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https://hackaday.com/2020/05/31/building-one-test-fixture-to-rule-them-all/ | Building One Test Fixture To Rule Them All | Donald Papp | [
"hardware",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"4066",
"jig",
"laser cut",
"one-off",
"pogo pins",
"programming fixture",
"sparkfun",
"test fixture"
] | Test and programming fixtures are great time-savers for anyone who needs to deal with more than a handful of PCBs. Instead of plugging in connectors (or awkwardly holding probe tips or wires) to program some firmware or run tests, one simply pops a PCB into a custom fixture with one hand, and sips a margarita with the other while a program decides whether everything is as it should be. Test fixtures tend to be custom-made for specific board layouts, meaning one tester is needed per board or device type, but this work is easily justified by the huge time savings they offer.
An inserted PCB sits atop the thick acrylic piece, with pogo pins making contact from below. Generous space on the left and right make sure there is clearance for any mounted components. Visible near the bottom of the green board are output LEDs, and two touch-sensitive pads.
But the fine folks at Sparkfun’s quality control department figured they could save even more time by exploiting common design features across different boards, and shared details about designing
a single test fixture flexible enough to handle multiple board types and designs
.
The test unit looks like pretty familiar stuff at first glance: some hardware responsible for running the test program, laser-cut acrylic jig to hold a test PCB in a consistent position, spring-loaded pogo pins to make temporary electrical connections, and LEDs to clearly indicate PASS and FAIL states. The clever part is the way the fixture is designed to accommodate multiple board designs, and how it uses several 74LVC4066 quad bilateral switch ICs to take care of switching which pogo pins are connected and to where.
As mentioned, to be compatible with multiple boards there must be common design elements to exploit. In Sparkfun’s case, the through-hole connections on their breakout boards are all in a row with standard 0.1″ spacing. By using the aforementioned pogo pins and 4066 ICs, different pinouts can be accommodated and multiple board types can be used without any need to swap to different test hardware.
Test and programming fixtures, being one-offs, tend to have a lot of space for creativity and often show clever design or re-purposing of parts.
Our own [Bob Baddeley] explains all about them here
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250301",
"author": "Erik van Baarle",
"timestamp": "2020-06-01T08:20:39",
"content": "The 2 pictures of the product should be swapped to match the annotation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6250368",
"author": "Beef",
... | 1,760,373,472.001888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/31/if-this-is-your-inspiration-from-space-youre-doing-it-wrong/ | If This Is Your Inspiration From Space, You’re Doing It Wrong | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Rants",
"Space"
] | [
"careers",
"nasa",
"space"
] | So after a false start due to bad weather, the first crewed launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule with two astronauts on board has gone ahead. After playing catch-up with the ISS for around 27 hours they’re now safely aboard. At times it seems that space launches have become everyday occurrences, but they are still heroes who have risked their lives in the furtherment of mankind’s exploration of space. Their achievement, and that of all the scientists, engineers, and other staff who stand behind them, is immense.
I watched the drama unfold via the live video feed. Having heaved a huge sigh of relief once they were safely in orbit, the feed cut to the studio, and then moved on to interview the NASA administrator
Jim Bridenstine
. He was naturally elated at a successful launch, and enthused about the agency’s achievement. You can watch the full interview embedded below, but what caught my attention was
his parting sentence
:
And if this can inspire a young child to become the next Elon Musk, or the next Jeff Bezos, or the next Sir Richard Branson, then that’s what this is all about
I was slightly shocked and saddened to hear this from the NASA administrator, because to my mind the careers of Musk, Bezos, or Branson should not be the ones first brought to mind by a space launch. This isn’t a comment on those three in themselves; although they have many critics it is undeniable that they have each through their respective space companies brought much to the world of space flight. Instead it’s a comment on what a NASA administrator should be trying to inspire in kids.
Ask yourself how many billionaire masters-of-the-universe it takes for a successful space race compared to the number of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technicians, physicists, et al. From the anecdote of the NASA administrator it takes about three, but if he is to make good on his goal of returning to the Moon in 2024 and then eventually taking humanity to Mars it will take a generation packed full of those other roles. To understand that we’ll have to take a trip back to the Apollo era, and how that generation of kids were inspired by the spacecraft on their screens.
Inspiration from probably the coolest room in the world at the time, the Apollo mission control in Houston. NASA on The Commons /
No restrictions
Fifty years ago, we were very much on the brink of becoming a spacefaring planet. American astronauts were taking their first steps on the Moon, and Soviet cosmonauts were occupying real space stations that would soon be capable of housing them for months at a time. Planetary probes were returning colour TV pictures from other worlds, and it was certain that in the immediate aftermath of the Apollo programme we’d be sending astronauts and probably cosmonauts too further afield. A Mars base in the 1980s perhaps, and following our fictional
Star Trek
heroes further afield thereafter.
We now know it didn’t quite work out that way, but a whole generation of tech-inclined kids grew up wanting nothing more than to be involved in space flight. The vast majority of us never made it, but with that inspiration we took our soldering irons and 8-bit home computers and ran with them. Those NASA folks were the
coolest
of role-models, and no doubt their Soviet equivalents were too for kids on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
With the best will in the world, the chances of any kid becoming the next Jeff Bezos is about as high as that of their becoming the next Neil Armstrong. Compared to the number of kids in the world, the number of billionaires and the number of astronauts both pale into statistical insignificance. But the chances of a kid becoming an engineer or a scientist is much higher, and in those careers their chances of having some of their work be involved with the space effort becomes not entirely unlikely.
I understand what the NASA administrator was trying to say, but can’t shake the feeling that if those are the people he rolls out to inspire kids watching a space launch, he’s missed an opportunity. Those are the names we all recognize, but shouldn’t we also elevate the people making the scientific breakthroughs so their names are equally recognized? Like
Margaret Hamilton
,
Gene Kranz
, and
Sergei Korolev
and many others before them, we should be making names like
Tom Mueller
and
Margarita Marinova
prominent examples of where a career in the sciences can take you. But to be honest, the real problem is we just don’t hear much about all the people doing this fascinating engineering and that’s a sad state of affairs.
Looks like it’s time for Hackaday to pursue a biography series based on the many great minds who are the ones delivering on the promise and vision of today’s (and tomorrow’s) space race. Get us started by talking about your favorite behind the scenes science folks in the comments below. | 162 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250110",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T17:28:20",
"content": "I agree, Jenny.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6250193",
"author": "James L King",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T22:08:10",
"conten... | 1,760,373,472.56162 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/31/homebrew-binaural-microphone-lets-you-listen-like-a-human/ | Homebrew Binaural Microphone Lets You Listen Like A Human | Dan Maloney | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"balanced",
"binaural",
"electret",
"microphone",
"phantom power",
"pro audio",
"rc",
"shield",
"xlr"
] | We humans may not have superpowers, but the sensor suite we have is still pretty impressive. We have binocular vision that autofocuses and can detect a single photon, skin studded with sensors for touch, heat, and pain, and a sense of smell that can detect chemicals down to the parts per trillion range. Our sense of hearing is pretty powerful, too, allowing us to not only hear sounds over a 140 dB range, but also to locate its source with a fair degree of precision, thanks to the pair of ears on our heads.
Recreating that binaural audio capture ability is the idea behind
this homebrew 3D microphone
. Commercially available dummy head microphones are
firmly out of the price range
of [LeoMakes] and most mortals, so his was built on a budget from a foam mannequin head and precast silicone rubber ears, which you can
buy off the shelf
, because of course you can.
Attached to the sides of the foam head once it got the [Van Gogh] treatment, the ears funnel sound to tiny electret cartridge microphones. [Leo] learned the hard way that these little capsule mics can’t use the 48-volt phantom power that’s traditionally pumped up the cable to studio microphones; he fixed that problem with a resistor in parallel with the mic leads. A filtering capacitor, an RC network between the cold line and ground on the balanced audio line, and a shield cleverly fashioned from desoldering braid took care of the RF noise problem.
The video after the break shows the build and test results, which are pretty convincing with headphones on. If you want to build your own but need to learn more about balanced audio and phantom power, we’ve got
a short primer on the topic
that might help. | 22 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250098",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T16:14:44",
"content": "Just excellent. Well produced and presented. I really wish there were more videos on YouTubr like this. You have researched the subject well and treated your viewer with respect. More power to you. Thanks... | 1,760,373,472.182112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/31/the-descendants-of-ancient-computers/ | The Descendants Of Ancient Computers | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"bipolar junction transistor",
"bjt",
"computer",
"cray",
"discrete",
"frequency",
"retro",
"supercomputer",
"switching",
"transistor"
] | Building computers from discrete components is a fairly common hobby project, but it used to be the only way to build a computer until integrated circuits came on the scene. If you’re living in the modern times, however, you can get a computer like this running easily enough, but if you want to dive deep into high performance you’ll
need to understand how those components work on a fundamental level
.
[Tim] and [Yann] have been working on replicating circuitry found in the CDC6600, the first Cray supercomputer built in the 1960s. Part of what made this computer remarkable was its insane (for the time) clock speed of 10 MHz. This was achieved by using bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) that were capable of switching much more quickly than typical transistors, and by making sure that the support circuitry of resistors and capacitors were tuned to get everything working as efficiently as possible.
The duo found that not only are the BJTs used in the original Cray supercomputer long out of production, but the successors to those transistors are also out of production. Luckily they were able to find one that meets their needs, but it doesn’t seem like there is much demand for a BJT with these characteristics anymore.
[Tim] also posted
an interesting discussion
about some other methods of speeding up circuitry like this, namely by using reach-through capacitors and Baker clamps. It’s worth a read in its own right, but if you want to see some highlights be sure to check out
this 16-bit computer
built from individual transistors. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250078",
"author": "Bryan",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T14:05:04",
"content": "Having worked as a technician on a fully discrete computer many years ago; the Honeywell H400. All transistors and diodes were germanium (I sometimes still dream about working on that monster). I can appr... | 1,760,373,471.873143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/31/digitize-an-analogue-oscilloscope/ | Digitize An Analogue Oscilloscope | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"analog oscilloscope",
"oscilloscope",
"oscilloscope camera",
"python",
"qt"
] | Many of us will possess digital oscilloscopes which offer at an affordable price an array of features once unimaginable on the analogue CRT ‘scopes of yesteryear. But those old analogue beasts were fine pieces of equipment when they were made and remain so today. So how can they find a place in the digital age?
Perhaps [Joseph Eoff] has the answer, because
he’s fitted his trusty Telequipment D43 with a camera in a 3D-printed attachment
, paired with a piece of cross-platform Python/Qt custom software using OpenCV to identify, digitize, and quantify the traces. The software allows viewing the either the digitized trace or the real trace, and derives measurements of voltage and frequency from them. One limitation is that despite the ‘scope being a dual-trace model, the software only has a single set of cursors to measure one trace at a time. All the code can be had from the GitHub repository, should you wish to experiment with it or extend it.
It’s worth thinking for a minute at what price point a remotely decent digital ‘scope starts, then considering the ease with which surprisingly good older analogue instruments can be found on the second-hand market for not a lot. An approach such as this one makes them an even more attractive proposition.
If you’re looking further into enhancements for an analogue ‘scope,
how about a logic analyser
? | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250036",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T08:12:01",
"content": "It’s nice that you’re covering a hackaday.io article on the front page. I enjoy that much more than a popular science topic.Also that the guy has got this to work made me think “gee I suppose openCV could be... | 1,760,373,472.127084 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/a-tasty-output-device/ | A Tasty Output Device | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"taste",
"taste buds",
"umami"
] | We have headphones for your ears, and monitors for your eyes. Some computers even have tactile feedback. Now researchers have
an output device for taste
. The decidedly odd device uses five gels, one for each of the tastes humans can sense. If we understand the paper, the trick is that ionizing the gels inhibits the taste of that gel. By controlling the ionization level of each gel, you can synthesize any taste, just like you can make colors with three LEDs.
The five gels are made from agar and glycine (sweet), magnesium chloride (bitter), citric acid (acidic), salt (salty), and glutamic sodium (umami). If you didn’t learn about umami in school, that’s a savory taste likened to the taste of a broth or meat and often associated with monosodium glutamate.
The shape of the device is made like a sushi roll so that while the gels contact the tongue, a copper foil cathode can connect also. Using this will make you look even stranger than someone wearing Google Glass, but that’s the price of being on the cutting edge of technology, we suppose. There doesn’t seem to be any reason you couldn’t duplicate something like this, although we wonder about the hygiene of passing it around at parties. Maybe your next home movie could show a meal and let the viewer taste it too.
If you are wondering about smell, that’s
another set of researchers
. You would think this is the first taste output device we have seen, but no… surprisingly,
it isn’t
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250044",
"author": "P. Le Gal",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T09:45:48",
"content": "This is very interesting, but of course a taste (the perceived experience of something put in mouth) involves much more than the gustatory system (which is targeted by that device). The olfactory system... | 1,760,373,471.829491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/microwave-for-a-stereo/ | Swap Your Microwave For A High Voltage Stereo | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"audio",
"capacitor",
"danger",
"fire",
"high voltage",
"magnetron",
"microwave",
"speaker",
"vacuum tube"
] | When building a new project, common wisdom suggests to avoid “reinventing the wheel”, or doing something simple from scratch that’s easily available already. However, if you can build a high-voltage wheel, so to speak, it might be fun just to see what happens. [Dan] decided to reinvent not the wheel, but the speaker, and instead of any conventional build he decided to
make one with parts from a microwave and over 6,000 volts
.
The circuit he constructed works essentially like a Tesla coil with a modulated audio signal as an input. The build uses the high voltage transformer from the microwave too, which steps the 240 V input up to around 6 kV. To modulate that kind of voltage, [Dan] sends the audio signal through a GU81M vacuum tube with the support of a fleet of high voltage capacitors. The antenna connected to the magnetron does tend to catch on fire somewhere in the middle of each song, so it’s not the safest device around even if the high voltage can be handled properly, but it does work better than expected as a speaker.
If you want a high-voltage speaker that (probably) won’t burn your house down, though, it
might be best to stick to a typical Tesla coil
. No promises though, since working with high voltages typically doesn’t come with safety guarantees.
Thanks to [David] for the tip! | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250004",
"author": "Col. Panek",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T02:24:53",
"content": "I don’t think my wife would go for that, even though it’s smaller than my current speakers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6250318",
"a... | 1,760,373,472.247991 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/this-old-console-stereo-hides-a-liquor-cabinet/ | This Old Console Stereo Hides A Liquor Cabinet | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"console stereo",
"drinks cabinet",
"furniture",
"logitech media server",
"raspberry pi"
] | There was a time when consumer electronics were statement items, designed to resemble quality furniture that would be shown off as a centerpiece of the home. Televisions in ornate wooden cabinets, or stereos looking for all the world like sideboards. [Zethus] had just such a huge record player and radio combo in a sideboard, and having little use for the cream of 1950s home entertainment technology, he rebuilt it as a concealed liquor cabinet with electronic controls and a much more modern stereo that forms part of a Logitech Media Server multi-room system.
After removing the tube-based radio chassis and Garrard jockey-wheel turntable it was time to gut their supporting woodwork and install the platform derived from a standing desk. With suitably impressive lighting and a pair of VFD displays for the music choice, there is the inevitable Raspberry Pi running the show. Control is achieved by a set of hidden capacitive buttons, and there’s a Web interface to allow both music and magical appearance of alcohol from the comfort of a smartphone. The whole can be seen in the video below the break.
Whenever a piece of vintage electronics is gutted in this way there will always be people who find it disquieting, but the truth is that these all-in-one stereos were made in huge quantities during the mid-century period and do not have a significant value. This one may have lost its original electronics, but it lives on safe from the dump that has claimed so many of its brethren. Happily
this isn’t the first one we’ve seen saved with a Pi
. | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249986",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-05-30T23:42:41",
"content": "Forty Creek, he does have taste. I assume he reused the speakers in the unit at least.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6250013",
"author"... | 1,760,373,472.29103 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/dmca-vs-hacker/ | DMCA Vs Hacker | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"casio",
"copyright",
"dmca",
"newsletter"
] | This week featured a large kerfuffle over a hack that you probably read about here on Hackaday: [Neutrino]
wedged an OLED screen and an ESP32 into a Casio calculator
. REACT,
an anti-counterfeiting organization
, filed DMCA copyright takedowns on Casio’s behalf everywhere, including GitHub and YouTube, and every trace of [Neutrino]’s project was
scrubbed from the Internet
.
The DMCA is an
interesting piece of legislation
. It’s been used to prevent people from working on their tractors, from refilling printer ink cartridges, and to silence dissenting opinions, but it’s also what allows us to have the Internet that we know and love, in a sense.
In particular, the “safe harbor” provision absolves online platforms like YouTube and GitHub from liability for content they host, so long as they remove it when someone makes a copyright claim on it. So if a content owner, say Casio, issues a takedown notice for [Neutrino]’s GitHub and YouTube content, they have to comply. If he believes the request to be made in error, [Neutrino] can then file a counter-notice. After ten to fourteen days, presuming no formal legal action has been taken, the content must be reinstated. (
See Section 512(g)
.)
Both the takedown notice and counter-notice are binding legal documents, sworn under oath of perjury. Notices and counter-notices can be used or abused, and copyright law is famously full of grey zones. The nice thing about GitHub is that they publish all DMCA notices and counter-notices they receive, so
here it is
for you to judge yourself.
Because of the perjury ramifications, we can’t say that the folks at REACT who filed the takedown
knowingly
submitted a bogus request
in bad faith
— that would be accusing them of breaking federal law — but we can certainly say that it looks like they’re far off base here. They’re certainly not coders.
The good news is that the code is back up on GitHub, but oddly enough the video describing the hack is still missing on YouTube.
But here’s how this looks for Casio and REACT: they saw something that was unflattering to a product of theirs — that it could be used for cheating in school — and they sent in the legal attack squad. If that’s the case, that’s rotten.
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
! | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249940",
"author": "Vinod S",
"timestamp": "2020-05-30T20:16:11",
"content": "Casio is not growing or moving along with the technology.They are still the old old-school calculators. Will never grow up.Shame on you Casio.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,472.078785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/build-your-own-dial-up-isp-now-with-modem-pool/ | Build Your Own Dial-Up ISP – Now With Modem Pool! | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"internet hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"dial up internet",
"dial-up",
"isp",
"modem"
] | When it was the only viable option, the screech and squeal of dial-up internet was an unwelcome headache to many. But now that its time has passed, it’s gained a certain nostalgia that endears it to the technophiles of today. [Doge Microsystems] is just one such person, who has gone all out to
develop their very own dial-up ISP for multiple clients.
The retro network
is based on an earlier single-device experiment
, with a Raspberry Pi 3B acting as the dial-up server. It’s hooked up to four modems, three of which are connected over USB-serial adapters implementing hardware flow control.
Obviously, four analog phone lines are hard to come by in this day and age, so [Doge] uses Asterisk along with a series of Linksys SIP devices to create their own PBX network. Each modem gets a phone line, with four left over for clients to dial in.
To connect, users can either call a certain modem directly, or dial a special number which rings the whole pool. Thanks to
mgetty
, each modem is set up to answer on a different number of rings to allow the load to be shared. Once connected, a PPP daemon handles connecting the user to the Internet at large.
While it’s unlikely we’ll all be ringing [Doge]’s house to get our next YouTube fix, owning your own dial-up ISP is certainly an admirable feat. We’d love to see it deployed in the field sometime, perhaps at a hacker conference or Burning Man-type event. Of course, if you’ve got your own old-school network pumping data,
be sure to let us know!
Video after the break.
My new do-it-yourself dial-up ISP guide is finally ready, now with a modem pool for multiple clients!
https://t.co/lVnZK0mhtN
I've even got a USB modem this time :)
pic.twitter.com/bhr8ffKnb0
— Doge Microsystems (@DogeMicrosys)
May 30, 2020 | 54 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249907",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-05-30T17:10:16",
"content": "A decentralized internet for makers sounds good to me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6249924",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,373,472.379469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/spacing-out-all-the-orbital-news-youre-missing/ | Spacing Out: All The Orbital News You’re Missing | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Roundup",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"nasa",
"roundup",
"skyrora",
"space",
"SpaceX",
"Spacing Out"
] | We keep finding more great space stories than we can cover, so here’s a speed-run through the broader picture of the moment as it applies to space flight.
The big news this week was the first launch of a manned SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to the ISS. I was excited because the pass en route to the space station was scheduled to be visible from the UK at dusk, and on Wednesday evening I perched atop a nearby hill staring intently at the horizon. Except
it had been cancelled due to bad weather
. The next launch window is
planned for today and you can watch it live
.
Meanwhile, fashion is the other piece of this manned-launch’s appeal. Their sharply-designed
spacesuits
have attracted a lot of attention, moving on from the bulky functional Michelin Man aesthetic of previous NASA and Roscosmos garments for a positively futuristic look that wouldn’t be out of place in
Star Trek
. Never mind that the two astronauts are
more seasoned space dog than catwalk model
, they still look pretty cool to us.
Against the backdrop of a political upheaval at the top of NASA
, this first crewed orbital mission from American soil since the retirement of the Shuttle has assumed an importance much greater than might be expected from a run-of-the-mill spaceflight.
While we’re on the subject of the ISS, it’s worth noting that we’re
approaching twenty years since the first crew took up residence there
, and it has been continuously crewed ever since as an off-planet outpost. This is an astounding achievement for all the engineers, scientists, and crews involved, and though space launches perhaps don’t have the magic they had five decades ago it’s still
an awe-inspiring sight
to see a man-made object big enough to discern its shape pass over in the night sky. We understand that
current plans are to retain the station until at least 2030
, so it’s a sight that should remain with us for a while longer.
Closer to Earth are a couple of tests for relative newcomers to the skies. When Richard Branson’s Virgin group isn’t trying to boot millionaires off the planet through its Virgin Galactic operation, it’s aiming to cheaply fling small satellites into orbit from a rocket-toting airborne Boeing 747 with its Virgin Orbit subsidiary.
Their first test launch sadly didn’t make it to space
, once the rocket had flawlessly launched from the airliner it suffered a fault and the mission had to be aborted. Getting into space is
hard
.
The second test was never intended to make it into space, but is no less noteworthy. The British company Skyrora
have performed a successful ground test of their Skylark L rocket
, aiming for a first launch next year and for offering low-earth orbit services by 2023. This is significant because it will be the first British launch since
the ill-fated Black Arrow launch in 1971
, and with their Scottish launch site the first ever from British soil. If you’ve seen Skyrora mentioned here before, it is because they were behind the retrieval of the Black Arrow wreckage from the Aussie outback that we mentioned when we wrote about that programme.
Looking forward to the coming week, especially today’s rescheduled SpaceX launch. This time however, I’ll check the weather conditions before climbing any hills. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249889",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2020-05-30T15:40:00",
"content": "SpaceX managed to perform a RUD on one of their Starship prototypes on Friday, too. It’s business as usual for their rapid development process, but made an impressive boom.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,373,472.657513 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/rolling-your-own-led-matrix-driver-with-copper-foil-tape-to-the-rescue/ | Rolling Your Own LED Matrix Driver, With Copper Foil Tape To The Rescue | Donald Papp | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"copper tape",
"cree",
"diffuser",
"dot matrix LED",
"ESP32",
"IS32FL3738",
"led matrix",
"surplus",
"wi-fi"
] | It all started when [Damien Walsh] got his hands on some surplus LED boards. Each panel contained 100 mini-PCBs hosting a single bright LED that were meant to be to be snapped apart as needed. [Damien] had a much better idea:
leave them in their 20×5 array and design a driver
allowing each LED to be controlled over WiFi. He was successful (a brief demo video is embedded down below after the break) and had a few interesting tips to share about the process of making it from scratch.
The first hurdle he ran into was something most of us can relate to; it’s difficult to research something when one doesn’t know the correct terms. In [Damien]’s case, his searches led him to a cornucopia of LED drivers intended to be used for room lighting or backlights. These devices make a large array of smaller LEDs act like a single larger light source, but he wanted to be able to individually address each LED.
Eventually he came across the IS32FL3738 6×8 Dot Matrix LED Driver IC from
ISSI
which hit all the right bases. Three of these would be enough to control the 100-LED panel; it offered I2C control and even had the ability to synchronize the PWM of the LEDs across multiple chips, so there would be no mismatched flicker between LEDs on different drivers. As for micontroller and WiFi connectivity, we all have our favorites and [Damien] is a big fan of Espressif’s ESP32 series, and used the
ESP32-WROOM
to head it all up.
LED pads bridged to copper tape, with Kapton (polyimide) tape insulating any crossovers.
The other issue that needed attention was wiring. Each of the LEDs is on its own little PCB with handy exposed soldering pads, but soldering up 100 LEDs is the kind of job where a little planning goes a long way. [Damien] settled on a clever system of using strips of copper tape, insulated by Kapton (a super handy material with a
sadly tragic history
.) One tip [Damien] has for soldering to copper tape: make sure to have a fume extractor fan running because it’s a much smokier process than soldering to wires.
A 3D-printed baffle using tracing paper to diffuse the light rounds out the device, yielding a 20 x 5 matrix of individually-controlled rectangles that light up smoothly and evenly. The end result looks fantastic, and you can see it in action in the short video embedded below.
If you find yourself having a similar need to drive an array of LEDs, be sure to read
this guide on driving LED matrices
for some tips on what’s out there and available. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6250027",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2020-05-31T06:10:23",
"content": "Donald Papp Said: “Eventually he came across the IS32FL3738 6×8 Dot Matrix LED Driver IC from ISSI [http://www.issi.com/US/index.shtml] which hit all the right bases.”Actually, the IS32FL3738 is made by Lum... | 1,760,373,472.601628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/30/job-application-script-automates-the-boring-stuff-with-python/ | Job Application Script Automates The Boring Stuff With Python | Sven Gregori | [
"Lifehacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"careers",
"jobs",
"python",
"web scraping"
] | Job hunting can certainly require a good amount of hoop-jumping in today’s age. Even if you’re lucky enough to have your application read by an actual human, there’s no guarantee the person on the other end has much of an understanding about your skill set. Oftentimes, the entire procedure is futile from the start, and as a recent graduate, [harshibar] is well aware of the soul-crushing experience investing a lot of time in it can be. Well, as the saying goes: if you can’t beat them, join them — and if you can’t join them,
automate the hell out of the application process
.
As the final piece of a “5 Python Projects in 5 Days” challenge [harshibar] set for herself — which also spawned a
“Tinder for Netflix”
for the web development section of it — she essentially created a web-scraper that gathers job openings for a specific search term, and automatically sends an application to each and every one of them. Using
Beautiful Soup
to parse the scraped pages of a certain job portal,
Selenium’s
browser automation functionality to fill out the online application forms, she can get all her information into the form saving countless hours in comparison to the manual alternative. The program even hits the apply button.
While the quantity-over-quality approach may not be for everyone, there’s of course room for more filtering and being more selective about the job openings beforehand, which [harshibar] also addresses in
her video about the project
(embedded below). And while this won’t fix the application process itself, we can definitely see the satisfaction a beating-them-at-their-own-game might provide — plus, it can’t have a worse miss rate than your typical LinkedIn “recruiter”. Still, if you’re looking for a more systematic approach, have a look at [Lewin Day]’s
view on the subject
, he even has advice job hunting
is still further down the road for you
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249842",
"author": "Vladimir",
"timestamp": "2020-05-30T09:58:04",
"content": "Loosely targeted dandelion-spreading strategy, can only land you a job you´re half happy with. I stick to mine: sending max. 5 to 10 job applications, highly targeted, with >30% interviews yield, and 20-... | 1,760,373,472.704624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/bluetooth-takes-keyboard-from-diy-to-super-fly/ | Bluetooth Takes Keyboard From DIY To Super Fly | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Adafruit Feather",
"dactyl",
"diy keyboard",
"keyboard",
"MCP23018",
"ortholinear",
"trrs"
] | They say you should never cheap out on anything that comes between you and the ground, like tires, shoes, and mattresses. We would take that a little further into the 21st century and extend it to anything between you and work. In our case, ‘buy nice or buy twice’ includes keyboards and mice.
[Marcus Young] is a fan of ortholinear ergonomic comfort, but not of cables.
He gave [adereth]’s dactyl keyboard some wings by using a Bluetooth micro, and the Pterodactyl was born
. Of course, the two halves still use a TRRS cable to communicate, and wires are required to charge batteries, but it’s the principle of the thing.
That’s not all [Marcus] did to make the dactyl his own — it also has a modified full-fat base that gives him all the room in the world to wire up the keyswitch matrix compared to the original streamlined design.
Instead of the usual Teensy, Pro Micro, or Proton-C, the pterodactyl has a Feather 32u4 in its belly. [Marcus] is clacking on Holy Panda switches which we’ve been meaning to try, and individual PCBs for each switch, which seems like it might negate gluing the switches in place so they survive through keycap changes. Check out
[Marcus]’ write-up
to see what he learned during this build.
This isn’t the first modified dactyl we’ve seen flying around here, and it won’t be the last.
Here’s one with a dual personality
— both halves can work together or alone.
Via
r/mk | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249377",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T20:06:05",
"content": "I see he added a key to exit vim. Most useful keyboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6249421",
"author": "cliff claven",
... | 1,760,373,472.749033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/hackaday-prize-and-conservation-x-labs-issue-design-challenges-to-address-extinction-crisis/ | Hackaday Prize And Conservation X Labs Issue Design Challenges To Address Extinction Crisis | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"Conservation X Labs",
"Dream Team challenge",
"the hackaday prize"
] | When most people think of extinct species, they likely imagine prehistoric creatures such as dinosaurs or woolly mammoths. Extinction is something you read about in history books, nature’s way of removing contestants in the great game of life. It’s a product of a cruel and savage world, and outside of a few remaining fringe cases, something that humanity’s advanced technology has put a stop to.
Unfortunately, the truth is far more complicated than that. The planet is currently going through its sixth major extinction event, and this time, it’s our fault. Humanity might not be
willfully
destroying the natural habitats of the plants, fish, birds, and other lifeforms that have been eradicated, but we’re responsible for it just the same. Humans are an apex predator unlike any the world has ever seen before, and the only force that can stop us is ourselves.
Founded in 2015,
Conservation X Labs
is devoted to doing everything it can to end this sixth wave of extinction. Unsatisfied with the pace of traditional conservation, they leverage technology and open innovation to develop unique new ways of combating the damage our species has done to life on this planet. After all, it’s the only one we’ve got.
We’ve partnered with this organization
to help develop solutions to some of these problems. This includes an open call challenge that anyone can enter, and a Dream Team program that you can get involved with if you act quickly. Let’s take a look at what Conservation X Labs is all about, and what is involved with the challenges at hand.
The Challenge of Hacking the Planet
With such a worthy goal and their embrace of out-of-the-box thinking,
Conservation X Labs was a perfect partner for the 2020 Hackaday Prize
. Saving species that have become endangered by human activity requires robust real-world solutions, but if they’re to have any chance at being adopted on a large scale, they need to be deployable at minimal cost and with the least amount of disruption as possible. That can be a difficult balance for large commercial entities to strike, but it’s the sort of thing that the hacking and making community absolutely excels at.
For the 2020 Hackaday Prize, Conservation X Labs has tasked competitors with developing innovative solutions for protecting marine life and combating invasive species. Building hardware that can survive the harsh ocean environment adds an extra dimension of challenge to these entries, and we’re excited to see how the submitted designs take it into account.
According to Sam Kelly, the Conservation Technology Program Manager at Conservation X Labs and mentor for this year’s Hackaday Prize, teams that want to tackle these challenges need to plan ahead if their design is to have any chance of surviving. “Between the salt, weather, pressure, and water, any solution needs to be ready for ingress and corrosion. It is also essential to consider the potential inaccessibility of any deployed device – for both maintenance and communication.”
Teams also have to make special considerations for the end-user. If you’re developing a device that needs to be operated by fishermen on a rocking boat in the middle of the ocean, a tiny touch screen probably isn’t going to work out very well. If it’s too difficult or time consuming to operate, then in all likelihood it just won’t get used.
Divide and Conquer
As you may already know,
this year we’re approaching the Hackaday Prize a little differently
. Each non-profit we’ve partnered with has given us a few different problems they’d like to see addressed, plus a “Dream Team” assignment that could earn the selected team a stipend to work on the problem full-time over the summer. Just make sure act fast if you want into one of the four Dream Teams since applications close on Tuesday!
For Conservation X Labs, the challenge categories are:
Combating Invasive Species
Under normal circumstances, an ecosystem will balance itself out so that lifeforms within it are largely compatible with each other and evenly matched. But once humans started traveling around the globe and taking plant and animal life with them, that balance was jeopardized. From the exotic pet trade to animals that are inadvertently transported aboard ships and cargo containers, there are many species that are now being forced to deal with competitors that Mother Nature never intended for them to meet.
The trick with this challenge is to develop solutions that can monitor or even curtail the spread of a particular species without harming the indigenous life. Ideas in this category could potentially make use of computer vision or machine learning for identification, such as in the case of a trap that only closes when the targeted invasive species is inside.
New Tools for Marine Protection
To help combat illegal fishing operations, Conservation X Labs is looking at ways to provide continuous real-time monitoring of everything happening above and below the water in designated Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). This is where teams will really be challenged to develop robust solutions that can spend an indeterminate amount of time exposed to the elements.
For this challenge, there’s a special focus on systems which are inexpensive and have low maintenance requirements. To be useful in the developing world, proposals should be careful not to assume that there will be reliable local infrastructure available. For inspiration, teams might
look to something like the OpenCTD project to get ideas
on how to design low-cost deployable underwater sensors.
Dream Team: Reducing Ghost Gear
Lost or abandoned fishing equipment is a huge problem, as a trap or net that’s been left in the water doesn’t have an off switch. Animals get caught, die, and serve as bait for the next wave of victims. The process will generally continue until the equipment rots away, which could take years or even decades. An investigation by
NOAA determined there were at as many as 145,000 derelict traps in the Chesapeake Bay alone
, responsible for killing over three million blue crabs annually.
Conservation X Labs says this problem has been particularly difficult to solve in an affordable and practical way. They believe that the most promising avenue of research is into technology that can reduce the so-called “soak time” of fishing equipment. If you can reduce how long a trap, net, or line needs to remain in the water, it’s less likely it will be snagged or lost inadvertently.
Other possible solutions include systems that can track or identify underwater fishing gear for recovery purposes, or the development of more selective traps and nets. Prior art includes
the PISCES device by SafetyNet Technologies
, which has shown that illuminating nets with color coordinated LEDs can help reduce bycatch; an industry term used to describe undesirable species being pulled in along with whatever the fishermen were intending to catch.
The Race is On
Whether your team wants to tackle the aquatic challenges put forward by Conservation X Labs, or the equally worthy goals of the three other incredible non-profits we’ve partnered with for the 2020 Hackaday Prize, the clock is already ticking. You have until August 31st to get your entries in, but groups looking to address the
Dream Team will have to get their applications in by Tuesay, June 2nd
if they want to be considered for the summer microgrant program.
[Main image source: Andrew Richard Hara]
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249411",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T21:46:45",
"content": "Pangolins and Bats are teaming together to reduce the 6th mass exctinction.There won’t be any change as long as ecosystems and habitats are not restored.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,373,472.903854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/peeking-inside-executables-and-libraries-to-make-debugging-easier/ | Peeking Inside Executables And Libraries To Make Debugging Easier | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Skills",
"Software Development"
] | [
"elf",
"nm",
"PE",
"readelf",
"software development",
"strace"
] | At first glance, both the executables that a compiler produces, and the libraries that are used during the building process seem like they’re not very accessible. They are these black boxes that make an application go, or make the linker happy when you hand it the ‘right’ library file. There is also a lot to be said for not digging too deeply into either, as normally things will Just Work™ without having to bother with such additional details.
The thing is that both executables and libraries contain a lot of information that normally is just used by the OS, toolchain, debuggers and similar tools. Whether these files are in Windows PE format, old-school Linux
a.out
or modern-day
.elf
, when things go south during development, sometimes one has to break out the right tools to inspect them in order to make sense of what is happening.
This article will focus primarily on the Linux platform, though most of it also applies to BSD and MacOS, and to some extent Windows.
Opening the Black Box
Regardless of which platform you’re on, executable and library formats all have a number of common sections. There is of course the section with the actual instructions, as well as the section with all of the text strings and constant values that we put in the code before we compiled it. If we instructed the compiler to generate debug symbols and told the linker to leave those in place, we also have the debug symbols included in its own section. We will look at those later in this article.
In the
ELF
(Executable and Linkable Format) that is commonly used on Linux and many other operating systems, the rough layout follows this diagram. Not all of these sections are required, and their inclusion depends on what options were selected when the executable file was created.
A quick overview of an executable file’s properties can be obtained with the
file
utility:
ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (GNU/Linux), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=0558c7ef0f6845826d012b4ccc14948a2ffe8277, stripped
This output tells us that we’re dealing with a 32-bit binary, compiled for the x86 architecture, which uses a number of shared libraries, and which has had its debug symbols stripped.
If debug symbols are still present, we get:
ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (GNU/Linux), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=0558c7ef0f6845826d012b4ccc14948a2ffe8277, with debug_info, not stripped
In this particular case, we are dealing with a binary that was compiled on Raspbian Buster for x86, which is a 32-bit version of Linux, so that all matches.
For a Windows executable file we get the following, less expansive output:
PE32+ executable (GUI) x86-64, for MS Windows
This tells us that we are dealing with a PE (Windows) executable, compiled for the 64-bit x86-64 architecture.
As one may have guessed at this point, libraries, both dynamic and shared, use the
same format
as the executables, so for example examining an
.so
shared library file on Linux would generate almost the same output when we use the
file
command.
Sharing Responsibly
Unique to (desktop) operating systems is the ability to load dynamic (shared) libraries when the application is started. Here the assumption is made that the required libraries are present on the host system, and in the search path for the library loader (an OS component). Libraries can also be versioned to indicate different revisions. This usually happens via the filename, with the generic name (e.g.
libfoo.so
)
symlinked
to the actual file (
libfoo.so.0.1
). If there’s a mismatch with the version, this can result in a symbol error, which we’ll look at in the next section.
When an executable uses shared library files, it is easy to check which direct dependencies (encoded in the executable file) it uses, by checking the executable with the
ldd
utility, which has a gotcha that it does not work well with the older
a.out
format. This isn’t really an issue with modern day development on Windows, Linux/BSD, and MacOS, which use the PE (PE32+), ELF and Mach-O formats, respectively. For embedded development (e.g. ARM Cortex-M) the ELF format is also used as an intermediary format before generating the binary image.
Listing Dependencies
The basic output from
ldd
shows where direct dependencies are found on the filesystem, and which dependencies are not found. For example, this is the (heavily) abbreviated output from
ldd
for
ffplay.exe
under MSYS2 on Windows:
$ ldd /mingw64/bin/ffplay.exe
ntdll.dll => /c/Windows/SYSTEM32/ntdll.dll (0x77780000)
kernel32.dll => /c/Windows/system32/kernel32.dll (0x77660000)
KERNELBASE.dll => /c/Windows/system32/KERNELBASE.dll (0x7fefd730000)
msvcrt.dll => /c/Windows/system32/msvcrt.dll (0x7fefed80000)
SHELL32.dll => /c/Windows/system32/SHELL32.dll (0x7fefdab0000)
SHLWAPI.dll => /c/Windows/system32/SHLWAPI.dll (0x7fefda10000)
GDI32.dll => /c/Windows/system32/GDI32.dll (0x7feff0e0000)
USER32.dll => /c/Windows/system32/USER32.dll (0x77560000)
LPK.dll => /c/Windows/system32/LPK.dll (0x7fefeb30000)
USP10.dll => /c/Windows/system32/USP10.dll (0x7feff6e0000)
SDL2.dll => /mingw64/bin/SDL2.dll (0x644c0000)
[...]
Dependencies shown for the average executable can be pretty massive (the full list is about eight times this length), but it’s useful as a quick sanity check to see not only whether a dependency has been fulfilled, but also whether the application loader has picked the right library. It can happen for example that a system has two different versions of a library (e.g. in
/usr/shared/bin
and
/usr/bin
), which can lead to the hilarious situation where you spend half a day debugging different libraries and application versions, rolling back ‘known working’ code versions and losing your sanity.
Another thing which a tool like
ldd
shows is at which address the library has been loaded, but that’s useful only for truly advanced levels of debugging and optimization.
When Symbols Go AWOL
Things get fun when we talk about symbols in the context of executable and library formats. This is not about debug symbols, which are a completely different topic, but the symbols that are integral to making it possible for sections of code to be found, whether while executing, or while linking object files and static libraries together. Missing symbols lead to fun run-time errors as well, where an ‘entry point’ is not found in some shared library.
A quick way to fix such issues is usually to ensure that you have the matching versions of the libraries for the code or executable file. Sometimes this all checks out, and the application loader or linker tool is still giving you lip about missing symbols, so what gives?
In the case of linking code, it can be as simple as the wrong linking order, as toolchains for most languages use an opportunistic linking style that remembers missing symbols, but does not remember symbols it has already seen. While in languages like Ada this is not an issue, in C-style languages, determining the linking order in the commands given to the linker tool is essential.
Another issue is where a language (like C++) supports overloading functions to support different arguments and return types, and name mangling is used (to get a unique symbol). If a header file was compiled in C++ mode, when it’s supposed to be linked against a library that was compiled as C code, without name mangling, this would make the linker tool give the ‘missing symbol’ error for those functions.
In order to figure out whether a missing symbol is truly missing, improperly mangled, left unmangled or in another library or object file, one can use a utility like
readelf
to check which symbols are actually in the file. Note that (obviously) readelf only supports ELF-style files. A more generic utility that focuses on just symbols in a variety of formats is
nm
. For example, this output from the
Wikipedia entry
on nm:
# nm test.o
0000000a T _Z15global_functioni
00000025 T _Z16global_function2v
00000004 b _ZL10static_var
00000000 t _ZL15static_functionv
00000004 d _ZL15static_var_init
00000008 b _ZZ15global_functioniE16local_static_var
00000008 d _ZZ15global_functioniE21local_static_var_init
U __gxx_personality_v0
00000000 B global_var
00000000 D global_var_init
0000003b T main
00000036 T non_mangled_function
This shows what the output from nm looks like when a C++ compiler is used. Nm can be instructed to demangle symbols to make it easier to read if that’s necessary. Regardless, its output tells us whether a symbol exists in the file or is undefined (‘U’). It will also detail where the symbol is defined (which section) and what type of symbol it is (if relevant). In the above example we see one undefined symbol (‘U’), a couple of text (code) section symbols (‘T’ & ‘t’), one symbol in the uninitialized data section (BSS, ‘B’ & ‘b’) and two in the initialized data section (‘D’ & ‘d’).
Of these, we’d just need to hand the linker a library or object file that contains the one undefined symbol to make this code link and produce an executable.
Last Resort: Tracing Application Startup
Annoyingly, sometimes everything seems in order, yet the application fails to start, or quits half-way through with a mysterious message. This is where a utility like
strace
can be extremely useful, as it traces all system calls involving the application from the moment that the application starts. Often, the issue with an application not loading is due to an indirect dependency that cannot be loaded, an environmental setting that is inappropriate, or a file that was accidentally set to read-only.
Simply firing up strace with the application as argument will output a list of the system calls as made by the application, including errors, such as a missing file:
open("/foo/bar", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
Or a missing library dependency:
open("/usr/lib/libfoo.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
Wrapping Up
Obviously none of this is the end-all, be-all of debugging the linking and running of executables, binaries, and an assortment of related issues. As with so many things in life, in the end it’s mostly experience that counts. Over time one will develop an intuition for where the problem likely lies, as well as how to find out the culprit as quickly as possible.
Having spent many years in commercial software development and having survived a range of (overly) ambitious hobby projects, I can definitely say that there is a lot of knowledge that I wish I had had sooner. On the other hand, the act of discovering why some things were not working and correcting this injustice against the order of the world was usually rewarding in itself.
That said, one has to pick their battles wisely. Sometimes learning things from scratch isn’t worth it, and leaning on the knowledge of others is nothing to be ashamed of. Especially when it’s Friday afternoon and the client expects delivery of the new version on Monday. Hopefully this article has been helpful in that regard. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249366",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T19:41:11",
"content": "Only to say that a.out pre-dates Linux, or even Minix (remeber that?) but was on Unix, both 4.2 BSD and System V, and probably earlier Unices too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,472.955485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/begin-your-day-on-an-uplifting-note-with-a-daily-affirmation-mirror/ | Begin Your Day On An Uplifting Note With A Daily Affirmation Mirror | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"14-segment display",
"affirmation",
"deep thoughts",
"glass",
"Magic Mirror",
"node mcu",
"reflective",
"Stuart Smalley",
"Trinket"
] | We’ve seen dozens of “Magic Mirror” builds around here, most of which display all sorts of information — calendar, weather, news. They’re great builds, but they tend to be a bit busy and don’t really inspire a calm start to the day. But if you’re good enough and smart enough, you can build
this electronic affirmation mirror
, and doggone it, people will like you.
[Becky Stern] stripped the magic mirror concept down to a minimum with this build and uses only an array of 14-segment alphanumeric displays to scroll uplifting messages. The glass she used is partially reflective, and when covered with black tape on the backside, with a small portal for the display, it makes a decent mirror. The displays are driven by a Trinket using static affirmations stored in the sketch; a microcontroller with a WiFi connection could also be used to source affirmations on the fly. Or, you know, stock prices and traffic updates, if you’re not into the whole [Stuart Smalley] thing.
So what about those aforementioned magic mirror builds? We’ve got
large ones
,
small ones
,
retro ones
, and even
kid-centric ones
. Take your pick! | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249276",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T16:24:35",
"content": "I’ve seen this show, it starts out all positive, but soon you’re answering questions from a kid on a c64 and then you’re wondering the streets with a shopping card.",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,373,473.137267 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/raspberry-pi-4-gets-its-8-gigs/ | Raspberry Pi 4 Gets Its 8 Gigs | Mike Szczys | [
"News",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Slider"
] | [
"64-bit",
"8 GB",
"ram",
"rasbian",
"Raspberry Pi 4",
"Raspberry Pi OS"
] | What began as a rumor becomes reality. This morning [Eben Upton] announced that
the newest flavor of the Raspberry Pi 4 comes with 8 gigabytes of RAM
and a sticker price of $75, roughly twice that of
the base model which is now pegged at 2 GB of ram
.
Originally released on June 23rd of last year, the Pi 4 came with three different options for 1, 2, or 4 GB of memory. But just a few days later, Hackaday reported on an Easter egg in the user guide that referenced an 8 GB option.
So why didn’t this version get released in 2019? That’s the crazy thing about this story. In the announcement [Eben] mentions that the Pi’s design is capable of addressing up to 16 GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM (we say bring it, but that’s a discussion for a different day). It took a year to get here because there wasn’t a source available for this 8 gig version until Micron began manufacturing the chip earlier this year.
Also addressed in this announcement is a looming changeover that was bound to happen eventually: the move from 32-bit to 64-bit operating systems on the Pi. While a 32-bit image can access all of this larger memory across multiple process, it can’t devote more than 3 GB to a single Linux process because of address space limitations. Simply put, you need more bits to access the higher addresses. Moving to a 64-bit system accomplishes that, something you can do by running unofficial builds on the Pi, but the official build didn’t support it until today’s announcement of
a 64-bit beta image
.
This is inevitable, not purely because of this memory limitation, but because we’ve seen examples where
the juggernaut of Linux development has its own eye on a 64-bit future
. Official images for Raspberry Pi have always been 32-bits, and remain so for now, but the wind is beginning to blow for this and future hardware offerings that are bumping up against limitations. Along with the news of this impending architecture switch over, the official operating system has also gotten a name change: Raspbian will henceforth be known as Raspberry Pi OS.
When [Jenny List] first reported on the 8 GB rumors last June, she speculated that today’s announcement would happen on February 29th of this year. Why the leap day? It happened to be the 8th birthday of Raspberry Pi and synced up nicely with an 8 GB surprise. Today’s announcement drops the morsel of trivia that the foundation was indeed planning on that date, but missed it by three months due to supply chain disruption associated with the coronavirus pandemic that prevented them from sourcing all the parts necessary for the new power supply design included in this revision.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this move. Do you need 8 GB on your Pi, and does the 3 GB limitation of a 32-bit kernel matter to you? Let us know in the comments below. | 121 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249248",
"author": "Steven",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T15:29:19",
"content": "Now building a RAID with it, is slightly less of a bad idea than before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6249371",
"author": "Drone",
... | 1,760,373,473.599555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/x-37b-spaceplane-to-test-power-beaming-technology/ | X-37B Spaceplane To Test Power Beaming Technology | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"clean energy",
"microwave",
"Space Force",
"space solar",
"US Navy",
"X-37B"
] | Since 2010, the United States military has been operating a pair of small reusable spaceplanes that conduct secretive long-duration flights in low Earth orbit. Now officially operating under the auspices of the newly formed Space Force, the X-37Bs allow the military to conduct in-house research on new hardware and technology with limited involvement from outside agencies. The spaceplane still needs to hitch a ride to space on a commercial rocket like the Atlas V or the Falcon 9, but once it’s separated from the booster, the remainder of the X-37B’s mission is a military affair.
An X-37B being prepared for launch.
So naturally, there’s a lot we don’t know about the USSF-7 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 17th. The duration of the mission and a complete manifest of the experiments aboard are classified, so nobody outside the Department of Defense truly knows what the robotic spacecraft is up to. But from previous missions we know the craft will likely remain in orbit for a minimum of two years, and there’s enough
public information to piece together at least some of the investigations it will be conducting
.
Certainly one the most interesting among them is an experiment from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) that will study converting solar power into a narrow microwave beam; a concept that has long been considered the key to unlocking the nearly unlimited energy potential offered by an orbital solar array. Even on a smaller scale, a safe and reliable way to transmit power over the air would have many possible applications. For example it could be used to keep unmanned aerial vehicles airborne indefinitely,
or provide additional power for electric aircraft as they take-off
.
Performing an orbital test of this technology is a serious commitment, and shows that all involved parties must have a fairly high confidence level in the hardware. Unfortunately, there isn’t much public information available about the power beaming experiment currently aboard the X-37B. There’s not even an indication of when it will be performed, much less when we should expect to see any kind of report on how it went. But we can make some educated guesses based on the work that the Naval Research Laboratory has already done in this field.
Starting (Very) Small
As it turns out, the X-37B experiment won’t be the first time the Naval Research Laboratory has demonstrated the concept of wireless power transmission in space. In April, astronaut Jessica Meir verified that the Lab’s light-emitting rectifying antenna (LECtenna) worked as expected aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Although hailed as the first practical test of this concept ever performed in orbit, the scope of the experiment was more limited than you’d probably expect.
A LECtenna lights up on the ISS
The LECtenna demonstrated on the ISS was nothing more than a standard LED and a Schottky diode that had their leads twisted together. Secured in a clear plastic tube, the simple circuit is able to flicker the LED when in close proximity to high frequency energy. In a video on the NRL YouTube channel, Meir brings the simple LECtenna to within a few millimeters of one of the Station’s WiFi access points to prove that the concept works.
Realistically, this demonstration was more about public relations than anything. At the end of the video, Meir explains that viewers can construct their own LECtenna that they can use to visualize energy around their own homes.
In a companion video, an NRL researcher goes through the step-by-step process of building a LECtenna. He concludes the presentation by inviting educators to use the video as part of an interactive lab. It would seem that some inside the NRL want to make sure the people are educated about wireless power transfer, and considering how
certain elements of the public can respond to new technology
, it’s probably not a bad idea.
Even if it offers limited practical application, the LECtenna demonstration aboard the ISS does essentially work the same way that a proper space-solar installation would. Sunlight gets converted into electrical power by the Station’s solar array, which in turn is used to generate 2.4 GHz electromagnetic radiation in the form of standard WiFi. The small fraction of this radiated energy that was captured by the LECtenna, was then converted back into a DC voltage which lit the LED. But can it be done on a larger scale?
Now You’re Playing With Power
The hardware that the NRL has sent aboard the X-37B, known as the Photovoltaic Radio-frequency Antenna Module (PRAM), aims to find that out under real-world conditions. Using a 12-inch square photovoltaic panel, the device will convert sunlight into electrical power that will drive a high frequency generator. From the published information it’s not immediately clear what the receiver side of the experiment looks like, though presumably there will at least be some method of detecting the amount of microwave energy being radiated from the PRAM.
PRAM module, with possible liquid cooling connections.
According to a NRL press release
, a major focus of this experiment will be to study the thermal properties of the PRAM while in operation. Keeping the temperature stable could prove to be a challenge, as the cooling system not only has to contend with whatever heat is generated by the microwave electronics but intense sunlight. One of the major advantages of space-based solar power (SBSP) is the extended collection time compared to the surface of the Earth, so the hardware would need to survive nearly continuous operation for years or decades.
It’s unlikely the PRAM will actually be used to send power back down to Earth. Given the immense losses that could be expected (SBSP proposals usually assume transmission losses of around 60%), the amount of energy that would reach the surface of the Earth from such a small solar panel would have no practical application. Though such a sufficiently sensitive receiver, it’s possible that some effort might be made to at least detect the energy beam from a ground station.
The Spear of Destiny
If made practical, space-based solar power could greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels while simultaneously addressing the shortcomings of contemporary renewable energy sources and the stigma of nuclear power. Short of perfecting fusion power, it may well be humanity’s best chance at meeting its immense power requirements in a responsible and sustainable way.
Given the incredible importance of this research, one might wonder why it’s being tested on a shadowy military spacecraft rather than the International Space Station or even a dedicated satellite. While it’s nothing more than conjecture at this point, there are some that believe that
the military has a vested interested in the technology
and wants to see it developed as quickly as possible.
It’s certainly not hard to see why. The ability to beam power to vehicles and bases on the front line with no concern over local infrastructure would be an incredible tactical advantage over the enemy. The Space Force is surely interested in weaponizing the technology for space-to-space engagements as well. Any microwave transmitter powerful enough to overcome atmospheric losses and deliver a useful amount of energy to the Earth’s surface
could easily be repurposed as an anti-satellite weapon
.
Just as the Global Positioning System
started as a military project and evolved into something used by civilians on a daily basis
, solar power from space could get its start as an instrument of war. It might not be a particularly pleasing thought, but if it means that the technology gets developed faster and can ultimately be pushed into service for more peaceful endeavours, it might be a price worth paying. | 49 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249216",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T14:21:31",
"content": "LECtenna?Radio-Electronics showed how to make one decades ago.Yes, it was just a RadioShack Schottky Barrier Diode (SBD) with an LED in parallel, reverse biased.Radio-Electronics called it a Microwave Oven Le... | 1,760,373,473.360482 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/jack-tramiel-got-a-good-deal-and-ruined-everything/ | Jack Tramiel Got A Good Deal, And Ruined Everything | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"basic",
"c64",
"commodore"
] | A sideshow in the playground wars of the early 1980s over who had the best home computer lay in the quality of their onboard BASIC interpreters. Where this is being written the cream of the crop was Acorn’s BBC Basic, while Sinclair owners could hold their own, and the Commodore 64 was regarded as powerful, but not easy to program. It’s a teenage memory brought to mind by [Liam Proven], who argues in a blog post that
Commodore’s BASIC left a problematic legacy that can still be felt today
.
It’s an interesting proposition, and one with its roots in Commodore founder Jack Tramiel’s 1977 deal with Bill Gates to acquire a version of Microsoft BASIC for his machines, in which he paid a one-off fee for unlimited uses of the language rather than a per-sale levy. The argument in the post is that this led to later Commodore machines being hamstrung by an outdated BASIC interpreter as a cost saving measure. It fits well with those 1980s memories from school computer labs, because by comparison its competitors six years after the deal had the benefit of language extensions missing in Commodore’s 64.
Where [Liam]’s analysis becomes interesting is in how he perceives the effect of this long-in-the-tooth BASIC; he postulates that the sheer number of Commodore 8-bit machines sold ensured it had a dominant position in the market place and thus coloured the perception of BASIC as a programming language in the years that followed. We’re not so sure about his view that this led eventually to some of the shortcomings in computing today, but we agree wholeheartedly with him that Commodore were less than competent in marketing their hardware.
We look forward to hearing your take on the matter in the comments, and meanwhile for some perspectives on the Commodore of the day who better to relate them than somebody who had a ringside seat. Our colleague [Bil Herd] has shared with us some of his Commodore recollections over the years, including
the Commodore 128 story
, an account of
the 1985 CES show,
and a two-parter on
the TED chip
and
its speech capabilities
.
Header image: Commodore BASIC /
Public Domain
, and Evan-Amos /
Public domain
. | 89 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249181",
"author": "gebhardm",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T12:26:28",
"content": "Well, I remember the C64 BASIC being “good enough” for the things to do on this machine; more considerable stuff, like the Mandelbrot set display, went anyway a more efficient way of programming using al... | 1,760,373,473.268823 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/29/steampunk-brushless-motor-demo-pushes-all-the-maker-buttons/ | Steampunk Brushless Motor Demo Pushes All The Maker Buttons | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"BLDC",
"brass",
"brushless",
"casting",
"commutation",
"nixie",
"steampunk",
"tachometer",
"wood"
] | We’ll be honest right up front: there’s nothing new in [David Cambridge]’s
brushless motor and controller build
. If you’re looking for earth-shattering innovation, you’d best look elsewhere. But if you enjoy an aimless use of just about every technique and material in the hacker’s toolkit employed with extreme craftsmanship, then this might be for you. And Nixies — he’s got Nixies in there too.
[David]’s build started out as a personal exploration of brushless motors and how they work. Some 3D-printed parts, a single coil of wire, and a magnetic reed switch resulted in a simple pulse motor that performed surprisingly well. This morphed into a six-coil motor with Hall-effect sensors and a homebrew controller. This is where [David] pulled out all the stops on tools — a lathe, a plasma cutter, a welder, a milling machine, and a nice selection of woodworking tools went into making parts for the final motor as well as an enclosure for the project. And because he hadn’t checked off quite all the boxes yet, [David] decided to use the 3D-printed frame as a pattern for casting one from aluminum.
The finished motor, with a redesigned rotor to deal better with eddy currents, joined the wood and metal enclosure along with a Nixie tube tachometer and etched brass control plates. It’s a great look for a project that’s clearly a labor of self-edification and skill-building, and we love it. We’ve seen
other BLDC demonstrators
before, but few that look as good as this one does. | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249630",
"author": "Alexander Wikström",
"timestamp": "2020-05-29T16:01:52",
"content": "At times I sit thinking by myself about why brushless motors using vacuum tubes for control never took off as early as it could have…Like tubs can control very high currents and voltages, so se... | 1,760,373,473.453847 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/29/this-week-in-security-leaking-partial-bits-apple-news-and-overzealous-contact-tracing/ | This Week In Security: Leaking Partial Bits, Apple News, And Overzealous Contact Tracing | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ios",
"LadderLeak",
"This Week in Security"
] | Researchers at the NCCGroup have been working on
a 5-part explanation of a Windows kernel vulnerability
, targeting the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM). The vulnerability, CVE-2018-8611, is a local privilege escalation bug. There doesn’t seem to be a way to exploit this remotely, but it is an interesting bug, and NCCGroup’s work on it is outstanding.
They start with a bit of background on what the KTM is, and why one might want to use it. Next is a handy guide to reverse engineering Microsoft patches. From there, they describe the race condition and how to actually exploit it. They cover a wide swath in the series, so go check it out.
Left4Dead 2
Just a reminder that bugs show up where you least expect them, [Hunter Stanton] shares his story of
finding a code execution bug
in the popular Valve game, Left4Dead 2. Since the game’s code isn’t available to look at, he decided to go the route of fuzzing. The specific approach he took was to fuzz the navigation mesh data, part of the data contained in each game map. Letting the Basic Fuzzing Framework (BFF) run for three days turned up a few possible crashes, and the most promising turned out to have code execution potential. [Hunter] submitted the find through Valve’s HackerOne bug bounty program, and landed a cool $10k bounty for his trouble.
While it isn’t directly an RCE, [Hunter] does point out that malicious mesh data could be distributed with downloadable maps on the Steam workshop. Alternatively, it should be possible to set up a fake game server that distributes the trapped map.
Big Brother Apple?
There is a constant tension between security and privacy. We’re used to governments making arguments about giving up privacy for the sake of security, but the same trade-off can show up in computer security, too. In this case, Apple has implemented
an online check for every executable run by a macOS Catalina system
. If you’re running macOS 10.15, you might have noticed
your system is a bit slower than it should be
. It seems that when connected to the internet, a modern Mac will upload a hash of each binary to Apple, assumably to check it against a blacklist of known malware.
The
Reddit thread discussing this issue
had a few more interesting observations. First off, one user pointed out that he had observed this issue while flying and connected to the terrible in-flight wifi. A second poster observed that a Mac will take an inordinate amount of time to reboot when connected to a network without internet access.
While there is likely an upside, this approach is terrible for performance and user privacy, and a breach of trust between Apple and their users. If they wanted to monetize the data, Apple now has a record of which binaries are run by which users and when. This sort of behavior should be documented at the very least, and come with an off switch for those who don’t wish to participate. The fact that it was discovered by internet sleuths is a black eye for Apple.
LadderLeak
An interesting attack on certain ECDSA schemes was
published on the 25th
(
PDF
). This attack was specifically developed against OpenSSL, and uses a Flush+Reload cache attack to leak information from the elliptic curve operation as it is calculated. At some point we’ll do an in-depth look at elliptic curve cryptography, but for now it’s sufficient to understand that a mathematical operation is performed repeatedly in order to do key exchanges.
For each iteration, the researching team were able to extract approximately one bit of information about the internal state of the key. (Technically less than one bit, since it is a statistical attack.) After the data collection was carried out, a rather intensive CPU process is required to calculate the key. It’s not an attack that is particularly practical at this point, but it’s still important for the affected projects to mitigate against.
The math required to fully appreciate their work is pretty intense, but if that’s your thing, it’s there to be appreciated. For the rest of us, it’s just good to know that our algorithms are under such scrutiny from the good guys. We all win as a result.
iOS Jailbreak
The iOS security landscape has been in a tizzy over the last few weeks. It wasn’t long ago that an iOS exploit was the holy grail of security research, but just recently Zerodium, a zero-day vendor, has stopped accepting iOS zero-days because they have too many.
We will NOT be acquiring any new Apple iOS LPE, Safari RCE, or sandbox escapes for the next 2 to 3 months due to a high number of submissions related to these vectors.
Prices for iOS one-click chains (e.g. via Safari) without persistence will likely drop in the near future.
— Zerodium (@Zerodium)
May 13, 2020
There’s been a new development,
a jailbreak for any device running iOS 11 or newer
. This jailbreak, named unc0ver, requires an unlocked phone and a computer. It’s quite a boon to researchers and end users alike.
COVID-19 Contact Tracing — What Could Go Wrong?
The Australian government has developed an Android and iOS app to track the spread of COVID-19, and it seems that
it went wrong in all the predictable ways
. For starters, it seems that once a device has the app installed, that device can be tracked even after it’s been uninstalled. A few of the issues have been fixed,
but as the app is closed source, it’s impossible to fully verify that it’s well behaved
. Update:
The source is available
, but under a bizarre license. We suspect that there are other bugs. The link above is the working document maintained by a handful of researchers working to audit the app. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249609",
"author": "Wretch",
"timestamp": "2020-05-29T14:33:20",
"content": "The macOS thing, it can’t be true, can it? I can’t access a couple of the referenced sites; I can’t believe someone ran this past their legal dept. and got an OK, and that nobody raised a privacy concern,... | 1,760,373,473.643069 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/29/toilet-paper-chase-and-indoor-cycling-race-with-unity-and-arduino/ | Toilet Paper Chase And Indoor Cycling Race With Unity And Arduino | Sven Gregori | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"bicycle",
"game controller",
"game design",
"Magnetic sensor",
"toilet paper",
"unity"
] | While we’re still far away from returning to a pre-Corona everyday life, people seem to have accepted that toilet paper will neither magically cease to exist, nor become our new global currency. But back at the height of its madness, like most of us, [Jelle Vermandere] found himself in front of empty shelves, and the solution seemed obvious to him:
creating a lifelike toilet paper chasing game in hopes to distract the competition
.
Using Unity, [Jelle] created a game world of an empty supermarket, with the goal to chase after distribution tubes and collect toilet paper packs into a virtual cart. Inspired by the Wii Wheel, he imitated a shopping cart handle built from — as it appears — a sunshade pole that holds an Arduino and accelerometer in a 3D-printed case as game controller. For an even more realistic feel, he added a sound sensor to the controller, and competing carts to the game, which can be pushed out of the way by simply yelling loud enough. You can witness all of this delightful absurdity
in his build video
after the break.
From racing shopping carts to racing bicycles
But that’s not all. With the toilet paper situation sorted out, [Jelle] found himself in a different dilemma: a cloud foiled his plans of going for a bicycle ride. In the same manner,
he ended up building a cycling racing game
, once again with Unity and Arduino. From a 3D-scanned model of himself and his bicycle, to automatically generating tracks on the fly and teaching an AI to ride a bike, [Jelle] clearly doesn’t joke around while he’s joking around.
However, the best part about the game has to be the controller, which is his actual bicycle. Using a magnetic door sensor to detect the speed, and a potentiometer mounted with an obscure Lego construction to the handlebar, it’s at least on par with the shopping cart handle — but judge for yourself in
another build video
, also attached after the break. The only thing missing now is to level up the difficulty
by powering the Arduino with the bicycle itself
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249649",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-29T17:06:42",
"content": "Does the virtual shopping cart have a sticky wheel that keeps turning the cart to the left?Because, reality.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6339190",
... | 1,760,373,473.68745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/29/two-way-mirror-improves-video-conferencing/ | Two Way Mirror Improves Video Conferencing | Al Williams | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"eye contact",
"foam board",
"two way mirror",
"video conferencing"
] | Like everyone lately, [Matt] has been spending more time doing video conferencing lately. The problem is you naturally want to look at the screen, but that means you aren’t looking at the camera and, thus, you aren’t making eye contact. If you use a laptop, there is a relatively easy fix, although it isn’t particularly stylish. [Matt] built a black shroud out of foam board and put in two-way mirror. How does that help? Well, with the set up, you can put a very thin black web camera pointing up towards the mirror. Because the shroud is dark, you can see the screen through the mirror, but the camera sees you.
Where do you get a thin black web camera? You make one from an old laptop camera. They are tiny and easy to repurpose, a trick [Matt] has shared before. As a bonus, the post shows an easy way to take an LED strip and make a diffused light for lighting up your webcam call.
It looks like the downside is it will make the keyboard difficult to use, so you might want to pair this with a Bluetooth keyboard. It is also a little bulky, but if you are on the go, it looks like you could remove the mirror, fold the shroud, and the whole thing would lay flat for transport.
Even if you don’t want to improve your video chat, there are a few gems here. The light is simple enough and would be a good way to use a little bit of extra LED lighting. We can think of lots of reasons we want a thin web camera. But what struck us the most was the possibility of using this as a teleprompter. If you had text on your screen scrolling (or used your mouse to scroll, you could read the text while looking straight at the camera. Just the thing the next time you run for office.
Most of the two way mirrors we see are for
infinity mirrors
. If you try this project, maybe add some motors and
eye tracking
so it forces you to make eye contact. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249528",
"author": "visionrouge",
"timestamp": "2020-05-29T08:25:07",
"content": "It’s like a prompter….. ;-)You can display your screen on the text dedicated area and plug your webcam to an usb port and put it in front of the glass.I guess I have been using this for the past 10 ye... | 1,760,373,473.731682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/building-a-3270-terminal-controller/ | Building A 3270 Terminal Controller | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3270",
"ibm",
"mainframe",
"SNA",
"terminal"
] | We like to talk about how most of our computers today would have been mainframes a scant 40 or 50 years ago. Because of that, many people who want to run IBM mainframes such as the IBM 360 or 370 use the Hercules emulator to run the big iron on their PCs. However, mainframe IBM computers used an odd style of terminal and emulating it on a PC isn’t always as satisfying. At least, that’s what [lowobservable] thought, so he decided to get
a 3270 terminal working with Hercules
.
Back in the bad old days of computing, there were two main styles of terminals. Some companies, for example DEC, essentially used terminals as a “glass teletype.” That is, the screen was an analog of a roll of paper — more or less — and the keyboard immediately sent things to the remote system. However, companies like IBM and HP favored a different approach. Their terminals dealt with screens full of data. The terminal was smart enough to let you fill in forms, edit text on the screen, and then you’d send the entire screen in one gulp. Both systems had pros and cons, but — as you might expect — the screen-oriented terminals were more complex.
The project turned out to be a lot of detective work. A lot of these old protocols were poorly documented or even secret. However, some datasheets for old interface chips had some details and eBay even had the chips in question. We had forgotten that the 3270 used 93 ohm coax, but we never knew why they picked that particular value.
It turns out there were two different styles of terminals. One required a very sophisticated controller that did most of the work. The other did most of the work locally. Either way, the mainframe only dealt with the processed data. Luckily, [lowobservable] is documenting what he’s learned on
GitHub
.
At the start of the project, [lowobservable] picked up a surplus terminal unit. However, it had a corrupt disk image so it wouldn’t work. It did, however, have a usable diagnostic disk that could talk to the terminal. This allowed some analysis of the traffic which helped answer some questions.
The end result is a controller that isn’t complete (yet) but it is workable. There are plans for an FPGA version that doesn’t rely on obsolete chips, too.
Of course, we wish we had
a real IBM 360
. You could settle for an
AS400
, though. | 56 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249495",
"author": "Dom",
"timestamp": "2020-05-29T05:17:24",
"content": "One advantage of 3270 and 5250 page-mode terminals (at least in the IBM world), is that you can pre-process much of your data before it gets fed to the program running on the big box. Data input fields on the... | 1,760,373,473.823271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/what-rhymes-with-spice-and-simulates-huge-circuits/ | What Rhymes With Spice And Simulates Huge Circuits? | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"circuit simulation",
"sandia",
"SPICE",
"xyce"
] | Most of us have computers on our desk that would have been considered supercomputers not long ago. We always wonder how many of them get any actual workout other than decoding video. If you want to simulate circuits you may very well start chewing up significant CPU time, so you might consider
Xyce
, an open source high-performance analog circuit simulator from Sandia National Labs. As you’d expect from a giant government lab it is able to support large scale parallel computing, but will also work on common desktop systems. On Linux, it will do what they call “small-scale parallelism.” In addition, it can deal with simulations of things as diverse as neural networks and power grids.
The code is open source, but oddly you do have to register to download it. Xyce has been around for a bit, but version 7.0 just arrived in April. Many of the changes are to improve compatibility with other Spice programs, notably HSpice.
The program is in C++ and not a derivative of Spice even though it tries to be compatible. It does, however, have a variety of features that support more efficient modeling and the use of some powerful solving engines and techniques.
Like traditional Spice, you’ll have to create netlists to use Xyce. Of course, for many circuits, you could probably create your netlist in another Spice tool and export the netlist. Why would you not just use the other tool? Xyce offers the potential to run very large simulations using multiple CPUs or clustered computers.
While it probably isn’t for everyone, Xyce might be just the excuse you need to build that Linux supercomputer you’ve always wanted. We imagine you’d need something more than
ESP32s
, though. We wonder if it will support
CUDA
or OpenCL. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249473",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2020-05-29T02:15:23",
"content": "There’s an official GitHub since June 2019:https://github.com/Xyce/Xyce. It doesn’t require any registration to download.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,373,473.867728 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/psst-wanna-buy-a-control-panel-from-a-nuclear-power-station/ | Psst – Wanna Buy A Control Panel From A Nuclear Power Station? | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"auction",
"control panel",
"nuclear power",
"surplus"
] | Doing the rounds today is an interesting lot in an otherwise unexciting industrial dispersal auction in Lincolnshire, UK. On sale is an “
Ex nuclear plant reactor control/monitoring system
“, at the time of writing attracting the low low bid of £220 ($270), but we guess it will rise. Everyone who has watched
Chernobyl
(or maybe
The Simpsons)
is now gazing awestruck at a crescent of metal consoles covered in screens, buttons, and joysticks just waiting for a staff of white-coated technicians to pore over them.
Chernobyl Unit 3 control room (still active). [Source:
IAEA Imagebank on Flickr
CC-SA 2.0]
It’s a very cool lot indeed, but it raises more questions than it answers. The auction house has very little information indeed, so we’re left guessing, where did it come from? From this image showing the unit 3 control room at Chernobyl it’s obvious didn’t come from there (/s). Since it is for sale in the UK, and the country has decommissioned the majority of its first-generation reactors by now, so there is no shortage of candidates. But that intriguing possibility raises another question. Is it even a reactor control panel in the first place?
British civilian nuclear plants have tight security but they are hardly a secret, so plenty of photos are online showing their interiors. And in studying those we hit a problem, this panel doesn’t resemble any of the control panel images we can find. The first generation of Magnox (
Magnetic Oxide
Magnesium Non Oxidising) plants had
panels covered in analogue dials and chart recorders
so it’s unlikely to be one of those. The second-generation AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor) stations
had similarly complex panels
, and it’s evidently not one of them.
Looking closely at the photos it becomes apparent that there are a lot of camera controls and monitors, and even what looks like a uMatic video recorder. It’s definitely nuclear-related and the 1980s look of it suggests maybe it could have come from an Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (AGR) station, but could it be a little closer to Sector 7G than the centre of the action? Is it a video monitoring console used to keep a physical eye on its operation?
Be careful if you bid, you could end up with a rather cool but absurdly large 1980s CCTV system. Can any of our readers shed any light on the matter?
Thanks [Gregg “Cabe” Bond] for the tip. | 73 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249433",
"author": "Dimitris Zervas",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T23:17:47",
"content": "I’m a bit considerate about the radiation that this thing has been exposed to. Could this be a life hazard?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,373,474.093325 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/home-assistant-get-fingerprint-scanning/ | Home Assistant Get Fingerprint Scanning | Al Williams | [
"home hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"fingerprint",
"fingerprint scanner",
"fingerprint sensor",
"home automation",
"home-assistant"
] | Biometrics — like using your fingerprint as a password — is certainly convenient and are pretty commonplace on phones and laptops these days. While their overall security could be a problem, they certainly fit the bill to keep casual intruders out of your system. [Lewis Barclay] had some sensors gathering dust and decided to
interface them to his Home Assistant
setup using an ESP chip and MQTT.
You can see the device working in the video below. The code is on GitHub, and the only thing we worried about was the overall security. Of course, the security of fingerprint scanners is debatable since you hear stories about people lifting fingerprints with tape and glue, but even beyond that, if you were on the network, it would seem like you could sniff and fake fingerprint messages via MQTT. Depending on your security goals, that might not be a big deal and, of course, that assumes someone could compromise your network to start with.
On the other hand, this would probably work fine for keeping little ones out of the workshop or the liquor cabinet or something like that. If the kid can hack the MQTT, she probably should be in the workshop, after all. Seems like for real security, you’d need to authenticate the fingerprint reader with some sort of key scheme at a minimum.
If you want to know more about how
fingerprint scanners work
, there’s plenty to read about. If tape and glue are too low tech for you, you can also
print a fake finger
. That’s why we
don’t suggest them for security
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249134",
"author": "xMob",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T08:15:42",
"content": "Biometrics should never be considered the ‘password’. Only use them for the ‘username’.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6249145",
"author": "... | 1,760,373,474.138299 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/dim-hallway-gets-lighting-upgrade/ | Dim Hallway Gets Lighting Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led",
"lighting",
"rtc"
] | There’s nothing worse than a lightswitch that’s nowhere near where it should be, leaving you fumbling around in the dark. [supersquirrel72] had just this problem,
and decided to put an Arduino to work instead.
Rather than using the original mains lighting that was poorly positioned and not enough to light the hall, instead 2 meters of white LED strip was chosen. The form factor is perfect for lighting a long, thin space – far better than running a series of seperate bulbs. The strip was rigged up to an Arduino Uno, that triggers the lights when movement is detected with a simple PIR motion sensor. After some feedback from the other occupants of the house, it was decided to tweak things further. An RTC was implemented to allow the Arduino to keep things dimmer after 9PM, so as to not wake others when making a trip to the kitchen for a midnight snack.
It’s a simple solution which brightens up the hallway nicely. We imagine this could just be the first step to a yet-more-integrated lighting solution in [supersquirrel72]’s house. Whether it’s
IOT lights
or
something more festive
, we can’t wait to see what’s next. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249109",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T05:13:15",
"content": "I have 40mm long strips of 10mm luminous tape (dirt cheap on eBay) on the corners of the skirting boards, at light switches and on the edges of doors directly across underneath the latch bolt. On... | 1,760,373,474.185007 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/slaying-dragons-in-notepad/ | Slaying Dragons In Notepad | Sven Gregori | [
"Games"
] | [
"ascii art",
"editor",
"lua",
"Notepad++",
"text adventure"
] | We all have our favorite text editor, and are willing to defend its superiority above all other editors by any means necessary. And then there’s Notepad. But what Notepad may lack in text manipulation features, it compensates with its inconspicuous qualities as a gaming platform. Yes, you read that correctly, and [Sheepolution] delivers the proof with
a text-based adventure game running within Notepad
.
What started out with [Sheepolution] jokingly wondering what such a game may look like, ended up as an actual implementation as answer to it. Behind the scenes, a script written in Lua using the
LÖVE framework
— for which he also created
an extensive tutorial
— monitors the state of several text files that make up the game world. Each location is a separate text file to open in Notepad, showing the current state of the game, telling the story with text and ASCII art, and offering choices to the player. The game is played by modifying and saving those text files, which the script then processes to push the gameplay forward by simply updating the content of those files with the new state. Check out the game’s trailer after the break to get a feel of what that looks like.
Unfortunately, Notepad itself doesn’t automatically reload the file when its content changes, so to provide a smoother gaming experience, [Sheepolution] modified the open source implementation Notepad2 to work around this, and bundled it as part of the game’s executable. Initially, he even added animations to the ASCII graphics, but in the end decided against most of them to avoid constant disk writes and race conditions caused by them.
Sure, this is no
Game Boy emulator in a text editor
, and it may not be as groundbreaking as
Notepad’s latest feature
, but it’s always amusing to see
alternative uses for well-established tools
.
(As a side note for Linux users, the game can be played with Wine, but you might have to manually load the game world’s text files from within Notepad. Once the executable was started, you will find those files in the
C:\users\<user>\Application Data\And yet it hurt\Game\
directory.) | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249090",
"author": "gudenau",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T02:19:43",
"content": "I swear this exact post was on here before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6249168",
"author": "really?",
"timestamp": "2020-05-28T11:31:10"... | 1,760,373,474.222699 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/atmega328-ssb-sdr-for-ham-radio/ | ATMega328 SSB SDR For Ham Radio | Danie Conradie | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"atmega328",
"ham radio",
"HF",
"homebrew",
"QRP",
"QRP Labs",
"sdr",
"ssb"
] | The humble ATmega328 microcontroller, usually packaged as an Arduino Uno, is the gateway drug for millions of people into the world of electronics and embedded programming. Some people just can’t pass up the challenge of seeing how far they can push the old workhorse, and it looks like [Guido PE1NNZ] is one of those. He has managed to implement a
software-defined SSB ham radio transceiver
for the HF bands on the ATMega328, and it looks like the project is going places.
The radio started life as a
QRP Labs QCX
, a $49 single-band CW (morse code) HF transceiver kit that is already one of the cheapest ways to get on the HF bands. [Guido] reduced the part count of the radio by about 50%, implementing much of the signal processing digitally on the ATmega328. On the transmitter side, the SSB signal is generated by making slight frequency changes to a Si5351 clock generator using 800kbit/s I2C, and controlling a very efficient class-E RF power amplifier with PWM for about 5W of output power. The increased efficiency means that there is no need for the bulky heat sink usually seen on SSB radios. The radio is continuously tunable from 80m to 10m (3.5 Mhz – 30 Mhz), but it does require plugging in a different low pass filters for each band.
The modified QCX is named QCX-SSB, but the project is rapidly evolving with [Guido] and a few other working to turn it into a completely new radio, called the µSDX. Go drop in at the
discussion group
to stay up to date. If you want to build your own, the easiest way at the moment is to get a QCX kit, and build it using the instruction on the QCX-SSB Github repo. Take a look at the overview below by [Manuel DL2MAN]. However, the project is rapidly evolving, and it seems very likely that it will soon outgrow its QCX base and the ATmega328 powering it.
This project could greatly reduce the technical and financial barrier of entry for new hams into the HF bands, and we will definitely be keeping a very close eye on it. If you want to get started with just a receiver, check out this
multi-band SSB capable receiver
based on the Silicon Labs Si4735. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249054",
"author": "geocrasher",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T23:03:56",
"content": "Thank you for posting this! This is a very fun project. I myself recently built such a radio from one of the last QCX kits of hte original style. I currently have it running JS8. I’ve made several JS8 ... | 1,760,373,474.487604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/building-a-serious-solar-inverter-battery-pack/ | Building A Serious Solar Inverter Battery Pack | Lewin Day | [
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"18650 cell",
"battery pack",
"solar power"
] | If you’re out in the wilderness, having plenty of electricity on hand is a blessing. Eschewing fossil fuels, [LithiumSolar] is, as their name suggests, a fan of other technologies –
undertaking the construction of a 3.5kWh solar generator that’s rugged and ready for the outdoors.
The build starts with 18650 lithium-ion cells sourced from a recycler, packed inside obsolete modem battery packs. After harvesting 390 cells, the best 364 are chosen and assembled into plastic holders to create a 14S26P configuration. A spot welder is employed to weld the pack together, with XT60 connectors used as the main bus connectors, albeit in a very non-standard configuration. Balance leads are hooked up to a 14S battery management system, to keep things in check. The huge pack is then installed inside a stout Craftsman toolbox, along with a MPPT solar charger module, and a 1500W inverter for output.
The build video is a great resource for anyone interested in building custom 18650 packs or battery solar power systems. [LithiumSolar] does a great job of clearly explaining each step and the reasons for part selections along the way. Of course, in a neat dovetail to this project, we’ve even seen
solar-powered spot welders before
– which would be useful if you need to replicate this build out in the field somewhere. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Keith O for the tip!] | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249023",
"author": "J.Cook",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T21:31:36",
"content": "It’s a neat project, but I notices a few cringe-worthy items: the way the cells were being stored (haphazardly thrown in a box), the main power connectors depending on soldered connections instead of a ph... | 1,760,373,474.346309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/epaper-tablet-gets-desktop-linux-install/ | EPaper Tablet Gets Desktop Linux Install | Lewin Day | [
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"epaper",
"reMarkable",
"tablet"
] | ePaper is an interesting thing, providing a non-backlit viewing experience that is much more akin to reading a book than staring at a screen. The reMarkable tablet is a device designed around just such a display, and [Davis Remmel] has been hacking away at the platform.
His latest work brings full-fat Linux to the fore.
The work builds upon [Davis]’s earlier work,
installing a microSD slot in the tablet to make development easier.
Getting Linux running required a custom kernel, but once sorted, working with the reMarkable is easy. apt is available for easy software installs, and the tablet is demonstrated using several different pieces of software, like mtPaint and Xournal.
The golden part of all this has been getting automated partial screen refreshes working. ePaper displays take a long time to refresh the whole screen. Being able to do faster partial writes makes for a much faster interface, which is evident when some of the drawing software is demonstrated. Even
Doom
runs, but remains largely unplayable, sadly – the ePaper is still a long way off hitting 25 fps.
We look forward to seeing where [Davis] takes this project, and how display performance improves with newer reMarkable tablets. With the reMarkable 2 out for pre-order, there could be a step change in display speed on the horizon. We’re betting that there’s big things to come yet for ePaper –
2020 may finally be its year. | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248980",
"author": "ScriptGiddy",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T18:42:43",
"content": "This pleases me. More!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6249036",
"author": "carney3",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T22:07:57",
... | 1,760,373,474.554388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/losing-a-wheel-on-your-commute-3-wheelers-vie-for-the-open-road/ | Losing A Wheel On Your Commute; 3-Wheelers Vie For The Open Road | Jenny List | [
"car hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3-wheeler",
"car",
"three-wheeler"
] | We live at an interesting point in time for the technologically minded motor vehicle enthusiast, and we stand on the brink of a major directional shift in how we imagine a car. Within ten years it’s likely that the electric motor will have moved from an extravagance or a fringe choice to a mainstream one, and a piston engine will be the preserve of an ever smaller niche market.
The Electrameccanica Solo three-wheeler car.
Along the way is it possible that the very form factor of an automobile will change, or will cars in decades hence have the same basic shape as those we’re used to? The Canadian company
Electrameccanica
certainly think so, because they’ve launched a refreshingly different take on commuter transport for one. Their Solo is a three-wheeler car, with two wheels at the front and one trailing wheel at the back configuration. It’s a bold design, but if it’s such an obvious one then why don’t we drive three-wheelers already?
It’s time to examine a few of the properties of a three-wheeler, and along the way visit some of the past attempts at this configuration.
There Are More Three-Wheelers Than You Realise
It’s hardly as though three-wheelers are a new phenomenon, both the world’s first motorised vehicle created by
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
in late-18th century France and
Karl Benz’s 1885 first ancestor of all modern cars
had leading wheel designs. Writing this in the United Kingdom the first that come to mind are the
Morgan trailing wheel sports car
, the
Reliant
and
Bond
series of leading wheel small cars and vans, and maybe
the Grinnall Scorpion sports car
as a spiritual successor to the Morgan before Morgan decided to get back in the game themselves.
The Grinnall Scorpion is a three-wheeler I would definitely drive! Brian Snelson (
CC BY 2.0
)
The
astonishing variety of three-wheeled machines
across all conceivable vehicle types already produced will probably come as a surprise to many readers. With so many tries at the formula one might expect that more of them of them would have gained long-term traction, so just what is it about three-wheelers that lacks appeal?
It’s fair to say that humans value conformity, so it’s possible that one of the steepest barriers for a new three-wheeler is the thought of what others might think should you rock up at work in one. I would drive a Reliant Robin because it’s a quirky little motor and has the last vestige of the famous Austin 7 in its automotive heritage, and I’d love to own a
Piaggio Ape
because it’s the epitome of Italian small farm transport and a handy little pickup truck to boot, but I’m a farm-dwelling hackerspace denizen and not a besuited drone on the corporate ladder.
As it stands, I run a retro Volkswagen and a decrepit Triumph not through necessity but because I
like
them; a modern would make sense in every way possible but if I had a Ford Mondeo on the drive then something inside would have died. Perhaps many readers will join me in this sentiment, but for most people the fear of ridicule or non-conformity is a powerful motivation and a Toyota Corolla is a much safer bet than a small-production car that’s a little bit
weird
.
We are however not here to pass social commentary, instead our purview lies in the technology of what we write about. If three-wheelers make practical small car transport, are there any technical reasons why they are inferior?
Is A Three-Wheeler Really Worse On Corners?
Despite the BBC’s
Top Gear
playing tricks with strategically-placed ballast
to make fun of the Reliant three-wheelers as comically unstable
, the truth was that they had no worse handling in the corners in normal driving conditions than many of their contemporaries in the 1950s through the ’70s. In an age of near-flawless-handling front wheel drive cars, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when many four-wheeled vehicles required an element of care to drive while staying on the road. My Triumph Herald certainly
raises some doubts
.
To gauge what happens when you push a car to the limit I had a chat with
some of my friends in the kit car community
. I also have my own knowledge from a youth misspent on motorcycles.
If you push a four wheeled car into a corner, the force increases on the outside front wheel and decreases on the rear inside one as the car is both pitched forward by deceleration and put into a roll by the centripetal force of cornering. The Mini in the picture below has its rear nearside wheel off the ground, and though the body roll has reduced the force on its front nearside wheel it still retains three wheels in contact with the road. Assuming that the contact patch of the offside wheel with the road does not lose grip from the sideways force, it retains enough contact with the road for its driver to remain in control.
A Mini under cornering forces at Silverstone. Brian Snelson (
CC BY 2.0
)
The BBC
Top Gear
Reliant Robin modified to roll at low speeds.
Looking at a leading-wheel three-wheeler such as the Reliant tackling the same corner as the Mini then, the same forces apply upon cornering. The car will experience body roll, the front suspension will be compressed, and in extreme cornering the rear nearside wheel will lift off the ground as the Mini’s has. Where it differs from the Mini though is that its single centrally-placed front wheel then becomes a pivot point. With only two points of contact between the road and the car it becomes both far more susceptible to rolling, and the friction of the tyre contact patches countering the sideways force becomes correspondingly less than the Mini with its three wheels left on the road. In normal on-road driving the car is unlikely to reach this point, so the
Top Gear
piece linked above resorted to subterfuge to achieve the effect.
A 1933 Morgan 3-wheeler cornering at the Nürburgring in 1976. Lothar Spurzem (
CC BY-SA 2.0
)
A trailing-wheel three-wheeler might then be expected to be the ideal configuration, its two widely-spaced front wheels providing the stability and two contact patches on corners that the Mini has, while its single rear wheel removes the tendency in four-wheel car for a rear wheel to come off the ground in cornering. All is not so perfect though, because in heavy cornering a trailing-wheel car can experience something in common with a motorcycle.
The highside is a term familiar to motorcyclists, an accident while cornering
in which the rider is thrown upwards into the air over the bike
. Motorcycles counter centripetal force while cornering by leaning into the corner, the highside begins when the rear tyre contact patch with the road loses grip and the rear of the bike begins to slide sideways. Inevitably after a period of this sliding sideways it momentarily retains grip, and the sideways momentum over this new pivot point causes the bike to sharply sit upright and launch the rider into the air. Exactly the same phenomenon can occur with a trailing-wheel three-wheeler under extreme cornering, causing the car to flip up and the inside front wheel to leave the ground. Instead of the driver being flung into the air the car can roll over spectacularly, as one of the kit car folks I asked related seeing a Grinnall do once while on a trackday.
Commuting, Not Racing
Neither of these doom-laden outcomes are the result of a typical cornering manoeuvre in a three-wheel car at road speeds, and cars such as the Reliants, Grinnalls, Morgans and others cover many thousands of miles each year just as their four-wheeled equivalents do. Your community general public will spend more time in bumper-to-bump than they will ripping around the corners.
The Solo looks to be an interesting car that deserves a chance to break the automotive mould, but to avoid going the way of the
Corbin Sparrow
before it, there has to be something exceptional in that diminutive chassis. At least unlike the Sparrow it’s got the looks for the job. | 76 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248952",
"author": "jake",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T17:28:41",
"content": "No mention of the other 3 wheel car scams: Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation’s Dale, or Elio’s Elio?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248954",
... | 1,760,373,474.67112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/useless-machine-for-an/ | Useless Machine For An Existential Quandary | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arduino nano",
"candle",
"hall effect sensor",
"lighter",
"motor controller",
"robot",
"snuffer",
"useless machine"
] | There’s no project that dives into existential quandaries more than a useless machine, as they can truly illustrate the futility of existence by turning themselves off once they have been powered on. Typically this is done with a simple switch, but for something that can truly put the lights out, and then re-illuminate them, [James]’s latest project is
a useless machine that performs this exercise with a candle
.
The project consists of two arms mounted on a set of gears. One arm has a lighter on it, and the other has a snuffer mounted to a servo motor. As the gears rotate, the lighter gets closer to the candle wick and lights it, then the entire assembly rotates back so the snuffer can extinguish the flame. Everything is built around an Arduino Nano, a motor driver powering a Pitman gear motor, and a set of Hall effect sensors which provide position data back to the microcontroller.
If you’re in the mood for a little existential angst in your own home, [James] has made the project files available on his GitHub page. We always
appreciate a useless machine
around here, especially a unique design like this one, and one which could easily make one recognize the futility of lighting a candle at all. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248981",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T18:44:02",
"content": "Perhaps it could be made to measure the resistance of the flame to know when it’s burning and that could reverse the rotation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,373,474.433589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/coronavirus-testing-crispr-technology-set-to-streamline-viral-testing/ | Coronavirus Testing: CRISPR Technology Set To Streamline Viral Testing | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Medical Hacks",
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"antibodies",
"Cas13",
"Covid-19",
"CRISPR",
"diagnostic",
"dna",
"lateral-flow assay",
"nucleic acid",
"point-of-care",
"rna",
"SARS-CoV-2"
] | If we could run back 2020 to its beginning and get a do-over, chances are pretty good that we’d do a lot of things differently. There’s a ton of blame to go around on COVID-19, but it’s safe to say that one of the biggest failures of this whole episode has been the lack of cheap, quick, accurate testing for SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the current pandemic. It’s not for lack of information; after all, Chinese scientists published the sequence of the viral genome very early in the pandemic, and researchers the world over did the same for all the information they gleaned from the virus as it rampaged around the planet.
But leveraging that information into usable diagnostics has been anything but a smooth process. Initially, the only method of detecting the virus was with reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests, a fussy process that requires trained technicians and a well-equipped lab, takes days to weeks to return results, and can only tell if the patient has a current infection. Antibody testing has the potential for a quick and easy, no-lab-required test, but can only be used to see if a patient has had an infection at some time in the past.
What’s needed as the COVID-19 crisis continues is a test with the specificity and sensitivity of PCR combined with the rapidity and simplicity of an antibody test. That’s where a new assay, based on the latest in molecular biology methods and dubbed “STOPCovid” comes in, and it could play a major role in diagnostics now and in the future.
Bacterial Immunity
To the extent that CRISPR has entered the popular lexicon, it’s understood to be a new and powerful technique for editing the genome of organisms, potentially as a way to treat genetic disorders. That’s certainly a big part of the story, and one that will rightly win someone a Nobel prize within the next 15 years or so, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The roots of CRISPR gene editing methods lie in the bacterial world, and how these single-cell organisms evolved a sophisticated immune system that bears a strong resemblance to the human immune system.
With all the stress we put on avoiding, detecting, and treating viral infections, it might be surprising to some people that there are thousands of viruses that have evolved to attack bacteria. It is estimated that these
bacteriophages,
or phages for short, outnumber their bacterial hosts by a factor of ten, meaning that Earth has something like 10
30
phage particles, a number that vastly eclipses any organism’s population. And just like any other virus, like influenza or SARS-CoV-2, a phage’s business is to find a suitable host, inject its genetic material, and take over the cell’s machinery to make more of itself, generally destroying the host in the process.
So it stands to reason that bacteria would have evolved mechanisms to detect and evade viral infections. That’s where
clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats
, or CRISPR, comes into play. CRISPR sequences are essentially a collection of DNA fragments that have been snipped from the genetic material of invading phages. These short sequences, called spacers, are added to the bacterial genome by a set of enzymes known as CRISPER associate (Cas) proteins.
The spacers are the key to bacterial immunity. Along with some of the adjacent repeating sequences in the CRISPR segment, the spacers are transcribed into complementary RNA fragments called crRNA, or CRISPR-RNA. crRNAs bind to proteins like Cas9, a CRISPER-associated enzyme that can both unwind DNA and cut it. The section of the crRNA from the spacer allows it to bind to the phage DNA that the spacer originally came from, which signals Cas9 to snip the invading phage DNA. No phage DNA, no infection, and having the spacer integrated into the bacterium’s genome means that it and its descendants have a memory of that particular phage.
The discovery of the importance of CRISPR in bacterial immunity naturally led to genetic engineering methods based on the CRISPR-Cas enzymology that go far beyond what can be accomplished with earlier molecular biology techniques, which are based mainly on restriction endonucleases. These enzymes, also part of the bacteria immune system, evolved to cut DNA at short, specific base-pair sequences; there are hundreds to choose from, but you’re stuck making cuts at naturally occurring recognition sequences, or using other genetic engineering techniques to insert the sequences where you want them. CRISPR-Cas allows you to dictate exactly where the cuts will occur, regardless of the sequence.
Collateral Damage
The incredible usefulness of CRISPR techniques has led to the discovery of more Cas enzymes, each with different properties. One such enzyme, Cas13, has very interesting and useful properties. Like Cas9, Cas13 uses a crRNA transcribed from the CRISPR region as a template to recognize invading phages. But rather than binding to and subsequently cleaving DNA, Cas13 targets phage RNA, cleaving it at the sequence specified by the spacer in the rRNA. Once that happens, Cas13 gets a bit sloppy, cleaving any RNA fragment within reach, regardless of sequence. It’s a little like cutting your account number from a bank statement, only to then take all those tiny pieces of paper and put them through a shredder, just to be sure.
It’s this nonspecific collateral damage to RNA by Cas13 that lead to the development of a CRISPR method dubbed SHERLOCK, for
Specific High-Sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter Unlocking
. Developed in 2017 in Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT, SHERLOCK uses tiny reporter fragments of RNA that have been tagged on both ends with different markers. After an initial RNA amplification step, Cas13 finds and cleaves its target RNA. Once activated, it keeps chopping up any RNA it can find, including the reporter RNA fragments added to the reaction. The two markers on the reporter are separated from each other by this collateral cleavage only if the target sequence is present, allowing SHERLOCK to detect viral infections with extreme specificity and exquisite sensitivity; in initial diagnostic tests, viral DNA from patients with Zika virus infections could be detected down into the attomolar range, or about 2,000 copies of the virus per milliliter of sample.
For all its utility, though, the SHERLOCK procedure is still a fussy lab process. Like the
reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction
process that’s currently the gold standard for COVID-19 testing, a SHERLOCK-based diagnostic test would require trained technicians and a well-equipped lab to perform, the potential for cross-contamination as the multiple reaction tubes are accessed, and would still be subject to delays due to shipping samples and returning the results.
To rectify these problems, the Zhang lab came up with a far simpler version of the SHERLOCK assay called STOPCovid, for
SHERLOCK Testing in One Pot
. They optimized the RNA amplification and Cas19 recognition and cleavage steps to run together in one buffer at a single temperature, reducing the number of manipulations needed for each sample tested. This greatly reduces the risk of lab mistakes, and makes the process simple enough to perform in even poorly equipped labs.
Lab On A Stick
Schematic of the STOPCovid process. Source:
STOPCovid
To streamline the process even further, the RNA reporter fragments were re-engineered to allow detection via antibodies. This may seem like a step in the wrong direction, since
as we discussed previously
, antibody testing for COVID-19 infection can only detect whether a patient has created antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and due to the time it takes to do that is more of a lagging indicator of infection. But in the STOPCovid assay, antibodies are used not to detect viral proteins, but as a way to separate the cleaved RNA markers, which are tagged with two different proteins. This opens up the possibility of using a lateral-flow assay, where capillary action pulls reaction solution past strips that have antibodies to the tag proteins applied to them. That will allow health care providers to use a test strip similar to a pregnancy test to read results from the STOPCovid assay, turning the whole process into a point-of-care test.
As with anything in the medical field, there’s a long road between the lab and the clinic. Trials must be conducted, intellectual property disputes must be settled, and manufacturers must be lined up. In the meantime, though, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues aren’t waiting.
They’ve made the full STOPCovid protocol available to anyone
, with all the details on how to run the reaction and interpret the results. They make it very clear that this is not intended for clinical use at this time, but the mere fact that they’re willing to put the information out there and worry about the details later is pretty encouraging.
With the ability to detect a current infection similar through nucleic acid analysis combined with the ease-of-use of a lateral-flow antibody test, STOPCovid could be a real revolution in viral testing, not only for COVID-19 but for viral infections yet to come. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248927",
"author": "Transparent?",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T15:06:22",
"content": "“…pretty early….”You mean after they stopped denying its existance, incarcerating/torturing/disappearing people who reported it, etc?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,373,474.392042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/improving-3d-printed-supports-with-a-marker/ | Improving 3D Printed Supports With A Marker | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"marker",
"Octoprint",
"release agent",
"sharpie",
"solenoid",
"support material"
] | Anyone who’s spent some quality time with a desktop 3D printer is familiar with the concept of supports. If you’re working with a complex model that has overhanging features, printing a “scaffolding” of support material around it is often required. Unfortunately, supports can be a pain to remove and often leave marks on the finished print that need to be addressed.
Looking to improve the situation,
[Tumblebeer] has come up with a very unique modification to the traditional approach
that we think is certainly worthy of closer examination. It doesn’t remove the
need
for support material, but it does make it much easier to remove. The method is cheap, relatively simple to implement, and doesn’t require multiple extruders or filament switching as is the case with something like water-soluble supports.
The trick is to use a permanent marker as a release agent between the top of the support and the area of the print it’s actually touching. The coating of marker prevents the two surfaces from fusing, while still providing the physical support necessary to keep the model from sagging or collapsing.
To test this concept, [Tumblebeer] has outfitted a Prusa i3 MK3S with a solenoid actuated marker holder that hangs off the side of the extruder assembly.
The coil is driven from the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi running OctoPrint
, and is engaged by a custom command in the G-code file. It keeps the marker out of the way during normal printing, and lowers it when its time to lay down the interface coating.
[Tumblebeer] says there’s still a bit of hand-coding involved in this method, and that some automated G-code scripts or a custom slicer plugin could streamline the process considerably. We’re very interested in seeing further community development of this concept, as it seems to hold considerable promise. Having a marker strapped to the side of the extruder might seem complex, but it’s
nothing compared to switching out filaments on the fly
. | 43 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248856",
"author": "Animux",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T11:16:57",
"content": "Wow the surface looks so clean.To try this you could maybe simply pause the printing at the specific layer height and manually paint the support interface.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,373,474.889008 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/27/hacking-dell-laptops-to-use-off-brand-chargers/ | Hacking Dell Laptops To Use Off-Brand Chargers | Lewin Day | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"dell",
"laptop charger"
] | Dell, along with many other manufacturers, have begun to implement smart features into their laptop charging circuitry. This leaves the user out of luck if they wish to use an off-brand part, or get caught short when their original charger fails. [Neutrino] was in just such a position,
and decided to hack around the problem.
The laptop verifies the identity of the attached charger by a third pin. This communicates with a One-Wire IC embedded in the charger, which reports the charger’s identity when queried by the laptop. When [Neutrino]’s charger broke, an attempt was made to use an off-brand charger, with the third pin hooked up to the original failed unit. This tricked the laptop into charging successfully.
For a more permanent workaround, [Neutrino] harvested the One-Wire IC from inside the original charger, and instead hooked it up inside the laptop, directly to the charge port. Thus, the laptop always thinks a Dell charger is connected when power is applied. There is some risk, in that if the user plugs in a lower-power charger than the original, there could be an overload event, but that’s just the risk inherent in the hack.
It’s a tidy workaround for an annoying problem that is all too common in the post-DRM world. Laptop chargers are often prime candidates for failure too; we’ve seen fixes as creative as
repairing a Magsafe with a pistacchio nut before!
[Thanks to Levi for the tip] | 67 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248840",
"author": "Alex Rossie",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T09:27:43",
"content": "Shame they didn’t capture the communication.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248866",
"author": "leo_pl",
"timestamp": "2020-0... | 1,760,373,474.778452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/ewon-is-an-expressive-robot-with-google-assistant/ | Ewon Is An Expressive Robot With Google Assistant | Al Williams | [
"google hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"google assistant",
"raspberry pi",
"snowboy"
] | Had too much self-quarantine? [Sharathnaik] had, so he decided to build a robot companion named
Ewon
. Using a Raspberry Pi, Ewon isn’t a robot that moves around, but rather an expressive Google assistant. Using some servo-driven ears and a display, Ewon reacts to you based on keywords you use in your queries. For example, it might perk up and smile at the mention of ice cream. Or look unhappy if you mention sadness.
The project is simple because of the Google Assistant API. However, we liked the 3D printed body and some of the additional features the robot adds.
If we are being honest, one of the things we were most interested in was the use of
Snowboy
which is a hot word detector you can use on the Pi. This allows the robot to answer to “Hey Ewon,” instead of “Hey Google.” Unfortunately, the GitHub page notes that the developer behind Snowboy is ceasing operations in December, though the code is open-source so it will still be around. The system works on the Pi, of course, but also on Linux, Mac OS, Android, and iOS in a variety of languages.
We wish there was a video of Ewon, but we couldn’t find one. We’d like to build this and add a feature so Ewon’s ears and expressions would keep time with the music playing.
If you don’t like sending your data to Google, maybe try
Almond
. If you want to give Ewon some legs,
this robot
might be your inspiration. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248874",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T12:40:25",
"content": "snowboy is not opensource. What’s opensource is a wrapper for running the freely distributed binary-only libraries for some platform. If, for whatever reason, one of the libc symbol happens to change, y... | 1,760,373,474.813627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/assemble-your-virtual-robotic-underground-exploration-team/ | Assemble Your (Virtual) Robotic Underground Exploration Team | Roger Cheng | [
"contests",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous drone",
"autonomous robot",
"cave",
"cave mapping",
"darpa",
"DARPA Robotic Challenge",
"darpa robotics challenge",
"robotics",
"underground"
] | It’s amazing how many things have managed to move online in recent weeks, many with a beneficial side effect of eliminating travel making them more accessible to everyone around the world. Though some events had a virtual track before it was cool, among them the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) robotics competition. Recent additions to their
“Hello World” tutorials
(with promise of more to come) have continued to lower the barrier of entry for aspiring roboticists.
We all love
watching physical robots explore
the real world, which is why SubT’s “Systems Track” gets
most of the attention
. But such participation is necessarily restricted to people who have the resources to build and transport bulky hardware to the competition site, which is just a tiny subset of all the brilliant minds who can contribute. Hence the “Virtual Track” which is accessible to anyone with a computer that
meets requirements
. (64-bit Ubuntu 18 with NVIDIA GPU) The tutorials help get us up and running on
SubT’s virtual testbed
which continues to evolve. With every round, the organizers work to bring the virtual and physical worlds closer together. During the recent Urban Circuit, they made high resolution scans of both the
competition course
as well as
participating robots
.
There’s a lot of other traffic on various SubT code repositories. Motivated by Bitbucket
sunsetting their Mercurial support
, SubT is moving from
Bitbucket
to
GitHub
and picking up some housecleaning along the way. Together with the newly added tutorials, this is a great time to dive in and see if you want to assemble a team (both of human collaborators and virtual robots) to
join in the next round
of virtual SubT. But if you prefer to stay an observer of the physical world, enjoy
this writeup
with many fun details on systems track robots. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248800",
"author": "Alexander",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T03:19:43",
"content": "Sorry, tell me, what real made at this road? I see only “loosely linked links”. What are you do you propose to do at real level? May be beautiful idea, but “what the plan”?",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,475.023294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/telco-curio-hacked-into-simple-counter/ | Telco Curio Hacked Into Simple Counter | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"attiny13",
"counter",
"tikkenteller"
] | The tikkenteller was a device used to measure the duration of telephone use. 70 Volts were sent down the telephone line at 50Hz to run an electromechanical counter, and the devices were often used in communal areas where several users shared a single phone.
[Charles Babbadge] decided to repurpose the stout 1950s hardware into a simple counter.
The build uses an ATtiny13 to generate pulses for the original hardware, when receiving inputs from the tikkenteller’s buttons. A solid state relay is triggered by the microcontroller, which connects the original solenoid to mains power to jog the counter. An HLK-PM01 5V power supply is used to run the micro, allowing the entire project to run off a single mains supply.
It’s a big, heavy, beautiful hunk of metal, built in a style that we simply don’t see anymore. It’s in no way the cheapest or most efficient counter you could build, but it’s got a charm you can’t find on more modern hardware. You could use such a device to track your Youtube subs, that is…
if the API hadn’t broken that for everyone.
Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248807",
"author": "rewolff",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T05:44:38",
"content": "Your article starts out with a falsehood.> The tikkenteller was a device used to measure the duration of telephone use.No. The Tikkenteller was used to measure the COST of a telephone call. Back in the ol... | 1,760,373,475.062388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/boot-your-pi-over-usb/ | Boot Your Pi Over USB | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bootloader",
"raspberry pi",
"solid state disk",
"ssd"
] | Historically, booting a Raspberry Pi required an SD card. However, if you follow
[tynick’s] instructions
, you can get a Pi 4 to boot from the USB port. Combine it with a small solid state disk drive, and you’ll get great performance, according to his post.
The caveat is this depends on a beta bootloader and, of course, you’ll still have to boot from an SD card at least once to load that bootloader. If you were deploying something serious, you’d probably want to make sure the bootloader is suitable for your needs.
In fact, most of the work here is doing the prep work. You have to grab the new bootloader and flash it. You also have to make some changes to get the boot code to check the USB port. You also install the operating system image on the SSD just like you would an SD card.
After that, it is easy to copy the boot files to the USB drive and you are ready to go. This would be a great use for an old SSD if you pair it with a USB adapter.
According to the post, the SSD is about ten times faster than the SD card, so the performance boost is significant. Of course, some of this depends on the USB adapter, and [tynick] recommends a particular one that seems to work well.
The Pi 4 is already fast,
especially with a 64-bit OS
. If you don’t like the SSD bootloader, you can do a similar trick to
boot from the network
. | 50 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248503",
"author": "Jaakko",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T05:40:20",
"content": "It’d be interesting to know some actual measurements on boot times with a tiny image. At least when I did some tests with USB-SATA bridge vs SDCard on a tiny buildroot image, it seemed that the USB device ... | 1,760,373,475.143685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/this-frequency-generator-knows-how-to-get-down/ | This Frequency Generator Knows How To Get Down | Tom Nardi | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"demodulation",
"frequency generator",
"signal generator",
"sine wave",
"square wave"
] | What kind of clever things could you do with a signal that had a period of 2 hours? Or 20? Any ideas? No seriously, tell us.
Because [Joseph Eoff] has come up with a way to produce incredibly low frequency signals
that stretch out for hours, and we’d love to figure out what we can do with it.
To be fair, it’s not like [Joseph] has any ideas either. He thought it would be an interesting project, and figures now that he has the technology, maybe some application will come to him. They say that if you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail, so maybe the next project he sends our way will be a sinusoidal fish feeder.
[Joseph] says doing the software side of things with Pure Data wasn’t a problem, but getting it out of the computer proved to be tricky. It turns out that your average computer sound card isn’t equipped to handle frequencies down into the millihertz range (big surprise), so they need to be coaxed out with some extra hardware. Using a simple circuit not unlike an AM demodulator, he’s able to extract the low-frequency signal from a 16 kHz carrier.
So if you ever find yourself in need of a handful of hertz, now you’ve got the tool to generate them. At least it’s more practical than
how they used to generate low frequency signals back in the 1900s
. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248504",
"author": "ganzuul",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T05:40:25",
"content": "The sinewave could perhaps be made pure with a capacitance multiplier circuit. Unless the demodulator works as a new kind of filter circuit, it is going to look like a train of DC voltage levels.",
"p... | 1,760,373,475.196954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/herb-garden-is-smarter-than-the-average-garden/ | Herb Garden Is Smarter Than The Average… Garden | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"garden",
"gardening",
"herb garden",
"herbs"
] | After 13 days, the herbs are showing good signs of growth.
Herbs are a great way to spice up any dish. Often they don’t need much, meaning that it’s possible to grow a useful amount in a fairly compact area. [Sunyecz22] wanted to do just that, so built a convenient indoor herb garden,
giving it some smarts along the way.
The project is built around an Arduino Mega, a venerable stalwart of the scene that comes in handy on projects requiring plenty of digital I/O. It’s paired with four soil moisture sensors, one per planter pot to keep an eye on water levels. The system also controls LEDs which provide light based on the time of day to help the herbs grow. Finally, a tidy 3D printed enclosure gives the project a neat, finished look.
It’s a build that’s a straightforward way to get into automatic plant maintenance, and leaves plenty of scope for future work. With the capable Arduino Mega on hand, it would be a cinch to upgrade to automatic watering down the track.
We’ve seen similar builds before, too
. Video after the break. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248470",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T23:41:57",
"content": "Things I have learnt give plenty of space for the plant to grow.– 1 seed per container as each of them can grow up to take up the whole container. Seeds are not friends with each other as they are com... | 1,760,373,475.249609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/secret-knock-unlocks-door/ | Secret Knock Unlocks Door | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"door lock",
"knock",
"lock",
"piezo"
] | Watch any movie about the years of prohibition, and you’ll probably see character gain admittance to a speakeasy by using a secret knock on the door. In the old movies, a little sliding door would open so the doorman could check you out and let you in. With [IsmailSan’s] electronic lock, the secret knock
automatically unlocks the door
. You can see a video of how it works, below.
(Ed Note: Grrr…GitHub repo got pulled between writing and publication. Go check out the in-links in the bottom paragraph if you’re interested in knock-detectors.)
The device uses a piezoelectric speaker to detect the knocking. A speaker is a transducer and like many transducers, it will work — to some extent — in either direction. A servo motor manages the deadbolt. An Arduino runs the whole thing.
The code is relatively simple. It holds an array of projected delays between knocks and compares what it hears to those delays. If you complete the sequence, the door unlocks. We probably would add some extra security if we were locking up the country’s gold supply, but for a light-duty lock, it should be fine.
The circuit is simple, too. There is an analog input tied to a resistor and the sensor. The Arduino is perfectly capable of driving a small servo directly. Add a battery and it is done.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen knock-operated locks around here, but they used to be all the rage. Here is a
nice simple one
, one that
uses logic chips
, and of course
one built from 555s
. If knocking isn’t your style, try
replacing the piezo with a button
or
even a capacitive sensor
. You can’t knock it! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248424",
"author": "Freddie Chopin",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T20:07:14",
"content": "Instead of security by obscurity make a security by obscenity. Show your schlong to the camera and it’ll unlock the doors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,475.300272 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/fpga-raises-component-video-from-a-sinclair-zx-spectrum/ | FPGA Raises Component Video From A Sinclair ZX Spectrum | Jenny List | [
"FPGA",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"fpga",
"sinclair spectrum",
"video",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | An abiding memory of the early-80s heyday of 8-bit computing for many is operating their computer from the carpet in front of the family TV. While the kids in the computer adverts had parents who bought them a portable colour telly on which to play
Jet Set Willy
, the average kid had used up all the Christmas present money on the computer itself. The cable would have been an RF connection to the TV antenna socket, and the picture quality? At the time we thought it was
amazing
because we didn’t know any different, but with the benefit of nearly 40 years’ hindsight, it was awful.
For ZX Spectrum owners in 2020 a standard modification is to bring out a composite video signal, but [c0pperdragon]
has gone a step or two beyond that with a component video interface
. And this isn’t a mod in which the signals are lifted from the Spectrum’s colour encoder circuitry, instead it uses an FPGA hooked directly to the ULA chip to generate the component video itself.
The Altera chip sits on a little PCB designed to occupy the footprint of the original Astec modulator, and sports a neat bundle of wires hooked up to the various Spectrum signals it needs. There are a couple of jumpers to select the output type and resolution, it supports YPbPr or RGsB outputs and both 288p and 576p. If you think perhaps it looks a little familiar, that’s because it’s the sister project of
an earlier board for the Commodore 64
. So if you have a Spectrum and are annoyed by UHF and PAL, perhaps it’s worth a look. | 39 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248376",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T17:49:07",
"content": "The Spectrum was a more capable machine than the TS-1000, right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248398",
"author": "garlicbready",
"t... | 1,760,373,475.371231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/2020-hackaday-prize-hack-chat-with-majenta-strongheart/ | 2020 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat With Majenta Strongheart | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"assistive",
"challenge",
"conservation",
"design",
"disaster",
"Hack Chat",
"prize",
"relief",
"renewable"
] | Join us on Wednesday, May 27 at noon Pacific for the
2020 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat
with
Majenta Strongheart
!
It hardly seems possible, but the Hackaday Prize, the world’s greatest hardware design contest, is once more at hand. But the world of 2020 is vastly different than it was last year, and the challenges we all suddenly face have become both more numerous and more acute as a result. We’ve seen hackers rise to the challenges presented by the events of the last few months in unexpected ways, coming up with imaginative solutions and pressing the limits of what’s possible. What this community can do when it is faced with a real challenge is inspiring.
Now it’s time to take that momentum and apply it to some of the other problems the world is facing. For
the 2020 Hackaday Prize
, we’re asking you to throw your creativity at challenges in conservation, disaster response, assistive technology, and renewable resources. We’ve teamed up with leading non-profits in those areas, each of which has specific challenges they need you to address.
With $200,000 in prize money at stake, we’re sure you’re going to want to step up to the challenge. To help get you started, Majenta Strongheart, Head of Design and Partnerships at Supplyframe, will drop by the Hack Chat with all the details on the 2020 Hackaday Prize. Come prepared to pick her brain on what needs doing and how best to tackle the problems that the Prize is trying to address. And find out about all the extras, like the “Dream Team” microgrants, the wild card prize, and the community picks.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 27 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have
a handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6249486",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-29T03:07:05",
"content": "Okay, a tile in the title photo shows a “80085” house,where is the link to that project?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6249491",
"author": "j... | 1,760,373,475.410724 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/hacking-the-road-roundabouts/ | Hacking The Road: Roundabouts | Al Williams | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"civil engineering",
"roundabouts",
"Swindon",
"traffic",
"traffic circles"
] | If you are from the US, you might be surprised at how prevalent roundabouts are in most of the world. Outside of Carmel, Indiana which has 125 roundabouts, these are pretty unusual in the United States though have been gaining in popularity over the past decade. It turns out, that while a modern roundabout is safer and more efficient than other intersection types, roundabouts got a bad rap early on and so the typical US driver still has a lot of anxiety when approaching one.
Prior to 1966, traffic circles were a spotty thing. In some cases, they were just big circular junctions. In others, the right-of-way rules were difficult to figure out or there were traffic lights and stop signs that did not lead to a better or safer driving experience.
Enter Frank Blackmore. In the UK, he introduced the “Priority Rule” which — simply — mandates that traffic entering a circle must give way to traffic already in the circle. Blackmore worked out that this method increases traffic flow by 10%. Although this kind of roundabout became law in the UK in 1966, the US was slow to adopt, primarily due to negative public opinion. In 2016, there were about 4,800 modern roundabouts in the U.S while France and the UK have roughly 55,000 combined.
So what are the virtues of the modern rounabout, and where did it come from? Let’s take a look.
Modern Style
The modern roundabout has several features that were lacking on most older rotary traffic junctions. We already mentioned the priority rule. But a modern roundabout also requires cars to turn to enter the roundabout. This forces cars to slow and makes the intersection safer.
A roundabout is cheaper over the long run. There are no traffic signals to maintain and there is no power required. A single-lane roundabout can handle over 20,000 vehicles a day. The two-lane version can handle at least 40,000. Because there is less stopping and waiting, emissions are reduced, and the circles are more fuel-efficient, too.
Provably Safer For Cars, Less So for Cyclists
But the real pay off is in safety. Studies show that modern roundabouts are safer than other kinds of intersections for both drivers and pedestrians. A US study shows 39% fewer vehicle collisions, 76% fewer injuries and 90% fewer serious injuries and fatalities when an intersection changes into a modern roundabout. A New Zealand study did show, however, that bicycle/automobile accidents were higher at traffic circles.
It is a bit intimidating when you have a lot of streets feeding one circle. The
Place Charles de Gaulle
surrounding the Arc de Triomphe which has 12 roads feeding it. What really gets confusing is when you have multiple circles going different directions. The video below shows Swindon’s “magic roundabout” that has seven circles together!
Hack PR
You might consider this a civil engineering hack, but really we think the real interesting thing here is more social engineering. Just because you develop something better doesn’t mean people will flock to it. The US still won’t budge on using the metric system. The Dvorak keyboard remains an oddity (though
it’s benefits may have been overhyped
). People still write checks and use FAX machines. We still resist traffic circles.
Perhaps what Blackmore failed to consider is that in addition to tests showing the efficiency and safety of the roundabout, he should have also turned in a public relations campaign to convince people about the benefits. If you have the next great idea that will change everything, maybe you’ll take the Blackmore lesson to heart.
Usually, traffic circles don’t have lights, and we do like
traffic lights
. Especially the
old fashioned kind
. | 111 | 43 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248303",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T14:10:39",
"content": "I once saw classic “cross” intersection retrofitted to roundabout by putting pole with roundabout sign in the middle of it. Cars then had to ride around that pole. French engineering.",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,373,475.817478 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/lasercut-puzzlebox-is-safe-cracking-fun/ | Lasercut Puzzlebox Is Safe-Cracking Fun | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"Puzzle Box",
"puzzlebox"
] | If you head out into the real world and start twiddling knobs on random safes, you might find yourself being hauled away by uniformed police. A safer pastime might be playing with your own puzzlebox at home,
which is precisely what [thediylife] has done with this build
.
The design implements a basic safe-cracking game, in which players try to guess the combination to the safe in a series of rounds. Input is via a rotary encoder, hooked up to the Arduino Uno inside. This project really wins because the finish looks so amazing. The safe is constructed out of 3mm MDF, which is lasercut to shape — an easy one to whip up in the average makerspace. The interface is fleshed out with a small OLED screen and some LEDs, while a servo acts as the lock which holds the door shut. When you see the underside of the face plate with components hot glued into holes you’ll really pale at how clean the business side ended up.
It’s a simple build, and one that would make a great party game with a prize hidden inside. We’ve seen other puzzle-box builds before, too —
like the GPS-based reverse geocache build.
Video after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248359",
"author": "Micy",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T16:42:56",
"content": "Its a geat gift for a puzzle fan.a 3d printed version would be very nice and cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6248363",
"author": "Henrik",
... | 1,760,373,475.450383 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/25/a-diy-electronics-lab-you-can-show-off-with-pride/ | A DIY Electronics Lab You Can Show Off With Pride | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atx power supply",
"Digital storage oscilloscope",
"electronics lab",
"power supply",
"workbench"
] | It’s hardly a secret that getting into a serious electronics habit can be detrimental to your bank account. A professional grade lab is simply unobtainable for many a tinkerer, and even mid-range hardware can set you back considerably. Which is why many folks just starting out will attempt to salvage or build as much of their equipment as possible. It might not always be pretty, but it’ll get the job done.
But this project by
[Chrismettal] could end up completely reinventing the home electronic workspace
. Using 3D printed frames, low-cost components, and a sprinkling of custom PCBs, this modular electronics workbench has all the bells and whistles an aspiring hardware hacker could need. As an added bonus, it looks like something that came off the International Space Station.
Inside the resistor substitution module.
This is one of those projects that simply can’t be done justice in a few paragraphs. If you’ve ever wanted to put together a dedicated electronics workbench but were put off by the cost of individual components, read though the fantastic documentation [Chrismettal] has prepared for the EleLab_v2. Is it all top-of-the-line hardware? No, of course not. But it’s more than suitable for the kind of work people in this community usually find themselves involved in on a weekend.
So what’s included? Naturally [Chrismettal] has created a power supply module, in both variable and fixed flavors. But there’s also a module for a resistor substitution, a component tester, and even a digital storage oscilloscope. You can mix and match the modules suit your needs, and if you want to create entirely new ones, the FreeCAD sources are available to get you started.
We’ve seen low-cost power supply modules before
, and
naturally we’re no strangers to cheap DSO kits
. But this project wraps those devices and gadgets up into a form factor that anyone would be happy to have on their bench. We’re exceptionally interested in seeing new modules developed for the EleLab_v2, and doubt this is the last time you’ll see this impressive project grace these pages.
[Thanks to BrunoC for the tip.] | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248252",
"author": "Mike Massen in Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T08:19:30",
"content": "Takes me way back, did something like this in a foolscap (bigger than A4) plan portable format all cobbled together before I knew much about production engineering or effic... | 1,760,373,475.878114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/ironclad-tips-for-copper-clad-prototyping/ | Ironclad Tips For Copper-Clad Prototyping | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"copper clad",
"copper tape",
"prototyping",
"Teflon tubing",
"tips and tricks",
"wire wrap"
] | The idea of trying to prototype with SMD parts on the fly sounds like insanity, right? But then we watched [Leo Fernekes]
walk calmly and carefully through his process
(video, embedded below). Suddenly, SMD prototyping jumped onto our list of things to try soon.
[Leo] speaks from a lot of experience and tight client timelines, so this video is a fourteen-minute masterclass in using copper-clad board as a Manhattan-style scratch pad. He starts by making a renewable tool for scraping away copper by grinding down and shaping an old X-Acto blade into a kind of sharpened Swiss Army knife bottle opener shape. That alone is mind-blowing, but [Leo] keeps on going.
In these prototypes, he uses the through-hole version of whatever microcontroller is in the design. For everything else, he uses the exact SMT part that will end up on the PCB that someone else is busy designing in the meantime.
After laying the board out on paper, [Leo] carves out the islands of conductivity, beep-checks them for shorts, shines the whole thing with steel wool, and goes to town.
The tips and tricks keep coming as he makes jumps and joins ground planes with bare copper wire insulated with heat-proof Teflon tubing, and lays out the benefits of building up a stash of connectors and shelling out the money for a good crimp tool.
And why do you need a good crimp tool? Because when they’re done properly, crimped connections are stronger and more reliable than solder.
There’s a lot more to them than you might think
. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248225",
"author": "Artenz",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T05:39:59",
"content": "The tool is convenient, but the cut seems rather wide, so it wouldn’t work well with fine pitch stuff, especially not if it has more than 3 or 4 leads.And the MCP9700 he used as an example is also availabl... | 1,760,373,477.489792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/mimicking-exoplanet-exploration-at-home/ | Mimicking Exoplanet Exploration At Home | Sven Gregori | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"dc motor",
"exoplanet",
"Kepler",
"ldr",
"space exploration"
] | Mankind will always wonder whether we’re alone in the universe.
What is out there?
Sure, these past weeks we’ve been increasingly wondering the same about our own, direct proximity, but that’s a different story. Up until two years ago, we had the Kepler space telescope aiding us in our quest for answers by exploring exoplanets within our galaxy. [poblocki1982], who’s been fascinated by space since childhood times, and has recently discovered 3D printing as his new thing, figured there is nothing better than finding a way to combine your hobbies, and built
a simplified model version simulating the telescope’s main concept
.
The general idea is to detect the slight variation of a star’s brightness when one of its planets passes by it, and use that variation to analyze each planet’s characteristics. He achieves this with an LDR connected to an Arduino, allowing both live reading and logging the data on an SD card. Unfortunately, rocket science isn’t on his list of hobbies yet, so [poblocki1982] has to bring outer space to his home. Using a DC motor to rotate two “planets” of different size, rotation speed, and distance around their “star”, he has the perfect model planetary system that can easily double as a decorative lamp.
Obviously, this isn’t meant to detect actual planets as the
real Kepler space telescope
did, but to demonstrate the general concept of it, and as such makes this a nice little science experiment. For a more pragmatic use of our own Solar System, [poblocki1982] has recently built
this self-calibrating sundial
. And if you like rotating models of planets, check out
some previous projects on that
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248274",
"author": "datacarrierdetect",
"timestamp": "2020-05-25T11:03:20",
"content": "Shouldn’t the planet closest to the start orbit faster? Other than that, cool idea :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248364",
"... | 1,760,373,477.861577 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/hackaday-links-may-24-2020/ | Hackaday Links: May 24, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"electronic music",
"fpga",
"hackaday links",
"jackstands",
"Marconi",
"moog",
"oscilloscope",
"pronunciation",
"radio",
"recall",
"remote",
"safety",
"salvage",
"style",
"synthesizer",
"titanic",
"wireless"
] | We’re saddened to learn of
the passing of Gershon Kingsley
in December 2019 at the age of 97. The composer and electronic music pioneer was not exactly a household name, but the things he did with the Moog synthesizer, especially the surprise hit
“Pop Corn”
, which he wrote in 1969, are sure to be familiar. The song has been covered dozens of times, in the process of which the spelling of the name changed to “Popcorn.” We’re most familiar with the
1972 cover by Hot Butter
, an earworm from our youth that doesn’t hide the Moog as deeply in the backing instruments as Kingsley did in the original. Or, perhaps you prefer
the cover done by a robotic glockenspiel
, because robotic glockenspiel.
A few months back, we covered the audacious
plan to recover the radio gear from the Titanic
. At the time, the potential salvors, Atlanta-based RMS Titanic, Inc., were seeking permission to cut into the submerged remains of the
Titanic
‘s Marconi room to remove as much of the wireless gear as possible.
A federal judge granted permission for the salvage operation
last Friday, giving the company the green light to prepare an expedition for this summer. The US government, through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Park Service, argued strenuously to leave the wreck be and treat it as a tomb for the 1,527 victims. For our part, we had a great discussion about the merits in the comments section of the previous article. Now that it’s a done deal, we’d love to hear what you have to say about this again.
Although life appears to be slowly returning to what passes for normal, that doesn’t mean you might not still have some cycles to spare, especially when the time spent can bolster your skillset. And so if you’re looking to adding FPGAs to your resume, check out
this remote lab on FPGA vision systems
offered by Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University. The setup allows you to watch lectures, download code examples, and build them on your local computer, and then upload the resulting binaries to real hardware running on the lab’s servers in Germany. It sounds like a great way to get access to FPGA hardware that you’d otherwise have a hard time laying hands on. Or, you know, you could have just come to
the 2019 Hackaday Superconference
.
Speaking of skill-builders, oscilloscope owners who want to sharpen their skills could do worse than to listen to the advice of a real scope jockey like Allen Wolke. He recently posted a helpful video listing
the five most common reasons for your scope giving “wrong” voltage readings
. Spoiler alert: the instrument is probably doing exactly what you told it to do. As a scope newbie, we found the insights very helpful, and we can imagine even seasoned users could make simple mistakes like using the wrong probe attenuation or forgetting that scope response isn’t flat across its bandwidth.
Safety tip for the gearheads among us: your jack stands might be unsafe to use. Harbor Freight, the stalwart purveyor of cheap tools, has issued
a recall of two different models of its jack stands
. It seems that the pawls can kick out under the right conditions, sending the supported load crashing to the ground. This qualifies as a Very Bad Day for anyone unlucky enough to be working underneath when it happens. Defective jack stands can be returned to Harbor Freight for store credit, so check your garage and be safe out there in the shop.
And finally, because everyone loves a good flame war, Ars Technica has come up with
a pronunciation guide for common tech terms
. We have to admit that most of these are not surprising; few among the technology literate would mispronounce “Linux” or “sudo”. We will admit to a non-fanboy level of ignorance on whether the “X” in “iOS X” was a Roman numeral or not, but learning that the “iOS” part is correctly pronounced as three syllables, not two was a bit shocking. It’s all an exercise in pedantry that reminds us of a mildly heated discussion we had around the secret Hackaday writers’ bunker and whether “a LED” or “an LED” is the correct style. If the Internet was made for anything, it was stuff like this. | 56 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248153",
"author": "Garrett",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T23:30:43",
"content": "Well, that settles it. If we’re accepting pronunciation from the inventor as definitive, it’s “GIF” with a soft G like the peanut butter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,477.826698 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/finding-rf-cable-impedance/ | Finding RF Cable Impedance | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"characteristic impedance",
"Coax",
"impedance",
"ladder line",
"transmission line"
] | At DC and low frequency, we can pretend wires are perfect conductors. At radio frequencies, though, there are many effects that you need to take into account for wires and cables. One of these is characteristic impedance. If you have a marked cable, you can look it up on the Internet, of course. But what if you don’t know what kind of wire it is? With help from [The Offset Volt],
you can measure it
as he shows in the video below.
This is one of those things that used to take exotic test equipment like an LCR bridge, but these days meters that measure inductance and capacitance are commonplace. The trick is simple: measure the capacitance and then short one end of the cable and measure the inductance.
Once you have those numbers, it is easy to do a little math and determine the impedance. It doesn’t matter how long the cable is. The length will change the individual readings, but the ratio of the two readings will remain relatively constant.
If you don’t have a way to measure the inductance and capacitance, you can always
build your own measuring gear
. If you want to take a different approach,
Tektronix showed us how
to do this with a fast pulse back in the 1960s. But for that, you are going to need a scope. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248130",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T21:31:35",
"content": "I still don’t remember the visible differences between 50 and 75 ohm BNC connectors!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248185",
"author": "ForSq... | 1,760,373,477.922126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/arduband-gives-your-eyes-a-hand/ | Arduband Gives Your Eyes A Hand | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Lifehacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"arduino",
"buzzer",
"eye protection",
"notification",
"vibration motor"
] | Let’s face it, we probably all sit at our computers for way too long without getting up. Yes, there’s work to be done, games to be played, and the internet abounds with people who are wrong and must be down-voted and/or corrected. We totally get and respect all that. However, if you want to maintain your middle- and long-range vision, you should really get up regularly and gaze out the window for a bit.
In fact,
the Arduband
does you one better. Its Arduino Nano and accelerometer check your position every ten minutes. If you haven’t changed your Z by the third check, then it’s time for a break. The combination of an RGB LED, buzzer, and vibrating disc motor working together should be enough to pull you out of any computerized stupor, and they won’t give up and go back to sleep until you have stood up and remained upright for one minute.
We like that [ardutronics123] spun up a board and made it small enough to be wrist-mounted using a watch strap. It would work just as well worn around your neck, and would probably even fit in your pocket. Blink a few times before you check out the build video after the break.
Arduband would be great on the go, but who does that anymore?
If you spend every day at the same desk, you could point a time-of-flight sensor at your chair and start a timer
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248096",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T18:31:06",
"content": "Should use bluetooth to shut off your screen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248139",
"author": "qwert",
"timestamp": "2020-05-... | 1,760,373,477.693356 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/breathing-new-life-into-old-school-thinkpad-keyboards/ | Breathing New Life Into Old School ThinkPad Keyboards | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"computer hacks",
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"IBM Thinkpad",
"input device",
"keyboard",
"Teensy 3.2",
"thinkpad",
"TrackPoint",
"usb hid"
] | The ThinkPad is generally considered the unofficial laptop of hackerdom, so it’s no surprise that we see plenty of projects focused on repairing and modifying these reliable workhorses. But while we usually see folks working on relatively modern incarnations of this iconic line of computers, this project by [Frank Adams] and [Brian Chan] shows that the
hacker’s love affair with the ThinkPad stretches back farther than many might realize
.
As explained on the project’s Hackaday.io page, the duo have produced an open hardware board that will allow you to take the keyboard and trackpoint from a late ’90s ThinkPad 380ED and use it as a standard USB input device on a modern computer. According to [Frank], the keyboards on these machines are notable for having full-size keys rather than the “chicklet” boards that are so common today.
Now you may be wondering why this is significant. After all, we’ve seen plenty of projects that hook up an old keyboard to a USB-equipped microcontroller to get them speaking the lingua franca. Well, the trick here is that the trackpoint on these older ThinkPads actually required additional circuitry on the motherboard to function. The keyboard features three separate FPC connections for the matrix, the trackpoint buttons, and the analog strain gauges in the trackpoint itself.
After a considerable amount of reverse engineering, [Frank] and [Brian] have developed a board that uses the Teensy 3.2 to turn this plethora of pins into something useful. In the video after the break, you can see the new composite USB device working perfectly on a modern Windows computer.
It will probably come as little surprise to find that [Frank] is no stranger to hacking ThinkPad keyboards. In
2018 we covered a similar adapter he built for the far more modern T61
, which was an absolute cakewalk by comparison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGSg1ky4UUs | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248797",
"author": "Steve L",
"timestamp": "2020-05-27T02:28:39",
"content": "Thinkpad keyboards were and are very good, but the best keyboards ever on laptops were on Toshiba laptops. Sadly, they exited the market.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,373,477.738126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/simple-sprite-routines-ease-handheld-gaming-diy/ | Simple Sprite Routines Ease Handheld Gaming DIY | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"diy",
"game development",
"gaming",
"handheld gaming",
"pybadge",
"pygamer",
"sprite",
"ST7735",
"TFT display"
] | Making your own handheld games is made much easier with [David Johnson-Davies’]
simple sprite routines for the Adafruit PyBadge and PyGamer boards
. Sprites can be thought of as small, fixed-size graphical objects that are drawn, erased, moved, and checked for collision with other screen elements.
xorSprite()
plots an 8×8 sprite,
moveSprite()
moves a given sprite by one pixel without any flicker, and
hitSprite()
checks a sprite for collision with any screen elements in a given color. That is all it takes to implement a simple game, and [David] makes them easy to use, even providing
a demo program
in the form of the rolling ball maze shown here.
These routines work out-of-the-box with the PyBadge and PyGamer, but should be easy to adapt to any TFT display based on the ST7735 controller. The PyGamer is the board shown here, but you can see the
PyBadge as it was used to create an MQTT-enabled conference badge
.
If you really want to take a trip down the rabbit hole of sprite-based gaming graphics, you simply can’t miss hearing about
the system [Sprite_TM] built into the FPGA Game Boy badge
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248729",
"author": "Freddie Chopin",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T19:59:06",
"content": "I like C++ on embedded systems, especially with LEON and STM32 although there was a time folks at IAR cared nothing for hobbyists coding at their spare time… When their only experience of humanity ... | 1,760,373,477.418515 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/teardown-nabaztag/ | Teardown: Nabaztag | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"Internet Appliance",
"IoT",
"nabaztag",
"teardown"
] | In 2020 there is nothing novel or exciting about an online device. Even the most capable models are designed to be unobrusive pucks and smart speakers; their function lies in what they do rather than in how they look. In 2005, an Internet connected device was a rare curiosity, a daring symbol of a new age: the “Internet of Things”!
Our fridges were going to suggest recipes based upon their contents, and very few people had yet thought of the implications of an always-on connected appliance harvesting your data on behalf of a global corporation. Into this arena stepped the Nabaztag (from the Armenian for “rabbit”), an information appliance in the form of a stylised French plastic rabbit that could deliver voice alerts, and indicate status alerts by flashing lights and moving its ears.
Le Premier Lapin Connecté, Ensuite Le Premier Lapin Disconnecté
The 100 Nabaztag Opera at NextFest 2006. Violet06 (
Public domain
)
If this sounds unexpected now, in 2005 it was the darling of the more technically literate chattering classes, hailed as the dawn of a new future in online information and
appearing as a piece of art
rather than consumer electronics. Quality magazine columnists raved about them, though
some spied a glimpse of what future devices would bring in addressing their faults
, and for a while an odd anthropomorphic plastic light-up rabbit became an object of desire.
The tale of an IoT startup that gains a lot of traction but fails to create sufficient market is a familiar one to us today, but while the French company Violet who created the Nabaztag were by no means the first in the field to falter they were an early high-profile case of a hardware device being orphaned when its servers left the Internet. Financial troubles led to a sale to the game developer Mindscape, but even that failed to save the device and its servers were turned off in 2011. Since then the remaining Nabaztags have remained alive through the efforts of a hacking community that has grown up around them, with boards such as the Raspberry Pi providing replacement Nabaztag servers.
What’s Beneath That Cute Exterior?
The Nabaztag has always wielded a curious fascination for me as one of the iconic early internet information appliances. They were too expensive for an impulse buy in 2005, but they can now be had for less than a Raspberry Pi 4 via your favourite online auction house. So a couple of years ago I bought a brand new and boxed example, on which I’m now going to perform a teardown. There were three models with varying functionality, mine is the original Nabaztag from 2005.
Out of the box comes a power adapter, instruction leaflet, and the bunny itself. It’s a roughly conical white plastic device about 150 mm (just below 6″) high whose circular base is about 130 mm (5″) in diameter, tapering to around 80 mm (3.25″) at its top. On its front is printed a stylised rabbit face, in the centre at the top is a white plastic button, and either side at its top are mounted a pair of 100 mm (4″) long plastic ears. These are detachable, held on by magnets, and they can be rotated to point anywhere from straight up to out sideways from the body. At the rear bottom is a power jack for the 8 V DC supply, and a three-position volume switch for the internal speaker.
The front of the disassembled bunny. The PCMCIA card is nestled behind the PCB.
The rear of the unit. At the top are the ear motors and their position sensors.
The PCMCIA network card, an off-the-shelf Benq item.
Turning it over, there are a couple of screws holding the base and body together, requiring a tamper-resistant triangular screwdriver. I found a tri-wing driver could unscrew them with a bit of care, and soon had the body apart to reveal the inner workings. Inside is a vertical black plastic chassis with PCB on one side and speakers and ear motors with their small position sensor PCBs on the other, and a series of black plastic light guides protruding from the front of the PCB. Examining the board, all peripheral cables are neatly mounted with sockets at the edge of the board, and all parts save for an
L293D
motor controller in a DIP package are surface-mount. Of note are the
PIC18F6525
microcontroller that forms the brains of the unit, an OKI ML2870A sound chip, and an Atmel AT45DB161B 16 megabit Flash chip.
This is a WiFi enabled device, so I was expecting also to find a screened can on the board containing the WiFi chipset and RF circuitry. Instead I was surprised to find a PCMCIA socket on the reverse side of the PCB, and in it a Benq 801.11B 11 megabit PCMCIA WiFi card. By 2005 these were starting to disappear from laptops as USB and built-in devices took on that role, so it’s an unexpected find. It is especially unusual to see a microcontroller driving this interface, but considering that it had its roots in early-90s portable computing it’s hardly beyond this PIC’s capabilities.
Making Sense Of A Nabaztag In 2020
Just because you can see a network, doesn’t mean you can connect to it.
There are a range of options to get your Nabaztag working in 2020, including the
Nabaztaglives
Raspberry Pi server,
OpenJabNab
, and even a
ServerlessNabaztag firmware
. Of most interest though is the
TagTagTag
, a Raspberry Pi Zero-based upgrade board produced by the original Nabaztag designers, the second crowdunded production run of which has now been suspended due to COVID-19. Not having a TagTagTag, I set out to connect my Nabaztag to one of the first two options, and that’s where I hit a snag.
Out of the box, the Nabaztag appears to attempt to connect to an open WiFi network, and from there try to reach the now-defunct Nabaztag server. It’s an echo of a more innocent time of 11 megabit wireless networking, when WEP was still considered secure and many networks had no security whatsoever. To connect to a secured network reveals another reminder of times past, powering the device up with the button pressed causes it to set up a peer-to-peer wireless network on which can be accessed a web interface. If you are young enough never to have used peer-to-peer wireless you should consider yourself lucky, because it was unreliable at the best of times and thus a modern device would invariably set up a temporary hotspot to do the same job. Modern devices support peer-to-peer networking, but here was where I drew a blank. I have no device that can connect to my Nabaztag. Several evenings of fruitless tweaking of settings on Linux, Android, and ChromeOS devices left me able to see the network but unable to form a connection with it. Evidently there is some setting that a 2005-era Windows XP laptop would have, but here in 2020 I’m simply unable to make it happen. We’ve all heard of digital obsolescence when it comes to media formats and other files, it’s unexpected to find it in a forgotten section of a protocol that’s very much still part of our everyday life.
No rabbits were harmed in the writing of this piece.
So my Nabaztag isn’t much use as it stands, though it makes a pretty desk ornament and a talking point in itself.
It’s easy enough to hack its internals
and there is part of me that is tempted to put together my own board with probably an ESP32 for brains. I find it fascinating though for what it teaches us about the progression of IoT devices since 2005. A PIC driving a PCMCIA card might seem
impossibly
quaint to us now, but in 2005 they really were pushing the boundaries of what was possible in an appliance. Today’s equivalent would almost certainly have Linux-capable processor and/or an infinitely cleverer cloud service behind it. It might even have the WiFi electronics on the same die as the core! That we can buy processors that do all this in single quantities for only a dollar or two is a minor miracle, and the Nabaztag is a reminder of how far we’ve come. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248655",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T17:17:31",
"content": "Lekernel might know more about this beast, he wrote some driver for it:“After working for several small companies – which included developing the Wi-Fi driver infrastructure for the Nabaztag/tag (200000 un... | 1,760,373,477.996473 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/nintendo-switch-gets-a-stylish-dock-in-a-broken-nes/ | Nintendo Switch Gets A Stylish Dock In A Broken NES | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"dock",
"nes",
"Nintendo Switch",
"switch"
] | The Switch is Nintendo’s latest home console, which has forever blurred the line between handhelds and consoles you plug in to your TV. It does both! Typically, hooking up to a screen is done through the dock, but that wasn’t
quite
cool enough for [sturm].
He took a NES and turned it into a tidy Switch dock instead!
The build starts with an original NES shell,
which is gutted of its original hardware
. The PCB from the original dock is installed, and a slot cut in the top of the NES to allow the Switch to be inserted. Naturally, there’s a spring flap reminiscent of the Super NES to keep the dock looking clean when not in use. When it is installed, a series of cables and bezels break out the USB ports to the original controller ports on the NES.
It’s a tidy build that brings a touch of nostalgia to the modern console. We’re sure an official version would sell like hotcakes, too. There’s plenty of similarly inspired builds for the Switch,
with the Gamecube Joycons a particular highlight!
NES Switch dock (build pics in comments)
from
NintendoSwitch | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248641",
"author": "vk",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T16:38:23",
"content": "Okay, I was always laughing at people complaining about GIFs in articles, but putting one in a thumbnail is a bit too much.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,373,477.539167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/aluminium-pucks-fuel-hydrogen-trucks/ | Aluminium Pucks Fuel Hydrogen Trucks | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"alternative fuel",
"aluminium",
"aluminum",
"gallium",
"hydrogen car",
"hydrogen fuel",
"hydrogen on demand",
"hydrogen on tap"
] | In the race toward a future free from fossil fuels, hydrogen is rapidly gaining ground. On paper, hydrogen sounds fantastic — it’s clean-burning with zero emissions, the refuel time is much faster than electric, and hydrogen-fueled vehicles can go longer distances between refuels than their outlet-dependent brethren.
The reality is that hydrogen vehicles usually need fuel cells to convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity. They also need pressurized tanks to store the gases and pumps for refueling, all of which adds weight, takes up space, and increases the explosive potential of the system.
Kurt Koehler has a better idea:
make the hydrogen on demand, in the vehicle, using a solid catalyst and a simple chemical reaction
. Koehler is the founder of Indiana-based startup AlGalCo — Aluminium Gallium Company. After fourteen years of R&D and five iterations of his system, the idea is really starting to float. Beginning this summer, these pucks are going to power a few trucks in a town just outside of Indianapolis.
Pucks for Trucks
Kurt Koehler and his hydrogen-on-tap system in the back of a Carmel, Indiana city truck. Image via
IEEE Spectrum
AlGalCo’s hydrogen-on-tap (HOT) system has none of the bulky and dangerous trappings of other hydrogen vehicles. Instead, it uses solid pucks of an alloy of aluminium and gallium to instantly create hydrogen whenever it’s needed. The moment these pucks come into contact with water, a chemical reaction begins, and the water molecules are split into hydrogen and oxygen. The resulting hydrogen gas is captured and sent immediately to the intake manifold to fuel the engine. Here’s the best part: the oxygen binds with aluminium and becomes aluminium oxide powder, which can be turned into new pucks indefinitely with the addition of more gallium.
This summer, the city of Carmel, Indiana is running a trial on five of their street department’s existing gasoline-engine trucks. These trucks will be retrofitted with the hydrogen-on-tap system, which consists of a metal box with six canisters that sit in the truck bed just behind the cab. The hydrogen is pumped underneath the bed and into the engine. Each day, the trucks will start out running on hydrogen and automatically switch over to gas when all the canisters full of alloy pucks are spent. When they roll back into the motor pool, the canisters can be swapped out for fresh ones in a matter of minutes. Testing has shown that the system brings a 15% improvement in gas mileage to these trucks, and a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
A Solid Solution
AlGalCo uses a patented secret sauce to keep the aluminium/gallium alloy in a solid state until it meets water. Image via
IEEE Spectrum
Kurt Koehler has been developing this hydrogen-on-tap system at Purdue University for the last 14 years, but the technology itself is much older. The HOT system is based on the work of Jerry Woodall,
who discovered the chemical reaction in 1968
while he was developing aluminium gallium arsenide compound that gave us the cheap and energy-efficient red LEDs now used in brake lights, traffic lights, and DVD players.
Woodall was trying to grow crystals in a solution of aluminium and liquid gallium. When he rinsed out his crucible with water, there was a violent, gas-emitting chemical reaction. That gas turned out to be hydrogen. Over time, he tried using less gallium.
Below is part one of a two-part video of Kurt demonstrating the previous iteration of the HOT system, including the awesome chemical reaction that goes on inside an AlGalCo canister. (
Link to part 2
)
We think this is a fantastic step toward widespread adoption of hydrogen power, and the hydrogen-gasoline hybrid trials will probably win the idea a lot of support. Solid fuel is easier to store and transport, and this particular fuel seems to be non-volatile as long as it stays dry.
All five of the Carmel city trucks should be running by the end of June. If you happen to live anywhere near central Indiana, Koehler gives weekly demonstrations of the technology at the Carmel street department’s garage. AlGalCo plans to adapt the system for use in diesel trucks and delivery vans, and already has interest from New York City officials. | 147 | 37 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248590",
"author": "Rocky Bass",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T14:14:42",
"content": "Is Gallium that cheap? This becomes a gallium fueled system right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248601",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
... | 1,760,373,478.183823 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/tic-tac-arduintoe-moves-the-game-to-4x4/ | Tic Tac Arduintoe Moves The Game To 4×4 | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"Arduino Uno",
"RGB LED",
"tic-tac-toe"
] | We know you’re out there spending a lot more time with your loved ones, and appreciate that you may be running out of ways to keep everyone entertained. [Mukesh] dropped us a tip because he has the antidote to boredom —
a new twist on that old chestnut, Tic Tac Toe
.
Instead of the usual 3×3 configuration, [Mukesh] made the grid 4×4 so the game would be more engaging. Game play is otherwise the same — this Tic Tac Toe still results in a lot of draws, but they take longer and you can’t see them coming a mile away. What’s even more engaging is that you get to push clicky buttons that light up, and don’t have to draw a grid before every game.
Under the hood is an Arduino Uno that controls 16 push buttons and their corresponding RGB LEDs. Whoever goes first is blue, and player two gets pink. If you win, your color floods the board for a brief victory animation. If the game is a tie, the board turns red. We really like the printed two-piece buttons that house the LEDs and actuate the push buttons while keeping the two separate. Toe your way past the break to check out the build video.
Intrigued by the 4×4 version, but need a build that takes more time?
Try building your TTT in TTL
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248639",
"author": "Mike Giles",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T16:38:09",
"content": "Does the computer play game with you.From watching the video, I would say not.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248642",
"author": "Mike... | 1,760,373,478.220926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/26/beautiful-sourdough-bread-at-home-thanks-to-dynamic-recipe-paramatrization/ | Beautiful Sourdough Bread At Home Thanks To Dynamic Recipe Parameterization | Donald Papp | [
"cooking hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"baking",
"bread",
"documentation",
"dynamic recipe",
"food",
"kitchen",
"semi-sourdough",
"sourdough"
] | More people are making sourdough at home than ever before, and while it may not take a lot of effort to find a decent recipe, it’s quite another thing to try using recipes to figure out how and why bread actually works. Thankfully, [Makefast Workshop] has turned copious research and hundreds of trials into
a dynamic sourdough (and semi-sourdough) bread recipe chock-full of of drop-down options
to customize not just ingredients, but baking methods and other recipe elements as well. Want to adjust quantities or loaf styles? Play with hydration or flour type? It’s all right there, and they even have quick-set options for their personal favorites.
In order to do all this, [Makefast Workshop] needed to understand bread at a deeper level than is usually called for. During research, they observed that the format of recipes was often an obstacle to understanding how good bread actually gets made. The reason for this is simple: recipes are presented as standalone documents describing a fixed process; a set of specific steps that, when followed, yield a particular result. What they do
not
normally do is describe the interplay and balance between ingredients and processes, which makes it difficult to understand how and why exactly the recipe produces what it does. Without that knowledge, it’s impossible to know what elements can be adjusted, and how. The dynamic recipe changes all that.
[Makefast Workshop] performed hundreds of tests, dialing in parameters one by one, to gain the insights needed to populate their dynamic recipe. It’s got clear processes and drop-down options that dynamically update not just the recipe steps, but also the URL. This means that one can fiddle the recipe to one’s desire, then simply copy and paste the URL to keep track of what one has baked.
When it comes to thoughtful approaches to food, this certainly isn’t [Makefast Workshop]’s first rodeo. We covered their
beautiful directions for creating delicious speculoos, complete with effective 3D printed molds
for a modern twist on a Belgian classic. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248540",
"author": "kalle",
"timestamp": "2020-05-26T09:01:40",
"content": "Afaik protein is gluten so i´m buying cheapo standard flour and add gluten/seitan powder(also really cheap) to it – much much cheaper than buying high protein flour. Really nice for pizza aswell.",
"par... | 1,760,373,478.278488 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/milling-a-custom-6-pin-din-connector/ | Milling A Custom 6-Pin DIN Connector | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"cnc",
"CNC router",
"connector",
"din",
"pcb"
] | When [Charles Ouweland] found himself in need of a DIN connector that had a somewhat unusual pin arrangement, he figured he
could fashion his own in less time than it would take to have a replacement shipped to him
. In the end it sounds as though it took a lot longer than expected, but given the worldwide situation, we don’t doubt this bespoke connector was still put to work before its eBay counterpart would have arrived.
More importantly, the connector [Charles] produced looks fantastic. If we weren’t told otherwise, we’d have assumed the finished product was commercially produced. Although to be fair, he did have a little help there. The housing and pins themselves were pulled from a sacrificial connector; his primary contribution was the insulating block that holds the pins in their proper position.
So how did he make it? He had considered using a piece of scrap material and just putting the holes in it with a drill press, but he was worried getting the aliment right. Instead, he decided to call his cheap CNC router into service. By routing his design out of copper clad PCB, he was even able to tie the appropriate pins together right in the connector.
Admittedly, we don’t see a lot of hardware that still uses DIN connectors these days. But this tip is certainly worth filing away just in case. You never know when you might find
an old piece of hardware that just needs a little TLC
to get up and running again. Who knows, you
might even find a dumpster full of them
. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247686",
"author": "Casual Observer",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T20:31:36",
"content": "When I am really in a pinch I put a piece of paper over the mating connector and poke the pre-wired pins through then hot glue them together. Then the dimensions are solid and it has a built in la... | 1,760,373,478.539365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/dyeing-fabric-to-create-sensors/ | Dyeing Fabric To Create Sensors | Danie Conradie | [
"Art",
"chemistry hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"clothing",
"conductive fabric",
"motion capture",
"sewing"
] | Fabrics with electrical functionality have been around for several years, but are very rarely used in mainstream clothing. The fabrics are very expensive and the supply can be unreliable. Frustrated by this, [Counter Chemists] developed
PolySense
, simple open-source technology to make any fibrous material into a conductive material that can be used to sense pressure, stretch, capacitive touch, humidity, or temperature.
PolySense uses a process called
in-situ polymerization
, effectively dying a fabric to become piezoelectric. This is done by first soaking the fabric in a mixture of water and the organic compound
pyrrole
, and then adding iron chloride to trigger a reaction. The polymerization process that takes place wraps the individual fibers of the fabric in conductive polymer chains.
Instead of just uniformly coating a fabric, various masking techniques can be used to dye patterns onto the fabric for various use cases. The video after the break shows a range of these applications, including using polymerized gloves and leggings for motion capture, a zipper that acts like a linear potentiometer, and touch-sensitive fabric. The project page lists sources for the required chemicals in both Europe and the US, and we look forward to seeing what other applications the community can come up with.
The project is very well documented, with a number of
scientific papers
covering all the details. [Counter Chemists] will also be presenting PolySense at the
2020 Virtual Maker Faire
.
This technology can also be used to make a
fabric piano
with a lot less effort. On the more mechanical side of things, you can also
3D print on pre-stretched fabric
to make it pop into 3D shapes.
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 21 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247669",
"author": "theRainHarvester on YouTube",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T19:42:13",
"content": "VR body glove incoming ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6247670",
"author": "Drix",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T1... | 1,760,373,478.599129 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/radios-sordid-history-of-being-blamed-for-everything/ | Radio’s Sordid History Of Being Blamed For Everything | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"History",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"5g",
"paranoia",
"radio"
] | In the surreal world of a pandemic lockdown, we are surrounded by news stories that defy satire. The idea that 5G cellular networks are to blame for the COVID-19 outbreak and a myriad other ills has the more paranoid corners of social media abuzz with concerned citizens leaping upon
random pieces of street furniture
as potential 5G infrastructure.
The unanimous advice of the world’s scientists, doctors, and engineers that it is inconceivable for a phone technology to cause a viral outbreak. Amusingly, 5G has not yet been rolled out to some of the places where this is happening. But with conspiracy theory, fact denial only serves to reinforce the idea, however misguided. Here at Hackaday
we have already ventured into the technical and scientific side of the story
, but there is another side to it that leaves the pandemic behind and reaches back over the decades. Fear of new technology and in particular radio is nothing new, it stretches back almost as long as the public has had access to it.
This innocent-looking Royal Mail post box in an English village could conceal a hidden 5G mast! (If only! – finally, decent bandwidth around here.)
Where this is being written, in a quiet corner of rural Southern England, we don’t have a good mobile signal. In part this is due to an ineffectual roll-out of cell towers across the country going back decades, but in particular it is due to the residents of a neighbouring village who successfully campaigned against a proposed mast during the 3G deployment over a decade ago.
Browsing the archives it rapidly becomes obvious that we aren’t alone, with fears of everything from headaches to cancer clusters being
blamed on cell towers
worldwide since their arrival on the scene. But the archives also reveal a parallel set of stories from the 1920s, when it wasn’t the centimetre and millimetre wavelengths of mobile phone signals in play, but the much lower frequencies of AM radio.
Fear And Mistrust In The Age Of Marconi
There have been
quasi-humorous compilations of seemingly-absurd small-town headlines
on the subject, but it’s interesting to note that this was not restricted to
superstitious peasants
, instead reaching to the top of some societies. In a distant precursor to some of today’s pronouncements from on high, in 1926 the French statesman Paul Painlevé, then Minister for War,
blamed a spell of unusually wet and stormy weather on radio transmissions
. This was quickly debunked by meteorologists,
who instead fingered sunspot activity as a more likely culprit
.
As if to prove that we are a set of actors performing the same character roles separated by a century, it was not difficult to find a 1920s technical journalist willing to go into battle just as we have on 5G. Hugo Gernsback was editor of
Science and Invention
, and in October 1924 he felt it necessary to pen
a lengthy editorial debunking the idea
(PDF, turn to page 13). Some of his claims of the health-giving properties of radio lack substance from a 21st century viewpoint, but we can certainly see a parallel. Perhaps in a hundred years time another exasperated scribe will write a piece for whatever medium serves the thirst for tech news debunking fears about quantum entanglement communication heralding the end of the world.
Pro Science, Not Anti Testing
There must be times in every copywriter’s life when they wish they could go back and change what they’ve written. Courtesy of Science History Institute (
Public Domain
).
It is right and proper to question new technologies for potential harm as they emerge, lest they conceal another tragedy such as
Thalidomide
-related birth defects or leave a toxic legacy such as
DDT
accumulation in the ecosystem. It is even right to question new developments in the light of emerging scare stories such that surrounding the MMR vaccine and
its supposed connection to autism
in the 1990s. This is the point of science; to always question and push the boundaries of human knowledge.
But this article is not dealing with the evidence-based research. Instead we are up against a much more primeval part of human nature; the fear of that which we don’t understand. The same impetus that made some of our ancestors burn suspected witches when their livestock became sick is making them ascribe random headaches or other pieces of bad luck to the appearance (or in the case of those random pieces of street furniture,
imagined
appearance) of a cell tower. While the concerned citizens will almost certainly all use cellphones, to them they are a magic artifact covered in glowing runes that might as well have been seized from the dust of a hidden tomb as part of the plot of an
Indiana Jones
movie.
Are we as engineers and technologists in part responsible for this? Have we made the technology so invisible as to be considered witchcraft? The purpose of technology should be to make lives better, and for that to extend to everyone it means you shouldn’t need an engineering background to use it. So yes, we have made it invisible and perhaps were we’ve been lax is in making the basic concepts a part of the hype for cell technology itself. But no matter how good a job is done in educating the end user, to exercise the vernacular of social media:
idiots gonna idiot
.
Header image, a broadcast radio curtain array: MikeincDerivative work: Chetvorno /
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 101 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247627",
"author": "midori",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T17:36:18",
"content": "Poor cell reception? That would be my cue to get a satellite phone which I’ve been craving for a long time. Yeah, pricey but street cred doesn’t come cheap.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,373,479.036086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/hackaday-podcast-068-picky-feeders-slaggy-tables-wheelie-droids-and-janky-batteries/ | Hackaday Podcast 068: Picky Feeders, Slaggy Tables, Wheelie Droids, And Janky Batteries | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast",
"lunar lander",
"Padauk",
"pick and place"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys ride the rails of hackerdom, exploring the sweetest hacks of the past week. There’s a dead simple component feeder for a pick and place (or any bench that hand-stuffs SMD), batteries for any accomplished mixologist, and a droid build that’s every bit as cool as its Star Wars origins. Plus we gab about obsolescence in the auto industry, fawn over a frugal microcontroller, and ogle some old iron.
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 068 Show Notes:
New This Week:
2020 Hackaday Prize Reveals Four Open Challenges And New Dream Team Program
Join us on Saturday:
Microcontroller Show & Tell
Find more live online fun:
Hackaday Classes and Events
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Printable, Castable Feeders Simplify Pick-and-Place Component Management
New All-3D-Printed Tape&Reel Feeder
60’s Natural Gas Pipeline Computer Retires To Play Games
Cyphercon Badge Has A Paper Tape Reader Built In
Systems Engineering Laboratories – Wikipedia
Heathkit H19 – Terminals
Ultra-Cheap Microcontroller Powers Addressable 7-segment Display
Making A Three Cent Microcontroller Useful
Building D-O, The Cone Face Droid
The 19th Century, When Gravity Battery Meant Something Different
A Redox Flow Battery Made From Iron Industry Waste
Whiteboard Plotter Rocks Three Colors And An Eraser
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
CNC Plasma Cutter Filter Gets The Slag Out
Look Ma, No Support For My Floating Holes!
How Much Is That Plotter In The Window?
Mike’s Picks:
A French Cleat Twist On Electronics Bench Organization
ESP32 Trail Camera Goes The Distance On AA Batteries
Robotic Basketball Hoop V2
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Mitigating Con Deprivation: Disobey 2020
Electric Vehicles Continue The Same Wasteful Mistakes That Limit Longevity | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247970",
"author": "Carl Hage",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T04:27:51",
"content": "Mike & Elliot, if you have a zoom link to the recorded session, please post it!Shelter-In-Place virtual conference MakerFaire sessions really showcase the software state-of-the-art. True to life, if you... | 1,760,373,478.835761 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/from-zero-to-led-cube-in-less-than-seven-months/ | From Zero To LED Cube In Less Than Seven Months | Dan Maloney | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"bbc microbit",
"IMU",
"led",
"LED cube",
"raspberry pi"
] | We know that LED video cubes are so last year, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still love to see them. Any project that incorporates over 24,000 LEDs is bound to be impressive, after all. But the more interesting bit about
[Mike Cann]’s self-contained LED cube
has more to do with the process he chose to get to the finished product.
There are two ways to approach a new project, especially when you’re new to hardware hacking like [Mike] is. One is to jump in with both feet and just see what happens, for good or for ill. The other is is to ease into it with a starter project, to find out where your limitations lay and work around them gradually. [Mike Cann] wisely chose the latter approach with his LED cube project, starting with
an LED sand toy
. The single 64 x 64 LED panel was a bit easier to work with, and got him up to speed on the care and feeding of such hardware, as well as the code needed to drive it. The video below tells the tale of scaling that project up by a factor of six to make the cube, a process that had its share of speedbumps. Everything ended up fitting together great, though, letting [Mike] get on to the software side. That’s where this project really shines — the smartphone app running the cube is really slick, and the animations are great.
There’s clearly room for new features on [Mike]’s cube, so here’s hoping he can carve out some time to make a great build even better. For inspiration he might want to check out
this side-scrolling Castlevania cube
, or perhaps read up on the finer points of
OpenGL for LED cubes
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247596",
"author": "0xfred",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T16:07:38",
"content": "From his blog, he’s about to become a dad next month. You got that project done just in time! Expect your hacking time over the next few years to vanish.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,373,478.653195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/this-week-in-security-dns-ddos-revenge-of-the-15-year-old-bug-and-more/ | This Week In Security: DNS DDOS, Revenge Of The 15 Year Old Bug, And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ddos",
"This Week in Security"
] | Another DDOS amplification technique has just recently been disclosed,
NXNSAttack
(
technical paper
here) that could be used against DNS servers.
We’ve
covered amplification attacks before
. The short explanation is that some UDP services, like DNS, can be abused to get more mileage out of a DDoS attack. The attacking machined send messages like this: “Hello Google DNS, This is the Hackaday server. Can you send me a really big DNS response packet?” If the DNS response is bigger than the request, then the overall attack is bigger as a result. The measure of effectiveness is the amplification factor. For every byte of DDoS sent by attacking machines, how much many bytes are actually sent to the victim machine?
Mirai
, for example, had an amplification factor of something around 2.6.
NXNSAttack has a theoretical per-byte amplification factor of 163. That’s not a missed decimal point, this has the potential to be quite the nasty problem.
To pull off the attack, the baddie needs to control a domain name server that’s authoritative for its own domain:
evil.com
. An innocent DNS is then asked for the IP address of a random machine in the evil subdomain. Since the innocent DNS has never seen the name before, it asks the root
.com
server for the IP address of the evil DNS server (
ns1.evil.com
) and then goes to ask there.
Normally, the evil DNS server would respond with the IP address of the machine in its own domain, and the story would end happily. But here the evil nameserver responds with the addresses of many “nameservers” in the target domain, all invented simply to generate traffic, and tells the innocent DNS server to go ask them:
nslgb7vX.sucker.com
and
nseHOiF.sucker.com
and so on. Here comes the amplification.
Many DNS resolvers will look up the IP address for each and every “nameserver” it receives, and will do this in parallel, because under normal circumstances these IPs are cached and they can sweep up an entire domain’s set of DNS servers in one go and never have to ask again. So the innocent DNS asks the root
.com
server for the IP address of target’s authoritative server
ns1.sucker.com
, where it’s going to lookup all of the IP addresses for the fake nameservers.
But since all of the “nameserver” names are random and fake, the innocent resolver is fooled into hammering
ns1.sucker.com
with requests for the IP address of each of these fake nameservers. In practice, this multiplies the DNS requests a few-fold: 10-20x is plausible. The full attack uses two stages of redirections from the evil nameserver to essentially square the number of requests, which is how they end up with a factor of 163 in practice. In this scenario, the traffic from just a few malicious machines can quickly overwhelm the victim’s infrastructure.
NXNSAttack was privately disclosed to a handful of DNS vendors, so limited mitigations are already available. Running a recursive DNS server was already a difficult task, but now there is one more pitfall to watch out for.
15-year-old Vulnerability Finally Exploited
Some vulnerabilities are obviously exploitable, and get fixed ASAP. In other cases, code may technically be vulnerable, but in a way that seems extremely unlikely to ever be practically exploitable. It’s easy to dismiss these as non-issues, and never do the work to fix them.
Qmail contained a trio of flaws
for at least 15 years, and serves as a good example of why it’s important to fix “unexploitable” issues.
2005 was the era when x86-64 machines were first becoming available to the greater public. It shouldn’t be a great surprise that certain programming assumptions are safe to make on the 32-bit platform, and are no longer valid on a 64-bit machine.
Qmail
was written with the assumption that an array would never be allocated for more than 4 GB of memory — safe in the 32-bit era.
CVE-2005-1513,1514, and 1515
were reported and dismissed, as reaching the 4 GB limit was considered impossible in any default, or sane, deployment.
Fast-forward to May 19th, 2020 and a way to exploit these bugs was finally found. The vulnerable code is also used in the
qmail-local
service, which by default isn’t limited to a set memory amount. A specially crafted 4 GB email can trigger the integer overflow, and lead to remote code execution. There are plenty of juicy details in the full write-up, so check it out for more.
300,000 Vulnerable QNAP Devices
QNAP makes a NAS device that’s rather popular with prosumer users. Going above and beyond simple file storage, these QNAP devices have features like an integrated photo organizer, music player, etc. [Henry Huang] discovered
three separate vulnerabilities that can be chained together to gain a root webshell
. So first off, any QNAP users out there, go check for updates!
Now that you’re up to date, let’s dig through the exploit chain. First, a remote API designed for interacting with sample albums is accessible without authentication. An attacker can create a sample album, and is returned an Album ID. The information from the created sample ID is used to craft a request, which can read any file on the file system, though unsanitized file names containing “
../../
” style characters. This is used to read an application login token.
That token is then used to log in, and another pair of vulnerabilities allows an attacker to drop PHP code in the web folder. All that’s left is to access the new page in a browser, and the injected PHP code is run. As the webserver on these devices runs as root, injecting a remote shell means full device compromise.
The Million Dollar Challenge?
The Houseparty social network, run by Epic Games put out a challenge on Twitter: Provide proof of a smear campaign about security problems on Houseparty, and they would pay a cool million dollar bounty.
We are investigating indications that the recent hacking rumors were spread by a paid commercial smear campaign to harm Houseparty. We are offering a $1,000,000 bounty for the first individual to provide proof of such a campaign to bounty@houseparty.com.
— Houseparty (@houseparty)
March 31, 2020
That offer caught the attention of [Zach Edwards], who started looking into the security of Houseparty.
What he found wasn’t pretty
. The login page doesn’t use any Content Security Policy (CSP). Among other things, this means it could be embedded in a phishing page.
[Zach] kept digging, and discovered a number of “thehousepartyapp.com” subdomains that have been hijacked. It appears that there is a sophisticated credit card fraud campaign using these subdomains. The entire story is complex, and there is probably even more to the story. Unfortunately, it appears that Epic Games isn’t taking the discovery as seriously as one might hope.
Odds-n-Ends
The TrendMicro Rootkit Remover tool installs the TrendMicro Common Module driver. [Bill Demirkapi], who is only 18, decided to take a look, and
discovered a few oddities
. Among them, this driver detects when it’s being inspected by a tool like
Driver Verifier
, and cheats in order to pass the WHQL test. To put a cherry on top of his research, [Bill] describes a rootkit that hijacks the TrendMicro driver.
Supercomputers are apparently the next frontier in malware
. Multiple machines have been compromised by what appears to be a rather sophisticated campaign — one that intentionally tries very hard to clean evidence of its activities. It’s unclear what exactly the purpose of the attacks are, but it’s a reasonable conclusion that as expensive as modern supercomputers are, the data they produce could potentially also be of great value, in certain situations. For a special bonus, the article calls out this situation’s resemblance to “The Cuckoo’s Egg” and everyone’s favorite, Clifford Stoll. (I suggest a Klein Bottle drinking game for every mention of Stoll, who seems to be everyone’s favorite guy.)
And finally, while a port scan isn’t a crime, it’s a bit rude for a website to
run one from within your browser, just because you visited
. Ebay is the given example, and interestingly, the scan is only run when the site is accessed from a Windows machine. It’s suggested that the port scanning is intended to discover visitors that are compromised. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247580",
"author": "Wretch",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T15:08:50",
"content": "Hm… I don’t see the port scanning when I visit eBay from a Windows machine. It’s interesting, though. I didn’t know this sort of thing exists.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,478.799091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/joy-con-mod-gives-nintendo-switch-touchpad-control/ | Joy-Con Mod Gives Nintendo Switch Touchpad Control | Tom Nardi | [
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro micro",
"digital potentiometer",
"i2c",
"joy-con",
"Nintendo Switch",
"TouchPad"
] | While Valve’s Steam Controller ultimately ended up being a commercial flop, most users agreed its use of touch-sensitive pads in place of traditional analog joysticks or digital directional buttons was at least a concept worth exploring. Those same touchpad aficionados will likely be very interested in this modification by [Matteo Pisani], which
replaces the analog joystick on a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con with a capacitive touch sensor
.
As [Matteo] explains in his detailed write-up, the initial inspiration for this project was to create a permanent solution to joystick fatigue and drifting issues. He reasoned that if he removed the physical joystick completely, there would be no way for it to fail in the future. We’re not sure how many people would have taken the concept this far, but you can’t argue with the logic.
The original joystick is a fairly straightforward device, comprised of two analog potentiometers and a digital button. It’s connected to the Joy-Con’s main PCB with a 0.5 mm pitch flexible cable, so the first step for [Matteo] was to spin up a breakout for the cable in KiCad to make the development process a bit easier.
The board design eventually evolved to hold an Arduino Pro Mini, a digital potentiometer, and a connector for the circular touchpad. The Arduino communicates with both devices over I2C, and translates the high resolution digital output of the touch controller into an analog signal within the expected ranges of the original joystick. [Matteo] says he still has to implement the stick’s digital push button, but thanks to an impressive 63 levels of pressure sensitivity on the pad, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Now that he knows the concept works, the next step for [Matteo] is to clean it up a bit. He’s already working on a much smaller PCB that should be able to fit inside the Joy-Con, and we’re very interested in seeing the final product.
We’ve seen several interesting Joy-Con hacks
since the Switch hit the market,
including a somewhat less intense joystick swap
. Between the Joy-Con and the legendary Wii Remote, Nintendo certainly seems to have a knack for creating
input devices that catch the imagination of gamers and tinkerers alike
. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247556",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T12:49:49",
"content": "Cool hack. When L3 is implemented he should consider activating the haptic feedback to make it feel clicky when pressed",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,373,478.898529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/adding-midi-to-an-old-casio-keyboard/ | Adding MIDI To An Old Casio Keyboard | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"casio",
"keyboard",
"midi",
"usb midi"
] | Not content to rule the world of digital watches, Casio also dominated the home musical keyboard market in decades past. If you wanted an instrument to make noises that sounded approximately nothing like what they were supposed to be, you couldn’t go past a Casio. [Marwan] had just such a keyboard, and wanted to use it with their PC, but the low-end instrumented lacked MIDI. Of course,
such functionality is but a simple hack away.
The hack involved opening up the instrument and wiring the original keyboard matrix to the digital inputs of an Arduino Uno. The keys are read as a simple multiplexed array, and with a little work, [Marwan] had the scheme figured out. With the Arduino now capable of detecting keypresses, [Marwan] whipped up some code to turn this into relevant MIDI data. Then, it was simply a case of reprogramming the Arduino Uno’s ATMega 16U2 USB interface chip to act as a USB-MIDI device, and the hack was complete.
Now, featuring a USB-MIDI interface, it’s easy to use the keyboard to play virtual instruments on any modern PC DAW. As it’s a popular standard, it should work with most tablets and smartphones too, if you’re that way inclined. Of course, if you’re more into modular synthesizers,
you might want to think about working with CV instead! | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247877",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-23T17:09:20",
"content": "“If you wanted an instrument to make noises that sounded approximately nothing like what they were supposed to be, you couldn’t go past a Casio.”Astute!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,373,479.090013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/start-your-engines/ | Start Your Engines! | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"newsletter"
] | Here we go again:
The 2020 Hackaday Prize has just been announced
! And as usual, we want to see you all using your powers for good, to help make the world a better place. The twist this year is that four nonprofits have been selected, and your job is to help them with their goals: developing solutions to aid ocean conservation, creating or redesigning open-source assistive tools for people with cerebral palsy, designing modular housing for communities in need, and engineering open-source medical and technical tools that can be easily built in the field.
How often have you wanted to help, but been held back by lacking the background knowledge of which problems to tackle, or where to start? That’s the point of teaming up with non-profits that already have a very tangible need right now.
Oh, and did we mention the prize money? Not only can you do good, but you’ll also do well! The Best All Around Solution gets $50,000, there are four $10,000 prizes, one for each non-profit, $3,000 honorable mentions, a $5,000 wildcard, twenty $500community-chosen prizes, and then the twelve two-month Dream Team grants.
Pshwew! There’s something for everyone, and that’s made possible by our sponsors:Supplyframe, Digi-Key, Microchip, and ARM.
We’ve got four good ways for you to do good. Get out there and get hacking!
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
!
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247853",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2020-05-23T15:15:07",
"content": "It does say this was brought to us by sponsors. My guess is the cameras are all the Hackaday folks personal gear (no sponsorship) – though with how cheap a reasonable but old DSLR is it would be nice if... | 1,760,373,479.138305 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/a-4-bit-random-number-generator/ | A 4-bit Random Number Generator | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"entropy",
"random",
"random number generator",
"rng"
] | Randomness is a pursuit in a similar vein to metrology or time and frequency, in that inordinate quantities of effort can be expended in pursuit of its purest form. The Holy Grail is a source of completely unpredictable randomness, and the search for entropy so pure has taken experimenters into the sampling of lava lamps, noise sources, unpredictable timings of user actions in computer systems, and even into sampling radioactive decay. It’s a field that need not be expensive or difficult to work in, as [Henk Mulder] shows us
with his 4-bit analogue random number generator
.
One of the simplest circuits for generating random analogue noise involves a reverse biased diode in either Zener or avalanche breakdown, and it is a variation on this that he’s using. A reverse biased emitter junction of a transistor produces noise which is amplified by another transistor and then converted to a digital on-off stream of ones and zeroes by a third. Instead of a shift register to create his four bits he’s using four identical circuits, with no clock their outputs randomly change state at will.
A large part of his post is an examination of randomness and what makes a random source. He finds this source to be flawed because it has a bias towards logic one in its output, but we wonder whether the culprit might be the two-transistor circuit and its biasing rather than the noise itself. It also produces a sampling frequency of about 100 kbps, which is a little slow when sampling with he Teensy he’s using.
An understanding of random number generation is both a fascinating and important skill to have. We’ve featured so many RNGs over the years, here’s
one powered by memes
, and another
by a fish tank
. | 43 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247801",
"author": "Art Mezins",
"timestamp": "2020-05-23T11:19:36",
"content": "I created a reversed biased transistor noise generator back in college in the 70s. It made a great source for gun, cannon, and other sounds with the appropriate analog filter post-processing, which was... | 1,760,373,479.21716 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/more-terrible-keyboards-that-nonetheless-work/ | More Terrible Keyboards That Nonetheless Work | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard"
] | For most of computing history, keyboards have featured at least one key per letter one may wish to type – as far as the Latin alphabet goes, anyway. Mobile phones of the 90s and 2000s showed us that basic typing could be accomplished with less. [foone], however, likes to go way out into left field when designing text entry methods, and post them up on Twitter.
The most elegant, in our opinion, is this binary-based design
. 7 flip switches are used to set the binary value of the key you wish to press, at which point hitting the button will send the keypress. It’s painfully slow for just about anything except backspace – set all the switches on for keycode 127, and mash away.
This breadboard design is an excercise in frustration
. A keycode is randomly generated approximately once every second. Press the button if this keycode is the one you wish to send. Reportedly, it took ten minutes to type “Hello!”.
An analog dial design speeds things up a little, but not by much.
While these may not be useful, they’re fun experiments which we could imagine making an excellent contest at a future hacker con. If you’re a big fan of the esoteric and insane when it comes to input devices,
consider this typewriter simulation design. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247790",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2020-05-23T09:21:46",
"content": "You want even worse, use the RAW keycodes with up/down, multibytes modifiers :P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6247810",
"author": "Paula",
... | 1,760,373,479.256658 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/hiding-malware-with-windows-xp/ | Hiding Malware, With Windows XP | Jenny List | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"malware",
"security",
"Sophos",
"virtualbox",
"windows xp"
] | In the nearly four decades since the first PC viruses spread in the wild, malware writers have evolved some exceptionally clever ways to hide their creations from system administrators and from anti-virus writers. The researchers at Sophos have found one that conceals itself as probably the ultimate Trojan horse:
it hides its tiny payload in a Windows XP installation
.
The crusty Windows version is packaged up with a copy of an older version of the VirtualBox hypervisor on which to run it. A WIndows exploit allows Microsoft Installer to download the whole thing as a 122 MB installer package that hides the hypervisor and a 282 MB disk image containing Windows XP. The Ragnar Locker ransomware payload is a tiny 49 kB component of the XP image, which the infected host will run on the hypervisor unchallenged.
The Sophos analysis has a fascinating delve into some of the Windows batch file tricks it uses to probe its environment and set up the connections between host and XP, leaving us amazed at the unorthodox use of a complete Microsoft OS and that seemingly we have reached a point of system bloat at which such a large unauthorised download and the running of a complete Microsoft operating system albeit one from twenty years ago in a hypervisor can go unnoticed. Still,
unlike some malware stories we’ve seen
, at least this one is real. | 20 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247771",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2020-05-23T06:40:34",
"content": "I wonder what would happen if you ran the vm in a vm, For years I have used sacrificial V;s for looking at unknown software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,373,479.30843 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/come-on-baby-light-my-fire-button/ | Come On Baby Light My Fire Button | Sven Gregori | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"gamecube",
"neopixel",
"nintendo controller",
"RGB LED",
"smash bros"
] | While the Nintendo GameCube stood deep in the shadows of the PS2 in its day, its controller remains a popular target for all sorts of modifications today — many of them involving LEDs, thanks to a translucent bottom and button option. As an avid player of the Super Smash Bros. series, [goomysmash] is of course an owner of the very same controller, which motivated him to write
GoomWave
, a “versatile and hackable LED library”. In an impressively detailed Instructable,
he shows how to modify your own controller in two different ways
to make use of the library for yourself.
Initially inspired by the
Shinewave
mod that lights up RGB LEDs in colors associated to pre-defined moves in Smash Bros, [goomysmash] aimed to improve on it and add more versatility from the very beginning. Its latest iteration comes in a simplified ABXY-buttons-only variety using an ATtiny85, and a full-blown all-button variety using an Arduino Nano. Both of them are powered straight from the controller board, and have different modes where they either react to controller interactions, or are just custom lights. A brief showcasing of all the different modes can be seen in the video after the break, and there a few more details also in
an older version’s video
, also embedded below.
Mesmerizing LED-blinking aside, we just have to admire the diligence and cleanliness [goomysmash] put into the wiring and fitting everything inside the controller. But in case light mods aren’t your thing or you’re looking for other GameCube controller modifications,
how about adding Bluetooth
? | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,479.343898 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/microsoft-releases-the-source-code-you-wanted-almost-30-years-ago/ | Microsoft Releases The Source Code You Wanted Almost 30 Years Ago | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"basic",
"basic interpreter",
"github",
"gw-basic",
"gwbasic",
"microsoft",
"source code"
] | In the late 1970s and early 1980s, if you had a personal computer there was a fair chance it either booted into some version of Microsoft Basic or you could load and run Basic. There were other versions, of course, especially for very small computers, but the gold standard for home computer Basic was Microsoft’s version, known then as GW-Basic. Now you can
get the once-coveted Microsoft Basic source code for the 8086/8088 directly from Microsoft
in the state you would have found it in 1983. They put up
a read only GW-BASIC repository
, presumably to stop a flood of feature requests for GPU acceleration.
You might wonder why they would do this? It is certainly educational, especially if you are interested in assembly language. For historical reasons, you might want to get a copy you could modify, too, for your latest retrocomputer project.
There are a few tidbits of interest. Some of the source is marked that it was translated. Apparently, Microsoft had a master implementation for some processor — real or imagined — and could translate from that code to 8088, Z-80, 6502, or any other processor they wanted to target.
From what we understand, GW-Basic was identical to IBM’s BASICA, but didn’t require certain IBM PC ROMs to operate. Of course, BASICA, itself, came from MBASIC, Microsoft’s CP/M language that originated with Altair Basic. A long lineage that influenced personal computers for many years. On a side note, there’s debate on what the GW stands for. Gee-Whiz is a popular vote, but it could stand for ‘Gates, William’, Greg Whitten (an early Microsoft employee), or Gates-Whitten. The source code doesn’t appear to answer that question.
We did enjoy the 1975 copyright message, though:
ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM
FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975
BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.
MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE (F4I.MAC).
It wasn’t long ago that Microsoft released some
old versions of MSDOS
. If you have the urge to write some Basic, you might pass on GW-Basic and try
QB64
, instead.
GW-Basic Disk and Manual photo by [Palatinatian]
CC-SA-4.0
. | 66 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247717",
"author": "Alex Rossie",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T23:04:49",
"content": "Excellent move from MS, I was never too sure why this doesn’t happen more often.EA have promised to release some source code recently too. I think for some of the older C&C/Red Alert games.Why the hel... | 1,760,373,479.715354 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/dmca-takedown-issued-over-casio-code-that-wasnt/ | DMCA Takedown Issued Over Casio Code That Wasn’t | Jenny List | [
"hardware",
"News"
] | [
"casio",
"dmca",
"streisand effect"
] | Earlier this month, we posted coverage of an ingenious calculator hack that took a Casio calculator and put an ESP8266 module and an OLED display in the space occupied by its solar cell. Controlled by a pair of unobtrusive Hall effect devices, the calculator could have been used as an ingenious cheating device but was to us the epitome of a well-executed hack. We may have liked it but it seems the folks at Casio didn’t, because they’ve
issued a DMCA takedown notice for the project’s GitHub repository
.
Editor’s Update:
[Tom Fleet]
reports that GitHub has completed the DMCA review
and found
the code repo
does not infringe on Casio’s IP. However, it appears the copyright claim on the YouTube video has not been resolved and that video remains unavailable. However,
that video is still available on the Internet Archive
.
This is a picture of Barbra Streisand, who might almost be the patron saint of unintended consequences. Unknown author /
Public domain
.
We’re not lawyers, but if you’d care to visit
our original coverage
and watch the video in full, you’ll see that the ESP does not in any way tap into the calculator’s functions. The epoxy blob over the Casio processor is intact and no wires connect to the calculator mainboard, so it is difficult to imagine how any Casio code could have found its way into a repository full of ESP8266 code for the Arduino IDE. A quick search for “Hack-Casio-Calculator” on GitHub, at the time of publishing, turned up the relevant code despite Casio’s takedown, and we can’t see what they’re on about. Maybe you can?
Over the years there have been many attempts to use the DMCA on projects in our community.
Some have been legitimate
, others have been
attempts to suppress exposure of woeful security
, and still more have been
laughably absurd
. This one seems to us to edge into the final category, because it is difficult to see how the project described could contain any Casio code at all. It would be entirely legitimate to issue a DMCA takedown had the epoxy blob been removed and Casio’s code been retrieved from the calculator chip (and we’d certainly cover that story!), but as far as we can see taking a scalpel to a calculator’s case and stuffing a module behind the solar panel window does not come close.
It’s evident that Casio do not like the idea of one of their calculators being turned into a cheating device, and we understand why that might be the case. But to take the DMCA route has served only to bring more publicity to the affair, and those of us with long memories know that
this can only lead to one conclusion
.
Thanks [Tom] and others for the tip. | 97 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248031",
"author": "Joseph Sammarco",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T14:08:06",
"content": "Casio is dumb. Go TI!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6248056",
"author": "Dj Biohazard",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T15:55:27... | 1,760,373,479.987428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/matrix-of-resistors-forms-the-hot-hands-behind-this-thermochromic-analog-clock/ | Matrix Of Resistors Forms The Hot Hands Behind This Thermochromic Analog Clock | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"arduino nano",
"clock",
"flip-flop",
"heat",
"lcd",
"resistor",
"shift register",
"smd",
"thermochromic"
] | If you’re going to ditch work, you might as well go big.
A 1,024-pixel thermochromic analog clock
is probably on the high side of what most people would try, but apparently [Daniel Valuch] really didn’t want to go to work that day.
The idea here is simple: heat up a resistor by putting some current through it, lay a bit of thermochromic film over it, and you’ve got one pixel. The next part was not so simple: expanding that single pixel to a 32 by 32 matrix.
To make each pixel square-ish, [Daniel] chose to pair up the 220-ohm SMD resistors for a whopping 2,048 components. Adding to the complexity was the choice to drive them with a 1,024-bit shift register made from discrete 74LVC1G175 flip flops. With the Arduino Nano and all the other support components, that’s over 3,000 devices with the potential to draw 50 amps, were someone to be foolish or unlucky enough to turn on every pixel at once. Luckily, [Daniel] chose to emulate an analog clock here; that led to additional problems, like dealing with cool-down lag in the thermochromic film when animating the hands, which had to be dealt with in software.
We’ve seen other thermochromic displays before, including recently with
this temperature and humidity display
. This one may not be the highest resolution display out there, but it’s big and bold and slightly dangerous, and that makes it a win in our book. | 21 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248011",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T11:23:33",
"content": "1) get a giant petry dish2) put that 1024 heat element array under it3) put it inside an enviroment at 10C4) turn on the pixels at 30CCongratulations, you can now print bacteria on a petry dish",
"parent... | 1,760,373,479.771405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/24/flexible-pcb-earrings-put-the-art-in-art-deco/ | Flexible PCB Earrings Put The Art In Art Deco | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"Art",
"ATtiny Hacks"
] | [
"art",
"Art Deco",
"attiny",
"Earring",
"flex",
"flex PCB",
"IMU",
"motion sensing",
"neopixel",
"tag connector"
] | Earrings have been a hackers’ target for electronic attachment for quite a while, but combining the needed components into a package small enough to wear in that finicky location is quite a challenge. If
[
Sawaiz Syed]’s Art Deco Earrings
are anything to go by, ear computers have a bright future ahead of them!
This is a project unusually well described by its name. It is in fact an earring, with art deco styling. But that sells it way too short. This sliver of a flex circuit board is double sided to host an ATtiny, accelerometer, LDO, and eight 2020 formfactor controller-integrated LEDs. Of course it’s motion sensitive, reacting to the wearer’s movement via LED pattern. [
Sawaiz] makes reference to wearing it while dancing, and we can’t help but imagine an entire ballroom all aglow with tiny points of LED light.
The Art Deco Earrings are also set apart by the thoroughness of their documentation (have we mentioned how much we love detailed documentation?). [
Sawaiz] not only drops the source in your lap, but the README in the Github repo linked at the top walks the reader through each component of the design in detail. Plus the PCBA render is so complete it includes a model of the wire loop to fit through the wearer’s ear; how cool is that? The single piece that’s still in progress is the battery. The earring itself hosts an LDO, so all that is required is stashing a battery somewhere discrete, perhaps in the user’s hair? We’re looking forward to seeing what [Sawaiz] works out.
For the full effect, check out the gif of an assembled unit in action after the break. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6248054",
"author": "Adam DeMuri",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T15:42:58",
"content": "I wonder if these could be powered by a supercapacitor, like these earrings from Tindie:https://www.tindie.com/products/bobricius/usb-supercapacitor-led-earrings/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,373,480.03151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/conduit-birdhouse-and-skateboard-become-giant-pen-plotter/ | Conduit, Birdhouse, And Skateboard Become Giant Pen Plotter | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"electrical conduit",
"pen plotter",
"plotter"
] | If you think you need fancy parts to build a giant robot drawing machine, think again! [Cory Collins] shows you how he built his
Big-Ass Wall Plotter v.2
out of stuff around the house or the hardware store, including electrical conduit, gang boxes, scrap wood, and skateboard bearings, alongside the necessary stepper motors, drivers, and timing belt. (You should consider having this trio of parts on hand as well, in our opinion.) With a span of 48″ (1.2 m) on a side, you probably don’t have paper that’s this big.
And while the construction is definitely rough-and-ready, there are a ton of details that turn this pile of parts into a beautifully working machine in short order. For instance, making the rails out of electrical conduit has a few advantages. Of course it’s cheap and strong, but the availability of off-the-shelf flanges makes assembly and disassembly easy. It also hangs neatly on the wall courtesy of some rubber cuphooks.
Note also the use of zip-tie belt tensioners: a simple and effective solution that we
heartily endorse
. [Corey] makes good use of custom 3D printed parts where they matter, like the
compliant pen holder
and
linear mechanism for the z-axis
, but most of the mechanical accuracy is courtesy of wooden shims and metal strapping.
[Corey] uses the machine to make patterns for
his paper sculptures
that are worth a look in their own right, and you can see the machine in action, sped up significantly, in the video below. This is the perfect project if you have a
DIY eggbot that’s out of commission post-Easter
: it reuses all the same parts, just on a vastly different scale. Heck, [Corey] even uses the same Inkscape Gcodetools extension as we did in that project. Now you know what we’re up to this weekend.
Can’t get enough pen plotters? Check out this one that
lets you write whatever you want
! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247974",
"author": "canibeanartist",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T05:46:18",
"content": "I’m currently working on a potter made of randomly collected materials around my house and free items from Kijiji (Canadian online market for people to sell their unwanted stuff).",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,373,479.615558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/resistors-sorter-measures-values/ | Resistors Sorter Measures Values | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"resistor",
"Resistor sorter",
"servo"
] | We’ve all been there. A big bag of resistors all mixed up. Maybe you bought them cheap. Maybe your neatly organized drawers spilled. Of course, you can excruciatingly read the color codes one by one. Or use a meter. But either way, it is a tedious job. [Ishann’s] solution was to build an
automatic sorter that directly measures the value using a voltage divider
, rather than rely on machine vision as is often the case in these projects. That means it could be modified to do matching for precise circuits (e.g., sort out resistors all marked 1K that are more than a half-percent away from one nominal value).
There is a funnel that admits one resistor at a time into a test area where it is measured. A plate at the bottom rotates depending on the measured value. In the current implementation, the resistor either falls to the left or the right. It wouldn’t be hard to make
a rotating tray with compartments
for different values of resistance. It looks like you have to feed the machine one resistor at a time, and automating that sounds like a trick considering how jumbled loose axial components can be. Still, its a fun project that you probably have all the parts to make.
An Arduino powers the thing. An LCD screen and display control the action. If you want some practice handling material robotically, this is a great use of servos and gravity and it does serve a practical purpose.
We have seen many variations on this, including ones that
read the color code
. If you ever wanted to know where the
color code for resistors came from
, we took a trip to the past to find out earlier this year. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247963",
"author": "Curly",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T02:37:50",
"content": "Just throw them in the bin",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6247964",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T02:45:54",
... | 1,760,373,480.083947 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/an-arduino-as-a-pll/ | An Arduino As A PLL | Jenny List | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"PLL",
"vco"
] | At the heart of many amateur radio and other projects lies the VFO, or Variable Frequency Oscillator. Decades ago this would have been a free-running LC tuned circuit, then as technology advanced it was replaced by a digital phase-locked-loop frequency synthesiser and most recently a DDS, or Direct Digital Synthesis chip in which the waveform is produced directly by a DAC. The phase-locked loop (PLL) remains a popular choice due to ICs such as the Si5351 but is rarely constructed from individual chips as it once might have been. [fvfilippetti] has revisited this classic circuit
by replacing some of its complexity with an Arduino
(Spanish language,
Google Translate link
).
The internals of a PLL frequency synthesiser.
Image by Chetvorno
– CC0
A PLL is a simple circuit in which one oscillator is locked to another by controlling it with a voltage derived from comparing the phase of the two. Combining a PLL with a set of frequency dividers creates a frequency synthesiser, in which a variable frequency oscillator can be locked to a single frequency crystal with the output frequency set by the division ratios. The classic PLL chip is the CMOS 4046 which would have been combined with a pile of logic chips to make a frequency synthesiser. The Arduino version uses the Arduino’s internal peripherals to take the place of crystal oscillator, dividers, and phase comparator, resulting in an extremely simple physical circuit of little more than an Arduino and a VCO for the 40 metre amateur band.
The code can be found on GitLab
, should you wish to try for yourself.
It would be interesting to see how good this synthesiser is at maintaining both a steady frequency and minimal phase noise. It’s tempting to think of such things as frequency synthesisers as a done deal, so it’s always welcome to see somebody bringing something new to them. Meanwhile if PLLs are new to you,
we have just the introduction for you
. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247944",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2020-05-24T00:01:53",
"content": "A chip which was designed to do this from the ground up is the Parallax Propeller — but alas, it doesn’t do it quite well enough since its internal PLL jitters, the signal contains birdies and harmonic... | 1,760,373,480.138381 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/23/rocking-out-on-a-limb-with-le-strum/ | Rocking Out On A Limb With LE STRUM | Sven Gregori | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"keytar",
"le strum",
"mannequin",
"midi",
"MIDI instrument"
] | It’s hard to imagine 80s Synth-pop without the keytar, and yet this majestic Centaur of a musical instrument rarely gets much love, and their players are often the target of ridicule. It almost seems as if being hung around the neck should be a privilege solely reserved for stringed instruments. Well, [midierror] has at least that part somewhat right then, with
the Full On MIDI Leg
that is guaranteed to make every keytarist look like a prestigious cellist in comparison.
What looks like the 1987 movie
Mannequin
taking a dark, Mengelesque turn, is as awesome as it is bizarre, thanks to building the concept of the
LE STRUM
into, well, a leg. LE STRUM itself is an
open source
MIDI instrument built by [Jason Hotchkiss], who describes it as “a cross between a Stylophone and an Omnichord”. It consists of a set of buttons to select different combinations of chords, that can than be strummed by scratching an attached stylus over an array of contact pads. However, [midierror], who also distributes
a pre-assembled version
of the LE STRUM, uses strings instead of contact pads, and a pick for the actual strumming, turning this into a close-enough string instrument.
The only thing missing now is a functioning knee joint, and maybe some inspiration from
this MIDI-controlled concertina
, and we’d be ready to revolutionize the accordion world with the, uhm, kneetar? And since it’s built around a PIC16, this thigh-slapper won’t even cost you an ARM, just the leg — but enough already with these toe-curling puns. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247910",
"author": "Tweepy",
"timestamp": "2020-05-23T20:19:37",
"content": "Awesome, but cannot stop from hearing some notes from Clockwork Orange/Wendy Carlos :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6247913",
"author": "chris"... | 1,760,373,480.227267 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/22/is-that-an-esp32-on-your-wrist/ | Is That An ESP32 On Your Wrist? | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"clock hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"Lilygo",
"smartwatch",
"watch"
] | What could you do with a dual-core 240 MHz ESP32 that supports Arduino-style programming, with 16 MB of flash, 8 MB of PSRAM, and 520 k of RAM? Oh, let’s throw in a touchscreen, an accelerometer, Wifi, and Bluetooth. Besides that, it fits on your wrist and can show the time? That’s the proposition behind
Lilygo
T Watch 2020. If it sounds like a smartwatch, it is. At around $25 –and you can snag the hardware from
a few different places
— it is not only cheaper than the latest flagship smartwatch, but it is also infinitely more hackable.
OK, so the screen is only 1.54″, but then again, it is a watch. If Arduino isn’t your thing, you can use anything else that supports the ESP32 like Micropython or even Scratch. There are variants that have LoRA and GPS, at slightly higher prices. You can also find ones with heart rate monitors and other features.
If you would like a preview of the firmware, it is all there on
GitHub
and there is
a smattering of documentation
. There are even a few
examples
, although brush up on your Mandarin. The watch actually looks passable for a smartwatch, although the one blemish is that it is 20 mm thick. That’s almost double the thickness of an Apple Watch 5 or a Samsung Active 2.
Still, if you want total hackability, that extra 10 mm is probably worth it. You can, of course,
hack some watches
that are not meant to be used this way. Besides, this watch is a bit more socially acceptable than one that would earn you
hacker street cred
. | 38 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247515",
"author": "Szaja",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T08:24:35",
"content": "It seems that author mixed two versions of the TTGO Watch. Only older, thicker model is available on Aliexpress right now (as linked in the article). Watch 2020 (new model) is sold on Tindie.",
"parent_... | 1,760,373,480.297323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/spherical-quadruped-arduino-robot/ | Spherical Quadruped Arduino Robot | Orlando Hoilett | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"animatronics",
"arduino",
"astromech",
"BB-8",
"diy",
"droid",
"first project",
"instructables",
"quadruped",
"robotics",
"star wars",
"transformers",
"Zoids"
] | [Greg06] started learning electronics the same way most of us did: buy a few kits, read a few tutorials, and try your hardest to put a few things together. Sound familiar? After a while, you noticed your skills started increasing, and your comfort level with different projects improved as well. Eventually, you try your hand at making your own custom projects and publishing your own tutorials.
Few are lucky to have a
first-project as elaborate as [Greg06’s] quadruped robot
. We don’t know about you, but for some of us, we were satisfied with blinking two LEDs instead of just one.
[Greg06’s] robot has a quadruped based, housed within a 3D printed spherical body. The legs are retractable and are actuated by tiny servo motors inside the body. [Greg06] even included an ultrasonic distance sensor for the obstacle avoidance mechanism. Honestly, if it weren’t for the ultrasonic distance sensor protruding from the spherical body, you might think that the entire robot was just a little Wiffle ball.
This reminds us of another design we’ve seen before
.
If that weren’t enough, the spherical head can rotate, widening the range of the ultrasonic distance sensor and obstacle avoidance mechanism. This is accomplished by attaching another servo motor to the head.
Pretty neat design if you ask us.
Definitely one of the coolest quadrupeds we’ve seen
. | 9 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247484",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T05:43:00",
"content": "I think it needs some traction. Maybe dip the ends of the feet in Plasti-Dip:https://plastidip.com/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6247486",
"auth... | 1,760,373,480.188288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/3d-printed-switch-uses-paperclip/ | 3D Printed Switch Uses Paperclip | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed switch",
"3d printing",
"paperclip",
"slide switch",
"switch"
] | We live in a time when all manner of electronic components are practically a mouse click away. Still, we like to see people creating their own components. Maybe a stock part won’t fit or isn’t immediately available. Or maybe you just want to build it yourself, we get that. [Aptimex] shows off a design for a
3D printed slide switch
that uses a paperclip for the contact material.
Of course, it had better be a metal paperclip and we’d make sure the shiny metal was pretty conductive. Of course, you could probably use thick wire to get the same effect. It sounds like [Aptimex] was inspired by an earlier
Hackaday.io
project that created a few different kinds of switches using similar techniques.
The 3D printing pieces look small and easy to print, the hard part is probably straightening and cutting the paperclip. The instructions offer some tips on how to best do that. From the pictures, they look as though they make nice PCB terminals.
Custom printing switches might not be for everyone. As for us, we can’t help thinking about how to design switches for some retrocomputer replicas or to replace bad switches in old radio gear. Of course, it isn’t news that paperclips are pretty versatile hack material. We’ve seen them in use for
breadboarding
. We can’t forget the
paperclip computer
, either. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247505",
"author": "behle",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T07:25:39",
"content": "Even in small switches material erosion due to arcing is limiting the lifespan of a switch.Maybe this is of no concern for [Aptimex]. But was it, instead of paperclip, a silver coated copper wire could impr... | 1,760,373,480.341979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/brass-and-nickel-work-together-in-this-magnetostrictive-earphone/ | Brass And Nickel Work Together In This Magnetostrictive Earphone | Dan Maloney | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"brass",
"coil",
"copper",
"diaphragm",
"earphone",
"magnetostriction",
"magnetostrictive",
"nickel",
"speaker",
"transducer"
] | When you go by a handle like [Simplifier], you’ve made a mission statement about your projects: that you’ll take complex processes and boil them down to their essence. So tackling the rebuilding of the humble speaker, a device he himself admits is “both simplified and optimized already,” would seem a bit off-topic. But as it turns out,
the principle of magnetostriction can make the lowly speaker even simpler
.
Most of us are familiar with the operation of a speaker. A powerful magnet sits at the center of a coil of wire, which is attached to a thin diaphragm. Current passing through the coil builds a magnetic field that moves the diaphragm, creating sound waves. Magnetostriction, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby ferromagnetic materials change shape in a magnetic field. To take advantage of this, [Simplifier] wound a coil of fine copper wire around a paper form, through which a nickel
TIG electrode
welding filler rod is passed. The nickel rod is anchored on one end and fixed to a thin brass disc on the other. Passing a current through the coil causes the rod to change length, vibrating the disc to make sound. Give it a listen in the video below; it sounds pretty good, and we love the old-time look of the turned oak handpiece and brass accouterments.
You may recall [Simplifier]’s recent attempt at
a carbon rod microphone
; while that worked well enough, it was unable to drive this earphone directly. If you need to understand a little more about magnetostriction,
[Ben Krasnow] explained its use in anti-theft tags
a couple of years back. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247419",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T23:05:37",
"content": "A nickel TIG electrode? Do you mean a nickel filler rod for welding nickel?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6247586",
"author": "CW",
... | 1,760,373,480.401963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/building-a-custom-camera-mic/ | Building A Custom Camera Mic | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera audio",
"microphone",
"videography"
] | Most consumer-grade cameras these days come with adequate microphones built in. However, as with all hardware made down to a price point, there’s room for improvement. [M. Ploegmakers] decided to whip up a better microphone setup for his Sony A6300,
with the Dumbbell Mic as the result.
The microphone is based around an electret condensor element, which provides good performance at a remarkably low price. This is then integrated with a preamp circuit to bring the audio up to the appropriate level for the camera to record along with the video. Switches on board set the gain level, as well as changing the mic to operate with or without phantom power, where available. The electronics is wrapped up in a 3D-printed enclosure, designed to mount on top of the camera for use out in the field.
It took some experimentation, but now [M. Ploegmakers] has a custom mic rig that records straight into the camera, avoiding the need to splice audio and video back together in post. If your camera lacks an audio input,
you might have to do a little more work to hack one in, though! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247535",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2020-05-22T11:15:36",
"content": "Interesting approach. There’s lots of “high quality” mics for video like the rode video mic, but they usually fall foul of the camera’s mono input and low quality preamp.I love the power save function though,... | 1,760,373,480.43684 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/stealing-ram-for-a-microcontroller-from-a-tft-display/ | Stealing RAM For A Microcontroller From A TFT Display | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"display",
"display memory",
"memory"
] | PC users with long memories will recall the days when the one-megabyte barrier was a significant problem, and the various tricks of extended and expanded memory used to mitigate it. One of them was to install a driver that mapped surplus graphics card memory as system memory when the display was in DOS text mode, and it was this that was brought to mind when we read about [Frank D]’s
microcontroller implementation of Conway’s Game Of Life
.
The components were those he had to hand; an STM32F030F4P6 and an RM68130 176 × 220 TFT board. The STM is not the most powerful of chips, with only 16 kB of Flash and 4 kB of RAM. The display has enough on-board memory to support 18 bits of colour information, but when it is running in eight-colour mode it only uses three of them. The 15 bits that remain are thus available to be used for other purposes, and though the arcane format in which they are read required some understanding they could be used to provide a very useful extra 38720 bytes of RAM for the microcontroller just as once happened with those DOS PC graphics cards of old. Interestingly, the same technique should work with other similar displays.
Though this isn’t a new technique by any means we can’t recall seeing it used in a microcontroller project such as this one before. We’ve brought you many Games of Life though, as well as
marking John Conway’s passing earlier this year
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247342",
"author": "occamlab",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T19:18:21",
"content": "https://habr.com/ru/post/412325/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6247383",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T20:56:... | 1,760,373,480.943901 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/linux-fu-alternative-shells/ | Linux Fu: Alternative Shells | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ash",
"bash",
"bourne shell",
"dash",
"fish",
"korn shell",
"ksh",
"linux",
"sh",
"shell",
"Thompson shell",
"unix",
"zsh"
] | On Unix — the progenitor of Linux — there was
/bin/sh
. It was simple, by comparison to today’s shells, but it allowed you to enter commands and — most importantly — execute lists of commands. In fact, it was a simple programming language that could make decisions, loop, and do other things to allow you to write scripts that were more than just a list of programs to run. However, it wasn’t always the easiest thing to use, so in true Unix fashion, people started writing new shells. In this post, I want to point out a few shells other than the ubiquitous
bash
, which is one of the successors to the old
sh
program.
Since the 7th Edition of Unix,
sh
was actually the Bourne shell, named after its author, Stephen Bourne. It replaced the older
Thompson shell
written in 1971. That shell had some resemblance to a modern shell, but wasn’t really set up for scripting. It did have the standard syntax for redirection and piping, though. The PWB shell was also an early contender to replace Thompson, but all of those shells have pretty much disappeared.
You probably use
bash
and, honestly, you’ll probably continue to use
bash
after reading this post. But there are a few alternatives and for some people, they are worth considering. Also, there are a few special-purpose shells you may very well encounter even if your primary shell is
bash
.
Two Philosophies
There are really two ways to go when creating a new shell. Unix and Linux custom, as well as several standards, assume you will have
/bin/sh
available to execute scripts. Of course, a shell script can also ask for a specific interpreter using the
#!
syntax. That’s how you can have scripts written in things like
awk
.
That leads to two different approaches. You can create a new shell that is compatible with
sh
, but extended. That’s the approach things like the Korn shell (
ksh
) or the Bourne Again shell (
bash
) take. On the other hand, you can completely replace the shell with something new like the C shell (practically, now,
tcsh
which has pretty much replaced C shell). These shells don’t look anything like the classic shell. Of course, neither does
bash
if you look at the details, but superficially, most things you can do with
sh
will work with
bash
, too, but
bash
adds a lot more.
Korn Shell
David Korn at AT&T wrote a shell that bears his name. If you only know
bash
, you’d be a lot more comfortable with
ksh
than with
sh
. It is a compatible shell, but offers things we take for granted today. For example,
ksh
provided command line editing, coroutines, and new control structures like
select
. It also borrowed ideas from the C shell such as history, functions, and aliases.
The only problem with
ksh
is that AT&T held it pretty close to its chest for years. So even though not many people use
ksh
today, the ideas in
ksh
spread to other shells and are widely used today. There is a public domain version,
pdksh
, if you want to try it out.
Ash and Dash
The Almquist shell, or
ash
, is basically a clone of the Bourne shell written by Kenneth Almquist. It doesn’t add a lot of features, but it is very small and fast. This makes it a popular choice for tiny Linux distributions like rescue disks or embedded systems. In 1997 Herbet Xu ported
ash
for use with Debian and it became
Dash
— the Debian Almquist shell. If you use any of the Debian-derived distributions, you’ll probably find that
/bin/sh
is a link to
dash
.
Fish
Fish
isn’t named after anyone — not even a TV detective. It stands for Friendly Interactive Shell. Unlike
ksh
,
ash
,
dash
, and
bash
,
fish
doesn’t try to be compatible with the old classic shell programs. Instead, it tries to be very user friendly. For example, it automatically suggests things as you type.
A big feature of
fish
is that it doesn’t implicitly create subshells. Consider this (contrived) example:
SUCCESS=0; cat /etc/passwd | if grep ^kirk: ; then SUCCESS=1; fi
Change “kirk” out for a user in your passwd file and try this under
bash
. Then print out
$SUCCESS
and you will see it stays zero no matter what. The reason is the part of the command to the right of the pipe character spawned a new shell. You set the variable in that shell, which then exits and the shell you started in still has
SUCCESS
as zero. With fish, this doesn’t happen.
If you were setting up Linux for a new user,
fish
might be a good choice for their default shell. For most power users, though, they’ll want to stick to something more conventional. If you do want to learn more, check out the video, below.
Z Shell
The Z shell is newer, dating from 1990. This may be the most popular shell outside of
bash
on this list. One of the biggest reasons is that it has a plugin architecture that allows for lots of customization including themes and very sophisticated command line completion. You can edit multiline commands easily. Some plugins even provide things like an FTP client.
Many of the things you get out of the box with
zsh
can be added to
bash
, but it would be a lot of work. If you start
zsh
as
sh
, it pretends to be
sh
— a lot of advanced shells do that.
Because of the plugin architecture, there’s something like an app store for
zsh
called “
Oh My ZSH
.” If you browse through it, you’ll probably be tempted to try
zsh
. If you ask a seasoned Linux user — at least in the year 2020 — what shell they use, and they don’t answer
bash
, they’ll probably answer
zsh
. If you have an hour and a half to kill, you might enjoy the video below.
And There’s More
There are probably more shells, but ultimately it is a matter of personal preference. One we are watching is
Nu shell
. It has some interesting ideas about extending the idea of a pipe and stream in Linux. I haven’t tried it yet, but as it becomes more stable, I might. If you are an
emacs
fan, there is
eshell
— something I’ll talk about in a future post.
Wikipedia has a good
comparison matrix of shells
if you are curious. Personally? I use
bash
, but I am always tempted to learn
zsh
better. I’ve used all of these at some point except
fish
. How about you? Leave a comment with your favorite shell, especially if it isn’t on this list. | 38 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247279",
"author": "komradebob",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T17:11:17",
"content": "Let the shell wars commence….I used sh for years because it was the default (only) shell.Then I used csh for the next few decades because it added history. Surprised to find no mention of it here.bash ... | 1,760,373,480.742525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/dont-worry-this-box-will-protect-you-from-5g/ | Don’t Worry, This Box Will Protect You From 5G! | Jenny List | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"5g",
"quack",
"snake oil"
] | As part of an investigation into opposition to 5G mobile phone networks in the English town of Glastonbury the BBC reporter [Rory Cellan-Jones] shared details of a so-called 5G protection device that was advertised as casting a bubble of 5G-free space around its owner. This set [The Quackometer] writing, because as part of his probing into the world of snake-oil, he’s bought just such a unit and
subjected it to a teardown
.
What he has is a plastic project box with a graphic on top, a switch and green LED on the side, and a battery compartment on its rear. Opening the battery compartment reveals a standard 9 V alkaline cell, but the real interest comes when the cover is removed. There is a copper cylinder with a coil of wire round it, though the wires from the coil to the battery have been cut. The active part of the device is simply a battery powering an LED through a switch, as he puts it the device is a £50 ($61) poor quality torch (flashlight). Of more interest is the copper cylinder, which he identifies as a short piece of copper water pipe with two end caps. He doesn’t open it up, leaving us to expect that whatever mystical component deals with the RF must be concealed within it. This is not the usual Hackaday fare, but we know our readers are fascinated by all new technologies and will provide plenty of speculation as to how it might work in the comments.
The BBC story is worth a read to give a little background
. If you are a non-Brit and you have heard of Glastonbury it is probably for the famous summer music festival held on a neighbouring farm, but the town is also famous for its connections with Arthurian legend and in recent decades for having become a centre for New Age mysticism. It has also become something of a hotbed of activism against the spread of 5G mobile networks, and has made the news this week because of concerns over the impartiality of a report condemning the technology released by its local government. If you have an interest in the 5G saga then brace yourselves for this document being used to lend a veneer of official credibility.
We’ve spent a while covering 5G issues
, and given that some aspects of the story are shaping up to be a gift to technical journalists that keeps on giving, no doubt we’ll bring you more in due course. Devices such as the one featured here could even supplant
audiophile products
as a source of technical wonderment!
Thanks [Deus Ex Silicium] for the tip. | 128 | 41 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247237",
"author": "wei",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T15:39:50",
"content": "Cut wires? I would’ve though the writers at hackaday would recognize a dual-line spark gap stabilized RF discombobulation crystal, even if its clearly an older model. Be better guys.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,373,480.895745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/no-the-nintendo-leak-wont-help-emulator-developers-and-heres-why/ | No, The Nintendo Leak Won’t Help Emulator Developers, And Here’s Why | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"broadon",
"emulation",
"leak",
"legal",
"nintendo",
"nintendo 64",
"sgi"
] | If you haven’t heard from other websites yet, earlier this year a leak of various Nintendo intellectual properties surfaced on the Internet. This included prototype software dating back to the Game Boy, as well as Verilog files for systems up to the Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii. This leak seems to have originated from a breach in the BroadOn servers, a small hardware company Nintendo had contracted to make, among other things, the China-only iQue Player.
So, that’s the gist of it out of the way, but what does it all mean? What is the iQue Player? Surely now that a company’s goodies are out in the open, enthusiasts can make use of it and improve their projects, right? Well, no. A lot of things prevent that, and there’s more than enough precedent for it that, to the emulation scene, this was just another Tuesday.
What’s in the Leak
Getting the files to take a look at them yourself comes with a certain risk, just like having a copy of any copyrighted piece of information on your computer. Much of the legal aspects of it might be overlooked on the Internet, but that means we can’t just tell you where to get it, and we obviously can’t endorse the action. However, other people have already rooted through them and categorized everything so we can tell you what the leak contains at a glance.
In China, the Nintendo 64 was available as a plug-and-play controller system called iQue
Most notably, there’s a wealth of source code relating to the Nintendo WII in this leak. That includes the boot0, 1, and 2 bootloaders, plus the full source code and SDK for
IOS, the operating system
that runs on the Wii’s ARM9 processor. These are all low-level parts of the software side of the Wii, making the underlying system on which the Wii System Menu runs.
There’s also Verilog sources for all the parts of the iQue Player system, a hardware revision of the Nintendo 64 for the Chinese market, and consequently enough information to build a version of it from scratch. Since the company was involved in making the iQue and other projects for Nintendo, there are also extensive planning documents from the 2004-2006 era for such consoles.
Some of it could be interesting, for example, for individuals to use in order to repair their own systems, much like having the schematics to an old home computer to trace down and find where a fault is. But other than that, there isn’t much use for them, at least within legality.
Toxic for Emulator Devs, and Not All That New
If you’re one of the many people thinking this leak could finally make the ever-plagued Nintendo 64 emulation be perfect, we have bad news for you; using the official confidential documents to help build your own reimplementation of these consoles would constitute breach of copyright law. Since Nintendo is already known for not being keen on others emulating their games, and this will net you at best a cease-and-desist order, and at worst a hefty lawsuit.
A proof-of-concept prototype game called Mekton running on SGI hardware from the Project Reality era.
In fact, many of the documents included in this leak which has caused an uproar this month, have already been floating around the ‘net for two decades now. Dubbed “The Oman Archive”, an SGI leak from 1999 exposed the source files for Project Reality, the basis for the Nintendo 64 console. Developers have had to steer clear of those documents ever since, for the same legal issues with them.
Ever since the modern console emulation scene began with Nesticle in 1997, the legality of such software has been put into question numerous times. Arguments can be had that the software is the copyrighted part, and not the arrangement of chips running it, but barely any of those internet opinions are sound legal advice, and neither is my opinion. But the main common agreement between most developers is that an emulator is legal, as long as it is completely reverse-engineered without referencing the copyrighted source material. Which is known as…
The Clean Room Design
You may be familiar with this term if you’ve read about early
IBM PC clones
and the lawsuits surrounding them. Back in the early 1980s, IBM’s line of PCs were remarkable not only for being leaders in the business market, but also for being built entirely with off-the-shelf parts. This meant that IBM produced none of the hardware in the computer, they simply put it together and wrote a BIOS for it, and therein lay their copyright.
Soon enough, clones from companies such as Sanyo and DEC started appearing — but since they wrote their own BIOS none of them were fully IBM compatible, they merely ran their own flavor of MS-DOS. Eagle Computers was one such company, but instead of writing their own BIOS they were accused of cloning IBM, infringing on IBM’s copyright. It wasn’t until 1983, with Compaq and Phoenix reverse-engineering their own BIOS from scratch, that full compatibility could be achieved legally. Eagle and IBM settled out of court, with Eagle agreeing to write their own BIOS, however they never recovered from the lost sales.
The case had since then been made that in order for a clone product to remain legally protected against copyright infringement suits, it had to be completely built up from scratch without any sort of contact with the source of the material itself, merely a reimplementation of its observed behavior. More relevantly to the subject at hand, this was brought up twice against Sony’s Playstation, once with Connectix’s Video Game Station emulator and Bleem Company’s bleem! emulator. In both cases the jury ruled in favor of the defendants against Sony, cementing precedent for the legality of emulators, but in both cases the legal costs forced the companies into bankruptcy.
But the Data is Still Out There
So who is it for? Legally speaking, this should have never left the hands of Nintendo and BroadOn, so it’s hard to say if this has any use to anybody. Of course, that’s not going to stop everybody and we’re still likely to see effects of it in the future. Since the early 1990s, manufacturers of various countries have been producing clones of the Famicom (known in the west as the NES), affectionately dubbed “famiclones”. These are still produced today in various forms, and now that Nintendo’s patents on the hardware have expired,
they’re more prominent than ever in the bootleg and retro markets
.
It’s possible then that, through some exploitation of legal loopholes, the files describing console hardware in this leak might end up being used by cloners and we might see knock-off Nintendo 64s in the wild in a few years, but it’s impossible to predict that. At best someone not involved with the development of emulators of the systems included in the leak could use these to assess how close the reverse-engineering efforts have come to the real deal, but in the mean time, the developers themselves need to stay far away from it in order to continue to claim legality to their efforts. | 34 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247208",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T14:26:34",
"content": "The original Compaq reverse engineering didn’t happen completely in isolation: the source to IBM’s BIOS was published in the manual, after all. So just buying the thing got you access to the source (different... | 1,760,373,481.142702 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/open-agriculture-initiative-shuttered-amid-scandal/ | Open Agriculture Initiative Shuttered Amid Scandal | Tom Nardi | [
"green hacks",
"News"
] | [
"agriculture",
"farming",
"mit",
"mit media lab",
"OpenAg"
] | The MIT Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) promised to revolutionize urban farming with their Food Computers: essentially miniature automated gardens that could be installed in racks to maximize growing space. Each unit would be provided with a “Recipe” that allowed it to maintain the ideal environmental conditions for the species it contained, which meant that even the novice gardener to produce a bumper crop no whether they lived in the Arctic Circle or the Sahara.
With such lofty goals, success certainly wasn’t assured. But we still didn’t expect to hear that
the program had to be permanently closed after a string of startling accusations
came to light. From engaging in scientific dishonesty to setting off a minor ecological disaster, the story just gets worse and worse. Who could have imagined that one day we’d have to report on an open source project having direct ties to Jeffrey Epstein?
Food Computer v3.0
According to reports, MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito and OpenAg principal researcher Caleb Harper attempted to secure $1.5 million in funding for the program during a 2017 meeting with the disgraced financier. Epstein apparently wasn’t impressed by what he saw, and no money ever changed hands. Given the information we now have about the project, this might actually be the least surprising part of the story.
It has since come to light that the Food Computers never worked consistently, and indeed never made it past the prototype stage. This despite the fact that Harper claimed that functional units had already been deployed to refugee camps during presentation to potential investors. A scientist working with the project has even come forward with claims that staff were instructed to place plants brought from local garden centers into the prototype Food Computers prior to tours of the lab so visitors would think they had been grown in the devices.
A former researcher working on the OpenAg program, Babak Babakinejad, also went public with his concerns over the environmental impact of dumping waste water from the Food Computers. The lab had a permit to pump nitrogen-infused water into an underground disposal well, but according to Babakinejad, internal testing showed the
nitrogen levels in the water would occasionally top 20 times the stated limit
. After his concerns were ignored by Harper and other MIT staff, he eventually took his concerns directly to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection which led to an investigation and ultimately a fine of $25K.
We first covered the Open Agriculture Initiative back in 2016
, and readers expressed doubts about the concept even then. While we certainly don’t relish making an update like this about a project we’ve featured, it’s an important reminder that honesty and integrity can’t take a backseat to technical achievement. | 43 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247164",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T11:51:19",
"content": "But the project didn’t kill itself right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6247197",
"author": "LonePatriot",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21... | 1,760,373,481.36529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/21/the-next-best-thing-to-a-cybertruck/ | The Next Best Thing To A Cybertruck | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"aluminum",
"cybertruck",
"epoxy",
"model",
"polycarbonate",
"tesla"
] | While production of the Tesla Cybertruck won’t start production until 2021 (at the earliest), you can always try to build your own. Unless you have a really big spare parts drawer, though, it probably won’t be full sized, but you can at least build a model if you have a shop as well-stocked as [Emiel]. He took some time to
build a model cybertruck out of a single sheet of aluminum
. (Video, embedded below. You might want to turn on subtitles.)
This project is a great example of the fact that some projects that seem simple on the surface require some specialized tools to get just right. To start, the aluminum sheet was cut with a laser to get into the appropriate shape and include details like windows, and the bending points were marked with an engraver to help the bending process along. The one tool that [Emiel] was missing was a
brake
, but he got great results with a set of metal bending pliers.
Finishing the model didn’t go particularly smoothly, either. He had planned to braze the metal together, but the heat required kept warping the body panels. The solution was to epoxy it together and sand down the excess, and the results are hopefully stronger than brazing would have been since he added a cloth to the epoxy for extra strength. The windows are made from polycarbonate (and didn’t break during the durability test), and we hope that when [Emiel] is ready to put in a motor he uses
one of his custom-built electric motors
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247149",
"author": "rewolff",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T09:19:31",
"content": "Subtitles? Why? He’s perfectly understandable!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6247155",
"author": "John Little",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,373,481.225299 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/led-matrix-takes-you-down-to-nixieland/ | LED Matrix Takes You Down To Nixieland | Sven Gregori | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"clock hacks",
"nixie",
"nixie clock",
"RGB LED matrix"
] | It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Sure, there are some who might simply sugarcoat blatant plagiarism with fancy quotes, but there are still cases that come from well-intended, genuine admiration. The Nixie tube with its ember-like glow is a component that definitely gets a lot of such admiration, and being a fond LED enthusiast, [tuenhidiy] saw a perfect opportunity
to imitate them with a RGB LED Matrix and build a virtual Nixie clock from it
.
What may sound like just displaying images of Nixie tubes on a LED matrix, is actually exactly that. Using the UTFT library and converter, [tuenhidiy] turned pictures of individually lit-up Nixie tube digits into arrays of 16bit RGB values, and shows the current time on an ESP32-controlled 64×64 matrix with them. Providing two different image sizes, you can either place two tubes next to each other, or in a 3×2 arrangement, and of course have plenty of flexibility for future extensions. In the demo video after the break, you can see the two options in action while displaying both the full time, and only the seconds.
Unfortunately, it’s always difficult to judge an LED project through the lens of a camera, especially when looking for the characteristic color of a Nixie tube, but we take [tuenhidiy]’s word that it resembles it a lot better in reality. On the other hand, the pixelated look certainly adds its own charm, so you might as well go completely overboard with the colors — something we’ve seen with
a different LED-themed Nixie alternative a little while back
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247196",
"author": "STEPHEN SHAFFER",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T13:26:32",
"content": "I love it when we find ways to make something more expensive, like seriously, this stuff will be cheap in 5 years, start playing with it like it’s cheap today and you’ll have an idea about tomorro... | 1,760,373,481.178378 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/radio-shack-shortwave-goes-digital/ | Radio Shack Shortwave Goes Digital | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"digital display",
"dx-160",
"frequency counter",
"frequency display",
"IF",
"radio shack",
"shortwave",
"VFO"
] | If you spent the 1970s obsessively browsing through the Radio Shack catalog, you probably remember the DX-160 shortwave receiver. You might have even had one. The radio looked suspiciously like the less expensive Eico of the same era, but it had that amazing-looking bandspread dial, instead of the Eico’s uncalibrated single turn knob number 1 to 10. Finding an exact frequency was an artful process of using both knobs, but [Frank] decided to refit his with a
digital frequency display
.
Even if you don’t have a DX-160, the techniques [Frank] uses are pretty applicable to old receivers like this. In this case, the radio is a single conversion superhet with a variable frequency oscillator (VFO), so you need only read that frequency and then add or subtract the IF before display. If you can find a place to tap the VFO without perturbing it too much, you should be able to pull the same stunt.
In this receiver’s heyday, this would have been a formidable project. Today, a cheap digital display will do fine. As it turns out, this radio has some bands that tune to the VFO’s frequency minus 455 kHz and some bands tune to the VFO frequency plus 455 kHz. With a microcontroller you could deal with this easily, but [Frank’s] solution was to simply use two displays. They are cheap, so why not? The displays are configurable, so you could probably work out a way to use one even if you had to manually throw a switch to do it.
The displays draw power from the radio’s lamp sockets. The real trick to the project is finding a place to tap the VFO frequency and then doing so in a way that doesn’t kill the oscillator or introduce instability. [Frank’s] design uses a capacitor to couple the oscillator’s energy into the counters.
If you don’t want to use an off-the-shelf display, it is pretty easy to count frequency with most microcontrollers. Some have dedicated hardware for this purpose. A common trick is to count the number of zero crossings over a period of time and scale to how many you would have in a second. There, are, however, a
variety of methods
.
We have to admit that while we enjoy old radios, we also enjoy a digital display. Of course, another answer would be to
replace the VFO completely
, but that would negate the cool old dial. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247117",
"author": "Alan W2AEW",
"timestamp": "2020-05-21T02:33:33",
"content": "I still have the DX-160 that I bought in the 70s as a teenager, using the proceeds from cutting lawns on summer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,373,481.285292 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/a-foam-core-stand-against-tablet-design/ | A Foam Core Stand Against Tablet Design | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"cheesecloth",
"foam board",
"foam core",
"laser cut",
"poster board",
"tablet stand"
] | We hadn’t considered how challenging it might be to try drawing long-term on a tablet, and it sounds as though Apple didn’t, either. According to [Eric Strebel], who normally designs products for other people, there are many problems to solve. The camera area creates a bump on an otherwise flat backside, so it wobbles on the table. It’s thick. It’s too easy to run your stylus off the side.
Yes there are tablet holders out there, even a few with cup holders, but almost none of them have a kickstand for holding the thing vertically. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
And so [Eric] designed his ideal stand to solve all of these problems
(video, embedded below). It’s mostly made of laser-cut foam core board, with some layers of poster board added to make the bezel totally flush with the tablet.
[Eric] can snap the tablet in place and use it flat, or fold back the upper half into a stand. It even works well over on the couch, or sitting up in bed. We particularly like the window gasket feet and all the versions of his hinges, which start with strips of cheesecloth and end in grosgrain ribbon. [Eric]’s approach to design always reminds us to keep an open mind about materials and methods. If you try using what you already have, the results may surprise you. Check out the build video after the break.
Maybe you don’t need or want a tablet stand. How about
a foam core spray booth
? | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247098",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T23:29:39",
"content": "Cool. I’ve been messing with regular carton cardboard, and thicker pressed cardboard for tablet and phone stands. Then I can get a couple of screens lined up next to each other right, instead of at w... | 1,760,373,481.446456 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/a-sweet-little-insulin-reminder-light/ | A Sweet Little Insulin Reminder Light | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"diabetes",
"feather m4",
"Flic button",
"insulin",
"pikachu",
"RGB LED"
] | So much of what we do relies on a certain societal structure that has been absent for a few months now. When the days run together, it’s hard to remember to do the things that must happen daily. You think you did something, and maybe you’re right, but it’s quite possible you’re thinking of yesterday.
[Flameeyes] has diabetes and must use an insulin pen every morning without fail, no matter what’s happening outside his door. This was pretty much a non-issue in the before-time, but quickly became a serious problem as the routine-free weeks wore on.
With no room for false positives, he needed a solution that doesn’t trigger until the deed is done
.
Now when [Flameeyes] puts the pen away, he also triggers a Flic smart button mounted nearby. The Flic shares its status with a Feather M4 Express through a web app, and the Feather in turn changes the RGB LED inside of Pikachu’s base from red to yellow for the day. Pikachu sits in plain sight by the kettle, so there’s no guessing whether [Flameeyes] took his insulin.
Insulin is a critical commodity with a lot of DIY interest, which is probably starting to spike about now. Our own [Dan Maloney] wrote
a great piece on the subject
that brings up an insulin hack from around 80 years ago. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246855",
"author": "W00f",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T05:39:02",
"content": "Depending on your insulin cartridge , you could just get the novopen 4 (or the novopen echo for 1/2 unit range) , it display last number of unit and a time “range”.Perfect as I was having the same, “did I or... | 1,760,373,481.401647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/an-easy-hack-for-working-with-your-hands-on-video-calls/ | An Easy Hack For Working With Your Hands On Video Calls | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"mirror",
"video chat",
"videoconferencing"
] | Video calls are
okay.
While some advocate for the benefit of body language over a standard phone call, they remain an imperfect substitute for in-person interaction. [Amos] wanted to be able to demonstrate things better when on a video chat,
so devised this simple solution for when he’s working with his hands.
The hack consists of a mirror attached to a clothespeg with a flexible piece of wire. This simple device can then be clipped to the screen of a laptop, and the mirror adjusted to allow the webcam to view the user’s desk. By positioning it correctly, the user can both show their desk and their face together, in split screen. It’s a great way to explain something while giving viewers a clear shot of your face and your hands at the same time.
It’s not exactly complicated, but a nifty hack that could prove useful to anyone trying to teach without having to muck about with complicated digital handwriting setups or multiple webcams. There’s a shortage at the moment, anyway. If you’re looking for a way to chat with your less tech savvy relatives,
consider repurposing an old Android tablet
. Video after the break. | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246833",
"author": "dbtx",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T02:41:48",
"content": "‘not exactly complicated’ means said hack is a good hack.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6246840",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2020-05... | 1,760,373,481.48552 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/wall-climbing-robot-grabs-prize/ | Wall-Climbing Robot Grabs Prize | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bridge",
"camera",
"car",
"citadel",
"drone",
"engineering",
"infrastructure",
"inspection",
"rc",
"robot",
"students"
] | Gravity is a nice thing to have most of the time, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to ignore it for certain applications. Rock climbing, for example, would be much easier, as would performing bridge inspections in the way that a group of mechanical engineering cadets (students) at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, were tasked with doing. Frustrated with the amount of traffic backups that normal bridge inspections caused,
they invented a robot that defies gravity
, and won a $10k prize for their efforts.
The result is essentially an RC car with a drone built in, or looking at it another way it’s a drone with wheels. The car is able to drive on vertical surfaces to inspect the bridges by using its propellers to force itself onto the surface. The lack of complicated moving parts or machinery, like a cable suspension system or other contraption, makes this device exceptionally versatile for the task at hand, reduces the amount of time needed for inspections, and can do them more safely and without closing lanes of traffic. The group hopes to build a second prototype soon and present it to the Department of Transportation for approval for more widespread use.
The need for tools like these is in high demand now as well, especially in the United States where crumbling infrastructure is often not thought about, taken seriously, or prioritized. Even for bridges
that aren’t major pieces of infrastructure
, tools like these will prove to be very useful.
Thanks to [Ben] for the tip! | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246814",
"author": "lukilukeskywalker",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T23:31:55",
"content": "“Invented” is a big word for an idea that isn’t new…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRYT2kYbgo4And more when it is a crappy execution like this one is",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,481.703509 |
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