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https://hackaday.com/2023/11/10/utah-nuke-reactors-canceled-due-to-lack-of-interest/ | Utah NuScale Nuclear Plant Project Canceled Due To Lack Of Interest From Utilities | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"nuscale",
"Small Modular Reactor"
] | Intended to be the first 6-unit deployment of NuScale’s 77 MW VOYGR small modular reactors (SMRs), the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) in Utah was scheduled to begin construction by 2025 on the grounds of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), yet it has now been
canceled by NuScale
(
press release
) after not finding enough utilities interested in purchasing power from the nuclear plant. This led NuScale and
UAMPS
(Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems) to back out of the
CFPP project
.
To be clear, it seems this decision neither reflects on SMRs as a whole, nor NuScale’s prospects. Currently NuScale still has a number of projects which it is involved in, including the use of its SMR technology
with the Polish copper and silver producer KGHM Polska Miedź SA
. Demand for SMRs is also being
flooded with various designs
by both established and start-up companies, with
TerraPower’s Natrium
reactor seeing additional demand, including
at the Kemmerer site
in Wyoming.
Meanwhile, the European Commission
is establishing
an SMR Industrial Alliance, and countries like Norway are looking to
build their first nuclear plants
using SMRs, which includes Danish Seaborg’s molten salt reactor. In the end it should be clear that whether a singular infrastructure project works out economically or not depends on many factors. This can also be seen with e.g. wind farm projects, where Danish Ørsted
canceled
two large US offshore wind projects, Swedish Vattenfall abandoned its new
British offshore wind project
due to rising costs and Siemens Energy is having to borrow billions of Euros to
patch up financial holes
in its Spanish wind turbine unit. | 59 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697782",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T12:20:49",
"content": "The issue is that renewable power is both less expensive and more expensive. An utility can get a power purchasing agreement (PPA) out of a solar array or a wind farm for $20-30 per MWh because the taxpayers... | 1,760,372,110.616279 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/the-eyes-of-the-basilisk-are-watching-you/ | The Eyes Of The Basilisk Are Watching You | Richard Baguley | [
"Art"
] | [
"ESP32",
"LCD matrix",
"thermal camera"
] | MIT student [Anhad Sawhney] built an interesting decoration for his dorm room corridor called
The Eyes of the Basilisk
. Named after the mythical creature with a deadly gaze, the project monitors passers-by using thermal cameras and an LED matrix.
The project uses a thermal camera and a 64 by 64 LCD panel, with an ESP32 taking the signal from the thermal camera and processing it to find the largest hot blob in the image, which is (probably) a person. The ESP32 then displays the pixel art basilisk eye image with the iris closest to the blob’s coordinates, updating once a second. With a bit of processing to make the eye appear more spherical, it is a pretty convincing trick.
Most might have built one (or two) of the devices on a breadboard and left it at that, but [Anhad] decided to use the project as a way to teach PCB fabrication to some friends, so they created a PCB that could be mounted onto the back of the LCD matrix and built 14 of them, using the pick & place machine that he had access to at the
MIT Media Lab
. They then mounted all of them on the wall of his dorm room so the wall appeared to keep track of anyone walking by. I’ve never met a Basilisk, so I don’t know how many eyes they have, but it has a pretty creepy look as it watches you walking down the corridor. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697817",
"author": "Laps",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T14:38:00",
"content": "LCD matrix?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,110.218542 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/fastest-semiconductor-may-also-be-most-expensive/ | Fastest Semiconductor May Also Be Most Expensive | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"rhenium",
"semiconductor"
] | Scientists have found what they think may be the
fastest known semiconductor
. Sounds great, right? But it happens to made from one of the rarest elements: rhenium. That rare element combines with selenium and chlorine to form a “superatom.” Unlike conventional semiconductor material, the superatom causes phonons to bind together and resist scattering. This should allow materials that can process signals in femtoseconds,
Rhenium was the last stable element to be found in 1925. It is primarily used in combination with nickel in parts of jet engines, although it is also known as a catalyst for certain reactions. It is very rare and has a high melting point, exceeded only by tungsten and carbon. When it was discovered, scientists extracted a single gram of the material by processing 660 kg of molybdenite. Because of its rarity, it is expensive, costing anywhere from $2,800 to $10,600 per kilogram.
So maybe we aren’t destined to have desktop computers with 100 terahertz processors in them. But maybe we will. While the structure now uses rhenium, it is possible that understanding this effect will lead to new high-speed semiconductors using more affordable materials.
This is one of those areas where we always hear about new materials, yet we rarely see any impact on the actual market. For example, where are our
diamond transistors
?
GaN
may be the exception that proves the rule. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697717",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T03:07:19",
"content": "Possibly, or it may be reserved for electronics that need it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6697722",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"times... | 1,760,372,110.678257 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/the-height-of-1960s-dental-electronic-technology/ | The Height Of 1960s Dental Electronic Technology | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"dental",
"medical device",
"teardown",
"vacuum tube"
] | If you’ve ever been to the dental surgery and found yourself requiring some gum surgery, the chances are you’ll have found your dentist wielding an electronic probe to cauterise the flesh. It’s evidently some form of RF device because you are usually required to hold one of the electrodes while it’s being used, but annoyingly, for an engineer, it’s hardly the time or place to ask how it works. For the curious, then, [Keri Szafir] has the box of tricks behind the probe
and is subjecting it to a teardown
.
The box on her bench isn’t the one you’ll find in your dentist’s toolkit today, but its distant ancestor from the 1960s that integrates multiple functions into a single box. It’s a very period enclosure with typically 1960s-style vacuum tubes and point-to-point wiring. There’s an HF oscillator using a pair of EL81 power pentodes for that electrode you always wished you could ask your dentist about, and unexpectedly, a thyratron, a type of gas-filled switching tube not dissimilar to a thyristor, in a separate circuit for dental pulp testing. We’re not dental experts here at Hackaday, but [Keri] has done the research and explains the device in the video below the break. At one point, she observes that it’s quite a scary machine to be connected to a living person, and we can concur with that.
Her bench has provided a few projects here in the past,
including one of her amplifiers
. While it might be fun to tear down a more modern version, you are better off asking for
old dental burrs
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697679",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-10T00:08:30",
"content": "I remember our dentist back in the 1960s had a large multi function machine next to the dental chair. It was a sickly color green, had a motorized door to hide the instruments... | 1,760,372,110.335158 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/hack-a-soda-can-into-jewelry/ | Hack A Soda Can Into Jewelry | Al Williams | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"aluminium",
"aluminum",
"jewelry",
"recycling"
] | If you’ve ever needed some aluminum for a project, you might have noticed you have easy access to aluminum cans. If you need a cylinder, fine. But what if you don’t? [ThescientistformerlyknownasNaegeli] shows how to
create an attractive necklace from two soda cans
, and we think the techniques might be usable for other cases where you might need aluminum. If you care more about the necklace, it looks good. You only have to add a 3D-printed clasp or, if you prefer, you can buy a clasp and use that. For the Hackaday crowd, you can also use the resulting structure as an aluminum cable shield, which might better suit you.
The post gives more details and points to other posts for even deeper dives into many of the steps. But the basic idea is you strip the ink from the outside of the can and then cut the can into a strip. The mechanism for that looks a lot like a machine to cut plastic bottles into strips, but that method isn’t feasible without special blades.
Reforming the strip is the apparent part, but it might not be obvious that you also have to set the aluminum in its new shape. That’s done with a 200C oven. There are a few minor details, like using tubing to protect around the clasp, that you can pick up from the original post.
We imagine you could cut things other than strips from the cans and then use the heat setting method to make other things. Cans are everywhere and in many sizes, so it seems like this should be a ready source of recycled project material.
Of course, you can also
just use the cans
. If you are willing to melt the cans, that opens up a whole new
range of possibilities
. The good news is all of these techniques work even if you spell it aluminium. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697592",
"author": "JNA",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T21:08:04",
"content": "The other cool thing I accidentally find out that works pretty well is using a can opener to take the top off of aluminum cans. Mount it along the top seal, leaves a smooth edge that won’t cut your lip. I h... | 1,760,372,110.387073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/does-getting-into-your-garage-really-need-to-be-difficult/ | Does Getting Into Your Garage Really Need To Be Difficult? | Dan Maloney | [
"home hacks",
"Rants"
] | [
"api",
"Chamberlain",
"garage door",
"home-assistant",
"smart home",
"third party"
] | Probably the last thing anyone wants when coming home from a long day at work or a trip is to be hassled at the last possible moment — gaining entrance to your house. But for some home automation enthusiasts, that’s just what happened when they suddenly learned that
their own garage doors had betrayed them
.
The story basically boils down to this: Chamberlain, a US company that commands 60% of the garage door market, recently decided to prevent “unauthorized usage” of their MyQ ecosystem through third-party apps. Once Chamberlain rolled out the change, users of Home Assistant and other unauthorized apps found themselves unable to open or close their doors with the apps they were accustomed to.
Those of us with custom smart home setups can relate to how frustrating it is when something disturbs the systems you’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and optimizing. It’s especially upsetting for users who both Chamberlain hardware specifically because it was supported by Home Assistant, only to have the company decide to drop support. This feels like false advertising, but we strongly suspect that buried in the EULA users must have agreed to at some point is a clause that essentially says, “We can do anything we want and tough noogies to you.” And if you read through the article linked above, you’ll get an idea why Chamberlain did this — they probably didn’t like the idea that users were avoiding their ad-spangled MyQ app for third-party interfaces, depriving them of ad revenue and the opportunity for up-selling.
We feel the frustration of these users, but rather than curse the darkness, perhaps this will light a candle of righteous rage that leads to a clever workaround. The Home Assistant blog article mentions a dongle called
ratgdo
, which should allow any door with plain old dry contacts to work via MQTT or ESPHome. It’s extra work that users shouldn’t have to put in, but maybe getting one over on The Man would be worth the effort.
Thanks to [KC] for the tip; please keep us posted on your workaround. | 78 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697542",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T19:54:42",
"content": "Replace the Chamberlain opener’s electronics with something open source which will always work with Home Assistant. At some point in there the door opener just connects the motor to power. Anything... | 1,760,372,110.952757 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/mining-and-refining-graphite/ | Mining And Refining: Graphite | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"carbon",
"elements",
"graphite",
"mining",
"raw materials"
] | In my teenage years I worked for a couple of summers at a small amusement park as a ride operator. Looking back on it, the whole experience was a lot of fun, although with the minimum wage at $3.37 an hour and being subjected to the fickle New England weather that ranged from freezing rains to heat stroke-inducing tropical swelter, it didn’t seem like it at the time.
One of my assignments, and the one I remember most fondly, was running the bumper cars. Like everything else in the park, the ride was old and worn out, and maintenance was a daily chore. To keep the sheet steel floor of the track from rusting, every morning we had to brush on a coat of graphite “paint”. It was an impossibly messy job — get the least bit of the greasy silver-black goop on your hands, and it was there for the day. And for the first few runs of the day, before the stuff worked into the floor, the excited guests were as likely as not to get their shoes loaded up with the stuff, and since everyone invariably stepped on the seat of the car before sitting on it… well, let’s just say it was easy to spot who just rode the bumper cars from behind, especially with white shorts on.
The properties that made graphite great for bumper cars — slippery, electrically conductive, tenacious, and cheap — are properties that make it a fit with innumerable industrial processes. The stuff turns up everywhere, and it’s becoming increasingly important as the decarbonization of transportation picks up pace. Graphite is amazingly useful stuff and fairly common, but not all that easy to extract and purify. So let’s take a look at what it takes to mine and refine graphite.
Heat, Pressure, and Bugs
The story of graphite begins two billion years ago, when the oceans were teeming with cyanobacteria. Having just managed the evolutionary trick of figuring out photosynthesis, these organisms sopped up the nearly unlimited carbon dioxide from the Precambrian atmosphere, turning the upper layers of the ocean into a thick bacterial soup. When they died, mats of their carbon-rich remains piled up on the floors of the oceans, eventually becoming entombed under thick layers of sediment, where pressure and heat could begin to work their alchemy.
Schematic of a lithium-ion battery. The graphite layers in the anode help store charge by intercalating lithium ions between individual graphene layers. Credit:
OpenStax
,
CC By 4.0
While all these dead bacteria are the ultimate source of graphite (not to mention every other carbon mineral, from coal to oil to diamonds), exactly what type of graphite is formed depends on geological circumstances. The most abundant form of graphite is flake graphite, which occurred when those dead cyanobacteria formed carbon-rich shales and limestones which were then thrust into high pressure and temperature conditions by tectonic activity. These metamorphic conditions produced rocks with crystals of graphite trapped inside them. On the other hand, amorphous graphite formed when the dead cyanobacteria formed coal deposits, which were then subsequently swallowed up into the Earth’s furnace. The heat and pressure cooked out everything but the carbon in the coal, leaving behind almost completely pure carbon.
No matter how graphite is formed, the nearly pure crystals of carbon give it unique chemical and physical properties. Graphite is a very soft mineral, often as soft as talc. It’s formed of multiple one-atom-thick layers of carbon stacked on top of each other, which leads to graphite’s fame as a lubricant. It was once thought that graphite’s lubricity came from fluids like air or water being trapped between these monoatomic layers, giving it some slip, or just from the fact that the individual sheets would shear away from each other. But current thinking is that graphite is slippery thanks to adjacent layers getting twisted relative to each other on an axis perpendicular to the layer lines; this has the effect of unlocking the nesting between layers, allowing them to slide over each other.
In addition to its lubricity, graphite has a vast number of useful properties, some of which have been exploited since antiquity. Neolithic cultures used natural graphite as a colorant for ceramics, and the mineral’s refractory properties — it doesn’t melt until over 3,600°C — have been put to use in high-temperature industrial processes for nearly 500 years, such as crucibles and molds for casting metals. Today, graphite has a bewildering range of applications, appearing in everything from pencil leads to electrodes for smelting aluminum. But the newest and perhaps biggest market for graphite is in manufacturing batteries for everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. Graphite makes up something like 95% of the anode in most lithium batteries, and it takes 50 to 100 kg of graphite to make the batteries for a single EV.
Silvery Bubbles
There are only a few places in the world where veins of pure graphite exist — Sri Lanka is the only commercially viable source of this type — and those graphites tend to be reserved for specialty uses. So, as with most commercially valuable minerals, mining and refining graphite is a matter of finding deposits with enough of the stuff to justify the effort and expense involved in liberating it from the rocks it’s embedded within. Graphite mines are usually open-cast mines, with all the usual equipment and processes — blasting to free up vast quantities of ore quickly, huge shovels and haul trucks, and crushing plants to reduce the graphite-bearing rocks to manageable sizes.
After primary crushing, graphite ore is ground to a fine powder. To release the graphite from the surrounding rock, or gangue, the particle size must be smaller than the graphite flakes within the rock. A series of grinding processes with ball mills and rod mills accomplishes this. Depending on the rock type and graphite form, acids may sometimes be used to dissolve the gangue from around the graphite. In any case, graphite is almost universally separated from gangue by some sort of flotation process. Graphite is considerably less dense than the surrounding rock, making it easy to create a froth that lifts the graphite to the top of a flotation tank where it can be skimmed off, leaving the denser gangue to sink. Flotation methods have the added benefit of making it easy to move the graphite around to different processes in the plant by pumping it.
The graphite-rich slurry from flotation undergoes a series of steps to remove remaining impurities and further concentrate the graphite. These steps include filtration, centrifugation, and separation. A spiral separator is sometimes used; slurry runs down a spiral sluice with lighter particles and water tending to run along the outside edge while denser gangue particles bunch up along the inside of the sluice. When the graphite slurry reaches the desired purity it’s dried in a kiln, screened to a specific size, and bagged for shipment.
Global production of natural graphite in 2021 was over a billion tonnes. China produces almost 80% of that, with the rest coming mostly from Brazil, Turkey, and India. North America has only one operating graphite mine at this time, at the Lac des Iles mine in Quebec. The United States has no active graphite mining operations, although there have been mines in Montana and Alabama in the past.
Hot Coke
Natural ores aren’t the only source of graphite, though. Methods for producing synthetic graphite have been around since the 1890s, and while they produce extremely high-purity graphite, it comes at quite a price. Synthetic graphite is made by subjecting amorphous (non-crystalline) carbon to enormously high temperatures to rearrange the carbon atoms into the proper crystal structure. Choice of feedstock is critical if the process is to produce high-quality graphite; the carbon needs to have gone through a “mesophase” sometime in its thermal history where most of the work of producing and aligning the basic structural units of carbon crystals has already been done. The final heat treatment is really just an annealing process that indexes the monoatomic carbon sheets into their final layered form.
Synthetic graphite electrodes in steel making. Petroleum coke and coal tar resin come together under heat to create conductive and highly heat-resistant electrodes.
As it turns out, the perfect starting material is a byproduct of oil refining: petroleum coke, or pet coke. This carbon-rich material is basically the low-value stuff left over once all the higher distillates like diesel and gasoline have been boiled away. Pet coke is basically a solid mass of long-chain molecules, mostly carbon but with some volatile organics and a bit of water trapped inside, both of which need to be driven off by heating, or calcining, the coke in a horizontal rotary kiln. Graphitization takes place in an Acheson furnace, named after Edward Goodrich Acheson, who stumbled upon the synthetic graphite process while searching for a method to make synthetic carborundum.
An Acheson furnace is essentially an enormous carbon composition resistor: a chamber packed with calcined pet coke with graphite electrodes buried in each end. Graphitization starts when a massive current is passed through the graphite electrodes, heating the pet coke charge to 2,600°C or so. The process continues until graphitization is complete. This usually takes just a couple of days, but cool-down of the furnace and the graphite inside can take weeks. This process can be used to turn out raw synthetic graphite powder, but more commonly, it’s used to create graphitic parts like electrodes for metal refining. In that case, coal tar pitch is mixed in with the pet coke before firing, to act as a binder to give the graphite electrode more mechanical strength.
Given the expense of feedstocks and the enormous amount of energy required to produce it, synthetic graphite is about twice the cost of natural graphite. There are some applications where it makes sense, though; the aforementioned smelting electrodes are a good example, since they can be manufactured in their final shape. Synthetic graphite also tends to be better suited for use in composite materials like carbon fiber.
Whether it’s natural or synthetic, there’s no denying that getting graphite is a messy business — either we burn diesel to tear a lot of holes in the ground, or we keep refining oil so we can blast megawatts of electricity through the waste. And our need for graphite is only likely to increase, so here’s hoping that someone figures out a better way. | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697520",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T19:03:11",
"content": "Great article–thanks much!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6698741",
"author": "Dan Maloney",
"timestamp": "2023-11-14T21:53:47",... | 1,760,372,110.825018 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/programming-1949-style/ | Programming 1949 Style! | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"api",
"edsac",
"eniac"
] | What was it like to program an early digital computer? [Woven Memories] wanted to know and
wants you to know,
too. [Maurice Wilkes] and his team wrote a book about their EDSAC and the 18 instructions that it used. These days, you can even run an EDSAC program on a number of emulators.
It is hard to realize how things we take entirely for granted had to be invented by [Wilkes] and his colleagues. The book, “The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computers” has, among other things, the first recorded use of a software library and the first API. Even the subroutine needed inventing by [Wilkes’] student [David Wheeler], which was known for a while as the “Wheeler Jump.”
Like many things in old computers, the Wheeler Jump required code to modify itself. Even indexing modes were often implemented by changing an address inside the program.
While we frown on techniques like this today, you have to start somewhere.
We are big fans of EDSAC
and [Dr. Wilkes] had a long and distinguished career long after EDSAC, too. The original plans for
EINIAC
led to EDSAC, EDVAC, and a slew of other early machines. You can see a video of the machine with an introduction by [Wilkes] below.
If you want to try your hand with the EDSAC,
try your browser
. There’s also a very nice
Windows emulator
that runs fine under WINE. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697478",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T16:51:26",
"content": "Was the ENIAC a real computer in the conventional sense, even?It didn’t use binary yet, like the Z3 did. 🤷♂️It’s more like a big calculator/cash register to me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,110.281629 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/continental-europes-first-spaceport-and-its-above-the-arctic-circle/ | Continental Europe’s First Spaceport – And It’s Above The Arctic Circle! | Jenny List | [
"Space"
] | [
"Norway",
"polar orbit",
"spaceport"
] | When we think of a space launch it’s likely our minds might turn to the lush swampland of Florida’s Cape Canaveral, or the jungle of Kourou in Guyana. These are both in the tropical regions on sites as close to the Equator as the governments who built them could find, because the higher rotational speed of the planet at its widest point gives departing rockets a bit of extra kick. Even the Soviet Baikonur cosmodrome in modern-day Kazakhstan which sits at around 45 degrees North, was chosen in part to lie in one of the more southerly Soviet republics.
It’s unexpected then to report on
the opening of what may at the time of writing be the world’s newest spaceport
, situated on the island of Andøya in northern Norway, at around 69 degrees North. Just what is going on?
The answer for the German company
Isar Aerospace
is that their launches from the site will be ideally placed not for low-inclination orbits but for polar orbits, something of a valuable commodity and a worthy point of competition when compared to equatorial sites. We have shamefacedly to admit that we’re not completely
au fait
with Norwegian geography, so it took us a minute to find Andøya towards the top of the country’s westward chain of islands.
The spaceport itself
lies in a bay facing westward over the Norwegian Sea, and the launch platform is on a stone jetty protruding into the water. It appears to be a beautiful landscape, a suitable reward for any hardy souls who make the trip to watch a launch. Unexpectedly the spaceport stands alone in Continental Europe, though before too long it’s likely to be joined by other projects including
one in northern Scotland
. European skies are likely to become busier over the coming years. | 28 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697366",
"author": "Sweeney",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T12:16:58",
"content": "Erm, what about the SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetlands?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6697377",
"author": "Phil Ashby",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,110.520855 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/09/virginia-cave-is-the-largest-musical-instrument-in-the-world/ | Virginia Cave Is The Largest Musical Instrument In The World | Richard Baguley | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"cavern",
"organ",
"solenoid"
] | Hit something with a hammer, and it makes a sound. If you’re lucky, it might even make a pleasant sound, which is the idea behind the
Great Stalacpipe Organ
in
Luray Caverns, Virginia
. The organ was created in 1954 by [Leland W. Sprinkle], who noticed that some stalactites (the ones that come down from the ceiling of the cave) would make a nice, pure tone when hit.
So, he did what any self-respecting hacker would do: he picked and carved 37 to form a scale and connected them to an electronic keyboard. The resonating stalactites are spread around a 3.5 acre (14,000 square meters) cave, but because it is in a cave, the sound can be heard anywhere from within the cave system, which covers about 64 acres (260,000 square meters). That makes it the
largest musical instrument in the world
.
We’ll save the pedants the trouble and point out that the name is technically an error — this is not a
pipe organ
, which relies on air driven into resonant chambers. Instead, it is a lithophone, a percussion instrument that uses rock as the resonator. You can see one of the solenoids that hits the rock to make the sound below.
This is also the sort of environment that gives engineers nightmares: a constant drip-drip-drip of water filled with minerals that love to get left behind when the water evaporates. Fortunately, the Stalacpipe Organ seems to be in good hands: according to an NPR news story about it, the instrument is maintained by lead engineer for the caverns [Larry Moyer] and his two apprentices, [Stephanie Beahm] and [Ben Caton], who are learning the details of maintaining a complex device like this.
Thanks for the tip, [Stephen Walters] | 23 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697311",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T09:21:34",
"content": "Conflicted about this one. My caver ethics discourage even touching the “pretties” but at the same time it’s quite a cool thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,110.452588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/apple-system-7-on-solaris/ | Apple System 7… On Solaris? | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"68000",
"68k",
"apple",
"compatibility",
"emulator",
"hp-ux",
"mac",
"macintosh application environment",
"mae",
"operating system",
"solaris",
"unix",
"virtualization"
] | While the Unix operating systems Solaris and HP-UX are still in active development, they’re not particularly popular anymore and are mostly relegated to some enterprise and data center environments They did enjoy a peak of popularity in the 90s during the “wild west” era of windowed operating systems, though. This was a time when there were more than two mass-market operating systems commercially available, with many companies fighting for market share. This led to a number of efforts to get software written for one operating system to run on others, whether that was simply porting software directly or using some compatibility layer. Surprisingly enough it was possible in this era to run an entire instance of Mac System 7 within either of these two Unix operating systems,
and this was an officially supported piece of Apple software
.
The software was called the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), and was an effort by Apple to bring Macintosh System 7 applications to various Unix-based operating systems, including Solaris and HP-UX. This was a time before Apple’s OS was Unix-compliant, and MAE provided a compatibility layer that translated Macintosh system calls and application programming interfaces (APIs) into the equivalent Unix calls, allowing Mac software to function within the Unix environments. [Lunduke] outlines a lot of the features of this in his post, including some of the details the “scaffolding” allowing the 68k processor to be emulated efficiently on the hardware of the time, the contents of the user manual, and even the memory management and layout.
What’s really jarring to anyone only familiar with Apple’s modern “walled garden” approach is that this is an Apple-supported compatibility layer for another system. At the time, though, they weren’t the technology giant they are today and had to play by a different set of rules to stay viable. Quite the opposite, in fact: they almost went out of business in the mid-90s, so having their software run on as many machines as possible would have been a perk at the time. While this era did have major issues with cross-platform compatibility, there was
some software that attempted to solve these problems
that are still in active development today.
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697268",
"author": "avics",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T06:19:36",
"content": "There was a similar product for emulating a PC called SoftPC for HP-UX emulating a 80286.I have an old HP9000/433T with a 68040 running HP-UX 9.10. It still boots…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,111.012198 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/lunar-gateways-advanced-solar-electric-propulsion-engine-passes-initial-qualification-tests/ | Lunar Gateway’s Advanced Solar Electric Propulsion Engine Passes Initial Qualification Tests | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"ion propulsion",
"Lunar Gateway"
] | Recently NASA
announced earlier this month
that the 12 kW Advanced Electric Propulsion System (
AEPS
) — which is scheduled to form an integral part of the
Lunar Gateway when it is launched
— has passed a number of qualification tests, after a rather tumultuous number of years during its development.
Top-Level PPE Conceptual Ion Propulsion System (IPS) Block Diagram. (Credit: NASA)
Originally designed since 2015 to propel the
AARM
mission to fetch rocks from an asteroid, when AARM was cancelled it became the cornerstone of the Lunar Gateway that should enable astronauts in the Artemis program to land on the Moon.
The AEPS is a solar electric propulsion system that uses xenon as its propellant, much like existing ion engines. Where it differs is in the power output, which should allow it to work as the primary propulsion method for large deep space and cargo missions. Much of the development and projections are covered in a
2017 presentation
at the International Electric Propulsion Conference (IEPC).
Although the projected dates for much in this presentation (e.g. first flight of SLS Block 1 was in 2022, not 2018) are decidedly off, once the individual AEPS thrusters are validated, three strings will be mounted on the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) that forms the core of the Lunar Gateway and is scheduled to be launched in November of 2025.
Top image: AEPS installed for testing at NASA Glenn. (Credit NASA) | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697277",
"author": "Olaf",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T07:31:11",
"content": "I’m still a bit reserved regarding this “AEPS”. The input power (12kW) gets mentioned quite often, but iirc the output was 600mN. Has that really been achieved?🤔",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,111.062492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/getting-pcie-working-on-the-new-pi-5/ | Getting PCIe Working On The New Pi 5 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bus",
"communication",
"expansion",
"gen 1",
"PCIe",
"Pi 5",
"port",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi 5"
] | After the Pi 4 released, a discovery was quickly made that the internals of the popular single-board computer use PCIe to communicate with each other. This wasn’t an accessible PCIe bus normally available in things like desktop computers for expansion cards, though; this seemed to be done entirely internally. But a few attempts were made to break out the PCIe capabilities and connect peripherals to it anyway, with varying levels of success. The new Pi 5 seems to have taken that idea to its logical conclusion and included a PCIe connector, and [George] is
showing us a way to interface with this bus
.
The bus requires the port to be enabled, but once that’s done it’s ready to be used. First, though, some support circuitry needs to be worked out which is why [George] is reverse engineering the system to see what’s going on under the hood. There are a few handshakes that happen before it will work with any peripherals, but with that out of the way a PCIe card can be connected. [George] removed the connector to solder wires to the board directly in order to connect a proper PCIe port allowing a variety of cards to be connected, in this case a wireless networking card and an old Firewire card. This specific build only allows Gen 1 speeds, but the bus itself supports faster connections in theory with better wiring and support circuitry.
While it might not be the prettiest solution, as [George] admits, it does a great job of showing the inner workings of this communication protocol and its use in the new, more powerful Raspberry Pi 5. This makes a lot of things more accessible, such as high-speed PCIe HATs allowing for a wide range of expansion for these popular single-board computers, which wouldn’t have been possible before. If you’re still stuck with a Pi 4, though, don’t despair.
You can still access the PCIe bus on these older models
but it’ll take a little bit more work.
Thanks to [CJay] for the tip! | 36 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697212",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2023-11-09T01:04:20",
"content": "Definitely interesting but I’ll wait for an official expansion board personally. Jeff Geerling has done some tests with a test one that he was able to borrow from the Raspberry Pi folks and that can get up t... | 1,760,372,111.138193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/an-open-source-ebike-motor-controller/ | An Open-Source Ebike Motor Controller | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"bicycle",
"controller",
"ebike",
"open source",
"stealth",
"vesc"
] | DIY e-bikes are often easy to spot. If they’re not built out of something insane like an old washing machine motor, the more subtle kits that are generally used still stand out when compared to a non-assisted bike. The motors tend to be hub- or mid-drive systems with visible wires leading to a bulky battery, all of which stand out when you know what to look for. To get a stealthy ebike that looks basically the same as a standard bicycle is only possible with proprietary name-brand solutions that don’t lend themselves to owner repair or modification,
but this one has at least been adapted for use with an open source motor controller
.
The bike in use here is a model called the Curt from Estonian ebike builder Ampler, which is notable in that it looks indistinguishable from a regular bicycle with the exception of the small 36-volt, 350-watt hub motor somewhat hidden in the rear wheel. [BB8] decided based on no reason in particular to replace the proprietary motor controller with one based on
VESC
, an open-source electric motor controller for all kinds of motors even beyond ebikes. Installed on a tiny Arduino, it fits inside the bike’s downtube to keep the stealthy look and can get the bike comfortably up to around 35 kph. It’s also been programmed to turn on the bike’s lights if the pedals are spun backwards, and this method is also used to change the pedal assist level, meaning less buttons and other user-interface devices on the handlebars.
[BB8] has been working on this for a while, and although the bulk of a working ebike controller is there, it still doesn’t support the torque sensing pedals included with this bike. We’re presuming that this is still a work-in-progress as the Arduino and associated code easily interfaces with all the other sensors available on this bike. Hopefully this open-source motor controller finds its way into other proprietary systems as well, since a lot of these ebikes can turn into massive paperweights if the companies who originally built them go out of business or simply decide to stop supporting older models. Of course, you can avoid this issue entirely by
building your own ebike from spare parts
.
Thanks to [Arnoud] for the tip! | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697151",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T21:09:02",
"content": "Nice!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6697191",
"author": "Kyle",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T23:44:47",
"content": "Given that the whole batte... | 1,760,372,111.189855 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/forever-writing-on-monofilament-fishing-line/ | Forever Writing On Monofilament Fishing Line | Dan Maloney | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"ASCII",
"fishing line",
"fluorcarbon",
"fluoropolymer",
"medium",
"monofilament",
"solenoid"
] | Collectively, we have a long-term memory problem. Paper turns to mulch, dyes in optical disks degrade, iron oxides don’t last forever, and flash memories will eventually fade away. So what do you do when you want to write something down and make sure it’s around a couple of thousand years from now? Easy — just use something that even Mother Nature herself has trouble breaking down: plastic.
Specifically, fluoropolymer fishing line, which is what [
Nikolay Valentinovich Repnitskiy
] uses as a medium in
his “Carbon Record” project
. There’s not a lot of information in the repository, but the basic idea is to encode characters by nicking the fishing line along its length. The encoder is simple enough; a spool of fresh line is fed into a machine where a solenoid drives a sharpened bolt against the filament. This leaves a series of nicks that encode the ones and zeros of 255 ASCII characters. It looks like [
Nikolay
] went through a couple of prototypes before settling on the solenoid; an earlier version used a brushed motor to drive the encoder, but the short, rapid movements proved too much for the motor to handle. We’ve included a video below that shows the device encoding some text; sounds a little like Morse to us.
There seems to be a lot more going on with this device than the repo lets on; we’d love to know what the big heat sink on top is doing, for instance. Hopefully we’ll get more details, including how [Nikolay] intends to decode the dents. Or perhaps that’s an exercise best left to whoever finds these messages a few millennia hence. | 50 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697110",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T19:37:03",
"content": "mmmm….. plastic molecules don’t break down for thousands of years but that doesn’t mean that plastic objects don’t. They embrittle and turn into little pieces of microplasitcs that no longer carry ... | 1,760,372,111.278826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/2g-or-not-2g-that-is-the-question/ | 2G Or Not 2G, That Is The Question | Jenny List | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2g",
"3g",
"cell phone",
"switchoff"
] | Since the very early 1990s, we have become used to ubiquitous digital mobile phone coverage for both voice and data. Such has been their success that they have for many users entirely supplanted the landline phone, and increasingly their voice functionality has become secondary to their provision of an always-on internet connection. With the 5G connections that are now the pinnacle of mobile connectivity we’re on the fourth generation of digital networks, with the earlier so-called “1G” networks using an analogue connection being the first. As consumers have over time migrated to the newer and faster mobile network standards then, the usage of the older versions has reduced to the point at which carriers are starting to turn them off. Those 2G networks from the 1990s and the 2000s-era 3G networks which supplanted them are now expensive to maintain, consuming energy and RF spectrum as they do, while generating precious little customer revenue.
Tech From When Any Phone That Wasn’t A Brick Was Cool
If this is your phone, you may be in trouble. Digitalsignal,
CC BY-SA 3.0
.
All this sounds like a natural progression of technology which might raise few concerns, in the same way that nobody really noticed the final demise of the old analogue systems. There should be little fuss at the 2G and 3G turn-off. But the success of these networks seems to in this case be their undoing, as despite their shutdown being on the cards now for years, there remain many devices still using them.
There can’t be many consumers still using an early-2000s Motorola Flip as their daily driver, but the proliferation of remotely connected IoT devices means that there are still many millions of 2G and 3G modems using those networks. This presents a major problem for network operators, utilities, and other industrial customers, and raises one or two questions here at Hackaday which we’re wondering whether our readers could shed some light on. Who is still using, or trying to use, 2G and 3G networks, why do they have to be turned off in the first place, and what if any alternatives are there when no 4G or 5G coverage is available?
How Big Is The Problem And Where Can We Go From Here?
I shouldn’t be surprised that I get a far better 2G signal where this is being written than I do 4G or 5G.
The first question finds its answer fairly easily, before we’ve even considered IoT devices. Take a journey away from the cities and main transport arteries, and it’s likely you won’t have to go far before the faster connections stop and 2G is your only option.
Data rates drop to levels from the dial-up age with GPRS and EDGE, and any electronic devices you own with a speaker start that characteristic 2G chirping as they pick up stray RF from your phone. Speaking from a European perspective this happens even in places one might consider well populated, for example when a Eurostar train travels through the Belgian countryside.
Aside from the convenience of rural mobile phone users, there are plenty more places where older tech can be found. In
the estimated 7 million British smart meters which will go offline after the turnoff
for example, or in the numerous
anecdotes of cars with online systems behaving strangely
when they lose their cellular connection. But beyond that we have several decades of devices of all kinds that use a cellular connection, while many will like those smart meters be owned by utilities
or public bodie
s, countless more will be in private hands. When the cell service they rely on stops it’s likely many owners will only become aware when the device they rely on ceases to work. A quick online search finds plenty of inexpensive devices still on sale with 2G connectivity, so it’s not even a legacy issue.
These ubiquitous GSM modules have made cellular IoT devices easy, but they could be about to bring a huge headache. Aseel zm,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
So if the older networks are still required in some form, just why are they being turned off? Here the argument is mostly economic, despite those rural travelers and IoT devices, it’s no longer economic for the carriers. The older technologies still occupy a significant quantity of valuable spectrum, and the infrastructure running them is power-hungry for little revenue. A remote sensor with a 2G SIM in it uses a tiny quantity of data, nowhere near enough to pay for the network it uses.
As to alternatives, the easy answer is that every device should simply upgrade to 4G or 5G, though we expect the scale of the task would make that impossible in anything but a very long timescale, and even then the costs could be difficult to bear. Can it be kept then?
At the network end we have a question for any readers who work in the industry, if the 2G network is vital but has such limited use, is it possible to maintain a 2G network shared by carriers on a very small piece of shared spectrum? We know that a 2G implementation using SDR technology is a fraction of the size and power consumption of the large cabinet-sized base stations which went in when GSM was a new technology, could such a network of low-bandwidth 2G cells provide just enough to keep all those smart meters and other devices working?
Can You Take A Little Bit Of The Network With You?
A 2010 advert for Vodafone’s now-discontinued femtocell product.
This neatly brings us to the measures a Hackaday reader might be able to take themselves. A femtocell is a very small scale mobile phone cell sometimes used by networks to fill in small gaps in coverage, but it is also something that can be found in a domestic setting both as a commercial product and from a hacker perspective. The commercial home femtocells are largely obsolete because most phones now offer Wi-Fi calling, but they usually take the form of a box similar to a home router that would create a short-range cell using the home broadband connection as a backhaul. During the 3G era they were sold by carriers as a home upgrade, but at least where this is being written
the service has largely been switched off
. It’s possible that these technologies could return to be used in some situations, but they would require carrier buy-in.
All isn’t lost for the more adventurous souls though, because 2G networks have for quite some years been an open book in terms of the way they work. With a relatively inexpensive SDR and open source software such as
Osmocom
or
OpenBTS
it’s possible to host your own 2G cellular network giving internet connectivity back to your devices with no carrier involved. We feel duty bound at this point to remind you that most countries take a dim view of unlicensed spectrum usage.
From reading up on the tale of 2G and 3G switch-off in both the countries that have done it, and those that intend to do it, the overall impression is of a seamless operation for the majority of people who long ago switched to 4G or 5G without noticing, but something of a headache for rural users and owners of 2G-connected IoT devices. It appears that 2G in particular is one of those technologies which gained so much traction that we seem doomed never to be rid of it.
Header image: Luis,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 66 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697076",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T18:06:43",
"content": "2G has been dead in the USA for years. A lot of vehicle telematic systems have stopped working.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6697104",
"aut... | 1,760,372,111.556332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/reliving-the-authentic-90s-linux-experience/ | Reliving The Authentic 90s Linux Experience | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"90's",
"floppy disk",
"installation",
"linux",
"manual",
"red hat",
"retro",
"retrocomputing"
] | Installing Linux on a modern PC has never been easier. There are tons of tools available that will nearly-automatically download your Linux distribution of choice, image a USB drive, and make it bootable so you can finally ditch your bloated, privacy-violating operating system and get the free performance boost that comes along with it. This wasn’t always the case, though. In the 90s you had to take a trip to a store (or library) and buy (or borrow) a boxed copy of some variety of Linux on floppy disk or CDs, and then install it on your own, often without the help of the Internet. [Action Retro]
demonstrates this process for us
so we don’t have to relive the pain ourselves.
Complete with a 90s-era Pentium machine enclosed in a beige case, this is really the full 90s experience. He’s found a boxed version of Red Hat version 5.2 with everything needed to get it up and running and, after a brief issue with the installer crashing because it couldn’t figure out the ZIP disk drive, had another era-appropriate experience by erasing the existing Windows 98 installation. This was before automatic partitioning tools were widely available, so it was a real risk for beginner Linux enthusiasts if they were trying to dual boot.
With the installation complete, the X window system still needed to be set up, as well as making sure the settings for the old CRT monitor were correct. With everything finalized, the system can really be explored. It includes out-of-the-box some software plenty of us would recognize today such as GIMP and some other software we might not, like Netscape Communicator. It’s a real time machine experience to get this operating system running on period-appropriate hardware, and a lot of features of modern Linux systems can still be seen especially if your modern distribution of choice still requires a lot of manual configuration during installation. Old operating systems aside, this machine might be capable of running a modern Linux distribution as well,
provided it has something slightly newer than a 486
. | 65 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697046",
"author": "The Gwen",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T16:46:52",
"content": "Next we need someone to show what the 1992 vintage MCC Interim was like.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6697094",
"author": "mkomarinski"... | 1,760,372,111.666297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/jennys-daily-drivers-riscos-5-28/ | Jenny’s Daily Drivers: RiscOS 5.28 | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"acorn archimedes",
"arm",
"raspberry pi",
"RiscOS"
] | On a mundane day at some point in late 1987, though I didn’t grasp exactly what it would become at the time, I sat in front of the future. My school had a lab full of BBC Micros which I’d spent the previous few years getting to know, but on that day there was a new machine in one corner. It was a brand-new Acorn Archimedes, probably an A300, and it was the first time I had used an operating system with a desktop GUI. The computer was the first consumer application of the ARM processor architecture which has since gone on to conquer the world, and the operating system was called Arthur, which hasn’t. That’s not to say that Arthur is forgotten though, because it was soon renamed as RiscOS, managed to outlive both Acorn and the Archimedes, and still survives as a maintained though admittedly niche operating system to this day. So my Daily Driver this month is the current generation of RiscOS, version 5.28, and the machine I’m running it on is a Raspberry Pi 4. For a computer with an ARM core that’s designed and sold by a company based in Cambridge just like the original Acorn, it’s the most appropriate pairing I can think of.
Probably the Smallest OS In This Series
The first ARM product, an Acorn Archimedes A310. mikkohoo,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
At one point the Raspberry Pi folks even featured the Pi version of RiscOS on their website, but for those missing it there it’s freely downloadable
as a disk image from the RiscOS Open site
. Having spent most of its life as a closed-source product it’s been opened up over the last decade, and
you can grab the source if you’re interested
. When it’s normal for an OS download to run into the many gigabytes, it’s a bit of a shock to grab one that’s a shade under 140 megabytes and can be written to a 2 gigabyte SD card. This makes it probably one of the quickest operating system installs I have ever done, with all steps completed in a very short time. Sticking the SD card into the Pi it boots to a desktop in about 32 seconds which is only 5 seconds less than
the latest Raspberry Pi OS image
, so sadly that compactness doesn’t net you any extra speed.
The desktop retains the familiar layout I remember from those early machines, but with a much more modern feel. Along the bottom is a bar with quick access icons for discs on the left and for running apps on the right, while shortcut icons for frequently used apps are on the desktop itself. It feels very much like a quirky early 1990s interface from the days before users came to expect a Windows 95 Start menu or MacOS Dock. It took me a while to figure out the middle-button context menus and how to shut it down without pulling the plug, for example. Once the initial settling-in period is over though, it’s an easy environment to use and it’s pretty intuitive. One point to remember though, networking is wired-only.
Not Quite Enough For Work
Always a good start, it displays Hackaday nicely.
For my work I need a web browser, and for that RiscOS ships with
NetSurf
. It’s well known as a lightweight browser on many platforms, but it originated on this operating system and it remains probably the fastest option. It doesn’t have Javascript enabled by default, but once the option is found in the context menus it will do its best to run most modern sites. I say
most
modern sites though, because sadly for me one of the ones it had problems with was wordpress.com. Viewing Hackaday is fine, but thus unable to log in, sadly working on it is impossible.
For such a long-lived OS it’s not surprising that there’s plenty of software out there for RiscOS, though some of it is pretty old. This version comes bundled with both a store and a package manager, both of which have free software but the former also includes some paid packages. Searching online will provide more choices, but beware, as stuff compiled for the earlier Archimedes computers will only run on processors with the 24-bit address space. Even if you don’t want to download anything the distribution ships with
a range of apps
, for example besides Netsurf there’s the PipeDream office suite.
Under the hood, this remains a relatively simple operating system close to its roots. I’m told by friends who know more about these things than I do that it’s still possible for a single developer to understand the whole thing completely, so for anyone interested in such things it’s probably worth a look at the source. Meanwhile I’m left a little sad that I was thwarted by not being able to log in to WordPress.com for Hackaday, I found RiscOS to be a very usable and pleasant experience still reminiscent of all those earlier consumer GUIs. I had strong Amiga Workbench vibes at times, and if the browser was a little more capable I could see myself loading this on a Pi 400 and really using it as a daily driver. Give it a try yourself, you may come away feeling the same. | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6697014",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T15:18:13",
"content": "> My windows pc’s can boot to my login and desktop In about 5 secondsActually, are you sure that is a fresh boot? Windows defaults to something with is more like a recovery from hibernation per default.",
... | 1,760,372,111.746646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/the-golden-age-of-gadget-catalogs/ | The Golden Age Of Gadget Catalogs | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"catalog",
"retrocomputer",
"retrotechnology"
] | Among Hackaday’s readership are likely to be many gadget enthusiasts who live for the latest electronics and who have obsessively followed gadget trends for most of their lives. You possess elite AliExpress-fu, and like the hipsters, you were into everything long before it was cool. It’s safe to say the Internet has revolutionized the world of the gadget freak, but in a time before even dial-up access there was another way into this most technophilic of pastimes. As soon as there was consumer electronics there were mail-order catalog companies slaking the thirst of the gadget-crazy, and [Cabel Sasser] is here
with a look at both their heyday and their swansong
.
Drew, just shut up and take my money!
He has a particular focus on the catalog produced during the 1980s by DAK Industries Inc, a North Hollywood California based company that was the work of an entrepreneur named Drew Kaplan. He presented a glittering array of the latest and greatest tech of the era, and packaged it with riveting descriptions and beautifully-shot glossy photographs. [Cabel] was hooked, and we would certainly have been too. There were digital watches with outrageous functionality, portable briefcase computers, novelty telephones, Hi-Fi components at knock-down prices, and plenty of cassette tapes to play in them.
Their signature was an engaging copy-writing style that really made you want the product, and here we enter an interesting story in itself. There was another mail order gadget company in the 1970s which used exactly the same formula but running full-page adverts, similar enough to be obviously connected in some way. Had DAK stolen the idea? Not quite, for these were the product of a man called Joseph Sugarman, who also ran a “Learn my formula for sales success” course. Drew Kaplan didn’t hesitate to attribute his success to the Sugarman course, leaving us with the surprising conclusion that there’s more to the “Learn my formula” business than simply making money from marks prepared to pay for the course.
Here at Hackaday
we occasionally venture into purple prose for fun
, but we’re not trying to sell you any consumer electronics. We can’t help a professional admiration for the copy-writing in these catalogs though, and since
they’re all available for download from Internet Archive
we’re going to spend a while wallowing in tech nostalgia.
It’s a place we’ve been to before
. | 22 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696980",
"author": "SoonToRetireEngineer",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T13:10:42",
"content": "I have a few DAK products that I’m still using to this day. Loved getting that catalog :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6697079",
... | 1,760,372,111.443697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/08/3d-printing-improves-passive-pixel-water-gauge/ | 3D Printing Improves Passive Pixel Water Gauge | Dan Maloney | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"flip-dot",
"float",
"gauge",
"magnet",
"sensor",
"water level"
] | Here at Hackaday, we feature all kinds of projects, and we love them all the same. But some projects are a little easier to love than others, especially those that get the job done in as simple a way as possible, with nothing extra to get in the way.
This completely electronics-free water gauge
is a great example of doing exactly as much as needs to get done, and not a bit more.
If this project looks a bit familiar, it’s because we featured
[Johan]’s previous version of “Pixel Pole”
a few years back. Then as now, the goal of the build is to provide a highly visible level gauge for a large water tank that’s part of an irrigation system. The basic idea was to provide a way of switching a pump on when the tank needed filling, and off when full. [Johan] accomplished this with a magnetic float inside the tank and reed switches at the proper levels outside the tank, and then placed a series of magnetic flip dots along the path of the float to provide a visual gauge of the water level. The whole thing was pretty clever and worked well enough.
But the old metal flip dots were getting corroded, so improvements were in order. The new flip dots are 3D printed, high-visibility green on one side and black on the other. The only metal parts are the neodymium magnet pressed into a slot in the disc and a sewing pin for the axle. The housing for each flip dot is also printed, with each module snapping to the next so you can create displays of arbitrary height. The video below shows printing, assembly, and the display in action.
[Johan]’s improvements are pretty significant, especially in assembly; spot-welding was a pretty cool method to use in the first version, but printing and snapping parts together scales a lot better. And this version seems like it’ll be much happier out in the elements too. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696985",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T13:19:48",
"content": "Very cool, as long as you live where it will never get below freezing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696992",
"author": "Brad",
... | 1,760,372,112.134042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/50-year-old-program-gets-speed-boost/ | 50-Year-Old Program Gets Speed Boost | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"4004",
"4040",
"algorithm",
"assembly",
"bellard",
"eniac",
"intel",
"mathematics",
"optimization",
"Pi",
"speed"
] | At first glance, getting a computer program to run faster than the first electronic computers might seem trivial. After all, most of us carry enormously powerful processors in our pockets every day as if that’s normal. But [Mark] isn’t trying to beat computers like the ENIAC with a mobile ARM processor or other modern device. He’s now
programming with the successor to the original Intel integrated circuit processor
, the 4040, but beating the ENIAC is still little more complicated than you might think with a processor from 1974.
For this project, the goal was to best the 70-hour time set by ENIAC for computing the first 2035 digits of pi. There are a number of algorithms for performing this calculation, but using a 4-bit processor and an extremely limited memory of only 1280 bytes makes a number of these methods impossible, especially with the self-imposed time limit. The limited instruction set is a potential bottleneck as well with these early processors. [Mark] decided to use [Fabrice Bellard]’s algorithm given these limitations. He goes into great detail about the mathematics behind this method before coding it in JavaScript. Generating assembly language from a working JavaScript was found to be fairly straightforward.
[Mark] is also doing a lot of work on the 4040 to get this program running as well, including upgrades to the 40xx tool stack, the compiler and linker, and an emulator he’s using to test his program before sending it to physical hardware. The project is remarkably well-documented, including all of the optimizations needed to get these antique processors running fast enough to beat the ENIAC. We won’t spoil the results for you, but as a hint to how it worked out, he started this project using the 4040 since
his original attempt using a 4004
wasn’t quite fast enough. | 19 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696928",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T07:10:35",
"content": "Cheating! These spigot algorithms weren’t discovered back then. The only Spigot I remember was for square root and even that needed to start at the base set.It would have been far more impressive if he had im... | 1,760,372,111.898797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/using-gravitational-lensing-to-transmit-power-and-detect-aliens/ | Using Gravitational Lensing To Transmit Power And Detect Aliens | Richard Baguley | [
"Space"
] | [
"aliens",
"laser",
"SETI"
] | Most of us will have at some point have bought a long power cable to charge the bike on the deck, but [Slava G. Turyshev] has a slightly more ambitious idea. In
this recent paper
, he outlines how an advanced civilization could use a star or two to transmit power or send signals over an interstellar distance. And his idea is also simple enough that we could do it right now, with existing technology, or detect if someone else is doing it.
Gravitational lensing is where a large mass (such as, say, a star) bends the path of light around it. That can act like a lens in a telescope, focussing light that would otherwise be impossible to see. Imagine, say, a very, very distant star and a cluster of galaxies: if things line up just right, you could see the
light of a star from early in the life of the universe
. [Turyshev] speculates that this effect could be used on a smaller scale to transmit power. Well, a smaller scale involving a couple of stars, that is.
The idea [Turyshev] ponders here is that if you plonked a giant laser at the right distance from a star, you could use the gravity of the star to direct the beam, creating a focus point at a certain distance. The gravity of the star acts to focus the beam. According to his work, the system gets more efficient if you take the next step and use a couple of stars to focus the beam, rather like using multiple lenses to improve a telescope, because the spreading of the beam gets smaller with multiple elements. However, [Turyshev] calcuates, this might not work because the second star also lenses the light from the first, so it would be more difficult to filter out the wanted radiation from the background noise of the first star.
The paper also raises the idea that someone might be already doing this out there, and he speculates that this might be an interesting way to contact or detect aliens. If someone is doing this to send signals or energy, then it would be possible to detect with even a moderately sized telescope. The technology is also not particularly difficult: we could, with existing technology put a signal source at the right distance from our own sun to send a message:
Concluding, we would like to mention that the results obtained here, could have a profound effect for applications aiming at interstellar power transmission. Not only we can look for transmitted signals using modern astronomical techniques, we may also transmit such signals with space-based platforms in the focal region of the solar gravitational lens (SGL) using technologies that are either extant or in active development.
[Via
Universe Today
]
Header: NASA Goddard Photo and Video,
CC BY 2.0
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696910",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T04:29:57",
"content": "Power transmission?Even with gravitational lensing, square law would have its say.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6697... | 1,760,372,111.950847 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/we-like-big-keyboards-and-we-cannot-lie/ | We Like Big Keyboards And We Cannot Lie | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"scale model",
"world record"
] | So, let’s say you’re good at DOTA. Like, world-class good. How good do you think you’d be on a keyboard that’s 16 feet long, with a space bar the size of a person? Well, you’d need the rest of your team, that’s for sure.
Alienware have created the world’s largest mechanical keyboard and mouse
, which are working, 14:1 scale representations of their AW420K keyboard and AW720M mouse. And they got Team Liquid to try it out.
While this may be a marketing ploy, it took quite a lot of work and weeks of 3D printing to faithfully reproduce those peripherals on that scale.
What’s really impressive are the custom key switches, which are described early on in the video after the break. They are nearly a foot wide with the keycap on, and they have an incredible four inches of travel.
Each of the 87 key switches is made with two snugly-fitting pieces of PVC, a thick rubber band, and of course, an actual, regular-size key switch to register the presses. Not satisfied with that, the team added a small piece of measuring tape to produce a nice clicky, tactile feedback. And, oh yeah, that space bar? The stabilizer is made from a 1″ copper pipe. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.
This just so happens to be the same size as
the last keyboard we saw claiming to be the world’s largest
, which was rejected from the Guinness Book because it’s not an exact replica of an existing keyboard. So, somebody call Guinness, we suppose. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696884",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-11-08T00:10:22",
"content": "Look on my Works, ye Touch Typists, and despair!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8112094",
"author": "PCBoi",
"timestamp": "2025-... | 1,760,372,112.087857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/trouble-brewing-for-risc-v-as-issue-of-technology-transfer-is-questioned/ | Trouble Brewing For RISC-V As Issue Of Technology Transfer Is Questioned | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"microprocessors",
"RISC-V",
"RISC-V ISA"
] | Within the messy world of international politics, a major consideration by governments concerns which types of kn0w-how and technology can be transferred and sold to other nations, with each type facing restrictions depending on how friendly the political relations are with the target country at that point in time. Amidst all of this, there are signs that a so far relatively minor player in the world of CPU instruction set architectures – RISC-V – may become a victim of this, as a bipartisan group of US politicians is
petitioning the White House
to restrict transfer of know-how (so-called Intellectual Property, or IP) to RISC-V, as this may benefit adversaries like China.
As a US citizen who is involved in the RISC-V ecosystem, [Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang] feels rather strongly about this, and has
written an open letter
to the US President, pleading to not restrict the way that US citizens can deal with the Switzerland-based
RISC-V organization
. This comes as the California-based RISC-V startup
SiFive
has announced that
it’ll lay off
20% of its workforce. Depending on how a restriction on RISC-V is implemented, this could mean that US citizens would be forbidden from contributing to this ISA and surrounding ecosystem.
China has made it clear that RISC-V is a
big part of its strategy
to loosen its dependence on the West along with its investments in its MIPS-based
Loongson
processors, all of which strengthens the case for restricting US participation in RISC-V, even if it forces US companies like SiFive to move countries or cease its operations.
(Thanks to [cbjamo] for the tip) | 42 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696862",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T22:17:04",
"content": "So basically, this is why the US can’t have nice things.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696890",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"... | 1,760,372,112.033286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/hackaday-prize-2023-ending-10-years-on-a-high-note/ | Hackaday Prize 2023: Ending 10 Years On A High Note | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"Slider",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Prize",
"2023 Hackaday Supercon"
] | It’s a fact of life — all good things must eventually come to an end. The trick is not to focus so much on the chapter that’s closing, but look ahead to what comes next. This is precisely how the Hackaday Prize ended its incredible ten-year run on Saturday during Supercon.
This final year of the competition saw some of the most impressive entries we’ve ever had, leaving us with five exceptionally promising winners. These projects exemplify the qualities that the Hackaday Prize was designed to seek out and amplify and make a perfect capstone for this grand experiment in philanthropic hacking.
Grand Prize: Refreshable Braille Module
In the 1992 film
Sneakers
, a blind computer expert named [Whistler] uses a Braille terminal while cracking into several high-profile online services in a scene with about as much technical accuracy as you’d expect for a Hollywood depiction of hacking in the early ’90s. But they did get at least one thing right: computer-connected Braille “displays” have existed for decades.
Unfortunately, they remain monstrously expensive in the 21st century, to the point of being completely inaccessible for many. On the second-hand market, even outdated models can still command four-figure prices. To try and make this technology more accessible, Vijay spent years working on his
Electromechanical Refreshable Braille Module
. It leverages both off-the-shelf components and high-resolution 3D printing to provide six individually controlled pins that poke into the user’s fingers. Unlike commercial units, which use expensive piezo-electric actuated pins, his design utilizes an array of tiny electromagnets to rotate even tinier cams. Build up an array of 40 or even 80 of these modules, and you’ll be hacking along with [Whistler] in no time.
Second Place: Jumperless
Jumperless by Kevin Santo Cappuccio
is very much like your standard breadboard. But where it differs is that with this board, you don’t even need wires. Just plug in your components use the computer to make your connections virtually, and the array of crosspoint switches on the Jumperless will do the work for you.
The addition of RGB LEDs is a masterstroke, as it not only allows you to visualize the “wires” connecting each component but can communicate all sorts of information about the circuit’s performance.
Third Place: AutoDuct
Daniel Porzig’s AutoDuct
is designed to improve the efficiency of decentralized HVAC systems, specifically in apartments. Each unit has a humidity and temperature sensor, which allows the vent’s PIC32 microcontroller to increase or decrease airflow as necessary automatically.
This can put less burden on the building’s existing HVAC system with a relatively small investment. As an added bonus, the vent’s shutters can also help block unwanted noise from outside.
Fourth Place: OHMni-Stick
The
OHMni-stick
is an open-source assistive technology device designed to help those with limited motor ability. It uses a low-torque joystick and pneumatic pressure-sensitive buttons.
By lowering both the force and range of movement necessary to operate the device, the OHMni-stick is easier to actuate than more traditional input devices, especially for users with minimal strength and mobility. Customizable grips can make operating the device more comfortable, and its open-source nature makes it more accessible to a larger range of users.
Fifth Place: BrailleRAP
The
BrailleRAP
project seeks to provide a way to make printing Braille documents cheaper and more accessible. Using parts commonly found in desktop 3D printers, the open-source machine can emboss Braille into paper and even thin sheets of plastic and metal.
Inspired by the RepRap project, which helped drive down the cost of DIY 3D printers, an individual can assemble their own BrailleRAP for as little as $250 USD — compared to commercial offerings, which can easily cost ten times as much.
Protolabs Grant: AI Recycle Bin
Looking to increase the amount of household refuse that gets recycled,
Samuel Alexander designed this bin
, which can automatically sort materials based on the sound they make when they’re tossed inside. After the sound has been classified by the bin’s machine learning algorithm, the segmented drum in the bottom of the unit rotates so the object falls into the appropriate compartment.
While such an elaborate device might not end up in everyone’s home, it offers value as an educational tool in public spaces.
Looking to the Future
The Hackaday Prize has had a phenomenal ten-year run, and while we’re sad that it has to end, we’re incredibly proud that it’s ending on such a high note. Providing seed money to get a project like the Electromechanical Braille Display off the ground is an honor, and looking back over the years, the Prize has done that repeatedly. We believe the Hackaday Prize has made a difference, and the last decade’s entrants are a testament to what small groups of determined hackers can get done.
In place of the Prize, we’ll be running more focused contests with the same goals of improving the world through our collective efforts. We’re still working out the details, but we’d like to continue to be able to encourage progress in the open-source hardware and software where it most matters. While this is the end of the Hackaday Prize as a giant monolith, our commitment to helping you to help us all isn’t going to change.
The
Hackaday
Prize 2023
is Sponsored by: | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696822",
"author": "ScubaBearLA",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T20:18:24",
"content": "I’m sad to see the Hackaday Prize sunset… will you continue to have Supercon?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696901",
"author": "Elli... | 1,760,372,112.194234 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/flipped-transformer-powers-budget-friendly-vacuum-tube-amp/ | Flipped Transformer Powers Budget-Friendly Vacuum Tube Amp | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"amplifier",
"filament",
"Isolation",
"power",
"primary",
"secondary",
"transformer",
"vacuum tube",
"valve"
] | If you’ve ever wondered why something like a radio or a TV could command a hefty fraction of a family’s yearly income back in the day, a likely culprit is the collection of power transformers needed to run all those hungry, hungry tubes. Now fast-forward a half-century or more, and affordable, good-quality power transformers are still a problem, and often where modern retro projects go to die. Luckily, [Terry] at D-Lab Electronics has a few suggestions on
budget-friendly transformers
, and even shows off a nice three-tube audio amp using them.
The reason transformers were and still are expensive has a lot to do with materials. To build a transformer with enough oomph to run everything takes a lot of iron and copper, the latter of which is notoriously expensive these days. There’s also the problem of market demand; with most modern electronics favoring switched-mode power supplies, there’s just not a huge market for these big lunkers anymore, making for a supply and demand equation that’s not in the hobbyist’s favor.
Rather than shelling out $70 or more for something like
a Hammond 269EX
, [Terry]’s suggestion is to modify an isolation transformer, specifically the
Triad N-68X
. The transformer has a primary designed for either 120 or 230 volts, and a secondary that delivers 115 volts. Turn that around, though, and you can get 230 volts out from the typical North American mains supply — good enough for the plate supply on the little amp shown. That leaves the problem of powering the heaters for the tubes, which is usually the job of a second 6- or 12-volt winding on a power transformer. Luckily, the surplus market has a lot of little 6.3-volt transformers available on the cheap, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
We have to say that the amp [Terry] put these transformers to work in sounds pretty amazing — not a hint of hum. Good work, we say, but we hope he has a plan in case
the vacuum tube shortage
gets any worse.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696781",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T17:34:30",
"content": "Are HaD readers too much for triadmagnetics.com’s webserver?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6696786",
"author": "Lee Hart",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,112.263627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/all-about-cats-and-what-ethernet-classifications-mean-beyond-bigger-number-better/ | All About Cats, And What Ethernet Classifications Mean Beyond ‘Bigger Number Better’ | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"ethernet",
"line code",
"spectral bandwidth"
] | Although it probably feels like forever to many of us since Category 5 Ethernet cabling became prevalent, now that 2.5 and even 5 Gbit Ethernet has trickled into the mainstream, a pertinent question that many probably end up asking, is when you should replace Cat-5e wiring with Cat-6, or even Cat-7. Since most of us are likely to use copper network wiring for the foreseeable future in our domiciles and offices, it is a good question that deserves a good answer. Although swapping a Cat-5e patch cable with a Cat-7 one between a network port and computer is easy enough, replacing all the network cable already pulled through the conduits of a ‘future-proofed’ home is not.
The good news is probably that Category 8 Class II (Cat-8.2) is all you need to run your 40 Gbit Ethernet network with standard
twisted pair wiring
. The bad news is that you’re limited to runs of only thirty meters before signal degradation begins to kick in. If you take things down a notch to Cat-6A or Cat-7 (
ISO/IEC 11801
Class E
A
and F, respectively), you can do 100 meter runs at 10 Gbit/s just like 100 meters runs at 1 Gbit/s were possible with Cat-5e before. Yet what differentiates these categories exactly?
Spectral Bandwidth
The increased spectral use of the copper wiring by subsequent Ethernet standards.
The primary measurement that underlies these differences is called the
spectral bandwidth
, and is defined in Hertz. The bandwidth for twisted pair Ethernet wiring is in the MHz range, with Cat-5(e) hitting 100 MHz, Cat-6 250 MHz and Cat-6A 500 MHz. What this effectively means is the number of times that the signal can change per second before the receiver no longer is capable of receiving the entire session, at which point data loss will occur.
Much of the improvement in speeds over the same copper wiring is due to
improved encoding schemes
(also known as the
line code
), which are also responsible for boosting dial-up internet from a few baud to a few kilobytes per second. Here an essential factor is also the overhead of the encoding scheme, such as the old-school Manchester encoding used with 10BASE-T Ethernet. For its rated 10 Mbit you need at least 10 MHz spectral bandwidth to keep up, which worked fine even on Category 3 unshielded twisted pair (UTP) wiring, as is still commonly used for telephone wiring.
Eye pattern of a 100BASE-TX Ethernet data stream. MLT-3 can only transition one level at a time, unlike PAM-3. (Credit:
Andrew A. Zonenberg
)
Here the encoded signal uses 2-level encoding (binary 0 or 1), but it’s also possible to use more levels for the encoded signal, such as the 4-bit-5-bit (
4B5B
) encoding of 100BASE-TX (
Fast Ethernet
), which encodes 4 bits of data in 5 bits, which would normally require 125 MHz of bandwidth to transfer, but the final encoding step of 100BASE-TX is
MLT-3
(Multi-Level Transmit), which as the name suggests cycles between three voltage levels (+1, 0, -1 V). Due to the use of MLT-3, to reach the effective data rate of 100 Mbit/s only a bandwidth of 31.25 MHz is required rather than 125 MHz.
Interestingly, 100BASE-T1 uses a three-level PAM-3 (
Pulse-Amplitude Modulation
) encoding, which makes it more practical for automotive and other embedded applications, but limits this version to a mere 15 meters on the same Cat-5e. For
Gigabit Ethernet
(1000BASE) the 1000BASE-T1 variant is similar in that it uses PAM-3 for the encoding, but requires (500 MHz capable) Cat-6A cabling due to its 375 MHz bandwidth requirements.
The more pedestrian 1000BASE-T uses 4-dimensional Trellis Coded Modulation (
TCM 4D
) and PAM-5 on all 4 wiring pairs in Cat-5, demanding a mere 62.5 MHz from the 100 MHz that Cat-5 is required to handle. Although a 1000BASE-TX standard was proposed in 2001 to replace the 1999 1000BASE-T standard that would use only PAM-5 on Cat-6 wiring, this was a failure in the market as the 1999 standard more than met the market’s demand.
Yet now that 2.5 Gbit Ethernet and beyond seem to have truly arrived, it ought to be clear that Cat-5 and the tweaked Cat-5e standards are now rapidly gaining legacy status, and should not be considered for new purchases and installations. Even though
2.5GBASE-T
(using 64B66B, PAM-16 and
DSQ128
) can technically use 100 MHz Cat-5e wiring courtesy of its 100 MHz bandwidth requirement, this assumes flawless wiring. Putting in 500 MHz-capable Cat-6A would give much more leeway (up to 400 MHz-requiring 10GBASE-T), with a healthy tolerance in the case of degraded cables.
Twists And Turns
Cross sections of three different types of 10 gigabit network cables. (Credit:
Tosaka
, Wikipedia Commons)
With the basics of spectral bandwidth out of the way, a pertinent question that may have floated to the surface of one’s mind by this point is where the twists in ‘Ethernet cables’ (
twisted pair
cabling) are relevant. Perhaps more specifically: where does the extra spectral bandwidth in those different categories of networking cables come from?
The basic answer is that it is affected by the used conductor material (e.g. copper) and the amount of interference (EMI and
crosstalk
) which limit the effective range and bandwidth of the signal. For
Category 6
and up this means that only copper (not e.g. copper-clad aluminium (CCA) ) is an acceptable conductor, leaving the remainder of the research focus on reducing the impact of external interference. The first line of defense here is found in the presence of the signal pairs, each of which form a
balanced signal pair
that enables significant amounts of noise to be rejected.
By also twisting these two conductors within a balanced pair around each other, the amount of electromagnetic noise they’re exposed to is reduced, while also reducing the amount of noise these twisted pairs expose nearby pairs to, effectively limiting the amount of crosstalk. The more twists per length of cable, the more significant this effect is. The relevant standards do not specify a specific number of twists (pitch) per length of cable, just that the cable can perform at the parameters required by the targeted standard.
In order to further increase noise rejection, the cable can be further shielded in a variety of ways, either with foil around the individual pairs (U/FTP), around all the pairs (F/UTP), or both (F/FTP). A network cable can be marked and sold as Category 6A if it passes a 500 MHz bandwidth and crosstalk test, for the latter measuring
crucial parameters
such as Near End crosstalk (NEXT, near the transmitter) and Far End crosstalk (FEXT, near the receiver). With Category 6+ wiring alien crosstalk (AXT) from neighboring cables becomes more crucial as well.
Squeezing Copper
Category 7, 7A and 8 cables use even stricter noise shielding than Cat-6A in order to bump the spectral bandwidth up to 600 MHz for Cat-7, 1 GHz for Cat-7A and a pretty amazing 2 GHz for Cat-8. As noted earlier, Cat-8 is what’s required to run networks at 25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T speeds, albeit over fairly short distances (~30 meters). In general use you will find Cat-6(A), as well as Cat-7(A), with the latter being mostly advertised for fixed installation (using the solid core version), though you could argue that between a theoretical 500 and 600 MHz it’s somewhat of a toss-up, especially when taking into account factors like the quality of installation, such as the untwisting of pairs when punching them into a terminal block.
With either Cat-6A or Cat-7(A) run through the conduits of the new office or one’s dream house, it would seem likely that this is as far as copper will be pushed for now. As anyone who has recently browsed at their local IT networking store for 5 and 10 GBit cards and switches can probably attest to, at these extreme points of twisted pair networking the cost picture between a copper- and fiber-based network begin to somewhat blur together.
For equipment that supports
SFP
modules, it’s even possible to switch its interfaces between copper-based twisted pair and fiber-optic versions, which at least saves the trouble of replacing the entire device if upgrading the network to fiber. It’s quite possible that by the time that 10GBASE-T begins to feel as old and grizzled as 1000BASE-T today, fiber-optics may be the new mainstream standard. This would have the advantage of fiber-optics being immune to factors like EMI and crosstalk, while providing the potential for 100+ GBit home networks.
Until that time, it’s best to ensure you get your twisted pair cables from reputable brands, as anyone can put some lettering on a cable, yet not many have the test equipment lying around to validate that a ‘Cat-6A’ cable isn’t secretly a barely-Cat-5-cable with CCA conductors. Just so that you don’t wonder later why your ‘2.5 GBit network’ actually runs at closer to Fast Ethernet speeds. | 48 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696772",
"author": "NurseBobIsRetired",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T16:32:38",
"content": "This home I bought three years ago was one of the first Model Homes for the development and is fully wired with CAT5 cabling and multiple ports per room, even in the garage. Given what it would ... | 1,760,372,112.423576 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/intel-v-nec-the-case-of-the-v20s-microcode/ | Intel V. NEC : The Case Of The V20’s Microcode | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Intel 8086",
"intel 8088",
"microcode",
"nec v20"
] | Back in the last century, Intel saw itself faced with a need to have ‘second source’ suppliers of its 8088 and 8086 processors, which saw NEC being roped in to be one of those alternative suppliers to keep Intel’s customers happy with the μPD 8086 and μPD 8088 offerings. Yet rather than using the Intel provided design files, NEC reverse-engineered the Intel CPUs, which led to Intel suing NEC over copying the microcode that forms an integral part of the x86 architecture. In a recent
The Chip Letter
entry by [Babbage] this case is
covered in detail
.
Although this lawsuit was cleared up, and NEC licensed the microcode from Intel, this didn’t stop NEC from creating their 8086 and 8088 compatible CPUs in the form of the V30 and V20 respectively. Although these were pin- and ISA-compatible, the internal microcode was distinct from the Intel microcode due to the different internal microarchitecture. In addition the V20 and V30 also had a special 8080 mode, that provided partial compatibility with Z80 software.
Long story short, Intel sued NEC with accusations of copyright infringement of the microcode, which led to years of legal battle, which both set many precedents about what is copyrightable about microcode, and ultimately cleared NEC to keep selling the V20 and V30. Unfortunately by then the 1990s had already arrived, and sales of the NEC chips had not been brisk due to the legal issues while Intel’s new 80386 CPU had taken the market by storm. This left NEC’s x86-compatible CPUs legacy mostly in the form of legal precedents, instead of the technological achievements it had hoped for, and set the tone for the computer market of the 1990s.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696726",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T13:03:22",
"content": "My first PC got a V20 implant, and I gained about 10% on the benchmarks of those times. It looked like a miracle in those days……",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,112.322539 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/nixie-tube-rpn-calculator-project/ | Nixie Tube RPN Calculator Project | Chris Lott | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"70's calculators",
"calculator hack",
"hp calculator",
"nonpareil"
] | If you like Nixie tubes and/or DIY calculators,
checkout this interesting talk from the HP Handheld Conference
in Orlando last month by [Eric Smith] from
Brouhaha
and [John Doran] from
Time Fracture
. For 20-some years, [Eric] and the late [Richard Ottosen] have been incrementally developing various DIY calculators —
this paper
from the 2005 HHC conference is an excellent overview of the early project. [John] got one of those early DIY calculators and set about modifying it to use Nixie tubes. However, he got distracted by other things and set it aside — until reviving it earlier this year and enlisting [Eric]’s aid.
This presentation goes over the hardware aspects of the design. Unlike the earlier PIC-based DIY calculators, they decided to use a WCH RISC-V processor this time around. The calculator’s architecture is intentionally modular, with the display and keyboard housed in completely separate enclosures communicating by a serial interface. If the bulkiness alone doesn’t exclude it from being pocket-sized, the 170 VDC power supply and 1/2 W per digit power consumption certainly does. This modularity does lend itself to DIYers replacing the display, or the keyboard, with something different. [Eric] wants to build a mechanical flip-digit display for his unit. As for the software, [Eric] reviews the firmware approach and some future upgrades, such as making it programmable and emulating other flavors of HP calculators.
If you’re embarking on a similar project yourself, check out this talk and take notes — there are a lot of interesting tidbits on using Nixie tubes in the 21st century. If [Eric]’s name sounds familiar, you may know him from the
Nonpareil calculator software
used on many emulators and DIY calculator projects, one of which
we covered some years ago
. [John] is also a long-time tinkerer, and we wrote about his
gorgeous D16/M HCMOS computer system
back in 2012. Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for sending in the tip. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696689",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T09:26:53",
"content": "Really good aesthetic on this one, feels like the real deal",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6696692",
"author": "Carl Foxmarten",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,372,112.817484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/browsing-the-www-on-a-1980s-ibm-pc-using-microweb/ | Browsing The WWW On A 1980s IBM PC Using MicroWeb | Maya Posch | [
"internet hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"IBM PC",
"MicroWeb"
] | Do you ever sit at your 1981 vintage IBM PC and get the urge to pop onto that newfangled ‘WWW’ to stay up to date on all the goings-on in the world? Fret not, because [Al’s Geek Lab] has you covered with
a new video
(also embedded below), which you will unfortunately have to watch on a device that was made at the very least in the late 1990s. What makes this feat possible is a miniscule web browser called
MicroWeb
, created by [jhhoward], that will happily run on an 8088 CPU or compatible, without requiring any fiddling with EMS or similar RAM extensions.
Of course, you do need to have some kind of way to actually connect to the World Wide Web, which can be an ISA network expansion card, EtherSlip, as well as using a thin client as
a network bridge
with some Serial Line Interface Protocol (SLIP) action. Of course, some limitations exist, in that graphics and CSS are not rendered, JavaScript is totally off-limits, and for HTTPS-only websites a workaround like
retro-proxy
has to be used as TLS encryption would be completely unusable on a couple-of-MHz-CPU.
There’s also the
FrogFind
service, which will helpfully strip down a target website down to its barest HTML essentials, along with the
68K News
site that strips down Google News, so that you can enjoy the WWW in its text-based glory as it would have looked in the early 1980s.
(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip) | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696674",
"author": "aa",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T08:10:42",
"content": "I have agreed with myself not to watch any youtube video that contains a surprised face in the thumbnail… (So that’d be 90% of youtube nowadays i think. *surpised face* o.o)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth... | 1,760,372,112.705113 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/tiny-forth-could-be-the-smallest/ | Tiny Forth Could Be The Smallest | Al Williams | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"boot sector",
"forth"
] | When you think of a programming language, you probably think of a hefty compiler or interpreter. Maybe its on a bunch of floppies, a CD, or even an EEPROM. But what about a language that fits in a single disk sector? A language like that would — in theory — be used to help bootstrap a computer system and that was the idea behind Sector Forth and, later, Sector Lisp. However, there’s a new game in town:
milliForth
, which claims to be the smallest ever at
422
380 bytes.
Why would you want such a thing? Well, first of all, why not? Even as a form of code golf, packing a functioning language into a tiny space seems interesting. However, you could also presumably use something like this to boot a small system or on a system with limited storage.
As you might expect, there are compromises. There are only a few keywords but since Forth can define new words, that might not be a problem The input system is a little different than you might expect, but you are unlikely to want to use this as an interactive interpreter, anyway.
Of course, this implies a challenge: Can you write more with less? If you want to try, there’s no need to actually boot a system. Virtualization software makes it easy to spin up a virtual machine to try things like this out.
SectorLisp
is a little larger, but not much. Forth is a great candidate for
putting on small computers
. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696651",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T03:37:19",
"content": "That github readme actually claims it’s the smallest ever at /380/ bytes (and says sectorFORTH is 436).Maybe it shrunk in the minutes since this article was posted?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,372,112.770451 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/3d-printed-led-wall-clock-does-lots-with-little/ | 3D-Printed LED Wall Clock Does Lots With Little | Richard Baguley | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"led",
"neopixel ring"
] | This
wall clock
built by [Alf Müller] is lovely, using two NeoPixel rings to mark the time by casting light onto a 3D-printed ring. The blue shows the minutes, made more discrete by a grid inside the ring. The green shows the hours. [Alf] has provided the code so you can rework the color scheme. It might be interesting to add seconds with the red LEDs, or perhaps a countdown triggered by a touch sensor…
The clock is built from two
Adafruit Neopixel rings
, each with 60 LEDs. These are mounted on a 3D-printed shield that directs and softens the light to create the time elements. It is all driven by an ESP8266 controller, running a program that grabs the time from an NTP server and translates that into LEDs. The code is provided, and [Alf] has
documented it nicely
so you can easily change the time zone, colors, or other elements.
This does remind us of
[andrei erdei]’s time strip clock
, but it is a bit easier to read. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696619",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2023-11-07T00:43:55",
"content": "Nice, looks like the one I made using wled and my own 3d printed design to hold the leds (only one strip of 60 that shines outward), with wled you get a clock, a wake light, IoT triggers, your... | 1,760,372,112.895989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/open-brain-surgery-for-ebikes-and-escooters/ | Open Brain Surgery For EBikes And EScooters | Navarre Bartz | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bike",
"CircuitPython",
"electric bike",
"electric scooter",
"electric skateboard",
"electric vehicle",
"ESP32",
"ev",
"micromobility",
"Personal Electric Vehicle",
"PEVs"
] | Personal Electric Vehicles (PEVs) all contain the same basic set of parts: a motor, a battery, a motor controller, some sensors, and a display to parse the information. This simplicity allowed [casainho] to develop a
custom controller setup
for their own PEVs.
Built around the venerable
VESC motor controller
, [casainho]’s addition is the
EBike/EScooter board
that interfaces the existing motor of a device to the controller. Their ESP32-powered
CircuitPython
solution takes the sensor output of a given bike or scooter (throttle, cadence, or torque) and translates it into the inputs the controller uses to set the motor power.
They’ve also designed an
ESP32-based display
to interface the rest of the system to the user while riding. Since it also runs CircuitPython, it’s easy to reconfigure the functions of the three button device to display whatever you’d like as well as change various drive modes of your system. I know I’d love to see my own ebikes have a different mode for riding on road versus on shared paths since not getting run over by cars and not harassing pedestrians aren’t going to have the same power profile.
If you want to find more ways to
join the PEV revolution
, check out this wild
omni-wheeled bike
or this
solar car built from two separate e-bikes
. If that doesn’t suit your fancy, how about an off-label use for an e-bike battery to
power your laptop off grid
? | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696567",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T21:52:01",
"content": "Ah, yes, very useful for certain uh… very legal and fun activities concerning particular bits of sidewalk garbage.I’ll take three.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,112.939916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/smart-ring-measures-blood-pressure/ | Smart Ring Measures Blood Pressure | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Medical Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"biohacking",
"blood pressure",
"blood pressure monitor",
"kelvin cell"
] | Continuous blood pressure monitoring has always been a major challenge for the biohacking community. Those giant arm cuffs aren’t exactly the kind of thing you want to wear all day and the wrist monitors aren’t super great either. So, [Kaan] and his research team set out to create a better continuous blood pressure monitor. This time
as a ring
.
When your heart beats, the volume of blood in the blood vessels increases ever so slightly. This increase in volume results in a decrease in electrical impedance because blood is fairly conductive. We’ve seen a similar
volume measurement using light for detecting heart rate
, but [Kaan] says with impedance, you won’t need to worry about
the effect of skin tone on the accuracy of the measurement
.
As far as the hardware is concerned, they inject a small, constant 10 kHz sinusoidal current into the finger through 2 current-injecting electrodes, and then measure the resulting voltage drop across the finger with two sensing electrodes,
a standard 4-probe Kelvin approach
. Their results seem pretty good. They are within 5.27 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) of the gold standard for systolic blood pressure and 3.87 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure across 10 subjects, which they say are within the American Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation’s (AAMI) guidelines. That’s definitely something to catch your attention.
We’ve seen several attempts to measure blood pressure using the
analogous photoplethysmography technique
, but those generally don’t seem to work out. Will the impedance plethysmography approach overcome
the optical technique’s shortcomings
? Only time will tell. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696546",
"author": "Rudranand Sahu",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T20:04:22",
"content": "How does it works around the difference in impedance caused by sweating?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696568",
"author": "Jace",... | 1,760,372,113.413368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/virginia-to-get-large-scale-wind-farm/ | Virginia To Get Large-Scale Wind Farm | Al Williams | [
"green hacks",
"News"
] | [
"offshore",
"wind power",
"windmill"
] | If you go about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia, you’ll find two windmills jutting up out of the sea. Two windmills aren’t particularly interesting until you realize that these two are on the edge of a 2,100-acre lease that Dominion Energy is placing in Federal water. According to the company, those two will be
joined by 176 more
windmills on a nearly 113,000-acre adjacent lease. The project has been in the planning and pilot phase for a while, but it was recently
given the green light
by the US government. You can see a promotional video about the project below. There’s also a video of the first monopiles — the mounts for the windmills — arriving in the area.
The project will eventually have three offshore substations that feed the power to the state military reservation and, from there, to Naval Air Station Oceania, where it feeds the commercial power grid. The final project will power 660,000 homes.
The schedule calls for full operation by 2026. The project will cost roughly 10 billion dollars. Upon completion, they estimate the project will produce 9.5 million megawatt-hours per year. We still had a few questions. Why put substations offshore? What happens when a hurricane comes? They say they will survive a category 2 hurricane with wind speeds between 96 and 110 miles per hour. But, of course, hurricanes can be more powerful than that.
Still, this will be a project where success may lead to more offshore wind energy in the US. If it isn’t successful, of course, it may inhibit future projects. Something to watch.
Want more technical details about wind turbines?
We got you
. Of course, you don’t just have to generate the power. You have to
get it on the grid,
which is another problem. | 89 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696480",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T16:40:41",
"content": "Ah, yes — but what about the poor birds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696481",
"author": "Climate Forward",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,113.247183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/its-a-marble-clock-but-not-as-we-know-it/ | It’s A Marble Clock, But Not As We Know It | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"clock",
"ir sensor",
"marble",
"solenoid"
] | [Ivan Miranda] is taking a very interesting approach to a marble clock.
His design is a huge assembly
that uses black and white marbles to create a (sort of) dot matrix display. It’s part kinetic art and part digital clock, all driven by marbles.
Here’s how it works: black and white marbles feed into a big elevator. This elevator lifts marbles to the top of the curved runs that make up the biggest part of the device. The horizontal area at the bottom is where the time is shown, with white and black marbles making up the numerical display. But how to make sure the white marbles and black marbles go in the right order?
The solution to that is simple. Marbles feed into the elevator in an unpredictable order. An array of sensors detects the color of each marble. Solenoids simply eject any marble that isn’t in the right place. For example, if the next marble for track
n
needs to be white, then simply kick out any black marbles in that position until there’s a white one. Simple, effective, and guarantees plenty of mesmerizing moving parts.
Of course, this means that marble ejection and marble color sensing need to be utterly reliable, and [Ivan] ran into problems with both. Marble ejection took some careful component testing and selection to get the right solenoids. Color sensing (as well as detecting empty spaces) settled on IR-based sensors commonly used in line-following robots.
You can watch the clock in action in the video embedded below just under the page break. We recommend giving it a look, because [Ivan] does a great job of showing all of the little challenges that reared their heads, and how he addressed them. There are still a few things to address, but he expects to have those licked by the next video. In the meantime, [Ivan] asks that if anyone knows a source for high quality glass marbles in bulk, please let him know. Low quality ones vary in size and tend to get stuck.
Marble clocks are great expressions of creativity
, especially now that 3D printing is common. We love clock hacks, so if you ever create or run across a good one,
let us know about it
! | 28 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696445",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T12:59:53",
"content": "There are _very_ high quality balls available, but not glass. And probably out of budget:https://simplybearings.co.uk/shop/Loose-Balls-&-Rollers/c23/index.htmlA combination of alumina and silcon nitride... | 1,760,372,113.01079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/reduce-the-pi-5s-power-consumption-at-a-stroke/ | Reduce The Pi 5’s Power Consumption At A Stroke | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Pi 5",
"power consumption",
"power hack",
"Raspberry Pi 5"
] | The Raspberry Pi 5 is the new wunderkind single-board computer on the block, so new in fact that users are still finding out its quirks. One of those quirks is a surprisingly high power consumption when powered down, despite halting the SoC, it leaves the power on and consumes over a watt even in standby. [Jeff Geerling] has a solution,
and it’s a simple config change
.
It’s useful to know how to fix this, and we’re indebted to him for finding it, but it’s hardly the most complex of hacks. Where the interest lies is in why the board leaves the lights turned on when nobody’s at home in the first place. It seems that some HATs have an issue when the 3V3 rail shuts down, but the 5V rail doesn’t. The Raspberry Pi foundation took the most compatible route and kept the rails on all the time. Perhaps future OS releases will come up with something more elegant, but at least there *is* a fix.
If you’re new to the Pi 5,
you can take a look at our review of a preview model
, and see why it’s the closest yet to a usable everyday PC that they’ve produced. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696431",
"author": "LED Blastard",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T10:37:25",
"content": "Is this also a problem with Pi 4? If so, does the same fix apply? I’d fancy the LED off at very least when powered off.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"commen... | 1,760,372,113.357375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/adding-temperature-sensor-functionality-to-the-ch32v003-mcu/ | Adding Temperature Sensor Functionality To The CH32V003 MCU | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"CH32V003",
"MCU",
"microcontroller",
"RISC-V",
"temperature"
] | As cheap as the WCH CH32V003 MCU is, its approximately $0.10 price tag looks far less attractive when you need to start adding on external ICs for missing basic features, such as temperature measurement. This is a feature that’s commonly found on even basic STM32 MCUs. Fear not though, as [eeucalyptus] shows, you can improvise a working solution by
finding alternative sources
that can act as a thermometer.
Plot of the temperature measurement using the improvised CH32V003 -based temperature sensor. (Credit: eeucalyptus)
The
CH32V003
is a low-end, 32-bit RISC-V-based MCU by the China-based Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics, commonly known abbreviated as ‘WCH’, and
featured on Hackaday
previously. Although it features a single-core, 48 MHz CPU, its selection of peripherals is fairly basic:
So how do you create an internal temperature sensor using just this? [eeucalyptus] figured that all that’s needed is to measure the drift between two internal clocks – such as the LSI and HSI – as temperatures change and use this to calibrate a temperature graph.
Unfortunately, the LSI isn’t readily accessible, even through the Timer peripheral. This left the AWU (automatic wake-up unit) which also uses the LSI as a clock source. By letting it go to sleep and wake up after N LSI cycles, the AWU enabled indirect access to the LSI.
Internal diagram of the CH32V003 MCU. (Credit: WCH)
After calibrating against room temperature (~22 °C) and ice water (0 °C), a temperature plot was obtained, which could conceivably be somewhat accurate. As [eeucalyptus] warns, this is a kind of calibration that likely differs per MCU, and no attempt to quantify the absolute accuracy of this method has been made yet. Even so, as a crude temperature measurement, it might just be good enough. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696399",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T06:14:28",
"content": "Even the STM32 built-in temperature sensor has really poor accuracy, like +- 5°C. Adding NTC resistor to ADC pin costs 2 cents and gets you to +-1°C or better.Still a cool hack, though, and useful if you can’... | 1,760,372,113.307484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/what-parts-should-you-desolder/ | What Parts Should You Desolder? | Jenny List | [
"Parts",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"desolder",
"junk",
"junkbox",
"scrap",
"stock parts"
] | A rite of passage for a young electronics enthusiast used to be collecting an array of surplus boards from whatever could be found, and using them as sources of parts to desolder. It was possible with a bit of work and searching to build all manner of electronic projects without spending much at all. Many hardware hackers know their way around consumer electronics from the decade before their teenage years as a result. Secondhand components can still be used, but the type of components to be found has changed, as well as those needed. [ElectricMonkeyBrain] takes a look, and asks “
What should you desolder
?”.
As a general rule, he lands on the premise that it’s worth hanging on to the expensive stuff rather than the cheap stuff. Large capacitors, power semiconductors, and inductors aren’t cheap at all, and in the case of the inductors they can yield both ferrite parts and enameled wire for rewinding to suit. We’re surprised that he advocates holding on to electrolytic capacitors as a kit of many values is now pretty cheap, but it’s understandable that if you lack the part and it’s there on a motherboard in front of you, it’s worth desoldering. Finally, he discusses cases, something we’ve been tempted by a few times more than we’d like to mention.
In a world of easy online ordering, it’s useful to be reminded that sometimes there’s still space for salvaged parts, after all, no delivery service is as quick as reaching under your bench for
an old ATX power supply
to raid. As always though,
don’t amass too much of it
. | 28 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696370",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T03:27:52",
"content": "“We’re surprised that he advocates holding on to electrolytic capacitors as a kit of many values is now pretty cheap,”If they are in expensive gear, they might be better qualit... | 1,760,372,113.48109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/hackaday-links-november-5-2023/ | Hackaday Links: November 5, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"Cherenkov",
"factory tour",
"hackaday links",
"half-life",
"nuclear power",
"nuclear waste",
"Open Hardware Summit",
"osh",
"radiation",
"Raspberry Pi 5",
"Solar Cycle 25",
"solar max",
"sunspot",
"Supercon 2023"
] | As I write this, Supercon 2023 is in full swing down in Pasadena — 80 degrees and sunny at the moment, as opposed to 50 and pouring rain where I am, not that I’m bitter. Luckily, though, we can all follow along with the proceedings thanks to the
livestreams on the Hackaday channel
, which of course will all be available once they’re edited in case you miss anything live. There are
a ton of interesting talks
coming up, so there’ll be a lot to catch up on when the dust settles. And that won’t be far from now; by the time this post publishes, Supercon will be all but over, which makes it the Thanksgiving dinner of cons — all that work and it’s over in just a few minutes.
And once you come down from your post-Supercon high, it’ll be time to start thinking about what comes next. May we be so bold as to suggest coming up with
a talk or workshop proposal for the 2024 Open Hardware Summit
? The summit is tentatively scheduled for the end of April, or it may go into early May. Either way, it’ll be in Montreal, a beautiful city that can be pretty nice in the early Spring. The deadline for proposals is December 17, so start thinking about what you can bring to the table and get your proposals together.
In space news — because it wouldn’t be a Links article without space news — it looks like
Solar Cycle 25 has some surprises in store for us
. Back when this solar cycle started, expectations were that there would be relatively little activity at solar maximum, as assessed by the number of observed sunspots, which correlates to the magnetic activity beneath the Sun’s surface. Cycle 25 has already blown that prediction, with far more sunspots than expected — solar maximum for this cycle was supposed to have a sunspot number of about 115; we’re currently sitting around 130 or so. Not only that, solar maximum is probably going to arrive well ahead of schedule, possibly as early as the beginning of 2024. That’s a huge difference from the prediction of July 2025 for peak activity. That also means the solar max peak could stretch out far longer, which could have interesting implications for radio propagation, increased risk of Earth-impacting coronal mass ejections, and disruptions to satellites in orbit. On the plus side, solar maximum during the upcoming total solar eclipse could make for some pretty wild views of the corona.
If you’ve read the Links column much, it’ll be no surprise that we love factory tours around here. And brief though it may be,
MagPi magazine’s tour of the Raspberry Pi 5 factory
is worth checking out. The Pi 5 isn’t the only thing made at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, of course; they make a ton of Sony broadcast cameras and associated equipment there too. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of tech on the assembly line, but a lot of it is “cobot” work cells, where robots and humans work on the same steps. They’re geared up to make 250,000 Pi 5s a week, which will hopefully put a dent in inventories and drive the pandemic-inflated prices we’ve all gotten used to back to more reasonable levels.
And finally, while we’re not sure we’d quite follow suit, Kyle Hill has
a new video
where he gets up close and personal with high-level radioactive waste, for… reasons? Actually, what Kyle has in mind here is the “de-Simpsonization” of the nuclear power industry. Kyle is a big booster of nuclear energy, so after touring places where nuclear power went terribly wrong, like Chernobyl and Fukushima, he wangled a tour of the Dresden Generating Station in Illinois, the first privately financed nuclear power station in the US. His goal is to dispel the myths surrounding radioactive waste storage, to which end he toured the fuel rod cooling pools with their eerie blue Cherenkov glow, or “sonic booms of light in water,” as he aptly puts it. The big moment comes out at the dry flask yard, where immense concrete and steel cylinders hold fuel rods for enough half-lives to render them harmless; that’s where Kyle shows his true feelings about nuclear power.
“Controlled nuclear fission is a demanding mistress,”
after all. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696355",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-06T00:33:12",
"content": "“not that I’m bitter. ”Because they saved one of the cool badges for you?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6696539",
... | 1,760,372,113.570841 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/servo-claw-game-puts-your-muscles-to-the-test/ | Servo Claw Game Puts Your Muscles To The Test | Kristina Panos | [
"Android Hacks",
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"9G servo",
"arduino",
"Arduino Uno",
"claw game"
] | As fun as claw games are, the jaws are always disappointingly weak, and you usually end up with bupkis. What if the jaws were completely within your control?
That’s the idea behind [Upside Down Labs]’ muscle-controlled servo claw game
.
While electromyography (EMG) is great for identifying neuro-muscular abnormalities and allows for amazing prosthetic limbs to work, it can also be used for fun. As you’ll see in the video after the break, accurate block-stacking (and possible candy-grabbing) depends on teamwork and tensed muscles.
Though the user provides the muscle, the brains behind this operation is an Arduino Uno with a
Muscle BioAmp shield
stacked on top, which [Upside Down Labs] also created. This shield makes it ridiculously easy to connect EMG sensors and other I²C devices like screens and, well, servo claws. From there, it’s really just a matter of printing the claw, connecting it to a 9g servo, and using an accompanying kit to prepare the skin and connect the muscles to the Arduino. Be sure to check it out in tense block-stacking action after the break.
If you want to listen in on your muscles, look no further than
the BioAmp EMG Pill
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696348",
"author": "Jabberwock",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T23:17:25",
"content": "To be exact, the claws are configured to be disappointingly weak in a predefined number of cases in order to make the claw games profitable. It is a game of chance pretending to be a game of skill.",
... | 1,760,372,113.523913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/reducing-poop-on-multicolor-prints/ | Reducing Poop On Multicolor Prints | Bob Baddeley | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"3d printer extruder",
"Bambu",
"filament extruder",
"plastic recycling",
"poop",
"printer waste",
"purge",
"recycling",
"waste"
] | While multicolor printing eliminates painting steps and produces vibrant objects, there are two significant downsides; filament consumption and print time. A single-nozzle filament printer needs to switch from one color to another, and doing so involves switching to the other filament and then purging the transition filament that contains a mixture of both colors, before resuming the print with the clean new color.
[teachingtech] tests out a
variety of methods for reducing print time and waste.
One surprising result was that purging into the infill didn’t result in significant savings, even when the infill was as high as 50%. Things that did have a positive effect included reducing the amount of purge per transition based on light to dark color changes, and printing multiple copies at once so that even though the total amount of waste was the same as a single part, the waste per part was reduced.
All of the tests were with the same model, which had 229 color changes within a small part, so your mileage may vary, but it’s an interesting investigation into some of the deeper settings within the slicer. Reducing filament waste and print time is an admirable goal, and if you
make your own extruder
, you can turn all of that purge waste into various shades of greenish brownish filament. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696317",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T20:22:36",
"content": "Well, reducing this waste is easy – if you don’t want the waste, don’t do multicolor prints with many color changes on a machine that has a single extruder and has to change filaments – like the Bambulab ones... | 1,760,372,113.630132 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/oh-the-places-youll-go-with-stop-motion-animation/ | Oh, The Places You’ll Go With Stop Motion Animation | Adam Fabio | [
"Art",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"animation",
"bionicle",
"I Fight Dragons",
"robots",
"stop motion"
] | Robots made of broken toy parts, stop-motion animation, and a great song to tie it all together were not on our bingo card for 2023,
but the results are perfect
. [Mootroidxproductions] recently released the
official music video for I Fight Dragons 2019 song “Oh the Places You’ll Go”
.
The song was written by lead vocalist [Brian Mazzaferri] with inspiration from the classic Dr. Seuss book. [Brian] wrote it for his newborn daughter, and we’re pretty sure it will hit any parent right in the feels.
[Mootroidxproductions] isn’t a parent themselves, but they expanded on the theme to create a video about sacrificing oneself to save a loved one. With a self deprecating wit, they take us through the process of turning broken Bionicle parts, bits of Gundam, Lego, and, armature wire to make the two robots in the film. He also explains how he converted garbage into sets, greebles, and lighting effects.
The robots had to be designed so that they could fulfill their roles in the film. From the size of their hands down to their individual walking gaits, he thought of everything. His encyclopedic knowledge of Bionicle parts is also on full display as he explains the origin of the major parts used to build “Little Blue” and “Sherman”
Click through the break for both the main video and the behind-the-scenes production.
I Fight Dragons themselves have a strong chiptune influence. Many of their songs make use of the NES, SNES, and GameBoy sound engines. They even used retro controllers, a power glove, and a power pad in some of their earlier works. We’re saddened to hear the band has gone on an indefinite hiatus. We just hope they’ll be back someday to make more great music — hopefully with [Mootroidxproductions] animating the videos. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696327",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T21:00:43",
"content": "Touching!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6696346",
"author": "GarthVader",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T22:39:11",
... | 1,760,372,113.674897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/perfect-dark-recompiled/ | Perfect Dark: Recompiled | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Games",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"nintendo",
"perfect dark",
"recompile",
"retrogaming"
] | There’s an interesting renaissance of Nintendo 64 gaming, powered by the ability to decompile N64 ROMs back into C code using Ghidra. There are projects around multiple classic games, taking the Ghidra output and renaming the generic function and variable names. There are two approaches to these projects, sometimes happening in parallel. The first is to perfectly recreate the original work, and get a bit-perfect binary that matches the original ROM. The other approach is to fix bugs, optimize the code, and add new features, often porting to new platforms in the process. Right now, we’re seeing the latter happen with 2000’s
Perfect Dark
.
There is
a project by [Ryan Dwyer] to produce a matching C codebase
, and that project is functionally complete with an over 99% bit-perfect output. But as impressive as that is, we’re interested in making code even better, and
that’s what [fgsfdsfgs] has accomplished with the
Perfect Dark
port
.
The game now runs on Windows or Linux, has mouse support, and runs at a solid 60 frames per second (FPS) at multiple screen resolutions. Want an ultra-widescreen
Perfect Dark
experience? The upgraded rendering engine handles it wonderfully. Mods? No problem. In the future, the developer is also looking to support high-definition textures.
To play, you do have to provide your own legally sourced copy of the original
Perfect Dark
game. That is the only way this project is remotely legal, and we suspect that even then it’s in a somewhat grey zone, as a derivative work of a copyrighted game. Big N hasn’t shut the project down, but the
Mario 64
port was killed for attempting the same thing. We’ll hope for the best, and enjoy the nostalgia trip in the meanwhile! | 55 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696229",
"author": "solipso",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T12:16:22",
"content": "A wild Nintedo lawyer will appear in 3, 2, …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696232",
"author": "mt23",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T1... | 1,760,372,113.973214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/05/flash-programmer-shows-some-nifty-tricks/ | Flash Programmer Shows Some Nifty Tricks | Jenny List | [
"hardware",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"CH341A",
"i2c",
"usb"
] | A handy tool to have on the bench is a Flash chip programmer, and the ones based around the CH341A USB bus converter chip are readily available. But the chip is capable of so much more than simply programming nonvolatile memory, so [Tomasz Ostrowski]
has created a utility program that expands its capabilities
. The software provides easy access to a range of common i2c peripherals. He’s got it talking to smart batteries, GPIOs, environmental sensors, an OLED display, and even an FM radio module. The code
can all be found in a GitHub repository
. The software is Windows-only so no fun and games for Linux users yet — but since it’s open source, new features are just a pull request away.
The CH341A is much more than an i2C controller
, it also supports a surprising range of other interfaces including SPI, UARTs, and even a bidirectional parallel printer port. Maybe this software will serve to fire the imagination of a few others, and who knows, we could see more extended use of this versatile chip. Oddly we’ve featured these programmer boards before,
though in a tricky flashing job
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696214",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T08:50:45",
"content": "Still hunting for libusb examples to pilot the all the GPIOs, here it’s only one:https://github.com/sarim/ch341a-bitbang-userland",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,372,114.028903 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/lessons-in-printer-poop-recycling/ | Lessons In Printer Poop Recycling | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"Bambu",
"extruder",
"PLA",
"poop",
"purge",
"recycling",
"waste"
] | The fundamental problem with multi-color 3D printing using a single hotend is that they poop an awful lot. Every time they change filaments, they’ve got to purge the single nozzle, which results in a huge number of technicolor “purge poops” which on some machines are even ejected out a chute at the back of the printer. The jokes practically write themselves.
What’s not a joke, though, is the sheer mass of plastic waste this can produce. [Stefan] from
CNC Kitchen
managed to generate over a kilo of printer poop for a 500-gram multi-color print. So he set about looking for
ways to turn printer poops back into filament
, with interesting results. The tests are based around a commercial lab-scale filament extruder, a
3Devo Composer
, but should apply to almost any filament extruder, even the homebrew ones. A few process tips quickly became evident. First, purge poops are too big and stringy (ick) to feed directly into a filament extruder, so shredding was necessary.
Second, everything needs to be very clean — no cross-contamination with plastics other than PLA, no metal bits in the chopped-up plastic bits, and most importantly, no water contamination. [Stefan]’s first batch of recycled filament came from purge poops that had been sitting around a while, and sucked a lot of water vapor from the air. A treatment in a heated vacuum chamber seems to help, but what worked best was using purge poops hot and fresh from a print run. Again, ick.
[Stefan] eventually got a process down that produced decent, usable filament that would jam the printer or result in poor print quality. It even had a pretty nice color, which of course is totally dependent on the mix of colors you start with. Granted, not everyone has access to a fancy filament extruder like his, so this may not be practical for everyone, but it at least shows that there’s a path to reducing the waste stream from any printer, especially multi-material ones. | 33 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696183",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T05:48:03",
"content": "Wouldn’t jam the printer?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696296",
"author": "Charles the Impaler",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T18:02:... | 1,760,372,114.391764 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/looking-at-how-pyramids-were-built-using-their-casing-stones/ | Looking At How Pyramids Were Built Using Their Casing Stones | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"historical construction",
"pyramid"
] | As one of the most famous Ancient Egyptian pyramids, the Pyramid of Khafre on the plateau of Giza has been a true wonder of the Ancient World ever since its construction around 2570 BCE. Today, well over 4,500 years later, we are still as puzzled as our ancestors over the past hundreds of years how exactly this and other pyramids were constructed. Although many theories exist, including ramps that envelop the entire pyramid, to intricate construction methods from the inside out, the only evidence we have left are these pyramids themselves.
This is where the jokingly called
[History for Granite] channel on YouTube
has now pitched some new ideas, involving the casing stones that used to fully cover the Pyramid of Khafre, prior to widespread theft and vandalism.
Bonding stones within the casing stones on the Pyramid of Khafre. (Credit: History for Granite, YouTube)
Despite the pyramids of Giza in particular being a veritable tourist trap, said tourists are heavily discouraged from climbing onto the pyramids, or even set up high-powered camera gear on tripods near them. Even with drone footage available, it was necessary to get a zoomed-in look on the casing stones that remain on the
pyramid of Khafre
near its top at well over 100 meters. Working within these limitations, it was possible to take detailed photos of three sides of the pyramid, which revealed interesting details.
In the top screenshot from the video the top of the pyramid is visible, which gives some indication of just how much the pyramid may have shifted out of alignment due to earthquakes over the millennia. This turned out to be not significant enough to account for some purported ‘gaps’ between the casing stones, with supposed ‘filler material’ from scaffolding holes explainable as just broken off sections of these casing stones. What was more interesting was that a pattern could be found in so-called bonding stones.
Pattern of bonding stones on the north face of the pyramid of Khafre. (Credit: History for Granite, YouTube)
These bonding stones have a slanted end, so that they can be lifted slightly above a matching slanted stone, before being lowered to complete a row of bricks or stonework. After analyzing the three faces of the still mostly intact casing stones, a clear pattern emerged, such as that on the north face, pictured here.
What this suggests is that each row of casing stones were laid down by multiple groups of workers, each starting at a specific point before coming together where those sections would be joined with a bonding stone. This lends credence to the theory that the pyramid was constructed layer by layer, including the outer covering. To further examine these clues, the even older
Bent Pyramid
at the royal necropolis of Dahshur with mostly intact casing stones will be examined in more detail next.
If anything this series shows just how much there still is that we don’t know about these massive construction projects that are really only preceded by the works of the Sumerian and Akkadian people. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696186",
"author": "Rob Ward",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T06:39:33",
"content": "My bet would be that the limestone covering was carefully made to fit the underlying “rough bricks” and after that the rough hewn outer shape was cleaned up after the pyramid was totally covered.So it wa... | 1,760,372,114.182941 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/an-intel-8008-on-a-single-board-computer/ | An Intel 8008 On A Single-Board Computer | Julian Scheffers | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8008",
"single board computer"
] | The last time we covered [Dr. Scott M. Baker], he made his Heathkit H8 run on a considerably older processor than it was made for. This time, apparently still not satisfied with the number of 8008 computers, he made
an Intel 8008-based single-board computer
.
The Mini-08, as [Scott] calls it, is based on his previous endeavour of
downgrading the Heathkit H8
. Its “CPU board” has even more memory than its predecessor at 128KiB RAM and ROM and an 8251 UART connected to a DB25 serial port. The entirely optional “display board” adds to that 10 digits of 7-segment displays, a backlit Cherry MX Blue hexadecimal keypad, a real-time clock and even a 4-voice sound generator!
[Scott] has also done an impressive job with the software, porting BASIC, FORTH, a clone of Star Trek and some utilities to his Mini-08. He demonstrates both BASIC and FORTH by printing “SCOTT WAS HERE” in a for loop and finishes off by showing how to use some of the display board with FORTH.
Like last time, he published
design files and resources
for you to enjoy. Overall, an interesting spin on the retro single-board computer concept.
Video after the break.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip! | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696161",
"author": "Doug Leppard",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T00:02:25",
"content": "8008 was my first computer wire rapped it from scratch my own design. I learned so much from that computer. It was so slow but worked. Next was the z80. Those the days but never going back.",
"... | 1,760,372,114.227758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/custom-aluminum-monitor-stand-for-the-home-office/ | Custom Aluminum Monitor Stand For The Home Office | Matthew Carlson | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cantilever",
"extruded rail",
"monitor stand"
] | Monitor stands vary wildly in price, from a few cents for a pile of books from a thrift store to hundreds of dollars. One trendy style, as [Steven Bennett] puts it, is the “General Grievous,” with adjustable arms splayed around a central pole. While effective, it is not particularly aesthetically pleasing. [Steven] set out to
make his monitor stand out of extruded aluminum.
[Steven] started with a cantilever design with a VESA adapter and a c-clamp. With some 3D-printed adapter brackets, he could attach them directly to the tracks in the aluminum. Of course, the 3D printed parts, while great for prototyping, might not be the best choice for the loads he was planning on. He sent it off to a fab to get some powder-coated steel parts. After using it for a few months, he revisited the drawing board. Moving away from the cantilever with an offset center post, he switched to a single 1×4 piece of aluminum. This allowed him to create 3D-printed attachments to hold his headphones, flash drives, and cables. A build guide is available online, as well as
printable add-ons.
While it doesn’t have a built-in computer like this
glorious wooden stand,
we can’t deny the utility or the aesthetic of the aluminum version.
Video after the break. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696163",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-11-05T00:11:37",
"content": "under a grand? *cough* *choke* srsly?Thanks. I’ll put up with the scrap of 2×4 screwed to my wall. Bonus: zero desk footprint.And almost a grand left over to spend on a monitor too.",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,372,114.11661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/beaglev-catches-fire/ | BeagleV Catches Fire With The BeagleV-Fire | Richard Baguley | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"beagleboard",
"BeagleBoard.org",
"BeagleV",
"fpga",
"RISC-V"
] | A new BeagleBoard is on the way, full of FPGA hotness: the
BeagleV-Fire
has been announced. The new $150 Single-Board Computer (SBC) from the pioneering open source BeagleBoard company is built around a RISC-V chip that has FPGA features built in. The BeagleV-Fire is built around the snappily named
Microchip PolarFire MPFS025T FCVG484E
, a System on a Chip (SoC) that has five Reduced Instruction Set Coding Version 5 (
RISC-V
) cores and a big chunk of FPGA fabric built in. That means it combines the speed of RISC-V processors with the flexibility of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), a big pile of logic gates that can be reprogrammed.
The new BeagleV-Fire includes a sizeable chunk of FPGA to work with: the core chip includes 23 K logic elements and 68 Math blocks, plus 4 Serializer/Deserializer (SerDer) lanes that can throw about 12.7 Gbps of data into and out of the fabric. On the BeagleV-Fire, the main chip is supported by 16 GB of eMMC and 2 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, plus a micro SD slot for extra storage. Gigabit Ethernet is also included, plus USB-C power and a few serial connections for debugging. There is no WiFi built in, but there is an M.2 Key E connection were you could plug in an a wireless adapter if you need it.
Like most other BeagleBoards, the BeagleV-Fire has two headers with 92 pins, which offer access to pretty much every signal on the board, plus lots of analog to digital stuff that works with add-on boards (BeagleBoard refers to them as capes). Also present is the usual 22-pin CSI connector for attaching cameras and other devices.
Want one? They are available for immediate order on
BeagleBoard.org
or from the usual suspects. It looks like they are already in stock for next-day delivery. If this all sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been posting about this particular board for awhile now, covering both the
announcement
and
first tests
. | 35 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696113",
"author": "willmore",
"timestamp": "2023-11-04T17:28:34",
"content": "The only people this is going to burn are those foolish enough to pay $150 for it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696116",
"author": "M"... | 1,760,372,114.459993 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/supercon-2023-is-on-live/ | Supercon 2023 Is On: Live | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"2023 Hackaday Superconference"
] | Supercon is in full swing! If you weren’t able to join us in person, we’re streaming the main stage and you should absolutely check out the talks as they happen.
The full schedule is here
, and you’ll find all the streams over on our
YouTube channel
. Come join in the fun.
For those of you
are
here with us in Pasadena,
we’ve got a signup form for anyone
who wants to submit a Lightening Talk for Sunday.
Hint: absolutely don’t miss Cory Doctorow’s keynote speech, taking place at 10:00 AM Pacific. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696110",
"author": "Orzel",
"timestamp": "2023-11-04T16:45:49",
"content": "The link “over on our youtube channel” brings me to a login screen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696111",
"author": "Orzel",
"tim... | 1,760,372,115.989278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/saving-apollo-by-decoding-core-rope/ | Saving Apollo By Decoding Core Rope | Jonathan Bennett | [
"History",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"agc",
"Apollo Guidance Computer",
"core memory",
"Core rope memory"
] | One of our favorite retro hardware enthusiasts, [CuriousMarc], is back with the outstanding tale of
preserving Apollo Program software
, and building a core rope reader from scratch to do it. We’ve talked about [Marc]’s
previous efforts to get real Apollo hardware working again
, and one of the by-products of this effort was recovering the contents of the read-only core rope memory modules that were part of that hardware.
The time finally came to hand the now-working Apollo guidance computer back to its owner, which left the team without any hardware to read core rope modules. But the archive of software from the program was still incomplete, and there were more modules to try to recover. So, the wizardly [Mike Stewart] just decided to roll up his sleeves and build his own reader. Which didn’t actually work as expected the first time.
And this leads us into one of [Marc]’s elevator music explainers, where he gives a beautiful rundown on how core rope works. And if you are thinking of core memory based on ferrite cores, get ready for a brain stretch, as core rope is quite a bit different, and is even more complicated to read. Which brings us to the bug in [Mike]’s reader, which is actually a bug in the block II design of the core rope modules.
Reading a byte off the module requires setting multiple inhibit wires to select an individual core. An innovation in block II allowed those inhibit wires to run at half current, but it turns out that didn’t actually work as intended, and partially selected multiple cores on the other half of the module. And [Mike] forget to re-implement that bug — the reader needs to literally be bug-for-bug compatible. A quick recompile of the FPGA code makes everything work again. And the conservation effort can continue. Stay tuned for more in the Apollo story! | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696088",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-11-04T14:52:21",
"content": "I’m speechless. Kudos to them!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6696093",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2023-11-04T15:12:54",
"content":... | 1,760,372,116.538059 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/random-number-generator-is-a-blast-from-the-past/ | Random Number Generator Is A Blast From The Past | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"555",
"linear feedback shift register",
"nixie",
"nixie tube",
"prng",
"rng"
] | Hackers love random numbers, or more accurately, the pursuit of them. It turns out that computers are so good at following our exacting instructions that they are largely incapable of doing anything that would fit the strict definition of randomness — which has lead to some elaborate methods of generating the unexpected.
Admittedly, the
SB42 Random Number Generator
built by [Simon Boak] isn’t exactly something you’d be using for cryptography. The method used to generate the digits, a pair of 555 timers sending pulses through linear-feedback shift registers, would at best be considered pseudo-random. Plus the only way of getting the digits out of the machine is by extracting them from the Nixie tubes with your Mark I Eyeballs. But it absolutely excels at the secondary reason many hackers like to build their own randomness rigs — it looks awesome.
Externally, it absolutely nails the look of a piece of vintage DIY year. Down to the classic white-on-black label tape. But open up the hood, and you’re treated to a real rarity these days: wirewrap construction. In an era where you can get PCBs made and shipped to your door for literally pennies, [Simon] is out there keeping the old ways alive. It doesn’t just look the part either. Unlike most modern projects we see, there isn’t a multi-core microcontroller behind the scenes doing all the work, it’s logic gates all the way down.
This isn’t the first
random-ish number generator that we’ve seen use shift registers
. But if you’re looking for something that might actually pass some randomness checks, and don’t mind working with something a bit spicy, you could check out some of the previous devices we’ve covered that used
radioactive decay as an entropy source
. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695735",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T22:50:47",
"content": "Using a LFSR, with 99 possible states represented by 8 bits, would make the periodicity quite small. It wouldn’t be suitable for Monte Carlo simulations. However this device could maintain form factor and ... | 1,760,372,116.155495 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/pocketable-yagi-antenna-really-shoots-for-distance/ | Pocketable Yagi Antenna Really Shoots For Distance | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"2 meter",
"amateur radio",
"antenna",
"copper foil",
"ham",
"tyvek",
"yagi",
"yagi-uda"
] | For amateur radio operators, the quest for the perfect antenna never seems to end. Perhaps that’s because our requirements are always changing. We never quite seem to get to one design that can do everything.
This copper-foil Yagi antenna
might not do
everything
, but it really seems to tick off the boxes for gain and directionality along with ultra-portability.
If you’ve been following [Ben Eadie (VE6SFX)]’s trip down the rabbit hole of lightweight antenna building, you’ll recall that he’s already knocked off
a J-pole antenna
and
a stealthy mobile slot antenna
using little more than copper foil tape. Both of those designs performed great, but [Ben] had bigger fish to fry: he wanted to build a directional antenna for the 2-meter band and go for distance. The traditional
Yagi-Uda
is generally the preferred design for beam antennas, but they tend to be bulky and cumbersome. But with a roll of copper foil tape [Ben] was able to lay out a three-element Yagi on a sheet of Tyvek wrap. Reinforced with some packing tape and stiffened with a couple of fiberglass rods attached to a 3D printed handle, and it was ready to go.
[Ben]’s field test results were most impressive. Not only was he able to open up repeaters up to 90 km away, but he was getting good signal reports to boot. He was even able to reach a repeater 150 km distant, just barely though. Still, that’s mighty impressive performance from something that looks like a Union Jack and rolls up to fit in a pocket. | 45 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695696",
"author": "andarb",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T18:41:05",
"content": "I was imagining something that unfurls like an umbrella. I guess that’d be the next generation of the concept. Cool work, just not quite as cool as I thought at first.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,372,116.336304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/2000-year-old-charred-manuscripts-reveal-their-secrets/ | 2000-Year Old Charred Manuscripts Reveal Their Secrets | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Misc Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"CT Scan",
"papyrus",
"scroll",
"sroll",
"vesuvius challenge",
"x-ray",
"xray"
] | Imagine trying to read a 2000-year old scroll from an ancient civilization. Now imagine that scroll is rolled up, and in a delicate, charred, carbonized form, having been engulfed by the fiery eruption of a volcano. The task would seem virtually impossible, and the information in the scroll lost forever. Right?|
As it turns out, new developments are changing that. Modern scanning techniques and machine learning tools have
made it possible to read fragments of the heavily-damaged Herculaneum scrolls
. Hopes are now that more of the ancient writings will be salvaged, giving us a new insight into the ancient past.
Library Fire
The Herculaneum scrolls stand as a haunting reminder of the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, which entombed them. For centuries, these scrolls have been deemed “unreadable” due to the damage sustained from the eruption, leaving the wisdom contained within their tightly wound rolls inaccessible to the modern world. The scrolls were part of a library that is the only one to have survived from ancient times.
The bundles of scrolls were quickly carbonized due to the intense heat of volcanic matter from the eruption. Turned into delicate, charred blocks, they were then effectively preserved in this damaged state by the layers of rock that formed around them. They sat silently in their carbonized state, waiting for someone to unlock their secrets, until being discovered in 1752. A variety of methods were attempted over the years to unroll the scrolls and recover the information within. Whether mechanical, chemical, or otherwise, these methods often damaged or destroyed the scrolls entirely.
More recently, attempts have been made to decipher the remaining scrolls via a safer, non-contact method. Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, has been at the forefront of these efforts, involving the use of CT scans to image the scrolls non-destructively, before digitally “unrolling” them to be read. These techniques have been used to great success on other
aged, folded transcripts.
Often, the density of the ink compared to the paper makes it easy to find with a CT scan. Unfortunately, the carbon-based ink used on the Herculaneum scrolls complicated matters, as it does not readily stand out from the carbon-based papyrus itself on a CT scan.
New Methods Bear Fruit
The scrolls weren’t offering any low-hanging fruit, but Seales was undeterred.
In 2019
, a new method using a particle accelerator to X-ray the scrolls at higher resolution was used, with the hope that machine learning methods could identify tiny surface details that indicate the presence of the carbon-based ink on the page. Earlier this year, the techniques started to deliver promising results, with decoding the scrolls now looking more and more like a problem that could be solved with software.
Seales went on to establish the
Vesuvius Challenge
to help decode the scrolls from the scan data. The grand prize stands at $700,000 for the first team to read a scroll by December 31, 2023. To claim it, a team must read at least four separate passages of “continuous and plausible text,” each being at least 140 characters long. The prize has spurred people across the world to try and decode the scrolls using provided CT data. Now, the progress prize has been claimed, with two individuals receiving $40,000 and $10,000 each for decoding multiple letters, and even a whole word.
Machine learning methods revealed a fragment of text buried deep inside one of the scrolls. Credit: YouTube/Univ. of Kentucky Pigman College of Engineering
The breakthrough was made by challenge contestants Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old SpaceX intern, and Youssef Nader, an Egyptian biorobotics graduate student. Each individually discovered the same word in the scrolls, with Farritor being the first to achieve the milestone. The pair revealed the Greek characters πορφύρας, which translates to “purple dye” or “clothes of purple.” These characters are just a small fraction of the multiple characters and lines of text that have been extracted by the duo. Farritor and Nader used machine learning methods to virtually unwrap many layers of papyrus, revealing the ink within X-ray CT scans of the scroll. The results were independently verified by expert papyrologists, who assessed the letter shapes found for validity.
Digitally unrolling the charred scrolls helps to reveal the secrets within. Credit: Vesuvius Challenge
The Vesuvius Challenge was launched as a global competition to read the charred scrolls after Seales and his team demonstrated that an AI program could successfully extract letters and symbols from X-ray images of the unrolled papyri. Thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments were released as part of the challenge, incentivizing global researchers and scholars to build upon the AI technology and expedite the decoding process.
The Vesuvius Challenge has succeeded in its mission to harness the collective intelligence of over a thousand research teams worldwide, all working together to solve a problem that would typically have only a handful of people working on it. The results have been nothing short of remarkable, proving that the seemingly impossible task of reading the Herculaneum scrolls is not so unachievable. It could potentially unlock one of the largest discoveries of written text from the ancient world.
As we look to the future, the race is on to read every unopened papyrus scroll in the collection, with over 600 scrolls still waiting to be decoded. The possibilities are limitless, with the potential to uncover ancient wisdom that has remained hidden for over 2,000 years. The Vesuvius Challenge has paved the way for a new era in the field of digital restoration, providing a blueprint for how we can use modern technology to unlock the secrets of the past and learn from the wisdom of ancient civilizations. As Seales aptly puts it, “Overcoming damage incurred during a 2,000-year span is no small challenge. But that’s what researchers do — together, we conquer the seemingly impossible.” | 38 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695676",
"author": "YoDrTentacles",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T17:07:25",
"content": "Utterly fascinating. This reminds me of those lost Picasso paintings that they found existing as other parts of his work after X-raying them, whether it was reusing canvas or whatever.The only conce... | 1,760,372,116.494853 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/the-best-sounding-walnut-youll-hear-today/ | The Best-Sounding Walnut You’ll Hear Today | Kristina Panos | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth speaker",
"dead bug",
"dead bug construction",
"walnut"
] | Do you ever find yourself eating walnuts and think, this would make a great enclosure for something like a Bluetooth speaker? That seems to be exactly what happened to [Penguin DIY].
In the
mesmerizing video after the break
, you’ll see [Penguin DIY] do what seems to be impossible. They start with a tiny 5 V power bank module which is still not small enough to fit, so they remove all the components and dead-bug them back together.
This is really just the beginning. There of course has to be a female USB of some type, so [Penguin DIY] Dremels out the perfect little slot for it.
They did manage to stack and fit a MH-MH18 Bluetooth audio module and an HXJ8002 mini audio amplifier module in the walnut, but of course, it took a lot of fiddly wiring to extend the LEDs and wire them up.
Then in the
other
half of the shell went the 4Ω 2 W mini speaker. [Penguin DIY] of course drilled a ton of little holes in the shell for the sound to come through. Also on this side are three tiny switches for play/pause and previous and next track, and the latter two can be long pressed to control the volume. Definitely check this out after the break.
Do the notifications of your Bluetooth speaker annoy you?
There’s a hack for that
.
Thanks for the tip, [Hyperific]! | 17 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695663",
"author": "Tidy Hobo",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T15:35:04",
"content": "I bet the sound is nuts!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6695664",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T16:13:25",
"conten... | 1,760,372,116.091997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/homebrew-tem-cell-lets-you-emc-test-your-own-devices/ | Homebrew TEM Cell Lets You EMC Test Your Own Devices | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"copper",
"electromagnetic compatibility",
"emc",
"fr4",
"impedance",
"line impedance stabilization network",
"LISN",
"spactrum analyzer",
"TEM",
"testing",
"transvere electromagnetic cell"
] | Submitting a new device for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing seems a little like showing up for the final exam after skipping all the lectures. You might get lucky and pass, but it really would have been smarter to take a few of the quizzes to see how things were going during the semester. Similarly, it would be nice to know you’re not making any boneheaded mistakes early in the design process, which is what
this DIY TEM cell
is all about.
We really like [Petteri Aimonen]’s explanation of what a TEM cell, or transverse electromagnetic cell, is: he describes it as “an expanded coaxial cable that is wide enough to put your device
inside of
.” It basically a cage made of conductive material that encloses a space for the device under test, along with a stripline going down its center. The outer cage is attached to the outer braid of a coaxial cable, while the stripline is connected to the center conductor. Any electric or magnetic field generated by the device inside the cage goes down the coax into your test instrument, typically a spectrum analyzer.
[Petteri]’s homebrew TEM is made from a common enough material: copper-clad FR4. You could use double-sided material, or even sheet copper if you’re rich, but PCB stock is easy to work with and gets the job done. His design is detailed in
a second post
, which goes through the process of designing the size and shapes of all the parts as well as CNC milling the sheets of material. [Petteri] tried to make the joints by milling part-way through the substrate and bending the sheet into shape, but sadly, the copper didn’t want to cooperate with his PCB origami. Luckily, copper foil tape and a little solder heal all wounds. He also incorporated
a line impedance stabilization network
(LISN) into the build to provide a consistent 50-ohm characteristic impedance.
How does it work? Pretty well, it seems; when connected to a
TinySA
spectrum analyzer, [Petteri] was able to find high-frequency conductive noise coming from the flyback section of a switch-mode power supply. All it took was a ferrite bead and cap to fix it early in the prototyping phase of the project. Sounds like a win to us. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695617",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T12:03:52",
"content": "I’ve been through this a few times and helped our hardware engineers (mainly by driving engineering versions of software, but also, with some radio knowledge).What would be interesting is whether the TEM cel... | 1,760,372,116.040835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/a-network-adapter-thinks-its-a-cd-rom-restore-its-true-calling/ | A Network Adapter Thinks It’s A CD-ROM. Restore Its True Calling! | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"network card",
"usb",
"USB mode"
] | A mildly annoying trend over recent years has been for USB hardware devices to expose a CD-ROM drive containing their drivers for Windows users. Of course there’s no real CD in there, instead the software lives on a piece of flash memory. It’s usually not a problem as they also appear on the USB bus as their true calling, but not always.
[Martijn Braam] found himself the lucky owner of
a USB network adapter which seemed to see its only purpose in life to be such a drive
, and since he wasn’t anxious to make another piece of e-waste, he broke it open to see if the fake CD drive could be disabled.
Inside the flimsy case he found a CoreChips SR9700 Ethernet controller, a chip for which there seems to be very little data in the wild. On the underside of the PCB was a flash chip, and as expected disabling this caused the CD drive to disappear to be replaced by the expected network card.
It’s a simple but useful hack, but there’s a little bonus for those unaware in the write-up. There’s a piece of software called
USB_modeswitch
that can perform this task on many cards, which is worth storing away in the event that it’s needed. | 32 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695555",
"author": "Carl Foxmarten",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T08:30:12",
"content": "If you’re using Linux, I’d recommend trying “usb_modeswitch”. This is a common tactic for USB WiFi adapters (which I found out the hard way) to include their Windows (and rubbish Linux) drivers wit... | 1,760,372,116.412704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/toy-gaming-controller-makes-the-big-leagues/ | Toy Gaming Controller Makes The Big Leagues | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"controller",
"ESP32",
"game controller",
"internet of things",
"IoT",
"mqtt",
"peripherial",
"toy",
"wemos d1 mini"
] | Some of the off-brand video game consoles and even accessories for the major brands can leave a lot to be desired. Whether it’s poor build quality or a general lack of support or updates, there are quite a few things on the market not worth anyone’s time or money. [Jonathan] was recently handed just such a peripheral, a toy game controller originally meant for a small child, but upon further inspection it
turned into a surprisingly hackable platform
, capable of plenty of IoT-type tasks.
The controller itself was easily disassembled, and the functional buttons within were wired to a Wemos D1 Mini instead of the originally-planned ESP32 because of some wiring irregularities and the fact that the Wemos D1 Mini having the required amount of I/O. It’s still small enough to be sealed back inside the controller as well, powered by the batteries that would have powered the original controller.
For the software, [Jonathan] is using MQTT to register button presses with everything easily accessible over Wi-Fi, also making it possible to update the software wirelessly. He was able to use it to do a few things as proof-of-concept, including playing a game in PyGame and controlling a Sonos speaker, but for now he’s using it to control an LED sculpture. With something this easily modified, though, it would be pretty straightforward to use it instead for
a home automation remote control
, especially since it is already set up to use MQTT. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695656",
"author": "Baird Bankovic",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T15:00:07",
"content": "Always cool to see up-cycling of kids toys!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6695678",
"author": "Rush",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T17:08... | 1,760,372,116.241616 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/this-week-in-security-cvss-4-oauth-and-activemq/ | This Week In Security: CVSS 4, OAuth, And ActiveMQ | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ActiveMQ",
"CVSS",
"oauth"
] | We’ve talked a few times here about the issues with the CVSS system. We’ve seen CVE farming, where a moderate issue, or even a non-issue, gets assigned a ridiculously high CVSS score. There are times a minor problem in a library is a major problem in certain use cases, and not an issue at all in others. And with some of those issues in mind,
let’s take a look at the fourth version of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System
.
One of the first tweaks to cover is the de-emphasis of the base score. Version 3.1 did have optional metrics that were intended to temper the base score, but this revision has beefed that idea up with Threat Metrics, Environmental Metrics, and Supplemental Metrics. These are an attempt to measure how likely it is that an exploit will actually be used. The various combinations have been given names. Where CVSS-B is just the base metric, CVSS-BT is the base and threat scores together. CVSS-BE is the mix of base and environmental metrics, and CVSS-BTE is the combination of all three.
Another new feature is multiple scores for a given vulnerability. A problem in a library is first considered in a worst-case scenario, and the initial base score is published with those caveats made clear. And then for each downstream program that uses that library, a new base score should be calculated to reflect the reality of that case.
The last thing to mention is the extra granularity now baked into the scoring. We have the addition of “Attack Requirements”, which reflects whether the given vulnerability depends on other factors for exploitability. And similarly, the User Interaction metric is now a tri-state, set to none, passive, or active. Though I might have chosen “reasonable” and “bonehead” instead.
So far, industry response seems to be cautiously optimistic. This won’t solve every problem, but it should help. Hopefully we’ll see fewer vulnerabilities with dubious 10.0 scores, and a bit more nuance in hos CVSS is reported.
OAuth is Hard
Last week we mentioned an OAuth problem when a particular site had an open redirect. This week we’ll talk about another potential problem —
OAuth without access token validation
. And for the record, this Salt Security write-up is also an excellent explainer on OAuth.
So first off, OAuth is a authorization scheme. A user clicks a button on a given site to link with the user’s Facebook account. That site will open a Facebook link in a new window, with a redirect value and client ID specified as URL parameters. If it’s a new connection, Facebook spells out what information is being shared with the requesting site. If the user agrees, Facebook redirects that window to the value specified in the first URL, and appends an OAuth token to the new URL. The remote site then makes a new request to Facebook, asking for the user information, specifying the token. Facebook recognizes the token, and returns the requested information.
This scheme was designed for authorization, not authentication. The important difference is that authentication is proving who the user is, but authorization is securely allowing a site access to something. This isn’t to say that OAuth can’t be used for authentication — OpenID is based on OAuth after all. The point is that extra care has to be taken to make this authorization scheme secure for authentication.
One of the extra steps that must be taken for proper authentication is token validation. In the case of Facebook, that’s a separate API call to verify that this token was generated for the App ID where it is being used. Without that step, there’s nothing to prevent an OAuth token from one service from being reused on another service. The attack here is that if someone uses a Log in with Facebook button on a malicious site, the access token can be re-used on other sites where the user has accounts.
That’s not just theoretical, as the Salt researchers found this very problem in the wild at Vidio.com, Bukalapak.com, and Grammarly. The Grammarly flaw was particularly clever, as that site uses OAuth codes instead of tokens. But it turns out an attacker could simply include a token instead, and it worked. These issues have been privately reported and fixed on all three sites.
ActiveMQ Actively Targeted
Apache’s ActiveMQ has a really nasty issue, CVE-2023-46604, and
it’s being used in active ransomware attacks already
. This CVSS 10 is probably going to rate a score of 10 even on the kinder, more nuanced CVSS 4 scale. This is a Remote Code Exploit (RCE) that’s trivial to attack, vulnerable with default settinge, requires no authentication or privileges, and targets OpenWire, which is the default transport protocol in ActiveMQ.
It’s
another deserialization flaw
, in Java this time. An OpenWire packet with the
EXCEPTION_RESPONSE
type can override the
createThrowable
method with another class, and set the string parameter to that class. That opens a wide range of possibilities, but the public Proof of Concept calls a Spring configuration class, and passes an HTTP URL pointing to an attacker-controlled XML config file.
There are still over three thousand of these services accessible over the internet. That’s down from just over seven thousand on October 30th. So that’s progress. If your unpatched machine is among them, just consider it compromised and act accordingly.
Bits and Bytes
For some much-needed good news,
the Mozi botnet is dead
. An update to this bit of stubborn IoT malware was pushed out methodically, starting in August, deploying to India first, then China. That update was a go dormant command, and it looks like an intentional shuttering of the botnet. It’s unclear if the botnet’s masterminds just decided they were done, or if
the $5 wrench decryption method was deployed
.
The
phpFox web application had a PHP deserialization flaw
, where user input wasn’t properly sanitized before being fed into the
unserialize()
function. This flaw could lead to arbitrary PHP execution, and was fixed in release 4.8.14, after some waffling by the phpFox developers. We’re inclined to give developers a bit of grace on stories like these, so long as the flaw does get fixed in reasonable time. After all, a security report might be a legitamate RCE, and it might just be someone who found the Chrome DevTools for the first time.
You may use link shorteners to share documents and pictures, or to track how well an advertisement campaign is going. Scammers and other malicious actors have other ideas, like using link shorteners to make phishing links look more legitimate. But that’s against the Bit.ly terms of service. And so,
there’s a shadowy enterprise that apparently makes money selling bulletproof link shortening services to cyber criminals
. Because of course there is. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695913",
"author": "bemusedHorseman",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T16:44:12",
"content": ">wrench decryption methodI’m partial to “Lead Pipe Legilimency”, myself. Either way, it’s great to see another botnet invoking __AvadaKedavra(self);, for once.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,116.200211 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/machine-teaches-morse-code/ | Machine Teaches Morse Code | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"instructograph",
"morse code",
"paper tape"
] | If you are a ham radio operator of a certain age, you probably remember ads for “The Instructograph,” a mechanical device for learning Morse code. [Our Own Devices] has
an ancient specimen of the machine
and shows us how it works in the video below. The machine is a model of simplicity. You wind up a spring-driven motor like you would for an old record player or music box. A slider sets the playback rate, and paper tape starts to spin.
The paper tape looks like computer tape, but since it only has literal long and short notches, it has two distinct sides. When you learned one set of messages, you could flip the tape over and get more practice that way. How did the machine read the paper tape? With a mechanical contact. Literally, if the paper had a hole in it, you made the circuit. If it didn’t, the circuit was broken. A buzzer and batteries or some other kind of sounder was all you needed.
The company was in business for 50 years. The newer versions had more electronics, but they always used the paper tape mechanism to store the code practice sessions. A 1962 ad noted that the machine could play back the tapes from three words a minute up to 40. You could buy or rent the machine, and we always assumed it was pretty pricey for its day. Around 1965, a new unit would cost $53 but did not include a headset or a key. So that was actually more reasonable than we expected. In 1965, a brand-name clock radio cost about $50, so it wasn’t any more than that.
Everyone has their own
favorite method for learning code
, especially [Ludwig Koch]. At least you
don’t have to learn Alex-style
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695912",
"author": "SteveS",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T16:41:00",
"content": "In this format the tape also has the advantage of being easily readable (and writable) by eye, which was probably a nice feature.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"co... | 1,760,372,116.650291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/partial-relay-based-calculator-puts-the-click-where-it-counts/ | Partial Relay-Based Calculator Puts The Click Where It Counts | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"ALU",
"and",
"boolean",
"calculator",
"logic",
"nor",
"OR",
"relay"
] | It looks like [Michal Zalewski] is raising the next generation the right way. First, his eldest son asks for help building a one-bit computer from discrete transistors. Not to be left behind, his little brother then asked for help with an even more retro project, which resulted in
this partially relay-based calculator
. Maybe there is some hope for the future.
Now, purists will no doubt notice the ATmega64 microcontroller sitting in the middle of the main PCB on this project and cry “Foul!” But perfect is the enemy of done, and as [Michal] explains, at $6 a pop for the Omron relays he and his son chose, there’s only so far you can go with relay logic before you’re taking out a second mortgage. So the relays are limited to the ALU of the calculator, along with the drivers for the six seven-segment LED displays. The microcontroller is just there for housekeeping functions like scanning the keyboard and decoding digits. All the actual calculations are in the relay logic, not silicon. And we’d be remiss not to praise his son’s stylistic choices for this design — that it uses relays with clear covers, and that it has
single-sided
PCBs with curvy,
hand-drawn traces
traces that look hand-drawn on old-school yellow substrate. [Michal]’s heart must swell with pride to have fathered someone with such exquisite taste.
For his part, [Mikal] did some really good documentation for this build, including excellent descriptions of Boolean math with half- and full-adders and how relays are used to create the basic logic gates that comprise them. The calculator itself is still a work in progress, with microcontroller code still in development, but it’s working enough that you can enjoy the display driver’s clickiness in the video below. If that doesn’t do it for you, we’ve got
other relay calculators
to scratch that click itch. | 15 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695848",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T13:00:07",
"content": "gorgeous. the design and implementation is fantastic. even without knowing anything about it, you can practically see where information is coming from and to where it flows. You don’t even have to know what... | 1,760,372,116.704142 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/robot-sunflower-follows-the-sun/ | Robot Sunflower Follows The Sun | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"servo",
"sun tracker",
"sunflower"
] | Real flowers do it, and even the Beatles did it. [Robo Hub] now has a
plastic sunflower that tracks the sun
using, of course, an Arduino. It may not qualify as a real robot, but it does mimic a real sunflower. The electronics aren’t earth-shattering, of course. An Arduino, a light sensor, and a servo motor are all you really need. But we enjoyed the whimsy and the artistic sensibility. This would be a great school project, for example. Interesting enough to get kids interested but not so hard as to be undoable. You can see a video of the ersatz flower below.
There are actually a pair of light sensors, as you might expect. That way you can determine which sensor is getting the most light. Obviously, these can’t be on-off sensors. They are, in fact, light-dependent resistors, so you get a nice analog reading.
Of course, you might not need an Arduino for this. A 555 driving a servo and a handful of discrete components could measure a bridge with the photoresistors and get the same effect. On the other hand, a microcontroller these days is inexpensive and versatile, so why not?
Usually, people tracking the sun are
trying to get more energy
. That doesn’t have to be
any more complicated
, though. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695825",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T10:53:56",
"content": "Challenge: implement this with 555 timers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6695855",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T13:18... | 1,760,372,116.752002 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/pour-one-out-for-this-bottle-playing-robot/ | Pour One Out For This Bottle-Playing Robot | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"midi",
"solenoid",
"wine bottle"
] | If you have an iota of musicality, you’ve no doubt noticed that you can play music using glass bottles, especially if you have several of different sizes and fill them with varying levels of water. But what if you wanted to accompany yourself on the bottles? Well, then you’d need to
build a bottle-playing robot
.
First, [Jens Maker Adventures] wrote a song and condensed it down to eight notes. With a whole lot of tinkling with a butter knife against their collection of wine and other bottles, [Jens] was able to figure out the lowest note for a given bottle by filing it with water, and the highest note by emptying it out.
With the bottle notes selected, the original plan was to strike the bottles with sticks. As it turned out, 9g servos weren’t up to the task, so he went with solenoids instead. Using
Boxes.py
, he was able to parameterize a just-right bottle holder to allow for arranging the bottles in a circle and striking them from the inside, all while hiding the Arduino and the solenoid driver board. Be sure to check it out after the break.
Don’t have a bunch of bottles lying around?
You can use an Arduino to play the glasses
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695934",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T18:44:55",
"content": "Glad you knew servos wouldn’t work. The solenoids are being used backwards, maybe the first type used were pull only but these can strike when pulsed. Though these may not move past energized state to s... | 1,760,372,117.350027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/proposed-european-electronic-id-law-raises-concerns/ | Proposed European Electronic ID Law Raises Concerns | Jenny List | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"eIDAS",
"eu",
"root certificate"
] | The harmonisation of standards for electronic identification across the EU should normally be soporific enough to send even the most Club-Mate-hyped hacker straight to sleep, but
as Computer Weekly reports
, discussion of this reform in the EU corridors of power has caused significant unrest among cyber security experts. Just how can providing Europeans with a harmonised digital ID be so controversial? As you might imagine, the devil lies in the detail.
At issue is
the eIDAS Regulation
, a system which, in the words of its website: “
ensures that people and businesses can use their own national electronic identification schemes (eIDs) to access public services available online in other EU countries
,” and “
creates a European internal market for trust services by ensuring that they will work across borders and have the same legal status as their traditional paper-based equivalents
,” and the point of concern lies with its application to websites. The EU want to ensure that Europeans can digitally verify businesses as well as individuals they deal with, and since that includes websites, they want to insert a provision allowing countries to mandate their own trusted root certificates. At a stroke, this opens the potential for state actors to snoop on all encrypted online traffic, something which would compromise the security of all.
Sadly for Europeans,
this isn’t the only questionable online regulation effort from that region
.
Thanks [Joyce Ng] for the tip. | 39 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695769",
"author": "Kevin",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T02:38:28",
"content": "How , technically, does controlling the trusted certs open “the potential for state actors to snoop on all encrypted online traffic”? And if it really does, a bunch of private companies already have this po... | 1,760,372,117.298264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/02/the-avon-computer-goth-challenge/ | The Avon Computer Goth Challenge | Bil Herd | [
"computer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"Avon",
"jeri ellsworth",
"LGR",
"mydrunksiblings",
"Taylor and Amy",
"tiltfive",
"VCF Midwest",
"Veronica Explains"
] | Hot off the heels of their musical debut
6502 song
the good folk at the
Taylor and Amy Show
are at it again. This time instead of assaulting our auditory senses, they play with our perception of color all while keeping the spirit of retro computing alive.
To back up a bit, I had the pleasure of witnessing the discovery of the Avon Beauty Vision Computer while at the
Vintage Computer Festival Mid-West
(VCFMW) this past September. We had visited the home of our friend [Jim W] from VCFMW who nonchalantly pulled down from the shelf the reddest computer I have ever seen.
A crowd quickly gathered at this newfound treat, designed and built before the invention of the Blue LED, was fallen upon and the process of prying out its secrets began. I was not privy to the negotiations, but I did notice a brightly colored red suitcase being exfiltrated by highly trained operatives later that night.
The next day several of the outdoor tables at said VCF Midwest event were relegated to the effort to breathe life into the aging T1000
Cyberdyne
Toshiba system that ultimately powered the Avon Beauty Vision Computer (ABVC). The ABVC was created to provide personalized makeup suggestions to users based on their skin tone as measured by some sort of large optical gun. “Combining facial analysis with Avon’s beauty database, it offered tailored recommendations” …in theory. More about the Avon computer can be seen in
LGR’s video
.
It was a long day of repair ups and downs; success, followed by failure, followed by success, with almost no mistakes made. People stopped by to offer opinions and prayer throughout the day until finally [Taylor] proclaimed “It’s ALIVE”. She was wrong but it was still an impressive moment. Later it really did work, but we weren’t falling for that again.
As seen on
their video
[Taylor and Amy] found the existing software and its results to be… wanting. A bright Disco Green was in their future as recommendations for both women consisted of a subtle palette of mostly refined taste… for the 1980s.
Cleary the outdated software needed to be updated. A Brownian Motion Generator was consulted and it was decided that the color palettes should be Gothified. Look it up, it means “to make Gothy”.
What’s amazing is the effort that went into Gothifying the firmware, as I am told that [Jeri Ellsworth and Amy] from
@TiltFive
, but mostly [Amy], stayed up late editing raw hex code so that the printout was real. This was a great touch as I would imagine they had to come up with words that fit the sizes of the existing words such as “Violent Violet”. As a hardware engineer I would have just preprinted the paper rather than do the actual work, but not this crowd.
What was needed was field testing which resulted in the
Goth Makeup Palette Challenge
where some of us would submit to the mostly painless process of having our palates determined.
I was in the blast zone when the challenge was decreed and gladly accepted the opportunity to dawn long locks of hair in a futile attempt to recapture my Bad Boy period of the 1980s.
Bil Herd in the Avon Goth Palate Challenge
The blast zone of those affected included old friends such as [Ken] from
@CanadianRetroThings
, [Robin] from
@8_Bit
, and [Evie] from
@EviesRevue
, as well as new friends [Veronica] from
@VeronicaExplains
who also shows us
her trip to the VCF MW
. I had looked forward to meeting [AJ] and [Tim] from
@mydrunksibling
but apparently and unfortunately, [Tim]
did not survive the filming of the insert
.
As you might be able to tell, attending a
Vintage Computer Festival
is not just about cool electronics, but also about the people that you meet and the friends that you make. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695743",
"author": "AlyssonR",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T23:36:46",
"content": "I remember being subjected to the indignity of one of those machines.It wanted me to wear blues and golds. For the first and only time I was ever thankful for having allergies, I was able to honestly cry... | 1,760,372,117.487469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/raspberry-pi-os-in-place-upgrades-not-for-the-faint-hearted/ | Raspberry Pi OS In-Place Upgrades, Not For The Faint Hearted | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"debian",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi OS",
"Raspbian"
] | The Raspberry Pi series of boards are noted for their good software support, with a continuous flow of operating system upgrades such that an original Pi from 2012 will still boot the latest Pi OS. But these upgrades are best done by writing a fresh SD card, so oddly, the Pi remains surprisingly difficult in many cases to upgrade in place. [Iustin Pop] has taken a look at the problem, and finds that though it’s not always easy
it remains possible with a bit or work
.
An upgrade in place of a Raspberry Pi OS install that’s running on a headless device is probably the simplest of the lot, with a relatively small set of issues. Do it on a machine using the GUI though, and the switch from x.org to Wayland makes for a whole world of pain.
Perhaps most interesting for the insight it gives us into the way Raspberry Pi OS is derived from Debian, is the crossgrade process from the ARMhf build for earlier machines to the ARM64 one for the more recent ones. Here aside from a headache of differing paths and versions, he encounters the Pi-specific compilation tweaks put in place by the developers of Raspberry Pi OS, leading to the ARMhf version being a different branch from the original Debian than the ARM64 one.
Having read his examination of in-place upgrades we have to say that simply writing a new SD card remains the most attractive option. But sometimes along comes a remote system where that’s simply not possible, and this guide might just be very useful sometime. | 33 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695531",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T03:46:11",
"content": "I’ve run Debian on my home machines for almost two decades now, and Raspbian / Raspberry Pi OS for about a decade.I found, fairly early on, that while upgrading Debian from one major release to the next is t... | 1,760,372,117.105063 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/2023-halloween-hackfest-spooky-noise-maker-is-self-contained/ | 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Spooky Noise Maker Is Self-Contained | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"2023 Halloween Hack Fest",
"halloween",
"raspberry pi"
] | We just love it when y’all build off of each other’s projects.
This spooky Halloween noise maker
from [C.M. Herron] is no exception. But while the projects we’ve seen lately rely on external computers and/or guitar pedals to create the effects part of the build, this one has everything running on a Raspberry Pi that sits inside the box.
Readers of a certain vintage will recognize this as an 8-track storage box, on top of which are several noise-making objects that creak and ting and reverberate nicely. A USB microphone picks up the sounds, and by using a regular microphone instead of a piezo, [C.M.] can introduce varying levels of feedback to make the sounds even spookier.
So, how did [C.M.] make this work on a Pi 4? To put it simply, they’ve got the Reaper DAW and Windows Valhalla plugins running on top of WINE, which running on top of Box64, which is running on top of the Bullseye Pi OS. [C.M.] sure learned a lot from this build, and hopes to inspire others to build their own spooky noise boxen. Plus, they’ve already thought of ways to improve it for next year. Be sure to check it out in action after the break. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695515",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T00:37:40",
"content": "So why is the screwdriver 🪛 on top of the box?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6695939",
"author": "CMH62",
... | 1,760,372,117.434799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/this-oshw-trackball-is-ready-to-be-customized/ | This OSHW Trackball Is Ready To Be Customized | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"input device",
"oshw",
"Ploopy",
"trackball"
] | Oh sure, Amazon can deliver any number of Logitech peripherals to your door in 48 hours, but where’s the fun in that? With open source hardware (OSHW) input devices like the
Ploopy Adept Trackball
, you not only get to say you built the thing yourself, but there’s also an opportunity to tune the gadget to your exacting specifications — even if that just means packing it full of RGB LEDs.
The trackball is powered by the Raspberry Pi Pico running QMK, features a high-accuracy PMW3360 sensor that can be found in commercial gaming mice, and uses a snooker ball for the business end. All the hardware is wrapped up in a 3D printed enclosure, and thanks to the VIA project, configuring the device can be done right in the browser
through a web app
.
Like the other devices
in the (somewhat unfortunately named) Ploopy family, all of the design files for the Adept Trackball are released under the CERN license, which combined with the project’s fantastic documentation means you’ve got everything you need to build it from scratch. There are official parts kits if you don’t want to source or print all the components yourself, but as of this writing, the
Ploopy Shop
will only let you preorder them. | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695458",
"author": "Animal717",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T20:33:17",
"content": "track ball is the only way to go.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6695586",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2023-11-02T09:05:43",... | 1,760,372,117.555365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/digital-photography-comes-to-the-apple-ii/ | Digital Photography Comes To The Apple II | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Apple 2",
"Apple QuickTake",
"quicktake"
] | Back in the very early days of consumer digital photography, one of the first stars of the new medium came from Apple. The QuickTake 100 used a novel flat form factor and at its highest resolution could only shoot 640×480 images, but at the time it was a genuine object of desire. It came in Windows and Apple versions, and to use the Apple variant required a Mac of the day with appropriate software.
The interface was an Apple serial connector though, so it was quite reasonable for [Colin Leroy-Mira] to wonder whether it could work with Apple’s 8-bit machines. The result is
QuickTake for the Apple IIc
, the product that perhaps Apple should have brought us in an alternative 1994.
Fortunately the protocol has already been reverse engineered and forms part of the
dcraw
package, however the process of extracting the code wasn’t easy. The full resolution and colour of the original pictures has to be sacrificed, and of course once the custom serial cable has been made it’s a painfully slow process transferring the pictures. But to get anything running in this way on such elderly hardware which was never intended to perform this task is an extremely impressive feat. We would have given anything for this, back in the 8-bit days.
If you have a QuickTake and want to use a more modern machine,
we’ve got you covered there
, too. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695440",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T19:12:22",
"content": "QuickTake 100 was released 1994, it sems.By that time, 640×480 was full VGA/NTSC resolution and nothing to be ashamed about. For comparison, CD-i/Video CD players used less than that, too.Okay, Kodak Photo... | 1,760,372,117.392382 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/fancy-gyroscopes-are-key-to-radio-free-navigation/ | Fancy Gyroscopes Are Key To Radio-Free Navigation | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Misc Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"dead reckoning",
"gyroscope",
"IMU",
"inertial navigation",
"ins",
"navigation"
] | Back in the old days, finding out your location on Earth was a pretty involved endeavor. You had to look at stars, use fancy gimballed equipment to track your motion, or simply be able to track your steps really really well. Eventually, GPS would come along and make all that a bit redundant for a lot of use cases. That was all well and good, until it started getting jammed all over the place to frustrate militaries using super-accurate satellite-guided weapons.
Today, there’s a great desire for more accurate navigational methods that don’t require outside communications that can easily be jammed. High-tech gyroscopes have long been a big part of that effort, allowing the construction of inertial navigation systems with greater accuracy than ever before.
Why Inertial Measurement?
The fact is that GPS and other satellite navigation systems can no longer be relied upon in contested battlefields, and even in peaceful areas at times. The technology to jam or spoof these navigational systems is now readily accessible, to both state actors and even the well-resourced individual.
Thus, there is a great desire for navigational systems that are impervious to jamming. An inertial navigation system (INS) is just that. The concept is simple. From a known starting position, an INS measures acceleration and rotation of a given vehicle or projectile. From these measurements, it’s possible to calculate position, orientation, and velocity over time via dead reckoning. In a simplistic example, if you start at your house, quickly accelerate to 2 meters per second, and run in a straight line for a certain length of time, you could determine your position relatively easily. An INS does exactly that, but in three dimensions, and really really accurately.
The problem with the dead reckoning approach is that errors are cumulative. If you get your speed measurement slightly wrong, for example, your estimated current position will rapidly become more inaccurate over time.
Thus, better measurements create a far more accurate fix that’s usable for longer without needing to check in with an external reference like GPS. Hence the interest in high-performance gyroscopes that can measure more accurately with less drift over time. The latest technologies eschew the spinning rotors and fancy mechanical contrivances of the past for altogether wilder approaches.
Ring Laser Gyroscopes
A ring laser gyroscope produced by the Arsenal factory in Ukraine. Credit:
Nockson, CC-BY-SA 3.0
Ring laser gyros, or RLGs, use a closed ring of light to measure angular acceleration. At the heart of the RLG is a triangular or square-shaped optical path, formed by mirrors that allow light to travel in a closed loop. Within this loop, two beams of light, typically from a single laser source, travel in opposite directions. Under stationary conditions, both beams of light take an equal amount of time to complete a loop, resulting in no observable phase difference between them.
However, things change when the gyroscope experiences rotation, thanks to the
Sagnac effect
. When the RLG is subjected to rotation, the path length for the beam of light traveling in the direction of rotation effectively becomes longer. In turn, the path for the opposite beam becomes shorter. This difference in path lengths causes the two beams to experience a shift in their relative phase. As the beams complete their paths and reconverge, they interfere with each other. The phase difference manifests as an interference pattern. By measuring this pattern, one can calculate the angular velocity experienced by the gyro.
It’s worth noting that RLGs are remarkably sensitive, capable of detecting minute changes in angular velocity. This sensitivity arises from the fact that light travels at an incredibly high speed, and even small rotational motions can induce detectable phase shifts in the light beams. Moreover, the solid-state nature of RLGs, devoid of moving mechanical components, grants them a robustness that is especially valuable in applications where durability and reliability are paramount. From aviation to satellite navigation, RLGs have found their niche, ensuring precise rotational measurements even in the most demanding environments.
RLGs can be a little fussy though, particularly when it comes to detecting low rates of rotation. At these levels, the two laser beams moving in opposite directions can “lock-in” to each other, hiding any phase difference. To avoid this from happening, RLGs are often subject to “forced dithering”, where the laser cavity is actually rapidly rotated back and forth, usually around 400 Hz. This keeps the system’s angular velocity outside of the lock-in range. To avoid lock-in occurring at the extremes of motion, where the gyro is changing direction, white noise is often introduced into the 400Hz rotations.
RLG-based navigation systems have become popular in commercial aviation as well as in military contexts. Typical accuracy can be on the order of
one nautical mile of error per hour of operation
. Larger systems, or systems that stack up additional gyros to compare measurements can improve performance further.
Fiber-Laser Gyroscopes
A fiber-optic gyroscope, or FOG, works using the Sagnac effect, just like a ring-laser gyro. However, instead of a using a small rigid cavity as in a ring laser gyro , a long length of looped fiber-optic cable is used as the cavity. Two beams from the same laser are injected into the fiber in opposite directions. Their interference pattern, as impacted by the rotation of the gyro assembly, is then measured in the same way as the ring laser gyroscope.
The benefit of the FOG is that the impact of the Sagnac effect is effectively increased by a multiple of the number of loops of fiber optic cable. This is because the laser’s path is much longer, by virtue of passing through a long coiled-up fiber optic cable. The longer path length means the path difference is also greater between the two interfering beams, giving the device a greater potential resolution.
Thanks to the capability to pack a very long laser cavity into a compact space, practical fiber-optic gyroscopes can be built with excellent performance in a compact space. Large marine examples tuned for optimum performance can offer accuracy
on the order of 1 nautical mile over 360 hours of operation.
Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscopes
A cutaway showing the mushroom-shaped resonator inside an HRG. Credit:
Sagem, CC BY 4.0
Hemispherical resonator gyroscopes
, or HRGs, use mechanical resonance as the basis of their operation. They offer benefits over traditional mechanical gyros, as well as laser types, in that they have drastically reduced
Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP)
requirements. They make it possible to create highly accurate intertial navigation systems in compact, portable packages.
At the core of the HRG is a thin, hemispherical shell, typically crafted from quartz. This shell is anchored at its base and can resonate, or vibrate, in a specific mode when appropriately excited. Just as a wine glass produces a distinctive tone when flicked, the hemispherical shell of the HRG resonates at a particular frequency when driven by external actuators.
The shell must be delicately tuned for peak performance via techniques like ion beam erosion or laser ablation, much in the same way that quartz radio crystals are tuned to a specific frequency. The resonator is then coated with an ultra-thin metallic film. To initiate the resonance, electrostatic actuators are strategically placed in the vicinity of the resonator. Some designs use a hemispherical electrode within the hemispherical resonator, but more compact and cheaper designs can be achieved with simpler flat electrodes located on the equatorial plane of the resonator. Once activated, these actuators cause the hemispherical shell to vibrate in its resonant mode.
A comparison of HRG technology versus MEMS from Safran, one of only three HRG manufacturers in the world. Credit:
Safran via ResearchGate
Now, when the HRG experiences an angular motion, the Coriolis force comes into play. As the HRG itself rotates, the pattern of the vibration rotates too, but not by as much. The shifted vibration pattern can be picked up by the gyro’s electrostatic sensors, which convert them back into electrical signals. By analyzing these signals, the angular velocity of the HRG can be accurately determined.
HRGs have been used in a wide variety of contexts, from spacecraft to commercial aircraft and in guided weapons. Their compact size means they are well-suited to more compact mobile platforms. Peak performance figures are, to a degree, classified secrets, but they are orders of magnitude better than popular MEMS gyroscopes commonly used in consumer hardware.
Conclusion
If you’re eager to design a navigational system that can operate in areas where satellite communications are denied, you’ll likely find yourself exploring these advanced gyroscope technologies. Whether you’re tangling with congested radio spectrum, or operating underground or underwater, these advanced gyros are key to achieving the minimum in drift over time. They don’t come cheap, and they’re certainly not easy to build, but these devices have become staples in the world of high-end inertial navigation devices. | 49 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695418",
"author": "Howard",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T17:32:20",
"content": "It would have been great if you also referred to future directions – e.g. Quantum Sensorshttps://www.advancednavigation.com/tech-articles/the-future-of-inertial-navigation-is-classical-quantum-sensor-fusio... | 1,760,372,117.710433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/only-one-hacker-at-the-keyboard-amateurs/ | Only One Hacker At The Keyboard? Amateurs! | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"Meme",
"NCIS"
] | We imagine many of you have seen the ridiculous scene from the TV series
NCIS
in which a network intrusion is combated by two people working at the same keyboard at once. It’s become a meme in our community, and it’s certainly quite funny. But could there be a little truth behind the unintentional joke?
[Tedu] presents some possibilities
, and they’re not all either far-fetched or without application.
The first is called Duelmon, and it’s a split-screen process and network monitor worthy of two players, while the second is Mirrorkeys, a keyboard splitter which uses the Windows keys as modifiers to supply the missing half. As they say, the ability to use both at once would be the mark of the truly 1337.
Meanwhile here at Hackaday we’re evidently closer to 1336.5, as our pieces are written by single writers alone at the keyboard. We would be fascinated to see whether readers could name any other potential weapons in the dual-hacker arsenal though, and we’d like to remind you that as always, the comments are open below.
The
intense
hacking scene from
NCIS
can be found below the break. Be warned though, it contains the trauma of seeing a computer unplugged without shutting down first. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695400",
"author": "maxzillian",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T16:30:45",
"content": "Two idiots, one keyboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6695408",
"author": "Beatsmith",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T17:00:59",
... | 1,760,372,117.615204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/what-the-artisan-3-in-1-cnc-offers-if-one-has-the-table-space/ | What TheArtisan3-in-1 CNC Offers (If One Has The Table Space) | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks",
"Featured",
"Laser Hacks",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3-in-1",
"3d printer",
"cnc",
"desktop manufacturing",
"diode laser",
"dual extruder",
"laser",
"prototyping",
"review",
"snapmaker artisan"
] | I never feel like I have enough space in my workshop. The promise of consolidating tools to make the most of limited space drew me to the
Snapmaker Artisan
, a plus-sized 3-in-1 tool combining 3D printer, laser engraver, and CNC machine.
Smaller than three separate tools, but still big.
Jacks of all trades may be masters of none, but it is also true that a tool does not need to be a master of its functions to be useful. For many jobs, it enough to simply be serviceable. Does a machine like the Artisan offer something useful to a workshop?
Snapmaker was kind enough to send me an Artisan that I have by now spent a fair bit of time with. While I have come to expect the occasional glitch, having access to multiple functions is great for prototyping and desktop manufacturing.
This is especially true when it allows doing a job in-house where one previously had to outsource, or simply go without. This combo machine does have something to offer, as long as one can give it generous table space in return.
What It Is
The Artisan is a large dual-extrusion 3D printer, CNC router, and diode-based laser engraver. To change functions, one physically swaps toolheads and beds. Very thankfully, there are quick-change fixtures for this.
Driving the Artisan is Snapmaker’s software
Luban
(
GitHub respository
). Named for the
ancient Chinese master craftsman
, it is responsible for job setup and control. For laser and CNC work, there are convenient built-in profiles for a variety of paper, plastic, leather, and wood products.
The unit is enclosed, nicely designed, and — while I have come to expect the occasional glitch — serviceable at all three of its functions. The size and stature of the machine warrants some special mention, however.
The Artisan Is Big (And Also Small)
As far as desktop machines go, the Artisan is bigger than most. Ideally, it wants nearly a square meter of table space. That’s big, but compared to the space required for three separate machines, one square meter doesn’t look so bad.
Fitting It In
Most tables and workbenches are only about 70 cm to 90 cm deep (28 to 36 inches), which is a bit shy of the Artisan’s footprint.
One option is to build a custom table. Personally, I connected two sturdy flat-top utility carts together with some 3D-printed adapters. This also provided storage underneath for the toolheads and beds.
The touchscreen control box (which normally sits alongside the enclosure) can be relocated. Doing so reduces the width needed to as low as 70 cm, allowing the Artisan to fit sideways on most standard tables and workbenches. Not ideal, but workable in a pinch.
Keep Rear Access In Mind
The rear of the Artisan houses the exhaust port and ventilation fan. There is also a cable bundle that goes to the control box. The enclosure’s back panel can be removed, making the rear of the machine a bit easier to access for cleaning and servicing.
We’ll talk about ventilation later, but wherever you plan to put this machine, be aware there will be some need to access the back during assembly, and possibly also when cleaning up after a particularly dusty CNC operation. The enclosure, by the way, does a fantastic job of keeping CNC waste bits on the inside.
Be also aware that the rear of the machine is not 100% sealed. When laser engraving, laser light can escape from an uncovered ventilation port, or from gaps in the cable fixture. This should be taken into consideration when planning location.
Thoughtful Design
I will say that the mechanical design, packaging, and assembly documentation of the Artisan impressed me. Parts were secure, directions were IKEA-level clear, and it was honestly kind of a joy to put together.
The Artisan uses sturdy linear modules designed to keep dust and debris away from inner workings by sealing them with thin metal sheets. Take care not to press on these areas during assembly. There’s a warning to that effect, but the linear modules are quite heavy. It’s easy to put a fingertip where it shouldn’t be when handling them.
Snapmaker has made combo machines before, but the Artisan has a number of advantages over its predecessors:
It includes an enclosure which is suitable for all three functions.
It has a considerable 400 mm x 400 mm x 400 mm work area (although 3D printing is limited to 356 mm x 356 mm x 356 mm on account of needing space for the dual extruder toolhead.)
The big winner is quick-change hardware for swapping out the toolhead and beds.
Snapmaker’s previous combo machines had a large number of individual screws involved when changing beds and toolheads, so quick-change hardware is a
very
welcome feature.
Things It Can Do
Besides all the usual operations that a CNC router, 3D printer, and diode laser can do, here are a few capabilities I think are worth mentioning:
Dual Extruder Printing Without Filament Swaps
This feature (as well as huge print volume) sets this machine’s 3D printing somewhat apart from others. It’s true that dual extrusion heads are often more trouble than they are worth, but Snapmaker’s auto-leveling dual toolhead has a clever XY offset calibration method to ensure extrusions line up properly. This makes two-color printing — or printing with special support material — much faster than if one were relying on filament swaps through a single nozzle.
This functionality comes at a cost: the 3D printing toolhead is proprietary, expensive, and heavy. It’s capable, but don’t expect to break any print speed records.
PCBs via CNC engraving
I was able to mill out a small
Manhattan-style
test board very cleanly and easily. It is
a convenient alternative to etching a board
and requires very little post-processing.
Engraving via CNC with the included v-bit.
Light sanding and a pass with a brush is all it takes to clean up.
A quick soldering test, Manhattan-style.
A UV light highlights how clean the engraved lines are.
Stainless Steel Marking with the 10W Diode Laser
The 10W diode laser can
cut and engrave various materials
, and it turns out can also
mark stainless steel
. Despite the wavelength of laser not really being the correct tool for the job, I was still able to mark some steel flasks.
This process doesn’t handle curvature well (the laser loses focus and causes inconsistent results) and the heat over time buckled the thin steel. Other than that, a little wipe with oil afterwards looked promising!
Engraving at 100% power yields surprisingly good results on steel. But watch out for cooling, and curvature.
This test shows inconsistent marking (see corners) due to curvature. Also the heat distorted the thin steel.
Precision Paper Cutting
The laser is capable of very fine control, and cutting intricate patterns into paper is something it excels at. As an experiment, I created a light box with a laser-cut shadow mask. Cutting a mask like this by laser is much faster and more accurate than doing it by hand.
The laser is finely controllable, and can mark or cut paper.
Laser was used to cut the shadow mask on the left.
LED lighting in 3D-printed enclosure.
Ready for testing, all parts made on the same machine.
“Kitten in Workshop Sunbeam”, LED backlighting and construction paper shadow mask.
I created this as one of the projects for which I used the 3-in-1 machine as much as possible to get a feel for it’s capabilities.
I generated the image (“Kitten in a workshop sunbeam”) with the help of
Midjourney
. The lighting mask was done with a combination of
GIMP
and
Inkscape
. I designed the enclosure to snap onto the back of a cheap IKEA 5×7 photo frame, and printed it on the Artisan.
Cutting paper creates smoke, so be sure to have ventilation set up. Also, keep laser power as low as possible to do the job. Otherwise, stray scraps of paper get scorched by the laser which causes extra smoke.
It’s pretty gratifying to use a single machine to perform multiple functions.
Ventilation and Cleaning
The enclosure does a great job of keeping messes contained. Even when making a load of MDF dust, it stayed on the inside.
On the back of the enclosure is a ventilation port with a small fan. When 3D printing it can be advantageous to turn this fan on to ventilate the enclosure, depending on the material.
When using the laser module, one will definitely want to attach the vent hose to send smoke and fumes elsewhere. Laser cutting and engraving can create nasty smells and smoke, and some operations and materials are worse than others. Engraving is not too bad, but cutting wood or plastics is the worst. If both you and the machine are indoors, the little exhaust fan won’t cut it. The best way to deal with this is by adding a strong inline fan, and vent it all outside.
When CNC cutting, a handheld cordless vacuum makes cleanup much easier, and being able to access the back of the machine by removing the rear panel helps reach tricky areas.
Limitations
As useful as the Artisan’s functions can be, and as convenient as it is to have them combined in a single unit, it’s important to know what it cannot do, and what it will not replace.
It is not a toolchanger
The Artisan is really three separate tools. Being a 3-in-1 doesn’t make mixing and matching functions any easier or more practical. One cannot easily 3D print an object then laser-engrave a serial number, nor easily print an object then CNC bore out a precise hole. But you can do these functions separately, just as though you were using three separate tools.
It won’t replace a CO2 laser
I had hoped this machine might be able to take the place of my (much larger and heavier) CO2 laser cutter, but that’s not to be. Diode lasers and CO2 lasers have different wavelengths. Their energy is absorbed differently by different materials, which means they do different jobs. Both will cut paper and engrave wood, but acrylic (for example) is a different story. A CO2 laser will beautifully slice clear acrylic, but a diode laser’s beam will pass right through it.
No air assist on the laser toolhead
Air assist is a laser beam accompanied by a jet of compressed air that helps blow debris away, and control potential flare-ups. Air assist is most useful during cutting operations. If one is primarily doing light engraving, or working with lightweight objects that an air jet would blow around, lack of air assist is not a concern.
If you’re fussy about dust…
The
first
time I CNC cut MDF was also the
last
time the inside of the machine was 100% clean. At least the enclosure does a good job of keeping it contained.
It’s not foolproof
There are a few things the operator is expected to know. The machine should be shut down before toolheads and beds are changed, as they are not hot-swappable. Re-calibrating toolheads is occasionally called for to address glitches. All this and more is the operator’s responsibility.
As a safety measure, opening the enclosure door during operation causes laser or CNC operations to stop. But when testing this function, I found that it takes a good moment to kick in. Be aware that the door sensor does not react instantly.
The software is helpful, but has limitations
I don’t think Luban will ever be anyone’s favorite software. It does things its own way, and I have run into some glitches while experimenting. But once I witness a job starting properly, I can relax. Most issues are solved by re-calibrating a toolhead.
All that being said, as long as one can provide enough table space and ventilation (if needed), the Artisan provides an efficient way to combine three tools into one enclosure.
Summary
The Artisan might be big, but it’s smaller than three separate devices and it does a serviceable job of its functions. The full enclosure and the quick-change fixtures are extremely welcome features. The software makes job planning reasonably straightforward, but experienced users may find themselves longing for favorites like
LightBurn
,
PrusaSlicer
,
Cura
, or others.
Would a 3-in-1 tool like the Artisan be of use in your own workshop? If not, why not? Let us know in the comments! | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695368",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T14:33:29",
"content": "The quality and potency of diode lasers now really is fun, and it seems like this isn’t a bad platform to expand on either. Though I would have liked to see some better shots of the frame structure and ... | 1,760,372,117.799122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/android-coming-soon-to-a-risc-v-processor-near-you/ | Android: Coming Soon To A RISC-V Processor Near You | Jenny List | [
"Android Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"mobile",
"RISC-V",
"SoC"
] | In the roughly decade and a half since the Android mobile operating system appeared on the scene it has been primarily sold on devices with an ARM core at their heart, but along the way it has also appeared for other architectures. If you had a MIPS Android phone you may have been in the minority, but Intel phones enjoyed some popularity, and the up-and-coming new kid in the world of Android is RISC-V. For anyone interested in this last architecture it’s worth looking at the Google Open Source blog,
in which they’ve published an overview of the current status of the project
.
In short, it’s full steam ahead — as the development environment and emulation is in place for RISC-V Android. It’s certain we’ll start seeing RISC-V phones on the market soon, but perhaps that’s not the part which should interest readers the most. Over the last decade we have seen an explosion of inexpensive ARM single board computers, and though some of them such as the Raspberry Pi owe their heritage to set-top-box SoCs, it’s fair to say that a strong driver for this trend has been the proliferation of powerful mobile chips. A take-up of RISC-V driven by Android would mean a similar explosion of powerful SoCs with those cores, leading we hope to much more accessible and powerful RISC-V computing. Sadly we expect them to still come with proprietary peripherals leading to plenty of closed source blobs, but we can’t have everything.
If you’d like to read more about the whole blob situation and RISC-V,
we’ve got you covered
. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695361",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T14:18:53",
"content": "I’ve still got at least one MIPS Android device around here somewhere. It’ll be good to see another contender again in the low power space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,117.859253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/01/making-a-solder-paste-stencil-from-what-you-have-on-hand/ | Making A Solder Paste Stencil From What You Have On Hand | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"lasercut",
"solder paste",
"stencil"
] | Sometimes there are moments when an engineer has to use whatever materials they have to hand in order to complete the job on time. Such a situation arose at the RevSpace hacker space in Den Haag, Netherlands, as they were the assembly venue for a conference badge.
Their problem was that the badge PCB had no solder paste stencil, and
the solution was to laser cut one out of an unexpected materia
l. The backing paper for self-adhesive vinyl sheet has properties not unlike those desired of a stencil, so they tried laser-cutting one from that material. The result was a robust stencil that outperformed the Mylar they had previously used, enabled the manufacture of 350 boards.
They think that the polymer layer on top of the paper may be silicone, and found that the laser didn’t unduly melt the edges of the cut. We’re not sure we’d feed random unknown plastics into our cutter, we’re guessing they have good quality ventilation. It’s mounted into a plywood jig in much the same way as a conventional stencil might be.
The badges were destined for
WICCON
, a Dutch conference from an organisation for women in cybersecurity. Sadly we’ve not seen a completed one so we’re not sure what it does, however we’re pleased to hear they were completed before the event. That’s a hurdle all badge designers will know well.
Long term readers may remember, that
RevSpace have something of a history when it comes to assembling badges
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695304",
"author": "Abroad",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T09:28:08",
"content": "Another option is to build a DIY stencil from…. a beer can like this link shows:https://electroagenda.com/en/remote-control-car-hacking/#PCB",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,117.905707 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/31/2023-halloween-hackfest-converted-proton-pack-lights-up-the-night/ | 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Converted Proton Pack Lights Up The Night | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"cyclotron",
"ghostbusters",
"proton pack"
] | It’s really quite unfortunate that Hackaday/Supplyframe employees and their families are not allowed to place in the 2023 Halloween Hackfest, because our own [Tom Nardi] has thrown down a costume gauntlet with his
kids’ proton pack conversion
.
Starting with an inert off-the-shelf toy from 2021, [Tom] set out to make the thing more awesome in every way possible. For one thing, it’s blue, and outside of the short-lived animated series
The Real Ghostbusters
, who ever heard of a blue proton pack? So one major change was to paint it matte black and age it with the old silver rub ‘n buff technique. And of course, add all the necessary stickers.
[Tom] added plenty of blinkenlights, all running off of an Arduino Nano clone and a pair of 18650s. He got lucky with the whole power cell thing, because an 8 x 5050 RGB LED stick fits there perfectly and looks great behind a PETG diffusing lens. He also drilled out and lit up the cyclotron, because what’s a proton pack without that? There’s even a 7-segment LED voltmeter so Dad can check the power level throughout the night.
Finally, he had to do a bit of engineering to make the thing actually wearable by his daughter. A frame made of square aluminium tubing adds strength, and a new pair of padded straps make it comfortable. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.
What’s a Ghostbusters costume without
a PKE meter
? | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695366",
"author": "Zee",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T14:28:22",
"content": "You’re right I’m sorry.Police and gun violence aren’t daily, widely documented occurrences.I made must have made it all up in my drug addled brain because of the massive opioid addiction epidemic going on aro... | 1,760,372,118.266755 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/31/need-a-low-mass-antenna-in-space-just-blow-it-up/ | Need A Low-Mass Antenna In Space? Just Blow It Up! | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"antennas",
"inflatable",
"nasa",
"parabolic antenna"
] | A parabolic antenna is a simple enough device, a curved reflector designed to focus all the radiation from the direction it’s pointed into a waveguide or antenna at its feedpoint. They’re easy enough to make for a radio amateur, but imagine making one for a spacecraft. It must fold into a minimal space and weigh almost nothing, both difficult to achieve. An engineering academic doing work for NASA, [Christopher Walker], has a new way to make the parabolic surface that solves the spacecraft designer’s problems at a stroke,
it forms its parabolic reflector on the inside of an inflatable structure
. In this way relatively huge reflectors can be built in space, with easy folding and very little weight.
The linked article describes the antenna as spherical and its accompanying photograph certainly looks pretty spherical to us. This does however present a problem, because a circle and a parabola are not the same. Thus a purely spherical shape might approximate to a parabola at low angles but would remain a not-very-good antenna because of the relatively small usable area of the sphere it would present. The same problem affects photographers, in that their lenses will present some level of spherical aberration as they tend away from a parabolic shape.
The NASA article is frustratingly vague on the details of how they intend to solve this problem, but we’re guessing that they might design their balloon with carefully shaped panels such that it reaches the desired profile when under pressure. Think for a moment of the techniques that dress designers use to create 3D shapes in fabric, or that metal fabricators put into structures for hydroforming. It’s also possible that a feedhorn could be designed to correct for the effect of a spherical reflector, but perhaps that might be a less simple solution.
Oddly
this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at the shape of a parabola
. | 28 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695233",
"author": "GameboyRMH",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T02:17:06",
"content": "See also: The inflatable reflector cone on the MISTY stealth spy satellites:https://www.space.com/637-anatomy-spy-satellite.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,118.329704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/31/2023-halloween-hackfest-quoth-the-raven-caww/ | 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Quoth The Raven, “Caww!” | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"arduino nano",
"DF Player Mini",
"PIR sensor",
"power LED",
"raven"
] | Sometimes, projects start in somewhat unlikely places. This one began when [Istvan Raduly] scored a fake raven at a neighbor’s garage sale and decided to
turn it into a thunder-and-lightning decoration
that would frighten even the bravest trick-or-treater.
Get close enough to this raven and you’ll set off the PIR sensor, which triggers lighting and sound effects, including some spooky glowing and blinking red eyes, general cawing, and of course, thunder. The light comes from a whopping 10-watt, 12-volt power LED. This bird’s brain is an Arduino Nano, which is protected from the 12V supply with a boost converter. As you might expect, the sounds are on an SD card and played through a DF Player Mini.
Spookiness aside, our favorite part might be the absolutely lovely job that [Istvan] did decorating the raven’s base. Hiding electronics and hot glue is one thing, but this is above and beyond. Be sure to check it out after the break, both in the safety of the house, and outside in the scary darkness. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695219",
"author": "Bucky McBuckFace",
"timestamp": "2023-11-01T00:07:42",
"content": "The nano is protected from the 12V supply by a boost converter eh?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6695348",
"author": "adrian",
... | 1,760,372,118.108862 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/31/dot-matrix-printer-gets-an-epson-ribbon-transplant/ | Dot Matrix Printer Gets An Epson Ribbon Transplant | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"dot matrix",
"ink",
"printer",
"printer ribbon",
"ribbon"
] | What do you do when your dot matrix printer’s ribbon is torn to shreds after decades of use, and no new cartridges are available? You might like to attempt a ribbon transplant from another printer’s cartridge,
and that’s just what [Chris Jones] did.
[Chris] was hoping to find a new ribbon for his Canon PW-1080A after the 33-year-old ribbon had been hammered to bits. With replacements unavailable, he instead turned to the more popular Epson FX80, for which new ribbons can still be found. Thankfully, the FX80’s ribbon is the same width as the one used in the Canon printer, even if the cartridge is of a completely different design.
The first step was to crack open the Canon cartridge to dump out the old ribbon. With that done, the Epson ribbon could be looped into the Canon cartridge and wound in using the built-in winder. With this done, [Chris] attempted a test print, but found results to be poor. The ribbon wasn’t advancing properly and there was a rather horrible noise.
The problem was that the Epson ribbon was significantly longer than the Canon part, and thus was getting jammed inside the cartridge housing. [Chris] was able to fix this by cutting out a slice of the Epson ribbon and sticking the two ends back together with superglue. With that done, the printer was happily up and running once more.
If you’ve got a dot matrix printer ribbon that’s dried up but not yet falling apart,
you can always try reinking it.
Video after the break.
Try another test print and it's working perfectly. The printer is back in action so my children can print their masterpieces from AMX Art again. /end
pic.twitter.com/tQUmPUzzLA
— Chris Jones (@mjtech01)
October 31, 2023 | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695173",
"author": "Greg Chabala",
"timestamp": "2023-10-31T20:06:56",
"content": "Good to know fresh Epson FX-80 ribbons are available, will have to check if I have a matching printer stowed away.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,372,118.169884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/31/chugging-along-a-steam-powered-sawmill-still-makes-its-mark/ | Chugging Along: A Steam-Powered Sawmill Still Makes Its Mark | Donald Papp | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bandsaw",
"historical",
"Sawmill",
"steam engine"
] | [Rural Heritage TV] has video of a private tour of
a working, two-story, steam-powered sawmill
at Lake Itasca, Minnesota. This is believed to be one of the only working steam-powered band-sawmills in the country with a shotgun (or reciprocating) feed carriage. The carriage moves back and forth with a log while a monstrous 44-foot long bandsaw cuts pieces off on every stroke. There’s even a log turning mechanism, because if there’s one thing that never changes, it’s that time is money.
There is great footage of the whole thing in action, and also a serious tour of just how much work was needed to keep such a tool running. For example, in its heyday a machine like this would be swapping bands out for maintenance and sharpening every few hours.
Viewers unfamiliar with such machinery may notice the lack of rims or guard rails on the bandsaw and other belts and pulleys. How do bands stay centered on spinning wheels without falling off? The
crowned pulley
was the steam era’s solution, providing a means for belts to self-center without any need for rims or other additions.
This tour of the sawmill is a nifty peek at a technology that, at one point, ruled the roost. Watch it in action in the video, just under the page break. If that leaves you hungry to know more, there’s a second video that goes into added detail about saw sharpening and more.
One last tip: if you’re hungry to know more about the history of the steam engine,
The Perfectionists
is absolutely a book you should read
because it goes into fascinating detail about that, and more.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for bringing this to our attention! | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695162",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-10-31T18:53:43",
"content": "Hey, it’s that blade sharpener thingy from Twin Peaks",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6695169",
"author": "SteveS",
"timestamp": "2023-10-31T19:43... | 1,760,372,118.221989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/william-blake-was-etching-copper-in-1790/ | William Blake Was Etching Copper In 1790 | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"copper",
"etching",
"illuminated books",
"nitric acid",
"stopping varnish",
"William Blake"
] | You may know William Blake as a poet, or even as #38 in the BBC’s 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. But did you know that Blake was also an artist and print maker who made illuminated (flourished) books?
Blake sought to marry his art with his poetry and unleash it on the world. To do so,
he created an innovative printing process
, which is recreated by [Michael Phillips] in the video after the break. Much like etching a PCB, Blake started with a copper sheet, writing and drawing his works backwards with stopping varnish, an acid-resistant varnish that sticks around after a nitric acid bath. The result was a raised design that could then be used for printing.
Cleaning up the ink smudges before printing.
Blake was a master of color, using few pigments plus linseed or nut oil to create pastes of many different hues. Rather than use a brayer, Blake dabbed ink gently around the plate, careful not to splash ink or get any in the etched-away areas. As this was bound to happen anyway, Blake would then spend more time wiping out the etched areas than he did applying the ink.
Another of Blake’s innovations was the printing process itself. Whereas traditionally, illuminated texts must be printed in two different workshops, one for the text and the other for the illustrations, Blake’s method of etching both in the same plate of copper made it possible to print using his giant handmade press.
Want to avoid censorship and print your own ‘zines?
Why not build a proofing press?
.
Thanks for the tip, [Andy Pugh]! | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694986",
"author": "BLMac",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T23:39:50",
"content": "Blake was a genius.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6695000",
"author": "hartl",
"timestamp": "2023-10-31T00:50:19",
"content... | 1,760,372,118.469599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/rotating-necked-guitar-looks-difficult-to-play/ | Rotating Necked Guitar Looks Difficult To Play | Richard Baguley | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"guitar",
"musical instrument"
] | Have you ever looked at a guitar and thought “Nah, that’s way too easy to play.”[Mattias Kranz] seems to have done, so he built the
360 Guitar
, a new instrument with a circular, rotating neck. The rotating neck means that it can have more strings than most: we think that it has sixteen, but it’s hard to tell. Anyway, it has a lot of strings and looks utterly impractical, which makes it an exciting project.
The basic idea is intriguing: take a conventional guitar design and replace the fretboard with a rotating pillar. Perhaps even stick a motor in there to rotate it on command. Each of the strings is mounted along this pillar using standard string retainers and tuning pegs, with frets along the pillar. Because you can fit so many strings, you can use all of the standard strings for a bass and treble guitar, plus a few extra like the
thickest bass string available
and the thinnest guitar strings. It’s like a four-dimensional
Chapman Stick
.
[Mathias] is still working on the project as you can see in the video below the break, so we will be interested to see what new design aspects he comes up with, like the plan to use a motor to rotate the neck. [Mattias] has built a few instruments that we have featured before, like the
Helium guitar
, which replaces the resonant cavity with a helium balloon, and the
Plasma Piano
, a combination of piano and tuned plasma coil. | 20 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694942",
"author": "NoWay",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T20:19:00",
"content": "a Gatling Guitar?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6694945",
"author": "Horst the horstige",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T20:29:50",
... | 1,760,372,118.527099 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/particle-accelerator-on-a-chip/ | Particle Accelerator… On A Chip | Al Williams | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"laser",
"particle accelerator"
] | When you think of a particle accelerator, you usually think of some giant cyclotron with heavy-duty equipment in a massive mad-science lab. But scientists now believe they can create particle accelerators that can fit on a
chip smaller than a penny
. The device uses lasers and dielectrics instead of electric fields and metal. The conventional accelerators are limited by the peak fields the metallic surfaces can withstand. Dielectric materials can withstand much higher fields but, of course, don’t conduct electricity.
Physicists fabricated a 225 nanometers wide channel in various sizes up to 0.5 millimeters long. An electron beam moves through the channel. Very short infrared laser pulses on top of the channels accelerate the electrons down it using tiny silicon pillars.
The electron beam entered the channel at 28,400 electron volts. They exited at 40,700 electron volts, a substantial increase. The tiny pillars are only two microns high, so fabrication is tricky. Possible applications include cancer treatment, electron microscopy, and the creation of compact high-energy lasers.
The nanofabrication required for these devices won’t be in our garage any time soon. However, we hope this might lead to a new class of devices that we can use to build exciting new things. After all, remember how it used to be hard to build things using a laser?
We’ve seen
laser-based accelerators
before. If you want a
history of particle accelerators
, we can help you there, too. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694919",
"author": "Saint Aardvark the Carpeted",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T19:06:04",
"content": "When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to build my own particle accelerator. Although I didn’t end up working in CERN like I expected, stuff like this is still music to my ears.... | 1,760,372,118.583174 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/saving-australias-ants-with-age-of-empires-ii/ | Saving Australia’s Ants With Age Of Empires II | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Misc Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ant",
"ants",
"Battle",
"Battlefield",
"combat",
"conservation"
] | Australia’s native meat ants are struggling. Invasive species of foreign ants have a foothold on the continent, and are increasingly outcompeting their native rivals for territory. Beyond simple encroachment, they pose a hazard to native animals and agriculture.
Scientists at the CSIRO have been investigating the problem
, hoping to find a way to halt the invasion. Charged with finding a way to help Australia’s native ants fight back, they turned to one of the most popular battle simulations of all time:
Age of Empires II.
Lanchester’s Laws
In a battle between equally-skilled soldiers, a small numerical advantage at the outset of battle can have a major impact. Lanchester’s laws were developed to model scenarios like these. Credit: YouTube/Spirit of the Law
The work by the CSIRO aimed to investigate the dynamics of conflict between Australia’s native meat ants and the smaller invasive Argentine ant species. The latter are much smaller than the local Australian ants, with the Argentine species tending to live in huge, dense colonies that are highly cooperative in behaviour.
In one-on-one combat, the native meat ant will always win against the Argentine invader, by virtue of its much larger size. However, in the real world, a meat ant might find itself overwhelmed in combat by the sheer numbers of Argentine soldier ants that show up to battle.
The researchers aimed to determine how this numerical advantage worked in various scenarios. It’s a topic that has been explored deeply in military contexts, with English engineer Frederick William Lanchester noted for his work on the problem in the early 1900s. He developed mathematical models that could be used to compare the progress of a battle between two armies based on their initial strengths. His laws came to be used to determine the value of a smaller number of stronger soldiers versus a much larger army of weaker individuals. In a scenario where combat occurs on a restrictive one-on-one basis, the stronger soldiers are typically favored. They can vanquish one weaker enemy before moving on to the next. However, in areas where the weaker soldiers can all attack a stronger soldier at once, the greater numbers will carry the day.
Thus, the composition of a battlefield can play a great role in the outcome of a battle. A great example of Lanchester’s work at play is the famous tale of the Greeks fighting at Thermopylae. There, a narrow pass allowed a tiny but highly capable Greek force to hold the Perisan invaders at bay, despite their overwhelming numerical superiority. Any kind of terrain or feature that restricts the swarming of a larger force around a smaller one can tilt a battle towards a numerically-weaker force made up of stronger individuals.
The CSIRO researchers used
Age of Empires II
to explore this mathematical concept, and relate it to combat between Australian and Argentine ant species. The game readily represents
Lanchester’s laws
well, and helped the researchers understand the impact of battlefield complexity on the outcome of a battle. The team noted that in the game, a small army of strong Teutonic Knights could easily best 50 units of the weaker Two-Handed Swordsman on an open field. in a more complex battle space, however, where the weaker units couldn’t all attack the Teutonic Knights at once, things changed. In these conditions, just nine Teutonic Knights could secure a victory over as many as 70 Two-Handed Swordsman.
As the researchers tried the same concepts with real ants, the same logic played out. Simple, featureless plastic arenas were more favorable to the tiny Argentine ants, as they could easily swarm the larger meat ants all at once. In more complex arenas, however, meat ants would take less casualties as the Argentine ants were restricted to attacking in smaller numbers at a time.
This has implications for conservation efforts for Australia’s native ants. Researchers have already noted that the invasive foreign ants are most prevalent in “disturbed” environments, where the landscape is simpler and undergrowth and natural debris has largely been removed. Meanwhile, the actual ant fights run by researchers, along with the battle models, indicate that a more complex environment might help the natives dominate more easily. By restoring natural debris and undergrowth, the battlefield may turn to their favor, even against far greater numbers of invasive ants.
Simplification
The idea of using a real-time strategy gaming engine to model insect warfare makes a lot of sense. Game engines allow the simulation of combat between tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual units, allowing a proper exploration of battles at scale. It’s also possible to modify game units to suit the parameters of a given creature, with regards to things like strength, defensive armor, or the ability to attack close in or at range.
However, there are also some limitations to this methodology. Strategy game engines necessarily use abstractions to simulate combat. The vast majority of games simulate a unit like a soldier or a tank with a health bar. As the unit is attacked, its health is slowly depleted, with the unit dying when its health reaches zero. Real combat is far more complex. A human soldier might take a bullet to the hand or have a leg blown off—both survivable shots, but ones that drastically degrades their combat ability in an instant, and in different ways. Simplified strategy games rarely go beyond some window dressing, with badly injured units slowing down or attacking slower.
The more complex landscape prevents the weaker units from swarming the stronger soldiers, giving the latter an advantage. In Age of Empires II, as in life. Credit:
CSIRO, Age of Empires II
There’s also something to be said for the human element in setting up the scenario. Let’s say you’re simulating insect battles in
Age of Empires II
. How many hit points should an inch ant have? What about its pierce armor and melee armor, and damage output? For most stats beyond speed, it’s difficult to subjectively assign accurate parameters for one insect over another, without introducing some kind of human bias. Those that believe stick insects are better armored than ladybugs will unfairly rate their statistics higher, for example.
Without micromanagement by a human, such battles may also ignores tactics and strategy. Perhaps fire ants know that their cockroach enemies are readily disabled by attacks to the legs, leaving them motionless and vulnerable, making it impossible for them to fight back. Complex externalities like this generally aren’t baked into strategy game engines unless put there by design.
Some games go to great lengths to do so, such as the vehicle damage models in games like
Company of Heroes,
but these engines were specifically designed to more accurately represent a certain type of vehicular combat. A proper insect battle model would have to be designed from the ground up in a similar way to give reliable quantitative results for a given scenario.
However, the key to good research is often abstraction, backed up with real-world insight. That’s very much the case here. Researchers didn’t simply rely on gaming studies to inform their results, nor did they feel the need to modify the game with simulated ants. Instead, they relied on a simple model of a small force of strong soldiers versus a greater force of weaker ones. They used this to relate Lanchester’s mathematical models to both the game itself and the observations they made in actual ant combat studies from the lab. That enabled the insight that battlefield complexity favors a larger, stronger ant just as the pass of Thermopylae favored the valiant Greek defence.
Fundamentally, a game of
Age of Empires II
won’t be enough to guarantee success for your ant reintroduction project in any given suburb. What it can do, however, is guide conservation efforts towards tactics that could give Australia’s meat ants the best possible chance of success.
Featured image: “
Two meat ants fight two smaller Argentine ant adversaries
.” by Bruce Webber, CC BY-SA, CSIRO | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694905",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T17:16:14",
"content": "They should’ve used SimAnt! /jk",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6694940",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T20:13:20",
"content"... | 1,760,372,118.644511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/tile-based-macro-pad-keeps-getting-better/ | Tile-Based Macro Pad Keeps Getting Better | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Futaba MD",
"macro pad",
"macropad"
] | If there’s one thing we love to see around here, it is the various iterations of a project. If you keep up with Keebin’, you know that [Michael Gardi] created a tile-based macropad after developing a tile system for yet another project. This macro pad would have 3D-printed tiles next to the keys that would not only make them easy to relabel, but give [Michael] a novel way to change the function when changing the tile using magnets and Hall effect sensors.
Well, fast forward to [Michael] actually using the thing, and he’s found that, more often than not, he’s pressing the tiles instead of the keys next to them. So it was time for another iteration:
a macro pad with tile buttons
. Much like the previous iteration, this one uses a Pro Micro for a brain and a handful of very cool Futaba MD switches that bear Cherry MX stems.
Those Futaba switches are activated by
tile holder buttons
, which were quite the feat to create. These tile holder buttons each contain two Hall effect sensors and have a Cherry MX-style recession on the other side to connect to the Futaba. Unfortunately, some usage has already damaged the connections, so the next iteration will include small PCBs for surface-mount Hall effect sensors and a main PCB, as well.
[Michael] can make these pretty cheaply, but
are they cheap enough to be given away? | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694888",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T15:58:55",
"content": "Hmm probably a good quality of life improvement on the original, both more compact and intuitive.Do have to ask if it was really required to put electronics on the keycap at all – I’d have thought you c... | 1,760,372,118.693264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/how-framework-laptop-broke-the-hacker-ceiling/ | How Framework Laptop Broke The Hacker Ceiling | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"expansion card",
"framework",
"Framework laptop"
] | We’ve been keeping an eye on the Framework laptop over the past two years – back in 2021, they announced
a vision for a repairable and hacker-friendly laptop
based on the x86 architecture. They’re not claiming to be either open-source or libre hardware, but despite that, they have very much delivered on repairability and fostered a hacker community around the laptop, while sticking to pretty ambitious standards for building upgradable hardware that lasts.
I’ve long had a passion for laptop hardware, and when Hackaday covered Framework
announcing the motherboards-for-makers
program, I submitted my application, then dove into the ecosystem and started poking at the hardware internals every now and then. A year has passed since then, and I’ve been using a Framework as a daily driver, reading the forums on the regular, hanging out in the Discord server, and even developed a few Framework accessories along the way. I’d like to talk about what I’ve seen unfold in this ecosystem, both from Framework and the hackers that joined their effort, because I feel like we have something to learn from it.
If you have a hacker mindset, you might be wondering – just how much is there to hack on? And, if you have a business mindset, you might be wondering – how much can a consumer-oriented tech company achieve by creating a hacker-friendly environment? Today, I’d like to give you some insights and show cool things I’ve seen happen as an involved observer, as well as highlight the path that Framework is embarking upon with its new Framework 16.
As Community Expands, So Do The Options
One of the selling points of a Framework laptop is that none of its external ports are set in stone – instead, it has USB-C-based slots for cards that can have various ports on them. This doesn’t give you more ports than the usual, maybe even less depending on which cards you get, but it does give you more flexibility in what ports you give yourself.
Maybe you prefer three external displays and a Thunderbolt dock, maybe you want three USB-A ports, or maybe you want to go full USB-C – whatever combination you’d like to use day to day, you can likely combine a few cards and get there. The “Expansion Card” standard also opens the door for third-party cards – cards that someone else has designed, either a hacker or Framework themselves in the future, or maybe even cards that you might want to design for your own use. In particular, Framework has published KiCad PCB files and 3D case drawings, keeps a separate forum area for expansion card development, and even gives more targeted support to individual hackers prototyping their own Expansion Cards.
Over the two years, we’ve seen a ton of expansion card ideas, mockups, designs and actual hardware. I’d estimate that out of all the expansion card ideas, 50% of them have stayed in the idea realm, 40% have been designed but never built, and 10% have been built and become available to users. The 10% include cards like
UART
,
CAN
and
RS485
expansion cards, a
Solo 2 security token adapter
, an
ESP32-S3 devboard
, an optoisolated USB port card, an EC debugging adapter for your low-level laptop hacking needs, a
USB3-connected logic analyzer
, and other ones. By making expansion cards into a playground for hackers, Framework has let quite a few beginners go through their own “making a PCB idea into reality” journeys, something that’s so often a stepping stone to a myriad of wonderful projects down the line.
There are also less involved but nevertheless useful projects, like multiple Logitech mouse
dongle hider cards
using off-the-shelf adapters, a
SNACK project
that’s a 3D-printed empty expansion card you can store things in, or a conveniently-sized
full-size SD card reader turned expansion card
with just a little bit of PCB cutting!
There are a few upcoming cards, too – the
dual-port USB-C card project
is impressive, giving you two extra USB3-capable USB-C ports! Three different people and companies are working on an LTE card, and I might just make it four, purely because I have an outrageous idea that would be fun to make real. Framework also hasn’t been slacking – we’ve got an
Ethernet expansion card,
a
3.5mm audio adapter card
that fits the upcoming Framework 16 but works everywhere, and we’ve also got
firmware updates and rework instructions to enable power saving
on the DisplayPort and HDMI cards they’ve already shipped.
In that way, USB-C and the Framework laptop
are a match made in heaven,
and the mechanical standard is reasonably well thought-out. If I were to be designing a laptop or other portable device today, I’d absolutely add a Framework-compatible Expansion Card socket!
Innovation in consumer laptop space seems to be mostly stagnant and improvements superficial, so having a ripe for the taking standard like this on the table is exciting, as even the currently relatively small number of third-party expansion cards makes it super worthwhile as a selling point. Given that MNT Reform has gone all-in on the USB-C in its Pocket edition, it could very well turn out to be a community mod – not that you can’t already plug an Expansion Card into a random USB-C socket, as the cards are fundamentally USB-C compatible!
Framework has also recently
announced a video series
where they’re going to take a full-sized SD Expansion Card from idea to manufacturing, and I have a suspicion that it won’t be limited to PCB design tutorials. Seeing a company get an actual product through their pipeline, explaining the reasoning behind it, is not the kind of lesson you get every day, and you can’t expect any other laptop company to give you such insights, as it stands.
Reduce, Reuse, Rejoice
When it comes to repairability, upgradability and hacker-friendliness, there’s an elephant in the room – individual part reuse, from the motherboards and screens, to keyboards and cases. Since the beginning, Framework has promised that you would be able to upgrade your motherboard when they release a new one, and indeed, there’s now 12th generation Intel CPU motherboards available, with 13th gen Intel and even AMD motherboards on the horizon. This is amazing, but what do you do with the old motherboard you now have laying on your desk, which is effectively a full computer in need of a home?
Framework has addressed this from multiple angles – the most fun one was the
“motherboards for makers” program,
a seed effort where they’ve sent out motherboards to people who described what kind of project they’d like to do. The reality of such an effort is lower-than-100% ROI – plenty of people will put the board on a shelf, and I have to admit that I’ve effectively done the same with the board I got, never using it for the purpose I stated I would. However, we’ve seen a good few prominent projects grace our pages, and my view is that the main achievement of this program has been putting the idea of “you can build things with this mainboard” rather than 100% return on the hardware investment. Something is better than nothing?
I’ve noticed that Framework hooks into “I’ve built it myself” aspect of maker culture. Even if you’re just printing out a new case for a motherboard, it’s a project that you’re directing, and having a finished project under your belt feels good. With Framework, whenever you decide to upgrade your motherboard, you get a whole computer in return, that’s also a project part, and a seed for a project that you might just bring to reality.
On Hackaday alone, we’ve covered
a cyberdeck
,
a cool-looking handheld
,
a tablet
,
a futuristic-looking terminal
, a
rebuild of venerable Thinkpad 701C
,
a mechanical keyboard
, and all sorts of other devices like
this all-in-one
. On the Framework Discord server, I’ve just watched someone work on a build where a Framework board is packed together with a PC PSU and a Thunderbolt-connected external GPU for a reasonably powerful yet compact gaming machine. Upgrading such a laptop isn’t just a regular kind of upgrade you can do in the future, it’s a moment you can eagerly await with a special project idea in mind.
The Thinkpad 701C rebuild project
is still ongoing,
and involves an impressive amount of custom PCBs
Part reuse has been the area that I’ve focused on – I love such mostly-unexplored niches, and I’ve been building laptop hardware reuse projects long before that. This is where Framework has given free reign to the community,
publishing
partial schematics focused on external connectors of the board, and following up whenever people had further inquiries. They’ve released DXFs of the motherboard and associated boards, pinout, connector and part sourcing information for third-party boards, notes on the wiring intricacies, even
EC sourcecode
and
a decent amount of sourcecode or libraries
for various parts of the ecosystem, and they are quite helpful to all projects seeking to go beyond expansion cards and motherboard reuse. The Framework board has essentially become a kind of high-power x86
CPU module
you can use for your project, with all sorts of interfaces you can pull out of USB-C and lower-level onboard ports, and a ready-to-go battery power solution if you need that.
Because of trade secret concerns and subsequent NDAs with the companies Framework has to work with in the x86 platform space, we may never see full Framework laptop schematics – what we hackers have is
a 12-page PDF
with the high-level board overview and Framework-specific connector schematics. This partial openness is understandable, and, it’s way better than building projects using smuggled schematics that only become available years after the device’s release.
There were a few nuances stemming from the proprietary aspects, that I and others had to reverse-engineer – for instance, Compal
screwing up the pinout
on the input cover connector symbol using a completely pin numbering different notation than the connector’s datasheet. However, simply probing the board with a multimeter has led to success, and in the end, I’ve successfully developed
a RP2040-based controller
for the keyboard+touchpad combo of the Framework – which has been a good playground for me to learn QMK, and also a platform for my experiments with HID over I2C, a wonderful technology that I hope I can introduce to you all sometime soon!
One thing we didn’t see materialize was third-party motherboards – despite us getting info like DXF outlines. However, a few people did start hacking on it, and as someone who talks with other hackers in the Framework community, I know that we might just get a surprise project down the road!
That said, as much as it’d be fun to have such a board, there’s not much demand – all in all, people have been pretty satisfied with the 12th and 13th generation Intel motherboard upgrades. Also, AMD motherboards already getting into the hands of people who have preordered them, and given that, we might just see an influx of projects based on Framework motherboards in the Hackaday Tips line! It won’t be the only influx we see, either.
Bigger, Faster, More Expandable
About a year ago, Framework has
announced the Framework 16
– a 16″ gaming/workstation laptop, larger, all-AMD, and with a discrete GPU. It’s no doubt a response to people who wanted something more beefy than the 13″ model, and it also has two standout features that push the Framework’s expandability standard even further – the Input Module ecosystem, and the Expansion Bay, giving you input device modularity and GPU replacements respectively.
An RGB LED-packed community-designed Input Module by [Joe Schroedl]
The Expansion Bay has a PCIe x8 link you can bifurcate into two x4 links, a beefy power bus capable of bidirectional power transfer, and a few extra useful connections like a direct-to-panel eDP input, I2C, and a few GPIOs. From the business standpoint, it’s also a fun way to reduce SKUs they have to offer, and from a hackability standpoint, it’s a port for the ultimate kind of upgrades given its sheer PCIe capabilities. The connector, once again, makes use of
reasonably accessible FX-Beam interconnect lineup,
and Framework has released
reference design information
– which led to
a community-sourced KiCad template,
and a few in-progress projects have popped up that are adding things like
OcuLink
, extra expansion card sockets, or even an MXM GPU and a Dell docking station port.
The Input Modules, on the other hand, take the 13″ laptop’s single-piece keyboard+touchpad combination, and split it into modules socketed onto a common base, with the individual modules connected over USB or I2C. For a user, this means you can easily add a numpad to your Framework, remove it if you’re numpad-averse, or stack eight numpads in case you suffer from numpad deprival-induced trauma. It also means you can create your own modules that go in the place of the keyboard or the touchpad – from macropads to smartcard readers, and even extra screens! Framework has, once again, provided reference designs, and community members are already manufacturing their own cards, like
this RGB LED matrix card
that’s already been manufactured and is now in its second revision!
Raising The Bar
Now, this is a lot to say about a two-year-old product, but I guess my background helps. I’ve spent a decade using devices like laptops and phones and then a decade more fixing and improving them, and during that time, I’ve watched them turn more and more into black boxes with knobs to tune the endless stream of entertainment. The difference is especially stark when I compare it to the 8-bit computing years I’ve been taught about, years that raised the generation whose knowledge and advice helped me find my place in the world of hacking and electronics. We’ve had a treasure trove of technological improvements since then, sure, but we’ve lost some core principles that made computers more human-friendly, and accumulated a fair bit of cruft that made the personal computer world feel dull and grey – no matter how bright the everpresent RGB lights shine.
Looking at what Framework has achieved so far, I feel reassured. A lot of the most annoying cruft has been shed here, and you can see people having fun with the concept, driven because they get to improve upon a thing they will be using on the daily, or build something new that helps them live a fulfilling life in this tech-focused world.
Just throughout the few last days, I’ve been watching someone on the Framework Discord server build a powerful router out of a Framework motherboard, with PCIe Ethernet cards in both of the M.2 sockets, and a colorful 3D-printed case that makes the project look solid while shielding it from dust. Given the trove of existing mechanical designs you can start with, it’s been an easy project for them to build, and it’s been fun to observe for me too. It warms my heart to see people build their own tech so easily, because ultimately, it isn’t something you can buy – not just the specific device you build, but the fun you have on the way, and the power that it gives you.
The hacker-driven projects I list, aren’t there just for the technical value – each one of them holds a fair bit of joy from the person who worked on it. And that’s, without doubt, because Framework’s focus on the hackability has helped people channel the fundamental desire to play with the technology we use, each hacker imbuing their creation or mod with a piece of their soul. That’s a stark contrast to the soulless machines designed to be used in a certain way for a few years and then discarded – each Framework laptop is a gateway to a Framework laptop-based project, and each Framework project brings yet another hacker into our community.
A cyberdeck build that
we’ve just covered a week ago
I don’t know if these relatively high standards can nudge other companies to take lead, though we can all hope. I do know how powerful examples of actual success can be when it comes to making the world turn, and it matters that we can highlight a company that’s making large steps in the hacker-friendly direction while maintaining undeniable mass appeal. Sure, you can form an underground movement with repurposed and low-volume tech, but producing hackable things at scale is how you shape a generation, and we could always use a bit more of that.
Framework is, in many ways, an ecosystem ripe to be conquered by the hacking spirit, from upgrades to repairs made simple. I personally can’t wait to see where it goes, and whether its high standards can nudge other companies into a better direction as the repairability, hackability and openness promises come true one by one.
The Framework experiment
has, without a doubt, paid off, and sets a high standard for hacker community involvement and outreach – one that we haven’t been seeing companies do on such a scale, and can only hope to see more in the future. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694886",
"author": "Scat",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T15:56:58",
"content": "And the point of this article is…?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6694892",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T16:21... | 1,760,372,119.013654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/all-inverters-are-not-created-equal/ | All Inverters Are (Not) Created Equal | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"crystal oscillators",
"crystals"
] | Building a crystal clock source for a CPU used to be a bit of an effort but these days, there’s nothing to it. Even if your CPU or other device needs an external clock, you just slap in an inverter, a crystal, and two capacitors together, and you are done, right? Maybe not. [Dave Collins] got interested in the common circuit and pulled out
his scope and an array of different kinds of inverters
. He looked at inverters and NAND gates and a few common circuit configurations.
This is one of those things you just assume is of little importance, but it turns out your choice of circuit architecture and active device can have a big impact on the output. But who has time to do all the testing? Thanks to [Dave] you don’t have to.
Honestly, we are as likely to just buy a “can” oscillator if we need something like that these days. But still, it is interesting to see what kind of differences there are between using different inverting elements.
Crystal oscillators
are relatively ancient tech, but they still beat everything until you get into exotic and expensive things. If you want to look even deeper into what goes into these,
[Ken] can help
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694820",
"author": "Senile Data Systems",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T11:16:11",
"content": "Kinda reminds me of the GDR PolyPlay arcade machine, on one, the screen started drifting (H-freq) and the machine started crashing when warm. So I checked the main oscillator and it wasn’t a q... | 1,760,372,118.739057 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/30/creating-a-new-metal-rohde-schwarz-eb200-miniport-receiver-dial-knob/ | Creating A New Metal Rohde & Schwarz EB200 Miniport Receiver Dial Knob | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"lathe"
] | Recently [Roberto Barrios]
got his hands on
a
Rohde & Schwarz EB200
monitoring and surveillance receiver that, despite its late 90s vintage, was in mint condition. Aside from damage to the main dial, that is, which was very much broken. With no off-the-shelf replacement available in 2023, the obvious answer was to get a close-enough dial knob with the rough proportions and use a lathe to machine it into shape. Initially, [Roberto] had used some filler material to replace the front of the original knob that was missing, but this was a decidedly inferior tactile experience with questionable long-term reliability.
Dimensions of the Rhode & Schwarz EB200 dial knob. (Credit: Roberto Barrios)
The challenge in replacing the original knob with a proper replacement was in how the dial knob is mounted on the receiver, as an internally threaded shell that goes on the internal dial encoder assembly. With a lathe at his behest, taking an off-the-shelf dial knob that accepts a 6 mm shaft and turning it into a compatible knob was a straightforward affair. Removing the excess material and creating the internal 1 mm pitch thread allowed the newly made knob to fit on the receiver like an OEM part. The only niggle was having to remove 1.8 mm off the face of the brass body to get the knob to sit close to the front panel.
Unlike the old patched-up knob, this new one is fully out of metal and has the absolutely essential feature of the recessed area for easy fine-tuning. Although perhaps not the most exciting fix for old gear, it’s decidedly essential to keep it functional. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694854",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T13:48:36",
"content": "Wow! Nice catch. That receiver is certainly worth the effort you put into building a new knob!Happy listening!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,372,118.787706 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/29/real-nes-plays-frame-perfect-for-you-on-twitch/ | Real NES Plays Frame-Perfect For You On Twitch | Julian Scheffers | [
"Games"
] | [
"arduino",
"Nintendo Entertainment System"
] | Have you ever wanted to be the best Super Mario Brothers speedrunner, but you just couldn’t do the frame-perfect inputs? Fear not, because [Gregory Strike] is here to save the day with his
automatic NES controller
!
In
his previous video
, [Greg] already made an automatic controller that plays a sequence of inputs at the perfect time, but it still failed some of the frame-perfect tricks. So what gives? Deviation in the timing of the NES itself gives, as he shows how the NES doesn’t sample inputs at exactly the same time every frame. To account for this, he used the latch signal, which starts the controller reading process as a time reference, and replaced his digital “mixtape” with a more time-flexible Arduino. After the modification, he shows it pulling off frame-perfect inputs every time he plays Super Mario Brothers.
But if you have a controller that can do frame-perfect inputs and it can be connected to a computer, you can connect the controller to the internet! That’s right, [Greg] created a Twitch bot that tells the Arduino exactly what inputs to send, which then relays it to the NES. It accepts simple sequences of inputs via chat, and you can try it out right now on
[Greg]’s Twitch stream
.
This project shows promising results, and we think it’s possible to do much more with its internet connection. We’re certainly looking forward to what [Greg] decides to make next.
Video after the break. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694864",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2023-10-30T14:44:19",
"content": "https://www.instructables.com/NESBot-Arduino-Powered-Robot-beating-Super-Mario-/Similar projects allow you to download and play back the button presses for speedruns. Many games don’t sample the controller e... | 1,760,372,118.902729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/29/2023-halloween-hackfest-hack-skellington-is-the-life-of-the-party/ | 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Hack Skellington Is The Life Of The Party | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"ChatGPT",
"halloween",
"servo",
"skeleton",
"talking skeleton",
"viam"
] | [Matt Vella] has had a talking, non-posable skeleton knocking around for years. As cool as that sounds, [Matt] is really tired of its three stock phrases. Fast forward to this year — [Matt] got a posable skeleton and decided to go all out on this, the hackiest of all holidays. The result?
Hack Skellington
.
Between the eye socket-mounted camera, the speaker, and servos in the head, jaw, and one arm, Hack Skellington is decked out to scare trick-or-treaters (or anyone who gets close enough) in modern fashion. Thanks to ChatGPT and an AI-generated voice, Hack can recognize people and welcome them by name, look people in the eye, or simply move its arm when someone gets too close.
The brains of this operation is a Radxa Zero SBC programmed in Viam, though any SBC with Wi-Fi, GPIO, I²C, and USB should work just fine. [Matt] only spent about $150 total, half of which went to the skeleton itself. Be sure to check the spooky action out after the break.
You have until 9 AM PT on Tuesday, October 31st to enter
the 2023 Halloween Hackfest
. Procrastinators unite! Don’t want to animate a whole skeleton? Come to think of it,
a severed, animated hand
is even creepier, anyway. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,118.854139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/29/hackaday-links-october-29-2023/ | Hackaday Links: October 29, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"42",
"Bennu",
"california",
"cruise",
"Deep Thought",
"hackaday links",
"life the universe and everything",
"MSRP",
"nasa",
"OSIRIS-REx",
"Raspberry Pi 5",
"robotaxi",
"scalper",
"self-driving",
"TAGSAM"
] | “As California goes, so goes the nation.” That adage has been true on and off for the last 100 years or so, and it’s true again now that
GM’s Cruise self-driving car unit has halted operations across the United States
, just a couple of days after
California’s DMV suspended its license
to conduct driverless tests on state roadways. The nationwide shutdown of testing was undertaken voluntarily by the company and takes their sore beset self-driving taxi fleet off the road in Phoenix, Houston, Austin, Dallas, and Miami, in addition to the California ban, which seemed to be mainly happening in San Francisco. Cruise’s fleet has suffered all manner of indignities over the last few months, from
vandalism
to
“coning” pranks
to even being used as
rolling hookup spots
, and that’s not to mention all the trouble they caused by
brigading to the same address
or losing games of chicken with
a semi
and
a firetruck
. We’re not sure what to make of all this; despite our somewhat snarky commentary on the company’s woes, we take little pleasure in this development other than to the degree it probably increases roadway safety in the former test cities. We really do want to see self-driving cars succeed, at least for certain use cases, but it seems like this is a case of too much, too soon for the technology we currently have at our disposal.
Speaking of unintended consequences, as we
previously noted
, NASA is having a tough time dealing with its unexpected largesse of asteroid goodness in the sample return container from OSIRIS-REx. The spacecraft’s TAGSAM, or “Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Module,” delved too greedily and too deep into the surface of asteroid Bennu, which resulted in a full to busting sample container. Literally busting, as it now appears that
two of the 35 fasteners holding the sample container together are stuck
. As NASA
somewhat bloodlessly puts it
, the wonky fasteners “could not be removed with the current tools approved for use in the OSIRIS-REx glovebox.” Our translation: “We stripped two screw heads and we’d really like to Dremel them out, but we can’t.” OK, that’s stretching it a bit; there are certainly challenges presented by working on a billion dollars worth of asteroid stuff that absolutely, positively can’t be contaminated that most of us will never have to consider. So we’ll have to cut NASA some slack here. And we’re genuinely interested in how they solve this problem from an engineering standpoint, so stay tuned for more on that. The good news is that they already have more than enough sample to meet their needs, so anything they free up from inside the sample canister will just be icing on the cake.
If you think the new Raspberry Pi 5 is such a good SBC that it would be a bargain at twice the list price, you’d be
just about right
— at least after the scalpers got through with you. It seems like the usual suspects got their preorders in to buy as many units as possible at the MSRP (a reasonable $60 for the 4GB and $80 for the 8GB) only to immediately list them on eBay for up to 108% of that. We’re all for making a buck, but it really would be better if people tried to earn a profit by adding something to the value chain instead of doing nothing more demanding than a few mouse clicks. This is why we can’t have nice things.
And finally, the number “42” became something of a geek culture in-joke thanks to Douglas Adams, who chose it as the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
trilogy, which of course has five books, or six depending on how you count it. In the books, the disappointingly concise answer was 7.5 million years in the making by mega-computer Deep Thought, and no doubt Adams picked the number at random because it would be funny.
But it turns out that there’s more to 42 than just pithy British comedy
, as the number shows up time and again as an answer across multiple disciplines. Along with a bunch of arcane mathematical stuff, a rainbow creates a 42° arc in the sky, the Hubble constant that describes the expansion of the universe has a 42 in it (if you mix traditional units in with SI), and it appears the Sun with complete 42 orbits of the galactic center before it dies. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694751",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-10-29T23:38:06",
"content": "Well, I hope that Raspberry will make enough and soon enough Number 5’s that the scalpers will see their inventory lose value and end up looking foolish.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,372,119.186267 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/29/the-uk-online-safety-bill-becomes-law-what-does-it-mean/ | The UK Online Safety Bill Becomes Law, What Does It Mean? | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"News",
"Rants"
] | [
"encryption",
"privacy",
"uk"
] | We’ve previously reported from the UK about the Online Safety Bill, a piece of internet safety legislation that contains several concerning provisions relating to online privacy and encryption. UK laws enter the statutes by royal assent after being approved by Parliament, so with the signature of the King, it has now become the law of the land as the
Online Safety Act 2023
. Now that it’s beyond amendment, it’s time to take stock for a minute: what does it mean for internet users, both in the UK and beyond its shores?
The Act puts the onus on online platform owners to identify and remove illegal content and requires age verification for anything deemed unsuitable for sensitive young eyes. The concerning part is a provision allowing for service providers to be required to monitor communications,
which would require strong encryption to be either removed or backdoored
. Crucially, it’s a provision rather than a requirement, meaning that they can enact it in the future, but it’s not in force yet, but its mere existence
has prompted some services to indicate that they’d leave the UK market if it came into force
. Were that to happen, there would remain a concern for people not in the UK that backdoors introduced to satisfy UK law might compromise security for everyone.
When does coverage of a story about gunsmithing become illegal?
Though the legislation is now on the books, there remains a process of consultation during which the parameters of what constitutes illegal content would be decided, along with the mechanics of how it would be enforced. While some of the areas of its scope, such as child abuse or terrorist recruitment, might be obvious, we can see that there could be unexpected ramifications. As an example, close to home, making or owning a firearm is illegal in the UK. We’d expect a terrorist firearms training video to be also illegal under the new Act, but could it be argued that
watching an American make a firearm
through a site like Hackaday would also be illegal? We expect that the consultation process will throw up more stories as it grapples with this kind of question.
Though we think this is a concerning piece of legislation with plenty of possibilities for becoming infamous as a bad piece of law, we’d counsel readers to remember how incompetent governments usually turn out to be when dealing with anything involving technology. There’s a probably apocryphal story about the medieval Norse King of England Knut the Great,
ordering the tide to stop
as a demonstration of the limits of his powers, which we think might form an appropriate parallel.
King Canute header image: William Balfour Ker,
Public domain
. | 64 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694721",
"author": "whatever",
"timestamp": "2023-10-29T21:08:45",
"content": "all platforms should keep strong encryption… and yes maybe need to relocate their servers :(which might have an negative economic impact on the UK",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,372,119.297885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/29/behold-the-mega-wheelie-a-huge-one-wheeled-electric-skateboard/ | Behold The Mega-Wheelie, A Huge One-Wheeled Electric Skateboard | Donald Papp | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"big wheel",
"diy",
"electric vehicle",
"IMU",
"self balancing",
"skateboard",
"unicycle"
] | DIY electric personal vehicles are a field where even hobbyists can meaningfully innovate, and that’s demonstrated by the
Mega-Wheelie
, a self-balancing one-wheeled skateboard constructed as an experiment in traversing off-road conditions.
[John Dingley] and [Nick Thatcher] have been building and testing self-balancing electric vehicles since 2008, with a beach being a common testing ground. They suspected that a larger wheel was the key to working better on rough ground and dry sand and tested this idea by creating a skateboard with a single wheel. A very big, very wide wheel, in fact.
The Mega-Wheelie houses a 24V LiFePO4 battery pack, 450 W gearmotor with chain and sprocket drive, SyRen motor controller from
Dimension Engineering
, Arduino microcontroller, and an inertial measurement unit to enable the self-balancing function. Steering is done by leaning, and the handheld controller is just a
dead man’s switch
that disables the vehicle if the person piloting it lets go.
Design-wise, a device like this has a few challenging constraints. A big wheel is essential for performance but takes up space that could otherwise be used for things like batteries. Also, the platform upon which the pilot stands needs to be as low to the ground as possible for maximum stability. Otherwise, it’s too easy to fall sideways. On the other hand, one must balance this against the need for sufficient ground clearance.
Beaches are rarely covered in perfectly smooth and firm sand, making them a good test area.
In the end, how well did it work? Well enough to warrant a future version, says [John]. We can’t wait to see what that looks like, considering their past
3000 W unicycle’s only limitation was “personal courage”
and featured a slick mechanism that shifted the pilot’s weight subtly to aid steering. A video of the Mega-Wheelie (and a more recent unicycle design) is embedded just below the page break.
And just for reference, here is some of [John]’s previous work on a self-balancing unicycle design. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694702",
"author": "mr23",
"timestamp": "2023-10-29T18:02:46",
"content": "They really should add a mudguard/cover to the wheel. Sooner or later a sock or a toe or a sole will get stuck in the unprotected wheel and someone will get hurt.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,119.121418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/10/29/ham-radio-may-speed-up-soon/ | Ham Radio May Speed Up Soon | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"digital modes",
"fcc",
"ham radio",
"vlf"
] | The FCC is circulating a proposal for new rules pertaining to amateur radio in the United States. In particular, they want to
remove certain baud rate restrictions
that have been in place since 1980. It appears the relaxed rules would apply only to some bands, notably some VHF and UHF bands along with the 630 meter and 2200 meter bands, which — we think — are lightly used so far. We’ll save you from grabbing the calculator. That’s around 475 kHz and 136 kHz.
Ham radio operators have long used digital modes like radio teletype and with restrictions on antennas and increasing interference from wireless networking to solar panels and more, digital has become even more popular than in the past. Besides that, cheap computer soundcards make it easier than ever and sophisticated digital modulation techniques have long left the old, clunky TeleType in the dust.
However, the FCC currently limits the baud rate to 300 baud or less, ostensibly to restrict signal bandwidth. No one wants to have an entire band consumed by a 10 Gb RF network. However, modern techniques often squeeze more into less and the FCC will finally recognize that by converting the limit to signal bandwidth, not baud rate.
What’s the bandwidth? For the common bands, it sounds like 2.8 kHz is the answer. For the VLF bands, they are asking for suggestions. The 2200 meter band isn’t even 2.8 kHz wide to start with!
All this talk makes us want to build something for the 2200 meter band. We better start winding the coil now. Then again, maybe we should
go piezo
. You know, just in case Thomas Dolby tells us that
one of our submarines is missing
. | 14 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6694678",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-10-29T14:55:05",
"content": "That new ~3 KHz channel limitation of the SSB era wasn’t very wise to begin with.Back in the AM days, ~5 KHz were being used (carrier+two side bands).Rather than reducing the channel bandwidth, it would ha... | 1,760,372,119.350286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/wooden-game-boy-is-a-challenging-intro-cnc-project/ | Wooden Game Boy Is A Challenging Intro CNC Project | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"blender",
"Case mods",
"cnc",
"game boy",
"walnut"
] | [Sebastian] describes himself as “a total noob” when it comes to CNC, so in an attempt to get to know his new CNC router, he chose about the most complex possible project —
replicating an original Game Boy case in wood
. And spoiler alert: he nailed it.
Of course, he did have a few things going for him. At least from a straight woodworking perspective, it’s hard to go wrong by choosing walnut as your material. Then again, it can be unforgiving at times, and picky about tooling, which is probably why [Sebastian] used nine different tools to get the job done. But where he upped the difficulty level was in reproducing so many of the details of the original injection-molded plastic case. There are top and bottom shells, each of which has to be milled from both sides. This makes registration tricky when the parts are flipped. Specific indexing holes were used for that, along with the old “blue tape and CA glue” fixturing trick, which seemed to work quite well. For our money, though, the best bit is the lettering on the front face, which was milled out with an engraving bit and then filled with a spritz of white spray paint. A surfacing bit then came along to knock the overspray down, leaving labels that contrast beautifully with the dark wood. Gorgeous!
It wasn’t all easy sailing, though. There are just some things plastic can do that wood can’t, like holding screw threads in small studs without splitting. So, the case had to be glued shut once the mix of salvaged and new components went in. Still, it looks fabulous, and [Sebastian] says what we see in the video below is the one and only piece. Pretty sweet for the first try. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem as if we’ve seen a wooden Game Boy before —
a wooden NES
, sure, but not a Game Boy. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696069",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-11-04T12:53:59",
"content": "Very nice!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6696108",
"author": "time travel mold",
"timestamp": "2023-1... | 1,760,372,119.403623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/2023-halloween-hackfest-meet-creepsy-the-robotic-people-seeking-ghost/ | 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Meet Creepsy, The Robotic People-Seeking Ghost | Donald Papp | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"2023 Halloween Hack Fest",
"autonomous",
"halloween",
"people-seeking",
"raspberry pi",
"robot"
] | The 2023 Halloween Contest might be over, but we saw some great entries and clever modifications bringing projects into the Halloween spirit. One of them is
Creepsy
by [Hazal Mestci], a Raspberry Pi-based robotic ghost able to autonomously pick people out of a crowd and glide towards them, emitting eerie sounds as it does so.
The tech behind Creepsy (
GitHub repository
) originally led the somewhat less spooky existence of a mobile drink serving platform. But with a little bit of modification and the addition of a bedsheet with cutouts for sensors, the transformation into an obstacle-avoiding people-seeking spooker was complete. Key to this transformation was the
Viam Python SDK
, a software Swiss army knife used by robot builders everywhere. Creepsy itself was built using handy aluminum extrusion, and 3D printed parts along with the requisite suite of motors, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the
2023 Halloween Contest
. Got an idea for next year? It’s never too early to get started because ideas are great, but nothing beats “done on time”! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,119.438681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/learn-forth-on-the-commodore-vic-20/ | Learn Forth On The Commodore VIC-20 | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"forth",
"VIC-20"
] | Although BASIC was most commonly used on home computers like the Commodore VIC-20, it was possible to write programs in other languages, such as Forth. Conveniently, all it took to set up a Forth development system was inserting the cartridge into the VIC-20 and powering it on, with the VIC-FORTH cartridge by [Tom Zimmer] being a popular choice for the Commodore VIC-20. In a
recent video
, the [My Developer Thoughts] YouTube channel covers
Forth
development using this cartridge.
In addition to the video tutorial, the original VIC-FORTH
Instruction Manual
is also available, together with the
1541 disk image
. In an upcoming video, the Commodore 64 version of the cartridge will also be covered, which is called
64Forth
, and which is also readily available to tinker with. For those interested in learning more about [Tom Zimmer] and his Forth-related work, a
2010 interview
could be interesting. This covers the other platforms which he developed an implementation for.
As for why Forth might be interesting to developers and users, this comes mostly down to the much lower overhead of Forth compared to BASIC, while avoiding the pitfalls of ASM and resource-intensive nature of developing in C, as the entire Forth development system (compiler, editor, etc.) comfortably fits in the limited memory of the average 8-bit home computer.
(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip) | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696052",
"author": "juergenUK",
"timestamp": "2023-11-04T09:43:20",
"content": "What is the oldest system to run Forth on?Nowadays an Arduino is the lowest cost option probably as there are so many around.Have a look and try it outhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/eForth-Arduino-Sketch-extr... | 1,760,372,119.570896 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/most-ai-content-is-trash-just-like-everything-else/ | Most AI Content Is Trash, Just Like Everything Else | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Development"
] | [
"backlash",
"open source",
"sturgeon's law"
] | [Max Woolf] has been working in the AI space since 2015, and among other work has created numerous useful open-source tools. He also recently wrote a thoughtful blog post that attempts to put into words his feelings on the state of things in the wake of experiencing a bit of an AI backlash-related burnout. Essentially,
people effortlessly creating vast amounts of bad AI content has caused a bigger problem than we may realize
.
How so? Well,
Sturgeon’s law
(summarized as “ninety percent of everything is crud”) applies to AI as much as it does to anything else. Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction author and critic (and writer of multiple Star Trek episodes) who observed in the 1950s that while Science Fiction — the hot new popular thing at the time — was often derided by critics as being little more than low quality pap, so was everything else. It was true that most Science Fiction was garbage. But most work in other fields was of similarly low quality, and thus Science Fiction was really no different. It’s all trash, except for the parts one likes. Just like anything else.
What makes this observation particularly applicable to the current AI landscape is that, according to [Max], the incredible ease of use makes AI’s “ninety percent crud” very large indeed, and the attached backlash is similarly big. The remaining ten percent of AI that is absolutely fantastic and full of possibilities? It’s practically invisible due to how quickly the industry is moving, the speed with which the big players are vying to control it, and how unfashionable it has become to admit one is using AI tools at all.
[Max] knows the scene better than most. One of his projects is
simpleaichat
, a tool aimed not just at enabling people to integrate AI into projects easier, but piercing the hype around AI to more easily reveal just how these tools actually work. Sadly, a general AI backlash has made developing these tools feel rather less rewarding than it once did. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6696001",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2023-11-04T02:30:04",
"content": "Of course AI uses the tons of information it was trained on, but I assume that AI is also programmed to learn from the interactions it has with the people using it. For example, ChatGPT often gives the wr... | 1,760,372,119.642071 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/just-how-dodgy-are-cheap-usb-chargers-anyway/ | Just How Dodgy Are Cheap USB Chargers Anyway? | Dan Maloney | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"charger",
"fuse",
"safety",
"smps",
"switched-mode power supply",
"teardown",
"usb",
"wall wart"
] | Aside from apparently having both the ability to reproduce on their own and simultaneously never being around when you need one, USB chargers seem innocuous enough. The specs are simple: convert mains voltage to 5 volts, and don’t kill anyone while doing it. Both specs are typically met by most designs, but judging by
[DiodeGoneWild]’s latest USB charger teardown
, the latter only just barely, and with a whole lot of luck.
The sad state of plug-in USB power supplies is one of [DiodeGoneWild]’s pet gripes, and deservedly so. Most USB chargers cram a lot of electronics into a mighty small volume, and are built to a price point, meaning that something has to give in the design. In the case of the two units he tears apart in the video below, it’s pretty clear where the compromises are. Neither unit met the specs on the label in terms of current supplied and voltage regulation, even the apparently more capable quick charger, which is the first to go under the knife. The PCB within holds some alarming surprises, like the minimal physical isolation between the mains part of the circuit and the low-voltage section, but the real treat is the Schottky diode that gets up to 170°C under full load. Safety tip: when you smell plastic burning, throw the thing out.
The second charger didn’t fare any better; although it didn’t overheat, that’s mainly because it shut itself off before it could deliver a fraction of its rated 1 amp output. The PCB construction was shoddy in the extreme, with a squiggly trace standing in for a proper fuse and a fraction of a millimeter separation between primary and secondary traces. The flyback transformer was a treat, too; who doesn’t want to rely on a whisper-thin layer of cheap lacquer to keep mains voltage out of your phone?
All in all, these designs are horrible, and we have to thank [DiodeGoneWild] for the nightmares we’ll have whenever we plug into one of these things from now on. On the other hand, this was a great introduction to switch-mode power supply designs, and what not to do with our own builds. | 49 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695973",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T23:18:11",
"content": "Nice tear down information, but even more useful would be to know some units that are not trash. Unfortunately, price is not a reliable indicator of that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,372,119.730893 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/mini-ddr-cabinet-gets-maximum-upgrade/ | Mini DDR Cabinet Gets Maximum Upgrade | Kristina Panos | [
"Games",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"arcade game",
"ddr",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi 4"
] | Those shrunken-down arcade cabinets are a nifty idea, but they sure do suck in practice. At least, the Dance Dance Revolution game is full of empty promises. With the $25 cabinet, all you get are three songs that come out of a crappy little speaker, and a not-great display to match.
[BigRig Creates] endeavored to make it better, however, and
managed to cram a Raspberry Pi 4 in the cabinet
without disturbing the stock components too much. They did have to trim every extraneous piece of plastic from the inside of the cabinet and trim the I/O pins down, but it fit.
What didn’t fit are the fans that [BigRig Creates] needed once it was clear that it was necessary to overclock the Pi. As [BigRig Creates] points out, a custom PCB would have saved some room. And perhaps time. And definitely some wires.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple on the software side. (It never is, is it?) Even getting the screen to work was no picnic. But in the end, it worked, and even survived a bunch of gamers testing it out at LTX. Check it out after the break.
Got an old PS2 DDR controller?
You could make it play Simon instead
.
Thanks for the tip, [Gerald]! | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6695960",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2023-11-03T21:29:35",
"content": "A fun mod, just surprised Bigrig Creates didn’t 3d print a boxier back to fit everything into.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6695991",
... | 1,760,372,119.772569 |
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