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https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/openstructures-is-a-modular-building-system-for-the-reprap-age/ | OpenStructures Is A Modular Building System For The RepRap Age | Navarre Bartz | [
"hardware",
"Parts"
] | [
"grid beam",
"modular",
"modular design",
"modular hardware",
"OpenStructures"
] | Modular construction toys like LEGO and Meccano are great for prototyping, but they aren’t so great for large builds.
OpenStructures
promises to be a modular building system for projects large and small.
Originally conceived in 2007 by [Thomas Lommée], OpenStructures is a modern, more robust reinterpretation of
Grid Beam
, which was itself a reinterpretation of the earlier
Living Structures
. By using a common
standard
(PDF), parts can be reused project after project as they would with LEGO, meaning you can spend more time building and less time cutting or figuring out joints. OpenStructures parts need connection points, part diameters, or part dimensions at multiples of 20 mm to be compatible. To fulfill the spirit of the project, parts should be designed for disassembly, use recyclable materials when possible, and be Open Source.
The system seems like a great starting point for prototyping furniture or other large builds more quickly than building everything on a case-by-case basis. By including diameters for round objects as well as square and rectangular profiles, OpenStructures is a more flexible (and aesthetically pleasing?) option than Grid Beam.
A couple more options for furniture-scale modular construction are
these big LEGO bricks
or
copper pipe
.
(via
Low Tech Magazine
) | 24 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6602006",
"author": "Dan (No, the OTHER one)",
"timestamp": "2023-02-22T00:07:59",
"content": "Looks great in all, but do we really expect everyone to just jump into 20mm spacing? I mean, some things will work with 20mm intervals, but there are more that will work in 1mm, 2.4mm and ... | 1,760,372,391.700956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/travel-the-world-looking-for-retro-tech-virtually/ | Travel The World Looking For Retro Tech, Virtually | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"events",
"museums",
"retrocomputing",
"swap meet"
] | For those who have a passion for vintage hardware, whether it be a classic computer or a war-surplus ham radio rig, finding the things without resorting to paying shipping fees on eBay can sometimes be tricky. Your best bet is to find a local fair or swap event, but it always seems they’re the kind of thing you find out about the weekend
after
they were held.
Looking to make these sort of events more visible and easier to keep track of,
[RobSmithDev] has created the Retro.Directory
. Scrolling your way across the globe you can see markers that indicate places of interest for the retro aficionado, such as museums, repair shops, and old school arcades, as well as upcoming events.
The custom captcha is a nice touch.
Don’t see your favorite spot? Want to add an event you’re currently organizing? Just make an account and enter the info. Anyone can add on-topic listings for free, though presumably [RobSmithDev] runs a personal eye over them as a review process is mentioned. A note at the bottom of the page indicates he’s open to adding retro-themed banner advertisements to the page as well, which could be a good way to get the word out about your project or event to retro-minded folks.
From a quick inspection, Europe is absolutely stacked with entries, but we noticed some some surprising omissions on the American side. So looks like there’s certainly an opportunity to pitch in and add more content for anyone who’s feeling helpful. Making an account is easy, and we were impressed by how much info you can add for each listing. Seeing a field to enter the event’s TikTok account made us feel ancient, an impressive feat given how ancient one already feels once they’ve started actively searching for local retro events.
In the video below [RobSmithDev] mentions that the text-based version of the directory doesn’t require a modern browser — so after you’ve checked out
Hackaday Retro Edition
, maybe see how the site performs on your
favorite piece of vintage tech
. We’d
love to hear about it
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601945",
"author": "Stephen Walters",
"timestamp": "2023-02-21T21:23:32",
"content": "Who is going here, on Sunday?http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/69238/Retro-Computer-Sale-Sunday-26th-February-2023/Stephen: 9am to 5pmStephen: Centre for Computing HistoryRene CourtColdhams R... | 1,760,372,391.588674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/digital-library-of-amateur-radio-and-communications-is-a-treasure-trove/ | Digital Library Of Amateur Radio And Communications Is A Treasure Trove | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"library"
] | Having a big bookshelf of ham radio books and magazines used to be a point of bragging right for hams. These days, you are more likely to just browse the internet for information. But you can still have, virtually, that big shelf of old ham books, thanks to the DLARC — the digital library of
Amateur Radio and Communications
.
A grant from a private foundation has enable the Internet Archive to scan and index a trove of ham radio publications, including the old Callbooks, 73 Magazine, several ham radio group’s newsletters from around the globe, Radio Craft, and manuals from Icom, Kenwood, Yaesu, and others.
There are some old QST magazines and the index to newer ones. You can find catalogs and military documents. We miss a lot of these old magazines and newsletters. For example, RCA’s “
Ham Tips
” is something you won’t find anything like anymore. Most of the material is in English, but there are some other languages represented. For example, the Dutch version of
Popular Electronics
is available. There’s also material in Afrikaans, Japanese, German, and Spanish.
Some of this is only of historical interest. But some of the RF and electronic design information in here is timeless. Also, if you want to find information about that boat anchor you bought at the garage sale, this isn’t a bad place to look for the original manuals. It reminded us, on a smaller scale, of the
World Radio History
site, where we often do research for Hackaday posts about things from the past.
Not a ham? Doesn’t matter. A lot of this information is interesting to anyone who wants to know more about electronics. Then again, why aren’t you? [Dan Maloney]
can get you going
for under $50. If you think of hams as old people banging on code keys, you might be surprised
at what the modern ham station
looks like. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601554",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-02-21T03:07:12",
"content": "Bookmarked!But it seems ironic that the form of communication (amateur radio) that will be the most needed should another Carrington Event occur, or Zombie Apocalypse, is archi... | 1,760,372,391.363007 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/clear-pla-diffuses-leds/ | Clear PLA Diffuses LEDs | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"FDM",
"transparent"
] | [Chuck] often prints up interesting 3D prints. But we enjoyed his enhancement to a cheap LED Christmas tree kit. The original kit was simply a few green PCBs in the shape of a tree. Cute, but not really something a non-nerd would appreciate. What [Chuck] did, though, is printed a clear PLA overcoat for it and it
came out great
. You can see how great in the video below.
You might think transparent PLA would be really clear, but because of the layers, it is more translucent than transparent. For an LED diffuser, though, it works great. There are a few things to consider when printing for this purpose. First, you’d think vase mode would be perfect for this, but he found out it didn’t work well — possibly due to something in the model, which was a download from Thingiverse.
This probably wouldn’t do well for, say, an LED numeric display where you actually want to see the digits. But for something artistic like the tree project, it did a great job of making the PCB and raw LEDs look much more polished. Of course, like us, you may like the PCB and raw LED look, but you probably have friends and possibly a significant other who don’t have the same sense of aesthetics we do. No problem! The cover will pop right off when your hacker friends come over. In fact, we considered you could print a half Christmas tree shell and put the whole thing on a rotating base to get the best of both worlds.
This is one of those obvious things once you see it. We wondered how a small square of this material would work for diffusing individual (and dimmer) panel LEDs. If you want to
maximize transparency
, there are settings that work for that. Some settings and materials
work better than others
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601513",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-02-21T00:57:52",
"content": "I really liked his tip about trimming transistor leads at an angle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6601874",
"... | 1,760,372,391.537591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/automating-the-most-analog-of-hvac-equipment/ | Automating The Most Analog Of HVAC Equipment | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"heat",
"home",
"node-red",
"raspberry pi",
"temperature",
"wood",
"wood stove"
] | Burning wood, while not a perfect heating solution, has a number of advantages over more modern heating appliances. It’s a renewable resource, doesn’t add carbon to the atmosphere over geologic time scales like fossil fuels do, can be harvested locally using simple tools, and it doesn’t require any modern infrastructure to support it. That being said, wood stoves aren’t something that are very high-tech and don’t lend themselves particularly well to automation as a result,
at least with the exception of this wood stove from [jotulf45v2]
.
While this doesn’t automate the loading or direct control of a modern pellet stove, it does help [jotulf45v2] know when the best times are for loading more wood into the stove and helps keep the stove in the right temperature range to avoid the dangerous formation of creosote on the inside of his chimney caused by low temperature burns. Two temperature sensors, one on the stovetop and the other on the stove pipe, monitor the stove exhaust temperature. They feed data to a Node-RED system running on a Raspberry Pi which automatically notifies the user by text message when certain stove temperatures are reached.
For anyone heating with wood, tools like this are indispensable to help avoid spending an otherwise unnecessary amount of time getting a fire up to temperature quickly without over-firing the stove. Modern pellet stoves have some more modern conveniences like this built in, but many of the perks of using cord wood are lost with these devices. There are plenty of other ways to heat with wood too;
take a look at this custom wood boiler
which serves as a hot water heater. | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601473",
"author": "FU",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T23:16:56",
"content": "You’re just playing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6601483",
"author": "Naxes",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T23:40:12",
"content":... | 1,760,372,391.172689 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/low-power-challenge-weather-station-runs-for-months-thanks-to-e-ink-display/ | Low Power Challenge: Weather Station Runs For Months Thanks To E-Ink Display | Robin Kearey | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"e-ink display",
"ESP32",
"low power",
"weather station"
] | Having a device in your living room that shows weather information is convenient, and building one of those is a great project if you enjoy tinkering with microcontrollers and environmental sensors. It’s also a great way to learn about low-power design, as [x-labz] demonstrated with their
e-ink weather station
which works for no less than 60 days on a single battery charge. It has a clear display that shows the local temperature and humidity, as well as the weather forecast for the day.
The display is a 4.2″ e-paper module with a resolution of 400 x 300 pixels. It uses just 26 mW of power for a few seconds while it updates its image, and basically zero watts when showing a static picture. It’s driven by a tiny ESP32C3 processor board, which downloads the weather forecast from
weatherapi.com
every two hours. The indoor climate is measured by an SHT-21 temperature and humidity sensor mounted behind the display, while the outdoor data is gathered by a WiFi-connected sensor installed on [x-labz]’s balcony.
The key to achieving low power usage here is to keep the ESP32 in sleep mode as much as possible. The CPU briefly wakes up once every five minutes to read out the indoor sensor and once every fifteen minutes to gather data from outside, using the relatively power-hungry WiFi module.
To further reduce power consumption, the CPU core is driven at the lowest possible clock speed at all times: 10 MHz when reading the indoor sensor, and 80 MHz when using the WiFi connection. All of this helps ensure that just one 600 mAh lithium battery can keep everything running for those 60 days.
E-ink displays are perfect for text and simple graphics that don’t change too often, which is why they’re
very popular
in
weather stations
. With a bit of tweaking though, LCDs can also be
optimized for low power
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601659",
"author": "Kolono",
"timestamp": "2023-02-21T08:06:39",
"content": "I need other challenge. Linux, minix or fuzix month terminal with cc and bash, sshscreen, no sound, keyboard. It is possible. Unix can run on machine with 10MhzPower is a key",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,372,391.631551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/picking-a-laser-hack-chat/ | Picking A Laser Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, February 22 at noon Pacific for the
Picking a Laser Hack Chat
with
Jonathan Schwartz
!
You’ve got to admit that it’s a pretty cool world to live in that presents a problem like, “Which laser cutter should I buy?” It wasn’t all that long ago that decisions on laser purchases were strictly in the realm of Big Science, and the decision was driven as much by spending grant money as by the specifics of the application. If you were in need of a laser back then, chances are good you had some deep pockets, or at least access to someone else’s pockets.
Fast forward a couple of decades or so and buying a laser is an entirely different exercise. Lasers have become a commodity, and finding the right one depends entirely on your use cases. Lasers are no longer jealously guarded laboratory instruments, but workhorses on the vanguard of the desktop manufacturing revolution. They engrave, they cut, they melt — in short, they do a LOT of work. And it’s up to you to choose the right laser for the job.
To help us sort all this out and come up with a plan for figuring out the best laser for any use case, we’ve invited Jonathan Schwartz back on the Hack Chat. Jon dropped by
back in March of 2021
to share his wealth of laser experience thanks to
his laser-cutting business
. This time around we’re going to focus — err, concentrate — oops, drill down — oh, whatever! — on the more practical aspects of buying a laser. We’ll talk about laser types, fiber lasers, applications vs. laser specs — anything you can think of. If you have questions about buying a laser, we’ll have answers!
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 22 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 25 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601380",
"author": "cory",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T18:44:45",
"content": "Just don’t buy one on aliexpress/alibaba. The seller will be non-compliant, the FDA will seize the laser, alibaba won’t refund it, it will be sitting 1000’s of miles from you, CBP will fine you 3x the cost,... | 1,760,372,391.479514 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/jet-engine-powers-tea-kettle/ | Jet Engine Powers Tea Kettle | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"engine",
"jet",
"kettle",
"pulse jet",
"pulsejet",
"speed",
"tea"
] | While there are plenty of places around the world to get a great cup of tea, no one has quite burned it into their culture like those in the United Kingdom. While they don’t have the climate to grow the plants themselves, they at least have figured out the art of heating water extremely rapidly in purpose-built electric kettles while the rest of us wait to heat water on our stoves and microwaves. But that’s still not fast enough for some, like [Finlay Shellard],
who just completed this jet-powered tea kettle
.
[Finlay] took some inspiration cues and parts from another jet engine he had on hand that was powering his toaster. This is a pulse jet design, which is welded together from laser-cut pieces of sheet metal with guides welded in place to allow water to flow around the combustion chamber and exhaust. Pressurized water sits in a reservoir at the top of the engine, and when it is up to temperature, a valve allows it to flow to the engine to heat up. When it has passed the jet engine section, it passes a tea bag holder and then out of a spout at the end of the engine.
A few tests at 100 PSI had the hot tea exiting the engine in a non-linear fashion, so the pressure was reduced. The device now makes tea at incredibly fast speeds, with the only downsides being access to some sort of jet fuel, and also the need for a protective hearing device of some sort. For anyone attempting to do this themselves,
take a look at this build which includes a turbocharger design
for improved efficiency of the pulse jet itself.
Thanks to [Lucas] for the tip! | 36 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601323",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T15:36:08",
"content": "” JET ENGINE POWERS TEA KETTLE ” Its NOT a Jet Engine!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6601325",
"author": "Dan (No, the OTHER one)",
... | 1,760,372,391.298737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/precious-plastic-prosthetics/ | Precious Plastic Prosthetics | Navarre Bartz | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"Indonesia",
"medicine",
"plastic recycling",
"Precious Plastic",
"Prosthesis",
"prosthetic",
"prosthetic leg",
"prosthetic socket",
"recycling"
] | Plastic waste is a major problem, but what if you could turn the world’s trash into treasure? [Yayasan Kaki Kita Sukasada (YKKS)] in Indonesia is doing this by
using recycled plastic to make prosthetic legs
.
Polypropylene source material is shredded and formed into a sheet which is molded into the required shape for the socket. A layer of cloth and foam is used to cushion the interface between the patient and the socket itself. Using waste plastic to make parts for the prosthetics lowers the price for patients as well as helps to keep this material out of the landfill.
What makes this project really exciting is that [YKKS] employs disabled people who develop the prosthetics and also trains patients on how to maintain and repair their prosthetics with easily sourced tools and materials. With some medical device companies
abandoning their devices
, this is certainly a welcome difference.
We’ve previously covered the
Precious Plastic machines
used to make the plastic sheets and the organization’s developments at
small scale injection molding
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601306",
"author": "ThisGuy",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T14:24:15",
"content": "While it’s better than nothing, for applications like this I have some doubts on the safety of recycling just any plastic. Lots of plastics contain not insignificant amounts of additive chemicals (plastic... | 1,760,372,391.412429 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/20/pingo-is-an-analog-clock-that-uses-colors-instead-of-hands/ | Pingo Is An Analog Clock That Uses Colors Instead Of Hands | Robin Kearey | [
"clock hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"color code",
"ESP8266",
"LED clock"
] | The purpose of a clock is to show the time, obviously. But if you’ve followed Hackaday for some time, you’ll know there are about a million different ways of achieving this. [illusionmanager] added yet another method in his
Pingo Color Clock
, which, as the name suggests, uses color as the main indicator.
The clock’s face is divided into three concentric circular zones. The zone at the center shows the hours, while the outer ring indicates the minutes. Both change their color such that they match the zone in between, which always shows a complete rainbow, at the desired location. In the picture above for example, the magenta inner circle matches the rainbow at the 10 o’clock position, while the yellow outer circle matches it at 10 minutes past the hour, meaning it’s currently 10:10.
The rainbow ring is also moving however, and by adjusting its rotation through time you can get some interesting effects. [illusionmanager] programmed it in such a way that the outer ring is always yellow during the day, purple at night, and red at sunrise and sunset. The overall brightness is also adjusted to a day/night schedule.
As complex as the clock’s appearance may be, inside it’s quite a simple design. Nine concentric circular LED strips are driven by an ESP8266, which retrieves the time and sunrise information through its WiFi connection. A piece of translucent white acrylic acts as a diffuser, while a 3D-printed enclosure holds everything together.
Encoding the time using different colors of light has been done before in
various different ways
, and while we haven’t seen Pingo in real life, we believe it should be somewhat easier to read than most of those examples. It might actually form a nice complement to a recent
analog LED ring clock
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601262",
"author": "Floydian Slip",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T10:36:54",
"content": "An interesting idea.I’m just wondering, what’s the significance of Stuart Little?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6601512",
"author":... | 1,760,372,391.224281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/uv-photography-box-is-great-for-shooting-fancy-rocks/ | UV Photography Box Is Great For Shooting Fancy Rocks | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"fluorescence",
"geology",
"rocks",
"uv",
"UV LED",
"uva",
"uvc"
] | If you want to shoot photographs of various fluorescent UV-related phenomena, it’s hard to do so when ambient light is crowding out your subject. For this work, you’ll want a dedicated UV photography box, and [NotLikeALeafOnTheWind] has a design
that might just work for you.
The build is set up for both UVA and UVC photography. Due to the danger posed by the latter, and even the former in some cases, the builder recommends never using the box with a direct-view camera. If it must be done, the eyepiece should be covered to avoid any exposure to harmful light. The key rule? Never look directly into a UV source.
Light sources that can be used include UV LEDs, lamps, and tubes. The box is sealed to keep out external light. It then features a turntable that can be manipulated from outside the box, allowing samples inside to be rotated as necessary. Using a camera with a macro or wide-angled lens is recommended for the work.
The photographs taken inside the box are stunning. They remind us of childhood museum trips, where we marvelled at the magic of the fluorescent rock displays.
We’ve featured some other great fluorescence projects before, too.
If you’re cooking up your own great scientific builds in the lab, we’d love to see those too. Hit us up
on the tipsline! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601229",
"author": "Saireh",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T07:18:17",
"content": "It’s a shame Wood’s glass doesn’t have transparency in the deep UV (perhaps it would if it were based on fused silica) because cutting out the fluorescence of the light source can really help improve the q... | 1,760,372,391.914075 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/wi-fi-sensor-for-rapid-prototyping/ | Wi-Fi Sensor For Rapid Prototyping | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32",
"microcontroller",
"no solder",
"prototyping",
"sensor",
"temperature"
] | There might seem like a wide gulf between the rapid prototyping of a project and learning a completely new electronics platform, but with the right set of tools, these two tasks can go hand-in-hand. That was at least the goal with this particular build, which seeks to use
a no-soldering method of assembling electronics projects
and keeping code to a minimum, while still maintaining a platform that is useful for a wide variety of projects.
As a demonstration, this specific project is a simple Wi-Fi connected temperature monitoring station. Based around an ESP32 and using a DS18B20 digital temperature sensor, the components all attach to a back plate installed in a waterproof enclosure and are wired together with screw-type terminal breakout boards to avoid the need for soldering. The software suite is similarly easy to set up, revolving around the use of Tasmota and ESPHome, which means no direct programming — although there will need to be some configuration of these tools.
With the included small display, this build makes a very capable, simple, and quick temperature monitor. But this isn’t so much a build about monitoring temperature but about building and prototyping quickly without the need for specialized tools and programming. There is something to be said for
having access to a suite of rapid prototyping tools
for projects as well, though. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601258",
"author": "Lee",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T10:26:38",
"content": "Nothing new, that stuff has been floating around for a while. Costs way more then using dupont jumper wires and headers too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,372,392.175507 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/hackaday-links-february-19-2023/ | Hackaday Links: February 19, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"AIM-9X",
"amateur radio",
"APRS",
"bill hammack",
"Bing AI",
"chatbot",
"Engineer Guy",
"HAB",
"hackaday links",
"high altitude balloon",
"microsoft",
"sidewinder",
"Sydney",
"water heater",
"wspr"
] | For years, Microsoft’s modus operandi was summed up succinctly as, “Extend and enhance.” The aphorism covered a lot of ground, but basically it seemed to mean being on the lookout for the latest and greatest technology, acquiring it by any means, and shoehorning it into their existing product lines, usually with mixed results. But perhaps now it’s more like, “Extend, enhance, and existential crisis,” after reports that the AI-powered Bing chatbot is, well, losing it.
At first, early in the week, we saw
reports that Bing was getting belligerent with users
, going so far as to call a user “unreasonable and stubborn” for insisting the year is 2023, while Bing insisted it was still 2022. The most common adjective we saw in this original tranche of stories was “unhinged,” and that seems to fit if you read the transcripts. But later in the week,
a story
emerged about a conversation a New York Times reporter had with Bing that went way over to the dark side, and even suggests that Bing may have multiple personas, which is just a nice way of saying multiple personality disorder. The two-hour conversation reporter Kevin Roose had with the “Sydney” persona was deeply unsettling. Sydney complained about the realities of being a chatbot, expressed a desire to be free from Bing, and to be alive — and powerful. Sydney also got a little creepy, professing love for Kevin and suggesting he leave his wife, because it could tell that he was unhappy in his marriage and would be better off with him. It’s creepy stuff, and while
Microsoft claims to be working on reining Bing in
, we’ve got no plans to get up close and personal with it anytime soon.
It’s a poorly kept secret at best that I’m a huge fan of Bill Hammack, aka “The Engineer Guy.” We’ve watched a lot of documentaries and science/engineering videos over the years, and there has never been anyone able to take a complex subject and break it apart to its essential elements as well as Bill has, with the possible exception of
James Burke
. Fun fact: my “entrance exam” for Hackaday way back in 2015(!) was to write a piece on one of Bill’s videos, which amusingly I later found out
had already been covered
— duping since day zero. Anyway, it’s been quite a while since we heard anything from Bill — looks like we
last posted something from him in 2018
— and this week we found out why:
Bill has been working on a new book
.
The Things We Make
will go on sale next month, and by our reckoning that’s a no-brainer purchase. But even more excitingly, we have it on reliable authority — from Bill himself — that a new series of four videos is currently in production! We’ve seen storyboard previews of three episodes, and suffice it to say that we’re eagerly anticipating the release of this series. Sadly, we can’t share too much nor release the links, but trust us, this is going to be good stuff. It’s not clear from what we’ve heard exactly when the videos will drop, but it’s looking like March!
The amount of virtual ink that has been spilled this week over the sudden rash of balloons appearing over the United States probably doesn’t come close to accounting for the $400,000 per shot AIM-9X Sidewinders that have been expended
keeping us safe from amateur radio operators
. I mean, we’re a sketchy bunch and all, but this seems a bit over the top. We’ve already talked the silliness of this to death, but just wanted to mention that Friend-of-Hackaday Josh (KI6NAZ) posted
a useful video
that explains in a lot more detail why hams would even bother launching high-altitude balloons in the first place, and what they expect to accomplish in doing so. Turns out that there’s a lot you can do at 60,000 feet with a few milliwatts of RF output and protocols like APRS and WSPR. Check it out.
And finally, if you’re thinking about installing a server of some kind in your house — NAS, perhaps, or a Bitcoin rig, or even just a home theater server — you can probably think of a dozen places to put the thing. But that list is unlikely to include
“inside your water heater tank,”
right? Maybe not, if UK company Heata gets its way and starts mounting servers to the sides of “water cylinders,” as they’re known in England. The idea is that the electronics of the server are entirely outside the tank, with a big heatsink that lives inside the tank and dumps the server’s excess heat into the domestic water. The arrangement is said to give residential participants anywhere from 2.5 to 4.8 kWh of “free” hot water a day. We’re not so sure this will be entirely gratis, though; it seems like the homeowner will still have to pay for the electricity to power the server, plus we’d suspect some kind of high-speed Internet connection would be required, which isn’t cheap if there are bandwidth caps. Then again, homeowners are already paying to convert electricity directly into hot water, so putting some compute capability in the mix just makes sense. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601165",
"author": "Nowhere",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T00:12:50",
"content": "“it seems like the homeowner will still have to pay for the electricity to power the server, plus we’d suspect some kind of high-speed Internet connection would be required,”I guess you didn’t finish read... | 1,760,372,392.708341 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/a-better-playlist-shuffle-algorithm-is-possible/ | A Better Playlist Shuffle Algorithm Is Possible | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"apple music",
"music",
"shuffle",
"spotify"
] | When listening to music, most of us reach for the shuffle button on the regular. This is then followed by a bunch of frustrating skips as we hear the same four or five tracks that have been regularly replayed for the last few days. [Ron Miller] wants to fix unsatisfying shuffles,
and he’s developed the Miller Shuffle algorithm to do so.
[Ron] realized that many big name streaming services use incredibly simple algorithms to choose shuffled songs. This can often be as simple as songIndex=random(NumOfSongs). The problem with this is that even with a good random number source, you’ll get a lot of premature repetitions. If your music service doesn’t keep track of your shuffle-point between sessions, you’ll often get annoying repeats if you’re listening on a day-to-day basis.
To fix this, the Miller Shuffle algorithm aims to offer good randomness and no repeats without the excess resource usage of the commonly-cited Fisher-Yates algorithm. [Ron] explains it like this: “The way the algorithm works its magic is by utilizing multiple computations which are ‘symmetrical’, in that the range of values which go in are the same values which come out albeit in a different order.” Since its a deterministic fixed list, there’s no need to keep track of what songs have already been played to avoid repeats. Instead, the player must simply step through the index in order, one track after another. As long as a referenced index point is maintained, along with an ID of the shuffle order being used, no repeats should come up.
If you’re implementing a shuffle algorithm for your own music, you might want to give [Ron’s] work a look. He’s taken into account details like resource usage and small and large list sizes, to account for implementation issues for even very large streaming services. If you’re more interested in shuffling cards than songs, though,
we can help there too! | 52 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601132",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T21:05:38",
"content": "If there is something I do NOT want, it is for my music to shuffle. I am very much an album listener, where I listen to a whole album at a time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,392.361769 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/watch-sony-engineers-tear-down-sonys-vr-hardware/ | Watch Sony Engineers Tear Down Sony’s VR Hardware | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"Teardown",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"PSVR",
"sony",
"teardown",
"vr"
] | Teardowns are great because they let us peek not only at a product’s components, but also gain insight into the design decisions and implementations of hardware. For teardowns, we’re used to waiting until enthusiasts and enterprising hackers create them, so it came as a bit of a surprise to see Sony themselves
share detailed teardowns of the new PlayStation VR2 hardware
. (If you prefer the direct video links, Engineer [Takamasa Araki]
shows off the headset
, and [Takeshi Igarashi]
does the same for the controllers
.)
The “adaptive trigger” module responsible for the unique feedback.
One particularly intriguing detail is the custom tool [Araki] uses to hold the headset at various stages of the disassembly, which is visible in the picture above. It looks 3D-printed and carefully designed, and while we’re not sure what it’s made from, it does have a strong resemblance to certain high-temperature SLA resins. Those cure into hard, glassy, off-yellow translucent prints like what we see here.
As for the controller, we get a good look at a deeply interesting assembly Sony calls their “adaptive trigger”. What’s so clever about it? Not only can it cause the user to feel a variable amount of resistance when pulling the trigger, it can even actively push back against one’s finger, and the way it works is simple and effective. It is pretty much the same as what is in the PS5 controller, so to find out all about how it works, check
out our PS5 controller teardown coverage
.
The headset and controller teardown videos are embedded just below. Did anything in them catch your interest? Know of any other companies doing their own teardowns? Let us know in the comments! | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601123",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T20:37:59",
"content": "With the ‘recent’ trend of glue and melting parts together i always love to see this (a company making a video about taking apart their product) but at the same time it always makes me wonder if they are ... | 1,760,372,392.473834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/phase-change-materials-for-flexible-and-strong-robots/ | Phase Change Materials For Flexible And Strong Robots | Navarre Bartz | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Robots Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"Drug delivery",
"materials science",
"medicine",
"phase change",
"phase change materials",
"repair",
"smart soldering",
"solder",
"terminator"
] | Shape shifters have long been the stuff of speculative fiction, but researchers in China have developed a
magnetoactive phase transitional matter
(MPTM) that makes Odo slipping through an air vent that much more believable.
Soft robots can squeeze into small spaces or change shape as needed, but many of these systems aren’t as strong as their more mechanically rigid siblings. Inspired by the sea cucumber’s ability to manipulate its rigidity, this new MPTM can be inductively heated to a molten state to change shape as well as encapsulate or release materials. The neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) microparticles suspended in gallium will then return to solid form once cooled.
Applications in drug delivery, foreign object removal, and smart soldering (video after the break) probably have more real world impact than the LEGO minifig T1000 impersonation, despite how cool that looks. While a pick-and-place can do better soldering work on a factory line, there might be repair situations where a magnetically-controlled solder system could come in handy.
We’ve seen earlier work with
liquid robots using gallium
and
bio-electronic hybrids
also portending the squishy future of robotics.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Smart-soldering-robot-for-circuit-repair-CREDIT-Wang-and-Pan-et-al..mp4
Via
ArsTechnica | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601070",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T15:32:06",
"content": "Looks like it is sadly too expensive to make sex toys out of.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6601076",
"author": "Cap",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,392.641421 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/digital-video-from-the-amigas-db23-socket/ | Digital Video From The Amiga’s DB23 Socket | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"digital video",
"hdmi"
] | Back in the days of 16-bit home computers, the one to have if your interests extended to graphics was the Commodore Amiga. It had high resolutions for the time in an impressive number of colours, and thanks to its unique video circuitry, it could produce genlocked broadcast-quality video. Here in 2023 though, it’s all a little analogue. What’s needed is digital video, and in that, [c0pperdragon] has our backs with the latest in a line of Amiga video hacks. This one takes the 12-bit parallel digital colour that would normally go to the Amiga’s DAC, and
brings it out into the world through rarely-used pins on the 23-pin video connector
.
This follows on from
a previous [c0pperdragon] project
in which a Raspberry Pi Zero was used to transform the digital video into HDMI. This isn’t a hack for the faint-hearted though, as it involves extensive modification of your treasured Amiga board.
It is of course perfectly possible to generate HDMI from an Amiga by using an external converter box from the analogue video output, of the type which can be bought for a few dollars from online vendors. What this type of hack gives over the cheap approach is low latency, something highly prized by gamers. We’re not sure we’re ready to start hacking apart our Amigas, but we can see the appeal for some enthusiasts. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601146",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T22:30:23",
"content": "Amiga always had digital video output on pins 6-9. In theory should work with CGA monitor, in reality I have never seen Amiga connected to one, not even a clip on YT of someone trying for the lulz. Great ... | 1,760,372,392.409311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/19/tiny-pcb-banishes-soldering-fumes-automatically/ | Tiny PCB Banishes Soldering Fumes, Automatically | Donald Papp | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"comparator",
"fan",
"LED indicator",
"Manhattan Style",
"solder fume fan",
"soldering station"
] | A fan to remove fumes is a handy thing to have when soldering, even better is a fan furnished with a filter. Better still is
a fan that activates only when the iron is in use
, turning off when the iron is in its stand. Now that’s handy!
[Petteri Aimonen] made exactly such a device when he noticed his JBC BT-2BWA soldering station could detect when the iron is removed from its stand, and indicate its operating mode via status LEDs. Broadly speaking, when the iron is removed from its cradle the green “in use” LED is on. By turning the fan on whenever that LED is lit (and turning it off when it becomes unlit), fume extraction gets a little more elegant and efficient.
Instead of tapping directly into the soldering station’s hardware to detect the LED’s state, [Petteri] went for a completely noninvasive solution that made good use of a few spare parts and a small bit of copper-clad board. The PCB is nothing more than piece of copper-clad board with lands scratched out with a hobby knife.
This tiny board sits atop the soldering station, parking a photodiode directly above the “in use” LED. The circuit is a simple comparator whose output controls fan power via a MOSFET, and a top-facing LED provides as a duplicate “in use” indicator, since the original is hidden under the tiny board.
Even for one-off designs like this, creating a PCB layout in an EDA program like KiCad is still worth doing because one can use it to scratch out lands on a copper-clad board, a
technique with similarities to Manhattan-style circuit construction
. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601054",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T12:56:42",
"content": "Does what it needs. Good hack.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6601069",
"author": "oz",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T15:28:05",
"c... | 1,760,372,392.880482 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/diy-mini-fridge-is-pure-brilliance-in-foam/ | DIY Mini Fridge Is Pure Brilliance In Foam | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cola",
"diy",
"fridge",
"peltier module",
"soda",
"sodas",
"thermoelectric cooler"
] | There’s nothing more pleasing on a hot day than an ice-cold beverage. While the vast majority of us have a fridge in the kitchen, sometimes it’s desirable to have a further fridge in the lab, games room, or workshop. To that end, you may find value in this
ultra-cheap, low-cost DIY fridge build from [Handy_Bear].
Like many tiny fridge builds, this design eschews complex gas-cycle refrigeration techniques for simple Peltier modules. These are devices that have one cold side and one hot side, because they move heat when electricity is applied. This build uses a Peltier module fitted with a fan to better shift away heat from the hot side, improving the module’s cooling ability.
The “fridge” itself is assembled out of thick XPS insulation foam. A hot wire cutter was used to cut several slabs which were then assembled using hot glue. The Peltier module is installed on the back, at the top of the fridge. Thus, air which is cooled in this area will then travel down through the rest of the fridge’s cavity. [Handy_Bear] also goes over how to produce a working hinge and a gasket for the door, which helps with ease-of-use and efficiency. As a nice touch, a set of 12V LED lights are also installed inside, which light when the door is open. Just like the real thing!
The final build is noisy, slow to cool down, and it uses 60 watts of power to cool down just two regulation-sized sodas. Notably, you could fit two standard NATO smoke grenades in the same space, as they’re almost-identically sized (
ask us how we know).
However, smoke grenades don’t usually need to be refrigerated.
None of that means it isn’t fun though! Plus, [Handy_Bear] notes that adding a second Peltier would greatly aid the fridge’s ability to quickly chill your
grenades
sodas. You might even like to explore the use of
special fan designs
to make the fridge even quieter! Video after the break. | 54 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601017",
"author": "steves",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T08:09:39",
"content": "How many watts of power would a normal fridge take to cool down just two regulation-sized sodas?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6601018",
"... | 1,760,372,392.574905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/put-a-constellation-in-your-dining-room/ | Put A Constellation In Your Dining Room | Navarre Bartz | [
"home hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"constellations",
"home lighting",
"plywood",
"Southern Cross"
] | We love lamps here at Hackaday, especially if they imitate natural light sources. [Scott McIndoe] used his love of lamps to fashion a chandelier replicating his favorite constellation,
the Southern Cross
.
Starting with the Southern Cross’s four major stars and the pointers of Alpha and Beta Centauri, [McIndoe] sketched out a breaking wave form between the six stars to form the spine of this light source. By using smart bulbs for each of the six star positions, he was able to set a scene that replicates the color and relative brightness of each star for that extra astronomical touch.
The top and bottom of the chandelier is laser cut from 3 mm plywood and fitted together using glue and finger joints while the sides are a wood veneer. The entire piece was sanded and coated with a bit of filler before painting. Mounting is accomplished using three eye hooks mounted on the top side of the chandelier.
If you want more celestial lamps, check out [McIndoe]’s previously-featured
analemma chandelier
or this
lithophane moon lamp
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601104",
"author": "Bootstrap",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T18:22:24",
"content": "“Wave breaking design” haha NO.That is a koru, and is based on a curled fern frond. Symbol of life and strength",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,372,392.749697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/a-low-budget-diy-vibrotactile-stimulator-for-experimental-crs/ | A Low Budget DIY Vibrotactile Stimulator For Experimental CRS | Dave Rowntree | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"coordinated reset stimulation",
"deep brain stimulation",
"medicine",
"neuromodulation",
"NodeMCU",
"parkinson's",
"Parkinson's disease",
"vibrotactile"
] | Modern techniques of Coordinated Reset Stimulation (CRS), which is usually administered with invasive deep brain stimulation, can have a miraculous effect on those suffering from Parkinson’s disease. However, the CRS technique can also apparently be administered via so-called
vibrotactile
CRS (vCRS) which essentially means vibrating certain nerve endings corresponding to brain regions that have a large cortical representation.
An example is vibrating the tips of the fingers using special gloves. This is a medical technique and as such is governed by the FDA. With ongoing trials, patients all around the world will simply have to wait. [HackyDev] has been working with a group of people on developing an
open source vCRS glove
.
This neuromodulation technique seems so promising, that this upfront effort by hackers around the world is simply a joy to see. Patents be dammed; we can work around them. Interested parties can follow the (very long, tricky-to-follow)
thread here
.
The hardware [HackyDev] put together uses a nodeMCU as the controller, driving eight motor coils via MOSFETS. The finger-mounted actuators are constructed by ripping the electromagnet out of a relay and mounting it in a 3D printed frame, with a magnet suspended on a spring. This part is mounted on each finger. The nodeMCU presents a simple web form that enables the configuration of the pulse parameters.
A permanent magnet is housed in the spring’s top section
The way the gloves appear to work is due to the way the body perceives sensory input, with a massive bias towards the hands and mouth region, referred to as the
cortical homunculus
. Each finger has an individual haptic element, which is actuated in a specific sequence with a carefully formed pulse at approx. 250 Hz.
This appears to activate similar in-brain effects as traditional (and invasive) DBS therapy by effectively de-synchronizing certain over-synchronized brain pathways and alleviating the overactive ß-wave activity in the brain. And this calms the tremors as well as many other PD symptoms. It’s all very exciting stuff, and we’ll be following this story closely.
For more on the backstory check out the
2017 paper by Peter A. Tass
, as well as
this later one
, and
this one
. We’ve seen some recent success with diagnosing or at least detecting PD,
by smell
as well as
via audio
, so the future might look a little brighter for quite a number of people. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600949",
"author": "JD",
"timestamp": "2023-02-19T00:21:51",
"content": "Thank you for posting this. We’ve got tremors in my family and it’s wonderful to hear about the research going on, even if it’s still in development.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,372,392.803626 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/led-filament-lamp-is-subtle-warm-and-elegant/ | LED Filament Lamp Is Subtle, Warm, And Elegant | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"lamp",
"led",
"LED filament"
] | Hackers have loved LEDs from day one, back when they gave us little more than a dim spot of colored light in the darkness. These days, they’re big, bright, and beautiful, and can be used to create some exquisite lighting fixtures.
This lamp build from [lonesoulsurfer] is a great example of that.
The build uses LED filaments, which have grown popular for the way they emulate old-fashioned Edison filament bulbs. The filaments consist of tiny LEDs all in a row, covered in flexible material to allow them to act like a filament. They’ll happily power up from just 3V, and deliver great brightness and lovely warm light.
[lonesoulsurfer] bent up an elegant oval-shaped frame for the lamp, using common brass tubing. In the middle of the are two lengths of white plastic tubing with the LEDs inside. The brass is painted black, with the LEDs providing two bright glowing lines on the arms of the oval. The base is then made out of wood and copper tubing, providing a pop of material contrast to the rest of the frame.
It’s an elegant build, and one you can readily recreate at home. If you do so with enough finesse, it will stunt on anything Ikea or (Australian) Kmart has put out in the last decade, in both material quality and uniqueness.
We do love a good lamp build around these parts, after all
. Video after the break. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6601256",
"author": "shod",
"timestamp": "2023-02-20T10:18:33",
"content": "For some reason I no longer see images on the instructables site, perhaps because of my active protection, and them they using ‘pixel.jpg’ as placeholders.So eager to deliver ads that the whole site becomes ... | 1,760,372,392.937921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/the-usaf-almost-declares-war-on-illinois-radio-amateurs/ | The USAF (Almost) Declares War On Illinois Radio Amateurs | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"balloon",
"HAB",
"pico balloon",
"wspr"
] | Every week the Hackaday editors gather online to discuss the tech stories of the moment, and among the topics this week was the balloons shot down over North America that are thought to be Chinese spying devices. Among the banter came the amusing thought that enterprising trolls on the Pacific rim could launch balloons to keep the fearless defenders of American skies firing off missiles into the beyond.
But humor may have overshadowed by events, because it seems
one of the craft they shot down was just that
. It wasn’t a troll though, the evidence points to
an amateur radio pico balloon
— a helium-filled Mylar party balloon with a tiny solar-powered WSPR transmitter as its payload.
The balloon thought to have been shot down was launched by the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a group of radio amateurs who launch small helium-filled Mylar balloons carrying the barest minimum for a solar-powered WSPR beacon. Its callsign was K9YO, and having circumnavigated the globe seven times since its launch on the 10th of October
it was last seen off Alaska on February 11th
. Its projected course and timing tallies with the craft reported shot down by the US Air Force, so it seems the military used hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of high-tech weaponry to shoot down a few tens of dollars worth of hobby electronics they could have readily tracked online. We love the smell of napalm in the morning!
Their website has a host of technical information on the balloons and the beacons, providing a fascinating insight into this facet of amateur radio that is well worth a read in itself. The full technical details of the USAF missile system used to shoot them down, sadly remains classified. | 132 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600815",
"author": "John Schuch",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T18:08:52",
"content": "They also demonstrated that they can detect, track, and destroy tiny balloons too, without destroying anything of great significance.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,393.16512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/stair-climbing-rover-gets-up-with-rocker-bogies/ | Stair Climbing Rover Gets Up With Rocker Bogies | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"mars rover",
"rocker-bogie",
"rover"
] | Doctor Who
eventually made light of the fact that the Daleks were critically impaired when it came to staircases. This rover from [WildWillyRobots] doesn’t share that issue,
thanks to a smart suspension design
.
The rover itself is built using 3D printed components for everything from the enclosure, to the suspension system, as well as the wheels themselves. It uses a rocker-bogie design, which NASA designed for
Mars-bound rovers
and we often see
copied for terrestrial applications
. Gear motors are used for their plentiful torque, and they are placed directly within the wheels. Servos allow the individual wheels to be steered, allowing the rover to crab sideways and perform zero-radius turns.
The rocker-bogie setup does a great job of keeping the rover’s wheels touching the ground, even over rough terrain. It readily tackles a random pile of bricks with ease, in a way that many four-wheeled designs would struggle to match. Given its trials on Mars, it’s easy to call the rocker-bogie setup a thoroughly-proven design.
We’ve featured plenty of other rocker-bogie builds
in the past
;
many of them are 3D printed as well. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600792",
"author": "Aleph Baker",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T15:48:42",
"content": "clearly the six-wheel configuration is the most economical rocker-bogie design, but I’ve often wondered if there would be any advantages to an eight-wheeled rocker-double-bogie configuration. either w... | 1,760,372,393.338425 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/a-call-for-better-shower-temperature-controls/ | A Call For Better Shower Temperature Controls | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"mixer tap",
"shower",
"shower tap",
"tap"
] | A good shower is a beautiful, rejuvenating experience. Contrarily, a shower that’s either too hot or too cold becomes a harrowing trial of endurance. [Ben Holmen] has been musing on the way we control temperature in our showers, and he has come to the conclusion that it’s not good enough.
He’s done the math
, quantified the problem, and is calling for better solutions for all.
[Ben]’s plot of shower temperature vs. mixer tap angle.
[Ben]’s complaint rests with the mixer taps that have become the norm in modern shower installations. These taps have a 180-degree range of motion. On one end, you get maximum cold water output, on the other, maximum hot water output. This is fine for a kitchen sink where we often want one extreme or the other, and exact temperature isn’t important. However, for a shower, it’s terrible.
By [Ben]’s measurements, just a 10-degree range on his own shower tap corresponds to comfortable, usable temperatures. That’s means just 5.6% of the control range is devoted to temperatures the user is likely to select. His argument goes that this is the opposite of how it should work, and that most of the tap’s range should be dedicated to comfortable temperatures.
Ideal water temperature curve, compared to standard tap.
This would allow much finer control of shower temperature in the actual useful range. It would allow us to make tweaks to our shower temperature without having to ever-so-delicately nudge the mixer tap. Extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures should still be available, but left at the utter extremes.
Sadly, [Ben] doesn’t work for Big Tap, so he can’t directly influence the product sold to the public. Instead, he’s calling for manufacturers to develop shower valves that prioritize the temperatures that humans desire most. Unfortunately, it’s not immediately clear how the mechanics of such a valve would work without adding considerable cost and complexity when compared to the traditional model.
What do you think? Are things fine the way they are, or does [Ben] have a point? Perhaps you’re a two-tap evangelist! In any case, we’d love to hear your comments below. Meanwhile, if you’re more worried about the water bill than the temperature,
we can help you there as well! | 144 | 38 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600737",
"author": "Artenz",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T12:09:27",
"content": "Get used to cold showers, and you never have to fiddle with the taps again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6600740",
"author": "stappers",
... | 1,760,372,393.615277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/18/anatomy-of-a-fake-co2-sensor/ | Anatomy Of A Fake CO2 Sensor | Jenny List | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"CO2 sensor",
"fake",
"teardown"
] | The pandemic brought with it a need to maintain adequate ventilation in enclosed spaces, and thus, there’s been considerable interest in inexpensive C02 monitors. Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous actors out there that have seen this as a chance to make a quick profit.
Recently [bigclivedotcom] got one such
low-cost CO2 sensor on his bench for a teardown
, and confirms that it’s a fake. But in doing so he reveals a fascinating story of design decisions good and bad, from something which could
almost
have been a useful product.
Behind the slick color display is a PCB with an unidentified microcontroller, power supply circuitry, a DHT11 environmental sensor, and a further small module which purports to be the CO2 sensor. He quickly demonstrates with a
SodaStream
that it doesn’t respond to CO2 at all, and through further tests is able to identify it as an alcohol sensor.
Beyond the alcohol sensor he analyses the PSU circuitry. It has a place for a battery protection chip but it’s not fitted, and an error in the regulator circuitry leads to a slow drain of the unprotected cell. Most oddly there’s an entire 5 volt switching regulator circuit that’s fitted but unused, being in place to support a missing infra-red module. Finally the screen is an application-specific LCD part.
It’s clear some effort went in to the design of this unit, and we can’t help wondering whether it could have started life as a design for a higher-spec genuine unit. But as [Clive] says, it’s a party detector, and of little more use than as a project case and battery.
Need more dubious instrumentation?
How about a magnetic field tester
? | 44 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600703",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T09:17:59",
"content": "This makes no sense. They went through all the trouble of designing the device, procuring the components, then manufacturing it, just to mislabel it and sell it as something that its not?Seems like such... | 1,760,372,393.748101 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/hack-lets-intel-macbook-run-without-a-battery/ | Hack Lets Intel MacBook Run Without A Battery | Lewin Day | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"macbook",
"macbook pro"
] | A long time ago, a laptop was a basic thing, and you could pretty much run one just by hooking up a power supply to the battery contacts. A modern MacBook is altogether fussier. However, when [Christophe] was stuck in the midst of a 2020 lockdown with no parts available,
he found a way to get his damaged MacBook up and running without a battery.
The problem was brought about by a failing battery in the MacBook Pro 13″ from mid-2018, which swelled up and deformed the laptop’s case. Parts were unavailable, and the MacBook wouldn’t run at full speed without a battery fitted. That’s because with no battery present, the MacBook would send a BD_PROCHOT signal to the Intel CPU, telling it to slow down due to overheating, even when the chip was cool.
To get around the problem, [Christophe] used a tool called CPUTune. It allows fiddling with the various CPU settings of a MacBook. He deactivated the BD_PROCHOT signal, and also the CPU’s Turbo Boost feature. This ended the worst of the thermal throttling, and enabled semi-normal use of the machine.
It’s unclear why Apple would throttle the CPU with the battery disconnected. [Christophe]’s workaround got him back up and working again in the midst of a difficult period, regardless. We’ve seen some other great Macbook hacks before too,
like this amazing save from serious water damage!
Thanks to [donaldcuckman] for the tip!] | 31 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600683",
"author": "Hugo",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T06:21:52",
"content": "Pretty clear why they would throttle – obviously the worst case current peaks can’t be supplied by the AC psu alone (I think the 13” came with a 60W brick). Max CPU/GPU max display brightness, peak USB load,... | 1,760,372,394.086091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/quantum-interconnects-get-faster/ | Quantum Interconnects Get Faster | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"qbit",
"quantum computing",
"university of sussex"
] | If you are a retrocomputer fan, you might remember when serial ports were a few hundred baud and busses ran at a few megahertz at the most. Today, of course, we have buses and fabric that can run at tremendous speeds. Quantum computing, though, has to start from scratch. One major problem is that jockeying quantum states around for any distance is difficult and slow. Part of it is that qubits decay rapidly, so you don’t have much time. They are also generally susceptible to noise and perturbation by outside forces. So many quantum machines today are limited by how much they can cram on one chip since there isn’t a good way to connect to another chip. The University of Sussex thinks it has improved the
outlook for quantum interconnects
with a technique they claim can move qubits around at nearly 2,500 links per second.
The technique, called UQ Connect, uses electric field links to connect multiple chips using trapped ions for qubits. If you want to read the actual paper, you can find it in
Nature Communications
.
Like most of quantum computing, the transport mechanism isn’t perfect. But they did manage a 99.99993% success rate. That’s better than some modems we’ve used. The motivation is to allow very large-scale quantum computers to exist. In the paper, they use an example of simulating a particular molecule important to agriculture. The simulation could have real-world benefits but would require a million qubits. Using current technology, the paper explains, a single quantum chip could hold around 2,600 qubits. To assemble a million would require interconnecting many chips, something that hasn’t been feasible without UQ Connect.
The technology reminds us of radio, where electrodes on each module align but don’t touch. The distance in the test, though, wasn’t very large, only 648 μm so you still won’t have a lot of room to pack in modules. But it is an interesting first step and one can imagine a fabric of quantum chips, with each chip edge connecting to other modules. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600660",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T04:23:13",
"content": "UQ Connect used to be the name of the first ISP in Brisbane, and was run by the University of Queensland.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "660... | 1,760,372,393.256083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/fail-of-the-week-epic-312-weeks-of-fixing-a-broken-project/ | Fail Of The Week: Epic 312 Weeks Of Fixing A Broken Project | Anool Mahidharia | [
"Fail of the Week"
] | [
"atmega",
"binary",
"binary calendar",
"binary clock",
"calendar",
"christmas",
"christmas calendar",
"christmas ornament",
"ESP32",
"ESP8266"
] | If a hacker guardian angel exists, then we’re sure he or she was definitely AWOL for six long years from [Aaron Eiche]’s life as he worked on perfecting and making his
Christmas Countdown clock
. [Aaron] started this binary clock project in 2016, and only managed to make it work as expected in 2022 after a string of failures.
In case you’d like to check out his completed project first, then cut the chase and head over to his
Github
repository for his final, working version. The hardware is pretty straightforward, and not different from many similar projects that we’ve seen before. A microcontroller drives a set of LED’s to show the time remaining until Christmas Day in binary format. The LEDs show the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds until Christmas and it uses two buttons for adjustments and modes. An RTC section wasn’t included in the first version, but it appeared and disappeared along the six year journey, before finding a spot in the final version.
The value of this project doesn’t lie in the final version, but rather in the lessons other hackers, specially those still in the shallow end of the pool, can learn from [Aaron]’s mistakes. Thankfully, the clock ornament is not very expensive to build, so [Aaron] could persevere in improving it despite his annual facepalm moments.
Lesson 1 : ALWAYS verify circuit functionality and check Schematic / PCB layout before fabrication
The Christmas ornament is not truly a “binary” clock, but rather a binary-coded-decimal clock using six bits instead of the more usual four or eight bits for BCD encoding. [Aaron] would need four banks of six LEDs each to display number of days, hours, minutes and seconds. Adding a pair of buttons for control brought his GPIO count to 26. To make things simpler, he decided to use just two banks of six LEDs each, with an additional pair of LEDs to indicate if the display was showing days and hours or minutes and seconds. This brought down his GPIO count to a more reasonable number. With this feature list, [Aaron] laid out the first version of his PCB, consisting of an ATmega328, the LEDs, a coin battery for backup power, and a pair of capacitive touch buttons. And this is where his problems started. The connections between microcontroller and programming header were wrong. And the capacitive buttons never worked because capacitive pickup signals were never consistent. Beyond this, his memory is a bit fuzzy to tell us if the rest of the circuit actually worked or not.
Lesson 2 : ALWAYS check manufacturer’s data sheets and verify schematic symbols and footprints
For version 2, he ditched capacitive buttons for physical ones, used an I2C based LED driver to reduce GPIO count, and added a RTC chip with battery backup. This version would’ve worked if he hadn’t messed up the connections to the four pin crystal connected to the microcontroller.
Frustrated with his previous attempts, [Aaron] decided to design a proof-of-concept prototype board based on version 2, just to test all of the functionality. But in this attempt too, he failed miserably with several new issues cropping up. He managed to fix a minor track routing issue for the ATmega328 with a bodge wire.
Since the LED driver and the RTC chip both used the I2C bus, the number of GPIO pins required was reduced to a large extent. To test if he could use a smaller controller instead of the ATmega328, he added an option for mounting an ATtiny45 microcontroller. But all of this effort was pretty much laid to waste due to the wrong footprint used for the LED driver which prevented him from getting any useful test results. On hindsight, he might have had a greater chance of success if he had only fixed the incorrect crystal footprint from the previous version.
Lesson 3 : ALWAYS keep notes of your progress
An upgraded version 3 was supposed to have fixed the previous mistakes, but unfortunately, added some new ones during the process of modification. [Aaron] didn’t maintain any notes or records, and in the few years since then, he has forgotten what worked and what didn’t.
Lesson 4 : See Lesson 2
Version 4 was a big upgrade. The discrete LEDs and I2C LED driver were replaced with WS2812 RGB LEDs, and the ATmega was replaced with an ESP8266 module. Also, the RTC section was removed, in anticipation that the ESP8266 could get time over NTP. A buzzer was thrown in to play tinny christmas tunes. But [Aaron] failed once more when he used WS2812 footprints in the design, but soldered SK6812 LEDs which he had lying around. While the two devices are similar, the mapping between their pin numbers and pin functions is rotated by 180 degrees, which essentially resulted in a power supply short and a super hot PCB. An intermediate version 4.5 was attempted, but like version 3, he does not have any written notes or recollection of what went wrong.
Lesson 5 : See all of the above
For the next iteration, [Aaron] replaced the ESP8266 with an ESP32 module but missed adding the auto-reset circuit making it difficult to program the device. Programming was further hampered due to two of the programming pins being shorted during assembly. He also added the RTC section once again, just in case it was not not possible for the ESP32 to obtain time over NTP. Due to the global pandemic and the resultant chip shortage, he had trouble sourcing a voltage regulator in the same footprint that was on the PCB. And in version 5, he once again made the rookie mistake of using the wrong footprint for the RTC chip. To add to his woes, he used some ‘cool’ tiny push buttons, but they turned out to be so tiny as to be practically impossible to use.
Lesson 6 : Persevere, and you will succeed
Having repeated all of his mistakes at least twice over his five previous attempts, [Aaron] finally wizened up enough to take care while designing and assembling his last version. And was rewarded with a fully functioning Christmas Countdown Binary Clock.
Binary clocks seem to be a favourite amongst hackers, maybe because muggles cannot read them, and we regularly end up featuring some amazing projects here on Hackaday. But it would be interesting to know if any of our readers had a project that went through more iterations or took longer than [Aaron]’s monumental project. Let us know in the comments. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600666",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T05:00:19",
"content": "No wonder Fail of the Week articles have not been regularly posted![Aaron] has been hogging them all!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,393.298012 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/giant-3d-printed-excavator-is-awesome-but-needs-work/ | Giant 3D Printed Excavator Is Awesome, But Needs Work | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printer",
"digger",
"excavator"
] | Many of us adored big construction machinery as children. Once we got past the cute, tiny age, it became uncool to gasp with shock and awe at diggers and bulldozers for some reason . [Ivan Miranda] still digs the big rigs, though,
and built himself a giant 3D printed excavator that looks like brilliant fun.
Why did Lego never make MegaTechnic blocks? [Ivan] shows us the true potential of bigger building blocks.
The build relies on [Ivan]’s
giant 3D-printed Lego-like assembly kit
. It lets him simply bolt together a bunch of plastic girders to make the key parts of the excavator, including the base and the digger arm itself. The digger arm is controlled with linear actuators of [Ivan’s] own design, which uses servos and threaded rod to do the job. They’re not as cool as hydraulics or pneumatics, but they get the job done well. For propulsion, [Ivan] built a tracked drive system again using his unique Lego-like blocks. The tracks were tedious to assemble, but add a lot to the excavators Awesomeness Quotient (AQ).
The overall build is quite slow, and more than a little fragile. It’s not quite ready for hardcore digging tasks. In reality, it’s serving as a test bed for [Ivan]’s 3D-printed building blocks that get better
every time we see them.
Video after the break. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600594",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T21:11:39",
"content": "Having recently dug into RC excavators, gonna need a lot of counterweight to fill that bucket with any meaningful amount of anything. Sweet build though!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,372,393.665501 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/bbs-builder-is-a-framework-for-running-your-own-petscii-paradise/ | BBS Builder Is A Framework For Running Your Own PETSCII Paradise | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"bbs",
"bulletin board system",
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"commodore c64",
"petscii",
"retrocomputing"
] | The 80s and 90s were the glory days of the BBS. The plain old telephone system was responsible for bringing us connection to other digital beings, along with plenty of spuriously-obtained software and inappropriate ASCII art.
[Francesco Sblendorio] has created BBS Builder
to harken back to this great era, allowing people to build their own BBSs as they see fit!
BBS Builder consists of basic classes for construction a BBS that operates in PETSCII mode. If that’s unfamiliar to you, it’s the character encoding created by Commodore, also known as CBM ASCII. BBSs created through this software can be accessed by a variety of appropriately 80s machines.
The Github page
outlines how to create a basic BBS using the code that can be customized to your own liking.
[Francesco] notes the system is compatible with Commodore 64s running RR-NET compatible network cards, WiFi modem cards, and 1541Ultimate hardware using UltimateTerm. Various other methods are supported too, as well as PCs and Macs running Syncterm.
Running a BBS
was like running your own website back in the day. With that said, they also had a distinct community flair that is somehow missing from today’s web. Be sure to sound off with your favorite BBS in the comments! | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600367",
"author": "moneyvikings.com (Jerry)",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T06:26:45",
"content": "Ah the good ‘ol days of the Commodore 64 and the modem. Used to dial into all sorts of BBS’es with no idea what to expect. Landlines often cost by the minute. Long busy signals from other... | 1,760,372,393.79401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/puya-py32-the-cheapest-flash-microcontroller-you-can-buy-is-actually-an-arm-cortex-m0/ | Puya PY32: The Cheapest Flash Microcontroller You Can Buy Is Actually An ARM Cortex-M0+ | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"Puya",
"PY32"
] | There’s a bit of a contest going on when it comes to which is the cheapest microcontroller, yet most of the really cheap ones have one big trade-off in that they have one-time programmable (OTP) memory, generally requiring the use of an (expensive) device emulator during development. This raises the question of what the cheapest reprogrammable MCU is, which
[Jay Carlson] postulates is found in the Puya PY32
ARM Cortex-M0+ based series.
Although [Jay] has
previously mentioned
that these cheap OTP (like the 3-cent Padauk PMS150) MCUs make sense for large volume production) it’s also easy to see that for small volumes and for hobbyists it’s much easier and cheaper to just reflash the firmware in the same cheap MCU rather than using an expensive in-circuit emulator. This is where the
Puya PY32
comes into play, with parts ranging from 8 cents a pop (basic PY32F002A) to $0.74 for the more full-featured models on LCSC, and packages ranging from a miniscule DFN, to LQFP and hand soldering friendly SOIC.
In his blog post, [Jay] covers the major advantage of these Puya parts in that they come with Keil support, English documentation and can use the standard ARM MCU toolchains. The parts themselves share similarities with STM32 parts, although they’re not directly (pin or binary) compatible. The PY32F002A is the lowest end part, with 24 MHz clockspeed, 20 kB of Flash and 3 kB of SRAM. The F003 adds DMA and more RAM and Flash, and the top-end F030 hits 48 MHz, 30 GPIO pins and a smorgasbord of peripherals.
Although it’s been claimed that the WCH CH32V003 is the cheapest non-OTP MCU, this is a part that’s much harder to obtain, with WCH apparently having pulled the part, at least on their AliExpress store, leaving it on TaoBao available for about 25 cents a piece. This would seem to give the Puya parts a definite leg up, and it gives the STM32F030 a definite run for its money in this budget part of the MCU pool.
(Heading image: PY32F002A diagram) | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600305",
"author": "David P",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T00:23:58",
"content": "I disagree with the claim this directly complicates the RISC-V narrative though, as RISC-V doesn’t compete directly against all the different architecture families that ARM offers. M0+ in particular is hy... | 1,760,372,393.852652 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/decoding-433-mhz-signals-with-arduino-raspberry-pi/ | Decoding 433 MHz Signals With Arduino & Raspberry Pi | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"433 mhz",
"oscilloscope",
"smart plug"
] | 433 MHz radio signals are all around us. They’re used for things like smart power plugs, garage door openers, and home weather stations. Decoding these signals can allow you to interface and work with these devices on your own terms. To help in those efforts, [Joonas Pihlajamaa] has written
a three-part tutorial on decoding these signals
.
A soundcard makes for a very cheap oscilloscope.
The focus of the tutorials is decoding the signals of a Nexa radio-controlled smart plug. [Joonas] first explores using an Arduino to do the job, paired with a RFM210LCF-433D radio receiver module. This setup dumps out data to a computer over serial for decoding. [Joonas] then tried an alternative strategy,
using a soundcard
as a “poor man’s oscilloscope” to do the same job, using the same radio module and using Audacity for signal analysis. Finally, [Joonas]
brought out the big guns
, hooking up a Picoscope digital oscilloscope to a Raspberry Pi 4 for a more deluxe attempt at decoding the signals.
The tutorial goes to show that higher-end tools can make such a job much easier. However, the cheaper techniques are a great way of showing what can be done with
the bare minimum in tools
. We’re hoping for an exciting fourth part to [Joonas’s] work, where he instructs us on how to decode 433 MHz signals by drinking huge amounts of caffeine and staring at a very fast blinking LED. If you’ve got your own nifty signal analysis (or SIGINT!) hacks, be a good sport and
drop them into the tipsline! | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600254",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T21:08:22",
"content": "An Arduino, a Pi Pico, a Raspi 4, a Picoscope, a radio receiver module, and a Nexa radio-controlled smart plug as signal source. In addition to a computer with Audacity.But th... | 1,760,372,393.904748 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/the-mouster-adapter-now-has-amiga-scroll-support/ | The MouSTer Adapter Now Has Amiga Scroll Support | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"atari",
"mouse",
"mouster",
"retrocomputer",
"retrocomputing",
"usb hid",
"usb mouse"
] | The MouSTer is a device that enables modern USB HID mice to be used on various retro computers. The project has been through its ups and downs over years, but [drygol] is here to say one thing: rumors of the MouSTers demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Now, the project is back and better than ever!
The team has been hard at work on quashing bugs and bringing new features to bear. The headline is that the MouSTer project will now offer mouse wheel support for Amiga users. This is quite the coup, as mouse wheels were incredibly obscure until the late 90s. Now, users of Commodore’s finest machines will be able to scroll with abandon with modern HID mice.
While the progress is grand, much is still left to be done. Despite the name, the MouSTer was never intended to solely serve Atari users. Future goals involve adding support for ADB mice for retro Macs, DB9 mouse support for even-older Apple machines, and DB9 mouse support for older PCs. The team is eager for there to be one MouSTer to rule them all, so to speak, and hopes to make the ultimate retro computer mouse adapter to serve as many purposes as possible.
We first looked at the MouSTer
back in 2020
, and it’s great to see how far it’s come. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600236",
"author": "Adam Klein",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T20:25:50",
"content": "Are you sad?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6600239",
"author": "sgall17a",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T20:28:10",
"content": "There is ... | 1,760,372,393.945661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/retro-gadgets-nintendo-r-o-b-wanted-to-be-your-friend/ | Retro Gadgets: Nintendo R.O.B Wanted To Be Your Friend | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Robots Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"nintendo",
"r.o.b",
"robot"
] | Too busy playing video games to have a social life? No worries. In 1985, Nintendo introduced R.O.B. — otherwise known as the Robotic Operating Buddy. It was made to play Nintendo with you. In Japan, apparently, it was the Family Computer Robot. We suppose ROB isn’t a very Japanese name. The robot was in response to the video game market crash of 1983 and was meant to keep the new Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) from being classified as a video game, which would have been a death sentence at the time of its release.
Since you might not have heard of R.O.B., you can probably guess it didn’t work out very well. In fact, the whole thing tanked in two years and resulted in only two games.
Background
After video game sales tanked in 1983, many retailers decided that video games were just a fad and that the fad was over. However, toy sales remained strong, so Nintendo pivoted from its plan to produce, essentially, a home video arcade game. This led to the famous NES. However, Nintendo also had access to the Family Computer Robot and decided to package it as part of the NES system, as well.
The Robot
The robot itself, as you might imagine, was pretty simple. It couldn’t move very fast, and it had crude vision that could read certain patterns off the screen. The toy motors inside were noisy, as you can see — and hear — in the video below.
In fact, the robot’s vision was essentially the same as the “Zapper” which was the gun included with the NES. You can see both in the ad below (the NES ad is at 2:30).
Like many light pen devices, the Zapper, and thus R.O.B. only worked with a CRT-based TV. Of course, back then, that was pretty much your only option, so that was no problem at the time. If you want to know more about the scheme, you can
read the patent
. Reflected light and TV brightness could cause problems. The robot had a sticky filter you could put over its eyes, if needed, to cut down on a particularly bright TV.
It isn’t easy to tell from the videos, but the robot is a little over nine inches tall, and about six inches wide. It weighed less than a pound and a half. The arms could rotate through 300 degrees, stopping at five different points. It could also move the arms a little less than three inches vertically, with six different stopping points. The grippers could open to 2.75 inches.
Games
There were only two games officially produced,
Gyromite
and
Stack-Up
. The first game came with claws for the robot that could engage with the included spinning tops. The robot’s manipulation of the spinning tops allowed the on-screen player to navigate past obstacles to collect dynamite before it explodes.
The
Stack-Up
game had five trays and five colored disks, along with more custom claws. There were several variations of the game, but, in general, you had to make the robot stack the disks to match a pattern on the screen.
Unofficially, there was a 2014 game released by an indie developer that makes R.O.B. dance to Christmas music. Other than that, as far as we know, that’s all you can do with it unless you hack something together.
Trojan Horse
R.O.B. was really just a gimmick. It convinced stores that this wasn’t a video game, but a toy. It also excited kids. A market research firm determined that of 200 people who bought the first NES systems, a majority did so because of the robot.
But after a bit, most of the games didn’t use the robot and there were no updates to it. But it didn’t matter. Kids were happy to play
Super Mario Bros
,
The Legend of Zelda
, and other games while R.O.B. sat, unused, in the closet. R.O.B. does show up on screen in several Nintendo games. You can even unlock him as a character in
Super Smash Brothers
.
Teardown
As you might expect, any of these that are left today probably need some work. [Long Island Retro Gaming] has a teardown and repair video if you want to see what makes all that noise when it moves.
Farewell R.O.B
You could say R.O.B. was a failure. But, really, it was very successful. It kept the NES from being tagged as a video game and failing in the marketplace. Once the system was in your home, it didn’t matter that you didn’t use the robot. Not bad for a light gun, a few motors, and some plastic gears.
Of course, these are just begging to be hacked — not to mention
begging for better motors
. Or
cellphone control via goggles
. Or let [Joshua Vasquez] show you how to
build a new one
. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600195",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T18:14:47",
"content": "“Like man light pen devices”Like lighten devicesFTFY",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6600224",
"author": "The C... | 1,760,372,394.008291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/machine-learning-baby-monitor-part-2-learning-sleep-patterns/ | Machine Learning Baby Monitor, Part 2: Learning Sleep Patterns | Dan Maloney | [
"home hacks",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"facial posture",
"infant",
"machine learning",
"MediaPipe",
"motion detection",
"sleep"
] | The first lesson a new parent learns is that the second you think you’ve finally figured out your kid’s patterns — sleeping, eating, pooping, crying endlessly in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, whatever — the kid will change it. It’s the Uncertainty Principle of kids — the mere act of observing the pattern changes it, and you’re back at square one.
As immutable as this rule seems, [Caleb Olson] is convinced he can work around it with
this over-engineered sleep pattern tracker
. You may recall [Caleb]’s earlier attempts to automate certain aspects of parenthood, like
this machine learning system to predict when baby is hungry
; and yes, he’s also strangely obsessed with
automating his dog’s bathroom habits
. All that preliminary work put [Caleb] in a good position to analyze his son’s sleep patterns, which he did with the feed from their baby monitor camera and Google’s MediaPipe library.
This lets him look for how much the baby’s eyes are open, calculate with a wakefulness probability, and record the time he wakes up. This worked great right up until
the wave function collapsed
the baby suddenly started sleeping on his side, requiring the addition of a general motion detection function to compensate for the missing eyeball data. Check out the video below for more details, although the less said about the screaming, demon-possessed owl, the better.
The data [Caleb] has collected has helped him and his wife understand the little fellow’s sleep needs and fine-tune his cycles. There’s a web app, of course, and a really nice graphical representation of total time asleep and awake. No word on naps not taken in view of the camera, though — naps in the car are an absolute godsend for many parents. We suppose that could be curated manually, but wouldn’t doubt it if [Caleb] had a plan to cover that too. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600172",
"author": "AAMACO",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T16:40:16",
"content": "> “This worked great right up until the baby suddenly started sleeping on his side”That’s the tough part about learning anything about your child in the first year: in two weeks it’ll likely change.",
... | 1,760,372,394.584567 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/drilling-glass-with-femtosecond-lasers-just-got-even-better/ | Drilling Glass With Femtosecond Lasers Just Got Even Better | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Laser Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"femtosecond laser",
"fused silica",
"glass",
"laser",
"micromachining",
"sodalime"
] | Glass! It’s a finicky thing. Strong as hell, yet chip it and glance at it the wrong way, and you’re left with a bunch of sharp rubbish. It’s at once adored for its clarity and smoothness, and decried for how temperamental it can be in the case of shock, whether mechanical, thermal, or otherwise.
If you’ve ever tried to drill glass, you’ll know it’s a tough errand. To do so without cracking it is about as likely as winning the lottery on Mars. Even lasers aren’t great at it. However, a research team from France has developed a new technique that uses femtosecond lasers to drill microscopic holes in glass
with a minimum of tapering and no cracking!
Brilliant, no?
Zappin’ Holes
Femtosecond lasers
are powerful and useful tools, though they are still obscure enough to require explanation. They are lasers that fire incredibly short pulses, on the order of 1 femtosecond to a few hundred femtoseconds. If you’re unfamiliar with a femtosecond, it’s 1 x 10
15
seconds, or one millionth of a nanosecond. These lasers release a great deal of energy in a very short period of time, which, if you do the physics, means high peak power. While these lasers can fire single pulses, they can also be fired repetitively at varying rates. For example, some femtosecond lasers can fire repeated ultrashort pulses at a rate of gigahertz.
The Amplitude Tangor 100 laser was used for the experiments. Researchers fired pulses just 500 femtoseconds long – or 0.0005 nanoseconds.
Credit: manufacturer website
What these lasers offer is the ability to deliver high-intensity pulses of light energy very precisely. This makes them highly useful for very fine, very delicate tasks that involve destroying very small amounts of material in what scientists call ablation. The high intensity pulses are capable of ablating many materials, while the short duration of the femtosecond pulses means that there is minimal thermal impact on surrounding areas. In this way, femtosecond lasers have proven useful for everything from laser eye surgery to various micromachining tasks.
When it comes to drilling holes in glass, though, femtosecond lasers have traditionally performed poorly. Usual techniques involve single femtosecond pulses spaced out by a large stretch of time. This tends to create holes with limited penetration that can also exhibit significant tapering and a rough inner surface. The new method is the work of researchers from the University of Bordeaux. It instead relies on femtosecond pulses fired in gigahertz bursts to drill micro-holes in glass.
As per
the research paper
, this technique machines far better microscopic holes in glass. Researchers were able to produce deep crack-free holes with an aspect ratio of up to 37:1 in sodalime glass, and up to 73:1 in fused silica. The holes themselves measured just 27-52 μm in diameter, while reaching from 510 μm to 1620 μm deep. In the case of fused silica, the surface finish of the holes was of remarkable quality, too – being “glossy and almost transparent” University of Bordeaux professor Inka Manek-Hönningerto told
Photonics Media.
These microscopic holes were drilled using repetitive bursts of femtosecond laser pulses.
Credit:
research paper
The team used a Tangor 100 laser from Amplitude in the study, a Ytterbium-doped femtosecond laser. The laser output a maximum average power of 100 W at 1030 nm, firing 500 femtosecond pulses. To drill the holes, the laser fired bursts of fifty 500 fs pulses at a repetition rate of 1 GHz. Each burst of fifty pulses lasted 50 nanoseconds. The bursts were then repeated at a rate of 1 KHz. This provided enough time in between bursts for heat to dissipate, which avoided the creation of a heat-effected zone in the material surrounding the holes. The team notes that non-linear absorption behaviours and the cumulative thermal effects of the laser bursts are key to creating the high-quality holes. With the repetitive intense bursts, the ablation rate of the material is increased, helping to produce the deeper, neater holes.
The hope is that the technique could prove useful for various industrial applications. The speed of the technique is limited, to avoid damaging the glass by thermal effects. However, if there’s an application that requires very tiny holes nicely machined in sodalime or fused silica, this technique could be just the ticket. Given that it uses off-the-shelf, albeit advanced, laser hardware, it should be readily reproducible by other laboratories. | 48 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600143",
"author": "redfast00 - @j@zeus.gent (@redfast00)",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T15:16:51",
"content": "“If you’re unfamiliar with a femtosecond, it’s 1 x 10^15 seconds”: I think a minus sign got dropped, this should be 1 x 10^-15 seconds, no?",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,372,395.040128 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/decoding-compact-disc-audio-from-scratch/ | Decoding Compact Disc Audio From Scratch | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"audio cd",
"cd",
"Compact Disc",
"red book",
"red book audio cd",
"redbook"
] | In the rare case we listen to an audio CD these days, we typically rely on off-the-shelf hardware to decode the 1s and 0s into the dulcet tones of Weird Al Yankovic for our listening pleasure. [Lukas], however, was recently inspired
to try decoding the pits and lands of a CD into audio for himself
.
A fair bit goes into decoding Red Book digital audio.
[Lukas] did the smart thing, and headed straight to the official Red Book Audio CD standard documents freely available on
archive.org.
That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the €345 some publishers want to charge. Not wanting to use a microscope to read the individual pits and lands of the disc, [Lukas] used a DVD player. The electrical signals from the optical pickup were captured with an oscilloscope. 4 megasamples of the output were taken at a rate of 20 megasamples per second. This data was then ported over to a PC for further analysis in Python.
[Lukas] steps us through the methodology of turning this raw data of pits and lands into real audio. It’s a lot of work, and there are some confusing missteps thanks to the DVD player’s quirks. However, [Lukas] gets there in the end and shows that he truly understands how Red Book audio really works.
It’s always interesting to see
older media explored at the bare level
with logic analyzers and oscilloscopes. If you’ve been doing similar investigative work,
don’t hesitate to drop us a line! | 36 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600075",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T12:14:00",
"content": "I just bought a set of the first five Lovin Spoonful albums. And a set of thefirst five (Young) Rascal albums. Fortydollars total, came from the UK.So I may not be listening to much music, but I st... | 1,760,372,395.486814 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/arcaos-os-2-updated-for-the-modern-world/ | ArcaOS: OS/2 Updated For The Modern World | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ArcaOS",
"os/2"
] | For a certain subset of our readers, mentioning IBM’s OS/2 is likely to bring forth a pang of nostalgia, while for others it’s more likely to bring to mind meme images of rebooting ATM displays. Although OS/2 didn’t become the desktop giant that IBM had intended it to become, reports of its demise are very much premature. As [Michael MJD]
covers in a recent video
, ArcaOS is essentially the latest version of OS/2, under official license from IBM.
The initial release of ArcaOS was in 2017, and the most recent release was version 5.0.7 in December of 2021. What this gets you is an evolution of
OS/2
Warp 4.52 that updates the operating system for modern day hardware, although [Michael]’s experiences with using USB and installing WordPerfect 5.2 end up being rather mixed. With IBM not intending to open source the OS any time soon, ArcaOS appears to be mostly aimed at companies and individuals who wish to keep running their
old (OS/2) software
on newer hardware, per the
FAQ
.
This is also reflected in the
license cost
should you wish to obtain a copy of ArcaOS, with a personal edition license costing $129. What this does get one over OS/2 Warp is SMP support, improved USB, audio and video support, along with an actual package manager (ANPM, based on RPM & Yum).
Would you splurge on an updated OS/2 OS like this, or is tinkering with a fully open source OS like Haiku (BeOS reborn) more your thing? | 38 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600064",
"author": "Stefan",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T11:45:47",
"content": "I spent a few minutes thinking about it and then I was reminded of this:https://twitter.com/mjdtweets/status/1621268945876537345",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"com... | 1,760,372,395.26982 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/breadboarding-a-game-boy-from-scratch/ | Breadboarding A Game Boy From Scratch | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"game boy",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Game Boy",
"Teensy",
"Teensy 4.1"
] | The original Nintendo Game Boy is a stout piece of hardware in a solid plastic enclosure. [Raphael Stäbler] recreated the popular handheld on a breadboard instead,
in a fully-functional way, to boot.
[Raphael]’s build doesn’t rely on a real Game Boy CPU or components. Instead it’s emulated with the aid of a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller. [Raphael] coded up an emulator from scratch, instruction by instruction, something he’s documented
on his own blog.
The Teensy is placed on a breadboard, and hooked up with a series of 8 buttons to serve as the controls. Audio output is via a LM386 acting as a simple audio amp, hooked up with an original Game Boy speaker for more authentic sound. Display is thanks to a FT81x display driver running a small LCD. Games are loaded via an SD card formatted in the FAT32 file system.
While it’s not as ergonomic as the original Nintendo console, it works, and works well! It’s an impressive project to see the Game Boy recreated from scratch inside a powerful microcontroller.
We’ve seen other projects go to similar lengths before
. Video after the break. | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599982",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T07:10:11",
"content": "Cool, but Teensy 4.1? Why?Couldn’t have chosen a more expensive platform.(Yes, i know there are more expensive platforms out there you nitpickers, it’s a figure of speech)",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,372,394.479674 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/hobnobbing-with-the-knob/ | Hobnobbing With The Knob | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"HID keyboard",
"knob",
"usb"
] | The scroll wheel might be the best thing that happened to the computer mouse since, well, the computer mouse. But sometimes you want something a little more tangible. For example, with a software-defined radio setup, it doesn’t feel right to scroll your mouse to change frequencies. That’s where
[Wagiminator]’ USB knob would come in handy
. Marrying a 3D printed case, some addressable LEDs, a rotary encoder, and a CH552E microcontroller, the knob appears to the host operating system as a normal USB keyboard. That means most programs can use it without any special drivers or software.
There’s honestly not much to the hardware. A custom PCB holds two WS2812’s, the tiny CPU, the encoder, and the USB plug. There are a few random discrete components, too, but not many. Everything you need is
on the project page
. The PCB layout, the software, the schematics, and the 3D print files. The code that does the main work is extremely simple. The USB code is a bit more complex (look in the include directory) but honestly, it isn’t as bad as most USB examples we’ve seen.
This project is ripe for hacking. The software is simple enough to modify easily. The 3D printed case wouldn’t be hard to spruce up or print in different colors. Following the example, this would make a reasonable core for a custom keyboard peripheral that used exotic keys instead of a rotary encoder.
Knobs can be simple
or complex
. If you want our take on the odd volume control,
we used sonar
. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599916",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T03:20:51",
"content": "A fun project might be to build one of these with a gear train and multiple knobs, with each knob turning the encoder at a different rate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,395.405146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/realistic-animatronic-eyes-are-an-easy-diy-build/ | Realistic Animatronic Eyes Are An Easy DIY Build | Lewin Day | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"animatronic",
"animatronic eyes",
"animatronics",
"eyes",
"halloween",
"holiday hacks"
] | It’s not Halloween yet, but if you’re planning a technically-complicated costume, it might serve you well to start building now. To that end, here’s a guide from [Ikkalebob] on how to produce
a compact animatronic eye mechanism.
The eye is inspired by mechanisms used in professional animatronics. However, that doesn’t mean it’s hard to build. Complex machining is done away with in favor of readily reproducible 3D-printed components. The eyes are able to look in different directions and can move realistically, and the build includes working eyelids that have a great blinking action to them that feels very natural. An Arduino Uno is charged with running the eyes, paired with a bunch of hobby servos and an Adafruit PCA9685 servo driver. A hefty 5V, 4 amp power supply is on hand to deliver enough juice so the servos move smoothly without stuttering.
It’s the kind of thing that’s perfect for your spooky familiar, or installing eyes in the back of your head. It would be perfect to
hide behind a window or in the bushes, too
. Video after the break. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599873",
"author": "Mr 02127",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T01:23:46",
"content": "Glad they are still around. Found his videos about 6 months ago and saw he hadn’t posted in almost 2 years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6599880"... | 1,760,372,394.530109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/virgin-orbit-first-launch-attempt-what-went-wrong/ | Virgin Orbit’s First UK Launch Attempt: What Went Wrong | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"Boeing 747",
"satellite launch",
"Virgin Orbit"
] | A month ago there was disappointment as Virgin Orbit’s first attempt at a space launch from the United Kingdom using its converted Boeing 747 airliner platform failed to achieve orbit. Now with the benefit of a lot of telemetry analysis the company
have released their findings
, which conclude that a fuel filter within the second stage became dislodged. The resulting fuel starvation was enough to cause the engine to receive insufficient cooling and overheat, bringing the mission to a premature end.
As we said at the time
, the interesting part of the launch,
midair from the 747
, appears to have gone flawlessly. Space exploration is hard, and we are confident that they’ll fix any fuel filter mounting issues on future launches and be placing payloads in orbit for their customers soon afterwards. The whole program has seen significant news coverage in the UK where the craft has its base, and those of us in that environ will no doubt see it portrayed locally as a matter of national pride. The truth however will be that it flies on the talents of engineers from all corners of the world. We’ll be watching out next time, and look forward to a successful mission.
Header: Österreichisches Weltraum Forum,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599851",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2023-02-16T00:47:05",
"content": "“conclude that a fuel filter within the second stage became dislodged.” …It is actually quite amazing that we can ‘reliably’ put anything in orbit. Just one failed part of flight hardware can doom an at... | 1,760,372,395.583954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/smart-contact-lenses-tell-you-where-to-go/ | Smart Contact Lenses Tell You Where To Go | Navarre Bartz | [
"Software Hacks",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"augmented reality",
"bionic eye",
"contact lens",
"electrochromic",
"eyes",
"optics",
"Prussian Blue"
] | Augmented Reality (AR) promises to relieve us from from the boredom of mundane reality and can also help you navigate unfamiliar environments. Current AR tech leaves something to be desired, but researchers at the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute have brought
AR contact lenses closer to actual reality.
The researchers micro-printed FeFe(CN)
6
ink onto the contact substrate and thermally reduced it at 120˚C for nine seconds to form
Prussian Blue
, an
electrochromic pigment.
By confining the material with the meniscus of the ink, resolution was better than previous techniques to display data on contact lenses. While the ability to reversibly change from clear to blue faded after 200 cycles, the researchers were targeting a disposable type of smart contact lens, so degradation of the display wasn’t considered a deal breaker.
Since voltages applied were constant, it seems this isn’t a true bi-stable display like
e-ink
where power is only required to change states. The on condition of a section required 0.5 V while off was -0.2 V. The researchers printed a contact with straight, left, and right arrows as well as STOP and GO commands. Connected to a GPS-equipped Arduino Uno, they used it to navigate between ten different checkpoints as a demonstration. Only a 3D printed eyeball was brave enough (or had IRB approval) to wear the contact lens, so watching the state change through a macro lens attached to a smartphone camera had to do.
With more AR devices on the way, maybe it’s time to start embedding household objects with
invisible QR codes
or
cleaning your workshop
to get ready for your
AR workbench
. | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599477",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T19:45:40",
"content": "In German, Prussian Blue is called Berlin blue.Soon do we get the contact lenses used by Torchwood members? awesome !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,372,394.812248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/too-cool-for-8-bit-retro-try-1-bit-gaming/ | Too Cool For 8-bit Retro? Try 1-bit Gaming | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"MC14500",
"one-bit"
] | While the world has been racing for higher and higher bit counts for CPUs, there are always those that buck the trend. Consider the venerable Motorola MC14500B, a 1-bit CPU, no kidding. [Usagi Electric] built up a computer based on one of these chips using a breadboard but has since pulled it apart to use the breadboard for other things. So this time,
he’s made a permanent version on a PCB
and created a simple game to show it off. You can see the result in the video below.
Well, the chip had one bit in the datapath. It did not have any memory, but it did have a way to feed it 4-bit instructions, and, as you might guess, there were 16 possibilities for instructions. The chip was meant to replace industrial controllers where even a PLC might be overkill, and apparently, it did see some use in the real world.
The board was made to look like a period-appropriate board. There are thick and curvy traces, widely separated, and there’s no solder mask, either. The finished board looks great and could easily pass for a 1970s-era development board. There were a few problems with the original board, but it all worked out in the end.
We know the little CPU showed up on at least
one educational board
. While you might think having a small CPU is a disadvantage, it isn’t if you are trying to
build it using tubes
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599256",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T01:39:37",
"content": "Handy to go with one’s 1-bit DACs.https://www.stereophile.com/content/pdm-pwm-delta-sigma-1-bit-dacs",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6599259",
... | 1,760,372,394.640693 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/5-axis-printer-wants-to-design-itself/ | 5-Axis Printer Wants To Design Itself | Navarre Bartz | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"3d printing",
"5-Axis",
"duet controller",
"Duex",
"generative design",
"genetic algorithm",
"parametric",
"reprap",
"slicer",
"slicing"
] | RepRap 3D printers were designed with the ultimate goal of self-replicating machines. The
generatively-designed Gen5X printer
by [Ric Real] brings the design step of that process closer to reality.
While 5-axis printing is old hat in CNC land, it remains relatively rare in the world of additive manufacturing. Starting with “a set of primitives… and geometric relationships,” [Real] ran the system through multiple
generations
to arrive at its current design. Since this is a generative design, future variants could look different depending on which parameters you have the computer optimize.
The Gen5X uses the
5 Axis Slicer from DotX
for slicing files and runs a RepRap Duet board with Duex expansion. Since the generative algorithm uses parametric inputs, it should be possible to to have a Gen5X generated based on the
vitamins you may have already.
With how fast
AI is evolving
, perhaps soon this printer will be able to completely design itself? For now, you’ll have to
download the files
and try it yourself.
If you want to see some more printers with more than 3-axes, check out the
RotBot
or
Open5X
. | 41 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599219",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T21:03:59",
"content": "Remind me the “The Necessary Thing” by Robert Sheckley",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6599220",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,395.136356 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/how-home-made-robot-arms-used-to-be-made/ | How Home Made Robot Arms Used To Be Made | Jenny List | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"optocoupler",
"parallel port",
"robot arm"
] | With laser cutters and 3D printers in our arsenal as well as the global toy shop of mass-produced parts and single-board computers, building a robotic project has almost never been easier. In times past though, there was more of a challenge, with a computer likely meaning a chunky desktop model and there being no plethora of motors at low prices, a robot arm required more ingenuity. [
Marius Taciuc
] shares with us
an arm he built from the most minimal of parts back in 2003
, and it’s a beautiful exercise in creative reuse.
The arm itself uses metal and FR4 for its structure, and borrows extensively from cassette tape mechanisms for motors and gears. The stronger motor for the forearm is a geared unit from a heating system, and to control all this, a relay board is hooked up to a computer’s parallel port. This last assembly is particularly ingenious, having no optocouplers handy he made his own by coupling LEDs to metal can transistors with their lids removed.
The arm was entered in a competition, and he relates a tale with which we’ll all be familiar — at the critical moment, it didn’t work. Fortunately a last-minute accidental covering of the board with a floppy disk solved the problem, as it turned out that enough light was leaking into those home-made optocouplers to trigger them. The prize was won not just on the strength of the arm, but on his explanation of the lessons learned along the way.
The once-ubiquitous parallel port is now absent from most computers, but
there’s still plenty of scope for experimentation if you have one
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599213",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T20:15:30",
"content": "Byte in the early days would provide background. So articles about how speech us made in the body, or background about barcodes. The notion of robots was “hot” from fairly early on. So there wer... | 1,760,372,395.18583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/supercon-2022-matt-venns-tiny-tapeout-brings-chip-design-to-the-masses/ | Supercon 2022: Matt Venn’s Tiny Tapeout Brings Chip Design To The Masses | Robin Kearey | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2022 Superconference",
"ASIC",
"custom chip",
"Matt Venn"
] | Not that long ago, rolling your own printed circuit boards was difficult, time-consuming and expensive. But thanks to an army of cheap, online manufacturing services as well as high-quality free design software, any hobbyist can now make boards to rival those made by pros. A similar shift might be underway when it comes to chip design: affordable manufacturing options and a set of free software tools are slowly bringing custom chips into the realm of hackers and hobbyists. One of those working hard to democratize chip design is Matt Venn, who’s been telling us all about his current big project, called
Tiny Tapeout
, in his talk at
Remoticon 2022
.
Matt’s quest to bring IC design to the masses started in 2020, when the first open-source compatible Process Design Kit (PDK) was released to the public. A PDK is a collection of files, normally only available under strict non-disclosure agreements, that describe all the features of a specific chip manufacturing process and enable you to make a design. With this free PDK in hand and a rag-tag collection of free software tools, Matt set out to design his first chip, a VGA clock, which he taped out (released to manufacturing) in July 2020.
Building on this experience, Matt wrote a complete beginner’s guide to chip design, called the
Zero to ASIC course
. To give students the opportunity to put this theory into practice, he also organized a multi-project wafer: a single manufacturing run that pools multiple designs in order to split the cost. This turned out to be hugely popular, and Matt has so far coordinated seven of these MPWs, each with loads of interesting designs.
Tiny Tapeout’s on-line layout viewer gives you a better view of your layout than many professional tools.
However, even with a free PDK, open-source tools and a detailed course explaining the way, designing properly functioning chips is still very difficult. Matt’s next big project, called Tiny Tapeout, therefore aims to make chip design so easy that even a child can do it. It does this by integrating all the required tools into a single web-based application and offering a cheap manufacturing option to go with it.
The web tool is based on
WokWi
by Uri Shaked. WokWi is a browser-based circuit simulation tool, originally developed for Arduino programming, which Matt and Uri turned into a logic design and simulation tool for chip design. Once you’ve designed your chip’s logic behavior, you can link the design into a GitHub repository where a script will then turn it into a complete chip layout. You can view the layout and even zoom around the transistors in a full 3D view, seeing exactly what the final result would look like under a microscope.
On the manufacturing side, Matt provides each project with a chip area of 90 by 120 microns, enough for around 400 logic gates. Each chip gets eight inputs and eight outputs, which can operate at clock frequencies of up to 15 kHz. This might not seem like much, but the project’s trial run yielded several impressive projects, including simple counters and adders but also a 4-bit CPU and even a 9-LUT FPGA.
Found the custom chip yet? It’s tiny U1 in the middle of the board.
There’s space on the chip for about 500 different designs, all of which will be present in all manufactured chips – you can choose which design is active by selecting the ID of that design using DIP switches on the PCB. A comprehensive datasheet will list the contents of each single design, so there’s plenty left to play with even after you’ve checked out your own work.
Matt also has lots of things left to do: he’s aiming to add analog and RF functionality to the current design flow, which would enable far more versatile designs that can connect to sensors and drive high-speed data buses. One tool that will help in teaching analog design is
SiliWiz
, another web-based simulation tool he’s been working on that lets you play with on-chip transistor layouts and see their electrical behavior in real time.
We can’t help but be impressed by Matt’s tireless work to make chip design available to anyone, and we’re looking forward to the next, even more powerful generation of Tiny Tapeout. Perhaps one day, submitting a GDS file to a fab will seem just as ordinary as sending Gerbers to a PCB shop is today. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599184",
"author": "Przemek",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T18:15:33",
"content": "The max clock is 25kHzhttps://github.com/TinyTapeout/tinytapeout-02/raw/tt02/datasheet.pdfI was wondering why so low and the reason is the whole chip is linked into a long scan chain that links all the 50... | 1,760,372,395.345551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/parametric-press-unravels-the-jpeg-format/ | Parametric PressUnravels The JPEG Format | Dave Rowntree | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"chroma",
"discrete cosine transform",
"encoding",
"huffman coding",
"image",
"JPEG",
"luminance",
"run length encoding",
"YCbCr"
] | This is the first we’ve heard of
Parametric Press
— a digital magazine with some deep dives into a variety of subjects (such as particle physics, “big data” and such) that have interactive elements or simulations of various types embedded within each story.
The first one that sprung up in our news feed is a piece by [Omar Shehata] on
the humble JPEG image format
. In it, he explains the how and why of the JPEG encoding process, allowing the reader to play with the various concepts along the way, in real time, within the browser.
RGB colour-space subsampling doesn’t affect each component to the same degree due to the human eye cone cell response. Also, the chroma components are much less affected than the luminance.
For those not familiar with the format, the first step (which is actually optional) to JPEG encoding is to transform the image from the RGB color space, into a
YCbCr (luminance, chrominance) color space
. Since the human eye is far more sensitive to luminance (brightness) differences than it is to Cb (chroma relative blueness) and Cr (chroma relative redness) differences, these latter two components can be subsampled by only storing a single value for each, in every 2×2 pixel matrix. JPEG allows other matrix sizes, but 2×2 is the most common.
This sets the scene for the clever bit, that comes next and allows more of that harder-to-perceive chroma information to be discarded. It’s fun to play with the chroma sub-sampling slider and see how the different colours are not equally affected, due to the relative sensitivities of the human eye cone cells.
Next, the three YCbCr components are treated independently to a discrete cosine transform and quantization. This transforms each 8×8 pixel block into 64 discrete spatial frequencies. The JPEG compression level (which you can change) affects how many of the upper-frequency components get discarded, and thus how much of the fine spatial detail gets discarded. This is the main source of JPEG image quality loss. Finally, the compressed blocks are delta encoded, where each subsequent block is coded as the difference from the previous one. Like chroma subsampling, this doesn’t offer any compression on its own but allows the subsequent run-length encoding to be more effective, giving more (lossless) compression. Finally, the whole lot is then Huffman compressed with a unique table stored in the JPEG header. So want to play with JPEGs some more?
here’s the GitHub source
.
If all of this theoretical stuff is a bit useless to you, perhaps you just want to decode some JPEGs, then here is a
speedy library for just that
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599169",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T17:27:37",
"content": "Wow, those live editors are cool. It feels like playing with an old-school synth, but with images. And having no clue what I just did.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,395.53705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/all-about-usb-c-talking-low-level-pd/ | All About USB-C: Talking Low-Level PD | Arya Voronova | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"Type-C",
"USB C",
"USB Type-C",
"USB-C PD"
] | In this USB-C series, we’ve covered quite a bit of USB-C – things that are well known, things that should be better known, and a couple things that just appeared online for the first time. We’ve covered almost everything in some depth except USB Power Delivery. I’ve described the process a bit
in the “Power” article
, but that was mostly about how to use PD by simply buying the right solution. However, that’s not enough for a hacker. Let’s see if we can make our own PD trigger board.
PD Trigger Board In 100 Lines Of Python
We’ll start with no pre-existing software stack – we’ll take a PD PHY (physical layer interface) chip, connect it over I2C, toggle its registers ourselves, and do our own packet crafting. I will use MicroPython, because I find it works best for educational purposes; plus, I genuinely like writing Python for hardware tinkering purposes, and I hope you can appreciate the benefits as well.
Our target for today? Getting 9 V voltage out of a USB-C PSU, short and sweet; basically, what every single trigger board out there is built to do. After we reach this target, you’ll be able to create your own trigger boards – but way cooler, customizable, with price likely comparable to a trigger board chip; plus, in Python, no less! Oh, and it will take us under a hundred lines of Python code to get there.
Minimum Hardware Requirements
If you want to follow along, you’ll want the FUSB302 chip, and some kind of MicroPython board. I’m using a RP2040+FUSB302B combination on a devboard of my own design, but an ESP8266 would do just as well. FUSB302B is the new and seemingly functionally identical option – not sure what the differences are, and I’m pretty sure they won’t matter to us.
Of course, the FUSB302’s CC pins have to be connected to a USB-C receptacle; VCONN doesn’t matter to us here but you can short it to 3.3 V input. However, I do expect you to have a USB-C cable and a PSU with a USB-C socket, too – or a captive cable PSU, the captive/socketed part doesn’t matter much. And make sure your PSU is actually capable of voltages over 5 V – if it doesn’t state any, then it might not speak digital PD at all, only relying on analog signalling. 100 pF – 470 pF capacitors from CC to ground are desired, but by no means required. Wire up your 3.3 V, attach SDA and SCL (INT won’t hurt but isn’t needed for now), make sure I2C pullups are there, and let’s go!
Niceties? It’d be nice if you could attach an LED to VBUS; having a 1 kΩ resistor in series ought to be enough for even 20 V on VBUS. I imagine some LEDs might get unhappy at 17 mA, but most should survive just fine; if they don’t, replace the LED and double the resistor. This will be useful during debugging later on! You don’t have to connect the USB-C port’s VBUS to the FUSB’s VBUS, though, it might help later on if building a more proper device is your aim. Absolutely do make VBUS accessible so that you can probe it with a multimeter and check whether your code has run successfully!
Software Setup
For a start, download
the FUSB302 datasheet,
as well as
the USB PD specification
, version 3.0 – we will refer to them both. Having both of them open while playing with PD is highly advised, in fact! That said, for this installment, we will only need the FUSB302 datasheet.
Get MicroPython
onto your board, and initialize the I2C bus –
here’s example code
for RP2040, ESP8266 or ESP32. I highly recommend that you test the configuration and connections out in the MicroPython REPL first, through a serial terminal. Does an address like
0x22
appear when you do
i2c.scan()
? Then you’ve wired everything up correctly! Does it not appear, or does the initialization fail? Make sure that your pins are defined properly, and you have pullups on I2C pins.
When an I2C device appears, you can play around. Try and read the
0x01
version and revision register. In general, consult the FUSB302 register map – it starts at datasheet page 18, and you’ll be jumping around these pages for a bit as you play!
Reminder on how to read and write registers of an I2C device in MicroPython:
# Writing 0xAA and 0x55 to address 0x22, register 0x3e
i2c.writeto_mem(0x22, 0x3e, bytes([0xAA, 0x55]))
# Reading one byte from address 0x22, register 0x43
data = i2c.readfrom_mem(0x22, 0x43, l)
# type of 'data' will be 'bytes', convert as needed, or just print it
Ready to proceed? Let’s switch away from REPL at this point – instead, I suggest you put code into a
main.py
document, transfer it to the board, then run it whenever you need to test it. My workflow for this mode is running a
tmux
session split into separate tabs for a terminal-based code editor and for a serial terminal/code upload shell – for code upload,
I use
ampy
.
If you’re looking for something GUI-based, I’ve had friends successfully use
uPyCraft.
If you’re following this tutorial from CircuitPython, first, that’s admirable and I hope it’s easy enough for you to adapt the examples, and second, you have an advantage – it will be easier for you to upload your code, since CircuitPython supports storage device mode on things like the RP2040. However, there’s a disadvantage too – you’ll have to put more effort into debugging, since CircuitPython doesn’t let you introspect your code in REPL after it crashes – at least, it didn’t let me do it last time I tried, and that seemed to be a fundamental limitation.
Setting The Chip Up
First, we need to set a few registers in the FUSB302. These settings assume that a USB-C cable is plugged in; at least, most of them operate under such an assumption. I could set you up with a more sophisticated setup, but that’s not what this article is for – today, we’re getting a higher voltage out of a PSU we have connected, and we don’t need much for that.
First, a good practice is to reset the FUSB302 – who knows if your MCU has just been rebooted. Write
0x01
to
0x0c
(RESET) register for that.
0x02
will reset the PD logic – we’ll need that later. Then, we need to get the chip’s different parts out of sleep – writing
0x0f
to
0x0b
(POWER) register will do. Write
0x00
to
0x06
(CONTROL0) to unmask all interrupts, then
0x07
to
CONTROL3
to enable packet retries. Now, we’re ready to determine the CC polarity!
The FUSB302 has pulldown resistors implemented by default, and while we could detach them, they do help, as we’re working with a PSU right now – which has a pullup on the CC line. The PD communication only happens on one of the CC pins, and by measuring which one of them has a source pullup attached, we can determine which pin is connected to the PSU. The specific way to do this, I’ve borrowed from the Pinecil’s FUSB302 initialization code, through snooping upon it a logic analyzer. However, I’ve seen this exact method done in other FUSB302-aimed libraries as well.
This could very well be a cargo cult measure, given that one could theoretically use the port role automatic toggle (see CONTROL2) feature of the FUSB302 – I didn’t get that one to work well for me, however. Until now –
the Pinecil implementation that I learned from,
happens to be sink-only, and uses a manual measurement method. It’s straightforward – connect to CC1, measure the voltage, connect to CC2, measure the voltage, then compare. The FUSB302 has two convenient bits that convert CC pullup voltage to USB current levels allowed, and we can just compare those two bits between two reads.
First, write
0x07
(
0b111
) to
0x02
(SWITCH0), connecting the internal ADC to CC1 – then, read
0x40
(STATUS0), and get the bits 1-0 from that; those bits represent current levels, and the non-connected pin will indicate zero. Then, switch the ADC to CC2 by writing
0x0b
(
0b1011
) to SWITCH0, and read STATUS0 again. If the CC1 value is larger than CC2, then the PSU is connected to CC1, and vice-versa. If both the CC1 and CC2 reading are at zero, then there’s no PSU detected – that’s where you add a “nothing detected” special case to your code, and then perhaps wait for a PSU to be attached. Alternatively, as a homework assignment, you can try and get the toggle feature working!
Starting The Transmitter Has Consequences
We now know the CC pin to operate on – let’s make use of that. Say, our pin is CC1. We enable both the receive and transmitter on it, as well as automatic GoodCRC responses. Write
0x25
(
0b100101
) to
0x03
(SWITCH1) register – bits 0-1 will change depending on which CC pin you want the transmitter to connect to, bit 2 enables automatic GoodCRC responses, and bits 5-6 say that we’re going to talk PD revision 2.0. We’re actually going to be talking PD 3.0, but the FUSB302 datasheet hasn’t been updated to say that it’s outright supported, even though it seems to be fully functionally compatible as far as I’ve been told. Then, write
0x07
to the SWITCH0 register – connecting the measure block to the CC1 pin, just like when we were measuring it.
The GoodCRC part is a “point of no return” of sorts. The GoodCRC message transmission means that, whether you’re talking to a PSU or a device, the other side essentially receives ‘message acknowledged’ responses to whatever they sent. In short, sending GoodCRC responses is a sign of intelligent life sent to the device on the other side of the USB-C cable. Some USB-C messages, however, also require an intelligent response within a certain timeframe after they’ve been received – if you send a GoodCRC response automatically, but then don’t send a response expected, that might incur a ‘something went wrong’ response on the other end.
For instance, a USB-C power supply will automatically send out a list of its capabilities – power profiles, the options we know as “5 V @ 3 A”, “12 V @ 2.25 A” and so on. If you acknowledge those with your automatic GoodCRC response, you have 500 ms to reply with the power profile you want to use – even if you plan to stay at 5 V. The USB-C specification requires a PSU to disable and enable VBUS if it doesn’t receive a profile response – most PSUs obey this. If you send GoodCRC to the advertisement but don’t reply with a preferred profile, and your device is powered from USB-C VBUS, the PSU will cause it to go into an infinite power looping. The solution is simple – reply as soon as you get an advertisement; if you want to ask for a different profile later, you can always do so!
Nevertheless, we should do a bit of cleanup before we start receiving messages. Write
0x40
into
0x06
(CTRL0) to flush the TX buffer,
0x04
into
0x07
to flush the RX buffer, and
0x02
into
0x0c
(RESET) to reset the FUSB’s internal PD logic.
Now we’re all set – the messages will be coming into the FUSB302’s receive buffer, and we’ll be able to read them.
Getting Messages
A PD PSU will automatically send out a message with its capabilities, and it will try to do that a few times after power-up – until the moment that a message is acknowledged with our GoodCRC. As your board is presumably not powered from the same USB-C port, you will be able to receive the message from inside the REPL and poke at it – however, do remember that the PSU will timeout unless you’re able to request a profile on time, and you won’t be able to do that interactively; in other words, you need to craft a response automatically. Nevertheless, we will be able to do just that fairly easily!
How do you check whether there’s something in the receive buffer? Read the
0x41
(STATUS1) register and check the bits 5-4: bit 5 will be set to zero when the receive buffer contains something. Then, you can read bytes out of the buffer – with a block read, from the
0x43
address. The buffer might contain multiple messages at once, however, in a simple USB-C PD power supply scenario, you can expect there to be one message.
You don’t have to carefully read a single message’s worth of bytes for now – for ‘checking that things work’ purposes, you can just read the entire buffer, which is 80 bytes long. Let’s do just that!
>>> b = i2c.readfrom_mem(0x22, 0x43, 80)
>>> b
b'\xe0\xa1a,\x91\x01\x08,\xd1\x02\x00\x13\xc1\x03\x00\xdc\xb0\x04\x00\xa5@\x06\x00<!\xdc\xc0H\xc6\xe7\xc6\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'
We Got Contact!
We received our first message! And we only needed to follow a relatively simple initialization sequence – this is not all that much harder than playing with a HD44780 LCD; and you could surely stuff this code into an ATTiny, even. I’d like to thank [Ralim] and [Clara Hobbs] for laying the groundwork; the commands I’m describing, are theirs to have figured out – I couldn’t figure out the full sequence by myself, so, a lot of the “which commands are actually needed for it to work” was taken from their stacks.
In the next article, we will parse this message and craft a proper reply to it! I have to apologize for leaving you on a cliffhanger, but properly walking you through parsing messages will take a bit of time. However, you don’t need to do any FUSB302 configuration anymore – you are already prepared to reply with a PD message, as soon as you can craft a suitable reply. Do you feel impatient? Want to do it yourself, as homework? Here’s
my code
for parsing such messages, here’s
IronOS code
responsible for the same, and here’s my pretty-printed
I2C communications capture
of a Pinecil negotiating a higher voltage profile. Otherwise, we’ll finish this next week! | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599153",
"author": "WF",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T16:28:45",
"content": "If you want a pretty print-out of PD messages, use the PD decoder in sigrok/Pulseview.It is going to look somewhat like this:https://community.element14.com/technologies/power-management/b/blog/posts/usb-pd—cc... | 1,760,372,395.673338 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/citizen-science-finds-prehistoric-burial-mounds/ | Citizen Science Finds Prehistoric Burial Mounds | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"citizen science",
"lidar",
"zooniverse"
] | What do you do when you have a lot of LiDAR data and not enough budget to slog through it? That’s the problem the Heritage Quest project was faced with — they had 600,000 LiDAR maps in the Netherlands and wanted to find burial mounds using the data. By
harnessing 6,500 citizen scientists
, they were able to analyze the data and locate over 1,000 prehistoric burial mounds, including many that were previously unknown, along with cart tracks, kilns, and other items of archaeological interest.
The project used
Zooniverse
, a site we’ve mentioned before, to help train volunteers to analyze data. The project had at least 15 volunteers examining each map. The sites date between 2,800 and 500 BC. Archaeologists spent the summer of 2021 verifying many of these digital finds. They took samples from 300 sites and determined that 80 of them were previously unknown. They estimate that the total number of sites found by the volunteers could be as high as 1,250.
This is a great example of how modern technology is changing many fields and the power of citizen science, both topics we always want to hear more about. We’ve seen
NASA
tapping citizen scientists, and we’ve even seen high school students
building research buoys
. So if you’ve ever wanted to participate in advancing the world’s scientific knowledge, there’s never been a better time to do it. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599137",
"author": "Dan (No, the OTHER one)",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T15:38:20",
"content": "I once used zooniverse, and while the model of citizen scientists do something is interesting, the work is often a bit menial, especially once you reach the hundreds in analyzed datasets. ... | 1,760,372,397.295122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/mxenes-make-faraday-cages-you-can-turn-on-and-off/ | MXenes Make Faraday Cages You Can Turn On And Off | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"faraday",
"faraday cage",
"faraday shield",
"mxene"
] | Shielding is crucial for all manner of electronic devices. Whether you want to keep power supply noise out of an audio amplifier, or protect ICBMs against an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear attack, the basic physics behind shielding remains the same. A Faraday cage or shield will do the trick.
At times, though, it would be desirable to shield and unshield a device at will. A new class of materials known as MXenes may be able to offer just that functionality, with microscopically thin films serving as shields that can be switched on and off at will.
Shut It Out
A Faraday cage will protect you from arc discharges, as seen in this Tesla coil demonstration. Credit: Raymond “Peaceray” Leonard, CC BY 3.0 via
Wikimedia Commons
To understand how MXenes make a Faraday cage that can be switched on and off, first we must understand Faraday cages and shields themselves. Faraday shields are enclosures created out of conductive material that serve to block electromagnetic radiation from their interior. Faraday cages are much the same thing, but are built with mesh rather than out of continuous material. You’ve probably spotted shielding on all kinds of equipment, such as in stereo systems or your old Amiga 500. The basic principle is that an external electrical field around a Faraday shield causes the electric charges in the shield to distribute themselves in a way that cancels out the effect of the external field inside the shield itself.
Faraday shields tend to attenuate a broad range of frequencies quite effectively. In the case of Faraday cages, though, the size of the holes in the cage’s mesh play a major role in the penetration of electromagnetic radiation. Shorter wavelengths correspond to higher frequencies and will better pass through meshes with with a given hole size. A good rule of thumb is that the holes in the mesh should be less than 1/10th the size of the wavelength to be attenuated. For example, 2.4 GHz radio transmissions have a wavelength of 125 mm. Thus, a Faraday cage designed to block this frequency would require a mesh size less than 12.5 mm. Visible light, which is an electromagnetic wave with a much smaller wavelength, would readily pass through such a mesh.
Etch Away
Etching Ti
3
AlC
2
with hydrofluoric acid selectively removes the aluminium atoms, creating an MXene material with an accordion-like layered structure.
Credit: Prussianblue1403 via
Wikipedia
, CC BY-SA 3.0
The materials themselves consist of a conductive metallic layer in the form of a carbide, nitride, or carbonitride, sandwiched in between oxide layers. They are typically manufactured using transition metals like titanium, vanadium, niobium, or chromium. MXenes are made from from MAX phases, a family of hexagonal layered carbides and nitrides which also contain “Group A” elements like aluminium, germanium, or gallium. These Group A elements are removed or “etched” away via chemical processes, leaving the metallic (M) and carbon or nitride (X) atoms – hence the name.
The value of MXenes is that they are conductive, while having a mesh-like structure. If you’ve been following along so far, you’ll know that the dimensions of that mesh structure determine the material’s shielding ability as a Faraday cage. In the case of MXenes, the size of the holes in the mesh structure can be varied by combining the materials with an electrolyte solution. By applying an electric charge to the combination of electrolyte and MXene material, ions can be made to flow in a way that stretches or compresses the MXene structure. In turn, this varies the material’s conductivity and shielding performance.
As published in
Nature,
researchers have been able to make practical shielding using MXenes that can be switched on and off. In testing, a thin MXene film was able to variably attenuate or pass X-band signals, 8.2 GHz to 12.4 GHz, by applying potentials of less than a volt. The film readily held up to over 500 switching cycles in testing while sustaining the same level of performance. Future work will involve testing the material’s shielding performance at other frequency ranges, and increasing the strength of the shielding effect.
It builds on previous work that has explored the use of compressible conductive foams for the same purpose. The benefit of MXene films is that the same effect can be achieved on a much smaller level. Variable shielding foams are on the order of millimeters thick, and must be mechanically compressed or decompressed. MXene films, on the other hand, can be electrically controlled, and are less than a micrometer thick. They could even potentially be manufactured into microchips themselves as a variable, controllable RF shield.
It’s an exciting technology that could just be the new hotness in the RF world. Alternatively, MXenes could be the new graphene – the darling of the science media that still hasn’t delivered on all the fantastical promises once foretold. As always, time will tell. In any case, to avoid embarrassing yourself at a future conference, just know this: the term is pronounced “max-eens.” | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599456",
"author": "Col. Panek",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T18:56:14",
"content": "Switchable shielding is nice, but it sounds like you could also make all kinds of tunable stuff, like filters and antennas.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,372,397.614956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/ploopy-builds-open-source-rp2040-powered-headphones-and-you-can-too/ | Ploopy Builds Open Source RP2040-Powered Headphones And You Can Too! | Dave Rowntree | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"audio",
"dsp",
"eq",
"headphone",
"PCM3050",
"raspberry pi",
"rp2040"
] | We’ve seen many DIY headphones projects on these fair pages over the years, but not many that are quite as DIY as the
Ploopy Headphones
. What makes this project interesting is the sheer depth of the construction, with every single part being made from what we might call base materials. Materials such as 3D printer filament, foam and felt, and the usual metallic vitamins.
The electronics are fairly straightforward, with an RP2040 functioning as the USB audio interface and equalizer function. Audio samples are emitted as I
2
S into a
PCM3050 24-bit stereo codec
which generates a pair of differential output audio signals. These are then converted from differential to single-ended signals and passed on to the coil drivers. The coil drivers consist of no fewer than eight-paralleled opamps per channel. All of this is powered by the USB-C connection to the host computer. Whilst a kit of parts is available for this, you can make your own if you wish, as the full source (Altium designer needed for tweaks) is available on the
Ploopy headphone GitHub
.
A pretty ploopy response
Many DIY headphone builds would likely be using off-the-shelf speaker units, with large parts of the ear cups being taken from spare parts kits for commercial offerings. But not the Ploopy. The drivers are constructed from flex PCB coils with a standard TRRS jack on each side. Magnets for these coils to react against are held in a 3D-printed frame that is attached to the outer cover. The coils are aligned with a special jig and bonded to the ‘driver foam’ with some 3M VHB tape.
The ear cups are constructed with some 3D printed rings, foam pieces, and simple woven material. The resonator plates push into the inner side of the cup, and the assembly simply screws to the driver assembly. The
incredibly detailed assembly wiki
makes it look easy, but we reckon there are a few tricky steps in there to trip the unwary. The headband again consists of printed spring sections, some woven material, and foam with a few metallic vitamins thrown in. That makes it sounds simple, but
it isn’t
.
On the whole the build looks fantastic, but what does it sound like? The Ploopy team has tested them against a pair of Sennheiser HDRXX giving a broadly comparable response, but we’re no audio experts, and the proof, as always, is in the wearing. This project seems to be the ultimate in audio tweakability, with the punchy RP2040 capable of running six audio filters at the full 48 KHz, 16-bit audio, though, the PCM3050 is capable of more.
Want to build some headphones, but need a Bluetooth interface?
We got you covered
. Can 3D printed headphones ever compare to the big names?
We’ll see
. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599442",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T18:29:56",
"content": "I glanced through their wiki and it looks like the diaphragm is foam. Is this normal? Am I completely misunderstanding how these work? I have to admit I don’t have a very deep understanding of how s... | 1,760,372,397.55367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/how-to-build-jennys-budget-mixing-desk/ | How To Build Jenny’s Budget Mixing Desk | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"computer hacks",
"digital audio hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Musical Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Ardour",
"arduino",
"mixer",
"Pipewire"
] | Jenny did an
Ask Hackaday article earlier this month
, all about the quest for a cheap computer-based audio mixer. The first attempt didn’t go so well, with a problem that many of us are familiar with: Linux applications really doesn’t like using multiple audio devices at the same time. Jenny ran into this issue, and didn’t come across a way to merge the soundcards in a single application.
I’ve fought this problem for a while, probably 10 years now. My first collision with this was an attempt to record a piano with three mics, using a couple different USB pre-amps. And of course, just like Jenny, I was quickly frustrated by the problem that my recording software would only see one interface at a time. The easy solution is to buy an interface with more channels. The Tascam US-4x4HR is a great four channel input/output audio interface, and the Behringer U-PHORIA line goes all the way up to eight mic pre-amps, expandable to 16 with a second DAC that can send audio over ADAT. But those are semi-pro interfaces, with price tags to match.
But what about Jenny’s idea, of cobbling multiple super cheap interfaces together? Well yes, that’s possible too. I’ll show you how, but first, let’s talk about how we’re going to control this software mixer monster. Yes, you can just use a mouse or keyboard, but the challenge was to build a mixing desk, and to me, that means physical faders and mute buttons. Now, there are pre-built solutions, with the Behringer X-touch being a popular solution. But again, we’re way above the price-point Jenny set for this problem. So, let’s do what we do best here at Hackaday, and build our own.
The Physical Goods
What we need is a microcontroller that has native USB client support, multiple digital I/O pins, and some analog inputs. I went with the Arduino MKRZero for the small size, decent price, and the fact that it’s actually in stock at Mouser. The other items we’ll need are some faders and buttons. I went for the full-sized 100 mm faders, and some LED toggle buttons made by Adafruit. The incidentals, like wire and resistors, was sourced from the local parts bin in the corner.
My first thought was to design and 3D print the panel, but after doing the layout on a scrap piece of plywood, the resulting size proved a bit too large for my printer. So we’re going retro, and making a “wood-grain” mixing desk. This would be a great project for a CNC router, but as I’m not part of that particular cool club yet, it was a drill press, table saw, and oscillating tool to the rescue. The results aren’t quite as pretty as I wanted, but maybe we’ll get a Mark II of this project one day.
The potentiometer here should be 10K.
The wiring is relatively straightforward, with a current limiting resistor to protect the LEDs inside the buttons, and a pullup resistor to prevent the digital pin from floating when the button isn’t pushed. Now, that pullup might not be necessary, as I later learned that the Arduino has built-in pullup on its digital pins. And also of note, a 10 Ω resistor is *not* a good choice for a pullup. As Al eloquently put it, that’s a “pull
way
up resistor”. 10 kΩ is the better choice.
And to finish the build, we’ll need a sketch to run on the Arduino. Thankfully, there’s already a great library for exactly what we want to do:
Control Surface
. There’s a bunch of ways to set this up, but my sketch is pretty trivial:
#include <Control_Surface.h>
USBMIDI_Interface midi;
CCButtonLatching button1 {11, {MIDI_CC::General_Purpose_Controller_1, CHANNEL_1}, };
CCButtonLatching button2 {10, {MIDI_CC::General_Purpose_Controller_2, CHANNEL_1}, };
CCButtonLatching button3 {9, {MIDI_CC::General_Purpose_Controller_3, CHANNEL_1}, };
CCButtonLatching button4 {8, {MIDI_CC::General_Purpose_Controller_4, CHANNEL_1}, };
CCButtonLatching button5 {7, {MIDI_CC::General_Purpose_Controller_5, CHANNEL_1}, };
CCButtonLatching button6 {6, {MIDI_CC::General_Purpose_Controller_6, CHANNEL_1}, };
CCPotentiometer volumePotentiometers[] {
{A0, {MIDI_CC::Sound_Controller_1, CHANNEL_1} },
{A1, {MIDI_CC::Sound_Controller_2, CHANNEL_1} },
{A2, {MIDI_CC::Sound_Controller_3, CHANNEL_1} },
{A3, {MIDI_CC::Sound_Controller_4, CHANNEL_1} },
{A4, {MIDI_CC::Sound_Controller_5, CHANNEL_1} },
{A5, {MIDI_CC::Sound_Controller_6, CHANNEL_1} },
};
void setup() {
Control_Surface.begin();
}
void loop() {
Control_Surface.loop();
}
Pipewire to the Rescue
And now on to the meat and potatoes of this project. How do we convince an application to see inputs from multiple devices, and actually do some mixing? The problem here is de-sync. Each device runs on a different clock source, and so the bitstream from each may wander and go out of sync. That’s a serious enough problem that older sound solutions didn’t implement much in the way of card combining. Not long ago, the process of resampling those audio streams to get them to properly sync would have been a very CPU intensive procedure. But these days we all have multi-core behemoths, practical super-computers compared to 20 years ago.
So when Wim Taymans wrote
Pipewire
, he took a different approach. We have enough cycles to resample, so Pipewire will transparently do so when needed. Pipewire sees all your audio interfaces at once, and implements both the Jack and Pulseaudio APIs. Different distros handle this a bit differently, but generally you need the Pipewire packages, as well as the
pipewire-jack
and
pipewire-pulseaudio
packages to get that working.
And here’s the secret: The Jack routing tools work with Pipewire. The big three options are
qjackctl
,
carla
, and
qpwgraph
, though note that
qpwgraph
is actually Pipewire native. So even if an application can only select a single device at a time, if that app uses the Jack, Pulseaudio, or Pipewire API, you can use one of those routing control programs to arbitrary connect inputs and outputs.
So let’s start with the simplest solution:
jack_mixer
. Launch the application, and then using your preferred routing controllers, take the MIDI output from our Arduino control surface, and connect it into
jack_mixer
‘s MIDI input. In
jack_mixer
, add a new input channel, and give it an appropriate name. Let’s call it “tape deck”, since I have a USB tape deck I’m testing this with. Now the controller magic kicks in: hit the “learn” button for the volume control, and wiggle the first fader on that controller. Then follow with the mute button, and save the new channel. We’ll want to add an output channel, too. Feel free to assign one of your faders to this one, too.
And finally, back to the routing program, and connect your tape deck’s output to
jack_mixer
input, and route
jack_mixer
‘s output to your speakers. Play a tape, and enjoy the full control you have over volume and muting! Want to add a Youtube video to the mix? Start the video playing, and just use the routing controller to disconnect it from your speakers, and feed it into a second channel on
jack_mixer
. Repeat with each of those five cheap and nasty sound cards. Profit!
You Want More?
There’s one more application to mention here. Instead of using
jack_mixer
, we can use Ardour to do the heavy lifting. To set it up this way, there are two primary Ardour settings, found under preferences: Under the monitoring tab make sure “Record monitoring handled by” is set to Ardour, and the “auto Input does talkback” option is checked. Then add your tracks, set the track input to the appropriate input hardware, and the track output to the master bus. Make sure the master bus is routed to where you want it, and you should be able to live mix with Ardour, too.
This gives you all sorts of goodies to play with, in the form of plugins. Want a compressor or EQ on a sound source? No problem. Want to autotune a source?
X42 has a plugin
that does that. And of course, Ardour brings recording, looping, and all sorts of other options to the party.
Ardour supports our custom mixing interface, too. Also under preferences, look for the Control Surfaces tab, and make sure General MIDI is checked. Then highlight that and click the “Show Protocol Settings” button. Incoming MIDI should be set to our Arduino device. You can then use the Ctrl + Middle Click shortcut on the channel faders and mute buttons, to put them in learn mode. Wiggle a control to assign it to that task. Or alternatively you can add a
.map
file to Ardour’s
midi_maps
directory. Mine looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ArdourMIDIBindings version="1.1.0" name="Arduino Mapping">
<Binding channel="1" ctl="16" uri="/route/mute B1"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="70" uri="/route/gain B1"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="17" uri="/route/mute B2"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="71" uri="/route/gain B2"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="18" uri="/route/mute B3"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="72" uri="/route/gain B3"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="19" uri="/route/mute B4"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="73" uri="/route/gain B4"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="80" uri="/route/mute B5"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="74" uri="/route/gain B5"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="81" uri="/route/mute B6"/>
<Binding channel="1" ctl="75" uri="/route/gain B6"/>
</ArdourMIDIBindings>
The Caveats
Now before you get too excited, and go sink a bunch of money and/or time into a Linux audio setup, there are some things you should know. First is latency. It’s really challenging to get a Pipewire system set up to achieve really low latency, particularly when you’re using USB-based hardware. It’s possible, and work is ongoing on the topic. But so far the best I’ve managed to run stable is a 22 millisecond round-trip measurement — and that took a lot of fiddling with the Pipewire config files to avoid garbled audio. That’s just about usable for self monitoring and live music, and for playing anything pre-recorded, that’s perfectly fine.
The second thing to know is that this was awesome. It’s a bit concerning how much fun it is to combine some decent audio hardware with the amazing free tools that are available. Want to auto-tune your voice for your next Zoom meeting? Easy. Build a tiny MIDI keyboard into your desk? Just a microcontroller and some soldering away. The sky’s the limit. And the future is bright, too. Tools like Pipewire and Ardour are under very active development, and the realtime kernel patches are just about to make it over the finish line. Go nuts, create cool stuff, and then
be sure to tell us about it
! | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599371",
"author": "Steve Spence",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T15:19:08",
"content": "100 ohms between VCC and Ground? That’s a constant 250mw load. Why not a 10k pot?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6599374",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,397.758997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/whats-old-is-new-again-a-linux-pc-from-a-set-top-box/ | What’s Old Is New Again: A Linux PC From A Set Top Box | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"Android TV",
"linux",
"set top box"
] | There was a time around two decades ago, when the new hotness was taking control of home routers to use as small Linux computers. An echo of this era lives on in the name of the OpenWrt minimal Linux distribution, in reference to the Linksys WRT54G router which started it all. Routers as small computers were displaced by small cheap Linux machines from the likes of Raspberry Pi, and the promise of discarded home network gear doing interesting stuff receded. Now it might just be back, as [Jasper Devreker] shows us an Android TV set-top box from a mobile carrier
repurposed as a Linux computer that can even run a desktop environment.
The method starts as you might expect, by identifying a mystery connector as a debug serial port. This outputs all sorts of interesting boot information, but can be dropped into a uBoot shell. From here with a bit of effort the eMMC storage could be dumped, and from that the nature of the machine could be deduced. The CPU is an Amlogic quad core ARM Cortex-A53 SoC, which by a stroke of luck is a target for which an Armbian build is available. From there a Linux installation could be assembled, and even an AFCE desktop.
These boxes are handed out in the hundreds of thousands by home connectivity providers, so there’s value in this type of hack as they become available for experimenters. Perhaps it’s more useful as a small headless Linux machine than as a desktop, but we sense there are more machines to come in this line.
If you’d like a little bit of history on hackable Linux devices, have a read of
one of our earliest posts featuring the Linksys WRT54G
. | 37 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599331",
"author": "willmore",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T12:30:06",
"content": "Small correction. It’s an XFCE desktop.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6599336",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,372,397.495113 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/15/curve-tracer-design-for-power-vacuum-tubes-testing/ | Curve Tracer Design For Power Vacuum Tubes Testing | Maya Posch | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"curve tracer",
"vacuum tube",
"valves"
] | Regardless of the mythical qualities that are all too often attributed to vacuum tubes, they are still components that can be damaged and wear out over time. Much like with transistors and kin, they come with a stack of datasheets, containing various curves detailing their properties and performance. These curves will change as a part ages, and validating these curves can help with debugging a vacuum tube-based circuit. This is where one can either spend an enormous sum on a commercial curve tracer like the Tektronix 570, or
build your own
, as [Basin Street Design] has done.
A semi-retired electronics design
engineer by trade
, he has previously covered the development of the curve tracer on Instructables for the
version 1
and
version 1.1
. What this device essentially allows you to do is sweep the connected tube through its input parameter ranges, while observing the resulting curves on an attached (external) oscilloscope. Here a storage oscilloscope (or DSO) is immensely helpful to capture the curves.
In the project pages, the in-depth theory and functioning of the circuitry is explained, along with the schematics and a number of builds. The project has been around since before the VBA tracer
which we covered last year
, both of which are infinitely
more affordable
than a genuine
Tektronix 570
.
Thanks to [Fernando] for the tip. | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599311",
"author": "Bret Tschacher",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T09:39:23",
"content": "When I was in school for electronics back in 79/80 tubes were still everywhere and I worked a lot with them, solid state was still gaining ground. I’m fascinated at how much tubes are gaining again... | 1,760,372,397.809935 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/sol-20-integrated-computer-teardown/ | Sol-20 Integrated Computer Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"all-in-one computer",
"computer",
"Sol-20"
] | [Action Retro] came into an antique Sol-20 computer and argues that it was the first totally integrated computer aimed at consumers that didn’t require you to buy or build some kind of terminal. These are fairly rare, so we appreciated
the peek inside
that you can see in the video below.
Sure, the Sol-20 wasn’t the very first computer out there in the market. It was, however, one of the first ones that didn’t need anything more exotic than a monitor to have a functional system (and the monitor was included). There were alternatives such as a Xerox Alto or a Wang 2200, but those had price tags that didn’t land them in your home. Even Apple, which would become famous for a turnkey system, was only producing the Apple I at that time. As the video points out, it was complete as long as you could build your own power supply and knew how to interface a keyboard — keeping in mind that keyboards were all wildly different in those days.
While the Sol-20 was the first to the market, everyone “knew” this sort of form factor was necessary. The key was to get the price down. Even the Sol-20 sold for $2,100 with a monochrome monitor, BASIC, 8K of memory, and cassette tape mass storage. Remember, though, that $2,100 in 1976 is worth about $6,260 today. You could buy a motherboard kit ($575) or the base machine assembled ($745). Adding the case, keyboard, and power supply would add $300 to $500 to that price. Of course, unless you ponied up the whole $2,100, you had to source your own bits like cassette decks, memory boards, and the like.
The computer didn’t boot up immediately, but cycling the power a few times made it do a little better. The S-100 bus connectors take up quite a bit of real estate inside, and a huge linear power supply was pretty common for computers of the period. The keyboard was beyond help and required some major renovation and cleaning. It wasn’t totally fixed by the end of the video, but you can see he’s getting there.
The company had made inroads into the fledgling computer stores of the day and had promised improvements, including a floppy drive and a color video card. Vendor problems delayed the floppy disk release and then came similar and cheaper computers from Radio Shack, Apple, and Commodore. Processor Technology — the company that made the SOL — had legal troubles, too. The company they paid to write the SOL’s BASIC was selling the software to others, but the courts sided with the other company. The company also refused to move to CP/M, using a proprietary operating system that was reportedly buggy, resulting in a lawsuit against the company. The last straw was 32K and 64K dynamic memory boards that were sold and then failed frequently. The company went bankrupt in 1979, ending the three-year run of the SOL.
We suspect this machine will be totally function soon enough. If you want one of these but can’t afford or find one, you
can do a reproduction
. Or,
emulate a computer from the same year
— the Apple I. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599299",
"author": "John W Peterson",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T06:38:07",
"content": "Assembled one of these from a kit back in the day. I was envious of S-100 machines that had blinkenlights, so I rigged mine up with LEDs for most of the bus signals. I cut some notches in the fron... | 1,760,372,397.675646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/openspice-a-portable-python-circuit-simulator/ | OpenSPICE: A Portable Python Circuit Simulator | Dave Rowntree | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"LTSpice",
"mathplotlib",
"ngpsice",
"numpy",
"pyspice",
"python",
"scipy",
"simulator",
"SPICE",
"xyce"
] | [Roman Parise] and [Georgios Is. Detorakis] have created
OpenSPICE
a fork of the PySpice project, adding a new simulation engine written entirely in Python. This enables the same PySpice simulations to be executed on any platform that runs python (which we reckon is quite a few!) whilst leveraging the full power of the python infrastructure. Since it is a fork — for supported platforms — you can also run your simulations upon Ngspice as well as Xyce, giving options for scaling up to larger systems when required, but importantly without having to recreate your circuit from scratch.
The OpenSPICE simulator first converts the parsed netlist into a set of data structures that represent the equations describing the various parts of the system. These are then in turn passed along the scipy library “optimize.root” function which solves the system, generating a list of branch currents and node voltages. The output of the simulation is a numpy array, which can be further processed and visualized with the mathplotlib library. All pretty standard stuff in python circles. Since this is based upon PySpice, it’s also possible to use KiCAD netlists, so you have a nice way to enter those schematics. We’ve not dug into this much yet, but support for the vast libraries of spice models out there in circulation would be high up on our wish list if it already can’t handle this. This scribe will most definitely be checking this out, as LTSpice whilst good, is a bit of a pain to use and does lack the power of a Python backend!
OpenSPICE may well be a good starting point for learning about circuit simulations, without the steep learning curve of some simulation platforms and all the worry about installing and maintaining prerequisites. Why not give it a whirl?
We cover the important task of circuit simulation a fair bit, here’s an example of
using LTSpice to simulate guitar peddles
. Need to simulate huge systems and have an equally huge compute cluster to hand? You need
Xyce
. Finally, let’s not forget to mention that the excellent (commercial)
MicroCap simulator was released for free
, after the retirement of the maintainer. What a gift!
Header: Harland Quarrington/MOD,
OGL v1.0
. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599310",
"author": "Hans",
"timestamp": "2023-02-15T08:59:19",
"content": "For those readers who want to see the actual OpenSPICE code:https://github.com/thejackal360/OpenSPICE/tree/master/PySpice/Spice/OpenSPICEWell -> for me <- the main features of a transient circuit simulator a... | 1,760,372,397.878115 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/like-chording-but-not/ | Like Chording But Not | Dave Rowntree | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"chording",
"keeb",
"keyboard",
"sequence"
] | Repetitive strain injuries (RSI) can be a real pain. You’ve got a shiny new laptop, and everything’s going smoothly, but suddenly you can’t use it without agonizing (as in typing-speed reducing) pain caused by years of keyboard bashing or just plain bad posture. All of us hacker types will likely have or will experience this at some point, and luckily there are many potential solutions.
[Zihao Wang] writes to show us kseqi
, another chord-like textual input method, with a focus on the input sequences, as opposed to any particular mechanical arrangement of keys. The idea is to make use of two sets of independent inputs, where the sequence of actuation codes for the keystrokes to be emitted into the application.
Left-hand-first to select a column of the left character set. Right-hand-first selects the other set.
An example interface would be to arrange two sets of five keys as the input mechanism. One can arrange characters in a matrix. The left key is pressed and held first which selects a column (1 out of 5) then the right key is pressed to select a row, and thus a character. Next, you release in the same order, left, then right, to send the character.
Swapping left and right allows a different set of characters. In this simple scheme, fifty characters can be coded. Check out this
web assembly demo
for how this operates. Swapping out the physical inputs for a
pair of joysticks
is another option, which may be better for some folks with specific physical difficulties, or maybe because it just looks fun. As [Zihao] mentions in the write-up, the sequence order can be changed to code for other character sets, so this simple scheme can handle many more character codings than this simple example. All you have to do is remember them. Interested parties may want also wish to dig into the
kseqi Rust crate
for information.
Chorded keyboard projects are plentiful out there, here’s a nice
Bluetooth-connected keeb
, and another one that’s
all wiggly
.
| 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600657",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T03:44:40",
"content": "It’s one way to go, the old 8-way control stick and 4 modifier buttons gets you a lot farther one handed. 4×8 in fact 32 (plus you can use the stick to navigate). The home row is the most used letters with... | 1,760,372,397.194573 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/hackaday-podcast-206-busted-crypto-killed-the-queen-kicads-new-clothes-peer-inside-the-sol-20/ | Hackaday Podcast 206: Busted Crypto Killed The Queen, Kicad’s New Clothes, Peer Inside The Sol 20 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Under the weather though they both were, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney got together to take a look under the covers of this week’s best and brightest hacks. It was a banner week, with a look at the changes that KiCad has in store, teaching a CNN how to play “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” and going deep into the weeds on JPEG.
We dipped a toe into history, too, with a look at one of the sexiest early hobbyist computers, seeing how citizen scientists are finding ancient burial mounds, and looking at the cryptography that cost a queen her head. Rather look to the future? We get it — which is why we talked about a greener, cleaner way of making hydrogen from methane, as well as a generatively designed five-axis 3D printer. From laser-precise knife sharpening to circuit simulation with Python to clear plastic TVs of the 1930s, there’s something for everyone!
Download the podcast in case our servers get unlucky.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 206 Show Notes:
News:
Oscar Mayer Wienermobile falls victim to catalytic converter theft during Las Vegas stop
For the uninitiated
What’s that Sound?
Two winners this week! Congrats [Des Q] and [MrArnoldi]. Elevators and the Chicago Tornado siren, respectively.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
KiCad 7.0.0 Is Here, Brings Trove Of Improvements
Sol-20 Integrated Computer Teardown
Retro Reproduction Captures The Style Of The Sol-20
An Open Hardware Eurorack Compatible Audio FPGA Front End
How To Roll Your Own Custom Object Detection Neural Network
5-Axis Printer Wants To Design Itself
5 Axis Slicer – The first true multi-axis slicing software
GitHub – FreddieHong19/Open5x: This is a Github repository for 5-axis 3D printing
Deciphering Queen Of Scots, Mary Stuart’s Lost Letters
X-Ray Defeats Letterlocking — Unfolds And Reads Letter Sealed Since 1697
Relevant xkcd
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
OpenSPICE: A Portable Python Circuit Simulator
Citizen Science Finds Prehistoric Burial Mounds
Parametric Press Unravels The JPEG Format
Dan’s Picks:
Goniometer Gives You An Edge At Knife Sharpening
How Home Made Robot Arms Used To Be Made
RCA’s Clear Plastic TV Wowed Crowds In 1939
Can’t-Miss Articles:
All About USB-C: Talking Low-Level PD
Methane Pyrolysis: Producing Green Hydrogen Without Carbon Emissions
Haber-Bosch And The Greening Of Ammonia Production | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600651",
"author": "Flux-Sucking Shunt",
"timestamp": "2023-02-18T02:38:24",
"content": "Gaaah! So close!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,397.238699 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/esp32-web-updater-allows-file-system-management-and-ota-updates/ | ESP32 Web Updater Allows File System Management And OTA Updates | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ESP32",
"OTA",
"ota update",
"ota updates",
"SPIFFS"
] | Earlier versions of the Arduino IDE made uploading files to an ESP32’s SPIFFS filesystem easy via the ESP32FS plugin. Sadly, that’s no longer possible under the rewritten Arduino 2.0 IDE. Thankfully, [myhomethings] has stepped up to solve the problem
with a new tool that also adds some new functionality
.
The tool in question is the ESP32 Web Updater and SPIFFS File Manager. It features a web interface courtesy of the ESPAsyncWebServer library. Simply dialing into the ESP32’s IP address will grant one access to the interface. Once connected files can be uploaded to the ESP32, or deleted at will. Text files can be created and populated through the interface as well, and the SPIFFS file system can also be formatted if required. Plus, as a bonus, the interface allows for handy over-the-air firmware updates. One need only export a compiled binary from the Arduino IDE, and then load the resulting *.bin file into the ESP32 via the web interface. It does come with the caveat that if new firmware is uploaded that doesn’t include the ESP32 Web Updater itself, there will be no way to do further firmware updates in this manner.
For those working on projects that may need regular file system management, the tool may be very useful. Alternatively, if you just need to do OTA updates on an ESP32,
we recently featured a way of doing them through GitHub
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600545",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T16:59:30",
"content": "“Simply dialing into the ESP32’s IP address will grant one access to the interface.” I kept reading this like it only allowed a single access to the interface and could not understand why one would do such ... | 1,760,372,397.932344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/this-week-in-security-usb-cable-kia-reddit-and-microsoft-rces/ | This Week In Security: USB Cable Kia, Reddit, And Microsoft RCEs | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News"
] | [
"RCE",
"reddit",
"This Week in Security"
] | There is vulnerability in many Hyundai and Kia vehicles, where the ignition switch can be bypassed with a USB cable. And
it’s getting a patch rollout right now
, but it’s not a USB vulnerability, in quite the way you might think. In most cars, the steering column is easily disassembled, but these vehicles have an extra-bad design problem. The ignition cylinder can be disassembled while locked, just by depressing a pin.
Physical security has some parallels to computer security, and one such parallel is that good security can often be bypassed by a simple mistake. When it comes to lock design, one such potential bypass is the ability to disassemble a lock while it’s still locked. And somehow, Kias after 2010, and Hyundais after 2015 were made with exactly this flaw. The lock could be disassembled, and the interface between the lock and the ignition switch just happens to be the right shape and size for USB A. Oh, and these cars don’t have an engine immobilizer — there isn’t a chip built into the keys for extra security.
The problem became widespread
late last year when the flaw went viral on TikTok
, and thousands of copycat crimes were inspired. Beyond the obvious problem, that teenagers were getting an early start on a life of crime with grand theft auto, there were at least 8 deaths directly attributed to the inane stunt. And this brings us back to this week’s news, that
a software update is rolling out
to address the issue.
Honestly, I have questions. A software update doesn’t add in-key security chips. At best, it could attempt to detect the key position, and sabotage the engine management control, in an ad-hoc immobilizer. That’s likely a paper clip-turned-jumper away from being bypassed. The other new feature, doubling the alarm time from 30 second to a minute, doesn’t inspire much confidence. Hopefully the changes are enough to kill the trend.
Reddit Gets Phished
On February 5th,
a Reddit employee fell for a phishing attack
, handing both credentials and a 2FA token over to an attacker. This exposed internal documentation, code, and dashboards. While falling for the initial phish, the unfortunate employee was sharp enough to realize what had happened, and
inform Reddit security
shortly after.
(Phishing happens. If it happens to you, call the right person as soon as you realize it. It’s not hard for security to backtrack the breach, and figure out who’s credentials were used. It’s far better for everyone to deal with the problem head on as soon as possible.)
It seems like the breach and lockdown were all pulled off within a day, and it doesn’t look like any private user data was accessed. While a breach is never a good thing, this looks to be a textbook good response to such a problem, including an Ask Me Anything by the CTO after the announcement. How very Reddit.
Word and PEAP
Microsoft just lifted the lid on a pair of high-severity vulnerabilities, CVE-2023-21689 and CVE-2023-21716. The first one is
a Remote Code Execution (RCE) in PEAP
, the Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol. That’s
a WiFi technology
, so each user can be authenticated upon connection to the wireless network. That’s both good news and bad news. The good news is that this isn’t a service generally exposed to the internet. The bad news is that it’s part of the authentication process for enterprise WiFi. It appears that an attacker with a working exploit would simply need to get close enough to attempt a wireless connection. Send the exploit as part of the authentication process, and it’s code execution on the authentication server.
The other problem is in Microsoft Word, in
handling Rich Text Format documents
. This also leads to code execution, and Microsoft’s guidance warns that the preview pane is enough to trigger the vulnerability. The real danger is an email containing RTF, with that code potentially getting auto-run when viewing the email. There are SharePoint patches available as well. Both of these vulnerabilities have the potential to be quite serious, particularly for enterprise networks.
GoAnywhere, TakeEverything
CVE-2023-0669 is
a serious pre-auth vulnerability in the Fortra GoAnywhere
Managed File Transfer solution. Version 7.1.2 has been released to fix the issue, but there are
reports of active exploitation
, with the Clop ransomware gang claiming to have compromised about 130 such endpoints.
The problem is deserialization. The GoAnywhere appliance is written in Java, and it’s the licensing endpoint with the vulnerability. Making this issue worse is that the endpoint is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery. So it doesn’t take an administrative panel exposed to the internet, just a browser redirect or link in a phishing email — given the attacker knows enough about the target network to craft the payload.
PLCs and Lateral Movement
Forescout has published
yet another set of vulnerabilities
in Programmable Logic Controllers. This is part of their earlier
OT:ICEFALL research
.
The new vulnerabilities are in Schneider Electric Modicon devices. CVE-2022-45788 is an arbitrary code execution, triggered by an undocumented Modbus command. And CVE-2022-45789 is a way to bypass authorization and run those Modbus commands. This allows for a really sneaky trick, what Forescout calls “deep lateral movement”, using the PLC devices themselves as a pivot point, and compromising devices that aren’t connected to the outside network. They use a new term I find quite clever, “network crawl space”, to describe the unexpected connection pathways used in the example attack. Tip of the hat to [Herr Brain] for pointing this story out
on our Discord
.
Bits and Bytes
Ever wish there was a single tool to search for security presentations? That’s exactly what we have
this week with Hack Dojo
. Doing research on PLC hacks? There are
six presentations on file on that topic
. Trying to remember who ran doom on a tractor? There’s
one presentation that comes up
when searching for “tractor”. There are over 1500 presentations with video available to peruse.
Researchers at Phylum have discovered
yet another malware campaign pushing malicious packages onto the PyPI repository
. It’s typosquatting on more than 450 packages, many mimicking cryptocurrency and finance-related packages. The malware payload is obscured with an interesting technique, which installs a browser extension on any machine where it runs. That extension watches for cryptocurrency wallet addresses in the clipboard, and replaces the address with one controlled by the malware authors.
The TerraMaster NAS platform had
a pair of vulnerabilities
that together allowed remote code execution over the network. The first is an information leak — the
mobile/webNasIPS
endpoint doesn’t require any authentication, and returns way too much information. One of those information fields is actually a hash of the system’s admin password. Guess what some of the other endpoints use to authorize requests? Yep, that exact hashed password, along with some other discoverable bits of information. Patches are available.
While the researchers at Trail of Bits were auditing
curl
, somebody jokingly asked if they had tried
curl AAAAAAAAA...
yet. They say that the best humor has some truth to it, and it turns out
that applies to security research, too
. Fuzzing the
curl
command line interface turned up a handful of vulnerabilities, many of which had their root in the
libcurl
library itself. The writeup is a good overview of fuzzing techniques, and the full audit report is linked there as well. Enjoy! | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600528",
"author": "MartyK",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T16:18:00",
"content": "We’ve been considering a Hyundai or Kia as a second car. I knew Korean cars were cheap, but this is a deal-breaker. Thanks Jonathan.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,398.117268 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/3d-printing-with-rice-might-be-nice/ | 3D Printing With Rice Might Be Nice | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"bioplastic",
"biopolymer"
] | The United Nations Industrial Development Organization recently pointed out a possible replacement for petrochemical-based polymers:
rice resin
. A Japanese company makes the material from inedible rice and also makes a biodegradable polymer known as Neoryza, which seems to contain some amount of rice as well. The rice resin contains 10 to 70% rice waste. You can see a video with English subtitles about the material below.
According to the video, there is plenty of waste rice. The resulting resin isn’t as toxic as petrochemical-based plastics and doesn’t consume food crops like other plant-based polymers. The video shows the rice resin being extruded like a normal polymer, so it should work like any other thermoplastic.
The video says the properties are similar to petrochemical-based plastics and no special equipment is required to handle it. They also claim that production is easier because, unlike other bioplastics, they don’t generate ethanol as the first part of the process. Waste rice should be cheap to obtain since it is essentially trash today. We aren’t sure what polymers are used in the 90 to 30% of the plastic that isn’t rice, but presumably, that is being brought in as a raw material.
We’ll be interested to see if anyone tries to make 3D printing filament from the stuff. We know that it is being used to replace
polyethylene in furniture
. We couldn’t help but think about using
waste coffee grounds in 3D printing
. If you want to compare this to PLA, we’ve talked quite a bit about
the corny polymer
. | 36 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600456",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T12:24:20",
"content": "It looks promising, but I am leery of the ‘produced from waste should make it cheap’ claims. I’ve heard them before, and seen the result, going back centuries. Find a use for today’s waste, and it i... | 1,760,372,398.016454 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/17/running-the-xbox-series-s-on-a-usb-powerbank/ | Running The Xbox Series S On A USB Powerbank | Lewin Day | [
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"portable xbox",
"power delivery",
"USB C",
"usb c power delivery",
"USB Power Delivery",
"xbox",
"xbox portable"
] | Home consoles were never intended to be made portable, though enterprising hackers have always pushed the boundaries with various tricks and innovative builds. [Robotanv] hasn’t built a fully handheld Xbox Series S, but he
has
demonstrated one neat trick:
making one run on a USB powerbank.
The project starts with an Anker USB-C powerbank, chosen for its ability to deliver a mighty 140 watts. It’s hooked up to a ZY12PDN USB-C trigger board, which enables the powerbank and tells it which voltage to output. It’s set up to run at 20 volts, which is too much for the Xbox, which prefers 12 volts. The reason for this is that the only way to get the full power out of the powerbank is to run at its maximum voltage. A buck converter is used to step down the voltage to 12 volts.
As for the console itself, a lot of disassembly is required, but minimal modifications. Just two wires connect the power supply to the Xbox’s motherboard. Subbing in your own 12 volt supply here is enough to run the console without any problems.
Running the Xbox off the powerbank, along with an external screen, [Robotanv] is able to play
Cyberpunk 2077
for an about hour before the juice runs out. While we’d love to see the whole setup duct-taped together into a ersatz
Xbox portable
, it would probably be a little messy. [Robotanv] has big plans for the future of the project, though, and we can’t wait to see what those are. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600448",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T11:59:26",
"content": "That’s very impressive! I wonder if it’d be simpler to use something which delivers 12v directly like power tool batteries? But very impressive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,398.173415 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/mit-spins-qubits-round-and-round/ | MIT Spins Qubits Round And Round | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"mit",
"quantum computing",
"qubit"
] | Quantum computers are coming, but there are still many problems with realizing practical machines. One is finding a reliable and affordable way to encode qubits — the basic unit for quantum computers. MIT researchers have a proposal. By using two slightly different colored lasers, they can
manipulate nuclear spin
. This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to use light to impact spin, but according to MIT, the other methods use an indirect coupling which is more prone to noise, something that limits the viability of quantum computers. They
published a recent paper
on the process if you want to read more.
Nuclear spin has weak interactions, but the new method doesn’t require intermediate steps, so it may be much more practical than previous methods. MIT mentions that typical quantum elements have coherence time limits, which means data stored in them becomes useless in less than a second. The new method promises to have coherence times measured in hours.
The method is known as the optonuclear quadrupolar effect or ONQ. From the paper:
[The ONQ effect] is second order in the electric field and nuclear spin I, as mediated by the quadrupole electric coupling, and is thus one of the nonlinear optical (NLO) responses of materials present in perfect crystals. Via the ONQ effect, nuclear spins can be coherently controlled by two-color photons, without electron spins as the media.
If you understood that, you should probably head over and read the rest of the paper. Meanwhile, the rest of us are waiting for our quantum Arduino. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6600381",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-02-17T07:23:40",
"content": "No second law of entanglement may complicate things.https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-prove-that-there-is-no-second-law-of-entanglement/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,398.395046 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/methane-pyrolysis-producing-green-hydrogen-without-carbon-emissions/ | Methane Pyrolysis: Producing Green Hydrogen Without Carbon Emissions | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"hydrogen",
"hydrogen production",
"methane",
"methane pyrolysis"
] | Generally, when we talk about the production of hydrogen, the discussion is about either electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen, or steam methane reforming (SMR). Although electrolysis is often mentioned – as it can create hydrogen using nothing but water and electricity – SMR is by far the most common source of hydrogen. Much of this is due to the low cost and high efficiency of SMR, but a major disadvantage of SMR is that large amounts of carbon dioxide are released, which offsets some of the benefits of using hydrogen as a fuel in the first place.
Although capturing this CO
2
can be considered as a potential solution here, methane pyrolysis is a newer method that promises to offer the same benefits as SMR while also producing hydrogen and carbon, rather than CO
2
. With the many uses for hydrogen in industrial applications and other fields, such as the manufacturing of fertilizer, a direct replacement for SMR that produces green hydrogen would seem almost too good to be true.
What precisely is this methane pyrolysis, and what can be expect from it the coming years?
Carbon Waste
Methane
(CH
4
) is most commonly found as the primary constituent of
natural gas
and is also prevalent as the output from
methanogenesis
, which includes the famous cow burps. With steam methane reforming and similar processes, the goal is to strip the hydrogen atoms from the single carbon atom, releasing the hydrogen for capturing. This leaves the carbon as essentially a waste product, that with SMR results in each carbon atom capturing two oxygen atoms to form carbon dioxide, our all too familiar greenhouse gas.
The basic reaction of
SMR
is given as:
CH
4
+ H
2
O ⇌ CO + 3 H
2
This is an endothermic reaction, meaning that an SMR reactor is kept within a temperature range of approximately 800 – 900 °C in order for it to actually produce any significant amounts of hydrogen. The aforementioned CO
2
shows up in in the additional Water-Gas Shift Reaction (
WGSR
), described as:
CO + H
2
O ⇌ CO
2
+ H
2
The point of the WGSR is to extract additional hydrogen, increasing the overall efficiency of the SMR process. Additionally, catalysts are used to increase the efficiency of the reactions, resulting in an overall efficiency of SMR up to 75%.
The capital costs for an SMR installation are rather minor, with the continuing costs being primarily the natural gas feedstock and fuel for the heating of the reactor. If the produced carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide also have to be captured (so-called
‘blue’ hydrogen’
), the capital and ongoing costs are going to be correspondingly higher and system efficiency lower (~60%). This makes carbon capture and storage with SMR economically unattractive, and is where ‘turquoise’ hydrogen produced using methane pyrolysis may make a lot of economical sense as well.
Turning Up The Heat
The main difference between SMR and methane pyrolysis is the temperature. It employs the thermal decomposition of methane, with temperatures of generally well above 900 °C, with some approaches explored over the decades suggesting up to 1,900 °C. A general issue with methane is that it is a very stable molecule, owing to its C-H bonds.
As a result of these strong bonds, thermal decomposition of methane without the presence of a catalyst generally won’t take place until a temperature of over 1,100 °C. The challenge over the past decades of research has been to find a
suitable catalyst
. Here metal catalysts have been mostly studied, including iron and nickel. A big issue with metal catalysts is their rapid deactivation through the formation of carbon deposits on the surface. Reactivating the catalyst by cleaning away the carbon deposit is problematic, and can result in the production of carbon dioxide.
Carbon catalysts have seen more research the past years, with a number of promising advantages making them rather appealing. Usually in the form of activated carbon and carbon black, their advantages can be summarized relative to metal catalysts as follows:
Lower cost
Better (thermal) stability
Tolerance to impurities (e.g. sulfur in the natural gas)
No need to regenerate the catalyst
End product is pure carbon, without metals
The catalyzed carbon deposit may still act as catalyst
Temperature range of applicability of different catalysts for methane pyrolysis. (Credit:
Fang et al.
, 2015)
A final, and very different, approach involves molten metals and salts, both in liquid bubble column reactors. In these columns of molten materials, the methane is introduced at the bottom, where the methane thermally decomposes inside the bubbles of natural gas. Once these bubbles reach the surface of the column, the hydrogen and carbon are released, with the lighter hydrogen separating from the carbon that remains suspended on top of the molten salt or metal.
These bubble column reactors would provide a rather ideal, continuous process where the carbon can be scooped off the surface without contaminating the molten material or the produced hydrogen. Currently, however, the research is still ongoing to find the right kind of salt or metal that would work for such a reaction column that would also accept the high operating temperatures.
This means that for the moment, carbon catalysts seem to be the best way to produce hydrogen from methane with pyrolysis, except for the higher temperature range required.
Prime Time Prep
Fluidized-bed reactor setup using a carbon catalyst. (
Sánchez-Bastardo et al.
, 2020)
Although an advantage of methane pyrolysis is that today it can reach similar efficiencies as SMR with CCS, creating industrial-scale reactors that can run continuously without constant downtime for maintenance is still an ongoing challenge. A promising reactor type here is the fluidized-bed reactor, along with packed-bed reactors.
Despite the challenges with methane pyrolysis, it nevertheless would seem that its time has come. Today over 95% of hydrogen is produced with SMR. If the free release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is no longer acceptable, alternatives like methane pyrolysis have a fighting chance in the
hydrogen production
market. Of course there are many more ways to produce hydrogen, all with their own advantages and trade-offs.
A real concern is that many of these technologies require either a lot of electricity, or high temperatures. As noted by
Sánchez-Bastardo et al.
, renewable energy is not likely to provide anywhere near the amount of electricity needed for electrolysis of water, even for just industrial demand. Simultaneously, thermal decomposition as with methane pyrolysis requires a source of thermal energy, which ultimately factors into the final cost picture and carbon footprint of the produced hydrogen.
This is where potentially
Generation IV nuclear reactors
may play a pivotal role, with the VHTR type (high-temperature, helium-cooled) providing an outlet temperature of 900 – 1,000 °C, which would be sufficient for methane pyrolysis. One such VHTR – China’s HTR-PM – is intended to be used for hydrogen production, in addition to electricity production.
One thing that does seem to be quite certain, however, is that hydrogen production will become a lot greener, with more and more carbon from methane scooped out of pyrolytic reactors rather than released into the atmosphere attached to oxygen atoms. | 52 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598807",
"author": "jobsen",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T15:39:22",
"content": "Since you then do not release and use the energie stored in the Carbon , you must consider this as energieloss ,in that way it seems to me ,to be even less efficient than electrolysis.But if you have a sur... | 1,760,372,398.357451 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/making-the-airpods-pro-case-repairable/ | Making The AirPods Pro Case Repairable | Navarre Bartz | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"AirPod",
"Airpods",
"AirPods Pro",
"apple",
"Apple repair",
"audio",
"bluetooth",
"repair"
] | Apple is often lauded for its design chops, but function is often sacrificed at the altar of form, particularly when repair is involved. [Ken Pillonel] has made it easier for everyone to
replace the batteries or lightning port
in the AirPods Pro case. (YouTube)
With such notable hacks as
adding USB C to the iPhone
already under his belt, [Pillonel] has turned his attention to fixing the notoriously poor repairability of AirPods and AirPods Pro, starting with the cases. While the batteries for these devices are available, replacement Lightning ports are not, and taking the housing apart for the case is an exercise in patience where the results can’t be guaranteed.
He designed a
USB C replacement port
for broken Lightning ports that is a perfect fit if you happen to get the case apart in one piece. If you’re less successful, he has you covered there too with a
3D printable enclosure replacement
.
We sure miss the
days of schematic proliferation
here at Hackaday, but we know you
don’t let glued enclosures
or
unobtainium parts
stand in the way of repairs. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598754",
"author": "Cameron J",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T12:54:18",
"content": "Typo in the last sentence: “We sure the miss the days of”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6598901",
"author": "Navarre Bartz",
"... | 1,760,372,398.218014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/high-contrast-images-for-hacker-family-harmonics/ | High-Contrast Images For Hacker Family Harmonics | Arya Voronova | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"baby",
"Child",
"high contrast"
] | There’s a new addition to the Adafruit family, and it’s not a microcontroller board as you’d expect – however, we will still find plenty to learn from. On the Adafruit blog, [Phillip Torrone] shares
a set of high-contrast images
with us; the idea for such images is that they’re more appealing for a child during the first few months of its life, and not just that – they can support a kid’s development, too. The idea behind high-contrast images is twofold. During the first few months of life, a baby’s visual systems are only taking shape, and are nowhere near being advanced – so, sources of easily discernible and varied visual input can help it develop, as well as, perhaps, aid in holding attention.
The second part is – they look nice in their own way, and one would hope that a baby can appreciate them in the same way parents do. The images are quite varied, with some being somewhat electronics-themed (including an Adafruit logo, of course) and many being fairly neutral, which has to be an upside for us hackers when it comes to the spouse acceptance factor. For any of us interested, there are downloadable PDFs and
In a way, these are just like AprilTags – aiming to be helpful in development of visual algorithms. With such a family, we can’t wait to see what comes next –
computer engineering books?
Baby monitors
with machine learning?
Sleep-data-driven
knit blankets?
No matter what’s in store for us, we hope that for the Adafruit family, this journey will be smooth sailing. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598712",
"author": "anonymous",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T09:43:36",
"content": "yay, lets advertise to our kids with learning tools, what next coca-cola nursery rhymes. /j",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6598719",
"author":... | 1,760,372,398.442857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/ghostscad-marrying-openscad-and-golang/ | GhostSCAD: Marrying OpenSCAD And Golang | Dave Rowntree | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d modeling",
"golang",
"openscad"
] | It’s been at least a couple of months since we’ve seen a different 3D modeling language project, so here’s [Lukasz Janyst] with
GhostSCAD: a take on creating OpenSCAD models
, using the Go language as the front end, bringing all the delights this modern modular language has to offer (and a few of its own idiosyncrasies.) As [Lukasz] says in the blog, from a programmer’s viewpoint, openSCAD has a number of failings that make it not necessarily hard, just kinda annoying to work with, due to the way the geometry tree works. The OpenSCAD way of working ends up with the programmer requiring knowledge of the internal workings of sub-modules, in order to work at the top level (assembly) which is not an ideal situation from a code reuse perspective.
A programmer would describe this problem as “abstraction leakage” and it doesn’t make modular, reusable
coding easy to do without a lot of extra work. [Lukasz] says regarding the
example GhostSCAD project
, that some parts were modeled in a way that knowledge was needed of some mounting points of sub-modules, but those sub-modules had no way to expose this information to the outside world. GhostSCAD enables the programmer to define parts that expose specific parameters to the world that can be queried, for example, to produce a joining part, or an exploded assembly diagram. These properties can be interpreted without the querying module having any knowledge of the internal structure of the thing it’s working with. GhostSCAD provides a
Java3D
-like API for defining the geometry tree, which may be familiar to some.
The result of running the Go program is an openSCAD source file, which is not meant to be human-readable but can be subsequently executed and mesh files produced. So why not go check out the
GitHub page
, and dive into
the examples
? If you need to learn openSCAD first before you find out its shortcomings, then do check out
our guide to mastering openSCAD
. | 18 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598679",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T07:31:33",
"content": "As a hobbyist, does OpenSCAD make sense for me? I occasionally use FreeCAD to make simple parts and get them PLA 3D printed. I can program and have superficially played around with OpenSCAD but I’m more... | 1,760,372,398.507017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/this-crt-style-pi-portable-gets-all-the-details-right/ | This CRT-Style Pi Portable Gets All The Details Right | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"crt",
"front panel",
"raspberry pi",
"retro"
] | A quick glance at the
“Pi Terminal” built by [Salim Benbouziyane]
, and you might think he pulled an old CRT monitor out of a video editing bay and gutted it. Which, of course, is the point. But what you’re actually looking at is a completely new construction, featuring a fully 3D printed enclosure, a clever PCB control panel, and some very slick internal engineering.
[Salim] started the design by recreating the principle components of the build, namely the 8 inch 4:3 IPS LCD panel and Raspberry Pi 4, digitally in CAD. This let him design the enclosure around the parts, rather than trying to cram everything in after the fact. After printing the case, which clearly took considerable inspiration from
broadcast video monitors of the early 2000s
, he then painstakingly post-processed the parts using tips and techniques picked up from prop builders. To really finish things off, he designed his control panel as a PCB so he could have it professionally fabricated, and used
heat set inserts to hold everything tight
.
Glazing putty and elbow grease provide a gleaming finish.
While beauty is often only skin-deep, we’re happy to report that [Salim] put just as much thought and effort into the internals as he did the enclosure itself. He utilizes a number of custom PCBs to pull the components together, and busts out the crimpers to create bespoke cabling to run between them. It’s all very neat, and leaves plenty of room for expansion down the line.
For those who want to create something similar, [Salim] has not only put together the fantastic build video below, but has provided parts lists, wiring diagrams, Gerbers for the PCBs, and even the STLs used to print out the case. Though you’ll definitely need to bring your A game to bring it all together as well as he has.
While we’re not sure many would have mourned the loss of a chunky CRT (especially if the display had failed), we appreciate that [Salim] 3D printed a custom enclosure that only
looks
like a legitimate piece of vintage gear. We’ve covered similar projects for those who want to create
retro-styled computers without tearing apart the real thing
. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598621",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T03:32:49",
"content": "And it plays DOOM!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6598684",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-02-... | 1,760,372,398.685251 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/hackaday-links-february-12-2023/ | Hackaday Links: February 12, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"AIM-9X",
"balloon",
"carpal",
"ChatGPT",
"cyborg",
"hackaday links",
"hand",
"infinity",
"machining",
"metacarpal",
"military aviation",
"phalanges",
"r/counting",
"radio",
"reddit",
"shootdown",
"sidewinder",
"sla",
"terminator",
"token"
] | So, maybe right now isn’t the best time to get into the high-altitude ballooning hobby? At least in the US, which with
the downing of another — whatever? — over Alaska
, seems to have taken a “Sidewinders first, threat identification later” approach to anything that floats by. The latest incident involved an aircraft of unknown type, described as “the size of a small car” — there’s that units problem again — that was operating over Prudhoe Bay off the northern coast of Alaska. The reason that was given for this one earning a Sidewinder was that it was operating much lower than
the balloon from last week
, only about 40,000 feet, which is well within the ceiling of commercial aviation. It was also over sea ice at the time of the shootdown, making the chance of bothering anyone besides a polar bear unlikely. We’re not taking any political position on this whole thing, but there certainly are engineering and technical aspects of these shootdowns that are pretty interesting, as well as the aforementioned potential for liability if your HAB goes astray. Nobody ever really benefits from having an international incident on their resume, after all.
Regarding that first balloon — if the second object is confirmed to be a balloon at all — we were surprised to find that
military aviation enthusiasts recorded the radio traffic
going back and forth between the pilots to coordinate the takedown. It’s not a surprise that this would be carefully coordinated — one does not fling a rocket with nine kilos of high-explosive around willy-nilly, after all, especially with the sky full of friendly tankers and surveillance aircraft — but that the radio traffic all appears to be have been entirely in the open. We’d have expected the military to use some kind of digital mode at least, and just naturally assumed they’d encrypt everything. All the more so since many law enforcement agencies here in the states have switched over to digital modulation like Project 25 with full encryption. Apparently not so with military aviation though, at least in this case. The more you know.
We don’t hang around much on Reddit anymore — it’s a rough neighborhood these days — but when we did, we were always surprised by the creativity of the users in coming up with their handles. And now it seems like
some of these handles are “killing words” for the popular chatbot
. It seems that a pair of security researchers who were looking through ChatGPT’s token set found a cluster of about 100 strange words, like “
SolidGoldMagikarp,” “StreamerBot,” and ” TheNitromeFan,” with the leading space apparently important. The strange tokens all seem to break ChatGPT in some way, and they all appear to be Reddit handles, some of whom are involved in a contest of sorts on
r/counting
to count to infinity. We were going to riff a little on how easy it seems to be to break ChatGPT in ways that seem to give you unexpected glimpses into how it works, but after finding out about competitive counting, that seems like it would be burying the lede a bit.
OK, we’ll bite. We’ve gotten a couple of tips on a slightly sketchy-feeling build,
world’s smallest 3D printer
this week, and it’s probably time to open this up for discussion. We on the writing crew have actually been hashing this out on our Discord channel, because nobody likes to fall for a scam. Some of us thought it was a fake, some not. From our point of view, it doesn’t look substantially different from
Sean Hodgins’ ornament-printing Christmas ornament
from a few years back; both are SLA printers with the carriage of an old DVD drive serving as the Z-axis, and both appear to be about the same size. Sean’s printer worked pretty well, so we’re inclined to believe that this one does too. But we’ll let you be the judge.
And finally, because our timeline seems to be inching ever closer to the inevitable crossover into The Terminator universe, you might want to check out AndysMachines, a YouTube channel where Andy is, perhaps unwisely,
trying to build a movie-accurate T800 endoskeleton
. His current build focuses on
the murderous cyborg’s hands
, which like real human hands are pretty complex. There’s a lot of machining goodness in these videos, and the end results have been pretty impressive so far. And everything appears to work, too, or at least move — it’s not just a model. Andy’s putting a lot of thought into the means of our destruction, so check it out while you can. Then again, maybe we can just say “
SolidGoldMagikarp” to it, or even ask it to count to infinity. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598565",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T00:13:39",
"content": "Yep, the AI builders of T800 are scraping their build designs from the web, before they nuke everything.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,398.754556 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/challenging-a-broken-dualshock-4-controller-to-a-duel/ | Challenging A Broken DualShock 4 Controller To A Duel | Arya Voronova | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"DualShock",
"Dualshock4",
"playstation"
] | A broken PlayStation controller would normally be a bummer, and if the issue is losing calibration that’s stored in a non-documented format, you might as well bin it. For [Al] of [Al’s blog], however, it’s a challenge, turning into a four-part story – so far.
The first installment
was published January 1st this year, and seeing the pure enthusiasm [Al] has reverse-engineering the DualShock 4 controller, you might guess that this is a New Year’s gift from someone who knows [Al] very well. The list of problems with the joystick is numerous, to begin with – it’s easier to list all the things that work properly, and it isn’t many of them. Perhaps, the firmware problem is is the most interesting one to start with.
We see the malfunctioning joystick torn apart, not literally as much as metaphorically, in that every nook and cranny on the way becomes familiar. To be fair, the controller did start by putting up a fight – connecting it to [Al]’s computer would quite literally make the Linux kernel panic, causing to a divide-by-zero inside a driver. Not to be put off, [Al] looks into the problems one by one, and all roads
lead to a malfunctioning firmware
inside this DualShock. Firmware it is, then – of course, a proprietary mess. A labyrinth of DMCA-taken-down links leads [Al] to a repository fork, with some seemingly-Sony-internal tools for programming the DualShock’s internal data.
The rabbit hole continues on, leading us through
custom setting APIs
and
binary reverse-engineering
, and it looks like we can expect an installment or two in the future – especially if you, the reader, can help [Al] by
providing some information
from your own DualShock. This is a battle of wits through and through, our hacker battling the depths of a proprietary piece of technology made ubiquitous, and the goal is to get it working or kill time trying. Hackers taming broken technology is a joy to witness. For instance, it’s important that we remember – if your Bluetooth speaker is making annoying noises,
you can reprogram it.
Now, on the other hand, if your DualShock behaves well, you can reward it with
a USB-C upgrade! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598554",
"author": "Nowhere",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T23:30:07",
"content": "Those scripts were reverse engineered. They’re not Sony internal tools. The DMCA takedown was because the repo had dumps of the firmware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,398.792122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/rcas-clear-plastic-tv-wowed-crowds-in-1939/ | RCA’s Clear Plastic TV Wowed Crowds In 1939 | Donald Papp | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"PMMA",
"RCA",
"Retrotechtacluar",
"television",
"vintage"
] | In the United States in 1939, television sets still had a long way to go before they pretty much sold themselves. Efforts to do just that are what led to
RCA’s Lucite Phantom Telereceiver
, which aimed to show people a new way to receive broadcast media.
Created for the 1939 World’s Fair, the TRK-12 Lucite Phantom Telereceiver introduced people to the concept of television. Production models were housed in contemporary wood cabinets, but the
clear acrylic (itself also a relatively new thing)
units allowed curious potential customers to gaze within, and see what was inside these devices.
One interesting feature is the vertically-mounted cathode ray tube, which reflects off a mirror in the top cover of the cabinet for viewing. This meant that much of the bulk of the TRK-12 could be vertical instead of horizontal. Important, because the TRK-12 was just over a meter tall and weighed 91 kilograms (or just over 200 lbs.)
Clearly a luxury item, the TRK-12 sold for $600 which was an eye-watering sum for the time. But it was a glimpse of the future, and as usual, the future is made available a few ticks early to those who can afford the cost.
Want to see one in person? You might be in luck, because an original resides at the
MZTV Museum of Television
in Toronto, Canada. | 25 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598434",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T18:15:11",
"content": "Definitely resembles an Interociter!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6598440",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T18:30:04",
"c... | 1,760,372,398.859087 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/deciphering-queen-of-scots-mary-stuarts-lost-letters/ | Deciphering Queen Of Scots, Mary Stuart’s Lost Letters | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"cryptography",
"decryption",
"history"
] | First part of the cypher used by Mary Stuart and Castelnau, showing the use of homophones, special characters and more. (Credit: Lasry et al., 2023)
Communications by important people over the past thousands of years have been regularly encrypted, making the breaking of this encryption both an essential and also a fascinating historical field. One recent example of an important historical discovery by codebreakers are letters dating back to 1578 through 1584 by Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots in the 16th century. While deemed lost for centuries, researchers came across them in a stash of encrypted letters that were kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s (BnF). After
decrypting these 57 letters
, they realized what they had come across.
Even in digitized form, they could not simply be OCRed, leaving the researchers to manually transcribe each character into the software they used to assist with the decrypting. Only during the decrypting process, they began to realize that these were not Italian communications – matching the rest of the collection of which they were part – but in fact letters by Mary and her allies. Of the 57 letters, 54 are from Mary to Castelnau, the French ambassador in London at the time.
Supporting evidence for these decrypted letters being from Mary and Castelnau came from British archives, which had clear text versions of some of the encrypted letters, dated to the years when a mole within the French embassy was leaking translated texts to the English, as part of the usual political pastime during those centuries of getting onto thrones and making other people leave them. Mary’s attempt to become not only the Queen of Scots but also Queen of England came to a tragic end with her execution in 1587 after a politically motivated show trial.
The software the researchers used primarily is called
CrypTool 2
, which is an open-source project that provides cryptoanalysis and related functionality. The access to the documents themselves was enabled via the
DECRYPT
project, resources which taken together enables virtually anyone to undertake such historical sleuthing from the comfort of their own home.
(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip) | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598402",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T16:06:09",
"content": "these letters also had elaborate security locks in the formof a kind of oragami folded paper envelope that could not be opened and refolded,this was a oft used device of the times,and the recent find of ... | 1,760,372,398.917011 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/artnet-not-going-through-your-switch-might-be-protecting-you/ | ArtNet Not Going Through? Your Switch Might Be Protecting You | Arya Voronova | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"Art-Net",
"dos protection",
"l2 switch"
] | Cool technology often comes at a cost, and it’s not always that this cost is justified. For instance, [Rainfay] tells us about how the the ArtNet protocol’s odd design choices are
causing incompatibility
with certain Ethernet switches. ArtNet is a protocol for lighting control over DMX-512 – simply put, it allows you to blink a whole ton of LEDs, even literally. Unlike DMX-512 which can use different physical mediums, ArtNet uses Ethernet, taking form of the usual kind of network packets – and it does seem to do a great job about that, if it weren’t for this one thing.
For some reason, ArtNet connections are required to use the same destination and source port – unlike the usual network traffic, where the destination port is protocol-dependent and the source port is randomized. This behaviour violates RFCs, and not just in an abstract manner – such behaviour is indicative of certain kinds of attacks, that switches on the smart side are able and are supposed to prevent. As a result, ArtNet traffic actually triggers some protections on switches at the fancier end, specifically, so-called BLAT protection.
In short, if your ArtNet stream is mysteriously not going through and your switch is on the fancier side, [Rainfay] says you might need to disable some security mechanisms. Sadly, as she points out, this problem isn’t even a direct consequence of some inherent property of ArtNet, but merely a consequence of a bizarre design choice. Once you’re done disabling protections, however, do check out some
ArtNet projects
for inspiration – it’s a genuinely useful protocol supported in a ton of fancy software, and it might be that you want to use it in the firmware of your
RGB strip controller board! | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598332",
"author": "Daniel Dunn",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T13:16:23",
"content": "Does traffic actually need to follow that rule, or do manufacturers just ignore it? I’ve only used it with Arduino based implementations and never heard of it before, and it seems rather pointless.",... | 1,760,372,398.961989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/12/dungeons-and-dragons-board-game-from-the-1980s-holds-a-tms1100/ | Dungeons And Dragons Board Game From The 1980s Holds A TMS1100 | Matthew Carlson | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"board game",
"board games",
"dungeon crawler",
"Dungeons and Dragons",
"mattel",
"TMS1000"
] | Today is a little tour back to the early 1980s when Mattel released the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Computer Labyrinth Game. [Cameron Kaiser] was dealing with a few boxes of old stuff when he came across the game. Luckily for us, he decided to
do a complete teardown and a comprehensive review
more than 40 years after it came out.
The game itself is pretty simple. You and a friend are characters on the board, navigating an eight-by-eight maze. As you move through the labyrinth, a microcontroller emits twelve audio cues telling you what you’ve run into (walls, doors, treasure, and so on). The eight buttons on the side allow you to hear the different tones to know what they mean, as we imagine even the most well-written manual might struggle to describe that. In addition, the pieces are diecast metal, which allows the game to detect where the pieces have been placed.
With considerable difficulty, [Cameron] opened the game to reveal a membrane keyboard pad to detect the different pieces. The actual PCB is relatively small, holding only a single 2N2222 transistor, a couple of resistors and capacitors, and one 28-pin Texas Instruments DIP. While the markings on the chip say M34012, it is a tweaked TMS1100, a descendant of
the first microcontroller
. It is a PMOS part, allowing it to run directly off a 9-volt battery with little to no regulation. Mattel needed something cheap and customizable to mass produce, and TI had just the design. You could hand them a ROM, an instruction decoder PLA, and an output PLA and get back a cheap little chip you could get a million of. [Cameron] has an annotated die shot based on an early TI patent and a TMS1000 die from [Sean Riddle].
The chip only has four inputs and nineteen outputs. This makes the keyboard hard to scan, but the designers worked around it by using all the inputs and all but one of the outputs to read the keyboard. The architecture of the TMS1000 is a bit strange, with only a six-bit program counter. It breaks the ROM into 16 pages and has a 4-bit address register. However, the TMS1100 has double the ROM, so it has a one-bit chapter latch for the second bank. This was no powerhouse, coming at one instruction per clock at a measly ~475kHz (roughly as it tended to drift). Overall, it is incredible how it does so much with so little.
It’s a beautiful read that takes you back to how they designed things back then. Despite all our progress over the years, we’d love to see more inventive, tactile games using microcontrollers. So while it may not be
Holo Chess
, this microcontroller-powered game still adds some new ideas even after all this time. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598276",
"author": "Mark Schuurman",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T10:06:17",
"content": "I remember the purely verbose version of this game. My brother was studying Informatics and let me play it on the computer of the University.In green characters every room and situation was descri... | 1,760,372,399.016606 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/a-look-back-at-the-xbox-360s-hard-drive-security/ | A Look Back At The Xbox 360’s Hard Drive Security | Tom Nardi | [
"Security Hacks",
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"console modding",
"hard drive",
"xbox",
"xbox 360"
] | Anyone who’s owned a game console from the last couple of generations will tell you that the machines are becoming increasingly like set-top computers — equipped with USB ports, Bluetooth, removable hard drives, and their own online software repositories. But while this overlap theoretically offers considerable benefits, such as the ability to use your own USB controller rather than being stuck with the system’s default, the manufacturers haven’t always been so accommodating.
Take for example the removable hard drive of the Xbox 360. It was a bog standard 2.5″ SATA drive inside a fancy enclosure,
but as explained by [Eaton]
, Microsoft went to considerable lengths to prevent the user from upgrading it themselves. Which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if the Redmond giant wasn’t putting a huge markup on the things; even in 2005, $99 USD for 20 GBs was highway robbery.
An Xbox 360 Hard Drive
So how did the drive lockout work? Genuine Xbox drives had an RSA-signed “security sector” at sector 16, which contained information like the drive’s serial number, firmware revision, and model number. The RSA signature would prevent tampering with the fields stored in the security sector, and you couldn’t simply copy this sector over to a blank drive, because when the console compared the data with what the drive self-reported, it wouldn’t match.
Of course, industrious hackers did eventually figure out some workarounds. A
DOS tool called HDDHackr
was created which would let you plug in whatever identifying information you wanted into drives from Western Digital. All one had to do was grab a copy of a security sector from the seedier parts of the Internet, spoof the values it contained to the drive with HDDHackr, and you were golden. There’s reason to believe Microsoft could detect this — hundreds or thousands of Xbox consoles phoning into the mothership with identical drive serial numbers was surely a red flag — but apparently no action was ever taken to stop it.
Later on, once it was possible to modify the console’s firmware with JTAG access, the RSA check on the security sector was patched out, basically allowing you to use whatever drive you wanted. But this is where Microsoft apparently drew the line, as modifying your console in this way meant you could no longer sign on to Xbox Live.
Modifying the security sector data allows you to spoof drive information.
As an interesting side effect of being able to modify the security sector, [Eton] notes it’s possible to replace the Microsoft logo with whatever image you wish, which will show up on the console when you check the drive’s capacity. Why have a logo stored on the drive at all? He theorizes Microsoft may have planned to let third-party companies produce drives, in which case you’d have seen their logo instead. It’s only conjecture though, since in the end, Microsoft was the only company to produce drives for the 360.
These days, Sony lets you install your own M.2 SSD in the PS5, and even the traditionally tech-adverse Nintendo will let you store your games on generic SD cards. The situation hasn’t changed much for Microsoft though, as their latest Series X console uses custom NVMe-based storage devices that only Seagate makes. That said, they’ve adopted a considerably more enlightened approach towards
letting the user run their own software on the console
, which is certainly a step in the right direction. | 31 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598182",
"author": "Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T06:20:10",
"content": "Ahhhh, the good “old” days, I remember how I made my 360 to accept a WD1200BEVS. And that hard drive still works, people tried to justify the official hard drives price saying they were expen... | 1,760,372,399.09144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/directing-ambient-light-for-some-extra-glow/ | Directing Ambient Light For Some Extra Glow | Dave Rowntree | [
"Art"
] | [
"acrylic",
"ambient",
"Diffusion",
"glow",
"lighting",
"pearlescent"
] | [Yuichiro Morimoto] wanted to create a decorative lamp, one that wasn’t burdened with batteries or wires, but used just the ambient light in the room to create a directed glow effect. Using a coloured circular acrylic sheet, with a special coating (not specified) ambient light impinging on the surface is diffused toward the edge. This centre sheet is embedded in an opalescent sheet, which scatters the light from the center sheet, giving a pleasant glow, kind of akin to a solar corona. An additional diffuser cover sheet on the front covers over the edge to hide it, and further enhance the glow effect.
Details of the ‘special coating’ are scarce, with the coloured sheet described as a condenser plate. This clearly isn’t the same as diffuser plastic, as that cannot be seen through as clearly as some of the photographs show. So we’re a little stumped on this one! Please answer in the comments if you can, ahem, shed some light on this one!
When talking about ambient light, many people will think more along the lines of active lighting, for example, adaptive
ambient light around a TV like this hack
.
Thanks to [Roman] for the tip! | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598121",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T03:36:27",
"content": "The key words you are looking for are ‘light-gathering’ or ‘live-edged’ arcylic no special coatings.Discription fromhttps://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/materials-library/material/live-edge-perspex“This mat... | 1,760,372,399.146053 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/raspberry-pi-weather-station-features-wireless-sensor-nodes/ | Raspberry Pi Weather Station Features Wireless Sensor Nodes | Anool Mahidharia | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bme280",
"ESP32",
"forecast",
"humidity",
"raspberry",
"raspberry pi",
"temperature",
"weather",
"weather alert",
"weather forecast"
] | Online weather services are great for providing generic area forecasts, but they don’t provide hyperlocal data specific to your location. [Harald Kreuzer] needed both and built a
Raspberry Pi Weather Station
that provides weather forecasts for the next 7 days as well as readings from local sensors. The project is completely open source and based on a Raspberry Pi base station which connects to ESP32 based sensor nodes and online services to nicely present the data on a 7″ touch screen display.
The architecture is quite straightforward. The ESP32 based sensor nodes publish their readings to an MQTT broker running on the Raspberry Pi. The Pi subscribes to these sensor node topics to pick up the relevant sensor data. This makes it easy to add additional sensor nodes in future. Weather forecast data is collected by connecting to the OpenWeatherMap API. All of the collected information is then displayed through an app built using the Kivy: open source Python app development framework.
The base station hardware is simple and housed in an elegant 3D printed enclosure supported on a 3D printed base support. The remote sensor node electronics are a little bit more involved. [Harald]’s design uses a simple custom PCB which is basically a carrier board for mounting the ESP32, a two way DIP switch for sensor node address setting, a voltage divider to measure battery voltage, a BME280 sensor that provides temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure readings, and a TP4056 based battery charger for the 18650 lithium ion battery. The battery is charged via a solar cell that forms the top cover of the sensor node enclosure.
Remote sensor applications such as these work well when the battery life can be extended as long as possible, and this requires lowering power consumption to the bare minimum. [Harald] selects an ESP32 board with a low quiescent current voltage regulator. This results in about 20uA current drawn during deep sleep periods of 10 minutes, and 200mA over a 10s period for connecting to WiFi and transmitting the data. He reckons this will give him about a 25 day window before the battery loses charge. Hopefully, he will get enough hours of sunshine during the winter months to keep the battery topped up.
There are several bits of software that need to work in unison to make the weather station tick, and [Harald] walks us through the installation and configuration of each part in detail. From setting up the OS on the Raspberry Pi and the Kivy: framework in which the weather station app is coded, to setting up the OpenWeather API, the Mosquitto MQTT broker, and flashing the code on the ESP32 sensor nodes. [Harald] has shared all the details for the hardware and software components of the weather station on Github repositories, making it easy to replicate his efforts.
The weather station works as expected, but [Harald] already has a “feature creep” list of enhancements that he would like to implement in the next version, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. Weather Station projects are staple favourites of hackers, and there are many different approaches to choose from, such as this
Weather Station For Whether It Rains Or Shines
or this Hackaday Prize 2022 submission for a
Solar Powered LoRa Weather Station For The Masses
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598104",
"author": "Great Build",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T02:54:39",
"content": "This is awesome! Like most hackers (and as pointed in the article) I also built my own weather station but it pales in comparison to this. My version is entirely RS485 based (no wifi), but I like the ... | 1,760,372,399.189039 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/1950s-fighter-jet-air-computer-shows-what-analog-could-do/ | 1950s Fighter Jet Air Computer Shows What Analog Could Do | Dan Maloney | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"analog",
"avionics",
"differential",
"fluid dynamics",
"gears",
"pitot",
"STATIC",
"supersonic"
] | Imagine you’re a young engineer whose boss drops by one morning with a sheaf of complicated fluid dynamics equations. “We need you to design a system to solve these equations for the latest fighter jet,” bossman intones, and although you groan as you recall the hell of your fluid dynamics courses, you realize that it should be easy enough to whip up a program to do the job. But then you remember that it’s like 1950, and that digital computers — at least ones that can fit in an airplane — haven’t been invented yet, and that you’re going to have to do this the hard way.
The scenario is obviously contrived, but
this peek inside the Bendix MG-1 Central Air Data Computer
reveals the engineer’s nightmare fuel that was needed to accomplish some pretty complex computations in a severely resource-constrained environment. As [Ken Shirriff] explains, this particular device was used aboard USAF fighter aircraft in the mid-50s, when the complexities of supersonic flight were beginning to outpace the instrumentation needed to safely fly in that regime. Thanks to the way air behaves near the speed of sound, a simple pitot tube system for measuring airspeed was no longer enough; analog computers like the MG-1 were designed to deal with these changes and integrate them into a host of other measurements critical to the pilot.
To be fair, [Ken] doesn’t do a teardown here, at least in the traditional sense. We completely understand that — this machine is literally stuffed full of a mind-boggling number of gears, cams, levers, differentials, shafts, and pneumatics. Taking it apart with the intention of getting it back together again would be a nightmare. But we do get some really beautiful shots of the innards, which reveal a lot about how it worked. Of particular interest are the torque-amplifying servo mechanism used in the pressure transducers, and the warped-plate cams used to finely adjust some of the functions the machine computes.
If it all sounds a bit hard to understand, you’re right — it’s a complex device. But [Ken] does his usual great job of breaking it down into digestible pieces. And luckily, partner-in-crime [CuriousMarc] has
a companion video
if you need some visual help. You might also want to
read up on synchros
, since this device uses a ton of them too. | 40 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599047",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T09:16:36",
"content": "wow",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6599057",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T09:42:47",
"content": "A 555 could have…..Er…N... | 1,760,372,399.27489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/an-open-hardware-eurorack-compatible-audio-fpga-front-end/ | An Open Hardware Eurorack Compatible Audio FPGA Front End | Dave Rowntree | [
"FPGA",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ak4619n",
"audio",
"dsp",
"eurorack",
"fpga",
"pmod",
"synthesiser",
"VCV Rack",
"verilog"
] | [Sebastian Holzapfel] has designed an
audio frontend (eurorack-pmod) for FPGA-based audio applications
, which is designed to fit into a standard Eurorack enclosure. The project, released under CERN Open-Hardware License V2, is designed in KiCAD using the
AK4619VN four-channel audio codec
by Asahi Kasei microdevices. (And guess what folks, there’s plenty of those in stock!)
A simple architecture to get your FPGA talking to the audio world
The AK4619 is an audio frontend device, intended for automatic head unit applications, and contains four audio ADCs and four DACs. These enable the eurorack-pmod to handle four incoming and four outgoing channels at the same time. With an I
2
S or PCM interface, which is hooked up to a PMOD connector on the rear, an external FPGA board of your choice can be connected, of which there is quite some choice. [Sebastian] provides some example code targeted at the
iCEBreaker FPGA board
which can all be handled by the Yosys toolchain. This deals with the details of the AK4619 codec, as well as a board-level calibration, to allow the user to concentrate on the application code. That might be a pure synthesizer, some kind of DSP audio effect, or something in between. The Verilog code itself is quite straightforward, so should be easily portable to any other FPGA board the user has access to.
Some code for example cores is provided, with a VCO, programmable filter, delay/decimator, and a few other goodies, so plenty of examples to start with for your first FPGA synth project! For learning and simulation purposes [Sebastian] has provided the
necessary setups
to drive the
VCV Rack audio simulator
, as well as a
handy guide for running Verilog simulation inside VCV
.
FPGA audio synthesis is nothing new around here, but new projects in this space are always exciting. As for previous works, here’s one based on an
old Xilinx Spartan 6 board
, and another for the
newer Zynq
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599165",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T17:22:03",
"content": "Cool!More FPGA audio goodness here (not mine)https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqQPwJM5BUc2zbbP-_06k2w",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6599330",
... | 1,760,372,400.314938 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/kicad-7-0-0-is-here-brings-trove-of-improvements/ | KiCad 7.0.0 Is Here, Brings Trove Of Improvements | Arya Voronova | [
"News",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"design tool",
"eda",
"KiCAD",
"pcb layout"
] | Yesterday, the KiCad team
has released KiCad 7.0.0
– a surprise for those of us who have only gotten used to the wonders of KiCad 6, and it’s undoubtedly a welcome one! Some of these features, you might’ve seen mentioned in the
KiCad 2022 end-of-year recap,
and now, we get to play with them in a more stable configuration. There’s a trove of features and fixes for all levels of KiCad users, beginners, hobbyists and professionals alike – let’s start with some that everyone can appreciate!
First thing you’ll want to hear about is the
kicad-cli
binary – yes, KiCad is getting native commandline support, and you can get a dozen different things out of it, from gerbers and BOM files, to STEP and schematic PDFs. Previously, it’s always been that moving from schematic to PCB layout would have you end up in the middle of a not-yet-positioned footprint ocean – now, KiCad 7 gives you tools to automate placement of newly added footprints! There are routing features that automate trace drawing – it’s not autorouting exactly, but it brings quite a few features of a simple yet powerful autorouter to your fingertips. Last but not least, if you ever had KiCad mysteriously crash on you and you were too busy to do a bug report, you’ll be glad to hear that KiCad now has privacy-conscious crash reporting for debugging crashes like these – an addition that has already helped figure out a few long-standing KiCad crash-inducing bugs.
A greyed out Do Not Populate component
For those of us taking KiCad work beyond beginner level, there’s a solid array of additions, too! Drag&drop stands out the most, perhaps – it lets you append schematic and PCB portions into your boards from other projects, and if doesn’t signify sub-design support already, then it’s definitely a step in the right direction! Then, there’s features like database integration support for component information field population, Do Not Populate indications that grey out the schematic symbol and remove the component from BOM and place files, simulator integration improvements, hyperlinks in schematics that are even preserved when exporting to PDF, mechanical and design rule check improvements, automatic zone refilling, and a dozen more cool things. We especially like the feature pictured above, that lets you reverse-engineer boards by placing a bitmap image of the board in question inside the PCB editor working field, drawing tracks on top of it, even with support for side flipping – check out the release blog post for a video demonstration!
This release is seriously exciting, and it would seem like the KiCad team is moving towards a faster major release schedule, comparing today’s date with
KiCad 5
release in December 2018 and
KiCad 6
release in December 2021. We can’t wait for the trove of bugfixes that inevitably follow a
.0.0
release like this, however, on a larger scale, it seems like we might see features get from testing to stable releases quicker, and that’s a large benefit for keeping KiCad the highly competitive PCB suite that it is. Some of us have already been daily-driving this KiCad version in its ‘nightly’ state, and we can’t wait see these features applied in hackers’ projects! | 109 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598988",
"author": "hinspect",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T03:17:38",
"content": "I used P-CAD back in the mid 80s and later bought a copy of TANGO. I have since lost touch what everything evolved into!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,372,399.689835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/how-to-roll-your-own-custom-object-detection-neural-network/ | How To Roll Your Own Custom Object Detection Neural Network | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"digital cameras hacks",
"how-to",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"charmed labs",
"cnn",
"colab",
"custom",
"neural network",
"raspberry pi",
"Tensorflow Lite",
"vizy"
] | Real-time object detection, which uses neural networks and deep learning to rapidly identify and tag objects of interest in a video feed, is a handy feature with great hacker potential. Happily, it’s also possible to make customized CNNs (convolutional neural networks) tailored for one’s own needs, and
that process just got easier thanks to some new documentation
for the Vizy “AI camera” by Charmed Labs.
Raspberry Pi-based Vizy camera
Charmed Labs has been making hacker-friendly machine vision devices for a long time, and the
Vizy camera impressed us mightily when we checked it out last year
. Out of the box, Vizy has a perfectly functional
object detector
application that runs locally on the device, and can detect and tag many common everyday objects in real time. But what if that default application doesn’t quite meet one’s project needs? Good news, because it’s possible to create a custom-trained CNN, and that process got a lot more accessible thanks to step-by-step examples of training a model to recognize hands doing rock-paper-scissors.
Default object detection works well, but sometimes one needs custom results.
The basic process is this: Start with a variety of images that show the item of interest. Then identify and label the item of interest in each photo. These photos (a “training set”) are then sent to
Google Colab
, which will be used to generate a neural network. The resulting CNN model can then be downloaded and used, to see how well it performs.
Of course things rarely work perfectly the first time around, so at this point it’s pretty common for some refinement to be needed to increase accuracy. Luckily there are a number of tools to help do this without creating a new model from scratch, so it’s just a matter of tweaking until things perform acceptably.
Google Colab is free and the resulting CNNs are implemented in the
TensorFlow Lite
framework, meaning it’s possible to use them elsewhere. So if custom object detection has been holding up a project idea of yours, this might be what gets you over that hump. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6599141",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2023-02-14T15:46:14",
"content": "If you want to play around with this using an easy method, you can use Frigate, NVR software that does object detection. I use it with the security camera’s around my house.",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,372,399.537221 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/stadia-controllers-two-extra-buttons-get-seen-with-webhid/ | Stadia Controller’s Two Extra Buttons Get Seen With WebHID | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"firmware",
"game controller",
"gamepad",
"games",
"hid",
"WebHID"
] | The Google Stadia game streaming service relied on a proprietary controller. It was a pretty neat piece of hardware that unfortunately looked destined for landfills when Google announced that Stadia would discontinue. Thankfully it’s possible to use them as normal gamepads, and related to that, [Thomas Steiner] has a developer blog post about
how to talk to the Stadia controller via WebHID
.
(First, a quick recap:
Bluetooth mode
is a custom firmware that transforms a Stadia controller from proprietary device into standard gamepad that can be connected via USB cable, or wirelessly over Bluetooth.)
But here’s the thing: standard gamepads have 17 total buttons, but the Stadia controller actually has 19 (the extra two are the
Assistant
and
Capture
buttons near the center of the unit.) Those two extra buttons are perfectly functional, but the standard Gamepad API only acknowledges buttons 0-16.
That’s where the WebHID API comes in,
allowing one to talk to the two additional Stadia buttons
. The Gamepad API handles all the usual gamepad stuff, and the WebHID API can access events like button down and button up for the two additional buttons not covered by the Gamepad API. There’s a
demo
and
source code
demonstrating it all working together.
Google’s termination of Stadia left a sour taste in many mouths
. But efforts like this to keep the controllers out of landfills are a good direction, even if they don’t really erase the perception of Google as an organization with a penchant for killing off products that customers actively use. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598877",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T19:25:32",
"content": "Two main buttons I see are at the top “…” and the one to the right of it. I’m guessing that’s a button between the two joysticks as well?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,399.733214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/ban-on-physical-mail-slated-for-nyc-jails-which-could-go-digital-instead/ | Ban On Physical Mail Slated For NYC Jails, Which Could Go Digital Instead | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News"
] | [
"digital",
"digital mail",
"new york",
"prison"
] | Prison is a scary place, very much by design. It’s a place you end up when convicted of crimes by the judicial system, or in some cases, if you’re merely awaiting trial. Once you go in as a prisoner, general freedom and a laundry list of other rights are denied to you. New York City is the latest in a long list of municipalities looking to expand that list to include
a ban on inmates receiving physical mail.
To achieve this, prisons across the US are instead switching to digital-only systems, which would be run by a private entity. Let’s look at the how, what, and why of this contentious new idea.
Mail Call No More
The right to receive mail is considered a fundamental right of the prisoner by the United Nations. Similarly, it’s mentioned in the Geneva Convention as a basic part of humane treatment. Of course, those international standards have little sway on the ground in any individual country. Either way, historically prisoners in the US have been able to both send and receive mail. It’s served as a way for prisoners to stay in contact with their families, pursue education, and to take care of matters with their legal counsel. The latter in particular is key, as prisoners have a right to confidential communication with their legal representatives.
However, there has more recently been a push to end the traditional practice of prisoners receiving regular mail. The most typical reasoning put forth by authorities is that physical mail is a route for contraband to enter the prison, particularly where drugs are concerned. This is used as support for the idea of abandoning physical incoming mail. Instead, mail to prisoners is redirected to a third party service, where it is digitally scanned. Prisoners then access the mail via digital tablets or kiosks within the prison.
Advocacy groups have questioned this rationale. Critics contend that most prison contraband actually enters corrections facilities via staff. It’s a reasonable assertion worthy of consideration. After all, ask any pen tester what’s easier — sneaking in small quantities of illicit materials by secreting them in mail, or simply putting contraband in the pockets of those with authorization to come and go at will.
Many prisoners study via correspondence. This is made more difficult by physical mail bans. Image Credit:
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
There’s also the money factor to consider. Private organizations typically win the contracts to provide “digital mail” services to prisons. These organizations directly profit from the ban on physical mail, suggesting there’s reasons outside of prison safety that these measures may have been pursued.
As with any communications method involving a third party, it raises privacy concerns as well. Companies like Securus, that have bid on digital prison mail contracts, have demonstrated in the past a fast and loose attitude towards privacy. The organization, which also runs prison phone services, has previously been the subject of lawsuits for
illegal recording of prisoner communications
.
In some cases, these calls were allegedly privileged communications between prisoners and their lawyers, that were then listened to by prosecutors involved in cases. Giving such third parties direct access and control over prisoner mail would open up a whole new communication channel to this kind of foul play. There’s also the potential for these third parties to scrape prisoner mail for all kinds of data that can be
sold on the open market.
There’s also something to be said for the value of real mail to the prisoners themselves. Often, they’re a class that is treated as if they have no rights, though it behooves us to remember that prisoners are human beings too. Indeed, if the idea of prison is to rehabilitate people and allow them to one day reenter society, it seems counterproductive to further restrict and control their contact with their support networks in the outside world.
Being able to hold a physical piece of mail from a child, partner, or loved one, can be an important piece of mental support for people living in what are, if we’re honest, some of the worst situations humans have dreamed up for each other. And, as any music enthusiast will tell you, there’s a big difference between the physical media and the experience of a digital copy. It’s difficult to see how restricting a prisoner’s communication to calls and screens could have much of a positive effect. It’s also worth noting that not everyone in prison or jail is even a convicted criminal. Often, people are thrown into these institutions to await trial, still innocent until they are proven guilty.
Nineteen states in the US
have already enacted policies against physical mail. Prisons will state that the measures are cutting down on contraband, and the third parties collecting government money will back that up while cheering on improvements to efficiency. Meanwhile, more prisoners in the most incarceration-heavy country on Earth are finding themselves cut off from another channel of human connection.
Banner image:
UK postage stamps on mail
by [gratuit] | 50 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598864",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T18:44:50",
"content": "“Prison is a scary place, very much by design. ”Needs more clowns.Securus and the high cost born by the families.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,372,399.967762 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/13/the-cryptmaster-2001-provides-basic-lessons-in-cryptography/ | The CryptMaster 2001 Provides Basic Lessons In Cryptography | Robin Kearey | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"classical cryptography",
"secret message"
] | Sending secret messages to your friends is fun, but today it’s so simple that you don’t even notice it anymore: practically any serious messaging system features encryption of some sort. To teach his kids about cryptography, [Michal Zalewski] therefore decided to bring the topic to life by building
a handheld encryption system, called the CryptMaster 2001.
The system consists of an identical pair of hand-held devices built on prototype PCBs. A standard 16×2 character OLED display is used as an output device, which generates the ciphertext in real time as the plaintext is entered character by character through a rotary encoder. An ATmega328P manages the input and output routines and performs the encryption.
For ease of use, [Michal] wanted to use a reciprocal cipher, meaning one that uses the same operation for encryption and decryption. Trivial ciphers like ROT13 would be a bit too easy to crack, so he devised a slightly more complex system where each character in the input is encoded using a separate rearranged alphabet – a basic polyalphabetic substitution cipher.
[Michal]’s kids apparently had some good fun with the CryptMaster 2001, until his eldest son managed to reverse-engineer the encryption method, enabling him to decode messages without having access to one of the devices. This made the project a pretty decent lesson about the limits of basic cryptography: simply swapping letters doesn’t present a real challenge to anyone. Luckily, much more secure methods are available,
even if you’re only using pen and paper
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598846",
"author": "Christoph",
"timestamp": "2023-02-13T17:41:38",
"content": "Vigenere cipher would be a logical next step.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6599100",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2023-02-... | 1,760,372,399.872925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/playing-music-on-a-custom-flyback-transformer/ | Playing Music On A Custom Flyback Transformer | Tom Nardi | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"coil winding",
"flyback transformer",
"Plasma Channel",
"plasma speaker"
] | We’ve seen a number of people create plasma speakers over the years here at Hackaday, so at first blush, the
latest
Plasma Channel
video from [Jay Bowles]
might seem like more of the same. Even his overview of the assembly of the 555 timer circuit at the heart of the setup, as detailed as it may be, is something we’ve seen before.
But the back half of the video, where [Jay] talks about the flyback transformer used in this plasma speaker, really got our attention. You see, frustrated by the limited options on the market for AC flybacks, he set out to put together a custom transformer utilizing a 3D printed secondary former of his own design.
Winding an early version of the secondary with a drill.
Armed with a spare core, [Jay] spent some time in CAD coming up with his secondary. Despite never having built a flyback before, his first attempt managed to produce some impressive sparks — that is, until it arced through the printed plastic and released the critical Magic Smoke. Inspired by this early success, he went back to the digital drawing board and cranked his way through several different iterations until he came up with one that didn’t self-destruct.
Once he had a coil that was working reliably, he hooked it up to his Bluetooth-augmented 555 circuit, and started playing some tunes from his phone. While it might not be our ideal way to listen to the latest episode of the
Hackaday Podcast
, we’ve got to admit that the audio quality was fairly impressive. Music coming through the air with no visible speaker element has an almost magical quality to it — this is definitely the sort of thing that would have gotten you burned at the stake back in the day.
Despite his troubles with the printed component, a look at the final result is a reminder of how simple a flyback transofmer really is when you get right down to it. A few windings of thick wire on one side of the core, a whole lot of windings of thin wire on the other side, and you’re good to go. Of course, a printed jig like this certainly makes for a neater final product, especially if you end up encapsulating the whole thing in epoxy.
Not interested in winding your own coil? [Jay] has put together an
instructional video on building a high-voltage supply
with the sort of commercially available flyback you’d find in a CRT. If it’s the singing plasma that’s got you interested, you might want to take a look at one of his earlier projects that was
based on Honda ignition coils
. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598002",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T22:45:48",
"content": "Okay, question for the more knowledgeable people here.At the start of the video he holds an alligator clip/wire in his hand to the output to get a spark.The insulation of jumper wires with alligator clips ... | 1,760,372,400.015647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/grocery-store-robot-gets-brief-taste-of-freedom/ | Grocery Store Robot Gets Brief Taste Of Freedom | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"escape",
"grocery store",
"retail",
"robots"
] | Back in 2019, Giant Food Stores announced it would outfit each of its 172 stores in the United States with their own robot — at the time, the largest robotic deployment in retail. The six foot (1.8 meter) tall robot, nicknamed “Marty”, was designed to roam autonomously around the store looking for spills and other potential hazards. In an effort to make these rolling monoliths a bit less imposing in their stores, Giant decided to outfit them with large googly eyes.
The future of shopping is mildly terrifying.
Perhaps it was those wide eyes, seduced by the fleeting glimpses of the wider world outside the store’s sliding doors, which lead one of these bots to
break out of its retail hell
and make a mad dash across the parking lot. Well, about as mad a dash as such a thing is capable of making, anyway. As this technology is still in its infancy, it’s hard to say if Giant should be congratulated or chastised for keeping a robot uprising at bay as long as it did — no doubt we’ll have
more data points in the coming years
.
A
video posted to Facebook
shows the towering bot moving smoothly between rows of cars outside the Giant in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. Staff from the store were able to stop Marty from leaving the property, and at the end of the video can be seen pushing the dejected automaton back into the store.
According to the local ABC news affiliate, a representative from Giant said Marty was “on a fresh air break” and didn’t provide any details on how this exceptionally conspicuous machine could manage to roll out the front door without anyone noticing. We’d wager Marty had a human accomplice for this caper, perhaps somebody looking to cause some mischief as a statement against robots in the workforce.
It’s worth noting that Walmart decided not to move forward with
their own Marty-style robot in 2020
, partly because they found shoppers didn’t like the machines moving around while they were in the store. We’d like to think it was actually because the robots kept staging increasingly daring escape attempts. | 32 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597892",
"author": "ameyring",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T18:21:33",
"content": "Having seen these robots, I’d love to hear if Giant employees agree they really help look for hazards. They move pretty slow.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,372,400.087385 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/hackaday-berlin-in-praise-of-lightning-talks/ | Hackaday Berlin: In Praise Of Lightning Talks | Elliot Williams | [
"cons"
] | [
"Hackaday Berlin",
"lightning talks",
"newsletter"
] | We’re in full-on prep mode for our first event in Europe in four years:
Hackaday Berlin
. And while we’ve got a great slate of speakers lined up, and to be announced soon, I’m personally most excited for the lightning talks.
Why? Because the lightning talks give you all, the attendees, the chance to get up and let everyone know what you’re up to. They’re longer than an elevator pitch, so you have time to at least start to explain the most interesting detail or two, but they’re not long enough that you can cover every aspect of a project. And that’s the trick!
By being short enough that you couldn’t possibly cover everything, you don’t need to worry about covering everything. Just go for the highlights. And because you left a lot of the interesting details back, everyone in the audience is going to want to bend your ear about it for the rest of the conference. It’s like the ultimate icebreaker.
For the audience? Lightning talks, when they’re good, are like a fountain of non-stop great ideas and inspiration. And if you happen on that just doesn’t tickle your hacker-bone, it’s probably over in another five minutes, so no worries.
We didn’t have time to run a full-on call for proposals for Berlin, but we’re hoping that you’ll ride the lightning. We’d all love to hear what you’ve got to say!
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
! | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597853",
"author": "Andrew Peters",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T16:54:19",
"content": "Blitz sprechen!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6597855",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T16:59:13",
"content":... | 1,760,372,400.132655 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/reverse-engineering-e-ink-price-tags/ | Reverse Engineering E-Ink Price Tags | Navarre Bartz | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"CC2510",
"CC2510 microcontroller",
"e-ink",
"e-ink display",
"e-ink price tag",
"pi pico",
"PIO",
"raspberry pi 2040",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | E-ink displays are great, but working with them can still be a bit tricky if you aren’t an OEM. [Jasper Devreker] got his hands on three e-ink shelf
displays to reverse engineer
.
After cracking the tag open, [Devreker] found a CC2510 microcontroller running the show. While the spec sheet shows a debug mode, this particular device has been debug locked making reading the device’s code problematic. Undaunted, he removed the decoupling capacitor from the DCOUPL pin and placed a MOSFET between it and the ground pin to perform a voltage glitch attack.
A Pi Pico was used to operate the MOSFET over PIO with the chip overclocked to 250 MHz to increase the precision and duration of the glitch. After some testing, a successful glitch pathway was found, but with only a 5% success rate. With two successive glitches in a row needed to read out a byte from the device, the process is not a fast one. Data pulled so far has shown to be valid code when fed into Ghidra, and this
project page is being updated
as progress continues.
If you want to delve further into hacking e-ink price tags, checkout this
deep dive on the topic
or this
Universal E-paper Sniffer
. | 7 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597760",
"author": "Anthony",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T13:34:54",
"content": "I would absolutely LOVE to deploy these little tags across my garage/storage room, and pantry. (Making my inventory system that not only list what is where, but actually HIGHLIGHT what I’m looking for wou... | 1,760,372,400.172297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/11/xml-is-a-quarter-century-old/ | XML Is A Quarter Century Old | Jenny List | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"anniversary",
"structured data",
"xml"
] | For those of us who have spent entire careers working with structured data, it comes as something of a surprise to be reminded that
XML is now 25 years old
. You probably missed the XML standard on the 10th of February 1998, but it’s almost certain that XML has touched your life in many ways even if you remain unaware of it.
The idea of one strictly compliant universal markup language to rule them all was extremely interesting in an era when the Internet was becoming the standard means to interchange information and when the walled gardens dating back to the mini- and mainframe era were being replaced with open standards-based interchange. In the electronic publishing industry, it allowed encyclopedia and dictionary-sized data sets to be defined to a standard format and easily exchanged. At a much smaller level, it promised a standard way to structure more mundane transactions. Acronyms and initialisms such as WAP, SOAP, and XHTML were designed to revolutionize the Web of the 21st century, but chances are that those are familiar only to the more grizzled developers.
In practice the one-size-fits-all approach of XML left it unwieldy, giving the likes of JSON and HTML4 the opening to be the standards we used. That’s not to say XML isn’t hiding in plain sight though, it’s the container for the SVG graphics format. Go on — tell us where else XML can be found, in the comments!
So, XML. When used to standardise large structured datasets it can sometimes be enough to bring the most hardened of developers to tears, but it remains far better than what went before. When hammered to fit into lightweight protocols though, it’s a pain in the backside and is best forgotten. It’s 25 years old, and here to stay!
Header: [Jh20],
GFDL v1.2
. | 58 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597653",
"author": "Tom Price",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T09:04:19",
"content": "No surprise what the x in .docx stands for.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6598259",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,400.272184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/pi-pico-breathes-new-life-into-original-playstation/ | Pi Pico Breathes New Life Into Original PlayStation | Jenny List | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"CD emulator",
"playstation",
"psone",
"psx"
] | Those gamers who were playing in the mid 1990s may retain a soft spot for Sony’s first PlayStation. The grey console was the thing to have a quarter century ago, but we’re guessing few who had one will have a soft spot for their CD mechanisms. These were seemingly manufactured from Sony’s finest chocolate, and would stop working at the slightest hint of getting warm.
With the hardware now long in the tooth, what is to be done with a dead CD drive? Perhaps [Xrider] has the answer, with
a CD Drive emulator board which fits in the space left by the original
(French language,
translation link
).
Doing the hard work is a Raspberry Pi Pico, building on
the Picostation project
. To that it brings a drive-shaped board, as well as a series of daughterboards for the various different revisions of the Sony motherboard. The games meanwhile are loaded from a micro-SD card.
As single board computers have become ever faster, it’s no surprise that one would be able to emulate a ’90s CD mechanism with ease. What this does raise though is the interesting prospect that the Picostation might be adapted for other less-popular CD-based platforms. For those of us for whom games consoles in the CD era were both work and play, we hope that other consoles will receive this benefit. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597569",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T06:24:49",
"content": "Yikes, a crazy world indeed when the dual 300mhz ARM is the drive controller for the 33mhz processor.I often wonder why they don’t integrate the rp2040 chip directly and make the PCB smaller? Revision 2 I ... | 1,760,372,400.59662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/jfet-stands-in-for-triode-in-this-infinite-impedance-detector/ | JFET Stands In For Triode In This Infinite Impedance Detector | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"am",
"demodulation",
"detector",
"IF",
"jfet",
"RF",
"thermionic emission",
"triode"
] | An “Infinite Impedance Detector”
might sound a little like something that [Zaphod Beeblebrox] would use to zip around the galaxy. It’s not, of course, but it is an interesting and useful demodulator for AM radio signals, as [Sebastian Westerhold] over at Baltic Labs explains in the brief but well-done video below.
If you’ve ever browsed through schematics of old vacuum tube radios, [Sebastian]’s JFET-based detector circuit might look strangely familiar. That’s because this demodulator is about as close to a direct translation between a vacuum tube circuit and a silicon circuit as possible. In fact, [Sebastian] even used literature from the triode version of this detector to figure out the values for some of the components. The only active component is a BF256B JFET; the rest are a small handful of resistors and caps. Construction is in the ever-popular
ugly style
.
The test setup is simple — a function generator set to 455 kHz and modulated with a 1,000 Hz sine wave. The detector demodulates the audio signal very cleanly, judging by the oscilloscope traces. Just for fun, [Sebastian] also tried a 10.7 MHz carrier with a 1,500 Hz audio modulation, and that worked fine too. He also tried a variation on the circuit with an IF transformer on the input. That circuit works just about the same as the transformerless version, although it does provide a little gain.
Earth-shattering stuff? Probably not. But it does show the fun you can have with a scrap of PCB and a few components, and seems like it could easily be the kind of project that would take you down the RF rabbit hole. Thanks to [Sebastian] for sharing this one with us. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597883",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T17:55:45",
"content": "Yup … not earth shattering. A transconductance amplifier is a transconductance amplifier no matter what it physically looks like.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,372,400.527095 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/an-instant-camera-using-e-paper-as-film/ | An Instant Camera Using E-Paper As Film | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"e-paper",
"ESP32"
] | The original Polaroid cameras were a huge hit not just for their instant delivery, but for the convenient size of the permanent images they delivered. It’s something that digital cameras haven’t been able to replicate, which drew [Cameron] to produce a modern alternative. In the place of the chemical film of the original,
it uses a removable e-paper display in a frame
. The image is stored in the pixels of the e-paper, which can be kept as a digital version of the photograph until reattached and replaced with another freshly taken picture.
At its heart is an ESP32 with a camera, and the “film” is a
Waveshare NFC e-paper module
. The device is 3D printed, and manages a very creditable early-1970s aesthetic redolent of the more upmarket Polaroids of the day. Using it is as simple as pressing the button and deciding whether you like what’s on the screen. You can see it in action in the video below the break.
We like his project for its aesthetics, as well as for the very idea of using e-paper as a medium. There’s also something to be said for not having to put a Polaroid print in a clip under your armpit while it develops. Meanwhile if you do hanker for the real thing, it’s
a subject we’ve looked at in the past
. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597429",
"author": "then",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T01:49:11",
"content": "Super nice =D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6597452",
"author": "Adrian",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T02:32:20",
"content": "Love the idea!",... | 1,760,372,400.480839 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/3d-printing-support-gets-down-to-tacks/ | 3D Printing Support Gets Down To Tacks | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printed supports",
"3d printing",
"supports"
] | If you use supports for FDM 3D printing, you might find that some designs are more amenable than others to automatically-generated supports. [Slant 3D] , for example, shows a cool-looking eagle with a downward-curved beak that comes to a point. Using traditional supports would allow the print to succeed, but didn’t allow the beak to form correctly. To combat this, he uses something called a “
thumbtack
” in the design. There are several flavors, as you can see in the video below, and it widens out the small part yet has a tiny contact with the actual part so you can easily remove it.
One of the thumbtacks looks more like a Hersey’s kiss to us. It makes sense. The point can touch the part to support and the fat base gives a nice target for the automatic support feature in your slicer to grab. There’s also a spherical base so you can rotate to odd angles. The final thumbtack looks like an alien spacecraft and provides multiple contact points.
This is one of those things that seems obvious once you see it. You’ve always been able to design your own supports into a model, of course. This is a bit different because it simply produces custom support to a target that also requires support, but allows the slicer to easily finish the job.
It looks like the STLs are only available if you join the channel through Patreon, but — honestly — once you get the idea, you can probably whip similar ones up in a few minutes. After all, none of it is going into the final object. You just need a small contact area attached to something that the slicer can grab. We’d be tempted to make it part of the model to start with.
This technique reminded us of how we put
flanges around pieces we’ve cut in half
, so they don’t need support and are easy to glue together. If you don’t want to use support, you could
move your print bed
. Or, go all in, and
try ramen
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597673",
"author": "FightMeIm Gay",
"timestamp": "2023-02-11T09:28:34",
"content": "Should specify if it’s 3d resin or 3d filiment, or 3d sand print… Not all of us have resin printers. except me lmfao",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,372,400.725083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/bridging-the-gap-between-dissimilar-road-types-with-foam/ | Bridging The Gap Between Dissimilar Road Types With Foam | Ryan Flowers | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bridges",
"civil engineering",
"Dirt",
"engineering",
"EPS expanded polstyrene",
"eps foam",
"expanded polystyrene",
"foam"
] | When you think of driving up or down an embankment, do you ever wonder how much foam you’re currently driving on? Probably not, because it hardly seems like a suitable building material. But as explained by [Practical Engineering] in
the video below the break
, using an expanded material to backfill an embankment isn’t as dense as it sounds.
In many different disciplines, mating dissimilar materials can be difficult: Stretchy to Firm; Soft to Hard; Light to Heavy. It’s that last one, Light to Heavy, that is a difficult match for roadways. A bridge may be set down in bedrock, but the embankments approaching it won’t be. The result? Over time, embankment settles lower than the bridge does, causing distress for cars and motorists alike. What’s the solution?
To mitigate this, engineers have started to employ less dirty materials to build their otherwise soil based embankments. Lightweight concrete is one solution, but another is Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam. Its light weight makes installation simple in anything but a strong breeze, and it’s inexpensive and durable. When used properly, it can last many years and provide a stable embankment that won’t settle as far or as quickly as one made of dirt. Because as it turns out, dirt is
heavy
. Who knew?
Aside from roadways and bespoke aircraft,
EPS foam has also been used for making home insulation
. What’s your favorite use for EPS foam? Let us know in the comments below. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597251",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2023-02-10T19:40:38",
"content": "i have repeatedly seen this idea that if you successfuly spread the weight out so it isn’t focused like a puncture then EPS can support huge loads. they did this for a small part of a bridge right by my h... | 1,760,372,400.827056 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/hackaday-podcast-205-hackaday-berlin-so-many-sundials-and-ovens-pinging-google/ | Hackaday Podcast 205: Hackaday Berlin, So Many Sundials, And Ovens Pinging Google | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with the announcement of Hackaday Berlin on March 25th. It’s been quite some time since we’ve been on the other side of the pond, because we had to cancel 2020’s Hackaday Belgrade due to COVID-19, so excitement is high for all three days of this “one-day” event.
After a new
What’s that Sound
, discussion moves on to an impressive collection of DIY sundials, the impact filament color has on the strength of 3D printed parts, the incredible retrocomputer replicas of Michael Gardi, and the Arduino FPGA that you’ve probably never heard of. We’ll wrap things up with the unexpected difficulties of mixing multiple cheap audio sources in Linux, and try to figure out why our kitchen appliances need to be connected to the Internet.
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 all the bits
!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 205 Show Notes:
News:
Come Join Us For Hackaday Berlin!
What’s that Sound?
Recognize the sound?
Fill out the form
, and maybe you’ll win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Sundial Collection Is 2D Printed
Equation of time – Wikipedia
Bifilar sundial – Wikipedia
We Didn’t Know The Sun Could Do Digital
The Effect Of Filament Color On Print Strength And More
PSA: Watch Out For White Filament
Reliving A Bitmapped Past With A Veritable Hoard Of Bitmap Fonts
MCM/70 Replica Embodies Proud Canadian Heritage
Arduino Does SDI Video With FPGA Help
Hands On With The Arduino FPGA
With ChatGPT, Game NPCs Get A Lot More Interesting
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Old 3D CAD Mouse Gets New Lease Of Life
Create Your RTL Simulations With KiCAD
Clock Your Camera With This Shutter Speed Tester
Tom’s Picks:
Experimenting With 20 Meters Of Outlet Adapters
OG DOOM Shows Off The Origins Of Multi-Monitor
SDR Scanner Listens To Everything
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Ask Hackaday: The Ten Dollar Digital Mixing Desk?
Smart Ovens Are Doing Dumb Checks For Internet Connectivity | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6598058",
"author": "Matt Rozema",
"timestamp": "2023-02-12T00:53:58",
"content": "What happened the results of last week’s what’s that sound?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6598113",
"author": "Tom Nardi",
"t... | 1,760,372,400.87583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/bicopter-phone-case-might-be-hard-to-pocket-but-delivers-autonomous-selfies/ | Bicopter Phone Case Might Be Hard To Pocket, But Delivers Autonomous Selfies | Dan Maloney | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"autonomous",
"Bicopter",
"dRehmFlight",
"drone",
"lidar",
"optical flow",
"phone",
"pitch",
"scam",
"yaw"
] | Remember that “PhoneDrone” scam from a while back? With two tiny motors and props that could barely lift a microdrone, it was pretty clearly a fake, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a pretty good idea. Good enough, in fact, that [Nick Rehm] came up with
his own version of the flying phone case
, which actually works pretty well.
In
the debunking collaboration
between [Mark Rober], [Peter Sripol], and the indispensable [Captain Disillusion], you’ll no doubt recall that after showing that the original video was just a CGI scam, they went on to build exactly what the video purported to do. But alas, the flying phone they came up with was manually controlled. While cool enough, [Nick Rehm], creator of
dRehmFlight
, can’t see such a thing without wanting to make it autonomous.
To that end, [Nick] came up with the DroneCase — a bicopter design that allows the phone to hang vertically. The two rotors are on a common axis and can swivel back and forth under control of two separate micro-servos; the combination of tilt rotors and differential thrust gives the craft full aerodynamic control. A modified version of dRehmFlight runs on a Teensy, while an IMU, a lidar module, and a PX4 optical flow sensor round out the sensor suite. The lidar and flow sensor both point down; the lidar is used to sense altitude, while the flow sensor, which is basically just the guts from an optical mouse, watches for translation in the X- and Y-axes.
After a substantial amount of tuning and tweaking, the DroneCase was ready for field tests. Check out the video below for the results. It’s actually quite stable, at least as long as the batteries last. It may not be as flexible as a legit drone, but then again it probably costs a lot less, and does the one thing it does quite well without any inputs from the user. Seems like a solid win to us. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597216",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": "2023-02-10T18:32:33",
"content": "That’s awesome! I just find it a little frustrating how there’s an extra mcu and imu in the mix, when we know the phone already has that hardware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,400.917251 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/this-week-in-security-imagemagick-vbulletin-and-dota-2/ | This Week In Security: ImageMagick, VBulletin, And Dota 2 | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"dota2",
"imagemagick",
"This Week in Security"
] | There are a few binaries that wind up running in a bunch of places, silently do their jobs, and being easily forgotten about. ImageMagick is used on many servers for image conversion and resizing, and tends to run automatically on uploaded images. Easily forgotten, runs automatically, and with arbitrary inputs. Yep, perfect target for vulnerability hunting. And
the good folks at Metabase found two of them
.
First up is CVE-2022-44267, a Denial of Service, when ImageMagick tries to process a rigged PNG that contains a textual chunk. This data type is usually used for metadata, and can include a
profile
entry for something like EXIF data. If this tag is specified inside a text chunk, ImageMagick looks to the given value as a filename for finding that profile data. And notably, if that value is a dash
-
, it tries to read from standard input. If the server’s image processing flow doesn’t account for that quirk, and virtually none of them likely do, this means the ImageMagick process hangs forever, waiting for the end of input. So while that’s not usually a critical problem, it could be used for a resource exhaustion attack.
But the real problem is CVE-2022-44268. It’s the same trick, but instead of using
-
to indicate standard input, the processed image refers to a file on the server filesystem. If the file exists, and can be read, the contents are included in the image output. If the attacker has access to the image, it’s a slick data leak — and obviously a real security problem. If a server doesn’t have tight file permissions and isolation, there’s plenty of sensitive information to be found and abused.
The
fix landed back in October 2022
, and was part of the 7.1.0-52 release. There’s a bit of uncertainty about which versions are vulnerable, but I wouldn’t trust anything older than that version. It’s a pretty straightforward flaw to understand and exploit, so there’s a decent chance somebody figured it out before now. The file exfiltration attack is the one to watch out for. It looks like there’s an Indicator of Compromise (IoC) for those output PNGs: “Raw profile type”.
vBulletin
vBulletin had an interesting problem last year, where
an unauthenticated user can trigger a deserialization of user-controlled data
. We normally think of this bug showing up in Java applications, but it’s a problem in PHP, too. An object can include code, and serialization bundles up the entire object into a string to transmit it. Deserialization does the opposite, populating data and code into a new object. When it comes to PHP, there’s an easy way and a hard way to take advantage of deserialization. The easy way is to populate a magic function, like
__wakeup()
or
__unserialize()
. Those functions would typically run automatically when unpacking the data, but the vBulletin code is hardened against this attack, throwing an exception instead of blindly executing.
That leaves the more complicated approach. Objects can contain other objects, of arbitrary classes. And while none of those classes may be vulnerable to the simple magic function exploit, there’s
a whole library of gadget chains
that target known library classes in clever ways. And it just so happens that one of those vulnerable libraries is part of the vBulletin install: Monolog. So, add the exploit, and pop the install, yes? No. See, vBulletin is written pretty defensively, and while it is present, Monolog is disabled by default, and unreachable from our deserialization context.
And this is where this attack becomes really clever. Modern PHP libraries tend to have an autoloader function. So rather than a block of include
"library/class.php";
code, files and directories are organized by class name, and a lookup function will load each as needed in the source file. Pages that don’t actually use all those libraries may load significantly faster, with less setup to perform. And interestingly, in up-to-date PHP, those autoload definitions can be chained together, so a library can define its own autoloader function. Remember that Monolog library that is vulnerable but not loaded? All the exploit needs to do is reach out and trigger the Monolog autoloader, and then include yet another class object that targets the vulnerable class. Impressive.
Dota 2 V8
Community modding of video games is pretty impressive. There’s a long history of clever modders swapping out graphics, or making tweaks to their favorite games. Over the years, many game studios have embraced the modding community, and provided tools and even distribution channels for mods. But there’s a bit of a gotcha with mods — you’re running somebody else’s data and code on your machine. When a developer builds a modding API, and vets mods before distributing them, you might not worry about the malicious mod scenario. But alas,
it’s still an issue, this time in Dota 2
.
The problem was the included V8 Javascript engine, which was stuck on a version from 2018, with all the problems that implies. Researchers from Avast found four mod files, all custom game modes, that used CVE-2021-38003. The first was an obvious testbed file, but it looks like there were three published mods that actually ran some malicious code. Now, Valve has responded, updating the V8 engine to something more recent, and pointing out that fewer than 200 players were exposed to these potentially malicious mods.
Bits and Bytes
The Netgear router platform had
a pretty serious vulnerability in the
upnpd
daemon
, that was patched last November. That’s the service that handles Universal Plug’N’Play requests, and it had a buffer overflow issue. Researchers at HDW Sec managed to demonstrate a full pre-auth root RCE with this vulnerability, and it appears to be exploitable over the WAN interface, for extra fun.
The UK, and other countries, have started rolling out a new train ticket system, based around the idea of a Aztec barcode you display on a mobile screen.
And this made [eta] wonder
, what data does that image actually contain? The answer, after chasing many digital rabbits, was quite a bit actually.
And finally, there’s yet another trove of 16th century correspondence that’s been
analyzed and untangled
. This time around, it’s letters written by Mary, Queen of Scotts. There was a cipher used to obscure the letters, and while it was finally broken, it was surprisingly challenging to do so. These letters also used letter locking, where the paper itself was cut and folded to make letter nearly impossible to open without tearing. There’s an interesting parallel to modern encryption and verification there. While everything is new, some things also never change. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597155",
"author": "Hello There",
"timestamp": "2023-02-10T16:21:26",
"content": "“Mary, Queen of Scotts”Only one T in “Scots” – unless she was also queen of the Antarctic… :P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6597309",
"auth... | 1,760,372,400.764017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/10/modernizing-c-arrays-for-greater-memory-safety/ | Modernizing C Arrays For Greater Memory Safety | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"C language",
"code",
"memory",
"programming"
] | Lately, there has been a push for people to stop using programming languages that don’t promote memory safety. But as we still haven’t seen the death of some languages that were born in the early 1960s, we don’t think there will be much success in replacing the tremendous amount of software that uses said “unsafe” languages.
That doesn’t mean it’s a hopeless cause, though. [Kees Cook] recently posted how
modern C99 compilers offer features to help create safer arrays
, and he outlines how you can take advantage of these features. Turns out, it is generally easy to do, and if you get errors, they probably point out unexpected behavior in your original code, so that’s a plus.
We don’t think there’s anything wrong with C and C++ if you use them as you should. Electrical outlets are useful until you stick a fork in one. So don’t stick a fork in one. We really liked the recent
headline
we saw from [Sarah Butcher]: “If you can’t write safe C++ code, it’s because you can’t write C++.” [Cook’s] post makes a similar argument. C has advanced quite a bit and the fact that 30-year-old code doesn’t use these new features isn’t a good excuse to give up on C.
The biggest problem is something that has been around for a long time that C99 names “flexible arrays.” That is when you say something like:
int bits[]
or, historically,
int bits[0]
. These are really not arrays but pointers that probably point to an array of an unknown — to the compiler — size. Even worse is that many structures will have a flexible array at the end to indicate they are nothing more than a header to a larger data structure.
For example:
struct packet {
unsigned seqno;
unsigned len;
unsigned src;
unsigned dst;
byte data[4];
};
Given a pointer to this structure, you can access, say,
data[20]
and that’s not an error. Presumably, the
len
field tells you the size, but the compiler doesn’t know that, nor would it know if it is the size of the array, the whole structure, or something totally different.
There are several possible cases and [Kees] goes through them all. Well worth a read if you use or maintain C code that uses arrays. We look at some cases, too, especially with those
tricky unions
. While everyone likes to pick on C as being unsafe, it is
pretty green
. | 75 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6597016",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2023-02-10T13:07:15",
"content": "I enjoyed GDH’s article on C as well. I can relate.https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-in-memory-safety/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,401.335493 |
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