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https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/e-paper-news-feed-illustrates-the-headlines-with-ai-generated-images/ | E-Paper News Feed Illustrates The Headlines With AI-Generated Images | Dan Maloney | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ai",
"cnn",
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"generative",
"headline",
"news",
"news feed",
"prompt",
"raspberry pi",
"stable diffusion"
] | It’s hard to read the headlines today without feeling like the world couldn’t possibly get much worse. And then tomorrow rolls around, and a fresh set of headlines puts the lie to that thought. On a macro level, there’s not much that you can do about that, but on a personal level,
illustrating your news feed with mostly wrong, AI-generated images
might take the edge off things a little.
Let us explain. [Roy van der Veen] liked the idea of an e-paper display newsfeed, but the crushing weight of the headlines was a little too much to bear. To lighten things up, he decided to employ
Stable Diffusion
to illustrate his feed, displaying both the headline and a generated image on a 7.3″ Inky 7-color e-paper display. Every five hours, a script running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W fetches a headline from a random source — we’re pleased the list includes Hackaday — and composes a prompt for Stable Diffusion based on the headline, adding on a randomly selected prefix and suffix to spice things up. For example, a prompt might look like, “Gothic painting of (
Driving a Motor with an Audio Amp Chip
). Gloomy, dramatic, stunning, dreamy.” You can imagine
the results
.
We have to say, from the examples [Roy] shows, the idea pretty much works — sometimes the images are so far off the mark that just figuring out how Stable Diffusion came up with them is enough to soften the blow. We’d have preferred if the news of the floods in Libya had been buffered by
a slightly less dismal scene
, but finding out that what was thought to be
a “ritual mass murder”
was really only a yoga class was certainly heartening. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6684388",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-09-20T00:15:46",
"content": "Nice to see color e-ink as reasonable priced.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6684637",
"author": "Unochepassa",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,164.889942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/powerful-nerf-blaster-aims-to-fire-100-darts-per-second/ | Powerful Nerf Blaster Aims To Fire 100 Darts Per Second | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"nerf",
"nerf blaster"
] | Nerf has made plenty of fully-automatic blasters over the years, but their toys typically lack punch, precision, and fire rate. [3DprintedLife] set about building a blaster to rectify that last shortcoming,
aiming for design that could fire 100 darts per second.
The design uses half length darts which tend to fly a little nicer from high-powered blasters. It fires them using belts driven by powerful motors, similar to wheel blasters. The darts themselves are loaded into a drum magazine which has sliders to push the darts into the wheels as the drum rotates by.
It all sounds straightforward enough, but getting it all working in harmony is a challenge—particularly at a fire rate of 100 darts per second. The build video explains the trials and tribulations involved in getting near that fire rate, with darts getting shredded and magazines throwing out parts along the way. A good helping of iterative design helps get everything playing nice, with the darts neatly leaving the magazine and flying downrange at great speed. The slow-motion videos of darts flying out of the blaster in rapid succession are a special treat.
Files are available
via Onshape
for those looking to dive deeper into the design. We’ve seen some other neat Nerf blasters before, too. Video after the break. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6684354",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-09-19T21:16:57",
"content": "Ol’ Painless, by NERF.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6685140",
"author": "chip munk horde",
"timestamp": "2023-09-21T18:29:36",... | 1,760,372,164.789813 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/implementing-megatextures-on-real-nintendo-64-hardware/ | Implementing MegaTextures On Real Nintendo 64 Hardware | Maya Posch | [
"Games",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"mipmapping",
"nintendo 64"
] | As amazing and groundbreaking as the Nintendo 64 was, over the years it has also become synonymous with blurry textures and liberal use of Gouraud shading as its most strongly defining visual features.
In a recent video
, [James Lambert] covers how the system’s minuscule 4 kB texture memory (
TMEM
) can be circumvented using
mipmapping
. By loading progressively more detailed textures (each in 4 kB chunks) in a level-of-detail (LoD), the visual fidelity can be maximized while keeping rendering speeds relatively zippy, as the real-time demo proves.
Determining which textures are visible to the player.
This project was made for the N64brew 2023, with the
source code available
on [James]’s GitHub account. Although impressive, it bears noting that mipmapping was not an unknown approach in 1996, and many approaches were used to work around the N64’s physical limitations.
In the case of mipmapping, [James]’s demo perfectly demonstrates the problematic nature of mipmapping, as it dramatically increases the storage requirements for the textures, hitting 40 MB just for this one single room, for a system that supports up to 64 MB cartridges.
Ultimately, this shows that the 4 kB TMEM was not the only issue with the N64, with the limited (and expensive) mask ROMs for the cartridges proving to be an insurmountable obstacle that systems like Sony’s PlayStation largely did not have to contend with. With roomy 650 MB+ optical storage, the PS1 got instead tripped up by the glacial access and loading speeds of optical media and its soggy-potato-powered GPU.
Seeing demonstrations like these manage to wonderfully highlight the bottlenecks in these old consoles, and makes one wonder about what could have been, even in an era before 1 TB solid-state drives and direct resource streaming between GPU and said storage. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6684314",
"author": "steelman",
"timestamp": "2023-09-19T19:01:07",
"content": "I wonder m, how this would work with procedurally generated textures?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6684450",
"author": "devl547",
... | 1,760,372,165.244177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/hello-halloween-hackfest/ | Hello, Halloween Hackfest! | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"contest",
"halloween",
"Halloween Hackfest",
"seasonal"
] | Halloween is possibly the hackiest of holidays. Think about it: when else do you get to add animatronic eyes to everyday objects, or break out the CNC machine to cut into squashes? Labor day? Nope. Proximity-sensing jump-scare devices for Christmas? We think not. But for Halloween, you can let your imagination run wild!
Jump Scare Tombstone
by [Mark]
We’re happy to announce that DigiKey and Arduino have teamed up for
this year’s Hackaday Halloween Contest
. Bring us your best costume, your scariest spook, your insane home decorations, your wildest pumpkin, or your most kid-pleasing feat!
We’ll be rewarding the top three with a $150 gift certificate courtesy of DigiKey, plus some Arduino Halloween treats if you use a product from the Arduino Pro line to make your hair-raising fantasy happen.
We’ve also got five honorable mention categories to inspire you to further feats of fancy.
Costume:
Halloween is primarily about getting into outrageous costumes and scoring candy. We don’t want to see the candy.
Pumpkin:
Pumpkin carving could be as simple as taking a knife to a gourd, but that’s not what we’re after. Show us the most insane carving method, or the pumpkin so loaded with electronics that it makes Akihabara look empty in comparison.
Kid-Pleaser:
Because a costume that makes a kid smile is what Halloween is really all about. But games or elaborate candy dispensers, or anything else that helps the little ones have a good time is fair game here.
Hallowed Home:
Do people come to your neighborhood just to see your haunted house? Do you spend more on light effects than on licorice? Then show us your masterpiece!
Spooky:
If your halloween build is simply scary, it belongs here.
Head on over to Hackaday.io
for the full details. And get working on your haunts, costumes, and Rube Goldberg treat dispensers today. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6685280",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2023-09-22T01:33:33",
"content": "Yes. I had my project as a feature and “runner up” in the special categories. But did not get news of a tindie coupon. Don’t know if I got that wrong. Besides, the contests page was never updated.",
"pa... | 1,760,372,165.28979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/time-and-tide-are-one-thing/ | Time And Tide Are One Thing | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed fascinator",
"3D printed hat",
"clock",
"sea urchin",
"sea urchin hats",
"tide clock"
] | The rise of 3D printing has given us incredible things, from awesome tchotchkes to intricate chocolates to useful things like spare body parts. But none has been so vital to comedy as say, printing hats for sea urchins. That’s right, sea urchins like to cover up with various things and will happily don, say, a 3D printed hat if presented the opportunity.
So anyway, this is
a tide clock that uses a printed sea urchin and various hats to tell the time
until/between low and high tide. How? It uses the position of a given hat relative to a couple nOOds LED strands, one for high tide and another for low.
Inside the large bamboo enclosure is an TTGO that fetches cheaply-obtained tide information and displays it on the screen. The TTGO also controls a servo that moves the sea urchin around. As it moves, a magnet in the urchin’s head (?) attracts the next hat.
Before settling on the current design, [rabbitcreek] experimented with both a sand dollar and a sea urchin skeleton. All the files are available if you want to whip up your own.
This isn’t [rabbitcreek]’s first foray into tide clocks.
Here’s a solar number that should last for years
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6684271",
"author": "Tony Robinson",
"timestamp": "2023-09-19T16:27:30",
"content": "I’m writing a tide clock for wasp-os right now. It’s a lot of fun writing in micropython for your watch. I’m deep in the (quite hairy) signal processing so that it doesn’t need an IP connection or... | 1,760,372,164.946332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/scientists-call-out-apollo-17-after-investigating-moonquakes-past/ | Scientists Call Out Apollo 17 After Investigating Moonquakes Past | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"earthquake",
"earthquakes",
"moon",
"moonquake",
"moonquakes",
"seismic",
"seismic activity"
] | In the vast realm of space exploration, new discoveries often emerge from old data. Thanks to advanced algorithms and keen observers, the seismic activities of our closest celestial neighbor, the Moon, have recently been thrust back into the limelight.
Thanks to the effort of the NASA crew involved in the Apollo 17 mission, it’s possible investigate these phenomena today with datasets from the past. Recently, researchers working with this data turned up some intriguing findings, and published them
in a new paper
. It reveals that one unexpected source of moonquakes could be the very equipment that Earth’s astronauts left behind.
The Lunar Seismic Profiling Experiment
A geophone deployed by NASA on the Moon. Credit: NASA
The Apollo 17 mission in 1972 was more than just the final time man would walk on the moon. It also involved the deployment of a lesser-known experiment, known as the
Lunar Seismic Profiling Experiment (LSPE).
It built upon the earlier Active Seismic Experiment deployed by Apollo 14 and Apollo 16, and aimed to explore the subsurface lunar structure. To achieve this, the astronauts deployed four geophones – sensitive seismic devices – that captured vibrations from deliberate explosive detonations to map out the near-surface structure of the Moon.
Actual seismic data recorded on the Moon back in 1976. Credit:
Research paper
, The Journal of Geophysical Research Planets
Post-mission, the equipment was left behind to operate in passive recording mode, picking up seismic signals autonomously. Thousands of moonquakes were documented over an 8-month span from October 1976 to May 1977. Researchers were able to categorize these due to different causes. Unlike on Earth, these aren’t caused by the shifting of large tectonic plates. So-called “deep” moonquakes are thought to be caused by tidal forces generated by the Earth, while mysterious “shallow” moonquakes are
a bit more of a mystery.
Others are believed to be caused by meteorite impacts. There are also so-called “thermal” moonquakes caused by the heating and cooling of the Moon’s crust as the sun warms its surface and moves away again. With parts of the surface swinging from -133 C to 121 C through the transition from lunar day to lunar night, it’s a major source of seismic activity. New research into the data has since revealed a further category of moonquake, however, with an altogether more human origin.
Shake It Like a Lunar Lander
Triangulating the source of the strange vibrations pointed directly to the Lunar Module Descent Vehicle from the Apollo 17 mission. Credit:
Research paper
, The Journal of Geophysical Research Planets
Caltech researchers, using machine learning techniques, dove deep into the Apollo 17 seismic data and unraveled an astounding revelation. Regular moonquakes occurred predictably every lunar afternoon as the surface cooled. Yet, every lunar morning, a set of unusual repeating signals popped up.
The impulsive signals differed from the more typical emergent events that were well-established as thermal quakes caused by sunlight on the moon’s surface. Triangulating the high-amplitude seismic signals revealed them to be coming from the vicinity of the Apollo 17 lander itself.
Indeed, these vibrations appeared to be the were
the echoes of the Apollo 17 lander’s interactions with the rising sun.
“Every lunar morning when the sun hits the lander, it starts popping off. Every five to six minutes another one, over a period of five to seven Earth hours. They were incredibly regular and repeating,” noted Allen Husker, a co-author of the research paper. As the lander responded to the morning warmth, it naturally expanded with the heat, with its creaking vibrations becoming distinct seismic signals. The geophones, being in close proximity, picked them up.
The team used a technique called stochastic gradient descent to measure the azimuth of detected seismic signals relative to the geophone installation on the Moon. Credit:
Research paper
, The Journal of Geophysical Research Planets
There is hope that further seismic research could reveal more of the Moon’s secrets, too. Husker notes that it could be possible to search for subsurface craters or other deposits beneath the Moon’s surface. A geophone array installed on parts of the Moon that never see sunlight could be of particular value, allowing scientists to hunt for water ice trapped on the Moon, since seismic waves travel more slowly through that material.
The discovery, while fascinating, offers more than just a curious factoid about space exploration. It’s a poignant reminder of the lasting impact of our space endeavors, even those decades old. This research underscores the necessity of understanding both natural and artificial influences on lunar seismic activity. More than that, it shows how our own exploration of space can have an impact on other worlds. To say nothing of the contamination that can be
spread by human probes
and the quarantine protocols
we should be adhering to
.
Fundamentally, the Apollo 17 findings remind us that sometimes, to find the most unexpected answers, we must first look at our own footprint. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6684218",
"author": "Adam",
"timestamp": "2023-09-19T14:20:15",
"content": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Moon",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6684254",
"author": "Doctor Who fan",
"timestamp": "2023-09-... | 1,760,372,165.180141 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/19/normal-users-dont-code-on-their-mac-but-apple-keeps-trying/ | Normal Users Don’t Code On Their Mac, But Apple Keeps Trying | Jenny List | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"apple",
"applescript",
"programming"
] | Most people use their computer to run pre-packaged programs: usually a web browser, games, or office applications. Whether the machine is a PC or a Mac, they don’t generally write their own software. For them, the computer is an appliance, and they do what their computer allows them to do.
It shouldn’t have to be that way, if only programming were
easier
. The Eclectic Light Company has a fascinating article
looking at the various attempts that Apple has made to lure their users into creative programming
.
Probably the most familiar of them all is AppleScript, with its origins in late 1993. Or maybe you’re thinking of Hypertalk, the scripting component of 1987’s Hypercard. That would go on to be a mainstay of mid-1990s multimedia software, but while it’s fallen by the wayside it’s AppleScript which still has support in the latest MacOS.
The biggest surprise for us lies in the forgotten products. 1989’s Prograph graphical language looks amazing. Was it simply before its time? In the modern era, Apple describes the reach of
Shortcuts
diplomatically: “its impact has so far been limited”.
Maybe the most forward-thinking line on programming from Apple came in 2007, even if it wasn’t recognized as such. The original iPhone didn’t have any third-party apps, and instead developers were supposed to write web apps to take advantage of the always-connected device. Would that be such a bad piece of advice to give a non-developer writing software for their Mac today? | 93 | 34 | [
{
"comment_id": "6684122",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2023-09-19T11:15:52",
"content": "Nice click bait.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6684123",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2023-09-19T11:16:47",
"content": "It wouldn’t be ... | 1,760,372,165.096083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/17/hackaday-links-september-17-2023/ | Hackaday Links: September 17, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"Aeolus",
"Alaska",
"bear",
"cruise",
"hackaday links",
"hiker",
"iphone",
"luddism",
"recall",
"robotaxi",
"san francisco",
"self-driving",
"simulator",
"snuff film",
"z80"
] | OK, it’s official — everyone hates San Francisco’s self-driving taxi fleet. Or at least so it seems, if
this video of someone vandalizing a Cruise robotaxi
is an accurate reflection of the public’s sentiment. We’ve been covering the increasingly fraught relationship between Cruise and San Franciscans for a while now — between their cabs
crashing into semis and being used for — ahem — non-transportation purposes
, then
crashing into fire trucks and eventually having their test fleet cut in half by regulators
, Cruise really seems to be taking it on the chin.
And now this video, which shows a wannabe Ninja going ham on a Cruise taxi stopped somewhere on the streets of San Francisco. It has to be said that the vandal doesn’t appear to be doing much damage with what looks like a mason’s hammer; except for the windshield and side glass and the driver-side mirror — superfluous for a self-driving car, one would think — the rest of the roof-mounted lidars and cameras seem to get off lightly. Either Cruise’s mechanical engineering is better than their software engineering, or the neo-Luddite lacks the upper body strength to do any serious damage. Or maybe both.
Trouble this week for Apple as well, at least in France where regulators have ordered the company to
halt sales of its iPhone 12
over concerns about excess radiation emissions. The
Agence Nationale des Fréquences
(ANFR), which appears to be the equivalent of the US Federal Communications Commission but with so much more class, says that an “accredited lab” measured absorption of electromagnetic energy and measured the popular smartphones emit at 5.74 Watts/kg, well in excess of the EU’s 4.0 W/kg limit. We haven’t seen any specific technical details on what specific frequencies are being emitted or how the tests were run, but the excessive level seems to come from a test that simulates holding the phone or keeping it in a pocket, so that’s pretty intimate contact. The phone did pass a test that simulates absorption at a 5 cm distance, where the limit is 2 W/kg, but that seems like cold comfort since most of us are in direct contact with our phones most of the time. It’ll be interesting to see what’s behind this test and how Apple plans to remedy these phones.
Score another win for technology after
a hiker in Alaska used a wildlife camera to get himself unlost
. The story doesn’t have much information about the hiker, but the incident occurred on Dumpling Mountain in Katmai National Park, where a camera live streams the comings and goings of wildlife, primarily the local bear population. The hiker, clearly underprepared for the charming late summer weather of southern Alaska, wandered across the camera and mouthed the words “Help me” and “Lost” into the lens. Thankfully, the camera has a faithful following of bear watchers, who used the live stream chat to notify the National Park Service, who sent rangers out to lend the guy a hand. We’re glad everything worked out, but we’re left wondering what the camera is using for broadband, since the hiker apparently didn’t have cell service.
If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like inside a CPU while it’s doing its thing, you’ll want to check out t
his incredible interactive Z80 simulator
. The simulator recreates the inner workings of the 8-bit chip that powered everything from the TRS-80 to
Pac-Man
, and traces out exactly which lines go high as the machine executes instructions. You can single-step the program and even half-step it, or you can just let it rip to run at full speed — apparently not actual clock speed, though, even at the slowest 2.5-MHz variant. It’s pretty cool to see what’s actually going on at the transistor level, and pretty instructive as well.
And finally, from the “What goes up must come down” files, the European Space Agency (ESA) recently decommissioned its aging Aeolus satellite but gave it
one final mission
before its fiery end. Aeolus, launched in 2018, used a Doppler lidar to study winds on Earth, and is the first satellite in history to use “assisted reentry” to end its own life. Back in July, ESA controllers commanded the satellite to use the rest of its fuel to lower its orbit. A radiotelescope in Germany took a series of eight radar images of the spacecraft as it began to feel the rough embrace of the atmosphere, resulting in the stunning image below. We were a little disappointed to learn this wasn’t an optical image; seeing a satellite actually start to heat up and burn in the atmosphere with this kind of resolution would be pretty cool. But it’s still a great sendoff to a valuable mission. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683453",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-18T02:06:31",
"content": "Thankfully the wildlife camera didn’t show a bear mouthing “that was a great meal!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "66834... | 1,760,372,164.841967 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/17/the-end-of-basic/ | The End Of Basic? | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"basic"
] | Many people, one way or another, got started programming computers using some kind of Basic. The language was developed at Dartmouth specifically so people could write simple programs without much training. However, Basic found roots in small computers and grew to where it is today, virtually unrecognizable. Writing things in something like Visual Basic may be easier than some programming tasks, but it requires a lot of tools and some reading or training. We aren’t sure where the name
EndBasic
came from, but this program — written in Rust — aims to bring Basic back to a simpler time. Sort of.
You can run the program in a browser, locally, or connected to a cloud service. It looks like old-fashioned Basic at first. But the more you dig in, the odder it gets. The command line is more akin to a Python REPL. You type things, and they happen. It took a while to figure out that you need to enter EDIT to write a program. Then, what you type gets saved until you press escape. The syntax is Basic-like but has oddities. There are no line numbers, but you can use labels that start with an at sign.
If you want to see the program in action, try a game of
Snake
. Press Q to quit, and you can see the program by typing LIST. You’ll see something like this:
Although it looks text-based, you can do graphics. There’s even a way to connect to a Raspberry Pi and do physical I/O. For learning this looks interesting. There’s nothing to deploy in a classroom setting and there’s collaboration and help tools. On the other hand, it probably isn’t that practical for real-world things or, at least, not what you would want to use.
Maybe we are old-fashioned, but we like
real old-school Basic better
. You can load
Basic on a Raspberry Pi Pico
, for example, and have a machine that would have been practically a supercomputer when most people were getting started with Basic. | 101 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683376",
"author": "Bob A.",
"timestamp": "2023-09-17T20:18:45",
"content": "No disrespect to EndBasic, but I too prefer my BASIC the old fashioned way: buck naked on a beach running BASIC-8 on a PDP-8 emulator.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,165.436718 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/17/chromebooks-now-get-ten-years-of-software-updates/ | Chromebooks Now Get Ten Years Of Software Updates | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"chromebook",
"ChromeOS",
"google"
] | It’s an acknowledged problem with the mobile phone industry and particularly within the Android ecosystem, that the operating system support on a typical device can persist for far too short a time, leaving the user without critical security updates. With the rise of the Chromebook, this has moved into larger devices, with schools and other institutions left with piles of what’s essentially e-waste.
Now in a rare show of sense from a tech company,
Google have announced that Chromebooks are to receive ten years of updates from next year
. Even better, it seems that this will be retroactively applied to at least some older machines, allowing owners to opt in to further updates for the remainder of the decade following the machine’s launch.
Of course, a Chrome OS upgrade on an older machine won’t make it any quicker. We’re guessing many users will feel the itch up upgrade their hardware long before their decade of software support is up. But anything which saves e-waste has to be applauded, and since this particular scribe has a five-year-old ASUS Transformer just out of support, we’re hoping for a chance to jump back on that train.
There’s another question though, and it relates to the business model behind Chromebooks. We doubt that the hardware manufacturers are thrilled at their customers’ old machines receiving a new lease of life and we doubt Google are doing this through sheer altruism, so we’re guessing that the financial justification comes from an extra five years of making money from the users’ data. | 48 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683329",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2023-09-17T17:24:40",
"content": "Chromebooks…lasting more than a couple of years?Where is this hardware?In the hands of kids?I don’t believe it.I’ll grant that the newest Chromebook I’ve seen has two charging jacks, should last about two ye... | 1,760,372,165.526096 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/17/pyobd-gets-python3-upgrades/ | PyOBD Gets Python3 Upgrades | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"elm327",
"library",
"OBD",
"open source",
"pyobd",
"python",
"python-obd",
"python2",
"python3",
"software",
"vehicle"
] | One of the best things about open source software is that, instead of being lost to the ravages of time like older proprietary software, anyone can dust off an old open source program and bring it up to the modern era. PyOBD, a python tool for interfacing with the OBD system in modern vehicles, was in just such a state with its latest version still being written in Python 2 which hasn’t had support in over three years.
[barracuda-fsh] rewrote the entire program for Python 3
and included a few other upgrades to it as well.
Key feature updates with this version besides being completely rewritten in Python 3 include enhanced support for OBD-II commands as well as automating the detection of the vehicle’s computer capabilities. This makes the program much more plug-and-play than it would have been in the past. PyOBD now also includes the python-OBD library for handling the actual communication with the vehicle, while PyOBD provides the GUI for configuring and visualizing the data given to it from the vehicle. An ELM327 adapter is required.
With options for Mac, Windows, or Linux, most users will be able to make use of this software package provided they have the necessary ELM327 adapter to connect to their vehicle. OBD is a great tool as passenger vehicles become increasingly computer-driven as well, but there are
some concerns surrounding privacy and security
in some of the latest and proposed versions of the standard. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683291",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2023-09-17T14:26:31",
"content": "OOOOH very nice! I thought I had one of these, but turns out I have the ELM 327 (bluetooth version). Booo",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6683292",
... | 1,760,372,165.58911 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/17/helping-robots-learn-by-letting-them-fail/ | Helping Robots Learn By Letting Them Fail | Richard Baguley | [
"Machine Learning",
"News",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"machine learning",
"robots"
] | The [MIT Technology Review] has just released its
annual list of the top innovators under the age of 35
, and there are some interesting people on this list of the annoyingly accomplished at a young age.
Like [Lerrel Pinto]
, an
associate professor of computer science at NY University.
His work focuses on teaching robots how to do things in the home by failing.
To do this, he set up an example home in his lab, amusingly filled with kids’ toy versions of appliances like ovens, and then asked a robot to perform tasks like warming his lunch. [Lerrel] had given the robot a primer, a machine learning model based on 30-second videos of his students performing some of the tasks using the same tools that the robot would have, such as robot hands, fish slices, etc. Then he left them to it, trying to perform the tasks for 24 hours a day and judging their own performance.
This technique is called reinforcement learning, where the machine learning system tries something, considers how close it got to the example, and then tries something slightly different. He published the results in a paper entitled “
Teach a Robot to FISH
“, based on the old saying
give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you will feed him for life
. This paper is well worth reading, mainly as it includes lots of examples of how the tasks were broken down and trained. There is also an interesting video of a talk that [Lerrel] did for a presentation to the CMU Robotics Initiative.
EDIT 9/20/23: fixed link to the Arvix paper and the YouTube video. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683268",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-09-17T12:27:25",
"content": "I don’t think your paper link works. Anyway failure is fine to a degree. Depends upon the consequences of failure.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,372,165.777313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/17/multi-year-doorbell-project/ | Multi-Year Doorbell Project | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"computer vision",
"design",
"doorbell",
"image recognition",
"intercom",
"pi zero",
"raspberry pi",
"touch screen"
] | Camera modules for the Raspberry Pi became available shortly after its release in the early ’10s. Since then there has been about a decade of projects eschewing traditional USB webcams in favor of this more affordable, versatile option. Despite the amount of time available there are still some hurdles to overcome, and [Esser50k] has
some supporting software to drive a smart doorbell
which helps to solve some of them.
One of the major obstacles to using the Pi camera module is that it can only be used by one process at a time. The PiChameleon software that [Esser50k] built is a clever workaround for this, which runs the camera as a service and allows for more flexibility in using the camera. He uses it in the latest iteration of a smart doorbell and intercom system, which uses a Pi Zero in the outdoor unit armed with motion detection to alert him to visitors, and another Raspberry Pi inside with a touch screen that serves as an interface for the whole system.
The entire build process over the past few years was rife with learning opportunities, including technical design problems as well as experiencing plenty of user errors that caused failures as well. Some extra features have been added to this that enhance the experience as well, such as automatically talking to strangers passing by. There are other unique ways of using machine learning on doorbells too, like
this one that listens for a traditional doorbell sound
and then alerts its user. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683246",
"author": "Lee",
"timestamp": "2023-09-17T10:13:25",
"content": "I made my own video doorbell once. Used a metal case to house it all. With my background with Access Control and CCTV I was able to do this easily. The box had a mic, RFID reader, PIR and a Camera. Ran off th... | 1,760,372,165.820489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/dalibor-farnys-enormous-nixies-light-up-contemporary-art-museum/ | [Dalibor Farný]’s Enormous Nixies Light Up Contemporary Art Museum | Robin Kearey | [
"Art",
"Science"
] | [
"art installation",
"Dalibor Farny",
"Hiroshima",
"nixie tube"
] | Nixie tubes come in many shapes and sizes, but in only one color: the warm orange glow that makes them so desirable. They don’t usually come in large numbers, either: a typical clock has four or six; a frequency counter perhaps eight or nine. But some projects go bigger – a lot bigger in [Dalibor Farný]’s case. He built
an art installation featuring more than a hundred jumbo-sized nixie tubes
that make an entire wall glow orange.
This project is the brainchild of renowned installation artist [Alfredo Jaar], who was invited to create an exhibition at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art. Its title,
Umashimenkana
, means “we shall bring forth new life” and refers to a poem describing the birth of a child amid the suffering and despair following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Visitors to the exhibit experience a dark room where they see a wall of orange numbers count down to zero and erupt into a waterfall of falling zeroes.
Nixie tube expert [Dalibor] was the go-to person to implement such an installation – after all, he’s one of very few people
making his own tubes
. But even he had to invest a lot of time and effort into scaling them up to the required 150 mm diameter, with 135 mm tall characters. We covered his efforts towards what was then known as the H-tube project
two years ago
, and we’re happy to report that all of the problems that plagued his efforts at the time have since been solved.
One of the major issues was keeping the front of the tubes intact during manufacture. Often, [Dalibor] and his colleagues would finish sealing up a tube, only for the front to pop out due to stress build-up in the glass. A thorough heating of the entire surface followed by a slow cooling down turned out to be the trick to evening out the stress. All this heat then caused oxidation of the cathodes, necessitating a continuous flow of inert gas into the tube during manufacture. Those cathodes already had to be made stronger than usual to stop them from flexing, and the backplate light enough to keep everything shock resistant. The list goes on.
After ironing out these quirks, as well as countless others, [Dalibor] was finally able to set up a small-scale production line in a new workshop to get the required 121 tubes, plus spares, ready for shipment to Japan. The team then assembled the project on-site, together with museum staff and the artist himself. The end result looks stunning, as you can see in the excellent video embedded below. We imagine it looks even better in real life – if you want to experience that, you have until October 15th.
You might remember [Dalibor] from his excellent
video on nixie clock fault analysis
– which we hope won’t be necessary for
Umashimenkana
. He might be able to make
your favorite shape into a nixie tube, too.
Thanks for the tip, [Jaac]! | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683188",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2023-09-17T05:39:59",
"content": "I’d like to see nixie tubes made with different gases to make different colors like blue or green.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6683212",
... | 1,760,372,165.900433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/preserving-floppy-disks/ | Preserving Floppy Disks | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"5.25\"",
"antique",
"audio",
"computer",
"court",
"data recovery",
"DEC PDP-11",
"floppy disk",
"investigation",
"police",
"raspberry pi",
"retro",
"stenography"
] | Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, floppy disks, and hard disk drives, and after several decades data may not be recoverable anymore. It’s always worth trying to back it up, though, especially if you have something on your hands like
critical evidence or court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk
last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.
This project all started when an investigation unit in Maryland approached the Bloop Museum with a request to use their antique computer resources to decode the information on a 5.25″ floppy disk. Even finding a floppy disk drive of this size is a difficult task, but this was further compounded not just by the age of the disk but that the data wasn’t encoded in the expected format. Using a GreaseWeazle controlled by a Raspberry Pi, they generated an audio file from the data on the disk to capture all available data, and then used that to work backwards to get to the usable information.
After some more trials with converting the analog information to digital and a clue that the data on the disk was not
fragmented
, they realized they were looking at data from a digital stenography machine and were finally able to decode it into something useful. Of course,
stenography machines are dark magic in their own right
so just getting this record still requires a stenographer to make much sense out of it. | 36 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682969",
"author": "cnlohr",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T09:00:46",
"content": "The bloop museum is pretty cool place to check out if you’re ever in the Baltimore area!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682985",
"author":... | 1,760,372,166.147414 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/coning-cars-for-fun-and-non-profit/ | Coning Cars For Fun And Non-Profit | Navarre Bartz | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"News"
] | [
"hacktivism",
"self-driving cars",
"traffic"
] | Self-driving cars are being heralded as the wave of the future, but there have been many hiccups along the way. The newest is activists showing how autonomous vehicles are easy to hack with a
simple traffic cone
.
As we’ve discussed before, self-driving cars
aren’t actually that great at driving
, and there are a number of conditions that can cause them to fail safe and stop in the middle of the road. Activist group
Safe Street Rebel
is exploiting this vulnerability by “coning” Waymo and Cruise vehicles in San Francisco. By placing a traffic cone on the vehicle’s hood in the way of the sensors and cameras used to navigate the streets, the vehicles are rendered inoperable.
Safe Street Rebel is asking for an end to self-driving vehicle companies privatizing the benefits and socializing the costs of the development of this technology. These anti-autonomous vehicle demonstrations are the latest in a series of protests by San Francisco residents against the experiments run by tech giants with little to no public oversight. Privatization of transportation like the Google buses or shared scooter services have also drawn the ire of locals over the years.
As hackers, we know too well that corporations and actual people often don’t have the same goals. Sometimes a little creative mischief can go a long way toward rebalancing the scales. If you think “self-driving” is a deceptive term for these vehicles,
you’re not alone
, and we’ve seen some
Open Source driver assistance efforts
that could be more community-friendly than the commercial offerings. | 61 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682912",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T02:26:26",
"content": "Kinda malicious, kinda hilarious.I love it! Reminds me of the trick with jumpering train tracks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682917",
"... | 1,760,372,166.074052 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/infinite-z-axis-printer-aims-to-print-itself-someday/ | Infinite Z-Axis Printer Aims To Print Itself Someday | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"build volume",
"buttress thread",
"CoreXY",
"extruder",
"gantry",
"printer",
"self-replicating"
] | “The lathe is the only machine tool that can make copies of itself,” or so the saying goes. The reality is more like, “A skilled machinist can use a lathe to make many of the parts needed to assemble another lathe,” which is still saying quite a lot by is pretty far off the implication that lathes are self-replicating machines. But what about a 3D printer? Could a printer print a copy of itself?
Not really, but
the Infini-Z 3D printer
certainly has some interesting features that us further down the road to self-replication. As the name implies, [SunShine]’s new printer is an infinite Z-axis design that essentially extrudes its own legs, progressively jacking its X- and Y-axis gantry upward. Each leg is a quarter of an internally threaded tube that engages with pinion gears to raise and lower the gantry. When it comes time to grow the legs, the print head moves into each corner of the gantry and extrudes a new section onto the top of each existing leg. The threaded leg is ready to use in minutes to raise the gantry to the next print level.
The ultimate goal of this design is to create a printer that can increase its print volume enough to print a copy of itself. At this moment it obviously can’t print a practical printer — metal parts like bearings and shafts are still needed, not to mention things like stepper motors and electronics. But [SunShine] seems to think he’ll be able to solve those problems now that the basic print volume problem has been addressed. Indeed, we’ve seen
complex print-in-place designs
,
assembly-free compliant mechanisms
, and even
3D-printed metal parts
from [SunShine] before, so he seems well-positioned to move this project forward. We’re eager to see where this goes. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682892",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T23:54:58",
"content": "“We’re eager to see where this goes.”Upwards?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6682904",
"author": "Mike",
"tim... | 1,760,372,165.96942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/backyard-led-sculpture-inspired-by-las-vegas-sphere/ | Backyard LED Sculpture Inspired By Las Vegas Sphere | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led",
"LED sphere",
"sphere"
] | The Las Vegas Sphere is a large building. It stands 112 meters high and 157 meters wide, and is covered in a full 54,000 square meters of LED displays. That’s a little difficult to recreate at home for the typical maker.
A scaled-down version is altogether more achievable though, as demonstrated by [DrZzs & GrZzs].
The Pixelhead Megasphere, as it is known, is 1.98 meters high and 2.4 meters in diameter. That makes it altogether easier to fit in an average backyard, and it comes with a much smaller pricetag than the $2 billion used to build the Las Vegas Sphere. It runs 20,028 individual addressable LED pixels, and runs on four 12-volt 100-amp power supplies. As seen here, it’s only running at 15%, so it can go plenty brighter to really get those power supplies toasty. The sphere is controlled by Xlights, with the LEDs interfaced via Kulp controller boards. It’s able to run a variety of different animations at a good frame rate, with [DrZzs & GrZzs] busy whipping up different designs for Halloween. The eye of Sauron is a particularly nice example.
We’ve seen some other neat LED spheres before, too
. Video after the break. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682858",
"author": "kluge",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T21:59:58",
"content": "So what’s the “much lower price”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682861",
"author": "John Christensen",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T22... | 1,760,372,166.303413 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/hackaday-prize-2023-autoduct-smart-air-duct/ | Hackaday Prize 2023: AutoDuct Smart Air Duct | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Prize",
"cooling",
"duct",
"fan",
"green",
"heating",
"home",
"hvac",
"shutter",
"vent",
"ventilation"
] | Modern building techniques are relying more and more on passive elements to improve heating and cooling efficiencies, from placing windows in ways to either absorb sunlight or shade it out to using high R-value insulation to completely sealing the living space to prevent airflow in or out of the structure. One downside of sealing the space in this fashion, though, is the new problem of venting the space to provide fresh air to the occupants.
This 3D printed vent system
looks to improve things.
Known as the AutoDuct, the shutter and fan combination is designed to help vent apartments with decentralized systems. It can automatically control airflow and also reduces external noise passing through the system using a printed shutter mechanism which is also designed to keep out cold air on windy days.
A control system enables features like scheduling and automatic humidity control. A mobile app is available for more direct control if needed. The system itself can also integrate into various home automation systems like Apple’s HomeKit.
A 100% passive house that’s also as energy-efficient as possible might be an unobtainable ideal, but the closer we can get, the better. Some other projects we’ve seen lately to help climate control systems include
this heat pump control system
and this
automatic HVAC duct booster fan system
.
The
Hackaday
Prize 2023
is Sponsored by: | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682832",
"author": "hartl",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T20:11:48",
"content": "If you’re about to get new windows, consider ordering them with an automatic vent like this one:https://www.regel-air.com/These air valves don’t cost much, but should be factory fitted for best results.",
... | 1,760,372,166.248797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/supercon-2022-alex-whittemore-on-treating-your-sensor-data-well/ | Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well | Arya Voronova | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"2022 Superconference",
"grafana",
"homeassistant",
"sensor data",
"Supercon 2022",
"tasmota"
] | If you build your own devices or hack on devices that someone else has built, you know the feeling of opening a serial terminal and seeing a stream of sensor data coming from your device. However, looking at scrolling numbers gets old fast, and you will soon want to visualize them and store them – which is why experienced makers tend to have a few graph-drawing and data-collecting tools handy, ready to be plugged in and launched at a moment’s notice. Well, if you don’t yet have such a tool in your arsenal, listen to this 16-minute talk by [Alex Whittemore] to learn about a whole bunch of options you might not even know you had!
For a start, there’s the Arduino Serial Plotter that you get for free with your Arduino IDE install, but [Alex] also reminds us of the Mu editor’s serial plotter – about the same in terms of features, but indisputably an upgrade in terms of UX. It’s not the only plotter in town, either –
Better Serial Plotter
is a wonderful standalone option, with a few features that supercharge it, as [Alex] demonstrates! You don’t have to stop here, however – we can’t always be tethered to our devices’ debugging ports, after all.
With this in mind, [Alex] reminds us all about platforms like Tasmota and HomeAssistant that bring datalogging and graphing to our fingertips, and he shows us us how easy it is to set up a filament drying monitor with these, spending hardly any time on software and yet getting all the features we could wish for. With these platforms, it’s never been easier to build cool things quickly, to the point you can spend about an hour and build something that will then serve you years – and Grafana is, perhaps, the ultimate platform when it comes to aggregating data.
[Alex] quickly goes over what you need to install Grafana, and then shows us why you want to install it – with Grafana, collecting data from myriad sources becomes a breeze and a satisfying goal by itself, and you end up learning things you would never learn otherwise. He shows us some examples – for instance, by feeding battery voltage data from his sensor, he could figure out that one of them has a noisy power supply. Collecting RSSI data while querying your wireless sensors can be useful for tracking down sources of interference.
Whichever goal you’re pursuing with your device, there’s a little bit for everyone in Alex’s talk – you should check it out to be prepared for the next time you’re looking at a serial terminal with numbers scrolling by, thinking of the best way to wrangle these numbers into a graph!
And speaking of Supercon,
get your tickets already
! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682829",
"author": "Brian Wyld",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T20:03:07",
"content": "+1 on the greatness of granadaA good companion is influxdb to store the data…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682921",
"author": "The C... | 1,760,372,166.191913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/hackaday-podcast-236-the-car-episode-building-leonardos-water-mill-reviving-radio-shack/ | Hackaday Podcast 236: The Car Episode, Building Leonardo’s Water Mill, Reviving Radio Shack | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Elliot and Dan got together this time around to recap the week in hacks, and it looks like the Hackaday writing crew very much had cars on their minds. We both took the bait, with tales of privacy-violating cars and taillights that can both cripple a pickup and financially cripple its owner. We went medieval — OK, more like renaissance — on a sawmill, pulled a popular YouTuber out of the toilet, and pondered what an animal-free circus would be like. Is RadioShack coming back? Can an ESP32 board get much smaller than this? And where are all the retro(computer)virus writers? We delve into these questions and more, while still saving a little time to wax on about personal projects.
And although the show is peppered with GSM interference for the first few minutes it’s
not
actually a clue for the What’s That Sound. (Elliot says sorry! And edited most it out by swapping over to the backup recording for most of the rest of the show.)
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download it yourself
if that’s your jam.
Episode 236 Show Notes:
News:
Review: Battery Spot Welders, Why You Should Buy A Proper Spot Welder
Here’s a very complicated Hoverboard Bobbycar mod
It’s all Dan’s fault:
Ask Hackaday: What’s Your “Tactical Tool” Threshold?
What’s that Sound?
Guess the sound for a chance to win a Podcast T-shirt
!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Your Car Is A Privacy Nightmare On Wheels
When Tail Lights Lose Touch With Reality
Out With The Circus Animals, In With The Holograms
Volumetric OLED Display Shows Bladerunner Vibe, Curious Screen Tech
3D Printed Helix Displays Graphics In 3D
Wiremap
Tape Is Very, Very Quiet
[Thomas Sanladerer]’s YouTube Channel Goes In The Toilet
Bringing Da Vinci’s Saw Mill To Life
Mill – David Macaulay – Google Books
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
A Virus For The BBC Micro
Building A Cargo Bike Dream
Putting The Magic Smoke Back Into A Dodgy Spectrum Analyzer
Dan’s Picks:
How Small Can The ESP32 Get?
Clock Hack Gives DEC Rainbow A New Lease On Life
The Computer That Controlled Chernobyl
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Will RadioShack Return?
The Return Of RadioShack?
Forrest Mims, Radio Shack, And The Notebooks That Launched A Thousand Careers
Road Salt? Bah! New Roadway Material Promises A Better Solution To Snow And Ice
Intelligent Roadways Pave Way To The Future | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682792",
"author": "Mayor of Chemistry",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T16:57:06",
"content": "The What’s that sound link is expired.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682812",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2023-... | 1,760,372,166.667655 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/a-die-cast-car-subframe-pushing-the-limit-too-far/ | A Die-Cast Car Subframe, Pushing The Limit Too Far? | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"die casting",
"manufacturing",
"tesla"
] | A piece of manufacturing news from Tesla Motors caught our eye, that Elon Musk’s car company
plans to die-cast major underbody structures — in effect the chassis — for its cars
. All the ingredients beloved of the popular tech press are there, a crazy new manufacturing technology coupled with the Musk pixie dust. It’s undeniably a very cool process involving a set of huge presses and advanced 3D-printing for the sand components of the mould, but is it really the breakthrough it’s depicted as? Or has the California company simply scored another PR hit?
We produced
an overview of die casting earlier in the year
, and the custom sand moulding in the Tesla process sounds to us a sort of half-way house between traditional die casting and more conventional foundry moulding. I don’t doubt that the resulting large parts will be strong enough for the job as the Tesla engineers and metallurgists will have done their work to a high standard, but I’m curious as to how this process will give them the edge over a more traditional car manufacturer building a monocoque from pressed steel. The Reuters article gushes about a faster development time which is no doubt true, but since the days of Henry Ford the automakers have continuously perfected the process of making mass-market cars as cheaply as possible. Will these cast assemblies be able to compete with pressed steel when applied to much lower-margin small cars? I have my doubts.
Aside from the excessive road noise of the Tesla we had a ride in over the summer, if I had a wish list for their engineers
it would include giving their cars some longevity
.
Header: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0. | 81 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683161",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-09-17T02:04:55",
"content": "Grown up version of a Hot Wheels car.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6683368",
"author": "YoDrTentacles",
"timestamp": "2023-09-1... | 1,760,372,166.55967 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/spinning-crt-makes-a-360-degree-audio-oscilloscope/ | Spinning CRT Makes A 360 Degree Audio Oscilloscope | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"crt",
"oscilloscope",
"persistence of vision",
"POV",
"tachyscope"
] | A question for you: if the cathode ray tube had never been invented, what would an oscilloscope look like? We’re not sure ourselves, but it seems like something similar to
this mechanical tachyscope display
might worked, at least up to a point.
What’s ironic about this scenario is that the tachyscope [Daniel Ross] built actually uses a CRT from a defunct camcorder viewfinder as the light-up bit of what amounts to a large POV display. The CRT’s horizontal coil is disconnected while the vertical coil is attached to the output of a TEA205B audio amplifier. The CRT, its drive electronics, and the amp are mounted to a motorized plastic platter along with a wireless baby monitor, to send audio to the CRT without the need for slip rings — although a Bluetooth module appears to be used for that job in the video below.
Speaking of slip rings, you’d expect one to make an appearance here to transfer power to the platter. [Daniel] used a slip ring for
his previous steampunk tachyscope
, but this time out he chose a hand-wound air core transformer, with a stationary primary coil and secondary coil mounted on the platter. With a MOSFET exciter on the primary and a bridge rectifier on the secondary, he’s able to get the 12 volts needed to power everything on the platform.
Like most POV displays, this one probably looks better in person than it does in video. But it’s still pretty cool, with the audio waveforms sort of floating in midair as the CRT whizzes around. [Daniel] obviously put a lot of work into this, not least with the balancing necessary to get this running smoothly, so hats off for the effort. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683138",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T23:49:26",
"content": "“A question for you: if the cathode ray tube had never been invented, what would an oscilloscope look like?”Like a mechanical oscillograph?Here in ol’ Germany, we used to casually call the oscilloscope an ... | 1,760,372,166.441626 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/the-science-behind-the-majesty-of-dancing-raisins/ | The Science Behind The Majesty Of Dancing Raisins | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"beer",
"carbonation",
"peanuts",
"raisins",
"sparkling water",
"water"
] | Have you ever thrown a handful of raisins into a tub of sparkling water? Or peanuts into beer? It seems like an altogether strange thing to do, but if you’ve tried it, you’ll have seen the way the raisins dance and tumble in the fluid. As it turns out, there’s some really interesting science at play when you dive into the mechanics of it all. [Saverio Spagnolie] did just that,
and even went as far as publishing a paper on the topic.
The fundamental mechanism behind the dancing raisins is down to the bubbles in sparkling water. When dropped into the fluid, bubbles form on the raisins and attach to them, giving them additional buoyancy. They then float up, with some of the bubbles shedding or popping on the way, others doing so at the fluid surface. This then causes the raisins to lose buoyancy, rotate, flop around, and generally dance for our amusement.
[Saverio] didn’t just accept things at face value though, and started taking measurements. He used 3D-printed models to examine bubble formation and the forces involved. Along with other scientists, models were developed to explore bubble formation, shedding, and the dynamics of raisin movement. If you don’t have time to dive into the paper, [Saverio] does a great job of explaining it
in a Twitter thread
(
Nitter
) in an accessible fashion.
It’s a great example of
cheap kitchen science
that can teach you all kinds of incredible physics if you just care to look. Video after the break.
It turns out that sparkling water and raisins are *fascinating*. My daughter and I happened upon this effect playing together in the kitchen a long time ago, and I couldn't help but explore the system more deeply… 1/n
https://t.co/wNBX7nnGJS
pic.twitter.com/BVmVOeHvrP
— Saverio Spagnolie (@SaverioIV)
September 13, 2023 | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683092",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T21:09:07",
"content": "When I was young, we used mothballs instead of raisins, citric acid and baking soda in water to make the bubbles.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,372,166.614966 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/open-source-rover-gets-an-update-for-easier-building/ | Open Source Rover Gets An Update For Easier Building | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"jpl",
"mars rover",
"nasa-jpl",
"rocker-bogie",
"rover"
] | Once upon a time, NASA-JPL put out a design for an open-source rocker-bogie rover. It was an impressive and capable thing, albeit a little expensive and difficult to build. Now, the open source community has dived in and refreshed the design,
making it cheaper and more accessible than ever before.
Many parts of the original design have either become prohibitively expensive, gone out of stock, or been discontinued entirely. The new version, developed by the community that formed around the project, focuses on using off-the-shelf parts to bring costs down. Where the original design could cost as much as $3000 to build, the new model slashes that bill almost in half. It also eliminates any need for anything custom fabricated, with no machined or 3D printed parts required.
Other optimizations include cutting the rover’s head out from the basic model, as it’s not necessary for a great deal of applications. There is also better fluid and dust ingress protection, and improved serviceability. The entire rover model can also be loaded in OnShape for those desiring to inspect it or make their own modifications.
Parts lists are
on GitHub
for those desiring to build their own. Alternatively,
check out the original design to learn more
. Video after the break. | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683052",
"author": "Mr Roboto",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T17:48:59",
"content": "My kids and I built an equally capable one for ~$100. I bought a few broken used hover boards for $50. Most broken hoverboards are just cracked at the plastic central pivot or charger port connection.... | 1,760,372,166.71434 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/inspiration/ | Inspiration | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [] | While we were debating about
whether it even makes any sense to reboot RadioShack
, or indeed any brick-and-mortar electronics store in the modern era,
Dan Maloney and I
stumbled on what probably is the real source of all of our greybeard nostalgia for the store chain: inspiration.
For both of us, the appeal of a store like RadioShack was going through the place and thinking of what you’d do with all of those parts. Looking at the back of the beefiest MOSFET in the joint, you’d think about all the current you could pass with it. Or what you’d do with all of those piezo buzzers. And if you didn’t know yet what electronics project you wanted to make, there were things like the
Forrest Mims notebooks
to inspire you. There you’d find a way to turn the humble LED into a light sensor, whether you needed to or not. I wonder how many packs of assorted LEDs that book sold?!
Dan got his first hands on with a computer in RadioShack as well, because they let folks try them right there. If you didn’t know what you wanted a computer for, and that
was
the big question of the early microcomputer era, you could head into the store yourself and find out. Seeing, and playing with, Demon Dancer inspired.
A lot of this role is taken over by hackerspaces these days, and even more is taken by the Internet itself, of course. We have no shortage of inspiration – just read a day’s worth of Hackaday if you don’t believe me. So is there any room left for RadioShack’s inspirational role? Maybe not. But if that’s the cost of living in a world where we have access to more great ideas than we’ll ever have time to execute, then so be it!
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 55 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683011",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T14:06:53",
"content": "If there is any problem with inspiration these days, then it’s probably because of being overwhelmed by so many possible projects that it’s nearly impossible to make any choice at all.",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,372,166.930339 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/toy-bulldozer-becomes-epic-terrifying-lawnmower/ | Toy Bulldozer Becomes Epic Terrifying Lawnmower | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"bulldozer",
"mower"
] | Regular lawnmowers are a perfectly fine way to mow your lawn, but they can be a bit boring. They’re also not always the best at tackling thick brush and bushes. [rctestflight] has a solution to both of those problems,
in the form of a plant-munching bulldozer.
The concept is simple — it starts with a hefty miniature RC bulldozer. Weighing in at 27 kilograms (60 pounds), the beast has actual functioning hydraulics to control the blade and plow. It struggles somewhat with traction, particularly in muddier conditions, and can’t really dig much, but it nonetheless looks the business.
As cool as it was, [rctestflight] decided to employ it for some real yard work by outfitting it with a mowing rig. The ‘dozer was outfitted with a pair of sawblades, run by twin brushless motors for plenty of grunt. That gave the bulldozer the ability to mow through not just lawn, but even thick blackberry bushes and two-foot high weeds.
It’s not great at steering, but it’s able to destroy thick brush with reckless abandon. Fundamentally, it looks like a very fun way
to mow an overgrown yard
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682989",
"author": "No one of consequence",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T11:44:05",
"content": "Oh, boy. Don’t let anyone in Granby, CO see this…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6683009",
"author": "KomatsuD355A",
... | 1,760,372,166.838212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/16/kinetic-sculpture-intermittently-lights-up-the-night/ | Kinetic Sculpture Intermittently Lights Up The Night | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Art"
] | [
"arduino",
"Arduino Nano Every",
"kinetic sculpture"
] | We absolutely love the impetus of this project, as it definitely sounds like something a Hackaday reader would go through. After finally deciding between a CNC router and a laser cutter, [Eirik Brandal] was planning to “Hello, World” the CNC with something quick and simple, like maybe a few acrylic plates with curves and some electronics. Instead, feature creep took over, “things escalated out of control”, and [Eirik] came up with
this intriguing and complicated kinetic sculpture
.
As you’ll see in the demo video below, this is a motor-driven sculpture with sound and intermittent light. It has an Arduino Nano Every, two motors, and eight gears with various cog counts to accommodate the project. The light comes from LEDs that are attached to the DIY gears with their legs bent and their little feet sliding around homemade slip rings in order to alight.
But what about the sound? There’s an affixed piezo disk that picks up the gears’ vibrations and chafing, and this gets amplified to augment the acoustic sounds of the sculpture. Be sure to check out the quite satisfying demo video after the break, and stick around for the build video.
Are you as fascinated by kinetic sculptures as we are?
Here’s on that uses machine learning in order to bring balance to itself
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6683004",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-16T13:10:43",
"content": "I think it could do without the audio augmentation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6683112",
"author": "Andrew",
... | 1,760,372,167.104432 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/tricks-for-mass-producing-laser-etched-art/ | Tricks For Mass-Producing Laser-Etched Art | Lewin Day | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"maker",
"production",
"small business"
] | Art is a funny thing. Sometimes, it’s best done in a one-off fashion and sold for a hugely inflated price. Othertimes, it’s more accessible, and it becomes desirable to sell it in great quantity. [Wesley Treat] has been doing just that,
and he’s shared some of his tricks of the trade on YouTube
.
The video concerns some retro-futuristic raygun artwork panels that [Wesley] made in a recent video. The panels proved mighty popular, which meant he had a new problem to contend with: how to make them in quantity. His initial process largely involved making them in a one-off fashion, and that simply wouldn’t scale.
[Wesley] starts right at the beginning, demonstrating first how he produces stacks of blanks for his art panels. For production scale, he used pre-painted matte aluminium panels to speed the process. It’s followed by a sanding step, before the panels go into a laser etching jig to get imprinted with [Wesley’s] maker’s mark. Panels are then drilled via CNC, etched with their front artwork, and then fitted with a front acrylic panel, similarly cut out on the laser cutter. Then it’s just a matter of packing and shipping, a logistical hurdle that many small businesses have had to overcome.
[Wesley] does a great job of examining what it takes to scale from building one of something to many. It’s a topic we’ve looked
at a few times in the past
. Video after the break. | 26 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682803",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T17:44:58",
"content": "“Hugely inflated” price? If it’s one of a kind, what is the price inflated from?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682808",
"author": "Jeff Koons... | 1,760,372,166.991342 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/this-week-in-security-blastpass-mgm-heist-and-killer-themes/ | This Week In Security: Blastpass, MGM Heist, And Killer Themes | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Blastpass",
"Honeypots",
"ransomware"
] | There’s
yet another 0-day exploit chain discovered as part of NSO Group’s Pegasus malware suite
. This one is known as BLASTPASS, and it’s a nasty one. There’s no user interaction required, just receiving an iMessage containing a malicious PassKit attachment.
We have two CVEs issued so far. CVE-2023-41064 is a classic buffer overflow in ImageIO, the Apple framework for universal file format read and write. Then CVE-2023-41061 is a problem in the iOS Wallet implementation. Release 16.6.1 of the mobile OS addresses these issues, and updates have rolled out for macOS 11, 12, and 13.
It’s worth noting that
Apple’s Lockdown mode
does seem to block this particular exploit chain. Citizen Lab suggests that high-risk users of Apple hardware enable Lockdown Mode for that extra measure of security.
MGM and Scattered Spider
Starting the morning of September 11, MGM Resorts began experiencing systems outages as a result of “a cybersecurity issue”. Apparently it also hits their slot machines and ATMs — try to imagine a worse fate for the Las Vegas casino and hotel chain.
pic.twitter.com/nxIweGInsB
— MGM Resorts (@MGMResortsIntl)
September 11, 2023
It turns out,
this was the work of Scattered Spider,
a group known to use social engineering to crack large networks, and then demand ransom payments to stand down. It’s beginning to look like
the initial attack vector here was a simple phone call
to the helpdesk, asking for help getting logged in.
China’s CVE Registry
I’ve mused a few times that some companies must have arrangements with their national governments, to turn over vulnerabilities when discovered, and then slow-roll public announcement and fixes. Strictly speaking, that’s a conspiracy theory, but
it appears to be the state of play for the Chinese National Vulnerability Database
. A 2021 law seems to mandate exactly this, giving companies doing business in China a two day deadline to hand over vulnerabilities.
On the other hand, as several companies point out, it’s not uncommon for governments to have regulations requiring vulnerabilities be reported to a government prior to disclosure. The
full report
maps out the Chinese government interaction with both discovered vulnerabilities and state-sponsored hacking, and makes a rather compelling case that there is overlap.
iOS Bluetooth Annoyance
There was an annoyance at DEF CON this year —
Bluetooth popups on Apple phones
. The trick here is to spoof Bluetooth Low Energy proximity actions. This is generally intended to allow pairing devices or sharing contact info, by bringing devices right to next to each other. To determine proximity, the device just uses signal strength, and that’s the gimmic. Just push your broadcast power a little higher than a normal BLE device, and it shows up as being close enough to trigger a proximity action.
Walk around DEF CON with the battery powered setup, and annoy all your new geeky friends! And if you don’t want to build the rig out of a Raspberry Pi, apparently
a Flipper Zero can pull off the same trick
. Groovy.
Will the Real 345gs5662d34 Please Stand Up?
So this is a bit of a mystery. Honeypots, open SSH services, and all sorts of other services are constantly being bombarded with login attempts. Some clever folks record those attempts, and track some of the data, like
the most commonly attempted username and password
. And the top five you might be able to guess:
root
,
admin
,
user
,
test
, and
ubuntu
. But the sixth most common username is an oddball:
345gs5662d34
. And what’s more, all the attempts to guess that username used the same string as the password. And a very similar
3245gs5662d34
shows up often as a password guess for other usernames.
The community has already
come up with some plausible explanations
, like the values being used as breadcrumbs to track a bot or do honeypot detection. The more interesting guess is that this is how a default username and password combination gets translated into ASCII text when typed on a non-English keyboard. That’s apparently already been observed with the similar string,
ji32k7au4a83
. If you have any guesses or answers to this mystery, let us know!
Killer Themes
Themebleed has it all
. It’s a silly, catchy name, illustrates TOCTOU, MotW, and SMB manipulation, and isn’t actually all that serious. It’s perfect. Loading a
.theme
file in Windows 10 should load a new system theme, merely changing the desktop’s appearance. Running a theme file downloaded from the Internet would normally invoke the Mark of the Web (MotW), warning about an untrusted file. But stuff a
.theme
inside a
.themepack
cab file, and no warning is shown.
A
.theme
file can call a
.msstyles
file. If that
.msstyle
is set to version 999, some legacy handling code gets called, and the file name gets changed to end in
_vrf.dll
. The file is opened, the signature is checked, and the file is closed. If the signature verifies, the file is re-opened, and a function is called from within the DLL.
And that is the Time Of Check, Time Of Use bug. There is an interruptable slice of time between closing the verified file, and reopening it. Normally a TOCTOU bug is a race condition, but the clever bit here is to use a remote SMB share as the
.msstyles
location. If that’s an attacker controlled location, it’s trivial to swap out the verified DLL after the signature checks out. And that’s it, a user trying to apply a theme runs arbitrary code with no warnings. For his findings, [Gabe] scored a $5000 bounty from Microsoft, and the version 999 legacy code has been removed, ending the exploit chain.
Bits and Bytes
HPE Aruba 9000 series devices have
a pair of high severity issues
. The first allows for code execution early in the boot process, and the second allows for booting unsigned kernel images. That’s not really a problem for securely installed systems, but it does mean that an Aruba gateway could be tampered with in such a way that even a factory reset doesn’t properly clear it back to default. Fixes are available.
Cisco has
a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability in the Single Sign-On
built in to BroadWorks. This can potentially affect quite a few Cisco applications that are part of the BroadWorks cloud calling platform. Cisco has issued updates to fix the problems.
And finally, last week we talked about some unfixed issues in Notepad++. We’re thrilled to see that
a new release has been issued with fixes landing,
likely partially spurred on by the coverage here and on other news sites. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682759",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T14:35:09",
"content": "Slots and ATMs should be on separate networks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682879",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,372,167.053793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/new-lora-distance-record-830-miles/ | New LoRA Distance Record: 830 Miles! | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"distance record",
"LoRa",
"radio propagation"
] | The LoRa radio communication system is useful for low-bandwidth communication, and as many readers will be aware its special skill lies in delivering long range. For most of us that range tops out at a few miles, but pushing the limits of what is possible for LoRa has resulted in some significant records falling. Most recently this has reached
an impressive distance of 1336 kilometres, or 830 miles
.
The record in question was set from near the Portuguese coast, from where LoRa beacons on a fishing boat and its buoys were able to open up a gateway on the Spanish Canary islands. The conductive surface of the sea makes an excellent aid to propagation, and from amateur radio experience we’d guess that tropospheric conditions aided by the summer weather would have something to do with it too.
Radio amateurs on those coasts and islands chase those conditions and live in hope of making
a rare UHF contact across the ocean to the Americas or the Caribbean
. The difference in their respective frequency allocations notwithstanding, we wonder whether the same might be possible using LoRa given a fortuitous atmosphere. We’re not quite sure whether a set of dual-band LoRa gateways could be made to test this idea though.
This record breaks
a previous one set between Germany and Poland
. If you think you’ve seen a far greater LoRa record here before you’d be correct, but
only in the modulation scheme and not the frequency
. | 49 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682719",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T11:34:39",
"content": "The American mile in this case. Otherwise it would be 721 miles if nautical.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682728",
"author": "SillyGooseNot... | 1,760,372,167.200655 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/15/reverse-engineering-the-milwaukee-m18-redlink-protocol/ | Reverse-engineering The Milwaukee M18 Redlink Protocol | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"logic analyzer",
"Milwaukee M18",
"power tool battery"
] | In an ideal world, every single battery pack for power tools would use the same physical interface and speak a clearly documented protocol with chargers. Since we live in a decidedly less-than-ideal world, we get to enjoy the fun pastime of reverse-engineering the interfaces and protocols of said battery packs.
Hooking up a logic analyzer to a M18 battery and charger.
A
recent video from the [Tool Scientist
] goes over what is already known about the Milwaukee M18 Redlink protocol, used with the manufacturer’s M18-series of batteries, before diving into some prodding and poking of these packs’ sensitive parts to see what comes out of their interface.
Previously, [Buy It Fix It] shared their
findings on Reddit
, covering the basic protocol, including the checksum method, but without an in-depth analysis of the entire charging protocol. Meanwhile [Quagmire Repair] performed an
in-depth teardown
and reverse-engineering of the M18 hardware, including the circuitry of the BMS.
Putting these two things together, [Tool Scientist] was able to quickly get some of his M18 packs strapped down into the analysis chair for both passive analysis, as well as the effect of overvoltage, undervoltage, overheating and freezing the battery pack on the output reported by the battery’s BMS.
One of the lists of commands and response messages obtained by [Tool Scientist] on YouTube.
The result is a rather comprehensive list of instructions obtained under these various conditions, including a fault condition (05) returned by the BMS of one pack indicating its likely demise. Overall, it does not appear to be a particularly special (or well-designed) protocol, but it does make for a good reverse-engineering target, while adding to the body of collective knowledge on these widely available battery packs.
Hopefully the same inertia that prevents people from moving outside the designated power tool ecosystem due to the incompatible battery packs will also ensure that this level of knowledge will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, especially since the manufacturers of knock-off battery packs seem rather unwilling to share the results of their own reverse-engineering efforts. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682703",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T08:46:32",
"content": "I wonder why they chose 2000 baud and not a standard baudrate such as 9600 (1800 and 2400 are pretty close to 2000). Maybe it’s all clocked very low so it’s to avoid rounding issues?",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,167.357009 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/building-ram-expansions-for-the-dec-rainbow-100/ | Building RAM Expansions For The DEC Rainbow 100 | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"DEC",
"dec rainbow 100",
"rainbow",
"rainbow 100",
"retrocomputing"
] | It’s hard enough to get your hands on a forgotten computer from yesteryear. It’s even more difficult to get accessories like RAM expansions and graphics cards, because half the time they’re just discarded as random e-waste when they’re outside of their original context. [na103] has solved this problem for the DEC Rainbow 100 to a degree, by building new
RAM expansions
and
graphics cards
from scratch.
In the case of the RAM expansion, the design [na103] built is capable of boosting a Rainbow 100 computer to a full 896KB. This is more than other contemporary IBM machines like the 8088 XT, which had an architecture-enforced limit of 640 KB. It was rebuilt from
some notes
and
original DEC schematics.
The GS2 graphics card was recreated
in a similar fashion
, also relying on some photos snagged from the internet. Its GALs and PROMs are programmed using rips from an original board. While the design is considered complete, [na103] hasn’t yet had the opportunity to build and test it yet.
The trick is, armed with the right documentation, it’s not actually that impossible to recreate old hardware yourself. If you’ve been whipping up something similar in your own workshop, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682684",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T05:39:57",
"content": "That usagi electric guy’d probably find this nifty.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6682705",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T08:55:09... | 1,760,372,167.240444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/find-that-obscure-function-with-this-interactive-map-of-the-linux-kernel/ | Find That Obscure Function With This Interactive Map Of The Linux Kernel | Julian Scheffers | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"linux kernel",
"visualization"
] | Linux has become one of the largest operating systems on the servers that run large websites, and hopefully, one day, it will be big in the desktop market too. Some of you may know how Linux as an operating system is structured, but have you ever wondered how the kernel itself is structured? Maybe you’ll find
this colorful interactive map of the Linux kernel
by [Costa Shulyupin] useful.
The interactive map depicts the major levels of abstraction and functionalities, dotted with over 400 prominent functions from the Linux kernel, which are also links to a cross-reference site so you can see all the definitions and usages. It divides the kernel into 7 rows and 7 columns containing domains with well-known terms like security and debugging, but also more obscure things like block devices and address families. These are also links, this time to the definition of the term in question. Finally, there are arrows flying everywhere, to show the relationships between all the many functions in the kernel.
Now, the great number of arrows is certainly impressive, but to some people, the word “kernel” means nothing. Typically, the
kernel
is the supervisor in an operating system: programs request resources like memory, files and processing time from the kernel, which decides whether the requests are permitted and how much of a resource to give.
This is a bit on the theoretical side. If you want something “practical”, how about
running Linux on a Commodore 64
? | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682686",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2023-09-15T06:17:57",
"content": "“.. and hopefully, one day, it will be big in the desktop market too.”I hope not.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682697",
"author": "volt-k",... | 1,760,372,167.292204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/bare-bones-vacuum-forming-just-add-plastic-plates/ | Bare Bones Vacuum Forming, Just Add Plastic Plates | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"dollar store",
"economical",
"thermoforming",
"vacuum forming"
] | Vacuum forming is a handy thing to be able to do, and [3DSage] demonstrates
how to do a bare-bones system
that can form anything smaller than a dinner plate with little more than a 3D printed fitting to a vacuum cleaner, a heat gun, and a trip to the dollar store.
Plastic plates from the dollar store make excellent forming sheets, and in a variety of colors.
The 3D printed piece is a perforated table that connects to a vacuum cleaner hose, and [3DSage] mentions elsewhere that he tried a few different designs and this one worked the best. A cardboard box makes an expedient stand. The object being molded goes on the table, and when the vacuum is turned on, air gets sucked down into the holes.
As for the thermoforming itself, all that takes is some cheap plastic plates and a heat gun. Heat the plastic until it begins to droop, then slap it down onto the vacuum table and watch the magic happen. Using plastic plates like this is brilliant. Not only are they economical, but their rim serves as a built-in handle and helps support the sagging plastic.
Thermoforming plastic on a 3D-printed vacuum table and using 3D-printed molds definitely isn’t a system that will be cranking parts out all day long, but as long as one allows time for everything to cool off in between activations, it’ll get the job done.
Nylon will hold up best
but even PLA can be serviceable.
Watch it in action in the video embedded below. The video is actually about [3DSage] making adorable Game Boy themed s’mores, but
here’s a link to the exact moment
the vacuum forming part happens. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682626",
"author": "Tony M",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T23:14:37",
"content": "I know someone is gonna say it anyway so:That sucks! but it’s hot tho.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6682631",
"author": "michaelryangreer",
... | 1,760,372,167.552009 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/building-a-rotating-display-plate-from-a-lazy-susan/ | Building A Rotating Display Plate From A Lazy Susan | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"lazy susan",
"rotating table"
] | A rotating table is a super nifty tool for all kinds of photography and videography purposes. [Handy Bear] built a super simple example
using some parts from IKEA.
The build starts with a Snudda, which is IKEA’s version of a Lazy Susan. It’s fitted with a 3D-printed gear to allow it to be easily driven. The platter is then fitted to a 3D printed base, which also contains the drive electronics, and driven by a small brushed DC gear motor. An off-the-shelf speed controller was employed to allow the speed of the platter to be varied as required.
[Handy Bear] does a good job of explaining how to build the project properly while avoiding the usual pitfalls. In particular, he demonstrates how to fit the gear to the platter without getting it off-axis. We also appreciate a design that can be built virtually anywhere thanks to using commonly-available parts.
We’ve featured other rotating tables before, like this open-ended design that was built
on a much larger scale
. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Peeter for the tip!] | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682601",
"author": "Ack210",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T21:10:45",
"content": "The one time I needed to do this I went to the store and bought one of those cheap wind-up turntables meant for microwave ovens. Wound it up, set the camera to take a picture every 5 seconds, edited it int... | 1,760,372,167.40208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/machine-learning-robot-runs-arduino-uno/ | Machine Learning Robot Runs Arduino Uno | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"lidar",
"machine learning"
] | When we think about machine learning, our minds often jump to datacenters full of sweating, overheating GPUs. However, lighter-weight hardware can also be used to these ends,
as demonstrated by [Nikodem Bartnik] and his latest robot.
The robot is charged with autonomously navigating a simple racetrack delineated by cardboard barriers. The robot is based on a two-wheeled design with tank-style steering. Controlled by an Arduino Uno, the robot uses a Slamtec RPLIDAR sensor to help map out its surroundings. The microcontroller is also armed with a Bluetooth link and an SD card for storage.
The robot was first driven around the racetrack multiple times under manual control, all the while collecting LIDAR data. This data was combined with control inputs to help create a data set that could be used to train a machine learning model. Feature selection techniques were used to refine down the data points collected to those most relevant to completing the driving task. [Nikodem] explains how the model was created and then refined to drive the robot by itself in a variety of race track designs.
It’s a great primer on machine learning techniques applied to
a small embedded platform
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682572",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T19:02:11",
"content": "Was the model actually trained on-board though? The article seems to imply that, but it’s not specific.I find it rather more likely the data was beamed off the robot and trained elsewhere, even if *maybe* some ... | 1,760,372,167.800238 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-death-metal-macro-pad/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Death Metal Macro Pad | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cube keyboard",
"death metal macropad",
"deathpad",
"macro pad",
"macropad",
"raspberry pi",
"raspberry pi typewriter"
] | At “the size of three 60% keyboards (put together)” or approximately one Cannibal Corpse record on vinyl,
this beautifully-executed death metal font-inspired macro pad
by [zyumbik] may be better off hanging on the wall than hanging out on the desktop.
But let’s say you did have room for the 9-key Deathpad on your desktop. Wouldn’t you just play with the tentacles (?) all the time like I would? Yeah, that’s what I thought. They’re pretty inviting.
So why does this look so fantastic? It’s an SLA print, for one thing. For another, [zyumbik] spent over 1,000 hours designing the thing. Unfortunately it’s not open-source, but
you can buy the only other one in existence
for a cool $1,000.
Rubik’s
Cube Keyboard
Although it doesn’t rotate (yet), creator [_Rudeism] is calling this
the Rubik’s Cube Keyboard
. Fine with me, though any type of actual rotation would be insanely difficult to pull off. The plan is to do it with RGB LEDs.
The layout is QWERTY-adjacent — the white side is the num pad, yellow has the modifiers, and the other four sides house all the letters. As you might imagine, this uses a custom frame and PCBs. The switches are Glorious Gateron Clears, which definitely supports the blinkenlights planned for V2.
This thing reminds me a bit of of
the SafeType™ vertical keyboard
, or even
[Aaron Rasmussen]’s spherical keyboard
.
Be sure to check it out in Monkeytype action
, where [_Rudeism] manages to pull off about 20WPM.
The Centerfold: All Clear Everything
By now y’all know how much I love clear technology and things. I even built an all-clear ErgoDox, minus the PCBs of course. So it’s only natural that I would choose
[HadouKang]’s setup
for this issue’s centerfold.
That cute little pill organizer of a keyboard is Vault35 with the ortho PCB option, Designer Studio White Jade switches, and MiTo Keysterine keycaps. The ‘buds are Beats Studio Buds+, and the pen is an Opus88 Demonstrator, an interesting fountain pen that one fills with an eyedropper instead of simply drawing the ink up with suction. Finally, dig that ‘lil crab holding up the pen. Doesn’t it just make this whole picture?
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: The Crandall New Model
Image via
Antikey Shop
Often cited as the most beautiful typewriter ever produced, I’d have to agree that
the Crandall New Model
is a sight to behold. Between the mother-of-pearl inlay, floral arrangements, ornate gold embellishments and pin-striping, you’d think it was an expensive sewing machine of the same era (1886-1888).
Most notable beyond the style are the two-row keyboard and something less obvious — the
type-sleeve
. Instead of individual type bars, the New Model has a cylinder about the size of a finger with glyphs all the way around it. When a key was struck, the cylinder would rotate to the correct position and move up or down as necessary to strike the paper. I think this
has
to be the inspiration for
the typeball in the IBM Selectric
.
The awesome thing about the type-sleeve is that you could easily change fonts, which seems kind of mind-blowing for 1886. Speaking of fonts, it’s really, really weird to me how modern those legends look. You’d halfway expect something more flowery, wouldn’t you?
ICYMI: A Raspi Typewriter for the Modern Age
Distraction-free writing is getting harder and harder to come by. Not only is there the pull of life, the computer itself is full of attention-getting alternatives to what one writer called bleeding from the forehead.
For [Brendan], there was just one more obstacle to writing the great American novel: the lack of a dedicated machine that would have all the right features. So naturally, [Brendan] took time to whip one up.
The
Most Unusual Sentence Extractor, or MUSE for short
, is a Raspberry Pi-powered typewriter that saves to the cloud. The design is heavily inspired by the Olympia Traveller de Luxe of the late 1960s and early 70s, and it looks fantastic. I love the logo and the fact that [Brendan] incorporated the LCD touch screen into what would be the platen on an actual typewriter.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682611",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T21:58:33",
"content": "Are you sure it’s not Blickensderfer that was the inspiration for Selectric? It had much simpler mechanism, closer to the one used in the IBM machine, and even had an electric version!https://www.antikeyc... | 1,760,372,167.850754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/students-set-ev-acceleration-world-record/ | Students Set EV Acceleration World Record | Navarre Bartz | [
"car hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"acceleration",
"electric car",
"evs",
"speed",
"world record"
] | Humans have a need for speed, and students from the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) have set a
new acceleration record
for an electric vehicle with a 0 to 100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) time of 0.956 seconds.
The
mythen
features four custom electric hub motors with a total output of 240 kW and a vehicle weight of 140 kg (309 lb) thanks to the use of carbon fiber and aluminum honeycomb. The car was able to get up to speed over only 12.3 m (40 ft)! As with many student design team projects, every component was hand built and designed to optimize the power to weight ratio of the vehicle.
The students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts were excited to regain the record from the team at the University of Stuttgart, having previously held the title in 2014 and 2016. We suspect that they will find any European EV maker’s engineering department excited for the chance to hire them come graduation.
If you want to go fast at a smaller scale, checkout
3D printing RC car wheels for speed
, and if you’d rather ride the rails at an accelerated rate, here’s an article on
high speed rail
. | 29 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682515",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T15:35:40",
"content": "For reference, the acceleration due to gravity produces a 0-100km/h time of 2.83s. So this thing is approaching 3g on a level, straight line.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,167.697378 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/rocker-bogie-suspension-the-beloved-solution-to-extra-planetary-rovers/ | Rocker Bogie Suspension: The Beloved Solution To Extra-Planetary Rovers | Lewin Day | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"engineering",
"mars rover",
"rocker-bogie",
"rover"
] | When navigating the vast and unpredictable expanses of outer space, particularly on the alien terrains of distant planets, smart engineering often underlies every major achievement. A paramount example of this is the rocker bogie suspension system. It’s an integral component of NASA’s Mars rovers and has become an iconic feature in its own right. Its success has seen the design adopted by the Indian space program and thousands of hobbyists in turn.
So, what exactly is it that makes rocker bogie suspension such a compelling design solution? Let’s dive into the engineering that makes these six-wheeled wonders so special.
Rock Yo’ Bogies
The rocker-bogie layout easily handles rough terrain. This animation is simplified; in reality, the chassis, pictured in blue, would tilt with the average angle of the two rocker arms.
Credit: Facepunch, CC BY-SA 3.0
What’s great about the rocker-bogie design is that
NASA isn’t afraid to share what makes it great.
Part of the magic of the rocker-bogie layout is its simplicity. This innovative design omits the use of springs or shocks. Instead, picture a mechanical linkage that involves pairs of arms, termed as ‘rockers’, one on each side of the rover. These are connected with a differential pivot linking the left and right sides together. The rockers have a wheel at one end, and a “bogie” of two wheels that can pivot relative to the rocker at the other end. This basic six-wheeled layout is all there is to the rocker bogie system.
The brilliance lies in the differential’s ability to control the way the rover sits on the terrain. Due to the action of the differential between the left and right side of the rover, as one side of the suspension is pushed up, the opposite side is pushed down. This naturally spreads the load of the vehicle across all six wheels, which minimizes the maximum ground pressure on any one wheel. This is particularly desirable when traversing soft terrain, where excess ground pressure on one wheel can lead to it sinking into the ground. The differential action also keeps the rover relatively level, with the chassis maintaining an angle the average of the two rocker arms.
The Spirit and Curiosity rovers use a geared differential linking the left and right rocker-bogie assemblies.
Credit: NASA
Earlier NASA designs used a differential pivot link at the back of the rover to allow one rising side of the rover’s suspension to push down the other.
Credit: NASA
A major advantage of this design is its remarkable ability to scale obstacles up to twice the wheel’s diameter while still keeping all six wheels on the ground. This capacity allows duly-equipped rovers to effortlessly handle considerable boulders or fissures on rough terrain, while reducing the chances of getting stuck or losing traction. When approaching a vertical obstacle, a rocker-bogie rover first presses its front wheels against the obstacle. As the front wheel rotates, it lifts the wheel up the obstacle, and then crests it and rolls over. The middle wheel then does the same, with the bogie pivoting in turn, before the rear wheel completes the same journey. Forward progress is slow during such a maneuver, but a rocker-bogie rover can steadily work its way over these obstacles in a way altogether unfamiliar to other vehicle designs.
In NASA designs, it pairs the rocker-bogie suspension with high-torque actuators in the wheels. Combined with the suspension’s ability to keep all six wheels on the ground under most conditions, it provides the rover plenty of motive force to propel itself forward over even difficult obstacles. This also means that if a wheel or two are elevated or find themselves in a sandy pit, the rest can adeptly compensate, ensuring the rover continues its journey without hindrance. In the relentless and unpredictable Martian realm, this quality is invaluable, especially when a stuck rover could equate to a mission’s premature end.
The sheer simplicity and sturdiness of the rocker bogie system, with its avoidance of springs or shock absorbers, are commendable. This uncomplicated design translates to fewer components that could malfunction, offering resilience perfectly tailored for Mars’s challenging environment. Having less mechanical parts that can get clogged with dust, fatigue, or wear, is of huge benefit when your rover is on another planet far beyond any maintenance help.
Roger Cheng’s Sawppy rover uses a rocker-bogie suspension design. Here, it demonstrates the suspension’s ability to tackle high obstacles.
The one area in which the rocker bogie design doesn’t really excel is in speed. NASA’s fastest Mars rover is Perseverance, with a top speed of around 0.12 km/h. As a guide, walking pace is a comparatively blazing 4 km/h. The slow speed is somewhat justified by the fact that there’s a huge time delay between Earth and Mars, making fast travel difficult to control. At the same time, the slow nature of the rovers helps reduce the mechanical complexity. The faster a vehicle travels, the greater the shock loads. Reducing shock loads by reducing speed reduces the need for dampers.
NASA pioneered the rocker-bogie design for its Mars rovers.
Credit: NASA JPL
The rocker-bogie system has been copied many times over, a true testament to its engineering value. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chose this very suspension system for its
Pragyan lunar rover
, which landed on the moon as part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission. The rover has ably navigated the difficult lunar surface without major incident.
Similarly, many makers have put the design to good use, with Roger Cheng’s
Sawppy rover
a great example of the form. The design demonstrates excellent obstacle climbing abilities. That’s due to Roger’s hard work in building a proper implementation of the rocker bogie design, with the crucial differential link between the two sides of the rover. Many builders of homebrew rovers try to replicate the six-wheeled design, but miss this key feature. It’s understandable, given the mechanical complexity of implementing the differential link, but a rover without it gives up some ability in turn.
(Editor’s note: On the day we’re publishing this, a new version of the
NASA-JPL Open Source Rover
hit our inbox! Check it out.)
If you find yourself hard at work in a government or private space program, and you need to build a rover, consider the benefits of the rocker-bogie design. If you’re going anywhere soft, bumpy, rocky, or treacherous, it could be the solution you need. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682540",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T16:47:26",
"content": "How about an 8 or even 10 wheeled version?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682933",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,372,167.760265 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/homebrew-probe-tip-etcher-makes-amazingly-sharp-needles/ | Homebrew Probe Tip Etcher Makes Amazingly Sharp Needles | Robin Kearey | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"etching",
"probe etching",
"scanning tunneling microscope",
"tungsten probe"
] | There’s a simple reason why high-tech gadgets like PCs, TVs and smartphones are so cheap: they’re mass-produced. By spreading out huge engineering costs over equally huge production volumes, the cost per item can remain quite low. The flipside to this is that devices with only a small niche market can be extremely expensive even when they seem quite simple.
[Baird Bankovic], an undergrad student at Penn State University, discovered this when he was working with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). He noticed that the machines used to make STM probes, a pretty straightforward process, cost north of $7500. This inspired him to make
a cheap STM probe etching machine
using simple homebrew parts.
If you’re not familiar with scanning tunneling microscopy, here’s how it works in a nutshell: a very sharp tungsten needle is positioned a few nanometers above the sample to be analyzed, and a small voltage is applied between the two. Through an effect known as
quantum tunneling
, a small current then flows between the probe and the sample. By observing this current and scanning the probe across the sample, a three-dimensional picture of the surface is obtained with sub-nanometer-level resolution.
One of the many factors that determine the quality of the image is the sharpness of the probe. Because a very sharp probe is extremely fragile and prone to oxidation, they are typically made on-site by dipping a piece of tungsten wire into an etchant in one of those costly machines.
That’s exactly what [Baird]’s device does: a Petri dish on a 3D printed frame holds a volume of sodium hydroxide solution, while a jackscrew Z-stage moves a probe holder up and down. A piece of tungsten wire is dipped into the solution and a voltage is applied to start the etching process. Because most of the etching happens at the liquid’s surface, the wire gets progressively thinner at that point until it snaps and the bottom half drops off. When this happens, the current through the wire changes rapidly, which triggers the machine to pull the wire out of the solution and stop the etching process.
The resulting probes have a well-defined sharp tip with an estimated width of about 50 nanometers — pretty impressive for such a simple setup. The entire hardware design is open source and available on
[Baird]’s GitHub page
for anyone to replicate. Nanometer-sized needles might only seem useful for those with a professional STM setup, but they also come in handy for all kinds of
homebrew atomic-scale imaging experiments
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682463",
"author": "leather suit",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T11:39:50",
"content": "I need something like that to sharpen TIG electrodes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682600",
"author": "Baird Bankovic",
"t... | 1,760,372,167.9127 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/14/esp32-drives-tiny-fm-radio/ | ESP32 Drives Tiny FM Radio | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"display",
"ESP32",
"fm",
"radio",
"stereo",
"TEA5767",
"TTGO"
] | Even as music streaming services and podcast apps dominate most of our listening time, it’s still a great idea to keep a radio on hand, if for nothing else than in emergency situations. After all, blizzards, hurricanes, and other natural disasters can quickly take out both home and mobile Internet access. If you’d like to have an FM radio with the absolute smallest footprint,
take a look at this one built around an ESP32
.
While the radio uses the ESP32 as the main control board hosted by a
TTGO T-Display board which adds a 1.14 inch ST7789V IPS panel
, it also makes use of the
TEA5767 chip for handling the FM radio signals. As [Volos Projects] has it programmed, the ESP32 stores five preset channels which can be toggled using two buttons at the bottom of the device. There’s also some circuitry to handle output to headphones or a stereo.
For making the radio even smaller, some of the audio processing could be done on the ESP32 instead, although its much simpler to take a slightly larger footprint and offload this to an audio processing chip. Since the source code for this project is open, modifications could be done including adding seek/tune functionality instead of relying only on presets. If you’re not building this for emergencies, though, and your entire area is dominated by cookie cutter corporate-owned radio stations,
an ESP32 with an internet connection is great for accessing better radio stations around the world
.
Thanks to [Peter] for the tip! | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682417",
"author": "JPRDL",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T08:44:16",
"content": "Radio? It’s like browsing Internet without uBlock.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682482",
"author": "bart",
"timestamp": "2023-09-... | 1,760,372,168.232591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/a-virus-for-the-bbc-micro/ | A Virus For The BBC Micro | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8 bit",
"BBC Micro",
"virus"
] | If you work at all with British software or hardware engineers, you’ll find that there’s an entire generation perhaps now somewhere between their mid-40s and mid-50s, who stand slightly apart from their peers in their background and experience. These were the lucky teenagers who benefited from the British government’s 1980s push to educate youngsters in computing, and who unlike those before or who followed, arrived at university engineering courses fresh from school fully conversant with every facet of a computer from the hardware upwards.
[Alan Pope] is from that generation, and he relates a tale from his youth that wasn’t so out of place back in those days, of how he wrote what we’d now call a simple virus for the BBC Micro.
Better still, he’s re-created it
.
The post is as much a delightful trip back through that era of microcomputing, including an entertaining aside as he shared an airline journey with BBC Micro designer Chris Turner, and it serves as a reminder of how the BBC Micro’s disk operating system worked. There was a !boot file, which was what would be run from the disk at startup, and his bit of code would subvert that and hide itself in the machine’s so-called sideways RAM. The payload was pretty simple, every 32 soft reboots it would print a “Hello world” message, but it seems that was enough back in 1989 to get him into trouble. The 2023 equivalent works, but we’re guessing no teacher will come for him this time.
If you can’t find a real BBC Micro but still want one on hardware,
we’ve brought you an FPGA version in the past
. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681921",
"author": "Josh Bensadon",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T19:19:20",
"content": "Very cool! Wish there were a few more pictures in this article.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6681925",
"author": "Dean",
"timestamp... | 1,760,372,168.068287 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/book8088-slows-down-to-join-the-demoscene/ | Book8088 Slows Down To Join The Demoscene | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8088",
"bodge",
"cga",
"demoscene",
"dma",
"dram",
"IBM Model 5150",
"netbook",
"retrocomputing",
"V20"
] | As obsolete as the original IBM Model 5150 PC may appear, it’s pretty much the proverbial giant’s shoulders upon which we all stand today. That makes the machine worth celebrating, so much so that we now have machines like the Book8088, a diminutive clamshell-style machine made from period-correct PC chips; sort of a “netbook that never was.”
But the Book8088 only approximates the original specs of the IBM PC, making
some clever hardware hacks
necessary to run some of the more specialized software that has since been developed to really stretch the limits of the architecture. [GloriousCow]’s first steps were to replace the Book8088’s CPU, an NEC V20, with an actual 8088, and the display controller with a CGA-accurate Motorola MC6845. Neither of these quite did the trick, though, at least not on the demanding
8088MPH demo
, which makes assumptions about CPU speed based on the quirky DRAM refresh scheme used in the original IBM PC.
Knowing this, [GloriousCow] embarked on a bodge-fest aimed at convincing the demo that the slightly overclocked Book8088 was really just a 4.77-MHz machine with a CGA adapter. This involved cutting a trace on the DMA controller and reconnecting it to the machine’s
PIO
timer chip, with the help of a 74LS74 flip-flop, a chip that made an appearance in the 5150 but was omitted from the Book8088. Thankfully, the netbook has plenty of room for these mods, and with the addition of a little bit of assembly code, the netbook was able to convince 8088MPH that it was running on the correct hardware.
We thoroughly enjoyed this trip down the DMA/DRAM rabbit hole. The work isn’t finished yet, though — the throttled netbook still won’t run the Area 5150 demo yet. Given
[GloriousCow]’s recent Rust-based cycle-accurate PC emulation
, we feel pretty good that this will come to pass soon enough. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681870",
"author": "0xDEADBEEF",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T16:08:29",
"content": "Well, it shipped with NEC V20 which is too fast for some demos, but they worked almost fine with D8088 (AMD made copy). Also, holy shit, 8087 is toasty even when not in use.Sadly my BOOK8088 has some w... | 1,760,372,168.117467 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/logic-analyzers-capabilities-and-limitations/ | Logic Analyzers: Capabilities And Limitations | Arya Voronova | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"limitations",
"logic analyzer",
"protocol decoder",
"reverse engineering",
"workarounds"
] | Last time
, we’ve used a logic analyzer to investigate the
ID_SD
and
ID_SC
pins on a Raspberry Pi, which turned out to be regular I2C, and then we hacked hotplug into the Raspberry Pi camera code with an external MCU. Such an exercise makes logic analyzers look easy, and that’s because they are! If you have a logic analyzer, you’ll find that a whole bunch of hacks become available to you.
In this article, let’s figure out places where you can use a logic analyzer, and places where you can’t. We’ll start with the first limitation of logic analyzers – capture speed. For instance, here’s a cool thing you can buy on Aliexpress – a wristband from TTGO that looks like a usual fitness tracker, but has an ESP32 in it, together with an IMU, an RTC, and an IPS screen! The seller also has an FFC-connectable devboard for programming this wristband over UART, plus vibromotor and heartrate sensor expansion modules.
You can run C, MicroPython, Rust, JavaScript, or whatever else – just remember to bring your own power saving, because the battery is super small. I intended to run MicroPython on it, however, and have stumbled upon a problem – the ST7735-controller display just wouldn’t work with the
st7735.py
library I found; my image would be misaligned and inverted.
The specifications didn’t provide much other than “ST7735, 80×160”. Recap – the original code uses an Arduino (C++) ST7735 library and works well, and we have a MicroPython ST7735 library that doesn’t. In addition to that, I was having trouble getting a generic Arduino ST7735 library to work, too. Usually, such a problem is caused by the initialization commands being slightly different, and the reason for that is simple – ST7735 is just the name of the controller IC used on the LCD panel.
Each display in existence has specifics that go beyond the controller – the pixels of the panel could be wired up to the controller in a bunch of different ways, with varying offsets and connection types, and the panel might need different LCD charge pump requirements – say, depending on the panel’s properties, you might need to write
0x10
into a certain register of the ST7735, or you will need
0x40
. Get one or more of these registers wrong, and you’ll end up with a misaligned image on your display at best, or no output at worst.
2 Fast 2 Catch
First, I tried reading the code to compare the initialization parameters by sight. However, it was abstracted enough to be hard to compare – the C++ code looked something like
write_to_display(ST7735_PWCTR1 , 2+TFT_INIT_DELAY, 0x02, 0x70, 10)
and the MicroPython code looked like
write_to_display(0xC0, 0x80, 0x02, 0x70, 0xA)
. Decoding sixty lines of
#define
-heavy C code was not in my plans for the day, and I wired up my logic analyzer to the display’s SPI pins, aiming to capture the commands as they’re transferred.
The display has a bunch of pins we can see on the wristband schematic. One of them is SPI data in, another is SPI clock, and one more is called RS, also known as D/C or A0 on other SPI displays like this – it’s used to let display know whether you’re sending commands or data (pixel values). There’s also RESET and CS pins, but we don’t need to capture them – we have no other devices on this SPI bus so CS is meaningless, and we don’t care when the display is reset, either. As a result, we only need to wire up three GPIOs to our analyzer.
However, if you run the logic analyzer in this state, you will notice a problem fast – the signal doesn’t make much sense, the clock is garbled and the packet data won’t decode. Here’s where our $5 logic analyzer fails – we need to capture a whole bunch of SPI data, but the SPI speed used by this code is simply way too fast. It makes sense – you want to transmit data to your display as quickly as you can, so that your images appear on it quicker.
This is a limitation of USB 2.0 interface that the FX2 chip inside our analyzer can use; our logic analyzer has 480 Mbps connection speed, and that’s 480 megabits per second which is only 60 megabytes per second, and that’s without USB protocol and logic analyzer low-level protocol overhead. These analyzers are referred to as 24 MHz analyzers for a reason – that’s about the fastest frequency you can stream bytes to your PC, and our SPI interface was set faster than that, because it made sense to do so. And, again, you want to use a capture frequency that’s three or four times higher than the signal frequency – capturing at twice the frequency is theoretically okay, but in practice, it will result in missed datapoints, as the signals we’re measuring are imperfect.
Slow Down To Compare
There are three ways you can work around such a problem. The first is getting a faster logic analyzer – there are analyzers that connect through a USB3 port, and you can buy them online. There are also logic analyzers that have a memory chip on them – they capture a higher-speed signal for a certain amount of time into their memory chip, and then transmit all the captured data to your PC through the comparably slower USB interface. This is not as convenient as the streaming mode we get with FX2 analyzers, but it does make certain kinds of captures possible! And, if you were wondering, our FX2 analyzers don’t have extra memory in them for such a trick.
The third way, as you might have guessed, is to lower the SPI speed in the code! Displays are typically fine with a low SPI speed – it’s far more common to see “highest possible” speed limitations than “lowest possible” ones. On the MicroPython side, that was trivial, and on the factory firmware side, it took a bit of time to find the source code for it – the official GitHub only seemed to have .bin files at first, I had to dig in the “Examples” folder to actually find the source code for those.
After capturing the display communications, I could export logs of both of the communications, and see which initialization parameters the Arduino library actually uses. Then, I put the working SPI initialization parameters into the MicroPython ST7735 library source code, and the MicroPython-driven display started to work properly!
Low capture speed will not be an issue for low speed interfaces like UART, I2C, and many others – which is why I started the first article with I2C as an example, as it’s hard to screw that up. For interfaces like SPI, speed can be a problem.
For instance, grab your nearest ESP32 or ESP8266 devboard – it will have a qSPI (quad SPI) interface to talk to the flash chip, and this interface is typically exposed on SD0-3 pins on cheap devboards; unwisely so, as wiring up to those pins can only really break things unless you know what you’re doing. This interface typically goes at 40 MHz or even higher, which does require you to get a decently specced analyzer as 25 MHz max will no longer do, and you can’t just lower the interface speed either.
Speed isn’t the only limitation for logic analysis, either – not all interfaces can be easily tapped to begin with.
Bring Extra Hardware
A logic analyzer can only capture digital, logic-level signals referenced to ground, swinging from ground to 3.3 V or 5 V. We know these as single-ended signals, and these include SPI, I2C, UART, and many others. However, in this intricate tech world, many signals are differential, many are analog, and some are digital but have an analog component to them.
Let’s take RS232,
RS485
and
CAN
– they’re powerful interfaces used in automotive and embedded settings; your car likely has a CAN network in it, and if you’re working with some industrial equipment, it might have a RS232 or RS485 connection exposed for communication purposes. However, RS232 is decidedly not logic level – instead of 0 V and 5 V, it goes from -12 V to 12 V. RS485 and CAN, on the other hand, are differential interfaces – if you don’t recall, a differential pair encodes 0 and 1 with two signals, and the voltage levels on those pairs are relative to each other as opposed to ground – not logic-level signalling at all.
Not all is lost, however – all you need to do is to get a RS232/RS485/CAN to logic level PHY chip, set it to receive mode, and listen in on the output of it – receiving all the bus communications, nicely converted to a logic level range! Same goes for the USB-PD communications, except I haven’t quite seen a PHY that lets you receive the PD comms as a logic level signal – however, you can make
a circuit with an operational amplifier
and listen in on the deepest secrets of your USB-C devices.
A similar situation is with the USB interface – you might remember that some USB devices run at 12 Mbps, which is a relatively low speed; such devices are mice, keyboards, and many MCUs like the RP2040. You might think that it’d be easy to wire up such a USB signal to a logic analyzer, but not so fast – USB uses a differential pair too! Worse, the pair is also half-duplex – you can transfer data from host to device, or from device to host, but not both at the same time.
So, if you wanted to capture USB communications, you’d need to tap into D+ and D- wires, convert them into a single-ended signal somehow, let’s say, with an operational amplifier that’s fast enough, and then interpret the USB packets’ direction from their contents. Mind you, this would only cover 12 Mbps (Full-Speed) communication – USB works a bit differently at 480 Mbps (High-Speed), and it would be out of range of a cheap analyzer anyway. This is why dedicated logic analyzers exist – they might have a somewhat hefty price tag, but they can be indispensable. There’s also software USB packet capture options that you can use, for instance, Wireshark has a plugin for that.
Out Of Range
Of course, there’s a whole bunch of interfaces that are even faster than that. If you want to analyze PCIe, USB3, or DisplayPort, you’ll want to get a dedicated analyzer instead of a generic one – these interfaces are both differential and seriously fast, and that’s the point where you want to get something purpose-built. A logic analyzer is not as efficient as a dedicated peripheral that receives the signal, it’s an analysis tool first and foremost, and it would do badly sampling a seriously high speed signal when what you really care about are either the packet contents, or the signal’s analog properties.
Even under 100 MHz, things will stay tricky. There’s the LPC interface, which is basically the oldtimey ISA but scaled down to six wires – running at speeds from 33 MHz to 100 MHz. Even though it’s logic level, the LPC signal is a constant stream of messages between the CPU or the chipset and the other peripherals, and it’s not the kind of signal you want to put on prototyping wires without at least buffering it – reflections will get you. In the end,
getting an FPGA to decode LPC signals
might be way cheaper than getting an analyzer and a hardware setup that could handle straight up LPC decoding. On the upside, if you do get your hands on the LPC bus messages, you get a chance at showing everyone that all those fancy TPMs are not what they seem to be!
Last but not least, here’s one more actionable warning for the road. If you want to capture a 1.8 V signal, your logic analyzer might flake on you – it’d depend on whether it has an input buffer or not, and what kind of buffer that is. With 1.8 V tech getting more and more abundant every day, if you don’t get a signal while probing a piece of tech, you could do good throwing a scope on the pin to double check, and use a logic IC to buffer the signal if it turns out there is indeed activity and it’s just out of input range for your $5 LA! | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681860",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T15:39:13",
"content": "In case you didn’t figure it out, for the screen orientation you need the highest three bits of the MADCTL register (0x36), which is well documented in the ST7735 datasheet, and for the offset you just ne... | 1,760,372,168.173291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/your-car-is-a-privacy-nightmare-on-wheels/ | Your Car Is A Privacy Nightmare On Wheels | Jenny List | [
"Security Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"automotive privacy",
"car manufacturers",
"privacy"
] | There was a time when a car was a machine, one which only came to life when its key was turned, and functioned simply as a way to get its occupants from point A to B. For most consumers that remains the case, but unfortunately in the last decade its function has changed from the point of view of a car manufacturer. Motor vehicles have become a software product as much as a hardware one, and your car now comes with all the privacy hazards you’d expect from a mobile phone or a computer. The Mozilla Foundation have taken a look at this problem, and their disturbing finding was that
every one of the 25 major automotive brands they tested had significant failings
.
Their quote that the cars can collect
“deeply personal data such as sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, health and genetic information, and where you drive.”
had us wondering just exactly
what kind
of sensors they incorporate in today’s vehicles. But beyond mild amusement at some of the possibilities, it’s clear that a car manufacturer can glean a significant amount of information and has begun doing so largely without the awareness of the consumer.
We’ve
railed about unnecessary over-computerisation of cars in the past
, but from an obsolescence and reliability perspective rather than a privacy one, so it’s clear that the two issues are interconnected. There needs to be some level of public awareness that cars can do this to their owners, and while such things as this Mozilla investigation are great, the message needs to appear in more consumer-focused media.
As well as the summary,
Mozilla also provide a detailed report broken down by carmaker
.
Header: Michael Sheehan,
CC BY 2.0
. | 116 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681771",
"author": "WereCatf",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T11:05:34",
"content": "Pfft, I’m safe from all this: I can’t afford to buy a recent enough car to have any of this privacy-invading junk!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,372,168.40511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/clock-hack-gives-dec-rainbow-a-new-lease-on-life/ | Clock Hack Gives DEC Rainbow A New Lease On Life | Dan Maloney | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Parts",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"arduino",
"clock",
"DEC",
"oscillator",
"pacemaker",
"Rainbow 100-B",
"retrocomputing",
"SI5351"
] | In retrocomputing circles, it’s often the case that the weirder and rarer the machine, the more likely it is to attract attention. And machines don’t get much weirder than the DEC Rainbow 100-B, sporting as it does both Z80 and 8088 microprocessors and usable as either a VT100 terminal or as a PC with either CP/M or MS-DOS. But hey — at least it got the plain beige box look right.
Weird or not, all computers have at least a few things in common, a fact which helped [Dr. Joshua Reichard]
home in on the problem with a Rainbow that was dead on arrival
. After a full recapping — a prudent move given the four decades since the machine was manufactured — the machine failed to show any signs of life. The usual low-hanging diagnostic fruit didn’t provide much help, as both the Z80 and 8088 CPUs seemed to be fine. It was then that [Joshua] decided to look at the heartbeat of the machine — the 24-ish MHz clock shared between the two processors — and found that it was flatlined.
Unwilling to wait for a replacement, [Joshua] cobbled together a temporary clock from an Arduino Uno and an Si5351 clock generator. He connected the output of the card to the main board, whipped up a little code to generate the right frequency, and the
nearly
departed machine sprang back to life. [Dr. Reichard] characterizes this as a “defibrillation” of the Rainbow, and while one hates to argue with a doctor — OK, that’s a lie; we push back on doctors all the time — we’d say the closer medical analogy is that of fitting a temporary pacemaker while waiting for a suitable donor for a transplant.
This is the second recent appearance of the Rainbow on these pages — [David] over at
Usagi Electric
has been
working on the graphics on his Rainbow
lately. | 21 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681766",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T10:50:29",
"content": "I love some of these old retro machines and back in the day I got to briefly play with and repair a DEC rainbow as well as many other weird n wonderful machines that were around at the time of the 8088 IBM P... | 1,760,372,168.465191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/exploring-hidden-lyrics-on-1990s-dcc-audio-tapes/ | Exploring Hidden Lyrics On 1990s DCC Audio Tapes | Chris Lott | [
"digital audio hacks",
"home entertainment hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"audio",
"dcc",
"digital audio",
"ITTS",
"lyrics",
"metadata"
] | Having a fondness for old and obscure audio and video media formats,
[Techmoan] recently revisited the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC)
format introduced in 1992. Despite being billed as the successor to Philips’ original analog Compact Cassette format from 1963, DCC was short-lived and slipped away after only four years in 1996. [Techmoan] obtained a unique cassette that purports to be the only known published DCC tape which contains embedded song lyrics that scroll on the DCC player’s tiny screen in sync with the music — “
Size Isn’t Everything
” by the Bee Gees from 1993. Sure enough, he is able to demonstrate this in the video down below the break.
But, there’s more. For reasons unclear, this only happens on on this one Bee Gees’ album. But it turns out that many DCC tapes did in fact include lots of other metadata, and sometimes lyrics as well. But these were only visible using an unreleased Philips system called Interactive Text Transmission System (ITTS). It just so happens that the folks at
the DCC Museum
obtained a Philips prototype ITTS box and have been gradually hacking the protocol.
Track Listing Using Blocky Graphics
[Techmoan] demonstrates a modernized prototype version from Germany designed by [Thomas Falkner] called the
ITTS video box NG
. Using this, he runs through a bunch of DCC tapes from his collection, and finds a significant number of them were published with lyrics and metadata, presumably in anticipation of as ITTS launch. It’s interesting to see how some publishers spent a lot of effort to format this information and others seemed to just copy / paste over the bare minimum.
The more elaborate pages resemble what you might see on your teletext screens back in the day. On those albums that do have lyrics, the presentation can be different, as well. Lyrics from the Bee Gees album appear like text scrolling up on a terminal, with current phrases shown in yellow. Another album’s lyrics can be scrolled in different peculiar ways, including a one-word-at-a-time mode.
If this kind of historical dive into technology interests you, check out the talk that [Jac] and [Ralf] gave at the
2022 Supercon
about DCC, and
this video
from 2018 where [Ralf] digs deeper into this topic. Also, [Jac] has some more recent details on hacking the protocol posted over on his
Hackaday.io project page
. If you want a more basic introduction to DCC, [Techmoan]
introduced this format some years ago
on his YouTube channel. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681717",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T06:26:05",
"content": "From:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette#Technology“This backward compatibility was intended to allow users to adopt digital recording without rendering their existing tape collections... | 1,760,372,168.642346 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/out-with-the-circus-animals-in-with-the-holograms/ | Out With The Circus Animals, In With The Holograms | Maya Posch | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Holography",
"volumetric display"
] | As futuristic as holographic technology may sound, in a sense it’s actually already in widespread commercial use. Concerts and similar events already use volumetric projection, with a fine mesh (hologram mesh or gauze) acting as the medium on which the image is projected to give the illusion of a 3D image. The widespread availability of this technology has now
enabled Germany’s Roncalli circus
to reintroduce (virtual) animals to its shows after ceasing the use of live lions and elephants in 1991 and other animals in 2018.
For the sticklers among us, these are of course not true
holograms
, as they do not use a recorded wavefront, nor do they seek to recreate a wavefront. Rather they employ as mentioned
volumetric projection
to essentially project in ‘thin air’, giving the illusion of a tangible object being present. By simultaneously projecting multiple views, to an observer standing outside the projection mesh, it would thus appear that there is a physical, three-dimensional object which can be observed. In the case of the Roncalli circus there are 11 projectors lining the circumference of the mesh.
To a circus the benefits of this approach are of course manifold, as not only do they no longer have to carry lots of animals around every time the circus moves to a new location – along with the on-site demands – but they get to experiment with new shows and new visuals that were never before possible. Ironically, this could mean that after 3D fizzled out at movie theaters, circuses and similar venues may be in a position to make it commonplace again for the masses. | 25 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681674",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T02:14:39",
"content": "And so much less poop to clean up afterwards.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6681680",
"author": "AggregatVier",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T02:5... | 1,760,372,168.580085 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/fpga-runs-ibm-5151-mda-display/ | FPGA Runs IBM 5151 MDA Display | Lewin Day | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"5151",
"fpga",
"ibm",
"monitor"
] | When it comes to driving a display, you can do all kinds of fancy tricks with microcontrollers to get an image up. Really, though, FPGAs are the weapon of choice for playing with these kinds of signals. [Ted Fried] put one to great work driving an ancient IBM 5151 MDA display,
and shared his results on Hackaday.io.
The build relies on a Digilent Arty Z7-20 SOC FPGA development board, which has a beefy 600 MHz ARM processor on board. It also packs 500 MB of DRAM—more than enough for storing pixel data for an ancient display.
To drive the old display, [Ted] whipped up a state machine on the FPGA. It’s tasked with fetching display data from RAM and creating the appropriate timings for the MDA display interface. The images are stored directly in an array in C code running on the ARM core. From there, they are copied into the FPGA’s RAM for trucking out to the display. The 720×350 images are stored as 1 bit per pixel, and are created by converting the original JPEGs into single-bit bitmaps in GIMP, before final conversion into a C code array via utility of [Ted’s] own design.
If you’ve ever wanted to display your images in resplendent amber or green, then this could be the project for you. It’s also just a great way to learn about using FPGAs and interfacing with
alternative display technologies
. If you’ve been whipping up your own retro display hacks, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682403",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T07:28:53",
"content": "Next step: live conversion from DVI input into a signal suitable for the 5151 :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6682472",
"author": "Garth Bock... | 1,760,372,168.514304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/mistranslation-of-newtons-first-law-discovered-after-nearly-300-years/ | Mistranslation Of Newton’s First Law Discovered After Nearly 300 Years | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"Isaac Newton",
"natural philosphy"
] | For hundreds of years, we have been told what Newton’s First Law of Motion supposedly says, but recently a paper
published in
Philosophy of Science
(
preprint
) by [Daniel Hoek] argues that it is based on a mistranslation of the original Latin text. As
noted by [Stephanie Pappas]
in Scientific American, this would seem to be a rather academic matter as Newton’s Laws of Motion have been superseded by General Relativity and other theories developed over the intervening centuries. Yet even today Newton’s theories are highly relevant, as they provide very accessible approximations for predicting phenomena on Earth.
Similarly, we owe it to scientific and historical accuracy to address such matters, all of which seem to come down to an awkward translation of Isaac Newton’s original Latin text in the 1726 third edition to English by Andrew Motte in 1729. This English translation is what ended up defining for countless generations what Newton’s Laws of Motion said, along with the other chapters in his
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
.
In 1999 a new translation (Cohen-Whitman translation) was published by a team of translators, which contains a number of notable departures from the 1729 translation. Most notable herein is the change of the original (Motte) translation:
Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line,
unless
it is compelled to change that state by forces impress’d thereon.
to the following in the Cohen-Whitman translation:
Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward,
except insofar
as it is compelled to change its state by the forces impressed.
This more correct translation of the Latin
nisi quatenus
has significant implications for the law’s effects, as while Newton’s version does not require force-free bodies, the weak reading introduced by Motte’s translation incites exactly the kind of debate which has been seen over the centuries about why the First Law even exists, when in this translated form it automatically follows from the Second Law, rendering it redundant.
In the example of e.g. a spinning top, which Newton used in later elucidations of the First Law this follows as well, as a spinning top does not follow a rectilinear trajectory, yet it still maintains its spinning and other motions, unless disturbed by an external force (e.g. a hand touching it). Unfortunately, Newton never saw the English translation, as he died a few years before its publication, and thus was never able to correct this mistake.
The essential impact of this improved translation would thus be that we have to reconsider our interpretation of Newton’s First Law of Motion, along with the complexity of translating precise wording between natural languages which are so different. | 57 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682360",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T02:32:09",
"content": "He also made a tasty fig pastry!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682384",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"t... | 1,760,372,170.400187 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/paper-punching-machine-looks-like-cute-piece-of-computer-history-past/ | Paper Punching Machine Looks Like Cute Piece Of Computer History Past | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"machine",
"mechanism",
"paper tape",
"punch card"
] | Computing used to run on punch cards. Great stacks of cards would run middling programs, with data output onto more punched cards in turn.
[Nii] has built a machine in this vein, capable of punching binary into paper tape.
The machine is run by a stepper motor, which is charged with feeding the paper tape through the machine in steady steps. A series of vertically-actuated solenoids punch holes in the paper tape as directed. The machine buzzes and clicks away like the best electromechanical computing devices of the mid-century era.
To what end, we couldn’t possibly say. One user noted the machine was punching seemingly random binary into the paper tape, and [Nii] has not provided any explanation as to the machine’s higher purpose. Regardless, whatever it is doing, it looks like it’s doing it well. Feel free to speculate in the comments.
Impressively, the petite device will be demonstrated at MF-TOKYO, the 7th Annual Metal Forming Fair in Tokyo this year. We’re sure
the clickity-clack
will be muchly appreciated in person. Video after the break.
うおぉお！動いた！！！！
#紙テープパンチャー
pic.twitter.com/pUcB1hDId3
— Nii (@neet2121)
September 10, 2023 | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682326",
"author": "[Todd]",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T23:05:04",
"content": "I wonder if this is to make tape for some old machine (cnc, textile loom, etc) to keep it running.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682328",
... | 1,760,372,170.466399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/its-time-you-built-a-smart-pocket-watch/ | It’s Time You Built A Smart Pocket Watch | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"diy smart watch",
"pocket watch",
"smart pocket watch",
"smart watch"
] | There’s just something about a pocket watch that screams class compared to the barbaric act of bending your arm, or the no-fun way of looking at your phone.
But smartwatches are dumb, analog things that mostly look pretty. Or are they? [JGJMatt] proves otherwise with their stunning
DIY smart pocket watch
. It is essentially a cheap smart watch from Amazon stuffed into the shell of an old pocket watch, but you know it’s not quite that simple.
On the easier side of things, [JGJMatt] had to come up with a 3D-printed bracket to hold the smart watch’s guts. On the harder end of the spectrum, he ended up building the charging port into the crown, where the latch used to be.
This is a beautiful build for sure, and a great way to reuse something that might otherwise end up thrown away or melted down.
Looking for a cool alternative pocket watch that’s a little easier to build?
Check out [JGJMatt]’s pocket sundial
. | 39 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682285",
"author": "Dan D.",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T20:34:16",
"content": "Oh please. If there is indeed something that “screams class” about a pocket watch its an old one that still winds and tells time. Not a DRM-controlled digital analogue with slow IQ iconography.And yes, I k... | 1,760,372,170.6307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/3d-printed-rc-car-is-geared-for-speed/ | 3D Printed RC Car Is Geared For Speed | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"R/C car",
"radio control"
] | You can always go out and buy an RC car off the shelf. However, it’s readily achievable to print your own design that has many of the features of off-the-shelf models,
as demonstrated by [Jinan]
.
[Jinan] set about creating a rear-wheel-drive design with a low center of gravity for good handling. Two large 5.2 Ah batteries slung low in the chassis help keep the car planted when cornering. [Jinan] also developed a double-wishbone suspension setup up front to handle bumps with ease.
With his eyes on top speed, [Jinan] needed a drivetrain that could handle sustained high RPM operation without failure. During the development process, [Jinan] spent plenty of time learning about the mathematics behind gear shapes before relying on a built-in CAD generator to do the job for him. Armed with proper gearing, he focused on making sure the driveshafts and other links wouldn’t fail at speed.
[Jinan] doesn’t shy away from diving into the engineering of his design, analyzing failures and improving on his designs along the way. It’s no surprise his design was able to reach 66 km/h (41 MPH) after his rigorous development process. It’s compelling watching, and
a great way to learn something
. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682402",
"author": "NFM",
"timestamp": "2023-09-14T07:17:06",
"content": "The wide rear tyres are interesting.Wider tyres don’t directly translate to more traction as one would think.The only two real parameters that affect traction (on a solid road surface) is tyre compound and co... | 1,760,372,170.296316 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/youve-got-mail-automatic-for-the-people/ | You’ve Got Mail: Automatic For The People | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"automated post office",
"automation",
"Project Gateway",
"Project Turnkey",
"USPS"
] | When we last left the post office,
I told you all about various kinds of machinery the USPS uses to move mail around
. Today I’m going to tell you about the time they thought they could automate nearly every function inside the standard post office — and no, it wasn’t anytime recently.
By 1953, the post office badly needed modernization. When Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was appointed that year, he found the system essentially in shambles. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, the USPS had done absolutely no spending beyond the necessary, with little to no investment in the future. But Summerfield was an ideas man, and he had the notion to build a totally automated post office. One of them would be located in Providence, Rhode Island and be known as Project Turnkey — as in a turnkey operation. The other would be located in Oakland, California, and serve as a gateway to the Pacific.
The Post Office of Tomorrow
Commemorative stamp issued October 20, 1960. Image via
Smithsonian Postal Museum
Turnkey opened on October 20, 1960, and was quite a building. It was a one-story affair, 420′ long, 300′ wide, and 55′ high, but only had two supporting columns in order to maximize floor and equipment space.
Both a distribution center and a regular post office, the building was nestled amid several major transportation routes. Ideally, Project Turnkey would show the world its worth by first speeding mail around Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts.
The point of such an automated post office was to be a proving ground for new machinery, a laboratory for postal invention. Just as we learned last time, processing begins with cullers that separate out the packages from letters and flats. The cullers take similarly-sized letters and stack them neatly in trays, although they are going every which way. Then it’s on to the facer-canceller, which locates the postage and faces the mail piece for cancellation.
So, Not Exactly Automated
The interior of Project Turnkey. Note the control tower. Image via
Smithsonian Postal Museum
Although a automated post office, Turnkey was not without human intervention. After coming out of the facer-canceller, trays of letters would travel to semi-automated sorting compounds where employees hand-coded in destinations. Then the letters would be sacked up.
Packages moved much the same way — faced by machines, taken by conveyors to humans to hand-code the destinations, and whisked away in canvas sacks.
The numbers that came out of Turnkey were fairly impressive. The sorters were capable of routing letters to 30 destinations. The cullers and the facer-cancellers were cranking out 25,000 pieces per hour.
But far from being a fully-automated post office, Turnkey required 1,500 employees to run the thing, which was about 100 more than the previous post office.
Project Turkey
The view from the control tower. Image via
Shorpy
In hindsight, Project Turnkey seemed doomed from the start. Its origins were political in nature, and the building was dedicated just weeks before the Kennedy vs. Nixon election. Afterward, little attention was paid to the project, which had cost around $20 million to build.
More importantly, the employees were inadequately trained on the machinery, some of which ended up being under-utilized or not used at all.
Unfortunately, Turnkey didn’t have any of its problems locked up. Some enterprising scalawag sent a letter through Turnkey with a Russian stamp on it (in 1960!), and — you know it — the thing was culled, faced, cancelled, and delivered. And because humanity can behave speaking collectively like it’s twelve years old, this inspired copycat stunts. See, and then they just had to add more humans.
By March of 1961, Projects Turnkey and Gateway were declared a failure, first by the Washington Post. Critics referred to it as “Project Turkey.” Apparently the House Postal Appropriations Subcommittee told the USPS to stop paying Intelex, from whom they were leasing the expensive Turnkey building. Additionally, the newly-elected Postmaster General J. Edward Day was much more grounded when it came to the day-to-day operations of the USPS.
But Wait, There’s More
Of course, that wasn’t the end of postal automation. Stay tuned for more about the USPS’ advancements, including OCR machines, ZIP codes, vending machines, and something called v-mail. We’ll also take a look at ways the USPS has attempted to improve productivity and service as well as the customer experience. And no, I haven’t forgotten about that bit of trivia. | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682231",
"author": "spaceminions",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T18:26:38",
"content": "Throughout the “30s and 40s, the USPS had done absolutely no spending beyond the necessary, with little to no investment in the future.”Well that doesn’t sound familiar at all!",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,372,170.877109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/how-three-letters-brought-down-uk-air-traffic-control/ | How Three Letters Brought Down UK Air Traffic Control | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"air traffic control",
"air transport",
"software bugs"
] | The UK bank holiday weekend at the end of August is a national holiday in which it sometimes seems the entire country ups sticks and makes for somewhere with a beach. This year though, many of them couldn’t, because the country’s
NATS air traffic system went down
and stranded many to grumble in the heat of a crowded terminal. At the time it was blamed on faulty flight data, but news now emerges that the data which brought down an entire country’s air traffic control may have not been faulty at all.
Armed with the official incident report and publicly available flight data,
Internet sleuths theorize
that the trouble was due to one particular flight:
French Bee flight 731
from Los Angeles to Paris. The flight itself was unremarkable, but the data which sent the NATS computers into a tailspin came from two of its waypoints — Devil’s Lake Wisconsin and Deauville Normandy — having the same DVL identifier. Given the vast distance between the two points, the system believed it was looking at a faulty route, and refused to process it. A backup system automatically stepped in to try and reconcile the data, but it made the same determination as the primary software, so the whole system apparently ground to a halt.
It’s important to note that there was nothing wrong with the flight plan entered in by the French Bee pilots, and that early stories blaming faulty data were themselves at fault. However we are guessing that air traffic software developers worldwide are currently scrambling to check their code for this particular bug. We’re fortunate indeed that safety wasn’t compromised and only inconvenience was the major outcome.
Air traffic control doesn’t feature here too often, but we’ve previously looked at
a much earlier system
.
Header image: John Evans,
CC BY-SA 2.0
. | 51 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682193",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T15:51:39",
"content": "I wonder if they are still searching for that drone flying around their airport.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682204",
"author": "James... | 1,760,372,170.818571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/this-keyboard-doesnt-work-without-game-boy-cartridges/ | This Keyboard Doesn’t Work Without Game Boy Cartridges | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Microcontrollers",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Gameboy Advance",
"gameboy cartridge",
"keyboard",
"typeboy",
"typepak"
] | Just when we though we’d seen it all when it comes to custom keyboards (or most of it, anyway),
along comes [Stu] with the TypeBoy and TypePak
. Like the title implies, TypeBoy and TypePak are inseparable.
Let’s talk about TypePak first. Somehow, some way, [Stu] managed to fit the following into an aftermarket Game Boy Advance cartridge: a XIAO BLE microcontroller, a Sharp Memory Display, a shift register, and a LiPo battery. It’s all there in [Stu]’s incredibly detailed blog post linked above.
Amazing, no? And although [Stu] claims that the TypePak is mostly for aesthetics (boy howdy), it will make swapping microcontrollers much easier in the future.
If this looks sort of familiar, you may remember a likely render of [mujimaniac]’s board called
the GIGA40
that also employed a cartridge system. Allegedly there is now a working prototype of the GIGA40.
Would you like to give the TypeBoy and TypePak a go?
Files are available on GitHub
, but this doesn’t seem like a project for the faint of heart.
Speaking of stuffing things in to Game Boy cartridges,
check out this SNES cartridge turned hard drive enclosure
.
Via
KBD | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681659",
"author": "Scarlett",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T00:24:09",
"content": "Those aren’t gameboy cartridges",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6681660",
"author": "Scarlett",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T00:25:36"... | 1,760,372,170.732174 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/this-arduino-debugger-uses-the-ch552/ | This Arduino Debugger Uses The CH552 | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arduino",
"debug",
"debugging"
] | One of the things missing from the “classic” Arduino experience is debugging. That’s a shame, too, because the chips used have that capability. However, the latest IDE has the ability to work with external debuggers and if you want to get started with a classic ATMega Arduino, [deqing] shows you how to get started with a cheap
CH552 8-bit USB microcontroller board as the debugging dongle
.
The CH552 board in question is a good choice, primarily because it is dirt cheap. There are design files on
GitHub
(and the firmware), but you could probably pull the same trick with any of the available CH552 breakout boards.
There was a time when having a god-eye view of your embedded system required an expensive in-circuit emulation system. These were expensive, difficult to deploy, and rare. Then, CPUs started adding debugging hardware right on the chip. A few spare pins on the CPU and some sort of adapter would give you most of what you wanted from an emulation system. Although these adapters are often proprietary, sometimes they aren’t, or they have been reverse-engineered. If you know the protocol, it is easy enough to get a processor to speak it for you. That’s why you often see, for example, Raspberry Pi
Picos debugging other Picos
. There’s nothing you can’t do
a million other ways
here, but it is an excellent step-by-step tutorial for getting started without breaking the bank. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681602",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T20:36:50",
"content": "Gosh, I thought the ATMEGA328 did not have debugging hardware on board, but I just checked the datasheet and it does have debugwire.Now why does this Hackaday article not mention debugwire? Debugwire is m... | 1,760,372,170.683414 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/flip-the-switch-on-this-i2c-controlled-usb-hub/ | Flip The Switch On This I2C Controlled USB Hub | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"digital switch",
"i2c",
"USB hub"
] | You’ve probably seen USB hubs with physical switches for each port, they provide a handy way to cut the power to individual devices, but only if you’re close enough to flip them. They won’t do you much good if you want to pull the plug on a USB gadget remotely.
That’s why
[Jim Heaney] created the I2C-USB-Hub
. The device takes your standard USB 2.0 hub circuit, and adds in a MT9700 P-MOSFET load switch for each port. The enable pin on each of these switches is in turn connected to one of the output pins of a PCA9557PW I2C I/O chip. That means controlling each port is as easy as sending the proper sequence of bits over the wire, though [Jim] says he does plan on writing up an Arduino library to make flipping the digital switches a little more user friendly.
Since the 8-bit chip had a few extra pins left over, [Jim] wired one up to serve as a master control for the LED indicator lights on the PCB. Another is used to adjust the current limit on the MT9700 between 500 mA and 1 A.
While naturally we’re big fans of spinning up your own hardware here at Hackaday, we’ve also seen similar results achieved by
modifying an off-the-shelf USB hub
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681581",
"author": "dqd",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T19:12:06",
"content": "That is the time to use a Per-Port Power Switching hub.https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6681900",
"author": "Andr... | 1,760,372,170.237905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/cheap-lcd-uses-usb-serial/ | Cheap LCD Uses USB Serial | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Microcontrollers",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"CH552",
"lcd",
"python"
] | Browsing the Asian marketplaces online is always an experience. Sometimes, you see things at ridiculously low prices. Other times, you see things and wonder who is buying them and why — a shrimp pillow? But sometimes, you see something that probably could have a more useful purpose than the proposed use case.
That’s the case with the glut of “smart displays” you can find at very low prices. Ostensibly, these are being sold as system monitors. A business-card-sized LCD hooks up via USB and shows your CPU speed, temperature, and so on. Of course, this requires sketchy Windows software. I don’t run Windows, and if I did, I wouldn’t be keen to put some strange service on just so I could see tiny displays of my system information. But a 3.5-inch IPS LCD screen for $15 or less probably has some other uses. But how to drive it? Turns out, it is easier than you think and the hardware looks reasonably hackable, too.
Like a lot of this cheap stuff, these screens are sold under a variety of names, and apparently, there are some subtle differences. Two of the main makers of these screens are Turing and XuanFang, although you rarely see those names in the online listings. As you might expect, though, someone has reverse-engineered the protocol, and there is
Python software that will replace the stock Windows software
the devices use. Even better, there is an example of using the library for your own purposes.
Inside Hardware
There’s not much behind the metal cover. Taking out the two screws reveals this neat layout.
The hardware is super simple — at least, the variant I have. A cheap CH552T CPU is an 8051 with a USB core. It should be possible to crack into it and reprogram the whole thing, but that seems like a lot of work. There’s a 3.3 V regulator and a handful of small components on the board.
There are two USB-C ports and a connector to hook up to a motherboard’s internal USB port. You can only use one of the ports at a time, though. There’s actually only one port. The different ports are there so you can route the wire based on your mounting preference.
From the software standpoint, the thing looks like… a serial port! I was hoping the USB conversion occurred outside the chip since a logic-level RS232 LCD display would have been very cool, indeed! Alas, no. The CH552 has its own USB controller. On the other hand, the device does have two normal UARTs, so it would be possible assuming you could reflash the controller.
Inside Software
The Python software is pretty simple to use. There are several versions of the display, and you do need to know which one you have: mine is a revision B. The software can find the serial port automatically, which seems to work well, or you can specify a port number. You can use simple calls to clear the screen, draw text, lay down images, and draw “progress bars” that the stock software uses as a meter.
Reading the code, there are several commands available. One provides a handshake with the display. You can also set the LED lighting, the brightness, and the orientation, portrait or landscape. To display text or graphics, you build an image and send that to the display.
The code provided uses the
Pillow
library for Python. Of course, it would be possible for you to directly interact with the screen in your own applications using the serial port directly. The underlying protocol sends 8 bytes at a time in a 10-byte packet. The code is easy to read, so you could easily work out your own drivers if you wanted to.
A Quick Example
Naturally, I had to try it out for myself. My goal? Show the last Hackaday headline on the diminutive screen. I stuck with Python since the libraries were ready to go, and I prepared a Jolly Wrencher graphic with a little room on the bottom.
The code just opens the display, scrapes the headline, draws it, and then quits. If you want constant updates, you must run the whole thing from a cron job or a systemd timer.
Here’s the code:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from library.lcd.lcd_comm_rev_b import LcdCommRevB, Orientation
# init LCD
lcd=LcdCommRevB() # default is AUTO,320,480
lcd.Reset() # Does nothing for Rev B hardware
lcd.InitializeComm()
lcd.SetOrientation(Orientation.LANDSCAPE)
lcd.SetBrightness(10);
# background graphic
back='had.png'
lcd.DisplayBitmap(back)
# scrape
r=requests.get('http://www.hackaday.com')
if (r.ok) :
soup=BeautifulSoup(r.content, 'html.parser')
entry=soup.find('div', class_='entry-intro')
title=entry.findAll('a')[1].text;
# put title on LCD
print(f"Found {title}\n")
lcd.DisplayText(" " + title, 0, 280, font_size=16, font_color=(0,0,0), background_color=(255,255,255))
exit(0)
else : # error message
lcd.DisplayText(" Internet error!", 0, 280, font_size=16, font_color=(0,0,0), background_color=(255,255,255))
exit(1)
The BeautifulSoup library makes it easy to pull the title — at least until we do a site redesign. After that, it is just a matter of calling DisplayText. You can find the code and the graphic you need on
GitHub
. A good idea to grab it from there since the browser display of the code above is always suspect when you need indentation.
If you need a quick and dirty (and cheap) LCD and you have a USB host port and Python, this could be just the ticket. Even without Python, the protocol would be easy to replicate. We are still tempted to reflash the
CH552
to convert it to use a normal serial port. If you decide to give it a go,
you’ll need to figure out programming
. The header would be a good place to pull up the D+ pin to 3.3V to enter bootloader mode. Let us know how you do! | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681531",
"author": "david moloney",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T17:08:18",
"content": "Is this the kind of panel you mean?https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/04/29/turing-smart-screen-a-low-cost-3-5-inch-usb-type-c-information-display/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,372,170.942512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/balloon-eye-view-via-ham-radio/ | Balloon-Eye View Via Ham Radio | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"balloon",
"high altitude balloon",
"video streaming"
] | If you’ve ever thought about launching a high-altitude balloon, there’s much to consider. One of the things is how do you stream video down so that you — and others — can enjoy the fruits of your labor? You’ll find
advice on that and more
in a recent post from [scd31]. You’ll at least enjoy the real-time video recorded from the launch that you can see below.
The video is encoded with a Raspberry Pi 4 using H264. The MPEG-TS stream feeds down using 70 cm ham radio gear. If you are interested in this sort of thing, software, including flight and ground code, is on the Internet. There is
software for the Pi
, an
STM32
, plus the packages you’ll need for the ground side.
We love high-altitude balloons here at Hackaday. San Francisco High Altitude Ballooning (SF-HAB)
launched a pair during last year’s Supercon
, which attendees were able to track online. We don’t suggest you try to put a crew onboard, but there’s a
long and dangerous history
of people who did. | 22 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681496",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T15:35:20",
"content": "Hmmm nothing at all about putting stuff at high altitudes from an aviation hazard standpoint.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6681499",
"a... | 1,760,372,171.002915 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/wi-fi-7-the-next-big-leap-or-a-whole-lotta-nothing/ | Wi-Fi 7: The Next Big Leap Or A Whole Lotta Nothing? | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"802.11be",
"Wi-Fi 7"
] | For most people, the Wi-Fi hardware of today provides a perfectly satisfactory user experience. However, technology is ever-evolving, and as always, the next advancement is already around the corner. Enter Wi-Fi 7: a new standard that is set to redefine the boundaries of speed, efficiency, and connection reliability.
Wi-Fi 7 isn’t just another incremental step in the world of wireless tech. It’s promising drastic improvements over its predecessors. But what does it bring to the table? And how does it differ from Wi-Fi 6E, which is still relatively fresh in the market? Read on.
A Glimpse into Wi-Fi 7
Wi-Fi 7 offers a bit more of everything. Credit:
Intel
Wi-Fi 7 is recognized in the official naming convention as IEEE 802.11be. It’s headline feature is speed. Wi-Fi 7 is expected to provide speeds up to up to 46,120 Mbit/s. That’s over four times faster than Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, or over 4,000 times faster than 802.11b, the first Wi-Fi standard the world fell in love with. Wi-Fi 7 is also engineered with advanced features to combat latency, bolster capacity, and enhance stability and efficiency. And while it will be backward compatible, like prior Wi-Fi standards, unlocking its full potential will require users to upgrade their devices.
For context, we can compare Wi-Fi 7 with Wi-Fi 6E, its direct predecessor. Both standards utilize the same frequency bands: 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz. Yet, Wi-Fi 7 boasts some distinct enhancements.
The additional speed of Wi-Fi 7 largely comes by virtue of wider channels, which offer more bandwidth. On the 2.4 GHz band, Wi-Fi historically uses 11 channels of 20 MHz each. Meanwhile, in the 5 GHz band, it can use 45 channels of 20 MHz each, while also ganging them together into 40 MHz and 80 MHz channels. The last standard, Wi-Fi 6E, opened up new spectrum in the 6 GHz range, with 60 channels and widths up to 160 MHz. Wi-Fi 7 goes farther again, supporting channels up to 320 MHz wide.
Such wide channels present an issue, wherein an existing signal within that range would typically make the whole channel unusable. However, Wi-Fi 7 supports a feature called “puncturing” to get around this. For example, if a 40 MHz signal was taking up a chunk of a 320 MHz channel, the puncturing feature of Wi-Fi 7 would allow the other 280 MHz of the bandwidth to still be used.
Wi-Fi 7 aims to reduce worst-case latency performance compared to previous standards.
Credit: IEEE
Wi-Fi 7 also improves with something called 4K-QAM. QAM, which stands for Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, is the scheme by which Wi-Fi technology turns digital data into a radio signal. It’s a complex method by which the phase and amplitude of radio waves are varied to encode data. QAM techniques allow a great deal of data to be sent in a compact amount of radio spectrum. The new 4K-QAM encoding method enables Wi-Fi 7 to encode 12 bits of data per “symbol” sent over the radio link, versus 10 bits for the 1024-QAM encoding method of Wi-Fi 6. This change alone helped provide a 1.2x speed improvement compared to the previous standard.
Multi-link operation (MLO) also debuts in Wi-Fi 7. Despite past Wi-Fi standards specifying many channels spread over several frequency bands, devices always made a link over a single channel at any one time. Wi-Fi 7 opens up the possibility of running multiple channels at once, even across multiple frequency bands. Using multiple channels and multiple frequency bands in a single aggregated connection should offer better speeds, significantly lower latency, as well as improved reliability, versus older Wi-Fi standards that had to manually switch between bands one at a time.
Techniques are also used in Wi-Fi 7 to try and bring down latency further compared to previous standards. This is of prime interest for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications. This is due to the multiple delays involved in sending motion or head tracking data via Wi-Fi, with a further corresponding latency addition while waiting for updated graphical data to be sent back in response. Tens of milliseconds can spoil immersion or create visual issues, so lower latency is key. Advanced signal techniques like
parameterized spatial reuse
help in this regard, reducing latency by making bandwidth available in a timely fashion, while
coordinated beamforming helps slash latency even further.
Wi-Fi 7 won’t drastically improve median latency so much, but the plan is that it should offer a substantial improvement in worst-case latency, thus offering smoother performance for demanding applications.
While Wi-Fi 7 is poised to deliver significant benefits like high-quality video streaming, seamless cloud gaming, and robust support for AR and VR applications, the new feature set also addresses common problems like congestion and interference. This will be especially beneficial for large venues or enterprises with a dense arrangement of devices.
The Road Ahead
MSI’s upcoming Wi-Fi 7 router includes mechanically movable antennas that automatically seek the best possible signal. This isn’t a Wi-Fi 7 technology specifically, but it’s very cool. Credit:
Tom’s Hardware
Early adopters can expect the debut of a wide range of Wi-Fi 7 routers, phones, and laptops
by late 2023 or early 2024
. Those in nations
yet to approve 6 GHz networking devices
may have to wait longer.
Some devices are already on the market, however. The OnePlus 11 smartphone already features Wi-Fi 7 thanks to its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. Similarly, the Lenovo Legion Slim 7 Gen8 laptop features a MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 card.
Companies like TP-Link have already jumped on the bandwagon, announcing their Wi-Fi 7 router lineup, including the top-tier quad-band Archer BE900 which debuted in April 2023. On the device front, giants like Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MSI have showcased their Wi-Fi 7 technologies, with many other vendors expected to ship in the near future. Particularly fancy examples include the MSI RadiX BE22000 router, which uses mechanically movable antennas to provide the best possible signal at all times.
For those considering a switch, it’s worth noting that the full potential of Wi-Fi 7 will be unlocked when paired with Wi-Fi 7 compatible devices. And even though Wi-Fi 7 looks promising, it doesn’t signal the end for Wi-Fi 6. Both standards are set to coexist, serving as complementary technologies in the foreseeable future.
In a world that’s rapidly becoming more connected, Wi-Fi 7 stands as a testament to our insatiable appetite for faster, more efficient, and reliable internet connectivity. While the majority might still be getting accustomed to Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, the horizon already holds the promise of a brighter wireless future. | 52 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681466",
"author": "WereCatf",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T14:29:57",
"content": "Oh well, I may be able to use WiFi 7 in 15-20 years once support for some routers begins to finally land in OpenWrt.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,372,172.11912 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/atari-introduces-a-new-old-console/ | Atari Introduces A New Old Console | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"atari",
"atari 2600",
"retro",
"Rockchip"
] | Readers of a certain age no doubt remember the Atari 2600 — released in 1977, the 8-bit system helped establish the ground rules for gaming consoles as we know them today, all while sporting a swanky faux wood front panel designed to make the system look at home in contemporary living rooms.
Now, nearly 50 years later, the Atari 2600 is back. The new system,
imaginatively named the 2600+
, looks exactly like the original system, albeit at around 80% scale. It will also work the same way, as the system will actually be able to play original Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges. This is something of a surprise when compared to the previously released retro consoles from the likes of Sony and Nintendo, as they were all limited to whatever games the company decided to pack into them. Of course, this probably has something to do with the fact that
Atari has been selling newly manufactured 2600 games
for some time now.
Although it will play original cartridges, it’s still an emulated console at heart. There aren’t a lot of technical details on the product page, but it does say the 2600+ is powered by a Rockchip 3128 SoC with 256 MB of DDR3 RAM and 256 MB eMMC flash. Some quick searching shows this to be a pretty common board for set-top gadgets, and wildly overpowered considering the meager requirements for emulating a game console from 1977. We wouldn’t be surprised to find it’s running some kind of minimal Linux install and using one of the existing open source emulators.
While the 2600+ sports the same 9-pin D-sub controller connectors as the original console, it thankfully embraces modern display technology and outputs over HDMI. Each console will come with a “10-in-1” cartridge that contains some of the console’s most popular titles, as well as a modernized version of the original single-button joystick. (Unlike the original, the 2600+ comes with only a single joystick — the other is sold separately.)
Atari won’t start shipping the 2600+ until this fall, but they’re currently taking preorders for the $130 system. We’re eager to see somebody pull it apart, as the earlier “mini” consoles
ended up being ripe for hacking
.
Thanks to [Rog77] for the tip. | 29 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681426",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T11:33:05",
"content": "Oh no… this is a ploy to sell the remaining E.T. game carts, isn’t it?https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,372,171.659084 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/11/bringing-da-vincis-saw-mill-to-life/ | Bringing Da Vinci’s Saw Mill To Life | Al Williams | [
"History",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"leonardo da vinci",
"Sawmill",
"woodworking"
] | DaVinci’s notebook — the real one, not the band — was full of wonderous inventions, though many were not actually built and probably weren’t even practical with the materials available at the time (or even now). [How To Make Everything] took one of the Master’s drawings from 1478 of a sawmill and
tried to replicate it
. How did he do? You can see for yourself in the video below.
There are five different pieces involved. A support structure holds a water wheel and a saw. There’s a crank mechanism to drive the saw and a sled to move the wood through the machine. It sounds simple enough, although we were impressed and amused that he made his own nails to be authentic. No Home Depot back in the 1470s, after all.
Watching him produce, for example, castle joints, makes us think, “Hey, we could do that!” But, of course, we probably can’t, at least not by hand. We must admit we are pretty dependent on CNC tools and 3D printing, but we admire the woodwork, nevertheless. There’s some pretty cool metal working, too.
We thought the waterwheel would be the easy part, but it turned out to be a bit of a problem. Things worked, but it was slower than you would think. We’ve seen sawmills
put together before
. Da Vinci worked for money, and there was always
money in weapons
so he did design a lot of them, too. | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681385",
"author": "dnoms",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T08:41:30",
"content": "Glad I clicked about 14 minutes into the video. Tl;dr machine doesn’t work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6681434",
"author": "sjm4306",
... | 1,760,372,171.427094 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/new-electric-motor-tech-spins-with-no-magnets/ | New Electric Motor Tech Spins With No Magnets | Al Williams | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"AC synchronous motor",
"motor"
] | When you think of electric motors, you usually think of magnets. But magnets are heavy, and good magnets can pose problems when you need lots of them. A technology called SESM (separately excited synchronous motors) requires no magnets, but now ZF — a German company — claims to have a different scheme using
inductive excitation
. Motors that employ SESM tend to be larger and require a direct current to turn the rotor. This DC is often supplied by slip rings or an AC induction with a rectifier. The innovation here is that the inductive excitation is built completely into the shaft, which the company claims makes the motor both compact and powerful.
This kind of motor is usually destined for electric vehicles. The company claims the motor reduces losses by about 15% over conventional techniques. To maximize efficiency, conventional SESM uses slip rings or brushes to transmit power to the shaft. However, ZF claims their inductive improvements are even more efficient and can reduce axial size by around 90 mm.
Another advantage of the technology is that there is no need to provide a dry space for slip rings. That means fewer seals and the ability to cool the rotor with oil as you would with a motor containing permanent magnets. The company plans to offer a 400 V version of the motor and an 800 V that uses silicon carbide electronics.
If you build your own motors, have you tried anything like this? Usually, we don’t see
motors this big
, of course. We have, however, seen builds of
reluctance motors
that don’t use magnets. | 58 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681353",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T05:11:46",
"content": "Cool, this would work really well for very large setups as in economies of scalesuch as in respect if materials versus utility Eg flywheel energy storage etcThats a good link... | 1,760,372,171.583592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/grannophone-helps-you-stay-in-touch/ | Grannophone Helps You Stay In Touch | Kristina Panos | [
"home hacks",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"raspberry pi",
"video conferencing",
"videoconferencing",
"vpn"
] | Whether it’s distance, pandemics, or both that separate you from your elderly loved ones, what’s the best idea for communicating with them so they don’t suffer from loneliness on top of issues like dementia? We’d say it’s probably something like [Stefan Baur]’s
Grannophone
.
Back in late 2020, a Twitter user named [Nitek] asked the Internet what could be done in the way of a grandma-friendly video-conferencing solution, provided Grandma has a TV and a broadband internet connection. At first, [Stefan] was like, just get her an old iPad and FaceTime with her. But the question got him thinking. And prototyping.
Grannophones are essentially Linux machines with a video-capable SIP client connected over a VPN for privacy reasons. In simple mode, picking up the handset of one Grannophone will call the other, but more complicated configurations are possible. We particularly like that replacing the handset automatically obscures the camera. That’s a nice touch.
At this point, the Grannophone is a work in progress. The idea is that they be extremely easy to build at the kitchen table, like on the order of disposable Swedish furniture. If you can contribute to the project,
please do
. Be sure to check out the demonstration video after the break.
On the other hand, if Granny is 1337,
you could always video-conference in terminal
. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681337",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2023-09-11T03:41:40",
"content": "I really like it! From some of the family members I had, I would skip switching the video to the TV to avoid confusing the person. But if the person can handle that ok, it certainly is a nice touch for poo... | 1,760,372,172.019146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/hackaday-links-september-10-2023/ | Hackaday Links: September 10, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"auction",
"Chandrayaan-3",
"chatbot",
"ChatGPT",
"fungi",
"hackaday links",
"helium",
"iphone",
"luna 25",
"mushroom",
"pants",
"reserve",
"sensor",
"skynet",
"surveillance",
"theft",
"underwear",
"windows"
] | Most of us probably have a vision of how “The Robots” will eventually rise up and deal humanity out of the game. We’ve all seen that movie, of course, and know exactly what will happen when SkyNet becomes self-aware. But for those of you thinking we’ll get off relatively easy with a quick nuclear armageddon, we’re sorry to bear the news that AI seems to have other plans for us, at least if
this report of dodgy AI-generated mushroom foraging manuals
is any indication. It seems that Amazon is filled with publications these days that do a pretty good job of looking like they’re written by human subject matter experts, but are actually written by ChatGPT or similar tools. That may not be such a big deal when the subject matter concerns stamp collecting or needlepoint, but when it concerns differentiating edible fungi from toxic ones, that’s a different matter. The classic example is the Death Cap mushroom (
Amanita phalloides
) which varies quite a bit in identifying characteristics like color and size, enough so that it’s often tough for expert mycologists to tell it apart from its edible cousins. Trouble is, when half a Death Cap contains enough toxin to kill an adult human, the margin for error is much narrower than what AI is likely to include in a foraging manual. So maybe that’s AI’s grand plan for humanity — just give us all really bad advice and let Darwin take care of the rest.
We had to check the calendar on this one to make sure we hadn’t Rip van Winkle-d all the way to the next March-April interface before diving into this one:
US spooks are spending $22 million to develop “smart underwear.”
They’ve even got a cool acronym — “Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems,” or Smart ePANTS. The popular press is all over the “surveillance undies” thing, and understandably so — who wants sensors built into a garment in such close contact with your most private areas? But if you read into it a bit, the idea starts to make sense, at least how IARPA — the intelligence community’s answer to DARPA — is pitching it. They’re saying that people on sensitive missions, like arms inspections, are often so laden with electronics that it’s hazardous for them to negotiate ladders and catwalks in industrial facilities where arms-control treaty violations are likely to occur. Putting all that electronic junk in with your junk might just make the job easier. It’s not lost on us that this could be a massive benefit to espionage in general, too. It’s intriguing, but we hate to think about what happens when this technology leaks out to the consumer market, as it inevitably will. It’s bad enough that you can buy a new car that doesn’t spy on you.
When you look through US government auction sites, you never know what interesting things you’ll come across. We’ve been tempted a few times, mostly by equipment like military surplus generators and old government vehicles, but we’ve never pulled the trigger on anything. Nor are we likely to on our latest find, which is — well,
the entire remaining US strategic stockpile of helium
. Digging into this a bit, it looks like the government is auctioning 800 million cubic feet of stored helium as well as helium and natural gas interests on 38,000 acres of land, 423 miles of pipeline easements, and the entire Cliffside Gas Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Depending on your interests, you can bid on either the helium alone or the whole shebang, which includes the facility that
refines crude helium
into clean, pure monoatomic gas. The remaining helium in the reserve is the merest fraction of what was once stored there — 44 billion cubic feet in its heyday — but still nothing to sneeze at; it’s enough to fill 123 WWII
Akron
-class airships, if that’s what you’re into.
By now you’ve probably heard about
India’s successful Chandrayaan-3 landing
near the Moon’s south pole, which was preceded by
the not-so-successful Luna-25 attempt by Russia
. On the latter,
NASA has released before-and-after photos
that show what’s most likely Luna-25’s final resting place. The pictures were taken about two months apart by the indispensable Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which never fails to return fascinating high-resolution photos of the Moon’s surface. The LRO team’s analysis of the new crater, which is about ten meters wide, suggests it wasn’t made by a natural impactor, given the angle of attack and the fact that it’s along Luna-25’s path and about 400 km short of the planned landing zone. RIP Luna-25.
Some would say any Windows is too much Windows, but that didn’t stop someone from trying to run Windows within Windows
ad nauseam
. Aptly dubbed
Winception
, the demo starts with a moderately powerful laptop running Windows 11, which then starts up a VMWare session of Windows 10, which launches Windows 8.1, then Windows 8, followed at last by Windows 7. It’s Windows all the way down, at least until launching Windows DOS on the Win7 VM, which breaks the fenestration chain a bit. It sounds like performance down the line would be awful, but it’s really not that bad — a little sluggish, perhaps, but really not that far off of what the perceived performance would have been when running each OS on top-of-the-line tech at the time it was released. We’d love to see how far down this could go — XP? Windows 95? Dare we hope for NT or Windows 3.1?
And finally, if your appetite runs more toward the Apple ecosystem but you lack the funds for the latest iPhone, fear not — all you need is
a sharp set of chompers
. As the story goes, a woman phone shopping in China was taken aback by the steep price of an iPhone 14. Rather than dish out for the phone, she allegedly decided to take off with a display unit, only to be thwarted by the security cable tethering the phone to the display. Undaunted, she proceeded to chew her way through the plastic-coated steel cable, liberating the phone — at least for the 30 minutes it took police to track her down. It sounds like an almost superhuman feat, but when you think about it, it’s not much different than stripping stranded copper wire with your teeth. And once she was past the plastic covering, it would have been pretty easy to twist the underlying steel cable enough to get individual strands exposed, which would be trivial to clamp between your teeth and bend until they break. How she managed to do all this without raising suspicions of the “Geniuses” staffing the store is hard to imagine; then again, maybe it’s not. | 17 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681298",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T23:17:50",
"content": "All of humanity dies over and over and over… Maybe AI noticed and figures it doesn’t matter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6681299",
"author... | 1,760,372,171.488584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/upgraded-graphics-gremlin-adds-hdmi-video-to-vintage-pcs/ | Upgraded Graphics Gremlin Adds HDMI Video To Vintage PCs | Robin Kearey | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"hdmi",
"isa",
"vga",
"video card"
] | Although new VGA-equipped monitors can still be bought, the old standard is definitely on its way out by now, being replaced by high-speed digital interfaces like HDMI and DisplayPort. It therefore makes sense to prepare for a VGA-less future, as [Yeo Kheng Meng] is doing. He designed an
8-bit ISA display card with an HDMI output
that enables even the very first generation of PCs to talk to a modern monitor.
The design is based on the
Graphics Gremlin by [Tube Time]
, which is an 8-bit ISA display card that aims to be software compatible with the obsolete MDA and CGA display formats while outputting a clean VGA signal. [Yeo Kheng Meng] modified the board by adding a TFP410 HDMI bus driver and replacing the rarely-used 9-pin RGBI connector with an HDMI version. He also updated the HDL code for the Lattice FPGA, which forms the heart of the graphics card, to account for the new digital output. While he was at it, he also added a few features he was missing in the original product, such as the option to select the color displayed in MDA mode and the ability to output both HDMI and composite video at the same time.
The video below shows the updated card in action in an IBM 5155 Portable PC. The HDMI port connects to a modern monitor, while the composite video output is routed to the 5155’s internal CRT as well as a small color monitor on top. The IBM thereby joins a small list of retro computers that have received an HDMI upgrade — the
Amiga 500
and
PlayStation 2
being other examples. HDMI might be a lot more complex to work with than VGA, but luckily
there are open-source implementations
that do much of the work for you. | 34 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681253",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T20:14:09",
"content": "I’m looking forward to the HDMI card for my TimexSinclair-1000!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6681271",
"a... | 1,760,372,171.734144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/open-deck-is-your-window-to-shortcuts/ | Open Deck Is Your Window To Shortcuts | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"carbon fiber",
"ESPP8266",
"macro pad",
"macropad"
] | Once in a while, we see projects that could easily pass for commercial products. This is one of those projects: a (surprisingly)
low-cost DIY macro pad
from [Josh R] that was designed to be a cheaper alternative to the various stream decks out there. Between the carbon fiber top plate and the crystal-clear acrylic keycaps, this is quite the elegant solution.
This lovely little macro pad is built around the ESP8266, specifically the WEMOS D1 Mini V4. However, the most vital part to get right is the screen, which must be a 128 x 160 TFT display in order to line up with the 3D printed frame that divides it into fourths. Custom parts like the acrylic keycaps and the carbon fiber top plate are
available on Tindie
if you don’t have access to a CNC.
Operationally, Open Deck has a nice-looking GUI. Once programmed, each shortcut is capable of having three beneath it, with the fourth button reserved for Home. Be sure to check out the extremely satisfying build video after the break.
Want a stream deck, but don’t want to build it?
Just dig up an old phone or tablet
. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681234",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T18:55:41",
"content": "Steam deck, stream deck, I’m confused.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6681235",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,171.955076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/industrial-surge-protector-teardown/ | Industrial Surge Protector Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"surge protector",
"varistor"
] | Surge protectors are a common item in the modern household, but the
Meanwell unit that [Big Clive] tears apart
was clearly intended for commercial use. In fact, he mentions it was made for outdoor signage. Removing the rear panel didn’t help much — the entire unit was potted in resin — but that didn’t stop [Clive]. Removing the resin revealed only a few components surrounded by a sand-like substance.
There’s no circuit board inside. Components are just wired together before potting. The significant player inside is a metal oxide varistor with a thermal fuse. [Clive] draws out a schematic, which is deceptively simple. The two LEDs are an older style of green LED, and he explains why the choice of LED is important in this application. In typical operation, the LEDs light. If a fuse blows, at least one of the LEDs will extinguish.
Not all useful circuits have to be complicated. This is an excellent example of how a simple but well-constructed design can succeed commercially.
Not all surge protectors
are built this well. If you need a refresher on
how varistors work
, we can help with that. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681237",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T19:07:55",
"content": "The manufacturer does “mean well” when supplying products to customers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6681281",
... | 1,760,372,172.166302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/zinc-air-the-next-contender-in-vehicle-batteries/ | Zinc-Air, The Next Contender In Vehicle Batteries? | Jenny List | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"battery",
"rechargeable batteries",
"zinc-air"
] | If you’ve got an interest in technology, it’s inevitable that your feed will feature a constant supply of stories with titles in the vein of “New battery breakthrough offers unlimited life and capacity!”. If we had a pound, dollar, or Euro for each one, we’d be millionaires by now. But while the real science behind the breathless headlines will undoubtedly have provided incremental battery improvements, we’re still waiting for the unlimited battery.
It’s not to say that they don’t conceal some interesting stories though, and there’s an announcement from Australia proving this point admirably.
Scientists at ECU in Perth have created a new cathode compound for rechargeable zinc-air batteries
, which it is hoped will make them much safer and cheaper competitors for lithium-ion cells.
Most of us think of
zinc-air
batteries as the tiny cells you’d put in a camera or a hearing aid, but these conceal a chemistry with significant potential that is held back by the difficulty of creating a reliable cathode. In these batteries the cathode is a porous support in which a reaction between zinc powder wet paste and oxygen in the air occurs, turning zinc into zinc oxide and releasing electrons which can be harvested as electricity. They have a very high power density, but previous cathode materials have quickly degraded performance when presented with significant load.
The new cathode support
is a nano-composite material containing cobalt, nickel, and iron, and is claimed to offer much better performance without the degradation. Whether or not it can be mass-produced remains to be seen, but as a possible alternative to lithium-ion in portable and transport applications it’s of great interest. | 35 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681137",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T12:34:15",
"content": "If they can realize the double- or triple- the energy density of lithum batteries, that’s great. It will enable lighter, less resource-intensive and lower carbon-footprint EVs.But they still have the issue ... | 1,760,372,171.804178 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/10/pi-pico-becomes-sram-for-1981-educational-computer/ | Pi Pico Becomes SRAM For 1981 Educational Computer | Robin Kearey | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"busch 2090",
"level shifter",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"sram",
"sram emulator"
] | Ever since the Raspberry Pi Pico was introduced in early 2021 we’ve seen the tiny Pi being used for an astonishing variety of applications. It has powered countless clocks, gadgets, games, and accessories for all kinds of computers old and new. [Michael Wessel] has recently added an interesting new application in the “old computer” category, by turning a Pico into
a 2114 SRAM emulator for his Busch 2090
, an educational computer system from 1981.
The pinout of the classic 2114 SRAM chip is quite simple: ten address lines, four data lines, Write Enable and Chip Select. Since the 3.3 V Pico
is more or less 5V tolerant
, you could directly connect these signals to its GPIO ports, but [Michael] considered it more reliable to use level shifters between the two voltage domains. He experimented with a few standard level shifter circuits, but quickly realized he had to take the 33 kΩ pulldown resistors on the Busch 2090’s address bus into account. By just adding a couple of resistors to the Pico’s ports he could make completely passive level shifters, which worked just fine since the system’s clock frequency is only 500 kHz.
[Michael] demonstrates his RAM replacement in the video below, with a neat set of blinkenlights showing the data being shuttled around in real time. He has plans to make a proper PCB for his project, as well as to enable all kinds of neat features by modifying the system’s RAM in real time. This is of course not limited to the Busch 2090: the 2114 chip was widely used in the 1980s, so the PicoRAM can probably be used in many other systems of the era. Code for the Pi is
available on GitHub
if you’re interested in trying this for yourself. If you’d like to find out what programming a Busch 2090 feels like, you can
emulate one using an Arduino
. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681119",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T09:49:08",
"content": "Odd to think that this Busch 2090 was launched _after_ the ZX80 and any number of other actually-useful computers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,172.222487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/when-tail-lights-lose-touch-with-reality/ | When Tail Lights Lose Touch With Reality | Jenny List | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"automotive design",
"cars",
"ford",
"repair",
"right to repair"
] | To study the history of the automobile is to also be a student of technological progress — as with each decade’s models come new innovations to make them better handling, more corrosion-resistant, faster, more efficient, or whatever the needs of the moment dictate. But sometimes that technological advancement goes awry and works against the motorist, making for a vehicle that’s substantially worse than what went before. [FordTechMakuloco] has
a video with an example in a Ford pickup
, which we believe deserves to be shared.
The problem with the vehicle was simple enough, indeed it’s one we’ve had in the past ourselves. Water got into a tail light, and corroded some connectors. The difference with this Ford though was that such a simple fault took out the whole car, and that the fix for a simple tail light cost $5600. The first was due to a vehicle-wide CAN bus going down due to the electrical short, and the second was due to the assembly containing an assortment of wiring and modules which couldn’t be replaced separately. These included some form of side-facing parking radar, a component unnecessary for operation of the light itself. Some relatively straightforward design and component supply decisions such as separating subsystems across multiple CAN busses, ensuring individual modules are separately available, and even designing connectors to face downwards and self-drain, could have fixed it, but the automaker chose instead to build in some planned obsolescence. Would you buy a Ford truck after seeing the video below the break?
We’ve written here before about
how automotive design has taken this wrong path
, and even advanced a manifesto
as to how they might escape it
. This Ford tail light seems to us an egregious example of electronics-as-the-new-rust rendering what should be a good vehicle into a badly designed piece of junk, and honestly it saddens us to see it. Oddly, there was once a time when a Ford truck was about as good as you could get. | 129 | 33 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681091",
"author": "handyman_jam",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T05:37:20",
"content": "Perfect opportunity for the hackers and makers of the car community.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6681096",
"author": "bob",
... | 1,760,372,172.511032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/the-webstick-is-a-small-cheap-nas/ | The WebStick Is A Small, Cheap NAS | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"esp12f",
"ESP8266",
"hosting",
"microsd",
"nas",
"networking",
"storage"
] | The ESP8266 was one of the first chips that provided wireless functionality at a cost low enough to be widely popular for small microcontroller projects.
This project uses one to provide rapid, small, and inexpensive network-attached storage (NAS) capabilities
wherever you happen to go.
With an ESP12F board at the heart to provide network connectivity, the small device also hosts a micro SD card slot and a USB-A port to provide power and programming capabilities for the device. It’s Arduino-compatible, and creator [tobychui] has provided the firmware source code necessary to bring it up on your network and start serving up files. Originally intended for people to host web services without experience setting up all of the tools needed for it, there’s services for storing and streaming music and video over the network as well.
While it includes a lot more functionality than is typically included on a NAS,
[tobychui] notes
that with a library, something like WebDAV could be added to provide more traditional NAS capabilities. As it stands, though, having networked storage with web hosting capabilities on a PCB with a total cost of around $5 is not something to shy away from. If you’re looking for something a little more powerful for your home network,
take a look at this ARM-based NAS instead
. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681068",
"author": "WereCatf",
"timestamp": "2023-09-10T02:41:06",
"content": "“While it includes a lot more functionality than is typically included in a NAS”What? A typical NAS includes far more functionality than this! NASes typically include Samba support, iSCSI, a hypervisor, ... | 1,760,372,172.283971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/tape-is-very-very-quiet/ | Tape Is Very, Very Quiet | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"3m",
"noise dampening",
"tape"
] | If someone stops by and asks you to help them make some noisy thing less noisy, you probably wouldn’t reach for a roll of tape. But [The Action Lab] shows some
3M tape made for exactly that purpose
. For the right kind of noise, it can dampen noise caused by a surface vibrating. You can see how (and why) it works in the video below.
The tape works using a technique known as “constrained layer damping.” Obviously, the tape only works in certain applications. The video explains that it bonds a stiff surface to the vibrating surface using an elastic-like layer. The tape reduces vibrations from things like cymbals and a cookie tin. The noise reduction is both in amplitude and in the duration of the sound, making things noticeably quieter.
You sometimes see a
similar material
in cars to reduce vibration noise, but we aren’t sure if it uses the same technique. We’ve also seen different kinds of tape used to lower drums’ volume. Reduces the neighbor’s complaints about your practice jam sessions.
This tape reduces noise but can also reduce fatigue wear on metal and composite structures. The downside is it seems extraordinarily expensive. It also doesn’t help that most places want you to buy an entire case, which drives the price even higher. Depending on the size, you can expect to pay about $200 for each 36-yard roll of this tape. But it seems like the principle involved is simple enough that you could make your own, sort of like the video does with the aluminum plate.
Usually, when we talk about noise reduction around here, we mean the
electronic kind
. Or, sometimes,
fungal
. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681042",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-09-09T23:18:46",
"content": "Yeah, people have been using it on drums since duct tape was a thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6681046",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,172.339555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/clean-water-from-a-plant-based-filter/ | Clean Water, From A Plant-Based Filter | Jenny List | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"filter",
"water",
"xylem"
] | If you’re an outdoors person, one of the earliest things you learned was probably that in-field water sources can’t always be trusted as drinkable. A clear mountain stream could have a dead sheep in it just upstream, for example. Maybe you learned to boil it, or perhaps add chemical tablets. Up-to-date campers have a range of filters at their disposal thanks to nanotechnology, but such devices aren’t the only options to avoid sickness. [BeraAjan]
has built one using plant xylem
.
The inspiration for this filter came from
an MIT paper
, and the plant xylem in question isn’t the thin layer we were expecting but a far thicker one found in young conifer branches. In fact, the whole twig without its bark is placed in a tube, and the water filters through it.
It’s fair to say that this isn’t the fastest of filters though, as you can see in the video below the break. He’s combined a few individual filters, but maybe it’s not for the easily bored.
Header image: USFWS,
Public domain
. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681000",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2023-09-09T20:31:18",
"content": "I could take toilet paper and do the same. (But the water would not be taste like pine)Where is the qualitative analysis that is filters anything ? Or is it just a MIT inspiration of anything at all ?",
"... | 1,760,372,173.162084 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/rare-arcade-game-teardown-and-mods/ | Rare Arcade Game Teardown And Mods | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Teardown"
] | [
"arcade games"
] | [Video Game Esoterica] loves a 1990s video game called
Operation Tiger
. Apparently, there are only a few of these known to exist in 2023, and he
managed to find one of them
. Well, it is really just a module so he has to figure out how to give it enough input and output to be actually playable. You can see several videos of his work with the Taito game below.
The board has a lot of ICs and a Power PC to handle the 3D graphics. The graphics seem clunky today, but they were impressive for the time. According to the video, the CPU board was only used for this game. The ROM that holds the software is separate with a mix of mask-programmed memory and EPROMs.
The machine is meant to live in an arcade box. So wiring things like coin selectors, video, speakers, and controllers is a non-trivial exercise. The wiring paid off, though, as the board started up but with no buttons, it wasn’t able to start in the first video. The controls go through a 60-pin connector and he tackles that project in part two.
The next step is to actually
update the game software
, which is hard but possible. Of course, you can run many of these old games with MAME or, if you prefer, use it to score that
primo engineering workstation
you used to covet. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680975",
"author": "LambdaMikel",
"timestamp": "2023-09-09T17:57:38",
"content": "Nice! Looks like good action!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6680989",
"author": "Cmh62",
"timestamp": "2023-09-09T19:35:33",
"conte... | 1,760,372,172.843092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/determining-the-size-of-the-new-us-lithium-deposit-amidst-exploding-demand/ | Determining The Size Of The New US Lithium Deposit Amidst Exploding Demand | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"battery",
"lithium",
"lithium iron"
] | With demand for lithium in the world market projected to increase by 2040 to as much as eight times the demand in 2022, finding new deposits of this metal has become a priority. Currently most of the world’s lithium comes from Australia, Chile, China and Argentina, with potential new mining sites under investigation. One of these sites is the McDermitt caldera in the US, a likely remnant of the Yellowstone hotspot and resulting volcanic activity. According to a
recent study
(
Chemistry World article
) by Thomas R. Benson and colleagues in
Science Advances
, this site may not only contain between 20 to 40 million tons of lithium in the form of the mineral clay
illite
, but was also formed using a rather unique process.
This particular group of mineral clays can contain a number of other chemicals, which in this particular case is
lithium
due to the unique way in which the about 40 meter thick layer of sediment was formed. Although lithium is a very common metal, its high reactivity means that it is never found in its elementary form, but instead bound to other elements. Lithium is thinly distributed within the Earth’s crust and oceans. Incidentally, the Earth’s oceans contain by far the largest amount of lithium, at approximately 230 billion tons.
So how much lithium could be extracted from this new area, and how does this compare to the increasing demand?
Chasing The Buck
Probably is mostly the concentration of the lithium that determines whether extraction is economical. In ocean water, the concentration is approximately 0.14 to 0.25 ppm, whereas that in one of the currently largest known reserves in Chile is 6% after evaporation of most of the moisture in the pumped-up salty water. In comparison, the approximate concentration of lithium in the illite mineral clay samples analyzed by Benson et al. was over 10,000 ppm. This is significantly more than is contained in the other common mineral clay –
smectite
– also found in the
McDermitt caldera
region at 3,400 to 6,800 ppm.
The complicated distribution of the lithium deposits is due to the volcanic origin of the region, which in a sense acted to concentrate lithium not unlike how lithium is recovered from salty water by concentrating it into brine.
South-north schematic cross section of McDermitt caldera at the time of magmatic resurgence (~16 Ma ago). (Credit: Thomas R. Benson et al., 2023)
Just knowing the concentration of lithium in a few select samples isn’t enough, of course to determine how much lithium might be extracted. This is where the geological study of the region comes into play, which was described in a 2020 study
published in
Minerals
, carried out by Stephen B. Castor and Christopher D. Henry. This study builds upon previous geological studies that examined the formation and current organization of the region’s layers.
Areas of Li mineralization identified by Lithium Nevada Inc. and Jindalee Resources Inc. with representative lithium contents of drill holes and outcrop. Tuffaceous sediments throughout the caldera are highly enriched in lithium. (Credit: Stephen B. Castor et al., 2020)
Previously this part of the caldera – called Thacker Pass – has been investigated in the most detail, with its smectite deposits already being an attractive target for mining. The newly studied illite mineral clay would seem to be an even more concentrated result of the same processes that would have formed the smectite sediment. In the article by Benson et al., it is proposed that this process involved successive volcanic resurgences, along with the presence of a lake in the caldera in between. The caldera and the lake would have gathered and concentrated a large amount of minerals and other elements using a hydrothermal process that ultimately resulted in the meters-thick layers of mineral clay sediment found in the region today.
Here opinions between Benson and Henry differ, with the latter seeing an issue as the geological evidence indicates that the lake persisted long beyond the era of volcanic activity. Regardless, the presence of these sediments are an empirical fact, and the Lithium Americas Corporation where Thomas R. Benson is employed as a geologist intends to begin mining these illite deposits by 2026. At the projected concentrations of the millions of tons of lithium contained in the clays it should not only be economically viable to extract, but also last for quite a few years.
In 2023, the global demand for lithium is
projected
to be about 685,000 tons, in the common lithium carbonate equivalent, to rise to more than 2 million tons by 2030. Despite the association of lithium with renewable energy, the mining and processing of lithium from both brine and other sources is highly controversial due to the environmental impact. The cause of this is mostly the high water usage with brine extraction, as detailed by Maria L. Vera and colleagues in a
2023 review article
in
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment
.
Environmental Issues
Lithium extraction from mineral clays using acid leaching. (Credit:
Mohammad Zaki Mubarok et al.
)
When processing lithium-containing clays, the use of
sulfuric and other acids
is very common, in a process called acid leaching. The consequence of this is that in order to safely mine lithium, environmental considerations have to be taken seriously, as this tends to produce large amounts of hazardous waste. It is perhaps little surprise that many environmental groups
have lodged protests
against lithium mines in Chile and elsewhere, as lithium extraction from brine, hard rock and mineral clays all come with a range of issues.
When lithium extraction begins at the McDermitt caldera, dealing with these issues will be an important aspect, along with the energy required for the extraction process. This incidentally is an issue shared with the recycling of lithium-containing material, such as battery cathodes, with
Yi-Chin Tang et al. (2023)
studying the efficiency of acid leaching with three different types of acids. Here sulfuric acid was the most efficient, recovering 71% of the lithium after 15 minutes at 60°C, yet leaving acid that has to be safely disposed of, a loss of lithium material with each processing and recycling step, and the need for energy input to get the appropriate reactivity temperature.
Terra Incognita
Projected global lithium demand from 2020 to 2040. (Credit: IEA)
According to the International Energy Agency, the demand for lithium is expected to increase from 74 kilotons in 2020 to an astronomical 1,163 kilotons in its ambitious ‘sustainable development’ scenario, or a 15.7 times increase in twenty years. Considering the lead time before a new lithium mine can be prepared and started, this would seem to be more than just somewhat ambitious.
If such a spike in demand were to become reality, it’s not hard to see how even a few dozen megatons of lithium deposits could be used up in a matter of decades, even with recycling in place. A lot of total demand for newly extracted lithium will depend on how much recycling will truly be possible, and what the losses will be in the process.
Another major unknown is whether or not the
extraction of lithium from seawater
becomes possible in a way that makes it economical. This is incidentally where research in the extraction of
uranium from seawater
could conceivably also provide some inspiration. Regardless, how the demand and supply sides of the global lithium market will develop over the coming decades will likely remain the territory of speculative investors, even if this potential new source of lithium in the US could help to significantly ease the supply within the immediate future. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682165",
"author": "shod",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T14:14:14",
"content": "Talking of resources.I heard that one side of the moon has a lot of iron and the other side a lot of aluminium.Now with the moon being so dusty from ground up material does that mean that if we accidentally... | 1,760,372,172.736471 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/binggpt-brings-ai-chat-to-the-desktop/ | BingGPT Brings AI Chat To The Desktop | Lewin Day | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"bing",
"binggpt",
"browser",
"ChatGPT",
"edge",
"large language model",
"microsoft edge"
] | Interested in AI, but sick of using everything in a browser? Miss clicking on a good old desktop icon to open a local bit of software? In that case,
BingGPT could be just the thing for you.
It’s nothing too crazy—just a desktop application that gives you access to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot. It’s available on a range of platforms, from Windows, to Apple, and Linux, and binaries are available for Intel, Apple Silicon, and ARM processors.
Using BingGPT is simple. Sign in with your Microsoft account, and away you go. There’s no need to use Microsoft Edge or any ugly browser plugins, and you can export your conversations to Markdown, PNG, and PDF for sharing beyond the program. It’s also complete with a range of keyboard shortcuts to speed your interaction with the large language model when it gets off track. There’s also the
Compose button
which can actually go ahead and write stuff for you.
Fundamentally, all the cool stuff is still coming in via the web, but it’s nice to be able to use Bing’s chatbot without having to succumb to the horrors of a Microsoft browser. It’s interesting to see how
large language models
are becoming an all-pervasive tool of late. If you’re building your own nifty projects in this area, don’t hesitate to
let us know
! | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682110",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T11:44:50",
"content": "Really, what’s the difference between this and running it through Edge?It’s not a desktop application if I must sign in with a Microsoft account.It’s not a desktop application if it relies on cloud resources... | 1,760,372,172.904955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/13/portrait-of-a-long-wave-station-in-its-twilight-years/ | Portrait Of A Long Wave Station In Its Twilight Years | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"am",
"broadscat radio",
"longwave",
"radio"
] | There’s a quirk of broadcasting in Europe left over from the earliest days of the medium, which our American readers may not have encountered. As well as the familiar AM band, Europeans and Africans also have a so-called long wave band, on which you’ll find AM broadcast stations between about 150 and 280 kHz. Long wave transmissions were an ideal solution in the 1920s and 1930s to the problem of achieving national coverage from a single transmitter, and were widely used by state broadcasters. In an age of digital streaming they are increasingly irrelevant, and [Ringway Manchester]
takes a look at one of Britain’s last long wave transmitter sites
at Droitwich not too far from Birmingham.
The site covers around 50 acres, and is home to a variety of both medium wave (AM, for Americans), and a single long wave transmitter carrying BBC Radio 4 on 198 kHz. As he takes us through its history in the video below the break we hear a rundown of most of the major events in British broadcasting, while few Brits will have visited this unassuming field it’s likely most of us will have listened to something sent from here.
The long wave antenna is a T-shaped affair strung between two masts. We’re guessing that the radiator is the vertical portion, with the bar of the T forming a capacitance with the ground to make up for the radiator being a fraction of the 1515 meter wavelength. The video is something of a tribute to this once-vital station, as the Radio 4 transmissions are likely to stop in 2024 and the medium wave ones over the following years. We have to admit to catching our BBC transmissions online these days, but we still have to admit a pang of sadness at its impending end.
This reminds us,
we’ve taken a fond look at AM radio in the past
. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682092",
"author": "adrian",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T10:13:55",
"content": "The 198kHz transmission is also maintained as a frequency reference. There have been disciplined oscillators which lock to it and provide a 10MHz reference for calibration. These also exist for the MSF tra... | 1,760,372,172.800255 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/zx-spectrum-gets-a-3d-fps-engine/ | ZX Spectrum Gets A 3D FPS Engine | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"doom",
"quake",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | The Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 are well-known for bringing 3D gaming into the mainstream in a way that preceding consoles just couldn’t. The ZX Spectrum, on the other hand, is known for text adventures and barebones graphics. However, it now has a rudimentary version of a
Quake-
like engine,
as demonstrated by [Modern ZX-Retro Gaming].
As you might expect, the basic ZX Spectrum that sat in front of your dodgy old TV in the 1980s isn’t really up to the task of running a full 3D game. The engine runs at a fairly jerky frame rate on a 3.5 MHz ZX Spectrum, with purely monochrome graphics. However, the game can run more smoothly on 7, 14, and 28MHz
ZX Spectrum compatibles
. As with many such projects, most of the video you’ll see is of the game running in emulators. Impressively, the game features sound effects, three weapons, and a standard WASD control layout as per modern FPS games.
If you’re wondering about the confusing visuals, there’s a simple explanation. Yes, the UI and weapons are straight out of
Doom
. However, the game is running on a true 3D engine, with 3D enemies, not sprites. It’s inspired by the full 3D engine pioneered by
Quake,
hence the designation.
Files are available
for those wishing to try it out at home.
We do see a fair bit of the ZX Spectrum around these parts
. Video after the break. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682055",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T05:15:54",
"content": "Cool, now let’s do that with a Sinclair ZX81/Timex 1000 or compatible! 😁There was “hires” graphics, I remember..Or let’s use graphics features of Laser 100/110 or Laser 200/210 or 310 (aka VZ-300).",
... | 1,760,372,173.220582 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/putting-the-magic-smoke-back-into-a-dodgy-spectrum-analyzer/ | Putting The Magic Smoke Back Into A Dodgy Spectrum Analyzer | Dan Maloney | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"diagnosis",
"front end",
"noise floor",
"PIN diode",
"repair",
"rigol",
"spectrum analyzer",
"test equipment"
] | The trouble with fixing electronics is that most devices are just black boxes — literally. Tear it down, look inside, but it usually doesn’t matter — all you see are black epoxy blobs, taunting you with the fact that one or more of them are dead with no external indication of the culprit.
Sometimes, though, you get lucky, as [FeedbackLoop] did with
this Rigol spectrum analyzer fix
. The instrument powered up and sort of worked, but the noise floor was unacceptably high. Even before opening it up, there was clearly a problem; in general, spectrum analyzers shouldn’t rattle. Upon teardown, it was clear that someone had been inside before and got reassembly wrong, with a loose fastener and some obviously shorted components to show for it. But while the scorched remains of components made a great place to start diagnosis, it doesn’t mean the fix was going to be easy.
Figuring out the values of the nuked components required a little detective work. The blast zone seemed to once hold a couple of resistors, a capacitor, a set of PIN diodes, and a couple of tiny inductors. Also nearby were a pair of chips, sadly with the markings lasered off. With some online snooping and a little bit of common sense, [FeedbackLoop] was able to come up with plausible values for most of these — even the chips, which turned out to be HMC221 RF switches.
Cleaning up the board was a bit of a chore — the shorted components left quite a crater in the board, which was filled with CA glue, and a bunch of missing pads. This called for some SMD soldering heroics, which sadly didn’t fix the noise problem. Replacing the two RF switches and the PIN diodes seemed to fix the problem, albeit at the cost of some loss. Sometimes, good enough is good enough.
This isn’t the first time [FeedbackLoop] has gotten lucky with choice test equipment in need of repairs —
this memory module transplant on a scopemeter
comes to mind. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6682025",
"author": "MmmDee",
"timestamp": "2023-09-13T02:30:06",
"content": "Combining this article with the recent discussion of Radio Shack reminds me of a simpler time when the majority of RadioShack electronic equipment came with schematics either in booklet form or affixed to ... | 1,760,372,172.947333 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/3d-printing-a-sock-knitting-machine/ | 3D Printing A Sock Knitting Machine | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"knitting machine",
"sock",
"socks"
] | 3D printing socks isn’t really a thing yet. You’d end up with scratchy plastic garments that irritate your feet no end. You can easily 3D print all kinds of nifty little mechanisms, though, so why not 3D print yourself a machien to knit some socks instead?
That’s precisely what [Joshua De Lisle] did.
The sock knitting machine is a simple device, albeit one that takes up most of the build area on a common 3D printer. It’s properly known as a circular sock machine, and is capable of producing the comfortable tubular socks that we’re all familiar with. All it takes is a bit of yarn and a simple handcranking of the mechanism, and it’s capable of extruding a sock before your very eyes.
He steps through his various iterative design improvements, and shows us how to build the device using knitting machine hooks to handle the yarn directly. The device is also instrumented with a digital counter to keep track of how far along your given sock is.
Your friends at the pub might go running for the doors when you start explaining that you’re thinking about making your own socks. Don’t let them deter you;
we’ve seen others tread this path before
. Video after the break. | 33 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681983",
"author": "AlwaysInterested(notAI)",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T23:41:57",
"content": "Ok. Now make a pant knitting machine. One leg. Another leg. Put them together. Voilá!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6682170",
... | 1,760,372,173.108494 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/12/building-a-cargo-bike-dream/ | Building A Cargo Bike Dream | Navarre Bartz | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"bike",
"cargo",
"cargo bike",
"ebike",
"electric bicycle",
"electric bike",
"frame",
"Front Loader",
"long john",
"welding"
] | Cargo bikes can haul an impressive amount of stuff and serve as a car replacement for many folks around the world. While there are more models every year from bike manufacturers, the siren song of a custom build has led [Phil Vandelay] to
build his own dream cargo bike
.
The latest in a number of experiments in hand-built cargo bike frames, this electrified front-loader is an impressive machine. With a dual suspension and frame-integrated cargo area, this bike can haul in style and comfort. It uses a cable steering system to circumvent the boat-like handling of steering arm long john bikes and includes a number of nice touches like (mostly) internal cable routing.
The video below the break mostly covers welding the frame with [Vandelay]’s drool-worthy frame jig, so be sure to
watch Part 2
of the video for how he outfits the bike including the internal cable routing and turning some parts for the cable steering system on the lathe. If you get an urge to build your own cargo bike after following along, he offers plans of this and some of his other cargo bike designs. [Vandelay] says this particular bike is not for the beginner, unlike his
previous version
built with square tubing.
Looking for more DIY cargo bikes? Checkout this
Frankenbike
, another
front loader
, or this
Russian trike
. | 54 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6681934",
"author": "Bruce Gettel",
"timestamp": "2023-09-12T20:15:09",
"content": "I wanna know what this guy does for his day job. Holy cow what a set up!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6681937",
"author": "Jan Praegert"... | 1,760,372,173.395609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/08/cerabyte-one-terabyte-per-square-centimeter/ | Cerabyte: One Terabyte Per Square Centimeter | Julian Scheffers | [
"computer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"cerabyte",
"ceramic",
"data storage"
] | Most of us will at one point have run out of storage and either had to buy a larger driver or delete some of those precious files. This problem can happen to data centers, too, with the ever-increasing amount of data stored on servers across the world.
[Cerabyte] aims to fix this
, with their ceramic-based media promising 1 TB/cm² of
areal density
.
To put into perspective just how much better this density is, we can compare it against SSDs and hard drives. At the time of writing, the densest SSD (NAND flash storage) is claimed to be 0.1825 TB/cm² and the densest hard drive is claimed to be 0.1705 TB/cm², which means 5.48 times and 5.87 times more dense respectively. The density improvement doesn’t end there — both an SSD and a single HDD platter might be a couple millimeters tall, while a [Cerabyte] layer claims to be merely 50 atoms tall.
[Cerabyte] aims to create 10 PB (10,000 TB) and later 1 EB (1,000,000 TB) racks with their technology, a feat difficult to achieve with mere hard drives. The ceramic-based media is written to using lasers and read from with a microscope, though throughput is limited to a “mere” 1 GB/s, which means filling that one rack could take as long as 110 days. Despite the relatively slow access times, we think this new storage technology is impressive, assuming [Cerabyte] succeeds.
Do you need so much storage that even [Cerabyte] can’t satisfy your needs? Simply
use YouTube as infinite storage
! | 45 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680636",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T18:35:07",
"content": "IBM Millipedenuff said.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6680662",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T19:07:53... | 1,760,372,173.301894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/08/will-radioshack-return/ | Will RadioShack Return? | Al Williams | [
"Current Events",
"News"
] | [
"radio shack"
] | We suspect that if you want to write a blockbuster movie or novel, the wrong approach is to go to a studio or publisher and say, “I have this totally new idea that is like nothing you’ve ever seen before…” Even Star Trek was pitched to the network as “Wagon Train to the stars.” People with big money tend to want to bet on things that have succeeded before, which is why so many movies are either remakes or
Star Trek XXII: The Search for 4 PM Dinner Specials
. Maybe that’s what the El Salvador-based Unicomer Group had in mind when they bought one of our favorite brands, RadioShack. They are
reportedly planning a major comeback
for the beleaguered brand both online and in the physical world.
In all fairness, the Shack may be better in our memories than in our realities. It was handy to stop off and pick up a coax connector, even if it cost three times the going rate for one. There was a time when RadioShack offered reasonable parts for projects, and it seems like near the end, they tried to hit that target again, but for many years, you could not find the typical parts for a modern project there anyway. However, Unicomer isn’t just a random group of investors.
Apparently, Unicomer has been operating in Central America as a RadioShack franchisee since 1998. In 2015, they bought the RadioShack brand for Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. But now, they’ve acquired the rights to the brand in over 70 countries, including the U.S., Canada, China, and Europe. We imagine their
El Salvador website
might hint at what is coming. We didn’t see anything in the way of components or
P-Box kits
, though.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the new owners want to focus on cellphone products, headphones, batteries, and adapters. So, it isn’t clear if you’ll be stopping at the local mall to pick up an Arduino and a roll of solder or not. This isn’t the first
Radio Shack revival attempt
. We didn’t even cover the silly attempt to make it into a cryptocurrency company. But our original advice still stands: Give away content to sell components. People can buy parts anywhere at crazy low prices. What they can’t readily get is the support that helps them use those components effectively. The same holds true for computer and consumer products. It might seem silly to us, but ordinary people are probably perplexed by setting up a VPN for their home network or designing a theater room. Helping them is one avenue to creating sales in today’s price-driven market for electronics. After all, how many parts did the famous
[Forrest Mims] books
sell?
Photo credit: [Coolcaesar]
CC-BY-SA-3.0 | 145 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680600",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T17:09:20",
"content": "I thought that radio shack got too caught up with the consumer electronics fads (sat tv or cell phones). It felt like they were tyrying to be a mini Circit City. ‘”I thought they should have tried to foc... | 1,760,372,173.589449 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/08/hackaday-podcast-235-licorice-for-lasers-manual-motors-and-reading-resistors/ | Hackaday Podcast 235: Licorice For Lasers, Manual Motors, And Reading Resistors | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Name one other podcast where you can hear about heavy 3D-printed drones, DIY semiconductors, and using licorice to block laser beams. Throw in homebrew relays, a better mouse trap, and logic analyzers, and you’ll certainly be talking about Elliot Williams and Al Williams on Hackaday Podcast 235.
There’s also contest news, thermoforming, and something that looks a little like 3D-printed Velcro. Elliot and Al also have their semi-annual argument about Vi vs. Emacs. Spoiler alert: they decided they both suck.
Missed any of their picks? Check out the links below, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download it yourself
. You can even play it backwards if you like.
Episode 235 Show Notes:
News:
Hackaday Prize 2023: The Gearing Up Challenge Finalists
2023 Cyberdeck Challenge: The Best Decks on the Net
What’s that Sound?
In what may be a first, absolutely no one got last week’s sound:
an Enigma machine in operation
. Perhaps the people who knew what it sounded like were all sworn to secrecy. Listen next week for your chance to win a coveted Hackaday podcast T-shirt.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Hefty 3D Printed Quadcopter Meets Nasty End
Drehmflight Customizable Flight Stabilisation for Your Weird Flying Contraptions
Hackaday Prize 2023: Gen5X, A Generatively-Designed 5-Axis 3D Printer
Awesome Looking 3D Printed RC Plane is Full of Design Considerations
How to Slice Lightweight Aircraft Parts for 3D Printing
Growing Oxides on Silicon on the Road to DIY Semiconductors
Electro-Optical Control of Lasers with a Licorice Twist
Wikipedia: Acousto-optic Modulator
Make Better 3D Printed Molds for Thermoforming Plastics
Arduino-Powered Trap Hopes to Catch Mice
Conflict Escalates Between Brilliant Rat and 555 Timer
Building a Better Mousetrap with the Raspberry Pi
3D Printed – Um – Hook and Loop Fasteners
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
It’s Numbers All The Way Down with this Tape Measure Number Station Antenna
Finally, a Machine to Organize Resistors!
Spooky Noise Box Has Post-Halloween Potential
Al’s Picks:
If You Aren’t Making Your Own Relays…
The Scope of this Kickstarter? Ten Years!
Hands-free Compass Uses Haptic Feedback
Can’t-Miss Articles:
On VIM Modal Interfaces and the Way We Interact with Computers
Logic Analyzers Tapping into Raspberry Pi Secrets | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680797",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2023-09-09T02:27:51",
"content": "I loved the “Noise Box” article this week and am so glad that you highlighted it as a quick hack! It was a simple project and yet very creative AND encourage me to go down the learning rabbit hole of new s... | 1,760,372,173.699468 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/08/fitting-3d-prints-in-a-snap/ | Fitting 3D Prints In A Snap | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing"
] | The good news is that 3D printing lets you iterate on your design until it is just right. The bad news is that you often have to iterate your design over and over to get things to fit together. It is a little easier if you are designing both parts, but matching sizes and positions on a printed part that fits something that already exists can be a pain. Sure, you can grab the calipers and make fidgety measurements — but
[Maker Tales] has a different approach
. As you can see in the video below, he takes a photo, imports it into CAD, scales it, and then uses it as a reference.
If you have one, you could, of course, scan the existing part. However, if you’ve ever tried that, results vary wildly, especially with cheap hardware. [Maker Tales] just takes a picture with his phone, trying to get as straight as possible and from a distance. Once in CAD, he makes one measurement and scales the image to the correct size.
This is one of those things that should be obvious, but you don’t always think it through. Of course, it is possible to measure everything precisely or — even better — if you have the original CAD or drawing for the part that has exact measurements. But compared to making numerous precise measurements, this method is a lot less work and gives good results.
If you are creating mating parts, think about
shadow lines
. Many commercial parts now have
CAD models as STEP files
if you want to skip the scanning. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680582",
"author": "Danno",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T16:23:27",
"content": "A very simple way to avoid full size “fit test” prints is to start with a to-scale paper print out the most important dimensional slice of your model. Then move to a single layer (or two for stiffness) of t... | 1,760,372,173.656256 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/08/this-week-in-security-lastpass-shoe-drops-keys-lost-and-train-whistles-attack/ | This Week In Security: LastPass Shoe Drops, Keys Lost, And Train Whistles Attack | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Barracuda",
"lastpass",
"Proton Mail"
] | There has been
a rash of cryptocurrency thefts
targeting some unexpected victims. Over $35 million has been drained from just over 150 individuals, and the list reads like a who’s-who of the least likely to fall for the normal crypto scams. There is a pattern that has been noticed, that almost all of them had a seed phrase stored in LastPass this past November when the entire LastPass database was breached.
The bulletproof security of the LastPass system depends in part on the rate limiting of authenticating with the LastPass web service. Additionally, accounts created before security improvements in 2018 may have had master passwords shorter than 12 characters, and the hash iterations on those accounts may have been set distressingly low. Since attackers have had unrestricted access to the database, they’ve been able to run offline attacks against accounts with very low iterations, and apparently that approach has been successful.
Microsoft’s Signing Key
You may remember a story from a couple months ago, where
Microsoft found the Chinese threat group, Storm-0558, forging authentication tokens
using a stolen signing key. There was a big open question at that point, as to how exactly an outside group managed to access such a signing key.
This week
we finally get the answer
. A crash log from 2021 unintentionally included the key, and Microsoft’s automated redaction system didn’t catch it. That crash dump was brought into development systems, and an engineer’s account was later accessed by Storm-0558. That key should not have worked for enterprise accounts, but a bug in a Microsoft key validation allowed the consumer systems key to work for enterprise accounts. Those issues have been fixed, but after quite a wild ride.
MSI Keys Demonstrated
In March MSI suffered a major breach, and among the pilfered data was MSI’s BootGuard private key.
The Hardcore Matrix team has put together an attack chain
that uses these keys to inject a custom module into the UEFI boot image.
Forgot The Key Generation
If there’s anything worse than losing your keys, it’s
forgetting to generate them in the first place.
VMware Aria has a CVSS 9.8 vulnerability, which boils down to a shared SSH key across all installs from version 6.0 to 6.10.
Proton
Researchers at Sonar set their sights on Proton Mail, and found some impressive issues, that chained together results in
running unsanitized JavaScript from inside an incoming email
, with access to the entire logged-in account. Proton Mail is carefully built to avoid exactly this sort of attack, so it takes some clever work to pull it off.
The first observation is that
tags in incoming emails get replaced with
— after the code has run through the HTML sanitizer. SVG data is very different from normal HTML, and making that change has some unexpected effects. Inside SVG tags, quotation marks are absolute, and additional tags inside of quotes are ignored. But in regular old HTML, tags are absolute, and quotation marks are mere suggestions. This means that JavaScript can be smuggled inside of an SVG element.
It’s not that easy, as Proton Mail also uses iframe sandboxing and Content Security Policy (CSP). One of the allowed contents, however, is the
script-src blob
. That’s intended to be used for temporary content that uses a random UUID to refer to it. The key to making use of this is to send two emails to the victim. One email has a JavaScript file as an attachment, which automatically gets converted into a blob, but not executed. That email also has CSS in it, that uses the
cross-fade()
function to leak the temporary name of the blob one byte at a time, by making a series of requests back to a malicious server. Using the leaked name, the attacker sends a second email, that executed the blob from the first.
If the victim is running Safari, the CSP is written to allow access to the entire page at this point. On other browsers, Further user interaction is required, in the form of following a link to open a new tab. The flaw was reported in June, and a fix went live in July. The solution was the simple one, to just turn off SVG support altogether.
Oof Barracuda
We missed this update last week, but the Barracuda saga continues. The latest is
this FBI warning
(pdf), that as of August 23, fully patched Barracuda ESG appliances were still being compromised. This vulnerability is triggered by these email gateways unpacking a compressed file to scan it for malware, and as such doesn’t require any special configuration or open ports.
This leads us to the unfortunate situation where Barracuda has announced that
every ESG appliance in production should be assumed to be compromised
. There’s a bit of disagreement from Mandiant,
who maintain that there have been no confirmed compromises
of patched devices after the May 20th update.
Train whistle Cap’n Crunch Style
You may have seen
headlines about a cyber-attack against Poland’s rail network
, with statements like “Hackers broke into railway frequencies to disrupt traffic”. Except, this has more in common with phone phreaking than anything cyber. Rather than breaking into radio frequencies with some elaborate attack, th
is is just transmitting three audio tones over a 150.100 MHz radio signal
. No encryption, no authentication. No word on whether the audio was produced using a toy whistle found in cereal boxes.
Bits and Bytes
If you’re one of the many fans of Notepad++,
you’ll want to be a bit extra careful
about opening untrusted files with this beloved text editor. A set of four vulnerabilities have been found in the program, with the worst having the potential to lead to remote code execution (RCE). Unfortunately, fixes have not landed in the project, and these issues are being released by Github’s Security Lab due to 90+ days having passed since disclosure.
The Openfire chat server has an authentication bypass issue in its admin console, and while patches are available,
this vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild,
but this vulnerability apparently isn’t sufficiently enterprise to have garnered much attention.
Someone has apparently had enough of spyware, as
two
separate
mobile-centric spyware operations were breached, wiped, and shut down last month.
If you make kids’ snacks, and put a URL on the box,
please make sure you don’t let the domain expire
. Because otherwise, someone will come along and claim the domain, and maybe put something really nasty there. That’s the basic story behind a recall of Paw Patrol snacks in the UK. The original manufacturer ceased business in 2022, and when their old domain expired and got bought by a porn site, the inevitable happened.
And finally,
the DEA has fallen for a classic cryptocurrency scam
. In moving seized cryptocurrency around, DEA agents sent a small value from one account to another. A scammer quickly created an address where the first five and last four values matched the legitimate address — two addresses that would look identical at a quick assessment. And the bait was taken, losing the DEA around $50,000. Oops! | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680572",
"author": "BillyG",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T15:02:32",
"content": "Seems like Crypto Wallet addresses would benefit from a check sum/crc as part of the address. Be a way to catch data entry typos….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"... | 1,760,372,173.749147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/08/wien-bridge-oscillator-drives-distortion-into-the-floor/ | Wien Bridge Oscillator Drives Distortion Into The Floor | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"agc",
"attenuator",
"audio frequency",
"distortion",
"Notch filter",
"THD",
"wien bridge"
] | It’s not often that a single photo can tell you pretty much everything you need to know about a project, but the spectrum analyzer screenshot nearby is the perfect summary of
this over-the-top low-distortion audio oscillator build
. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a ton of interesting stuff going on with this one, so buckle up.
One spike at the fundamental and not much more.
The project is by [Basin Street Design], who doesn’t really offer much by way of inspiration for this undertaking, nor a discussion on what this will be used for. But the design goals are pretty clear: build an oscillator with as little distortion as possible across the audio frequency range.
The basic circuit is the well-known Wien bridge oscillator where the R-C pairs are switched in and out of the feedback loop to achieve frequency range control. This was accomplished with rotary switches rebuilt from their original configuration in a Heathkit IG-18 sine/square wave generator, a defunct instrument that was gutted and used as an enclosure for this build. There are a lot of other treats here, too, like the automatic gain control (AGC) that uses a homebrew voltage-controlled resistor made from an incandescent lamp and a cadmium sulfide photoresistor glued inside a piece of brake line, and an output attenuator made from discrete resistors that drops the output in 10 dB steps while maintaining an overall 75-Ohm impedance.
But at the end of the day, it all comes down to that single spike on the spectrum analyzer, with no apparent harmonics. To make sure there wasn’t something hiding down in the noise, [Basin Street] added a notch filter to lower the fundamental by 60 dB, allowing the spectrum analyzer sensitivity to be cranked way up. Harmonics were visible, but so far down into the noise — as low as -115 dBc — that it’s hardly worth mentioning.
There’s a lot more detail in this one, so dive in and enjoy. If you want another take on Wien bridge circuits, check out
this recent LM386-based oscillator
. Just don’t expect such low distortion with that one. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680499",
"author": "Craig Hollabaugh",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T11:09:41",
"content": "< -115dB is damn impressive. Thanks for the post.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6680520",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,173.850372 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/08/share-your-feelings-like-a-spy/ | Share Your Feelings Like A Spy | Navarre Bartz | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"confessional",
"emotions",
"feelings",
"shredder",
"simone giertz"
] | While hackers can deftly navigate their way through circuit diagrams or technical documentation, for many of us, simple social interactions can be challenge. [Simone Giertz] decided to help us all out here by making a device to help us
share our feelings
.
Like an assignment in
Mission: Impossible
, this aluminum box can convey your confessions of love (or guilt) and shred them after your partner (or roommate) reads the message. The box houses a small shredder and timer relay under a piece of bamboo salvaged from a computer stand. When the lid is opened, a switch is depressed that starts a delay before the shredder destroys the message. The shredder, timer, and box seem almost made for each other. As [Giertz] says, “Few things are more satisfying than when two things that have nothing to do with each other, perfectly fit.”
While seemingly simple, the attention to detail on this build really sets it apart. The light on the front to indicate a message is present and the hinged compartment to easily clean out shredded paper really make this a next-level project. Our favorite detail might be the little space on the side to store properly-sized paper and a marker.
While the aluminum box is very industrial chic, we could see this being really cool in a vintage metal lunch box as well. If you’re looking for other ways to integrate feelings and technology, checkout how
[Jorvon Moss] brings his bots to life
or how a bunch of
LEDs can be used to express your mood
. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680498",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T10:46:55",
"content": "Now this is techno-cool. Could be used in murder/mystery games or even an escape room.I would have one ready for my untimely end for my relatives…. “The billion dollars in cash is hidden in the… (zzzzz... | 1,760,372,173.796407 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/07/thomas-sanladerers-youtube-channel-goes-in-the-toilet/ | [Thomas Sanladerer]’s YouTube Channel Goes In The Toilet | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"3d scanning"
] | We like [Thomas Sanladerer], so when we say his channel has gone in the toilet, we mean that quite literally. He had a broken toilet and wanted to compare options for effecting a 3D printed repair. The mechanism is a wall-mounted flush mechanism with a small broken plastic part. Luckily, he had another identical unit that provided a part that wasn’t broken.
The first attempt was to 3D scan the good part. The first scanner’s software turned out to be finicky, and [Thomas] finally gave up on it. He finally used a handheld scanner which took about a half hour. It wasn’t, of course, perfect, so he also had to do some more post-processing.
The next step was to make measurements and draw the part in CAD. It took the same amount as the scan, and it is worth noting that the part had curves and angles — it wasn’t just a faceplate. The printed results were good, although a measurement error made the CAD model bind a bit instead of pivoting the way it should. The scan, of course, got it right.
A quick revision of the design solved that problem but, of course, it added some time to the process. At the end, he noticed that the scanned “good” part was also broken but in a different way. He added the additional part, which didn’t seem to bother the function. The scanned object required a little trimming but nothing tremendous.
In the end, the scanning was a bit quicker, partly because it didn’t suffer from the measurement error. However, [Thomas] noted that it was more fun to work in CAD. We thought the results looked better, anyway. [Thomas] thinks the scanners, at least the budget ones, are probably better for just getting reference objects into CAD to guide you when you create the actual objects to print.
It isn’t hard to
make a cheap scanner
. Some of the
open designs are quite sophisticated
. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680423",
"author": "George Graves",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T05:12:44",
"content": "One thing about Thomas – he is a really great YouTuber…But I find his “engineering” and 3d printing skills lacking – although these in this video look good. But in the past, he’s said and done thi... | 1,760,372,173.976331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/07/triso-fuel-and-the-rolls-royce-of-nuclear-reactors/ | Triso Fuel And The Rolls Royce Of Nuclear Reactors | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"nuclear power",
"triso"
] | Bangor University scientists think that the way to go big with nuclear power is to, in fact,
go small
. Their tiny nuclear fuel pellets called triso fuel are said to be the size of poppy seeds and are meant to power a reactor by Rolls Royce the size of a “small car.” We aren’t sure if that’s a small Rolls Royce or a small normal car.
The Welsh university thinks the reactor has applications for lunar bases, here on Earth, and even on rockets because the reactor is so small. We can’t tell if the fuel from Bangor is unique or if it is just the application and the matching reactor that is making the news. Triso fuel — short for tri-structural isotropic particle fuel — was developed in the 1960s, and there are multiple projects worldwide gearing up to use this sort of fuel.
The U.S. Department of Energy calls Triso “
the most robust nuclear fuel on earth
.” Each tiny pellet consists of a kernel made of uranium, carbon, and oxygen. The fuel has an outer jacket around the kernel made of three layers of carbon- and ceramic-based materials to isolate the radioactive material. Traditionally, the kernel contained uranium dioxide, but recently, the pellets contain uranium oxycarbide. Because of the self-containment system, the pellets won’t melt and release radioactive material even when heated for 300 hours at 1800C. If you want to know more about the history of this fuel and where it has been used so far, Power Magazine has
a good overview
. We’ve
talked about it before
, too. Turns out that making a nuclear reactor is hard, but making the fuel for one is
one of the hardest parts
. | 59 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680394",
"author": "Monsonite",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T02:24:44",
"content": "Interesting article. I studied electronic engineering at Bangor between 1983 and 1986. My first class B.Sc. degree has served me well over the years.In the mid-1980s, it was a small rural University col... | 1,760,372,174.167452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/07/how-small-can-the-esp32-get/ | How Small Can The ESP32 Get? | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"challenge",
"dev board",
"development",
"ESP32",
"microcontroller",
"pcb",
"small",
"tiny"
] | At its core, the ESP32 chip is not much more than an integrated circuit, a huge mass of transistors sealed inside an epoxy resin package with some leads. Of course, most of us won’t buy discrete ESP32 chips with no support circuitry since it’s typically easier and often not that much more expensive to get them paired with development boards of some type for easy access to things like USB and GPIO. But these tiny chips need little in the way of support to get up and running
as [Paul] demonstrates with this tiny ESP32 board
.
The project started as a challenge for [Paul] to build the smallest ESP32 that would still function. That means carving away nearly everything normally found accompanying one of these chips. There is no charging circuitry, only one of the GPIO pins is accessible, and it even foregoes the WiFi antennas which eliminates the major reason most people would reach for this chip in the first place. But at this form factor even without wireless capabilities it still blows other chips of this stature, like the ATtiny series, out of the water.
Even though [Paul] built it as a challenge, it goes a long way to demonstrate what’s really needed to get one of these chips up and running properly. And plenty of projects don’t need a ton of I/O or Wi-Fi either, so presuming these individual chips can be found cheaply and boards produced for various projects its an excellent way to minimize size and perhaps even power requirements. You can make these boards
even smaller than a USB-A connector
if you want to take this process even further, too. | 25 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680368",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2023-09-07T23:42:04",
"content": "I have to agree, it is a very useful chip even ignoring the wifi…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6680477",
"author": "Torsten Martinsen",
... | 1,760,372,173.913669 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/07/programming-a-poker-game-with-gpt-help/ | Programming A Poker Game With GPT Help | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"amoled",
"artificial intelligence",
"Assistant",
"ChatGPT",
"ESP32",
"game",
"large language model",
"poker",
"programming",
"tool"
] | Although ChatGPT generated a huge amount of hype around replacing white collar workers completely when it was first released to the public, the general consensus now is that it won’t outright replace anyone yet, but rather people who know how to use it as a tool will replace those who don’t. Getting started with it is not too hard, either, but you’ll of course need a project to work on to familiarize yourself with the tool. [Volos Projects] gave himself the challenge of writing a poker game using ChatGPT not as the opposing player,
but as a co-designer in order to learn more about it as an assistant
.
The poker game is being built on an ESP32 board with a built-in AMOLED screen. Five buttons are wired to the microcontroller to allow the player to select which cards to discard and which to keep. The bet for each hand can be raised or lowered much like the tabletop poker games often seen in bars and restaurants. To program it, though, ChatGPT was used to help design the code at each step of the way, first describing the overall goal and then building each function one-by-one like shuffling the deck, dealing the hand, and then replacing and dealing new cards.
For anyone who hasn’t yet explored using ChatGPT to help design their programming projects, this effort goes a long way to showing just how useful a tool it can be. For more complex tasks, though, it does take a little bit of knowledge on the part of the user because ChatGPT can often turn out nonsense or factually inaccurate information, but at least in a programming environment you’ll generally find out quickly when that happens. It’s not just a useful tool for writing programs, either.
It can accomplish a lot of ancillary tasks related to programming as well
, even if it’s not writing the code directly.
Thanks to [Peter] for the tip! | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680406",
"author": "edward yagi",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T03:55:22",
"content": "Beautiful build. Slap a 3d printed case on it, you have the an advanced handheld video poker on the cheap.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "668041... | 1,760,372,174.213804 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/07/2023-cyberdeck-challenge-the-best-decks-on-the-net/ | 2023 Cyberdeck Challenge: The Best Decks On The Net | Tom Nardi | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2023 Cyberdeck Challenge"
] | It was an easy decision to run a
Cyberdeck Challenge in 2023
— after all, it was far and away one of our most popular contests from last year. But what was much harder was sorting out the incredible array of bespoke computers that readers have been sending in for the last few months.
Our judges have painstakingly whittled down the list of entries to get our top three winners, each of which will be awarded $150 in credit from the good folks over at DigiKey. But there were simply too many fantastic custom computers in the running to let everyone else go home empty-handed, so we’ve decided to also break out some $50 Tindie gift cards for the decks that best exemplified this year’s special categories.
Without further ado, let’s take a tour through the judge’s top picks for this year’s Cyberdeck Challenge!
First Place: Zvychai One
While the judges had a hell of a time placing the rest of the decks in this competition, the decision to give the top spot to
[mkdxdx]’s Zvychai One
was unanimous, with each and every judge putting it at the top of their respective list.
But really, is it any wonder? This gorgeous build absolutely nails the cyberpunk aesthetic, while also being a formidable computing and hacking device in its own right. The basic specs are about what you’d expect for a DIY cyberdeck, with a Raspberry Pi 4 coupled to a small mechanical keyboard and an LCD panel.
Where the Zvychai One really shines is in its expandability, as the 3D printed case features multiple ports and openings to take additional hardware such as sensors and displays. There’s also a rail mounting system that allows larger modules to be securely attached, such as an RTL-SDR “caddy” that features a clever fold-down antenna.
Second Place: Micro-PC
While some entries in this year’s Cyberdeck Challenge leaned hard into the more fanciful elements of cyberpunk culture, other’s instead set their sights on day-to-day practicality. Of these, our judges felt that the
Micro-PC from [Matt Deeds]
best managed to hit the target.
In the most basic of terms, it’s a small PC mounted to a plank. More specifically, an Intel Alder Lake N100 NUC bolted to a piece of laser-cut acrylic. Right out of the gate, that means it has
way
more processing power than anything powered by the ~$100 single-board ARM computers we usually see at the heart of these builds. But that also means it’s very power hungry, so there’s a beefy 65 W 20,000 mAh battery pack along for the ride to keep it well fed. With the addition of a tilting 5.5 inch 1920×1080 IPS display inside a 3D printed frame, it’s able to deliver desktop-class performance no matter where your hacking adventures take you.
While it might be somewhat simplistic from a technical standpoint, the Micro-PC is a great example of how a collection of high-tech gadgets can be cobbled together into a device that fits a specific user’s needs — one of the core tenets of the cyberdeck movement.
Third Place: TOP_LAP
Although we generally think of a cyberdeck as having a unique form factor that sets it apart from commercially available offerings, it’s hard to deny the phenomenal portability of the classic clamshell laptop. But while the outward appearance of
[Ethan Russell]’s TOP_LAP
might seem surprisingly traditional, the internals are anything but.
Built from laser-cut steel, this heavyweight machine has plenty of room onboard for a micro-ATX motherboard, a 7.3 Ah battery originally intended for an Freefly Astro commercial drone, and a massive 24 inch LCD display. When you’ve got to add gas struts just to hold the lid of your laptop open, you know things are getting serious.
A particularly nice touch is the custom STM32F091 board that communicates with the drone batteries over CAN. As you might expect given the $20,000+ drone they were designed to be slung under, the batteries in question are pretty advanced, and require a degree of sweet talking to be utilized. Luckily Freefly publicly published their CAN protocol (what a concept!), which made [Ethan]’s job that much easier.
Honorable Mention: Red V2
If the
Cyberdeck Red V2 from [Gabriel]
looks familiar, it’s because the original version took second place in the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest. But while the impressively appointed machine might look remarkably similar at first glance, nearly every component has been revised on this new and improved incarnation.
But for all that’s changed, one thing remains the same: this deck is packed to the gills with gear for electronic hacking. The onboard Digilent Analog Discovery 2 provides not only a two-channel 30 MHz oscilloscope, but also a function generator, logic analyzer, and voltmeter. It’s also packing a Great Scott Hack RF One software defined radio, a removable breadboard, and a short throw projector that lets you turn any flat surface into a second monitor.
Special Categories
This year, we had four
Neuromancer
inspired special categories which gave creators something extra to strive for. While it wasn’t required that entries take any of these categories into consideration, we asked our judges to keep them at the back of their mind while reviewing each deck, and had them nominate what they thought were the best examples.
Icebreaker
To qualify for the Icebreaker category, a cyberdeck needed to be ready to do some real work. While the more outlandish designs might be more fun to look at, here we were after the decks that had a clear practical application.
The
Oni Mobile Command Center from [Brent]
is a perfect example of this principle. While an undeniably cool looking piece of gear, its integrated GPS, RTL-SDR, and FM transmitter make it uniquely equipped for radio experimentation and research. It’s also packing a wide array of penetration testing tools, and its dual displays can help make it easier to monitor multiple processes simultaneously.
Even in a competition as closely matched as this one, finding a spot for
[Garra]’s CyberSecDeck-001
was a particular challenge. As one of the commenters put it on the project page, in many ways its the archetypal cyberdeck. But ultimately, the judges were most impressed with the remarkable practicality of this particular deck.
While it still looks like something from Gibson’s imagination, [Garra] designed it to be a reliable workhorse. It’s robust case looks like it can take a proper beating, especially with the repurposed cupboard handles acting as a roll cage to protect the keyboard and screen. It also features a pair of Picatinny rails (also known as MIL-STD-1913 by the US military) which allows both custom and commercially available modules to be quickly and easily attached.
ROM Construct
For a deck to qualify for this category, it had to demonstrate a particularly high level of customization. Keep in mind that a cyberdeck, by its very nature, is a bespoke computing device. As such, these are the builds that really took that core concept to the next level.
Of all the entries this year, the
North American Cyberarms Cyberdeck by [Patrick Tait]
was the most obvious choice for this particular category. The physical user interface on this machine, a combination of a 10-key board and wireless mouse, is so bonkers that we wager the average passerby would assume it’s not even capable of general computing. But if you’ve got the touch, this highly portable machine makes a great companion for distraction-free writing and programming.
Similarly, you’ve got to be a real Console Cowboy to wrangle
[RobsonCouto]’s KOAT0 Portable Terminal
. While at least this machine gives you a full keyboard, its vacuum fluorescent display only provides the user with a particularly meager 256 x 48 to work with. It’s doable — that’s enough pixels to get a few console lines in, and it’s even capable of rudimentary graphics, but it wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice in 2023. On the flip side, it’s absolutely gorgeous.
Dex Dealer
While there’s canonically nothing that really says a cyberdeck has to be mobile device, there’s certainly a trend in the community to shoot for some element of portability. But the sticking point is finding a way to reasonably power these machines while you’re out and about. For this category, the judges were looking for designs which seemed uniquely suited to operating without the benefit of a convenient AC outlet.
For hackers who still remember what sunlight looks like, the
Solar Box built by [Nick Scratch]
is an ideal companion. The lid-mounted solar panel can top off its internal 2,500 mAh battery, while its energy-sipping internals make sure you can squeeze out as much runtime as possible. That includes a Raspberry Pi Zero, an electronic paper display that’s ideal for showing static content, and a Sharp Memory LCD that refreshes quickly enough that you can use it for interactive tasks.
Though it doesn’t have the benefit of a solar panel to recharge itself, the judges also liked the approach
[a8ksh4] used on the Thumb Term
. This handheld is powered by just a single 18650 cell, which are so incredibly common that even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you shouldn’t have a problem scrounging up a few fresh cells. It was clear that a lot of thought was given to the power management on the Thumb Term, with a Pi Pico being used to monitor the battery level and alert the user appropriately when the available juice is getting low.
Turing Police
We knew this category, which focused on decks that were either made with or utilized artificial intelligence, was going to be a tough one. But AI tech is improving by leaps and bounds right now, so we figured we’d throw it out there and see what the community could come up with. In the end, we got good examples of both AI generation and utilization.
The wearable
Smart Companion & Observational Utility Tech (SCOUT)
, developed by [Quoc Duong], runs a custom developed AI assistant and connects to a wireless display. The AI software leverages several cloud services, so you won’t be going off-grid with this cyber assistant quite yet, but we appreciate the code being open source for those looking to spin up their own AI helper.
While it doesn’t actively use AI, the
Toddler’s Cyberdeck by [Josh]
benefited greatly from the technology. After wiring up a collection of buttons, switches, and potentiometers to an Arduino Mega 2560, [Josh] turned to ChatGPT to create the code that ties it all together. He’s posted a link to the conversation that produced the final source code, which provides some interesting reading for those who may be curious about how these type of large language models can be put to use for practical purposes.
The Future is Now
If you ever need a reminder of just what the individual hacker or maker is capable of with today’s technology, you only need look at the meteoric rise of the cyberdeck. Just a few short years ago, we were looking at plywood decks held together with hot glue. Today, we’ve got custom computers that don’t just
look
like they could be Hollywood props, but manage to provide real-world functionality above and beyond the traditional consumer computer paradigm. The community has moved well past the “how” stage, and is now deep into the “why” — and we love to see it.
As always, special thanks to our sponsor DigiKey for helping make the 2023 Cyberdeck Challenge a reality. We’ll be announcing a new contest in the very near future, so stay tuned. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680379",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-09-08T00:32:43",
"content": "(Micro-PC)“In the most basic of terms, it’s a small PC mounted to a plank. More specifically, an Intel Alder Lake N100 NUC bolted to a piece of…”I was disappointed it wasn’t bo... | 1,760,372,174.635518 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/07/transistor-radio-repair-more-complex-than-it-seems/ | Transistor Radio Repair, More Complex Than It Seems | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"am",
"germanium transistors",
"repair",
"transistor radio"
] | The humble transistor radio is one of those consumer devices that stubbornly refuses to go away, but it’s fair to say that it’s not the mover and shaker in the world of electronics it might once have been. Thus it’s also not a staple of the repair bench anymore, where fixing a pocket radio might have been all in a day’s work decades ago now they’re a rare sight. [David Tipton] has a
Philips radio from we’re guessing the later half of the 1960s which didn’t work
, and we’re along for the ride as he takes us through its repair.
It’s an extremely conventional design of the era, with a self-oscillating mixer, 455 kHz IF amplifier, and class AB audio amplifier. The devices are a little archaic by today’s standards, with comically low-gain germanium transistors and passives from the Ark. Injecting a signal reveals that the various stages all work, but that mixer isn’t oscillating. A lot of fault-finding ensues, and perhaps with a little bit of embarrassment, he eventually discovers a blob of solder shorting a collector resistor to ground. All isn’t over though, for the volume pot is also kaput. Who knew that the track from a modern component could be transplanted into one from the 1960s? | 48 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680262",
"author": "Marco",
"timestamp": "2023-09-07T16:30:02",
"content": "A ceramic capacitor is unlikely to be “leaky”, and even those resistors usually don’t have problems. I would have focused right away on the autodyne, which is the most common source of problems in these rec... | 1,760,372,174.41309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/07/where-did-electronic-music-start/ | Where Did Electronic Music Start? | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Musical Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"electronic music",
"player piano",
"synthesiser",
"theremin"
] | A culture in which it’s fair to say the community which Hackaday serves is steeped in, is electronic music. Within these pages you’ll find plenty of synthesisers, chiptune players, and other projects devoted to synthetic sound. Not everyone here is a musician of obsessive listener, but if Hackaday had a soundtrack album we’re guessing it would be electronic. Along the way, many of us have picked up an appreciation for the history of electronic music, whether it’s EDM from the 1990s, 8-bit SID chiptunes, or further back to figures such as Wendy Carlos, Gershon Kingsley, or Delia Derbyshire. But for all that, the origin of electronic music is frustratingly difficult to pin down. Is it characterised by the instruments alone, or does it have something more specific in the music itself? Here follows the result of a few months’ idle self-enlightenment as we try to get tot he bottom of it all.
Will The Real Electronic Music Please Stand Up?
If you own a synthesiser, the Telharmonium is its daddy.
Anyone reading around the subject soon discovers that there are several different facets to synthesised music which are collectively brought together under the same banner and which at times are all claimed individually to be the purest form of the art. Further to that it rapidly becomes obvious when studying the origins of the technology, that purely electronic and electromechanical music are also two sides of the same coin. Is music electronic when it uses an electronic instrument, when electronics are used to modify the sound of an acoustic instrument, when it is sequenced electronically often in a manner unplayable by a human, or when it uses sampled sounds? Is an electric guitar making electronic music when played through an effects pedal?
The history of electronic music as far as it seems from here, starts around the turn of the twentieth century, and though the work of many different engineers and musicians could be cited at its source there are three inventions which stand out. Thaddeus Cahill’s tone-wheel-based
Telharmonium US patent
was granted in 1897, the same year as that for
Edwin S. Votey’s Pianola player piano
, while the Russian Lev Termen’s Theremin was invented in 1919. In those three inventions we find the progenital ancestors of all synthesisers, sequencers, and purely electronic instruments. If it appears we’ve made a glaring omission by not mentioning inventions such as the phonograph, it’s because they were invented not to make music but to record it.
I Never Expected To Find Myself In 1940s Cairo
Even when we’ve established the origins of the technology, the same timeline doesn’t apply to the music itself. Player pianos spent their lives banging out the show tunes of the day, and even the decidedly modern sound of the theremin found its place as a classical music instrument
playing in a similar role to the violin
. Perhaps the biggest surprise in all this comes in the foundations of the music we’d recognise as being purely electronic coming as late as the middle of the 20th century.
The fantastically complex compositions of Conlon Nancarrow for the player piano
push the boundaries far past what we’re used to in a typical sequencer file today, but it’s in music concrète, the assemblage of found sounds enabled by the development of tape and wire recorders, that we find the progenitor of sampled music. Halim El-Dabh recorded
The Expression of Zaar
on a wire recorder in Cairo in 1944, and for those of us who hear it for the first time nearly eight decades later it’s lost none of its haunting qualities.
This Moog synthesiser wouldn’t have been possible without the invention of the transistor. Attila Szász,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
As a child of 1970s, the electronic music I grew up on that was
part of the broadcasting soundscape
and which forms the basis of what we’d recognise as electronic music today, sounded nothing like the 1950s avant garde of music concrète or the 1930s classical music of Clara Rockmore’s theremin. Perhaps the most significant event in electronic music history wasn’t a technological one but a social one then, because the happy confluence of engineers such as Robert Moog mastering the manipulation of sound fell alongside both the huge social change of the 1960s and the solid state revolution bringing the tech within reach of the common man.
By the time I was a teenager and then a student at the end of the 1980s the democratisation process of electronic music was complete, as I or any other kid could have a keyboard or a Commodore Amiga with a sampler on their desk. If the electronic music geeks where I grew up had a star in their midst it was
Adamski
, who shot to fame with a keyboard and sampler on a stand without the performance of a would-be rockstar,
with his name on a reflective UK car number plate
.
It would be another few decades
before I’d learn the nuts and bolts of making music
this way, because as with amateur radio my interest was in the tech not the usage. In researching this piece then I’ve gone over a lot of instruments and techniques that I already knew something about, but the real joy has come in listening to a bunch of obscure compositions from decades past I’d never otherwise have been fortunate enough to find. If you come to electronic music via the tech then I’d urge you to open up YouTube and get searching as I did. And if you’ve got a recommendation for something we should be listening to, put it in the comments. There’s way more to the history of electronic music than
Popcorn
! | 53 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680219",
"author": "Alx",
"timestamp": "2023-09-07T14:22:15",
"content": "Tomita",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6680238",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-09-07T15:12:25",
"content": "The master",
... | 1,760,372,174.316313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/agreeing-by-disagreeing/ | Agreeing By Disagreeing | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [] | While we were working on the podcast this week, Al Williams and I got into a debate about the utility of logic analyzers. (It’s Hackaday, after all.) He said they’re almost useless these days, and I maintained that they’re more useful than ever. When we got down to it, however, we were actually completely in agreement – it turns out that when we said “logic analyzer” we each had different machines, and use cases, in mind.
Al has a serious engineering background and a long career in his pocket. When he says “logic analyzer”, he’s thinking of a beast with a million probes that you could hook up to each and every data and address line in what would now be called a “retrocomputer”, giving you this god-like perspective on the entire system state. (Sounds yummy!) But now that modern CPUs have 64-bits, everything’s high-speed serial, and they’re all deeply integrated on the same chip anyway, such a monster machine is nearly useless.
Meanwhile, I’m a self-taught hacker type. When I say “logic analyzer”, I’m thinking maybe 8 or 16 signals, and I’m thinking of debugging the communications between a microcontroller, an IMU, or maybe a QSPI flash chip. Heck, sometimes I’ll even break out a couple pins on the micro for state. And with the proliferation of easy and cheap modules, plus the need to debug and reverse commodity electronics, these logic analyzers have never been more useful.
So in the end, it was a simple misunderstanding – a result of our different backgrounds. His logic analyzers were extinct or out of my price range, and totally off my radar. And he thinks of my logic analyzer as a “simple serial analyzer”. (Ouch! But since when are 8 signals “serial”?)
And in the end, we both absolutely agreed on the fact that
great open-source software
has made the modern logic analyzers as useful as they are, and the lack thereof is also partially responsible for the demise of the old beasts. Well, that and he needs a lab cart then to carry around what I can slip in my pocket today. Take that!
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
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! | 35 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680916",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-09-09T14:08:12",
"content": "The soul of a new machine.https://mdswanson.com/writeup/2015/09/26/the-soul-of-a-new-machine.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6680923",
... | 1,760,372,174.584968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/ceiling-mounted-orrery-is-an-excercise-in-simplicity/ | Ceiling-Mounted Orrery Is An Excercise In Simplicity | Robin Kearey | [
"classic hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"CNC machined",
"orrery",
"planetarium",
"planets"
] | Ever since humans figured out that planets move along predetermined paths in the heavens, they have tried to make models that can accurately predict their motion. Watchmakers and astronomers worked together to create
orreries
: mechanical contraptions that illustrate the positions of all planets and the way they move over time through complex gear systems. [Illusionmanager] continues the orrery tradition but uses a different approach: he built
a beautiful ceiling-mounted model of our Solar System without a gearing system
.
The mechanism that makes his Solar System tick is deceptively simple. All planets can move freely along their orbit’s axis except Mercury, which is moved along its orbit by a motor hidden inside the Sun. Once Mercury has completed a full revolution, a pin attached to its arm will begin pushing Venus along with it. After Venus has completed a full circle, its own pin will pick up Earth, and so on all the way to Neptune. Neptune is then advanced to its correct location as reported by NASA, after which Mercury’s motion is reversed and the whole procedure is repeated in the opposite direction to position Uranus.
Cycling through the entire Solar System in this way takes a long time, which is why the planets’ positions are only updated once a day at midnight. An ESP32, also hidden inside the Sun, connects to the internet to retrieve the correct positions for the day and drives the motor. The planet models, sourced from a museum shop, are hanging from thin aluminium tubes attached to wooden mounts made with a desktop CNC machine.
[Illusionmanager] made
a detailed Instructables page
showing the process of making a miniature version of the mechanism using just laser-cut wooden parts, as an update to
a version we featured earlier
. We really like the simplicity of this design, which stands in stark contrast to the
huge gear trains
used in
more traditional orreries
. | 29 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6680877",
"author": "illusionmanager",
"timestamp": "2023-09-09T11:21:30",
"content": "Here is an additional picture of the whole mechanisme before putting it togetherhttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1ivrrCOzkYd2hoBmX4HOFnLbVnqO79KbN/view?usp=sharing",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,372,174.49871 |
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