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https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/true-craftsmanship-pneumatic-powered-drone-wasnt-made-to-fly/ | True Craftsmanship: Pneumatic Powered Drone Wasn’t Made To Fly | Danie Conradie | [
"Engine Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"air engine",
"craftmanship",
"drone",
"hexacopter",
"lathe",
"metal working"
] | From time to time it’s good to be reminded that mechanical engineering can also be art. [
José Manuel Hermo Barreiro], also known as [Patelo], is a retired naval mechanic with a love for scale model engines. Using only basic tools and a lathe, he has built a non-flying hexacopter display model,
each propeller turned by a tiny single cylinder motor that runs on compressed air
. From the tiny components of the valve systems, the brass framed acrylic windows into the crankcases, and the persistence of vision disc on the exhaust, the attention to detail is breathtaking.
One of the six hand crafted pneumatic motors
[Patelo] started the project on paper, and created a set of detailed hand-drawn blueprints to work from. Sadly a large part of the build took place during lockdown, and was not filmed, but we still get to see some work on a crankcase, connecting rod, camshaft, propellers, flywheel, and exhaust tubes. It is very clear that [Patelo] knows his way around his lathe very well, and is very creative with custom tools and jigs. The beautiful machine took approximately 1,560 hours to build, consists of 265 individually made parts held together with 362 screws.
We previously featured
tiny V-12 engine
that [Patelo] built around 2012. At that time he was 72 years of age, which means he should be around 80 now. We can only hope to come to emulate him one day, and that we get to see more of what comes out of his workshop. Hats off to you, sir. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269816",
"author": "LightningPhil",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10T20:12:05",
"content": "Cool. Subscribed to his channel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6269835",
"author": "Jeremy S. Cook 🤖💾👊",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10... | 1,760,373,394.183458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/breathtaking-alarm-clock-looks-like-it-came-from-a-1960-fallout-shelter/ | Breathtaking Alarm Clock Looks Like It Came From A 1960 Fallout Shelter | Mike Szczys | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"alarm clock",
"bell",
"cd4017",
"decade counter",
"Fallout",
"hard drive read head",
"industrial",
"retro"
] | All the hardcore geeks have alarm clocks where the bell striker is a hard disk read head… or at least they’ll be building them after seeing this. [Senile Data Systems] created
an industrial voltage alarm clock out of decade counters
that looks like it was unearthed from a fallout shelter (
machine translation
).
At first glace you might mistake this for a binary clock since it uses a column of LEDs to indicate each digit of 24-hour time. It’s not, as each row corresponds to a pin on the CD4017 decade counters that make up the timekeeping circuit inside.
Thumb
screw
wheel switches at the top of the bulky handheld unit are how the alarm time is set, triggering a bell along the top edge. The clock is driven by the 50 Hz line voltage and [SDS] tried using that AC to drive a solenoid as the striker on the prototype unit but it performed poorly. The use of a hard disk read head turns out to be the perfect striker, as heard in the video after the break. As for triggering from the decade counters, here’s what [SDS] told us about the design:
The switches’ outputs gets ANDed with a 10 Hz signal (on a 60 Hz grid it will become 12 Hz). This drives a slightly beefy transistor which in turn drives an electromagnet to hammer a bell which broke off my bicycle. Yes. This is a digital analog alarm clock. The clock portion is digital but the bell is analog and sounds like Grampa’s old wind up alarm clock.
The build came about when a cache of over 600 industrial LEDs (24 V – 48 V) fell into his lap. This makes the insides of the clock something to behold as point-to-point soldering connects the panel mount lights and all nine logic chips. Add in that transformer for getting the line voltage and we imagine this thing has quite a bit of heft to it.
If you’ve ever had an alarm with a wind-up bell you know there’s no better way to jolt yourself out of a peaceful slumber and into the chaos of the real world. If the gentle tinkle of the hard drive head isn’t enough for you,
this fire bell alarm clock will certainly do the trick
. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269797",
"author": "k-w",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10T18:51:12",
"content": "Thumbwheel, not thumbscrew switches. Much less painfull way to set the clock.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6269798",
"author": "k-ww",
"times... | 1,760,373,394.468711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/boom-hopes-to-reignite-supersonic-travel-with-xb-1/ | Boom Hopes To Reignite Supersonic Travel With XB-1 | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"airliner",
"concorde",
"experimental aircraft",
"nasa",
"supersonic"
] | Since the last Concorde rolled to a stop in 2003, supersonic flight has been limited almost exclusively to military aircraft. Many have argued that it’s an example of our civilization seeming to slip backwards on the technological scale, akin to returning to the Age of Sail. There’s no debating that we have the capability of moving civilian passengers and cargo at speeds above Mach 1 safely, it’s just something that isn’t done anymore.
Concorde on its final flight, November 2003
Of course to be fair, there’s plenty of good reasons why the sky isn’t filled with supersonic aircraft. For one, they’ve historically been more drastically expensive to build and operate than their slower peers. The engineering that goes into an aircraft that can operate for an extended period of time at supersonic speeds doesn’t come cheap, nor do the materials required. But naturally, the same could have been said for commercial jet aircraft at one time. With further development, the cost would eventually come down.
The real problem holding supersonic aircraft back is much more practical: they are just too loud. From the roar of their powerful engines on takeoff to the startling and sometimes even dangerous “sonic boom” they leave in their wake, nobody wants them flying over their homes or communities. In fact, civilian flight above Mach 1 over land has been outlawed in the United States for exactly this reason since 1973 under the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulation 91.817.
For any commercial supersonic aircraft to be viable, it needs to not only be much cheaper to build and operate than older designs, but it also needs to be far quieter. Which is exactly what
Boom hopes to demonstrate with their XB-1 prototype
. The sleek craft will never enter into commercial service itself, but if all goes according to plan during its 2021 test flights, it may prove that the state-of-the-art in aircraft design is ready to usher in a new era of supersonic civilian transport.
On The Shoulders of Giants
When the Concorde was being designed in the early 1960s, commercial jet aircraft were still a relatively new concept. It represented a technological quantum leap, and had more in common with military research aircraft than anything that had ever carried a paying passenger. Many core components, such as the Olympus 593 engines, had to be tailor made for the Concorde. This made it an exceptionally expensive aircraft to develop and manufacture, and while estimates vary considerably, in the end the program is believed to have cost nearly 10 billion dollars.
But that’s not the case for the XB-1. Many of the core technologies that Boom has identified as critical to the success of commercial supersonic aircraft, such as a carbon fiber airframe, are already well understood. Like essentially all modern aircraft, the design of the XB-1 has also benefited tremendously from the advancements in computational fluid dynamics. Physical testing which could have taken years previously can now be simulated on the computer in a fraction of the time.
Another huge benefit is the use of an existing engine, the General Electric J85. Originally designed for the United States Air Force in the 1950s, it’s certainly not a new engine. But it’s gone through several revisions to increase its performance and efficiency, and its expected to remain in service for at least the next few decades.
A Familiar Face
It’s no coincidence that the XB-1 bears more than a passing resemblance to
NASA’s X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft
. While Boom has been relatively cagey about how quiet their planes will eventually end up being, it’s clear from even a cursory glance that they’ve adopted some of the design elements that NASA and X-59 prime contractor Lockheed Martin believe will help mitigate the sonic booms generated by their experimental aircraft.
Boom XB-1
NASA X-59 QueSST
Both planes utilize a long and thin fuselage to prevent the front and rear pressure waves from compressing together and generating an energetic shock wave. Instead of hearing the loud crack of these waves slamming into each other, an observer on the ground would hear a series of dull thumps. While this doesn’t solve the problem completely, it should reduce the traditional sonic boom to the point it would simply blend into the normal background noise of life in an urban environment.
That said, the XB-1 clearly isn’t taking the concept quite as far as the X-59. Boom is ultimately looking to create a practical commercial aircraft, whereas NASA is researching the limits of the technology. The almost comically long nose extension on the X-59 will surely provide NASA with a wealth of data about sonic boom abatement, but probably won’t become a standard feature on aircraft of the future.
Open For Business
Boom says construction of the XB-1 will be largely completed by the end of the year, and that flight tests will start in 2021. That just so happens to be when NASA and Lockheed Martin plan on starting flight testing of the X-59. Assuming neither project is
significantly delayed by the global COVID-19 pandemic
, of course.
But for Boom, the successful testing of the XB-1 is just the beginning. After validating their core technology and design principles on the smaller craft, the company says they will immediately begin construction on a Mach 2.2 capable airliner they call Overture.
The 52 meter (170 ft) long aircraft would be able to carry up to 55 passengers, and is intended for high-speed international business flights. Even though it’s projected to be considerably quieter than the similarly sized Concorde, Boom envisions the Overture primarily flying transoceanic routes where noise won’t be a concern. While the timetable obviously depends on how well the XB-1 performs, Boom hopes to have the Overture ready to enter service by 2027. | 69 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269772",
"author": "Rob T",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10T17:15:30",
"content": "Just as businesses realise they can work with Zoom, along comes Boom to suggest they pay eye watering fares for face to face meetings.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,394.900073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/recreating-retrocomputers-hack-chat/ | Recreating Retrocomputers Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3d printing",
"Hack Chat",
"history",
"Minivac",
"paperclip computer",
"retrocomputing",
"trainer"
] | Join us on Wednesday, August 12 at noon Pacific for the
Recreating Retrocomputers Hack Chat
with
Mike Gardi
!
Building the first commercial computers in the late 1950s and early 1960s was certainly a complex a task, but building the computer industry was even harder. Sure, engineers were already getting on board with designing in silicon and germanium instead of glass and tungsten, and all digital circuits are really just abstractions of analog designs most of them were already familiar with. But what about all the other people who would need to get up to speed on the workings of digital computers? What good is a tool if the only people who know how to use it art the ones who built it?
To make computers make money, companies needed legions of installers, operators, programmers, marketers, and salespeople, and all of them needed training. And so early computer companies put a lot of effort into building training devices to get people up to speed. These trainers helped teach everything from basic logic circuits and Boolean relationships to simple programming concepts, and each of them contributed in their own way to developing the computer industry that we know today.
Mike Gardi has a unique hobby: among other things, he builds faithful replicas of some of the nicer examples of these lost bits of computing history.
His reproduction of Claude Shannon’s Minivac 601 trainer
is a great example of the art, as is
the DEC H-500 Computer Lab
build he’s currently working on. Along the way, he’s explored some side alleys on the road to our computerized world, like
Dr. Nim
and
the paperclip computer
. All his builds are lovingly created from 3D-prints and really capture the essence of the toys and tools of the time.
Join us as we take a trip inside this niche realm of retrocomputing and find out why Mike finds it fascinating enough to devote the time it obviously takes to build such exacting replicas. We’ll talk about what projects he’s got going on right now, what he has planned for the future, and maybe even dive into some of his secrets for such great looking 3D prints.
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 12 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, we have
a handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269767",
"author": "ChrsP",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10T16:55:49",
"content": "Mike, you’re my god !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,394.280519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/acoustic-camera-uses-many-many-microphones/ | Acoustic Camera Uses Many, Many Microphones | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"beamforming",
"MEMS",
"sound camera"
] | If you’re a human or other animal with two ears, you’ll probably find great utility in your ability to identify the direction of sounds in the world around you. Of course, this is really just a minimal starting point for such abilities. When [John Duffy] set out to build his acoustic camera,
he chose to use ninety-six microphones to get the job done
.
The acoustic camera works by having an array of microphones laid out in a prescribed grid. By measuring the timing and phase differences of signals appearing at each microphone, it’s possible to determine the location of sound sources in front of the array. The more microphones, the better the data.
[John] goes into detail as to how the project was achieved
on the project blog
. Outlining such struggles as assembly issues, he also shares information about how to effectively debug the array, and just how to effectively work with so many microphones at once. Particularly impressive is the video of
[John] using the device to track a sound to its source.
This technology has potential applications in industry for determining the location of compressed air leaks, for example.
Overall, it’s a university research project done right, with a great writeup of the final results. [John]’s project would serve well as a jumping off point for anyone trying to build something similar. Phased array techniques work in RF, too,
as this MIT project demonstrates
. Video after the break. | 53 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269738",
"author": "Doug Leppard",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10T15:07:24",
"content": "very nice, love it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6269739",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10T15:10:40",
"c... | 1,760,373,394.550928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/the-weather-station-at-the-top-of-the-world/ | The Weather Station At The Top Of The World | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"mount everest",
"mt everest",
"nepal",
"weather station"
] | The crown jewels of the Earth’s mountain ranges, the Himalayas, are unsurpassed in their beauty, their height, and their deadly attraction to adventurers, both professional and amateur. The gem of the Himalayas is, of course, Mount Everest, known as
Sagarmatha
to the Nepalis and
Chomolungma
to the Tibetans. At 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) — or more; it’s a geologically young mountain that’s still being thrust upward by tectonic activity — it’s a place so forbidding that as far as we know the summit was never visited until 1953, despite at least 30 years of previous attempts, many of which resulted in death.
The conquest of Everest remains a bucket list challenge for many adventurers, and despite advances in technology that have made the peak accessible to more people — or perhaps because of that — more than 300 corpses litter the mountain, testament to what can happen when you take the power of Mother Nature for granted.
To get better data on the goings-on at the
Roof of the World
, an expedition recently sought to install five weather stations across various points on the route up Mount Everest, including one at its very peak. The plan was challenging, both from a mountaineering perspective and in terms of the engineering required to build something that would be able to withstand some of the worst conditions on the planet, and to send valuable data back reliably. It didn’t all go exactly to plan, but it’s still a great story about the intersection of science and engineering.
How’s the Weather Up There?
Despite seven decades of exploration that have seen over 5,200 pairs of boots across its summit, Mount Everest remains very much a climatological mystery. There has never been a permanent weather station at the summit, in part because of the technical challenges that building and installing such a device entails. What little we know of conditions at the summit come by way of portable instruments lugged up by expeditions, with the deadly conditions up there making it impossible to stay around long enough to gather much more than a few readings of wind speed, pressure, and temperature. In addition, almost all Everest summit attempts occur during a very brief window lasting only a few weeks to as little as a few days out of every year.
The need for a permanent weather station on Everest is not just driven by the demands of adventure seekers. The Himalayas stand in a unique position to act as sentinels for a changing climate. By some estimates, nearly a quarter of the world’s population gets their drinking water from the glaciers nestled in and around the Himalayas, and knowing how those ice packs are responding to rising temperatures is critically important. But with so few weather stations above 5,000 meters, climatologists have to rely on remote sensing to build a picture of what’s going on up there, and a skewed one at that.
There’s another bit of serendipity with the peak of Mount Everest: it actually reaches high enough to penetrate into the jet stream, those high-velocity air currents that meander around the globe. This partly explains the characteristically bad weather and high winds on the summit of Everest, the bane of most explorers. But jet stream winds also reveal a lot about the air masses that they typically form the boundary of, and hence are valuable tools for studying the climate. Jet stream winds are generally studied through the use of weather balloons, which can obviously only send back limited data. Having a permanent weather station sitting where it can directly monitor the jet stream will prove to be invaluable to climate researchers.
Might as Well Be a Spacecraft
Having established the need for a network of Everest weather stations,
The National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition
took up the non-trivial task of designing equipment that was up to the extreme conditions on the mountain. This would be an installation like no other, more akin to designing instruments for a space mission than for monitoring terrestrial weather. Even the most durable of commercially available, scientific-grade weather stations would pale by comparison to what the Everest summit stations would require.
The comparison to space exploration is apt on a number of levels. First, weight is a primary concern, since every gram of material used to build the station, plus all the tools and hardware needed to install it, would have to be lugged up the 8,800-meter peak using nothing but muscle power. That meant that the station would have to be broken into pieces to spread the load over multiple climbers. Also, just as a planetary spacecraft is repeatedly tested to ensure it will survive the forces of launch and landing, so too would the station have to be tested to ensure its survival in some of the harshest weather conditions this planet can dish out.
Another way the engineering of the weather station is similar to space exploration is in terms of power and communication. The Everest weather stations would need to be completely self-contained, which as a practical matter means solar power. That presents special challenges: a solar panel is large, flat, and offers a lot of sail area to the wind. What’s more, solar panels are notoriously fragile, and the winds on Everest are known to pick up chunks of gravel as they whip around. A solar power system would need to be built to survive this constant peppering with rocks. Also, the weather can be cloudy for weeks at a time on the summit, so a battery to store energy would also be required.
For communication, the Everest weather station took another page from the spacecraft engineer’s playbook: redundancy. Data from the station would have to be sent wirelessly, and so it was provided with redundant transmitters. In addition to the prominent high-gain Yagi antenna for the 400-MHz instrumentation and scientific measurement (ISM) band, which talks back to the weather station at the base camp, the summit station also supports data transfer via
a Thuraya FT2225
M2M L-band satellite terminal.
Finally, in an environment where wind speeds can exceed 290 km/h (180 MPH), the station has to be able to be literally bolted down. The exact mounting location couldn’t be easily surveyed in advance, so the legs and feet of the station were made adjustable for angles up to 50°. In addition to having its feet bolted to the rock, the mast was provided with adjustable guy wires, again to be bolted to the rock, to keep the instrument mast secure and to keep the directional antennas pointing in the right direction.
Close Enough
After extensive testing by the manufacturer,
Cambell Scientific Instruments
, on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, where the highest-ever wind speed was recorded (317 km/h, or 231 MPH), the five weather stations were shipped to Nepal in time for the spring 2019 climbing season. The team honed their installation procedure on the four lower-altitude stations before attempting the final assault on the summit station.
The expedition team was far from alone. The Nepali government had issued a record number of climbing permits in 2019, which resulted in over 700 climbers converging on the mountain for the 2019 season. By the time the team had made it to the South Col camp, the traditional last stop before attempting the summit, they were at the back of an enormous traffic jam of climbers desperate for their chance to stand on the summit, however briefly.
Climbers crowd the southeast ridge route in May 2019. Source:
New York Times
This paradoxical crush of humanity on the way to one of the least accessible spots on the planet presented a huge risk to the team. While getting a few seconds on the summit for a selfie was the goal of the hundreds of climbers in line ahead of them, the team would need something like three hours to install the weather station. They faced a tough choice: attempt the summit and face the possibility of having not enough oxygen bottles and not enough room to work, or settle for a spot lower down the mountain. They opted for the latter and selected a spot on the Southeast Ridge known as The Balcony, at 8,430 meters above sea level, that gave them the time and the room to work, while only being 450 meters shy of the summit.
Once the team selected the site for the station, they quickly ran into trouble. First, the batteries they brought along to power the cordless hammer drills needed to bolt the station to the rock were too cold to work. Warm armpits under thick mountaineering jackets thawed the batteries enough to get on with the work, but it soon became apparent that the very thing that made lugging everything up the mountain possible — the ability to break the station into separate parts — also caused them to leave a critical part behind. The masts to hold the wind sensors — arguably the most critical instruments in the station — had gone missing.
Hacking at 8,400 Meters
Even on the Roof of the World, hackers rule, and a solution to the expedition-ending problem was soon found. By an incredible stroke of good fortune, the team discovered that the handles of the lightweight aluminum snow shovels that they had brought along were about the same size as the missing parts. A Sherpa set to the task of disassembling the shovel and hammering the handle into submission, while the universal problem solver — duct tape — was applied to improve the fit. The fixes worked well enough to bolt everything down and power up the station to confirm it was operating before heading back down the mountain.
At 8,430 meters above sea level, the high-altitude expedition team celebrates after setting up the world’s highest operating automated weather station during the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition. Learn more at
www.natgeo.com/everest
. Photo by Mark Fisher, National Geographic.
The Balcony station sent data back to the NGS for about nine months before something happened to knock it offline. It’s not clear what caused the failure; the rest of the lower altitude stations are all still
sending back data
, so it’s something specific to the Balcony station. The station went offline in January, so it could be that the hacked instrument masts weren’t up to the fierce winter winds and were ripped off. Or perhaps the solar panels were destroyed by wind-borne gravel, or even fouled by some bit of cast-off climbing gear. The route up to the summit, after all,
is not exactly pristine
.
Unfortunately, the only way to be sure what happened to the Balcony station is to visit it, and while that should have been possible during the 2020 climbing season, the COVID-19 pandemic had other ideas. Nepal canceled all permits to climb the mountain in 2020, and access from the Chinese side has always been limited.
A Chinese survey team did summit in May of 2020
, but they approached along the Northeast Ridge, a route that didn’t pass anywhere near the balcony.
With the climbing season now closed, the fate of the highest weather station in the world will remain a mystery until at least the spring of 2021. Hopefully it’s still up there, and can be brought back online with a simple fix. But the fact that it got up there in the first place and that it worked for nine months is a testament to the engineering that went into the whole effort. | 14 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269760",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-08-10T16:45:37",
"content": "Maybe they should set up a zip line to get the tourists off of the summit quickly.B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6269829",
"author": "Jace",
... | 1,760,373,394.129457 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/11/ring-the-bell-for-the-hackaday-prize-three-more-weeks-to-enter-your-project/ | Ring The Bell For The Hackaday Prize: Three More Weeks To Enter Your Project! | Mike Szczys | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize"
] | We are hurtling toward the close of entries for
the 2020 Hackaday Prize
. You need to have your project submitted within the next three weeks, by 7:00 AM Pacific time on Monday, August 31st. Entry is easy, just
start a project page over on Hackaday.io
and use the “Submit project to:” button on the left sidebar to enter it in the Hackaday Prize.
There are a number of cash prizes on the line this year. In addition to a $50,000 grand prize we have four best nonprofit solution prizes of $10,000, four $3,000 honorable mention prizes, and a $5,000 wildcard prize.
Need some inspiration to help you get started? We’ve teamed with four nonprofit organizations who have highlighted
real-world challenges for you to tackle
. From protecting our oceans and innovating on earthen housing designs to building assistive devices and designing systems for disaster relief, there’s plenty of ground to cover here!
Once entries close at the end August, we’ll announce a slate of finalists who will continue to refine their designs for another month. Each finalist’s project entry will be reviewed in October by
our panel of expert judges
to identify the top winners. Of course, with these type of challenges, having more people focus on ways to help is a win in our books. So grab your engineering notebooks and get to work!
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,394.075079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/11/folding-raspberry-pi-enclosure-prints-in-one-piece-no-screws-in-sight/ | Folding Raspberry Pi Enclosure Prints In One Piece, No Screws In Sight | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3d printed",
"clearance",
"enclosure",
"print in place",
"raspberry pi",
"tolerance"
] | [jcprintnplay] has challenged himself to making Raspberry Pi cases in different ways, and
his Fold-a-Pi enclosure tries for a “less is more” approach
while also leveraging the strong points of 3D printing. The enclosure prints as a single piece in about 3 hours, and requires no additional hardware whatsoever.
The design requires no screws or other fasteners, and provides a mounting hole for a fan as well as some holes for mounting the enclosure itself to something. All the ports and headers are accessible, and the folding one-piece design is not just a gimmick; in a workshop situation where the Pi needs to be switched out or handled a lot, it takes no time at all to pop the Raspberry Pi in and out of the enclosure.
Microsoft’s 3D Builder has a pretty useful measurement tool for STLs.
[James] points out that the trick with a print-in-place hinge like this is leaving enough space between the parts so that the two pieces aren’t fused together, but not so much space that the print fails. He doesn’t go into detail about how much space worked or didn’t work, but an examination of the downloadable model shows that the clearance used looks like 0.30 mm, intended to be printed with a 0.4 mm nozzle.
[James] also demonstrates the value of being able to do quick iterations on a design when prototyping. In
a video
(embedded below) The first prototype had the hinge not quite right. In the second prototype there was a lack of clearance when closing. The third one solved both and shows the final design.
The tricky process of finding just the right amount of clearance for something can be made much easier with
the Goldilocks approach
, and can be an efficient use of 3D printing.
[via
Reddit
] | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6270035",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-08-11T15:14:58",
"content": "Silly me, I was expecting enclosing to happen. 11/10 for ventilation though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6270041",
"author": "hunt... | 1,760,373,394.239886 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/11/our-trucks-wont-need-no-batteries-electric-trucks-look-to-overhead-wires-for-power/ | Our Trucks Won’t Need No Batteries! Electric Trucks Look To Overhead Wires For Power | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric truck",
"freight",
"infrastructure",
"railroad",
"truck"
] | As the world grapples with the spectre of the so-called “hockey stick” graph of climate change, there have been a variety of solutions proposed to the problem of carbon emissions from sectors such as transport which have become inseparable from the maintenance of 21st century life. Sometimes these are blue-sky ideas that may just be a little bit barmy, while other times they make you stop and think: “That could just work!”.
Such an idea is that of
replacing the diesel engines in trucks with electric motors powered not by batteries but from overhead cables
. An electric tractor unit would carry a relatively small battery for last-mile transit, but derive its highway power by extending a pantograph from its roof to a high-voltage cable above the road. It’s extremely seductive to the extent that
there have even been trials of the system
in more than one country, but does it stack up to a bit of analysis?
Time’s Up For Those Big Rigs
Siemens and Scania are justifiably proud of their electrified stretch of autobahn and electric trucks in Germany.
One thing that should be obvious to all is that moving our long-distance freight around by means of an individual fossil-fuel-powered diesel engine for every 38 tonne or so freight container may be convenient, but it is hardly either fuel-efficient or environmentally friendly The most efficient diesel engines on the road are said to have a 43% efficiency, and when hauling an single load they take none of the economies of scale afforded to the diesel engines that haul for example a freight train. Similarly they spread any pollution they emit across the entirety of their route, and yet again fail to benefit from the economies of scale present in for example a power station exhaust scrubber. However much I have a weakness for the sight of a big rig at full stretch, even I have to admit that its day has passed.
The battery technology being pursued for passenger cars is a tempting alternative, as we’ve seen with
Tesla Semi
. But for all its technology that vehicle still walks the knife-edge between the gain in cost-effectiveness versus the cost of hauling around enough batteries to transport that quantity of freight. Against that the overhead wire truck seems to offer the best of both worlds, the lightness and easy refueling of a diesel versus the lack of emissions from an electric. In the idealised world of a brochure it runs on renewable wind, sun, and water power, so all our problems are solved, right? But does it
really
stack up?
The trouble with evaluating claims about overhead wire electric trucks is that there is little comparable from which to draw parallels. Long-distance electric trains have been around for over a century, but though they make infinitely more sense for very long distance transport they are not analagous enough to a myriad of individual routes for a direct comparison. Likewise electric urban transport in the form of trams and trolley buses are old enough to have been invented, abandoned, and rediscovered, but their use cases of city transport over set routes doesn’t match that of a free-ranging truck. Perhaps it’s better to look at the costs involved both in providing the distribution infrastructure and the extra generating capacity.
Out Comes The Hackaday Back of An Envelope
You’ll need more than 1.21 Jiggawatts to power all the trucks in the UK! MsSaraKelly (
CC BY 2.0)
Just how much energy does a truck user per mile anyway, and what effect would all the trucks going electric have on the grid? Time for a back-of-envelope calculation.
This 2017 paper from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(PDF) puts some figures on the table, deriving a 1.89 kWh per mile figure for a battery electric truck versus as 2.02 kWh figure for its diesel equivalent. This disparity is due to predicted recovery of energy through regenerative braking.
Since the
Guardian
piece linked at the top of the article applies to the UK, a quick look at
the British government’s road freight statistics
reveals 152 billion tonne kilometres of freight were moved by road over 18.7 billion kilometres traveled in 2018, with an average haul length of 108km or 67.1 miles. This gives us 173,148,148 of those 67.1 mile journeys, and taking in the Oak Ridge energy figures, 23,468,846,276 kWh of diesel or 21,958,474,981 kWh of electric energy consumption. That’s a yearly figure, so dividing by 365 and taking a dubious assumption that those journeys are spread over 12 hours of daytime, we arrive at 5,013,350.45 kW of extra generating capacity. 5.013 GW may be enough to get you back to the future four times, but it’s not inconsequential in generating capacity terms.
To give an idea of the cost, and taking the rosy view that all this capacity will be renewable wind power,
a 3.5 MW wind turbine costs £3.13 million to install
. To generate 5.013 GW we would need 1433 of them for which we probably have space offshore, so we’d have to find an extra £4,485,290,000 ($5,895,667,014.05). £4.5 billion is a lot of money but it’s not out of sight for a government that’s spending over £100 billion on
a high-speed railway
at the moment, even if they may soon have some economic uncertainty to contend with.
How about the cost of putting up those electric cables? For that we don’t have any comparisons as there are no large road networks that have been converted to overhead wires. But we do have a parallel in the railway system, as the ongoing electrification of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
‘s Great Western Railway from London to South Wales. It’s mired in controversy and has moved significantly from its original cost estimate and scope, but in 2017 the 129 miles from London to Cardiff
were estimated to cost £2.8 billion
, or somewhere over £21.7 million per mile. The likely size of the UK road network to be converted is quoted as 4,300 miles, so that gives us a final bill of £93.31 billion, or about $122.506 billion. Add to that our by now relatively paltry-sounding £4.5bn for those wind turbines, and we reach a final figure of £97.81 billion (about $128.67 billion).
So our back-of-the-envelope calculation for a countrywide network comes in at a shade under £100 bn, definitely in the same ballpark as the high-speed rail project that only serves London and Birmingham, about 125 miles apart. I’m sure that there will be other costs and that Hackaday readers will pick up on me should I have made any calculation errors, but I must admit to being pleasantly surprised at how relatively affordable that is for a country. Cynical long-time watchers will tell you that everything the UK government touches comes in at twice the price, but even at £200bn it’s not out of sight for the benefit it might deliver.
It May Be Affordable, But Does It Scale?
MK to Vladivostok
on Google Maps, by electric train(s). Tell me again that electric traction is impractical over long distances.
Doubters will of course point to the size and density of the United Kingdom versus the wide open spaces of for example the American mid-west as evidence for why it could not possibly work over distances greater than those in a small country. To them I would point to the experience in the railway system. For many decades now I have been able to take an electric train (with a few changes) for thousands of miles from the Atlantic coast of the UK through the Channel Tunnel across Europe and into Russia, and
since 2002
from Moscow further via the Trans-Siberian Railway to China and as far as Vladivostok. It’s not really an easy journey at over a week, but I can take an electric train journey and then a ferry crossing from near my hackerspace in Milton Keynes to arrive in Japan, and that’s not an inconsequential distance. There is nothing about the technology which makes it impossible or impractical over a large distance, and since it has been around for a long time there’s nothing unproven about doing so.
In investigating the viability of electrified road transport we’ve found to our surprise that it could indeed be viable, and to demonstrate this we’ve leaned heavily upon the analogous experience in the rail industry. But in doing so we’ve inadvertently demonstrated something else, that railways can more successfully be electrified over very long distances. Perhaps the real story here is that what might work best to decarbonise freight transport using electricity would be to electrify the rail lines for freight as the branches of a transcontinental tree, and to treat the regional road networks as its electrified fine roots and leaves rather than try to electrify every road. After all, an electric locomotive can move a hundred loads at once.
Header image:
Scania
. | 212 | 49 | [
{
"comment_id": "6270013",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2020-08-11T14:13:45",
"content": "It’s probably as impossible as switching to metric system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6270148",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,373,394.796863 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/11/espflix-brings-streaming-video-to-the-world-of-microcontrollers/ | ESPFLIX Brings Streaming Video To The World Of Microcontrollers | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"amazing",
"ESP32",
"netflix",
"video"
] | These days, if you’ve got a TV that’s a little too old to directly access streaming services, you’ve got plenty of options. Apple TV, Chromecast, and a cavalcade of Android boxes are available to help get content on your screen. However, if you’re really stuck in the past,
ESPFLIX might just be for you.
Control of the system is achieved by an Apple TV remote.
Yes, that’s right – it’s an online streaming service running on an ESP32. [rossumur] has achieved this feat through a careful use of codecs, and some efficient coding strategies to make it all come together. Video is MPEG1, at just 352×192 resolution. Audio is via the SBC codec, originally intended for use with Bluetooth devices. It’s chosen here for its tiny sample buffers, making it easier to decode in the limited RAM of the ESP32. Output is via composite video, generated on the ESP32 itself.
The titles themselves consist of public domain content, running off an Amazon Web Services instance. With limited RAM on the ESP32, there’s not much buffering to be had, so [rossumur] is bankrolling an AWS Cloudfront instance which should make it possible to use ESPFLIX from most places around the world with a solid internet connection.
We’ve seen [rossumur]’s work before,
with the ESP_8_BIT serving as a prelude to this project’s capabilities.
Video after the break. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269975",
"author": "huntdesigns",
"timestamp": "2020-08-11T11:20:32",
"content": "Looks more responsive than anyrhing amazon or google has to offer… better add some more telemry/tracking and other bloat “features”.Very nice. impressive from a simple wifi device. ,",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,373,394.038144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/11/3d-printable-kinematic-couplings-ready-to-use/ | 3D Printable Kinematic Couplings, Ready To Use | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"hardware",
"Parts"
] | [
"3d model",
"3d printed",
"cad",
"kinematic",
"stl"
] | Time may bring change, but kinematic couplings don’t.
This handy kinematic couplings resource
by [nickw] was for a design contest a few years ago, but what’s great is that it includes ready-to-use models intended for 3D printing, complete with a bill of materials (and McMaster-Carr part numbers) for hardware. The short document is well written and illustrated with assembly diagrams and concise, practical theory. The accompanying 3D models are ready to be copied and pasted anywhere one might find them useful.
What are kinematic couplings? They are a way to ensure that two parts physically connect, detach, and re-connect in a precise and repeatable way. The download has ready-to-use designs for both a Kelvin and Maxwell system kinematic coupling, and a more advanced design for an optomechanical mount like one would find in a laser system.
The download from Pinshape requires a free account, but the models and document are licensed under
CC – Attribution
and ready to use in designs (so long as the attribution part of the license is satisfied, of course.) Embedded below is a short video demonstrating the coupling using the Maxwell system. The Kelvin system is similar.
In the past we saw the Maxwell system form the basis of
this 3D-printed magnetic camera mount
. Want a more in-depth resource for kinematic couplings? Check out [Joshua Vasquez]’s take on the book
Exact Constraint: Machine Design Using Kinematic Principles
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269953",
"author": "Marc PELTIER",
"timestamp": "2020-08-11T08:24:55",
"content": "Nice, but this is not really a kinematic coupling: there are three equivalent slots, whereas the exact kinematic coupling supposes under each ball respectively a cone, a slot directed towards the con... | 1,760,373,395.400672 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/glasgow-uses-an-fpga-as-an-embedded-systems-multitool/ | Glasgow Uses An FPGA As An Embedded Systems Multitool | Al Williams | [
"FPGA",
"Microcontrollers",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"eeprom",
"eprom",
"fpga",
"jtag",
"spi"
] | Everyone who builds embedded systems wants tools to help build and debug systems faster, so it isn’t uncommon to see boards outfitted with various tools like serial port sniffers. We’ve seen a few incarnations and the latest is
Glasgow
. The small board uses an FPGA and claims to do the following:
UART with automatic baud rate determination
SPI or I2C
Read and write common EEPROMs and flash chips
Read and write common EPROMs including a data rescue function
Program AVR chips via SPI
Play back JTAG SVF files
Debug ARC and some MIPS CPUs
Program XC9500LX CPLDs
Communicate to several wireless radios and CPUs
Do sound synthesis
Read raw data from floppy drives
The revC board is the first to be relatively functional and sports 16 I/O pins operating at up to 100 MHz, although the documentation hints that 6 MHz might be the top of what’s easily accomplished. The software is written in Python and the
iCE40 FPGA toolchain
that we’ve talked about many times in the past.
This already looks like a useful tool and the reconfigurable nature of FPGAs makes it a good platform to expand. The documentation discusses the difficulty in debugging things for the board, so the base software offers support such as a built-in logic analyzer to help.
We have seen dev boards become bench tools, like
using the iCEstick
as
a logic analyzer
. It’s nice to see dedicated tools like this one built up around the speed and versatility of FPGAs. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269932",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2020-08-11T06:49:57",
"content": "Started off sounding like a Bus Pirate, but there are certainly enough extra features to make this worth considering.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,373,394.984523 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/10/modular-vibrating-bots-made-from-pcbs/ | Modular Vibrating ‘Bots Made From PCBs | Lewin Day | [
"Art"
] | [
"bristlebot",
"pcb",
"pcb art"
] | Printed circuit boards, they’re a medium designed primarily to mount electrical components with the wires themselves places as copper traces on the boards. To accommodate wide range of needs that have arisen over decades, board houses have evolved all manner of advanced techniques in routing and plating. To our benefit, this also makes it possible to leverage PCBs in an entirely artistic way, taking advantage of the highly-optimized manufacturing process. [GeeekClub] did just that,
creating awesome vibrating robots out of custom-made PCBs
.
The ‘bots come as a single PCB, with the parts snapped out akin to removing parts from sprues in a plastic model kit. They can then be assembled, with a pair of pager vibration motors installed to provide motive power. But really it’s the aesthetic of the boards and not the functionality that make these so incredible.
The design nestles a coin cell in the base of each bot, providing power and using the weight to help keep them upright. There’s a smattering of LEDs on board, and the art style of the ‘bots draws from Hopi Indian, Asian, and South American influences.
Cyphercon 2017
featured these exciting cubic badges, created from PCBs and soldered by hand.
This Star Trek inspired piece
shows just how far you can go with the right color soldermask and some creativity.
This “flat-pack” style of PCB design that comes to life with creative use of angles and layers is becoming its own sub-genre of the art.
The Star Trek Enterprise inspired build
in another great example. We’ve also seen a growing trend of using the PCB as enclosures, take the
Cyphercon badge
and
Queercon badge
projects from 2017 as examples. Get yourself up to speed on design techniques for
using FR4 as an enclosure from [Voja Antonic’s] in-depth guide
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269923",
"author": "Budi Prakosa",
"timestamp": "2020-08-11T05:37:59",
"content": "checkout this inkscape plugin i created for pcb artisthttps://github.com/badgeek/svg2shenzhen",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6270060",
"aut... | 1,760,373,394.941151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/09/recreating-early-apple-mice-for-the-modern-era/ | Recreating Early Apple Mice For The Modern Era | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3d model",
"apple",
"cad",
"computer history",
"mouse",
"replica"
] | At a time when practical graphical user interfaces were only just becoming a reality on desktop computers, Apple took a leap of faith and released one of the first commercially available mice back in 1983. It was criticized as being little more than a toy back then, but we all know how that particular story ends.
While the Apple G5431 isn’t that
first
mouse, it’s not too far removed. So much so that
[Stephen Arsenault] believed it was worthy of historic preservation
. Whether you want to print out a new case to replace a damaged original or try your hand at updating the classic design with modern electronics, his CAD model of this early computer peripheral is available under the Creative Commons license for anyone who wants it.
The model is exceptionally well detailed.
[Stephen] tells us that he was inspired to take on this project after he saw new manufactured cases for the G5431 popping up online, including a variant made out of translucent plastic. Realizing that a product from 1986 is old enough that Apple (probably) isn’t worried about people cloning it, he set out to produce this definitive digital version of the original case components for community use.
With these 3D models available, [Stephen] hopes that others will be inspired to try and modify the iconic design of the G5431. Perhaps by creating a Bluetooth version, or adding the ability to right-click.
Considering we’ve already seen custom PCBs for mice
, it’s hardly a stretch. We’d love to see somebody take him up on the offer, but even if not, the
digital preservation of computer history is always welcome
. | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269555",
"author": "Somun",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T14:05:59",
"content": "Nice modeling indeed. And kudos for uploading not just STLs but also proper 3D models.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6269557",
"author": "Ostracu... | 1,760,373,395.359631 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/09/oak-vision-modules-help-you-see-the-forest-and-the-trees/ | OAK Vision Modules Help You See The Forest And The Trees | Roger Cheng | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"computer vision",
"crowdfunded",
"kickstarter",
"machine vision",
"movidius",
"myriad x",
"open source",
"open source cam",
"opencv",
"smart camera"
] | OpenCV is an open source library of computer vision algorithms, its power and flexibility made many machine vision projects possible. But even with code highly optimized for maximum performance, we always wish for more. Which is why our ears perk up whenever we hear about a hardware accelerated vision module, and the latest buzz is coming out of the
OpenCV AI Kit (OAK) Kickstarter campaign
.
There are two vision modules launched with this campaign. The OAK-1 with a single color camera for two dimensional vision applications, and the OAK-D which adds stereo cameras for that third dimension. The onboard brain is a Movidius Myriad X processor which, according to team members who have dug through its datasheet, have been massively underutilized in other products. They believe OAK modules will help the chip fulfill its potential for vision applications, delivering high performance while consuming low power in a small form factor. Reading over the spec sheet, we think it’s fair to call these “Ultimate Myriad X Dev Boards” but we must concede “OpenCV AI Kit” sounds better. It does not provide hardware acceleration for the entire OpenCV library (likely an impossible task) but it does cover the highly demanding subset suitable for Myriad X acceleration.
Since the campaign launched a few weeks ago, some additional information have been released to help assure backers that this project has real substance. It turns out OAK is an evolution of
a project we’ve covered almost exactly one year ago
that became a real product
DepthAI
, so at least this is not their first rodeo. It is also encouraging that their invitation to the open hardware community has already borne fruit. Check out
this thread discussing OAK for robot vision
, where a question was met with an honest “we don’t have expertise there” from the OAK team, but then ArduCam pitched in with their camera module experience to help.
We wish them success for their planned December 2020 delivery. They have already far surpassed their funding goals, they’ve shipped hardware before, and we see a good start to a development community. We look forward to the OAK-1 and OAK-D joining the ranks of other hacking friendly vision modules like
OpenMV
,
JeVois
,
StereoPi
, and
AIY Vision
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269582",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T17:10:28",
"content": "You lost me at kickstarter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6269592",
"author": "Roger Cheng",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T18:19:35",
... | 1,760,373,395.137368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/09/tune-into-the-bonnaroo-that-no-one-gets-to-go-to/ | Tune Into The Bonnaroo That No One Gets To Go To | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"16 segment display",
"Bonnaroo",
"feather m4",
"MCP23017",
"music festival",
"slide potentiometer"
] | Just like everything else in 2020, the four-day, multi-stage festival of music and art known as Bonnaroo has been cancelled. This would have been [Guy Dupont]’s fifth year making the journey to Tennessee with his friend. Since they couldn’t go, [Guy] decided to
build an interactive Bonnaroo mix tape into an 80s clock radio
as a birthday present.
[Guy] was able to re-purpose all the original buttons and dials to navigate through the schedule of acts that would have performed across four days and five stages. The conveniently four-way function slider is used to choose the day, and the radio tuning dial selects the stage, complete with delightful static between the positions. The rest of the buttons move back and forth through the scheduled set times, and one will scroll the track and artist name across the 16-segment displays. The snooze button has the honor of being the play/pause button.
All the inputs are controlled with a Feather M4 express, and the music comes through a DFPlayer Mini. We love that [Guy] was able to repurpose the analog tuning dial by coupling it to a slide potentiometer that fit perfectly in a slot on the underside of the plastic. Stay tuned for a great video that starts with an explanation and demo and then goes into the build.
Though the utility of the clock radio may have been supplanted by cell phone alarms and doomscrolling, that just means that there are theoretically more of them to gut and turn into other things, like
this Fallout-inspired luggable Pip-Boy
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269537",
"author": "Roald",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T08:57:16",
"content": "The end result looks awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6269573",
"author": "Daniel Larrosa",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T16:24:17",
"co... | 1,760,373,395.052525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/animal-crossing-irl-with-nova-lights-to-mark-the-passage-of-time/ | Animal Crossing IRL With Nova Lights To Mark The Passage Of Time | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"Animal Crossong",
"clock",
"origami"
] | We feature a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, but it’s not often that one comes along and makes us stop in our tracks and reconsider the fundamental question: just what
is
a clock? [Charlyn] has managed it though, with her
Nova Light clock
, which doesn’t so much measure the passing of time, but mark it.
The clock itself is a set of origami pieces in the shape of the Nova lights and a star fragment from the popular
Animal Crossing New Horizons
game, and each has a multicolour LED underneath. The star fragment pulses, while the two Nova lights imperceptibly slowly change colour, one over the course of the day and the other over the course of the week. Except for Fridays, when in celebration of the end of the work week they pulsate with different colours. Under the hood is an Adafruit Feather with a real-time clock module, and since all the code is there for your enjoyment you can have a go at making your own. Below the break is a video showing the clock in action.
[Charlyn] is no stranger to these pages, in fact
we’ve featured her exquisite use of origami before
. It’s probably
her rideable rocking horse
that’s the most memorable among her projects though.
Thanks [Sophi] for the tip. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269591",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T18:15:59",
"content": "Sort of a clock & calendar in one, not accurate but a nice approch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,395.086378 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/print-with-plasma/ | Print With Plasma! | Jenny List | [
"Art"
] | [
"plasma lighter",
"printer",
"thermal printer"
] | Over the years there have been a variety of methods for a computer to commit its thoughts to paper. Be it a daisy wheel, a dot matrix, a laser, or an inkjet, we’ve all cursed at a recalcitrant printer. There’s another type of printer that maybe we don’t think of quite as often but is workhorse in a million cash registers and parking ticket machines: the thermal printer. These mechanisms can be readily found as surplus items and have made their way into more than one project here over the years. [HomoFaciens] has taken thermal printing a step further
by building a plasma printer from scratch
that makes use of the thermal paper.
A thermal printer does its job as its name suggests, by burning the image into the paper. It may not deliver the best quality print, but scores on not needing ink ribbons, cartridges, or toner. This DIY version uses an off-the-shelf battery-powered plasma lighter to do the job, mounted on a 3D printed XY printer mechanism driven by two stepper motors. Behind the scenes is an Arduino Uno, which receives its instructions via USB from a command-line program on a Linux box. It’s admitted that this is hardly the pinnacle of printing technology, but it does at least make for a fascinating project. You can see it in action in the video below the break.
This isn’t [HomoFaciens]’ first printer, we’re instantly reminded of
this ink drop printer from a few years ago
.
Thanks [Baldpower] for the tip. | 29 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269497",
"author": "Bruce Perens",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T02:16:00",
"content": "I’m really sure that the heating elements in every thermal printer you can buy never reaches the flashpoint of thermal paper. In contrast, I’m just as sure that a plasma lighter mechanism always exc... | 1,760,373,395.197047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/wood-fired-hot-tub-for-the-end-of-the-world/ | Wood-Fired Hot Tub For The End Of The World | Jenny List | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"hot tub",
"softwood",
"wood fired"
] | It’s one of the idyls of our age, to imagine oneself lounging in a hot tub watching a golden sunset, glass of wine in hand and the love of your life at your side. Along the way though it’s one that’s become diverted from the original, instead of a Scandinavian style wood fired tub in the forest we’re more likely to be thinking of an electric whirlpool spa made from fibreglass, as much a status symbol as a leisure item. It’s refreshing then to see [sirClogg]’s
home made hot tub
, a simple wooden tub with associated wood stove to heat its water. We can’t wait to step in!
The tub is simplicity itself, being made from softwood planks held together under tension by some steel cables. He admits though that he made a mistake using green wood, as it has now contracted leaving the tub with some gaps. But it’s a simple enough build that he can contemplate dismantling and rebuilding it to correct for that oversight.
Heat meanwhile is provided by a pipe that circulates water from the bottom of the tub through a heat exchanger coil inside a brick-built wood stove adjacent to the tub. The fabrication of the heat exchanger is detailed in the video below, we enjoyed seeing the copper piping filled with salt to ensure it doesn’t collapse when being bent around a five-gallon bucket. It doesn’t get much simpler than this, and the reward of a hot tub must be a sweet one indeed.
For hot tub enthusiast hackers, it’s always worth remembering that the excellent Danish hacker camp BornHack
has a hot tub as part of its wellness area
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269472",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T23:45:52",
"content": "Nice build but how do you go back in time?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6269487",
"author": "R. Hargreaves",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,373,395.452835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/vintage-gauges-turned-classy-weather-display/ | Vintage Gauges Turned Classy Weather Display | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"analog gauge",
"dht22",
"environmental monitoring",
"restoration",
"temperature sensor",
"weather display",
"woodworking"
] | It’s always good to see old hardware saved from the junk pile, especially when the end result is as impressive as this
analog gauge weather display put together by [Build Comics]
. It ended up being a truly multidisciplinary project, combing not only restoration work and modern microcontroller trickery, but a dash of woodworking for good measure.
Naturally, the gauges themselves are the real stars of the show. They started out with rusted internals and broken glass, but parts from a sacrificial donor and some TLC from [Build Comics] got them back in working order. We especially like the effort that was put into making the scale markings look authentic, with scans of the originals modified in GIMP to indicate temperature and humidity while retaining the period appropriate details.
To drive the 1940s era indicators, [Build Comics] is using an Arduino Nano and a DHT22 sensor that can detect temperature and humidity. A couple of trimmer pots are included for fine tuning the gauges, and everything is mounted to a small scrap of perfboard hidden inside of the custom-made pine enclosure.
This is hardly the first time we’ve seen
analog gauges hooked up to modern electronics
, but most of
the projects are just that: modern
. While the end look might be somewhat polarizing, we think
maintaining the hardware’s classic style
was the right call. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269479",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T00:36:54",
"content": "Pots to tune (or calibrate) the meters?Meters are actually the reference to which you calibrate.The magic figure is Full Scale Deflection (FSD) current. Often in a 1,5 sequence like 50uA 100uA 500uA 1mA.Knowi... | 1,760,373,395.495508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/a-shell-a-programming-language-relax-its-both/ | A Shell? A Programming Language? Relax! It’s Both! | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"bash",
"crush",
"linux",
"nushell",
"shell"
] | Every time we publish a Linux hack that uses a shell script, someone will chime in about how awful it is to program shell scripts. While we like the ubiquity and efficiency, we can’t disagree that the shell is a bit of a hack itself. [Axel Lijencrantz] wants to
change your shell
to be a full-blow programming language called Crush.
On the face of it, it looks like a shell. Want to see the contents of the current directory? Simple:
ls
.
The difference is underneath. In Crush, ls is a built-in and it returns data in rows like a database. You can manipulate that database with SQL-like commands:
ls | where {type=="directory"}
.
You can still treat I/O as binary streams. But Crush also knows about CSV files, JSON, line-oriented files, and several other formats. So if you were trying to feed the output of
ls
to a program and need it in JSON form, that’s simple:
ls | json:to ./listing.json
.
Crush can also do math without resorting to trickery like older shells or strange syntax like bash. The shell supports closures that you can assign to a variable to make what amounts to a function. Another welcome feature is that Crush understands the idea of namespaces.
There are a few oddities like using
%
as a wildcard instead of
*
because the
*
is for multiplication. However, we like a lot of the features, including simplified remote execution and the ability to create custom types.
Crush is similar to
Nu,
but has some different goals with respect to programming languages. If you are still writing programs in traditional shells like bash, be sure to run a
linter
. | 55 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269400",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T17:21:15",
"content": "“Every time we publish a Linux hack that uses a shell script, someone will chime in about how awful it is to program shell scripts.”Consider it an incentive not to do long scripts where a program would d... | 1,760,373,395.640262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/diy-hid-omg/ | DIY HID, OMG! | Elliot Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"hid",
"input devices",
"mouse",
"newsletter",
"pointer",
"scroll wheel"
] | William English, one of the creators of the mouse back in the 60s, passed away last week. And that got me thinking of how amazing it would have been to be in
the
place that was inventing what would become modern computing interfaces. What a special time! Of course, they probably had no idea.
From here, it looks like the mouse changed everything, but you have to realize that they were working in a world with light-pens, where you could actually draw on the screen. In contrast, the mouse seems positively non-futuristic. They must have known they’d come up with an improvement over the status quo, but did they know they’d created a revolution?
So where has the revolutionary spirit in DIY human interface devices gone? I’d claim it’s still alive and kicking. Indeed our own Kristina Panos has a series called “
Inputs of Interest
” and we’ve seen a ton of DIY keyboards of late. Then there are many varieties of
dial inputs
. I used to have a dedicated scroll wheel made out of a hard-drive platter, and when I was reading lots of PDFs on-screen, I have to say it earned its desk-space. Heck, we’ve even seen people
make their own mouse
.
But what I love about the story of the development of the mouse is that they asked the question “what is the best way to locate a point on a screen” and tried to answer it. Half of their success is probably in simply asking the right question, and the other half in prototyping something half-workable. My gut says that we don’t have inputs figured out 100% on mobile yet. This sounds like a job for Hackaday. What’s the next big human-interface design need? And have you got any crazy ideas to solve it?
Hackaday Remoticon
And this week, we announced the
Hackaday Remoticon
, our shelter-in-place version of the Supercon. It’s going to take place in November as usual, but online instead of IRL.
The good news? It’s going to be chock full of workshops, all streamed online and recorded for posterity. And for that we need your proposals. If you’d like to teach a group of distributed hackers learning your favorite techniques and tricks, this is your chance!
The bad news is of course that we won’t get to see you all in person. That’s going to make the 2021 Hackaday Supercon seem even more super.
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
! | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269377",
"author": "MendesL",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T16:06:22",
"content": "Now I’m sure, hackaday is getting us duplicated posts. I clearly remember reading this a few days back. The only thing different is the cover image, it wasn’t that stylized neon art.",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,373,395.551574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/why-buy-the-newer-model-when-you-can-just-replicate-its-user-interface/ | Why Buy The Newer Model, When You Can Just Replicate Its User Interface? | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"DJ controller",
"Pioneer",
"STM discovery"
] | Every now and then, along comes an awesome hack from years past that we missed at the time. We kick ourselves for somehow missing such amazing work, and since it’s that good, we share it with you with apologies. Such is the case with [Andrei Anatska]’s
faithful replication of the Pioneer CDJ-2000 user interface as an upgrade to the earlier CDJ-1000 DJ controller
, a piece of work of such quality that you could almost mistake it for being a commercial product.
At its heart is the STM32F746G Discovery board, which for some reason it pleases us greatly in this context that he refers to as the Disco board. If you’re hazy on the details of the various STM dev boards, this is the all-singing all-dancing one with the fancy colour LCD display. Out comes the VFD on the CDJ-1000 and a set of wires are soldered to its main board, then the Disco board is hooked up with the project firmware installed. The
piece de résistance
is the case, for which he eschews 3D-printing and instead cuts out from black plastic.
Full instructions can be found in this PDF
, so should you happen to have a CDJ-1000 that’s seen better days, you can join in the fun. See it in action in the video below.
DJ controllers may be run-of-the-mill today, but to those of us whose DJing days were in the era of a pair of Technics SL1200s and a stack of vinyl to the sound of early ’90s house music they are still nothing short of miraculous. We’ve featured plenty of hacks involving them here but they don’t always involve professional kit.
Even a game controller can be pressed into service
.
Thanks [Niklas Fauth] for
the tip
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269382",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T16:32:07",
"content": "That’s such clean work and great reverse engineering on top of that. Also learned that $55 can buy you a nice programmable touch UI module masquerading as an eval board.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth... | 1,760,373,395.684628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/08/an-amiga-sampler-30-years-later/ | An Amiga Sampler 30 Years Later | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"retrocomputing",
"sound sampler"
] | There was a magic moment for a few years around the end of the 1980s, when home computers were better than professional ones. That’s a mighty grand pronouncement, but it refers to the crop of 16-bit home computers that genuinely were far better than nearly all PCs at the time for multimedia tasks. You could plug a sampler cartridge into your Amiga and be in the dance charts in no time, something which sparked a boom in electronic music creativity. As retrocomputing interest has soared so have the prices of old hardware, and for those still making Amiga music that cart can now be outrageously expensive. it’s something [echolevel] has addressed, with
an open-source recreation of an Amiga sampler.
As anyone who peered inside one back int he day will tell you, an Amiga sampler was a very simple device consisting of a commonly-available 8-bit A to D converter, a CMOS switch for right and left samples, and maybe an op-amp preamplifier. This is exactly what he’s produced, save fpr the CMOS switch as he points out that Amiga musicians use mono samples anyway. At its heart is an ADC0820 half-flash ADC chip, and the whole thing is realised on a very retro-looking through-hole PCB.
For a Hackaday scribe with a Technosound Turbo still sitting in a box somewhere it’s a real trip down memory lane. It was a moment of magic to for the first time be able to edit and manipulate audio on a computer, and we’re glad to see that something of those days still lives on. See it in action in the video below the break. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269333",
"author": "Nitpicker Smartyass",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T09:26:57",
"content": "To be fair, 8-bit ADC was quite common even on C64 with “Soundtrackers” doing the melodic work and a sample line using the weird “undocumented waveform” on the SID plus volume-“DA-hack” for th... | 1,760,373,395.749977 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/virtual-software-defined-radio/ | Virtual Software Defined Radio | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"KiwiSDR",
"RTL-SDR",
"sdr",
"SDR Console",
"software-defined radio",
"websdr"
] | Software defined radio or SDR has changed the radio landscape forever. But to use one you need to buy some kind of hardware right? Maybe not. As [Tech Minds] shows in a recent video there are plenty of
SDRs publically available on the Internet
. We know that isn’t news, but the video does cover several different methods of finding and using SDR receivers including many that run totally in the browser.
Of course, there are a lot of reasons you might want to borrow an alien radio receiver, even if you have your own hardware. Maybe you don’t have a great antenna or maybe you want to hear a signal — maybe even your own — from a different location.
Some of these methods even have the ability to pipe audio data out to another program if you want to do some sort of decoding or processing. The SPY network uses the SDR# software, so you will have to install something for that. On the other hand, the program doesn’t really treat local hardware and remote any differently, so you can do lots of different things. But many of the programs will work inside a normal browser. SDR Console also needs some software, as well.
WebSDR works totally in the browser. KiwiSDR uses the very cool OpenWebRX interface and apparently it decodes radio signals on the server side, making it easy to listen to different signals in the browser.
With everyone having a bit more free time at home lately, this is a great way to take up listening to the radio with zero extra investment. Of course, if you have the inclination and the antennas, you can get a
cheap dongle
, although you’ll need an HF converter to listen to the shortwave bands. Or you can hack a
QCX
transceiver. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269292",
"author": "ScriptGiddy",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T02:07:12",
"content": "Awesome write up. I hope this inspires!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6269361",
"author": "Beaker",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T13:52:40",... | 1,760,373,395.791127 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/tired-of-regular-keebs-might-be-time-to-split/ | Tired Of Regular Keebs? Might Be Time To Split | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"diy keyboard",
"ergonomic keyboard",
"ergonomics",
"hot swap sockets",
"keyboard",
"split keyboard"
] | No matter how much geek cred your old vintage keyboard pulls, it’s not worth suffering through wrist pain or any other discomfort while using it. Especially now, when there are so many points of entry into the
rabbit hole
world of DIY mechanical keebs.
Once the wrist pain started, [Ben Congdon] switched from a big old Apple keeb to a Kinesis Freestyle — it’s basically a regular keyboard, but in two halves that can be placed far enough apart that [Ben]’s wrists are straight while typing. Comfortable as that split rectangle may be, it’s just not that cool looking, and he was ready to build something new, as long as it had enough keys.
[Ben] settled on building a Keebio Sinc
, a new board which comes mostly soldered already and supports a handful of layouts. In the spirit of leaving doors open, [Ben] soldered in hot-swap sockets instead of permanently attaching the key switches to the PCB. This way, those Gateron reds can be easily switched out for something else, for instance should [Ben] want to try a little tactility down the road.
We think the Sinc is a cool offering precisely because it is such a full keyboard. Not everyone is ready to jump into 60% layouts or thumb clusters, and it’s nice to have options. This is entry-level ergo and DIY all at once. What’s not to like? Even if you want to go for something small and ortholinear, there are options.
Here’s a build we saw recently that starts with a breakaway PCB
that lets you choose between small and smaller.
Via
reddit | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269283",
"author": "dee",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T23:47:47",
"content": "nope, regular “keebs” are perfect for me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6269307",
"author": "Vladimir",
"timestamp": "2020-08-08T06:4... | 1,760,373,395.850525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/hawt-wind-turbine-is-mostly-3d-printed/ | HAWT Wind Turbine Is Mostly 3D Printed | Lewin Day | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"vertical axis wind turbine",
"Wind turbine"
] | Wind turbines are a great source of renewable energy, and a great DIY project, too. They can be built with all kinds of materials and the barrier for entry is low for the beginner. [Fab] has built just such a device, taking advantage of modern construction techniques,
and dubbed it the WinDIY.
The WinDIY design is mostly 3D printed, with a familiar three-bladed design. The diameter of the rotor is 1.2 m, meaning that braking and regulating the turbine is required for safety in high winds. [Fab] is aiming to achieve this control with a combination of mechanical and electronic braking, as well as variable-pitch blades. The benefit of 3D printing the design is it allows iterations to be made quickly, particularly of parts with complex geometries that would be too time-consuming or expensive to machine otherwise.
[Fab]’s writeup goes into great detail on topics like
the design of the pitch control systems and other minutae,
which should serve as a great reference for anyone else working on a similar project. If you’re looking for something with more of a sci-fi future vibe,
consider attempting a vertical-axis build instead.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 13 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269282",
"author": "Gamma Raymond",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T23:46:10",
"content": "I don’t know what “HAWT” means and the post doesn’t say. So I went searching the web for a picture or diagram to explain it. Now I know.I’ll be in my bunk.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,373,396.042117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/hands-on-andxor-unofficial-dc28-badge-embraces-the-acrylic-stackup/ | Hands-On: AND!XOR Unofficial DC28 Badge Embraces The Acrylic Stackup | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"hardware"
] | [
"AND!XOR",
"badge",
"badgelife",
"DEF CON",
"defcon 28"
] | Still hot from the solder party,
a new AND!XOR badge
just landed on my desk courtesy of the hacking crew that has been living the #badgelife for the past five years. Originally based on the
Futurama
character Bender, the design has morphed to the point that it’s no longer recognizable as a descendant of that belligerent robot. Instead we have a skeletal midget whose face is half covered by a gear-themed mask.
At first glance, you might not even notice the character design because you’re too distracted by the beautiful composure of the hardware. This year’s badge includes a double stack-up of acrylic on top of a red circuit-board. Anyone who has used acrylic bezels in a badge design can tell you the cost for material and laser cutting time is significant. In this case the overall aesthetic of the badge is based upon the look of the mirrored gold with the art detail laser etched into the back. It’s a unique bling without even turning the power on.
When you do flip that hard switch next to three AAA batteries secured to the back of the badge, you’re greeted with RGB LEDs hidden under the etched parts of the faceplate, and both a 128×64 OLED screen and a 160×128 color LCD. The larger screen provides the menu system which is navigated via the Blackberry keyboard worn by the skeletal midget like a belt.
The Blackberry keyboard is a hot trend this year as we’ve seen the
Blackberry PMOD KeyBoard
that sells out every time it hits Tindie, and projects like
the LoRa QWERTY Messenger
sourcing them for delicious backlit user input. Why not? The original hardware was a homerun, so it makes sense the surplus replacement stock is now being embraced by hardware hackers.
If you don’t want to type everything with the edge of your thumb, the USB-C port on the bottom of the board provides terminal access. A really nice touch is that the badge also enumerates as USB mass storage, providing access to the readme file as well as a way to load new animations, images, and BASIC programs.
These things must have been a huge hassle to assemble. The keyboard is attached with some clear sticky mounting squares and two tiny screws that thread into holes on the faceplace. That’s not the hard part… the cable threads through a hole, loops somewhere under the stackup, and then snaps into a connector on the board. Four screw bosses hold the acrylic in place, and the two screens adhere to the spacer layer of acrylic. Taking it apart we get a nice look at the underside of the laser-etched acrylic.
An STM32F412RET6 is at the heart of the design. There are far fewer LED than in previous years so there is no dedicated LED driver. The choice there was to use APA-102 RGB LEDs which are driven with simple SPI signals. If you’re wondering about the cuttable traces seen in gold, [Zapp] says he uses them while prototyping the badges in case components need to be rerouted. Normally they’d be hidden, but since the board is covered by acrylic he left them in on the production board.
That beefy QR code? Yeah, it resolves to a sketchy URL:
https://secure.verylegit.link/private-key(3ad-shockwave-flash.jar.docm
Further investigation shows it leads to a 302 “moved temporarily” redirect which goes… and you’ve probably already guessed this… to
a video of our friend Richard Paul Astley
.
The Game, the Culture, the Goodies
The real fun of these badges are the puzzles and interactive activities wrapped inside the firmware. I haven’t had time to dive into those but they are as present as in all previous years, including a public Slack channel where friend exchanges can be done to unlock challenges within. A few guidelines for the capture the flag are mentioned
on the project’s documentation page
.
The AND!XOR badge is always one of the hottest unofficial DEF CON badges for collectors and this year is no different. Except of course it’s all extremely different since DC is actually cancelled and we’re all socially distancing. How do you distribute hundreds of badges when nobody is centrally located?
As always, they produced a few hundred of these badges. Some of them were sold, but most of the badges were given away for free, underwritten by the companies that sponsored this badge. The distribution scheme for the free badges was an awesome one,
sending caches of badges to trusted hackers in locations all over North America
which were then given to people who solved challenges or were “doing great hacker things”.
I can’t wrap up this review without mentioning how the badge was wrapped when it arrived. This stretchy sleeve provided a bit of padding around the anti-static bag and can be used as a pandemic mask. But look closely, you’ll see this is custom printed material that includes the silhouette of each of the AND!XOR badges that came before this. It’s unique, incredibly awesome, and a testament to the team’s devotion to making everything about their badges awesome because just because they can.
Soldered screw bosses and tag connect
Instructions for keyboard navigation
Power controller on back of board | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269518",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-08-09T05:07:49",
"content": "page break please",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,395.935208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/separation-between-wifi-and-bluetooth-broken-by-the-spectra-co-existence-attack/ | Separation Between WiFi And Bluetooth Broken By The Spectra Co-Existence Attack | Pedro Umbelino | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"DEF CON",
"defcon 28",
"defconsafemode",
"spectra",
"vulnerability",
"wifi"
] | This year, at
DEF CON 28
DEF CON Safe Mode, security researchers [Jiska Classen] and [Francesco Gringoli]
gave a talk about inter-chip privilege escalation using wireless coexistence mechanisms
. The title is catchy, sure, but what exactly is this about?
To understand this security flaw, or group of security flaws, we first need to know what wireless coexistence mechanisms are. Modern devices can support cellular and non-cellular wireless communications standards at the same time (LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth). Given the desired miniaturization of our devices, the different subsystems that support these communication technologies must reside in very close physical proximity within the device (in-device coexistence). The resulting high level of reciprocal leakage can at times cause considerable interference.
There are several scenarios where interference can occur, the main ones are:
Two radio systems occupy neighboring frequencies and carrier leakage occurs
The harmonics of one transmitter fall on frequencies used by another system
Two radio systems share the same frequencies
To tackle these kind of problems, manufacturers had to implement strategies so that the devices wireless chips can coexist (sometimes even sharing the same antenna) and reduce interference to a minimum. They are called coexistence mechanisms and enable high-performance communication on intersecting frequency bands and thus, they are essential to any modern mobile device. Despite open solutions exist, such as the Mobile Wireless Standards, the manufacturers usually implement proprietary solutions.
Spectra
Spectra is a new attack class demonstrated in this DEF CON talk, which is focused on Broadcom and Cypress WiFi/Bluetooth combo chips. On a combo chip, WiFi and Bluetooth run on separate processing cores and coexistence information is directly exchanged between cores using the Serial Enhanced Coexistence Interface (SECI) and does not go through the underlying operating system.
Spectra class attacks exploit flaws in the interfaces between wireless cores in which one core can achieve denial of service (DoS), information disclosure and even code execution on another core. The reasoning here is, from an attacker perspective, to leverage a Bluetooth subsystem remote code execution (RCE) to perform WiFi RCE and maybe even LTE RCE. Keep in mind that this remote code execution is happening in these CPU core subsystems, and so can be completely invisible to the main device CPU and OS.
Join me below where the talk is embedded and where I will also dig into the denial of service, information disclosure, and code execution topics of the Spectra attack.
Denial of Service
This happens when one wireless core denies transmission to the other core. DoS attacks are possible if one core is able to claim spectrum resources of the other core. As this is the basic working principle of any coexistence interface, all of them are vulnerable by definition, as long as one core keeps constantly claiming the resource for himself. Other DoS opportunities arise from one wireless core being able to crash another via shared RAM abuse.
Information Disclosure
One wireless core can infer data or actions of the other core. One example is when connecting an HID device like a keyboard. Timings and contents of keypresses can be observed on the host that receives those keystrokes. However, an attacker who has only code execution on a WiFi chip should not be able to make such observations. While the content of the keypresses are missing, it is possible for code running on the WiFi chip to infer timing statistics about the keys pressed in the Bluetooth side. This becomes interesting for inferring passwords and password lengths.
Code Execution
One wireless core can execute code within the other core. The security researchers demonstrate that it is possible to execute an arbitrary WiFi address with controlled contents via Bluetooth. This happens because when both cores are running, they share a RAM region which contain, among other information, a large function table. By overwriting a specific address, it is possible to control the WiFi core program counter. This means that a Bluetooth subsystem exploit can turn into a WiFi exploit. In addition, writing to the WiFi buffer and executing addresses produces various kernel panics on Android and iOS, indicating that further escalations into the host are possible and probably it’s just a matter of time until someone pops calc.
Conclusion
Although the research was centered on Broadcom and Cypress combo chips (which cover, by the way, all iPhones, MacBooks, iMacs, older Apple Watches, Samsung S and Note series, some Google Nexus, Raspberry Pi and so forth…) advisories were sent to Intel, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Marvell, NXP and they all mention similar coexistence interfaces in their devices. So, mutatis mutandis, and because of its very nature, some Spectra class vulnerabilities probably exist in other vendors too.
And since [Jiska] has a history
breaking wireless stuff
, we can probably expect a follow-up on this research and this class of inter-chip privilege escalation vulnerabilities. Can’t wait! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269232",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T18:53:53",
"content": "Good work.Can’t say I am surprised… Little surprised at some of the shared resources and methods in these chips, having never looked at how these chips work before.. But much like the Intel ME risk, and... | 1,760,373,395.988869 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/hackaday-podcast-079-wobble-sphere-pixelflut-skeeter-traps-and-tracing-apps/ | Hackaday Podcast 079: Wobble Sphere, Pixelflut, Skeeter Traps, And Tracing Apps | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"artic",
"contact tracing",
"coronavirus",
"Covid-19",
"exercise bike",
"flywheel",
"github",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"mosquitoes",
"multimeter",
"pixelflut",
"potentiostat",
"rat trap"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gaze upon the most eye-popping projects from the past week. Who would have known that springy doorstops could be so artistic? Speaking of art, what happens if you give everyone on the network the chance to collectively paint using pixels? There as better way to catch a rat, and a dubious way to lure mosquitoes. We scratch our heads at sending code to the arctic, and Elliot takes a deep look at the contact tracing apps developed and in use throughout Europe.
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
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 079 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Hackaday Remoticon: Our 2020 Conference Is Packed With Workshops And We’re Calling For Proposals
William English, Computer Mouse Co-Creator, Has Passed
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Springs And Things Wrap Into A Polyhedron Of Interactive LED Art
DIY Dungeon Crawler Game Plays On Single LED Strip
A DIY 6.5-Digit Multimeter Is A Lesson In Clever Circuitry
Cheap And Effective Mosquito Trap Looks Like A Disco
DIY Dust Cyclone A Traffic Cop Would Be Proud Of
Unbricking A $2,000 Exercise Bike With A Raspberry Pi Zero And Bluetooth Hacks
Electrochemistry At Home
Why Is Continuous Glucose Monitoring So Hard?
Hands-On: CCCamp2019 Badge Is A Sensor Playground Not To Be Mistaken For A Watch
Playing The Pixelflut
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks:
Optimizing GIF Playback For Microcontrollers
Pinephone Gets Thermal Imaging Backpack
You’ve Got Rat!
Elliot’s Picks:
Cryptographic LCDs Use The Magic Of XOR
The Game Boy As A Midi Synthesiser
See The Science Behind VR Display Design, And What Makes A Problem Important
VK-01 Is A Bartender You Don’t Need To Tip
A Homebrew Radio, As All The Best Homebrew Radios Should Be
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Ask Hackaday: Why Did GitHub Ship All Our Software Off To The Arctic?
COVID Tracing Apps: What Europe Has Done Right, And Wrong | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269249",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T19:52:33",
"content": "The thing about the github vault is that the cost to replicate is minimal – the cost to vet code for usefulness or correctness isn’t. It’s almost impossible to say what code should be preserved, so it’s a be... | 1,760,373,396.087026 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/this-week-in-security-garmin-ransomware-keepass-and-twitter-warnings/ | This Week In Security: Garmin Ransomware, KeePass , And Twitter Warnings | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"keepass",
"This Week in Security",
"twitter"
] | On July 23,
multiple services related to Garmin were taken offline
, including their call center and aviation related services. Thanks to information leaked by Garmin employees, we know that this multi-day outage was caused by the Wastedlocker ransomware campaign. After four days, Garmin was able to start the process of restoring the services.
It’s reported that the requested ransom was an eye-watering $10 million. It’s suspected that Garmin actually paid the ransom. A leaked decryptor program confirms that they received the decryption key. The attack was apparently very widespread through Garmin’s network, as it seems that both workstations and public facing servers were impacted. Let’s hope Garmin learned their lesson, and are shoring up their security practices.
KeePass
KeePass
released an update this week
addressing a couple flaws in the KeePassRPC service. The update announcement is light on the details, but thankfully we have the full story directly from [Philipp Danzinger],
the student that discovered the vulnerabilities
. Both vulnerabilities are in the implementation of the SRP-6(a) key exchange protocol.
The vulnerable component is the RPC. KeyPass is essentially a simple database containing passwords. That database is encrypted using the user’s password, so the contained passwords cannot be retrieved without that master password. When a user launches KeePass, he or she is first prompted for this master password, and the database is decrypted using that password. The KeePassRPC service allows other processes, like a browser plugin, to access the now-decrypted database. The first time a new client attemps to access the RPC service, a keypair is generated, and the user is prompted whether to allow the new connection. The public key is stored and marked as trusted, allowing that client to request passwords again in the future, so long as the database had been unlocked.
The authentication protocol is similar to a DH key exchange. A shared value is raised to the power of the secret key resulting in a value called
A
. This is sent as part of the key exchange, and the formal specification states that it is never allowed to be 0. The problem is that KeePassRPC doesn’t properly check that
A
!= 0. When
A
is set to 0, the entire key exchange breaks down, as all the values end up equaling 0, as 0^x is always 0. This means that any client can spoof an already authorized client.
The second vulnerability is a weak random number generator used on the server side to generate the secret key
b
. That key is based on the current date and time, run through a pseudo-random function. Because that function is known, if an attacker can guess the exact time value used, then the secret key is easily calculated. It’s not quite as simple as it seems, as the time value is measured in “ticks”, each tick being 100 nanoseconds. It would take a bit of guesswork and a few thousand guesses to land on the right value, but without any rate limiting, that process would just take a few seconds.
What makes this attack very serious is the fact that modern web browsers allow Javascript running on a webpage to attempt to connect to localhost. If your KeePass database is unlocked, and you load a page running malicious JS, it could access the RPC port and spoof the authorized KeePass browser plugin and download your entire KeePass database. Thankfully this bug was disclosed privately and KeePassRPC has been updated to 1.12.1, which closes both vulnerabilities. Additionally, 1.13 has since been released with additional safeguards against this and similar attacks.
Twitter
Twitter has started displaying a security warning for some users. The details are extremely scarce, but lets see what details we can tease out. First, the warning specifies that the issue in question was a vulnerability in the Twitter Android app, but that it was related to an Android vulnerability, and then links to
the October 2018 Android security update
. Looking through the vulnerabilities disclosed, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious candidate for the related vulnerability.
KDE Ark
We’ve seen a very simple technique show up in countless security stories: path transversal. It’s simple, you can include a “..” as part of a file path to move up a directory. Often times this can be included in unexpected places to bypass security restrictions, or do other unintended things. Archive files are no exception, and there is nothing preventing a zip archive from having such paths. Most archive programs catch this behavior and don’t allow the archive to extract as it’s written. The venerable unzip command complains like this:
# unzip relative2.zip
Archive: relative2.zip
warning: skipped "../" path component(s) in tmp/../../moo
extracting: tmp/moo
KDE Ark, until recently, didn’t treat those paths as special, and
would happily extract files to whatever path it was instructed to
. The update doesn’t seem to be officially released at the time of writing, so be wary of blindly extracting archives until that update is available. There is
a useful repository of archives
that can be used to test for various transversal issues, and I’ve confirmed that
one in particular
(harmless zip file containing
tmp/../../moo
) does demonstrate the issue in Ark.
And Finally…
Remember
Boothole
? Multiple vendors pushed fixes to this Linux secure boot vulnerability, and
a handful of unbootable systems was the result
. For the case of RHEL and CentOS, another round of updated packages have been released, fixing the problem and making for bootable systems again.
And what does a criminal do with a database breach? Apparently after selling them,
they release them for free
. If it wasn’t stolen data, I’d call it a win. Once a breach has made as much money as the seller thinks it’s likely to make, it’s not uncommon for the data to be released for free. These aren’t very popular sites or services, but it might be worth a check to see if your data was included in the release. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269238",
"author": "Steven13",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T19:10:11",
"content": "Every person in charge of funding allocation for infosec should do the following:Determine the maximum amount that would be spent in the event of a ransom attack. Start spending that money on improved se... | 1,760,373,396.145139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/odyssey-is-a-x86-computer-packing-an-arduino-along-for-the-trip/ | Odyssey Is A X86 Computer Packing An Arduino Along For The Trip | Roger Cheng | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"gpio",
"intel",
"Lattepanda",
"SAMD21",
"SBC",
"Seeed",
"single board computer",
"x86",
"x86_64"
] | We love the simplicity of Arduino for focused tasks, we love how Raspberry Pi GPIO pins open a doorway to a wide world of peripherals, and we love the software ecosystem of Intel’s x86 instruction set. It’s great that some products manage to combine all of them together into a single compact package, and we welcome the recent addition of
Seeed Studio’s Odyssey X86J4105
.
[Ars Technica]
recently looked one over
and found it impressive from the perspective of a small networked computer, but they didn’t dig too deeply into the maker-friendly side of the product. We can look at the
product documentation
to see some interesting details. This board is larger than a Raspberry Pi, but its
GPIO pins were laid out
in exactly the same order as that on a Pi. Some HATs could plug right in, eliminating all the electrical integration leaving just the software issue of ARM vs x86. Tasks that are not suitable for CPU-controlled GPIO (such as generating reliable PWM) can be offloaded to an on-board Arduino-compatible microcontroller. It is built around the SAMD21 chip, similar to the Arduino MKR and Arduino Zero but
the pinout does not appear to match
any of the popular Arduino form factors.
The Odyssey is not the first x86 single board computer (SBC) to have GPIO pins and an onboard Arduino assistant.
LattePanda
for example has been executing that game plan (minus the Raspberry Pi pin layout) for the past few years. We’ve followed them
since their Kickstarter origins
and we’ve featured creative uses
here
and
there
. LattePanda’s current offerings are built around Intel CPUs ranging from Atom to Core m3. The Odyssey’s Celeron is roughly in the middle of that range, and the SAMD21 is more capable than the ATmega32U4 (Arduino Leonardo) on board a LattePanda. We always love seeing more options in a market for us to find the right tradeoff to match a given project, and we look forward to the epic journeys yet to come. | 58 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269150",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T12:31:05",
"content": "There are also a number of Udoo boards offering this.They all have failed so for for my purposes by having a non-realtime link between the x86 and Arduino cores.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,373,396.652417 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/07/lightning-analysis-with-your-sdr/ | Lightning Analysis With Your SDR | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"lightning",
"lightning detector",
"RTL-SDR",
"sdr"
] | Perhaps it’s just one of those things adults dream up to entertain their children, but were you ever told to count slowly the time between seeing a lightning flash and hearing the rumble of thunder? The idea was that the count would tell you how far away the storm was, but from a grown-up perspective the calibration accuracy of a child saying “one… two…three…” in miles seems highly suspect. It’s a valid technique though, and it can be used to monitor thunderstorms by the radio emissions created through the electrical discharge. It’s an area the SAGE project has been working in, and
they’ve posted some details including a fascinating run-down of the software techniques , on how lightning can be detected with an RTL-SDR
.
A lightning strike produces a characteristic wideband burst that shows up in the time domain as a maximum point that can easily be detected but could also be confused with radio interference from another source. Thus after identifying maxima they zoom in and perform a Fourier transform to spot the wideband burst. It’s all done in Python, and the pleasant surprise is how straightforward to understand it all is.
SAGE are working on a distributed sensor network, so we hope this work might one day give us real-time open lightning data. The FFT approach should ensure that it won’t be fooled by false positives as
a traditional detector
might be.
Via
RTL-SDR.com
. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269163",
"author": "zombielinux",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T13:05:39",
"content": "You will have much better luck spending some dough on an upconverter and listening in around the 100kHz mark.I know it increases BOM cost, but it’ll result in some MUCH clearer peaks.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,373,396.216031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/google-chrome-dinosaur-game-in-real-life/ | The Google Chrome Dinosaur Game, In Real Life | Orlando Hoilett | [
"google hacks",
"internet hacks"
] | [
"404",
"arcade",
"chrome",
"dinosaur",
"Mini game",
"retro"
] | [Ryan] wanted to
hack the Google Chrome Dinosaur Game so he could control the dinosaur with his own movements
. The game only requires two keyboard presses (up and down arrow keys), so controlling the game with the Arduino Keyboard library only requires a few simple function calls.
He uses the Arduino MKR board in his build, but notes any number of other boards would work as well. A force sensor detects his jumps and a stretch sensor detects him ducking. Both the stretch and force sensors are resistive transducers, so two simple voltage divider circuits (one for each sensor) are needed to convert changes in force to a voltage. You may need to adjust the sensor threshold to ensure the code responds to your movements, but [Ryan] makes that pretty easy to do in software as both thresholds are stored as global variables.
It’s a pretty simple hack, but could make for some good socially-distanced fun. What other
hackable Google Chrome extensions
do you like? | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269131",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T07:48:38",
"content": "Creative use of sensors combined with a silly game, cool little project, I love it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6269146",
"author": "Orland... | 1,760,373,396.558048 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/irobot-makes-learning-robot-more-affordable/ | IRobot Makes Learning Robot More Affordable | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"education",
"irobot",
"robot",
"scratch"
] | When you think of iRobot, you probably think of floor cleaning or military robots. But they also have a set of
robots aimed at education
. The Root robot — an acquisition the company made in 2019 — originally targeted classrooms and cost about $200 each. A new version costs about $130 and is a better fit for home users.
The original version — Root rt1 — is still available, but the rt0 version has several missing features to hit the desired price. What’s missing? Apparently, the rt1 can stick to a whiteboard using magnets, but that feature is missing on the rt0. There are also no “cliff” sensors or color scanner.
On the plus side, there is a new $20 option that allows either version of the robot to mount Lego creations. Usually, the robots can draw with a marker underneath and retract it on command. The rt1 can also erase the marker. With the Lego base, though, you can use that same mechanism to actuate something like the catapult in the video.
The robots can be coded using something that looks like Scratch or using text-based coding. The editor — you can even simulate it
online
for free– has three levels, depending on the student’s ability to read and code. In addition, there are many free
exercises and activities
.
For $130, these seem as though they’d be easily hackable as a robot platform. Of course, you want this for your kids and we wouldn’t say otherwise.
Educational robots
are not a new idea. If you want to stick with iRobot for the big league stuff, you can also get
a Roomba that doesn’t suck
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269108",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T03:43:49",
"content": "🖤 iRobot. Providing service parts for really old units to keep them going. Much much more reliable than my ZA1 ever was too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,373,396.518808 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/a-tongue-operated-human-machine-interface/ | A Tongue Operated Human Machine Interface | Danie Conradie | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Tech Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"assistive technology",
"hci",
"HMI",
"mouth input",
"time of flight",
"tongue input"
] | For interfacing with machines, most of us use our hands and fingers. When you don’t have use of your hands (permanently or temporarily), there are limited alternatives. [Dorothee Clasen] has added one more option,
[In]Brace
, which is basically a small slide switch that you can operate with your tongue.
[In]Brace consists of a custom moulded retainer for the roof of your mouth, on which is a small ball with an embedded magnet, that slides long wire tracks. Above the track is a set of three magnetic sensors, that can detect the position of the ball. On the prototype, a wire from the three sensors run out of the corner of the users mouth, to a wireless microcontroller (Which looks to us like a ESP8266) hooked behind the user’s ear. In a final product, it would obviously be preferable if everything were sealed in the retainer. We think there is even more potential if one of the many 3-axis hall effect sensors are used, with a small joystick of rolling ball. The device could be used by disabled persons, for physical therapy, or just for cases where a person’s hands are otherwise occupied. [Dorothy] created a simple demonstration, where she plays Pong, or Tong in this case, using only the [In]Brace. Hygiene and making sure that it doesn’t somehow become a choke hazard will be very important if this ever became a product, but we think there is some potential.
[Kristina Panos] did a very interesting deep dive into
the tongue as an HMI device
a while ago, so this isn’t a new idea, but the actual implementations differ quite a lot. Apparently it’s also possible to use your
ear muscles
as an interface!
Thanks for the tip [Itay]! | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269114",
"author": "marcus",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T04:16:02",
"content": "interesting and bwesome ..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6269117",
"author": "KVG",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T05:09:28",
"content": "At f... | 1,760,373,396.381093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/telepresence-robot-navigates-upgrades/ | Telepresence Robot Navigates Upgrades | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"cardboard",
"inexpensive",
"platform",
"robot",
"smartibot",
"telepresence"
] | As time marches on and a good percentage of us are still isolating from society at large, the progress of technology isn’t kept as stagnant. Earlier this year we featured a project about a much-needed small telepresence robot with an exceptionally low barrier for entry, and with the progress of time it
has received several upgrades and some crowdfunding
, all while preserving its original intent of a simple and easily-operated way of keeping in contact with others.
The new robot is still based on the cardboard design that holds a smartphone and drives it around using a microcontroller platform, but thanks to its small size and low power requirement this seems to suit it nicely. Improvements over the original design include a more robust one-size-fits-all phone mount and a more refined cardboard body. Also, since the small size is a little bit of a downside when navigating anywhere that isn’t a desk or counter, the new version makes it easier to make modifications such as adding a pedestal which can elevate the phone and improve the experience of the remote driver. A number of other optional modifications are possible as well, including a grabbing arm.
While telepresence robots unfortunately are needed now more than ever, we are happy to see people like [Ross] take on projects like this which will hopefully help improve our shared situation by allowing us to have a more involved level of contact with people we would otherwise prefer to see in person. If you’d like to build your own without waiting on the crowdfunding, be sure to
check out the original project we featured back in April
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269054",
"author": "spiritplumber",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T21:30:47",
"content": "We’ve been making these since 2010, and our source code and schematics are available on the wiki.https://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/pub/web/Main.HomePage.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,373,396.737315 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/generate-positivity-with-machine-learning/ | Generate Positivity With Machine Learning | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Art",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"arduino",
"atltvhead",
"gesture recognition",
"machine learning",
"performance art",
"raspberry pi",
"rollerblades",
"tensorflow",
"tv"
] | Gesture recognition and machine learning are getting a lot of air time these days, as people understand them more and begin to develop methods to implement them on many different platforms. Of course this allows easier access to people who can make use of the new tools beyond strictly academic or business environments. For example, rollerblading down the streets of Atlanta with a
gesture-recognizing, streaming TV that [nate.damen] wears over his head
.
He’s known as [atltvhead] and the TV he wears has a functional LED screen on the front. The whole setup reminds us a little of
Deep Thought
. The screen can display various animations which are controlled through Twitch chat as he streams his journeys around town. He wanted to add a little more interaction to the animations though and simplify his user interface, so he set up a gesture-sensing sleeve which can augment the animations based on how he’s moving his arm. He uses an Arduino in the arm sensor as well as a Raspberry Pi in the backpack to tie it all together, and he goes deep in the weeds explaining how to use Tensorflow to recognize the gestures. The video linked below shows a lot of his training runs for the machine learning system he used as well.
[nate.damen] didn’t stop at the cheerful TV head either. He also
wears a backpack that displays uplifting messages
to people as he passes them by on his rollerblades, not wanting to leave out those who don’t get to see him coming. We think this is a great uplifting project, and the amount of work that went into getting the gesture recognition machine learning algorithm right is impressive on its own. If you’re new to Tensorflow, though, we have featured some projects that can do
reliable object recognition using little more than a Raspberry Pi and a camera
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269023",
"author": "BillSF9c",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T18:50:03",
"content": "“…and he goes deep in the weeds …”? Or BC is going far afield in search for new euphemisms. You’re upstaging the uh, subject artist… literally, one might poffer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,396.697206 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/just-who-makes-tubes-these-days/ | Just Who Makes Tubes These Days? | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"audio",
"thermionic valves",
"tubes",
"vacuum devices",
"valves"
] | For most of us, electronic technology comes in the form of solid state devices. Transistors, integrated circuits, microcontrollers. But for the first sixty years or so of the field existing, these devices either hadn’t been invented yet or were at too early a stage in their development to be either cost-effective, or of much use. Instead a very different type of electronic component ruled the roost, the vaccum tube.
A set of electrodes in an evacuated glass envelope whose electrical properties depended on the modulation of the flow of electrons through them, these were ubiquitous in consumer electronics up until the 1960s, and clung on in a few mass-market applications even as far as the mid 1970s. As cheaper and more versatile semiconductors superseded them they faded from electronic parts catalogues, and the industry that had once produced them in such numbers disappeared in favour of plants producing the new devices. Consumer products no longer contained them, and entire generations of engineers grew up never having worked with them at all. If you were building a tube amplifier in the early 1990s, you were a significant outlier.
Alive And Kicking In The 21st Century
The warm glow of a tube amplifier lends credibility to an audiophile set-up. Hannes Grobe /
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
As our consumer electronics have become ever more digital in their make-up, interest has blossomed in analogue devices, or at least devices with a visibly analogue component. In particular the world of audio has begun to chase the elusive “tube sound”, whether it be in the context of intentionally overdriven amplifiers for the guitarist, or closer to perfect ones for the audiophile.
High-end hi-fi shops are full of tube-based devices, and a plethora of tube amplifier kits are available for the electronics enthusiast. Tubes can be bought under a bewildering array of brands often at eye-watering prices, something of a surprise for a technology which might be presumed to have disappeared over four decades ago. This does raise an interesting question though, with such a large number of tube brands on the market, where are they all made, and how have their manufacturers survived for so long? The answer is relatively straightforward, yet in other aspects a story of labyrinthine complexity.
High-power transmitting tubes never went away. Angeloleithold (CC BY-SA 3.0)
While consumer vacuum tubes might have disappeared from mundane electronics decades ago, it’s first worth pointing out that many of the old names in the vacuum tube business didn’t stop manufacturing vacuum tubes, they simply stopped making the tubes you might be familiar with. There are industrial applications in which vacuum devices are very much still with us , even though in many cases they have semiconductors snapping at their heels.
High power RF amplifiers for UHF and higher frequencies for example still use vacuum tubes, be they
specialised planar tubes
or slightly more exotic fare such as klystrons. Similarly there are specialised RF applications that still use
travelling wave tubes
, and very high power industrial equipment that uses vacuum and gas-filled tubes for control or rectification.
But who is making the “normal” tubes — the smaller glass-envelope tubes, small triodes and pentodes such as you’d find in that guitar amplifier? We recognize some names from times past such as
Telefunken
or
Mullard
, others are modern brands such as
JJ
or Fender’s
Groove Tubes
brand, and others are clearly Russian or Chinese names such as
Svetlana
,
SovTek
, “
Winged C
“, or
Shuguang
. Clearly there are not as many tube factories left in the world as there are logos stamped on the glass of imported tubes, so what on earth is going on?
A Technology For The Few, Not The Many Any More
The answer is that the consumer tube business in 2020 is no longer a commodity component market producing the lifeblood of a million televisions and radios, instead it’s a boutique operation serving a niche market. Looking at the tubes available, it’s clear that if you are searching for an obscure 1050s small-signal RF tube you’ll be out of luck; these are mostly audio amplifier parts, double triodes, output pentodes, even the occasional power rectifier, and at costs that would raise an eyebrow or two for buyers of their originals.
A current-manufacture Mullard-branded ECC83 (12AX7) general purpose small signal double triode for example
costs $43.20
(£35.09) in 2020, while
browsing a 1957 copy of Wireless World
we find the same part number advertised for 8 shillings and thruppence, which is £0.41 ($0.51) in post-decimalisation British money. Using
the Bank of England’s inflation calculator
that comes out at about £9.96 ($12.27) today, so the modern re-issue is more than three times as expensive as was the genuine article in its heyday. This is evidently a business with a significant mark-up, and the world’s remaining tube factories are cashing in.
A selection of Mullard ECC83s from back in the day.
Investigating further, we find that tube manufacture of this type appears to be entirely absent from the Americas and Western Europe. It survived the decline of the 1970s in Russia, China, and the formerly Communist states of eastern Europe, and as Soviet communism fell and the Chinese economy grew in the 1990s it emerged from the shadows to supply the audio market. These count among them factories that have been in the tube business for a very long time indeed, and their products have many proven decades of reliable service.
So if you buy a tube with a Western sounding brand name today it will have been made in the same Eastern factories as those with an obviously Communist heritage, and thus given that the same part numbers are available from the same sources under those cheaper brands it’s difficult not to wonder whether or not they are in fact exactly the same tubes but with an inflated price.
Communism, Folks, The Secret To High-End Audio
JJ’s take on
the KT88 power beam pentode
.
In the Slovak Republic are
JJ
, a very long-established tube manufacturer who were previously the consumer end of the
Tesla
vacuum device range. They don’t admit to branding their tubes for anyone else on their website, but they are reputed to be the source of those Telefunken-branded parts. Moving eastwards to Russia we then find
SED-SPb
in St. Petersburg, for whom consumer tubes are listed on the website as a small part of their range alongside industrial and high-power RF vacuum devices. They were previously the producers of the Svetlana range of tubes through the Soviet era, and though they no longer have that brand name they retain the winged C logo from that era. It’s unclear whether they are still involved in the production of branded tubes as their website is not very informative, but the “Winged C” tubes manufactured by them are still on sale.
Further across Russia in the southern Russian city of Saratov is the Expo-PUL factory, and here is where the story becomes interesting. It’s owned by the American
Electro-Harmonix
company, who in turn hold the rights for a host of older brands including Svetlana, Sovtec, Mullard, and Tung-Sol. It’s here that reissued Mullard ECC83 is made, and it has made the news in the past
as Russian mobsters reportedly tried to seize it.
PSVane are definitely marketing their tubes such as this
300B
as desirable high-end products.
Into China, and the situation becomes rather opaque. China has a selection of larger manufacturers who produce tubes to a very high quality for the high-end export trade, but there are also inexpensive tubes on the market with scant manufacturer logos and little else in the way of traceability. If you pay $20 for an AliExpress tube headphone amplifier kit then it’s likely you’ll receive one of this latter variety, but its origins will be unclear.
The largest Chinese manufacturer is
ShuGuang
, based in Changsha, in Hunan province. They manufacture a large range as well as producing components for other brands. Their upstart competitor
PSVane
is also based in Changsha, and concentrates specifically on the high-end audio market. It’s unlikely for example that a
45 cent 6j1 small-signal pentode
will have come from either of these two manufacturers or their smaller high-end competitors though, so it’s clear that there are more Chinese tube manufacturers at all levels of the market than can easily be found from the other side of the world.
Is It Really Worth It Though?
As someone who has been a vacuum technology enthusiast for four decades now it makes me happy to find that tubes are still in production and their industry appears healthy for now. But my tour through the world of 21st century tube manufacture leaves me slightly disappointed that so much of their marketing is still clouded by mythology.
As someone
who was building tube amplifiers with Yugoslavian TV tubes
back when it was extremely unfashionable, I understand the allure of that elusive “tube sound”, but experience has taught me that it’s not as great a thing as its proponents would have you believe. Even the distortion characteristics sought by musicians can more easily be created through DSP in 2020, so I can’t help the feeling that people are being led astray as I see essentially the same tube being sold at a range of different prices based solely on its brand. Enjoy working with tubes, and enjoy listening to a tube amplifier. But don’t make the mistake of falling into the trap of falling for the hype, and never lose sight of the engineering. | 104 | 38 | [
{
"comment_id": "6269000",
"author": "Anachronda",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T17:16:41",
"content": "A set of electrodes in an evacuated glass envelope whose electrical properties depended on the modulation of the flow of electrons through them, these were ubiquitous in consumer electronics up until t... | 1,760,373,397.05239 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/the-redesigned-cnc-scroll-saw-rides-again/ | The Redesigned CNC Scroll Saw Rides Again | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"aluminum extrusion",
"cnc",
"scroll saw",
"stepper motor"
] | When [Andrew Consroe] tried to build a CNC scroll saw, he quickly learned how tricky of a design problem it is. With a blade that only cuts in one direction, you can’t simply move the tool in the X and Y dimensions like you can with a laser or router; either the work piece or the blade itself needs to continuously rotate towards the direction of the cut.
He’s
recently shown off the third version of the machine
, and while it’s still not exactly a
practical
tool, there’s no question it’s a brilliantly designed one, or that it works, slowly. Earlier attempts used a rotating table to spin the work piece, but [Andrew] found this to be an imperfect solution. Building a mechanism heavy duty enough to spin the material being cut while remaining accurate enough not to break the blade was a tall order, though he did get pretty close.
The earlier version used a rotating table.
This time around he’s decided to simply rotate the blade itself. This can be accomplished with a single stepper motor and some suitably sized pulleys, while maintaining an exceptionally high degree of accuracy. The whole blade assembly moves up and down on an aluminum extrusion rail with a motor and crank arrangement. By synchronizing the rotation of the blade with the vertical movement of the saw, the software can be sure that everything is where it needs to be before the cutting stroke actually happens.
Judging by the video after the break, the system works quite well. The complex rounded shapes he cuts out of the piece of plywood look essentially perfect, and it sounds like this new version of the machine isn’t
breaking blades due to positional errors like the previous one did
. Unfortunately, it’s also very slow. There’s so many moving parts and careful positioning required that even when the video is sped up 10x, the saw still appears to only be creeping its way through the material.
On the back half of the video, [Andrew] details another approach to rotating the blade that would reduce the amount of moving mass in the saw. This would give the machine a considerable speed boost, and we’d love to see him implement it. By the way, before anyone says it: using a spiral blade is cheating. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268993",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T15:37:33",
"content": "great work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6269223",
"author": "Deimos",
"timestamp": "2020-08-07T17:53:16",
"content": "Actu... | 1,760,373,396.797146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/proteus-the-shape-shifting-and-possibly-non-cuttable-material/ | Proteus, The Shape-Shifting And Possibly Non-Cuttable Material | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"aluminium",
"aluminium foam",
"aluminium powder",
"angle grinder",
"ceramic",
"material science",
"metal",
"proteus"
] | How cool would it be if there was a material that couldn’t be cut or drilled into? You could make the baddest bike lock, the toughest-toed work boots, or the most secure door. Really, the list of possibilities just goes on and on.
Proteus chews through an angle grinder disc in seconds.
Researchers from the UK and Germany claim that they’ve created such a magical material
. It can destroy angle grinder discs, resist drill bits, and widen the streams of water jet cutters.
The material is made of aluminium foam that’s embedded with a bunch of small ceramic spheres. It works by inducing retaliatory vibrations into the cutting tools, which turns the tools’ force back on themselves and quickly dulls their edges.
The creators have named the material Proteus after the elusive and shape-shifting prophet of Greek mythology who would only share his visions of the future with those who could get their arms around him and keep him still. It sounds like this material could give Proteus a run for his money.
The ceramic spheres themselves aren’t indestructible, but they’re not supposed to be. Abrading the spheres only makes Proteus stronger. As the cutting tool contacts them, they’re crushed into dust that fills the voids in the aluminium foam, strengthening the material’s destructive vibratory effect. The physical inspiration for Proteus comes from protective hierarchical structures in nature, like the impact-resistant rind of grapefruit and the tendency of abalone shells to resist fracture under the impact of shark teeth.
How It’s Made
Proteus recipe in pictures.
At this point, Proteus is a proof of concept. Adjustments would likely have to be made before it can be produced at any type of scale. Even so, the recipe seems pretty straightforward. First, an aluminium alloy powder is mixed with a foaming agent. Then the mixture is cold compacted in a compressor and extruded in dense rods. The rods are cut down to size and then arranged along with the ceramic spheres in a layered grid, like a metallurgical lasagna.
The grid is spot-welded into a steel box and then put into a furnace for 15-20 minutes. Inside the furnace, the foaming agent releases hydrogen gas, which introduces voids into the aluminium foam and gives it a cellular structure.
Effects of cutting into a cylinder of Proteus with an angle grinder.
According to their paper
, the researchers tried to penetrate the material with an angle grinder, a water jet cutter, and a drill. Of these, the drill has the best chance of getting through because the small point of contact can find gaps more easily, so it’s less likely to hit a ceramic sphere. The researchers also made cylindrical samples without steel cladding which they used to test the compressive strength and prove Proteus’ utility as a structural material for beams and columns. It didn’t fare well initially, but became less compressible as the foam matrix collapsed.
The creation process lends some leeway for customization, because the porosity of the aluminium foam can be varied by changing the bake time. As for the drill bit problem, tightening up security is as easy as adjusting the size and/or density of the ceramic spheres.
In the video after the break, you can watch a chunk of Proteus eat up an angle grinder disc in under a minute. Some may argue about the tool wielder’s technique, but we think there’s something to be said for any material that can destroy a cutting disc that fast. They don’t claim that Proteus is completely impenetrable, but it does look impressive. We wish they would have tried more cutting tools like a gas torch, or experimented with other destructive techniques, like plastic explosives, but we suppose that research budgets only go so far.
Images via
Nature | 71 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268968",
"author": "Somun",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T14:08:25",
"content": "Either this has been covered here a couple weeks ago or I am having a mental malfunction.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268973",
"author":... | 1,760,373,396.909736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/scratch-built-subnautica-sub-explores-the-pool/ | Scratch BuiltSubnauticaSub Explores The Pool | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"ballast",
"rov",
"submarine",
"submersible",
"underwater",
"watertight"
] | In
Subnautica
, players explore an alien underwater landscape with the help of a number of futuristic tools and vehicles. [Robert Cook] found himself particularly enamored with the large submarine you unlock towards the later parts of the game, so much so that
he decided to build his own real-life version
.
Even though the RC version of the
Cyclops
[Robert] has designed is only big enough to explore swimming pool sized alien landscapes, it’s by no means a simple build. In fact, the sub’s internal watertight compartment holds an impressive array of electronics and systems that are arguably overkill for what’s essentially a toy. Not that we’re complaining, of course.
Beyond the electronics and a few key components, almost every part of the RC
Cyclops
has been 3D printed. From the bulkheads that cap off the internal watertight acrylic tube to the hull itself, there’s a lot of plastic aboard this ship. Which might explain why it takes nearly two kilograms of lead weight to get the sub close to neutral buoyancy. From there, a clever ballast tank arrangement made from a syringe and peristaltic pump allow the vehicle to dive and surface on command.
[Robert] is in the process of releasing the STL files for all the submarine’s 3D printed components, and has done an excellent job of documenting the roughly four months he’s spent working on the project in a series of videos on his YouTube channel. The videos contain a wealth of fascinating tips and tricks regarding DIY submersible vehicles, such as selecting the proper radio frequencies for maximum penetration through water and counteracting the permeability of 3D printed parts with a generous coating of epoxy.
Modern RC hardware makes it
easier than ever to cobble together a “submarine”
, but there’s still something to be said for a project that takes the long way around and actually
implements features like a functioning ballast system
.
[Thanks to kemfic for the tip.] | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268964",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T13:21:48",
"content": "Now we need to see a match against LegoGlassBowl sub, Robot Wars pool edition.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6268987",
"author": "Ostracus... | 1,760,373,397.096174 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/06/miles-the-spider-robot/ | Miles The Spider Robot | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arachnid",
"arduino",
"Biomimetics",
"biomimicry",
"inverse kinematics",
"solidworks",
"terminator"
] | Who doesn’t love robotic spiders? Today’s biomimetic robot comes in the form of
Miles, the quadruped spider robot from [_Robox]
.
Miles uses twelve servos to control its motion, three on each of its legs, and also includes a standard HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor for some obstacle avoidance capabilities. Twelve servos can use quite a bit of power, so [_Robox_] had to power Miles with six LM7805 ICs to get sufficient current. [_Robox_] laser cut acrylic sheets for Miles’s body but mentions that 3D printing would work as well.
Miles uses inverse kinematics to get around,
which we’ve seen in a previous project
and is a
pretty popular technique for controlling robotic motion
. The Instructable is a little light on the details,
but the source code is something to take a look at
. In addition to simply moving around [_Robox_] developed code to make Miles dance, wave, and take a bow. That’s sure to be a hit at your next virtual show-and-tell.
By now you’re saying “wait, spiders have eight legs”, and of course you’re right. But that’s an awful lot of servos. Anyway, if you’d rather 3D print your four-legged spider,
we have a suggestion. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268927",
"author": "zombie",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T09:22:11",
"content": "Wieviel Erwerbsminderungsrente bekommt eine Spinne, die die Hälfte ihrer Beine verlor?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268938",
"author": "... | 1,760,373,397.142617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/mold-making-masterclass-in-minutes/ | Mold-Making Masterclass In Minutes | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"casting",
"mold making",
"silicone casting",
"silicone mold",
"sprue"
] | Making silicone molds seems easy, but there are a lot of missteps to be made along the way that can mean the difference between a great, reusable mold, and one that’s a sad waste of silicone. If you’re helpless to know the difference, then
check out [Eric Strebel]’s 9-minute masterclass teaser video on making a two-part mold for resin casting
, which is also embedded below.
Even if you already know how to do this, there’s probably a good tip in here somewhere. One of them being that you should always pour your silicone from one place and let it coat the piece being copied. Otherwise, there might be lines on the mold. Another tip is for DIY mold release made from petroleum jelly thinned with naphtha.
Our favorite tip has to do with the way [Eric] makes this a reusable two-part mold, which is more akin to injection molding. To pour silicone for the second part and get it to separately nicely, [Eric] uses sprues made out of resin rods that were cast inside of drinking straw molds. These he chamfers against a belt sander to minimize the contact with the cast part, which makes them a snap to break off. [Eric] says this is just the beginning, and there are more videos to come that will break down the steps.
There’s more than one way to make a mold, especially for casting in metal. We’ve seen everything from
3D-printed molds
to
kinetic sand
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268918",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T08:22:08",
"content": "Cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6268966",
"author": "Falieur",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T13:35:43",
"content": "I nearly missed a deadli... | 1,760,373,397.20042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/can-you-remembrandt-where-this-is-from/ | Can You Remembrandt Where This Is From? | Sharon Lin | [
"Art",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"Deepfake",
"GaN",
"generative art"
] | A group of researchers have built an algorithm for finding
hidden connections in artwork
.
The team, comprised of
computer scientists
from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Microsoft, used paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to demonstrate these hidden connections, which link artwork that shares similar styles, such as Francisco de Zurbarán’s
The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion
(above left) and Jan Asselijn’s
The Threatened Swan
(above right). They were initially inspired by the “Rembrandt and Velazquez” exhibition in the Rijksmuseum, which demonstrated similarities between the artists’ work despite the former hailing from the Protestant Netherlands and the latter from Catholic Spain.
The algorithm, dubbed “MosAIc”, differs from probabilistic generative adversarial network (GAN)-based projects that generate artwork since it focuses on image retrieval instead. Rather than focusing solely on obvious factors such as color and style, the algorithm also tries to uncover meaning and theme. It does this by constructing a data structure called a conditional k-nearest neighbor (KNN) tree, which provides a tree-like structure where branches off a central image indicate similarity to the image. In order to query the data structure, these branches are followed until the closest match to an image in a dataset is found. In further iterations, it prunes unpromising branches in order to improve its time for new queries.
Some results from running the algorithm against museum collections were finding similarities between the Dutch Double Face Banyan and a Chinese ceramic figurine, traced to the flow of porcelain and iconography from the Chinese to the Dutch in the 16th to 20th centuries.
A surprising result of this study was discovering that the approach could also be applied to find problems with deep nerual networks, which are used for creating deepfakes. While GANs can often have blind spots in their models, struggling to recreate certain classes of photos, MosAIc was able to overcome these shortcomings and accurately reproduce realistic images.
While the team admits that their implementation isn’t the most optimized version of KNN, their main objective was to present a broad conditioning scheme that is simple but effective for applications. Their hope is to inspire related researchers to consider multi-disciplinary applications for algorithms. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268896",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-06T04:23:17",
"content": "“Connections” seems like a poor choice of wording, in my opinion. “Similarities” is more accurate. They could probably stumble across actual connections, which implies intentional similarity, but the algorit... | 1,760,373,397.27151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/a-wood-gas-powered-lawn-mower/ | A Wood Gas Powered Lawn Mower | Danie Conradie | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"alternative fuel",
"colin furze",
"lawn mower",
"wood gas",
"wood gas generator"
] | When mowing the lawn, you generally have a choice of pushing power, electric or gasoline. Thanks to the nutty inventor [Colin Furze], you can now add wood gas to the list, as long as you don’t mind some inconvenience. He
built a wood gas generator on top of a formerly gasoline powered lawn mower,
so he can now run his lawn mower on wood chips.
Wood gas generators have been used with internal combustion engines for a very long time, reaching their peak in the later parts of WW2 when fuel shortages plagued Europe. When wood is burned at high temperature but with limited oxygen, it produces a combustible gas mix that can be fed into an internal combustion engine. [Colin]’s generator went through a number of iterations, and the problem-solving that goes into a project like this is always interesting to watch. We would not recommend running tests like these indoors, but we suppose no [Colin Furze] video would be complete without a bit of danger.
On his first version he had an extraction fan that was too close to the outlet of the burn chamber, so it melted very quickly. The combustion temperature was also not high enough, which required some changes to the chamber geometry. The main problem that plagued the project was filtering out the moisture and tar. [Colin] did eventually get the lawn mower to run on wood gas, but tar was still getting into the engine, which prevented it from starting the second time. The filtering system will need some refinement, which [Colin] will address in his next video, which he also hints will involve some sort of diabolical swing set.
How [Colin] has escaped serious injury up to this point is beyond us, but his projects have undeniable entertainment value, ranging from a
giant hydraulic exoskeleton
, to a
hoverbike.
We’ve also seen a number of other wood gas projects, including a
wood gas powered bicycle
, and
gasometer storage tank
. | 44 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268854",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T23:04:48",
"content": "Coming apocalypse when all gas stations are shut down and the lawn needs to be mowed. Someone is ready.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268860",
... | 1,760,373,397.361098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/rgb-led-shutter-shades/ | RGB LED Shutter Shades | Orlando Hoilett | [
"LED Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"dot matrix",
"ESP8266",
"LED display",
"neopixel",
"ws2812b"
] | [splat238] is back at it again with
another cool RGB LED display project
. We were contemplating whether or not our readers have had enough of these over the last few weeks, but we’ve learned over the years that
you can never have too many LED projects
.
Instead of
making a cool mask like we’ve covered before
, [splat238] decided to trick-out some shutter shades. What’s really cool is he used the PCB itself as the frame,
similar to another hack we’ve seen
, which we’re sure also made his design process that much more convenient.
[splat238] got his boards pre-assembled since it would be really difficult to solder all those LEDs by hand. There are 76 of them in this design. It’s pretty helpful that he walks the reader through how to get the boards assembled, providing information on reliable fabrication and assembly houses that he’s had good experiences with. Pretty solid information if you don’t already have a go-to one-stop-house or have never
designed for assembly before
.
The glasses use an ESP8266-based microcontroller since it has plenty of space for storing LED patterns and has the potential benefit of including WiFi control in later revisions. However, we think you’ll be pretty happy with simply toggling through the patterns with a simple pushbutton.
The LEDs use a whopping 2.5 A at maximum and rely on an external power bank, so you’ll probably want to be really careful wearing this over an extended period of time. Maybe consider doing a bit of
PWM
to help reduce power consumption.
Another cool project [splat238]! Keep them coming. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268831",
"author": "Msto",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T20:53:51",
"content": "Always nice to see almost the exact project you’re working on featured, except that it’s done by someone else.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268842... | 1,760,373,397.413086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/illegal-blast-fishing-detector-is-all-ears/ | Illegal Blast Fishing Detector Is All Ears | Kristina Panos | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"blast fishing",
"criminal deterrent",
"fishing"
] | Blast fishing — the act of using explosives underwater to kill entire schools of fish with shock waves — has been a widespread problem in the Philippines for decades. Although a few fishermen get rich from the first blast at a fresh site, it isn’t good for anyone in the long term, especially the coral and other sea life. Many blast fisherman use homemade explosives, often at the risk of losing fingers and limbs.
The local authorities have tried many tactics to deter the activity. Where education about the diminishing returns of blast fishing has failed, appeals to religion with strategically placed statuary of the Virgin Mary have been somewhat successful.
[Ifthekar ahammad] has another idea, and it involves detecting the explosion, triangulating the position of the blast, and reporting it to the authorities as soon as possible
.
The CBobby system works by analyzing the audio spectrum. It looks for transient changes from the ambient background noise levels, and analyzes duration and the frequencies it heard to decide whether there was an explosion or not. Plans to field test this in the Philippines have been dashed by the pandemic, but [ifthekar] has been hard at work testing in Germany with underwater speakers blasting out explosion noises. Already, the system can differentiate the blasts from various environmental sounds like ships, the bellows of large sea creatures, earthquakes, rain, and thunder.
Although the test rig is encased in neon orange acrylic, the actual blast fishing tattler will be disguised as a venomous stonefish, making it as appealing to mess with as fire ants or wasps.
Destructive blast fishing is all-around terrible, even though it’s done for survival.
But what do we think of using drones to fish for sport?
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 17 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268803",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T18:32:28",
"content": "“Where education about the diminishing returns of blast fishing has failed, appeals to religion with strategically placed statuary of the Virgin Mary have been somewhat successful. ”Atheist fishermen. ;-... | 1,760,373,397.571788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/the-smell-of-space/ | The Smell Of Space | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"apollo",
"fragrance",
"smell",
"space"
] | In space, so the
Alien
tagline goes, nobody can hear you scream. One of the most memorable pieces of movie promotion ever, it refers to the effect of the vacuum of space on the things human senses require an atmosphere to experience. It’s a lesson that Joss Whedon used to great effect with
the
Serenity
‘s silent engine light-ups
in
Firefly
, while
Star Wars
ignored it completely to give us
improbable weapon noises in space battles
.
Sound may not pass through the vacuum of space, but that’s not to say there are not things other than light for the senses. The Apollo astronauts reported that
moon dust released a smell they described as akin to burnt gunpowder
once it was exposed to the atmosphere inside their lander, and by now you may have heard that there is
a Kickstarter that aims to recreate the smell as a fragrance
. Will it replace the cloying wall of
Axe
or
Lynx Africa
body spray that pervades high-school boys’ changing rooms, or is it a mere novelty?
The Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan, liberally coated with moon dust after returning to the Lunar module.
NASA
/
Public Domain
Smells Like Moon Dust
The gunpowder smell experienced by the Apollo crews is likely to have been caused by oxygen-sensitive compounds in the moon dust being oxidised by their first exposure to an atmosphere after having accumulated through billions of years of our satellite’s buffeting by solar winds. By the time the samples reached Earth-based scientists this process was long over, so no smell remains for analysis. Even the vacuum containers in which the astronauts were to catch a sample for return to earth without being compromised by a vacuum failed to stop it, it’s thought that their seals were compromised by the unexpectedly pervasive nature of the dust. Thus the “Eau de Luna” perfume will be a creation based only on the astronauts’ recollections rather than an analysis of the smell they experienced.
Like a Locker Room in Orbit
Moon dust may so far be our species’ only encounter with another heavenly body, but that isn’t to say that space is not without other smells. The NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger described “
a distinct, burnt-dry smell
“in the airlocks of the Soviet/Russian Mir space station after returning from space, which is probably analogous to the Moon smell. But numerous accounts from the residents of Mir and other stations talk of smells from a completely different source; the astronauts themselves.
In a space station it is impossible to open a window for a bit of extra ventilation, so as the early stations gave way to continuously-crewed modular outposts that stayed aloft for many years their atmospheres reflected the accumulated biome of all that had been brought to them by their crews. Mir was said to be infested with mould and fungus towards the end of its life, and in 2019
there was concern that the same fate was befalling the ISS
. It’s said that the fluid displacement effect of weightlessness adversely affects the human sense of smell, which is perhaps fortunate for those who have to live with it.
So the space fragrance probably remains the closest that most of us will ever come to leaving the atmosphere, thus it could smell of anything at all and none of us would ever smell the real thing and be able to ask for a refund if it didn’t match. Does it matter though, for the hacker who doesn’t quite have everything? No doubt we’ll catch that open-airlock scent at one or other of next year’s events. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268793",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T17:37:40",
"content": "“…while Star Wars ignored it completely to give us improbable weapon noises in space battles.”Funny you should say that.https://youtu.be/T_bLVAqLZMY",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,373,397.640799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/perfect-your-beer-pong-game-with-the-pongmate-cybercannon-mark-iii/ | Perfect Your Beer Pong Game With The PongMate CyberCannon Mark III | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Beer Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [] | [Grant] was inspired to help his party guests improve their beer pong game. What he created is a
fairly impressive contraption
, sure to make him unstoppable in his next bout.
The device uses a gyroscope and a time-of-flight sensor to calculate the optimum trajectory for the ping pong ball. The user is guided to the correct launching position using two bubble levels and a series of indicator LEDs that turn green when the optimal position is reached.
The launching mechanism uses a servo motor to push the ball into the circular wheel machine which then propels the ping pong ball to its target. The circular wheel machine is powered by two DC motors whose speeds are determined by the distance from the target. [Grant] calibrated the DC motor speed to the distance from the target and found a pretty reproducible relationship favoring a cube root function. You can see his calibration data on his Instructable page as well as
a cool demo video
showing how the device automatically adjusts motor speed to distance from the target.
We should combine the PongMate with the
Auto-Bartender
we wrote about a few weeks ago. What are your favorite beverage hacks? Please share in the comments below. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268791",
"author": "Chris O",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T17:21:51",
"content": "Stellar.. add a couple gyros to coerce proper leveling (for those who might have had a few too many already) and, bam, winner!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comm... | 1,760,373,397.674463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/teardown-orthofix-spinalstim/ | Teardown: Orthofix SpinalStim | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Medical Hacks",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"magnetic field",
"medical device",
"nRF51822",
"stimulation",
"stm32",
"STM32F103"
] | If you’ve ever had a particularly nasty fracture, your doctor may have prescribed the use of an electronic bone growth stimulator. These wearable devices produce a pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) around the bone, which has been shown to speed up the natural healing process in a statistically significant number of patients. That’s not to say there isn’t a debate about how effective they actually are, but studies haven’t shown any downsides to the therapy, so it’s worth trying at least.
Image from SpinalStim manual.
When you receive one of these devices, it will be programmed to only operate for a certain amount of time or number of sessions. Once you’ve “used up” the bone stimulator, it’s functionally worthless. As you might imagine, there’s no technical reason this has to be the case. The cynic would say the only reason these devices have an expiration date on them is because the manufacturer wants to keep them from hitting the second hand market, but such a debate is perhaps outside the scope of these pages.
The Orthofix SpinalStim you’re seeing here was given to me by a friend after their doctor said the therapy could be cut short. This provided a somewhat rare opportunity to observe the device before it deactivated itself, which I’d hoped would let me take a closer look at how it actually operated.
As you’ll soon see, things unfortunately didn’t work out that way. But that doesn’t mean the effort was fruitless, and there may yet be hope for hacking these devices should anyone feel like taking up the challenge.
Keeping it Simple
Since the SpinalStim is designed to produce an electromagnetic field around the spine, it’s not hard to guess that the foam-covered “back brace” contains some kind of coil. But being a high-tech medical device, you might imagine there’s some exotic materials or techniques involved. As it turns out, there isn’t.
Cutting the foam lining away from the brace in an operation not entirely unlike gutting a fish, we can see there’s nothing very special going on here. It’s just a dozen or so loops of two conductor insulated wire that’s held together with, as far as I can tell, painter’s masking tape.
It’s not even like they made a neat coil; pulling the rest off the foam off, there are areas where the wires overlap a bit. I would have thought they’d use some kind of flexible loom to hold the wires in place, but apparently the foam of the brace itself was considered enough to keep the wires flat.
Taking a close look at the four pin connector that goes into the back of the control unit, we can see that the wires have actually been twisted together and crimped to both conductors in the yellow cable. The loop itself is connected to another identical arrangement located on the other side of the brace by a wire hidden in one of the straps that holds them together.
Taking Control
With construction techniques not far removed from a grade school science project, I’ll admit the coils were something of a letdown. But luckily the Control Unit is a bit more interesting. As the SpinalStim has no patient-accessible settings, this device is simplistic in the extreme: just a single button to turn it on and off and a USB-B port for charging. It does however have a rather nice LCD display that indicates the battery level and how much treatment time is left. The screen is even backlit, which seems somewhat unnecessary, but is perhaps beneficial for elderly users who might have trouble seeing the display otherwise.
Both inside and out, the Control Unit is much closer to what I was expecting from a medical device. It’s got considerable heft thanks to internal battery pack, and the thick enclosure with o-ring seals is really quite impressive. Between all the wire you can pull from the coils and this beefy electronics enclosure, there’s a surprising amount of salvage value in this device already.
On the reverse side of the PCB, we can see a few interesting details. Chief among them are the dedicated programming headers for the device’s STM32 microcontroller and nRF Bluetooth Low Energy chipset.
We usually have to hunt around for useful debug or programming interfaces
, so to see them not only labelled but actually populated with pins is really a treat. We can also see the backup battery used to keep the device’s internal timer ticking even if the primary battery dies, and a bank of capacitors that are likely used to build up a charge to fire through the coil.
Peeling the firmware release sticker off of the microcontroller reveals it to be the very common STM32F103, and removing the board’s RF shield uncovers another chip Hackaday readers will likely be familiar with, the nRF51822. The presence of these well documented chips certainly bodes well for any potential reverse engineering or repurposing of the device.
An Investigation Cut Short
At this point, I was hoping to get the Orthofix SpinalStim hooked up to the oscilloscope and take a look at what kind of signal it was passing through the coil, but it was not to be. After putting the Control Unit back together, I’m now immediately greeted with an angry beep and an error message.
Unblock me you coward.
Just like the
VeriFone MX 925CTLS payment terminal we looked at last year
, it would seem the SpinalStim is designed to “self-destruct” once it’s been opened. I didn’t notice any obvious triggers like we saw in the VeriFone, but I’m assuming when I disconnected the battery it was enough for the device to realize something was amiss. This is probably designed to prevent users from trying to reset the device’s internal counter,
which seems to have been a problem on older bone stimulators
.
While I’m disappointed the SpinalStim swallowed its cyanide pill rather than submit to further interrogation, the hardware uncovered in the Control Unit certainly looks ripe for further hacking. We’ve seen
medical devices reverse engineered to unlock new capabilities
in the past, and while there might not be a huge demand for a FOSS bone growth simulator firmware, it seems the possibility is there for anyone who wants to free these devices from their arbitrary limitations. | 59 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268758",
"author": "H4ck5rz",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T14:17:58",
"content": "Giving up way too easily. Should verify if controller is locked and if you can get into firmware. Or connect debugger and potentially trace down what branched the code to the error message.Would wager t... | 1,760,373,399.67502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/pour-yourself-a-glass-of-100000-volts/ | Pour Yourself A Glass Of 100,000 Volts | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts",
"Science"
] | [
"capacitance",
"high voltage",
"marx generator",
"resistance",
"spark gap",
"water"
] | You’d be hard pressed to find a hacker or maker who doesn’t have a soft spot for the tantalizing buzz and snap of a high voltage spark gap, but it remains the sort of project that most of us don’t take on personally. There’s a perceived complexity in building a device capable of shooting a proper spark through several inches of open air, with connotations of exotic components and massive hand-wound coils. Plus, nobody wants to inadvertently singe off their eyebrows.
While the latest video from [Jay Bowles] might not assuage anyone’s fear of performing impromptu electrolysis, it does at least prove that you
don’t need to have a laboratory full of gear to produce six figure voltages
. In fact, you don’t even need much in the way of electronics: the key components of this DIY Marx generator are made with little more than water and some household items.
This is made possible by the fact that the conductivity of water can be changed depending on what’s been dissolved into it. Straight tap water is a poor enough conductor that tubes of it can be used in place of high voltage resistors, while the addition of some salt and a plastic insulating layer
makes for a rudimentary capacitor
. You’ll still need wires to connect everything together and some bits of metal to serve as spark gaps, but nothing you won’t find lurking in the parts bin.
Of course, water and a smattering of nails won’t spontaneously generate electricity. You need to give it a bit of a kick start, and for that [Jay] is using a 15,000 volt
DC flyback power supply
that looks like it may have been built with components salvaged from an old CRT television. While the flyback transformer alone could certainly generate some impressive sparks, this largely liquid Marx generator multiplies the input voltage to produce a serious light show.
We’re always glad to see a new video from the perennially jovial [Jay] come our way. While his projects
might not always be practical in the strictest sense
, they never fail to inspire a lively discussion about
the fascinating applications of high voltage
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268731",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T11:32:01",
"content": "A salvaged neon transformer can provide 5 digit voltages at small amperages, providing a relatively safe spark gap experience. I found mine outside of a bar.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,373,399.535753 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/05/the-game-boy-as-a-midi-synthesiser/ | The Game Boy As A Midi Synthesiser | Jenny List | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"chiptune",
"game boy",
"midi",
"synth"
] | In the world of chiptune music there are many platforms to choose from, each with their own special flavour tot heir sound. The Game Boy has a particular following, but it differs from some of its contemporary platforms in having a custom sound chip built into the same silicon as its processor. You can’t crank open a Game Boy and lift out the sound chip for your own synth project, instead you must talk to it through the Game Boy’s Z80 processor. This is something [Adil Soubki] knows well, as he’s completed a project that
turns the handheld console into a MIDI synthesiser
.
A Game Boy was designed to play games and not as a developer’s toy, so it doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for the hacker. He’s got under the console’s skin by mapping a section of its memory address map to the pins on a Teensy microcontroller board, and running some Game Boy code that reads the vaues there and uses them to configure the sound hardware. The Teensy handles the translation between MIDI and these byte values, turning the whole into a MIDI synthesiser. It’s a succesful technique, as can be seen in the video below the break. Best of all,
the code is available
, so you can have a go for yourself.
We’ve featured Game Boy synths before here at Hackaday, but usually they have been
of the more conventional variety
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268714",
"author": "mined",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T09:00:03",
"content": "From what I saw back in 2005, the band called “047” from Sweden produces live music with Gameboys.https://youtu.be/WacmzS68Kec",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"commen... | 1,760,373,399.377521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/retro-game-bow-tie/ | Retro Game Bow Tie | Orlando Hoilett | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"atari",
"attiny85",
"galaga",
"nes",
"nintendo",
"pac-man",
"pong",
"tetris"
] | [Greg] loves hacking his bow ties. Back in high school, he added some bright RGB LEDs to the bow tie he wore to prom and even won the male best-dressed award. Recently he decided to try another bow tie hack, this time
giving his tie some retro arcade game feels
.
He decided to use an ATtiny85 and to experiment doing some more lower-level programming to refresh his skills. He wrote all his libraries from scratch which really helped him learn a lot about the ATtiny in the process. This also helped him make sure his code was as efficient as possible since he had quite a bit of memory constraints using the ATtiny85 (only 512 bytes of RAM).
He designed the body of the bow tie with wood. He fit all the electronics inside the body while allowing the ATtiny to protrude out of the body giving his bow tie some wanted hacker aesthetic. Of course, he needed to access the toggle switch to play the game, so he made a slot for that as well.
Nice addition to the
electronics bow tie collection on Hackaday
. Really aesthetic design if you ask us. And you know how much
we love retro games
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268786",
"author": "grounded",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T16:51:08",
"content": "In 1984, I added blinking lights to my graduation bow tie. Microcontroller? Smart LEDs? Huh? I used a 555 and two grain of wheat bulbs dipped in red nail polish. Power was from a 9 volt battery in my bre... | 1,760,373,399.336254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/a-hybrid-helical-antenna-for-the-eshail-2-geosynchronous-repeater/ | A Hybrid Helical Antenna For The Es’hail-2 Geosynchronous Repeater | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"downlink",
"Es'hail-2",
"geosynchronous",
"ham",
"helical",
"LNB",
"QO-100",
"repeater",
"satellite",
"uplink"
] | Amateur radio operators like to say that working a contact in space can be done with a simple handheld transceiver and a homemade antenna. And while that’s true, it’s true only for low Earth orbit satellites such as the ISS. If you want to reach a satellite in geosynchronous orbit it’ll take a little more effort, and
this dual-feed helical “ice cream cone” antenna
could really help.
Until recently, the dream of an amateur radio repeater in geosynchronous orbit remained out of reach, but that changed with the launch of the Qatari satellite
Es’hail-2
last year. Since then, hams from Brazil to Thailand have been using the repeater, and UK-based [Tech Minds] has been in the thick of the action. The antenna he presents is a hybrid design, needed because of the 2.4-GHz band uplink and 10-GHz downlink on the satellite, also known as QO-100. Both require a largish dish antenna, with the downlink requiring a low-noise block downconverter (LNB) and feed horn. The uplink side of [Tech Minds]’ antenna is a helical design, with three-and-a-half turns of heavy copper wire and a tuning section of copper strapping that attaches directly to an N-type connector. The helix is just the right size for the feed horn of an LNB for the downlink side, nestled in a hole in the helical antenna’s aluminum reflector disc. There are 3D-printed parts to support everything, plus a cone-shaped radome to keep it all safe from the elements.
It looks like a great design, but sadly, North American and East Asian hams can only dream about building one, since QO-100 is below the horizon for us. We’re jealous, but we’re still glad the repeater is up there. Check out
this article
for more on how
Es’hail-2
got the first geosynchronous ham repeater. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268667",
"author": "N. Christopher Perry",
"timestamp": "2020-08-05T02:59:18",
"content": "If the satellite is geosynchronous, how can it be below the horizon anywhere on earth?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268668",
... | 1,760,373,399.785215 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/bringing-an-ipod-to-the-modern-nand-era/ | Bringing An IPod To The Modern NAND Era | Bryan Cockfield | [
"ipod hacks"
] | [
"classic",
"flash",
"ipod",
"nand",
"nano",
"replacement",
"solder",
"tiny",
"upgrade"
] | Flash storage was a pretty big deal back in the mid ’00s, although the storage sizes that were available at the time seem laughable by today’s standards. For example, having an iPod that didn’t have a spinning, unreliable hard drive was huge even if the size was measured in single-digit gigabytes, since iPods tended to not be treated with the same amount of care as something like a laptop. Sadly, these small iPods aren’t available anymore, and if you want one with more than 8GB of storage
you’ll have to upgrade an old one yourself
.
This build comes to us from [Hugo] who made the painstaking effort of removing the old NAND flash storage chip from an iPod Nano by hand, soldering 0.15mm enameled magnet wire to an 0.5mm pitch footprint to attach a breakout board. Once the delicate work was done, he set about trying to figure out the software. In theory the iPod should have a maximum addressable space of 64 GB but trying to get custom firmware on this specific iPod is more of a challenge and the drives don’t simply plug-and-play. He is currently using the rig for testing a new 8GB and new 16GB chip though but it shows promise and hopefully he’ll be able to expand to that maximum drive size soon.
The build is really worth a look if you’re into
breathing new life into old media players
. Sometimes, though all these old iPods really need to get working again is just to be
thrown into a refrigerator
, as some genius engineer showed us many years ago. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268645",
"author": "Peter Burkimsher",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T23:07:17",
"content": "I tried upgrading a 1st generation iPod Nano by adding a second chip, without success. I hope it’ll work out for him!http://peterburk.github.io/blog/I’ve since heard that it is possible to upgrad... | 1,760,373,399.838619 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/official-arduboy-upgrade-module-nears-competition/ | Official Arduboy Upgrade Module Nears Competition | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"Arduboy",
"atmega32u4",
"bootloader",
"spi",
"upgrade",
"W25Q128"
] | We’ve been big fans of the Arduboy since [Kevin Bates] showed off the first prototype back in 2014. It’s a fantastic platform for making and playing simple games, but there’s certainly room for improvement. One of the most obvious usability issues has always been that the hardware can only hold one game at a time.
But thanks to the development of an official add-on
, the Arduboy will soon have enough onboard storage to hold hundreds of games
Even the rear silkscreen was a community effort.
The upgrade takes the form of a small flexible PCB that gets soldered to existing test points on the Arduboy. Equipped with a W25Q128 flash chip, the retrofit board provides an additional 16 MB of flash storage to the handheld’s ATmega32u4 microcontroller; enough to hold essentially every game and program ever written for the platform at once.
Of course, wiring an SPI flash chip to the handheld’s MCU is only half the battle. The system also needs to have its bootloader replaced with one that’s aware of this expanded storage. To that end, the upgrade board also contains an ATtiny85 that’s there to handle this process without the need for an external programmer. While this is a luxury the average Hackaday reader could probably do without, it’s a smart move for an upgrade intended for a wider audience.
The upgrade board is currently available for pre-order
, but those who know their way around a soldering iron and a USBasp can upgrade their own hardware right now by following along with the technical discussion
between [Kevin] and the community in the “Project Falcon” forum
. In fact, the particularly astute reader may notice that this official upgrade has its roots in the
community-developed Arduboy cartridge we covered last year
. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268628",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T21:14:43",
"content": "The presence of the attiny seems at odds with the requirement of a soldering iron.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268630",
"author": "Inhibi... | 1,760,373,399.483835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/menoplay-through-the-pain-of-menopause/ | MenoPlay Through The Pain Of Menopause | Kristina Panos | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"accelerometer",
"ble",
"hot flashes",
"menopause",
"menstruation",
"temperature sensor"
] | Menopause, that fireworks finale of fertility, is like a second puberty that works in reverse. At least, that’s what we hear. Along with mood swings and acne, there are new joys like hot flashes that make you want to jump naked into the nearest snowdrift, or at least put your head in the freezer for a while. Sounds great; can’t wait.
The biggest problem with menopause is that it gives suffers pause when it comes to getting help.
This is natural
, they think.
There’s nothing I can do but ride it out
. Those who do seek relief are likely to find expensive products that only treat single symptoms. This dearth of solutions inspired [Moinak Ghosh] to create one system to rule them all,
a wearable with a suite of sensors that’s designed to take the pause out of menopause
.
MenoPlay will take temperature readings at the neck and pelvis and switch on a Peltier module worn on the back of the neck when it senses a hot flash in progress. Exercise is a natural defense against hormonal imbalance, but step counters are too easy to cheat or ignore. The MenoPlay system will model the user’s movements using 9DoF accelerometers and suggest exercises that fill in the gaps.
We particularly like the automation aspect of this wearable. After decades of manually tracking menstrual cycles and everything that implies, the idea of so much useful biological data being collected automatically and fed over BLE to a NodeRed application sounds wonderful.
Hot flashes may not feel useful internally, but would do a fine job of powering
the right kind of flashlight
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268608",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T19:03:30",
"content": "How is this thing going to be powered? Am I walking around with a 10lb battery strapped to my waist?A cursory search shows that peltier devices draw >40Watts of power. Obviously we don’t need as much power a... | 1,760,373,399.574143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/fresh-food-year-round-you-can-thank-frederick-mckinley-jones/ | Fresh Food Year Round? You Can Thank Frederick McKinley Jones | Kristina Panos | [
"Biography",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"dry ice",
"ice cream truck",
"refrigerated trucks",
"refrigeration"
] | When you’re a kid, one of the surest signs of summer is hearing the happy sound of the ice cream truck crawling through the neighborhood. You don’t worry about how that magical truck is keeping the ice cream cold, only that it rolls down your street, and that the stars align and your parents give you money for a giant ice cream-cookie sandwich with the edge rolled in tiny chocolate chips.
In the early days of mobile refrigeration, ice cream trucks and other food delivery vehicles relied first on ice, and then dry ice to keep perishables cold. Someone eventually invented an electric cooling system, but those had to be recharged periodically at power stations. There was also a short-lived mechanical system, but it was highly susceptible to road vibrations.
Until Frederick McKinley Jones came along, mobile refrigeration was fledgling, and sources of perishable food were extremely localized and limited. In the early 1940s, Frederick patented the first practical automated refrigeration system for trucks, and it revolutionized the shipping and storage of food and medicine.
A Cold Childhood
Fred drives a race car that he built. Image via
The Black Inventor Online Museum
Frederick McKinley Jones had what most would consider a rough start to life. He was born in 1893 to a Black mother and an Irish father in Cincinnati, OH. Frederick’s mother abandoned him when he was a baby, and his father struggled to raise him alone.
When no orphanage would accept the seven-year-old Frederick, his father sent him to live with a Catholic priest across the river in Kentucky. Two years later, his father died.
Little Fred was a tinkerer from the start, and loved to play around with his father’s pocket watch. The priest encouraged Fred’s interest in mechanics, and let him fix the congregation members’ cars while they sat through the church services.
Fred lived with the priest until he was eleven, when he quit school and ran away, back across the river to Cincinnati. He found work as a janitor in a garage, and by the age of fourteen had worked his way up to mechanic and started building race cars for his boss. Within a year or two, the boss fired him for racing cars when he was on the clock.
Handyman Fred
Fred with a refrigeration unit he designed. Image via
Star Tribune
After that, Fred moved around a bit and took odd jobs to support himself. One night he offered to fix the boiler at a hotel in exchange for a room and a few meals, though he had no experience with boilers or the required tools. Fred did such a good job that the hotel owner offered him a job as a mechanic on his family’s large farm in Hallock, Minnesota. Fred packed his bags and moved once again.
The farm proved to be a great opportunity for Fred. An engineer working there helped him study and eventually earn his engineering license. Soon after, Fred was called up to fight in WWI. Once the officers saw what he was capable of, Fred’s mechanical skills were soon in great demand, and he was asked to work on all kinds of equipment and vehicles. Within a short time, Fred was promoted to sergeant.
When the war was over, Fred went back to the farm in Hallock. He taught himself new skills like electronics in his spare time by reading library books and taking mail order courses. Fred quickly became known around the town as a handyman and problem solver, and built many things for the town over the years, including a transmitter for the town’s first radio station.
Fred built a snowmobile to help doctors make house calls. Image via
ShipEx
After one of town doctors complained about having to wheel patients down to the x-ray equipment all the time, Fred built a portable x-ray machine. He also built what is arguably the first snowmobile by slapping skis to an airplane fuselage and adding a propeller on the back. The purpose? Helping doctors get around in the snow to make house calls.
When talkie pictures came along and Hallock’s only theater couldn’t afford to upgrade their equipment, Fred built a machine that could synchronize film and sound. This invention caught the attention of a film industry businessman from Minneapolis named Joseph Numero, who hired him in 1930.
The King of Cool
The first practical system for mobile refrigeration. From
US Patent 2,475,841A
But the problem that would define Fred’s legacy came about as an offhand comment. One of Numero’s golf buddies complained to him about a poultry truck that got stuck overnight. All the ice melted, and the entire shipment was ruined. Numero was only recounting the story to Fred, but he took the problem seriously anyway.
The problem was twofold; vehicles lacked the power necessary to run a refrigeration system, and the vibrations present in automotive applications made existing refrigeration unfeasible.
Fred’s approach was to invent a single unit for installation in the roof of any enclosure, made up of the cooling unit and the motor to drive it. This made it both compact and simple to repair. The use of a dedicated engine solved the power issue, and by using a thermostatically controlled motor (for which he was
issued a patent
) the refrigeration unit was automatic. With Fred’s solution in hand, Numero quit the film industry so that the two could go into the refrigeration business together. They started the US Thermo Control Company, later called Thermo King.
Fred’s invention arrived in time to be of great service in WWII. The US Department of Defense chose one of Fred’s mobile refrigeration units for use throughout the armed forces, and they cropped up everywhere from B-29 cockpits to field hospitals. The idea was soon expanded to planes and boxcars, and the cold transport chain that we all greatly benefit from today was born.
Fred with a Thermo King refrigerated truck. Image via
World Kings
Illness forced Fred to retire from Thermo King in the late 1950s, and he died of lung cancer in 1961. He was the first African-American to receive the National Medal of Technology, which he was posthumously awarded in 1991.
Frederick Jones hasn’t gotten all the credit he deserved throughout the years for a couple of reasons. He failed to apply for patents on his earlier inventions. But also, he was a half Black man inventing things in the early American 20th century. Everywhere he went, people doubted his abilities, but they usually thawed out once they saw what he was capable of. Fred was a self-made man, and it’s clear that he always took his own advice: be willing to work, be willing to read and study to enrich your life, and always believe in yourself. | 27 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268597",
"author": "Marc",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T18:09:18",
"content": "This is a wonderful post about a man who should be better known, thank you for writing it! I do have one objection. As an African American from a family of tinkerers, inventors, and now three generations o... | 1,760,373,399.737201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/unbricking-a-2000-exercise-bike-with-a-raspberry-pi-zero-and-bluetooth-hacks/ | Unbricking A $2,000 Exercise Bike With A Raspberry Pi Zero And Bluetooth Hacks | Dan Maloney | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bike",
"bluetooth",
"exercise",
"Peloton",
"reverse engineering",
"uart",
"Zwift"
] | Really, how did we get the point in this world where an exercise bike can be bricked? Such was the pickle that [ptx2] was in when their $2,000 bike by Flywheel Home Sports was left without the essential feature of participating in virtual rides after Peloton bought the company. The solution?
Reverse engineer the bike to get it working with another online cycling simulator
.
Sniffing Flywheel Bluetotooth packets with
Bluetility
We have to admit we weren’t aware of the array of choices that the virtual biking markets offers. [ptx2] went with
Zwift
, which like most of these platforms, lets you pilot a smart bike through virtual landscapes along with the avatars of hundreds of other virtual riders. A little Bluetooth snooping with
Bluetility
let [ptx2] identify the bytes in the Flywheel bike’s packets encoding both the rider’s cadence and the power exerted, which Zwift would need, along with the current resistance setting of the magnetic brake.
Integration into Zwift was a matter of emulating one of the smart bikes already supported by the program. This required some hacking on the Cycling Power Service, a Bluetooth service that Zwift uses to talk to the bike. The final configuration has a Raspberry Pi Zero W between the Flywheel bike and the Zwift app, and has logged about 2,000 miles of daily use. It still needs a motor to control the resistance along the virtual hills and valleys, but that’s a job for another day.
Hats off to [ptx2] for salvaging a $2,000 bike for the price of a Pi and some quality hacking time, and for sticking it to The Man a bit. We have to say that most bike hacks we see around here have to do with making
less work for the rider
, not more. This project was a refreshing change.
[Featured images:
Zwift
,
Flywheel Sports
]
[via
r/gadgets
] | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268573",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T16:31:44",
"content": "Interesting that they just killed the service like that. Normally a purchase like this comes with inheriting any contractual responsibilities from it as well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,373,399.432144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/hackaday-remoticon-our-2020-conference-is-packed-with-workshops-and-were-calling-for-proposals/ | Hackaday Remoticon: Our 2020 Conference Is Packed With Workshops And We’re Calling For Proposals | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Featured"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Remoticon",
"call for proposals",
"Circuit Sculpture",
"Remoticon",
"SMD Challenge",
"workshops"
] | We’re proud to announce the Hackaday Remoticon, taking place everywhere November 6th – 8th, 2020. It’s a weekend packed with workshops about hardware creation, held virtually for all to enjoy.
Update:
Tickets are now available for 2020 Remoticon
!
But we can’t do it without you.
We need you to host a workshop
on that skill, technique, or special know-how that you acquired through hard work over too many hours to count. Send in your workshop proposal now!
What is a Remoticon?
The Hackaday Remoticon achieves something that we just couldn’t do at the Hackaday Superconference: host more workshops that involve more people. Anyone who’s been to Supercon over the past six years can tell you it’s space-limited and, although we do our best to host a handful of workshops each day, those available seats are always in high demand.
We’re sad that we can’t get together in person for Supercon this year, but now we have an opportunity to host more workshops, engaging more live instructors and participants because they will be held virtually. This also means that we can make recordings of them available so that more people can learn from the experience. This is something that we tried way back during the first Supercon with
Mike Ossmann’s RF Circuit Design workshop
and 140,000 people have watched that video. (By the way, that link is worth clicking just to see Joe Kim’s excellent art.)
Now I’m not saying that your workshop will have a view count into six digits. What I am saying is that you have skills worth sharing, and people are hungry to learn. Since traveling to massive conferences is on pause for a while, spinning up a way to share your experience with others is a superb use of your time.
We need you to submit a workshop proposal! This can take any shape that makes sense for your topic, but here’s the gist of how this might work. Each accepted workshop makes a list of necessary materials and where to get them so that participants can order ahead of time and follow along. Live workshops will be held via video conference, with periods of instruction, work time, and recap that lets participants ask questions and show results as they go.
Get Your Tickets Now!
Wait, wait, wait. Before you click away to the next awesome Hackaday article, don’t assume you have nothing to teach. In fact, do the opposite. Assume you have rare and specialized knowledge on something (because you do!) and seek that out. Then unleash your mind to form a workshop idea around it. Hackaday is filled with weird, wild, and interesting projects, and we always want to see more of them. Share the wealth so that more people begin to walk the path of the hardware hacker
What Kind of Workshops Do You Have in Mind?
In general, we’re looking for anything related to hardware creation. It can be artistic, practical, programming-based, fabrication-focused, cerebral in nature, or none of the above. Teach us to properly characterize parts, optimize firmware, remove headaches from manufacturing runs, design 3D printed parts that last, or build proof-of-concept showpieces. Bring it on!
To get the ball rolling with Remoticon we do have two concrete things to tell you about today. First off, Mohit Bhoite, Kelly Heaton, and Jiri Praus will host a circuit sculpture workshop. You may remember Kelly’s museum-grade
nesting bird sculpture
that won Hackaday’s Circuit Sculpture contest. You’ll certainly be familiar with
Jiri’s moving tulip sculpture
. And Mohit’s talk
sharing his build techniques
at last year’s Supercon is something that really makes us gaga for a hands-on workshop. From choosing materials to making two and three dimensional templates to aesthetically pleasing solder joints and structure, this topic runs deep.
Not too shabby, but 0402’s my limit.
Kapton tape and tweezers at work
Another activity we wish we could expand during our in-person conferences is competitive soldering. For the Hackaday Remoticon we’re taking
the SMD soldering challenge
global. The event will run all weekend long, as competitors have their chance to set up a camera at their workbench and show us how extremely-small soldering is meant to be done. We’ll see some inspiring skills, we’ll see some hilarious flops, and we’ll all have fun cheering on the action.
Hackaday is Better Together
The Hacker spirit is what makes the world go ’round. But at times we all do some pretty geeky things, and most often your neighbors and family don’t want to spend hours gabbing about this stuff. Let’s build a high-point of the autumn together by supporting one another during these strange days of social distancing. Put the Hackaday Remoticon on your calendar, and
pull together a proposal to host your own workshop
! | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268567",
"author": "macegr",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T16:14:35",
"content": "Where do we buy the T-shirt? my Supercon shirts have been worn too much and are getting a bit ratty.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268587",
... | 1,760,373,399.907894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/dont-let-endianness-flip-you-around/ | Don’t Let Endianness Flip You Around | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"compiler intrinsics",
"endianness"
] | Most of the processor architectures which we come into contact with today are little-endian systems, meaning that they store and address bytes in a least-significant byte (LSB) order. Unlike in the past, when big-endian architectures, including the Motorola 68000 and PowerPC, were more common, one can often just assume that all of the binary data one reads from files and via communication protocols are in little-endian order. This will often work fine.
The problem comes with for example image formats that use big-endian formatted integers, including TIFF and PNG. When dealing directly with protocols in so-called ‘network order’, one also deals with big-endian data. Trying to use these formats and protocol data verbatim on a little-endian system will obviously not work.
Fortunately, it is very easy to swap the endianness of any data which we handle.
Keeping Order
If bits can be packed in either order, it makes sense to tag the data with a marker up front. For instance, in
TIFF
(Tagged Image File Format) images, the first two bytes of the file indicate the byte order: if they read ‘II’ (from ‘Intel’) the file is in little-endian (LE) format, if they read ‘MM’ (from ‘Motorola’) then the data is in big-endian (BE) format. Since Unicode text can also be multi-byte in the case of UTF-16 and UTF-32, its endianness can optionally be encoded using the
byte order mark
(BOM) at the beginning of the file.
Although one could argue the need to care about endianness in most code, it bears reminding that many processor architecture in use today are in fact not LE, but bi-endian (BiE), allowing them to operate in either LE or BE mode. These architectures include ARM, SPARC, MIPS and derivatives like RISC-V, SuperH, and PowerPC. On these systems, one can’t just assume that it’s running in LE mode. Even more fun is that some of these architectures allow for endianness to be changed per process, without restarting the system.
Case Study: Dealing with Endianness
Recently I implemented a simple service discovery protocol (
NyanSD
) that uses a binary protocol. In order to make it work regardless of the endianness of the host system, I used another project of mine called ‘
ByteBauble
‘, that contains a few functions to easily convert between endiannesses. This utility was originally written for the
NymphMQTT
MQTT library, to also allow it work on any system.
The use of ByteBauble’s endianness features is fairly straightforward. First one has to create an instance of the ByteBauble class, after which it can be used for example to compose a binary (NyanSD) message header:
ByteBauble bb;
BBEndianness he = bb.getHostEndian();
std::string msg = "NYANSD";
uint16_t len = 0;
uint8_t type = (uint8_t) NYSD_MESSAGE_TYPE_BROADCAST;
After the message body has been defined, the length of the message (
len
) is the only part of the message header that is more than a single byte. As the
NyanSD protocol
is defined as being little-endian, we must ensure that it is always written to the byte stream in LE order:
len = bb.toGlobal(len, he);
msg += std::string((char*) &len, 2);
The global (target) endianness is set in ByteBauble as little-endian by default. The
toGlobal()
template method takes the variable to convert and its current endianness, here of the host. The resulting value can then be appended to the message, as demonstrated. If the input endianness and output endianness differ, the value is converted, otherwise no action is taken.
The other way around while reading from a byte stream is very similar, with the known endianness of the byte stream being used together with the
toHost()
template method of ByteBauble to ensure that we are getting the intended value instead of the inverted value.
Converting Between Endiannesses
Fortunately, processor architectures don’t simply leave us hanging with these endianness modes. Most of them also come with convenient hardware features to perform the byte swapping operation required when converting between LE and BE or vice versa. Although one could use the required assembly calls depending on the processor architecture, it is more convenient to use the compiler intrinsics.
This is also how ByteBauble’s byte swapping routines are implemented. Currently it targets the
GCC
and
MSVC
intrinsics. For GCC the basic procedure looks as follows:
std::size_t bytesize = sizeof(in);
if (bytesize == 2) {
return __builtin_bswap16(in);
}
else if (bytesize == 4) {
return __builtin_bswap32(in);
}
else if (bytesize == 8) {
return __builtin_bswap64(in);
}
As we can see in the above code, the first step is to determine how many bytes we are dealing with, following by calling the appropriate intrinsic. The compiler intrinsic’s implementation depends on what the target architecture offers in terms of hardware features for this process. Worst case, it can be implemented in pure software using an in-place reverse algorithm.
Determining Host Endianness
As we saw earlier, in order to properly convert between host and target endianness, we need to know what the former’s endianness is to know whether any conversion is needed at all. Here we run into the issue that there is rarely any readily available OS function or such which we can call to obtain this information.
Fortunately it is very easy to figure out the host (or process) endianness, as demonstrated in ByteBauble:
uint16_t bytes = 1;
if (*((uint8_t*) &bytes) == 1) {
std::cout << "Detected Host Little Endian." << std::endl;
hostEndian = BB_LE;
}
else {
std::cout << "Detected Host Big Endian." << std::endl;
hostEndian = BB_BE;
}
The idea behind this check is a simple experiment. Since we need to know where the MSB and LSB are located in a multi-byte variable, we create a new two-byte
uint16_t
variable, set the LSB’s first bit high and then proceed to check the value of the first byte. If this first byte has a value of 1, we know it is the LSB and that we are working in a little-endian environment. If however the first byte is 0, we know that it is the MSB and thus that this is a big-endian environment.
The nice thing about this approach is that it does not rely on any assumptions such as the checking of the host architecture, but directly checks what happens to multi-byte operations.
Wrapping Up
We will likely never see the end of having to deal with these differences in byte order. This both due to the legacy of existing file formats and processor architectures, as well as due to the fact that some operations are more efficient when performed in big-endian order (like those commonly encountered for networking equipment).
Fortunately, as we saw in this article, dealing with differing endianness is far from complicated. The first step is to always be aware of which endianness one is dealing with in the byte stream to be processed or written. The second step is to effectively use the host endianness with readily available functions provided by compiler intrinsics or libraries wrapping those.
With those simple steps, endianness is merely a mild annoyance instead of a detail to be ignored until something catches on fire. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268534",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T14:24:04",
"content": "I always find it strange that the normal convention for handling endian-independent code is to test for the endianess of the host and then swapping bytes, when it’s easy to write endian-independen... | 1,760,373,400.362228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/nilered-makes-superconductors/ | [NileRed] Makes Superconductors | Al Williams | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"nilered",
"superconductor",
"ycbo"
] | We always enjoy [NileRed’s] videos. His latest shows how he made some
relatively high-temperature superconducting ceramic
. After finding what appeared to be some really good instructions on the Internet, [NileRed] found there were some things in the paper that didn’t make sense. You can watch the video, below.
The superconductor was YBCO, sometimes known as 123 because of the ratio of its components. Turns out that most of the materials were available online, except for one exotic chemical that he had to buy from a more conventional source.
The purity of some of the chemicals was in doubt, so he purified some of it and did find some contaminants in it. If you want to do this yourself, you are going to need some chemical handling gear and we’d suggest reading the safety sheets on all the material involved.
If you don’t have the tools, you are going to have to arrange for vacuum chambers, an 8-ton press, furnaces, and more mundane things like stirring hot plates and lab glassware. You might even need a blender.
Of course, you also need to handle liquid nitrogen to cool things off enough to see the superconducting effect. [NileRed] actually had to buy a furnace for this effort–spending about $2,000– and had a bit of a challenge getting it in one piece, as you’ll see, along with hitting it with twice the rated voltage.
Even though we might not have had to repair the furnace, we doubt we are going to make any superconductors anytime soon. But it is reassuring to know that it is in the realm of what you could do in your garage if you wanted to.
We’ve talked about some of the
projects
that [NileRed] found for inspiration. While we were impressed with the process, we aren’t sure this material is up to making a
practical hoverboard
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268518",
"author": "Peter Knoppers",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T13:09:27",
"content": "Wow! Unlike Dexter’s lab, this is educational, informative and inspiring.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6268539",
"author": "AndreN",
... | 1,760,373,400.288633 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/04/facial-detection-with-pi-matlab/ | Facial Detection With Pi + MATLAB | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Machine Learning",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"matlab",
"Viola-Jones algorithm"
] | [Monica] wanted to try a bit of
facial detection with her Raspberry Pi
and she found some pretty handy packages in MATLAB to help her do just that. The packages are based on the
Viola-Jones algorithm which was the first real-time object detection framework for facial detection
.
She had to download MATLAB’s Raspbian image to allow the Pi to interpret MATLAB commands over a custom server. That setup is mostly pretty easy and she does a good job walking you through the setup on her project page.
With that, now she can control the Pi in MATLAB: configure the camera, toggle GPIO, etc. The real fun comes with the facial detection program. In addition to opening up a live video feed of the Pi camera, the program outputs pixel data. [Monica] was mostly just testing the stock capabilities, but wants to try detecting other objects next. We’ll see what cool modifications she’s able to come up with.
If MATLAB doesn’t quite fit your taste,
we have a slew of
facial detection
projects on Hackaday
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268489",
"author": "anna",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T08:10:23",
"content": "… ok?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6268504",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T10:52:32",
"content": "Cool guide. To expand on th... | 1,760,373,400.244894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/iot-pinball-puts-oktoberfest-fun-on-tap/ | IOT Pinball Puts Oktoberfest Fun On Tap | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Oktoberfest",
"pinball",
"pinball machine",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi 4"
] | We don’t really miss going out to bars all that much, unless you’re talking about the one downtown with all the pinball machines. Don’t get us wrong — pinball emulators have gotten crazy good, and you can find exact digital replicas of most machines to play on your phone or whatever. But it just doesn’t compare to the thrill of playing a real cabinet.
Don’t despair, because for the next couple of weeks, you can
queue up to play on a real Oktoberfest pinball machine that’s sitting in Espoo, Finland
. The controls are hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 4 through a custom HAT, along with a camera pointed at the playfield and another focused on the backglass screen. The game development/video streaming company Surrogate is hosting a tournament over the internet, and will be giving prizes to the top ten high rollers.
We usually have to wait until the holiday season to come across these remote-reality gaming opportunities. Having played it several times now, we recommend spamming the flippers until you get a feel for the lag. Also, just holding the flippers up while the ball is in the upper half of the playfield will catch a lot of balls that you might otherwise lose due to flipper lag, and sometimes they end up back in front of the launcher to shoot again. After the break, check out a brief but amusing video of setting up the cameras and Pi that includes a taste of the Oktoberfest music.
The tournament runs until the end of August, which should be enough time for somebody to set up CV and a keyboard to play this automatically. Need inspiration?
Here’s an open-source pinball machine that can play itself
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268529",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T14:04:46",
"content": "I got 873,552,000, beat that….. just kidding it’s saying it’s offline until tomorrow.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268761",
"autho... | 1,760,373,400.427102 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/optimizing-gif-playback-for-microcontrollers/ | Optimizing GIF Playback For Microcontrollers | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"GIF",
"software"
] | Despite being cooked up by Compuserve back in the late 1980s, GIFs have seen a resurgence on the modern internet, mostly because they’re fun. However, all our small embedded systems are getting color screens these days, and they’d love to join in the party. [Larry Bank] has whipped up a solution for just that reason,
letting embedded systems play back short animated GIFs with limited resources.
[Larry] does a great job of explaining how the GIF format works, using LZW compression and variable-length codes. He talks about how the design of the format presents challenges, particularly when working with microcontrollers. Despite this, the final code works well, and is able to work with most animated GIFs of the right dimensions and construction. 24K of RAM is required, and image width is limited to 320 pixels. Images can be loaded from flash, memory, or SD cards, and he notes that best performance is gained with a microcontroller with fast SPI for writing to screens quickly.
It’s a great piece of software that promises to add a lot of charm, or silliness, to microcontroller projects. It also simplifies the use of animations, which can now be designed on computers rather than by using onboard graphics libraries. GIF really is the format that never seems to die;
we’ve featured cameras dedicated to the form before
. Video after the break. | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268461",
"author": "Acme Fixer",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T04:24:05",
"content": "There are bazillions of .GIF files out there that were saved as single images with *no* animation, and they were compressed without losses so they look great without the ugly artifacts we see in highly... | 1,760,373,400.113602 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/william-english-computer-mouse-co-creator-has-passed/ | William English, Computer Mouse Co-Creator, Has Passed | Kristina Panos | [
"Biography",
"Current Events",
"News"
] | [
"computer mouse",
"Douglas Engelbart",
"eidophor",
"mother of all tech demos",
"mouse",
"parc",
"sri",
"Stanford Research Institute",
"xerox parc"
] | We are saddened to report that William English, co-inventor of the computer mouse,
died July 26 in San Rafael, California
. He was 91 years old.
Bill at the controls at Stanford Research Institute. Image via
MSN
Every piece of technology starts with a vision, a vague notion of how a thing could or should be. The computer mouse is no different. In fact, the mouse was built to be an integral part of the future of personal computing — a shift away from punch cards and mystery toward a more accessible and user-friendly system of windowed data display, hyperlinks, videoconferencing, and more. And all of it would be commanded by a dot on the screen moving in sync with the operator’s intent, using a piece of hardware controlled by the hand.
The stuff of science fiction becomes fact anytime someone has the means to make it so. Often times the means includes another human being, a intellectual complement who can conjure the same rough vision and fill in the gaps. For Douglas Engelbart’s vision of the now-ubiquitous computer mouse, that person was William English.
William English was born January 27, 1929 in Lexington, Kentucky. His father was an electrical engineer and William followed this same path after graduating from a ranch-focused boarding school in Arizona. After a stint in the Navy, he took a position at Stanford Research Institute in California, where he met Douglas Engelbart.
The first computer mouse, built by William English in the 1960s. Image via
Wikipedia
Engelbart showed William his notes and drawings, and he built the input device that Englebart envisioned — one that could select characters and words on the screen and revolutionize text editing. The X/Y Position Indicator, soon and ever after called the mouse: a sort of rough-yet-sleek pinewood derby car of an input device headed into the future of personal computing.
William’s mouse was utilitarian: a wooden block with two perpendicular wheels on the bottom, and a pair of potentiometers inside to interpret the wheels’ X and Y positions. The analog inputs are converted to digital and represented on the screen. The first mouse had a single button, and the cord was designed to run out the bottom, not the top.
This controller was designed to steer Engelbart’s magnum opus, an experimental computer dubbed oN-Line System, later NLS, which turned out to be a great prognosticator of modern networked computing. Engelbart and English presented the many facets of the NLS in a legendary demonstration given December 9th, 1968 in San Francisco.
This event, known as the mother of all tech demos
, was well covered by our own [Dan Maloney] in a biographical/Retrotechtacular mash-up marking the 50th anniversary. By the time they gave the demo, the mouse had three buttons and sat atop a stately chair-mounted lap console designed by Herman Miller. This NLS console contained an IBM Selectric keyboard and held a 5-button chording keyboard on the left side.
The luxury console of the NLS. Image via
The Smithsonian
Bill designed all the audio-visuals for the demo, set everything up, and staged the 90+ minute presentation by speaking to Englebart and others through headsets. The show was only possible from a technical standpoint because Bill had a chance encounter with a Silicon Valley phone technician and convinced him to set up a wireless link for voice and video between the hall and their lab some 30 miles away in Menlo Park. That, plus the giant
Eidophor projector
they borrowed from NASA to show the demo to the hundreds of engineers in attendance. English and Englebart discuss the NLS, the Eidophor, and much more in the interview embedded below, but the topic is worth much a much deeper dive (something
Mike Harrison did for his talk at the 2016 Hackaday Belgrade conference
).
In 1971, Bill left Stanford Research Institute for Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he continued to develop the features of the NLS into the Alto. You likely know the story from here — Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both toured PARC, both saw the Alto, and both steered the personal computer toward their own vision.
Main and thumbnail images via
NYT | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268432",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T23:45:43",
"content": "Rest in Peace Father of all Demos.Also Wilford Brimley.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268446",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,400.576854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/hack-a-folding-bike-to-help-you-catch-some-pike/ | Hack A Folding Bike To Help You Catch Some Pike | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bike",
"fishing",
"Kydex",
"milling",
"prototyping",
"PVC"
] | For many of us, this whole pandemic thing has produced some unexpected upsides. One of [George Turvey]’s was finding a nice new scenic route to work that goes by a lake with bike trails. [George] thought it might be nice to go fishing after work, and use a folding bike to cover a lot of ground while looking for good spots on the shore. There was just one problem — riding a bike while transporting tackle is awkward.
The bike comes with a front mount that’s meant to hold the special bags they make, so that became square one for designing a rod and tackle holder
. Then [George] had to weigh the pros and cons of additive vs. subtractive methods for prototyping the holder, or at least the connection between it and the mount on the bike.
Milling won out, at least for the initial proof of concept, and result is a modular mock-up that combines a milled Kydex connector and tackle box holder with a double-barrel PVC rod holder. This way, [George] had a prototype in a fraction of the time it would have taken to design and print it. Cast your line past the break to see how fast [George] can switch gears into fishing mode.
3D printing definitely has a place in the fishing world.
How else are you gonna design your own lures? | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268429",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T23:18:23",
"content": "I like the bike!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6268441",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2020-08-04T01:07:36",
"content": "Did you make... | 1,760,373,400.472352 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/cryptographic-lcds-use-the-magic-of-xor/ | Cryptographic LCDs Use The Magic Of XOR | Lewin Day | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"cryptography",
"lcd",
"xor"
] | Digital security is always a moving target, with no one device or system every being truly secure. Whether its cryptographic systems being compromised, software being hacked, or baked-in hardware vulnerabilities, it seems there is always a hole to be found. [Max Justicz] has a taste for such topics,
and decided to explore the possibility of creating a secure communications device using a pair of LCDs
.
In a traditional communications system, when a message is decrypted and the plaintext is displayed on screen, there’s a possibility that any other software running could capture the screen or memory state, and thus capture the secret data. To get around this, [Max]’s device uses a concept called visual cryptography. Two separate, independent systems with their own LCD each display a particular pattern. It is only when the two displays are combined together with the right filters that the message can be viewed by the user, thanks to the visual XOR effect generated by the polarized nature of LCDs.
The device as shown, working with both transparent OLEDs and traditional LCDs, is merely a proof of concept. [Max] envisions a device wherein each display is independently sourced, such that even if one is compromised, it doesn’t have the full message, and thus can’t compromise the system. [Max] also muses about the problem of side-channel attacks, and other factors to consider when trying to build a truly secure system.
We love a good discussion of cryptography and security around here;
[John McMaster]’s talk on crypto ignition keys was a particular hit at Supercon last year.
Video after the break.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/lcdxor.mp4 | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268408",
"author": "Duh",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T20:40:13",
"content": "This is clever, even from the non cryptographic sense; basically turning a second LCD into the polarizer film…I wonder how else this could be used.Kinda reminds me of the color overlay LCDs used on b/w CRT os... | 1,760,373,400.520248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/linux-fu-help-messages-for-shell-scripts-and-here-documents/ | Linux-Fu: Help Messages For Shell Scripts And Here Documents | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"bash",
"here document",
"linux"
] | Imagine that you want to output multiple lines of text in Bash, or any shell script. Maybe it’s for a help string for a particularly convoluted shell script you’re writing. You could have a separate
echo
command for each line. Or you could use the “
here document
“.
The “here document” construction takes the text between two delimiters and passes it, as if it were piped, to a command.
if [[$# == 0 ]] || [[ "$1" == "-h" ]]; then
cat << EOF
This is my help message. There are many like it but this one is mine.
My help message is my best friend.
EOF
All of the text, as written, with line breaks and spaces and all, get passed to
cat
and your helpful formatted message is printed to the user.
You can use here documents interactively at the command prompt, and you can use them in functions:
#!/bin/bash
help() {
cat << EOF
Here is your help.
EOF
}
More About Here Documents
More than just writing help scripts, here documents are useful any time that you want to enter multiple lines and have them piped to a command. We use them most often from the shell directly. There are a few nuances, however.
You probably figured out that the “EOF” string in the above examples marks the beginning and end of the here document. There’s nothing special about it. You can use any word that doesn’t appear in your document. So “<< END_OF_HERE_DOC” would work.
The end of document string has to be at the beginning of a line, and by itself. You should not have whitespace before or after it. It is usually a good idea to use something odd and more than a few characters as the end string, although — in theory — you could use even a single character.
But that requirement messes up code indentation — see the
help()
function above. If you put a dash between the redirection brackets and the string, the shell will consume any leading tab characters (but not spaces!). That lets you indent your message so it doesn’t all run together. But here, you have to be careful about spaces in the declaration:
cat <<- EOF
and
cat <<-EOF
work, while
cat << -EOF
doesn’t. (It expects the delimiter “-EOF”.) Still, it lets you indent your code if you can get it right, and use tabs instead of spaces.
#!/bin/bash
help() {
cat <<- EOF
Here is your help.
EOF
}
Substitution
One thing that might not be obvious is that the here document can handle variable expansion. Try typing:
cat << EOF
Your path is $PATH
Your prompt is $PS1
EOF
Your path is /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:...
Your prompt is ($HOSTNAME \w)\$
That even works with things like command substitution. So you could put things in like
$(ls)
, for example. Sometimes you don’t want that, though. In those cases, just quote the end string. For example:
cat << "EOF"
Your path is $PATH
Your prompt is $PS1
EOF
Your path is $PATH
Your prompt is $PS1
Peculiarities
You can even send the input to a program that does nothing like
:
which might seem odd. But some people use that to comment out large blocks of script for debugging or other purposes. It is a bit wasteful, because the lines you don’t want get put in a temporary file and fed to the input of a program that will ignore them, but you might see it done.
Clearly, here documents are niche. I use them a lot for writing help strings in scripts, but they’re just the ticket when you need to pass multiple lines in a script or to a script as you typed multiple lines into
stdin
. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268363",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T17:09:50",
"content": "Anyone who is writing bash scripts in this day and age where there are so many far superior languages to choose from needs help alright.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,373,400.63809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/cheap-and-effective-mosquito-trap-looks-like-a-disco/ | Cheap And Effective Mosquito Trap Looks Like A Disco | Adil Malik | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bucket",
"Dengue",
"fan",
"ir",
"malaria",
"mosquito",
"trap",
"uv"
] | Words cannot quite articulate the collective loathing humankind has for mosquitoes, and rightfully so! These parasite peddling, blood sucking little critters are responsible for a great deal of human suffering. Mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria still account for a significant proportion of human mortality, especially in under-developed parts of the world . So it’s no wonder that people try to reduce their numbers; see this latest
$40 mosquito trap by [jacobsk]
. (Video, embedded below.)
The idea is critically simple, opening up the potential for widespread deployment. The base and body of the trap are made out of three five-gallon buckets with a mini desk fan sandwiched in between, providing suction into the main trap bin. An opening is cut in the top bucket as a point of entry, and an old school incandescent blacklight is mounted in the centre, with just enough IR and UV output to entice these little vermin, who will definitely regret mistaking it for a black-light rave.
[jacobsk] also does a very good job of showing every step of its construction in his videos. Whilst this solution is purposefully low tech, check out this admittedly
overcooked way of killing mosquitoes, with a laser turret
. | 34 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268341",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T15:35:29",
"content": "Fun fact, mosquitoes are not attracted to UV or IR, they are attracted by CO2 and heat. Most of the bugs inside this trap are probably harmless insects like moths, beetles and others. There might be a m... | 1,760,373,400.707444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/covid-tracing-apps-what-europe-has-done-right-and-wrong/ | COVID Tracing Apps: What Europe Has Done Right, And Wrong | Elliot Williams | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Medical Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"contact tracing",
"coronavirus",
"covid tracing app",
"Covid-19",
"ENF",
"ENS"
] | Europe has been in COVID-containment mode for the last month, in contrast to the prior three months of serious lockdown. Kids went back to school, in shifts, and people went on vacation to countries with similarly low infection rates. Legoland and the zoo opened back up, capped at 1/3 capacity. Hardware stores and post offices are running “normally” once you’ve accommodated mandatory masks and 1.5 meter separations while standing in line as “normal”. To make up for the fact that half of the tables have to be left empty, most restaurants have sprawled out onto their terraces. It’s not really normal, but it’s also no longer horrible.
But even a country that’s doing very well like Germany, where I live, has a few hundred to a thousand new cases per day. If these are left to spread unchecked as before, the possibility of a second wave is very real, hence the mask-and-distance routine. The various European COVID-tracing apps were rolled out with this backdrop of a looming pandemic that’s tenuously under control. While nobody expects the apps to replace public distancing, they also stand to help if they can catch new and asymptomatic cases before they get passed on.
When Google and Apple introduced their frameworks for tracing apps,
I took a technical look at them
. My conclusion was that the infrastructure was sound, but that the implementation details would be where all of the dragons lay in wait. Not surprisingly, I was right!
Here’s an update on what’s happened in the first month of Europe’s experience with COVID-tracing apps. The good news is that the apps seem to be well written and based on the aforementioned solid foundation. Many, many people have installed at least one of the apps, and despite some quite serious growing pains, they seem to be mostly functioning as they should. The bad news is that, due to its privacy-preserving nature, nobody knows how many people have received warnings, or what effect, if any, the app is having on the infection rate. You certainly can’t see an “app effect” in the new daily cases rate. After a month of hard coding work and extreme public goodwill, it may be that cellphone apps just aren’t the panacea some had hoped.
Europe is a Patchwork
The first thing you need to know about Europe’s COVID apps is that there’s a ton of them, and they’re all different. Just as our neighbors to the south make phenomenal pizza, those to the west fantastic baguettes and cheese, and those to the east delicious Pilsner, the nationally endorsed tracing apps differ in more than language.
There are three frameworks in play, but two of them are essentially the same. The Google/Apple “
Exposure Notification System
” (ENS) was inspired by the original drafts of the European “
Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing
” (DP-3T) framework, and both use date-time-ID hashes broadcast over Bluetooth LE to allow individual phones to determine if they’ve come into contact with infected individuals.
We covered the ENS extensively before.
Since the hashes change frequently and since your secret ID is never communicated outside your phone, these two provide very strong privacy guarantees. And since the DP-3T and EN frameworks are essentially the same, it should eventually be feasible for apps using both systems to converge; ENS basically incorporates the concepts of DP-3T into OS-level API calls in both Android and iOS. So while Europe is split about 50/50 between DP-3T and ENS, it’s fundamentally all the same thing.
“Croissants”
by Jo@net, CC BY 2.0
The odd country out is France, which is using a centralized version of the same Bluetooth LE beacons approach. The
ROBERT system used in their StopCovid app
collects both your random ID and the date-time-ID hashes that your phone has heard, compares them in a central databank, and then informs you if there is a match. ROBERT is essentially a spinoff of the forerunner to DP-3T, the “
Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing
” framework (PEPP-PT).
The “privacy” in PEPP-PT is due to the fact that the ID numbers are generated randomly per-phone as with the decentralized solution, so they are pseudonymous. On the other hand, if the central server could somehow correlate numbers with people, then they would have a tremendously detailed log of who has been near whom, when. The potential de-anonymizing of the data lead most of the Universities participating in PEPP-PT development to leave for DP-3T, and also resulted in possibly the most passive-aggressive whitepaper title of all time: “
Proximity Tracing Applications: The misleading debate about centralised versus decentralised approaches
” from the French camp.
You don’t have to fear the government to not want your data stored centrally, either.
The Korean app’s encryption was just broken
, and since it reports not only your COVID status but your location and purchase history back to the central server, this is a huge privacy breach. (The password with which everything was encrypted? “1234567890123456”. At least it’s long.) There don’t seem to be any similar howlers in the French code, but the database of everyone’s activities and contacts is going to be a juicy target for bad hackers.
But even leaving France aside, the apps that use the same framework don’t work together yet. Even though the apps use similar frameworks, a government agency needs to broadcast the authoritative list of contagious hashes daily for your phone to compare against. Should the German app pull data from the Italians and from the Spanish? The consensus seems to be that it should, and
there is work afoot to make it possible before long
. But for now, Europe’s COVID apps remain a patchwork delineated by national borders, even though travel restrictions within Europe have been partially lifted.
And still a few countries have no system up and running yet.
Spain
is notable here, although it’s in progress.
Europe is Open
One of the most reassuring sights in the European COVID app development process has been how thoroughly the development was debated in the public sphere. Here in Germany, the switch from the only-pseudonymous PEPP-PT to the DP-3T was widely reported on in the press, and probably due in no small part to efforts by the Chaos Computer Club and other public-interest groups with security expertise, and of course those in parliament who listened to them.
And because transparency was seen as crucial to app uptake, almost all of the nationally sponsored apps are open source. In the case of Germany, the app was developed behind closed doors by SAP and Deutsche Telekom, firms hardly known for their open-source credentials. But a few weeks before the release, they put it
all
up on GitHub
: server, apps, verification portal, and extensive docs. As of today, of 356 issues raised, 293 are closed and all appear to be getting triaged quickly and taken seriously. How often do you hear a grumpy security programmer say of a codebase that it’s “
astoundingly clean and contains, on first look, no obvious backdoors or security holes
.”? High praise! (
Translated by robots here.
) No code is ever 100% secure, but the open security process seems to be working.
While I’ve followed Germany’s progress most closely, code is out for many other countries. Here’s
Ireland’s
,
Italy’s
,
Austria’s
,
France’s
,
Poland’s
, and
The Netherlands’
. Notably absent are Denmark and Finland, with proprietary apps, although they are based on the ENS and DP-3T frameworks, respectively. Feel free to update us all on any other country’s programs in the comments!
If you don’t believe that open, auditable code matters, see the South Korean debacle above. A hard-coded password in everyone’s app wouldn’t stand up for one day, much less a few months, in an open environment. This is not to say that there aren’t
deep
bugs in any of the open codebases — they’re huge and complex after all — but low-hanging fruit like 1234567890123456 would have been caught immediately.
Now the Bad News
One of the most important factors for any COVID app to be useful is that it’s in widespread use. For example, if only 5% of the population installs the application, you have a hard maximum chance of 5% that an actual exposure will be correctly reported to you, given that you have the app installed. While the positive effects of early tracing increase as the install base grows,
British scientists estimate that you’d need ~60% coverage to wipe the disease out
, and uptake varies wildly from country to country.
I couldn’t find up-to-date statistics for all countries, but I’d bet that Germany has the largest install base, with over 16 million downloads. But with a population of 83 million, that’s only 19% of the population. According to Angela Merkel’s chief of staff (who is
totally
not biased), Germany has the “best” app, and yet when asked in a survey
only 42% say they would install the app
.
Ireland
boasts 1.3 million users
, or 27% of their 4.9 million inhabitants, probably taking the prize for highest install rate. France’s app was only downloaded 2.3 million times in the first few weeks, on 65 million. 3.5%. Ouch.
You might need this. (
“charging-battery”
by Wolfgang Lonien, CC BY-SA 2.0)
And that’s assuming that everyone has the app on and running all the time. Germany’s app, which is supposed to run on the Android OS facilities provided by the ENS,
ending up with gaps in service as it was backgrounded on Samsung and Xiaomi phones
(
translated
) for most of the first month, undetected. The operating systems’ power saving modes were overly enthusiastic. It runs on “prioritized background” mode now, but taking the two largest phone manufacturers out of your dataset for a few weeks isn’t going to help. The French app, which can’t use the ENS and has to run in the foreground, is reported to eat batteries like they were Nutella crepes. How many people will keep battery hogs running?
It’s not all Android, either. There was a problem with users upgrading to iOS 13.6 that prevented the app from running at all. I don’t know if that’s been fixed yet. Anyone?
Other glitches in the German system have been more policy than software. If you test positive for COVID, your doctor informs you by mail, and then you have to validate a secret code by phone with a special hotline in order to enter the system as contagious. This can cause a two-day delay in getting into the system, during which time people won’t know that they’ve had contact with someone infectious. Since speed in tracing back contacts is the name of the game, this is a shame. And that’s assuming you register at all —
there’s some preliminary evidence from the Robert Koch Institute that between four and six percent of people who’ve tested positive end up registering that on the app
. (
Translated
.)
It could be worse. While no longer technically part of the EU, England has still failed to come out with a COVID app. After months of supporting a central-server model, and serious issues getting their app to run on iOS devices, the NHS
decided to switch up to the decentralized ENS after all
, which is probably a good thing for privacy and uptake but results in further delays. Meanwhile
Scotland
and
Northern Ireland
, ostensibly part of the UK, have taken matters into their own hands.
On top of all this, people still debate whether Bluetooth LE range is a good proxy for close, virus-communicating proximity in the first place. The various apps require multiple exposures to trigger a warning, so the “bus passing by” scenario isn’t such a concern, but people living in an apartment below someone who has tested positive will doubtless get false positives.
A Big Experiment? A Dress Rehearsal?
What are the take-home lessons of the last month of European COVID-tracing apps? On the positive side, inviting public involvement in the requirements process and providing open and auditable code can go a long way to encourage app adoption. Comparing France, Germany, and Ireland, it looks like users also care about their privacy enough to make a significant difference in uptake as well, even when it’s as subtle as the difference between anonymity and pseudonymity.
Still, it’s hard to see any effect of the COVID apps yet. Whether this is because of the technical glitches, too low an install base, or a failure to self-report as contagious, the systems have not made a real dent in the daily case numbers. Maybe there will be some effect visible later on, or maybe not. Only time will tell, sadly. The apps could even make things worse; we can also imagine a world where people relax their behavior based on false confidence of low exposure simply because nobody is using the app around them.
It’s a little bit disheartening that there isn’t a simple technological solution to preventing the spread of a highly contagious disease that lies dormant for a week or so, even when it’s confronted with clever cryptographic frameworks and open-source development. Masks, distance, and early testing and notification really seem to be the path forward: science and medicine instead of cellphones and software.
That said, the nice thing about many of the European apps is that they are open, respect your privacy, and
do
at least stand a non-zero chance of helping contain the spread of the disease. You don’t have anything to lose by using them, and the development process will hopefully serve as a model for the future. And given the ample supply of anti-patterns, that’s a success in itself. | 63 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268327",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T14:41:57",
"content": "“Meanwhile Scotland and Northern Ireland, ostensibly part of the UK, have taken matters into their own hands.”Major public services affected by the pandemic, in particular public health services and educati... | 1,760,373,400.815536 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/pinephone-gets-thermal-imaging-backpack/ | Pinephone Gets Thermal Imaging Backpack | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"pinephone",
"Thermal",
"thermal camera"
] | When you buy a mass-market mobile phone, you’re making the decision to trust a long list of companies with your private data. While it’s difficult for any one consumer to fully audit even a single piece of consumer technology, there have been efforts to solve this problem to a degree. The Pinephone is one such example, with a focus on openness and allowing users to have full control over the hardware. [Martijn Braam] is a proud owner of such a device,
and took advantage of this attitude to add a thermal imager to the handset
.
The build is not a difficult one, thanks to the expansion-friendly nature of the Pinephone hardware. The rear of the phone sports six pogo pins carrying an I2C bus as well as power. [Martin] started by modifying the back cover of the phone with contacts to interface with the pogo pins. With this done, the
MLX90640
thermal imager was attached to the case with double-sided tape and wired up to the interface.
While the 32×24 output from the sensor isn’t going to help you build cutting edge heat-seeking missiles, it’s an affordable sensor with good performance for low-end thermal imaging tasks.
We’ve featured teardowns of thermal imaging hardware before, too. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268300",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T12:41:48",
"content": "Good work getting started! I’d try my hand at a proper 3D printed backplate if it was more functional.Hopefully someone with more time than me runs with this and makes a nice compositor for the v4l2 inter... | 1,760,373,400.864391 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/03/see-the-science-behind-vr-display-design-and-what-makes-a-problem-important/ | See The Science Behind VR Display Design, And What Makes A Problem Important | Donald Papp | [
"Science",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"depth",
"focus",
"headset",
"hmd",
"occlusion",
"virtual reality",
"vr"
] | VR headsets are more and more common, but they aren’t perfect devices. That meant [Douglas Lanman] had a choice of problems to address when he joined Facebook Reality Labs several years ago. Right from the start, he perceived an issue no one seemed to be working on: the fact that the closer an object in VR is to one’s face, the less “real” it seems. There are several reasons for this, but the general way it presents is that the closer a virtual object is to the viewer, the more blurred and out of focus it appears to be. [Douglas]
talks all about it and related issues in a great presentation from earlier this year
(YouTube video) at the Electronic Imaging Symposium that sums up the state of the art for VR display technology while giving a peek at the kind of hard scientific work that goes into identifying and solving new problems.
Early varifocal prototype
[Douglas] chose to address seemingly-minor aspects of how the human eye and brain perceive objects and infer depth, and did so for two reasons: one was that no good solutions existed for it, and the other was that it was important because these cues play a large role in close-range VR interactions. Things within touching or throwing distance are a sweet spot for interactive VR content, and the state of the art wasn’t really delivering what human eyes and brain were expecting to see. This led to years of work on designing and testing varifocal and multi-focal displays which, among other things, were capable of presenting images in a variety of realistic focal planes instead of a single flat one. Not only that, but since the human eye expects things that are
not
in the correct focal plane to appear blurred (which is itself a depth cue), simulating that accurately was part of things, too.
The entire talk is packed full of interesting details and prototypes. If you have any interest in VR imaging and headset design and have a spare hour, watch it in the video embedded below.
Things have certainly come a long way since
mobile phone-based VR headsets
, and displays aren’t the only thing getting all the attention.
Cameras have needed their own tweaks
in order to deliver the most to the VR and AR landscape. | 28 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268277",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T09:15:30",
"content": "I would not damage my eyesight further for VR technology. Enough to deal with my natural eyesight problem. I have serious doubts that VR is at all suitable for longer use (3-4 hours a day)https://www.bbc.com... | 1,760,373,401.138115 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/electrochemistry-at-home/ | Electrochemistry At Home | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Science",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"acs",
"aptamer",
"arduino",
"Cyclic Voltammetry",
"electrochemistry",
"glucometer",
"KickStat",
"Linnes Lab",
"LMP91000",
"MDPI",
"potentiostat",
"purdue university",
"SAMD",
"Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering"
] | A few years ago, I needed
a teeny, tiny potentiostat for my biosensor research
. I found a ton of cool example projects on
Hackaday
and on
HardwareX
, but they didn’t quite fulfill exactly what I needed. As any of you would do in this type of situation, I decided to build my own device.
Now, we’ve talked about potentiostats before
. These are the same devices used in commercial glucometers, so they are widely applicable to a number of biosensing applications. In my internet perusing, I stumbled upon a cool chip from Texas Instruments called the LMP91000 that initially appeared to do all the hard work for me. Unfortunately, there were a few features of the LMP91000 that were a bit limiting and didn’t quite give me the range of flexibility I required for my research. You see, electrochemistry works by biasing a set of electrodes at a given potential and subsequently driving a chemical reaction. The electron transfer is measured by the sensing electrode and converted to a voltage using a transimpedance amplifier (TIA). Commercial potentiostats can have voltage bias generators with microVolt resolution, but I only needed about ~1 mV or so. The problem was, the LMP91000 has a resolution of ~66 mV on a 3.3 V supply, mandating that I augment the LMP991000 with an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC) as others had done.
However, changing the internal reference of the LMP91000 with the DAC confounded the voltage measurements from the TIA, since the TIA is also referenced to the same internal zero as the voltage bias generator. This seemed like a problem other DIY solutions I came across should have mentioned, but I didn’t quite find any other papers describing this problem. After punching myself a little, I thought that maybe it was a bit more obvious to everyone else except me. It can be like that sometimes. Oh well, it was a somewhat easy fix that ended up making my little potentiostat even more capable than I had originally imagined.
I could have made a complete custom potentiostat circuit like a few other examples I stumbled upon, but the integrated aspect of the LMP91000 was a bit too much to pass up. My design needed to be as small as possible since I would eventually like to integrate the device into a wearable. I was using a SAMD21 microcontroller with a built-in DAC, therefore remedying the problem was a bit more convenient than I originally thought since I didn’t need an additional chip in my design.
I am definitely pretty happy with the results. My potentiostat, called KickStat, is about the size of a US quarter dollar with a ton of empty space that could be easily trimmed on my next board revision. I imagine this could be used as a subsystem in any number of larger designs like a
glucometer
,
cellphone
, or maybe even a
smartwatch
.
Check out all the open-source files on my
research lab’s GitHub page
. I hope my experience will be of assistance to the hacker community. Definitely a fun build and I hope you all get as much kick out of it as I did. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268261",
"author": "Vinalon",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T05:33:53",
"content": "Cool project. Wonder if you could use an MCU with a built-in TIA; maybe something like an MSP430FR2311? It has a dedicated TIA and a focus on low power consumption, along with GCC support and an Arduino f... | 1,760,373,401.018202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/foldinghome-and-rosetta-for-arm/ | Folding@Home And Rosetta, For ARM | Jenny List | [
"ARM",
"computer hacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"Covid-19",
"folding@home",
"rosetta"
] | Most readers will be aware of the various distributed computing projects that provide supercomputer-level resources to researchers by farming out the computing tasks across a multitude of distributed CPUs and GPUs. The best known of these are probably Folding@Home and Rosetta, which have both this year been performing sterling service in the quest to understand the mechanisms of the SARS COVID-19 virus. So far these two platforms have remained available nearly exclusively for Intel-derived architectures, leaving the vast number of ARM-based devices out in the cold.
It’s something the commercial distributed-computing-on-your-phone company Neocortix have addressed
, as they have successfully produced ARM64 clients for both platforms that will be incorporated into the official clients in due course.
So it seems that mundane devices such as mobile phones and the more capable Raspberry Pi boards will now be able to fold proteins like a boss, and the overall efforts to deliver computational research will receive a welcome boost. But will there be any other benefits? It’s a Received Opinion that ARM chips are more power-efficient than their Intel-derived cousins, but will this deliver more energy-efficient distributed computing? The answer is “probably”, but the jury’s out on that one as
computationally intensive tasks are said to erode the advantage significantly
.
Folding@Home
was catapulted by the influx of COVID-19 volunteers into first place as the world’s largest supercomputer
earlier this year, and
we’re pleased to say that Hackaday readers have played their part in that story
. As this is being written the July 2020 stats show our team ranked at #39 worldwide, having racked up 14,005,664,882 points across 824,842 work units. Well done everybody, and we look forward to your ARM phones and other devices boosting that figure. If you haven’t done so yet,
download the client
and join us..
Via
HPCwire
. Thanks to our colleague [Sophi] for the tip. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268238",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2020-08-03T02:15:29",
"content": "BOINC also does it Jenny. I found out about it via a twitter-gram from IBM about a month ago. It’s running on a Pi Zero W./",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_... | 1,760,373,401.069775 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/a-homebrew-radio-as-all-the-best-homebrew-radios-should-be/ | A Homebrew Radio, As All The Best Homebrew Radios Should Be | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"fm",
"fm radio",
"pal",
"tv"
] | It started with an old TV sound chip
, and some curiosity. The TDA1701 that [Philip Bragg] found in a box of junk is a complete FM IF strip and audio power amplifier from the golden age of analogue PAL televisions, and while it was designed for the 5.5 MHz or 6 MHz FM subcarrier of European broadcast TV, he found it worked rather well at the more usual 10.7 MHz of a radio receiver. There followed a long thread detailing the genesis bit-by-bit of a decent quality VHF radio receiver, built dead-bug-style on a piece of PCB material.
The TDA1701 was soon joined by a couple of stages of IF amplification with a ceramic filter, and then by several iterations of a JFET mixer. A varicap tuned MOSFET RF amplifier followed, and then a local oscillator. Finally it became a fully-functional FM radio, with probably far better performance than most commercial radios. He admits tuning is a little impractical though, with what appears to be a cermet preset potentiometer covering the entire band.
We suspect this project isn’t finished, and we hope he posts the schematic. But it doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t, because the value here isn’t in the design. Instead it lies in the joy of creating an ad-hoc radio just for the fun of it, and that’s something we completely understand.
We’ve covered a lot of radios in our time, and while it might be the first to feature a TV sound chip,
it’s not the first built on bare PCB
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268064",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T03:11:44",
"content": "There isn’t much special for tv sound. I’m certain lots of FM IF strip ICs were designated for both TV and FM broadcast.There was a narrow band FM 2M receiver detailed back in 1972 and I think the ... | 1,760,373,401.422249 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/vk-01-is-a-bartender-you-dont-need-to-tip/ | VK-01 Is A Bartender You Don’t Need To Tip | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bartender",
"cocktail robot",
"peristaltic pump",
"robot"
] | [Donald Bell’s]
robotic bartender
entry into the 2020 Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge is one of those things that sounds easy until you start getting into the details. After all, how hard is it to dispense some liquids into a glass? Harder than you might think. Sure there are pumps — [Donald] uses peristaltic pumps — but there’s also two Raspberry Pis, an ESP8622, and at least one more microcontroller lurking underneath. You can see a video about the device below.
Even if you don’t want a refreshing libation, you’ll probably like the VK-01’s Bladerunner cyberpunk styling. What we really enjoyed about the post was that it took you through the concept sketches, some of the design trades, and even a cardboard prototype.
There are some interesting thoughts about the psychology of a robot bartender, too. Apparently, people don’t find it satisfying to push a button and have a drink silently pour out like a hospital coffee machine.
There’s also an RFID card that [Donald] had ambitious plans for, but for now, it just detects that the user scanned a card. The software is something called Hello Drinkbot, so the custom software doesn’t have to do that part.
On the hardware side, there were a few clever tricks. For example, since the pumps only run forward — you never suck liquor back up from a glass — the machine gets double duty out of a motor driver meant to drive four motors bidirectionally.
Definitely
not the first robot
mixologist we’ve seen. If you don’t want to serve drinks to replicants, maybe you need
one of these
. | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268041",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T23:18:21",
"content": "Real drinkers know that you tip your bartender well, with the first drink. That ensures prompt and enthusiastic service and generous pours all night. Bartenders gotta eat, people!",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,373,401.474391 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/playing-the-pixelflut/ | Playing The Pixelflut | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"Art",
"Hackerspaces",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"art",
"blinkenlights",
"competition",
"display",
"hacker camp",
"led",
"pixelflut",
"sha",
"sha2017"
] | Every hacker gathering needs as many pixels as its hackers can get their hands on. Get a group together and you’ll be blinded by the amount of light on display. (We propose “a blinkenlights” as the taxonomic name for such a group.) At a large gathering, what better way to show of your elite hacking ability than a “competition” over who can paint an LED canvas the best? Enter
Pixelflut, the multiplayer drawing canvas
.
Pixelflut has been around since
at least 2012
, but it came to this author’s attention after editor [Jenny List] noted it in her
review of SHA 2017
. What was that beguiling display behind the central bar? It turns out it was a display driven by a server running Pixelflut. A Pixelflut server exposes a display which can be drawn on by sending commands over the network in an extremely simple protocol. There are just four ASCII commands supported by every server — essentially get pixel, set pixel, screen size, and help — so implementing either a client or server is a snap, and that’s sort of the point.
While the original implementations appear to be written by [defnull] at the link at the top, in some sense Pixelflut is more of a common protocol than an implementation. In a sense, one “plays” one of a variety of Pixelflut minigames. When there is a display in a shared space the game is who can control the most area by drawing the fastest, either by being clever or by consuming as much bandwidth as possible.
Then there is the game of who can write the fastest more battle-hardened server possible in order to handle all that traffic without collapsing. To give a sense of scale, one
installation at 36c3 reported
that a truly gargantuan 0.5
petabytes
of data were spent at a peak of rate of more than 30 gigabits/second, just painting pixels! That’s bound to bog down all but the most lithe server implementation. (“Flut” is “flood” in German.)
While hacker camps may be on pause for the foreseeable future, writing a performant Pixelflut client or server seems like an excellent way to sharpen one’s skills while we wait for their return. For a video example check out the embed after the break. Have a favorite implementation? Tell us about it in the comments!
70Mbps takeover of
#pixelflut
at
#33c3
with
#Python
. Thanks
@Maschinendeck_
for setting it up, it was major fun.
pic.twitter.com/7ea7JBi7H9
— 🗿 Alberto Granzotto (@vrde)
December 30, 2016 | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268054",
"author": "Michael Betz",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T01:31:14",
"content": "Finally a `good` use for the 2x gigabit ethernet ports of the colorlite board …https://github.com/enjoy-digital/colorlite",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comm... | 1,760,373,401.525631 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/how-many-of-you-are-there-really/ | How Many Of You Are There, Really? | Orlando Hoilett | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Art"
] | [
"8BitsAndAByte",
"art",
"Belgium",
"census",
"freeform"
] | We’re now accustomed to hearing, “We’re all special in our own unique ways.” But what if we weren’t really aren’t all that unique? Many people think there are no more than two political opinions, maybe a handful of religious beliefs, and certainly no more than one way to characterize a hack. But despite this controversy in other aspects as life, at least we can all rely on the uniqueness of our individual names. Or can you?
You ever thought there were too many people named [insert name here]? Well, [Nicole] thought there were too many people who shared her name in her home country of Belgium and decided to
make an art piece out of it
.
She was able to find data on the first names of people in Belgium and wrote a Python script…er…used Excel to find the number of Nicoles in each zip code. She then created a 3D map of Belgium divided into each province with the height of each province proportional to the number of Nicoles in that area. A pretty simple print job that any standard 3D printer can probably do these days.
Not much of a “do something” hack, but could make for a cool
demotivational ornament
that will constantly remind us
just how unique we really are
.
Happy hacking!
https://youtu.be/_67oXoSZdoo | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267986",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T17:22:20",
"content": "> Many people think there are no more than two political opinionsO’Sullivan’s Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,373,401.382253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/2020-everything-is-virtual/ | 2020: Everything Is Virtual | Elliot Williams | [
"cons"
] | [
"cons",
"COVID",
"DEF CON",
"HOPE conference",
"VCF West"
] | It’s like the dystopian future arrived out of the blue. From one year to the next we went from holing up in overly air-conditioned hotel ballrooms and actually meeting our fellow meatbags in the flesh, to huddling in our pods and staring at the screens. I’m looking for the taps to hook me in to the Matrix at this point.
But if you haven’t yet received your flying car or your daily Soma ration, you can still take comfort in one thing:
all of the hacker conferences
are streaming live, as if it were some fantastic cyber-future! In fact, as we type this, someone is telling you how to print your way to free drinks on USAir flights as part of HOPE’s offering, but the talks will continue for the next few days. (Go straight to
live stream one
.)
If retrocomputing is more your thing, Saturday marks the start of the
virtual Vintage Computer Festival West
of which Hackaday is a proud sponsor. (
Here’s the schedule
.)
And next weekend is DEF CON in Safe Mode with Networking. While we can totally imagine how the
talks
and
demo sessions
will work, the
Villages
, informal talks and hack-togethers based on a common theme, will be a real test of distributed conferencing.
OK, I’ll admit it: I really miss getting together with folks and having the truly random conversations that pre-scripted teleconferences just don’t seem to facilitate. Lobbycon suffers in lockdown. But if you’ve never been to any of these events, and you just want a taste of the talks and presentations at least, now’s your chance to get in for free. And if you like what you see, and if the virus lets us, we’ll see you in person next summer!
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
! | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267964",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T14:46:34",
"content": "“OK, I’ll admit it: I really miss getting together with folks and having the truly random conversations that pre-scripted teleconferences just don’t seem to facilitate. Lobbycon suffers in lockdown.”Just... | 1,760,373,401.230937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/youve-got-rat/ | You’ve Got Rat! | Jenny List | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"IFTTT",
"rat",
"trap"
] | If you home has never been subject to a rodent invasion then you are fortunate. Our world is full of rats and mice, and despite the best efforts of humanity to keep them at bay it is inevitable that a few will find their way through. For [Marius Taciuc] this became a problem, as his traps needed constant checking to avoid the prospect of a festering rat carcass. His solution? A humane trap equipped
with an ESP8266, that notifies him when the rodent is incarcerated
.
The tech behind it is about as simple as it’s possible to get, the trap’s door activates a switch, that powers on an ESP8266 module. The ESP’s code simply wakes it up, connects to a wireless network, and sends a query to IFTTT with a call to a service that sends him an email alert. There’s no need to monitor any GPIO lines or have any code running to keep an eye on the trap, it’s all purely a function of the power switch.
The trap itself is interesting, in that it’s a home-made one constructed from soldered copper wire. Sadly there are few details of its construction, but you can see more of it including a live rat inside it, in the video below the break. And if making a trap catches your interest,
we can help you there
. | 34 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267937",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T12:51:57",
"content": "And to think people keep those things as pets (my daughter being on of them, good thing she doesnt live at home anymore )Keeping the power off is one way to keep the standby current low – I seem to recall... | 1,760,373,401.587231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/this-mini-soviet-micro-will-have-astounding-attention-to-detail/ | This Mini Soviet Micro Will Have Astounding Attention To Detail | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"soviet",
"USSR",
"vector-06"
] | As the retro craze has gone mainstream, we’ve grown used to seeing “mini” versions of classic hardware, preloaded with a selection of games and ready for a wallow in nostalgia. Unfortunately for fans of the less well known platforms, the only devices to get the mini treatment so far are popular ones such as the Nintendo consoles, or the Commodore 64. This is something [Svofski] is aiming to change for one classic micro, by
producing a mini version of the Soviet Vector-06c
. And unlike the Commodore with its fake keyboard, this one will work in its entirety and have a fully-functional keyboard.
It’s a build that’s not finished yet. But in this case that’s no bad thing, because such is the extreme attention to detail that you’ll want to stick around and watch it unfold. The electronics will come courtesy of
an FPGA recreation of the hardware
, while the Vector’s unique keyboard is being recreated in miniature, with keycaps designed to fit a particular Alps switch. These are 3D-printed, painted, and then marked with their decals using stencils carefully etched from copper sheet. Even if you have no interest in the Vector-06c, these techniques could find a place in so many other projects.
The wonderfully ingenious and diverse world of Soviet technology has found its way onto these pages many times over the years, including
at least one other microcomputer
, and
even a supercomputer
. If your interests extend behind the Iron Curtain though, you might wish to read
our colleague [Voja Antonic]’s account of hacking in Communist Yugoslavia
. | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267932",
"author": "Jim Shortz",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T12:37:21",
"content": "Jenny – I’m a big fan of your articles but your two today are riddled with typos. Detracts from your otherwise excellent writing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,401.633104 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/hackaday-links-august-2-2020/ | Hackaday Links: August 2, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"boston dynamics",
"Covid-19",
"dog",
"google glass",
"hackaday links",
"kernel",
"lp0 on fire",
"robot",
"seismic",
"smog",
"solar",
"spot",
"UAP",
"UFO"
] | If you somehow manage to mentally separate yourself from the human tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic, it really has provided a fascinating glimpse into how our planet operates, and how much impact seven billion people have on it. Latest among these revelations is that the shutdowns had a salubrious effect in at least one unexpected area:
solar power
. Researchers found that after the Indian government instituted mandatory lockdowns in March, output from solar power installations in Delhi increased by more than eight percent. The cause: the much-diminished smog, which let more sunlight reach solar panels. We’ve seen similar shutdown-related Earth-impact stories, from
decreased anthropogenic seismicity
to
actually being able to see Los Angeles
, and find them all delightfully revealing.
Remember Google Glass? It’s hard to forget, what with all the hype leading up to launch and the bitter disappointment of realizing that actually wearing the device wouldn’t go over well in, say, a locker room. That said, the idea of smart glasses had promise, and several startups tried to make a go of combining functionality with less out-there styling that wouldn’t instantly be seen as probable cause for being a creep. One such outfit was
North
, who made the more-or-less regular looking (if a bit hipsterish) Focals smart glasses. But alas, North was bought out by Google back in June, and as with so many things Google acquires,
Focals smart glasses are being turned off
. Anyone who bought the $600 specs will reportedly get their money back, but the features of the smart glasses will no longer function. Except, you know, you’ll still be able to look through them.
It looks like someone has finally come up with a pretty good use case for the adorably terrifying robot mini-dogs from Boston Dynamics.
Ford Motors has put two of the yellow robots to work
in their sprawling Van Dyke Transmission Plant in Michigan. Dubbed Fluffy and Spot (aww), the dogs wander around the plant with a suite of cameras and sensors, digitally mapping the space to prepare for possible future modifications and expansions. The robots can cover a lot of ground during the two hours that their batteries last, and are even said to be able to hitch a ride on the backs of other robots when they’re tuckered out. Scanning projects like these can keep highly trained — and expensive — engineers busy for weeks, so the investment in robots makes sense. And we’re sure there’s totally no way that Ford is using the disarmingly cute robo-pets to keep track of its employees.
We all know that the Linux kernel has some interesting cruft in it, but did you know that it can actually alert you to the fact that your printer is aflame? We didn’t either until Editor-in-Chief Mike Szczys shared
this reddit post
that details the kernel function
lp_check_status
and how it assumes the worst if it detects the printer is online but also in “check mode.”
The Wikipedia entry
on the “lp0 on fire” error message has some interesting history that details how it’s not as implausible as it might seem for a printer, especially one in the early 1970s, to burst into flames under the right conditions. A toner fuser bar running amok on a modern laser printer is one thing, but imagine a printer with a fusing
oven
running out of control.
And finally, because 2020 is apparently the gift that can’t stop giving, at least in the weirdness department, the US Department of Defense let it slip that
the office charged with investigating unidentified aerial phenomena is not quite as disbanded as they once said it was
. Reported to have been defunded in 2017, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program actually appears to live on, as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, operating out of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Their purpose is ostensibly to study things like
the Navy videos of high-speed craft out-maneuvering fighter jets
, but there are whispers from former members of the task force that “objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study.” All this could just be a strategic misdirection, of course, but given everything else that has happened this year, we’re prepared to believe just about anything. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268213",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T23:17:51",
"content": "Well I have to say that looking at all the evidence gathered about UFOs, if they are Aliens (not chest bursters but little pale fellows with big eyes) then we can come to only one conclusion, Extraterre... | 1,760,373,401.684252 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/a-diy-6-5-digit-multimeter-is-a-lesson-in-clever-circuitry/ | A DIY 6.5-Digit Multimeter Is A Lesson In Clever Circuitry | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dual-slope ADC",
"multimeter",
"precision multimeter"
] | A multimeter is an easy prospect, right? Back in the day you could make one fairly easily with a decent panel meter and a set of precision resistors, and now a digital one can be had for throwaway prices from China.
But what if instead of a cheap-and-cheerful bench instrument your needs extend to a high-precision device, a really
good
multimeter? It’s a path [jaromir.sukuba] has trodden with
his 6.5 digit multimeter project
, and along the way he’s offered us a fascinating window into their design that should be of interest to any electronic engineer even if they never intend to build a multimeter.
The range selection network of switches and resistors, microcontroller, and seven-segment displays are universal to a multimeter design, meaning that there is nothing too special about them in a high-precision instrument except that here he’s using an FPGA for timing.
Where the meat lies in this project is in the ADC and its associated voltage reference, and for that he takes a surprising turn. Instead of taking an off-the-shelf ADC part from one of the usual manufacturers, he’s created his ADC from scratch using op-amps, and to understand why that is the case he takes us on a journey into the world of dual-slope integrating ADCs. These circuits are very well explained
in a 1989 HP journal article
(PDF, page 8), and are a clever design that measures the time taken to charge and discharge a capacitor from the voltage to be measured and compares it to the same time from the reference voltage.
The beauty of it comes out in the HP article, that the mathematics of the charge/discharge cycle cancel out any effects of the analogue component values, allowing the much higher precision of the reference and the clock timing to dictate that of the reading. We look forward to seeing more of this project.
It’s surprising how few home-made multimeters we have on these pages, perhaps because of those cheap ones. Of the few we’ve had, perhaps
this state-based Nixie one is most unusual
. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268188",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T20:44:57",
"content": "Amazing!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6268189",
"author": "jrfl",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T20:45:18",
"content": "I don’t understand why... | 1,760,373,401.747842 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/springs-and-things-wrap-into-a-polyhedron-of-interactive-led-art/ | Springs And Things Wrap Into A Polyhedron Of Interactive LED Art | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led",
"neopixel",
"polyhedron",
"soccer ball",
"spring",
"Teensy",
"TriantaduoWS2811"
] | Any resemblance between
The Wobble Sphere
and a certain virus making the rounds these days is purely coincidental. Although as yet another project undertaken during the COVID-19 lockdowns, we can see where the inspiration came from.
Wobble Sphere is another work of interactive art from the apparently spring-driven imagination of [Robin Baumgarten], whose
Quantum Garden
piece graced our pages last year. The earlier, flatter version used a collection of spring door stops — the kind that sound awesome when plucked by a passing foot — each of which is surrounded by a Neopixel ring. The springs act as touch sensors that change the patterns and colors on the LED rings in endlessly fascinating ways.
For Wobble Sphere, [Robin] took the same spring and LED units, broke them into a collection of hexagonal and pentagonal PCBs, and wrapped the whole thing up into a 72-sided polyhedron. There’s some impressive mechanical and electrical engineering involved in the transition from 2D to 3D space, not least of which is solving the problem of how to connect everything while providing pluck-friendly structural support. The former was accomplished with a ton of ribbon cables, while the latter was taken care of with a combination of a 3D-printed skeleton and solder connections between adjacent PCBs. The result is a display that invites touch and rewards it with beautiful patterns of light chasing around the sphere. See it in action in the video after the break.
Lest anyone think springs are the only tool in [Robin]’s box, we mustn’t forget that he once set
a knife-wielding Arduino-powered game
on an unsuspecting public. Check it out; it’s way more fun than it sounds. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268185",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T20:16:25",
"content": "ah, a cat toy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268214",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T23:20:00",
... | 1,760,373,401.786027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/little-jumping-bot-can-now-stick-the-perfect-landing/ | Little Jumping Bot Can Now Stick The Perfect Landing | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"balancing robot",
"jumping",
"monopedal",
"salto-1p"
] | Sticking the perfect landing can take years of practice for a human gymnast, and it seems the same is true for little monopedal jumping robots. Salto-1P, an old acquaintance here on Hackaday, always needed to keep jumping to stay upright. With some clever control software improvements, it can now
land reliably
on an area the size of a coin, and then stay there. (Video after the break)
[Justin Yim] from the UC Berkeley’s Biomimetics Lab has been working on Salto for the past four years, and we’ve
covered
it
twice
before. Attitude control is handles by a combination of propeller thrusters for roll and yaw, and a reaction wheel for pitch.While it was already impressive before, it had a predictable landing area about the size of a dinner plate.
The trick to the perfect landing is a combination of landing angle, angular velocity and angular momentum. Salto can only correct for ±2.3° of landing angle error, because it doesn’t have a second foot to catch itself when something goes wrong. Ideally the robot’s angular velocity and momentum should be as close as possible to 0 at takeoff, which gives the reaction wheel maximum control authority in flight, as well as on landing. Basically a well executed takeoff directly influences the chances of a good landing. [Justin] does an excellent job explaining all this and more on the
project’s presentation video.
What is the practical application of Salto, you may ask?
Search and rescue
of course.
Successfully controlling a robot like Salto is all about control theory. If you want to learn more about the field, you can check out some
online lectures
on the fundamentals, or get your feet wet with
self-blancing robots
.
Thanks [Qes] for the tip! | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268140",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T15:34:16",
"content": "Fantastic news! I mean, sure it’s way more likely that human hunting robots are going to all be gymnastic abilities allowing them to always stick the landing but it’s still cool. I, for one, welcome our ... | 1,760,373,401.83905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/swimming-pool-lap-counter-relies-on-ultrasound/ | Swimming Pool Lap Counter Relies On Ultrasound | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Lap counter",
"swimming"
] | Swimming is a great way to exercise, both for the cardiovascular benefits and the improved muscle tone. However, while he’s a fan, [Peter Quinn] sometimes finds it hard to keep track of how far he’s gone when he gets in the zone. Obviously, the solution is an electronic lap counter,
which [Peter] promptly set about creating.
The build is based around an ultrasonic distance sensor, which is triggered when it detects a swimmer approaching the end of the lane. It’s run by an Arduino Nano, which is also set up to announce the accumulated distance with a speech synth library. [Peter] notes there have been some stumbling blocks thus far, necessitating modifications along the way. Water ingress into the ultrasonic sensor has required the installation of a protective shroud, while battery operation has required a module to properly handle the lithium-polymer battery.
While we might hesitate to bring a takeaway container full of wires, circuit boards and an LED display to a public pool for fear of being deemed a bomber, the basic bones of the project are a great way to approach the problem. There’s plenty of scope to implement laptiming too,
as we’ve seen in other sporting builds! | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268147",
"author": "miked",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T16:38:54",
"content": "If my next house doesn’t have a lap pool adding one will be seriously considered. This lap counter is a much better way to keep track than my previous method which was guessing the time.",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,373,401.932986 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/02/digital-caliper-talks-for-accessibility-with-this-app/ | Digital Caliper Talks For Accessibility, With This App | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"accessibility",
"caliper",
"metrology"
] | A good instrument stays with its owner for a lifetime, becoming part of their essential trusted toolkit to be consulted as a matter of habit. If you use a caliper to measure dimensions you’ll know this, and a quick glance at its scale or digital display will be second nature. But if you aren’t fortunate enough to have the eyesight to see the caliper, then it’s off-limits, and that’s something [Naomi Wu] has addressed
with her open-source accessible speaking caliper app
. It’s an Android app that connects to digital calipers that contain Bluetooth connectivity, and as well as speaking aloud the caliper reading it also displays it in very large text on the device screen. As well as the source link from which you can build the app,
it’s available for installation directly from the Google Play Store
.
If you’re used to [Naomi] from her video tours of the electronics businesses in her native Shenzhen, her eye-catching wearable projects, or her exploits with an industrial CNC machine in her living room, you might be interested to know that aside from this app she’s been a long-time proponent of open-source in China. She was responsible among other projects for
the Sino:bit educational computer board
, which holds the distinction for her of having secured
the first ever Chinese OSHWA certification
.
You can see the caliper app in action below the break. | 38 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268095",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T09:04:03",
"content": "Sigrok/Pulseview recently added caliper support as well:https://sigrok.org/wiki/Protocol_decoder:Caliper",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6268106",
... | 1,760,373,402.00461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/08/01/art-piece-builds-up-images-with-dots-on-thread/ | Art Piece Builds Up Images With Dots On Thread | Dan Maloney | [
"Art"
] | [
"art",
"plotter",
"printer",
"solenoid",
"stepper",
"textile",
"thread"
] | Hackers being as a rule practical people, we sometimes get a little guff when we run a story on an art installation, on the grounds of not being sufficiently hacky. We understand that, but sometimes the way an artist weaves technology into their pieces is just too cool to pass us, as with
this thread-printing art piece
entitled
On Framing Textile Ambiguities
.
We’ll leave criticism of the artistic statement that [Nathalie Gebert]’s installation makes to others more qualified, and instead concentrate on its technical aspects. The piece has four frames made mainly from brass rods. Three of the frames have vertical rods that are connected to stepper motors and around which is wrapped a single thread. The thread weaves back and forth over the rods on one frame, forming a flat surface that constantly changes as the rods rotate, before heading off to do the same on the others. The fourth frame has a platen that the thread passes over with a pen positioned right above it. As the thread pauses in its endless loop, the pen clicks down onto it, making a dot of color. The dots then wend their way through the frame, occasionally making patterns that are just shy of recognizable before morphing into something new. The video below shows it better than it can be easily described.
Love it or hate it, you’ve got to admit that it has some interesting potential as a display. And it sort of reminds us of
this thread-art polar robot
, although this one has the advantage of being far simpler. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6268096",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2020-08-02T09:07:55",
"content": "Use some kind of non-porous thread (nylon fishing line?) with whiteboard marker, so it can be wiped and recirculated to display new image…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},... | 1,760,373,402.045665 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/reverse-engineering-the-charge-pump-of-an-8086-microprocessor/ | Reverse Engineering The Charge Pump Of An 8086 Microprocessor | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8086",
"bias",
"capacitor",
"charge pump",
"decapping",
"die",
"intel",
"silicon",
"substrate"
] | You’d think that the 8086 microprocessor, a 40-year-old chip with a mere 29,000 transistors on board that kicked off the 16-bit PC revolution, would have no more tales left to tell. But as [Ken Shirriff] discovered,
reverse engineering the chip from die photos
reveals some hidden depths.
The focus of [Ken]’s exploration of the venerable chip is the charge pump, a circuit that he explains was used to provide a bias voltage across the substrate of the chip. Early chips generally took this -5 volt bias voltage from a pin, which meant designers had to provide a bipolar power supply. To reduce the engineering effort needed to incorporate the 8086 into designs, Intel opted for an on-board charge pump to generate the bias voltage. The circuit consists of a ring oscillator made from a trio of inverters, a pair of transistors, and some diodes to act as check valves. By alternately charging a capacitor and switching its polarity relative to the substrate, the needed -5 volt bias is created.
Given the circuit required, it was pretty easy for [Ken] to locate it on the die. The charge pump takes up a relatively huge amount of die space, which speaks to the engineering decisions Intel made when deciding to include it. [Ken] drills down to a very low level on the circuit, with fascinating details on how the MOSFETs were constructed, and why eight transistors were used instead of two diodes. As usual, his die photos are top quality, as are his explanations of what’s going on down inside the silicon.
If you’re somehow just stumbling upon [Ken]’s body of work, you’re in for a real treat. To get you started, you’ll want to check out how he found
pi baked into the silicon of the 8087 coprocessor
, or perhaps
his die-level exploration of different Game Boy audio chips
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267915",
"author": "Sweeney",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T10:19:08",
"content": "The point was (a) not to waste another pin for the supply voltage and (b) reduce the amount of support circuitry. The TMS9900 (also a 16 bit CPU, but a couple of years older) needs a +5, -5 and 12V rail i... | 1,760,373,402.25199 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/sanitizer-dispenser-does-it-hands-free/ | Sanitizer Dispenser Does It Hands-Free | Lewin Day | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"COVID",
"hand sanitizer",
"hygiene"
] | Hand sanitizer is
the
hot product of 2020, and it seems nobody can get enough. In the same way that touching a dirty tap takes the shine off washing your hands in a public bathroom, one wishes to avoid touching the hand sanitizer bottle entirely. To get around this,
[makendo] whipped up a quick solution.
The solution consists of a 3D printed caddy which holds a typical bottle of hand sanitizer. This is affixed to a wall with either screws or double sided tape. A long string is then attached to the dispenser nozzle, and passes down to a foot pedal. By depressing the pedal, it pulls on the string, pulling down the dispenser nozzle and delivering the required sanitizer to the hands.
It’s by no means an advanced hack, but one that can be whipped up in a short time to make sanitizing one’s hands just that little bit more pain-free. If you’re still short on sanitizer, you might want to make your own. If you do,
let us know how it goes.
Otherwise,
consider alternate methods of automating the delivery! | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267871",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T03:22:20",
"content": ">one wishes to avoid touching the hand sanitizer bottle entirely.You are washing your hands that are assumed to be contaminated in soap or sanitizer, so whether the button was clean or not doesn’t matt... | 1,760,373,402.170469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/electric-skateboard-with-tank-tracks-from-a-big-3d-printer/ | Electric Skateboard With Tank Tracks, From A Big 3D Printer | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric skateboard",
"ivan miranda",
"large scale 3d printing",
"tank track"
] | One of the basic truths of ground vehicles is that they are always cooler with tank tracks. Maybe not better, but definitely cooler. [Ivan Miranda] takes this to heart, and is arguably the king of 3D printed tank projects on YouTube. He has built a giant
3D printed electric skateboard with tank tracks
with the latest version of his
giant 3D printer
. Videos after the break.
The skateboard consists of a large steel frame, with tracked bogies on either end. Most of the bogie components are 3D printed, including the wheels and tracks, and each bogie is driven by a brushless motor via a belt. Some bends were added to the steel frame with just 3D printed inserts for his bench vice. The bogies are mounted to the frame with a standard skateboard truck, which allows it to steer like a normal skateboard, by tilting the deck. It looks as though this works well on a smooth concrete floor, but we suspect that turning will be harder on rough surface where the tracks can’t slide. We’ll have to wait for the next video for a full field test.
The large components for this skateboard were printed on [Ivan]’s MK3 version of his giant 3D printer. Although it’s very similar to the
previous version
, improvements were made in key areas. The sliding bed frame’s weight was reduced by almost 50%, and the wheels were rotated, so they ride on top of the extrusion below it, instead of on it’s side, which helps the longevity of the wheels. This also allows bed levelling to be done by turning the eccentric spacers on each of the wheels. The rigidity of base frame and x-axis beam were increased by adding more aluminium extrusions. Although he doesn’t explicitly mention the print volume, it looks to be the same as the previous version, which was 800x500x500. For materials other than PLA, we suspect a heated build chamber will be required have any chance of making big prints without excessive warping.
[Ivan] really likes big prints, with a number of
3D printed tanks
, a
giant nerf gun
, and a
sand drawing bot
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267869",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-08-01T02:55:50",
"content": "Those don’t seem a whole lot different in size than the ones you can get for ATVs",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6267888",
"author": "Gregg... | 1,760,373,402.124667 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/producing-a-prop-gun-that-actually-ejects-cases/ | Producing A Prop Gun That Actually Ejects Cases | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"movie prop",
"prop",
"prop gun",
"props"
] | With the movie
Man of War
shooting in Cyprus, there was a problem. They needed prop guns that looked realistic and ejected cases when fired, but that were also allowed under the country’s firearm laws. The task fell on [Paradym’s] shoulders,
and he set to work producing a prop capable of doing the job.
With the laws in Cyprus, using anything off-the-shelf like an Airsoft pistol was simply not allowed. Instead, he had to start from scratch, creating a design outwardly similar to the Colt 1911 to suit the era of the film. Using green gas canisters for power, the first focus was on getting a realistic semi-automatic firing cycle happening. With that done, the next goal was to get the cases to eject from the weapon on each shot. To achieve this, a lever was used, actuated by the slide moving back after a shot, pushing the “spent” cartridge out of the port.
[Paradym] goes into great deal, covering the design of the 3D printed parts, the machining of springs, as well as the final assembly of the prop.
We’ve seen other prop gun builds before, too.
Video after the break. | 34 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267825",
"author": "fpp2002",
"timestamp": "2020-07-31T20:22:06",
"content": "WETA workshop has been working on similar guns, that not only eject fake shells, but give realistic kickback, and bright muzzle flashes. Unfortunately, the video is only available to Premium members of T... | 1,760,373,402.31564 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/transform-kicad-design-to-patchwork-for-isolation-routing/ | Transform Kicad Design To Patchwork For Isolation Routing | Danie Conradie | [
"Software Hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"custom PCB",
"engraving",
"etching",
"KiCAD",
"milling",
"voronoi"
] | Tuning a desktop router and your board designs for isolation routing can be a bit tricky, with thin traces usually being the first victim. For simple prototype boards you usually don’t need tightly packed traces, you just want to isolate the nets. To do this with a minimum amount of routing, [
Michael Schembri] created
kicad-laser-min
, a command-line utility that takes a Kicad PCB design and expands all the tracks and pads to their maximum possible width.
Laser scribed PCB with maximum track widths
The software takes one layer of the PCB layout, converts it to black and white, and then runs a C++
Voronoi
algorithm on it to dilate each track and pad until it meets another expanding region. Each region is colourised, and OpenCV edge detection is used to produce the contours that need to be milled or etched. A contour following algorithm is then used to create the G-code. The header image shows the output of each step.
Full source code is available on
GitHub
. [
Michael] has had good results with his own boards, which are scribed using a laser cutter before etching, but welcomes testing and feedback from other users. He has found that OpenCV doesn’t always completely close all the contours, but the gaps are usually smaller than the engraving width of his laser, so no shorts are created.
This is basically
“Scribble style” prototyping
with CAD and CNC tools. If you prefer scribe and etch, you might consider building a simple
PCB shaker
for faster etching. If you have a router but want to avoid the dust, you can use a
carbide scribe to scratch out the tracks
without needing to etch. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267818",
"author": "Danny Andreev",
"timestamp": "2020-07-31T20:02:40",
"content": "WOW, this is actually so useful!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6267835",
"author": "Torsten Martinsen",
"timestamp": "2020-07-31T20:5... | 1,760,373,402.468679 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/campzone-2020-badge-literally-speaks-to-us/ | CampZone 2020 Badge Literally Speaks To Us | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"badge",
"badge.team",
"badgelife",
"CampZone",
"HackZone",
"WebUSB"
] | The pandemic has left my usual calendar of events in shambles this year. Where I’d have expected to have spent a significant portion of my summer mingling with our wonderful and diverse community worldwide, instead I’m sitting at home cracking open a solitary Club-Mate and listening to muffled techno music while trying to imagine myself in a field somewhere alongside several thousand hackers.
As a knock-on effect of the event cancellations there’s another thing missing this summer, the explosion of creativity in the world of electronic conference badges has faltered. Badges are thin on the ground this year, so the few that have made it to production are to be treasured as reminders that life goes on and there will be another golden summer of hacker camps in the future. This year, the CampZone 2020 badge was given its own voice and perform neat tricks like presenting a programming interface via WebUSB!
A Badge, That Isn’t Quite A Badge
All the parts laid out
CampZone
is a European event mostly for the gaming community but incorporating the HackZone event within it. The in-person conference has been cancelled this year and gone online like so many others, but that hasn’t stopped its badge creator Tom Clement and team bringing out the CampZone 2020 badge anyway.
The result is the
AerPane
, pronounced “Ear-pain” in a reference to the
2019 i-Pane
, and a design that continues the theme of CampZone badges by providing an in-your-face multimedia experience for musical experimenters with onboard speakers and a very bright LED-lit 16-key silicone keyboard. It runs the well-established
badge.team
firmware under the skin, so when I ordered my badge I was interested to see just how they had managed to incorporate a rich interface into such minimal UI hardware.
Inserting the flat ribbon cable is a little fiddly
In my package from the Netherlands was the badge kit, containing two PCBs, a bag of hardware, and the silicone keyboard overlay. The badge could be ordered with either of two versions of the keyboard, one with 12 mm tall keys and the other that I fitted with shorter ones about 8 mm. The main PCB is about 111 mm by 100 mm and has a row of touch buttons, the keypad button contacts, and the LEDs on the top with the rest of the components on the underside. The smaller PCB meanwhile is about 40 mm by 100 mm, holds the speakers, and is connected via a short flat ribbon cable.
Assembly
was fairly straightforward, with the silicone held in place by the plastic stand-offs that double as a stand for the badge, and the speaker board secured by a pair of clip-on 45 degree plastic angle brackets. The speakers themselves are secured with a self-adhesive ring, and have small PCB connectors. The fiddliest part of the assembly is fitting the ribbon cable, something in which I found a good pair of tweezers to be very useful.
The components on the rear of the PCB
Looking at the hardware on the underside of the board, there is an ESP32-WROVER-2 module that does the heavy lifting, and an Apex Microelectronics APM32F103C8 definitely-not-an-STM32 microcontroller that handles the USB interface. The ESP has a microSD card holder, one of the type with the flip-up lid rather than a slide-in. Further down there are a brace of LED driver chips and a Shenzhen Titan TM8211 i2s DAC with a pair of audio driver chips. Finally there is an unpopulated area for a battery charger and LiPo circuit. Connectivity comes via a USB-C port at the rear of the main board. Mentioning the unpopulated battery circuit area brings us to an important point about the badge, in a strict sense it’s not really a badge at all if you take a badge to be a wearable device. Instead it’s a standalone unit that’s best sitting on a flat surface.
Connecting the badge for the first time to USB-C power sends it into a one-off startup sequence, with flashing LEDs and impressive sounds, and then we gain our first experience of the badge interface as a synthesised voice tells us that a long press on a lit-up button reveals the app it launches, and a short press launches that app. It comes with five apps preinstalled: a simple polyphonic sine wave synthesiser, a four-in-a-row game, a MIDI controller app, a Dutch radio app, and an app that acts as a USB-HID keyboard and types “Cyber” to the host computer. This last one refers to a “CYBER” meme among European hackerspaces, and yes of course its occurrence in the previous sentence was typed using the app on my badge.
WebUSB Brings A New Convenience To Badges
The code editor and Python shell
The badge’s physical characteristics now described, it’s time to plug it into the computer and investigate its other features. It’s here that this badge really pushes the envelope in ease-of-use terms, because instead of requiring a toolchain or a terminal, it can be accessed directly for development via WebUSB. Simply point a WebUSB-capable browser at
webusb.hackz.one
, and immediately there is a list of available apps. Just like all the other badge.team badges, these are hosted on their app store referred to as the hatchery, and using MicroPython they are very easy to write without low-level knowledge of the hardware itself. Even better, the AerPane brings development into the browser via WebUSB with a code editor and a MicroPython prompt, allowing instant code hackery. I dove in and borrowed some code from one of the existing clock apps to combine with a project I wrote years ago, and within about half an hour I had
my resistor colour code clock
up on the hatchery.
This badge was designed for a gamer event at which many of the participants are not coders and are more likely to own a Windows machine than one running Linux or another OS. Thus the WebUSB approach makes excellent sense as a route to entice them into coding for it, but we can see it’s something that may be less welcome in some circles as WebUSB isn’t supported by all browsers. In particular Firefox users will have to find a Chrome-based browser, and I had to follow
a few instructions
to get it all working with Chromium on my Ubuntu box. Its design though is fresh and new, it’s a fun and engaging peripheral that you’ll want to play with, and its ease of coding is taken to new heights with the WebUSB interface.
It’s all open-source,
and we are really looking forward to seeing some of its ideas influencing the next crop of badges from the global #BadgeLife community. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267797",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2020-07-31T18:22:14",
"content": "This is the case where you can say it literally virtually speaks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6267865",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp... | 1,760,373,402.556178 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/hackaday-podcast-078-happy-b-day-mp3-eavesdropping-on-a-mars-probe-shadowcasting-7-segments-and-a-spicy-commodore-64/ | Hackaday Podcast 078: Happy B-Day MP3, Eavesdropping On A Mars Probe, Shadowcasting 7-Segments, And A Spicy Commodore 64 | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"7-segment display",
"commodore 64",
"ESP8266",
"Falcon 9",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"mars mission",
"mp3",
"plasma cutter",
"Tianwen-1"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys go down the rabbit hole of hacky hacks. A talented group of radio amateurs have been recording and decoding the messages from Tianwen-1, the Mars probe launched by the Chinese National Space Administration on July 23rd. We don’t know exactly
how
magnets work, but know they do a great job of protecting your plasma cutter. You can’t beat the retro-chic look of a Commodore 64’s menu system, even if it’s tasked with something mundane like running a meat smoker. And take a walk with us down MP3’s memory lane.
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 078 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Hands-On: The Pandemic DEF CON Badge Is An Audio Cassette
DEF CON 28 Badge Hacking
Stay At Home, HOPE And DEF CON Will Come To You
Saturday: Vintage Computer Festival West
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
What Is The Tianwen-1 Probe Saying?
Space Packet Protocol
(PDF)
Tracking Tianwen-1’s orbit to Mars: part II – Daniel Estévez
Chinese Mars probe Tianwen-1 successfully received by AMSAT-DL – AMSAT-Deutschland
UHF-Satcom
ESP8266 Makes A Wireless Card Reader
Simple Plasma Cutter Collision Detection System
Books You Should Read: Exact Constraint: Machine Design Using Kinematic Principles
Jubilee: A Toolchanging Homage To 3D Printer Hackers Everywhere
Mechanical Seven-Segment Display Really Sticks Out From The Pack
Smoking Meat With A Commodore 64
This Four-Axis Stencil Printer Is The Ultimate In SMD Alignment Tools
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Trick From 1903 Makes An Old Monochrome TV Spit Some Colours
New Release Of FidoCadJ Draws Schematics Everywhere
The Swiss Army Knife Of Bench Tools
Mike’s Picks:
USB-C Where It Was Never Intended To Be
Panic Button Is An Audio-Visual Parachute Out Of Zoom Calls
RadioGlobe Takes The World Of Internet Radio For A Spin
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Falcon 9 Beats Shuttle’s Reflight Record, But Still Has A Long Way To Go
From Oldest to Youngest: The Average Fleet Age of the 10 Major U.S. Airlines
MP3 Is 25 Years Old! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,402.509857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/the-internet-of-bubble-machines/ | The Internet Of Bubble Machines | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bubbles",
"IoT",
"Pi",
"relay",
"remo"
] | Everyone loves a good bubble machine. These oddly satisfying novelty items have brought children and adults mindless entertainment since their inception. [8BitsAndAByte] had the same thought, but wanted to
give their bubble machine a taste of the IoT-age
.
First, they modified an off-the-shelf bubble machine with a Raspberry Pi and relay module. The Pi can easily trigger the bubbling mechanism by controlling power to the machine using the relay. Seems simple enough. The part of this project that might be a bit more unfamiliar to you is controlling the robot over the internet using
remo.tv
.
Remo.tv is a robot controller platform that’s both free and open-source, and
we’ve seen [8BitsAndAByte] take advantage of this web controller before
. Seems like they’re really getting the hang of it. Their writeup links to a detailed setup guide for configuring the Pi, so hopefully, that’s not too much trouble.
Couple the IoT setup with a Pi camera and you’ve got a live stream that’s admittedly oddly satisfying to watch
with or without the bubbles
.
https://youtu.be/Mp7LrYoTGsY | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267770",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2020-07-31T16:21:25",
"content": "Human blown bubbles are biological weapons and people who blow then should be treated as terrorists.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6268184",
"a... | 1,760,373,402.605417 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/this-week-in-security-twilio-pogotv-and-boothole/ | This Week In Security: Twilio, PongoTV, And BootHole | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"BootHole",
"PogoTV",
"This Week in Security"
] | Twilio, the cloud provider for all things telecom, had
an embarrassing security fail
a couple weeks ago. The problem was the Amazon S3 bucket that Twilio was using to host part of their public facing content. The bucket was configured for public read-write access. Anyone could use the Amazon S3 API to make changes to the files stored there.
The files in question were protected behind Cloudflare’s CDN, but there’s a catch to Cloudflare’s service. If you know the details of the service behind Cloudflare, it can often be interacted with directly. In many cases, knowing the IP address of the server being protected is enough to totally bypass Cloudflare altogether. In this case, the service behind the CDN is Amazon’s S3. Any changes made to the files there are picked up by the CDN.
Someone discovered the insecure bucket, and modified a Javascript file that is distributed as part of the Twilio JS SDK. That modification was initially described as “non-malicious”, but in
the official incident report
, Twilio states that the injected code is part of an ongoing magecart campaign carried out against misconfigured S3 buckets.
IPTV
We received a story on the Hackaday tip line this week about a Swedish IPTV service, Pongo IPTV. This report is unsubstantiated, but there seems to be something going on. At the very least, pongotv.com is currently returning a Cloudflare error, “This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.”
A pair of
Youtube
videos
seem to show access to the Pongotv backend, with exposed customer records and all. At this point, I have to stress that this is unconfirmed report. Based on the details provided, it sounds like the tipster is actually pretty closely involved with this story, maybe even part of the group that is behind the attack.
Espressif
[Lukas Bachschwell]
discovered a flaw in the Espressif SDK
, tracked as CVE-2020-12638. The vulnerability affects devices running firmware built using the vulnerable SDK. In short, it allows a WiFi authentication downgrade attack. An attacker can inject WiFi traffic, and cause the device to connect to a network under the attacker’s control. For devices used for home automation and other similar applications, this could have serious consequences. Patches are available for most of the devices the SDK covers, and the rest are in progress.
D-Link Patches EOL Device
In response to a series of flaws discovered by researchers at Loginsoft,
D-Link has released firmware for an End Of Life device
, and strongly recommends taking other affected devices out of use. The devices in question are the DAP-1520, DAP-1522, and DIR-816L.
These aren’t sophisticated vulnerabilities, either. The first one,
CVE-2020-15892
, can be triggered as simply as sending 256 characters as the password when trying to log in. The login page limits this value to 15 characters, but that limit is imposed on the client side, so an attacker can easily manipulate the raw response to bypass that restriction. The longer than expected password overflows the buffer and crashes the device. A proper exploit would take it over instead.
Another rather trivial vulnerability,
CVE-2020-15893
, affects the DIR-816L. A shell command can be injected in a UPnP request, as simply as including a semicolon in the packet data. When the UPnP request is parsed, part of it is used as a command line option. Including a semicolon breaks out of that command, and allows executing arbitrary commands.
Sharepoint
CVE-2020-1147 is a vulnerability in Microsoft Sharepoint, found by multiple researchers independently. [Steven] at Source Insight
wrote up an explainer on the bug
, and concludes that at its heart it’s a deserialization issue. In this case, it seems that functions of a DataSet object, like
parse()
and
Deserialize()
can be overwritten by the data being deserialized.
The write-up includes a full PoC, so consider this vulnerability to fully weaponized already. Patches are available, so be sure to go take care of your Sharepoint servers. [Steven] also suggests that we’ll see this same bug show up in other .net applications, as the DataSet object has been considered safe for outside data.
Apple Research Device
Apple has announced
the Security Research Device
, a modified iPhone that is essentially rooted from the factory. The program is run in typical Apple fashion, as the device is only loaned out 12 months at a time, and comes with a list of do’s and don’ts. I have to wonder if this is a response to
Google Project Zero’s debuggable iPhone work
from last year. Either way, Project Zero’s [Ben Hawkes] has already issued a statement that the program is likely a non-starter for them, as their strict 90 day disclosure policy is incompatible with the sign-up agreement.
BootHole
And finally,
a vulnerability in Grub2 was released this week, BootHole
. This vulnerability is a rather simple buffer overflow bug that can be triggered by a malicious
grub.cfg
file. You might point out that if an attacker can modify
grub.cfg
, isn’t the system hopelessly compromised anyway? This is a fair question, and the answer is yes, usually. What makes BootHole novel is that taking control of Grub in this way can allow a Secure Boot bypass. This will obviously be more important in specific use cases where Secure Boot is a key part of security.
This vulnerability was found by [eclypsium], who privately disclosed the bug to the Grub developers and other upstream projects. Patches are available, so make sure to get those updates installed. If your curious about the in-depth details, the writeup and
PDF
on BootHole are quite detailed, go check them out. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267768",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2020-07-31T16:11:34",
"content": "And yet another exploit made possible by the lack of a length check on a data field, in this case the 15 character password.People must keep in mind that when you exchange data things can go wrong! And ... | 1,760,373,402.647988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/31/patent-law-and-the-legality-of-making-something-similar/ | Patent Law And The Legality Of Making Something Similar | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"design patent",
"legal",
"patent law",
"registered design"
] | When [Erich Styger] recently got featured on Hackaday with his meta-clock project, he probably was not expecting to get featured again so soon, this time regarding a
copyright claim on the ‘meta-clock’ design
. This particular case ended with [Erich] removing the original blog article and associated PCB design files, leaving just the summaries, such as the
original Hackaday article
on the project.
Obviously, this raises the question of whether any of this is correct; if one sees a clock design, or other mechanisms that appeals and tries to replicate its looks and functioning in some fashion, is this automatically a breach of copyright? In the case of [Erich]’s project, one could argue that at first glance both devices look remarkably similar. One might also argue that this is rather unavoidable, considering the uncomplicated design of the original.
Not copyright, but patent law
An inherent property of copyright law in most jurisdictions is that the act of creating a work automatically grants one the copyright to that work. In most jurisdictions (e.g. the EU), signing away one’s copyright is even forbidden by law. Not so with patent law. Here we have two distinct forms, one being patents as we all know and love them, for the patenting of ideas and inventions. The other form concerns itself with what a product looks like: its design.
In the US this is referred to as a ‘
design patent
‘, while elsewhere it is referred to as a ‘registered design’, which effectively comes down to the same thing. It means that one can patent for example the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle, or in the case of the folk at
Humans Since 1982
(‘HS1982’) the look of their meta-clocks, in not
one
, but
two
EU registered designs.
Comparative analysis
We can compare the two designs side by side to see how similar they are.
The top design is [Erich]’s, while the lower design is HS1982’s clock (black version). Both have the same 8×3 hole pattern, similar color scheme, and so on. That the HS1982’s version is in a mineral composite housing and [Erich]’s in a wooden enclosure is hereby not relevant as it does not change the design. To the casual observer it might indeed appear as if both follow the same design.
Since design registrations are meant to deter companies from for example selling their own soft drink in a bottle that looks exactly like a Coca-Cola one, down to the label design, it makes sense that HS1982 came down on [Erich] and others with similar clock designs like the proverbial sack of bricks.
Naturally, the next question which one should ask here is whether it makes any difference that this was a freely available, open project. Meaning that there was no intention to sell such clocks, or even provide all of the necessary information to assemble a clock from scratch, including the software.
Consistency is key
Although with patents and design registrations there is no need to actively pursue infringement cases to keep the patent as is the case with trademarks, it’s likely that to HS1982 there was no question of tolerating any form of infringement. Their audience appears to be those interested in exclusive art pieces, with the device described by them as ‘both a kinetic sculpture and a functioning clock’.
The manufacturing costs of a single
ClockClock24
device is unlikely to be even half the asking price of $6,000 to $10,700, even taking into the account that each version is a limited edition. Yet this asking price remains only ‘legitimate’ if the product remains as exclusive as possible. This provides HS1982 with enough incentive to actively seek out and destroy any similar products. In the end we are talking about sculptures, i.e. art, here.
This isn’t just like one smartphone manufacturer accusing the other manufacturer of also making their smartphone into a black, rounded rectangular slab with glass covering. The ironic thing is probably that any number of small changes to [Erich]’s project could likely have made the registered design not apply, such as through the addition of a colon between the hours and minutes, adding seconds, making the box into an oval, or changing the number of rotating elements.
Not all is lost
As [Erich] also notes in his blog post, there are still certain ‘fair use’ provisions with registered designs. Nobody is going to bust down the doors of a kindergarten when one of the preschoolers clumsily draws a Coca-Cola bottle without explicit permission from Coca-Cola’s lawyers. Similarly, anyone can in theory make their own copy of HS1982’s ClockClock24 clock so long as they do not sell it or otherwise make it publicly available.
This knowledge should give anyone who sets out to copy a design which they saw somewhere and liked at least some idea of how far they can take it. Publishing the project on a blog and making the design files available is the part where things can get dicey. Even making small alterations to the original design are not guaranteed to keep one from getting harassed by a company’s irate lawyers.
While there is a small chance of victory if [Erich] or someone else were to take a case like this to court, to argue that small-fry open-hardware projects are unlikely to harm the profits or sales of a company like HS1982, it would essentially be asking the law makers to add a major exception to patent law that would no doubt come with its own set of headaches.
In the meantime it seems that we can do little but get a chuckle out of the ClockClock24 clones available on Chinese stores for peanuts. | 61 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6267683",
"author": "Will",
"timestamp": "2020-07-31T11:16:43",
"content": "“Similarly, anyone can in theory make their own copy of HS1982’s ClockClock24 clock so long as they do not sell it or otherwise make it publicly available.”This right here. Take down any files for sale (PCB’... | 1,760,373,402.780549 |
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