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https://hackaday.com/2022/12/08/audio-amp-puts-vfds-to-work-in-an-unusual-way/ | Audio Amp Puts VFDs To Work In An Unusual Way | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"vacuum fluorescent display",
"vfd"
] | It’s safe to say that most projects that feature a VFD emphasize the “D” aspect more than anything. Vacuum fluorescent displays are solid performers, after all, with their cool blue-green glow that’s just the right look for lots of retro and not-so-retro builds. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t applications that leverage the “V” aspect, such as
this nifty audio preamp using VFDs as active components
.
The inspiration behind [JGJMatt]’s build came from the
Korg Nutube
line of VFD-based low-voltage dual-triode vacuum tubes. Finding these particular components a little on the expensive side, [JGJMatt] turned to the old standby DM160 VFD indicator tube, which is basically just a triode, to see how it would fare as an amp. The circuit takes advantage of the low current and voltage requirements of the VFDs — the whole thing runs from a USB boost converter — by wedging them between a 2N3904 input stage and a 2N2007 MOSFET output. There’s a mix of SMD and through-hole components on the custom-etched PCB, with a separate riser card to show off the VFDs a little bit through the front panel of the 3D printed case.
All in all, we find this little amp pretty cool, and we love the way it puts a twist on the venerable VFD. We’ve seen
similar VFD amps
before, but this one’s fit and finish really pays off. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544544",
"author": "Brad",
"timestamp": "2022-12-08T17:05:12",
"content": "Took me a minute. I was seriously amazed someone had managed to create an amp with a Variable Frequency Drive…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6544609... | 1,760,372,472.14435 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/08/an-affordable-and-programmable-plc/ | An Affordable And Programmable PLC | Jenny List | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino IDE",
"plc",
"STM32F103"
] | We’re all used to general purpose microcontroller boards such as the Arduino or its many imitators, but perhaps we don’t see as much of their industrial cousins. A programmable logic controller (PLC) is a computer designed to automate industrial machinery, and comes with protected interfaces and usually a specific PLC programming environment. Thus
[Galopago]’s work with an inexpensive Chinese PLC clone
is especially interesting, providing a route forward to using it within the Arduino IDE ecosystem.
Opening it up, the processor is identified as an STM32F103, and the connection needed to place it in bootloader mode is identified. Then it can be programmed from the Arduino IDE, even though its bootloader can’t be changed. Then to complete the process it’s necessary to identify the various different inputs and outputs by old-fashioned hardware reverse engineering.
This PLC may not be quite as robust as some products costing much more money, but it still represents a cost-effective way to access a microcontroller board with much of the interface circuitry already installed that would normally be required for controlling machinery. We expect that we’ll be seeing it appear on these pages over the coming months, and perhaps
there might even be another comparison in the air
. | 74 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544418",
"author": "RKG-9",
"timestamp": "2022-12-08T09:45:03",
"content": "For last 12 years I’ve worked with Siemens PLCs, starting from S7-300. Calling this Chinese toy a PLC is like serving freshly baked pepperoni pizza on a toilet seat stolen from pubic lavatory. It might work... | 1,760,372,472.33287 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/09/turning-a-toy-gamepad-into-a-real-one-with-bluetooth/ | Turning A Toy Gamepad Into A Real One, With Bluetooth | Robin Kearey | [
"Games",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth gamepad",
"fisher-price",
"game controller"
] | It’s important to instill healthy habits in your children when they’re still young. Preferences for sports, snacks and dinosaurs are typically formed in early childhood, as is loyalty to a specific gaming platform. [RetrogradeScene] apparently wished to steer his young daughter towards the Nintendo camp, but wasn’t looking forward to having her grubby hands touch his prized controllers. So he built her her own
kid-friendly controller out of a Fisher-Price toy
.
The toy in question is an imitation game controller that just makes funny sounds when you press the buttons. Converting it into a real, working game controller was a matter of soldering some wires onto the existing PCB and hooking them up to a microcontroller board, in this case a DFRobot FireBeetle. After loading the ESP32-BLE-Gamepad library and assigning the correct pin-button combinations in software [RetrogradeScene] ended up with a big, brightly-coloured gamepad that actually functioned as one.
Unfortunately, the FireBeetle took up space where the original AAA batteries were sitting, so the hacked gamepad needed a new power source. Classic batteries are heavy and inconvenient anyway, so [RetrogradeScene] installed a modern lithium battery plus a USB-C port for charging. Of course, no Bluetooth gadget is complete without an accompanying smartphone app either: [RetrogradeScene] wrote one for his iPhone that enables him to quickly change the button layout between the Nintendo and Xbox styles.
This might be a rare example of someone making a gamepad from, well, a gamepad. We’ve seen a few more unusual things being converted into game controllers, ranging from
a handful of LEGO bricks
to
entire cars
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6545701",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T17:31:36",
"content": "That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the exact same toy 😆Bookmarking this for when my older brother’s kids outgrow it 😉",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{... | 1,760,372,472.375281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/09/this-week-in-security-rackspace-falls-over-poison-ping-and-the-wordpress-race/ | This Week In Security: Rackspace Falls Over, Poison Ping, And The WordPress Race | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"lockpicking hacks",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"botnet",
"ping",
"ransomware",
"This Week in Security",
"wordpress"
] | In what’s being described as a Humpty-Dumpty incident, Rackspace customers have
lost access to their hosted Exchange service
, and by extension, lots of archived emails. The
first official word of trouble came on December 2nd
, and it quickly became clear that this was more than the typical intern-tripped-over-the-cable incident. Nearly a week later, Rackspace confirmed what observers were beginning to suspect, it was a ransomware attack. There’s not a lot of other answers yet, and the incident FAQ answers are all variations on a theme.
Our investigation into the incident is ongoing and will take time to complete. To ensure the integrity of the ongoing investigation, we do not have additional details to share at this time.
Knowing the security issues that have plagued Microsoft Exchange over the last couple of months, one has to wonder if Rackspace was breached as a result of the PowerShell problems. What’s staggering is that a week after the incident, Rackspace still has no timeline for service restoration.
Rackspace isn’t the only major ransomware attack this week, as
a hospital in Versailles has partially shut down
due to another ransomware attack. Operations were canceled, and work has to be done the old fashioned way, without the network to support.
Hikvision Rebadge Gotcha
There’s a joke that’s halfway serious, that claims that there’s actually only one manufacturer of security cameras. While not entirely implausible, it’s common knowledge that many cameras on the market are rebadged Hikvision or Dahua hardware. That rebadge means that a security issue in one brand may affect far more devices than initially suspected. In this case, a
vulnerability in Hikvision Ezviz
cameras appeared to be limited to that brand, but
research by IPVM confirmed
that other Hikvision-manufactured cameras share the same issue. That is, bad crypto makes the admin password recoverable. Even worse, Ezviz cameras are a cloud solution, but many other Hikvision models are exposed to the Internet. A Shodan scan suggests over 400,000 devices are unpatched and accessible. As they’re not current models, there’s not a security update planned.
And speaking of cameras, Anker’s Eufy system seem to have
some severe security issues that fly in the face
of all the privacy assurances made about the system. Anker claims the cameras only store data locally, streaming is end-to-end encrypted all the way to the user’s devices, etc. The truth seems to be that anyone with a camera’s serial number could trivially brute-force the 16-bit key to produce an unencrypted stream. So far, this looks ugly. Some fixes have been rolled out, but the entire system appears to be much less secure and private than Anker advertised them to be.
Ping
FreeBSD’s
ping
utility
has a bit of an issue
, made more serious by the requirement for it to run setuid root. When sending a ping, the response from the remote server gets copied into local memory, and that response can include a quoted packet. That quoted packet can include extra, unexpected options, which can lead to buffer overflow during processing. This may be possible to chain into a Remote Code Execution (RCE), leading to a whole new meaning to ping of death. Patches were made available November 29th.
Android Keys Leaked
There are
problems over in Android-land
, too. It seems that multiple vendors have lost control of their secret keys, and malware is currently being distributed using those signing keys. The list includes Samsung, LG, and Mediatek. It’s bad in multiple ways. One in particular is that these keys are “platform certificate keys”, which allow a signed app to run as a system user — nearly worst-case for malware. Questions abound, like how multiple vendors are affected. Even more puzzling is the fact that
VirusTotal has a malicious sample
using Samsung’s signing key from 2016. How or why the key has been compromised for six years, and still in use is unknown. If more information becomes available, we’ll revisit this very odd story in the future.
The WordPress Race
How many of us have done WordPress installs? Remember how quick and easy it is? Just get the installer extracted to the right place, open it in a web browser, and punch a few details in. Give it your database information, and your site is quickly online. There’s a gotcha that may surprise you. The “5-minute install” is
actually a window for exploit
. The usual process puts the installer on the public internet, but since there aren’t any links pointing to the installer, it’s vanishingly unlikely to be found by an attacker before the install finishes. However, many services automate acquiring a valid SSL certificate, and every new certificate generates an entry on the
Certificate Transparency Log
. (Side note, every Let’s Encrypt certificate does the same, meaning your private project may not be as private as you thought.)
The actual attack, which is happening in the wild, is fiendishly clever. A single POST sets the WordPress database to the attacker’s server. When the legitimate user runs the installer, it looks just as expected, save without prompting for database settings. The result is that the attacker, who is hosting the database, is the ultimate authority over the WordPress install. When researching sites that had been compromised in this way, the researcher that caught this campaign, [Vladimir Smitka], found various compromises like web shells, malicious plugins, and more! In response, he set up an automatic service, that watches the malicious database and emails the legitimate site owner for every new compromised domain.
KmsdBot Does Us a Favor: The Fatal Typo
It’s hard to imagine a better poetic ending for KmsdBot. This botnet was written using Go, and the payload runs in memory without writing any permanent changes to disk. The author seems to have skimped on the error handling part of the code. And to our great delight,
the good folks at Akamai were watching
when the botnet operator sent a typo’ed command.
!bigdata
http://www.bitcoin.com443
/ 30 3 3 100
should have included a space between the URL and port number. It didn’t, and it looks like the entire botnet crashed as a result. One less to worry about.
Bits and Bytes
Not to be left out, Kaspersky researchers have
found a wiper masquerading as a fake ransomware campaign
, this time targeting machine solely in Russia. CryWiper checks in with a C&C server before actually scrambling files, and once it gets clearance it runs every 5 minutes. The malware goes out of its way to stop SQL services, Exchange servers, and other such services. This likely ensures that the database on disk is corrupted, rather than access denied because the service has a lock on the file. Also of interest, it disables Remote Desktop Protocol on the affected system.
There’s
a Google Chrome release that dropped on the 2nd
, and it includes a fix for
CVE-2022-4262
, a type confusion problem in the V8 Javascript engine. It’s notable, because there’s an in-the-wild exploit for it. This sort of bug is usually the foot in the door — visit a malicious website, it runs some weird looking Javascript, and triggers the exploit. Once enough time has gone by, the
bug details should become available on Google’s bug tracker
.
And finally, something novel in the world of physical security. Picking some locks is laughably easy, if you have the proper tools. A skilled thief might carry a tension wrench and lock rake tool, and give a lock a few seconds of effort before giving up — or turning to an angle grinder. The traditional way to defeat a trivial picking attempt is to make a better lock. Tighter tolerances and security pins make raking very difficult. The
Curt Coupler Lock has taken a different approach
. The lock core is trivially raked, but the core locks in four different orientations, and the unlock procedure works by unscrewing the lock through nearly three turns. Yes, this lock has to be picked eleven times to get it open without the key. Now it’s not a perfect solution — the whole video is only three minutes long after all. But it’s clever, and that’s something. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6545715",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T17:47:01",
"content": "Hospitals using Windows, and ransomwared, surprise!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6546032",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2022-... | 1,760,372,472.090746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/09/nostalgic-30-in-one-electronics-badge-for-def-con-30/ | Nostalgic 30-in-ONE Electronics Badge For DEF CON 30 | Joseph Long | [
"cons",
"hardware"
] | [
"badgelife",
"educational toy",
"radio shack"
] | [hamster] and the DC Zia crew offered up a throwback
30-in-ONE Learn Electronics
indie badge for DEF CON 30. The badge is inspired by the Radio Shack “100-in-1” style project kits that so many of us cut our teeth on back in the 70s and 80s.
DC Zia
is a hacker group loosely associated with New Mexico who have been working together to make an indie badge for DEF CON each year. If you aren’t familiar with the badgelife community of hardware hackers and programmers who make electronic indie conference badges, check out our
BadgeLife Documentary
.
The 30-in-ONE badge is provided in the form of a kit, so the learning and fun begins with assembling the badge. From there, an included booklet guides the badge holder through building and experimenting with 30 different circuits.
The included components include resistors, capacitors, LEDs, transistors, switches, transformer, speaker, OLED display, battery box, and a bundle of jumper wires for making any desired circuit connections. The documented circuits have compelling titles such as the Electric Cat, Light Theremin, Grandfather Clock, and Frequency Counter.
Flashback to what DC Zia, and other groups, were up to five years prior in our expose on
The Hardware Badges of DEF CON 25
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6545406",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T12:17:03",
"content": "At max volume the soundtrack of the video was weak. It was a good thing the house was quiet when I played it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,472.030832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/09/theres-nothing-square-about-this-rectangular-guitar/ | There’s Nothing Square About This Rectangular Guitar | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"guitar",
"humbucker",
"les paul",
"square"
] | We kind of already knew this, but it seems that [Uri Tuchman] really can build absolutely anything. This fall, he was asked to compete in the Great Guitar Build-Off competition, which involves a fully-customizable kit guitar sent to each entrant as a starting point. In order to allow for maximum creativity, the wooden parts like the body and the headstock are square.
And quite creatively, [Uri] kept them that way
. Square, that is.
While yes, the body rising out of the squareness is in fact a Les Paul profile, there are a ton of details that make this a [Uri Tuchman] instead. For starters, everything is square, beginning with the custom brass knobs for the volume and tone potentiometers. We’re not sure if it came with humbuckers, but that sure is a happy accident if so. If only the neck blank had been square, [Uri] could have made a lap steel. Once it was finished, [Uri] took it to a luthier to have it set up, fine-tuned, and assessed for quality. Of course, it passed with flying
Vs
colors.
There are plenty of other [Uri] hallmarks, like the bird on the neck plate, and another hiding in the hand-drawn and hand-carved pickguard, so be sure to check it out after the break. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6545308",
"author": "Howard Davies",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T10:16:48",
"content": "Uri is fun, more art than science, but shows off some impressive skill in using his tools. Well worth a follow.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,372,472.556761 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/08/pi-pico-qr-display-hands-out-wifi-info-with-style/ | Pi Pico QR Display Hands Out WiFi Info With Style | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"micropython",
"network security",
"qr code",
"WiFi network"
] | At this point, you’re likely aware that you can store your wireless network’s credentials in a QR code, so that anyone who wants to connect with their smartphone need only scan the 2D barcode. Whether you print it out on paper, extrude it out of plastic, or paint the thing on the wall, it still works the same. It’s a neat trick for when you’ve got friends and family over, and saves you having to explain your ponderously long WPA key.
But what if you want to change up the encryption key every so often? Sure would be a hassle to have to repaint the wall.
Enter this interesting project from [Predrag Mijatovic]
, which uses a few scripts to automatically set up a new encrypted guest WiFi network and present the appropriate QR code on an OLED display attached to a Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s a bit convoluted, and almost certainly won’t work on your network without significant tweaks, but we’re intrigued by the idea.
As [Predrag] explains, the whole thing is based on a Latvian MikroTik router that can be configured over SSH. A Bash script generates a new encryption key by base64 encoding the output
/dev/urandom
, logs into the router to set up a new network using it, and then generates the matching ASCII QR code. With some
sed
trickery, the code is then embedded into a MicroPython program that gets uploaded to the connected Pi Pico.
In the video after the break [Predrag] takes us through the process manually so it’s easier to see what’s going on. Under normal circumstances, it would all happen automatically and would take just a few seconds to complete. We’d feel more comfortable if the scripts had some error correction that would allow them to gracefully exit if something goes wrong, but as a proof of concept, it certainly works.
We’d like to see this concept explored a bit further, perhaps using one of the
physical QR code displays
we’ve seen over the years. A
programmable electronic paper display
would also be a logical way to show off a dynamic QR code. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6545282",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T09:43:11",
"content": "It doesn’t “set up a new encrypted guest WiFi network” it changes the password each time on the existing wireless network profile – this sadly means that each time a new QR code is generated it would invalidate... | 1,760,372,471.981349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/08/power-over-ethernet-explained/ | Power Over Ethernet, Explained | Jenny List | [
"hardware"
] | [
"ethernet",
"PoE",
"power"
] | Most readers will be familiar with Ethernet networks in some form, in particular the Cat5 cables which may snake around the back of our benches. In a similar vein, we’ll have used power over Ethernet, or PoE, to power devices such as webcams. Buy a PoE router or switch, plug in a cable, and away you go! But what lies behind PoE, and how does it work?
[Alan] has written a comprehensive guide, based on experience working with the technology
.
What we get first is a run-down of the various topographies involved. Then [Alan] dives into the way a PoE port polls for a PoE device to be connected, identifies it, and ramps up the voltage. Explaining the various different circuits is particularly valuable. The final part of the show deals with the design of a PoE module, with a small switching power supply to give the required 48 volts.
All in all, this should be required reading for anyone who works with Ethernet, because it’s one of those things too often presented as something of a black box. If you’re thirsty for more,
it’s a subject Hackaday have touched on too in the past
. | 42 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6545006",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T04:10:53",
"content": "Ah the magic of the center tap",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6545059",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T05:12:35",
... | 1,760,372,472.224448 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/08/osprey-keyboard-lets-the-nrf52840-spread-its-wings/ | Osprey Keyboard Lets The NRF52840 Spread Its Wings | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"column stagger",
"ergonomic",
"ergonomic keyboard",
"keyboard",
"nRF52840",
"ortholinear",
"ZMK"
] | While most people don’t care whether they use one finger or ten, some people want to better themselves by learning how to touch-type. And honestly, there’s no easier way to do that than by getting into the ergo keyboard game. Even if you consider yourself a touch-typist already, an ortholinear or column-staggered keyboard may teach you otherwise, as you find yourself trying to type ‘c’ with your index finger (for example) and failing miserably.
[ebastler] chose the best of all routes and
decided to build his own perfect keyboard, called the Osprey
. It’s a wireless, column-staggered 40% that runs on ZMK firmware, which of course is open-source, as is the PCB itself and the thick and travel-ready printed enclosure. Although [ebastler] has yet to implement either one of these additional inputs, the Osprey also supports a thumbstick and a track pad.
Brain-wise, it’s a bare nRF52840 chip along with a TI BQ24075 for battery charging. The interesting thing about this implementation is that [ebastler] used and abused
Nordic sample schematic #4
, which utilizes both DC-DC converter stages of the chip. We can’t wait to see what this trailblazing build will mean for the community! | 14 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544836",
"author": "sudobash1",
"timestamp": "2022-12-09T00:25:07",
"content": "I am a touch-typist. I’ve been using a keyboard with no keycap labels for years, so I’ve really had to be. (Even now if I stop to think about it, I have a hard time pressing the correct symbol) It’s a s... | 1,760,372,472.61097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/a-wheatstone-bridge-matches-your-pots/ | A Wheatstone Bridge Matches Your Pots | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"measurement",
"potentiometer",
"wheatstone bridge"
] | Sometimes the simplest hacks can be the most useful or ingenious, and such is the case with [Keri Szafir]’s
method of ensuring that potentiometers used in audio devices are matched
. If you consider a typical stereo amplifier for a moment, you’ll see two amplifiers in one box with a single volume control. Two channels, one knob? Volume knobs are ganged stereo potentiometers.
All potentiometers are not created equal, and particularly in the cheaper devices they may not have a consistently matched resistance across both pots and across their travel. This messes up the stereo balance, so naturally it’s worth selecting a part with good matching. [Keri] selects them not with his golden ears, but by wiring both pots together as a Wheatstone bridge. A meter between the two wipers would detect any current due to a mismatch.
A Wheatstone bridge is one of those handy circuits that has
plenty of uses in both AC and DC measurements
. We probably see them most often
in a strain gauge
. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544433",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2022-12-08T11:00:12",
"content": "Probably a stupid question but: “A meter between the two wipers would detect any current due to a mismatch”. But with a stereo source, Left/Right signals are obviously most of the time different, so won’t ... | 1,760,372,472.50897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/recreating-the-sounds-of-the-90s-with-a-ym3812-synthesizer/ | Recreating The Sounds Of The ’90s With A YM3812 Synthesizer | Robin Kearey | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"eurorack synth",
"fm synthesis",
"OPL2",
"YM3812"
] | One reason the x86 PC became the dominant game platform in the early 1990s was the availability of affordable sound cards like the AdLib and Sound Blaster. These provided a quantum leap in sound quality compared to the PC speaker’s tinny beeps, thanks to Yamaha’s YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2. [Tyler] has made a detailed study of the various OPL series chips and wrote
a comprehensive guide describing their operation
.
[Tyler] begins by explaining the theory of FM synthesis. The basic idea is that you generate sine waves of different frequencies, combine them through mixing and modulation, and then adjust their strength over time. This way, a few simple operations on the chip’s nine sound channels can generate an astonishing variety of sounds from clear notes to chaotic noise. He then delves into the details of the YM3812 chip, including its 279 different register settings that enable all these operations.
The final goal of [Tyler]’s research is the design of a YM3812 EuroRack module that fits inside standard modular synthesizers. He’ll go into detail on the board’s design and construction in future blog posts, but he already shows the finished product and demonstrates its features in the video embedded below. It’s a great introduction if you’re new to FM synthesis and want to recreate those magic DOS game sounds.
Of course, you can also just connect the OPL2 chip to your DOS computer, whether through a classic sound card or
through a parallel port
. The related YM2612 from the Sega Genesis also makes
a fine synthesizer
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544356",
"author": "Mog",
"timestamp": "2022-12-08T05:03:56",
"content": "The YM3812 and YM2612 were venerable chips. I think it’s often overlooked just how extensive Yamaha’s lineup in terms of audio chips during the 80’s and 90’s were, and how they contributed not only to the sou... | 1,760,372,472.663184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/a-tiny-risc-v-emulator-runs-linux-with-no-mmu-and-yes-it-runs-doom/ | A Tiny RISC-V Emulator Runs Linux With No MMU. And Yes, It RunsDOOM! | Jenny List | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"does it run doom",
"linux",
"MMU",
"RISCV"
] | It’s something of an article of faith, that to run Linux your computer must include a hardware memory management unit, or MMU. To an extent it’s true, in that for a Linux-based system to shine it must have that hardware, but in fact there has been support for MMU-less Linux for many years now. Prolific hacker [cnlohr] has created
an emulated simple RISCV processor without an MMU
, and not only does it run Linux,
it also runs
DOOM
.
The videos below the break go into significant depth on writing and debugging an emulator not to mention the inner workings of
DOOM
, but fear not if it’s not your thing. Everything can be found in a GitHub repository, and there are straightforward instructions should you wish to try it yourself.
All this is entertaining stuff, but it becomes of much more interest when viewed as part of an ongoing chain of projects working on no-MMU Linux for low-end RISC-V microcontrollers. Imagine the prospect of running Linux on a CPU costing relative pennies, and you can see why that’s an interesting prospect. Even if it’s not
the most unexpected way to run Linux without an MMU
. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544307",
"author": "niosghe",
"timestamp": "2022-12-08T00:52:49",
"content": "I get really angry when people confuse MMU with virtual memory. Sometimes I want to take my Makita and SDS through my monitor in rage when I see stupidity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,372,472.734709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/transparent-metal-hydroxide-without-mr-scott/ | Transparent Metal (Hydroxide) Without Mr. Scott | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"sodium",
"transparent metal"
] | There’s a famous scene in one of the Star Trek movies where Scotty, who has traveled to the past, teaches a metal company to create the transparent aluminum he needs to bring some whales back to the future. But [The Action Lab] shows that we already have
see-through metal
, just not aluminum. You can see a video about why metals are normally opaque.
The metal in question is sodium. Normally, it isn’t transparent, but molten sodium hydroxide does turn transparent after it — well, sort of explodes. Of course, sodium hydroxide isn’t really a metal, but then neither is the aluminum oxide that’s been touted as real transparent aluminum. Aluminum oxide also makes transparent gemstones like rubies. However, there is some — kind of — transparent aluminum at the end of the video.
The thin aluminum film on a plastic substrate probably won’t hold a whale, though. It isn’t totally transparent, either. The material looks like a mirror, but a laser on one side will make a partial appearance on the other side.
What’s interesting here, though, is the explanation about why metals aren’t normally transparent. Well, that, and exploding sodium.
We’ve looked at so-called
transparent aluminum
before. We’ve also seen apparently transparent metal that uses a
mysterious trick
. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544230",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T21:19:07",
"content": "Call me when they have one that dents instead of breaks when you hit it with a hammer. The mylar stuff doesn’t count",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "654... | 1,760,372,472.800408 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/microscopic-metal-3d-printing-with-gels/ | Microscopic Metal 3D Printing With Gels | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"caltech",
"metal 3d printing",
"whitepaper"
] | Everyone wants to 3D print with metals, but it is a difficult task. You need high temperatures and metals with high thermal conductivity make the problem even worse. Researchers at Caltech have a way of
printing tiny metal structures
. The trick? They don’t print metals at all. Instead, they 3D print a hydrogel and then use it as a scaffold to form metallic structures. You can read the
full paper
, if you are interested in the details.
Hydrogels are insoluble in water and made from flexible polymer chains. If you’ve ever handled a soft contact lens, that’s a hydrogel. Like resin printing, UV light triggers chemical reactions in the hydrogels, causing them to harden in the desired pattern.
What about the metal? They infuse the hydrogel with a metallic salt dissolved in water. This saturates the hydrogel. Burning in a furnace causes the hydrogel to burn away but leaves the metal. The furnace also causes the structure to shrink, so this is a good method for very tiny pieces. The team has made prints with feature sizes around 40 microns.
By altering the metal salts, you can work with different metals or even mix different metals. The team has produced parts using copper, nickel, silver, and several alloys.
Printing small structures is a big research goal with
many different approaches
. We’ve even seen a
tiny welder
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544200",
"author": "Also accurate shrinkage despite parts differing dramatically each time?",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T19:57:23",
"content": "Good method for no warpage too, right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6544212",
... | 1,760,372,473.465509 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/love-ai-but-dont-love-it-too-much/ | Love AI, But Don’t Love It Too Much | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial intelligence",
"computational linguistics",
"search engine",
"text analysis"
] | The up-and-coming Wonder of the World in software and information circles , and particularly in those circles who talk about them, is AI. Give a magic machine a lot of stuff, ask it a question, and it will give you a meaningful and useful answer. It will create art, write books, compose music, and generally Change The World As We Know It. All this is genuinely impressive stuff, as anyone who has played with DALL-E will tell you. But it’s important to think about what the technology can and can’t do that’s new so as to not become caught up in the hype, and in doing that I’m immediately drawn to a previous career of mine.
I Knew I Should Have Taken That 8051 Firmware Job Instead
How I got my start in the search engine business. Prompt: “trained monkeys bashing away at computer keyboards, cartoon art”.
I’m an electronic engineer by training, but on graduation back in the 1990s I was seduced by the Commodore CDTV into the world of electronic publishing. CD-ROMs were the thing, then
suddenly they weren’t
, so I tumbled through games and web companies, and unexpectedly ending up working for Google. Was I at Larry and Sergei’s side? Hardly, the company I had worked for folded so I found some agency temp work as a search engine quality rater.
This is a fascinating job that teaches you a lot about how search engines work, but as one of the trained monkeys against whom the algorithm is tested you are at the bottom of the Google heap. This led me into the weird world of search engine marketing companies at the white hat end, where my job morphed into discovering for myself the field of computational linguistics without realising it was already a thing, and using it to lead the customers into creating better content for their websites.
At this point, it’s probably time to talk about how the search engine marketing business works. If you own a website, you’ll almost certainly at some time have been bombarded with search engine optimisation, or SEO, companies offering you the chance to be Number One on Google. As we used to say: if anyone says that to you, ask their name. If it’s Larry Page or Sergei Brin, hire them. Otherwise don’t.
What the majority of these companies did was find chinks in the search giant’s armour, ways to exploit the algorithm to deliver a good result on some carefully chosen search term. The result is a constant battle between the SEOs and the algorithm developers, something we saw first-hand as quality raters. If you’re unwise enough to hire a black-hat SEO company, any success you gain will inevitably be taken away by an algorithm update, and you’ll probably be thrown into search engine hell as a result.
This is a very simple demo screenshot of one task the corpus analysis tool could do, generating likely collocates for a source word. Behind that was a huge quantity of number-crunched text.
On the white hat end of the scale the job is a different one. You have a customer with a website they believe is good, but with little interesting content beyond whatever it is they sell, the search engine doesn’t agree with them. Your job is to help them turn it into an amazing website full of interesting, authoritative, and constantly updated content, and in that there were no shortcuts. The computational linguistic analysis of pages of competitor search results and websites would deliver a healthy pile of things to talk about, but making it happen was impossible without somebody putting in a lot of hard graft and creating the content. If you think about Hackaday for a moment, my colleagues have an amazing breadth of experience and are really good writers so this site has very good content, but behind all that is a lot of work as we bash away at our keyboards creating it.
Does A Thing Have To Be Clever To Tell You Things You Didn’t Know?
XKCD, on the nail as always. (
CC BY-NC 2.5
)
If there’s one awesome thing corpus text analysis can do for you it’s tell you something you didn’t know about something you thought you knew, and there were many times we had customers who gained a completely new insight into their industry by looking at a corpus of the rest of the industry’s information. They might know everything there was to know about the widgets they manufactured, but it turned out they often knew very little about how the world talked about those widgets.
But at this point it’s super-important to understand, that a corpus analysis system isn’t clever and it’s not trying to be. Comparing it to AI, it’s a big cauldron full of sentences in which the idea is to make the stuff you want float to the top when you stir it, while the AI is an attempt to make a magic clever box that knows all that information and says the good stuff from its mind when you prompt it. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the two as simply dim, and bright.
I’m very happy to be writing for Hackaday and not tweaking the web for a living any more, but I still follow the world of content analysis because it interests me. I’ve noticed a tendency in that world to discover AI and have a mind blown moment. This technology is amazing, they say, it can do all these things! And it can, but here I have a moment of puzzlement. I’m watching people who presumably have access to and experience of those “dim” tools that do the job by statistical analysis of a pile of data, reacting in amazement when a “bright” tool does the same job using an AI model trained on the same data. And I guess here is my point. The AI is a very cool tech, but it’s cool because it can do new things, not because it can do things other tools already do. I’ve even read search engine marketeers gushing about how an AI could tell you how to be a search engine marketeer, when all I’m seeing is an AI that presumably has a few search engine marketing guides in its training simply repeating something it knows from them.
Please Don’t Place AI On A Pedestal Just Because It’s New To You
Prompt: “A female journalist, skeptical about the promise of AI, oil painting”.
A friend of mine is somewhere close to the bleeding edge of text-based AI, and I have taken the opportunity to enhance my knowledge by asking him to show me what’s under the hood. It’s a technology that can sometimes amaze you by seeming clever and human — one of the things he demonstrated was a model that does a very passable D&D DM for example, and being a DM is something that requires a bit of ability to do well — but I despair at its being placed on a hype pedestal. It’s clear that AI tools will find their place and become an indispensable part of our tech future, but let’s have a little common sense as we enthuse about them, please!
My cauldron of sentences eventually evolved into a full-blown corpus analysis system that got me a job with a well-known academic publisher. When fed with news data it could sometimes predict election results, but even with that party trick I never found a freelance customer for it. Perhaps its time has passed and an AI could do a better job.
Meanwhile I worry about how the black hats in my former industry will use the new tools, and that an avalanche of AI-generated content that seems higher quality than it is will pollute search results with garbage that can’t be filtered out. Who knows, maybe an AI will be employed to spot it. One thing you can rely on though, Hackaday content will remain written by real people with demonstrable knowledge of the subject! | 51 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544154",
"author": "Sikri",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T18:11:00",
"content": "Thank the ai overloards for that!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6544160",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T18:18:40",
"cont... | 1,760,372,473.812446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/the-10-kinds-of-programmers-that-use-calcutron-33/ | The 10 Kinds Of Programmers That Use Calcutron-33 | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"cpu",
"decimal",
"risc"
] | It is interesting how, if you observe long enough, things tend to be cyclical. Back in the old days, some computers didn’t use binary, they used decimal. This was especially true of made up educational computers like TUTAC or CARDIAC, but there was real decimal hardware out there, too. Then everyone decided that binary made much more sense and now it’s very hard to find a computer that doesn’t use it.
But [Erik] has written a simulator, assembler, and debugger for
Calcutron-33
, a “decimal RISC” CPU. Why? The idea is to provide a teaching platform to explain assembly language concepts to people who might stumble on binary numbers. Once they understand Calcutron, they can move on to more conventional CPUs with some measure of confidence.
To that end, there are several articles covering the
basic architecture
, the
instruction set,
and how to
write assembly
for the machine. The CPU has much in common with modern microprocessors other than the use of decimal throughout.
There have been several versions of the virtual machine with various improvements and bug fixes. We’ll be honest: we admire the work and its scope. However, if you already know about binary, this might not be your best bet. What’s more is, maybe you should understand binary before tackling assembly language programming, at least in modern times. Still, it does cover a lot of ground that applies regardless.
Made-up computers like
TUTAC
and
CARDIAC
were all the rage when computer time was too expensive to waste on mere students. There was also MIX from computer legend
Donald Knuth
. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544137",
"author": "kd9kck",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T17:00:59",
"content": "The link to the Donald Knuth related page is broken. As extra stuff added at the end.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6544145",
"author": "John Be... | 1,760,372,473.170318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/review-inkplate-2-shrinks-down-adds-color/ | Review: Inkplate 2 Shrinks Down, Adds Color | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Microcontrollers",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"ESP32",
"Inkplate"
] | Regular Hackaday readers may recall the Inkplate family of devices: open source all-in-one development boards that combine the power and versatility of the ESP32 with electronic paper displays salvaged from commercial e-readers. By taking the sharp, high-speed, displays intended for readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and bundling it together with all the hardware and software you need to make it work, the Inkplate provided a turn-key platform for anyone looking to get serious with e-paper.
Given the fact that their screens were pulled from recycled readers, it’s no surprise the previous Inkplate entries came in familiar 6 and 10 inch variants. There was even an upgraded 6 inch model that benefited from newer reader technology by adopting a touch-sensitive backlit panel,
which we took a close look at last year
. Their large displays make them excellent for wall mounted applications, such as a household notification center or constantly-changing art display. Plus, as you might expect, the Inkplate is an
ideal choice for anyone looking to roll their own custom e-reader
.
But of course, not every application needs so much screen real estate. In fact, for some tasks, such a large display could be considered a liability. Seeing a void in their existing product lineup, the folks at Soldered Electronics (previously e-radionica) have recently unveiled the diminutive Inkplate 2. This new miniature Inkplate uses the same software library as its larger predecessors, but thanks to its 2.13 inch three-color display, lends itself to a wider array of potential projects. Plus it’s considerably cheaper than the larger Inkplate models, at just $35 USD.
Considering the crowd sourced funding campaign for the Inkplate 2
blew past its goal in just 72 hours, it seems clear there’s plenty of interest in this new smaller model. But if you’re still not sure if it’s the e-paper solution you’ve been waiting for, maybe we can help — the folks at Soldered sent along a pre-production version of the Inkplate 2 for us to play around with, so let’s take it for a test drive and see what all the fuss is about.
A Lean, Mean, E-Ink Machine
Thanks to their far larger screens, earlier Inkplate models had plenty of free space on the PCB for extra hardware such as a real-time clock, temperature sensor, and MCP23017 I/O expander chip. But Soldered had to forgo such luxuries on the Inkplate 2, as the smaller PCB is already packed tight with just the ESP32 WROVER-E, CH340C UART chip, MCP73831 charge controller, and the various passives required to keep everyone happy.
But even without the IO expansion hardware of the previous models, the Inkplate 2 still has a fair number of GPIO pins available which are broken out along the top side of the board, and there’s a Qwiic-compatible easyC connector on the back. You’ll be able to connect up to external sensors over I2C, and of course if you
really
needed more pins, adding your own I/O expander chip is always an option.
That said, I do miss the interactivity offered on the previous Inkplate models. The 6 and 10 inch featured touch-sensitive pads on the front of the PCB, and the 6PLUS had the luxury of a complete touch screen. While the board is admittedly tight, I still think they could have tucked in a side-mounted SMD momentary button. As it stands, you’ll need to take up a GPIO pin by wiring in your own button if you need a way to interact with your running program.
Another causality of the limited PCB space is the ESP32’s onboard antenna — best practice is to hang it off the edge of the PCB, or route out a notch behind it. Unfortunately neither option would have really worked in this case, meaning a likely reduction in the MCU’s radio reception. This may or may not have been a huge deal for many applications, but even so, Soldered added a provision for an external antenna on the Inkplate 2. While the prototype pictured here just has a bit of wire soldered on, the final production hardware has a proper IPX connector onboard.
Color, At a Cost
Since there aren’t any old two inch e-readers from which to salvage the displays, Soldered can’t boast that they’re keeping hardware out of landfills with each unit sold this time. But while the newly manufactured electronic-paper used in the Inkplate 2 might not be as
green
as the ones used in the Inkplate 6 and Inkplate 10, it is capable of doing a very nice red.
The 2.13″ panel has a resolution of 212 x 104, which gives it a PPI of 111. Combined with the wide viewing angles, and fantastic daylight readability, it looks great in person. Refresh rate is respectable in the B&W mode, but it should be noted that engaging the third color does
significantly
delay the process — expect to wait 20 to 30 seconds before the screen fully settles down after showing a three-color image.
But in practice, this isn’t really much of a concern. As Soldered shows in the demos on the campaign page, and as you quickly learn while playing with the hardware in person, the Inkplate 2 works best as secondary display that shows slowly changing data. Throw the day’s weather forecast on it, or your schedule for the next couple of hours. As long as you don’t require the information to be updated more than every 15 minutes or so, it would probably be a good fit for the Inkplate 2.
The Inkplate Experience
While the hardware is solid enough, the real star of the show is the phenomenal software, documentation, and experience that’s part of the Inkplate line of devices. For the higher-end models, which could set you back as much as $169 USD in the case of the Inkplate 10, this level of support was something of a given. After all, if you’re paying a premium price you’d expect a premium experience. But the fact that the $35 sticker price of the Inkplate 2 grants you access to this complete ecosystem is a pleasant surprise, and is perhaps one of the most exciting things about the product.
Like the previous models, the Inkplate 2 can be programmed either with the Arduino IDE or MicroPython, and also features the unique “Peripheral Mode” where the device can be controlled directly via commands sent over UART. Soldered also offers
an online image converter
(which has already been updated for three-color displays),
as well as a GUI creator
, though it’s not immediately clear if the latter will be updated for the Inkplate 2 given its lack of touch screen.
Getting up and running with the Inkplate 2 is incredibly easy. It took just minutes to add the board definitions and library to the Arduino IDE and edit the HTTP example to point to my server. From there, the device would periodically update its display with whatever image I provided it.
Combined with some Python on the computer side
, it made for a quick desktop display that
will show whatever I throw at it
.
Bang For Your Buck
Now let’s get real for a minute here. If you’re reading Hackaday, you’re more than capable of hooking up an ESP32 to a small e-paper display without somebody holding your hand. You probably also know that the going rate of those two devices on eBay is less than the $35 Soldered is asking for the Inkplate 2. Sure they won’t be on a handy little PCB, and you won’t get the
unifying power of USB-C
, but those are hardly show stoppers.
That being said, I still think the documentation, tools, libraries, and end-user experience offered by the Inkplate 2 is more than worth the extra cost of this unified solution. It’s arguably the most straight-forward and painless way of getting info on a small e-paper display, which frees you up to tackle more important (and honestly, more interesting) tasks such as figuring out how to generate the data you want to push out to it. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544171",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T18:41:33",
"content": "Beautiful board! I’d love to get ahold of a handful of these to integrate into my home assistant installation as a display for temp, relative humidity, etc, etc.Nice work!",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,372,473.512985 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/in-my-neighborhood-we-played-asteroids-with-real-asteroids/ | In My Neighborhood, We PlayedAsteroids…with Real Asteroids | Al Williams | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"asteroid",
"ele"
] | There was a comedian in the 1980s who always said he grew up in a tough neighborhood. He claimed they played cops and robbers with real cops. They played gin rummy with real gin. Well, maybe if he knew about [Neal Agarwal]’s
asteroid launcher simulation website
, he would have said they played asteroids with real asteroids.
If you ever wondered what would happen if a 1,500-foot stone or iron asteroid hit your hometown going at 38,000 mph, now you can find out. Apparently, I live far enough in the suburbs that even a 1 mile-wide iron asteroid hitting the center of Houston wouldn’t put a crater under my house. The 17-mile-wide and 2,608-foot-deep crater would release the equivalent of 399 Gigatons of TNT, but it wouldn’t reach me.
The 29-mile-wide fireball would be a different story. Oh, and the 244 dB shockwave would almost certainly reach me. So if the clothes catching on fire resulting in second- and third-degree burns didn’t get me, perhaps the shockwave would. The simulation says that zone will have 99% fatalities, and even further out, people will get severe lung damage. Eardrums burst even further away. Homes would collapse almost to the Mexican border.
The 1,000-mile-per-hour wind might present problems, too. While we are well-situated for hurricanes in this area, that’s about five times more wind than even a big hurricane generates. And we are not well prepared for earthquakes, much less the magnitude 70 quake that would occur.
Pretty bleak. On the plus side, a strike like that happens about once every 2.6 million years. If you try it yourself, be sure to scroll down the right panel to see the graphical representation of the different effects.
Maybe NASA is on to something when they tell us they want
to learn to deflect asteroids
. Even private foundations are getting into the business
of finding them
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6544054",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T13:29:16",
"content": "Excellent!Here’s the equivalent with nuclear weapons:https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6544096",
"author": "damien... | 1,760,372,473.269407 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/07/merry-christmas-rip-and-tear/ | Merry Christmas! Rip And Tear! | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"christmas ornament",
"doom",
"ESP32"
] | If you want a little mayhem on your Christmas tree, you can check out [Sprite_tm]’s
tiny PC Christmas ornament
. With 3D printing, that isn’t such a tall order, but [Sprite]’s does have a unique ability: it plays
DOOM
, as you can see in the video below.
The device uses an ESP32, and while [Sprite] had ported the iconic shooter to the microcontroller before, he decided to use a Game Boy port that is more lightweight instead. There were a few reasons for the choice, including the ability to do Bluetooth so you could connect controllers so you can play the game. The only catch was he had to pull off the flash memory and replace it with a larger one (see the second video below).
Granted, the screen is tiny, so it is sort of a novelty. But if you want to have a go, the
files are all there
. As you might expect, there is a tiny battery and the circuitry required to recharge it, as well. We’d probably make an adapter to let it charge from the Christmas lights, but that can wait for version 2.
The input device handling is a bit strange. Bluetooth BLE devices will automatically grab an input device that is in pairing mode. There is no provision for connecting using the “normal” Bluetooth mechanism. A fun project and you could use the case for some other tiny projects, too. A larger flash on an ESP32 has lots of possibilities, as well.
If you need a primer on the
ESP32
, we got it. If you want to play
DOOM
on something truly strange,
try seven-segment displays
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543995",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T09:51:18",
"content": "Amazing! Even more that the original IBM PC couldn’t even play Doom at all…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6544457",
"author": "Joshua",... | 1,760,372,473.214372 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/restarting-the-grid-when-the-grid-is-off-the-grid/ | Restarting The Grid When The Grid Is Off The Grid | Ryan Flowers | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"alternator",
"exciter",
"grid simulator",
"induction motor",
"oscilloscope",
"power grid",
"substation"
] | If you watch YouTube long enough, it seems like going “off the grid” is all the rage these days. But what if the thing that goes off the grid is
the grid itself
? In the
video below the break
, [Grady] with
Practical Engineering
explores the question: How do you restart an entire power grid after it’s gone offline? It’s a brilliantly simple deep dive into what it takes to restore power to large amounts of customers without causing major damage to not just the grid, but the power generators themselves.
What’s A Power Grid Operators Favorite Band?
The hackers among us who’ve dealt with automotive alternators know it must be
excited
in order to generate electricity. What does that even mean, and how does it affect the grid? Simply put, it takes power to make power. For example, old heavy equipment had what they called pony motors — a small easy to start engine that’s sole purpose was to start a much larger engine. Aircraft have auxiliary power units (APUs) for the same purpose. What do power grids have? You’ll have to watch the video to find out.
Once at least two power generators are online, grid operators can just flip the switch and start feeding power to customers, right? Not quite. [Grady] once again uses a clever test jig and an oscilloscope to show the damage that can occur if things aren’t done
just right.
It’s a fascinating video well worth watching.
Learn how grid operators use a
Power Grid Emulator called LEGOS
to help them with keeping the electrons flowing in the right direction. | 33 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543906",
"author": "mythoughts62",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T06:08:17",
"content": "In the video, he shows an animation of a synchroscope used to synchronize alternators. To see a real synchroscope in action, check out DiodeGoneWild’s video on them:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ... | 1,760,372,473.426855 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/psa-watch-out-for-white-filament/ | PSA: Watch Out For White Filament | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"colorant",
"titanium dioxide"
] | We all know that using 3D printing filament with exotic filament that has metal or carbon fibers in it will tend to wear standard nozzles. That’s why many people who work with filaments like that use something other than conventional brass nozzles like hardened steel. There are even nozzles that have a ruby or diamond surfaces to prevent wear. However, [Slant 3D] asserts something we didn’t know:
white filament may be wearing your nozzle
, too. You can see his argument in the video below.
The reason? According to Slant 3D, the problem is the colorant added to make it white: titanium dioxide. Unlike some colorants, the titanium dioxide colorant has a large grain size. The video claims that the hard titanium material has a particle size of about 200 nm, which is much larger than, say, carbon black, which is about 20 times smaller.
Honestly, we love printing with matte white PLA, and we haven’t noticed a problem. On the other hand, we usually don’t use brass nozzles, either, so maybe that’s part of the reason we are satisfied with it. We wonder what other abrasive and large colorants might be lurking in otherwise normal-looking filament.
If you want to really try something exotic,
we have some suggestions
. There are plenty of
engineering polymers
available you can print with, for a price. | 48 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543872",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T04:49:29",
"content": "If there were some iron oxides in reds, that would be something I would suspect. It’s harder than brass anyway.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,473.354909 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/how-on-frequency-are-those-cheap-radar-modules/ | How On-Frequency Are Those Cheap Radar Modules? | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"Doppler",
"microwve",
"radar"
] | If you’re partial to browsing AliExpress, Banggood, or eBay for unusual hardware, you may have seen the HB100 Doppler Radar modules. These are a PCB with a metal can on board, and their reverse side has a patch antenna array. They work on a frequency of 10.525 GHz, and [OH2FTG]
has characterized a few of them to see how close they lie to that figure
.
These devices have
a superficially very simple circuit
that makes extensive use of PCB layout for creating microwave inductors, capacitors, and tuned circuits. There’s a FET oscillator and a diode mixer, and a dielectric resonator coupling the output and input inductors of the FET. This component provides the frequency stability, but its exact frequency depends on what lies within its electric field. Thus the screening can does more than screening, and has a significant effect on the frequency and stability of the oscillator.
The higher quality HB100s have a small tuning screw in the top of the can which in turn adjusts the frequency. This should be tweaked in the factory onto the correct point, but is frequently absent in the cheaper examples. In this case he has a pile of modules, and while surprisingly some are pretty close there are outliers that lie a significant distance away.
If you use an HB100 then the chances are nobody will ever bother you if it’s off-frequency, as its power output is tiny. But it’s worth knowing about their inner workings and also how to adjust them should you ever need to. Meanwhile if you’re interested in Doppler radar,
here’s how to design one for a lower frequency
. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543834",
"author": "Alex99a",
"timestamp": "2022-12-07T01:24:14",
"content": "Somebody at the Dayton Hamvention used to sell something similar along with a simple circuit to turn the thing on. The idea was that you would use it out on the interstate to spook people’s radar detector... | 1,760,372,473.560269 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/the-worlds-brightest-laser-pointer/ | The World’s Brightest Laser Pointer? | Al Williams | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"laser array",
"laser pointer"
] | The videos from [styropyro] are always amusing and informative. However, ironically for him, he is alarmed that many green laser pointers are more powerful than they are supposed to be. Sure, you often want a powerful laser, but if you think a laser is safe and it isn’t, you could… well… put an eye out. See the video below to see what [styropyro] claims is the
brightest laser pointer in the world
.
The key is a possibly gray market very large green laser array. It appears to have at least 24 lasers and some pretty serious lenses. He tested the array first with a power supply and it looked like something out of a bad science fiction movie, even at reduced power.
One problem with a big laser pointer is having enough voltage to drive the laser. He took an inverter-style microwave and pulled out the lightweight transformer. The final build has a 555 and is extremely dangerous. Unprotected lithium cells, high voltage, and blinding laser light. What can go wrong?
It is fun to watch the testing, but we don’t want to build one. We’ll settle for our handheld pointer. However, we always enjoy [styropyro’s] antics, like his
laser oven
. Our favorite, though, was his amusing take on a book from our childhood:
The Chemical Formulary
. | 37 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543766",
"author": "Ken de AC3DH",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T21:30:08",
"content": "Just in time for Christmas… You’ll shot your eye out!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6543771",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,473.631346 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/silicone-slapping-servos-solve-simon-says/ | Silicone-Slapping Servos SolveSimon Says | Robin Kearey | [
"Games",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"motion sensor",
"robot hand",
"servo",
"simon"
] | Most modern computer games have a clearly-defined end, but many classics like
Pac-man
and
Duck Hunt
can go on indefinitely, limited only by technical constraints such as memory size. One would think that the classic electronic memory game
Simon
should fall into that category too, but with most humans struggling even to reach level 20 it’s hard to be sure. [Michael Schubart] was determined to find out if there was in fact an end to the latest incarnation of
Simon
and built
a robot to help him in his quest
.
The
Simon Air
, as the newest version is known, uses motion sensors to detect hand movements, enabling no-touch gameplay. [Michael] therefore made a system with servo-actuated silicone hands that slap the motion sensors. The tone sequence generated by the game is detected by light-dependent resistors that sense which of the segments lights up; a Raspberry Pi keeps track of the sequence and replays it by driving the servos.
We won’t spoil the ending, but [Michael] did find an answer to his question. An earlier version of the game was already
examined with the help of an Arduino
, although it apparently wasn’t fast enough to drive the game to its limits. If you think
Simon
can be improved you can always
roll your own
, whether from scratch or by
hacking an existing toy
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543738",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T20:06:19",
"content": "Funny to mention pac-man and duck hunt. As those both have “kill screens”, where the game becomes impossible to beat at a certain point. On duck hunt it is level 100, on pac-man it is level 256.",
"paren... | 1,760,372,473.859511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/usb-c-introduction-for-hackers/ | All About USB-C: Introduction For Hackers | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Slider",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"Type-C",
"USB C",
"USB Type-C",
"USB-C PD"
] | We’ve now had at least five years of USB-C ports in our devices. It’s a standard that many manufacturers and hackers can get behind. Initially, there was plenty of confusion about what we’d actually encounter out there, and manufacturer-induced aberrations have put some people off. However, USB-C is here to stay, and I’d like to show you how USB-C actually gets used out there, what you can expect out of it as a power user, and what you can get out of it as a hobbyist.
Modern devices have a set of common needs – they need a power input, or a power output, sometimes both, typically a USB2 connection, and often some higher-speed connectivity like a display output/input or USB 3. USB-C is an interface that aims to be able to take care of all of those. Everything aforementioned is optional, which is a blessing and a curse, but you can quickly learn to distinguish what to expect out of a device based on how it looks; if ever in doubt, I’d like to show you how to check.
Communicating Capabilities, Configurations and Caveats
We all know that USB-C can be rotated – it lets you insert the cable whichever way around — which was a significant improvement over USB-B. Let’s get down to how this works. To make this possible, there’s a CC (Configuration Channel) connection – a single-wire line in every USB-C cable that attaches to one of the two CC pins in the Type-C connector, and it is essential to making USB-C work. For simple USB-C usecases, like “get USB 2.0 and 5 V out of a port, follow a simple recipe – attach a 5.1 kΩ pulldown to each CC pin, and you will have a USB-C port that will work with all reasonable devices out there.
There’s support for stuff beyond 5 V and USB 2.0 in USB-C, of course. You can get a variety of voltages out of a USB-C port, which is quite handy for charging things like laptops. You can get USB 3, DisplayPort, and Thunderbolt. Most laptops will let you connect a docking station taking advantage of USB-C as much as possible, giving you a high-resolution display, plenty of USB ports and charging all over the same cable. Now, how does that work?
For usecases like voltages larger than 5 V (USB-PD) or high-speed connectivity beyond USB 2 and 3 (the “altmodes”, for Alternate Mode) you have to invoke them through the same CC connection. You have a single-wire for two-way communications, which makes the CC wire a half-duplex channel; it’s a
fixed-rate 300 kbps Ethernet-like protocol.
There’s plenty of ICs that talk this protocol to implement a set of defined features, and quite a few ICs and microcontroller peripherals will help you say anything you want over the protocol.
With Great Power…
USB-C ports have pins for four high-speed differential pairs, eight pins in total. Many simpler USB-C devices have them disconnected, but there’s a lot of power in these ports. For a start, you can usually get USB 3.1 or 3.2 out of them when you see such a port on a laptop. A USB3 port usually takes up two differential pairs out of four, but some devices support 2 x 2 USB3 links, doubling the amount of pairs and the transfer speed. More and more often, you can get DisplayPort out of your USB-C ports, too – with either two or four lanes, you can drive some pretty-high-resolution displays.
Then, there’s Thunderbolt, a half-proprietary technology that also uses the high-speed pairs on a USB-C connector. It can tunnel USB3, DisplayPort and even PCIe within itself, though it’s none of these three things. With Thunderbolt, you can have a docking station but on steroids, with more DisplayPort options, better and faster ports, or perhaps even an external GPU! You might guess that it’s the rarest and most expensive option out of all of these.
Given these high-speed and high-power capabilities, the unification of everything into one connector has strong upsides. Your USB-C laptop charger can also charge your phone in times of need, and thanks to aggressive standardization, there’s not much proprietary stuff involved in charging anymore.
If you have a USB-C Nintendo Switch dock, it will also theoretically act as a dock for your laptop, assuming you can mechanically make it connect, and laptop docks will work with your Steam Deck. In general, docking stations are becoming reasonable – you use a single cable for everything, it works with most USB-C devices out there, and that’s that.
Each year, there’s less and less that USB-C cannot do.
Last year, they announced EPR
, which raises USB-C port capability up to 240 W, at 48 V @ 5 A – as opposed to SPR, where a USB-C port would be limited to 100 W, 20 V @ 5 A. This basically eliminates the need for barrel plug adapters on laptops, where 100 W of USB-C used to be a barrier – no longer should we need all the “universal” power supplies with an assortment of barrel jack adapters. Then, there’s USB4, an upcoming standard, which is just like Thunderbolt, but not quite, but better, but worse? Either way, we’re going to see more USB4 support in computers, and hopefully one day every laptop will be equipped with a high-speed interface, even the cheapest ones.
Overall, USB-C has a bright future, and it’s reasonably well-designed in many aspects – learning from mistakes we’ve been making throughout the decades of ports, cables and standards, and leaving enough for upcoming additions.
Of course, USB-C also created a whole new field to make mistakes in.
…Comes A Memorable Track Record
USB-C horror stories are everywhere – basically everyone who has used USB-C, can tell you about that one time when USB-C failed them, or perhaps, multiple times over. There’s more upsides to USB-C than there are downsides, but I firmly believe it’s important we remember the ways it used to fail us, and the ways it still does, so that we can learn from these ways and figure out how to avoid them.
Not all parts of the USB-C standard are equally well-thought-out. The cable and port situation is the first one to come to mind. When you see a USB-C port, you can hardly ever know at a glance what it supports, and the same goes for cables. The situation is pretty dire, as it stands – using USB-C can, at times, require plenty of guesswork for someone who hasn’t found a decent explanation yet. There are guidelines to how you can distinguish cables, and I will show some tricks along the way. That said, they should have introduced a compelling visual marking scheme from the start.
The USB-C standard is somewhat complicated to implement, with the numerous state machines and peculiarities involved. The USB-C specification is
known for infamously long PDF documents
: the connector and cables document is 350 pages and the USB-PD document is 600+ pages long. Many manufacturers have tried over the years, in good faith, and still created devices with noticeable and bizarre edgecases. Laptops that only work with certain chargers and vice-versa, docks that only work with certain laptops or only in combination with a certain charger, cables that work in one orientation only or
devices that work differently depending on cable orientation
– there’s no shortage of mystery.
In addition to that, there is an infinite amount of ways to misuse USB-C, and certain manufacturers try hard! It’s not USB-C standard’s fault that others misuse it — when defining a complex standard, you can only implement a limited amount of protections. However, we still have a whole new category of problems for us to watch out for. Some USB-C sins are hard to forgive and worth zoning in on, and some are less obvious – we’ll go through many of these along the way.
Myriad Ways To Hack On
It’s important you keep this in mind – USB-C will only become more coherent as time goes on; by force, if necessary. Likewise, it will only become more hackable. Because as over time, we will collect more and more building blocks – pieces of hardware and knowledge alike. In addition to that, the USB-C ecosystems in our homes are only growing within each day. If you’re designing something today, you should strongly consider USB-C for your usecases.
Here, let’s recap what you need to add a USB-C port to make sure your device gets 5 V with up to 3 A possible, with USB 2.0 data, and full rotation support for both.
Symbol: USB_C_Receptacle_USB2.0; footprint: USB_C_Receptacle_HRO_TYPE-C-31-M-12
That’s it. Compared to MicroUSB, it’s only two extra resistors, and the pins are easier to solder. Wire the resistors up specifically as pictured on the schematic; don’t join the CC pins like Raspberry Pi 4 did, and don’t omit the resistors either. If you omit the resistors, the upstream Type-C port will not provide 5 V to your device – a lot of cheap devices omit them. There’s no power provided without the 5.1 kΩ resistors, unless you use an USB-A to USB-C cable to power your device. If you omit one of the resistors, only one rotation of the port will work –
some cheap devices only have one resistor.
Every USB-C device that wants to receive 5 V at any point has those resistors, either onboard or inside an USB-C communications IC. For a simple “5 V and USB 2.0” purpose, you can just use 1% 5.1 kΩ resistors. That said, in pinch, you can
parallel two 10K resistors
and it actually works. Personally, I just ordered a reel of 5.1 kΩ resistors and they’ve been of big help. If you have a port where the designer forgot to add these resistors, you can also order some
FPC shims that help solder such resistors onto a popular kind of connectors!
You have plenty of USB-C connectors to pick from, and the 16-pin ones are a crowd favourite – with a ton of pin-compatible ones available for purchase anywhere, and reasonably easy to hand-solder, especially if you have solder wick to fix mistakes with. Make sure you don’t use connectors without CC pins – as you can’t connect pulldown resistors, it’s not possible to make such connectors work with actual Type-C ports, and they’ll only ever work with an USB-A to USB-C cable, which is a significant limitation.
Of course, there is way more to USB-C than just 5 V @ 3 A and USB 2.0, as I’ve mentioned, and I will show you how you can get to all the other possibilities. However, it’s important that you remember the formula shown, as it’s the one you will use the most often, and it will help you understand other formulae as well. In the meantime, you can use SBU pins to expose some debug connections likea UART, because nothing except DisplayPort uses SBU. However, it can be tricky to find plug breakouts that expose SBU in a hand solderable form-factor. And, if you ever enter the USB-C port hacker big leagues, you can
actually implement debugging in a standards-compliant way,
too!
You Don’t Always Have To Comply
And even full compliance won’t always keep you safe.
Compliance to USB-C standards for a hacker is a double-edged sword. If you don’t comply,
you might destroy a laptop,
or it might be that you will benefit hugely without dangers or downsides. Some scenarios are “outlawed” not because they’re actually dangerous, but because they are deemed confusing for an average user or won’t result in tip-top functionality, and in many cases, the worst outcome for non-compliance is that someone on the Internet might get angry at you over a nitpick.
In upcoming installments, I will discuss things that are outright terrible and should never have been made. I will also show you how to gently (or harshly) violate the standards where it could benefit you or it would outright make sense, and where it might look like you could violate the standards, but you really, really shouldn’t. Here’s a guideline – when you hear that something you want to use violates the USB-C standards, it very much matters what the consequences of that are in your specific application.
Let’s learn, propagate, and violate the USB-C standard together! See you next week. | 53 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543688",
"author": "darius",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T18:06:34",
"content": "I am the first to comment.Does every USB-C support OTG ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6543795",
"author": "Vankata513",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,473.958695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/rocket-mounted-3d-printed-camera-wheel-tries-succeeds-and-also-fails/ | Rocket Mounted 3D Printed Camera Wheel Tries, Succeeds, And Also Fails | Ryan Flowers | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"bps.space",
"camera",
"despin",
"high power rocket",
"karman line",
"reaction wheel",
"rocket"
] | [Joe] at
BPS.space
has a thing for rockets, and his latest quest is to build a rocket that will cross the Kármán Line and launch into the Final Frontier. And being the owner of a YouTube channel, he wants to have excellent on-board video that he can share. The trouble? Spinning. A spinning rocket is a stable rocket, especially as altitude increases. So how would [Joe] get stable video from a rocket spinning at several hundred degrees per second? That’s the question being addressed in the
video below the break
.
The de-spun video looks quite good
Rather than use processing power to stabilize video digitally, [Joe] decided to take a different approach: Cancelling out the spin with a motor, essentially making a camera-wielding reaction wheel that would stay oriented in one direction, no matter how fast the rocket itself is spinning.
Did it work? Yes… and no. The design was intended to be a proof of concept, and in that sense there was a lot of success and some excellent video was taken. But as with many proof of concept prototypes, the spinning camera module has a lot of room for improvement. [Joe] goes into some details about the changes he’ll be making for revision 2, including a different motor and some software improvements. We certainly look forward to seeing the progress!
To get a better idea of the problem that [Joe] is trying to solve, check out this
360 degree rocket cam
that we featured a few years ago. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543662",
"author": "Cap",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T17:08:26",
"content": "This Guy is too brutal on himself.. I’d be way thrilled with what he did.. Even if it was not ‘Picture Perfect’..Any Launch you can get the pieces back from is a Good Flight!.. His was perfect!",
"pare... | 1,760,372,474.027042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/gift-idea-from-1969-a-kitchen-computer/ | Gift Idea From 1969: A Kitchen Computer | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"Honeywell",
"kitchen computer",
"personal computer",
"recipe",
"yesterday's future today"
] | The end of the year is often a time for people to exchange presents and — of course — the rich want to buy each other the best presents. The Neiman Marcus company was famous for having a catalog of gift ideas. Many were what you’d consider normal gifts, but there were usually extreme ones, like a tank trunk filled with 100,000 gallons of cologne. One year, the strange gift was an authentic Chinese junk complete with sails and teak decks. They apparently sold three at $11,500 (in 1962 money, no less). Over the top? In 1969, they featured a kitchen computer.
Wait a minute! In 1969, computers were the purview of big companies, universities, and NASA, right? Well, not really. By that time, some industrial minicomputers were not millions of dollars but were still many thousands of dollars. The price in the catalog for the kitchen computer was $10,600. That’s about $86,000 in today’s money. The actual machine was a Honeywell 316, based on one of the computers that helped run the early Internet.
It isn’t entirely clear if the company really thought they would sell one and — as far as anyone can tell — they didn’t. The machine came with a two-week training class to learn how to program the machine and with no real screen, we aren’t entirely clear how it worked. According to
Earlycomputers.com
:
The computer used binary code, so if Mom wanted to plan a dinner around some nice steak that she had just bought, she would need to enter the binary code for steak:
01110011011101000110010101100001011010110000110100001010.
And even if she managed to do that correctly, the output from the computer was displayed as a series of lights that “spelled out” the answer in binary code. Imagine eight small lights in a row and if they were on it would be read as a “1” and if it were off it would be read as a “0”. There is mention of a teletype machine that had a typewriter keyboard and would make the interface easier but that doesn’t seem to be included in price of the computer.
User Guide
Best guess? We think you keyed in some recipe ID number and how many servings you wanted. Then the computer would give you codes for each ingredient and the quantity: 1/4 cup per serving times 6 servings would somehow tell you 1 1/2 cups.
Hardware-wise, the over-100-pound machine used 16-bit words and had 72 instructions. The machine has 4 KB of magnetic core expandable to 16 KB and ran at a respectable 2.5 MHz. There isn’t much information about the actual machine, although plenty can be found about the actual H316. But you could tell it was a kitchen computer. Why? Because it included a built-in cutting board, something a stock H316 probably couldn’t claim. You can see the only known version that lives at the Computer History Museum in the video below.
A Solution in Search of
It is hard to remember, but in those days and all the way up until sometime in the 1980s, we all predicted that computers would be in people’s homes. We just couldn’t agree on what they were going to do. Tracking recipes was a common suggestion. So was balancing a checkbook, something few people seem to do anymore. Programs like Visicalc and Wordstar sold businesses on computers, but the real killer application for people wound up being communicating with other people and businesses via the network. Sure, gaming, digital photography, digital video, and digital music also became popular, but remember that it has been fairly recently that personal computers have had the storage and horsepower to do a good job at many of those things.
Even today, though, most people don’t have a permanent computer in the kitchen for cooking. Sure, there are probably a few microcontrollers in your appliances. You might use a tablet, a phone, or a laptop to look up a recipe. But the idea of a recipe computer never really caught on.
Let’s face it, early computers didn’t look like they do now, even
if they were personal
. Ditto for what used to pass
for a laptop
. | 51 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543621",
"author": "mathman",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T15:12:56",
"content": "Selling Chinese junk for Christmas…Oh well, some things never change ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6543625",
"author": "Mike",
... | 1,760,372,474.235219 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/clever-design-technique-makes-flexible-pcb-fit-for-a-queen/ | Clever Design Technique Makes Flexible PCB Fit For A Queen | Robin Kearey | [
"Tech Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"flexible PCB",
"flexures",
"PCB milling"
] | Printed circuit boards can be square, round, octagonal, or whatever shape you desire. But there’s little choice when it comes to the third dimension: most PCBs are flat and rigid. Sure, you can make flexible PCBs like the kapton-backed ones you find inside electronic gadgets, but those are complicated to work with. As it turns out however, you can also make flexible boards using regular PCB material: check out [Rehana Al-Soltane]’s
Flexible Crown PCB
, a project she did as part of [Neil Gershenfeld]’s “How To Make (Almost) Anything” class at MIT.
The basic idea is to create flexures in the PCB by milling out several long slots with thin pieces connecting the two sides. [Rehana] got this idea from [Quentin Bolsée]’s
flexible capacitive sensor project
and applied it to make a crown-shaped PCB with sparkly LEDs. The crown can bend through 180 degrees and can actually be worn as a head ornament, with pin headers to clamp it down on the wearer’s hair.
[Rehana] used a tool called
svg-pcb
to design the board. This is an open source toolkit that lets you design PCBs by describing them in code, rather than drawing shapes by hand. Although this might look a bit odd if you’re used to working with traditional PCB design software, it’s ideal for making repetitive structures like the flexures in the crown: simply write a
for
loop and let the tool generate a perfect array of identical slots.
Fabricating the Flexible Crown posed a few difficulties of its own, because the PCB began to flex and wiggle itself loose before the milling process was finished. As it turned out, the trick was to cut all the slots on the interior first and only mill the board’s outline as the very last step.
Adding flexures to a PCB like this looks like a promising technique and we’ll keep an eye on further developments in this field. There are other ways of making bendy boards though: researchers at the University of Maryland
used a laser engraver to make foldable PCBs
. Our
2019 Flexible PCB Contest
also yielded several impressive implementations.
https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.22/Harvard/people/Rehana/images/week10/10-blinking.mp4 | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543572",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T12:29:43",
"content": "“with pin headers to clamp it down on the wearer’s hair.”Well, that rules me out!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "65... | 1,760,372,474.285812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/06/homebrew-3d-printer-goop-promises-better-bed-adhesion/ | Homebrew 3D Printer Goop Promises Better Bed Adhesion | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"bed adhesion",
"isopropyl alcohol",
"PVA"
] | Back when 3D printers were pretty new, most of us had glass beds with or without painter’s tape. To make plastic stick, you’d either use a glue stick or hair spray. Many people have moved on to various other build surfaces that don’t require help, but some people still use something to make the bed sticky and there are quite a few products on the market that claim to be better than normal glue or hairspray. [Jonas] wanted to try it, but instead of buying a commercial product, he found a recipe online for “3D printer goop” and
made it himself
.
You need four ingredients: distilled water and isopropyl alcohol are easy to find. The other two chemicals: PVP and PVA powder, are not too hard to source and aren’t terribly dangerous to handle. The recipe was actually from [MakerBogans] who
documents this recipe
as “Super Goop” and has another formula for “Normal Goop.” You’ll probably have to buy the chemicals in huge quantities compared to the tiny amounts you really need.
We assume the shots of the 3D printer printing its first layer is showing how effective the glue is. This looks like a very simple thing to mix up and keep in a sprayer. If you have some friends, you could probably do a group buy of the chemicals and it would cost nearly nothing for the small amounts of chemicals you need.
If you don’t want to order exotic chemicals,
you might not need them
. We used to make “goop” by dissolving ABS in acetone, but
hairspray usually did the trick
. | 43 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543560",
"author": "Gello",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T11:36:30",
"content": "Too complex. Pinch of Polyvinylpyrrolidone (povidone) + glass of Alchogol = best glue ever",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6543790",
"author"... | 1,760,372,474.146452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/rotary-dial-number-pad-is-the-perfect-prank-for-retro-phone-enthusiast/ | Rotary Dial Number Pad Is The Perfect Prank For Retro-Phone Enthusiast | Dan Maloney | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"dial",
"keyboard",
"numeric",
"numpad",
"phone",
"rotary"
] | We’re not sure about the rest of you, but to us, a keyboard without a number pad all the way over to the right just seems kind of — naked? We might not be accountants, but there’s something comforting about having the keypad right there, ready for those few occasions when you need to enter numbers more rapidly than would be possible with the row of number keys along the top of the keyboard.
What we are sure about, though, is that rapid numeric keying is not what
this rotary dial numpad keyboard
is all about. In fact, it’s actually an April Fool’s prank [Squidgeefish] played on a retro-phone-obsessed coworker, and it worked out pretty well. Starting with an old telephone dial from what must be an exceptionally well-stocked parts bin, [Squidgeefish] first worked out the electrical aspects of interfacing the dial with a cheapo mechanical keyboard. It turns out that there’s a lot of contact bounce in those old dials, leading to some software hacks to keep the Arduino happy.
There was also a little hackery needed to stuff a USB hub into the keyboard, as well as literal hacking of the keyboard’s PCB. A 3D printed enclosure allows the rotary dial to nestle into the place where the regular numpad would be, and it looks pretty good. We also like forcing the issue by replacing the entire row of number keys with a single massive prank key.
While this was all for fun, there are a couple of cool tips here, like chucking a bit of printer filament in a Dremel tool to stir-weld parts together. And even though we’ve seen
that parametric keycap generator
before, it is pretty cool to see it in action. | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543495",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T06:11:22",
"content": "yeah shutup and take my money",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6543503",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T06:56:... | 1,760,372,474.070231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/designing-to-remove-supports/ | Designing To Remove Supports | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"chamfer",
"fillet"
] | If you want to 3D print arbitrary shapes with an FDM printer, you often find you need supports. If you have dissolvable support material, that might not be a big issue, but if you use the same material for support as you print in, removing it can be difficult, depending on the location of the support and your slicer. At the very least, it is going to require more time and filament to print and at least some post-processing. [Slant 3D] asserts that you can always redesign the part using
chamfers and fillets
to avoid needing support to start with. Watch the video, below.
Of course, sometimes you just need to flip the part around. For example, the part in question — which is just an example — could just be rotated to avoid support, but that isn’t the point, of course. A fillet, however, still might need support, so you wind up having to do a double fillet to really avoid support.
The answer, according to the video, is a chamfer. The steady change in angle is easy to print, although not all designs will allow a steep chamfer. So picking the angle is the key and you might even mix both chamfers and fillets.
Creating chamfers and fillets might be easy or difficult,
depending on your CAD package of choice
. OpenSCAD is notoriously difficult to add these things, but you can use FreeCAD which can interoperate with OpenSCAD to make it easier. There are also a number of
libraries
available. Speaking of FreeCAD, we saw that tool used in another method to avoid supports:
print flat and fold
. | 22 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543097",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T12:56:19",
"content": "I use Openscad (O) and Cura (C).Want to have an infill with different density at certain point? Create multiple overlapping models in O, export in 3MF and import in C with different setting. Cumberso... | 1,760,372,474.363359 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/using-electron-beams-to-draw-tiny-shapes-onto-silicon/ | Using Electron Beams To Draw Tiny Shapes Onto Silicon | Robin Kearey | [
"Science",
"Tech Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"chip manufacturing",
"electron beam",
"electron-beam lithography",
"lithography"
] | Over the past few years we’ve seen several impressive projects where people try to manufacture integrated circuits using hobbyist tools. One of the most complex parts of this process is lithography: the step in which shapes are drawn onto a silicon wafer. There are several ways to do this, all of them rather complicated, but [Zachary Tong] over at Breaking Taps has managed to make one of them work quite well. He shares the results of
his electron-beam lithography experiments
in his latest video (embedded below).
In e-beam lithography, or EBL, shapes are drawn onto a wafer using an electron beam in a vacuum chamber. This is a slow process compared to optical lithography, as used in mass production, but it is reasonably simple and very flexible. [Zach] decided to use his electron microscope as an e-beam litho machine; although not designed for lithography, it has the same basic components as a real EBL machine and can act as a substitute with a bit of software tweaking.
[Zach] also has an atomic force microscope, which he used to make these beautiful images.
The first step is to coat a wafer with a layer of e-beam resist. [Zach] used PMMA, commonly known as acrylic plastic, and applied it using spin coating after dissolving it in anisole. He then placed the wafer into the electron microscope and used it to scan an image. The image was then developed by rinsing the wafer in cold isopropyl alcohol.
[Zach] explains the whole process in detail in his video, including how he tuned all the parameters like resist thickness, beam strength, exposure time and development time, as well as the software tricks needed to persuade the microscope to function as a litho machine. In his best runs he managed to draw lines with a width of about 100 nanometers, which is seriously impressive for such a relatively simple setup.
These e-beam lithography experiments follow on from
[Zach]’s earlier research using lasers
. Homebrew IC expert Sam Zeloof has also
used electron beams in his work
. Thanks for the tip, [smellsofbikes]! | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543074",
"author": "rho",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T11:32:47",
"content": "I don’t understand. We used to do things like these during early 1980s at CEMI. Even back then it wasn’t really breakthrough science anymore.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,474.415627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/dirty-trs-80-has-a-surprise-hack/ | Dirty TRS-80 Has A Surprise Hack | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"retrocomputing",
"trs-80"
] | [Adrian] had a
TRS-80 model IV
that looks like it was stored in a mulch pile. However, it seemed to have some surprises. The first hint that something was up was that the keyboard looks like a model III and there are two mystery knobs in the back.
So what’s going on? You” have to watch [Adrian’s] video below to find out. At about the six-minute mark, you’ll find that things are not at all what you might think.
Here’s a hint: strapped to the disk drive, there is a VHF and UHF tuner. No kidding. There were also some other odd parts inside, but we’d give away the surprise if we said more. The keyboard hack is — well, impressive might not be the right word. Surprising, maybe?s
Someone who once owned the machine definitely did a hack in the truest sense of the word. It required some surgery to get some activity on the computer. [Adrian] has some more troubleshooting to get the beast working, but we imagine we’ll see the troubleshooting in one or more future videos.
If you already know what the surprise is, it couldn’t help but
remind us of this post
, but we won’t say why so you can click it after you’ve watched the entire video. We were sort of surprised
no bits of this computer
showed up. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543008",
"author": "geocrasher",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T06:46:34",
"content": "Truly, a trash-80! Totally love it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6543013",
"author": "MmmDee",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T06:56... | 1,760,372,474.463746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/miracle-of-science-scotch-tape-improves-generator/ | Miracle Of Science: Scotch Tape Improves Generator | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"energy harvesting",
"micropower",
"triboelectric"
] | We were always amused that one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the recent past — graphene — was started with pencil lead and Scotch tape. Now, researchers at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville
have determined that double-sided Scotch tape can
improve triboelectric power generators
. Triboelectric generation, of course, is nothing new. These energy harvesters take mechanical and thermal energy and turn them into tiny amounts of electricity. What’s new here is that PET plastic, aluminum, and double-sided tape can make an inexpensive generator that works well.
Keep in mind we are talking about little bits of power. In the best scenario with the device stimulated at 20 Hz, the generator peaked at 21.2 mW. That was better than some designs that only got to 7.6 mW in the same configuration.
The aluminized PET film used is not hard to obtain and a large roll is under $11. This seems like something you could put together easily if you wanted to do your own experiments.
It is something of a standard test to show how many LEDs you can power with devices like this. The researchers powered a flashlight, 476 LEDs, and a laser diode using the new generators.
If you don’t think self-power has any practical applications,
think again
. We’ve seen
tape used in triboelectric generators
before, by the way. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542988",
"author": "Markus",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T05:17:23",
"content": "Ok, I wonder what these guys are really doing all day long ;-) Scotch tape after sandwich…https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211285520309885?via%3Dihub",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,372,474.51291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/hackaday-links-december-4-2022/ | Hackaday Links: December 4, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"Artemis",
"charging",
"delamination",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"hackaday links",
"Jezero",
"lane departure",
"LED streetlights",
"olivine",
"orion",
"Perseverance",
"phosphor",
"spectrum",
"spoofing",
"water"
] | Well, this is embarrassing! Imagine sending a multibillion-dollar rover to an ancient lakebed on Mars only to discover after a year of poking around at the rocks that
it might not actually have been a lake after all
. That seems to be the impression of Jezero Crater that planetary scientists are forming after looking at the data coming back from
Perseverance
since it
nailed the landing
in what sure as heck looked like a dried-up lake, complete with a river delta system. A closer look at the sediments
Perseverance
has been sampling reveals a lot of the mineral olivine, which on Earth is rare near the surface because it readily reacts with water. Finding lots of olivine close below the surface of Jezero suggests that it either wasn’t all that watery once upon a time, or that what water was there was basically ice cold. The results are limited to where the rover has visited, of course, and the nice thing about having wheels is that you can go somewhere else. But if you were hoping for clear signs that Jezero was once a lake teeming with life, you might have to keep waiting.
In other space news, we have to admit to taking NASA to task a bit in the podcast a couple of weeks back for not being quite up to SpaceX’s zazzle standards with regard to instrumenting the SLS launch. Yeah, a night launch is spectacular, but not having all those internal cameras like the Falcon has just sort of left us flat. But we should have been more patient, because
the images coming back from Artemis 1 are simply spectacular.
We had no idea that NASA attached cameras to the solar panels of the Orion spacecraft, which act a little like selfie sticks and allow the spacecraft to be in the foreground with Earth and the Moon in the background. Seeing Earth from lunar distance again for the first time in 50 years has been a real treat, and getting our satellite in the frame at the same time is a huge bonus.
We all know how the algorithmic tides of news stories ebb and flow on the Internet these days, but even when you’re expecting it, it can be jarring to see related stories suddenly popping up in your feed. To wit, we found a couple of stories this week about electric vehicles suffering serious damage at charging stations. The first was
a report by a Ford F-150 Lightning driver that a charger bricked his truck
. The user reports that while topping off at an Electrify America station in Oregon, he heard a loud boom before the charger and his ungodly expensive vehicle went dead, requiring a flatbed tow to the Ford dealership for repairs. Separately,
a BC Hydro charger in Vancouver reportedly borked at least two EVs
, one of which racked up $6,300 in repair charges. No word about the nature of the damage, of course, and BC Hydro claims the charger was taken out of service. We can’t help but wonder what the concurrence of these two stories has to tell us about the state of charging stations in general, though.
Also from the, “Isn’t that weird?” files, reports are popping up around the world of
LED streetlights suddenly going all purple
. Normally an intense bluish-white, LED streetlights in places like Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, California, and elsewhere are now glowing an eerie but beautiful shade of deep purple. When we first saw this story, we figured it would just be a problem with the phosphors on the COB LEDs, perhaps wearing away and letting the underlying UV light shine through. And indeed, that’s the conclusion this story eventually reaches, at least for Vancouver lights which seem to be suffering from delamination of the phosphor layer thanks to heat damage. The article goes a bit further and blames the ever-present “supply chain issues” for the problem, which honestly isn’t that hard to swallow.
And finally, can you turn a car into a pillar of salt? No, you can’t, but if you follow the lead of artist James Birdle you may just be able to
trap a self-driving car with a couple of kilos of salt
. James found that encircling his car with a double dashed line of salt made the car think it could both drive across the barrier and not violate it. So the car just failed safe and stayed put inside the salty circles. We’d love to dive a little further into this– it’s not clear what the car is, but one comment on the Vimeo video claims it’s a 2006 SEAT Ibiza, whatever that is. It’s not likely a 16-year-old vehicle is self-driving, so perhaps it has lane-departure sensors. | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542893",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T00:34:26",
"content": "LEDs can last a long time, saving money in electricity and replacement costs, if they are not overdriven. Sadly, the manufacturers don’t want to drive themselves out of busines... | 1,760,372,474.595123 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/the-palmpilot-returns-this-time-in-your-browser/ | The PalmPilot Returns, This Time In Your Browser | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"PalmPilot",
"retrocomputing"
] | The PalmPilot doesn’t seem to get much retrocomputing love, but maybe it should. After all, it might not have been the very first handheld, but it was probably the most successful, and that ultimately led to the era of the smartphone. Whether you miss your old Palm applications, or never got to experience them the first time around, fear not. You can now
relive them in all their glory
in your browser thanks to the Internet Archive project.
There are over 500 applications and games all running in a browser-based emulator. Some of the programs don’t seem to work well, and some don’t make sense in the context of a virtual environment. But many work fine, and if you want the classic apps, just open up anything and press the home button. If you want a review of the Palm IIIe PDA from 1999, check out [VWestlife’s] video, below.
The
Grafitti
handwriting recognition system was state-of-the-art for the day. The key was the system could more easily recognize printing if it were mostly single strokes that always worked the same way. For example, the “A” had no crossbar and the “F” was missing the bottom horizontal line. As much as possible, you make letters with a single stroke and there was only one way to form each letter. Good times!
What was high tech back then you can now
build out of spare parts
. If you happen to have a Palm, you might consider giving it a
much-needed backlight
. | 31 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542848",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T21:12:41",
"content": "Nice, I was pondering single purposing a palm or two, but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to go through software on them to find out what’s actually useful still. That is because they have limited me... | 1,760,372,474.665929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/diy-repair-stand-holds-your-bike-and-weighs-it/ | DIY Repair Stand Holds Your Bike And Weighs It | Robin Kearey | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle repair",
"load cell",
"repair stand",
"strain gauge",
"weighing scale"
] | If you’ve ever done maintenance or repair work on your bicycle, you’ll know that positioning a bike in your workshop isn’t trivial. You can use your bike’s kickstand, or lean it against a wall, but then you can’t work on the wheels. You can place it upside-down, but then the shifters and brake levers are hard to reach. You can hang it from the ceiling, but then you first need to install hooks and cables in hard-to-reach places. Ideally you’d want to have one of those standing clamp systems that the pros use, but their price is typically beyond a hobbyist’s budget.
Or at least, that’s how it used to be. As [Dane Kouttron] discovered, a simple wall-mounted bike clamp can be had for as little as $35 on eBay, and can easily be
converted into a smart mobile repair stand
. [Dane] fashioned an adjustable stand from some steel pipes he had lying around, and 3D-printed an adapter bracket to mount the bike clamp on it. This worked fine, but why stop at a simple clamp when you can expand it with, say, an integrated scale to weigh your bikes while you work on them?
[Dane] thought this a useful addition and went searching for load cells. After finding a suitable model he designed a new bracket that could accurately translate the downward force exerted by the clamp into a compressive force on the load cell: a few blocks of aluminium and a hinge did the trick nicely. He then connected the load cell to an HX711 strain gauge amplifier, whose output was digitized by an Arduino and displayed on an LCD. Finally, he made a sleek 3D-printed enclosure for the whole system that neatly fit on top of the bike clamp.
The resulting system is sturdy enough to hold even a fully loaded electric bike but flexible enough to position it in various orientations. If, like us, you now realized you also need to have this in your workshop, then you can simply download the STL files and the Arduino sketch and build your own. If you’re trying to solve the inverse problem of mounting your workshop onto your bike,
there’s solutions for that too
. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542794",
"author": "manny",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T18:06:24",
"content": "This writeup is ludicrously detailed, i really like the short video clips.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542837",
"author": "transistor",
... | 1,760,372,474.818553 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/radial-vector-reducer-rotates-at-really-relaxed-velocity/ | Radial Vector Reducer Rotates At Really Relaxed Velocity | Ryan Flowers | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3D CAD",
"3d printed",
"3D printed gears",
"cycloidal drive",
"cycloidal gearbox",
"gear",
"planetary gears"
] | When [Michael Rechtin] learned about Radial Vector Reducers, the underlying research math made his head spin, albeit very slowly. Realizing that it’s essentially a cycloidal drive meshed with a planetary gear set, he got to work in CAD and, in seemingly no time, had a design to test. You can see the full results of his experiment in the
video below the break
. Or head on out to Thingiverse to
download the model directly
.
[Michael] explains that while there are elements of a cycloidal drive, itself a wonderfully clever gear reduction
mechanism, the radial vector reducer actually has more bearing surfaces, and should be more durable as a result. Two cycloidal disks are driven by a planetary gear reduction for an even greater reduction, but they don’t even spin, they just cycle in a way that drives the outer shell, setting them further apart from standard cycloidal drives.
How would this 3D printed contraption hold up? To test this, [Michael] built a test jig with a NEMA 23 stepper providing the torque, and an absurd monster truck/front loader wheel — also printed — to provide traction in the grass and leaves of his back yard. He let it drive around its tether for nearly two weeks before disassembling it to check for wear. How’d it look? You’ll have to check the video to find out.
If you aren’t familiar with cycloidal drives, check out this
fantastic explanation we featured
. As for planetary drives, what better way to demonstrate it than by an
ornamental planetary gear clock
! | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543478",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T04:41:30",
"content": "I’m happy to see this.This type of gearbox is indeed an improvement of the cycloidal. I never liked the loose planet pins in the big holes in the cycloidal drives, and this mod eliminates that. This type ... | 1,760,372,474.875561 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/epic-guide-to-bare-metal-stm32-programming/ | Epic Guide To Bare-Metal STM32 Programming | Joseph Long | [
"ARM",
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"bare metal",
"embedded development",
"stm32"
] | [Sergey Lyubka] put together this
epic guide for bare-metal microcontroller programming
. While the general concepts should be applicable to most any microcontroller, [Sergey]s examples specifically relate to the Nucleo-F429ZI development board featuring the ARM-based STM32F429 microcontroller.
In the realm of computer systems, bare-metal programming most often refers to programming the processor without an intervening operating system. This generally applies to programming BIOS, hardware drivers, communication drivers, elements of the operating system, and so forth. Even in the world of embedded programming, were things are generally quite low-level (close to the metal), we’ve grown accustomed to a good amount of hardware abstraction. For example, we often start projects already standing on the shoulders of various libraries, boot loaders, and integrated development tools.
When we forego these abstractions and program directly on the microprocessor or microcontroller, we’re working on the bare metal. [Sergey] aptly defines this as programming the microcontroller “using just a compiler and a datasheet, nothing else.” His guide starts at the very foundation by examining the processor’s memory map and registers including locations for memory mapped I/O pins and other peripherals.
The guide walks us through writing up a minimal firmware program from boot vector to blinking an LED connected to an I/O pin. The demonstration continues with setup and use of necessary tools such as the compiler, linker, and flasher. We move on to increasingly advanced topics like timers, interrupts, UART output, debuggers, and even configuring an embedded web server to expose a complete device dashboard.
While initially more time consuming, working close to the metal provides a good deal of additional insight into, and control over, hardware operations. For even more on the subject, you may like our
STM32 Bootcamp
series on bare-metal STM32 programming. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543400",
"author": "Eric Mockler",
"timestamp": "2022-12-06T00:11:57",
"content": "I have one of those, this is cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6544403",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-12-08T08:44:... | 1,760,372,474.99781 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/trash-bag-and-foam-board-hovercraft-doesnt-fail-to-succeed-or-fail/ | Trash Bag And Foam Board Hovercraft Doesn’t Fail To Succeed. Or Fail. | Ryan Flowers | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"DIY hovercraft",
"foam board",
"hovercraft",
"skirt",
"trash bags"
] | When you think of a vehicle that can do it all- water, land, ice, snow and more- the hovercraft often comes to mind. And while they might not be ubiquitous, hovercraft catch the imagination of many a hacker just as it has for [JamesWhomsley] of [ProjectAir]. [James] has built a small, but just big enough hovercraft as you can see in the
video below the break
.
Starting with a small RC proof of concept, [James] tested out some of his favorite construction materials: foam board, trash bags, duct tape, and our personal favorite: hot glue! After a successful run with the radio controlled model, [James] set out to build a hovercraft big enough to carry a human.
The resulting hovercraft was definitely enough to take a human for a spin, despite still using RC airplane parts for power. Sure, there were a couple of instances of parts going flying, foamboard being shredded, and loss of control. Even so, the trash bag air skirt stayed intact, and the aforementioned damage was nothing some tape and hot glue couldn’t fix. [James] was back on the air in no time.
Of course, some of the very reasons that we don’t see hovercraft roaming the streets come up in the video, namely off-camber paths. But the build itself is quite good, and for those of us who’ve wondered what it takes to make a hovercraft, this video shows how the sausage is made.
This isn’t the first garbage bag based hovercraft, and we featured another
RC/Arduino controlled version just a while back
. | 23 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543286",
"author": "PEBKAC351",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T21:18:47",
"content": "I have to wonder about the skirt material – there must be something on the market that’s similarly available/inexpensive while still being a little tougher.Maybe a good nylon tarp? As I understand it, p... | 1,760,372,475.057028 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/dekatron-clock-tells-the-time-sans-semiconductors/ | Dekatron Clock Tells The Time, Sans Semiconductors | Robin Kearey | [
"classic hacks",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"dekatron",
"GPS clock",
"tubes"
] | Over the years, there have been several memory and display technologies that served a particular niche for a while, only to be replaced and forgotten when a more suitable technology came along. One of those was the dekatron: a combination memory and display tube that saw some use in the 1950s and ’60s but became obsolete soon after. Their retro design and combined memory/display functionality make them excellent components for today’s clock hackers however, as [grobinson6000] demonstrates
in his Dekaclock project
.
A dekatron tube is basically a neon tube with ten cathodes arranged in a circle. Only one of them is illuminated at any time, and you can make the tube jump to the next cathode by applying pulses to its pins. The Dekaclock uses the 50 Hz mains frequency to generate 20 ms pulses in one tube; when it reaches 100 ms, it triggers the next tube that counts hundreds of ms, which triggers another one that counts seconds, and so on with minutes and hours.
The Dekaclock uses no semiconductors at all: the entire system is built from glass tubes and passive components. However, [grobinson6000] also built an auxiliary system, full of semiconductors, that makes the clock a bit easier to use. It sits on top of the Dekaclock and automatically sets the correct time using a GPS receiver. It also keeps track of the time displayed by the dekatrons, and tells you how far they have drifted from their initial setting.
Both systems are housed in sleek wooden cases that perfectly fit the tubes’ retro aesthetic. [grobinson6000] was inspired to make the Dekaclock after watching
another dekatron clock we featured earlier
, and designed the GPS receiver to work alongside it. Dekatrons are surprisingly versatile devices: you can use them to make anything from
internet speed gauges
to
kitchen timers
. | 19 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543220",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T19:04:59",
"content": "it sounds pretty neat but, just as a matter of semantics, isn’t a dekatron tube a semiconductor? it conducts or doesn’t conduct in response to a control signal, which i thought was the definition",
"p... | 1,760,372,474.929345 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/perhaps-its-time-to-talk-about-all-those-fakes-and-clones/ | Perhaps It’s Time To Talk About All Those Fakes And Clones | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"clone",
"copy",
"counterfeit",
"fake"
] | A while back, I bought a cheap spectrum analyser via AliExpress. I come from the age when a spectrum analyser was an extremely expensive item with a built-in CRT display, so there’s still a minor thrill to buying one for a few tens of dollars even if it’s obvious to all and sundry that the march of technology has brought within reach the previously unattainable. My AliExpress spectrum analyser is a clone of a design that first appeared in a German amateur radio magazine, and in
my review at the time
I found it to be worth the small outlay but a bit deaf and wide compared to its more expensive brethren.
When A Bargain Relies On Somebody Else
My cheap spectrum analyser in all its glory.
As part of my investigation I addressed the question of software, and found that the NWT4 package it relied on was the work of one man, [Andreas Lindenau, DL4JAL]. He made it available for free-as-in-beer on his website, which was fine when servicing German radio amateurs, but became a severe problem when he was expected to provide free personal tech support for thousands of buyers of a commercially mass-produced cheap instrument from China. I can’t blame him for taking it down under those circumstances, and neither should you.
This was a pattern I found repeated more recently, when my periodic scan for new cheap stuff turned up an SDR board. It’s a USB peripheral with a range from 0 to 1000 MHz, and when it arrived it became obvious that it was a clone of a commercially produced SDR.
The Clone Wars
The SDRplay RSP1 is a high-quality receiver that
in its latest revised version
costs around $100. The cheap clone I bought has inexpensive filter components, and has a line of input sockets because it lacks the RF input switch chip for different bands. It bears no branding, but a further search will find examples with RSP1 branding that definitely cross the line from “clone” to “fake”.
This is not an SDRplay RSP1.
As you may have already guessed, the easiest way to get my SDR working would be to use SDRplay’s software and drivers for the RSP1. They’re easy enough to get hold of because they’re available for RSP1 owners, but they are unambiguously not free and are certainly not licensed for use with anything but a genuine SDRplay board.
It’s the same story as with [DL4JAL]’s spectrum analyser software; a commercially mass-produced clone board relies on software support from the originator who gets a something of a headache and who loses sales of the project they put all the hard work into developing. Other examples such as the Saleae logic analyser clones to make it a subject that bears further investigation, so I reached out to both SDRPlay and to [DL4JAL] for their experiences. Of the two, SDRplay responded, and I had a conversation with [Jon Hudson], their marketing director.
On one hand, it’s understandable that SDRplay do not want to give publicity to the fakes and clones, which it’s evident have become something of a bugbear to them. The direct fakes are a clear breach of their trademarks, while the clones undermine the significant research and development investment that went into bringing the genuine products to market. Use of the software drivers with a clone or fake is a clear breach of the licence. I asked whether they would consider selling the driver as a product in its own right, and understandably the response was that they don’t want to endorse the clones and fakes in that way, neither do they wish to be embroiled in support for inferior hardware not of their own manufacture.
Enjoy Your Cheap Stuff, Responsibly
The NanoVNA isn’t a clone, it’s based on
an open source project
.
We all like cheap instruments, whether they are a logic analyser, an SDR, a spectrum analyser, or whatever. Sometimes the cheap products are based upon open source projects, such as the
NanoVNA vector network analyser
we looked at a while back, but it’s important to be aware that just as often they are clones of commercial products that have had a huge research and development applied to create them.
There may be some open-source enthusiasts who would respond that all such things should be open source hardware anyway, and that the devices have been somehow “set free” by the cloners. And we’d agree to the extent that Hackaday’s whole existence depends on open hardware and it would be a Utopian environment in which we could find any device of our choosing on GitHub and spin up our own version for a modest outlay.
But despite the many wonderful open source hardware projects out there, it’s imperative that promising commercial ones are not throttled, because without them we simply wouldn’t have so many of the devices we depend on. Ultimately, the choice is up to the producer of the device, right? And a cynic might ask why someone demanding a small producer open-source their device is not also pursuing a larger player for the same. Call me back when you’re standing outside Agilent Technologies with a placard demanding they open-source their ‘scopes!
Since we all like to see new products coming to market, it behooves us as the customers to question the origin of cheap new devices, and consider buying the real thing instead if they are clones or fakes. Judging by my clone SDR which is plagued with spurious peaks, I’d suggest that the real thing will be a far better product anyway.
(And just in case you’re wondering, the clones also work, legally, with the open-source
LibMiriSDR
software, which is what I used to test it out.)
Banner photo: “
Genuine fake watches
” by Erik Cleves Kristensen, CC BY 2.0. | 87 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543205",
"author": "Needleroozer",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T18:31:15",
"content": "s/Salae/Saleae/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6543231",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T19:29:52",
"con... | 1,760,372,475.248437 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/how-realtime-is-your-kernel-scope-a-gpio-to-find-out/ | How Realtime Is Your Kernel? Scope A GPIO To Find Out | Arya Voronova | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"deterministic",
"digital Oscilloscope",
"embedded",
"interrupt latency",
"linux",
"real-time",
"RTLinux",
"RTOS"
] | When debugging something as involved as kernel scheduler timings, you would typically use one of the software-based debugging mechanisms available. However, in cases when software is close to bare metal, you don’t always need to do that. Instead, you can output a signal to a GPIO, and then use a logic analyzer or a scope to measure signal change timing – which is
what [Albert David] did
when evaluating Linux kernel’s PREEMPT_RT realtime operation patches.
When you reach for a realtime kernel, latency is what you care about – realtime means that for everything you do, you need to get a response within a certain (hopefully very short) interval. [Albert] wrote a program that reads a changing GPIO input and immediately writes the new state back, and scoped both of the signals to figure out the latency of of the real-time patched kernel as it processes the writes. Overlaying all the incoming and outgoing signals on the same scope screen, you can quickly determine just how suitable a scheduler is when it comes to getting an acceptable response times, and [Albert] also provides a ready-to-go BeagleBone image you can use for your own experiments, or say, in an educational environment.
What could you use this for? A lot of hobbyists use realtime kernels on Linux when building CNC machine controllers and robots, where things like motor control put tight constraints on how quickly a decision in your software is translated into real-world consequences, and if this sounds up your valley, check out
this Linux real-time task tutorial
from [Andreas]. If things get way too intense for a multi-tasking system like Linux, you might want to use a RTOS to begin with, and we have
a guide on that for you,
too. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543169",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T16:46:20",
"content": "WooHoo! Debugging micros like it’s 1989!Great to see reminders of the simple old-fashioned techniques. Refreshingly direct.Maybe even more useful now in this age of multi-core, multitasking micros with NVIC... | 1,760,372,475.118755 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/05/asbestos-the-miracle-mineral-of-our-worst-nightmares/ | Asbestos: The Miracle Mineral Of Our Worst Nightmares | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"asbestos"
] | For much of the 19th and 20th century, the mining and use of asbestos saw near-constant growth, with virtually every material used in the construction of homes, offices,
ships
, road networks and industries featuring this miraculous mineral in some fashion. Some of these materials would contain only a few percent asbestos mineral as a binder, while others would be mostly or entirely composed out of asbestos.
What had begun as mostly a curiosity thousands of years prior was now turning into the material that was helping propel humanity into an era of hitherto unknown levels of prosperity and technological progress. It seemed as if the addition of even just a bit of asbestos would make houses weather- and fireproof, make concrete and
asphalt
nearly indestructible and add just that little bit of zing to tiling and interior decorations, as well as rigidity to the predecessor to today’s plastics:
bakelite
.
“
Damaged asbestos roof
” by Harald Weber
Being a fibrous material, asbestos would also be used everywhere for insulation purposes, as well as around boilers, steam pipes and everywhere else where the heat-retaining yet thermally stable properties were very useful. Yet we all know how this story went: by the 1970s it was clear that humanity had mostly unwittingly walked into a nightmare, where every house, every surface and basement was a potential death trap.
With a war in Ukraine razing entire cities to the ground, and Europe seeking to revitalize its
asbestos-filled
post-war housing stock in the face of an energy crisis, this risk is more real now than ever before. So how did we get here, and what can we do about it?
A Historical Curiosity
Early uses of
asbestos
have been found in the form of
asbestos-ceramics
. These are essentially pottery that mix clay and asbestos mineral in varying degrees. The high-asbestos (90%) products made this way would have been highly heat-resistant, which along with the other forms show evidence of having been used with metal work. Potentially this heat-resistant property would have been extremely useful during the iron and bronze ages.
In addition, the fibrous strands made it possible to make asbestos ware that was much lighter and stronger than comparable pure clay pottery. Later in history, the ancient Greek would call asbestos ‘amiantos’, which is also retained in modern Greek, French and other Latin languages. Because of an error made by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder in his
Natural History
manuscript, Germanic languages and English would end up with the Greek word for ‘lime’ (ἀσβεστος, i.e. asbestos), which refers to something entirely different.
With most of the usage of asbestos during this period limited to integration in ceramics and similar that limited exposure to the invisible asbestos fibers, it wasn’t until the 19th century with industrial-scale mining and usage of the mineral that its adverse effects would become undeniable. This despite
reports
during Roman times on some observed ill effects of handling asbestos by both
Strabo
and Pliny the Younger. Back then and in the 19th century the most obvious signs were generally found among workers who dealt with asbestos directly. Inspectors as early as 1898 noted the signs of
asbestos-related diseases
, yet no concerted action would be undertaken until the 1970s.
Widescale bans on the general usage of asbestos containing materials (ACM) and asbestos by itself would not be put in place until the 1990s and 2000s, with currently over sixty countries having done so. In many countries – including Russia, China and Kazakhstan – asbestos is still mined, exported to
a large number
of countries and used in a variety of materials. This includes construction material like asbestos cement (AC), which are still a common sight on buildings and sheds in the West as well.
Despite the clear dangers,
even Canada
– as one of the formerly largest asbestos exporters – has a ban in place only since 2018, and the US still only has a
partial
ban on asbestos. For example, only Washington state has made asbestos brake pads illegal, despite the known risks (
1986 EPA video
). This highlights the patchwork global approach to asbestos and the
struggle
to get it banned.
Just A Needle-Prick
Considering that asbestos is a mineral that was assumed to be biochemically inert (
Kuroda et al.
, 2008), what harm can it do to the human body? If we look at the asbestos mineral itself, we can see that it is a
silicate mineral
, with the main groups which we refer to as ‘asbestos’ found in the
amphiboles
as:
anthopyllite
riebeckite (“blue asbestos”, or “crocidolite”)
crummingtonite/grunerite (“brown asbestos”, or “amosite”)
actinolite/tremolite
Within the serpentine subgroup we find
chrysotile
, which is commonly known as “white asbestos”. A characteristic of the serpentine asbestos is that it has a more curled shape to the fibers, whereas those in the amphiboles look more like jagged spikes. Of these asbestos minerals, chrysotile is most commonly used, followed by the so-called ‘blue’ and ‘brown’ amphiboles.
Despite their differences in outwards appearance, what they have in common is their effect on the body. Thanks to their small size and needle-like shape, the fibers can not merely enter the body via the airways, but will also readily remain stuck deep inside the lungs.
The below PSA video by the Workers’ Compensation Board of British Columbia (
WorkSafeBC
) visualizes the basic process of asbestos fiber inhalation:
Macrophages try to get rid of the fibers and
ultimately fail
to do so, which results in
pulmonary fibrosis
as part of a condition called
asbestosis
. Aside from symptoms such as shortness of breath due to the formation of scar tissue in the lungs, the increased stiffness and decreased diameter of blood vessels in the lungs means increased pressure to overcome for the heart’s right ventricle, leading to
pulmonary hypertension
. This often leads to heart failure.
Electron micrograph of asbestos. Amosite, obtained from the Japan Association for Working Environment Measurement (Tokyo, Japan), observed by field emission scanning electron microscopy. (Source: Akio Kuroda, 2021)
In addition to the increased risk of lung cancer due to the localized inflammatory damage, asbestos fibers can also
penetrate the lungs and reach the mesothelium
, which is the tissue lining the chest wall and outside of the lungs and other organs. This is the most common cause (over 80%) of
mesothelioma
, which is a highly aggressive form of cancer with
exceedingly poor
5-year
survival prospects
, even with treatment.
Because of the high correlation between mesothelioma and asbestos exposure, this type of cancer is used to gauge the full health impact of decades of asbestos exposure, as detailed in a recent paper by
Furuya et al. (2018)
in
E
nvironmental Research and Public Health.
An interestingly frightening aspect of asbestos fibers is that they do not necessarily need to be inhaled to cause ill effects. Despite the WHO’s
drinking water guidelines
not counting asbestos as a carcinogen when ingested, recent studies (
Ciaula et al.
(2016),
Totaro et al.
(2019)) provide evidence of mesothelioma cases being correlated with high levels of asbestos in the drinking water of Tuscany, Italy at 700,000 fibers/liter.
This is corroborated by
Kjaerheim et al.
(2005) who provided evidence of increased GI tract cancers among lighthouse keepers who drank water from asbestos cement water pipes. Since such asbestos cement water pipes are in use today in most nations with a 50 year – 70 year
service life
, this would seem to be a pertinent concern. What makes this issue so particularly hard to pin down is that the consequences of asbestos exposure can take decades to become apparent, such as with mesothelioma.
Staying Alive
Since asbestos containing materials are essentially everywhere, and asbestos can be literally scooped off the ground in some regions (e.g.
Metsovo
, Greece), what can we do about it? For the ACMs at least, we have as guideline that any building material from before an asbestos ban went in place likely contains asbestos. There are also many image galleries that give helpful guidance as to what to look for, such as at the UK Health and Safety Executive
gallery
, and their accompanying
asbestos survey guide
with a detailed overview of the many types of ACMs.
In brief, these ACMs include:
Asbestos insulation.
Sprayed asbestos coatings.
Thermal insulation (around e.g. boilers).
Asbestos Insulating Board (AIB).
Asbestos papers, felts and cardboard.
Asbestos textiles.
Asbestos gaskets, washers and strings.
Asbestos cement sheets and tiles.
Molded asbestos cement products (pipes, tanks, gutters, etc.).
Textured coatings (e.g.
Artex
&
popcorn ceilings
).
Bitumen (roofing and acoustic dampening) products.
PVC (vinyl) floor tiles
Asbestos-reinforced plastic, resin and friction (brake) products.
Metal-asbestos composites (e.g. wood-burning stove flue).
Wall jointing tapes and fillers.
Even such innocuous materials as
drywall
(plasterboard) are likely to contain asbestos in addition to the gypsum, and both
bricks and mortar
are likely to contain asbestos. Over the past decades,
glass wool
and
mineral wool
have taken the place of asbestos for most insulation and fiber-reinforcement applications, along with fiberglass fabric products like
Zetex
. To the naked eye, however, it is hard to impossible to positively distinguish ACMs from asbestos-free materials. To this day, the only reliable way to identify ACMs is to take samples and put each one under an electron microscope to see what the fibers in the sample look like.
Heating Up
During the process of
asbestos abatement
, ACM is carefully removed, using negative air pressure zones, water or similar to prevent dust, PPE (full-face respirators and protective clothing) and HEPA filters as needed to prevent the release of fibers into the environment or endanger the workers. The exact scope of the ACM removal will depend on the preceding survey results, with materials that are at risk of releasing fibers at the top of the disposal list, while ACMs that are fully contained in the material (like resins) generally left in place unless the goal is full demolition of a structure.
While most of this ACM waste is generally deposited in special landfills that aim to contain leaking of asbestos into the surrounding environment, there’s the possibility of neutralizing the asbestos fibers through thermal treatment at 1000 °C – 1250 °C (
Gualtieri et al.
(2000)), or microwave thermal treatment (
Leonelli et al.
, 2005), though neither approach seems to have found much traction so far. Only one company in the UK (
Thermal Recycling
) seems to be an active player in this market.
It’s conceivable that the sheer amount of ACM to be disposed of would make thermal disposal impractical, but this is something nations will have to consider as the need to dispose of increasing amounts of such waste keeps building. For nations like Ukraine that are faced with countless Soviet-era buildings pulverized through the violence of war, identification and safe disposal of any ACM is a very daunting task, made worse through the urgent need to rebuild people’s homes.
In other nations that have phased out new construction with asbestos, but are dealing with standing houses filled literally up to the attic with asbestos, there is every risk of asbestos exposure in the process of upgrading heating systems, installing PV solar panels replacing windows and adding insulation. What is astoundingly clear is that this is not a health risk that will go away by itself, even if the cost of exposure today will not become clear until a few decades from now.
Featured image: “
asbestos bagged twice
” by NAVFAC. Thumbnail image: “
Anthophyllite Asbestos Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)
” by USGS. | 99 | 39 | [
{
"comment_id": "6543146",
"author": "hinspect",
"timestamp": "2022-12-05T15:20:29",
"content": "When I was young people used to be able to buy it by the foot at almost any hardware store, my Dad kept a roll of it in the utility room. The houses in Oak Ridge, TN used to be made with at least some as... | 1,760,372,475.445389 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/rocket-switch-accessibility-done-with-elegance/ | Rocket Switch – Accessibility Done With Elegance | Arya Voronova | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"3.5mm jack",
"access controller",
"accessibility",
"Adafruit trinket",
"adaptive controller",
"adaptive technology"
] | Quite a few makers try and create devices helpful to others – today’s hack,
Rocket Switch,
is a lovely example of that. It’s a design by [Neil Squire] of [Makers Making Change], with a PCB that plugs onto an Adafruit Rotary Trinkey, soldering onto its exposed pads, equipping it with two headphone jacks connected to GPIOs. This is a simple design – only two headphone jacks and resistors, complete with a 3D printed case. The value is not as much in its construction, but more in what the Rocket Switch provides to its users.
This is an accessibility-enabling controller, a USB HID device which interfaces to a wide variety of headphone-jack-connectable switches. With this device, someone unable to use a computer mouse can use two tactile buttons to control their computer, either by imitating mouse clicks or by sending keypresses into accessibility software equipped a control flow for such two-switch arrangements.
Everything is open-source
, and there’s
an impressive amount of documentation
– for 3D printing, ordering, usage, design choice explanations, and of course, a picture-peppered 15-page tutorial PDF with detailed assembly instructions for anyone who might need a Rocket Switch. Plus, [Makers Making Change]
created a page
where both people in need and makers with some free time can sign up to exchange these devices. It’s not the first time we see a design like this – perhaps the most famous example is Microsoft’s
Xbox Adaptive Controller
, something that we’ve seen a dad use to
build an entertainment platform
for his daughter.
The Rocket Switch Interface, ready for its close-up!
https://t.co/5ioiLaPmKB
#AssistiveTechnology
#Artemis
@NASA
pic.twitter.com/6nYswTs2yt
— Makers Making Change (@MakerMakeChange)
November 23, 2022 | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542790",
"author": "stappers",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T17:55:21",
"content": "https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-rotary-trinkey",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6542846",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T21:11... | 1,760,372,475.298226 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/breathe-through-your-ears/ | Breathe Through Your Ears? | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"Empatica",
"fitbit",
"heart rate",
"PPG",
"respiration",
"respiratory rate",
"wearable"
] | With all the attention given to heart rate monitoring and step counting, respiratory rate monitoring is often overlooked. Smartwatches are starting to incorporate respiratory rate monitoring more and more these days. However, current devices often simply look at breaths per minute without extracting more interesting features of the respiratory waveform which could give us more insight into our bodies than breaths per minute could alone.
[Davies] and his team decided they wanted to change that by making an
earbud that can measure respiratory rate
.
We’ve seen a few commercial earbuds and headphones that can measure heart rate and tune your music to the rhythm of your heart. [Davies’s] project uses
photoplethysmography
(PPG) which measures changes in blood volume with each heartbeat and is often used to determine heart rate. As it turns out, PPG can also be used to measure respiratory rate as well. When we breathe in, the pressure in our chest cavity decreases which leads to a decrease in central venous pressure and a subsequent decrease in the DC and AC components of the PPG waveform. These modulations in the PPG waveform due to respiration are much slower than the ones we see due to your heart beating, making them often overlooked in common PPG measuring devices. As you could imagine, [Davies’s] project could be really useful for not only determining the respiratory rate, but also examining time domain changes in the respiratory signal that could indicate asthma, sleep apnea, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Interestingly enough, he uses similar hardware to extract the PPG signal as we’ve seen in other heart rate monitoring devices. A simple analog front-end with an infrared LED to illuminate blood vessels underneath the skin and a photodiode to measure changes in the LED signal reflected from the tissue underneath the skin. Since the blood volume changes slightly with breathing, the LED signal reflected from the tissue changes slightly as well. And by analyzing these small changes in the reflected LED signal, he could extract the respiratory waveform and look at changes in the signal between people with a respiratory disease like COPD and people without the disease.
We recommend giving [Davies’s] paper a thorough read. Maybe we can incorporate their analysis into
other PPG measuring devices we’ve seen here on Hackaday
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542731",
"author": "Marcus",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T13:26:20",
"content": "There seems to be a formatting problem with the first sentence of the first paragraph.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6542738",
"author": "Gregg ... | 1,760,372,475.495231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/04/this-is-the-future-of-waste-management/ | This Is The Future Of Waste Management | Dave Rowntree | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"arduino mega",
"dc motor",
"dead reckoning",
"deepgram ai",
"extrusion",
"navigation",
"Nvidia Jetson Nano",
"robot bin",
"Robot Operating System",
"servo",
"TPU",
"waste"
] | Many of us have been asking for some time now “where are our robot servants?” We were promised this dream life of leisure and luxury, but we’re still waiting. Modern life is a very wasteful one, with items delivered to our doors with the click of a mouse, but the disposal of the packaging is still a manual affair. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to summon a robot to take the rubbish to the recycling, ideally have it fetch a beer at the same time? [James Bruton] shares this dream, and with his extensive robotics skillset, came up with the perfect solution;
behold the Binbot 9000
. (Video, embedded below the break)
With a frame built from aluminium extrusion, using t-nuts to attach to 3D printed pieces where required, the off-the-shelf bin fits snugly in place. The base has a three-wheeler approach with a rear-mounted caster wheel. On the front, a pair of
Gimson robotics
24-V worm-geared motors drive each wheel in a two-wheel differential arrangement, with a 3D-printed TPU tyre on each side. A big servo motor on the back of the frame pulls a cord attached to a leaver mounted on the bin lid, completing the mechanics.
Control for the motors is via an Arduino Mega hooked up to a pair of BTS7960 high current H-bridge drivers mounted on small PCBs, with wheel encoders on top of each motor to provide some basic dead-reckoning navigation. However as [James] explains, accumulated error due to wheel spins, and other external factors make dead-reckoning navigation indoors a dead-duck, so an Nvidia Jetson Nano is used together with a Raspberry Pi camera, and some fiducial markers, to provide a more accurate positioning system. The mandatory googly eyes add the finishing touch to the robot aesthetic. But that isn’t the whole solution. As [James] shows, it is useless to start the robot moving poking a debug button. Voice-summoning is the final piece of the build, utilising
DeepGram
AI-based speech recognition to tell the Binbot where to go. All that was required was to plug in a USB Omni-directional microphone and add a few extra scripts on the Jetson, and away it goes.
All it needs now is the ability to interface to the fridge and to fetch that beer, and we’ve got it made. Feel free to dig into the
project GitHub
and add a pull request!
On the subject of voice-commanded beer fetching robotics, this is
already a solved problem
, but it can’t recycle the empties for you. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542686",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T09:17:00",
"content": "Pretty cool considering how precise and smooth the movements are. A ruggedized version with metal spikes following people littering cities could be the game changer :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,475.541884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/a-cycle-accurate-intel-8088-core-for-all-your-retro-pc-needs/ | A Cycle-Accurate Intel 8088 Core For All Your Retro PC Needs | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8086",
"8088",
"fpga",
"x86"
] | A problem faced increasingly by retrocomputer enthusiasts everywhere is the supply of chips. Once a piece of silicon goes out of production its demand can be supplied for a time by old stock and second hand parts, but as they become rare so the cost of what can be dubious parts accelerates out of reach. Happily for CPUs at least, there’s a ray of hope in the form of FPGA-based cores which can replace the real thing, and for early PC owners there’s a new one from [Ted Fried].
MCL86 is a cycle accurate Intel 8088 FPGA Core
that can be used within an FPGA design or as a standalone in-circuit replacement for a real 8088. It even has a full-speed mode that sacrifices cycle accuracy and can accelerate those 8088 instructions by 400%.
Reading
the posts on his blog
, it’s clear that this is a capable design, and it’s even been extended with a mode that adds cache RAM
to mirror the system memory at the processor’s speed
. You can find all the code
in a GitHub repository
should you be curious enough to investigate for yourself. We’ve pondered in the past
where the x86 single board computers are
, perhaps it could be projects like this that provide some of them. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542710",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T11:46:00",
"content": "But didn’t early PC users often replace their 8086/8088 by a NEC V30/V20?My father was a PC user in the 80s and he told me that he did.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,475.597458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/better-coding-through-sketching/ | Better Coding Through Sketching | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Software Development"
] | [
"cursive",
"sketch",
"writing"
] | Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, engineering students would take a few semesters of drafting and there would usually be a week or two of “computer-aided drafting.” In those days, that meant punching cards that said RECTANGLE 20,30 or something like that and getting the results on a plotter. Then we moved on to graphical CAD packages, but lately, some have gone back to describing rather than drawing complex designs. Cornell University researchers are trying to provide the same options for coding. They’ve built a Juypter notebook extension called
Notate
that allows you to sketch and handwrite parts of programs that interact with traditional computer code. You can see a video about the work below.
The example shows quantum computing, but the idea could be applied to anything. The example has sketches that generate quantum circuits. Naturally, there is machine learning involved.
We don’t disagree that this is a great option, but we learned our lesson about wanting to draw when it came to FPGAs. When you start FPGAs, there is a tendency to want to draw schematics and skip the high-level languages like VHDL or Verilog. But then if you do a 7-segment decoder in a schematic, it is difficult to draw and prone to errors that are hard to correct. But in VHDL or Verilog it is a few lines of highly-readable and highly-correctable code. Now try designing a CPU using schematics. It can be done, but it is a lot more work.
Usually, when you hear about graphical programming, it is
a little more structured
. We wonder how Notate would handle
cursive
? | 25 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542623",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T03:09:12",
"content": "Sounds like flowcharts are being reinvented.I’ve always said that flowcharts are crutches for the incompetent and for imbeciles.Take FPGA design for example. Hankering for graphical tools just... | 1,760,372,475.754639 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/build-your-own-mini-fogging-cauldron/ | Build Your Own Mini Fogging Cauldron | Lewin Day | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"atomizer",
"cauldron",
"halloween",
"Halloween hacks"
] | The best cauldrons are full of bubbling, steamy potions of great magical potential. We don’t have many of those in the real world, though, so sometimes we have to make do with a simulacra. [wannabemadsci] has built just that,
with this fogging cauldron prop that uses no fog fluid or dry ice
, running solely with water instead.
The heart of the build is a piezo element that vibrates at ultrasonic frequencies to atomize water. They’re available from websites like AliExpress complete with a driver circuit to energize the piezo element. The water is delivered from a wetted fiber wick, and quickly becomes a fog when the piezo is energized.
The disk was installed in a custom PVC water cup with the wetted wick, along with the electronics. The assembly was then lowered into an off-the-shelf plastic cauldron party favor to complete the look. The trick is to mount the piezo element sideways to get a nice-looking distribution of fog. A green LED was installed to light the cauldron from within.
The resulting effect is a sinister-looking glowing cauldron with a steady stream of fog emanating from the top. It’s a great piece of Halloween decor, and as a bonus, it doesn’t require any fancy chemicals to make it work. If you’re thirsty for more, be sure to check out the winners of last year’s
Halloween Hackfest
. Video after the break. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542635",
"author": "MartyK",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T03:41:40",
"content": "Could this be used as a humidifier?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542641",
"author": "Ryan",
"timestamp": "2022-12-04T04:00:26",
... | 1,760,372,475.799769 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/bit-banging-bidirectional-ethernet-on-a-pi-pico/ | Bit-Banging Bidirectional Ethernet On A Pi Pico | Dave Walker | [
"hardware",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"bit bang",
"ethernet",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"software ethernet"
] | These days, even really cheap microcontroller boards have options that will give you Ethernet or WiFi access. But what if you have a Raspberry Pi Pico board and you really want to MacGyver yourself a network connection? You could do worse than check out this project by [holysnippet] that gives you a
bit-banged bidirectional Ethernet port using only scrap passive components and software
.
This project is similar to
one we shared
back in August by [kingyo], but differs in that what [holysnippet] has achieved is a fully-functional (albeit only around 7 Mbps) Ethernet port, rather than a simple UDP transmit device. The Ethernet connection itself is handled by the
lwip stack
. Connection to the RJ45 socket can be made from any of the Pi Pico pins, provided TX_NEG is followed directly by TX_POS, but the really hacky part is in the hardware.
Schematic showing the empirically-determined passive component values required.
Rather than developing hardware that would protect the Pico, this design admits that it “shamefully relies on the Pico’s input protection devices” to limit the Ethernet voltages to 3.3 V.
You’ll need an isolation transformer from some old Ethernet-enabled gear (either standalone or as part of a magnetic jack), but then it’s only resistors and capacitors from there. There are warnings not to connect this to PoE networks for obvious reasons, and the component layout needs to keep in mind the ~20 MHz frequencies involved, but to get this working at all feels like quite a feat.
Normally, there’d be no reason to go to these lengths, but it’s always educational to see if it can be done and, with the current component shortages, this is another trick to keep up your sleeve for emergencies!
Putting ports where they shouldn’t belong is not a new idea, of course. Back in the day we even shared an inadvisable
ATTINY implementation of bit-banged Ethernet
with no protection at all.
Thanks to [biemster] for the tip-off | 38 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542585",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T23:37:40",
"content": "I’d love to see a version of this using the PIOs to bit-bang ethernet, but with the full complement of protection circuitry. That would be fit to be used far and wide.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,477.910313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/nixie-display-module-is-addressable-via-spi/ | Nixie Display Module Is Addressable Via SPI | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"nixie tube",
"nixie tubes",
"pic",
"spi"
] | There are plenty of SPI interface screens on the market, but few of them have the charm of the good old Nixie tube. [Tony] decided to whip up
a simple three-Nixie module that could be addressed via SPI.
The stacked construction keeps things compact.
The module relies on a PIC16F15344 microcontroller to run the show, using its built-in SPI interface. It’s built with four stacked-up PCBs for ease of assembly and testing. It uses an internal buck converter to create the 170 volts required for the Nixie tubes from a 6 to 12 volt input. The high-voltage lines are routed towards the inside of the stack to minimize any nasty shocks when handling, though caution would still be advisable.
Driving the display is as simple as sending 16-bit words over the SPI interface, with the device operating in SPI client mode 1. If you’re looking for a simple way to have projects write output to a nice Nixie display, this module could be just what you’re looking for. Alternatively, if you can’t lay your hands on the tubes,
there are other pretty solutions out there, too.
Video after the break. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542505",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T18:06:11",
"content": "“It’s built with four stacked-up PCBs for ease of assembly”I wouldn’t consider cordwood construction easy to assemble.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,372,477.584166 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/cargo-culting-and-buried-treasure/ | Cargo Culting And Buried Treasure | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"cargo cult",
"learning",
"newsletter"
] | I have no idea how true the stories are, but
legend has it
that when supplies were dropped on some Melanesian islands during WWII, some locals took to replicating runway signs in order to further please the “gods” that were dropping them. They reportedly thought that making landing strips
caused
laden airplanes to visit. Richard Feynman later
turned this into a metaphor about scientific theory
– that if you don’t understand what you’re doing deeply, you may be fooling yourself.
I’d like to be a little bit more forgiving of adherents of technological cargo cults. Because the world around us is very complicated, we often just take things as they are rather than understanding them deeply, because there’s simply only so deep you can go into so many fields.
Is someone who doesn’t know the i386 machine language cargo-culting their way through a job as a web backend developer? Probably not. But from the perspective of an assembly-language programmer, any of us who write in compiled or interpreted programming languages are cargo-culting coding. You don’t need to understand a cell phone to dial home, but can you really say that you understand everything about how one works? Or are you just going through the motions?
So while some reliance on metaphor and “well, it worked last time” is perfectly normal, I think noticing when you cargo-cult is also healthy. It should also be a warning sign, or at least a flag to remind yourself that there may be dragons here. Or maybe just a buried learning opportunity, the X that marks the spot where digging deeper might be productive.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 55 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542486",
"author": "Eric Mockler",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T16:56:24",
"content": "It’s not a bandwagon, it’s a rollerskate going down a steep hill and nobody’s wearing helmets or even kneepads, but they’re vaccinated.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,477.496379 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/bring-out-the-fine-detail-in-small-objects-with-this-coaxial-lighting-rig/ | Bring Out The Fine Detail In Small Objects With This Coaxial Lighting Rig | Dan Maloney | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"beam-spliiter",
"coaxial",
"macro",
"numismatics",
"photography"
] | All things considered, modern photography is pretty easy. It’s really just a matter of pointing the camera at the thing you want to take a picture of and letting the camera do the rest. But that doesn’t mean
good
photographs are easy to make, especially when fine detail is required. And that’s the reason
this 3D printed coaxial lighting setup
was built — to make quality photographs of small objects a snap.
The objects of [Peter Lin]’s photographic desire are coins, no doubt of the collectible variety. Since the condition of a coin is essential to determining its value, numismatic photographers really need to be meticulous about the quality of their work. The idea here is to keep the incoming light parallel to the optical axis of the camera, for which purpose ring lights around the camera lens are often used. But they can result in lighting artifacts, and can be awkward to use for such smaller subjects.
So for this setup, [Peter] essentially built a beam-splitter. The body is a printed block that’s painted matte black to keep reflections down; a little self-adhesive flocking paper helps with that too. The round aperture on the top is for the camera lens, with the square window on the side admitting light. The secret is a slot oriented at 45 degrees to both of those openings, into which the glass element from a cheap UV filter is inserted. The filter acts like a beam splitter which reflects light down onto the coin on the bottom of the block and lets it pass up into the camera lens directly above the coin, parallel to the optical axis. Genius!
The video below shows it in use with both DSLR and smartphone cameras, and the image quality is amazing. While most of us probably aren’t photographing coins, we do enough high-resolution photography of small objects that this seems applicable. In a way, it reminds us of
[Big Clive]’s “TupperCam” method
of high-res PCB photography (final item). | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542441",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T13:36:35",
"content": "Check out “dark field illumination” and make composites in your favorite image editing software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542527",
"au... | 1,760,372,477.39945 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/03/hanging-christmas-lights-with-no-ladder-and-no-fuss/ | Hanging Christmas Lights With No Ladder And No Fuss | Lewin Day | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"christmas",
"christmas lights",
"magnets"
] | Getting up on a ladder to hang Christmas lights is a great way to hurt yourself if you’re not careful, and winter conditions only add to the peril. One enterprising hacker has whipped up a neat way to avoid ladders entirely, by
hanging their lights while planted safely on the ground.
Result!
The build uses hefty magnets and triangle eye bolts, attached at regular intervals to the string of Christmas lights. The magnets are used to hold the lights to metal roof siding, while the hooks allow the lights to be lifted into place using a hook on a large extendable pole. Washers, spacers, and screws are used to attach the magnets and hooks to the lights.
For a layout that follows the lines of a simple peaked roof, this hack works great. For more complicated installations, you might still have to climb up a ladder. We’ve featured great primers on getting started
with advanced Christmas light displays before
, if you’re looking to up your game.
Meanwhile, no matter how much you enjoy seasonal decoration brinkmanship, don’t even think about watching
Deck the Halls (2006).
Danny Devito has saved a lot of films, but he couldn’t save this. Happy holidays! | 25 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542418",
"author": "nono",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T11:07:13",
"content": "jingle b… yawn.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542532",
"author": "[EGO]",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T19:28:29",
"content": "h... | 1,760,372,477.713599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/stack-trace-from-the-1950s-punches-again/ | Stack Trace From The 1950s Punches Again | Chris Lott | [
"Phone Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"5xb",
"connections museum",
"Electro-Mechanical",
"telephone exchange",
"telephone switch",
"trouble recorder"
] | This repair/tutorial video by the telephone
Connections Museum of Seattle
features an amazing piece of electro-mechanical technology from the 1950s — the 5XB trouble recorder. Museum volunteer Sarah the “Switch Witch” has a deep passion for old phone equipment, and gives an excellent description of the trouble recorder, the problems it solved, and how it works, and how they went about fixing it.
As central office switching became more complex and more dense, the manual methods of hunting down faults became unmanageable. Semi-automatic approaches using trouble lamps, but even that had its limits. This “stack trace”, which could have hundreds of indicators, had to be frozen while the technician recorded the status on a form. If another fault came along during this time, it was lost. The solution, using the available technology of the day, was a mind-boggling punched card apparatus that punches over a thousand bits of information when an switching error is detected or when various watchdog timers expire.
The trouble recorder in the Connections Museum was not quite working. But with a lot of patience and access to a service manual, the team eventually got it up and running again. Now the biggest issue now is getting new blank cards printed when the few boxes they have finally run out.
If you are interested in these kinds of intricate electro-mechanical systems, do check out the video below. We especially liked the mechanism that broke up 1200 bits into a timed sequence of ten each 120 bits to drive the punches using motors, cams, gears and relay contacts. You can read more about this trouble recorder in
this Bell Labs Record technical report (pg 214)
from May 1950 (interestingly, this issue leads off with Dr Hamming’s famous paper on error detection and correction codes). | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542514",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T18:20:05",
"content": "She’s a witch! She turned me into a newt!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542529",
"author": "SteveS",
... | 1,760,372,477.542585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/hackerboards-making-finding-the-right-single-board-computer-easy/ | Hackerboards: Making Finding The Right Single-Board Computer Easy | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"SBC",
"single board computer"
] | The great thing about the wide availability of single-board computers (SBCs) is that it offers such a large selection of options, in terms of CPU performance, GPU features, RAM size, I/O options and much more. This is however also the largest issue, especially with the annual surge of new boards with new feature sets. Trying to make sense of all these offerings is the recently overhauled Board-DB, also known as
Hackerboards
.
As
[Martijn Braam] explains in the blog post on the changes
, a major upgrade over the old Hackerboards (which
we covered
in 2016) is a far more extensive set of parameters that can be filtered against. This makes a fine-grained selection of detailed features significantly easier, which is also reflected in the technical specifications
comparison feature
. With over 450 active entries there are a lot of boards that can already be filtered on, but manufacturers are invited to take up contact to add further entries, which should keep the list up to date.
Incidentally, if you’d like to know how [Martijn] gets those gorgeous PCB photographs,
he wrote a whole a separate write-up that goes over his camera setup
.
Thanks to [Vlad] for the tip. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542338",
"author": "Good Job",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T05:03:45",
"content": "Oh this is awesome!! I’ve been using that site a few times a year for the last few years. Its been a wonderful resource and I’m happy they’ve updated it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,372,477.762651 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/converting-a-porsche-944-to-run-a-maf/ | Converting A Porsche 944 To Run A MAF | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"AFM",
"air flow meter",
"car",
"car hacks",
"maf sensor",
"mass air flow",
"mass air flow sensor"
] | Electronic fuel injection was a big leap forward for engine control. However, early implementations often left something to be desired. This was the case for [Rob] and his Porsche 944, which had relied on an old-fashioned mechanical air flow meter (AFM). He decided to replace this with a modern mass air flow (MAF) sensor instead,
and documented the process online.
The output of the sensors was compared with a rig built using a vacuum cleaner to create air flow.
AFMs are often a target for replacement on old cars. They’re usually based on a flap that moves a potentiometer wiper across a carbon trace which wears out over the years. They can also present an air flow restriction in some cases, limiting performance. MAF sensors instead measure the amount of air flowing through with a hot wire. The amount of current required to maintain the temperature of the wire indicates the amount of air flowing through the sensor. They’re less restrictive and readily available as they’re used in many cars today.
To run a MAF in place of the AFM requires a circuit to emulate the AFM’s output. [Rob] used a STM32 Cortex-M0 to read the MAF, and then output the relevant voltage to the Porsche’s engine computer via PWM and a low pass filter. To figure out how to map the MAF’s output to match the AFM,
[Rob] built a rig
to blow air through both devices in series, and measuring their output on an oscilloscope. This data was used to
program the STM32
to output the right emulated AFM voltage for the given MAF signal.
It’s a great piece of work from [Rob] that has his Porsche running happily on new parts.
We’ve seen similar hacks done to other cars before
, as well! Video after the break. | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542252",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T00:05:48",
"content": "I’m one to complain about long videos on HaD, but 7 seconds?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542259",
"author"... | 1,760,372,477.64873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/a-dead-photographic-format-rises-from-the-ashes/ | A Dead Photographic Format Rises From The Ashes | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"Disc film",
"film",
"film camera",
"kodak"
] | Sometimes we stumble upon a hack that’s not entirely new but which is still pretty exceptional. So it is with [Hèrm Hofmeyer]’s
guide to recreating a film cartridge for the Kodak Disc photographic format
. It’s written in 2020, but describing a project around a decade old.
The disc format was Kodak’s great hope in the 1980s, the ultimate in photographic convenience in which the film was a 16-shot circular disc in a thin cartridge. Though the cameras were at the consumer end of the market they were more sophisticated than met the eye, with the latest electronics for the time and some innovative plastic multi-element aspherical lenses. It failed in the face of better compact 35 mm cameras because the convenience of the disc wasn’t enough to make up for the relatively small negative and that few labs had the specialized printing equipment to get the best results from the format. The cameras faded from view, and the film ceased manufacture at the end of the 1990s.
The biggest hurdle to creating a Disc cartridge comes in the cartridge shells themselves. It’s solved by sourcing them second-hand from
Film Rescue International
, a specialist in developing expired photographic film. The stages follow the cutting of a film disc, perforating its edges, and fitting it into the cartridge. It’s an exact enough process in the pictures, and it’s worth remembering that in the real cartridges it must be done in the dark.
This is an interesting piece of work for anyone with an interest in photography, and while the Disc cameras were always a consumer snapshot camera we can see that it would appeal to those influenced by Lomography. We wish we could get our hands on a Disc cartridge, an maybe CAD up a 3D printable version to make it more accessible. | 34 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541901",
"author": "Brian Suarez",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T09:54:51",
"content": "The following quote from the article brought out a small audible chuckle as I reminenced for a quick moment of a tale once described to me while I was involved in the graphic films industry during wh... | 1,760,372,477.977485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/throwback-usb-hotplate-used-30-whole-ports/ | Throwback: USB Hotplate Used 30 Whole Ports | Lewin Day | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"cooking",
"hot plate",
"hotplate",
"usb",
"usb 1.1",
"USB C",
"USB-C PD"
] | Once upon a time, USB was still hip, cool, and easy to understand. You could get up to 500 mA out of a port, which wasn’t much, but some companies produced USB cup warmers anyway which were a bit of a joke. However, one enterprising hacker took things further back in 2004,
whipping up a potent USB hot plate powered by a cavalcade of ports.
Delicious.
The project was spawned after a USB cup warmer
sadly failed to cook a decent fried egg
. To rectify this, a souped-up version was built. The cup warmer was stripped of its original hardware, and fitted with six 2-ohm resistors instead. At 5 volts, each would draw 2.5 amps and the total power draw would be on the order of 75 watts. Each resistor would thus need five USB ports to power it to stay under the 500 mA limit, for a total of 30 USB ports in total. Six PCI-to-USB cards were installed in a motherboard for this purpose, providing the requisite ports. A 500 watt power supply meant the computer had plenty of juice to run the hot plate.
Cooking proved successful, generating a decent amount of heat to brown up some beef. Served with some white rice, it proved an adequate meal, though apparently with a noted taste of electronic components.
This wouldn’t be such a challenge today.
USB-C is capable of delivering 100 watts
through a single port at 20 volts and 5 amps. However, there’s something joyous and charming about cooking on a ridiculous hotplate running off 30 USB 1.1 ports. The ingenuity is to be applauded, and it is truly a project of its time. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541821",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T06:07:37",
"content": "I don’t know about ingenuity. More like dogged determination in the face of surmountable odds.I remember someone working up a cupwarmer that used a 486 chip as the heating element, which was “... | 1,760,372,477.824497 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/ply-your-craft-with-tubular-origami/ | Ply Your Craft With Tubular Origami | Abe Connelly | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"kirigami",
"laser origami",
"origami",
"papercraft",
"prototyping"
] | Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have just published a paper on creating modular tubular origami machines which they call
“Kinegami”
, a portmanteau of “kinematic” and “origami”.
The idea behind their work is to create individual modules and joint mechanisms that can then be chained together to create a larger “serial” robot. Some example joints they propose are “prismatic” joints, allowing for linear motion, and “revolute” joints, which allow for rotational motion. One of the more exciting aspects of this process is that the joint mechanisms are origami-like structures which can be constructed from a single piece of flat material which is folded and glued together to make the module. Of particular interest is that the crease pattern for the origami-like folds can be laser cut into a material, cardboard or thin acrylic for example, which can be used as a guide to create the resulting structure. The crease patterns for the supporting structures, such as tubes or joints, can be taken from pre-formatted patterns or customized, so this method is very accessible to the hobbyist and could allow for a rich new method of rapid project prototyping.
The researchers go on to discuss how to create the composition of modules from a specification of joints and links (from a
“Denavit-Hartenberg”
specification) to attaching the junctures together while respecting curvature constraints (via the
“Dubins path”
). Their
paper
offers the gritty details along with the available accompanying
source files
. Origami hacking is a favorite subject of ours and we’ve featured articles on the use of origami in
medical technology
to creating
inflatable actuators
.
Video after the break! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541778",
"author": "SB5",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T03:11:19",
"content": "This calls for some music – maybe Tubular Bells",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6541829",
"author": "Grand piano, Reed and pipe organ, Glockens... | 1,760,372,478.020986 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/using-i%c2%b2c-sensors-with-any-linux-via-usb-and-iio/ | Using I²C Sensors With Any Linux Via USB And IIO | Maya Posch | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"i2c",
"linux"
] | Hooking up I2C sensors is something which is generally associated with microcontrollers and SBCs, yet it’s very easy to use such I2C sensors from basically any system that runs Linux. After all, I2C (that is, SMBus) is one of the interfaces that is highly likely to be used on your PC’s mainboard as well as peripherals. This means that running our own devices like the well-known BME280 temperature, pressure and humidity sensor, or Si1145 light sensor should be a piece of cake.
In a blog post from a few years ago, [Peter Molnar]
explains in detail
how to wire up a physical adapter to add a USB-connected I2C interface to a system. At its core is the ATtiny85 AVR-based MCU, which provides a built-in USB interface, running the
I2C-Tiny-USB
firmware.
The essential part here is that the MCU shows up to the Linux kernel as an i2c device, requiring the
i2c-dev
driver to be loaded. After this the I2C device that is connected to the adapter MCU’s I2C bus can be used via the Linux module’s API calls, either directly or via existing drivers. [Peter] found that the BMP280 driver came with Debian Sid, for example. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541738",
"author": "Ø",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T01:06:24",
"content": "On most non-Apple *Nix computers, you can also use the i2c lines in the VGA, DVI or HDMI plug, which normally are used by the system to either read a ROM chip in the monitor that contains compatible resolutions... | 1,760,372,478.679307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/simple-atx-bench-power-supply-adds-variable-output/ | Simple ATX Bench Power Supply Adds Variable Output | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atx",
"atx power supply",
"power supply",
"psu"
] | A benchtop power supply is a key thing to have for any aspiring electronics hacker. While you can always buy one, plenty of us have old computer PSUs lying around that could do a fine job themselves. [Frugha] decided to whip up a neat 3D-printed design
for converting any ATX PSU into a usable bench unit.
The design features banana plugs outputting +12V, -12V, +5V, and +3.3V, with all outputs appropriately fused for safety. There’s also a fused stepdown converter used to supply variable voltages as needed. Its original trimpot was replaced with a multi-turn pot for ease of control. To make everything work, a load resistor on the 5V circuit makes the power supply think it’s hooked up to a motherboard. It’s all wrapped up in a neat slant-sided 3D-printed case that fits onto the ATX power supply itself.
The result is a neat and tidy power supply built out of readily-available components. We particularly like the addition of the stepdown converter – most ATX-based projects don’t offer variable output, which can nonetheless come in handy.
We’ve seen
some other great builds
along these lines before, too. If you’ve been cooking up your own homebrew power supply,
don’t hesitate to share it on the tipsline! | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541645",
"author": "Orzel",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T21:26:41",
"content": "Come on ?? Again !??",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6541655",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T21:54:43",
"content... | 1,760,372,478.525495 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/rescue-that-dead-xbox-with-an-external-psu/ | Rescue That Dead Xbox With An External PSU | Jenny List | [
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"power supply",
"psu",
"repair",
"xbox",
"Xbox Series S"
] | There is nothing worse than that sinking feeling as a computer or other device fails just after its warranty has expired. [Robotanv] had it with his Xbox Series S whose power supply failed, and was faced with either an online sourced PSU of uncertain provenance, or a hefty bill from Microsoft for a repair. He chose to do neither,
opening up his console and replacing the broken PSU with a generic external model
. See the video below the break.
The Xbox appears surprisingly well designed as a modular unit, so accessing and unplugging its PSU was quite easy. To his surprise he found that the connections were simply two wires, positive and negative lines for 12 V. The solution was to find a suitably beefy 12 V supply and wire it up, before continuing gaming.
Beyond that simple description lies a bit more. The original was a 160 W unit so he’s taken a gamble with a 120 W external brick. He’s monitoring its temperature carefully to make sure, but with his gaming it has not been a problem. Then there’s the board wiring, which he appears to have soldered to pads on the PCB. We might have tried to find something that fit the original spade connectors instead, but yet again it hasn’t caused him any problems. We’d be curious to see what has failed in the original PSU. Meanwhile we’re glad to see this Xbox ride again,
it’s more than can be said for one belonging to a Hackaday colleague
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541631",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T20:58:38",
"content": "In college I got broken ps2 that wouldn’t power on so I rigged it to my 3d printer’s 12V supply to test if it was the internal supply or the mobo. It booted up and played just fine, the supply was toast t... | 1,760,372,478.879458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/car-batteries-more-than-just-wet-lead/ | Car Batteries: More Than Just Wet Lead | Al Williams | [
"Battery Hacks",
"car hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"AGM battery",
"car battery",
"lead acid battery"
] | Working on car electrical systems used to be easy. The battery simply provided power for the car’s starter motor when starting or to run the small number of accessories when the engine wasn’t running. The rest of the time, the alternator charged the battery and provided power for the rest of the vehicle and the ignition system. While very early cars didn’t have batteries, and some old cars had 6 V positive ground systems, most of us have lived our entire lives where car batteries come in several sizes (controlled by Battery Council International) and cars have a 12 V, negative ground system.
Times have changed. Cars don’t have distributors anymore, they have computers. They also have lots of gadgets from GPS to backup cameras and cellphone chargers. Batteries have had to get beefier and the modern trend is to also require less maintenance So, today, you’ll find that there isn’t just one kind of car battery. But how do these other batteries work and what was wrong with the good old lead acid wet cell?
For the purposes of this post, I’m not talking about electric car batteries which is a whole different topic — and most of them have a regular car battery, too.
In the Realm of the Practical
A 6-cell lead acid battery.
CC BY SA 3.0
by [Genetics4good]
Back to reality, you don’t need to pay $800 for a car battery, but there are a number of choices. The traditional battery we all grew up with is a flooded-cell lead-acid battery. These batteries have a number of desirable characteristics. They stay charged for a long time. They can handle large surges like the ones that occur when you crank the starter motor. They can survive being lightly discharged and recharged many times. In fact, most of these batteries don’t like being totally discharged and recharged.
These batteries are simple enough. Each cell has a grid with a lead-based alloy for the cathodes and lead oxide anodes sitting in sulfuric acid. A typical battery has six cells to get to 12.6V, and there was a cap that allowed the user to add water — preferably, distilled water — when needed and also would vent out hydrogen gas generated during charging.
Evaporation and Shedding
The scourge of all this is evaporation of the electrolyte battery. With old batteries, you could actually spill the contents. Battery operation also removes water. Heat can evaporate liquid. Less liquid means less surface area exposed to electrolyte which reduces the battery’s capabilities. It also can lead to sulfation, where the electrodes are coated with lead sulfate which weakens the battery and requires careful recharging.
However, the primary wear on this type of battery is how part of the material sheds lead sulfate during operation, which sinks to the bottom of the battery. Deep cycle batteries will have thicker plates and more room at the bottom for waste to accumulate. Eventually, if enough waste material accumulates at the bottom, the battery will fail.
Improvements
In the day when you had to check the water in the battery like checking the air in tires, there were additives like VX-6 that you could dump into the battery cells that used cadmium sulfate to prevent sulfation. At least, that was the claim that some disputed.
But clearly, you would like to have a battery that lasts forever and doesn’t require any maintenance. You can’t have everything, of course, but you can try. New alloys reduced the amount of water decomposed, so batteries can have enough liquid in them to last over their useful service life. That’s why most batteries today are sealed and only have vents for gas to escape during charging.
Enhanced flooded batteries were another innovation and managed to largely supplant conventional batteries. These use a polymer separator that is porous to electrolyte but prevents the plates from shorting together. These batteries last much longer than conventional batteries and have far greater tolerance to deep discharge.
Glass Tacks
AGM battery opened up.
CC BY SA 3.0
by [Bullenwächter]
The major battery today, however, is the AGM or absorbent glass mat battery. These are also known as valve-regulated lead-acid or VRLA batteries or sealed lead-acid batteries. Technically, VRLA or sealed lead acid can also refer to gel cells, but in automotive applications, you usually see AGM batteries due to the fast charging and long service life they provide.
The key innovation to AGM batteries is that the electrolyte isn’t a liquid. Instead, it is held in a fiberglass mat woven from very thin glass fibers. During manufacturing, the mats are soaked in acid, wrung out to remove excess liquid, and then installed in the battery where they keep sufficient acid in contact with the electrodes for the life of the battery.
AGM batteries require little maintenance and, unlike liquid batteries, can operate in any orientation. This is especially important in all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles where the battery may be tipped or flipped. They also emit less hydrogen gas which makes them safer. They do not require any periodic maintenance, but they may or may not last longer than a properly maintained conventional battery. Note, though, that if you don’t maintain the normal battery properly, all bets are off. Then again, overcharging is harder on AGMs.
While a mat seems to imply a flat pad-like structure, AGM mats can be rolled or put in other configurations depending on the battery. For example, below you can see a comparison of a conventional battery and a spiral AGM battery. Another option for semi-solid electrolytes is the gel cell, but you don’t see these often in automotive applications because the gelled sulphuric acid doesn’t perform well at colder temperatures.
There are ways to
fix some types of problems
in unsealed batteries, some of which
involve big voltage spikes
. Thomas Edison liked using nickel-iron batteries in his electric car, and there may be a bit of a
revival of this technology
in some cases, too.
Featured image: “
Walmart EverStart Car Batteries, Battery
” by Mike Mozart | 47 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541577",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T18:53:50",
"content": "Recyclable is the biggest. How often do the other types get recycled?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6541649",
"author": "Todd3465",
... | 1,760,372,478.831196 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/is-that-a-typewriter-in-your-pocket-or-are-you-just-pleased-to-see-me/ | Is That A Typewriter In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me? | Dave Rowntree | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"aluminium",
"milling",
"strike bars",
"typewriter"
] | Don’t have the right milling tool? Just make one!
[Attoparsec] wondered what if you could carry a typewriter in your pocket, then
followed through with that and built one
. (Video, embedded below.) Kind of. The plan was to use an existing set of striker bars, but not wanting to destroy a perfectly good typewriter, they realised that you can easily source just the bar set on eBay.
The first problem was that the striker bars are shaped to allow the typewriter mechanism to operate, but that would not make for a compact arrangement. After a spot of straightening in a big vice, and drilling in a custom jig, they were in a suitable state to be arranged inside the case. The casing is milled from a chunk of aluminium, complete with a nice recess to hold an ink-impregnated felt pad. To prevent this pad from drying out when stowed, and to keep the whole thing clear of pocket lint, a U-shaped metal cover was bent from some sheet. This slides into a set of slots that are milled near the edges, in a very satisfying manner. This last bit was causing them a little trouble, so a custom slotting tool was created especially for the job. And a good job was indeed done. The final results look as you might expect from a manual ‘typewriter’ quirky, a bit wonky, but fabulous all the same.
If you have an old typewriter that needs some attention, here’s a
quick guide for giving it a once-over
. Some of you of a certain age may remember electronic typewriters with some fondness. They died a rapid death, but if you’ve still got one lurking, you could
convert it into a Linux terminal for some clackity nostalgic fun
.
Thanks to [smellsofbikes] for the tip! | 16 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542204",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T21:24:32",
"content": "I had a portable electric typewriter abiut 1976. It was a small suitcase. But better than the one I had as a kid, where you turn the knob to get the letter, then oress the keyboard, the whole thin... | 1,760,372,478.462901 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/the-j1772-hydra-helps-you-charge-two-evs-at-once/ | The J1772 Hydra Helps You Charge Two EVs At Once | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"car",
"cars",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"EV charger",
"evse"
] | There are plenty of electric vehicle (EV) chargers out there that are underutilized. This is particularly common where older EVs are involved, where the cars may only be able to charge at a few kW despite the charger being capable of delivering more. [Nick Sayer] regularly found 6.6 kW chargers being used by vehicles that could only draw down 3.3 kW at his work.
Thus, he built the J1772 Hydra as a nifty double-adapter to charge two cars at once.
The Hydra comes in two versions. One is a “splitter,” which is designed to be plugged into an existing J1772 AC charger. The other is a version designed for permanent installation to an AC power supply as an EV charger in its own right. Either way, both versions of the Hydra work the same way. In “shared” mode, the Hydra splits the available AC power equally between both cars connected to the charger. When one completes, the other gets full power. Alternatively, it can be set up in “sequential” mode, allowing one car to first charge, then the other. This is great when you have two cars to charge overnight and don’t want to wake up to shift the plugs around.
It’s a neat hack that could be useful if you’re running older EVs that rely on slower AC charging.
We’ve seen other DIY EV chargers before, too
. Expect hacking in these areas to
become more commonplace as EVs grow in popularity
. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542139",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T19:53:10",
"content": "Sounds totally safe. /s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542215",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T22:04:22",
"conten... | 1,760,372,478.734439 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/the-amateur-rocketry-hack-chat-reaches-for-the-stars/ | The Amateur Rocketry Hack Chat Reaches For The Stars | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"amateur rocketry",
"Hack Chat",
"rocketry",
"solid fuel rocket"
] | Hackaday has been around long enough to see incredible changes in what’s possible at the hobbyist level. The tools, techniques, and materials available today border on science-fiction compared to what the average individual had access to even just a decade ago. On a day to day basis, that’s manifested itself as increasingly elaborate electronic projects that in many cases bear little resemblance to the cobbled together gadgets which graced these pages in the early 2000s.
Kip Daugirdas
But these gains aren’t limited to our normal niche — hobbyists of all walks have been pushing their respective envelopes. Take for example the successful launch of MESOS, a homebuilt reusable multi-stage rocket, to the very edge of the Kármán line. It was designed and built by amateur rocket enthusiast Kip Daugirdas over the course of several years, and if all goes to plan, will take flight once again this summer with improved hardware that just might help it cross the internationally recognized 100 kilometer boundary that marks the edge of space.
We were fortunate enough to have
Kip stop by the Hack Chat this week to talk all things rocketry
, and the result was a predictably lively conversation. Many in our community have a fascination with spaceflight, and even though MESOS might not
technically
have made it that far yet (there’s some debate depending on who’s definition you want to use), it’s certainly close enough to get our imaginations running wild.
The bulk of the conversation was about, as you might have guessed, rocket fuel. Or more accurately, the different types of propellants available for these sort of large amateur rockets. While liquid fueled rocket engines hold incredible promise in terms of performance, they remain a considerable engineering challenge for the home gamer. Plus as Kip explains, solid rocket motors offer a higher propellant density, meaning you can get more energy into a smaller vehicle.
For MESOS, Kip says he used a propellant known as ammonium perchlorate composite propellant (APCP). While the composition naturally varies depending on the application, this family of propellants is the same as you’d find inside the Space Shuttle (and now SLS) Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) or an aircraft ejection seat.
It’s powerful, reliable, and somewhat surprisingly, not terribly difficult to mix up at home. As the name implies, the primary ingredient is ammonium perchlorate, which at least in the United States, is not a regulated substance. To that you add fine aluminum powder, and then a binder to hold it all together. Kip didn’t give the exact formula for his secret space-scraping sauce, but did mention that the rubberized binder makes up approximately 18% of the mixture.
This being Hackaday, there were also questions about the electronics aboard MESOS. Unfortunately for those hoping to hear some juicy details about the rocket’s custom flight computers, Kip revealed that MESOS is using off-the-shelf units. Specifically, a Featherweight Raven 4 and a Multitronix Kate 3.0. There were a pair of modified GoPro Hero 9s onboard as well, but he actually off-loaded the modifications to a Canadian company by the name of Backbone. Of course, who can blame him for not wanting to tackle custom electronics on a project like this? When you’re literally building a rocket from scratch, there’s already more than enough components that need to be designed and fabricated.
To that end, Kip did provide some interesting details about the rocket’s construction. The engine mounts were machined out of 6061 aluminum, while the airframe itself is largely fiberglass and carbon fiber composite. The carbon is wound around the tubular structures and nosecone, but the fin section necessitated a complex multi-step layup.
Judging by the state of MESOS when it landed, we’d say it’s certainly built tough enough — though Kip does mention during the Chat that he might need to revisit the protective coating on the second stage’s fins. With an ascent velocity beyond Mach 4, the leading edges were subjected to temperatures as high as 704 °C (1,300 °F), which the carbon composite construction wasn’t overly thrilled with.
We want to thank Kip Daugirdas for taking the time to talk with the Hackaday community about his incredible accomplishment. He really pulled the curtain back and shared some fascinating information about the project and rocketry in general, so if you’re at all interested in the hobby, we’d suggest reading through the complete transcript. We can’t wait to see MESOS take to the skies again, and hope it finds itself on the other side of the Kármán line before too long.
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. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542107",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T18:29:54",
"content": "Um not sure if the shuttle solids were categorized as apcp, not a chemist but instrumentation tech, we were told while working at Edwards 1C15 test stand that they were nitroglycerine with aluminum chlor... | 1,760,372,479.116059 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/hackaday-podcast-195-no-nabu-for-you-self-assembling-3d-prints-black-hats-look-at-ev-chargers/ | Hackaday Podcast 195: No NABU For You, Self-Assembling 3D Prints, Black Hats Look At EV Chargers | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi find themselves in the middle of a slow news week, so they dispense with the usual timely chit-chat and dive right into the results of a particularly tricky “What’s that Sound” challenge.
From there they’ll cover the new breed of ATtiny microcontollers (and why you probably won’t be buying them), a recently unearthed Z-80 consumer gadget that’s begging to be reverse engineered, the fine art of electrifying watercraft, and a particularly impressive speech recognition engine. Stick around till the end to hear about the potential dangers of unsecured EV chargers, and take a walk down memory lane to a time when soldering irons and paper schematics ruled the world.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download the podcast for safe-keeping
!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 195 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
The week’s sound was static electricity generated by a CRT display. Congrats to [Nate from Chile (from Detroit)]
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Come Learn About New ATtiny Generations
Technoblogy – Getting Started with the New ATtiny Chips
GitHub – SpenceKonde/megaTinyCore: Arduino core for the tinyAVR 0/1/2-series
GitHub – qbolsee/serialupdi: a Python utility for Microchip CMSIS-DAP based debuggers
GitHub – mraardvark/pyupdi: Python UPDI driver
pymcuprog · PyPI
NABU PC – A 1984 Z-80 Computer You Can Buy Today
DIY Self-Assembling 4D Printing
This Electric Outboard Conversion Makes For A Quiet Day On The Water
Electrifying A Vintage Outboard Motor
Here’s A Plain C/C++ Implementation Of AI Speech Recognition, So Get Hackin’
GitHub – openai/whisper: Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision
whisper.cpp/examples/talk.wasm at master · ggerganov/whisper.cpp · GitHub
Making 3D Print Time-lapses With Old Earphones And A Few Spare Parts
Automatic Print Ejector For All 3D Printers
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Tesla Coil Makes Sodium Plasma
Interfacing An Old Engine Cowl Flaps Indicator To USB
I’ve Got Two Turntables And A Laser Engraver
Laser Cut Your Own Vinyl Records
Tom’s Picks:
Portable Commodore 64 Lives!
Blackout Logger Keeps Track Of Power Outages
Telnet Gets Stubborn Sony Camera Under Control
Can’t-Miss Articles:
EV Chargers Could Be A Serious Target For Hackers
Brokenwire Attack
How To Repair? The Death Of Schematics | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542251",
"author": "Atomic Johnson",
"timestamp": "2022-12-03T00:03:33",
"content": "About gas pumps being internet connected. Ever notice that a lot of gas stations have satellite dishes on top? I want to say that I’ve seen a few chevron stations with dishes that say Hughs Net on ... | 1,760,372,478.925916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/spool-tower-empty-filament-spool-or-base-for-miniature-civilizations/ | Spool Tower: Empty Filament Spool Or Base For Miniature Civilizations | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"FDM",
"miniatures",
"recycling"
] | While churning through rolls of FDM filament, there are these empty spools that remain at the end. These can be thrown out with the trash, or be used as a standard base for miniatures, for use with
Dungeons & Dragons
tabletop gaming or similar, or just as a display piece. The latter is what the blokes
over at Digital Taxidermy
ran with when they started their first Spool Tower Kickstarter campaign. Now they’re back with
Spool Tower 2: The Re-Spoolening
.
These are STL bundle packs that should contain all that’s needed to turn an empty filament spool into an art piece, minus of course the painting. To get a free taste of what the experience is like, Digital Taxidermy provides a few free STLs, such as for the
Ye Olde Taxidermee Shoppee
and the
Hab Block
from the new crowdfunding campaign.
This effort raises the interesting question of what other standard (plastic) shapes of packaging could conceivably be used in a similar manner. After all, why print the whole thing when half the model could be made from something you’d otherwise just toss into the trash bin?
Thanks to [scat happens] for the tip. | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542076",
"author": "nono",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T17:08:24",
"content": "looks like all the filament that was on the spool was used for the “add-ons” that goes over the empty spool…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542086",... | 1,760,372,478.986871 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/this-week-in-security-huawei-gets-the-banhammer-lastpass-and-old-code-breaking/ | This Week In Security: Huawei Gets The Banhammer, Lastpass, And Old Code Breaking | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"Black Hat",
"Huawei",
"lastpass",
"This Week in Security"
] | While many of us were enjoying some time off for Thanksgiving,
the US government took drastic action against Huawei
and four other Chinese companies. The hardest hit are Huawei and ZTE, as the ban prevents any new products from being approved for the US market. The other three companies are Dahua and Hikvision, which make video surveillance equipment, and Hytera, which makes radio systems.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr noted the seriousness of the decision
.
[As] a result of our order, no new Huawei or ZTE equipment can be approved. And no new Dahua, Hikvision, or Hytera gear can be approved unless they assure the FCC that their gear won’t be used for public safety, security of government facilities, & other national security purposes.
There is even the potential that previously approved equipment could have its authorization pulled. The
raw FCC documents are available
, if you really wish to wade through them. What’s notable is that two diametrically opposed US administrations have both pushed for this ban. It would surely be interesting to get a look at the classified reports detailing what was actually found. Maybe in another decade or two, we can make a Freedom of Information Act request and finally get the full story.
Fuzzing for Recollapse
[0xacb] has a fun new technique to share,
that he calls REcollapse
. It’s all about regular expressions that get used in user input validation and sanitation. Regex is hard to really get right, and is full of quirks in how different languages and libraries implement it. A simple example is an email address that contains “punycode” — non-ASCII Unicode characters. It’s perfectly legitimate for an address to contain Unicode, but many normalization schemes collapse unicode strings down into the nearest approximation of ASCII. Take
exámple.com
and
example.com
. If some part of a web service sees these as the same thing, and another backend service keeps sees them as unique, that mismatch could allow account takeover. Enter your email here to receive a password reset link.
The novel thing here is a structured approach to fuzzing for these problems. [0xacb] suggests identifying “regex pivot positions”, places in a string where there could be unexpected or inconsistent regex matching. A very different example of this is the end-of-string symbol,
$
. A developer might use this to specify that a given pattern should only be matched when it’s at the very end of a string. But what happens when there’s a newline embedded in the string? It depends on the language. Yikes!
REcollapse is now available as an Open Source tool, and works great to feed fuzzing inputs into an automated tool. Run it against a target, and watch for different responses. Find something good enough, and profit!
Phishing With Smart Watches
The team at Cybervelia have cooked up
yet another way to spear-phish a target
. Many of us have smart watches, and one of the most useful functions of those wrist-mounted marvels is to glance at a SMS or other message without fishing out a phone. Could an attacker, with a Bluetooth Low Energy antenna, spoof a text message to a nearby smart watch? After some reverse engineering work, absolutely. With the right message, like “need help, 2nd floor”, the target might just start moving without checking the phone and discovering the spoof.
Real-time Malware Hunting
This one’s fun, as
the researchers at Phylum found yet another malicious PyPi package campaign
back on the 15th. Their tooling alerted them to the activity very early in the campaign, as packages were being uploaded and the payload was still being fine-tuned. That payload was being developed on Github, so there was only one thing to do.
The union of memes and security research is a wondrous thing. The packages were reported, removed, and it looks like this particular malware campaign was eliminated before it really got started.
This does lead to a hilarious tangent from Phylum, about some of the
laughably terrible attempts at malware they’ve discovered
in other campaigns. There’s a certain poetic justice to be found in malware refusing to run, because the deobfuscation routine checks for the acknowledgement string and errors out when it’s tampered with.
Lastpass Breach Continued
Lastpass has
updated their security incident report
, noting that there seems to have been follow-on access of data. They noticed “unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service”, which usually means Amazon’s AWS. The
story here seems to be that a token
to the storage service was snagged during the August compromise, and was just now used for more mischief. This does raise some uncomfortable questions about how well Lastpass understands what data was accessed in the earlier breach. That said, cleaning up after an incident is a complicated task, and missing a single AWS token in the action is all too easy.
Another “Legitimate” Commercial Spyware Vendor
In the just-what-we-needed category, the latest
report from Google’s Threat Analysis Group
names Variston as previously unknown player in the commercial malware game. Like NSO Group and others, Variston seems to have access to 0-day exploits in multiple devices and platforms.
A
trio of bug reports were opened in the Chrome bug system
, and each contained a mature framework and exploit code for a serious bug. Each of these were known and fixed bugs, but piecing together the clues would indicate that they were being used as 0-days by a vendor, probably Variston. It’s not uncommon for the “legitimate” spyware authors like the NGO Group, the NSA, and others, to properly report bugs once they’ve finished exploiting them, or assumably once a target has discovered the exploit.
500 Years Later
There’s a concept in encryption, that pretty much any encryption scheme is theoretically breakable, given enough time and technological innovation. As an example, see the rate at which quantum computers are developing, and the predicted breakdown of some classical crypto. The philosophy that spills out of this reality is that crypto just needs to be strong enough, that the secrets being protected are entirely stale by the time technology and computing power catch up. Which finally brings us to the story, that
Emperor Charles V got nearly 500 years out of his cipher
. Probably strong enough.
It turns out that this cipher had some clever elements, like multiple symbols that didn’t mean anything at all, just to make it harder to figure out. The real breakthrough was finding a cipher text that had been loosely translated. It was enough to finally figure out the basic rules. So what was in the central letter that was finally deciphered? Political maneuvering, fears of assassination, and a conspiracy to spread fake news to downplay a setback. Some things never change.
Font Fingerprint
There was
a Reddit post over the break that caught our attention
, where a user wired money online from his bank in England to Kenya, to pay for a trip. It was a legitimate transaction, but triggered the fraud protection from his bank. In the conversation with the fraud department, one of the flags for possible fraud surprised the Redditor in question: You have TeamViewer installed on your computer.
Now wait. That’s a bit disconcerting, a website can see your list of installed programs? No, not directly. There is no web API to list applications, at least, not since ActiveX died. However, there is an API to list installed fonts. And since Teamviewer brings its own font, it’s pretty easy to detect when it’s installed. And let’s face it, a remote controlled desktop is a reasonable flag for malicious activity. So now you know, your fonts may just be fingerprinting you.
Bits and Bytes
The Google Play store has
ejected a pair of mildly popular apps
, that were spying on users’ SMS messages. The data collection was incidental, and the real point was to enable fake accounts on various web services, using the victim’s cell phone numbers. Need a hundred Twitter accounts? Rent access to a hundred compromised phones, to use those numbers for the activation flow.
Need to get something past a plagiarism checker?
Just rot13 and change the font
! It’s a silly demonstration, but it does indeed work. Make your own font to change the letter mapping, and then apply the reverse mapping to the underlying text. To the human eye, it’s the same, but to an automated tool it’s garbage. Save as PDF, and off you go. While circumventing a plagiarism filter is a bad idea, this could have other, more positive uses, like censorship circumvention.
Black Hat 2022
videos are available
, only three months later. There are some fun presentations in here, like the Starlink hack, analysis of real-world malware campaigns, and lots of software getting compromised. Enjoy! | 37 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6542055",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T16:13:25",
"content": "“Enter your email here to receive a password reset link.”Wouldn’t the need for a hardware key stop that since even if someone has your e-mail account they’ll need the physical key to reset?",
"parent... | 1,760,372,479.066176 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/02/a-timepiece-straight-out-of-back-to-the-future/ | A Timepiece Straight Out OfBack To The Future | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"back to the future",
"clock",
"movie prop",
"prop"
] | [Stephen Holdaway] needed a desk clock, and decided to whip something up from scratch. The result is
a beautiful tribute to the DeLorean’s time circuits
from legendary 1985 film
Back to the Future.
We say it’s a tribute rather than an exact replica, as it only implements the “present time” section of the time circuits. However, for those of us without time machines, that’s more than enough. In any case, the build is a very faithful recreation. It uses a lovely sheet metal enclosure complete with era-appropriate sticky labels.
Naturally, the numerals are all shown on green segment displays, though [Stephen] used 16-segment devices instead of the more typical 7-segment parts. What really helps add to the look is the shaded acrylic windows, which adds a very nice effect.
It’s a nice tribute piece that any fan would instantly recognize. We’ve seen some other great builds, too, like
this replica of the RC controller that first gets the DeLorean up to 88 mph.
If you’ve been whipping up your own neat prop project, don’t hesitate to hit us up
on the tipsline! | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541960",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2022-12-02T12:21:15",
"content": "Nice result, and on a project timescale I can get behind.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6541999",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2022-... | 1,760,372,479.176668 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/taking-good-pictures-of-pcbs/ | Taking (Good) Pictures Of PCBs | Bryan Cockfield | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"camera",
"imagemagic",
"lighting",
"pcb",
"photography",
"python"
] | Snapping pictures is not technically difficult with modern technology, but taking good photographs is another matter. There are a number of things that a photographer needs to account for in order to get the best possible results, and if the subject matter isn’t particularly photogenic to start with it makes the task just a little more difficult. As anyone who’s posted something for sale online can attest, taking pictures of everyday objects can present its own challenges even to seasoned photographers. [Martijn Braam]
has a few tricks up his sleeve for pictures like this
in his efforts to photograph various circuit boards.
[Martijn] has been updating the images on
Hackerboards
, an online image reference for single-board computers and other PCBs, and he demands quality in his uploads. To get good pictures of the PCBs, he starts with ample lighting in the form of two wirelessly-controlled flashes in softboxes. He’s also using a high quality macro lens with low distortion, but the real work goes into making sure the image is sharp and the PCBs have well-defined edges. He’s using a Python script to take two pictures with his camera, and some automation in ImageMagic to composite the two images together.
While we’re not all taking pictures of PCBs, it’s a great way of demonstrating the ways that a workflow can be automated in surprising ways, not to mention the proper ways of lighting a photography subject. There are some other excellent ways of lighting subjects that we’ve seen, too, including using
broken LCD monitors
, or you can take some of these principles to your workspace with
this arch lighting system
. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541511",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T16:50:06",
"content": "Use a flatbed scanner?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6541515",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T16:56:10",
"... | 1,760,372,479.288178 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/ask-hackaday-when-it-comes-to-processors-how-far-back-can-you-go/ | Ask Hackaday: When It Comes To Processors, How Far Back Can You Go? | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"cpu",
"history",
"microprocessor"
] | When it was recently announced that the Linux kernel might drop support for the Intel 486 line of chips,
we took a look at the state of the 486 world
. You can’t buy them from Intel anymore, but you can buy clones, which are apparently still used in embedded devices. But that made us think: if you can’t buy a genuine 486, what other old CPUs are still in production, and which is the oldest?
Defining A Few Rules
The daddy of them all, 1972’s Intel 4004 went out of production in 1981. Thomas Nguyen,
CC BY-SA 4.0
There are a few obvious contenders that immediately come to mind, for example both the 6502 from 1975 and the Z80 from 1976 are still readily available. Some other old silicon survives in the form of cores incorporated into other chips, for example the venerable Intel 8051 microcontroller may have shuffled off this mortal coil as a 40-pin DIP years ago, but is happily housekeeping the activities of many far more modern devices today. Still further there’s the fascinating world of specialist obsolete parts manufacturing in which a production run of unobtainable silicon can be created specially for an extremely well-heeled customer. Should Uncle Sam ever need a crate of the Intel 8080 from 1974 for example,
Rochester Electronics can oblige
.
Thus when we’re looking for the oldest CPUs, it’s those available from regular production that we’re talking about, not old stock, not special manufacture, and not a core included in a modern part. What’s the oldest CPU in production today that an engineer from back in the day would recognise? To answer this question it’s necessary to delve back into
the timeline of early microprocessors
, and comb the world’s electronic suppliers in search of obscure chips.
Working Through The Years
A Motorola M6800 advert from 1976. The architecture survives in some of NXPs microcontroller ranges. Motorola,
Public domain
.
The first microporcessors appeared on the market in 1972, with Intel’s 4004 being generally accepted as the first of the breed. None of the early Intel chips are in regular production today, mostly we suspect because of the success of the aforementioned Z80. Its backward compatibility with 8080 instructions as well as its lower support chip count than the Intel part made it a huge seller, and the obvious choice for continuing development in that line. From the rest of the players in those first couple of years as far as we can see no others survive. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, as the microprocessor was a new, expensive, and fast-moving technology in which no one chip gained enough market share to attain longevity.
So with nothing from ’72 and ’73 remaining in production, it’s in 1974 that things become interesting. The
TMS1000 mask-programmed microcontroller
has long since faded away, but the Motorola 6800 series still appears in suppliers listings in the form of the Hitachi HD46800 and its derivatives manufactured by Renesas. A closer look shows these processors as being supplied through Rochester Electronics though, so sadly we’ve not found our earliest still-in-production chip. The
NXP HC05 and HC08 microcontrollers
may be the 6800’s distant descendant, but don’t count here because they’re not the same part.
Like a tired glam rock band unable to see punk on the horizon, we stumble into 1975. Here there’s a clear contender in the form of the aforementioned 6502. It was famously first sold at the Wescon electronics trade show in September of that year, and continues to be available in CMOS form as
the WDC 65C02
. Before crowning it though, there’s another contender. The RCA 1802 is variously listed as launching in either 1975 or 1976, and is listed on some suppliers websites as the Harris CDP1802. However as far as we can ascertain it was first on sale in early 1976, and yet again it’s revealed as coming via Rochester Electronics.
The Winner, And A Few Others
Winning since 1975, the 6502! MOS Technology,
Public domain
.
We have a winner then, in the 6502. Its popularity in home computers and more mundane appearances in a myriad control systems have kept it in production for nearly five decades, and its influence has permeated far and wide.
But before we leave this subject, it’s worth taking a look at some other famous microprocessor families to see whether any of their forebears remain from later in the ’70s.
It’s fair to say that the families we’ve already covered span most of the popular 8-bit lines from the mid-1970s, and by the end of the decade the attention at the cutting edge had moved to 16-bit designs. Of these, 1979’s Motorola 68000 ceased production in the mid 1990s, and the closest remaining family parts are
NXP’s Coldfire range
. For its 8086 rival we’ve talked about the much later 486 above, but surprisingly there’s a semiconductor company that still lists the an equivalent to the 16-bit Intel part in its product line.
The Kvazar plant in Kiev, Ukraine
(Google Translate link) has the KR1810VM86 Soviet 8086 clone, though sadly due to the war in that country we’re guessing they might have more important things on their plate at the moment.
Finally, it may be a surprise to some users of PIC microcontrollers to find that this family has its roots in a peripheral chip for a long forgotten General Instruments 16-bit system. The PIC1650 from 1976 was simply a Peripheral Interface Controller that contained a programmable core. This gave it a usefulness far beyond its original application, and while the original chip has long gone out of production there are still PIC chips in production that share the original PIC architecture.
When we were discussing this topic among Hackaday staffers we didn’t expect the 6502 to be the winner, as we were sure that a few others would have made it. But since our ruleset applied to volume-produced devices and the original chips rather than merely architectures, it’s hardly surprising that something so hugely popular would remain in production. Let’s hope it’s still on sale as it passes into its sixth decade!
header image: Pauli Rautakorpi,
CC BY 3.0
. | 89 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541472",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T15:09:39",
"content": "Not sure the 6502 wins – the 65C02 is slightly different.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6541476",
"author": "Ramtop",
"timestamp... | 1,760,372,479.997845 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/tega-typescript-embedded-game-boy-macro-assembler/ | TEGA: Typescript Embedded Game Boy (Macro) Assembler | Dave Rowntree | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"game boy",
"game boy hacks",
"nintendo",
"typescript"
] | [Francis Stokes] has a real love for the original Game Boy, suggesting that owning this machine pushed him along a certain path that many of us would recognize. Developing Game Boy games isn’t particularly difficult from a hardware point of view, as you can easily buy special cartridges that have an SD card slot, allowing custom code. [Francis] had the idea of easy software development by producing a typescript hardware abstraction library,
TEGA (or TypeScript Embedded Game Boy Macro Assembler)
.
This provides a safe environment in which to play with the code, which can then be run inside an emulator such as
BGB
, before being deployed onto actual hardware.
The video embedded below — which we warn you now is a long one — goes into extensive justification and technical explanation of how [Francis] leverages typescript to create lots of nice features to produce safe code, whilst handling many of the Game Boy’s architectural restrictions, as well as the weirdness of the Sharp SM83 processor that powers it. We particularly liked the built-in support for on-the-fly asset compression, since every byte matters in the meager 32 Kb system, it’s nice not to have to think about it all the time! After discussing TEGA, the Game Boy hardware, the ins and outs of a demo game
Block Jump
, and then how to debug with BGB, we’re pretty confident many of you will be in a strong position to bust out a Game Boy application in the future!
As an aside, we did also stumble upon a
new hardware guide
provided by Finnish programmer and Game Boy superfan [Joonas Javanainen]
which will help frame some of the topics [Francis] was talking about.
You may recall a little while back, the same author targeted the
RISC-V using code written in typescript
. After all, when you’re comfortable with a tool, you can shape it to do practically anything. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541490",
"author": "None",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T16:06:22",
"content": "If I’m not mistaken, this basically is abusing the typescript support in VS Code to implement a macroassembler+IDE. Quite a hack!Although, other options exist for that. There’s even a VS Code extension that... | 1,760,372,479.518754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/01/a-cheap-3d-printer-control-panel-as-a-general-purpose-interface/ | A Cheap 3D Printer Control Panel As A General Purpose Interface | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"Human Interface",
"module",
"reverse engineering"
] | Browsing the usual websites for Chinese electronics, there are a plethora of electronic modules for almost every conceivable task. Some are made for the hobbyist or experimenter market, but many of them are modules originally designed for a particular product which can provide useful functionality elsewhere. One such module, a generic control panel for 3D printers, has caught the attention of [Bjonnh]. It contains an OLED display, a rotary encoder, and a few other goodies, and he set out to
make use of it as a generic human interface board
.
To be reverse engineered were a pair of 5-pin connectors, onto which is connected the rotary encoder and display, a push-button, a set of addressable LEDs for backlighting, a buzzer, and an SD card slot. Each function has been carefully unpicked, with example Arduino code provided. Usefully the board comes with on-board 5 V level shifting.
While we all like to build everything from scratch, if there’s such an assembly commonly available it makes sense to use it, especially if it’s cheap. We’re guessing this one will make its way into quite a few projects, and that can only be a good thing. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541325",
"author": "Jeff Brown",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T09:05:39",
"content": "Nice! I also used one of these boards as a controller for some fancy lighting in a Little Free Library. It’s quite versatile.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"... | 1,760,372,479.477902 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/the-game-boy-color-accessory-youve-been-waiting-for/ | The Game Boy Color Accessory You’ve Been Waiting For | Dave Rowntree | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"game boy",
"game boy hacks",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Game Boy"
] | Sometimes silly projects catch our eye, and we just can’t resist covering them. Over on Hackaday.io, [solderking] realized that there was a glaring omission in the multi-game management hardware for the Game Boy Color. Obviously, it’s too mundane to carry the handheld around with a bunch of games in one’s pocket, and a hardware multi-changer would definitely improve the usability. This
convenient, pocket-friendly solution
allows you to dock up four cartridges at a time, and with only a little mild inconvenience, spin the whole assembly, lock in a game and load it up. What could be easier?
Constructed from a ridiculous three-tier PCB stack, with a rotating center joint, the assembly is completely passive, with the connections from the selected game cartridge passed down a series of connectors before finally entering the Game Boy via the usual edge connector. The mere fact that this works at all just shows how tolerant (and we guess, slow) older gaming platforms used to be, and just what you can get away with! Still, it’s a fun build, and it does work, which just goes to show that just because you can, then you should.
We’re no strangers to Game Boy hacks. Here’s
a useful cartridge
to help with developing your first program. If the old platform is just a bit too limited for you, then we’ve got you covered with a hack that
wedges an iCE40 FPGA and a Pi Zero
inside the case, to give a bit more oomph. | 27 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541263",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T06:58:52",
"content": "Why spend time and money on such an idea?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6541268",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T07:11:49"... | 1,760,372,479.585274 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/nerf-neural-radiance-fields/ | NERF – Neural Radiance Fields | Anne Ogborn | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"3d",
"3d capture",
"3d video"
] | Making narrative film just keeps getting easier. What once took a studio is now within reach of the dedicated hobbyist. And
Neural Radiance Fields
are making it a dramatic step easier. The guys from [Corridor Crew] give an early peek.
Filming and editing have reached the cell phone and laptop stage of easy. But sets, costumes, actors, lighting, and so on haven’t gotten substantially cheaper, and making your own short film is still a major project.
Enter 3D graphics. With a good gaming laptop, anybody can make a photorealistic scene in Blender and place live action actors in it. But it takes both a lot of skill and work. And often, the scene you’re making is available as a real place, but you can’t get permission to film or haul actors, props, crew, and so on to the set.
A new technology, NERF, for “NEural Radiance Fields”, has decreased the headaches a lot. Instead of making a 3D model of the scene and using that to predict what reaches the camera, the software starts with video of the scene and machine learns a “radiance field” – a model of how light is reflected by the scene.
If you use the radiance field to predict the light that falls on a 3D model, the software can render the 3D model as if it was lit inside the scene. So if your actor stands near a red wall, the red reflection will show on their face.
The result is dramatic – live video of actors converted to 3D models by photogrammetry and dropped into the radiance field look like live action video shot on set. 3D models dropped into the scene look eerily real. Camera motion from tracking the actor’s video can be applied to a camera in the radiance field, so the camera can move during the shot.
The elements are CG objects, so they can be moved or scaled. In the video they use this to insert an actor as a giant towering over a warehouse. You can adjust camera motion after the fact, so no more shaky camera moves or regrets.
It’s a powerful new tool for low budget film makers. If you like VFx this is a real advance. NERF is new, but we’ve covered photogrammetry many times, including
this neat “donut” version of a turntable
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541221",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T04:47:49",
"content": "I see this being added to VFX software in the near future.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6541398",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,479.640711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/a-weather-station-for-whether-it-rains-or-shines/ | A Weather Station For Whether It Rains Or Shines | Abe Connelly | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"anemometer",
"BMP180",
"dht22",
"ESP32",
"rain gauge",
"weather",
"wind vane"
] | [Giovanni Aggiustatutto] creates a
DIY weather station
to measure rain fall, wind direction, humidity and temperature. [Giovanni] has been working on various parts of the weather station, including the
rain gauge
and
anemometer
, with the weather station build incorporating all these past projects and adding a few extra features for measurement and access.
For temperature and humidity, a DHT22 sensor is located in a 3D printed Stevensen screen, giving the sensor steady airflow while protecting the module from direct sunlight and rain. A mostly 3D printed wind vane is printed with the base attached to a ball bearing and magnet so that the four hall sensors positioned in a “plus” configuration at the base can detect direction. The 3D printed anemometer uses a hall sensor to detect the revolution speed of the device. The rain gauge uses a “tipping bucket” mechanism, with a magnet attached to it that triggers the hall sensor affixed to the frame. The rain gauge (or pluviometer if you’re fancy) needs extra calibration to adjust for how much water the buckets take on before tipping.
An ESP32, with additional level shifters and BMP180 atmospheric pressure sensor module, are placed in a junction box. The ESP32 is used to communicate with each of the sensors and allows for an external internet connection to a
Home Assistant
server to push collected data out.
[Giovanni] has done an excellent job of documenting each piece, including making the 3D STL files available. Weather stations are a favorite of ours with a lot of variety in what gets collected and how, from
ultrasonic anemometers
to
solar powered weather stations
, and it’s great to see [Giovanni]’s take.
Video after the break! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541114",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-12-01T00:12:40",
"content": "” a DIY weather station to measure rain fail, wind direction, humidity and temperature”Rain fail?Isn’t that a drought?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,372,479.754071 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/nano-sized-7-segment-led-display-on-a-surface-mount-module/ | Nano-Sized 7-Segment LED Display On A Surface Mount Module | Joseph Long | [
"LED Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"7 segment LED display",
"miniaturization",
"smd"
] | Inspired by a prank tweet, [Sam Ettinger] endeavored to create an SMD seven-segment display. The
NanoRaptor NanoSegment
implements a panel of seven-segment display modules sized at “0806” each or just a bit wider than a standard 0805 SMD footprint. Each of the seven segments is a single 0201 LED. Six I/O lines and three resistors are required to operate each module.
To demonstrate the operation of his tiny display modules, Sam also created the “6Pin 7Seg”
development board
featuring an ATtiny84 microcontroller coupled to PCB footprints sized to receive the NanoRaptor NanoSegment display modules. A demonstration of the board counts through digits displayed on one of the tiny seven-segment modules.
Hoping to reduce the module’s interface to two pins, Sam is now experimenting with a seven-segment display on a flex PCB that folds up into a 1208 footprint. He is attempting to fold the resistors and a ATtiny20 microcontroller into an “origami PCB” configuration.
If these hacks are getting a little too small for your tastes, we’ve got you covered with this
giant seven-segment display
. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541052",
"author": "Adam",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T21:51:38",
"content": "Love the use of the PCB as its own solder stencil.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6541117",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"t... | 1,760,372,479.70121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/cardboard-game-tokens-become-shiny-click-clacks-with-diy-treatment/ | Cardboard Game Tokens Become Shiny Click-Clacks With DIY Treatment | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"how-to"
] | [
"board game",
"resin",
"Tabletop",
"token"
] | Tabletop games and cardboard tokens go hand-in-hand for a good reason: they are economical and effective. However, their tactile attributes leave a little to be desired. There’s something really great about high-quality pieces possessing a shiny, pleasing smoothness and
click-clack
handling that cardboard simply can’t deliver, but that all changes with [Dzhav]’s
simple method for converting cardboard tokens into deluxe versions of themselves
with a little work and a resin coating.
The result is a token with a crystal-clear, smooth, and slightly-convex coating of hardened resin on it. They feel (and sound) like plastic, rather than cardboard. The resin used is a two-part clear jewelry resin, used for casting things like pendants. It benefits from a long working time and unlike UV-cured resin (like the SLA 3D printer resin) it won’t be affected by light.
Careful application of resin relies on surface tension to prevent messes.
Like with most things, good results come from careful preparation and technique. [Dzhav] suggests preparing the tokens by sanding the edges completely smooth with fine sandpaper, then using a black marker to color them. Then, tokens are coated one side at a time with a paintbrush and correctly-mixed resin: while holding a token down with a toothpick, resin is brushed right to (but not over) the edges. Then, additional resin can be dropped in the center of the token, and gravity and surface tension will work together to ensure an even coating that doesn’t drip.
After the resin has had plenty of time to cure, the tokens are flipped over and the process repeated. The end result are tokens with both sides coated in a nice, smooth, ever-so-slightly-convex shield of resin.
They look fantastic, and sound even better. Turn up your volume and play the two-second video embedded below to listen for yourself. And when you’re ready for another gamer that didn’t settle for what was in the box,
check out this redesigned Catan version
. | 30 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6541051",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T21:47:58",
"content": "I wonder if one could devise a similar process with casein based polymers… my local Rexall pharmacy for example is always reducing excess milk down to like 50 cents a gallon with a couple of days dat... | 1,760,372,480.070757 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/jcb-is-exploring-hydrogen-combustion-engines-for-construction-machinery/ | JCB Is Exploring Hydrogen Combustion Engines For Construction Machinery | Lewin Day | [
"green hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"agricultural equipment",
"construction equipment",
"hydrogen combustion",
"hydrogen engine",
"hydrogen storage",
"jcb"
] | When we think about greening up the planet, solar panels and electric cars are often at the forefront of our mind. However, there’s a whole bunch of other things out there that are spewing out carbon dioxide that also need to be cleaned up. That includes leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and yes – big equipment for construction and agricultural work!
JCB manufactures diesel engines for big machines, but is now looking to switch things up for a cleaner future. To that end,
the company is working on hydrogen-burning engines for its big machines.
Burning The Lightest Gas
Hydrogen can be used to produce electricity by passing it through a fuel cell, where it can then be used to power motors. Companies have explored using hydrogen in this manner
to power cars and trucks.
JCB initially started by looking at hydrogen fuel cells, too, but found they weren’t great at delivering the instantaneous high power needed for construction machinery. Instead, the company began exploring using hydrogen to burn in otherwise fairly conventional combustion engines. It’s a concept that other companies have explored too, with Toyota even looking into the technology
with a motorsports program
.
Hydrogen is useful as a fuel because its combustion is very clean. In terms of the direct products of the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, the only byproduct is water. Of course, when burning hydrogen at high temperatures in air, the reaction does cause the production of some oxides of nitrogen. Overall though, the emissions from hydrogen combustion are far cleaner than burning fossil fuels. It’s all down to the absence of carbon, which means the reaction produces zero carbon dioxide.
JCB engineered an engine to run on hydrogen. Notably, shots from the video show the engine using components designed for injecting compressed natural gas. Credit:
JCB, YouTube
For this reason, JCB has pursued hydrogen combustion engines as a way to cleanly power its machines. The company has developed a 4.8-liter four-cylinder hydrogen-powered engine. It’s capable of putting out the same power and torque as the company’s similarly-sized Dieselmax 448 engine, and is expected to land at the same cost, too. Plus, there’s even potential to retrofit the cleaner-burning engine to old machines.
To build the hydrogen engine, JCB started with the bottom half of the existing Dieselmax model. The sump and cylinder block are the same as the diesel-powered model, as is the cooling system. The hydrogen engine also still uses a regular variable-geometry turbo. Up top, though, the engine is quite different. There’s a new cylinder head and injection system, designed for injecting hydrogen gas instead of diesel. The engine had to be modified for spark ignition instead of compression ignition, too, as hydrogen is most suited to the former. The diesel fuel tank is similarly gone, replaced with five 1kg storage vessels for hydrogen gas made of aluminium and carbon fiber. .
Notably, hydrogen-burning combustion engine can work in largely the same way as a spark-ignition gasoline engine. Just like a gas engine can be converted to run on liquified petroleum gas, they can be converted to run on hydrogen pretty much just by changing the injectors, albeit at lower power thanks to induction inefficiencies. Designing a direct-injection engine specifically for hydrogen combustion can get around this problem though, and could theoretically produce an engine with 20% more power than a similar-sized gasoline engine. Other modifications to suit hydrogen power, like hardened valves and special spark plugs, help with longevity and to improve the quality of combustion. As for diesel engines, they’re not as simple to convert to hydrogen power, as the gaseous fuel isn’t as suitable for compression ignition. However, as JCB has demonstrated, a hydrogen engine of similar size can match the power and torque of a diesel when built properly, and can even share fundamental components.
JCB’s engine is still in the testing phase. It aims to start pre-production on the engine by the end of 2023, applying to its construction and agricultural vehicles. Meanwhile, as much as hydrogen is cleaner burning than fossil fuels, the technology does still face some hurdles to wider adoption.
Challenges
JCB has built a mobile hydrogen refuelling truck to deliver fuel to vehicles in much the same way as diesel tankers already do on job sites around the world. Credit: JCB
Hydrogen doesn’t have a viable distribution network yet, either in terms of long-distance pipelines or in terms of filling stations for consumers. To that end, JCB has developed its own mobile refuelling vehicle. For agricultural and construction operators, this fits the bill, as fuel is often taken to machines, rather than vice versa. It’s far less of an issue compared to powering road-going vehicles, which owners expect to be able to drive to a filling station wherever they are.
Producing hydrogen is also a problem. It can be produced cleanly using renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen, producing what is known as “green hydrogen.” However, much hydrogen currently on the market is instead chemically produced from natural gas, releasing harmful carbon emissions and making what is called “grey hydrogen”. Some producers split the difference, storing the carbon emissions to make what is known as “blue hydrogen.” Fundamentally, though, there simply isn’t a major renewable source of “green hydrogen” ready to power hydrogen vehicles yet. Thus, hydrogen vehicles are currently just shifting emissions to the grey hydrogen plants.
JCB’s early experiments with hydrogen fuel cells pushed the company to look to hydrogen combustion engines as an alternative solution. Credit:
JCB, YouTube
The other major problem with hydrogen combustion engines is efficiency. Hydrogen-engined vehicles have a well-to-wheel efficiency of only around 20-25%, which compares poorly to the 25-30% figure for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. That’s largely down to the greater losses involved in internal combustion engines compared to fuel cells. However, when compared to battery vehicles, the losses are even worse, thanks to all the energy lost in refining and transporting hydrogen fuel. A comparable electric vehicle could have efficiency as high as 80-85% in comparison. In the end, a hydrogen-burning vehicle is roughly as efficient as a diesel-burning one, though with the benefit of having far cleaner emissions.
Looking Ahead
Overall, if the world is to get to a point of net zero carbon emissions, just about every fossil-fuel burning machine will need to be converted to a method of cleaner operation. JCB’s research over the last few years is pursuing exactly that goal, and should be commended.
At the same time, it’s clear that there are more hurdles to clear before the world of construction and agricultural machinery can be said to be fully clean and green. For machines that work heavy jobs for long hours, electric drive may not yet be an option. In those cases, hydrogen combustion could be a viable technology to clean them up in the meantime. However, the production and distribution of cleanly-sourced hydrogen must be there to make the pursuit worthwhile. JCB is holding up its end of the deal, and the supply of hydrogen must catch up to complete the puzzle. | 60 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540947",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T18:09:16",
"content": "The biggest problem with Hydrogen in this use case is that it’s so leaky. Even NASA struggles to design tanks and pipes that can contain the slippery stuff.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,372,480.180397 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/mechanical-keyboard-with-a-framework-inside/ | Mechanical Keyboard With A Framework Inside | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"commodore 64",
"framework",
"Framework laptop",
"mechanical keyboard",
"milled aluminum case"
] | Like the Commodore 64 and other keyboard computers of yore, the
[Elevated Systems]’s CJ64
fits all of its processing and I/O into a single keyboard-shaped package.
This iteration of the project takes it to the next level with an enclosure milled out of aluminum instead of the mere 3D printed enclosure of the previous versions. With a Framework mainboard, the ports are configurable via the Framework expansion card system giving you even more options to customize this build. To round it out, this keyboard PC doesn’t scrimp on the keyboard part either with mechanical switches and MT3 profile keycaps.
If you’d like to build one of these for yourself, [Elevated Systems] has uploaded the
3D printed enclosure files
to his GitHub repository. The files for machining are available as well, but only to patrons.
For some more Framework-based mods, check out this
Framework Tablet
, the
Framedeck
, or this other
retro-inspired Framework build
. If you want an all-in-keyboard slabtop, then maybe check out
Are Slabtops the Future of Computing
? | 31 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540908",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T16:44:00",
"content": "Kinda like a hyper-retro pi400. Love what Framework is enabling.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6540912",
"author": "R",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,480.249286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/building-your-own-consensus/ | Building Your Own Consensus | Matthew Carlson | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"consensus",
"raft"
] | With billions of computers talking to each other daily, how do they decide anything? Even in a database or server deployment, how do the different computers that make up the database decide what values have been committed? How do they agree on what time it is? How do they come to a consensus?
But first, what is the concept of consensus in the context of computers? Boiled down, it is for all involved agents to agree on a single value. However, allowances for dissenting, incorrect, or faulting agents are designed into the protocol. Every correct agent must answer, and all proper agents must have the same answer. This is particularly important for data centers or mesh networks. What happens if the network becomes partitioned, some nodes go offline, or the software crashes weirdly, sending strange garbled data? One of the most common consensus algorithms is Raft.
Raft
The Secret Lives Of Data has a
great animated demonstration of how data flows inside the Raft algorithm between agents
. The Raft GitHub page also
has helpful diagrams
. The Raft has provable guarantees that offer fault tolerance by an elected leader. Importantly, this elected leader does lead to a weakness in Byzantine failures, but we’ll cover that later. Databases such as Cockroach DB, Splunk, and MongoDB often use Raft, which is particularly tuned for allowing agents to agree on a set of state transitions, like transactions to a database. To summarize the Raft algorithm, there are two parts: leader election and log replication.
Imagine a set of servers communicating with each other and a client producing messages. These messages can be anything, like “set register Y to 6” or “delete row with id = 1230231”. When servers first come up, they are in a follower state and are looking to hear from a leader via a heartbeat. They try to become candidates in an election if they don’t receive a heartbeat within 150 to 300ms. The servers then vote on the candidates, and in the case of a split vote, the election term ends, and the cycle begins again. Timeouts are randomized to attempt to prevent divided votes.
The client sends messages to the current leader, and then the leader replicates the message to all the followers. Once it hears back from a majority of followers, the message is considered committed. The messages are appended to a log to be consistent across all servers. In the event of a leader failure, the logs of the newly elected leader are used, and inconsistent entries are deleted. Because any follower must have the most up-to-date committed log to be considered for election, it ensures that data committed to the majority cannot be lost.
Byzantine Failures
“
Byzantine Generals
” by Lord Belbury: How can you tell if everyone got the message?
As mentioned, Raft/Paxos protects against server failures, not
Byzantine failures
. The name comes from the famous Byzantine Generals problem, where some generals are unreliable. They say one thing but do another. Raft assumes that when a system crashes, it fails and restarts. This is not the case in a hardware sense, as the device could continue to produce incoherent data, act incorrectly, or even be taken over by a hostile entity.
Nevertheless, many real-time systems, such as those on an airplane or spaceship, must keep Byzantine failures in mind. A component can generate erroneous data, and the rest of the systems must work around that. This can be done by additional messages to verify the actions of other servers, signing the data, or even getting
rid of the idea of a leader altogether
.
Lockstep Protocol
If you’ve played a real-time strategy game, you might wonder how the game can be consistent across dozens of players with incredibly slow connections. Unfortunately, the networking for Age of Empires was developed in 1996 when a 28.8 modem was relatively standard. So how can you serial the position and updates of every single object on the screen when you have a few bits per second to spare with wild network latency swings? The answer is that you don’t.
There’s a fantastic
article on having 1500 archers running in real-time
from [Paul Bettner], who worked on Age of Empires (among other things). The answer is only to send players’ actions rather than the state of each object in the game. Each game runs the exact same simulation, and each player’s commands are simulated on every player’s computer. In many ways, this is just like the Raft protocol: messages are passed and appended to a read-only log, and the log must always be consistent across all computers. But unlike Raft, there is no leader, and every server is also a client. There is a host, but there is no one true authority on the state of the game.
There is a monotonic turn number that is consistent across all clients. Each command is scheduled to be run in two turns. This allows the command to be sent, acknowledged, and processed while the game simulates. This does mean the simulation can only run as fast as the slowest machine, and there is a speed controller to change the length of a turn to keep the game playable. By separating render time from turn time, the gameplay stays buttery smooth for the player, even if the turn rate is relatively low.
Since each client runs the same simulation, it is hard to cheat (the Byzantine problem again). Any client sending confusing or non-sensical messages was de-synced and kicked out of the game. However, as you might be thinking, getting a simulation with randomness and probabilities to be consistent across dozens of machines with different processors and potentially even different architectures is challenging to say the least.
Crypto
Here at Hackaday, we tend to focus
on the actual mining side of Bitcoin
, but how does the network agree on the next hash? That’s the real power of Proof of Work. It is a distributed consensus algorithm at a large scale that can accommodate a large percentage of bad actors. We won’t go into detail (perhaps an article for another time). At the end of the day, that’s the only power of the blockchain and all the hype that goes with it. It is just a log of entries that we can all agree on in a decentralized way.
Chia is another cryptocurrency
that works on a similar principle but uses proof of stake instead of proof of work but has the same concept at its core.
Consensus is Everywhere
Consensus is everywhere, from airplanes to web services to cryptocurrencies. As a result, there are hundreds of consensus algorithms, each with different tradeoffs and performance profiles. Perhaps next time you’re implementing a mesh scale IOT project with many nodes that need to agree on shared values, you can reach for some of the ideas here. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540896",
"author": "Ethan Waldo",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T16:10:11",
"content": "Kudos on the shout out to Chia, the most decentralized and secure cryptocurrency blockchain in the world.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6541984... | 1,760,372,480.296571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/making-3d-print-time-lapses-with-old-earphones-and-a-few-spare-parts/ | Making 3D Print Time-lapses With Old Earphones And A Few Spare Parts | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"selfie stick",
"timelapse",
"timelapse 3d printing"
] | The trick to producing great 3D printing time-lapse animations is to ensure that the extruder has moved out of the frame each time a photo is taken — which usually requires OctoPrint to be controlling both the camera and printer. But [NirL] managed to bodge up a system to get the same result with
a spare limit switch, a resistor, his mobile phone, and an old set of earbuds
. Not bad for some spare parts and a little extra G-Code.
The print head hits a remote shutter button during a brief parking action after each layer.
Inserting custom G-Code to park the print head at regular intervals takes care of standardizing the printer’s movements; there’s even a post-processing extension in Cura that makes this easy. As for triggering the camera, [NirL] was inspired by the remote shutter button on a selfie stick. By positioning a physical switch in such a way that the print head pushes it every time it (briefly) parks, a photo gets taken for every layer. Essentially the same thing Octolapse does, just with fewer parts.
To create the DIY remote shutter button, [NirL] used a spare limit switch, resistor, and cannibalized an old set of earbuds for the cable and 4-conductor 3.5 mm audio plug. Most phones and camera apps trigger the shutter when they receive a Vol+ signal through the audio plug, which is
done by connecting MIC and GND through a 240 Ohm resistor
.
In this way a photo is snapped for every layer, giving [NirL] all that is needed to assemble a smooth animation. Sure, it ties up a mobile phone for the duration of the print, but for just a few spare parts it does the job. You can see the project in action in the video, embedded just under the page break.
As mentioned, the usual way to implement effortless time-lapses is by
using the Octolapse plugin for OctoPrint
, which creates silky smooth animations
without the typical blur of time-lapses
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540793",
"author": "Hal H",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T13:19:11",
"content": "Always wondered what good might become of that old android phone i have laying around. This looks like a simple project. Would probably need to 3d print a phone holder or is an independent tripod better?And... | 1,760,372,480.359289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/30/acrylic-light-puzzle-has-a-point/ | Acrylic Light Puzzle Has A Point | Matthew Carlson | [
"Art"
] | [
"acrylic laser cutter",
"lasercutting",
"puzzle"
] | [JBV Creative] recently became a proud owner of a laser cutter and, like most of us, started to think about what they could make with it. The answer was simple, a clever little
piece of art or puzzle made of stacked acrylic
.
He created some text and extruded it from a single point, but not every part intersected with every plate, giving each plate an indecipherable appearance. This allows a small light source (like the LED likely on the back of your phone) to cast a shadow on the wall. With some 3D printed brackets and spacers, it was mounted to a nice piece of cherry plywood. Overall, the technique is quite simple and easy to understand. [JBV Creative] didn’t include more detail on the process, which is a shame because it looks like a beautiful effect to recreate for some puzzles.
These
glowing coasters
are fantastic if you’re looking for engraved acrylic with a light source. Or
this puzzle
that lights up as the pieces are placed. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540713",
"author": "piachoo",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T10:40:19",
"content": "The concept is perfectly clear to me, I like concise messages",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6541043",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,480.3991 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/tiny-3d-printed-ho-scale-escalator-that-works/ | Tiny 3D Printed HO Scale Escalator That Works | Anne Ogborn | [
"News",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"3dprinting",
"escalator"
] | [Luke Towan] has a cool
HO scale Escalator
mostly made of 3D printed parts, with some laser cut acrylic, for a station on his HO model railroad.
Escalators are mesmerizing to watch – there’s something magical about the stairs unfolding at the bottom and folding up at the top. But they’re very hard to model.
[Luke Towan] has done it – his 3D printed version closely resembles the real thing mechanically. Pins are carried around, cantilevered out from a 3D printed chain. A stair swivels on each pin – at the bottom each stair’s free end rests on a ‘bottom’ far enough down for the stairs to be level, while on the incline the ‘bottom’ is just below the pins. It’s a tricky build.
If you like pushing the envelope of what 3D printing can do this is an interesting project, even if you’re not planning to build an escalator. There are lots of tips for making small mechanisms with 3D printing, and for making small mechanisms that work reliably without stuttering.
He’s not the first to build an escalator. Back in 2015 we covered
this wooden escalator for slinkies
, and just recently
this 3D printed version
from [AlexY]. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540657",
"author": "piachoo",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T08:54:20",
"content": "it is “H-zero” not “H-oh”!awesome work nonetheless!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6540696",
"author": "Pablo",
"timestamp": "2022... | 1,760,372,480.464426 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/prototyping-the-prototype/ | Prototyping The Prototype | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"breadboard",
"Concept",
"crumb",
"educational",
"prototype",
"software"
] | For basic prototyping, the go-to tool to piece together a functioning circuit is the breadboard. It’s a great way to prove a concept works before spending money and time on a PCB. For more complex tasks we can make use of simulation software such as SPICE. But there hasn’t really been a tool to blend these two concepts together.
That’s what CRUMB is hoping to solve
as a tool that allows simulating breadboard circuits.
Currently, most basic circuit functions are working for version 1.0. This includes passive components like resistors, capacitors, switches, some LEDs, and potentiometers, as well as some active components like transistors and diodes. There are some logic chips available such as 74XX series chips and 555 timers, which opens up a vast array of circuit building. There’s even an oscilloscope feature, plus audio output to incorporate buzzers into the circuit simulation. Currently in development is an LCD display module and improvements to the oscilloscope.
Besides prototyping, this could be useful for anyone, students included, who is learning about circuits without the need to purchase any hardware. The major downside to this project is that it there doesn’t seem to have a free or trial version, the source is not available, and it’s only for sale on Steam, Apple Store, and Google Play. That being said, there is a forum available for users to discuss problems and needs for future versions, so it’s possible that a community could build up around it. We’ve seen
previously non-free versions of circuit simulation software
become more open after some time, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Thanks to [Thomas] for the tip! | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540649",
"author": "cdilla",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T08:38:18",
"content": "Looks interesting but the lack of free desktop trial and odd targeting of mobile platforms puts me off. Anyway, I bookmarked the site forum to see what happens in the future, so thanks for the article.",
... | 1,760,372,480.683008 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/interfacing-an-old-engine-cowl-flaps-indicator-to-usb/ | Interfacing An Old Engine Cowl Flaps Indicator To USB | Dave Rowntree | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"aircraft",
"digital potentiometer",
"dotnet",
"general electric",
"indicator",
"magnetic",
"PIC16f1459",
"selsyn",
"usb"
] | [Glen Akins] had a WW2-era aircraft engine cowl flap indicator lying around (as you do) and thought it would make a jolly fine USB-attached indicator. The model in question is a General Electric model 8DJ4PBV DC Selsyn, which was intended for four-engined aircraft. For those not familiar with the purpose [Glen] explains in
his detailed writeup
, that piston-engine aircraft of that era were air-cooled, and during conditions of maximum engine power — such as during take-off — flaps on the side of the engine cowling could be opened to admit additional cooling airflow. These indicator dials were connected to a sender unit on each of the flap actuators, providing the pilots an indication of the flaps’ positions.
The mode of operation in the DC power environment of WW2-era aircraft utilised the concept of variable magnetic field orientation. The sender is a potentiometer, sending a voltage down the wire between 24V and ground. The indicator unit has a pair of coils set at 120 degrees around a ring, with the coils wired in series, and
the center tap connected to the sender signal. The other ends of each coil connect to the DC power bus so that as the signal voltage varies, the coils produce a varying magnetic field. Lower voltages bias the field towards the coil connected to 24V, and higher voltages the other way. A permanent magnet in the center is attached to the indicator dial, with a small spring to bias it to the center. A very simple but effective arrangement, giving analog feedback of the actual flap position.
To interface this thing to modern technology, a custom PCB was constructed leveraging the USB functionality of the PIC16F1459 microcontroller, that [Glen] was already familiar with. Four Microchip MCP31HV41-502 digital potentiometers were pressed into service directly driving the coils of the indicator units. That might seem like an odd if not viable way to drive such a thing, but [Glen] goes into some extensive theory and some modeling to determine which devices would have sufficient margin, which is worth a read for the unfamiliar. After bit-banging the SPI connection to the digipots (even though the PIC has hardware SPI) [Glen] goes on to describe how the USB endpoints work, finishing off with a .NET application to drive it all.
We’ve seen plenty of hacks bringing retro hardware back to life, connecting to modern computing. Here’s a project that goes the other way, building
custom aircraft instrumentation from modern parts
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540423",
"author": "some guy",
"timestamp": "2022-11-30T01:16:44",
"content": "Typo in the blog post and this article: The pots are called MCP41HV31 (4 and then 3).https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/MCP41HV31",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,480.559175 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/this-electric-outboard-conversion-makes-for-a-quiet-day-on-the-water/ | This Electric Outboard Conversion Makes For A Quiet Day On The Water | Dan Maloney | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"BLDC",
"boat",
"ev",
"ice",
"motor",
"propellor",
"stator"
] | Nothing beats a day on the lake in a little boat with an outboard motor putt-putting along behind you. It’s great fun, if perhaps a little noisy with all that putting going on. And maybe that oily sheen on the water in your wake is not so nice. it could be that the fish are a little annoyed with your putting, too. Come to think of it, outboard motors are a bit of a problem.
Fortunately there’s a better way,
like converting an old outboard motor to electric
. It comes to us by way of [Anton], who happened upon the perfect donor platform — a 5-hp outboard by Crescent, sporting a glorious 1970s color scheme and a motor housing shell perfect for modding. He started by ripping the old engine and drivetrain out of the housing to make room for the BLDC motor and its driver. The motor was a project in itself; [Anton] rewound the original stator with much thicker wire and changed the coil configuration to milk as much torque as possible out of it. What started as a 180-kv motor ended up at 77 kv with much more copper and new Hall sensors for the controller. He also put a ton of effort into waterproofing the motor with epoxy resin. With a 3D-printed prop and a streamlined fairing, the new motor looks quite at home on the outboard. In fact, the whole thing barely looks customized at all — the speed control is even right on the tiller where you’d expect it.
The video below shows the build and a test run, plus an analysis of the problems encountered, chief of which is water intrusion. But as [Anton] rightly points out, that’s easily solved by reusing the original driveshaft and mounting the motor above the waterline, like
this
. Still, we like the look of this, and the idea of knocking around on the water nearly silently seems wonderful.
Thanks for the tip, [Måns] | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540271",
"author": "Darren",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T21:20:16",
"content": "I’m wondering why the original drive shaft wasn’t used with the motor kept under the cowling.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6540285",
"aut... | 1,760,372,480.616799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/aesthetic-pcb-design-tips-for-improved-functionality/ | Aesthetic PCB Design Tips For Improved Functionality | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware"
] | [
"aesthetics",
"emc",
"pcb",
"solderability",
"yield"
] | Those of us hardware types that spend a lot of time designing PCBs will often look at other peoples’ designs with interest, and in some cases, considerable admiration. Some of their boards just look so good. But are aesthetics important? After all, for most products, the delicate electronic components on that PCB are tucked safely inside a protective enclosure. But, as [Phil’s Lab] explains,
aesthetic PCB designs can lead to functional improvements
, such that better-looking designs are also better performing, in terms of manufacturability (and therefore yield), electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), and several other factors that can be important.
First off, making a PCB easy to read and using sane placement of components and connections will speed up debugging by reducing errors. Keeping a consistent and not too-tight placement grid can give the pick and place machine an easier task, and reduce solder issues during reflow. But there are also more serious concerns, such as the enforcement of design partitionings — such as keeping analog circuits together and away from noisy power and digital areas — which can make the difference between functioning within specification, and failure.
The video goes into a few other interesting tips, one highlight is using a ground-tied PCB perimeter zone, with wavelength-of-interest via stitching. This will reduce EMC side emissions from the power plane, but also if you select an appropriate surface finish, and keep the solder mask open, you’ve got a free, full perimeter contact to ground your scope probe. Oh, and it looks good too.
Hackaday is no stranger to beautiful artistic PCBs, like the
work of [Saar Drimer] and many others
. But if one PCB doesn’t cut it for your needs, there’s always
the ‘Oreo’ construction to consider
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540201",
"author": "mnidtj",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T19:42:03",
"content": "And of course that’s a fully licensed version of Altium, which costs as much as a new Miata… yeah right 😂",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6540235",... | 1,760,372,480.72695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/weird-energy-storage-solutions-could-help-the-grid-go-renewable/ | Weird Energy Storage Solutions Could Help The Grid Go Renewable | Lewin Day | [
"green hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"carbon dioxide",
"flow battery",
"grid storage",
"renewable energy",
"storage"
] | We’re all familiar with batteries. Whether we’re talking about disposable AAs in the TV remote, or giant facilities full of rechargeable cells to store power for the grid, they’re a part of our daily lives and well understood.
However, new technologies for storing energy are on the horizon for grid storage purposes, and they’re very different from the regular batteries we’re used to. These technologies are key to making the most out of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power that aren’t available all the time. Let’s take a look at some of these ideas, and how they radically change what we think of as a “battery.”
Iron Flow Batteries
Diagram indicating the operation of an iron flow battery. Credit:
ESS, Inc, YouTube
Normally, the batteries we use consist of a metal or plastic case with some electrolyte inside, sandwiched between electrodes. Usually, the electrolyte is in a paste or gel form and for all intents and purposes, we think of batteries as a typically solid object, even if they’re gooey inside.
Iron flow batteries work in an altogether different fashion. They use liquid electrolyte that is pumped into a battery as needed to generate electricity. The electrolyte consists of iron ions in solution, typically in the form of aqueous solutions like iron chloride or iron sulfate.
Typical electrode materials are carbon for both the positive and negative sides, with the battery constructed as two half cells with a porous separator in between. As the battery is charged, the iron (II) ions are oxidized in the positive half-cell, giving up electrons to become iron (III) ions. In the negative half-cell, the iron (II) ions gain electrons to become iron (0), with the metallic iron plating on to the negative electrode itself. When the battery is discharged into a load, these reactions run in reverse, with the metal on the negative half-cell electrode returning to solution.
ESS has developed iron flow batteries that can fit inside shipping containers. This model can deliver 50 kW of power, and stores up to 400 kWh of energy. Credit:
ESS, Inc., YouTube
Iron flow batteries have the benefit that they scale. Larger tanks and larger cells can easily be built, which is ideal for grid applications where there is a desire to store many megawatt-hours of energy. Of further benefit is the cycle life of an iron flow battery, measured anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 cycles. That’s an order of magnitude better than most lithium-ion cells, and gives iron flow batteries a working lifetime on the order of 10 to 20 years, or even longer.
The chemicals involved are also cheap and readily available – iron and its salts being easy to source almost anywhere in the world. There is little requirement for the fancy rare-earth metals that are key to the production of high-end lithium-ion cells. Plus, the chemicals used are also safe – there’s not really anything in a iron flow battery that can explode or catch fire like other technologies.
The iron flow battery does come with some drawbacks, though. The technology simply doesn’t have the power density of lithium-ion batteries, so more space is required to build a battery capable of delivering the same power. Additionally, due to the plating reaction on the negative electrode, the iron flow battery doesn’t scale as well as some other theoretical designs. Other flow batteries only require more electrolyte to keep producing energy, with the size of the electrodes unimportant in this regard. Furthermore, while the technology stores electrical energy directly in a chemical sense, iron flow batteries are still typically less efficient than
hydroelectric pumped storage
, assuming suitable land is available. Advanced hydroelectric storage methods
can counter this requirement
, however.
Companies are developing the technology for real-world applications today.
Shipping-container sized flow batteries from companies like ESS are available with capacities up to 500 kWh, with power outputs high enough to power tens of houses over a 12 hour period. Stacking multiple units into a single installation scales the capacity as needed. They’re aimed at the so-called “long term” storage market, for storing energy on the order of 4 to 24 hours. This makes them ideal for use cases like storing energy during daily solar peaks for use in the dark night time hours.
Carbon Dioxide Storage
A diagram indicating how Energy Dome’s storage facility works in charge and discharge cycles. Credit:
Energy Dome, YouTube
Carbon dioxide is all around us, as a key component of the atmosphere. It’s also a gas that can readily be stored as a liquid at ambient temperature, as long as you put it under enough pressure. In this form, it takes up far less space, and there’s energy to be gained in the phase transition, too. Energy Dome is a company that identified that this property could be useful,
and has developed a storage system based on the prevalent gas.
To charge the carbon dioxide “battery,” energy is applied to compress the gaseous CO
2
into a liquid. The heat generated in the compression process is stored in a thermal energy storage system. To extract power, the liquid CO
2
is warmed from the formerly stored heat, and allowed to expand through a turbine, which generates power. The design uses CO
2
in a sealed system. The energy is stored in the pressure applied to the CO
2
and in the phase change, rather than in any chemical reaction. Thus, it’s not really a “battery,” per se, any more so than hydroelectric pumped storage, but it is an energy storage system.
The system has the benefit of being constructed from simple, well-understood equipment that is already readily available. There’s nothing radical about compressing gases nor expanding them through turbines, after all. Plus, there’s no need for expensive rare earth materials or even large amounts of copper wiring, as with lithium-ion battery storage solutions.
Energy Dome is already planning a commercial deployment in the US by 2024. It has already run tests at a scale of multiple megawatts, indicating the basic principle of the technology. The company has also secured an agreement to build a facility for the Italian energy company A2A, with a 200 MWh capacity and 20 MW power delivery.
Future Realities
The fact is that as grids around the world switch to more renewable energy solutions, there will be ever-greater demands to store that energy. Traditional solutions like hydroelectric pumped storage are still relevant, as are
the major lithium-ion battery installations
popping up all around the world.
However, different circumstances mean that other storage technologies can also find their own niche. In particular, those that rely on cheap, readily available materials will have an advantage, particularly given the geopolitical and supply chain issues faced today. Expect more new technologies to pop up in this space as storing renewable energy becomes a key part of our electricity grid in future. | 122 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540103",
"author": "dhrni",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T18:19:44",
"content": "A shipping container full of batteries can deliver 50kW. Same container filled with diesel generator could provide 400-700 kW constant power.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,481.54982 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/standing-desk-with-a-clever-flair/ | Standing Desk With A Clever Flair | Matthew Carlson | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"kerf cutting",
"plywood",
"standing desk",
"woodworking"
] | Standing desks (also known as sit-stand desks) are somewhat polarizing. The height is adjustable, but the idea is that you move between sitting and standing while you work. Hundreds of manufacturers are out there, but they’re all the same. Two metal legs that extend and one or more motors to move the legs up and down. [JAR Made] tried to make something slightly different for their standing desk with
an extending curved surface
.
The build started with some gorgeous alder that was milled into square with a track saw and a planer — no jointer was required. However, he wanted long boards and was debating how to butt join the pieces together and decided on pocket holes with dowels to try and clamp the boards together while the glue dried. The resulting product was one that [JAR Made] was unhappy with. He pivoted on his feet by switching Baltic birch plywood for the main desk surface. Which was bent using a kerf-cutting technique (though just using a track saw
rather than a CNC bit
).
Here is where you can see him learn from his earlier mistakes. He routed a half lap in the plywood for the butt joint to give it more strength and devised a clever clamping mechanism using CA glue and painter’s tape to get good clamping pressure. The alder from earlier came in use to serve as a front edge for the plywood and a groove to hold the sliding piece of plywood that extends and retracts as the desk goes up and down.
Regular old standing desk legs screw into the underside of the desk and allow it to move up and down. Overall, it’s a wonderful build of a gorgeous desk. We love seeing people make mistakes and then pivot and learn from them. Perhaps the next step is to
automate the desk to move on its own
. | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6540050",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T16:44:03",
"content": "Curved, so actually 20cm less usable than space needed..But nice finish anyway. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6540060",
"author": "Paul",
... | 1,760,372,481.178951 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/vr-sickness-a-new-old-problem/ | VR Sickness: A New, Old Problem | Donald Papp | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"balance",
"motion sickness",
"vestibular",
"virtual reality",
"vr",
"VR sickness"
] | Have you ever experienced dizziness, vertigo, or nausea while in a virtual reality experience? That’s VR sickness, and it’s a form of motion sickness. It is not a completely solved problem, and it affects people differently, but it all comes from the same root cause, and there are better and worse ways of dealing with it.
If you’ve experienced a sudden onset of VR sickness, it was most likely triggered by flying, sliding, or some other kind of movement in VR that caused a strong and sudden feeling of vertigo or dizziness. Or perhaps it was not sudden, and was more like a vague unease that crept up, leaving you nauseated and unwell.
Just like car sickness or sea sickness, people are differently sensitive. But the reason it happens is not a mystery; it all comes down to how the human body interprets and reacts to a particular kind of sensory mismatch.
Why Does It Happen?
The human body’s vestibular system is responsible for our sense of balance. It is in turn responsible for many boring, but important, tasks such as not falling over. To fulfill this responsibility, the brain interprets a mix of sensory information and uses it to build a sense of the body, its movements, and how it fits in to the world around it.
These sensory inputs come from the inner ear, the body, and the eyes. Usually these inputs are in agreement, or they disagree so politely that the brain can confidently make a ruling and carry on without bothering anyone. But what if there is a nontrivial conflict between those inputs, and the brain cannot make sense of whether it is moving or not? For example, if the eyes say the body is moving, but the joints and muscles and inner ear disagree? The result of that kind of conflict is to feel sick.
Common symptoms are dizziness, nausea, sweating, headache, and vomiting. These messy symptoms are purposeful, for the human body’s response to this particular kind of sensory mismatch is to assume it has ingested something poisonous, and go into a failure mode of “throw up, go lie down”. This is what is happening — to a greater or lesser degree — by those experiencing VR sickness.
How Can It Be Dealt With?
For those unlucky enough to be susceptible, there are three ways of dealing with VR sickness: avoidance, moderation, and adaptation. Fortunately, unlike being stuck at sea while seasick, one is typically in complete control of their engagement in a VR experience. Not all experiences will be an issue, and people are differently sensitive. One may be able to tolerate some things, but others not at all.
Most VR experiences include some kind of comfort rating, and offer different locomotion and interface options. Seated experiences tend to be more comfortable ones. Teleportation-type movement and snap turning also tend to be more comfortable for users. Smooth locomotion and smooth turning are more challenging. These options allow one to avoid some elements, and moderate others.
It is also possible to adapt, and here a bit of education will ease the process of getting one’s “VR legs”.
Adaptation Is Possible
Sailors eventually get their “sea legs” and adapt to an environment in which motion sensed by their bodies does not match what their eyes see. Astronauts residing on the ISS (International Space Station) have a similar experience: in microgravity, the inner ear does not provide useful information. As a result, astronauts’ brains eventually learn to rely primarily on visuals. (As it happens, after an extended period in microgravity, astronauts suffer serious sensory mismatch when returning to Earth. As
Chris Hadfield
described it in a talk I attended, “you’re smiling for the camera but you feel
terrible
.”)
I have some added insight into the adaptation process thanks to long experience with a disease that affects my vestibular system. In physiotherapy, I learned that the brain is highly plastic and in most cases can is able to re-learn the necessary lessons. But it’s best to know a bit about how exactly this process works.
While the brain is capable of re-learning how to deal with confusing sensory input to the vestibular system, this learning happens with a high degree of specificity. That means that if one practices a certain thing, such as looking left while moving forward, the brain
only
re-learns how to deal with that specific thing. One cannot practice a narrow activity and expect it to “carry over” in a general sense. One will only get better at the things one practices.
My advice to those attempting to gain their VR legs is to expose yourself to a mix of different activities in VR that challenge your sense of balance, and do so
gently
and in moderation, for short periods at a time. There is no good in forcing things and pushing too hard. When you bump up against your limits, immediately stop and re-center yourself, and try again. Then after a short while, give yourself a rest.
Vestibular physiotherapy and rehabilitation exercises are designed with this in mind, and the same principles apply.
Will VR Develop Past This?
In a way, modern VR development has already done much to eliminate many common triggers of VR sickness at a low level. High frame rates and highly accurate motion tracking aren’t just for providing good visuals and satisfying feedback. Display lag and subtly delayed visuals can cause feelings of illness, and these have been impressively addressed in the development of modern headsets. Smaller and lighter headsets also make for more secure and stable mounting to users’ heads; loose and wobbly headsets being also a path to visual mismatch.
The experiences coming from the VR applications themselves are another story, however. Some software titles are mindful of comfort level when it comes to their design of interfaces and experiences, while others seem to ignore comfort completely in favor of exploring novel gameplay. One thing that’s clear is that it is still early in this space.
In the meantime, if you find yourself suffering from VR sickness, the best most obvious thing to do is avoid applications and experiences that cause you to feel ill. Use others in moderation, and if you’re determined to adapt, then follow the guidelines I laid out earlier. Your stomach will thank you for it. | 56 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539975",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T15:05:49",
"content": "I have been trying a Valve Index for a month, I had this distinct feeling while using the jetpack in No Man’s Sky.I think I should be able to adapt to it, it got easier already",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,372,481.081578 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/diy-self-assembling-4d-printing/ | DIY Self-Assembling 4D Printing | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"4D printing",
"PLA",
"PVA",
"TPU"
] | A 4D printed object is like a 3D printed object, but it changes shape or self-assembles when its environment changes. [Teaching Tech] has been reading about this technology and decided to try to
replicate it using his conventional 3D printer.
His attempts to make a joint that changes when submerged in the water looked at several options: material that can absorb water, material that expands with temperature, and — the selected option — a dissolvable locking mechanism. Essentially, a hinge is held open by a water-soluble lock. When water dissolves the lock, the hinge can spring to its natural position.
Like most experiments, this one had a few false starts. But you always learn something each time. The final design had a TPU hinge and spring with PLA structural beams. The TPU required flat printing, so various pieces have to be rotatable so they can be placed in their final orientation after printing.
Usually, multi-material setups are for printing different colors of the same kind of plastic, it’s possible to use different plastics, but it can be tricky. As a compromise, [Teaching Tech] did one print using PLA and TPU, but printed the PVA locks in a separate pass and installed them on the print at the end. The first finished 4D print wasn’t entirely successful. The hot water slowly dissolved the PVA, but it also deformed the PLA. A redesign of the lock made a big difference.
We aren’t sure this is practical yet, but we are sure someone has a need for this technique and it could be made very practical with a little work. The last time we saw 4D printing,
there were magnets involved
. We think this is an exciting time where people aren’t just trying to get conventional printing to work well, but are pushing the envelope with new techniques like
conical slicing
, for example. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539887",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T12:45:10",
"content": "Use a sugar cube to lock the hinge open until it is submerged.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6539906",
"autho... | 1,760,372,481.118696 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/29/a-handy-guide-to-the-humble-bbs/ | A Handy Guide To The Humble BBS | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"antique",
"bbs",
"bulletin board",
"guide",
"how-to",
"internet",
"retro",
"retrocomputing",
"telnet"
] | Some of us who’ve been online since the early days fondly remember the web of yore — with its flashing banners, wildly distracting backgrounds, and automatic side-scrolling text. But there was a time before the worldwide web and the Internet as we recognize it today, and the way of communicating in this before-time was through Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS. There are still some who can cite this deep magic today, and
this page is perhaps the definitive guide to this style of retrocomputing
.
This how-to is managed by [Blake
.
Patterson] who is using a wide variety of antique machines and some modern hardware in order to access the BBSes still in service. He notes in this guide that it’s possible to use telnet and a modern computer to access them, but using something like an Amiga or Atari will give you the full experience. There are some tools that convert the telephone modem signals from that original hardware to something that modern networking equipment can understand, and while the experience might be slightly faster as a result, it does seem to preserve the nostalgia factor quite well.
For those looking for more specific guides, we’ve featured [Blake]’s work a few times in the past,
once with an antique Epson PX-8 laptop
and
again with a modern ESP8266
. It doesn’t take much computing power to get connected to these old services, so grab whatever you can and start BBSing! | 35 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539762",
"author": "daveboltman",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T09:22:26",
"content": "“the BBSes still in service”? Oh that’s interesting! Now I wish I hadn’t thrown my 56K dialup modems away then. Oh wait – I might still have a US Robotics one in my parts bin…. But then I got rid of m... | 1,760,372,481.324598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/i-see-by-your-tattoo-that-you-are-a-hacker/ | I See By Your Tattoo That You Are A Hacker | Anne Ogborn | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"555",
"body art",
"tattoo"
] | We spotted [Segfault]’s new tattoo on a fast failing bird app a few days ago. We thought it was nice looking piece of skin art, but without a write up couldn’t cover it. The bearer of the tattoo pointed us to
this blog post about the tattoo
, and now we
really
like it.
It’s fun on it’s own, but when you start staring at it you realize it’s full of hidden jokes and meanings. If you like puzzles, go hunting for them before you read the blog post. We also liked the reminiscence about [Segfault]’s early electronics experimentation days, and how the 555 timer IC figured prominently in them.
We’ve not covered a lot of tattoos here at Hackaday. Mostly we cover the technology behind skin fused or embedded hacks. But occasionally some tattoo art catches our eye, as it did in
this interesting barcode tattoo
. | 38 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539669",
"author": "Hitomi",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T06:19:58",
"content": "Cool for them but bodyhacking and tattoos make me uncomfortable and get mixed feelings :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6540213",
"author"... | 1,760,372,481.249739 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/taking-distance-based-cad-to-the-next-level/ | Taking Distance Based CAD To The Next Level | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Parts",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d modeling",
"SDF",
"sdfx",
"stl"
] | For those who model CAD models regularly, a pair of calipers is essential as it allows reasonably accurate measurements to fit a specific part. However, [Jason Harris] is taking that concept to the next level with a
signed distance function-based CAD tool, SDFX
.
For those who don’t know, Signed Distance Functions can tell you from a given point how close the nearest part of the model is. The model is represented as a single function that offers some exciting benefits. For instance, chamfering and fileting are often quite complex in traditional CAD programs and trivial in an SDF setting. SDFX is a golang library that allows you to write golang programs to describe the model.
OpenSCAD is a favorite of Hackaday
as it is a beautiful parametric code-first CAD package. But the syntax and language are somewhat cludgy, to say the best. The advantage of using golang rather than a
DSL
is that you can use all the niceties that a full-featured language brings. For example, you can export multiple objects, make network requests, and interface with GUI libraries to
recreate something like the customizer for OpenSCAD
.
Objects are rendered to STL using Marching squares. Then, they can be printed in whatever slicing software suits your fancy. It’s an excellent project with a great API and almost a hundred examples.
The code is
available on GitHub
under an MIT License. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539685",
"author": "Jake",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T06:59:32",
"content": "I think it’d be better to link to the Github directly instead of the hackaday.io page; I just spent 5 mins looking for anything of substance on the .io page before resorting to Google. It was only after rea... | 1,760,372,481.387999 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/a-modchip-to-root-starlink-user-terminal-through-voltage-glitching/ | A Modchip To Root Starlink User Terminals Through Voltage Glitching | Arya Voronova | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"mod chip",
"modchip",
"rp2040",
"voltage glitch",
"voltage glitching"
] | A modchip is a small PCB that mounts directly on a larger board, tapping into points on that board to make it do something it wasn’t meant to do. We’ve typically seen modchips used with gaming consoles of yore, bypassing DRM protections in a way that a software hacks couldn’t quite do. As software complexity and therefore attack surface increased on newer consoles, software hacks have taken the stage. However, on more integrated pieces of hardware, we’ll still want to return to the old methods – and that’s what
this modchip-based hack of a Starlink terminal
brings us.
[Lennert Wouters]’ team has been poking and prodding at the Starlink User Terminal, trying to get root access, and needed to bypass the ARM Trusted Firmware boot-time integrity checks. The terminal’s PCB is satellite-dish-sized, so things like laser fault injection are hard to set up – hence, they went the voltage injection route. Much poking and prodding later, they developed a way to reliably glitch the CPU into verifying a faulty firmware, and got to a root shell – the journey
described in a BlackHat talk
embedded below.
To make the hack more compact, repeatable and cheap, they decided to move it from a mess of wires and boards into slim form-factor, and that’s where the modchip design was made. For that, they put the terminal PCB into a scanner, traced a board outline out, loaded it into KiCad, and put all the necessary voltage glitching and monitoring parts on a single board, driven by the venerable RP2040 – this board has everything you’d need if you wanted to get root on the Starlink User Terminal. Thanks to the modchip design’s flexibility, when Starlink released a firmware update disabling the UART output used for monitoring, they could easily re-route the signal to an eMMC data line instead. Currently, the KiCad source files aren’t available, but there’s Gerber and BOM files
on GitHub
in case we want to make our own!
Hacks like these, undoubtedly, set a new bar for what we can achieve while bypassing security protections. Hackers have been designing all kinds of modchips, for both proprietary and open tech – we’ve seen one that
lets you use third-party filters
in your “smart” air purifier, another that lets you
use your own filament
with certain 3D printers, but there’s also one that lets you
add a ton of games to an ArduBoy.
With RP2040 in particular, just this year we’ve seen used to build a
Nintendo 64 flash cart,
a
PlayStation 1 memory card,
and a mod that
adds homebrew support to a GameCube.
If you were looking to build hardware addons that improve upon tech you use, whether by removing protections or adding features, there’s no better time than nowadays! | 37 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539478",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T00:33:10",
"content": "Why?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6539620",
"author": "MrChristian",
"timestamp": "2022-11-29T04:54:05",
"content": "... | 1,760,372,481.682824 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/desktop-sized-fully-automatic-loom-is-an-electromechanical-marvel/ | Desktop-Sized Fully Automatic Loom Is An Electromechanical Marvel | Robin Kearey | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dobby loom",
"loom"
] | Weaving is one of the oldest crafts in the world, and was also among the first to be automated: the Industrial Revolution was in large part driven by developments in loom technology. [Roger de Meester] decided to recreate that part of the industry’s history, in a way, by building
his own desktop-sized, fully automatic loom
. After a long career in the textiles industry he’s quite the expert when it comes to weaving, and as you’ll see he’s also an expert machine builder.
[Roger]’s loom is of a specific type called a
dobby loom
, which means that the vertical threads (the
warp
) can be moved up and down in various ways to create different patterns in the fabric. The horizontal wires (the
weft
) are created by a shuttle moving left and right, carrying a bobbin that unspools as it travels. A comb-shaped plate (the
reed
) then fixes the fresh weft in its place. [Roger]’s videos (embedded below) clearly show this mechanism in action, as well as the loom’s overall design.
A clamp hold the end of the weft as the shuttle starts its run
The 3D printed shuttle is moved back and forth through the warp by a belt-driven system that grabs the magnetic end of the shuttle. Revolving storage drums on either side of the machine enable the use of different thread colors for each shuttle run. Shuttles are exchanged by a robotic arm that picks them up and places them onto the track; there’s a clamp that grabs the end of the thread as the shuttle starts its run, and a wire cutter to detach it when the shuttle is up for replacement.
This intricate mechanical dance is controlled by a set of Arduino Megas and Nanos. They drive all the servos, DC motors, and steppers while reading out an array of sensors and switches. The system can even detect several faults: the weft is checked for proper tension after each cycle, shuttles with empty bobbins are automatically discarded, while a laser keeps an eye on the warp to ensure none of the threads have snapped.
The entire machine is of [Roger]’s own design; apart from 3D-printed and CNC-machined parts, he also re-used components from various pieces of discarded machinery. His ultimate purpose is to use this machine to make specialized fabrics for medical or industrial use: for example, it can use conductive threads to make fabrics with built-in sensors.
Although this isn’t the first DIY automatic loom we’ve featured, it’s definitely the most advanced. Previous examples, like this
3D-printed miniature version
or
this neat computer-controlled one
can’t really compare to [Roger]’s 26 cm reed width and wide customizability. If you prefer to keep things a bit simpler, you can also use a 3D-printer
to directly print certain fabrics
. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539366",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T21:26:53",
"content": "I was a copy machine repair tech in college and I thought moving paper a sheet at a time was one of the hardest things a machine could do repeatedly in a hurry.I humbly stand corrected.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,372,481.612804 |
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