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https://hackaday.com/2023/11/22/freshening-up-googles-usb-c-pd-sniffer/ | Freshening Up Google’s USB-C PD Sniffer | Julian Scheffers | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"sniffer",
"USB C",
"usb c power delivery"
] | USB-C Power Delivery has definitely made the big mess of wires a bit smaller but not all cables are created equal — some of them can handle upwards of 100 W while the cheapest can handle only 10. To accommodate this, USB-C cables need to actively tell both ends what their capabilities are, which turns an otherwise passive device into a hidden chip in a passive
looking
cable.
[Greg Davill] has decided to unravel the mystery of why your laptop isn’t charging by
creating a USB-PD sniffer
. Based on
Google’s Twinkie sniffer
, the FreshTwinkie makes the design more accessible by reducing the number of layers in the PCB and replacing the BGA variant of the STM32 for a more DIY-friendly QFN version. Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody try and simplify the Twinkie; back in 2021, the
Twonkie from from [dojoe]
hit a number of similar notes.
USB-C Power Delivery
is just one of many protocols spoken over the CC pins, and the FreshTwinkie might be able to detect when some of those are enabled and why or why not. With future development, it could potentially provide useful information as to why a Thunderbolt 4 or tunneled PCIe device isn’t working correctly. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6701105",
"author": "drew",
"timestamp": "2023-11-22T21:50:46",
"content": "I would love to see v0.2 drop the microUSB connector for anything else. As my microUSB cables wear out, I hope never to replace them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,100.220737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/22/australias-second-largest-telco-went-dark-and-chaos-reigned/ | Australia’s Second Largest Telco Went Dark, And Chaos Reigned | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"Australia",
"network",
"networking",
"optus",
"telecommunications"
] | Engineers tend to worry about uptime, whether it’s at a corporate server farm or just our own little hobby servers at home. Every now and then, something will go wrong and take a box offline, which requires a little human intervention to fix. Ideally, you’ll still have a command link that stays up so you can fix the problem. Lose that, though, and you’re in a whole lick of trouble.
That’s precisely what happened to Australia’s second largest telecommunications provider earlier this month. Systems went down, millions lost connectivity, and company techs were left scrambling to put the pieces back together. Let’s dive in and explore what happened on Optus’s
most embarrassing day in recent memory.
Where to Go?
It all went down in the wee small hours of November 8, around 4:05 AM, when a routine software upgrade was scheduled. As part of the upgrade, there was a change to routing information for the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for Optus’s network from an international peering network. According to the company’s analysis after the event, “These routing information changes propogated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.”
That’s all a bit of a mess, so what does it mean? Well, fundamentally, the BGP routing information tells Optus’s routers where to find other machines on the internet. The routing information updates came from a Singtel internet exchange, STiX, which Optus uses to access the global internet. What happened is that the updates overwhelmed Optus’s own routers, which shut down in response to reaching a certain default threshold level of route updates. These limits are pre-configured into the router equipment from the factory. As this occurred in routers on Optus’s core network, as they went offline, they took down the telco’s entire national network, affecting voice, mobile, and internet customers.
Engineers spent the first six hours investigating various causes of the incident, while millions were waking up to dead internet connections and phones without signal. Crews rolled back recent changes by Optus itself and looked into whether they were under some kind of DDoS attack. In the end, the engineers determined the issue of the routers self-isolating to avoid the overwhelm of routing information updates that had propagated through the network. Resetting routing back to normal was enough to get networks back online, with engineers carefully reintroducing traffic to Optus’s backbone to avoid any unseemly surprises during the process. Optus eventually put the blame on the automatic safety mechanisms, stating “It is now understood that the outage occurred due to approximately 90 PE routers automatically self-isolating in order to protect themselves from an overload of IP routing information. These self-protection limits are default settings provided by the relevant global equipment vendor (Cisco).” It perhaps implies that the self-protection limits are unduly cautious and took the network offline when it was not really necessary to do so.
Optus took to social media to apologize to customers, once they were able to get online to read the message. Credit: Optus/Facebook
According to Optus, 150 engineers were directly involved in investigating the problem and restoring service, with another 250 staff and 5 vendors working in support. Meanwhile, the efforts to get back online were frustrated by the fact that, with Optus’s network down, it was difficult for technicians to actually access machines on the network to fix the problem. Ultimately, it would take a full fourteen hours for Optus to get its systems fully back online, with technicians having to attend some equipment in person to get it back online.
Optus isn’t the only company to have had issues with a major BGP meltdown. Facebook famously disappeared from the internet in 2021 for a few hours when it got the settings wrong on
a few of its own backbone routers.
The Aftermath
The result of this unprecedented outage was Optus temporarily becoming public enemy #1 in the Australian media. Millions across the nation had spent the day with no internet connection, no mobile connectivity, and few to little updates from Optus about what was actually going on. Customers had to get their updates via conventional media like newspapers, radio, and television—as they had no way to access the internet or receive calls via their own devices. Thankfully, cellular users were at least able to contact emergency services via alternate cellular networks, but landline users were cut off.
Businesses relying on EFTPOS payment terminals with Optus SIM cards were unable to take payments, while banks, hospitals, and even some train services were affected. The Melbourne train network underwent a one-hour shutdown as drivers could not communicate with the control centre, with hundreds of trains cancelled throughout the day. As for Optus itself, it shed $2 billion in value on the stock market as the day wore on, with CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigning a few weeks later due to the outage. Thus far, the company has offered customers 200 GB of free data as restitution for the outage. It’s proven cold comfort for many, particularly those in small businesses who lost out on hundreds or thousands of dollars in trade during the period.
The only winners in the scenario were Optus’s main competitors, namely, Telstra and Vodafone. The two companies run competing cellular networks as well as offering home internet connections across the nation. With this disaster occurring only a year after a major data breach at Optus saw customers compromised en masse, the two companies will be seeing dollar signs when it comes to stealing their rivals’ customer base.
Ultimately, there’s a lesson to be learned from Optus’s downfall. Crucial systems should be able to handle a routine update without collapsing en masse, even if something goes wrong. In 2023, customers simply won’t accept losing connectivity for 14 hours, especially if it’s due to some poorly-configured equipment. Connectivity is now almost as important to people as the air they breathe and the water they drink. Take that away and they get very upset, very quickly indeed. | 51 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6701005",
"author": "J. Cook",
"timestamp": "2023-11-22T15:13:40",
"content": "HA! It’s BGP, once again. (It’s always BGP, unless it’s DNS. :: snickers :: )",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6701008",
"author": "Wade Moeller",... | 1,760,372,100.310181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/22/keeping-a-mazdas-radio-on-after-the-engine-shuts-off/ | Keeping A Mazda’s Radio On After The Engine Shuts Off | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"car audio",
"infotainment",
"mazda"
] | Have you ever pulled into a car park with your favorite song blaring, only to lament the fact that the music cut out when you stopped the engine? Some modern cars are smart enough to keep the radio on until you open the door.
[ssh16] decided to hack that very functionality into their Mazda MX-5.
The device uses a microcontroller to read the CAN bus of the vehicle. The microcontroller also has the ability to keep the vehicle’s ACC (accessory) relay energized at will. Thus, when the engine is turned off, the microcontroller keeps the ACC relay on, maintaining power to the stereo and infotainment system. Then, after ten minutes, or when it receives a CAN message that the driver’s door has been opened, it cuts power to the relay, shutting the accessories off. It’s a simple build, but one that [ssh16] executed cleanly. By putting the microcontroller on a neat PCB with a harness that can clip into the stock Mazda one, it’s possible to install the hack without needing to cut any wires. Plus, with a small modification, it was even possible to use the same hack with a Mazda CX-5.
Whether you’re jamming out to a cool song, or you just want to finish a phone call over Bluetooth, it’s a nifty feature to have in a vehicle.
We’ve seen some other neat infotainment hacks before, too
. Video after the break. | 51 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700968",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2023-11-22T12:12:22",
"content": "Maybe not on a Mazda, but on my Nissan a double-tap of the start-stop button kills the engine while leaving it in “ON” rather than dropping straight into “off”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,099.93192 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/22/a-brand-new-antique-radio/ | A Brand-New Antique Radio | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antique radio",
"ESP32 wroom",
"ESP32-WROOM-32",
"radio"
] | This beautiful little radio may look like an art deco relic from a hundred years ago, but it is actually from 2023. When [Craig Lindley] first saw this design on these very pages a few years ago,
he just had to build one eventually
. Turns out, all he had to do wait until he bought a laser cutter.
Built with hardware on hand, this radio runs on an ESP32 WROOM and uses an Adafruit VS1053 CODEC breakout. Song information is displayed on an SPI LCD display, and output comes via a 1/8″ jack. It can play songs streamed from Internet radio stations, [Craig]’s website, or directly from an SD card.
The lovely cabinet is made from 1/8″ Baltic birch, with a living hinge for a roof and sides. The amber shellac goes a long way toward establishing the antique aesthetic.
Not content with this cute radio, [Craig] went ahead and built a speaker system to go with it out of a pair of small, external laptop speakers. [Craig] says this project had a lot of ups and downs, but we are quite happy to see it come to fruition.
Do you have an antique radio you’d like to restore?
Be sure to check out our guide
. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700961",
"author": "Jarek",
"timestamp": "2023-11-22T10:58:46",
"content": "Well, I would easily guess that it isn’t from a 100 years ago, namely blue LEDs, color LCDs and CNC laser cutters were much scarcer back then.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,099.709453 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/21/the-ghost-detector-9000-is-a-fun-spirit-chasing-game/ | The Ghost Detector 9000 Is A Fun Spirit-Chasing Game | Lewin Day | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"ghost",
"halloween",
"light",
"raspberry pi"
] | Halloween may have come and gone for another year, but we’re still finding neat spooky projects lurking out on the Interwebs. Case in point,
the Ghost Detector 9000 from [Jules].
Effectively, what you’re looking at here is a fun interactive ghost-detecting game. It consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero hooked up with an IMU sensor that can detect the rig’s movement and orientation. As the user moves the Ghost Detector 9000 around, it outputs lights and sound when it’s aimed at a so-called “ghost-signal”. The user then pulls the trigger to “capture” the ghost. The whole rig is built inside a flashlight which presented a useful form factor for modification.
For those eager to dive into the nitty-gritty, [Jules] has shared the project files
on GitHub.
There’s some nifty stuff going on, like Rust code that interfaces with I2C devices hooked up to the Pi, and a sensor-fusion algorithm to make the most out of the data from the 9-axis IMU.
It’s a fun build that probably taught [Jules] a great deal along the way, even if it’s a game at heart. If you prefer to shoot zombies instead of capture ghosts, we’ve seen a build that lets you go
hunting with a laser crossbow
, too. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6701154",
"author": "Lr0dy",
"timestamp": "2023-11-23T05:46:40",
"content": "I had a toy like this when I was a kid. Definitely some kind of 80s tech.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,100.101675 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/20/revive-a-sony-vaio-p-series-with-kicads-background-bitmaps/ | Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"laptops hacks",
"PCB Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Slider"
] | [
"KiCAD",
"sony vaio",
"sony vaio p",
"vaio",
"vaio p"
] | You might remember that
KiCad 7 came out
this February, with a multitude of wonderful features. One of them was particularly exciting to see, and
the KiCad newsletter
even had an animated GIF to properly demo it – a feature called “Background Bitmaps”, which is the ability to add existing board images into your board editor, both front and back, and switch between them as you design the board. With it, you can draw traces, recreate the outline and place connectors over these images, giving you a way to quickly to reproduce everything on an existing PCB! I’ve seen some friends of mine use this feature, and recently, I’ve had a project come up that’s a perfect excuse for me to try it.
By [
Yoggy
]
, CC-BY-2.0
Back in 2020, I managed to get a
Sony Vaio P
from a flea market, for about 20€. It’s a beloved tiny laptop from 2009, now a collectors item, and we’ve covered
a few hacks
with it! The price was this wonderful only because it was not fit for regular flea market customers – it was in bad condition, with the original DC jack lost and replaced by some Molex-like power connector, no hard drive, and no battery in sight.
In short, something worth selling to a known tinkerer like me, but not particularly interesting otherwise. Nevertheless, about half a year later, when I fed it the desired 10.5 V from a lab PSU and gave the power button a few chances, it eventually booted up and shown me the BIOS menu on the screen! I’ve disassembled and reassembled it a few times, replaced the DC jack with an original one from a different Vaio ultrabook I happened to have parts from, and decided to try to bring it back to original condition.
Only a tad larger than the Supercon 2022 badge
In total, I’ve
spent a good week
(
nitter
) trying to make this Vaio work properly so I could make a portable typing machine out of it. Its Atom CPU with PowerVR graphics made it extremely hard to have a Linux distro boot, as everything i386 I tried would hang indefinitely after GRUB.
Lack of battery didn’t make the experience pleasant either. I wanted to build a new battery out of two smartphone cells in series and a salvaged protection board from a different Sony battery, but it turned out that Sony had an extra pin on the battery connector, going to a proprietary controller that was apparently specifically designed to prevent non-legit battery use.
At some point, while demoing this laptop and my battery circuitry journey to a friend, I accidentally connected the salvaged Sony BMS in reverse, which made the laptop release some magic smoke – it still boots up, but when it comes to making it work in the way it was originally intended to work, my hopes are gone.
Despite everything, I love this laptop and don’t want to give up on it, even though I’ve never actually got to make use of it. It’s tiny in an adorable way yet with hardly any compromises in sight, it comfortably fits in purse-sized places, and it’s got some wacky aspects to it too, like the 1600 x 768 screen and a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard. The main problem is the mainboard, sadly – it’s a work of art and engineering alike, but it just doesn’t work well in the world of today, and the missing parts that rely on proprietary interfaces make it a financially Sisyphean task to try and restore this laptop. Today, let’s peek inside a legendary Sony laptop from 2009, and then use KiCad’s new reverse-engineering features to take a dig at rebuilding its mainboard.
A Look Inside
This “middle layers are flex” technique can be costly!
The innards of this laptop are an engineering marvel. A significant chunk of the laptop’s bottom half are taken up by the battery – the 1.8″ SATA HDD with its IDE-to-SATA on-FPC converter, the motherboard with the soldered-on CPU and RAM, the WiFi/GPS/BT expansion board, and the port PCBs take up only about 60% of the laptop’s inner space! Sony has made heavy use of flex PCBs, and not just that – half of the FR4 boards have flex layers in the middle of them! It’s a rare manufacturing technique to see in real-life boards, and this can’t have been cheap to produce.
All in all, it’s fascinating to look at just how well everything fits together inside of this laptop. If you’re interested to know more about what makes this laptop tick, someone on Hackaday Discord has linked
this document
to me, analyzing the hardware of this laptop – sadly, without pictures, but here’s a few to satiate your curiosity, and there’s also
some
wonderful
teardowns
!
I’ve covered
laptop motherboard reuse
before, and building a new motherboard for an existing laptop is obviously going to have many parallels. Here’s the main aspect that gives me hope – we have schematics! I won’t share them here, but you can find them easily if you look up “Sony Vaio VGN-P Series (Foxconn MBX-187).pdf”. This alone is super helpful and in fact makes this rebuild possible, because the connectors on the board turned out to have some wacky pinouts. For instance, the LCD has a weird LVDS pinout, and unlike many others, doesn’t implement backlight on the LCD panel itself – instead, the backlight driver chip is on the motherboard, and what we get is bare LED connections; reverse-engineering this without the schematic would’ve been a daunting task.
It’s not just the pinouts, either – not any connector will fit all these FPCs mechanically, the suitable connectors have very specific part numbers. However, the schematic lists all of the connector part numbers that I could need! They might not have datasheets easily available, but I can buy them, and that’s what matters. I’ve ordered the connectors I need – specifically, I only need a few, since I’ll get rid of the RF expansion board too. The RF board, with its two mPCIe cards and IDE passthrough for the internal HDD, needs way too much PCIe and proprietary interfaces for me to bother, and the schematic doesn’t contain any info about the connectors found on the expansion board specifically, so it’s just wasted space in the end when I compare it to other things I could build into this laptop’s shell instead.
Now, I just need to build a new mainboard! A friend of mine has helped me along the way, by drawing a Kicad footprint for the LCD connector from a datasheet she found. Still, there’s a good few tricky tasks when building a new mainboard for such a laptop – you need to copy the outline, connector positioning, and then add enough circuitry to make the laptop do what you need it to do. Thankfully, Kicad’s new Board Bitmap integration makes it easy to take care of all the mechanical aspects, and let me show you just how well this works.
Perfection In, Perfection Out – A Scanner Will Help
At the moment, the key to success is getting good pictures and processing them well. To get proper pictures, you’ll want to use something like a scanner – unless you find a way to position your phone just right, pictures from your phone will have a certain perspective to them, and unless you correct this perspective in something like GIMP, using these pictures will be a bother – KiCad doesn’t have a way to change perspective of an imported picture, so you have to do this externally. For scaling purposes, including a ruler is not a bad idea, because the distortion was negligible and was mostly a problem with screw holes where the shade produced by the scanner’s lightbar would have the hole position be slightly ambiguous.
Nevertheless, a scanner picture is what did the job for me, and I’ve talked to a friend who had problems with a phone-produced picture, so a scanner is what I’d recommend at the moment. I’ve heard that scanners can still have X/Y distortion, with slightly different PPI on X and Y axis, but I haven’t encountered that personally. I’m sure someone else has been using this KiCad feature for a while, though, and has found an even quicker solution than finding a scanner to put your board into – if that’s you, please do tell us more in the comment section!
Chipped set
I got some monochrome pictures at 300ppi, with negligible perspective differences, and these were more than enough. Of course, the board has components on it on both sides, and if they were just a bit taller or disproportionately placed, the board would’ve not been quite parallel with the scanner’s glass, which would’ve required me to actually change the perspective of the images in GIMP. If you’re scanning a board like that, desoldering connectors might be a solution.
In my case, for a somewhat flat board, if I were to think this aspect through, I would’ve found a way to equally offset this board vertically relative to the glass while not letting any light in, adding some sort of standoffs and then a soft ‘frame’ of some sorts. Instead, I just pushed down on the scanner lid, which appears to have slightly cracked the chipset’s die on the scanner glass. That’s a disappointment, because I still wanted to power this board up a few times to sniff communications with things like the trackpoint, and now I’m not sure I can quite do that – but I will try regardless!
From Image To Wonderful Board
One Schroedinger’s chipset later, I got board images and cropped them in GIMP. It’s important that you rotate them so that the board is not off-angle in any perceivable way – if your PCB images are slightly rotated by a few degrees, you’ll want to tweak their rotation in GIMP/Paint/Kolourpaint/etc and re-import, because KiCad can’t help rotate them for you. Also, scanners will mirror your board image – so mirror it back as required, and, you can mirror images in KiCad.
This is it! You’re ready to open the KiCad PCB Editor, press Place => Add Image, select your image and scale it. You’ll want to flip (hotkey F) the bottom image, but you’ll also want to open its properties (hotkey E) and change its layer from the default F.Cu to B.Cu – that’s how you get the images to change as you go from top to bottom layer while routing tracks. After all the rotating and cropping that I did, I was very pleasantly surprised when I scaled the image, placed my friend’s LCD connector footprint, and had it match perfectly with the connector pads on the image.
A bit of repositioning the images, and I’ve matched both the top and bottom outlines to a bounding box of the real-world PCB size, then redrawing the outline. I’ve also rounded the corners – the original board has sharp corners and they kept scraping at me as I was handling it! By the way, if you want to round corners of a board in KiCad, simply select both of the lines which make the corner, right click and press “Fillet Lines” – there’s no need to manually draw arcs anymore.
This isn’t a magic bullet for all your PCB reverse-engineering troubles, but it’s exceptionally useful – it saves you a ton of fiddling with calipers figuring out exact connector and hole positions! Load the images into KiCad, position them, and you can start placing your connectors and Edge.Cuts lines. With this method, you can reproduce proprietary boards in KiCad easier than ever before, as long as you can get a good picture – which is perfect for things like custom FPCs. Of course, it still helps if you can lasercut your board’s outline before submitting it for production!
It Will Only Get Better
Rough sketch of what I will put onto my board
There’s, of course, a few small caveats. For instance, when you’re drawing the outline on top of the images, it’s not hard to misclick and select the images, having them overlap the outline so you have to reach for the Esc key to continue drawing. This is very simple to solve, however – in the bottom right corner of the PCB Editor, in the Selection Editor field, uncheck “Drawings” and you won’t have that problem anymore. Overall, KiCad had support for different image scaling on X/Y, image rotation, or maybe even perspective tweaks, it’d be a bit quicker to start reverse-engineering any given board. At the moment, of course, reverse-engineering is not the main purpose of KiCad – but it will become more prominent!
Having this integration is a wonderful step forward for building all sorts of boards, and these quirks are no showstopper – they can’t even approach the immense value that this tool provides, and it’s a new addition so the quirks will be smoothed over. I’m only listing them so that you know what to expect at the moment, but in future releases, I’d expect background bitmaps to only become more comfortable to use.
As for the Sony Vaio, I’m going to put a Pi Zero W onto this board and work on converting its DPI (parallel RGB) output into LVDS that the screen needs, and slap an RP2040 onto the board for keyboard/trackpoint/LED purposes – that should make for a good v1 board. If the LVDS part pans out, I can’t wait for the moment when this laptop is usable as my daily driver! Given how quickly I work on my projects, this one could take a year, but I’m seriously thankful for KiCad making quick work of previously the most annoying part of such reverse-engineering. In the meantime, the board pictured
is on my GitHub.
I hope that this part of my journey can be a demonstration of how quickly you can reverse-engineer a PCB’s most important aspects with this new feature that KiCad 7 brought to us. Just like when we used KiCad’s then newly added SVG import to
build a Jolly Wrencher SAO board,
this is one more addition to your KiCad toolkit that you might not have known you needed!
Main/thumbnail picture made by [Wificable]! | 31 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700492",
"author": "lamalas",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T19:18:27",
"content": "Now do this with a HP Jornada 720.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6700504",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T20... | 1,760,372,100.175625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/20/cnc-plus-microscope-plus-game-controller-equals-awesome/ | CNC Plus Microscope Plus Game Controller Equals Awesome | Richard Baguley | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"automated microscope",
"cnc",
"g-code"
] | What do you get if you strap a microscope onto a CNC and throw in a gaming controller? The answer, according to Reddit user [AskewedBox] is something kind of awesome: you get a microscope that can be controlled with the game controller for
easier tracking of tiny creepy-crawlies
.
[ASkewedBox] set up this interesting combination of devices, attaching their
Adonostar AD246S
microscope to the stage of a no-brand 1610 CNC bought off Amazon, then connected the CNC to a computer running
Universal G-Code Sender
. This great open source program takes the input from an Xbox game controller and uses it to jog the CNC.
With a bit of tweaking, the game controller can now move the microscope, so it can be used to track microbes and other small creatures as they wander around on the slide mounted below the microscope eating each other. The movement of this is surprisingly smooth: the small CNC and a well-mounted microscope means that there seems to be very little wobble or backlash as the microscope moves.
[Askewedbox] hasn’t finished yet, though: in
the latest update
, he adds a polarizing lens to the setup and mentions that he wants to add focus control to the system, which is controlled by a remote that comes with the microscope.
There are plenty of other things that could be added beyond that, though, such as auto pan and stitch for larger photos, auto focus stacking and perhaps even auto tracking using OpenCV to track the hideous tiny creatures that live in the microscopic realm. What would you do to make this even cooler? | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700529",
"author": "Phil Barrett",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T21:00:11",
"content": "Interesting and not hard at all to do. Anyone interested in building one of these, keep an eye open on facebook market place. I see the 3018 CNC machines selling second hand for $100-$200. They ma... | 1,760,372,099.756323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/20/2023-halloween-hackfest-this-years-spooky-winners/ | 2023 Halloween Hackfest: This Year’s Spooky Winners | Tom Nardi | [
"contests",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Halloween Hack Fest",
"contests",
"Hackaday Contests"
] | With the zombies, ghouls, and ghosts now safely returned to their crypts until next October, it’s time to unveil this year’s winners for the
2023 Halloween Hackfest
.
For this contest, sponsors DigiKey and Arduino challenged the community to come up with their best creations for what’s arguably the most hacker-friendly of holidays. Pretty much everything was fair game, from costumes to decorations. The top three winners will get $150 credit from DigiKey and some treats from Arduino — just don’t try to eat them.
First Prize: Flying Ghost
Halloween offers a rare opportunity to not only take your creations out into the world, but to terrorize passerby without consequence. You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of that spirit, no pun intended, than the
Flying Ghost created by [Scott Duckworth]
.
We’ve seen various RC aircraft get dressed up for the holiday in the past, but this example is a bit different. Rather than build his ghost around a free-flying rotorcraft, [Scott] suspended his haunter from a cable system that was connected to a trio of beefy winches that could be controlled by a central microcontroller using RF24L01+ modules. With a sprinkle of trilateration, the system was able to convert the length of line in each winch into a 3D position over the street. After the sun goes gown, the result is an illuminated ghost that can swoop over the heads of trick-or-treaters in silence with no obvious means of propulsion.
Or at least, that was the idea. Unfortunately, [Scott] ran into a glitch that prevented the central controller from calculating the ghost’s position on Halloween, and there wasn’t enough time to sort it out before the roving bands of sugar bandits showed up. Not all was lost, as the ghost was still hanging menacingly over the street, but it wasn’t able to move around. Naturally, it only took a few minutes to figure out the problem on November 1st. Hey, at least he’ll be ready for 2024.
What was the problem, you ask? He had defined a variable as
int16_t
when it should have been
int32_t
— real spooky stuff around these parts.
Second Prize: Fire Dragon
This
fire-breathing dragon head from [Science Shack]
started its life as a realistic mask from Amazon, but after the addition of some animatronic hardware and a bit of flammable gas, it’s more than just a pretty face.
A lightweight acrylic “skeleton” inside the mask is articulated with three servos, which is enough to provide a reptilian-like head motion without getting too bogged down in the details. A fourth servo is used to depress the nozzle on a can of butane as part of the the 3D printed “flamethrower” in the beast’s mouth. After the gas travels through a small brass tube, it’s lit off with a spark and the dragon is able to belch out an impressive flame. Luckily the mask’s latex construction is relatively heat-resistant, so it doesn’t melt itself when the heat is on.
Third Prize: Haunted Keyboard
When you think of traditional Halloween decorations and props, a mechanical keyboard probably doesn’t make the cut. But what about a
haunted
keyboard? Well that’s a different story.
This spectral keyboard,
created by [Mx. Jack Nelson]
is inhabited by the spirit of a particularly terrifying entity: ChatGPT. Once you type in a message, the internal Raspberry Pi Pico forwards it to the large language model (LLM) chatbot so it can produce a suitably spooky response. Once the keyboard receives the results, it “types” them out as if an unseen hand was at work.
The result is something like a futuristic Ouija board; where each question is met with a response that’s just vague enough to make you think there might be some kind of intelligence at work. We still wouldn’t trust it to write any code for us, but as far as Halloween set dressing goes, it seems more than up to the task.
Honorable Mentions
As usual, this contest featured a number of special categories which the judges were asked to consider while placing their votes.
Costume: Electronic Harry Potter Wand
Technically, all you need to dress up as somebody from the Harry Potter universe is some robes and maybe a scarf. But you won’t be much of a witch or a wizard without a wand, where is where
this creation from [Mike Kushnerik] comes in
.
The wand is powered by an Adafruit RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather microcontroller, which features an onboard LIS3DH three-axis linear accelerometer that’s used to detect when a “spell” is being cast. An RGB LED in the tip of the wand lights up accordingly, and an 18650 cell provides more than enough power to keep the magic going all night.
A 3D printed enclosure helps to sell the wand look while still being rugged enough to handle a night out. We also appreciated the modular nature of the design, which makes future repairs and upgrades easier.
Pumpkin: Animatronic Halloween Pumpkins
According to [Nico], every year his neighborhood holds a pumpkin carving contest. The locals do their best to produce something exciting with the traditional tools of the trade, and then he comes in and slam dunks on their efforts with his
high-tech animatronic singing creations
. It truly is the reason for the season.
His creation this year takes the form of a trio of pumpkins, which light up and play audio thanks to a Teensy 3.5 which in turn is controlled by an Android application over a Bluetooth link. While two of the pumpkins look more or less like you’d expect, the third features a large eyeball that uses a pair of servos to look around and blink.
Though we imagine there was a considerable temptation just to 3D print the pumpkins so he’d be able to use them year after year, we appreciate that [Nico] housed his electronics in real gourds.
Kid-Pleaser: Halloween Candy-Pult
What’s better than getting candy? Seeing said candy launched into the air and work its way through a convoluted contraption before you get it, obviously. Or at least, that
seems to be the idea behind this entry from [pdxalz]
. While admittedly a relatively low-tech project compared to the other entries, it has a fun spirit that made it stand out with the judges.
The original idea was to create a pneumatic “Candy Cannon” which would fire chocolate bars out of a PVC tube barrel. But it tended to destroy the treats in the process, so [pdxalz] changed gears and built a far less aggressive catapult to fling the sweet treats across the porch and into a faux spider web. From there, they fall into a hopper and then work their way down to a waiting bucket.
Hallowed Home: Organ-Playing Skeleton
The components for this project are simple enough: take one broken Hammond organ, combine with a dancing skeleton from the Home Depot, add in a 555 timer, an MP3 playback module, and sprinkle relays liberally. The end result is a otherworldly musical performance with far less complexity than you might expect.
As explained by creator [bryan.lowder]
, the dancing skeleton from the Home Depot had a way of moving its arms that looked a bit like it was playing the organ once properly positioned. The trick was getting it to do it on command, as the dancing didn’t start until you pressed a “Demo” button attached to its back.
Instead of a microcontroller, he reached for a 555 timer and relay combination that would close the circuit after waiting an appropriate amount of time. The MP3 module, connected to an amplified speaker system, is then kicked in at the appropriate time to complete the scene.
Spooky: Billy RC Tricycle
This last category was an easy one: just build something that’s actually scary. On that account, the judges had no problem identifying the
Billy RC Tricycle by [Marcel]
as the project they’d least like to run into on a dark October night.
Inspired by previous (but less creepy) RC tricycle projects, the components used to steer and propel this roving hell-hound are expertly hidden. In the dark, you’d swear the puppet mounted to the bike is really pedaling its way towards you. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the custom control board features a DFPlayer module that plays MP3s of unsettling music and manic laughter.
[Marcel] has done a great job documenting the build, and has even provided the files necessary to produce the electronics that allow the tricycle to be remotely operated from a standard PlayStation 3 controller. Under normal circumstances, we’d be happy to see such transparency…but the cowards among us would actually prefer
not
to see a bunch of Billy clones in 2024.
Only 11 Months to Go…
Halloween is over now, and most people have their eyes on the fast-approaching holiday season. But then, you’re not
most
people, are you? No, you’re reading Hackaday, and that means you’ve probably started brainstorming what kind of electronic horrors you can put together before Halloween 2024.
If the winners weren’t inspiring enough, make sure to
browse through the full list of entries this year
. There’s surely something in there that should help get your own macabre machinations off the ground. Just make sure to document your work so you can show it off to us next year. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700639",
"author": "Mx. Jack Nelson",
"timestamp": "2023-11-21T06:09:43",
"content": "Oh my gosh, thank you! I’m excited and honored to have gotten third place, there are so many amazing entries. The little Haunted Keyboard is thrilled, and will get a few upgrades, now!",
"pare... | 1,760,372,100.065994 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/20/what-can-you-do-with-thousands-of-vintage-telephones/ | What Can You Do WithThousandsOf Vintage Telephones? | Dave Rowntree | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"phone",
"recycling",
"vintage"
] | Telephones. We’ve got a few around the place, and some may remember all the weird and wonderful varieties produced over the years. But, vintage phone dealers [Ron and Mary Knappen]
may have a few too many
. With a large 41,000 sqft property, at least three farm buildings, and no fewer than 33 semi-trailers loaded to busting with racks of phones, the retiring couple have a job sorting it all out and finding someone passionate enough to
take over this once-strong business
.
Technology has moved on somewhat since 1971 when they got into the retro business, and there are only so many period dramas being produced that could make a dent in a collection of a
thousand
steel desk phones. Nobody seems interested in taking on their business, so they are concentrating on emptying that large property in order to sell it, but the fate of the crazy number of other storage locations seems uncertain. Perhaps, other than a few museums around the world purchasing a few, this collection really is likely heading to the recyclers.
So what can we do with a vintage phone in this modern era? Here’s a
primer to get you started
. How about
going cellular
? Or maybe just add them to
your existing designer collection
?
Thanks to [Jeremy] and
Adafruit
for the tip! | 56 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700376",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T12:12:47",
"content": "“So what can we do with a vintage phone in this modern era?”By god, save those 600 ohms speakers in the hand sets! 😔🙏Those are great for all kinds of experiments!I’ve used them as fine microphones on com... | 1,760,372,100.022955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/20/3d-human-models-from-a-single-image/ | 3D Human Models From A Single Image | Al Williams | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"3d scanning",
"human digitization"
] | You’ve seen it in movies and shows — the hero takes a blurry still picture, and with a few keystrokes, generates a view from a different angle or sometimes even a full 3D model. Turns out, thanks to machine learning and work by several researchers, this
might be possible
. As you can see in the video below, using “shape-guided diffusion,” the researchers were able to take a single image of a person and recreate a plausible 3D model.
Of course, the work relies on machine learning. As you’ll see in the video, this isn’t a new idea, but previous attempts have been less than stellar. This new method uses shape prediction first, followed by an estimate of the back view appearance. The algorithm then guesses what images go between the initial photograph and the back view. However, it uses the 3D shape estimate as a guideline. Even then, there is some post-processing to join the intermediate images together into a model.
The result looks good, although the video does point out some areas where they still fall short. For example, unusual lighting can affect the results.
This beats
spinning around a person or a camera
to get many images. Scanning people in 3D is
a much older dream than you might expect
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700377",
"author": "Anonymus",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T12:21:13",
"content": "That website just crashes my browser with over 2GB ram used by a single page",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6700458",
"author": "Michael ... | 1,760,372,100.355002 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/how-the-ws2812-is-made/ | How The WS2812 Is Made | Elliot Williams | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led",
"manufacturing",
"neopixel",
"ws2812"
] | [Scotty Allen] of
Strange Parts
is no stranger to Chinese factory tours, but this one is now our favorite.
He visits the font of all WS2812s, World Semi
, and takes a good look at the machines that make two million LEDs per day.
The big deal with the WS2812s, and all of the similar addressable LEDs that have followed them, is that they have a logic chip inside the LED that enables all the magic. And that means die-bonding bare-die ICs into each blinky. Watching all of the machines pick, place, glue, and melt bond wire is pretty awesome. Don’t miss the demo of the tape-and-frame. And would you believe that they test each smart LED before they kick it out the door? There’s a machine that clocks some data in and reads it back out the other side.
Do we take the addressable LED for granted today? Probably. But if you watch this video, maybe you’ll at least know what goes into making one, and the next time you’re blinking all over the place, you’ll spill a little for the epoxy-squirting machine. After all, the WS2812 is the LED that prompted us to ask, three years ago,
if we could live without one
. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700297",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T06:46:05",
"content": "WS2813, WS2815…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6700302",
"author": "mh",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T06:55:17",
"content": "I’m still learning... | 1,760,372,100.417775 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/first-crispr-based-therapies-for-sickle-cell-disease-and-beta-thalassemia-approved-in-the-uk/ | First CRISPR-Based Therapies For Sickle Cell Disease And Beta Thalassemia Approved In The UK | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"CRISPR",
"CRISPR CaS9",
"gene-therapy",
"hemoglobin",
"red blood cells"
] | The
gene-therapy-based treatment called Casgevy
was recently approved in the UK, making it the first time that a treatment based on the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool has been authorized for medical treatments. During the clinical trials, a number of patients were enrolled with either
sickle cell disease
(SCD) or
β thalassemia
, both of which are blood disorders that affect the production of healthy red blood cells. Of the 45 who enrolled for the SCD trial, 29 were evaluated in the initial 12-month efficacy assessment, with 28 of those found to be still free of the severe pain crises that characterizes SCD. For the β thalassemia trial, 42 patients were evaluated and 39 were still free of the need for red blood cell transfusions and iron chelation after the 12-month period, with the remaining three showing a marked reduction in the need for these.
Both of these blood disorders are inherited via recessive genes, meaning that in the case of SCD two abnormal copies of the
β-globin
(HBB) gene are required to trigger the disorder. For β thalassemia a person can be a carrier or have a variety of symptoms based on the nature of the two sets of mutated genes that involve the production of
HbA
(adult hemoglobin), with the severest form (β thalassemia major) requiring the patient to undergo regular transfusions. Both types of conditions have severe repercussions on overall health and longevity, with few individuals living to the age of 60.
The way that the
Casgevy treatment
works involves taking stem cells out of the bone marrow of the patient, after which the CRISPR-Cas9 tool is used to target the
BCL11A
gene and cut it out completely. This particular gene is instrumental in the switch from fetal γ globin (HBG1, HBG2) to adult β globin form. Effectively this modification causes the resulting cells to produce fetal-type hemoglobin (HbF) instead of adult HbA which would have the mutations involved in the blood disorder.
For the final step in the treatment, the modified stem cells have to be inserted back into the patient’s bone marrow, which requires another treatment to make the bone marrow susceptible to hosting the new cells. After this the patient will ideally be cured, as the stem cells produce new, HbF-producing cells that go on to create healthy hemoglobin. Although safety and costs (~US$2M per patient) considerations of such a CRISPR-Cas9 gene therapy may give pause, this has to be put against the prospect of 40-60 years of intensive symptom management.
Currently, the US FDA as well as the EU’s EMA are also looking at possibly approving the treatment, which might open the gates for similar gene-therapies.
Top image: A giemsa stained blood smear from a person with beta thalassemia. Note the lack of coloring. (Credit: Dr Graham Beards,
Wikimedia Commons
) | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700272",
"author": "Travis",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T04:51:37",
"content": "“another treatment to make the bone marrow susceptible to hosting the new cells.” Sounds a bit like chemo.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6700395",
... | 1,760,372,100.85825 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/hackaday-links-november-19-2023/ | Hackaday Links: November 19, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | Two RUDs are better than one, right? That might be the line on
Saturday morning’s briefly spectacular second attempt
by SpaceX to launch their Starship vehicle atop a Super Heavy booster, which ended with the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of both vehicles. The first attempt, back in April, had trouble from the get-go, including the rapid unscheduled partial disassembly of their Stage Zero launch pad, followed by rapid but completely predictable disassembly of a lot of camera gear and an unfortunate minivan thanks to flying chunks of concrete.
Starship’s first “hot” separation
Engineering changes helped keep Stage Zero more or less intact this time, and the Super Heavy booster performed flawlessly — for about three minutes. It was at that point, right after the start of the new “hot staging” process, where Starship’s six engines light before the booster actually drops away, that the problems started. The booster made a rapid flip maneuver to get into the correct attitude for burn-back and landing before disappearing in a massive ball of flame.
Reports are that the flight termination system did the deed, but it’s not yet exactly clear why. Ditto the Starship, which was also snuffed by the FTS after continuing to fly for about another five minutes. Still in all, the SpaceX crew seem to be ecstatic about the results, which is understandable for a company with a “move fast, break things” culture. Nailed it.
As a professional YouTube watcher — not YouTuber; big difference — it’s hard to escape the impression lately that the video-sharing service really, really doesn’t like me. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been inundated with nasty pop-ups of escalating aggression indicating YouTube’s displeasure with the presence of the uBlock Origin extension on my browser. How it discerns that fact — which isn’t changing, by the way — may now be getting the company into hot water with EU regulators, who are fielding complaints that
scripts to detect ad blockers constitute illegal spyware
. The complaint originates from a privacy consultant in Ireland, which has its own privacy laws on top of EU rules, and claims that the software is deployed on users’ machines without their knowledge or consent. Color us cynical, but we’re pretty sure this will go nowhere, and we who have no choice but to continue using YouTube will be in a constant state of war with the service as it attempts to keep The Spice flowing.
From the “You get paid for doing this?” files,
a new scientific paper
reveals that virtual meetings are more fatiguing than in-person meetings. The peer-reviewed paper, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, does make an interesting distinction between “active fatigue,” which they classify as exhaustion due to overloading demands, and “passive fatigue,” which stems from a lack of stimulation. Most of us can probably relate to the difference; there’s a world of difference between being tired at the end of the day because you were absolutely swamped with work, and spending a day having your soul sucked out of you through your webcam. To their credit, the researchers did make every effort at objective measures of fatigue, like heart rate analysis of test subjects. They also did “time-stamped field observations,” which consisted of someone shadowing test subjects during their workdays and attending both IRL and virtual meetings with them to watch for signs of fatigue. Imagine having to go to someone else’s meetings and count the number of times they yawn. Being a grad student sucks.
We’ve never been to Tulsa, Oklahoma, but now that we’ve learned that there’s
a “physics-defying” auditory anomaly
there, we’re still reasonably sure we won’t be going there anytime soon. Which is too bad, because the accidental phenomenon actually seems pretty cool. It occurs on a pedestrian bridge, where a circular plaza with a
tripping hazard
low wall of curved planters reflects sound back to the center of the circle. Stand at the center of the circle and you hear an echo of your own voice; stand outside the planters, and nobody can hear you, at least not very well. The “Center of the Universe,” as it’s known, has become a minor tourist attraction, which has the city of Tulsa looking into improvements to make the auditory effect more pronounced. And with all due respect to Tulsans, the place could use a little sprucing up — looks a little dumpy.
And finally, the Geerling boys are back at it, this time with
a tour of an AM radio transmitter facility
. Having already looked at a “supertower” site hosting multiple FM and TV stations, their attention this time turns to KMOX, a 50,000-watt flamethrower in Missouri that has been on the air pretty much as long as there’s been radio. To a radio geek, the tour is fascinating, especially details like the ceramic insulator that bears the entire weight of the tower, the web of counterpoise wires spread out in the ground under the tower, and the many ways all that blistering RF energy is generated and contained. Also interesting was the relatively recent addition of hardened “station-in-a-box” facilities, which
we discussed recently
in our
Radio Apocalypse series
. The senior Geerling has been in the radio business for decades and really knows his stuff, so there are tons of little tidbits that any radio buff is sure to enjoy. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700215",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T01:07:59",
"content": "I thoroughly enjoyed the video of KMOX!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6700244",
"author": "Pinhead BE",
"timest... | 1,760,372,100.669863 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/hacking-apples-magic-mouse-to-fix-its-worst-flaws/ | Hacking Apple’s Magic Mouse To Fix Its Worst Flaws | Maya Posch | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"magic mouse"
] | The Magic Mouse was first released by Apple in 2009 and was a major departure from previous designs. It was sleek, low-profile, and featured a touch pad on the top for gestures. Although the first generation was powered by two AA batteries and didn’t lead to much commentary, the 2015 redesign caused a lot of scathing memes and worse, mostly due to the rechargeable battery and the Lightning charging port that had been located on its bottom, leading to Dead Magic Mouse syndrome when you wanted to charge it. Since then myriad hackers have tried to fix the Magic Mouse’s issues, with
[Ivan Kuleshov]’s recent attempt
being perhaps the most straightforward and possibly successful.
Essentially, the Magic Mouse has two major flaws: ergonomics and the worst possible location of the charging port. Although both 3D models and commercial products exist to alleviate the former issue – and some of these even add wireless charging in between mousing sessions – all attempts to relocate the charging port were met by failure, as the Magic Mouse cannot be both charged and used at the same time due to how Apple designed the circuit.
What [Ivan] did differently is that aside from tweaking some existing 3D models for Magic Mouse extensions to his liking, he also fixed the charging issue by avoiding Apple’s circuitry altogether and adding a USB-C port in the process. He also added a TP4056-based charging module, directly soldered to the battery’s terminals, that will top off the battery when plugged in. During experimentation on a live Magic Mouse, this led to the battery charge reported in MacOS increasing correspondingly. More or less, at least.
The 3D printed shell isn’t just a wrapper around the original mouse either, but splits the squat rodent into its upper and lower sections, so that the optical sensor isn’t suspended off the surface, while also keeping the touch-sensitive top section where it should be. According to [Ivan] the project files will be made available on
his GitHub account
in the near future. | 50 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700168",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T21:38:21",
"content": "Why would anyone tolerate a mouse that forces you to stop using your computer when it needs a recharge?Why would anyone try to work around such a stupid design fault instead of complaining to the company tha... | 1,760,372,100.950467 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/fixing-astronomy-in-the-blink-of-an-eye/ | Fixing Astronomy In The Blink Of An Eye | Al Williams | [
"LED Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"astronomy",
"dark sky"
] | If you’ve ever set a telescope up in your backyard, you probably learned how quick any kind of lighting ruins your observation. In fact, a recent study found that every year, about 10% of the stars that were visible the previous year disappear in the mishmash of light scattering through the atmosphere. A company called StealthTransit has a solution:
blink the lights in a controlled way
. They have an animated video
explaining the concept
.
The technology, named DarkSkyProtector, assumes there is LED lighting and that the light’s owner (or manufacturer) will put a simple device in line that causes the LED to blink imperceptibly. As you might guess, the telescope — presumably some giant observatory uses a GPS receiver to synchronize and then images only when the LED lights all turn off. That presumes, of course, that you have a significant number of lights under control.
It is hard to imagine every city and home having astronomy-safe lighting. However, we can imagine a university installing a lighting system on its campus to protect night viewing. The system underwent a test in the Caucasus mountains using a 24-inch telescope and was apparently quite successful with a shutter rate of about 150 Hz. We weren’t clear if each LED control module has to have a GPS-disciplined time source, but it seems like you’d have to. However, the post talks about how the bulbs wouldn’t cost more to make than conventional ones, so maybe they don’t have anything fancy in them.
You can see
satellites in the day
with some tech tricks. Want to check out observatories?
Hit the road
. Or, get time on a telescope with
Skynet University
. | 37 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700119",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T18:33:48",
"content": "Doesn’t really matter whether it’s LEDs or any other form of lighting, it’s all a PITA for astronomy/astrophotography. LP filters are usually the first port of call depending on the type of li... | 1,760,372,100.798544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/two-channel-guitar-stomp-box-makes-momentary-switches-latching/ | Two-Channel Guitar Stomp Box Makes Momentary Switches Latching | Dan Maloney | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"attiny2313",
"effect pedal",
"guitar",
"latching",
"microcontroller",
"momentary",
"relay",
"should have used a 555",
"stomp box"
] | When we first saw [Maarten Tromp]’s article about a
“momentary latching switch” for guitar effects pedals
, we have to admit to being a bit confused. When it comes to push-button switches, “momentary” and “latching” seem to be at odds with each other, with different mechanisms inside the switch to turn one into the other. What gives?
As it turns out, [Maarten]’s build makes perfect sense when you consider the demands of a musical performance. Guitar effects pedals, or “stomp boxes,” are often added to the output of electric guitars and other instruments to change the signals in some musically interesting way. The trouble is, sometimes you only need an effect for a few bars, and the push-on, push-off switches on many effects pedals make that awkward.
[Maarten]’s idea was to build a stomp box with momentary switches that act as inputs to an ATtiny2313 microcontroller rather than directly controlling the effect. That way, a bit of code can determine how long the switch is tapped, and activate a relay to do the actual switching accordingly. A short tap of the button tells the microcontroller to latch the relay closed until another tap comes along; a long press means that the relay is held open only as long as the button is held down.
Yes, he could have used a 555, a fact which [Maarten] readily acknowledges, but with some loss of flexibility; he currently has the threshold set at 250 milliseconds, which works for his performance style. Changing it would be a snap in code, as would toggling the latching logic. A microcontroller also makes expansion from the two-channel setup shown here easier.
Looking for more effects pedal action? We’ve got a bunch —
a tube-amp tremolo
, an
Arduino Mega multipedal
, a
digital delay line
. Take your pick! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700084",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T15:03:47",
"content": "He really needs to name it “The Tromp Stomp”!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6700111",
"author": "pruttelherrie",
... | 1,760,372,100.721932 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/pineberry-pi-hatdrive-using-nvme-ssds-with-the-raspberry-pi-5/ | Pineberry Pi HatDrive: Using NVMe SSDs With The Raspberry Pi 5 | Maya Posch | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"NVMe",
"Raspberry Pi 5"
] | When the Raspberry Pi 5 launched, many were left chomping at the bit after seeing the PCIe FPC connector alongside the promise that an ‘NVMe SSD HAT would be forthcoming’. Although the official Raspberry Pi NVMe HAT is still a long while off, the Polish company Pineberry Pi is ramping up to release its Top & Bottom versions of its very wittily called HatDrive.
They sent a prototype to [Jeff Geerling], who has been putting his grubby mitts all over them before
putting together a video
showing off the
HatDrive
Top, which can accept 2230 and 2242 size NVMe drives.
The primary goal of adding an NVMe drive to the RPi is of course to get rid of those slow and fragile SD cards. Although the SD card standard supports near-NVMe-like speeds with UHS-III, the Raspberry Pi 5
bottoms out
at UHS-I, around 100 MB/s. Despite this, using an NVMe drive for booting still takes some work, as [Jeff]
lays out
in a clear article. Most of this involves tweaking the
/boot/config.txt
file to enable external PCIe support, editing the onboard EEPROM to change the boot order (in lieu of having a PC-like BIOS screen) and getting the OS image flashed onto the NVMe drive you intend to boot from.
Although things seem to work fine
during [Jeff]’s testing
, some caveats remain, such as the RPi 5 officially supporting only PCIe Gen 2 x1, with Gen 3 possible, but with potential data integrity issues. There’s also the fundamental limit of having only a single lane of PCIe available. If that’s no problem, then Pineberry Pi offers the aforementioned HatDrive Top for traditional HAT-style mounting, and a Bottom version that can accept up to 2280 format NVMe SSDs. Including the provided ribbon cables, you can order the Top and Bottom for €20 and €25.99 respectively, with the first batch to ship in early December.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700056",
"author": "Grawp",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T12:40:51",
"content": "Just why… If you don’t want to use RPi like a normal embedded device i.e. with RO memory and have wear leveled RW memory just for logs and you are hell bent on using it as a desktop then why not use just in... | 1,760,372,101.15045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/19/miniature-hydraulic-jack-is-a-scale-marvel/ | Miniature Hydraulic Jack Is A Scale Marvel | Julian Scheffers | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"hydraulics",
"machining",
"scale model"
] | Most hydraulic jacks are big tools that can lift upwards of 1000 kg but [Maker B]’s
is quite a bit smaller than average
.
The world’s smallest hydraulic jack is a tiny hand-machined model made out of tiny pieces of iron, brass and copper. But here’s the kicker: It’s a real hydraulic jack with real hydraulic fluid! At 1/5th scale, it obviously isn’t as strong as a full-size jack, but it can still easily lift an impressive 24 soda cans! Switching between the lathe and mill, [Maker B] shows how all the parts of the jack are made from stock metal in detail, and even explains in simple terms how a hydraulic jack works in this masterpiece of a video.
Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of tiny objects cranked out from stock pieces of metal — often bolts. But the fact that the
end result here is a working tool
, puts it into a decidedly less common niche. Of course, given
what we’ve seen from [Maker B] in the past
, it’s hardly a surprise. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700067",
"author": "Clara",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T13:28:15",
"content": "Perfect for stealing 1/5 scale bikes!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6700158",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T20:35... | 1,760,372,100.992086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/bigfoot-turns-classic-sewing-machine-into-a-leather-eating-monster/ | Bigfoot Turns Classic Sewing Machine Into A Leather-Eating Monster | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"hall effect",
"leather",
"photointerrupter",
"pid",
"pwm",
"sewing",
"tachometer",
"universal motor"
] | If you try to sew leather on a standard consumer-grade machine, more often than not you’ll quickly learn its limits. Most machines are built for speed, and trying to get them to punch through heavy material at the low motor speeds often needed for leather work is a lesson in frustration.
How frustrating? Enough so that [Joseph Eoff] expended considerable effort to create
this sewing machine speed controller
for his nearly century-old Adler sewing machine. The machine was once powered by a foot treadle, which is probably why the project is dubbed “Bigfoot,” but now uses a 230 V universal motor. Such motors don’t deliver much torque when run at low speeds with the standard foot-pedal rheostat control, so [Joseph] worked up an Arduino-based controller with a tachometer for feedback and a high-power PWM driver for the motor.
There are a ton of details in [Joseph]’s post and even more in the original blog article, which is well worth a read, but a couple really stand out. The first is with the tachometer, which uses an off-the-shelf photointerrupter and slotted disc. [Joseph] was displeased with the sensor’s asymmetrical and unreliable output, so he made some modifications to the onboard comparator to square up the signal. Also interesting is the PID loop auto-tuning function he programmed into Bigfoot; press a button and the controller automatically ramps the motor speed up and down and stores the coefficients in memory. Nice!
The short video below shows Bigfoot in action with varying thicknesses of faux leather; there are also some clips in the original article that show the machine dealing with a triple thickness of leather at slow speed and not even breaking a sweat. Hats off to [Joseph] on a solid build that keeps a classic machine in the game. And if you want to get into the textile arts but don’t know where to start,
we’ve got you covered
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6700025",
"author": "Elucidator",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T08:46:13",
"content": "Well thats one way to do it. Definitely a hack.But $100-200 gets you a brushless sewing machine motor with needle position control on the bay.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,101.201043 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/restoring-the-silver-swan-automaton/ | Restoring The Silver Swan Automaton | Navarre Bartz | [
"History",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"automaton",
"kinetic art",
"kinetic sculpture",
"museum piece",
"swan"
] | It’s easier than ever to build your own robot, but humans have been building automatons since before anyone had even thought of electronics. One beautiful example is
the Silver Swan
, built in the 18th century.
The brainchild of [John Joseph Merlin] and silversmith [James Cox], the swan features three separate clockwork drives, appearing to swim in a moving river where it snatches fish in its motorized beak. Mark Twain said the swan had “a living grace about his movements and living intelligence in his eyes” when he saw it at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867.
The swan has been delighting people for 250 years, and recently received some much-deserved maintenance. In the video below, you can see museum staff disassembling the swan including its 113 neck rings which protect the three different chain drives controlling its lifelike motions. Hopefully, with some maintenance, this automaton will still be going strong in 2273.
If you’d like to
Bring Back the Age of Automatons
, perhaps you should
study this bird bath
or the
“Draughtsman-Writer.” | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699942",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T03:18:34",
"content": "Beautiful!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6699969",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T05:... | 1,760,372,101.254641 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/wandering-through-old-word-processors-yields-a-beast/ | Wandering Through Old Word Processors Yields A Beast | Donald Papp | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ms-dos",
"NEC",
"olivetti",
"typewriter",
"vintage",
"word processor",
"x86"
] | The world once ran on hardcopy, and when the digital age started to bring new tools and ways of doing things, documents were ripe for change. Today, word processors and digital documents are so ubiquitous that they are hardly worth a thought, but that didn’t happen all at once. [Cathode Ray Dude] has a soft spot for old word processors and the journey they took over decades, and
he walks through the Olivetti ETV 2700.
In the days of character displays and no multitasking, WYSIWYG as a concept was still a long ways off.
The ETV 2700 is a monstrous machine; a fusion of old-school word processor, x86-based hardware, and electric 17 inch-wide typewriter.
With it one could boot up a word processor that is nothing like the WYSIWYG of today, write and edit a document, and upon command, the typewriter portion could electronically type out a page. A bit like a printer, but it really is an electric typewriter with a computer interface. Characters were hammered out one at a time with daisy wheel and ink ribbon on a manually-loaded page using all the usual typewriter controls.
While internally the machine has an x86 processor, expects a monitor and even boots MS-DOS, the keyboard had its own layout (and even proprietary keys and functions), did not support graphical output, and in other ways was unusual even by the standards of the oddball decades during which designers and products experimented with figuring out what worked best in terms of functionality and usability.
Nowadays, we see
AI-enabled typewriter projects
and
porting vintage OSes to vintage word processor hardware
, but such projects are in some part possible in part thanks to the durability of these devices. The entire video is embedded below, but you can
jump directly to what the Olivetti ETV 2700 looked like on the inside
if that’s what interests you most.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip! | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699900",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T01:25:16",
"content": "MASS11 anybody?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6700263",
"author": "Bert Schultz",
"timestamp": "2023-11-20T04:10:43",
"conte... | 1,760,372,101.307973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/cooking-with-magnets-and-3d-printing/ | Cooking With Magnets And 3D Printing | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"induction heating"
] | Have you ever wondered how induction cooking works? A rotating magnetic field — electrically or mechanically — induces eddy currents in aluminum and that generates heat. When [3D Sage] learned this, he decided to try to
3D print some mechanical rigs to spin magnets
so he could try cooking with them.
We doubt at all that this is practical, but we have to admit it is fun and there are some pretty impressive 3D prints in the video, too. The cook surface, by the way, is tiny, so you won’t be prepping a holiday meal on it. But there’s something super charming about the tiny breakfast on a plate produced by a printed magnetic “stove.” We would be interested to know how much power this setup consumed and how much heat was produced compared to, say, just using a big resistor to heat things up.
We’ve heard that
induction heating is efficient
, but this setup is a bit unconventional. If cooking things isn’t your bag, you can use
induction for soldering
, too. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699776",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T21:12:58",
"content": "Looks like a recycled video idea.Many Moving Magnets Melting Metalhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8PxXZoHTVU",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6699803... | 1,760,372,101.352005 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/bringing-back-the-crt-tv-experience-in-software/ | Bringing Back The CRT TV Experience In Software | Donald Papp | [
"Software Hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"cathode ray tube",
"crt",
"ntsc",
"retro",
"shader"
] | Cathode-Retro
is a collection of shaders and sample C++ code for reliving the glorious days when graphics were composite video signals displayed on a CRT screen. How? By faking it in software and providing more configuration options than any authentic setup ever had.
Love it or don’t, there’s nothing quite like it.
Not satisfied with creating CRT-style color images with optional scanlines and TV picture controls like tint and saturation, Cathode-Retro can emulate more nuanced elements as well.
The tool includes the ability to imitate things like the slight distortion of a period-correct curved screen, the subtle effects of different methods CRT displays used to actually work (such as
shadow mask
vs
aperture grille
), and even taking into account the slight distortion of light refracting imperfectly through the glass face of the CRT. There’s even options for adding noise and ghosting, which may spark some artistic ideas.
If all you need is software to recreate an old-school CRT terminal,
we have you covered
. But if your needs are a bit more low-level, Cathode-Retro might be what you’re missing. | 44 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699718",
"author": "David Martin",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T19:34:17",
"content": "Color convergence? Bringing the 3 CRT beams together in an exact point at every place on the screen is near impossible. Dynamic circuitry (magnetic coils etc) tweak the deflection of the 3 beams to ... | 1,760,372,101.629064 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/procrastineering-and-simulated-annealing/ | Procrastineering And Simulated Annealing | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"newsletter"
] | The software for the Supercon badge went down to the wire this year, with user-facing features being coded up as late as Thursday morning. This left “plenty of time” to flash the badges on Thursday afternoon, but they were admittedly still warm as the first attendees filed in on Friday morning. While I’ve always noted that the last minute is the best minute, this was a little close, and frankly there was an uncaught bug that we would have noticed if we had a few more hours to just play with it before showtime.
But we were
by no means
slacking. On the contrary, a few of us were putting in nights and full weekend days for six or eight weeks beforehand. The problem was hard, and the path to a solution was never clear, and changed depending on the immovability of the roadblocks hit along the way. This is, honestly, a pretty normal hacker development pattern.
What was interesting to me was how similar the process was to
simulated annealing
. This is an optimization method where you explore more of the solution space in the beginning, when the metaphorical “temperature” is hot. Later, as you’re getting closer to a good solution, you want to refine in smaller and smaller steps – it cools down. This rate of “cooling” is a tremendously important parameter in practice.
And this is exactly the way the badge development felt. We were searching in a very big solution space in the beginning, and many aspects of the firmware infrastructure were in flux. As it got closer and closer to a working solution, more and more of the code settled down, and the changes got smaller. In retrospect, this happened naturally, and you can’t always control or plan for the eureka moments, but I wonder if it’s worth thinking of a project this way. Instead of milestones, temperatures? Instead of a deadline, a freeze date.
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
! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699871",
"author": "12AU76L6GC",
"timestamp": "2023-11-19T00:04:08",
"content": "Simulated annealing was used in the US to assign a paired digital channel during the transition from NTSC to ATV. The assignment of analog TV channels was determined by spacing of co-channel, first adj... | 1,760,372,101.544943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/why-gas-turbines-rule-the-world/ | Why Gas Turbines Rule The World | Al Williams | [
"Engineering"
] | [
"electric generation",
"Gas turbine"
] | It is an interesting fact that the most efficient way to generate electricity — at least so far — is to spin the shaft of a generator. The only real question is
how
you spin it. Falling water works. Heat from a nuclear reaction is another choice. For many decades, the king of the hill was steam. Now, however, gas turbines rule the electric generator landscape, and [Construction Physics]
explains why
in a recent post.
With a steam turbine, something burns or otherwise generates heat that boils water. The steam spins the blades, which turns the generator. With a gas turbine, the system compresses air and mixes it with gas. The hot gasses then drive the turbine, which is more efficient than using the combustion to produce steam.
Turns out, the idea for the gas turbine is very old, but material science had to catch up to be practical. Inefficient compressors led to low operating pressures, which was good, in a way, because the materials couldn’t stand the heat and pressure. However, low pressures led to inefficient turbines that were not practical.
The post is long and covers a lot of details about Carnot, Brayton, and Rankine cycles. It is a fascinating read, and we learned a few new things. Bet you will, too.
Turbines are a little like jet engines, but they transfer more power to the turbine blade instead of generating thrust. Turbines
show up in odd places
today. Some
odder
than others. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699552",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T14:20:25",
"content": "https://fusionflight.com/arc/Fusion Flight has a production model hand carry gas turbine generator that can be linked to run in parallel with other units for increased output.Says they run on a diesel and lubr... | 1,760,372,101.695967 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/18/behold-the-track-twisting-mobius-tank/ | Behold The Track-Twisting Möbius Tank | Donald Papp | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"mobius strip",
"tank"
] | It started with someone asking [James Bruton] about using a Möbius strip as a tank tread. He wasn’t sure what the point would be,
but he was willing to make one and see what happened
. Turns out it works reasonably well!
The grey plates are responsible for tensioning the tracks. Designing them as separate pieces means rework for fine-tuning avoids having to re-print structural parts.
The main design challenge was creating a tread system that would allow for the required rotation. [James] designed in the ability for each link to rotate about 18 degrees, and ensured plenty of open space on the upper side of the drive train to accommodate a full 180 degree twist. It took a little fine-tuning and looks a bit trippy, but in the end works about as well as a regular tread system.
[James] shows off a good technique to keep in mind when constructing big assemblies like this tank. It takes a lot of time and material to print large pieces, and in such cases it’s especially important to minimize rework. [James] therefore designs smaller, separate pieces as interfaces to other parts. This way, if changes are needed down the line (for example, to adjust motor placement or change tension on parts), only a smaller interface piece needs to be redone instead of having to re-print a huge part.
The unit uses an Arduino Mega, two 24 V gearmotors to drive each tread independently, an RC radio receiver, and some beefy BTS7960 DC motor drivers to drive the motors.
[James]’ unit is pretty big, but
we’ve also seen 3D printed tanks capable of carrying a human driver
. It’s clear that build plate size doesn’t seem to limit tank designs. Watch the Möbius tank get built and drive around in the video, just below the page break. | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699488",
"author": "Cricri",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T11:10:24",
"content": "I suppose an advantage is that you wear “both sides” of the track, so it might be better for longevity. One disadvantage is that on the other hand, you are constrained into designing a track that is revers... | 1,760,372,101.837392 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/that-time-nasa-built-a-tiny-tank-to-pop-shuttle-tires/ | That Time NASA Built A Tiny Tank To Pop Shuttle Tires | Tom Nardi | [
"History",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"nasa",
"RC tank",
"Space Shuttle"
] | The Space Shuttle has often been called the most complex pieces of machinery ever built, an underhanded compliment if there ever was one. But it’s a claim not strictly limited to the final spacecraft. With a project as far ahead of the technological curve as the Shuttle was in the 1970s, nearly every component and system of the legendary spaceplane required extensive research and development to realize.
A case in point is that the speed and mass of the Shuttle at touchdown required tires that could survive forces far beyond that of a normal airplane. Pumped up to an incredible 350 psi, the space agency estimated each tire had the explosive potential of two and one-half sticks of dynamite. So while testing landing gear upgrades in the 1990s, they
cobbled together an RC tank that could “defuse” a damaged tire
remotely by drilling holes into it and letting off the pressure.
The TAV on display at Armstrong Flight Research Center. Credit:
DutchSpace
As explained in a recent article on
Tank Historia
, the CR-990 Tire Assault Vehicle (TAV) was built by NASA contractor [David Carrott] out of a 1/16 scale Tamiya RC Tiger II tank. The toy provided the lower hull and locomotion components, and an upgraded deck and side skirts were fabricated out of metal. In place of the turret, the modified Tiger carried an off-the-shelf DeWalt drill motor with a 3/8-inch bit in the chuck.
There was also a camera and video transmitter which gave the operator a first-person view of the action; an expensive proposition in the 1990s. While the average Hackaday reader could probably rig up their own TAV today for a hundred bucks and the contents of their parts bin, back then, it cost the taxpayers around $3,000. Though to be fair, that was peanuts compared to the six-figure bomb disposal robot that NASA had been using previously.
More than a decade after its retirement, the
Space Shuttle is still inspiring future engineers and scientists
. While its complexity arguably kept it from
hitting many of the program’s original design goals
, the iconic winged spacecraft will forever be remembered as one of the most
important milestones on humanity’s journey to the stars
. | 64 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699302",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T16:55:24",
"content": "Nice one to use on your neighbors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6699303",
"author": "Lee Gleason",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T16:59:31",
"co... | 1,760,372,102.066537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/this-week-in-security-ssh-ftp-and-reptar/ | This Week In Security: SSH, FTP, And Reptar | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ftp",
"rsa",
"ssh"
] | It’s time to strap on our propeller beanies, because we’re going to talk crypto. The short version is that
some SSH handshakes can expose enough information for a third party to obtain the host’s private signing key
. That key is the one that confirms you are connecting to the SSH server you think you are, and if the key validation fails, you get a big warning:
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
The math that makes this warning work is public-private key cryptography. The problem we’re talking about today only shows up in RSA authentication. Specifically those that use the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) to quickly calculate the modulos needed to generate the cryptographic signature. If something goes wrong during that calculation, you end up with a signature that is mathematically related to the secret key in a different way than intended. The important point is that knowing this extra value *significantly* weakens the security of the secret key.
This attack has been known for quite some time, but the research has been aimed at causing the calculation fault through power vaults or even memory attacks like Rowhammer. There has also been progress on using a lattice attack against captured handshakes, to make the attack practical with less known information. The real novel element of
this week’s approach
(pdf) is that it has been tested against SSH.
The paper’s authors performed weekly scans of the entire IPv4 public network space, capturing the handshake from any listening SSH server, and also had 5 years of historic data to draw from. And the results are mixed. There is a Cisco SSH server string that is extremely common in the dataset, and only once did one of these machines send a miscalculated handshake. Possibly a random ram bit flip to blame. And on the other hand, the string “SSH-2.0-Zyxel SSH server” had so many bad signatures, it suggests a device that *always* sends a miscalculated signature.
If an adversary is able to recover a server’s private host signing key, this does
not give the adversary the ability to decrypt passively collected SSH
connections to the compromised host….
It’s vital to understand what this does and does not allow. A server certificate that is compromised through this attack can be used to impersonate that server, making Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks dangerously effective. On the other hand, this does not allow decryption of SSH sessions. It does not allow access to SSH services. And the most common SSH daemon, OpenSSH, has mitigations against sending these miscalculated signatures.
FTP Part 1
Progress has a lineup of developer tools, and among them is WS_FTP. This business-grade FTP server had what we’ll charitably call an undocumented feature: arbitrary file upload to the OS file system. The good news is that it only affects servers with the Ad Hoc Transfer Module turned on, and does require authentication. The bad part is that anywhere on the filesystem, and that’s an obvious recipe for problems, earning this issue a CVSS of 9.1. Thankfully
the issue was found privately by Progress engineers
, and the fix was offered in the November. There is also an official workaround, to
disable just the offending module
.
FTP Part Deux
Yet another FTP implementation, CrushFTP, had a serious vulnerability.
CVE-2023-43177
is a weird issue that starts with a 404 error also returning a valid session cookie for the “anonymous” user. Anonymous has no privileges, but does pass the code checks for having a valid username. That’s the quirk that makes this one an unauthenticated attack. The real flaw is that if the
AS2-To
header is present in one of these pseudo-authenticated requests, all the request headers get sucked into the user-info object. That object includes some important data, and the logic flaw makes all of it writable. That seems like it should be the vulnerability, but some decent security hardening makes it difficult to directly exploit.
The next step is to harness another function,
drain_log()
, which can copy a file to any location, append some XML, and delete a file. That appended XML is a huge problem for exploitation, but it turns out there’s one of those overwritten items that can turn off the extra XML. Now we have an interesting primitive — move any file to any location, deleting the source location. This is used to leak the
sessions.obj
file, which contains session tokens for logged-in users. With a valid user, arbitrary files can be uploaded, and then moved with the previous primitive, allowing for easy overwrite of any file on the system.
There are two final notes on this story to make. First, the CrushFTP developers pulled off an overnight turnaround on getting this issue patched. So many big companies take 89 days on a 90-day disclosure, the timely fix is refreshing. And secondly, in the Converge write-up, I was struck by the statement: “Converge security researchers responsibly disclosed a critical unauthenticated zero-day vulnerability.” There’s the obvious, that this was an attempt to put as many impressive-sounding buzzwords in a summary as possible. But I have to point out that “responsibly disclosed” and “zero-day” are mutually exclusive. If it was responsibly disclosed, it was not used as a 0-day.
Reptar on Ice (Lake)
There’s a weird glitch in some Intel processors, and the CPU security ninja himself, [Tavis Ormandy],
has the story
. X86 instructions are a bit… arcane. You can have an instruction, and add a prefix to make it do something a bit different. For example,
rep movsb
is the memory moving
movsb
,
rep
eated several times. The fun part is that you can add that prefix, well, repeatedly.
rep rep rep rep movsb
is perfectly valid assembly, and is actually really useful for getting binary contents to line up the way it needs to.
There’s another interesting prefix,
rex
, the register extension, used to stuff even more register data into a single instruction. When that extra data isn’t needed, the
rex
prefix is ignored just like the
rep
prefixes. At least that’s the idea. It turns out that on Ice Lake and later, a
movs
instruction with both prefixes does something squirrelly to internal processor state. After this instruction, various strange behavior is witnessed, usually ending with a halt or exception. It seems like yet another example of memory corruption inside the CPU internals. Fun!
While [Tavis] and company didn’t manage to turn this into an actual exploit,
Intel’s advisory seems to indicate that such an attack would be possible
. There’s a decent chance your OS has already shipped the microcode that fixes this, and BIOS updates are rolling out, too.
Bits and Bytes
Microsoft is tired of authenticator spam
. That’s essentially an attack where multiple authenticator requests get sent, and the attacker hopes the user will get confused or overwhelmed, and approve the request. So now, on the Microsoft Authenticator, potentially spammy authenticator requests are silent, and requests that are more likely to be legitimate are given priority.
What’s worse than getting hit with a data breach?
Getting reported to the SEC by your attacker
, apparently. This is really adding insult to injury, though chances are there’s more to this story. Maybe the perpetrators shorted the company stock before making the filing? Who’s to say? (Probably the FBI.)
There’s
a twenty year old vulnerability in Windows that just got fixed
, and it’s unfortunate that this one didn’t come in early enough to get full coverage. The vulnerability is triggered by the Web Speech API. As Chromium doesn’t natively implement a Text-To-Speech (TTS) service, this API results in calls outside the browser sandbox. The bug is in an XML parser used to parse the Speech Synthesis Markup Language. It’s a wild ride, and worth a read, even though we ran out of time and space to cover it fully here. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699578",
"author": "bwmetz",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T15:17:07",
"content": "The SSH bit was intriguing, particularly concerning the math and amount of data required to test this. That said, I would wager a MITM attack is far more likely due to folks simply ignoring thise key chan... | 1,760,372,102.10829 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/taking-a-public-transit-display-from-project-to-product/ | Taking A Public Transit Display From Project To Product | Dan Maloney | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"api",
"app store",
"firmware",
"led",
"manufacturing",
"matrix",
"product",
"project to product",
"scale-up"
] | We’ve noticed an uptick in “project to product” stories lately, which seems like a fantastic trend to us. It means that hackers are turning out projects that really resonate with people, to the degree that taking the leap and scaling up from a one-off to a marketable product is worth the inherent risk. And luckily enough for the rest of us, we get to learn from their experiences.
The latest example of this
comes to us from [Stefan Schüller], who from the sound of things only reluctantly undertook the conversion of
his LED matrix public transit sign
into an actual product. The original project had a lot going for it; it looked fantastic, it was technologically simple, and it provided a valuable service. But as a project, it made certain assumptions and concessions that would cause problems when in the hands of a customer. Chief among these was the physical protection of the fragile LEDs, which could easily shear off the display modules if bumped or dropped. There were also firmware issues, such as access to the backend API that serves the transit data; requiring each customer to sign up for and configure their own API key is a non-starter for a product.
In the article, [Stefan] enumerates a long list of problems that going from project to product raises, as well as how he addressed them. The API issue was solved by implementing his own service, which acts as a middleman between the official API and his customers. A nice plexiglass and sheet-metal frame serves to protect the display, too. Design changes were made as well, not only to provide better functionality but to make manufacturing easier. [Stefan] also relates a tale of woe with regard to getting the display’s app into the app stores, something that few of us have to deal with when we’re just fiddling around with something on the bench.
All in all, [Stefan] does a great job walking us through the trials and tribulations of bringing a product to market. There are similar lessons in
this production run scale-up
, too, but with an entirely different level of project complexity. | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699239",
"author": "Feinfinger (with diabolic laughter)",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T12:25:57",
"content": "Aaaaaah…. DORT wurd Schlierenphotographie erfunden…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6699244",
"author": "David",
... | 1,760,372,101.745575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/apple-archeology-the-future-once-had-server-side-computing-in-it/ | Apple Archeology: The Future Once Had Server Side Computing In It | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"AIX",
"apple",
"ibm",
"system 7"
] | To read the IT press in the early 1990s, those far-off days just before the Web was the go-to source of information, was to be fed a rosy vision of a future in which desktop and server computing would be a unified and powerful experience. IBM and Apple would unite behind a new OS called Taligent that would run Apple, OS/2, and 16-bit Windows code, and coupled with UNIX-based servers, this would revolutionise computing.
We know that this never quite happened as prophesied, but along the way, it did deliver a few forgotten but interesting technologies.
[Old VCR] has a look at one of these
, a feature of the IBM AIX, which shipped with mid-90s Apple servers as a result of this partnership, in which Mac client applications could have server-side components, allowing them to offload computing power to the more powerful machine.
The full article is very long but full of interesting nuggets of forgotten 1990s computing history, but it’s a reminder that DOS/Windows and Novell Netware weren’t the only games in town. The Taligent/AIX combo never happened, but its legacy found its way into the subsequent products of both companies. By the middle of the decade, even Microsoft had famously been caught out by the rapid rise of the Web. He finishes off by creating a simple sample application using the server-side computing feature, a native Mac OS application that calls a server component to grab the latest Hacker News stories. Unexpectedly,
this wasn’t the only 1990s venture from Apple involving another company’s operating system
. Sometimes, you just want to
run Doom
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699247",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T12:53:18",
"content": "Once? every single app you can download nowadays has some type of internet connection requirement (do you even know any truly offline app?) and server side processing.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,101.96971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/a-canned-ham-ham-antenna/ | A Canned Ham Ham Antenna | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"70 cm",
"amateur radio",
"antenna",
"canned ham",
"ham",
"radio",
"slot antenna"
] | If you’d have asked us for odds on whether you could successfully turn a canned ham into an amateur radio antenna, we’d have declined the offer. Now, having seen
[Ben Eadie (VE6SFX)]’s “hamtenna” project
, we’d look at just about any “Will it antenna?” project with a lot less skepticism than before.
To be painfully and somewhat unnecessarily clear about [Ben]’s antenna, the meat-like product itself is not in the BOM for this build, although he did use it as sustenance. Rather, it was the emptied and cleaned metal can that was the chief component of the build, along with a few 3D printed standoffs and the usual feedline and connectors. This is a slot antenna, a design [Ben]
recently experimented with
by applying copper foil tape to his car’s sunroof. This time around, the slot was formed by separating the top and bottom of the can using the standoffs and electrically connecting them with a strip of copper tape.
Connected to a stub of coax and a BNC connector, a quick scan with a NanoVNA showed a fantastic 1.26:1 SWR in the center of the 70-cm ham band, and a nearly flat response all the way across the band. Results may vary depending on the size of canned ham you sacrifice for this project; [Ben]’s can measured just about 35 cm around, a happy half-wavelength coincidence. And it actually worked in field tests — he was able to hit a local repeater and got good signal reports. All that and a sandwich? Not too shabby. | 29 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699219",
"author": "dendad",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T08:15:20",
"content": "I wonder if it did “meat” your expectations?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6699229",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T09:... | 1,760,372,102.171628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/robot-hand-has-good-bones/ | Robot Hand Has Good Bones | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ligaments",
"robot",
"robot hand",
"tendons"
] | What do you get when you mix rigid and elastic polymers with a laser-scanning 3D printing technique? If you are researchers at ETH Zurich, you get
robot hands with bones, ligaments, and tendons
. In conjunction with a startup company, the process uses both fast-curing and slow-curing plastics, allowing parts with different structural properties to print. Of course, you could always assemble things from multiple kinds of plastics, but this new technique — vision-controlled jetting — allows the hands to print as one part. You can
read the full paper
from
Nature
or see the video below.
Wax with a low melting point encases the entire structure, acting as a support. The researchers remove the wax after the plastics cure.
The technique isn’t just for hands. The paper shows a functional heart pump, for example. The printer uses an inkjet arrangement to deposit material and a UV LED curing system. A laser scanner generates a high-resolution map of the build surface, allowing the controller to adapt the print layers.
This might not be a technique for every day although, honestly, we want to hear more about the wax support systems. However, for the right print job, the ability to mix differing kinds of polymer may allow for unique and cost-effective designs.
We’d like to see how this hand compares to the Clone Hand. Don’t want to 3D print?
Stop by the hardware store
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699171",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T03:04:48",
"content": "These folks deserve a hand!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6699175",
"author": "JN",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T03... | 1,760,372,101.888506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/no-tp-no-problem/ | No TP? No Problem! | Jenny List | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"paper",
"recycled paper",
"toilet paper"
] | Among First World Problems, there can be few worse than running out of toilet paper. The horror! If you’re not able to do as we did yesterday and borrow a pack until more can be bought, then you’re not without options. A handy copy of the
Daily Mail
could be cut into squares and hung up in your Smallest Room,
or you can even make your own with the help of this handy instructional video
from [whoisandrewfahmy]. It appears from a casual search to be one of many such guides that appeared during the pandemic when the bog roll supply was seen as endangered, but it’s still interesting simply as a diversion into how something is made.
The process is surprisingly straightforward, starting with scrap paper, which is shredded and soaked before being boiled to break down to pulp. The pulp is then emulsified, and some body oil is added to remove the sandpaper-on-the-butt experience before being spread between a sheet and a piece of window screen to be ironed dry. It’s an energy-intensive process, so the
Daily Mail
is likely to be an easier stopgap if no friends can lend you a few rolls, but it’s left us here curious about papermaking. The butts of Hackaday may be safe from homemade TP, but that’s not to say that it wouldn’t be interesting to make other paper products. Check out the video below.
Of course, back in April 2020
we had our own solution to the pandemic toilet paper shortage
. After you make your bespoke dunny roll, how can you wind it into a nice roll? Don’t worry.
We got you
. | 42 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699142",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T00:08:13",
"content": "Does it come in other colors?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6699167",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T02:22:23",
... | 1,760,372,102.332923 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/colorreplica-is-a-rainbow-at-your-fingertips/ | ColorReplica Is A Rainbow At Your Fingertips | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"color picker",
"ESP32",
"hex",
"HSV",
"oled",
"rgb"
] | Have you ever wanted to match paint to the color of a pillow, or make a website where the primary color matches your favorite shade of electrolytic capacitor?
Then ColorReplica is the project for you
.
At the heart of this build are two ESP32s, one of which controls the color picker, and the other lights up the 18 WS2812 LEDs and displays information on the OLED screen.
ColorReplica has two modes, ColorPicker and ColorCube. In ColorPicker mode, you just choose what color you want, adjust the brightness level, and choose between static and dynamic modes for the LEDs. [CiferTech] used the ESP32 touch pins extended to pads on the PCB to control different menu variables, which is a nice touch.
In ColorCube mode, there’s a secondary circuit with a color sensor an another ESP32. Once detected, it transmits the color data to the main device at the push of a button. The RGB LEDs turn that color, and shows the RGB, HEX, and HSV values on the OLED screen. If you’d like to make one of these yourself,
everything is available on GitHub
.
Want something a big more tangible?
Check out this color picker that types HEX codes for you
. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699111",
"author": "J. Peterson",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T21:05:34",
"content": "I tried to create something similar back in the day. It did -not- work out.In fact, I think it was even used for a Hackaday “Fail Friday”.https://saccade.com/writing/projects/ColorMeter/",
"parent... | 1,760,372,102.39168 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/umbrella-antenna-protects-you-from-rain-but-not-the-way-you-think/ | Umbrella Antenna Protects You From Rain, But Not The Way You Think | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"GOES",
"noaa",
"RTL-SDR",
"satellite",
"SAWbird",
"umbrella"
] | You never know when you’ll be called upon to [MacGyver] your way out of an emergency. We can’t imagine what kind of situation would call for whipping up a
satellite ground station for NOAA weather satellites from junk
, but hey, it could happen.
And when it does, you’ll be ready — as long as you have an umbrella, some foil tape, and various bits and bobs like wire and an RTL-SDR dongle. That’s what [saveitforparts] used for his field-expedient build, at least in the first instance; as you can imagine, builds like this take a lot of tweaking to get right. The umbrella and foil tape form the main reflector for the antenna, with a pie tin, a scrap of wire, and some random twigs being used to build the antenna’s helical feed. Attached to a SAWbird LNA/filter and an RTL-SDR plugged into a dodgy second-hand phone, he was able to get at least some kind of data from one of the GOES satellites, but it wasn’t great.
Switching the feed to a commercially available log periodic antenna worked much better, with some partial decodes of weather map data. Actually, getting anything at all with a setup like this is impressive enough for us to call it a win. It shows that the umbrella approach to antennas is valid; but then again,
we already knew that
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699100",
"author": "MrHoward",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T19:44:55",
"content": "Also features Fluff. So, bonus.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6699112",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T21:13:23... | 1,760,372,103.050344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/a-3d-printed-grinder-for-printed-lens-blanks/ | A 3D Printed Grinder For Printed Lens Blanks | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"blanks",
"FDM",
"grinding",
"lens",
"optic",
"polishing",
"resin",
"sla"
] | When one thinks of applications for 3D printing, optical components don’t seem to be a good fit. With the possible exception of Fresnel lenses, FDM printing doesn’t seem up to the job of getting the smooth surfaces and precision dimensions needed to focus light. Resin printing might be a little closer to the mark, but there’s still a long way to go between a printed blank and a finished lens.
That gap is what [Fraens] aims to fill with
this homebrew lens grinding machine
. It uses the same basic methods used to grind and polish lenses for centuries, only with printed components and lens blanks. The machine itself consists of a motorized chuck for holding the lens blank, plus an articulated arm to hold the polishing tool. The tool arm has an eccentric drive that wobbles the polishing tool back and forth across the blank while it rotates in the chuck. Lens grinding requires a lot of water and abrasive, so a large bowl is provided to catch the swarf and keep the work area clean.
Lens blanks are printed to approximately their finished dimensions using clear resin in an SLA printer. [Fraens] spent a lot of time optimizing the printing geometry to minimize the number of print layers required. He found that a 30° angle between the lens and the resin pool worked best, resulting in the clearest blanks. To polish the rough blanks, a lapping tool is made from polymer modeling clay; after baking it dry, the tool can hold a variety of pads and polishing compounds. From there it’s just a matter of running the blank through a range of abrasives to get the desired final surface.
Are the lenses fantastic? Well, they’re probably not going to make it into fine optical equipment, but they’re a lot better than you might expect. Of course, there’s plenty of room for improvement; better resins might result in clearer blanks, and perhaps degassing the uncured resin under vacuum might help with bubbles. Skipping the printed blanks and going with
CNC-machined acrylic
might be worth a try, too. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699078",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T17:14:47",
"content": "Fantastic project! Does anyone have an idea how I can make real glass for lenses? I have access to furnaces and various related equipment.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,102.445295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/tech-in-plain-sight-what-does-a-yellow-light-mean/ | Tech In Plain Sight: What Does A Yellow Light Mean? | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"Traffic Lights"
] | Ghigleri’s traffic light
The traffic light is a ubiquitous feature of modern life and is quite old — dating back to 1868 London, although that device was a modified railroad semaphore operated by a policeman, but it was the same idea. The initial test of the signal proved disastrous.
The semaphore had gas lamps to illuminate the signs in the dark. A gas leak caused one of the lamps to explode, badly burning the operator and ending the nascent invention for a while. In 1910, American inventor Ernest Sirrine worked out an automatically controlled traffic signal. Two years later, Lester Wire, a police officer, developed a different version powered by overhead trolley wires to light the signal. A 1917 patent by William Ghiglieri also had two lights — red and green. But where was the yellow light?
Time To Slow Down
The fundamental problem with the red/green system is that of inertia. Cars can’t stop instantly, and if the side with green starts moving before the side with red stops, they collide. Borrowing from the rail system, the first yellow light appeared when policeman
William Potts
added it to signals in Detroit in 1920.
Yet another system to include a pause state was invented by
Garret Morgan
. Morgan was the first African-American to own a car in Cleveland. He also invented several things, including a hair relaxer that came from a solution used to prevent sewing machine needles from overheating, and a firefighter’s safety hood that routed cool air from floor level to the user in 1914. He and his brother would use the hoods to rescue two people trapped underground after a gas explosion in 1916. The Army used these hoods in World War I.
But back to traffic lights, Morgan was driving through Cleveland one day and saw an accident. He noted that the traffic signals of the day would abruptly change from “go” to “stop” and decided a third state would solve the problem. From his patent:
One of the objects of my invention is the provision of a visible indicator which is useful in stopping traffic in all directions before the signal to proceed in any one direction is given. This is advantageous in that vehicles which are partly across the intersecting streets are given time to pass the vehicles which are waiting to travel in a transverse direction; thus avoiding accidents which frequently occur by reason of the over-anxiety of the waiting drivers, to start as soon as the signal to proceed is given.
Morgan’s traffic signal relied on using arms labelled “stop” and “go”, but importantly also included the pause to stop traffic in all directions until the intersection could clear. This “caution period” between go and stop would become a standard for traffic signals of all kinds. Morgan’s invention was cheaper to produce than the Potts design, and he sold the rights to General Electric for a cool $40,000 — quite the sum in those days. The original prototype is in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum.
Like many inventions, there wasn’t a single inventor for the modern device. Charles Adler is another name in traffic light history. In 1928, he perfected a system that allowed drivers to honk to change the light. That would seem to have some problems operationally, but it did serve as a foundation for lights that respond to vehicle traffic. Adler also came up with the pedestrian push button in 1929.
Tech
Then there are all the technical issues the public never thinks about. How do you maximize incandescent bulb life? You derate the bulbs and keep a slight current flowing through them all the time so the filaments stay warm, minimizing thermal shock when you turn them on again. Or, these days, use LEDs. Then again, LEDs don’t melt snow off the lights like the old bulbs did. Of course, you need a wide viewing angle, and there is usually some sort of visor to help prevent the sun from washing out the color.
Then there is control. The original signals were operated by policemen. Automated or timed lights started to appear around 1922. The Crouse Hinds company, based in Houston and known for railroad signals, added timers to Houston traffic lights around that time.
Cities found it enticing to automate lights. New York City, for example, had 6,000 officers working traffic control and, thanks to light automation, reduced that number to 500, saving over $12 million a year. One problem was that drivers thought a human would do a better job controlling traffic. Many thought it was a fad, although, obviously, that wasn’t the case.
Coordinating lights was another issue. Turning all the lights on a major street green seems like a good idea for traffic flow. But in practice, drivers would race to make as many lights as possible, resulting in Philadelphia seeing an increase in accidents after implementing such a system.
The answer was to change the lights in lockstep so that a vehicle going at some speed would, in theory, never have to stop after making one green light. General Electric pioneered this in Washington, D.C., in 1926. Of course, back then, the timing mechanisms to pull this off were finicky. Eventually, computers and sensors would add sophistication to lights. That’s only gotten better with time.
Inertia
One interesting bit of engineering trivia is that the “standard” traffic control signals were not standardized for many years. They did inherit from the railroad system, but — mostly — the people working on traffic control were a tightly knit bunch, and they valued uniformity and not confusing the public. For example, in 1923, there were well under 1,000 traffic lights in the United States. Someone realized that 10% of drivers were color blind, seeing both green and red as a gray color. The proposal to change to yellow and blue was quickly dismissed.
Not that there were no deviations or attempts at deviations. They were just short-lived. Famously, an Irish neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, defaced traffic lights because red on top of green was seen as a symbol of British domination over Ireland. Authorities briefly switched the lights in those areas. China’s Red Guard proposed making lights in that country so that the red light indicated “go,” but the government rejected the proposal. Of course, these days, there are standards at the
national
and
international
levels.
Of Course, There’s More
If you want a higher-level history of traffic lights — including the yellow light — check out the video from [The History Guy] below. If you want to know what the yellow light
really
means, check out the clip from the TV show Taxi below that. Want
a peek inside
? Then there are always
traffic circles
.
Featured image: “
Traffic Light Tree, Canary Wharf London
” by Martin Pearce | 58 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699057",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T15:28:06",
"content": "Eyes scan article title.Brain hears “SLOW DOWN”. . .“WWWWHHHHAAAATTTTT DOOOOOEEEEESSSSS UUUUHHHHH YYYYYEEEEELLLLLOOOOWWWW LLLLLIIIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTTTT MMMMMMEEEEEAAAANNNNN?!”Not disappointed to see the refe... | 1,760,372,102.617973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/probably-the-largest-selfie-camera-in-the-world/ | Probably The Largest Selfie Camera In The World | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"camera obscura",
"selfie"
] | Most readers will have some idea of how a camera works, with a lens placed in front of a piece of film or an electronic sensor, and the distance between the two adjusted until the images is in focus. The word “camera” is a shortening of “camera obscura”, the Latin for “dark room”, as some early such devices were darkened rooms in which the image was projected onto a rear wall. [David White], a lecturer at Falmouth University in the UK
has created a modern-day portable camera obscura using a garden gazebo frame
, and uniquely for a camera obscura, it can be used to take selfies.
As might be expected the gazebo frame covered with a dark fabric forms the “room”, and the surface on which the image is formed comes from a projection screen. The lens is a custom-made 790 mm f/5.4, not exactly the type of lens found off-the-shelf. The selfie part comes from a Canon digital camera inside the gazebo focused on the frame, using its Wi-Fi control app a subject can sit at the appropriate point in front of the lens and take the selfie as they see fit.
The resulting images have a pleasing ethereal feel to them, and while it’s definitely not the most practical taker of snaps it’s still very much a camera to be impressed by. We’d be curious to see how it would perform as a pinhole camera, and even though it’s nowhere near
the 2006 record pinhole image taken using an abandoned US Marine Corps aircraft hangar
we think it would still deliver when given enough light. Meanwhile this isn’t the first time we’ve shown you a camera obscura,
here’s one using the back of a U-Haul truck
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,102.477908 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/lessons-in-mass-production-from-an-atari-punk-console/ | Lessons In Mass Production From An Atari Punk Console | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"apc",
"atari punk console",
"design for manfacturing",
"dfm",
"manufacturing",
"mass production",
"packaging",
"scale-up"
] | Sometimes the most interesting part of a project isn’t the widget itself, but what it teaches you about the manufacturing process. The story of
the manufacturing scale-up of this Atari Punk Console
and the lessons learned along the way is a perfect example of this.
Now, don’t get us wrong — we love
Atari Punk Consoles
. Anything with a couple of 555s that bleeps and bloops is OK in our books. But as [Adam Gulyas] tells the tale, the point of this project was less about the circuit than about the process of making a small batch of something. The APC was low-hanging fruit in that regard, and after a quick round of breadboarding to decide on component values, it was off to production. [Adam] was shooting for 20 units, each in a nice enclosure and a classy package. PCB assemblies were ordered, as were off-the-shelf plastic enclosures, which ended up needing a lot of tweaking. [Adam] designed custom labels for the cases, itself a fraught job; glossy label stock and button bezels apparently don’t mix.
After slogging through the assembly process, boxing the units for shipping was the next job. [Adam] sourced jewelry boxes just a bit bigger than the finished APCs, and rather than settle for tissue paper or packing peanuts, designed an insert to hold the units snugly. That involved a lot of trial and error and a little bit of origami-fu, and the results are pretty nice. His cost per unit came out to just a hair over $20 Canadian, including the packaging, which is actually pretty remarkable for such a short production run.
[Adam] includes a list of improvements for larger-scale runs, including ordering assembled PCBs, outsourcing the printing processes, and getting custom boxes made so no insert is needed. Any way you cut it, this production run came out great and teaches us all some important lessons. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699007",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T09:15:43",
"content": "nice!It was interesting to see how much effort he put into making the folded paper insert. Came out looking very professional. Nice touch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,102.520006 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/robots-how-the-pros-keep-them-safe/ | Robots: How The Pros Keep Them Safe | Richard Baguley | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"robots",
"safety"
] | Robotic safety standards are designed for commercial bots, but amateur robot builders should also consider ideas like the keepout zone where a mobile robot isn’t permitted to go or how to draw out the safety perimeter space for your experimental robot arm. After all, that robot arm won’t stop crushing your fingers because you built it yourself. So,
it is worth looking at the standards for industrial robots
, even if your aim is fun rather than profit.
The basics of this for fixed robots like robot arms are defined in the standard
R15-06
. You don’t need to read the full text (because it costs $325 and is *incredibly* tedious to read), but the
Association for Advancing Automation has a good background on the details
. The bottom line is to ensure that a user can’t reach into an area that the robot arm might move to and provide a quick and easy way to disable the motors if someone does reach in.
Robots that move, called Industrial Mobile Robots (IMRs) or Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) bring in a whole new set of problems, though, because they are designed to move around under their own control and often share space with humans. For them, the standard is called
R15.08
. The AGV network has a
good guide to the details
, but again, it boils down to two things: make sure the robot is keeping an eye on its surroundings and that it can stop quickly enough to avoid injury. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698997",
"author": "WereCatf",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T06:26:40",
"content": "There just was recently a news story about a South Korean employee who got maimed by an industrial robot and died of his injuries. They were apparently inspecting the robot, but had not disabled it or it... | 1,760,372,102.894281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/electric-truck-carries-74-tons/ | Electric Truck Carries 74 Tons | Al Williams | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric truck",
"heavy haul",
"volvo"
] | Thanks to the various measurement systems in use, we aren’t sure if
Volvo has created an electric truck
that carries 74 metric tons, 74 short tons, or 74 long tons, but either way, that’s a lot of cargo for an electric truck. After all, that’s somewhere between 148,000 and 163,000 pounds (or 67,000 kg to 74,000 kg). That’s about three times what a typical 18-wheeler with a flatbed carries in the US. In fact, on a U.S. road, trucks typically have to weigh less than 80,000 pounds, including the truck to be legal.
Well, the monster electric Volvo has two trailers, so it is more fair to compare it to turnpike doubles, which typically carry about 148,000 pounds of cargo. The truck operates 12 hours a day and charges when the driver takes a break. At the depot, charging is from two 180 kW chargers that use green electricity, according to the company. The truck has been running for a few months, although we haven’t heard more about how successful or unsuccessful it might be.
Volvo has been
producing electric trucks for a few years
, but this is a behemoth. We have a feeling that this might be more of a technology demonstrator than something they think they will sell in quantity, but that could also depend on the operating costs of driving the thing.
We keep waiting for power for vehicles to
come from the road
instead of the vehicle. If you do it right, though, they claim you
can produce more power than you consume
— you just have to roll down a mountain loaded down. | 73 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699443",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T06:46:08",
"content": "Do note that those 74tonnes (As they write it, which implies metrichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne) is the gross combination weight, and not the cargo capacity.So I assume that means it can carry it’... | 1,760,372,102.852927 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/additive-manufacturing-of-nickel-nanopillars-using-two-photon-lithography/ | Additive Manufacturing Of Nickel Nanopillars Using Two-Photon Lithography | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"lithography",
"nanotechnology"
] | The multistep, two-photon-lithography-based additive manufacturing method forms intermediate products of blank polymer, Ni-infused polymer, and NiO while fabricating Ni
nanopillars. (Credit: Zhang et al., 2023)
Manufacturing nano-sized features is rapidly becoming an essential part of new technologies and process, ranging from catalysts to photonics and nano-scale robotics. Creating these features at scale and in a reproducible manner is a challenge, with previous attempts using methods ranging from dealloying and focused ion beams to templated electrodeposition all coming with their own drawbacks. Here
recent research
by Whenxin Zhang and colleagues as published in
Nano Letters
demonstrates a method using additive manufacturing.
Specifically, nanopillars were printed in a hydrogel polymer with a laser-based lithography method called
two-photon absorption
which allows for a femtosecond laser to
very precisely
affect a small region within the targeted material with little impact on the surrounding area. This now solid and structured polymer hydrogel was then submerged into a Ni(NO
3
)
2
solution to infuse it with nickel. After drying, the resulting structure had the polymer burned away in a furnace, leaving just the porous Ni nanopillars.
Subsequent testing showed that these nanopillars were more robust than similar structures created using other methods, presumably due to the less ordered internal physical structure of each pillar. Based on these results, it’s likely that the same approach could be used for other types of nano-sized structures. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,102.736793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/a-low-voltage-tube-makes-for-a-handy-preamplifier/ | A Low Voltage Tube Makes For A Handy Preamplifier | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"low voltage",
"tube",
"Tube Preamp"
] | When most people think of tube circuits, the first thing that comes to mind is often the use of high-voltage power supplies. It wasn’t a given for tube circuits, though, as a range of low-voltage devices were developed for applications such as car radios. It’s one of these, an ECH83 triode-heptode, which
[
mircemk
] has taken as the basis of an audio preamplifier circuit
.
The preamp circuit is pretty simple, being a two-stage single-ended design using both halves of the tube. Between the two is a three-band tone control circuit as used in classic guitar amplifiers, making for a serviceable and easily achievable way to chase that elusive “valve sound.”
There is much discussion among audio enthusiasts about the supposed benefits of vacuum technology as opposed to transistors in an amplifier. Much of it centres around the idea that tubes distort in the even harmonics while semiconductors are supposed to do so in the odd harmonics. Still, we’d be inclined to spot a bit of snake oil instead and point to early transistor amplifiers simply being not very good compared to the tube amps of the day. That said, a well-made tube amplifier set-up will sound just as amazing as it always did, and since this one is paired with
a matching power amp
we wouldn’t say no to it ourselves.
If you fancy messing about with tubes for not a lot,
there’s a cheap module for that
. | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699398",
"author": "Michael Henderson",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T00:17:58",
"content": "I don’t recall 0V control grid bias being a thing (for linear modes, anyway). I’ll have to review previous topologies. The microphonic enhancing mechanical design is in keeping with guitar cultu... | 1,760,372,102.971937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/supersize-your-intel-4004-by-over-10-times/ | Supersize Your Intel 4004 By Over 10 Times | Julian Scheffers | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"discrete transistors",
"intel 4004"
] | This is quite a bit bigger than the original 12mm² die.
The Intel 4004 was among the first microprocessors and one of the first to use the MOS silicon-gate technology. In the decades long race to build bigger CPUs, it’s been mostly forgotten. Forgotten that is, until
[Klaus Scheffler] supersized it over ten-fold
!
The project took about 2 years to complete and re-creates it faithfully – all 2,300 transistors included – enough to run software written for the Intel 4004. But the idea for this project isn’t unique and dates all the way back to 2000, so what gives? Turning a bunch of masks for silicon fabrication into a schematic is actually harder than it seems! [Tim McNerney] originally came up with the idea to make a giant 4004 for its “35th anniversary”. [Tim] managed to convince Intel to give him schematics and other drawings and would in return make an exhibit for Intel’s museum. With the schematic straight from [Federico Faggin], software analysis tools from [Lajos Kintli] and [Klaus Scheffler] to actually build the thing, they did what [Federico] did in one year without CAD, but in two with modern tools.
The full story by [Tim] is a lot longer
and it’s definitely worth a read
. | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699406",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T01:12:26",
"content": "Awwww! Gee whiz!I was hoping he was going to give it 10 times the data and address lines!Shucks!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,103.108829 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/you-can-now-build-your-own-polaroid-style-pack-film-cartridge/ | You Can Now Build Your Own Polaroid-style Pack Film Cartridge | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"instant camera",
"instant film",
"polaroid"
] | Instant photography was one of the twentieth century’s coolest-to-have consumer inventions, but when the digital photography revolution came it had few answers. It survives as a niche format thanks to Fuji’s Instax line and a group of Dutch entrepreneurs who revived a defunct Polaroid works, but what hasn’t made it are the earlier pack and roll film formats for which the picture is revealed by peeling apart a negative and positive side. All isn’t lost though, because a small Austrian company has been producing pack film cartridges as a handmade artisan product. To reduce the cost per print
they’re now available as a DIY self-assembly kit
, and it’s this which [In an Instant] is taking a look at in their latest video.
The kit has enough components for eight shots, and where the original cartridge would have held multiple exposures this one can only hold one at a time. The cartridge itself is cleverly formed from folded card as opposed to the plastic and metal of the original, and the components are a relatively straightforward assembly task. It’s a fascinating window into how the Polaroid pack film process worked, with the light-sensitive layer behind a pull-away black light screen, in front of the white positive sheet and with a pouch of developer chemicals to one side. It’s in no way cheap at somewhere about 10 dollars a shot, but it’s amazing that pack film can be recreated and for enthusiasts it’s a lifeline that keeps their cameras useful.
This isn’t the first time we’ve looked at revitalising a pack film camera, but it’s a lot easier than
hacking a Fuji cartridge to do the job
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699365",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T20:14:31",
"content": "Adjusted for inflation, 10 bucks a shot isn’t far off the cost of the real stuff in 1950.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6699886",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,103.011857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/the-case-for-a-technology-aware-lobby-correspondent/ | The Case For A Technology Aware Lobby Correspondent | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"journalism",
"politics",
"technology"
] | We cover all manner of stories here at Hackaday, including awesome hardware hacks, the latest trends and inventions, and in-depth guides to fascinating technologies. We also cover a few news stories from the wider world outside our community, usually when they have some knock-on effect that has an impact on us. Recently this last category of stories has included laws which present a threat to online encryption and privacy
in the UK
and
in the European Union
, for example. They’re not the most joyful of news, but it’s vital for everyone with an interest in online matters to be informed about them.
A Long And Inglorious History
The infamous Clipper chip. Travis Goodspeed,
CC BY 2.0
Those of us who have followed the world of technology will know that badly thought out laws with a negative impact on technology have a long and inglorious history. Some like the infamous backdoored
Clipper chip
encryption device die an inglorious death as industry or the public succeed in making them irrelevant, but others such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA live on for decades and
present an ongoing malign influence
. Most recently
our ongoing coverage of dubious drone stories
included a hefty dose of equally dubious action from lawmakers.
When considering these pieces of legislation it’s easy to characterise the politicians who advance them as gullible idiots easily swayed by any commercial lobbyist with a fistful of cash. But the reality is far more nuanced, while some of them may well be tempted by those lobbyists they are in most cases neither gullible nor foolish. Instead they are better characterised as clueless on technical issues, and thus easily swayed by received opinion rather than by technological reality. If there’s a fault in the system it’s that the essential feedback which provides the checks and balances is missing, and oddly while sitting here writing this story, the responsibility for this comes close to home. The solution doesn’t lie in changing the politicians, but in changing how they are treated by journalists.
Technology Meets
The West Wing
President Nixon addressing the White House Press Corps in 1971. White House Photo Office Collection,
Public domain
.
Perhaps a couple of decades ago one of your pieces of required viewing was the hit TV show,
The West Wing
. It followed the White House staff of the fictional President Jeb Bartlett, and among its lead characters were his press and communications team. Many of the plot lines followed their relationship with the White House Press Corps, the team of accredited journalists whose job is to report on happenings in the upper echelons of power, and to hold the president to account. Where this is being written they are called the Lobby Correspondents after the central lobby of the British Houses of Parliament, and you will no doubt find similar accredited parliamentary journalists wherever there are countries with a free press.
The lobby correspondents are all specialist political journalists at the peak of their game, and what they don’t know about the inner workings of government isn’t worth knowing. Give them a fiscal policy story and they will write a pithy and insightful analysis which will successfully hold the politicians to account in the eyes of their readers, but sadly were you to give them a story with a technology angle the same can not be said. It takes a strong person to admit when they know little about a subject, and since journalists are in most cases paid to pretend to know something about everything, when faced with a complex technological issue they prefer to rely upon received opinion as what they know about it, rather than get to the real issue. The required cog in the machine of holding politicians to account is thus broken in the case of tech stories, and we’re all poorer for it.
If there’s a solution to be found for this problem, it lies in treating political coverage of technological issues as seriously for example as social or a fiscal ones. Despite the attractive perks that no doubt come with lobby accreditation, this sadly doesn’t mean that we as Hackaday writers should be authorised to walk the corridors of power. The Prime Minister doesn’t need to see me bearing down on him with a question about encryption, instead he needs to be standing at his lecturn facing the same type of political correspondents he does at the moment, but whose employers have ensured have at least a grasp of technology issues.
A Bit Of Basic Technology Education Should Be Essential
A quick scan through the ranks of British lobby correspondents reveals education in history, law, literature, English, French, and the Politics, Phlosophy and Economics, or PPE, degree which produces so many politicians. It would probably be inappropriate to demand instead that they all have physics or engineering degrees, but if no candidates with a technical background are available than there should at least be a job requirement for a basic grounding in technology. American universities have courses with titles such as “
Physics for Poets
“, which teaches scientific method alongside basic physics for non-scientists, and these as well as courses exploring such matters as the workings of the Internet and issues surrounding online privacy should be a career essential.
When we covered that Gatwick drone story a few years ago we ended with pleas for better evaluation and official investigation of drone reports, but we also concluded there was a need for responsible journalism on the matter. In the five years since then that has failed to materialise, and it’s not difficult to spot in that the other side of the same coin when looking at the lobby journalists. With technology issues now more central to our lives than ever before, there has never been more of a need for those who would exercise control over it to be held to account. Sadly we have to predict that even when another five years has passed, we don’t expect to be seeing a more technologically informed press corps fulfilling that need.
Featured Image: “Jim Mattis talks to the press” Department of Defense, via
The Journalist’s Resource | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699335",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2023-11-17T18:21:50",
"content": "Here in the US whenever the politicians are finally convinced they need to consult someone with more technical knowledge things don’t get better. Instead that just means they will bring someone in ... | 1,760,372,103.171032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/17/hackaday-podcast-244-fake-chips-drinking-radium-and-spotting-slippery-neutrinos/ | Hackaday Podcast 244: Fake Chips, Drinking Radium, And Spotting Slippery Neutrinos | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up to discuss the best hacks of the previous week, at least in our opinions.
After chasing the angry bird away from Kristina’s office, we go to the news and learn that we’re in the middle of a solar conjunction Essentially, the Sun has come between Earth and Mars, making communication impossible for about another week. Did you know that this happens every two years?
Then it’s time for a new What’s That Sound, and although Kristina had an interesting albeit somewhat prompted guess, she was, of course, wrong.
And then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with a
really
cool digital pen that packs all the sensors. We learned about the world’s largest musical instrument, and compared it to the Zadar Sea Organ in Croatia, which if you’ll recall was once a What’s That Sound.
From there we take a look at fake buck converters, radioactive water as a health fad, and a garage door company that has decided to take their ball and go home. Finally we talk about how slippery neutrinos are, and discuss Tom’s time at JawnCon.
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!
Download and savor at your leisure
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 244 Show Notes:
News:
Solar conjunction halts communications between Mars missions and NASA
What’s that Sound?
Fill out the form, place yer bets!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
D-POINT: A Digital Pen With Optical-Inertial Tracking
Virginia Cave Is The Largest Musical Instrument In The World
Sea Organ – Zadar, Croatia – Atlas Obscura
Zadar Sea Organ – YouTube
Cheap Power Supplies With Fake Chips Might Not Be That Bad
Radioactive Water Was Once A (Horrifying) Health Fad
The Radioactive Source Missing In Australian Desert Has Been Found
Does Getting Into Your Garage Really Need To Be Difficult?
Cory Doctorow: An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse – YouTube
GitHub – Kaldek/rat-ratgdo: Open source schematics for ratgdo PCB
3D Printed Stamp Rollers
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Solder Two Boards At Once With This Dual Reflow Plate
Putting 3D Printed Screw Threads To The Test
Neopixels? Try Liquid Nitrogen To Color Shift Your LEDs Instead
Leaky SMD Electrolytics? Try These Brute Force Removal Methods
Kristina’s Picks:
Arduino Sticker Dispenser Saves Time
Forever Writing On Monofilament Fishing Line
Hack A Soda Can To Jewellery
Soda Can Strip Cutter : 10 Steps (with Pictures) – Instructables
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Detecting Neutrinos, The Slippery Ghost Particles That Don’t Want To Interact
Prototype for DUNE detector will test new technology that can handle more neutrinos
JawnCon 0x0: A Strong Start With A Bright Future | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6699669",
"author": "calculus",
"timestamp": "2023-11-18T18:07:28",
"content": "This one is for Kristina and her bird. There is a bird colloquially called the go away bird due to the sound it makes.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BsO7XL2W7K0Enjoy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,372,103.210488 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/the-linux-scheduler-and-how-it-handles-more-cores/ | The Linux Scheduler And How It Handles More Cores | Maya Posch | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"scheduler"
] | Sometimes you read an article headline and you find yourself re-reading it a few times before diving into the article. This was definitely the case for a
recent blog post
by [The HFT Guy], where the claim was made that the Linux kernel has for fifteen years now been hardlocked into not scheduling for more than 8 cores. Obviously this caused a lot of double-checking and context discovery on
both Hacker News
and the
Level 1 Techs
forum. So what is going on exactly? Did the Linux developers make an egregious error more than a decade ago that has crippled Linux performance to this day?
Where the blog author takes offence is in the claim made in the Linux kernel code and documentation that the base time slice scales with the number of CPUs (or cores), pointing out the commit in which the number of CPUs taken into account was limited to a maximum of 8. So far so good, even if at this point quite a few readers had already jumped to showing that their Linux system could definitely load more than 8 cores to 100%.
As pointed out by [sirn] on the Level 1 Techs forum, this limit was intentional, as discussed on the Linux Kernel mailing list (LKML) in
November
and
December
of 2009. Essentially – as also pointed out by a few commentators in the Hacker News thread – the granularity of task switching (time slices per second) should be higher with fewer cores, to give the impression of concurrency, which becomes less important with more cores, where diminishing returns – around the 8 CPU mark – mean that task switching overhead becomes more crucial.
That means that this ‘hardcoded limit’ was put in there on purpose back in 2009, based on solid empirical evidence using many-core workstations and servers. It also shows that writing good schedulers is hard, which is why the LKML is famous for its Scheduler Wars and why you can pick alternative schedulers if you compile your own kernel. The current Completely Fair Scheduler (
CFS
) is also likely going to be replaced in the Linux kernel with the
EEVDF
scheduler as the default. | 18 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698996",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T05:50:49",
"content": "After 2005 the majority of computers in the top 500 have been running Linux (Before that it was mostly Unix), and after 2018 Linux has completely taken over and it dominates the market. ALL of them are ru... | 1,760,372,103.349618 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/after-mems-microphones-mems-speakers-enter-the-market/ | After MEMS Microphones, MEMS Speakers Enter The Market | Maya Posch | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"MEMS",
"MEMS speaker"
] | These days it’s hard to not come across solid-state (micro-electromechanical systems, MEMS) microphones, as they are now displacing electret microphones almost everywhere due to their small size and low cost. Although MEMS speakers are not impossible, creating a miniature speaker that can both displace a lot of air (‘volume’) and accurately reproduce a wide range of frequencies – unlike simple piezo buzzers – is a lot tougher. Here a startup called xMEMS figures that they have at least partially cracked the code with their
piezoMEMS speakers
, with Creative using the
Cowell
version in their brand-new
Aurvana Ace
in-ear monitors.
XMems Cypress MEMS-based speaker. (Credit: xMEMS)
The Cowell is a full-range speaker, but its sound pressure level (SPL) is not sufficient (~111 dB @ 1 kHz) for use in an active-noise cancelling, which is why the Aurvana Ace also includes a traditional 10 mm driver. The likely successor in the form of Cypress is a small (6.5 x 6.3 x 1.65 mm) package that claims to reach an SPL of 143 dB at 20 Hz, which might be able to handle IEM ANC duty by itself.
According to xMEMS, what enabled the performance of these MEMS speakers is the use of silicon membranes (flaps) along with the piezo elements. These structures can be made out with some degree of clarity on the speakers, and according to early hands-on tests of the Aurvana Ace, audio quality is very good. Since with this first product the MEMS speaker mostly handles the high-end, the overall audio reproduction is a combination of the dynamic driver, the MEMS speaker and the DSP magic that glues it all together, so it’s hardly a fair assessment of the technology, but it will be interesting to see where it goes from here. Who doesn’t want to have a feather-light, 1×1 meter PCB that’s a wafer-thin 1 500 Watt RMS-level speaker, or just laptop speakers that don’t sound terrible?
Top image: XMems Cowell MEMS-based tweeter on top of dynamic driver. (Credit: xMEMS) | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698987",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2023-11-16T04:06:20",
"content": "Would these be useful in a phase array where you need a larger sound field but one that is directional? e.g. Your device can see you with its camera so it knows where your ears are and can then project soun... | 1,760,372,103.402612 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/backyard-ufo-is-out-of-this-world/ | Backyard UFO Is Out Of This World | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"friggin lasers",
"RGB LEDs",
"smoke",
"Teensy 4.1",
"UFO"
] | Halloween may be over for another year, but UFOs in your yard are cool year-round. This one might take the cake.
[frydom.john]’s excellent UFO
is fully programmable and contains about 2000 addressable RGB LEDs, smoke, a laser-lit ramp, and of course, an alien crew.
Under the hood of the wooden frame, you’ll find a Teensy 4.1 running the blinkenlights. There’s also a hacked smoke machine, because what’s a UFO without smoke or fog emanating from underneath? There are six PC fans to blow it around and recycle it, and the ramp runs on a linear actuator.
[frydom.john]’s
project notes
(PDF), which they refer to as ‘scrappy/hacky’ are also available. We beg to differ a bit on the scrappy/hacky part; it’s 60 pages long and full of photos and diagrams and charts. Even so, it may not be enough for you to replicate this extraterrestrial vehicle, so [frydom.john] is open to questions. Be sure to check this thing out after the break.
Want to have your UFO lift off of the ground?
It’s possible with
the Coandă effect
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698945",
"author": "Seth G",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T21:52:06",
"content": "No Close Encounters music?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6698952",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T22:35:... | 1,760,372,103.452793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/dont-look-up-or-youll-see-the-time-from-this-vfd-projection-clock/ | Don’t Look Up, Or You’ll See The Time From This VFD Projection Clock | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"ceiling",
"clock",
"JSON-RPC",
"lenses",
"projection",
"stm32",
"vacuum fluorescent display",
"vfd"
] | Ceiling clocks were a bit of a thing back in the days when clock radios were a fixture of nightstands. The idea was to project the time onto the ceiling so you’d only have to roll over onto your back and open your eyes to check the time, instead of potentially disturbing your slumber by craning your neck around to see the front of the clock.
As we recall, what sounded like a good idea was iffy in practice, with low-end optics and either weak incandescent bulbs or blazing LEDs.
This nifty VFD projection clock
by [Thomas Shupfs] seeks to fix those problems, and from the look of it does a pretty good job. It takes advantage of something else that fell out of favor with consumers — analog photography — by tapping into the ready supply of unwanted lenses. He paired that up with an IVL2-7/5 vacuum fluorescent display inside a 3D printed case with a cone-shaped extension to hold the lens at the right distance above the display. [Thomas] says that the STM32 software only supports JSON-RPC over USB at this time, and includes a couple of Python programs with examples of how to set the time and check the accuracy of the clock.
[Thomas] compares the clock head-to-head against his old LED projection clock, as seen in the featured image above; we flipped it for a better idea of what it would look like from bed. We’ve got to say the soft blue glow of the VFD would be a lot more pleasant to wake up to than the bright red LED projection. But
this soft white projection clock
is nice too.
Thanks to [skymab] for the tip. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698935",
"author": "Kelly",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T20:22:14",
"content": "Really nice, I wonder what the focal distance from VFD to lens ended up being. Now at night staring at the ceiling, how would you know the alarm is on? I made the colons blink if ALM_ON and on steady if ALM... | 1,760,372,105.579249 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/a-brief-history-of-weather-control/ | A Brief History Of Weather Control | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History"
] | [
"cloud seeding",
"weather",
"weather control"
] | It used to be a common expression to say that something would happen when “people walked on the moon.” That is, something that was never going to happen. Of course, by 1960, it was clear that someone was going to walk on the moon eventually. There were many other things everyone “knew” would happen in the future. Some of them came true, but many of them didn’t. Some, like video phones and robot factory workers, came true in a way, but not as people imagined. For example, people were confident that computers would easily translate between human languages, something we still have trouble doing entirely reliably. Another standard prediction is that people would control the weather.
Controlling the weather, in some ways, seems even less likely than walking on the moon. After all, we know where the moon is and where it will be. We still don’t understand precisely what causes the weather to behave the way it does. We have models and plenty of scientific theories. But you still can’t know exactly what’s going to happen, where, or when.
History
If you farm or live in a hut, weather is especially important. You want rain but not too much rain. Without scientific knowledge, many cultures had rain-making superstitions like a rain dance or other rituals meant to encourage rain. Some think that loud noises like cannon fire prevent hail. Charlatans would promise rain in exchange for donations.
However, science would eventually surface, and in the 1800’s James Espy — the first U.S. meteorologist — theorized that convection was what really caused rain. He had bold plans to set massive fires to encourage rain but could not convince Congress to go along.
Half a century later, Robert St. George Dyrenforth tested the effect of explosions on rainfall. There is no evidence that his cannon and fireworks did anything. He did, however, claim credit for any rain that happened to occur nearby. There have been many reports that explosions cause rain — rain often falls after a heated battle, apparently. The government in Thailand tried to induce rain using dry ice flakes dropped into clouds with, reportedly, some success. Abu Dhabi, Russia, and China’s governments claim to have working weather control today.
Effects
Popular Science Monthly imagined balloons clearing clouds with charged sand.
Exactly what you want the weather to do depends a lot on where you are and when. While farmers want rain, coastal dwellers want hurricanes to dissipate. People on the plains don’t want tornadoes, and aviators don’t want fog.
In the early 1920s, electrically charged sand cleared fog and, reportedly, created rain as part of a Cornell chemist’s project sponsored by the Army. In May 1923, Popular Science Monthly featured an article: “Is Rainmaking Riddle Solved?” featuring the work with charged sand.
However, by 1925, despite the positive press, things had not gone well, and the military withdrew air support. This effectively ended the program. MIT scientists tried spraying calcium chloride from pipes over an airfield to break fog. It didn’t work well, but it did lay the foundation for modern airport deicing systems.
Hot and Cold War
The British used a surefire way to drive off fog from airfields during World War II. Just as Espy proposed decades earlier, they burned
100,000 gallons of petrol an hour to drive off fog
. Coincidentally, the process also heated and lit the landing strips. For war purposes, it was effective, but the cost was too high for commercial use.
By 1946, General Electric was experimenting with seeding clouds with dry ice and silver iodide and tried diverting hurricanes, but with no apparent effect. They did, however, drop dry ice into a cloud to stimulate a snowstorm.
Colliers May 1954 imagined a man controlling the weather from a console
The real heat — no pun intended — came with the cold war. According to NASA, a hurricane can produce as much energy as 10,000 bombs. If you could send a hurricane over to your enemy… In 1954, Collier’s had a cover with a man in office attire controlling the weather with a lever. Schemes including using pigments on the polar ice caps to cause flooding, saturating the stratosphere with dust, and even pumping water out of the Bering Straits.
[Harry Wexler], head of research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, predicted that an adversary could use chlorine or bromine to rip a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer. But weather control wasn’t only something the West dreamed about. The Soviet Union assumed that by 2017, you might have a job at the “
Central Institute for Weather Control.
”
A Russian artist’s idea of what a flying weather control station might look like
However, after cloud seeding was secretly used in Vietnam (
Operation Popeye
, an attempt to lengthen the monsoon season in Southeast Asia), a UN convention agreed to prohibit the hostile use of environment modification techniques.
Cloud Seeding
Speaking of cloud seeding, although GE’s original plans for it didn’t work out, it does appear to be at least somewhat effective. Modern understanding of the technique is that it is only effective in cases where water is already in the air. So it was probably going to rain soon, anyway. Still, the technique may be useful for making it rain right here and right now, for cases where that is important.
Cloud seeding has also attempted to
weaken hurricanes
. In fact, there have been many proposals and tests ranging from soot, which didn’t seem to do much, to barges with jet engines to disrupt the storm’s airflow, which, as far as we know, has never been tested. One problem is that the amount of force in a hurricane is difficult to grasp — it is huge. Jet engines or absorbent polymers — another proposed solution — would have to operate on a gigantic scale to make much of a difference.
Slippery Slope
Stop hurricanes and tornados? Yes, please. But then again, the weather is a complex system, and we don’t always understand how changing one thing that seems like a good idea can have unfortunate unintended consequences. That, of course, is assuming you don’t have bad intentions. Weather warfare and terrorism are frightening prospects.
So far, real weather control is the stuff of science fiction. But so were robots, video phones, and trips to the moon. So it seems likely we will get there one day. We just have to hope we are smart enough to handle it. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698918",
"author": "Jeremy Hong",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T20:37:01",
"content": "Going to leave a comment here stating that “Did you know? HAARP isn’t just a mysterious conspiracy theory—it’s actually a ham radio station!” KL7ERP",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,372,105.316835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/underwater-kites-buoying-the-prospect-of-more-tidal-power-generation/ | Underwater Kites Buoying The Prospect Of More Tidal Power Generation | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks",
"News"
] | [
"renewable energy",
"tidal"
] | Swedish start-up Minesto has been for years trying to float the idea of having underwater turbines that generate power for use on-shore. These would be anchored to the seafloor by a long tether and move around in figure-of-eight patterns like a kite, which would increase the flow over the turbine’s blades. After a few years of trials, its 1.2 MW Dragon 12 kite will
now be installed off the coast of the Faroe Islands
.
Previously, Minesto had installed its much smaller DG500 (0.5 MW) kite turbine at
Holyhead Deep
, in Wales, where a single unit has been tested at a depth of between 65 and 91 meters. So far, only this unit has seen continuous operation. As noted in the linked Tethys report, this one unit was not connected to the grid, and research on its environmental impact is still ongoing as of September 2022. The main concerns are how it might affect cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.), including potential collisions with these as well as diving birds who might end up diving in the midst of a swarm of kites moving about at fairly high speeds.
One of the proposed Minesto Dragon 12 kite array installation sites at the Faroe Islands. (Credit: Minesto)
Although by itself putting a turbine into the much stronger and energetic ocean currents – not to mention near-continuous – makes sense, the marine environment is a tough one to survive. The DG500 prototype has seen a few years of use, but this would be the first large-scale deployment of such a system and thus the first significant long-term durability test. The goal at the Faroe Islands is to install 120 MW of capacity, across four kite groups, joining the smaller Dragon 4 (0.4 MW) unit that was grid-connected in May of last year.
Depending on the results, including the economics, this technology could prove to be either much better and cheaper than off-shore wind turbines, or turn out to be saddled with fundamental flaws that has plagued previous attempts to make use of the strong currents and tides that make the world’s oceans and seas into one of Nature’s most impressive sights. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698897",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T16:48:34",
"content": "Kinda similar to this wind-powered project, though I think that it generates power from pulling on the tether, which turns a generator, rather than relying on an onboard propeller-driven generator (... | 1,760,372,105.185974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/a-look-at-all-the-badge-hacks-of-supercon-2023/ | A Look At All The Badge Hacks Of Supercon 2023 | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"handhelds hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"badge hacking",
"vectorscope"
] | For those of you who’ve had the opportunity to join us in Pasadena for Supercon, you’ll know it’s a wild ride from start to finish. Singling out a single moment as our favorite is pretty much impossible, but certainly the Sunday Badge Hacking Ceremony has to rank up there. It’s the culmination of ~78 hours of intense hardware and software hacking, and that’s not even counting the pre-show work that attendees often put into their creations. Every year, without fail, this community manages to pull off badge hacks that are beyond anything we could have imagined — and we’re the ones who made the thing in the first place.
Unfortunately, in the mad rush, we’ve never had a chance to actually photograph the hacked badges and share them with the Hackaday readers. This year, at the urging of some of the badge hackers themselves, we were able to throw together a suitable overhead light at the last minute and actually snapped shots of each badge after it was presented to the audience.
The resulting images, sorted by badge hacking category, are below. While some proved difficult to photograph, especially with an impromptu setup, we’re happy to at least have a complete record of this year’s creations. Hopefully we’ll be able to improve on our technique for 2024 and beyond. If yours shows up, or if you’d like to share your appreciation, sound off in the comments below!
All Vectorscope
To qualify for this category, entries had to not only use the original Vectorscope firmware, but do all the work on the badge itself without any additional hardware. This was a significant limitation, but the advantage was that (at least in theory) these hacks could easily be shared with others.
Vectorscope + External
Hacks for this next category utilized some external hardware to drive the Vectorscope display using the X and Y inputs. A few hacks did modify the colors of the display from the stock green on black to better match their theme, but otherwise left the badge in its original state.
Raster Mode
These hacks abandoned the standard vectorscope display and instead simply came up with interesting graphics to show on the badge’s round LCD, which may or may not have required any external components.
Software
Most of the hacks which reached this point essentially blew out the badge’s original firmware and replaced it with something else, a task made easier this year thanks to the onboard Raspberry Pi Pico.
Hardware Add-Ons
This final category was a little bit of everything; if your badge had so much stuff hacked onto it that it looked like a Borg cube, then this was probably the category for you.
Live Action Hacking
If you weren’t there with us in person, do yourself a favor and check out the recorded live stream of Sunday’s Badge Hacking Ceremony. It’s one thing to look at them in all their cobbled-together glory, but there’s nothing quite like hearing the cheers from the crowd when [Sprite_tm] mic-drops his
DOOM
demo, or when Pluto was triumphantly reinstated as a planet. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698883",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T15:44:10",
"content": "Funny, just saw this:https://hackaday.io/project/193538The Hack-a-Sketch.Other folks who have put their hacks up on IO, or anywhere, please drop us a link here. Don’t be shy!",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,372,105.260749 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/diesel-station-wagon-runs-on-plastic/ | Diesel Station Wagon Runs On Plastic | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"240",
"alternative fuel",
"distillation",
"hydrocarbon",
"plastic",
"refinery",
"station wagon",
"volvo"
] | Old diesel engines from various car manufacturers like Mercedes and Volkswagen are highly prized even in modern times. Not only were these engines incredibly reliable and mechanically simple, but they can easily be modified to run on a wide variety of fuels. It’s common to see old Volkswagen Jettas or Mercedes 300Ds running on used vegetable oil or any other free flammable liquid that might otherwise end up in the garbage. [Gijs Schalkx] has an diesel Volvo 240 wagon, and rather than compete with all the other diesel owners looking for cooking oil,
he modified this one to run on plastic waste instead
. (
Google Translate from Dutch
)
While our Dutch language skills aren’t the best, what we gather about this project is that it uses standard solid plastic waste for fuel, but an intermediate step of cooking the plastic into a liquid is first needed. The apparatus on the roof is actually a plastic refinery which uses a small wood fire to break the plastic molecules into usable hydrocarbons, which are then sent to the engine for burning. The car is street legal and seems to operate like any other diesel of this vintage, although the fuel delivery system may not be able to provide it enough to get it going at very high speeds.
While it is possible to use wood to produce wood gas for fuel in an internal combustion engine
like this wood gas-powered lawnmower
, the hydrocarbon strings in plastic are essentially stabilized hydrocarbons from refining oil and have potentially much more available energy. Releasing this energy is generally difficult enough that used plastic is simply landfilled. [Gijs Schalkx] has made plenty of alternative fuel vehicles, too, like
this moped that used locally-harvested swamp gas
to ride around town.
Thanks to [Lucas] for the tip! | 58 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698839",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T12:05:36",
"content": "Quick translation from Dutch on how it works is that is heats up the plastic in an enclosed container where there is no air (or oxygen, word in Dutch can mean both). And then it becomes gas form, goes trough... | 1,760,372,105.52112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/15/num-pad-reborn-as-stream-deck/ | Num Pad Reborn As Stream Deck | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"macro pad",
"macropad",
"num pad",
"numpad",
"stream deck"
] | Stream decks are cool and all, but they are essentially expensive, albeit sorta cool-looking macro pads. So why not try to make your own?
You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch
.
It all started when [dj_doughy] found an extremely clicky num pad in a recycle pile. It was so clicky, in fact, that even though [dj_doughy] didn’t need an external num pad, they wanted to keep it around as a fidget toy. From the video after the break, they look to be white ALPS switches. The only problem? It had a PS/2 connector.
Well, okay, there was another problem. The chip inside seemingly has no datasheet available. [dj_doughy] took to Discord for help, and was advised to just have the thing use extended keys, like F13-F24, and assign those as hotkeys in OBS.
In order to make it USB, [dj_doughy] need a microcontroller capable of acting as a Human Interface Device (HID). While [dj_doughy] tested using an Arduino Leonardo, they ended up using an Arduino Beetle due to its diminutive size. [dj_doughy] had a bit of trouble with the code sending two key presses, but found out they were just missing some variables. Now it works like a charm.
Would you like a macro pad that lets you physically reassign macros?
Then check out this tile-based macro pad
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698838",
"author": "greg",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T11:57:46",
"content": "Not to be at all disparaging of the work here, I can’t help but note I’ve been doing this for a couple of years with a Windows app called Multi-Keyboard Macros. I use it with a full keyboard to my left for ... | 1,760,372,105.130641 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/the-quaint-history-of-the-commodore-chessmate/ | The Quaint History Of The Commodore ChessMate | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"chess",
"ChessMate",
"commodore"
] | The Commodore International of the 1970s was a company which dabbled in a bit of everything when it came to consumer electronics, with the Commodore ChessMate being a prime example of the circuitous way that some of its products came to be. Released in 1978, its existence was
essentially the result of
MOS Technology releasing the KIM-1 single board computer in 1976. In May of that year, [Peter Jennings] traveled all the way from Toronto, Canada to Cleveland, USA to attend the Midwest Regional Computer Conference and acquire a KIM-1 system and box of manuals for a mere $245. On this KIM-1 he’d proceed to
develop his own chess game
, called MicroChess, implemented fully in 6502 ASM to fit within the 1 kB of RAM.
As one of the first major applications to run on the KIM-1, it quickly became an international hit, which caught the attention of Commodore – which had acquired MOS Technology by then – who ended up contacting [Peter] about a potential chess computer project. This turned out to based on the custom MOS 6504 CPU, while sharing many characteristics with the KIM-1 SBC. Being a MicroChess-only system, the user experience was optimized for more casual users, with the
user manual
providing clear instructions on how to start a new game and how to enter the position of a newly moved piece, along with no less than eight difficulty settings.
If you’re feeling like making your own ChessMate, or want to dig into the technical details,
this excellent article
by [Hans Otten] has got you covered.
Top image: Commodore ChessMate Prototype in 1978. (Credit: Peter Jennings)
(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip) | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698828",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T10:19:12",
"content": "A rather important footnote to this story is that [Peter Jennings] went on to write VisiCalc, the precursor to spreadsheets we know today!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,105.006493 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/balloon-to-fly-during-solar-eclipse/ | Balloon To Fly During Solar Eclipse | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"balloon",
"data",
"eclipse",
"instrumentation",
"live stream",
"science",
"solar eclipse",
"stratosphere",
"telescope",
"weather balloon"
] | The Great American Eclipse was a solar eclipse that passed nearly the entire continental United States back in 2017. While it might sound like a once-in-a-lifetime event to experience a total solar eclipse, the stars have aligned to bring another total solar eclipse to North America although with a slightly different path stretching from the west coast of Mexico and ending off the cost of Newfoundland in Canada. Plenty of people near the path of totality have already made plans to view the event, but [Stephen] and a team of volunteers have done a little bit of extra preparation and
plan to launch a high-altitude balloon during the event
.
The unmanned balloon will primarily be carrying a solar telescope with the required systems onboard to stream its images live during its flight. The balloon will make its way to the stratosphere, hopefully above any clouds that are common in New Brunswick during the early spring, flying up to 30,000 meters before returning its payload safely to Earth. The telescope will return magnified images of the solar eclipse live to viewers on the ground and has been in development for over two years at this point. The team believes it to be the first time a non-governmental organization has imaged an eclipse by balloon.
For those who have never experienced a total solar eclipse before,
it’s definitely something worth traveling for
if you’re not already in its path. For this one, Canadians will need to find themselves in the Maritimes or Newfoundland or head south to the eastern half of the United States with the Americans, while anyone in Mexico needs to be in the central part of the mainland. Eclipses happen in places other than North America too, and are generally rare enough that you’ll hear about a total eclipse well in advance. There’s more to eclipses than watching the moon’s shadow pass by, though. NASA expects changes in the ionosphere
and is asking ham radio operators for help for the 2024 eclipse
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698795",
"author": "KoshsShadow",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T03:12:13",
"content": "Having just been watching Monty Python on airships, I have to channel their version of Count Zeppelin and say:IT IS NOT A BALLOON! IT IS AN AIRSHIP!And out the door they go",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,105.364762 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/increase-your-blinkenlights-with-this-silicon-wafer-necklace/ | Increase Your Blinkenlights With This Silicon Wafer Necklace | Julian Scheffers | [
"Art"
] | [
"necklace",
"RISC-V",
"silicon wafer",
"tapeout"
] | Necklaces aren’t often very high-tech, mostly because of the abuse they have to go through being worn. This was obviously a problem that needed solving, so [Matt Venn] decided to change that by making
a necklace out of ASICs
just in time for Supercon.
Although this isn’t the first time [Matt] made such a necklace, he though his previous one was “too hip-hop” and not enough “15 million dollar Nikon Lithography Stepper”. Obviously, this means designing the whole chain, art included, from scratch with the blinkenlights to match. Together with [Pat Deegan] and [Adam Zeloof], the team created a beautiful technopunk necklace with art on every chain link and of course a real silicon wafer with a RISC-V tapeout from 2022 on it.
With [Adam] doing modeling for the chain links, and [Pat] and [Matt] designing the electronics required for the mandatory blinkenlights, and some last-minute soldering and assembling the project was finished just in time for Supercon, where it fit right in with all the other blinkenlights. It even runs on one of the RISC-V cores from the same tapeout as the central wafer! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698777",
"author": "Lee Gleason",
"timestamp": "2023-11-15T00:59:01",
"content": "THis takeme back to the late 60s, when LEDs were new and started bcoeming available at reasonable prices. Companies produced pendants with blinking LEDs…and they looked really exotic at the time.",
... | 1,760,372,105.417751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/an-off-grid-ev-camper-van/ | An Off-Grid EV Camper Van | Navarre Bartz | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"camper",
"camper van",
"camping",
"eindhoven",
"solar car"
] | Despite our predilection for creature comforts like electricity, it can be nice to get away from it all from time-to-time. Students from
Eindhoven University of Technology
developed
Stella Vita
to let you glamp from the power of the sun alone.
Solar-powered vehicles have been plying the highways for decades, but we’re only now getting vehicles with multiple seats that could potentially be used for transport outside of protected race conditions. While production vehicles that can charge off the sun are yet to appear in any appreciable numbers, universities are continuing to push the envelope of what’s possible in a solar car.
Stella Vita is a whale shark-esque camper van designed to be as aerodynamic as possible while still housing all the accoutrements one would want when car camping including a large bed, inductive cooktop, fridge, shower, sink, toilet, and standing room via a pop top. The 2 kW solar array expands to 4 kW when parked via two wings extending from the pop top that also function as awnings for your base camp. By keeping the car lightweight (1,700 kg or 3,700 lb) and aerodynamic, it can go about 600 km (370 mi) on a single charge with its 60 kWh battery.
While it’s still experimental, the team took Stella Vita on a road trip of 3,000 km (1,900 mi) to the south of Spain and were able to get there with only a couple charging stops to account for technical difficulties. A full charge on solar alone takes 2-3 days, which we can see being a convenient amount of time to stop in one spot for your outdoor adventures before heading home or to your next destination.
If you want to build a slightly smaller off-grid camper that’s fueled by coffee instead, you might want to check out
this bike camper
or
this other example
. | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698736",
"author": "NurseBobIsRetired",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T21:45:26",
"content": "Very Cool, though while off grid, with that ground clearance it would never survive off pavement except, maybe, on my lawn… Still waiting for one of the mythical Rivian “Camper” vans…However, ma... | 1,760,372,105.079472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/theres-no-ai-in-a-markov-chain-but-theyre-fun-to-play-with/ | There’s No AI In A Markov Chain, But They’re Fun To Play With | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"language",
"Markov chain",
"python"
] | Amid all the hype about AI it sometimes seems as though the world has lost sight of the fact that software such as ChatGPT contains no intelligence. Instead it’s an extremely sophisticated system for extracting plausible machine generated content from the corpus on which it is trained. There’s a long history behind machine generated text, and perhaps the simplest example comes in the form of a Markov chain. [Ben Hoyt] takes us through how these work,
and provides some Python code so that you can roll your own
.
If you’re uncertain what a Markov chain is, consider the predictive text on your phone. It works by offering the statistically most likely next word in your sentence, and should you accept all of its choices it will deliver sentences which are superficially readable but otherwise complete nonsense. He demonstrates with very simple short source texts how a collocate probability map is generated for two-word phrases, and how from that a likely next word can be extracted. It’s not AI, but it can be a lot of fun to play with and it opens the door to the entire field of computational linguistics. We haven’t set one loose on Hackaday’s archive yet but we suspect it would talk a lot about the Arduino.
We’re talking about Markov chains here with respect to language, but it’s also worth remembering that
they work for music too
.
Header: Bad AI image with Dall-E prompt, “Ten thousand monkeys with typewriters”. | 72 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698710",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T19:45:29",
"content": "More like “Associated Press Intelligence” (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6698714",
"author": "Miroslav",... | 1,760,372,105.695941 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/testing-various-properties-of-lego-compatible-axles/ | Testing Various Properties Of LEGO-Compatible Axles | Maya Posch | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"lego",
"material testing"
] | If you ever wondered what’d happen if you were to use LEGO Technic parts, but they were made out of something other than plastic, the
[Brick Experiment Channel] has got you covered
. Pitting original Lego axles against their (all except steel commercially available) equivalents made out of carbon fiber, aluminium and steel, some of the (destructive) results are very much expected, while some are more surprising.
Starting off with the torque test, each type of axle is connected with others and rotated with increasing torque until something gives out. Unsurprisingly, the plastic Technic part fails first and renders itself into a twist, before the carbon fiber version gives up. Aluminium is softer than steel, so ultimately the latter wins, but not before a range of upgrades to the (LEGO-based) testing rig, as these much stronger axles require also strong gears and the like to up the torque.
When it comes to durability, all except the original LEGO version didn’t mind having plastic rubbing against them for a while. Yet for friction in general, the plastic version did better, with less friction. Whether or not this is due to material wearing away is a bit of a question. Overall, stainless steel gets you a lot of strength, but in a dense (8000 kg/m
3
) package, aluminium comes somewhat close, with 2700 kg/m3, and carbon fiber (1500 kg/m3) does better than the original part (1400 kg/m3), with only a bit more weight, though at roughly ten times the cost.
On that note, we’re looking forward to the first 100% stainless steel LEGO Technic kit, reminiscent of the era when Meccano came in the form of all-metal components and a bucket of bolts. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698692",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T16:41:08",
"content": "Very occasionally, LEGO has released bearing blocks that had some sort of bushings in them, that spun much, much better. I have a few wheels that are official LEGO parts with round steel pins stick... | 1,760,372,105.746797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/detecting-neutrinos-the-slippery-ghost-particles-that-dont-want-to-interact/ | Detecting Neutrinos, The Slippery Ghost Particles That Don’t Want To Interact | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"neutrino",
"neutrinos",
"particle physics",
"physics"
] | Neutrinos are some of the most elusive particles that are well-known to science. These tiny subatomic particles have no electric charge and an extremely small mass, making them incredibly difficult to detect. They are produced in abundance by the sun, as well as by nuclear reactions on Earth and in supernovae. Despite their elusive nature, scientists are keen to detect neutrinos as they can provide valuable information about the processes that produce them.
Neutrinos interact with matter so rarely that it takes a very special kind of detector to catch them in the act. These detectors come in a few different flavors, each employing its unique method to spot these elusive particles. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how these detectors work and some of the most notable examples of neutrino detectors in the world today.
Patience and Scale
Modern physics tells us that around 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body
every second
. You’d think being so common would make these particles easy to find, but it’s anything but the case. These ultralight uncharged particles interact with matter so rarely that detecting them requires a rather specialized experimental setup.
The first successful neutrino detection was achieved in 1956 by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan. Two targets were created, using a solution of cadmium chloride in water, with scintillation detectors placed next to the targets. Antineutrinos from a nuclear reactor underwent an “inverse beta decay” with protons in the water. This reaction saw the proton turn into a neutron, and the antineutrino forming a positron. The positron quickly annihilated with an electron, releasing a gamma ray, while the neutron was captured by a cadmium nuclei, itself releasing a gamma ray a few microseconds later. By capturing the gamma ray signature of these events, the duo proved a successful detection of an antineutrino, which would later see them awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995.
This method was useful for detecting neutrinos, but little more than that. To learn more about the universe, physicists needed to study neutrinos in greater detail, determining their natural sources, their interactions, and their behaviour. Thus, a variety of more advanced detectors have been built over the years. Many of these are at a grand scale, involving hundreds of tons of this, or thousands of tons of that. The sheer scale is often required to capture a rare interaction with a neutrino, given their propensity to pass through great expanses of material without any interaction whatsoever.
Cherenkov Radiation
With its thousands of photomultiplier tubes, the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector looks like something straight out of an early-2000s hip-hop film clip. Credit:
Super-Kamionade experiment
A more modern and popular method of neutrino detection is via Cherenkov radiation, which has netted scientists richer information on neutrinos and their origins. When a neutrino moves faster than the speed of light in a given material, like water, Cherenkov radiation is produced in a sort of optical shockwave, analogous to an airplane breaking the speed of sound in air. The ring of light released can be detected with simple photomultiplier tubes. With an appropriate array of photodetectors, it can be possible to determine the direction and energy levels of incident neutrinos.
These detectors use large tanks filled with water, heavy water, or oil, and are equipped with sensors that can detect the faint flashes of Cherenkov radiation produced when a neutrino interacts with matter. A prime example of a water Cherenkov detector is the
Super-Kamiokande
in Japan, a massive underground tank holding 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water, lined with 11,000 photomultiplier tubes. The whole experiment is buried a kilometer underground, helping to shield it from other natural phenomena like cosmic rays. It’s set to be superceded by the Hyper-Kamiokande in coming years. Another example is the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, with 1,000 tons of heavy water surrounded by a cylinder of regular pure water. The experiment is able to capture the gamma rays released when a neutrino breaks up a deuterium atom in the heavy water.
Different particles leave a different signature of Cerenkov radiation when they pass through the MiniBooNE detector. Credit:
H. Ray
Los Alamos National Laboratory
The MiniBooNE detector works on the same scintillation principal, but uses oil as its medium instead of water. It was designed to investigate the concept of
neutrino oscillation
, where neutrinos change between several “flavors” over time. The experiment hunted for the signature of an electron neutrino hitting a neutron—which would generate an electron plus a slow-moving proton—which occurs rarely. This would be contrasted against the signature of more common events where muon neutrinos struck protons, creating a muon and a proton. These different events can be determined by patterns of light detected by the experiment’s photomultipliers, as different particles at different speeds create their own telltale patterns of Cherenkov radiation.
The ICECube experiment uses strings of photodetectors placed in holes drilled into the Antarctic ice. Credit: Amble,
CC BY-SA 3.0
Other Cherenkov detectors eschew the use of a giant purpose-built container, instead electing to take advantage of naturally-existing bodies of water or ice. The Antares experiment sits at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, 2.5 km below the surface. As a result, it has to filter out light caused by things like radioactive decays from potassium-40 in sea salt, and bioluminescent organisms. Meanwhile, at the South Pole, the AMANDA and IceCUBE experiments use photodetectors in holes drilled deep into the ice.
Time Projection Chambers
DUNE aims to use time projection chambers filled with liquid argon to detect the results of neutrino-matter interactions. Credit:
Rlinehan, CC BY-SA 4.0
Time-projection chambers represent another method of neutrino detection, where a neutrino interaction ionizes atoms in a gas or liquid, and the resulting trail of charged particles is then detected. The DUNE experiment in South Dakota, USA, currently under construction, is an example of a project employing this method. With its four massive detectors, each holding thousands of tons of liquid argon, DUNE aims to study neutrinos with unprecedented precision. The density of the liquid argon helps increase the chances of an interaction with a neutrino.
Time-projection chambers use light detection just like scintillator experiments, but also go further. The chambers use a cathode plane to create an electric field across the chamber. On the opposite side of the chamber, there are multiple planes of parallel anode wires. Inner planes are typically termed as induction grids, which allow so-called drift electrons from neutrino-particle interactions to pass by. If a drift electron passes by a wire in the induction plane, it produces a bump in the current in the wire which can be picked up. Beyond the one or more induction grids, a collection grid then picks up electrons directly, outputting a signal for collection. The benefit of having multiple planes of anode grids is that it allows a two-dimensional reconstruction of an ionization event to be made as an electron is picked up moving by the multiple grids.
Gallium
If you’re less interested in directionality and more interested in quanitities of neutrino interactions, liquid metal can be a useful tool. In a gallium detector, neutrinos pass through a tank filled with, wait for it, gallium. Thanks to the neutrino-induced inverse beta decay reaction, the neutrino impacting the gallium atom sees one of the atom’s neutrons become a proton, turning gallium into germanium and releasing an electron. The produced germanium can be chemically extracted and due to its instability, its decay can be detected with
proportional counters
.
A schematic of the GALLEX experiment. Credit:
OSTI, DOE
The GALLEX experiment in Italy is one of the notable examples of gallium-based neutrino detectors. Located deep underground to shield it from cosmic rays, the GALLEX detector consisted of a tank holding 30 tons of liquid gallium, and ran from 1991 to 1997. This experiment played a crucial role in studying solar neutrinos, and its results have significantly contributed to our understanding of the Sun and its processes. It’s successor was the Gallium Neutrino Observatory, which was in operation from 1998 to 2003. The Soviet-American Gallium Experiment, or SAGE, was another long-running gallium-based neutrino detector. These experiments were prized for their ability to detect low-energy neutrinos, though they were expensive due to their requirement for many tons of gallium, either in liquid metal form or as a gallium trichloride-hydrochloric acid solution.
Conclusion
The nature of particle physics today is that a wide variety of large-scale experiments are needed to investigate all manner of phenomenon. This is by no means an exhaustive list of neutrino detection methods, but instead a guide as to the many methods that can be used to hunt down these elusive particles. New and more exciting detectors will be built, and hopefully reveal to us more secrets about the sub-atomic particles beyond the basic ones we learn about in high-school physics. If you’re currently studying particle physics at the university level, you may yet find yourself working on one of these advanced neutrino projects! | 62 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698681",
"author": "O",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T15:17:50",
"content": "Interesting article, but neutrinos don’t move “faster than the speed of light.” At least not according to these folks:https://www.science.org/content/article/once-again-physicists-debunk-faster-light-neutrino... | 1,760,372,106.026215 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/d-point-a-digital-pen-with-optical-inertial-tracking/ | D-POINT: A Digital Pen With Optical-Inertial Tracking | Dave Rowntree | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"6-DOF",
"ArUco",
"Inertial tracking",
"Kalman Filtering",
"Numba JIT compiler",
"numpy",
"pressure sensor",
"sensor fusion",
"visual pose estimation",
"webcam"
] | [Jcparkyn] clearly had an interesting topic for their thesis project, and was conscientious enough to write up a chunk of it and release it to the wild. The project in question is a
digital pen that uses some neat sensor fusion
to combine the inputs from a pen-mounted gyro/accelerometer with data from an optical tracking system provided by an off-the-shelf webcam.
A six degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking system is achieved as a result, with the pen-mounted hardware tracking orientation and the webcam tracking the 3D position. The pen itself is quite neat, with an
ALPS/Alpine HSFPAR003A load sensor
measuring the contact pressure transmitted to it from the stylus tip. A
Seeed Xaio nRF52840 sense
is on duty for Bluetooth and hosting the needed IMU. This handy little module deals with all the details needed for such a high-integration project and even manages the charging of a single 10440 lithium cell via a USB-C connector.
Positional tracking uses Visual Pose Estimation (VPE) assisted with
ArUco markers
mounted on the end of the
stylus. A consumer-grade (i.e. uncalibrated) webcam is all that is required on the hardware side. The software utilizes the familiar OpenCV stack to unroll the effects of the webcam
rolling shutter
, followed by
Perspective-n-Point
(PnP) to estimate the pose from the corrected image stream. Finally, a coordinate space conversion is performed to determine the stylus tip position relative to the drawing surface.
The sensor fusion is taken care of with a Kalman filter, smoothed with the typical Rauch-Tung-Striebel (RTS) algorithm before being passed onto the final application. This process is running in Python using the NumPy module, as you would expect, but accelerated using the
Numba JIT compiler.
Motion tracking is not news to us, we’ve seen many an implementation over the years, such as
this one
. But digital input pens?
Why aren’t they more of a thing
?
Thanks to [Oliver] for the tip! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698672",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T13:45:39",
"content": "This pen had some similar functionality (and a roller/encoder too) 7 or so years ago.https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/01-world-s-first-dimensioning-instrument#/(I actually bought one, and have never r... | 1,760,372,105.908897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/14/pi-zero-fpv-robot-uses-tiny-motor-gears/ | Pi Zero FPV Robot Uses Tiny Motor & Gears | Richard Baguley | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"FPV",
"pi zero",
"robot"
] | We’ve seen plenty of first-person view (FPV) robots built using the Raspberry Pi Zero, but this one from [Shane] has an interesting twist: rather than directly driving the wheels from big motors, it uses small motors and gearboxes to drive the wheels, with some of the gears being 3D printed.
[Shane] has posted the
full details of this cute little robot,
complete with 3D models, code, and plans for the PCB that connects the Zero to the motors. These motors are N20 ones, which are much smaller and cheaper than what we usually see used in these projects, and run faster. They also often come with a gearbox that reduces the speed to something a bit more useful. Each motor drives the two wheels on one side through a 3D printed gear for tank-style steering.
To run the whole thing off a single LiPo battery, [Shane] also designed his own Pi Hat that converted the voltage to 5 V and added a couple of H bridge chips for the motors. It is a cute little build, but the requirement for a custom Pi hat perhaps puts it beyond most beginners, who might be interested in a cheap, straightforward build like this. Does anybody have any alternatives? | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698669",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T13:28:26",
"content": "Oh that’s cute! A pretty nice robot for a beginner who’s okay with assembling a PCB!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6698694",
"autho... | 1,760,372,106.112805 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/3d-printed-stamp-rollers/ | 3D Printed Stamp Rollers | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"roller",
"stamp"
] | If you have an artistic bent, you might have seen self-inking stamp rollers. These are like rotary rubber stamps that leave a pattern as you roll across a page. [Becky] wanted a
larger custom roller and turned to 3D printing
to make it happen. The first prototype used a modified Sharpie. However, she soon moved to an unmodified acrylic marker that had a rectangular tip.
A Tinkercad design produces a cap that fits the marker and a wheel that contains the desired pattern. Text works well, although you can easily do a custom pattern, too, of course.
The design counts. [Becky] noticed that commercial products had small artifacts deliberately on the design. Turns out these were made to help the roller spin reliably. Clearly, not everything will work as well as others when you use it as a pattern. But Tinkercad is easy enough, so you should be able to experiment easily.
If you prefer a more conventional rubber stamp,
that’s easy enough
. If you want to do more advanced things in Tinkercad, check out how to do
parameterization
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698639",
"author": "tinky",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T08:17:07",
"content": "Maybe the PrusaSlicer emboss/deboss feature can be used on a .stl with a blank wheel in place to easily add custom text or symbols.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,106.155241 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/using-nuclear-decay-as-random-number-generator-source-for-an-mcu/ | Using Nuclear Decay As Random Number Generator Source For An MCU | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"hardware rng",
"random number generator"
] | Although there are many ways to get a random number generator (RNG) set up on a microcontroller, it’s hard to argue with the sheer randomness of the various kinds of radiation zipping all around us from nuclear decay events. For [gbonacini] the purchase of a Geiger counter first in 2022 was the reason to tinker with
using these as the source
for an RNG, which simply runs a counter until a Geiger counter event occurs that ‘selects’ a number and the counter is reset to zero.
With the
next version of this system
the hardware and layout has changed somewhat, using a commercial handheld Geiger counter (GMC-320+) and its audio output as a generic input for any MCU. The (pulsed) audio signal is amplified with an opamp (left unspecified) that connects to a GPIO pin of the MCU (RP2040-based Pico W). Here the same algorithm is used to create a continuous queue of randomly picked numbers, which can also be queried via the WiFi interface with a custom protocol, essentially making it a network-connected RNG that could be used by other network-connected appliances.
C++ source is provided for the Pico W example, but it should be easy enough to adapt to other platforms. The GMC-320+ is also among the more affordable Geiger counters out there, even if it’s somewhat bulky to pair with just a single MCU, making a more basic Geiger counter module better for a permanent installation. Either way you should get pretty good RNG this way without splurging on exotic hardware.
Thanks to [navigator] for the tip. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6703729",
"author": "William Payne",
"timestamp": "2023-12-01T00:20:16",
"content": "Orderly enumeration of nonsingular binary matrices applied to text encryption.https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/359460.359464The GFSR.https://www.google.com/search?q=generalized+feedback+shift+register... | 1,760,372,106.071708 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/obsolete-e-reader-gets-new-life/ | Obsolete E-Reader Gets New Life | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"book",
"display",
"ebook",
"ereader",
"inktober",
"linux",
"picture",
"pocketbook",
"shell",
"uboot"
] | For those who read often, e-readers are a great niche device that can help prevent eye fatigue with their e-ink displays especially when compared to a backlit display like a tablet or smartphone, all while taking up minimal space unlike a stack of real books. But for all their perks, there are still plenty of reasons to maintain a library of bound paper volumes. For those who have turned back to books or whose e-readers aren’t getting the attention they once did,
there are plenty of things to do with them like this e-book picture frame
.
The device started life as a PocketBook Basic Touch, or PocketBook 624, a fairly basic e-reader from 2014, but at its core is a decent ARM chip that can do many more things than display text. It also shipped running a version of Linux, which made it fairly easy to get a shell and start probing around. Unlike modern smart phones this e-reader seems to be fairly open and able to run some custom software, and as a result there are already some C++ programs available for these devices. Armed with some example programs, [Peter] was able to write a piece of custom software that displays images from an on-board directory and mounted the new picture display using an old book.
There were a number of options for this specific device that [Peter] explored that didn’t pan out well, like downloading images from the internet to display instead of images on the device, but in the end he went with a simpler setup to avoid feature creep and get his project up and running for “#inktober”, a fediverse-oriented drawing challenge that happened last month. While not strictly in line with a daily piece of hand-drawn artwork, the project still follows the spirit of the event. And, for those with more locked-down e-readers there’s some hope of unlocking the full functionality of older models
with this FOSS operating system
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698591",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T00:27:31",
"content": "I use an inkplate 10, with a library of ebooks that I, uh, *acquired* for free. It’s actually helped me keep off my laptop for 3/4 my waking hours. Definitely do recommend, although you need to roll the softwar... | 1,760,372,106.241642 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/data-science-the-stanford-way/ | Data Science The Stanford Way | Al Williams | [
"Science",
"Software Development"
] | [
"data science",
"stanford"
] | Data science is a relatively new term for a relatively old discipline. Essentially, it is data analysis, particularly for large data sets. It involves techniques as wide-ranging as statistics, computer science, and information theory. What to know more? Stanford has a “
Data Science Handbook
” that you can read online.
Topics range from how to design a study and create an analytic plan to how to do data visualization, summarization, and analysis. The document covers quite a bit but is very concise.
Data science tends to use Python, although we aren’t sure why that is. However, you might look into the
Python Data Science Handbook
and
Think Stats
to apply what you’ve learned about data science to Python. Be sure, too, to check out Stanford Online’s
playlist
for Statistics and Data Science for many interesting seminars, including “How to be a Statistical Detective.”
Generating a lot of data is something sensors are good at, so it makes sense that data science and statistics techniques
might apply
. Data science is supposed to be new and shiny, but in reality, it has been going on for a very long time. Ask
World War II statistician Abraham Wald
.
Title graphic: by [Schutz]
CC-SA-3.0
. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698373",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T03:08:54",
"content": "I’m guessing Python is easy to work with.https://www.humblebundle.com/books/data-science-no-starch-press-books",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "669... | 1,760,372,106.448596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/hackaday-links-november-12-2023/ | Hackaday Links: November 12, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"astronauts",
"calculator",
"cruise",
"hackaday links",
"iss",
"layoffs",
"nice round numbers",
"relay logic",
"satellite",
"spacewalk",
"tire",
"tools",
"unix epoch",
"wagon wheel",
"wheel",
"wheelwright"
] | Somebody must really have it in for Cruise, because the bad press just keeps piling up for the robo-taxi company. We’ve highlighted many of the company’s woes in this space, from
unscheduled rendezvous
with various vehicles to
random acts of vandalism
and
stupid AI pranks
. The hits kept coming as
California regulators pulled the plug on testing
, which finally convinced parent company General Motors to
put a halt to the whole Cruise testing program nationwide
. You’d think that would be enough, but no — now we learn that
Cruise cars had a problem recognizing children
, to the point that there was concern that one of their autonomous cars could clobber a kid under the right conditions. The fact that they apparently knew this and kept sending cars out for IRL testing is a pretty bad look, to say the least. Sadly but predictably,
Cruise has announced layoffs
, starting with the employees who supported the now-mothballed robo-taxi fleet, including those who had the unenviable job of cleaning the cars after, err,
being enjoyed by customers
. It seems a bit wrongheaded to sack people who had no hand in engineering the cars, but then again, there seems to be a lot of wrongheadedness to go around.
In space, no one can hear you scream, which is probably a good thing for
the ISS astronaut who dropped a toolbag during a recent spacewalk
. Astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were out fixing one of the rotary joints that keep the station’s solar panels pointing toward the Sun when the bag got away from one of them; NASA is being kind and not revealing which astronaut did it. Thankfully, the repair work was almost done at the time, and nothing in the toolkit was irreplaceable. And hey — now we have a new satellite that
you can actually see with binoculars
. But you’d better hurry; free from the regular orbital boosts of the ISS, it’ll probably reenter the atmosphere in a couple of months. Wonder how expensive that shooting star will be?
We recently featured
a partly relay-based calculator project
; we thought it was pretty snazzy then, but now? Wow!
The finished Calc-U-Later
build is pretty spectacular, with a custom wood enclosure that really looks great. And bonus points for the attention to detail, especially on
the brackets that hold the display to the base
. There’s also a video of it in action and it sounds fantastic, almost as if the wood is acting as a resonator for the clicking relays. Great job, Michal!
“It’s almost 1.7 billion o’clock; do you know where your Unix sysadmin is?” That’s right, in just a few days time, it’ll be 1,700,000,000 seconds since the Unix epoch started on January 1, 1970. Milestones such as these are custom made for clock watcher, odometer freaks, and anyone who appreciates a nice round number. The big moment comes on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 22:13:20 GMT, so mark your calendar and head over to
Unixtimestamp.com
to watch the digits flip. And while you’re at it, ponder the enormity of what awaits us once another mere 447,483,648 seconds elapse and the 32-bit clock in every Unix machine is filled with ones. Y2k problem? Pfft! Think about Y2.038k?
And finally, if you think dealing with car tires is a hassle, check out
this highly problematic tire change
on an enormous hand-made wooden wheel. We’ve been following the epic story of Engels Coach Shop’s built of 10′ (3 meter) wooden wheels for a logging wagon, and the scale of the work that wheelwright Dave Engel accomplishes here is nothing short of amazing. The wheel build itself is worth following in full, but the final step of shrinking iron tires onto the wooden wheels is the real showstopper. What’s especially fascinating is that there are no fasteners holding the wheel together, and until that tire shrinks and snugs up all the joints, the wheel can barely support itself. While the
first wheel of the pair
was a textbook example of setting a tire, the one in the video below had different ideas. We won’t spoil the surprise except to say watch out at around the 10:52 mark, when all hell breaks loose — literally. And just think about what kind of effort went into these wheels before forklifts and skid steers. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698361",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T00:41:31",
"content": "Steel toed boots.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6698364",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T01:33:26",
"content": "Shouldn’t t... | 1,760,372,106.293734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/arduino-sticker-dispenser-saves-time/ | Arduino Sticker Dispenser Saves Time | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"NEMA-17",
"paste dispenser"
] | What’s the worst part about packaging up a whole lot of the same basic thing? It might just be applying the various warning stickers to the outside of the shipping box. Luckily, [Mr Innovative] has built
an open-source automatic sticker dispenser
that does the peeling for you, while advancing the roll one at a time quite satisfyingly.
This tidy build is made primarily of 20×20 extruded aluminium and stainless steel smooth rod. All the yellow bits are 3D printed. The brains of this operation is an Arduino Nano, with an A4988 stepper motor driver controlling a NEMA17.
Our favorite part of this build is the IR sensor pair arranged below the ready sticker. It detects when a sticker is removed, then the stepper advances the roll by one sticker height. The waste is collected on a spool underneath.
Between the video and the instructions, [Mr Innovative] has made it quite simple to build one for yourself. Definitely check this one out after the break.
[Mr Innovative] may as well go by [Mr. Automation].
Check out this automated wire prep machine from a few years ago
. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698344",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T22:00:45",
"content": "That’s a nice neat solution! I can see that saving a lot of time if you are labelling boxes or something.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6698347",
"... | 1,760,372,106.378383 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/the-ibm-mda-should-have-been-the-cda/ | The IBM MDA Should Have Been The CDA | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"display adapter",
"IBM PC",
"MDA"
] | If you are reading this on an IBM PC-compatible computer, it is a certainty that its graphics card will support the lowest common denominator of PC displays, the Monochrome Display Adapter, or MDA. This was a video card which delivered a text-only display in black-and-white that was an option fitted to the very first PC models. But was it really a monochrome display adapter? [TubeTimeUS] is here to show us that when connected to the appropriate colour monitor,
it can produce text in colour
. It seems that this was a feature only on the very earliest revisions of the card.
Reading up on the MDA card, we find that at its heart it had a Motorola MC6845 CRT controller, a chip that appeared in a huge variety of machines from that era. The beauty of this chip was that it provided the correct timing signals and memory locations for video to be created, but didn’t include any video circuitry thus the designer was free to craft a video device to their specification, allowing for it to appear in both colour and monochrome devices. While the MDA card only supported a text mode it seems its designers managed to put in some form of colour attribute support even if it was never marketed as such. We’re not students of IBM graphics card modes here at Hackaday, but it would be fascinating to know whether this undocumented mode works in the same way from the software side as the colour text modes on CGA and better colour cards.
Thanks [Stephen Walters] for the tip.
Header image: German,
CC BY-SA 3.0 | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698313",
"author": "Felix Domestica",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T18:20:42",
"content": "Note that the monochrome _display_ (the CRT) relied on the adapter for its timing signals. It was reportedly possible to put the adapter into a mode that would cause actual damage to the display’... | 1,760,372,106.637849 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/a-classic-shortwave-radio-restored/ | A Classic Shortwave Radio Restored | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"shortwave",
"sony"
] | Before the Internet, if you wanted to hear news from around the world, you probably bought a shortwave receiver. In the golden age of world band radio, there was a great deal of high-quality programming on the shortwave bands and a large variety of consumer radios with shortwave bands. For example, the
Sony CRF-160 that [M Caldeira] is restoring
dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s and would have been a cool radio in its day. It retailed for about $250 in 1972, which sounds reasonable, but — don’t forget — in 1972 that would have been a 10% downpayment on a new car or enough to buy a Big Mac every day for a year with change left over.
As you can see in the video below, the radio seemed to work well right out of the gate, but the radio needed some rust removal and other sprucing up. However, it is an excellent teardown, with some tips about general restoration.
We liked that there was an access port to get to the alignment adjustments without taking the whole thing apart. Overall, the construction looks great for the period. We were happy to hear the cleaned up radio once again tuning in the world or, at least, as much of the world as is still transmitting.
Of course, if your neighbor had one of these back in the day, you pretty much assumed
he was a spy
. These days a shortwave radio is
not much more than a chip
and won’t buy nearly as many Big Macs. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698288",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T15:09:04",
"content": "The Big Mac was available in 1972?I wouldn’t know, our town did not get a McDonald’s until the latter 1970s.“Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, …”",
"par... | 1,760,372,106.700164 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/introducing-molybdenene-as-graphenes-new-dirac-matter-companion/ | Introducing Molybdenene As Graphene’s New Dirac Matter Companion | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"graphene",
"materials",
"molybdynene"
] | Amidst all the (well-deserved) hype around graphene, it’s important to remember that its properties are not unique to carbon. More atoms can be coaxed into stable 2-dimensional configuration, with molybdenene previously theoretically possible. This is now
demonstrated
by Tumesh Kumar Sahu and colleagues in a recent
Nature Nanotechnology
article, through the manufacturing of a 2D
molybdenum
-based material which they showed to be indeed molybdenene. Essentially, this is a 2D lattice of molybdenum atoms, a configuration in which it qualifies as
Dirac matter
, just like graphene. For those of us unfamiliar with Dirac materials, this
gentle introduction
by Jérôme Cayssol in
Comptes Rendus Physique
might be of use.
Manufacturing process of molybdenene. (Credit: Sahu et al., 2023)
In order to create molybdenene, the researchers started with molybdenum disulfide (MoS
2
), which using a microwave-assisted field underwent electrochemical transformation into whiskers that when examined turned out to consist out of monolayers of Mo. The sulfur atoms were separated using a graphene sheet. As is typical, molybdenene sheets were exfoliated using Scotch tape, in a process reminiscent of the early days of graphene research.
Much like graphene and other Dirac materials, molybdenene has many potential uses as a catalyst, as cantilever in scanning electron microscope (SEM) tips, and more. If the past decades of research into graphene has demonstrated anything, it is that what once seemed more of a novelty, suddenly turned out to have endless potential in fields nobody had considered previously. One of these being as
coatings for hard disk
platters, for example, which has become feasible due to increasingly more efficient ways to
produce graphene
in large quantities. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698261",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T12:44:30",
"content": "“If the past decades of research into graphene has demonstrated anything, it is that what once seemed more of a novelty, suddenly turned out to have endless potential in fields nobody had considered p... | 1,760,372,106.824832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/leaky-smd-electrolytics-try-these-brute-force-removal-methods/ | Leaky SMD Electrolytics? Try These Brute Force Removal Methods | Dan Maloney | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"brute force",
"capacitor",
"desoldering",
"destructive",
"electrolytic",
"recapping",
"smd"
] | When you say “recapping” it conjures up an image of a dusty old chassis with point-to-point wiring with a bunch of dried-out old capacitors or dodgy-looking electrolytics that need replacement. But time marches on, and we’re now at the point where recapping just might mean removing SMD electrolytics from a densely packed PCB. What do you do then?
[This Does Not Compute]’s answer to that question is to
try a bunch of different techniques
and see what works best, and the results may surprise you. Removal of SMD electrolytic caps can be challenging; the big aluminum can sucks a lot of heat away, the leads are usually pretty far apart and partially obscured by the plastic base, and they’re usually stuffed in with a lot of other components, most of which you don’t want to bother. [TDNC] previously used a hot-air rework station and liberally applied Kapton tape and aluminum foil to direct the heat, but that’s tedious and time-consuming. Plus, electrolytics sometimes swell up when heated, expelling their corrosive contents on the PCB in the process.
As brutish as it sounds, the solution might just be as simple as ripping caps off with pliers. This seems extreme, and with agree that the risk of tearing off the pads is pretty high. But then again, both methods seemed to work pretty well, and on multiple boards too. There’s a catch, though — the pliers method works best on caps that have already leaked enough of their electrolyte to weaken the solder joints. Twisting healthier caps off a PCB is likely to end in misery. That’s where brutal method number two comes in: hacking the can off the base with a pair of flush cutters. Once the bulk of the cap is gone, getting the leads off the pad is a simple desoldering job; just don’t forget to clean any released schmoo off the board — and your cutters!
To be fair, [This Does Not Compute] never seems to have really warmed up to destructive removal, so he invested in a pair of hot tweezers for the job, which works really well. But perhaps you’re not sure that you should just reflexively replace old electrolytics on sight. If so,
you’re in pretty good company
. | 25 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698253",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T11:34:13",
"content": "hmm. seems that i cannot post comments from my phone since the new “update”, but. I stongly oppose his method. you should NEVER pull on the cap. just grab it with a pair of pliers and rotoate while PUSH... | 1,760,372,107.149208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/hot-wheel-car-becomes-1-64-scale-micro-rc-car-complete-with-camera/ | Hot Wheel Car Becomes 1/64 Scale Micro RC Car, Complete With Camera | Donald Papp | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"car",
"ESP32",
"ESP32-CAM",
"FPV",
"hot wheels",
"micro",
"rc"
] | If you enjoy watching skilled assembly of small mechanical systems with electronics to match, then make some time to watch [Max Imagination]
transform a Hot Wheels car into a 1/64th scale RC car complete with video FPV video feed
. To say the project took careful planning and assembly would be an understatement, and the results look great.
The sort of affordable electronics available to hobbyists today opens up all kinds of possibilities, but connecting up various integrated modules brings its own challenges. This is especially true when there are physical constraints such as fitting everything into an off-the-shelf 1/64 scale toy car.
There are a lot of interesting build details that [Max] showcases, such as rebuilding a tiny DC motor to have a longer shaft so that it can drive both wheels at once. We also liked the use of 0.2 mm thick nickel strips (intended for connecting cells in a battery pack) as compliant structural components.
There are actually two web servers being run on the car. One provides an interface for throttle and steering (here’s
the code it uses
), and the other takes care of the video feed with
ESP32-CAM
sending a motion jpeg stream. [Max]’s mobile phone is used to control the car, and a second device goes into an old phone-based VR headset to display the FPV video feed.
Circuit diagrams and code
are available for anyone wanting to perhaps make a similar project. We’ve seen
micro RC builds
of high quality before, but integrating an FPV camera kicks things up a notch. Want even more complex builds? All the rules change when weight reduction is a non-negotiable #1 priority. Check out
a micro RC plane that weighs under three grams
and get a few new ideas. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698576",
"author": "EGO111",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T21:42:58",
"content": "Excellent idea.Excellent build.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6698587",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-... | 1,760,372,106.890671 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/vectorscope-kicad-redrawing-project/ | Vectorscope KiCad Redrawing Project | Chris Lott | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"KiCAD",
"PCB design",
"schematics",
"vectorscope"
] | When I saw this year’s Supercon Vectorscope badge, I decided that I had to build one for myself. Since I couldn’t attend in-person, I immediately got the PCBs and parts on order. Noting that the GitHub repository only had the KiCad PCB file and not the associated schematics and project file, I assumed this was because everyone was in a rush during the days leading up to Supercon weekend. I later learned, however, that there really wasn’t a KiCad project — the original design was done in Circuit Maker and the PCB was converted into KiCad. I thought, “how hard can this be?” and decided to try my hand at completing the KiCad project.
Fortunately I didn’t have to start from scratch. The PCB schematics were provided, although only as image files. They are nicely laid out and fortunately don’t suffer the scourge of many schematics these days — “visual net lists” that are neither good schematics nor useful net lists. To the contrary,
these schematics
, while having a slightly unorthodox top to bottom flow, are an example of good schematic design.
Graphical Lines to PCB Traces
The first thing I took a look at was the features on the PCB file, since I was hoping to extract the net names from the traces. Unfortunately, when I looked at the traces, they were just graphical lines. I knew from previous digging on the KiCad user forums that going backwards from a PCB to a schematic is an unnatural workflow. But I was surprised that there in recent versions of KiCad (I am using v7) there is a feature to convert graphical lines into traces.
Part Pads Have Net Names
Example of Graphical PCB Trace
One non-obvious quirk to be aware of — this operation duplicates the selected the graphical lines before converting them into traces, resulting overlapping elements. This can be confusing, because the newly-created trace is presented by PCBNEW as being underneath the original graphical line, making it appear that the conversion failed. The solution is to immediately delete the selected items, and the converted tracks will remain. You can do this on an entire board at once by disabling everything except graphical items in the selection filter and just select an entire layer for conversion.
Part Footprints
When designing a PCB, the task of mapping the schematic symbols into their corresponding physical footprints can be tedious. Most modern CAD tools with their corresponding parts management schemes make this process easier than ever, but it can still be a headache when you are using parts not in the libraries. We’re going backwards in this design, so I wasn’t quite sure what problems might exist. But a quick glance at the PCB file shows that the parts on the board are really footprints. This seems promising, so let’s move on to making schematics.
Automatic Schematic Generation?
The usual design flow is from schematics to PCB, whether you’re using a CAD tool or doing everything by hand. Changes to a schematic are reflected on the PCB layout. Modern PCB CAD tools can update a PCB design automatically from the schematics, updating the net list and adding and/or removing parts as needed. These tools even take a stab at placing any new parts for you. Even if this is only a jumbled cluster of footprints, it’s easier than adding each part manually. But can you go the other direction?
There are also long-established processes for going the other direction, from PCB to the schematics, which have been around longer than computerized CAD tools. Perhaps the most common of these is called back annotation. Once the layout is substantially complete, the designer will re-sequence the reference designators on the board so that they appear in some order and are easy to find by people working on the PCB. We often skip this step for the kinds of small boards people make today, but if you’re making a 9U Eurocard design that is some 350 mm square, you really need to re-sequence the reference designators and back annotate the schematic.
Examples of Multiple Gates and Inputs
Another example of this backwards flow is gate swapping, so-named because it was very common in old designs using 74-series TTL logic chips. These chips have multiple gates per chip, single logic gates with multiple inputs, or both. Fortunately, CAD tools such as KiCad have provisions for these as well.
But we have the complete opposite of the normal “have a schematic and want to populate a new blank PCB” situation. Can I get KiCad to similarly populate a schematic from an existing PCB, no matter how ugly and disorganized it would be? Conceptually it doesn’t seem far fetched, given the existing KiCad capabilities. But in practice, the answer is no.
Make Schematics
Not unexpectedly, I needed to re-draw these schematics from scratch. Fortunately, this project doesn’t have a lot of parts and many of those parts are standard and found in KiCad or my own libraries. Equipped with the original documentation, I proceeded to draw the schematics in KiCad. Rather than making an exact duplicate of the existing schematics, I decided to rearrange the flow of the circuit into the more familiar left-to-right direction.
I started with just the main chips and components, ignoring connections and discrete components at first. Some of the parts weren’t in my libraries and had to be constructed in the KiCad symbol editor. I normally start with a large schematic sheet, realizing the page can always be resized later if needed ( I guessed A3, which turned out to be correct ). With all the chips on the page, you have to move things around until the visual flow on the page describes the actual logical flow of the design. Similar to placing components on a new PCB layout, there is no clear-cut process to place schematic symbols on a blank page. But here are some general concepts that I’ve learned over the years that I find helpful:
Take a step back from circuitry, and consider the inputs, outputs, and functionality of the overall design as if it were a black box.
Flow goes from left to right, inputs on left, outputs on right.
Connectors go on the sheet edges, or for large designs, put all connectors on page 1.
Group circuits together by function on the page, or for large designs, into hierarchical sheets.
Avoid signal-name-only hidden connections (those without a wire) when possible — try to arrange the parts so all pins can be connected by wires.
Use signal buses when applicable and when it helps the visual flow of the circuit.
There are many exceptions and contradictions within these guidelines. And the quality of the results can be subjective — give the same circuit, two different engineers could both prepare two different but good schematics.
Know Your Tools, Tweak Your Symbols
If you’ve ever sketched a circuit on paper, you usually make chips starting from an empty rectangle and then add signals where they are needed to make things flow. For many chips, like an 8-bit latch, the logical arrangement for your circuit matches up with the standard symbol diagrams provided by the manufacturer and/or your CAD tool libraries. But this is far from universal, especially when it comes to complex chips like microprocessors or FPGAs.
Pico Schematic Symbol Tweaking
Don’t be afraid to tweak the schematic symbols to match your needs if necessary (being sure to use a local project-specific copy of the symbol). Remember the multiple-gates-per-IC feature of your EDA tool, like a hex inverter or a quad comparator package. This can be used to break up large chips into smaller manageable chunks. This is often used to separate the power supply pins of large chips into a separate symbols. But you can be further subdivide the chip into smaller symbols as needed by the overall signal flow of your design.
But probably the most helpful tweak is to simply rearrange the location of pins on the symbol and its size to better match your circuit. Consider the schematic symbol of a Raspberry Pi Pico module, which is arranged in a familiar pattern by GPIO number. Following that is the same Pico module after being tweaked to fit into the redrawn Vectorscope schematics.
Wrapup
There were a few issues between the original schematics and the PCB layout, but those have been sorted out. Some of the part footprints on the PCB are not footprints after all. Instead, they appear as a bunch of independent pads. And some parts have a discrepancy between the PCB pattern and the parts purchased from the BOM.
Just a few of the nets on the original schematic have names, and the rest are just blank. In the schematics, I tried to pick reasonable net names for the nets. I think this will be helpful when I eventually make the connection between the schematics the PCB.
At this point, I’ve completed what I wanted to in the beginning — make a KiCad schematic for the Vectorscope project. The KiCad project is not 100% consistent, but I have dug into the few missing pieces and solving those issues is not going to be a huge effort. These issues are explained in the
readme
of the
project’s GitHub repository
. | 23 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698533",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T19:51:40",
"content": "Nicely written article“visual net lists” – not sure exactly what the author means by that, but what I find incredibly irritating is schematics where netlabels are used in a similar way to ‘global variables’ ... | 1,760,372,106.773931 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/watch-time-roll-by-on-this-strange-spiral-clock/ | Watch Time Roll By On This Strange, Spiral Clock | Donald Papp | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"clock",
"laser cut",
"spiral",
"wood"
] | [Build Some Stuff] created
an unusual spiral clock
that’s almost entirely made from laser-cut wood, even the curved and bendy parts.
The living hinge is one thing, but getting the spacing, gearing, and numbers right also takes work.
The clock works by using a stepper motor and gear to rotate the clock’s face, which consists of a large dial with a spiral structure. Upon this spiral ramp rolls a ball, whose position relative to the printed numbers indicates the time. Each number is an hour, so if the ball is halfway between six and seven, it’s 6:30. At the center of the spiral is a hole, which drops the ball back down to the twelve at the beginning of the spiral so the cycle can repeat.
The video (embedded below) demonstrates the design elements and construction of the clock in greater detail, and of particular interest is how the curved wall of the spiral structure consists of a big
living hinge
, a way to allow mostly rigid materials to flex far beyond what they are used to. Laser cutting is well-suited to creating living hinges, but it’s
a technique applicable to 3D printing
, as well.
Thanks to [Kelton] for the tip! | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698490",
"author": "J",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T17:11:42",
"content": "That’s one of the most fun clocks I’ve ever seen.Just for the love of god get rid of those laser cutting burn marks… Laser cutters are a great fabrication tool, but most of the time the result can do with some ... | 1,760,372,106.952466 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/jawncon-0x0-a-strong-start-with-a-bright-future/ | JawnCon 0x0: A Strong Start With A Bright Future | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"hacker con",
"InfoSec",
"JawnCon",
"philadelphia"
] | Last month, I had the pleasure witnessing a birth. No, not of a child. What I’m talking about is something far rarer, though arguably, just as loud and danger fraught — the birth of a new hacker convention.
The very first
JawnCon took place on October 19th and 20th
at Arcadia University, just outside of Philadelphia. If you’re in the Northeast US and suddenly find yourself surprised to learn that a hacker con managed to slip under your radar, don’t be. The organizers, who previously helped launch the
WOPR Summit back in 2019
, wisely decided to keep the scale of this first outing in check. Just a single track of talks, a chill out room, and 130 or like-minded individuals.
Although, even if they’d hatched a more ambitious plan, it’s hard to imagine they’d have had enough time to pull it off. Due to various circumstances, JawnCon had to come together at a breakneck pace, with less than 100 days separating the con’s inception and kickoff. That an event such as this could not only be organized so quickly, but go off without a hitch, is a testament to the incredible folks behind the scenes.
As for what a Jawn is…well, that might take a bit more explaining. It’s regional slang that’s perhaps best described as a universal noun in that it can be used to refer to basically anything or anyone. Think “smurf” or “da kine”. According to organizer Russell Handorf, the all-encompassing nature of the word describes not only his personal ethos but the spirit of the event. Rather than focusing too closely on any one aspect of hacking, JawnCon set out to explore a diverse array of tech topics from both the new and old schools. It would be an event where you could listen to a talk on payphone remote management, try your hand at lock picking, and learn about the latest in anti-drone technology, all under the same roof.
To that end, the team did an incredible job. Everyone I spoke to, young or old, newbie or vet, had a fantastic time. What’s more, as revealed in the Closing Remarks, the con actually managed to stay in the black — no mean feat for a first attempt. With a little luck, it seems like JawnCon is well on its way to becoming one of the Northeast’s can’t-miss hacker events.
School’s in Session
I’ll admit to being a bit skeptical of Arcadia University as a venue at first. It wouldn’t be the first time a hacker con took place on a university campus, and the results can sometimes be mixed. Unsurprisingly, the schools don’t want a bunch of rowdy nerds roaming around disrupting things, so there’s usually pretty strict limits on what you can do or where you can go. That tends to aggravate said rowdy nerds, who occasionally act out and cause mischief — ultimately, the whole thing turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves everyone unhappy.
Arcadia University, Commons Building at top left
But reflecting back on the event, you really couldn’t have asked for a better location. Not only is the Arcadia campus beautiful, but the Commons Building in which JawnCon was held ended up being particularly well-equipped for this sort of event.
The presentation room was huge, the chill out area was just an elevator ride away, and perhaps best of all, the building also contained a cafeteria that offered affordable food and drinks all day. You could literally spend the entire day in the Commons Building and have everything you needed.
From what I was able to gather, it sounds like the school was happy with how things went as well. Much of the credit is due to the JawnCon attendees, who were well behaved and kept their antics to the designated areas. The only complaint appeared to relate to the teletype that was operating in the hallway outside the chill area. In a particularly clever hack, it had been rigged to bang out a live-transcript of the talks being presented downstairs, which naturally caused it to make quite a racket during the first day of the event. Despite the regular application of high-grade motor oil, its rapid-fire machinations were loud enough to disturb students who were studying in the building, so it was voluntarily turned off on the second day.
All that being said, the best part of holding JawnCon at Arcadia University is that it came with a built-in audience. The organizers wisely offered up free tickets to anyone with a .edu email address, and some of the professors had been told to invite their students down to the Commons Building to check out what was going on. This lead to a fairly steady stream of younger attendees, many of which were eager to get involved. While I did overhear at least one student who seemed indignant to find himself surrounded by old computers and payphones, on the whole it was a fantastic ploy to bring some fresh blood into the community, and something JawnCon should be commended for.
Hackers At Play
The JawnCon chill room wasn’t just a hub for networking (both in the social and copper contexts), but also an exhibit hall of sorts. Much of the hardware was “official” in that it was referenced on the website ahead of time, but as you might expect from a hacker con, several attendees brought along whatever piece of gear has most recently been keeping them up into the wee hours.
Of particular note was the
Ferris WarDrive
, a gloriously overengineered wireless scanning rig built by [BusySignal]. Now in its third iteration, this portable rig boasts sixteen wireless interfaces split between a pair of PCI Express equipped ZIMABoard single-board computers (SBCs). It also includes an i7 Intel NUC, a Hak5 WiFi Coconut, a CradlePoint IBR200 cellular router, and naturally, a whole bunch of antennas. As you might imagine, it takes a lot of power to feed all the components of the Ferris WarDrive, but the automotive-style 12 V wiring looks more than up to the task.
Another highlight was the payphones on display from the
PhilTel project
. They were rigged up to create their own private telephone network, which attendees could explore in a way that’s not really practical in the real-world these days. Calls could be made to other phones dotted around JawnCon or to external numbers, and thanks to a link to
PhreakNet
, there were even special numbers you could call to hear music or the current weather conditions. For some, this exhibit would be the first time they’d ever used a payphone, but it wasn’t just a historical curiosity. PhilTel aims to collect and modify old payphones into free-to-use public VoIP phones, and distribute them to interested businesses and venues around Philadelphia as a public service.
Swapping Stories
Of course, it wouldn’t be a hacker con without some talks. JawnCon managed to fit 11 talks, not counting the closing and opening remarks, into two days. And since there was only the one stage, you never found yourself having to pick one talk over another.
Many of the the talks had a strong infosec leaning, with several of them addressing professional development within the security field. Others focused on more general software topics, such as
Linux Secure Boot with TPM and FDE
by David Collins and
High Availability in MySQL using Group Replication
from Shayan Patel.
But for my money, I thought the most fascinating talk of them all was
The Payphone You Have Dialed Has Been Disconnected — The State (and Revival) of Payphones in 2023
. Presented by Mike Dank and Naveen Albert, this talk detailed an effort to determine how frequently payphones across the United States are actually being utilized by way of their unsecured telemetry interfaces.
Example of telemetry data returned from a payphone
It turns out that if you call a modern payphone, you’ll often be connected to a modem that spits out a string of data. One of the fields it returns is how much money is currently in the coin box, so if you pull the telemetry every day and keep track of that value, you can actually see how many calls were placed on each phone. By automating this process and giving it a list of around 450 payphones, they were able to determine that 75% of them were still being used daily.
Jawn to the Future
The future isn’t guaranteed, and in the past we’ve seen small hacker cons come and go. But at the end of the two-day event, it was clear that there’s incredible potential for JawnCon going forward. Everyone, whether they were there as an attendee or working behind the scenes, had a blast and was eager for more. In a short time, a real sense of community had developed around the event — I’ve been to plenty of hacker cons, and it’s not often that paying ticket holders hang around to fold chairs and load up the trucks at the end.
Baring an unexpected global pandemic, there’s every indication that JawnCon will come back bigger and better for 2024. I certainly plan on being there, and if you’re in the Philly area, so should you. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698478",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T16:44:38",
"content": "Fantastic!Best of luck to the organizers. I hope they realize that there’s a deep and abiding message in the longevity of this event being directly related to the amount of civility (and good cheer) the... | 1,760,372,107.08581 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/stream-vinyl-to-your-sonos-without-the-financial-penalty/ | Stream Vinyl To Your Sonos Without The Financial Penalty | Jenny List | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"audio",
"raspberry pi",
"streaming",
"vinyl"
] | One of the unexpected success stories in the world of hi-fi over the past decade has been the resurgence of the vinyl LP as a musical format. What was once old hat is now cool again, but for freshy minted vinyl fans there’s a snag. Hi-fi itself has moved on from the analogue into the digital, so what can be done if your listening comes through a Sonos system. Sonos will sell you a box to do that of course, but it’s as overpriced as 2023-pressing vinyl. [Max Fischer] has a far better solution, in the form of
a Raspberry Pi loaded with open source software
.
At the vinyl end is a Behringer audio interface containing a pre-amp with the required RIAA response curve. This acts as the source for the DarkIce audio streamer and the IceCast2 media serer, all of which even with the cost of a Pi and the interface, is considerably less than the commercial device.
We’re guessing that a more humble interface coupled to an older RIAA pre-amp could cut the cost further, and we’d be hugely curious as to whether a simple mic pre-amp could be used alongside some DSP from the likes of Gnu Radio to give the RIAA response.
Either way, he’s made a handy device for any 21st-century vinyl fan. Meanwhile if you’re one of the streaming generation seduced by round plastic discs,
we’ve gone into some detail about their audiophile credentials in the past
. And if you have found yourself a turntable, of course
you’ll need to know how to set it up properly
. | 47 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698440",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T13:46:09",
"content": "Call me crazy, but it feels like those old vinyls captured more than just the sound waves that were in the air at that moment.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,107.239727 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/general-instruments-video-game-chip-rides-again/ | General Instruments Video Game Chip Rides Again | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"AY-3-8500",
"general instruments",
"pong"
] | Early video games like Pong were not computer-controlled. They used discrete logic to generate the TV signals. As you might expect, the market exploded when you could get all the logic on a chip. Many of those games used the General Instrument AY-3-8500-1 chip, and [Jeff Tranter]
shows us the chip
and the many different yet similar games it could play. You can check out the retro gameplay in the video below.
These were marvels of their day, although, by today’s standards, they are snoozers. All the games were variations on a theme. A ball moved and hit paddles, walls, or goals. A few available light gun games were rarely seen in the wild because they took extra components.
The datasheet shows how simple the device was. Two CMOS chips and a couple of transistors put you in business. [Jeff] built his own board using the device, which is, of course, no longer made, but still available on the surplus market. It is great to see how simple this chip makes it.
You may not remember General Instruments, but they started the PIC chip and still exist in some form as part of ARRIS, which was spun off from Motorola and later bought by another General Instrument spinoff CommScope. General Semiconductor is another part of the brand that still operates.
We’ve seen this pulled off before, both with
real chips
and emulated chips. If you want to see what
hardware goes into a Pong game and even simulate it
, we can help with that, too. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698410",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T09:32:08",
"content": "It drove me mad back in the day that if the paddle was moving too fast the ball would go “through” it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6698419",
... | 1,760,372,107.29674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/12/a-small-packing-antenna-for-2-metre-portable-work/ | A Small-Packing Antenna For 2 Metre Portable Work | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"2 metre",
"ham radio",
"portable antenna"
] | One of amateur radio’s many interests comes in portable operation, taking your radio to an out of the way place, usually a summit, and working the world using only what can be carried in. Often this means using the HF or shortwave bands, but the higher frequencies get a look-in as well. A smaller antenna is no less the challenge when it comes to designing one that can be carried though, and [Thomas Witherspoon] demonstrates this with
a foldable loop antenna for the 2 metre band
.
The antenna provides a reminder that the higher bands are nothing to be scared of in construction terms, it uses a BNC-to-4 mm socket adapter as its feedpoint, and makes the rectangular shape of the loop with pieces of fiberglass tube. The wire itself is flexible antenna wire, though we’re guessing almost any conductor could be used. The result is a basic but useful antenna that certainly packs down to a very small size, and we can see it would be a useful addition to any portable operator’s arsenal.
If you’re a 2 metre band user,
this certainly isn’t the first time we’ve visited lightweight antennas for this band
. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698393",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2023-11-13T07:29:32",
"content": "Yes any wire could be used, but knowing the propagation speed and thus the length gets tough",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6698398",
"au... | 1,760,372,107.351608 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/ham-radio-memes-in-the-1970s/ | Ham Radio Memes In The 1970s | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"SSTV"
] | If you have a fondness for old and unusual ham gear, [Saveitforparts] has a great video (see below) about a
Robot slow scan receiver
he found at a junk store. Slow scan or SSTV is a way to send pictures via low-bandwidth audio, such as you often find on the ham bands. The idea is you take a picture, send some squeaks and blips over the air, and in about 8 or 10 seconds, a single frame of video shows up at the receiver. Hams aren’t the only ones who used it. The Apollo missions used an SSTV system in some cases, too.
I’ve been a ham radio operator for a very long time. When I first heard about SSTV, I thought it sounded cool that you could be talking to someone and then show them a picture of your station or your dog or your kids. But when I looked into it, the reality was far different. In the pre-internet days, SSTV-equipped hams hung out on a handful of watering hole frequencies and basically just sent memes and selfies to each other. Everyone would take turns, but there wasn’t really any conversation.
This actually still goes on, but the hardware isn’t a big deal anymore. The Robot in the video had to decode the signal from audio and store the image somehow. On old gear — some of it homebrew — it was simply persistent phosphor that would eventually fade, but, of course, eventually, images were stored in some form of digital memory. These days, you are likely to use a PC soundcard to both send and receive the necessary audio.
But in the mid-1970s, the Robot, with its 6-inch screen and $295 price tag, was a marvel. It would rapidly become obsolete, though, as SSTV practitioners moved to more advanced formats that used color and had better performance.
Honestly, we were surprised the old machine worked as well as it did, handily decoding some prerecorded SSTV signals. Overall, it’s great to see this classic piece of gear again. The International Space Station
sometimes sends SSTV
. Of course, if you ever needed to send a picture over a noisy medium, you might want to
borrow the ham radio technique
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698235",
"author": "Taylor Hay",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T08:11:01",
"content": "Sounds like my experience so far with Mastodon, cool new tech, but just a few of us hanging out sharing memes. It’s the way it always is I’m afraid.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,372,107.402196 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/the-ai-pin-a-smart-body-camera-that-wants-to-compete-with-smartphones/ | The AI Pin: A Smart Body Camera That Wants To Compete With Smartphones | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"mobile device",
"projector",
"smartphone"
] | Seeking to shake up the smartphone market, Humane
introduced its ‘AI Pin’
, which at first glance looks like someone put a very stylish body camera on their chest. There’s no display, only the 13 MP camera and some other optics visible above what turns out to be a touch panel, which is its main gesture-based input method, while it’s affixed to one’s clothing using either a magnet on the other side of the fabric, a wireless powerbank or a clip.
Inside the unit
you find a Qualcomm octa-core processor with 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage, running a custom Android-based ‘Cosmos’ OS.
The AI Pin home screen, demonstrating why hand palms are poor projection surfaces. (Credit: Humane)
There is also a monochrome (teal) 720p laser projector built-in that provides something of a screen experience, albeit with the expectation that you use your hand (or presumably any other suitable surface) to render it visible. From the PR video it is quite clear that visibility of the projection is highly variable, with much of the text often not remotely legible, or only after some squinting. The hand-based gestures to control the UI (tilting to indicate a direction, touching thumb & index finger together to confirm) are somewhat of a novelty, though this may get tiresome after a day.
An article by [Ron Amadeo] over at Ars Technica
also takes a look
at the device, where the lack of an app ecosystem is pointed out, as well as the need for a mandatory internet connection (via T-Mobile). Presumably this always-on ‘feature’ is where the ‘AI’ part comes in, as the device has some voice assistant functionality, which seems to rely heavily on remote servers. As a result, this ends up being a quirky device with no third-party app support for a price tag of $700 + the $25/month for online service. Not to mention that people may look a bit odd at you walking around with a body camera-like thing on your chest that you keep rubbing and holding your hand in front of.
To be fair, it’s not often that we see something more quaint in this space come out than Google Glass, now many years ago. | 21 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698220",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T04:10:13",
"content": "Something to incorporate into a LEO badge.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6698227",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,107.465412 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/a-mysterious-6502-apple-2-simulator/ | A Mysterious 6502 Apple 2 Simulator | Julian Scheffers | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"Apple 2",
"emulation"
] | Nice, visual simulators of CPUs such as the 6502 are usually made much later and with more modern tooling than what they simulate. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if a simulator runs on the very hardware it’s simulating?
This is what [Tea Leaves]
stumbled upon
when he found a mysterious disk with only “APL6502.SIM” on it. [Tea Leaves] demonstrates the simulator with a basic 6502 assembly program, revealing an animated, beautiful Apple 2 simulator that actually runs on the Apple 2! The simulator shows all the major components of a 6502 and actually animates the complete data flow of an instruction.
But why is this mysterious? It’s mysterious because – a “hello” program aside – it’s the only thing on the disk! Not so much as a single clue as to where it came from. [Tea Leaves] finds out where it comes from, including incorrectly copied disk images and a revelation at the end.
Video after the break. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698204",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T00:49:22",
"content": "I live in Minnesnowta, and had not heard of the MECC.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6698215",
"author": "arge... | 1,760,372,107.516872 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/neopixels-try-liquid-nitrogen-to-color-shift-your-leds-instead/ | Neopixels? Try Liquid Nitrogen To Color Shift Your LEDs Instead | Dan Maloney | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"band gap",
"conduction",
"cryogenic",
"electrons",
"led",
"liquid nitrogen",
"photon",
"quantum",
"valence"
] | If you’re like us, you’ve never spent a second thinking about what happens when you dunk an ordinary LED into liquid nitrogen. That’s too bad because as it turns out,
the results are pretty interesting
and actually give us a little bit of a look at the quantum world.
The LED fun that [Sebastian] over at Baltic Lab demonstrates in the video below starts with a bright yellow LED and a beaker full of liquid nitrogen. Lowering the powered LED into the nitrogen changes the color of the light from yellow to green, an effect that reverses as the LED is withdrawn and starts to warm up again. There’s no apparent damage to the LED either, although we suppose that repeated thermal cycles might be detrimental at some point. The color change is quite rapid, and seems to also result in a general increase in the LED’s intensity, although that could be an optical illusion; our eyes are most sensitive in the greenish wavelengths, after all.
So why does this happen? [Sebastian] goes into some detail about that, and this is where quantum physics comes into it. The color of an LED is a property of the bandgap of the semiconductor material. Bandgap is just the difference in energy between electrons in the valence band (the energy levels electrons end up at when excited) and the conduction band (the energy levels they start at.) There’s no bandgap in conductive materials — the two bands overlap — while insulators have a huge bandgap and semiconductors have a narrow gap. Bandgap is also dependent on temperature; it increases with decreasing temperature, with different amounts for different semiconductors, but not observably so over normal temperature ranges. But liquid nitrogen is cold enough for the shift to be dramatically visible.
We’d love to see the color shift associated with other cryogens, or see what happens with a blue LED. Want to try this but don’t have any liquid nitrogen?
Make some yourself
! | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698167",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T21:46:06",
"content": "Decades ago I read an article (by Lancaster? Mims?) Where they dunked red LEDs in LN2. They had poured the LN2 into a foam cup. The brightness of the LED increased dramatica... | 1,760,372,107.574875 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/pimp-the-potentiometer/ | Pimp The Potentiometer | Al Williams | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"knob",
"ring light"
] | Sometimes, a hack isn’t really about the technology but about the logistics. If we asked you to light up an LED using an Arduino, there’s a good chance you’d know exactly how to do that. How about a bunch of LEDs? Simple. Now turn on LEDs proportional to an input voltage. A little harder, but nothing that you probably haven’t done a million times. Finally, arrange the LEDs in an attractive circle around a potentiometer. Wait, how are you going to do that? [Upir] shows us a
ready-made ring light
for just this purpose and you can see the beautiful thing in the video below.
We made the LED things sound slightly easier than it is. The ring light has 31 LEDs but only 12 pins, so there is some multiplexing going on. The modules come in pairs for about $20, so not a throwaway part, but they will really dress up anything that needs a knob of any kind.
Naturally, it doesn’t matter what you use to drive the LEDs. You could track a pot or a rotary encoder. Or you could show microphone levels or something else. After all, it is just a bunch of LEDs. For that matter, they’d probably make a good pair of robot eyes. Let us know what you want to use them for in the comments.
If your significant other is a little geeky, you might want
a different kind of ring light
. We couldn’t help but wish the LEDs on the ring were
addressable
. That would open up a world of interesting possibilities while reducing the pin count, too. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698136",
"author": "Lee Hart",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T18:11:48",
"content": "It looks really nice! But there’s an easier way to do it. 40-50 years ago, I had a stereo amp that did it. The knob had a clear plastic skirt, painted black on the back but with a varying-width slot in i... | 1,760,372,107.82592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/supercon-and-soylent-green/ | Supercon And Soylent Green | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"2023 Hackaday Superconference",
"newsletter"
] | The 2023 Hackaday Supercon is all done and dusted, and we’re still catching up on our sleep. I couldn’t ask
everyone
, but a great time was had by everyone I talked to. It’s honestly a very special crowd that shows up in Pasadena every November, and it’s really the attendees who make it what it is. We just provide the platform to watch you shine. Thank you all!
It all started out on Friday with an open day of chilling out and badge experimentation. Well, chill for those of you who didn’t have a bug in their badge code, anyway. But thanks to some very keen observation and fantastic bug reports by attendees, Al and I figured out what we’d done and pushed a fix out to all 300 of the badges that were given out on the first day. And thanks to the remaining 200 folks who walked in the next day, who fixed their own badges at Tom’s Flashing Station.
From then on, it was one great talk after another, punctuated by badge hacks and all the other crazy stuff that people brought along with them to show off. For me, one of the highlights was on Sunday morning, as the Lightning Talks gave people who were there a chance to get up and talk about whatever for seven minutes. And subjects ranged from a mad explosive propane balloon party, to Scotty Allen’s experience with a bad concussion and how he recovered, to a deep dive into the world of LED strands and soft sculptures from our go-to guru of blinkiness, Debra [Geek Mom] Ansell.
Supercon first-timer Katie [Smalls] Connell gave a phenomenal talk about her wearable LED art
things
,
Spritelights
. These are far from simple art pieces, being a combination of medical adhesive, home-mixed Galinstan – a metal alloy that stays flexible at human body temperature, and soon even flexible printed batteries. That this whole project hit us without warning from out of the audience just made it more impressive.
And these were just the folks who stepped up on stage. The true story of Supercon also belongs to all the smaller conversations and personal demos taking place in the alley or by the coffee stand. Who knows how many great ideas were hatched, or at least seeds planted?
So as always, thank you all for coming and bringing your passions along with. Just like Soylent Green, Supercon is made of people, and it wouldn’t be half as yummy without you. See you all next year. And if you’re thinking of joining us, get your tickets early and/or submit a talk proposal when the time comes around. You won’t meet a more warm and welcoming bunch of nerds anywhere.
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
! | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698121",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T15:34:09",
"content": "I’m on the other side of the nordic hemisphere with no chance in the near future to participate directly to the Supercon. Will it be difficult to create a virtual realtime presence to the next ... | 1,760,372,107.951349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/nvidia-trains-custom-ai-to-assist-chip-designers/ | NVIDIA Trains Custom AI To Assist Chip Designers | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"AI assistant",
"ChipNeMo",
"eda",
"LLM",
"NVIDIA"
] | AI is big news lately, but as with all new technology moves, it’s important to pierce through the hype. Recent news about NVIDIA creating a custom large language model (LLM) called ChipNeMo to assist in chip design is tailor-made for breathless hyperbole, so it’s refreshing to read
exactly how such a thing is genuinely useful
.
ChipNeMo is trained on the highly specific domain of semiconductor design via internal code repositories, documentation, and more. The result is a vast 43-billion parameter LLM running on a single A100 GPU that actually plays no direct role in designing chips, but focuses instead on making designers’ jobs easier.
For example, it turns out that senior designers spend a lot of time answering questions from junior designers. If a junior designer can ask ChipNeMo a question like “what does signal
x
from memory unit
y
do?” and that saves a senior designer’s time, then NVIDIA says the tool is already worth it. In addition, it turns out another big time sink for designers is dealing with bugs. Bugs are extensively documented in a variety of ways, and designers spend a lot of time reading documentation just to grasp the basics of a particular bug. Acting as a smart interface to such narrowly-focused repositories is something a tool like ChipNeMo excels at, because it can provide not just summaries but also concrete references and sources. Saving developer time in this way is a clear and easy win.
It’s an internal tool and part research project, but it’s easy to see the benefits ChipNeMo can bring. Using LLMs trained on internal information for internal use is something organizations have experimented with (for example,
Mozilla did so, while explaining how to do it for yourself
) but it’s interesting to see a clear roadmap to assisting developers in concrete ways. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698097",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T12:58:50",
"content": "Can it design a 555 ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6698358",
"author": "A Curious Dog",
"timestamp": "2023-11-12T23:58:12",
... | 1,760,372,107.765392 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/11/roll-your-own-python-debugger/ | Roll Your Own Python Debugger | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"debugger",
"python"
] | Debugging might be the one thing that separates “modern” programming from “classic” programming. If you are on an old enough computer — or maybe one that has limited tools like some microcontrollers — debugging is largely an intellectual exercise. Try a program, observe its behavior, and then try again. You can liberally sprinkle print statements around if you have an output device or turn on LEDs or digital outputs if you don’t. But with a debugger, you can get a bird’s-eye view of your program’s data and execution flow.
For some languages, writing a debugger can be hard — you usually use at least some system facility to get started. But as [mostlynerdness] shows, Python’s interpreter wants to help you create your own debugger, and you can
follow along to see how it’s done
. This is accessible because Python has a built-in debugging core that you can use and extend. Well, regular Python, that is. MicroPython has some low-level support, and while we’ve seen
attempts to add more
, we haven’t tried it.
Of course, you may never need to build your own debugger — most of the IDEs have already done this for you, and some of the code is, in fact, lifted from an open code base and simplified. However, understanding how the debugging plumbing works may give you a leg up if you need to create custom logic to trap an error that would be difficult to find with a generic debugger. Plus, it is just darn interesting.
Like many Python things, there are some version sensitivities. The post is in four parts, with the last two dealing with newer API changes.
We can’t promise that Python can
debug your hardware
, though. We always thought the C preprocessor was subject to abuse, but it turns out that
Python has the same problem
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698100",
"author": "Jürgen Key",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T13:14:56",
"content": "Funnily enough – I did something very similar to a different scripting language a while ago: Beanshell is a scripting dialect for java with the drawback of not being debuggable – well, until I came alo... | 1,760,372,108.04817 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/putting-3d-printed-screw-threads-to-the-test/ | Putting 3D Printed Screw Threads To The Test | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"FDM",
"screw thread"
] | One of the challenges with 3D printing is seeing how far designs can be pushed before they break. This includes aspects like flexible hinges and structural components, but also smaller details such as screw threads. Often metal inserts with threads are added to FDM 3D prints by melting them into the plastic, but might 3D printed threads be sufficient for many cases? This is a question which [Adam Harig] sought to investigate
in a recent video
while working on parts that would connect to a rather expensive camera.
Trusting expensive camera gear to 3D printed threads… (Credit: Adam Harig)
Rather than risking the camera, a few stand-in cubes printed in PLA+ (AnkerMake brand) were used, with these and their internal thread being exposed to destructive testing. For the measuring equipment only a luggage/fishing scale was used. The difference between the test parts was the amount of infill, ranging from 10 to 100% infill, with 0.2 mm layer height. After this the test involved pulling on the metal hook screwed into the plastic test item with the scale, up to the point of failure or the human element giving up.
The results are rather interesting, with the 100% infill version scoring better than than the 50% infill version (the next step down), with [Adam] giving up on trying to pull the test unit apart and with the scale maxed out. This gave him enough confidence to use this design to lift his entire camera off the table. What’s perhaps most interesting here is that the way the test items were printed, the layers experienced a peeling force, which as the final clips in the video show seemed to often result in the bottom layers giving away, which was the part not being held together by the metal screw inside the item. What the effect of dynamic loads are is something that should possibly also be investigated, but it does show that FDM printing screw threads is perhaps not that silly.
(Thanks to [Pidog] for the tip) | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698054",
"author": "easy",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T08:23:39",
"content": "Not going to click the video. Any chance we can get a recap of the results?Did he try printing holes and let the screw self tap the threads because that’s what I found works best?",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,108.181017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/radioactive-water-was-once-a-horrifying-health-fad/ | Radioactive Water Was Once A (Horrifying) Health Fad | Donald Papp | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"1920s",
"1930s",
"Curie",
"medicine",
"quackery",
"radiation",
"radioactivity",
"radithor",
"radium",
"radium water",
"snake oil"
] | Take a little time to watch
the history of Radithor
, a presentation by [Adam Blumenberg] into a quack medicine that was exactly what it said on the label: distilled water containing around 2 micrograms of radium in each bottle (yes, that’s a lot.) It’s fascinatingly well-researched, and goes into the technology and societal environment surrounding such a product, which helped play a starring role in the eventual Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. You can watch the whole presentation in the video, embedded below the break.
If you happen to come across a bottle, perhaps in an antique shop, maybe don’t buy it.
Radium was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, and despite the deeply saddening case of the Radium Girls (part of humanity’s
history with radiation
) being settled unhappily in 1928, it took the horrifying death of Eben M. Byers — a wealthy and famous golfer — in 1932 for radium’s dangers to take center stage.
Radium is actually a very interesting substance, best admired from outside of the body. If ingested, due to its chemical structure the human body treats it like calcium and dutifully deposits it into bones. The body then proceeds to have a bad time.
Eben Byers had been drinking Radithor for years before he ultimately died of radium poisoning. At the time of his death, the wealthy Eben Byers was estimated to have consumed some 1,400 bottles. In the hospital near the end of his life, one record states that the very air he exhaled was found to be radioactive. His jaw was literally falling apart. Great holes were in his very bones, and his end was sad indeed. It may be interesting to note that Radithor was explicitly advertised as harmless, and was in fact prescribed to Byers by a physician.
A long-exposure fluoroscope image showing that another of Bailey’s products — a sort of male enhancement jock strap — is still radioactive over 100 years later.
What kind of person did it take to capitalize on peoples’ ignorance in such a selfish way? A man like William Bailey, the person behind Radithor and quite a few other quack remedies. There’s no shortage of such people in our world, but history buffs are in luck here because [Adam], as usual, really went the extra mile in learning about the man. Here’s a link to
the point in the video where [Adam] talks about William Bailey
, and shares all kinds of information that he dug up — even getting his records from Harvard — which paints a picture of a dropout conman. His first foray into sham medicines was a male enhancement that contained strychnine, and from there he got into radium products.
Considering he was such a con man, it’s mildly shocking that his products
actually
contained radium. Although, that was almost certainly a calculated act. The FDA looked into things when people were getting sick, but at the time, all that was really required was that a product be truthful about what it contained. Radithor was certainly so, and that was that. For a time, anyway. After Eben’s death Radithor was eventually shut down, and the incident helped lead to increased awareness of the need for consumer protection laws, which eventually resulted in the passing of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938.
Find yourself wanting more? Check out the
Toxic History!
channel for more interesting-slash-horrifying content. | 25 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698025",
"author": "Rick Bowles",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T03:30:46",
"content": "Fascinating article",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6698028",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T04:32:15",
"content": "... | 1,760,372,108.11415 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/wind-tunnel-uses-the-last-straw/ | Wind Tunnel Uses The Last Straw | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"laminar flow",
"wind tunnel"
] | If you watch the movies, there isn’t much to a wind tunnel. Just a fan and a tunnel, right? The truth is there’s a lot more to it than that, and [ejs13] shows you how you can
make a small tunnel
with some basic supplies. One of the requirements for a useful tunnel is to have laminar flow — that is, flow in uniform layers with little, if any, mixing. This tunnel achieves laminar flow using an array of soda straws to direct the flow. In fact, there are 150 straws in total. You can see a short clip of the wind tunnel in action below.
The rest of the parts are easy, too. A computer fan provides wind, and there’s a little bit of wood and acrylic. You’ll notice in the video that you can easily see the airflow. That’s thanks to a light source, some water, and a bit of dry ice.
We imagine you can scale this design up with bigger fans and, of course, more straws. The acrylic is to provide a window so you can see inside. Glass would probably work, too. Overall, this would make a great class project, along with creating some wings or small models of planes or cars.
We’ve seen similar
laminar flow
setups but not using soda straws. Just what you need to
test out that paper airplane
design you’ve had in your head. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698015",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T01:48:31",
"content": "I think that wing is stalling.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6698013",
"author": "Patrick Ingle",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,107.999315 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/solder-two-boards-at-once-with-this-dual-reflow-plate/ | Solder Two Boards At Once With This Dual Reflow Plate | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"heating element",
"pid",
"PTC",
"reflow",
"smd",
"solder",
"solder paste",
"thermistor"
] | Homebrew reflow projects generally follow a pretty simple formula: find a thrift shop toaster oven or hot plate, add a microcontroller and a means to turn the heating element on and off, and close the loop with a thermistor. Add a little code and you’re melting solder paste. Sometimes, though, a ground-up design works better, like
this scalable reflow plate
with all the bells and whistles.
Now, we don’t mean to hate on the many great reflow projects we’ve seen, of course. But [Michael Benn]’s build is pretty slick. The business end uses 400-watt positive temperature coefficient (PTC) heating elements from Amazon controlled by solid-state relays, although we have to note that we couldn’t find the equivalent parts on the Amazon US site, so that might be a problem. [Michael] also included mechanical temperature cutoffs for each plate, an essential safety feature in case of thermal runaway. The plates are mounted at the top of a 3D-printed case, which also has an angled enclosure for a two-color OLED display and a rotary encoder.
The software runs on an ESP32 and supports multiple temperature profiles for different solder pastes. The software also supports different profiles on the two plates, and even allows for physical expansion to a maximum of four heating plates, or even just a single plate if that’s what you need. The video below shows it going through its paces along with the final results. There’s also
a video showing the internals
if that’s more your style
We appreciate the fit and finish here, as well as the attention to safety. Can’t find those heating elements for your build? You might have to
lose your appetite for waffles
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6698004",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2023-11-11T00:11:56",
"content": "That looks like a really neat build and comes in at a nice price too.If you want the PTC heater plate from amazon US, it’s there, under a different brand name, searching using the product title... | 1,760,372,108.305886 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/openmv-promises-flyby-imaging-of-components-for-pick-and-place-project/ | OpenMV Promises “Flyby” Imaging Of Components For Pick And Place Project | Donald Papp | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"global shutter",
"OpenMV",
"pick and place"
] | [iforce2d] has an interesting video exploring
whether the OpenMV H7 board is viable as a flyby camera for pick and place
, able to quickly snap a shot of a moving part instead of requiring the part to be held still in front of the camera. The answer seems to be yes!
The OpenMV camera module does capture, blob detection, LCD output, and more.
The H7 is
OpenMV
‘s most recent device, and it supports a variety of useful add-ons such as a global shutter camera sensor, which [iforce2d] is using here. OpenMV has some absolutely fantastic hardware, and is able to snap the image, do blob detection (and other image processing), display on a small LCD, and send all the relevant data over the UART as well as accept commands on what to look for, all in one neat package.
It used to be that global shutter cameras were pretty specialized pieces of equipment, but they’re much more common now. There’s even a
Raspberry Pi global shutter camera
module, and it’s just so much nicer for machine vision applications.
Watch the test setup as [iforce2d] demonstrates and explains an early proof of concept. The metal fixture on the motor swings over the camera’s lens with a ring light for even illumination, and despite the moving object, the H7 gets an awfully nice image. Check it out in the video, embedded below. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697935",
"author": "Jose Rodriguez",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T19:50:55",
"content": "They are sold out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6697946",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T20:33:41",
"... | 1,760,372,108.355278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/hands-on-with-boondock-echo/ | Hands On With Boondock Echo | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks",
"Reviews"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"Audio Kit",
"baofeng",
"codec",
"ESP32",
"ham",
"public safety",
"repeater",
"scanner",
"store-and-forward"
] | Perhaps no words fill me with more dread than, “I hear there’s something going around.” In my experience, you hear this when some nasty bug has worked its way into the community and people start getting whatever it is. I’m always on my guard when I hear about something like this, especially when it’s something really unpleasant like norovirus. Forewarned is forearmed, after all.
Since I work from home and rarely get out, one of the principal ways I keep apprised of what’s going on with public health in my community is by listening to my scanner radio. I have the local fire rescue frequencies programmed in, and if “there’s something going around,” I usually find out about it there first; after a half-dozen or so calls for people complaining of nausea and vomiting, you get the idea it’s best to hunker down for a while.
I manage to stay reasonably well-informed in this way, but it’s not like I can listen to my scanner every minute of the day. That’s why I was really excited when my friend Mark Hughes started a project he called
Boondock Echo
, which aims to change the two-way radio communications user experience by enabling internet-backed recording and playback. It sounded like the perfect system for me — something that would let my scanner work for me, instead of the other way around. And so when Mark asked me to participate in the beta test, I jumped at the chance.
Hardware Design
If Boondock Echo sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve written about it a few times already. The project was entered in the
2022 Hackaday Prize
, and actually ended up
winning the 4th place award
that year. There’s also
a Hackaday.io project
, and as a personal point of pride, Mark and Kaushlesh Chandel, now the firmware architect on the project, started their collaboration after meeting at
a Hack Chat
back in 2021. We get results!
One of these things is not like the other. There are different hardware codecs under the RF shield on what appear to be identical ESP32-A1S modules.
The Boondock Echo beta test units I have are based on an AI-Thinker ESP32 Audio Kit, a commercially available dev board that’s specialized for digital audio applications. It wasn’t the team’s first choice for a platform, not by a long shot, and the path to it is an object lesson in the often harsh realities of product design. The original design called for the same audio module as the full AI-Thinker dev board, the ESP32-A1S. They designed a nice PCB around it with all the interface electronics needed to support a Baofeng handy talkie along with a good-quality speaker, and ordered up a bunch of the ESP modules.
However, they found that despite identical part numbers, FCC ID numbers, and external arrangements, not all the modules they had ordered for the first run worked as planned. It was only when they took the RF shielding off the modules that they discovered the reason: significant differences in board layout and components used, particularly in the area of the ES8388 audio codec.
From the sound of it, sorting all this out was a huge time-sink for the team. With no way to tell from the outside whether a module would work in their design, they eventually had to cut their losses and go with the pre-built Audio Kit board with a small, custom-built “sidekick” board that connects to the Baofeng. It’s a sensible approach, especially given the circumstances, and not only does it allow them to actually ship working units, but it also gives them a chance to move to another, more capable platform later.
They Don’t Call It “Easyware”
From the outset, let me make it clear that I suspect I’ve been anything but the typical beta tester, at least from the team’s point of view. Boondock Echo was designed primarily to retransmit the audio it receives; it’s right in the name, after all. Mark’s original vision for Boondock Echo was based on his experience with California wildfires and the spotty radio communications that often interrupted the timely flow of news and evacuation orders But my immediate interest in Boondock Echo is for recording public safety radio calls from my scanner. So, rather than just plugging into the Baofeng handy talkie they sent along with my test unit, I had to go rogue and try my own thing. Sometimes you just have to break things.
Two versions of the Boondock Echo. The production version has a nicer front panel with labels for the controls.
Under the hood. The ESP32 Audio Kit dev board is on the left, with the custom audio sidekick board attached on the right.
Boondock Echo teamed up with a Baofeng, which isn’t the way I’ve been testing — yet.
And break things I did. Try as we might, the first Boondock Echo I got just wouldn’t work. We tried everything — punching holes in my firewall, disabling my Pi-Hole ad blocker, and even setting up a hotspot on my phone to bypass my home WiFi. That last attempt actually worked, meaning that the was something specific about my network that was making it impossible for the device to register with the Boondock Echo server. This resulted in some very long conference calls with Mark, KC, and hardware architect Jesse Robinson, and kudos to them for trying everything to get me online. But they simply had to go back to the drawing board.
Things went much better on the second attempt. They sent me a new unit with updated firmware running on essentially the same hardware, with an updated and much-improved enclosure. I was able to get this device online with very little effort; all that was required was editing a config file on the included SD card with my WiFi credentials and rebooting. However, audio from my scanner — a Bearcat BCD996P2 — was not being recorded. Again, the team was very professional about it, getting on a conference call with me and later continuing the discussion over a Discord chat. We eventually figured out that the line-out jack on my scanner just wasn’t putting out as much signal as the Baofeng external speaker jack does. KC went off and changed the firmware to increase the dynamic range of the audio input, and between that change and a little bit of adjustment of the attenuator on the side-kick board, I was finally recording audio.
My Experience
At least in my case, once the Boondock Echo is online, there’s not much need to interact with it. That doesn’t mean you can’t, of course — there are buttons on the front panel that let you control the volume of the internal speaker, scroll back and forth between recorded sound clips, and even a push-to-talk button that will record a clip through the front panel mic for transmission on the Baofeng, if you’re suitably licensed to do so. There are also some LEDs that tell you the current status of the device. All these are thoughtful features, but in practice, I found that all the real action is in the Boondock Echo web interface.
To be clear, the Boondock Echo application isn’t running on the ESP32 built into the device. Rather, it’s hosted on AWS, for security and scalability in the future. The ESP32 in the device takes care of all the local functions, like digitizing the audio, running the local interface, and playing back audio clips locally. I find the design of the web app pretty good; it’s functional without a lot of flash or fluff, but still good-looking and intuitive. The main page has a list of audio clips that have been recorded by your device — or devices; the idea of a “dock pack” of multiple Boondock Echo devices is supported, for capturing audio from multiple sources. Each entry has an embedded player to let you listen to the clip on your PC or phone, along with buttons that send the clip back to the Boondock Echo device for playback over the internal speaker, or for retransmission over the attached transceiver. Again, a proper license is required to transmit.
One of the neatest features of Boondock Echo, and the one that I was most interested in testing, is online transcription of recorded clips. Clips are sent to
OpenAI’s Whisper API
for transcription, and all things considered, the results are pretty good. There are obviously limits, of course; it doesn’t seem like Whisper’s training model includes such catchy phrases as “patient contact green,” which is used around here when an arriving unit encounters a patient who isn’t in any immediate danger. Transcription of specialist speech like this is spotty, with results like “face your contact green,” or “Trojan 41” for “Engine 41.” I’ve also noticed that when in doubt, Whisper seems to skew toward the very polite, and even a bit amorous; there are plenty of “Thank very much” and “Have a great day” transcripts, which I’m reasonably sure isn’t what was said, and the occasional “I love you” sprinkled in, especially on channels where users tend to talk way too loud.
That brings up a good point, and one that there’s probably not much the Boondock Echo team can do much about right now. The quality of audio in public service radio can be all over the place, ranging from barely audible to over-driven and distorted. Certain dispatchers are soft-spoken, others louder and more confident on the air, while firefighters and paramedics often get into situations where they can’t help but get a bit excited. There are also what I call “incidental radio operators,” such as the nurses who talk to paramedic units in the field and take reports on the radio. These people are medical professionals without much radio training, and they all tend to “swallow the mic,” resulting in severe distortion.
The team hopes to implement some DSP algorithms to clean up audio before it goes off to Whisper, but that may have to wait until they make some hardware changes to the Boondock Echo. That’ll be a huge benefit to one of its most useful features: keyword monitoring. Users can set up monitors that scan transcripts for specific keywords and then perform an action. In my case, I have monitors set up for the names of roads my family and friends live on; if there’s an ambulance or fire call for my parents’ address, I want to know about it instantly. At this time, notification when a keyword matches is limited to an email, but future actions will include SMS texts and even IFTTT, so you can do pretty much anything you can imagine. It all depends on the accuracy of the transcription, though, since the match with the keyword needs to be exact. It might be a good idea to implement the
Soundex algorithm
here, or at least make it an option.
Hiccups aside, I’ve been very pleased with how my Boondock Echo has performed, especially considering that it wasn’t built to support my specific use cases. I’m still very early in the process of integrating it into my workflow, but I can see a lot of potential uses for it. I can imagine using this as the basis of a local information network, for people who don’t want to sit in front of a scanner all day listening to all the routine stuff, but really want to know when “the big one” hits. I’m also keen to try setting up a “store and forward” simplex repeater for ham radio experiments; a Boondock Echo operating in offline mode would make this simple to set up.
Hats off to the whole Boondock Echo team for going from idea to working project in such a short time, and thanks for inviting me along for the ride. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697912",
"author": "Mark J Hughes",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T18:29:10",
"content": "Thanks for a wonderful article Dan! KC, Jesse, Suraj, Nandini and I really appreciate it! Hey — would it be okay if we ask the hackaday crowd to sign up athttps://www.crowdsupply.com/boondock-tech... | 1,760,372,108.420332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/hackaday-podcast-243-supercon-super-printing-and-super-gyros/ | Hackaday Podcast 243: Supercon, Super Printing, And Super Gyros | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | With solder fumes from Supercon still in the air, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Al Williams met to compare notes about the conference talks, badge hacking, and more. Tom Nardi dropped by, too.
Did you miss Supercon? It isn’t quite the whole experience, but most of the talks are on our YouTube channel, with more coming in the weeks ahead. Check out the
live tab
for most of the ones up now. You can even watch
the badge hacking celebration
. We’ll be writing up more in the following weeks.
Al nailed What’s That Sound, as did many others, except Elliot. [Jacx] gets a T-shirt, and you get a chance to play again next week.
The hacks this week range from a pair of posts pertaining to poop — multi-color 3D printer poop, that is. We wondered if you could print rainbow filament instead of a purge tower. The Raspberry Pi 5 draws a lot of excess power when in standby. Turns out, thanks to the Internet, the easy fix for that is already in. Other hacks range from EMI test gear to portable antennas with excursions into AI, biomedical sensors, and retrocomputing.
In the Can’t Miss category, we discussed Maya Posch’s post, which could just as easily be titled: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about CAT Cable (But Were Afraid to Ask). Last, but not least, you’ll hear about Lewin Day’s round up of exotic gyroscope technology, including some very cool laser pictures.
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!
Download for listening or for a very long ringtone
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 243 Show Notes:
News:
2023 Hackaday Superconference
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [Jacx] who was one of many who submitted the correct answer: a self-inking date stamp. Be sure to listen next week for a new sound and a new chance to win.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Reducing Poop On Multicolor Prints
Lessons In Printer Poop Recycling
3D Print Your Own Multi-Color Filament
Reduce The Pi 5’s Power Consumption At A Stroke
Homebrew TEM Cell Lets You EMC Test Your Own Devices
Smart Ring Measures Blood Pressure
Most AI Content Is Trash, Just Like Everything Else
Pocketable Yagi Antenna Really Shoots For Distance
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
This OSHW Trackball Is Ready To Be Customized
Need A Low-Mass Antenna In Space? Just Blow It Up!
“Cheap Yellow Display” Builds Community Through Hardware
The Many Ways To Play Colossal Cave Adventure After Nearly Half A Century
Al’s Picks:
Tiny Forth Could Be The Smallest
An Intel 8008 On A Single-Board Computer
Machine Teaches Morse Code
Can’t-Miss Articles:
All About Cats, And What Ethernet Classifications Mean Beyond ‘Bigger Number Better’
GitHub – openspeedtest
Fancy Gyroscopes Are Key To Radio-Free Navigation | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,108.473873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/synthesizing-360-degree-views-from-single-source-images/ | Synthesizing 360-degree Views From Single Source Images | Donald Papp | [
"Machine Learning",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"360 view",
"3d model",
"nerf",
"neural radiance fields",
"still image"
] | ZeroNVS
is one of those research projects that is rather more impressive than it may look at first glance. On one hand, the 3D reconstructions — we urge you to click that first link to see them — look a bit grainy and imperfect. But on the other hand, it was reconstructed using a
single
still image as an input.
Most results look great, but some — like this bike visible through a park bench — come out a bit strange. A valiant effort for a single-image input, all things considered.
How is this done? It’s
NeRFs (neural radiance fields)
which leverages machine learning, but with yet another new twist. Existing methods mainly focus on single objects and masked backgrounds, but a new approach makes this method applicable to a variety of complex, in-the-wild images without the need to train new models.
There are a ton of sample outputs on
the project summary page
that are worth a browse if you find this sort of thing at all interesting. Some of the 360 degree reconstructions look rough, some are impressive, and some are a bit amusing. For example indoor shots tend to reconstruct rooms that look good, but lack doorways.
There is
a research paper
for those seeking additional details and a
GitHub repository
for the code, but the implementation requires some significant hardware. | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697867",
"author": "spiritplumber",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T16:40:55",
"content": "Awesome, looks like the braindance scenes from CP2077",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6697940",
"author": "adobeflashhater again",
... | 1,760,372,108.532625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-security-find-my-keylogger-zephyr-and-active-exploitation/ | This Week In Security: Find My Keylogger, Zephyr, And Active Exploitation | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"airtags",
"Find My",
"Looney Toonables",
"n-day"
] | Keyloggers. Such a simple concept — you secretly record all the characters typed on a keyboard, and sort through it later for interesting data. That keyboard sniffer could be done in software, but a really sneaky approach is to implement the keylogger in hardware. Hardware keyloggers present a unique problem. How do you get the data back to whoever’s listening? One creative solution is
to use Apple’s “Find My” tracking system
. And if that link won’t let you read the story, a creative solution for that issue is to load the page with javascript disabled.
This is based on
earlier work from [Fabian Bräunlein], dubbed “Send My”
. As an aside, this is the worst naming paradigm, and Apple should feel bad for it. At the heart of this cleverness is the fact that Apple used the standard Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio protocol, and any BLE device can act like an Apple AirTag. Bits can be encoded into the reported public key of the fake AirTag, and the receiving side can do a lookup for the possible keys.
A fake AirTag keylogger manages to transfer 26 characters per second over the “Find My” system, enough to keep up with even the fastest of typists, given that no keyboard is in use all the time. Apple has rolled out anti-tracking protections, and the rolling key used to transmit data also happens to completely defeat those protections.
Zephyr RTOS
[Marco Ivaldi] has opted to do security research on Open Source projects for a while, following a less than stellar experience trying to report vulnerabilities to Oracle. So to celebrate 20 years of vulnerability hunting,
[Marco] is disclosing 12 vulnerabilities in the Zephyr
Real-Time Operating System (RTOS).
Of those, five are rated CVSS 7.0 or more serious, with the top two tying at 7.6. Those are each buffer overflows in the transmit functions of
CANbus
and
IEEE 802.15.4
respectively. As the overflows are on transmit, they’ll be much harder to exploit, but there are still clever attacks that make use of such vulnerabilities, so it’s good to get these cleaned up. Of the twelve vulnerabilities, one was fixed with Zephyr 3.4.0, ten in 3.5.0, and one additional vulnerability that is still pending.
Looney Tunables Joins the Show
We talked about the Looney Tunables vulnerability when it first dropped. For a quick recap, that is a buffer overflow in the glibc dynamic library loader. Proofs of Concept (PoCs) have been published, and the inevitable has happened.
The vulnerability is now being used in real attacks
,
being used by a threat actor known as Kinsing
.
Atlassian Confluence Not To Be Outdone
The other serious vulnerability to make it to active exploit is
the Atlassion Confluence authentication bypass
. Attacks started in mass Saturday night, and at least three discrete IPs were making attempts to use the exploit. At least one of those attacks is a ransomware attempt from an unknown group, “C3RB3R”.
PRTG Network Exploitation
And one of the next exploits we’ll likely see in the attacker toolkit is
this RCE in the PRTG Network Monitor system
. PRTG works by installing sensors to various machines on the network, managed by a central server. The problem is that the server can make live changes to the sensor config, and one of those changes can inject arbitrary parameters. And a valid parameter is the debug flag.
Debug options left in production should fill the reader with a bit of dread. Here that debug flag allows for file creation with a few caveats. The approach taken by Baldur Security to demonstrate the flaw was to write out a
.bat
file, which can then be executed as a sensor. Compromise the PRTG machine, and you can push arbitrary code running as SYSTEM to every monitored machine.
Bits and Bytes
If you had any doubt, typosquatting & Co are alive and well, with
one of the latest reports coming from python-land
. Eight packages all claimed to be related to code obfuscation, and each name started with “Pyobft”. In fact, the code would spy on the developers that were unfortunate enough to install them, steal passwords and files, and then finally encrypt the hard drive. Ouch.
There are good responses to disclosure, there are bad responses to disclosure,
and then there’s this guy
. [Eddie Zhang] found a pair of open Amazon S3 buckets that were obviously not intended to be public. Monash University did everything right, and even shared public recognition, as well as rapidly fixing the problem. An unknown CIO took the other road, complaining that this was the third time this month someone had wasted the company’s time with news of a breach. [Eddie] has opted to submit through a few third parties, including [Troy Hunt], and leave it at that. I would actually encourage full disclosure after 90 days, as this companies customers absolutely deserve to see how their data is being handled.
And finally,
the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China was hit with a ransomware attack
in their US offices. It’s a reminder just how much the world relies on digital systems, and how bold the ransomware gangs have gotten — attacking one of China’s largest industrial banks. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697849",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T15:52:47",
"content": "> Attacks started in mass Saturday night,That would be ‘en masse’:https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/en%20masse",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,108.577555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/cheap-power-supplies-with-fake-chips-might-not-be-that-bad/ | Cheap Power Supplies With Fake Chips Might Not Be That Bad | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts"
] | [
"buck converter",
"counterfeit",
"dc-dc",
"fake",
"lm2596",
"ripple"
] | We all know the old maxim: if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably made with fake components. OK, maybe that’s not exactly how it goes, but in our world gone a little crazy, there’s good reason to be skeptical of pretty much everything you buy. And when you pay the equivalent of
less than a buck for a DC-DC converter
, you get what you pay for.
Or do you? It’s not so clear after watching [Denki Otaku]’s video on a bargain bag of buck converters he got from Amazon — ¥1,290 for a lot of ten, or $0.85 a piece. The thing that got [Denki]’s Spidey senses tingling is the chip around which these boards were built: the LM2596. These aren’t especially cheap chips; Mouser lists them for about $5.00 each in a reel of 500.
Initial testing showed the converters, which are rated at 3 to 42 VDC in and 1.25 to 35 VDC out, actually seem to do a decent job. At least with output voltage, which stays at the set point over a wide range of input voltages. The ripple voltage, though, is an astonishing 400 mV — almost 10% of the desired 5.0 V output. What’s more, the ripple frequency is 18 kHz, which is far below the 150 kHz oscillator that’s supposed to be in the LM2596. Other modules from the batch tested at 53 kHz ripple, so better, but still not good. There were more telltales of chip fakery, such as dodgy-looking lettering on the package, incorrect lead forming, and finger-scorching heat under the rated 3 A maximum load. Counterfeit? Almost definitely. Useless? Surprisingly, probably not. Depending on your application, these might do the job just fine, especially if you slap a bigger cap on the output to smooth that ripple and keep the draw low. And keep your fingers away, of course.
Worried that your chips are counterfeits? Here’s
a field guide for fake chip spotters
. And what do you do if you get something fake?
A refund might just be possible
. | 33 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697779",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T12:10:24",
"content": "Yes, they are (in general). Period. Buy from a reputable source.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6697785",
"author": "jbo",
"timestamp": "2023-1... | 1,760,372,108.653369 |
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