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https://hackaday.com/2023/01/31/find-swd-points-quickly-no-extra-hardware-needed/ | Find SWD Points Quickly, No Extra Hardware Needed | Arya Voronova | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"j-link",
"SWD",
"testpoint probing"
] | Say you’re tinkering with a smart device powered by a CPU that uses Serial Wire Debug (SWD), but doesn’t mark the testpoints. Finding SWD on a board — how hard could it be? With [Aaron Christophel]’s method, you can
find the SWD interface on a PCB
within a few minutes’ time. All you need is two needles, a known-to-be-ground connection, an SWD dongle of some kind, and a computer with an audio output. What’s best — you could easily transfer the gist of this method to other programming interface types!
The idea is simple: you wire the ground up, connect the needles to SWDIO and SWCLK, launch [Aaron]’s Python script, then start poking around all the unnamed test points. The script runs JLink software to probe for SWD devices attached to the probes — if an SWD interface isn’t found, it beeps idly, but as soon as the device is detected, your computer will start beeping at you in a lively manner. In this way, you don’t have to re-scan devices manually, solder to any test points except the GND one, or try and hold both probes on test points with one hand – the scanning process itself is hands-free.
Depending on how many points your board has and whether you try to optimize the process by probing points closest to the SWD pins on the CPU, you might hit the jackpot immediately, or you might have to poke around for a minute-two. That said, [Aaron]’s method seems to be the best you can do while remaining relatively extra-hardware-free, and if you want to make it a tinge more permanent,
clothespins are there for you.
In case you don’t mind extra hardware – could we interest you in some 3D printed needle probe desks? There’s a wide variety of those, whether you’d like some
tentacle-like ones,
or ones that make your desk look like
like an acupuncture table.
Or, say, would you like a more automatic method of finding all kinds of debug interfaces? Then
JTAGulator
might be what you’re looking for. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6587960",
"author": "some guy",
"timestamp": "2023-01-31T22:36:08",
"content": ">you could easily transfer the gist of this method to other programming interface types!Only if you have more than 2 hands… The idea of accustic feedback is still a good one.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,415.626245 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/31/driverless-buses-take-to-the-road-in-scotland/ | Driverless Buses Take To The Road In Scotland | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous bus",
"autonomous car",
"bus",
"self-driving"
] | Scotland! It’s the land of tartans, haggis, and surprisingly-warm kilts. It’s also ground zero for the first trial of full-sized driverless buses in the United Kingdom.
It’s not just automakers developing driverless technologies. Transit companies are desperate to get in on the action because it would completely upend their entire existing business structure. Now that self-driving buses are finally approaching a basic level of competence, they’re starting to head out to haul passengers from A to B.
Let’s look at how the UK’s first driverless bus project is getting on out in the real world.
On Schedule
Members of Stagecoach’s Co-Design Panel were invited to an early trial run of the autonomous bus route.
Credit: Stagecoach
Scotland’s autonomous bus trial, known as the CAVForth project, has been a long time in the making, and we first looked at it
last year.
Trials were intended to begin long ago, but faced multiple delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the rubber is finally ready to meet the road, with the buses imminently ready to hit the public roads.
The trial will see autonomous buses operated by Stagecoach Group taking to the roads of Scotland. The initial route is a 14-mile run between Fife and Edinburgh Park, which crosses the famous Forth Bridges along the way. The bus service itself has been duly designated “AB1”, standing for “Autonomous Bus 1,” and will be the first full-sized autonomous bus operating on public roads in the UK. The project is being undertaken as a partnership between transit operator Stagecoach, autonomous driving company Fusion Processing, and bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis. Also involved are Transport Scotland, as well as Edinburg Napier University, Bristol Robotics Lab, and the University of the West of England.
Unlike some smaller-scale trials, AB1 is set to be a regular timetabled service open to members of the public, just like any other regular bus route. When it scales to full-time service in the spring, the five autonomous buses involved in the project will have the capacity to take on approximately 10,000 journeys a week. Notably, though, passengers won’t have to worry about hailing the bus. To avoid having to develop a “hailing detection system,” the bus simply stops at every bus stop along its route.
The buses are capable of driving at up to 50 mph, and have been developed to operate autonomously in mixed traffic. The buses will be capable of
SAE Level 4 self-driving.
This means there is no need for the human driver to pay attention or keep their hands on the wheel at all times, but the bus can only drive like this in select limited areas. A human driver will remain on board as a monitor for safety reasons, and in part to comply with UK regulations. Beyond that, the buses will also be staffed with a “bus captain” who can assist passengers with ticketing, boarding, and alighting the vehicle.
While this person is hailing the bus, there is no need. Buses on the AB1 route will stop at every bus stop, which eliminates the requirement for the bus to detect hailing passengers.
Credit: Stagecoach
An initial trial run took place with Stagecoach’s Co-Design Panel, a group of local bus users that the company consults on service and equipment projects. According to one rider, the experience was, by and large, just like catching a regular bus. “I wasn’t worried at all about it,” said Fleur, adding “You wouldn’t know the difference between this and a normal bus from the driving.” Given the concerns around the sometimes-erratic nature of
certain “self-driving” systems
, that’s almost a glowing endorsement. The Co-Design Panel recommended the “bus captain” concept to ease passengers that may have questions or concerns about using an autonomous bus, as well as developing materials to communicate how the bus will work to the broader public.
In much the same way that self-driving cars promise to revolutionize personal transport, self-driving buses aim to do the same for public transit. Overall, the basic technologies used for self-driving cars and self-driving buses are by and large the same. However, it bears noting the stakes are higher – there’s a lot more people on board a bus that will suffer the results of any poor driving decisions, and a bus running over a car does a lot more damage. Companies are also juicy targets for litigation, and transit drivers care strongly about the safety of their passengers. While the owner of a modern car may choose to take their life into their own hands by trusting a self-driving system, transit operators and their drivers can’t be so cavalier. Their decision to trust such a system isn’t taken lightly, and that is likely why we’ve seen self-driving buses take longer to show up on the road.
In any case, the CAVForth project in Scotland will be watched closely by many in the UK and around the world. There’s nothing like the pressure of sticking to a tight bus schedule, day in, day out. If the buses can handle the AB1 bus route without relying on human drivers, it will mark a historic day in the history of self-driving technology. It will also leave the companies behind the project with a highly-valuable product on their hands – the technology to create self-driving bus fleets in cities around the world. | 70 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6587750",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-01-31T18:37:33",
"content": "> transit operators and their drivers can’t be so cavalier.You’d think. Around here, when the bus driver puts the blinkers on they’re going to pull up right NOW. Doesn’t matter that you’re already past the... | 1,760,372,415.239914 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/31/wooden-smartphone-sleeve-keeps-you-on-task/ | Wooden Smartphone Sleeve Keeps You On Task | Navarre Bartz | [
"Cellphone Hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"cellphone",
"distracted",
"distraction",
"do not disturb",
"fabric",
"felt",
"NFC",
"productivity",
"smarphone",
"smartphone sleeve",
"veneer"
] | Smartphones are amazing tools, but sometimes they can be an equally amazing time suck. In an effort to minimize how much precious time goes down the drain, [Lance Pan and Zeynep Kirmiziyesil] decided to make a
functional and beautiful smartphone sleeve
to keep you on task.
Most modern smartphones have some form of Do Not Disturb mode available, but having the phone visible can still be an invitation for distraction. By tucking the phone into an accessible but less visible sleeve, one can reduce the visual trigger to be on the phone while keeping it handy in the even of an emergency.
Once in the sleeve, the NFC tag sandwiched between the felt and wood veneer triggers an automation to put the phone into Do Not Disturb mode. This hack looks like something that you could easily pull off in an afternoon and looks great which is always a winning combination in our book.
To see some more focus-oriented hacks, checkout the
Pomodachi
or this
Offline E-Paper Typewriter
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6587617",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2023-01-31T16:38:24",
"content": "On the one hand, it is cool that they made something. On the other hand, isn’t wood veneer a little lacking in robustness?I guess on the third hand it turned the lame-ass leather phone holster I made... | 1,760,372,415.327579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/31/all-about-usb-c-pinecil-soldering-iron/ | All About USB-C: Pinecil Soldering Iron | Arya Voronova | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"pinecil",
"Type-C",
"USB C",
"USB Type-C",
"USB-C PD"
] | As many people have pointed out, what matters with USB-C isn’t just the standard, it’s the implementations. After all, it’s the implementations that we actually have to deal with, and it’s where most of the problems with USB-C arise. There is some fault to the standard, like lack of cable markings from the get-go, but at this point, I’m convinced that the USB-C standard is a lot better than some people think.
I’d like to walk you through a few USB-C implementations in real, open-source, adjacent, and just interesting products. They’re all imperfect in some way – it can’t be otherwise, as they have to deal with the messy real world, where perfection is a rarity.
Today, let’s check out the Pinecil. A soldering iron by Pine64, released a few years ago, keeping the price low and quality high. It sports both a barrel jack and a USB-C port for its power input – a welcome departure from the Miniware iron strategy, where neither the barrel-jack-only TS100 nor the low-power proprietary-tip TS80 irons quite did it. And, given its design around TS100 T12-style tips, it’s no wonder Pinecil took a well-deserved spot in hobbyist world.
Can’t Just Pull The Trigger
Now, you might be thinking that Pinecil ought to be a simple device. The usual way to get high power out of a USB-C port is a Power Delivery (PD) trigger IC, and you could merely use that. However, if you’ve read the USB-C power article, you might remember the 45 W vs 60 W charger scenario, where such an arrangement would fail immediately. Overall, the configurability of trigger ICs is quite low, and when encountering a PD compatibility problem with some PSU, you can’t do anything about it except replace the IC with a slightly-different-logic IC- if a replacement even exists, and it usually does not. This is costly and limiting for a real-world use product.
Pinecil went the “PD stack software + PD frontend IC” way, devoting part of the MCU to the realtime nature of PD communications. The PD frontend used is the FUSB302, connected to the MCU over the regular I2C interface. The microcontroller itself has changed from the GD32VF103 in Pinecil v1 to the BL706 in Pinecil v2 – both of them RISC-V.
Now, I’ve started talking in abstract here, but it makes sense to talk about the hacker doing the actual work at making the PD stack possible – in fact, the entire Pinecil software stack. The person responsible for the PD and overall Pinecil software is [Ralim], known for his IronOS firmware initially developed for TS100, TS80 and other soldering irons with MCUs on them. Pine64 reached out to [Ralim] back when Pinecil was just a concept, asking if he’d be available to port IronOS, including the required PD work.
Over the years, the “frontend + MCU” approach has paid off tremendously. A major reason is PSU compatibility – there’s a ton of variance within USB-C power supply communications out there, as the PD stuff can be hard to implement, especially when it comes to edgecases. The initial firmware on the Pinecil irons, indeed, didn’t work with a number of power supplies out there – including, for instance, some Apple power bricks.
Now, the beautiful thing is, whenever someone filed a PSU compatibility issue on GitHub, [Ralim] could track this issue down, either by remote ‘try this binary’ debugging, or by straight up buying the same PSU. Then, he would fix the issue by changing how the stack treats edge cases, test the fix, and upload a new Pinecil firmware version on GitHub for everyone to use. Within a year, most of the USB-C issues were gone, and if you have a Pinecil problem, it’s likely that you only need to update the firmware from the factory-flashed old version.
Over the years, the stack has become quite mature, and most importantly, battle-tested – it’s tricky to find a PSU that the Pinecil doesn’t work with nowadays. For debugging and hacker convenience reasons, if you plug a USB-C PSU into your Pinecil while holding the + button, you will be shown a PD debug menu listing all the profiles – in a way, the Pinecil is a PD debugger tool that you might already own.
Would such an approach work for a small-scale hobbyist USB-C power supply-requiring project? Not back when the Pinecil was new, perhaps. However, today, the PD stack is open-source and mature.
Leading USB-C In Open-Source
Writing a USB-C PD software stack is not as straightforward as writing, say, an ADC driver. To enforce the coexistence and safety requirements, USB-C uses state machines. If you’ve ever had someone share one of these intimidating diagrams straight from USB-C documentation pages with you, you might be inclined to believe that USB-C is best not touched by humans. That viewpoint isn’t entirely wrong – reimplementing these state machines is not something you necessarily might want to spend your time doing. On the other hand, despite the informationally aggressive nature, the state machines involved are simpler than they might look.
That said, if you’re dreaming of a USB-C-talking open-source project, you don’t want to start from scratch, and you don’t have to. Nowadays, thanks to [Ralim]’s work, we have
an open-source PD stack at our fingertips.
It’s in C++, and is designed to work with an RTOS – as USB-C requires reasonably fast responses to parts of the protocol, enforced on the power supply side. This stack was started by [Clara Hobbs] as part of the
PD Buddy Sink project,
and grew into an actual library you want to use if you, too, look to develop your own USB-C-powered device.
The stack is well-tested, thanks to a notable collection of various USB-C PSUs that Ralim owns and can test with – perhaps, this is what makes this stack the most valuable. However, it also serves as a USB-C playground. When EPR chargers, like the Apple’s 140 W one, started appearing on the market, they had 28 V available – something that the Pinecil could use to jump from 50 W to 98 W of tip heating power. In a few months’ time, the SPR-only stack gained EPR compatibility and we saw first Pinecils getting 28 V power from Apple chargers, making it the first open-source project able to deal with the additional requirements of EPR.
Frontend Variance Woes
The PD frontend IC used, FUSB302, has a bizarre aspect to it – its datasheet specifies two maximum voltages on its VBUS pin, 21 V “recommended maximum” and 28 V “absolute maximum”. Now, this pin was connected to the VBUS power trace on the USB-C port, which is to say, to the power input. Early on, this caused community concerns, and while someone did test 24 V compatibility and post convincing curve tracer graphs, the Pinecil was label-downgraded by stating that it’d only be compatible with 21 V or lower supplies – excluding 24 V supplies, a disadvantage over the TS100.
Later on, it might’ve happened that the FUSB302 became more sensitive due to manufacturing tolerances in different batches. I happened to hang out and do volunteer tech support in Pine64’s Pinecil chat, and what we met back then was a trend – someone used a cheap barrel jack power supply, or accidentally plugged a 24 V supply in, or just used a regular 20 V USB-C brick, and the FUSB302 would die. Sometimes it would die quietly and make the iron only work through barrel jack or QC; sometimes the FUSB302 would short the internal 3.3 V rail and bring the entire iron down permanently, requiring hot air removal to revive the Pinecil.
The issues weren’t prominent when keeping the total amount of Pinecils sold in perspective, but they were definitely a trend, and we were curious. At some point, [Thanos the tank engine], a fellow hacker, decided to dig into it and figure out what the fix could be. Together with [Ralim], they figured out that the VBUS pin connection was not used in software at all, and in fact, could be completely disconnected. What followed was
the “VBUS mod”
– a hack would add 24 V support to the Pinecil by removing the VBUS connection, with video instructions on how to properly cut the trace involved.
[Ralim] modified the firmware to detect whether the mod has been performed correctly, as a failsafe for users who might’ve missed a sliver of copper the first time. The fix eventually made it into a new Pinecil PCB revision, too, and
the Pinecil V2.
Overall, it’s a wonderful short story of how large open-source products with a thriving community turn into a force multiplier.
Non-Compliance For Compatibility And Debugging
USB-C is designed to get rid of proprietary charging standards, and this is why the USB-C standard says that you shall not support USB-data-pair-hijacking charger communication standards like QC on your USB-C ports. The goal of the Pinecil is to be accessible, however, and this part of the USB-C specification had to be ignored. So, apart from PD support, there’s also QC support in case a QC charger or powerbank is what you have to work with – hacker accessibility matters more than USB-C compliance. It’s not the only part of USB-C standard that the Pinecil violates for good reasons, either.
The high-speed and SBU signals on the Pinecil’s USB-C port are used for a variety of signals – JTAG, SPI, I2C, UART and a few ADCs from the main MCU. As a result, the Pinecil is a RISC-V and USB-PD devboard, with a cheap breakout board to match. Not a lot of people have taken advantage of these signals, but they’re definitely available, and initially, they were used during the Pinecil development – so why leave them out on the production version?
The USB-C specification does allow reuse of these signals for debug purposes, but it does require a multiplexer to shut them off until the debug mode is summoned; hence, the Pinecil is not compliant in that regard. On the other hand, there would’ve been no space on the Pinecil PCB for a multiplexer, and it would’ve caused too much of a price increase for a rarely used feature that’s still good enough to not pass up on. Instead, just in case someone used a high-speed cable to connect a Pinecil to a USB3 port, the signals were arranged in a way that none of the set-as-output GPIOs were connected to the TX pair of the USB3 – and no users ever raised any issues. Even if they did, using a different cable would suffice, and if the issues were to turn out to be frequent, there were 0 R jumpers that could be omitted at the factory; thankfully, none of that was required.
Non-Compliance Out Of Need, With Spicy Consequences
When reading the FUSB302 story, you might have asked – how could it be that barrel jack voltage could get to the FUSB302’s VBUS? The reason is simple – the barrel jack center pin and USB-C VBUS are connected together. If you ever design a product with dual power inputs, this is what you must never do. However, it seems, Pine64 had no other way but to do just that. Instead, they selected the barrel jack and the USB-C port with lowest possible mechanical profiles, making it impossible to insert cables into both of these sockets at the same time – creating a mechanical interlock of sorts.
Now, there’s no reason you’d ever plug both of these connectors in at the same time, unless you’re using the Pinecil as a fancy trigger board – which you theoretically could, if it weren’t for the mechanical impossibility. There aren’t any instructions that ask you to do this, either. That said, there are two stories of someone deciding to insert both a barrel jack and a USB-C cable while they were trying to flash firmware, burning the computers they were using for that. This was a puzzling occurrence – nobody in the Pinecil community could fit both plugs in at the same time, even though we sure tried.
Ultimately, this was a design tradeoff, where a mechanical route was taken to solving a possible problem – and it was a successful solution. You gotta have a very specific set of circumstances to even get to a place where a failure mode is possible, and at this point, the failure rate approaches the same percentage you’d get if Pine64 were to put a FET switch or a diode in the way of the USB-C port; power switching components like to fail short-circuit, after all. On the community side, we did figure out a further fix, however – updating all flashing instructions and the custom Pinecil flasher tool, warning the user that they have to remove the barrel jack PSU before flashing. After the warnings have been added, this issue has been unheard of.
Nets A Good Outcome
There’s considerable might behind an open-source project that’s been manufactured in tens of thousands of units and got into hands of hobbyists and hackers across the globe. My Pinecil has never let me down, and its USB-C capabilities is something I ended up relying upon. We shouldn’t undervalue the gift that is a battle-tested open-source PD stack, either. While the USB-C implementation of the Pinecil isn’t flawless, it’s been a large benefit to hackers all over the world; and there’s a trove of stories to learn from, too. | 79 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6587509",
"author": "xeon",
"timestamp": "2023-01-31T15:05:18",
"content": "pinecil…. pencil…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6588881",
"author": "James Feeney",
"timestamp": "2023-02-01T16:29:24",
"con... | 1,760,372,415.755605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/31/a-reverse-polish-calculator-for-your-keychain/ | A Reverse Polish Calculator For Your Keychain | Jenny List | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"calculator",
"RPN",
"RPN calculator"
] | As the smartphone has eaten ever more of the gatgets with which we once surrounded ourselves, it’s with some sadness that we note the calculator becoming a less common sight. It’s with pleasure then that we bring you [Nekopla]’s keychain calculator, not least because it’s a little more than a conventional model. This is a
calculator which uses Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN
.
A full write-up in Japanese
(
Google Translate link
) carries an impressive level of detail about the project, but in short, it takes an Arduino Pro Micro, an array of keys, and an OLED display, and packages them on a couple of fiberglass prototyping boards in a sandwich between laser-cut Perspex front and rear panels.
The RPN notation is what makes it especially interesting,a system in which where you might be used to writing
2+2=
to get 4, in RPN you would write
2 2 +
. It allows the use of much simpler code with a stack-based architecture than that used in a conventional calculator. It’s a system that’s usually the preserve of some pretty exclusive machines, so it’s great to see on something with more of the toy about it.
If RPN interests you, then
you might like to read our look at the subject
, and even feast your eyes on the teardown of
a vintage 1975 Sinclair RPN calculator
. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6587418",
"author": "Harold Hill",
"timestamp": "2023-01-31T13:22:03",
"content": "” RPN you would write 2 2 + ”Shouldn’t that be 2 [Enter] 2 +?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6587542",
"author": "Greg Scott Key",
... | 1,760,372,415.389722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/30/retroarch-on-a-leapfrog-leapster-gs/ | RetroArch On A LeapFrog Leapster GS | Navarre Bartz | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"doom",
"emulator",
"Leapfrog",
"LeapPad",
"LeapPad2",
"leapster",
"LeapsterGS",
"Retroarch"
] | Retro games are a blast, and even more so when you can bring the fun on the go. [mac2612] has developed a custom
retroarch-based firmware
for the Leapster GS and LeapPad2. (via
Bringus Studios
on YouTube)
We covered
Linux on the Leapster
before, but Retroleap seems better documented (and still up on the internet). Installation is done over the command line with
sshflash
, also by [mac2612], after booting the Leapster or LeapPad2 into “Surgeon Mode.” Since the stock bootloader remains intact, you can always return the LeapFrog to its default state if anything gets wiggy by reflashing the device via the LeapFrog Connect App.
The default system includes emulators for NES, SNES, GBA, Genesis, Atari 800, and MAME. Performance varies, but some PS1 games have even run successfully on the device.
If you’d like to see some other LeapFrog hacks, checkout this
LeapFrog TV Running DOOM
or
Composite Video Out on the DIDJ
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586545",
"author": "Isaac Pettis",
"timestamp": "2023-01-30T19:50:24",
"content": "Really cool project, thanks! Many of these systems are tossed after a kid grows out of them or gets bored. New life brethed in.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,415.289923 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/30/what-losing-everything-taught-me-about-backing-up/ | What Losing Everything Taught Me About Backing Up | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"backup",
"backups",
"loss",
"theft"
] | Backing up. It’s such a simple thing on paper – making a copy of important files and putting them in a safe place. In reality, for many of us, it’s just another thing on that list of things
we really ought to be doing
but never quite get around to.
I was firmly in that boat. Then, when disaster struck, I predictably lost greatly. Here’s my story on what I lost, what I managed to hang on to, and how I’d recommend you approach backups starting today.
Best Practices
“
A stack of HDDs
” by Ervins Strauhmanis
Industry standards have moved on, but backup evangelists used to swear by the 3-2-1 rule. It’s simple, straightforward, and covers you in the event of a wide range of disasters. It states you should have three copies of your data, two of which are on different devices locally, and one more which lives off-site. This protects you against data loss from a single failed hard drive or computer, as well as covering you in the event your home or business is suddenly on fire, under water, or occupied by enemy belligerents.
It will not shock you that my own backup regime was not so robust. Oh, I had many excuses for why it wasn’t. Over the years my work and files had spread across two laptops and two PCs. Important files were scattered across multiple hard drives, lurking in folders across the digital Savannah.
Backing up for me would be no simple matter. I’d have to figure out where everything important was, then find a way to organize it or back up the entire sweaty mess as-is. Just trying to find all that stuff and drag it onto a portable drive would be a pain. Let alone having to do that manually every week!
Plus I’d then also have to make a copy and truck that somewhere off-site on the regular to truly protect what I had. Even worse, I had on the order of 8 terabytes of data built up from years of video production and other creative works. Backing up would be difficult
and
expensive. Instead, every time I thought about backups, I thought “too hard!” and moved on with my life. I trusted my hard disks, after all, and figured if I’d been fine for 20 years, I’d be fine forever.
Like Tears In Rain
That all came crashing down when some enterprising criminals broke into my house and stole everything of value that I had. Every laptop and PC walked out the door, along with multiple guitars, a prized synthesizer, and just about everything else electronic worth over $50. One small victory was that my television was too big for the thieves to carry, so mercifully, they let me hang on to it.
When my computers left the building, so did the vast majority of my data. YouTube videos, T-shirt designs, robot projects, websites, logos, PCBs… all gone. It was a crushing blow. The worst losses were the various files that made up the tools of my trade. I write over a thousand articles a year, and to do that means having a streamlined workflow. Things like image templates, logos, audio and video stings and other ephemera I use for producing media were all gone, and that was really painful. Similarly, a few filmclips and other projects laid unedited, and those shoots are now gone forever.
The loss put a lot in perspective for me. I realized I’d been holding terabytes of data, unwilling to lose any. It was surprising, but the vast majority of data I was keeping was almost meaningless to my day to day life. Funnily enough, the next day, I borrowed an old laptop and was able to get to work without too much trouble. I simply have had to start recreating my tools as I go.
In the following days, I was glad to realize that not all was lost. I found bits and pieces of data wherever I could. My phones have backed up my photos to the cloud since 2015, so all my photographic memories were preserved. My source files for YouTube videos were all gone, but my finished output still survives on YouTube itself. Thankfully,
my darling robot
cum
autonomous mower
had been in pieces, and ignored by the thieves. That meant I could make a new backup of all the code on its SD card, containing the sum total of hundreds of hours of my engineering effort. Having to recreate that code would take me months; finding a copy was truly glorious. Finally, I’d also seen fit to spend some money on cloud backups for my studio computer. That meant my last decade of musical output was similarly protected.
Moving forward, I took this traumatic event as an opportunity for a new start. With virtually no files left, backing up would be easier. I no longer have files scattered across four machines because I no longer have four machines. Nor do I have 8 TB of data to deal with.
Microsoft still includes a backup utility with Windows 11. The OS tries to guide you towards a OneDrive cloud backup, but if you hunt in the old Control Panel, you can find the Windows 7 tool still present and functional if you want to run automated disk backups yourself.
Credit: Screenshot
I’m still not sure I’ll go for a full 3-2-1 backup regime, though. Instead, I’ll invest in a cloud backup of my main data. Previously, I’d considered this, but avoided it for reasons of cost. 8 TB would have cost me on the order of $60 a month to secure back when I’d looked into it, and I’d found this too expensive to bear. Now, I can choose a much cheaper backup plan, at least until I start building up a huge cache of video again. Having a second local copy of my data doesn’t seem particularly useful, other than if the cloud backup and my main storage fails on the same day. It could happen, but I feel like I’m still willing to gamble it won’t.
Ultimately, I’m doing okay through a combination of luck and forward planning. I knew my musical works were impossible to recreate, so I’d spent a few bucks backing them up in the cloud. That was smart. As for the design files stored on my robot, I simply got lucky that they weren’t stolen as well. Had I suffered a major house fire instead of a theft, I might have found myself significantly worse off.
Actions To Take
Sharing-focused cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox will store your files, but they’re expensive. Backup-specialized cloud services like iDrive and Backblaze offer storage at much lower rates.
Credit: Screenshot/Google
If you’re reading this story and fretting yourself, that’s normal. The best time to start backing up your files was a long time ago, but the second best time is today. Depending on the route you take, it may be expensive to backup your files, or require a lot of mucking around. Cloud services charge a fee for storage, for example, and buying portable drives costs money. Trucking your own backups on- and off-site on the regular also takes a lot of effort.
In reality, the best backup scheme is the one you can actually implement and stick to. There’s no point in setting up a cloud service to backup your data if you have to cancel your subscription in three months because it’s too pricy. Similarly, if you forget to keep running your backups, you put yourself at risk of loss once again. The trick is to manage these risks. If you can’t spend the time to manually back up your stuff, look at using a backup manager or building an automated tool to handle it for you. If you can’t afford to pay for cloud backups, consider stashing some drives at a friend’s house and setting up a automated service to sync your files.
Overall, I learned that while backups are expensive, losing valuable files is expensive too.
Valuable
being the key word. For me, the things that would be most expensive for me to recreate, in time or money, were saved largely by luck. These were things like code or design files that I still regularly need and use, and would have to recreate from scratch. Now I realise I need to spend the most effort backing up that data.
As for things like old game saves, old university assignments, and source files for old videos I finished years ago? 99% of that stuff, I would never touch in a decade anyway. It’s a shame to lose it, for sure. But because I couldn’t afford to protect everything I had, I ended up protecting none of what I had. I could have lost so much more.
The upshot is that if you want to protect your data, you need to take action to do so. If you can’t protect it all, focus on protecting what is most valuable to you. Then, find a way to protect it that is feasible for you and that you can readily keep up with. Then, when the worst happens
,
you’ll bounce back better than I did. Stay safe out there! | 128 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586414",
"author": "Sean",
"timestamp": "2023-01-30T15:17:29",
"content": "I’m feel terrible about your loss, but thank you seeing the positive side and sharing your experience and thoughts for us all to learn from.I had a very VERY close call once with me stupidly leaving a minima... | 1,760,372,415.5776 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/30/wizards-get-creative-maybe-save-the-world/ | Wizards Get Creative, Maybe Save The World | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Games",
"News"
] | [
"creative commons",
"Dungeons and Dragons",
"Open Gaming",
"Wizards of the Coast"
] | While it’s not normal Hackaday fare,
we’ve covered the Dungeons & Dragons licensing kerfuffle
, partially because we’re all nerds at heart, and also because it’s worrying that an Open Source styled license could be “deauthorized”. I did touch base with the Open Source Initiative, and got a telling comment that this issue was outside their purview, as the OGL 1.0a didn’t rise to the definition of an OSI approved license, and the update looked to be a disaster.
Since our coverage was published, Wizards of the Coast released part of the Fifth Edition System reference Document (SRD) under a Creative Commons license, removed the profit sharing language from the OGL update, but notably left the language in place about deauthorizing the 1.0a version of the license. As you can imagine, fans were still unamused, and we informed WotC of our displeasure when they launched a survey, asking fans their thoughts on the new license.
And the outpouring was overwhelming, with over 15,000 survey responses in just over a week. The vast majority (90% for some questions) informed WotC that they had lost their collective minds. That response, combined with a plummeting subscription count on DND Beyond, Paizo’s explosion of popularity and new ORC license announcement, and the plethora of publishers jumping ship, has finally shone the light of reason upon management at WotC.
The latest announcement is a win in basically every regard
. The OGL 1.0a will not be deauthorized, and the entire 5e SRD has been released under the
Creative Commons 4.0 By Attribution
license. That’s an interesting choice, as CC-BY-4.0 is a very permissive license. It’s not “viral”, as it does not place any licensing restrictions on derivative works, and there are no restrictions on commercial use. The only restriction is that attribution must be included. The latest SRD is now available under both licenses, you pick your preference. So as a reward for going through the trauma, we get a sizable chunk of the game under an even less restrictive license. Bravo.
I’ve seen some complaints that WotC have not made the OGL 1.0a irrevocable, and I think that’s a misunderstanding of how licensing works. Wizards cannot change the text of the 1.0a OGL to include an irrevocability clause. The one action they could take to accomplish this would be to authorize a 1.0b revision of the license, and explicitly make that version irrevocable. While they’re at it, I’d suggest they clean up the language about authorization works, to remove the loophole the draft OGL license abused. I won’t hold my breath.
We should mention that this announcement doesn’t put any restriction on WotC for how they license the next iteration of Dungeons and Dragons. One D&D may very well ship with an updated license that contains some features of the leaked draft — and that’s OK. So long as it doesn’t include a measure to force the migration of already published content to the new license, updated terms are squarely within their rights as content creators. And now we wait to see, is this enough to save the sinking ship?
One of the other points we made in our previous coverage was that the Open Source software world would need to watch this situation carefully, and check its licenses for similar problems and loopholes. Interestingly enough, the Free Software Foundation, the arbiter of the GPL family of licenses, just announced a bylaws change.
Any new or updated license will now require the approval of a supermajority
of the FSF’s directors to sign-off on it. It’s hard not to see this as a response to, and protection against, the OGL drama. This means that a future GPL v4 has a higher hurdle to approval, giving us a bit more protection against a similar malicious license update. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586371",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2023-01-30T12:42:45",
"content": "Good to see WoTC stupidity and greed has at least rung a few alarm bells and lead to better protections in other areas of open source. And now they have backed down on the historical changes we don’t ha... | 1,760,372,415.807332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/30/inside-a-1940s-spy-radio/ | Inside A 1940’s Spy Radio | Al Williams | [
"Teardown",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"boat anchor",
"radio receiver"
] | The
RCA CR-88
was a radio receiver made to work in top-secret government eavesdropping stations. As you might expect, these radios are top-of-the-line, performance-wise, at least when they are working correctly. [Mr. Carlson] has one on his bench, and we get to watch the show on his recent video that you can see below.
Interestingly, [Mr. Carlson] uses some Sherlock Holmes-like deductive reasoning to guess some things about the radio’s secret history. The radio’s design is decidedly heavy-duty, with a giant power transformer and many tubes, IF transformers, and large filter capacitors.
The underside of the radio reveals neat wiring and some big metal shields. The metal shields and filters have a very specific purpose. The radio was probably in a bank of radios, and you don’t want them interfering with each other. In addition, you might not want someone tracking your super secret listening post by its RF emission. [Mr. Carlson] shows on the schematic how the designers reduced unwanted emissions from the radio.
The end of the video shows the radio turning on and receiving something for some frequencies, but it had some problems. We suspect he’ll be fixing and aligning the whole thing in a future video. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586338",
"author": "Simon Eatough",
"timestamp": "2023-01-30T09:33:05",
"content": "What was the difference between the cr88 and ar88 ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6586415",
"author": "yet another bruce",
... | 1,760,372,414.926193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/surgery-on-an-led-to-preserve-vintage-aesthetics/ | Surgery On An LED To Preserve Vintage Aesthetics | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"led",
"leds",
"repair"
] | [Chris Jones] recently found himself in a pickle. An indicator LED off an old piece of stereo equipment had failed. It was a strange rectangular type for which he could source no modern substitute. Using a different LED would ruin the aesthetic. Thus, what else was [Chris] to do, but attempt surgery on an LED!
The first attempt was the simplest. [Chris] tried soldering a small SMD LED between the legs of the existing part, which was open circuit. It worked, but the light didn’t really propagate to the top of the LED’s plastic. It was too dim to do the job.
Unperturbed, [Chris] instead elected to cut the LED apart. he soldered the SMD LED to the original LED’s leads, inside its body this time. The top part of the plastic lens was then notched to fit snugly over the new SMD part. A bit of superglue then joined everything back together. The finished product looks a touch messy on the PCB. However, installed back inside the stereo, it’s a perfectly stealth fix that looks great.
Some will consider this fix frivolous and a waste of time. Others will appreciate the way it preserved the attractive retro look of a piece of vintage audio gear. In any case, we can all agree
that modern LEDs are often a great replacement for older parts in many cases.
If you’ve pulled off your own weird, oddball repair hacks, don’t hesitate to share us with them
on the tipsline!
This green LED has stopped working. I think it's my fault – one leg shorted to the chassis while it was switched on and gave it 15V which it didn't like. It's an odd shape so we can't buy a new one. Can we fix it? 🧵 /1
pic.twitter.com/DX71Kk0TP5
— Chris Jones (@mjtech01)
January 25, 2023 | 53 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586292",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-01-30T06:38:57",
"content": "One thing to note is that modern LEDs are substantially brighter and may become overdriven when substituted for old LEDs in circuit. You no longer need to use 25 mA to drive a red LED.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,372,415.025351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/ambient-display-tells-you-if-borealis-is-coming-to-town/ | Ambient Display Tells You If Borealis Is Coming To Town | Navarre Bartz | [
"hardware",
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"7 segment",
"ambient display",
"aurora borealis",
"ESP8266",
"microcontroller",
"NodeMCU",
"northern lights",
"tutorial",
"veneer"
] | For those times when you’d rather not get sucked down another internet rabbit hole when you really just wanted the weather, an ambient display can be great. [AlexanderK106] built a simple ambient display to know the
probability the Northern Lights
would visit his town.
Starting with a NodeMCU featuring the ESP8266, [AlexanderK106] walks us through a beginner-friendly tutorial on how to do everything from configure the Arduino IDE, the basics of using a breadboard. finding a data source and parsing it, and finally sticking everything into an enclosure.
The 7-segment display is taped and set into the back of the 1/4″ pine with enough brightness to shine through the additional layer of veneer on top. The display is set to show one digit and then the next before a three second repeat. A second display would probably make this easier to use day-to-day, but we appreciate him keeping it simple for this tutorial.
Looking for more ambient displays? Checkout the
Tempescope
or this clock that lets you
feel the temperature outside
! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586257",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2023-01-30T04:18:49",
"content": "Surely he could just check to see if smoke is coming out of his kitchen?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6586271",
"author": "bemusedHorsema... | 1,760,372,415.854138 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/hackaday-links-january-29-2023/ | Hackaday Links: January 29, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"Academic",
"ChatGPT",
"CHEATING",
"comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)",
"crypto mining",
"diatomic carbon",
"Empire State Building",
"exam",
"fish",
"hackaday links",
"machine vision",
"MBA",
"motion capture",
"noise",
"pokemon",
"test"
] | We’ve been told for ages that “the robots are coming for our jobs!” It’s true that we’ve seen robots capable of everything from burger flipping to bricklaying being demonstrated, and that’s certainly alarming for anyone employed in such trades. But now it looks like AI has set its sights set on the white-collar world, with the announcement that
ChatGPT has managed a passing grade on a Wharton MBA exam
.
For those not in the know, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business is in the major league of business schools; earning a Master’s in Business Administration from that august institution is no mean feat, and is likely to put the budding executive on a ballistic career trajectory. So the fact that ChatGPT could pass the exam is significant. But before you worry about a world in which our best and brightest business leaders are replaced with soulless automatons, relax. The exam presented to ChatGPT was just a final exam for one course, Operations Management, so it’s not like it aced everything an MBA is expected to know, and it took a lot of hints from a human helper to get it that far. It’s also reported that it made a lot of simple math mistakes, too, so maybe a Wharton MBA isn’t that much of a big deal after all.
Don’t look up! No wait,
do
look up, because you might be treated to a spectacular sight over the next few nights, as
comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) makes a rare visit to our neck of the solar system
. The comet with the cumbersome name is a long-period comet, meaning it comes from out in the deepest reaches of the Oort Cloud and may never return. Pictures of the comet have been pretty spectacular, with
a ghostly green glow that Dr. Becky explains
is not from copper but rather due to diatomic carbon in the comet being broken down by UV light from the Sun and emitting light with a 518-nm wavelength. She’s also careful to manage expectations, since this comet will be 100 times fainter than the recent comet Neowise was; it’ll take some very dark skies and at least a set of good binoculars to spot this one.
Note to self: like pretty much any kind of mine, crypto mines make lousy neighbors. At least that’s the experience of residents of a rural North Carolina town, where
a newly constructed mining operation is said to put out a constant, deafening sound
. Murphy, NC, resident Mike Lugiewicz lives about 500 ft (150 m) from the newly opened mine and describes the sound as similar to “a jet sitting on the tarmac and that jet never leaves.” He measured the sound, which appears to be coming from the air handlers, at 85 dB, and further complains about the massive power use of the operation, claiming that while he and his neighbors suffered through rolling blackouts on a frigid Christmas Eve, the mine just kept chugging along. It doesn’t seem like a very neighborly thing to do, to be honest.
Also worthy of note:
don’t teach your fish to play Pokémon
. Because if you do, you just might end up getting unauthorized charges to your credit card. The trouble started when Japanese YouTuber Mutekimaru set up a motion-tracking system for his pet fish and hooked it up to his Nintendo switch. The fish’s random motions are translated to in-game movements in Pokémon, the whole thing is live-streamed, and hilarity ensues. But when Pokemon crashed while Mutekimaru was AFK, the fish actually managed to complete a series of commands that added 500 Yen to Mutekimaru’s account, changed the account name, purchased a new avatar, and download an N64 emulator. There’s also the little problem of flashing the credit card number to all the fish-watching fans, but apparently, the fish was forgiven for its transgressions.
And finally, if you’ve ever wondered
what all those antennas up on the Empire State Building do
, wonder no more. Crypto-radio enthusiast and avid antenna spotter Ringway Manchester appears to have taken a trip to the Big Apple, and managed to get some great shots of the antenna tower way up on what was the tallest building in the world for the longest time. It may no longer hold that title, but it still makes a dandy platform for getting antennas up above the concrete canyons, which accounts for a lot of the public safety installations up there. It’s also a great place for getting broadcast signals out into the surrounding area. He does a great job of breaking down what each antenna does, so check it out. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586224",
"author": "me",
"timestamp": "2023-01-30T00:20:47",
"content": "Soulless automaton, required a lot of help from others (which went mostly unacknowledged) and got the math wrong? Sounds like an MBA to me!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,416.043599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/automatic-on-air-light-prevents-distractions-during-online-meetings/ | AutomaticOn AirLight Prevents Distractions During Online Meetings | Robin Kearey | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"illuminated sign",
"on air",
"thingspeak"
] | Remote working has become so normal that even important meetings are now routinely held online. But for those working from home there’s always the risk of pets or flatmates entering the room right when you’re in a heated argument with your boss or presenting your results to an important client. To overcome this problem, [Hans Scharler] designed
a system that lights up a big “ON AIR” sign
whenever he’s in an online meeting. Although his cat might still disregard it, any human housemates will now know not to disturb him.
[Hans] built a similar device out of spare parts
back in 2020
, but completely redesigned it to make a more robust version. The basic idea is simple: the sign is illuminated whenever [Hans]’s webcam is enabled, as he is then presumably in a meeting. A few lines of Python code detect the webcam’s state and send the result to ThingSpeak, an IoT service that can be hooked up to various types of gadgets. In this case, the online service sends a signal to an ESP32 hidden inside the sign to turn on an LED string. Those LEDs consume very little power, so they can be driven directly from one of the ESP32’s GPIO ports.
The whole system is powered by a 5V USB power supply and can be placed on a shelf or mounted on a wall, giving your room a bit of a vintage radio studio vibe. Modern IoT services make this kind of project much easier than before: back in 2011, [Matt] probably had to write a lot more code to make
a similar Arduino-powered light
work. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586183",
"author": "AggregatVier",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T22:19:47",
"content": "We used Alexa Dots to control WIFI lamp sockets to control different color “flame” LEDs – Blue for phone and Red for Zoom – placed strategically near AC outlets close to either the home office or the... | 1,760,372,415.918056 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/self-watering-planters-reuse-household-jars/ | Self-Watering Planters Reuse Household Jars | Donald Papp | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"diy",
"green",
"planter",
"reuse",
"self-watering"
] | Self-watering planters are low-maintenance, and common DIY projects. What we like most about [Tommy]’s design is that it
reuses empty jars to create self-watering planters
. After all, jars are fantastic at reliably holding water, so why not put them to work? Incorporating jars as part of the design means fewer worries about leakage, but it also means less 3D printing is needed overall.
A wick (in this case, a piece of string) takes care of moving water from jar to the soil.
[Tommy]’s planter screws onto the threads of a jar’s neck. Getting water to the plant is helped by a small piece of string, which acts as a wick between the soil at the top and the water in the jar at the bottom. This design works best with small plants, but on the plus side there are no moving parts or other complexities. Got a 3D printer?
Models for the planter are available here
.
The biggest challenge for this design is that not all jar threads are alike, so planters made in this way are not completely interchangeable across all different types of jars. Fortunately, [Tommy] provides the OpenSCAD code he used to generate his design, which he created with the help of
an industry guide on how to measure the finish (or threads) of jars and lids
.
If you find yourself needing to further customize your own version to fit a particular container’s threads, there’s no need to start from scratch. Unsurprisingly,
threads and lids are highly standardized
so chances are there exists a calculator, tool, or existing model for exactly what you need. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586141",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T20:21:35",
"content": "If Wide Mouth Mason (or Kerr) canning jars are not the default threads (cover screw), I hope someone with the OpenSCAD skills will develop one.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,372,416.28561 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/wireless-minidisc-walkman-has-bluetooth-inside/ | Wireless MiniDisc Walkman Has Bluetooth Inside | Robin Kearey | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"minidisc",
"portable audio"
] | For most people, MiniDisc is just one of countless media formats that became obsolete when music went online. Not so for MiniDisc enthusiasts, many of whom still use a MiniDisc deck at home and a MiniDisc Walkman on the go. Unfortunately, high-end headphones these days often come with Bluetooth connectivity only, necessitating the use of clunky signal converters that ruin the tidy compactness of those portable players. [Daniel Rojas] cleverly solved this problem by
directly adding Bluetooth functionality to a Sony MZ-R500 MiniDisc Walkman
.
MiniDisc Walkmen are famously compact devices, so adding a full circuit board to one wasn’t easy. [Daniel] managed to squeeze the PCB from a Schosche wireless audio transmitter inside the front of the Walkman, next to the control buttons. He connected the audio signal to the transmitter’s input and rewired the little-used “End Search” button to become the “Pair” button. Sadly, the recording head and some associated hardware had to be removed in order to make space for the new component, turning the Walkman into a playback-only device.
Lots of flying wires and Kapton tape, but it all fits.
The project’s GitHub page contains a detailed walk-through of the modification process that should enable anyone to reproduce the end result. [Daniel] didn’t arrive at the optimal solution in one go however, and he describes the three major revisions of his project in separate sections. In the first iteration for example, the Bluetooth module caused interference on the audio signal, which [Daniel] solved by adding isolation transformers in version two. He also includes
a page full of technical information
he collected during his project, which will come in handy if you ever want to perform other modifications on your MiniDisc Walkman.
We’ve seen several impressive projects where Bluetooth interfaces were added to pre-Bluetooth gadgets, ranging from
tube radios
to
8-track players
. Some, like
the iPod Nano
, are even more space-constrained than a MiniDisc Walkman. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586104",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T18:18:25",
"content": "I have two used Minidisc players. The first is playback only, hence I boughtthe next one I saw at a garage sale.The bluetooth transmitters I’ve bought are pretty small. Im tempted just to glue one... | 1,760,372,416.108212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/opening-a-safe-with-a-stepper-motor-and-diy-auto-dialer/ | Opening A Safe With A Stepper Motor And DIY Auto-Dialer | Maya Posch | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"safe autodialer",
"safe cracking"
] | What do you do when you happen to come into possession of a safe of which the combination is lost to the sands of time? If you’re someone like [eNBeWe], you grab a stepper motor with driver module you had lying around gathering dust, an ESP8266 for the brains and a few other pieces to
build your very own auto-dialer
to crack that safe combination. The software has been made
available on GitHub
for those interested.
While other auto-dialers used with the fun hobby of
safe cracking
can generally find the combination in a matter of hours if not less, it took [eNBeWe]’s contraption two days to crack the combination. Much of this was due to the hacked together nature of the structure, with the glue joints among other weak points that’d probably not take too kindly to a lot of abuse. Since there was no particular rush to get into the safe, this worked out fine.
As an impromptu auto-dialer thrown together with parts that were lying around it seemed to perform just fine for the task, and we presume that this is the beginning of a beautiful new lock- and safe-picking hobby. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586049",
"author": "JR",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T13:59:08",
"content": "Bookmarking this one: I want to connect my dumb boiler to a ras pi with next to no risk of breaking the landlord’s boiler, or having to mess with mains relays.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,372,415.982678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/29/illuminate-your-benched-things-with-this-death-stranding-lamp/ | Illuminate Your Benched Things With This Death Stranding Lamp | Abe Connelly | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"LED Hacks",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"3D printable",
"cosplay",
"nRF52840",
"TinyML",
"TTP223",
"video game",
"ws2812"
] | [Pinkman] creates a smart RGB
table lamp
based off of the “Odradek device” robot arm from the video game “Death Stranding”.
[Pinkman] adds a XIAO BLE nRF52840 Sense device, with Bluetooth support, microphone and TinyML capability. The nRF52840 is used to push data to the five WS2812 strips, one for each “blade” of the lamp, and also connects to a TTP223 capacitive touch controller to add touch input detection. The TinyML portion of the nRF52840 allows for custom keyword training to turn on the lamp with voice commands ([Pinkman] uses “Bling Bling”). [Pinkman] has also provided Bluetooth control, allowing the color and pattern to be changed from a phone application.
The lamp is 3D printed with the build being based off of [Nils Kal]’s
Printables files
. Each of the five blades has a white 3D-printed diffusor plate to help ease out the hot spots for the LED strip. The lamp is fully adjustable in addition to having cavities, channels and access points for “invisible” wiring. [Pinkman] has also upgraded the original 3D files to allow for the three wires needed to drive the WS2812, instead of the two wires that [Nils] had allotted in the original.
[Pinkman] has all of the code, STL files and training data available for download, so be sure to check it out. Lamps are a favorite of ours and we’ve featured our fair share, including 3D printed
Shoji lamps
and RGB
wall lamps
.
Video after the break! | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6586005",
"author": "Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T10:19:38",
"content": "Great Prop, Great Build, Shit game…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6586068",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T15:2... | 1,760,372,416.353225 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/the-voice-of-chatgpt-is-now-on-the-air/ | The Voice Of ChatGPT Is Now On The Air | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"ChatGPT",
"text to speech",
"voice",
"voice recognition"
] | AIs can now apparently carry on a passable conversation, depending on what you classify as passable conversation. The quality of your local pub’s banter aside, an AI stuck in a text box doesn’t have much of a living quality.
human.
An AI that holds a conversation aloud, though, is another thing entirely.
[William Franzin] has whipped up just that on amateur radio.
(Video, embedded below.)
The concept is straightforward, if convoluted. A DSTAR digital voice transmission is received, which is then transcoded to regular digital audio. The audio then goes through a voice recognition engine, and that is used as a question for a ChatGPT AI. The AI’s output is then fed to a text-to-speech engine, and it speaks back with its own voice over the airwaves.
[William] demonstrates the system, keying up a transmitter to ask the AI how to get an amateur radio licence. He gets a pretty comprehensive reply in return.
The result is that radio amateurs can call in to ChatGPT with questions, and can receive actual spoken responses from the AI. We can imagine within the next month, AIs will be chatting it up all over the airwaves with similar setups. After all, a few robots could only add more diversity
to the already rich and varied ham radio community
. Video after the break. | 39 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585961",
"author": "_Sol_",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T06:22:13",
"content": "How long before ChatGPT and FT8 are merged?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6586274",
"author": "muhsin de TA1MHS",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,416.609692 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/creative-vandalism-the-kitt-way/ | Creative Vandalism The KITT Way | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"KITT",
"knight rider",
"LED scanner",
"london"
] | It’s probable that most of us have at some time dreamed up a witty and subversive way to deface our city, but that few of us will have followed through on the idea. [Matt Gray] then is something of a modern-day urban hero for doing just that. Who couldn’t walk past Knightrider Court, EC4, in the City of London, without thinking of the 1980s TV series featuring David Hasselhoff and a talking car? [Matt] couldn’t, and so of course
he simply
had
to upgrade the street sign with the signature LED scanner
.
At its heart is an Adafruit Gemma ATtiny85 board in a 3D-printed case attached to a length of aluminium extrusion holding a strip of addressable LEDs. When attached to the sign it looks the business, and while the late-night crowd showed it little interest the Londoners passing in the morning were much more enthusiastic. We applaud him for the idea.
As
occasional students of medieval history
here at Hackaday, of course we couldn’t let this go without asking where the unexpected London street name came from. Sadly for fans of the Hoff it has nothing to do with the small screen, instead it appears to have a much earlier origin having been first recorded in 1322. The knightriders in question
are reputed to have been real medieval knights
, or at least horsemen.
Pay it a visit
, should you ever find yourself in the British capital.
Thanks [Renze] for the tip. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585929",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T03:05:59",
"content": "So, the authorities will probably arrest him on vandalism, public nuisance, and several charges of domestic terrorism?Because they have no sense of humor.(Not true, a security ... | 1,760,372,416.404507 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/3d-printed-servo-motor-has-360-degrees-of-rotation/ | 3D-Printed Servo Motor Has 360 Degrees Of Rotation | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"servo"
] | Hobby servos are nifty and useful for a wide range of projects. There’s nothing stopping you from building your own servos though, and you can even give them nifty features like 360-degree rotation In fact,
that’s exactly what [Aaed Musa] did!
The servo relies on 3D printed gears in a 3D printed housing. The design makes prodigious use of threaded inserts to hold everything together nice and tight. A DC motor is charged with driving the assembly, as with any regular servo motor. However, in the place of a potentiometer, this design instead uses an AS5600 magnetic rotary position sensor to read the servo’s angle, via a magnet mounted in the servo’s gear. An Arduino is used to determine the servo’s current position versus the desired position, and it turns the motor accordingly with a BTS7960 motor driver.
The result is a sizeable and capable servo with an easily-customizable output, given it’s all 3D printed. If you’d rather just mod some servos instead,
we’ve covered some great work in that area, too
. Video after the break. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585912",
"author": "Now just Bob",
"timestamp": "2023-01-29T01:19:43",
"content": "Seems to me the motor is not 3D printed. However, very cool housing and gearing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6586120",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,416.449916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/an-atomic-pendulum-clock-accurate-enough-for-cern/ | An Atomic Pendulum Clock Accurate Enough For CERN | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"cern",
"cesium",
"chain",
"invar",
"pendulum",
"phase-locked loop",
"PLL",
"stepper"
] | That big grandfather clock in the library might be an impressive piece of mechanical ingenuity, and an even better example of fine cabinetry, but we’d expect that the accuracy of a pendulum timepiece would be limited to a sizable fraction of a minute per day. Unless, of course, you work at CERN and built
“the most accurate pendulum clock on the planet.”
While we’re in no position to judge [Daniel Valuch]’s claim, we’re certainly inclined to believe him, mainly because the 1950s-era Czechoslovakian pendulum clock his project was based on, the Elektročas HH3, was built specifically as a master clock for labs, power plants, and broadcast use. The pendulum of this mid-century beauty is made of the alloy invar, selected for its exceptionally low coefficient of thermal expansion. This ensures the pendulum doesn’t change length with temperature, but it still only brings the clock into the 0.1 second/day range.
Clearly that’s not good enough for a clock at CERN, the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research, where [Daniel] works as an RF engineer. With access to a 10-MHz timebase from a cesium fountain atomic clock — no less a clock than the one that’s used to define the SI second, by the way — [Daniel] looked for ways to sync the clock up to it. Now, we know what you’re thinking — he must have used some kind of PLL to give
an electromagnetic “kick” to the bob
to trim the pendulum’s period. Good guess on the PLL, but the trimming method is a little cruder — [Daniel] uses a stepper motor attached to the clock’s frame to pay out or retract a length of fine chain into a cardboard dish attached to the pendulum’s rod. The change in mass changes the pendulum’s center of gravity, which changes its effective length, and allows the clock to be tuned a couple of seconds per day.
It seems like [Daniel] is claiming that his chain-corrected clock won’t drift more than a second from the cesium clock for 158 million years. Again, we’ll take his word for it, but it’s a wonderfully ad hoc approach to tuning the clock, and we appreciate its simplicity. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585852",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T21:14:58",
"content": "i don’t understand. it sounds like his clock is trained to the nuclear clock, not an alternative to it? i mean, ntp running on my home pc won’t ever get more than 1 second away from the stratum 0 time so... | 1,760,372,416.524333 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/toroidal-propellers-make-drones-less-annoying/ | Toroidal Propellers Make Drones Less Annoying | Navarre Bartz | [
"drone hacks",
"Parts",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3D printed propeller",
"drone propeller",
"drones",
"mit",
"MIT lincoln lab",
"prop",
"propeller"
] | Despite being integral to aviation for more than a century, propellers have changed remarkably little since the Wright Brothers. A team at MIT’s Lincoln Lab has developed a new propeller shape
that significantly reduces the noise associated with drones
. [PDF via
NewAtlas
]
Inspired by some of the experiments with “
ring wings
” in the early 20th Century, researchers iterated on various toroidal propeller geometries until arriving at one that significantly reduces the sound produced by the rotors, particularly in the range of human hearing. The team suspects the reduction in noise is due to vortices being distributed over the whole propeller instead of just the tips.
Experiments show the drones can get twice as close before becoming a nuisance for human ears which should be great news for anyone hoping to launch
Skynet
commercial drone deliveries. Since the rotors are easily fabricated via 3D printing they should be easy to adapt to a number of different drones.
If you want to explore some more interesting drones, checkout this one that can
fly and swim
or this one that only
uses a single propeller
.
The toroidal propeller, one of the Lab's
@RD100Awards
winners, has a unique, closed-form propeller design that makes it a significantly quieter alternative to common multirotor propellers on commercial uncrewed aerial vehicles.
https://t.co/hgda3NgYIz
pic.twitter.com/5XkIxNVPHd
— Lincoln Laboratory (@MITLL)
January 6, 2023 | 61 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585806",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T18:06:13",
"content": "It won´t take long before it will be used on the battlefield in UA !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6585810",
"author": "Eric",
"times... | 1,760,372,416.721098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/speak-to-the-machine/ | Speak To The Machine | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Rants"
] | [
"g-code",
"newsletter"
] | If you own a 3D printer, CNC router, or basically anything else that makes coordinated movements with a bunch of stepper motors,
chances are good that it speaks G-code
. Do you?
If you were a CNC machinist back in the 1980’s, chances are very good that you’d be fluent in the language, and maybe even a couple different machines’ specialized dialects. But higher level abstractions pretty quickly took over the CAM landscape, and knowing how to navigate GUIs and do CAD became more relevant than knowing how to move the machine around by typing.
Reprap Darwin
: it was horrible, but it was awesome.
Strangely enough, I learned G-code in 2010, as the RepRap Darwin that my hackerspace needed some human wranglers. If you want to print out a 3D design today, you have a wealth of convenient slicers that’ll turn abstract geometry into G-code, but back in the day, all we had was
a mess of Python scripts
. Given the state of things, it was worth learning a little G-code, because even if you just wanted to print something out, it was far from plug-and-play.
For instance, it was far easier to just edit the M104 value than to change the temperature and re-slice the whole thing, which could take an appreciable amount of time back then. Honestly, we were all working on the printers as much as we were printing. Knowing how to whip up some quick bed-levelling test scripts and/or demo objects in G-code was just plain handy. And of course the people writing or tweaking the slicers had to know how to talk directly to the machine.
Even today, I think it’s useful to be able to speak to the machine in its native language. Case in point: the
el-quicko pen-plotter I whipped together two weekends ago
was actually to play around with Logo, the turtle language, with my son. It didn’t take me more than an hour or so to whip up a trivial Logo-alike (in Python) for the CNC: pen-up, pen-down, forward, turn, repeat, and subroutine definitions. Translating this all to machine moves was actually super simple, and we had a great time live-drawing with the machine.
So if you want to code for your machine, you’ll need to speak its language. A slicer is great for the one thing it does – turning an STL into G-code, but if you want to do anything a little more bespoke, you should learn G-code. And if you’ve got a 3D printer kicking around, certainly if it runs Marlin or similar firmware, you’ve got the ideal platform for exploration.
Does anyone else still play with G-code?
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
! | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585766",
"author": "Rev JMoney",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T15:18:16",
"content": "I learned gcode in a proper tool n die shop about thirty years ago. Not working with those cnc machines cutting steel now, it is so much fun having a 3d printer and being able to read the code my slic... | 1,760,372,416.88681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/original-controller-ports-in-custom-case-means-retro-gaming-in-style/ | Original Controller Ports In Custom Case Means Retro Gaming In Style | Donald Papp | [
"computer hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"3d printed",
"console",
"controllers",
"finishing",
"fpga",
"post-processing",
"retro gaming",
"Vintage Gaming"
] | Some careful measuring and a little extra effort can be all that separates what looks like a hack job from a slick end product, and that is apparent in [Eric Sorensen]’s
classy retrogaming rig
, complete with ports for original console controllers.
Neatly housing these components in a case makes all the difference.
[Eric] likes his vintage gaming, and was terrifically pleased with
MiSTer
, an open-source project that recreates various classic computers, game consoles and arcade machines using modern FPGA-based hardware. Of course, what makes retro gaming even better is using a platform’s genuine original controllers, which just takes a little extra hardware and wiring.
But [Eric] found that all the required accessories and peripherals started to look awfully cluttered. He solved this issue by packing everything carefully into a specialty PC case called the Checkmate A1500 Plus, which gives off a strong 80s design vibe. As a bonus, the front panels are all removable and that’s where [Eric] decided to house the custom controller ports.
First [Eric] carefully measured each controller connector to create CAD models, then designed matching front panels to house the connectors and 3D printed them. Once that was done, post-processing the panels was a long process of apply Bondo, sand, paint, and repeat as needed. The results looks fantastic, and this project is a prime example of how aesthetics and finish can matter.
Find yourself in a similar situation? [Tom Nardi] has shown us all that
3D prints don’t have to look 3D-printed
, and careful application of paint and primer can
really put the ‘pro’ in prototyping
. | 34 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585764",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T15:16:29",
"content": "I really wonder what is wrong with people sometimes that they have such nostalgia for awful to hold and use controllers…Still its a great looking project, and Ideal if you do long to play hand cramps in... | 1,760,372,416.829029 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/28/the-times-they-are-a-chaining/ | The Times They Are A-Chaining | Al Williams | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"steampunk"
] | If [Bob Dylan] had seen [Pgeschwi]’s
bike chain clock
, it might have influenced the famous song. The clock uses a stepper motor and a bike chain to create a clock that has a decidedly steampunk vibe. Despite the low-tech look, the build uses 3D printing and, of course, a bike chain.
A full view of the bike chain clock.
The clock doesn’t just show the time. There is a contraption to show the day of the week, and a pendulum shows the current phase of the moon. The visible wiring is all old-school brass wire on the wood base. [Pgeschwi] is considering changing out all the 3D printed parts for brass ones, so this may be just an early prototype of the final product, but it still looks great.
The design used common tools, including Tinkercad and an
online gear generation tool
. There are a lot of details you wouldn’t suspect until you tried to build something like this yourself. For example, making the chain reliably go in both directions required a timing belt to synchronize the top gears. Getting the numbers on the chain to pass by the gears.
It is hard to tell from the picture, but there’s an LED under the 10-minute marks that shows the unit’s digits of the time. There are no markings for it yet, but in the picture, the time is actually 4:09.
We love unusual clocks, and we see plenty of them. From
Fibonacci
clocks to
magnetic field line clocks
, we love them all. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585692",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T09:43:48",
"content": "a work of art, I love it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6585894",
"author": "Derek Tombrello",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T23:45:23",
"content"... | 1,760,372,416.94352 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/fps-game-engine-built-in-ancient-macintosh-hypercard-software/ | FPS Game Engine Built In Ancient Macintosh HyperCard Software | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"hypercard",
"mac",
"macintosh",
"retrocomputing"
] | Wolfenstein 3D
and
Doom
are great examples of early FPS games. Back in that era, as Amiga was slowly losing its gaming supremacy to the PC, Apple wasn’t even on the playing field. However, [Chris Tully] has used the 90s HyperCard platform to create an FPS of his own,
and it’s charming in what it achieves.
If you’re not familiar with it, HyperCard was a strange combination of database, programming language, and graphical interface system all rolled into one. It made developing GUI apps for the Macintosh platform simpler, with some limitations. It was certainly never intended for making pseudo-3D video games, but that just makes [Chris’s] achievement all the more impressive.
At this stage, [Chris’s] game doesn’t feature any NPCs, weapons, or items yet. It’s thus more of a First Person Walker than First Person Shooter. It features four small rooms with perpendicular, vertical walls, rendered either greyscale or 8-bit color. Now that he’s got the basic engine running, [Chris] is looking to recreate a bit of a Doom RPG experience, rather than copying Doom itself. He hopes to add everything from monsters to weapons, lava, and working HUD elements. If you want to dive in to the code, you can – HyperCard “stacks”, as they’re known, are made up of readily editable scripts.
[Chris] built the project to celebrate the aesthetic and limitations of the original Mac platform. While it could technically run on original hardware, it would run incredibly slowly. It currently takes several seconds to update the viewport on an emulated Mac Plus with 4MB of RAM. Thankfully, emulation on a modern PC can be sped up a lot to help the framerate.
We love seeing HyperCard pushed far beyond its original limits. We’ve seen it before, too,
such as when it was used on a forgotten 90s Apple phone prototype.
If you’ve been hacking away on retro software yourself, we’d love to see your projects
on the tipsline! | 14 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585658",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T06:08:00",
"content": "“It’s thus more of a First Person Walker than First Person Shooter. It features four small rooms with perpendicular, vertical walls, rendered either greyscale or 8-bit color. ”Kind of like that windows s... | 1,760,372,417.0443 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/a-single-resistor-radio-transmitter-thanks-to-the-power-of-noise/ | A Single-Resistor Radio Transmitter, Thanks To The Power Of Noise | Dan Maloney | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bandpass filter",
"feedhorn",
"Johnson Noise",
"Johnson-Nyquist",
"LNA",
"modulation",
"on off keying",
"OOK",
"physics",
"sdr",
"Thermal",
"wireless"
] | One of the great things about the Hackaday community is how quickly you find out what you don’t know. That’s not a bad thing, of course; after all, everyone is here to get smarter, right? So let’s work together to get our heads around
this paper
(PDF) by [Zerina Kapetanovic], [Miguel Morales], and [Joshua R. Smith] from the University of Washington, which purports to construct a low-throughput RF transmitter from little more than a resistor.
This witchcraft is made possible thanks to Johnson noise, also known as Johnson-Nyquist noise, which is the white noise generated by charge carriers in a conductor. In effect, the movement of electrons in a material thanks to thermal energy produces noise across the spectrum. Reducing interference from Johnson noise is why telescopes often have their sensors cooled to cryogenic temperatures. Rather than trying to eliminate Johnson noise, these experiments use it to build an RF transmitter, and with easily available and relatively cheap equipment.
On the transmitter side, we have little more than an antenna connected to the common side of a digital RF switch, an Analog Devices ADG901 eval board. The switch toggles the antenna between a 50-Ohm dummy load or ground; this allows data to be modulated with on-off keying, with the Johnson noise generated by the dummy load representing a logical 1. The antenna is a pyramidal horn antenna made from foil-covered foamboard, offering 13.6 dBi of gain. The receiver is a pair of high-gain LNAs, a bandpass filter, and an SDR dongle with a Raspberry Pi, all attached to an identical antenna.
After running a number of control experiments to make sure they weren’t measuring general RF noise or feedthrough from the RF switch control signal, the authors did several demonstrations of what can be done with this. They were able to show throughput in the 20 bps range at 1.42-GHz, over distances of up to 7 meters, and offered a couple of practical uses, such as a battery-free remote temperature sensor.
It’s important to note that this isn’t using backscatter of ambient RF signals from local radio stations;
we’ve seen those before
and were suitably impressed with what they can do. This is just relying on thermal noise to generate a carrier, and that’s pretty cool too. We’d love to see someone replicate this — if you do, make sure you drop us a tip so we can write it up.
Thanks to [Reed] for the tip! | 36 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585633",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T03:17:10",
"content": "Witchery!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6585637",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T03:4... | 1,760,372,417.672976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/reverse-engineering-the-conditional-jump-circuitry-in-the-8086-processor/ | Reverse-Engineering The Conditional Jump Circuitry In The 8086 Processor | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Intel 8086",
"microprocessor",
"reverse engineering"
] | The condition PLA evaluates microcode conditionals.
As simple as a processor’s instruction set may seem, especially in a 1978-era one like the Intel 8086, there is quite a bit going on to go from something like a conditional jump instruction to a set of operations that the processor can perform. For the CISC 8086 CPU this is detailed in a
recent article by [Ken Shirriff]
, which covers exactly how the instructions with their parameters are broken down into micro-instructions using microcode, which allows the appropriate registers and flags to be updated.
Where the 8086 is interesting compared to modern x86 CPUs is how the microcode is implemented, using gate logic to reduce the complexity of the microcode by for example generic parameter testing when processing a jump instruction. Considering the limitations of 1970s VLSI manufacturing, this was very much a necessary step, and an acceptable trade-off.
Each jump instruction is broken down into a number of micro-instructions that test a range of flags and updates (temporary) registers as well as the program counter as needed. All in all a fascinating look at the efforts put in by Intel engineers over forty years ago on what would become one of the cornerstones of modern day computing. | 13 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585591",
"author": "Mmmdee",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T00:24:28",
"content": "I have “fond” memories of developing microcode for a made-up processor back in graduate school in the late 80s. With such training, you get a near close as possible understanding of bare metal computer pro... | 1,760,372,417.174333 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/cut-your-own-gears-with-this-diy-machine/ | Cut Your Own Gears With This DIY Machine | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cutting tool",
"gear cutting",
"gear train",
"gearbox",
"gears",
"machine"
] | You can buy gears off the shelf, of course, and get accurately machined parts exactly to your chosen specification. However, there’s something
rugged and individualist
about producing your own rotating components. [Maciej Nowak] demonstrates just how to produce your own gears
with a homemade cutting tool
.
The cutting tool for the job is an M16 machine tap, chosen for the smaller flutes compared to a hand tap. This makes it more suitable for cutting gears. It’s turned by a belt driven pulley, run by a small motor. The workpiece to be cut into a gear is then fed into the cutting tool by sliding on a linear bearing, with its position controlled by a threaded rod. The rod can be slowly turned by hand to adjust the workpiece position, to allow the gear teeth to be cut to an appropriate depth.
The method of action is simple. As the tap turns it not only cuts into the workpiece, but rotates it on a bearing as well. By this method, it cuts regular teeth into the full circumference, creating a gear. Obviously, this method doesn’t create highly-complex tooth shapes for ultimate performance, but it’s more than capable of creating usable brass and steel gears for various purposes. The same tool can be used to cut many different sizes of gear to produce a whole geartrain. As a bonus, the resulting gears can be used with M16 threads serving as worm gears, thanks to the pitch of the tap.
If you find yourself needing to produce tough metal gears on the regular, you might find such a tool very useful. Alternatively, we’ve explored methods of producing your own sprockets too,
both in a tidy manner,
and in a more haphazard fashion
. Video after the break. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585543",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T21:29:05",
"content": "I’ve done this, it works, but it does bear pointing out that the result of this is gears that have slightly helical teeth with a slight depression in the center. It’s a great way to make wormgears.... | 1,760,372,417.118508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/led-air-vent-gauges-are-a-tasteful-mod-for-the-mazda-miata/ | LED Air Vent Gauges Are A Tasteful Mod For The Mazda Miata | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"car",
"car hacks",
"mazda miata",
"mazda MX-5",
"miata"
] | Anyone in the JDM scene can tell you, round air vents are prime real estate for round analog gauges. If you want a gauge but don’t want to block your vent,
you could consider building these LED vent gauges from [ktanner] instead.
Tasteful, no?
The design is simple. It relies on 3D printing a replacement bezel for the Mazda Miata’s stock round air vents. This bezel is designed to hold a NeoPixel ring from Adafruit. When built with the optional laser-cut diffuser, the parts have a near-stock look when the LEDs are turned off. It’s a classy, stealthy mod – exactly the sort of thing Miata owners need but never seem to have!
(Author Note: don’t be mad, I was once one of you!)
With 24 addressable RGB LEDs, it’s possible to display all kinds of data by turning the LEDs on and off and varying the colors. For example, you could readily build a boost gauge that turns on more LEDs at higher boost pressure. It could then be set up to flash red in the event that you surpass safe thresholds. [ktanner] hasn’t specified any particular microcontroller for the setup — but just about any part you like can be used to drive NeoPixels, after all.
If you’re new to NeoPixels,
you might find a simulator useful for developing your projects
. Meanwhile, if you’re doing similar work on other cars, be sure to hit us up
on the tipsline! | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585522",
"author": "Slacker",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T20:09:03",
"content": "I’m not sure ‘tasteful’ is the word you’re looking for..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6585528",
"author": "Keith Tanner",
"times... | 1,760,372,417.242402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/hackaday-podcast-203-flashlight-fuel-fails-weird-dma-machines-and-a-3d-printed-prosthetic-hand-flex/ | Hackaday Podcast 203: Flashlight Fuel Fails, Weird DMA Machines, And A 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Flex | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about all the hacks that are fit to print. This week’s episode starts off with a discussion about the recently unveiled 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, and how hackers more often than not thrive when forced to work within these sort of narrow parameters. Discussion then continues to adding a virtual core to the RP2040, crowd-sourced device reliability information, and mechanical Soviet space computers. We’ll wrap things up by wondering what could have been had Mattel’s ill-fated ThingMaker 3D printer actually hit the market, and then engage in some wild speculation about the issues plaguing NASA’s latest Moon mission.
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!
Available in the cloud,
or as download
!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 203 Show Notes:
News:
Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge Begins Today
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [TheElectricCanuck] for getting the sound of musical cards in bike spokes.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
RP2040 DMA Hack Makes Another ‘CPU Core’
You Can Help Build A Resin Printer Review Database
DIY Capacitor Leakage Tester With A Professional Finish
Inside Globus, A Soviet-Era Analog Space Computer
Designing A Simpler Prosthetic Finger
Secure LoRa Mesh Communication Network
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Knitting Clock Makes You A Scarf For Next Year
Minimalist Homebrew Hardware Recreates Arcade Classics
Floppy Photog: Making An IR Filter From A 3.5″ Disk
Tom’s Picks:
Bend It Like A Carpenter
Cassette Player Cupholder Is A Useful But Risky Idea
Wii Turned Expansion Card For Broadcast Monitor
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Ask Hackaday: Do Kids Need 3D Printers?
NASA Lunar Probe Finds Out It’s Not Easy Being Green | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585736",
"author": "Zach",
"timestamp": "2023-01-28T13:31:02",
"content": "Tinkercad had some decent modular parts that can be drag and drop in the hardware section of its built in library. It has ball and socket like stuff that could be used to make the joints of an articulating ... | 1,760,372,417.416349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/esp8266-coaster-keeps-your-drink-warm/ | ESP8266 Coaster Keeps Your Drink Warm | Abe Connelly | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"coaster",
"ESP8266",
"mqtt",
"pcb art",
"PCB Heater"
] | Looking for the perfect winter desk accessory? [Wq] has created a beautiful coaster made out of PCBs that can
keep your drink warm with an internal heater
. (Chinese).
An ESP8266 sits as the main controller, with an additional MQTT control option, where the whole unit is powered over a USB-C connection. On board PCB traces, in the shape of a Hilbert curve, create the heating element used to heat beverages placed on the coaster, where [Wq] reports a measured resistance of the PCB trace network at 1.2 ohms. [Wq] writes that an AON6324 MOSFET replaces the D4184 that was previously being used, but might need some testing to get working properly. There are two capacitive touch sensors which has a TTP223E capacitive touch controller attached to detect input, with a multi-colored FM-3528 RGB LED for user feedback.
We love the artistry that went into building the coaster. For adventurous hackers wanting to build their own, the bill of materials (BOM), source code and
board files
are all available. We’ve seen everything from
coasters
and to
PCB reflow boards
, so it’s nice to see experimentation with a combination of these ideas. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585495",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T18:51:28",
"content": "I wish I still had my original Mattel ThingMaker cup holder warmer. It wouldn’t work with today’s mugs though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "65... | 1,760,372,417.281982 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/this-week-in-security-gta-apple-and-android-and-insecure-boot/ | This Week In Security: GTA, Apple And Android, And Insecure Boot | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"This Week in Security"
] | When we first saw tweets about a security issue in Grand Theft Auto V, it sounded a bit like a troll. “Press ‘alt and f4’ to unlock a cheat mode”, or the hacker that claims to be able to delete your character.
[Tez2]’s warning tweet
that you shouldn’t play GTA Online without a firewall sounds like another of these online urban legends. But this one actually seems legit.
NIST is even in on the fun
, assigning CVE-2023-24059 for the exploit.
When playing an online game, other users send a “join request” to join the active session. This packets can contain malformed data which has been observed to crash the game client remotely. It’s believed, though not publicly confirmed, that it’s also a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability. It seems likely that this aspect will be added to some of the various cheat panels that are already widely used for this 10-year-old game. So now, rather than just giving your own character infinite ammo and health, you can inflict some havoc on other players, possibly up to corrupting their character files and getting them banned.
But why stop there? If we have code execution inside the game, what stops another player from launching a real attack? A video game isn’t sandboxed like a browser, and there’s nothing preventing a disk wiper attack or even a worm from compromising a bunch of players. The worst part is that it’s an old game, and even though there’s a large playerbase, it’s not guaranteed to get a fix. There’s
at least one project aiming to be a firewall
to prevent the issue.
XNU’s 19 and 20 year old Bugs
[Adam Doupé] seems to have a knack for finding old bugs in Apple’s code, and this time it’s a pair of really old flaws in Apple’s kernel, XNU. The first is
an issue in
dlil.c
, the network interface handler
. This issue is a type casting error, where an int is cast to a uint_16. If that cast overflows, the value becomes a large negative number, and the subsequent data write underflows the buffer and writes out-of-bounds. The method to trigger this one is a bit tricky, as it requires creating 65536 network interfaces.
There are two approaches to triggering that condition. The first is the simplest, a tiny script running as root, that calls
ifconfig
repeatedly to create the interfaces. While that could be interesting as part of an exploit chain, the more interesting idea is to make a malicious USB dongle that presents itself as multiple network interfaces. The rest of the post is [Adam]’s attempt to turn the underflow into an exploit. He didn’t quite pull it off, but it looks like it’s possible.
The second bug is even older,
a 20 year old flaw
in XNU’s
ndrv.c
, the raw socket handler. It’s an edge case where a linked list with two members get improperly walked, one of the list members is freed, but the parent item still contains a pointer to the now-freed memory. Both bugs have now been fixed in the latest iOS and macOS releases.
Android (ARM) Too
Android isn’t one to be left out, with a great writeup from [Man Yue Mo] of Github Security Lab, about a problem in the Arm Mali GPU shipped as part of Pixel 6 devices. With great irony, we are told of how the one non-Google element in the all-Google phone
led to kernel-space exploitation from within an app
. Specifically, it’s the driver for that GPU, and how it handles JIT memory, which is memory segments that are managed by the kernel, and accessed by userspace and directly by the GPU. And as you might expect, having three different components accessing memory at once can cause problems.
In this case, the problem is how eviction is handled. Those chunks of memory get processed, and then can be returned to the free store. A performance optimization by the driver is to keep memory buffers “warm”, not actually asking the kernel to free them, and skipping the allocation process when the next request is needed. The problem is that memory in this limbo state is considered “evictable”, and the kernel can free those regions without doing so through the GPU driver. This leave the system in an odd state where the GPU driver and userspace still have valid pointers to a memory location, but the kernel has marked it free. The real fun begins when the freed memory location is claimed by an attacking process, and a fake JIT object put in its place. By some clever memory manipulation, this can be leveraged to produce a userspace mapping of kernel code, which can then be read and written. And the simplest step from there is to just modify the userspace application, making it run as root.
It’s a clever find, but what really stands out is the problem with getting it fixed. This was reported to Android engineers in July of 2022, and a few weeks later the report was closed as a “Won’t fix” issue. There is a legitimate point here, that it’s not Android code that contains the problem, and this needed to be fixed in the ARM driver. ARM issued an update that fixed the issue less than three months later, in August of 2022. A coordinated disclosure was scheduled with ARM for November, but it seems the Android engineers completely dropped the bug, and waited til the January update to finally ship the patch to Android users. And when it finally came, it was tracked as a different bug altogether, meaning the original report was closed and forgotten about. It’s a bit disheartening to see Google show such a flippant attitude toward a vulnerability of this severity, on their own product.
KSMBD Again
It’s beginning to look like a bad idea to put the Server Message Block Daemon driver in the Linux kernel, as we have another pre-auth integer underflow leading to denial of service.
Researchers at Sysdig found the flaw
this time, researching based on the previous ZDI-22-1690, which was a more serious RCE in the same kernel module. This one is a bit different from other integer underflows we’ve looked at. The wrap-around nature of integers instead saves this vulnerability from being a more serious one.
The real problem is that during SMB authentication, the data structure from the remote user contains a pair of length values, which are used to parse the incoming authentication data. It’s obvious that these values aren’t implicitly trusted, and some good error checking is done to prevent a trivial buffer overflow. The case that trips us up is when
nt_len
is less than
CIFS_ENCPWD_SIZE
, and the resulting value is negative. When this negative integer is cast to the unsigned
size_t
in a
memcpy()
call, the negative integer is “unwrapped” to a nearly max-value
size_t
. The memory copy function will attempt the instruction, but this is a rather uncontrolled operation, and eventually reaches inaccessible memory, and panics the kernel. So far there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn this particular flaw into a true RCE. And besides, after this many years, surely everyone knows not to expose an SMB service to untrusted users, right?
Insecure Boot
While Secure Boot hasn’t quite proven to be the dystopian PC lock-in that some of us feared, it’s still occasionally a pain to deal with while trying to fix something on a broken machine. Need a custom boot disk to run a tool? Yep, time to disable secure boot. But there’s a few cases where it’s helpful, like preventing boot malware from getting a toe-hold in an encrypted system. There’s maybe something to be said for a known quantity like secure boot.
Which is why it’s a bit odd to find that
MSI decided to compromise it
en masse on their desktop motherboards in a firmware update pushed out last January. And do note, MSI didn’t turn off secure boot. Check the firmware settings, or run
mokutil --sb-state
, and these machines would happily inform you that Secure Boot was still enabled. But an obscure firmware setting, “Image Execution Policy” is set to “Always Execute” — so Secure Boot would still check the signature on the boot stack, and then boot it regardless of what was found. I’ll just quote the discoverer, [Dawid Potocki]’s conclusion: “Don’t trust that whatever security features you enabled are working, TEST THEM!”
QT’s RCE
Vulnerability
Bug
The QT suite has an issue, where Javascript embedded in QML (Qt Modeling Language) code
could trigger one of two memory handling issues
, and achieve RCE. There’s a bit of disagreement between Cisco Talos and QT, as to whether this is a simple bug, or security vulnerability. QML code is explicitly intended to be user interface code for applications, and should never execute untrusted code. In fact, according to QT, the security vulnerability would be any “application that is passing untrusted input to QtQml”. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585425",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T15:21:40",
"content": "FYI, “QT” isalwayswritten Qt because QT hasalwaysbeen QuickTime.Anyway, I’m with Qt on this issue because the stated purpose of QML is to reduce the amount of code needed to write complex GUIs. Executing a... | 1,760,372,417.526189 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/wolfenstein-3d-as-you-never-imagined-it/ | Wolfenstein 3D, As You Never Imagined It. | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"8088",
"cga",
"retrogaming",
"wolfenstein"
] | When tracing the history of first-person shooting (FPS) games, where do you credit with the genesis of the genre? Anyone who played
3D Monster Maze
on the Sinclair ZX81 might dare to raise a hand, but we’re guessing that most of you will return to the early 1990s, and id Software. Their 1992 title
Wolfenstein 3D
might not have been the first to combine all the elements, but it’s arguably the first modern FPS and the first to gain huge popularity. Back in 1992 it needed at least a VGA card and a 286 to run, but here in 2023 [jhhoward] has taken it back a step further.
You can now slay virtual Nazis in 3D on an 8088 PC equipped with a lowly CGA card
.
Whether the gameplay survives in the sometimes-bizarre CGA color schemes and whether it becomes too pedestrian on an 8088 remains as an exercise for the reader to discover, but it’s a feat nevertheless. The textures all need converting to CGA mode before they can be used and there are even versions for the shareware and paid-for versions of the game. It’s possible that an 8088 may never be able to say yes to “Will it run
DOOM
?”, but at least now it can run the predecessor. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585367",
"author": "Glaskows",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T12:56:17",
"content": "Surprising to see it running on such lowly CPU, amazing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6585398",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,417.4765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/27/3d-printer-spool-roller-is-built-for-giant-spools-of-filament/ | 3D Printer Spool Roller Is Built For Giant Spools Of Filament | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"filament",
"spool holder"
] | Most 3D printers come with a pretty basic filament holder — often little more than a bar to hang the spool on. [Ivan Miranda]’s 3D printers run bigger spools than most, though,
so he had to craft an altogether more serious solution.
Unlike most of [Ivan]’s creations, the spool holder isn’t actually 3D printed. For this job, he turned to a laser cutter instead, cutting the parts out of 5 mm plywood. A handful of layers of wood bolt together to form the frame. The frame holds several bearings for the outer rims of the spool itself to ride on, allowing it to spin freely as the extruder tugs on the filament. Reducing the rolling resistance of the spool is key when working with such large, heavy spools, and reduces the chances of the filament not feeding properly.
It’s a tidy example of a tool built quickly and easily using a laser cutter. It pays to remember that while 3D printers are great,
a laser cutter can often turn out parts in a short fraction of the time
. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585358",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T12:15:00",
"content": "Ok, that will cause problems. It runs too smooth, meaning that if the printer gives a tug on it and then stops, the spool will spin more and the material will get a bit lose. Repeat this a bunch of times and... | 1,760,372,417.590844 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/lego-guitar-is-really-an-ultrasonically-controlled-synth/ | Lego Guitar Is Really An Ultrasonically-Controlled Synth | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"guitar",
"lego",
"slide",
"synth",
"synth guitar",
"ultrasonic sensor"
] | The phrase “Lego Guitar” can be a stressful one to hear. You might imagine the idea of strings under tension and a subsequently exploding cloud of plastic shrapnel.
This build from the [Brick Experiment Channel] eschews all that
, thankfully, and is instead a digital synth that only emulates a guitar in its rough form factor.
The heart of the build is a Lego Mindstorms EV3 controller. It’s acts as the “body” of the guitar, and is fitted with a Lego “fretboard” of sorts. A slide is moved up and down the fretboard by the player. The EV3 controller detects the position of the slide via an ultrasonic sensor, and uses this to determine the fret the user is trying to play. The button the user presses on the controller then determines which of five “strings” the user is playing, and the selected note is sounded out from the EV3’s internal speaker. It’s strictly a monophonic instrument, but three different sounds are available: a bass guitar, a rock guitar, and a solo guitar, with all the fidelity and timbre of a 90s Casio keyboard.
It’s a fun and silly instrument, and also kind of difficult to play. The slide mechanism doesn’t offer much feedback, nor are the EV3 buttons intended for dynamic musical performance. Regardless, the player belts out some basic tunes to demonstrate the concept. We doubt you’d ever be able to play
Through The Fire and Flames
on such a limited instrument, but [Brick Experiment Channel] used their editing skills to explore
what that might sound like regardless.
We’ve seen some other great synth guitars before, too
. Modern microcontrollers and electronics give makers all kinds of creative ways to build electronic instruments with unique and compelling interfaces. Some are more successful than others,
but they’re all fun to explore
. Video after the break. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585276",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T07:16:41",
"content": "Now now – it’s a value-adding service that is well worth the advertising dollars. Think about it – the original author gets more views to their video, and Google gets their 30% cut, and HaD also gets page cl... | 1,760,372,417.717778 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/tracking-humans-with-wifi/ | Tracking Humans With WiFi | Navarre Bartz | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Security Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"big brother",
"human detection",
"pose detection",
"surveillance",
"tracking",
"wifi"
] | In case you thought that cameras, LiDAR, infrared sensors, and the like weren’t enough for Big Brother to track you, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to
track human movements via WiFi
. [PDF via
VPNoverview
]
The process uses the signals from WiFi routers for an inexpensive way to determine human poses that isn’t hampered by lack of illumination or object occlusion. The system produces UV coordinates of human bodies by analyzing signal strength and phase data to generate a 2D feature map and then feeding that through
a modified DensePose-RCNN
architecture which corresponds to 3D human poses. The system does have trouble with unusual poses that are not in the training set or if there are more than three subjects in the detection area.
While there are probably applications in Kinect-esque VR Halo games, this will probably go straight into the toolbox of three letter agencies and advertising-fueled tech companies. The authors claim this to use “privacy-preserving algorithms for human sensing,” but only time will tell if they’re correct.
If you’re interested in other creepy surveillance tools, checkout the
Heat-Sensing Crotch Monitor
or this
Dystopian Peep Show
. | 45 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585183",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T03:07:41",
"content": "“The authors claim this to use privacy-preserving algorithms for human sensing”HA I despise these people",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6585359",
... | 1,760,372,417.799824 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/binary-watch-rocks-a-bare-pcb-with-pride/ | Binary Watch Rocks A Bare PCB With Pride | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks",
"News"
] | [
"binary",
"binary clock",
"binary watch",
"led",
"pcb",
"smd"
] | Most of us learn to read digital clocks first, which display the time in obvious numbers. Analog clocks are often learned later, with the hands taking our young brains a little longer to figure out. Once you’ve grown into a 1337h4XX0r, though, you’re ready to learn how to read a binary watch. Then you can build your own,
just like [taifur] did.
The watch rocks a simplistic, bare bones design with the PCB acting as the body of the device itself. It’s not great for water resistance, or even incidental contact, but it’s a sharp look with the golden traces on display. The heart of the operation is a ATmega328P, as seen in the popular Arduino Uno, and it’s paired with a DS3231M real-time clock module to keep accurate time. 13 SMD LEDs are charged with displaying the time in binary format, with [taifur] choosing to spec a classic red color for the build. The watch is powered via a CR2032 coin cell, which you’re best advised not to swallow. So far, [taifur] has found the watch will last for over a month before the battery is tapped out.
It’s a fun build, and one that looks good when paired with a classic NATO watch strap in green. If, however, you desire a watch that definitely
won’t
last a month on a single coin cell,
you can always build a Nixie watch instead.
Video after the break. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585115",
"author": "Scott",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T00:54:55",
"content": "Us of a certain age learned to read “analog” clocks before digital clock were common, or even existed for the masses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,372,417.917717 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/casting-custom-resin-buttons-for-the-steam-deck/ | Casting Custom Resin Buttons For The Steam Deck | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Parts"
] | [
"custom controller",
"resin casting",
"silicone mold",
"steam deck",
"UV resin"
] | If you play games on multiple consoles, you’re probably familiar with the occasional bout of uncertainty that comes with each system’s unique button arrangement. They’re all more or less in the same physical location, but each system calls them something different. Depending on who’s controller you’re holding, the same button could be X, A, or B. We won’t even get started on colors.
Overhearing her partner wish the buttons on his Steam Deck matched the color scheme of the Xbox, [Gina Häußge] (of OctoPrint fame) decided to
secretly create a set of bespoke buttons for the portable system
. There was only one problem…she had no experience with the silicone molding process or epoxy resins which would be required for such an operation.
Toothpicks were used to make channels in the mold.
Luckily we have the Internet, and after researching similar projects that focused on other consoles, [Gina] felt confident enough to take apart Steam’s handheld and extract the original plastic buttons. These went into a clever 3D printed mold box, which was small enough to put into a food vacuum container for degassing purposes. The shape of the buttons necessitated a two-piece mold, into which [Gina] embedded two channels: one to inject the resin, and another that would let air escape.
The red, green, blue, and yellow resins were then loaded into four separate syringes and forced into the mold. It’s critically important to get the orientation right here, as each button has a slightly different shape. It sounds like [Gina] might have mixed up which color each button was supposed to be during an earlier attempt, so for the final run she made a little diagram to keep track. After 24 hours she was able to peel the mold apart and get a look at the perfectly-formed buttons, but it took 72 hours before they were really cured enough to move on to the next step.
[Gina] applied the legends with a sheet of rub-on lettering, which we imagine must have been quite tricky to get lined up perfectly. Since the letters would get worn off after a few intense gaming sessions without protection, she finally sealed the surface of each button by brushing on a thin layer of UV resin and curing it with a flashlight of the appropriate wavelength.
There are a fair number of steps involved
, and a fair bit of up-front cost to get all the materials together, but there’s no denying the final result looks phenomenal. Especially for a first attempt. We wouldn’t be surprised if the next time
somebody wants to head down this particular path
, it’s [Gina]’s post that guides them on their way. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6585063",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T22:28:05",
"content": "Gina always comes up with great ideas, but this is particularly awesome in using that food container as a vacuum chamber. I do a lot of stuff that could use a cheap somewhat-low-pressure vacuum, fo... | 1,760,372,417.857963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/ads-b-exchange-sells-up-contributors-unhappy/ | ADS-B Exchange Sells Up, Contributors Unhappy | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ads-b",
"crowdsourcing",
"open source"
] | In the news among aviation enthusiasts, the
ADS-B data aggregation and aircraft tracking site ADSB-Exchange has been sold by its founder to JETNET
for a reported $20,000,000. This type of routine financial news is more at home in the business media than on Hackaday, but in this case there’s something a little different at play. ADS-B Exchange is a community driven site whose data comes from thousands of enthusiasts worldwide
connecting their ADS-B receivers to its feed API
. The sale to a commercial flight data company has not gone down well with this community who are unsurprisingly unimpressed that their free contributions to the website have been sold.
This certainly isn’t the first time a site built on community data has flipped into big business, and while it’s unclear whether JETNET will
do a full CDDB
and boot out anyone not paying to play, we can understand the users feeling that their work has been sold from under them. On the other hand, how many of us can truly claim their open source beliefs wouldn’t start to buckle once somebody slides a $20m check across the table?
It’s evidently too late for anyone aggrieved by their ADS-B data being sold, but perhaps there’s something else to think about here. We have an established way to recognize open source software in the many well-known software libre licences, but we don’t for crowd-sourced data. Perhaps it’s time for the open-source community to consider this problem and come up with something for future sites like ADS-B Exchange whatever field they may be in, a licence which clearly defines the open terms under which contributors provide the data and those under which site owners can use it. Otherwise we’ll be here again in a few years writing about another aggrieved community, and we think that doesn’t have to happen. | 62 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584990",
"author": "steelman",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T19:38:01",
"content": "how many of us can truly claim their open source beliefs wouldn’t start to buckle once somebody slides a $20m check across the table?That is why copyleft licenses are so important. And proper contracts s... | 1,760,372,418.124039 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/all-about-usb-c-framework-laptop/ | All About USB-C: Framework Laptop | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Framework laptop",
"Type-C",
"USB C",
"USB Type-C",
"USB-C PD"
] | Talking about high-quality USB-C implementations, there’s a product that has multiple selling points designed around USB-C, and is arguably a shining example of how to do USB-C right. It’s the Framework laptop, where the USB-C expansion cards take the center stage.
Full disclosure – this article is being typed on a Framework laptop, and I got it free from Framework. I didn’t get it for Hackaday coverage – I develop Framework-aimed hardware as hobby, specifically, boards that hack upon aspects of this laptop in fun ways. As part of their community developer support effort, they’ve provided me with a laptop that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get for such a hobby. By now, I’m part of the Framework community, I have my own set of things I like about this laptop, and a set of things I dislike.
This is not an article about how I’m satisfied or dissatisfied with the Framework laptop – there’s plenty of those around, and it would not be fair for me to write one – I haven’t paid for it in anything except having lots of fun designing boards and hanging out with other people designing cool things, which is something I do willingly. I’m an all-things-laptops enthusiast, and the reason I’d like to talk about Framework is that there is no better example of USB-C, and everything you can do with it, in the wild.
It’s USB-C All The Way Down
There are four USB-C ports on the Framework laptop. All of these ports can be used as charging, USB3, DisplayPort or Thunderbolt 3 ports. This is possible in part because, well, there are no other ports in the system – these four ports are what you get, bar the headphone jack, and each port has a Thunderbolt and PD controller assigned to it. However, there are no dongles to deal with, unlike Macbooks – all ports are deeply recessed into the case, and you use so-called expansion cards for your port needs. The simplest one, USB-C expansion card, just extends the USB-C port it plugs into – it’s essentially a USB-C extension but somehow, of the standard-compliant kind; it has no active components inside of it and just forwards pins 1:1, inheriting all the properties of the ports.
There are other cards, like HDMI, DisplayPort, USB-A, Ethernet and also storage expansion cards. As you might guess, they summon altmodes out of the USB-C ports they’re connected into – with DisplayPort and HDMI using the DP altmode, DisplayPort card just passing the high-speed altmode-enabled pins through, and HDMI using an active DisplayPort-HDMI converter chip. The USB-A acts as a male USB-C to female USB-A 3.1 adapter, Ethernet connects over USB3, and storage expansion cards seem to connect over USB3, too.
This solves quite a few problems. If you want a laptop with a very specific combination of ports, you are likely able to get it here. You don’t have to carry dongles – the expansion cards are small and manageable, you can throw a fistful of them into your laptop bag, and only use the DisplayPort card when you need a DisplayPort output, having USB-C or USB-A ports at other times instead. If a port breaks, you no longer have to replace and fix the mainboard – swap the Expansion Card and go. Oh, and if you have one more USB-C-equipped laptop, all your expansion cards will work as USB-C dongles in a pinch, provided that the necessarily inflexible mechanical form-factor isn’t an issue for you.
Community-Driven Cards
From the beginning, Framework published files for others to develop their own expansion cards – a KiCad template with part numbers, an example card with an STM32 microcontroller, and printable card housing files. They also pledged to support developers in the community by funding prototype production runs – the program that I’ve benefitted from, as I’ve described above. While a lone hacker might not be able to develop a Thunderbolt device, you still get 5 V output and a USB 2.0 port, with USB 3.0 ability if you dare try your luck at impedance matching. Plus, of course, USB-C charging passthrough is there as long as you preserve the CC lines.
Since then, the Framework forum has become lively with people inventing, discussing, developing and polishing expansion card designs, ideas ranging from LTE modem to MagSafe. There are already a few community-sourced cards, like the magnetic USB-C charging card, which anyone can assemble by combining a 3D-printed case with Aliexpress components, and people have been improving upon it. There are also cards for a serial port, a miniDisplayPort, and a VGA port currently being designed by someone on Discord; cards like the RP2040 and dual-port USB-C are brewing, and we might see a few unexpected designs appear in the future, too. In fact, there was an Ethernet card community project way before an Ethernet card appeared on the Framework store!
Sadly, not all community-driven expansion card designs have reached production. I don’t think this is Framework’s problem – rather, it’s a general “getting hardware from design to reality” problem, something I had to solve for myself, and I still struggle with it at times. It would indeed be cool to see more community-driven expansion cards out there, and given a different set of circumstances, the designs will flourish.
Flaws Mostly At The Edges
Not everything is perfect in Framework land when it comes to USB-C. For instance, the expansion cards are somewhat small, they have a certain thermal envelope, and in the wild, it was found that storage expansion cards controllers might overheat and start throttling – causing read/write performance to drop. Every Framework laptop comes with a screwdriver, however, and
there’s a guide
on how you can put this screwdriver to good use by adding a thermal pad inside your storage card – bringing the heat down a notch and stopping the card from throttling. That said, it’s not the only card where this could be a problem – the community-driven LTE card, whenever it actually appears, might hit thermal issues too, it’s just that there’s not a lot of space mechanically.
All expansion cards, except the USB-C passthrough card, are basically permanently-plugged-in devices, and they consume power. Each of those cards has a 5.1 kΩ pulldown inside of them, which is detected by the Thunderbolt controller of each USB-C port, and causes the controller to go out of deep sleep mode, enabling the altmode that the card requests. Plus, it switches the internal 5 V power rail to the USB-C port, powering the card’s internals. My guess is that both of these factors are what is causing
the expansion card-related power drain
that some people report. This drain was mostly, but not fully, negated by firmware updates at some point; yet, some part of it is inevitable.
USB-C charging hasn’t been flawless either. There are power supplies that I found the Framework wouldn’t work with, and I did have to scramble to find a different USB-C PSU at one point, when I thought I already had one which worked. Not unlikely that the PSU was to blame, and, I never updated the BIOS, either, so it’s quite likely that I’m a firmware update away from better compatibility. Also, in certain batches of the mainboards, due to a FET in a charging path having different characteristics than the designed-in one, 15 V charging specifically
didn’t work well
– precluding use of certain powerbanks and PSUs. Given that the stock Framework charger operates at 20 V, it makes sense that this failure mode was missed. Thankfully, you can order a replacement FET and swap it, and re-enable the 15 V charging in the EC – remember,
the EC has open-source firmware
.
A Clear, Open Path Forward
These issues are fun to talk about, but they’re miniscule when it comes to using the Framework’s USB-C ports day-to-day. Overall, the USB-C implementation on the Framework laptop is brilliant, and many laptops don’t reach anywhere near the level of functionality that its USB-C ports provide.
The level of openness when talking about design decisions and flaws is unparalleled, too – no other laptop company would’ve shown you where to add a thermal pad, or given you a FET part number to substitute a subpar FET on your mainboard when your USB-C charging is situationally non-functional; much less publish partial schematics and connector information for the DIY community. The USB-C-fostered ecosystem of Framework is seriously impressive to witness, and I can’t wait to see what it brings, both for the Framework userbase, and also influencing other laptops’ and devices’ design decisions indirectly by doing things right, and by using the variety of USB-C modes to its advantage. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584971",
"author": "philosiraptor117",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T19:08:44",
"content": "they are pretty committed to the ecosystem too, they gave out a gripload of the mainboards out to folks and everyone started cobbling thier own computers together. I for one am in love with the u... | 1,760,372,418.198376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/exploring-the-hall-effect-for-haptic-feedback-ps4-joysticks/ | Exploring The Hall Effect For Haptic Feedback PS4 Joysticks | Dan Maloney | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"BLDC",
"hall effect",
"haptic",
"Joystick",
"neodymium",
"pcb motor",
"ps4",
"sensor",
"TMAG5170",
"TMAG5273"
] | Modern gaming console controllers aren’t without their annoyances — Joy-Con drift, anyone? The problems might stem from design deficiencies, but we suspect that user enthusiasm and the mechanical stress it can introduce might play a significant role as well. Either way, [Marius Heier] decided to take a look at what would be required to build a better joystick and came up with some interesting results.
The first video below
lays the basic groundwork, with a bunch of experiments with 3-axis Hall effect sensors, specifically the Texas Instruments TMAG5273 and TMAG5170. They’re essentially the same sensor with different interfaces — SPI for the 5170 and I2C for the 5273. Using just one of these sensors, he was able to build a joystick with the usual X- and Y- axis control, but also with a rotary axis. What’s more, he built a motorized version using two NEMA 17 steppers to mechanically drive the stick back to center.
The joystick is bulky, but it looks like he’s got plans for a much smaller one with
[Carl Bugeja]-style PCB motors
that should fit into a PS4 controller. That’s the subject of
the second video below
, which uses a different Hall sensor — an Allegro A1304 — and is mainly concerned with getting the output of a non-motorized but considerably miniaturized joystick stick talking the language that the controller expects. It’s not a simple process, but it seems to be coming along nicely, and we’ll be watching progress closely. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584957",
"author": "duuudeder87",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T18:11:52",
"content": "There where drop in replacement analoge sticks with hall effect sensors for switch joycons released just a few weeks ago",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,372,418.002791 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/do-you-need-the-raspberry-pi-camera-module-v3/ | Do You Need The Raspberry Pi Camera Module V3? | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"digital cameras hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Reviews"
] | [
"autofocus",
"Pi camera",
"Raspberry pi camera"
] | This month came the announcement of some new camera modules from Raspberry Pi. All eyes were on
version 3 of their standard camera module
, but they also sneaked out
a new version of their high quality camera with an M12 lens mount
. The version 3 module is definitely worth a look, so I jumped on a train to Cambridge for the Raspberry Pi Store, and bought myself one for review.
There’s nothing new about a Pi camera module as they’ve been available for years in both official and third party forms, so to be noteworthy the new one has to offer something a bit special. It uses a 12 megapixel sensor, and is available both in autofocus and wide angle versions in both standard and NoIR variants. Wide angle and autofocus modules may be new in the official cameras, but these are both things which have been on the third-party market for years.
So if an autofocus camera module for your Pi isn’t that new, what can we bring to a review that isn’t simply exclaiming over the small things? Perhaps it’s better instead to view the new camera in the context of the state of the Pi camera ecosystem, and what better way to do that than to turn a Pi and some modules into a usable camera!
This Isn’t Just Any Camera, It’s A Hackaday Camera!
Minimalism is the new cool, right?
Along with the V3 non-wide-angle camera module then, I bought a
Pimoroni Display HAT Mini
, and a Pi Zero W. The camera module itself is the same small PCB as its predecessors, but with a slightly bigger silver protrusion around the lens for the autofocus mechanism.
My reasoning was that these parts could form the nucleus of a camera system, and to complete the hardware side I put together a camera case in OpenSCAD. It’s not that special, just
a parameterised project box
with cut-outs for the module and the Pimoroni display, and an impressive-looking but zero-function lens hood tube for the front.
A bit of printing and some small screws later, I had a camera, or at least something that looks a lot like one. A digital camera is nothing without software, and for the past year or two on the command line this has meant
libcamera
for the Raspberry Pi. You can still use the earlier software stack if you desire, but it’s no longer supported. Likewise on the programming side the Picamera Python library is being deprecated, and replaced by
the picamera2 library
. I was able to hack together
an awful Python camera script
that (slowly) updates the Pimoroni screen as a viewfinder, and uses one of its buttons as a shutter. I am no software developer, so I’m certain there will be Hackaday readers who could do a far better job.
It’s all very well to talk about the peripherals, but what matters with a camera is the pictures it takes. The sensor is a Sony IMX708, which we’re told has all of their new sensor technologies, but proves difficult to find on the Sony Semicon website. I can find reference to it being used as a secondary rear camera on some pretty recent mobile phones, if that helps give you and idea of its capabilities. The killer feature on this module is the autofocus lens, which is under full control via software and can be either set for a particular focus or put in automatic mode. My script used the latter, and I set to work taking a few pictures around my hackerspace.
Autofocus Is Where It’s At
The first thing to note is that Sony’s autofocus algorithm is very good in the automatic mode, as long as there’s something pretty clear for it to see as the subject. A close-up of some screwdriver bits or a Pi Zero came out in beautiful detail, as did a landscape scene, but looking down a table along a tape measure had it confused between the foreground, middle ground, and distance on alternate shots. The tape measure was pushing the envelope to prove a point and happily for more accomplished programmers than me there’s a windowed autofocus mode to allow more targeted focusing.
Everyone uses flowers as an example shot.
Native resolution of a Pi Zero, from about 30cm.
The camera found it difficult to choose where to focus.
Outdoors in January, and as you’d expect it’s a bit grey.
This camera is good at close-up shots.
My impression of this camera module is that it’s much more of a step forward from the V2 module than the V2 was from their first model. The extra resolution is nice, but the autofocus makes it much more useful. If the HQ camera module wishes it were a mirrorless compact camera then this module wishes it were a decent quality mid-range mobile phone camera, and in this it doesn’t do too badly.
The question is then for $25 or so is it worth the outlay? I’d say yes, if you have an application for a decent quality small camera module. There are still cheaper cameras, and even other modules with autofocus to be found on the usual electronics sites, but this one isn’t too much more expensive for the benefit of much wider support. I don’t regret buying mine, and I’ll be putting some work in to making a much more efficient script for it.
Before we leave this piece, it’s worth mentioning
the Raspberry Pi shop in central Cambridge
, where I bought the module. It’s their public showcase to the world, but it’s also somewhere you can buy a Pi even in times of shortage if you’re prepared to make the journey. (Visit
the Centre for Computing History
while you’re there!) The staff are knowledgeable and helpful, and there are a few Pi prototypes to be seen at the counter. I’m fortunate in being able to get to Cambridge without too much grief, but even for those of you who can’t it’s somewhere to put on the list to visit if you get the chance. | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584903",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T15:37:48",
"content": "As not mentioned in the article, I looked it up. Yes, you can manually focus and disable autofocus on this camera as well. Which I think is also a very important feature.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,418.997549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/better-macro-images-with-arduino-focus-stacking/ | Better Macro Images With Arduino Focus Stacking | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"focus stacking",
"macro photography"
] | If you’ve ever played around with macro photography, you’ve likely noticed that the higher the lens magnification, the less the depth of field. One way around this issue is to take several slices at different focus points, and then stitch the photos together digitally.
As [Curious Scientist] demonstrates
, this is a relatively simple motion control project and well within the reach of a garden-variety Arduino.
You can move the camera or move the subject. Either way, you really only need one axis of motion, which makes it quite simple. This build relies on a solid-looking lead screw to move a carriage up or down. An Arduino Nano acts as the brains, a stepper motor drives the lead screw, and a small display shows stats such as current progress and total distance to move.
The stepper motor uses a conventional stepper driver “stick” as you find in many 3D printers. In fact, we wondered if you couldn’t just grab a 3D printer board and modify it for this service without spinning a custom PCB. Fittingly, the example subject is another Arduino Nano. Skip ahead to 32:22 in the video below to see the final result.
We’ve seen similar projects, of course. You can build for
tiny subjects
. You can also adapt an existing motion control device like a
CNC machine
. | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584821",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T12:22:20",
"content": "Had to watch video on silentHow do you merge the photos? Somehow make a mask from focus (? Based on an FFT)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "65848... | 1,760,372,418.929778 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/adding-electronic-shifter-functionality-to-bicycle-derailleur/ | Adding Electronic Shifter Functionality To Bicycle Derailleur | Maya Posch | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"derailleur",
"electronic shifter"
] | For the overwhelming majority of bicycles out there that feature multiple gears, switching between these is done purely mechanically, with a cable. Generally this uses a derailleur, which forms part of the gear switching and chain tensioning mechanism. As a mechanical system, it’s reliable when well maintained, but tuning it can be a real hassle. This is where an electronic shifter should be able to provide faster, more reliable and quieter shifting, and is also where
[Jesse DeWald]’s electronic shifting project
begins.
As [Jesse] points out in the
introductory article
on electronic shifting, it’s not a new concept, with everyone from Shimano (
Di2
) to Archer and others coming up with their own version. Some of these require replacing the existing derailleur, while others should allow for non-destructive modification. What [Jesse] did not find among this constellation of options was a version that’d work with existing derailleurs, did not require destructive modifications and have a long battery life.
[Jesse]’s design omits the servo present in Archer’s design, and uses the existing derailleur spring, with the reasoning explained in a nice spring physics refresher. Instead a stepper is used along with a matched balancer spring that in testing managed over 3 months of standby time with a 3,700 mAh Li-ion battery and thousands of shifts. At the core of the system is an Arduino Pro Mini board, the code for which is
available
along with the design plans.
The project is not done at this point, of course, with a whole range of improvements still to be added, including a case, so that the shifter can be used outside in the rain. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584829",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T12:46:12",
"content": "For a general rider, I think elec shifting is folly unless you make use of the ability to detect shift performance and correct for misalignment on the fly. It’s just a reason to carry around another thing t... | 1,760,372,418.291127 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/a-simple-air-suspension-demo-with-lego-technic/ | A Simple Air Suspension Demo With Lego Technic | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"air suspension",
"car",
"lego",
"lego technic",
"suspension",
"Technic"
] | The most common suspension systems on automobiles rely on simple metal springs. Leaf spring and coil spring designs both have their pros and cons, but fundamentally it’s all about flexing metal doing the work. Air suspension works altogether differently, employing gas as a spring,
as demonstrated by this simple Lego build from [JBRIX].
The suspension system is employed on a Lego Technic car, with a relatively unsophisticated design. The car has no real form of propusion, and serves solely to demonstrate the air suspension design. They may look like dampers, but the system is actually using Lego pneumatic pistons as springs for each wheel. The pistons are connected to the upper control arm of a double wishbone suspension setup. Each piston is pneumatically connected to a main reservoir. With the reservoir, and thus the pistons, pressurized, the suspension system can support the weight of the car. If a bump perturbs a wheel, the piston compresses the air in the system, which then returns the piston to its original position, thus serving as a spring. If the reservoir is vented, the suspension collapses. Air springs on real, full-sized automobiles work in basically the same way. However, they usually have a separate reservoir per corner, keeping each wheel’s suspension independent.
Overall, if you’re working on some kind of Lego rambler, you might find this suspension concept useful. Alternatively, you might simply find it good as a learning aid. If you want to learn more about oddball suspension systems,
we can help there too
. Video after the break. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584725",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T07:27:05",
"content": "LEGO Technic 8860 was one of my most favorite childhood Christmas presents ever!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6584762",
"author": "Dave",
... | 1,760,372,418.346093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/toxic-telescope-makes-you-mad-as-a-hatter/ | Toxic Telescope Makes You Mad As A Hatter | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"liquid mirror telescope",
"mercury",
"mirror"
] | [Hank Green] posted an interesting video about the
first liquid mirror telescope
from back in the 1850s. At the time, scientists were not impressed. But, these days, people are revisiting the idea. The big problem with the early telescope is that it used mercury. Mercury is really bad for people and the environment.
The good thing about a liquid scope is that you can pretty easily make a large mirror. You just need a shallow pool of liquid and a way to spin it. However, there are downsides. You need to isolate the liquid from vibrations and dust. Another downside is that since gravity makes the shape of the mirror, these telescopes only go one way — straight up.
Modern liquid telescopes have high-tech ways to combat all of the problems except the straight-up view. While it can be expensive to safely handle a huge amount of mercury and isolate it from vibrations, it can still be less expensive than polishing mirrors of similar size. The 6-meter Large Zenith Telescope at the University of British Columbia, for example, claims to cost about 2% of what a similar instrument made with glass would cost. In addition to rotating to maintain their parabolic shape, Earth-bound liquid mirrors also rotate around the Earth’s axis, which causes the mirror to point ever so slightly off the point directly overhead, something that precise observations have to take into account.
The first actual practical liquid mirror telescope had a 50cm mirror. Modern examples are mostly in the 3-6 meter range. Gallium is another possible liquid, but that raises the cost significantly. In addition, research is underway to find safer liquids and solve the problems associated with tilting the mirror.
The classic way to make a mirror is
to grind it from a glass blank
. If you make your own telescope,
you can play with the look of it
in interesting ways. | 51 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584622",
"author": "lwatcdr",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T03:20:53",
"content": "So why not spin molten glass and allow it to cool slowly? Maybe they already do so and I am just not aware of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,372,418.640997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/unlocking-hidden-features-of-an-unusual-camera/ | Unlocking Hidden Features Of An Unusual Camera | Robin Kearey | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"disassembler",
"light field",
"lytro"
] | Back in 2012, technology websites were abuzz with news of the Lytro: a camera that was going to revolutionize photography thanks to its innovative
light field
technology. An array of microlenses in front of the sensor let it capture a 3D image of a scene from one point, allowing the user to extract depth information and to change the focus of an image even after capturing it.
The technology turned out to be a commercial failure however, and the company faded into obscurity. Lytro cameras can now be had for as little as $20 on the second-hand market, as [ea] found out when he started to investigate light field photography. They still work just as well as they ever did, but since the accompanying PC software is now definitely starting to show its age, [ea] decided
to reverse-engineer the camera’s firmware
so he could write his own application.
[ea] started by examining the camera’s hardware. The main CPU turned out to be a MIPS processor similar to those used in various cheap camera gadgets, next to what looked like an unpopulated socket for a serial port and a set of JTAG test points. The serial port was sending out a bootup sequence and a command prompt, but didn’t seem to respond to any inputs.
Digging deeper, [ea] began to disassemble the camera’s firmware. He managed to find a list of commands like “take photo”, “delete”, “reboot” and so on which neatly mapped to known camera functions, as well as a few undocumented ones. The command interpreter also seemed to check for a certain input string, generated by passing the camera’s serial number together with the word “please” through an SHA-1 hash function – this turned out to be the keyword to unlock the serial interface.
Now able to send commands directly to the camera’s CPU, [ea] wrote
a Python library and a set of tools
to operate the camera remotely, and enabled several new features. The Lytro can now function as a webcam, for instance, or be operated remotely with full control over its zoom and focus mechanisms. All those functions can be accessed through the built-in WiFi interface, so there’s no need to solder wires to the CPU’s serial port.
With the low-level functions now out in the open, we’re curious to see what hidden potential there still is in Lytro’s technology. Perhaps these cameras can be repurposed to make more advanced 3D capture systems, similar to
research Google presented in 2018
. If you need a primer on light field technology, check out
Alex Hornstein’s presentation from the 2018 Supercon. | 65 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584524",
"author": "KSlith",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T00:09:11",
"content": "The HAD effect strikes again. Lytro light field cameras immediately shot to $100/each.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6584528",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,418.878436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/pizza-making-cnc-machine-is-the-only-tool-weve-ever-dreamed-of/ | Pizza-Making CNC Machine Is The Only Tool We’ve Ever Dreamed Of | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"cheese",
"CNC machine",
"Pizza",
"sauce"
] | Making pizza is fun, but eating pizza is even better. Ideally, you’ll get to spend much more time doing the latter than the former. If you had a pizza-making CNC machine, that would help you achieve this goal, and thankfully,
[Twarner] is working on that very technology.
The Pizza-Pizza CNC Machine is based on Marlin firmware running on a Mini RAMbo 3D printer motherboard, and is a 3-axis CNC machine. At a glance, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s some kind of fancy futuristic vinyl player, but it’s actually intended to cook a tasty delicious pie. It’s a gantry-based machine that uses two tool ends, one charged with distributing sauce, and the other cheese. It’s programmed with G-code to designate areas to coat with sauce and areas to cover with cheese. It can’t create dough from scratch sadly, but instead operates using pre-manufactured pizza bases.
The current level of sophistication is low, and there are issues with cheese clogs and the general messiness of the operation. However, this doesn’t mean there’s no value in automated pizza manufacture. If anything, we want to see the more open-sauce development in this area until we end up with a pizza factory on every kitchen bench worldwide. We’ve already seen that hackers have mastered
how to build a good pizza oven
, so now we just need to solve this part of the equation. Video after the break. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584419",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T21:14:10",
"content": "Next step – add a heated “build platform”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6584423",
"author": "doobie",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T21:22:44",
... | 1,760,372,418.704804 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/ive-been-printing-on-the-dragon-railroad/ | I’ve Been Printing On The Dragon Railroad… | Al Williams | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"model railroad",
"model train"
] | We know many people who put much effort into building model train setups. But
[Rambros] has an entire set 3D printed
, and the
files are open source
, so you can print your own or modify it to suit you. When we first read “complete open source ecosystem,” we thought it might have been a bit of hyperbole, but it isn’t. The S-scale set includes two locomotives, a tanker, a box car, a hopper car, and a gondola car. There are different sections of track, customizable with Fusion 360. The “Dragon Railway” takes a few mechanical parts and electronics, of course. You can see one of several videos about the system below.
You can control the whole system using Bluetooth and a smartphone. The electronics are pretty simple, consisting of an ESP32 board, some motor drivers, N20 motors, and a few miscellaneous parts. We expect it would be compatible with other off-the-shelf S scale tracks and cars, but we don’t know that for sure.
Although you’ll need Fusion 360 to customize, there are plenty of ready-made STL files if you want to get started quickly. Some of the track items, like the crossing and turnout are not customizable, anyway. One particularly impressive item is a printed auto-coupler; while a small item, getting that to work reliably with printed parts seems like it may be the most difficult part of the whole thing.
Maybe an
OLED display
would be the next thing? We’ve seen
other printed trains
, but this seems like a real labor of love. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584384",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T20:06:43",
"content": "+2^15One of the best things seen here. Thanks!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6590537",
"author": "Rambros (@rambrosteam)",
"... | 1,760,372,418.766302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/supercon-2022-sophy-wong-is-making-an-impact-with-artistic-wearables/ | Supercon 2022: Sophy Wong Is Making An Impact With Artistic Wearables | Kristina Panos | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"chain maille"
] | Prolific designer and maker Sophy Wong is always looking toward the future, and that goes for everything from the costume pieces she makes to the idea of making itself. In her excellent and highly-visual Supercon talk, Sophy explores both, and gives the viewer a window on her evolved-and-evolving design philosophy.
You likely know Sophy as That Maker Who 3D Prints On Fabric, a label she is quick to dismiss, pointing animatedly toward the seminal work of one David Shorey, who also happened to be at Supercon 2022. As Sophy explains, the process begins by modeling disconnected bodies to be printed, then printing the first layer and pausing the print. At this point, a piece of nylon mesh is inserted, and the print is resumed. The result is that the mesh is trapped between the first and second layers, and the bodies are now connected by a common thread. Carefully remove the sandwich from the print bed and you have a highly-flexible, mesmerizing piece of material that almost acts like chain maille.
After a ton of experimentation with printing on fabric, Sophy completed her 3D-printed dress during the height of the pandemic, and spends a good chunk of the talk discussing how she was able to leverage this concept into an entire garment — in other words, how the heck she turned it into a dress. To further complicate things, the build volume of her printer prohibited making any one piece larger than 10×10″.
As futuristic as this whole idea is, Sophy still employs time-honored sewing techniques like first making a muslin (a prototype of a garment using inexpensive, plain fabric) but then again, we’re not sure how else you would go about this type of undertaking. Sophy started by drafting a bodice — the top part of any dress — and then consulted her vast experiments library to find the best print pattern that would not only drape well, but would get the concept across.
Then she literally cut apart the muslin and scanned in the pieces so that she could model the 3D printable bodies directly on the real dress pattern pieces. Three and a half spools of filament later, Sophy had all the pieces to make an entirely 3D-printed dress. But wait, how did she stitch the pieces together? Quite cleverly, on the back, with a 3D doodle pen. In case you’re wondering, Sophy made a lining layer that’s completely separate from the outer, printed layer. This of course prevents chafing and wardrobe malfunctions while allowing Sophy to spot clean the plastic and launder the lining layer.
So, what does one do after such an achievement? What should she do with all the stuff she learned along the way? Make another dress, one might say — but Sophy doesn’t like to make the same thing twice. So in a way, she went back to the drawing board after this project, but it was more like the drawing board that represents the drawing board.
See, Sophy sought to go beyond technique. She explains that she came up with a hierarchy for projects that begins with a foundation of tools — everything from hammers to laser cutters — and is capped by the impact that her projects make.
It’s like this: if she has to explain a what or why a piece is, she considers the impact on the public to be low. But if she hands her 3D-printed glove to someone and they go, ‘ohmygosh are you making a space suit?’, then she has delivered not only on technique and concept, but on impact. And it doesn’t get much better than that. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584520",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-01-26T00:03:18",
"content": "You didn’t mention how she made the face shield for the helmet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6586231",
"auth... | 1,760,372,420.913175 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/diy-macro-keyboard-wood-be-nice/ | DIY Macro Keyboard Wood Be Nice | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"display",
"editing",
"keyboard",
"macro",
"magnetic rotary encoder",
"pad",
"stm32",
"usb",
"video",
"wood",
"woodworking"
] | Editing video tends to involve a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and while this might be fine for the occasional edit, those who regularly deal with video often reach for a macro pad to streamline their workflow. There are plenty of macro keyboards available specifically meant to meet the needs of those who edit a lot of video, but if you want something tailored for your personal workflow you may want to design your own keyboard
like this wooden macro pad from [SS4H]
.
The keyboard itself is built around an STM32 microcontroller, which gives it plenty of power to drive and read the keyboard matrix. It also handles an encoder that is typically included on macro keyboards for video editing, but rather than using a potentiometer-type encoder this one uses a magnetic rotary encoder for accuracy and reliability. There’s a display built into the keyboard as well with its own on-board microcontroller that needs to be programmed separately, but with everything assembled it looks like a professional offering.
[SS4H] built a prototype using 3D printed parts, but for the final version he created one with a wooden case and laser etched keys to add a bit of uniqueness to the build. He also open-sourced all of the PCB schematics and other files needed to recreate this build so anyone can make it if they’d like. It’s not the only macro keyboard we’ve seen before, either, so if you’re looking for something even more esoteric
take a look at this keyboard designed to be operated by foot
. | 13 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584262",
"author": "shod",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T16:48:29",
"content": "Pretty nice, and gracious of him to make the files available.Having said that I consider this to be out of my budget for such things at the moment, with all the equipment needed.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,421.012255 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/open-sourcing-the-lisa-macs-bigger-sister/ | Open-Sourcing The Lisa, Mac’s Bigger Sister | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [] | Forty years ago, on January 19th of 1983, Apple released the Lisa, which was in many ways a revolutionary system. On January 19th of 2023, to celebrate the system’s 40th birthday, the Computer History Museum
released the source code
for Lisa OS version 3.1 under the
Apple Academic License Agreement
. Written in Pascal, the source includes over 1,300 source files, covering the OS itself, the Lisa Toolkit development system and a number of applications. The questions one might ask at this point include what the Apple Lisa even is, and why it was such an important system in computer history.
This especially in light of the terrible flop that the
Lisa
turned out to be, with only 10,000 units sold over two years. Part of this failure was definitely due to the introductory price, that was set at $9,995 (over $27,000 in 2021 dollars). Although it featured an OS with memory protection, despite the lack of an MMU on the Motorola 68k, among other advanced features that placed it well beyond other desktop computers of the time, it got quickly crushed in the market by Apple’s MacIntosh, even after successive Lisa successor releases that sought to address its shortcomings.
What’s In A Name
Whether the Lisa system truly was named after Steve Job’s first daughter (Lisa Nicole Brennan), an acronym for ‘Locally Integrated Software Architecture’ (LISA) or some torturous backronym may be a factoid that is forever lost to the sands of time, but that the
Lisa’s development
was itself torturous is beyond question.
The idea for the system was sparked when Steve Jobs, as part of a delegation from Apple, visited PARC in 1979 and received a demonstration of SmallTalk on the Xerox Alto system, with its GUI and mouse-driven interface. In the mind of Jobs, the Lisa would be the first commercialized, GUI-equipped desktop computer. At the time Apple was trying to develop a successor to the Apple ][, which was a best-selling, but still command line-based system.
Using the Motorola 32-bit 68000 MPU as the core, the new system would feature an object-oriented programming language — Object Pascal — hard drive storage, and a GUI- and mouse-driven interface on top of Lisa OS. Even as the project proceeded, Jobs was removed from the Lisa project by the Apple board of directors in 1982, which is where Steve Jobs’ role in the Lisa ends and the success story of the MacIntosh begins.
The Lisa 2 series was announced in January 1984, with the Macintosh, as part of the Apple 32 SuperMicro series. Note that the twin Twiggy drives have been replaced by the Mac’s Sony 3.5” floppy drive. Not only did this improve reliability, but also improved compatibility with the Mac, allowing them to use the same floppy disks. (Credit: Computer History Museum #102689034)
Although the Lisa was still finished and released, it was the MacIntosh that would see many upgrades and improvements based on lessons learned with the Lisa. In that sense the MacIntosh is the spiritual successor of the Lisa, which itself derives from Xerox’s Alto. As a low-cost desktop system, the MacIntosh did not feature the same high-end specs as the Lisa, but as a commercial success it opened new avenues for successor systems. Meanwhile the Lisa 2 was released in 1984, with a range of cost-cutting measures, such as dropping the twin Twiggy floppy drives for a single 3.5″ 400 kB FDD and lowering the amount of installed RAM.
Interestingly, the MacIntosh development used the Lisa systems as test systems, including the development of the first MacIntosh software, since architecturally they were still quite similar. The Lisa range of Apple computers would reach their end with the Lisa 2/10 (later rebranded as the MacIntosh XL). In 1986 the Lisa line of computers along with Lisa OS was officially discontinued.
The Lisa Legacy
It’s notable that despite Steve Jobs’ disbelief that Xerox would not simply commercialize the Alto system, Xerox ultimately would release the
AMD Am2900
-based
Xerox Star 8010
in 1981, for a measly $16,595 (in 2021 dollars: $49,460). This meant that despite the overlap in features between Xerox’s and Apple’s offerings, Xerox targeted the government and research markets.
The Lisa remained trapped in a kind of limbo between the need to be as cost-effective as possible, while offering advanced features such as memory protection. The MacIntosh did not bother with such features, which allowed its MacOS to run faster on the same hardware, even if it was more prone to crashing and locking up.
Steve Jobs and John Couch pointing at a Lisa. Totally not staged.
As noted by Byte Magazine in its February 1983 preview of the Lisa, many people were interested in the features offered by the system, especially in comparison with the IBM PC that was making waves at the time. The mouse-based OS was, at the time, a revolution. They expressed the hope that Apple would figure out a way to offer these features at an affordable price, which as we now know never came to fruition. At least not within the Lisa range of computers, but in a sense the PowerPC-based Macs would. When OS X replaced MacOS and gave it the memory protection and other features that Lisa OS had pioneered years prior, it would have felt to many like justification for the effort spent on Lisa OS and the underlying hardware.
Perhaps that Lisa was simply ahead of its time, trying to hit features at a price target that was not yet achievable. Lisa OS was forced to implement its memory protection purely in software, which put a lot more strain on the already fairly anemic CPU. The task- and document-based GUI brought a lot of new ideas to the table, some of which can still be seen in OS X (now again MacOS) today.
As a purely financial investment, the Lisa was a flop, but as a development platform and a turning point in computer history its value is perhaps beyond measurement. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584211",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T15:26:47",
"content": "I had an Apple III for a while. Never turned it on. Sold more, but lost in history.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6584813",
"auth... | 1,760,372,421.226963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/secure-lora-mesh-communication-network/ | Secure LoRa Mesh Communication Network | Dave Walker | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"mesh",
"network",
"peer-to-peer",
"radio",
"raspberry pi",
"secure"
] | The Internet has allowed us to communicate more easily than ever before, and thanks to modern cell-phone networks, we don’t even have to be tied down to a hard line anymore. But what if you want something a little more direct? Maybe you’re in an area with no cell-phone coverage, or you don’t want to use public networks for whatever reason. For those cases, you might be interested in this
Secure Communication Network
project by [Thomas].
By leveraging the plug-and-play qualities of the
Raspberry Pi 4
and the
Adafruit LoRa Radio Bonnet
, [Thomas] has been able to focus on the software side of this system that really turns these parts into something useful.
Messages are tagged as “authenticated” when a shared hashing code is included in the message
Rather than a simple point-to-point radio link, a mesh network is built up of any transceivers in range, extending the maximum distance a message can be sent, and building in resilience in case a node goes down. Each node is connected to a PC via Ethernet, and messages are distributed via a “controlled flooding” algorithm that aims to reduce unnecessary network congestion from the blind re-transmission of messages that have already been received.
Security is handled via RSA encryption with 256-byte public/private keys and additional SHA256 hashes for authentication.
The packet-size available through the LoRa device is limited to 256 bytes, of which 80 bytes are reserved for headers. To make matters worse, the remaining 176 bytes must contain encrypted data, which is almost always more lengthy than the raw message it represents. Because of this, longer messages are fragmented by the software, with the fragments sent out individually and re-assembled at the receiving end.
If you’re in need of a decentralized secure radio communications system, then there’s a lot to like about the project that [Thomas] has documented on
his Hackaday.io page
. He even includes an STL file for a 3D printed case. If you need to send more than text, then this
Voice-over-LoRa Mesh Network
project may be more your style. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584097",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T12:04:29",
"content": "> Security is handled via RSA encryption with 256-byte public/private keys and additional SHA256 hashes for authentication.Encryption key sizes are normally given in bits… so that’d be 2048 bits i... | 1,760,372,420.75513 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/new-commodore-vic-20-build/ | New Commodore VIC-20 Build | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"commodore VIC",
"recreation",
"VIC-20"
] | In a
recent episode of [The Retro Shack]
, a new Commodore VIC-20 is built, using a
‘Vicky Twenty’
replacement PCB by [Bob’s Bits] as the base and as many new components as could be found. The occasion for this was that a viewer had sent in a VIC-20 that turned out to be broken, so in order to diagnose it, building a new one with known working parts seemed incredibly useful.
Advantages of the reproduction PCB are a number of board-level fixes that negate the need for certain bodge wires, while also having footprints for a wider range of round DIN connectors. The non-proprietary ICs were obtained along with other standard parts from a retro computing store, while the proprietary Commodore components were scrounged up from your friendly used component selling sites.
The result is what from the outside looks like a genuine VIC-20, and which should prove to be very useful in diagnosing the broken VIC-20 system in the future, as well as presumably to play some games on.
Thanks to [Arranyn] for the tip! | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584000",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T09:36:03",
"content": "My friend Pieter Hintjens made some games for VIC20, I have the last copy of his games on tapes, I have to find a way to dump them and put all that into an emulator. Anyone with experience with that, consi... | 1,760,372,420.963729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/sequencing-the-vintage-way/ | Sequencing The Vintage Way | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"sequencer",
"SWTPC",
"synth"
] | For most of us, an 8-bit microcomputer means one of the home computers which set so many of us on our way back in the 1980s. But this ignores an entire generation of 1970s 8-bit machines which filled the market for affordable office and industrial desktop computing before we were seduced by
Pac-Man
or
Frogger
. It’s one of these, an
SWTPC 6809
, that’s found its way into the hands of [Look Mum No Computer], and in direct contradiction to his branding,
he’s used it to control a synthesizer
.
As you’d expect from the name, the computer hides a 6809 processor, and comes from the end of the 1970s when that chip had been released in an effort to stave off the market threat from the likes of Zilog and MOS Technologies. It has an SS-50 bus motherboard, and the saga in the video below the break is as much about the production of a custom DAC and trigger port for it to drive the synth as it is about troubleshooting a four-decade-old computer. It’s a credit to SWTPC that the machine is largely working after all this time, however it succumbs to some damage during the development of the interface.
At the end though, there’s a fully functional sequencer on a 1970s computer, playing some pretty good electronic music from an analogue synth. This is
EXACTLY
the future we were promised, back in 1979!
Long-time readers will know
this isn’t the first SWTPC that has graced these pages
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6584084",
"author": "rumpel",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T11:42:22",
"content": "Ah, the old days…I once had an Appple II and a cheesy drum rompler with midi input. The Apple II was just fast enough to spit out midi via its game port. It needed a nop-tuned machine code call which was j... | 1,760,372,421.057273 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/you-can-help-build-a-resin-printer-review-database/ | You Can Help Build A Resin Printer Review Database | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"resin printer",
"reviews"
] | Picking the best resin (SLA) printer is not an easy task. Every large and small 3D printer manufacturer offers a range of models covering many features that are backed by an equally extensive range of customer support. Although review sites and user feedback on forums can help with making a decision, especially for beginners it can feel like just a wild guess. Even for advanced users, it is a chore to stay on top of all the goings-on within the world of resin printers. This is why
[VOG] (VOGMan, formerly VegOilGuy) has started a resin printer review site
that asks for feedback from the community.
In the video, [VOG] explains the goal behind the data gathering, how to
use the form to submit
experiences with a specific resin printer, as well as any communications with the customer support behind these printers. Ultimately this should result in a pretty solid, community-sourced data set that can be used to figure out trends, pin-point issues with specific printers and make statements about which printer manufacturer offers the best customer support.
(thanks to [Dan] for the tip) | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583835",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T04:16:48",
"content": "Database for resins as well?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6585445",
"author": "VogMan",
"timestamp": "2023-01-27T16:06:10",
... | 1,760,372,420.624515 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/translating-and-broadcasting-spoken-morse-code/ | Translating And Broadcasting Spoken Morse Code | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur",
"continuous wave",
"cw",
"ham",
"key",
"morse",
"morse code",
"radio",
"verbal",
"voice",
"vox"
] | When the first radios and telegraph lines were put into service, essentially the only way to communicate was to use Morse code. The first transmitters had extremely inefficient designs by today’s standards, so this was more a practical limitation than a choice. As the technology evolved there became less and less reason to use Morse to communicate, but plenty of amateur radio operators still use this mode including [Kevin] aka [KB9RLW]
who has built a circuit which can translate spoken Morse code into a broadcasted Morse radio signal
.
The circuit works by feeding the signal from a microphone into an Arduino. The Arduino listens for a certain threshold and keys the radio when it detects a word being spoken. Radio operators use the words “dit” and “dah” for dots and dashes respectively, and the Arduino isn’t really translating the words so much as it is sending a signal for the duration of however long each word takes to say. The software for the Arduino is provided on
the project’s GitHub page
as well, and uses a number of approaches to make sure the keyed signal is as clean as possible.
[Kevin] mentions that this device could be used by anyone who wishes to operate a radio in this mode who might have difficulty using a traditional Morse key and who doesn’t want to retrain their brain to use other available equipment like a puff straw or a foot key. The circuit is remarkably straightforward for what it does, and in the video below it seems [Kevin] is having a blast using it. If you’re still looking to learn to “speak” Morse code, though,
take a look at this guide which goes into detail about it
.
Thanks to [Dragan] for the tip! | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583696",
"author": "Kevin Loughin",
"timestamp": "2023-01-25T00:23:33",
"content": "Thanks for posting. I’ve had several comments from hams who’s physical limitations do indeed impede upon their enjoyment of their favorite mode. They were excited about this project getting them b... | 1,760,372,420.867835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/generating-pal-video-with-a-heavily-overclocked-pi-pico/ | Generating PAL Video With A Heavily Overclocked Pi Pico | Dave Rowntree | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"dma",
"pal",
"PIO",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rp2040",
"video"
] | Barely a week goes by without another hack blessing the RP2040 with a further interfacing superpower. This time it’s the turn of the humble
PAL standard composite video interface
. As many of us of at least a certain vintage will be familiar with, the Phase Alternate Line (PAL to friends) standard was used mainly in Europe (not France, they used SECAM like Russia, China, and co) and Australasia, and is a little different from the
much
earlier NTSC standard those in the US may fondly recollect. Anyway, [Fred] stresses that this hack isn’t for the faint-hearted, as the RP2040 needs one heck of an overclock (up to 312 MHz, some 241% over stock) to be able to pull off the needed amount of processing grunt. This is much more than yet another PIO hack.
The dual cores of the RP2040 are really being pushed here. The software is split into high and low-level functions, with the first core running rendering the various still images and video demos into a framebuffer. The second core runs in parallel and deals with all the nitty-gritty of formatting the frame buffer into a PAL-encoded signal, which is then sucked out by the DMA and pushed to the outside world via the PIO. There may be a few opportunities for speeding the code up even more, but [Fred] has clearly already done a huge amount of work there, just to get it working at all. The PIO code itself is very simple but is instructive as a good example of how to use multiple chained DMA channels to push data through the PIO at the fastest possible rate.
Beyond the Pico PCB, the only extra hardware needed was a resistor-ladder DAC implemented on a solderless breadboard. [Fred] needed a couple of goes to get the correct DAC resistor values, the first version was built on a small prototyping PCB, but unfortunately, the peak voltage was only 1 V, so it was necessary to build a second version (hence the breadboard) to get it to the correct 1.25 V.
We’ve covered video hacks on diminutive hardware many a time, even going into some details of the various standards, like this piece on just
why is NTSC so odd
? But as time marches on,
video standards
have gone through vast changes to get to where we are now.
"High-resolution" 164×125 colour composite PAL video using just a passive resistor DAC on an
@Raspberry_Pi
#pico
. Only a smidge of an overclock at 241%.
Code at
https://t.co/pORMOgmkcq
pic.twitter.com/Him694i2hP
— Fred (@theguruofthree)
January 22, 2023
via Adafruit. | 19 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583646",
"author": "just passing",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T23:10:22",
"content": "PAL isn’t that different from NTSC, and indeed variations of PAL exist that have NTSC’s timing and colourburst frequency. The only real innovation of PAL was that the polarity of the colour signal fl... | 1,760,372,420.68887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/lanna-factory-makes-you-work-for-your-lampshade/ | Lanna Factory Makes You Work For Your Lampshade | Navarre Bartz | [
"Art",
"home hacks"
] | [
"human powered machines",
"human-powered",
"lamp",
"lampshade",
"thailand",
"traditional",
"yarn"
] | While you could 3D print a lampshade, there’s something to be said for having a more active role in the process of creating an object. [THINKK Studio] has made
custom lampshades as easy as riding a bike
.
The Lanna Factory was inspired by the cotton ball string lamps sold by vendors in Thai flea markets. Bangkok-based [THINKK Studio] wanted to build a device to let anyone have a hand (and feet) in making a custom lampshade without any experience. Five spools of thread are routed through a “glue case” and onto a spindle holding a lampshade mold. Pedals control the wrapping speed and the location on the shade being wrapped is controlled with a hand wheel on the table.
Once the glue dries, the shade can be removed from the mold and fitted with the appropriate hardware. Giving the user control over the process means that each lampshade will be unique and the final product will mean that much more to the person who made it.
If you’re thinking this would be cooler in carbon fiber, than maybe you should checkout the
X-Winder
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583506",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T19:45:50",
"content": "i once made a lamp shade out of 2 coat hangers and used printer paper. bent the coat hangers into two parallel circles and appropriate connecting bits. to attach the paper, i had to slit it a little bit ... | 1,760,372,420.804994 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/hackaday-low-power-challenge-begins-today/ | Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge Begins Today | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Misc Hacks",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"challenge",
"hackaday.io",
"low power"
] | How low can you go? The
2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge
is about doing the most with the least juice – bang for the power-budget buck, if you get our drift. And with three $150 gift certificates from Digi-Key on the line, you’ll be able to keep your projects going forever. The Challenge runs until March 21st, but with low-power, the devil is often in the details, so get started today!
More and more projects need to run on their own power, and more often than not, that means getting by without access to a wall plug. This contest is to encourage your designs that run on solar, small batteries, and generally energy harvested from wherever you can get it. But the power generation mechanism is taking the back seat here – we want to see what you can do with a few good electrons. Surprise us with your maximum minimalism!
Honorable Mention Categories
While the three big prizes go to the best projects in open judging, we’ve come up with a few sub-categories to inspire you. (And if we get enough good entries in these honorable mention categories, we’ll probably have to come up with some additional prizes.)
Sensible Sensors
How much sweet, sweet environmental monitoring can you get done on your power budget? Extra points here for wireless, especially because it’s harder to pull off within a low-power constraint.
Artful Art
There’s no reason that low-power and high-concept need to be at odds. Whether blinking, bleeping and blooping, or just being cool, this category rewards the most beauty per milliwatt.
Battery Buster
We sometimes see projects that run for ten years or more on paper, but are hamstrung by finding a cell with low enough self-discharge to run that long. If your project is going to beat the shelf-life of the batteries it’s designed around, it’s a battery buster.
Perpetual Motion
Moving things around in the real world isn’t cheap. This category is for the projects that produce the most physical movement for the least power. In this household, we obey the laws of thermodynamics, but we’d still like to see how much physical motion you can generate on a tight power budget.
Just How Low?
Measuring very tiny currents or extremely low duty cycles due to sleep modes can be challenging. But you need to know to go low. This category is for measurement methods and devices specifically for low power applications.
Rules and Inspiration
To enter the contest,
create a Hackaday.io project
and use the pull-down menu to submit it to the Challenge. You’re on your way.
We’re looking for the most efficient projects out there, but we’re also interested in being able to make one ourselves, so be sure to document everything as well as you can. Photos, videos, and even graphs can help. Quantifying ultra-low-power builds can be an art in itself, hence the honorable mention category, so don’t scrimp on the measurement details either.
We’ve seen a lot of low-power hacks over the years, but a few still stick out as our favorites. One that ticks
all
of the boxes is [Ted Yapo]’s
TritiLED project
. From tailoring LED choice to match human eye color response to diving deep into optimal pulse widths to make the most of a coin cell’s electron load, this project is amazing. (We have had one running for four years now on our bedside.)
TritiLED
EZ Spin Motor
The Newt
ESP8266 Power Meter
In terms of maximum movement, we’re impressed by [lasersaber]’s long-running efforts to keep things spinning: his
most-recent rotor design
draws only 150 nanoamps and should keep turning for longer than any of us will be around. Magnetic bearings are the secret, but he’s also shown that you can
get by with a much simpler setup
. Could you make this into a clock? We’d love to see it!
On the measurement side, we love [Daniel]’s
ESP8266-based power meter
, because it gives you all the stats you need, including time spent in sleep mode. It also extrapolates out to how much runtime you’d get from a given battery. Cool!
Or maybe this is your excuse to try out a new low-power part that you’ve always wanted to experiment with. E-paper? Those
fun Sharp transflective displays
? Substituting a
more appropriate wireless technology
than WiFi for your IoT sensor’s data? This is your chance to break out and try something new.
Thanks again to Digi-Key for sponsoring! | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583527",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T20:18:58",
"content": "I’m in.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6583528",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T20:20:34",
... | 1,760,372,421.434487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/old-ham-wisdom-leads-to-better-aluminum-painting/ | Old Ham Wisdom Leads To Better Aluminum Painting | Al Williams | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"aluminum",
"metalworking",
"painting"
] | When [bdk6] tried painting aluminum for electronic projects, he found it didn’t tend to stay painted. It would easily scratch off or, eventually, even flake off. The problem is the paint doesn’t want to adhere to the aluminum oxide coating around the metal. Research ensued, and he found an article in an old ham radio magazine about a technique that he could adapt to get
good results painting aluminum
.
Actually, paint apparently adheres poorly, even to non-oxidized aluminum. So the plan is to clean and remove as much aluminum oxide as possible. Then the process will convert the aluminum surface to something the paint sticks to better. Of course, you also need the right kind of paint.
The key ingredients are phosphoric acid and zinc phosphate. Phosphoric acid is found in soft drinks, but is also sold as a concrete and metal prep for painting. The zinc phosphate is part of a special paint known as a self-etching primer.
Cleaning takes soap, elbow grease, and sandpaper. The next step is a long soak in the phosphoric acid. Then you apply a few coats of self-etching primer and sand. Once it is all set, you can paint with your normal paint. That’s usually epoxy-based paint for [bdk6].
Of course, you can also
dye aluminum while anodizing it
. Soldering aluminum
also has its challenges
. | 50 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583354",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T16:43:12",
"content": "“…even to non-oxidized aluminum.”That’s because there is no “non-oxidized aluminum.” Oxides form much too quickly to ever do anything with “bare” aluminum. The surface will be aluminum oxide.",
"parent... | 1,760,372,422.657951 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/broken-genes-and-scrambled-proteins-how-radiation-causes-biological-damage/ | Broken Genes And Scrambled Proteins: How Radiation Causes Biological Damage | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"damage",
"dna",
"hydroxl",
"ionizing",
"non-ionizing",
"protein",
"pyrimidine",
"radiation",
"radical",
"reactive oxygen species",
"thymine",
"uv",
"UV-B",
"x-ray"
] | If decades of cheesy sci-fi and pop culture have taught us anything, it’s that radiation is a universally bad thing that invariably causes the genetic mutations that gifted us with everything from Godzilla to Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish. There’s a kernel of truth there, of course. One only needs to look at pictures of what happened to Hiroshima survivors or the first responders at Chernobyl to see extreme examples of what radiation can do to living tissues.
But as is usually the case, a closer look at examples a little further away from the extremes can be instructive, and tell us a little more about how radiation, both ionizing and non-ionizing, can cause damage to biochemical structures and processes. Doing so reveals that, while DNA is certainly in the crosshairs for damage by radiation, it’s not the only target — proteins, carbohydrates, and even the lipids that form the membranes within cells are subject to radiation damage, both directly and indirectly. And the mechanisms underlying all of this end up revealing a lot about how life evolved, as well as being interesting in their own right.
A Radical Proposal
Strangely enough, the main target for ionizing radiation in the cell isn’t any of the usual suspects like DNA or protein, but something quite unexpected: water. It makes sense when you think about it; on average, 70% of each cell is made up of water molecules, so it’s by far the largest target in terms of volume. Water absorbs most of the energy transferred to cells by radiation, whether in the form of photons — gamma rays, X-rays, cosmic rays, and ultraviolet light — or particles — alpha rays and beta rays, speeding neutrons, etc. And the changes that this energy transfer induces in water molecules can be responsible for dramatic biological effects.
When a water molecule is struck by an ionizing event, it leaves behind a positively charged species and a free electron. Both of these are quite reactive, and set off a cascade of reactions that can result in the production of free radicals, which are basically molecules that have an unpaired electron. The primary free radical that results from the ionization of water is the hydroxyl radical, which is one hydrogen and the oxygen from the original water molecule, with an unpaired electron on the oxygen. Hydroxyl radicals and related products of ionizing events are known collectively as reactive oxygen species, or ROS.
Thanks to that unpaired electron, hydroxyl radicals are so reactive that they’re virtually guaranteed to react with something within the diameter of only two water molecules from the ionization event, a very small distance indeed. That’s pretty bad news, because what the hydroxyl really wants is to hook up with a proton so it can be plain old water again, and it doesn’t care where it gets that proton from. That can spell doom for something like DNA, which is mainly composed of the five-carbon sugar deoxyribose; when a hydroxyl radical pulls a proton off this sugar, it leaves a lesion on the backbone of the DNA double helix that makes it prone to breakage.
No matter what the target is, biological damage that results from radiation-induced oxidative stress is called indirect damage, since the energy of the original radiation is transferred through the intermediary of free radicals. It’s estimated that 70% to 80% of radiation damage is indirect damage, which again makes sense because of the amount of water in a cell.
Holes In Bones
Biological macromolecules can also incur direct damage from radiation, and depending on the target, the results can be catastrophic. This can result in much of the same kind of damage that oxidative stress reactions cause, except without the limitation imposed by the narrow window of opportunity that hydroxyl radicals have to act. What’s more, because of the way DNA is packed in cells — each cell in your body has over a meter of DNA; to pack it all in, it’s wound tightly around proteins called histones — it’s likely that an incident photon of ionizing radiation can cause more than one lesion on a small stretch of DNA. This is compounded by the actual structure of DNA — despite the simplified cartoons, DNA isn’t a ladder, but rather a double helix with opposite strands actually in very close proximity to each other — which makes it highly likely that direct radiation will result in a double-strand break in DNA. The information-containing bases inside the double helix are also subject to direct radiation damage.
While DNA gets a lot of attention, it isn’t the only potential target for direct damage from radiation, nor is it necessarily the most important one. Proteins are also subject to damage, sometimes visibly so.
Recent experiments
have actually shown the physical track of high-energy X-rays as they passed through samples of bone, showing up as a series of tiny holes where the radiation destroyed collagen, a tough, fibrous protein found in structural tissues. The damage caused by the X-rays is thought to have been amplified to some degree by the mineral crystals of calcium and phosphorus in the bone, resulting in damage beyond the original path of the radiation. Although non-structural proteins, like enzymes, were not studied here, it can be assumed that they’d suffer the same kind of damage from direct radiation, with the same kind of amplification being possible.
Direct radiation damage to a piece of fish bone. The sample on the right was demineralized, so the larger holes on the left suggest calcium and phosphorus crystals present in intact bone somehow amplify the damage. Source: Sauer, K., Zizak, I., Forien, JB.
et al
. Primary radiation damage in bone evolves via collagen destruction by photoelectrons and secondary emission self-absorption.
Nat Commun
13
, 7829 (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34247-z
Bind-ed By The Light
It’s not just ionizing radiation that causes direct damage to biological macromolecules. As anyone who has ever had a sunburn knows, ultraviolet light can cause quite a lot of damage too. While DNA is actually quite efficient at protecting itself from UV damage — most of the energy in UV is just converted to heat by DNA — some of the UV slips through to the information-coding bases inside the double helix. Here it can form what’s known as pyrimidine dimers, where adjacent pyrimidine bases — thymine (T) and cytosine (C) — become bonded together covalently. This happens when light in the UV-B range strikes the carbon-carbon double bonds in the ring structure of the pyrimidine bases. The result is that the two adjacent bases are joined together through a four-carbon ring, called a cyclobutane ring:
Thymine dimers are formed when two adjacent “T” bases are bound together by UV-B light. This puts a kink in the sugar-phosphate backbone of that section of DNA.
When a dimer forms, it introduces a conformational “kink” in the DNA backbone, designated by the “R — R” in the diagram. Normally, thymine (T) on one strand of the DNA double helix binds with adenine (A) on the other strand, but the formation of a dimer leaves those A residues unmatched. The whole thing is a messy situation that presents a number of challenges to the cell.
First is the problem of DNA replication. Normally, an enzyme called DNA polymerase rides along the length of a DNA strand, unzips it, and makes an exact copy of both strands. The kink induced by a thymine dimer makes it hard for DNA polymerase to move down the strand, potentially slowing down replication or even stopping completely at the lesion. Luckily there are variants of DNA polymerase that have evolved to deal with thymine dimers; unfortunately, they tend to be a bit error-prone, stuffing any old base in the growing DNA strand rather that the pair of adenines it should. This results in changes to the genetic code in the new strands of DNA, which can be a very bad thing indeed.
There’s also a problem with transcription, which creates the messenger RNA (mRNA) template that’s used to direct protein synthesis. The enzyme that directs this is called RNA polymerase, which can also stall at the kink produced by thymine dimers. This can result in truncated mRNA templates, with potentially disastrous results if they end up being transcribed into partial-length proteins. There’s a lot that can go wrong with a cell thanks to a little UV light.
The Repair Squad
Ironically, though, the fact that thymine dimers can form so easily — some estimates are that 50 to 100 thymine dimers form
every second
human skin is exposed to sunlight, a tanning bed, or even
the UV light needed to cure nail polish
, it seems — may have been the evolutionary pressure needed to build the biochemical machinery needed to fix these lesions. A whole host of DNA repair enzymes, called photolyases, have evolved to fix thymine dimers and other radiation-induced damage to DNA, especially in plants, which are obviously constantly challenged by ultraviolet light. Photolyases are interesting because they’re literally solar-powered — they contain an “antenna complex” consisting of cofactors that can absorb light at the blue end of the spectrum and in turn transfer electrons into the dimers to break them apart.
Photolyases are evolutionarily ancient; they can be found in almost every organism stretching back to the earliest bacteria. Humans and most other mammals have evolved an additional repair pathway, called nucleotide excision repair, to deal with thymine dimers; essentially, it recognizes the backbone kink and enzymatically clips a section on either side out of the DNA strand, which is immediately filled in by a team of enzymes.
It’s easy to say that nothing good can come from either ionizing or non-ionizing radiation acting on biological tissue; just looking at the tracks left in bone by X-rays certainly supports that. But radiation damage, especially to DNA, is a double edge sword. Yes, most lesions that aren’t repaired can potentially cause problems, up to causing lethal cancers. But the damage caused by radiation has also been a major driver of the mutations that power evolution, and as such is pretty much responsible for what life has become over the last couple of billion years. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583328",
"author": "Fat Slob",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T15:55:46",
"content": "> photons — gamma rays, X-rays, cosmic rays, and ultraviolet light — or particles > — alpha rays and beta raysHUH? At screwl they taught us photons are particles.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,372,422.015772 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/lithium-sulfur-battery-cycle-life-gets-a-boost/ | Lithium Sulfur Battery Cycle Life Gets A Boost | Navarre Bartz | [
"Battery Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"battery",
"battery chemistry",
"battery research",
"electric vehicle battery",
"electrochemistry",
"lithium",
"lithium sulfur",
"lithium sulphur",
"research",
"sulfur"
] | Lithium sulfur batteries are often touted as the next major chemistry for electric vehicle applications, if only their cycle life wasn’t so short. But that might be changing soon, as a group of researchers at Drexel University has
developed a sulfur cathode capable of more than 4000 cycles
.
Most research into the Li-S couple has used volatile ether electrolytes which severely limit the possible commercialization of the technology. The team at Drexel was able to use a carbonate electrolyte like those already well-explored for more traditional Li-ion cells by using a stabilized monoclinic γ-sulfur deposited on carbon nanofibers.
The process to create these cathodes appears less finicky than previous methods that required tight control of the porosity of the carbon host and also increases the amount of active material in the cathode by a significant margin. Analysis shows that this phase of sulfur avoids the formation of intermediate fouling polysulfides which accounts for it’s impressive cycle life. As the authors state, this is far from a commercial-ready system, but it is a major step toward the
next generation of batteries
.
We’ve covered the elements
lithium
and
sulfur
in depth before as well as an
aluminum sulfur battery
that could be big for grid storage. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583204",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T12:55:53",
"content": "This dates back to Feb. 2022. Maybe a newer status would be good to have: has anyone else be able to reproduce their enormous claims ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,422.387892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/24/bend-it-like-a-carpenter/ | Bend It Like A Carpenter | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"woodworking"
] | We’ve always known, in theory, there are ways to bend wood, but weren’t really clear on how it worked. Now that we’ve seen
[Totally Handy]’s recent video
, we’ve learned a number of tricks to pull it off. Could we do any of them? Probably not, any more than watching someone solder under a microscope means you could do it yourself with no practice. But it sure made us want to try!
All of the techniques involve either water or steam, but we were fascinated with the cuts that make the wood almost into a flexible mesh. There are several tricks you can pick up, too, if you watch carefully. In “wordless workshop” form, there’s no real audio or text, just watching this guy make some really interesting wood pieces.
It looks like you could do some of this with pretty ordinary tools, although he does use a table saw, a router, and a few types of sanders. There isn’t anything too exotic, although we weren’t entirely clear on how the steam tube worked. If you have a cheap CNC machine, those usually can do a pretty good job on wood, and we wondered if you couldn’t pull off some of these tricks that way, too.
We love projects made with wood that
look like they were impossible
to make. Don’t forget wood as a construction material.
Combined with 3D printing
and other techniques, it can make some impressive things. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583069",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T09:17:44",
"content": "There is no wood",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6583072",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T09:20:02",
"content": "…o... | 1,760,372,421.886385 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/arduino-is-out-to-rocket-launch/ | Arduino Is Out To (Rocket) Launch | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"model rocket launcher",
"rocket launcher"
] | It looks like an ordinary toolbox, but when you open up the
Arduino Launch Control System
, you’ll find a safe method for triggering model rocket launches. The system uses two separate power supplies. Both must be on for a successful launch and one requires a key. To trigger a 10-second countdown, the operator must hold down two buttons. Releasing either button will stop the countdown.
Besides safety, the controller tracks mission elapsed time and can read weather information from a few sensors. A good-looking build and we like the idea of building inside a toolbox for this sort of thing.
Towards the end of the post, there are some ideas for improving the build, like using a consolidated weather sensor, using a larger screen, and a bigger, more capable controller. It seems like more I/O would be useful,
Model rocketry isn’t as rigorous as launching a crew, but there were a few things that could improve the overall system safety. For example, the launch buttons could provide both normally open and normally closed contacts to guard against switch failure. In other words, if you see both inputs from one switch on or off for more than a tiny moment during switching, you can assume the switch has failed and put the system in a fail-safe mode. Of course, a switch failure in the off position isn’t a hazard, just an inconvenience. But a switch failure in the active position could allow an inadvertent launch. Granted, it would require something jamming the remaining switch for the entire 10-second countdown, but still. Arduinos are pretty reliable, but for a real rocket system, you’d probably have redundancy, and the software would do periodic checks to guard against things like memory corruption. For example, NASA has a relatively succinct
list of requirements
. But some of this is overkill for a model rocket launcher.
We’ve seen
many takes on this kind of project
. Of course, like everything else these days, you can just use
your smartphone
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6583200",
"author": "muratduran41",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T12:42:31",
"content": "I am using this producthttps://www.projehocam.com/urun/arduino-uno-r3-klon-usb-chip-ch340/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6583675",
"... | 1,760,372,421.935099 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/the-tale-of-the-final-evga-gpu-overclocking-record/ | The Tale Of The Final EVGA GPU Overclocking Record | Dave Rowntree | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"bga",
"evga",
"gpu",
"NVIDIA",
"overclocking",
"rework"
] | It’s not news that EVGA is getting out of the GPU card game, after a ‘little falling out’ with Nvidia. It’s sad news nonetheless, as this enthusiastic band of hardware hackers has a solid following in certain overclocking and custom PC circles. The
Games Nexus
gang decided to fly over to meet up with the EVGA team in Zhonghe, Taiwan, and
follow them around a bit as they tried for one last overclocking record
on the latest (unreleased, GTX4090-based) GPU card. As you will note early on in the video, things didn’t go smoothly, with their hand-lapped GPU burning out the PCB after a small setup error.
The fun parts of the video show some behind-the-scenes details of the EVGA GPU operation, including some sections of BGA reworking which are pretty informative (but we’d like more detail, thanks!) showing that even with only a handful of AD102 Silicon available and a few prototype PCBs, even letting out the magic smoke is not necessarily the end of the show.
But why hand-lap the die? Apparently, the surface is pre-curved outwards, so that when it warms up under load, the die surface ends up flat, making the best contact with the thermal interface surface of the cooler. But [biso biso] uses liquid nitrogen for their overclocking speed records, and that has the opposite effect, with the extreme cooling (about -90 Celsius) causing the die to flex differently, and ‘crack’ the thermal paste, ruining the thermal contact with the cooling media. Lapping the die back to flat, apparently reduces this problem.
On the rework side of things, (14:45 in the video) they needed to remove the lapped GPU from the blown card using a standard IR rework station. The technician waited for the moment all the GPU balls were molten, before quickly whipping away the smoking chip with a vacuum pickup. Next, it was thoroughly cleaned and brushed with flux whilst sitting on a preheater. After hand-tinning the pads, it’s ready for the re-balling jig, and given a sprinkling of fresh balls, before a trip through the oven to fix them in place. Finally, after ultrasonic cleaning, it was ready for testing on a socketed development card. Once a test pass was achieved, the GPU was mounted onto a suitably prepared donor PCB, likely using the same reflow station seen earlier (but that was not shown,) it’s a simple process, but a skilled one that the repair team does all the time, making it look effortless. We’d sure break a sweat trying to do this!
Think all this PC overclocking, just for a short-lived record is somewhat pointless? How about an
overclocked TI-84
instead?
And, an earlier video with a tour of the EVGA shop:
Thanks to [Simon] for the tip! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582843",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T03:09:53",
"content": "I owned an EVGA video card.Very average copy of a NVIDEA ref board, died young. They were on the ‘never again’ list.‘Nothing of value was lost.’",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,422.151861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/diy-custom-earplugs-for-pennies-per-pair/ | DIY Custom Earplugs For Pennies Per Pair | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"ear plugs",
"earplugs",
"silicone"
] | Hearing is one of our most precious senses, and yet many take their hearing for granted, exposing themselves to loud noises that do lasting damage. [Jonathan Levi] of The Next Level does no such thing, at least not anymore. He’s even gone so far as to have custom acrylic earplugs made, which he carried around for two years, finally had them tweaked to be perfect, and promptly lost them. Rather than shell out another $150-$200 for another pair,
[Jonathan] decided to see if he could make some himself
.
While it’s true that [Jonathan] got a head start by asking the earplug company for the STLs they created back when he was fitted, he goes through the ways that one could mold and then scan one’s ears at home for not a lot of money. There are even kits for squirting that quick-setting goo into your ear to get just the right shape. Once you’ve got the ear canal positives, some quick photogrammetry work with your phone camera and a lazy Susan should be enough to get a model going in Blender.
[Jonathan] had the good sense to label left and right on the 3D printed mold, and furthermore added some small 3D printed screws that are color-coded to help him keep them plugs straight, and give him something to grab on to when it’s time to take them out. Be sure to check out the build video after the break. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582732",
"author": "punkdigerati",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T00:21:04",
"content": "I’ve only ever used soft earplugs, are acrylic or 3d printed ones comfortable?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6582821",
"author": "Ha... | 1,760,372,422.082958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/running-cray-os-and-unicos-on-your-own-cray-simulator-instance/ | Running Cray OS And UNICOS On Your Own Cray Simulator Instance | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cray"
] | The Cray series of super computers have been pretty much symbolic for high-powered computing since the 1970s, and to this day there’s a certain level of mysticism to them. Much of this is also helped by how rare these systems were and are today. Unlike Commodore, Apple and IBM PC systems which got sold by the truckload, Cray super computers and the much smaller workstation systems were and are significantly more rare. Despite or perhaps because of this [Andras Tantos] embarked on a decade-long quest to bring together what is left of the Cray legacy in the form of
the Cray Files
.
Part of this is a
Cray system simulator
that can be found on GitHub
as well as online
. This simulator allows you to run software written for the Cray
X-MP
(1982),
Y-MP
(1988),
J90
(1994) and
SV1
(1998), which covers essentially all major Cray systems after the Cray 1 and up till when Cray had become part of SGI in 1996. Described in the blog is the extensive archaeological work [Andras] had to undertake to unearth and resurrect these systems. Along the way he got a few lucky breaks, such as when finding two
UNICOS
CD images on Archive.org, and when people who used to work with Cray systems still had software and such lying around, along with the treasure trove of knowledge contained in their memories.
Although these Cray computer systems are as solidly obsolete as SGI and Sun’s once high-end systems of the 1990s are today, very few would have gotten a chance to use any of those systems, which makes it even more important that they are preserved. As an ongoing project, [Andras] is asking for anyone who might be able to fill in some of the remaining blanks to contact him.
[Heading photo: Cray X-MP serial number 302 being assembled (Credit: Andy Gelme)] | 38 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582136",
"author": "Jim st",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T10:03:11",
"content": "I thought these required a Sun front end. Will try to get it going as I love emulations like.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6582815",
"aut... | 1,760,372,422.322147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/reading-data-from-a-cd-with-a-microscope/ | Reading Data From A CD, With A Microscope | Jenny List | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"cd",
"digital audio",
"microscope"
] | There was a time when electronic engineering students studied the audio CD, for all its real-world examples of error correction and control systems. There’s something to be found in the system still for young and old though, and thus we were intrigued when we saw [Peter Monta]
reading the data from a CD using a microscope
.
CDs encode data as so-called pits and lands in a spiral track across a metalised surface, with a transition from pit to land signifying a logic 1 and a missing transition signifying a 0. Reading a section of the raw data is achieved in the first part of his write-up,
but in the next installment
he goes further into retrieving more data through stitching together microscope pictures and writing some code to retrieve data frames. He’s not quite at the audio playback stage, but he’s planning in the future to spiral-track a full image to rip an entire disc.
There are plenty of CD drives around to read audio the conventional way, but the techniques here still find a use where less ubiquitous media has to be read. In the last decade for example
there was an effort to read the BBC Domesday Project from the 1980s
, as it became clear that few of the original readers survived in working order. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582090",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T09:02:53",
"content": "I wonder if something similar could be applied to magnetic storage discs (or tapes). How could one obtain an image of magnetic state of a whole media with enough precision to later decode its content by so... | 1,760,372,422.207102 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/minimalist-homebrew-hardware-recreates-arcade-classics/ | Minimalist Homebrew Hardware Recreates Arcade Classics | Robin Kearey | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"atmega",
"breakout",
"diy handheld",
"snake"
] | Classic video games might look primitive by today’s standards, but the addictive gameplay of
Breakout
or
Pac-Man
remains fun no matter what decade you were born in. Keeping the relevant hardware running becomes harder as the years pile up however, so when [Michal Zalewski] decided to introduce his kids to classic video games, he didn’t dig up his old game consoles. Instead, he decided to
recreate several games from scratch using the bare minimum amount of hardware needed
.
The first project is a copy of
Snake
, the arcade classic that millennials will recognize from their Nokia phones. [Michal] made an initial version using an ATmega328P with an 8×8 LED matrix as a display, but quickly upgraded the hardware to a 16×16 display powered by an ATmega644, and added an LED seven-segment display to show the score. All parts are simply soldered onto a piece of prototyping board, with no need for any custom PCBs or enclosures.
Game #2 is a side-scrolling space shooter called
Dino in Space
. This game runs on an ATmega1284 and uses a 4×20 character text display, allowing simple graphics as well as an on-screen score counter. Similar hardware, although with a 128×64 graphic OLED screen, powered game #3, a
Breakout
/
Arkanoid
clone called
Blockbuster 7000
.
[Michal]’s blog post is filled with interesting tips for real-life game programming. For example, a true random number generator creates a rather odd-looking bunch of asteroids in space – tweaking the distribution to make it a bit more uniform greatly enhances the game’s playability. Source files for all games are available on [Michal]’s website, and include a description of the exact hardware setup needed for each game.
Recreating
Snake
on custom hardware is sort of a rite of passage for microcontroller hackers, as you can see in
many
impressive
projects
.
Breakout
-style games can also be implemented on various hardware platforms, including
analog oscilloscopes
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6581958",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T05:33:26",
"content": "The games look really balanced and well thought through, i bet the kids love these devices :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,422.247836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/hackaday-links-january-22-2023/ | Hackaday Links: January 22, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial intelligence",
"building automation",
"cartoon",
"charging",
"DALL-E",
"darpa",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"GPT-3",
"hackaday links",
"Hummer",
"Level 2",
"machine learning"
] | The media got their collective knickers in a twist this week with the news that
Wyoming is banning the sale of electric vehicles in the state
. Headlines like that certainly raise eyebrows, which is the intention, of course, but even a quick glance at the proposed legislation might have revealed that the “ban” was nothing more than a non-binding resolution, making this little more than a political stunt.
The bill
, which would only “encourage” the phase-out of EV sales in the state by 2035, is essentially meaningless, especially since it died in committee before ever coming close to a vote. But it does present a somewhat lengthy list of the authors’ beefs with EVs, which mainly focus on the importance of the fossil fuel industry in Wyoming. It’s all pretty boneheaded, but then again, outright bans on ICE vehicle sales by some arbitrary and unrealistically soon deadline don’t seem too smart either. Couldn’t people just decide what car works best for them?
Speaking of which, a man in neighboring Colorado might have some buyer’s regret when he learned that
it would take five days to fully charge his brand-new electric Hummer at home
. Granted, he bought the biggest battery pack possible — 250 kWh — and is using a standard 120-volt wall outlet and the stock Hummer charging dongle, which adds one mile (1.6 km) to the vehicle’s range every hour. The owner doesn’t actually seem all that surprised by the results, nor does he seem particularly upset by it; he appears to know enough about the realities of EVs to recognize the need for a Level 2 charger. That entails extra expense, of course, both to procure the charger and to run the 240-volt circuit needed to power it, not to mention paying for the electricity. It’s a problem that will only get worse as more chargers are added to our creaky grid; we’re not sure what the solution is, but we’re pretty sure it’ll be found closer to the engineering end of the spectrum than the political end.
In tangentially related news, energy costs are much on the minds of the taxpayers of Wilbraham, Massachusetts, where the local high school’s interior lights have been ablaze for the better part of two years now, because
nobody can figure out how to turn them off
. The story goes that when Minnechaug Regional High School was built about a decade ago, the school board specified a fancy building automation system that would be able to turn the building’s 7,000 light fixtures on and off automatically, to save energy. That worked fine up until April of 2021, when the software running the system barfed. It was a “good news, bad news” thing; on the one hand, the lights were still on, meaning students didn’t have to work in the dark. But now every light in the huge building stays on all day, every day, which has just got to gall the taxpayers who thought they were paying for a green system. The school board tried to get the original installer to fix the issue, but the business had changed hands a few times and wasn’t able to make repairs. A quote for $1.2 million to gut and replace the system was a non-starter, so they decided to cobble together bits and pieces of new hardware to fix things, but the dreaded “supply chain issues” keep pushing the fix back. The fix described in the linked story seems a bit heavy-handed; seems like one of us could probably have fixed this with a little reverse engineering, and for far less money.
Judging by the number of “Artificial Intelligence” articles that pop up in our feeds these days with
Terminator
references, the fear of the machines coming alive and killing us all in one fell swoop is very much on people’s minds. And while a few minutes on Twitter is enough for you to yearn for SkyNet to just launch all the nukes and get it over with, it looks like we’re going to have to wait a bit, if
DARPA’s idea of battlefield AI is any indication
. It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency once enlisted the help of a group of Marines to train the AI model on a robot to detect approaching forces. All the Marines were able to avoid detection using such proven battlefield tactics as crawling while covered by a cardboard box, pretending to be a tree, and somersaulting for 300 meters. Granted, this training session seems like it was several years ago, so it’s likely that the models have been tuned up since then. But still, in a contest between humans and machines, we’ll put our money on the treachery and creativity of the human mind any day of the week.
And finally, we all know how spookily accurate
The Simpsons
has been at predicting the future. But even for a show that premiered over 30 years ago, there was at least
one cartoonist who beat them to the punch
by a long margin. Get a load of this 1923 political cartoon, which predicted that by 2023, cartoonists would have “all our work done by electricity.” It depicts a “cartoon dynamo” powering an “idea dynamo,” which uses an IV bottle full of ink and something like an X-Y plotter to churn out political cartoons automatically. It’s not too far off of what’s possible with GPT-3 and DALL-E, but judging by what resulted from the prompt “one-frame political cartoon about DALL-E,” it seems like cartoonists still have as much job security as Marines. | 48 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6581702",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T00:29:08",
"content": "The school with the lighting problem … don’t they have breakers somewhere in the power delivery system? I know they aren’t intended as switches, but still.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,372,422.553983 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/pcb-pen-holder-is-over-the-top/ | PCB Pen Holder Is Over The Top | Al Williams | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"pcb enclosure",
"pen holder"
] | Like most of us, [Arnov] used a spare coffee mug to hold pens on his desk. But there has to be a better way, right? Surely if you build a better mouse trap… or, in this case, a pen holder. He’d be the first to admit that he might have gotten a little carried away, but
the result is an attractive pen holder
made from PCB material, one of which is actually an active circuit board.
The pen holder has some power management, as there’s a rechargeable battery that allows it to charge devices such as a smartphone or an embedded board. The power is also available for LEDs in the pen holder. The PCBs are bound together with 3D printed brackets.
The non-functioning PCBs still have patterns etched to make them more interesting looking. This is one of those things that isn’t technically a big deal, but we really liked the look of it, which was quite professional. We’ve seen PCBs
used as enclosures before
, but making the pattern and improving light transmission by removing the solder mask were nice touches.
If you don’t like the idea of making enclosures from PCB material, don’t forget they can
form other components
, as well. Clever arrangements can build resistors, capacitors, and inductors not to mention exotic transmission line elements. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6581550",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T21:23:24",
"content": "In the first minute of the video he explains the active circuit supplies USB power in addition to the LED lighting.I stopped watching at that point as that was not explained in... | 1,760,372,422.700482 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/off-grid-van-build-uses-3d-scanning-for-smarter-planning/ | Off-Grid Van Build Uses 3D Scanning For Smarter Planning | Donald Papp | [
"home hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"conversion",
"diy",
"off grid",
"Photogrammetry",
"van"
] | Folks who refurbish and rebuild vans into off-grid campers (especially with the ability to work in them remotely) put a fantastic amount of planning and work into their projects. [Rob]
meticulously documented his finished van conversion
and while he does a ton of clever work, we especially liked how he shows modern tools like photogrammetry can improve the process.
Photogrammetry helped turn a bunch of photos from different angles into a textured 3D model with accurate dimensions.
[Rob] used a camera and photogrammetry software to
3D scan the van inside and out
. The resulting model means that CAD tools can better assist with the layout and design phase. This is an immense help, because as [Rob] points out, an empty van is
anything but
a hollow box on wheels. Every surface is curved, none of the sides are identical, and there frankly isn’t a right angle to be found anywhere. When every little scrap of space counts, it’s important to have an accurate reference.
Of course, mapping the work are was just the beginning. It took six months, but he turned a Volkswagen Crafter cargo van into a slick off-grid camper capable of remote work.
The full series of videos is on his site
, but you can also watch the video highlights, embedded below.
The photogrammetry was done with
Meshroom
, and if you’d like to know more,
we’ve previously explained different 3D scanning methods and how they can help
with design work like this. | 44 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6581414",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T18:20:32",
"content": "I wonder what are the bonuses he could not explain on the video (last comment of the video). I suspect it is some hidden compartments.The build is a bit on the heavy side with all this wood. And I hope for hi... | 1,760,372,423.160304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/designing-a-simpler-prosthetic-finger/ | Designing A Simpler Prosthetic Finger | Navarre Bartz | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed prosthetic",
"medicine",
"Prosthesis",
"prosthetic hand",
"prosthetic kit"
] | Prosthetic limb design is an area where desktop manufacturing has made huge strides, but there’s always room for improvement. For example, take a look at [Ian Davis] and his attempts to design a
simpler prosthetic finger
.
[Davis] favors his
aluminum partial hand prosthetic
for its strength, but because it was scratch built for his particular situation, it isn’t easy to recreate for someone else. To this end, he has started working on a simpler design that might be applicable in the future for people who want to build their own prosthetics. With less than ten major components per finger including the replaceable TPU fingerpads, this is a major step toward that end.
According to [Davis], one of the more exciting parts of the build is that while this hand has a more limited feature set, he was able to get it closer to the size of his natural hand. Because of the durability problems he’s experienced for day-to-day use of plastic prosthetics, he is having the next iteration 3D printed in stainless steel for further testing.
If you want to see some more interesting prosthetic designs, checkout the
Kid Who Designed His Own Prosthetic Arm
or this
Skull Lamp Prosthetic Eye
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6581560",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T21:30:45",
"content": "The fingers could have the ability to glue on fashion finger nails.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6581570",
"author... | 1,760,372,423.928222 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/listening-to-a-flashlight-lunar-flashlight/ | Listening To A Flashlight — Lunar Flashlight | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"gnu radio",
"telemetry"
] | If you’ve been looking for a practical example of using GNU Radio, you should check out [Daniel Estévez’s] work on decoding telemetry captured
from the Lunar Flashlight cubesat
. The cubesat is
having some trouble
, but the data in question was a recording from the day after launch. We aren’t sure what it would take to eavesdrop on it live, but the 3-minute recording is from a 20-meter antenna at 8.4 GHz.
The
flowgraph for GNU Radio
isn’t as bad as you might think, thanks to some judicious reuse of blocks from other projects to do some of the decoding. The modulation is PCM/PM/bi-phase-L. Nominally, the speed is supposed to be 48,000 baud, but [Daniel] measured 48,077.
Spacecraft telemetry often uses the
CCSDS
(Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) standard, and the encoding matches the standard. One oddity is that midway through the recording, the carrier frequency jumps over 120 kHz. [Daniel] speculates that the satellite was correcting its frequency to lock to an uplink carrier from a ground station.
Once the data is unpacked, you have to interpret it, and [Daniel] does a good job using Jupyter. He doesn’t know the complete format of all the telemetry, but he makes some assumptions that seem sound. We have to wonder how the analytics compare with JPL’s official ground station.
The last time we checked in with Daniel, he did the same trick for
Voyager I
. If you want to try GNU Radio — even if you don’t have any radio hardware — check out our
introduction
. | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582631",
"author": "Shirley Marquez",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T21:29:55",
"content": "The bit rate of serial ports on microcontrollers (and in many other contexts) is derived from a clock that is divided down from some master clock in the system. It’s quite common for it not to be ... | 1,760,372,422.782152 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/smart-bike-suspension-tunes-your-ride-on-the-fly/ | Smart Bike Suspension Tunes Your Ride On The Fly | Dan Maloney | [
"Machine Learning",
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"Arduino Nano 33 BLE",
"bicycle",
"bike",
"Edge Impulse",
"machine learning",
"model",
"suspension"
] | Riding a bike is a pretty simple affair, but like with many things, technology marches on and adds complications. Where once all you had to worry about was pumping the cranks and shifting the gears, now a lot of bikes have front suspensions that need to be adjusted for different riding conditions. Great for efficiency and ride comfort, but a little tough to accomplish while you’re underway.
Luckily, there’s a solution to that, in the form of
this active suspension system
by [Jallson S]. The active bit is a servo, which is attached to the adjustment valve on the top of the front fork of the bike. The servo moves the valve between fully locked, for smooth surfaces, and wide open, for rough terrain. There’s also a stop in between, which partially softens the suspension for moderate terrain. The 9-gram hobby servo rotates the valve with the help of a 3D printed gear train.
But that’s not all. Rather than just letting the rider control the ride stiffness from a handlebar-mounted switch, [Jallson S] added a little intelligence into the mix. Ride data from the accelerometer on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense was captured on a smartphone via Arduino Science Journal. The data was processed through Edge Impulse Studio to create models for five different ride surfaces and rider styles. This allows the stiffness to be optimized for current ride conditions — check it out in action in the video below.
[Jallson S] is quick to point out that this is a prototype, and that niceties like weatherproofing still have to be addressed. But it seems like a solid start — now let’s see it teamed up with
an Arduino shifter
. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582659",
"author": "Bogus",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T22:21:24",
"content": "Absolutely brilliant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6582759",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": "2023-01-24T00:59:32",
"content": "I could... | 1,760,372,423.687968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/ask-hackaday-do-kids-need-3d-printers/ | Ask Hackaday: Do Kids Need 3D Printers? | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d printing",
"education"
] | Mattel holds a fond place in most people’s hearts as they made many of the toys we played with as kids. You might remember the
Thingmaker
, which was essentially an Easy Bake Oven with some goop and molds that let you make rubbery creatures. But back in 2016, Mattel had an aborted attempt to bring 3D printing to kids under the Thingmaker label. You can see a promo video of the device below. You might not have seen one in real life, though. The product was delayed and eventually canceled. Even so, we frequently see press releases for “kids printers” and we’ve been wondering, should this be a thing?
Definitions
Let’s define kids. Of course, at some age, a kid interested in 3D printing should have a 3D printer in the same way they might have a guitar if they are interested in playing the guitar. But you probably don’t give your 9-year-old a guitar and hope it catches on. So by kid, in this context, we really mean pre-teen or earlier. We also aren’t even considering resin printers as they are, today, messy and toxic. We’re talking garden-variety FDM printing with relatively safe materials like PLA.
You might think no one thinks you should have your 9-year-old operating a 3D printer. Really? Toybox, recommends its 3D printer for children 5 and up, with adult supervision. Granted, with adult supervision it is possible, but we aren’t sure that’s very wise.
The Pros
Of course, we are always in favor of things that give kids something technical to spark their imagination. A 3D printer can teach many things: patience for slow prints and jams, electronics, mechanics, polymer chemistry, and 3D modeling. All of those could lead to marketable job skills down the road.
There are worse hobbies a kid could have. However, there are some negatives, too. Like many things, your approach is everything. You can help a kid form a lifelong interest or completely ruin any chance of them wanting to do any sort of technology.
The Cons
Printers are not as safe as you’d like. There is a very hot tip, maybe a heated bed, and possibly fumes and chemicals. Of course, with adult supervision, none of that is a deal breaker. Possibly a larger problem is maintenance. Cheap consumer-grade printers tend to need work. Things wear out or need lubrication. Belts wear or need tightening. Now, granted, if Mom’s a Hackaday reader, she can probably do all of these things, but it is going to quickly erode a child’s excitement for the process.
Another issue is expectations. Think of telescopes. A kid sees a telescope in a big box store and imagines using it to see the amazing rings of Saturn and the spot on Jupiter. But with a cheaply-made 2.5 inch lens, you are lucky to see smudges of planets, badly twinkling stars, and — maybe — slightly better views of the moon. How many astronomy buffs have been disenchanted by a cheap first telescope?
Printers for kids are usually not expensive industrial-quality machines. They aren’t going to print in multiple materials and colors. They are slow and won’t print very large models. There are only so many little plastic widgets you can produce before it gets boring.
So What is the Answer?
We’ve often said, having a 3D printer is not far away from being like owning a drill press. Not everyone has a drill press, but if you have one, no one thinks twice about it. Just like kids take shop classes, we think 3D printer classes have their place either in schools, libraries, or hackerspace camps.
Think of the analogy to programming. Everyone these days uses a computer, and kids who know something about how computers work probably have a competitive advantage, but that doesn’t mean you teach every kid software engineering in C++ using real-time operating systems. In the future, understanding how 3D printing works might be of value, assuming 3D printing in 20 years looks anything like 3D printing today. But knowing how to level a bed on an Ender 3 is probably not that helpful.
One way to address this is to have kids design things and have them made via a third-party service or even a parent. Tools like Tinkercad are very easy for kids to pick up and it unleashes their creativity. With a little coaching, learning what to expect from 3D printing and what kind of things to avoid when making 3D-printed parts is probably a skill for the future. Older kids that might be in a shop class, might very well take a supervised 3D printing class. But only a few kids really need their own 3D printer and the ones that do could probably make do with a normal printer, not one specifically aimed at kids.
If you are contemplating running a class for kids, you might find the video from a seasoned “Innovative Arts” teacher in the video below.
Over to You
So what do you think? What’s the youngest kid you’ve had operating a 3D printer? How did it go? Would you try younger or not? Tell us what you think in the comments. If you think your school or library can’t afford a 3D printer, there are
options
although commercial printers aren’t much more expensive these days. You can actually work with kids
without much hardware
at all. | 72 | 34 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582482",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T18:17:29",
"content": "One little note here. I use my printer maybe once a week for different household chores. My little 1 year old LOVES the printer. Every time it’s on she wants to just watch it go for easily 5 minutes (anyone ... | 1,760,372,424.381181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/vintage-electronics-hack-chat/ | Vintage Electronics Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, January 25 at noon Pacific for the
Vintage Electronics Hack Chat
with
Keri Szafir
!
The world of the hardware hacker is filled with smells. The forbidden but enticing waft of solder smoke, the acrid bite of the Magic Blue Smoke, the heady aroma of freshly greased gears, the unmistakable smell of hot metal — they all tell a story, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
But the smell inside a piece of vintage electronics? Now that’s a complicated story indeed. It might be the wax of the old capacitors, the resinous scent of well-baked resistors, the enameled wire in transformers, or just the smell of the hot glass of the vacuum tubes. Whatever it is, once you smell it, you’ll never forget it
For some of us, that first whiff starts a lifelong passion for vintage gear. Keri Szafir knows quite well what it’s like to be bitten by the vintage bug, so much so that she goes by “The Vacuum Tube Witch” over on
her YouTube channel
. Her projects include repairs and restorations of vintage amps and radios, and even
new builds with old tubes
. She’ll stop by the Hack Chat to talk about vintage electronics, tube
hoarding
collecting, and even her new interest in retro display technologies. Where there’s a tube, there’s a way!
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 25 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582455",
"author": "Greg",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T17:40:19",
"content": "I’m hoping to find out late this year what a high performance 300B SET amp would “smell” like, assuming I can afford to keep it supplied with crazy expense tubes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,423.015212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/knitting-clock-makes-you-a-scarf-for-next-year/ | Knitting Clock Makes You A Scarf For Next Year | Navarre Bartz | [
"clock hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"fiber arts",
"knitting",
"knitting clock",
"scarf",
"textiles",
"time",
"wool",
"yarn",
"yarn work"
] | Time got a little wibbly wobbly during these pandemic years. Perhaps we would’ve had a more tangible connection to it if [Siren Elise Wilhelmsen]’s
knitting clock
had been in our living rooms.
Over the course of a year, [Wilhelmsen]’s clock can stitch a two meter scarf by performing a stitch every half hour. She says, “Time is an ever forward-moving force and I wanted to make a clock based on times true nature, more than the numbers we have attached to it.” Making the
invisible visible
isn’t always an easy feat, but seeing a clock grow a scarf is reminiscent of cartoon characters growing a beard to organically communicate the passage of time.
We’d love some more details about the knitting machine itself, but that seems like it wasn’t the focus of the project. A very small run of these along with a couple prototypes were built, with a knitting grandfather clock now occupying the lobby of The Thief hotel in Oslo.
If you’re looking for more knitting machines, checkout this
Knitting Machine Rebuild
or
Knitting 3D Models Into Stuffies
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582396",
"author": "That kid",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T16:42:29",
"content": "Stitch in time!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6582419",
"author": "Mojo",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T16:59:56",
"content": "I guess comp... | 1,760,372,423.071783 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/nasa-lunar-probe-finds-out-its-not-easy-being-green/ | NASA Lunar Probe Finds Out It’s Not Easy Being Green | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"artemis program",
"infrared",
"inGaAs",
"lunar exploration",
"regolith",
"thruster"
] | If you’re a space fan, these are very exciting days. There’s so much happening overhead that sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with the latest news. Artemis I just got back from the Moon, the International Space Station crew are dealing with a busted Soyuz, SpaceX is making incredible progress with their Starship architecture, CubeSats are being flung all over the solar system, and it seems like every month a new company is unveiling their own commercially-developed launch vehicle.
Lunar Flashlight
So with everything going on, we wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard about
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission
. The briefcase-sized spacecraft was launched aboard a special “rideshare” flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket back on December 11th — tagging along with two other craft heading to our nearest celestial neighbor, the Japanese Hakuto-R lander, and a small rover developed by the United Arab Emirates. There was a time when a launch like that would have been big news, but being that it was only the second of seven launches that SpaceX performed in December alone, it didn’t make many headlines.
But recently, that’s started to change. There’s a growing buzz around Lunar Flashlight, though unfortunately, not for the reasons we’d usually hope. It seems the diminutive explorer has run into some trouble with its cutting-edge “green” propellant system, and unless the issue can be resolved soon, the promising mission could come to an end before it even had a chance to start.
Shining a Light on Lunar Ice
After decades of false starts, it seems like NASA is finally serious about refreshing the Moon’s supply of American flags. But while the Apollo missions only saw astronauts make short jaunts to the lunar surface, the Artemis program promises to establish a long-term human presence on and around the Moon. To pull it off, the space agency needs as much information as possible about the lunar environment, hence the notable uptick in reconnaissance missions recently.
Lunar Flashlight is one such mission. Its goal is to search for and quantify water ice deposits on the Moon, specifically in the permanently shadowed craters located in the the polar regions. An accurate map of these ice deposits, once confirmed by a subsequent robotic mission, will almost certainly influence the decision making process when it comes time to establish the location for
humanity’s first lunar outpost
. A local supply of ice means the facility could produce its own oxygen and rocket propellants, not to mention provide vital drinking water to astronauts.
Originally Lunar Flashlight was to be
equipped with a large solar sail
, which would have been used to reflect 50 kW of sunlight towards the surface of the Moon to facilitate visual and spectral observations. From an altitude of 20 kilometers (12 miles), it was estimated the spacecraft could have lit up a spot 400 meters (1,300 feet) in diameter.
As you might expect, the final version of the hardware ended up being considerably less fanciful. It will still swoop down to an altitude of 20 km, but the solar sail has been replaced with four lasers operating at different infrared wavelengths: 1.064, 1.495, 1.85, and 1.99 µm.
The beams will illuminate a 35 m (115 ft) spot of the lunar surface, with the reflected light being collected by a mirror and directed into a indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) photodetector. The basic principle is that ice is expected to absorb some of the laser light, while the highly reflective regolith will bounce more of it back to the spacecraft. The hope is that this reflectivity data, when combined with existing observations, will finally confirm the location and density of surface water ice.
Of course, it’s all moot if the Lunar Flashlight spacecraft never makes it to the Moon.
In Thrust We Trust
As of the latest update from NASA
, ground controllers have noted that three out of the four thrusters on the spacecraft are under-performing. This would seem to hint at some sort of systemic issue rather than a problem with the thruster design or control hardware, which is where things start to get interesting.
Lunar Flashlight is the first spacecraft to use a
new “green” propellant known as AF-M315E
outside of low Earth orbit. Not only is this new propellant less toxic than the hydrazine traditionally used, it’s more efficient: it offers 12% higher specific impulse (ISP) and is approximately 50% denser, so you can pack more thrust into the same sized tank. For performance reasons alone, the new propellant was worth looking into — the lower toxicity, which will make handling craft on the ground easier and safer, is really just an added bonus.
Lunar Flashlight uses four tiny thrusters to maneuver.
Now, there’s no question that AF-M315E works. The
Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM)
spent over a year in orbit testing the new propellant and quantifying its performance, and the formula had been studied for years by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) on the ground. While true it has never been used this far from Earth before, there’s no obvious reason that should have an impact on its behavior. Yet the fact remains that, if three out of four thrusters are experiencing the same issue, the this points to a problem with the propellant itself.
Or at least, the system that delivers the propellant. It’s worth noting that the Lunar Flashlight’s propulsion system, which was co-developed by NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center and the Space Systems Design Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, utilized
3D printing to produce a one-piece propellant manifold
with integrated fluid channels. While undoubtedly a more mass efficient way to produce the component, it seems likely that inspecting it for debris or foreign material would be more difficult when compared to traditional plumbing.
Though the reason has yet to be determined, NASA says that ground controllers are currently operating on the assumption that something is clogging the propellant lines of the spacecraft, and that running the thrusters for longer may clear up the blockage. As it so happens, in early February the spacecraft will need to start making larger course corrections as it approaches the Moon, so ground controllers will get their opportunity to open up the throttle very shortly. We’ve got our fingers crossed. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582347",
"author": "David Given",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T15:31:35",
"content": "Just to add to the article:> …the lower toxicity, which will make handling craft on the ground easier and safer, is really just an added bonus…Ground handling also becomes _much cheaper_. No need for ... | 1,760,372,423.985201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/inside-globus-a-soviet-era-analog-space-computer/ | Inside Globus, A Soviet-Era Analog Space Computer | Dan Maloney | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Space"
] | [
"analog computer",
"differential",
"globe",
"latitude",
"longitude",
"navigation",
"reverse engineering",
"Soyuz",
"Vostok"
] | Whenever [Ken Shirriff] posts something, it ends up being a fascinating read. Usually it’s a piece of computer history, decapped and laid bare under his microscope where it undergoes reverse engineering and analysis to a degree that should be hard to follow, but he still somehow manages to make it understandable. And the same goes for
this incredible Soviet analog flight computer
, even though there’s barely any silicon inside.
The artifact in question was officially designated the “Индикатор Навигационный Космический,” which roughly translates to “space navigation indicator.” It mercifully earned the nickname “Globus” at some point, understandable given the prominent mechanized globe the device features. Globus wasn’t actually linked to any kind of inertial navigation inputs, but rather was intended to provide cosmonauts with a visual indication of where their spacecraft was relative to the surface of the Earth. As such it depended on inputs from the cosmonauts, like an initial position and orbital altitude. From there, a complicated and absolutely gorgeous gear train featuring multiple differential gears advanced the globe, showing where the spacecraft currently was.
Those of you hoping for a complete teardown will be disappointed; the device, which bears evidence of coming from the time of the Apollo-Soyuz collaboration in 1975, is far too precious to be taken to bits, and certainly looks like it would put up a fight trying to get it back together. But [Ken] still manages to go into great depth, and reveals many of its secrets. Cool features include the geopolitically fixed orbital inclination; the ability to predict a landing point from a deorbit burn, also tinged with Cold War considerations; and the instrument’s limitations, like only supporting circular orbits, which prompted cosmonauts to call for its removal. But versions of Globus nonetheless appeared in pretty much everything the Soviets flew from 1961 to 2002. Talk about staying power!
Sure, the “glass cockpit” of modern space vehicles is more serviceable, but just for aesthetics alone, we think every crewed spacecraft should sport something like Globus. [Ken] did a great job reverse-engineering this, and we really appreciate the tour. And from the sound of it, [Curious Marc] had a hand in the effort, so maybe we’ll get a video too. Fingers crossed.
Thanks to [saintaardvark] for the tip. | 13 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6582221",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2023-01-23T12:33:06",
"content": "Wow fascinating and great to see. I really appreciate a proper write up, and [Ken] never disappoints. Video only needed if he can get something moving.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,372,423.289263 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/diy-capacitor-leakage-tester-with-a-professional-finish/ | DIY Capacitor Leakage Tester With A Professional Finish | Dave Rowntree | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"capacitor",
"diy instrument",
"leakage"
] | [Manuel Caldeira] has built a nice electronics work area that would be the envy of many, complete with an under-shelf rail of custom-built instruments that are specific to the needs of areas of electronics that [Manuel] is involved with. The highlighted project here is a
capacitor leakage tester
, which is very handy for sorting through piles of old parts looking for anything still within spec, or just verifying a part on a board is the culprit you suspect it is.
The thing is, certain types of capacitors have a limited life both in operation and in storage. Usually, we’re talking about electrolytics here, where the electrolyte solution can leak out or dry out, but also the passive oxide layer on the anode plate can deteriorate if the device is left unpowered for long periods — the oxide disintegrates, and the capacitor will start to leak current. Eventually, the breakdown can be bad enough for the capacitor to conduct so well that it overheats and the result can be a surprisingly violent experience. So, if you deal with capacitors a lot, especially electrolytics, then a leakage tester is a very good instrument to own.
We like [Manuel]’s construction method here, with custom PCBs nestled inside a simple bent aluminium enclosure. No need for a top or sides, as these, are intended to bolt underneath a shelf, and butt up against their neighbor. The front panel graphics are done in a simple but very effective manner, using printable sticker sheets, with a clear adhesive over-sheet. They certainly have a professional finish, and this is definitely a construction method worth considering.
For those a little unfamiliar with this important component, why not leap into some theory with this handy dive into the
simple parallel plate capacitor
? Next, may we suggest a little
overview of the different capacitor types
and how to best make use of them? | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6581256",
"author": "MartyK",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T14:42:14",
"content": "I would have opened the meter and obscured the movement info (“µA”, etc).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6581330",
"author": "Paul",
... | 1,760,372,423.216428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/22/wii-turned-expansion-card-for-broadcast-monitor/ | Wii Turned Expansion Card For Broadcast Monitor | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Nintendo Wii Hacks"
] | [
"broadcast video monitor",
"BVM",
"crt",
"trimmed",
"wii"
] | For the proper retro gaming aesthetic, plenty of gamers look to old CRT displays. Older games can look better on these displays because the original programmers took their visual characteristics into account. Finding a CRT from the 90s or early 2000s is one option, but an even better option is a broadcast video monitor (BVM) which were extremely high quality CRTs with some other features,
like the ability to install a Wii straight to an expansion port on the monitor itself
(
Nitter
).
These monitors were, as their name implies, made for broadcast TV productions. As such, they don’t have the typical video connections that might be found on a consumer unit. Instead, they used modular cards to interface with the monitor. Thanks to an open design for cards made for Sony monitors, [ShankMods] was able to make one for the Wii by “trimming” away the unnecessary parts of the console’s PCB and mapping its video and audio outputs to the slot connector.
While the Wii might not be everyone’s idea of retro, it was still a console that came out when plenty of people still had CRTs as their primary home television. It isn’t as necessary to have a CRT for a Wii as some of the older consoles, but it was very easily adaptable to this single-board design. If you don’t have a CRT and still want the CRT feel,
there are ways of retrofitting a more modern display to get this effect
, though.
Thanks to [Jonas] for the tip! | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6581231",
"author": "Sunoo",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T14:01:08",
"content": "The Wii doesn’t need a power cable, it gets power from the monitor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6581240",
"author": "Mojo",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,372,423.345566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/an-unexpected-amiga-network-interface/ | An Unexpected Amiga Network Interface | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Amiga 1200",
"clock port",
"raspberry pi"
] | The retrocomputer enthusiast has increasingly to grapple with not only runaway computer prices but the astronomical cost of vintage peripherals. A welcome solution in some cases comes from the Raspberry Pi, which has proved itself fast enough to emulate those add-ons for a lot less outlay. A good one comes from [
Niklas Ekström
], who’s made a Pi-based network adapter for the Commodore Amiga 1200. Better still it doesn’t hog the main expansion port or the PCMCIA slot, instead
it sits on the 1200’s rarely-used real-time-clock port
. Software wise it uses an updated version of
his earlier project for the Amiga 500
. It provides access to the Pi command prompt, as well as a SANA driver and a mounted filesystem.
While many of us view the Amiga from 2023 as a retro gaming platform, for those of us who used it at the time it was a desktop productivity machine on a more affordable budget than the Macintosh. At the time the thought of having a UNIX-like operating system running on a super-powerful co-processor in your Amiga would have been beyond our wildest dreams, but whether it provides enough now to make a 1992 machine compete on the desktop is debatable. Who wants to run Firefox from the Pi in an X server on the Amiga? | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580895",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T06:12:30",
"content": "“At the time the thought of having a UNIX-like operating system running on a super-powerful co-processor in your Amiga would have been beyond our wildest dreams [..]”Not only that, it would also seem like ... | 1,760,372,423.623064 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/all-your-keys-are-belong-to-keydecoder/ | All Your Keys Are Belong To KeyDecoder | Navarre Bartz | [
"lockpicking hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"house key",
"key",
"KeyDecoder",
"physical key",
"physical security",
"security"
] | Physical security is often considered simpler than digital security since safes are heavy and physical keys take more effort to duplicate than those of the digital persuasion. [Maxime Beasse and Quentin Clement] have developed a smartphone app that can
duplicate a key from a photo
making key copying much easier.
KeyDecoder is an open source Android app that can generate all the necessary
bitting info
to duplicate a key from just an image. Luckily for the paranoid among us, the image must be taken with the key laying flat without a keyring on an ISO/CEI 7810 ID-1 ID or credit card. A passerby can’t just snap a photo of your keys across the room and go liberate your home furnishings, but it still would be wise to keep a closer eye on your keys now that this particular
cat
hack is out of the bag.
The project’s GitHub page is awash in warnings that this tool is designed solely for “pentesters and security enthusiasts” to warn their friends and clients about the dangers of leaving their keys exposed. After learning about this tool, we wouldn’t be surprised if some in the audience start rethinking how they carry and store their physical keys from now on.
If you want to see some more hacks to duplicate keys, checkout
Copying High Security Keys With OpenSCAD And Light
and
Methods Of Copying High Security Keys
. | 56 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580752",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T03:07:18",
"content": "If the key can be generated from a single photo, a Bumpkey will probably open it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiUh_BjIsUg",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,372,423.784177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/floppy-photog-making-an-ir-filter-from-a-3-5-disk/ | Floppy Photog: Making An IR Filter From A 3.5″ Disk | Al Williams | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"dslr",
"full spectrum camera"
] | Sony used to sell digital cameras that recorded on actual floppy disks. We’ve come a long way, but [Mathieu] put a floppy in a digital camera recently for
an entirely different reason
. First, though, he had to modify the camera to work on the
full spectrum
, something he covered in an earlier video. You can see both videos, below.
As you might expect, he didn’t actually put an entire floppy inside the camera. He used the internal disk portion as an infrared filter to obtain some striking photos. In all honestly, the results were not as nice as what you get from a very expensive professional filter. But the pictures looked great and the difference was not as much as you’d expect compared to the cost difference.
The real work, though, is converting the camera to full spectrum as seen in the second video. A normal camera has an IR filter to prevent the sensor from seeing IR light. This prevents the image sensor from capturing things your eyes don’t see. The modification replaces the filter with a clear filter.
We’ve covered
this kind of conversion
before. You can even do it with a
Raspberry Pi
, if you like. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580675",
"author": "squirrel",
"timestamp": "2023-01-22T00:53:07",
"content": "This or using developed film. Its pretty common. Its how I’ve made a few filters for astrophotography.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6582111",
... | 1,760,372,423.84546 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/an-open-hardware-automatic-spinning-machine/ | An Open Hardware Automatic Spinning Machine | Dave Rowntree | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3030",
"arduino",
"ATMega2560",
"processing",
"spinning",
"textiles"
] | The team at the Berlin-based Studio HILO has been working on ideas and tools around developing a more open approach to small-scale textile production environments. Leveraging open-source platforms and tools, the team has come up with a simple
open hardware spinning machine
that can be used for interactive yarn production, right on the desktop. The frame is built with 3030 profile aluminium extrusions, with a handful of 3D printed, and a smidge of laser cut parts. Motion is thanks to, you guessed it, NEMA 17 stepper motors and the once ubiquitous Arduino Mega 2560 plus RAMPS 1.4 combination that many people will be very familiar with.
The project really shines on the documentation side of things, with the
project GitLab
positively dripping with well-organised information. One
minor
niggle is that you’ll need access to a polyjet or very accurate multi-material 3D printer to run off the drive wheel and the associated trailing wheel. We’re sure there’s a simple enough way to do it without those tools, for those sufficiently motivated.
We liked the use of Arduino for the firmware, keeping things simple, and in the same vein,
Processing
for the user interface. That makes sending values from the on-screen slider controls over the USB a piece of cake. Processing doesn’t seem to pop up on these pages too often, which is a shame as it’s a great tool to have at one’s disposal. On the subject of the user interface, it looks like for now only basic parameters can be tweaked on the fly, with some more subtle parameters needing fixing at firmware compilation time. With a bit more time, we’re sure the project will flesh out a bit more, and that area will be improved.
Of course, if you only have raw fibers, that are not appropriately aligned, you need a carder,
like this one maybe
?
Thanks [Daniel] for the tip! | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580597",
"author": "J. Samson",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T22:38:02",
"content": "Confusingly contradictory- you state that: “…you’ll need access to a polyjet or very accurate multi-material 3D printer to run off the drive wheel and …associated…”, but then correct yourself, saying: ... | 1,760,372,423.890477 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/robot-collects-ping-pong-balls-for-you/ | Robot Collects Ping Pong Balls For You | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"hackaday",
"robot",
"robots"
] | If you’ve ever played ping pong, table tennis, or beer pong, you know that it’s a struggle to hang on to the balls.
[MaximeMonsieur] has designed a robot to handle picking them up so you don’t have to.
The robot is specifically designed to pick up ultra-light ping pong balls. To that end, it has a large spinning paddle that simply wafts the balls into its collector basket at the rear. The robot gets around with a simple two-motor drive system, relying on skid-steering with a castor wheel at the rear. An Arduino Uno runs the show, and navigates the robot around with the aid of ultrasonic sensors to avoid crashing into walls.
Overall, the robot shows the benefits of designing for a specific purpose. Such a design would likely be far less successful with other types of heavier balls, but for ping pong balls, the spinning paddle collector works great. We can imagine the robot being put to good use between sets to pick up all the lost balls around a table tennis court.
We’ve seen other ball collecting robots before, too
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580528",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T19:43:20",
"content": "My aunt needs this. But then a heavier version, that can collect fallen walnuts from between grown grass.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6580627",
... | 1,760,372,424.103083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/irreproducible-accumulative-hacks/ | Irreproducible, Accumulative Hacks | Elliot Williams | [
"cnc hacks",
"Rants"
] | [
"cnc",
"newsletter",
"pen plotter",
"plotter"
] | Last weekend, I made an incredibly accurate CNC pen-plotter bot in just 20 minutes, for a total expenditure of $0. How did I pull this off? Hacks accumulate.
In particular, the main ingredients were a CNC router, some 3D-printed mounts that I’d designed and built for it, and a sweet used linear rail that I picked up on eBay as part of a set a few years back because it was just too good of a deal. If you had to replicate this build exactly, it would probably take a month or two of labor and cost maybe $2,000 on top of that. Heck, just tuning up the Chinese 6040 CNC machine alone took me four good weekends and involved replacing the stepper motors.
Oh yeah, dowels as end stops for lifting the pen
On Sunday night, I had all this stuff on hand, so for me it was free, fast, and the path of least resistance. But it’s an objectively horrible idea. The linear rail is holding a pen, although it is designed to hold hundreds of newtons of side-force. Consequently, it weighs a
lot
. You wouldn’t be able to strap it to your 3D printer chassis, which is normally a fantastic way to make a pen plotter. But I didn’t need to, and the CNC can swing weight like that around all day without even complaining.
The custom mounts? I designed it a couple years ago to hold the vacuum hose for the dust shoe. But because the CNC makes such a convenient platform for all kinds of hacks, I printed out five of them. So far, I’ve put on a laser head, a vinyl cutter, and now a pen plotter.
The entire effort in building the pen plotter consisted of drilling holes in a piece of thin scrap plywood and screwing things together. But while I was doing so, I was laughing because of how tremendously overkill it all was. Too heavy, too rigid, too noisy, and if I didn’t already have it all lying around, too expensive. It made me consider whether documenting some projects is simply worthless, because they’re fundamentally irreproducible.
But here we are, and I’m showing you the project. Why? Because I’m hoping it will inspire you to make a pen plotter with whatever you’ve got on hand. Even just taping a pen to the hot end of a 3D printer would make an easy start, but you’ll quickly run into two issues that the linear rail solved for me: holding the pen stiff in all directions except one, along which it floats freely with a little weight to hold the pen on the paper. I’m sure you can solve them, but I can’t tell you how, because I don’t know what you’ve got lying around. I don’t know what your stockpile of previous hacks looks like. In that sense, we’re all on our own with some hacks.
Of course there are STL files out there for a pen head that will fit your exact 3D printer model, so if that’s the way you want to go, you’re set. And I
love
reproducible hacks. But I think there’s something to learn from the irreproducible, accumulative, idiosyncratic hacks as well. What do you think?
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
! | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580445",
"author": "h2odragon",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T15:40:07",
"content": "I call it “Redneck Engineering” but there’s probably a slightly wider term for doing with what you have.Overkill, underkill, duct tape monstrosity that works once with someone holding it together: doesn... | 1,760,372,424.05905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/beehive-in-a-bottle/ | Beehive In A Bottle | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"bee",
"beekeeping",
"bottle",
"hive",
"honey",
"insulation",
"nature",
"plastic",
"tree"
] | One of the most common types of beekeeping hive is based around the Langstroth hive, first patented in the United States in 1852. While it does have some nice features like movable frames, the march of history has progressed considerably while this core of beekeeping practices has changed very little. But that really just means that beekeeping as a hobby is rife with opportunities for innovation, and
[Advoko] is pioneering his own modern style of beehive
.
In nature, bees like to live inside of things like hollowed-out tree trunks, so he has modeled his hive design after that by basing it around large inverted plastic bottles. Bees can enter in the opening at the bottle and build their comb inside from the top down. The bottles can be closed and moved easily without contacting the bees, and he even creates
honey supers
out of smaller bottles which allows honey to be harvested without disturbing the core beehive.There are a number of strategies to improve the bees’ stay in the bottles as well, such as giving them wooden skewers in the bottle to build their comb on and closing the bottles in insulation to help the hives regulate their temperature more evenly and to keep them dark.
He hopes this idea will help inspire those with an interest in the hobby who wouldn’t otherwise have the large amount of money it takes to set up even a few Langstroth-type hives. Even if you don’t live in a part of the world where the
Langstroth hive
is common, this system still should be possible to get up and running with a minimum of financial investment. Once you’ve started, though, take a look at some other builds which
augment the hive with some monitoring technology
.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! | 49 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580392",
"author": "Gordon",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T13:15:49",
"content": "Great presentation! (But I especially like the skateboard supporting the end of the board he is sawing!)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6580473",
... | 1,760,372,424.473151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/21/rc-car-gets-f1-style-drs-rear-wing/ | RC Car Gets F1-Style DRS Rear Wing | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"car",
"car hacks",
"drs",
"f1",
"formula 1",
"motorsport"
] | DRS, or the Drag Reduction System, has become a key part of Formula 1 in the past decade. [Engineering After Hours]
decided to implement the same system on an RC car instead.
The DRS system was implemented in Formula 1 to increase passing in the series. By moving a flap in the rear wing of the race cars, drag could be reduced, allowing a car to attain a higher top speed on the straights. The racing series limited the activation of the DRS wing to only cars following closely behind another. This artificially enabled them to gain a speed boost over the car in front to aid passing.
[Engineering After Hours] wanted to see if a tiny wing on a small RC car could work the same way. It would fundamentally come down to whether moving a tiny wing element would appreciably change the car’s drag or not. Naturally, on such a small scale, attaining high speeds would be necessary to detect much difference. At lower speeds, the difference in drag would likely be too negligible to notice.
The RC-scale DRS system fundamentally does work. With DRS engaged, flattening out the rear wing elements noticably reduced downforce at the rear. With the DRS not engaged, though, the rear wing on the car was creating so much downforce that the car was squatting at the rear and occasionally flipping end over end. [Engineering After Hours] didn’t get any top speed measurements, but estimated that the wing could potentially increase top speed by up to 7 mph with the DRS enabled.
We’ve seen [Engineering After Hours] bring other fun motorsport tech to RC cars before, too,
like this amazing fan car build
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580478",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T17:07:44",
"content": "Could possible speed improvement be quantified by measuring motor current and/or RPM?I know those additions would add weight and therefore affect top end speed, but they could ... | 1,760,372,424.565549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/3d-printed-triptych-shows-trio-of-ai-generated-images/ | 3D Printed Triptych Shows Trio Of AI-Generated Images | Tom Nardi | [
"Art",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ai art",
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"stable diffusion",
"TinyPICO",
"wall art"
] | Fascinated by art generated by deep learning systems such as DALL-E and Stable Diffusion? Then perhaps a wall installation like this phenomenal
e-paper Triptych created by [Zach Archer]
is in your future.
The three interlocking frames were printed out of “Walnut Wood” HTPLA from ProtoPasta, and hold a pair of 5.79 inch red/black/white displays along with a single 7.3 inch red/yellow/black/white panel from Waveshare. There are
e-paper panels out there with more colors available
if you wanted to go that route, but judging by the striking images [Zach] has posted, the relatively limited color palettes available on these displays doesn’t seem to be a hindrance.
Note the clever S-shaped brackets holding in the displays.
To create the images themselves, [Zach] wrote a script that would generate endless customized portraits using Stable Diffusion v1.4, and then manually selected the best to get copied over to a 32 GB micro SD card. The side images were generated on the dreamstudio.ai website, and also dumped on the card.
Every 12 hours a TinyPico ESP32 development board in the frame picks some images from the card, applies the necessary dithering and color adjustments to make them look good on the e-paper, and then updates the displays.
With the onboard 350 mAh battery, [Zach] says the frame will run for about 16 days. That’s pretty impressive given the relatively low capacity, so we imagine you could really get some
serious runtime from a pair of 18650s
. In the past we’ve even seen
e-paper wall displays use solar panels
to help stretch out their battery life, though we can see how tacking on some photovoltaic cells might impact the carefully considered aesthetics of this piece.
It’s a beautiful project, but according to [Zach], he’s starting to have some second thoughts about the images he’s showing on it. Like many of us, he’s
wondering about the implications of content generated by AI
, specifically how it can devalue the work of human artists. Thankfully loading the display up with new images is just a matter of popping in a new SD card, so we imagine the hardware itself will still be put to use even if the content itself is swapped out. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580361",
"author": "Hitomi",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T10:45:12",
"content": "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.–Jean Baudrillard (1994)What is AI generated “art” anyways?The present age – dominated by simulations, things that hav... | 1,760,372,424.52408 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/help-needed-on-thumb-image-rp2040-dma-hack-makes-another-cpu-core/ | RP2040 DMA Hack Makes Another ‘CPU Core’ | Dave Rowntree | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arduino",
"dma",
"ece4760",
"rp2040",
"virtual cpu"
] | [Bruce Land] of Cornell University will be a familiar name to many Hackaday readers, searching the site for ‘ECE4760′ will bring up many interesting topics around embedded programming. Every year [Bruce] releases yet more of the students’ work out into the wild to our great delight. This RP2040-based project is a bit more abstract than some previous work and shows yet another implementation of an older hack to utilise the
DMA hardware of the RP2040 as another CPU core
. While the primary focus of the RP2040 DMA subsystem is moving data between memory spaces, with minimal CPU intervention, the DMA control blocks have some fairly complex behaviour. This allows for a Turing-complete CPU to be implemented purely with the DMA hardware and a sprinkling of memory.
The method ties up three of the twelve DMA channels, and is estimated to have a similar performance to ‘an Arduino’ but [Bruce] doesn’t specify which one of the varied models that could be. But who cares anyway? Programming the CPU is a matter of leveraging the behaviour of the hardware, which is all memory mapped and targetable by the DMA. For example, the CPU can waggle GPIO pins by using the DMA to write values to the peripheral address space. The basic flow can be seen in the image above. DMA0 is used as the program counter, which points DMA1 to an array of DMA control blocks, a sequence of which codes for
some
of the ‘opcodes’ of the CPU model. DMA0 chains to (hands over control to) DMA1 which reads the control blocks and configures itself accordingly. DMA1 performs whatever data move is programmed, chains to DMA2, which in turn reprograms the DMA0 program counter to point to the next block in the list to be executed by DMA1.
By also using DMA1 to modify subsequent DMA1 control blocks (that’s self-modifying code happening there!) the system can implement more useful operations such as addition, logical operations, and conditional branching.
Transport-triggered operations
in certain shadow registers enable atomic set, reset, and XOR operations. All clever stuff, and a wonderful student project to have been involved with. [Bruce]
points out a paper
(using the Pi2) from the
WOOT 2015 workshop
which might offer a better explanation of this whole process.
If you’re still wondering who [Bruce Land] is and want a bit of a primer on some of these topics, then
check out our previous coverage
. If this theoretical stuff is a bit heavy then some of the projects have a more practical bent, such as
the critical task of colour-sorting skittles
.
Thumbnail image: Thomas Glau,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580289",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T05:51:58",
"content": "Only thing I can see arising from all this additional complexity is it making auditing hardware for security harder. Does DMA need to be Turing complete?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,372,424.782944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/wormhole-coffee-table-takes-woodworking-to-another-dimension/ | Wormhole Coffee Table Takes Woodworking To Another Dimension | Navarre Bartz | [
"home hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"coffee table",
"furniture",
"lathe",
"led coffee table",
"science",
"table",
"woodworking",
"wormhole"
] | While some people are happy with a simple coffee table to hold their snacks while watching Star Trek reruns, others want their furniture to go where no furniture has gone before. [Olivier Gomis] has definitely satisfied this need with his
Wormhole Coffee Table
. [YouTube]
The complicated shape and curvature of a (3D representation of a) wormhole isn’t easy to create, but [Gomis] managed to carve one without the aid of a CNC or 3D printer. Starting with walnut planks and maple veneer laminated together, he created a grid stackup to replicate the common representation of spacetime as a 2D grid. Using various arrangements of these grids, he built up the central section of the wormhole which looked like a low poly vase before he put it on the lathe for turning.
The lathe work on this build is simultaneously impressive and terrifying. Turning down the central portion of the wormhole required working between two large spinning squares of walnut, which [Gomis] admits was “scary.” Multiple custom jigs were required to keep parts flat and deal with the extreme curvature of the inside of the wormhole’s opening. If that weren’t enough, if you look down the wormhole, he has installed a set of LED lights that show the spacetime grid continuing on to parts unknown.
If you’d like to see another impressive wormhole, check out this
Amazing STARGᐰTE With DHD And Infinity Mirror Wormhole
. | 20 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580202",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T00:33:52",
"content": "That’s glorious. Nice work. The lighting effect is a nice extra touch.And he’s a braver guy than me on the lathe.I’d lose a beer or two down the wormhole pretty quick though, so a glass top would come alon... | 1,760,372,424.72694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/one-piece-tank-chassis-pushes-print-in-place-to-new-heights/ | One-Piece Tank Chassis Pushes Print-in-Place To New Heights | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"print in place",
"tank",
"tracks",
"treads"
] | What’s better than 3D printing a tank chassis with working tracks? How about
3D printing the entire thing, moving parts and all, as a single piece
? That’s [3D Honza]’s
PiPBOT-1
, and it’s the culmination of a whole lot of design work.
The design prints flat, then folds up into its final form.
[3D Honza] has been sharing progress pictures and videos on
his Twitter account
, and just recently released the first version of his design. Version 1.0 is just the mechanics, but he’s already at work on version 2.0 which includes the ability to attach servos to drive the treads. At this writing, the design is
currently downloadable directly from his site
and includes CAD files, which is great to see.
One part of the design we’d like to draw your attention to is the chunky hinge that doubles as a kind of axial structure making up the body. This allows the tank to print in an unfolded state with the treads and wheels flat on the print bed. After printing, the tank gets folded up a bit like a taco to attain its final form. It’s a clever layout that allows the unit to be printed according to a filament-based 3D printer’s strengths, printing as a single piece that transforms into a small tank chassis, complete with working treads, in a few seconds.
When it comes to vehicles and bots,
whether to choose wheels or tracks
is a serious question our own Lewin Day has explained thoroughly. And for those of you who choose tracks, this design is great for small devices but don’t forget
it’s always possible to go bigger when it comes to 3D-printed tanks
. | 30 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580152",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2023-01-20T22:04:51",
"content": "Very nicely done. I’ll bite and see if my crummy printer can still do stuff like this.Downloadable only for 48 more hours! Grab it while you can",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,424.900783 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/extrusion-for-the-pottery-shop/ | Extrusion For The Pottery Shop | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"clay",
"extruder",
"extrusion",
"pottery"
] | Extrusion is a process for forming materials by forcing them through an opening, which can allow for complex shapes. Aluminum extrusion beams are what most of us are probably thinking of, but plenty of other things are made from extruded material like pipe, heat sinks, and even macaroni. Extrusion can also be used for modelling clay to create uniform sections of rounded clay as a starter material for producing other pottery, and [Justins Makery]
has built a custom extruder to do just that
.
The build starts with welding together a metal frame to hold the press, and uses a wooden wagon handle to drive the extruder. The handle can be moved up or down the frame to increase the range of motion thanks to a custom bearing and slots cut into the frame’s post. The piston mechanism itself is built out of aluminum plate with a cylinder loosely fitted to it to allow for easy cleaning, and the top of the piston uses a loose-fitting plastic cap cut out of an old cutting board.
With everything in pace, the extruder can make cylinders of clay of any desired thickness thanks to swappable dies. While it doesn’t produce the end result of the workshop directly, it definitely helps to provide the potter with clay of uniform dimensions used for building other pieces of pottery, much like how
aluminum extrusions are used to build all kinds of other things as well
.
Thanks to [Zane] for the tip! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580178",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2023-01-20T23:37:19",
"content": "I remember the playdoh toy of the same design, nice to see it scaled up",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6580418",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
... | 1,760,372,424.603574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/machining-with-electricity-explored-in-the-hack-chat/ | Machining With Electricity Explored In The Hack Chat | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"ecm",
"EDM",
"electric discharge machining",
"electrochemical machining",
"Hack Chat",
"machining",
"metal working"
] | As a Hackaday reader, it’s safe to assume you’ve got a better than average understanding of electricity. There’s also an excellent chance you’re familiar with machining, and may even have a lathe or old mill in the workshop. But combining the two, and actually machining a piece of metal with electricity, isn’t something that many home gamers can boast first-hand experience with.
Daniel Herrington
Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an interest. To help answer the burning (or at least, sparking) questions from the community, CEO and founder of Voxel Innovations
Daniel Herrington stopped by this week’s Hack Chat
to talk about the cutting edge of both electric discharge machining (EDM) and the closely related field of electrochemical machining (ECM). While his company uses the technology to produce components at incredible scales, Daniel got his start tinkering in the garage like so many of us, enabling him to provide both a professional and hobbyist prospective on the technologies.
Naturally, the first big question to be addressed was the difference between EDM and ECM. Put simply, electric discharge machining uses high-voltage to literally blast away material from the workpiece. The resulting finish is generally rough, and progress through the material tends to be slow, but it’s relatively simple to implement.
In contrast electrochemical machining could be thought of as a sort of reverse electroplating process, as the material being removed from the workpiece is dissolved and transferred to the cathode — though in practice the flow of pressurized electrolyte keeps it from actually plating the negatively charged tool. ECM is a faster process than EDM and allows for an exceptionally smooth surface finish, but is considerably more challenging from a technical perspective.
Of the two, EDM is easier to
achieve in the home shop
.
So why use electricity to machine metal instead of traditional tools? Both ECM and EDM have a unique advantage: the tool never actually touches the piece being worked on. This obviously places less stress on the material than cutting, but also means the machine itself doesn’t need to be as mechanically rigid, the motors don’t need to be as strong, etc. The non-contact nature of ECM/EDM is especially compelling for hobbyists, as it means a cheap 3D printer can be repurposed to move the tool over the workpiece.
Unfortunately, hacking a 3D printer to move the tool around is perhaps the only aspect of ECM or EDM that could really be called “easy” from a hobbyist perspective. As Daniel explains, one of the biggest issues is that of tooling. If you’re doing EDM your electrode will be made of something like graphite or brass, which on the plus side isn’t terribly expensive and is fairly easy to work with. Unfortunately, the electrode is consumed during the process, so you’ll need to make a lot of them. As for ECM, the good news is that the cathode doesn’t get worn down while machining like in EDM. On the other hand, it needs to be made of something like stainless steel to survive the chemical processes at play. Producing tools for complex shapes can therefore become very expensive, and only makes sense in commercial applications if you can amortize the cost over many parts.
Of course, if we’re talking about a personal project, maybe you aren’t concerned about the time and effort involved in creating the ECM tooling. In that case, you’re biggest problem is going to be the electrolyte. There’s various specific mixtures used, but generally speaking you’re going to be running your tool through salt water. In fact, Daniel says Voxel usually uses sodium nitrate, which is commonly used for preserving food. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about that, but in practice, the corrosive liquid splashes all over the place as the tool moves around. If that wasn’t bad enough, electrolysis breaks down the salt water into hydrogen and oxygen — a potentially explosive combination. As an added bonus, if you try and do it with standard table salt, you’ll produce poisonous chlorine gas as well.
This homebrew ECM machine, put together by Cooper Zurad, shows incredible promise.
Several attendees in the Chat chimed in with their own stories about trying to wrangle ECM on the desktop, and it doesn’t sound pretty. No matter how you try and seal up the work area, the salt water gets into everything, rusting linear rails and shorting out electronics. All the while, you’ve got to make sure all of the gasses being generated are properly vented. But if you’re willing to put in the effort,
the results can be extremely impressive
.
The short version of all this is that pulling off EDM or ECM in the home shop is difficult, maybe even a bit dangerous, but certainly not impossible. Whether or not it makes sense to spend time chasing the ability to machine metal with electricity rather than just picking up an old Bridgeport from Craigslist is of course another story. Even in the commercial world, Daniel says the technology really only makes sense when you’re looking to produce thousands or even millions of parts. Of course, turn back the clock 20 years or so, and who could have imagined that hackers and makers would have personal 3D printers and laser cutters? Perhaps in the coming decades, EDM/ECM rigs will be a common a sight at the hackerspace as an Ender 3 is today.
Special thanks to Daniel Herrington for sharing his knowledge about this fascinating technology with the Hackaday community. We were also glad to see others chime in with their own success stories and projects — while there may only be one official host, that doesn’t mean others can’t share their relevant experience with the group. It was a great way to kick off a new year of Hack Chats, and we’re excited to talk with a whole new slate of hosts in 2023. If you’d like to host a Chat of your own,
simply fill out the application form
and let us know what you’d like to talk about.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the
transcripts posted to Hackaday.io
make sure you don’t miss out. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580075",
"author": "digitally$NUMB",
"timestamp": "2023-01-20T18:23:09",
"content": "Sodium nitrite, not nitrate is whats typically used as curing salt for meats. The nitrates potassium, sodium, and ammonium are oxidizers and used in blackpowder formulations, fertilizers, and explo... | 1,760,372,424.666323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/hackaday-podcast-202-cnc-monks-acrobot-bootleg-merch-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-megahex/ | Hackaday Podcast 202: CNC Monks, Acrobot, Bootleg Merch, And The Rise And Fall Of Megahex | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos stood around and marveled at machinery in its many forms, from a stone-cutting CNC to an acrobatic robot to an AI-controlled Twitch v-tuber. But before all of that, we took a look at the winners of our FPV Vehicle Contest, poured one out for Google Stadia, and Elliot managed to stump Kristina once again with this week’s What’s That Sound. Will you fare better?
Later, we drooled over an open-source smart watch, argued screen printing versus stenciling when it comes to bootleg Hackaday merch, and got into the finer points of punycodes.
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!
And/or
download it and listen offline
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 202 Show Notes:
News:
2022 FPV Contest: Congratulations To The Winners!
Stadia Says Goodbye With Bluetooth And Crap Game
What’s that Sound?
If you could figure out this week’s sound,
fill out this form
and maybe you’ll win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
A Medieval Gothic Monastery Built Using CAD / CAM
ZSWatch: This OSHW Smart Watch Is As DIY As It Gets
A Flex Sensor For A Glove Controller Using An LDR
Building Optical Flex Sensors
US4542291A – Optical flex sensor
Sensor Glove Translates Sign Language
Avoiding The Engineer-Saviour Trap
3D Printer Filament From Reel-to-Reel Audio Tapes
Recyclebot Digests Milk Jugs To Feed MakerBot
Robotic Acrobot Aces The Moves
Celebrating A Decade Of Bootleg Hackaday Merch
Wrencher SVGs
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Swap The Clock Chip On The Mac SE/30 With An ATTiny85
Megahex Will Give You Robo-Arachnophobia
Kirby Sucks, Literally
DIY Magnet Handling Tool Puts An End To Placement Errors
Kristina’s Picks:
Making The One Ring By Electroplating Gold On A 3D Print
An E-Ink Progress Bar For Your Unborn Child
Homebrew Telephone Exchange Keeps The Family In Touch, In The House And Beyond
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Punycodes Explained
AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580380",
"author": "Daniel Simu",
"timestamp": "2023-01-21T12:01:21",
"content": "Thanks so much for featuring the Acrobot, I’m excited to hear you even dug into my other works!It’s such an honor to be mentioned by the Hackaday podcast :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,424.827574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/20/cassette-player-cupholder-is-a-useful-but-risky-idea/ | Cassette Player Cupholder Is A Useful But Risky Idea | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"3D printed parts",
"car",
"car hacks",
"cupholder"
] | The cup was invented in 1570 BC. Despite this, infuriatingly, the cupholder didn’t become common in the automotive world until the early 2000s. Cars built in the years PCH (pre-cupholder) typically also had tape decks. Noticing this relationship, [thephatmaster] designed
this useful cassette-deck cupholder accessory.
The design is simple, consisting of a 3D printed ring with a tab that neatly slides into an automotive stereo’s cassette slot. The design does require that the tape deck be empty prior to inserting the cup holder. Given that few cassette players from that era still work, this isn’t much of a drawback. Of course, if you really do need tunes, it wouldn’t be too difficult to integrate a
Bluetooth cassette adapter
into the printed design.
[thephatmaster] uses the cupholder in a Mercedes W202, and has posted a special inclined version to suit this model. The creator also notes that using it on vehicles like the Mercedes W210 can be a risk. The cupholder typically places the beverage directly above the transmission lever, where any spills can damage switches or other important electronics. Also, the cupholder isn’t designed to work with vertical tape decks, though modification for this layout may be possible.
This build may look silly or pointless to some. But if you’ve ever tried to pull a U-turn in an old manual car while precariously cradling a steaming latte between your legs, you’ll clearly see the value here. It only has to save one pair of pants before it’s paid for itself.
We’ve seen some other creative cupholder hacks before too,
like this nifty laptop holder
. If you’ve whipped up your own nifty car hacks,
send them into the tipsline. | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6580039",
"author": "Joe Brown",
"timestamp": "2023-01-20T16:49:21",
"content": "Pretty sure the cup was invented long long before 1570 BC, gonna need a citation on that assertion. Heck they were building the great pyramids around 2500BC, and definitely had pottery in the pre-dynast... | 1,760,372,425.023819 |
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