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https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/something-to-look-forward-to-mch2021-call-for-participation/ | Something To Look Forward To: MCH2021 Call For Participation | Jenny List | [
"cons"
] | [
"cfp",
"hacker camp",
"MCH2021"
] | As we stare dejectedly at our screens and consider what might have been during the 2020 summer that didn’t quite happen, here’s a little something to look forward to in a future where the COVID-19 pandemic will with any luck be much less of a threat. We have have had precious little in the way of events in 2020, but
the call for participation has been announced for one of the largest planned for 2021
. MCH2021 will be big European summer camp of next year, and is scheduled for the 6th to the 10th of August at Scoutinglandgoed Zeewolde in the Netherlands province of Flevoland. It will be the latest in a long line of such events going back to 1989, and with such a track record we know it’s going to be a good one.
We know that among our community are many people who’ll be interested in going to MCH, and that each and every one of you will have some fascinating insights that others would love to hear about. The challenge of the MCH orga is to bestow upon you the courage to stand up in front of your peers and talk about it, and from our experience here at Hackaday we’d say that an event such as this one makes for a very good place to give speaking a try. As always they’re interested in all the cool stuff that comes from our diverse community, but to help you along they’ve suggested a theme. Recent events have it’s fair to say presented a challenge to the world, and in that light they state that “we are especially looking for content that is about our ability to recover from extreme events of whatever nature”. We look forward to seeing you there. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274423",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2020-08-31T07:22:13",
"content": "That’s okay, you don’t have to tell us what “MCH” is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6274424",
"author": "Attilla",
"timesta... | 1,760,373,372.638332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/__trashed-38/ | Sudden Death Rainbow Sorting Game Reveals Your True Colors | Kristina Panos | [
"Games",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"Arcade buttons",
"Espruino",
"javascript",
"leds",
"rainbow",
"Roy G. Biv"
] | When [marzsman]’s eight-year-old daughter thought up a game they could play together involving rainbows, he was all ears. She is a certified rainbow expert, after all. They had a few R&D sessions and came up with
a rainbow sorting speed trial game that looks fun to play and fairly easy to build
.
Press that blue button on the side, and the RGB LEDs along the top are put in randomized order. The object of this game is simple — just sort the rainbow before the other player by pressing each LED’s corresponding arcade button. Whoever sorts faster is rewarded with a rainbow animation behind their set of way-cool clear buttons.
Inside the laser-cut box is an Espruino, which is a handy little microcontroller that speaks JavaScript. All of the arcade buttons are wired up as a key matrix. The astute among you have noticed there is six of everything, and that’s because indigo light is too hard to distinguish from blue. Check out the intense gameplay after the break.
If [marzsman]’s daughter wants to learn computer science,
rainbows are good for that, too
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274389",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2020-08-31T03:02:47",
"content": "Finally, a use of RGB LEDs that’s not just annoying, but actually serves a purpose! ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6274426",
"author": "Ian... | 1,760,373,372.290879 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/hackaday-links-august-30-2020/ | Hackaday Links: August 30, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"astronaut",
"balloon",
"brain",
"Elon Musk",
"exoskeleton",
"hackaday links",
"helium",
"implant",
"mech",
"neuralink",
"neurosugery",
"pig",
"Skylab"
] | Tech history is rife with examples of bizarre product demos, but we’ve got to think that
Elon Musk’s Neuralink demo
this week will have to rank up there with the weirdest of them. Elon’s job here was to sell the proposition that having a quarter-sized plug removed from your skull by a surgical robot and having it plunge 1,024 tiny wires into your gray matter will be totally normal and something that all the cool kids will be doing someday. We watched
the 14-minute supercut of the demo
, which went on for considerably longer than that due to the realities of pig wrangling, and we remain unsold on the technology. Elon selling it as “a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires” probably didn’t help, nor did the somewhat terrifying appearance of the surgical robot needed to do the job. On the other hand, Gertrude the Bionic Pig seemed none the worse for her implant, which was reportedly wired to her snout and sending data wirelessly. The demonstration of reading joint positions directly from the brain was honestly pretty neat. If you want to dive deeper into Neuralink, check out
Maya’s great article
that separates fact from science fiction.
Jerry Carr, NASA astronaut and commander of the third and final crewed Skylab mission,
passed away this week
at the age of 88. Carr’s
Skylab 4
mission was record-breaking in 1974, with the three astronauts living and working in the orbiting workshop for 84 days. The mission contributed a vast amount of information on space medicine and the human factors of long-duration spaceflight. Carr retired from NASA in 1977 and had a long career as an engineer and entrepreneur. It’s sad to lose yet another of the dwindling number of heroes remaining from NASA’s manned-flight heyday.
Speaking of spaceflight, the closest most of us DIYers can get to space is likely courtesy of a helium-filled balloon. If you’ve ever considered sending something — or someone — aloft, you’ll find
this helium balloon calculator
an invaluable tool. Just plug in the weight of your payload, select from a few common balloon sizes, and the calculator will tell you how many you need and how much gas it will take to fill them. It’s got a second section that tells you how many more balloons it’ll take to get to a certain altitude, should merely getting off the ground not be enough for you.
If 2020 has proven anything, it’s that time is, at best, a negotiable concept. Improbably, September is only a day away, after an August that somehow took forever to go by in the blink of an eye. With that in mind,
October is OSHWA’s Open Hardware Month
, with this year’s theme being “Label and Certify”. We’re a little bit in love with
the Open Hardware Facts generator
, which takes your open-source hardware, software, and documentation license and generates a USDA “Nutrition Facts”-style label for your product. They’ve also added tools to make it easier to get OSHWA certification for your project.
And finally, what would it be like to pilot a giant exoskeleton? Like, a 9,000 pound (4,100 kg), quadrupedal all-terrain beast of a mech? Turns out you can (theoretically) find out for yourself courtesy of
Furrion Exo-Bionics
and their monster mech, dubbed Prosthesis. The machine has been in development for a long time, with the vision of turning mech racing into the next big thing in sports entertainment.
Their Alpha Mech Pilot Training Program
will allow mere mortals to learn how to pilot Prosthesis at the company’s proving ground in British Columbia. Details are sparse, so caveat emptor, but it sure looks like fun. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274371",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2020-08-31T00:21:06",
"content": "Best line ever “so that the electrodes can be inserted with no noticeable damage, so you will have no noticeable neural damage in inserting the link” – Elon Musk, August 2020No noticeable brain damage, soun... | 1,760,373,372.596733 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/solar-satellite-glows-at-night/ | Solar Satellite Glows At Night | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"attiny",
"ATTiny25V",
"beam robotics",
"Circuit Sculpture",
"led",
"pummer",
"supercapacitor"
] | They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If we were going to imitate one of master circuit sculptor Mohite Bhoite’s creations, we’d probably pick the little blinky solar satellite as a jumping off point just like [richardsappia] did. It’s cute, it’s functional, and it involves solar power and supercapacitors. What more could you want?
SATtiny is a pummer
, which is BEAM robotics speak for a bot that soaks up the sun all day and blinks (or ‘pumms’, we suppose) for as long as it can throughout the night on the juice it collected. This one uses four mini solar panels to charge up a 4 F supercapacitor.
At the controls is an ATtiny25V, which checks every eight seconds to see if the supercapacitor is charging or not as long as there is enough light. Once night has fallen, the two red LEDs will pumm like a pair of chums until the power runs out. Check out the brief demo after the break.
Would you rather have something more nightstand-friendly?
Here’s a mini night light sculpture with a friendly glow
. If you haven’t started your entry into our
Circuit Sculpture Challenge
, there’s still plenty of time — the contest runs until November 10th. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274363",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-08-30T22:11:13",
"content": "I wonder if it really would work in space?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6274430",
"author": "pirlouwi",
"timestamp": "2020-08-... | 1,760,373,372.54119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/a-pin-pad-blasting-uv-sanitizer/ | A PIN Pad Blasting UV Sanitizer | Tom Nardi | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"sterilizer",
"uv"
] | Retailers have instituted enhanced cleaning procedures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with an aim to keep frequently touched surfaces as clean as possible. Certainly one of the most commonly handled objects in the entire store is the payment terminal by the register, and the PIN pad specifically. Which is why [Josh Starnes] is working on a
UV sterilizer that mounts onto a standard credit card terminal
.
It’s a simple enough idea, but as is often the case, figuring out how to properly execute it is where things get tricky. [Josh] has already moved through several design iterations for his 3D printed enclosure in an attempt to make something that’s unobtrusive enough to be practical. The goal is to make something that the user won’t mistake for some kind of skimming device,
which can certainly be tricky
.
The skeptics in the audience will be happy to hear that [Josh] isn’t bothering with an LED UV source, either.
We’ve all seen the pitfalls of trying to sanitize using UV LEDs
, so this design goes old school with a small 12 volt UV bulb. That does mean it will need a dedicated power source however, which it seems like he’ll be addressing in the next phase of the project.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 47 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274326",
"author": "SteveEh",
"timestamp": "2020-08-30T17:37:25",
"content": "I wonder if a small ozone generator might be more efficient? Great idea none the less, despite constant wiping; I’m sure these pads are not very sanitary",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,373,372.773682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/ocr-reads-old-newspapers-so-we-dont-have-to/ | OCR Reads Old Newspapers So We Don’t Have To | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"digitizing",
"history",
"ocr",
"opencv",
"optical character recognition"
] | Plenty of people don’t bother to read the
current
newspaper, let alone editions that were published over 100 years ago. But there’s a wealth of important historical information buried in these dusty old publications, assuming you can find a way to reliably digitize and index it all. You might think the solution is as simple as running images of the paper through optical character recognition (OCR) software,
but as [John Scancella] explains, the problem is a bit more complicated than that
.
Stretching the text vertically highlights the columns.
Ultimately, the issue largely comes down to formatting. The OCR software reasonably assumes all the text is in orderly horizontal lines, because in the vast majority of cases, it would be. That’s how you’re reading these words now. But as anyone who’s seen an old time newspaper knows, that’s not how things were necessarily written back then. Pages consisted of multiple narrow columns of stories separated by vertical lines; if the OCR tries to read the page from left to right, the resulting text is a mishmash of several unrelated topics.
The answer is to break all those articles into their own images, but doing that manually at any sort of scale simply isn’t an option. So [John] has been working on a system that uses OpenCV to identify the columns of text and isolate them. He details the multi-step process down in his write-up, and even provides the Python code should you want to give it a spin. But the short version is that the image is converted to grayscale and the OpenCV
dilate
function is used to stretch the text in the Y dimension. This produces big blobs of white that can easily be picked out with
findContours()
and snipped into individual images.
It’s not a perfect solution, and there are still a few pitfalls. For one, the name of the paper needs to be removed from the front page before the stretching operation happens. But it’s clearly a step in the right direction, and the results certainly look very promising.
Anything that makes OCR more accurate or easier to implement
is a win in our book, so we’re excited to see where [John] takes this concept. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274297",
"author": "e",
"timestamp": "2020-08-30T14:36:00",
"content": "there may be enough frequency information in the picture to do it without the scaling, i.e.for (x = 0; x < width; x++) {column_total[x] = 0;for (y = 0; y < height; y++) {if (pixel(x,y) == black) {column_total[x... | 1,760,373,372.690798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/olaf-lets-an-esp32-listen-to-the-music/ | Olaf Lets An ESP32 Listen To The Music | Al Williams | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"audio fingerprinting",
"emscripten",
"ESP32",
"Frozen"
] | The joys of overengineering a simple gift. [Joren] wanted to create a dress for his daughter’s fourth birthday that would
react with lights in sequence for a song from Frozen
. The dress and an LED strip, along with a digital microphone and a battery were easy to procure. But how to make it all work? An ESP32 did the trick.
While the project’s name–Olaf–sounds like it was from Frozen, according to the
GitHub
page it actually means Overly Lightweight Acoustic Fingerprinting. Right. However, as the name implies, it can learn to identify any sound you want.
One interesting twist. The code is in C, so running it through Emscripten allows the code to run in your browser and you can watch it work alongside a YouTube video of the movie. You can see in the image above that the fingerprint screen gets red dots until it matches the audio and then the dots turn green, indicating a match.
Even if you don’t want a magic Frozen dress, the code on GitHub could be a good starting point for developing audio-sensitive applications. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274287",
"author": "Sancho",
"timestamp": "2020-08-30T12:48:45",
"content": "I’d use ESP8266 and cnlohr’s simple but brilliant colorchord, but still – impressive project!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6274368",
"aut... | 1,760,373,372.33258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/30/read-my-lips-under-this-no-sew-mask/ | Read My Lips, Under This No-Sew Mask | Brian McEvoy | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"adafruit",
"clear",
"Deaf",
"hearing impaired",
"macgyver",
"mask",
"no-sew",
"towel",
"window"
] | Humans continuously communicate with our bodies, and face masks cover one of the most expressive parts. For some, this is a muffler on strangers, but devastating for people who rely on lip-reading. Several masks exist that have a clear window for precisely this purpose, but they’re specialty and high-demand. [Erin St Blaine] over at Adafruit shows how she makes
windowed masks
with stuff you may already have in your house. Even if your sewing machine is locked up the local maker-space, you are in luck, because you don’t need a single stitch. For the thread-inclined, it is easy to tweak the recipe.
The part of the mask that touches your face is terry cloth, but any breathable cotton towel should work. There is a PDF in the instructions where you can print templates in four sizes. You will also find a cutout for the plastic window salvaged from your cold soft drink cup. A water bottle should work too. Flexible glue holds the fabric together, but to attach the ear-loops, we fall back on our old friend, the red Swingline. If you don’t have that color and brand, any stapler will do in a pinch. Don’t forget to add some defogger and keep smiling.
Wear your homemade mask proudly and fasten it well, but
not too fast
.
Thank you, [Gerben], for the tip. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274282",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-08-30T10:43:37",
"content": "I think it would look pretty manky rather quick , if my experiences with the mask I use when spray painting is anything to go by. The condensation starts dripping out rather quickly on a cold day.Hopefu... | 1,760,373,372.36851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/rc-halftrack-is-lasercut-masterpiece/ | RC HalfTrack Is Lasercut Masterpiece | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"half-track",
"halftrack"
] | The half-track is a vehicle design that has gradually fallen out of favour in the decades since World War II. Combining the benefits of easy driving and handling of wheeled vehicles with the strong mud and snow performance of a tracked vehicle, they served a niche before largely being phased out with the rise of the armoured personnel carrier. [JackCarter] wished to build his own,
so whipped up a lasercut RC version of the
SdKfz 251 22.
The work is impressive, with [JackCarter] creating the design in Solidworks from photos and illustrations of the vehicle. The moving parts are lasercut, including the tracks themselves, assembled from many tiny lasercut MDF parts. The benefit of using lasercutting to make the model is that it was easy for [Jack Carter] to create simple jigs to ease the process of putting the tracks together. A NodeMCU with a motor shield controls the gear motors used to drive the tracks, and drives a servo for steering. Control is via a smartphone, thanks to the Blynk framework which makes building apps for custom projects easy.
The finished product really shows off [JackCarter]’s 3D design skills, and looks like great fun to build and drive. We’d love to see it with a lick of paint and some period decals to really complete the look. Hackers love a good tracked vehicle,
and we’ve seen some impressive builds before.
Video after the break. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274262",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2020-08-30T07:00:27",
"content": "“We’d love to see it with a lick of paint and some period decals to really complete the look.”Sorry leave it as is so you can see the laser cutting, With the paint and decals becomes just another half-t... | 1,760,373,372.487355 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/sdr-transmitting-gets-the-power/ | SDR Transmitting Gets The Power | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amplifier",
"HackRF",
"LimeSDR",
"pluto sdr",
"power amplifier",
"radio",
"sdr",
"software-defined radio",
"transmitter"
] | Most hobby-grade software defined radio setups don’t transmit. Of the few that do, most of them put out anemic levels around one milliwatt or so. If you want to do something outside of the lab, you’ll need an amplifier and that’s what [Tech Minds]
shows how to do in a recent video
. (Embedded below.)
The video covers LimeSDR, HackRF, and the Pluto SDR, although the amplifiers should work with any transmitter. The SPF5189Z module is quite cheap and covers 50 MHz to 4 GHz, amplifying everything you throw at it. The downside is that it will amplify everything you throw at it, even parts of the signal you don’t want, such as spurs and harmonics.
There are other modules, depending on your needs. The CN0417 covers a very narrow range from 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz. (If you can call 100 MHz bandwidth “narrow”.) The RF2126 will cover from 400 Mhz to 2.7 GHz.
None of these are powerhouses. The maximum 20 dB gain will only give you a watt or so out with the minimal drive from most SDR transmitters. But for very many applications, that’s plenty, especially with some filtering.
Unfortunately the gain isn’t stable, and we wonder about the linearity which would affect some modulation modes. There are datasheets for these devices around, such as this one for the
SPF5189Z
.
If you are really into SDR, the
SDR Academy
went virtual this year. You might also enjoy
this book
. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274250",
"author": "Jakub",
"timestamp": "2020-08-30T03:26:33",
"content": "Please, use at last low pass filters… It’s really easy to find yourself on many others, unplanned and restricted bands using this stuff and unwillingly affect somebody’s (eg. emergency response teams) commu... | 1,760,373,372.439603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/a-tiny-jacobs-ladder-you-can-build-at-home/ | A Tiny Jacob’s Ladder You Can Build At Home | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"jacob's ladder"
] | Big fizzing electrical arcs are fun, and handled properly, not too dangerous either. The Jacob’s Ladder is one such piece of arc-generating equipment, one that featured heavily in vintage sci-fi films. It remains a charming demonstration of high-voltage electrical principles,
and you can easily build your own mini version at home
.
The build starts with a basic high-voltage step-up kit that turns 4V DC into 15 kV at the output. At this voltage level, it’s possible to generate an arc in air. To create the Jacob’s ladder, the kit is wired up to a pair of closely-spaced electrodes that slowly get farther apart as they go up vertically. When an arc jumps from one electrode to the other, it ionises the air, and the voltage sags due to the current flow. The flowing current heats up the air, which begins to rise, taking the current path with it, causing the familiar climbing arc we all know and love. As the distance between the electrodes increases towards the top, the arc can eventually no longer be sustained. With no current flowing, the voltage rises again, and a new arc forms at the bottom of the device, repeating the process.
It’s a fun build that would make an excellent desk toy, albeit best shown under glass to avoid accidental electric shocks.
You can even build a larger one out of microwave parts if you’re so inclined
. Video after the break. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274229",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T23:03:21",
"content": "NPN triode :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6274626",
"author": "Tom Li",
"timestamp": "2020-08-31T21:14:52",
"content... | 1,760,373,372.959089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/unifiedwater-finds-potable-water-and-stops-polluters/ | UnifiedWater Finds Potable Water And Stops Polluters | Kristina Panos | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"arduino",
"Arduino MKR",
"dashboard",
"gsm",
"IoT",
"pollution",
"water pollution",
"water quality"
] | Millions of people all over the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and it’s largely because of pollution by corporations and individuals. Solving this problem requires an affordable, scalable way to quickly judge water quality, package the data, and present it to an authority that can crack down on the polluters before the evidence dissipates. Ideally, the solution would be open source and easy to replicate. The more citizen scientists, the better.
[Andrei Florian]’s UnifiedWater flows directly from this line of thinking.
Dip this small handheld device below the surface, and it quickly takes a bunch of water quality and atmospheric readings, averages them, and sends the data to a web dashboard using an Arduino MKR GSM
.
UnifiedWater judges quality by testing the pH and the turbidity of the water, which gauges the amount of impurities. Commercial turbidity sensors work by measuring the amount of light scattered by the solids present in a liquid, so [Andrei] made a DIY version with an LED pointed at a photocell. UnifiedWater also reads the air temperature and humidity, and reports its location along with a timestamp.
This device can run in one of two modes, depending on the application. The enterprise mode is designed for a fleet of devices placed strategically about a body of water. In this mode, the devices sample continuously, taking readings every 15 minutes, and can send notifications that trigger on predefined thresholds. There’s also a one-and-done individual mode for hikers and campers who need to find potable water. Once UnifiedWater takes the readings, the NeoPixel ring provides instant color-coded judgment. Check out the demo after the break.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274214",
"author": "Jerry",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T20:32:45",
"content": "Very cool project… with all those LED’s, why not just have a row of individual LED’s that are labeled Boot, Insert in sample, Remove from Sample, Processing, Uploading, Error, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,373.013871 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/easy-to-use-music-player-relies-on-rfid/ | Easy-To-Use Music Player Relies On RFID | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"DFPlayer",
"music",
"music player",
"rfid"
] | Microwaves used to be simple to use. Set the dial for the desired time, and hit start. Then, everything went digital and the average microwave now takes between four and six button presses in precise order just to start heating. Music players have gone down a similar path, and those that grew up in the era of vinyl records can find modern digital media simply too hard to work with. To solve this problem, [ananords] whipped up Juuke,
a music player focused on ease of use
.
The Juuke has a simplistic interface intended to be as easy to use as possible. Songs are selected using printed cards with embedded RFID tags – placing them on the Juuke triggers playback. Volume is controlled with a simple knob, and the only two buttons are for play/pause and shuffle mode.
Underneath, an Arduino Uno runs the show, hooked up to a RC522 RFID interface board. Music is handled by the DFPlayer mini, which loads tracks off a microSD card. The DFPlayer can be hooked up to a speaker directly, but there’s also a 3.5mm jack output if the device is to be used with an external amplifier.
It’s a tidy project, and one that actually looks pretty fun to use. Obviously, there’s some time investment required to prepare the SD card and produce the RFID cards, but the final product could be fun to use at a party, too.
We’ve seen similar builds before, as well.
Video after the break. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274185",
"author": "Osgeld",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T17:17:26",
"content": "wait wut most microwave ovens you hit one number button and it goes for that amount of minutes, its actually simpler than the dial and start",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,373.123325 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/impossibilities-and-3d-printing/ | Impossibilities And 3D Printing | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d printing",
"commerce",
"getting paid",
"licensing",
"newsletter"
] | This week our own [Donald Papp] wrote a thought-provoking piece on
buying and selling 3D-printer models
. His basic point: if you don’t know what you’re getting until you’ve purchased it, and there’s no refund policy, how can you tell if your money is being well spent? It’s a
serious problem for these nascent markets
, because when customers aren’t satisfied they won’t come back.
It got me thinking about my own experience, albeit with all of the free 3D models out there. They are a supremely mixed bag, and even though you’re not paying for the model, you’re paying in printing time, filament, and effort. It pays to be choosy, and all of [Donald]’s suggestions hold in the “free” market as well.
Failenium Falcon. Image by
Johannes
Only download models that have been printed
at least once
, have decent documentation about things like layer height, filament type, and support, and to the best of your abilities, be critical about the ability to fabricate the part at all. Fused-deposition printers can only print on top of previous layers, and have a distinct grain, so you need to watch out for overhangs and print orientation. With resin printers, you need to be careful about trapped volumes of uncured resin. You want to be sure that the modeler at least took these considerations into account.
But when your parts have strength requirements, fits, and tolerances, it gets even worse. There’s almost no way a designer can know if you’re overextruding on your first layers or not. Different slicers handle corners differently, making inner surfaces shrink to varying degrees. How can the designer work around your particular situation?
My personal answer is open-source. Whenever possible, I prefer models in OpenSCAD. If you download an STL with ten M8 bolt holes, you
could
widen them all in a modeling program, but if you’ve got the source code, it’s as easy as changing a single variable. Using the source plays to the customizability of 3D printing, which is perhaps its strongest suit, in my mind. Nobody knows exactly how thick your desk is but you, after all. Making a headphone hook that’s customizable is key.
So even if the markets for 3D prints
can
solve the reliability problems, through customer reviews or requirements of extensive documentation, they’ll never be able to solve the one-size-fits-nobody issue. Open source fixes this easily. Sell me the source, not the STL!
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
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! | 43 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274165",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T14:10:24",
"content": "A free STL is better than nothing. It would be ungrateful to suggest otherwise. It’s akin to the old ‘give a man a fish…’.With limited time, I’ll take the fish. I might make kedgeree from it, or a fillet... | 1,760,373,373.455172 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/two-days-left-to-enter-the-hackaday-prize/ | Two Days Left To Enter The Hackaday Prize! | Mike Szczys | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize"
] | Your entry for the
2020 Hackaday Prize
needs to be in by Monday morning, August 31st!
This is the deadline for initial entries, if you’re one of the one hundred lucky projects that advance to the finals you’ll still have another month to polish up your project. Why not make this weekend your own personal hackathon?
Entries focus on
four challenges outlined by our non-profit partners
this year. From improving modular dome housing and developing manufacturing techniques in disaster zones, to designing interfaces for people with physical challenges and protecting natural ocean landscapes, there’s plenty of room to be creative here. In addition to the $50,000 grand prize there are still nine other top prizes up for grabs.
You can do this. Tell your story, show a proof of concept, and document it to convince the judges your project is viable. It’ll be tight, but hackers work best when deadlines are looming. We can’t wait to see what you come up with between now and Monday!
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274195",
"author": "Cromulent Bloviator",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T18:01:39",
"content": "It seems like everybody running this forgot to do anything this year.If you click the link, they want you to enter, that much is clear. But they don’t want you to see the entries!There is no l... | 1,760,373,373.314038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/automation-with-a-new-twist/ | Automation With A New Twist | Brian McEvoy | [
"Games",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"frustrating",
"game",
"home automation",
"puzzle",
"rubiks cube",
"smart home"
] | Turning on a lightbulb has never been easier. You can do it from your mobile. Voice activation through home assistants is robust. Wall switches even play nicely with the above methods. It was only a matter of time before someone decided to make it fun, if you consider a Rubik’s cube enjoyable. [Alastair Aitchison] at Playful Technology demonstrated that it is possible to
trigger a relay when you match all the colors
. Video also after the break.
The cube does little to obfuscate game data, so in this scope, it sends unencrypted transmissions. An ESP32 with [Alastair]’s Arduino code, can track each movement, and recognize a solved state. In the video, he solves the puzzle, and an actuator releases a balloon. He talks about some other cool things this could do, like home automation or a puzzle room, which is in his wheelhouse judging by the rest of his YouTube channel.
We would love to see different actions perform remote tasks. Twisting the top could set a timer for 1-2-3-4-5 minutes, while the bottom would change the bedroom lights from red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet. Solving the puzzle should result in
a barrage of NERF darts
or maybe keep housemates from
cranking the A/C
on a whim. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274183",
"author": "jwrm22",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T17:03:28",
"content": "I can imagine these cubes to become quite useful for practising cubing skills.For instance when learning fewest moves challenge where you want to find the shortest solution.The optimum is always below 20 m... | 1,760,373,373.275091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/29/auxiliary-display-makes-ham-radio-field-operations-easier/ | Auxiliary Display Makes Ham Radio Field Operations Easier | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"cat",
"computer aided transceiver",
"FT-817",
"ham",
"transceiver",
"yaesu"
] | As popular as the venerable Yaesu FT-817 transceiver might be with amateur radio operators, it’s not without its flaws, particularly in the user interface department. [Andy (G7UHN)] is painfully familiar with these flaws, so he designed
this auxiliary display and control panel for the FT-817
to make operating it a little easier.
There are a ton of ways to enjoy ham radio, but one of the more popular ways is to bust out of the shack and operate in the great outdoors. From the seashore to mountain peaks, hams love giving their rigs some fresh air and sunshine. The battery-powered, multimode, all-band FT-817 is great for these jaunts, but to fit as much radio into a small package as they did, Yaesu engineers had to compromise on the controls. Rather than bristling with buttons, many of the most-used features of the radio are buried within menus that require multiple clicks and twists to access.
[Andy]’s solution is a PCB bearing an Arduino Nano, an LCD screen, and a whole bunch of actual buttons. The board sits on top of the case and talks to the radio over a 8-pin mini-DIN cable using both documented and undocumented CAT, or
Computer Aided Transceiver
commands. The LCD displays the current status of various features and the buttons provide easy access to changing them, essentially by sending keystrokes to the radio.
Hats off to [Andy] for tackling this project.
The only other FT-817 hack
we’ve seen before was useful but far simpler, and didn’t require KiCad, which [Andy] had to teach himself for this one. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274142",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T08:15:57",
"content": "I’m proud to not own an FT-817.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6274143",
"author": "Hamham",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T08:22:12",
... | 1,760,373,373.584364 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/robotic-mouse-toy-built-for-cats/ | Robotic Mouse Toy Built For Cats | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"cat",
"mouse",
"robot"
] | Cats are nature’s born hunters. Whether its rodents, insects, or lasers, they’ll pounce and attack with ruthless efficiency. Built to challenge a cat, or perhaps merely to tease it, Sourino is
a robotic mouse built with common off-the-shelf parts
.
A test subject appears unamused.
So named for the combination of Souris (French for “mouse”) and Arduino, the project is driven by an Arduino Nano. Hooked up to three sets of ultrasonic transducers, this gives the robot mouse much improved obstacle avoidance abilities compared to using just a single transducer front-and-centre. The ‘bot can navigate basic mazes or household floors with ease. A pair of geared motors are used for drive, using simple skid-steering to turn corners. It’s all packed in a 3D printed enclosure, which mounts the various components and exposes the ultrasonic sensors. There’s even an IR remote enabling mode selection or full manual control.
While the ‘bot lacks the speed and agility of common house mice, it’s nevertheless a project that teaches plenty of valuable lessons. We’re sure [Electrocat01] picked up plenty of skills in robotic navigation, mechanical design and 3D printing along the way. Creating robot mice is actually a competitive field,
as we’ve seen before.
Video after the break. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274127",
"author": "starhawk",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T05:37:54",
"content": "Should’ve named it “Ratatouino” IMO…( :P :P :P )",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6274134",
"author": "kalle",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T07:03... | 1,760,373,373.536555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/video-compression-explainer-like-were-five-year-olds/ | Video Compression Explainer — Like We’re Five-Year-Olds | Al Williams | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"discrete cosine transform",
"matlab",
"video compression"
] | [Ottverse] has an interesting series in progress to demystify video compression. The latest installment promises to
explain discrete cosine transforms
as though you were five years old.
We’ll be honest. At five, we probably didn’t know how to interpret this sentence:
…the Discrete Cosine Transform takes a set of N correlated (similar) data-points and returns N de-correlated (dis-similar) data-points (coefficients) in such a way that the energy is compacted in only a few of the coefficients M where M << N.
Still, the explanation is pretty clear and we really liked the analogy with the spheres and the stars in a constellation.
The example Matlab code is probably also lost on a five-year-old, but we liked it. Anyone, we think, can understand the practical result where removing too much data — high compression — resulted in a poor quality image, but the image quality was pretty good even when 75% of the data vanishes.
So while you might not want to show this to your five-year-old, you might enjoy it and even learn something. The rest of the series is pretty good, too. There are discussions of data compression, codecs, and encoders. We are sure there’s more to come, also.
If you are not into Matlab, you could probably do the same trick with
SciPy
pretty easily. Or, try
Octave
, one of several open-source projects that are similar to Matlab. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274109",
"author": "Krishna",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T02:59:33",
"content": "Hey guys – author of that blog post here. My colleague submitted it to HN and I got a lot of positive comments and constructive feedback (the way I like to look at it). I guess my core audience got it imm... | 1,760,373,373.365763 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-new-spin-on-a-medical-test/ | A New Spin On A Medical Test | Brian McEvoy | [
"computer hacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"centrifuge",
"disk",
"e-waste",
"ewaste",
"hdd",
"medical sample",
"microhematocrit",
"packed cell volume",
"PCV"
] | Most of us can say that we have taken an obsolete hard drive out of a computer and felt it was a waste to toss it in the e-waste pile. Some of us have children’s drawings hung on the fridge with actuator magnets, or maybe a vast spreadsheet suspended on a steel filing cabinet. Let us not forget that there is also a high-speed, low-noise motor in there. On some models it is separate from the PCB, so grab an Electronic Speed Controller (ESC), your microcontroller of choice, and make yourself a
salvaged HDD centrifuge
like [Cave Man] has. His build uses the tray as a chassis, but he modeled and printed a new face in the same style as the original.
On top, he has an OLED screen for displaying the requested speed, measured speed, and runtime. Next to the display is a four-button pad with a customized legend for setting parameters. The video after the break shows the machine running through its paces. This version accommodates the tiny capillary tubes, microhematocrit tubes, for processing raw blood. This test can calculate the packed cell volume, which professionals use to determine things from dehydration to anemia.
There are other builds out there where people have modified an old drive into the kind of centrifuge that accepts larger diameter tubes, but this was a shining example of what is possible. One good turn deserves another, so we recommend a
desktop bio-lab companion
, or
enlist some LEGO Mindstorms
to help out. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274114",
"author": "Red-Fathom",
"timestamp": "2020-08-29T03:40:53",
"content": "I would like to point out the drive board already has a motor driver, and most micro controllers are more than capable communicating with it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,373.49594 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/laser-etching-photos-on-to-eggs/ | Laser-Etching Photos On To Eggs | Lewin Day | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"egg",
"eggbot"
] | CNC machines are every maker’s dream. Capable of churning out accurate parts from CAD designs with a minimum of manual labor, they’re a great tool to have in the workshop. Alternatively, you can use them for more entertaining pursuits. [Leo]’s project is one of the latter –
etching greyscale photos on to eggs.
The first thing you’ll need is an egg-compatible CNC machine.
The Eggbot is a popular option
, else a fourth-axis on an existing machine can also do the job as in [Leo]’s case. Coupling the egg is a delicate task, for which some rubber paper rollers are salvaged from an old printer and put to work. Then, a laser needs to be fitted to the CNC head, and the egg depth mapped with a probe to ensure the entire etching is in focus. Then it’s simply a matter of loading up an image, and turning the greyscale data into the relevant G-code to burn it onto the egg.
Using eggs coated in black ink, the results [Leo] achieves are impressive. The eggs would make an amusing Easter gift, or serve as a great cheap way to teach students about CNC techniques. Obviously, eye protection is a must, and be sure to mount your laser securely to avoid any unintentional exposures. Video after the break. | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274073",
"author": "H",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T20:49:04",
"content": "Nice job but it’s gonna put a lot of Ukrainians out of work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6274088",
"author": "Automated ≠ Automatic",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,373.632797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/building-a-heavy-duty-open-source-ventilator/ | Building A Heavy Duty Open Source Ventilator | Tom Nardi | [
"Medical Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"Covid-19",
"medical device",
"ventilator"
] | Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, we’ve seen several attempts to create homebrew ventilators designed to address the shortage of these lifesaving machines. Unfortunately, most hackers aren’t terribly experienced when it comes to designing practical medical equipment. So while many of the designs might have appeared functional on the workbench, there’s little chance they’d get used in any official capacity.
The open source DP Ventilator is still clearly the product of a couple plucky hackers, but we think it shows a
level of design maturity that’s been missing
in many of the earlier attempts. Made primarily with 3D printed components, this mechanical device is designed to operate a hand-held manual resuscitator; essentially standing in for a human operator. This makes the design far less complex than if it had to actually pump air itself, not to mention safer for the patient since the resuscitator (often referred to as an Ambu Bag) installed in it would be a sterile pre-packaged item.
In the video after the break, you can see just how much thought and effort has been put into the device’s touch screen interface. With a few quick taps the medical professional operating the DP Ventilator can dial in variables such as breathing rate, pressure, and volume to match the patient’s needs. While the Arduino Mega 2560 at the machine’s heart wouldn’t pass muster for any regulating body in charge of medical devices, we think with a few more tweaks, this design is getting close to something that might actually be able to save lives.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 12 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274055",
"author": "RetiredHobgoblin",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T18:46:16",
"content": "The hackers have not written up a specification. Can the behaviour of any engineered system be “correct” without such a specification? NO",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,373,374.541634 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-tale-of-tutor-texts/ | A Tale Of Tutor Texts | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"programmed instruction",
"tutor text",
"tutortext"
] | Have you ever had one of those books that let you choose your own adventure? You know, the book will say “The bully tells you to hand over the secret message. If you want to run away, turn to page 48. If you want to fight him, turn to page 70.” While this is normally a staple of children’s literature, there were a series of training books known as Tutor Texts that used the format to teach technical topics.
In fact, one of these books was my first introduction to computer programming more years ago than I care to admit. But it wasn’t just computer programming. There were titles from the same publisher about trigonometry, slide rules, and even how to play bridge. I own four of these old books and it got me to thinking about how we deliver information on the web. Maybe these books were ahead of their time.
The Advantage
Assuming a book like this is well constructed, this is a pretty good idea. A regular book just tells you something and then — maybe — asks you a question or two to see if you got the idea right. If you don’t, you have to go back and reread the same material that didn’t make sense to you in the first place.
If you think back to some skill you struggled with, you can probably see the value of getting a second or even third take on the same topic. For example, think about learning to tie your shoes or even a necktie. It probably seems effortless now, but whoever taught you probably had to show you several different ways. Ditto for riding a bike.
With the Tutor Text approach — technically known as programmed instruction — this isn’t how it works. You are given a problem and if you choose the wrong answer, you are directed to a new different explanation. Once in awhile the text will simply give you an explanation and tell you to go back and try again, but often the wrong answer pages take you on a detour path to correct your thinking before rejoining the main line of the book.
As a side note, there are other techniques that also fall under the umbrella of programmed instruction, training, or learning. For the purpose of this post, I mean programmed instruction to be in the style of the Tutor Texts: ask a multiple choice question and then explain why it was correct or incorrect before proceeding. As far as I can tell, the technique originated with the US Air Force where psychologist Norman Crowder used it to efficiently train maintenance crews in the 1960s.
For Example
For example, in the computer programming version of the book, they are using an imaginary machine called TUTAC that works with decimal numbers — not unheard of in the 1960s. (We’ve talked about
the TUTAC and other made up machines of those days
before.)
Here’s an example problem:
Honestly, I don’t remember the answer — I haven’t really read this book since I was 12 years old. But let’s just randomly pick the first answer and go to page 244:
Oops. From the context of this answer, I’m guessing the correct answer was on page 251. That page not only reports you are correct but explains why you are correct before posing a new question. Sometimes there is new information before the new question and sometimes it is just a multi-part question.
The Problem
Although the better topics lead you to more practice problems when you stumble, the more complex ones tend to give you an explanation and then send you back to the question to try again. Why? If you try writing something like this yourself, you find that it quickly spirals out of control. You explain A but the reader doesn’t get get it. So you explain it again, but still no dice. So you review something from the past and ask again. Nothing. Now what? There has to be some limit to how much you branch.
Sometimes it is hard to know in advance the topics people aren’t going to understand. If you’ve ever tried to teach someone to tie a tie or ride a bike, you know what I mean. It is so easy once you know how. But until you get to that point it is nearly impossible and — worse — once you do know, you forget why it was so hard in the beginning. Ideally, you want to design questions that have answers that indicate where there is a misunderstanding.
For example, if I showed a picture of two resistors in parallel connected to a 10 V battery, I might ask: What’s the voltage across the two resistors? The correct answer, of course, is 10 V. But I might throw in 5 V as a decoy answer because some people might think the resistors split the voltage, for example. Another answer might be 10 divided by the sum of the resistors in case someone thought it was an Ohm’s law problem.
There’s also the problem of combinatorial explosion. Let’s say you have a topic about interpreting a data dump and from the answer the reader chooses, you realize they don’t know hexadecimal. No problem, you just write a topic on that. But now you realize they don’t understand exponents. Chains like this can go on and on.
Modern Day
You do see programmed instruction from time to time in your Web browser, but you’d think it would be ubiquitous, and it isn’t. A lot of training courses are little more than overhead slides converted to PowerPoint. Yet this seems like a missed opportunity.
Think about it. With a computer-based text, you would have a lot more options. The excellent
EDx electrical engineering class
, for example, can give you random practice questions. I assume the author could give a range of values and relationships (e.g., R1=5K to 10K, R2=(1.8 to 2.2)*R1). The computer solves the problem and knows the answer. So if you work the same practice problem four or five times, you get a different answer each time.
Imagine a report that showed which incorrect answers have the most hits and, perhaps, which have none. Which topics have a high percentage of incorrect responses the first time through? Maybe that text needs some additional thought. How long do students read a topic before answering? Lots of data to mine that could make the material better.
It is interesting that if you search Google for “programmed instruction” most of what you get back are pedagogical articles about the technique. There are a few other books that have used the technique. However, more used a different form proposed by B. F. Skinner where questions and answers appear after a short bit of text. “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” is a good example, as is Quick Calculus.
Radio Shack had a ham radio course called “
From 5 Watts to 1,000 Watts
” that proudly proclaimed it was a programmed course. While a lot of online courses do insert activities as these books do, there are few that do the multiple-choice/explanation style that the Tutor Text uses.
Future
Maybe one day this kind of programmed instruction will be popular again. It wouldn’t be hard to build a web-based framework to present this kind of thing. You could even do it with PowerPoint, in a crude way. After all, in the 1960s they did it with paper.
Meanwhile, the Tutor Text stands as a great tribute to the concept. They taught me a lot, and I’m sure a lot of others, too. Of course, nowadays you can also take college courses online, many
for free
. Or go old school and learn electronics
from the Navy
. | 30 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274028",
"author": "TomWSMF",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T17:23:50",
"content": "So of course once I finished reading this I DDG’d TutorText and happily there was one up on the Internet Archive.https://archive.org/details/TutorText_on_Nutritional_Cooking/page/n11/mode/2upFascinating u... | 1,760,373,373.706109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/hackaday-podcast-082-dj-cnc-nfc-black-box-sound-of-keys-and-payin-for-3d-prints/ | Hackaday Podcast 082: DJ CNC, NFC Black Box, Sound Of Keys, And Payin’ For 3D Prints | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"cardboard",
"CNC mill",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"lock picking",
"NFC",
"shed"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys check in on the best hacks from the past week. All the buzz is the algorithm that can reverse engineer your house keys from the way they sound going into the lock. Cardboard construction goes extreme with an RC car build that’s beyond wizard-level. Speaking of junk builds, there’s a CNC mill tipped on its side grinding out results worlds better than you expect from something made with salvaged CD-ROM drives. And a starburst character display is a clever combination of laser cutting and alternative using UV-cured resin as a diffuser.
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 082 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Running A Successful Hacker Camp In A Pandemic: BornHack 2020
2020 Hackaday Prize
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Mini CNC Mill Goes Horizontal To Reuse CD Drives
Cheap small CNC mill – “Formula 1551” for now
Four Years Later, Off-Grid Office Shed Still Rocks
Working In Peace With An Off-Grid Office Shed
Stealing Keys From The Sound Of The Lock
Prop-Driven Cardboard RC Car Doesn’t Skimp On Performance
Breaking Smartphone NFC Firmware: The Gory Details
RFID Readers, Writers, And Spoofers
Nexmon Turns Nexus 5 (and RPi3!) Into WiFi Toolkit
Unique LED Display Inspired By Fighter Jet Dashboard
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
New Arduino JPEG Library Focuses On Speed
Circle Guitar Creates Wall Of Sound
Sunrise, Sunset, Repeat
Mike’s Picks:
MIDI Slide Whistle Shows The Value Of A Proper Fipple
Mini Marble-Powered Synth Pays Homage To Its Bigger Cousins
GTA V Mod Shows (And Cheats) Those Stunt Jump Hoops
Can’t-Miss Articles:
3D Printering: The World Of Non-Free 3D Models Is Buyer Beware
Damage To Arecibo Leaves Gaping Hole In Astronomy
Aricebo Message | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6275737",
"author": "Sasza",
"timestamp": "2020-09-04T15:45:20",
"content": "Hi, why there is no hackaday podcast in Google podcast app? It looks like someone delete channel and all files…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6276212... | 1,760,373,373.797782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/creating-kelvin-test-leads-for-four-wire-measurments/ | Creating Kelvin Test Leads For Four-Wire Measurments | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"four-wire sensing",
"kelvin",
"kelvin probes"
] | [VoltLog] has a cheap Hantek LCR meter, but it only has two probes. The best resistance and impedance measurements, though, use four wires to improve accuracy. The first order of business was a
custom PCB
to fit into the connector of the meter, along with a 3D-printed case.
Using a four-wire scheme requires unusual alligator clips that don’t electrical short the jaws together. The clips were hard to solder and even harder to strain relief. but [VoltLog] seemed to handle it with little problem.
There are some ready-made solutions for this, of course, but the good ones aren’t cheap. Besides, this way, the lead length is exactly what you want and you can control the entire construction, including sheilding and strain releif.
If you haven’t run into four-wire sensing before, it is a simple idea. In a normal two-wire measurement, you send a voltage through the device under test and measure the current through the wires. But since you’re using the same pair of wires to deliver the current and measure it, the resistance of the test leads get tangled up in the measurement.
With four wires, one pair of wires is used to supply the current, and the other to measure the voltage drop across them. The sense wires won’t carry very much current and, thus, there won’t be a significant voltage drop between the device under test and the measurment device. There may be a drop across the supply wires, but we don’t care anymore.
We have seen four-wire measurements in a lot of
different places
. We even
simulated how it improves measurements
and you can too. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274025",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T17:19:10",
"content": "“you send a voltage through the device under test and measure the current through the wires”Huh? Wha?Shoot a voltage through the device?I know what you are trying to say, here, but… noAlso, most DVMs... | 1,760,373,373.910274 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/this-week-in-security-xcode-infections-freepik-and-crypto-fails/ | This Week In Security: XCode Infections, Freepik, And Crypto Fails | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"crypto",
"google",
"wordpress"
] | There is a scenario that keep security gurus up at night: Malware that can detect software compilation and insert itself into the resulting binary.
A new Mac malware, XCSSET
(
PDF
), does just that, running whenever Xcode is used to build an application. Not only is there the danger of compiled apps being malicious, the malware also collects data from the developer’s machine. It seems that the malware spreads through infected Xcode projects.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress has a complicated security track record. The core project has had very few serious vulnerabilities over the years. On the other hand, WordPress sites are routinely compromised. How? Generally through vulnerable plugins. Case in point?
Advanced Access Manager
. It’s a third party WordPress plugin with an estimate 100,000 installations. The problem is that this plugin requires user levels, a deprecated and removed WordPress feature. The missing feature had some unexpected results, like allowing any user to request administrator privileges.
The issue has been fixed in 6.6.2 of the plugin, so if you happen to run the Advanced Access Manager plugin, make sure to get it updated. Beyond that, maybe it’s time to do an audit on your WordPress site. Uninstall unused plugins, and make sure the rest are up to date, along with the WordPress installation itself.
Freepik
A source of graphics and stock photos, Freepik gives a few bits away for free, and requires a monthly subscription for access to the rest of the library. A few days ago, someone discovered a SQL injection attack on the icon site, and
the user database was grabbed
. A few things caught my interest about their report. First, the report claims that the only data that escaped was email addresses and in some cases, password hashes. It’s unclear why addresses and credit card information weren’t part of the leak.
The next tidbit of interest is that any account using a federated login, that is using a Facebook, Twitter, or Google account to log in, only exposed an email address. In retrospect, it’s an obvious advantage of using a single sign on. The service has that much less information to lose about the account. The other bit of interest is that a few older accounts still used salted MD5 password hashes, while the vast majority used the more modern bcrypt.
Overcoming Exploit Mitigations
Crowdstrike put out
a pair
of
blog posts
about the state of OS hardening techniques, and how to overcome them. Data Execution Prevention and Address Space Layout Randomization are considered legacy techniques at this point, so go check out the series to get up to date.
Let’s Talk About Crypto
What’s the first rule of crypto? “Don’t roll your own crypto.” What exactly does that mean, and why? We have
a case study in how crypto can go wrong
, and a few tips on how to do it right. The project in question is a
.net
implementation of
the Branca token
, which is an interesting protocol in itself.
That warning about rolling your own crypto usually means that you should use published algorithms, that have been proven by time and peer review. For years now, AES has had smarter people than you or I looking for flaws. It’s very likely that it’s a better block cipher than anything we could come up with. That warning, however, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ever build anything crypto related. If there isn’t a library that does what you need for a project, go for it, built it from scratch. But take some precautions to keep yourself out of trouble.
Test vectors are the published results of running an algorithm with specific settings. If you run AES with a certain key and a certain input text, you get a known ciphertext every time. A good set of test vectors will include possible edge cases, like an empty string for the plaintext. Find the test vectors for the crypto you’re using, and make sure your project replicates them. Even better, build in unit testing, and automate that process. The Branca token has published vectors, and the
.net
implementation in question failed to replicate. Oops.
Another bit of good crypto hygiene is to use constant time functions to thwart timing-based attacks. Again, in our example library, Branca uses the Poly1305 Message Authentication Code (MAC). A MAC is essentially a keyed hash that is appended to the string to be verified. It’s the last thing changed on the outgoing message, and the first thing checked on the incoming message. If the MAC doesn’t validate, the message can be dropped right away. It’s possible that an attacker would be able to detect how long it takes the receiving end to drop a message with an invalid MAC. If the comparison is done in a naive way, as it is here, the timing gives away how far into the comparison the message differed from what was expected. You know the scene in the movie when the super secret password is being guessed one character at a time? That’s kind of how a timing attack against this sort of flaw would work, and that’s what you want to avoid.
There are obviously more gotchas when working with cryptography, but this particular story underlines two of the first steps you should take to be sure that you’re using cryptography correctly. Use known good code and algorithms, verify inputs with outputs, and follow best practices like constant time string comparisons.
Hacking Google’s infrastructure for Fun and Profit
[Wouter ter Maat] and [Ezequiel Pereira] were researching Google’s Cloud SQL service, and
found a SQL injection
in a CSV export function. Just a bit of cleverness allowed them to dump data from a database into a specified file in the
/mysql/temp/
directory. The real trick is that they could run the export again, but intercept the API call and modify it, adding command line options to the
mysqldump
command.
One of those options? Specifying an authentication plugin. Since they already had the ability to drop a file on the filesystem, getting
mysqldump
to run a malicious plugin was fairly easy, leading to a reverse shell. For their efforts, they got a message from the Google Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in the form of a
greetings.txt
file. The bugs they found have been fixed, but not before they discovered an SSH hijack that allowed escaping the SQL container. Let’s hope Google paid them a nice bounty for their hard work. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6274004",
"author": "jonmayo",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T14:45:48",
"content": "Infecting the compilation process is an old trick, as documented in Ken Thompson’s “Reflections on Trusting Trust”https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,373,374.146822 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/open-hardware-laptop-built-on-power-pc-isa/ | Open Hardware Laptop Built On Power PC ISA | Bryan Cockfield | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"ibm",
"instruction set arcitecture",
"laptop",
"open source",
"pc",
"power",
"Power ISA",
"powerpc"
] | Since Apple switched to Intel chips in the mid-00s, the PowerPC chips from Motorola and the PowerPC Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that they had been using largely fell by the wayside. While true that niche applications like supercomputing still use the Power ISA on other non-Apple hardware, the days of personal computing with PowerPC are largely gone unless you’re still desperately trying to keep your Power Mac G5 out of the landfill or replaying Twilight Princess. Luckily for enthusiasts, though, the Power ISA is now open source and
this group has been working on an open-source laptop based on this architecture
.
While development is ongoing and there are no end-user products available yet, the progress that this group has made shows promise. They have completed their PCB designs and schematics and have a working bill of materials, including a chassis from Slimbook. There are also prototypes with a T2080RDB development kit and a NXP T2080 processor, although they aren’t running on their intended hardware yet. While still in the infancy, there are promising videos (linked below) which show the prototypes operating smoothly under the auspices of the Debian distribution that is tailored specifically for the Power ISA.
We are excited to see work continue on this project, as the Power ISA has a number of advantages over x86 in performance, ARM when considering that it’s non-proprietary, and even RISC-V since it is older and better understood. If you want a deeper comparison between all of these ISAs, our own [Maya Posch]
covered that topic in detail
as well as covered the
original move that IBM made to open-source the Power ISA
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273983",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T12:12:48",
"content": "There is even a group developing a libre SOC based on Open Power PC ISA:https://libre-soc.org/Interesting reads!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "62740... | 1,760,373,374.308662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/over-engineered-single-button-timer/ | Over-Engineered Single Button Timer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"features",
"lcd",
"simplicity",
"single button",
"timer"
] | Feature creep is typically something to be avoided, since watching a relatively simple project balloon into a rat’s nest of complexity often leads to ineffective, or even abandoned, projects. On the other hand, if you can maintain a tight focus, it’s not always a bad thing. [cbm80Amiga] shows us how to drill down and add specific features in this
single-button timer
without losing focus on what the original project was all about.
The timer is based on an Arduino Pro Mini and an HX1230 LCD with a simple piezo speaker for audible alerts. A single button controls operation of the timer, with short presses incrementing each digit and long presses moving on to the next digit. Controlling button presses this finely is a project in its own, but then [cbm80Amiga] moves on to other features such as backlight control, low power modes which allow it to operate for around two years on a single battery charge, preset times for various kitchen uses, and different appearance settings.
Honestly we aren’t sure how you could cram any more features on this timer without fundamentally altering the designed simplicity. It doesn’t fall into the abyss of feature creep while being packed with features, and it’s another example of how
keeping things simple
is often a recipe for success.
Thanks to [Hari] for the tip! | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273944",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T08:22:08",
"content": "Is it really not able to update once a second?!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273947",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,373,374.101831 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/38-years-later-the-atari-2600-learns-to-speak/ | 38 Years Later, The Atari 2600 Learns To Speak | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"atari",
"atari 2600",
"atari 8 bit",
"atari 800xl",
"speech generating device",
"speech synthesis",
"text to speech",
"voder"
] | Back in the early 1980s, there was a certain fad in making your computer produce something resembling human speech. There were several hardware solutions to this, adding voices to everything from automated telephone systems to video game consoles, all the way to Steve Jobs using the gimmick to introduce Macintosh to the world in 1984. In 1982, a software-based version of this synthesis was released for the Atari 8-bit line of computers, and ever since them [rossumur] has wondered
whether or not it could run on the very constrained 2600
.
Fast-forward 38 years and he found out that the answer was that yes, it was indeed possible to port a semblance of the original 1982 Software Automatic Mouth (or SAM) to run
entirely on the Atari 2600
, without any additional hardware. To be able to fit such a seemingly complicated piece of software into the paltry 128 bytes (yes, bytes) of RAM, [rossumur] actually uses an authoring tool in order to pre-calculate the allophones, and store only those in the ROM. This way, the 2600 alone can’t convert text to phonemes, but there’s enough space left for the allophones, which are converted into sound, that about two minutes of speech can fit into one cartridge. As for why he went through the trouble, we quote the author himself: “Because creating digital swears with 1982 speech synthesis technology on a 1977 game console is exactly what we need right now.”
For this project, [rossumur] has written
an incredibly interesting article on speech synthesis
in order to explain the SAM engine used here. And this isn’t his first time on the website either, always cramming software where it shouldn’t fit, such as
a “Netflix”-like streaming service
, or
8-bit console emulators
, both on nothing but an ESP32 microcontroller. Check this one out in action after the break. | 11 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273968",
"author": "Phillip",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T10:49:14",
"content": "That’s pretty cool! Had a hard time understanding it at times but nevertheless impressive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6273969",
"author": "P... | 1,760,373,374.190552 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/cold-tube-draws-the-heat/ | Cold Tube Draws The Heat | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"air conditioning",
"cooling",
"radiant cooling"
] | If you live anywhere near the tropics, air conditioning isn’t a luxury but a necessity. The problem however is that humid climates can cause conventional air conditioners to draw more power to dehumidify the air than it requires to just cool it, which increases the power needed to run the unit. Back in 1963, there was a proposal to create a cooling system that didn’t foster condensation and couple it with different methods of removing humidity. Researchers in Singapore have now
created such a system
. It uses a membrane that is permeable to infrared radiation but prevents condensation around the cooling unit.
You can see a video of the apparatus in a pavilion in the Singapore heat in the video below. Chilled water runs through tubes behind a membrane that passes thermal radiation. Since the tubes are not exposed to the ambient atmosphere, condensation is minimal. But heat radiates from the warmer area to the much colder area of the tubes.
Desiccant passively dries the air. Does it work? The paper mentions testing in January which sounds odd to people from chillier latitudes, but Singapore is so near the equator that it isn’t really what others might call winter there even in January. A quick search reveals the average temperature in January is 87F or about 30.5C. People found the area to be subjectively cool and comfortable.
We wonder of course if you could cool electronics with a scheme like this in applications where airflow or vibration from a contact surface could be an issue–for example, under a microscope. You can
build a classic air conditioner
out of odd parts if you like.
Swamp coolers
work well, but not with humidity. | 63 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273882",
"author": "SteveS",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T02:26:21",
"content": "Did a doubletake on that graphic….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273883",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T02:29:38",
... | 1,760,373,374.399011 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/hands-on-bornhack-2020-badge-has-9x32-of-bling-fed-by-circuitpython/ | Hands-On: BornHack 2020 Badge Has 9×32 Of Bling Fed By CircuitPython | Jenny List | [
"cons"
] | [
"badge",
"badgelife",
"BornHack",
"CircuitPython"
] | Despite widespread pandemic cancellations, BornHack still happened this year and they even managed to once again bring an electronic badge to all attendees. If you missed it, I’ve already published
an overview of the hacker camp itself
. Today let’s dig into
the 2020 BornHack badge
!
Designed by Thomas Flummer and manufactured in Denmark, it takes the form of a PCB in the shape of a roughly 60 degree circular arc with most of its top side taken up by a 9 by 32 array of SMD LEDs. There is the usual 4-way button array and space for an SAO connector on the rest of the front face, while on the rear are a set of GPIO pads and a pair of AA battery holders for power. Connectivity is via USB-C and infra-red, and usefully there is also a power on/off switch.
At the heart of its hardware is a
SAMD21G18A
ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller which is perhaps not the most exciting of chips, but the hardware becomes more interesting with the LED drivers. A pair of the
IS31FL3731
chips (you may recognise from Brian Benchoff’s Mr. Robot badge) each drive half of the Charliplexed LED array. These versatile chips take the bother of scanning the LED matrix away from the microcontroller with their own internal frame registers fed from an I2C interface. This choice both makes the best use of the relatively meagre microcontroller in this application, and opens the way for the software choice. This badge runs Adafruit’s CircuitPython, and can thus be programmed over the USB connection in the same way as any other CircuitPython board. To test this I put aside my GNU/Linux laptop, and picked up something considerably less versatile to test its ease of use: a Chromebook.
# configure I2C
i2c = busio.I2C(board.SCL, board.SDA)
# turn on LED drivers
sdb = DigitalInOut(board.SDB)
sdb.direction = Direction.OUTPUT
sdb.value = True
# set up the two LED drivers
display = adafruit_is31fl3731.Matrix(i2c, address=0x74)
display2 = adafruit_is31fl3731.Matrix(i2c, address=0x77)
text_to_show = "BornHack 2020 - make clean"
CircuitPython devices mount as a disk drive in which can be found a Python file that can be edited with the code of your choice. The BornHack badge
ships with code to display a BornHack banner text
, which serves as a quick introduction to the capabilities of its display. It’s noticeable that the text scrolling performance leaves something to be desired, but this microcontroller is hardly one of the more powerful supported by the CircuitPython platform. The Chromebook was happily able to edit the code, though viewing the Python serial console necessitated diving into its Linux virtual machine.
The BornHack badge then, an attractive design that fulfils the aim of being capable and easy to program through its use of the popular CircuitPython platform, and through its decent sized LED matrix and available GPIOs with the chance of seeing a use beyond the camp as a general purpose display/experimentation platform. It may not be the most powerful of badges, but it does its job well. In particular it has achieved the feat missed by so many others, of arriving at the camp fully assembled and with working hardware and software. You can see more about it in
Thomas’ badge presentation at the camp
(cut from a stream, talk begins at 5:27) which we’ve placed below the break.
We look forward to seeing its influence upon other similar badges. Meanwhile if you are interested, you can compare it with
the 2019 BornHack badge
which we reviewed last year. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273951",
"author": "Thomas Flummer",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T09:08:02",
"content": "It’s an exact 5th of a circle (72°), with the LED spacing at the edge matched to make a seamless multi badge screen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,373,374.442288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/print-in-place-engine-aims-to-be-the-next-benchy/ | Print-in-Place Engine Aims To Be The Next Benchy | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"benchmarking",
"Benchy",
"connecting rod",
"crankshaft",
"engine",
"infill",
"layers",
"piston",
"print in place",
"support"
] | While there are many in the 3D-printing community who loudly and proudly proclaim never to have stooped to printing a 3DBenchy, there are far more who have turned a new printer loose on the venerable test model, just to see what it can do. But Benchy is getting a little long in the tooth, and with 3D-printers getting better and better, perhaps a better benchmarking model is in order.
Knocking Benchy off its perch is the idea behind this
print-in-place engine benchmark
, at least according to [SunShine]. And we have to say that he’s come up with an impressive model. It’s a cutaway of a three-cylinder reciprocating engine, complete with crankshaft, connecting rods, pistons, and engine block. It’s designed to print all in one go, with only a little cleanup needed after printing before the model is ready to go. The print-in-place aspect seems to be the main test of a printer — if you can get this engine to actually spin, you’re probably set up pretty well. [SunShine] shares a few tips to get your printer dialed in, and shows a few examples of what can happen when things go wrong. In addition to the complexities of the print-in-place mechanism, the model has a few Easter eggs to really challenge your printer, like the tiny oil channel running the length of the crankshaft.
Whether this model supplants Benchy is up for debate, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still a cool design that would be fun to play with. Either way, as [SunShine] points out, you’ll need a really flat bed to print this one; luckily, he recently came up with
a compliant mechanism dial indicator
to help with that job.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273830",
"author": "J. Peterson",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T20:43:28",
"content": "I created another set of tests for calibrating exactly how your 3D parts fit together.More details here:https://saccade.com/blog/2019/12/fit-testing-block/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,374.49278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/simultaneous-soldering-station/ | Simultaneous Soldering Station | Brian McEvoy | [
"The Hackaday Prize",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"arduino",
"atmega",
"ATMEGA 32u4",
"pcb",
"rohs",
"sketch",
"solder",
"soldering iron"
] | Soldering irons are a personal tool. Some folks need them on the cool side, and some like it hot. Getting it right takes some practice and experience, but when you find a tip and temp that works, you stick with it. [Riccardo Pittini] landed somewhere in the middle with his open-source
soldering station, Soldering RT1
. When you start it up, it asks what temperature you want, and it heats up. Easy-peasy. When you are ready to get fancy, you can plug in a second iron, run off a car battery, record preset temperatures, limit your duty-cycle, and open a serial connection.
The controller has an Arduino bootloader on a 32u4 processor, so it looks like a ProMicro to your computer. The system works with the RT series of Weller tips, which have a comprehensive lineup. [Riccardo] also recreated SMD tweezers, and you can find everything at his
Tindie store
.
Soldering has a way of bringing out opinions from novices to masters. If we could interview our younger selves, we’d have a few nuggets of wisdom for those know-it-alls. If ergonomics are your priority, check out
TS100 3D-printed cases
, which is an excellent iron, in
our opinion
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273873",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-28T00:20:00",
"content": "Whew, $120 shipping included with no tips. It’s a very nice feature set, but probably overkill for most people like me. If I ever absolutely needed the features, I might be tempted, but it’s not an impulse b... | 1,760,373,374.578718 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/vr-technology-helps-bring-a-galaxy-far-far-away-to-our-tv/ | VR Technology Helps Bring A Galaxy Far, Far Away To Our TV | Roger Cheng | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"LED Hacks",
"Slider",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"3d tracking",
"disney",
"game engine",
"LED wall",
"star wars",
"television",
"unreal",
"virtual reality"
] | Virtual reality is usually an isolated individual experience very different from the shared group experience of a movie screen or even a living room TV. But those worlds of entertainment are more closely intertwined than most audiences are aware. Video game engines have been taking a growing role in film and television production behind the scenes, and now they’re stepping out in front of the camera in a big way for
making
The Mandalorian
TV series
.
Big in this case is a three-quarters cylindrical LED array 75 ft (23 m) in diameter and 20 ft (6 m) high. But the LEDs covering its walls and ceiling aren’t pointing outwards like some installation for Times Square. This setup, called the Volume, points inward to display background images for camera and crew working within. It’s an immersive LED backdrop and stage environment.
Incorporating projected imagery on stage is a technique going at least as far back as 1933’s
King Kong
, but it is very limited. Lighting and camera motion has to be very constrained in order to avoid breaking the fragile illusion. More recently, productions have favored green screens replaced with computer imagery in post production. It removed most camera motion and lighting constraints, but costs a lot of money and time. It is also more difficult for actors to perform their roles convincingly against big blank slabs of green. The Volume solves all of those problems by putting computer-generated imagery on set, rendered in real time via video game engine Unreal.
Lighting is adjusted to blend with the physical set pieces within, taking advantage of dynamic lighting capabilities developed recently for realistic games.
3D position trackers conceptually similar to those on a VR headset are attached to the primary camera. By tracking the camera’s motion precisely, Unreal Engine ensures the part of the Volume seen by the camera (
the viewing frustum
) is rendered with the perspective necessary to maintain the illusion no matter how the camera is aimed. It is an effect best seen in motion, starting with
The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian
, a short four-minute clip ILMVFX released on YouTube. (Embedded below.) The Volume is also the star for a 22-minute
episode 4:
Technology
of
Disney Gallery: Star Wars The Mandalorian
. (Disney Plus subscription required.)
The amount of money spent to develop and build the Volume isn’t discussed, but it would be an expensive up-front cost expected to be paid back in the form of faster and cheaper production over the long run, making this research project consistent with others
under the umbrella of ILM StageCraft
. It makes sense since they’re running a streaming service that requires a constant feed of fresh content to keep subscribers on board. Taking an engine for realistic VR games and adapting them to television production, the Volume opens up options that were previously the exclusive domain of big-budget blockbusters. And while the Volume itself required deep Disney pockets, the technique is accessible to far lower budgets. A
demonstration clip released by Unreal Engine
illustrates a much smaller scale application for a hypothetical motorcycle commercial.
But as great as it looks, and however many constraints it removed, the Volume nevertheless still has constraints of its own. For one example, its LED array’s resolution is not high enough to take center stage in today’s 4K HDR production flow, relegated to out-of-focus mid- and long-distances in order to avoid moire effects. The people who built the Volume said they expect it to only be the first version in a long evolution, that they invite others to experiment with this new idea and together move the industry forward. We anticipate there are indie filmakers already working on how to implement this concept on their smaller-than-Disney budgets, and they’ll need to recruit hacker friends familiar with LEDs and 3D tracking electronics to make it happen. We can’t wait to see the results. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273781",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T17:12:11",
"content": "VR is cool and all but all I expect from it currently are cool video gamesEverything else is a bonus",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273796",
... | 1,760,373,374.640005 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/mil-spec-looks-without-defense-department-budget/ | Mil-Spec Looks Without Defense Department Budget | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"cyberdeck",
"MIL-SPEC",
"Milspec",
"PETG",
"raspberry pi",
"ruggedized"
] | While hackers and makers have a tendency to focus on functionality above all else, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for some visual flair. A device that works well
and
looks good will always be more impressive than the bare bones approach, but the extra time and money it usually takes to polish up the visual component of a build means it’s often overlooked. Which is exactly what
[Jay Doscher] wanted to address with his Mil-Plastic project
.
On the surface, the Mil-Plastic is yet another entry in the rapidly growing and often ill-defined world of cyberdecks: custom computing devices that forgo the standard laptop and desktop dichotomy and instead explore the road not taken by mainstream consumer electronics. To that end, it’s a solid build more than worthy of praise. But more than that, it’s also a lesson on how 3D printing and some clever design can create a truly impressive visual for little more than the cost of a spool of PLA.
The modular design allows parts to be printed in parallel.
The Mil-Plastic, as the name implies, looks like it was pulled from a Humvee or an Abrams tank. While the gorgeous olive green PETG filament that [Jay] has stumbled upon certainly helps, his eye for detail and design chops aren’t to be underestimated. He’s given the case a rugged and armored look that simply screams “Your Tax Dollars At Work”, complete with faux cooling fins running along the back and a generous application of low-profile stainless steel fasteners.
We’ve taken a close look
at the
decadence of military engineering
in the past, and the Mil-Plastic could hang with the best of them.
Most importantly, [Jay] has given us all the tools and information we need to recreate the look on our own terms. You don’t have to be in the market for yet another Raspberry Pi gadget to appreciate the Mil-Plastic; the design can serve as the backbone for whatever you happen to be building. The printed case not only looks impressive, but can easily be modified and expanded as needed.
[Jay] kicked off a minor revolution late last year
with his Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit
, and has continued to
produce well-documented designs
that illustrate the incredible power of desktop 3D printing. If you can look through his portfolio and not get inspired, you may want to speak with a doctor. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273804",
"author": "Surfingtheither",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T18:38:34",
"content": "Oh man look at those prints, how does he make it look like injection molded plastic?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273806",
"aut... | 1,760,373,374.774382 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/the-mini-console-revolution-and-why-hackers-passed-them-by/ | The Mini Console Revolution, And Why Hackers Passed Them By | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Playstation Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"nes classic",
"nes classic mini",
"nes mini",
"Playstation classic",
"raspberry pi",
"snes",
"snes classic",
"snes classic mini",
"xbmc"
] | The Raspberry Pi was initially developed as an educational tool. With its bargain price and digital IO, it quickly became a hacker favorite. It also packed just enough power to serve as a compact emulation platform for anyone savvy enough to load up a few ROMs on an SD card.
Video game titans haven’t turned a blind eye to this, realising there’s still a market for classic titles. Combine that with the Internet’s love of anything small and cute, and the market was primed for the release of tiny retro consoles.
Often selling out quickly upon release, the devices have met with a mixed reception at times due to the quality of the experience and the games included in the box. With so many people turning the Pi into a retrogaming machine, these mini-consoles purpose built for the same should have been immediately loved by hardware hackers, right? So what happened?
Emulation Über Alles
Nintendo fired the first salvo in the mini console wars in late 2016.
The first salvo fired in the marketplace was the NES Classic Edition, launched in late 2016. It quickly took the market by storm, selling 2.3 million units in its first six months. Shipments sold out almost immediately, with many units being scalped on eBay for multiples of the sticker price, with varying levels of success.
The device showed that there was a huge market for classic console re-releases at a low price. This was achieved through the use of emulation, rather than recreating the NES’s bespoke hardware or using something like a
Nintendo On A Chip
. The heart of the system was a quadcore Allwinner R16 ARM Cortex-A7, kitted out with 256MB of RAM and 512MB of flash storage. This was more than enough grunt to emulate classic NES titles, with ample space for plenty of games, too. Besides people just playing the emulated games there was no shortage of
people hacking on the NES Classic to see what made it tick
.
The formula was so successful, Nintendo boxed up the same hardware in a new shell and launched the Super NES Classic Edition a year later. Other manufacturers rushed in to deliver similar machines for their own back catalogues. Sega delivered the Genesis Mini, and Konami dropped the TurboGrafx 16 Mini, both based on the ZUIKI Z7213, with similar specs to the Nintendo units. Sony’s Playstation Classic upped the ante, somewhat, needing more power and storage to deal with 3D games from the CD-ROM era. It packed a full 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM, running a Mediatek MT8167A. Later on, there were further spins on the same concept, like TheC64Mini and even the NeoGeo Mini which shipped in a tiny arcade cabinet, complete with a 3.5″ LCD screen.
Capabilities
It wasn’t long before enterprising hackers cracked the machines; guides to add more games to the NES Mini were
online within months of the NES Mini’s release.
Similar hacks are available for most, if not all, the systems that have been released this far. Some, like TheC64 Mini, even officially welcome users to add more software which really should have been the standard for all these reissued systems.
Most hacks have focused on adding more games to the consoles, or running RetroArch to enable the emulation of many different consoles.
However, there’s more on the table than just running a different set of ROMs. Packing ARM processors, flash storage, and HDMI outputs, they have the makings of a small single-board computer. While some have limited interfaces, many pack in USB ports too, making hooking up peripherals theoretically easy. Ten years ago, these would have been tantalizing machines for hackers to open up for all manner of projects. However, in a world with Raspberry Pis on the shelf for under $50, it’s difficult to justify the effort required to turn these machines into more fully-fledged platforms.
Efforts thus far have focused almost entirely on gaming. Not content to load more titles from the systems in question, hackers have ported the RetroArch emulator to these micro consoles. This enables the ARM systems to emulate a wide variety of systems, from the dawn of the home console era all the way up to modern consoles like the Gamecube and Wii, for systems with the power to do so.
Getting Retroarch going is achieved
using a tool by the name of Hakchi
on the NES and SNES mini, ironically the
SNES Classic emulated Playstation games better
than the PS Classic in some cases. Due to the lack of USB ports, Wii Classic Controllers are the only viable choice for those seeking proper analog sticks for use with their Nintendo Mini consoles.
In the case of the Playstation Classic, running Retroarch is achieved with BleemSync, named for the original Playstation emulator,
or the later Project Eris
. Reportedly,
it too runs better than Sony’s in-house emulator,
which may partially be due to
the decision to include PAL ports on the stock machine.
Conclusion
What started as the Xbox Media Center was then ported to the Raspberry Pi and other platforms. Our own Mike Szczys
called in 2012
for “a streaming media device that could just be stuck to the back of a television.” These days, such devices are commonplace.
For those wanting an emulation system in a funsize package, the Nintendo and Sony offerings may be attractive. The fuss of using hacked tools and limitations on controllers may prove too fussy for most however, when the alternative is simply slapping a Raspberry Pi in a nice plastic replica case instead. While the systems have largely been cracked wide open by hackers, there’s little thirst to get a full desktop OS or other code running on the platforms. Single-board computers are cheap and plentiful, so there’s little incentive to bother with one that has even the lightest of restrictions standing in the way.
It’s a very different scene to the era in which this website was born. In the early 2000’s, torrents reigned supreme, and there were few devices suitable for playing digital video content on television screens.
The Xbox was a prime target,
featuring USB, ethernet, and an x86 chip all in a TV-friendly package. The Xbox Media Centre project (still around today but rebranded as KODI) and even full Linux distros quickly sprung out of the woodwork, gracing the loungeroom of hackers around the world. Being able to do something no off-the-shelf product readily could, huge amounts of time were poured into developing on the platform.
In the case of these micro consoles, there’s very little they can do that can’t be done better with other hardware. Even their primary role of playing retro games is arguably better experienced on the Raspberry Pi, even for the technologically inexperienced. Ultimately, what manufacturers sold was nostalgia in a cute plastic box, and I imagine that this is a fad that won’t last much longer. As always, time will tell. | 31 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273733",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T14:09:32",
"content": "“For those wanting an emulation system in a funsize package, the Nintendo and Sony offerings may be attractive.”Or, y’know, legal access to the actual games. Silly stuff like that. Especially with the SNES Cl... | 1,760,373,374.716261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/tiny-raspberry-pi-mac-nails-the-apple-aesthetic/ | Tiny Raspberry Pi Mac Nails The Apple Aesthetic | Tom Nardi | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"imac",
"mac",
"miniature",
"miniature computer",
"raspberry pi",
"replica"
] | We know that some in the audience will take issue with calling a Raspberry Pi in a 3D-printed case the “World’s Smallest iMac”, but you’ve got to admit, [Michael Pick] has certainly done a good job
recreating the sleek look of the real hardware
. While there might not be any Cupertino wizardry under all that PLA, it does have a properly themed user interface and the general aversion to external ports and wires that you’d expect to see on an Apple desktop machine.
The clean lines of this build are made possible in large part by the LCD itself. Designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi, it offers mounting stand-offs on the rear, integrated speakers, a dedicated 5 V power connection, and a FFC in place of the traditional HDMI cable. All that allows the Pi to sit neatly on the back of the panel without the normal assortment of awkward cables and adapters going in every direction. Even if you’re not in the market for a miniature Macintosh, you may want to keep this display in mind for your future Pi hacking needs.
Well, that’s one way to do it.
Despite this clean installation, the diminutive Raspberry Pi was still a bit too thick to fit inside the 3D-printed shell [Michael] designed. So he slimmed it down in a somewhat unconventional, but admittedly expedient, way. With a rotary tool and a steady hand, he simply cut the double stacked USB ports in half. With no need for Ethernet in this build, he bisected the RJ-45 connector as well. We expect some groans in the comments about this one, but it’s hard to argue that this isn’t a hack in both the literal and figurative sense.
We really appreciate the small details on this build, from the relocated USB connectors to the vent holes that double as access to the LCDs controls. [Michael] went all out, even going so far as to print a little insert for the iconic Macintosh logo on the front of the machine. Though given the
impressive work he put into his miniature “gaming PC”
a couple months back, it should come as no surprise; clearly this is a man who takes his tiny computers very seriously. | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273696",
"author": "Sebastian",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T11:23:32",
"content": "Really cutting RPi ?Better is to desolder ports and eventually solder thinner.or redesign case",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273724",
... | 1,760,373,375.035879 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/27/tmd-1-makes-turing-machine-concepts-easy-to-understand/ | TMD-1 Makes Turing Machine Concepts Easy To Understand | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"arduino",
"cell",
"demostration",
"hall effect",
"head",
"magnet",
"state machine",
"tape",
"Turing machine"
] | For something that has been around since the 1930s and is so foundational to computer science, you’d think that the Turing machine, an abstraction for mechanical computation, would be easily understood. Making the abstract concepts easy to understand is what
this Turing machine demonstrator
aims to do.
The TMD-1 is a project that’s something of a departure from [Michael Gardi]’s usual fare, which has mostly been carefully crafted recreations of artifacts from the early days of computer history, like t
he Minivac 601 trainer
and
the DEC H-500 computer lab
. The TMD-1 is, rather, a device that makes the principles of a Turing machine more concrete. To represent the concept of the “tape”, [Mike] used eight servo-controlled flip tiles. The “head” of the machine conceptually moves along the tape, its current position indicated by a lighted arrow while reading the status of the cell above it by polling the position of the servo.
Below the tape and head panel is the finite state machine through which the TMD-1 is programmed. [Mike] limited the machine to three states and
four transitions
three symbols, each of which is programmed by placing 3D-printed tiles on a matrix. Magnets were inserted into cavities during printing; Hall Effect sensors in the PCB below the matrix read the pattern of magnets to determine which tiles are where. The video below shows the TMD-1 counting from 0 to 10, which is enough to demonstrate the basics of Turing machines.
It’s hard not to comment on the irony of a Turing machine being run by an Arduino, but given that [Mike]’s goal was to make abstract concepts easy to understand, it makes perfect sense to leverage the platform rather than try to do this with discrete logic. And you can’t argue with results — TMD-1 made Turing machines clear to us for the first time. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273701",
"author": "Klaus Ening",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T11:35:51",
"content": "Neat :DI actually wanted to point out the error in the link description, but it actually is turNing its digits :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,373,375.07831 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/discrete-logic-uart-keeps-8-bit-ttl-computer-connected/ | Discrete-Logic UART Keeps 8-Bit TTL Computer Connected | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"74LSxx",
"asynchronous",
"clock",
"discrete",
"logic",
"serial",
"shift register",
"ttl",
"uart",
"universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter"
] | Pity the poor TTL computer aficionado. It’s an obsession, really — using discrete logic chips to scratch-build a computer that would probably compare unfavorably to an 80s era 8-bit machine in terms of performance. And yet they still forge ahead with their breadboards full of chips and tangles of wire. It’s really quite beautiful when you think about it.
[Duncan] at Shepherding Electrons has caught the TTL bug, and while building his 8-bit machine outfitted it with
this discrete logic UART
. The universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter is such a useful thing that single-chip versions of the device have been available since the early 1970s. [Duncan]’s version makes the magic of serial communications happen in just 12 chips, all from the 74LS logic family.
As if the feat of building a discrete logic UART weren’t enough, [Duncan] pulled this off without the aid of an oscilloscope. Debugging was a matter of substituting the 2.4576 MHz crystal oscillator clock with a simple 1 Hz 555 timer circuit; the reduced clock speed made it easier to check voltages and monitor the status of lines with LEDs. Once the circuit was working, the full-speed clock was substituted back in, allowing him to talk to his 8-bit computer at up to 38,400 bps. Color us impressed.
For more TTL computer goodness, and to see where [Duncan] got his inspiration, check out [Ben Eater]’s many discrete logic projects —
his scratch-built 6502
,
a low-end video card
, or even
his take on serial communications
. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273645",
"author": "jcarpoff",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T05:33:43",
"content": "you mean 38,400 bps, no “k”ilo.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273658",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T07... | 1,760,373,374.95945 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/tiny-robot-beetle-runs-on-alcohol/ | Tiny Robot Beetle Runs On Alcohol | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"beetle",
"robot",
"robotic insect"
] | Batteries have come a long way in the past few centuries, but pale in comparison to hydrocarbon fuels when it comes to energy density. When it comes to packing plenty of juice in a light, compact package, hydrocarbons are the way to go. Recently, researchers have begun to take advantage of this, powering small robots with liquid fuels. Just like Bending Unit 22, aka Bender Bending Rodriguez,
this tiny robotic beetle runs on alcohol.
Robeetle can carry up to 2.6 times its own weight, using Nitinol muscle wires to move its legs.
Affectionately named Robeetle, the tiny ‘bot weighs just 88 milligrams, comparable in mass its insectoid contemporaries. It stores methanol in a polyimide film tank, operating for up to 2 hours on a single fill.
As shown in the video
, a solely mechanical control system is used to actuate the robot’s legs. In the neutral state, vents in the fuel tank are open, releasing methanol vapor. This passes over nitinol muscle wires coated in a special catalyst which causes the combustion of the methanol, heating the wires. The wires then contract, moving the legs, and closing the vents. When the wire cools, the wires relax, opening the vents and beginning the cycle anew.
While the ‘bot is solely capable of walking in a single direction, it nevertheless shows the possibilities enabled by powering small devices from energy-dense fuels. Waiting for improved battery technologies to develop is such a bore, after all. We look forward to swarms of such ‘bots exploring disaster areas or performing environmental sampling in years to come.
The scientific paper outlines the research outcomes in detail.
We love tiny robots at Hackaday;
we’ve featured a few in the past, too.
Video after the break. | 44 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273621",
"author": "none",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T03:07:51",
"content": "How is this a robot?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273630",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T03:38:47",
"content": "... | 1,760,373,375.160167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/this-geiger-counter-has-few-parts/ | This Geiger Counter Has Few Parts | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flyswatter",
"geiger counter",
"Geiger tube",
"geiger-muller",
"high voltage"
] | With all the focus on biological problems, we might forget that sometimes it’s handy to know about radiation hazards, too. [Ryan Harrington] shows us how to make
a Geiger counter with very few parts
, and you can see the results in the video below.
The glut of surplus Russian tubes has made this a common project, but we were amused to see the main part of the high-voltage supply was gutted from a cheap electronic flyswatter sourced from Harbor Freight. Even without a coupon, it only costs about $4.
There’s also a stack of zener diodes, a transistor, and some resistors. A battery, a piezo speaker, and a switch round out the bill of materials. Even then, the switch was upcycled from the flyswatter, so there’s not much to buy.
We see these flyswatters on deep sale sometimes, so maybe next time we do we’ll stock up. You could probably use the high voltage module for other projects, too. The module puts out enough voltage that it needs 400V worth of zener diodes to clamp it. [Ryan] used four 100V zeners.
The transistor causes the speaker to click. Apparently you can omit it, but the clicking becomes much harder to hear. Even with no radioactive material around, you’ll hear clicks occasionally from background radiation. But if you get the device near a smoke detector or a lantern mantle, you should hear a lot more clicks.
This reminded us of another cheap build
with a camera flash
. Want something more complex? Try
this one
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273598",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2020-08-27T00:24:57",
"content": "Truly shocking construction technique!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6274377",
"author": "Hiro Protagonist",
"timestamp": "2020-08-... | 1,760,373,375.570254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/slack-off-from-home-with-a-networked-jam-session/ | Slack Off From Home With A Networked Jam Session | Kristina Panos | [
"LED Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"led matrix",
"mqtt",
"nodered",
"RGB LED strip",
"Wemos d1"
] | Those of you who were regular office dwellers before the pandemic: do you miss being with your coworkers at all? Maybe just a couple of them? There’s only so much fun you can have through a chat window or a videoconference. Even if you all happen to be musicians with instruments at the ready, your jam will likely be soured by latency issues.
[Eden Bar-Tov] and some fellow students had a better idea for breaking up the work-from-home monotony —
a collaborative sequencer built for 2020 and beyond
. Instead of everyone mashing buttons at once and hoping for the best, the group takes turns building up a melody. Each person is assigned a random instrument at the beginning, and the first to go is responsible for laying down the beat.
Inside each music box is an ESP8266 that communicates with a NodeRed server over MQTT, sending each melody as a string of digits. Before each person’s turn begins, the LED matrix shows a three second countdown, and then scrolls the current state of the song. Your turn is over when the LED strip around the edge goes crazy.
Music can be frustrating if you don’t know what you’re doing, but this instrument is built with the non-musician in mind. There are only five possible notes to play, and they’re always from the same scale to avoid dissonance. Loops are always in 4/4, which makes things easy. Players don’t even have to worry about staying in time, because their contributions are automatically matched to the beat. Check it out after the break.
Tired of sitting indoors all day, but still want to make music?
Build a modular synth into a bike and you’ve solved two problems
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273568",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T21:46:29",
"content": "Would it have killed you to say what “five notes” for those of us who don’t learn good from videos? 1,2,3,5,6? Can the players select a key?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,375.216478 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/driving-a-pal-tv-over-rf-thanks-to-pwm-harmonics/ | Driving A PAL TV Over RF Thanks To PWM Harmonics | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"Nucleo",
"pal",
"PAL TV"
] | While most analog televisions come with composite video inputs on a yellow RCA jack, the feature is not universal. This problem was even more prevalent in the 1980s, and most home consoles got around the problem by instead feeding video to the television’s tuner with an RF modulator. [Manzel Seet] had just such a television which used the PAL standard.
Wanting to display images from a microcontroller, he put together PAL-Streamer.
The aim of the project was to display images on an analog television with minimal investment in hardware over and above what [Manzel] already had on hand. To this end, the project was built using a STM32F411 Nucleo development board. Capable of running at clock speeds up to 100 MHz, there’s plenty of grunt to handle demanding tasks like outputting video signals to a TV.
To achieve the target frequency of VHF Channel 3 (61.25 MHz), [Manzel] elected to rely on the onboard PWM hardware, after being inspired by
[CNLohr]’s ATTiny NTSC project.
The project takes advantage of the odd harmonics of square waves. Setting the PWM output to operate at 6.86 MHz, the ninth harmonic ends up at around 61.71 MHz, close enough to be tuned in on the TV set. With the hard part done, [Manzel] then implemented a virtual COM port allowing an attached PC to send PNG images or GIF animations to the display.
It’s a fun project that shows it’s possible to drive all kinds of analog displays if you’re willing to be creative about how you do it.
Files are available on GitHub for those eager to recreate the work
. [Manzel] points out that this method does put out a lot of RF energy in the surrounding bands, but for direct hookup to an antenna input, it works just fine. We love to see creative video projects on microcontrollers, so if you’ve figured out how to get an Arduino Uno to do 1080P over HDMI,
be sure to let us know
. Video after the break.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273537",
"author": "cde",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T19:47:04",
"content": "How can we do this using atsc?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273560",
"author": "GenTooMan",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T21:15:19",
... | 1,760,373,375.262114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/dealing-with-a-hacked-brain-lets-talk-about-depression/ | Dealing With A Hacked Brain; Let’s Talk About Depression | Bob Baddeley | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"anxiety",
"depression",
"mental health"
] | This post is different from normal Hackaday fare. I don’t want to presume anything about you, but I’m pretty sure the story I’m about to share resonates with at least some of you.
I’ve been having a tough time, exacerbated by this age of social distancing. This all crept up on me at first, but as I began to look back on my behavior and moods, I began noticing patterns that I hadn’t noticed before. This is certainly a relevant issue in this community, so let’s talk about mental health, beginning with my own journey.
Discovering the Problem
I am a prolific maker. I always have projects that I’m working on, projects that I’m thinking about working on, and projects that I’m getting paid to work on. I have an idea about how long the projects should take, and I get stressed and frustrated and beat myself up when they take longer than I think they should. I can’t admit defeat, so I continue the project until it is complete, but all of the joy is gone because it was stressful more than fun while I was working on it. Even at completion it’s difficult to enjoy the product because I’m already behind on starting the next thing in my queue (you may remember
my earlier article on dealing with time debt
). Further, I haven’t documented the project enough for my own satisfaction, so I’m uncomfortable sharing it to the public. It’s a perpetual problem, leading to perpetual grump.
I see other people on Hackaday and YouTube who are also prolific makers, but they have millions of subscribers, do much cooler projects, and put them out at a frequency I could only dream of. Imposter syndrome creeps in. I work harder on my projects, spending more and more time on them; the family makes fun of the fact that I’m the “basement troll” whose primary line is “I have to work on my projects.” Weekends are spent primarily watching YouTube and scrolling Reddit (but not contributing) and beating myself up for not working harder and getting on top of my pile of things to fix or improve around the house.
I have no social life to speak of. I had a plan, but the pandemic trashed that, and I still haven’t discovered a solution. People assume that I’m super busy and don’t have time to socialize, but the reality is that working on projects is a default for me, but not a preference, and it’s a thing I can do alone, so it’s easy to fall into.
The inner voice is loud, constant, and extremely critical. It tells me my work isn’t good enough, I’m not fast enough, I’m not interesting enough to have friends. Just to put something out there is a huge risk, and anyone who reads Hackaday regularly knows that the commenters are really good at identifying the slightest mistakes, meaning I agonize about every sentence far longer than I should.
This has been getting worse for years, though I didn’t notice and it wasn’t until someone pointed it out that I even realized it. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that’s difficult to discover, and really difficult to get out of, especially with the inner voice. This is more than just being too busy, depression and anxiety have crept into the picture for me and these are not issues that should be ignored. So I got some help and started working through the problem.
Dealing with the problem
The hardest part about depression and anxiety is getting started. The voice is telling you you can’t, and that even if you could, life sucks and there’s nothing to look forward to. Enter one of the most important scenes in movie history.
The movie magic of
The Matrix
reduces the difficult part for learning incredible skills to an eye flutter, but the point is not to say “I can’t” and give up; it’s to say “not YET”, and then learn the skills you need to do the thing.
One of the most important steps in getting out of the rut for me has been to silence the critic. With the bully crushing me constantly, I didn’t have a chance of getting out. Therapy was helping, but it wasn’t enough. What helped a lot was prescribed antidepressants. Antidepressants are not an easy thing to take. Most people have to try a few different medications before finding one that works, and then adjust the dose to get it right. The side effects are no joke, either, and sometimes make things worse than they were before. And they can take weeks to start to become effective. It’s tempting to give up on them, or endure the side effects of a misfit longer than you should.
In my case I started one at the direction of my doctor, had headaches and migraines and extreme exhaustion for a little more than a week, and stopped, waited two weeks to return to a baseline, then started a new medication. After a couple weeks of that, with few side effects but not much positive benefit, we increased the dose a little. A week later the inner critic was gone, I was no longer irrationally irritable, and while the exhaustion hasn’t gone away, it was eased somewhat by switching to nighttime for taking the med. I still have off days where I feel like I did before the meds, but they are rare and recognizable.
I also reached out on social media to friends and family, and explained what I was going through, and that I needed more social interaction. This was a huge success, and I spent weeks catching up with people I hadn’t talked to in decades. One of the biggest lessons here was that it’s ok to absolve yourself of the guilt of not keeping in constant contact with people, and that it’s ok to say “we haven’t talked in a long time. What’s your life like?”
Solving the Problem
For many, pharmaceuticals are the solution. They are content to silence the inner voice so they can resume their day-to-day. I hope that for me they will just be a crutch on my way to healing; a temporary measure that will allow me to change the underlying cause of the injury to my mental health. Maybe my brain is broken and not capable of producing the right chemicals, and antidepressants will be a permanent solution. I hope not, and here are the more permanent mental fitness goals that research has shown are likely to be successful.
Therapy
– It’s important to find a good therapist whose methods agree with your goals. My first attempt wanted to meet more frequently than I was comfortable and talk about my broken home as a child, and ignored my pleas to deal with my current problems and find tools to get through until I had resolved my childhood. My current therapist is far better, and listens and suggests tools that make sense. Consider something called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Exercise
– The statistics are solid here. Most of us aren’t getting enough exercise now anyway, which just makes the problem worse. One of the reasons I develop hardware and not just software is I like to do things with my hands and see physical progress and point to something I built. That’s hard when working on mental health, but if you also work on your physical health, you’ll have demonstrable results you can point to.
Gratitude journaling
– This one also has lots of science behind it. The idea is to regularly write down things for which you are grateful. Short lists are fine. The point is to get in the habit of thinking about good things in your life. It’s really difficult to start, and for a while I was criticizing myself because most of my entries were spins on things that I didn’t like “I like that I have the skills to fix the house when it breaks.” Then I realized that was actually exactly the point of the exercise; that instead of focusing on all the terrible things like the house falling apart all the time, I should be appreciating and celebrating the good things more, like the satisfaction of looking around the room at all the things I’ve done to improve it. Eventually this becomes a habit and the gratitude journal becomes ingrained in the brain.
Social interaction
– This is hard, but extremely important right now. When nobody reached out to me for months I was miserable, but I realized I wasn’t reaching out to anybody, either. After an experiment I discovered that the things I feared about reaching out pretty much never happen. It feels good to interact with people and have friends. You feel more important and seen.
Giving
– There are a lot of people struggling right now. Not more than you; this isn’t a contest. But struggling in ways that you can offer help. Find causes that you believe in, and offer to help in whatever ways you can contribute. Feeling needed is important, feeling like you are valued and that you’ve made someone’s life better is a good thing.
Putting more out there
– I recently presented a project at my local makerspace’s monthly meeting (now held over zoom). It wasn’t a finished project, but I did it anyway. There were so many details in the work I had done that deserved attention that it didn’t matter that it wasn’t yet complete. You’re not going to be just like Colin Furze and Mark Rober and Adam Savage and all the others combined; that’s not your day job (unless you are Colin or Mark or Adam, in which case I’m honored that you are reading this, and please don’t have imposter syndrome comparing yourself to yourself). But you can put out something and some people will see it and they will be more supportive than nobody.
Fake it until you make it
– Your inner critic is a lying jerk, and you know it’s a lying jerk, but you can’t ignore it. Well, you can pretend you are ignoring it. This was the actual advice of my therapist. He’s pretty cool. Objectively, you know the science is behind doing the things you want to do but just can’t. You know the science says you should exercise and eat right and be more social, and yet your inner critic tells you that you can’t. If you can ignore that critic just long enough to get started (and many people require antidepressants to help them get started with this), then you can discover that your inner critic was wrong all along and it becomes easier to ignore it.
Listen to your inner critic, then do what they say
– I had this revelation on my own, and it was completely counter to the previous point, but it was oddly successful. One day I was beating myself up a lot, and I decided to just give in to my inner critic. I wasn’t giving enough; so I researched a few charities and donated. I wasn’t exercising enough; so I went for a run. I wasn’t doing enough social things; so I reached out to three friends. Every time my voice criticized me I acknowledged it, agreed with it, and did something about it. It worked really well, and felt empowering because I was dealing with everything my critic was throwing at me. Maybe I didn’t give enough or exercise enough, but I did what I could do at the time, and the voice couldn’t make me feel guilty about that more than I felt good about doing something.
Conclusions
While an article can have a hasty conclusion, depression and anxiety usually don’t. This is likely something many of us are dealing with, now more than ever, and it’s likely to stick around for a while. It affects a lot of people, and you don’t often know who, so please be gentle to others, including yourself. I’ll end with a video I recently discovered, which illustrates that the problems persist at all levels, and we probably all have some work to do. | 100 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273489",
"author": "S",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T17:11:10",
"content": "Excellent post. Thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273493",
"author": "Alexander Lang",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T17:16:37",
... | 1,760,373,375.517026 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/youve-never-seen-this-retropie-emulator-console-watermelon/ | You’ve Never Seen This RetroPie Emulator Console: Watermelon | Lewin Day | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"retropie",
"watermelon"
] | The Raspberry Pi is a hugely popular platform for emulating older consoles, with the RetroPie framework making it easy to get started in no time at all. Often, these single board computers get built into fun arcade boxes or replica console shells to add to the charm. That’s all been done, so instead, [Cedishappy] decided to go in his own direction – resulting in the wonderful
Watermelon Gameboy.
What sounds like a trivial exercise of building a RetroPie rig in a unique enclosure actually comes with some engineering challenges. The basics are all pretty standard – GPIO pins interfacing buttons, a speaker and the screen, emulating a Gameboy Advance. But the mechanical implementation is more complex. The watermelon is first cut open, having its red flesh removed, leaving just the rind. Paper and cardboard templates are then used to make holes for the buttons and screen. Unfortunately, hot glue doesn’t work on watermelon, so instead, toothpicks were used to hold the screen and speaker in place. To protect the electronics from the moist melony environment inside, clear food wrap was applied to the Raspberry Pi and other components where needed.
[Cedishappy] goes above and beyond with the project video charmingly showing the reactions of bystanders to the contextually confusing game system. The combination of electronics with fruit and vegetables is an area we don’t see explored often enough;
our own [Mike Szczys] built a magnificent LED Jack-o-Lantern
that really looks the business. Video after the break. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273506",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T17:52:21",
"content": "Next up, a single board computer in a potatoe, that plays, portal.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273509",
"author": "RandyKC",
"t... | 1,760,373,375.611277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/3d-printering-the-world-of-non-free-3d-models-is-buyer-beware/ | 3D Printering: The World Of Non-Free 3D Models Is Buyer Beware | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"3D models",
"3D Printering",
"design for manufacture",
"dfm",
"no refunds",
"non-free"
] | There are more free 3D models online than one can shake a stick at, but what about paid models? Hosting models somewhere and putting a buy button in front of the download is certainly a solved problem, but after spending some time buying and printing a variety of non-free 3D models online, it’s clear that there are shortcomings in the current system.
What the problems are and how to address them depends a little on the different ways models get sold, but one thing is clear: poorly-designed 3D models are bad for consumers, and bad for the future of pay-to-download in general.
Different Ways Models Get Sold
There are quite a few different ways 3D models get sold online. Online sales are great for digital models because models are not physical goods, and serving a thousand buyers is no different from serving ten. A user technically pays for a license to use the model rather than purchasing it outright, and terms vary depending on the creators and providers.
Direct Sales (Pay per Model)
Direct sales work just like free 3D models, but with a price tag stuck in front of the download. Sites like
Cults3D
and
MyMiniFactory
allow creators to set prices on non-free models. Sales numbers are a bit hard to determine, but popular models have hundreds or a few thousand downloads.
A standout success is a site like
Hero Forge
, which allows users to create custom tabletop gaming miniatures with a web-based interface. Users can pay to download the STL of their creation, or pay for a printed version. Hero Forge is a proprietary system, but
a highly successful one judging by their recent Kickstarter campaign
.
Indirect Sales (Pay for Access to Models)
Indirect selling is when customers pay for access, rather than buying models individually. Successful creators make models in a niche area of interest, and people pay for ongoing access to the creator’s library of work.
Patreon
is a common way for 3D model creators to manage monthly subscribers and provide access to files. Tabletop gaming is a common niche, and some of the bigger players have thousands of monthly subscribers.
Another way indirect sales are done is via crowdfunding campaign. Money is raised to create a specific set of models, and backers receive access to the resulting files. Again, tabletop gaming miniatures and terrain are over-represented in this area.
Kits Where Customers Print Their Own Parts
This approach sells 3D models as part of a product. Sold with or without additional hardware like electrical parts or fasteners, a purchaser buys a kit and prints their own plastic parts. As a result, the kit has fewer pieces, is easier to produce, cheaper to ship, and generally costs less than if the seller had to provide everything.
Examples of this business model include the (NERF-compatible)
Bulwark Blaster
, and the
OpenScan
(open-source 3D scanner.) In both cases, the project is built around 3D-printed parts and a solid bill of materials. Generally, the buyer is purchasing a single-use license for the printed parts.
Where Are The Problems?
In an ideal world, 3D printers reliably create any arbitrary shape without having issues with overhangs, bridges, distortions, or supports. One could purchase a 3D model and get exactly what’s expected. Sadly, we’re not there yet.
Good-quality 3D models must be designed specifically for 3D printing, and this is especially true if money is involved because in the current system, buyers accept all the risk.
No Test Drives, No Fitting Rooms, No Refunds
The world of non-free 3D models is a lot like a clothing store without a fitting room, or a showroom without test drives. “No refunds” is a common term of service and sale, and when combined with an inability to try before one buys, results can be unfortunate if a model is of poor quality.
Models With Poor DFM (Design for Manufacture) Exist
3D printers, like any tool, are good at some things, passable at others, and bad at the rest. That means models intended for 3D printing should be designed with the strengths and weaknesses of 3D printers in mind. A model that has been designed in such a way can be said to have good design for manufacture (DFM).
As designed, this model will require supports and post-processing no matter what orientation is chosen.
If a model has
not
been designed with 3D printing in mind, it can make life difficult for the person trying to print it. The trouble is that it’s not always possible to identify troublesome models by screenshots alone. Here are two examples.
The first is a simple latch from a larger assembly intended for FDM (filament-based) printing, shown here. The problem is subtle: the way it has been designed makes it virtually impossible to print reliably without needing supports, no matter the orientation. (It also had other problems, but more on that later.)
Adding supports means additional post-processing and a poor surface finish where the supports connect. If supports are placed on the latch’s presentation side, the part will be ugly. If supports go on a non-presentation side (where the hinge is) it invites fitment problems.
These issues can be solved with post-processing, but that’s not the point. The point is that it would be better to design the part in a way that avoids such problems in the first place.
Model sliced in two, with colors added for contrast between inner and outer layers. The model is not solid. Gaps where the outside layer (jacket) and inner layer (light blue) do not touch are a problem.
Another example is shown here. This model was advertised as being compatible with SLA (resin-based) printing.
FDM and SLA printers are good at very different things
, so it was encouraging to see a model specifically designed for SLA.
Unfortunately this turned out to not be the case. The model was not a solid figure. There are gaps between the outer layer (the figure’s jacket) and inner layer (the body) because they were modeled separately, and left as-is.
Not only do these gaps trap uncured resin, but the areas around the gaps are very thin, which invites print failures. In short, this model’s design choices ensure that the outside layers — the presentation surfaces — are the most likely to fail. These issues were not visible until after the model was paid for.
These problems and others like them demonstrate poor DFM that is not evident from screenshots and renders, and as mentioned earlier, pay-to-download is currently the land of No Refunds and Buyer Beware.
Why Bad Quality Models Are A Big Problem
The problem bad models cause is this: by the time a model has proven to be troublesome (or impossible, or wasteful) to print, a buyer has invested considerably more than the purchase price. All a bad model accomplishes is to alienate a person who was willing to mash a BUY button.
Having a buyer accept all the risk, only to have their expense of money and effort rendered worthless should be considered a worst-case scenario for any platform that is trying to grow.
Ways To Improve
It may be tempting to try to solve the issue of no returns or refunds with a system that can control access to downloaded files, but anything in this direction starts to look a lot like DRM, which is doubtful as a way forward.
It is possible to increase confidence about model quality and purchase without changing much about the underlying platforms as they currently exist. Here are some things that can be done.
Demonstrate Model Quality with Photos and Documentation
Documentation and photos (of the printed results, not just renders of the model) are an effective way to let a buyer know more about a model. Documentation doesn’t have to be long, but it should talk about design elements, assembly, or areas of special attention. An example is
this model of a 3D printable vise by Christophe Laimer
. It’s a free model, but excellent documentation in a way that builds confidence in the model’s quality.
Models that require additional hardware should have a clear bill of materials along with specifications and sources. That latch model I used as an example of poor DFM? It required a mystery spring of unspecified dimensions and no source; another issue not discovered until too late.
If a designer doesn’t clearly demonstrate that they have printed their own design successfully, don’t buy it.
Provide “Test Drive” Pieces
Designers of kits or other assemblies for sale can offer free access to small number of parts as a way of saying “if you can print these models and assemble them, you’re good to go because my product is designed using the same principles.” If customers cannot return purchases, this can at least provide a form of test drive.
Perform Automatic Quality Checks on Models
Professional print places like
3D Hubs
perform an analysis of uploaded objects as part of their quote process, and warn about model features like thin walls, intricate details that could be lost, or the potential for hard-to-remove supports. Services responsible for hosting and selling models could increase buyer confidence by performing similar checks on models for sale, and showing the analysis along with the model and price.
What is Your Experience With Paid Models?
Have you bought models online, or do you sell your own designs? What’s been your experience, and what would you change about how it all works? Let us know your feelings in the comments. | 32 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273421",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T14:05:59",
"content": "Bold of you to assume I would ever pay for a 3D model.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273949",
"author": "Printerman",
"timesta... | 1,760,373,375.693765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/new-arduino-jpeg-library-focuses-on-speed/ | New Arduino JPEG Library Focuses On Speed | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"JPEG"
] | Working with graphics on microcontrollers has always meant focusing on making the most of limited resources. Particularly in the 8-bit era, all manner of tricks were used to get low-performance chips to achieve feats beyond their lowly station. However, these days, we’re blessed with 32-bit workhorses with clock speeds in the tens, or even hundreds, of MHz and many kilobytes of RAM to match.
It’s these higher performance chips [Larry] had in mind when writing his JPEGDEC library.
As [Larry] discusses in a blog post on the topic
, JPEG libraries already exist for the Arduino platform. However, many of these are aimed at 8-bit platforms with tiny amounts of RAM. While it’s possible to decode JPEGs piece by piece with some intelligent code under these conditions, it’s possible to go much faster when you’ve got a little more headroom. [Larry] does a great job of explaining the variety of optimizations he’s developed in the two decades since writing his first JPEG decoder back in 1994. From eliminating unnecessary marker checks to ignoring unneeded data for scaled-down output, it all adds up to get the job done faster. The library targets the Cortex-M0+, or any chip with a minimum of 20K of RAM, as its bare minimum to operate. Faster chips with higher clock rates naturally do better, and [Larry] provides benchmark decoding times for various common hardware using the library.
We’ve featured [Larry]’s GIF decoder for the Arduino platform before
, again a useful library that’s optimised for good performance. If you’ve got your own neat tricks for image processing on microcontrollers,
you know how to call! | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273398",
"author": "Paul Stoffregen",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T11:51:53",
"content": "If anyone’s interested to see this in action, I tested Larry’s JPEGDEC library and recorded a little video. Here’s the YouTube link.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwVwjh3ztBY",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,373,375.745776 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/26/circle-guitar-creates-wall-of-sound/ | Circle Guitar Creates Wall Of Sound | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"circle guitar",
"effects",
"guitar",
"instrument",
"midi",
"picks",
"wall of sound",
"wheel"
] | In the 60s a musical recording technique called the “wall of sound” came to prominence which allowed artists to create complex layers of music resulting in a novel, rich orchestral feeling. While this technique resulted in some landmark albums (
Pet Sounds
by the Beach Boys for example) it took entire recording studios and many musicians to produce.
This guitar, on the other hand, needs only a single musician
but can create impressive walls of sound on its own thanks to some clever engineering.
Called the Circle Guitar and created by [Anthony Dickens], the novel instrument features a constantly-rotating wheel around the guitar’s pickups in the body. Various picks can be attached in different ways to the wheel which pluck the strings from behind continuously. This exceeds what a normal guitar player would be able to do on their own, but the guitarist is able to control the sounds by using several switches and pushbuttons which control a
hexaphonic humbucker
and are able to mute individual strings at will. Of course, this being the 21st century, it also makes extensive use of MIDI and [Anthony] even mentions the use of a Teensy.
While details on this project are admittedly a little fleeting, the videos linked below are well worth a watch for the interesting sounds this guitar is able to produce. Perhaps paired with a
classic-sounding guitar amplifier
it could produce other impressive walls of sound as well. Either way, we could expect someone like
[Brian Wilson]
to be interested in one once it is in production.
Thanks to [Mel] for the tip! | 24 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273368",
"author": "David Lyons",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T08:34:55",
"content": "That is the coolest guitar innovation in the I’ve seen in years!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6274120",
"author": "DerMeister",
... | 1,760,373,375.806638 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/sunrise-sunset-repeat/ | Sunrise, Sunset, Repeat | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"arduino",
"Arduino Nano Every",
"CCTV",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi 3 B+",
"sunrise",
"sunset",
"vfd",
"vfd != nixie"
] | Sunrises and sunsets hardly ever disappoint. Still, it’s difficult to justify waking up early enough to catch one, or to stop what you’re doing in the evening just to watch the dying light. If there’s one good thing about CCTV cameras, it’s that some of them are positioned to catch a lovely view of one of the two, and a great many of them aren’t locked down at all.
[Dries Depoorter] found a way to use some of the many unsecured CCTV cameras around the world for a beautiful reason: to constantly show the sun rising and setting
. Here’s how it works: a pair of Raspberry Pi 3B + boards pull the video feeds and display the sunrise/sunset location and the local time on VFD displays using an Arduino Nano Every. There isn’t a whole lot of detail here, but you can probably get the gist from the high-quality pictures.
If you wanted to recreate this for yourself, we might know where you can find some nice CCTV camera candidates.
Just look through this dystopian peephole
.
Thanks for the tip, [Luke]! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273379",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T09:26:12",
"content": "“or to stop what you’re doing in the evening just to watch the dying light”Well, that’s what I LOVED about living in the Caribbean. Sunset coincides with the end of the workday. Close shop and go home and w... | 1,760,373,375.847799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/assembly-language-for-real/ | Assembly Language For Real | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"assembly",
"x86",
"x86 assembly",
"x86_64"
] | We all probably know that for ultimate control and maximum performance, you need assembly language. No matter how good your compiler is, you’ll almost always be able to do better by using your human smarts to map your problem onto a computer’s architecture. Programming in assembly for PCs though is a little tricky. A lot of information about PC assembly language dates back from when assembly was more common, but it also covers old modes that, while still available, aren’t the best answer for the latest processors. [Gpfault] has
launched a series
on 64-bit x86 assembly that tries to remedy that, especially if you are working under Windows.
So far there are three entries. The first covers setting up your toolchain and creating a simple program that does almost nothing. But it is a start.
The
second entry
talks more about FASM and how to use macros and other features to simplify your programming. In particular, he shows macros that can wrap details like PE tables and calling convention protocols to make things easier. You wind up with a working Hello World program.
The
third entry
starts work on a fantasy CPU emulator, QBX. This isn’t a bad idea since emulating a CPU forces you to use many of the host computer instructions and doesn’t require any special knowledge other than what you probably have if you are trying to learn assembly language, anyway.
Of course, if you are writing boot code, you need to know all that old-fashioned legacy stuff. We liked [Ben Jojo’s]
tutorial
for that. If Linux is more your jam, we have an
introduction
for that, too.
Header: AMD Ryzen x86-64 processor, Fritzchens Fritz /
CC0 | 48 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273327",
"author": "John Benham",
"timestamp": "2020-08-26T03:20:35",
"content": "Takes me back a bit, I remember writing an assembly I/O routine to allow a PDP 11/23 to talk to a somewhat specialized $1.0M Watkins Johnson radio receiver. The receiver received and reported its fre... | 1,760,373,375.93129 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/two-part-four-wire-air-quality-meter-shows-how-its-done/ | Two-Part, Four-Wire Air Quality Meter Shows How It’s Done | Donald Papp | [
"home hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"air quality",
"BME680",
"environmental sensor",
"ESP32",
"tutorial"
] | The Bosch BME680 is a super-capable environmental sensor, and [Random Nerd Tutorials] has
married it to the ESP32 to create an air quality meter that serves as a great tutorial
on not just getting the sensor up and running, but also in setting up a simple (and optional) web server to deliver the readings. It’s a great project that steps through everything from beginning to end, including how to install the necessary libraries and how to program the ESP32, so it’s the perfect weekend project for anyone who wants to learn.
The BME680 is a small part that communicates over SPI or I2C and combines gas, pressure, temperature, and humidity sensors. The gas sensor part detects a wide range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and contaminants, including carbon monoxide, which makes it a useful indoor air quality sensor. It provides only a relative measurement (lower resistance corresponds to lower air quality) so for best results it should be calibrated against a known source.
The tutorial uses the Arduino IDE with an add-on to support the ESP32, and libraries from Adafruit. Unfamiliar with such things? The tutorial walks through the installation of both. There’s a good explanation of the source code, and guidance on entering setup values (such as local air pressure, a function of sea level) for best results.
Once the software is on the ESP32, the results can be read from the serial port monitor. By going one step further, the ESP32 can run a small web server (using
ESPAsyncWebServer
) to serve the data to any device wirelessly. It’s a well-written tutorial that covers every element well, and
complements this other BME680-based air quality meter that uses MQTT and Raspberry Pi
. | 34 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273289",
"author": "Builder2",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T23:34:45",
"content": "Humidity to 2 decimal places! Can anyone really tell the difference between 59.44% and 59.45% humidity? Why do designers lose the forest for the trees? How meaningful is to most people to know the temper... | 1,760,373,377.985006 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/mini-cnc-mill-goes-horizontal-to-reuse-cd-drives/ | Mini CNC Mill Goes Horizontal To Reuse CD Drives | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cd",
"cnc",
"grbl",
"linear",
"spindle"
] | Here at Hackaday, we pride ourselves on bringing you the freshest of hacks, preferably as soon as we find out about them. Thanks to the sheer volume of cool hacks out there, though, we do miss one occasionally, like
this e-waste horizontal CNC mill
that we just found out about.
Aptly called the “CDCNC” thanks to its reliance on cast-off CD drive mechanisms for its running gear, [Paul McClay]’s creation is a great case study on what you can do without buying almost any new parts. It’s also an object lesson in not getting caught in standard design paradigms. Where most CNC mills mount the spindle vertically, [Paul] tilted the whole thing 90 degrees so the spindle lies on its side. Moving it back and forth on a pair of CD drive mechanisms is far easier than fighting gravity for control, and as a bonus the X- and Y-axes have minimal loading too. The video below shows the mill in action, and it’s easy to see how the horizontal arrangement really helps make this junk bin build into something special.
We think [Paul] did a great job of thinking around the problem with this build, and we’re glad he took the time to tip us off. Apparently it was the upcoming
CNC on the Desktop Hack Chat
that moved him to let us know about this build. Here’s hoping he drops by for the chat and shares his experience with us. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273278",
"author": "12L14",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T22:00:55",
"content": "While that(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qQQphEMhtYo) is almost destop HBM, this is pocket version of it ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6273281",
... | 1,760,373,378.054711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/checking-in-on-the-damn-linux-tablet-one/ | Checking In On The Damn Linux Tablet One | Mike Szczys | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Tablet Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"displayport",
"Jetson Nano",
"Linux Tablet",
"modular",
"som",
"Supercon"
] | Tablets, slates, phones, and fablets, there are no shortage of electronics that take the Star-Trek-ish form factor of a handheld rectangle of glass that connects you to everything. This is the world we live in, but unfortunately it’s not currently a world with many Linux options, and certainly not one that includes modular design concepts. This is what motivated [Timon] to design the
Damn Linux Table one
,
a “Proper Linux Tablet” built around the Nvidia Jetson Nano board
.
The design really took off, because who isn’t interested in the ability to upgrade and customize a tablet? During last year’s Hackaday Supercon we caught up with [Timon] for
an interview the morning after he won the Best Design prize for DLT one
. Check out that video below, then join us after the break for an update on the latest from the project.
There’s only one week left to
get your project entered in the 2020 Hackaday Prize
. We won’t know this year’s winners until the Hackaday Remoticon rolls around this November. The
Call for Proposals
for that virtual conference is still open!
[Timon] is realistic about the limits of modular design. He readily admits you’re not going to upgrade a graphics card on a mobile device, but when it comes to the peripherals, why not? You might want to choose between micro-USB, USB-C, barrel-jack, or do something completely custom. One hacker’s NFC equipment might be replaced by another’s SDR or LoRa. This tablet design sees a world where connecting PCIe components to your mobile devices is completely doable. The point is to make a base model that works great, but has the potential to be what each different user wants their device to be.
It should have come as no surprise to everyone paying attention that [Timon] won the Best Design in the 2019 Hackaday Prize for the Damn Linux Table one.
He tells the story of the design is this superb overview video
that includes a teardown of the prototype. In it we’re introduced to the aluminum plate that makes up the central slice of the tablet, with screen attached to the front side and the uniformed modular mounting holes milled around the edge of the back side that allows components and spacers to be easily positioned.
At the center of the plate is the “motherboard” designed to break out the IO of the Jetson Nano system-on-module (SOM). Flat cables bridge the gap from the motherboard to peripherals you choose to use. The really interesting thing about the Jetson is that it uses a SO-DIMM module and [Timon] went with a reverse-mount connector. That way, a cutout in the motherboard allows the module’s chip to pass through the circuit board and make contact with the aluminum plate as a heat sink.
The $10,000 prize has allowed him to continue iterating on the design. Last month we were treated to
an update on the progress of the tablet’s display
. It was a struggle to get the DisplayPort screen working because there is a bug in the driver when dealing with 2-lane screens. The 10.1″ 4-lane screen shown here is working at a beautify 2560×1440. With that technical hurdle pushed aside, progress is once again under way to
polish up the fit and finish and begin work on the battery management system
.
Projects like this one are a tour de force of skills that at one time would have taken an entire company. The fact that this can be designed by one person is a testament to the hacker community sharing feedback and skill, the availability of design tools, the accessibility of supply chains for individuals, and above all the determination of Timon to see the project continue. Head on over to
his project page
, there’s a week’s worth of reading there and the opportunity to send kudos and constructive feedback.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 27 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273232",
"author": "rtt5655",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T18:54:43",
"content": "I’m very old man. If this device run terminal for week (one charging) and have wifi (I need a good usb keyboard)nothing more. No color, small disc, memory 1MiB or less.gcc+bc+mc+git",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,373,378.136959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/frances-allen-optimised-your-code-without-you-even-knowing/ | Frances Allen Optimised Your Code Without You Even Knowing | Ben James | [
"Biography",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"compiler optimization",
"compilers",
"FORTRAN",
"frances allen",
"ibm",
"optimisation",
"optimization",
"parallelism",
"stretch",
"turing award"
] | In 2020, our digital world and the software we use to create it are a towering structure, built upon countless layers of abstraction and building blocks — just think about all the translations and interactions that occur from loading a webpage. Whilst abstraction is undoubtedly a great thing, it only works if we’re building on solid ground; if the lower levels are stable and fast. What does that mean in practice? It means low-level, compiled languages, which can be heavily optimised and leveraged to make the most of computer hardware. One of the giants in this area was Frances Allen, who recently passed away in early August. Described by IBM as “a pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms,” she made numerous significant contributions to the field.
Early Days
Via
Wikimedia
Trained as a maths teacher, Allen worked at a high school in New York for two years after graduating. She went back to complete a Masters in mathematics and was recruited by IBM Research on campus. Though planning to only stay long enough to pay off her debt and quickly return to teaching, she found herself staying with IBM for the rest of her career, even becoming the first female IBM fellow in 1989.
Allen’s first role at IBM was teaching internal engineers and scientists how to use FORTRAN — apparently a difficult sell to people who at the time were used to programming in assembly, which did just fine thank you very much.
In an interview
, Allen talks about the resistance from scientists who thought it wasn’t possible for a compiled language to produce code that was good enough.
The Stretch supercomputer (via
IBM
)
After teaching, Allen began working on the compiler for a 100 kW “supercomputer” called Stretch. With 2048 kB of memory, the goal of Stretch was to be 100 times faster than any other system available at the time. Though this ultimately failed (to the dismay of a few clients, one finding Stretch took 18 hours to produce their 24 hour weather forecast), it caught the attention of the NSA.
Because of this, IBM designed a coprocessor addon, Harvest, specifically for codebreaking at the NSA. Harvest ended up being larger than Stretch itself, and Allen spent a year leading a team inside the NSA, working on highly classified projects. The team didn’t find out many things about what they were working on until they were leaked to the press (it was spying on the Soviet Union — no prizes for guessing).
Engineers with Tractor tapes for Harvest
An engineering feat, Harvest used a unique streaming architecture for code-breaking: information loaded onto IBM
Tractor tape
was continuously fed into memory, processed and output in real time, with perfectly synchronised IO and operations. Harvest could process 3 million characters a second and was estimated by the NSA to be 50-200 times faster than anything else commercially available. The project was extremely successful and was used for 14 years after installation, an impressive feat given the pace of technological advancement at the time.
Speed is of the Essence
The success of the project was in large part due to Allen’s work on the optimisations performed by its compiler. Compiler optimisations are magic. Some of us think of compilers as simple “source code in, machine code out” boxes, but much of their complexity lies in the entirely automatic suite of optimisations and intermediate steps they use to ensure your code runs as swiftly as possible. Of course, this was important for the limited hardware at the time, but the techniques that Allen helped develop are present in modern compilers everywhere. The New York Times quotes Graydon Hoare (the creator of Rust and one of today’s most famed compiler experts) as saying that Allen’s work is in “every app, every website, every video game or communication system, every government or bank computer, every onboard computer in a car or aircraft”.
So what do compiler optimisations actually look like? Allen wrote many influential papers on the subject, but
“A catalogue of optimizing transformations”
which she co-authored with John Cocke in 1972 was particularly seminal. It aims to “systematize the potpourri of optimizing transformations that a compiler can make to a program”.
It has been said that compilers that implement just the eight main techniques
from this paper can achieve 80% of best-case performance. Here are some of the most basic ideas:
Procedure integration: replacing calls to subprocedures with inline code where possible, avoiding saving/restoring registers
Loop unrolling
: flattening loops by writing out statements explicitly, avoiding unnecessary comparison conditions
CSE (common subexpression elimination): eliminating redundant computations which calculate values already available
Code Motion
: moving subexpressions out of loops where it is safe to do so
Peephole optimisation: replacing known instruction combinations with more efficient variants
Some of these might seem obvious to us now, but formalising and standardising these ideas at the time had great impact.
Parallelism
Allen’s last major project for IBM was PTRAN, the Parallel Translator. This was a system for automatic parallelism, a special type of compiler optimisation. The aim was to take programs that weren’t written with parallelism in mind and translate them for execution on parallel architectures. This concept of taking sequentially written code and automatically extracting features from it to be run in parallel led to the extensive use of dependency graphs, now a standard representation in compilers. One of the recurring themes throughout Allen’s career was her ability to take highly technical problems and abstract them into maths — often graphs and sets — and solve them precisely. On this project Allen led a team of young engineers, churning out industry leading papers and compilers for parallelism for 15 years.
IBM Academy and Beyond
In 1995 Allen became president of the IBM Academy, an internal steering group of IBM’s very top technical minds. She was able to use the position to advocate in two areas: mentoring and women in technology. In interviews, she frequently talked about how she didn’t have a mentor, and how important it is for people starting out in tech. Her visibility as an expert in the field inspired others — at its peak in the 70s/80s, half of the IBM experimental compiler group were women. Her advocacy for women in tech never ceased, even as she described a drop in participation after the early days of computing:
Later, as computing emerged as a specialized field, employers began to require engineering credentials, which traditionally attracted few women. But the pendulum is swinging back as women enter the field from other areas such as medical informatics, user interfaces and computers in education.
In 2006 Allen received the Turing Award (considered the Nobel Prize for computing) — the first woman to do so.
So the next time you fire up gcc, write anything in a language above assembly, or even use any software at all, remember that Frances Allen’s ideas are invisibly at play. | 9 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273213",
"author": "David Ehnebuske",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T18:05:51",
"content": "To this I would only add that Fran was a wonderful human being. I miss her.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6273288",
"author": "asheets"... | 1,760,373,377.495019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/the-usb-null-modem-cable-is-now-a-thing/ | The USB Null Modem Cable Is Now A Thing | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"null modem",
"serial",
"usb"
] | The classic serial null-modem cable was, among other things, used to connect two computers together for communications and file transfer. Largely eliminated in daily use by the advent of home networking, there are still fringe applications where such a thing can come in handy. [Nick Sayer] needed just such a tool, but one that would work in a modern USB environment.
Enter the isolated USB null-modem.
The device consists of two USB Communication Device Class, or CDC chips, creating a USB serial port for each attached computer. The TX and RX lines are cross-connected to allow communication between the two sides. Rather than directly connect the lines, however, they pass through an opto-isolator. This is important, as it allows two computers at different ground potentials to be safely connected to each other without damage.
[Nick] originally created the device to solve a specific problem at his day job, but community response was large enough that he was kind enough to share the project online. Expect to see devices available on Tindie in future for those that need a hookup. While it’s not something everyone will need, for those that do, it should come in handy. If you’re looking for other useful applications for USB-serial devices, there’s plenty –
you can even try your hand at software-defined radio! | 87 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273165",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T15:37:46",
"content": "Wasn’t this possible back with Win 95, with a “PC-link bridge” cable? They seem to still be available online.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273172",... | 1,760,373,378.47788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/linux-fu-your-own-dynamic-dns/ | Linux-Fu: Your Own Dynamic DNS | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"awk",
"bind",
"dns",
"dynamic dns",
"linux",
"Linux Fu",
"zone file"
] | It is a problem as old as the Internet. You want to access your computer remotely, but it is behind a router that randomly gets different IP addresses. Or maybe it is your laptop and it winds up in different locations with, again, different IP addresses. There are many ways to solve this problem and some of them are better than others.
A lot of routers can report their IP address to a dynamic DNS server. That used to be great, but now it seems like many of them hound you to upgrade or constantly renew so you can see their ads. Some of them disappear, too. If your router vendor supplies one, that might be a good choice, until you change routers, of course. OpenWRT supports
many such services
and there are many lists of
common services
.
However, if you have a single public accessible computer, for example a Web server or even a cloud instance, and you are running your own DNS server, you really don’t need one of those services. I’m going to show you how I do it with an accessible Linux server running
Bind
. This is a common setup, but if you have a different system you might have to adapt a bit.
There are many ways to
set up dynamic DNS
if you are willing to have a great deal of structure on both sides. Most of these depend on setting up a secret key to allow for DNS updates and some sort of script that calls
nsupdate
or having the DHCP server do it. The problem is, I have a lot of client computers and many are set up differently. I wanted a system where the only thing needed on the client side was
ssh
. All the infrastructure remains on the DNS server.
Background
I’m going to assume you already have
Bind
setup and you have a working knowledge of what DNS does. In general, though, you will have a single file for each domain — zone in DNS speak — you control. Here’s a typical zone file (
RFC 1035
controls the format):
; zone file for wd5gnr.com
$TTL 3600 ; default TTL for zone
$ORIGIN wd5gnr.com.
@ 3600 IN SOA ns1.wd5gnr.com. alw.al-williams.com. (
12040320 ; serial number
3m ; refresh
180 ; retry
1209600 ; expire
3m ; negative
)
@ IN A 158.69.212.64
@ IN NS ns1
@ IN NS ns2
ns1 IN A 158.69.212.64
ns2 IN A 158.69.212.64
@ IN MX 10 mail
www IN A 158.69.212.64
The parts of interest here are the
$TTL
or time to live. The value is in seconds, so this is an hour. That might be a bit long to wait if your IP address changes a lot. There’s also a serial number that servers use to tell that the record changed. There’s no real format to the number as long as every change results in a larger number. You can use a sequence counter or permute the date. It doesn’t really matter. Finally, there are IN records that tell us different IP addresses. For this file,
@
is a shorthand for
wd5gnr.com
and anything without a period at the end will have
wd5gnr.com
appended to it. So the last line defines a host “www.wd5gnr.com” and could have been written with “www.wd5gnr.com.” instead of “www” — that last period makes all the difference.
Somehow, we need a way to make more records in this zone file that will point other hosts — maybe
dyn.wd5gnr.com
— to a different IP address. I started out with a very simple script on the DNS server that would find the IP address of the caller and modify a template to create a DNS zone file and then reload the zone. This worked until I wanted to handle more than one dynamic host at a time. I’ll show you how I dealt with that, but first, let’s talk about what you need to do this yourself.
What You’ll Need
In addition to the DNS server for a domain you control, you’ll also need ssh access to your server set up to use a certificate and not a password. You probably need root access, too, although I’ll show you how you won’t need it after setup, if you don’t mind allowing anyone logged into your account to update your IP address.
Setting up
ssh
to
not require a password
is easy and highly recommended. If you need a primer on setting up
Bind
, you can read
this article
, as long as you remember to use your package manager in place of
yum
— unless your package manager is
yum
! Or you might prefer
this one
.
The Plan
Once you have your DNS server set up and an
ssh
session, there are only a few things to setup.
A script to run remotely using
ssh
.
A template that defines your DNS zone file (but isn’t your DNS zone file).
A way to trigger the script from your local machine.
A way to reload the DNS server.
The script, of course, is a Bash script but it makes good use of Awk. My original template file format was simple. I made a copy of the zone file, replace the serial number with
$SERIAL
and the dynamic IP address with
$IP
. The script would plug in new values and reload the DNS server using a control program known as
rndc
, more in a minute.
A Few Gotchas
The biggest problem with this scheme is that there is only one dynamic IP address allowed. But before we fix that, let’s look at some of the problems. First, we need to learn the remote address of the computer calling the script. Here’s some code:
echo "$SSH_CLIENT" | cut -d ' ' -f 1
This, of course, assumes we are logged in via
ssh
. I took a few shortcuts since I didn’t expect to call this script manually except during testing. The arguments were simple, although I’d later have to add a bit more. The first script took an IP address or a dash to indicate my
ssh
IP address, a zone name and that was it.
The script would look for
${ZONENAME}.dns.template
in the current directory and use a simple
awk
script to
gsub
any occurrence of
$SERIAL
and
$IP
in the template.
Awk
would write to a temporary file and once successful, I’d move the file over to the DNS file (again, in the same directory) and make the server update.
That last bit is a little tricky, too.
Bind
has a tool,
rndc
, that can reload a zone (among other things). But normally you have to be root to run it. You can use
sudo
, of course, but for an automated script, that’s not handy since it will want your password.
Modifying SUDOERS
Turns out that
sudo
has a lot of features you don’t often use. One of them will allow users or groups of users to execute things with no password even if it would normally require root. Obviously, you need to be very careful with this ability. I made a file called
/etc/sudoers.d/91-dynamicdns
on the DNS server that has a single line in it:
myuserid ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/rndc reload wd5gnr.com
This allows me to reload that one zone file as my normal user without entering a password by using
sudo
. If you try to do anything else, you’ll still get the
sudo
password prompt.
XKCD by [Randall Munroe]
CC By_NC 2.5
Calling the Script
All that’s left is to call the script on the local machine using
ssh
. You have several options. Of course, running it manually is easy enough, but I used
cron
or
anacron
to schedule execution of the script periodically and roughly in sync with the TTL value. You could use
systemd
, if you prefer. On a laptop using
NetworkManager
, it would be possible to write a script that runs when the network connection connects, which would probably be suitable.
Exactly how you do it will depend on your setup. Keep in mind that even once WiFi connects, the router could get a new WAN IP address at any time, so probably some sort of periodic update is a good idea even if you want to force an update on network connect or log in.
Multiple Hosts
That all worked fine for a while, but I eventually wanted to allow for multiple lines. The problem is that each update is disconnected from the rest. Somehow you want the template to only impact the specific lines that need to change. I also wanted to check the IP address and only reload in the case that the new IP address was different.
There are many solutions to this problem, of course. It would even be possible to store the IP addresses in a database or file and then make all updates each time. But that seemed like a pain, so I opted for something easier. The template file will now copy any line without a prefix right to the output unchanged. But some lines will have a prefix which is text followed by a colon. When the script finds such a line, it looks to see if the prefix is the one we are working with. If so, it replaces
$SERIAL
and
$IP
as before. It strips the prefix off and temporarily stashes the line. There is one special prefix,
!
, that matches any prefix. That’s primarily to allow
$SERIAL
to be used in one line that changes on each update.
With this new scheme, no output occurs as the script processes the template. However, the script now takes two arguments: the template and the existing zone file. Processing for the second file is different. It simply copies each line from the zone file to a new file unless there was a replacement line from the first pass. If there is, that line replaces the old line. You can determine which pass
awk
is in by looking at
ARGIND
which tells you which file you are currently processing.
The only big issue, then, is if you tried to run the script twice at the same time. The answer to that problem is to use
flock
, a technique covered in
an earlier Linux-Fu
.
You can find the entire final script on
GitHub
along with an example template file. Note that everything runs on the server. You simply run the script via
ssh
— and that can be done automatically in a number of ways — and the code on the server side takes care of the rest. Since you probably need
ssh
set up anyway, this means there are no extra keys to maintain and no updates to each client any time you want to modify anything.
Other Methods
As usual, there are many ways to solve this problem. This may or may not suit your needs. I considered just writing the template using
$INCLUDE
to include a sub zone file for each dynamic host and having the script write those. That will probably work but if you had a lot of hosts, it would wind up with a lot of stray files. There is also some ambiguity in RFC 1035 as to the correct behavior of
$INCLUDE
although the Bind documentation clears it up, at least as far as Bind is concerned.
It still shows some interesting tricks with
awk
and
flock
, though. There are other ways to find your remote servers, such as
PageKite
. Finally, you can throw
hardware at the problem
. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273155",
"author": "Sebastian",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T14:48:36",
"content": "Before I setup my own public bind server for this, I’d rather just use SSH remote port forwarding and do not need to care about port forwarding in the NAT router at home – if that is even possible when ... | 1,760,373,377.680418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/prop-driven-cardboard-rc-car-doesnt-skimp-on-performance/ | Prop-Driven Cardboard RC Car Doesn’t Skimp On Performance | Donald Papp | [
"how-to",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"CA glue",
"car",
"cardboard",
"diy",
"propeller",
"rc"
] | [Kryzer Channel] takes making a DIY RC car to a whole new level with
this prop-driven electric car that is made almost entirely out of cardboard
(YouTube video, also embedded below.) By attaching an electric motor with a push prop to the back of the car, [Kryzer] avoids the need for any kind of drive system or gearing. Steering works normally thanks to some scratch-built linkages, but the brake solution is especially clever.
Braking is done by having a stocky servo push a reinforced stub downward, out of a hole in the center of the car. This provides friction against the road surface. After all, on an RC car a functional brake is simply not optional. Cutting the throttle and coasting to a stop works for a plane, but just won’t do for a car.
Winding thread around metal components then saturating with CA glue makes a durable assembly.
Layers of corrugated cardboard and hot glue make up the bulk of the car body, and some of the assembly techniques shown off are really slick and make the video really worth a watch. For example, the construction of the wheels (starting around
2:24
) demonstrates making them almost entirely out of cardboard, saturated with CA glue for reinforcement, with a power drill acting as a makeshift lathe for trimming everything down. A section of rubber inner tube provides the tire surface and a piece of hard plastic makes a durable hub. Wraps of thread saturated in CA glue, shown here, is another technique that shows up in several places and is used in lieu of any sort of fasteners.
The well-edited video (embedded below) is chock full of clever assembly and construction. Unsurprisingly, this is not [Krazer]’s first cardboard vehicle:
their video channel has other impressive cardboard models and racers to show off
.
Cardboard is
an often under-rated prototyping material
that offers loads of advantages. We’ve also seen the results of saturating paper products with CA glue before, like in
this paper slug-flinging cardboard gun
. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273126",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T13:13:02",
"content": "Cool design, is it model after any existing automobiles?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273236",
"author": "weirdwhit",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,373,377.738192 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/25/schlieren-on-a-stick/ | Schlieren On A Stick | Bryan Cockfield | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"camera",
"density",
"fluid",
"image",
"optics",
"phone",
"photograph",
"Schlieren",
"selfie stick"
] | Schlieren imaging is a technique for viewing the density of transparent fluids using a camera and some clever optical setups. Density of a fluid like air might change based on the composition of the air itself with various gasses, or it may vary as a result of a sound or pressure wave. It might sound like you would need a complicated and/or expensive setup in order to view such things, but with a few common things
you can have your own Schlieren setup
as [elad] demonstrates.
His setup relies on a cell phone, attached to a selfie stick, with a spherical mirror at the other end. The selfie stick makes adjusting the distance from the camera to the mirror easy, as a specific distance from the camera is required as a function of focal length. For cell phone cameras, it’s best to find this distance through experimentation using a small LED as the point source. Once it’s calibrated and working, a circular field of view is displayed on the phone which allows the viewer to see any change in density in front of the mirror.
The only downside of this build that [elad] notes is that the selfie stick isn’t stiff enough to prevent the image from shaking around a little bit, but all things considered this is an excellent project that shows a neat and useful trick in the photography/instrumentation world that could be useful for a lot of other projects. We’ve only
seen Schlieren imaging once before
and it used a slightly different method of viewing the changing densities. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273105",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T11:50:52",
"content": "“Schlieren setup”… It’s funny how you use that German word. Schlieren is not the name of the person who invented it. It is just the word for visible streaks inside a fluid (or inside glass, but that’s also... | 1,760,373,377.540098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/an-old-calculator-lives-again/ | An Old Calculator Lives Again | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"calculator",
"radio shack",
"vfd"
] | There was a time when any electronics student would have a slide rule hanging off their belt. By the 1970s, the slide rule changed over to an electronic calculator which was a pricy item. Today you can buy calculators at the dollar store. [JohnAudioTech] pulled out an
old Radio Shack vacuum fluorescent display
(VFD) calculator and found it didn’t work. Obviously, that means it is time to open it up.
It is fun to see one of these old devices opened up again. Consumer electronics with big through-hole ICs! Troubleshooting the device wound up being anti-climatic, as a broken wire to the battery compartment explained the whole thing.
As a teardown, though, this is a fun video. Not only are all the parts through-hole, but the PCB is clearly a manual layout with serpentine traces flowing across the board like some sort of art piece.
[John] even has a need hack for the calculator itself, if you happen to have one. Apparently, the calculator IC had a provision for a pi constant key, but there was no key for that function. Pressing the square root and 4 keys at the same time will trick the chip into providing pi anyway.
Another interesting item: [John] modified a cheap camera and removed the IR filter from it. Using that he was able to image the display’s cathode wire, which is normally difficult to see unaided.
There isn’t much need for a calculator now since your phone can easily do math ranging from a simple calculator app to symbolic math programs. But, like slide rules, we have a soft spot for these handheld computers.
If you don’t want vintage, an
Arduino
has plenty of power compared to these old machines. If, by chance, you want a
modern calculator
, they can also do plenty these days. | 42 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273064",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T05:32:33",
"content": "“By the 1970s, the slide rule changed over to an electronic calculator which was a pricy item.”Well, last time I bought a slide rule (a Pickett log-log trig model with about 20 scales), it cost me a... | 1,760,373,377.620803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/hacking-d-link-firmware/ | Hacking D-Link Firmware | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"d-link",
"decryption",
"encryption",
"firmware",
"reverse engineering"
] | When [0xRickSanchez] found some D-Link firmware he couldn’t unpack, he was curious to find out why. The firmware had a new encryption method which was doing its job of preventing tampering and static analysis. Of course, he had to
figure out how to get around it
and is documenting his work in a series of blog posts.
Looking at the entropy analysis showed the data to be totally random, a good sign it was either encrypted or compressed. The target router cost about $200, but a similar cheaper router used the same encryption and thus this model became the hardware of choice for testing.
A console cable provided access to the router and an executable named imgdecrypt immediately caught his eye. Moving that file to a regular PC allowed the usual attack to see how it does its job.
You can follow along with
part 2
which is in
2 different parts
. The end result is on
GitHub
, but — honestly — the real adventure is in the story of how it came together.
We spend a lot of time thinking about
reverse engineering things like this
. We aren’t always looking at
routers
, either. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273048",
"author": "nik282000",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T03:10:56",
"content": "How ignorant can a network hardware company be. There will always be a guy who cracks your consumer device and reverses your FW. If you just make it open to begin with AND take bug reports from the comm... | 1,760,373,377.789989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/reactive-pixel-lamps-create-colourful-vibes-on-command/ | Reactive Pixel Lamps Create Colourful Vibes On Command | Lewin Day | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"ambilight",
"led",
"Wemos d1"
] | Phillips Ambilight technology is a curious thing, never quite catching on in the mainstream due to its proprietary nature. Consisting of an LED array that sits behind a television screen, it projects colours relevant to the content on screen to create a greater feeling of ambience.
[Ed Chamberlain]’s reactive pixel lamps aim to do much the same thing in a more distributed way.
Each pixel lamp consists of a Wemos D1 controller fitted with an old-school 4-wire RGB LED. The components are placed in a 3D printed translucent cube, which serves as an attractive enclosure and diffuser. With WiFi connectivity on board, it’s possible to connect the individual cubes up to a Raspberry Pi serving as a Phillips Hue bridge thanks to
DIYHue
. Once setup, the lights can be configured as an Ambilight system within the Phillips Hue app.
It’s an impressive way to give a room reactive lighting on a budget, without resorting to costly off-the-shelf solutions. We’d love to see this expanded further, as we’re sure a room full of reactive lights would be truly a sight to behold.
Other methods to recreate the Ambilight technology are possible, too.
Video after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273088",
"author": "kenneth",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T08:51:22",
"content": "This can look cool if just play a music video but for normal use and video… Hm .. No .. this is too distracting andpretty irritating when trying to watch the screen.I think there is a very good reason why... | 1,760,373,378.180276 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/arduino-rig-does-spectrophotometry/ | Arduino Rig Does Spectrophotometry | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"science",
"Spectrophotometer",
"spectrophotometry"
] | Spectrophotometry is an important scientific tool, most commonly used in biology and chemistry. It’s a method to measure the amount of light absorbed by a chemical solution at various different wavelengths. While it’s typically the preserve of expensive lab equipment,
[Daniel Hingston] built a rig to do the job at home.
The heart of the rig is a normal filament-based flashlight bulb, which produces good-quality white light containing all colors. A prism is then used to split the light into its component wavelengths, so that the sample can be tested across the whole light spectrum. The prism is rotated by a servo motor, which exposes the sample to the full rainbow, while an Arduino uses a light-dependent resistor to measure how much light makes it through the sample. Thus, the amount of light absorbed by the sample can be calculated, relative to calibrations made with no sample present.
It’s a simple build that can be achieved with fairly common materials, barring the prism which may need to be specially ordered. It would be a great way to teach highschool students about advanced scientific concepts, as well as showing them behind the curtain of how lab equipment works.
We see all kinds of DIY science gear around here;
this lantern-based bioreactor is a great example.
Video after the break.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP9oaMI_R7s | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272970",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T20:10:52",
"content": "Cool, I’ve seen a similar _commercial_ device for use in Chemistry Labs (High School and College).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272992",
"author"... | 1,760,373,378.225788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/assistive-gloves-come-in-pairs/ | Assistive Gloves Come In Pairs | Brian McEvoy | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Robots Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"assistive device",
"assistive technology",
"exercise",
"glove",
"hand",
"human powered machines",
"human-powered",
"physical therapy",
"pneumatic",
"rehabilitation",
"robot",
"soft robotics",
"tendon"
] | We have to hand it to this team, their entry for the 2020 Hackaday Prize is a classic pincer maneuver. A team from [The University of Auckland] in New Zealand and [New Dexterity] is designing
a couple of gloves for both rehabilitation and human augmentation
. One style is a human-powered prosthetic for someone who has lost mobility in their hand. The other form uses soft robotics and Bluetooth control to move the thumb, fingers, and an extra thumb (!).
The human-powered exoskeleton places the user’s hand inside a cabled glove. When they are in place, they arch their shoulders and tighten an artificial tendon across their back, which pulls their hand close. To pull the fingers evenly, there is a differential box which ensures pressure goes where it is needed, naturally. Once they’ve gripped firmly, the cables stay locked, and they can relax their shoulders. Another big stretch and the cords relax.
In the soft-robotic model, a glove is covered in inflatable bladders. One set spreads the fingers, a vital physical therapy movement. Another bladder acts as a second thumb for keeping objects centered in the palm. A cable system draws the fingers closed like the previous glove, but to lock them they evacuate air from the bladders, so jamming layers retain their shape, like food in a vacuum bag.
We are excited to see what other handy inventions appear in this year’s Hackaday Prize, like the
thumbMouse
, or how about more assistive tech that uses
hoverboards to help move people
?
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272980",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T20:57:01",
"content": "I think a myoelectric glove would have been a better idea, actually use electrical signals to cause the muscles in the hand to move in a coordinated fashion, it would make the glove smaller and lighter ... | 1,760,373,378.628815 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/running-a-successful-hacker-camp-in-a-pandemic-bornhack-2020/ | Running A Successful Hacker Camp In A Pandemic: BornHack 2020 | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"BornHack",
"Covid-19",
"Denmark",
"hacker camp"
] | You could say 2020 is The Year That Didn’t Happen, or perhaps even The Year That Everything Happened Online. All the international cons and camps have been cancelled, and we’ve spent our time instead seeing our friends in Jitsi, or Zoom.
But there was one camp that wasn’t cancelled. The yearly Danish hacker camp
BornHack
has gone ahead this year with significantly reduced numbers and amid social distancing, turning it from what is normally one of the smaller and more intimate events into the
only
real-world event of 2020.
I bought my ticket early in the year and long before COVID-19 became a global pandemic, so on a sunny day in August I found myself in my car with my friend Dani from FizzPop hackerspace in Birmingham taking the ferry for the long drive through the Netherlands and Germany to Denmark.
Have Fun, Don’t Spread The Virus
Hand sanitiser points were all around the site.
One of many hand washing points.
Social distanching was enforced in the kitchen area
A maximum capacity for the kitchen area
Socially distanced seating in the speaker’s tent.
The first thought of anyone traveling in 2020 is of the pandemic, and while we’d prefer to take you straight into the usual cool stuff from our community it’s best to dive into this, the thing that whether we like it or not had the biggest influence on the whole event.
Most obviously in the event itself, this was a much smaller gathering than usual, limited by Danish Government rules as an outdoor event to only 150 attendees rather than the usual greater numbers. Last year they had about 450 people and the site has room for more, so the various parts were much more sparsely populated than the hacker camps we’re used to. Hylkedam scout camp makes a great venue in a normal year, but in 2020 its spread-out terrain was a bonus for social distancing.
Meanwhile the pandemic brought all the rules we’ve all come to expect. Spaced all around the site were had washing and sanitising stations — the BornHack 2020 logo reflects this, with a “Make clean” tagline and icons of hand sanitiser and hand washing. Communal areas were social distanced, masks were advised indoors, and the speaker’s tent was reduced to a much smaller audience spaced out across its rows. It was reassuring that both the orga and participants took the whole thing seriously.
There was a report of one visitor who came to the camp for a day during which they received a positive result to an earlier test. So far we’re unaware of any camp-related infections following the event. This is why it’s so important that everyone was strictly observing all of these precautions.
A Strange Kind Of Hacker Camp
Clever use by [Myrtle] of a 2019 BornHack badge as a beacon for the token hunt game.
It’s good to be back at a hacker camp.
Plenty of space for distancing on the camp site.
It’s a bar graph!
A BornHack tradition comes in specially made spirits from a distillery on Bornholm.
Oddly for the only hacker camp of the year, there wasn’t as much in the way of hacks as you might expect. When 150 people spent the year amid lockdown restrictions and have a single week of normal summer, it’s hardly surprising that their minds turn more towards having a holiday in the sunshine of a Danish forest in August than to what we’d expect in a normal year.
So the atmosphere was simultaneously more festive as everyone had a chance to let their hair down, and quieter as they recharged a little from the stresses of the preceding months. This is not to say that there were not plenty of the usual hacker camp activities such as the token hunt game, the CTF, or the Hacker Jeopardy quiz, but the allure of lying in a hammock under the trees with a Club-Mate or driving the short distance to the beach on a hot day was strong. The well-stocked bar and
excellent local Danish street food
from the on-site food van kept us all happily sated, and I can truthfully say that never has a hacker camp hit the spot for me at the time I needed it in quite the same way as this one.
The bar was a centre of activity through the night.
It’s a tough job, the badge-write-up and part of this one were written here.
Thanks to [Renze], a Tindie badge becomes an SAO for the BornHack badge.
An Otter Lounge, a pop-up dancefloor in the woods courtesy of my friends Niklas and Jan-Henrik. (Thanks @CosmoGecko for the image!)
Buy beer, get Pixelflood pixels.
Plenty Still To Get Your Teeth Into
I’ll write in detail about the badge in a separate piece, suffice to say that it’s a very well-executed LED array with an ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller running Circuit Python. The event had
a full programme of speakers
which thanks to
their very efficient video system
they were able to put up on YouTube very quickly, so
it’s worth taking a browse through some of the offerings
. There seemed to be more infosec/software talks than hardware ones and some of them are in Danish so may be less accessible to an international audience, but there are still a few I’d like to bring to your attention. They’re auto-generated from live streams and some of them start a few minutes into the clip, so our links will jump in as the talk begins.
If you’ve ever been to a festival or hacker camp and used the WiFi or other IT services then you may be interested by a talk from Lasse Leegaard, giving us
a fascinating view from the trenches of the IT infrastructure
for the Roskilde Festival. The challenges of providing connectivity for 100k music fans make even the largest hacker camps pale into insignificance. Meanwhile a BornHack regular, Mike Mikjær Christensen returns to his specialist theme of retrocomputing with ‘
Made In Denmark
‘, a run through his research into the Danish microcomputer industry in the 1970s and 1980s that features some fascinating and very rare hardware.
Tickling both retrogaming and reverse engineering fancies was Ramón Soto Mathiesen, whose talk on
manipulating PKF files
was in fact a fascinating primer on file format reverse engineering using a Spanish PC football game from the 1990s as an example. Finishing up with a satisfying bit of RF tech I was witness during the camp to someone asking to borrow the microwave oven from the food preparation area for use as an RF interference source in a talk. That was Mark-Jan Bast who is
examining the potential impact of Galileo satellite navigation on 23cm amateur radio users
. This talk provides a fascinating introduction to how satellite positioning systems work, as well as some of the differences between the various systems.
There were plenty of lights in the trees throughout the camp.
A stroopwafel masterclass, courtesy of [Moem].
This really is a beautiful place to spend a week.
A week is longer than most camps, and this time due to the pandemic there was little opportunity for trips out such as last year’s
visit to LegoLand and Lego House
. But the extra time led as always to a camp with much more opportunity to get to know our fellow attendees, and to take a holiday after a year of lockdown and pandemic-related restrictions. The forest surrounding the Hylkedam camp was an ideal place to unwind, and a lucky week of good weather meant it was every bit as good as any more conventional sunshine holiday.
I’m now stuck inside writing this during the two-week quarantine period imposed by the UK government while the camp was under way for travelers returning via the Netherlands, but that I see it as a small price to pay for what I consider to have been the opportunity of the year. I will return next year for what I hope will be a more conventional BornHack, but meanwhile I’ll always have the memories from this year: our only international hacker camp. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273133",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T13:32:01",
"content": "Ms. List attended a hacker camp,and I’m jealous!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6273138",
"author": "Tom H",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T13:45:5... | 1,760,373,378.691248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/cnc-on-the-desktop-hack-chat/ | CNC On The Desktop Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"engineering",
"green",
"Hack Chat",
"open source",
"photovoltaic",
"solar",
"sustainable"
] | Join us on Wednesday, August 26 at noon Pacific for the
CNC on the Desktop Hack Chat
with Matt Hertel and
John Allwine
!
Once limited to multi-million dollar machines on the floors of cavernous factories, CNC technology has moved so far downscale in terms of machine size that it’s often easy to lose track of where it pops up. Everything from 3D-printers to laser engravers use computer numeric control to move a tool to some point in three-dimensional space, and do it with unmatched precision and reproducibility.
CNC has gotten so pervasive that chances are pretty good that there’s a CNC machine of some sort pretty close to everyone reading this, with many of those machines being homebrew designs. That’s the backstory of
Pocket NC
, a company that was literally started in a one-bedroom apartment in 2011 by Matt and Michelle Hertel. After
a successful Kickstarter
that delivered 100 of their flagship five-axis desktop CNC mills to backers, they geared up for production and now turn out affordable machine tools for the masses. We’ve even seen
some very complex parts
made on these mills show up in projects we’ve featured.
For this Hack Chat, we’ll be joined by Pocket NC CTO and co-founder Matt Hertel and John Allwine, who recently joined the company as Principal Software Engineer. We’ll discuss not only Pocket NC’s success and future plans, but the desktop CNC landscape in general. Drop by with your questions regarding both the hardware and the software side of CNC, about turning an idea into a business, and where the CNC world and next-generation manufacturing will be heading in the future.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 26 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. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6273101",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2020-08-25T10:35:44",
"content": "bCNC is FOSS project with lots of potential. looking for developers :-)https://github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6273115"... | 1,760,373,378.734878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/evaluating-raspberry-pi-as-a-programmable-logic-controller/ | Evaluating Raspberry Pi As A Programmable Logic Controller | Maya Posch | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"industrial controller",
"plc",
"programmable logic controller"
] | It should be no surprise to many that one can use a Raspbery Pi SBC as an industrial controller, but is it any good at that? That was the question which [Dough Reneker] and [William Shaffer]
built a test rig to see how a Raspberry Pi performs in head to head tests
. They compared a Python-based control loop on a Raspberry Pi 3B against an
C0-12DD1E-2-D AutomationDirect CLICK
Programmable Logic Controller (
PLC
) using a simple water heating example.
A major snag with using the Raspberry Pi as a PLC is the lack of industrial I/O capacity. This requires additional hardware, in this case adding a four-channel ADC board as well as a custom board to condition the signals. The Raspberry Pi looks for 0-3 V inputs where industrial control applications are usually in the -10 to 10 V range and often use
a 4-20 mA current loop
.
Using a PLC leverages so-called ladder logic, where each action depends on conditions. With each update scan, the PLC ensures that all input conditions are translated into the appropriate output conditions in real-time. It’s only job is to monitor the process at hand and it does this very well.
Here the flexibility and generic nature of the Raspberry Pi running Linux was a disadvantage. Unlike the PLC, the lack of a hard real-time OS means you can’t guarantee the Pi will be as responsive to changing inputs.
The behavior of the two systems showed that while both did the task they were programmed for, the Raspberry Pi was decidedly more erratic. Although one could program around a lot of these issues (presumably using Linux in stripped-down, soft real-time configuration with interrupt-driven native code), the effort needed to make a Raspberry Pi system suitable for an industrial environment shows why single-board computers haven’t seen adoption as replacements for PLCs. | 105 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272868",
"author": "Source?",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T15:07:10",
"content": "To be fair, is Automation Direct exactly what one would consider an unbiased source? They literally sell PLCs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273... | 1,760,373,379.147798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/damage-to-arecibo-leaves-gaping-hole-in-astronomy/ | Damage To Arecibo Leaves Gaping Hole In Astronomy | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Radio Hacks",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Arecibo",
"Arecibo Observatory",
"asteroid",
"planetary defense",
"radar",
"Radio Telescope",
"space"
] | In the early morning hours of August 10th, a support cable at the Arecibo Observatory pulled lose from its mount and
crashed through the face of the primary reflector below
. Images taken from below the iconic 305 meter dish, made famous by films such as
Contact
and
GoldenEye
, show an incredible amount of damage. The section of thick cable, estimated to weigh in at around 6,000 kilograms (13,000 pounds), had little difficulty tearing through the reflector’s thin mesh construction.
Worse still, the cable also struck the so-called “Gregorian dome”, the structure suspended over the dish where the sensitive instruments are mounted. At the time of this writing it’s still unclear as to whether or not any of that instrumentation has been damaged, though NASA at least has said that the equipment they operate inside the dome appears to have survived unscathed. At the very least, the damage to the dome structure itself will need to be addressed before the Observatory can resume normal operations.
The Arecibo Observatory
by JidoBG
[CC-BY-SA 4.0]
But how long will the repairs take, and who’s going to pay for them? It’s no secret that funding for the 60 year old telescope has been difficult to come by since at least the early 2000s. The cost of repairing the relatively minor damage to the telescope sustained during Hurricane Maria in 2017 may have been enough to shutter the installation permanently if it hadn’t been for a consortium led by the University of Central Florida.
They agreed to share the burden of operating the Observatory
with the National Science Foundation and put up several million dollars of additional funding.
It’s far too early to know how much time and money it will take to get Arecibo Observatory back up to operational status, but with the current world situation, it seems likely the telescope will be out of commission for at least the rest of the year. Given the fact that repairs from the 2017 damage still haven’t been completed, perhaps even longer than that. In the meantime, astronomers around the globe are left without this wholly unique resource.
A Cold War Relic
It might not be immediately obvious why the loss of Arecibo might be such a problem. After all, it’s just a radio telescope. It’s not even the largest one anymore, as that title was taken from it in 2016 by the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China. Surely researchers could shuffle their experiments over to other observatories?
In some cases, they likely will. But the Arecibo Observatory has a special feature that makes it unique among all of the large radio telescopes in the world. It can do something that even the much more modern FAST isn’t capable of: it has the ability to
transmit
, where the others can only serve as receivers. This lets Arecibo perform radar astronomy, by transmitting microwaves and observing how they reflect off of distant objects.
Workers installing the reflector’s mesh panels in 1963.
Normally, transmitting is not something a radio telescope would ever be expected to do. No more than an optical telescope would be expected to project light into the sky. But the Arecibo Observatory wasn’t actually designed as a radio telescope to begin with, at least, not primarily. Its original goal was to help detect nuclear intercontinental ballistics missiles launched from the Soviet Union.
In the late 1950s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now known as DARPA) started looking into ways to detect incoming ICBMs as they reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. It was generally understood that a object traveling at reentry speeds through the atmosphere would leave a ionized trail in its wake, and that further, this would show up as a distinctive radar signature. But there was little hard data on the subject, and even less was known about the region of the upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere.
To help fill in these gaps, and hopefully produce a reliable way of detecting and tracking potential ICBM warheads, a contract between Cornell University and the ARPA led to the construction of what was then called the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in 1963. By sending powerful radar transmissions into the ionosphere and studying the returning echo, the installation would be able to study electromagnetic interactions at the wispy edges of the atmosphere.
Reaching for the Stars
The field of radio astronomy was still in its infancy when the dish was built, but it didn’t take long before the true scientific value of Arecibo became apparent. The study of the ionosphere certainly had value, but the sensitive equipment at the observatory could see much farther than that. Within a decade of coming online, data from the dish was able to confirm the existence of neutron stars and identify the first binary pulsar.
The first image ever taken of an asteroid.
The installation’s ability to transmit signals into deep space also held tantalizing possibilities. In 1974 researchers
broadcast what has come to be called the Arecibo Message
towards the star cluster M13. This 210 byte burst of digital information included simple images of the human form and the radio telescope itself.
It represented the first, and to date only, concerted attempt
to directly communicate with potential extraterrestrial life
. The composers of the message, which included Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, didn’t really expect a reply; but the fact that humanity was capable of sending it in the first place was seen as a technological turning point.
In 1989, Arecibo was able to capture the first direct images of an asteroid in space. Usually asteroids are too far away and too small to be more than a spec of light through an optical telescope, but when viewed by radar, the shape and rotation of
Castalia
could be observed easily.
Data collected by the dish in 1990 would later be used to confirm for the first time the existence of planets outside of our own solar system. We now know there to be thousands of these so-called exoplanets, and more are
still being discovered thanks to dedicated planet-hunting spacecraft
that owe their origins to Arecibo.
An Uncertain Future
To this day, the Arecibo Observatory remains the largest and most powerful deep space transmitter in the world. The radar images it’s able to generate of distant objects is absolutely unparalleled, even 60 years after its construction. More than just satisfying our curiosity about the cosmos, this capability makes it an important part of NASA’s Planetary Defense program. We’re already
leaning heavily on antiquated orbital assets
to help identify and track potentially dangerous asteroids as they approach the Earth, losing the one-of-a-kind radar capabilities of Arecibo is only making a bad situation even worse.
The 70m dish at Goldstone
Until Arecibo Observatory is able to come back online, our closest thing to a backup is the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. Rather than one huge dish, it’s made up of five independent antennas, the largest of which is less than 1/4 the diameter of the primary reflector at Arecibo.
While not nearly as sensitive, the multiple antennas do have the advantage in that they can each be aimed at a separate targets. That’s because Goldstone is primarily tasked with maintaining communications with distant spacecraft, often several at a time. The antennas can be used as radio telescopes, but only when they aren’t actively engaged in spacecraft communications. That limited research time just got even more valuable with the influx of former Arecibo researchers who will be vying for time on the equipment.
The reality is, much of the research that was being conducted at the Arecibo Observatory will have to be put on hold for the time being. There’s no direct replacement for the radio telescope’s unique set of abilities, and the available research time on lesser installations won’t be sufficient to cover the increased demand. Still, the clear scientific need to get the Observatory back online doesn’t automatically make the logistics of making it happen any easier. At least for the time being, humanity’s ability to peer into the cosmos will be a bit more limited than what we’ve become accustomed to. | 69 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272860",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T14:20:06",
"content": "Reminds me that this moon-based version of Arecibo is on the possible horizon:https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_I_Phase_II/lunar_crater_radio_telescope/",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,373,378.851878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/raspberry-pi-makes-a-practical-tricorder/ | Raspberry Pi Makes A Practical Tricorder | Al Williams | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"scanner",
"sci-fi",
"star trek",
"tricorder"
] | What do you get when you add a thermal camera, a software-defined radio dongle, and a battery to a Raspberry Pi? If you are [saveitforparts] you
make a tricorder for sniffing radio signals and viewing heat signatures
. He admits, the videos (see below) aren’t exactly a “how-to” but it will still give you some ideas for your next build.
You can sense the frustration with some Linux configuration issues, but [saveitforparts] admits he isn’t a Linux or Raspberry Pi guru. Version 1 seemed to be a bit of a prototype, but version 2 is more polished. We still aren’t sure we’d see Spock carrying a case like that, but some 3D printing could spiff that right up.
Of course, a real tricorder is a McGuffin that does whatever the plot calls for. This one is a bit more practical, but it can monitor thermal and RF energy and could accommodate more sensors. This is a great example of a project that would have been very hard to do in the past but is much easier today. The availability of cheap computers and ready-made modules along with associated software open up many possibilities.
If you want to do your own Tricorder hacking you could take over
a commercial model
. Then again, there’s an
official replica
on its way that seems like it might have some similar features. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272921",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T17:26:54",
"content": "Technically (at least according to TV Tropes), a macguffin is something which is itself pretty useless.Here’s the TV Trope for an “Everything Sensor”, a kind of “Applied Phlebotenum”:https://tvtropes... | 1,760,373,378.574154 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/24/midi-slide-whistle-shows-the-value-of-a-proper-fipple/ | MIDI Slide Whistle Shows The Value Of A Proper Fipple | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino DUE",
"CNC shield",
"fipple",
"rack and pinion",
"stepper",
"whistle"
] | We pride ourselves on knowing the proper terms for everyday things: aglet, glabella, borborygmi, ampersands. But we have to confess to never having heard of a “fipple” before finding
this interesting MIDI-controlled slide whistle
, where we learned that the mouthpiece of a penny whistle or a recorder is known as a fipple. The more you know.
This lesson comes to us by way of
a Twitter post
by [The Mixed SIgnal], which showed off the finished mechanism in a short video and not much else. We couldn’t leave that alone, so we reached out for more information and were happy to find that [The Mixed SIgnal] quickly posted a build log on Hackaday.io as well as the build video below.
The slide whistle is a homebrew version of the kind we’ve all probably annoyed our parents with at one time or another, with a 3D-printed fipple (!) and piston, both of which go into a PVC tube. Air is supplied to the pipe with a small centrifugal blower, while a 3D-printed rack and pinion gear of unusual proportions moves the piston back and forth. An Arduino Due with a CNC shield controls the single stepper motor. The crude glissandos of this primitive wind instrument honestly are a little on the quiet side, especially given the racket the stepper and rack and pinion make when queuing up a new note. Perhaps it needs more fipple.
While the humble author is new to fipple-isms, luckily the Hackaday editors see all and know that there two
epic hacks featuring fipples
to
create bottle organs
. These are far from the first weirdest instruments we’ve seen —
a modulin
,
a Wubatron
, and
the Drum-Typeulator
all fit that bill well. But we like what [The Mixed Signal] has done here, and we’re looking forward to more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-gjM94Bu5E | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272853",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T13:53:52",
"content": "Octothorpe, quadthorpe, bithorpe",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272907",
"author": "Papacro",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T16:24:03",
"content"... | 1,760,373,378.899467 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/mobile-transmitter-gets-internal-gps-and-bluetooth/ | Mobile Transmitter Gets Internal GPS And Bluetooth | Tom Nardi | [
"gps hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"APRS",
"bluetooth",
"gps",
"ham radio",
"Kenwood",
"mobile radio",
"transmitter"
] | While [Selim Olcer] was relatively happy with his Kenwood TM-D710a radio, he didn’t like the fact that it needed a bulky external GPS “backpack” for APRS location data. So he decided to
crack open the head unit and see if he couldn’t integrate his own GPS hardware
(
machine translation
). Not only did he succeed, but he even threw in Bluetooth compatibility for good measure.
With the repair manual circuit diagrams in hand, it was no problem to find the GPS RX and TX lines that were being broken out to the external connector. Unfortunately, the radio’s electronics are all 5 volts and the GPS module [Selim] wanted to use was only 3.3 V. So he came up with a small PCB that included not only the voltage regulator to power the GPS module, but also some voltage-dividers to level shift those signals.
Since the Kenwood TM-D710a was already designed to accept a GPS upgrade module, he just needed to change some configuration options in the radio’s menus for it to see the new hardware. Technically the project was done at this point, but since there was still room in the case and he had a GPS module spitting out NMEA sentences, [Selim] tacked on a common Bluetooth serial module so he could see the position information on his smartphone. With an application like APRSdroid, he now has a nice moving map display using the position pulled from the radio’s GPS.
With this modification done it looks like the head unit is ready to go, but that’s only the beginning for a mobile rig. Now we want to see how he
integrates the whole thing into the car
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272822",
"author": "JHB",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T07:07:02",
"content": "same here in german:http://www.ov-d20.de/tm-d710_gps.htm(without bluetooth)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272897",
"author": "Michael W. Perry, WA... | 1,760,373,379.241593 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/e-paper-display-shows-movies-very-very-slowly/ | E-Paper Display Shows Movies Very, Very Slowly | Dan Maloney | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"ffmpeg",
"film",
"frame",
"motion picture",
"movie",
"slow motion",
"waveshare"
] | How much would you enjoy a movie that took months to finish? We suppose it would very much depend on the film; the current batch of films from the
Star Wars
franchise are quite long enough as they are, thanks very much. But a film like
Casablanca
or
2001: A Space Odyssey
might be a very different experience when played on
this ultra-slow-motion e-paper movie player
.
The idea of displaying a single frame of a movie up for hours rather than milliseconds has captivated [Tom Whitwell] since he saw
[Bryan Boyer]’s take on the concept
. The hardware [Tom] used is similar: a Raspberry Pi, an SD card hat with a 64 GB card for the movies, and a Waveshare e-paper display, all of which fits nicely in an IKEA picture frame.
[Tom]’s software is a bit different, though; a Python program uses FFmpeg to fetch and dither frames from a movie at a configurable rate, to customize the viewing experience a little more than the original. Showing one frame every two minutes and then skipping four frames, it has taken him more than two months to watch
Psycho
. He reports that the shower scene was over in a day and a half — almost as much time as it took to film — while the scene showing [Marion Crane] driving through the desert took weeks to finish. We always wondered why [Hitch] spent so much time on that scene.
With the proper films loaded, we can see this being an interesting way to really study the structure and flow of a good film. It’s also a good way to cut your teeth on e-paper displays, which we’ve seen pop up in everything from
weather stations
to
Linux terminals
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272794",
"author": "NiHaoMike",
"timestamp": "2020-08-24T03:11:54",
"content": "For such a low framerate, wouldn’t a STM32 or even the classic Arduino be a better fit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6272802",
"author... | 1,760,373,379.199651 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/hackaday-links-august-23-2020/ | Hackaday Links: August 23, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"apple",
"Bechtel",
"burnout",
"contest",
"fire",
"genetics",
"GoPro",
"hackaday links",
"ipod",
"repeater",
"sensor",
"tire"
] | Apple, the world’s first trillion-dollar company — give or take a trillion — has built a bit of libertarian cachet by famously refusing to build backdoors into their phones, despite the entreaties of the federal government. So it came as a bit of a surprise when we read that
the company may have worked with federal agents to build an “enhanced” iPod
. David Shayer says that he was one of three people in Apple who knew about the 2005 program, which was at the behest of the US Department of Energy. Shayer says that engineers from defense contractor Bechtel, seemed to want to add sensors to the first-generation iPod; he was never clued in fully but suspects they were adding radiation sensors. It would make sense, given the climate in the early 2000s, walking down the street with a traditional Geiger counter would have been a bit obvious. And mind you, we’re not knocking Apple for allegedly working with the government on this — building a few modified iPods is a whole lot different than turning masses of phones into data gathering terminals. Umm, wait…
A couple of weeks back, we included a story about
a gearhead who mounted a GoPro camera inside of a car tire
. The result was some interesting footage as he drove around; it’s not a common sight to watch a tire deform and move around from the inside like that. As an encore, the gearhead in question, Warped Perception, did the same trick bit with a more destructive bent:
he captured a full burnout from the inside
. The footage is pretty sick, with the telltale bubbles appearing on the inside before the inevitable blowout and seeing daylight through the shredded remains of the tire. But for our money, the best part is the slo-mo footage from the outside, with the billowing smoke and shredded steel belts a-flinging. We appreciate the effort, but we’re sure glad this guy isn’t our neighbor.
Speaking of graphic footage, things are not going well for some remote radio sites in California. Some towers that host the repeaters used by public service agencies and ham radio operators alike have managed to
record their last few minutes of life
as wildfires sweep across the mountains they’re perched upon. The scenes are horrific, like something from Dante’s
Inferno
, and the burnover shown in the video below is terrifying; watch it and you’ll see a full-grown tree consumed in less than 30 seconds. As bad as the loss of equipment is, it pales in comparison to what the firefighters face as they battle these blazes, but keep in mind that losing these repeaters can place them in terrible jeopardy too.
For everyone who enjoyed The Martian, here’s your chance to science the Watney out of something. Element14 is running
the “One Meter of Pi” contest
, which asks you to imagine how to make the most productive use out of one cubic meter. Using a Raspberry Pi 4 and a bunch of other goodies supplied to each of 20 successful applicants, your challenge will be to figure out how to use the Pi and the space to feed as many people as possible, whether they be space travelers or just people here on terra firma. It’s an interesting challenge that we hope someone from Hackaday will absolutely crush.
Another Pi contest:
the ZeroDays cyberdeck building competition
. This one asks you to design a cyberdeck around the Raspberry Pi Zero. The rules on this one are considerably more flexible, and really seems more about the design of the case rather than the functionality of the cyberdeck. Not familiar with cyberdecks?
We’ve got you covered
.
And finally, did you ever wonder what DNA sounds like? Neither have we, but it turns out that the sequences of DNA bases can make some interesting music, with a little help from
DNA Sonification
. The idea is to use the rules of gene expression — how the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs code for different proteins — and use them to create music by mapping notes to each base. Feed the DNA Sonifier a sequence, — say, from your 23 and Me results — set a few reading rules, and you can listen to the music of your genes. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272750",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T23:21:16",
"content": "“And finally, did you ever wonder what DNA sounds like?” If you Sonify your DNA and it plays Dueling Banjos does that mean you’re inbred?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDlZLsJJkVA",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,373,379.294219 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/lithium-sulfur-batteries-slated-for-takeoff/ | Lithium Sulfur Batteries Slated For Takeoff | Al Williams | [
"chemistry hacks",
"News"
] | [
"battery",
"electric airplane",
"electric vehicle",
"lithium battery",
"lithium sufur"
] | Spectrum recently published a post on
a new lithium sulfur battery technology
specifically targeting electric aviation applications. Although lots of electric vehicles could benefit from the new technology, airplanes are especially sensitive to heavy batteries and lithium-sulfur batteries can weigh much less than modern batteries of equivalent capacity. The Spectrum post is from Oxis Energy who is about to fly tests with the new batteries which they claim have twice the energy density of conventional lithium-ion batteries. The company also claims the batteries are safer, which is another important consideration when flying through the sky.
The batteries have a cathode comprised of aluminum foil coated with carbon and sulfur — which avoids the use of cobalt, a cost driver in traditional lithium cell chemistries. The anode is pure lithium foil. Between the two electrodes is a separator soaked in an electrolyte. The company says the batteries go through multiple stages as they discharge, forming different chemical compounds that continue to produce electricity through chemical action.
The safety factor is due to the fact that, unlike lithium-ion cells, the new batteries don’t form dendrites that short out the cell. The cells do degrade over time, but not in a way that is likely to cause a short circuit. However, ceramic coatings may provide protection against this degradation in the future which would be another benefit compared to traditional lithium batteries.
We see a lot of
exciting battery
announcements, but we rarely see
real products with them
. Time will tell if the Oxis and similar batteries based on this technology will take root. | 60 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272716",
"author": "Jim",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T20:12:01",
"content": "So if these new batteries, a ‘bank’ of them would weight less than the aviation fuel , also the reduced weight of brushless DC motors from the prop(s), would that concept ‘fly’?",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,379.389343 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/monitor-not-vesa-compliant-it-is-now/ | Monitor Not VESA-Compliant? It Is Now! | Donald Papp | [
"computer hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"adapter",
"monitor arm",
"monitor mount",
"vesa"
] | Some monitors lack the holes on the back that make them VESA-compliant, so mounting them on a monitor arm can be a non-starter. To handle this, [Patrick Hallek] designed and 3D printed
these adapter arms to make flat monitors mount to VESA hardware
whether they want to or not.
How does it work? When a monitor can’t attach directly to a VESA mount, this assembly attaches to the mount instead. The three arms extend around the edge of the monitor to grip it from the bottom and top. Some hex-head M5 bolts and nuts are all that are required to assemble the parts, and the top arm is adjustable to accommodate different sizes of monitor. As long as the screen size is between 17 and 27 inches diagonal, and the monitor thickness falls between 30 mm and 75 mm, it should fit.
It’s a smart design that leverages one of the strengths of 3D printing: that of creating specialized adapters or fixtures that would be troublesome to make by hand. That is not to say that there’s no other way to make exactly what one wants when it comes to mounting monitors: check out
this triple-monitor setup using some common metal struts, no welding required
.
[via
reddit
] | 37 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272688",
"author": "Hyratel",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T17:40:51",
"content": "*looks at post**looks at basic woodshop skills*amateur hackery.I kid, it’s a very clean build.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272691",
"author"... | 1,760,373,379.57198 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/the-cias-corona-project-was-about-satellites-not-a-virus/ | The CIA’s Corona Project Was About Satellites, Not A Virus | Al Williams | [
"Space"
] | [
"cia",
"corona satellite",
"film",
"spy satellite"
] | We take orbital imagery for granted these days, but there was a time that it was high technology and highly secretive. [Scott Manley] has a
good overview of the CIA’s Corona spy satellites
, along with declassified images from the early days of the program.
It seems strange today, but the spy images needed high resolution and the only practical technology at the time was film. The satellite held a whopping 3,000 feet of film and, once shot, a capsule or bucket would return to Earth for retrieval and development. They didn’t make it to land — or at least they weren’t supposed to. The CIA didn’t want opponents sweeping up the film so an airplane was supposed to snag the bucket as it descended on a parachute, a topic covered in [Tom Nardi’s] article about
the history of catching stuff as it falls from space
.
The early cameras could see detail down to about 40 feet. By the end of the program in the 1970s, improved cameras could see down to 3 feet or less. Later satellites had a 3D-capable camera and multiple return buckets. The satellites were — officially — a program to expose biological samples to the space environment and return them for analysis. The Discover program was pure cover and the whole thing was declassified in 1992.
Of course,
film from airplanes
also had a role. Some spy satellites tried to
scan film
and send the data back, but that saw more use on lunar missions where returning a capsule to Earth was a lot more difficult. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272658",
"author": "Gerhard",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T14:39:21",
"content": "“It seems strange today, but the spy images needed high resolution and the only practical technology at the time was film.”The U2 still uses film, and for a reasonhttps://petapixel.com/2018/06/08/film-pho... | 1,760,373,379.441787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/a-miniature-power-supply-for-high-voltage-hacking/ | A Miniature Power Supply For High Voltage Hacking | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts",
"Science"
] | [
"flyback transformer",
"high voltage",
"plasma"
] | If you’re looking to experiment with plasma, you’re going to need a high voltage power supply. Usually that means something big, complex, and (naturally) expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. As [Jay Bowles] demonstrates in his latest
Plasma Channel
video, you can
put together a low-cost power supply capable of producing up to 20,000 volts
that fits in the palm of your hand. Though you should probably just put the thing down on a table when in use…
Finding the feedback coil with a multimeter.
The secret to the build is the flyback transformer. A household staple during the era of CRT televisions, these devices can still be readily found online or even salvaged from a broken TV. We’d recommend searching eBay for new old stock (NOS) transformers rather than risk getting blown through a wall while poking around in an old TV you found on the side of the road, but really it all depends on your experience level with this sort of thing.
In any event, once you have the flyback transformer in hand, the rest of the build is very simple. [Jay] demonstrates how you can determine the pinout for your transformer even if you can’t find a datasheet for it, and then proceeds to assemble the handful of ancillary parts necessary to drive it. Housed on a scrap of perfboard and mounted to a piece of plastic to keep stray objects away from the sparky bits underneath, this little power supply would be a reliable workhorse for anyone looking to start experimenting with high voltage.
Perhaps an ionic lifter is in your future
?
Readers with a photographic memory may recall that [Jay] used this same diminutive power supply in
his recently completed water-based Marx generator
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272649",
"author": "EBo",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T13:34:12",
"content": "I love this. I’ve wanted a small HV power supply in the 8 to 50KV range for a couple of small projects, and was looking at repurposing an electric fence energizer. I think something like this will work bet... | 1,760,373,379.497794 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/23/breaking-smartphone-nfc-firmware-the-gory-details/ | Breaking Smartphone NFC Firmware: The Gory Details | Sven Gregori | [
"cons",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"DEF CON",
"exploit",
"firmware hacking",
"NFC",
"research",
"reverse engineering"
] | Near-field Communication (NFC) has been around a while and is used for example in access control, small data exchange, and of course in mobile payment systems. With such sensitive application areas, security is naturally a crucial element of the protocol, and therefore any lower-level access is usually heavily restricted and guarded.
This hardware is especially well-guarded in phones, and rooting your Android device won’t be of much help here. Well, that was of course only until [Christopher Wade] took a deep look into that subject, which he presented in
his NFC firmware hacking talk at for this year’s DEF CON
.
But before you cry out “duplicate!” in the comments now, [Jonathan Bennett] has indeed mentioned the talk in a recent
This Week In Security
article, but [Christopher] has since
written up the content of his talk in a blog post
that we thought deserves some additional attention.
To recap: [Christopher] took a rooted Samsung S6 and searched for vulnerabilities in the NFC chip’s safe firmware update process, in hopes to run a custom firmware image on it. Obviously, this wouldn’t be worth mentioning twice if he hadn’t succeeded, and he goes at serious length into describing how he got there. Picking a brain like his by reading up on the process he went through — from reverse engineering the firmware to actually exploiting a weakness that let him run his own code — is always fascinating and downright fun. And if you’re someone who prefers the code to do the talking,
the exploits are on GitHub
.
Naturally, [Christopher] disclosed his findings to Samsung, but the exploited vulnerability — and therefore the ability to reproduce this — has of course been out there for a long time already. Sure, you can use a Proxmark device to attack NFC, or
the hardware we saw a few DEF CONs back
, but a regular-looking phone will certainly raise a lot less suspicion at the checkout counter, and might open whole new possibilities for penetration testers. But then again, sometimes a regular app will be enough,
as we’ve seen in this NFC vending machine hack
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272653",
"author": "Hummmmmmmmmmm",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T14:01:55",
"content": "Uniplicate!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272742",
"author": "Jim",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T22:16:36",
"content": "Extremely n... | 1,760,373,379.955238 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/graphene-prints-more-smoothly-under-the-influence-of-alcohol/ | Graphene Prints More Smoothly Under The Influence Of Alcohol | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"alcohol",
"coffee",
"coffee ring effect",
"graphene",
"isopropyl"
] | If you’ve ever sloshed coffee out of your mug and watched the tiny particles scurry to the edges of the puddle, then you’ve witnessed a genuine mystery of fluid mechanics called the coffee ring effect. The same phenomenon happens with spilled wine, and with functional inks like graphene.
Graphene and other 2D crystals print much better under the influence of alcohol.
The coffee ring effect makes it difficult to print graphene and similar materials onto silicon wafers, plastics, and other hard surfaces because of this drying problem. There are already a few commercial options that can be used to combat the coffee ring effect, but they’re all polymers and surfactants that negatively affect the electronic properties of graphene.
Recently, a group of researchers discovered that alcohol is the ideal solution
. In the case of spilled graphene, the particles fleeing for the edges are naturally spherical. By adding a mixture of isopropyl and 2-butanol alcohol, they get flattened into a pancake shape, resulting in smoother deformation during the drying process and
an easier printing process with better results
.
Graphene is quite interesting by nature, and has many uses. It can
shift from an insulator to a superconductor
with the right temperature changes, and
it can desalinate sea water for drinking
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272629",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T06:25:46",
"content": "I don’t think I would describe it as “a genuine mystery of fluid mechanics” because the Wikipedia page describes the cause quite succinctly. Perhaps a better description would be a “a wonder of fluid mech... | 1,760,373,379.763346 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/facing-the-coronavirus/ | Facing The Coronavirus | Brian McEvoy | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Medical Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"alarm",
"coronavirus",
"COVID",
"Covid-19",
"distance sensor",
"face covering",
"HC-SR04",
"intruder"
] | Some of us are oblivious to how often we touch our faces. The current finding is we reach for our eyes, nose, or mouth every three to four minutes. Twenty times per hour is an awful lot of poking, picking, itching, and prodding when we’re supposed to keep our hands away from glands that can transmit and receive disease. To curb this habit and enter the 2020 Hackaday Prize, [Lloyd lobo] built a proof-of-concept
device that sounds the alarm when you reach for your face
.
We see an Arduino Uno connected to the classic HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, an LED, and we have to assume a USB battery pack. [Lloyd] recommends the smaller Nano, we might reach for the postage-stamp models and swap the ultrasonic module out for
the much smaller laser time of flight sensor
. At its soul, this is an intruder alarm. Instead of keeping siblings out of your room, you will be keeping your hands out of the area below the bill of the hat where the sensor is mounted. If you regularly lift a coffee cup to your lips, it might chastise you, and if you chew sunflower seeds, you might establish a tempo. *crunch* *chip* *
beep
* *crunch* *chip* *
beep
*
We have reviewed technology to improve our habits like a
bracelet that keeps a tally
, and maybe there is
a book that will help shirk some suboptimal behaviors
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272640",
"author": "M. Bindhammer",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T09:22:59",
"content": "https://hackaday.io/project/170722-the-invisible-maskPosted in February…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,379.805743 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/fbi-reports-on-linux-drovorub-malware/ | FBI Reports On Linux Drovorub Malware | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Drovorub",
"fbi",
"GRU",
"linux",
"malware",
"nsa"
] | The FBI and the NSA released
a report on the Russian-based malware that attacks Linux known as Drovorub
(PDF) and it is an interesting read. Drovorub uses a kernel module rootkit and allows a remote attacker to control your computer, transfer files, and forward ports. And the kernel module takes extraordinary steps to avoid detection while doing it.
What is perhaps most interesting though, is that the agencies did the leg work to track the malware to its source: the GRU — Russian intelligence. The name Drovorub translates into “woodcutter” and is apparently the name the GRU uses for the program.
A look inside the code shows it is pretty mundane. There’s a server with a JSON configuration file and a MySQL backend. It looks like any other garden-variety piece of code. To bootstrap the client, a hardcoded configuration allows the program to make contact with the server and then creates a configuration file that the kernel module actively hides. Interestingly, part of the configuration is a UUID that contains the MAC address of the server computer.
The rootkit won’t persist if you have UEFI boot fully enabled (although many Linux computers turn UEFI signing off rather than
work through the steps to install an OS with it enabled
). The malware is easy to spot if you dump raw information from the network, but the kernel module makes it hard to find on the local machine. It hooks many kernel functions so it can hide processes from both the
ps
command and the /proc filesystem. Other hooks remove file names from directory listings and also hides sockets. The paper describes how to identify the malware and they are especially interested in detection at scale — that is, if you have 1,000 Linux PCs on a network, how do you find which ones have this infection?
This is a modern spy story, but not quite what we’ve come to expect in Bond movies. “Well, Moneypenny, it appears Spectre is using the POCO library to generate UUIDs,” is hard to work into a trailer. We prefer the old days when high-tech spying meant
nonlinear junction detectors
,
hacking Selectrics
,
moon probe heists
, and
passive bugging
. | 26 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272601",
"author": "cyberzerocool",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T00:55:36",
"content": "Just use AWS Amazon Linux 2.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6272623",
"author": "Bert",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T05:57:32",
... | 1,760,373,379.914704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/mini-marble-powered-synth-pays-homage-to-its-bigger-cousins/ | Mini Marble-Powered Synth Pays Homage To Its Bigger Cousins | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"marble machine",
"sequencer",
"steel ball",
"synthesizer"
] | If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what then are we to make of something that shares only a few of the original’s design elements, operates in a completely different way, and has been scaled down to a fifth its size? Still seems like flattery to us.
Despite the changes, it’s clear where [Love Hultén] took inspiration for
his miniature Marble Machine XS
. Readers will no doubt see in it elements from
[Martin Molin]’s original Marble Machine
, the fantastic plywood and Lego musical contraption, along with his new Marble Machine X, the construction of which never seems to end. Like the originals, [Love]’s miniature version uses a lot of steel balls, albeit considerably scaled down, and it still uses a programming drum to determine where and when to drop them. But rather than strike real traditional instruments, the falling balls strike synthesizer keys, triggering a range of sounds through its built-in speaker. The whole thing is powered by a small electric motor rather than being hand-cranked and is small enough to sit on a desktop, a decided advantage over the mammoth machines to which it pays homage.
We have to say that as much as we love the hacksmanship of the original Marble Machine and the craftsmanship of its successor, the look and feel of [Love]’s machine just blows us away. We’re not sure what materials he used, but the whole hammertone paint scheme and Meccano look is a feast for nostalgic eyes. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272582",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T21:37:30",
"content": "Awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272608",
"author": "Josh",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T02:40:07",
"content": "I’m very intereste... | 1,760,373,379.849906 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/manual-larson-scanner-invites-you-to-crank-it/ | Manual Larson Scanner Invites You To Crank It | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"larson scanner",
"led",
"lego"
] | Hasselhoff make Larson Scanners famous. That’s the name for the scanning red lights on the front of KITT, the hero car from the popular 1980s TV series
Knight Rider.
Despite serving a solely aesthetic role, they remain a fun and popular LED project to this day. Putting a new twist on the old concept, [Pete Prodoehl] whipped up
a Larson Scanner that you crank to operate
.
Built out of LEGO, the project relies on a hand crank to work. The crank turns a drum, onto which is placed several strips of conductive Maker Tape –
a steel/nylon material which we’ve looked at before.
Strips of tape running side-by-side are bridge by segments of tape on the drum as it turns. The LEDs are switched on in the requisite pattern of a traditional Larson scanner.
The project has inspired further possibilities, such as using similar techniques to produce an electronic music box or player piano that will change tempo as the user changes the speed with the crank. [Pete] notes that turning the crank is an inherently enjoyable experience, and
given the wonder inherent in hand-cranked musical projects like Marble Machine X
, we can’t wait to see where this one goes next. Video after the break. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272556",
"author": "just sayin",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T17:19:43",
"content": "There was an earlier show, in the late 70s, the original Battlestar Galactica (with Lorne Greene) that featured the same moving LED thing as the eyes of the cylons. I think Larsen might actually have b... | 1,760,373,380.074648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/seeing-the-skill-is-better-than-seeing-the-project/ | Seeing The Skill Is Better Than Seeing The Project | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"cnc",
"diy foam cutter",
"habits",
"hacking",
"inspiration",
"newsletter"
] | Pulling off a flashy project that gets the viral-media hug of widespread approval feels great. Getting there is no easy path to walk and often times the craft that went into a finished project doesn’t even take the back seat but gets no mention at all. Often I find I’m more impressed by — or a least my attention is more strongly captured by — the skills put on display as prominently as the finished build.
Case-in-point this week comes from the model railroad work of [Diorama111]. Seeing an OLED screen in the nose of an HO scale locomotive just like the real-life version is impressive, but how many people missed
the one-off soldering masterpiece that went into this one
? You’ll marvel at the SMD techniques used with through-hole protoboard on this one.
Occasionally we do get to look over the shoulder of the master as decades of skills are shared for the purpose of passing them on. So was the case back in May when we watched as [Leo] walked through his
tips and tricks for prototyping at the electronics bench
. This included a lot of non-obvious but clever stuff; tips on working with copper tape for solder buses, using Teflon tubing with bare wire instead of stripping PVC-insulated wire, and a deep dive into copper clad prototyping.
So remember all of us hardware geeks when you look to tell the story of your project. We want to know how it was done at least as much as what was done. There was a time when electronic designers were a separate work group from electronic technicians (and wow,
those technicians were in a league of their own
). These days we all have that technician hat hanging on our workbenches and I’m always interested in packing in yet another unlearnt skill. Throw us a bone!
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272533",
"author": "Eric R Mockler",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T14:58:35",
"content": "https://old.reddit.com/r/RASPBERRY_PI_PROJECTS/comments/ie0v6m/handmade_hdmi_capture_card/https://preview.redd.it/mumym19q1ei51.jpg?width=3946&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b072c5b5ce6b13acc2574219186317... | 1,760,373,380.308211 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/stealing-keys-from-the-sound-of-the-lock/ | Stealing Keys From The Sound Of The Lock | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"lockpicking hacks"
] | [
"lockpicking",
"pin tumbler lock",
"security",
"tumbler lock"
] | If you are smart, you wouldn’t hand your house key over to a stranger for a few minutes, right? But every time you use your key to unlock your door, you are probably broadcasting everything an attacker needs to make their own copy. Turns out it’s all in the sound of the key going into the lock.
Researchers in Singapore reported that
analyzing metallic clicks
as the key slides past the pins gives them the data they need to 3D print a working key. The
journal published research
is behind a paywall, but
there is a copy on co-author [Soundarya Ramesh’s] website
which outlines the algorithm used to decode the clicks of key teeth on lock pins into usable data.
The attack didn’t require special hardware. The team used audio capture from common smartphones. While pushing your phone close to the lock while the victim inserts a key might be problematic, it isn’t hard to imagine a hacked phone or smart doorbell picking up the audio for an attacker. Long-range mikes or hidden bugs are also possible.
There are practical concerns, of course. Some keys have a plateau that causes some clicks to skip, so the algorithm has to deal with that. It sounds like the final result be a small number of key possibilities and not just converge on one single key, but even if you had to carry three or four keys with you to get in, it is still a very viable vulnerability.
The next step is to find a suitable defense. We’ve heard that softening the pins might reduce the click, but we wondered if it would be as well to put something in that deliberately makes loud clicks as you insert the key to mask the softer clicks of the pins.
While a sound recording is good, sometimes a
picture is even better
. Of course, if you want to go old school, you can
3D print your lockpicks
. | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272522",
"author": "Jitendra kumar",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T13:23:19",
"content": "Hacking",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272523",
"author": "Tony Robinson",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T13:38:22",
"content": "Great... | 1,760,373,380.141962 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/22/unique-led-display-inspired-by-fighter-jet-dashboard/ | Unique LED Display Inspired By Fighter Jet Dashboard | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"74hc595",
"alphanumeric display",
"diffuser",
"f-18",
"fighter jet",
"led matrix",
"mosfet"
] | Last year, [Mangy_Dog] was asked by a few friends to consult on a project they were working on. The goal was to build an authentic replica of an F-18 cockpit, apparently for the purposes of creating a film. The project never materialized, but it did inspire him to take a hard look at the 1970s era alphanumeric displays utilized in the real aircraft. One thing lead to another, and he ended up
using his own take on the idea to build his own “starburst” digit display
.
As [Mangy_Dog] explains, while the faces of these original displays might have been quite small, there was a lot going on behind the scenes. Due to the technical limitations of the time, each alphanumeric character was made up of an array of incandescent light bulbs and fiber optic cables. This worked well enough, but was bulky and complex to manufacture.
Today, we can do better, even on the hobbyist level. As it turns out, 0402 LEDs are just about the right size to recreate the segments of the original starburst displays. So [Mangy_Dog] came up with a simple PCB design to not only align the LEDs properly, but drive them with a 74HC595 shift register and an array of MOSFETs. While assembly wasn’t without its challenges,
he made good use of his custom built reflow oven
to get all the diminutive components in place.
He went through a few different ideas for the diffuser, but eventually settled on black plastic with tiny holes drilled through courtesy of his laser cutter. Behind each set of three holes is a small pocket that got filled from both sides with
transparent UV resin
, which was then sanded down after curing. The end result isn’t
perfect
as you can still tell the center dot is brighter than its peers, but the overall effect is still very nice and definitely has a sort of faux-retro appeal.
The military naturally has
access to some incredible technology
, though they have a tendency to
hold onto it for decades
. That an individual with a meager budget and homemade tools can improve upon a piece of hardware installed in a $60+ million airplane is a testament to just how fast things are moving. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272547",
"author": "Chris E",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T16:19:27",
"content": "You can still get Minitron displays from WAMCO if you want the real deal, but they are SO expensive (mil-spec!) and this is a good enough imitation!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,373,380.018185 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/student-rover-explores-the-backyard-in-tribute/ | Student Rover Explores The Backyard In Tribute | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"mars rover",
"raspberry pi",
"rocker-bogie",
"rover"
] | Three students were a little sad when NASA’s Opportunity rover went silent after 15 years on the Martian surface.
So they decided to build their own rover
inspired by Opportunity to roam their backyards using an off-the-shelf robot chassis, a Raspberry Pi, and the usual list of parts like motors, H-bridges, and batteries.
Like the real rover, the vehicle uses a rocker-bogie system, although it is a little less complex than the version NASA sent blasting off towards the Red Planet. The plucky vehicle comes complete with miniature solar panels to recharge its onboard battery, courtesy of some dollar-store garden lights. A pair of videos after the break show how the rover is controlled, as well as the view sent back from its onboard camera.
The rover ran a simulated Mars mission as part of a school project where it had to find an object and transmit an image of it back to home base, and by the looks of it, is was a rousing success. But the young explorers aren’t resting on their laurels, and are already working on a second version of their exploration vehicle that can operate in inclement weather and includes some new tools such as a robotic arm and infrared illumination for low-light imaging.
We’ve seen
plenty of Mars rover clones
in the past, but
there’s always room for more
. Of course, if you’re looking for something a bit easier to start with,
you can always go the LEGO route
. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272644",
"author": "Simon Ludborzs",
"timestamp": "2020-08-23T10:11:56",
"content": "This is not the greatest rover in the world.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6273061",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2020-... | 1,760,373,380.348584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/cool-off-with-a-piezo-and-a-glass-of-water/ | Cool Off With A Piezo And A Glass Of Water | Kristina Panos | [
"home hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"555",
"atomizing transducer",
"cool mist",
"humidifier",
"mosfet",
"piezo",
"piezo disk",
"transducer",
"ultrasonic atomizer"
] | Some cool-mist humidifiers work by flinging water at a vaporizer, but our favorite kind uses a piezoelectric transducer. These work by using high-frequency sound waves to pound the surface of the water with mechanical energy. That energy introduces standing waves that force the water to break apart into a fine mist on the surface of the piezo disk.
The driving circuit for
this DIY mist maker uses a 555 to generate 113 KHz
, a trimmer potentiometer to fine-tune it, and a MOSFET to amplify the signal. You don’t need much more than that and a handful of passives to recreate this cool junk box experiment, but the spec of the piezo disk is quite important. The circuit is designed for atomizing transducers, which have a resonant frequency of 113 KHz — much higher than your average junk box piezo. Check out the demo and build video after the break.
Atomizing transducers can do way more than than moisten the air for our comfort. They’re not picky about where the water comes from, so
if you have enough of them, you can dry a load of laundry in a few minutes
. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272482",
"author": "ahron wayne",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T03:16:38",
"content": "Neato! For extra fun and to bring the point home, stick your finger in the water while it’s going.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6595028",
... | 1,760,373,380.405765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/get-creative-with-this-esp8266-photography-light/ | Get Creative With This ESP8266 Photography Light | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"photo light",
"photography",
"RGB LED",
"ws2812b"
] | In today’s fast-paced world of social media, if you want your photos to grab attention, you’ve got to have an edge. Whether it’s a deft touch in Photoshop or an amazing lens, it’s important to stand apart. Another great way is to experiment with lighting and color. To do just that,
[Andrei] built a pocket RGB photo light for the home studio.
[Andrei]’s cat models for the camera.
This is a project that any experienced maker should be able to whip up in a weekend. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. The basic enclosure is 3D printed and readily reproducible on any FDM printer. Lighting is provided via the venerable WS2812B LED, 68 of them, to be exact. Finally there’s an ESP8266 running WLED,
a webserver for the platform that’s dedicated to controlling LED strips.
This makes it easy to tweak the LEDs with your smartphone.
Thanks to the WS2812Bs LEDs, a full range of RGB colors are available for [Andrei] to experiment with. He’s done a great job showing off the light with a few choice cat pics that serve to show its capabilities. While we wouldn’t expect to use such a device for clean white lighting in a serious photographic sense, it’s a perfect tool for art photography.
We’ve covered other studio light builds before, too
. Video after the break. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272457",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T23:39:51",
"content": "Sure you can reproduce any color. But skin tones are going to look terrible and makeup might look like a clown applied it.For photography you want a very high CRI light, or preferably a light that has a hig... | 1,760,373,380.482754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/four-years-later-off-grid-office-shed-still-rocks/ | Four Years Later, Off-Grid Office Shed Still Rocks | Donald Papp | [
"home hacks",
"Lifehacks",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"home office",
"off grid",
"shed office",
"solar power",
"work from home"
] | About four years ago, [Russell Graves] created what was, to him, the ultimate work-from-home environment: an off-grid office shed. The shed might look a bit small, but it’s a considerably larger workspace than most people in an office are granted. Four years later, in the middle of a global pandemic, working from home has become much more common and [Russel]
shares some thoughts on working from home and specifically reflects on how his off-grid, solar powered shed office (or “shoffice” as he likes to call it) has worked out
. In short, after four years, it rocks
hard
and is everything he wanted and more.
Its well-insulated plywood walls let him mount monitor arms and just about anything else anywhere he wants, and the solar power system allows him to work all day (and into the night if he wants, which he doesn’t) except for a few spells in the winter where sunlight is just too scarce and a generator picks up the slack. Most importantly, it provides a solid work-life separation — something [Russell] is convinced is critical to basic wellness as a human being.
That’s not to say an off-grid solar shed is the perfect solution for everyone. Not everyone can work from home, but for those who can
and
who identify with at least some of the motivations [Russell] expressed
when we covered how he originally created his office shed
, he encourages giving it some serious thought.
The only thing he doesn’t categorically recommend is the off-grid, solar powered part. To be clear, [Russell] is perfectly happy with his setup and even delights in being off-grid, but admits that unless one has a particular interest in solar power, it makes more sense to simply plug a shed office into the grid like any other structure. Solar power might seem like a magic bullet, but four years of experience has taught him that it really does require a lot of work and maintenance. Determined to go solar? Maybe give the
solar intensity sensor
a look, and find out just how well your location is suited to solar before taking the plunge. | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272447",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T22:50:57",
"content": "I think there’s a VERY big, almost understated, message right here in plain sight, which needs some serious consideration, and even more serious thought–“The only thing he doesn’t categorically recommen... | 1,760,373,380.639295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/free-refrigeration-in-hot-climates/ | Free Refrigeration In Hot Climates | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"cooling",
"evaporative",
"passive",
"refrigerator"
] | Passive homes are a fairly recent trend in home building, but promise a future with minimal energy inputs in our day-to-day. One of the challenges in this year’s Hackaday Prize is to envision ways to add utility to earthen homes often used in refugee camps where there is a housing crisis. Adding passive utilities to these adobe buildings would be a fantastic upgrade, so [Cat] decided to tackle the challenge by
creating a refrigerator that needs no electricity
.
The the plan for the device works by using evaporative cooling to reduce the temperature in a small box which can be used for food storage. Of course, using evaporative cooling means that you need ready access to water and it likely won’t work in a humid or cool environment, but
systems like these
have been in use for centuries in plenty of places around the world. [Cat]’s plan is a little more involved than traditional methods of evaporative cooling though, and makes use of a specially painted chimney which provides the airflow when heated by sunlight.
The project is still in its infancy but it would be interesting to see a proof-of-concept built in a real-life passive house in an arid environment. Unfortunately, those of us in humid (or tropical) environments will have to look
elsewhere for energy-efficient cooling solutions
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 34 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272405",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T18:54:29",
"content": "Passive cooling is hardly new. It ancient, and quite effective if one has the space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6272423",
"author": "Lig... | 1,760,373,380.56615 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/microsoft-flight-simultors-data-insanity-spawn-enourmous-buildings-an-anomalies-from-openstreetmap/ | Microsoft Flight Simulator’s Data Insanity Spawns Enormous Buildings And Anomalies From OpenStreetMap | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"crowdsource",
"flight simulator",
"geospatial data",
"gis",
"map data",
"openstreetmap"
] | The OpenStreetMap project is an excellent example of how powerful crowdsourced data can be, but that’s not to say the system is perfect. Invalid data, added intentionally or otherwise, can sometimes slip through the cracks and lead to some interesting problems. A fact that developers Asobo Studio are becoming keenly aware of as players explore their recently released
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
.
Like a Wiki, users can update OpenStreetMap and about a year ago, user nathanwright120 marked a 2 story building near Melbourne, Australia as having an incredible 212 floors (
we think it’s this commit
). The rest of his edits seem legitimate enough, so it’s a safe bet that it was simply a typo made in haste. The sort of thing that could happen to anyone. Not long after, thanks to the beauty of open source, another user picked up on the error and got it fixed up.
But not before some script written by Asobo Studio went through sucked up the OpenStreetMap data for Australia and implemented it into their virtual recreation of the planet. The result is that the hotly anticipated flight simulator now features a
majestic structure in the Melbourne skyline
that rises far above…everything.
The whole thing is great fun, and honestly, players probably wouldn’t even mind if it got left in as a Easter egg. It’s certainly providing them with some free publicity; in the video below you can see a player by the name of Conor O’Kane land his aircraft on the dizzying edifice, a feat which has earned him nearly 100,000 views in just a few days.
But it does have us thinking about filtering crowdsourced data. If you ask random people to, say, identify flying saucers in NASA footage, how do you filter that? You probably don’t want to take one person’s input as authoritative. What about 10 people? Or a hundred?
The Army Marches on Data
When you think about geospatial data, what heuristics could you use to at least identify areas to look at closer? In this case, the fact that the
tallest building in the world
only has 163 floors would have been a good clue. Even if the building had 100 floors, the fact that nothing else near it has even a quarter of that number would be another clue. In either case, the Great Tower of Melbourne could have been avoided with a single line of code validating the height data pulled from OpenStreetMap.
For terrain, rapid changes in elevation might be another data indicator. That would have prevented
the wall of ice
that guards us from the White Walkers. We wondered if anyone had given this any thought before. Turns out, the
US Army has
. They even mention OpenStreetMap and many other sources, some of which we didn’t know about.
Section 4 of the aptly named
Crowdsourced Geospatial Data
talks about how to vet crowdsourced data and address errors due to sensor variability, language, and other technical factors. However, errors from logical inconsistency should be moderately simple to filter out, and the paper identifies efforts to automate that for geospatial data. For example, the angle between two intersecting roads is typically within a relatively narrow range of angles.
According to the paper, several researchers have validated data and found high error rates in public information sources. For example, in the United Kingdom and Ireland, OpenStreetMap data with more than 15 edits had errors in about 8% of the time. In France, about 5% of the crossroads had geometric inaccuracies.
Geospatial Graffiti
Of course, that assumes the errors are the result of honest mistakes. Protecting against malicious data entry is an entirely different problem, and one that’s potentially much harder to identify and fix.
This situation is also addressed in the Army’s report, but only briefly. It stands to reason that if the military has some particular tips and tricks they use to sniff out this sort of thing, they probably don’t want them to become public knowledge.
With crowdsourced data growing in popularity, it would be easy to imagine wanting to displace key targets slightly or even significantly. A bunker “known” to be at the center of a facility might survive if the data says that the facility is a few hundred meters to the right of its actual position. Disinformation has always been a powerful tool, and it’s only amplified in the era of Big Data.
That said, some of it isn’t too hard to find. People actually use GPS tracks to spell out graffiti in OpenStreetMap, for example. So if you stumble upon any mile-wide letters written in the countryside, it’s probably safe to leave them out of your flight simulator.
Closer To Home
This doesn’t just apply to geospatial data, either. How often do you take data from a pressure or temperature sensor? Do you validate it? For high-reliability data, you might need multiple redundant sensors with some voting logic. That’s common in aircraft and spacecraft. You might have three sensors and take the average of the three if they read close together or reject one if it is way off compared to its counterparts.
I had a commercial drone once suddenly decide it was 4,096 feet below sea level due to a failed pressure sensor. The resulting rapid ascent to try to correct the altitude was both amazing and terrifying since it was a big drone. The firmware should have made some simple assumptions about data quality, such as realizing that it wasn’t likely to suddenly find itself hundreds of feet below seal level, or that the data wasn’t trending in the expected way as it tried to gain altitude. It certainly would have made my day easier, not to mention the pilot’s.
What’s your favorite data validation trick? How much do you trust crowdsource data? Wikipedia is usually right over the long term, but there are certainly cases where bad data slips through until someone catches it.
Thanks [ptkwilliams] for the tip about Flight Simulator. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272397",
"author": "Jan Ciger (@janoc200)",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T18:03:38",
"content": "Actually this is unlikely to be problem with the original map data, which does not contain the 3D building information.It is all due to Microsoft’s AI model that attempts to reconstruct 3D g... | 1,760,373,380.709954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/hackaday-podcast-081-mask-apult-beef-tallow-grinding-melted-plastic-and-stretching-flowing-metal/ | Hackaday Podcast 081: Mask-apult, Beef Tallow, Grinding Melted Plastic, And Stretching Flowing Metal | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Tom Nardi chew the beef tallow as they take a tour through some of the best and most interesting articles from the past week, from kicking off another round of the popular Circuit Sculpture contest to building artisan coffee makers. We’ll look at the engineering behind the post-apocalyptic face mask launcher of our nightmares, and stand in awe at the intersection of orbiting spacecraft and lawn emojis. Several tiny remote controlled vehicles will be discussed, and we’ll take an unexpected look at how extruding plastic and aluminum might not be so different after all. Make sure to stick around until the end to learn why a little-known locomotive technology of the 1840s really sucked.
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
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 081 Show Notes:
New This Week:
2020 Circuit Sculpture Challenge
Hackaday Remoticon: Our 2020 Conference Is Packed With Workshops And We’re Calling For Proposals
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
The Mask Launcher; Like An Airbag For Your Face
Don’t Ignore The Artist’s Supply Store
E3D Teaches Additive 3D-Printers How To Subtract
Draw On Your Lawn With This Autonomous Mower And RTK-GPS
DIY Autonomous Mower In The Wild
Exotic Device Gets Linux Support via Wireshark And Rust
Scratch Build Of This Tiny RC Car Is A Handmade Fabrication Masterpiece
Tiny R/C P-51D Mustang Tips The Scales At 3 Grams
Model Railroad Engine Gets A Tiny OLED Rollsign While Showing Off Tidy Protoboard Skills
Keycap Customizer Brings All Your Caps To The Board
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks:
Abused Hard Drive Becomes POV Clock
Something’s Brewing Up In The Woods – And It Looks Stunning
PIC32 DMA Is A Weird Machine
Tom’s Picks:
Robots With A Delicate Touch Assemble PlayStation 4
Simple MP3 Player Hides Home Automation Brilliance
Mercurial Light Box Has A Secret Switch
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Mostly Forgotten Story Of Atmospheric Railway
Hardware Heroes: Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Under Pressure: How Aluminum Extrusions Are Made
How To Build Anything Out Of Aluminum Extrusion And 3D Printed Brackets | 7 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272525",
"author": "Horch",
"timestamp": "2020-08-22T14:15:53",
"content": "Could it be that the publication dates of new episodes are always off? It seems that they are always set to midnight, e.g.:“`Ep081: Mask-apult, Beef Tallow, Grinding Melted Plastic, and Stretching Flowing M... | 1,760,373,381.32798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/hand-stitched-keycaps-for-truly-luxurious-typing/ | Hand-Stitched Keycaps For Truly Luxurious Typing | Tom Nardi | [
"Art",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cross stitch",
"custom keyboard",
"embroidery",
"keycap",
"resin 3d printer"
] | We’ve seen some very unique custom keycaps recently, but
nothing quite like the embroidered ones that [Billie Ruben] has been experimenting with
. Using a clever 3D printed design, she’s crafted what could well be one of the most easily customizable keycaps ever made…assuming you’ve got a needle and thread handy.
The idea is to take a standard keycap blank and pop an array of 25 holes in the face. Your thread or yarn is run through these holes, allowing you to create whatever shape you wish within the 5 x 5 matrix. While it’s somewhat tight quarters on the underside of the cap, nothing prevents you from using multiple colors or even materials to do your stitching. As an added bonus, the soft threads should provide a very comfortable and particularly tactile surface to tap on.
Now the most obvious application is to simply stitch up versions of all the alphanumeric keys, but there’s clearly room for some interpretation here. [Billie] has already shown off some simple iconography like a red heart and we’re sure creative folks will have no trouble coming up with all sorts of interesting needlepoint creations to
top their prized mechanical keyboards
.
The intricate details necessary to make this idea work may be beyond the common desktop FDM 3D printer, so [Billie] ran these prototypes off on a resin printer (she attributes the visible layer lines to a hasty print). She’d love to hear feedback from other keyboard aficionados
who’ve made the leap to liquid goo printing
, so be sure to drop her a line if you print out a set of your own. It sounds like a new version is in the works which will provide a false bottom to cover the stitching from below, but functionally these should get you started. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272367",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T15:45:58",
"content": "Great idea!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272369",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T15:47:25",
"content": "All decorati... | 1,760,373,380.759479 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/this-week-in-security-bluetooth-hacking-nec-phones-and-malicious-tor-nodes/ | This Week In Security: Bluetooth Hacking, NEC Phones, And Malicious Tor Nodes | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"bluetooth",
"Kali",
"NEC",
"penetration testing",
"phone",
"Red Team",
"tor"
] | One of the fun things about vulnerability research is that there are so many places for bugs to hide. Modern devices have multiple processors, bits of radio hardware, and millions of lines of code. When [Veronica Kovah] of Dark Mentor LLC decided to start vulnerability research on the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, she opted to target the link layer itself, rather than the code stack running as part of the main OS. What’s interesting is that the link layer has to process data before any authentication is performed, so if a vulnerability is found here, it’s guaranteed to be pre-authentication. Also of interest, many different devices are likely to share the same BLE chipset, meaning these vulnerabilities will show up on many different devices. [Veronica] shares some great info on how to get started, as well as the details on the vulnerabilities she found,
in the PDF whitepaper
. (Just a quick note, this link isn’t to the raw PDF, but pulls up a GitHub PDF viewer.) There is also
a video presentation of the findings
, if that’s more your speed.
The first vuln we’ll look at is CVE-2019-15948, which affects a handful of Texas Instruments BT/BLE chips. The problem is in how BLE advertisement packets are handled. An advertisement packet should always contain a data length of at least six bytes, which is reserved for the sending device address. Part of the packet parsing process is to subtract six from the packet length and do a
memcpy
using that value as the length. A malicious packet can have a length of less than six, and the result is that the copy length integer underflows, becoming a large value, and overwriting the current stack. To actually turn this into an exploit, a pair of data packets are sent repeatedly, to put malicious code in the place where program execution will jump to.
The second vulnerability of note, CVE-2020-15531 targets a Silicon Labs BLE chip, and uses malformed extended advertisement packets to trigger a buffer overflow. Specifically, the sent message is longer than the specification says it should be. Rather than drop this malformed message, the chip’s firmware processes it, which triggers a buffer overflow. Going a step further, this chip has non-volatile firmware, and it’s possible to modify that firmware permanently. [Veronica] points out that even embedded chips like these should have some sort of secure boot implementation, to prevent these sort of persistent attacks.
NEC Phone Systems
This story was sent in directly by [Austin Martinetti], who worked on this research with [Brett Bryant]. They took a look at an interesting platform,
NEC phone systems
. What did they find? A handful of issues, like a hard coded username/password, and an HTTP endpoint that resets the user passwords to default:
PasswordReset.htm?PWD_RESET()
What can you do once you have access to the web interface? How about a hidden endpoint that downloads voicemail messages. For the impatient, there’s even a quick-and-dirty script to automate the process of downloading the entire backlog of voicemails. Next up is the really interesting developer level account. Doing just a bit of manipulation of POST data in your web browser allows modifying an account to have a privilege level above administrator.
All this is interesting, but we know better than to ever expose the web interface of an embedded device to the internet. So long as it’s inaccessible to the outside world, we don’t have to worry about these bugs. Right? It seems that when NEC built their voicemail add-on, they built in a slick little hidden feature. On extension 740, an old-school dial-up modem is available. Any valid credentials from the web interface can make the connection and gain access to the system, including some undocumented services.
These vulnerabilities were privately disclosed, and
updated firmware is available
(PDF). If you happen to have NEC phones sitting on your desk, it might be worth trying to get the firmware updates applied. And for goodness sake, don’t put your phone system’s ports on the internet!
Tor Exit Nodes
Tor is a boon for anonymity on the Internet, but have you ever looked closely at the potential downsides? Tor is a clever mesh network that uses layers of encryption to strongly anonymize traffic by sending it through multiple relays, and finally out to the regular internet through an exit node. That exit node is the weak point of the Tor network, in multiple ways. Because of the sometimes malicious or illegal traffic sent through Tor, exit nodes are often targeted by law enforcement or network operators. These nodes are a weak spot for another reason — the exit node gets to inspect and potentially modify all the traffic that goes through it.
This shouldn’t be a problem, as we have TLS to protect against MitM attacks. There is a clever attack that can get around TLS protection, SSL stripping, notably introduced by [Moxie Marlinspike] in 2009. The idea is simple: when a user tries to access a website using HTTP, and the site returns a redirect to an HTTPS connection. The attacker intercepts this redirect and proxies the HTTPS connection, leaving the user on an unencrypted connection. This attack is of limited usefulness, as web browsers will remember a permanent redirect, which is why it’s considered best practice to use the “301 Moved Permanently” redirect for enforcing HTTPS connections.
That said, how many of the current Tor exit nodes do you think are malicious? According to [nusenu], at one point
almost 25% of the Tor exit node connections were using malicious exit nodes
. This isn’t an easy problem to solve, as the vast majority of exit nodes are run by volunteers. When these malicious nodes are found, many of them are removed at once, but it’s relatively straightforward to shuffle the names and IPs and get those nodes back into the network. It’s estimated that right now, you have a 10% chance of using a malicious exit node when you use Tor. It’s known problem, and it’s slowly being worked on, but currently the Tor project doesn’t have the resources to really tackle the issue in earnest. If you’re going to use Tor to access outside sites, make sure to specifically check that your connection is a valid HTTPS connection.
A Red Team Story
Some of the best stories in infosec come from the red teams doing penetration tests. This week, [Federico Lago] shares some
stories and tips from a recent successful pentest
. The single best tip in the write-up is to try scanning ports while specifying the source port as a commonly used port. Apparently many firewalls are misconfigured to allow incoming traffic from these ports, when the intention was to allow outgoing traffic.
The second tip is that the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) can be incredibly powerful for leaking information about a system. It’s not a TCP service, so it’s easy to miss, but it’s worth the effort. There’s a lot of potential information to be gained, including the list of processes and their command line arguments. In this case, a valid username/password combination was found for a Jenkins instance discovered earlier. Jenkins can be configured with a “script console” enabled, and it’s possible to abuse this to get a reverse shell and access to bash.
Part 2
continues the story, detailing how they used a command available to run using sudo in order to get a root shell, and then used the same SNMP trick to access the company’s databases. The whole thing is a good read, so go check it out.
Bits and Bytes
Ars told us about FritzFrog
, a new Linux botnet client that spreads through poor SSH password policy.
The technical report by Guardicore
, has the juicy details and the indicators of compromise. You might want to check your servers for an added ssh authorized key, binaries running from nonexistent locations, and a listening socket on port 1234.
Gmail’s
DMARC/SPF protections can be short-circuited
by using Gmail’s inbound gateway setting, together with a global mail routing setting in the G Suite’s administrative console. In essence, the inbound gateway turns off the SPF and DMARC check for mail coming from the specified IP address. Forwarding it through Google’s mail service does mean that the messages get signed by Google, so it then passes those checks. While there were some complications, the bug has now been fixed.
Kali Linux, formerly Backtrack, has
minted their 2020.3 release
. Most notable is the addition of a new set of Bluetooth tools. There is also the new “Win-KeX”, a persistent GUI for running Kali inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux. | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272386",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T16:51:51",
"content": "” Going a step further, this chip has non-volatile firmware, and it’s possible to modify that firmware permanently. ”non-volatile firmware that is modifiable?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,373,380.994889 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/gta-v-mod-shows-and-cheats-those-stunt-jump-hoops/ | GTA V Mod Shows (And Cheats) Those Stunt Jump Hoops | Sven Gregori | [
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cheat",
"game",
"Grand Theft Auto",
"modding",
"reverese engineering",
"video game"
] | While the recent announcement of Grand Theft Auto V for the upcoming next-generation game consoles was a disappointment for those fervently waiting for a successor in the infamous video game series, it shows that after almost seven years of its initial release, the epic title is still going strong — and rightfully so. But a game as varied and complex as GTA V isn’t without some quirks, especially if you’re going for 100% completeness.
The stunt jumps seem a particular pesky nut to crack here, so [Anthony Som] made it his mission to shed some light on what qualifies as a successful jump by
reverse engineering the system and writing both a mod for displaying the landing zone and a cheat to instant success
.
If you’re not familiar with the game, its vast open world map features a variety of side quests, one of them being stunt jumps, where certain locations allow you to launch the vehicle you’re driving into the air in hopes to land on an adjacent road or area — whether to evade the people chasing you, or just for fun. There’s no telling how to actually succeed though, the game just tells you if you did or not afterwards, causing some degree of frustration. As an avid speedrunner (as in finishing a game in the shortest possible time), [Anthony] was looking for a way to increase the success rate for those stunt jumps, and decided to dig into the code to find out how to get there. Of course, being a proprietary game, he had to resort to reverse engineering and utilizing GTA’s vivid
modding
scene to do so.
His initial outcome was a mod that displays the launch and landing area as rectangles inside the game itself, which was a great help. But well, after already getting
that
far, [Anthony] figured he might as well continue and add a cheat mode to teleport the car right inside that expected landing area and be done with second-guessing his attempts once and for all.
If you’re curious about modding GTA yourself, his write-up has a few good pointers for that, and of course features some real examples of it. Whether this is a good idea for the
self-driving AI that uses GTA as learning environment
is probably a different story though. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,380.883076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/21/transparent-oled-hitting-the-market-with-xiaomis-mi-tv-lux-transparent-edition/ | Transparent OLED Hitting The Market With Xiaomi’s Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition | Maya Posch | [
"hardware",
"News"
] | [
"oled",
"transparent oled"
] | One of the major advantages of OLED over LCD panels is that the former can be made using far fewer layers as the pixels themselves are emitting the light instead of manipulating the light from a backlight. This led some to ask the question of whether it’s possible to make an OLED panel that is transparent or at least translucent. As
Xiaomi’s new Mi TV LUX OLED Transparent Edition
shows, the answer there is a
resounding ‘yes’
. Better yet, for a low-low price of about $7,200 you can own one of these 55″ marvels.
Transparent OLED technology is not new, of course. Back in 2018 LG was showing off a prototype TV that used one of the early transparent OLED panels. In the video that is embedded after the break, [Linus] from Linus Tech Tips goes hands-on with that LG prototype while at LG in South Korea, while including a number of crucial details from an interview from one of the engineers behind that panel.
As it turns out, merely removing the opaque backing from an OLED panel isn’t enough to make it transparent. In order for an OLED panel to become transparent, the circuitry in the pixel layer and TFT layer need to be aligned as best as possible to allow for many, many tiny holes to be punched through the display.
Looking at [Linus]’s experiences with the LG prototype, it does appear that this kind of technology would be highly suitable for signage purposes, while also allowing for something like an invisible television or display in a room that could be placed in front of a painting or other decoration. Once displaying an image, the screen is bright enough that you can comfortably make out the image. Just don’t put any bright lights behind the TV.
Anyone else anxious waiting for sub-10″ versions of these panels?
[Thanks, Qes] | 46 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272298",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T08:18:17",
"content": "I get the feeling this display is both a monochrome lcd for the alpha channel and an oled display in front. Otherwise its impossible to show black or dark areas against a light back wall. Which means th... | 1,760,373,380.95825 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/20/mixing-up-your-own-supersized-sidewalk-chalk/ | Mixing Up Your Own Supersized Sidewalk Chalk | Brian McEvoy | [
"Art",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"cast",
"chalk",
"decorate",
"mold",
"paint",
"plaster of paris",
"sidewalk",
"sidewalk chalk",
"tempera"
] | When folks started quarantining, chalk art spilled onto driveways and sidewalks to remind us that there’s still beauty and creative people doing what they always do. Now it’s time to strut your stuff and show your neighbors that things are greener on your slab of concrete.
[friedpotatoes] has shared their giant sidewalk recipe
with the world so you can paint the town red. With chalk.
Name brand sidewalk chalk is expensive considering how easy it is to make. What
Big Chalk
doesn’t want you to know is that the ingredients are just water, plaster of Paris, and tempera paint; meaning this project should be safe enough for the junior hackers to get some hands-on time. Some folks use food coloring instead of paint, but we know what happens to clothing when kids get their mitts on food coloring. [friedpotatoes] also includes extensive repurposing of recyclables, which is commendable.
The instructions suggest filling potato chip (crisp) tubes through a milk jug funnel to make giant pieces, but you can use any mold you like. If you have a CNC machine, it should be no trouble to make stamp-like pieces of chalk for tagging on the go, or shapes like arrows when you have to direct a miniature parade.
For permanent and precise sidewalk decorations, you can check out a
graffiti paint machine
and for totally temporary messages there is a
water-dispensing writer
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272272",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T05:15:12",
"content": "” If you have a CNC machine, it should be no trouble to make stamp-like pieces of chalk for tagging on the go, or shapes like arrows when you have to direct a miniature parade.”Umm… have you ever used chalk ... | 1,760,373,381.042118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/20/fire-pit-burns-to-the-beat-with-bluetooth/ | Fire Pit Burns To The Beat With Bluetooth | Al Williams | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"fire pit",
"flame",
"propane",
"rubens tube"
] | Humans have several primal fascinations and perhaps two of the biggest ones are fire and music. While you can picture some cavemen and cavewomen sitting around a fire beating on sticks for rhythm, we think they’d be impressed if the fire danced along with the music. Through the power of Bluetooth,
that’s exactly what [Random Tech DIY’s] new fire pit does
.
Technically, this is called a Rubens tube, and while it’s an old technology, the Bluetooth is a certainly a modern touch. As you might expect, most of this project is workshop time, cutting MDF and plastic. The audio system is off-the-shelf and drives some car stereo speakers. The results looked good, and although it always makes us nervous building things that carry propane gas, it seems to work well enough from where we’re sitting.
We had to wonder what things you could change that would affect the display. Changing the number of holes, the diameter of the holes, or the gas pressure, for example, would certainly change how the flames look and react to the sound waves.
We have seen other
Rubens tube projects
, of course. However, we were really interested in the use of these as
crude oscilloscopes
before the availability of cathode ray tubes. We’ve seen
a modern take on that
, too. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272305",
"author": "none",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T08:50:05",
"content": "The vibrating flames are pretty annoying for my eyes. Maybe it is much better IRL, but on the recording it is pretty bad.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,373,381.07998 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/20/exotic-device-gets-linux-support-via-wireshark-and-rust/ | Exotic Device Gets Linux Support Via Wireshark And Rust | Sven Gregori | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"reverse engineering",
"rust",
"usb",
"water cooling",
"wireshark"
] | What can you do if you have a nice piece of hardware that kinda works out of the box, but doesn’t have support for your operating system to get the full functionality out of it? [Harry Gill] found himself in such a situation with a new all-in-one (AIO) water cooling system. It didn’t
technically
require any operating system interaction to perform its main task, but things like settings adjustments or reading back statistics were only possible with Windows. He thought it would be nice to have those features in Linux as well, and as the communication is done via USB, figured the obvious solution is
to reverse engineer the protocol and simply replicate it
.
His first step was to set up a dual boot system (his attempts at running the software in a VM didn’t go very well) which allowed him to capture the USB traffic with Wireshark and USBPcap. Then it would simply be a matter of analyzing the captures and writing some Linux software to make sense of the data. The go-to library for USB tasks would be libusb, which has bindings for
plenty of languages
, but as an avid Rust user, that choice was never really an issue anyway.
How to actually make use of the captured data was an entirely different story though, and without documentation or much help from the vendor, [Harry] resorted to good old trial and error to find out which byte does what. Eventually he succeeded and was able to get the additional features he wanted supported in Linux — check out the final code in
the GitHub repository
if you’re curious what this looks like in Rust.
Capturing the USB communication with Wireshark seems generally a great way to port unsupported features to Linux, as we’ve seen earlier
with an RGB keyboard
and
the VGA frame grabber
that inspired it. If you want to dig deeper into the subject, [Harry] listed a few resources regarding USB in general, but
there’s plenty more to explore with reverse engineering USB
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272246",
"author": "Alpha Geek",
"timestamp": "2020-08-21T00:21:11",
"content": "Nice work!I wrote the Antec/Asetec Kuhler-920, and Kuhler-1250 drivers using a method similar to this.Sharing data like this with the open source community is how stuff gets done and learning happens!G... | 1,760,373,381.192901 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/20/want-to-support-hacker-friendly-hardware-design-follow-valves-example/ | Want To Support Hacker-friendly Hardware Design? Follow Valve’s Example | Donald Papp | [
"hardware",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"diy",
"modding",
"valve index",
"virtual reality",
"vr"
] | It’s been just over a year since Valve released Index, their flagship VR system, and it’s worth looking back at
this GitHub repository as a fine example of how to provide supporting materials to a hacker-friendly hardware design
. The image above shows off one of the hacker-friendly design elements: an empty space behind the visor, with a USB port off to the right, that exists for no reason other than to make it easier to mount and plug in whatever one might come up with. There’s more to it than that, however. If one wishes to provide supporting materials for a hardware design, one could certainly do worse than emulate Valve’s example.
The violet 3D model shows the area that modifications can occupy without getting in the way of any sensors.
The hardware repository contains not just CAD models of mod-friendly hardware pieces (both in high-resolution STEP models as well as STL files) but also 3D models of the sensor zones, so modders can ensure they avoid occluding any sensors with their creations. Examples are great, and one provided by Valve is the
Booster
; a hand controller add-on providing extra comfort for people with large hands or long thumbs. The model also doubles as a reference for designing attachments that will not interfere with any of the tracking or touch-sensitive surfaces of the controllers.
Being hacker-friendly doesn’t mean the hardware has no warranty, but it does mean that there is concrete guidance on what does or doesn’t risk voiding it. In the case of the Index hardware, the guidance is simple: “Anything that requires a T5 or smaller is not user serviceable.”
To us, the whole attitude of being hacker-friendly is exemplified by a statement about the headstrap, found about half-way down the page. The words “removing the headstrap is not recommended” are followed immediately by
clear directions on how to do exactly that
, demonstrating the kind of trust necessary to reduce barriers for add-ons and modifications. That is a great way to help foster experimentation, like
this project for 1:1 mapping of physical elements to their VR counterparts, to make awesome spaceship cockpits
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6272211",
"author": "mathman",
"timestamp": "2020-08-20T20:21:19",
"content": "Excellent move, at least one company gets it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6272241",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-20T23:45:56",... | 1,760,373,381.254177 |
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