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https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/reverse-engineering-the-apple-touch-bar-screen/ | Reverse Engineering The Apple Touch Bar Screen | Maya Posch | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"apple",
"apple touch bar",
"mipi dsi"
] | The Apple Touch Bar was an oddity on a fairly small number of Apple laptops which replaced the function key row with a touch display. Yet what is special about this display other than its odd form factor when you consider it as a generic touch display? As [Wenting Zhang] describes in a recent
reverse-engineering video
, this 2,170 x 60 pixel display is somewhat limited in that it doesn’t support the MIPI DSI video mode, only command mode, along with a special instruction (0x3C) for automatic address offsets. The results of this project
can be found
on the GitLab account.
In a way these limitations make sense when you consider
Apple’s use case
for these special MIPI-DSI displays. As a touch screen with dynamic controls being displayed on it, features such as video playback never were a goal, and thus Apple likely decided to save a few bucks, possibly also due to MIPI licensing costs. What this means is that if you had dreamed of snapping up an extremely long and narrow OLED display for a video project you’re in for somewhat of a bad time. Although animated content is possible – as [Wenting] demonstrates – this comes with all the limitations of command mode, meaning slower updates, higher power usage and a lot more overhead.
Thanks to [John Little] for the tip. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723125",
"author": "Wenting Zhang",
"timestamp": "2024-01-24T00:40:43",
"content": "Sorry I wasn’t making it clear in the video… it’s still totally possible to do 60Hz video with command mode only, Apple is doing that on the MacBook after all. In addition it has Vsync output so it’... | 1,760,372,031.404935 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/autofeeding-cnc-lathe-cranks-out-parts-all-by-itself/ | Autofeeding CNC Lathe Cranks Out Parts All By Itself | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"cnc",
"industrial",
"Pneumatics",
"spindle",
"wood"
] | The trouble with building a business around selling low-margin widgets is that you have to find a way to make a lot of them to make it worth your while. And if the widget in question is labor-intensive to make, you’ve got to find ways to reduce your inputs. That sounds like a job for industrial automation, a solution that’s often out of reach of small shops, for all the obvious reasons. Not if you’re clever about things, though, as
this fully automated CNC lathe work cell
shows.
This build comes to us from the woodshop of [Maher Lagha], where he’s making wooden honey dippers. Wooden dowel blanks are dispensed from an infeed rack and chucked between centers on the headstock and pneumatic tailstock. A two-axis stage in front of the workpiece moves a tool against the spinning stock, carving out the honey dipper in just a few minutes. When the lathe work is done, the spindle stops, the tailstock pulls the honey dipper back off the headstock, and a pneumatic piston unceremoniously whacks the almost-finished part — it looks like it still needs a little manual post-processing — into a bin. Lather, rinse, repeat, profit.
[Maher] doesn’t provide many details, but just looking at the work cell shows a veritable feast of industrial automation equipment. The spindle and tailstock of the lathe sit on a bed made from a massive slab of aluminum extrusion, and the X- and Y-axes use linear rails and ballscrews. And mindful of the effects of wood chips on delicate mechanisms, [Maher] did a good job of containing the mess with a host of acrylic guards.
As we said when we saw [Maher]’s
wooden coaster work cell
a while back, the wood widget business must be pretty good to justify automation like this. What’s nice with both these rigs is that they look like they could be quickly reprogrammed and retooled to create other products. Pretty impressive. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723059",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T21:15:37",
"content": "Love the use of toggle bolts for the feed mechanism.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6723120",
"author": "Maher Lagha",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,031.350383 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/testing-your-c-knowledge-with-this-one-simple-quiz/ | Testing Your C Knowledge With This One Simple Quiz | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"C quiz",
"quiz"
] | One of the most exciting aspects of the C programming language — as effectively high-level assembly — is that although it’s a bit friendlier for the developer, it also adds a lot of required know-how on account of its portability across platforms and architectures. This know-how is what [Oleksandr Kaleniuk] manages to wonderfully illustrate with a simple 5-question,
multiple-choice quiz
on what the return value is of the provided function snippets of C code. How well do you know C?
For those who have had their run-ins with C directly (or indirectly via the support for it in languages like C++) the words ‘
undefined behavior
‘ (UB) are likely to induce a nervous twitch or two, along with a suspicious glance at whichever parts of reality are about to evaporate and destabilize the Universe this time. Although it is said that a proper C program is written with zero UB cases in it, in practice this can be rather tough, even before considering the other exciting ways in which a piece of code can fail to do the expected thing.
For languages other than C this is of course also a challenge, which is the reason why certification programs for e.g. avionics go out of their way to weed out such preventable issues, and only few programming languages
like Ada
(anything avionics, medical, etc.) and C++ (F-35 and other US DoD projects) make it into devices where failure is literally not an option. | 53 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723017",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T20:02:50",
"content": "“…and I’ve done some successful projects in C on my first full-time job, and even then, when I was mostly working with C++, I thought of it as over-bloated C.” lol; no, it’s not.I did fail the last on... | 1,760,372,032.152275 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/24/steamboat-willie-never-sounded-better/ | Steamboat Willie Never Sounded Better | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"audio processing",
"disney",
"flutter",
"Mickey Mouse",
"steamboat willie"
] | Mickey Mouse’s introduction to the world was the 1928 cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Not only was it the first appearance of Mickey with sound, it was also one of the first cartoons to employ synchronized sound. The problem is, the sound is awful. Sure, after nearly a century, what do you expect? But [Oona Räisänen] thought it wasn’t just age, but flutter from the original recording.
Could it be made better
? What follows that question is a self-described geek’s journey into the depths of recorded sound.
The first step was to find a high quality source. The Internet Archive had a copy that was mostly clean. But it also has a lossless scan of the movie including the original optical soundtrack. A quick script played back the original soundtrack and — you guessed it — the flutter is already there. You can see the original 7-minute short from Disney’s channel, below.
Next, a detailed analysis identified a 15 Hz as the flutter’s period and another custom tool allowed manual identification of the frequency speed for different areas of the film. Drawing on some older software made to correct VHS tapes by employing Lagrange interpolation, it was possible to filter out the 15 Hz component and use it to control the playback speed. There are several clips and you can tell it is quite an improvement in most cases.
Unsurprisingly, there were also bits of artifacts at 24 Hz and 60 Hz, the rate of the film and the power line frequency. Now that the
copyright on the film is expired
, someone could do a major audio and even video restoration on the film. We’re guessing someone will. Just hope they
get the details right
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723666",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2024-01-25T04:58:42",
"content": "I am guessing that flutter is acting a bit like FM – I really admire a person that was able identify that from recording and than to “demodulate” signal.This brings a question – every turntable has it’s flutt... | 1,760,372,031.671548 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/24/floss-weekly-episode-767-owntracks-are-we-there-yet/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 767: Owntracks, Are We There Yet? | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"gps",
"mqtt",
"owntracks"
] | This week Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie talk with
JP Mens
about
Owntracks
, the collection of programs that lets you take back control of your own location data. It’s built around the simple idea of taking position data from a mobile phone or other data source, sending it over MQTT to a central server, and logging that data to a simple data store.
From there, you can share it as trips, mark points of interest, play back your movement in a web browser, and more. And because it’s just JSON inside MQTT, it’s pretty trivial to make a connector to interface with other projects, like Home Assistant. We’ve even
covered the process
!
– Project Web site:
https://owntracks.org/
– Documentation:
https://owntracks.org/booklet/
– Source code:
https://github.com/owntracks
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show
right in the Hackaday Discord
? Next week we’re interviewing Jan-Piet Mens of the OwnTracks project!
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723578",
"author": "Benjamin Meadors",
"timestamp": "2024-01-25T00:47:28",
"content": "Finally, a podcast that puts a name to my dental regimen!Great episode, guys. Owntracks sounds really neat.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,372,031.938035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/24/robot-you-keep-using-that-word-but-it-doesnt-mean-what-you-think-it-means/ | Robot: You Keep Using That Word But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"android",
"automaton",
"Karl Čapek",
"robot"
] | The flute player automaton by
Innocenzo Manzetti
(1840)
With many words which are commonly used in everyday vocabulary, we are certain that we have a solid grasp of what they do and do not mean, but is this really true? Take the word ‘robot’ for example, which is more commonly used wrongly rather than correctly when going by the definition of
the person who coined it
: [Karel Čapek]. It was the year 1920 when his play
Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti
was introduced to the world, which soon saw itself translated and performed around the world, with the English-speaking world knowing it as
R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots
.
Up till then, the concept of a relatively self-operating machine was known as an
automaton
, as introduced by the Ancient Greeks, with the term ‘android’ being introduced as early as the 18th century to mean automatons that have a human-like appearance, but are still mechanical contraptions. When [Čapek] wrote his play, he did not intend to have non-human characters that were like these androids, but rather pure artificial life: biochemical systems much like humans, using similar biochemical principles as proteins, enzymes, hormones and vitamins, assembled from organic matter like humans. These non-human characters he called ‘roboti’, from
Old Czech ‘robot’
(robota: “drudgery, servitude”), who looked human, but lacked a ‘soul’.
Despite this intent, the run-away success of R.U.R. led to anything android- and automaton-like being referred to as a ‘robot’, which he lamented in a 1935 column in
Lidové Noviny
. Rather than whirring and clunking pieces of machinery being called ‘automatons’ and ‘androids’ as they had been for hundreds of years, now his vision of artificial life had effectively been wiped out. Despite this, to this day we can still see the traces of the proper terms, for example when we talk about ‘automation’, which is where automatons (‘industrial robots’) come into play, like the industrial looms and kin that heralded the Industrial Revolution.
(Heading image: Performance of
R.U.R. by Flat Earth Theatre
, showing the mixing of robot ingredients) | 33 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723493",
"author": "Natali",
"timestamp": "2024-01-24T21:29:34",
"content": "Thanks Maya!Could it be possible that we get in future some articles about the root of a modern terms. Something from where come the definition of a.i. or cells, battery…Who invented CAD, computer aided de... | 1,760,372,031.482334 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/24/fairberry-brings-the-pkb-back-to-your-smartphone/ | FairBerry Brings The PKB Back To Your Smartphone | Navarre Bartz | [
"blackberry hacks",
"Cellphone Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro micro",
"blackberry",
"integrated keyboard",
"openscad",
"physical keyboard",
"smartphone"
] | Missing the feel of physical keys on your phone, but not ready to give up your fancy new touchscreen phone? [Dakkaron] has
attached a BlackBerry keyboard
to a slightly more recent device.
Designed for the FairPhone 4, [Dakkaron]’s hack should be transferable to other smartphones as it connects to the phone over USB without any of that tedious mucking about with Bluetooth. There’s even a handy OpenSCAD-based generator to help you along in the customization process.
[Dakkaron] started with an Arduino Pro Micro-based implementation, but the most recent iteration uses a custom board that can be obtained partially-populated. Unfortunately, the Hirose connector for the keyboard isn’t available off-the-shelf, so you’ll have to solder that yourself if you’re planning to do this mod. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to practice your
surface mount soldering skills
!
If the
Q10 keyboard
looks familiar, it’s probably because it’s one of the most popular keyboards for small projects around here. Check out
Regrowing a BlackBerry from the Keyboard Out
or a
LoRa Messenger
with one. We’ve even seen them in a
conference badge
! | 37 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723450",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2024-01-24T19:50:39",
"content": "I really hope this happens for my “ancient” LG android thing…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6723569",
"author": "Dakkaron",
... | 1,760,372,031.625324 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/24/ask-hackaday-what-about-imperfect-features/ | Ask Hackaday: What About Imperfect Features? | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Software Development"
] | [
"perfection",
"software",
"vlc"
] | Throughout the last few years’ time, I’ve been seeing sparks of an eternal discussion here and there. It’s a nuanced one, but if I could summarize, it’s about different feature development strategies we can follow to design things, especially if they’re aimed at a larger market. Specifically – when adding a feature, how complete and perfect should it be?
A while back, I read
a Mastodon thread
about VLC not implementing backwards per-frame skipping. At the surface level, it’s about an indignant user asking – what’s the deal with VLC not having a “go back a frame” button? A ton of video players have this feature implemented. There’s
a forum thread linked,
and, reading it could leave you with a good few conflicting emotions. Here’s a recap.
In what appears to be one of multiple threads asking about a ‘previous frame’ button in VLC, there’s an 82-post discussion involving multiple different VLC developers. The users’ argument is that it appears to be clearly technically possible to add a ‘previous frame’ button in practice, and the developers’ argument is that it’s technologically complex to implement in some cases – for certain formats, even impossible to implement! Let’s go into the developers’ stated reasoning in more details, then – here’s what you can find in the thread, to the best of my ability.
The Mess Of Video Formats And Human Emotions
Video compression can get complex – you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that, in overwhelming majority of video formats, the compression algorithms generally store between-frame changes, with occasional full frames stored so that seek isn’t too expensive. That said, it can get even more complex than this, with some formats being particularly seek-unfriendly due to blurring the line of what even constitutes a separate frame. Again, we have real-world examples of, but this does create a non-unified interface for users. I could not find an argument made by VLC devs addressing the suggestion to enable previous frame seek for some formats and not others, with UI changes to match, but I did find a different take.
The gist is, VLC developers don’t see a clean way to implement seek, as-is. Whatever other video players are doing, it needs to be investigated, and then it might turn out to be messy code where the principles won’t even transfer into VLC without creating a maintenance burden. The devs have the best insight into the codebase, as it stands, and if they. Of course, there’s been users who haven’t taken it lightly, and together with overwhelmingly reasonable messages, the thread has seen a considerable backlash to what appears to be an obvious feature that should’ve been added years ago.
Of course, it’s foolish to conclude that if some people are going over the line, their core argument is invalid. On the other hand, it doesn’t make for a pleasant atmosphere, and the reality of human condition will mean that the negative aspects of this discussion will make any work on such a feature an increasingly unpleasant experience for VLC developers. If they implement it now in some form, expect it to be a chorus of “told ya so”, which is hardly ever positive motivation.
But the entire atmosphere of the discussion is now clouded, to the point where the questions come to a common dead-end – how much can you really ask from an open-source developer? On one hand, asking for features is about the only way that a user can signal a need of theirs – but when that need has been clearly signaled as tricky to meet, users’ questions can quickly become annoying, and managing them becomes extra work of the sort that not all equipped with. Those of us who have manufactured products, have definitely felt the pain of replying to a trove of identical questions. Some developers prepare email template responses and tirelessly send those out, and some object to the very notion that this burden is their responsibility. When the implicit message from users is “you’re wrong about your area of expertise and denying it”, it can become pretty hard to engage in a calm manner, and that’s going to explain how quite a few of the VLC developer replies in the thread are pretty harsh.
VLC is a wonderful player that’s rightfully claimed a throne in the open-source software kingdom, and I personally rely on it in my day to day life. You can’t deny that VLC developers are doing something right, or rather, they’re doing a huge amount of things right – it’s hard to write a sophisticated large piece of software without a coherent view on how this software could work, and VLC has thrived in the open-source world for decades now. There’s a strong argument for trusting the developers’ judgment on this one.
And, there might be a strong argument for not trusting the developers, too.
Perfection Isn’t A Virtue
Now, the Mastodon thread I linked, approaches the issue from a different perspective. It pokes at the very core of the developers’ argument, and makes a strong stand in that something is fundamentally wrong with the way this issue is approached within VLC developer circle. It’s hard to deny that, in other players, the previous skip button just works when users expect it to work. Sure, it can’t work for some formats because compression is wacky, maybe it’s not expected that it will work for network streams, but from users’ perspective it’s a solved task in what seems to be every player except VLC. So, given all the points that we’ve just gone through, the Mastodon thread argues that the VLC developers are wrong about their area of expertise. That’s a strong claim – how is it made?
One of the developers’ core arguments is that the feature can’t work perfectly in all cases. The problem is that nobody was asking for perfection. If the developers’ responses are focused on how a feature can’t be implemented perfectly but the users in question aren’t asking for a perfect implementation, maybe the developers are approaching this feature from a fundamentally wrong angle.
This puts into question the claim of an implementation being complex – is it really as complex as you claim, or did you back yourself into a corner while striving for an impossible standard? Cases of developers backing themselves into a corner aren’t unheard of, and reading the thread, it’s really not clear that this is not the case. This results in developers strongly communicating a pretty common failure mode, while fervently denying it could be an option.
The communication disconnect isn’t helped by fundamentally conflicting messaging. Throughout the developers’ messages, if you are to treat them as seriously as possible, you can piece together these serious points: “we genuinely don’t know how to implement this to our standards, we don’t want to provide users with a bad user experience, but we are open to pull requests”. However, these points are surrounded by developers’ replies like “it’s not generally possible”, or “if it’s so easy, why aren’t you doing it”, or a variation of “this can’t be done perfectly [but it can be done for some cases]”.
Obviously, open-source developers aren’t gods expected to solve every feature request that ever appears, but that’s the thing, you’re supposed to be able to contribute to open-source, and it’s not really clear if anyone can contribute to solving this problem. There is two incompatible stances here – the first stance is “sorry, we don’t know, help us if you can”, and the second stance is “we expect perfection and know that to be impossible”. This incompatibility isn’t explicit, but it’s weaved throughout the thread when you read between the lines, and this makes it really tricky to determine if someone’s work would be appreciated in case someone were to go implement the feature and do a pull request.
Will your pull request get the positive bias as a solution to a problem that developers are struggling to solve for their users, as is a custom in open-source land, or will it get denigrated as a solution to a problem that can’t be solved perfectly anyway? I guess you just can’t know until you put in hours of work. When such an uncertainty is going to hover over you all throughout you figuring out a way to do a clean implementation, it’s going to be hard to forget that you could be doing literally anything more promising with your time instead. And, given negativity bias, will some people’s experience with VLC be tarnished by reading this forum thread as they’re looking for a solution to a problem that’s a keypress away in all other players?
Bridging The Gap
VLC users and VLC developers are talking past each other, while sending each other implicit messages with a fundamentally dismissive core. It’s an open-source community problem, but pull requests and forks are the wrong tools here. Besides, the technical problem is solved – one of the last posts in the forum thread tells us that there’s a plugin which solves this problem, adding a ‘previous frame’ button. It might require a finicky sequence of actions to operate or install, but it’s a solution better than switching to a different player, something that you’ll see quite a few people state in the thread in frustration.
When you put on the user gloves, what do you have to say to a developer trying to choose between an imperfectly implemented feature and not implementing it at all? Which one would you rather work with? And when you sit in a developer’s seat, how you do you feel about working away at an imperfect feature that might just turn into a maintenance burden, especially if you can’t get yourself comfortable with implementing it? | 24 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723423",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-01-24T18:31:34",
"content": "‘And when you sit in a developer’s seat, how you do you feel about working away at an imperfect feature that might just turn into a maintenance burden, especially if you can’t get yourself comfortable with... | 1,760,372,031.551809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/24/random-number-generation-by-brain/ | Random Number Generation By Brain | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"mathematics",
"Raku",
"random number generator"
] | If you want to start an argument in certain circles, claim to have a random number generation algorithm. Turns out that producing real random numbers is hard, which is why people often turn to strange methods and still, sometimes, don’t get it right. [Hillel Wayne] wanted to get a “good enough” method that could be done without a computer
and found the answer
in an old Usenet post from random number guru [George Marsaglia].
The algorithm is simple. Pick a two-digit number — ahem — at random. OK, so you still have to pick a starting number. To get the next number, take the top digit, add six, and then multiply by the bottom digit. So in C: n1=(n/10+6)*(n%10). Then use the last digit as your random number from 0 to 9. Why does it work? To answer that, the post shows some Raku code to investigate the behavior.
In particular, where does the magic number 6 come into play? The computer program notes that not any number works well there. For example, if you used 4 instead of 6 and then started with 13, all your random digits would be 3. Not really all that random! However, 6 is just a handy number. If you don’t mind a little extra math, there are better choices, like 50.
If you think humans are good at picking random numbers, ask someone to pick a number between 1 and 4 and press them to do it quickly. Nearly always (nearly) they will pick 2. However, don’t be surprised when some people pick 141. Not everyone does well under pressure.
If you want super random numbers, try a
lava lamp
. Or grab some
555s and a few Nixie tubes
. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723398",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-01-24T16:43:46",
"content": "https://xkcd.com/221/Or use a real dice?Humans are just terrible at generating random numbers, and there is also no proof about the randomness of numbers generated by humans. That is why things like dice ... | 1,760,372,032.030963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/24/human-written-or-machine-generated-finding-intelligence-in-language-models/ | Human-Written Or Machine-Generated: Finding Intelligence In Language Models | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Featured",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"large language model",
"natural language"
] | What is the essential element which separates a text written by a human being from a text which has been generated by an algorithm, when said algorithm uses a massive database of human-written texts as its input? This would seem to be the fundamental struggle which society currently deals with, as the prospect of a future looms in which students can have essays auto-generated from large language models (LLMs) and authors can churn out books by the dozen without doing more than asking said algorithm to write it for them, using nothing more than a query containing the desired contents as the human inputs.
Due to the immense amount of human-generated text in such an LLM, in its output there’s a definite overlap between machine-generated text and the average prose by a human author. Statistical methods of detecting the former are also increasingly hamstrung by the human developers and other human workers behind these text-generating algorithms, creating just enough human-like randomness in the algorithm’s predictive vocabulary to convince the casual reader that it was written by a fellow human.
Perhaps the best way to detect machine-generated text may just be found in that one quality that these algorithms are often advertised with, yet which they in reality are completely devoid of: intelligence.
Statistically Human
(Credit: Gehrmann et al., 2019)
For the longest time, machine-generated texts were readily identifiable by a casual observer in that they employed a rather peculiar writing style. Not only would their phrasing be exceedingly generic and ramble on with many repetitions, their used vocabulary would also be very predictable, using only a small subset of (popular) words rather than a more diverse and unpredictable vocabulary.
As time went on, however, the obviousness of machine-generated texts
became less obvious
, to the point where there’s basically a fifty-fifty chance of making the right guess, as recent studies indicate. For example
Elizabeth Clark et al.
with the GPT-2 and GPT-3 LLMs used in the study only convincing human readers in about half the cases that the text they were reading was written by a human instead of machine generated.
Overall Turing Test Success Rate (SR) for
a subset of witnesses. (Credit: Cameron Jones et al., 2023)
Then there are a string of Turing Test-related experiments, such as one by
Daniel Jannai and colleagues
, in which human participants only guessed the identity of their anonymous chat partner in 68% of the time. Another experiment by
Cameron Jones and colleague
focused primarily on the modern GPT-4 LLM, pitting it against other LLMs and early chatbots like 1960s’ famous
ELIZA
.
This last experiment is perhaps the most fascinating, as although it used a public online test, it pitted not just a single LLM against human interrogators, but rather a wide range of different technological approaches, each aimed at making a human believe that they’re talking with another intelligent human being. As can be observed from the test results (pictured), ELIZA was doing pretty well, handily outperforming the GPT-3.5 LLM and giving GPT-4 a run for its money. The crux of the issue – which is also addressed in the paper by Cameron Jones – would thus appear to be how a human reader judges the intelligence behind what they are reading, before they are confident that they’re talking with a real human being.
Since even real-life humans in this experiment got judged in many cases to not be ‘human’ enough, it raises the question of not only what distinguishes a human from an algorithm, but also in how far we are projecting our own biases and feelings onto the subject of a conversation or the purported author of a text.
Wanting To Believe
What is intelligence? Most succinctly, it is the ability to reason and reflect, as well as to learn and to possess awareness of not just the present, but also the past and future. Yet as simple as this sounds, we humans have trouble applying it in a rational fashion to everything from pets to babies born with
anencephaly
, where instinct and unconscious actions are mistaken for intelligence and reasoning. Much as our brains will happily see patterns and shapes where they do not exist, these same brains will accept something as human-created when it fits our preconceived notions.
People will often point to the output of ChatGPT – which is usually backed by the GPT-4 LLM – as an example of ‘artificial intelligence’, but what is not mentioned here is the enormous amount of human labor involved in keeping up this appearance. A 2023 investigation by
New York Magazine
and
The Verge
uncovered the
sheer numbers of so-called annotators
: people who are tasked with identifying, categorizing and otherwise annotating everything from customer responses to text fragments to endless amounts of images, depending on whether the LLM and its frontend is being used for customer support, a chatbot like ChatGPT or to find matching image data to merge together to fit the requested parameters.
This points to the most obvious conclusion about LLMs and similar: they need these human workers to function, as despite the lofty claims about ‘neural networks’ and ‘self-learning
RNNs
‘, language models do not posses cognitive skills, or as Konstantine Arkoudas puts it in his paper titled
GPT-4 Can’t Reason
: “[..] despite the occasional flashes of analytical brilliance, GPT-4 at present is utterly incapable of reasoning.”
In his paper, Arkoudas uses twenty-one diverse reasoning problems which are not part of any corpus that GPT-4 could have been trained on to pose both very basic and more advanced questions to a ChatGPT instance, with the results ranging from comically incorrect to mind-numbingly false, as ChatGPT fails to even ascertain that a person who died at 11 PM was logically still alive by noon earlier that day.
Finally, it is hard to forget cases where a legal professional tries to get
ChatGPT to do his work
for him, and gets logically disbarred for the unforgettably terrible results.
Asking Questions
Can we reliably detect LLM-generated texts? In a
March 2023 paper
by Vinu Sankar Sadasivan and colleagues, they find that no reliable method exists, as the simple method of paraphrasing suffices to defeat even watermarking. Ultimately, this would render any attempt to reliably classify a given text as being human- or machine-generated in an automated fashion futile, with the flipping of a coin likely to be about as accurate. Yet despite this, there is a way to reliably detect generated texts, but it requires human intelligence.
The author and lead developer of Curl – Daniel Stenberg – recently published an article succinctly titled
The I in LLM stands for intelligence
. In it he notes the influx of bug reports recently that have all or part of their text generated by an LLM, with the ‘bug’ in question being either completely hallucinated or misrepresented. This is a pattern that continues in the medical profession, with Zahir Kanjee, MD, and colleagues in a
2023 research letter
to
JAMA
noting that GPT-4 managed to give the right diagnoses for provided cases in 64%, but only 39% of the time as its top diagnoses.
Although not necessarily terrible, this accuracy plummets when looking at pediatric cases, as Joseph Barile, BA and colleagues found in
a 2024 research letter
in
JAMA Pediatrics
. They noted that the ChatGPT chatbot with GPT-4 as its model had a diagnostic error rate of 83% (out of 100 cases). Of the rejected diagnoses, 72% were incorrect and 11% were clinically related but too vague to be considered a correct diagnosis. And then there is the
inability of medical ‘AI’ to adapt
to something as basic as new patients without extensive retraining.
All of this demonstrates both the lack of use of LLMs for professionals, as well as the very real risk when individuals who are less familiar with the field in question ask for ChatGPT’s ‘opinion’.
Signs Point To ‘No’
Although an LLM is arguably more precise than giving the good old Magic 8 Ball a shake, much like with the latter, an LLM’s response largely depends on what you put into it. Because of the relentless annotating, tweaking and adjusting of not just the model’s data, but also the front-ends and additional handlers for queries that an LLM simply cannot handle, LLMs give the impression of becoming better and – dare one say – more intelligent.
Unfortunately for those who wish to see artificial intelligence of any form become a reality within their lifetime, LLMs are not it. As the product of immense human labor, they are a far cry from the more basic language models that still exist today on for example our smartphones, where they learn only our own vocabulary and try to predict what words to next add to the auto-complete, as well as that always praised auto-correct feature. Moving from
n
-gram language models to RNNs enabled larger models with increased predictive ability, but just scaling things up does not equate intelligence.
To a cynical person, the whole ‘AI bubble’ is likely to feel like yet another fad as investors try to pump out as many products with the new hot thing in or on it, much like the internet bubble, the NFT/crypto bubble and so many before. There are also massive issues with the data being used for these LLMs, as human authors have their work protected by copyright.
As the lawsuits by these authors wind their way through the courts and more studies and trials find that there is indeed no intelligence behind LLMs other than the human kind, we won’t see RNNs and LLMs vanish, but they will find niches where their strengths do work, as even human intellects need an unthinking robot buddy sometimes who never loses focus, and never has a bad day. Just don’t expect them to do our work for us any time soon. | 45 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6723390",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-01-24T15:47:57",
"content": "“ChatGPT fails to even ascertain that a person who died at 11 PM was logically still alive by noon earlier that day.”ChatGPT is technically correct to say it cannot ascertain whether the person was alive by... | 1,760,372,031.891745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/could-solar-powered-airships-offer-cleaner-travel/ | Could Solar-Powered Airships Offer Cleaner Travel? | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"air travel",
"airship",
"clean travel",
"co2",
"solar power",
"transport"
] | The blimp, the airship, the dirigible. Whatever you call them, you probably don’t find yourself thinking about them too often. They were an easy way to get airborne, predating the invention of the airplane by decades. And yet, they suffered—they were too slow, too cumbersome, and often too dangerous to compete once conventional planes hit the scene.
And yet! Here you are reading about airships once more, because some people aren’t giving up on this most hilarious manner of air travel. Yes, it’s 2024, and airship projects continue apace even in the face of the overwhelming superiority of the airplane.
Why Float?
As the world reckons with decarbonizing the economy, air travel has fallen under the crosshairs. As you might imagine, lofting gigantic metal tubes full of people into the air takes a great deal of energy. Aviation makes up a significant
2.4% of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Work is underway to cut aircraft emissions through
new efficiency measures
and the
use of biofuels,
but demand for services continues to increase. Fiddling at the margins here isn’t going to solve the problem to any great degree.
Airships seem to offer some tantalizing bonuses to energy efficiency, however. With buoyancy provided by helium, airships don’t need forward propulsion to generate lift. Airplanes have to burn fuel to generate thrust to get enough speed up for the wings to work. All the while, the process of generating lift also generates drag, which costs fuel to overcome. In contrast, airships simply float upwards, essentially for free. The work of fighting gravity is done by the lifting gas in the airship’s bladders. Usually, it’s helium, because the Hindenburg disaster put most of us off ever riding in a hydrogen-filled airship.
Airships must still use fuel of some sort for propulsion to actually get to their destination. However, their minimum power requirements aren’t set by a need to maintain lift via wings. The airship will still float no matter how low the speed. Thus, where an airliner needs powerful engines just to get airborne, an airship can make do with less. This opens the prospect for electric airships, which could be a clean method of air travel if powered by renewable energy. Much research is ongoing in this area to determine whether such a method of transport could be feasible.
Slow Solar Airships
A paper published in the
International Journal of Sustainable Energy
recently explored the concept of an airship that uses onboard solar panels to harvest energy. Normally, we discount the idea of using solar panels on a vehicle for propulsion, as the surface area is too small to capture a meaningful amount of power. However, airships are huge, changing the calculations somewhat. The paper explored optimizing travel routes to enable the airship to fly between destinations using battery power and energy from the sun. It builds heavily on prior work, as many such papers do, but it’s rare to see one that references a publication from Zeppelin in 1908.
A solar-powered airship must optimize its travel path to get the most out of the energy available from the sun. Credit:
Pflaum, Riffelmacher, Jochner, 2022
The paper based its theoretical airship design around using thin-film solar cells, which are light, flexible, and efficient all that the same time. The idea is that an airship’s skin would form an excellent surface with which to capture energy from the sun. Proposing a large airship design, it would see an area of over 13,000 square meters covered in cells, weighing in total around 6.6 tons. Such a craft would have to be carefully piloted to make the most of any available sunlight, both with regards to the timing of its journey and its angle to the sun. Done properly, though, the paper concluded that such a craft could achieve emissions just 1-5% of those of a conventional aircraft.
But what of practicality? The paper worked with a theoretical design capable of hauling 100 to 200 passengers on routes between Madrid and Las Palmas, and London and New York City. The journeys planned were roughly 1,760 km and 5,566 km respectively in their shortest, most direct routes. In the latter case, the journey would take 48 hours from New York to London, far longer than the usual 8 hour plane flight. Going back, the numbers are even worse, taking 76 hours on average thanks to typical prevailing winds and available sunlight.
Potential flight routes from New York to London (blue), and London to New York (green). Prevailing winds play a huge role in flight time. Credit:
Pflaum, Riffelmacher, Jochner, 2022
Right away, it’s easy to see why we’re not blimping from city to city today. Or should we say airshipping, because blimps typically refer to smaller craft without rigid frames. No matter how cheap or efficient, few of us could afford the time to spend two or three days travelling by airship. Beyond the strain of such a journey, which would almost certainly necessitate sleeper cabins, you’d also need to take multiple entire seasons of TV to watch to get you through. You won’t get through
Friends
(around 88 hours) but you’d get through
Seinfeld (
around 69 hours) just fine, assuming you didn’t sleep between London and New York.
That’s not to say the technology is useless. The
International Conference on Electric Airships
took place to examine a number of potential uses for these cleaner forms of travel. Cargo doesn’t always have to move quickly, and could be a viable use for such airships. There are potential uses on some smaller passenger transport links, as well as uses for travelling to remote areas where conventional aircraft may be difficult to service. The conference also saw researchers sharing ideas on hybrid powertrain designs for clean airships, ultra-light solar solutions, and analyzing the economics of various use cases.
New blimp projects continue to pop up, like the Pathfinder 1 from LTA Research. Modern composite materials can help improve a design, but airships still have some difficult fundamental drawbacks that aren’t so easy to overcome. Credit: LTA Research
In any case, the well-documented flaws with airship travel aren’t stopping development in this space. Catching the headlines of late is the
Pathfinder 1
, a 400-foot airship built by LTA Research. That makes it almost twice as long as a Boeing 747-8, or roughly half as long as the largest Hindenberg-class Zeppelins. The company has been granted a special airworthiness certificate
for the large aircraft
, with testing to take place throughout 2024. It has a skeleton made of titanium and carbon fiber, supporting 13 bladders filled with helium to provide lift. Unlike some other modern airships,
it’s not a hybrid lifting body design
, and actually looks not that far removed from the airships of the 1930s, dangling gondola and all. The aim is for the airship to support disaster relief efforts in areas where conventional aircraft infrastructure may be damaged. It will also explore the use of hydrogen fuel-cells for cleaner power, though it is currently built to rely on diesel generators to run its electric motors.
Ultimately, airships aren’t going to replace planes any time soon. They’re simply too slow to get the job done. At the same time, they seem to keep popping up in niche uses here and there. And true, it could be that one day, air cargo is supported by large helium airships running on solar power for cleaner haulage. But for now, it seems like the basic fundamentals of airships will keep them as a neat obscurity, rather than a key technology underpinning global trade. | 93 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722962",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T18:12:36",
"content": "Oh, this is easy – no. No they can not.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6723161",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2024-01-24T03... | 1,760,372,032.30395 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/is-this-the-worlds-smallest-n-scale-train-layout/ | Is This The World’s Smallest N-Scale Train Layout? | Kristina Panos | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"foam",
"led",
"model train",
"model trains",
"N scale"
] | There’s just something about miniature worlds — they’re just so relaxing to look at and ponder. Think you don’t have ample room for a model train layout at your place? You may not be thinking small enough. [Peter Waldraff] knows a thing or two about hiding train layouts inside of furniture (that’s one solution), but this time,
he’s built a track in plain sight that’s meant to sit on the bookshelf.
The whole thing is just 5.5″ x 12″.
This N-scale layout was three years in the making, mostly because [Peter] was waiting for just the right little powered chassis to come along. For the layout, [Peter] started by creating custom flexible track by removing pieces with a sharp knife. He glued down the track to pink foam and used nails to hold it in place while the glue dried. He also built a wood frame around the base to stabilize it and hold some of the electronic components, including a switch made from an old ballpoint pen.
Then it was time to start decorating the thing, beginning with a couple of buildings made from more pink foam that are both lit up with LEDs. Eventually, [Peter] added a bunch of details like streetlights, animals, and garbage cans that really make the layout pop. As far as the engine goes, [Peter] picked up a Tomytec TM-TR02 on eBay and built a trolley out of two broken cars. [Peter]’s build is something you just have to see for yourself — fortunately for you, the build and demo video is after the break.
Like we said, [Peter]’s usual territory is hiding train layouts in
end tables
and
coffee tables
and the like, so it’s nice to see what he can do given different constraints. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722993",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T19:14:11",
"content": "If you are into miniatures, check Tokyobuild. It’s mind blowing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6723046",
"author": "Len",
"timestamp... | 1,760,372,032.515165 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/db-cooper-case-could-close-soon-thanks-to-particle-evidence/ | DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Featured",
"History",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"Boeing 727",
"cold rolling",
"D.B. Cooper",
"DB Cooper",
"skyjacking",
"titanium"
] | It’s one of the strangest unsolved cases, and even though the FBI closed their investigation back in 2016,
this may be the year it cracks wide open.
On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, who would become known as DB Cooper due to a mistake by the media, skyjacked a Boeing 727 — Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 — headed from Portland to Seattle.
During the flight, mild-mannered Cooper coolly notified a flight attendant sitting behind him via neatly-handwritten note that he had a bomb in his briefcase. His demands were a sum of $200,000 (about $1.5 M today) and four parachutes once they got to Seattle. Upon landing, Cooper released the passengers and demanded that the plane be refueled and pointed toward Mexico City with him and most of the original crew aboard. But around 30 minutes into the flight, Cooper opened the plane’s aft staircase and vanished, parachuting into the night sky.
In the investigation that followed, the FBI recovered Cooper’s clip-on tie, tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. While it’s unclear why Cooper would have left the tie behind, it has become the biggest source of evidence for identifying him. New evidence shows that a previously unidentified particle on the tie has been identified as “titanium smeared with stainless steel”.
The Ties That Bind
Scientist Tom Kaye analyzed Cooper’s tie in 2013 and discovered thousands of particles, including high-grade stainless steel, aluminium, and titanium, among other rare elements. These particles are believed to be linked to the aerospace industry, which would go a long way in explaining how a titanium particle could have ever been abraded with 400 series stainless steel in the first place.
The newly-identified particle in question. Image via
The U.S. Sun
Devoted DB Cooper investigator and researcher Eric Ulis, who has been studying the case for decades, determined that the particle came from the cold rolling process in which a sheet of titanium or other metal is thinned between two rollers at an extremely high pressure to enhance the metal’s strength.
Although cold rolling is common today, that wasn’t at all the case in the 1960s. Ulis believes that the particle places Cooper as an employee of a special metals facility in Pittsburgh called Crucible Steel, who were a major supplier to Boeing in the 60s and 70s.
This proposition is not exactly news — it has long been believed that Cooper had ties to the aerospace industry due to his use of aviation jargon throughout the heist, and at least enough knowledge of the Boeing 727 to open the aft staircase. The particle is nonetheless quite significant according to Ulis, who said that Crucible was one of few places where titanium was being cold-rolled in the 1960s, and they held two patents for the kind of titanium identified in the particle.
A Grain of Salt
Vince Petersen in the 1950s. Image by Eric Ulis via
The U.S. Sun
In late 2022, discovery of other elements by Tom Kaye led Ulis to a new suspect, Vince Petersen, who had been one of only eight engineers employed at Crucible in the years preceding the skyjacking. All eight of them wore ties to work, and their assistants did not.
Petersen was identified as a suspect after Ulis and his team combed through a spreadsheet of over 100,000 particles looking for anything out of the ordinary. That’s when the tens of thousands of particles linked to the aerospace industry were discovered.
Another interesting particle found on the tie was a trace of a commercial type of salt. Per Ulis’ research, Petersen was quite studied and even wrote an academic paper on the effects of salt on titanium. Unfortunately, Petersen died in 2002.
So, What’s Next?
The only other shred of evidence tied to the skyjacking showed up in 1980 when a young boy was digging on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state and found $5,800 in twenties. The serial numbers match those of the bills given to Cooper, but no new leads were formed. In the years that followed, the FBI looked at 800 potential suspects.
The adjustable clasp in question. Image by Eric Ulis via
The U.S. Sun
For Ulis, the only option is to gain access to the actual tie. In 2023, he sued the FBI in order to force them to release the tie for further testing. But a judge recently dismissed his case, citing that the Freedom of Information Act pertains only to records and not to tangible objects such as ties. Ulis intends to appeal the ruling, and says he is working a couple of other angles to gain access to the tie and look closer than before for DNA samples.
Ulis believes that the FBI overlooked a feature of the tie — a small clasp in the knot that allows the user to adjust the knot’s size. Ulis’ theory is that if Cooper ever adjusted this, his DNA would be trapped in the grooves. Ulis came upon the clasp after poring over the patent for the tie, which was sold by JC Penney. Recently, Ulis asked two former FBI investigators if they were aware of this feature of the tie at the time, and they said they were not.
And although the FBI closed the case almost a decade ago, Ulis refuses to give up, confident that the case will be solved in a matter of years. | 47 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722913",
"author": "Al",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T15:09:23",
"content": "Of course, a tie could always have been donated away or sold at a garage sale. Not to say that this avenue is the wrong one either.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comm... | 1,760,372,032.906605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/another-chance-to-revive-your-nabaztag/ | Another Chance To Revive Your Nabaztag | Jenny List | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"internet of things",
"nabaztag",
"Raspberry Pi Zero W"
] | The early history of home internet appliances was replete with wonderful curios as a new industry sought to both find a function for itself and deliver something useful with whatever semiconductors were available nearly two decades ago. A favourite of ours is the Nabaztag, a French-designed information appliance in the form of a cute plastic rabbit whose ears would light up and move around as it delivered snippets of information.
The entity behind the Nabaztag folded and the servers went away years ago of course, but the original designer [Olivier Mével] never gave up on his creation. Back in 2019 he created an updated mainboard for the device packing a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which has been released in a series of crowdfunding campaigns. If you have a Nabaztag and haven’t yet upgraded,
you can snag one now as the latest campaign has started
.
We took a look at the Nabaztag back in 2020,
at the time with out bricked original unit. Happily a year later we were able to snag one of the upgrades, so it’s now happily keeping us up to date with the time, weather, and other fun things. The upgrade motherboard is designed to slot into the same place as the original and mate with all its connectors, and even comes with that annoying triangle screwdriver. If you want to stand out against all the Alexa and Google Home owners, dig out your cute rabbit from the 2000s and give it this board! | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722875",
"author": "rubeus haCKgrid",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T13:22:59",
"content": "You could hack it, with an ardurino and also with a pico projector instead of this red leds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6722886",
... | 1,760,372,032.619519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/ai-on-the-hunt-for-better-batteries/ | AI On The Hunt For Better Batteries | Navarre Bartz | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial intelligence",
"battery",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"machine learning",
"science",
"solid state",
"solid-state battery"
] | While certain dystopian visions of the future have humans power the grid for AIs, Microsoft and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) set a machine learning system on the path of
better solid state batteries
instead.
Solid state batteries are the
current darlings of battery research
, promising a step-change in packaging size and safety among other advantages. While they have been working in the lab for some time now, we’re still yet to see any large-scale commercialization that could shake up the consumer electronics and electric vehicle spaces.
With a starting set of 32 million potential inorganic materials, the machine learning algorithm was able to select the 150 most promising candidates for further development in the lab. This smaller subset was then fed through a high-performance computing (HPC) algorithm to winnow the list down to 23. Eliminating previously explored compounds, the scientists were able to develop a promising Li/Na-ion solid state battery electrolyte that could reduce the needed Li in a battery by up to 70%.
For those of us who remember when energy materials research often consisted of digging through dusty old journal papers to find inorganic compounds of interest, this is a particularly exciting advancement. A couple more places technology can help in the sciences are
robots doing the work in the lab
or on
the surgery table
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722817",
"author": "Chris Burch",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T09:57:03",
"content": "Robots controlled by AI looking for batteries in the lab or the surgical table? What could possibly go wrong here!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,372,032.81545 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/writing-and-running-atari-2600-games-in-your-browser/ | Writing And Running Atari 2600 Games In Your Browser | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"atari 2600",
"emscripten"
] | Here in 2024, writing new games for the venerable Atari 2600 game console is easier than ever, with plenty of emulators and toolchains to convert your code into ready-to-load ROMs. Yet what is easier than diving straight into 6502 assembly code without even having to download or set up a toolchain? That’s where [Henry Schmale]’s
fully in-browser Atari IDE
and associated emulator (using the
Javatari
project) comes into play.
As [Henry]
explains
in a blog post, the main goal was to get a project working in Emscripten, the LLVM-based toolchain to create WebAssembly binaries with. The target of this became
DASM
, the macro assembler for a range of 8-bit MPUs, including the 6502. In the blog post [Henry] describes the general procedure for how he compiled and integrated DASM, as part of creating the earlier linked Atari 2600.
In this IDE a number of example programs are provided, which can be selected, assembled and run in the integrated Javatari instance. Beyond this you can write your own custom 6502 ASM, of course, but at this point you may be interested in taking things further with the versatile
Stella
emulator that can even run on platforms which you’d be hard-pressed to get a browser running on, never mind Chromium. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722878",
"author": "Hermi",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T13:34:13",
"content": "So children we dont need to go to a retro museum, your hipster parents can show you what they played in their youth in the browser :-D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,032.667291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/kites-fill-electricity-generation-gaps/ | Kites Fill Electricity Generation Gaps | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"electricity",
"energy",
"kite",
"kitepower",
"microgrid",
"shipping container",
"turbine",
"wind"
] | Looking at a wind turbine from first principles, it’s essentially a set of wings that generate lift in much the same way an airplane wing does. Putting the wings on a rotor and calling them “blades” is not a huge step away from that. But there’s no reason the wing has to rotate, or for that matter be attached to a fixed platform, in order to generate electricity. Anything that generates lift can be used, and
this company is demonstrating that with their kite-powered wind generators
.
Like other wind energy producers that have used kites to generate electricity, this one is similar in that the kite is flown in a figure-8 pattern downwind where it can harness energy the most efficiently, pulling out a tether which is tied to a generator. When fully extended, it is flown to a position where the wind doesn’t strike the kite as strongly and the tether is reeled in. Unlike
other kite generators we’ve seen
, though, this one is offered as a turnkey system complete with battery backup and housed in a self-contained shipping unit, allowing it to be deployed quickly to be used in situations where something like a diesel generator would be impossible to get or where the fuel can’t be obtained.
The company, called Kitepower, does note that these aren’t replacements for traditional wind turbines and would be used more for supporting microgrids. There are still some advantages to using kites over fixed turbine blades though: kites can reach higher altitude where the wind is stronger, and they require less materials for a given amount of energy production, often making them even more environmentally friendly and possibly more economical as well. Surprisingly enough,
kites can also be used to generate energy even in places where there’s no wind at all
. | 48 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722724",
"author": "Ronald",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T03:48:25",
"content": "The design as described in the IEEE article sounds really close to the one that Makani could never get to work. As far as I can tell, they haven’t developed something that can overcome the issues that kill... | 1,760,372,032.756031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/3d-printed-screw-compressor-revisited/ | 3D Printed Screw Compressor Revisited | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"screw compressor"
] | [Indeterminate Design] tried to 3D print a screw compressor some time ago but wasn’t satisfied with the result. He’s trying it again, and you can check it out in the video below. You can also download the
3D printable files
.
This isn’t a 3D-printed keychain. The screw threads have to mesh with a small space between them, and the design is not trivial. Even if you don’t want to build your own, the look inside the engineering behind these devices is interesting, and there is quite a bit of background about how the rotor’s shapes are optimized.
The complexity of the rotors is probably what caused the last version to fail. The rotor profile, this time, was handled differently using a Python script to pick up data from an existing profile and output suitable 3D printing data.
The finished product sounds loud, and the Printables page notes, “[The compressor] is extremely dangerous…” so act accordingly. He did have a service do the screw printing using a special high-temperature resin. The first prints had backward angles and were a bit smaller than needed. So he finally printed his own screws over many hours. The other parts had to be printed numerous times to get the sizes correct.
Not the first
compressor
we’ve seen. One
even used PVC
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722326",
"author": "mario mortadella",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T13:01:23",
"content": "i actually thought these were fusilli noodles",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6722371",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T... | 1,760,372,032.564869 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/haier-europe-eases-off-on-legal-threat-and-seeks-dialogue/ | Haier Europe Eases Off On Legal Threat And Seeks Dialogue | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Haier",
"home automation",
"IoT",
"legal",
"smart home"
] | After initially sending a cease and desist order to [Andre Basche] – the developer of a Haier hOn plugin for Home Assistant – Haier Europe’s head of Brand and IoT has now penned a much more amicable response, seeking to enter into dialogue in search of a solution for both parties.
This latest development is detailed both in the
ongoing GitHub issue
, as well as the
Takedown FAQ
and
Timeline
document that [Andre] created to keep track of everything that’s going on
since we last checked in on the situation
. As things stand, there is hope that Haier Europe may relent, especially as the company’s US division has shown no inclinations to join in on the original C&D.
In the confusion following the initial C&D announcement demanding the take-down of [Andre]’s hOn-related repositories, it was not clear to many which Haier was involved. As it turns out, Haier Europe as a separately legal entity apparently decided to go on this course alone, with
Haier US distancing themselves
from the issue. In that same Reddit thread it’s noted that GE Appliances (part of Haier US) has had a local API available for years. This makes Haier Europe the odd one out, even as they’re
attempting some damage control now
.
Amidst this whirlwind of developments, we hope that Haier Europe can indeed reach an amicable solution with the community, whether it’s continued API usage, or the development of a local API. | 42 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722227",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T10:01:18",
"content": "Sounds like they don’t like the negative publicity and realised they don’t really have a legal foot to stand on anyway",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,033.240621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/fm-radio-is-discriminating/ | FM Radio Is Discriminating | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"fm",
"fm discriminator"
] | AM radios were easy to understand. The strength of the signal goes up and down, and the audio follows. FM radio is a little more difficult. [AllAmericanFiveRadio] has an old tube FM set and takes us on a tour of how the
FM discriminator works
. You can see the video below.
The first step is to look at the IF signal on the scope. It is hard to see, but the frequency is changing, and that’s the basis of modulation that the discriminator has to resolve.
The next step is to feed a fixed signal into the IF tuned circuits. The scope shows that at the center frequency, the signal passes through with no issue. However, as the frequency changes, the tuned circuit attenuates the output, converting the frequency change into an amplitude change. Unsurprisingly, once you have the analog change, you can demodulate it like an AM signal.
There is a bit more, of course, but the basic idea is just that simple. The video redraws the tube schematic with diode symbols, and the explanation is clear.
You should know that there are several other ways
you can decode FM
. Also, of course, there are many other ways to
modulate a carrier
with information. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722162",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T08:15:51",
"content": "In principle, any AM radio is capable of demodulation of FM signals, by using edge demodulation – that’s slope detection in English?That’s a technique which CBers in Europe occasionally had used when FM ... | 1,760,372,033.155477 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/640k-was-never-enough-for-anyone-how-dos-broke-free/ | 640k Was Never Enough For Anyone: How DOS Broke Free | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8086",
"dos",
"ram"
] | On modern desktop and laptop computers, there is rarely a need to think about memory. We all have many gigabytes of the stuff, and it’s just
there
. Our operating system does the heavy lifting of working out what goes where and what needs to be paged to disk, and we just get on with reading
Hackaday
, that noblest of computing pursuits. This was not always the case though, and for early PCs in particular the limitations of the 8086 processor gave the need for some significant gymnastics in search of an extra few kilobytes. [Julio Merion] has
an interesting run-down of the DOS memory map
, and how memory expansion happened on computers physically unable to see much of it.
The 8086 has a 20-bit address bus, giving it access to a maximum of 1 megabyte. When IBM made the PC they needed space for the BIOS, the display, and the various accessory ROMs intended to come with expansion cards. Thus they allocated a maximum 640k of the map for RAM, and many early machines shipped with much less than that. The quote from Bill Gates about 640k being enough for anyone is probably apocryphal, but it was pretty clear as the 1980s wore on that more would be needed. The post goes into how memory expansion worked, with a 64k page mapped to switchable RAM on a card, and touches on how DOS managed extended memory above 1 Mb on the later processors that supported it. We dimly remember there also being a device driver that would map the unused graphics memory as EMS when the graphics card was running in text mode, but such horrors are best left behind.
Of course,
some of the tricks to boost RAM were nothing but snake oil
.
8086 header: Thomas Nguyen,
CC BY-SA 4.0 | 38 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722008",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T03:49:57",
"content": "Back in the day, yes … you spent a fair portion of your time optimizing your DOS computer (and especially RAM) in order to be able to do anything useful on it. But that was part of the fun. I remember rea... | 1,760,372,033.103073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/hackaday-links-january-21-2024/ | Hackaday Links: January 21, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"banana for scale",
"calcium channels",
"communication",
"Eben Upton",
"google",
"Guam",
"hackaday links",
"marine radio",
"plants",
"Play Store",
"raspberry pi",
"takedown",
"VHF"
] | Have you noticed any apps missing from your Android phone lately? We haven’t but then again, we try to keep the number of apps on our phone to a minimum, just because it seems like the prudent thing to do. But apparently,
Google is summarily removing apps from the Play Store
, often taking the extra step of silently removing the apps from phones. The article, which seems to focus mainly on games, and has a particular bone to pick about the removal of RPG
Wayward Souls
, isn’t clear about how widespread the deletions are, or what exactly the reason behind the removals could be. But they sure are exercised about it, and rightly so since in some cases the deleted games have actually been paid for by the users, and
Google pretty much says
that if you think you’re getting a refund, think again. They make some interesting points, such as this being the very definition of larceny, while also acknowledging that in all likelihood Google has a get-out-of-jail-free card buried in some EULA somewhere permitting them to do exactly what they’re doing. Google’s gonna Google, right?
We ran across a strange story this week, from Guam of all places, where it’s reported that
the Coast Guard is suffering from a VHF radio outage
. This is a big deal for the marine community, who spend a fair amount of money equipping boats with marine band VHF radios exactly for occasions where they need to get in touch with the Coast Guard right away. The outage is said to have started on January 12 as the result of “a routine and pre-planned router relocation.” That makes it sound a little like someone was doing a planned upgrade and ran into problems getting the system back together, especially since they also state that techs are visiting remote towers to fix things. It sounds like a pretty serious outage, with the Coast Guard warning mariners to make sure they have alternatives such as cell or satellite phones available. They also recommend HF radios, which we believe are more likely to be found on large ships than pleasure craft or other small craft.
It might not do filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan any good now, but it turns out that the premise of his famous flop
The Happening
might not be so far-fetched after all. In that film, a wave of mass suicide sweeps the world, driven by neurotoxins emitted by plants, which apparently have had enough of the human race. We’ve known for quite some time that plants communicate with each other, of course, but now there’s
visual confirmation of interplant communications
, and it’s pretty stunning. Using every plant biologist’s favorite model organism,
Arabidopsis thaliana
, researchers rigged up a system to pump air from injured or insect-ravaged plants into containers with genetically modified plants. Using fluorescence microscopy, they were able to see waves of calcium channels opening as the volatile compounds from the challenged plants wafted over their uninjured counterparts. It’s a bit of a reach to go from that observation to people jumping off buildings or trying to pet the lions at the Philadelphia Zoo, but it’s a start.
Good news, everyone —
Raspberry Pi production has really ramped up
. Up to 70,000 units a week of the Pi 5 are now being made, with plans to work up to an amazing 90,000 units per week soon. That apparently includes both the 8 GB and the 4 GB versions of the popular SBC. What’s more, CEO Eben Upton reports that Pi 4s are being produced at a similarly torrid pace.
And finally, if you’re like us, and you’re sick of the constant bickering and arguing over metric versus imperial —
a pot we’ve admittedly stirred a time or two ourselves
— here’s a chance to get beyond all that and embrace the One True Unit — the banana. To help us reach that lofty goal, Andrew Sink has kindly provided
this handy 3D Banana for Scale tool
, wherein you can compare any of your models with a 3D scan of a standard banana. Just upload your STL and it appears next to said banana along with indications of how many banana-equivalents your model occupies. Plus fun ChatGPT-generated banana facts, which are 100% reliable. We’re not sure exactly which banana was scanned for this purpose, but we suppose it’s one that’s kept in a bell jar in some laboratory in Paris, the ones where they keep the pots of boiling rubidium and platinum sticks that were used as standards in a less-enlightened time. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721901",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T00:12:30",
"content": "Cavendish, Manzano, old school Gros Michel…Cue the banana standard wars!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6722530",
"author": "Hirudinea",... | 1,760,372,033.303323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/simulating-cellular-biology-in-the-browser/ | Simulating Cellular Biology In The Browser | Al Williams | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"biology",
"cellular metabolism",
"simulation"
] | [Technistuff] read a paper about simulating a “minimal” cell — apparently a cell with only 493 genes. This led to a goal:
reproduce the simulation in TypeScript
so it can run in a web browser. Why? We don’t know, but it is an interesting look at both in-depth biology and how to handle complex simulations. The code is available on
GitHub
.
For a point of reference, E. Coli has over 4,500 genes. The cell in question — JCVI-syn3A — actually has seven more genes than truly necessary. The data for this bacteria is available from a research lab, again, using
GitHub
.
The chemical master equation models DNA transcription to mRNA, mRNA translation to proteins, mRNA degradation, DNA replication, and tRNA charging. Metabolic reactions require a differential equation that covers things like lipid metabolism, amino acid metabolism, nucleotide metabolism, and more.
The two simulation equations cooperate, so any simulation has to work with both equations and feed data from one to the other. Currently, the simulation only uses a single thread, so there is room for performance improvements. In addition, the original simulation doesn’t model cell cycle mechanics and instead relies on rules. This suggests an area of improvement, too.
If you are interested in biology, this is fascinating work. If you aren’t, it is still a sophisticated simulation to handle in TypeScript and the browser. Of course, modeling real cells and their metabolism is a long way from here. While most of our simulations are electronic, modeling any kind of real-world system is bound to have similarities. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721800",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T21:50:44",
"content": "So, how many genes are in a virus?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6721817",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly ... | 1,760,372,033.356042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/creators-can-fight-back-against-ai-with-nightshade/ | Creators Can Fight Back Against AI With Nightshade | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"generative AI",
"image poisoning"
] | If an artist were to make use of a piece of intellectual property owned by a large tech company, they risk facing legal action. Yet many creators are unhappy that those same tech companies are using their IP on a grand scale in the form of training material for generative AI. Can they fight back?
Perhaps now they can, with Nightshade
, from a team at the University of Chicago. It’s a piece of software for Windows and MacOS that poisons an image with imperceptible shading, to make an AI classify it in an entirely different way than it appears.
The idea is that creators use it on their artwork, and leave it for unsuspecting AIs to assimilate. Their example is that a picture of a cow might be poisoned such that the AI sees it as a handbag, and if enough creators use the software the AI is forever poisoned to return a picture of a handbag when asked for one of a cow. If enough of these poisoned images are put online then the risks of an AI using an online image become too high, and the hope is that then AI companies would be forced to take the IP of their source material seriously.
For this to work it depends on enough creators taking up and using the software, but we are guessing that an inevitable result will be an arms race between AIs and image poisoners. One thing is certain though, as the AI hype has fueled such a growth in generative AI systems, creators, whether they be major publishers, your favourite human-generated tech news website, or someone drawing a cartoon strip in their bedroom, deserve not to have their work stolen in this way. | 78 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721717",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T18:08:31",
"content": "It just means the models consuming the image will have to apply a human perception filter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6721718",
"a... | 1,760,372,033.49664 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/x-ray-ct-scanners-from-ebay-brought-back-to-life/ | X-Ray CT Scanners From EBay, Brought Back To Life | Donald Papp | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"citizen science",
"ct scanner",
"medical equipment",
"refurbish",
"repair",
"x-ray"
] | If you have ever wondered what goes into repairing and refurbishing an X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) scanner, then don’t miss
[Ahron Wayne]’s comprehensive project page on doing exactly that
. He has two small GE Explore Locus SP machines, and it’s a fantastic look into just what goes into these machines.
CT scan of papyrus roll in a bamboo sheath.
These devices use a combination of X-rays and computer software to reconstruct an internal view of an object. To bring these machines back into service means not only getting the hardware to work correctly, but the software end (including calibration and error correcting) is just as important.
That means a lot of research, testing, and making do. For example, instead of an expensive calibration grid made from an array of tiny tungsten carbide beads, [Ahron] made do with a PCB laden with a grid of copper pads. The fab house might have scratched their heads a little on that one, but it worked just fine for his purposes and price was certainly right.
Scan of a foil Pokémon card.
Tools like these enable all kinds of weird and wonderful projects of their own. So what can one do with such a machine?
CT scanning can spot fake AirPods
or
enable deeper reverse engineering
than a regular workshop is normally able to do.
What else? Shown here is an old foil Pokémon card
from an unopened package!
(Update: the scan is not from a card in a sealed package, it is just a scanned foil card. Thanks to Ahron for clarifying.) [Ahron] coyly denies having a pet project of building a large enough dataset to try to identify cards without opening the packs. (Incidentally, if you just
happen
to have experience with supervised convolutional neural networks for pix2pix, he asks that you please reach out to him.)
The real power of CT scanning becomes more apparent if you take a look at the videos embedded below the page break. One is a scan of an acorn, [Ahron]’s first successful scan. Another is an interesting scan of a papyrus roll in a bamboo sheath. Both of the videos are embedded below. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722678",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2024-01-23T00:30:57",
"content": "I cant believe they found Pokemon on an ancient papyrus.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6722709",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2024-01-... | 1,760,372,033.612922 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/read-qr-codes-without-a-computer/ | Read QR Codes Without A Computer | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"qr",
"qr code"
] | Did you ever watch Star Wars and wondered how people understood what R2D2 was saying? Maybe [Luke Skywalker] would enjoy learning to decode
QR Codes by hand
, too. While it might not be very practical, it would be a good party trick — assuming, like us, you party with nerds.
You can start by scanning a code, or the site will create one according to your specifications or generate one randomly. It then takes the selected code and shows you how it is put together. Fun fact: 21×21 “modules” (QR-speak for pixels) is the size of a version 1 QR code. Each version increases the size by four modules.
You probably figured out already that the three big blocks in the corners are to help scanners find the code and orient themselves. There are also empty areas around the boxes that don’t count. Some versions of QR have additional patterns for alignment and timing bars that provide alternating bits.
As you might expect, other areas encode the format and error-correcting codes. However, one of the most important things is the mask. The mask pattern breaks up large areas of 1s or 0s. There are eight different masks, and since the goal is to do this all from memory, the site offers a helpful story about going to jail to help you memorize the different patterns. If you just can’t remember, they also offer you
a foldable cheatsheet
. Each black module in the mask inverts the QR code data.
Perhaps the hardest part is the actual reading, which zig-zags in two-column groups. You might also want an ASCII cheat sheet, although we are guessing that many people here can decode ASCII without much help.
If you want to tweak it or contribute, you can
find the source code online
. We thought this was an original idea, but, of course,
it wasn’t
. Once you can read QR codes by hand, you might as well
make some by hand
, too. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722602",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T21:13:37",
"content": "I dont need a computer, I use my phone :P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6722651",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T2... | 1,760,372,033.559596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/inside-a-fake-lm358/ | Inside A Fake LM358 | Al Williams | [
"Parts"
] | [
"fake parts",
"op-amp"
] | [IMSAI Guy] got some fake LM358 op-amps. Uncharacteristically, these chips actually performed well even though they didn’t act like LM358s. [IMSAI Guy] did a video about the fake chips and someone who saw it offered to
analyze the part compared to a real LM358
to see what was going on. You can see it too in the video below.
A visual inspection made it obvious that the chip was probably a fake. X-ray analysis was a little less obvious but still showed poor quality and different internals. But the fun was when they actually decapsulated the part.
The die on the fake was labeled C665 on the die. The die was significantly different, but it isn’t clear why it wouldn’t be a more direct knockoff. It doesn’t appear that the device is cheaper to produce and it wasn’t a proper die rejected by a regular manufacturer.
If you want to see how the “C665” works, the original video that started it all appears below. The video shows the slew rate response was faster than a real LM358. The step response didn’t make a nice slope like the LM358 either. We hope he (or someone) will trace out the circuit and see what the circuit actually looks like.
Sometimes
fake parts
are good enough for hobby projects and sometimes not. Want to spot a fake? There are
several telltale signs
. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722550",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T19:41:10",
"content": "The thing that bothers me about fake components (other than someone scamming you) is that while it may perform to spec, and the way you expect it to perform when used properly, it may not perform the way it... | 1,760,372,033.759774 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/switching-regulators-for-dummies/ | Switching Regulators For Dummies | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [] | We often use linear regulators in our designs. They are cheap and simple – you put the regulator chip itself on the board, add two capacitors, and get a voltage. Linear regulators are imperfect, of course – they can’t help but waste the voltage difference as heat, for a start, which straight up excludes them for high-current purposes, or significant voltage difference conversions, unless you have a hefty heatsink handy. They also can’t boost voltage, which means you can only go from high to low – a bit of a disappointment.
Of course, we haven’t been just throwing our hands up in the air if a linear regulator doesn’t fit our purpose. Switching regulators have none of these disadvantages, which is why your mobile phone alone has a few dozen of these. They are way more efficient and hi-tec, able to convert one voltage into another while losing hardly any power into heat. All that you need to do is switch an inductor at a somewhat high frequency!
However, for some, switching regulators might look a bit intimidating. They tend to have higher standards for board layout compared to linear regulators, and, they do need an inductor – sometimes, a few more components too. Inductors alone are somewhat intimidating components, with a fair few more parameters than we’d expect, and you might get confused when looking into adding a switching regulator to your circuit.
No more! In this article, I shall give you the switching regulator basics, remove any fog of war that might be clouding your vision, and show you just how easily you can get a good few amps at your favourite voltage whenever you need it.
Finding Your Faves
There’s myriads of switching regulators you can use for many different purposes! For instance, buck regulators can only decrease voltage, boost regulators can only increase it, while buck-boost can do both, allowing you to get, say, 12V from a LiIon pack that varies from 10V to 14.4V. There’s two ways you can find yourself some switching regulator friends – either getting part numbers from somebody else’s circuits, or by going through Digikey/Mouser/etc and seeing their offerings.
There are switching regulators for most purposes you could think of. Want to convert 12V into a few amps of 5V or 3.3V? You have a ton options here! Want to make 5V or 3.3V out of LiIon voltage? There’s a good number of regulators for this exact purpose! An extremely low-power regulator that produces 3.3V for your ESP8266 from two AA batteries? You got it! And, the simplest option possible is borrowing a circuit from an existing reasonably-open or just publicly visible design.
For instance, there’s a ton of different “DC-DC” boards you can quickly find online – on Aliexpress alone, there’s dozens of popular designs, and a good amount of more obscure ones too. Simply enter “step-down DC-DC 5V”, any configuration/voltage you want, find a few listings which are actually accurate, and see which chip they’re using. Can you find the datasheet? Can you buy it easily? Some listings lie about current values, so, can the chip actually produce what you need? If so, you are set!
Of course, for many purposes, you can reuse those modules and not worry about even looking for your own designs. However, most often, making your own switching regulator circuit will pay off – both in price, but also in your circuit’s stability! For instance, an open secret is that these modules tend to have badly suited inductors, either cheapest parts possible or just miscalculated values. So often, you only have to replace the inductor to see the output current skyrocket, and see the heat output decrease overall, too!
Often, the switching regulator ICs used on these modules, are also the cheapest chips possible, and there’s better ICs available for hardly more money. So, go visit the switching regulator parts picker of your favourite parts website – Digikey/LCSC/Mouser or whatever else. Put in your desired input and output voltage ranges, maximum current with some leeway, check “In stock”, sort by price, and see just how far you can get under $1!
My personal faves recently are a good few. PAM2306 is a dual-rail 3.3V/1A buck regulator able to do 100% duty cycle, which helps a ton when powering stuff from a LiIon or LiFePO4 battery. AP63200 can do 5V or 3.3V at 2A from as high as 30V, which is rad for my USB-PD shenanigans! And, on the Eastern front, SY8089 is a good pick for general low-voltage rails. Got some regulators you’d recommend to others? Share them with us in the comment section!
Found a chip you like? Cheers! The overwhelming majority of them need an inductor. Let’s waste no time and learn about those.
Meet The Inductor
Inductors are coils of wire made in a certain way, able to store a good amount of electromagnetic energy under the right circumstances. They also resist changes in current by producing an opposite voltage. Someone more inductor-savvy than me could tell you a ton about how inductors are seriously cool, and they absolutely are very cool! And, for switching regulator use, you don’t need to know a lot about inductors to use them. What you do need to know is that a switching regulator chip makes use of these characteristics to convert one voltage into another, and there’s only three parameters you really need to keep track of.
First one is inductance, usually, in uH (microHenry) range. Your switching regulator’s datasheet will either straight up tell you which inductance value is a good fit, maybe in the example schematic or in the “recommended parameters” section, or, it will give you a formula to calculate the inductance you need. If it doesn’t give you either of these two, look into values that other people use with this chip, or pick a different chip – more often than not, there’s other switching regulator chips you can use just as easily and that actually have good datasheets.
Another value is DC current. Again, a lot of datasheets will straight up hold your hand while walking you through inductor selection, and the PAM2306 datasheet I show above, tells you that DC current is your maximum current plus ripple current, and you can assume ripple current to be 40% of maximum current you want. If you want to know for sure, the datasheet gives a formula to calculate a more precise value, but generally, the datasheets I’ve checked, do tell you to add 40-50%. So, if you pick inductor DC current to be 1.5 times larger than the max current you want, you likely won’t go wrong.
You might also see a specific parameter, DC resistance. The lower, the better, of course – less current wasted as heat. It’s not just waste, either – the kind of inductors used in switching regulator applications have their characteristics rapidly worsen when they heat up. Also, some inductors aren’t at their best when being used for switching regulator purposes, even if they look the part. Here’s
an example
of such an inductor. This is a power rail filtering inductor, and if that’s what you stumbled upon, there’s likely a power inductor (the kind you use for switching purposes) available with better specs that’s a much better fit for your application –
not that it’s 100% unusable,
but you will benefit from looking further.
Let’s sum up just how simple it is to find an inductor. Three parameters – inductance, DC current, and DC resistance. Inductance is in the datasheet, DC current is your desired max current times 1.5 give or take, and third is as low as you can go for your money. Plus, check that the inductor is suited for switching regulator applications. Looking to learn more? Here’s some appnotes – here’s
a Wurth appnote on inductor intricacies,
and
a TI appnote on switching regulator basics.
Go to your favourite component picker website – Digikey, Mouser, LCSC or anything else, – put the inductance and DC current parameters into the inductor part picker, find the best DC resistance for your money, and you’re set. Hell, you can even find inductors on Aliexpress! They don’t tend to list DC current/resistance parameters, and datasheets are few and far between, but if you need something simple and cheap, it’s on the table.
Found an inductor? Get the datasheet, see if KiCad already has a fitting footprint, if not, just take an existing footprint and adjust it, and that’s it. We got the regulator chip, we got the inductor picked, now it’s time to design a board!
In Case You Get Lost
If your regulator’s datasheet is good, you are already set. The best datasheets provide an example layout, show you which resistors to use, mention any extra components, capacitor requirements, and teach you everything else you could want to know.
Not all of the datasheets contain everything you’d want to know, however. It’s a bummer, but, it doesn’t mean you can’t get it done! There are only a few aspects to mind – board layout, feedback resistors, and any extra components you might need. Next time, let’s go through these, and I’ll show you some switching regulator tips&tricks too! | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722515",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T18:20:59",
"content": "What no love for the Recom add in regulators :)I personally like them for anything where I am not going over 1a. Easy to add to designs, very few parts.The R-78E5.0-1.0 has been the recommended optional ... | 1,760,372,033.692617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/x-ray-investigations-hack-chat/ | X-Ray Investigations Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, January 24 at noon Pacific for the
X-Ray Investigation Hack Chat
with Ahron Wayne!
It’s hard to imagine a world where we didn’t figure out how to use X-rays to peer inside things. Before Röntgen’s discovery that X-rays could penetrate living tissue, doctors had only limited (and often unpleasant) ways to get a look at what was going on inside the human body, and few of us would want to return to those days.
As fantastically useful as X-rays and later computed tomography (CT) became in medicine, it didn’t take too long for other uses for the technology to come along. Non-clinical applications for X-ray and CT abound, including their use in non-invasively exploring relics of immense archaeological value. One recent effort in this space that gained a lot of coverage in the press was the combination of CT imaging and machine learning to
read the ink inside carbonized papyrus scrolls
from the ruins of Pompeii.
The result was
the “Vesuvius Challenge,”
where different teams looked for techniques to virtually unwrap the roasted relics. Ahron’s contribution to the project was a little unusual — he bought a used desktop CT scanner, fixed it up, and started experimenting with reading ink from the carbonized remains of simulated papyrus scrolls. In other words, he made some scrolls, cooked them to beyond well-done in the oven, and tried to understand what happens to ink on papyrus that gets blasted by a volcano. If that’s not enough to get you to stop by the Hack Chat when Ahron joins us, we’re not sure what else would be! Suffice it to say we’re pretty excited about what Ahron has to say about DIY CT, X-rays, collaborative open-source citizen science, and unwrapping the mysteries of Pompeii.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 24 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Featured image:
Daderot
, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722476",
"author": "Aram",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T17:22:56",
"content": "Go wildcats!University of Kentucky!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6722478",
"author": "Down with the stasi",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T17:27:26... | 1,760,372,033.809537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/fixing-a-pdp-11-03-power-supply-is-easy-when-you-understand-it/ | Fixing A PDP-11/03 Power Supply Is Easy When You Understand It | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"DEC PDP-11",
"pdp-11",
"pdp-11/03"
] | After we last saw [David Lovett] of [Usagi Electric], he was knee-deep in trying to fix a DEC PDP-11/03 power supply, which fortunately led to a fixed PSU and a very happy PDP-11/23 system installed in the enclosure, as he
covers in today’s video
. Previously,
we had covered
his debugging attempt of this very much dead power supply, which had led [David] down many fruitless rabbitholes. By the time he was taking various components off the board to try and induce certain results, he threw in the towel and went back to the drawing board, assisted with many community comments.
The 5V rail on a DEC PDP-11/03 power supply. (Credit: David Lovett)
Much of the confusion came down to not really understanding how this PDP-11/03 PSU design works, which isn’t that crazy in hindsight, considering how quaint it is. Although [David] originally focused on the +5V rail, a small detail that was in the schematics is that the 5V rail is based around a 7805 that has its ground referenced to the -15V rail.
It is this 7805 that provides a linearly regulated 5V rail up till its current limit, at which point the control transistor gets biased sufficiently to start conducting, which eventually triggers the driver transistor that is responsible for driving the pass switch transistor. This then charges L2 from the unregulated supply, which is used effectively as a switching mode power supply until the current across the 7805 drops sufficiently that it becomes the primary 5V rail source again. This repeats at a kHz rate, making it more or less an SMPS as we know it today, but heavily reliant on the -15V rail as can be observed in the schematic.
The -15V rail on a DEC PDP-11/03 power supply. (Credit: David Lovett)
When [David] measured the -15V rail, it was thus little surprise that this rail was not working, which explained why the 5V rail never managed to get going. Fortunately, diagnosing the -15V rail was far more straightforward, as it just uses a 7915 along with some diodes on the unregulated supply from the transformer. Here it turned out that at least one of the diodes had stopped being a diode and was just passing current in both directions. As [David] accidentally crushed two more diodes in the process of removing the broken one, he installed three new ones, along with some fresh components on the 5V rail to replace those which he had previously removed. This thus left flicking the switch and hoping that everything was fixed now.
Since nothing ever works the first try, [David] then remembered he had to replace the resistor which he had accidentally turned into an incandescent lightbulb in the previous video, but one resistor later, the PSU purred to life. After installing PDP-11/23 processor and memory cards into the case, the system seemed quite happy with this newly restored PSU and giving [David] hopefully the easily portable PDP-11 system he can take to conventions. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722531",
"author": "Bill Higdon",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T18:56:24",
"content": "This regulator topology was not uncommon back in the 70’s & 80’s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6722560",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,033.858019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/bell-labs-is-leaving-the-building/ | Bell Labs Is Leaving The Building | Al Williams | [
"Current Events",
"Interest",
"News",
"Rants"
] | [
"bell labs",
"innovation",
"research"
] | If you ever had the occasion to visit Bell Labs at Murray Hill, New Jersey, or any of the nearby satellite sites, but you didn’t work there, you were probably envious. For one thing, some of the most brilliant people in the world worked there. Plus, there is the weight of history — Bell Labs had a hand in ten Nobel prizes, five Turing awards, 22 IEEE Medals of Honor, and over 20,000 patents, including several that have literally changed the world. They developed, among other things, the transistor, Unix, and a host of other high-tech inventions. Of course, Bell Labs hasn’t been Bell for a while — Nokia now owns it. And Nokia has plans to
move the headquarters lab
from its historic Murray Hill campus to nearby New Brunswick. (That’s New Jersey, not Canada.)
If your friends aren’t impressed by Nobels, it is worth mentioning the lab has also won five Emmy awards, a Grammy, and an Academy award. Not bad for a bunch of engineers and scientists. Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent, who had wound up with Bell Labs after the phone company was split up and AT&T spun off Lucent.
If you think about it, though, Bell Labs has been gone in a real sense for some time. It is a sign of our times. The days when companies invested in research for its own sake are long gone. Perhaps when the phone company was a monopoly, it was easier to think “We will earn $X a year and we will put Y% into research.” In the 1950s, Arthur C. Clarke called Bell Labs a “factory for ideas.”
But it isn’t like that anymore. In 2008, Alcatel-Lucent announced they would no longer spend money on basic science, material physics, and semiconductors. By 2013, the new president of Bell Labs promised to return Bell Labs to the forefront, but the focus was still on profit, not innovation. By 2021, Nokia had reorganized the lab. Bell Labs Core Research was to focus on technology with a “10-year horizon,” while Bell Labs Solutions would focus on immediate business needs. You have to wonder how many things like Unix, for example, would never happen in today’s climate (a topic discussed by Brian Kernighan
in his book
).
The list of people who have worked at Bell has names familiar to many Hackaday readers: Alfred Aho, Bjarne Stroustrup, Brian Kernighan, Claude Shannon, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Norton (the Norton equivalence guy), William Shockley, Ingrid Daubechies (JPEG 2000), Ken Thompson, Maurice Karnaugh (of Karnaugh maps), and Steve Bourne (the shell guy). But there are plenty of names you probably don’t know, like
James West
(microphones), Ali Javan (gas laser), Arthur Ashkin (optical tweezers), Corinna Cortes (later head of Google Research), Dawon Kahng (MOSFETs), Evelyn Hu (nanoscale fabrication), and many many more.
Of course, the lab is just moving, not closing. But there is something sad about seeing the Murray Hill headquarters from 1967 closing down. Even though we think the real Bell Labs has been gone for some time. If you want an hour of wrap-up of 90 years of innovation at the Lab (by Edward Eckert, the Bell Labs Corporate Archivist), check out the video below. You might find some surprising inventions that came from the lab. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6722423",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-01-22T15:37:49",
"content": "Doesn’t Microsoft own Nokia?https://youtu.be/sol42341LaM",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6722441",
"author": "Al Williams",
"times... | 1,760,372,034.059246 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/computer-logic-spins-with-no-electricity/ | Computer Logic Spins With No Electricity | Al Williams | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"logic gate",
"spintronics"
] | We’ve often said you can make a logic gate out of darn near anything. [The Action Lab] agrees and just released a video showing how he made some
logic gates from chains and gears
. Along the way, he makes the case that the moving chain is an analog for electric current. The demonstration uses a commercial toy known as Spintronics, but if you are mechanically handy, you could probably devise your own setup using 3D printing or gears.
A spring wound motor is a “battery.” Gears act like resistors and junctions to distribute “current” in multiple directions. Seeing series and parallel resistance as moving chains is pretty entertaining and might help someone new learn those concepts.
A spring acts like a voltmeter, which acts as an indicator. There are also switched gears that act as inputs. While it is possible to make a chained inverter, NAND gate, and NOR gate, it would quickly become unwieldy. But it is, at least in theory, possible.
Of course, there have
been mechanical computers
of a sort. We’ve often observed that
everything is a logic gate
if you look at it hard enough. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721665",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T15:21:23",
"content": "I find this analogy mildly confusing, could be the overwhelming visual part but this never worked for me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6721736",
... | 1,760,372,034.175588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/reverse-engineering-the-web-nywhere-watch-for-2001-era-smartwatch-action/ | Reverse-Engineering The Web-@nywhere Watch For 2001-Era Smartwatch Action | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"smartwatch"
] | Although smartwatches seem to be just a recent fad, people have been strapping wristwatches to their wrists with all kinds of functionality. Whether a miniscule calculator, a remote control, an organizer or as in the case of the Web-@nywhere Watch a web browser. In the last case only sort of, naturally, as it was released in 2001 and this little early 2000s marvel cost only $85 (or $150 in 2024 USD), so what could it really be capable of? This is the million dollar question that [Cameron Kaiser]
sought to find out
as he found a new-in-box unit for sale.
The Web-@nywhere watch in action. (Credit: Cameron Kaiser)
Beforehand he knew already that the unit required interaction with a PC-based application to sync the 93 kB of on-watch data, with the required software and remote servers now being very much outdated and/or gone. This required some reverse-engineering to once more bring this watch widget back to life. Along the way it became also quite clear that this watch was designed as a cheap rip-off of the much better 1998 Seiko Ruputer – which later got sold also as the
onHand PC
– using the same joystick-driven interface.
After some poking around with the Windows-based software that came with the watch [Cameron] quickly realized that while it could establish a serial link with the watch in its cradle, it fully relied on a now defunct FTP server formerly run by the manufacturer, Kinger, along with any games and content on it. Since FTP servers were never archived like HTTP sites, this content is likely gone forever.
Fortunately, the protocol between the PC and the watch is a standard serial link (with parity), so [Cameron] was able to sniff the serial traffic and figure out the protocol, the results of which he has made
available on GitHub
in the form of a Perl script for transforming text and a C-based application to do the uploading. Now once again Web-@nywhere users can proudly roam the streets with 2024-era website content on their wrists. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721615",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T12:26:00",
"content": "“Fortunately, the protocol between the PC and the watch is a standard serial link (with parity), ”A serial link is not a protocol !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,372,034.114484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/21/garden-light-turned-mesh-network-node/ | Garden Light Turned Mesh Network Node | Danie Conradie | [
"Solar Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"garden light",
"LoRa",
"Meshtastic",
"solar"
] | We love a good deal, especially when it comes to scavenging parts for projects. Cheap outdoor solar lights are more than just garden accessories; they’re a handy source of waterproof enclosures, solar panels and batteries. This is demonstrated by [Tavis], who
turned one such light into a Meshtastic LoRa communication node
.
Where there’s an antenna, there’s a radio
A nice feature on this specific $15 Harbor Breeze Solar LED is the roomy solar panel enclosure with integrated 18650 battery holder, allowing for easy battery swaps. [Tavis] was able to easily fit the RAKwireless modular dev board, and wire it into the light’s charging circuit. The cheap circuit is likely not the most efficient, but will probably get the job done. It’s always possible to just swap it out with a better charging board. [Tavis] also added an external antenna by using a panel-mount SMA pigtail connector.
The
Meshtastic project
is all about enabling text-only communications through LoRa-based mesh networks, built using off-the-shelf devices and development boards that won’t break the bank. The project has seen some incredible growth, with
people all over the world
setting up their own networks.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen garden lights get used in project. We’ve seen
MQTT added to a PIR solar light
with some clever power saving circuitry, and as a
power source for Attiny85-based projects
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721599",
"author": "reyheyh",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T11:51:30",
"content": "meshtastic still not connect to normal network like matrix , tox or wireI cant send message (no mQTT) from router, I can use this same network for 443 etc.Apple AirTag have more flexibility mesh networkBL... | 1,760,372,034.427959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/learn-sailing-mechanics-without-leaving-dry-land/ | Learn Sailing Mechanics Without Leaving Dry Land | Danie Conradie | [
"Toy Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"sailing",
"simulator"
] | The ancient art of sailing can be very intimidating for the uninitiated given the shifty nature of wind. To help understand the interaction of wind direction and board orientation, [KifS] designed a
hands-on sailing demonstrator
that lets students grasp the basics before setting foot on a real sailboat.
The demonstrator uses a potentiometer as a tiller to control a model sailboat’s angle, while another stepper motor adjusts the position of a fan to simulate changing wind directions. With an Arduino Uno controlling everything, this setup affords students the opportunity to learn about sail positioning and adjusting to shifting winds in an interactive way, without the pressures and variables of being on the water.
[KifS]’s creation isn’t just about static demonstrations. It features four modes that progressively challenge learners—from simply getting a feel for the tiller, to adjusting sails with dynamic wind changes, even adding a game element that introduces random wind movements demanding quick adjustments. [KifS] mentions there are potentials aspects that can be refined, like more realistic sail response and usability, but it already achieved the main project goals.
There are a myriad of potential ways to add new tech to the ancient art of sailing. We’ve seen a
DIY autopilot system
,
full sensor arrays
, and an
open source chart plotter
. It’s even been proven you can have a wind powered
land vehicle that travels faster than the wind
. | 31 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721635",
"author": "Rune",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T13:08:09",
"content": "I must admit this pains me to see. Why not just take the kids sailing?This seams so disconnected from what I enjoyed about sailing when I was a kid",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,034.673045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/how-a-steam-bug-once-deleted-all-of-someones-user-data/ | How A Steam Bug Once Deleted All Of Someone’s User Data | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"linux",
"valve"
] | In a retrospective, [Kevin Fang]
takes us back to 2015
, when on the Steam for Linux issue tracker [keyvin]
opened an issue
to report that starting the Steam client after moving the Steam folder had just wiped all of his user data, including his backup drive mounted under
/media
. According to [keyvin], he moved the standard
~/.local/share/steam
to a drive mounted under
/media
and symlinked
~/.local/share/steam
to this new location on the external drive. He then tried starting Steam, which failed, before Steam crashed and tried reinstalling itself. That’s when [keyvin] realized that Steam had apparently recursively deleted everything owned by his user from the root folder.
The infamous Valve code that made Linux users sad.
In the issue thread, user [doofy] got hit by the same bug when trying to directly start the
~/.local/share/steam/steam.sh
script with debugging enabled. He then was the first to point out the
rm -rf
in that
steam.sh
script, but since this particular line is in a function only called when Steam tries to remove and reinstall itself to ‘fix’ a botched start, how did this happen? Ultimately it seems to be because of the
STEAMROOT
variable being set to an empty string, and another unset variable triggering the
reset_steam()
function, leading to the demise of all the user data.
Since then Valve has presumably fixed the issue, as no further users have filed tickets, but it’s concerning that a similar issue seems to
still exist on Windows
. Whether or not the original Linux issue has been fixed, it shows clearly how one should always check return values and perhaps, just maybe, never do an automated
rm -rf
or equivalent. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721553",
"author": "BaSz",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T07:53:40",
"content": "#!/bin/bashset -eu -o pipefail# TODO: rest off the script goes here",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6721598",
"author": "Floydian Slip",
... | 1,760,372,034.601332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/the-giant-lego-you-always-wanted-to-play-with/ | The Giant LEGO You Always Wanted To Play With | Jenny List | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"lego",
"lego brick",
"snow"
] | The interlocking LEGO bricks are probably one of the most versatile toys to come out of the 20th century, but aside from the Duplo larger-sized version for smaller kids, they don’t come in what you might term grown-up sizes. This has not deterred [Veranda Vikings] though, who have come up with
the fantastic idea of giant LEGO bricks made from snow
.
Making them is simplicity itself given enough depth of the white stuff, simply press the lid of one of those plastic LEGO storage bins into some fresh snowfall hard enough to compact your brick, and then lift clear a perfect icy 2 by 2 brick. Most of the post is devoted to the building escapades of some very happy kids, and we can’t help envying them the opportunity. It appears that
like the LEGO fries in the cafe at Legoland in Bilund
, these bricks don’t quite interlock. We think that it would be possible to press the LEGO storage lid into the bottom of them though, perhaps some readers would like to experiment.
Either way, this is a hack to warm the hearts of readers worldwide, whether they live in a country with snow or not. We’re surprised Lego themselves haven’t caught on to the idea, and sold giant snow-brick moulds. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721399",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T00:25:01",
"content": "Great idea!But, instead of using the “bricks” to build the entire structure and have the gaps caused by the buttons of the lower bricks, use regular blocks of snow for lower ti... | 1,760,372,034.536668 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/hope-is-on-spread-the-word/ | HOPE Is On, Spread The Word | Tom Nardi | [
"cons"
] | [
"2600",
"hope",
"HOPE conference",
"HOPE XV"
] | Since 1994, Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) has been on the short list of must-see hacker events in the United States. Held in New York every other year (global pandemics notwithstanding), it’s an event where hackers, makers, artists, and luminaries can meet and swap ideas into the wee hours of the morning. With hands-on demonstrations, art installations, an incredible roster of speakers, and all the Club-Mate you can drink, there really is something for everyone.
Tickets are now available for HOPE XV
, which will be held from July 12th to the 14th in Queens. It will once again be held on the campus of St. John’s University, as the historic Hotel Pennsylvania which played host to the con since its inception was converted into a somewhat less luxurious empty lot in 2022.
Now under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t have to run a post like this. In previous years, the tickets have sold out so quickly that there was little point in making an announcement about it. Even if you had the store page open when another batch of tickets went on sale, you only had a window of a few minutes to hammer in your credit card info and grab your prize. As us how we know.
But according to the folks at
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
, who organize HOPE,
something seems to have changed
this time around. They believe part of it has to do with the implosion of Twitter, which used to offer them a fairly reliable platform to communicate with the technorati, especially those in the infosec circles. Those individuals are now scattered among a handful of competing services, with little to no interoperability between them. Worse,
2600
believes that Gmail has been automatically sending their emails to the spam folder, presumably because the benevolent megacorp that operates the world’s most popular free email service
has unilaterally determined them
to be scary balaclava-clad criminals.
Naturally, the concern is that there won’t be a HOPE unless enough folks kick in to make it a reality. Luckily, the solution is simple:
go buy a ticket
. There’s even a
reduced-cost ticket available
for those who can’t attend in person but want access to the virtual aspects of the con, which were first introduced when
HOPE had to go online-only
during the pandemic.
Even if you don’t plan on attending, you can still help the cause. Spread the word amongst your tech-loving friends and colleagues that HOPE has survived the destruction of the Hotel Penn and the
existential threats against
2600
, and is gearing up to be even bigger and better thanks to their spacious new venue. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721574",
"author": "cdilla",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T09:57:02",
"content": "Nice to see you spreading the word on this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6721877",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T23:37:30",
... | 1,760,372,034.475727 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/street-photography-with-radar/ | Street Photography, With RADAR! | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"radar",
"rangefinder"
] | As the art of film photography has gained once more in popularity, some of the accessories from a previous age have been reinvented, as is the case with
[tdsepsilon]’s radar rangefinder
. Photographers who specialized in up-close-and-personal street photography in the mid-20th century faced the problem of how to focus their cameras. The first single-lens reflex cameras (SLRs) were rare and expensive beasts, so for most this meant a mechanical rangefinder either clipped to the accessory shoe, or if you were lucky, built into the camera.
The modern equivalent uses an inexpensive 24 GHz radar module coupled to an ESP32 board with an OLED display, and fits in a rather neat 3D printed enclosure that sits again in the accessory shoe. It has a 3 meter range perfect for the street photographer, and the distance can easily be read out and dialed in on the lens barrel.
Whenever the revival of film photography is discussed, it’s inevitable that someone will ask why, and point to the futility of using silver halides in a digital age. It’s projects like this one which answer that question, with second-hand SLRs being cheap and plentiful you might ask why use a manual rangefinder over one of them, but the answer lies in the fun of using one to get the perfect shot. Try it, you’ll enjoy it!
Some of us
have been known to dabble in film photography
, too.
Thanks [Joyce] for the tip. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721339",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2024-01-20T19:27:18",
"content": "This is a cool project and offers the additional ability to scan a 3D surface data set by moving the sensor as people have done with the ultrasound modules.For photographic use, one of the foreseeable p... | 1,760,372,034.715499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/hardware-should-lead-software-right/ | Hardware Should Lead Software, Right? | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"hardware",
"newsletter",
"openwrt",
"software"
] | Once upon a time, about twenty years ago, there was a Linux-based router, the Linksys WRT54G. Back then, the number of useful devices running embedded Linux was rather small, and this was a standout. Back then, getting a hacker device that wasn’t a full-fledged computer onto a WiFi network was also fairly difficult. This one, relatively inexpensive WiFi router got you both in one box, so it was no surprise that we
saw rovers with WRT54Gs as their brains
, among other projects.
Long Live the WRT54G
Of course, some people just wanted a better router, and thus
the OpenWRT project
was born as a minimal Linux system that let you do fancy stuff with the stock router. Years passed, and OpenWRT was ported to newer routers, and features were added. Software grew, and as far as we know, current versions won’t even run on the minuscule RAM of the original hardware that gave it it’s name.
Enter the ironic proposal that OpenWRT – the free software group that developed their code on a long-gone purple box –
is developing their own hardware
. Normally, we think of the development flow going the other way, right? But there’s a certain logic here as well. The software stack is now tried-and-true. They’ve got brand recognition, at least within the Hackaday universe. And in comparison, developing some known-good hardware to work with it is relatively easy.
We’re hardware hobbyists, and for us it’s often the case that the software is the hard part. It’s also the part that can make or break the user experience, so getting it right is crucial. On our hacker scale, we often choose a microcontroller to work with a codebase or tools that we want to use, because it’s easier to move some wires around on a PCB than it is to re-jigger a software house of cards. So maybe OpenWRT’s router proposal isn’t backwards after all? How many other examples of hardware designed to fit into existing software ecosystems can you think of?
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
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.
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! | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721299",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2024-01-20T16:20:26",
"content": "“How many other examples of hardware designed to fit into existing software ecosystems can you think of?”I think this is a little different – what you’re saying here is basically the entire x86 hardware tree ... | 1,760,372,034.785987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/erasing-eeproms-isnt-always-as-easy-as-it-seems/ | Erasing EEPROMs Isn’t Always As Easy As It Seems | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"27C512",
"2n3904",
"2N3906",
"6502",
"bjt",
"eeprom",
"retro",
"switching"
] | When is 14 volts not actually 14 volts? Given
[Anders Nielsen]’s recent struggles with erasing an old-school EEPROM
, it’s when you really need it that things tend to go pear-shaped.
A little background is perhaps in order. [Anders] is working on
a scratch-built programmer for ROMs
to complement
his 65uino project
, which puts a complete 6502 computer into the footprint of an Arduino Uno. He wisely started the ROM programmer project at the beginning, which was to
generate the correct voltages for programming
. This turned out to be not as easy as you might think thanks to the solderless breadboard’s parasitic effects on the MIC2288 switching boost regulator he chose.
The video below is a continuation of the programmer build, which ends up being just as fraught as the first part. Being able to generate the programming voltages is one thing; getting them onto the right pins at the right time using nothing but the 5-volt GPIOs on a microcontroller is another. In true retro fashion, [Anders] tackled that problem with a pair of small-signal transistors, which seemed to work once the resistor values were sorted, at least when applying a 12-volt signal intended to show the ROM’s hard-coded manufacturer ID on the data bus.
But erasing the ROM, which requires 14 volts while the chip enable line is held high for 100 ms, proved a little trickier. Despite multiple tries, the ROM wouldn’t erase thanks to the 14-volt rail being dragged down to around 9 volts. [Anders] fixed that with a new base resistor on the driver, to increase the current and keep the voltage up where it needs to be. Just goes to show you that the data sheets don’t always tell the whole story.
We’ve been enjoying the unfolding story of this programmer, and we’re looking forward to the next installment. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721826",
"author": "nitpicker",
"timestamp": "2024-01-21T22:29:29",
"content": "“Just goes to show you that the data sheets don’t always tell the whole story.”I beg to differ; on page eight of revision A6 of the Winbond W27C512 datasheet, available athttps://mm.digikey.com/Volume0/... | 1,760,372,034.831482 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/arduino-provides-no-fuss-snes-to-usb-conversion/ | Arduino Provides No Fuss SNES-To-USB Conversion | Jenny List | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"snes",
"super famicom",
"usb"
] | Even for those of us who are fans of retrocomputing, it’s fair to say that not everyone plays their old-school games on real old-school hardware. The originals are now fragile and expensive, and emulators are good enough that if the gaming experience is all you’re after there’s little point in spending all that cash.
There’s one place in which the originals sometimes have the edge though, the classic controllers are the personal interface with the game. So when [Dome] found a SNES controller in an Akibahara shop, of course he picked it up. How to make it talk to a PC?
Tuck an Arduino Pro Micro inside it
, of course!
What we like about this project is that instead of ripping out the original electronics it instead hooks the Arduino board onto the original serial interface. We might have made a Nintendo socket to USB box to keep the original cable, but either way, the SNES (technically Super Famicom, because it’s a Japanese market unit) original stays true to its roots. The Arduino polls the clock line at the speed of the console, reads the result, and translates it to a USB interface for the computer. There’s a full run-down of the code and how it was made, should you wish to try.
Of course, if you don’t always have a PC handy, you could also
put the whole computer in the controller
. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721250",
"author": "John Little",
"timestamp": "2024-01-20T11:09:13",
"content": "Just a thought: I’ve seen NRF52840 microcontroller modules that also have an onboard LIPO charging circuit (e.g. Seeeduino XIAO BLE). Using the NRF5280 instead of a ATMEGA32U4 would allow to have both... | 1,760,372,034.879936 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/testing-the-atlas-icbm-a-1958-time-capsule-video/ | Testing The Atlas ICBM: A 1958 Time Capsule Video | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"cold war",
"missile",
"SM-65 Atlas"
] | The control room during the 1958 Atlas B 4B test. (Source: Convair)
Recently the [Periscope Film] channel on YouTube published a
1960 color documentary
featuring the 1958 launch of the Atlas B (SM-65B) ICBM, in its second, Missile 4B iteration. This was the second model of the second prototype, which earned the distinction of being the first truly intercontinental ballistic missile upon its successful test completion, which saw the payload plummeting into its designated part of the Atlantic Ocean. This was a much better result than the
previous test of the 3B
, which suffered a yaw gyro issue that caused the missile to disintegrate partway into the flight.
In this historic documentary, the Atlas B’s manufacturer – Convair – takes us through all the elements of the test range, including all the downrange stations, their functions and how all the data from the test is captured, recorded (on reel to reel tape) and integrated into one coherent data set. This includes radar data, telemetry received from the missile, as well as the data tape that the ICBM ejects from the payload section shortly before impact.
Although it’s also a promotion piece for Convair Astronautics, this does little to mar the documentary aspect, which is narrated by
William Conrad
, who manages to both instill a sense of technological wonder and grim foreboding against the scenery of 1950s military high-tech in the midst of a heating up Cold War. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721231",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-01-20T09:55:27",
"content": "I found it interesting to see the genesis of many NASA Apollo and Shuttle launch procedures here – the launch of an ICBM should not seem so familiar!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,034.936596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/can-car-parts-grow-on-trees/ | Can Car Parts Grow On Trees? | Navarre Bartz | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"agricultural waste",
"biocomposite",
"bioplastic",
"Olive",
"trash to treasure",
"tree",
"tree trimming",
"waste",
"wood"
] | Cars don’t grow on trees, but Ford is designing
car parts from olive tree cuttings
. [via
Electrek
]
Ford is no stranger to designing parts from plants for their vehicles. Henry famously liked to beat on the
Soy Bean Car
with a blunted axe to tout the benefits of bioplastic panels. Researchers at Ford’s Cologne, Germany facility have detailed their work to use waste from olive orchards as part of a new biocomposite from the LIVE COMPOLIVE program.
Fibers from the olive tree cuttings are mixed with recycled plastic and injection molded to form panels. The video below features interior panels that are currently made with traditional plastics that could be swapped over to the new composite. Since these cuttings are a waste product from food production, there isn’t the tension akin to that presented via biofuels vs food. We’re curious what Precious Plastics could do with this, especially if the fibers are able to reinforce the matrix.
If you want to see some other unusual uses for waste wood, why not checkout a
“paper” bottle
or
3D printing with sawdust
? | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721174",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2024-01-20T04:28:55",
"content": "Are we going to see massive olive tree orchards competing with corn farmers for government subsidies – while people go hungry because its all going into cars?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,035.00496 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/alarm-panel-hack-defeats-encryption-by-ignoring-it/ | Alarm Panel Hack Defeats Encryption By Ignoring It | Dan Maloney | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"16x2",
"ESP32",
"hd44780",
"home automation",
"home-assistant",
"lcd",
"matrix",
"optocoupler"
] | As frustrating as it may be for a company to lock you into its ecosystem by encrypting their protocols, you have to admit that it presents an enticing challenge. Cracking encryption can be more trouble than it’s worth, though, especially when a device gives you
all the tools you need to do an end-run around their encryption
.
We’ll explain. For [Valdez], the encrypted communication protocols between a DSC alarm panel and the control pads on the system were serious impediments to integration into Home Assistant. While there are integrations available for these alarm panels, they rely on third-party clouds, which means that not only is your security system potentially telling another computer all your juicy details, but there’s also the very real possibility that the cloud system can either break or be shut down; remember
the Chamberlain MyQ fiasco
?
With these facts in mind, [Valdez] came up with a clever workaround to DSC encryption by focusing on physically interfacing with the keypad. The device has a common 16×2 LCD and a 25-key keypad, and a little poking around with a multimeter and a $20 logic analyzer eventually showed that the LCD had an HD44780 controller, and revealed all the lines needed to decode the display with an ESP32. Next up was interfacing with the keypad, which also involved a little multimeter work to determine that the keys were hooked up in a 5×5 matrix. Ten GPIOs on the ESP32 made it possible to virtually push any key; however, the ten relays [Valdez] originally used to do the switching proved unwieldy. That led to an optocoupler design, sadly not as clicky but certainly more compact and streamlined, and enabling complete control over the alarm system from Home Assistant.
We love this solution because, as [Valdez] aptly points out, the weakest point in any system is the place where it can’t be encrypted. Information has to flow between the user and the control panel, and by providing the electronic equivalents to eyes and fingers, the underlying encryption is moot. Hats off to [Valdez] for an excellent hack, and for
sharing the wealth with the HA community
. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721134",
"author": "Matthew Carlson",
"timestamp": "2024-01-20T00:48:59",
"content": "myQ is still an active disaster. Makes me mad every time I think about it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6721161",
"author": "Adjustinth... | 1,760,372,035.439281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/radar-glasses-grant-vision-free-distance-sensing/ | ‘Radar’ Glasses Grant Vision-free Distance Sensing | Donald Papp | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"assistive device",
"blindness",
"lidar",
"radar",
"Time of Flight Sensor",
"vision impaired",
"VL53L1X"
] | [tpsully]’s
Radar Glasses
are designed as a way of sensing the world without the benefits of normal vision. They consist of a distance sensor on the front and a vibration motor mounted to the bridge for haptic feedback. The little motor vibrates in proportion to the sensor’s readings, providing hands-free and intuitive feedback to the wearer. Inspired in part by his own experiences with temporary blindness, [tpsully] prototyped the glasses from an accessibility perspective.
The sensor is a VL53L1X time-of-flight sensor, a LiDAR sensor that measures distances with the help of pulsed laser light. The glasses do not actually use RADAR (which is radio-based), but the operation is in a sense quite similar.
The VL53L1X has a maximum range of up to 4 meters (roughly 13 feet) in a relatively narrow field of view. A user therefore scans their surroundings by sweeping their head across a desired area, feeling the vibration intensity change in response, and allowing them to build up a sort of mental depth map of the immediate area. This physical scanning resembles RADAR antenna sweeps, and serves essentially the same purpose.
There are some other projects with similar ideas, such as
the wrist-mounted digital white cane
and the
hip-mounted Walk-Bot
which integrates multiple angles of sensing, but something about the glasses form factor seems attractively intuitive.
Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip, and remember that if you have something you’d like to let us know about,
the tips line
is where you can do that. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721075",
"author": "Bear Naff",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T21:35:13",
"content": "Of course I can’t find it now that I’m looking for it, but one of the wearable computing pioneers played around with integrating extra senses into existing sensory channels. You know, things like a dig... | 1,760,372,035.361719 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/you-wouldnt-download-a-house/ | You Wouldn’t Download A House | Navarre Bartz | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"CNC woodworking",
"design for disassembly",
"maslow",
"plywood",
"plywood house",
"structural insulated panel",
"WikiHouse",
"wooden house"
] | Shelter is one of the most basic of human needs, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we continually come up with new ways to build homes. Most building systems are open source to an extent, and the
WikiHouse project
tries to update the process for the internet age.
WikiHouse is a modular building system similar to
structural insulated panels (SIPs)
but designed to be made on a CNC and insulated in the shop before heading to the site. Using this system, you can get the advantages of a manufactured home, but in a more distributed manner. Plywood or oriented strand board (OSB) can be used to make up the chassis of the blocks which can then be assembled very quickly on site versus traditional wooden construction.
One of the more interesting aspects of WikiHouse is that it takes
design for disassembly seriously
. How many houses have parts that are still good when they’re demolished to make way for something new? In most places, the good is hauled to the dump along with the bad because it isn’t economical to separate the two. Building with end of life in mind makes it so much easier to recover those materials and not waste them. There are certainly
examples of careful material recovery
, but they’re few and far between.
If you’re looking for some other ways to quickly build a house from wood, checkout the
PlyPad
or
Brikawood
. | 62 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721036",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T19:59:11",
"content": "I’ve seen this before, and it’s quite a waste of materials.Just the idea of first making plywood from tree trunks and then then converting it to “beams” and then building something from that again, Why no... | 1,760,372,035.655194 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/hackaday-podcast-episode-253-more-wood-robot-glitching-and-fuming-nitric-acid-we-heart-usb-c/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 253: More Wood Robot, Glitching And Fuming Nitric Acid, We Heart USB-C | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off with a traffic report from the Moon, which has suddenly become a popular destination for wayward robots.
Anonymizing an ATtiny85 via laser
From there, they’ll go over a fire-tending contraption that’s equal parts madness and brilliance, two decades of routers being liberated by OpenWRT, impressive feats of chip decapping, and USB-C’s glorious rise to power.
You’ll also hear about the latest developments in laptop RAM, exploits against the flash encryption used on the ESP32, and Android powered oscilloscopes. The duo will wrap things up with horror stories from the self-checkout aisle, and a look at the fantastical rolling power station that Dan Maloney has been building in his driveway.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Oh look, an MP3 version
!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 253 Show Notes:
News:
Crippled Peregrine Lander To Make Fiery Return Home
SLIM Moon Landing Live & Press Conference – YouTube
What’s that Sound?
This week’s sound was the
mimicry of the Lyrebird
. Congratulations to [Pixie]!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Feeding The Fire By Robot
OpenWRT To Mark 20 Years With Reference Hardware
Reverse Engineering Smart Meters, Now With More Fuming Nitric Acid
Chip Decapping The Easy Way
CO2 Laser Decapping To Fix Soldering Mistake
Breaking The Flash Encryption Feature Of Espressif’s Microcontrollers
Laptop Memory Upgradable Again
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Simulate Running A Small Hardware Business With Hardware Hustle
Reverse-Engineering A Russian Tornado-S Guidance Circuit Board
Saving PIC Microcontrollers With DIY Programmer
Skip The Radio With This Software-Defined Ultrasound Data Link
Tom’s Picks:
All I Want For Mr. Christmas Is Some New Music
Countdown To A Spaceship Simulator
Android-Powered Rigol Scopes Go Wireless
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Ask Hackaday: Why Are Self-Checkouts Failing?
Sun On The Run: Diving Into Solar With A Mobile PV System | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721063",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T20:56:13",
"content": "Joked about it in the podcast…https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/DSCF3565.jpg",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6722006",
... | 1,760,372,035.80652 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/z80-i-o-madness/ | Z80 I/O Madness | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"breadboard",
"documentation",
"z80"
] | While the 8080 started the personal computer revolution, the Z80 was quickly a winner because it was easier to use and had more capabilities. [Noel] found out though that the
Z80 OUT instruction is a little odd
and, in fact, some of the period documentation was incorrect.
Many CPUs used memory-mapped I/O, but the 8080 and Z80 had dedicated I/O addressing pins and instructions so you could fill up the memory map with actual memory and still have some I/O devices. A quick look in the famous Zak’s book on Z80 programming indicates that an instruction like
OUT (C),A
would write the A register to the output device indicated by the BC register pair (even though the instruction only mentions C. However, [Noel] missed the note about the B register and saw in the Zilog documentation that it did. Since he didn’t read the note in the Zak’s book until later, he assumed it was a discrepancy. Therefore, he went to the silicon to get the correct answer.
Breadboarding a little Z80 system allowed him to look at the actual behavior of the instruction. However, he also didn’t appreciate the syntax of the assembly language statements. We’ve done enough Z80 assembly that none of it struck us as particularly crazy, especially since odd instruction mnemonics were the norm in those days.
Still, it was interesting to see him work through all the instructions. He then looks at how Amstrad used or abused the instructions to do something even stranger.
If you want to breadboard a minimal Z80 system,
consider this one
. If you enjoy abuse of the Z80 I/O system, you don’t want to miss this Z80 hack for “
protected mode
.” | 28 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6721012",
"author": "arcdoom",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T18:39:34",
"content": "The Z80 was the winner????The heck is that statement. The Z80 was designed to quite literally function as an 8080/as an extension of. It was so close that they had to double back and change stuff and it d... | 1,760,372,035.505802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/this-week-in-security-gitlab-vmware-and-pixefail/ | This Week In Security: Gitlab, VMware, And PixeFAIL | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"gitlab",
"Ivanti",
"This Week in Security",
"vmware"
] | There’s a
Gitlab vulnerability that you should probably pay attention to
. Tracked as CVE-2023-7028, this issue allows an attacker to specify a secondary email during a the password reset request. Only one email has to match the one on record, but the password reset link gets sent to both emails. Yikes!
What makes this worse is there is already
a Proof of Concept (PoC) released
, and it’s a trivial flaw. In an HTTP/S post containing the password reset request, just include two email addresses. Thankfully,
a fix is already out
. Versions 16.7.2, 16.6.4, and 16.5.6 contain this patch, as well as fixes for a flaw that allowed sneaking unauthorized changes into a previously approved merge request, and an issue with Slack and Mattermost where slash commands could be spoofed.
VMware
We don’t want to over-dramatise this vulnerability, but
VMware is calling it an emergency
. This one affects VMware vRealize and Aria Automation.
According to the the CVSS calculator
, it’s a low complexity network flaw, but does require at least some privileges. Hopefully more information will come out
about this vulnerability
, but for now that’s about all we know.
IPv6 is a Whole New World (Of Vulnerabilities)
The Open Source Tianocore project is the reference implementation of UEFI, and ends up being the upstream of pretty much every UEFI firmware. Tianocore implements PXE (“pixie”) booting, the mechanism for booting a machine from a network disk image. For the last few years, Tianocore has had IPv6 support for PXE boot, and it turns out
that new-ish stack has some problems
.
PXE Boot is fairly straightforward, but actually ends up needing quite a few features. DHCP, DNS, and Neighbor Discovery, to name a few. And because it’s low-level firmware code, most of those features are written from scratch for Tianocore. And of course, there are problems. To start, in handling a DHCPv6 Advertise message, a malicious option can trigger an integer underflow. Similarly, a very long server ID value sent in a DHCP Advertise can overflow the assigned buffer, leading to arbitrary memory write.
Additionally, there are a pair of infinite loops that can cause Denial of Service during boot, another pair of buffer overflows in DHCP, and some general weaknesses in random number generation. Many of these issues are considered severe. What’s noticeably lacking here is patches and updated firmwares from all the vendors that take Tianocore as their upstream. Looking at the disclosure timeline from Quarkslab, there seems to have been quite a fight over how long to keep the problems embargoed.
Ivanti Examined
Last week we warned you about a new pair of Ivanti vulnerabilities. This week we’re back with
The watchTowr Labs investigation into the mitigation
. There’s some fun tidbits in here, like how to get to the raw unencrypted filesystem to find the changes made by the workaround. You can switch up the kernel boot command to simply run
/bin/sh
. Except the Ivanti kernel has a string compare for exactly that init command. The solution?
//bin//sh
The key turns out to be the REST API, with multiple endpoints blocked with the XML update. This just happens to make it trivial to detect whether an Ivanti device has the mitigation installed. Now remember, this is just a mitigation, and the full patch is still a few days away from the start of a staggered roll-out. With that in mind, watchTowr has opted not to disclose the actual vulnerabilities yet.
Taking the Mirth out of Deserialization
The Mirth Connect platform is used to connect various Electronic Health Record systems, and back in October it was patched to fix an unauthenticated RCE.
Now we have the whole story:
it was a botched fix for an earlier vulnerability. Mirth Connect is a Java project, and as such it can be subject to deserialization problems. This one was an “unmarshalling” issue, which is taking XML data and converting to Java data objects.
The sign that something may have been wrong with the earlier fix was the claim that the problem was limited to Java 8. The previous solution was a limited list of class names that were blocked during unmarshaling, and the workaround was simply to find a missed class that was subject to exploit. A proper fix has landed, now using a list of allowed classes instead.
Bits and Bytes
Cacti has a
pair
of
vulnerabilities
, that allow an authenticated user to execute arbitrary code. The first is a SQL injection, where a request to save settings takes a parameter that isn’t properly sanitized, and doesn’t properly use a prepared statement. Then a second flaw is to write shellcode to the cacti log, and trick the system into attempting to execute that file. Look to Cacti 1.2.26 for fixes.
Atlassian has
released details on 28 high-severity vulnerabilities
in Bitbucket, Bamboo, Jira, Crowd, and Confluence. Many of those are RCEs and other serious problems, so if yours is an Atlassian shop, it’s time to update.
Nvidia has sent out the warning,
don’t put your supercomputer on the Internet
without security updates. The DGX A100 system has a series of critical problems with its Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), including vulnerabilities in the KVM service, the BIOS itself, and input validation bypasses.
And last but not least, JFrog
has discovered a pair of X.Org vulnerabilities
that have been around for 35 years. There’s quite the history to the XPM icon format, but when libX11 tries to process an odd single-pixel-height XPM, it ends up in an infinite recursion loop. Look forward to the next installment from JFrog, which will detail an RCE in X11. Both of these vulnerabilities were fixed in releases back in October. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720949",
"author": "BillyG",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T15:27:18",
"content": "And last but not least, JFrog has discovered a pair of X.Org vulnerabilities that have been around for 35 years.One of these days a security researcher will discover a vulnerability older than they are….if... | 1,760,372,035.546836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/haier-threatens-legal-action-against-home-assistant-plugin-developer/ | Haier Threatens Legal Action Against Home Assistant Plugin Developer | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Haier",
"home automation",
"IoT",
"legal",
"smart home"
] | Appliance manufacturer Haier has been integrating IoT features into their newer products, and as is so common these days, users are expected to install their “hOn” mobile application to access them. Not satisfied with that limitation, [Andre Basche] reverse engineered the protocol used by the app, and released a Python library and associated Home Assistant plugin to interface with a wide array of Haier appliances, which includes brands like Hoover, Candy, GE Appliances and others.
Unfortunately, it looks like his efforts have gotten him into a bit of legal hot water. In an
issue recently opened on the project’s GitHub page
, [Andre] explains the circumstances and legal options that have led him to consider pulling the repositories completely — mostly due to the cost of mounting a legal defense to the cease & desist from Haier Europe.
What’s ironic here is that
Haier has been part of
the Connectivity Standard Alliance (CSA) since 2022, whose goal is to ‘promote universal open IoT standards’, including Matter.
It’s possible that a legal defense will be mounted against this C&D from Haier within the coming days. Yet regardless of the outcome here, it remains problematic that these IoT-enabled Haier appliances are connected to the Haier servers. Ideally they would be controlled locally, which is the goal of projects like [Miguel Ángel López Vicente]’s
ESP Haier
, that uses an ESP8266 to connect Haier AC units to the local WiFi and e.g. HA instances, all without requiring internet access.
This is sadly just one more example of why
building your own off-line smart home
can be such an incredible struggle.
Thanks to [Ar3itrary] for the tip. | 109 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720863",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T12:10:21",
"content": "Boycott Haier products and flood customer service with unsatisfied messages is one way to exert pressure on those jerks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,037.870801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/19/cute-brass-lunar-lander-is-a-neat-little-environment-monitor/ | Cute Brass Lunar Lander Is A Neat Little Environment Monitor | Lewin Day | [
"Art",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"Circuit Sculpture",
"environmental monitor",
"nRF52840"
] | Sometimes form can make a project more attractive than its simple function. [Mohit Bhoite]’s free-form builds are great examples of this. His latest effort is a gorgeous little device that displays environmental readings,
and it’s shaped like a lunar lander
. (
Nitter
) Just exquisite!
The device is based around a Seeedstudio XIAO nRF52840 dev board. It’s hooked up to a BME280 sensor which delivers temperature, humidity and air pressure readings from the immediate environment. These readings are displayed on a tiny 128×32 OLED display, along with the current time. Power is via a compact 14250 lithium cell.
So far, so simple, but the real magic is in the housing. It’s a wireframe lunar lander lookalike which [Mohit] put together using brass wire and some careful soldering. It adds so much to the build, which wouldn’t be nearly as attractive if just assembled on a PCB. It’s not his first rodeo, either. He previously
built a cute device
(
Nitter
) with an animated face in 2019 using similar techniques; it used a CCS811 gas sensor to detect air quality.
Often, we find ourselves falling most in love with devices that please the eye. [Mohit] certainly demonstrates a great skill in building things that fit this brief. Sometimes, it only takes a bit of thought and careful application of the mind to bring
a beautiful aesthetic to your projects
, and the results can be most rewarding. Try his
Hackaday Supercon talk if you want to learn more.
New year, new lander 🚀 Meet Cumin!
Cumin is a little lander built around the
@seeedstudio
XIAO nRF52840 dev board. It measures temperature, humidity, and pressure using a BME280 sensor and displays it on a 128×32 OLED. The whole thing is powered by a single 14250 Lithium Ion…
pic.twitter.com/pkqYRnj9BT
— Mohit Bhoite | मोहित भोईटे he/him (@MohitBhoite)
January 15, 2024 | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720891",
"author": "Rembrand van Circuit",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T13:20:04",
"content": "This is art!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6720927",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T14:28:21",
"c... | 1,760,372,037.427319 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/dont-panic-a-cooperative-bomb-defusing-game/ | Don’t Panic: A Cooperative Bomb Defusing Game | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"arduino",
"bomb defusal",
"game",
"keep talking and nobody explodes",
"mesh network"
] | [Heath Paddock] wanted to confound his friends with a game that mimics an escape room in a box. About six months after starting, he had this glorious thing completed.
It’s a hardware version of a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
where players have five minutes to defuse a suitcase bomb. This implementation requires at least two players, one with the box-bomb itself, and one who holds all the knowledge but can’t see the box-bomb to defuse it.
The wiring of the Mastermind module.
[Heath]’s version has twice as many modules as the original game, each hand-wired one driven by an Arduino. One of the modules is an LED maze. There are two green anchor LEDs in one of six configurations, and and blue and a red LED.
The object is to move the blue LED next to the red one without touching any walls. Of course, the box-holder can’t see the walls and must describe the configuration of the anchor LEDs to their partner in order to get started.
All of the modules are quite different, which likely makes for an extremely fun and challenging five minutes. [Heath] reports that getting inter-module communication down was a long road. Eventually, [Heath] settled on a mesh network configuration and connected everything in a big loop. Be sure to check out the walk-through video after the break.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a hardware implementation of this game.
Here’s one that uses a Raspberry Pi. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720831",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T08:39:26",
"content": "Super nice, looks like great fun both building and playing :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6720856",
"author": "Stefan",
"timestamp": "2024... | 1,760,372,037.488083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/how-to-spend-a-million-dollars-on-the-ultimate-stereo/ | How To Spend A Million Dollars On The Ultimate Stereo | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"\"audiophiles\"",
"HiFi",
"stereo"
] | We’ve all seen the excesses that the Golden Ears set revel in; the five-figure power conditioning boxes, the gold-plated HDMI cables. As covered by the
Washington Post
, however, [Ken Fritz] may have gone farther than most. Before he passed away, he estimated that he spent a million dollars on the greatest possible hi-fi setup he could imagine.
There’s plenty of hardcore gear in the rig. Massive cabinets loaded with carefully-tuned speaker drivers. A $50,000 record player built into a 1,500-pound weighted base for the utmost in stability and vibration resistance. Expensive cartridges, top-tier reel-to-reel decks, and amplifiers worth more than most used cars.
As the piece explores, [Fritz] knew that none of that was enough. Sound is all about the space as much as it is the equipment. Thus, the family home itself was transformed to become the ultimate listening environment in turn. The listening room got everything from concrete floors and its own HVAC and electrical systems. Much of the equipment was custom built to avoid wasting money on overpriced name-brand gear. The story of the kit was also the subject of a documentary shared online, by the name of
One Man’s Dream.
The piece examines what goes into a top-tier setup like this, while also exploring the human cost that [Fritz’s] passion had on him and his family. The ending is sad and brutal in a way you wouldn’t think a story about hi-fi gear ever could be. It’s an education in more ways then one, and teaches us that it’s worth keeping an eye on the rest of our lives while pursuing what we enjoy the most. Video after the break. | 74 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720781",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T04:10:23",
"content": "He got suckered for every audio gimmick on the planet. Poor guy. Each to his own",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6720989",
"author": "Will",
... | 1,760,372,038.044709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/turning-a-1150-scale-model-car-into-a-real-driving-car-with-lights/ | Turning A 1:150 Scale Model Car Into A Real Driving Car With Lights | Maya Posch | [
"how-to"
] | [
"remote control car",
"scale model"
] | Closing up the remotely controlled 1:150 scale model car. (credit: diorama111)
For many people having a miniature version of something like a car is already a miracle in itself, but there’s always the possibility to take matters a bit further, as YouTube channels like [diorama111] demonstrate. In this particular case, they took a 1:150 scale model of a Nissan Micra and
installed a microcontroller
, battery, remote steering and front, rear and indicator lights. Considering the 24.5 x 11.4 x 10.5 mm (LxWxH) size of the scale model, this is no small feat.
The original plastic bottom and wheels are removed, and replaced with a metal frame, as well as steerable front wheels that have a neodymium magnet attached to follow a metal guidance track that can be underneath the road surface. For the brains an ATtiny1616 MCU in QFN format is used to receive commands from the PIC79603 infrared receiver module and drive the motor attached to the rear axle via a DRV8210 motor controller IC. The remaining MCU pins are mostly used for turning the LEDs on the lights and signals on or off.
In the video the miniscule RC car is driven around a course with traffic lights, which gives a good impression of how this could be used in a large scale model of a city, with a hidden rail system to determine car routes. As for keeping the 30 mAh Li-Po battery charged, there’s a charge port on the bottom, but at these low current rates you could have hidden conductive charging points throughout the route as well, assuming you can fit a small enough charging coil in this little space.
(Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip)
Schematic diagram of the remotely controlled model car. (credit: Diorama111) | 21 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720744",
"author": "Jarion",
"timestamp": "2024-01-19T00:48:02",
"content": "Very well done indeed. Of course, if it was here in the US, you would have to leave your blinker on the whole time and swerve into the other lane while checking FB on your phone. Actually driving on the ... | 1,760,372,037.715661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/lessons-learned-from-a-high-voltage-power-supply/ | Lessons Learned From A High-Voltage Power Supply | Dan Maloney | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"arcing",
"breakdown",
"corona",
"flyback",
"hv",
"PLA",
"pneumatic",
"ZVS"
] | When you set out to build a 60,000-volt power supply and find out that it “only” delivers a measly 50,000 volts, you naturally have to dive in and see where things can be improved. And boy, did [Advanced Tinkering]
find some things to improve
.
First things first: if you haven’t seen [Advanced]’s
first pass at a high-voltage supply
, you should go check that out. We really liked the design of that one, and were particularly impressed with the attention to detail, all of which seemed to be wisely geared to the safe operation of the supply. But as it turns out, the margin of safety in the original design wasn’t as good as it could be. Of most concern was the need to physically touch the supply to control it, an obvious problem should something go wrong anywhere along the HV path, which includes a ZVS-driven flyback and an epoxy-potted Crockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier.
To make things a little more hands-off, [AT] added a pneumatically actuated switch to the supply, along with some indicator lights to help prevent him from leaving the supply powered up. He also reworked the low-voltage DC supply section, replacing a fixed-voltage supply and a DC-DC converter with a variable DC supply. This had the side benefit of providing a little bit more voltage to the ZVS driver, which goosed up the HV output a bit. The biggest change, though, was to the potted part of the HV section, which showed signs of arcing to the chassis. It turns out that even at 100% infill, 3D printed PLA isn’t a great choice for HV projects; more epoxy was the answer to that problem. Along with rewinding the primary on the flyback transformer, the power supply not only hit the 60-kV spec, but even went a little past that — and all without any of that pesky arcing.
We thought [Advanced Tinkering]’s first pass on this build was pretty slick, but we’re glad to see that it’s even better now. And we’re still keen to see how this supply will be put to use; honestly, the brief teaser at the end of the video wasn’t much help in guessing what it could be. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720709",
"author": "Bzzz...",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T21:41:09",
"content": "Aww i expected mehdi from electroboom. Like lessons never learned :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6720770",
"author": "Tanner Bass",
"tim... | 1,760,372,037.377344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/crippled-peregrine-lander-to-make-fiery-return-home/ | CrippledPeregrineLander To Make Fiery Return Home | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"Artemis",
"commercial space",
"moon"
] | Within a few hours of this post going live, Astrobotic’s
Peregrine
spacecraft is expected to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere — a disappointing end to a mission that was supposed to put the first US lander on the Moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
In their twentieth mission update
since
Peregrine
was carried into space on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket, Astrobotic explains that the craft has been put on a trajectory designed to ensure it breaks up over a remote area of the South Pacific.
Predicted re-renty point for the
Peregrine
lander.
It was previously hoped the lander, which
suffered a severe system malfunction just hours after liftoff
, could have at least made a close pass of the Moon in lieu of touching down. But mission controllers felt the more responsible approach was to have
Peregrine
make a controlled re-entry while they still had the ability to maneuver it. The alternative, allowing the craft to remain in an uncontrolled orbit between the Earth and Moon, could potentially have caused problems for future Artemis missions.
Over the last ten days, ground controllers at Astrobotic have been working to piece together what happened to the doomed lander, while at the same time demonstrating a remarkable level of transparency by keeping the public informed along the way. It’s now believed that the stream of gas being expelled from a
rupture in one of the craft’s propellant tanks
was acting as a sort of impromptu thruster. This not only made the craft difficult to keep oriented, but also wasted the propellants that were necessary to perform a soft landing on the lunar surface.
Although the craft was eventually brought under control, the damage to the mission had already been done. While this obviously isn’t the ending that Astrobotic was hoping for, we have no doubt that the company collected valuable data during the craft’s flight through space, which took it approximately 390,000 kilometers (242,000 miles) from Earth.
As for us space nerds, we won’t have to wait long before another lunar lander makes its attempt. Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) should be touching down at around 10 AM Eastern on Friday (
YouTube Live Stream
), and the Nova-C lander from Intuitive Machines is scheduled to be launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket sometime next month. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720686",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T19:57:54",
"content": "“we have no doubt that the company collected valuable data during the craft’s flight through space”It’s not just the company. Powering up the payloads and letting them communicate is super-valuable too: they’... | 1,760,372,037.653023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/tech-in-plain-sight-windshield-frit/ | Tech In Plain Sight: Windshield Frit | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"automotive",
"fade",
"frit",
"seal",
"windshield"
] | You probably see a frit every day and don’t even notice it. What is it? You know the black band around your car’s windshield? That’s a frit (which, by the way, can also mean ingredients used in making glass) or, sometimes, a frit band. What’s more, it probably fades out using a series of dots like a halftone image, right? Think that’s just for aesthetics? Think again.
Older windshields were not always attached firmly, leading to them popping out in accidents. At some point, though, the industry moved to polyurethane adhesives, which are superior when applied correctly. However, they often degrade from exposure to UV. That’s a problem with a windshield, which usually gets plenty of sunlight.
The answer is the frit, a ceramic-based baked-on enamel applied to both sides of the windshield’s edges, usually using silk screening. The inner part serves as a bonding point for the adhesive. However, the outer part blocks UV radiation from reaching the adhesive. Of course, it also hides the adhesive and any edges or wiring beneath it, too.
But the Dots?
A typical frit band fades to transparent using a pattern of dots
What about the dots? Well, as you might expect, when the black enamel blocks UV, it turns into heat, so you now have, potentially, a hot edge and a cooler center. That’s not a good thing for glass and can cause deformation. At best, it might cause optical distortion. At worst, it might crack the glass. The dots, then, cause an even temperature gradient to form instead of a sharp transition.
This is especially important because of the way windshields are made. They start as ordinary flat glass but are placed in an oven and bent against a jig. There are usually two pieces of glass, one slightly larger than the other. Finally, the two pieces of glass are laminated together with a sheet of polyvinyl butyral — an optically clear, flexible, and sticky material that keeps the glass from shattering.
No Frit?
Some windshields have a tint in them that block UV and don’t need a frit. In addition, there are advanced adhesives that don’t need protection from UV. But for most cars, the frit is a visible reminder that someone puts a lot of thought into every piece of an automobile. Many cars now have frit behind the rearview mirror to help block sunlight in that area.
Older cars didn’t have frit bands because they used a gasket to seal out water and a metal trim plate over the edge of the windshield. That had a bad habit of letting the windshield fly free in certain kinds of accidents, though, so you won’t find that on modern cars.
Glass is one of the
oldest
engineered materials around. The wipers are the next thing to notice about windshields, but we’ve
already talked about those
. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720667",
"author": "pink bike",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T18:27:46",
"content": "Checked wikipedia in german and english, but in both frit means sintered glas, and the dust (before sintering), the sintered coat and the powdered (crushed after sintering for use in other areas) are al... | 1,760,372,037.560066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/deep-dive-into-3d-printing-nozzles/ | Deep Dive Into 3D Printing Nozzles | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing nozzle",
"focus stacking",
"Nozzle"
] | [Lost in Tech] set out to examine a variety of 3D printing nozzles. Before he got there, though, he found some issues. In particular, he found that his current crop of printers don’t take the standard E3D or MK8 nozzles. So, instead, he decided to
examine various nozzles under the microscope
.
Unsurprisingly, each nozzle had a tiny hole at the end, although the roundness of the hole varied a bit from nozzle to nozzle. As you might expect, more expensive nozzles had better orifices than the cheap ones. Grabbing pictures of nozzles at magnification isn’t easy, so he set up a special image stacking setup to get some beautiful images (and he has another video on how that works).
But the real star of the video is when he virtually travels into the orifice to show the innermost details of the nozzle from the inside out. This let him visualize the smoothness and finish. The Creality nozzles looked very good and weren’t terribly expensive. Many of the expensive nozzles were quite good. However, as you would expect, the quality of cheap nozzles were all over the place.
By the end, [Lost in Tech] speculates if the non-standard nozzles are a way to prevent you from buying low-cost nozzles and eating into sales or if they are a way to prevent you from buying low-cost nozzles that may give you poor print quality. What do you think?
There’s more than one way to
look inside a nozzle
. We just buy our nozzles, but some people
make their own
. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720640",
"author": "Jo",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T16:37:42",
"content": "So if he laser sintered a noozle he can increase the thermal surface area and could print a impossible shape (like for what laser manufacturing is made for).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,372,037.604344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/predicting-the-a-bomb-the-cartmill-affair/ | Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"atomic bomb",
"nuclear bomb",
"science fiction"
] | The cover of the infamous issue of Astounding, March 1944
There’s an upcoming movie,
Argylle,
about an author whose spy novels are a little too accurate, and she becomes a target of a real-life spy game. We haven’t seen the movie, but it made us think of a similar espionage caper from 1944 involving science fiction author Cleve Cartmill. The whole thing played out in the pages of Astounding magazine (now Analog) and involved several other science fiction luminaries ranging from John W. Campbell to Isaac Asimov. It is a great story about how science is — well, science — and no amount of secrecy or legislation can hide it.
In 1943, Cartmill queried Campbell about the possibility of a story that would be known as “Deadline.” It wasn’t his first story, nor would it be his last. But it nearly put him in a Federal prison. Why? The story dealt with an atomic bomb.
Nothing New
By itself, that’s probably not a big deal. H.G. Wells wrote “The World Set Free” in 1914, where he predicted nuclear weapons. But in 1914, it wasn’t clear how that would work exactly. Wells mentioned “uranium and thorium” and wrote a reasonable account of the destructive power:
When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendor spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water.
In fact, other earlier stories also predicted bombs, including 1941’s “Solution Unsatisfactory” by Anson MacDonald, a pseudonym for Robert Heinlen. So why was Carmill’s story of interest to the FBI?
The Story
Illustration from “Deadline” (art by Orban)
If you want to
read the short story
, you can do so thanks to the Internet Archive. Remember, science fiction was simpler then. The major groups in the story are the Sixa and the Seillia. If these don’t mean anything to you, try spelling them backward. Presumably, war-time censors didn’t. We’ll wait.
The two groups are at war, and apparently, both have mastered the atomic bomb. While one side tries to deploy it and fails, the other side refuses, believing it to be amoral. By itself, this is just another story and means no more than Star Trek postulating a photon torpedo.
The description of the bomb and the issues of producing one is what drew attention:
“Have you heard of U-235 ? It’s an isotope of uranium.”
“Who hasn’t?”
“All right. I’m stating fact, not theory. U-235 has been separated in quantity easily sufficient for preliminary atomic-power research, and the like. They got it out of uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods; they now have quantities measured in pounds. By ‘they’, I mean Seilla research scientists. But they have not brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it. Because they are not at all sure that, once started, it would stop before all of it had been consumed — in something like one micromicrosecond of time.”
. . .
“Now the explosion of a pound of U-235,” he said, “wouldn’t be too unbearably violent, though it releases as much energy as a hundred million pounds of TNT. Set off on an island, it might lay waste the whole island, uprooting trees, killing all animal life, but even that fifty thousand tons of TNT wouldn’t seriously disturb the really unimaginable tonnage which even a small island represents.
“The trouble is, they’re afraid that that explosion of energy would be so incomparably violent, its sheer, minute concentration of unbearable energy so great, that surrounding matter would be set off. If you could imagine concentrating half a billion of the most violent lightning strokes you ever saw, compressing all their fury into a space less than half the size of a pack of cigarettes — you’d get some idea of the concentrated essence of hyperviolence that explosion would represent. It’s not simply the amount of energy; it’s the frightful concentration of intensity in a minute volume.
“The surrounding matter, unable to maintain a self-supporting atomic explosion normally, might be hyper-stimulated to atomic explosion under U-235’s forces and, in the immediate neighborhood, release its energy, too. That is, the explosion would not involve only one pound of U-235, but also five or fifty or five thousand tons of other matter. The extent of the explosion is a matter of conjecture.”
Deadline’s secret mission glider. Art by Orban
The protagonist doing most of the speaking is on a secret mission to destroy the enemy’s bomb, which contains 16 pounds of U-235. He later describes using two hemispheres to separate the reaction mass and neutron shielding when the bomb is inactive.
Apparently, Cartmill’s original idea was just some “super bomb,” but Campbell, who attended MIT and had a physics degree from Duke, passed him background information on atomic bombs gathered from public information.
Los Alamos
Many at Los Alamos read science fiction. In fact, it is rumored that Cambell had noticed a swell in change of address forms to New Mexico and had surmised that something was going on there, although he apparently never mentioned it.
When the story came out in February 1944, workers at Los Alamos started to talk about it. After all, it had concerns very similar to their own. Should the bomb be used? It also identified separation as a major roadblock and the fear that a chain reaction might not stop.
A security officer made note of the conversations and reported it to the FBI. An investigation into Cartmill and Campbell resulted. The FBI even looked into their acquaintances, including Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.
Investigation and Retrospect
In retrospect, Cartmill’s bomb design probably wouldn’t work, but that might not have been clear in 1944. But it did predict the problem of isotope separation and hinted at several other realistic details.
The amount of effort spent on investigating the story was impressive. The FBI found that Campbell had lunch with an engineer working on an unrelated classified project and interviewed him, too. It didn’t help that Campbell initially claimed all the technical content of the story was due to his influence, while Cartmill claimed he was the architect of the faux nuclear device. Later letters showed that the ideas were, in fact, Campbell’s.
At least one investigator was convinced that some of the story had to be from classified research. However, the FBI never found a link between anyone involved and the Manhattan Project that produced the bomb. In the end, the feds forbade Campbell from running any more stories about uranium or atomic power until after the war.
Yesterday’s science fiction is sometimes tomorrow’s facts. We’ve seen reasonably good approximations of cell phones, self-driving cars, virtual reality, and more. Then again, fiction doesn’t anticipate everything. But just as legislators can’t change the value of pi, keeping science secret is rarely effective for very long. The inquisitive nature of scientists and engineers and the fact that nature keeps no secrets on purpose make it a futile effort.
There was real concern that one nuclear chain reaction could end everything,
but that’s not the case
or you wouldn’t be reading this. Even today, though,
extracting isotopes
isn’t child’s play. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720621",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T15:44:55",
"content": "Very interesting! Good science fiction is science fact extended to science possibly with an artfull application of scientific imagination.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,037.931524 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/a-dim-bulb-tester-is-for-testing-other-equipment-not-bulbs/ | A Dim Bulb Tester Is For Testing Other Equipment, Not Bulbs | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bulb",
"filament bulb",
"tester"
] | If you’re testing old stereo equipment, a dim bulb tester can really come in handy. It’s not for testing bulbs, though, it’s a tester that
uses a dim bulb
to test other things. [Nicholas Morganti] explains it all in his guide to
making your own example of such a tool
. Just be wary — you need to know what you’re doing with mains voltages to do this safely!
The dim bulb is a deceptively simple tool that nonetheless often proves useful in diagnostics. It normally just consists of a bulb connected in series with the equipment under test. The bulb is intended to be a similar wattage to the power draw of the equipment itself. Take for example, an amplifier. If the bulb glows brightly when the amp is under no load, it suggests there may be a short circuit somewhere. That’s because the glowing bulb indicates that plenty of current is being drawn under a condition when very little should be flowing. The bulb protects the equipment by essentially acting as a bit of a current limiting device. It’s a soft-start tool for a piece of vulnerable equipment.
Building one is usually as simple as gathering an enclosure, a plug receptacle, a bulb socket, and some other ancillary parts to lace everything together. [Nicholas] explains it all with clear diagrams and tells you how to follow along. It’s easy enough, but you really need to know what you’re doing to use one safely, as mains voltages are involved.
It’s a great tool to have if you’re
getting into amplifier repair
or similar work on old gear. If you’ve been whipping up your own must-have tools, don’t hesitate to let us know! | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720572",
"author": "Gary",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T12:42:25",
"content": "According to the NEC white is neutral and the black wire is hot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6720578",
"author": "Jj",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,038.104926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/18/a-rigol-scope-goes-wireless/ | Android-Powered Rigol Scopes Go Wireless | Al Williams | [
"Android Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"rigol",
"wifi"
] | The Rigol DHO800 and DHO900 series use Android underneath, and as you might expect, this makes them easier to hack. A case in point: [VoltLog] demonstrates that you
can add WiFi to the scope
using a cheap USB WiFi adapter. This might seem like a no-brainer on the surface, but because the software doesn’t know about WiFi, there are a few minor hoops to jump through.
The first issue is that you need a WiFi adapter the built-in OS already knows how to handle. The community has identified at least one RTL chipset that works and it happens to be in the TP-Link TL-WN725N. These are old 2.4 GHz only units, so they are widely available for $10 or less.
But even with the correct hardware, the scope doesn’t have any menus to configure the WiFi interface. To solve that, you need to temporarily use a USB hub and a USB keyboard. Once you have everything plugged in, you can use the Super + N keyboard shortcut to open up the Android notification bar, which is normally hidden. Once you’ve setup the network connection, you won’t need the keyboard anymore.
Or maybe not — it turns out the keyboard does allow you to change a few other things. For example, [VoltLog] used it to increase the screen brightness more than the default maximum setting.
The only other issue appears to be that the scope shows it is disconnected even when connected to WiFi. That doesn’t seem to impact operation, though. Of course, you could use a WiFi to Ethernet bridge or even an old router, but now you have a cable, a box, and another power cord to deal with. This solution is neat and clean. You bet we’ve already ordered a TP-Link adapter!
WiFi scopes are
nothing new
. We suspect Rigol didn’t want to worry about interference and regulatory acceptance, but who knows? Besides, it is fun
to add WiFi to wired devices
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720566",
"author": "bru3s",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T12:06:48",
"content": "Nifty little hack, albeit I’m not sure what this could be used for, at least without making other modifications to the onboard installation.Also could anyone explain why would the manufacturer use Android o... | 1,760,372,038.363486 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/neon-watch-glows-rather-nicely-tells-time/ | Neon Watch Glows Rather Nicely, Tells Time | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"neon",
"neon lamp",
"watch"
] | It wasn’t long after the development of the LED that LED watches became available. They were prized for their clear light output and low power draw. Neon bulbs, on the other hand, are thirsty for current and often warm or even hot in operation. And yet, [Lucas] found a way to build them into
a sweet watch that actually does the job
. Nice, right?
The design uses a simple trick to avoid killing the batteries with excessive power draw. The neon lamps are only activated when the user waves a hand above the watch, at which point the lamps light to display the time. Reading the time is a little fiddly, but understandable with the aid of this PDF diagram. Basically, the two electrodes of each neon lamp are driven independently. This gives each of the four lamps three possible states: with the first electrode lit, the second electrode lit, or both lit. Four lamps multiplied by three states equals 12—so the watch can display the hour quite easily. As for minutes, a similar scheme is used with
some modifications for clarity
. Setting the time is via a light sensor on the watch which picks up flashes from a computer screen.
It reminds us of a time when we once thought nixie tubes were too power hungry for a wristwatch build…
until the hackers of the world proved us wrong.
Video after the break.
[Thanks to Jan for the tip!] | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720585",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T13:36:57",
"content": "“Neon bulbs, on the other hand, are thirsty for current …”What? A LED typically might require 10 mA. A neon bulb is happy on 1 mA.Now, you get a lot more light out of that LED’s 30 mW vs the neon’s 60 mW,... | 1,760,372,038.409632 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/modeling-network-latency/ | Modeling Network Latency | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"docker",
"latency",
"network",
"proxy",
"self-hosted",
"speedbump",
"TCP",
"variable latency",
"waveform"
] | The selfhosting community is an interesting and useful part of the Internet dedicated to removing one’s own services and data from the cloud and hosting it on their own servers, often on hardware that can be physically touched. With that kind of network usage, it’s not uncommon for people to build their own routers, firewalls, and other network support systems from the ground up. And, if you go deep enough, maybe even a home lab dedicated to testing and improving the network’s various layers.
This piece of software helps simulate network latency
to more accurately assess quality of service, performance, and the optimization of one one’s own networks.
The tool, called Speedbump, allows a network administer to quickly build a test network where characteristics of the network such as base latency and wave shape and size can be set up. From there, a TCP proxy sends the network traffic through the virtual network, adding in a set amount of delay to anything traveling on the network. It can be installed (or built from source) on an existing installation or used from within a Docker terminal, so there are plenty of options depending on preference. It’s also available as a library for any programs written in Go.
While this certainly has applications for home labs where self-hosting services is done at a high level, this could have professional applications as well. For troubleshooting simpler network issues we’d always recommend
this tool
which allows a more comprehensive network test than the standard “ping” command, and if you haven’t heard of selfhosting before it’s probably time to read
this primer on it and build a hobby web server from scratch
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720524",
"author": "cbjamo",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T04:43:04",
"content": "The pingms tool’s website and repo have both been scrubbed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6720542",
"author": "the one and only mortimer",... | 1,760,372,038.448592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/floss-weekly-episode-766-webrtc-the-hack-that-connects-everyone-to-everything/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 766: WebRTC — The Hack That Connects Everyone To Everything | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"open source",
"WebRTC"
] | This week Jonathan Bennett and
Dan Lynch
talk with
Sean DuBois
, WebRTC wizard, all about the crazy feats the Pion Go server is capable of, how WebRTC is about to change OBS, and what it looks like to build a successful Open Source Career.
WebRTC is for more than video. The
TOR Snowflake project
uses
Pion
to sneak TOR traffic through firewalls even with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) at play. Since nobody wants to block web conferencing, TOR and even Wireguard can use this to slip though.
Sean is also working on some game-changing patches for OBS Studio, including WHEP support to go along with the newly introduced WHIP feature. This enables direct connections to another OBS client, as well as connection to another WebRTC client like
vdo.ninja
without running an embedded browser to make it work.
And then there’s
WebRTC For The Curious
, a free CC0 e-book all about the nuts and bolts of WebRTC. And
Broadcast Box
, a ready-to-run WebRTC one-to-many broadcasting solution that lets you run your own streaming service. You can connect with Sean at
the Real-time Broadcast Discord server
for information about all of the projects listed here and more!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show
right in the Hackaday Discord
? Next week we’re interviewing Jan-Piet Mens of the OwnTracks project!
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
For fans of the written word, we’ve got the
transcript for this week’s episode right here
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720484",
"author": "Ethan Waldo",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T00:26:35",
"content": "Really wish we’d see some movement onhttps://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/-/issues/1489so we can finally have useable av1 encoding :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,372,038.171513 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/blastoise-humidifier-shows-us-you-dont-need-a-3d-printer-if-youre-this-good-with-a-3d-pen/ | Blastoise Humidifier Shows Us You Don’t Need A 3D Printer If You’re This Good With A 3D Pen | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D pen",
"3d printer pen",
"3D printing pen",
"blastoise",
"pokemon"
] | [3D SANAGO] is a bit of a master when it comes to using a 3D-printing pen. Their latest work involved
fixing a broken humidifier and giving it a Pokemon-themed makeover
. It’s an education in just what can be achieved with a tool many of us write off as a simple novelty.
The basic idea of the build was to create a Blastoise figurine that serves as a humidifier. Work starts with marking out a basic outline on a round stone. The 3D pen is then used to create a tortoise shell with the appropriate concave shape, directly on the rock. [3D SANAGO] also demonstrates how a simple plastic framework can be heated with a blowtorch and shaped around the rock as needed to generate gentle curves. Meanwhile, a simple marker pen serves as a form for creating the gun barrels on Blastoise’s back. The legs are built with a similar technique, but with expert manipulation with a blowtorch to turn them into stubby muscular forms.
The full figurine is built up in stages, with individual wireframe components assembled into a complete body. The gaps in the frame are then filled in by hand, which takes a long time; [3D SANAGO] calls it “the most boring for sure.” Plenty of post-processing is then done with various sanding tools and a bladed tip on a soldering iron. The latter is used as the melting action allows the creation of a smooth final surface. In contrast, subtractive methods like sanding would leave holes and divots that need to be filled in before painting. There’s plenty of sealing to be done before paint, too, to ensure the interior of Blastoise can hold water without leaking. Then, the internal componets are installed and the body finished to its final cartoon form. In case you’re wondering, [3D SANAGO] says that sanding took 2-3 days to get such a great result.
If you really dig it, it’s on display at [3D SANAGO’s] cafe in Daejeon. Overall, it’s amazing to see such craftsmanship with a 3D pen. A resin printer could obviously print a wonderful Blastoise of similar quality, but there’s something about
watching the level of human skill
in this that’s just compelling. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Inne for the tip!] | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720447",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T21:21:45",
"content": "Having this level of craftsmanship makes the medium kind of a strange choice. Just to prove he can?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6720532",
"a... | 1,760,372,038.316666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/need-a-refresher-on-rms/ | Need A Refresher On RMS? | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"AC Voltage",
"rms"
] | If you mostly deal with DC current, you might not think much of root mean square or RMS measurements. Sure, you’ve seen meters that have “true RMS” settings, but what does it mean? If you don’t know — or you want a refresher — watch [Prof MAD’s]
recent video explaining the topic
.
There are two things to remember when working with RMS. If you put, say, 100VDC through a 100-ohm resistor, you’ll draw 1A and use 100W of power. However, since AC gradually makes its way to a peak value and then starts ramping down immediately, you can’t use the peak value or anything like it to figure out AC power. After all, the voltage is only at that peak for an instant. That’s where RMS comes in. 100 VAC RMS through a 100-ohm resistor will also consume an average of 100W over time.
The other thing to remember is that we use shortcuts for sine waves where we take the peak voltage and divide by the square root of 2. That only works for sine waves. For anything else, you need either hairy math or some way to directly measure the power.
RMS is one of those details a lot of people miss so
we’ve seen other explanations for it
. If you want to derive the math for an arbitrarily complex AC waveform, you are probably going to need some
calculus
. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720162",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T03:58:47",
"content": "I was taught that RMS is the voltage / current which will heat a resistor to the same amount as a DC voltage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,038.657782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/reverse-engineering-a-russian-tornado-s-guidance-circuit-board/ | Reverse-Engineering A Russian Tornado-S Guidance Circuit Board | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"military electronics",
"missile",
"russia"
] | With Russian military hardware quite literally raining down onto the ground in Ukraine, it’s little wonder that a sizeable part of PCBs and more from these end up being sold on EBay. This was thus where [msylvain] got a guidance board from a 300 mm Tornado-S 9M542 GLONASS-guided projectile from, for some
exploration and reverse-engineering
. The first interesting surprise was that the board was produced in February of 2023, with the Tornado-S system having begun production in 2016.
Presumed location of the PCB under investigation in the Tornado-S rocket.
The 9M542 and similar rocket projectiles are designed to reach their designated area with as much precision as possible, which where the guidance system comes into play. Using both GLONASS and inertial navigation, the rocket’s stack of PCBs (pictured) are supposed to process the sensor information and direct the control system, which for the 9M542 consists out of four canards. The board that [msylvain] is looking at appears to be one of the primary PCBs, containing some DC-DC and logic components, as well as three beefy
gate arrays
(ULAs). While somewhat similar to FPGAs, these are far less configurable, which is why the logic ICs around it are needed to tie everything together. For this reason, gate array technology was phased out globally by the 1990s due to the competition of FPGAs, which makes this dual-sided PCB both very modern and instantly vintage.
This is where a distinct 1980s Soviet electronics vibe begins, as along the way of noting the function of each identified IC, it’s clear that these are produced by the same Soviet-era factories, just with date stamps ranging from 2018 to more recent and surface-mount DIP-sized packages rather than through-hole. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720112",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T01:39:19",
"content": "Be careful with those boards.Or else the chinese will buy them, recycle the chips and sell them back to Russia.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "672... | 1,760,372,038.779417 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/kinetic-clock-is-a-clean-modern-way-to-tell-time/ | Kinetic Clock Is A Clean Modern Way To Tell Time | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"clock",
"time"
] | Hackers and makers aren’t usually too interested in basic round analog clocks. They tend to prefer building altogether more arcane and complicated contraptions to display numbers for the telling of time. [alstroemeria] did just that
with this nifty kinetic clock build.
The basic concept of the kinetic clock is to have a flat plate, which individual segments raise out of to create a physical (instead of illuminated) 7-segment display. This is achieved with servos which push the segments in and out using a small rack mechanism. It’s not a sophisticated build; it simply uses 30 servos to handle all the segments needed to tell time. Thus, the Arduino Mega was the perfect tool for the job. With a sensor shield added on, it has an abundance of IO, driving a ton of servos is a cinch. There’s also a DS3231 real time clock to help it keep accurate time.
Incidentally, it’s a hefty thing to print, according to YouTuber [Lukas Deem]
who replicated the project
. It took around 85 hours to print, and a total of 655 grams of filament – not counting mistakes and trashed parts.
And if you think you’re having deja-vu, you might well be.
We’ve seen a take on this exquisite design before
. We liked it then, and we like it now.
Overall, it’s a stylish build that looks as good as your 3D printer’s output will allow. A
resin printer would be a massive boon in this regard
. Video after the break. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719963",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T21:15:33",
"content": "Very interesting! Would be cool to make this out of metal using EDM to carve the sliding parts…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6719973",
"au... | 1,760,372,038.601423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/50-10gbps-mesh-network-uses-usb4/ | $50 10Gbps Mesh Network Uses USB4 | Al Williams | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"10GBASE-T",
"10gbps",
"Thunderbolt",
"usb4"
] | You want to build a cluster of computers, but you need a high-speed network fabric that can connect anything to anything. Big bucks, right? [Fang-Pen]
developed a 10 Gbps full-mesh network using USB4
that cost him under $50. The first part of the post is about selecting a low-power mini PC, but if you skip down to the “Networking” section, you’ll find the details on the cluster.
The machines selected have two USB4 ports. In theory, you can transfer 40 Gbps on these ports. In reality, the cluster only hit 11 Gbps, but that’s still well above common Ethernet speeds. [Fang-Pen] has yet to determine why he isn’t getting even faster speeds.
Since Linux is Linux, there is a module for networking over Thunderbolt, so the rest is basically set up. There are, of course, some limitations. First, it is only fully connected because the cluster has three computers. More computers would need more USB4 ports or more hardware.
In addition, the standard says you can only count on full speed with cables 0.8 meters or shorter. However, that’s the 40 Gbps number. We wondered if a 2 m cable, rated at 20 Gbps, would have still managed 11 Gbps in this setup. A 10GBASE-T network, on the other hand, should allow 100-meter cables. But for a cluster of computers, do you really care?
We’d be interested to see this idea extended to more nodes. High-speed fabric can be useful in networked disk servers, parallel computing, and probably some other scenarios. We’ve seen
10G Ethernet on the Pi
, although the PCI bus limited it to about 3.6 Gbps. For reference, we saw
another three computer networks with 10GBASE-T
done for about $130 with similar limitations. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719901",
"author": "ChristheITguy",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T19:55:57",
"content": "The 40Gbit rating is raw throughput and doesn’t include the overhead for error correction and alt mode channels. Realistically, you’ll see ~25Gbit maximum usable bandwidth. Maybe that mini has its t... | 1,760,372,038.722126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/ask-hackaday-why-are-self-checkouts-failing/ | Ask Hackaday: Why Are Self-Checkouts Failing? | Al Williams | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"self-checkout",
"technology"
] | Most people who read Hackaday have positive feelings about automation. (Notice we said
most.
) How many times have you been behind someone in a grocery store line waiting for them to find a coupon, or a cashier who can’t make change without reading the screen and thought: “There has to be a better way.” The last few years have seen that better way, but now, companies are deciding the grass isn’t greener after all. The BBC reports that self-checkouts have been a
“spectacular failure.”
That led us to wonder why that should be true.
As a concept, everyone loves it. Stores can hire fewer cashiers. Customers, generally, like having every line open and having a speedy exit from the store. The problem is, it hasn’t really panned out that way. Self-checkout stations frequently need maintenance, often because it can’t figure out that you put something in the bag. Even when they work flawlessly, a customer might have an issue or not understand what to do. Maybe you’ve scanned something twice and need one of them backed off. Then, there are the age-restricted products that require verification. So now you have to hire a crew of not-cashiers to work at the automated not-register. Sure, you can have one person cover many registers, but when one machine is out of change, another won’t print a receipt, and two people are waiting for you to verify their beer purchase, you are back to waiting. Next thing you know, there’s a line.
Self-checkout by [Pin Add] –
CC By 2.0 Deed
Another problem stores have is that the systems may facilitate theft, known as “shrink” in the industry. One study found that self-checkout systems have twice the shrink rate of human cashiers. Some of it is intentional, of course. But some of it is simply user error. You think you scanned something but you didn’t. Or the bar code picked up a nearby item instead of the one you intended. However, that’s also how people scam the system. You can swipe a bar code from some bananas, for example, scan that, and then put the equivalent weight in deli meat into your bag.
These systems aren’t cheap, which surprised us. A four-kiosk system might run upwards of $100,000. But that cost would be quickly absorbed if you could fire your cashiers and get customers to do their work for free. Faster? Some studies suggest that’s perception. Because you have an active role in the checkout process, it seems faster, even though it is often actually slower. Waiting in line or waiting for a non-cashier to approve things makes it even worse.
But Why?
So why is this a problem? Is it that the technology isn’t ready yet? Is it just poor implementations? Or do we need new strategies? After all, we’ve seen tech like videotape make false starts before catching on. We’ve also seen plenty of new products killed by poor implementation. New approaches are a bit more difficult, though.
One problem may be the whole idea of a checkout station to start with. Sometimes tech changes require you to approach problems differently. For example, Sam’s Club already lets you scan items as you put them in your cart using your smartphone. You pay on your phone; a human spot-checks you on exit. However, they are rolling out an “arch” you pass through, and cameras take pictures from all sides, verifying bar codes and items they can identify. Presumably, it will reject you if you have something extra and pass you if it can validate a certain percentage of your order. Amazon has famously fielded stores where you identify when you enter, load up, and leave. The store figures out what you bought and automatically deducts the cost.
ATMs have all but eradicated bank lobbies and tellers for all but the most complex transactions. But think about this: ATMs rarely fail. Sure, sometimes they are out of service or know they don’t have enough money or network connections and tell you that. But when was the last time an ATM gave you more or less money than you wanted without telling you? Imagine if you had to repeatedly scan your ATM card before it took and then, sometimes, it would not know if you had enough money, so someone had to check on it or you might have to go inside to get the 8th $20 bill of your $160 withdrawal because it only gave you seven bills. You probably wouldn’t use ATMs.
What do you think? Can self-checkout be saved? How? Will it sink beneath the waves only to resurface in 20 years with robo-AI cashiers? Let us know in the comments.
Of course, if you make your living as a cashier, this
might not be at all amusing
. While we think retailers are missing out by not “gamifying” self checkout — you win 10% off! — we don’t think
competing for speed is the right game
.
Banner Photo: “
Self-checkout not-so-high-tech
” by [Anj Simmons]. (WinXP!) | 260 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719820",
"author": "DJ",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T18:08:29",
"content": "Probably doesn’t help that they originally started using these for express checkouts, but then figured, “Hey why not just replace all of our workers?”. When it was just for express checkouts, it was great.",
... | 1,760,372,039.217304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/a-practical-open-source-air-purifier/ | A Practical Open Source Air Purifier | Jenny List | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"air filter",
"air purifier",
"filter"
] | In the years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s fair to say we’ve all become a lot more aware of the air quality surrounding us. Many of us have added a CO
2
monitor to our collection of tools, and quite a few will have an air filtration system too. There are plenty of devices on the market that fulfill this niche at varying qualities and prices, but shouldn’t a decent filter be something to make for yourself? [Naomi Wu] thinks so, and
she’s put up the design for her Nukit open air purifier online
under the GPLv3.
The principle of the unit is simple enough: it’s a box with an HVAC filter on the front and a set of computer fans on its side to draw air through. But it’s more than just a box, as there are three separate versions for wall-mount, hanging mount or a freestanding tower, and each one comes as a DXF file with all parts ready for laser cutting. It’s about as straightforward a way to get your hands on a well-designed and high quality air purifier as could be imagined.
[Naomi] has been quiet for a while in her familiar role as YouTube maker and guide to the nooks and crannies of her native Shenzhen, so it’s very positive to see her still active and producing projects after being warned off social media by the authorities. If you’d like to see another recent project of hers, look no further than
her update to [Bunnie Huang]’s Shenzhen guide
. | 44 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719798",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T17:36:29",
"content": "This seems to be reinventing the wheel. Adding a couple brackets (or a bungie cord) to the intake side of a 20″ box fan gives better air flow and is cheaper.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,372,038.859113 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-really-snazzy-folding-keyboard/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Really Snazzy Folding Keyboard | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"bar-lock typewriter",
"EVH 5150",
"folding keyboard",
"Killer Whale",
"Mintlodica keycaps",
"Raspberry Pi Zero",
"typewriter collection"
] | Sometimes you just have to throw your hat in the ring, and throw it hard.
Here is [mkdxdx]’s rockin’ EVH 5150-esque take on the keyboard business.
The Mriya foldable keyboard aims to be and sport a number of things, and it does all of them in great style. I could totally see my fingers flying over this thing somewhere in the wild, with robots fighting in the distance.
Image by [mkdxdx] via
Hackaday.IO
I have to say I really like the fact that [mkdxdx] uses thumb keys here for what I can only assume are Enter, Space, and Backspace. It’s a nice compromise between compactness and ergonomics. I also really like the totally impractical but quite cool-looking connector that runs between the top and bottom.
If the color scheme looks familiar, you’re probably remembering
[mkdxdx]’s first-place-winning entry into the 2023 Cyberdeck Contest
. This RP2040-based keyboard might just end up as part of a larger project, but it’s already an outstanding peripheral. We can’t wait to see the next phase, should there be one for this keyboard.
A Passion For Collecting Typewriters
It started with an idle thought that Mehedi Hasan Faud expressed aloud to his girlfriend one day. ‘If I had a typewriter, I would write you letters,’ he told her.
That was in 2017. Now,
Faud’s collection has grown to over 60 machines
, most of which are in working condition. Did he ever start writing those letters to his girlfriend? You bet he did, and that’s what ignited his passion for typewriters.
Prior to typewriters, Faud collected old cameras and telephones. And rather than have these things all over the house collecting dust, Faud plans to one day open a museum. “If the opportunity arises, I want to create a space where people can come and explore the history of typewriters,” he said. But for now, the museum is in his bedroom. Sounds familiar.
The Centerfold: Killer Whale Is a Thriller In Mint
Image by [Gypsy-hymn] via
reddit
[Gypsy-hymn] says their Killer Whale is finally finished, and that’s no small feat.
This Raspberry Pi Pico-driven keyboard is sold as a kit, and between the geometry of the thing and the choose-your-own-adventure-style
build guide
, it’s and undertaking that isn’t for the faint of heart.
As lovely and matchy-matchy as this all looks together, the macro pad — Mech Wild’s Murph Pad — is a completely different animal. The Killer Whale itself is even sold singly, so you must by two to make a split keyboard. But that just doubles your options for pointing devices. So why does this look so good? All the plastic matches, and the Magical Girl keycaps from Mintlodica really tie it together.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: Bar-Lock 4
Image by [Martin Howard] via
Antique Typewriters
This particular beauty is named after the those things hiding just behind that large, baroque hunk of copper.
Far from just being beautiful to behold, the bar-lock as it was called comprised a series of pins that guide and then lock each type bar as it arrives at the platen. This was supposed to allow for more accurate striking.
Like many machines of the time, the keyboard was doubled — one set of keys for lower case, and another for upper case. Unlike many typewriters of the time (1895), the typist could see what they were typing on the Bar-Lock 4 as long as they sat up straight enough to see over the shield.
The Bar-Lock was invented by Charles Spiro, who apprenticed at his father’s watch shop. Spiro also invented the Columbia index typewriter.
ICYMI: the Zerowriter Gives You Zero Excuses Not to Write
Image by [zerowriter] via
Hackaday.IO
In a perfect world, one could procure a small word processor here in 2024 without breaking the bank. But that ship has sailed, at least commercially speaking. But that’s okay, because this is Hackaday, and we make our own toys around here.
It’s really never been easier to whip up your own little on-the-go writing machine, and
the Zerowriter proves that.
Built on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, this little machine is a fairly inexpensive foray into the territory of writer’s cyberdeck.
It is, after all, essentially a Pi Zero, a Vortex Core 40% keyboard, and an E-ink display. The most expensive bit is that prefab keyboard, so figure out a way to roll your own and you might get there a bit more cheaply.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720091",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T00:46:26",
"content": "Like the Commenters on reddit said,The Killer Whale needs more photos.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6720387",
"aut... | 1,760,372,038.915966 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/arduino-virtually/ | Arduino, Virtually | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"simulation"
] | While simulating an Arduino isn’t a new idea, a recent project by [LRusso] provides an
open source JavaScript simulator that runs in your browser
. You can try it out live or host it yourself if you prefer.
The simulator looks much like the standard IDE, so there isn’t much to learn. You can select from several targets, including a UNO R3, a MEGA 1280, a MEGA 2560, or a NANO V3. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see the correct number of digital pins, analog pins, and the serial monitor. The code is relatively new, and we noticed that the digital and output pins seem to work only for outputs. There is no way to modify any of the values from the user interface. You can, however, enter things into the serial monitor.
You can run a canned demo that
uses digital and analog output
. There is also another sample that
uses the serial port
. Unlike some other simulators, you can’t really add much external circuitry but, for some purposes, that isn’t a problem.
If you are looking for more, there is
Simulide
, which is also free.
Falstad
can do mixed signal simulations with Arduino code. There’s also
Wokwi
, which we’ve covered a few times before. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720570",
"author": "Georgi Angelov",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T12:31:07",
"content": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKojOHDvfC0",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6720611",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T14:... | 1,760,372,039.301826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/linux-fu-wheres-that-darn-file/ | Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File? | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"file search",
"indexing",
"linux"
] | Disk storage has exploded in the last 40 years. These days, even a terabyte drive is considered small. There is one downside, though. The more stuff you have, the harder it is to find it. Linux provides numerous tools to find files when you can’t remember their name. Each has plusses and minuses, and choosing between them is often difficult.
Definitions
Different tools work differently to find files. There are several ways you might look for a file:
Find a file if you know its name but not its location.
Find a file when you know some part of its name.
Find a file that contains something.
Find a file with certain attributes (e.g., larger than 100 kB)
You might combine these, too. For example, it is reasonable to query all PDF files created in the last week that are larger than 100 kB.
There are plenty of different types of attributes. Some file systems support tags, too. So, you might have a PERSONAL tag to mark files that apply to you personally. Unfortunately, tool support for tags is somewhat lacking, as you’ll see later.
Another key point is how up-to-date your search results are. If you sift through terabytes of files for each search, that will be slow. If you keep an index, that’s fast, but the index will quickly be out of date. Do you periodically refresh the index? Do you watch the entire file system for changes and then update the index? Different tools do it differently.
Find
The most common tool is, in fact, no tool at all. The find command just does what you would do. It does directory listings and searches through them for whatever you want. The most common way to use the command is:
find . -name 'hackaday.txt' -print
You can probably leave off the -print as that’s the default action. However, find
can do so many things
like filter by dates, attributes, and even execute commands using the file names it finds, which can be dangerous.
There’s no index to build and store which is nice, but that also means it can be slow. If you do a find / you’ll get a search across the entire file system. However, find is fast for reasonable directory depths.
If you are lazy, you can ask a website
to generate your find commands for you
. If you want a faster, more modern find, try
fd,
which is called
fd-find
on Ubuntu; you execute it with
fdfind
.
Locate/Rlocate/Mlocate/Plocate
If you use find a lot on entire filesystems, you’ll eventually tire of waiting for it to search everywhere. What then? Well, you aren’t the first one to get tired of it, so back in the dawn of Unix, the locate command appeared. The idea is simple: Periodically the
updatedb
command builds at least one index file then locate searches that index. You can create multiple indices, say one for user files, one for system files, or maybe one for a network drive produced on the network drive’s local machine.
There have been many improved versions of locate, although the latest appears to be
plocate
. If you want to use locate, you should probably use this version, which is very similar to the original. There are options to search without case comparison, for example. You can use regular expressions, limit the search to the file name (and not the path), and control the output format to some extent.
No matter what version you use, you should look at
/etc/updatedb.conf
and try to control the indexing process. For example, you might not want to index remote filesystems. Dropping the index for transient files like browser caches is also good.
Of course, locate and its sister commands can only find what you’ve indexed. If you index once a month, you will have trouble finding recent files. Of course, you can reissue the index command manually, but still. In addition, locate doesn’t look inside your files or help you with attribute searches.
There was a time when nearly every Linux system had some form of locate preinstalled. These days, many distros make you install it manually and have a GUI-based search as the default. If you want to use a GUI with locate-like tools, there are a few options.
Krusader
, one of the KDE file managers, can perform locate searches. There is also
catfish
. However, the GUIs often can’t handle all the options that locate provides.
Baloo
If you use KDE, then you certainly have seen Baloo. This is the default KDE file indexer. It is very powerful but also very intrusive. Early versions were infamous for chewing up huge amounts of resources while indexing large files. Worse, there were few ways to control what it was doing.
Honestly, I use Baloo, but I have a set of scripts that only allows it to index while my computer is idle and in the wee hours of the morning. Is that still necessary? I don’t know. I’m afraid to unleash Baloo on my system.
So why use Baloo? It integrates perfectly with KDE. It also indexes file system tags and, if you don’t turn it off, file contents. It uses KDE’s metadata extractors to look inside files like archives, for example.
You can use the
baloosearch
: kio to get a search from many places inside KDE. Normally, you search the Baloo database from Dolphin or KRunner, but there are command line tools, too. The
balooctl
program gives you some options for working with the database and the daemon. The
baloosearch
tool lets you find files from the command line. The database can be large, so even a query can take a long time. Remember that Baloo indexes content, so you will sometimes see a result that doesn’t appear to match in the file name. That probably means the search string appears in the file. You can see more about what Baloo knows about a file using the balooshow program with the -x option.
The
query language
is very complete. For example, you can search for MP3 files from a particular album or images with a certain aspect ratio. You can also use operators like the less than or greater than sign.
You definitely want to configure Baloo. I’ve found that any remote file system or loop in the file system will bring it to its knees.
Recoll
Recoll
is another file searcher that can either update its index periodically or watch the file system constantly. Like baloo, it can decode several file types natively and with external programs. It is actively developed and tries to dig through as much as possible (although indexing inside tar files is off by default).
As noted on the program’s homepage, Recoll will index an MS Word document stored as an attachment to an e-mail message inside a Thunderbird folder archived in a Zip file. Wow.
Other Programs
There are some other search programs that are either obscure or were popular at one time but are less popular today:
Tracker and
MetaTracker
Beagle
SearchMonkey
Angry Search
FSearch
Of course, there are doubtless many more. Do you use a program we missed? Let us know in the comments. An example of a remote file system you might to exclude from indexing?
Hackaday
. Want to build your own system? Be sure you know about
incron
and the file system watches. | 20 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720398",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T18:25:52",
"content": "I’ve got a few aliases in my .bashrc to do that.ff is “find file”, a recursive search for any file name containing the text. It would manage a regex, but in practice I never use those. Just type the extens... | 1,760,372,039.455419 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/fan-with-automatic-door-is-perfect-for-camper-vans/ | Fan With Automatic Door Is Perfect For Camper Vans | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"camper",
"camping",
"fan",
"vent fan",
"ventilation",
"ventilation fan"
] | Ventilation fans are useful for clearing stuffy or stale air out of a space. However, they also tend to act as a gaping hole into said space. In the case of caravans and RVs, an open ventilation fan can be terrible for keeping the interior space warm, quiet, and free from dust. “Blast doors” or fan blocks are a common way to solve this problem.
[Raphtronic] whipped up a duly-equipped ventilation fan to do just that.
The solution was to create a fan setup with a custom fan holder and a sliding door to block airflow when necessary. [Raphtronic] designed a fan frame for this purpose using parts 3D printed in ASA plastic. This material was chosen such that they could readily withstand the 50 C (120 F) temperatures typical in his Ford Transit camper during the summer. A simple 12 V ventilation fan was then fitted to the frame, along with a sliding door controlled by a 12 V linear actuator.
The mode of operation is simple. A DPDT switch controls the linear actuator. Flipped one way, the linear actuator is fed 12 V in such a polarity as to move it to open the fan door. In this mode, 12 volts is also supplied to the fan to start ventilation. When the switch is flipped the other way, the actuator moves to the closed position, and a diode in the circuit stops the fan spinning backwards. As a bonus, limit switches are built into the linear actuator, so there’s no need for any microcontrollers, “off” switch positions, or additional wiring.
It’s a tidy solution to the problem of ventilating a camper in a clean and effective manner. Files are on GitHub for those wishing to build their own. We’ve seen some great work in this area before, like
this off-grid van project
that made excellent use of 3D scanning during the build process. If you’ve designed and built your own nifty camping gear, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line! | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720511",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T02:58:54",
"content": "All that work and words and no picture of the final installation?I don’t get whether this fan is to go on the van itself or in the (supposed garage?) the van is parked in.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,372,039.257848 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/sun-on-the-run-diving-into-solar-with-a-mobile-pv-system/ | Sun On The Run: Diving Into Solar With A Mobile PV System | Dan Maloney | [
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"charge controller",
"combiner",
"inverter",
"lithium",
"MC-4",
"mobile",
"mppt",
"off grid",
"photovoltaic",
"pv",
"solar",
"trailer"
] | For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of interest in small-scale residential solar power systems lately. Even in my neck of the woods, where the sun doesn’t shine much from October to April, solar arrays are sprouting up on rooftops in a lot of local neighborhoods. And it’s not just here in suburbia; drive a little way out into the country or spend some time looking around in Google maps and it won’t take long to spy a sizable array of PV panels sitting in a field next to someone’s ranch house or barn.
Solar has gotten to the point where the expense of an installation is no longer a serious barrier to entry, at least if you’re willing to put in a little sweat equity and not farm the project out to a contractor. Doing it yourself requires some specialized tools and knowledge, though, over and above your standard suite of DIY skills. So, in the spirit of sharing hard-won knowledge, I decided to take the somewhat unusual step of writing up one of my personal projects, which has been in progress for a couple of years now and resulted in a solar power system that isn’t on a rooftop or a ground-mounted array at all, but rather is completely mobile: my solar trailer.
The Big Idea
Right up front, I’ll admit that this project is a little weird. It sure raises eyebrows around the neighborhood; I can’t count the number of people who stopped to chat while I was working on it in the driveway, neighbors and total strangers alike. It’s a conversation starter for sure, which of course has its pros and cons itself. So what’s behind the design?
The idea started forming in my head some time ago, probably at least five years ago. I wanted to build a solar system but I didn’t particularly want one on our house. We have a very poor solar aspect in my neighborhood, populated as it is with thousands of towering Ponderosa pines. I’ve got a southern-facing roof that could comfortably hold perhaps a dozen PV panels, but to get sun on them for even part of the day I’d need to cut down at least six large trees, most of which are on the property of my neighbors to the south. At about $1,000 to remove each tree, plus lacking the desire to penetrate our brand-new shingles, the idea of a roof-mounted array was a non-starter.
There was another factor, though, one that I found more compelling and pretty much drove the design in the end. I really wanted a solar installation that could be moved around, something that I could use not only at my house but also at any rural property we might choose to buy someday. And “rural” means something in North Idaho; it’s very easy to find property that’s far enough away from any infrastructure that running wires to it is a practical impossibility. We were quoted $18,000 to run electrical service to one property we looked at, and that didn’t include the cost of conduit, excavation, and copper. And that was on a road where there were already power lines. It seemed like there were better ways to spend $18,000.
That’s when I came up with the idea of adorning a utility trailer with solar panels. With panels on the top and along one side and plenty of room inside for batteries and other equipment, I could have a mobile powerhouse that could easily be transported to any off-grid property we’d like, or parked at home to provide backup power. The trailer would serve to protect the sensitive electronics from the elements, secure it at least somewhat from vandals and thieves, and as a bonus provide some storage space for tools and equipment. It would also be easy to reposition it for optimal solar aspect, another big plus.
The decision to make a solar trailer came not a minute too soon, because right after I bought the trailer, the pandemic-induced trailer-to-tiny-house conversion craze started and there wasn’t a trailer to be found. I got the biggest trailer I could afford and spent the summer of 2020 converting it.
The first job was insulating it, as I figured a stable temperature would be better for the batteries and electronics inside. I ripped out all the walls, ceiling, and floor, filled the spaces with extruded polystyrene foam insulation, and replaced the wood. I also lined the exterior of the chassis with galvanized sheet steel, to protect the insulation from rodents.
The first step was to gut the trailer and add insulation
The bottom is skinned with sheet steel to deter rodents. Knees and elbows were skinned many times too while crawling around on the driveway.
EMT and Unistrut frames for the PV arrays. Threaded rod and turnbuckles tension the frame and reduce racking
Telescoping support arms for arrays are anchored to the trailer frame
Mounting the Arrays
Fittings needed a little reaming to work with standard EMT conduit.
Next up: solar panel mounts. My PV panels are Renogy 270-watt 24-volt panels. I bought eight, but my trailer was only big enough for six — three on the side, and three up top. I wanted to be able to fold the panels flat against the trailer for travel but pop them out for use, and hopefully adjust their angle for differing solar heights during the year.
I puzzled over how to do this for a long time until finally hitting on the idea of frames bolted together from standard electrical construction materials:
EMT
, or electrical metallic tubing, and
Unistrut
. My original plan had been to use 8020 aluminum extrusions, but the other stuff is much easier to get, and the galvanized finish is good for outdoor use. The adjustability of the arrays is thanks to
these interesting fittings
, which are aimed at hipsters who want to make shelves and desks from pipe. With a little modification, these (admittedly expensive) fixtures fit the EMT conduit well and allowed me to make each array hinged and adjustable.
Screw jack detail, before welding into a piece of pipe. The drive end has a thrust bearing and a bronze bushing, while the other end is screwed into an Acme nut welded into the smaller diameter pipe.
Once I got the six PV panels mounted I ran into my first major problem: these arrays are heavy. I imagined that I’d be able to stand the roof array up manually while standing on a ladder, but the near-death experience I had the first time I tried it was enough to convince me I needed help. I bounced around a lot of ideas before I designed a simple screw jack using a long Acme threaded rod running inside two nested pieces of EMT.
Luckily, 1-1/4″ diameter EMT nests nicely inside the 1-1/2″ stuff, making it easy to make telescoping assemblies; I took advantage of this fact to make the telescoping support arms for the array. Of all the aspects of this build, I’m particularly proud of the panel jack. I did some real mechanical engineering to decide on materials —
Euler’s column formula
to figure out how much load the screw would take before buckling, and
torque equations
to figure out if the jack would be able to lift the panel. And it works — I just put a 7/8″ socket on my cordless drill and run the panel up while standing on the ground, safe and sound.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/solar-panel-jack-1.mp4
Wiring Things Up
With the mechanical parts of the build largely addressed, it was time to move on to the electrical build. Ironically, this part gave me more pause than the mechanical build. I’m not any sort of engineer, but I’m far more comfortable with electrical engineering concepts than I am with mechanical engineering. But still, I was mindful that I’d be dealing with a lot of power, both on the DC side and with the AC, and coupled with visions of lithium battery fires, I was perhaps just a wee bit scared that I’d get something catastrophically wrong.
Weatherproof penetrations for PV wiring keep the trailer dry
Final layout of the electrical panel, with “big boy” batteries
The (more or less) completed trailer
There was also the need to pick out the right equipment. This would need to be an off-grid system, as opposed to a grid-tie system. Grid-ties can be simpler since they don’t have batteries; when there’s extra power they just ship it off to the grid instead of storing it locally. My off-grid system would need not only batteries but an MPPT controller to manage charging from the PV arrays as well as an inverter to convert DC to AC. I did a lot of research before finally landing on a Growatt 3000-watt 48-volt hybrid inverter/charger — it’s been discontinued but
this one
is comparable.
The inverter was an easy Amazon purchase. Batteries, however, were another matter. After a lot of hemming and hawing, I ordered some used 48-volt, 3.2-kWh rack-mount LG batteries from Battery Hookup — they were a one-time deal, so don’t bother to look for them. Using guidance from
a video by David Poz
, I stripped out the proprietary 14S 2P battery management cards and installed a 100A BMS in each.
Original 48-volt batteries under construction. The 100A BMS fit nicely in the space between each 24-volt pack, but it always made me antsy.
While these batteries work fine for what they are, I have to admit that their homebrew nature gnawed at me. The idea that a simple wiring mistake could result in a fire that would destroy years of hard work was hard to handle. Coupled with the fact that my testing revealed that they only had about a quarter of their original capacity left, I decided that it was time for “big boy” batteries.
There are a ton of rack-mount, 48-volt lithium batteries out there, some of better quality than others. I watched a lot of
teardowns by Will Prowse
before settling on a pair of
Ruixu
100-Ah server-rack batteries. Along with their knock-down bracket racks, bus bar kits, distribution cables, and most importantly, a
UL1973 listing
, they make a nice addition to my system. Although I will admit that since it was -13°F (-25°C) at the time of writing this, I wish the
self-heating option
had been available when I bought them.
Fit and Finish – Almost
When I build something or tackle any project, I try my hardest to work up to the professional standards of the job as best I understand them. While I didn’t have much to go on for the mechanical end of this build, and it remains to be seen if the panels will stay on the trailer when it’s being towed at highway speeds, I’ve got a little more experience with electrical wiring. So I tried to make all the wiring as tidy and professional as possible. On the DC side, I invested in a dedicated crimp tool for
MC4 connectors
, the industry standard for PV applications. I used the appropriate gauge wire for stringing together the arrays, a fused and surge-protected PV combiner box to make connections between the top and side arrays, and proper weatherproof penetrations to get the PV wires inside the trailer. I was extremely cautious with battery wiring, too, using oversized welding cable and a ratcheting crimper to attach properly sized copper lugs, and made sure to use the correct DC circuit breakers to protect the batteries.
Growatt doesn’t leave a lot of room for wiring, especially on the AC side, but flexible conduit helped a bit. Note the fire-resistant material between the inverter and wood wall paneling; fiber-cement tile backer board works well for this. And I painted it black, because I’m not a savage.
On the AC side, inverter inputs and outputs use industry-standard enclosures and fixtures, and everything is protected by circuit breakers and GFCIs. I am not a licensed electrician, so I can’t vouch for anything I did as being “up to code.” I did try to work to a good level of craftsmanship, though; after all, I don’t want to kill myself or anyone else thanks to a careless mistake. One area I know I have more work to do is grounding. The PV arrays are all bonded together, and everything is tied to the trailer chassis right now. But I need to add a ground connection for off-grid use. Right now, the trailer is grounded through the shore-power connection, but if I were use this away from my house, the ground would be floating, and that’s not good. Also, the Growatt inverter internally connects neutral to ground, which isn’t good since the National Electric Code requires that neutral and ground only be bonded at the service entry point. I need to add a relay that will break the connection between ground and neutral inside the inverter while the trailer is connected to shore power; I have the materials to do it, but the project has been on my to-do list for far too long.
Also on my list are niceties such as a dedicated power drive for the panel jack so the PVs can be retracted automatically in high winds, an automatic start signal to turn on a generator for true off-grid use, and built-in heaters for the batteries. I’m also planning on adding a 12-volt house battery system, because 12-volt power is just so handy to have around.
I haven’t bothered to tote up the costs on this project yet, as doing so would probably spoil some of the fun for me. I think I can safely say that it came in way under the $18,000 I would have spent to get electrical service dropped, so I consider myself ahead of the game. I did invest a tremendous amount of time in this build; on and off over the last three years, I’d estimate I’ve got a couple of hundred hours into it. But it was a real skill-builder for me, and for that reason alone I’m glad I tackled it. That I ended up with the ability to generate and store power is just icing on the cake. | 36 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720344",
"author": "Will B.",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T15:25:19",
"content": "Looks sorta like what the Everlanders did:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcck1ejlXt8",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6720354",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,039.542571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/compute-the-mandelbrot-set-with-a-custom-risc-v-cpu/ | Compute The Mandelbrot Set With A Custom RISC-V CPU | Julian Scheffers | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"fpga",
"mandelbrot set",
"RISC-V"
] | When faced with an FPGA, some people might use it to visualize the Mandelbrot set. Others might use it to make CPUs. But what happens if you combine the two? [Michael Kohn] shows us what happens with his
RISC-V CPU
with an instruction specially made for computing the Mandelbrot set.
[Michael] takes us through the unusual process of
turning his 8008 into a RISC-V CPU
. Re-using bits of logic here and replacing other logic there leaves him with a functional RISC-V core. Not finished, [Michael] takes it upon himself to also create a custom instruction just for computing a point for the Mandelbrot set, accelerating the demo from twenty-three seconds to merely one!
Still not finished, [Michael] also creates an implementation of the long gone
F100-L CPU
, once again with added Mandelbrot set flair, simultaneously with the RISC-V project. Finally, he ports his
“Java Grinder”
Java bytecode compiler to both RISC-V and the F100-L, because Java runs on 1 Billion devices
TM
. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720290",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T12:51:11",
"content": "Now the theme song from “The A Team” is running through my head.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6720322",
"aut... | 1,760,372,039.585091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/17/printed-centrifugal-dust-separator-stays-on-budget/ | Printed Centrifugal Dust Separator Stays On Budget | Maya Posch | [
"how-to"
] | [
"centrifugal",
"dust collection",
"dust separator",
"woodworking"
] | Anyone who’s ever spent time in a woodworking shop knows how much dust is produced when cutting, sanding, and so on. [Tim] of
Pilson Guitars
was looking to outfit his shop with centrifugal dust separators to combat the problem, which are supposed to remove over 99% of the sawdust particles right out of the air. Unfortunately, they can cost thousands of dollars. So he
decided to try making his own
.
Centrifugal dust separator design, by Tim at Pilson Guitars.
Using a clear PVC tube and 100 hours of printing on his Prusa i3 MK3, his CAD file had come to life, ready to use the power of centrifugal air to leave just enough fine dust in the output port to have a HEPA filter handle the remainder. Unfortunately, initial testing showed that a single dust separator filtered out far less than 90%, and even adding a second unit bumped that up to only 94.2%. Still impressive, but this would clog up a HEPA filter in no time. Thus [Tim]
had a second try at it
, after a range of helpful comments to the first video.
Changes included a different design for the impeller blades to improve the vortex, as well as attempting to run the system in series. Sadly more issues cropped up, with apparently the air also seeking a way via the collection bins that has [Tim] rethinking more aspects of the design. He has made the design files (STEP and more) available on GitHub for perusal by the community and hopefully some constructive input on how to DIY such dust separation system.
Over the years, we’ve seen many different approaches to the problem of dust collection.
We’ve covered other 3D printed solutions
if your printer is looking for something to do, but if you’d prefer something a little more low-tech,
this traffic cone dust separator is particularly clever
.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip. | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720259",
"author": "Arjan Wiegel",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T10:51:36",
"content": "I have a vacuum connected to a large bucket with the inlet on the side of the lid and an elbow in the bucket to make the air go swirl. It costs next to nothing and works like a charm with big nails a... | 1,760,372,039.644885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/check-out-this-pdp-11-running-unix-with-a-teletype-terminal/ | Check Out This PDP-11 Running Unix With A Teletype Terminal | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"BSD",
"pdp-11",
"teletype",
"unix"
] | If you’ve spent a few years around Hackaday, you’ve probably seen or heard of the DEC PDP-11 before. It was one of the great machines of the minicomputer era, back when machines like the Apple ][ and the Commodore 64 weren’t even a gleam in their creator’s eyes. You’ve also probably heard of Unix, given that so many of us use Linux on the regular. Well, now you can see them both in action, as [HappyComputerGuy] fires up real Unix on a real PDP-11/73…
with a real Teletype Model 33 to boot!
It’s a fascinating dive into the tech of yesteryear, with a rich dose of history to boot. It’s mindboggling to think that video terminals were once prohibitively expensive and that teletype printers were the norm for interacting with computers. The idea of interacting with a live machine via a printed page is alien, but it’s how things were done! We’re also treated to a lesson on how to boot the PDP-11 with 2.11BSD which is a hilariously manual process. It also takes a very long time. [HappyComputerGuy] then shows off the Teletype Model 33 rocking the banner command to great effect.
It’s awesome to see this hardware as it would really have been used back in its heyday. Computing really was different before the microcomputer format became mainstream.
It’s not the only PDP-11 we’ve seen lately, either
! Video after the break. | 19 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720221",
"author": "Michael Karliner",
"timestamp": "2024-01-17T08:22:16",
"content": "My first job was an asr33, an intel 8080 and a paper tape reader. Them were the days.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6720280",
"author"... | 1,760,372,039.696367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/betavoltaic-battery-rated-to-provide-power-for-50-years/ | Betavoltaic Battery Rated To Provide Power For 50 Years | Maya Posch | [
"Battery Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"batteries",
"Betavoltaic"
] | A newly introduced battery called the BV100 by Chinese Betavolt Technology
promises to provide
half a century of power, at 100 μW in a 15x15x5 mm package. Inside the package are multiple, 2 micron-thick layers nickel-63 isotope placed between 10 micron-thick diamond semiconductor, with each diamond layer using the principle of
betavoltaics
to induce an electrical current in a similar fashion to a solar panel using light. Ni-63 is a β emitter with a half-life of 100 years, that decays into copper-63 (Cu-63), one of the two stable forms of copper.
From the battery’s
product page
we can glean a bit more information, such as that the minimum size of the betavoltaic battery is 3x3x0.03 mm with one layer of Ni-63 and two semiconductor layers, allowing for any number of layers to be stacked to increase the power output within a given package. Also noted is that the energy conversion rate of the β energetic event is about 8.8%, which could conceivably be improved in the future.
Although this battery may seem new, it’s actually based on a number of years of research in diamond semiconductors in betavoltaics, with V. S. Bormashov and colleagues in 2018
reporting
on a similar diamond semiconductor with Ni-63 isotope layer battery. They noted a battery specific energy of 3300 mWh/g. Related research
by Benjian Liu and colleagues
in 2018 showed an alphavoltaic battery, also using diamond semiconductor, which shows another possible avenue of development, since alpha particles are significantly more energetic.
Whether we’ll see Betavolt’s BV100 or similar products appear in commercial products is still uncertain, but they plan to have a 1 Watt version ready by 2025, which when packaged into the size of an average Li-ion battery pack could mean a mobile power source that will power more than a pacemaker, and cost less than the nuclear batteries powering the two Voyager spacecraft and all active Mars rovers today. | 47 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719683",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T12:36:59",
"content": "I wouldn’t power a pacemaker with a radioactive battery.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6719684",
"author": "Ryan Dewsbury",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,039.800214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/16/countdown-to-a-spaceship-simulator/ | Countdown To A Spaceship Simulator | Richard Baguley | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"science toys",
"space",
"suimulator"
] | [Jon Petter Skagmo] claims that the
spaceship simulator he’s working on
is for his daughter, but we think there’s an excellent chance he’s looking to fulfill a few childhood dreams of his own. But no matter what generation ends up getting the most enjoyment out of it, there’s no question it’s an impressive build so far, complete with a very realistic-looking instrument display and joystick.
This is only the first in a series of builds, but our inner child is already intensely jealous. So far, [Jon] has built the instrument panel and controller that lights all buttons and runs the displays, which shows telemetry from a Falcon 9 launch. The video below goes into a lot of detail about how he built this SPI-driven instrument panel and why he made the whole thing modular, so it can be easily expanded without turning into a spaghetti-like mess.
It’s a great intro to thinking before you build, showing how he planned and built the system for maximum expandability and flexibility. Before the end, we wouldn’t surprised if he’s got quite a
Kerbal Space Program
controller on his hands
for when the kid goes to bed. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719608",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T09:32:37",
"content": "Oh the things we have to do for our children!Very impressive build, other equally impressive builds at the same web site.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,039.843208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/breaking-the-flash-encryption-feature-of-espressifs-microcontrollers/ | Breaking The Flash Encryption Feature Of Espressif’s Microcontrollers | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"espressif",
"side-channel attacks",
"sidechannel"
] | Espressif’s ESP32 microcontrollers come with a Flash encryption feature that when enabled ensures that the data and code stored on the (usually external) Flash chip is encrypted with AES-256 (ESP32) or better (ESP32-C3, -C6). For the ESP32 this encryption feature has been shown to be vulnerable to side channel attacks (SCA), leading [courk] to not only
replicate this result
with a custom ESP Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) board (pictured) that captures power usage of the MCU, but also to try his luck with the ESP32-C3 and ESP32-C6 parts that should be tougher nuts to crack.
Whereas the ESP32 uses a fairly straightforward AES-256 encryption routine that together with the exposed Flash communication lines on the QSPI bus make for a textbook SCA example, the ESP32-C3 ups the encryption to
XTS-AES
, which uses two 128-bit keys on the -C3 part (XTS-256). This particular MCU is still susceptible to the same SCA attack with CPA, making it somewhat harder to attack than the ESP32, but by no means impossible.
Following the
advisory from Espressif
(PDF) regarding the cracked ESP32 Flash encryption, anti-SCA measures were said to be implemented in future Espressif designs, which includes the ESP32-C6. These measure serve mostly to mask and obfuscate the internal operations in order make power trace data less useful. These countermeasures can be enabled in stages, which [courk] did, to see how much they affect a CPA-based SCA. Perhaps shockingly, none of these seemed to affect the CPA attack much, if at all.
As a bonus round, [courk] then
decided to speed up
the painfully slow process of recovering the encryption keys by fault injection, which just requires the first 128 bytes (one block) on the -C3 and -C6 parts. Using a voltage fault injection the Secure Boot feature is bypassed. The essential idea is that through a buffer overflow custom code can be run, which dumps the entire Flash content. After demonstrating this and report it to Espressif, an
advisory was published
that notes that there’s no defense against this SCA and fault injection attack, other than using an ESP32 part that has internal Flash and no access to the QSPI bus from the outside.
It would seem that with how leaky the Flash encryption is on these ESP32-family parts, placing your bets on an attacker having an aversion to decapping an IC might indeed be your best defense.
Top image: Block Diagram of the ESP CPA Board (Credit: Courk at courk.cc) | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719606",
"author": "Seth",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T09:27:55",
"content": "My ESP32 implementations have assumed the client iot device could be compromised. The ESP32 collects inputs and sends them to the cloud where logic is applied and combined with other datasets. The ESP32 may... | 1,760,372,039.89953 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/ai-binoculars-know-more-about-birds-than-you/ | AI Binoculars Know More About Birds Than You | Richard Baguley | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ai",
"binoculars",
"birds"
] | 2024 is the year of adding Artificial Intelligence to everything. Now, even a pleasant walk in the woods is getting a dose of AI: optics manufacturer Swarovski has announced the
AX Visio
, a binocular set with an AI bird identification feature. Not sure if that is a
lesser
or
greater scaup
on your pond? These binoculars will tell you, for the low, low price of $
4799
.
While digital cameras built into binoculars have been around for a while, adding AI is new. That’s a cool thing, but a bit of digging into the specs reveals that there is a much cheaper way to do it.
Buy a cheap digital camera, like the
Kodak Pixpro AZ255
, which has a higher resolution and longer zoom than these binoculars.
Transfer the image to your cell phone with an
$11 memory card reader
.
Run the free
Cornell Merlin ID
app to identify the bird.
Send the $4500 you just saved to us, or your favorite charity.
These ludicrously overpriced binoculars use the same
Cornell Merlin ID system
that you can use for free from their app, which also has the advantage of being able to ID birds from their songs. This is helpful because birds are tricky creatures who will try and hide from the hideously overpriced gadget you just bought.
[Via
DigitalCameraWorld
] | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719519",
"author": "lol",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T03:41:56",
"content": "Roasted.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6719577",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T07:59:44",
"content": "HaD is try... | 1,760,372,039.950495 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/pdp-11-trouble-with-a-ruthless-power-supply-issue/ | PDP-11 Trouble With A Ruthless Power Supply Issue | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"pdp-11",
"pdp-11/03"
] | After [David Lovett] of [Usagi Electric] was donated a few cars full of DEC PDP-11 minicomputers of various flavors and vintages, he passed on most of them to loving homes, but kept a few of them himself. One goal of this being
to put together a PDP-11 system
that could be more easily taken to vintage computer shows than the ‘rollable’ PDP-11s he had access to prior. Of 1980s PDP-11s, the first-generation Large Scale Integration (LSI) PDP11/03 system (so-called
Q-Bus
models) is among the smallest, taking up about as much space as a 1980s desktop PC, while supporting the second generation LSI PDP-11/23 cards. It all seemed so easy until [David] tried testing the PDP-11/03’s PSU and everything went south.
Despite having access to the circuit diagrams of the PSU, figuring out what was going wrong was an absolute nightmare for [David], after some easy fixes involving replacing a blown fuse and bulging capacitors failed to deliver salvation. Reading through the comments to the video, it would seem that people are generally confused about whether this PSU is a linear, switching or some other configuration. What is clear is that with the absolutely massive transformer, it looks more like a linear power supply, but with a lot of protections against over current and other failure modes built-in, all of which rely on transistors and other components that could have gone bad.
Although in round 1 the PDP-11/03 PSU won the battle, we hope that once round 2 commences [David] will have had the proverbial training montage behind him (set to ‘Eye of the Usagi’, probably) and will manage to get this PSU working once more. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719479",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-01-16T01:07:09",
"content": "I think “Eye of the Rabbit” is more in line with Usagi.B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6719489",
"author": "SayWh... | 1,760,372,040.213732 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/feeding-the-fire-by-robot/ | Feeding The Fire By Robot | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"Boiler",
"carbon",
"fire",
"heating",
"robot",
"robotic arm",
"wood"
] | It might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but one of the more carbon-neutral ways of heating one’s home is by burning wood. Since the carbon for the trees came out of the air a geologically insignificant amount of time ago, it’s in effect solar energy with extra steps. And with modern stoves and well-seasoned wood, air pollution is minimized as well. The only downside is needing to feed the fire frequently,
which [Anders] solved by building a robot
.
[Anders]’ system is centered around a boiler, a system which typically sits in a utility area like a basement and directs its heat to the home via another system, usually hot water. An Arduino Mega controls the system of old boat winches and various motors, with a grabber arm mounted at the end. The arm pinches each log from end to end, allowing it to grab the uneven logs one at a time. The robot also opens the boiler door and closes it again when the log is added, and then the system waits for the correct set of temperature conditions before grabbing another log and adding it. And everything can be monitored remotely with the help of an ESP32.
The robot is reportedly low-maintenance as well, thanks to its low speed and relatively low need for precision. The low speed also makes it fairly safe to work around, which was an important consideration because wood still needs to be added to a series of channels every so often to feed the robot, but this is much less often than one would have to feed logs into a boiler if doing this chore manually. It also improves on other automated wood-burning systems like pellet stoves, since you can skip the pellet-producing middleman step. It also eliminates the need to heat your home by burning fossil fuels, much like
this semi-automated wood stove
.
Thanks to [Peter] for the tip! | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719411",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T21:58:41",
"content": "Pellet stoves don’t really have an “extra step” when you consider that wood for a boiler or fireplace needs to be gathered (or bought) and split. Somebody is doing that. I can understand somebody trying... | 1,760,372,040.427948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/reverse-engineering-the-esp32s-wifi-binary-blob-with-a-faraday-cage/ | Reverse-Engineering The ESP32’s WiFi Binary Blob With A Faraday Cage | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"binary blob",
"ESP32",
"wi-fi"
] | The Faraday cage constructed by Jasper Devreker.
As part of a team reverse-engineering the binary blob driver for the ESP32’s WiFi feature at Ghent University, [Jasper Devreker] saw himself faced with the need to better isolate the network packets coming from the ESP32-under-test. This is a tough call in today’s WiFi and 2.4 GHz flooded airwaves. To eliminate all this noise, [Jasper] had to
build a Faraday cage
, but ideally without racking up a massive invoice and/or relying on second-hand parts scavenged from eBay.
We
previously reported
on this reverse-engineering project, which has since
seen an update
. Although progress has been made, filtering out just the packets they were interested in was a big challenge. The solution was a Faraday cage, but on a tight budget.
Rather than relying on exotic power filters, [Jasper] put a battery inside a Faraday cage he constructed out of wood and conductive fabric. To get Ethernet data in and out, a fiber link was used inside a copper tube. Initial testing was done using a Raspberry Pi running usbip and a WiFi dongle. The Faraday cage provided enough attenuation that the dongle couldn’t pick up any external WiFi signals in listening mode.
The total cost of this build came down to a hair over €291, which makes it feasible for a lot of RF experiments by hobbyists and others. We wish [Jasper] and the rest of the team a lot of luck in figuring out the remaining secrets of Espressif’s binary WiFi blob using this new tool. | 37 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719360",
"author": "fjjablonski@gmail.com",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T19:40:16",
"content": "A grounded disabled microwave oven would not be enough?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6719432",
"author": "ON7WPI",
... | 1,760,372,040.365405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/usb-c-pd-new-technology-done-right/ | USB-C PD: New Technology Done Right | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"manifesto",
"new technology",
"USB C",
"USB-PD"
] | There is a tendency as we get older, to retreat into an instinctive suspicion of anything new or associated with young people. All of us will know older people who have fallen down this rabbit hole, and certainly anything to do with technological advancement is often high on their list of ills which beset society. There’s a Douglas Adams passage which sums it up nicely:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Here at Hackaday we’re just like anybody else, in that we all get older. Our lives are devoted to an insatiable appetite for new technology, but are we susceptible to the same trap, and could we see something as against the antural order of things simply because we don’t like it? It’s something that has been on my mind in some way since I wrote a piece back in 2020
railing at the ridiculous overuse of new technologies to limit the lifespan and repairability of new cars
and then
a manifesto for how the industry might fix it
, am I railing against it simply because I can’t fix it with a screwdriver in the way I could my 1960 Triumph Herald? I don’t think so, and to demonstrate why I’d like to talk about another piece of complex new technology that has got everything right.
In 2017
I lamented the lack of a universal low voltage DC power socket that was useful
, but reading the piece here in 2024 it’s very obvious that in the years since my quest has been solved. USB Power Delivery was a standard back then, but hadn’t made the jump to the ubiquity the USB-C-based power plug and socket enjoys today. Most laptops still had proprietary barrel jack connectors, and there were still plenty of phones with micro-USB sockets. In the years since it’s become the go-to power standard, and there are a huge number of modules and devices to supply and receive it at pretty high power.
At first sight though, it might seem as though USB-PD is simply putting a piece of unnecessary technology in the way of what should be a simple DC connector. Each and every USB-PD connection requires some kind of chip to manage it, to negotiate the connection, and to transform voltage. Isn’t that the same as the cars, using extra technology merely for the sake of complexity? On the face of it you might think so, but the beauty lies in it being a universally accepted standard. If car manufacturers needed the same functionalty you’d have modules doing similar things in a Toyota, a Ford, or a Renault, but they would all be proprietary and they’d be eye-wateringly expensive to replace. Meanwhile USB-PD modules have to work with each other, so they have become a universal component available for not a huge cost. I have several bags of assorted modules in a box of parts here, and no doubt you do too. The significant complexity of the USB-PD endpoint doesn’t matter any more, because should it break then replacing it is an easy and cheap process.
This is not to say that USB-PD is without its problems though, the plethora of different cable standards is its Achilies’ heel. But if you’re every accused of a knee-jerk reaction to a bad piece of new technology simply because it’s new, point them to it as perhaps
the perfect example of the responsible use of new technology
. | 42 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719337",
"author": "herrmannc1899gmailcom",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T18:46:21",
"content": "Someone finally said it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6719338",
"author": "Tanner Bass",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T18:47:26",... | 1,760,372,040.289169 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/neutrino-hunters-hack-chat/ | Neutrino Hunters Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, January 17 at noon Pacific for the
Neutrino Hunters Hack Chat
with Patrick Allison!
It’s a paradox of science that the biggest of equipment is needed to study the smallest of phenomena. The bestiary of subatomic particles often requires the power and dimension of massive accelerators to produce, and caverns crammed with racks full of instruments to monitor their brief but energetic lives. Neutrinos, though, are different. These tiny, nearly massless, neutral particles are abundant in the extreme, zipping through space from sources both natural and artificial and passing through normal matter like it isn’t even there.
That poses a problem: how do you study something that doesn’t interact with the stuff you can make detectors out of? There are tricks that neutrino hunters use, and most of them use very, VERY big instruments to do it. Think enormous tanks of ultrapure water or a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, filled with photomultiplier tubes to watch for the slightest glimmer of Cherenkov radiation as a neutrino passes by.
Neutrino hunting is some of the biggest of Big Science, and getting all the parts to work together takes some special engineering. Patrick Allison has been in the neutrino business for decades, both as a physicist and as the designated guru who keeps all the electronics humming. He’ll join us on the Hack Chat to talk about the neutrino hunting trade, and what it takes to keep the data flowing.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 17 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Featured image:
Daderot
, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6720508",
"author": "Logan Flynn",
"timestamp": "2024-01-18T02:40:05",
"content": "Interesting",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,040.170272 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/haiku-os-the-open-source-beos-you-can-daily-drive-in-2024/ | Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive In 2024 | Maya Posch | [
"Reviews",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"BeOS",
"haiku",
"operating system"
] | Haiku is one of those open source operating systems that seem to be both exceedingly well-known while flying completely under the radar. Part of this is probably due to it being an open source version and continuation of the Be Operating System (BeOS). Despite its strong feature set in the 1990s, BeOS never got much love in the wider computer market. Nevertheless, it has a strong community that after twenty-two years of development has now reached a point where you can daily drive it,
according to
the [Action Retro] channel on YouTube.
One point where
Haiku
definitely scores points is with the super-fast installation and boot. [Action Retro] demonstrates this on real hardware, and we can confirm that it boots very fast in VirtualBox on a low-end Intel N100-based host system as well. With the recently introduced QtWebEngine-based
Falkon
browser (formerly known as QupZilla) even JavaScript-heavy sites like YouTube and retro Mac emulators work well. You can even get a Minecraft client for Haiku.
Although [Action Retro] notes that 3D acceleration is still a work-in-progress for Haiku, his 2014-era AMD system smoothly played back 1080p YouTube videos. Although not addressed in the video, Haiku is relatively easy to port existing software to, as it is POSIX-compatible. There is a relatively modern GCC 11.2 compiler in the Beta 4 release from 2022, backed up by solid
API documentation
. Who doesn’t want to take a poke at a modern take on the OS that
nearly became MacOS
? | 25 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719319",
"author": "Martin Hill",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T17:45:02",
"content": "Alrighty next time I have a spare commodity box to save from recycling I’ll give it a try!I tried to DD BeOS back around 1999. It was neat but I never had a machine where all the hardware was well-sup... | 1,760,372,040.566402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/solar-chimneys-viable-energy-solution-or-a-lot-of-hot-air/ | Solar Chimneys: Viable Energy Solution Or A Lot Of Hot Air? | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"clean energy",
"energy",
"power generation",
"solar",
"solar power",
"solar updraft tower",
"solar updraft towers"
] | We think of the power we generate as coming from all these different kinds of sources. Oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind… so varied! And yet they all fundamentally come down to moving a gas through a turbine to actually spin up a generator and make some juice. Even some solar plants worked this way, using the sun’s energy to heat water into steam to spin some blades and keep the lights on.
A solar updraft tower works along these basic principles, too, but in a rather unique configuration. It’s not since the dawn of the Industrial Age that humanity went around building lots of big chimneys, and if this technology makes good sense, we could be due again. Let’s find out how it works and if it’s worth all the bluster, or if it’s just a bunch of hot air.
You Spin Me Right Up, Baby, Right Up
The basic concept of a solar updraft tower. Credit:
Cryonic07,Kilohn limahn. CC BY-SA 3.0
The concept of a solar updraft tower is relatively simple to understand. The idea is to create a large greenhouse-type structure surrounding a tall vertical chimney. As solar energy passes through the glass of the greenhouse, it heats the air inside as well as the floor and other contents. Since the greenhouse is, by and large, not completely open to the atmosphere, the heat cannot readily pass away by convection, and so the air within tends to become hotter than ambient temperature. That is, except for the chimney. As the air under the greenhouse grows warmer, it becomes less dense, and thus due to buoyancy forces, it wishes to travel upwards, and the only way out is via the chimney. It’s thus possible to install turbines in the base of the chimney to capture energy from this air as it travels up and out of the tower.
Beyond simple power generation, the solar updraft tower also offers some potential for energy storage, much like a hydroelectric dam. The sun can be used to heat the air under the greenhouse, but that air does not have to be immediately allowed to pass through the chimney. It can be stored for some time before passing it through the turbines and up the stack. Some concepts propose to further improve the storage capability by adding large water tanks as thermal sinks beneath the greenhouse. However, like all thermal storage, it’s time-limited, as the air in the greenhouse starts losing energy when the sun goes down and the ambient temperature drops.
Simple engineering tells us that the potential power output primarily relies on how much warm air you have to turn the turbine, and how much you can get it moving. Thus, a larger greenhouse collector area will have more power potential. So too will a taller chimney, which will create a greater pressure difference between the hot air at ground level and the cooler ambient air at the top. As you might imagine, there’s not a huge amount of energy packed in to air that’s just been
warmed up a bit
by the sun. Thus, to get significant output, you’d want a huge collector and a huge chimney. If you’re wondering about scale, you’d want to consider chimneys many hundreds of meters high, and greenhouses measured in square kilometers.
As a guide,
one proposed project in Western Australia
promised to generate 200 MW of power. The tradeoff? It involved a 1-km high tower and a collector 10 km in diameter, to be built at a cost of $1.67 billion. The engineering team behind the idea, Schlaich Bergermann and Partner, noted that solar updraft towers really only make sense at these massive scales. Smaller installations aren’t cost competitive with photovoltaic solar panels, but larger ones can be. Large facilities make enough power to offset the huge construction costs, and ongoing maintenance is cheap, as it really just involves keeping the turbines and generator up and running. There are no dirty panels to clean, for example.
The project for a solar updraft tower built in Spain committed to the bit: you need to build the chimney high to get the best out of it. The higher, the better! Credit: Widakora, CC BY-SA 3.0
By and large, solar updraft towers have remained largely conceptual, with few real-world projects built. The best example of an actual solar updraft tower was
a small-scale effort built in Manzanares
, a locale south of Madrid, Spain in 1982. It was built for an output of 50 kW, and intended to operate for just 3 years. It ran for 7 years in the end, before collapsing in 1989 due to storm winds and corroded guy wires holding up the 194-meter tower. The chimney was paired with a 244-meter diameter collector, using a combination of glass and plastic membranes to create the greenhouse.
The Manzanares tower was a grandiose thing, pictured here from under the polyester roof of its collector. Credit:
Widakora
CC BY-SA 3.0,
More recently, other pilot projects have experimented with the technology. Researcheres in Botswana experimented with a small-scale build of just 22 meters height with a small 15-meter diameter collector. The country has instead looked to photovoltaic and concentrated solar power concepts since.
Chinese efforts got a little further, but not by much. In Jinshawan, a $200 million project saw the construction of a solar tower on desert lands
back in 2010
. It combined solar updraft generation with a special air entry door that let it capture power from prevailing winds as well. Big plans were to see the build expand in multiple phases to eventually generate 27.5 megawatts, but it never came close. It achieved just 200 kilowatts, and was plagued by glass panels shattering in the greenhouse collector. It was originally supposed to have a 200-meter high chimney, but a nearby airport meant that it could only be built to 50 meters instead. This greatly limited the pressure differential available to help generate power from the heated air. The project continued
for several years
, but has made little impression.
The Chinese solar updraft tower can be seen on Google Maps via satellite view.
Solar updraft towers are an interesting concept, to be sure. They rely on simple physics and are easy to understand. However, to generate meaningful power, they require huge tracts of land and incredibly tall towers. They pose a great number of challenges, many of which are simply construction and land use related, and come with a great many unknowns.
In comparison, we’ve now learned how to stick solar panels on every flat surface going spare, and are able to generate
huge amounts of power via that route
. Heck, they’re even
sticking them on water now.
Few governments or businesses would want to accept a pie-in-the-sky power generation project involving construction on a massive scale when there are easier routes to go. It seems that technology has marched well past the point where solar updraft chimneys might be viable, but who knows! Maybe one day, someone with a great deal of money and a taste for megaprojects might just make one a reality once more. | 90 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719285",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T15:42:39",
"content": "> Large facilities make enough power to offset the huge construction costs, and ongoing maintenance is cheap, as it really just involves keeping the turbines and generator up and running. There are no d... | 1,760,372,040.866933 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/vroomba-gets-upgrades-and-a-spoiler/ | Vroomba Gets Upgrades And A Spoiler | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"body kit",
"carbon fiber",
"irobot",
"nylon",
"robot",
"roomba",
"Spoiler",
"vacuum",
"vroomba"
] | [Electrosync] is the creator and driver of the world’s fastest robotic vaccum cleaner, the Vroomba. It’s a heavily modified roomba capable of speeds of around 60 kph, well beyond the pedaling speed of most bicyclists. Despite being rejected by Guinness for a world record, we’re fairly confident that no other vacuum cleaners have gotten up to these speeds since the Vroomba first hit the streets. That’s not going to stop [electrosync] from trying to top his own record, though, and
he’s brought the Vroomba some much needed upgrades
.
The first, and perhaps most important, upgrades are to some of the structural components and wheels. The robot is much heavier than comparable RC vehicles and is under much greater strain than typical parts are meant to endure, so he’s 3D printed some parts of the chassis and some new wheels using a nylon-carbon fiber filament for improved strength. The wheels get a custom polyurethane coating similar to last time.
Controlling the robot a handful with previous versions. This is because Roombas use differential steering, controlling direction by sending more or less power to one of a pair of wheels. This is great for maneuverability at low speeds but becomes nightmarish at 60 kph, so [electrosync] added an onboard gyroscope to help the controller maintain a stable direction.
The final improvement was a full aerodynamic body kit including a front splitter and a rather large spoiler. With those improvements, it was ready to hit the track. After some fine-tuning the Vroomba is nearly as fast as its previous record. This is presumably because of a combination of higher weight and losses due to downforce from the spoiler, but [electrosync] plans to continue this pursuit by building a new lightweight chassis for future versions. In the meantime, be sure to check out
the first prototypes of the Vroomba
.
Thanks to [Wouter] for the tip! | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719233",
"author": "Hanna",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T12:40:53",
"content": "My rc pan is more rigid. The aluminum plate is perfect to drill holes in it, screw everthing in position.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6719237",
... | 1,760,372,040.609818 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/15/remembering-isdn/ | Remembering ISDN | Al Williams | [
"Network Hacks",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"ISDN",
"T1"
] | We are definitely spoiled these days in terms of Internet access. In much of the world gigabit speeds are common and even cheap plans are likely to be measured in 100s of megabits. But there was a time not long ago when a fast modem received at 56 kilobits per second. If you couldn’t justify a dedicated T1 line and you had a lot of money, you might have thought about ISDN – the Integrated Services Digital Network. [Tedium] has
a great retrospective
now that the UK has decided to sunset ISDN in 2025. ISDN started in the UK in the mid-1980s.
ISDN offered two 64-kilobit channels that could be bonded to reach 128 kilobits. There was also a slower third channel for commands and signaling (although you could use it for data, too, using an X.25-like protocol). If you wanted phone service, your voice was on one 64K channel and the data on the other. No need to tie up your phone just to get online. Voice was digitized at 8 kHz with 8 bits of G.711 encoding.
One problem with ISDN was that it took a while to appear in the market, while conventional modems kept getting faster and faster. Despite having a theoretical maximum of 64k per channel, in reality, it sometimes topped out at 56K, just like an analog modem because of limits in the T1 backbone in the central office. In addition, cross-talk from the send and receive made long runs difficult. Someone eventually realized that it was because of the similar frequencies in use and that most people didn’t need the same upload speed as download. That was the birth of ADSL, but that’s another story.
For whatever reason, ISDN never really caught on. A common industry joke was that it stood for Innovations Subscribers Don’t Need. The truth is, the tech did offer more reliable connections and better voice quality. But in the end, it just didn’t pan out. It did spawn ADSL, but in the end, it was relegated to niche markets. Video conferencing and broadcasters used the technology and, of course, the phone company made use of it in a different way to manage the backend. You can see an AT&T video about ISDN below.
It is hard to remember when getting on the Internet
was a technical project
. Don’t even get us started on
T1
which still topped out at around 1.5 megabits per second. | 89 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719186",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T09:24:27",
"content": "Interested to know what ‘cheap plans’ cost around the world, I’ve just had gigabit FTTH installed and it’s costing me £27 PCM.ISDN in the UK was pretty good but so damned expensive, I had a client who insist... | 1,760,372,040.73977 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/14/simulating-a-time-keeping-radio-signal/ | Simulating A Time-Keeping Radio Signal | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"atomic clock",
"clock",
"radio",
"simulator",
"stm32",
"time",
"very low frequency",
"vlf",
"wwvb"
] | As far as timekeeping goes, there’s nothing more accurate and precise than an atomic clock. Unfortunately, we can’t all have blocks of cesium in our basements, so various agencies around the world have maintained radio stations which, combined with an on-site atomic clock, send out timekeeping signals over the air. In the United States, this is the WWVB station located in Colorado which is generally receivable anywhere in the US but can be hard to hear on the East Coast. That’s why [JonMackey], who lives in northern New Hampshire,
built this WWVB simulator
.
Normally, clocks built to synchronize with the WWVB station include a small radio antenna to receive the 60 kHz signal and the 1-bit-per-second data transmission which is then decoded and used to update the time shown on the clock. Most of these clocks have internal (but much less precise) timekeeping circuitry to keep themselves going if they lose this signal, but [JonMackey] can go several days without his clocks hearing it. To make up for that he built a small transmitter that generates the proper timekeeping code for his clocks. The system is based on an STM32 which receives its time from GPS and broadcasts it on the correct frequency so that these clocks can get updates.
The small radio transmitter is built using one of the pins on the STM32 using PWM to get its frequency exactly at 60 kHz, which then can have the data modulated onto it. The radiating area is much less than a meter, so this isn’t likely to upset any neighbors, NIST, or the FCC, and the clocks need to be right beside it to update. Part of the reason why range is so limited is that very low frequency (VLF) radios typically require enormous antennas to be useful, so if you want to listen to
more than timekeeping standards you’ll need a little bit of gear
. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6719169",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2024-01-15T07:41:52",
"content": "It can be very interesting to feed one of these clocks impossible time signals. For example, 12:74 or 43rd January. In some cases, it crashes them, in others, it enters a parallel reality of timekeeping.",
... | 1,760,372,040.914914 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/how-to-operate-a-500kw-transmitter/ | How To Operate A 500KW Transmitter | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"am radio",
"Crosley",
"wlw"
] | Crosley was a famous name in radio for more than one reason. The National VOA Museum of Broadcasting has a video telling [Powel Crosley Jr.’s] story, and the story behind the
500 kW WLW transmitter
. WLW was an AM broadcast station often called the nation’s channel since its signal covered most of the United States. The first Crosley station was identified at 8CR, running 20 watts from [Crosley’s] living room. Quite a modest start! By 1922, he had moved to his family business location along with 500 watts of output. Over the years, WLW got more powerful until it was finally a 500 kW giant.
Along the way, WLW had several firsts, including the first remote transmitter. The 50 kW transmitters are huge. The video also covers how Crosley made inexpensive radios including crystal radios and inexpensive tube sets.
From the technical point of view, these old tubes with 100,000-watt plate dissipation are truly amazing. There were several of them in the 50 kW transmitters. It is hard to imagine that the output would rise by a factor of 10 over the years. The transmitter used a DC generator that produced 4,000 amperes just for the tube filaments!
In a way, it was vertical marketing — produce programming and match it with inexpensive receivers to listen to the programming. This video is a great look back at a grand radio station. We’ve seen
a tour of WLW
before, though. When AM was king, there was a lot of work on making sure stations didn’t
interfere with each other
and that clear channels could cover most of the country. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6718899",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-01-14T10:40:38",
"content": "The one below is also watch worthy.It’s a 200kW mechanical transmitter from a museum ( built in 1924 or there abouts) that gets started up and operated.SAQ Grimeton Transmission on July 4th 11:00 CET (09... | 1,760,372,040.982293 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/reverse-engineering-smart-meters-now-with-more-fuming-nitric-acid/ | Reverse Engineering Smart Meters, Now With More Fuming Nitric Acid | Dan Maloney | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Chemistry",
"decapping",
"destructive",
"FNA",
"fuming nitric acid",
"micropositioning",
"microscopy",
"reverse engineering",
"smart meter"
] | If you’re lucky, reverse engineering can be a messy business. Sure, there’s something to be said for attacking and characterizing an unknown system and leaving no trace of having been there, but there’s something viscerally satisfying about
destroying something to understand it
. Especially when homemade fuming nitric acid is involved.
The recipient of such physical and chemical rough love in the video below is a residential electric smart meter, a topic that seems to be endlessly fascinating to [Hash]; this is far from the first time we’ve seen him take
a deep dive into these devices
. His efforts are usually a little less destructive, though, and his write-ups tend to concentrate more on snooping into the radio signals these meters are using to talk back to the utility company.
This time around, [Hash] has decided to share some of his methods for getting at these secrets, including decapping the ICs inside. His method for making fuming nitric acid from stump remover and battery acid is pretty interesting; although the laboratory glassware needed to condense the FNA approaches the cost of just buying the stuff outright, it’s always nice to have the knowledge and the tools to make your own. Just make sure to be careful about it — the fumes are incredibly toxic. Also detailed is a 3D-printable micropositioner, used for examining and photographing acid-decapped ICs under the microscope, which we’d bet would be handy for plenty of other microscopy jobs.
In addition to the decapping stuff, and a little gratuitous destruction with nitric acid, [Hash] takes a look at the comparative anatomy of smart meters. The tamper-proofing features are particularly interesting; who knew these meters have what amounts to the same thing as a pinball machine’s tilt switch onboard? | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6718876",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2024-01-14T06:02:52",
"content": "We have come a long way since you could pull the meter and just stick it back in upside down and it would go backwards. How easy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,041.032351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/simulate-running-a-small-hardware-business-with-hardware-hustle/ | Simulate Running A Small Hardware Business WithHardware Hustle | Donald Papp | [
"Games"
] | [
"games",
"javascript",
"print and play",
"roll and write",
"Tabletop"
] | [Oskitone]’s
Hardware Hustle
is a printable roll-and-write tabletop game that can be played on a single sheet of paper. It simulates attempting to run a small hardware business sustainably. Buy parts, make products, and sell them without burning yourself out!
If you’re not familiar with roll-and-write games, it’s a genre in which players take turns by rolling dice and then choosing how to assign those values in a game space as they progress from turn to turn. In the case of
Hardware Hustle
, it’s primarily a resource management game in which a player will be purchasing parts, assembling widgets, selling those widgets, and improving processes all while managing both money and opportunity costs.
The inspiration for
Hardware Hustle
comes from [Oskitone]’s own experience designing, building, and selling things like
open-sourced, hackable synth kits
that are known for their thoughtful design and fantastic use of 3D printing.
The game is in open beta-testing mode, so if you’d like to give it a try,
head over to the PDF download section
of the GitHub repository. Don’t forget to share your thoughts with the feedback form after playing. (If you’re wondering why a printable tabletop game has source code on GitHub, it’s because the game’s printable sheets are generated by JavaScript, making adjustments and tweaks and version control easier.) | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6718860",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-01-14T03:29:38",
"content": "Create in Tabletop Simulator.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6718905",
"author": "NikTheNan",
"timestamp": "2024-01-14T11:12:45",... | 1,760,372,041.126177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/tips-for-3d-printing-watertight-test-tubes/ | Tips For 3D Printing Watertight Test Tubes | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"spiral vase mode",
"test tube",
"vase mode",
"watertight"
] | [DaveMakesStuff] uses 3D printed test tubes for plants and similar purposes, and he’s shared
how to make them on a 3D printer
, complete with different models each optimized for different nozzle sizes.
The slots in the model are a means of manipulating how the slicer creates a toolpath when printing in spiral vase mode. These areas end up denser and stronger than they otherwise would be.
It’s not too hard to get clear-looking prints in spiral vase mode by using a transparent filament, but the real value in his design is that it comes out reliably watertight, with an extra-strong base and rim.
How is this accomplished when using spiral vase mode, which extrudes only a single wall perimeter? By using fancy geometry on the part, which makes the nozzle follow a high-density path that turns back onto itself multiple times, in concept a little like a switchback trail. The result is extra-dense areas on both the rim and the bottom of the tubes. This helps make them not only watertight, but far stronger than a single wall.
This technique is reminiscent of an earlier method we saw of
enhancing the strength of vase mode prints by modeling thin slots into an object
. After slicing, the model still consists of a single unbroken spiral extrusion. But in practice, the extruded plastic forms what resemble structural ribs. Why? Because those technically-adjacent extruded lines are so close to one another that they end up sticking together. Something similar is being done here by [DaveMakesStuff] to ensure that the bottom and top of the tubes are extra strong.
You can see a short video (embedded below) that showcases the tubes, as well as some
modular 3D-printable racks
that [DaveMakesStuff] also makes. And should you want some tips on
getting better transparency from your 3D prints
, the essentials boil down to printing with transparent filament, slightly hotter, and with a slightly higher extrusion rate. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6718866",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": "2024-01-14T04:28:16",
"content": "This sounds like the kind of thing that should be done in a slicer, rather than in the model.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6719052",
"aut... | 1,760,372,041.086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/skip-the-radio-with-this-software-defined-ultrasound-data-link/ | Skip The Radio With This Software-Defined Ultrasound Data Link | Dan Maloney | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"baud",
"bitrate",
"link",
"physical layer",
"sdr",
"transducer",
"ultrasound"
] | We know what you’re thinking: with so many wireless modules available for just pennies, trying to create
a physical data link using ultrasonic transducers
like [Damian Bonicatto] did for a short-range, low-bitrate remote monitoring setup seems like a waste of time. And granted, there are a ton of simple RF protocols you can just throw at a job like this. Something like this could be done and dusted for a couple of bucks, right?
Luckily, [Damian] wanted something a little different for his wireless link to a small off-grid solar array, which is why he started playing with ultrasound in an SDR framework. The design for his “Software-Defined Ultrasonics” system, detailed in
Part 1
, has a pair of links, each with two ultrasonic transducers, one for receiving and one for transmitting. Both connect to audio amplifiers with bandpass filters; the received signal is digitized by the ADC built into an Arduino Nano, while the transmitted signal is converted to analog by an outboard DAC.
The transducers are affixed to
3D printed parabolic reflectors
, which are aimed at each other over a path length of about 150′ (46 m).
Part 2
of the series details the firmware needed to make all this work. A lot of the firmware design is dictated by the constraints introduced by using Arduinos and the 40-kHz ultrasonic carrier, meaning that the link can only do about 250 baud. That may sound slow, but it’s more than enough for [Damian]’s application.
Perhaps most importantly, this is one of those times where going slower helps you to go faster; pretty much everything about the firmware on this system applies to SDRs, so if you can grok one, the other should be a breeze. But if you still need a little help minding your Is and Qs, check out
[Jenny]’s SDR primer
. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6718785",
"author": "cplamb",
"timestamp": "2024-01-13T18:17:19",
"content": "This is within the hearing range of dogs. A really smart one could eavesdrop on the transmission.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6718787",
... | 1,760,372,041.267995 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/13/its-the-simple-things/ | It’s The Simple Things | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"led strip",
"newsletter",
"ws2812"
] | I love minimal hacks. Limitations are sometimes the spark for our greatest creativity, and seeing someone do something truly marvelous with the simplest of technological ingredients never fails to put a smile on my face.
This week, it was the super-simple
1D Fireworks
project by [Daniel Westhof]. Nothing more than an ESP8266 and a long RGB LED strip went into this effect on the hardware side, and indeed the code isn’t all that tricky either. But what it
does
is a very nice simulation of the physics that define the movement of a flare rocket and then all of the stars that explode out of it. And that makes it look so good.
Hackaday’s [Kristina Panos] is apparently also a fan of the single dimension, because she picked out some of my personal favorite uses of an LED strip, including
Twang
, to which we’ll admit we’re addicted, or any of the
PONG
versions
.
But I’ve seen other games, including a button-mashing racer and various roller-coaster simulations. All with the same, essentially, two-part BOM. (OK, if you don’t count the buttons/accelerometer, or power supply.) Or
this demo of sorting routines
, or the
Velocicoaster
. And I think there’s more out there.
How much creativity can you pack into an LED strip? This sounds like we need to make a new contest…
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
! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6718773",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2024-01-13T17:37:22",
"content": "In my quest to replicate my favourite incandescent E27 “long john” lamp with something less wasteful, I used a length of pvc conduit and wrapped a colour-corrected-white strip around it. The fixutre itse... | 1,760,372,041.303964 |
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