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https://hackaday.com/2020/09/30/choosing-the-right-rtc-for-your-project/ | Choosing The Right RTC For Your Project | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Original Art",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"Clocks",
"ds1307",
"DS3231",
"ds3234",
"microcontroller",
"real time clock",
"rtc",
"RV-1805",
"RV-3028"
] | When it comes to measuring time on microcontrollers, there’s plenty of ways to go about things. For most quick and dirty purposes, such as debounce delays or other wait states, merely counting away a few cycles of the main clock will serve the purpose. Accurate to the tens of milliseconds, they get the average utility jobs done without too much fuss.
However, many projects are far more exacting in their requirements. When you’re building a clock, or a datalogger, or anything that relies on a stable sense of passing time for more than a few minutes, you’ll want a Real Time Clock. So called due to their nature of dealing with
real time,
as we humans tend to conceive it, these devices take it upon themselves to provide timekeeping services with a high degree of accuracy. We’ve compiled a guide to common parts and their potential applications so you can get things right the first time, every time.
Requirements Are Key
The RTC you choose for a given project will come down to a variety of factors. Battery-powered projects will benefit from a low power draw, while scientific measurement devices may need the ultimate in accuracy over time. Interfaces are important too, as implementing an RTC in an already-existing design may necessitate part choice due to the availability of I2C or SPI. Budget is not commonly a problem for the home experimenter in this space, as parts are cheap, however a production run in the thousands will make huge savings in quantity from a cheaper part. As always, having a clear idea of the project requirements is key to choosing the right component for the job.
I Just Need To Know What Time It Is!
Suggested Part: DS1307
The DS-1307 is often the default choice for an RTC. However, if you need advanced features like alarms or square wave outputs, it’s best to look upmarket.
The DS1307 has the proud title of being the de facto RTC for those experimenting with microcontrollers. Running off 5 V, with a 500 nA current draw on battery backup, it’s the barebones solution for a project that needs to keep track of time. Unlike more advanced solutions, the DS1307 relies on an external 32.768 KHz crystal for timekeeping.
As per the datasheet,
this means the accuracy of the timekeeping is somewhat affected by the design implementation, due to varying capacitances and noise. Maxim don’t provide a proscribed accuracy value for this reason, but for the average clock build or basic datalogger, the DS1307 will do the trick.
DS1307 modules
are readily available, and often the cheapest RTC solution available at most outlets.
I Need Something Accurate, With Alarms!
Suggested Part:
DS3231 (I2C), DS3234 (SPI)
The DS3234 has the distinction of using an SPI interface instead of I2C. It also packs in 256 bytes of user-addressable RAM.
For those that need accuracy they can bank on, an RTC with an integrated oscillator is key. These devices guarantee accuracy from the factory, as there’s no user design error possible in the installation of the crystal. Parts like the DS3231 and DS3234 fit this bill, with their temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) boasting accuracy as good as ±2 ppm in temperatures from 0°C to +40°C. This comes at a sacrifice to standby current, with 1500 nA more typical, meaning backup batteries don’t last as long.
These parts are more modern, able to operate at voltages between 2.3-5.5V, making them easier to use with a variety of different microcontrollers. They also feature square-wave and alarm outputs. These can be used to generate clocks for other hardware, or to wake microcontrollers out of sleep via a GPIO pin set as an interrupt. RTCs are commonly used in this way to enable battery powered projects to get the most out of their batteries, by keeping the main microcontroller in a low-power sleep mode and only waking up when necessary. There’s also a bonus temperature sensor onboard that can be read out, which may come in handy in some projects.
These modules are
marketed with terms like DeadOn
due to their accuracy. The additional features and more sophisticated hardware does come at a higher price, however.
I Need An RTC That Barely Sips Power, And All The Rest!
Suggested Part: RV-1805, RV-3028
The RV-1805 draws so little power that this Sparkfun module gets by without a backup battery at all. Instead, a supercap keeps time for up to 35 days without external power.
When it comes to battery power, every last bit of juice matters. For projects deployed out in the field, it’s even more crucial, as it’s often not practical to regularly change batteries or guarantee an ongoing supply of energy from alternate sources like solar or wind.
For applications like these, the RV-1805 and its newer replacement, the RV-3028 come in. Complete with alarms and other high end features, their party piece is an absolutely miniscule current draw. With a special mode that relies on a low-power RC oscillator with a crystal as calibration backup,
the RV-1805 draws just 22 nA in timekeeping mode.
This is low enough that
Sparkfun’s module
specifies only a supercap, which is capable of keeping the set time for a full 35 days, where other RTCs must rely on batteries instead. The RV-3028 ups that to 100 nA, with Pimoroni claiming
a potential run time of 9 years on the included battery
. Accuracy is also top notch with these parts (±2 ppm RV-1805, ±1 ppm RV-3028), making them perfect for accurate datalogging in far-flung environments.
Special Mention: Raspberry Pi Modules
The RTC Pi, a cheap and simple solution to keeping the Pi in sync when away from the Internet.
The Raspberry Pi, like many computers from the 1980s, lacks a real time clock. This obviates the need for a battery, but can also cause havoc with system logging and other duties, particularly in non-networked environments. Thankfully, many of the above listed RTC devices are available in special modules designed for the Raspberry Pi’s particular form factor. They’re available in all kinds, from the
humble DS1307
to the
razor-sharp DS3231.
Installing these requires a little work.
The vast majority communicate over I2C, which can be a headache for projects already using the interface for other purposes. It’s also necessary to install a utility to communicate with the RTC and use it to properly update the system time where necessary.
Conclusion
Whether you’re trying to make a sweet timepiece for your loungeroom, or maintain accurate debug logs for a complicated system, accurate timekeeping is key. Thanks to the ready availability of modern hardware, it doesn’t have to be too hard. We hope this guide helps you on your way, and when your project is done,
be sure to drop us a line.
Happy hacking! | 27 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282721",
"author": "macegr",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T17:22:08",
"content": "There are a bunch on Tindie as well, with the side benefit of helping support Hackaday’s parent company and individual designers:https://www.tindie.com/search/?q=rtc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,373,339.156224 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/30/robot-cat-takes-inspiration-from-nature/ | Robot Cat Takes Inspiration From Nature | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"robot",
"robot cat",
"robotics"
] | Oftentimes, a project starts with a clean sheet of paper, and we set out wildly sketching towards the goal in our minds. However, it can pay to do your research first,
as [Chen Liang] demonstrates with this great robotic cat build.
[Liang] began the project after being dissatisfied with existing robot animals they’d seen online. Rather than simply attempt to build a cat from memory, instead, [Liang] decided to first study a real cat to ensure the resulting robot would bear real resemblence to its biological inspiration. [Liang]’s focus was on the skeleton, as replicating the way the real skeleton worked would create a robot with more authentic movement.
Using 3D printed parts and many, many servos, we think [Liang] has done an admirable job at creating a basic robot cat platform. With an ESP32 running the show, the cat can be posed using a web interface to control the servo positions of its various joints. We look forward to future upgrades that enable fluid movement and other capabilities, particularly involving the onboard camera.
It’s not the first robot cat we’ve seen
, and it’s likely it won’t be the last. If you’ve got one living in your own lab,
drop us a note on the tipline
. Video after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282805",
"author": "profumple",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T22:35:23",
"content": "damn kitties extremely articulated. Show off contortionists. Going to need many more noisy servos but is a good start. Sliders nice. Waiting on the walk video.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,373,338.540885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/push-pedal-for-privacy/ | Push Pedal For Privacy | Brian McEvoy | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"microphone",
"mute",
"pedal",
"teleconferencing",
"the hackaday prize"
] | Many of us in the secret Hackaday lair use gaming hardware at our work desks because it is reliable and performs well. We are not alone, and maybe you are reading this on your coffee break over a 20-button mouse. We wager that [Thiago Ribeiro de Azeredo] has this mindset because he converted some old analog gaming pedals into teleconferencing tools for his home office. Now that he is not racing to the office, he has to take a lot of computer calls, and he must
quickly and covertly mute his microphone
when his howling son tries to take the stage.
The pedals were gathering dust when he started working from home, but they are unretired for the upgrade. Inside, there is no mystery, just a couple of spring-loaded variable resistors, so he adds an Arduino Nano a couple of 4.7 kΩ resistors to create a voltage divider. The Nano doesn’t have native Human Interface Device (HID) functionality, so a Python script receives the serial port signals and toggles an application bar notification so he can see the microphone status. With two pedals, he can press-to-talk or lock his microphone on and off. We have to wonder, did he write the software during a meeting?
We love the idea of
controlling our battle stations with our feet
or seeing a bunch of
RGB keyboards used as a low-res display
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282435",
"author": "Alexander Somma",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T19:26:45",
"content": "This would work best as a push to talk.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6282570",
"author": "Digitalzombie",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,373,338.666686 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/a-good-hard-look-at-pre-stressed-concrete/ | A Good, Hard Look At Pre-Stressed Concrete | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"anchorage",
"cement",
"compression",
"concrete",
"pre-stressed concrete",
"rebar",
"steel",
"tensile strength",
"tensioning"
] | From the looks of the average driveway or sidewalk, it may seem as though concrete is just destined to crack. But if concrete is so prone to cracking, how are we able to use it in so many high-stress applications like bridges and skyscrapers? This question came about while I was
researching 3D-printed thermite for an article
. Thermite is often used in welding railroad tracks, and I linked a video of fresh tracks being welded that had concrete ties. I knew I had to find out how concrete could be made to withstand the pressure of freight trains.
On its own, concrete is brittle and has no give to it at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t strong. Although concrete has good compression strength, the tensile strength is quite poor. Around the late 1800s, someone thought to fortify spans of concrete with steel reinforcing bars, better known as rebar. Steel can stretch, adding steel bars gives the concrete some tensile strength to go along with its compressive strength. Rebar also allows for thinner slabs and other members.
Rebar Only Goes So Far
Parking blocks are meant to be replaced occasionally. Image via
Checkers Safety
Rebar or mesh-enforced concrete is good for things like parking lot blocks and roads, but it still fails before it ought to. In fact, it usually has to crack before the rebar can chip in any of its tensile strength.
In high-stress concrete applications like bridges and skyscrapers, it’s terrifically important to avoid deflection — that’s when a concrete member flexes and bends under load. Deflection can cause the modern glass skins to pop off of skyscrapers, among other problems.
A solid, rigid bridge is much nicer to walk, drive, and bicycle on than a bridge that sways in the breeze. But how do you do make a rigid bridge? One solution is to apply stresses to the concrete before it ever bears the load of cars and trucks or a steady schedule of freight trains.
Pre-stressed concrete is like rebar-enforced concrete, but with the added power of tension baked in. By adding stress to the concrete before it goes into service, deflection will be reduced or perhaps eliminated altogether. With the addition of tensile strength, more of the concrete’s own strength is able to come into play.
A tendon anchorage for post-tensioning. Image via
Wikipedia
Tensioning Methods
Pre-stressed concrete is made by running tendons throughout a concrete member or adjacent to it, and then pulling the tendons taut from the anchorage points to add tension. These tendons are usually made of either high-tension steel, carbon fiber, or aramid fiber, which is used in anti-ballistic fabrics. They are arranged in either a monostrand or multi-strand configuration and act a bit like rubber bands.
The result of pre-stressing concrete is that future compressive forces will make the service member act like super concrete, and future tensile forces will make it act more like high-tension steel. In other words, pre-stressed concrete can stand up to pressure and even twisting much better than regular concrete. It is essentially programmable because it is pre-stressed in a calculated way that mimics the stresses it will bear once it’s in service.
The ‘pre’ in pre-stressing means that it happens before the concrete member goes into service. The tensioning itself can either be done before the concrete is poured, or after it has set. There are various reasons for using one method or the other, but they’re pretty equal in terms of results.
A casting bed for girders. Image via
Wikipedia
Pre-tensioning: Before the Pour
This is the oldest method of pre-stressing concrete, and it dates back to the late 1800s. Pre-tensioning is typically used in making beams, floor slabs, balconies, water tanks, and concrete pipes. Before the concrete is poured, the tendons are secured between end-anchorages whether the tendons will end up within the concrete or directly next to it.
As the concrete cures, it sticks to the tendons, and the tension from the tendons is transferred to the cured concrete. After they’re unbolted, the rods stay tensioned, held in place by the concrete. Pre-tensioning is often done in advance of a construction project and the completed pieces are shipped to the site. This way, multiples can be made at once in a large mold called a casting bed. These are set up with tendons that are several members long, and then cut down once the concrete has cured.
Post-tensioning
As you might imagine, post-tensioning is done after the concrete cures. In post-tensioning, the tendons are inside of sleeves made of plastic or galvanized steel, and the concrete is cast with the sleeves on. After the concrete is cast, the tendons are pulled taut by the anchorages just as they are in pre-tensioning.
There are two ways to do post-tensioning — bonded and un-bonded. In bonded post-tensioning, grout is applied to the tendon sheathing before tensioning, and this permanently attaches them to the concrete. This does three things: it protects against corrosion, it locks in the tendon before tensioning takes place, and it improves structural behaviors of the concrete once the member is out there doing its job. In un-bonded post-tensioning, the tendons are in a lithium grease-filled sheath and are thus allowed to move longitudinally within the concrete. These are usually prepared off-site and in advance.
Check out the the concrete experiment in the video below. The concrete members that were pre-tensioned and post-tensioned are both able to withstand twice as much force as the member with traditional rebar. It isn’t that tensioned concrete is magically stronger, just that it’s allowed to reach more of its strength potential. Be sure to stick around after the experiment for a dramatic look at the process of manufacturing concrete railroad ties. | 43 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282406",
"author": "Brenden Morales",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T17:10:21",
"content": "Great Article! I feel like the diy / maker community sometimes skips over considering the availability and strength of concrete when designing things.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,339.009897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/all-the-workshops-and-the-smd-challenge-happening-at-hackaday-remoticon/ | All The Workshops, And The SMD Challenge Happening At Hackaday Remoticon | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Remoticon",
"cons",
"registration",
"Remoticon",
"workshops"
] | Last week we announced the first fifteen workshops happening at
Hackaday Remoticon
, November 6-8, 2020. The weekend really is packed full of these hands-on events, and you’re invited to participate from anywhere in the world. Today we’re excited to announce the rest of the workshops, all of which are currently open for registration.
Can we get a few hundred people to show off their soldering skills (or amusing lack of skills) from their own workbench during the event? We think we can, so we’re running the SMD Challenge virtually this year. All of this, plus keynote talks, demos, a show-and-tell, and more make for one wild weekend. Read on!
What’s the Deal with Tickets?
First things first, get your free Remoticon ticket right now
. This lets us know how many people will be hanging around during the weekend for the keynotes, and to watch the soldering challenge and demo tracks. Everyone should have one of these tickets. If you happen to be in a giving mood, consider the “Pay as you wish” entry at the bottom of the ticketing options — it’s the same as the free ticket but your generous donation goes to charities that feed, clothe, and house people in need.
Now grab your workshop tickets
. You’re invited to be one of the live, hands-on attendees of the workshops which will be held via video chat. Each workshop ticket is $10, and some call for you to source your own materials ahead of the event so read the description of each. In addition to
those we announced last week
, here are the rest of the workshops:
Announced today (brings total to 21 workshops):
Circuit Sculpture
Creative Code Experiments
Finding Sound and Making Microphones
Give Pigweed a Whirl
Making Glowy Origami
Radi-uhoh: What Is This SDR Thing, and How Do I Use It
What’s That SMD Challenge All About?
Surface mount components are not really meant to be hand soldered, it’s a hack. So let’s hack together and do it on camera! For the past two years we’ve used the excellent
SMD Challenge board designed by MakersBox
as the target of
a head-to-head challenge at live events
. At Remoticon, you can take the challenge from your own workbench.
Ballpoint pen for scale
Your $5 SMD challenge ticket covers the cost of the kit — you just need to pay for shipping. The bargain is that you must commit to soldering the kit live on camera sometime during the weekend of Remoticon. This is an exhibition challenge… we’re not looking for the best, we’re looking for the most fun. So failing to complete all the parts is perfectly fine, at least you tried and that’s the point. Please limit yourself to one ticket.
To help amp up the fun, we’ve invited several hardware badge teams from conferences all over the world to compete as well. More on that later, but all of this should make the SMD Challenge room a hot place to hang out all weekend.
Awesome People Make for Unforgettable Events
We’re sorry we can’t get together in person this year. However, lemons, lemonade, and all that — Remoticon gives us a lot of new opportunities. The most profound is that it breaks down the barriers of geography, time, and expense to attending conferences in-person. If you’ve never been to a live Hackaday event, now you can! It also alleviates the pressures of having enough physical space to hold a multitude of workshops, and make recordings of them available to amplify the number of people that benefit from them.
We want to invite you to join us in thanking everyone who submitted a workshop proposal. As always, the Hackaday community is packed with talented and caring people who are willing to share their time and expertise to help others level up. Remoticon would be nothing without them, and it won’t be nearly as enjoyable without you.
So grab your tickets and let’s have some fun
! | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282393",
"author": "Pat Dooley",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T16:30:24",
"content": "I am very interested in the circuit sculpture workshop but I don’t see how to sign up for it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6282469",
... | 1,760,373,338.721514 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/split-keeb-splits-time-between-desk-and-tablet-modes/ | Split Keeb Splits Time Between Desk And Tablet Modes | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"haptic feedback",
"keeb",
"keyboard",
"lily58",
"oled",
"pimoroni haptic buzz",
"tenting"
] | A keyboard you build yourself should really be made just for you, and meet your specific needs. If you approach it this way, you will likely break ground and inspire others simply because it’s personalized. Such is the case with
[_GEIST_]’s highly-customized lily58, designed to work in two modes — on the desk, and mounted on the back of a tablet
.
The lily58, which is a 58-key split with dual OLED footprints, was just a starting point for this build. For tablet mode, where the keyboard is attached to the back of a tablet with hook-and-loop tape, [_GEIST_] created custom plates that double the thumb keys on the back.
We love that there is a PSP thumbstick for mousing on one layer and inputting keystrokes on other layer. But we can’t decide which is our favorite part: the fact that [_GEIST_] threaded it through the bottom of a Kailh Choc switch, or the fact that there’s a Pimoroni Haptic Buzz with a different wave form for each layer. [_GEIST_] also added an acrylic middle plate layer to support quick-change magnetic tenting legs.
Keyboard mods don’t have to be involved to be adopted by others.
This modified Dactyl adds custom wrist rest holders and has deeper bottoms that allow for less than perfect wiring
.
Via
reddit | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282405",
"author": "PAPPP",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T17:10:09",
"content": "That’s a really nice form-factor that solves both the “Touchscreens are terrible because you occlude your interface” and “Keyboards take up too much face real estate” problems (and it looks like even mostly... | 1,760,373,338.834818 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/linux-fu-making-awk-a-bit-easier/ | Linux-Fu: Making AWK A Bit Easier | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"awk",
"gawk",
"linux",
"Linux Fu",
"regular expressions"
] | awk
is a kind of Swiss Army knife for text files. However, some of its limitations are often a bit annoying. I’ve used a simple set of functions to make
awk
a bit better, although I will warn you: it does require GNU extensions to
awk
. That is, you must use
gawk
and not other versions. Your system probably maps
/usr/bin/awk
to something and that something might be
gawk
. But it could also be
mawk
or some other flavor. If you use a Debian-based distro, update-alternatives is your friend here. But for the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you are using
gawk
.
By the end of the post, you’ll see how to use my
awk
add-on functions
to split up a line into fields even when there is no single character to separate all fields. In addition, you’ll be able to refer to the fields using names you decide. You won’t have to remember that $2 is the time field. You’ll say
Fields_fields["time"]
instead.
The Problem
awk
does a lot of common work for you when you use it to process text files. It reads files a record at a time. Normally, a record is a single line. Then it splits the line on fields using whitespace, or some other choice of field separators. You can write code that manipulates the line or individual fields. This default behavior is great, especially since you can change the end of record character and the field separator. A surprising number of files fit this sort of format.
Until, of course, they don’t. If you have data coming from a data logging instrument or some database, it could be formatted in a variety of ways. Some fields might have structured data with a variety of separators. This isn’t a deal-breaker. Since you can get at the whole line, you can do almost anything you want, but the logic is harder and the whole point to using
awk
is to make things easier.
For example, suppose you had a file from a data recorder that had an eight-digit serial number, followed by a six-character tag, and then two floating point numbers separated by colons. The pattern might look like
^([0-9]{8})([a-zA-Z0-9]{6})([-+.0-9]+),([-+.0-9]+)$
This would be hard to handle with the conventional field splitting and you’d normally just write code to split everything apart.
If you have regular fields, but don’t know how many, you probably want to set
FS
or
FPAT
, instead. We talked about
FPAT
a little before when we were
abusing
awk
to read hex files
. This library is a little different. You can use it to pick apart a line totally. For example, you might have part of the line with a fixed field length and then multiple types of separators. That can be hard to handle with the other methods.
Regular Expressions
To make things easier, I’ll wrap up the
gawk
match
function. That function exists in regular
awk
, of course, but
gawk
adds an extension that makes things much easier. Normally, the function performs a regular expression match on a string and tells you where the match starts, if there was a match, and how many characters matched.
With the GNU extensions in
gawk
, you can provide an extra array argument. That array will get some information about the match. In particular, the zero item of the array will contain the entire match. If the regular expression contains sub-expressions in parenthesis, the array will contain those, numbering by the order of the parenthesis. It will also contain start and length information.
For example, if your regular expression were
"^([0-9]+)([a-z]+)$"
and your input string is
123abc
, the array would look like this:
array[0] - 123abc
array[1] - 123
array[2] - abc
array[0start] - 1
array[0length] - 6
array[1start] - 1
array[1length] - 3
array[2start] - 4
array[2length] - 3
You can even have nested expressions, so
"^(([xyz])[0-9]+)([a-z]+)$"
with an input of z1x gives
array[1]=z1
,
array[2]=z
, and
array[3]=x
.
Theory vs Practice
In theory, that’s all you need. You can write a regular expression to pick apart a line, parse it, and then access the pieces using the array. In practice, it is much nicer to have everything done so you can use plain names to access the data.
As an example data format, consider a line like this:
11/10/2020 07:00 The Best of Bradbury, 14.95 *****
There is a date in US format, a time in 24-hour format, an item name, a price, and a rating from 1 to 5 stars that may not be present. Writing a regular expression to grab each field is a bit complex, but not very hard. Here is one way to do it:
"^(([01][0-9])/([0-3][0-9])/(2[01][0-9][0-9]))[[:space:]]*(([0-2][0-9]):([0-5][0-9]))[[:space:]]+([^,]+),[[:space:]]*([0-9.]+)[[:space:]]*([*]{1,5})?[[:space:]]*$"
That’s a mouthful, but it works. Note that each item is in parenthesis and some of those are nested. So the date is one field, but the month, day, and year are also fields.
The Library
Once you grab the files on
GitHub
, you could put the fields_* functions into your code. You need to do some setup in the BEGIN tag. Then you process each line using fields_process. Here’s a small example (with the functions omitted):
BEGIN {
fields_setup("^(([01][0-9])/([0-3][0-9])/(2[01][0-9][0-9]))[[:space:]]*(([0-2][0-9]):([0-5][0-9]))[[:space:]]+([^,]+), [[:space:]]*([0-9.]+)[[:space:]]*([*]{1,5})?[[:space:]]*$")
fields_setupN(1,"date")
fields_setupN(2,"month")
fields_setupN(3,"day")
fields_setupN(4,"year")
fields_setupN(5,"time")
fields_setupN(6,"hours")
fields_setupN(7,"minutes")
fields_setupN(8,"item")
fields_setupN(9,"price")
fields_setupN(10,"star")
}
{
v=fields_process()
... your code here...
}
In your code you can write something like:
cost=Fields_fields["price"] * 3
Simple, right? The
fields_process
function returns false if there was no match. You can still access the normal
awk
fields like $0 or $2 if you want.
Inside
The extra functions rely on two things: the extensions to the
gawk
match
function and
awk
‘s associative array mechanism. In the past, I’ve added the named keys to the existing match array so you could get data out either way. However, I’ve modified it so that the match array is local because I almost never really want that capability and then you have to filter out the extra fields if you want to dump the entire array.
It is frequently useful to start the regular expression with
^
and end it with
$
to anchor the entire string. Just don’t forget that the regular expression needs to handle white space consumption, as the example does. This is often a benefit when you have fields that can contain spaces, but if you wanted spaces to break fields anyway, you are probably better off with the original parsing scheme.
Another trick is to get “the rest of the line” after you parsed off the first fields. You can do that by adding
"(.*)$"
to the end of the regular expression. Just don’t forget to set up a tag for it using
fields_setupN
so that you can fetch the value later.
An easy extension to this library would be to make the pattern an array. The processing function could try each pattern in turn until one matches. Then it would return the index of the matching pattern or false if there were no matches. This would let you define multiple types of lines if you had a complex file format. You’d probably want to have different sets of field tags for each one, too.
I have a long history of abusing tools like
awk
to do things, like build
cross assemblers
. Even so, I’m probably not the
worst offender
. | 18 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282340",
"author": "socksbot",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T14:06:29",
"content": "After several years writing one-liners in Perl it’s superseded awk entirely. This is something I type by heart:perl -nl -we ‘$totals{$1}+=$2 if /context (key) (number)/; END { print “$_ $totals{$_}” for... | 1,760,373,338.610663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/wifi-hacking-mr-coffee/ | WiFi Hacking Mr. Coffee | Adam Zeloof | [
"hardware",
"home hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"coffee",
"coffee machine",
"device security",
"firmware hacking",
"IoT"
] | You wake up on a Sunday, roll out of bed, and make your way to the centerpiece of your morning, the magical device that helps you start your day: the coffee machine. You open the companion app, because everything has an app in 2020, and select a large latte with extra froth. As you switch open a browser to check Hackaday, the machine beeps. Then the built-in grinder cranks up to 100, the milk frother begins to whir, and the machine starts spraying water. Frantic, you look at the display for an error code and instead see a message instructing you to send $75 to a bitcoin wallet, lest your $300 machine become a doorstop.
Outlandish though it may seem, this has become quite a real possibility, as
[Martin Hron] at the Avast Threat Labs demonstrates.
In fact, he could probably make your modern macchiato machine do this without setting foot in your house (so long as it comes with a built-in ESP8266, like his did).
Building on others’ work that identified the
simple commands that control the machine over it’s WiFi connection
(nothing says “brew me a nice cup o’ joe” like 0x37), [Martin] reverse-engineered the Smarter Coffee companion app to extract and reverse engineer its firmware. He was actually able to find the entire firmware image packaged within the app- relatively uncommon in the world of Over-The-Air (OTA) updates, but convenient in this case. Using
Interactive Disassembler (IDA)
to sift through the firmware’s inner workings, he identified the functions that handle all basic operations, including displaying images on the screen, controlling the heating elements, and of course, beeping. From there, he modified the stock firmware image to include some malicious commands and ran an OTA update.
The mind-boggling part here is that not only was the firmware transmitted as unencrypted plaintext over unsecured WiFi, but the machine didn’t even require a user to confirm the update with a button press. With one quick reboot, the trap was set. The machine operated normally, while waiting for “Order 66,” causing it to turn all the heating elements on, spool up the built-in grinder, and beep. Constantly.
While a broken coffee machine seems relatively innocuous, there are some
pretty significant lapses in hardware/firmware security
here that, while avoidable, almost seem unnecessary in the first place. It makes us wonder- why does Mr. Coffee need a smartphone in the first place?
[Thanks, Achilleas and STR-Alorman!] | 42 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282295",
"author": "BobH",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T11:46:15",
"content": "” It makes us wonder- why does Mr. Coffee need a smartphone in the first place?”This has been my question about most of the IOT stuff that I have seen/heard so far.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,339.086475 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/bunnies-betrusted-makes-first-appearance-as-mobile-fpga-based-soc-development-kit/ | Bunnie’s Betrusted Makes First Appearance As Mobile, FPGA-Based SoC Development Kit | Maya Posch | [
"Crowd Funding",
"FPGA",
"News"
] | [
"betrusted",
"Bunnie Huang",
"fpga development",
"precursor"
] | Recently, [Bunnie Huang] announced his
Precursor project
: a spiffy-looking case housing a PCB with two FPGAs, a display, battery and integrated keyboard. For those who have seen
[bunnie]’s talk at 36C3
last year, the photos may look very familiar, as it is essentially the same hardware as the ‘Betrusted’ project is intended to use. This also explains the name, with this development kit being a ‘precursor’ to the
Betrusted
product.
In short, it’s a maximally open, verifiable, and trustworthy device. Even the processor is instantiated on an FPGA so you know what’s going on inside the silicon.
He has set up
a Crowd Supply page
for the Precursor project, which provides more details. The board features a Xilinx Spartan 7 (XC7S50) and Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA, 16 MB SRAM, 128 MB Flash, integrated WiFi (Silicon Labs WF200-based), a physical keyboard and 1100 mAh Lio-Ion battery. The display is a 200 ppi monochrome 336 x 536 px unit, with both the display and keyboard backlit.
At this point [bunnie] is still looking at how much interest there will be for Precursor if a campaign goes live. Regardless of whether one has any interest in the anti-tamper and security features, depending on the price it might be a nice, integrated platform to tinker with. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282283",
"author": "Interested",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T10:35:55",
"content": "very nice. I hope they flip the antenna connectors to the back of the board at some point.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6282289",
"author":... | 1,760,373,338.78278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/state-of-the-art-for-nixies-gets-a-boost-from-dalibor-farnys-supersize-prototype/ | State Of The Art For Nixies Gets A Boost From Dalibor Farny’s Supersize Prototype | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"anode",
"cathode",
"glassblowing",
"manufacturing",
"nixie",
"prototype"
] | Never one to pass up on a challenge, artisanal Nixie tube maker [Dalibor Farný] has been undertaking what he calls “Project H”, an enormous array of 121 Nixie tubes for an unnamed client. What’s so special about that? Did we mention that
each Nixie is about the size of a sandwich plate
?
Actually, we did, back in May when we first noted Project H in our
weekly links roundup.
At that time [Dalibor] had only just accepted the project, knowing that it would require inventing everything about these outsized Nixies from scratch. At 150 mm in diameter, these will be the largest Nixies ever made. The design of the tube is evocative of the old iconoscope tubes from early television history, or perhaps the CRT from an old oscilloscope.
Since May, [Dalibor] has done most of the design work and worked out the bugs in a lot of the internal components. But as the video below shows, he still has some way to go. Everything about his normal construction process had to be scaled up, so many steps, like the chemical treatment of the anode cup, are somewhat awkward. He also discovered that mounting holes in the cathodes were not the correct diameter, requiring some clench-worthy manual corrections. The work at the glassblower’s lathe was as nerve wracking as it was fascinating; every step of the build appears fraught with some kind of peril.
Sadly, this prototype failed to come together — a crack developed in the glass face of the tube. But ever the pro, [Dalibor] took it in stride and will learn from this attempt. Given that he’s reduced
the art of the Nixie
to practice, we’re confident these big tubes will come together eventually. | 14 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282255",
"author": "Evgeny",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T07:31:57",
"content": "You are a great fellow! And you have golden hands!Everything will definitely work out! Success is near!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6282258",
... | 1,760,373,339.311092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/nasa-claims-cold-fusion-without-naming-it/ | NASA Claims Cold Fusion Without Naming It | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"deuterium",
"erbium",
"fusion",
"fusor",
"nasa",
"nuclear",
"nuclear fusion",
"nuclear power"
] | Do you remember in 1989 when two chemists announced they’d created a setup that created nuclear fusion at room temperature? Everyone was excited, but it eventually turned out to be very suspect. It wasn’t clear how they detected that fusion occurred and only a few of the many people who tried to replicate the experiment claimed success and they later retracted their reports. Since then, mentioning cold fusion is right up there with perpetual motion. Work does continue though, and NASA recently published
several papers on lattice confinement fusion
which is definitely not called cold fusion, although it sounds like it to us.
The idea of trapping atoms inside a metallic crystal lattice isn’t new, dating back to the 1920s. It sounds as though the NASA method uses erbium packed with deuterium. Photons cause some of the deuterium to fuse. Unlike earlier attempts, this method produces detectable neutron emissions characteristic of fusion.
This isn’t as seductive a proposition as having a beaker of heavy water and little else, though, because you do need a source of electrons to kick off the reaction. Still, this should point the way to future research and maybe even inspire some garage experiments.
Keep in mind there is a big difference between creating net positive energy via fusion and just
fusing a few atoms together
. We’ve seen a few
fusors
that can pull that off. | 62 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282209",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T02:20:57",
"content": "Except it’s not cold as NASA has pointed out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6282231",
"author": "Bunsen",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T04... | 1,760,373,339.254893 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/sliding-screen-has-wheels-will-travel/ | Sliding Screen Has Wheels, Will Travel | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"belt",
"installation",
"pulley",
"rail",
"scrap metal",
"stepper motor"
] | For a recent event, [MakerMan] was tasked with creating an interactive display that could move back and forth along an image of the Moscow skyline to highlight different points of interest. The end result is certainly gorgeous, but since this is Hackaday, we were more excited to
see all the behind the scenes video of how it was built
.
As with many of his projects, this one started with little more than scrap parts. Two metal I-beams were welded together to make a track, and a wheeled cart was fashioned to ride on it. Using a belt and pulley system that’s not unlike a scaled up version of what you might see on a desktop 3D printer, the motor in the cart is able to move the arrangement back and forth with minimal slop.
Installing the motor and pulley in the cart.
The cart actually holds all of the electronics in the project, including the power supplies, MA860H motor controller, a pair of endstop switches, and the Arduino that pulls it all together. A drag chain is used to keep the wires tight to the side of the rail without getting tangled up in anything.
[MakerMan] doesn’t explain much of the software side of this one, though we suppose he might only have been contracted to develop the hardware. But towards the end of the video you can see how the cart, now with large touch screen display mounted on top, moves back and forth when the appropriate commands are sent to the Arduino.
We’re not really sure what application such a contraption would have for the average hacker, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be jealous. There’s just
something about huge illuminated screens that just speaks to us
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282204",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T01:32:45",
"content": "Hm. Four V-rollers on two parallel rails. Looks overconstrained, to me. If there is any variation at all in distance between the rails, the cart will tilt as one set of rollers pushes up the slop... | 1,760,373,339.747139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/voice-controlled-sofa-meets-your-every-beverage-need/ | Voice Controlled Sofa Meets Your Every Beverage Need | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Beer Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"automatic",
"beer",
"couch",
"dispenser",
"refrigerator",
"sofa",
"voice control"
] | It’s often taken for grated, but the modern world is full of luxuries. Home automation, grocery delivery, and even access to the Internet are great tools to have at hand, but are trivial to most of us. If these modern wonders are not enough for you, and the lap of luxury is still missing a certain
je ne sais quoi
, allow us to introduce you to the ultimate convenience:
a voice controlled, beer-dispensing sofa with a built-in refrigeration system
.
This is a project from [Garage Avenger] and went through a number of iterations before reaching this level of polish. Metal work on the first version didn’t fit together as expected, and there were many attempts at actual refrigeration before settling on repurposing an actual refrigerator. With those things out of the way, he was able to get to the meat of a project. The couch-refrigerator holds 12 beers, and they are on a conveyor belt which automatically places the next beer onto the automated drawer. When commanded (by voice, app, or remote) the sofa opens the drawer so the occupant can grab one easily without having to move more than an arm. Everything, including the voice recognition module, is controlled by an Arduino, as is tradition.
The attention to detail is excellent as well. The remote control contains a built-in bottle opener, for one, there are backlights and a glass cover for the refrigerator, and the drawer is retracted automatically when it senses the beer has been obtained. We couldn’t ask for much more from our own couches, except maybe that they
take us where we want to go
. But maybe it’s best to keep these two couch use cases separate for now. | 9 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282123",
"author": "Steven Gann",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T20:31:17",
"content": "This is excellent. Nice build, professional quality. I’ve been wanting to build a concealed snack fridge for my theater for a while now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},... | 1,760,373,339.541532 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/check-your-pockets-for-components/ | Check Your Pockets For Components | Brian McEvoy | [
"hardware",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"capacitor",
"component",
"Component Tester",
"npn",
"passives",
"pnp",
"resistor",
"transistor"
] | The ideal component tester is like a tricorder for electronics — it can measure whatever it is that you need it to, all the time. Maybe you have a few devices like an ohmmeter and maybe a transistor socket on our multimeter. But what do you do when you need to see if that thyristor is faulty? [Akshay Baweja] wants an everything-tester at the ready, so he’s building
a comprehensive device that fits in a pocket
. It will identify the type and size of:
Resistors
Capacitors
Inductors
Diodes
Transistors
Thyristors
TRIACs
The key to its small size is the USB-C power port instead of an onboard battery and accompanying charging circuitry. On the back of the
custom PCB
is an ATMEGA328 and the front sports an OLED screen, three testing pin sockets, and a button.
We appreciate how the controller doesn’t care what order you connect the pins, and it figures out what the test subject is and the function of each lead. Results appear on the screen until you load a new component and press the button again. A function generator feature sets it apart from the
run-of-the-mill testers
out there, but it doesn’t have an
audible continuity meter
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282066",
"author": "Mike Massen in Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T19:09:19",
"content": "Cool, been wanting to do something along these lines, this looks like a heck of a good line to start along, well done nice mix and thanks for posting :-)",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,373,339.59208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/pc-cases-are-still-stuck-in-the-dark-ages-but-we-can-fix-this/ | PC Cases Are Still Stuck In The Dark Ages, But We Can Fix This | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"front panel connectors",
"pc case",
"pin headers",
"standards"
] | In the dawning of the IBM PC era, the computer case was a heavy, stout thing. These were industrial machines, built with beefy paddle power switches, and weighing as much as a ton of bricks. Painted in only the ugliest beige, they set the tone for PC design for the next couple of decades.
At the turn of the millennium, the winds of change swept through. The Apple iMac redefined the computer as a hip, cool device, and other manufacturers began to reconsider their product aesthetics. Around the same time, the casemodding scene took off in earnest, with adherents building ever wilder battle stations for internet clout and glory.
With all the development that has gone in the last 40 years of the PC platform, we’ve seen great change and improvement in almost every area. But in building a new rig this past month, this writer discovered there’s one element of the modern PC that’s still trapped in the past.
Ugly Little Headers
This photo was taken in 2019, and shows the PC platform still condones utter nonsense. It doesn’t have to be like this!
It’s the cases, yes. Sure, the modern PC builder has a wider selection to choose from than ever. Whether your predilection is for built-in acrylic windows or dazzling fans festooned with RGB LEDs, you can have your fill in the modern market. Connectivity options are better than ever too, with front panels overflowing with USB ports, audio sockets and even fancy drive caddies if you so desire.
Despite this, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the ugly little headers used to connect the very basics of a computer case to the motherboard inside. Power and reset buttons, the internal case speaker, and status LEDs are all hooked up with fiddly little individual pin headers. With all the sophistication of a set of breadboard jumper wires, they’re a pain to install and an absolute joke on a platform that is otherwise at the cutting edge of computing technology.
A Gigabyte X570 Gaming X motherboard, with the front panel header pictured. Next to it is a standard USB 3.0 front panel connector, indicating there’s no reason we should suffer this way. Look at those messy wires going every which way! Ugh.
What’s worse is that there is absolutely no reason it should be this way. As it stands, motherboard manufacturers are free to lay out their connections for these features any way they like, often simply lumping a double-row pin header on to the board and putting a pinout in the manual. However, some manufacturers have gone to a higher level, using a moulded and keyed connector on the board. Despite this, they’re still intended for use with the aforementioned individual pin connectors, just making them harder and more fiddly to install. What is maddening is that these often sit right next to other connectors on the motherboard, like front-panel USB-3 connectors, or HD audio headers. In both of these cases, motherboard manufacturers were able to agree a common standard such that a single connector carrying all necessary signals could be used to hook the case ports up to the motherboard. They still use cheap, 0.1″ pitch header-style connectors, but they bundle all the wires into one compact, keyed package, making install a one-step process.
The Day Case Connector, coming to a PC near you in 2021.
Why this hasn’t been done yet for power buttons and status LEDs absolutely escapes me. Thus, I propose a solution. A simple keyed header-style connector that carries all the basics for a PC case, that can be implemented on all PC motherboards going forward, and of course, all PC cases. This covers the Power LED and button, the reset button, the hard drive activity LED, the speaker, and a chassis intrusion switch.
The proposed solution, the
Day Case Connector
, if you will, is based loosely off a design already used by some motherboard manufacturers. If I’m honest, the diagram is largely cribbed from an existing motherboard manual with some extraneous “features” removed, because we’re trying to get this shipped, after all. Audio and USB connections are best left to the already-existing front panel connectors which work fine, and would only complicate things here. This is simply a basic standard for the barebones components in a PC case. Obviously, some cases do not implement reset buttons or speakers, but this is not an issue — they can be left unpopulated without interfering with the proper operation of the connector. Alternatively, mandate that every case have these features, and rule with an iron fist.
Obviously, a scathing op-ed isn’t going to be enough to make this happen overnight. You’ll need to help, by petitioning your local Congressman, Senator, or Girl Scout Troop, to get behind the cause. Only the people can affect real change at the end of the day, after all. Some may deride us, pointing out that for the average user who builds one PC every few years, it shouldn’t be an issue. They may point out that the time spent writing this article is longer than it took to install the headers anyway. These are mere distractions, and they must not stray us from our goal.
So please, next time you build a PC, do not throw your hands up in despair. Instead, let yourself be moved to action. We shall right this wrong before the decade is out — you have my word. Godspeed! | 182 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282018",
"author": "scott.tx",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T17:12:11",
"content": "let me help you fix the headline there… ‘pc motherboards are still stuck in the dark ages…’",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6282019",
"aut... | 1,760,373,339.965371 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/mechanical-engineering-hack-chat/ | Mechanical Engineering Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"cross-discipline",
"Hack Chat",
"mechanical engineering",
"structural",
"thermodynamics"
] | Join us on Wednesday, September 30 at noon Pacific for the
Mechanical Engineering Hack Chat
with
Adam Zeloof
!
Almost every non-trivial project involves some level of cross-discipline work. If you build a robot, for instance, you need to worry not just about the electronics but also the mechanical design. You need to make sure that the parts you use will be strong enough to deal with the forces that it’ll face, you have to know how much power it’ll take to move your bot, and you have to deal with a thousand details, from heat flow to frictional losses to keeping things moving with bearing and seals.
Unfortunately for many of us, the mechanical engineering aspects of a project are foreign territory. We lack the skills to properly design mechanical systems, and so resort to seat-of-the-pants decisions on materials and fasteners, or over-engineering in the extreme — the bigger the bolt, the better. Right?
Some of us, though, like
Adam Zeloof
, actually know a thing or two about proper mechanical engineering. Strength of materials, finite element analysis, thermodynamics — all that stuff that most of us just wing are Adam’s stock in trade. Adam brings a trained mechanical engineer’s skillset to his multi-discipline projects, like
the Rotomill
or
his reverse-engineered ride-share scooter
. And many of you will have been lucky enough to see
Adam’s excellent 2019 Superconference talk
on thermal design for PCBs.
Adam joins us on the Hack Chat to talk about anything and everything to do with mechanical engineering. Join us with your burning — sometimes literally — questions on how to make your designs survive the real world, where things break and air resistance can’t be ignored.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 30 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, 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. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282201",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T01:12:54",
"content": "“Almost every non-trivial project involves some level of cross-discipline work”(*) I’m in this picture and I don’t like itHeh, yeah just getting bogged down in something that needs organic chemistry,... | 1,760,373,340.014199 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/30/video-exploring-the-abandoned-birthplace-of-the-6502-and-commodore-64/ | Video: Exploring The Abandoned Birthplace Of The 6502 And Commodore 64 | Bil Herd | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"6502",
"bil herd",
"MOS"
] | I miss my friend Dave DiOrio. He was a chip designer in the 1980’s, which made him one of the true wizards back then. We met my first day when I started at Commodore Business Machines, though my paycheck said MOS Technology on it.
MOS Technology was the birthplace of the venerable 6502 microprocessor, the VIC video chip, and the SID sound chip to name the really famous ones. It also brought us the TED Text Display chip, a whole boatload of Amiga chips, and several other chips that
almost
did what we wanted them to do.
I worked with magicians whose stock and trade were comprised of half-part quantum tunneling effect and half-part straight-up logic implementation. These magicians weren’t bound by the number of pins available for TTL logic, not like us lowly hardware engineers who had to string 14 and 16 pin chips together to do any real lifting.
Below the spartan offices where the designs were drawn lived the dragon otherwise known as a chip fab, short for integrated circuit fabrication plant. This beast ate sand and made wafers; slices of almost pure silicon in crystalline form with all kinds of intricate things craftily grown on top of them.
Memory Lane: Touring the Abandoned MOS Headquarters
MOS Technology was started in 1969 by Allen Bradley but only became
the
MOS that I think of when I talk about the good old days when
Chuck Peddle
and a bunch of cohorts from Motorola, including Bill Mensch, swept in and produced the 6502 microprocessor, which resembled a particular Motorola processor quite a bit, in fact a lot. Lawsuits followed.
Meanwhile the 6502 was taking over several industries as
the
go-to processor for everything from medical equipment to microwave ovens to home computers. It was while designing home computers that I met Dave while standing above a chip fab. I can still remember the smell of that dragon farting below our feet… its an understatement to say I miss those times.
A couple of years ago I had a chance to return to the old stomping ground as it were, and set foot (legally) inside of MOS headquarters in Norristown, PA — which had become CSG (Commodore Semiconductor Group) by the end. The basement was dirty and flooded and yet we found wafers, one from one of the computers I worked on.
The ground floor was dark and quiet, I stood at the dirty glass entrance doors looking out at a drab street and I quickly moved on before I got hit by some sort of self evident metaphor for life that would have been annoying.
The second floor was where our offices had been. The hot press of design deadlines has long since left this space, now all there is to see is the golf course out the window and a little camp fire someone had made. I got to show this video to Dave, including the view looking out his old office window, and we both smiled at the thought that it was now 35 years later.
Dave has since passed away, the world has one less wizard and as the video shows, the dragon has long since gone quiet. | 65 | 36 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282646",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T14:09:09",
"content": "Wonder if he’s on the Cloanto discs?https://www.amigaforever.com/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6282651",
"author": "Mark S.",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,339.701135 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/30/weigh-your-car-with-paper/ | Weigh Your Car With Paper | Brian McEvoy | [
"how-to"
] | [
"algebra",
"area",
"force",
"gedanken experiment",
"gedankenexperiment",
"math",
"P=F/A",
"physics",
"pressure",
"pressure equals force divided by area",
"thought experiment"
] | Sometimes a problem is more important than its solution. Humans love to solve mysteries and answer questions, but the most rewarding issues are the ones we find ourselves. Take [Surjan Singh], who wanted to see if he could
calculate the weight of his Saab 96
. Funny enough, he doesn’t have an automobile scale in his garage, so he had to concoct a workaround method. His solution is to multiply the pressure in his tires with their contact patch. Read on before you decide this is an imperfect idea.
He measures his tires with a quality gauge for the highest accuracy and pressurizes them equally. Our favorite part is how he measures the contact patch by sliding a couple of paper pieces from the sides until they stop and then measures the distance between them. He quickly realizes that the treads didn’t contact the floor evenly, so he measures them to get a better idea of the true contact area. Once he is satisfied, he performs his algebra and records the results, then drives to some public scales and has to pay for a weigh. His calculations are close, but he admits this could be an imprecise method due to an
n-of-one
, and that he didn’t account for the stiffness of the tire walls.
This was a fun thought experiment with real-world verification. If you’re one of those
people who treats brainstorming like an Olympic sport
, then you may enjoy the
gedankenexperiment that is fractals
. | 23 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282610",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T11:37:23",
"content": "If only I could buy a SAAB96 for only $4k",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6282948",
"author": "SAAB Pilote",
"timestamp": "2020-10... | 1,760,373,340.329046 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/30/hyper-links-and-hyperfunctional-text-cad/ | Hyper Links And Hyperfunctional Text CAD | Brian McEvoy | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"3d",
"cad",
"CascadeStudio",
"modeling",
"openscad",
"parametric",
"parametric design",
"programming",
"text-based modeling"
] | Strong opinions exist on both sides about OpenSCAD. The lightweight program takes megabytes of space, not gigabytes, so many people have a copy, even if they’ve never written a shape. Some people adore the text-only modeling language, and some people abhor the minimal function list. [Johnathon ‘Zalo’ Selstad] appreciates the idea but wants to see something more robust, and he wants to see it in your browser. His project CascadeStudio has a
GitHub repo
and
a live link so you can start tinkering
in a new window straight away.
We’re going to assume that anyone reading past this point is familiar with this type of modeling.
At the first keystroke, it is evident that CascadeStudio is different from OpenSCAD. For starters, tooltips reveal that formatting is a little different. A cone in OpenSCAD uses the cylinder() function while CascadeStudio insists that Cylinders() are the same diameter at the top and bottom, but a
Cone()
tapers. You may also notice the capital letters for CascadeStudio. Minor differences of this scale mean that anyone familiar with one may have speedbumps with the other, but not roadblocks.
In our opinion, the biggest boon to CascadeStudio is that you can send someone a URL, and they will get access to a fully-functional copy. You cannot simultaneously edit like a Google document, but it is conceivable to store a 3D model within a QR code, or an RFID tag, possibly without a URL shortener. Each time you refresh the rendered model by pressing F5, the URL updates, so it is possible to create dated savepoints with your browser bookmarks. You can save and load JSON files if you prefer to download your files, and you can export STEP, STL, and OBJ files for your printer.
Please tell us what you think of CascadeStudio below, and if this changed your mind about text-based modeling. We’ve seen this parametric workhorse tackle everyday tasks like
container boxes
to
high-security keys
. | 61 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282585",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T08:16:24",
"content": "Wow! Just having STEP import and FilletEdges() would be a huge improvement to OpenSCAD.But there is an even bigger thing behind the scenes: this appears to process shapes as true curves, instead of forcing th... | 1,760,373,340.266418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/new-controllers-on-old-nintendos-with-usb64/ | New Controllers On Old Nintendos With USB64 | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"n64",
"nintendo 64",
"usb"
] | The Nintendo 64 made a big splash when it launched in 1996, not least of all for its innovative controller. Featuring a never-before-or-since seen trident design, and with an analog stick smack bang in the center, it changed what gamers expected from consoles from that day forward. Of course, those controllers are now much worse for wear, and technology has moved on somewhat.
The latest development from [Ryzee119] aims to rectify this somewhat.
The result of that work is USB64, a tool designed to allow the use of USB controllers on the Nintendo 64. Using a Teensy 4.1,
it builds upon earlier work to get the Xbox 360 controller working on the platform.
However, the feature set has been greatly expanded, covering almost any use case imaginable. Mempacks are now efficiently emulated, and save files can be backed up to a PC via SD card. Additionally, the GameBoy Transferpak is emulated, meaning data can be transferred between GameBoy ROMs on an SD card and games on the N64. Even the N64 mouse is supported, and can be emulated with a regular USB mouse. Capable of doing all this for all four players, work is ongoing to increase the number of compatible aftermarket controllers for the utmost flexibility.
[Ryzee119] also coded up a useful test ROM for the N64
, which is invaluable when debugging controller hardware.
Console controllers take a lot of punishment, particularly from serious gamers, so we’re always eager to see projects that allow modern replacements to be used with old hardware.
We’ve featured other great projects in this area before, too! | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282701",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T16:41:36",
"content": "Very cool! We usually see adapters doing the opposite action.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6282744",
"author": "purplepeopleated",
"times... | 1,760,373,340.38543 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/fiber-optics-but-wetter/ | Fiber Optics, But… Wetter? | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"fiber optic",
"fiber optics",
"water"
] | Fiber optics are a great way to transfer huge quantity of data at lightning speed. Thanks to the property of total internal reflection, which allows light to flow through a glass fiber like fluid through a pipe, they can be used for communications at long distances and form the backbone of modern communication networks. However, water is also able to pull off the total internal reflection party trick,
and [Mike Kohn] decided to see if it could be used as a communication medium, too.
The experimental setup consists of an ATTiny85 that receives signals over its serial port, and outputs the received bits by flashing an LED. This LED is attached to a plastic tube filled with water. On the receiving end, another ATTiny85 reads the voltage level of a photodiode placed in the other end of the tube. When the ADC detects voltage over a certain level, it toggles a pin connected to the serial RX pin.
Hooking the setup to a pair of terminals, [Mike] was able to successfully transmit 9600 baud serial data through a tube full of water with just an LED and a small microcontroller. To verify the success, he ran the test again with an air-filled tube instead, which failed. In doing so, he proved that the water was doing the work.
We’ve seen other optical data hacks, too –
like this awesome laser ethernet build.
Video after the break. | 27 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282534",
"author": "macona",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T02:28:47",
"content": "They use liquid fiber optics for high power illuminators. They won’t burn or solarize like plastic or glass. Also have a wider transmission range between 200 and 2000nm.https://www.edmundoptics.com/f/liqui... | 1,760,373,340.45697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/eight-motors-can-sure-pump-a-lot-of-water/ | Eight Motors Can Sure Pump A Lot Of Water | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"pump",
"water pump"
] | Once upon a time, 3D printing was more of a curiosity than a powerful tool, with many printing trinkets and tchotchkes rather than anything of real use. However, over the years as technology and techniques have progressed, we now see more application-ready builds.
This water pump from [Let’s Print] is a great example.
The pump consists of two major pieces – a drive unit, and an impeller. The drive unit consists of a gearbox that combines the power of eight electric motors, driving a single shaft. This is all achieved with striking yellow ABS gears in a black housing. The build video does a great job of explaining how to make the project work with different motors, and how to properly use the bolt adjuster to set the backlash on the gear train. The drive unit is then used to turn a 3D-printed impeller pump which is capable of delivering a great deal of water very quickly.
When fired up, the leaky assembly makes an awful racket and a huge mess, but sure as heck shifts a lot of water while it does so. Watching the water spray off the gears as it leaks through the bearings is a great sight, and it’s clear that the device works well. We’d love to see a cost and performance analysis of this pump versus a commercial offering.
While it’s certainly not the most rugged build, it’s a fun one that nevertheless gets the job done. We’d love to see this
running a foam machine
or a classic
slip and slide.
Video after the break.
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!] | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282517",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T01:17:27",
"content": "Interesting build. Some specs would be nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6282524",
"author": "The Gambler",
"timestamp": "2020-09-30T01:52:0... | 1,760,373,340.587611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/29/electric-window-mechanism-into-a-electric-screen-door/ | Electric Window Mechanism Into A Electric Screen Door | Danie Conradie | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"home automation",
"screen door",
"window motor"
] | In many parts of the world leaving open a door or window is a good way to get a house full of bugs. Remembering to close doors behind them can be surprisingly hard for members of the human race, so the [DuctTape Mechanic] used the components from a car’s electric window to
automate his sliding screen door
.
After the excess pieces were cut off the rail, the motor and rail were mounted on top of the door frame. A long bolt is attached to the moving plate on the rail, which pushes on the pack of the door to close it. After closing, the mechanism returns to its open position, allowing the door to be opened by hand again. The motor is controlled by an Arduino running a very simple sketch, which senses if the door is closed with a microswitch and starts a 10 second countdown once opened. Two relays are used to create an H-bridge circuit to drive the motor in both directions.
It doesn’t look like there is any provision to detect if it is obstructed. A simple solution could be to make the push rod spring-loaded, so it can slide over the door if there is excessive resistance.
If you only want to let certain creatures into your house, we have no shortage of
automated
pet
door
for your hacking pleasure. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282506",
"author": "Mart",
"timestamp": "2020-09-29T23:36:23",
"content": "Good idea, but the slide range is a little short ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6282521",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2020-0... | 1,760,373,340.514802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/lego-ziplining-robot-climbs-for-claps/ | Lego Ziplining Robot Climbs For Claps | Orlando Hoilett | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"bar linkage",
"lego",
"lego technic"
] | The internet has given us plenty of cool robotics projects,
but we don’t think we’ve seen one zipline before
. At least not until now.
This cool little ziplining robot is courtesy of the folks over at [Tart Robotics]. As they described it, the robot moves using a 4-bar linkage mechanism with the motor’s torque “transferred to the arm mechanisms through a pair of bevel gears and a worm drive.” Even cooler, the robot is activated by clapping. The faster you clap, the faster the robot moves. That’s sure to wow your friends at your next virtual hacker meetup.
They had to do a bit of custom 3D printing work to get a few of the Lego components to connect with their non-Lego off-the-shelf bits, so that took a bit of time. Specifically, they had some cheap, non-branded DC motors that they used that did not naturally mate with the Lego Technic components used to create the rest of the robot’s body. Nothing a few custom 3D printing jobs couldn’t solve.
It always amazes us what
cool contraptions you can put together with a few Lego blocks
. What’s your favorite Lego project? | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282006",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T16:13:55",
"content": "pedantic complaint: this a very cool project but THAT’S NOT A ZIPLINE, it’s just a rope (or a cord or string, if you think it’s too small to be a rope)A zipline, by definition, is on a slope and uses pulle... | 1,760,373,340.635611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/teardown-blackberry-smart-card-reader/ | Teardown: BlackBerry Smart Card Reader | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"2FA",
"Analog devices",
"blackberry",
"bluetooth",
"mobile device",
"security",
"smart card",
"two-factor authentication"
] | Years before Steve Jobs showed off the first iPhone, the BlackBerry was already the must-have accessory for mobile professionals. Back then, nobody was worried about watching movies or playing the latest games on their mobile devices, they just wanted a secure and fast way to send and receive email on the go. For that, the BlackBerry was king.
Fast forward to today, and the company is just a shell of what it once was. They don’t even bother making their own hardware anymore. Over the last several years they’ve opted to partner with a series of increasingly obscure manufacturers to produce a handful of lackluster Android phones so they still have something to sell to their dwindling userbase. Anyone excited about the new 5G BlackBerry being built by Texas start-up OnwardMobility? Did you even know it was in the works before now?
A DoD Common Access Card
But this article isn’t about BlackBerry phones. It’s about something that’s even
more
irrelevant to consumers: the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader. Technically, this little device isn’t dependent on the phones of the same name, but it makes sense that Research In Motion (which eventually just renamed itself to BlackBerry Limited) would market the gadget under the brand of their most popular product. Though as you might expect, software was available to allow it to work with the BlackBerry phone that you almost certainly owned if you needed a dedicated smart card reader.
For those who might not be aware, a smart card in this context is a two-factor authentication token contained in an ID card. These are used extensively by organizations such as the Department of Defense,
where they’re known as Common Access Cards
, that require you to insert your ID card into a reader before you can log into a secure computer system. This sleek device was marketed as a portable reader that could connect to computers over USB or Bluetooth. Worn around your neck with the included lanyard, the battery-powered reader allowed the card itself to remain on the user’s body while still being readable by nearby devices.
Civilians will recognize the basic technology from modern “Chip and PIN” debit and credit cards, but we’ve never had to stick one of those into our laptop just to log in. To be sure, the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader was never intended for the average home computer user, it was sold to companies and organizations that had tight security requirements; which just so happened to be the same places that would likely already be using BlackBerry mobile devices.
Of course, times and technology change. These devices once cost $200 apiece and were purchased in vast quantities for distribution to trusted personnel, but are now all but worthless. Even in new and unopened condition, they can be had for as little as $10 USD on eBay. For that price, it’s certainly worth taking a peek inside. Perhaps the hacker community can even find new applications for these once cutting-edge devices.
A Cyberpunk Accessory
The BlackBerry Smart Card Reader looks exactly like the kind of thing I would expect some futuristic military force to use as an authentication device, with a design that’s somehow simultaneously simplistic and aggressive. If somebody told me this thing was a prop from
RoboCop
or
Judge Dredd
, I’d believe it.
Promotional shot, circa mid 2009.
At least this version, anyway. It seems that the hardware changed a number of times, and each one looks different enough that there’s no mistaking which one is which. It’s probably safe to assume that was intentional from a logistics standpoint. The specimen we’re looking at is the second revision, released in 2009.
The smart card slots into a groove in the front of the device, which keeps it secure while still being completely visible. Only the lower part of the card, where the chip itself is located, is actually covered.
There are no controls or indicators of any sort on the front of the reader. At first glance, you might even think it was some kind of passive holder for the card. Which again, was sort of the point. Defense contractors wouldn’t have worn it all day if it was covered in blinking LEDs and indicators,
only modern hackers are into that kind of thing
.
On the back there’s small LCD, a tri-color LED, and a single button. A tap of the button turns on the Bluetooth radio and displays the PIN code on the LCD, while holding the button resets the device. There’s no power button, and as long as the battery isn’t flat, the device appears to always be on. Though after awhile it will go into some sort of sleep mode and display “OFF” on the LCD.
The Reader’s Bluetooth PIN is a bit more secure than the traditional 0000.
Built for Business
The BlackBerry Smart Card Reader easily comes apart after the removal of four T6 screws located behind the battery cover. There wasn’t even a tamper-evident sticker over any of the screw heads, which frankly surprised me for a high security device.
Inside we’re presented with a concise PCB design, without even a hint of silkscreen markings to help us get our bearings. There are no obvious programming headers or debug points. If there was ever a board layout that said “No User Serviceable Parts Inside”, this would be it. Interestingly, while there’s clearly a place where one would have been mounted, the RF shield that would have surrounded the CSR 41B14 Bluetooth chipset has not been installed.
The star of the show would appear to be the Analog Devices AD6529BABCZ, but I’ve been unable to find any documentation on what this chip actually is. But I did run into a few mentions of the AD6528, which is a
GSM baseband processor intended for mobile phones and PDAs
.
At first I thought it was unrelated, but a close look at some of the features of the chip shows interesting parallels with the Smart Card Reader. The AD6528 has a 32-bit ARM7 processor with onboard RAM, a display interface, integrated USB support, and offers various low power modes. Naturally it also has support for interfacing with the SIM cards, which themselves are very similar to the chips used in smart cards. The dimensions and package of the AD6528 also match the AD6529.
Given these facts, we may be looking at a customized version of the AD6528 that was made specifically for this high-security application. When you’re trying to sell a device to the Department of the Defense, spinning up a new chip is hardly out of the question. This version of the chip may even have been bumped up to Industrial or Military/Aerospace rating.
Next to the AD6529 there’s a
Intel 320W30 flash memory chip
that likely holds the device’s firmware, and a
Samsung K1S32161CD SRAM chip
.
Keeping Trim
Easily the most impressive feature of the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader, especially given the era in which it was designed and built, is how thin it is. This is partially due to the fact that there’s absolutely nothing on the back side of the PCB, which allowed it to be pushed as tightly as possible against the inside of the case.
A close look at the chip interface also shows how the designers were able to avoid putting an actual power switch on the device. When a card is fully seated in the reader, a miniature switch is pressed in. We didn’t see this
inside the chip reader of the VeriFone 925CTLS payment terminal
, as there was no reason to ever shut the hardware down. But in a battery powered device, a function to put the hardware to sleep when a card isn’t present will greatly increase the runtime.
Speaking of the battery, they could have made the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader even slimmer if they hadn’t used the same 1150 mAh C-S2 battery utilized by contemporary BlackBerry phones, though that was a clever decision considering their customers likely already had stockpiles of the cells from their phone fleets.
Putting it to Use
Realistically, the components inside of this device are all so antiquated at this point that there’s not much to salvage other than perhaps the chip interface itself if you’re looking to experiment with smart cards. The enclosure could potentially be reused, and it already has the interface and battery compartment for BlackBerry C-S2 batteries. But unless you’re building a DIY smart card reader, I’m not sure what else the case design would really lend itself to.
Oddly, the PIN code is given in the device name.
Trying to reprogram it would be tricky, to say the least. For one thing, there doesn’t appear to be any public data on the chip that’s driving it. More practically, there’s no sign of a programming header, and trying to remove the BGA flash chip and reading the firmware off of it manually is farther than most hackers would be willing to go.
So can we use it as-is? Unfortunately, that’s not looking very good either. When connected over USB, the reader doesn’t appear to be
supported by existing open source smart card libraries such as PCSClite
. I can see the reader when scanning for Bluetooth devices, but to date, I’ve been unable to successfully pair with it.
Officially the Windows software for the device supports XP and Vista, so if you could find a copy of it,
you could potentially run it in a VM and sniff the USB packets with Wireshark
to come up with a modern open source driver. But besides taking on an interesting challenge, there’s not much point in it; you can pick up a newly manufactured smart card reader for about as much as one of these relics costs.
As much as it pains me to say it, I don’t think there’s anything very exciting you can do with the BlackBerry Smart Card Reader. It might be worth picking a few up to complement your dystopian cyberpunk cosplay, but that’s about it. Though if you do manage to come up with something,
we’d love to hear about it
. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6282013",
"author": "Gilliam",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T16:56:52",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/verifone_reader.jpgthe verifone pad you mention most definitely has the insertion switch, which likely activates the chip contact pins after full insertion ... | 1,760,373,340.710419 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/an-elegant-modular-enclosure-system-for-the-raspberry-pi-4/ | An Elegant Modular Enclosure System For The Raspberry Pi 4 | Danie Conradie | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"custom enclosure",
"N-O-D-E",
"node",
"Raspberry Pi 4",
"server"
] | [NODE] has been experimenting with Raspberry Pi servers and mini computers for a long time, and knows all too well how the wiring can quickly turn into a rat’s nest. His latest creation is the
Mini Server version 3
, a modular enclosure system for the Raspberry Pi 4, is designed to turn it into practical computing box.
The basic enclosure is a 92 mm x 92 mm x 26 mm 3D printed frame with a custom PCB top cover. One of the main goals was to collect all the major connectors on one side and make the micro SD slot easily accessible. To do this [NODE] created a set of custom PCB adaptors to route the USB-C and an HDMI port to the same side as the other USB ports, and move the micro SD slot to the bottom of the enclosure. A low profile adaptor was also designed to connect a mSATA SSD to one of the USB 3 ports, and there is space inside the enclosure for one or two cooling fans. Unlike previous version of the mini server, no hardware modifications are required on the Pi itself.
The only downside that we can see is that it doesn’t allow external access to the GPIO ports, but the entire project is open source specifically to allow people to make their own modifications.
[NODE] is a big fan of turning Raspberry Pis into custom computing devices, ranging from small terminal devices and
pocket servers
, to complete
laptops
. | 45 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281936",
"author": "Sykobee",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T11:30:55",
"content": "The USB-C and HDMI rerouting can be seen in some commercial Pi 4 cases. The Pi can be a bit of a cable explosion, which reminds me to buy a proper Bluetooth mouse for mine.Obviously for small-scale server... | 1,760,373,340.801633 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/28/boot-sector-pong-as-a-crash-course-in-assembly/ | Boot Sector Pong As A Crash Course In Assembly | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"asm",
"assembly language",
"boot sector",
"low level",
"pong"
] | Have you ever wanted to develop a playable game small enough to fit into a disk’s 512 byte boot sector? How about watching somebody develop a program in assembly for nearly two hours? If you answered yes to either of those questions, or ideally both of them, you’re going to love this project from [Queso Fuego].
Whether you just want to check out the public domain source code
or watch along as he literally starts from a blank file and codes every line for your viewing pleasure, chances are good that you’ll pick up a trick or two from this project. For example, he explains how all of the “graphics” in the game are done in 80 x 25 text mode simply by setting the background color of character cells without printing any text to them.
We really like the presentation in the video after the break, which was recorded over the course of multiple days, judging by the changing light levels in the background. As he types out each line of code, he explains what its function is and gives any background information necessary to explain how it will fit into the larger program. If you’ve ever wondered if you had what it takes to program in ASM, watching this video is a great way to decide.
[Queso Fuego] mentions that this project, and his
research into this sort of low-level programming
, came about due to the
social distancing boredom that many of us are feeling
. While we’re certainly not advocating for him to kept locked in his home permanently, with projects like this, you’ve got to admit it seems like a win for the rest of us.
[Thanks to Joe for the tip.] | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281926",
"author": "Oler",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T09:56:23",
"content": "Did he 3D model/track his face for the first 46 minutes?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6281941",
"author": "ridoluc",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28... | 1,760,373,340.85459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/parking-assistant-helps-back-up-the-car-without-going-too-far/ | Parking Assistant Helps Back Up The Car Without Going Too Far | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"distance sensor",
"garage",
"leds",
"oled",
"parking",
"rotary encoder",
"ultrasonic sensor"
] | Sure, [Ty Palowski] could have just hung a tennis ball from the ceiling, but that would mean getting on a ladder, testing the studfinder on himself before locating a ceiling joist, and so on. Bo-ring. Now that he finally has a garage, he’s not going to fill it with junk, no! He’s going to park a big ol’ Jeep in it. Backwards.
The previous owner was kind enough to leave a workbench in the rear of the garage, which [Ty] has already made his own.
To make sure that he never hits the workbench while backing into the garage, [Ty] made an adorable stoplight to help gauge the distance to it
. Green mean’s he’s good, yellow means he should be braking, and red of course means stop in the name of power tools.
Inside the light is an Arduino Nano, which reads from the ultrasonic sensor mounted underneath the enclosure and lights up the appropriate LED depending on the car’s distance. All [Ty] has to do is set the distance that makes the red light come on, which he can do with the rotary encoder on the side and confirm on the OLED. The distance for yellow and green are automatically set from red — the yellow range begins 24″ past red, and green is another 48″ past yellow. Floor it past the break to watch the build video.
The humble North American traffic signal is widely recognized
, so it’s a good approach for all kinds of applications. Teach your children well:
start them young with a visual indicator of when it’s okay to get out of bed in the morning
. | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281893",
"author": "Doug",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T05:17:43",
"content": "useful project but do not lock doors on vehicles with rag tops… It take nothing to silently tear the top and get into the vehicle so locking the doors does nothing but waste money and time.",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,373,341.056479 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/already-have-that-book-get-the-isbn-411-over-iot/ | Already Have That Book? Get The ISBN 411 Over IoT | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [] | Have you ever been at the bookstore and stumbled across a great book you’ve been looking for, but had a nagging feeling that you already had it sitting at home? Yeah, us too.
If only we’d had something like [Kutluhan Aktar]’s ISBN verifier the last time that happened to say for sure whether we already had it
.
To use this handy machine, [Kutluhan] enters the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) of the book in question on the 4 x 4 membrane keypad. The Arduino Nano 33 IoT takes that ISBN and checks it against a PHP web database of book entries [Kutluhan] created with the ISBN, title, author, and number of pages. Then it lets [Kutluhan] know whether they already have it by updating the display from a Nokia 5110.
If you want to whip one of these up before your next trip to the bookstore, this project is completely open source down the web database. You might want to figure out some sort of enclosure unless you don’t mind the shy, inquisitive stares of your fellow bookworms.
Stalled out on reading because you don’t know what to read next?
Check out our Books You Should Read column
and get back to entertaining yourself in the theater of the mind.
Via
r/duino | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281874",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2020-09-28T02:32:25",
"content": "It’s a nice enough little project, I suspect it had more to do with wanting to use a keypad and a Nokia screen than wanting to search for books by ISBN, but that’s fine.If I were going to implement this f... | 1,760,373,340.933947 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/hackaday-links-september-27-2020/ | Hackaday Links: September 27, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"assembly",
"assistive technology",
"asteroid",
"booster",
"centaur",
"galaksija",
"hackaday links",
"laser",
"pick and place",
"satellite"
] | Hardly a week goes by without a headline screaming about some asteroid or another making a close approach to Earth; it’s only by reading the fine print that we remember what an astronomer’s definition of “close” means. Still, 2020 being what it is, it pays to stay on top of these things, and when you do the story can get really interesting. Take
asteroid 2020 SO
, a tiny near-Earth asteroid that was discovered just last week. In a couple of weeks, 2020 SO will be temporarily captured into Earth orbit and come with 50,000 km near the beginning of December. That’s cool and all, but what’s really interesting about this asteroid is that
it may not be a rock at all
. NASA scientists have reverse-engineered the complex orbit of the object and found that it was in the vicinity of Earth in late 1966. They think it may be a Centaur booster from the Surveyor 2 moon mission, launched in September 1966 in the runup to Apollo. The object will be close enough for spectral analysis of its. surface; if it’s the booster, the titanium dioxide in the white paint should show up loud and clear.
Lasers are sort of forbidden fruit for geeks — you know you can put an eye out with them, and still, when you get your hands on even a low-power laser pointer, it’s hard to resist the urge to shine it where you shouldn’t. That includes into the night sky, which as cool as it looks could be bad news for pilots, and then for you. Luckily, friend of Hackaday
Seb Lee-Delisle
has figured out a way for you to blast lasers into the night sky to your heart’s content. The project is called
Laser Light City
and takes place in Seb’s home base of Brighton int he UK on October 1. The interactive installation will have three tall buildings with three powerful lasers mounted on each; a smartphone app will let participants control the direction, shape, and color of each beam. It sounds like a load of fun, so check it out if you’re in the area.
We got an interesting story from a JR Nelis about a quick hack he came up with to help his wife stay connected.
The whole post
is worth a read, but the short version of the story is that his wife has dementia and is in assisted living. Her landline phone is her social lifeline, but she can’t be trusted with it, lest she makes inappropriate calls. His solution was to modify her favorite cordless phone by modifying the keypad, turning it into a receive-only phone. It’s a sad but touching story, and it may prove useful to others with loved ones in similar situations.
We pay a lot of attention to the history of the early computer scene, but we tend to concentrate on computers that were popular in North America and the UK. But the Anglo-American computers were far from the only game in town, and there’s
a new effort afoot
to celebrate one of the less well-known but still important pioneer computers: the Galaksija. Aside from having a cool name, the Yugoslavian Z80 computer has a great story that will be told in documentary form, as part of the crowdsourced Galaksija project. The documentary stars our own
Voja Antonic
, who was key to the computer’s development. In addition to the film, the project seeks to produce a replica of the Galaksija in kit form. Check out the Crowd Supply page and see if it’s something you’re willing to back.
There’s an interesting new podcast out there:
the Pick, Place, Podcast
. Hosted by Chris Denney and Melissa Hough, it comes out every other week and is dedicated to the electronic assembly industry. They’ve currently got eight episodes in the can ranging from pick and place assembly to parts purchasing to solder paste printing. If you want to learn a little more about PCB assembly, this could be a real asset. Of course don’t forget to make time for our own
Hackaday Podcast
, where editors Mike and Elliot get together to discuss the week in hardware hacking. | 15 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281850",
"author": "Edward Nardella",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T23:47:59",
"content": "I see so much potential for enhancing that phone! If you know the numbers the user frequently dials, you could potentially direct the call to one of a few desired numbers, even if the relevant num... | 1,760,373,340.988205 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/food-dispenser-shakes-and-rattles/ | Food Dispenser Shakes And Rattles | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"food mixer",
"mixer"
] | [Elite Worm] follows a strict diet that involves regularly mixing dry ingredients in varying proportions. The task grew tedious, and thus automation became a tantalising prospect.
Enter the DIY shaking food dispenser.
The machine has a simple touch screen interface, with an Atmega328P running the show behind the scenes. The user can store a series of profiles, which each correspond to a different mixture of four base ingredients. Dealing with dry ingredients like oats, chia, and flax, shaking is often necessary to get things moving. To achieve this, the rig packs a hefty DC motor up top, which turns an eccentric shaft, shaking the whole rig. Each ingredient hopper has a servo-controlled nozzle, so ingredients can be dispensed in turn, with a load cell in the base measuring the weight delivered.
It’s a neat system, though [Elite Worm] notes that the device shakes just a little too much, and suspects it won’t hold up in the long term. We suspect a less violent, higher frequency vibration might be less hard on the components, but we’re sure there’ll be some quality engineering going into the next build.
We’ve seen [Elite Worm]’s work here before, too.
Video after the break. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281814",
"author": "Entropy",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T20:05:07",
"content": "The amount of thought and care that undoubtedly went into this project is nothing short of impressive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6281819",
... | 1,760,373,341.11135 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/diying-a-high-end-camera-arm/ | DIYing A High End Camera Arm | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"camera arm",
"tripod"
] | One of the first purchases for anyone looking to shoot video should be a tripod. Key to getting clean and stable shots, they can nevertheless be limiting in their range of motion. Wanting something a little more high-end, but dissatisfied with the high cost of commercial options,
[Alexandre Chappel] decided to build his own camera arm.
The build is based around square alumiunium tubing, with the high-tolerance material acting as the arm’s vertical and horizontal rails. 3D printed brackets and adapters are used to bolt everything together, along with several printed components used as drilling guides to help accurately machine the aluminium tubes. Adjustment is built into the carriages that travel along the rails, to help account for any slop in the 3D printed parts. A counterweight system is then installed to ensure the camera doesn’t hit the floor when not in the locked position.
It’s a tidy build, and one that has given [Alexandre] far more flexibility to shoot than his existing tripods. Additionally, adjusting the camera position is much quicker than before. Of course, when you’re building your own rigs,
the sky is the limit.
Video after the break.
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!] | 21 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281782",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T17:59:21",
"content": "A quarter million views in 7 days! There must be millions and millions of people making “content” who want better camera support. I was going to remark about tech video makers who use up the frame with... | 1,760,373,341.378519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/rocket-plane-build-aims-for-high-speed-flight/ | Rocket Plane Build Aims For High Speed Flight | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"radio control",
"rc",
"rocket",
"rocket plane"
] | [James Whomsley] likes flying, and likes flying fast. After reaching a speed of 114 miles an hour with an RC plane, he wanted to go further and break that record. To do so, he looked towards rocket power,
and started a new build.
The design consists of a combination of 3D printed parts, laser-cut plywood bulkheads, and foamboard flight surfaces, with a few carbon fiber stiffeners thrown in here and there. For this early prototype, power is solely from hobby rocket motors, providing thrust for 1.6 seconds, meaning flight times are necessarily short. The craft is launched from an aluminium profile rail thanks to a 3D printed sliding guide pin.
Initial tests with two rocket motors were promising, leading to a second trial with a full six motors fitted. The thrust line was a little low, however, and a major pitch-up just after launch meant the plane only reached around 62 miles an hour. [James] still has a ways to go to beat his previous record, so intends to explore adding ducted fan propulsion to get the plane in the air before using the rockets as a speed booster in steady flight.
Of course, if you can’t lay your hands on rocket engines,
you could always consider spinning up your own
. (Or
ditch the engine entirely
.) Video after the break. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281766",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T15:30:15",
"content": "If it was my project knowing I intended to give it sustained powered flight too I’d put the EDF in the body or make it a tail pusher (move the rockets around a little in both cases to accommodate airflo... | 1,760,373,341.24119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/old-polaroid-gets-a-pi-and-a-printer/ | Old Polaroid Gets A Pi And A Printer | Dan Maloney | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"Pi Cam",
"pi zero",
"polaroid",
"thermal printer"
] | There’s nothing like a little diversion project to clear the cobwebs — something to carry one through the summer doldrums and charge you up for the rest of the hacking year. At least that’s what we think was up with
[Sam Zeloof]’s printing Polaroid retro-conversion project
.
Normally occupied with the business of learning how to make semiconductors in his garage, or more recently working on his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, [Sam], like many of us, found himself with time to spare this summer. In search of a simple, fun project that wouldn’t glaze over the eyes of people when he showed it off, he settled on a printing party camera. The guts are pretty standard fare: a Raspberry Pi and Pi cam, coupled with a thermal receipt printer for instant hardcopy. The donor camera was a Polaroid Pronto from eBay, in good shape on the outside and mostly complete on the inside. A Dremel took care of the latter, freeing up space occupied by all the plastic bits that held the film cartridge and running gear of the film handling system.
The surgery made enough room to squeeze in the Pi Zero and a LiPo battery pack, along with a buck converter. Adding in the receipt printer and its drive board and mounting the Pi cam presented some challenges, but everything fit without breaking the original look and feel of the Polaroid. The camera now produces low-res hardcopy instantly using a dithering algorithm, and store high-resolution images on an SD card for later download. As a bonus, [Sam] included a simulated time and date stamp in the lower corner of the saved images, like
those that used to show up on film
.
[Sam]’s camera looks like a ton of fun. We’ve seen other Polaroid conversions, including
a stunning SX-70 digital upgrade
, but this one shines for its simplicity and instant hardcopy.
[via
Tom’s Hardware
] | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281767",
"author": "Arthur Wolf",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T15:36:55",
"content": "Could make the printer print much wider prints if they used a laser diode to do the printing, would be pretty neat, might also significantly increase quality ( both resolution and greyscale ), you don... | 1,760,373,341.488239 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/27/a-battery-to-add-a-tingling-sensation-to-your-tweets/ | A Battery To Add A Tingling Sensation To Your Tweets | Sven Gregori | [
"hardware",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"aa battery",
"adult toys",
"ESP32",
"lipo battery",
"PCB design",
"sex toy",
"teledildonics",
"vibrator"
] | Internet-connected sex toys are a great way to surprise your partner from work (even the home office) or for spicing up long-distance relationships. For some extra excitement, they also add that thrill of potentially having all your
very
sensitive private data exposed to the public — but hey, it’s not our place to kink-shame. However, their vulnerability issues are indeed common enough to make them regular guests in security conferences, so what better way to fight fire with fire than simply inviting the whole of Twitter in on your ride? Well, [Space Buck] built just the right device for that:
the
Double-Oh Battery
, an open source LiPo-cell-powered ESP32 board in AA battery form factor
as drop-in replacement to control a device’s supply voltage via WiFi.
Double-Oh Battery with all the components involved
In their simplest and cheapest form, vibrating toys are nothing more than a battery-powered motor with an on-off switch, and even the more sophisticated ones with different intensity levels and patterns are usually limited to the same ten or so varieties that may eventually leave something to be desired. To improve on that without actually taking the devices apart, [Space Buck] initially built
the
Slot-in Manipulator of Output Levels
, a tiny board that squeezed directly onto the battery to have a pre-programmed pattern enabling and disabling the supply voltage — or have it turned into an alarm clock. But understandably, re-programming patterns can get annoying in the long run, so adding WiFi and a web server seemed the logical next step. Of course, more functionality requires more space, so to keep the AA battery form factor, the Double-Oh Battery’s PCB piggybacks now on a smaller 10440 LiPo cell.
But then, where’s the point of having a WiFi-enabled vibrator with a web server — that also happens to serve a guestbook — if you don’t open it up to the internet? So in some
daring experiments
, [Space Buck] showcased the project’s potential by hooking it up to his Twitter account and have the announcement tweet’s likes and retweets take over the control, adding a welcoming element of surprise, no doubt. Taking this further towards Instagram for example might be a nice vanity reward-system improvement as well, or otherwise make a great gift to send a message to all those attention-seeking people in your circle.
All fun aside, it’s an interesting project to remote control a device’s power supply, even though its application area might be rather limited due to the whole battery nature, but
the usual Sonoff switches
may seem a bit unfitting here. If this sparked your interest in lithium-based batteries, check out
[Lewin Day]’s beginner guide
and
[Bob Baddeley]’s deeper dive into their chemistry
. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281722",
"author": "Sjaak",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T08:35:40",
"content": "Twitter becomes twatter?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6281835",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T22:19:12",
... | 1,760,373,341.447148 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/an-fpga-video-player-built-just-for-fun/ | An FPGA Video Player Built Just For Fun | Lewin Day | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"fpga",
"media player",
"video player"
] | Sometimes, projects are borne out of neccessity; a fix for a problem that needs to be solved. Other times, they’re done just for the love of creation and experimentation. [ultraembedded]’s FPGAmp media player falls under the latter,
and served as a great learning experience along the way.
The aim of FPGAmp is to play back a variety of media files on the Arty A7 development board, based around the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. Capable of playing back MJPEG video at 800 x 600 resolution and 25 fps, it’s also able to play back MP3s as well for stereo audio.
Demonstrating the device on Twitter
, [ultraembedded] notes that the method of using an LED to do SPDIF optical audio output isn’t legit, but does work. A later update switches to using a dedicated audio output board with the Arty A7 platform,
featuring an excellent song from The Cardigans.
Using a RISC V processor core and a hardware JPEG decoder, we imagine [ultraembedded] really sharpened their FPGA skills with this project.
Particularly in the wake of the sale of ARM to NVIDIA
, RISC V continues to gain relevance in the hardware community. We were lucky enough to feature a keynote at last year’s Supercon,
with Megan Wachs speaking on the technology
. Video after the break.
Thanks to the
#LVGL
user interface library, my
@DigilentInc
#ArtyA7
#FPGA
based media player project is now looking half decent. Plays 800×600 25fps video, MP3's and JPEG stills. All RTL and firmware sources now available on Github:
https://t.co/TTG7huzyZW
pic.twitter.com/6UWy2UXOfW
— ultraembedded (@ultraembedded)
September 20, 2020 | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281691",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T05:30:49",
"content": "I think you misinterpreted the Twitter “via an LED” comment about the SPDIF implementation. He’s not saying it was not legit. SPDIF had two specified physical interfaces, coaxial cable via RCA con... | 1,760,373,341.542806 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/soldering-practice-kit-remains-useful-after-completion/ | Soldering Practice Kit Remains Useful After Completion | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atmega 328p",
"digital voltmeter",
"diy voltmeter",
"soldering kit",
"voltmeter"
] | Unsatisfied with the standard fare of soldering practice kits that offer little to no purpose once they’re built, [Jim Heaney] decided to take matters into his own hands and design an easy-to-assemble kit for his class that, once put together, becomes the handiest of tools in any maker’s workbench:
a functional voltmeter
.
At the heart of the kit is a standard Atmega 328P microcontroller. While he could’ve picked something smaller or cheaper, not only does the bulky part make for easier soldering, [Jim] reasons that it’s a chip that’s easy to repurpose should his students want to build something like a breadboard Arduino, for example. The voltmeter has a fixed measurement range from 0 to 100 VDC, the only switches on the board are for powering it on and a hold button, which freezes the value currently being shown in the three-digit, seven-segment display.
Along with selling his kit to other makers and educators, [Jim] also hopes that his project encourages others to design similar soldering kits which favor some sort of function rather than getting binned once there’s solder on all the pads, as well as part variety and documentation. If you’re on the other end of the soldering spectrum, then why not
challenge your skills soldering on a time limit
? | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281676",
"author": "Vinalon",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T03:30:32",
"content": "What a fantastic idea! This looks like a great way to spread the word that soldering isn’t scary.And the creator did a good job if they’re hoping that it encourages others; it’s definitely got me imaginin... | 1,760,373,341.70861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/cheap-current-probe-gets-good-review/ | Cheap Current Probe Gets Good Review | Al Williams | [
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"current probe",
"micsig"
] | A current probe isn’t a very common fixture on most workbenches because they are pretty expensive. [VoltLog] looks at a fairly inexpensive
current probe from Micsig
. He seemed impressed with the workmanship and it looks similar to more expensive offerings. There are two models with different bandwidth numbers (800 kHz and 2 MHz). It can measure current on a 10A and 100A scale.
According to [VoltLog] comparable probes from other vendors are more expensive and have lower bandwidth. He also liked that the device powers from USB since most newer scopes will have a USB port available.
If you aren’t familiar with a
current probe
, you might enjoy Digikey’s article on the topic or Keysight’s
take on it
. This probe can measure AC or DC current and while the specifications don’t promise super accuracy, [VoltLog] noted that his unit was better than the spec. He also noted that if you are wanting to measure small currents going to a microcontroller or similar device, these current probes are not really what you want to use.
We enjoyed the teardown of the device, too, about ten minutes into the video. The probe is surprisingly complex. It is possible that like some popular oscilloscopes, that changing the low bandwidth variant to the higher bandwidth model may be possible since the board appears to be used for both models.
We’ve looked at building
very precise current probes
. We’ve also looked at
dirt cheap ones
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281665",
"author": "Capo Toso",
"timestamp": "2020-09-27T01:01:09",
"content": "Is EVERYTHING on HaD a Youtube video? Has the written word and figures a completely forgotten art? Truly pathetic. I can read 10x faster than these silly videos, so no thanks, I miss the HaD of 10 year... | 1,760,373,341.652798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/tesla-turbine-boat-uses-lily-impeller/ | Tesla Turbine Boat Uses Lily Impeller | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"boat",
"impeller",
"lily impeller",
"radio control",
"tesla turbine"
] | Typically in the RC community, radio control boats rely on small nitro engines or electric motors to get around. Fitted with traditional propellers, they’re capable of great speed and performance. Of course, there’s more than one way to skin a cat,
as [Integza] shows with his latest build.
As far as the boat side of things is concerned, it’s a basic 3D printed single hull design. The innovation comes in the drivetrain, instead. The boat uses compressed air for propulsion, stored in a battery of four soda bottles, pressurized to 6 bar. The compressed air is used to drive a Tesla turbine of [Integza]’s design, which is 3D printed on a resin printer. Rather then driving a propeller, the Tesla turbine instead turns a Lily impeller, which pulls the boat through the water rather than pushing it along. The impeller uses a nature-inspired design, hence the name, and was also 3D printed, making producing its complex geometry a cinch. The guts of a toy radio control car are then used to control the boat.
Understandably, performance is less than stellar. The limited reserves of compressed air can’t propel the boat long, and the combination of the high RPM Tesla turbine and Lily impeller don’t provide a lot of thrust. However, the boat does move under its own power, demonstrating these oddball technologies while doing so.
[Integza] has been working with these technologies for a while;
we featured an earlier Tesla turbine build back in 2018.
Video after the break. | 19 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281620",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T21:28:29",
"content": "It’s fun if you’re in the mood for fun, which, clearly, you are not.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6281621",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,341.605856 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/orbital-tracking-on-the-nes/ | Orbital Tracking On The NES | Tom Nardi | [
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"international space station",
"iss",
"nes",
"nintendo",
"Tool assisted speed run"
] | It’s easy to dismiss the original Nintendo Entertainment System as just, well, an entertainment system. But in reality the 6502 based console wasn’t so far removed from early home computers like the Apple II and Commodore 64, and Nintendo even briefly flirted with creating software and accessories geared towards general purpose computing. Though in the end, Mario and friends obviously won out.
Still, we’re willing to bet that nobody at Nintendo ever imagined their plucky little game system would one day be
used to track the course of a space station in low Earth orbit
. But that’s precisely what [Vi Grey] has done with his latest project, which is part of his overall effort to demonstrate the unexpected capabilities of the iconic NES. While you’ll need a bit of extra hardware to run the program on a real console, there’s no fundamental trickery that would have kept some developer from doing this in 1985 if they’d wanted to.
Raspberry Pi Zero and TAStm32
If you want to see your own 8-bit view of the International Space Station, the easiest way is with an emulator. In that case, [Vi] explains how you can load up his Lua script in Mesen or FCEUX to provide the ROM with the necessary tracking data from the Internet.
To run it on a real NES you’ll not only need
some type of flash cart to get the ROM loaded
, but also a TAStm32 board that’s used for tool-assisted speedruns. This allows the computer to essentially “type” the orbital data into the NES by emulating rapid controller button presses. That might seem like a tall order, but it’s important to note that neither device requires you to modify the original console; the code itself runs on a 100% stock NES.
If tracking spacecraft isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d be more interested in the some of the work [Vi] has previously done on the NES. We’re particularly fond of his
polyglot ROM that is a ZIP file of its own source code
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ajzekMzTY | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281561",
"author": "scott.tx",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T18:05:21",
"content": "look how I used a calculator hot glued to the side of my desktop computer to play doom!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6281616",
"author"... | 1,760,373,341.771274 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/twitter-its-not-the-algorithms-fault-its-much-worse/ | Twitter: It’s Not The Algorithm’s Fault. It’s Much Worse. | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial intelligence",
"image recognition",
"neural network",
"newsletter",
"racism",
"tweets",
"twitter"
] | Maybe you heard about the
anger surrounding Twitter’s automatic cropping of images
. When users submit pictures that are too tall or too wide for the layout, Twitter automatically crops them to roughly a square. Instead of just picking, say, the largest square that’s closest to the center of the image, they use some “algorithm”, likely a neural network, trained to find people’s faces and make sure they’re cropped in.
The problem is that when a too-tall or too-wide image includes two or more people, and they’ve got different colored skin, the crop picks the lighter face. That’s really offensive, and something’s clearly wrong, but what?
A neural network is really just a mathematical equation, with the input variables being in these cases convolutions over the pixels in the image, and
training them essentially consists in picking the values for all the coefficients
. You do this by applying inputs, seeing how wrong the outputs are, and updating the coefficients to make the answer a little more right. Do this a bazillion times, with a big enough model and dataset, and you can make a machine recognize different breeds of cat.
What went wrong at Twitter? Right now it’s speculation, but my money says it lies with either the training dataset or the coefficient-update step. The problem of including people of all races in the training dataset is so blatantly obvious that we hope that’s not the problem; although getting a representative dataset is
hard
, it’s known to be hard, and they should be on top of that.
Which means that the issue might be coefficient fitting, and this is where math and culture collide. Imagine that your algorithm just misclassified a cat as an “airplane” or as a “lion”. You need to modify the coefficients so that they move the answer away from this result a bit, and more toward “cat”. Do you move them equally from “airplane” and “lion” or is “airplane” somehow more wrong? To capture this notion of different wrongnesses, you use a loss function that can numerically encapsulate just exactly what it is you want the network to learn, and then you
take bigger or smaller steps in the right direction
depending on how bad the result was.
Let that sink in for a second. You need a mathematical equation that summarizes what you want the network to learn. (But not
how
you want it to learn it. That’s the revolutionary quality of applied neural networks.)
Now imagine, as happened to Google,
your algorithm fits “gorilla” to the image of a black person
. That’s wrong, but it’s categorically differently wrong from simply fitting “airplane” to the same person. How do you write the loss function that incorporates some penalty for racially offensive results? Ideally, you would want them to never happen, so you could imagine trying to identify all possible insults and assigning those outcomes an infinitely large loss. Which is essentially what Google did — their “workaround” was to stop classifying “gorilla” entirely because the loss incurred by misclassifying a person as a gorilla was so large.
This is a fundamental problem with neural networks — they’re only as good as the data and the loss function. These days, the data has become less of a problem, but getting the loss right is a multi-level game, as these neural network trainwrecks demonstrate. And it’s not as easy as writing an equation that isn’t “racist”, whatever that would mean. The loss function is being asked to encapsulate human sensitivities, navigate around them and quantify them, and eventually weigh the slight risk of making a particularly offensive misclassification against not recognizing certain animals at all.
I’m not sure this problem is solvable, even with tremendously large datasets. (There are mathematical proofs that with infinitely large datasets the model will classify everything correctly, so you needn’t worry. But how close are we to infinity? Are asymptotic proofs relevant?)
Anyway, this problem is bigger than algorithms, or even their writers, being “racist”. It may be a fundamental problem of machine learning, and we’re definitely going to see further permutations of the Twitter fiasco in the future as machine classification is being increasingly asked to respect human dignity.
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.
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! | 160 | 38 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281489",
"author": "Douglas Coulter",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T14:12:06",
"content": "Maybe they could simply scale images instead of cropping. Yes, that would mean ignorant users who didn’t know how to manage their photos would get relatively useless results, revealing who is goo... | 1,760,373,342.002387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/linear-clock-ratchets-up-the-action/ | Linear Clock Ratchets Up The Action | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"impulse",
"linear",
"pawl",
"ratchet",
"saw blade"
] | On the face of it, making a clock that displays the time by moving a pointer along a linear scale shouldn’t be too hard. After all, steppers and linear drives should do the job in a jiffy. Throw an Arduino in and Bob’s your uncle, right?
Wrong. At least that’s not the way [Leo Fernekes] decided to build
this unique ratcheting linear clock
, a brilliant decision that made the project anything but run-of-the-mill. The idea has been kicking around in [Leo]’s head for years, and there it stayed until inspiration came in the unlikely form of [This Old Tony], one of our favorite YouTube machinists. [Old Tony] did
a video
on the simple genius of latching mechanisms, like the ones in retractable pens, and that served as an “A-ha!” moment for [Leo]. For a ratchet, he used a strip of bandsaw blade oriented so the teeth point upward. A complex bit of spring steel, bent to engage with the blade’s teeth, forms a pawl to keep the pointer moving upward until it reaches the top.
[Leo] decided early on that this would be an impulse clock, like the type used in schools and factories. He used a servo to jog a strip of tape upward once each minute; the tape is engaged by jaws that drag the pointer along with it, moving the pawl up the ratchet by one tooth and lifting the pointer one minute closer to the top. The pointer releases at the top and falls back to start the cycle over; to arrest its freefall, [Leo] had the genius idea of attaching magnets and using eddy currents induced in the aluminum frame for the job. Finished off with a 3D-printed Art Deco scale, the clock is a unique timepiece that’s anything but boring.
We really appreciate [Leo]’s unique and creative take on projects, and his range. Check out his
everlasting continuity tester
and his
phage-like sentry gun
for some neat build details. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281467",
"author": "JackMeinoff",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T12:03:29",
"content": "The hack is great, but I love the design itself – the art deco letters are what sets this apart.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6281470",
"a... | 1,760,373,342.051949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/26/fermenting-yogurt-with-the-help-of-hardware/ | Fermenting Yogurt With The Help Of Hardware | Lewin Day | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"Bulgaria",
"bulgarian yogurt",
"fermentation",
"fermenting",
"yogurt"
] | Fermentation is a natural process that has been exploited by humanity for millennia. Behind such favorites as cheese and beer, it takes just the right conditions to get the desired results. To aid in this process, and to explore the crafts of their ancestors,
[Victoria] and [Petar] created an electronic fermentation quilt.
Bulgarian yogurt was the tasty end result from this work.
Anyone familiar with breadmaking will be familiar with throwing a cloth over dough when left to rest. This is all about temperature management, providing optimum conditions for the yeast to work their magic. This fermentation quilt takes things to the next level, integrating soft heater pads and temperature sensing hardware into the fabric itself. Rather than acting as a simple insulator, the quilt can actively supply heat where needed, switching off when reaching the set temperature. In this example, the quilt is set to maintain a temperature of 45 degrees for the optimum production of Bulgarian yogurt.
The fermentation quilt serves as an excellent example of what can be achieved when combining textiles with smart electronics. Tools like Adafruit’s Lilypad and conductive thread all come together to make this a functional and useful device, and shows that electronic textiles aren’t just limited to blinky wearables.
Fermentation is a popular topic among hackers,
with [Trent Fehl]’s Supercon talk at the 2019 Supercon covering similar ground from a sourdough perspective
. It goes to show that hardware skills can pay off in the kitchen, too! | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281471",
"author": "CrossDraw",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T12:16:33",
"content": "I bought a electric yogurt maker ~20 years ago, it makes up to 6 Jelly/Jam (8oz) mason jars at a time and I only have had 2-3 bad batches in that time due to me being an idiot and not taking the time to... | 1,760,373,342.107618 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/internet-connected-e-paper-message-board/ | Internet Connected E-Paper Message Board | Rich Hawkes | [
"hardware",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"e-paper",
"google sheets",
"internet of things",
"python"
] | Are you still writing notes on paper and sticking them to the fridge like it’s the ’80s? Well, if you are, and you read this site, you’d probably like to upgrade to something a bit more 21st century. And, thanks to robot maker [James Bruton], you can leave your old, last century, message taking behind as he has a tutorial up showing you
how to build an internet connected e-paper message display board
. And, if you have a Raspberry Pi, an e-paper display and adapters just lying around doing nothing, then this project will cost you less than the buck that paper and a magnet will cost you.
Sarcasm aside, this is a pretty nice project. As mentioned, the base of this is a Raspberry Pi – [James] uses a Pi 4, but you could get away with an older, lower powered model as well. This powers the cheap(-ish) e-paper display he found online, which comes with the necessary adapters for the Pi, as well as a python library to write to the display. [James] uses a Google Sheet as the cloud storage for the message board, and there is some python code to access the cells in the Sheet and print them on the display if anything has changed. A cron job runs the script every 5 minutes to catch changes in the messages.
As with most of the projects that [James] does, he gives a good overview in the video and goes over the process of finding the hardware and writing and updating the script. He’s put the script and details as well as the CAD file for the frame he created for the project up on
GitHub
. [James] has been featured several times on the site before, check out
some
of his
projects
. | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281417",
"author": "Victor",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T05:48:05",
"content": "You do not need a raspberry pi for this. Use a simple ESP32 (see waveshare esp32 hat) with a battery, and you can last a year without charging.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,373,342.155694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/tracking-down-radio-frequency-noise-source-with-help-from-mother-nature/ | Tracking Down Radio Frequency Noise Source, With Help From Mother Nature | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"ferrite",
"ham",
"noise floor",
"QRM",
"radio frequency interference",
"RFI",
"shortwave",
"switch mode"
] | Amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners have a common enemy: QRM, which is ham-speak for radio frequency interference caused by man-made sources. Indiscriminate, often broadband in nature, and annoying as hell, QRM spews forth from all kinds of sources, and can be difficult to locate and fix.
But [Emilio Ruiz], an operator from Mexico, got
a little help from Mother Nature
recently in his quest to lower his noise floor. Having suffered from a really annoying blast of RFI across wide swaths of the radio spectrum for months, a summer thunderstorm delivered a blessing in disguise: a power outage. Hooking his rig up to a battery — all good operators are ready to switch to battery power at a moment’s notice — he was greeted by blessed relief from all that noise. Whatever had caused the problem was obviously now offline.
Rather than waste the quiet time on searching down the culprit, [Emilio] worked the bands until the power returned, and with it the noise. He killed the main breaker in the house and found that the noise abated, leading him on a search of the premises with a portable shortwave receiver. The culprit? Unsurprisingly, it was a cheap laptop power supply. [Emilio] found that the switch-mode brick was spewing RFI over a 200-meter radius; a dissection revealed that the “ferrite beads” intended to suppress RFI emissions were in fact just molded plastic fakes, and that the cord they supposedly protected was completely unshielded.
We applaud [Emilio]’s sleuthing for the inspiration it gives to hunt down our own noise-floor raising sources. It kind of reminds us of
a similar effort by [Josh (KI6NAZ)]
a while back. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281388",
"author": "Shirley Marquez",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T02:23:28",
"content": "A correction. QRM is interference from other ham operators. The noise that this article is about is QRN. The term RFI is also used; the top expert on RFI at the ARRL (American Radio Relay League, ... | 1,760,373,342.354116 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/building-a-compact-reflow-oven-with-halogen-lamps/ | Building A Compact Reflow Oven With Halogen Lamps | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"reflow",
"reflow oven",
"smd"
] | Very often, particularly on the Internet, we’re fooled into thinking bigger is always better. The fact remains that this isn’t always the case. When it comes to reflow ovens, for example if you’re working with short runs of small PCBs, or if you just don’t have a lot of space in the workshop, a smaller oven will be more desirable than a large one.
It’s factors like these that drove [Sergi Martínez]’s latest build
.
Built inside a metal project case, first attempts involved using an off-the-shelf heating element, with poor results. The element had a high thermal inertia, and was designed for use in water, so didn’t last in the reflow application. Learning from the experience of others, [Sergi] switched to using halogen lamps, netting much greater success. An Arduino Nano is responsible for running the show, using firmware developed by [0xPIT]. There’s also a screen for monitoring reflow profiles, and a cooling fan to help keep temperature in the ideal zone.
It’s a tidy build that would be particularly useful for quickly running batches of small PCBs without the long wait times required to heat a larger oven. Energy efficiency should be better, too. Of course, if you’re a fan of the classic toaster oven builds,
we’ve got those too.
Video after the break.
View this post on Instagram
Finally there is some reflow going on! It's nice to see how the solder paste melts. #smd #reflowpcb #reflow #ac #arduino #pcb #opensource #openhardware #diy #electronics #diyelectronics #nanoreflowcontroller
A post shared by
ComputingTheBishop
(@computingthebishop) on
May 26, 2020 at 2:39pm PDT | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281395",
"author": "Conrad Farnsworth",
"timestamp": "2020-09-26T03:43:47",
"content": "Does one have to worry about the vapors from the paste ruining the lamp? I know you’re not supposed to use your bare hands to touch them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,373,342.2019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/autodesk-blinks-keeps-step-file-export-in-free-version-of-fusion-360/ | Autodesk Blinks, Keeps STEP File Export In Free Version Of Fusion 360 | Dan Maloney | [
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"autodesk",
"cad",
"cam",
"export",
"Fusion 360",
"hobbyist",
"license",
"Personal",
"step"
] | Good news, Fusion 360 fans — Autodesk
just announced
that they won’t be removing support for STEP file exports for personal use licensees of the popular CAD/CAM platform after all.
As we noted last week
, Autodesk had announced major changes to the free-to-use license for Fusion 360. Most of the changes, like the elimination of simulations, rolling back of some CAM features, and removal of generative design tools didn’t amount to major workflow disruptions for many hobbyists who have embraced the platform. But the loss of certain export formats, most notably STEP files, was a bone of contention and the topic of heated discussion in the makerverse. Autodesk summed up the situation succinctly in their announcement, stating that the reversal was due to “unintended consequences for the hobbyist community.”
While this is great news, bear in mind that the other changes to the personal use license are still scheduled to go into effect on October 1, while the planned change to limit the number of active projects will go into effect in January 2021. So while Fusion 360 personal use licensees will still have STEP files, the loss of other export file formats like IGES and SAT are still planned. | 84 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281318",
"author": "kc8rwr",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T21:19:59",
"content": "Too bad.I had high hopes for a big upswing in one of the OSS tools, probably FreeCad in the hacker./maker/hobbyist/whatever you want to call it community. More users, more developers, more videos, blog pos... | 1,760,373,342.636995 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/xbox-controller-gets-snap-on-joystick-from-clever-3d-printed-design/ | Xbox Controller Gets Snap On Joystick From Clever 3D-Printed Design | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Games",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"flight simulator",
"hotas",
"Joystick",
"microsoft flight simulator",
"throttle",
"xbox controller"
] | Ball and socket linkages make for smooth operation.
People making DIY controls to enhance flight simulators is a vibrant niche of engineering and hackery, and it sure looks like Microsoft Flight Simulator is doing its part to keep the scene lively. [Akaki Kuumeri]’s latest project
turns an Xbox One gamepad into a throttle-and-stick combo
that consists entirely of 3D printed parts that snap together without a screw in sight. Bummed out by sold-out joysticks, or just curious? The slick-looking HOTAS (hands on throttle and stick) assembly is only a 3D printer and an afternoon away. There’s even a provision to add elastic to increase spring tension if desired.
The design looks great, and the linkages in particular look very well thought-out. Ball and socket joints smoothly transfer motion from one joystick to the other, and [Akaki] says the linkages accurately transmit motion with very little slop.
There is a video to go with the design
(YouTube link, embedded below) and it may
seem
like it’s wrapping up near
the 9 minute mark
, but do not stop watching because that’s when [Akaki] begins to go into hacker-salient details about of how he designed the device and what kinds of issues he ran into while doing so. For example, he says Fusion 360 doesn’t simulate ball and socket joints well, so he had to resort to printing a bunch of prototypes to iterate until he found the right ones. Also, the cradle that holds the Xbox controller was far more difficult to design than expected, because
while Valve might provide accurate CAD models of their controllers
, there was no such resource for the Xbox ones. You can watch the whole video, embedded below.
The last time we saw [Akaki]’s work
it was a 3D-printed flight simulator joystick that uses Hall effect sensors and magnets
, but it’s a delight to see such an accessible approach that doesn’t use a single screw or wire.
[via
reddit
] | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281361",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T23:32:41",
"content": "clever linkage design. but i personally would have gutted the controller and placed them in an old hotas. most throttle side controllers are full of empty space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,373,342.404288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/road-pollution-doesnt-just-come-from-exhaust/ | Road Pollution Doesn’t Just Come From Exhaust | Brian McEvoy | [
"car hacks",
"News"
] | [
"car",
"driving",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"gas",
"green",
"petrol",
"pollution",
"The Tyre Collective",
"tire",
"tyre"
] | Alumni from Innovation Design Engineering at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art want to raise awareness of a
road pollution source we rarely consider:
tire wear. If you think about it, it is obvious. Our tires wear out, and that has to go somewhere, but what surprises us is how fast it happens. Single-use plastic is the most significant source of oceanic pollution, but tire microplastics are
next on the naughty list
. The team calls themselves The Tyre Collective, and they’re working on a device to collect tire particles at the source.
Tires become positively charged as you drive, like a Van De Graaff generator, so the team postulates that the most efficient way to collect the waste is to mount electrostatically charged plates where the plastics discharge. Road dust should pass through instead of gumming up the system since it is not charged. In an odd twist, hybrid vehicles are more dangerous regarding this type of pollution than their 100% petrol counterparts since they have to support a battery and electric motor.
When the tire dust is collected, it isn’t dumped out, because it can be reused as a
pigment
or even refined back into
new tires
. They’re collecting 60% of thrown particles in a lab setting, and they’re improving. What goes around comes around. | 48 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281273",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T18:58:54",
"content": "Tire dust isn’t particularly hazardous for the environment. It breaks down biologically in a few months.The problem with most plastics in the environment is that they’re solid macroscopic pieces and micro-or... | 1,760,373,342.498756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/ask-hackaday-is-windows-xp-source-code-leak-a-bad-thing/ | Ask Hackaday: Is Windows XP Source Code Leak A Bad Thing? | Mike Szczys | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Current Events",
"Slider"
] | [
"leak",
"open source",
"source code",
"windows xp"
] | News comes overnight that the Windows XP source code has been leaked.
The Verge
says
they have “verified the material as legitimate” and that the leak also includes Windows Server 2003 and some DOS and CE code as well. The thing is, it has now been
more than six years since Microsoft dropped support for XP
, does it really matter if the source code is made public?
The Poison Pill
As Erin Pinheiro pointed out in
her excellent article on the Nintendo IP leak earlier this year
(perhaps the best Joe Kim artwork of the year on that one, by the way), legitimate developers can’t really make use of leaked code since it opens them up to potential litigation. Microsoft has a formidable legal machine that would surely go after misuse of the code from a leak like this. Erin mentions in her article that just looking at the code is the danger zone for competitors.
Even if other software companies did look at the source code and implement their own improvements without crossing the legal line, how much is there still to gain? Surely companies with this kind of motivation would have reverse engineered the secret sauce of the long dead OS by now, right?
Spy vs. Spy
The next thing that comes to mind are the security implications. At the time of writing,
statcount pegs Windows XP at a 0.82% market share
which is still going to be a very large number of machines. Perhaps a better question to consider is what
types
of machines are still running it? I didn’t find any hard data to answer this question, however there are dedicated machines like MRIs that don’t have easy upgrade paths and still use the OS and there is
an embedded version of XP
that runs on point-of-sale, automated teller machines, set-top boxes, and other long-life hardware that are notorious for not being upgraded by their owners.
From both the whitehat and blackhat side, source code is a boon for chasing down vulnerabilities. Is there more to be gained by cracking the systems or submitting bug fixes? The OS is end of life, however Microsoft has shown that a big enough security threat still warrants a patch like they did with
a remote desktop protocol vuln patch in May of 2019
. I wonder if any of this code is still used in Windows 10, as that would make it a juicy tool for security researchers.
As for dangerous information in the leak, there have been some private keys found, like
the NetMeeting root certificate
. But its hard to say how much of a risk keys like this are due to the age of the software. You should stop using NetMeeting for high-security video conferencing if you haven’t already… it was
end of life thirteen years ago
so there’s nothing surprising there.
You Just Might Learn Something
I think the biggest news with a leak of code like this is the ability to learn from it. Why do people look at the source code of open source projects? Sure, you might be fixing a bug or adding a feature, but a lot times it’s to see how other coders are doing things. It’s the apprenticeship program of the digital age and having source code of long-dead projects both preserves how things were done for later research, and lets the curious superstars of tomorrow hone their skills at the shoulder of the masters.
Like a Museum Vouching for the Legitimacy of Artifacts
Why don’t company’s get out in front of this and publish end-of-life code as open source? This would vouch for the validity of the code. As it stands, how do you verify leaked code acquired from the more dimly lit corners of the Internet? Publishing the official source code for end of life projects preserves the history, something the Internet age has never given much thought to, but we should. We’ve
heard the company promoting the message that Microsoft loves open source
, here’s another great chance to show that by releasing the source code since it’s already out there from this leak. It would be a great step to do so now, and an even better one to take before leaks happen with future end of life products.
This is a pie-in-the-sky idea that we often trot out when we encounter stories of
IoT companies that go out of business and brick their hardware
on their way out. In those cases, the source code would allow users to roll their own back-end services that no longer exist, but Microsoft would be likely to frown on a “LibreWinXP” project based on their own code. It’s likely that the company still has a few long-term contracts to provide support for entities using XP hardware.
So What Do You Think?
This is
Ask Hackaday
so we want to know your take on this. When old source code leaks, is it a bad thing? Are there any compelling reasons for keeping the source code from projects that have seen their last sunset a secret? And now that the XP code is out there somewhere, what do you think may come for it? Weigh in below! | 57 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281237",
"author": "fanoush",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T17:09:14",
"content": "So is there a NSA backdoor?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6281260",
"author": "Raukk",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T18:12:08",
... | 1,760,373,342.735949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/hackaday-podcast-086-news-overflow-formula-1-3-racer-standing-up-for-rubber-duckies-and-useless-machine-takes-a-turn/ | Hackaday Podcast 086: News Overflow, Formula 1/3 Racer, Standing Up For Rubber Duckies, And Useless Machine Takes A Turn | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"document camera",
"electric guitar",
"formula 1",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"most useless machine",
"R/C car",
"rubber duckies",
"venus"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys peruse the world of hacks. There was so much news this week that we lead off the show with a rundown to catch you up. Yet there is still no shortage of hardware hacks, with prosthetic legs for your rubber ducky, a RC cart that channels the spirit of Formula 1, and a project that brings 80’s video conferencing hardware to Zoom. There’s phosphine gas on Venus and unlimited hacking projects inside your guitar. The week wouldn’t be complete without the joy of riffing on the most useless machine concept.
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!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(60 MB or so.)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 086 Show Notes:
New This Week:
SpaceX Sending Tom Cruise To The Space Station In 2021
Closely Examining How A PG&E Transmission Line Claimed 85 Lives In The 2018 Camp Fire
Autodesk Announces Major Changes To Fusion 360 Personal Use License Terms
Community Testing Suggests Bias In Twitter’s Cropping Algorithm
Remoticon Tickets And Workshops Just Dropped
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Plastic Prosthetics For Rubber Duckies
1/3 Scale Hybrid RC Car With A Scratch-Built 125cc V10 Engine
Teleconferencing Like It’s 1988: Connecting Vintage Hardware To Zoom
Wooden Disc Player Translates Binary Back Into Text
Mirror Turns Webcam Into Document Camera
Mirror, Mirror, On Your Cam, Show Us What You’ve Drawn By Hand
Building A Crystal Clear Whiteboard
Document camera with pencil and a CD
Finally, A Differently Useless Machine
Pull-string Most Useless Machine
Most Useless Machine: Building Elevator Edition
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Watch A Fast Sand Plotter Plow Patterns At Speed
Cyberplotter Uses Multiple Tools To Great Success
A Walking Robot With A Single Servo
Mike’s Picks:
A Big Computer Needs A Big Keyboard
Custom Strain Gauges Help Keep Paraglider Aloft
Controlling A Broken Super Nintendo With MIDI
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Axe Hacks: New Sounds For Your Electric Guitar Beginning From What Makes Them Tick
Exploring The Clouds Of Venus; It’s Not Fantasy, But It Will Take Specialized Spacecraft
Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,344.432974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/3d-printed-adapter-keeps-your-guitar-in-tune-and-in-style/ | 3D-Printed Adapter Keeps Your Guitar In Tune And In Style | Sven Gregori | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed musical instruments",
"3d printing",
"adapter",
"guitar",
"musical instrument"
] | If you like building or upgrading guitars, you may have already learned the valuable lesson that the devil absolutely is in the detail when it comes to to replacement parts. Maybe you became aware that there are two types of Telecaster bridges right after you drilled the holes through the body and noticed things just didn’t quite fit. Or maybe you liked the looks of those vintage locking tuners and the vibe you associate with them, only to realize later that the “vintage” part also refers to the headstock, and the holes in your modern one are too big.
The latter case recently happened to [Michael Könings],
so he did what everyone with a 3D printer would: make an adapter
. Sure, you can also buy them, but where’s the fun in that? Plus, the solution is as simple as it sounds. [Michael] modelled an adaptor to bridge the gap between the headstock holes and the tuner shaft, but unlike the commercial counterpart that are mounted only on one side, his fills up the entire hole and fits the entire construct tightly together. For even more overall stability, he added an interlocking mechanism on the back side that keeps all the adaptors in line, and also allows for some possible distance differences.
[Michael] initially considered using wood filament for cosmetic reasons, but due to lack of the material went with simple white PLA instead. In the end, it doesn’t matter too much, as most of it hides under the new tuners’ metal covers anyway — and the small parts that
are
visible will serve as a great reminder of this lesson in guitar variety. Speaking of 3D printing and guitar variety, now that we reached the headstock, and
have seen bodies for a while already
(
including bass
), only 3D-printed guitar necks are missing. Well, we’ve had them
on violins though
, even
with 6 strings
, but they also don’t have to deal with frets and have a bit less tension going on. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,344.288582 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/textmeter-tells-its-tale/ | Textmeter Tells Its Tale | Brian McEvoy | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"Ammeter",
"amp meter",
"restoration",
"test equipment",
"text",
"textmeter"
] | One time-proven method to make a lesson memorable is to make it a story, but that is not easy if your core material is the repair log of a
rotted out analog ammeter
. Most folks don’t need a 300A meter on their drill press, so [Build Comics] converted it to a text display and describes the procedure like they are writing a comic book. He is using HDLO-3416 LED cluster arrays for that dated-but-legible industrial feel, and everything looks right at home in a box made from oak and steel. Even the USB cord even gets a facelift by running it inside a fabric shoelace. In our own lives, covering charging cables is a hack on its own because we don’t want to fumble with the wrong charger when it is time to sleep or drive. Glow-in-the-dark cord upgrades, anyone?
We don’t have a pre-operation picture of the subject, but the innards suggest that it comes from the bottom of an industrial scrap pile. There is a cross-hatch pattern on the front plate, which hinted at 3D printing, but if you look closely at the early images, you can see that it is original. There is a nodeMCU board to fetch the date information and control the four alphanumeric displays. Except for the red lights, all the new hardware hides behind wood or steel, so this old workhorse’s aesthetic lives on and has a story to share that is a delight to read.
If you enjoy reading [Build Comics] and their adventurous recollections, we forecast you’ll enjoy this
weather display
, or maybe it is
time to check out their clock
, but we want to
plant the seed
of literary build logs. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280975",
"author": "adrian",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T19:53:25",
"content": "‘There is a cross-hatch pattern on the front plate, which hinted at 3D printing, ‘Apparently someone who never encountered a 1960s ammeter before. Don’t journalists know any history ?I can understand not w... | 1,760,373,344.479437 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/in-praise-of-the-dt830-the-phenomenal-instrument-you-probably-dont-recognise-for-what-it-is/ | In Praise Of The DT830, The Phenomenal Instrument You Probably Don’t Recognise For What It Is | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"digital multimeter",
"DT830",
"ICL7106",
"multimeter"
] | If we had to make a guess at the single piece of electronic bench equipment owned by the highest proportion of Hackaday readers, it would not be a budget oscilloscope from Rigol, nor would it be a popular portable soldering iron like the TS100. Instead we’re guessing that it’s a multimeter, and not even the most accomplished one.
The DT830 is a genericised Chinese-manufactured 3.5 digit digital multimeter that can be had for an astonishingly low price. Less than a decent hamburger gets you an instantly recognisable plastic case with a chunky rotary range selector switch, and maybe a socket for some kind of transistor or component tester. Make sure that there is a 9 volt battery installed, plug in the pair of test leads, and you’re in business for almost any day-to-day electrical or electronic measurement. They’ve been available in one form or another for decades and have been the subject of innumerable give-aways and loss-leader offers, so it’s a reasonsble guess that you’ll have one somewhere. I have three as far as I know, they make great on-the-go instruments and have proved themselves surprisingly reliable for what they are.
Persuading You Is Going To Be A Tough Sell
An undervalued instrument, by my estimation.
If you talk about the DT830 in polite company, you might be greeted with snorts of derision. It’s not difficult to find reviews that tear one down and compare it to a more expensive meter, and not surprisingly find the pricey meter to be of higher quality.
And it’s certainly true that for a couple of dollars, you get a switch that won’t last forever and high voltage isolation that maybe isn’t quite up to spec. But I’m going to advance a different take on the DT830 that may surprise some of you: to me it’s a modern classic, an instrument that provides performance for its price that is nothing short of phenomenal. Because that pocket-money meter not only measures voltage, current, and resistance, it does so accurately and repeatably, and to compare that with what might have gone before is to show just much better a device it is.
Thirty years ago, a digital multimeter was an expensive item, and most multimeters were still analogue. A cheap multimeter was therefore invariably a small pocket analogue device, and the very cheap ones could be
astoundingly awful
. Accuracy and repeatability in reading wasn’t their strong point, and while I am
a great fan of analogue multimeters
when it comes to spotting dips and trends in tweaking analogue circuitry, even I can’t find reason to praise the inexpensive ones. By comparison the DT830 delivers reliable and accurate readings with a high-impedance input, something I would have given a lot for in 1985.
That Performance Is No Fluke
An ICM7106 epoxy blob on a 40-pin DIP-shaped PCB in this roughly 18-year-old DT830
So given that it costs considerably less than a pint of beer in a British pub, how does such a cheap instrument do it? The answer is, by standing on the shoulders of giants. My colleague Anool Mahidharia supplied the answer here back in 2017 when
he took a look at the Intersil 71XX series of integrated circuits
; the archetypal DT830 contains an
ICM 7106
3.5 digit digital panel meter chip, whose roots lie in a much more exclusive stratum of the industry.
(Despite there being
a load of newer and more accomplished multimeter chips
on the market I was surprised to find that none of them had found their way into the meters I’d opened.)
The ICM 7106 was based on work Intersil did in 1977 to produce the part in Fluke’s first portable DMM, the model 8020A.
Google hasn’t found any ICM7106 conterfeiters!
So you’re not getting anywhere near the physical design or component quality of that expensive meter, but you are benefiting from the tech that made its ancestor a very good instrument for the 1970s. The dual-slope integrating ADC and precision reference are the same as the ones in many far more expensive meters, which is what makes the reading from your few-dollar DT830 one you can trust. Not bad for something you might dismiss as a piece of junk!
If there is something to be gleaned from this story, it is a very real demonstration of the power of semiconductor manufacturing. Assuming it has passed acceptable factory QA, every 7106 is as good as any other 7016, from the first one made by Intersil in the 1970s through to the unknown-origin chip hiding under an epoxy blob in my cheap meter. The manufacturer can skimp on every other component in the meter, but assuming that there’s no money in counterfeiting a 43-year-old chip that long ago left its premium product phase behind and has been manufactured by many sources over the years, they can’t skimp on the chip that powers it. To be an ICM7106, it must have the same features as the original from the 1970s, thus my bargain-basement meter still shares something that matters with one of far higher quality.
The DT830 multimeter, then. It may be a heap of junk, but it’s an astonishingly
good
heap of junk. I for one, salute it. | 132 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280926",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T17:15:43",
"content": "I am a proud owner of one. It’s an Elro M630. But inside, the PCB is marked M830B-16B. Mine is stamped 2398, so I presume it’s week 23 of 1998, which should make it 22 years old. :)And yes, it still works ... | 1,760,373,345.078512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/roller-based-robot-hand-grasps/ | Roller-Based Robot Hand Grasps | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"gripper",
"hand",
"robot",
"stanford"
] | In a recent International Conference on Robotics and Automation paper, [Shenli Yaun] and some others from Stanford discuss the
design of a roller-based robot hand
that has many features that mimic the human hand. The key feature is that each of the three fingers has a roller with a small geared motor.
The rollers allowed the hand to change an object’s orientation without losing its grasp. Of course, this works well with spherical objects like a ball. But the video shows that it can manipulate other items like a 6-sided die, a water bottle, or even a piece of paper. By spreading the fingers it can even hold large objects you wouldn’t expect at first glance.
There are certain limitations such as slipping for some shapes and the paper covers those. This seems to be one of those things that will be very useful for certain applications, but perhaps not universally applicable.
The team is already working on version two which has small balls instead of rollers. We look forward to hearing more about it in the future.
We’ve seen soft gripping
robot fingers
before.
Gripping
is one of those things that is easy for even a child to do, but much harder for a robot. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280948",
"author": "TheFinn",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T18:28:30",
"content": "Looks like this would be the perfect manipulator if you were to build the Tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell. Not only could it grab and manipulate, but twist one of the fingers to roll and a robot could ... | 1,760,373,344.394741 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/dynamic-soaring-545-mph-rc-planes-have-no-motor/ | Dynamic Soaring: 545 MPH RC Planes Have No Motor | Elliot Williams | [
"drone hacks",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"aerodynamics",
"albatross",
"dynamic soaring",
"glider",
"RC airplane"
] | The fastest remote-controlled airplane flight ever recorded took place in 2018, with a top speed of 545 miles/hour. That’s 877 km/h, or Mach 0.77!
What was the limiting factor, preventing the pilot-and-designer Spencer Lisenby’s plane from going any faster? The airstream over parts of the wing hitting the sound barrier, and the resulting mini sonic booms wreaking havoc on the aerodynamics. What kind of supercharged jet motor can propel a model plane faster than its wings can carry it? Absolutely none; the fastest RC planes are, surprisingly, gliders.
Dynamic soaring (DS) was first harnessed to propel model planes sometime in the mid 1990s. Since then, an
informal international competition among pilots
has pushed the state of the art further and further, and in just 20 years the top measured speed has more than tripled. But dynamic soaring is anything but new. Indeed, it’s been possible ever since there has been wind and slopes on the earth. Albatrosses, the long-distance champs of the animal kingdom, have been “DSing” forever, and we’ve known about it for a century.
DS is the highest-tech frontier in model flight, and is full of interesting physical phenomena and engineering challenges. Until now, the planes have all been piloted remotely by people, but reaching new high speeds might require the fast reaction times of onboard silicon, in addition to a new generation of aircraft designs. The “free” speed boost that gliders can get from dynamic soaring could extend the range of unmanned aerial vehicles, when the conditions are right. In short, DS is at a turning point, and things are just about to get very interesting. It’s time you got to know dynamic soaring.
The Physics of DS
When wind blows over a hill, it has to go up and over, with emphasis on the “up”. Glider pilots have used this
ridge lift
to their advantage for a long time, and the model airplane practice of gliding around indefinitely in the ridge lift on the front side of a hill is called “slope soaring”. With an infinite source of lift, model gliders can do all sorts of fun acrobatics using very little power, as long as they don’t hit the hill or fly up and over to the back side of the mountain.
On the back side, the air pulls back down again, and there’s a strange turbulent zone between the moving air up-top, and the wind-shadow in the valley where the air is still. The back side was known to eat model airplanes, first pulling them downwards a little, then tumbling them around, and then leaving them to slowly sink in the still air. If you’re lucky, it’s a long walk down to pick up your intact plane. If you’re unlucky, you can collect your pieces off the leeward side of the hill.
Until one day, when glider pilot extraordinaire (and aeronautical engineer) Joe Wurts flew up and over. He realized that he couldn’t make it back against the strong wind, and didn’t want to hike down, so he aimed the plane at the valley floor. It picked up speed, crossed the turbulent zone, and entered the still air where he was able to fly it back to the crest of the hill because he wasn’t fighting the strong headwind. When it climbed and re-entered the wind stream, he noticed that it had picked up speed. Then
he started doing it on purpose
.
And thus was born Dynamic Soaring with RC gliders. (Ta-daa!) It seems like a perpetual motion machine at first, but the trick is that every time the plane re-enters the fast-moving air, it gets pushed downwind. Diving down into the still air lets it fly back to where it started without receiving the equivalent push in the opposite direction. As long as the plane gets more of a push than it loses to drag during the return leg of the flight, it comes out of the circle with more energy — it’s going faster.
Insanely Fast Model Airplanes
And fast is
fast
. The progress in speed records stalled for a number of years due to the fact that there were no commercially available radar guns that would measure above 300 mph — supercars are slow compared to carbon-fiber RC gliders. When better radar detectors became available, largely due to continual pestering by Spencer and the DS community, measured speeds jumped up dramatically — that’s the vertical line in the middle of the graph.
When the sport was young, the highest achievable speeds were limited by the stiffness of the wings:
Flutter
is the wing-killer. If an oscillation in the wing starts up at high speed, there’s a lot of energy to keep it amplifying, and the result is that the wing tears itself apart or away from the body of the plane.
Modern planes have flutter-resistant airfoil designs, but are also made out of carbon fiber and other high-tech composites. Unlike “normal” gliders, DS gliders have the enviable problem of being confronted with too much wind energy, so they can be built strong without worrying so much about weight.
Today, the limits to top speed are aerodynamics and the human pilot. The air moving over the top of the wing has to cross the sound barrier, where it is no longer compressible. This creates shock waves in the middle of the wing, which kill its aerodynamic efficiency. The solution, as with full-scale planes, is to sweep the wings backwards. This smoothes out the pressure gradient along the wing, but it means an entire re-design of the plane. This is where Spencer’s next design will be going.
For a great rundown of the state of the art in dynamic soaring, you should really check out Spencer’s talk. If you just care about the planes, the history of his own designs
starts around 20 minutes in
.
When Spencer manages to design and build a plane that can approach the sound barrier, the next limiting factor may be the human in the loop. At speeds already in excess of 200 m/s, a human’s reaction and decision time of around 250 ms to 500 ms translates to 100 m of plane travel. If a plane hits bad turbulence at those speeds while only 20 m above the ground, it could be carbon-fiber dust before any meatbag even has a chance to blink. To quote Spencer, “With each new speed, you get this feeling like you’re in over your head and your brain can’t keep up with what’s happening.”
While we’re not quite there yet, it’s likely that the fastest DS plane in another 20 years will be significantly more automated because humans just won’t be able to keep up. This brings a slew of new challenges, from instrumentation and motors to algorithm design. There are tons of autopilot systems available out there in the broader model airplane hobby, like
Ardupilot
for instance, but none of them have the closed-loop response times that will be necessary for transonic DS. But they’re faster than people.
The Albatross, the Drone, and the Windmill
Lord Rayleigh first noticed that albatrosses flew for long distances without flapping their wings. He called this “gust soaring”. But perversely, it wasn’t until after the DS revolution in model airplanes that we fully started to
understand the aerodynamics
fully, and we’ve still got a lot to learn from nature on this front.
An albatross has an array of strain and windspeed sensors along the length of its wings that enable real-time analysis and control of its flight that we can’t even begin to approach. They’re reported to be able to soar in the wake of the waves even while they’re asleep, a wingtip skimming only a few centimeters over the surface of the water.
Perhaps one future application of dynamic soaring will be UAVs that save power by harvesting windspeed gradients, whether on the ocean or taking advantage of specific terrain. We’d love to hear silent DS-bots replace their noisy helicopter-based brothers. Imagine gliders that pause along their course when they approach the leeward side of a windy hill, loop around to build up speed, and then move along to the next. Combine this with thermal lift sources over the flats, or solar, and you might have something.
But before our heads get too lost in the clouds, let’s return to physics. You might be thinking “hey, with all this free energy out there, why aren’t we harvesting it already?” The “dynamic” part of dynamic soaring comes from the top turn: the plane only gains energy when it is in the fast-moving air. The bottom half of the loop is just getting back to where it started. If you didn’t need to go anywhere, you might imagine skipping the inefficient return path and doubling the energy-harvesting efficiency simply by tethering the plane to the ground with a tall mast. Let the wing spin a generator, maybe use three of them, and you’ve invented the modern windmill, which is at least twice as efficient as the best DS plane out there.
So maybe the future of dynamic soaring is exactly like the present: a fun sport that’s chock-full of adrenaline, aerodynamics, and no shortage of design challenges. Or maybe the future
for you
is to
discover DSing
at all. In another world from the high cost of competitive carbon planes, you can get started for nearly nothing with
a DIY foam model
or just
cheese out and buy one
. Beginner models are surprisingly robust, and if you wreck it, you can glue it back together or harvest the servo motors and start again. Happy soaring! | 59 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280890",
"author": "Folkert",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T14:16:45",
"content": "Actually energy harvesting using a tethered wing or kite does not even require the lee part of a hill/wave to fly back. It can do this by flying head into the wind being pulled by the tether costing a fra... | 1,760,373,344.691967 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/3d-print-a-piece-of-nintendo-history-before-the-real-one-is-gone/ | 3D Print A Piece Of Nintendo History Before The Real One Is Gone | Drew Littrell | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"3d capture",
"3D printable",
"nintendo",
"Photogrammetry"
] | Nintendo wasn’t always in the videogames business. Long before Mario, the company was one of the foremost producers of Hanafuda playing cards in Japan. From 1930 until 1959, Nintendo ran its printing business from a four-story art deco style building that featured distinctive plaques at the front entrance. We now have
a chance to print those former Nintendo HQ plaques
at home thanks to [Mr. Talida] who shared some 3D models on Twitter. Talida, a self-described “retro video game archivist”, recreated the plaques via photogrammetry from a number of reference photos he took from a visit to the Kyoto site late last year.
These 3D models come at a crucial time as the old Nintendo HQ building, which sat dormant for years, is set to be turned into a boutique hotel next year.
According to JPC
, the hotel will feature twenty rooms, a restaurant, and a gym and is expected to be completed by summer 2021 (although that estimate was from the “before” times). The renovation is expected to retain as much of the original exterior’s appearance as possible, but the Nintendo plaques almost assuredly will not be included. For a first-person tour of the former Nintendo headquarters building, there is a video from the world2529 YouTube channel provided below.
It is encouraging to see examples of this DIY-style of historical preservation. Many companies have proven themselves to be less-than-stellar stewards of their own history. Though if
his Twitter timeline
is any indication, [Mr. Talida] is up to something further with this photogrammetry project. A video export exhibiting a fully textured 3D model of the old Nintendo headquarters’ entrance was published recently along with the words, “What have I done.” | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280850",
"author": "Clyde H Shaffer",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T12:22:44",
"content": "If they can’t or don’t want to keep the plaques on the exterior, a smart move would be to auction the plaques off. I’m sure there’s a collector out there who’d bid absurdly high.",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,373,344.532425 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/esp32-vulnerability-affects-older-chips/ | ESP32 Vulnerability Affects Older Chips | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"CVE",
"ESP32",
"expressif",
"glitch",
"UART bootloader"
] | There is a scene from the movie RED (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) where Bruce Willis encounters a highly-secure door with a constantly changing lock code deep inside the CIA. Knowing the lock would be impossible to break, he simply destroyed the wall next to the door, reached through, and opened the door from the other side. We thought about that when we saw [raelize’s] hack to
bypass the ESP32’s security measures
.
Before you throw out all your ESP32 spy gadgets, though, be aware that the V3 silicon can be made to prevent the attack. V1 and V2, however, have a flaw that — if you know how to exploit it — renders secure boot and flash encryption almost meaningless.
The hack centers around the UART bootloader. You can cause the chip to enter that mode and do basic operations such as read and write RAM and registers. You can also execute code from RAM. That’s not a particular security risk, though, since the flash memory may be encrypted. Decryption is transparent in the hardware and the chip doesn’t do the decryption during the boot loader mode. Sure, you can read the encrypted flash, but you could do that with some fancy desoldering or probing techniques, too.
During a normal boot, a bootloader in flash is placed in RAM. If you can glitch the CPU at just the right time — in theory — you could force the processor to run your RAM-based code in normal mode where the flash is already decrypted. The only problem is, they tried about 1,000,000 cycles and had no success. But they did notice something odd.
The illegal instruction exception that occurred during the glitch was due to an instruction in the original RAM code winding up in the PC register. This allows an attacker to load an arbitrary address in RAM into the PC if the glitch is timed just perfectly. It turns out, it is just that easy.
We wondered why a data item would wind up in the program counter and apparently [raelize] wondered the same thing. There are a few theories, but no one seems to know for sure. At least, no one who isn’t under a non-disclosure agreement.
Once you can set the PC address arbitrarily, it is easy enough to jump back into the UART bootloader. It took a little experimenting, but eventually, the unencrypted flash came pouring out of the serial port.
This is good work and we are glad the latest silicon doesn’t show the problem. The work is captured in an
official advisory
, so the community will know what is possible.
There have been quite a few
security-related exploits
lately. Usually, we think of ESP tools as part of the
hacker’s toolset
, not a target, but — of course — anything is fair game. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280820",
"author": "ziew",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T10:25:50",
"content": "Mentioning secure boot in the title would be nice. Now I’m expecting a stream of “ZOMG!1!! SHOULD I THROW OUT ALL MY SONOFFS??!!11! CAN HACKERS BURN DOWN MY SMART HOME?!!!111” comments from the tl;dr people ... | 1,760,373,344.353459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/candy-slide-keeps-halloween-spooky-and-socially-distant/ | Candy Slide Keeps Halloween Spooky And Socially Distant | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"gauze",
"halloween",
"Halloween candy",
"PVC",
"social distancing"
] | Pandemic got you down about the prospects for Halloween this year? While you may not be able to do the Monster Mash with all your friends and family, there are plenty of ways to hand out candy while upholding social distancing practices.
[WickedMakers] built a spooky six-foot candy slide to help keep their celebration in compliance with the CDC
.
Their candy slide is almost entirely made of PVC, plus some gauze to mummify it and make it scarier. It’s essentially a six-foot long section of 3″ tubing supported by two ladders made of 1″ tubing that put the top four feet off the ground and a kid-friendly two feet off the ground at the receiving end. [WickedMakers] did a great job of hiding the PVC-ness of this build. We can’t help but wonder how much harder it would be to make the skeleton put the candy on the slide. Check out the build video after the break.
Need some Halloween headgear? You could always build N95 filter material into
an EDM helm
to hand out candy. Stay safe out there this year, and remember:
always check your Halloween candy for malicious payloads
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281219",
"author": "EnnyPenny",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T16:20:16",
"content": "You want your friends to be safe, don’t you? Or are you a hillbilly who’s never heard of science? So start adjusting to COVID already damn.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,344.805693 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/this-week-in-security-utorrent-vulnerable-crowd-sourcing-your-fail2ban-and-cryptographers-at-casinos/ | This Week In Security: UTorrent Vulnerable, Crowd-Sourcing Your Fail2Ban, And Cryptographers At Casinos | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Fail2Ban",
"Roulette",
"This Week in Security"
] | The uTorrent client was recently
updated to fix a null pointer dereference
(CVE-2020-8437), discovered by [whtaguy]. Triggering the dereference simply crashes the client — so far an actual RCE hasn’t been found. Given the nature of the null pointer dereference, it’s possible this bug is limited to denial of service. That’s extremely good, because the flaw is extremely easy to target.
BitTorrent is a clever protocol. It’s still used to distribute large files, like Linux ISOs. The concept is simple: Split a large file into small chunks. Send the chunks to a client one at a time. As each chunk is received, the client sends a copy of that chunk to the next client. As a result of this peer-to-peer (p2p) arrangement, the bandwidth available to the server is greatly multiplied. As with all other p2p arrangements, the sticking point is how to make those connections between peers, particularly when most of the world’s desktops are behind NAT routers. In practice, for two peers to share data, at least one of them has to have a port opened or forwarded to the client. This is often accomplished through Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP) or the NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP). The idea of both protocols are the same; a client on an internal device can request a temporary port forward without manual intervention. Whether it’s a good idea to allow automatic port forwards is another issue for another day.
BitTorrent uses a custom data serialization scheme, bencode, to include more complex data structures in both .torrent files, as well as the handshake sent between peers when connecting. Bencode can represent multiple data types, one of which being a dictionary type. Of interest here is that a dictionary can contain a dictionary as a value, and the protocol doesn’t specify a maximum depth. In the uTorrent client, this depth is tracked internally by using an integer as a bit field, essentially bit-shifting a binary 1 into this integer for each level of dictionary parsed. The bencode decoding code overflows the integer when more than 32 dictionaries are nested. This overflow results in an attempted access of a null pointer, crashing the client.
This vulnerable code can be targeted in two different ways. The first is through a specially crafted torrent file. This is rather uninteresting, as the client simply crashes when trying to open the file. The interesting vector is through peer handshakes. The malicious bencode data can be sent as a part of the handshake, crashing the client on the other end. This ability is intriguing, because it could be used in a targeted DoS attack against a specific torrent.
It’s been pointed out that
a popular older version of uTorrent doesn’t have this exact vulnerability
, though the normal caution about running outdated software still applies. It’s also possible that similar vulnerabilities could be found in other BitTorrent clients.
Crowd-Sourced Fail2ban
If you run a service connected to the internet, then you probably know a bit about fail2ban. It’s a daemon that watches your system logs for repeated events, like an attempt at guessing an SSH password, and temporarily denies the IP address making the guesses. It’s a handy tool, but wouldn’t it be even better if that live deny-list could be used on many systems at once?
Crowdsec aims to be that solution
. Once installed and opted-in, each event of interest is turned into a data point consisting of the IP, event type, and timestamp, and uploaded to the central database. From there, each report is then folded in to the continually evolving deny-list. The project is young, but this might be one to keep your eyes on.
When a Cryptographer Goes to the (Virtual) Casino
Our old friends, the NCC Group, took aim at a niche industry, online gambling. Specifically,
they took a look at online roulette wheel gambling
, but their techniques are widely applicable.
The first principle to understand is that the house always wins. To put it another way, the gambling establishment is guaranteed to make a profit. Understanding exactly how that works can be important. In the case of roulette, both types of wagers are stacked slightly towards the house. The margin is small enough that even a minor advantage can turn the tables. So, one of the easiest avenues to examine is the random number generator. Find the list of winning numbers, and see if some numbers actually come up more often. A quick trick the authors shared: represent the numbers as a bitmapped image. The human brain is exceptionally good at recognizing patterns when the data is displayed the right way.
Another possible weakness is how the close of betting is implemented. If a user could modify the site’s JS in the browser, he could send bets later than intended. If the server-side doesn’t carefully check for such an attack, late bets could give a player an edge. The entire write-up is full of interesting strategies, both for general web security research, as well as gambling and roulette specific strategies.
Bits and Bytes
Remember the botched AES implementation in Microsoft’s Active Directory? The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has deemed it a severe enough risk that any government systems that haven’t been patched (as of the 22nd),
are to be permanently disconnected from government networks
.
Drupal just
released an update that addresses a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability
. An XSS attack is one where one user can inject some JavaScript into a website, and it runs when other users view the impacted page. (
The Samy worm on Myspace being the prime example.
) There isn’t much additional detail available at this time, but this problem is in Drupal core, rather than a 3rd party plugin, so the impact is potentially quite wide. Go dust off those Drupal installs, and get them updated! | 22 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281185",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T14:44:44",
"content": "“The human brain is exceptionally good at recognizing patterns when the data is displayed the right way.”That reminds me of when I ran a BASIC program on my Timex-Sinclair 1000…The program would pull a (pseud... | 1,760,373,344.758623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/hacking-a-cheap-action-cam-into-a-dashcam-with-a-microcontroller/ | Hacking A Cheap Action Cam Into A Dashcam With A Microcontroller | Danie Conradie | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera trigger",
"dash cam",
"microcontroller",
"pic10"
] | Repurposing commodity electronics is one of the true forms of hacking, and it’s always the simple little hacks that lead to big ones. [Everett] wanted to use a $20
GoPro clone as a dash cam
, so he wired a microcontroller into it to automate some actions and make it practical.
The camera turns on automatically when connected to external power like a car charger, but starting and stopping a recording and power down all had to be done manually. [Everett] wanted to automate these functions, so he opened up the camera and started probing with an oscilloscope. He found the power button, record button, 3.3 V and external 5 V traces conveniently next to each other in the top of the camera.
To automate the required functions, he wired in a PIC10 on a small breakout board, powered by the 3.3 V line. It detects if 5 V is connected to the charging port on start-up via an N-channel FET, then automatically starts a recording. When the 5 V power is switched off with the car, it waits 10 seconds before stopping the recording and switching off the camera. If no external 5 V is not detected on start-up the microcontroller does nothing, which allows the camera to be used as a normal handheld. [Everett] mounted the camera to his rearview mirror with a magnetic bracket made using a combination of a 3D printer and 3D pen.
This is a simple and practical little hack, and the firmware is available on
Github
. Cheap dashcams are available for similar prices, but you won’t get any hacking satisfaction that way.
The very nature of actions cameras inspire hacking. You can simply
add an external battery
with the help of a 3D printer, or go all out and build a
gimballed helmet cam
from scratch | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281156",
"author": "iot4c",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T11:57:55",
"content": "This cheap cameras has the “auto-registrator” mode. Look for menu items. Other one, and this is really problem,- they no compress files (problem with codec’s licenses?) as result, a rare file is not corrupt... | 1,760,373,345.133463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/25/adding-wifi-to-the-acorn-electron/ | Adding WiFi To The Acorn Electron | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"acorn",
"acorn electron",
"ESP8266",
"wifi"
] | In the continuing quest by countless hobbyists to allow every 1980s 8-bit home computer to experience the joys of an online experience that doesn’t involve a 9600 baud modem, [Roland Leurs] has
created a cartridge-based module
for the Acorn Electron that adds WiFi, which he showed off
at the virtual ABug conference
in September 2020.
The
Acorn Electron
is a Synertek 6502-based computer that was released in the UK in August of 1983. It’s a budget version of the well-known BBC Micro educational/home computer, with 32 kB of RAM and featuring BBC BASIC v2 in its ROM. [Roland]’s ElkWiFi card slots into an available cartridge slot, after which the onboard ESP8266 (ESP-1 module) can be enabled and used as a WiFi modem.
Acorn Electron with Plus 1 expansion, ElkWiFi and additional expansion card inserted.
The board features the Exar
ST16C2552CJ
dual UART chip, one channel of which connects to the ESP-1 module, with the other channel used as an uncommitted UART header. The control logic is implemented in VHDL and flashed to the onboard Xilinx CPLD, and a 128 kB RAM module is used as WiFi data buffer.
Although a definite niche product, reading through the forum thread makes one really appreciate the technical complexity and joy once things are beginning to work reliably. It also shows one of the few cases where an ESP-1 module is used for its original purpose: as an easy way to add WiFi functionality with full WiFi and TCP stack, without burdening the main CPU.
(Thanks, BaldPower) | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281148",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T11:04:49",
"content": "Nice board! Glad to see new stuff being built for CLASSIC computers (because OLD – as the people from Retrocomputaria use to say – is your PC)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,373,345.286313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/diy-grout-cleaning-machine-does-a-good-job/ | DIY Grout Cleaning Machine Does A Good Job | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"cleaning",
"floor",
"TILE",
"tiles"
] | Cleaning tiled floors can be a drag. Getting the tiles themselves clean is bad enough, but often dealing with the grouted joints in between requires more elbow grease and attention to detail. It’s a tedious chore, and thus one ripe for improvement.
[Elite Worm]’s cleaning machine is an excellent solution to the problem.
The machine is built entirely from scratch, using primarily 3D printed components. A fluid tank is fitted to the chassis, along with a custom 3D-printed pump run by a DC motor, to deliver cleaning product where its needed. A large DC motor is then used to spin a nylon brush which gets deep in the tile grooves to clean out the grime. The chassis is then fitted with rollers to allow it to glide along the floor. Finally, a handle is fitted which allows the user to push the tool along, with switches to turn on the spinning brush and dispense cleaning fluid.
It’s a great tool, and one which eliminates hours of scrubbing on hands and knees. We’re sure the time investment in the build will pay off before long.
We’ve seen other tricky cleaning hacks before, too.
Video after the break. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281085",
"author": "JIBE",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T05:35:39",
"content": "Neat !A great improvement since the classic toothbrush.But where is the camera + PI to make it autonomous ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6281092",
... | 1,760,373,345.405663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/robotic-worm-uses-ninjaflex-filament/ | Robotic Worm Uses NinjaFlex Filament | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"earthworm",
"Ninjaflex",
"peristaltic",
"pneumatic",
"robot",
"worm"
] | If you think about building a moving machine, you probably will consider wheels or tracks or maybe even a prop to take you airborne. When [nwlauer] found an earthworm in the garden, it inspired
a 3D-printed robot
that employs peristaltic motion. You can see a video of it moving, below.
The robot uses pneumatics and soft plastic, and is apparently waterproof. Your printer’s feed path has to be pretty rigid to support flexible filament without jamming. There’s also some PVA filament and silicone tubing involved.
For the control side, an Arduino controls a diaphragm pump and six small solenoid valves. We were amused to read that the solenoid valves are often used in eye massagers. The code is on
GitHub
.
The segments have Ninjaflex along with PVA support inserts. You glue the centers of each segment together, but not the edges, and then dissolve the PVA to form the air chambers inside.
The motion isn’t very efficient looking, but it probably handles a lot of terrain options. We aren’t sure if there is a real practical use for this technique in its current form, but we bet it could be adapted plus it is just a cool example of something to do with flexible filament besides printing phone cases.
We’ve seen Ninjaflex used for more practical purposes such as
custom belts
.
Keypads
are another practical project. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281063",
"author": "scott.tx",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T02:15:06",
"content": "robotic worm…..yeah, that’s the ticket!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6281100",
"author": "Sorger",
"timestamp": "2020-09-25T06:55:59",
... | 1,760,373,345.173666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/24/plaster-annealing-3d-prints-for-strength/ | Plaster Annealing 3D Prints For Strength | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"annealing",
"PETG",
"PLA"
] | [Stefan] is always trying to make stronger 3D prints. Annealing can strengthen prints, but often at the expense of the part’s exact dimensions. His latest approach is to
embed the prints in plaster and then anneal
in an attempt to fuse the plastic together without changing its shape or size. Did it work? See for yourself in the video below.
He’s done a lot of work we’ve taken note of before where he measures the strength of parts after different post-processing steps. His test plastic parts used both PLA and PETG.
In general, the parts were made with 100% infill to prevent the plastic from collapsing on itself during the heating process. Getting the plaster bubble-free took a few attempts. This isn’t a fast technique. The plaster had to be dry before annealing and even with a dehydrator, it was well over 36 hours before the parts were ready for the oven.
Getting the parts out of the plaster turned out to be harder than you’d think. Mechanically removing most of it and then washing away a little residue turned out to be the best way. The tests showed the PLA reference parts — those not treated — were stronger than the annealed parts. But the PETG parts were transformed and nearly three times as strong as they had been.
[Stefan] thinks that further drying of the plaster casts might result in even stronger PETG parts. Although the PLA parts were somewhat weaker, the annealed parts became much more temperature resistant, surviving 170 degree temperatures.
The only downside we see is that it isn’t a quick or simple process. But if you need stronger or more temperature resistant materials, this is very achievable with common equipment.
If you follow our coverage of this topic,
the hooks might look familiar
. We always enjoy [Stefan’s] videos as he does a lot of
interesting experiments
. | 29 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6281022",
"author": "socksbot",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T23:24:05",
"content": "> Getting the parts out of the plaster turned out to be harder than you’d think. Mechanically removing most of it and then washing away a little residue turned out to be the best way.Break off what you c... | 1,760,373,345.238858 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/21/adding-midi-to-a-mini-synth-is-easy-as-pi/ | Adding MIDI To A Mini Synth Is Easy As Pi | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"control voltage",
"keyboard",
"midi",
"Rasperry Pi",
"Ribbon Controller",
"synth",
"synthesizer"
] | There are a handful of relatively dirt cheap synths out there like the KORG Monotron, but many of them use ribbon controllers that aren’t very precise. Ribbon controllers basically slide pots that you operate with your finger or a stylus. They’re painted to look like piano keys in order to show you approximately where the notes are supposed to be. The Stylophone is another extremely affordable synth that does even less as a synthesizer and uses this type of input. It’s a fun input if you don’t mind imprecision, but can be annoying otherwise.
[schollz] isn’t satisfied to synth this way, so
they added MIDI input to their KORG Monotron using a Raspberry Pi and a DAC
. Fortunately, the Monotron is quite the hackable little synth, with nice, big, labelled pads on the PCB.
All it really took was a couple of solder joints in the right places, plus a clever Python script. The script listens for MIDI input from a keyboard, and then controls an MCP4725 DAC, which sends voltages to the Monotron. [schollz] wrote a tuning function that computes the FFT of the MIDI tones to find the fundamental frequencies of each to send along to the Monotron. Check it out after the break.
If liquid control is what you’re after but all you have is a keyboard,
try making your own ribbon controller
.
Via
adafruit | 11 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280144",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T05:22:08",
"content": "In 1976 McGill university had an electronic music studio. A Moog, a Mellotron, I can’t remember what else. But, the Moog a big early model, had no keyboard. Just a ribbon controller. Someone s... | 1,760,373,345.333065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/21/a-motorcycle-dashboard-straight-from-the-ecu/ | A Motorcycle Dashboard Straight From The ECU | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"cluster",
"diagnostic",
"display",
"ecu",
"ESP32",
"gps",
"Honda",
"instrument",
"motorcycle"
] | Classic motorcycles are the wild west of information displays. Often lacking even basic instrumentation such as a fuel gauge and sometimes even a speedometer, motorcycles have come a long way in instrument cluster design from even 20 years ago. There’s still some room for improvement, though, and luckily a lot of modern bikes have an ECU module that can be tapped into for some extra information as [Sophie Wheeler] illustrates
with her auxiliary motorcycle dashboard
.
This display is built for a modern Honda enduro, and is based upon an ESP32 module. The ESP32 is tied directly into the ECU via a diagnostic socket, unlike other similar builds that interface with a CAN bus specifically. It can monitor all of the bike’s activity including engine temperature, throttle position, intake air temperature, and whether or not the bike is in neutral. [Sophie] also added an external GPS sensor so the new display can also show GPS speed and location information within the same unit.
[Sophie] credits a few others for making headway into the Honda ECU. [Gonzo] created
a similar build using a Raspberry Pi and more rudimentary screen
but was instrumental in gathering the information for this build. If you’re looking for a display of any kind for your antique motorcycle which is lacking an ECU, though, we would suggest a
speedometer made with nixie tubes
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280130",
"author": "_Sol_",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T03:10:51",
"content": "Looks like a Honda NC700/750 dash?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6280183",
"author": "mickwheelz",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T08:59:5... | 1,760,373,345.82129 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/21/building-a-cell-testing-station-for-18650s/ | Building A Cell Testing Station For 18650s | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"battery",
"capacity tester",
"lithium battery"
] | The 18650 is perhaps the world’s favorite lithium battery, even if electric car manufacturers are beginning to move towards larger cells such as the 21700. Used heavily in laptops and flashlights, it packs a useful amount of energy into a compact, easy to use package. There’s a small industry that has developed around harvesting these cells from old equipment and repurposing them, and [MakerMan] wanted to a piece of the action.
Thus, he created a cell testing station to help in the effort.
Make no mistake, this is not a grandiose smart cell tester with 40 slots that logs every last iota of data into a cloud spreadsheet for further analysis. Nope, this is good old fashioned batch processing. [MakerMan] designed a single PCB that replicates the same cell testing circuit four times. Since PCB houses generally have a minimum order quantity of ten units, [MakerMan] ended up with forty individual cell testers on ten PCBs. Once populated, the boards were installed on a wooden frame with an ATX power supply which supplies the juice to run the system.
Overall, it’s a quick, cheap way for capacity testing cells en masse that should serve [MakerMan] well. We look forward to seeing where these cells end up. We’ve seen his work before, too – with a self-built laser engraver a particular highlight. Video after the break. | 34 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280095",
"author": "Michael W. Perry, WA4MP & medical writer",
"timestamp": "2020-09-21T23:56:42",
"content": "Ah yes, the 18650, my favorite battery. I’ve been doing a lot of work in my attic and been frustrated with how briefly a AA-battery flashlight lasted. When I adopted a fla... | 1,760,373,345.769779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/21/circuit-board-origami-puts-you-face-to-face-with-low-poly-electronics/ | Circuit Board Origami Puts You Face-to-Face With Low-Poly Electronics | Kristina Panos | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"atmega32u4",
"blinkenlights",
"copper clad",
"leds",
"origami",
"papercraft",
"PCB milling",
"pepakura",
"RGB LED"
] | Paper craft has been around almost as long as paper itself. It’s fun to mimic paper craft and origami with low-poly 3D prints, and [Stephen Hawes] wondered whether it could be done with copper-clad PCBs.
Two years after the question arose, we have the answer in the form of a fantastical mask with light-up eyes
. Check it out in the video below.
[Stephen] started with a model (Update: [kongorilla]’s
2012 low poly mask model from back in 2012
was the starting point for this hack) from the papercraft program Pepakura Designer, then milled out dozens of boards. Only a few of them support circuitry, but it was still quite the time-consuming process. The ATmega32U4 on the forehead along with the fold-traversing circuitry serve to light up the WS2812B eyes. Power runs up the copper tube, which doubles as a handy mounting rod to connect to the 3D printed base.
To be fair, eighteen months out of the two years this project took was spent hand-sanding a chamfer on every edge of every panel so that they could be glued together. Soldering the edges together didn’t work as well as you might think, so [Stephen] used Superglue mixed with baking soda to give it body and make it dry faster. The result is a low-poly human face of shiny copper with TQFP-44 chip package a the all-seeing eye in the middle of its forehead like something from
Tron
come to life.
Thanks to [Sophi] and [BaldPower] for the tip! | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280053",
"author": "profumple",
"timestamp": "2020-09-21T20:27:00",
"content": "Not origami. Stunning artwork. The face of modern Atmega or Atmega Man or…Stained glass work should be easier now with that training.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,345.694628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/21/upcycled-dryer-motor-makes-budget-disk-sander/ | Upcycled Dryer Motor Makes Budget Disk Sander | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"disk sander",
"dryer",
"dryer motor",
"motor",
"sander",
"upcycle"
] | At the most basic level, most shop tools are just a motor with the right attachments. But the details are often far from simple. [DuctTapeMechanic] took a junker clothes dryer, yanked the electric motor from it,
and converted it into a disk sander
. The price was right at about $10. You can see it all after the break.
As you might imagine, having the motor is only half the battle. You also need a way to mount the thing securely and a way to affix the sanding disk. While this doesn’t pose the same challenges as, say, a drill press, it does take some thought. The motor in the donor dryer didn’t have threads on the shaft, so a bolt and some welding time took care of that. We suspect that’s tricky because you need the shaft and the bolt to be concentric and level.
Once you have a threaded shaft, the rest of the build is anti-climatic. A little carpentry and a little electrical. We would probably cover up the electrical connections a bit more. It seems like you’d want to know which way the motor spins so you could use a reverse thread, if necessary. From the video, we think the motor he has was spinning the right way, but we don’t know if that’s always true.
There’s something satisfying about building your own tools. If you work on smaller things, we’ve seen
a miniature sander that might be handy to have around
. If you want to go the other way, try finding an
old floor polisher
instead of a dryer. | 39 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280045",
"author": "scott.tx",
"timestamp": "2020-09-21T19:59:53",
"content": "if you think that’s good I’ve got a dryer motor with a wire brush on it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6280051",
"author": "Bob",
"timesta... | 1,760,373,345.636143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/21/linux-fu-simple-ssh-file-sharing/ | Linux Fu: Simple SSH File Sharing | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"linux",
"Linux Fu",
"ssh",
"SSHFS"
] | If you have more than one Linux computer, you probably use
ssh
all the time. It is a great tool, but I’ve always found one thing about it strange. Despite having file transfer capabilities in the form of
scp
and
sftp
, there is no way to move a file back or forth between the local and remote hosts without starting a new program on the local machine or logging in from the remote machine back to the local machine.
That last bit is a real problem since you often access a server from behind a firewall or a NAT router with an ephemeral IP address, so it can’t reconnect to you anyway. It would be nice to hit the escape character, select a local or remote file, and teleport it across the interface, all from inside a single
ssh
session.
I didn’t quite get to that goal, but I did get pretty close. I’ll show you a script that can automatically mount a remote directory on the local machine. You’ll need
sshfs
on the local machine, but no changes on the remote machine where you may not be able to install software. With a little more work, and if your client has an
ssh
server running, you can mount a local directory on the remote machine, too. You won’t need to worry about your IP address or port blocking. If you can log into the remote machine, you are good.
Combined, this got me me very close to my goal. I can be working in a shell on either side and have access to read or write files on the other side. I just have to set it up carefully.
Wait… Is that Cheating?
You might say this is cheating because you are really using two
ssh
connections — one for the file system mount and another to log in. That’s true. However, if you have
ssh
set up properly, you’ll only authenticate once, and it won’t be as much overhead as two separate connections.
In addition, the script hides the details so from a user’s point of view, you connect (almost) the same as usual and it just works.
About SSHFS
The
sshfs
program is a user-space file system (FUSE), which means that it’s a user-space layer over the underlying file system. In this case, the underlying file system is an
ssh
server that can do
sftp
. This lets you access a file on the remote machine as if it were on the real filesystem on the local machine. If you haven’t used it, it works quite well.
If you have a login set up for a machine
myserver
, you simply run
sshfs myserver:/home/admin ~/mounts/myserver
from the local machine.
Now the
/home/admin
directory on the remote machine will appear at
~/mounts/myserver
on the local machine.
There are some options you can use. For example, it is useful to allow the file system to reconnect a broken connection. Read the man page for more.
Because
sshfs
uses the remotely mounted version of the file, all changes made show up on the remote machine, but once you’ve shut
sshfs
down, you’ve got nothing on the local box. Let’s fix that.
Before The Script
Before I get into the script, there is a little setup on the client that you could customize if you like. I create a directory
~/remote
and then create a subdirectory for each of my remote computers. For example
~/remote/fileserver
and
~/remote/lab
.
The script is called
sshmount
and it takes all the same arguments as
ssh
. To make life easier, you should have your details in the
~/.ssh/config
file for the remote host so that you can use a simple name. For example,
lab
might be something like this:
Host lab
Hostname lab.wd5gnr-dyn.net
Port 444
User alw
ForwardX11 yes
ForwardX11Trusted yes
TCPKeepAlive yes
Compression yes
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p
Thiat isn’t strictly necessary, but then you get a nice
~/remote/lab
directory and not
~/remote/alw@lab.wd5gnr-dyn.net:444
which is annoying to use. There’s nothing magic about any of these parameters but the
ControlMaster
and
ControlPath
do make multiple connections more economical which is important in this case.
You’ll also want to set up logging in automatically using a certificate if you haven’t already. We did
a post on this for the Raspberry P
i, but it really applies to any
ssh
setup.
The Script
The script has a split personality. If you call it via a link to
sshunmount
it will unmount the directory associated with the named remote host. If you call it as anything else (usually
sshmount
), it will do three things:
It checks for a directory under
~/remote
that matches the remote host name (e.g.,
lab
). If it fails to find it, it prints an error message and continues to execute
ssh
.
If the directory exists, the script examines the list of mounted file systems to see if it is already mounted. If it is, the script just continues with
ssh
.
If the directory is not mounted, the script calls
sshfs
and then proceeds with
ssh
.
You can find the script on
GitHub
, but here’s the gist of it (less some comments);
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" == "" ]
then
echo Usage: sshmount host [ssh_options] - Mount remote home folder on ~/remote/host and log in
echo or: sshunmount host - Remove mount from ~/remote/host
exit 1
fi
# if called as sshunmount...
if [ $(basename "$0") == sshunmount ]
then
echo Unmounting... 1>&2
fusermount -u "$HOME/remote/$1"
exit $?
fi
# normal call...
if [ -d "$HOME/remote/$1" ] # does directory exist?
then
if mount | grep "$HOME/remote/$1 " # already mounted?
then
echo Already mounted 1>&2
else
sshfs -o reconnect $1: $HOME/remote/$1 # mount
fi
else
echo No remote directory ~/remote/$1 exists 1>&2
fi
ssh $@ # do log in
This gives us half of what I wanted. My local machine has a direct mapping of the remote file system while I’m logged into the system. But getting the local directory mapped to the remote machine is a bit harder.
Reversing the Process
If you want to experiment with having a local directory mounted on the server, you can do that too if you have an
ssh
server running on the local machine. Of course, if your local machine is visible to the host and accessible, that’s trivial. Just run
sshfs
on the remote machine and mount a directory from the local machine. But in many cases, you won’t have an accessible route from the remote machine through whatever firewalls and routers you are behind, especially on something like a laptop that doesn’t stay in one place.
There is still an answer though. It requires two things. First, you need to add an extra argument when you call
sshmount
(you could edit the file if you wanted to always do this):
sshmount MyServer -R 5555:localhost:22
Then after you are on the host, run
sshfs -p 5555 localhost:/home/me ~/local
The -R option creates a socket on the remote machine at 5555 (which, obviously, needs to be otherwise unused) and maps it back to us on port 22. Assuming there is an
ssh
server on port 22, this will allow the server to log back into our local machine over the same connection. No need to know our IP address or have an open port.
The
sshfs
command, which you could put in your startup files, maps your local
/home/me
directory to the remote server’s
~/local
directory. If you log in locally too, there are several
SSH_ environment
variables you could use to tell if you are starting up remotely, for example
$SSH_CLIENT
or
$SSH_TTY
.
Of course, you’ll need to change the hosts and directories and port numbers to suit your environment. But once set up, you can have folders on both machines visible to the other. No, I haven’t tried circularly mounting the same directories. That might create a black hole.
Be Careful Out There
You still should probably be careful going in both directions. Tools that scan the whole file system, for example, could easily get confused. I also wish I had a better answer to cleanly disconnect the server’s file share when you log out of the last session.
However, for now, the system works well and it is an easy way to share files from within an
ssh
session without much work. Another answer might be to just keep
directories synchronized
and use those directories for transfers. Want more stupid
ssh
tricks? We
got ’em
. | 28 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280007",
"author": "12AU76L6GC",
"timestamp": "2020-09-21T17:22:52",
"content": "SSH with scripting is one of most complex and powerful tools in linux. I used to use it with tunnelling to run screens from a remote UltraSPARC on my linux desktop. Very nice article on shares.",
... | 1,760,373,346.263956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/21/into-the-plasmaverse-hack-chat/ | Into The Plasmaverse Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"discharge",
"Hack Chat",
"high voltage",
"ion",
"ionization",
"plasma",
"tesla coil"
] | Join us on Wednesday, September 23 at noon Pacific for the
Into the Plasmaverse Hack Chat
with
Jay Bowles
!
Most kids catch on to the fact that matter can exist in three states — solid, liquid, and gas — pretty early in life, usually after playing in the snow a few times. The ice and snowflakes, the wet socks, and the fog of water vapor in breath condensing back into water droplets all provide a quick and lasting lesson in not only the states of matter but the transitions between them. So it usually comes as some surprise later when they learn of another and perhaps more interesting state: plasma.
For the young scientist, plasma is not quite so easy to come by as the other phases of matter, coming about as it does from things they’re usually not allowed to muck with. High voltage discharges, strong electromagnetic fields, or simply a lot of heat can strip away electrons from a gas and make the ionized soup that we call plasma. But once they catch the bug, few things can compare to the dancing, frenetic energy of a good plasma discharge.
Jay Bowles picked up the plasma habit quite a while back and built
his YouTube channel
around it.
Tesla coils
,
Van de Graaff generators
, coils and capacitors of all types — whatever it takes to make a spark, Jay has probably made and used it to make the fourth state of matter. He’ll join us on the Hack Chat to talk about all the fun things to do with plasma, high-voltage discharge, and whatever else sparks his interest.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 23 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, 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. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280089",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2020-09-21T23:22:20",
"content": ">>>”For the young scientist, plasma is not quite so easy to come by as the other phases of matter, coming about as it does from things they’re usually not allowed to muck with. High voltage discharges, stro... | 1,760,373,346.004613 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/hard-disk-drives-have-made-precision-engineering-commonplace/ | Hard Disk Drives Have Made Precision Engineering Commonplace | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"backblaze",
"hard drives",
"hdd",
"reliability",
"reliability engineering",
"storage"
] | Modern-day hard disk drives (HDDs) hold the interesting juxtaposition of being simultaneously the pinnacle of mass-produced, high-precision mechanical engineering, as well as the most scorned storage technology. Despite being called derogatory names such as ‘spinning rust’, most of these drives manage a lifetime of spinning ultra-smooth magnetic storage platters only nanometers removed from the recording and reading heads whose read arms are twitching around using actuators that manage to position the head precisely above the correct microscopic magnetic trace within milliseconds.
Despite decade after decade of more and more of these magnetic traces being crammed on a single square millimeter of these platters, and the simple read and write heads being replaced every few years by more and more complicated ones, hard drive reliability has gone up. The
second quarter report
from storage company Backblaze on their HDDs shows that the annual failure rate has gone significantly down compared to last year.
The question is whether this means that HDDs stand to become only more reliable over time, and how upcoming technologies like MAMR and HAMR may affect these metrics over the coming decades.
From Mega to Tera
The internal mechanism and its fifty 610 mm platters of the IBM 350 hard drive (DSU).
The first HDDs were sold in the 1950s, with IBM’s
IBM 350
storing a total of 3.75 MB on fifty 24″ (610 mm) discs, inside a cabinet measuring 152x172x74 cm. Fast-forward to today, and a top-of-the-line HDD in 3.5″ form factor (~14.7×10.2×2.6 cm) can store
up to around 18 TB
with conventional (non-shingled) recording.
Whereas the IBM 350 spun its platters at 1,200 RPM, HDDs for the past decades have focused on reducing the size of the platters, increasing the spindle speed (5,400 – 15,000 RPM). Other improvements have focused on moving the read and write heads closer to the platter surface.
The IBM 1301 DSU (Disk Storage Unit) from 1961 was a major innovation in that it used a separate arm with read and write heads for each platter. It also innovated by using aerodynamic forces to let the arms fly over the platter surface on a cushion of air, enabling a far smaller distance between heads and platter surface.
After 46 years of development IBM sold its HDD business to Hitachi in 2003. By that time, storage capacity had increased by 48,000 times in a much smaller volume. Like 29,161 times smaller. Power usage had dropped from over 2.3 kW to around 10 W (for desktop models), while price per megabyte had dropped from $68,000 USD to $0.002. At the same time the number of platters shrunk from dozens to only a couple at most.
Storing More in Less Space
Inside of 1″ Seagate MicroDrive.
Miniaturization has always been the name of the game, whether it was about mechanical constructs, electronics or computer technology. The hulking, vacuum tube or relay-powered computer monsters of the 1940s and 1950s morphed into less hulking transistor-powered computer systems before turning into today’s sleek, ASIC-powered marvels. At the same time, HDD storage technology underwent a similar change.
The control electronics for HDDs experienced all of the benefits of increased use of VLSI circuitry, along with increasingly more precise and low-power servo technology. As improvements from materials science enabled lighter, smoother (glass or aluminium) platters with improved magnetic coatings, areal density kept shooting up. With the properties of all the individual components (ASIC packaging, solder alloys, actuators, aerodynamics of HDD arms, etc.) better understood, major revolutions turned into incremental improvements.
Six opened HDDs, from 8″ down to 1″.
Photograph by Paul R. Potts
[CC-BY-SA 3.0]
Although extreme miniaturization with HDDs has been attempted at least twice in the form of the
HP Kittyhawk
microdrive (1.3″) in 1992 and the
1″ Microdrive
in 1999, eventually the market would settle on the 3.5″ and 2.5″ form factors. The Microdrive form factor was marketed as an alternative to NAND Flash-based CompactFlash cards, featuring higher capacity and essentially unlimited writes, making them useful for embedded systems.
As happened in other fields, the physical limits on write speeds and random access times would eventually mean that HDDs are most useful where large amounts of storage for little money and high durability are essential. This allowed the HDD market to optimize for desktop and server systems, as well as surveillance and backup (competing with tape).
Understanding HDD Failures
Although the mechanical parts of an HDD are often considered the weakest spot, there are a number of possible causes, including:
Human error.
Hardware failure (mechanical, electronics).
Firmware corruption.
Environmental (heat, moisture).
Power.
HDDs are given an impact rating while powered down or when in operation (platters spinning and heads not parked). If these ratings are exceeded, damage to the actuators that move the arms, or a crash of the heads onto the platter surface can occur. If these tolerances are not exceeded, then normal wear is most likely to be the primary cause of failure, which is specified by the manufacturer’s
MTBF
(Mean Time Between Failures) number.
This MTBF number is derived by extrapolating from the observed wear after a certain time period, as is industry standard. With the MTBF for HDDs generally given as between 100,000 and 1 million hours, to test this entire period would require the drive to be active between 10 to 100 years. This number thus assumes the drive operating under the recommended operating conditions, as happens at a storage company like Backblaze.
Obviously, exposing a HDD to extreme shock (e.g. dropping it on a concrete floor) or extreme power events (power surge, ESD, etc.) will limit their lifespan. Less obvious are manufacturing flaws, which can occur with any product, and is the reason why there is an ‘acceptable failure rate’ for most products.
It’s Not You, It Was the Manufacturing Line
Despite the great MTBF numbers for HDDs and the obvious efforts by Backblaze to keep each of their nearly 130,000 drives happily spinning along until being retired to HDD Heaven (usually in the form of a mechanical shredder),
they reported an annualized failure rate
(AFR) of 1.07% for the first quarter of 2020. Happily, this is the lowest failure rate for them since they began to publish these reports in 2013. The Q1 2019 AFR was 1.56%, for example.
As we have covered previously, during the manufacturing and handling of integrated circuits (ICs),
flaws can be introduced
that only become apparent later during the product’s lifespan. Over time, issues like
electromigration, thermal stress and mechanical stress
can cause failures in a circuit, from bond wires inside the IC packaging snapping off, electromigration destroying solder joints as well as circuits inside IC packaging (especially after ESD events).
The mechanical elements of an HDD depend on precise manufacturing tolerances, as well as proper lubrication. In the past, stuck heads (‘
stiction
‘) could be an issue, whereby the properties of the lubricant changed over time to the point where the arms could no longer move out of their parked position. Improved lubrication types have more or less solved this issue by now.
Yet, every step in a manufacturing process has a certain chance to introduce flaws, which ultimately add up to something that could spoil the nice, shiny MTBF number, instead making the product part of the wrong side of the ‘bathtub curve’ for failure rates. This curve is characterized by an early spike in product failures, due to serious manufacturing defects, with defects decreasing after that until the end of the MTBF lifespan approaches.
Looking Ahead
It’s HAMR time.
HDDs as we know them today are indicative of a mature manufacturing process, with many of the old issues that plagued them over the past half decade fixed or mitigated. Relatively major changes, such as
the shift to helium-filled
drives, have not had a noticeable performance on failure rates so far. Other changes, such as the shift from
Perpendicular recording
(PMR, or CMR) to Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (
HAMR
) should not have a noticeable effect on HDD longevity, barring any issues with the new technology itself.
Basically, HDD technology’s future appears to be boring in all the right ways for anyone who likes to have a lot of storage capacity for little money that should last for at least a solid decade. The basic principle behind HDDs, namely that of storing magnetic orientations on a platter, happens to one that could essentially be taken down to singular molecules. With additions like HAMR, the long-term stability of these magnetic orientations should be improved significantly as well.
This is a massive benefit over NAND Flash, which instead uses small capacitors to store charges, and uses a write method that physically damages these capacitors. The physical limits here are much more severe, which has led to ever more complicated constructs, such as quad-level (QLC) Flash, which has to differentiate between 16 possible voltage states in each cell. This complexity has led to QLC-based storage drives
being barely faster
than a 5,400 RPM HDD in many scenarios, especially when it comes to latency.
Spinning Down
The first HDD which I used in a system of my own was probably a 20 or 30 MB Seagate one in the IBM PS/2 (386SX) which my father gave to me after his work had switched over to new PCs and probably wanted to free up some space in their storage area. Back in the MS DOS days this was sufficient for DOS, a stack of games, WordPerfect 5.1 and much more. By the end of the 90s, this was of course a laughable amount, and we were then talking about gigabytes, not megabytes when it came to HDDs.
Despite having gone through many PCs and laptops since then, I have ironically only had an SSD outright give up and die on me. This, along with the data from the industry — such as these Backblaze reports — make me feel pretty confident that the last HDD won’t spin down yet for a while. Maybe when something like
3D XPoint
memory becomes affordable and large enough might this change.
Until then, keep spinning. | 50 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280515",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T14:43:17",
"content": "Thanks for the history lesson! HDD tech has come a long ways. No doubt about that! Every time I crack open a no longer functioning HDD, I am amazed that it actually works as well as it does.Until the pri... | 1,760,373,346.371039 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/teleconferencing-like-its-1988-connecting-vintage-hardware-to-zoom/ | Teleconferencing Like It’s 1988: Connecting Vintage Hardware To Zoom | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"am modulation",
"antique",
"classic",
"mitsubishi",
"phone",
"retro",
"signal processing",
"video conferencing",
"visitel",
"zoom"
] | Hang up your car phone and toss that fax machine in the garbage. Even back in the late 80s it was possible to do away with these primitive technologies in favor of video conferencing, even though this technology didn’t catch on en masse until recently. In fact, Mitsubishi released a piece of video conferencing equipment called the VisiTel that can be put to use today, provided you
can do a bit of work to get it to play along nicely with modern technology
.
[Alex] was lucky enough to have one of these on hand, as soon as it was powered up he was able to get to work deciphering the messaging protocol of the device. To do this he showed the camera certain pictures with known properties and measured the output waveforms coming from the device, which were AM modulated over an RJ9 connection which he had changed to a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
It communicates in a series of pictures instead of sending an actual video signal, so [Alex] had a lot of work to do to properly encode and decode the stream. He goes into incredible detail on his project page about this process and is worth a read for anyone interested in signal processing. Ultimately, [Alex] was able to patch this classic piece of technology into a Zoom call and the picture quality is excellent when viewed through the lens of $399 80s technology.
We have been seeing a lot of other hacks around video conferencing in the past six months as well, such as
physical mute buttons
and a
mirror that improves eye contact
through the webcam. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280484",
"author": "Sergio Costas",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T11:58:58",
"content": "I love the detail of the on/off switch which, also, covers the camera.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6280509",
"author": "Mike Szcz... | 1,760,373,346.051129 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/displaying-incoming-server-attacks/ | Displaying Incoming Server Attacks By Giving Server Logs A Scoreboard | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"display",
"internet",
"port",
"raspberry pi",
"security",
"server",
"seven segment",
"ssh",
"Zero W"
] | In the server world, it’s a foregone conclusion that ports shouldn’t be exposed to the greater Internet if they don’t need to be. There are malicious bots everywhere that will try and randomly access anything connected to a network, and it’s best just to shut them off completely. If you have to have a port open, like 22 for SSH, it’ll need to be secured properly and monitored so that the administrator can keep track of it. Usually this is done in a system log and put to the side, but [Nick] wanted
a more up-front reminder of just how many attempts were being made to log into his systems
.
This build actively monitors attempts to log into his server on port 22 and notifies him via a numerical display and series of LEDs. It’s based on a Raspberry Pi Zero W housed in a 3D-printed case, and works by interfacing with a program called
fail2ban
running on the server.
fail2ban
‘s primary job is to block IP addresses that fail a certain number of login attempts on a server, but being FOSS it can be modified for situations like this. With some Python code running on the Pi, it is able to gather data fed to it from
fail2ban
and display it.
[Nick] was able to see immediate results too. Within 24 hours he saw 1633 login attempts on a server with normal login enabled, which was promptly shown on the display. A video of the counter in action is linked below. You don’t always need a secondary display if you need real-time information on your server, though.
This Pi server has its own display built right in to its case
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280485",
"author": "Mariusz",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T12:06:46",
"content": "Back in the late 1990s I had dot matrix printer connected to syslog, Every login attempt was permanently stored on paper. It was all good until the script kiddies started scanning ports like crazy.. I st... | 1,760,373,345.964666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/this-diy-drill-press-is-very-well-executed/ | This DIY Drill Press Is Very Well Executed | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"aluminum",
"cnc",
"diy",
"drill",
"drill press",
"gears",
"motor",
"tools",
"z-axis"
] | Plenty of projects we see here could easily be purchased in some form or other. Robot arms, home automation, drones, and even some software can all be had with a quick internet search, to be sure. But there’s no fun in simply buying something when it can be built instead. The same goes for tools as well,
and this homemade drill press
from [ericinventor] shows that it’s not only possible to build your own tools rather than buy them, but often it’s cheaper as well.
This mini drill press has every feature we could think of needing in a tool like this. It uses off-the-shelf components including the motor and linear bearing carriage (which was actually salvaged from the Z-axis of a CNC machine). The chassis was built from stock aluminum and bolted together, making sure to keep everything square so that the drill press is as precise as possible. The movement is controlled from a set of 3D printed gears which are turned by hand.
The drill press is capable of drilling holes in most materials, including metal, and although small it would be great for precision work. [ericinventor] notes that it’s not necessary to use a separate motor, and that it’s possible to use this build with a Dremel tool if one is already available to you. Either way, it’s a handy tool to have around the shop, and
with only a few modifications it might be usable as a mill as well
. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280426",
"author": "Somun",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T06:35:34",
"content": "This would be great for drilling holes in home made PCBs. That DC motor with en er11 shank has just plain radial bearings though. Would not try to push a 3/8 drill through a metal with that.",
"parent_i... | 1,760,373,346.199122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/watch-a-fast-sand-plotter-plow-patterns-at-speed/ | Watch A Fast Sand Plotter Plow Patterns At Speed | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cat",
"draw bot",
"drawing robot",
"plotter",
"sand patterns",
"sand table",
"speed",
"zen"
] | [Mark]’s sand table wisely has a glass top.
Most of us have probably seen a video of a sand drawing table at work, in which a steel ball — magnetically-coupled to a gantry under a layer of sand — lazily draws geometric patterns with utter precision and zen-like calmness. That’s all well and good, but [Mark Rehorst] thinks
it can also be interesting to crank up the speed and watch the ball plow through sand just as physics intended
. There’s a deeper reason [Mark] is working at this, however. Faster drawing leads to less crisp results, but by how much, exactly? To answer this, [Mark] simply ran his table (which is named
The Spice Must Flow
) at both fast and slow speeds and documented the results.
These two images show the difference between running the table at 100 mm/s versus 500 mm/s. The slower speed is noticeably crisper, but on the other hand the faster speed completed the pattern in about a fifth of the time. [Mark] says that as the ball aggressively accelerates to reach target speeds, more sand is thrown around over existing lines, which leads to a loss of detail.
Drawn at 100 mm/s (about 190 minutes)
Drawn at 500 mm/s (38 minutes)
Crisper detail, or a faster draw? Which is “better” depends on many things, but it’s pretty clear that [Mark]’s cat finds the fast version more exciting. You can see [Mark]’s table at high speed and the cat’s reaction in the video, embedded below.
Sand plotters are more or less alike in function, but under the table there are all kinds of different approaches.
SandBot uses a SCARA-based arm
, and
you can see the entire mechanism under the table turn in this polar arrangement
. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280386",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T01:17:49",
"content": "A high speed, high res video is here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfIEjEmIxBY&list=PLXhpuy8MGC9yrbIOfYheSZ1PJg6MrkSS_The high speed and acceleration are made possible by using iHSV servomotors to driv... | 1,760,373,346.45011 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/spacex-sending-tom-cruise-to-the-space-station-in-2021/ | SpaceX Sending Tom Cruise To The Space Station In 2021 | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"entertainment",
"international space station",
"iss",
"nasa",
"science fiction",
"SpaceX"
] | Several months after NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed the project was in the works, sources are now reporting that Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman will
officially be making the trip to the International Space Station in October of 2021
to film scenes for an as of yet untitled movie. Cruise and Liman previously worked together on the science fiction spectacle
Edge of Tomorrow
in 2014, which may give us a hint at what the duo are planning for their trip to the final frontier.
Industry insiders claim that the two film makers and potentially a female co-star will fly aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule under the command of Michael López-Alegría, a veteran astronaut who currently holds the American record for number and duration of extra-vehicular activities (EVAs). The mission is being organized by Axiom Space, which previously announced they would perform a series of privately funded flights to the ISS as a
precursor to constructing their own commercial expansion to the orbiting laboratory
.
This never happened.
Of course, with more than a year before liftoff, anything could happen. SpaceX has been linked, officially or otherwise, to several private trips to space that literally and figuratively never got off the ground.
Mars-One was touting concept art that showed a fleet of modified SpaceX Dragons on the Red Planet as far back as 2012, and Elon Musk himself once announced that the Falcon Heavy would send private passengers on a trip around the Moon by the end of 2018. But to date,
a pair of NASA astronauts have been the only humans to actually fly on SpaceX hardware.
Undoubtedly, some will see this flight of fancy as a waste of valuable resources. After all, there’s no shortage of scientists and researchers who would be more deserving of trip to a space than Jerry Maguire. But according to Bridenstine, the hope is that a big budget Hollywood film featuring scenes shot on the ISS could do for NASA what
Top Gun
once did for the Navy:
There was a day when I was in elementary school and I saw Top Gun. From that day, I knew I was going to be a Navy pilot. If we can get Tom Cruise to inspire an elementary kid to join the Navy and be a pilot, why can’t we get Tom Cruise to inspire the next Elon Musk? That’s what we need.
While we might not all agree on
who the next generation of engineers should look to for inspiration
, the impact that
Top Gun
had on Navy recruitment in the 80s and 90s is well established. If sending Tom Cruise to space for a few weeks might help inspire more kids to look into a STEM education, it’s probably worth a shot. Though it seems like Tom Hanks and his fellow
Apollo 13
crew mates did a respectable enough job celebrating the incredible engineering behind NASA’s greatest triumph without actually going into orbit themselves. | 53 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280346",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T21:33:05",
"content": "Does he have to pay extra for transporting his Thetans into orbit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6280349",
"author": "Legend",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,373,346.687577 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/second-hand-television-shines-takes-down-entire-villages-internet/ | Second-Hand Television SHINEs, Takes Down Entire Village’s Internet | Dan Maloney | [
"News"
] | [
"adsl",
"asymmetric digital subscriber line",
"British Telecom",
"broadband",
"isp",
"RFI",
"SHINE",
"single isolated impulse noise",
"spectrum analyzer"
] | We occasionally get stories on the tips line that just make us want to know more. This is especially true with tech stories covered by the mass media, which usually leave out the juicy tidbits that would just clutter up the story for the majority of non-technical readers. That leaves us to dig a little deeper for the satisfying details.
The latest one of these gems to hit the tips line is
the tale of a regular broadband outage in a Welsh village
. As in, really regular — at 7:00 AM every day, the internet customers of Aberhosan suffered a loss of their internet service. Customers of
Openreach
, the connectivity arm of the British telco BT, complained about the interruptions as customers do, and technicians responded to investigate the issue. Nobody was able to find the root cause, and despite replacing nearly all the cables in the system, the daily outages persisted for 18 months.
In the end, Openreach brought in a crack team from their Chief Engineer’s office to investigate. Working against COVID-19 restrictions, the team set up a spectrum analyzer in the early morning hours, to capture any evidence of whatever was causing the problem. At the appointed hour they saw a smear of radio frequency interference appear, a high-intensity pulse of noise at just the right frequency to interfere with the village’s asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) broadband service.
A little sleuthing led to the home of a villager and a second-hand TV, which was switched on every day at 7:00 AM. The TV was found to be emitting a strong RF impulse when it was powered up, strong enough to knock out the ADSL service to the entire village. Openreach categorized this as SHINE, or single high-level impulse noise. We’d never heard of this, but apparently it’s common enough that
BT warns customers about it
and provides helpful instructions for locating sources with an AM radio.
We’ll say one thing for the good people of Aberhosan: they must be patient in the extreme to put up with daily internet outages for 18 months. And it’s funny how there was no apparent notice paid by the offending television’s owner that his or her steady habit caused the outage. Perhaps they don’t have a broadband connection, and so wouldn’t have noticed the borking.
In any case, the owner was reportedly “mortified” by the news and hasn’t turned the TV on since learning of the issue. This generally seems to be the reaction when someone gets caught inadvertently messing up the spectrum — remember
the Great Ohio Key Fob Mystery
?
Thanks to [Kieran Donnelly] for spotting this for us. | 53 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280341",
"author": "david",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T21:02:41",
"content": "I’m an ISP engineer and we’ve replaced multiple non-customer CRT TV sets with modern flatscreens for free, as they messed with our actual customers DSL connection . Also lawnmower robots come to mind.The sh... | 1,760,373,346.596331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/apollo-dsky-replica-looks-the-part/ | Apollo DSKY Replica Looks The Part | Dan Maloney | [
"Space"
] | [
"agc",
"apollo",
"Apollo Guidance Computer",
"DSKY",
"VirtualAGC"
] | It’s hard to say what exactly it is about the Apollo DSKY that captures so many hackers’ imaginations. Whatever it is, the “Display and Keyboard” unit from the Apollo Guidance Computer has inspired dozens of teardowns, simulations, and reproductions over the years, to varying degrees of success. But
this mechanically faithful DSKY replica
really knocks it out of the park in terms of attention to detail.
The product of [M. daSilva], this DSKY replica takes a somewhat different path than many of the others we’ve seen. By working from as many original documents as possible, he was able to reproduce the physical size and shape of the DSKY very accurately — no mean feat when working from copies of copies of the original paper prints. Still, the details that are captured, like the gussets and reinforcements that were added to strengthen the original die-cast parts, really make this DSKY look the part. It’s functional, too, thanks to a Raspberry Pi running VirtualAGC, with a Nextion 4.3″ LCD display standing in for the original electroluminescent display. We were surprised to learn the DSKY had a port for nitrogen purging the case; check out the video tour below for that and other tidbits.
Of course, just because [M. daSilva] chose to concentrate on dimensional accuracy for this go-around doesn’t preclude more faithful electronics in the future. Perhaps he can team up with
[Ben Krasnow]
or
[Fran Blanche]
and really make this a showpiece. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280772",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T06:19:26",
"content": "Tires run better longer and rims too filled with nitrogen.I always hated those leaning to the right number displays. They thought that it looked modern. Their crude representation of 7 and 9 influenced ... | 1,760,373,346.506508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/building-a-usb-c-charger-for-canon-nb-4l-batteries/ | Building A USB-C Charger For Canon NB-4L Batteries | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"battery charger",
"canon",
"Lithium-ion battery",
"TP4056",
"USB C"
] | One of the most appealing aspects of USB-C is that it promises to be a unified power delivery system. You’ll no longer need to have a separate power cords for for your phone, camera, and laptop; physically they’ll all use USB-C connectors, and the circuitry in the charger will know how much juice to send down the line for each gadget. But in reality, we’ve all got at least a few pieces of older equipment that we’re not about to toss in the trash just because it doesn’t support the latest USB spec.
Note the relocated status LEDs.
Case in point, the old Canon camera that [Purkkaviritys] modified to take infrared pictures. Instead of abandoning it, he decided to
make a custom USB-C charger for its NB-4L batteries
. Since they’re just single cell 3.7 V lithium-ions, all he had to do was wire them up to the ubiquitous TP4056 charger module and design a 3D printed case to hold everything together.
He did go the extra mile and replace the SMD charging indicator LEDs on the PCB with 5 mm LEDs embedded into the 3D printed enclosure, though you could certainly skip this step if you were in a hurry. We imagine if you print the enclosure in a light enough color, you should be able to see the original LEDs glowing through the plastic.
This project is yet another example of
how incredibly useful the TP4056 module really is
. If there’s even a chance you might
want to build a rechargeable gadget in the near future
, you should have a few of these cheap boards ready to go in the parts bin. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280748",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T03:33:37",
"content": "Is there a dirt cheap USB charger module that will do three NiMH cells in series?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6280786",
"author"... | 1,760,373,346.748259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/diy-ergonomic-game-pad-lends-a-hand/ | DIY Ergonomic Game Pad Lends A Hand | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino pro micro",
"ergonomic",
"game pad",
"Joystick",
"macro pad",
"microswitch"
] | Does it seem like everyone you game against can do everything faster than you? Chances are good that they have some kind of dedicated game pad or macro pad with a bunch of custom shortcuts. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, but why buy one when you can build your own?
[lordofthedum] did the smart thing when they built their own version of the Azeron game pad
, which is an outrageously expensive but ergonomic and cool-looking macro pad that reminds us of
the DataHand ergonomic keyboard
.
Each finger hovers over a C-shaped group of three switches — one actuates by moving the finger forward, another by moving backward, and the third by pushing down like a regular button. The thumb gets a 4-way joystick. All of these inputs are wired up to an Arduino Pro Micro, which has sort of become the standard for DIY macro pads and keyboards. We think this looks fantastic, and really raises the bar for DIY macro pads.
Need a few more keys, but still want a thumb joystick?
Check out the smooth and sweet Sherbet game pad
. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280713",
"author": "Andrea Stewart",
"timestamp": "2020-09-24T01:07:22",
"content": "Seriously? It’s paid and not open source? That’s so disappointing…I was thinking about doing my own Azeron-inspired thing based on a similar open-source datahand that’s up on GitHub, but the form f... | 1,760,373,346.86203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/reforming-3d-prints-with-salt-and-heat/ | Reforming 3D Prints With Salt And Heat | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"annealing",
"PETG",
"salt"
] | The biggest problem with fused deposition 3D prints is that while the layers should stick together, they aren’t the same as a solid piece of plastic you would get from, say, injection molding. You can anneal plastic using moderate heat, but it is likely to cause the part to deform or change size. [Free Spirit 1] has a
solution for this
. Using a powdered salt, the part is packed on the inside and out and put in an oven. The results in the video below look really impressive.
In addition to making the part look solid and — we assume — adding strength, the resulting prints are also water- and gas-tight which was the purpose of the effort. That alone would make the technique worthwhile.
The only thing we noticed is that the part has to have access to hold the salt. Anything not supported would be subject to deformation. However, the ground-up salt is so fine that it should be relatively easy to fill in most parts and, of course, print with 100% infill to avoid hollow internal areas.
[Free spirit 1] used a coffee grinder to get the salt powder, but apparently you can buy “flour salt.” We wondered if other powders might work well, too. Apparently, sand didn’t work out, perhaps because the salt dissolves out in water, so whatever you use, it should probably dissolve in something that won’t attack your plastic.
Annealing
isn’t a new idea, and we’d love to see some objective tests on this new method. | 83 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280643",
"author": "scott.tx",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T20:32:19",
"content": "cnc kitchen just did a video where he packed them in plaster and had good results",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6280646",
"author": "Twe... | 1,760,373,346.978101 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/investing-in-menopause/ | In-vest-ing In Menopause | Brian McEvoy | [
"Medical Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"cooling",
"hot flashes",
"hydration",
"Menesto",
"menopause",
"peltier"
] | Most of us reach for an over-the-counter medicine if we have occasional pain, but menopause doesn’t act like that. Hot flashes don’t build like a headache, dizzy spells don’t wait for a good time, and panic attacks don’t announce themselves.
Predicting and addressing sudden hormone shifts
is the intent behind Menesto, a vest with sensors, cooling apparatus, and a companion app.
A thermometer and humidity detector monitor the skin for spikes in temperature and moisture to recognize when the wearer is having a hot flash. When an event is registered, a fan blows over a Peltier panel’s cool side and hopefully provides enough chilled air inside the vest. A Peltier panel is a thermoelectric heat engine that moves energy away from one ceramic plate to another, so one half gets cool while the other heats up. Power comes from rechargeable 18650 batteries and all the hardware talks to an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU running Arduino.
The next coolest thing is a built-in panic button (panic attacks and anxiety are less common but experienced by some during menopause) that talks to a companion app to send emails. Anyone on the recipient list receives a message that the wearer is in distress, along with their phone’s location. All the hardware is connected and talking, so a wearable test rig is on the horizon to work out the bugs like circulation and heat shedding. There are other nifty features, like a
hydration reminder
and
manual cooling mode
built in.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280621",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T19:28:02",
"content": "Honest question. Is there a study to show that these symptoms that people feel are measurable with these sensors? And if so will the proposed solution provide help?It’s a neat idea but I’m thinking about how... | 1,760,373,346.814244 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/community-testing-suggests-bias-in-twitters-cropping-algorithm/ | Community Testing Suggests Bias In Twitter’s Cropping Algorithm | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Machine Learning",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"algorithm",
"machine learning",
"twitter"
] | With social media and online services are now huge parts of daily life to the point that our entire world is being shaped by algorithms. Arcane in their workings, they are responsible for the content we see and the adverts we’re shown. Just as importantly, they decide what is hidden from view as well.
Important: Much of this post discusses the performance of a live website algorithm. Some of the links in this post may not perform as reported if viewed at a later date.
The initial Zoom problem that brought Twitter’s issues to light.
Recently, [Colin Madland] posted some screenshots of a Zoom meeting to Twitter, pointing out how Zoom’s background detection algorithm had improperly erased the head of a colleague with darker skin. In doing so, [Colin] noticed a strange effect — although the screenshot he submitted shows both of their faces, Twitter would always crop the image to show just his light-skinned face, no matter the image orientation. The Twitter community raced to explore the problem, and the fallout was swift.
Intentions != Results
An example pair of source images posted to Twitter, featuring two faces in alternate orientations.
Twitter users began to iterate on the problem, testing over and over again with different images. Stock photo models were used, as well as newsreaders, and images of Lenny and Carl from the Simpsons, In the majority of cases, Twitter’s algorithm cropped images to focus on the lighter-skinned face in a photo. In perhaps the most ridiculous example,
the algorithm cropped to a black comedian
pretending
to be white
over a normal image of the same comedian.
The result – Twitter’s algorithm crops on the white face, regardless of orientation.
Many experiments were undertaken, controlling for factors such as differing backgrounds, clothing, or image sharpness. Regardless, the effect persisted,
leading Twitter to speak officially on the issue.
A spokesperson for the company stated “Our team did test for bias before shipping the model and did not find evidence of racial or gender bias in our testing. But it’s clear from these examples that we’ve got more analysis to do. We’ll continue to share what we learn, what actions we take, and will open source our analysis so others can review and replicate.”
There’s little evidence to suggest that such a bias was purposely coded into the cropping algorithm; certainly, Twitter doesn’t publically mention any such intent
in their blog post on the technology back in 2018.
Regardless of this fact, the problem does exist, with negative consequences for those impacted. While a simple image crop may not sound like much, it has the effect of reducing the visibility of affected people and excluding them from online spaces. The problem has been highlighted before, too. In this set of images of a group of AI commentators from January of 2019,
the Twitter image crop focused on men’s faces, and women’s chests.
The dual standard is particularly damaging in professional contexts, where women and people of color may find themselves seemingly objectified, or cut out entirely, thanks to the machinations of a mysterious algorithm.
The problem remained consistent in many community tests, involving
newsreaders
,
cartoons
, and
even golden and black labradors.
Former employees, like [Ferenc Huszár], have also spoken on the issue —
particularly about the testing process the product went through prior to launch.
It suggests that testing was done to explore this issue, with regards to bias on race and gender. Similarly, [Zehan Wang], currently an engineering lead for Twitter, has stated that these issues
were investigated as far back as 2017 without any major bias found.
It’s a difficult problem to parse, as the algorithm is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. Twitter users are obviously unable to observe the source code that governs the algorithm’s behaviour, and thus testing on the live site is the only viable way for anyone outside of the company to research the issue. Much of this has been done ad-hoc, with selection bias likely playing a role. Those looking for a problem will be sure to find one, and more likely to ignore evidence that counters this assumption.
Efforts are being made to investigate the issue more scientifically,
using many studio-shot sample images to attempt to find a bias.
However, even these efforts have come under criticism – namely, that using an source image set designed for machine learning and shot in perfect studio lighting against a white background
is not realistically representative of real images that users post to Twitter.
Some users attempted to put the cause down to issues of contrast, saturation, or similar reasons. Whether or not this is a potential cause is inconclusive. Regardless, if your algorithm will only recognise people of color if they’re digitally retouched, you have a problem.
Twitter’s algorithm isn’t the first technology to be accused of racial bias; from
soap dispensers
to
healthcare
, these problems have been seen before. Fundamentally though, if Twitter is to solve the problem to anyone’s satisfaction, more work is needed. A much wider battery of tests, featuring a broad sampling of real-world images, needs to be undertaken, and the methodology and results shared with the public. Anything less than this, and it’s unlikely that Twitter will be able to convince the wider userbase that its software isn’t failing minorities. Given that there are gains to be made in understanding machine learning systems, we expect research will continue at a rapid pace to solve the issue. | 77 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280561",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T17:11:50",
"content": "I still find it a little creepy that android phones do facial reconstruction when you try to crop an image and there’s no way in the settings to turn off the functionality.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,373,347.308484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/how-to-create-hermetically-sealed-electrical-connections/ | How To Create Hermetically Sealed Electrical Connections | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"hermetic",
"hermetic seal",
"pressure tank",
"pressure vessel",
"seal",
"vacuum tank"
] | [Eric Strebel] is no stranger to pressure and vaccum tanks, regularly using them for all manner of resin casting jobs for his product design business. However, sometimes it becomes necessary to run equipment within a pressure tank, such as for rotomoulding or other similar jobs. In order to get power into a tank under pressure, [Eric]
built a special plug with a hermetic seal to do the job
. (Video, embedded below.)
The build starts with a large metal plug which screws into the pressure vessel, into which a square recess is machined. For the electrical passthrough, [Eric] selected GX-16 aviation connectors, in this case packing six conductors. The connectors are hooked up back-to-back through the hole in the metal tank plug, using bare copper wire. This is to avoid insulation on wires acting as a channel for gases to pass through. With the connectors wired up and an acrylic disc in place to stop overflow, the metal plug is filled with resin to create the hermetic seal.
Results are good, with the connectors functioning electrically and the resin acting as a perfect seal. There’s a small risk of short circuit with the exposed copper conductors, but [Eric] is exploring some easy solutions to avoid issues. We’ve seen his work before, too –
like this great discussion on cardboard as a design tool
. Video after the break. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280539",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2020-09-23T15:49:29",
"content": "LEMO connectors are pressure / vacuum-tight. Or at least I recall reading so. (I can’t find a reference now)I have had one fitted to the oil-filled spindle of my milling machine for about 10 years with ... | 1,760,373,347.03456 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/linkage-inferring-software-handwaves-away-the-hard-stuff/ | Linkage Inferring Software Handwaves Away The Hard Stuff | Sonya Vasquez | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"linkage",
"linkage design",
"mechanism",
"Mechanisms"
] | Jokes aside, manually designing linkages that move along specific paths is no easy task. Whether we’re doodling paper sketches or constraining lines in a CAD program, we still need to do the work of actually “imagining” the linkage design. If only there were some sort of tool that would do all that hard imagining work for us! Thankfully, we’re in luck! That’s exactly what researchers [Gen Nishida], [Adrien Bousseau2], and [Daniel G. Aliaga1] at Purdue have done. They’ve designed a software tool that lets us position important bodies in space in particular “key” frames, and then the software simply fills in the linkage for you!
To start the design process, the user inputs a few candidate locations that their solid bodies need to reach in the final linkage path. From here, these locations get fed to a particle filter. This particle filter seeds thousands of semi-random linkage configurations at small timesteps, selects some of the best-matching ones that most closely approximate the required body locations, removes the lesser-scoring results, re-creates a new set of possible joint configurations based on the best matching ones, and repeats until the tool converges on a linkage that respects our input key frames.
Like a brute force search, this solution takes lots and lots of samples to find a solution, but unlike a brute force search, trials iteratively improve, enabling the software to converge closer and closer to a final solution. Under the hood, the software needs to actually simulate these candidate linkage in order to grade them. It’s in this step that the team wrote in additional checks to remove impossible linkages like self-intersecting joints from this linkage “gene pool” before reseeding them. The result is a tool that does all that trial-and-error scratchwork for you–no brain cycles. For more details, have a peek at their (open access!)
paper
.
Design software that augments our mechanical design capabilities is a rare gem on these pages, and this one is no exception. If your curious to play with other useful linkages simulating tools, have a go at
Linkage Designer
. And if you’re in the mood for other tools that fill in the blanks, check out this machine learning algorithm that literally
fills in footage between frames
in a video feed. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280318",
"author": "Somun",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T19:09:27",
"content": "I was wondering if something like this existed just yesterday. Thanks HaD (and the tipster).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6280323",
"author": "M... | 1,760,373,347.081916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/inputs-of-interest-bigtrack-mouse-might-make-you-squeal/ | Inputs Of Interest: BIGtrack Mouse Might Make You Squeal | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"assistive technology",
"foot mouse",
"mouse",
"trackball"
] | You know me,
I like to get my feet involved when I use my computer
, which happens pretty much all day every day at this point. My cache of pedal inputs keeps growing like mushrooms in the darkness under my desk: every upper case letter in this post and dozens more have been capitalized with a shift pedal!
Naturally, I’ve thought about what it might be like to mouse with my toes. The more time I can spend with both hands on the keyboard, the better. I started sniffing around for foot-sized trackball candidates, thinking maybe I could just build one with regular mouse guts. Then I found a 15-year-old Golden Tee home edition console at a thrift store. It has a large ball and four buttons, so it seemed ripe for turning into a mouse as-is, or just stealing the ball to build my own. So far, that hasn’t happened, though I did solder a bunch of wires for testing out the controls.
Then I found out about this almost-perfect, existing mouse that resembles a sunny-side-up egg. Its trackball is much bigger than the Golden Tee’s, maybe even twice as big. And more of the ball is exposed, so it’s way easier to roll than the one on the console, regardless of what appendage is used.
This is a BIGtrack mouse. You’re right, it looks like something Fisher Price would market to toddlers. But this is an assistive device for people of all ages. It has a 3″ trackball and buttons that are just over 1″ across. This friendly-faced egg mouse weighs just over a pound, most of which is in the trackball. I think it would survive just fine living on the floor underneath my foot — the shell is made of thick plastic and seems sturdy.
This mouse has a cool feature for people with low mobility who are unable to drag and drop the traditional way. They call it drag lock. If you hover the cursor over the item you want to move and double click the right mouse button, the drag lock is enabled. Drag it wherever you want, and click either of the buttons to let it go.
The electronic bay is crawling with BIGtrack mice both young and old, and after a few months of email alerts, I found one in my price range. They were originally made by Infogrip, which is the same company who made
the BAT chording keyboard I roared about in the last installment of this column
.
As we learned then, Infogrip has gone out of business, and their old stock is being sold by Boundless AT and possibly others. But unlike the BAT keyboard,
AbleNet appears to be making new BIGtracks and selling them as BIGtrack 2
in several places, including the online version of the fruit phone store. AbleNet have improved this mouse a bit by using two different colors for the buttons, which makes them easily distinguishable. There’s also
a wireless version
that can use either a USB dongle or Bluetooth. It has a slider switch on the back if you want to keep the drag lock function on all the time.
The BIGtrack has one fatal flaw as far as I’m concerned — there’s no scroll wheel. Total deal-breaker for me as a mouse replacement. I’d have to add a clickable rotary encoder if I wanted to use this as my daily driver. Of course, while I’m at it, I might as well add two extra buttons to cover the copy/paste shortcuts I have come to depend on to
help save my pinkies and ulnar nerves
.
The switch actuator is that little red sprinkle.
These Buttons Push My Buttons
Despite being loud, clicky, and blue, these buttons fall short of being satisfying. In fact, they take quite a bit of force to actuate. For buttons on an assistive device, these don’t seem friendly for people who lack fine motor skills or have low mobility. I think the fault lies with both the buttons and the switches.
The problem with the buttons is that they pretty much have to be pressed dead center if you want the click to register. Pressing along the edge works about half the time, and incidentally, it makes the spring sing a bit upon release, like a Model M keyboard.
But these are big buttons on a piece of assistive technology, so they should be easy to actuate. Shouldn’t you also expect to be able to press them anywhere from dead center to the edge and have them click and release without issue? I say yes.
Then there’s the matter of how long it takes to press the buttons. There is an absurdly long travel distance before the button even touches the switch actuator. Then when the stem finally reaches the switch, it’s hitting an actuator that measures 4 mm x 1 mm.
The Buddy Button wire is six feet long!
Bigger, Better Buttons
These button problems may be part of the reason that they came out with the “switch adapted” version, which is what I have. Both buttons are wired internally to 1/8″ phono jacks that allow you to plug in Buddy Buttons: specially-designed assistive tech buttons that are much larger and activate almost effortlessly.
That’s not breathless hyperbole — I have access to one, and they are designed quite well. Press it literally anywhere and it clicks, and the action is identical all over the thing. These buttons are ludicrously expensive, but could be easily emulated with a low-travel arcade switch wired to an 1/8″ plug and placed in a sturdy housing.
I’d love to see exactly what’s going on inside the Buddy Button, but I hesitate to take it apart because it’s not mine. I suspect that it is superior to the BIGtrack mouse buttons because of better distribution of force from the button to the switch.
Dissection
The BIGtrack, on the other hand, was easy to open — three screws in the circle of six were in plain sight, and the other three were hiding under adhesive rubber feet. Since this is the switch-adapted version, I also had to unscrew the nuts on the phono jacks to get the halves apart.
Inside, it’s a ball-mouse. A trio of rollers of middling quality connect to opto-interrupters, and a Cypress mouse chip does the rest. The plastic rollers are a bit of a disappointment, because plastic on plastic can only last so long, and a heavy track ball riding on them with the partial weight of a leg on top will not prolong the life any.
Still, I think this is a good assistive technology mouse because the trackball is so large. Hopefully, AbleNet has made the buttons more user-friendly in the newer versions. It’s unfortunate that these types of devices cost as much as they do, but at least the options are out there. | 20 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280298",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T17:31:26",
"content": "Are you familiar with QLF in Ham Radio parlance?https://www.qsl.net/w5www/qcode.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6280832",
"author": "8bitw... | 1,760,373,347.419858 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/a-digital-guestbook-is-a-perfect-hacker-wedding-gift/ | A Digital Guestbook Is A Perfect Hacker Wedding Gift | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"e-ink",
"e-ink display",
"wedding",
"wedding gift"
] | With his brother’s wedding coming up, [Sebastian] needed a wedding gift. Rather than purchasing something,
he elected to build a digital guestbook so guests could share their well-wishes with the happy couple.
The guestbook has a simple web-based interface, which was accessible over a domain name [Sebastian] registered with the couple’s names ahead of the event. There, users could enter text and draw a friendly message for the digital guestbook. The guestbook itself consists of an ESP32 running a e-ink display, packaged in a tidy 3D printed enclosure featuring the couple’s initials. It regularly queries the web server, and displays the messages it finds on the screen.
It’s a great use of an e-ink display, as it made reading the messages in bright daylight easy where other technologies may have faltered. [Sebastian] was also clever to install some LEDs for the night portion of the reception.
We’ve featured a few wedding gifts on these pages before
, including this particularly amusing
sugar cube.
Video after the break. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280287",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T17:01:47",
"content": "Looks great, great idea. Just thinking that it should also have shown a QR-code to make it easier for people to browse to the website on their phones. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,373,347.461414 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/remoticon-tickets-and-workshops-just-dropped/ | Remoticon Tickets And Workshops Just Dropped | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Remoticon",
"registration",
"Remoticon",
"workshops"
] | Hackaday Remoticon
happens November 6-8 worldwide! The weekend will be packed with virtual activities, and most of them are hands-on workshops that you can participate in from the comfort of your home, lab, garage, basement, lair, or other socially distanced location of your choosing.
The news today is that everyone should register for Remoticon right now, and that we’re opening up registration for about half of the total workshops. More details on the remaining workshops, demos, and some special events will be available in a future article.
Get a Ticket for Remoticon, Then Register for Workshops
Step 1: Register for the Con.
What you want to do right now is
head over to the Remoticon ticketing page and register for the conference
. We need to get a headcount so that our servers don’t melt down during this massive online social event. You can get a ticket for free, or you can choose pay as you wish — scroll to the bottom of the tickets under “Donations” — and those proceeds go to charities that feed, house, or educate people. In these hard times, if you’re in a position to spare a few bucks, please do so.
Step 2: Buy your workshop ticket(s).
A workshop isn’t a workshop unless you can ask questions and get help along the way. Workshop
tickets are for attendees who want to participate live
, interacting with the presenters and other attendees via video chat. We’ve made all workshop tickets $10 as “skin in the game” to help ensure that these limited slots go to good use. Proceeds from workshop tickets will be used to offset the costs of hosting Remoticon.
If there is one request that we get every Supercon, it’s to film the workshops. This year, we can! If you can’t attend a workshop that you’re interested in we plan to record, edit, and publish them all so everyone can follow along at a later date.
The registration page has workshop descriptions listed when you select your ticket, but here are the titles whet your appetite. Thank you to everyone who submitted a workshop proposal, none of this is possible without you, naturally.
Basics of RF Emissions Debugging
Crowd-Controlled Robots
The Hackers Guide to Hardware Debugging
How to 3D Print onto Fabric
Introduction to Firmware Reverse Engineering
Introduction to Modular Synthesis using VCV Rack
KiCad to Blender > Photorealistic PCB renders
Learn How to Hack a Car
Live Breaking into Encrypted 3D Printer Firmware
MachineChat – JEDI One – A Universal Sensor Hub
PCB Reverse Engineering
Prototyping to the Max
Soldering, Nothing To Be Afraid Of!
Tiny ML
Zero to ASIC in Two Hours | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280289",
"author": "Keenan Rebera",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T17:05:15",
"content": "If we can’t make a workshop and want to view the recordings later, will they be free, or will we need a ticket?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,373,347.358368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/axe-hacks-new-sounds-for-your-electric-guitar-beginning-from-what-makes-them-tick/ | Axe Hacks: New Sounds For Your Electric Guitar Beginning From What Makes Them Tick | Sven Gregori | [
"Engineering",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Musical Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"audio",
"electric guitar",
"guitar",
"guitar pickup",
"music",
"musical instrument",
"tone"
] | Creating music is a perfect hobby for anyone into hacking, and the amount of musical hacks and self-made instruments we come across here makes that supremely evident. It’s just a great match: you can either go full-on into engineering mode as music is in the end “just” applied physics, or simply ignore all of the theory and take an artistic approach by simply doing whatever feels right. The sweet spot is of course somewhere in between — a solid grasp of some music theory fundamentals won’t hurt, but too much overthinking eventually will.
The obvious choice to combine a favorite pastime like electronics or programming with creating music would be in the realm of electronic music, and as compelling as building synthesizers sounds, I’ll be going for the next best thing instead: the electric guitar. Despite its general popularity, the enormous potential that lies within the electric guitar is rarely fully utilized. Everyone seems to just focus on amp settings and effect pedals when looking for that special or unique sound, while the guitar itself is seen as this immutable object bestowed on us by the universe with all its predestined, magical characteristics. Toggle a pickup switch, and if we’re feeling extra perky, give that tone pot a little spin, that’s all there is to it.
The thing is, the guitar’s electrical setup — or wiring — in its stock form simply is as boring and generic as it can get. Sure, it’s a safe choice that does the job well enough, but there’s this entirely different world of tonal variety and individual controllability locked inside of it, and all it really takes is a screwdriver and soldering iron to release it. Plus, this might serve as an interesting application area to dive into simple analog electronics, so even if guitars aren’t your thing
yet
, maybe this will tickle your creativity bone. And if bass is more your thing, well, let me be ignorant and declare that a bass is just a longer guitar with thicker, lower-tuned strings, meaning everything that follows pretty much applies to bass as well, even if I talk about guitars.
However, in order to modify something, it helps to understand how it functions. So today, we’ll only focus on the basics of an electric guitar, i.e. what’s inside them and what defines and affects their tone. But don’t worry, once we have the fundamentals covered, we’ll be all settled to get to the juicy bits next time.
The Electric Guitar: Pickups and Potentiometers
Presumably everyone has seen an electric guitar and knows what they look like, but not everyone has necessarily played one or concerned themselves with how they actually work. To keep the physics simple, an electric guitar works by moving a ferromagnetic object — the strings — through a fixed magnetic field — the pickup — which generates an electrical signal from the strings’ vibrations — the actual sound — that is then routed through the volume and tone control to the guitar’s output plug. From here, the signal can then be amplified and modified into any shape and form imaginable, which is where the amp settings and effect pedals take over then.
Piezo Pickup Heavy Metal Ukulele
The ferromagnetic part is crucial here, so in order to make this work, you’ll need steel strings, which is why you won’t find nylon strings on an electric guitar. Well, at least rarely, though there are other types of pickups than the
magnetic pickup
described here that aren’t relying on magnetic flux:
optical pickups
that use the same concept but pick up the string vibration as it moves through light, and
piezo pickups
that pick up the vibrations from the body the strings are attached to. The latter ones are usually found in bowed string instruments and acoustic guitars, but you can also get magnetic pickups specifically for a steel-string acoustic if need be.
So what’s a magnetic pickup then? Essentially, it’s a just a big inductor, typically in the mid to high single-digit Henries area, constructed from thousands of copper wire windings around a magnetic core. To add more focus to each string, round
pole pieces
are added that give them their typical look. Pole pieces are either made out of steel and are attached to a bar magnet on the bottom, or are rod magnets and the sole magnetic component. Sometimes they’re made as screws to adjust the height to each string individually, in other cases they’re of fixed same length (
flat pole
) or fixed variable length (
staggered pole
). Then there are also
rail pickups
that use a single metal blade instead of individual poles. If neither of that is visible, they’re simply covered.
Humbucker pickups showing the exposed copper wire, its bar magnet, and the pole pieces
The amount of copper wire windings, the wire’s gauge, and the magnetic material (usually ceramic or an Alnico alloy) and amount thereof all play with and against each other to define its output signal strength and frequency response — and with that, the sound it produces. The winding pattern itself will also have some impact, but since most pickups are machine made nowadays, it’s not as big of a variable as it used to be in the earlier days of hand-wound pickups, where imperfections gave each pickup its very own, unique character (and why there’s such a magical myth surrounding them).
As for the volume and tone control, the volume control is usually just a potentiometer with the pickup signal on one terminal, ground on the other, and the output signal on the wiper. Turn it to 10, and the wiper has the least resistance getting the full volume, turn it to 0, and the signal is discarded. The tone control on the other hand is another potentiometer that forms along with a capacitor (and of course the pickup itself) a variable low-pass filter, allowing us to cut off the higher frequencies and darken the sound on its way to the output jack.
That’s basically the gist of an electric guitar, but there’s obviously a bit more to in practice. After all, there’s thousands and thousands of different guitars out there, and that can’t be without a reason. But which one to choose?
A Guitar’s Character
The object of desire, and the one that could never live up to it
Well, possibly the biggest factor in choosing a guitar is simply its looks. When I was 11 years old, I saw a Gibson SG in a paper catalogue my cousin had lying around, and it was love at first sight. In fact, the sole reason I started playing guitar was that specific guitar.
After playing acoustic for a few years and saving up enough to get an electric, the local store didn’t have any in my price range. I went for a second-hand Hohner ST Lynx Superstrat instead. A few years later I tried again, this time I got lucky and finally became the proud owner of the cheapest Epiphone copy there was, the G-310. Did it sound great? Eh, I’d say the Superstrat was definitely superior. But did it matter? Absolutely not! To me, it was the best guitar ever.
So albeit anecdotal, there’s little doubt that looks affect how you feel about a guitar, and tone may be secondary. Also, certain guitars are associated with certain genres, and the psychological impact of that can’t be neglected either. In the end, it’s all a matter of personal taste anyway, and all the theory about a guitar won’t be relevant if you simply don’t like it. It’s like fancy expensive wine, just because it’s good on paper doesn’t mean you’ll actually enjoy drinking it.
Sadly people tend way too often to mistake personal taste for a matter of right vs wrong, resulting in unreasonably passionate and fruitless arguments — but who am I to tell you this? We’ve all had our share of arguing about spaces versus tabs,
vi versus emacs
, or pineapple on pizza.
My point here is that music is highly subjective, and everyone will have to define for themselves what’s right or wrong, what sounds good and what doesn’t. That being said, this is still about modifying a guitar’s tone, so let’s take a look at the factors that will define the tone that we are going to alter later on.
On The Origin Of Tone
Let’s say we pluck the open A string on a regularly tuned guitar, which is an A
2
with a
fundamental frequency
of 110 Hz. What happens is that the string vibrates with that fundamental frequency, along with numerous additional, overlapping multiples of it — so in this case 220 Hz, 330 Hz etc. — of varying amplitudes, known as
harmonics
or
overtones
.
The harmonics forming on a vibrating string. Original source:
Wikipedia
Their exact mix and actual amplitudes will vary depending on the string tension and where you actually play, i.e. the location of your fingers or pick, and with what force.
The string tension relates to the string gauge as well as the guitar’s
scale length
, i.e. the length of the strings between the
nut
and
bridge
(or rather double the length from the nut to the 12th fret to account for slight variations in the length for intonation reasons). A longer scale length requires more tension to reach the same pitch compared to a shorter scale length, as do thicker strings compared to a thinner gauge, also affecting how high or low you can tune the guitar. Too little tension and the strings just end up wobbling without producing any useful tone, too much tension and something’s gonna snap — if you’re lucky it’ll only be the string and not the neck of the guitar.
String tensions stated for different gauges based on a 25.5″ scale length and standard tuning
How that wild mixture of harmonics is going to end up as our actual signal, and therefore tone, depends of course on our pickup’s properties that determine its frequency response.
A Closer Look At Pickups
As I said earlier, the combination of winding count, wire gauge, and magnetic material define the pickup’s frequency response and output signal strength. For example, a higher winding count tends to suppress the higher frequencies, resulting in a darker, “warmer” tone. This could be countered with a magnetic core material of higher flux density (Alnico II vs Alnico V or ceramic) to get a signal with the same voltage levels but less windings, which leads to the general idea that Alnico II pickups have a warmer tone compared to Alnico V.
Lowering the wire gauge (44 AWG vs 42 AWG for example) on the other hand will fit more windings into the same physical space, which also changes the total wire length, which changes both the signal strength and frequency response. So it really all interacts with each other, and the frequency response is rarely linear anyway. To no surprise, there’s an enormous selection of pickups out there as a result.
To keep the selection a bit less overwhelming, we can split them up a bit. The high-level category to distinguish them is whether they’re
active
or
passive
. It mainly defines if they require an external power supply to function, in which case active circuitry is added to filter and pre-amplify the signal. I’ll mostly ignore active pickups here, as adding active electronics feels a bit like cheating and we might as well just add entire effects straight to the guitar — not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’d actually be a great subject on its own.
Single coil bridge pickup and humbucker neck pickup on a Telecaster. (Note the slanted pickup discussed later.)
Active or passive, either way, pickups come in two main varieties:
single coil
and
humbucker
pickups. Single coils are pretty much what the name suggests: a single coil of copper windings around the magnet. Humbuckers on the other hand are constructed from two coils connected in series. Why that name? Because they buck the hum a single coil may pick up from interfering AC power supplies. To achieve that, the coils are wound in opposite directions and are facing opposite polarity of the magnet. That way, external interference is phase cancelled while the actual signal is added up — essentially like differential signaling.
But pickup properties are only one part of the equation.
Location, Location, Location
With the harmonics’ nodes and antinodes distributed along the string, each harmonic’s amplitude differs in every location, so the tone we actually end up with also depends where exactly the pickup is placed along the body. The most common locations are close to the bridge, close to the neck, and somewhere in the middle if there’s a third one — hence they’re named bridge, neck, and middle pickup respectively.
The harmonics overlapped, highlighting the rough location of the neck (left) and bridge (right) pickups
As the graphic above shows, we’ll get the widest and simultaneously most consistent variety with a moderate fundamental frequency amplitude on the bridge pickup, making them generally sound brighter and sharper. The neck pickup on the other hand is a bit more complex with more emphasis on the fundamental frequency, resulting in an overall fuller, darker tone, with the occasional risk of turning it to mud.
Spectrum of the A string on a
bridge
pickup
Spectrum of the A string on a
neck
pickup
The variation is visible in the (unscientifically gathered) spectrum graphs, with some more variation in the neck pickup. The fourth harmonic is especially striking as the neck pickup is usually located right around the fourth harmonic’s node. Manufacturers usually account for these differences with dedicated pickups for each position, and mixing them up may yield interesting results.
A noteworthy special case are
slanted
pickups like the bridge pickup on a Stratocaster or Telecaster (as seen above), where the higher strings are picked up closer to the bridge, and the lower strings slightly further away, giving some brighter, clearer highs and deeper, alluring lows. That is unless you’re playing left-handed on a right-handed guitar, in which case you will have the exact opposite, and one reason why Jimi Hendrix had such a unique sound.
So the pickups and their locations have pretty much the biggest impact on a guitar’s sound, and there’s still plenty of details about them that I’ve left out so far. Don’t worry, we’ll get to them eventually, but for today, we’ll focus on the remaining major influence on the sound: the volume and tone controls.
But, But, What About…
If you followed any discussion on guitars, you’re probably wondering when I’ll talk about tonewood, i.e. how mahogany from southern Honduras planted during a new moon creates an
entirely different
tone in an electric guitar than mahogany from western El Salvador harvested on a Wednesday, along with everything else in that category: how different types of glues, finishes, and color pigments affect tone, how that classic paper-in-oil capacitor sound is superior to modern polyester, left vs right leg for bone nuts, and how twisting a piece of Billy Gibbons’ beard between the 4087th and 6142nd coil winding gives you that
warm vintage tone
™ (Poe’s Law may apply).
Wood is overrated anyway. Source:
Moose ON @ YouTube
Myriads of forum discussions, blog posts, and videos arguing whether and how any of that affects the tone or not are in existence, and years later we’re still none the wiser. So let’s be real, if something requires that much attention, intensive experimentation, and countless blind testing and comparisons in order to prove or disprove if something has any impact in the first place, and the main outcome of all that effort is just more people trying to confirm or disprove the results, there’s only one logical conclusion for the overall picture of it: it simply doesn’t matter.
“The guitarist should have gone with a maple body” said no one ever during a gig or while listening to an actual song. If you believe some specific wood, finish, or capacitor is superior to another, great, and if you don’t, also great. Whatever makes you happy is probably the right choice then. For all I know, hearing a difference or lack thereof might as well be genetic like soapy cilantro or funky asparagus — the discussions certainly are equally pleasant.
So let’s stick with the more relevant and interesting parts. Plus, it’s all passive component tolerances anyway.
Knob Fondling
As mentioned, the volume control is a potentiometer, and the tone control is a low-pass filter made from a potentiometer with a capacitor. The exact configuration depends on the guitar, though a single main volume and main tone control is probably the most common one. However, many Gibsons for example have a dedicated tone and volume control per pickup, while a Stratocaster has a main volume and a separate tone control for the neck and middle pickup with a shared capacitor. Others might ditch the tone knob altogether, and a bass oftentimes replaces a pickup switch in favor of dedicated volume controls for each pickup.
Whichever way they’re configured, the components’ values (for passive pickups) range typically between 250 kOhm and 1 MOhm for the potentiometers, and between 10 nF and 100 nF for the capacitors. Rule of thumb combinations for single coil pickups are 250 kOhm potentiometers and 47 nF capacitors, and 500 kOhm and 22 nF for humbuckers respectively.
Stock wiring of a Telecaster (clone)
Why that variation? Looking back at the pickup properties, more coil windings suppresses the higher frequencies, and since humbuckers consist of two coils in series, they naturally have a higher total winding count. As a result, single coils usually produce a brighter, snappier sound compared to humbuckers, which some might prefer and is the reason they exist despite their humming shortcomings. So the idea of different value combinations is to compensate for that: avoiding that a single coil becomes too shrill by cutting off the highs more drastically, while keeping the humbucker sound from becoming too muddy by cutting them off more gradually.
Of course, in reality, things are a little bit more complex. But the thing is, numbers won’t get you far here anyway, as pickup manufacturers aren’t too transparent about the details. They may state the DC resistance and what magnets are used, but that’s where it most of the time ends. You might get some rough treble, mids, and bass chart along with a relative output signal strength to compare between their pickup range, but nothing you could fill in any math formulas. Not that there would be much sense in that either though. For one, there’s plenty of other variables at play in wiring as a whole, and more importantly, numbers will hardly tell you what sounds good to you.
A slightly different wiring
Once again, it all boils down to personal taste, and trial-and-error experiments are the way to find out for sure. The good thing about it is that of all the components involved in shaping the tone of a guitar, the volume and tone controls are the easiest we can modify with a noticeable impact — and chances are we have everything we need for that lying around anyway. I mean, sure, you can open up the pickup and wind it up again differently to change the tone (and if that’s really your thing,
you should probably let us know
) or simply buy a new one. But sometimes, changing a capacitor or adding a resistor in the right place might be all it takes to sweeten up the tone to your liking.
Next Time
Now that we’ve covered the grounds for electric guitars and their tone, we’re all set to get started with some real-world tone modifications next time. We’ll look more into some ways to change the volume and tone control behavior, some alternative options for their use altogether, and how to get completely kinky with the pickup wiring.
In that sense, stay tuned — but not necessarily in EADGBE. | 30 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280236",
"author": "GeneralTsoChicken",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T14:15:04",
"content": "Aaaand awaaay we go …. lolhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz9VyggeSbA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6280248",
"author": "Vexer",
... | 1,760,373,347.584996 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/a-monotrack-bike-with-only-basic-tools-and-parts/ | A Monotrack Bike With Only Basic Tools And Parts | Danie Conradie | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"monotrack",
"motorcycle",
"tank track",
"welding"
] | Tracked vehicles are cool, but can be quite complicated to build. [XenonJohn] wanted to skip the complexity, so he created
Vector
, an electric tracked motorcycle using only basic parts and tools. No machine tools required.
If it looks familiar, it’s because it was inspired by
[Make It Extreme]’s monotrack motorcycle
that we covered last year. [XenonJohn] liked the concept, but wanted one that was simpler to build. That meant ditching the custom machined parts like the wheels and the suspension system. These were replaced with three go cart wheels and axles mounted in pillow blocks, on a simple welded frame. An e-bike battery powers a 500 W golf cart motor that drives the rear wheel. Like [Make It Extreme]’s version, the track is an SUV tire with the sidewall cut off. [XenonJohn] used tin snips to do this, but from personal experience we would recommend a utility knife. This track design will have a tendency to collect debris inside it, so cutting some hole in the tread could help. As with most single wheeled/tracked vehicles, you really don’t want to try and stop quickly.
It looks like this bike works fine in straight lines, but there is room for improvement with the steering. [XenonJohn] has some ideas to do this, which we hope to see some time in the future. Let us know in the comments how you would make it turn better.
[XenonJohn] really like vehicles that can make you face plant. He built quite a few
self-balancing motorcycles
, one of which was supposedly designed with
first responders
in mind. It honestly seems more likely to create an emergency than respond to one. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280204",
"author": "Kilian Demmel",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T11:19:29",
"content": "Cool, but a longer track base may help with the faceplanting situation…would love to see one with more “tankier” tracks though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,347.650444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/22/autonomous-rover-navigates-the-house-with-lidar/ | Autonomous Rover Navigates The House With LIDAR | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous rover",
"autonomy",
"robot",
"rover"
] | For those wishing to explore robot autonomy, there’s no better way then to learn by doing. [Greg] was in that camp, and decided to build an autonomous rover to roam his house,
and learned plenty along the way.
[Greg]’s aims with the project were to build a robot that was capable of navigating his home without external assistance. To do the job, a Raspberry Pi 3 was put in charge, and kitted out with a LIDAR for mapping. Pololu Roboclaw motor controllers are then used to allow the Raspberry Pi to drive the robot’s individual wheel motors, giving the four-wheeled bot skid steering capability.
[Greg] goes into immense detail on the project’s writeup, exploring the code and concepts behind its autonomous abilities. Creating a robot that can navigate using LIDAR is no easy task, but [Greg] does a great job of explaining how it all works, and why.
It’s not the first autonomous rover we’ve seen here
, and we’re sure it won’t be the last. If you’ve got your own build coming together in the lab,
be sure to let us know
. Video after the break. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6280223",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-09-22T13:34:24",
"content": "So, how do the cats respond to the laser beam(s)?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,347.498598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/20/boost-your-animation-to-60-fps-using-ai/ | Boost Your Animation To 60 FPS Using AI | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"animation",
"artificial intelligence",
"depth perception",
"frames per second",
"interpolation",
"video"
] | The uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to expand, with one of the more recent implementations being video processing. A new method can “fill in” frames to smooth out the appearance of the video, which
[LegoEddy] was able to use this in one of his animated LEGO movies
with some astonishing results.
His original animation of LEGO figures and sets was created at 15 frames per second. As an animator, he notes that it’s orders of magnitude more difficult to get more frames than this with traditional methods, at least in his studio. This is where the artificial intelligence comes in. The program is able to interpolate between frames and create more frames to fill the spaces between the original. This allowed [LegoEddy] to increase his frame rate from 15 fps to 60 fps without having to actually create the additional frames.
While we’ve seen AI create art before
, the improvement on traditionally produced video is a dramatic advancement. Especially since the AI is aware of depth and preserves information about the distance of objects from the camera. The software is also free, runs on any computer with an appropriate graphics card, and is
available on GitHub
.
Thanks to [BaldPower] for the tip! | 43 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6279805",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2020-09-20T20:16:36",
"content": "It does make me wonder how far this can be pushed. Like, could we take a 4 fps video and get 60 fps? That would be a real game changer for stop motion in general.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,373,347.733461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/20/finally-a-differently-useless-machine/ | Finally, A Differently Useless Machine | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"ball bearing",
"h-bridge",
"NEMA-17",
"stepper motor",
"toggle switch",
"useless machine"
] | Traditionally, the useless machine is a simple one that invites passersby to switch it on. When they do, the machine somehow, some way, turns itself off; usually with a finger or finger-like object that comes out from the box in what feels like an annoyed fashion. Honestly, that’s probably part of what drives people to turn them on over and over again.
But [Bart Blankendaal] has managed to turn the useless machine on its head
. When this machine is switched to the on position, unseen forces inside the box will spin the toggle switch around 180° to the off position.
What’s really happening is that an Arduino is getting a signal from the toggle switch, and is then rotating it on a ball bearing with a stepper motor driven through an H-bridge.
It shouldn’t be too hard to make one of these yourself, given that [Bart] has provided the schematic and STLs. If we weren’t living in such touchy times, we might suggest building one of these into your Halloween candy distribution scheme somehow. Sell the switch as one that turns on a candy dispenser, and then actually dispense it after three or five tries.
Many see useless machines as tangible examples of existential quandary.
Here is one that takes that sentiment a bit further by snuffing out a candle
. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6279771",
"author": "Gustavo F",
"timestamp": "2020-09-20T17:37:22",
"content": "Ha ha haBut, does it really need an Arduino??",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6279834",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,373,347.870493 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/20/esp8266-turned-secretive-wifi-probe-request-sniffer/ | ESP8266 Turned Secretive WiFi Probe Request Sniffer | Danie Conradie | [
"Security Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"mac address",
"privacy",
"probe requests",
"wifi"
] | When a Wi-Fi device is switched on, it starts spewing out probe requests to try and find a familiar access point. These probe requests contain the device’s MAC address and the SSID of the hotspot it’s looking for, which can potentially be used to identify a specific device and where it’s been. After experimenting with these probe requests, [Amine Mehdi Mansouri] has created
OpenMAC, a tiny ESP8266 based sniffer that could be hidden anywhere
.
The device consists of an ESP-07S module, a regulator circuit for getting power from a USB-C connector, and a button for power cycling. An external antenna is required for the module, which can be selected based on the size or gain requirements for a specific deployment. [Amine] tested the OpenMAC at a local library (with permission), in combination with a number of his own little Wi-Fi repeaters to expand the reach of the network. All the recorded MAC addresses were logged to a server, where the data can be used for traffic analysis in and around the library, or even for tracking and locating specific devices.
This is nothing new, and is relatively common technique used for gathering information in retail locations, and could be also be used for more nefarious purposes. Newer versions of iOS, Android, and Windows 10 feature MAC address randomization which can limit the ability to track devices in this manner, but it isn’t always activated.
We’ve seen a number of projects that exploit probe requests.
FIND-LF can be used for locating devices in your home
, and
Linger fools probe requests sniffers by replaying previously recorded requests
. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6279752",
"author": "Joseph dediego",
"timestamp": "2020-09-20T16:02:08",
"content": "This setup might work for a fox hunt. Worth exploring the idea.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6279775",
"author": "Leonard",
"timest... | 1,760,373,347.794995 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/20/ti-and-cadence-make-pspice-free/ | TI And Cadence Make PSpice Free | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cadence",
"LTSpice",
"PSpice",
"SPICE",
"texas instruments",
"ti"
] | We like simulation software. Texas Instruments long offered TINA, but recently they’ve joined with Cadence to make
OrCAD PSpice available for free with some restrictions
. You’ve probably heard of PSpice — it’s widely used in academia and industry, but is usually quite costly. You can see a promotional overview video below.
The program requires registration and an approval step to get a license key. The downloaded program has TI models along with other standard models. There seem to be few limits as long as you stick to the supplied library. According to the
datasheet
, there are no size or simulation complexity limitations in that case. If you want to use other models, you can, but that’s where the limitations hit you:
There is no limitation of how many 3rd party models can be imported into the design. However, if 3rd party models are imported, a user will be able to plot a maximum of 3 signals at a time of their choice when any 3rd party model is imported from web.
We aren’t completely sure what “from web” means there, but presumably they just mean from other sources. In any event, you still get AC, DC, and transient analysis with plenty of options like worst-case timing analysis. Mixed signal designs are supported and there is a wealth of data plotting options, as you would expect.
This is a great opportunity to drive some serious software that is widely used in the industry. The only thing that bummed us out? It runs under Windows. We couldn’t get it to work under Wine, but a Windows 10 VM handled it fine, although we really hate running a VM if we don’t have to.
Still, the price is right and it is a great piece of software. We also liked the recent
Micro-Cap 12
release, but we don’t expect any updates for that. Of course,
LTSpice
is quite capable, too. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6279718",
"author": "Moryc",
"timestamp": "2020-09-20T12:16:39",
"content": "Micro-Cap 12 is free and it has no restrictions, no registration, and no approval needed. Recently I had to learn it to do some PSU design/simulation. It’s quite easy…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,373,347.953196 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/20/a-budget-testing-rig-for-low-volume-production/ | A Budget Testing Rig For Low-Volume Production | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bed of nails",
"test fixture",
"test rig",
"testing"
] | It’s not unheard of for those who tinker in the land of electronics to suddenly find themselves with a project on their hands and potential customers clamoring at the door. Of course, the road to shipping a product is a long one, and requires a unique set of skills quite distinct from those required to build the initial prototype. In developing a product for Airsoft use,
[bald greg] realized that a testing rig would be key to ensuring their hundreds of units left the building in working condition.
When shipping units in the hundreds rather than thousands, keeping overheads low is key to maintain a sustainable profit margin on each unit sold. Thus, [bald greg] built a rig that would allow for effective testing of devices rather than breaking the bank. The rig also handles programming, saving the cost of purchasing pre-programmed microcontrollers from the manufacturer. A Raspberry Pi runs the show, using its GPIO pins to program boards and saving test results and serial numbers for later reference. A bed of nails fixture is used to connect to each individual board. Additionally, to test each board as realistically as possible, hardware mimicking a real Airsoft electric pistol is used to properly load the hardware.
[bald greg]’s work is a great example of approaching QC on a budget, and we suspect he’ll sleep soundly knowing the boards in the mail are going to work first time.
We’ve seen others take similar approaches, too.
If you’re working on your own production testing rig,
be sure to let us know!
SIGMA MOSFET- Production test rig | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6279701",
"author": "Mime",
"timestamp": "2020-09-20T09:16:41",
"content": "Nice topic.In his post, he mentions that the small 1mm test pads are problematic for probe testing.. What I’ve done in the past is give a test pad a very small diameter metallised hole anyway, which a sharp ... | 1,760,373,347.996761 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/19/a-big-computer-needs-a-big-keyboard/ | A Big Computer Needs A Big Keyboard | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"mechanical keyboard",
"Teensy"
] | It seems like many keyboard aficionados have been gravitating towards ever smaller boards, but not [Ren]. He’s mostly completed a
433% keyboard with a whopping 450 distinct keys
. Using two off the shelf PCBs and Teensy to control it all, this keyboard means you’ll never need to strain to make some awkward chord.
The PCBs have a diode matrix arrangement for 225 keys, which we would have thought was big enough. After all, a Scrabble board has 225 squares, so we assume that’s why the vendor calls them scrabbleboards. Honestly, we’re jealous someone has the desk space for this monster. We were also thinking what other sorts of switch-like sensors you could use with this board. Imagine a home system, for example, with 225 occupancy sensors, each with its own key you could easily read via USB.
There was a time when building your own keyboard of any sort would have been challenging. But now there’s a cottage industry supplying chips, switches, caps, and PCBs to those looking to craft their own custom input devices. The ready availability of 3D printers has also sparked a minor revolution in custom keyboard enclosures and keycaps.
If you’re a fan of the tiny keyboards, we’ve seen
some impressive specimens that might catch your fanc
y. If nothing else, at least they require less soldering. Especially when
they only have seven keys
.
Thanks [ptkwilliams] for the tip! | 36 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6279689",
"author": "BobbyMac99",
"timestamp": "2020-09-20T06:11:38",
"content": "Ummm, maybe a bit obsessive compulsive? On the upside you only need 6 sq feet to use it….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6279758",
"aut... | 1,760,373,348.12098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/19/mirror-mirror-on-your-cam-show-us-what-youve-drawn-by-hand/ | Mirror, Mirror, On Your Cam, Show Us What You’ve Drawn By Hand | Brian McEvoy | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"design",
"doc cam",
"document camera",
"laptop",
"mirror",
"presentation",
"teleconference",
"webcam",
"zoom"
] | Working and learning from home may be the new norm, and if IKEA shelves are any indication, folks are tricking out their home office with furniture, gadgets, and squishy chairs. While teleconferencing has proven to be an invaluable tool, paper documents aren’t going down with out a fight.
Unfortunately dedicated document cameras require significant space and monies, so they’re impractical if you only share once in a while. [John Umekubo] didn’t want students and teachers hobbled by the same costs and inconveniences, so he modeled
a mirror holder that slides over a laptop’s webcam
and directs the view downward.
[John]’s adventures started with a Twitter post, as seen below, but the responses were so encouraging that he published his design on Thingiverse for everyone. There’s also a version that can be laser cut out of cardboard, though we imagine a pair of scissors would work in a pinch. He admits there’s already a consumer model, but wasn’t planning to sell them anyway. Like us, he wants to get people to share their work.
We recently covered a
simpler version of the same idea in use at Northwestern University
, and we’ve seen a similar hack that gives a
split-screen effect to sketch and maintain eye contact
. If you want to share the view in your room, we have a
Raspberry Pi streaming option that’s worth checking out
.
When your students and teachers need to project their work during Zoom sessions from home. These will go out to all our middle schoolers and their teachers.
#remotelearning
#documentcamera
#laptop
#3ddesign
#design
#designthinking
@tinkercad
pic.twitter.com/ByJNkaYxar
— John Umekubo (@jumekubo)
September 4, 2020 | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6279662",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2020-09-20T03:05:04",
"content": "Why would document cameras be expensive? Aren’t they just (web)cams on an armature? I use a cheap mic arm and a second-hand phone mounted to it for my workspace camera. Cost me $11",
"parent_... | 1,760,373,348.054398 |
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