy] a lot of time and hassle during development, but it was only necessary because he quickly ran out of memory on his M0 Metro Express board, and couldn’t fit his code in any other way.
Still, it’s a good example of how one project can sometimes spawn others, and lead to all kinds of lessons learned. You can see buttonpusher automate the crafting process in Animal Crossing in the video, embedded below.
Video game controller automation is a common project, especially for nondestructive hacks. People get pretty creative, and
have even come up with ways to automate joystick movements
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328781",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T07:02:11",
"content": "The hack in itself is great. Just something to be very aware of is of course button wear-n-tear. AFAIK the joy-con I’d a Bluetooth device? So next hack could target that? :)",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,373,163.033588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/explore-the-cosmos-with-this-diy-digital-telescope/ | Explore The Cosmos With This DIY Digital Telescope | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"3d printed",
"astrophotography",
"Raspberry Pi HQ camera",
"star tracker",
"telescope"
] | Getting a closer look at the Moon isn’t particularly difficult; even an absolute beginner can point a cheap telescope towards our nearest celestial neighbor and get some impressive views. But if you’re looking to explore a bit farther, and especially if you want to photograph what you find out there amongst the black, things can get complicated (and expensive) pretty quick.
While
building this 3D printed automated telescope designed [Greg Holloway]
isn’t necessarily
cheap
, especially once you factor in what your time is worth, the final product certainly looks to be considerably streamlined compared to most of what’s available in the commercial space. Rather than having to lug around a separate telescope, tripod, motorized tracker, and camera, you just need this relatively compact all-in-one unit.
It’s taken [Greg] six months to develop his miniature observatory, and it shows. The CAD work is phenomenal, as is the documentation in general. Even if you’re not interested in peering into the heavens, perusing the Instructables page for this project is well worth your time. From his tips on designing for 3D printing to information about selecting the appropriate lens and getting it mated to the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera, there’s a little something for everyone.
Of course if you
are
looking to build your own motorized “GOTO” telescope, then this is must-read stuff. [Greg] has really done his homework, and the project is a fantastic source of information about motor controllers, wiring, hand controllers, and the open source firmware you need to tie it all together. Many of the ideas he’s outlined here could be applicable to other telescope projects, or really,
anything that needs to be accurately pointed to the sky
. If you’d like to get started with night sky photography and aren’t picky about what kind of things you capture, we’ve seen a number of projects that simply
point a camera towards the stars and wait for something to happen.
[Thanks to Eugene for the tip.] | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328775",
"author": "brodieman",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T05:41:07",
"content": "Thankyou for this. Yet another project to get onto….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328788",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,373,163.198837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/open-dip-surgery-cuts-retro-chips-down-to-size/ | Open-DIP Surgery Cuts Retro Chips Down To Size | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"chip",
"die",
"dip",
"dremel",
"lead frame",
"mod",
"nes",
"RP2A03"
] | At least by today’s standards, some of the early chips were really, really big. They may have been revolutionary and they certainly did shrink the size of electronic devices, but integrating a 40-pin DIP into a modern design can be problematic. The solution:
cut off all the extra plastic and just work with the die within
.
When [Redherring32] alerted us to this innovation, he didn’t include much information — just a couple of photos of the mod and a few brief words about the target chip, an RP2A03 from the glorious NES 8-bit days. Living as it does within the relatively enormous DIP-40 package, it stood to take up far too much space in compact, more modern designs. So the hapless chip fell under the knife, or rather the Dremel tool diamond cutoff wheel. [Redherring32] left a generous boundary around the die. Cutting through the package left the lead frame of the die exposed enough to solder 34AWG (0.02 mm²) magnet wire to bring the leads out for connection. We’d have worried that vibration from the cutting process would have damaged the silicon, but the video in the tweet tells otherwise.
For now, the liberated die is connected to a piece of perfboard, which ironically enough actually makes it larger than the original chip. But this is a proof-of-concept, and given that the operation shrunk the footprint of the chip by about 93%, it should enable some interesting applications. Perhaps a smaller, better version of [Redherring32]’s
OpenTendo
is in the works. | 34 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328737",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-03-06T00:20:11",
"content": "That’s really cool. Just make a custom footprint for it and surface mount it on your custom pcb.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6329856",
"au... | 1,760,373,163.281461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/get-apple-to-track-your-bluetooth-devices-for-you/ | Get Apple To Track Your Bluetooth Devices For You | Tom Nardi | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"bbc microbit",
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth low energy",
"Find My",
"OpenHaystack",
"tracker"
] | Apple’s “Find My” service allows users to track their missing devices by leveraging a worldwide network of location-aware iGadgets. With millions of iPhones and Macs out in the wild listening for the missing device’s Bluetooth advertisements and relaying their findings to the Cupertino Mothership, it’s a highly effective way of tracking hardware so long as it stays in relatively urban areas. Unfortunately, the system is completely proprietary and non-Apple devices aren’t invited to play.
Or at least, that used to be the case.
A project recently released by the [Secure Mobile Networking Lab] called OpenHaystack
demonstrates how generic devices can utilize Apple’s Find My network by mimicking the appropriate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) broadcasts. Currently they have a firmware image for the BBC micro:bit, as well as a Python script for Linux, that will allow you to spin up an impromptu Find My target. But the team has also published all the information required to implement similar functionality on other BLE-capable devices and microcontrollers, so expect the list of supported hardware to grow shortly.
Somewhat ironically, while OpenHaystack allows you to track non-Apple devices on the Find Me tracking network, you
will
need a Mac computer to actually see where your device is. The team’s software requires a computer running macOS 11 (Big Sur) to run, and judging by the fact it integrates with Apple Mail to pull the tracking data through a private API, we’re going to assume this isn’t something that can easily be recreated in a platform-agnostic way.
Beyond the occasional Hackintosh that might sneak in there
, it looks like Tim Cook might have the last laugh after all.
It’s not immediately clear how difficult it will be for Apple to close this loophole, but the talk of utilizing a private API makes us think there might be a built-in time limit on how long this project will be viable. After all,
Big Tech doesn’t generally approve of us peons poking around
inside their machinations for long. Though even if Apple finds a way to block OpenHaystack, it’s expected the company will be releasing “AirTags” sometime this year which will allow users to track whatever objects they like through the system. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328706",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T22:06:54",
"content": "Apple track the approximate, or exact, geographical location of every iDevice that broadcasts (which is them all), using every other iDevice. That is the way that I see it. Like apple is not going to push o... | 1,760,373,163.335646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/eyesight-guardian-polices-your-poor-pupils/ | Eyesight Guardian Polices Your Poor Pupils | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino pro mini",
"eye strain",
"TFT display"
] | Don’t know about you, but over the last year or so, we have gone from spending ten or twelve hours a day at this computer to upwards of sixteen or eighteen. Fortunately there’s a window behind the monitor for taking those 20/20/20 breaks that are supposed to prevent eye strain, but it’s so hard to remember (and boring) to do it. And nobody needs yet another thing to remember in the name of self-care.
[Daniel Hingston] certainly agrees. As you’ll see in the delightful video after the break, [Daniel]
has made a game out of the whole process
of stopping every twenty minutes to spend twenty seconds looking at a point that’s at least twenty feet away. Once the break is over, [Daniel] uses the dual-purpose start button to acknowledge having looked away for 20 seconds. The device is meant to clip onto the corner of any monitor, and [Daniel] has provided several sizes of the bridge piece so that everyone can find their fit.
The Guardian’s guts are pretty simple — an Arduino Pro Mini runs the stop watch and a TFT display to show the graphics that live on an SD card. This is a great way to preserve your eyesight by gamifying something we all know we should be doing. It might be nice to add a break timer that counts up to 25 or thereabouts so you have time to stand up and come back. If you press the button too soon, it scolds you and you have to start your eye break over.
Need some more self-care lately?
Our own [Jenny List] has your back in these interesting times
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRDmLbAgXZc | 12 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328652",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T19:54:18",
"content": "Mirrors, just say’n…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6328659",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T20:02:39",
"content": "every 20 m... | 1,760,373,163.580183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-fan-car/ | The Rise And Fall Of The Fan Car | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Engineering",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"aerodynamic",
"aerodynamics",
"brabham",
"can am",
"canam",
"car",
"cars",
"f1",
"fan car",
"formula 1",
"gordon murray",
"motorsport"
] | The advent of aerodynamic wings in motorsport was one of the most dramatic changes in the mid-20th century. Suddenly, it was possible to generate more grip at speed outside of altering suspension setups and fitting grippier tyres. However, it was just the beginning, and engineers began to look at more advanced ways of generating downforce without the drag penalty incurred by fitting wings to a racecar.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of this was the fan car. Mechanically complex and arguably dangerous, the technology offered huge downforce with minimal drag. However, the fan car’s time in the spotlight was vanishingly brief, despite the promise inherent in the idea. Let’s take a look at the basic theory behind the fan car, how they worked in practice, and why we don’t see them on racetracks today.
The Theory
The equation for dynamic friction states that the friction force generated, or grip in our case, is equal to the dynamic coefficient of friction, determined by the materials involved, and the normal force. For a regular object, this is simply the object’s weight times gravitational acceleration, but a fan car adds downforce to this as well, massively increasing the grip available.
The theory behind the fan car is similar to that of the ground-effect car, in that it involves generating a low pressure region beneath the car, causing the higher atmospheric pressure above to press the car down into the road. This increases the normal force between the tyres and the road surface, thus increasing the available grip. However, unlike the ground effect car, which relies on the car’s forward velocity to generate the low pressure region, fan cars actively do this with, as you might expect, a giant fan.
By fitting a fan to the back of the vehicle with the appropriate ducting, it can suck out air from beneath the car, creating the desired low pressure region underneath, and thus, downforce. In practice, to make the most of the effect, the area beneath the car should be sealed to the ground, like an inverse hovercraft. This limits the amount of outside air that can rush under the car when the fan is operating, ensuring the pressure underneath drops as low as possible. The lower the pressure underneath the car, the more the car will be pressed into the track surface by the atmospheric pressure above.
With only a small gap between the skirts and the track surface, the suction of the fan is able to generate a low pressure region under the car. This sucks the car down on to the track. Pictured is the setup of the Brabham BT46B from 1978; not shown is the engine, which took advantage of the rear-mounted fan for cooling purposes.
This method of generating downforce requires power to run the fan, but doesn’t generate anywhere near as much drag as wings. Additionally, the benefit of the fan car over static aerodynamic surfaces like ground effect venturis and wings is that the fan can lower the pressure beneath the car regardless of how fast the vehicle is travelling. Wings and venturis don’t start doing real work until the car exceeds 100 km/h or so, but the fan can generate huge downforce from a dead stop all the way to the car’s top speed. This is a huge benefit in low speed corners, allowing a fan car to put more power to the ground sooner than a regular competitor who needs to gradually get up to speed before their wings produce sufficient additional grip.
Practical Considerations
The Brabham BT46B featured a pitot tube on the front to measure the pressure difference between the atmosphere and beneath the car. Connected to a modified altimeter in the cockpit, if the pressure gauge was in the red zone, the driver knew a skirt had failed and downforce would be significantly lowered, and slow down to avoid a crash.
It’s not enough to simply whack a fan on the back of an existing car and call it done; like all aerodynamic modifications, careful design and testing is key to ensure success. Perhaps the most difficult feature of building a working fan car is producing viable sideskirts that can reliably seal underneath the car. These skirts need to be able to keep the undertray relatively well sealed to a consistent degree around the whole racetrack, regardless of bumps, pebbles, or other pertubations. If the skirt seal is unreliable, the car could face a sudden loss of downforce when the car hits a bump, as outside air rushes beneath the car, eliminating the low pressure zone underneath.
If this happens midcorner, the car can suddenly spin out as it no longer has enough grip to stay stuck to the track. The consequences for the driver in such a situation can be catastrophic, so designers worked hard to design skirts that would maintain a good seal in most conditions. Various ideas involved sliding skirts, or spring loaded skirts that maintained contact with the track over varying surfaces, and could account for wear over a race distance. Some fan cars, like the Brabham BT46B, featured pitot tubes and modified altimeters that could display the pressure beneath the car to the driver, letting them know if a skirt had failed and allowing them to change their driving style accordingly.
The Chaparrel 2J featured sliding skirts made of Lexan, a cutting-edge material at the time. Connected to the suspension to maintain a consistent seal to the track, they were key to making good downforce with the system.
Another consideration is how to drive the fan. The fan can be driven by its own engine or motor; this has the benefit of providing consistent downforce as long as the speed of the fan stays constant. Alternatively, the fan can be driven off the car’s main engine, with the caveat that the fan speed will change with engine speed. As long as this is predictable, however, it need not be a problem. In practice, drivers of this type of fan car noted they could stick the car to the track by accelerating through a corner, as downforce would increase with the engine speed.
The History
The first fan car built for competition was the Chaparral 2J, entered into the largely no-holds-barred Can Am series.
The brainchild of Jim Hall
, it debuted in 1970 featuring two massive fans from the cooling system of the M109 Howitzer on the back. Its slab-sided design absent of any wings was surprising at the time, but its competition quickly realised the threat the car posed.
With the fan system powered by a two-cylinder snowmobile engine, the sound of the car was a constant piercing whine at rest, and even louder when its Chevrolet V8 roared into life. Hunkering down two inches when the fans turned on, the car used sliding skirts connected to the suspenison to maintain a consistent one inch gap to the track all the way around, maintaining good downforce without destroying the skirts too quickly. The car had incredible grip, giving it huge corner speed and excellent braking ability. However, reliability proved to be a problem. Despite qualifying up to a full two seconds faster than the field, the car never won a race, often due to the fan engine failing before the finish. The car was outlawed for the following season after concerted protests from other competitors, who felt the fan design was an unfair advantage and constituted a “movable aerodynamic device”, already outlawed under FIA rules. There were also allegations that the system blew dust and rocks at other competitors, a potential hazard on the track.
The Brabham BT46B only competed once, but it did bring home the trophy in its single outing with Niki Lauda behind the wheel.
The Brabham BT46B followed a similar story in Formula 1, eight years later. A development of the existing BT46, the fan car design was chosen when the team realised they couldn’t modify their existing car to use ground effect venturi tunnels like the dominant Lotus cars due to their flat-12 engine. Instead,
Gordon Murray designed the BT46B with a large fan to generate downforce
. The rules at the time stated that any device whose primary function was aerodynamically related could not move; thus, over 50% of the fan’s flow was designed to cool the engine, thus making its
primary
function a cooling device. The scrutineers ruled it legal for the 1978 season, but alas, the car was to have a short-lived career. In its first appearance at the Swedish Grand Prix, Niki Lauda brought home the win in the BT46B, after sandbagging much of qualifying to try and placate those opposed to the new design. Regardless, other teams protested, most notably Colin Chapman of the Lotus team, whose cars were otherwise in the box seat to take the championship. Initial attempts to argue that the device was dangerously flinging debris at other cars were shouted down when the team pointed out the outlet velocity of the fan was just 55 mph. Not wiling to relent, the opposing teams threatened to pull out of the Formula One Constructor’s Association, a powerful body led by Bernie Ecclestone, then head of the Brabham team. Ecclestone agreed to pull the car from competition after just one race, in order to preserve his own position. While the BT46 design failed to win without its party piece, the deal paid off for Ecclestone – who eventually parlayed his position with FOCA into leading Formula 1 for decades.
The T.50 is designed by the same hand that penned the Brabham fan car, though it works somewhat differently.
Since then, fan cars have been absent from the motorsport world, as FIA regulations clamped down strongly against any form of movable aerodynamic device. However, the fan car concept has had one last gasp,
with Gordon Murray this time penning a road car with the technology instead, by the name T.50
. The design differs somewhat, however, with the intelligently-controlled electric fan used more to maintain flow to the car’s steep underbody diffuser, rather than outright generate downforce through its own suction. The fan is used in a variety of modes to reduce drag and maintain downforce, with flaps used to vary the flow underneath the car depending on the flow regime. Powered by a 48V motor, it’s highly reminiscent of the BT46B from the rear, even if it works somewhat differently.
Looking Ahead
Ultimately, we won’t be holding our breath for fans to make a reappearance at the racetrack anytime soon. Worldwide, regulations against movable aerodynamic devices have remained in place and only gotten more restrictive as teams pushed the boundaries in various ways. The complaints about debris will remain, and as with the ground effect era, it’s likely such devices would lead to corner speeds getting high enough to test the limits of human endurance. Regardless, the technology remains a fantastically interesting one, for the sheer performance it promises and the manner in which it burned so brightly for such a short time. | 51 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328613",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T18:39:26",
"content": "That reminds me, I would like to have a “Dustbuster on a stick”.Pretty much a regular Dustbuster with an attachable handle so I wouldn’t have to stoop when spot cleaning a floor. (My back gets cranky at times... | 1,760,373,163.737527 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/hackaday-podcast-108-eulogizing-daft-punk-helmets-bitcoin-feeling-the-heat-squeezing-soft-robots-and-motorizing-ice-skates/ | Hackaday Podcast 108: Eulogizing Daft Punk Helmets, Bitcoin Feeling The Heat, Squeezing Soft Robots, And Motorizing Ice Skates | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys travel through the greatest hacks the week had on offer. Charge up your ice skates (literally) by adding spiked electric motors to push you across the frozen pond. If that’s too cold for early March, snuggle up with a good book under the warm light of a clever lamp made from a rotary-dial telephone. We discuss CAD and CAM in your browser, and a software tool to merge images with PCB gerber files. The episode wraps up with a discussion on the balance of quality versus speed when prototyping, and digesting the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network.
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 108 Show Notes:
New This Week:
An Homage To Daft Punk In Fan-Made Helmets Through The Years.
Comment: Hari Wiguna’s panda dance
Wireless, Low Power E-Ink Weather Gadget
Pricer Brand ePaper Price Tag Teardown
Gerbolyze hex shaped half-tone example
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Open Source CAM Software In The Browser
GitHub – mkrabset/krabzcam: Web-application for converting SVG paths to g-code
FabLab/CAM-tools-CNC.md at master · geobruce/FabLab · GitHub
Shredding The Ice With Powered Skates
Pool Noodle Robot Shines A Light On The Pros And Cons Of Soft Robots
SVG To Gerber, Without The Pain
gerbolyze/pics at main · jaseg/gerbolyze · GitHub
Test image with hex half-tones
GitHub – badgeek/svg2shenzhen: Convert Inkscape SVG drawings to KiCad PCB and footprint modules
Bringing Full Colour PCB Art To Production
Building An Open Hardware EBook Reader
The 70s Are Calling To Shed Some Light
GitHub – Harvie/RotaryDial: Arduino library to read numbers from a rotary telephone dial
Simplify Your Life With This Pocket Rotary Cellphone
“MORPH” LED Ball Is A There-Is-No-Spoon, Reality-Bending Art Installation
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Attack Of The Flying 18650s
Machining A Honing Jig Will Keep Skills Sharp
Fail Of The Week: How Not To Build A Filament Extruder
Mike’s Picks:
3D-Printed Macro Pad Ditches The PCB With Slick Wiring Guides
DIY All-Transistor Addressable Pixel
Wind Turbines And Ice: How They’re Tailored For Specific Climates
Can’t-Miss Articles:
What If I Never Make Version Two?
What Uses More Power Than Argentina But Doesn’t Dance The Tango?
FPGA Bitcoin Miner Is Probably The Most Power Efficient.
Folding@Home And Rosetta, For ARM
Lowering The Electricity Bill By Mining Cryptocurrency | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328702",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T21:56:46",
"content": "Regarding Bitcoin and the ability to pay taxes:It’s not just the requirement to pay taxes in dollars or euros, but the reason WHY you have to pay the taxes in that currency, which is what makes fiat money mo... | 1,760,373,163.785135 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/elegant-and-portable-diy-nightlight-becomes-a-fixture-for-hackers-kids/ | Elegant And Portable DIY Nightlight Becomes A Fixture For Hacker’s Kids | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"leds",
"night light"
] | When [itzikdiy]’s kids asked for a night light for their room, he got the bright idea to build
something that straddles the line between portable and permanent
. This fixture-less fixture plugs directly into a wall socket and is turned on and off with a handsome rocker switch on the bottom.
This lovely little lamp is mostly made from scrap — the oak on the front appears to have come from an old cabinet door, and the other two ring-shaped pieces are made from pine. [itzikdiy] even took the acrylic from broken panel lamps. Everything was cut with a Dremel and a circle-cutter attachment except the oak, which required a jigsaw. We think it looks great, especially with the different grain directions — call it art deco woodworking.
When it was all said and done, [itzikdiy] found it was too heavy to hang by the plug alone, so he added an L-shaped support beneath the power supply that holds it more evenly against the wall. [itzikdiy] also made a pair of hooks that snap into a pair of slots on the sides of the outlet itself. The solution is simple, sturdy, and effective without disrupting the lines of the lamp at all. Carve out a little bit of time to watch the build video after the break.
We know that someone of your hulking intelligence has no fear of the dark. But if you think you could use a nightlight in the bathroom for those 2 AM trips,
look no further
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328604",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T17:59:20",
"content": "Very nice but a No Go in a world of duplex outlets.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6328608",
"author": "Will",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T1... | 1,760,373,163.63713 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/this-week-in-security-text-rendering-on-windows-gnu-poke-and-bitsquatting/ | This Week In Security: Text Rendering On Windows, GNU Poke, And Bitsquatting | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Bitsquatting",
"GNU Poke",
"This Week in Security"
] | Project Zero just unrestricted
the details on CVE-2021-24093
, a potentially nasty vulnerability in Windows 10’s DirectWrite, a text rendering library. The flaw got fixed in this month’s patch Tuesday roundup. The flaw is accessible in all the major browsers on Windows 10, as they use DirectWrite for font rendering. The trick here is to use a malicious font that uses some nonsense values. Those values result in a buffer allocation that is too small for complex characters such as
Æ
.
Because the vulnerability is a Windows library, it’s possible that an exploit would automatically work as a sandbox escape, but I haven’t seen confirmation either way. Let us know if you have some insight there.
Via Bleeping Computer
GNU Poke
The good folks at GNU have
minted the 1.0 release
of
poke
, a new binary editing tool. The real killer feature of poke is that it can interpret binary data, decoding it back into readable data structures. If you’re familiar with the way Wireshark can decode packets and give useful, organized output, it seems that
poke
will provide a similar function, but not limited to network traffic.
It looks like it could become a useful tool for getting a look inside otherwise opaque binaries. What
poke
brings is a system where you can write pretty-printing templates on the fly, which should be very useful when mapping out an unfamiliar binary. Distros will likely pick up and start packaging poke in the coming weeks, making it even easier to get and play with.
Legitimate Malware Makers?
The chickens may be coming home to roost for The NSO Group
. So quick review, NSO makes complex spyware. NSO produced malware targeting Whatsapp users around the world. NSO makes the case that they simply make the tools and sell them legally to governments, and can’t be held liable for what those governments do with those tools. Well, the US Department of Justice isn’t convinced, and has slowly been working on a case against NSO.
The case has the potential to be an important one, as it will set precedent for whether a malware maker is liable for how that malware is used. Some very big names, like Google and Microsoft, have thrown their weight behind the potential prosecution. Their stance is that immunity granted to a spyware maker will result in poorer security for everyone. I do wonder what such a ruling would mean for a security researcher releasing a proof-of-concept for a vulnerability. If a malware campaign went on to adapt and use research code, is that a liability?
Cisco Vulnerabilities
Cisco just recently released a set of patches and vulnerabilities, and a handful of them are really serious. First up is
CVE-2021-1393
, a bug in the Cisco Application Services Engine. The vulnerability is described as “insufficient access control” on a specific service. An unauthenticated attacker can connect to the service over TCP and make system changes. The description is quite vague, but this could be something like a debug port that was accidentally enabled in production. A very jaded and cynical guess would be that they simply left a telnet port wide open.
Next up is
CVE-2021-1388
, a similar bug in Cisco’s ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator. In this case, it’s an API that can be fooled into providing a administrator token. Once in possession of this token, one can access the entire API as an administrator, all without having a login at all.
And finally,
CVE-2021-1361
is a file system management service that was unintentionally exposed to the outside network on port 9075. A vulnerability in that service means that an attacker can make arbitrary file creation, deletion, or modification.
Exchange 0-days
Microsoft Exchange just got patched
for a set of vulnerabilities that were discovered because of active exploitation. Microsoft has attributed attacks to Hafnium, a group believed to be in the employ of the Chinese government.
Volexity seems to have been the firm that
first discovered the attack
. They have network monitoring services in place for various customers, and that service detected mass data exfiltration on two seperate customer networks. After tracking down the odd traffic, they discovered compromised Exchange servers, and were able to identify the 0-day that was used to compromise the machines.
Xerox
If you happen to discover a vulnerability in something made by Xerox, the appropriate response is apparently to release it anonymously online, as
Xerox will send you a cease-and-desist order
for anything else. [Raphaël Rigo] was scheduled to give a talk February 18th on a set of Xerox printer vulnerabilities, as part of the Infiltrate security conference. The day the talk was scheduled, Infiltrate announced that it had been canceled due to a legal threat from Xerox. The vulnerabilities were disclosed to Xerox back in 2020, so it’s not as if they didn’t have sufficient time to fix the problems.
Bitsquatting
Cosmic rays get blamed for the occasional computer problem. The theory is that a cosmic ray can hit a memory location and actually cause individual bits to flip. I don’t know whether cosmic rays are always to blame, but I do know that RAM problems are fairly common, and can cause hard-to-troubleshoot problems. We’ve talked about Rowhammer and associated attacks, where manipulating certain ram bits can cause changes in physically nearby bits. One of the security talks about unintentional bit flips suggested that the world’s computers see something like 600,000 mis-flips every day.
Now, bitsquatting is essentially a form of typosquatting. Typosquatting is picking a name a human is likely to accidentally mis-type, like “goggle.com”. Bitsquatting is selecting names likely to be reached through a bit flip. I was introduced to this idea through the work of [remy], who decided to finally
test the theory of bitsquatting using the windows.com domain
. I’ll use his research to demonstrate how this works. The string “windows” translates into binary as
01110111 01101001 01101110 01100100 01101111 01110111 01110011
. A single bit flip can change that second character from
01101001
, an “i”, to
01101000
, an “h”. Suddenly your computer is looking for “whndows.com” for updates, or to get the current time, etc.
How often do connections intended for the windows domain end up at a bitsquatted domain instead? [remy] calculated that there are 32 such valid domains, and was able to purchase 14 of them — just under half. He set up wildcard DNS so that “*.whndows.com” would also resolve to the IP address where he was listening for traffic. On his 14 domains, in a two week period, he received 199,180 NTP requests. Those came from 626 discrete addresses.
There was one event that was of particular interest. A computer on a Chinese IP address made an HTTP request to
time.wiodows.com
, which may have been a typo made by a human, as this wasn’t actually an NTP request. The odd thing is that soon after this request came in, a second request arrived from the Baidu search spider, to the same bogus domain. [remy] found it odd, but I believe I know exactly what this is. The “Great Firewall of China” is known to detect HTTP connections to unknown domains, and follow with a connection of its own, scraping the new site’s content. This unexpected connection was almost certainly the GFW’s probing.
An earlier experiment
ran for much longer, on a different set of bitsquatting domains. In this case, [Artem Dinaburg] observed the domains for just over seven months, and averaged 59 different IP addresses per day, trying to connect to the bogus domains. He points out that some of these connections are likely typos rather than bit flips. One other observation is that he found mobile devices to be overrepresented in connections to his bitsquatted domains. I can think of two possible explanations for this. First, it’s possible that mobile devices are more susceptible to bit flips, possibly because they are used outside so often. Alternatively, I suspect that mobile on-screen keyboards are just easier to typo on. In any case, bitsquatting is a very clever technique that really does have real-world impact. | 27 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328566",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T15:40:59",
"content": "“I do wonder what such a ruling would mean for a security researcher releasing a proof-of-concept for a vulnerability. If a malware campaign went on to adapt and use research code, is that a liability?”... | 1,760,373,164.158257 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/a-new-open-source-farming-robot-takes-shape/ | A New Open-Source Farming Robot Takes Shape | Jenny List | [
"green hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"agricultural robot",
"autonomous robot",
"farming",
"Mobile robot",
"rover"
] | The world of automated farming may be an unglamorous one to those not invested in its attractions, but like the robots themselves that quietly get on in the background with tending crops, those who follow that path spend many seasons refining their designs.
The Acorn
is a
newly-open-sourced
robot from Twisted Fields, a Californian research farm, and it provides a fascinating look at the progress of a farming robot design from germination onwards.
The Acorn is not a CNC gantry for small intensive gardens in the manner of designs such as the Farmbot, instead it’s an autonomous solar-powered rover intended for larger farms which will cruise the fields continuously tending to the plants in its patch. It’s a work in progress, so what we see is the completed rover with the tools and machine vision to follow. It pursues the course of a low-cost lightweight platform, an aluminium chassis surmounted by the solar panel, with mountain bike front fork derived wheels at each corner. It has four wheel drive and four wheel steering, meaning that it can traverse the roughest of farmland. We can see its progress since a 2019 prototype, and while it seems as slow as the seasons themselves to mature, we can see that the final version could be a significantly useful machine on a small farm.
It’s not the first autonomous farming robot we’ve seen over the years, as for example
this slightly more robust Australian model
. We’re guessing that this is the direction autonomous farming is likely to take, with the more traditional tractor-based machinery projected by some manufacturers
taking on repetitive loading and hauling roles
. | 48 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328549",
"author": "Canoe",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T14:30:48",
"content": "Lightweight if somewhat noisy platform.Looks so lightweight, it’s unclear if the platform would be capable of carrying a payload that can do actual work. And if so, for what duration.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,373,163.983403 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/05/magnetic-angle-sensor-mods-make-encoder-better-for-blasting/ | Magnetic Angle Sensor Mods Make Encoder Better For Blasting | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"angle",
"AS5048A",
"Asteroids",
"control",
"encoder",
"magnetic",
"neodymium",
"sensor"
] | Most of the hacks we see around these parts have to do with taking existing components and cobbling them together in interesting new ways. It’s less often that we see existing components gutted and repurposed, but when it happens, like with
this reimagined rotary encoder
, it certainly grabs our attention.
You may recall [Chris G] from his recent
laser-based
Asteroids
game
. If not you should really check it out — the build was pretty sweet. One small problem with the build was in the controls, where the off-the-shelf rotary encoder he was using didn’t have nearly enough resolution for the job. Rather than choosing a commodity replacement part, [Chris] rolled his own from the mechanical parts of the original encoder, like the shaft and panel bushing, and an AS5048A sensor board. The magnetic angle sensor has 14 bits of resolution, and with a small neodymium ring magnet glued to the bottom of the original shaft, the modified encoder offers far greater resolution than the original contact-based encoder.
The sensor breakout board is just the right size for this job; all that [Chris] needed to do to get the two pieces together was to 3D-print a small adapter. We have to admit that when we first saw this on Hackaday.io, we failed to see what the hack was — the modified part looks pretty much like a run-of-the-mill encoder. The video below shows the design and build process with a little precision rock blasting. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328519",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T10:52:06",
"content": "Why isn’t this a product?!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328521",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T11:19:37",
... | 1,760,373,164.094089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/retroarch-open-hardware-aims-for-plug-and-play/ | RetroArch Open Hardware Aims For Plug-and-Play | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cartridge",
"classic gaming",
"emulation",
"n64",
"Retroarch",
"USB mass storage"
] | At its core, the RetroArch project exists to make it easier to play classic games on more modern hardware. The streamlined front-end with its tailored collection of emulators helps take the confusion out of getting your favorite game from decades past running on whatever gadget you please, from your smartphone to the venerable Raspberry Pi. But there’s always room for improvement.
In a recent blog post,
the folks behind RetroArch took the wraps off of an exciting hardware project
that’s been in the works for about a year now. Referred to simply as “RetroArch Open Hardware”, the goal is to develop a fully open source cartridge adapter that will integrate seamlessly with the RetroArch software. Just plug in your original cartridge, and the game fires right up like back in the good old days.
Now to be clear, this isn’t exactly a new idea. But the team at RetroArch explain that previous devices that blurred the line between hardware and emulation have been expensive, hard to find, and worst of all, proprietary. By creating an open hardware project, they hope to truly unleash this capability on the community. Instead of having to deal with one vendor, multiple companies will be free to spin up their own clones and potentially even improve the core design. Should none of the ones on the market fit your particular needs, you’d even be free to build your own version,
What’s more, the gadget will also make it easier to create your own ROMs from cartridges you own. By appearing to the operating system as a USB Mass Storage device, users can literally drag and drop a game ROM to their computer’s desktop. No arcane software fired off from the command line; as much as we might enjoy such things, it’s not exactly intuitive for the gaming community at large. The same technique will also allow users to
backup their saved progress before it’s inevitably lost to the ravages of time
. The device demonstrated by the team currently only works on Nintendo 64 games, but presumably compatibility with be expanded to other cartridges in the future.
Over the years, we’ve seen a number of
hombrew devices designed to read and copy game cartridges
. We’ve even seen some
rather polished examples that were released as open hardware
. But those devices never had the public backing of such a well known group in the emulation scene, and we’re excited to see what kind of development and adoption can be spurred on by this level of legitimacy.
[Thanks to Nick for the tip.] | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328493",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T06:22:01",
"content": "I recommend clicking the link and reading the source. I had a huge misunderstanding of what was going on by the end of the article here. This isn’t going to be an emulation console, this is just a cartridge ... | 1,760,373,164.042568 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/smart-lid-spies-on-sourdough-starter-sends-data-wirelessly/ | Smart Lid Spies On Sourdough Starter, Sends Data Wirelessly | Donald Papp | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"dht22",
"ESP8266",
"IoT",
"oled",
"smart lid",
"sourdough",
"sourdough starter",
"ssd1306",
"TOF",
"vl6180x"
] | [Justin Lam] created a wonderfully-detailed writeup of his
Smart Sourdough Lid
project, which was created out of a desire to get better data on the progress and health of his sourdough starters, and to do so more efficiently. The result is a tidy, one-piece lid that constantly measures temperature, humidity, and height of the starter in the jar. Data is sent wirelessly for analysis, but there is also a handy OLED display on the top of the lid that shows immediately useful data like how much the starter has peaked, and how much time has passed since it did so.
The PCB was optimized for size, and not designed with mounting in mind, so a hot-glued machine screw serves as a “button extender”. Issues like this can happen when enclosures are designed after the fact; it’s something to which we can all relate.
We really like how focused the design is, and the level of detail [Justin] goes into to explain his design decisions and describe how well they worked out. This isn’t [Justin]’s first kick at the can when it comes to getting data on his sourdough, after all. We remember
his earlier work using computer vision to analyze sourdough starters
, and he used what he learned to inform this new design; the smart lid is easier to use and handles data much more efficiently.
The project’s GitHub repository
has all the information needed to build your own. The lid is ESP8266-based and integrates a VL6180X time-of-flight (ToF) distance sensor, DHT22 to sense temperature and humidity, and a small SSD1306 OLED display for data. A small custom PCB keeps the modules tidy, and a 3D-printed custom enclosure makes it one tidy package.
[Justin] also analyzes the results he obtained and talks about what they mean in the last part of his writeup, so if you’re into baking and interested in his findings, be sure to give that a look. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328475",
"author": "kitekid",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T03:31:41",
"content": "Definitely adding this to my to do list!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6328477",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T03:54:37",
... | 1,760,373,164.223931 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/homebrew-espresso-machine-has-closed-loop-control/ | Homebrew Espresso Machine Has Closed-Loop Control | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"espresso machine",
"group head",
"machining"
] | [Ben Katz] is in the process of building a compact, closed-loop espresso machine
, and really seems to be pulling it off in the first shot. Though it may not be the final product, we’re in awe of the beautiful guts and would love to taste-test the early results.
This machine will hit a sweet spot between lever-type espresso machines that are like driving a manual without power steering, and those fully automated machines that squeeze all the fun out of playing barista but are easier on the joints.
Here’s how it works so far: a motor drives an electric gear pump that pumps the water through a heater. It’s a closed-loop system, so there’s a 3-way valve after the heater that keeps sending the water back until it’s deemed hot enough. Once that happens, the valve switches functions and begins to pump water through the group head and on to the coffee grounds.
[Ben] designed and milled a beautiful group head that’s designed to fit a La Pavoni portafilter and some other parts he already had on hand. Grab a coffee and watch it pull the first shot after the break, then stick around to see the milling and the drilling.
Ready to kick that Keurig to the curb and get an espresso machine? Don’t just throw it out or take it to a field and smash it with a baseball bat —
turn that thing into an automatic drip for a small houseplant
.
Thanks for the tip, [tokol0sh]. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328454",
"author": "Jim Longley",
"timestamp": "2021-03-05T01:41:23",
"content": "Very cool, but will it fit on my kitchen counter?And did anyone notice the skull in the glass before it filled up?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,373,164.291196 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/inspire-dev-kit-drops-price-of-msla-printer-to-just-30/ | Inspire Dev Kit Drops Price Of MSLA Printer To Just $30 | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"development kit",
"ESP32",
"masked SLA",
"MSLA",
"resin 3d printer"
] | Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen massive price reductions on consumer 3D printers based on masked stereolithography (MSLA) technology. As the name implies, these machines use a standard LCD panel to selectively mask off the ultraviolet light coming from an array of LEDs. Add in a motorized Z stage, and you’ve got a simple and cheap way of coaxing UV resin into three dimensional shapes. These days, $200 USD can get you a turn-key MSLA printer with resolution far beyond the capabilities of filament-based FDM machines.
But [JD] still thinks we can do better.
His project aims to produce a fully-functional MSLA printer for $30
, and perhaps as low as $15 if manufactured in sufficient quality. He believes that by making high-resolution 3D printing more accessible, it will allow users all over the globe to bring their ideas to life. It’s no wonder he’s calling his machine the
Inspire 3D Printer
.
A test fixture for the LCD module.
This isn’t just some pie in the sky concept rolling around in [JD]’s head, either. You can order the
Inspire Development Kit
right now for just $30, though he makes it clear what you’ll receive isn’t quite a functional MSLA printer. By leveraging a common LCD module, the ESP32, and several 3D printed parts, he’s proven his price point for the kit is achievable; but there’s still plenty of work that needs to be done before the machine is ready for the general public.
For one thing, he’s still working the kinks out of the Z movement. The current design is 3D printed, but [JD] says he’s not quite happy with the amount of slop in the movement and is considering replacing the entire thing with the linear actuator from an optical drive.
We’ve already seen these parts reused for accurately positioning lasers
, so there’s certainly precedent for it. The firmware for the ESP32 is also in its infancy, and currently only allows the user to print from a selection of simple hard-coded shapes as a proof of concept.
We’ve seen DIY attempts at resin printers in the past
, but they’ve often been based on
more complex techniques involving projectors or UV lasers
. Masked stereolithography is much more approachable for the home gamer, and projects like the
Inspire 3D Printer
show just how little it really takes to
pull solid objects out of a puddle of goo
. | 41 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328394",
"author": "adrian",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T21:33:10",
"content": "The kit purchase page requests zipcode. Are you shipping beyond the US ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328396",
"author": "CRJEEA",
... | 1,760,373,164.379213 |
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