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https://hackaday.com/2023/03/24/sheepshaver-a-cross-platform-tool-for-retro-enthusiasts/ | SheepShaver: A Cross-Platform Tool For Retro Enthusiasts | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"application",
"BeOS",
"compatibility",
"cross-platform",
"emulator",
"linux",
"macOS",
"retro",
"run-time environment",
"sheepshaver",
"windows"
] | The world of desktop computing has coalesced into what is essentially a duopoly, with Windows machines making up the bulk of the market share and Apple carving out a dedicated minority. This relatively stable state hasn’t always existed, though, as the computing scene even as late as the 90s was awash with all kinds of competing operating systems and various incompatible hardware. Amiga, Unix, OS/2, MacOS, NeXT, BeOS, as well as competing DOSes, were all on the table at various points.
If you’ve still got a box running one of these retro systems,
SheepShaver might be able to help expand your software library
. It’s not the sort of virtualization that we’re used to in the modern world, with an entire operating system running on a sanctioned-off part of your system. But SheepShaver does allow you to run software written for MacOS 7.5.2 thru 9.0.4 in a different environment. Unix and Linux are both supported, as well as Mac OS X, Windows NT, 2000, and XP, and the enigmatic BeOS. Certain configurations allow applications to run natively without any emulation at all, and there is plenty of hardware support built-in as well.
For anyone running retro hardware from the late 90s or early 00s, this could be just the ticket to get an application running that wasn’t ever supported on one of these machines. As for the name, it’s a play on another piece of software called ShapeShifter which brought a Mac-II emulator to the Amiga. SheepShaver has been around since the late 90s, too, so we’re surprised that we haven’t featured it before since it is such a powerful tool for cross-platform compatibility for computers of this era.
Even if all you are hanging on to is an old BeBox
. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621957",
"author": "KD",
"timestamp": "2023-03-24T13:26:10",
"content": "This has been around for decades“Yes, SheepShaver originally appeared for BeOS in 1998 as a commercial application (first as shareware, then via the now long-defunct BeDepot). Due to the demise of Be, it has b... | 1,760,372,356.680904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/who-needs-gasoline-when-youve-got-sodium/ | Who Needs Gasoline When You’ve Got Sodium? | Dave Rowntree | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"fuel",
"Fuel injection",
"NaK",
"sodium-potassium alloy"
] | YouTuber and serial debunker [Thunderf00t] was thinking about the use of sodium to counteract global warming. The theory is that
sodium can be used as a fuel when combusted with air
, producing a cloud of sodium hydroxide which apparently can have a cooling effect if enough of it is kicking around the upper atmosphere. The idea is to either use sodium directly as a fuel, or as a fuel additive, to increase the aerosol content of vehicle emissions and maybe reduce their impact a little.
One slight complication to using sodium as a fuel is that it’s solid at room temperature, so it would need to be either delivered as pellets or in liquid form. That’s not a major hurdle as the melting point is a smidge below 100 degrees Celsius and well within the operating region of an internal combustion engine, but you can imagine the impact of metal solidifying in your fuel system. Luckily, just like with solder eutectic mixes,
sodium-potassium alloy
happens to remain in liquid form at handleable temperatures and only has a slight tendency to spontaneously ignite. So that’s good.
Initial experiments using ultrasonic evaporators proved somewhat unsuccessful due to the alloy’s electrical conductivity and tendency to set everything on fire. The next attempt was using a standard automotive fuel injector from the petrol version of the Ford Fiesta. Using a suitable container, a three-way valve to allow the introduction of fuels, and an inert argon feed (preventing spontaneous combustion in the air), delivering the liquid metal fuel into the fuel injector seems straightforward enough.
[Thunderf00t] started with ethanol, then worked up to pentane before finally attempting to use the feisty sodium-potassium, once the bugs had been shaken out of the high-speed video setup. [Thunderf00t] does stress the importance of materials selection when handling this potential liquid metal fuel, since it apparently just bursts into flames in a violent manner on contact with incompatible materials. Heck, this stuff even reacts with PTFE, which is generally considered a very resistant material. We’re totally convinced we’d not like to see this stuff being pumped from a roadside gas station, at all, but it sure is a fun concept to think about.
Sodium-Potassium alloy doesn’t feature on these pages too often, but
here’s a little fountain of the stuff
, just because why not?
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip! | 58 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621124",
"author": "Norbert",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T15:38:30",
"content": "There is a more meaningful usage of sodium: In rechargeable batteries!It’s crazy what ideas are born just to give the combustion engine a right to exist in the 21st century…",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,372,356.617818 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/working-with-bgas-soldering-reballing-and-rework/ | Working With BGAs: Soldering, Reballing, And Rework | Robin Kearey | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"how-to",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"BGA soldering",
"hot air rework",
"hot plate",
"smd components",
"smd stencil"
] | In our
previous article
on Ball Grid Arrays (BGAs), we explored how to design circuit boards and how to route the signals coming out of a BGA package. But designing a board is one thing – soldering those chips onto the board is quite another. If you’ve got some experience with SMD soldering, you’ll find that any SOIC, TQFP or even QFN package can be soldered with a fine-tipped iron and a bit of practice. Not so for BGAs: we’ll need to bring out some specialized tools to solder them correctly. Today, we’ll explore how to get those chips on our board, and how to take them off again, without spending a fortune on equipment.
Tools of the Trade
For large-scale production, whether for BGA-based designs or any other kind of SMD work, reflow ovens are the tool of choice. While you can buy reflow ovens
small enough
to place in your workshop (or even
build them yourself
), they will always take up quite a bit of space. Reflow ovens are great for small-scale series production, but not so much for repairs or rework.
Sold under many different names, a simple hot plate like this is a useful tool for basic SMD reflow work.
A smaller, cheaper and arguably more versatile tool is a hot plate. Although you can convert
cooking appliances
into soldering hot plates, it’s more convenient to buy one specifically made for the purpose with an adjustable temperature controller. Also known as “pre-heaters”, these can be had for less than $100 from the usual online channels. They’re pretty easy to use, too: simply place your board on top, set the desired temperature and wait for the solder to work its magic.
A hot air soldering station should have adjustable temperature and airflow, as well as nozzles of various sizes.
A drawback of hot plates is the fact that they heat up the entire board at once, making them less than ideal if you want to solder or desolder a single component. For that, a hot-air soldering station is the tool to use. Professional hot-air stations can run into thousands of dollars, but you can buy lower-range models, with adjustable temperature and airflow, for between $100 and $300.
Hot plates and hot-air soldering stations also work together very well: the hot plate can be used to pre-heat the entire board to about 150 °C, with the hot air gun used on just the part to be soldered. This reduces thermal stress on the board compared to heating up just one spot all the way from room temperature.
If you’re starting from scratch and are wondering what tool to buy for your first BGA project, here’s our advice: as a bare minimum, buy a hot plate; if you can spend a little more, get a hot-air soldering station; and if you want the best possible toolset, buy both.
Soldering – Get that stencil ready
No matter whether you use an oven, a hot plate, a hot-air station or any combination of those tools, the basic steps for soldering BGA chips are the same. Let’s start from the bare footprint for the 49-ball ATmega164 that we designed last time:
The first step is to deposit solder paste using an SMD stencil. Most PCB manufacturers nowadays offer the option to order a stencil along with your boards, and this is convenient if you use solder paste for any SMD components, not just for BGA parts. Align the stencil with your board (a
jig
comes in handy here), then spread a bit of solder paste across the required area using a squeegee. You should end up with a nice, even layer of paste across all pads.
Next, we’ll place the components. You can use tweezers or a vacuum pickup tool, or even a complete
pick-and-place machine
if you’ve got one. Note that for the BGA chip you can’t see the pads when placing the component, so having the package outline on the silkscreen helps a lot with getting a proper alignment.
Finally, we’ll heat the board to let the solder reflow. If you’re using an oven, simply set it to the reflow profile recommended in the chip manufacturer’s datasheet. When using a hot plate, set it to the peak temperature needed: typically about 245 °C for lead-free solder. You might want to set it a few degrees higher to account for any temperature gradient between the bottom and top of the board.
As the board heats up, the BGA chip will move a little bit as surface tension aligns the chip with its footprint, but typically it’s hard to see whether the solder has properly melted everywhere. It’s convenient to place a few resistors or capacitors on the board even if you were planning to reflow only the chip, because you can easily tell from those components whether the solder has reflowed properly.
If you’re using a hot-air station, you’ll need to experiment a bit with its settings to find what works best. Especially the “flow” setting can vary quite a bit between models, so you’ll have to figure out how much airflow can be used without blowing the components all over the place. Once you’ve found the proper setting, apply the heat evenly across the chip and its immediate surroundings. When the solder balls melt, you should see the chip wiggle its way onto its footprint.
The stencil-and-paste method method is the preferred way of soldering BGAs, and is typically the method recommended in manufacturers’ datasheets. But it’s still possible to solder a chip without a stencil – sometimes you don’t even have a choice, such as when you’re replacing a chip on an existing board.
While it is possible to directly solder a BGA chip to a set of bare copper PCB pads, you’ll get better results if you apply solder to the pads first: this will ensure a solder-to-solder connection between the chip and the board, easing heat transfer. You can simply drag a blob of solder across the pads, then remove it again using desoldering braid, so that all pads are nice and flat afterwards. Make sure not to set your iron too hot, and to always dab, not drag the braid across the pads. It’s very easy to pull pads off the board if you push a hot iron down too hard.
When you’re done with the desoldering braid, clean the area using isopropyl alcohol or flux remover, then apply a thin layer of fresh flux. It’s important not to use too much, because you don’t want it to bubble and dislodge the solder balls as you turn up the heat. Other than that, you can simply reflow the board as described before.
Rework – Getting the chip off again
Even if you’ve managed to solder your chip correctly the first time, you might need to remove it again at some later point. Although you can also do this with just a hot plate, a hot air station is really the best tool for this job. If you’re working with a large board that can sink a lot of heat, preheating the whole thing makes your life much easier – without a pre-heater you’ll spend ages trying to heat the entire board by blasting at one chip.
Our board is pretty small and light, so we’ll just use the hot air gun. Note how we’ve lifted the board off the table by putting small objects under the corners: this prevents the table from acting as a heat sink. Apply a generous amount of gel-type flux around the chip, then use the hot air gun to heat it up.
As you wield the nozzle, gently tug at the chip with your tweezers. You should be able to feel when the solder balls melt, at which point you should be able to lift up the chip effortlessly. Don’t use force at any time – if one or two balls haven’t melted yet, you might rip their pads off the board.
Once the chip is off, use desoldering braid and your iron to clean any remaining solder off the pads, then clean the area using flux remover. If your purpose was to place a fresh chip on the board, simply apply a fresh layer of flux and solder the new chip in place.
Things become more interesting if we want to re-use the chip as well: in that case, we’ll need to look at
reballing
.
Reballing – Ready for the next round
A desoldered BGA can be equipped with a fresh set of solder balls in a process known as
reballing
. For that, we’ll need a special tool called a
reballing jig
. This consists of a fixture to hold the chip as well a stencil that helps to position the solder balls. You can buy convenient kits that contain the jig, a set of commonly used stencils, a supply of solder balls and a few hand tools that might come in useful. A complete set like that will cost about $100.
Solder balls of various sizes, a jig, a set of stencils and a stencil holder make up a convenient reballing set. We also really like the blue colour.
The reballing kit in our workshop came with a set of generic stencils: they differ in ball size and pitch, but have all holes placed in a regular, square grid. The idea is that you use tape to mask off the holes that you don’t need, thereby customizing the stencil to your particular chip. This works fine as long as the ball pattern on your chip isn’t too complex.
For chips with irregular ball patterns, like many memory chips, you can buy specialized stencils that exactly match those specific layouts. These are usually sold in sets that match all chips in a specific model of smartphone or tablet. Such a set is great if you’re running a repair business, but for general work a simple square set is usually sufficient.
In order to reball our chip, we’ll first clean off all remains of the old balls, just as we did on the PCB. Use desoldering braid, then clean off all remaining flux and other dirt using isopropyl alcohol or flux remover. The pads on the bottom of the chip should look flat and shiny.
Next, we’ll mount the chip in our reballing jig. This particular model was designed for chips significantly larger than our tiny microcontroller, but we can still make it work by using only three of the four clamps. Note how the clamp on the left has a little leaf spring: we’ll position this one last, in order to put the chip under spring tension and keep it firmly in place.
Now we’ll apply a thin layer of sticky flux onto the chip’s surface, which will keep the balls in place and help them to reflow in the next step. It’s even more important here to ensure that you end up with a
very thin
layer, because we’ll be placing the stencil very close to the chip. If any flux ends up on the stencil, you’ll end up with solder balls stuck to the stencil rather than the chip.
Place the correct stencil inside the top part of the jig, then align it until the holes in the stencil line up exactly with the pads on the chip. Next, take some sticky tape and close off all holes that are not needed. For our little 7×7 BGA, that means taping off almost the entire stencil. Reballing kits often come with a roll of Kapton tape for this purpose, which works great, but regular Scotch tape you find in any desk drawer will do just fine, too – there’s no need for it to be heat-resistant.
Once you’re done taping, place the stencil holder back on top of the jig and pour some balls onto the stencil.
Wiggle the fixture around to ensure there’s a ball at each position on the chip. You might need to maneuver a few stubborn ones using tweezers or a fine brush. Once all slots are filled, lift up the stencil and pour any leftover balls back into the bottle using the little ramp on the bottom right of the stencil frame.
Next, we’ll need to reflow the balls onto the chip. Hot air is the easiest method here, but make sure to use a very low flow setting: solder balls weigh almost nothing and will fly away at the gentlest breeze. Alternatively, you can carefully lift up the chip with your tweezers and place it on a hot plate or in your reflow oven. In any case, once the balls reach their melting temperature you’ll see them reposition themselves and stick firmly to the pads. After the chip has cooled off, it’s ready to be mounted on a board again.
As you can see, soldering and desoldering BGAs is not that hard, as long as you’ve got the right tools. You can get even an absolute minimum toolset – a hot plate, SMD stencil and solder paste – for less than $100. This should be enough if you just need to solder the occasional BGA chip and prefer do the rest by hand.
Of course, if you were already using a stencil and solder paste to reflow your SMD boards, then throwing a BGA chip into the mix doesn’t really change the process. And if you weren’t convinced of the merits of solder paste, now might be a good time to order that stencil and try your hand at reflowing – it’s actually a very straightforward process. Now that proper SMD soldering tools are affordable even for a modest home lab, there’s really no reason not to use them. | 31 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621091",
"author": "Bil Herd",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T14:07:06",
"content": "Nice work",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6621119",
"author": "aninOI",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T15:21:04",
"content": "Missed opportuni... | 1,760,372,356.502976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/creating-a-game-boy-rom-from-pictures/ | Creating A Game Boy ROM From Pictures | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"cad",
"chip",
"data",
"decapping",
"game boy",
"photographs",
"rom",
"vias"
] | There are very few legal ways of obtaining ROM files for video games, and Nintendo’s lawyers are extremely keen on at least reminding you of the fact that you need to own the game cart before obtaining the ROM. With cart in hand, though, most will grab a cart reader to download the game files. While this is a tried-and-true method, for GameBoy games this extra piece of hardware isn’t strictly required. [Travis Goodspeed] is here to show us
a method of obtaining ROM files from photographs of the game itself
.
Bits can be manually edited to fix detection errors.
Of course, the chips inside the game cart will need to be decapped in order to obtain the pictures, and the pictures will need to be of high quality in order to grab the information. [Travis] is more than capable of this task in his home lab, but some work is still required after this step.
The individual bits in the Game Boy cartridges are created by metal vias on the chip, which are extremely small, but still visible under a microscope. He also has a CAD program that he developed to take this visual information and extract the data from it, which creates a ROM file that’s just as good as any obtained with a cart reader.
This might end up being slightly more work especially if you have to decap the chips and take the photographs yourself, but it’s nonetheless a clever way of obtaining ROM files due to this quirk of Game Boy technology. Encoding data into physical hardware like this is also an excellent way of ensuring that it doesn’t degrade over time.
Here are some other methods for long-term data storage
. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621063",
"author": "Jonathan Wilson",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T11:54:07",
"content": "Other than “because you can” why exactly would you do this rather than dumping either via the cartridge edge connector or by desoldering the chip and reading it out in a reader? If its something l... | 1,760,372,357.011464 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/smart-occupancy-sensor-knows-all/ | Smart Occupancy Sensor Knows All | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"home automation",
"mmwave",
"occupancy",
"PIR senor",
"radar",
"Room",
"security",
"sensor",
"tracking"
] | In the last few decades, building engineers and architects have made tremendous strides in improving the efficiency of various buildings and the devices that keep them safe and comfortable to live in. The addition of new technology like heat pumps is a major factor, as well as improvements on existing things like insulation methods and building materials. But after the low-hanging fruit is picked,
technology like this smart occupancy sensor created by [Sina Moshksar]
might be necessary to help drive further efficiency gains.
Known as RoomSense IQ, the small device mounts somewhere within a small room and uses a number of different technologies to keep track of the number of occupants in a room. The primary method is mmWave radar which can sense the presence of a person up to five meters away, but it also includes a PIR sensor to help prevent false positives and distinguish human activity from non-human activity. The device integrates with home automation systems to feed them occupancy data to use to further improve the performance of those types of systems. It’s also designed to be low-cost and easy to install, so it should be relatively straightforward to add a few to any existing system as well.
The project is also documented on
this GitHub page
, for anyone looking to build a little more data into their home automation system or even augment their home security systems. We imagine that devices like this could be used with great effect
paired with a heating device like this
, and we’ve also seen some
other interesting methods of determining occupancy
as well. | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621024",
"author": "gman",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T08:26:43",
"content": "Looks very much like “The Everything Presence One”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6623627",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2023-03-25... | 1,760,372,357.081191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/commodore-64-reports-the-news/ | Commodore 64 Reports The News | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"commodore",
"feed",
"journalism",
"modem",
"mystery",
"news",
"newspaper",
"newsroom",
"print",
"retro",
"software",
"wire service"
] | In the late 80s and into the 90s, [Cameron Kaiser] aka [ClassicHasClass] was an aspiring journalist, first becoming interested in the career in elementary school and then working on various publications into university. At some point, he started using a piece of software for laying out newspapers called The Newsroom which, he admits, was lacking a lot of tools that would have been modern even for the time, but had an otherwise agreeable price tag thanks to its focus more on home desktop publishing and newsletter production than on full-scale newspaper operations. It did have one interesting feature that he never could figure out, though,
at least until he went back and pieced this mystery together
.
The software itself ran on the Apple II and was eventually ported to other systems of the era, including the Commodore 64. The mystery feature was known as “Wire Service” and appeared to be a way that users of the software who had a modem could connect with one another and share news releases, layouts, graphics, and other content created in Newsroom, but in the days where it would have been modern never was able to connect to anything. In fact, it was eventually abandoned by the developers themselves in later releases of the software. But [ClassicHasClass] was determined to get it working.
After doing a number of experiments to break down the ways that Wire Service sends information from one Newsroom instance to another, including sending fonts, pictures, and graphics, the next step was to create a modem for the Commodore to receive information. From there a news feed with the latest worldwide happenings can be created and sent to the antique machine. This did take a few tries to get all of the data sent and decoded correctly, but now a modern news feed can be generated, and even printed, with a distinct retro feel.
As far as retrocomputing goes, the Commdore machines are still wildly popular thanks to the ease that they can be modified. This was a design choice at the time they were produced which allowed them to use all kinds of other drives and peripherals, but is still useful now for things like this news service. It’s likely that you wouldn’t even need a hardwired modem to get this to work, either. Take a look at this build which
adds a WiFi modem to an old Commodore
. | 13 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621017",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T07:49:19",
"content": "Looks like the First Bitcoin block:“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []... | 1,760,372,356.399266 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/combining-acoustic-bioprinting-with-raman-spectroscopy-for-high-throughput-identification-of-bacteria/ | Combining Acoustic Bioprinting With Raman Spectroscopy For High-Throughput Identification Of Bacteria | Maya Posch | [
"Machine Learning",
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"bacteria",
"machine learning",
"raman spectroscopy"
] | Rapidly analyzing samples for the presence of bacteria and similar organic structures is generally quite a time-intensive process, with often the requirement of a cell culture being developed. Proposed by Fareeha Safir and colleagues in
Nano Letters
is a method
to use an acoustic droplet printer combined with
Raman spectroscopy
. Advantages of this method are a high throughput, which could make analysis of samples at sewage installations, hospitals and laboratories significantly faster.
Raman spectroscopy works on the principle of Raman scattering, which is the inelastic scattering of photons by matter, causing a distinct pattern in the thus scattered light. By starting with a pure light source (that is, a laser), the relatively weak Raman scattering can be captured and the laser light filtered out. The thus captured signal can be analyzed and matched with known pathogens.
In the experiment, the researchers were able to distinguish between red blood cells (RBCs) and a host of distinct bacterial pathogens, both Gram-negative and Gram-positive. In addition, samples were printed onto a cell culture growth medium and incubated to demonstrate that the thus printed samples were still viable, even after the pass through the printing head.
To enable easy classification, a machine-learning algorithm was used, which was able to accurately identify the cells present in a given sample. This research may enable rapid and affordable diagnostics, without the need for sending samples to a central laboratory, instead offering stand-alone diagnostics units that could be used even by untrained personnel. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621185",
"author": "PRN",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T18:35:57",
"content": "Y’all left out the part about gold nanorods. In the right size (10-100 nm) and shape (greatly simplified, rods > spheres) the plasmon in the nanorod can couple with Raman modes in the analyte and greatly inc... | 1,760,372,356.303083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/optimize-your-paper-planes-with-this-cardboard-wind-tunnel/ | Optimize Your Paper Planes With This Cardboard Wind Tunnel | Robin Kearey | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"aerodynamics",
"drag",
"lift",
"wind tunnel"
] | We at Hackaday are great fans of hands-on classroom projects promoting science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects – after all, inspiring kids with technology at a young age will help ensure a new generation of hardware hackers in the future. If you’re looking for an interesting project to keep a full classroom busy, have a look at [drdonh]’s latest project:
a fully-functional wind tunnel made from simple materials
.
Built from cardboard, it has all the same components you’d find in a full-size aerodynamics lab: a fan to generate a decent stream of air, an inlet with channels to stabilize the flow, and a platform to mount experiments on. There’s even some basic instrumentation included that can be used to measure drag and lift, allowing the students to evaluate the drag coefficients of different car designs or the lift-generating properties of various airfoils.
The design of these instruments is as clever as it is simple. For measuring drag, [drdonh] made a mass balance out of pieces of wood and plastic film, with a small magnet attached to a long beam bringing it near a smartphone. The phone’s magnetometer can then be used to measure the beam’s deflection, which is a measure of the amount of drag experienced by the device under test.
A second instrument is able to measure the lift and drag of a paper plane, through a device called a
drag balance
as used by the Wright brothers. Students can change the angle of attack and use the measured lift and drag values to calculate the L/D ratio, which is a measure of the efficiency of gliders – which paper planes essentially are. It’s also possible to visualize a stall condition by increasing the angle of attack until the amount of lift suddenly decreases dramatically.
The cardboard setup might seem a bit fragile, but [drdonh] assures us it survived multiple sessions with classrooms full of giddy students. Wind tunnels are pretty nifty tools to have on your desk anyway: even if you’re not
optimizing aircraft designs at mach 20
, you can make neat
visualizations of the airflow across your car
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620910",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T23:35:02",
"content": "Can you put smoke in it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6620930",
"author": "some guy",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T01:16:09",
... | 1,760,372,356.791428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/homebrew-tire-inflator-pushes-the-limits-of-pvc-construction/ | Homebrew Tire Inflator Pushes The Limits Of PVC Construction | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"air compressor",
"modeling",
"piston",
"pump",
"PVC",
"Schrader valve",
"tire",
"tire inflator"
] | Let’s just clear something up right from the start with this one: there’s literally no reason to
build your own tire inflator from scratch
, especially when you can buy a perfectly serviceable one for not a lot of money. But that’s missing the point of this build entirely, and thinking that way risks passing up yet another fascinating build from PVC virtuoso [Vang Hà], which would be a shame
The chances are most of you will recall [Vang Hà]’s
super-detailed working PVC model excavator
, and while we’re tempted to say this simple air pump is a step toward more practical PVC builds, the fact remains that the excavator was a working model with a completely homebrew hydraulic system. As usual, PVC is the favored material, with sheet stock harvested from sections of flattened pipe. Only the simplest of tools are used, with a hand drill standing in for a lathe to make such precision components as the compressor piston. There are some great ideas here, like using Schrader tire valves as the intake and exhaust valves on the pump cylinder. And that’s not to mention the assembly tips, like making a hermetic seal between the metal valves and the PVC manifold by reaming out a hole with a heated drill bit.
We’re not sure how much abuse a plastic compressor like this will stand up to, but then again, we’ve seen some commercially available tire inflators with far, far less robust internals than this one. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620836",
"author": "srgnio",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T20:27:20",
"content": "Less than 30 seconds and I’ve already paused the video. Obvious clickbait, just like all those “amazing restoration” videos that pop up in recommended after watching anything technical.",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,372,356.744295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/vintage-tektronix-virtual-graticule/ | Vintage Tektronix Virtual Graticule | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"history",
"oscilloscope",
"test equipment"
] | Oscilloscopes are great for measuring the time and voltage information of a signal. Some old scopes don’t have much in the way of markings on the CRT, although eventually, we started seeing scales that allowed you to count squares easily. Early scopes had marks on the glass or plastic over the CRT,
but as [Vintage TEK Museum] points out
, this meant for best accuracy, you had to look directly at the CRT. If you were at an angle horizontally or vertically, the position of the trace would appear to move concerning the lines on the screen. You can see the effect in the video below.
The simple solution was to mark directly into the phosphor, which minimized the effect. Before that was possible, [Bob Anderson] invented a clever solution, although Tektronix didn’t produce any scopes using it for some reason. The idea was the virtual oscilloscope graticule, and it was quite clever.
The idea was to put the graticule on a semi-reflective mirror. Looking through the assembly, you would actually see the trace and the reflection of the graticule in the mirror. The resulting image is perfectly aligned if the assembly is constructed properly. You can, at some angles, see both the front and reflected graticules.
According to the video, management was not impressed because someone other than [Anderson] showed a poor-quality prototype to them. By 1962, the graticule in the phosphor took over, and there was no need for [Anderson’s] clever invention.
These days, a graticule is just
bits on the screen
. Even if you
roll your own
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620846",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T20:45:25",
"content": "Interesting idea, useful if you want to make a fixed mark or division on top of an OLED screen.The D1=D2 is not perfect if you’re working with different materials, as you have angles of refraction to combat.... | 1,760,372,356.943748 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/glove80-keyboard-sure-fits-like-one/ | Glove80 Keyboard Sure Fits Like One | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"curved key wells",
"ergonomic keyboard",
"ergonomics",
"Glove80",
"Kailh chocs",
"keyboard review",
"Kinesis Advantage",
"thumb cluster"
] | If you’re what one might call unlucky, there comes a point in your life when you need to switch to a keyboard that’s more ergonomic than your average rectangle. A little prevention goes a long way, though, and there’s no time like the present to go ergo. Why not? You have everything to gain, from long-lasting comfort to satisfying key presses.
The only problem is that most severely ergonomic keyboards just aren’t portable. At this point, we all know how much I love my Kinesis Advantage, and how I wouldn’t be able to write the Keebin’ column or even a grocery list without it. I have two now, and I take the ugly, yellowed, sticker-bombed one with me out into the world. But as much as I love it, I would really dig a a slimmed-down version that’s just as comfortable, perhaps more so. Well, move over, Kinesis, because you’ve got stiff competition in the form of a flexible little two-piece called the Glove80.
You may recall that there was a Kickstarter for this keyboard about a year ago. I was pumped about it then, and I still am. Here’s why:
It’s a compact, portable version of my favorite keyboard (since I can no longer Model M). What that means is that it’s a curved ortholinear with column stagger. What does that mean? No finger has to travel very far in either the x, y, or z direction to reach the keys.
Working from home is not for everyone, and I longed for a keyboard that would actually fit in my backpack along with my laptop. This is totally that keyboard and I can’t wait to take it out somewhere.
The Glove80 is meant for all hands, but especially small hands. Mine are 6″ long, and that’s from the tip of my middle finger to the base of my palm. That’s about an inch shorter than the average keyboard reviewer.
The halves are wireless, meaning I can put them as far apart as I want, or even mount them on my chair.
The designers did over 500 ergonomic experiments and built cool modular test rigs in order to build their end game keyboard, and that’s awesome.
Getting Started
First and foremost, let’s talk about the feel. I knew it would be lightweight, but it was lighter than I was expecting, which will be great for travel. That said, this is a substantial keyboard. It is super stable on the table, and the rubberized feet make sure it stays where you put it. This is really important when trying to get your ergonomics right. What good is a keyboard that slides around?
Height difference versus Kinesis Advantage.
Thanks to bullheadedness and user error, I had a little bit of trouble setting it up because both sides have a button and a USB-C slot. I started by plugging in the right side, just because it’s closer to my USB hub. The keyboard showed up as Glove80 Right but didn’t seem to work until I plugged in the left side instead and turned both on.
I could have avoided all of this by reading
the quick start guide
, or even
the full 47-page user guide
but honestly I’m glad I had the chance to test out the intuitiveness of the thing right out of the box. Speaking of that, it was well-packed and comes with a bunch of extras like spacers, threaded rods for extreme tenting, extra keycaps, a key cap puller, rubber feet, and a wrench to help pull off the keycaps without also pulling off the key switches.
So once I got it going and started looking it over, I noticed that it only has F1-F10 keys, with a pair of little notches that preclude their inclusion. According to
the FAQ
, this is to reduce the overall height of the thing, which is understandable. Really, this keyboard is quite portable, especially compared with the Kinesis, and I don’t think I’ll miss F11 and F12 too much.
The thumb clusters look kind of large for me, but we’re gonna find out in time. I’m honestly not too concerned with it as I’m not a big Alt person, and I’m not into layers. I found them quite easy to get used to — the difference being that that Kinesis uses a total of four 2u keys on the thumb clusters, and the Glove80 is made of 1u keys as far as the eye can see.
Getting Comfortable
For someone used to concavities and ortholinear layouts, there really wasn’t much of a learning curve for me, but it would likely take a couple of weeks to get up to speed if you’re used to regular, row-staggered rectangles. If you’re coming from an ErgoDox or something similar, the adjustment period should only be a few days.
Of course, the layout isn’t the same as a Kinesis, although one of the layouts on the Glove80 ZMK menu is meant to be Kinesis-like. Personally, I’ve changed enough of the layout that I’ll just tweak a few keys here and there and be set. Fortunately, the makers of the Glove80, MoErgo, made this really easy to do with their
web-based layout editor
.
About the biggest difference for me here is typing on Kailh chocs instead of something Cherry or Cherry-adjacent, which I haven’t really done at length before. I have to say that I rather like them, at least in brown, though I’m sure the others are great (especially blue).
Something really cool about the Glove80 is the built-in tenting system. The inside feet can be unscrewed and in the process lengthened, making it so your hand doesn’t have to lie flat. If the rods aren’t long enough, there are some really long ones it the goodies bag.
The Teardown
There’s not too much to tear down with this streamlined keyboard, but I did it anyway because I wanted to see inside. First of all, one must detach the palm rests, which is quite easy to do thanks to a pair of spring-loaded thumb screws on each half. According to Stephen from MoErgo, they changed to these thumb screws after the Kickstarter campaign, where they previously had used regular screws that required a screwdriver.
Stephen tells me that these screws were designed for sheet metal — no off-the-shelf screws are really designed for thin injection-molded plastic. Furthermore, the mold became way fancier to account for the direction of the thumb screws, which is about 8 degrees off of the push-pull direction of the mold.
After removing the palm rests, there are just a handful of small screws to remove before gazing upon the sleek interior. Both sides have an nRF52840 over which they communicate with each other, and not much else.
Small Wonder
I dig this keyboard a lot. I think it works quite well for small hands, but I doubt that medium hands would feel cramped at all. Like I said, my hands are only 6″ long, so size does matter. After all, what good is a so-called ‘ergonomic’ keyboard if you have to stretch and overreach all the time?
Although I must disclose that I received this as a free sample for review, I would absolutely spend the money on one. It seems that MoErgo really did think of everything when it comes to ergonomic portability, and it shows. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620815",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T19:12:14",
"content": "Thank you Kristina for this very comprehensive review. Glad you really dig Glove80.A quick note about “The Glove80 is meant for all hands, but especially small hands.”. Actually Glove80 is not especially ... | 1,760,372,357.167502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/one-method-for-removing-future-space-junk/ | One Method For Removing Future Space Junk | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Space"
] | [
"aa batteries",
"arduino",
"Brown",
"cubesat",
"drag",
"research",
"sail",
"satellite",
"space"
] | When sending satellites into space, the idea is to place them into as stable an orbit as possible in order to maximize both the time the satellite is useful and the economics of sending it there in the first place. This tends to become rather untenable as the amount of space junk continues to pile up for all but the lowest of orbits, but a team at Brown University
recently tested a satellite that might help solve this problem
, at least for future satellite deployments.
The main test of this satellite was its drag sail, which
increases its atmospheric drag significantly
and reduces its spaceflight time to around five years. This might make it seem like a problem from an economics standpoint, as it’s quite expensive to build satellites and launch them into space, but this satellite solves these problems by being both extremely small to minimize launch costs, and also by being built out of off-the-shelf components not typically rated for spaceflight. For example, it gets its power solely from AA batteries and uses an Arduino for its operation and other research.
The satellite is currently in orbit, and has already descended from an altitude of 520 km to 470 km. While it won’t help reduce the existing amount of debris in orbit, the research team hopes to demonstrate that small satellites can be affordable and economically feasible without further contributing to the growing problem of space junk. If you’re looking to launch your own CubeSat one day,
take a look at this primer
which goes over most of the basics. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620763",
"author": "socksbot",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T16:08:35",
"content": "Aw, I was hoping for detail about the release mechanism. Ideally it’d be something very simple, self-timed, like a pressurized bag that holds the mechanism locked while it leaks through a pore.",
"pa... | 1,760,372,357.224445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/why-llama-is-a-big-deal/ | Why LLaMa Is A Big Deal | Matthew Carlson | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"artifical intelligence",
"ChatGPT",
"GPT-3",
"inference",
"llama",
"LLM"
] | You might have heard about LLaMa or maybe you haven’t. Either way, what’s the big deal? It’s just some AI thing. In a nutshell, LLaMa is important because it allows you to run
large language models (LLM)
like GPT-3 on commodity hardware. In many ways, this is a bit like Stable Diffusion, which similarly allowed normal folks to run image generation models on their own hardware with access to the underlying source code. We’ve discussed
why Stable Diffusion matters
and
even talked about how it works
.
LLaMa is a transformer language model from Facebook/Meta research, which is a collection of large models from 7 billion to 65 billion parameters trained on publicly available datasets. Their
research paper
showed that the 13B version outperformed GPT-3 in most benchmarks and LLama-65B is right up there with the best of them. LLaMa was unique as inference could be run on a single GPU due to some optimizations made to the transformer itself and the model being about 10x smaller. While Meta recommended that users have at least 10 GB of VRAM to run inference on the larger models, that’s a huge step from the 80 GB A100 cards that often run these models.
While this was an important step forward for the research community, it became a huge one for the hacker community when [Georgi Gerganov] rolled in. He released
llama.cpp
on GitHub, which runs the inference of a LLaMa model with 4-bit quantization. His code was focused on running LLaMa-7B on your Macbook, but we’ve seen versions running on
smartphones
and
Raspberry Pis
. There’s even a
version written in Rust
! A rough rule of thumb is anything with more than 4 GB of RAM can run LLaMa. Model weights are available through Meta with some rather strict terms, but they’ve been leaked online and can
be found even in a pull request on the GitHub repo itself
.
Aside from occasionally funny and quirky projects, how does having a local GPT-3 like chatbot impact us? The simple fact is that it is accessible to hackers. Not only can you run it, but the code is available, the models are trained on publicly available data, so you could train your own though it took 21 days on 2048 A100 GPUs, and it’s useful enough to provide reasonable output. Stanford even released
a version called Alpaca
that is LLaMa-7B fine-tuned for instruction following which elevates it from a simple chatbot to a bot able to follow instructions. There is even
a guide on how to replicate Alpaca yourself
for less than $100 of cloud computing.
Of course, like most current LLMs, LLaMa suffers from the same problems of hallucination, bias, and stereotypes. When asked to generate code, it can try to request endpoints that don’t exist. When asked what the capital of Tanzania is, it will reply Dar es Salaam instead of Dodoma. Researchers haven’t solved the problem of
trying to secure a black box,
as it is still far too easy to get the model to do something its creators tried hard to prevent.
While it is incredible to think that just a few weeks ago it would have been ridiculous to think you could run a GPT-3 level model on your personal laptop, this ultimately asks the question: what will we do with this? The easy answer is sophisticated spam. Long term there are concerns that
large language models could replace programmers and writers.
For writing or tweaking small programs, it is already quite good as [Simon Wilson] demonstrated
by asking it to generate some AppleScript
. However, that is still up for debate. Being able to
spit out an accurate answer to a question does not a human make.
What do you do with the raw sort of bias-confused amorphous intelligence that is ChatGPT and other LLMs now running locally?
Rather than connecting to an API, the
Raspberry Pi inside of this old typewriter
can run it entirely locally with no internet connection required. Because the model is smaller, it becomes much easier to fine-tune for your use case. By taking a bunch of dialog from a TV show (let’s say the Simpsons) you could
fine-tune the model to respond like a character from the show
. Looking further into the future, there is an excellent paper called ReAct that tries to put something like an internal dialog into chat GPT by asking it to output questions, thoughts, and actions. A good example might be this:
Question: How much bigger is the land in Seattle, Washington versus the water?
Thought: I need to use Wikipedia to look up the square footage of the city area and the water
Action: search_wikipedia: Seattle, WA
Observation:
• City 142.07 sq mi (367.97 km2)
• Land 83.99 sq mi (217.54 km2)
• Water 58.08 sq mi (150.43 km2)
• Metro 8,186 sq mi (21,202 km2)
Thought: The city is 142.07 square miles and the water is 58.08 square miles, I should calculate a ratio.
Action: calculate: 142.07 / 58.08
Observation: 2.4461
Answer: The land is 2.4x the size of the water or 83.99 square miles bigger
You can see how this forms a loop where complex actions can be broken down to be performed by simplified helpers, like searching Wikipedia, calling APIs, controlling smart appliances, or actuating motors. Google has been experimenting with the concept in their
PaLM-SayCan system,
which uses an LLM (PaLM) and breaks it down into smaller tasks.
We can see LLaMa
powering NPCs in video games
,
optimizing blog titles,
and controlling robots. So understandably, we’re quite curious to see what you all do with it. One thing is for sure, though. Putting this in the hands of creative hackers is going to be fun. | 27 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620735",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T15:17:49",
"content": "Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass!(sorry but with this title image I couldn’t resist.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6620764",
"auth... | 1,760,372,357.29688 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/a-studio-condenser-microphone-for-a-constrained-budget/ | A Studio Condenser Microphone For A Constrained Budget | Jenny List | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"condenser microphone",
"microphone",
"phantom power"
] | As the Internet has turned so many of us into content creators, we’ve seen the quality of webcams and microphones steadily increase to the point at which even a fairly modestly-equipped YouTuber now captures their wisdom at a quality far exceeding that you might have found in some broadcast studios not so long ago. Still, decent quality costs money, and for that reason [Spirit532]
has built his own high quality condenser microphone for less expenditure
.
The capsule and body are off-the-shelf items — what he’s produced is the bias voltage supply and preamplifier. In both cases these are the interesting parts of a condenser microphone, so their circuit bears a second look.
The condenser microphone takes a diaphragm and turns it into one side of a capacitor. If you apply a charge to this capacitor, the voltage over it changes minutely with the capacitance as the diaphragm vibrates. Thus to have a usable audio signal level a high-voltage bias supply is required to provide the charge, and a very high impedance preamplifier circuit to catch the signal without draining the capacitor.
His bias supply is a charge pump using a string of diodes and capacitors fed by a chain of CMOS inverters, with an RC filter and resistor chain to provide that super-high impedance. The preamplifier meanwhile is a unity gain high-impedance op-amp with an inverting stage to provide a balanced connection. For good measure the circuit also includes a phantom power supply.
This is an interesting project for anyone with an interest in audio. if you’re further interested in condenser microphones,
how about also looking at electret microphones
? | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620669",
"author": "Spirit(the author)",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T12:00:30",
"content": "Hey, author here. Small correction: the circuit *uses* phantom power, it doesn’t just tack it on there “for good measure”, the circuit is fed via 48V phantom provided by the audio interface :)"... | 1,760,372,358.019399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/22/icicle-patterns-with-custom-gantry/ | Icicle Patterns With Custom Gantry | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"bearing",
"belt drive",
"gantry",
"icicles",
"linear"
] | [Cranktown City] uses a number of custom-built linear rails used as gantries for various tools in the shop. The first is on a plasma cutter, which is precise but difficult to set up or repair. Another is for mounting a camera, and while it is extremely durable, it’s not the most precise tool in the shop. Hoping to bridge the gap between these two, he’s building another gantry with a custom bearing system, and to test it he’ll be
using it to create patterns in icicles hanging from an eave at his shop
.
While this isn’t the final destination for this gantry, it is an excellent test of it, having to perform well for a long period of time in an extremely cold environment. The bearing system consists of a piece of square steel tubing turned 45° inside another larger square steel tube and held in place with two sets of three bearings with V-shaped notches. To drive the gantry he is using a motor with a belt drive, and for this test a piece of drip irrigation is mounted to it which lets out a predetermined amount of water on top of the roof to create numerous icicles beneath with various programmed lengths.
After a few test runs the gantry system can create some icicles, although they don’t have the exact sine wave shape that [Cranktown City] programmed into it. They are varying lengths though, and with no more cold days in the forecast he’s called it a success. This isn’t the final destination for this robotic linear gantry, though, but it did help him work out some of the kinks with it beforehand. For other sources of inspiration, take a look at
this linear rail system
also used for driving various robotic tooling.
Thanks to [Nikša] for the tip! | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620615",
"author": "Adjustinthings",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T08:30:31",
"content": "This man IS hackaday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6620693",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T13:11:04",
"content": "T... | 1,760,372,357.727489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/fresh-pcbs-for-the-quickshot-ii-and-ii-plus-joysticks/ | Fresh PCBs For The Quickshot II And II Plus Joysticks | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Joystick",
"Quickshot"
] | The Quickshot II was released by Spectravideo in 1983 for the Commodore 64 and compatible systems, with the Quickshot II Plus following the next year. After decades of regular use, it’s quite understandable that these old-timers may be having some functional issues, but as long as the plastic parts are still good, [Stephan Eckweiler]’s
replacement PCBs
may be just the thing that these joysticks need to revitalize them for another few decades.
What may be a matter of taste is that these replace the nice tactile clicky switches on the QS II Plus with SMD push buttons, but compared to the stamped metal ‘button’ construction of the original QS II, the new board is probably a major improvement. As for the BOM, it features two ICs: a 74LS00 latch and NE555 timer, along with the expected stack of passives and switches, both through-hole and SMD.
The PCB contains break-off boards for the switches within the joystick itself, requiring a bit of wiring to be run to the main PCB before soldering on the DE-9 connector and connecting the joystick for a test run to a Commodore 64. All one needs now is a 3D printable enclosure version to create more QS II joysticks for some multiplayer action. | 13 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620555",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T05:41:43",
"content": "Wow! Nice work. The QuickShot II was the joystick everybody wanted when I was a kid!The tear down is interesting. I didn’t realize the first QuickShot II version was so, erm, primitive.For those intereste... | 1,760,372,357.683721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/bittorrent-for-language-models/ | BitTorrent For Language Models | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ChatGPT",
"large language model"
] | In the old days of the Internet, FTP was sufficient for downloading the occasional file. But with the widespread use of computer audio and video, it was easy to swamp an FTP server so — eventually — BitTorrent was born. The idea was you would download bits and pieces of a file from different places and, in theory, people would download bits and pieces that you have if they need them. Now
Petals
wants to use this same method with language models. These AI language models are all the rage, but they take significant computer resources. The idea behind Petals is like BitTorrent. You handle a small part of the model (about 8 gigabytes which is small compared to the 352 gigabytes required), and other people have other parts.
Of course, if you are privacy-minded, that means that some amount of your data is going out to the public, but for your latest chatbot experiments, that might not be a big problem. You can install Petals in an Anaconda environment or run a Docker image if you don’t want to set up anything. If you just want to access the distributed network’s chatbot based on BLOOMZ-176B, you can
do that online
.
Since the network processes tokens, a chat with the device is a little jerky, with a noticeable pause between words. It did say you can increase speed by connecting your GPU. Here’s a transcript:
Hackaday: How many nodes host you?
AI: Two thousand six hundered and ninety-three
Hackaday: Do you know about hackaday.com?
AI: Yes, of course.
Hackaday: What is it?
AI: It's a website for hackers and geeks.
Hackaday: How would you write an Arduino program to blink an LED?
AI: You have to use the Arduino language and create a sketch that can load onto the Arduino board.
Hackaday: Can you write that program?
AI: No
So we suppose our jobs are safe for now. Still, if you want to experiment with your own custom models based on BLOOM or BLOOMZ, this is a quick way to start without needing a server farm. The
tutorial notebook
will get you started. If you want to dig deep, there is
a whitepaper
.
We’ve been worried about
model security
, so having it distributed will make some attacks easier and some harder, we imagine. We don’t know if we
trust any of them to run a circular saw blade
around our yard yet, though. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620676",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T12:15:18",
"content": "I think there’s a market for annoying chatbots. E.g.:Hackaday: Do you know about hackaday.com?AI: Yes, of course.Hackaday: What is it?AI: A genderless pronoun.Hackaday: No, Hackaday.AI: What about it?Hackaday... | 1,760,372,357.822488 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/dispense-60-bolts-in-2-3-seconds/ | Dispense 60 Bolts In 2.3 Seconds | Michael Shaub | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"hardware",
"News"
] | [
"3d print",
"3D printed gears",
"dispenser",
"herringbone",
"kitting",
"modular hardware",
"sorting machine"
] | We’ve covered a number of projects that assist makers who need to fill orders for their small businesses, or kitting. [Helmke] has sorted thousands of pieces of hardware that they include with 3D printed parts sold online. They have been developing an alternative,
a modular system for sorting and packaging specific quantities of parts
.
After the break, check out the latest video from their small but growing channel for a very clear walk-through of the counting system they’ve been iterating on. The 2nd video in the series explores solenoids, Geneva drives, and ultimately a sprocket to dispense a variable number of bolts from the sorting machine. The approach gives consistent results, easily to vary quantities, and is fast! These videos are also rich with lots of small details you might want to explore on your own like magnetic part feeding, discussions of different sensors for detecting and counting parts, 3D printed gear box designs, and we love the use of stackable crates for project enclosures.
We hope to see more videos from [Helmke] in the series as the project matures for deeper dives into the existing mechanisms and new features they develop next. Hungry for more? We’ve brought you everything from
cutting and stripping wire
, to
SMD tape
, to
resistors
, to
laser-cut parts
. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620468",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2023-03-22T00:41:51",
"content": "Similar disc with suction that smaller pill counters use.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6620482",
"author": "hello",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,372,357.947334 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/3d-printed-parts-dont-slow-down-this-speedy-printer/ | 3D-Printed Parts Don’t Slow Down This Speedy Printer | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"Benchy",
"CoreXY",
"speed",
"speedboat"
] | Truth be told, we generally find speed sports to be a little boring. Whether it’s cars going around in circles for hours on end or swimmers competing to be a few milliseconds faster than everyone else, we just don’t feel the need for speed. Unless, of course, you’re talking about
speedy 3D printers like “The 100”
, which claims to produce high-quality prints in a tenth the time of an ordinary printer. In that case, you’ve got our full attention.
What makes [Matt the Printing Nerd]’s high-speed printer interesting isn’t the fact that it can do a “Speedboat Run” — printing a standard Benchy model — in less than six minutes. Plenty of printers can do the same thing much, much faster. The impressive part is that The 100 does it with a 3D-printed frame. In fact, most of the printer’s parts are 3d printed, a significant departure from most speed printer builds, which generally shy away from printed structural elements. [Matt]’s design also aims to keep the center of gravity of all the printer’s components within a very small area, which helps manage frame vibrations that limit print quality. The result is that the CoreXY gantry is capable of a speed of 400 mm/s and an eye-popping 100,000 mm/s² acceleration. What also sets [Matt]’s printer apart is that The 100 is designed to be a daily driver. It has a generous 165 mm x 165 mm print bed, which is far more useful than a bed that’s barely bigger than a standard Benchy.
The video below has much more details on the open-source build, plus some nice footage of some speed runs. The quality of the prints, even done at speed, is pretty impressive. Perhaps there is a point to speed sports after all. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620385",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T20:45:07",
"content": "It’s like Tantillus but without the janky XY mechanism.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6620519",
"author": "MacAttack",
"timestamp": "2023-03... | 1,760,372,357.873656 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/info-sought-on-a-forgotten-cuban-radio/ | Info Sought On A Forgotten Cuban Radio | Jenny List | [
"History",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"Cuba",
"ham radio",
"islander"
] | Some of the daily normalities of life in the Cold War seem a little surreal from our perspective in 2023, when nuclear bombers no longer come in to land just down the road and you can head off to Poland or Czechia on a whim. Radio amateurs were one of the few groups of civilians whose activities crossed the geopolitical divide, and even though an operator on the other side from ours couldn’t buy a shiny Japanese radio, their homebrew skills matched anything we could do with our Western soldering irons.
[Bill Meara N2CQR] is particularly interested in one line of Cold War-era Communist homebrew radios,
the tube-based Cuban “Islander” and its solid-state “Jaguey” sibling
. It’s a homebrew double-sideband transceiver design built using readily-available Soviet TV parts, and though he’s published what he can find,
he’s on the lookout for more info
about these interesting rigs.
The mechanics of a DSB transceiver are simple enough, in that an oscillator and balanced mixer can serve as both modulator and as direct conversion receiver. The fuzzy black and white photographs give frustratingly little detail, but we’re impressed by the quality of what we can see. We have readers all over the world (including we hope, some in Cuba), so perhaps if you know something about these radios you can give Joe a hand. It’s a design that deserves to be appreciated.
For more epic Cold War hackery on the Communist side, read our colleague [Voja Antonic]’s story
of his personal computer odyssey
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620381",
"author": "Sodor",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T20:40:43",
"content": "Esperemos que algún día USA le quite las sanciones a Cuba.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6620469",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,357.779763 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/hands-on-nvidia-jetson-orin-nano-developer-kit/ | Hands-On: NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit | Tom Nardi | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"computer vision",
"Jetson",
"Jetson Nano",
"machine learning"
] | NVIDIA’s Jetson line of single-board computers are doing something different in a vast sea of relatively similar Linux SBCs. Designed for edge computing applications, such as a robot that needs to perform high-speed computer vision while out in the field, they provide exceptional performance in a board that’s of comparable size and weight to other SBCs on the market. The only difference, as you might expect, is that they tend to cost a lot more: the current top of the line Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit is $1999 USD
Luckily for hackers and makers like us, NVIDIA realized they needed an affordable gateway into their ecosystem, so
they introduced the $99 Jetson Nano in 2019
. The product proved so popular that just a year later the company refreshed it with a streamlined carrier board that
dropped the cost of the kit down to an incredible $59
. Looking to expand on that success even further, today NVIDIA announced a new upmarket entry into the Nano family that lies somewhere in the middle.
While the $499 price tag of the Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit may be a bit steep for hobbyists, there’s no question that you get a lot for your money. Capable of performing 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), NVIDIA estimates the Orin Nano is a staggering
80X as powerful
as the previous Nano. It’s a level of performance that, admittedly, not every Hackaday reader needs on their workbench. But the allure of a palm-sized supercomputer is very real, and anyone with an interest in experimenting with machine learning would do well to weigh (literally, and figuratively) the Orin Nano against a desktop computer with a comparable NVIDIA graphics card.
We were provided with one of the very first Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kits before their official unveiling during NVIDIA GTC (GPU Technology Conference), and I’ve spent the last few days getting up close and personal with the hardware and software. After coming to terms with the fact that this tiny board is considerably more powerful than the computer I’m currently writing this on, I’m left excited to see what the community can accomplish with the incredible performance offered by this pint-sized system.
More. More is Good
At first glance, the Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit looks remarkably like the previous Nano. It seems clear NVIDIA knew they had a winning design, and wisely decided to capitalize on that rather than trying to start over from scratch. It’s an excellent example of taking a good idea and making it better — they simply added more of everything, both inside and out.
Jetson Orin Nano 8GB Developer Kit (Left) vs the Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit from 2020 (Right)
The front of the Orin Nano Dev Kit features a DC barrel jack for power (19 V @ 2.4 A), four USB 3.2 Type-A ports, DisplayPort video, gigabit Ethernet, and a USB-C port that the documentation explains is for debug purposes only. The left side features two CSI camera connectors, and on the right, the same 40-pin expansion connector as seen on the previous Nano boards.
Of all these changes, I did find the switch to DisplayPort somewhat annoying. While DP is hardly a rare connector these days, there’s no competing with the ubiquity of HDMI. The return of the DC jack is also somewhat interesting, as its removal and replacement with a USB-C connector was one of the changes NVIDIA made between the original Jetson Nano and the cost-optimized $59 version. As the power requirements of the Orin Nano are
within the capability of USB-C Power Delivery
, I can only assume some user feedback must have triggered the change back to the more traditional connector.
Note the plastic frame — a welcome improvement over the traditional bare PCB.
Flipping the board over, we can see some more additions. Unlike its predecessors, the Orin Nano Dev Kit gets wireless capability in the form of a AzureWave AW-CB375NF WiFi/Bluetooth card plugged into the board’s M.2 2230 slot, complete with dual PCB antennas. There’s a second M.2 Key M slot for storage expansion, and a Key E slot that the documentation says breaks out PCIe, USB 2.0, UART, I2S, and I2C.
Ludicrous Speed
Plugs and ports are nice, but of course with something like this, the real question is how powerful it is. While the previous Jetson Nano brought a 128-core Maxwell GPU to the party, the new Orin Nano is packing NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture with 1,024 CUDA cores and 32 Tensor cores. That’s in addition to the 6-core ARM Cortex-A78AE CPU and 8 GB of LPDDR5 RAM that’s responsible for running the operating system itself.
The comparisons of the two boards provided by NVIDIA are hilariously one-sided, making it clear these two devices are in very different categories. Accordingly, the company doesn’t even bother to compare the Orin Nano with other SBCs on the market. Probably for good reason — as the previous Jetson Nano (rated at 472 GFLOPs) could already far exceed the raw computational power of the Pi 4 (estimated to be capable of 13.5 GFLOPS), it wouldn’t even be a blip on these charts.
But what do all these numbers mean in the real-world? As a simple test, I re-ran the same live object detection demo used as a benchmark during my hands-on with the 2020 Nano. While the previous board could handle a respectable 25 frames per second (FPS), it notably maxed out the available RAM in the process. In comparison, the Orin Nano screamed through the same demo at 180 FPS while consuming less than half of the available system memory.
Put simply, if you’re doing any kind of machine learning or artificial intelligence project, the move to the Orin Nano represents a generational leap over the previous hardware.
Software: Capable, but Heavy
While you’d be hard pressed to find much fault with the Orin Nano hardware, I did run into some pain points with the software side of things. Nothing that would dissuade me from recommending the product, but still things that I’d like to see improved in the future if possible.
Ultimately, my biggest gripe comes from NVIDIA’s decision to base their customized Linux build on Ubuntu. At the risk of starting a Holy War in the comments, Ubuntu strikes me as a far heavier operating system than you’d want on a SBC designed for peak performance. Indeed, the documentation for the older Nano recommended you kill Ubuntu’s GUI to try and free up RAM. The new Orin doesn’t have that particular problem, but I still didn’t like seeing the operating system
eating up precious space on the SD card with snap packages
.
As I said in my hands-on with the 2020 Nano, it would be nice if NVIDIA offered a more streamlined operating system for these boards, specifically one that’s better suited to headless operation. As it stands, the software setup is really geared towards the user having a monitor, mouse, and keyboard plugged into the Orin Nano — which obviously isn’t how its going to be operated in the field.
That said, I do appreciate having all of the libraries, tools, and demos required to use the board’s CUDA cores pre-installed and ready to go. Officially this suite is referred to as the JetPack SDK, and it provides everything you need to start writing your own accelerated AI applications. The best part is that the SDK is put together in such a way that code written on one Jetson board should run on all the others, just at different speeds depending on the hardware. So you could start your project on the Orin Nano Dev Kit, but then deploy it on one of the higher-end boards when it came time for production.
If You Need It, It’s Worth It
As I said in the beginning of this hands-on, not everyone is going to need this kind of power. To once again use the object detection demo as an example, your DIY project almost certainly doesn’t need to run at 150+ frames per second. Even with the RAM limitation, one of the older Jetson Nano boards would be more than suitable for
identifying squirrels in your backyard
.
A look at the official benchmarks provided by NVIDIA even show as much. Depending on the model, the previous Jetson Nano can still pull off more than 30 FPS. If one of those happens to be something you’re interested in playing with, you could save yourself some money by going with the older hardware.
But if you’re more serious with AI software and want a convenient research and experimentation platform that’s strong enough for more complex models, the Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit is very compelling. While an older gaming PC could potentially crunch more raw data, there’s no beating it in terms of size and energy efficiency, to say nothing of gaining access to NVIDIA’s official development environment — even if it is a bit heftier than I’d like. | 35 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620320",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T18:49:59",
"content": "Had to use a Jetson for a project in university. Can confirm that it runs dolphin emulator very well 🤣",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6690711",
... | 1,760,372,358.104675 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/wireless-charging-on-a-massive-scale/ | Wireless Charging On A Massive Scale | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"busses",
"charging",
"ev",
"ferries",
"high power",
"semiconductor",
"Vehicles",
"wireless"
] | Despite the increasing popularity of various electric vehicles, the limits of battery technology continue to be a bottleneck in their day-to-day use. They don’t behave well in extreme temperatures, they can wear out quickly, and, perhaps most obviously, charging them is often burdensome. Larger batteries take longer to charge, and this can take a lot of time and space, but this research team from Chalmers University
are looking to make this process just a little bit easier
.
The group has been developing an inductive wireless charging method for large vehicles including cars, trucks, busses, and ferries that can deliver 500 kW across a 15 cm (6 inch) air gap. The system relies on a silicon carbide semiconductor and extremely thin copper wire in order to make all this happen, and eliminates the need for any human involvement in the charging process. This might not be too much of a hassle for plugging in an electric car, but for larger vehicles like busses and ferries traditional charging methods often require a robot arm or human to attach the charging cables.
While this technology won’t decrease the amount of time it takes batteries to charge, it will improve the usability of devices like these. Even for cars, this could mean simply pulling into a parking space and getting the car’s battery topped off automatically. For all the talk about charging times of batteries, there is another problem looming which is that plenty of charging methods are proprietary as well.
This charger attempts to develop an open-source standard instead
.
Thanks to [Ben] for the tip! | 26 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620194",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T15:45:55",
"content": "Half a megawatt through the air? Yeah if you need me I’ll be standing wayyyy over here",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6620448",
"author": "Hiru... | 1,760,372,359.003368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/24/cnc-intaglio-esque-engraving/ | CNC Intaglio-Esque Engraving | Dave Rowntree | [
"Art"
] | [
"carving",
"CNC engraving",
"gem stones",
"hardness",
"intaglio",
"mohs scale"
] | Intaglio is an ancient carving technique for adding details to a workpiece, by manually removing material from a surface with only basic hand tools. If enough material depth is removed, the resulting piece can be used as a stamp, as was the case with rings, used to stamp the wax seals of verified letters. [Nicolas Tranchant] works in the jewelry industry, and wondered if he could
press a CNC engraving machine into service to engrave gemstones
in a more time-efficient manner than the manual carving methods of old.
Engraving and machining generally work only if the tool you are using is mechanically harder than the material the workpiece is made from. In this case, this property is measured on the
Mohs scale
, which is a qualitative measurement of the ability of one (harder) material to scratch another. Diamond is the hardest known material on the Mohs scale and has a Mohs hardness of 10, so it can produce a scratch on the surface of say, Corundum — Mohs value 9 — but not the other way around.
[Nicolas] shows the results of using a diamond tip equipped CNC engraver on various gemstones typical of Intaglio work, such as Black Onyx, Malachite, and Amethyst with some details of the number of engraving passes needed and visual comparison to the same material treated to traditional carving.
Let’s be clear here, the traditional intaglio process produces deep grooves on the surface of the workpiece and the results are different from this simple multi-pass engraving method — but limiting the CNC machine to purely metal engraving duties seemed a tad wasteful. Now if they can only get a suitable machine for deeper engraving, then custom digitally engraved intaglio style seal rings could be seeing a comeback!
Intaglio isn’t just about jewelry of course, the technique has been used in the typesetting industry for centuries. But to bring this back into ours, here’s a little something about
making a simple printing press
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621780",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2023-03-24T10:13:35",
"content": "What a cute cnc!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6622236",
"author": "Rumble_in_the_Jungle",
"timestamp": "2023-03-24T18:08:45",
... | 1,760,372,358.153081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/enormous-metal-sculpture-becomes-an-antenna/ | Enormous Metal Sculpture Becomes An Antenna | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur",
"art",
"club",
"FT8",
"ham",
"metal",
"radio",
"rit",
"rochester institute of technology",
"sculpture",
"statue",
"university"
] | Those who have worked with high voltage know well enough that anything can be a conductor at high enough voltages. Similarly, amateur radio operators will jump at any chance to turn a random object into an antenna. Flag poles, gutters, and even streams of water can be turned into radiating elements for a transmitter, but the members of this amateur radio club were thinking a little bit bigger when
they hooked up their transmitter to this giant sculpture
.
For those who haven’t been to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in upstate New York, the enormous metal behemoth is not a subtle piece of artwork and sits right at the entrance to the university. It’s over 70 feet tall and made out of bronze and steel, a dream for any amateur radio operator. With the university’s permission and some help to ensure everyone’s safety during the operation, the group attached a feedline to the sculpture with a magnet, while the shield wire was attached to a ground rod nearby. A Yaesu FT-991 running on only 5 watts and transmitting in the 20-meter band was able to make contacts throughout much of the eastern United States with this setup.
This project actually started as an in-joke within the radio club, as reported by Reddit user [bbbbbthatsfivebees] who is a member. Eventually the joke became reality, as the sculpture is almost a perfect antenna for certain ham bands. Others in the comments noted that they might have better luck with lower frequency bands such as the 40-meter band or possibly the 60-meter band, due to the height of the structure. And, for those who are still wondering if you really can use a stream of water to transmit radio waves,
it is indeed possible
. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621597",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2023-03-24T06:34:10",
"content": "If the sculpture is isolated from the ground, it’s close to the right height for a quarter wave antenna on the 80 meter band.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"c... | 1,760,372,358.661414 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/grow-your-own-brain-electrodes/ | Grow Your Own Brain Electrodes | Navarre Bartz | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"bci",
"bioelectrical",
"biology",
"brain",
"Brain controlled interface",
"brain hacks",
"brain implants",
"electrodes"
] | Bioelectronics has been making great strides in recent years, but interfacing rigid electrical components with biological systems that are anything but can prove tricky. Researchers at the Laboratory for Organic Electronics (LOE) have found a way to
bridge the gap with conductive gels
. (via
Linköping University
)
Outside the body, these gels are non-conductive, but when injected into a living animal, the combination of gel and the body’s metabolites creates a conductive electrode that can move with the tissue. This is accompanied by a nifty change in color which makes it easy for researchers to see if the electrode has formed properly.
Applications for the technology include better biological sensors and enhanced capabilities for future brain-controlled interfaces. The study was done on zebrafish and medicinal leeches, so it will be awhile before you can pick up a syringe of this stuff at your local computer store, but it still offers a tantalizing glimpse of the future.
We’ve covered a few different brain electrodes here before including
MIT’s 3D printed version
and
stentrodes
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,358.495479 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/ondol-korean-underfloor-heating/ | Ondol: Korean Underfloor Heating | Dave Rowntree | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"heating",
"hypocaust",
"ondol",
"underfloor"
] | One of the many aspects of the modern world we often take for granted is the very technology that keeps our accommodation at a habitable temperature. Examples of this include centralized heating systems using hot-water circulation, or blown air ducted to multiple rooms from a central furnace. Certainly in Europe, once the Romans shipped out, and before the industrial revolution, we were pretty cold unless someone lit a fire in the room. Every room. But not in Korea. The
Ondol heating principles
have been used constantly from about 5000 BC to only a few decades ago, keeping your average Korean countryman nice and toasty.
Having said that, the sophistication has improved a bit. Initially, the idea was to simply heat up a bunch of rocks in the fire, and bring them indoors, but
Ondol quickly became part of the building itself
. As will be seen from the video embedded below, the house sits on top of an elaborate double stack of serpentine channels, that circulate the hot combustion products from the furnace as thoroughly as possible, slowing down the gases and allowing their heat to transfer into the structure of the floor, and then radiate into the space above. It does bear more than a passing resemblance to the
Roman hypocaust system
, ruined examples of which can be found all over the UK and Europe. The skill demonstrated in the video is considerable, but must surely be an expensive build reserved for the most culturally aware Koreans who wish to live in simpler (and less hectic) locations in their country.
Maybe for the vast majority of us, this kind of thing is not viable, and we’re more likely to benefit from a
more centralized approach
, perhaps using waste heat from data centers or geothermal activity. (See:
Iceland
)
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 49 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621308",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T23:36:01",
"content": "The trick is to get the airflow even. One modern method uses a small number of cast block types that work together in a 3D Truchet tile like method to allow you to build an airflow tree, actually is is more... | 1,760,372,358.756038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/isa-over-tpm-to-your-pc/ | ISA Over TPM To Your PC | Navarre Bartz | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"doom",
"isa",
"ISA cards",
"SoundBlaster"
] | Sometimes you really want to use your legacy SoundBlaster instead of emulating it for classic games. While modern PCs don’t have ISA slots, [TheRasteri] is fixing this shortcoming with his
dISAppointment board
. (via
Adafruit
)
ISA
was the standard card bus for PCs during the golden age of DOS gaming, and many of these games will still run on modern x86 hardware. Unfortunately, they run into hiccups with regards to sound since they were designed to specifically support ISA-based sound cards. [TheRasteri] found he could access the ISA bus lurking in modern computers through the
Low Pin Count (LPC) bus
which is exposed on the
TPM port
in many modern motherboards.
Testing the card with DOOM, he gets music and sound effects with no emulation required. Open Source files and a more detailed video are on the way, so stay tuned if you’re hankering for more ISA goodness on your modern rigs.
We’re no strangers to ISA here. We’ve covered the
basics of the ISA bus
as well as
plugging ISA cards into USB
and how you can
emulate vintage ISA cards
with a Raspberry Pi and FPGA. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621228",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T20:33:10",
"content": "So you can attach a 5½” floppy drive to your TPM socket?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6621371",
"author": "CH",
"timestamp": "2023-... | 1,760,372,358.941501 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/a-little-chess-with-your-timepiece/ | A Little Chess With Your Timepiece | Navarre Bartz | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"chess",
"machining",
"micromachining",
"watch",
"wrist watch"
] | Some things remain classics, even after centuries, and chess and watches have certainly stood the test of time. [W&M Levsha] decided to
combine them both in this “Chess Club” watch
containing a miniature chess game frozen in time.
[W&M Levsha] used an off-the-shelf wristwatch for the mechanism and case, but rearranged the parts and built a custom watchface that’s much nicer than the original. The new watchface was cut and etched on a fiber laser after disassembly of the original watch.
The real magic happens when [W&M Levsha] turns those teeny little chess pieces on the lathe. The knight was a two piece affair with the horse head being laser cut out of brass sheet and then soldered onto a turned base. As you can see from the video embedded below, all of the chess pieces inside the watch could fit on the maker’s fingernail! It’s probably a good thing that this tiny set isn’t playable since trying to play on a board that size would be an exercise in patience.
We’ve seen
machined chess sets
here before at a larger scale, but if you’re more into 3D printing, how about
teaching your printer to play
? | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621199",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T19:05:01",
"content": "Looks awesome but I was sorta hoping it was going to be some kind of automata build where an ESP or something (this is still HaD right?) moving those little pieces around.",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,372,358.872994 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/23/pcie-for-hackers-link-anatomy/ | PCIe For Hackers: Link Anatomy | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"Slider"
] | [
"pci express",
"PCI-E",
"PCIe"
] | Last time,
we looked over diffpairs, their basics, routing rules and the notorious tolerances of PCIe when it comes to diffpairs. Now, let’s take a look at the exact signals that make PCIe tick, as well as give you an overview of which sockets you can get PCIe on.
I separate PCIe sockets into two categories – desktop sockets, which are the usual 1x, 16x, or perhaps x4 PCIe sockets we see on desktop motherboards — and mobile sockets: mPCIe and M.2. There are also sockets like ExpressCard that are still found on some older laptops, but they have definitely fallen out of relevance. On mobile, M.2 is the way forward when it comes to PCIe – if you’re interested, I’ve written
a short series
talking about everything M.2 before.
On these sockets, most signals will be optional and some signals will be socket-specific, but there are some signals required in any PCIe device. Of course, the first group of required signals is the PCIe diffpairs themselves.
PCIe Is Just Spicy UART
Any PCIe interface has two kinds of diffpairs – TX and RX; for an x1 link, you will have one TX diffpair and one RX diffpair, and a x16 link needs sixteen of each. As you might expect, RX on one end connects to TX on another end, and vice-versa – it’s just like UART, but spicy. Of course, if you’re doing a PCIe extender or socket-to-socket adapter of some kind, you don’t need to do any swapping. If you’re designing a board for one of the PCIe-carrying extension standards, the usual naming is host-side. For example, say you’re putting a PCIe Ethernet controller IC onto a PCB that plugs into a desktop PCIe socket – connect TX and RX of the PCIe socket board to to your Ethernet chip’s RX and TX respectively.
Swapping TX and RX will not work – I’ve learned the hard way
If there’s strong indication that this convention has been violated, don’t fret – make sure to compare to an existing host or device, and see if you are able to determine whether the naming is as-expected or indeed, unexpectedly, flipped. Again, it’s just like UART! That said, there’s also AC coupling capacitors placed in series on both the TX and RX lines. Specifically in case of PCIe extension cards, be it M.2 or desktop PCIe,
the convention
is placing them on device-TX (host-RX) lines on the device board, and on the host-TX side (device-RX) on the host board. This alone is a pleasant divergence from UART when it comes to design and reverse-engineering.
The third kind of diffpair, one that’s invariably present, is REFCLK – a 100 MHz clock diffpair. It’s a speedy clock, and I’m not sure about its full purpose, but apparently, it plays a part in decoding the data on TX and RX, specifically, clock recovery – staying vital despite being orders of magnitudes slower than the GBit-range bandwidth of PCIe TX and RX pairs. Unlike with RX and TX, you cannot swap the REFCLK polarity willy-nilly. On the other hand, it won’t hurt
as
much
if you have REFCLK pass through a set of vias or two in case you need to flip it – it’s just 100 MHz. Remember to respect your diffpairs, and you’ll be good.
REFCLK is required – except, theoretically, there’s
cases where you can omit it,
requiring both ends of the PCIe link to support recovering this clock from data passed through RX and TX pairs, or generate their own REFCLK. It sounds quite realistic, yet, REFCLK-less PCIe implementations aren’t really out there. Even
SD-Express,
a recent standard that brings PCIe to SD cards for blazing fast access speeds, didn’t go this route – the only consumer-available REFCLK-less implementation out in the wild is
SATA-Express,
a standard that became obsoleted by M.2 almost as soon as motherboards with SATA-Express ports hit the store shelves. As it stands, if you want your PCIe link to work, you absolutely need REFCLK.
The “Connector” line represents a PCIe-carrying connector – if you have one in your design
And now bit more about the capacitors. You need them on both TX and RX for the link to work, with
ranges from 75 nF to 265 nF
depending on PCIe link generation: 200 nF is a good all-around value and 100 nF
will work in a pinch.
Other than that, go for 0402 or 0201 package, and that’s basically it. REFCLK doesn’t typically need the capacitors, but they shouldn’t hurt either, and
certain devices might require them.
Also, here’s something puzzling – there’s been at least one documented case of a cheap mass-manufactured WD SSD seemingly
omitting its TX-side capacitors,
failing to initialize with a custom PCIe host board up until extra capacitors were added on the mainboard side. It’s not something you should do by default – merely a peculiarity that one manufacturer had the gall to create.
The Few Signals Necessary
Then, there’s a trio of single-ended control signals – CLKREQ, PEWAKE, and PERST. CLKREQ is used for power saving – the device usually sets CLKREQ low to start receiving REFCLK, and is able to de-assert CLKREQ (set it high) to signal the host that the host can stop providing REFCLK, saving power. The CLKREQ signal is peculiar – it’s present on mobile devices, but isn’t used on desktops, to the point where
desktop PCIe slots didn’t even initially have a dedicated pin for it.
As a result, the USB3-cable-perusing miner “GPU riser” boards do not pass CLKREQ through – only PEWAKE and PERST. If your host has a CLKREQ pin but the device doesn’t, ground it; if your device has a CLKREQ pin but the host doesn’t, ignore it, otherwise, connect them together.
Laptop and desktop mainboard schematics make for great PCIe schematic references. However, that could be a copyright violation in some cases, and I would never ever suggest that!
Well, if the corner-cutting miners bother to pass PEWAKE and PERST signals through, then they must be important, right? Let’s see. PERST is the reset pin for the PCIe link, and the host holds it low until all the clocks (including REFCLK) and power rails are stable and other requirements are met for the host to start talking PCIe; it’s also used for some low-power mode management. PEWAKE is used for power management just like CLKREQ, and does seem to be required as well – this is also a device-side-controlled signal. These two signals are a bit mysterious to me when it comes to ways you can omit them, so I recommend having both of them connected unless they’re outright unavailable on one of the ends.
Desktop slots also have PRSNT signals – depending on the link width, you have to short PRSNT#1 to one of the PRSNT#2 signals. Not that this is required – PCIe is more than capable of detecting link width correctly; however, desktop motherboards do often need this in practice. It seems to be used for hotplug – something that PCIe is technically capable of, and which will even work if you use a system like Linux;
Windows might just refuse to process PCIe hotplug
unless you dance around your PC chanting magic words.
There’s I2C signals on both desktop PCIe slots and mobile slots like mPCIe or M.2. However, those signals are rarely ever connected on the mainboard – when they are, it seems to be either the mainboard manufacturer’s whim, or provisions for features like VPro. On server boards, they’re connected, causing fun things like some server-originated SAS controllers not operating on certain desktop boards with I2C wired up to the desktop-size slots. If you are wiring up a host-side PCIe slot, you don’t really need to wire I2C up, and if you’re wiring up a device, don’t expect I2C to reliably be there. Same goes for JTAG signals – they’re used in debugging or server environments, and are best left unconnected unless you’re certain your implementation benefits from them in the place where you’ll use it.
Mobile PCIe devices usually operate on 3.3 V power, whereas desktop devices can run from either 3.3 V or 12 V, for less or more powerful devices respectively. As a result, if you’re adding a desktop-sized PCIe socket and you don’t have 12 V handy, some desktop cards might randomly not work. x1 slots are expected to provide less power on 12 V than larger slots, and desktop motherboard manufacturers often take advantage of this leeway – if you’re designing an x1 card, don’t expect it to provide the full 75 W (66 W at 12 V), and if you’re designing a motherboard with an x1 slot, the good news is that you don’t need to provide the full 75 W.
All The Different Link Widths
Both the host side and the device side can have different link widths – the choices are x1, x2, x4, x8 and x16, where the number indicates the amount of pairs being used; due to the way that a PCIe links function at the low level, these have to be powers of two. As such, don’t expect a x3 link to work if you somehow connect three lanes from a host to a device – it will downgrade to x2. PCIe is flexible with regard to link widths – the host and the device settle on the highest common denominator. No matter if your host has a x4 link and your device is x16, or your host is x16 and your device is x4, they will settle on a x4 link width, using four pairs, not bothered that one of the ends has twelve more to spare. There are very rare exceptions to this – namely, some server-purpose cards; that said, even those are cases of “x8 card won’t function with a x4 connection” and a 1x link will still work as a fallback.
This slot is manufactured open-ended, so you can expect it to support the power budget for 16x cards. By Hans Haase,
CC BY SA 4.0
This adds quite a bit of flexibility – if either side doesn’t have enough lanes to match the other, you can always expect at least an x1 link to work nevertheless. For instance, you can put a x16 GPU into a desktop x1 slot
by cutting a notch in the slot,
and perhaps shorting the PRSNT pins on the slot – though, make sure that your card doesn’t want more slot-provided power than your 1x slot is willing to provide, which might very well be the case if you’re plugging an extra GPU into a cut-up 1x slot directly! When it comes to desktop PCIe slots and cards, you will see x1, x4, and x16 physical slot widths, and x8 slots and cards being mostly a server occurrence. There are some low-end GPUs that are actually x8 cards, but they use x16 physical slot card edge width, and same goes for x2 cards – they use x4 slot card edge width. You will rarely, if ever, see physical x2 and x8 cards or slots.
When doing a multi-lane link, you must make sure that you’re connecting lane 0 with 0, 1 with 1 and so on. There’s apparently an ability to reverse the entire link in case that can help you with your layout – say, in case of an x4 link, you could connect lane 0 to 3, 1 to 2, and so on. However, it’s not clear how widely that’s supported – it seems to be optional and not automagic.
And It Will Work No Matter What
Just like Ethernet, PCIe link speeds have been increasing with each generation, through gradual data rate increases, encoding type and other incremental improvements. Same story as with the link widths – there’s great forwards and backwards compatibility, a Gen1 device will work in a Gen5 slot, and a Gen5 device will work in a Gen1 slot, again, picking the highest common denominator. Of course, the link might end up being throttled from the expectation – if you plug a Gen3 x1 USB3 controller card into the Gen1 PCIe x1 slot on an old motherboard, expect the USB3 port throughput to be limited (and of course, same goes for connecting GPUs through a x1 link). However, this does mean that typically, you don’t need to worry about PCIe generations unless you’re aiming for a certain speed target.
Thankfully, if you have any PCIe questions that go seriously in-depth, there’s a lot of information online, and specifications for even the last-gen PCIe 5.0 are quite easy to find. It can be a bit dense compared to what you’re reading right now, but when you go in deep, it will help. Next time, let’s complete your mental map of PCIe, so that whenever you set out to stretch the limits of PCIe, you know how to approach it! | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6621171",
"author": "Sailingfree",
"timestamp": "2023-03-23T18:03:14",
"content": "Thanks for this series, despite having used PCIe cards and servers in products we developed over many years, PCIe was still a bit of a secret world. One thing, in practice backwards compatibility is n... | 1,760,372,358.826434 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/vinyl-sales-ran-circles-around-cds-in-2022/ | Vinyl Sales Ran Circles Around CDs In 2022 | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Musical Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"CdS",
"compact discs",
"record sales",
"records",
"tangibility",
"vinyl",
"vinyl records"
] | How do you take your music these days? For those in Camp Tangible, it seems our ranks are certainly growing, and in the analog direction.
For the first time since 1987, vinyl record sales have outperformed CD sales in the US
, according to a new report. The CD, which saved us all from the cassette, was a digital revolution in music. But for some, the love was lost somewhere among the ones and zeroes.
Those who prefer pure analog troughs of sound cut into wax have never given up on vinyl, and the real ones probably gobbled up a bunch of it in the 90s when everybody was CD-crazy. But mind you these aren’t used vinyl sales we’re talking about, which means that enough new vinyl has to have been readily available for purchase for quite some time now. Although it doesn’t really seem like that long, new vinyl’s been back for almost 20 years — and according to the report, 2022 was the 16th consecutive year of growth for record sales.
So Why Vinyl?
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but there was a time in my 1980s childhood when vinyl was all this scribe had to listen to. I have historically been a bit slow to adopt new music formats — I didn’t have a CD player until 1998, and it was given to me for my birthday. I was excited to get the thing, mind you, especially since it had 10 seconds of anti-skip protection (which of course was a huge concern with portable CD players).
But CDs are way different from records. Sure, they’re both round, but the similarities sort of end there. For one thing, the artwork is disappointingly small compared to vinyl. And the whole
gatefold album cover
thing isn’t really possible with a CD, unless you forego the jewel case and release it in a chintzy little cardboard jacket. But then people will have this one disc that’s four times thinner than the rest and it throws everything off in the collection.
Your average Roger Dean album cover right here. Imagine holding this two-foot-wide beauty in your hands while getting your prog on. Image via
Glide Magazine
So why vinyl? For me and many others, it’s part process and part restriction. In order to listen to vinyl, you gotta work for it. You gotta start by running your thumb nail down the crack to open the plastic while leaving it intact so it can protect the jacket. Then you have to remove the sleeve from the jacket and slip the disc out while touching only the edge and/or the label, unless you’re the type to just pinch the spine and shake it out with the flick of the wrist. For the more serious collector, you can add a step by storing everything in clear plastic sleeves, although this makes the spines harder to read — which leads to investing in crates or record store-style flipping bins. It can be a whole thing. That’s kind of the point.
If you still don’t understand why someone would want to open up a record instead of a Spotify playlist: what if every book on your shelf was the same size, shape, and color? Sure, they’re all different on the inside, but wouldn’t that be boring, and worst of all, kind of frustrating when you wanted to find the right one?
The restriction of course comes in the fact that if you do nothing, you’re going to listen to a whole side of a record. But then you get to do more work — move the tone arm out of the lead-out groove, flip the record, and drop the needle once again. Why would a person prefer all of this pomp and circumstance? Well, it just makes us feel more connected to the music, man. | 108 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620125",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T14:16:26",
"content": "I don’t buy vinyl because PVC is an awful material.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6620170",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,359.714198 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/new-part-day-ti-jumps-in-to-the-cheap-mcu-market/ | New Part Day: TI Jumps In To The Cheap MCU Market | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"arm cortex m0",
"microcontroller",
"MSPM0",
"ti"
] | One of the interesting areas in the world of new parts recently has been at the lower end of the microcontroller market. Not because the devices there have new capabilities or are especially fast, but because they are cheap. There are now quite a few parts from China under 10 cents apiece, but have the Western manufacturers been able to follow suit? Not quite, but Texas Instruments has
a new line of ARM Cortex M0+ parts
that get under 40 cents in volume in their cheapest form.
That bottom-of-the-range chip is the
MSPM0L1105
, a single-core 32 MHz part with 32k of Flash and 4k of RAM. It’s got all the usual peripherals you’d expect on a small microcontroller, but the one which made our heads turn was the on-board 1.45-Msps ADC. On a cheap chip, that’s much faster than expected.
So there’s another microcontroller, and it’s not as cheap as some of its competition, so what? Aside from that ADC there are several reasons to be interested, it has TI’s developer support if you’re in that ecosystem, and inevitably it will find its way on to the dev boards and SBCs we use in our community. It remains to be seen how it will fare in terms of the chip shortage though.
Meanwhile,
here’s a reminder of that cheaper competition
.
Thanks to the several friends who delivered this tip. | 75 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6620014",
"author": "Marcus",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T11:23:58",
"content": "Honest question for the author/editor, not an attack:Hackaday isn’t really targetting mass-producing vendors, is it? So, the 1k-unit price of an MCU is much less relevant than the single-unit price to most... | 1,760,372,359.167066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/21/building-the-worlds-largest-nintendo-3ds/ | Building The World’s Largest Nintendo 3DS | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"3d",
"3ds",
"citra",
"emulator",
"large",
"nintendo",
"touchscreen"
] | While the Nintendo 3DS was capable of fairly impressive graphics (at least for a portable system) back in its heyday, there’s little challenge in emulating the now discontinued handheld on a modern computer or even smartphone. One thing that’s still difficult to replicate though is the stereoscopic 3D display the system was named for. But this didn’t stop [BigRig Creates] from creating
this giant 3DS with almost all of the features of an original console present.
The main hurdle here is that the stereoscopic effect that Nintendo used to allow the 3DS to display 3D graphics without special glasses doesn’t work well at long distances, and doesn’t work at all if there is more than one player. To get around those limitations, this build uses a 3D TV with active glasses. This TV is mounted to a bar stool with the help of some counterweights, and a second touch-sensitive screen courtesy of McDonalds makes up the other display.
The computer driving this massive handheld console runs Citra, and also handles the scaled-up controls as well. To recreate the system’s analog touch pad, a custom joystick tipped with conductive filament is used to interact with a smartphone hidden inside the case. Opposing rubber bands are used to pull the stick back into the center when it’s not being pushed.
Plenty of 3DS games are faithfully replicated with this arcade-sized replica, and as Citra supports various 3D displays, upscaling of the graphics, and the touchscreen interface, almost everything from the original console is produced here. There are a few games that don’t work exactly right, but all in all it’s a remarkable build and, as far as we can tell, the largest 3DS in the world. Don’t forget that even though this console is out of production now,
there’s still a healthy homebrew scene to take part in
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619972",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T10:21:32",
"content": "damn he really just went and made thehuge Nintendo DSreal",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6620446",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,359.044462 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/live2d-silently-subverting-threat-models/ | Live2D: Silently Subverting Threat Models | Arya Voronova | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"live2d",
"vtuber",
"youtube"
] | In online spaces, VTubers have been steadily growing in popularity in the past few years – they are entertainers using motion capture tech to animate a special-sauce 2D or 3D model, typically livestreaming it as their avatar to an audience. The tech in question is pretty fun, lively communities tend to form around the entertainers and artists involved, and there’s loads of room for creativity in the VTuber format; as for viewers, there’s a VTuber for anyone’s taste out there – what’s not to like? On the tech side of making everything work, most creators in the VTubing space currently go with a software suite from a company called Live2D – which is where
today’s investigation
comes in.
[undeleted] from [Ronsor labs] has dug into reverse-engineering the Live2D core libraries – a tasty target, given that Live2D is
known for sending legal threats
to even
the mildest forays
into the inner workings of their software. Typically, such behaviour means that a company has something to hide, and indeed, a peculiar aspect was found immediately – turns out, it’s exceptionally trivial to craft a 3D model file which allows arbitrary code execution. There’s a complete lack of boundary checks of any kind when importing a model, making the import code alone vulnerable to an obscene degree; a ready-to-run proof of concept
.moc3
file is provided in a repository, limited to merely crashing the Live2D viewer and any of its integrations.
Now, VTubers typically have to put effort into keeping their anonymity, for either safety or parasocial management reasons, and with community-related nuances, the threat model can get pretty involved. Ironically, with the way Live2D software is designed, it’s easy for a maliciously-inclined individual to negate all this privacy-keeping effort through a 2D model, something that is a requirement for most VTubers. Hopefully, this has people look towards free and open alternatives like
Inochi2D,
already in use by creators like that
one VTuber hard at work
porting Linux to Apple M1/M2 hardware. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619834",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T05:47:33",
"content": "+1 for Inochi2D. Truly astounding work that needs more support.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6620089",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2023-03... | 1,760,372,359.214302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/cold-war-listening-post-antennas/ | Cold War Listening Post Antennas | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"cold war"
] | With a UHF antenna, it is easy to rotate a directional antenna to find the bearing to a transmitter. But at HF, it is more common to use an array of antennas that you can electrically switch as well as analyze the phase information between the elements. [Ringway Manchester] has a look at the “
elephant cage
” antenna used by the US Iron Horse listening network from the 1950s. You can see a video about the giant antenna system, the AN/FLR-9.
Technically, the ring of concentric antenna elements forms a Wullenweber antenna. The whole thing consists of three rings built on a ground screen nearly 1,500 feet across. The outer ring covers from 1.5 to 6 MHz or band A. The band B ring in the center covers 6 to 18 MHz. The inner ring covers band C which was from 18 to 30 MHz. Band A was made up of 48 monopoles while band B used 96 elements. The much smaller band C elements were 48 pairs of horizontally polarized dipoles.
These listening posts could, together, locate an HF signal up to 4,000 nautical miles away. The Wullenweber design, as you may have guessed from the name, originated with the German navy during World War II. It found use in several other systems, although they are relatively rare today, with all of the AN/FLR-9 sites gone.
Cold war hardware
is always interesting even if sometimes terrifying. If you think a giant shortwave direction finder is high-tech, you should check out how the Russians
bugged IBM Selectric typewriters
for a long time undetected. | 32 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619737",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T02:58:14",
"content": "Not sure if I missed something but:1.5 to 6 MHz is band A.6 to 18 MHz is band B.18 to 10 MHz is band C.The way it’s written, it seems like band B and C overlaps by a lot?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,359.286579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/modifying-artwork-with-glaze-to-interfere-with-art-generating-algorithms/ | Modifying Artwork With Glaze To Interfere With Art Generating Algorithms | Maya Posch | [
"Art",
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"algorithmic art",
"glaze"
] | With the rise of machine-generated art we have also seen a major discussion begin about the ethics of using existing, human-made art to train these art models. Their defenders will often claim that the original art cannot be reproduced by the generator, but this is belied by the fact that one possible query to these generators is to produce art in the style of a specific artist. This is where feature extraction comes into play, and the
Glaze tool
as a potential obfuscation tool.
Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago, the theory behind this tool is covered in their
preprint paper
. The essential concept is that an artist can pick a target ‘cloak style’, which is used by Glaze to calculate specific perturbations which are added to the original image. These perturbations are not easily detected by the human eye, but will be picked up by the feature extraction algorithms of current machine-generated art models.
As a result, when this model is then asked to generate art in the style of this artist who cloaked their art, the result will be art in the style of the cloak, not that of the artist. The tool is
available for download
as a Beta release for MacOS and Windows (10+). The
FAQ
does not detail the possibility of a Linux version, but does helpfully point out the answer to questions such as whether the cloaking is easy to defeat using filters or screenshots (in short: no).
Regardless of what your views are on whether the content in training data sets require consent from the original creator, it’s hard to argue with the rights of artists to protect their style using such cloaks when posting content online.
(Thanks to [Tina Belmont] for the tip) | 48 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619596",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T23:49:25",
"content": "Don’t they use real art to train human artists?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6619674",
"author": "Obvious SAR chasm",
"timest... | 1,760,372,359.382231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/working-artificial-horizon-built-into-a-single-lego-brick/ | Working Artificial Horizon Built Into A Single LEGO Brick | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"artificial horizon",
"lego",
"rp2040"
] | Back in the day, LEGO spaceship sets used to come with these little wedge blocks painted with fake gauges on them. [James “Ancient” Brown] decided that wasn’t good enough. Thus, he took everything he needed for a functional artificial horizon, and stuffed it inside a single LEGO brick.
Yes, it’s real, and it’s spectacular.
We featured [James’] electronics-infused bricks some time ago
when they first hit the Internet.
The basic story is that he managed to cram an OLED screen and an RP2040 into a silicone mold for a LEGO-compatible brick. His first iterations stunned the world, as they ran pretty monochrome animations that brought life to formerly-inanimate chunk of plastic.
Since then, [James] has been busy. He’s managed to squeeze an accelerometer into the brick form factor as well. That allowed him to build a LEGO piece which displays an impressively-smooth artificial horizon display, as you might find in an aircraft. He demonstrates this by putting the instrument on a LEGO craft and zooming it around the room. All the while, the artificial horizon accurately tracks the motions of the craft.
It’s an impressive build, and something we’d love to see included in future LEGO vehicles…
even if they’re just 3D renders
. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619524",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T21:58:21",
"content": "“The artificial horizon is even better than the actual horizon.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6619559",
"author": "ono",
"timest... | 1,760,372,360.010486 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/dreamcast-linux-looking-back-at-linux-on-a-superh-based-gaming-console/ | Dreamcast Linux: Looking Back At Linux On A SuperH-based Gaming Console | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"dreamcast",
"linux",
"SuperH"
] | The Dreamcast is probably best known as the swansong of Sega’s ambitions as a gaming console manufacturer, but perhaps lesser known is the fact that you can run Linux on it. In
a deep-dive
by [Cameron Kaiser] over at the Old VCR blog, it is demonstrated what it takes to make this feat even work in 2023, and what one can expect from a system with a 200 MHz HItachi SuperH SH-4 CPU, 16 MB of RAM and the luxuries of VGA and network interfaces.
What’s interesting about Dreamcast Linux is that it was among the first times that Linux got put on a gaming console, even if it wasn’t entirely official or remotely supported by Sega. In fact, the fact that it works at all has its roots firmly in an exploit that was discovered shortly after the Dreamcast’s release. While Dreamcast discs are generally in a format called GD-ROM (Gigabyte Disc), early on it also supported the MIL-CD standard, which was Sega’s ill-fated attempt at creating multimedia CDs with MIL-CDs.
Not only did MIL-CDs flop in the market, the support form in Dreamcast units also provided a juicy exploit via the firmware that handles detecting and switching between GD-ROM and the much more constrained, audio-only MIL-CD mode. Later Dreamcast models dropped MIL-CD support and will thus also not boot Dreamcast Linux, which is an important gotcha to keep in mind when dragging out a Dreamcast for some Linux action.
As for running Linux on a Dreamcast, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from running it on such a constrained, RAM-disk only device. While [Cameron] was able to use workarounds such as swap-over-NFS to increase functionality, a lot more work remains to be done. Linux SuperH support seems to have petered out around the 2.6.x era, which would seem to have cemented the fate of Dreamcast Linux and similar SuperH platforms.
We’re curious, would
double the RAM
make a difference to this Linux platform? | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619437",
"author": "abzman2000",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T20:13:00",
"content": "It’s got an IDE bus, give it a hard drive (there eas a zip drive for it)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6619665",
"author": "Josiah Gou... | 1,760,372,359.861758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/another-room-temperature-superconductivity-claim-and-questions-of-scientific-integrity/ | Another Room-Temperature Superconductivity Claim And Questions Of Scientific Integrity | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"cold fusion",
"measurement",
"science",
"skepticism",
"superconductivity"
] | In early March of 2023, a paper was
published
in
Nature
, with the researchers claiming that they had observed superconductivity at room temperature in a conductive alloy, at near-ambient pressure. While normally this would be cause for excitement, what mars this occasion is that this is not the first time that such claims have been made by these same researchers. Last year their
previous paper
in
Nature
on the topic was
retracted
after
numerous issues
were raised by other researchers regarding their data and the interpretation of this that led them to conclude that they had observed superconductivity.
According to an
interview
with one of the lead authors at the University of Rochester – Ranga Dias – the retracted paper has since been revised to incorporate the received feedback, with the research team purportedly having invited colleagues to vet their data and experimental setup. Of note, the newly released paper reports improvements over the previous results by requiring even lower pressures.
Depending on one’s perspective, this may either seem incredibly suspicious, or merely a sign that the scientific peer review system is working as it should. For the lay person this does however make it rather hard to answer the simple question of whether room-temperature superconductors are right around the corner. What does this effectively mean?
Cold Fusion
What room-temperature super conducting materials and
cold fusion
have in common is that both promise a transformative technology which would alter the very fabric of society. From near-infinite, cheap energy, to zero loss transmission lines and plummeting costs of MRI scanners and every other device that relies on superconducting technology to work, either technology by itself would cause a revolution. At the same time, as with any such revolutionary new technology, it would also stand to make a select number of people very wealthy.
At this point in time, the term ‘cold fusion’ has become synonymous with ‘snake oil’, with researchers finding themselves unable to replicate the results of the original 1989 experiment by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. This experiment involved infusing a palladium electrode with deuterons (nucleus of
deuterium
), from surrounding heavy water (D
2
O), before running a current through the electrodes.
After the media backlash from the failure to replicate these results poisoned the very subject of ‘cold fusion’, its researchers have since maintained a low profile, calling the research area that of ‘low energy nuclear reactions’ (LENR) and generally shied away from the public eye. What is tragic about LENR is that at its core it’s essentially
lattice confinement fusion
(LCF), which NASA researchers at Glenn Research Center recently
demonstrated
in a study using erbium to provide the metal lattice.
Illustration of the main elements of the lattice confinement fusion process observed. (Credit:
NASA
)
The NASA LCF experimental setup involves a similar loading of the metal with deuterons as in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. The advantage of LCF over plasma-based fusion approaches as performed in tokamaks is that inside the host metal lattice the distance between the deuteron nuclei is less than that of D-T fuel nuclei in deuterium/tritium fuel plasma, making theoretically overcoming the Coulomb barrier and initiating fusion easier while not requiring high pressures or temperatures.
To initiate D-D fusion, the NASA researchers used 2.9+ MeV gamma beams to irradiate the deuterons, with the researchers confirming that fusion had in fact taken place. This fusion trigger is where the biggest difference between the Fleischmann-Pons and NASA experiment would appear to be, with the former using purportedly the electric current to initiate fusion. As with all experimental setups, contamination and environmental factors that were not accounted for may have confounded the original researchers.
In the world of scientific inquiry, this is an important aspect to keep in mind, a point further illustrated by the wild ride that was the hype around the
EmDrive
. This was supposed to be a fuel-less, microwave-based thruster that was supposed to work by physics-defying means. Ultimately the measured thrust from the original experiment was refuted when all environmental influences were accounted for, resigning the concept to the dustbin of history.
An important aspect to consider here is that of intent. Many major discoveries in science began with someone looking at some data, or even a dirty Petri dish and thinking to themselves something along the lines of “Wait, that’s funny…”. No one should feel constrained to throw wild ideas out there, just because they may turn out to be misinterpreted data, or a faulty sensor.
Superconductivity
Although superconducting materials have been in use for decades, the main issue with them is that they tend to require very low temperatures in order to remain in their superconducting state. So-called ‘
high-temperature
‘ superconducting materials are notable for requiring temperatures that are comfortably away from absolute zero. The record holder here at atmospheric pressures is the
cuprate superconductor
mercury barium calcium (HGBC-CO), with a temperature requirement of only 133 K, or -140 °C.
While we don’t understand yet how superconductivity works, we have observed that increasing pressure can drastically increase the required temperature, bringing it closer to room temperature. This discovery came along with the increased focus on hydrides, following the 1935 prediction of a ‘
metallic phase
‘ of hydrogen by
Eugene Wigner
and
Hillard Bell Huntington
. When combined with a material such as sulfur, the required pressure of 400 GPa (~3.9 million atmosphere) to create metallic hydrogen is reduced significantly. Even more tantalizing is that metallic hydrogen is theorized to be an excellent superconductor.
Metallic hydrogen was first experimentally produced in 1996 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using shockwave compression. The first claims of solid metallic hydrogen being produced came shortly after this, with many researchers having claimed to produce metallic hydrogen, though with some of the results being disputed. In 2017, rather than using the traditional diamond anvil cell (DAC) to put pressure on hydrogen,
researchers used the Sandia Z Machine’s
extremely strong magnetic fields to produce metallic hydrogen.
Controversy
Ranga Dias and colleagues have also published a number of papers on metallic hydrogen, including the production of it in a DAC at 495 GPa, a claim which was met with skepticism. This comes alongside the research in hydride alloys, with carbonaceous sulfur hydride (
CSH
) being the subject of the retracted 2020 paper. This material, when put under 267 GPa of pressure in a DAC, purportedly was superconducting at a balmy 15 °C, which would put it firmly in the realm of room-temperature superconducting materials as long as the pressure could be maintained.
Key to the claim of superconductivity lies in measuring this condition. With the speck of material trapped inside the DAC, this is not as simple as hooking up some wires and running a current through the material, and even this would not be sufficient as evidence. Instead the gold standard of measuring superconductivity is the ability to expel an applied magnetic field when the material enters the superconductive phase, yet this too is hard to accomplish with the material under test being inside the DAC.
Thus this property is inferred via the magnetic susceptibility, which requires that the magnetic noise from the environment is subtracted from the weak signal one is trying to measure. The effect is, as
James Hamlin puts it
, like trying to see a star when the sun is drowning out your sensors. One factor that led to the original Dias paper being retracted was due to the lack of raw data being supplied with the article. This made it impossible for colleagues to check their methodology and verify their results, and ultimately led to the do-over and this year’s paper.
Face Value
The lutetium nitrogen hydrogen material that superconducts at high pressures. At high pressures the blue material turns ruby red. (Credit: Ranga Dias/University of Rochester)
What is most interesting about this
2023 paper
is perhaps that it does not merely repeat the same claims about CSH, but instead focuses on a different material, namely N-doped lutetium hydride. The claimed upper temperature limit for this material would be 20.6 ºC at a pressure of a mere 1 GPa (10 kbar, 9,900 atmospheres).
Even though it’s still early days, it shouldn’t take long for other superconductivity researchers to try their hands at replicating these results. Although the gears of science may seem to move slowly, this is mostly because of the effort required to verify, validate and repeat. The simple answer to the question of whether we’ll have room-temperature superconductivity in our homes next year is a definite ‘no’, as even if these claims about this new hydride turn out to be correct, there are still major issues to contest with, such as the pressurized environment required.
In the optimal case, these youngest results by Ranga Dias and colleagues are confirmed experimentally by independent researchers, after which the long and arduous process towards potential commercialization may conceivably commence. In the less optimal case, flaws are once again detected and this paper turns out to be merely a flash in the pan before superconductivity research returns to business as usual.
One thing remains true either way, and that is that as long as the scientific method is followed, deceptions and mistakes will be caught, as physical reality does not concern itself with what we humans would reality to be like.
Featured image: “
Meissner effect p1390048.jpg
” by [Mai-Linh Doan] | 46 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619312",
"author": "C. Scott Ananian",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T17:21:29",
"content": "An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine the sorts of end-user devices/packaging that would go along with a high-pressure-but-room-temperature superconductor. It’s easy to imagine a... | 1,760,372,359.958169 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/haptick-the-strain-gauge-based-6dof-controller/ | Haptick: The Strain Gauge Based 6DoF Controller | Matthew Carlson | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"6dof",
"spacemice",
"strain gauge"
] | Six degrees of freedom (6DoF) controllers are used for manipulating an object in a CAD or 3d modeling program and are often called spacemice. You can twist it, push it, and even bop it. Most work with optical encoders, shining an LED through a slit to some form of photodetector on the other side. [Matthew Schubert] wanted to make his own spacemouse, but
had some new ideas of how to go about it
. His
two-part project
, dubbed haptic, focuses on measuring the forces, not the displacement.
He decided to try thick-film resistors as strain gauges and revisit load cells and proper strain gauges later. The actual structure quickly converged on the Stewart Platform, formed from three custom PCBs. A base to sit on, a knob for the top, and a middle board designed to take the strain with SMD resistors. A Teensy 3.2 talks to the ADS131M06 ADC and streams 4k samples per second to the host computer via serial. For prototyping, the calculations were done on the PC.
The first attempt showed a massive amount of noise in the reading as there were only a few filters already in place. Experimentation and referencing the spec sheets of the ADC showed that all the channels except channel 1 were near the noise levels specified by the ADC. A fourth-order Butterworth low-pass filter at 10hz offered significantly better signal-to-noise while remaining responsive. Using a known 390g mass, he placed it on the top disk, allowing him to measure the sensitivity of the gauges, which worked out to 7.8uV/newton. Ideally, [Matt] wants to measure forces down to 40-50mN, which is about 350nV, which is hard to detect even with the filtering. For the current version, he’ll just push a little harder but for the next version he’s switching to proper strain gauges for added sensitivity.
There are a few other issues such as measurement drift due to temperature differences and improving the ergonomics of a flat disk. The
code and design files are all up on GitHub
under CERN Open Hardware and GNU GPL3 licenses.
But it’s a wonderful journey with thought-out experimentation and investigation. We’re looking forward to the next revision. If you can’t wait, there’s
a potentiometer-based spacemouse project
that might tide you over.
Video after the link.
Thanks to [madpilot] for the tip! | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619286",
"author": "holysnippet",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T16:42:36",
"content": "It wouldn’t have even occurred to me to use an SMD resistor as a strain gauge. One of the best posts on HaD.It may not be suitable for its purpose, but the author of the hack went through with it. It’... | 1,760,372,360.061262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/the-rise-and-eventual-fall-of-the-sim-card/ | The Rise And (Eventual) Fall Of The SIM Card | Tom Nardi | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"eSIM",
"iSIM",
"mobile device",
"mobile phone",
"sim",
"sim card"
] | There are few devices that better exemplify the breakneck pace of modern technical advancement than the mobile phone. In the span of just a decade, we went from flip phones and polyphonic ringtones to full-fledged mobile computers with quad-core processors and gigabytes of memory.
While rapid advancements in computational power are of course nothing new, the evolution of mobile devices is something altogether different. The Razr V3 of 2003 and the Nexus 5 of 2013 are so vastly different that it’s hard to reconcile the fact they were (at least ostensibly) designed to serve the same purpose — with everything from their basic physical layout to the way the user interacts with them having undergone dramatic changes in the intervening years. Even the network technology they use to facilitate voice and data communication are different.
Two phones, a decade apart.
Yet, there’s at least one component they share: the lowly SIM card. In fact, if you don’t mind trimming a bit of unnecessary plastic away, you could pull the SIM out of the Razr and slap it into the Nexus 5 without a problem. It doesn’t matter that the latter phone wasn’t even a twinkling in Google’s eye when the card was made, the nature of the SIM card means compatibility is a given.
Indeed there’s every reason to believe that
very same
card, now 20 years old, could be installed in any number of phones on the market today. Although, once again, some minor surgery would be required to pare it down to size.
Such is the beauty of the SIM, or Subscriber Identity Module. It allows you to easily transfer your cellular service from one phone to another, with little regard to the age or manufacturer of the device, and generally without even having to inform your carrier of the swap. It’s a simple concept that has served us well for almost as long as cellular telephones have existed, and separates the phone from the phone contract.
So naturally, there’s mounting pressure in the industry to screw it up.
Home is Where the SIM Is
With landline telephones, it was
“easy” to figure out if the bill was paid
. The carrier knew where each subscriber lived, and they knew where the phones were installed. The homeowner either paid the bill and got service, or they were cut off. Even when the earliest mobile phones started hitting the market, their large size and high cost meant keeping track of who owned them wasn’t too difficult.
But as mobile phones became smaller, cheaper, and more widespread, it was clear some method of authentication would be required to prove the user had an active account. Since the physical location of the phone could no longer be used to determine who owned it and what number it should get, it would be necessary to give each mobile phone its own unique ID number. Further, since it was inevitable that the subscriber would eventually get a new mobile phone, it made sense to tie their information to some removable storage device so it could be moved between devices.
Thus, the Subscriber Identity Module was born. First introduced in 1991, the SIM card was actually envisioned as a way to carry the subscriber’s entire “digital life” between devices. It featured enough storage capacity to hold the user’s contact list and messages, which would be carried over to whatever new device the SIM was installed in. This concept has been all but abandoned today, as not only is the SIM’s storage capacity (less than 0.5 MB) laughable by modern standards, but we now have the cloud to allow seamless syncing between devices.
Modern SIMs are used almost exclusively to hold data necessary for network authentication. This consists primarily of the Integrated Circuit Card Identifier (ICCID), which is the SIM’s own serial number, and the subscriber’s account number, officially known as the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI). The IMSI includes identifying codes for which country and network the card is to be used on, as well as the subscriber’s phone number. In addition, the SIM contains a unique 128-bit authentication key that is checked against the carrier’s database when the device attempts to join the network. Naturally this is all an oversimplification —
[LaForge] gave a fantastic talk
on the nuts and bolts of SIM cards at 36C3 if you’ve got an hour to spare.
Nano-SIM with Micro and Mini adapters.
The first generation SIM cards were the same dimensions of a credit card, and generally were installed in car phones and other large portable telephones. By the time 2G cellular technology was mainstream, phones were much smaller and were using what at the time was called a Mini-SIM. For many years this second form was the defacto form of SIM, to the point that most people think of it as the original. But ever-shrinking smartphones necessitated something even smaller. This lead to the adoption of the Micro-SIM in 2010, followed by the Nano-SIM in 2012.
Interestingly the size of the SIM card was dictated by
ISO/IEC 7810
, an international standard for the size and shape of identification cards, rather than the internal electronics. Each version of the SIM has utilized essentially the same active components, just mounted to smaller and smaller PVC cards. This allows the larger cards to be cut down to fit devices which use the smaller forms, while the smaller versions can be used in older devices by way of an adapter.
Understanding the design of the SIM card and its various forms, it’s clear that the Nano-SIM is the end of the road. There’s only enough of the PVC card material left to orient the chip in the holder — any less, and you’d have to cut the chip itself, which could potentially break decades of backwards compatibility.
So how do you make the a SIM even smaller? Easy. You get rid of it.
Breaking the Nano Barrier
More and more phones today support what’s known as an Embedded-SIM (eSIM), which as the name implies, is built directly into the device. In practice, there’s still a dedicated flash chip that hold’s the subscriber’s information, the user just can’t get to it. But for some devices, such as a smartwatch, even an eSIM might be too large. In that case, there’s growing interest in Integrated-SIM (iSIM). With iSIM, the physical component is removed entirely — instead a sort of virtual SIM is integrated directly into the device’s System-On-Chip.
While most phones still offer Nano-SIM compatibility in addition to eSIM, the clock is ticking. Apple has already done away with physical SIM support as of the iPhone 14, and if history is any indicator, other manufacturers will soon follow. As of right now
iSIM is being marketed towards wearables and IoT devices
, but it’s not hard to predict that phone manufacturers will eventually be interested in the technology.
Who’s SIM is it Anyway?
With no physical SIM to remove, accessing and changing the data on the eSIM/iSIM must be done through the device’s own software. Naturally this means that not only will it require the latest-and-greatest version of your mobile operating system of choice, but that it’s possible for your device manufacturer or even carrier to control your access to it. Just as some carriers disable the option to unlock the bootloader on Google’s Pixel phones, one can imagine a future in which carriers will require you go through them every time you move your eSIM to another device.
In fact, there’s some scenarios in which you’ll almost certainly have to contact your carrier. Bust up your current phone bad enough that you can’t perform the self-serve eSIM swap? You’ll need to get the carrier to do it remotely. Want to switch eSIM between iPhone and Android? You guessed it, call the carrier and have them do it remotely.
To be fair, there are some potential security benefits to eSIM/iSIM. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about somebody stealing the SIM from your phone or replacing it with another one while you aren’t looking, because its not a physical object. Of course, that’s right now — who is to say a piece of malware couldn’t be crafted down the line to extract the subscriber information from the hardware?
In any event, it seems inevitable that the consumer won’t have much say in the matter going forward. Sure you can avoid buying a phone without a SIM card slot in 2023, 2024, and probably even 2025. But just as fewer and fewer phones each year
still include a headphone jack
, your options will eventually become limited. The day is coming when you’ll have to bid your trusty SIM card goodbye, and that’s a shame.
SIM diagram based on “
GSM SIM Card Evolution
” by Cvdr, and released under the CC BY-SA 3.0. | 109 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619158",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T14:18:32",
"content": "… and you left out the original SIM card in ~credit card format in the article’s main image. :-(> In fact, if you don’t mind trimming a bit of unnecessary plastic away, you could pull the SIM out of the Ra... | 1,760,372,360.243506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/remote-water-quality-monitoring/ | Remote Water Quality Monitoring | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"data",
"logging",
"pH",
"sd card",
"sensor",
"TDS",
"temperature",
"turbidity",
"water",
"water quality"
] | While it can be straightforward to distill water to high purity, this is rarely the best method for producing water for useful purposes. Even drinking water typically needs certain minerals in it, plants may need a certain pH, and wastewater systems have a whole host of other qualities that need to be measured. Measuring water quality is a surprisingly complex endeavor as a result and often involves a wide array of sensors,
much like this water quality meter from [RowlesGroupResearch]
.
The water quality meters that they are putting to use are typically set up in remote locations, without power, and are targeting natural bodies of water and also wastewater treatment plants. Temperature and pH are simple enough to measure and grasp, but this device also includes sensors for total dissolved solids (TDS) and turbidity which are both methods for measuring various amounts and types of particles suspended in the water. The build is based around an Arduino so that it is easy for others to replicate, and is housed in a waterproof box with a large battery, and includes data logging to an SD card in order to make it easy to deploy in remote, outdoor settings and to gather the data at a later time.
The build log for this device also goes into detail about all of the steps needed to set this up from scratch, as well as a comprehensive bill of materials. This could be useful in plenty of professional settings such as community wastewater treatment facilities but also in situations where it’s believed that industrial activity may be impacting a natural body of water. For a water quality meter more focused on drinking water, though, we’d recommend
this build that is trained on its own neural network
. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619069",
"author": "Bruce",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T12:12:14",
"content": "“Even drinking water typically needs certain minerals in it” Really? Why?When my wife (then fiancee) & a friend figured out simply putting a glass of water in my hand would fix a lot of problems, and... | 1,760,372,360.353406 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/20/a-feature-rich-amplifier-module-for-3-way-speaker-builds/ | A Feature-Rich Amplifier Module For 3-Way Speaker Builds | Lewin Day | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"amplifier",
"amplifier module",
"audio",
"dsp",
"speakers"
] | There’s something rewarding about building your own DIY audio hardware. Knowing you put it together yourself gives you faith in the construction, and psychosomatically makes the music sound all that much sweeter. If you’re into that kind of thing, you might like to give
[Eric Sorensen’s] Denmark amplifier module
a look.
The amplifier is intended to be used in a 3-way system, running a subwoofer, woofer, and tweeter. It uses a 1000 W ICEpower module to run the subwoofer, with a pair of 500W ICEpower modules to run the woofer and tweeter respectively. Meanwhile, a MiniDSP 2x4HD is used to accept optical audio input. It also offers digital signal processing and serves as a crossover to split the signal across the three speakers. An STM32F401 is used to run the show, controlling all the various modules and the necessary status LEDs. It’s a feature-rich build, too, with overtemperature monitoring, fan control, and clipping warnings built in.
The whole setup is built on to a sturdy aluminium backplate. The CNC-machined panel has simple tactile buttons for control. There’s also a nifty use of clear PETG 3D printer filament as a light pipe for LEDs. It’s effective, and it looks great. The whole module is designed to slide into the bottom of a 3-way speaker housing like a drawer.
Overall, if you’re building a big set of 3-way speakers, you might find the Denmark amplifier module is perfect for your needs. Alternatively, you could experiment with
a different kind of speaker entirely
. Video after the break. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6618969",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T09:32:08",
"content": "1000watts? What kind of watts are that?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6619160",
"author": "Felix",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T14:... | 1,760,372,360.306685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/rp2040-runs-linux-through-risc-v-emulation/ | RP2040 Runs Linux Through RISC-V Emulation | Arya Voronova | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"GNU/Linux",
"linux",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rp2040"
] | We’re used to running Linux on CPUs where it belongs, and the consensus is that RP2040 just isn’t up for the task – no memory controller, and nowhere near enough RAM, to boot. At least, that’s what you might believe until you see [tvlad1234]’s
Linux-on-RP2040 project,
reminding us there’s more than one way to boot Linux on a CPU like this! Just like with the
“Linux on AVR” project
in 2012 that emulated an ARM processor, the pico-rv32ima project emulates a RISC-V core – keeping up with the times.
Initially, the aforementioned “Linux on AVR through ARM” project was picked as a base – then, a newer development,
[cnlohr]’s RISC-V emulator,
presented itself and was too good to pass up on. Lack of RAM was fully negated by adding an SD card into the equation – coupled with a small caching layer, this is a crucial part for the project’s
not-so-secret
sauce. A fair amount of debugging and optimization later, [tvlad1234] got Linux to run, achieving boot times in 10-15 minutes’ ballpark – considering the emulation layer’s presence, this is no mean feat.
At this point, the boot process stalls as you enter a login shell. If Linux on RP2040 is within your area of interest, feel free to pick up the effort from here, as the project is fully open-source – you only need a Pi Pico board and a throwaway SD card! Now, if pairing a RP2040 with some classic software is your definition of an evening well-spent, you can’t go wrong with
DOOM!
However, if you’d rather play with something else *nix-like, we’ve seen someone port
Fuzix onto the RP2040
before. | 27 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6618887",
"author": "Feinfinger (M-x totally-tame-mode)",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T07:18:32",
"content": "Someone had to do it…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6618903",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2023-03-20T07:57... | 1,760,372,360.416644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/a-look-at-zweikanalton-stereo-audio-and-comparison-with-nicam/ | A Look At Zweikanalton Stereo Audio And Comparison With NICAM | Maya Posch | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"NICAM",
"stereo",
"tv",
"Zweikanalton"
] | With how we take stereo sound for granted, there was a very long period where broadcast audio and television with accompanying audio track were in mono. Over the decades, multiple standards were developed that provide a way to transmit and receive two mono tracks, as a proper stereo transmission.
In a recent video
, [Matt] over at [Matt’s Tech Barn] takes a look at the German
Zweikanalton
(also known as A2 Stereo) standard, and compares it with the
NICAM
standard that was used elsewhere in the world.
Zweikanalton is quite simple compared to NICAM (which we
covered previously
), being purely analog with a second channel transmitted alongside the first. Since it didn’t really make much of a splash outside of the German-speaking countries, equipment for it is more limited. In this video [Matt] looks at the Philips PM 5588 and Rohde & Schwarz 392, analyzing the different modulations for FM, Zweikanalton and NICAM transmissions and the basic operation of the modulator and demodulator equipment.
An interesting aspect of these modulations are the visible sidebands, and the detection of which modulation is used. Ultimately NICAM’s only disadvantage compared to Zweikanalton was the higher cost of the hardware, but with increased technological development single-chip NICAM solutions like the Philips SAA7283 (1995) began to reduce total system cost and by the early 2000s NICAM was a standard feature of TV chipsets, just in time for analog broadcast television to essentially become irrelevant. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6619918",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2023-03-21T08:45:05",
"content": "Quite surprisingly to me in Poland cable TV providers decided to cover all bases and standardized (1997) transmitting both NICAM and A2Stereo (1,2) simultaneouslyhttps://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polski_stand... | 1,760,372,360.457288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/hackaday-links-march-19-2023/ | Hackaday Links: March 19, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"am radio",
"animatronics",
"chuck e. cheese",
"ev",
"exoplanet",
"floppy",
"ford",
"hackaday links",
"infotainment",
"Vulcan 40 Eridani A",
"Wordle"
] | We get results! Well, sort of. You may recall that in this space
last week
we discussed Ford’s plans to exclude AM reception on the infotainment systems of certain of their cars starting in 2024. We decried the decision, not for the loss of the sweet, sweet content that AM stations tend to carry — although we always enjoyed “Traffic on the 8s” back in our dismal days of daily commuting — but rather as a safety concern, because AM radio can reach almost the entire US population with emergency information using just 75 stations. To our way of thinking, this makes AM radio critical infrastructure, and eliminating it from motor vehicles is likely to have unintended consequences.
Now it seems like there’s some agreement with that position
, as former administrators of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration; and no, not
FEDRA
) have gotten together to warn about the dangers of deleting AM from cars. Manufacturers seem to be leaning into the excuse that EVs emit a lot of radio frequency interference, rendering static-sensitive AM receivers less useful than other,
more profitable
less susceptible modes, like digital satellite radio. That seems like a red herring to us, but then again, the most advanced infotainment option in any car we’ve ever owned is a CD player, so it’s hard for us to judge.
Speaking of antiquated technology that’s apparently not, it was with great glee that we learned this week that some of the nearly 600 Chuck E. Cheese’s franchises in the world today are
still using floppies to run their animatronic shows
. Full disclosure: we worked at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in 1983, for the five hours it took to realize food service in a scratchy polyester uniform wasn’t our thing. But the animatronic show was pretty cool, at least the first couple of times; after seeing it a dozen times in a row, it wears pretty thin. And while technology has marched on lo these past 40 years, with most installations moving on to SD cards and flash drives, it seems not to have progressed for about 50 of the franchises, where the floppy still reigns supreme. We assume the floppy-philic locations are at least using 3.5″ disks, but you never know. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Then again…
But if it is broke, go ahead and turn it on and off — 120 times in a row!
Those are the instructions Ford has issued to technicians
who need to switch a vehicle out of “Factory Mode,” whatever that is. Sixty cycles of the start-stop button on the dash — 120 total pushes — will apparently do the trick. Given hourly labor rates, this could be an expensive proposition, and it certainly seems sort-sighted for Ford not to provide a more sensible way to do this. Then again, we’ve had to endure the whole “twice on the ignition, flash the high beams, and unlock the driver’s door three times” to set and reset features, so we suppose this is all just an artifact of the somewhat limited UI a car dashboard presents.
Bad news for science fiction fans:
it turns out that the planet Vulcan doesn’t actually exist
. According to
Star Trek
canon, Mr. Spock’s homeworld of Vulcan was said to orbit the star 40 Eridani A, the primary star of an actual triple star system about 16 light-years away. Back in 2018, exoplanet hunters discovered Doppler shifts in the spectrum of the star with a period of 42 days, leading them to conclude that the star hosted a planet inside its habitable zone. The news was greeted with much enthusiasm by
Star Trek
fans, and the prognosticatory abilities of Gene Roddenberry and the original series writing staff were much praised. But alas, more careful measurements now show pretty clearly that what was thought to be Vulcan’s signature was really just an artifact of stellar surface activity. If it sounds too good to be true…
And finally, if you never caught the Wordle bug, here’s your chance to try again, with a twist.
Progle()
is the name of the game, and it tests your knowledge of programming language attributes to narrow in on the language of the day. You pick a language at random from a list of choices — there are only 33, so your odds of a one-move win are pretty good — and a grid pops up to show you how various attributes, like typing, garbage collection, compiled vs. interpreted, compare to the target language. You then use your power of deduction and encyclopedic knowledge of language characteristics to home in on the answer. We’ve won a couple of times, but if we’re being honest, most of it was just wild guessing. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6618628",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T23:52:46",
"content": "Sounds to me like it’s time for Charles Edward Cheese to upgrade to Floppy Emus.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6618744",
"author": "Har... | 1,760,372,360.503665 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/the-50-pen-plotter/ | The $50 Pen Plotter | Chris Lott | [
"cnc hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"CoreXY",
"grbl",
"low cost",
"pen plotter"
] | [Arca] sets out to build himself a
low-cost pen plotter
that doesn’t require access to a 3D printer. The plotter uses a coreXY arrangement, powered by 28BYJ-48 stepper motors, which he overdrives with +12 VDC to increase the torque. Pen up and down control is done using a stepper motor salvaged from a DVD reader. The frame is constructed using PVC electrical conduit and associated fittings, and [Arca] uses the hot glue gun quite liberally. Steppers were driven by A4988 modules with heatsinks, and motion control is provided by GRBL running on an Arduino UNO.
He has a few issues with glitches on the limit switches, and is continuing to tweak the design. There is no documentation yet, but you can discern the construction easily from the video if you want to try your hand at making one of these. This is a really cool DIY plotter, and many parts you probably have laying around your parts boxes. As [Arca] says, it’s not an AxiDraw, but the results are respectable. Keep a lookout for part 2 of this project on his YouTube channel. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6618508",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T21:08:15",
"content": "Great work for a very low cost plotter!I have a zero cost suggestion that should improve its performance a little, depending on what you’re trying to draw: rearrange the pulleys to keep the belts parall... | 1,760,372,360.981045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/the-intricacies-of-starting-a-rocket-engine/ | The Intricacies Of Starting A Rocket Engine | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"ignition",
"rocket",
"rocket engine"
] | Rockets are conceptually rather simple: you put the pointy bit upwards and make sure that the bit that will go flamey points downwards before starting the engine(s). Yet how to start each rocket engine type in a way that’s both safe and effective? Unlike in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons, real-life rocket engines do not have a fuse you light up before dashing off to a safe distance. Rather they use increasingly more complicated methods, which depend on the engine type and fuels used. In a
recent article
written by [
Trevor Sesnic
] with accompanying
video
featuring everyone’s favorite Everyday Astronaut [Tim Dodd], we’re taken through the intricacies of how flamey ends are made.
The least complicated are probably solid rockets, which come with all of the fuel and oxidizer stacked and ready for the ignition source. While a small hobby rocket would happily ignite from just a spark, by the time you have an SRB the size of those strapped to a Shuttle’s main tank or to the SLS stack, you need something a lot beefier. On the STS & SLS SRBs this starts with the NASA Standard Detonator, which ignites a pyrotechnic charge that ignites propellent down the length of the SRB and ultimately starts it.
For liquid rocket engines things rapidly get more complicated, with hypergolic propellants such as hydrazine being the easiest and self-igniting. From there it escalates into cryogenic liquids, the need to precondition the engine, bootstrapping turbo pumps, and the application of the ignition source as fuel is being mixed and floods the combustion chamber. For the SpaceX Merlin engine, this ignition source is a pyrophoric chemical called TEA-TEB which ignites on contact with oxygen, while other engines use spark igniters, pyrotechnics, and so on.
Most exciting is the part where the ignition has to take place in space, which is something that is a well-known issue for new rockets and their second and third stage engines, and is an essential part of reusable rockets that are supposed to gently touch down using propulsive landing. All in all an excellent crash course on a topic that is often neglected. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6618433",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T19:44:50",
"content": "Obligatory recommendation to read “Ignition!” by John D. Clark.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6618486",
"author": "Giin",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,360.814589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/3d-printed-shredder-eats-lettuce-for-brekkast/ | 3D-Printed Shredder Eats Lettuce For Breakfast | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"shredder"
] | Shredding things isn’t just good for efficiently and securely disposing of them. It’s also very fun, as well. [Joonas] of [Let’s Print] didn’t have a shredder,
so set about 3D printing one of their very own.
The design apes that of the big metal trash shredders you’ve probably seen in videos all over the internet. They use a pair of counter-rotating drums with big teeth. As the drums turn, the teeth grab and pull objects into the gap between the drums, where they are duly torn apart into smaller pieces.
In this design, plastic drums are pressed into service as [Joonas] does not have a metal 3D printer. A brushed DC motor is used to drive the shredder. A large multi-stage gearbox is used to step down the motor’s output and provide plenty of torque to do the job.
The shredder gets tested with plenty of amusing garbage. Everything from old vegetables, to paper, and rock-hard old cheeseburgers are put through the machine. It does an able job in all cases, though obviously the plastic drums can’t handle the same kind of jobs as a proper metal shredder. Harder plastics and aluminium cans stall out the shredder, though. The gearbox also tends to strip gears on the tougher stuff. The basic theory is sound, but some upgrades could really make this thing shine.
Is it a device that will see a lot of practical use? Perhaps not. Is it a fun device that would be the star of your next
hackerspace Show and Tell
? Absolutely. Plus it might be a great way to get rid of lots of those unfinished projects that always clog up your storage areas, too! Video after the break. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6618245",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T15:34:09",
"content": "At least in Germany, such a working and cheap tool is the nightmare of every waste management company.We pay garbage mostly by volume. You get a certain sized waste container, pay for the size and ar... | 1,760,372,360.915759 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/customizing-the-start-up-chime-on-a-1999-g3-imac/ | Customizing The Start-Up Chime On A 1999 G3 IMac | Maya Posch | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"imac",
"powerpc"
] | The start-up chime on Macs is probably as recognizable as the default Nokia ringtone in this day and age. Yet much like a ringtone, so too one might want to change the start-up chime on a Mac. This is something which [Doug Brown] has done in the past already on a Power Mac G3 in 2012, which made him instantly an expert on the topic in the eyes of a reader who wanted to know how to
change the chime on a 1999 iMac
. While the firmware on both these systems is written in Forth, it did take a bit of sleuthing to figure out where the chime was hiding in the firmware image, and how to change it.
The target iMac is somewhat unique in that it has a G4 PPC CPU rather than the more common G3. The firmware is similar enough that it was a snap to simply search the newer iMac’s firmware for the signature of the chime sound data. This turned out to be the identical QuickTime IMA ADPCM format-encoded data, yet what was different was how this data was integrated into the firmware image. Key is finding the area in the firmware where not only the address of the chime data’s start is defined, but also its length. Finally, the checksums in the firmware image have to be updated so that it matches the patched data.
Reverse-engineering the checksum calculation in the Forth code turned out to be fairly straightforward, but getting the new firmware on the iMac turned out to be the biggest struggle, as [Doug] didn’t want to inflict running a manual firmware update onto this reader he was doing all this work for. This led [Doug] to do some more reverse-engineering using Ghidra to enable the use of the automatic updater like a regular firmware update.
In the end it all worked out great, and now another iMac no longer has the Mac chime on start-up. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6618616",
"author": "Sheff",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T23:41:38",
"content": "Ok, just copied that old tone as an .mp3 to use as a notification on my Android phone 😁",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6618824",
"author": "kaaaa... | 1,760,372,360.762727 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/19/tiny-pcb-piezopiano-plays-just-one-octave/ | Tiny PCB PiezoPiano Plays Just One Octave | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ATMega4809",
"piano",
"piezo"
] | Grand pianos are beautiful instruments, but take up altogether too much space. Upright pianos are smaller, but still fairly hefty. When it comes to the PiezoPiano, though, we suspect nobody could complain about its diminutive size.
It’s a tiny thing with just one buzzy little octave for your playing pleasure.
The PiezoPiano is a single PCB device with a ATmega4809 running the show. It has eight buttons and eight piezo transducers that give you just one octave’s range on the keyboard. Truth be told, that’s only in one scale; you’re not getting the whole twelve tones of flats and sharps included. And, when we say keyboard, we really mean “tactile buttons.” You get the drift. It’s all assembled in a cute enclosure mimicking the shape of a real grand piano.
Fundamentally, it’s a cute little musical desktoy that reminds us greatly
of the Stylophone.
Impressively, though, those eight buzzers mean it has eight-note polyphony. That’s nothing to sniff at compared to all the
monophonic synths out there
. It’s also available
on Tindie
if you’d like to buy a kit off the shelf. Video after the break. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617970",
"author": "steves",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T09:05:17",
"content": "I guess that if pianos were to replace their strings with electronics then they could take up much less space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "66180... | 1,760,372,360.861491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/doom-ported-to-a-single-lego-brick/ | DOOMPorted To A Single LEGO Brick | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"brick",
"doom",
"doom port",
"lego",
"lego brick",
"oled",
"rp2040",
"rp2040 doom",
"silicone"
] | By now you’ve all seen the tiny LEGO brick with a working screen in it. The work of one [James “Ancient” Brown], it was truly a masterpiece of miniaturization and creativity. Since then, [James] hasn’t stopped innovating. Now, he’s demoing a playable version of
DOOM
running on a single plastic brick.
We’ve covered the construction of
these astounding screen bricks before.
Long story short, [James] designed a tiny PCB that hosts an RP2040 microcontroller which is then hooked up to a tiny OLED screen. The components are placed in a silicone mold, which is then filled with transparent resin to form the brick. The screen is then powered via contacts in the bottom, much like older-style LEGO motors.
Early experiments involved running various graphics to emulate a spaceship dashboard, but [James] has now gone much further. He’s implemented
RP2040-doom
to run the game. It uses tilt controls thanks to an accelerometer, combined with capacitive touch controls for shooting. The monochrome OLED is driven very fast with
a special library of [James’] own creation
to create three levels of grayscale to make the game actually visible and (just barely) playable.
It’s a hack, of course, and the controls are far from perfect. Nobody’s speed-running E1M1 on [James’s] LEGO brick, to be sure. Perchance. With that said, it’s still a glorious piece of work nonetheless. Just imagine, sitting with friends, and announcing you’re going to play some
DOOM
— only to pluck a piece of LEGO out of your pocket and start blasting away at demons.
Just because [James] doesn’t know when to quit, we’re going to lay down the gauntlet. Let’s get
network play
happening on these things, yeah?
Thanks to [Måns Almered] for the tip! | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616917",
"author": "70sjukebox",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T08:24:55",
"content": "As someone who now uses glasses for fine soldiering and computer use, well played :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6616922",
"author":... | 1,760,372,362.901908 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/hp-3488a-teardown-dismantled-for-parts/ | HP 3488A Teardown, Dismantled For Parts | Chris Lott | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"gpib",
"HP 3488A",
"programmable relay",
"test equipment"
] | [IMSAI Guy] has
an old HP 3488A Switch Control Unit that he wants to dismantle for parts
( see video below the break ). The 3488A is pretty simple as far as HP test equipment goes — a chassis that can hold various types of relay cards and is programmable over GPIB. He notes up front that these are plentiful and inexpensive in the used test equipment market.
Around the back of the unit is a card cage that accepts up to five option cards providing
4×4 matrix switching
on/off SPST switching
switching signals to a common bus
VHF switching
Digital I/O signalling
The teardown is an interesting glimpse into the solid engineering design of 1980s HP test equipment. The option cards are well shielded, and have an interesting back panel connector that breaks out the signals to screw terminals and provides strain relief. The brains of switcher was a Motorola 6809 and connectivity was provided by an Intel 8291A GPIB interface chip. The power supply is solid, and many of its parts can be reused on other projects, such as the transformer and a beefy 20W DC-DC converter by ST. [IMSAI Guy] also scores a bunch of latching relays from the option cards which will no doubt come in handy on future projects.
These kinds of programmable relays can be very useful when building automated test fixtures. There were other solutions for this as well, back in the day. Metrabyte ( bought by Keithley, bought by Tektronix ) was one company that made a whole line of switching interface modules that hooked up to your PC’s ISA bus. Omron also offered similar products. Have you ever needed banks of programmable relays for your projects? If so, let us know your solution in the comments below. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617264",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T16:14:38",
"content": "What’s the point to dismantle it for pieces if he cannot determine what the parts are, since they are labelled with HP codes….. ???",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,362.62443 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/the-blue-soup-saga-is-one-beefy-mystery/ | The Blue Soup Saga Is One Beefy Mystery | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"beef soup",
"biology",
"blue soup",
"bluesoup",
"microbiology",
"science"
] | Beef soup! You’d normally expect it to be somewhere from reddish-brown to grey, depending on how well it was cooked and prepared. However, strangely, an assistant professor found the beef soup in their fridge had mysteriously turned blue.
That spawned an investigation into the cause which is still ongoing.
[Dr. Elinne Becket] has earned her stripes in microbiology,
but the blue soup astounded her.
Despite her years of experience, she was unable to guess at the process or a source of contamination that could turn the soup blue. Indeed, very few natural foods are blue at all. Even blueberries themselves are more of a purple color. The case sparked enough interest that [Elinne] went back to the trash to collect photos and sample for research at the request of others.
Thus far, metagenomic DNA analysis is ongoing and samples of the soup have been cultivated in petri dishes. Early analysis shows that some of the microbes
form iridescent colonies
, Another researcher is trying to determine if the bugs from the soup can make
blue color appear on soft cheese.
There’s some suspicion that a bacteria known as
pseudomonas aeruginosa
could be the cause of the blue color, but that presents its own problems.
P. aeruginosa
is classified as a Biosafety Level 2 pathogen which would require some researchers to abandon work on the project for safety reasons.
The jury’s still out on this
microbiological mystery.
If you’ve got some ideas on what could be going on, let us know in the comments! | 38 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616638",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T02:05:04",
"content": "Pseudomonas smells fruity and is instantly recognizable by smell alone. No advanced culture or sequencing work necessary.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,372,363.225873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/broken-pocket-watch-becomes-pocket-sundial/ | Broken Pocket Watch Becomes Pocket Sundial | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"sundial"
] | Pocket watches are all well and good, but they have some caveats. They either need regular rewinding, or they need batteries. Sundials on the other hand need only the light from our One True Sun. [JGJMatt] has just the project to convert your broken or disused pocket watches
to the solar way of telling the time.
The key is to replace the clockwork internals and face of the pocket watch with a sundial instead. The first step is to create a face for the watch marked out for sundial use. [JGJMatt] explains how to do this with a variety of CNC, painting, or etching methods. He also explains how to use simple tools to generate a sundial design that’s ideally suited to your geographical location. This includes methods for aligning the sundial to True North or True South with an offset compared to Magnetic North or Magnetic South. This allows the sundial to be as accurate as possible. [JGJMatt] describes the general techniques while also building a sundial of his very own. The resulting piece is a handsome bit of brass with a lovely gnomon standing tall to cast a shadow on the dial.
It’s not a quick way to tell the time, by any means. However, the next time your friends ask you what time it is, and you whip out a compass to line up your sundial, they’re sure to be impressed. We’ve seen some
creative sundial designs before
, too, and if you’ve been creating your own fancy timepieces, don’t hesitate to let us know
on the tipsline! | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616578",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T00:54:46",
"content": "Broken pocket watch becomes right twice a day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6616698",
"author": "Thovthe",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T03:17:3... | 1,760,372,363.273979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/finessing-a-soldering-iron-to-remove-large-connectors/ | Finessing A Soldering Iron To Remove Large Connectors | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"blob",
"connector",
"desoldering",
"pcb",
"solder",
"soldering iron",
"tools",
"wire"
] | One of the first tools that is added to a toolbox when working on electronics, perhaps besides a multimeter, is a soldering iron. From there, soldering tools can be added as needed such as a hot air gun, reflow oven, soldering gun, or desoldering pump.
But often a soldering iron is all that’s needed
even for some specialized tasks as [Mr SolderFix] demonstrates.
This specific technique involves removing a large connector from a PCB. Typically either a heat gun would be used, which might damage the PCB, or a tedious process involving a desoldering tool or braided wick might be tried. But with just a soldering iron, a few pieces of wire can be soldered around each of the pins to create a massive solder blob which connects all the pins of the connector to this wire. With everything connected to solder and wire, the soldering iron is simply pressed into this amalgamation and the connector will fall right out of the board, and the wire can simply be dropped away from the PCB along with most of the solder.
There is some cleanup work to do afterwards, especially removing excess solder in the holes in the PCB, but it’s nothing a little wick and effort can’t take care of. Compared to other methods which might require specialized tools or a lot more time, this is quite the technique to add to one’s soldering repertoire. For some more advanced desoldering techniques, take a look at
this method for saving PCBs from some thermal stresses
.
Thanks to [Filip] for the tip! | 32 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616334",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T20:09:35",
"content": "This is were the desolder needles come in: heat a single pin, push the stainless steel needle over the pin though the pcb, rinse and repeat.Protip: buy several boxes as the thinner ones for dil packages... | 1,760,372,363.14516 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/advanced-3d-printing-tips/ | Advanced 3D Printing Tips | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"gears",
"print in place",
"printed threads"
] | One of the best things about hanging around with other hackers is you hear about the little tricks they use for things like 3D printing. But with the Internet, you can overhear tips from people you’ll probably never meet, like [3D Printer Academy]. His recent video has a little bit of a click-bait title (“
10 Secret 3D Printing Tricks…
“) but when we watched it, we did see several cool ideas. Of course, you probably know at least some of the ten tips, but it is still interesting to see what he’s been up to, which you can do in the video below.
At one point he mentions 11 tips, but the title has 10 and we had to stretch to get to that number since some of them have some overlap. For example, several involve making printed threads. However, he also shows some C-clips, a trick to add walls for strength, and printing spur gears. Of course, some of these, like the gears, require specific tools, but many of them are agnostic.
Some of the tips are about selecting a particular infill pattern, which you’d think would be pretty obvious, but then again, your idea of what’s novel and what’s old hat might be different than ours. The explanation of how a print-in-place hinge works is pretty clear (even if it isn’t really a live hinge) and also applies to making chains to transfer power. We also thought the threaded containers were clever.
So if you can overlook the title and you don’t mind seeing a few tips you probably already know, you can probably take something away from the video. What’s your favorite “expert” trick? Let us know in the comments.
A lot of what we print tends to be enclosures and there are some
good tips for those floating around
. Of course, the value of tips vary based on your experience level. But if you are just starting out, you should check out [Bald Engineer]’s video of
things he wished someone had told him
when he started 3D printing. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616286",
"author": "JanW",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T19:13:05",
"content": "Yeah, that video is an ad for: 1) Fusion 360 2) his extendes course.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6616305",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,362.84712 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/the-singularity-isnt-here-yet/ | The Singularity Isn’t Here… Yet | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"GPT",
"GPT-4",
"Intelligence",
"knowledge",
"learning"
] | So, GPT-4 is out, and it’s all over for us meatbags. Hype has reached fever pitch, here in the latest and greatest of AI chatbots we finally have something that can surpass us. The singularity has happened, and personally I welcome our new AI overlords.
Hang on a minute though, I smell a rat, and it comes in defining just what intelligence is. In my time I’ve hung out with a lot of very bright people, as well as a lot of not-so-bright people who nonetheless think they’re very clever simply because they have a bunch of qualifications and diplomas. Sadly the experience hasn’t bestowed God-like intelligence on me, but it has given me a handle on the difference between intelligence and knowledge.
My premise is that we humans are conditioned by our education system to equate learning with intelligence, mostly because we have flaky CPUs and worse memory, and that makes learning something a bit of an effort. Thus when we see an AI, a machine that can learn everything because it has a decent CPU and memory, we’re conditioned to think of it as intelligent because that’s what our schools train us to do. In fact it seems intelligent to us not because it’s thinking of new stuff, but merely through knowing stuff we don’t because we haven’t had the time or capacity to learn it.
Growing up and making my earlier career around a major university I’ve seen this in action so many times, people who master one skill, rote-learning the school textbook or the university tutor’s pet views and theories, and barfing them up all over the exam paper to get their amazing qualifications. On paper they’re the cream of the crop, and while it’s true they’re not thick, they’re rarely the special clever people they think they are. People with truly above-average intelligence exist, but in smaller numbers, and their occurrence is not a 1:1 mapping with holders of advanced university degrees.
Even the examples touted of GPT’s brilliance tend to reinforce this. It can do the bar exam or the SAT test, thus we’re told it’s as intelligent as a school-age kid or a lawyer. Both of those qualifications follow our educational system’s flawed premise that education equates to intelligence, so as a machine that’s learned all the facts it follows my point above about learning by rote. The machine has simply barfed up what it has learned the answers are onto the exam paper. Is that intelligence? Is a search engine intelligent?
This is not to say that tools such as GPT-4 are not amazing creations that have a lot of potential to do good things aside from filling up the internet with superficially readable spam. Everyone should have a play with them and investigate their potential, and from that will no doubt come some very interesting things. Just don’t confuse them with real people, because sometimes meatbags can surprise you. | 112 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616193",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T17:22:38",
"content": "These newest chatbots really are incredible feats of computer science and technology, don’t get me wrong.Something about all AI related discussion just makes me feel sorta weird. As engineers and hackers we... | 1,760,372,363.065021 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/annoying-cicada-magnet-is-nonetheless-authentic/ | Annoying Cicada Magnet Is Nonetheless Authentic | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"annoying noise",
"attiny85",
"cicada",
"mp3",
"mp3 module"
] | We’ve all heard of those chirper devices that randomly make annoying noises for no other reason than sending people insane.
This project from [Kousuke Saito] brings altogether more art to this idea
, while still being quite annoying indeed.
The build is essentially a replica cicada. [Saito] was inspired to build the device as the sounds of the insect remind him fondly of the summer. His design consists of a 3D-printed housing that roughly approximates something like a cicada, with two wings attached to a central body. In this case, the layer lines of the 3D print actually added to the realism of the ersatz insect The housing is nicely painted to serve as an adequate simulacra to those who aren’t up on their entomology.
Inside, there’s an ATTiny 85 paired with an MP3 playback module and a small speaker. It’s charged with reproducing the noise of various cicadas. It’s setup with an ingenious mechanism to switch it on. There are magnets installed in the base which allow it to stick to metallic objects. There’s also a switch in the bottom of the device. When it magnetically attaches to a surface, that switch is depressed, and the cicada starts playing, well… cicada noises. [Saito] notes that a patent has been secured for the idea.
We’ve seen other cicada-themed projects before, astoundingly.
Video after the break. | 17 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617812",
"author": "Jeff Brown",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T05:11:34",
"content": "This is beautiful and wonderful and I dearly hope no one ever hides one in my house!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6617831",
"author": "Adju... | 1,760,372,362.67772 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/building-a-truss-braced-model-airplane-sense-or-nonsense/ | Building A Truss-Braced Model Airplane: Sense Or Nonsense? | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"model aircraft",
"truss-brace"
] | Following NASA’s recent results with truss-braced wing airplanes and the benefits this could bring to full-sized airplanes, [Think Flight] figured that if it helps with those airplanes, perhaps it may also be a boon for model airplanes. With the recent
construction of a carrier airplane
for smaller drones, he decided to give the concept a whirl to see whether it would make a difference compared to a regular wing design. This carrier airplane features a payload bay that can be opened in flight to release the drones stored inside it, making any potential increased payload capacity and improvements to the flight characteristics very welcome.
The
truss-braced wing design
has been studied by NASA and Boeing, with the design offering a high
aspect ratio
, not unlike the wings of a glider. The obvious disadvantage of those long, narrow wings of a glider is that they are also long and fragile, which are not desirable properties on a commercial jetliner. By adding the truss bracing, the wing design can be optimized for high aspect ratio, while the fragility is compensated for by the trusses. For a commercial jetliner, this could mean significant less fuel usage.
As [Think Flight] found, however, the typical issues with scaling wings up and down were apparent here too, with
Reynolds number
explaining the ‘why’, involving the
chord
length of the aerofoil, which is obviously different between a full-sized jetliner and a model you can hold in your hand. Effectively this means that on a model scale, the effect of higher aspect ratio isn’t as pronounced as it is with jetliners, even if the trusses may offer some benefit in structural rigidity. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617818",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T05:26:51",
"content": "Is that what inland California looks like after some serious rain? Wow…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6618272",
"author": "Peter Goetz... | 1,760,372,362.783922 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/calibrating-thermal-cameras-with-hot-patterned-objects/ | Calibrating Thermal Cameras With Hot Patterned Objects | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"thermal camera",
"thermography"
] | Thermal cameras are great if you want to get an idea of what’s hot and what’s not. If you want to use a thermal camera for certain machine vision tasks, though, you generally need to do a geometric calibration to understand what the camera is seeing and correct for lens distortion.
[Henry Zhang] has shared various methods of doing just that.
It’s all about generating a geometrically-regular thermal pattern.
To calibrate a thermal camera, first you need a thermal pattern. This is like typical test image for a camera or screen, but with temperatures instead of colors. [Henry] explains several methods for doing this. One involves using a grid of nichrome wires to create a thermal pattern for calibration purposes. Another uses discs of cold aluminium inserted into a foam board. Even a simple checkerboard can work, with the black spaces heating up more from ambient sunlight than their neighbouring white spots. [Henry] then explains the mathematical techniques used for calibrating based on these patterns.
It’s a useful primer on the topic if you’re working with thermal camera systems.
We’ve looked at some other interesting machine vision topics before, too.
If you’ve got any great thermal imaging tips of your own, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617607",
"author": "seth kreitinger",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T00:12:04",
"content": "Good ideas! We made a checkerboard target out of a powder coated aluminum plate and some metallic duct tape. The powder coat and shiny tape have very different emissivities so simply make the enti... | 1,760,372,362.729901 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/its-a-486-computer-on-a-breadboard/ | It’s A 486 Computer, On A Breadboard | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"486",
"80486",
"breadboard",
"i486"
] | Ever since the 1970s, a frequent project has been to take a microprocessor and construct a computer system on a breadboard or stripboard. Usually these machines feature a familiar 8-bit processor such as a 6502 or a Z80 because of their breadboard-friendly DIP packages, but there is surprisingly little reason why some of the more recent silicon can’t be treated in the same way. [FoxTech] is leading the way on this,
by making a breadboard computer using an 80486DX
.
A 1990-era 32-bit desktop CPU seems unpromising territory for this application, but its architecture is surprisingly accessible. It needs a breakout board to gain access to its various lines, but beyond that it can be interfaced to in a very similar way to those earlier chips.
So far there are two videos in the series, which we’ve placed below the break. The first one introduces the project and shows the basic set-up. A 486 running NOPs may produce a pretty light show, but as he starts to show in the second video, it’s capable of more. The eventual aim is to have a simple but fully functional breadboard computer, so he’s starting with logic to decode the 32-bit bus on the 486 into the 8-bit bus he’s going to use.
It’s fascinating to learn about how the 32-bit 486 handles its interfacing and deals with four bytes at once, and we’re very much looking forward to seeing this project play out.
The 486 may be on life support here in 2023
, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still receive some love.
Thanks [benny] for the tip! | 53 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617458",
"author": "P",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T20:57:17",
"content": "I happen to have the same chip, as well as a pentium w/mmx… I wonder if this is worth doing…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6713273",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,363.371653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/compact-mouse-jiggler-keeps-boss-off-your-back/ | Compact Mouse Jiggler Keeps Boss Off Your Back | Lewin Day | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"maus",
"mouse",
"mouse jiggler"
] | The work-from-home revolution enabled many workers to break free from the shackles of the office. Some employers didn’t like the loss of perceived control though, and saddled workers with all kinds of odious spyware to monitor their computer activity. Often, this involves monitoring mouse movement to determine if workers are slacking off or not. Mouse jigglers aim to fool these systems,
and the MAUS from [MAKERSUN99] is one you can build yourself.
The MAUS is not a mechanical system that moves a real-life mouse on your desk. Instead, it directly injects emulated mouse movements via USB. It runs on an ATtiny85, which is able to spit out USB HID commands with the help of
the V-USB software USB implementation.
Along with the microcontroller, MAUS also features a red LED and a WS2812B RGB LED for user feedback.
It’s also available on Tindie
if your boss has you so busy that you don’t have time to build one.
Mouse jigglers came to prominence as working from home became mainstream. However,
they’ve been around for years. | 68 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617310",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T17:05:47",
"content": "Isn’t easier to just put the mouse cord under one side of an optical mouse? My cursor moves all over the place in that configuration.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,363.475975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/study-hacker-history-and-update-it/ | Study Hacker History, And Update It | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"/var/log",
"3d",
"ideas",
"newsletter",
"wiimote"
] | Looking through past hacks is a great source of inspiration. This week, we saw [Russ Maschmeyer]
re-visiting a classic
hack by [Jonny Lee] that
made use of a Wiimote’s IR camera to fake 3D
, or at least provide a compelling parallax effect that’ll fool your brain, without any expensive custom hardware.
[Lee]’s original demo was stunning, and that alone is reason to revisit it. Using the Wiimote as the webcam was inspired back in 2007, because it meant that there was no hard computer vision work to be done in estimating the viewer’s position – the camera only sees IR LEDs anyway. The tradeoff is that you had to wear two IR LEDs on your head, calibrate it just right, and that only the person with the headset on gets the illusion just right.
This is why re-visiting the past can be fruitful. As [Russ] discovered, computing power is so plentiful these days that you could do face/eye position estimation with a normal webcam easier than you could source an old Wiimote. Indeed, he’s getting the positioning so accurate that he’s worried about to which eye he’s projecting the illusion. Clearly, it’s time for a revamp.
So here’s the formula: find a brilliant old hack, and notice if it was hampered by the state of technology back when it was done. Update this using modern conveniences, and voila! You might just find that you can take the idea further, simply because you have more tools in your toolbox. Nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants.
But beware! Time isn’t sitting still for you either. As soon as you make your killer 3D vision hack, VR goggles will become cheap and ubiquitous. So get it done today, before your hack becomes inspiration for the future.
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
! | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617665",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2023-03-19T01:36:59",
"content": "Not sure how to feel about this … I still use a note2 (12? Years old now, android 12l though:p) as my daily driver. My desktop is a motherboard with a 790 and chipset, I think 13 years on that. CPU is newe... | 1,760,372,364.035764 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/18/meet-the-new-moteus-bldc-controller-board-the-n1/ | Meet The New Moteus BLDC Controller Board, The N1 | Chris Lott | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"BLDC controller",
"mjbots",
"moteus"
] | [Josh] over at mjbots just released a
new version of the moteus controller board, dubbed the
moteus-n1
. One change is that the volume and footprint size has been reduced. Considering many people, [Josh] included, use these controllers to operate robotic dogs, smaller is better. The previous moteus controller maxed out at 44 V, but the n1 can run at up to 54 V, allowing use of 48 V power supplies. And [Josh] improved the interface circuitry, making it much more flexible than before. This comes at an increased price, but he sells both versions — parts availability permitting. And like the previous versions of the moteus controller, this is an open source project and you’re free to build it yourself. You can check out the complete design package at the
project’s GitHub repository
.
One helpful point is that the firmware for the n1 is the same, it simply enables new features related to the I/O ports. This means a user could swap in a new controller with no impact to their system. Maintaining firmware compatibility was just one of the challenges [Josh] faced along the way. Squeezing additional functionality into the small number of user-exposed I/O pins was a chore, but dealing with supply chain issues was a big headache:
…make a revision that leveraged the parts I had, along with ensuring that the parts I needed were achievable to purchase in a reasonable time frame. Some parts orders for this batch were placed nearly a year ago.
Check out moteus if you need a brushless servo controller. We covered
the previous major upgrade last year
, which was primarily firmware and interface focused. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6617118",
"author": "FU",
"timestamp": "2023-03-18T12:56:39",
"content": "Quite the rabbit hole, if you missed it, and nothing else here takes your interest:https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/automate-your-life-with-node-red-plus-a-dash-of-mqtt/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,372,364.213796 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/hackaday-podcast-210-living-in-the-future-flipper-mayhem-and-samsung-moons-the-world/ | Hackaday Podcast 210: Living In The Future, Flipper Mayhem, And Samsung Moons The World | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams is joined this week by newly minted Development Editor (and definitely not brother) Al Williams to bring you the weekly highlights from our little corner of the Internet. Between the rapidly approaching deadline for the Low-Power Challenge to Samsung creating a fake Moon with artificial intelligence, there’s plenty in the news to get this episode started. From there, the Williams plural discuss using a webcam for cheap virtual reality thrills, an impressive expansion for the Flipper Zero, and whether or not finding a bug in the Nintendo DSi browser counts as retrocomputing. Stick around to hear about the fascinating work Joshua Vasquez has been doing with DIY light guide plates, and Arya Voronova’s deep-dive into PCI-Express.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download, download, download
!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 210 Show Notes:
News:
2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [Tjørnild] for knowing what Tom’s radiator sounds like!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
AI And Savvy Marketing Create Dubious Moon Photos
Is The IPhone Camera Too Smart? Or Not Smart Enough?
Hacking Sony Alpha for clean HDMI / waxy skin workaround – YouTube
Immersive Virtual Reality From The Humble Webcam
Flipper Zero Mayhem Hat Adds Camera, More Radios
A Love Letter To The Sphere Computer
Breaking Into The Nintendo DSi Through The (Browser) Window
Dangling pointer – Wikipedia
The USB Protocol, Explained
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Building The Sanni Cartridge Reader To Back Up And Restore Games And Saves
A Pi Calculating Pi For Pi Day
Solar Powered Split Wireless Mechanical Keyboard
Al’s Picks:
A Fancy Connected Caliper For Not A Lot
A Retro-Style Trainer For Motorola’s 1-Bit Chip
Hack Your Heathkit To Trace MOSFET Curves
Can’t-Miss Articles:
A Hacker’s Introduction To DIY Light Guide Plates
PCIe For Hackers: The Diffpair Prelude | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616169",
"author": "Tom Nardi",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T16:54:30",
"content": "For those who might need some context, here is the noisemaker in question:",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6616175",
"author": "Elliot Wi... | 1,760,372,364.266913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/creating-gifs-for-the-channels-between-channels/ | Creating GIFs For The Channels Between Channels | Matthew Carlson | [
"classic hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"analog tv",
"composite video",
"ESP32"
] | In the United States, analog TV broadcasting officially ended in 2009. While the transition wasn’t without hiccups, we did lose something along the way. For [Emily Velasco], she misses the channels between channels — where an analog TV isn’t quite tuned right and the image is smeared and distorted. A recent bug in one of her projects led to her trying to
recreate the experience of the in-between on a CRT
.
One of [Emily]’s
other projects
involved generating composite video signals from an ESP32 microcontroller. While experimenting with adding color to the output signal, the image came out incredibly scrambled. She had made an error in the stride, which smeared the image across the screen. This immediately brought back memories of old analog TV sets. A quick potentiometer allowed her to control the stride error and she wrote some code to break the GIF up into discrete bitmaps for display since the GFX library handles GIFs differently than static images. Next up was vertical hold, which was accomplished by shifting the Y coordinates. With some help from [Roger], there was now
a handy GIF library
that would draw GIFs line by line with the composite video effects.
She used a Goldbeam portable CRT, soldered the tuning potentiometer to the ESP32, and set up 10 different GIFs to act as “channels” with space in between. It’s a fun and quirky idea, which is exactly the
sort of thing [Emily] has been encouraging people to do
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616106",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T15:41:25",
"content": "I love the look and implementation of this, from repurposing old hardware to the design of the video and its 1980’s late night advertising feel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,372,363.93334 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/this-week-in-security-kali-purple-malicious-notifications-and-cybersecurity-strategy/ | This Week In Security: Kali Purple, Malicious Notifications, And Cybersecurity Strategy | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Kali",
"Outlook",
"This Week in Security"
] | After a one-week hiatus, we’re back. It’s been a busy couple weeks, and up first is the release of
Kali Purple
. This new tool from Kali Linux is billed as an SOC-in-a-box, that follows the NIST CSF structure. That is a veritable alphabet soup of abbreviated jargon, so let’s break this down a bit. First up, SOC IAB or SOC-in-a-box is integrated software for a Security Operation Center. It’s intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, data analysis, automated system accounting and vulnerability scanning, and more. Think a control room with multiple monitors showing graphs based on current traffic, a list of protected machines, and log analysis on demand.
NIST CSF is guidance published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a US government agency that does quite a bit of the formal ratification of cryptography and other security standards. CSF is the CyberSecurity Framework, which among other things, breaks cybersecurity into five tasks: identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. The framework doesn’t map perfectly to the complexities of security, but it’s what we have to work with, and Kali Purple is tailor-made for that framework.
Putting that aside, what Purple really gives you is a set of defensive and analytical tools that rival the offensive tools in the main Kali distro. Suricata, Arkime, Elastic, and more are easily deployed. The one trick that really seems to be missing is the ability to deploy Kali Purple as the edge router/firewall. The Purple deployment docs suggest an OPNSense deployment for the purpose. Regardless, it’s sure to be worthwhile to watch the ongoing development of Kali Purple.
Notification of Doom
It’s amazing the “features” that lie dormant in popular software, until discovered as vulnerabilities. Did you know that Microsoft Outlook had a property that defined the sound file that should play when an email triggered a reminder? That seems like a problem on its own. An arbitrary audio file is bad enough. But what makes this misfeature a vulnerability is the fact that the filename could be a remote path. So send an email,
trigger a remote server access
.
That access happens when the email is received, regardless of other security settings. It’s a pretty simple way to hijack a remote authentication, and gives away a
shadow credential
. That’s a technique where a KeyCredentialLink is slipped into the connection stream, and serves as a credential for authorization.
The fix for this issue, tracked as CVE-2023-23397, shipped on the 14th. Microsoft also
published a script
to clean those problematic emails. No word on whether this completely removes the custom sound feature completely, or just blocks outside file sources. This one is apparently being exploited in the wild, so get it patched.
Speaking of flaws being exploited, Google’s Threat Analysys Group
discovered another Windows issue
, where the SmartScreen warning can be bypassed. Windows sets a flag on downloaded files, the Mark of the Web (MotW), and warns the user that the file is from the internet and may be dangerous. Trusted developers can sign their installers and avoid the warning. CVE-2023-24880 is a technique where the signature on malicious MSI files is malformed, and the processing error leads to a bypass of the SmartScreen warning. This is being used in the Magniber ransomware campaign, and has been fixed in this month’s Patch Tuesday.
And for more Microsoft goodness, there’s
CVE-2023-23415
, a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in ICMP packets. It’s yet another case of packet fragments embedded in ICMPs causing problems. The
caveat
is that to be vulnerable, the machine has to have a process listening on a raw socket, and that machine also be accessible to ICMP packets. There isn’t a public exploit yet, and the PoC seems to cause crash rather than an RCE. Still, this is one to take a close look at.
The Government Will Fix It
The US Government has rolled out a
National Cybersecurity Strategy
(PDF)
that’s sure to end ransomware, make everything secure, and — OK, maybe that’s a bit too much sarcasm. But the idea of a government policy to fix security is a bit scary. Among the proposed solutions are: liability for companies that ship insecure software, continuing the push for quantum-resistant cryptography, and pushing for better IPv6 rollout. It seems likely that one of those three ideas will actually have a positive outcome on security. I’ll leave the rest of the analysis to others, like Robert Graham, who sums the whole document up nicely, “Safen up!”
It's like Homer Simpson trying to appear effective as "safety inspector" who sees his jobs as telling everyone to "safen up!".
pic.twitter.com/Uoe0ljRw7q
— Robᵉʳᵗ Graham💰 @erratarob@infosec.exchange (@ErrataRob)
March 2, 2023
And
the EU is getting in on the game
, too. The headlining change here is to apply cybersecurity regulation to pure software. Does that include Open Source Software? Will the Linux kernel fall under those security guidelines? Nobody knows yet. Similar to software licenses, laws don’t have objective meaning until they’re tested in a courtroom.
Now don’t misunderstand, there are some great elements to both of these documents. The EU guidelines are going to require vulnerability disclosures, a published disclosure policy, and a contact address for vulnerability reporting. How many times have we covered stories about a researcher that struggles to get the attention of a big company, in order to report security findings? But even the good-sounding parts can be dangerous to mandate. Automatic updates are great, but there are some of my systems that I really don’t want to automatically pull firmware from the Internet. A “secure by default configuration” sounds good, but there’s a set of real trade-offs in any solution to the problem of secure initial setup. Pseudo-randomized passwords for every device sounds great, until the formula leaks for deriving the default password from the MAC address.
In the words of the G-Man himself, “prepare for unforeseen consequences.”
Github’s Insecure Security Advisory
Github is on a bit of a feature binge, and while there’s some great new tools in the mix, there is also
the occasional bug that makes it through
. Like this one, in Github’s Security Advisories, where an unprivileged user can report a vulnerability. Making that report automatically makes the reporter a collaborator, which can be great for getting things fixed. The problem was that this outside reporter was allowed to access the project’s Codespace, which is another new Github feature, for rapid iteration and testing.
Codespace comes with its own project environment variables, some of which can be secrets. Think AWS tokens, or access to a gerrit or Jenkins instance. Researchers from Ophinion Security noticed the loophole, and took the logical next step — hacking the Github internal repositories, via a user token for
gh-containers-bot
. That definitely did the trick, and the issue got fixed in 24 hours
Bits and Bytes
Ring
has been hit with a ransomware attack, maybe
. And like such attacks of big companies go these days, the attackers, ALPHV, are threatening to dump private data. The only problem is that Ring claims point-blank that they haven’t been breached. But there’s enough evidence to say that ALPHV has *something*, and Ring claims that it was a third-party vendor that was breached. We’ll see if and when data starts leaking.
There’s
a vulnerability in Home Assistant
that affects Home Assistant AS and Supervised installs. It’s an authentication bypass in the Supervisor API, and looks to have been in the code since 2017. This is a
CVSS 10.0
, and while there is not yet any evidence of exploitation, if your Home Assistant install is exposed to the internet, your hair might just be on fire.
The GoAnywhere vulnerability
just keeps going, as Rubrik
is the latest to get caught by the vulnerability. The issue was disclosed earlier this year, and Clop has claimed credit for hitting over a hundred locations with the flaw. Rubrik is the latest high-profile firm to feel the pain, but this vulnerability really seems to have legs.
And finally, falling into the so-clever-it’s-silly category, malware for SonicWall appliances has
a clever mechanism for surviving firmware updates
. Namely, the infection checks for an official update, downloads it, and pre-installs itself into the new software package. So when the user or automated process finally triggers the install, the fix is already in. Devilishly clever. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616414",
"author": "william payne (@william45994166)",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T21:35:02",
"content": "Adding more code going to solve computer security?The National Security Agency software guidelines in the 1980 specified that nobinaries shall be in their apps system other than ... | 1,760,372,364.120622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/virgin-orbit-pauses-operations-seeks-funding/ | Virgin Orbit Pauses Operations, Seeks Funding | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"commercial space",
"LauncherOne",
"low earth orbit",
"SmallSat",
"Virgin Galactic",
"Virgin Orbit"
] | It looks as though things may have gone from bad to worse at Virgin Orbit, the satellite carrying spin-off of Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic. After a disappointing launch failure earlier in the year,
CNBC is now reporting the company will halt operations and furlough most employees
for at least a week as it seeks new funding.
It’s no secret that company has struggled to find its footing since it was formed in 2017. On paper, it was an obvious venture — Virgin Galactic already had the White Knight Two carrier aircraft and put plenty of R&D into air-launched rockets, it would simply be a matter of swapping the crewed SpaceShipTwo vehicle for the LauncherOne orbital booster. But upgrades to the rocket eventually made it too large for the existing carrier aircraft, so the company instead purchased a
Boeing 747 and modified it to lift their two-stage rocket
out of the thick lower atmosphere.
Despite reshuffling plans and other setbacks, Virgin Orbit managed to put four payloads into low-Earth orbit since their first successful launch in 2021. Unfortunately, they’ve been unable to achieve the sort of launch cadence necessary to remain competitive in the market. For comparison
Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket
, arguably LauncherOne’s closest peer in terms of price and capability, performed 16 successful launches in the same time period.
Still, Virgin Orbit hoped to carve out a niche for themselves by being able to launch payloads from the United Kingdom, specifically from the newly-christened Spaceport Cornwall. The UK Space Agency, eager to establish a domestic launch capability, even picked up the bill for improvements to the Spaceport in anticipation of Virgin Orbit using it as a base of operations. The January 9th launch marked the first orbital flight ever attempted from British soil,
making its failure all the more stinging
.
Even in the increasingly competitive “smallsat” market, there’s demand for the unique capabilities offered by Virgin Orbit’s air-launch approach. If they can steer their way through this crisis and increase their launch rate, there’s undoubtedly a steady revenue stream ahead of them. But given the operational struggles that have plagued all of Virgin’s space aspirations, we’d say there’s good reason to be concerned about the future of the fledgling company. | 6 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615995",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T13:26:17",
"content": "Someone else had pointed out that it appears that Richard Branson ticked off “go to space” from his bucket list and thus abandoned the company.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,364.166624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/17/fish-tank-dosing-pump-built-using-pi-pico/ | Fish Tank Dosing Pump Built Using Pi Pico | Lewin Day | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"dosing pump",
"fish",
"fish tank",
"peristaltic pump",
"pump"
] | When you’re maintaining a fish tank, it’s actually quite important to get all your basic chemistry right. Mismanage things, and you’ll kill all the helpful bacteria in the tank, or kill your fish when things get too alkaline or too acidic. To help him get things just right,
[yojoebosolo] built a custom dosing pump to maintain his fishtank.
The pumps themselves are small peristaltic pumps sourced from AliExpress. They can be had for under $10 if you look hard enough. Two of these are assembled into a PLA housing. Meanwhile, the brains of the operation is a Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s charged with running the pumps to a regular schedule, ensuring that just the right amount of chemicals are delivered when they are needed. It delivers 2 mL of Kalkwasser solution into [yojoebosolo’s] reef tank every ten minutes. The pumps are switched on and off with a simple 5V relay.
If you’ve got a delicate and complex fish tank that demands only the best, building your own dosing pump may be the way to go. Off-the-shelf versions can be expensive, after all, so sometimes it makes sense to
roll your own.
Video after the break. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616021",
"author": "Notsrry",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T13:58:40",
"content": "calcium hydroxide you mean",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6616077",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T15:02:22",
"content": "As ... | 1,760,372,364.077175 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/coffee-grinder-gets-bluetooth-weighing/ | Coffee Grinder Gets Bluetooth Weighing | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"app inventor",
"coffee grinder",
"load cell"
] | Some people take their coffee grinding seriously. So what do you do when the hot new grinders automatically weigh coffee, and yours doesn’t? Well, if you are like [Tech Dregs] and the rest of us, you
hack your existing grinder
, of course. The link is to the source code, but for a quick overview, check out the video below.
In true hacker fashion, the first order of business was to pull a load cell out of a cheap scale. Originally, he intended to reuse the processor inside, too, but it was epoxied, so it was a good excuse to use some more modules. A load cell amplifier, an OLED display, and a tiny Xiao processor, which he describes as “ridiculous.” From the context, we think he means ridiculously small in the physical sense and ridiculously powerful for such a tiny board.
With the modules, the wiring wasn’t too hard, but you still need some kind of app. Thanks to App Inventor, an Android app was a matter of gluing some blocks together in a GUI. Of course, the devil is in the details, and it took a lot of “focused cursing” to get everything working correctly.
The coffee grinder has a relay to turn the motor on and off, so that’s the point the scale needs to turn the motor on and off. Conveniently, the grinder’s PCB had an unpopulated pin header for just this purpose.
This is one of those simple projects you can use daily if you drink coffee. We are always impressed that the infrastructure exists today and that you can throw something like this together in very little time without much trouble.
WiFi hacking coffee makers
is a popular Java project in these parts. Upgrading a machine can get pretty serious with
PID control loops
and more. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6616188",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T17:18:08",
"content": "“Some people take their coffee grinding seriously”Then there are the monsters and degenerates.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6617129",
"aut... | 1,760,372,363.978628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/8086-multiply-algorithm-gets-reverse-engineered/ | 8086 Multiply Algorithm Gets Reverse Engineered | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"8086",
"cpu",
"Intel 8086",
"microcode"
] | The 8086 has been around since 1978, so it’s pretty well understood. As the namesake of the prevalent x86 architecture, it’s often studied by those looking to learn more about microprocessors in general. To this end, [Ken Shirriff]
set about reverse engineering the 8086’s multiplication algorithm.
[Ken]’s efforts were achieved by using die photos of the 8086 chip. Taken under a microscope, they can be used to map out the various functional blocks of the microprocessor. The multiplication algorithm can be nutted out by looking at the arithmetic/logic unit, or ALU. However, it’s also important to understand the role that microcode plays, too. Even as far back as 1978, designers were using microcode to simplify the control logic used in microprocessors.
[Ken] breaks down his investigation into manageable chunks, exploring how the chip achieves both 8-bit and 16-bit multiplication in detail. He covers how the numbers make their way through various instructions and registers to come out with the right result in the end.
It’s a fun look at what’s going on at the ground level in a chip that’s been around since before the personal computer revolution. For any budding chip designers, it’s a great academic exercise to follow along at home. If you’ve been doing your own
digging deep into CPU architectures
, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615552",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T02:14:27",
"content": "Now lets compare it to a V20/V30",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6615554",
"author": "Slincolne",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T02:18:38",
"... | 1,760,372,364.374924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/wooden-itx-pc-case-smacks-of-sophistication/ | Wooden ITX PC Case Smacks Of Sophistication | Matthew Carlson | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"itx",
"MiniITX",
"woodworking"
] | Computer cases have come a long way from the ugly beige boxes of the early 2000s. Still, if it was going to sit on his desk, [MXC Builds] wanted something with a little more class. His
custom Ironbark ITX PC
seems to fit the aesthetic nicely.
The case’s outer shell is ironbark wood cut at 45 degrees and joined for a beautiful waterfall edge (the wood grain seems to flow uninterrupted). The power supply was heavily modified to take a thinner but larger fan, and a new cover and intake grill were 3D printed. As there were no mounting holes on the bottom of the power supply, he printed a bracket with spring clips to hold the PSU securely. Next, he routed a PCI riser cable to the other side of the internal panel so the GPU could mount on the back. He cut custom cables to match up the lengths needed for every run. Finally, rather than placing the power button on the front or top, it was on the side in a custom bracket.
It’s an absolutely gorgeous build that packs some respectable hardware in a tiny space (7.9 L or ~482 in
3
). The use of 3D printed parts and careful planning results in an incredibly tidy computer that most would proudly display on their desk. It is an open-air case, and if you’re looking for something a little more enclosed, perhaps this
mid-century PC might whet your appetite
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615249",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T08:56:36",
"content": "Mitred. The expression you need is “mitred”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6615262",
"author": "sjw",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T10:49:48",
... | 1,760,372,364.323664 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/raspberry-pi-adds-second-laptop-monitor/ | Raspberry Pi Adds Second Laptop Monitor | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"virtual monitor"
] | If you have a cheap laptop and you realize you can’t connect a second monitor to it, what do you do? Well, if you are [Pierre Couy], you grab a Raspberry Pi and put together
a virtual screen solution
.
Like all good projects, this one started with some goals and requirements:
Low latency
Redable text
At least 10 frames per second
Fast catch up if the remote screen falls behind
Low-bitrate encoding; no hardware acceleration
A DHCP server on the Pi to manage the network
Power control for the attached monitor
Since Linux has such flexibility, it was possible to stitch the system together using existing components. The versatile ffmpeg handled the streaming. There was, however, a fair amount of troubleshooting necessary to track down some issues using Wireshark.
If you want to try something like this yourself, the files are on
GitHub
. Honestly, though, the best part of this project is seeing how the tools interact and the troubleshooting steps. For most laptops, this isn’t necessary and that’s obviously the best solution.
If you have the opposite problem of wanting to stream the Pi’s video over the network, you can do that or just
leverage X11
. Then again, if you have a Pi,
do you even need the laptop
? | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615217",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T05:15:32",
"content": "Pretty sure there’s a kernel module since 5.13 to do this over USB:https://github.com/notro/gud/wikiBut over Ethernet has its own advantages, of course.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,364.53086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/unconventional-computing-laboratory-grows-its-own-electronics/ | Unconventional Computing Laboratory Grows Its Own Electronics | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"electronics",
"fungi",
"fungus",
"mushroom",
"myceliotronics",
"mycelium"
] | While some might say we’re living in a cyberpunk future already, one technology that’s conspicuously absent is wetware. The Unconventional Computing Laboratory is
working to change that
.
Previous work with slime molds has shown useful for spatial and network optimization, but mycelial networks add the feature of electrical spikes similar to those found in neurons, opening up the possibility of digital computing applications. While the work is still in its early stages, the researchers have already shown how to
create logic gates
with these fantastic fungi.
Long-term, lead researcher [Andrew Adamatzky] says, “We can say I’m planning to make a brain from mushrooms.” That goal is quite awhile away, but using wetware to build low power, self-repairing fungi devices of lower complexity seems like it might not be too far away. We think this might be applicable to environmental sensing applications since biological systems are likely to be sensitive to many of the same contaminants we humans care about.
We’ve seen a other efforts in myceliotronics, including
biodegradable PCB substrates
and attempts to
send sensor signals through a mycelial network
.
Via
Tom’s Hardware
. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615204",
"author": "philosiraptor117",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T03:31:08",
"content": "fungal math!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6615208",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T04:09:06",
"content": "Wel... | 1,760,372,364.923928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/e-paper-wall-paper/ | E-Paper Wall Paper | Matthew Carlson | [
"Art",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"8051",
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"e-paper display",
"SEM9110",
"ZBS243",
"zigbee"
] | Just like the clock clock of old, there’s something magical about a giant wall of smaller pieces working together to make a larger version of that thing. The
E-Paper Wall 2.0
by [Aaron Christophel] is no exception as it has now upgraded from 2.9″ to 7.4″ screens.
On the 1.0 version, the bezels made it harder to make out the image. The larger screens still have bezels but the larger screen area makes it much easier to make out the image. 3D-printed clips hold the displays onto a plywood backer. We can marvel that e-ink price tags brought the price of e-ink down so that building a wall is still expensive but not eye-wateringly so. The 5×9 array likely uses a module sold on DigiKey for $47 each.
So aside from being willing to drop some money on a custom piece of art, what’s special about this? The real magic comes with the firmware and tooling that [Aaron] developed to flash custom firmware onto each of the 45 displays. A 100MHz ZBS243/SEM9110 8051-based controller lives inside each display and [Aaron] even has a
Ghidra plugin
to reverse-engineer the existing firmware. It only has 64kb of flash onboard, so [Aaron] devised a clever compression technique that enabled him to store complex images on the displays. A 3D-printed jig with pogo pins means flashing them doesn’t require soldering pins or headers, just drop it on and flash it with an Arduino
with a helpful library [Aaron] wrote
. A
central station
communicates with the various displays over ZigBee to send image updates.
The 8051 has a funny way of showing up in projects like
this portable soldering iron
or
the TV Guardian
. In many ways, it is a boon for us hackers as it makes it easier to reverse engineer and write new custom firmware when so many devices use the same architecture. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615182",
"author": "Victor Martelli",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T00:11:02",
"content": "I plan to build one of these as soon as my bank allows me to withdraw my savings. Meanwhile, a new Samsung 65″ Class 4K Crystal UHD LED TV will get me through these dark days for well under $500... | 1,760,372,365.444746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/spin-up-to-speed-with-this-stroboscope/ | Spin Up To Speed With This Stroboscope | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"ATtiny1614",
"duty-cycle",
"frequency",
"led",
"pwm",
"stroboscope",
"timing",
"timing light"
] | A stroboscope is not the most common tool, and while they can be purchased fairly inexpensively from various online stores, they are straightforward enough tools that plenty of us could build our own mostly from parts laying around. The basic idea is to shine a flashing light on a spinning object, and when it appears stationary the stroboscope will indicate the rotational speed. There are a few specialty parts that might not be in everyone’s parts drawers, though, and [John]
shows us the ins-and-outs of his own DIY stroboscope
.
The effect relies on extremely precise timing, and as such the most important part of a build like this is making sure to get the LED circuitry correct so its duty cycle and frequency can be tightly controlled. [John] is using a PT4115E driver board for the LED, and is using it to power a 1W white LED which also includes its own heat sink and lens. The controls for the stroboscope are handled by an ATtiny1614 microcontroller which shows its pulse rate on a small screen. The user can control the rate the LED flashes with simple controls, and when the spinning object appears to come to a stop the only thing left to do is read this value off of the screen.
While it might seem like an overly niche tool, stroboscopes have plenty of day-to-day uses. Older cars that used a central distributor made use of a specialty stroboscope called a timing light in order to properly advance the ignition timing of the engine. They also retain some use in medical applications, and plenty of older readers may be familiar with their use adjusting the speed on record players. They can also be used to make sure the
shutter speeds on cameras are calibrated correctly
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615140",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T21:14:44",
"content": "Kinda neat that the PT4115 constant-current driver will apparently go fast enough for this to work, with its 2 us rise/fall time and minimum pulse width of 10 us (the maker uses a leisurely 200 us pulse widt... | 1,760,372,364.816014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/voice-without-sound/ | Voice Without Sound | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"alexa",
"machine learning",
"neural network",
"recognition",
"speech",
"voice"
] | Voice recognition is becoming more and more common, but anyone who’s ever used a smart device can attest that they aren’t exactly fool-proof. They can activate seemingly at random, don’t activate when called or, most annoyingly, completely fail to understand the voice commands. Thankfully, researchers from the University of Tokyo are looking to improve the performance of devices like these by attempting to use them without any spoken voice at all.
The project is called SottoVoce
and uses an ultrasound imaging probe placed under the user’s jaw to detect internal movements in the speaker’s larynx. The imaging generated from the probe is fed into a series of neural networks, trained with hundreds of speech patterns from the researchers themselves. The neural networks then piece together the likely sounds being made and generate an audio waveform which is played to an unmodified Alexa device. Obviously a few improvements would need to be made to the ultrasonic imaging device to make this usable in real-world situations, but it is interesting from a research perspective nonetheless.
The
research paper with all the details is also available
(PDF warning). It’s an intriguing approach to improving the performance or quality of voice especially in situations where the voice may be muffled, non-existent, or overlaid with a lot of background noise. Machine learning like this seems to be one of the more powerful tools for improving speech recognition, as we saw with
this robot that can walk across town and order food for you using voice commands only
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615101",
"author": "dlcarrier",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T18:44:33",
"content": "The Enders Game series had these, as well as tablet computers. Now all we need is faster-than-light communications and relativistic travel speeds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,372,365.050499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/retrotechtacular-military-graphics-in-the-1960s/ | Retrotechtacular: Military Graphics In The 1960s | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrocomputing",
"Retrotechtacular",
"Slider"
] | [
"MOBIDIC",
"Retrotechtacluar"
] | While you might think the military doesn’t have a sense of humor with names. Take the
AN/MSQ-19
“automated tactical operations central” for example. (Video, embedded below.) But then, when you find out that the truck-sized computer at the heart of it was MOBIDIC — yes, that’s pronounced Moby Dick — you know someone had a good chuckle somewhere. The video below was a promotional video from the early 1960s, and although it shows the unit in operation, it was most likely a mockup and not fully functional.
The MOBIDIC program ran from 1960-1964 and cost a whopping $25 million in 1960-era money. In 1964, testing revealed the system was too unwieldy, requiring at least five tractor-trailers, eight generators, portable buildings, and several large trucks to move around.
Graphical Output?
We doubt the system could have been very reliable, either. It relied on a Rube Golbergesque system to record and file transparencies that were projected on maps. These transparencies were stored in some sort of automatic filing system and carried around in pneumatic tubes. No kidding, watch the video. You can’t make this stuff up.
A
1966 report from an Army research lab
discusses using parts of AN/MSQ-19 in a laboratory, so at least some of the high-tech equipment did find a home. The designers of the system weren’t wrong, they were just a little early and needed better graphics capabilities along with smaller computers. The MOBIDIC weighed about 12,000 pounds, although at least the “B” version used by this project did have dual CPUs! There was a unique input device called a Grafton which was sort of like a modern digitizer. Sort of.
MOBIDIC
The MOBIDIC was built late in the 1950s as part of a larger Army strategy to computerize. You can watch a video about the solid-state computer in the second video below. It even includes a contemporary film about the computer. The base machine had 32,000 transistors, 6,000 diodes, and 311,200 bits of magnetic core. That’s less than 40 kB, to save you the math, and the narrator on the Army’s film calls that a “huge memory.” Perhaps he was really referring to the giant tape drives, which could hold about 10 MB. Not huge by today’s standards, of course, but still.
The trailer/computer had six tape drives, several cabinets for memory with space reserved for future upgrades, and an air conditioner. With power and extra equipment, there were actually four trailers together. There were several variants of these computers produced, and some saw actual use, particularly in Germany. The National Bureau of Standards bought the MOBIDIC-B used in this system and you can
read about its retirement
in 1973.
They Simply Fade Away
Sylvania, the MOBIDIC’s developer, also produced the 9400, a commercial variant of the machine. What was it like to program? Well, you used
BASICPAC
, which didn’t look at all like BASIC, if you were wondering.
Looking back over the 60-some-odd years between this system and our modern computers, you could choose to be amused at how primitive the systems were. Or, you can stand in awe that people could look at this new technology and see what could be possible, even if they weren’t quite able to get there right away. | 28 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615105",
"author": "Ken de AC3DH",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T19:08:42",
"content": "From someone who still works in this field, we are still working on these requirements… The Army is always looking for something better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,364.882989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/replacing-a-clock-ics-battery/ | Replacing A Clock IC’s Battery | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"DS12885",
"DS12887",
"real time clock battery"
] | You can find a lot of strange things inside IC packages. For example, the Dallas DS12885 and DS12887 real time clock “chips” were available in a large package with an internal battery. The problem, of course, is that batteries die. [New Old Computer Show] wanted to restore a machine that used one of these devices and
was able to repair the device
. You can see two videos below. In the first video, he replaces both the battery and adds an external oscillator which would be necessary for the DS12885. However, he actually had the DS12887, which has an internal oscillator, something the second video explains.
The repair used a PCB he ordered from
Tindie
. However, the board is only part of the problem. You also need to disconnect the dead battery which requires a Dremel and a steady hand.
The board fits on top of the IC — technically, it is more of a module than an IC — and solders to some contacts exposed by the Dremel surgery. It looks like a hack, but then that’s the way we like it.
In the second video, he uses clear nail polish to protect the exposed wires. Someone in the comments mentioned liquid electrical tape, but we might have been tempted to just coat it with hot glue or — if we didn’t want to take it apart — epoxy. | 23 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615479",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2023-03-17T00:01:35",
"content": "I did this some years back just with a carving knife since my Dremel had broken, sloppily soldered a couple wires and a cr2032 holder. Rather…inconvenient when it’s still soldered to the board lol.",
"pa... | 1,760,372,364.997337 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/taking-apart-ikeas-latest-air-quality-sensor/ | Taking Apart IKEA’s Latest Air Quality Sensor | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"air quality sensor",
"ikea",
"particle sensor",
"VINDSTYRKA",
"zigbee"
] | Whether it’s because they’re concerned about worsening pollution or the now endemic variants of COVID-19, a whole lot of people have found themselves in the market for a home air quality monitor thee last couple of years. IKEA noted this trend awhile back, and released the VINDRIKTNING sensor to capitalize on the trend.
The device must have sold pretty well, because last month the Swedish flat-packer unveiled the considerably more capable (and more expensive) VINDSTYRKA.
Now thanks to the efforts of [Oleksii Kutuzov]
we’ve got a fantastic teardown of the new gadget, and some more information on the improvements IKEA made over its predecessor.
Certainly the most obvious upgrade is the addition of an LCD readout that displays temperature, humidity, and how many particulates the device detected in the air. There’s even a “traffic light” colored indicator to show at a glance how bad your air supply is. The other big change is the addition of wireless, though unlike the
WiFi hacks we saw for the VINDRIKTNING
, this built-in capability uses Zigbee and is designed to plug into IKEA’s own home automation ecosystem.
Speaking of those hacks, a
GitHub user by the name of [MaartenL] chimes
in to say they’ve managed to hook an ESP32 up to test pads on the VINDSTYRKA motherboard, allowing the parasitic microcontroller to read the device’s sensors and report their data on the network over a service like MQTT, without impacting the sensor’s normal operations.
This is how the first hacks on the older VINDRIKTNING
were pulled off, so sounds like a promising start.
But even if you aren’t looking to modify the device from its original configuration (how did you find this website?), it seems pretty clear the VINDSTYRKA is a well-built piece of kit that will serve you and your family well. Which is more than what could be said for
some of the cheapo environmental sensors flooding the market
.
Thanks to [killergeek] for the tip. | 30 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615395",
"author": "Martin",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T20:45:05",
"content": "This sensor is a normal Zigbee device and works without IKEA’s own home automation ecosystem. Naturally. It is already supported by Zigbee2MQTT. So there is no need to modify it to get the readings via MQT... | 1,760,372,365.140067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/robot-hand-looks-and-acts-like-the-real-thing/ | Robot Hand Looks And Acts Like The Real Thing | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"artificial muscle",
"hydraulics",
"robotic hand"
] | Throughout history, visions of the future included human-looking robots. These days we have plenty of robots, but they don’t look like people. They look like disembodied arms, cars, and over-sized hockey pucks concealing a vacuum cleaner. Of course there’s still demand for humanoid robots like Commander Data, but there are many challenges: eyes, legs, skin, and hands. A company known as Clone may have the solution for that last item. The
Clone Hand
is “the most human-level musculoskeletal hand in the world,” according to the company’s website.
The 0.75 kg hand and forearm offer 24 degrees of freedom and two hours of battery life. It sports 37 muscles and carbon fiber bones. The muscle fibers can cycle over 650,000 times. You can watch the hand in action in the video below.
There is a hydraulic pump that the company likens in size to a human heart. The hand can also sense for feedback purposes. If you want to build your own, you’ll have to figure it out yourself. The Clone Hand is proprietary, but it does show what is in the art of the possible. The company claims they cost under $3,000, but it isn’t clear if that’s their cost or a projected future retail price.
Of course, human hands aren’t
always the perfect robot manipulator
. But when you need a realistic hand, you really need it. We see a lot of
attempts at realistic hands
, and we have to say they are getting better. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615367",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T18:40:01",
"content": "It looks like a person who’s suffering from cramps induced by a TENS machine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6615370",
"author": "MmmDee",
"tim... | 1,760,372,365.329283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/hackaday-berlin-final-schedule-last-call-for-tickets-and-more/ | Hackaday Berlin: Final Schedule, Last Call For Tickets, And More | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"Bring A Hack",
"Hackaday Berlin",
"Hackaday Berlin 2023",
"lightning talks"
] | Hackaday Berlin is just about a week away, and we’ve just put the finishing touches on our preparations. And that includes
a snazzy landing page
, the full schedule, details on the Friday night meetup, and more.
We’ll be meeting up Friday the 24th at 19:00 at DogTap / Brew Dog, Im Marienpark 23 for an ice breaker. This is a great time to unwind from your travels, catch up with old friends, and start getting into gear for the days ahead.
Saturday the 25th starts off at 9:30, you’ll get your badge and schwag bag, and have some breakfast. Then it’s talks, workshops, lightning talks, badge hacking, food and music until the wee hours.
Sunday morning starts up again at 11:00, but it’ll feel like 10:00 due to Daylight Savings time. We’ll have brunch, show off whatever cool hacks you’ve brought along, and just generally chill out into the afternoon. Some people are planning to go sightseeing around Berlin afterwards, so if that’s your thing, you’re in good company.
For any chat related to Hackaday Berlin, we have a not-so-cryptically named #Berlin channel over on
the Hackaday Discord server
.
There are still a few tickets left, so you procrastinators,
now’s your time to snap them up
. All the rest of you, put those finishing touches on whatever you’re bringing with you, and we’ll see you next week!
(Oh, and press the play button on the landing page.) | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615393",
"author": "Mary",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T20:41:02",
"content": "For those of us nowhere near Berlin, and perhaps even in timezones where Berlin daytime isn’t convenient for us, how do we watch all the lecture videos AFTER the conference at convenient time schedules. Stil... | 1,760,372,365.176828 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/dobsonian-telescope-adds-plate-solver/ | Dobsonian Telescope Adds Plate Solver | Bryan Cockfield | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"alt-azimuth",
"dobsonian",
"plate solver",
"raspberry pi",
"telescope"
] | The amateur astronomy world got a tremendous boost during the 1960s when John Dobson invented what is now called the Dobsonian telescope. Made from commonly-sourced materials and mechanically much simpler than what was otherwise available at the time, the telescope dramatically reduced the barrier to entry for larger telescopes and also made them much more portable and inexpensive.
For all their perks, though, a major downside is increased complexity when building automatic tracking systems. [brickbots] went a different way when solving this problem, though:
a plate solver
.
Plate solving is a method by which the telescope’s field of view is compared to known star charts to determine what it’s currently looking at. Using a Raspberry Pi at the center of the build, the camera module pointed at the sky lets the small computer know exactly what it’s looking at, and the GPS system adds precise location data as well for a quick plate solving solution. A red-tinted screen finishes out the build and lets [brickbots] know exactly what the telescope is pointed towards at all times.
While this doesn’t fully automate or control the telescope like a tracking system would do, it’s much simpler to build a plate solver in this situation. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to star hop with a telescope like this, though; alt-azimuth mounted telescopes like Dobsonians just need some extra equipment to get this job done. Here’s an example which
controls a similar alt-azimuth telescope
using an ESP32 and a few rotary encoders. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615318",
"author": "PupuPipi",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T15:44:07",
"content": "Great read!This has me thinking, what would be the opposite of a plate solver? Like an automated version of low-tech “guided by stars positioning system”. There probably has been at least one hacker out ... | 1,760,372,365.401035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/the-x-macro-a-historic-preprocessor-hack/ | The X Macro: A Historic Preprocessor Hack | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"preprocessor",
"x macro"
] | If we told you that a C preprocessor hack dated back to 1968, you’d be within your rights to remind us that C didn’t exist in 1968. However, assemblers with preprocessors did, and where there is a preprocessor, there is an opportunity to do clever things. One of those things is the so-called X macro, which saw a lot of use in DEC System 10 code but probably dates back even earlier. You can still use it today if you like, even though there are, of course, other arguably better ways to get the same result. However, the
X
macro can be very efficient, and you may well run into it in some code, too.
Background
Preprocessing used to be a staple of programming. The idea is that code is manipulated purely at the text level before it is compiled. These days, languages with a preprocessor usually handle it as part of the compiler, but you can also use an external preprocessor like m4 for more sophisticated uses.
Modern languages tend to provide other ways to accomplish many of the tasks handled by the preprocessor. For example, if you have a constant you want to set at compile time, you could say:
int X = 32;
y = X;
But then you’ve created a real variable along with the overhead that might entail. A smart compiler might optimize it away for you, but you can be sure by writing:
#define X 32
y = X;
A modern compiler would prefer you to write:
const int X=32;
y = X;
But there are still some common uses for macros, like including header files. You can also make more sophisticated macros with arguments so you don’t incur a function call penalty, although modern usage would be to mark those functions as inline.
The Problem
Which brings us to the X macro. With all great hacks, there is first a problem to solve. Imagine you have a bunch of electronic parts you want to deal with in your code. You don’t want a database, and you don’t want to carry a bunch of strings around, so you define an enumerated type:
enum parts { part_LM7805, part_NE555 }; // will add more later
Of course, you will eventually want to print them, so you do need to store the names somewhere, right?
const char *partnames = { "LM7805", "NE555" }; // will add more later
This is all fine until you add a new part like, say, a 2N2222. You must remember to update both the enumerated type and the string or havoc will ensue. This seems easy until you realize that you might define the enumerated type in a header file but only define the string array in a source file. It is easy to get them out of sync.
The Hack
The idea is to define a macro that handles all the definitions of parts in one place:
#define PARTS \
X(part_LM7805,"LM7805") \
X(part_NE555,"NE555")
Now when you declare the enum and the string array (which may not be in the same file, remember):
#define X(a,b) a,
enum parts { PARTS };
#undef X
#define X(a,b) b,
const char *partnames= { PARTS };
#undef X
If you carefully read the code, you can see how it works. The
PARTS
macro defines a list of items using the
X
macro. Before using the list, you define
X
to “select’ one of the pieces. The first
#define
makes X() return its first argument, and the second
#define
, the second. Because these preprocessor macros run before the code is interpreted, this causes the preprocessor to write the same code as in the original example. The advantage is that the ID and the name are joined together in the text which makes it harder to forget to add or update one when making changes.
Even Better
Using modern C preprocessor syntax, we can do even better by using token pasting and the stringize operator.
Here’s a quick tutorial if you haven’t encountered these oddball preprocessor operators. The stringize operator
#
converts whatever you put after it into a quoted string. The token pasting operator
##
joins two tokens into one token. So:
#define print(str) printf("%s\n", #str);
#define declare(type, prefix, var) type prefix##var;
declare(int,global_,v);
print(Hello!);
Not that either of these are a good idea, mind you. But you can see that the
declare
macro will define an integer called
global_v
and the
print
macro will print the token that follows it as a string.
Consider this:
#include <stdio.h>
#define PARTS \
X( LM7805, 0.20 ) \
X( NE555, 0.09 ) \
X( 2N2222, 0.03 )
// create enum
#define X(a, b) part_##a,
enum parts { PARTS };
#undef X
//create string table
#define X(a, b) #a,
const char *partnames[]={ PARTS };
#undef X
// create price table
#define X(a, b) b,
float partprice[]= { PARTS };
#undef X
int main()
{
enum parts p=part_NE555;
printf("%s costs %0.2f\n", partnames[p], partprice[p]);
printf("%s costs %0.2f\n", partnames[part_2N2222], partprice[part_2N2222]);
return 0;
}
Here, we define a table of parts and prices. (Made up prices, to be sure.) The enumerated type uses
part_##a
to create things like part_NE555. The string table uses
#a
to get a string “NE555” into the source code. Finally, the price table uses
b
.
Simple, yet effective. Sure, you could use a structure or an object to help. There are also plenty of other ways you could deal with this in the preprocessor. For example, you could define everything in one file and use
#if
to select what parts of it are included in different parts of the code. Regardless, the
X
macro is an elegant hack and it does solve the problem and has been since at least 1968.
The preprocessor can do some pretty amazing things. For example, we’ve
built a cross assembler
using it. We’ve even seen people do logic gate
simulations in the preprocessor
. | 45 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615289",
"author": "steelman",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T14:18:26",
"content": "#define X=32Should be#define X 32",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6615323",
"author": "g",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T15:53:31",
... | 1,760,372,365.532295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/16/laser-and-webcam-team-up-for-micron-resolution-flatness-measurements/ | Laser And Webcam Team Up For Micron-Resolution Flatness Measurements | Dan Maloney | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"CCD",
"cnc",
"flatness",
"gantry",
"image sensor",
"laser",
"linear bearing",
"micron",
"surface"
] | When you want to measure the length, breadth, or depth of an object, there are plenty of instruments for the job. You can start with a tape measure, move up to calipers if you need more precision, or maybe even a micrometer if it’s a really critical dimension. But what if you want to know how flat something is? Is there something other than a straightedge and an eyeball for assessing the flatness of a surface?
As it turns out, there is:
a $15 webcam and a cheap laser level will do the job
, along with some homebrew software and a little bit of patience. At least that’s what [Bryan Howard] came up with to help him assess the flatness of the gantry he fabricated for a large CNC machine he’s working on.
The gantry arm is built from steel tubing, a commodity product with plenty of dimensional variability. To measure the microscopic hills and valleys over the length of the beam, [Bryan] mounted a lens-less webcam to a block of metal. A cheap laser level is set up to skim over the top of the beam and shine across the camera’s image sensor.
On a laptop, images of the beam are converted into an intensity profile whose peak is located by a Gaussian curve fit. The location of the peak on the sensor is recorded at various points along the surface, leading to a map of the microscopic hills and valleys along the beam.
As seen in the video after the break, [Bryan]’s results from such a quick-and-dirty setup are impressive. Despite some wobblies in the laser beam thanks to its auto-leveling mechanism, he was able to scan the entire length of the beam, which looks like it’s more than a meter long, and measure the flatness with a resolution of a couple of microns. Spoiler alert: the beam needs some work. But now [Bryan] knows just where to scrape and shim the surface and by how much, which is a whole lot better than guessing. | 36 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615280",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-03-16T13:20:22",
"content": "I guess you’re really trusting the quality of that cylindrical lens in the laser. How would you verify *it* is good and correct?I’ve got a similar setup that uses a molded glass lens, and it’s frankly garba... | 1,760,372,365.92365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/take-a-ride-through-the-development-of-a-custom-bldc-motor-controller/ | Take A Ride Through The Development Of A Custom BLDC Motor Controller | Abe Connelly | [
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"BLDC",
"BLDC controller",
"bldc motor",
"brushless esc",
"MOSFETS",
"open source hardware",
"stm32"
] | The folks over at the [Barkhausen Institut] are doing research into controlling autonomous fleets of RC cars and had been using off the shelf electronic speed controllers (ESCs) to control the car motors. Unfortunately they required more reliable feedback for closed loop control of the motors, so they created their own
open source hardware brushless DC (BLDC) controller
.
The motor controller they developed uses an STM32 microcontroller that talks to a TMC6140 3 phase MOSFET driver to drive 6 IRLR 2905 MOSFETs. The [Barkhausen Institut] researchers went with the
SimpleFOC
library as the basis to program the STM32, with installed hall effect sensors indicating motor orientation for their closed loop control.
Designing a functioning BLDC and ESC controllers can be subtle, and their post goes into details about the problems and solutions they came up with to deal with with what was ultimately improper isolation of the MOSFETs interfering with the power rail for the STM32. The source for their BLDC motor controller is available through their
GitLab page
. For more information on the parent project that uses the BLDC driver, be sure to check out their work on a
connected convoy of RC cars
.
There’s now a wealth of open source BLDC drivers and projects, many of which we’ve featured in the past, like the
Moteus
and
haptic smart knob
, and it’s nice to see other projects explore different options. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615073",
"author": "Jared",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T16:53:51",
"content": "I’ve been interested in building my own BLDC controller just to become more familiar with the concepts… but if you are building a product I’m unsure why you wouldn’t go for an existing IC likehttps://www.mo... | 1,760,372,365.649251 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/review-xhdata-d-219-short-wave-radio-receiver/ | Review: XHDATA D-219 Short Wave Radio Receiver | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Radio Hacks",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"radio",
"sdr",
"Silicon Labs",
"swl",
"XHDATA"
] | As any radio amateur will tell you, the world of radio abounds with exciting possibilities. Probably the simplest pursuit of them all is that of the SWL, or short wave listener, who scours the airwaves in search of interesting stations. SWLs will often have fully-featured setups with high-end general-coverage communications receivers and tuned antenna arrays, but it can start with the cheapest of radios at its bottom end. Such a radio is the subject of this review, the
XHDATA D-219
is a miniature portable receiver that costs under ten dollars, yet is currently the talk of the town in SWL circles. This interest is in no small amount due to its being an especially low-price way to get your hands on a shortwave radio using one of the SIlicon Labs integrated software-defind radio receiver chips. We don’t often review a consumer radio here at Hackaday, but with an avid eye for unexpected gems at the cheaper end of the market this one’s worth a second look.
What Do You Get For Your Tenner?
This form factor is very typical for cheap “world band” radios.
I ordered my D-219 from the XHDATA website, spending about £10 including the postage from China. The usual wait ensued before the package landed on my doormat, and inside was the radio in its box with an instruction leaflet. It’s a small unit about 135 mm x 75 mm x 30 mm, and it follows closely the form factor of other similar radios.
On the top is the extensible antenna with an on-off switch and sockets for headphone and 5 V power, on the side are side-on knobs for tuning and volume, while on the front is the speaker and old-style multi-band tuning display.
On the back is a flip-up stand and a hatch for a pair of AA cells. There’s a band switch covering AM, nine different shortwave bands from 4.75 MHz to 22 MHz, the east Asian FM band from 64 MHz to 87 MHz, and the international FM band from 87 MHz to 108 MHz. The tuning indicator is very old-school, a vertical bar that moves across a frequency scale with the tuning knob.
There’s not much to a radio using one of these chips.
Opening it up, and it’s immediately obvious how simple the DSP chip makes a radio like this. Where once you’d have seen a board covered in analogue circuitry taking up most of the space, now aside from the AM ferrite rod antenna there’s a board about a third the size of the case, behind the tuning display. Carefully lifting this up reveals the circuitry, all surface-mount, with a
Silicon Labs Si4825
single-chip DSP radio, and a Shaoxing Silicore D2882 audio amplifier being the only integrated circuits.
How Does It Compare To Older Cheap Radios?
It seems crazy to give an SDR an analogue interface using an ADC, but you can’t deny it works.
The Silicon Labs single-chip radios are nothing new, having been on the market for over a decade. They come in a wide variety of versions for different applications and control methods, with the Si4825 being one of the lower-end versions. In keeping with its traditional analogue interface it doesn’t have any digital controls, instead it achieves both tuning and band switching by means of voltage. A switched voltage divider selects the band, while a variable resistor serves as the tuning control. Some of the higher-spec chips in the series allow the insertion of DSP code to demodulate for example SSB signals, but this one remains firmly stuck with AM, and FM on the two VHF bands. Inserting some batteries and turning it on, and there were the usual dial-full of FM stations. The real action though lies in the shortwave bands, so that was where I headed next. And immediately I had in my headphones a world of stations, and while
the shortwave bands have seen a decline
since I first listened to them back in the 1980s, there were still enough for me to quickly identify stations from the far east, north America, the Arabic-speaking world, and from eastern Europe.
Compare this traditional receiver with the SDR block diagram above. Chetvorno,
CC0
.
When evaluating a small portable shortwave radio like this one it’s important to understand a little about how such radios have traditionally worked. My other older cheap radio with a few shortwave bands is a more conventional model, it has a tuning capacitor that controls both an input tuned circuit and an oscillator. The oscillator is set 455 kHz away from the desired station, and the signal from the antenna is mixed with it to create a so-called intermediate frequency, the difference between the two at 455 kHz. This is then fed into an IF amplifier tuned to 455 kHz from which the audio can be demodulated.
It has two major shortcomings, first that 455 kHz isn’t enough distance from the receive frequency in a cheap shortwave radio, and second that the bandwidth of that 455 kHz amplifier is quite wide. The first leaves the possibility of receiving whatever is on the sum of the oscillator and 455 kHz alongside its difference, while the second sets the slice of spectrum that you are listening wide enough that more than one station can be heard at once. More expensive traditional receivers like my workhorse 1980s Lowe solve this by using a much larger frequency difference than 455 kHz and some expensive filter components to reduce that bandwidth, but you would certainly find neither in a ten dollar radio. The experience of short wave listening on a very cheap radio has thus always been rather dismal. Tuning is difficult, and there is lots of interference and breakthrough from other stations.
How Good is It And Should You Buy It?
A radio based on one of these Silicon Labs chips immediately solves both of the problems from the previous paragraph due to its software-defined architecture: it has no IF offset to worry about, and it replaces the need for those expensive filters by means of signal processing in its software. Thus the effect is much more similar to that of a receiver with one of those expensive IF filters: there’s little or no breakthrough from all those adjacent stations, and tuning becomes much easier. It also seems as though the demodulator is better than its analogue equivalent, returning even weak signals in a much clearer form. How much of this is my imagination and how much DSP tricks I can’t tell you, but the radio certainly delivers.
To sum up the D-219 then, it’s a good little radio that gives good results for a pocket-money price, and I can see why the SWL community are rather excited about it. It will never equal a high-end general coverage receiver with a well-implemented antenna array and even the Silicon Labs SDR chip is not new, but for the price of a couple of pints of beer it’s a no-brainer and a diamond in the rough. | 112 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6615034",
"author": "Stephen Walters",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T14:43:39",
"content": "Save your money, and build your own. You will learn more and it is more satisfying.I decide recently, not purchase a lot of this read-made ewaste. Especially as there is good chance that it might ... | 1,760,372,365.837547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/the-international-space-station-is-always-up-there/ | The International Space Station Is Always Up There | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Space"
] | [
"3d printed",
"ESP32",
"Feather",
"international space station",
"iss",
"programming",
"tracker"
] | Thanks to its high orbital inclination, the International Space Station (ISS) eventually passes over most inhabited parts of the Earth. Like other artificial satellites, though, it’s typically only visible overhead during passes at sunrise and sunset. If you’d like to have an idea of where it is beyond the times that it’s directly visible,
take a look at this tabletop ISS tracking system
created by [dpelgrift].
The tracker uses an Adafruit Feather inside its enclosure along with a Featherwing ESP32 WiFi co-processor. Together they direct a 3D printed rocket-shaped pointing device up and down by way of a SG90 micro-servo, while a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor provides rotation.
This setup allows it to take in all of the information required to calculate the Station’s current position. The device uses the current latitude and longitude, as well as its compass heading, and combines that with data pulled off the net to calculate which direction it should be pointing.
While it might seem like a novelty or programming challenge, this project could be useful for plenty of people who just want to keep track so they know when to run outside and see the Station pass by, or even by those who use the radio repeater aboard the ISS. The repeater on the ISS and plenty of other satellites are available to amateur radio operators for long-distance VHF and UHF communication
like we’ve seen in projects like these
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614975",
"author": "Klaws",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T11:26:53",
"content": "WTF?“THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION IS ALWAYS UP THERE”No, it’s not. The pedestal actually shows the correct position even if the ISS is down there.Then again, perhaps the pedestal is just another gadget f... | 1,760,372,365.603464 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/15/a-smart-home-that-can-do-it-all/ | A Smart Home That CAN Do It All | Matthew Carlson | [
"home hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"CAN",
"home automation",
"pi pico",
"raspberry pi home automation"
] | In an ideal smart home, the explosion of cheap WiFi and Bluetooth chips has allowed hundreds of small wireless devices to control the switches, lights, and everything else required for a “smart home” at a relatively low price. But what if you don’t want hundreds of internet-connected devices in your home polluting the wireless spectrum and allowing potential security holes into your network? If you’re like [Lucas Teske], you might reach for something
wired and use cheap and (currently) available Raspberry Pi Picos to create PicoHome
.
The unique twist of PicoHome is that it uses a CAN bus for communication. One of [Lucas’] goals was to make the boards easily swappable when hardware failed. This meant board-to-board communication and protocols like I2C were susceptible to noise (every time a relay triggered, the bus would lock up briefly). The CAN bus is designed to work in an electrically noisy environment.
There are two parts to the system: pico-relay and pico-input. The first connects to a 16 relay board and can control 16 different 24v relays. The second has 16 optoisolators to read from 12v-24v switches and various buttons throughout the house. These can be placed in a giant metal box in a central wiring location and not worry about it.
The
firmware
and
board files
are all released under an Apache 2.0 license, but the
CAN2040
library this project relies on is under GPL. We
covered the CAN2040 library
when it was first released, and it’s lovely to see it being used for something entirely unexpected. | 41 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614955",
"author": "Gambrius",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T09:26:10",
"content": "Nice work done, but I am not sure if it is worth the effort.There is a well known and long time established standard called KNX, where these kind of modules can be procured from several independent manuf... | 1,760,372,366.112508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/14/a-pi-calculating-pi-for-pi-day/ | A Pi Calculating Pi For Pi Day | Dan Maloney | [
"Art"
] | [
"Pi",
"Pi day",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | What is it about pi that we humans — at least some of us — find so endlessly fascinating? Maybe that’s just it — it’s endless, an eternal march of digits that tempts us with the thought that if we just calculate one more digit, something interesting will happen. Spoiler alert: it never does.
That doesn’t stop people from trying, of course, especially when “Pi Day” rolls around on March 14 every day — with apologies to the DD/MM set, of course. This year, [Cristiano Monteiro] commemorated the day with
this Pi-based eternal pi calculator
. The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi Pico board, which does double duty thanks to its two cores. One core is devoted to running the pi calculation routine, while the other takes care of updating the seven-segment LED display with the last eight calculated digits. Since the calculation takes increasingly more time the farther into pi it gets, [Cristiano] thoughtfully included a 1-Hz heartbeat indicator, to assure users that the display isn’t frozen; the video below shows how slow the display gets even just a few seconds after starting up, so it’s a welcome addition.
This is actually [Cristiano]’s second go at a Pi Day pi calculator;
last year’s effort
was a decidedly tactical breadboard build, and only supported a four-digit display. We applaud the upgrades, and if anyone wants to replicate the build, [Cristiano] has posted
his code
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614912",
"author": "MmmDee",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T06:09:13",
"content": "Arggh, we don’t get to see the first 8 decimal digits… very cool, I was obsessed with pi in high school and once had it memorized to about 100 digits. But that was many brain cells ago.",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,372,366.028025 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/14/mice-play-in-vr/ | Mice Play In VR | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"behavior",
"cornell",
"display",
"mice",
"mouse",
"neuroscience",
"raspberry pi",
"research",
"spi",
"virtual reality",
"vr"
] | Virtual Reality always seemed like a technology just out of reach, much like nuclear fusion, the flying car, or Linux on the desktop. It seems to be gaining steam in the last five years or so, though, with successful video games from a number of companies as well as plenty of other virtual reality adjacent technology that seems to be picking up steam as well like augmented reality. Another sign that this technology might be here to stay is
this virtual reality headset made for mice
.
These aren’t any ordinary pets out to take a pleasant jaunt through VR, though. These are lab mice from Cornell University that are helping to study various various aspects of neuroscience and behavior. The tiny headset is based on a Raspberry Pi and uses two small SPI-based displays with special lenses chosen and mounted specifically for a mouse’s field-of-view. The mouse will run on a Styrofoam ball that is attached to a separate set of sensors that can measure aspects of its motion.
While the project is still a work in progress, it’s an interesting solution to what would otherwise be a difficult problem to solve when studying mice in a laboratory setting. The team responsible for this effort has made their project available to the public as well and is asking for some help developing it, which can be found at
the project’s GitHub page
. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen rodents interacting with a virtual world, either. Who could forget
this cryptocurrency-trading hamster
? | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614902",
"author": "harry",
"timestamp": "2023-03-15T04:49:35",
"content": "Fusion, flying cars, desktop linux and VR are not in the same category. Fusion has been “20 years away” for >60 years – it should work but they haven’t worked out how yet, flying cars are already possible b... | 1,760,372,365.975306 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/14/solar-powered-split-wireless-mechanically-keyboard/ | Solar Powered Split Wireless Mechanical Keyboard | Matthew Carlson | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed mechanical keyboard",
"adjustable keyboard",
"mechanical keyboard",
"solar power",
"split keyboard"
] | When thinking about a perfect keyboard, some of us have a veritable laundry list: split, hot-swapping, wireless, 3d printed, encoders, and a custom layout. The
Aloidia keyboard
by [Nguyen Vincent] has all that and more.
One of the first things to notice is a row of solar panels on the top, which trickle charge the keyboard. The keyboard uses 65uA in idle and 30uA when in a deep sleep. With the solar panels providing anywhere between 600-1200uAh a day, the battery should last a year and a half under even harsh conditions. The encoders were specially chosen to reduce pull-up power consumption. Given the focus on power and the lack of wires between the halves, you might wonder how the connection to the computer is handled. Does one-half handle the connection and use more power? The answer is that both talk to a dongle based around an nRF52840. This lets the keyboard halves idle most of the time and enables the dongle to handle the expensive communications to the host PC.
Instead of an e-paper screen in the top left, [Nguyen] placed a Sharp memory display. The 3D-printed case is stunning, with no visible screws on the top and tenting feet on the bottom. The two halves snap together very satisfactorily with the power of magnets (the printed palm rests also magnetically attach). Overall it is an incredibly well-thought-out keyboard with all sorts of bells and whistles.
There are project logs with detail to dig into and more videos and photos. We love a good keyboard journey
like this one that went for a more ergonomic shape
that meant more custom wiring.
Schematics are up on hackaday.io in the files section—video after the break.
Thanks [Shantanu] for the tip! | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614859",
"author": "Myself",
"timestamp": "2023-03-14T23:25:50",
"content": "This…… this may be the sexiest thing I have ever seen.Absolutely exquisite in every detail. I aspire for any of my own projects to be so well executed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,372,366.182143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/13/the-curious-etymology-of-the-elements/ | The Curious Etymology Of The Elements | Jenny List | [
"Interest",
"Science"
] | [
"Chemistry",
"etymology",
"language",
"lexicography"
] | It’s not often that the worlds of lexicography and technology collide, but in a video by the etymologist [RobWords] we may have found a rare example. In a fascinating 16-minute video
he takes us through the origins of the names you’ll find in the periodic table
. Here’s a word video you don’t have to be on the staff of a dictionary to appreciate!
Etymology is a fascinating study, in which the scholar must disentangle folk etymologies and mistaken homophones to find the true root of a word. Fortunately in the case of most elements they bear a name bestowed on them by the scientists who discovered them, so their etymologies are rarely in dispute.
The etymologies split neatly into categories, with among them such distinctions as Latin or Greek descriptions, places including the Swedish village of
Ytterby
which has more elements named after it than anywhere else, elements named for mythological figures, and those named for people.
He artfully skates over the distinction between aluminium and a curiously similar metal the Americans call aluminum, because etymologists are used to deflecting controversy when language differences colour, or even
color
, people’s emotions. Thank you,
Noah Webster
!
It’s an entertaining diversion for anyone with a love of both science and of language, and should remind us that the study of language has just as much scientific rigour in its research as any of those elements.
Cupcake periodic table: Science History Institute,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 34 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614627",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2023-03-14T09:00:29",
"content": "Aluminum.Can we really trust a nation that lost a global empire to bureaucratic decay to dictate the correct pronunciation of a word? Have you been to Hackney? Two out of three words are gibberish… even t... | 1,760,372,366.262285 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/13/building-a-communications-grid-with-loratype/ | Building A Communications Grid With LoRaType | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"chat",
"commuications",
"e-paper",
"LoRa",
"mesh",
"network",
"off grid",
"radio",
"text"
] | Almost all of modern society is built around various infrastructure, whether that’s for electricity, water and sewer, transportation, or even communication. These vast networks aren’t immune from failure though, and at least as far as communication goes, plenty will reach for a radio of some sort to communicate when Internet or phone services are lacking. It turns out that certain LoRa devices are excellent for local communication as well, and this system known as LoraType looks to create
off-grid text-based communications networks wherever they might be needed
.
The project is based around the ESP32 platform with an E22 LoRa module built-in to allow it to operate within its UHF bands. It also includes a USB-based battery charger for its small battery, an e-paper display module to display the text messages without consuming too much power, and a keyboard layout for quickly typing messages. The device firmware lets it be largely automated; it will seek out other devices on the local mesh network automatically and the user can immediately begin communicating with other devices on that network as soon as it connects.
There are a few other upsides of using a device like this. Since it doesn’t require any existing communications infrastructure to function, it can be used wherever there are no other easy options, such as in the wilderness, during civil unrest where the common infrastructure has been shut down, or simply for local groups which do not have access to cell networks or Internet. LoRa is a powerful tool for these use cases, and it’s even possible to
network together larger base stations
to extend the range of devices like these. | 33 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614556",
"author": "whatevenisthis",
"timestamp": "2023-03-14T02:05:37",
"content": "“We have gone through several important stages of product development, which is very important.”Did they have ChatGPT write their github page ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,372,366.431762 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/13/the-nixie-clock-from-outer-space/ | The Nixie Clock From Outer Space | Al Williams | [
"clock hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"apollo",
"CuriousMarc",
"nixie clock"
] | Nixie clocks are nothing new. But [CuriousMarc] has one with a unique pedigree: the Apollo Program. While restoring the Apollo’s Central Timing Equipment box, [Marc] decided to
throw together a nixie-based clock
. The avionics unit in question sent timing pulses and a mission elapsed time signal to the rest of the spacecraft. Oddly enough, while it had an internal oscillator, it was only used during failures. It normally synched to the guidance computer’s onboard clock.
There is a detailed explanation of the unit, along with some of the ancillary equipment and panels. Much of what the output from the unit is driving counters to display timers, although some of the clocks drive other pieces of equipment, like the telemetry commutator, which time stamps each telemetry frame.
[Marc] reminds us of an archeologist employing X-rays and other tools to examine the rare hardware. Some of the connectors are very strange these days, too, and require some custom boards. The nixie clock depends on an old HP counter. The counter had an output that sends the BCD digits visible on the display. [Marc] intercepted the connections there and allowed the connector to receive the digits instead of sending them.
The modification involved removing some buffer ICs and replacing them with sockets. If you plug the original ICs in, the counter works as before. If you plug in a special substitute board, you can use the counter as an externally-driven nixie display.
We’ve been following [Marc’s]
exploration of the Apollo gear
for some time. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen
an old counter
used in a clock project, either. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,366.469137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/13/low-power-challenge-lcd-solar-creatures-live-on-sunlight-sleep-at-night/ | Low Power Challenge: LCD Solar Creatures Live On Sunlight, Sleep At Night | Robin Kearey | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"game of life",
"lcd"
] | With all those e-paper based projects doing the rounds these days, including in our Low Power Challenge, you’d almost forget that monochrome LCDs were the original ultra-low-power display. Without them, we wouldn’t have had watches, calculators and handheld games operating off button cell batteries or tiny solar panels back in the ’80s and ’90s. [Gabor] decided to build a set of gadgets with a 1990s LCD aesthetic, called
LCD Solar Creatures
. These cute little beasts live on nothing but solar power and provide some amusing animations on a classic seven-segment LCD screen.
The Creatures’ activity depends entirely on the amount of power that’s available to them. If their supercapacitors dip below 3.3 V, their micros enter a deep sleep state and do nothing except briefly flash an LED every now and then as a sign of life. When light hits the solar panel, the supercaps are charged up and the Creatures come to life and display a few basic stats. Once the caps hit 4.1 V, they really start their day and run a few programs, including a
Game of Life
-style simulation and an animation of Euclidean rhythms.
The Creatures come in two shapes: low and sleek, or tall and proud,
Even in active mode, the complete system uses just 11.4 micro-amps – enough to run completely off the 30×70 mm
2
solar panel. The charge circuitry is deliberately kept as simple as possible with just a pair of diodes to prevent the solar panel from overcharging the caps in bright light or discharging them in darkness. The ATtiny85 that runs the show is powered through a 3.3 V LDO and measures the capacitors’ voltage through a 1 MOhm resistive divider.
The Creatures’ bodies are made from pieces of laser-cut acrylic, further adding to the 1990s vibe. Monochrome LCDs might seem old-fashioned, but they’re perfect for low-power projects like this, or, say,
making your own wristwatch
. Nowadays you can even
design your own LCDs and have them professionally made
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614483",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2023-03-13T21:21:29",
"content": "Those solar led garden spikes seem like a good doner for a power supply. If coupled with a super capacitor, they could be charged relatively quickly. They can charge a relatively low capacity AA size cell.... | 1,760,372,366.524207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/13/hacking-skis-rules-and-friendships/ | Hacking Skis, Rules, And Friendships | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bindings",
"birkebeiner",
"cross country",
"rules",
"ski",
"skis",
"tandem"
] | The American
Birkebeiner is the second largest cross-country skiing race in the world and is quite a big deal within that sport. At 55 kilometers it’s not a short event, either, requiring a significant amount of training to even complete, let alone perform well enough to be competitive. Around a decade ago, friends [Joe] and [Chris] ran afoul of the rules when [Joe] accidentally won the race wearing [Chris]’s assigned entry number, a technicality that resulted in both being banned from the race for two years. Now they’re back, having learned their lesson,
and are strictly adhering to those rules this time using these tandem cross-country skis
.
The idea for this build was to make sure they could both compete in the race and win because they’d compete in a category no one enters, mostly because it effectively didn’t exist before these two invented it. This required a custom set of skis, but since ski manufacturers don’t typically make skis for two people, they had to get creative. The duo picked up the longest pair of skis they could find at their local ski shop, moving the bindings forward on the skis to make room for the second set of bindings that were added to the back.
This presented a few unique challenges, the first of which is that cross-country skis typically use a special material on the bottom of the skis which grabs the snow to make uphill travel possible, and with the wider distribution of weight this material wasn’t functioning at peak efficiency. The other problem was the stress on the bindings caused by two riders, especially during a crash. This eventually resulted in a broken binding while [Joe] and [Chris] were training. They then upgraded to a more modern pair of skis rated for a single 269-pound rider, had the bindings fitted for two riders, and added a special grip tape over the larger area on the bottom of the ski.
After four months of training and getting in sync, the two were ready for the race. The results are covered in a second video linked below, and while neither of them won the overall race this time, they did finish the event with in-tact skis, first in the new “tandem” class, and completely within the bounds of the strict rules of the race as well. Although winter is winding down in the northern hemisphere, for any of our southern friends looking for some other things to do with an old set of skis for the upcoming winter season,
take a look at this sled
which adapts some alpine skis to achieve some extremely high speeds. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614488",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2023-03-13T21:30:15",
"content": "If they persisted with this, at least in traditional non-skate-ski categories, they could possibly do very well. Tandem bicycles in largely flat races are measurably faster than singles, and even i... | 1,760,372,366.580138 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/13/supercon-2022-irak-mayer-builds-self-sustainable-outdoor-iot-devices/ | Supercon 2022: Irak Mayer Builds Self-Sustainable Outdoor IoT Devices | Dave Rowntree | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"Slider"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"energy",
"ESP32",
"INA219",
"internet of things",
"LC709203f",
"solar power",
"turbine",
"water power",
"wind power"
] | [Irak Mayer] has been exploring IoT applications for use with remote monitoring of irrigation control systems. As you would expect, the biggest challenges for moving data from the middle of a field to the home or office are with connectivity and power. Obviously, the further away from urbanization you get, the sparser both these aspects become, and the greater the challenge.
[Irak] solves his connectivity problem by assuming there is some WiFi network within range, building a system around the Blues Wireless WiFi note card. Substituting their cellular card would be an option for applications out of WiFi range, but presumably without changing too much on the system and software side of things. Leveraging the Adafruit FeatherWing
INA219,
which is a bidirectional current sensor with an I
2
C interface, for both the power generation and system consumption measurements. For control, [Irak] is using an Adafruit ESP32 board, but says little more about the hardware. On the software side, [Irak] is using the
Blues Wireless NoteHub
for the initial connection, which then routes the collected data onto the
Adafruit IoT platform
for collation purposes. The final part of the hardware is a LiPo battery which is on standby to soak up any excess power available from the energy harvesting. This is monitored by an
LC709203f battery fuel gauge
.
The idea of the project is to explore how much energy can be harvested from the water flow, using turbines taking a little energy from the flow. It was quickly noted that when the system connects to the WiFi network there is a large spike in power usage, which quickly overwhelms the turbine under test, and the battery is needed to take up the slack until the power draw drops enough. Connecting more turbines in parallel (electrically) did as you would expect, and provided more power to the system. [Irak] discovered that it was perfectly feasible to simply run without a battery, as the turbines alone were sufficient to get the system up and running, sending out data. With no water flow, there was no data flow, which is also diagnostically useful.
In the final parts of the talk, [Irak] touches upon the use of solar panels and also wind turbines as options for providing power, which could all be used in conjunction to provide power when any one power source is not providing enough on its own. For example, solar panels produce little power on a cloudy day, but if the wind happens to be blowing instead, then that may be enough to keep the data flowing.
None of these concepts are new, but the combination of multiple off-grid power sources combined with easily accessible hardware and open source software certainly builds the groundwork for some powerful applications out there,
in the field
.
The range of applications for IoT technology is incalculable, but we’ve seen a few over the years. Like this
IoT-connected water butt
, and another one
monitoring soil moisture levels
, with a plan to expand to the larger scale. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614486",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-03-13T21:23:04",
"content": "Hasn’t this basically been dealt with by LoRaWAN?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6614680",
"author": "Max S.",
"timestamp": "2023-03-14T12:33... | 1,760,372,366.624075 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/13/modded-see-n-say-teaches-the-sounds-of-city-life/ | Modded See ‘N Say Teaches The Sounds Of City Life | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"adafruit",
"I2S",
"See n' Say",
"toy",
"vintage"
] | The Fisher-Price See ‘n Say was introduced back in 1964, and since then has helped teach countless children the different sounds made by farm animals. But what about our urban youth? If they’re going to navigate a concrete jungle, why not prepare them to identify the sound of a jackhammer or the chime that plays before an announcement goes out over the subway’s PA system?
That’s the idea behind this
hacked See ‘n Say [John Park] put together for Adafruit
. Now we should note up front that no vintage toys were sacrificed during the production of this gadget — it seems Fisher-Price (predictably) dropped the tiny record player these toys used to use for a cheap electronic board sometime in the 90s. A quick check with everyone’s favorite A-to-Z megacorp shows you can pick up one of these new-school models for around $25 USD.
The modern electronic version of the toy is easy to mod.
Cracking open the electronic version of the See ‘n Say reveals a circular PCB with a series of membrane buttons that are pressed by the mechanics of the spinning pointer. As it so happens, there are handy test points next to each of these buttons, which makes it simple to wire up to a microcontroller.
In this case, it’s Adafruit’s KB2040, which is connected to a MAX98357A amplifier board over I2S. A small boost converter module is used to wring 5 volts out of the toy’s pair of AA batteries. The original speaker is repurposed, though [John] adds a physical power switch to keep the boost converter from flattening the alkaline batteries when not in use.
On the software side, all you’ve got to do is load the MCU with your sounds and write a bit of code that associates them with the button being pressed on the PCB. [John] gets his city sounds from
Freesound
, a community-maintained database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds, and provides the CircuitPython code necessary to tie everything together.
The last step is the artwork. For this project, [Brian Kesinger] provided some swanky vintage-looking imagery that perfectly fits the See ‘n Say style. The art is available under the NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license, so you’re free to use it in your own version. Though naturally, that assumes you’ve decided to use the same sounds as [John] — the beauty of this project is that you could easily load it up with
whatever sounds you’d like Hacker Junior to learn
. Possibly a
well-known Australian YouTuber
?
If anyone feels inclined to build a Hackaday-themed See ‘n Say based on this project,
we’ve love to see it
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614364",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2023-03-13T15:52:11",
"content": "“The mugger says” …..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6614420",
"author": "Dj Biohazard",
"timestamp": "2023-03-13T18:28:19",
... | 1,760,372,366.800195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/03/14/pocket-sized-thermal-imager/ | Pocket-Sized Thermal Imager | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"ESP32",
"flir",
"Imaging",
"MLX90640",
"pocket",
"small",
"stm32",
"Thermal"
] | Just as the gold standard for multimeters and other instrumentation likely comes in a yellow package of some sort, there is a similar household name for thermal imaging. But, if they’re known for anything other than the highest quality thermal cameras, it’s excessively high price. There are other options around but if you want to make sure that the finished product has some sort of quality control
you might want to consider building your own thermal imaging device
like [Ruslan] has done here.
The pocket-sized thermal camera is built around a MLX90640 sensor from Melexis which can be obtained on its own, but can also be paired with an STM32F446 board with a USB connection in order to easily connect it to a computer. For that, [Ruslan] paired it with an ESP32 board with a companion screen, so that the entire package could be assembled together with a battery and still maintain its sleek shape. The data coming from the thermal imagining sensor does need some post-processing in order to display useful images, but this is well within the capabilities of the STM32 and ESP32.
With an operating time on battery of over eight hours and a weight under 100 grams, this could be just the thing for someone looking for a thermal camera who doesn’t want to give up an arm and a leg to one of the industry giants. If you’re looking for something even simpler, we’ve seen
a thermal camera based on a Raspberry Pi that delivers its images over the network
instead of on its own screen. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6614818",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2023-03-14T20:25:32",
"content": "A problem I’ve noticed with my cheap low-resolution thermal camera is that its design makes it easy to miss small hotspots. The way the image is interpolated over the screen might lead you to believe tha... | 1,760,372,366.737915 |
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