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https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/nabu-pc-a-1984-z-80-computer-you-can-buy-today/ | NABU PC – A 1984 Z-80 Computer You Can Buy Today | Adam Fabio | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"1984",
"auction",
"cable modem",
"NABU",
"nabu PC",
"news",
"retrocomputing"
] | Want to hack on brand new 8-bit 1980s hardware? Until recently you needed a time machine, or deep pockets to do this. All that has recently changed with the NABU PC. A retro machine that can be bought brand new for $59.99, (plus shipping) no time machine needed.
[Adrian] has one in his
Digital Basement
, and breaks it all down for us. The NABU PC was a Canadian computer. Designed to connect to the cable TV network, the standard system had no internal secondary storage. You read that right; the NABU used the cable network to download and play games, view documents — just about anything you’d want to do with a computer. Cable modems back in the 80s — maybe someone did have a time machine?
Unfortunately, the NABU network failed. Not due to the PC’s hardware, but because the cable system back then was not designed for bidirectional data. While the NABU PC did see a limited release in Canada, was never widely successful. When production was shut down, the machines couldn’t be liquidated, as they didn’t do anything without the network. So in the warehouse, they sat, until this month, where
can find them being sold on eBay
.
So what’s inside a NABU? It starts with a Z-80 CPU sporting 64 kB of RAM. A TMS9918 handles video, while a General Instrument AY-3-8910 does the sound. There are also two UARTs. An 8251 for serial io to the keyboard and joysticks, and a high-performance UART chip to handle comms with the network adapter. The keyboard is loaded with good old ALPS switches, and [Adrian] found it rather impressive.
That’s all well and good, but what can you actually do with a NABU PC? Right now, not much. The ROM software comes up and looks for the network adapter, then complains when it doesn’t find it. This means it’s hacking time! An army of retrocomputing enthusiasts are already working on bringing back the NABU computer. Check [Adrian]’s video description for all the documentation links, and check here on Hackaday for the latest updates!
This isn’t our first time watching this sort of liquidation — remember the
HP touchpad
? | 63 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539284",
"author": "nono",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T19:52:48",
"content": "Fortunately the German version, the NADU is still available. But reserved to Germanophones.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6542716",
"author"... | 1,760,372,484.118156 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/app-detects-parkinsons-disease-and-covid-19-via-audio/ | App Detects Parkinsons Disease And COVID-19 Via Audio | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Medical Hacks",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"diagnosis",
"Disease",
"illness",
"medical",
"medical hacks",
"medicine",
"Parkinson's disease"
] | One of the challenges of diagnosing diseases is identifying them early. At this stage, signs may be vague or confusing, or difficult to identify. Early diagnosis is often tied to the best possible treatment outcomes, so there’s plenty of incentives to improve methods in this way.
A new voice-based method of diagnosing disease
could prove fruitful in this regard. It relies on machine learning techniques to detect when patients may be suffering from certain conditions.
Let Me Hear You Say /a/
Speech patterns and the patient’s general quality of voice have long been an important diagnostic tool for physicians. They are particularly relevant to neurological conditions. If the brain or nervous system is not functioning properly, speech can be affected.
A simple smartphone app is used to capture audio samples from the patient. The system can deal with background noise levels in a typical doctor’s office, and prompts the patient on the correct sounds to make for diagnosis. Credit:
Youtube – IEEE Spectrum
Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) developed a method to detect subtle signs of disease using a patient’s voice. The idea was to use machine learning algorithms to determine whether a patient’s pronunciation of certain sounds was indicative of illness. The primary goal was to identify the presence of Parkinson’s disease via sampling a patient speaking several normal English sounds. The research had to achieve this goal despite the natural variations in voices from person to person. 36 patients with Parkinson’s disease were recruited for the research, along with 36 healthy volunteers.
As per the
published study,
research participants were asked to pronounce three phonemes – /a/, /o/, and /m/. That’s the sound in the middle of “car,” the “oh” sound, and the “mmmm” sound, respectively. These phonemes require the use of the throat, mouth, and nasal passages to make the noise. A machine learning algorithm was trained to determine differences in these sounds between Parkinson’s patients and healthy volunteers. Intended for use in a typical clinical setting, the algorithm was designed to work with audio samples captured from patients using a regular smartphone with reasonable levels of background noise. An app was used to collect the data, and was set up to guide patients to creating the right sounds with vocal samples of the right phonemes.
Voice samples are analysed for features that could be indicative of disease. An illness can affect parameters like vocal strength or pitch stability, or introduce a wavering quality to a phoneme. Credit: YouTube – IEEE Spectrum
In testing, it was able to identify patients with Parkinson’s disease 100% of the time. Analysis of a combination of features from all three phonemes was found to be the most reliable method for detection. Testing was limited to patients from one geographical area, and using only one model of smartphone, among other limitations. However, it indicates that there may be potential to develop a diagnostic method for Parkinson’s disease using readily-available smartphone hardware to capture audio samples and process them with an app.
The same techniques were later applied to diagnose COVID-19 patients in a study in Indonesia. In this case, the phonemes used for analysis were expanded to include /e/, /i/, and /u/ sounds in addition to /a/, /o/, and /m/.
The study
took place over 22 days, and involved 40 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. 48 healthy subjects made up the control group. In this case, analysis of sound features of the /i/ sound were determined to be most indicative, when captured within three days of hospital admission. The method had a 94% accuracy. This is all the more impressive for the low-tech methods used. Sound samples were captured at a sample rate of just 8 kHz, to represent the capabilities of low-tech 2G and 3G phones.
The work suggests that a variety of diseases could potentially be diagnosed thanks to telltale changes in a patient’s speech. Of course, more rigorous studies would be required before such methods become mainstream. Additionally, while such methods may be indicative of disease, vocal techniques are unlikely to become a solitary gold-standard diagnosis for most diseases. More direct and less subjective
chemical diagnoses
are preferable rather than relying on the intuition of more black-box machine learning systems. However, for difficult-to-diagnose diseases, having a system to offer some indicative guidance can be crucial. Expect these techniques to become more refined and a major part of modern medicine going forward. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539205",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T18:10:36",
"content": "Did they ever test against people who weren’t in the training set? Training a nural net on 32 samples is a super low sample size, so unless they showed that it could correctly identify people it wasn’t tra... | 1,760,372,483.318013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/amateur-rocketry-hack-chat/ | Amateur Rocketry Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, November 30 at noon Pacific for the
Amateur Rocketry Hack Chat
with Kip Daugirdas!
This might be going out on a limb, but it seems like most of us probably fooled around with model rockets when we were younger. Those fantastic Estes kits were great fun to put together, and launching them was always a big neighborhood event, and one of the few that could make even the coolest of the cool kids pay attention to the nerds, if only for a little while. Launch day had it all — a slight element of danger, the rotten egg stink of spent propellant, a rocket gently floating back to Earth from a dizzying height of 100 meters, and the inevitable tree-climbing party to retrieve a lost rocket.
But while model rocketry is fun, it doesn’t scale up very well. If you want to reach the edge of space, you’re going to need to make the leap across the border to amateur rocketry. That’s where the big kids play, with real engineering needed to produce and control the forces required to reach altitudes of 100 km or more. Kip Daugirdas has made that leap, building rockets capable of almost getting to the Kármán line. It’s not easy — there was plenty of design work, static engine testing, and loads of test flights leading up to it, and surely more to come. Kip will stop by the Hack Chat to help us understand what’s needed to press the edge of space, and hopefully share his plans for going all the way.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, November 30 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539304",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T20:19:05",
"content": "It’ll be a blast.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6539450",
"author": "cj@seej.net",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T23:51:26",
"conten... | 1,760,372,483.821444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/silicon-sleuthing-finding-a-ancient-bugfix-on-the-8086/ | Silicon Sleuthing: Finding A Ancient Bugfix On The 8086 | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8086",
"chip decapping",
"ken shirriff",
"polysilicon",
"reverse engineering",
"silicon"
] | Few CPUs have had the long-lasting influence that the 8086 did. It is hard to believe that when your modern desktop computer boots, it probably thinks it is an 8086 from 1978 until some software gooses it into a more modern state. When [Ken] was examining an 8086 die, however, he noticed that
part of the die didn’t look like the rest
. Turns out, Intel had a bug in the original version of the 8086. In those days you couldn’t patch the microcode. It was more like a PC board — you had to change the layout and make a new one to fix it.
The affected area is the Group Decode ROM. The area is responsible for categorizing instructions based on the type of decoding they require. While it is marked as a ROM, it is more of a programmable logic array. The bug was pretty intense. If an interrupt followed either a MOV SS or POP SS instruction, havoc ensues.
The bug was a simple mistake for a designer to make. Suppose you want to change the stack pointer register entirely. You have to load the stack segment register (SS) and the stack pointer (SP). The problem is, loading both of these isn’t an atomic operation. That is, it takes two different instructions, one for each register. If an interrupt occurs after loading SS but before loading SP, then the interrupt context will wind up at some incorrect memory location.
You could fix this in several ways. The way Intel did it was to make the two instructions that could modify SS hold off interrupts for one more instruction cycle. This would allow you to load SP before an interrupt could occur. Essentially, it makes the MOV SS or POP SS instructions protect the next instruction so you can code an atomic operation. The truth is, the “fix” stalls interrupts for any segment register load. [Ken] notes that this wasn’t necessary and later implementations on newer processors only stall the interrupt for SS.
You might think you could have pushed this off to the programmer. You could, for example, insist that stack pointer changes occur with interrupts disabled. The problem is the 8086 has a nonmaskable interrupt that uses the stack, and software can’t stop it.
Failure analysis back the 1970s and 1980s was fun. An optical microscope would do most of it. If you had a
SEM
with an
EDS
attachment, you could do nearly everything. An
Auger
and a
SIMS
would put you in the world-class lab status. These days with device geometry several orders of magnitude smaller, dice upside down in the package, and dozens of layers — we aren’t sure how you’d do all this on a modern chip.
We love [Ken’s] CPU
teardowns
. He works on
bigger things
, too. | 31 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539147",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T16:43:57",
"content": "Don’t forget the missing opcodes in the original 6502. There were workarounds, but I’m not sure how many CPUs made it out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"c... | 1,760,372,483.773852 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/ev-chargers-could-be-a-serious-target-for-hackers/ | EV Chargers Could Be A Serious Target For Hackers | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"car",
"car hacks",
"cars",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"EV charger",
"evse",
"technology"
] | Computers! They’re in everything these days. Everything from thermostats to fridges and even window blinds are now on the Internet, and that makes them all ripe for hacking.
Electric vehicle chargers are becoming a part of regular life. They too are connected devices, and thus pose a security risk if not designed and maintained properly. As with so many other devices on the Internet of Things,
the truth is anything but.
Compromised!
Sometimes, securing a certain system or device is as easy as disconnecting it from the network. When it comes to light switches and door locks, for example, we got by perfectly fine for years without accessing them online. However, in the case of EV chargers, it’s not practical. At the very least, connectivity is required to run payment systems. Additionally, being able to monitor the status and health of EV chargers remotely is a big help in keeping them available and operational.
Given that EV chargers must be connected, securing them is important. However,
research by Sandia National Laboratories
indicates that thus far, EV charger companies haven’t done the best job at protecting their systems. Researchers investigated a variety of attack vectors and vulnerabilities and found many areas where existing systems were simply not up to scratch.
Vehicle-to-charger interfaces were studied as a primary target. EV chargers generally communicate with vehicles over signals passed through the charge cable. This communication involves negotiation on power levels and charge time, among other details. However, it could also be a path for malware to infect an EV charger if the vehicle’s responses aren’t handled properly or sanitized. Researchers found that not only could data be sniffed from these connections, but that
a low-powered attack
with a software-defined radio (SDR) could stop a vehicle’s charging session from up to 47 meters away. These interfaces are often completely unencrypted, too, leaving them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle and spoofing attacks.
“
Card skimmer
” by ThisIsntExeter
The user interfaces of EV chargers are also vulnerable. The simplest attacks mirror those used at gas pumps, where card readers are fitted
with skimmer devices
to capture card data. Other straightforward hacks include RFID cloning attacks for systems that rely on those for payment and account management. The smartphone apps used by charging networks can also be a target for hackers.
Much like other network hardware like printers, EV chargers often come with web-based configuration interfaces. And, just like printers, many of these inevitably end up accessible on the wider internet. Researchers found all kinds of EV chargers that had their configuration pages publicly accessible. Even worse, many had very weak credentials, often being configured with basic passwords or only requiring a serial number for access.
Even if the web services are secured, admin interfaces were still found to pose a serious risk. Often, EV chargers come with some form of diagnostic and maintenance port. This can be via serial, WiFi, Ethernet, USB, or Bluetooth. In many cases, chargers were found to have unneeded services like Telnet and FTP accessible over these interfaces, presenting a broader security risk. In some cases, chargers would readily allow firmware dumps or unsigned updates to be made, or exfiltration of log data. Worse, in many cases, the physical ports were poorly secured, providing easy access to malicious actors.
Potential Consequences
Vulnerabilities in EV chargers can present a variety of consequences in the event a device is compromised. Many of those consequences are minor in nature and limited in their scope. For example, a charger fitted with a card skimmer could lead to a criminal compromising the credit cards of a few hundred users. Open web configuration pages could let a hacker disable chargers or cancel user’s sessions in progress.
However, in some cases, the consequences can be far greater. A charger with compromised firmware could potentially be configured to disable certain safety features, placing users at risk. Chargers could be reprogrammed to energise cables prior to their safe insertion, leading to a risk of electrocution. Spoofed vehicle-to-charger communications could lead to a charger delivering excessive power to the vehicle. In such a situation, a properly-secure vehicle may shut down the connection to a rogue charger. However, ideally, both the vehicle and the charger would be secure enough not to pose the risk in the first place.
Sandia National Laboratory has prepared a “best practices” document on how companies can secure their EV charger hardware and operations. Credit:
Sandia National Laboratory
There are larger-scale concerns, too. Modern EV chargers demand huge amounts of power from the grid. While home chargers of 7 kW and 11 kW were once the norm, today’s DC fast chargers run at power levels in excess of 350 kW. At those power levels, researchers fear there is potential to cause significant disruption to the power grid with the right attack. If an attacker could control enough vehicle chargers, simply getting them all to stop at once could threaten the frequency and voltage stability of the grid. At current levels of EV uptake, this isn’t a major risk. There simply aren’t enough vehicles placing enough load on the grid all at once to cause a threat.
However, as EV uptake rises, the threat increases. With vehicle-to-grid chargers becoming a thing, too, there is also the potential for an oscillating attack method. Huge numbers of vehicles suddenly demanding power from the grid, then seconds later attempting to feed power back in could make it difficult for authorities to maintain control over the power network. Controlling the power grid is all about balancing electricity generation with power demand from the grid. Sudden changes in demand and supply from an EV charger botnet could cause widespread blackouts and even temporarily drive certain infrastructure offline. Doing so would likely require control of hundreds of thousands of chargers near-simultaneously, though, so for now, power grid engineers can continue to sleep soundly at night.
With EV charger roll-outs only increasing in coming years, the time to get security right is now. Thankfully, Sandia National Laboratory has provided
a document on best practices
for the EV charger industry. Much of it is straightforward stuff, like physically securing admin ports, verifying firmware updates, and keeping web config interfaces behind strict firewalls. Having a list of best practices all in one place, though, is an easy way for companies to ensure their products aren’t unnecessarily insecure. | 56 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6539090",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T15:21:20",
"content": "> With vehicle-to-grid chargers becoming a thing, too, there is also the potential for an oscillating attack method.That in particular has worried me, the other potential pitfalls are already common in ... | 1,760,372,483.51472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/carving-terrain-maps-into-plywood-with-software-help/ | Carving Terrain Maps Into Plywood With Software Help | Bryan Cockfield | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"CNC machine",
"map",
"plywood",
"relief",
"topo",
"topographic map"
] | CNC machines are incredibly versatile tools. At a machine shop, they can machine all kinds of metal and plastic parts. Beyond that, they can engrave various materials including glass, and even create PCBs. [Steve] has a CNC machine of his own creation in his shop, and while he might be employing it for those common uses, his artistic creations are on the showcase for today with
these 3D topographic relief maps
.
The key to creating a good topographic relief map is good material stock. [Steve] is working with plywood because the natural layering in the material mimics topographic lines very well, especially with the high-quality marine-grade birch plywood he is using. Making sure to select pieces without knots improves the final product substantially, as does taking the time to fill any voids. Selecting good stock is only part of the process though. [Steve] is using
TouchTerrain
, an open source project helmed by [Dr. Chris Harding] of Iowa State University, to create the model which gets fed to the CNC machine. Originally intended for 3D printing applications, the web-based tool lets you easily select an area on the globe and export its topographical data to a standard STL or OBJ file.
With good stock and the ability to easily create 3D topographic maps, anyone with a CNC machine like this could easily reproduce their terrain of choice. We imagine the process might be easily ported to other tools like 3D printers, provided the resolution is high enough.
We have also seen similar builds using laser cutters
, although the method used is a little different. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538959",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T12:26:25",
"content": "Then make it a mould and pour cake layers into the mould and bake it. Everyone at the geology department would love you! The picture at least had me hungry for some topographical goodness :)",
"parent... | 1,760,372,483.946331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/28/bicycle-gets-turn-signals-and-brake-lights-for-added-safety/ | Bicycle Gets Turn Signals And Brake Lights For Added Safety | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"backpack",
"bicycle",
"bike",
"brake lights",
"Circuit Playground",
"led",
"safety",
"turn signal"
] | Traveling by bicycle can be a fun and exciting mode of transportation, and can also save a ton of money compared to driving a car. There are plenty of places around the world where a bicycle is the primary mode of transportation for a significant percentage of the population, but there are many more places that are designed entirely for cars with little thought given to anyone else. For anyone riding a bike, especially for people living in these car-dominated areas,
additional safety measures like this LED array are often necessary
.
The light array was created by [Estudio Roble] for traveling around his city. The design is based on the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express, which sits directly in the middle of the light fixture. Surrounding it is a diamond-shaped strip of LEDs within an additional ring. The light uses a bright blue color for normal driving, but is programmed to turn red when the accelerometer in the dev board detects braking. There are also integrated turn signals which operate similarly to motorcycle turn signals. The signal is sent wirelessly between the handlebar switch to the lights.
The device itself clips onto any backpack, and since the controller is wireless there are no wires to connect every time a rider gets on their bike. It’s quite an improvement over the complete lack of lighting on most bikes. If you’ve read this far, you need to check out
this bicycle headlight
which uses a projector to display information directly in the path of travel. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538840",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T09:25:09",
"content": "Good idea but not visible from 270° like a stretched out arm as they teach you when you learn riding a bicycle in your youth.Next version should be a belt you wear: Right half and left half are 2 LED stri... | 1,760,372,484.013106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/mikroleo-a-4-bit-retro-learning-platform/ | MikroLeo, A 4-Bit Retro Learning Platform | Dave Rowntree | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"4-bit CPU",
"digital",
"discrete",
"KiCAD",
"retro",
"risc",
"ttl"
] | MikroLeo is a discrete TTL logic-based microcomputer intended for educational purposes created by [Edson Junior Acordi], an Electronics Professor at the Brazilian Federal Institute of Paraná, Brazil. The
4-bit CPU has a
Harvard RISC architecture built entirely from 74HCT series logic
mounted on a two-sided PCB using only through-hole parts. With 2K words of instruction RAM and 2K words of addressable RAM, the CPU has a similar resource level to comparable machines of old, giving students a feel for how to work within tight constraints.
Simulation
of the circuit is possible with
digital
, with the
dedicated PCB
designed with KiCAD, so there should be enough there to get cracking with it. Four 4-bit IO ports make interfacing easy, with dedicated INput and OUTput instructions for the purpose. An assembler, compiler, and emulator are all being worked on (as far as we can tell) so keep an eye out for that, if this project is of interest to you.
We like computers a bit around these parts, the “hackier” and weirder the better. Even just in the 4-bit retro space, we’ve seen so many, from those
built around ancient ALU chips
to those built from
discrete transistors and diodes
, but you don’t need to go down that road, an
emulation platform
can scratch that retro itch, without the same level of pain. | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538735",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T06:11:23",
"content": "Not sure what kind of ” educational purposes ” your going to learn from that! When its surrounded by modern micros to help get info to and from it. Just plain silly…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,372,483.704208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/create-a-compiler-step-by-step/ | Create A Compiler Step-By-Step | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"c/c++",
"compiler",
"language",
"lisp",
"parser",
"programming",
"software development"
] | While JavaScript might not be the ideal language to write a production compiler, you might enjoy the
“Create Your Own Compiler” tutorial
that does an annotated walkthrough of “
The Super Tiny Compiler
” and teaches you the basics of writing a compiler from scratch.
The super tiny compiler itself is about 200 lines of code. The source code is well, over 1,000 but that’s because of the
literate programming
comments. The fancy title comments are about half as large as the actual compiler.
The compiler’s goal is to take Lisp-style functions and convert them to equivalent C-style function calls. For example:
(add 5 (subtract 3 1)
would become
add(5,subtract(3,1))
.
Of course, there are several shortcut methods you could use to do this pretty easily, but the compiler uses a structure like most full-blown modern compilers. There is a parser, an abstract representation phase, and code generation.
Even if you don’t like the slide-show approach, the literate commented JavaScript is easy to read and very instructive. If you don’t know JavaScript it should still be fairly easy to work it out if you know any common programming language.
At the bottom left of the page are two buttons: Verbose and Internals. You can press these at any time. Text due to the verbose button will have a blue line next to it and text about internals will have a red line. This allows you to tune the experience depending on how much detail you’d like to read.
This
isn’t the first compiler we’ve seen
chopped up for exposition. If you are interested in what existing compilers generate for source input, we were always impressed with
Compiler Explorer
. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538642",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T03:21:19",
"content": "Reminds me of From Nand to Tetris, which includes a section on building a compiler. In assembly in that case, I think.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"com... | 1,760,372,483.880214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/heres-a-plain-c-c-implementation-of-ai-speech-recognition-so-get-hackin/ | Here’s A Plain C/C++ Implementation Of AI Speech Recognition, So Get Hackin’ | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"c++",
"openai",
"speech recognition",
"transcription",
"whisper"
] | [Georgi Gerganov] recently shared a great resource for running high-quality
AI-driven speech recognition in a plain C/C++ implementation
on a variety of platforms. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) model is fully implemented using only two source files and requires no dependencies. As a result, the high-quality speech recognition doesn’t involve calling remote APIs, and can run locally on different devices in a fairly straightforward manner. The image above shows it running locally on an iPhone 13, but it can do more than that.
Implementing a robust speech transcription that runs locally on a variety of devices is much easier with [Georgi]’s port of OpenAI’s
Whisper
.
[Georgi]’s work is a port of OpenAI’s
Whisper
model,
a remarkably-robust piece of software
that does a truly impressive job of turning human speech into text.
Whisper
is easy to set up and play with, but this port makes it easier to get the system working in other ways. Having such a lightweight implementation of the model means it can be more easily integrated over a variety of different platforms and projects.
The usual way that OpenAI’s
Whisper
works is to feed it an audio file, and it spits out a transcription. But [Georgi] shows off something else that might start giving hackers ideas:
a simple real-time audio input example
.
By using a tool to stream audio and feed it to the system every half-second, one can obtain pretty good (sort of) real-time results! This of course isn’t an ideal method, but the robustness and accuracy of
Whisper
is such that the results look pretty great nevertheless.
You can watch a quick demo of that in the video just under the page break. If it gives you some ideas, head over to
the project’s GitHub repository
and get hackin’!
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/194935793-76afede7-cfa8-48d8-a80f-28ba83be7d09.mp4 | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538574",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-11-28T01:45:28",
"content": "Local ! Yisssss…. now to dig out my IBM Home Director lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6538627",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly ... | 1,760,372,483.400701 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/come-learn-about-new-attiny-generations/ | Come Learn About New ATtiny Generations | Arya Voronova | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"Atmel",
"attiny",
"chip of the week",
"comparison",
"parts"
] | As the chip shortage hit, a lot of the familiar ATtiny chips have become unavailable and overpriced, and it mostly stayed the same since then. If you ever searched for “ATtiny” on your favourite electronics component retailer website, however, you’d notice that there’s quite a few ATtiny chips in stock most of the time – just that they’re from a much newer generation than we commonly see, with incompatible pinouts, slightly different architecture and longer model numbers like 412 and 3227. [David Johnson-Davies] from [technoblogy] is here to clarify things, and
provide a summary
of what the new ATtiny generations have to offer.
In 2019, he posted
about 0- and 1-series ATtiny chips,
comparing them to the ATtiny series we knew, decyphering the part numbering scheme for us, and providing a comparison table. Now, he’s returned to tell us about the 2- series ATtiny chips, merging the comparison tables together so that you can quickly evaluate available parts by their ROM/RAM size and the SMD package used. He also describes which peripherals are available on which series, as well as nuances in peripheral operation between the three generations. In the end, he reminds us of a simple way to program all these new parts – as it stands, you only need a USB-UART adapter and a 4.7K resistor.
Over the last decades, we’ve seen plenty of inspiring ATtiny projects – squeezing out everything we could out of 5 GPIOs, or slightly more for larger-package ATtiny chips. [David]
has been setting an example for us
, bringing projects like this
function generator
, this
continuity tester
, or
an IR receiver
with an OLED screen for diagnostics – all with an ATtiny85. It’s not the just pin count that’s a constraint, but the RAM and flash amounts as well – nevertheless, people have fit
machine learning
and
an entire graphics stack
into these chips before. If you’re stuck at home unable to do anything, like many of us were during lockdowns,
you can always breadboard an ATtiny
and see just how much you can get done with it. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538418",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T21:36:13",
"content": "You will possibly find that a certain application needs a lot of sensors but millisecond read speed is not essential, therefore you can use one of the simple bus protocols such as I2C etc to daisycha... | 1,760,372,484.168905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/ive-got-two-turntables-and-a-laser-engraver/ | I’ve Got Two Turntables And A Laser Engraver | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"engraver",
"laser",
"music",
"record",
"sound",
"vinyl",
"wood"
] | Digital media provides us with a lot of advantages. For something like recording and playing back music, digital copies don’t degrade, they can have arbitrarily high quality, and they can be played in a number of different ways including through digital streaming services. That being said, a number of people don’t feel like the digital experience is as faithful to the original sound as it could be and opt for analog methods instead. Creating analog copies of music is a much tougher matter though, as [Marco] demonstrates by
using a laser engraver to produce vinyl records
.
[Marco] started this month-long project by assembling and calibrating the laser engraver. It has fine enough resolution to encode analog data onto a piece of vinyl, but he had to create the software. The first step was to generate the audio sample, then process it through a filter to remove some of the unwanted frequencies. From there, the waveform gets made into a spiral, accounting for the changing speed of the needle on the record as it moves to the center. Then the data is finally ready to be sent to the laser engraver.
[Marco] did practice a few times using wood with excellent success before moving on to vinyl, and after some calibration of the laser engraver he has a nearly flawless 45 rpm record ready to hit the turntable. It’s an excellent watch if not for anything than seeing a working wood record.
We’ve actually seen a similar project before
(without the wood prototyping), and one
to play records from an image
, but it’s been quite a while.
Thanks to [ZioTibia81] for the tip! | 29 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538329",
"author": "Matteo",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T18:49:24",
"content": "Mvvblog, best blog in the world!!!! 😂😂😂",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6538333",
"author": "Pujo",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T18:57:51",
... | 1,760,372,484.316598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/i-need-a-hackation/ | I Need A Hackation | Elliot Williams | [
"Rants"
] | [
"newsletter"
] | In recent times, the “staycation” became a popular alternative to forays far afield: you could take time off and enjoy your local surroundings without having to get stamps in your passport. But I don’t need to go to a museum or visit an amusement park, much less catch up on Stranger Things. I’ve got a project burning in my brain, and what I need is a few days of good solid time in the basement workshop to make some headway. What I need is a Hackation.
Some projects make great after-work distractions, but this one is
hard
and requires my full brainpower. It’s just not a beer-and-a-project project. So during the week is out. That leaves weekends, but that’s prime time for hanging out with the family. Sure, I can get work in a few hours of good mid-day think/work time in on a Saturday or Sunday when my son is out playing with friends, but there’s something about devoting a whole day or more to cracking a tough nut.
Of course, I’m fully aware that I’ll probably not get it finished in just a day, and that I’ll want another day, or yet another. So be it. Isn’t that the way it is when you’re at the beach in the summer as well? Shouldn’t hacking be at least as high on the priority list as a trip to Disneyland?
Have you ever taken a Hackation? Because that’s what I need. And please tell me there’s a better name for it.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 45 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538214",
"author": "Myself",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T15:11:28",
"content": "Thank you for this term and concept, Elliot.I’m on the last day of an 8-day staycation, which has been mostly housework. I did some project-type stuff in the initial days, but quickly came to reckon with a... | 1,760,372,484.251023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/a-practical-discrete-386/ | A Practical Discrete 386 | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"audio",
"audio amplifier",
"lm386"
] | There are some chips that no matter how much the industry moves away from them still remain, exerting a hold decades after the ranges they once sat alongside have left the building. Such a chip is the 386, not the 80386 microprocessor you were expecting but the LM386, a small 8-pin DIP audio amplifier that’s as old as the Ark. the ‘386 can still be found in places where a small loudspeaker needs to be powered from a battery. SolderSmoke listener [Dave] undertook an interesting exercise with the LM386,
reproducing it from discrete components
. It’s a handy small discrete audio amplifier if you want one, but it’s also an interesting exercise in understanding analogue circuits even if you don’t work with them every day.
A basic circuit can be found in
the LM386 data sheet
(PDF), but as is always the case with such things it contains some simplifications. The discrete circuit has a few differences in the biasing arrangements particularly when it comes to replacing a pair of diodes with a transistor, and to make up for not being on the same chip it requires that the biasing transistors must be thermally coupled. Circuit configurations such as this one were once commonplace but have been replaced first by linear ICs such as the LM386 and more recently by IC-based switching amplifiers. It’s thus instructive to take a look at it and gain some understanding. If you’d like to know more,
it’s a chip we’ve covered in detail
. | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538143",
"author": "ONV",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T13:15:04",
"content": "Is this a clickbait title?A discrete LM386 is interesting but a discrete Intel 386 would be seriously cool :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6538152"... | 1,760,372,485.099947 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/27/portable-commodore-64-lives/ | Portable Commodore 64 Lives! | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"commodore",
"SX-64"
] | When you think of a luggable computer, you might think of the old Compaq or — if you are old enough — a Kaypro. But you don’t see as many Commodore SX-64 computers. [The 8-Bit Guy] has wanted one for a while and finally got one, but it wasn’t working. No problem!
Just fix it
!
The device actually looks sleek compared to some other portables of the era and had a color screen, but — probably due to the price — they didn’t sell very well. The outside of the device looked pretty clean other than some loose screws and clips. The space key was quite yellow but at least there was a keyboard cable which is nearly impossible to find anymore.
Turning it on just showed a white raster on the screen. The teardown is interesting. There’s quite a bit packed inside the little case. Of course, that means you have to pull the five boards out to get to them.
Removing the case caused the display to change a little. He pulled the CPU board out and started swapping chips with a working Commodore 64 until he found two chips that would prevent the known good machine from working. Replacing them did the trick for the CPU, but the keyboard was still not fully functional.
That led to a teardown of the keyboard, too. Some 3D-printed latches fixed the physically broken parts. The keyboard itself is unusual with a bunch of integrated keys and keycaps and a flexible membrane that apparently is a common failure point. However, you can get replacements, but the work looks like it takes a bit of patience.
Overall, the machine looks about as good as new. However, as [The 8 Bit Guy] points out, the color monitor was never very good and he explains exactly why that is.
We’d love to score one of these machines, even though the poor screen makes them less useful than a proper C64. We’ve seen someone
add a second drive to these machines
. If you want more detail about
restoring the SX-64 keyboard
, we’ve looked at that before, too. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538084",
"author": "nono",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T10:28:36",
"content": "Yikes. He´s opening the case and pulling boards out without removing the power cord. And the beast contains a CRT…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "653... | 1,760,372,484.806294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/human-vs-ai-drone-racing-at-the-university-of-zurich/ | Human Vs. AI Drone Racing At The University Of Zurich | Joseph Long | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"computer vision",
"drones"
] | [Thomas Bitmatta] and two other champion drone pilots visited the
Robotics and Perception Group
at the University of Zurich. The human pilots accepting the challenge to race drones against Artificial Intelligence “pilots” from the UZH research group.
The human pilots took on two different types of AI challengers. The first type leverages 36 tracking cameras positioned above the flight arena. Each camera captures 400 frames per second of video. The AI-piloted drone is fitted with at least four tracking markers that can be identified in the captured video frames. The captured video is fed into a computer vision and navigation system that analyzes the video to compute flight commands. The flight commands are then transmitted to the drone over the same wireless control channel that would be used by a human pilot’s remote controller.
The second type of AI pilot utilizes an onboard camera and autonomous machine vision processing. The “vision drone” is designed to leverage visual perception from the camera with little or no assistance from external computational power.
Ultimately, the human pilots were victorious over both types AI pilots. The AI systems do not (yet) robustly accommodate unexpected deviation from optimal conditions. Small variations in operating conditions often lead to mistakes and fatal crashes for the AI pilots.
Both of the AI pilot systems utilize some of the latest research in machine learning and neural networking to learn how to fly a given track. The systems train for a track using a combination of simulated environments and real-world flight deployments. In their final hours together, the university research team invited the human pilots to set up a new course for a final race. In less than two hours, the AI system trained to fly the new course. In the resulting real-world flight of the AI drone, its performance was quite impressive and shows great promise for the future of
autonomous flight
. We’re betting on the bots before long. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538091",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T10:42:11",
"content": "The “search and rescue” rationale is obviously total BS. They obviously wanted to beat the world’s best humans at yet another task but fell short of their goal. I’m not especially rooting for their success... | 1,760,372,484.752964 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/blackout-logger-keeps-track-of-power-outages/ | Blackout Logger Keeps Track Of Power Outages | Abe Connelly | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"data logger",
"DS3231",
"DS3231 RTC",
"eink",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rtc"
] | [Dmytro Panin] lives in Kyiv, Ukraine where there have been rolling blackouts to stabilize the power grid. To help keep track of when the blackouts might happen, be they planned or emergency, and to get more information on how long the blackouts last, [Dmytro] has created a
blackout logger
.
The build consists of a Raspberry Pi Pico that connects to a DS3231 real time clock (RTC) with a Waveshare 3.7 inch eInk display which [Dmytro] puts into a custom 3D printed case. The RTC has it’s own small power supply, often times from a coin cell battery attached to the module, allowing it to keep time when the module and other devices attached to it are powered off.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is programmed to “poll” every 30 seconds, writing the current time to a file. Should the unit lose power, the last time, within a 30 second window, is available when power is restored and the unit wakes up again. Since the RTC has kept the current time, there is enough information to display the duration of the blackout. The eInk screen ensures that the information is readily available, even when there is no power.
War is not the only reason blackouts can occur and we’ve covered some issues with blackouts in
Texas
and
California
in the US. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6538034",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T08:34:30",
"content": "I lived in a student house where we had power cuts 3, 4 times a day, we had a list next to the switchpanel on which we wrote time/date and whether the big power users (laundry machine, dishwasher, oven and m... | 1,760,372,484.650242 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/turn-your-furniture-into-a-light-show-with-hyelicht/ | Turn Your Furniture Into A Light Show With Hyelicht | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable leds",
"ikea",
"philips hue",
"sk9822",
"touch screen"
] | There’s something about the regimented square shapes of the IKEA Kallax shelf that convinced [Eike Hein] it could benefit from some RGB LED lighting, and while he
could
have simply used a commercial solution, he decided instead to develop
Hyelicht: an incredibly well documented open source lighting system featuring multiple control interfaces and APIs
. We’d say it was overkill, but truth be told, we dream of a world where everyone takes their personal projects to this level.
Hyelicht’s default touch UI
In the boilerplate configuration, [Eike] shows off controlling the LEDs using a graphical user interface running on a Waveshare 7″ touch screen mounted to the side of the shelf. That’s the most direct way of controlling the LEDs, as the touch screen is plugged into the Raspberry Pi 4B that’s actually running the software. But the same interface can also be remotely accessed by your smartphone or desktop.
You can also skip the GUI entirely and control the LEDs with a command line interface, or maybe poke Hyelicht’s HTTP REST interface instead. The system can even integrate with the Philips Hue ecosystem, if you prefer going that route.
The 5×5 Kallax shelf is the project’s official reference hardware, but of course it will work with anything else you might wish to cover with controllable LEDs. We’ve seen
similar setups used to light storage bins
in the past, but nothing that can even come close to the documentation and customization possibilities offered by Hyelicht. This is definitely a project to keep a close eye on if you’ve got the urge to add a little color to your world. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537848",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2022-11-27T00:29:59",
"content": "I also like how Technology Connections lit up his grid furniture: just mount a couple of big old LCD TVs behind them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,372,484.709152 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/magic-mirror-on-a-low-cpu-budget/ | Magic Mirror – On A Low CPU Budget | Arya Voronova | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Magic Mirror",
"midori",
"Raspbian"
] | For quite a few hackers out there, it’s still hard to find a decently powerful Raspberry Pi for a non-eye-watering price. [Rupin Chheda] wanted to build a magic mirror with a web-based frontend, and a modern enough Raspberry Pi would’ve worked just fine. Sadly, all he could get was single-1 GHz-core 512MB-RAM Zero W boards, which he found unable to run Chromium well enough given the stock Raspbian Desktop install, let alone a webserver alongside it. Not to give up, [Rupin] gives us
a step-by-step breakdown
on creating a low-footprint Raspbian install showing a single webpage.
Starting with Raspbian Lite, a distribution that doesn’t ship with any desktop features by default, he shows how to equip it with a minimal GUI – no desktop environment needed, just an X server with the OpenBox window manager, as you don’t need more for a kiosk mode application. In place of Chromium, you can install Midori, which is a lean browser that works quite well in single-website mode, and [Rupin] shows you how to make it autostart, as well as the little quirks that make sure your display doesn’t go to sleep. The webserver runs in Heroku cloud, but we wager that, with such a minimal install, it could as well run on the device itself.
With these instructions, you can easily build a low-power single-page browser when all you have is a fairly basic Raspberry Pi board. Of course, magic mirrors are a well-researched topic by now, but you can always put a new spin on an old topic, like in this
this retro-tv-based build.
You don’t have to build a magic mirror to make use of this hack, either – build
a recipe kiosk! | 21 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537782",
"author": "MrSVCD",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T22:20:07",
"content": "These instructions are just what I need for a project of mine. Thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6537784",
"author": "Andy",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,484.977045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/tesla-coil-makes-sodium-plasma/ | Tesla Coil Makes Sodium Plasma | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"plasma",
"tesla coil"
] | Looking for a neat trick to do with your Tesla coil? [The Action Lab] uses his coil to
make a metal plasma
— in particular, sodium. You can see the results in the video below.
To create a metal plasma, you need a metal vapor and sodium can create a vapor at a relatively low temperature, especially in a vacuum. The resulting glow is pretty to look at, but you will need a bit of lab gear to pull it off.
Plasma — sometimes referred to as the fourth state of matter — is matter that is so hot that the electrons are pulled away forming an ionized gas. That sounds exotic compared to gasses, solids, and liquids, but it turns out that over 99% of the visible universe is plasma. Things like lightning, the sun, and neon signs are all forms of plasma. Making plasma from metal vapor is a bit unusual, though, and the sodium experiment is pretty interesting and a fun use of that Tesla coil in your closet.
This is similar to a sodium vapor lamp, and he shows one of these, also.
Sodium vapor lighting is on the wane
, due to LED lights. Need a Tesla coil? We’ve seen them from the
near-perfect
to the
simple
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537678",
"author": "Charles Lamb",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T18:45:40",
"content": "Making plasma from metal vapor is quite common. Sodium vapor and mercury vapor lamps are commonly used for street lighting. Fluorescent bulbs also rely on a mercury plasma.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,485.024118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/leds-put-new-spin-on-a-sonic-the-hedgehog-costume/ | LEDs Put New Spin On A Sonic The Hedgehog Costume | Abe Connelly | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"arduino nano",
"costume",
"halloween",
"sonic",
"ws2812b"
] | [Wentworthm] couldn’t say no to his son’s plea for a Sonic the Hedgehog costume for Halloween but also couldn’t resist sprucing it up with LEDs either. The end result is a surprisingly cool
light up Sonic the Hedgehog costume
.
After some experimentation, [Wentworthm] ordered two costumes and ended up mixing and matching the head piece of one with the body suit of the other. For the head, [Wentworthm] created six 3D printed “quills” that had slots for the WS2812B LED strips to slide into and diffuse out the sides, with each quill sliding into the folds of the Sonic head “spikes”. Sewn strips of cloth were used to house the LED strips that were placed down the sides of the costume. An additional 3D printed switch housing was created to allow for a more robust interface to the two push buttons to activate the LEDs. An Arduino Nano, soldered to a protoboard, was used to drive the LED strips with a USB battery pack powering the whole project.
[Wentworthm] goes into more detail about the trials and errors, so the post is definitely worth checking out for more detail on the build. Halloween is always a great source of cool costumes and we’ve featured some great ones before, like a
light up crosswalk costume
to making a giant
Gameboy colour costume
.
Video after the break! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537583",
"author": "Kalle",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T16:17:11",
"content": "Great example of hacking skills being beneficial to parenting – check out his YouTube channel for similar examples.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,485.187878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/hackaday-podcast-194-fpv-contest-seven-words-lots-of-coffee-and-edible-drones/ | Hackaday Podcast 194: FPV Contest, Seven Words, Lots Of Coffee, And Edible Drones | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fumbled through setting up Mumble on Kristina’s new-ish computer box before hitting record and talking turkey. First off, we’ve got a fresh new contest going on, and this time it’s all about the FPVs. Then we see if Kristina can stump Elliot once again with a sound from her vast trove of ancient technologies.
Then there’s much ado about coffee roasters of all stripes, and you know we’re both coffee enthusiasts. We have many words to say about the subject, but none of them are any of the 7+ dirty ones that the FCC would probably rather we didn’t. Finally, we take a look at a bike frame that’s totally nuts, a clock that seemingly works via magic, and a drone made of rice cakes. So find something to nibble on, and check out this week’s episode!
Download the podcast for safe keeping.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 194 Show Notes:
News:
Start Your Engines: The FPV Contest Begins Now!
FPV-themed Hackaday.io Newsletter
Open-Source Passive Radar Taken Down For Regulatory Reasons
What’s that Sound?
Fill out the form
and send in your best guess.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Spoofing LIDAR Could Blind Autonomous Vehicles To Obstacles
Pop Your Way To A Fresh Roast Coffee
Wobble Disk Coffee Roaster Looks Good In Wood
Wobble Disk Coffee Roaster Gets The Beans Just Right
How To Cobble A Wobble Disk Roaster Together
Sweet Maria’s Coffee
Portable ESP32 RGB Lasershow Has All The Trimmings
Colorful Split Keyboard Uses VGA Connections
Reverse Engineering “The Seven Words (and More) You Can’t Say On TV”
Homebrew Espresso Maker Modding With Gaggiuino
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
If Your Drone Flies, Eat It!
This Standalone Camera Gets The Picture Through With SSTV
Move Aside Planar, I’m Slicing My Cone Way
Kristina’s Picks:
Crazy Bike Frame Made Out Of 147 Nuts
Faceless Clock Makes You Think Twice About How It Works
See The Forbidden Cigarette Machine In Action
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Don’t Believe Everything You Read: The Great Electric Toaster Hoax
Will The Fax Machine Ever Stop Singing? | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536895",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T18:29:20",
"content": "He really was a genius. The entertainment industry lost something when he died.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6539117",
"author": "Ticktok",
"ti... | 1,760,372,485.146359 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/when-pi-supply-falls-short-thin-clients-stand-tall-for-home-automation-and-low-power-computing/ | When Pi Supply Falls Short, Thin Clients Stand Tall For Home Automation And Low Power Computing | Ryan Flowers | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"debian",
"home automation",
"home-assistant",
"linux",
"low power pc",
"proxmox",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspbian",
"thin client",
"thin pc"
] | Do you need a cheap, small computer for a low power computing project? Historically, many of us would reach straight for a Raspberry Pi, even if we didn’t absolutely
need
the GPIO. But with prices elevated and supplies in the dumps, [Andreas Spiess] decided that it was time to look for
alternatives to now-expensive Pi’s
which you can see in the video below the break.
Setting up Debian for IOTstack
Many simply use the Pi for its software ecosystem, its lower power requirements, and diminutive size. [Andreas] has searched eBay, looking for thin PC clients that can be had for as little as $10-15. A few slightly more expensive units were also chosen, and in the video some comparisons are made. How do these thin clients compare to a Pi for power consumption, computing power, and cost? The results may surprise you!
Software is another issue, since many Pi projects rely on Raspbian, a Pi-specific ARM64 Linux distribution. Since Raspbian is based on Debian, [Andreas] chose it as a basis for experimentation. He thoughtfully included such powerful software as Proxmox for virtualization, IOTstack, and Home Assistant, walking the viewer through each step of running Home Assistant on x86-64 hardware and noting the differences between the Linux distributions.
All in all, if you’ve ever considered stepping out of the Pi ecosystem and into general Linux computing, this tutorial will be an excellent starting point. Of course [Andreas] isn’t the first to bark up this tree, and we featured another
thin client running Klipper for your 3D printer
earlier this month. Have you found your own perfect Pi replacement in these Pi-less times? Let us know in the comments below. | 80 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536787",
"author": "Bo-Erik Sandholm",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T15:53:41",
"content": "I Hate YouTube only documentation of a hack.The minimum should be a webpage!I read much faster than the time to talk trough videos.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,485.315989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/unlocking-a-locked-down-inverter/ | Unlocking A Locked-Down Inverter | Jenny List | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"inverter",
"power inverter",
"reverse engineering"
] | There was a time when a mains inverter was a heavy, expensive, and not particularly powerful item, but thanks to switch-mode technology we are now spoiled for choice. Most inverters still work with 12 V or 24 V supplies though, so when [Chris Jones] was looking for one to run from 36 V batteries, he found a limited supply. Sadly the Greenworks model he ended up with was affordable, but locked to a particular battery by means of a serial line between battery and inverter. Buy the special battery? No, he did what any hacker would do,
and modified the inverter to do without it
.
Tracing the serial link led to a mystery chip, probably a microcontroller but without available data. It in turn had a line to an 8051 derivative that seemed to be the brains of the operation. Acting on a hunch he pulled down the line with a resistor, and as if by magic, a working inverter appeared.
As you might expect, here at Hackaday we abhor such tricks by manufacturers, and thus any moves to circumvent them are to be applauded. It would be extremely interesting were anyone to have the Greenworks battery to subject to some reverse engineering of the profile.
Meanwhile if this is a little complex for you,
there is a much simpler way to make a rough and ready inverter
. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536707",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T13:33:20",
"content": "a quick and dirty way to spoof many such black box circuits,is with a small 12v light bulb and a pot or justrandom resistors",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,485.370895 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/making-paper-strandbeester/ | Making Paper Strandbeesten | Anne Ogborn | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"automata",
"papercaft"
] | We love the artistry of paper mechanisms. Simple tools and techniques creating humor, beauty, and amazement.
[Federico Tobon] from [Wolfcat Workshop] makes amazing automata, crosses between cut paper art, origami, and traditional carved wood automata. He’s put out a useful new video on making linkages in paper parts.
In
this short video,
[Federico] shows us how to make a paper version of the leg mechanism for [Theo Jansen]’s classic Strandbeest, which
we’ve covered in many variations
.
Rotating joints in paper automata are sometimes done with a mechanical fastener like a post screw, but it violates the simplicity of the affair and often looks clunky. [Federico] uses a simple self fastener. A 5 mm hole in one part mates with two “flaps” in the other part. He’s made a separate
video covering how to make the fastenings
. He’s using a paper crafter’s Cricut-type machine to cut the parts. Pretty cool.
We’ve covered lots of other cool stuf from [Wolfcat Workshop]. If you want more of his automata eye candy, check out
Simple Automata Extravaganza
. | 15 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536651",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T11:23:34",
"content": "Nice try, but Strandbeest is Dutch, not German. Its plural is therefore Strandbeesten.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6536710",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,485.502742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/squish-that-stack-with-rampart/ | Squish That Stack With Rampart | Dave Rowntree | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"database",
"HTTP",
"https",
"javascript",
"Redis",
"sql",
"web server",
"websockets"
] | [P B Richards] and [Aaron Flin] were bemoaning the resource hunger of modern JavaScript environments and planned to produce a system that was much stingier with memory and CPU, that would fit better on lower-end platforms. Think Nginx, NodeJS, and your flavour of database and how much resource that all needs to run properly. Now try wedge that lot onto a Raspberry Pi Zero. Well, they did, creating
Rampart: a JavaScript-based complete stack development environment
.
The usual web applications have lots of tricks to optimise for speed, but according to the developers, Rampart is still pretty fast. Its reason for existence is purely about resource usage, and looking at a screen grab, the Rampart HTTP server weighs in at less than 10 MB of RAM. It appears to support a decent slew of technologies, such as HTTPS, WebSockets, SQL search, REDIS, as well as various utility and OS functions, so shouldn’t be so lightweight as to make developing non-trivial applications too much work. One interesting point they make is that in making Rampart so frugal when deployed onto modern server farms it could be rather efficient. Anyway, it may be worth a look if you have a reasonable application to wedge onto a small platform.
We’ve seen many JavaScript runtimes over the years, like
this recent effort
, but there’s always room for one more. | 18 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536540",
"author": "tomás zerolo",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T07:19:02",
"content": "Ten *MEGA*bytes?My first Linux box was a 386 (admittedly a DX40, thanks, AMD) with *four megabytes*. It ran X with a choice of window managers (TWM, of course, olwm, and my favourite GWM, by Nicolas ... | 1,760,372,485.656281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/homebrew-led-bulbs-keep-your-circadian-rhythms-steady/ | Homebrew LED Bulbs Keep Your Circadian Rhythms Steady | Dan Maloney | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"Circadian",
"color temperature",
"led",
"phospor"
] | There was a time when LED light bulbs were a premium product that commanded a premium price, mainly because of limited supply and the usual marketing tricks. But now is not that time, since you can pick up an LED bulb for a buck or two at pretty much any store. So why in the world would you go to the effort
to make your own light bulb
?
For [DiodeGoneWild], the answer is simple: it’s all about staying in rhythm. Circadian rhythm, that is. We all know how light toward the blue end of the spectrum is bad for our sleep cycle, since it convinces our lizard brain that dawn is at hand. But even if you pick an LED bulb with a warm, or reddish, color temperature, there’s still a lot of UV light being emitted thanks to the phosphor LEDs that are typically used in them.
[DiodeGoneWild]’s first attempt at a design, in the first video below, mostly avoids phosphor LEDs in favor of a mix of yellow, red, and yellow-green LEDs to get a warmer spectrum. He used the housing and base from an expired bulb to enclose his custom circular PCB, the fabrication of which using a hand drill as a lathe and a Dremel to machine concentric tracks in the cladding was a real treat. So was the power supply, for that matter — a dropping capacitor followed by a bridge rectifier and a filtering cap. We like the discharge resistors across the caps and the fusible resistor on the mains side — it’s nice to see safety factored in from the start. And what’s not to like about using a DVD as a makeshift spectroscope?
We see that [DiodeGoneWild] has just dropped
a second design
, this time in a much smaller bulb and with relatively more phosphor LEDs. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536444",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T03:42:25",
"content": "Most human eyes have 3 cones, for R, G, and B, and the blue cone has a peak response around 437 nm. (Some people have a 4th cone sensitive in the UV.)The circadian rhythm is sensed by ganglia in the retina... | 1,760,372,485.607244 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/electroplated-3d-printed-sword-shiny/ | Electroplated 3D Printed Sword: Shiny! | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"electroplating"
] | We all want to 3D print metals, but the equipment to do that is still beyond most home workshops. However, [HEN3DRIK] takes
resin 3D-printed items and electroplates them
. Might not be as good as printing in metal, but it sure looks metallic. As you can see in the video below, the sword looks like it was crafted from highly-polished steel.
The sword comes out in four pieces. He repeats several times that sanding is the key because you must have flat surfaces. Using sandpaper and steel wool, he worked the parts to a fine finish. The parts assemble along an M8 threaded rod to form a whole. The next step was to electroplate with copper.
The sword was big enough that it required upscaling his normal electroplating setup. Of course, the resin isn’t conductive, so an airbrush deposits a conductive lacquer before the parts go in the bath. Some copper wire also helps the process.
If you don’t like post-processing parts, this technique isn’t for you. There’s a lot of sanding before and after electroplating. The plating itself takes patience, especially the copper plating. A very dangerous nickel plating process adds a shiny coating with a thin coat of palladium. An electroplating pen adds gold accents.
The sword looks amazing, but it obviously wasn’t a quick one-hour project. If you want to do electroplating, mind the safety factors as some of the chemicals are quite nasty.
Last time we checked in on [HEN3DRIK] he was building
a Star Wars prop
. If you are interested in
a DIY electroplating pen
, it has been done, too. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536390",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T01:29:28",
"content": "Nice, but it’s no basis for a system of government.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6536414",
"author": "Al Williams",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,485.553285 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/defeating-a-cryptoprocessor-with-laser-beams/ | Defeating A Cryptoprocessor With Laser Beams | Arya Voronova | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ATECC508A",
"ATECC608A",
"cryptographic coprocessor",
"laser glitching"
] | Cryptographic coprocessors are nice, for the most part. These are small chips you connect over I2C or One-Wire, with a whole bunch of cryptographic features implemented. They can hash data, securely store an encryption key and do internal encryption/decryption with it, sign data or validate signatures, and generate decent random numbers – all things that you might not want to do in firmware on your MCU, with the range of attacks you’d have to defend it against. Theoretically, this is great, but that moves the attack to the cryptographic coprocessor.
In
this BlackHat presentation
(
slides
), [Olivier Heriveaux] talks about how his team was tasked with investigating the security of the Coldcard cryptocurrency wallet. This wallet stores your private keys inside of an
ATECC608A chip
, in a secure area only unlocked once you enter your PIN. The team had already encountered the ATECC608A’s predecessor, the ATECC508A, in a different scenario, and that one gave up its secrets eventually. This time, could they break into the vault and leave with a bag full of Bitcoins?
Lacking a vault door to drill, they used a powerful laser, delidding the IC and pulsing different areas of it with the beam. How do you know when exactly to pulse? For that, they took power consumption traces of the chip, which, given enough tries and some signal averaging, let them make educated guesses on how the chip’s firmware went through the unlock command processing stages. We won’t spoil the video for you, but if you’re interested in power analysis and laser glitching, it’s well worth 30 minutes of your time.
You might think it’s good that we have these chips to work with – however, they’re not that hobbyist-friendly, as proper documentation is scarce for security-through-obscurity reasons. Another downside is that, inevitably, we’ll encounter them being used to
thwart repair and reverse-engineering.
However, if you wanted to explore what a cryptographic coprocessor brings you, you can
get an ESP32 module
with the ATECC608A inside, we’ve seen this chip put into
an IoT-enabled wearable ECG project,
and even
a Nokia-shell LoRa mesh phone!
We thank [Chip] for sharing this with us! | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537427",
"author": "Artenz",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T12:06:15",
"content": "> all things that you might not want to do in firmware on your MCU, with the range of attacks you’d have to defend it againstIf the crypto processor is configured as an I2C peripheral, you’d still have to ... | 1,760,372,485.803422 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/26/interpreting-the-lua-interpreter/ | Reinterpreting The Lua Interpreter | Matthew Carlson | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"interpreter",
"lua",
"lua interpreter",
"luajit"
] | The idea behind Lua is a beautiful one. A simple and concise syntax offers almost all of the niceties of a first-class language. Moreover, a naive implementation of an interpreter with a giant switch case can be implemented in an afternoon. But assembly is your go-to to get decent performance in a JIT-style interpreter. So [Haoran Xu] started to ask himself if he could achieve better performance without hand-rolled assembly, and after a few months of work, he
published a work-in-progress called LuaJIT Remake (LJR)
.
Currently, it supports
Lua 5.1
, and on a smattering of 34 benchmarks, LJR beats the leading fastest Lua, LuaJIT, by around 28% and the official Lua engine by 3x. [Haoran] offers a great explanation of interpreters that provides excellent background and context for the problem.
But the long and short of it is that switch cases are expensive and hard to optimize for compilers, so using
tail calling
is a reasonable solution that comes with some significant drawbacks. With tail calls, each case statement becomes a “function” that is jumped to and then jumped out of without mucking with the stack or the registers too much.
However, the calling convention requires any callee-saved registers to be preserved, which means you lose some registers as there is no way to tell the compiler that this function is allowed to break the calling convention. Clang is currently the only compiler that offers a guaranteed tail-call annotation (
[[clang::musttail]]
). There are other limitations too, for instance requiring the caller and callee to have identical function prototypes to prevent unbounded stack growth.
So [Haoran] went back to the drawing board and wrote two new tools: C++ bytecode semantical description and a special compiler called Deegen. The C++ bytecode looks like this:
void Add(TValue lhs, TValue rhs) {
if (!lhs.Is<tDouble>() || !rhs.Is<tDouble>()) {
ThrowError("Can't add!");
} else {
double res = lhs.As<tDouble>() + rhs.As<tDouble>();
Return(TValue::Create<tDouble>(res));
}
}
DEEGEN_DEFINE_BYTECODE(Add) {
Operands(
BytecodeSlotOrConstant("lhs"),
BytecodeSlotOrConstant("rhs")
);
Result(BytecodeValue);
Implementation(Add);
Variant(
Op("lhs").IsBytecodeSlot(),
Op("rhs").IsBytecodeSlot()
);
Variant(
Op("lhs").IsConstant(),
Op("rhs").IsBytecodeSlot()
);
Variant(
Op("lhs").IsBytecodeSlot(),
Op("rhs").IsConstant()
);
}
Note that this is not the C keyword return. Instead, there is a definition of the bytecode and then an implementation. This bytecode is converted into LLVM IR and then fed into Deegen, which can transform the functions to do tail calls correctly, use the GHC calling conventions, and a few other optimizations like inline caching through a clever C++ lambda mechanism. The blog post is exceptionally well-written and offers a fantastic glimpse into the wild world of interpreters.
The
code is on Github
. But if you’re interested in a more whimsical interpreter, here’s a
Brainf**k interpreter written in Befunge. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537419",
"author": "cumclave",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T11:52:57",
"content": "Python is useful for code which does HTTP requests, for everything else C and makefiles do good enough job.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6537421"... | 1,760,372,485.865336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/telnet-gets-stubborn-sony-camera-under-control/ | Telnet Gets Stubborn Sony Camera Under Control | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"busybox",
"firmware hack",
"sony",
"telnet",
"telnetd"
] | According to [Venn Stone], technical producer over at
LinuxGameCast
, the Sony a5000 is still a solid option for those looking to shoot 1080p video despite being released back in 2014. But while the camera is lightweight and affordable, it does have some annoying quirks — namely an overlay on the HDMI output (as seen in the image above) that can’t be turned off using the camera’s normal configuration menu. But as it so happens, using some open source tools and the venerable telnet,
you can actually log into the camera’s operating system and fiddle with its settings directly
.
As explained in the write-up, the first step is to install
Sony-PMCA-RE
, a cross-platform suite of tools developed for reverse engineering and modifying Sony cameras. With the camera connected via USB, this will allow you to install a program on the camera called
Open Memories Tweak
. This unlocks some developer options on the camera, such as spawning a telnet server on its WiFi interface.
With the a5000 connected to your wireless network, you point your telnet client to its IP address and will be greeted by a BusyBox interface that should be familiar to anyone who’s played with embedded Linux gadgets. The final step is to invoke the proper command,
bk.elf w 0x01070a47 00
, which sets the specific address of the camera’s configuration file to zero. This permanently disables the HDMI overlay, though it can be reversed by running the command again and setting the byte back to 01.
As you might expect, the Sony-PMCA-RE package is capable of quite a bit more than just unlocking a telnet server. While it might not be as powerful as a
firmware modification such as Magic Lantern for Canon’s hardware
, those looking for a hackable camera that won’t break the bank might want to check out the project’s documentation to see what else is possible.
Thanks to [Aaron] for the tip. | 13 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537327",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T08:57:23",
"content": "The camera hacks I want to see are breaking the 30 minute video time limit on various compact point and shoot models like the Nikon Coolpix S6200, Olympus FE240, Canon’s ELPH series etc. There are... | 1,760,372,486.126793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/honey-we-shrunk-the-nuclear-reactor/ | Honey, We Shrunk The Nuclear Reactor | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"heat pipe",
"microreactor",
"nuclear"
] | [Power Engineering] took a trip to the Westinghouse facility that provides maintenance for nuclear reactors. The research division there has a new microreactor called
eVinci
and — according to the company — it is a disruptor. Technically, the device is a heat pipe-based passive cooling design that can generate 5 MW of electricity or 13 MW of heat from a 15 MW heater core. You can see a video about the device below.
The company says its initial targets are remote areas like mines that usually depend on diesel generators. Hundreds of passive heat pipes inside a graphite core which contains TRISO (tristructural isotropic) fuel pellets. The heat pipes allow efficient transfer of thermal energy with no pumps.
A heat pipe uses a working fluid — in this case a liquid metal — to provide impressive thermal transfer characteristics. Heat boils the liquid which then moves to the cooler end of the pipe. There it condenses and wicking returns the liquid to the hot side where the process repeats.
The reactor has only one set of moving parts: the reactivity control drums which manage the power level. If power demand goes down, the drums expose an absorber to retard nuclear activity. For higher demand, the drums expose a reflector which increases nuclear activity. The reactor manages this autonomously.
Of course, the term “micro” is in the eye of the beholder. The eVinci would take four trucks to move. One carrying the reactor, another carrying the electrical conversion system. A third truck carries instrumentation and controls while a fourth carries some additional equipment. Fuel lasts eight years and is encapsulated in several different ways to prevent contamination.
Westinghouse claims they plan to have commercial availability by 2027. Of course, there are regulatory and other hurdles to clear before that can really happen.
Building your own nuclear battery
is possible, but don’t expect megawatts of output. We’ve been tracking the trend toward
microreactors
since last year. | 99 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537186",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T03:28:56",
"content": "About time! The shape reminds me of some designs I’ve read about for deep space propulsion applications. Also compact reactors, similar fuel cladding and reaction control scheme. But you pipe liquid hydrogen t... | 1,760,372,485.989707 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/are-slabtops-the-future-of-computing/ | Are Slabtops The Future Of Computing? | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks",
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"airplay",
"headless",
"laptop",
"macbook",
"macbook air",
"slabtop",
"wireless video interface"
] | The most popular computer ever was the Commodore 64 with its computer-in-a-keyboard form factor. If you have a longing for a keyboard computer with more modern internals, one of the easiest solutions today is to
pull the screen off a laptop
.
[Umar Shakir] wanted to see what the fuss was about regarding
a recent Apple patent
and took the top lid off of his M1 Macbook Air and turned it into a “slabtop.” The computer works great wired to a monitor but can also be used wirelessly via AirPlay. The approach doesn’t come without its downsides, of course. Newer MacBooks can’t access recovery mode without the built-in screen, and some older models had their WiFi antennas in the top lid, so making one into a slabtop will leave you desk-bound.
While [Shakir] focuses on MacBooks, this approach should work with any laptop. Apparently, it’s a
cottage industry in China
already. Back in the day, my own daily driver was a Pentium-powered laptop with its broken LCD (and lid) removed. It worked great with whatever CRT was nearby.
If you’re looking for an off-the-shelf keyboard computer of your own, you might want to check out the
Raspberry Pi 400
. | 114 | 33 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537086",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2022-11-26T00:03:57",
"content": "You mean, like a Commodore 64 / Atari ST ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6537110",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,486.326678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/custom-prusa-mk3-fan-duct-gives-camera-perfect-view/ | Custom Prusa MK3 Fan Duct Gives Camera Perfect View | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"borescope",
"nozzle camera",
"Octoprint",
"prusa",
"Prusa i3 Mk3"
] | A growing trend is to mount a borescope “inspection camera” near a 3D printer’s nozzle to provide a unique up-close view of the action. Some argue that this perspective can provide valuable insight if you’re trying to fine tune your machine, but whether or not there’s a practical application for these sort of nozzle cams, certainly everyone can agree it makes for a pretty cool video.
[Caelestis Cosplay] recently decided to outfit his Prusa i3 MK3S+ with such a camera, and was kind enough to
share the process in a write-up
. The first step was to find a community-developed fan duct, which he then modified to hold the 7 mm camera module. Since the duct blows right on the printer’s nozzle, it provides an ideal vantage point.
The camera module included a few tiny SMD LEDs around the lens, but [Caelestis Cosplay] added holes to the fan duct to fit a pair of 3 mm white LEDs to really light things up. While modifying the printed parts took some effort, he says the hardest part of the whole build was salvaging a 5X lens from a handheld magnifier and filing it down so it would fit neatly over the camera. But judging by the sharp and bright demo video he’s provided, we’d say the extra effort was certainly worth it.
After covering how the camera rig was put together, [Caelestis Cosplay] then goes over how it was
integrated into OctoPrint
, including
how the external LEDs are switched on and off
. He’s running OctoPrint on a Raspberry Pi, though as we’ve covered recently, a
small form factor desktop computer
could just as easily run the show. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6537017",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T22:10:23",
"content": "I love it. Feels like playing TRON in the arcade",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6537991",
"author": "Rekhan4242",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,486.17928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/25/circular-binary-clock-uses-the-power-to-tell-time/ | Circular Binary Clock Uses The Power To Tell Time | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"binary clock",
"DS1302",
"neopixel ring",
"RGB LED ring"
] | Should a clock be round? Depends on the style of clock, we suppose. After all, we wouldn’t expect to see a digital clock with a round readout just for fun. But a binary clock — that’s another animal altogether. Whereas [JohnThinger] made just a few weeks back a linear binary clock using an RGB LED strip and an ATtiny,
he decided it would look much better in the round
.
Before you go decrying the fact that there are numbers other than 1 and 0 on the thing, those are simply the power of two by which one must multiply to get the time. And naturally, it’s done in three phases, with the yellow-green numbers representing the seconds, the pink-red representing minutes, and the blue standing for the current hour. No, the point is not to make life easier. But it’s a good-looking clock, no?
Just as before, an ATtiny85 is the brain, with an RTC chip and an oscillator to keep time. But now, the display involves negative space 3D-printed numbers and an RGB LED ring. Be sure to check it out after the break. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536906",
"author": "nono",
"timestamp": "2022-11-25T18:57:09",
"content": "A cubic binary clock would have more power…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6537078",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,372,486.364884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/tidy-pov-display-using-the-esp32/ | Tidy POV Display Using The ESP32 | Dave Rowntree | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"apa102",
"arduino",
"ESP32",
"JLCEDA",
"led",
"persistance of vision",
"POV"
] | Chinese Youtuber [corebb] presents the second version of his POV display. The earlier version used 5050-sized SMT addressable LEDs, which didn’t give great resolution, so he
rev’d the design to use a much higher number
(160 to be exact) of APA102 LEDs. These are 2mm on the side, making them a little more difficult to handle, so after some initial solder paste wobbles, he decided to use a contract assembly house to do the tricky bit for him. This failed as they didn’t ‘understand’ the part and placed them the wrong way around! Not to be deterred, he had another go with a modified solder stencil, and eventually got the full strip to light up correctly.
Based on an ESP32 (using the
Arduino stack
) and SDCard for control, and a LiPo cell charged wirelessly, the build is rather tidy. A couple of hall effect switches are mounted at the start of each of the two arms, presumably lining
Real-time video streaming? Check!
up with a magnet on the case somewhere, although this isn’t clear. The
schematic
and
PCB
appear to have been designed with JLCEDA, which is a repackaging of EasyEDA. We can see the attraction with the heavy integration of this with the JLC and LCSC services. It appears that he even managed to get streamed video working — showing a live video from a webcam — which is quite an undertaking to pull off when you think how much processing needs to happen in real-time. As he alludes to in the video, trying to increase the resolution beyond this point is not viable with the processing capability of the ESP32.
A resin-printed case finishes off the build, with a screw-thread mount added to the rear, to allow typical camera mounts to be used to hold the thing down. A smart move we think.
We love POV displays around here, this
spherical POV display is especially fabulous
, but you don’t need fancy hardware if you have a
handy ceiling fan and a bit of protoboard spare
.
Thanks to [mrx23dot] for the tip! | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535464",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T00:21:10",
"content": "Oh the memories… I designed a POV mill 9 years ago, 2m diameter, what a beast… It used a RPi gen1.https://hackaday.io/project/6955-rosace",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,486.588082 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/how-to-build-your-own-analog-phone-network/ | How To Build Your Own Analog Phone Network | Robin Kearey | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"dtmf",
"rs-485",
"slic",
"telephone exchange"
] | Analog phones may be nearly obsolete today, but having served humanity for well over a century they’re quite likely to pop up in drawers or attics now and then. If you’ve got a few of them lying around and you think it’d be cool to hook them up and make your own local telephone system, check out [Gadget Reboot]’s latest work. His video series shows
all the steps towards making a fully-functional wired phone system
.
Of course, dedicated phone exchanges for home or small business use are not hard to find, but [Gadget Reboot] decided it would be way more interesting to design his own system from the ground up. To begin with, he used off-the-shelf subscriber line interface circuits (SLICs) to implement the correct voltages, currents and impedances to drive analog phones. He then added a DTMF decoder chip to allow the phone to dial a number, and hooked up both systems to an ESP8266 which controls the entire system. It implements the different states of picking up, dialing, ringing and hanging up, and also generates the corresponding audio signals.
The system becomes even more interesting through the implementation of a multi-exchange layout, just like in large-scale phone systems: when a number is dialled that’s connected to a different exchange, then a connection must be made between two exchanges in order to complete the call. Large-scale systems use dedicated protocols like SS7, but [Gadget Reboot] preferred to keep things simple and used an RS-485 connection. The two ESPs check each others status and if everything’s in order, a relay connects the two lines and the circuit is completed.
The current system is a bit of a mess of wires, but it works, and [Gadget Reboot] plans to make a cleaner setup based on custom circuit boards, possibly expanding it with functions like modem support. In any case it’s already way more advanced than
a simple electromechanical system
. Want to know more about classic phone networks?
We’ve got you covered
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535395",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T21:35:34",
"content": "Oh yeah I built one of those once with a pair of tin cans and fishing line",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6535402",
"author": "abjq",
"... | 1,760,372,486.462309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/termi2-is-siri-like-its-1976/ | Termi2 Is Siri Like It’s 1976 | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"acoustic coupler",
"serial terminal",
"typewriter"
] | What are your plans for the long weekend? If you don’t have time or don’t want to dive into a new project, why not dust off something left unfinished, or do as Hackaday alum [Cameron Coward] did recently and
upgrade an old project with a new brain
.
In this case, the project in question is a terminal typewriter — a Texas Instruments Silent 700 Terminal, to be exact — into a sort of late ’70’s version of Siri. The terminal typewriter is a special beast that used an acoustic coupler to send and receive both beeps and boops from distant mainframes. Whereas the first iteration of Termi used a Raspberry Pi Zero W to run a script that queries Wolfram Alpha, [Cameron] decided that between the login requirement, the boot time, and the weird formatting required to get it to work, that there had to be a better way.
Turns out that the better way is to use an ESP32 and read the “serial port”, which is a proprietary port with two serial connections — one for the acoustic coupler, and one for regular serial communication. Our favorite thing about this build, no matter the brain, is that there is a permanent record of all the questions and answers. Be sure to check out the video after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535392",
"author": "BozoTheGenious",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T21:29:39",
"content": "Very cool project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6535393",
"author": "Johannes Burgel",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T21:30:11",
"con... | 1,760,372,486.411416 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/books-you-should-read-why-buildings-fall-down/ | Books You Should Read: Why Buildings Fall Down | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"books you should read",
"collapse",
"failure",
"failure analysis",
"forensics",
"structural engineering"
] | People with long commutes usually come up with tricks to stay focused and alert and avoid the dangerous tendency to zone out during the drive. One trick I used to use was keeping mental track of the various construction projects I’d pass by on my way to work, noticing which piers on a new highway overpass were nearing completion, or watching steelworkers put together the complex rebar endoskeletons of a new stretch of roadway.
One project I loved to watch back in the 80s was a new high-rise going in right next to the highway, which fascinated me because of the construction method. Rather than putting together a steel frame, laying out decking, and covering each floor with concrete, the workers seemed to be fabricating each floor at ground level and then jacking them up on the vertical steel columns. I was fascinated by this because every time I passed by the floors were in a different position, spreading out vertically as the building grew.
And then one day, it just wasn’t there anymore. Where there had been columns stretching nine stories into the city sky with concrete slabs lined up ready to be jacked up into their final positions, there was just an enormous hole in the ground with a ghastly gray cloud of concrete dust rising from it. It was April 23, 1987, and what was once going to be a luxury apartment building called
L’Ambience Plaza
in Bridgeport, Connecticut lay pancaked into the ground, entombing the bodies of 28 construction workers.
House of Cards
The collapse of L’Ambience Plaza is just one of the many case studies contained in
“Why Buildings Fall Down,”
a book that Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori wrote in 1992. I stumbled upon the book not that long after it came out, and was instantly drawn to it because of my connection to the L’Ambience Plaza collapse; the job I was commuting to that day was actually as an emergency medical technician for an ambulance company in a neighboring city, so many of my friends were down in that hole trying to rescue construction workers as I was passing by, and I actually went to the scene later that day to volunteer my services. By the time I read this book I was already out of the EMS business and far more interested in the engineering aspects of what went wrong that day, and this book provided a detailed case study on L’Ambience Plaza that satisfied my curiosity about what happened that day, as well as more than a dozen other structural failures, most of which also resulted in at least some loss of life.
Each case study in the book is accompanied by simple but excellent diagrams by Kevin Woest that make it easy to understand the root cause of each failure. For L’Ambience Plaza, the threaded jack rods were found to pass through slots in the steel lifting frames rather than holes, which would have prevented them from slipping out and starting the progressive collapse that took the building down. The diagrams make this quite clear, and it’s easy to see why the mechanism was built the way it was; feeding a 1-1/4″ threaded rod through a hole is much harder to accomplish on a job site than slipping the lifting nut into a slot. But it’s also easy to see how that nut could slip out of the slot and cause a lot of trouble in the process.
Detail of lift-slab mechanism from L’Ambience Plaza. The lifting nuts fit into slots in the lifting head and slipped out under load. Source:
National Bureau of Standards Report
Rust, Water, Wind, and Human Error
Corrosion and metal fatigue are also well-represented in the book, from the multiple Comet airliner crashes at the beginning of the jet age thanks to stress concentration at the corners of the plane’s square windows to the 1980 collapse of the Mianus River bridge in Connecticut — my home state comes off rather badly in the book, with a total of three failures featured — thanks in part to rust accumulation in the hanger assembly of the suspended span bridge. There’s also a section devoted to the special problems that result from dealing with Mother Nature, including
the Scoharie Creek bridge collapse
on the New York Thruway in 1987 — it wasn’t a good decade for structural engineers — thanks to scouring of material from under the bridge’s piers by the creek’s flood waters. And what book on structural failures would be complete without a discussion of “Galloping Gertie,” the famously flexible suspension bridge over the Tacoma Narrows that underwent rapid unplanned disassembly shortly after it opened in 1940 thanks to wind and resonance?
Not every structural failure in the book has classical engineering roots, though. Sometimes there’s a social engineering aspect to it, as was the case with the 1980 Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse in Kansas City, which was the single worst structural failure in US history in terms of lives lost prior to 9/11. That collapse, which killed 114 people and wounded over 200 more, involved a set of suspended walkways through an atrium connecting two blocks of the plush hotel, which were suspended from the ceiling by stout threaded rods. The problem was that the original design proved difficult to fabricate on the construction site, so the contractor suggested a change to the design. Unfortunately, the original engineer signed off on the change without really thinking it through; the resulting change in how the loads from the walkways were distributed eventually tore the structure apart. That one is particularly frightening to me; how many other engineers have rubber-stamped a seemingly innocuous change without running at least some calculations?
You Don’t Know Until You Know
I think what comes to mind with all these failures is just how close to the edge structural engineering can cut sometimes, especially when trying to make something innovative and beautiful. Throw enough steel and concrete at a structure and chances are pretty good you’ll get something that can stand the test of time. But if you’re trying to push the envelope and build something light and airy rather than brutally utilitarian, the engineering problem gets a bit tougher. Finding the right places to put structural members to carry the intended loads without interfering with the aesthetic design gets to be a bigger challenge, and sometimes the engineers just don’t get it right. And that’s a little scary, since we’re all constantly in, on, or near structures that may be pushing that structural envelope.
Of course, most structures stand the test of time, and catastrophic failures are few and far between. But there have been enough of them to make a book like “Why Buildings Fall Down” possible, and definitely worth reading if you’re interested in knowing what an engineer’s worst nightmare can be like. And for me, the book actually provided some closure to what I saw that day, and all the engineering questions that popped up in my mind because of it. | 35 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535334",
"author": "Lee Hart",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T19:04:10",
"content": "Author Henry Petroski has also written some great books on engineering failures. See “To Engineer is Human”, and “The Evolution of Useful Things.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,372,486.537954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/hardware-store-chemicals-transform-sheets-into-waterproof-tarps/ | Hardware Store Chemicals Transform Sheets Into Waterproof Tarps | Ryan Flowers | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"canvas",
"knots",
"naphtha",
"recycled",
"silicone",
"tarp",
"textile",
"textiles"
] | For hackers in the Northern Hemisphere, the seasons of wet and cold are upon us. Staying dry is every bit as important as staying warm, so what better than a hack or two to keep us warm and dry! All you’ll need is a bed sheet, some rope, and a run to the local hardware store, and a bit of knowledge. [NightHawkInLight] has us covered with the excellent video “
Recycled Bedsheets Make The Best Waterproof Tarps
” as seen below the break.
[NightHawkInLight] brings old traditional methods into the 21st century by turning away from oil, beeswax and canvas in favor of a recycled bed sheet made waterproof with silicone. The video goes into just enough detail so that you can reproduce their results without fear of working with the powerful solvent being used.
Cheap hardware store grade silicone sealant is thinned by naphtha, worked into the old bed sheet, and then hung out to dry overnight. The result? A perfectly waterproof sheet that’s just as pliable as before treatment. But how can you use it like a tarp, when there are no eyelets? If you watch the video for no other reason, check out the neat attachment trick at the end, where traditional technology is brought to the fore once again with nothing more than a rock and a slip knot.
We can imagine that the uses for such inexpensive, durable home made tarps are many. Perhaps one could put it to use when building your own
Custom Cycling Camper
. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535292",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T17:02:26",
"content": "” But how can you use it like a tarp, when there are no eyelets?”Grommet tool kit. Not expensive either.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6535317",... | 1,760,372,486.781652 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/dont-believe-everything-you-read-the-great-electric-toaster-hoax/ | Don’t Believe Everything You Read: The Great Electric Toaster Hoax | Al Williams | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"hoax",
"Rant"
] | We’ve all looked up things on Wikipedia and, generally, it is usually correct information. However, the fact that anyone can edit it leads to abuse and makes it somewhat unreliable. Case in point? The BBC’s [Marco Silva] has the story of
the great online toaster hoax
which erroneously identified the inventor of the toaster with great impact.
You should
read the original story
, but in case you want a synopsis, here goes: Until recently, the Wikipedia entry for toasters stated that a Scottish man named Alan MacMasters invented the electric toaster in the 1800s. Sounds plausible. Even more so because several books had picked it up along with the Scottish government’s Brand Scottland website. At least one school had a day memorializing the inventor and a TV show also honored him with a special dessert named for Alan MacMasters, the supposed inventor.
And then if you looked up “Alan MacMasters”, you’d be lead to a page with his biography. The only problem is, he’s just a 30-year-old engineer who currently lives in London. We aren’t even sure if he owns a toaster.
It started in 2012 when a university lecturer warned about using Wikipedia as a source. He told the class that a friend of his had put his own name in as the inventor of the toaster. So the real Alan MacMasters and his friends decided they should correct it but then on a lark, decided to replace it with Alan’s name instead. The prank was forgotten until later when the Daily Mirror listed MacMaster’s toaster invention. Alan then decided to create an entire article about “himself” in 2013. It included a poorly photoshopped picture of himself — the rip hiding his modern clothes. For a decade, the story spread along with some embellishments. It was apparently a bit of a meme.
Last year, a schoolboy from Kent noticed the picture looked fake and raised it in a Reddit group that discusses Wikipedia. A bit of investigation had the article deleted.
Lesson Learned
There’s an old science demonstration where you have people guess how many gumballs are in a jar. Individual guesses are usually off, sometimes wildly. But, somehow, the average will be eerily correct. But that assumes you have a big enough sample size to average.
Perhaps the takeaway, then, is that while Wikipedia isn’t always totally accurate, it is more likely to be accurate on things that get a lot of attention either because people are interested or there is a controversy. After all, when people noticed the Alan McMaster article, it did get resolved, and within 24 hours. But for a long time, no one was really looking at it.
If you get the start date of World War II or the age of a world leader, it is probably correct because people are paying attention. But the more obscure the information, the more probability that it hasn’t been looked over by enough people to be certain. The same probably applies to websites in general. While no one is perfect, you do tend to weigh information from known credible sources over information from some unknown quantity.
And Who Was It?
D12 Toaster
photo by Eric Norcross
I’ve pointed out before that while everyone knows Ameilia Earheart, she didn’t actually make it around the globe. Who did? Jerrie Mach was the first woman to fly solo around the world in 1964. So who did invent the toaster? Toaster experts say it was American Frank Shailor who filed the patent in 1909 on behalf of General Electric. Not that it was anything we would recognize as a toaster.
One of the best parts of being alive today is that we live in a world where the information equivalent of thousands of libraries is accessible from our living rooms. The responsibility that comes with that is that we have to be critical consumers of information. Crowdsourcing might not be bad, but you have to be aware of how big the crowd is and who it consists of before you can assign validity to anything you read.
We think of false stories as being a modern thing,
but not so
! If you make your
hoax have at least some believable element
, it will go even further, although that’s hardly a requirement. | 65 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535255",
"author": "J.Cook",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T15:56:12",
"content": "Yep. Just have a look at Tumblr’s latest (and probably greatest to date) mass collaboration (or maybe hallucination?) on the 1973 film Goncharov.(no, it’s not a real film, but there’s been enough work put... | 1,760,372,486.972401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/the-13-5-million-core-computer/ | The 13.5 Million Core Computer | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"cluster",
"hpc",
"supercomputer"
] | Having a dual- or quad-core CPU is not very exotic these days and CPUs with 12 or even 16 cores aren’t that rare. The
Andromeda
from Cerebras is a supercomputer with 13.5 million cores. The company claims it is one of the largest AI supercomputers ever built (but not the largest) and can perform 120 Petaflops of “dense compute.”
We aren’t sure about the methodology, but they also claim more than one exaflop of “AI computing.” The computer has a fabric backplane that can handle 96.8 terabits per second between nodes. According to a post on
Extreme Tech
, the core technology is a 3-plane wafer processor, WSE-2. One plane is for communications, one holds 40 GB of static RAM, and the math plane has 850,000 independent cores and 3.4 million floating point units.
The data is sent to the cores and collected by a bank of 64-core AMD EPYC 3 processors. Andromeda is optimized to handle sparse matrix computations. The company claims that the performance scales “almost linearly.” That is, as you double the number of cores used, you roughly half the total run time.
The machine is available for remote use and cost about $35 million to build. Since it uses 500 kW at peak run times, it isn’t free to operate, either. Extreme Tech notes that the Frontier computer at Oak Ridge National Labs is both larger and more precise, but it cost $600 million, so you’d expect it to be more capable.
Most homebrew “supercomputers” we see are more for
learning how to work with clusters
than trying to hit this sort of performance. Of course, if you have a modern graphics card, OpenCL and
CUDA
will let you do some of this, too, but at a much lesser scale. | 55 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535208",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T12:58:44",
"content": "“40 GB of static RAM”My brain melted just thinking about this much SRAM.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6535213",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,486.868173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/racing-cars-on-a-pcb/ | Racing Cars On A PCB | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"magnetic field",
"magnetism",
"pcb",
"Printed Circuit Board",
"race track",
"slot car"
] | Carl Friedrich Gauss was, to put it mildly, a polymath responsible for a large percentage of the things we take for granted in the modern world. As a physicist and mathematician he pioneered several fields of study including within the field of magnetism. But since he died decades before the first car was built, it’s unlikely he could have imagined this creation,
a magnetic slot-car race track called the Gauss Speedway
by [Jeff McBride], which bears the name of the famous scientist.
The Gauss Speedway takes its inspiration from a recent development in robotics, where many small robots can travel around a large area with the help of circuit traces integrated into their operating area. With the right current applied to these traces, magnetic fields are generated which propel the robots. [Jeff] wanted to build something similar, integrated into a printed circuit board directly, and came up with the slot car idea. The small cars have tiny magnets in them which interact with the traces in the PCB, allowing the cars to move with high precision around the track. He did abandon the traditional slot car controller in favor of a push-button style one directly on the PCB too, which means everything is completely integrated.
While this was more of a demonstration or proof-of-concept, some of the features of this style of robot can be seen in
this video
, which shows them moving extremely rapidly with high precision, on uneven surfaces, or even up walls. Magnetic robots like these are seeing quite a renaissance, and we’ve even seen
some that use magnetism to shape-shift
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIINCeOVgow | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536251",
"author": "Steven Smethurst funvill@mastodon.social (@funvill)",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T21:09:33",
"content": "That is amazing, I could see a bunch of tracks that could be connected together using this method to make a large race course.",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,372,487.166642 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/meat-space-minesweeper-game-hits-the-mark/ | Meat-Space Minesweeper Game Hits The Mark | Dave Walker | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"3d printer",
"classic",
"game",
"minesweeper",
"stl",
"travel"
] | Hackers of a certain age will remember that before the Internet was available to distract us from our work, we had to find our own fun. Luckily, Windows was there to come to our aid, in the shape of “Minesweeper” – a classic of the age that involved figuring out/occasionally just guessing where a selection of mines had been hidden on a grid of squares via numerical clues to their proximity. For those missing such simple times, [Martin] has brought the game into physical space with his
3D-printed travel-game version
.
A number of pre-determined game fields can be inserted (by a friend… or enemy, we presume!) and covered by tiles, which the mine-clearing player can then remove with their plastic shovel to reveal the clues. The aim of the game is to avoid uncovering a bomb, and to place flags where the bombs are hiding.
Aficionados of the game may remember that a little guessing was often inevitable, which sometimes ended in disaster. On the computer version, this merely entailed clicking the Smiley Face button for a new game, but in this case would require a new sheet to be inserted. Blank sheet templates are included for producing your own fiendish bomb-sites, and all the pieces pack away neatly into a handy clam-shell design that would be ideal for long car journeys when the data package on the kids’ tablets has run out.
We wonder what other classic games may lend themselves to a travel remake and look forward to the first 3D-printed travel set of Doom with anticipation!
If you’re above solving your own Minesweeper games, then you can learn
how to write a solver in Java here
. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536207",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T19:59:55",
"content": "I can’t imagine how it would work, but 3d-printed travel Doom sounds awesome.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6536254",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,487.212398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/weasley-clock-for-magically-low-cost/ | Weasley Clock For Magically Low Cost | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"arduino",
"clock",
"cloud",
"gears",
"harry potter",
"hivemqcloud",
"mqtt",
"owntracks",
"weasley"
] | For those unfamiliar with the details of the expansive work of fiction of Harry Potter, it did introduce a few ideas that have really stuck in the collective conscious. Besides containing one of the few instances of time travel done properly and introducing a fairly comprehensive magical physics system, the one thing specifically that seems to have had the most impact around here is the Weasley family clock, which shows the location of several of the characters. We’ve seen these built before in non-magical ways,
but this latest build seeks to drop the price tag on one substantially
.
To do this, the build relies on several low-cost cloud computing solutions and smartphone apps to solve the location-finding problem. The app is called OwnTracks and is an open-source location tracker which can report data to any of a number of services. [Simon] sends the MQTT data to a cloud-based solution called HiveMQCloud, but you could send it anywhere in principle. With the location tracking handled, he turns to some very low-cost Arduinos to control the stepper motors which point the clock hands to the correct locations on the face.
While the build does rely on a 3D printer for some of the internal workings of the clock, this does bring the cost down substantially when compared to other options. Especially when compared to
this Weasley family clock which was built into a much larger piece of timekeeping equipment
, having an option for a lower-cost location-tracking clock face like this one is certainly welcome. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536043",
"author": "wibble",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T15:27:16",
"content": "Gawd, the safety stuff is a bit overblown. He really doesn’t need to be overly concerned about leaving it running unattended, the probability of it turning into a fireball is minuscule. To anyone thinking ... | 1,760,372,487.017231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/its-macos-on-an-unmodified-wii/ | It’s MacOS. On An Unmodified Wii! | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Nintendo Wii Hacks"
] | [
"macOS",
"wii"
] | We’re used to the so-called “Hackintoshes”, non-Apple hardware running MacOS. One we featured recently was even built into the case of a Nintendo Wii. But [Dandu] has gone one better than that, by
running MacOS on an unmodified Wii, original Nintendo hardware
(French,
Google Translate link
).
How has this seemingly impossible task been achieved? Seasoned Mac enthusiasts will remember the days when Apple machines used PowerPC processors, and the Wii uses a PowerPC chip that’s a close cousin of those used in the Mac G3 series of computers. Since the Wii can run a Linux-based OS, it can therefore run
Mac-on-Linux
, providing in theory an environment in which it can host one of the PowerPC versions of MacOS.
The installation sequence has more than its share of difficulties, but eventually he was able to get the Wii running MacOS 9, the last classic MacOS. It runs
DOOM
, Internet Explorer 5, and iTunes even on these limited resources, though the last package had display and sound issues. He then tries a MacOS X build, but without success.
It’s fair to say that this is not exactly a way to get your hands on a cheap Mac, and remains more of an exercise in pushing a console beyond its original function. But it’s still an interesting diversion, and maybe someone will in time make a MacOS X version work on the Wii too. If you’re curious about the Mac-in-a-Wii that inspired this work,
you can see it here
. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6536010",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T14:44:07",
"content": "Nonintendo WhyMac?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6536019",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T14:52:51",
"conten... | 1,760,372,487.361832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/24/pie-stop-for-emergency-dns-needs/ | Pie Stop For Emergency DNS Needs | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Network Hacks",
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"ad",
"advertisement",
"blocking",
"button",
"dns",
"emergency stop",
"ESP-01",
"ESP8266",
"estop",
"filter",
"network",
"Pi-hole"
] | The war on Internet ads rages on, as the arms race between ad blockers and ad creators continues to escalate. To make a modern Internet experience even remotely palatable, plenty of people are turning to DNS-level filters to stop the ads from coming into the network at all. This solution isn’t without its collateral damage though, as the black lists available sometimes filter out something that should have made it to the user.
For those emergencies, [Kristopher] created the Pie Stop,
a physical button to enact a temporary passthrough on his Pi-Hole.
While [Kristopher] is capable of recognizing a problem and creating the appropriate white list for any of these incidents, others in his household do not find this task as straighforward. When he isn’t around to fix the problems, this emergency stop can be pressed by anyone to temporarily halt the DNS filtering and allow all traffic to pass through the network. It’s based on the ESP-01S, a smaller ESP8266 board with only two GPIO pins. When pressed, it sends a custom command to the Pi-Hole to disable the ad blocking. A battery inside the case allows it to be placed conveniently anywhere near anyone who might need it.
With this button deployed, network snafus can be effectively prevented even with the most aggressive of DNS-level ad blocking. If you haven’t thought about deploying one of these on your own network, they’re hard to live without once you see how powerful they are.
Take a look at this one which also catches spam
. | 37 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535763",
"author": "R",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T09:23:21",
"content": "Or just host a web page on that same Pi that anyone can access from their device , and do this in software (click button graphic to run pihole stop script)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,372,487.437201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/trackball-split-keyboard-will-roll-into-your-heart/ | Trackball Split Keyboard Will Roll Into Your Heart | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"monoblock split",
"split keyboard",
"trackball"
] | One of the nicest problems to have with a split keyboard, even a monoblock split, is deciding what to put in the middle. Most people go for either the mouse, or else their beverage of choice. Some might sub in a bowl of snacks later on in the day. Personally, we most often use the space for holding notes.
[AlSaMoMo] went with the mouse,
but decided to make it a permanent installation
. They planted a trackball in the middle of Batreeq, their awesome little monoblock split. For a while now, [AlSaMoMo] has been using 30-key ‘boards and wanted to see about integrating a trackball. Not only that, Batreeq has a fun-looking scroll ring and haptic feedback. Plus, it just looks fantastic.
Even though Batreeq is vaguely bat-shaped, the word translates to ‘penguin’, which, on second glance, the keyboard does appear a bit villainous. But fear not,
Batreeq’s PCB is open source
, as are
all of [AlSaMoMo]’s keyboards
.
Want to have more space between your hands?
Check out this split that uses VGA connections
.
Via
KBD #103 | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535669",
"author": "Raniz",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T06:43:14",
"content": "Neat. I just got my ZSA Moonlander and are starting to test out alternate layouts. I have no idea how you’d get by with only 30 keys, but I’m intrigued. Will need to work on my own layout to use layers bett... | 1,760,372,487.311276 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/sick-beats-using-music-and-smartphone-to-attack-a-biosafety-room/ | Sick Beats: Using Music And Smartphone To Attack A Biosafety Room | Dan Maloney | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"attack",
"biohazard",
"biosecurity",
"bisafety",
"BSL",
"differential pressure",
"negative pressure",
"spoof"
] | Imagine a movie featuring a scene set in a top-secret bioweapons research lab. The villain, clad in a bunny suit, strides into the inner sanctum of the facility — one of the biosafety rooms where only the most infectious and deadliest microorganisms are handled. Tension mounts as he pulls out his phone; surely he’ll use it to affect some dramatic hack, or perhaps set off an explosive device. Instead, he calls up his playlist and… plays a song? What kind of villain is this?
As it turns out, perhaps one who has read a new paper on
the potential for hacking biosafety rooms using music
. The work was done by University of California Irvine researchers [
Anomadarshi Barua], [Yonatan Gizachew Achamyeleh], and [Mohammad Abd
ullah Al Faruque], and focuses on the negative pressure rooms found in all sorts of facilities, but are of particular concern where they are used to prevent pathogens from escaping into the world at large.
Negative pressure rooms use sophisticated HVAC systems to keep a lower pressure inside the room compared to the outside, and go to great lengths to keep it that way.
The control systems for such rooms rely on differential pressure sensors, which detect the difference in pressure between two ports separated by a thin diaphragm. The diaphragm’s deflection due to pressure differences between the two ports can be sensed either capacitively or piezoresistively.
Trouble is, the diaphragms tend to have resonant frequencies in the audio range, making them vulnerable to spoofing. Several different commonly used sensors were evaluated with audio frequency sweeps, showing a resonance sweet spot at 700 to 900 Hz. This is right in the ballpark for embedding into an audio track, allowing the attacker to hide in plain sight — or sound, as the case may be. Tweaking the sensor with this frequency can potentially convince the control system to make an adjustment that removes air — and any pathogens it contains — from the room. You can imagine the rest.
We’ve become quite fond of finding and reporting on some of the oddest of oddball side-channel attack vectors, like
potato chip bags
and
clicky keyboards
. This attack is particularly terrifying since it seems both more plausible and has much higher stakes.
Featured image: by Steve Zylius / University of California Irvine
[via
TechXplore
] | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535539",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-11-24T03:03:51",
"content": "” You can imagine the rest.”Dumped into the outside air.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6535951",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,487.264131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/23/the-fastest-fourier-transform-in-the-west/ | The Fastest Fourier Transform In The West | Dave Walker | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"fast fourier transform",
"fft",
"IEEE 754",
"julia",
"optimisation",
"signal processing",
"trigonometry"
] | An interesting aspect of time-varying waveforms is that by using a trick called a Fourier Transform (FT), they can be represented as the sum of their underlying frequencies. This mathematical insight is extremely helpful when processing signals digitally, and allows a simpler way to implement frequency-dependent filtration in a digital system. [klafyvel] needed this capability for a project, so started researching the best method that would fit into an Arduino Uno. In an effort to understand exactly what was going on they have
significantly improved on the code size, execution time and accuracy
of the previous crown-wearer.
A complete real-time Fourier Transform is a resource-heavy operation that needs more than an Arduino Uno can offer, so faster approximations have been developed over the years that exchange absolute precision for speed and size. These are known as Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs). [klafyvel] set upon diving deep into the mathematics involved, as well as some low-level programming techniques to figure out if the trade-offs offered in the existing solutions had been optimized. The results are impressive.
Benchmarking results showing speed of implementation versus the competition (ApproxFFT)
Not content with producing one new award-winning algorithm, what is
documented on the blog
is a masterclass in really understanding a problem and there are no less than four algorithms to choose from depending on how you rank the importance of execution speed, accuracy, code size or array size.
Along the way, we are treated to some great diversions into
how to approximate floats by their exponents
(French text), how to control, program and gather data from an Arduino using
Julia
, how to massively improve the speed of the code by using
trigonometric identities
and how to deal with overflows when the variables get too large. There is a lot to digest in here, but the explanations are very clear and peppered with code snippets to make it easier and if you have the time to read through, you’re sure to learn a lot! The code is
on GitHub here
.
If you’re interested in FFTs, we’ve seen them before around these parts. Fill your boots with
this link
of tagged projects. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535151",
"author": "Koren",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T09:20:38",
"content": "I’m not sure I understand how Fast Fourier Transform (as in Cooley-Tuckey algorithm) is an approximation or a “real” Fourier transform of a discrete signal… The algorithm gives an exact solution of a discre... | 1,760,372,487.498845 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/local-iot-cat-treat-dispenser/ | Local IOT Cat Treat Dispenser | Abe Connelly | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"internet hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"28BYJ-48",
"3d printed",
"cat food",
"IoT",
"raspberry pi",
"treat dispenser",
"uln2003"
] | [MostElectronics], like many of us, loves cats, and so wanted to make an internet connected treat dispenser for their most beloved. The result is
an ingenious 3D printed mechanism
connected to a Raspberry Pi that’s able to serve treats through a locally run web application.
From the software side, the Raspberry Pi uses a RESTful API that one can connect to through a static IP. The API is implemented as a Python Flask application running under a stand alone web server Python script. The web application itself keeps track of the number of treats left and provides a simple interface to dispense treats at the operators leisure. The
RpiMotorLib
Python library is used to control a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor through its ULN2003 controller module, which is used to rotate the inside shaft of the treat dispenser.
The mechanism to dispense treats is a stacked, compartmentalized drum, with two drum layers for food compartments that turn to drop treats. The bottom drum dispenses treats through a chute connected to the tray for the cat, leaving an empty compartment that the top drum can replenish by dropping its treats into through a staggered opening. Each compartmentalized treat drum layer provides 11 treats, allowing for a total of 22 treats with two layers stacked on top of each other. One could imagine extending the treat dispenser to include more drum layers by adding even more layers.
Source code is
available
on GitHub and the STL files for the dispenser are available on
Thingiverse
. We’ve seen
cat electronic feeders
before, sometimes with escalating consequences that shake us to our core and leave us questioning our superiority.
Video after the break!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Mx5WoefZ2h0 | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535162",
"author": "Jeboa",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T10:04:29",
"content": "Would be great to see this ported to work using a Pi Pico W.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6535230",
"author": "Matias",
"timestamp... | 1,760,372,489.17682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/fuel-cell-catalyst-less-is-more/ | Fuel Cell Catalyst: Less Is More | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"fuel cell",
"hydrogen"
] | A fuel cell is almost like a battery that has replenishable fuel. Instead of charging a battery with an electric current, you recharge a fuel cell with something like hydrogen or you simply consume it from a tank much as an internal combustion engine consumes gasoline. However, fuel cells usually use a catalyst — it isn’t consumed in the reaction, but it is necessary and many fuel cells use platinum as a catalyst which is expensive. But what if you could use less catalyst and get a better result? That’s what researchers in Canada and the US
are claiming in a recent paper
. The key isn’t how much catalyst they are using, but rather the shape of the catalyst.
Of course, everyone wants to use less of the expensive catalyst but polymer electrolyte fuel cells have had a particular problem where reducing the amount of catalyst used causes a disproportionate drop in cell performance. This new approach uses spherical catalyst support that improves the distribution and utilization of the catalyst.
One of the biggest problems with hydrogen fuel cells, of course, remains the storage of the hydrogen. Toyota has
a proposed answer for that
. We’ve also seen proposals for storing it in a paste form.
We are always surprised we don’t see more homebrew activity in the area of practical fuel cells. Sure, there’s
RACHEL the drone
. The last big push we saw was back in 2015, but those projects have either disappeared or
suspended further work
. | 14 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535089",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T03:42:11",
"content": "I did fuel cells for 10 years. I taught a class on fuel cells for 3 years. I still love fuel cells",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6535136",
"... | 1,760,372,489.079596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/home-built-cpu-runs-with-home-built-toolchain/ | Home-Built CPU Runs With Home-Built Toolchain | Dave Rowntree | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"cpu",
"custom",
"FPU",
"isa",
"risc"
] | A few years ago [Takaya Saeki] and fellow students of the University of Tokyo, were given a very limited instruction during their ‘CPU exercise’ class, along the lines of:
Take this ray-tracing program written in OCaml and run it on your CPU implemented on an FPGA
Splitting into groups to cover the CPU, FPU, simulator tool, and compiler toolchain, the students started with designing a RISC ISA, then designed a CPU around that. You can follow along with the
retrospective writeup of the class
, then dive into the GitHub pages for each of the components of the system, although the commentary is mainly in Japanese. Hey, you can google translate right?
The original task was to run a raytracing demo on the FPGA-hosted CPU, but the students went much further, porting Xv6, which is a Unix-like OS intended for educational use,
provided by MIT
, then ran the OCaml raytracing demo on top of that. Xv6 is intended for x86, not their own ISA, so a significant amount of work was needed on the compiler toolchain. The obvious path would be to port LLVM or GCC, but the group decided it would be more fun to make their C89-compliant toolchain from scratch, and
UCC
was born!
The
original CPU
did not have an MMU or interrupt handling, so this needed to be added to the design as well as the simulator. One of the gang added the extra hardware features needed to support the Unix-like OS, producing a
new CPU design, which they named GAIA
. The final version of Xv6 for the GAIA CPU can be
found here
. If you want to play around with this, they even made a Javascript version (using emscripten) so you can
have a go in your browser
! Blimey, and we thought our student projects were hard, let alone doing
this
much for extra credit!
Now, we know what you’re thinking — the number one question — can it run doom? We don’t know yet, but here on Hackaday, there’s always
another one around the corner that can
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6535031",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2022-11-23T00:08:40",
"content": "And here I was proud that the CPU I created for my processor design class could execute one instruction in simulation…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,372,489.49013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/new-metric-prefixes-get-bigger-and-smaller/ | New Metric Prefixes Get Bigger And Smaller | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"metrology",
"si units",
"units"
] | It always fascinates us that every single thing that is made had to be designed by someone. Even something as simple as a bag and box that holds cereal. Someone had to work out the dimensions, the materials, the printing on it, and assign it a UPC code. Those people aren’t always engineers, but someone has to think it out no matter how mundane it is before it can be made. But what about the terms we use to express things? Someone has to work those out, too. In the case of metric prefixes like kilo, mega, and pico, it is apparently the General Conference on Weights and Measures that recently had its 27th session. As a result of that, we have
four more metric prefixes
to learn: ronna, quetta, ronto, and quecto.
Apparently, the new prefixes are to accommodate “big data” which is rapidly producing more data than there are atoms in the Universe. There were actually
proposed earlier in a slightly different form
but accepted at the conference. Apparently quecca is too close to a Portuguese swear word. So what do these actually mean? A QB (quettabyte) would be 10
30
bytes while an RB (ronnabyte) is only 10
27
. So 1 QB would be 1,000,000 yottabytes (YB) the previous top of the scale.
On the other end of the scale, the previous tiny measure was the yocto. So a yW or yactowatt, would be 10
-24
watts. A rw (rontowatt) is 10
-27
and the qw or quectowatt is 10
-30
. The larger end of the scale seems more practical as now the sun weighs 2,000 quettagrams instead of 2,000,0000 yottagrams. In the old days, we used to mix prefixes like micro-micro farad instead of picofarad, so you could also say it was 2 mega-yottagrams, but that use has fallen out of favor in modern times.
We were sorry the earlier proposal by a student for ronna failed. The proposal would have had the prefix as “hella” as in a “hellawatt.” At least you’d remember it. Apparently, though, it wasn’t a serious contender because the new entries have to have a unique letter and they try to avoid things that measure common physical units although some of the older ones do. So hella, for example, clashes with both henry — the unit of inductance — and hecto, which is an existing prefix. If you write HW that’s a hectowatt, not a hellawatt. At least in ended in “a” and not “o” which indicates a positive power of 10 instead of a negative power, but that wasn’t enough to earn it a spot on the list.
Of course, the real politics in metrology isn’t the naming of things, but rather
the definition of the units
. Some people really
get into that
. | 72 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534943",
"author": "Doug",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T21:09:24",
"content": "Who the hell is using prefixes after your exponent gets to like 10^+/-18? Other than “science enthusiasts”, of course.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,372,489.777826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/minimalist-6502-system-uses-a-cpu-and-not-much-else/ | Minimalist 6502 System Uses A CPU And Not Much Else | Robin Kearey | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"65c02",
"breadboard",
"minimalism",
"single board computer"
] | A central processing unit, or CPU, is the heart of any computer system. But it’s definitely not the only part: you also need RAM, ROM and at least some peripherals to turn it into a complete system that can actually do something useful. Modern microcontrollers typically have some or all of these functions integrated into a single chip, but classic CPUs don’t: they were meant to be placed on motherboards along with dozens of other chips. That’s why [c0pperdragon]’s latest project,
the SingleBreadboardComputer, is such an amazing design:
assisting its 6502 CPU are just four companion chips.
The entire system takes up just one strip of solderless breadboard. Next to the CPU we find 32 KB of SRAM, 32 KB of flash and a clock oscillator. The fifth chip is a 74HC00 quad two-input NAND gate, which is used as a very tiny piece of glue logic to connect everything together. Two of its NAND gates are used for address decoding logic, allowing either the ROM or RAM chip to be selected depending on the state of the CPU’s A15 line as well as blocking the RAM during the low phase of the system clock. The latter function is needed because the address lines are not guaranteed to be stable during the low phase and could cause writes to random memory locations.
The remaining two NAND gates are connected as an RS-flipflop in order to implement a serial output. This is needed because the CPU cannot keep its outputs in the same state for multiple clock cycles, which is required for a serial port. Instead, [c0pperdragon] uses the MLB pin, normally used to implement multiprocessor systems, to generate two-clock pulses, and stores the state in the flipflop for as long as needed. A few well-timed software routines can then be used to transmit and receive serial data without any further hardware.
Currently, the only software for this system is a simple demonstration that sends back data received on its serial port, but if you fancy a challenge you could write programs to do pretty much anything. You could probably find some inspiration in
other minimalist 6502 boards
, or projects that
emulate a complete motherboard in an FPGA
. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534920",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T20:26:13",
"content": "https://content.thetechnickel.com/misc/fc6502/fc6502.png",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6534927",
"author": "c0pperdragon",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,489.287978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/a-hacker-walks-into-a-trade-show-electronica-2022/ | A Hacker Walks Into A Trade Show: Electronica 2022 | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"electronica 2022",
"parts",
"trade fair"
] | Last week, the world’s largest electronics trade fair took place in Munich, so I had to attend.
Electronica
is so big that it happens only once every two years and fills up 14 airplane hangars. As the fairly generic name suggests, it covers anything and everything having to do with electronics. From the producers of your favorite MLCC capacitors to the firms that deliver them to your doorstep, from suppliers of ASIC test equipment to the little shop that’ll custom wind toroids for you, that’s a pretty wide scope. Walking around, I saw tomorrow’s technology today from the big players, but I also picked up some ideas that would be useful for the home gamer.
When I first walked in, for instance, I ran into the Elantas booth. They’re a company that makes flexible insulation and specialty industrial coatings. But what caught my eye was a thermoformed plastic sheet with circuit traces on it. To manufacture them, they cut out copper foil, glue it to a flat plastic sheet with a glue that has a little give, and then put it all together into a vacuum former. The result is a 3D circuit and organically formed substrate in one shot. Very cool, and none of the tech for doing that is outside of the reach of the determined hacker.
The Cool Stuff
All of the stands, big or small, try to lure you in with some gimmick. The big fish, firms with deep pockets, put up huge signs and open bars, and are staffed by no shortage of salespeople in suits. The little fish, on the other hand, have to resort to showing you the cool stuff that they do, and it’s more often the application engineers sitting there, ready to talk tech. You can guess which I found more interesting.
For instance when I walked up to an obviously DIY popcorn popper that was also showing 5000 FPS footage of kernels in mid-pop, I had to ask. The company in question was a small UK outfit that made custom programmable power supplies and digital acquisition gear that interfaced with it. You could plug in their box to some temperature probes, fire off the high-speed video camera, and control the heating and cooling profile without writing any code. Very sweet.
The engineer who designed the demo was also running it, and we got into a long discussion of just how you measure the temperature anyway. He had one thermocouple on the converted heat-gun, one in the popcorn kernels, and one on the other side. He was triggering the camera off of the kernels, but there was this strange temperature anomaly in the logs of the post-kernel temperature, because popped popcorn releases steam, and at the same time is a good insulator. I love this kind of attention to crazy details, and
I roast my own coffee in a very similar setup
, so I sympathize.
Your IC goes here
Popcorn at 5000 FPS
I got into really interesting discussions with an engineer who designed custom chip-testing rigs. While they were mostly designing for lower voltages and currents, he told tales of implausibly small test pins that would nonetheless carry tens of amps.
A
company that makes power electronics and test equipment
sponsored the
solar-electric vehicle team from RWTH Aachen
, and they had their vehicle there to look at along with a university student who worked on the project. I must have spent half an hour talking with him about all of the little details that went into the design of their
World Solar Challenge contending car
. Most everything is hand-made on the vehicle, from the ultra-lightweight carbon fiber frame to the single-board computer that records all of the data and relays it to the chase van, as well as serving as a communication channel for the driver. The name of the game in solar cars is aerodynamics, and the car has fenders that fit the wheels with about 5 mm clearance, a wing-shaped solar panel, and three wheels to absolutely minimize the amount of air displaced. It had shark-skin tape on the sides, and when I asked about the
coefficient of drag
, he said it was a secret but that it started with a zero after the decimal point, even after rounding. Yowza.
The real panels are too fragile
Custom everything
Computer is in the 3DP black box
One company was making haptic actuator modules for use in automotive applications, for instance. Basically, you couple a capacitive sensor strip on the back side of a plastic moulding with their product – a small magnetic speaker-like device – and it vibrates when you press it. The effect is much like the haptic vibration on pressing the cell phone screen. But the idea of using a small speaker coil to do what you would normally do with a spinning weight was interesting.
Finally, I’ll admit to having spent way too much time in the testing and automation sections, with not enough hacker-friendly takeaways to warrant it. But it’s just so cool to watch real-time BGA X-ray inspection machines, high-speed pick-and-place, or PCB-testing robots do their thing.
The Next Stuff
MicroLED displays are the new hotness. Of the displays, by far the most impressive was a
114 DPI screen at the Tianma booth
. I don’t know anything about pricing or availability, and if you have to ask you probably can’t afford it. I’m also not exactly sure what the point is. They had them configured as HUDs for automotive applications, but it
loses the virtue of a dedicated HUD that the focus it out near infinity
. But as far as the tech goes, they looked very very cool. I bumped into [Mike Harrison] of
Mike’s Electric Stuff
fame, and he was wondering if he could get them into an art project.
114 DPI LEDs
Bigger LEDs
Organic solar cells were entirely new to me, but I bumped into them twice at Electronica. First off, I encountered
Dracula Technologies
. (Nice name!) They make inkjet-printable organic solar cells, and can thus customize the cell shape. Unfortunately, they are aimed at custom production runs for now. Again, if you have to ask…
Later, I stopped by the
Epishine
booth, which was displaying similar organic solar cells, but in a roll-to-roll process that turns them out in traditional squares. Off-the-shelf squares aren’t as sexy as custom shapes, but the advantage is that you can
buy them right now
. We might wait until the price comes down a little bit as they ramp up production, but they handed me an evaluation kit and it’s pretty cool, charging up a 0.4 F supercap in about four hours in my brightly lit mid-day office.
A solar-powered LED. So you can see in the dark.
Both of these organic solar technologies are on very thin and flexible plastic substrates, and both are tuned to optimally harvest the amounts of light that you commonly find inside.
This video explainer
is pretty good. Since the target is ambient indoor lighting, these cells produce microwatts rather than megawatts, but if you are looking to deploy a small sensor device indoors with a low duty cycle, something like this could be just the ticket.
Or you could drive an ultra low power display. On the way out, I ran by ynvisible, a company that
makes displays using polymer electrochromic inks
, coincidentally in the same factory as Epishine. The result is something like low contrast and slow-to-refresh e-ink, but on a much thinner substrate and using nanowatts. Because the displays are screen-printed, setup costs for custom displays are also supposedly affordable. Talking to one of the engineers, he mentioned that the tech should be DIYable. Anyone know more about
electrochromic polymers
? I love the way they fade in and out.
The Weird Stuff: Capacitors at the Beach
Put yourself in different shoes for a minute. You run a factory that manufactures resistors, weaves
wiring harnesses
, or winds toroidal transformers. What are you going to do for eye-candy at the big trade fair? How are you going to arrange those crimp connectors to draw foot traffic? I’m always amused by the clever and absurd displays put on by the makers of the less
sexy
electronics. So here’s a tribute to what I call “Capacitors at the Beach”, both from 2022 and from 2018.
This is where we grow the trimpots
Well, hello!
What if we spell out our name?
Connectors in the Desert
Timelessness and Timebases
Wagos in the Wastes
Copper clippies?
That’s not a bus bar, THIS is a bus bar
3.5 MJ water-cooled resistors. For nuclear subs.
Well, it’s BECK.
Company makes ASICS, but everyone loves robot arms
LEDs on a Pedestal
Literally 1 m tall spade connectors
Ferrule Flowers
Edgar makes harnesses
No explanation needed?
Transformers
Set sail on the seas of resistors
Coils in acrylic
Tasteful transformers
Come for the wine, stay for the PCBs
Taiyo Yuden was giving out plastic sushi and unmarked MLCC SMT caps. I took the sushi.
And David Hasselhoff. Photo Markus Broenner, Messe Muenchen
Electronica 2024
I made my best effort, and still there were corners of the show that I never visited and people I didn’t see because I was only there two days. It’s a big show, and it turned my brain to mush and put blisters on my feet. But it was worth it. If you’re able to make one, you absolutely should.
Featured image of the crowd, and thumbnail of David Hasselhoff by Markus Brönner, copyright Messe München | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534898",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T19:00:49",
"content": "“Hasselhoff at the Beach” was a beer can pyramid. Those Germans sure do love David Hasselhoff. RIP, Norm.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6535017",
... | 1,760,372,489.376894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/start-your-engines-the-fpv-contest-begins-now/ | Start Your Engines: The FPV Contest Begins Now! | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"contest",
"drone",
"FPV",
"quad",
"remote",
"rover",
"tank",
"video"
] | There are places that you can go in person, but for everything else, there’s FPV. Whether you’re flying race quads, diving the depths in a yellow submarine, or simply roving the surface of the land,
we want to see your builds
. If it’s remote controlled, and you feel like you’re in the pilot’s seat, it’s FPV.
That’s you in the car
.
When you say “first person view” many of you will instinctively follow up with “flight” or “drone”. But given the ease of adding a camera and remote control to almost any vehicle, there’s no reason to
only
fly the FPV skies. (Of course, we want to see your crazy quadcopter builds too.)
We went looking for a few less-traditional examples to whet your appetite, and we found a lot. There are
super-cute FPV bots for indoors
and
more robust tanks for cruising around the neighborhood
. In the summer, you’ll probably need an
FPV lawnmower
, and for the winter, naturally, an
FPV snowblower
or a
budget-friendly FPV snow-boat
. Or skip the outdoors entirely and terrorize the pool with an
FPV sub
.
This contest isn’t exclusively about the vehicles either. If you’re working on the tech that makes FPV possible, we want you to enter. For instance, this
simple quad/drone tracker
will help keep your video feed running and your mind on flying.
This cockpit
will make the immersion more complete. And nobody likes the jello-cam effect that excess vibration can cause, so we’d like to see
camera hacks
as well.
And of course, your quads. Is your FPV quad too fast, too light, or does it fly too far?
Show us.
The contest starts now and runs until Jan 3, 2023, and there are three $150 shopping sprees courtesy of Digi-Key on the line. Get hacking! | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534861",
"author": "Kip",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T17:26:24",
"content": "2 Possible typo’s here: One you say “whet your appetite” I think you mean “wet” and did you mean the contest ends in 2023 or in 2033 like you wrote?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,489.233403 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/an-open-source-modular-flexure-construction-set/ | An Open Source Modular Flexure Construction Set | Dave Rowntree | [
"Parts"
] | [
"3d printing",
"flexure",
"GrabCAD",
"mechanism"
] | Flexures are one of those innocent-looking mechanisms that one finds inside practically any kind of consumer device. Providing constrained movements with small displacements, complete with controlled tension, they can be rather tricky to design. GrabCAD designer [Vyacheslav Popov] hails from Ukraine, and due to the current situation there, plans to sell a collection of flexure building blocks became difficult. In the end, [Vyacheslav] decided to generously
release his work open source
, for all to enjoy. This collection is quite extensive, looking like it could solve a huge variety of flexure design problems. (Links to the first three sets:
Set00
,
Set01
,
Set02
but check the author’s collection page for many others)
It’s not just those super-cheap mechanisms in throw-away gadgets that leverage flexures, it’s much more. The Mars rovers use flexure-based suspension, scientific instruments (interferometers and the like) make use of them for small motions where specific axis constraints are needed, and finally, MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes are based entirely upon them. We’re not even going to try to name examples of flexures in the natural world. They’re everywhere. And, now we’ve got some more design examples to use, so why not flex your flexure muscles and send one to the 3D printer and have a play?
We see flexures here quite a bit, like this
nice demonstration of achievable accuracy
. Flexures can
make some delicious mechanisms
, and
neat 3D printable input devices
.
Thanks to [Addison] for the tip! | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534840",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T16:51:30",
"content": "This looks very interesting. It’s unfortunate that it’s not better documented. I will download the files and play with it. This looks like a very useful set of building blocks for developing more complex moti... | 1,760,372,489.127716 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/spoofing-lidar-could-blind-autonomous-vehicles-to-obstacles/ | Spoofing LIDAR Could Blind Autonomous Vehicles To Obstacles | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"autonomous driving",
"autonomous vehicles",
"car hacks",
"cars",
"lidar",
"lidar spoofing"
] | Humans manage to drive in an acceptable fashion using just two eyes and two ears to sense the world around them. Autonomous vehicles are kitted out with sensor packages altogether more complex. They typically rely on radar, lidar, ultrasonic sensors, or cameras all working in concert to detect the road conditions ahead.
While humans are pretty wily and difficult to fool, our robot driving friends are less robust. Some researchers are concerned that LiDAR sensors could be spoofed, hiding obstacles and tricking driverless cars into crashes, or worse.
Where Did It Go?
Using a laser to send false echoes back to a LiDAR sensor on an autonomous vehicle can be used to hide objects from its field of view. Credit: Research paper, Cao, Yulong and Bhupathiraju, S. Hrushikesh and Naghavi, Pirouz and Sugawara, Takeshi and Mao, Z. Morley and Rampazzi, Sara
LiDAR is so named as it is a light-based equivalent of radar technology. Unlike radar, though, it’s still typically treated as an acronym rather than a word in its own right. The technology sends out laser pulses and captures the light reflected back from the environment. Pulses returning from objects further away take longer to arrive back at the LiDAR sensor, allowing the sensor to determine the range of objects around it. It’s typically considered the gold-standard sensor for autonomous driving purposes. This is due to its higher accuracy and reliability compared to radar for object detection in automotive environments. Plus, it offers highly-detailed depth data which is simply not available from a regular 2D camera.
A new research paper
has demonstrated an adversarial method of tricking LiDAR sensors. The method uses a laser to selectively hide certain objects from being “seen” by the LiDAR sensor. The paper calls this a “Physical Removal Attack,” or PRA.
The theory of the attack relies on the way LiDAR sensors work. Typically, these sensors prioritize stronger reflection over weaker ones. This means that a powerful signal sent by an attacker will be prioritized over a weaker reflection from the environment. LiDAR sensors and the autonomous driving frameworks that sit atop them also typically discard detections below a certain minimum distance to the sensor. This is typically on the order from 50 mm to 1000 mm away.
The attack works by firing infrared laser pulses that mimic real echoes the LiDAR device is expecting to receive. The pulses are synchronised to match the firing time of the victim LiDAR sensor, in order to control the perceived location of spoofed points by the sensor. By firing bright laser pulses to imitate echoes at the sensor, the sensor will typically ignore the weaker real echoes picked up from an object in its field of view. This alone may be enough to hide the obstacle from the LiDAR sensor, but would seem to create a spoofed object very close to the sensor. However, since many LiDAR sensors discard excessively close echo returns, the sensor will likely discard them entirely. If the sensor doesn’t discard the data, the filtering software running on its point cloud output may do so itself. The resulting effect is the LiDAR will show no valid point cloud data in an area where it should be picking up an obstacle.
The attack requires some knowledge, but is surprisingly practical to achieve. One need only do some research to target various types of LiDAR used on autonomous vehicles to whip up a suitable spoofing apparatus. The attack works even if the attacker is firing false echoes towards the LiDAR from an angle, such as from the side of the road.
The top image shows the LiDAR scene under normal conditions. The bottom shot shows the scene with a Physical Removal Attack in progress. In a small segment of the LiDAR’s rotational travel, false echoes below the sensor’s minimum distance threshold are ignored. Thus, for a segment of the LiDAR’s rotation, no points are detected and the pedestrian in the road is hidden. Credit: Research paper, Cao, Yulong and Bhupathiraju, S. Hrushikesh and Naghavi, Pirouz and Sugawara, Takeshi and Mao, Z. Morley and Rampazzi, Sara
This has dangerous implications for autonomous driving systems relying on LiDAR sensor data. This technique could allow an adversary to hide obstacles from an autonomous car. Pedestrians at a crosswalk could be hidden from LiDAR, as could stopped cars at a traffic light. If the autonomous car does not “see” an obstacle ahead, it may go ahead and drive through – or into – it. With this technique, it’s harder to hide closer objects than those that are farther away. However, hiding an object even for a few seconds might leave an autonomous vehicle with too little time to stop when it finally detects a hidden obstacle.
Outside of erasing objects from a LiDAR’s view, other spoofing attacks are possible too. Earlier work by researchers has involved tricking LiDAR sensors into seeing phantom objects.
This is remarkably simple to achieve
– one only need transmit laser pulses towards a victim LiDAR that indicate a wall or other obstacle ahead.
The research team note that there are some defences against this technique. The attack tends to carve out an angular slice from the LiDAR’s reported point cloud. Detecting this gap can indicate that a removal attack may be taking place. Alternatively, methods exist that involve comparing shadows to those expected to be cast by objects detected (or not) in the LiDAR point cloud.
Overall, protecting against spoofing attacks could become important as self-driving cars become more mainstream. At the same time, it’s important to contemplate what is and isn’t realistic to defend against. For example, human drivers are susceptible to crashing when their cars are hit with eggs or rocks thrown from an overpass. Automakers didn’t engineer advanced anti-rock lasers and super-wipers to clear egg smears. Instead, laws are enforced to discourage these attacks. It may simply be a matter of extending similar enforcement to bad actors running around with complicated laser gear on the side of the highway. In all likelihood, a certain amount of both approaches will be necessary. | 74 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534805",
"author": "TW",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T15:33:59",
"content": "XKCD addressed something like this a while ago.https://xkcd.com/1958/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6534874",
"author": "anotherArticle",
... | 1,760,372,489.675649 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/if-your-drone-flies-eat-it/ | If Your Drone Flies, Eat It! | Jenny List | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"drone",
"edible drone",
"edible technology"
] | Over the years we’ve featured countless drone projects here at Hackaday, fixed wing, rotary wing, multi-rotor, and more. Among them all we think there may be a type that we’ve never seen, but that is about to change as it’s the first time we’ve brought you
an edible drone
.
Why might you need an edible drone, you ask? It’s not to conceal the evidence after closing an airport — instead it’s a research project from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to produce an efficient means of bringing sustenance to stranded climbers. The St. Bernard dogs are out of a job, it’s now done the modern way!
Jokes aside, this is clearly an experimental craft, a fixed-wing monoplane whose wings are made from rice cakes and gelatin. A stranded climber could certainly munch away at those airofoils, but we’re guessing a real device would need something a little more nutritious while retaining the light cellular structure.
This may be our first edible drone, but it’s not the first piece of
edible technology
we’ve brought you. | 29 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534736",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T12:28:59",
"content": "So the wings will disintegrate with the slightest hint of precipitation and using a standard drone with sustenance in a weatherproof wrapping would of course be way to simple.Is it April fools yet?",
"p... | 1,760,372,489.4398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/22/anime-inspired-holographic-virtual-assistant/ | Anime Inspired Holographic Virtual Assistant | Abe Connelly | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"digital assistant",
"hologram",
"home-assistant",
"virtual assistant",
"voice control"
] | [Jessp] has created a very cute and endearing
DIY virtual assistant called Maria
. The build combines a 3D printed housing that uses a modern take on the “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion to render a virtual, three-dimensional anime inspired assistant that can take commands to get information about the weather, play music or set timers.
The hub houses a Raspberry Pi 4B and a 3.2 inch LCD HDMI screen mounted flat on its back to render the perspective corrected “Maria” character using a technique borrowed from the
Pepper’s Cone
project. Polycarbonate sheets are formed into a cone, allowing for the 3D effect of rendering the virtual assistant model. A consumer grade mini USB microphone is used to receive voice commands along with a consumer grade USB speaker for audio feedback. The virtual assistant offloads the text to speech services to Google Cloud, along with using a weather API and Spotify developer account to for its musical options.
All source code is available on [Jessp]’s GitHub
page
, including build instructions and STL files for the housing. We’ve featured open source voice assistants in the past, including
Mycroft
and a even a
HAL-9000
virtual assistant (running Kalliope) but it’s nice to see further experimentation in this space. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534701",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T09:42:35",
"content": "This is not holographic and “Pepper´s Cone” effect does not exist.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6534715",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"... | 1,760,372,489.83742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/a-game-boy-advance-downgraded/ | A Game Boy Advance – Downgraded! | Jenny List | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"game boy advance",
"gba",
"lcd",
"rp2040"
] | We feature a large number of game console mods here, because enhancing the experience of using a classic machine often involves some really clever work. But here’s one that’s a bit different, instead of upgrading his Game Boy Advance, [Wenting Zhang]
has downgraded it from a colour screen to a monochrome LCD
. Take a look at the video below the break.
One might ask why this would be necessary, given that there are plenty of backlit colour LCD upgrades already for the GBA, but perhaps people who played the original might understand that it’s about improving the viewability over the rather poor-quality colour LCD original.
Interesting too is the choice of display controller. Where it might be expected to find an FPGA, instead there’s an PR2040. He goes into detail about its programming, and we hope it might inspire any others looking at screen transplants. Meanwhile if the name [Wenting Zhang] means anything to you, it should be for
his other work with mono LCD
s. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534665",
"author": "Teragon",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T06:59:40",
"content": "I’d like to see someone do one of these or even an old Lynx in OLED. Would be something to behold I imagine",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6534669",... | 1,760,372,490.034744 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/better-air-quality-sensing-with-co2/ | Better Air Quality Sensing With CO2 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"air",
"air quality",
"arduino",
"carbon dioxide",
"co2",
"eink",
"sensor",
"VOC"
] | Measuring air quality, as anyone who has tried to tackle this problem can attest, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Even once the nebulous term “quality” is defined, most sensors use something as a proxy for overall air health. One common method is to use volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as this proxy but as [Larry Bank] found out, using these inside a home with a functional kitchen leads to a lot of inaccurate readings. In the search for a more reliable sensor,
he built this project which uses CO2 to help gauge air quality
.
Most of the reason that CO2 sensors aren’t used as air quality sensors is cost. They are much more expensive than VOC sensors, but [Larry] recently found one that was more affordable and decided to build this project around it. The prototype used an Arduino communicating over I2C to the sensor and an OLED screen, which he eventually put in a 3D printed case to carry around to sample CO2 concentration in various real-world locations. The final project uses a
clever way of interfacing with the e-paper display
that we featured earlier.
While CO2 concentration doesn’t tell the full story of air quality in a specific place, it does play a major role. [Larry] found concentrations as high as 3000 ppm in his home, which can cause a drop in cognitive function. He’s made some lifestyle changes as a result which he reports has had a beneficial impact. For human-occupied indoor spaces, CO2 can easily be the main contributor to poor air quality, and we’ve seen at least
one other project to address this concern directly
. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534652",
"author": "wzhd",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T05:53:54",
"content": "After getting an CO2 meter I found that a VOC sensor wouldn’t be necessary. The CO2 I breathe out alone is enough to make air quality in the bedroom poor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,372,490.088376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/portable-esp32-rgb-lasershow-has-all-the-trimmings/ | Portable ESP32 RGB Lasershow Has All The Trimmings | Jenny List | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"galvanometer",
"laser"
] | Perhaps there was a time when fancy laser effects were beyond those without the largest of bank accounts, but today they can be created surprisingly easily. [Corebb] shows us how with a neat unit using an off the shelf RGB laser module and mirror module,
driven by a ESP32 with software designed to make it as easy as possible to use
.
The video below the break is in Chinese so you’ll have to turn on the subtitles if you’re an Anglophone, and it takes us through the whole process. It’s mounted in an SLA 3D printed enclosure which neatly holds all the parts. The ESP32 module drives a couple of DACs which in turn drive the galvanometer motors through a pair of amplifiers.
Then the software allows all sorts of custom displays for your creative expression, including uploading quick sketches over WiFi. Beyond pretty patterns we see it mounted on a bicycle for a head-up display of speed and navigation info. Even if it does fall off and break at one point we can see that could be an extremely useful accessory.
All the code can be found in a GitHub repository should you wish to try for yourself. Meanwhile we’ve covered a lot of laser projector projects here in the past, including most recently
this one using stepper motors in place of galvanometers
. | 47 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534586",
"author": "brufy",
"timestamp": "2022-11-22T00:17:11",
"content": "it is not dangerous for the eyes his invention? he should not wear protective glasses?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6534680",
"author": "T... | 1,760,372,490.167487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/reverse-engineering-the-seven-words-and-more-you-cant-say-on-tv/ | Reverse Engineering “The Seven Words (and More) You Can’t Say On TV” | Dan Maloney | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"censoring",
"closed captioning",
"EEPPROM",
"nsfw",
"ntsc",
"reverse engineering",
"television"
] | For as visionary as he was, [George Carlin] vastly underestimated the situation with his classic “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” bit. At least judging by
[Ben Eater]’s reverse engineering of the “TVGuardian Foul Language Filter” device
, it seems like the actual number is at least 20 times that.
To begin at the beginning, a couple of weeks ago [Alec] over at everyone’s favorite nerd hangout Technology Connections did
a video on the TVGuardian
, a device that attempted to clean up the language of live TV and recorded programming. Go watch that video for the details, but for a brief summary, TVGuardian worked by scanning the closed caption text for naughty words and phrases, muted the audio when something suggestive was found in a lookup table, and inserted a closed caption substitute for the offensive content. In his video, [Alec] pined for a way to look at the list of verboten words, and [Ben] accepted the challenge.
The naughty word list ended up living on a 93LC86 serial EEPROM, which [Ben] removed from his TVGuardian for further exploration. Rather than just plug it into a programmer and dumping the contents, he decided to roll his own decoder with an Arduino, because that’s more fun. And can we just point out our ongoing amazement that [Ben] is able to make watching someone else code interesting?
The resulting NSFW word list is titillating, of course, and the video would be plenty satisfying if that’s where it ended. But [Ben] went further and figured out how the list is organized, how the dirty-to-clean substitutions are made, and even how certain words are whitelisted. That last bit resulted in the revelation that Hollywood legend [Dick Van Dyke] gets a special whitelisting, lest his name becomes sanitized to a hilarious [Jerk Van Gay].
Hats off to [Alec] for inspiring [Ben]’s fascinating reverse engineering effort here. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534529",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T21:44:06",
"content": "I found the spreadsheet work more impressive than the arduino programming. I didnt even know you could do stuff like that in a spreadsheet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,490.222664 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/making-svd-files-searchable-with-svd2db/ | Making SVD Files Searchable With Svd2db | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"bare metal",
"SVD file"
] | Everyone who writes bare-metal code for microcontrollers probably know the joys of looking up the details of specific registers in the reference manual, including their absolute address. Although the search function of the PDF viewer can be helpful, it’d be rather nice if there was a way to search only the registers, and have the offset calculations performed automatically. This is basically what [Terry Porter]’s
Svd2db
tool enables. As the name suggests, this tool turns the SVD hardware description files that come with ARM-based MCUs into a database file.
This database file is an SQLite database, which allows it to be searched using the provided
readdb
tool, or any other SQLite tool. This would make the utility useful not just for quick look-ups during development, but presumably also for automated testing scenarios where having an easily searchable database of registers is of use. At this point
Svd2db
is guaranteed to work with STM32 SVDs, but may work with SVDs for other ARM-based SVD files as well. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534479",
"author": "Mykrolian",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T19:47:56",
"content": "As rare as it is, there are still occasions to bypass the development SW and tinker with the registers. For example, I had a micropower application that varied in it’s power consumption. It was due to... | 1,760,372,490.784502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/how-to-repair-the-death-of-schematics/ | How To Repair? The Death Of Schematics | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"photofact",
"repair",
"riders"
] | There was a time when, if you were handy with a soldering iron, you could pretty easily open up a radio or TV repair business. You might not get rich, but you could make a good living. And if you had enough business savvy to do sales too, you could do well. These days there aren’t many repair shops and it isn’t any wonder. The price of labor is up and the price of things like TVs drops every day. What’s worse is today’s TV is not only cheaper than last year’s model, but probably also better. Besides that, TVs are full of custom parts you can’t get and jam-packed into smaller and smaller cases.
Case in point, I saw a “black Friday” ad for a 40-inch 1080p flatscreen with a streaming controller for $98. Granted, that’s not huge by today’s standards and I’m sure it isn’t a perfect picture. But for $98? Even a giant high-quality TV these days might cost a bit more than $1,000 and you can get something pretty great for well under $500.
Looking back, a Sears ad showed a great deal on a 19″ color TV in 1980. The price? $399. That doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that today that would be about $1,400. So with a ratio of about 3.5 to 1, a $30/hour service call would be, today, $105. So for an hour’s service call with no parts, I could just buy that 40″ TV. Add even one simple part or another hour and I’m getting close to the big league TVs.
Did you ever wonder how TV repair technicians knew what to do? Well, for one thing, most of the time you didn’t have to. A surprising number of calls would be something simple like a frayed line cord or a dirty tuner. Antenna wires destroyed by critters was common enough. In the tube days, you could pretty easily swap tubes to fix the bulk of actual problems.
Back to the Shop: Riders and Sams
Many shops would send out a junior guy to check out simple things, and then bring everything else “back to the shop” where someone who knew what to do would troubleshoot at the component level. Amazingly, many TVs and other consumer electronics at one time had schematics inside the cabinet for the service person. They were often cramped, though.
A Rider page for an Admiral radio
There were better options. Rider would grab data from all the consumer electronics they could find and they would publish all of it in huge volumes, sometimes a total of 2,000 pages a year. Many of these old volumes
are available on the Internet
.
The other major publisher of service data was Sams Photofacts. These folders would have detailed information compiled about major TVs, radios, CB transmitters, and in a few cases, computers.
Sams is still around and will still sell you their Photofacts, so they are harder to find online. However, there are
some around if you look
. You can also often buy used originals just like you buy a used book. Apparently, the copyright is out on a few of the older ones and there are third parties that will sell copies of those, too. You can sometimes find them at libraries, too.
The Photofact folders were usually very detailed. They would show disassembly instructions and in addition to the schematic, show nominal operating waveforms for the gear, too. It wasn’t unusual to see a picture of a PCB with a grid of letters and numbers to help you find parts on a crowded board.
A grid helped Photofact users locate components
Schematics had nominal waveforms attached
There were even “Computerfacts” for computers like the TRS-80 Model 4
These were akin to the car manuals people often buy for their vehicles. Most service shops would buy these up and save them in case a certain brand of set came in again or the same set needed service later.
Parts
Parts were probably easier to find, too. Now you have many proprietary chips and assemblies that are difficult to source and may not even be marked. Tubes, of course, were ubiquitous. For other parts, service shops often relied on distributors like ECG, which became NTE. They would take parts with wide applicability and package them. They also produced cross-reference books that would tell you what parts you could use to replace common consumer electronics parts.
RCA also provided a similar service with RCA SK transistors and Motorola had HEP as their brand name. Generally, these parts were very expensive compared to what a hobbyist might pay, but they were readily available and were known to fit, so they were often used in the service business.
NTE
is still around and you sometimes find a store with stock of ECG or SK parts, usually in hanging plastic bags or blister packages.
Reuse, Recycle
There is something appealing about repairing things instead of junking them. It should be good for the pocketbook and it is certainly good for the environment. However, the sad case today is that many things are made to be unrepairable. Even if there were parts and schematics, unless you can do it yourself like many of us can, paying someone to do the repair is probably infeasible.
Times have changed
. Unless, of course, you can find a
Repair Café
. | 97 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534439",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T18:18:40",
"content": "But you wouldn’t buy that $399 tv set today. It would be far cheaper. In 1982, you’d think in terms of how much of your salary it cost.The “good old days” was full of inferior technology, and very... | 1,760,372,490.377884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/making-a-do-it-yourself-sand-battery/ | Making A Do-It-Yourself Sand Battery | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"Robert Murray-Smith",
"thermal battery",
"thermal storage"
] | Storing energy can be done in many ways, with the chemical storage method of a battery being one of the most common. Another option is a thermal battery, which basically means making something hot, and later extracting that heat again. In
this video
by [Robert Murray-Smith] the basic concept of a thermal battery that uses sand is demonstrated.
By running a current through a resistive wire that’s been buried inside a container with sand, the sand is heated up to about 200 °C. As [Robert] points out, the maximum temperature of the sand can be a 1000 °C or more. Because sand doesn’t boil like water, the total amount of energy stored in sand is correspondingly higher.
Extracting the thermal energy can be done rather inefficiently using the demonstrated Peltier element. A Stirling engine, or steam generator and turbine, would get a lot more energy out. Either way, the thermal battery itself is made using just plain sand, which makes it an attractive DIY target to tinker with. | 96 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534393",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T16:43:28",
"content": "The specific heat capacity is 4.2 kJ/(kg·K) which is actually pretty good.I doubt sand has anywhere near that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6534394"... | 1,760,372,490.739988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/fdas-approval-of-cell-culture-chicken-the-rise-of-fresh-meat-without-the-animal/ | FDA’s Approval Of Cell Culture Chicken: The Rise Of Fresh Meat Without The Animal? | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"cell culture",
"cultured meat"
] | On November 14th of this year, the FDA
cleared the path
for
Upside Foods
to sell its cell-culture-based chicken products within the US. This is the first product of its kind to be cleared for commercial sale within the Americas, with only Singapore having previously
cleared
a similar product for sale, back in December of 2020. This latter product comes courtesy of another California start-up called Eat Just.
Since that initial approval in Singapore, Eat Just has
begun
to set up a 2,800 square meter (~30,000 square feet) production facility in Singapore that is scheduled to begin producing thousands of kilograms of slaughter-free meat starting in the first quarter of 2023. This would make it the top-runner in the cultured meat industry, which to this point has seen dozens of start-ups, but precious few actual products for sale.
With CEO Josh Tetrick of Eat Just projecting price equality between their cultured meat and meat from animals by 2030, could the FDA’s approval herald the dawn of slaughter-free meat? There are obviously still hurdles, but as we’ll see, the idea is not nearly as far-fetched as one might think.
A Long History
The history behind
cell cultures
stretches back to the 19th century, when through experimentation it was discovered that tissues and entire organs could be kept alive, even after having been separated from the body. Subsequent research during the early 20th century increased our understanding of tissue and cell cultures, which during the 1940s and 1950s led to such medical leaps forward as growing viruses in cell cultures for the sake of producing vaccines.
The injectable polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, was among the first products that was mass-produced courtesy of such cell cultures. Beyond vaccine development, the ability to not only isolate cells, but to keep them alive for extended periods of time has led to countless medical and scientific breakthroughs over the intervening decades. Some of these cell cultures as used in laboratory settings are also
immortal
, either because of their starting point as a (human) cancer cell, due to them being stem cells, or because of immortalization treatment. Having immortalized cell lines allows for long-term studies on a well-documented type of cell.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, such cell cultures are involved in the initial step of setting up a cultivated meat production line. In the FDA Memorandum covering the approval of Upside Food’s product the following steps are detailed:
Cell isolation
Establishment of cell lines
Establishment of Master Cell Banks (MCB)
Proliferation phase
Differentiation phase
Harvest of cell material
None of these steps are necessarily new or uncommon within a laboratory setting. The isolation of the initial seed cells involves extracting these from a chicken. These then have to be characterized and checked for any pathogens. The resulting cells are then immortalized using gene-therapy with telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) as needed, to establish the master cell lines. These cell lines are immortal and can thus be used for the further duration of the production line.
During the proliferation phase, some of the cells from the cell banks are introduced to a bioreactor, where the cells are encouraged to multiply in suspension culture, while bathed in all the nutrients they need, and with a constant pH and temperature being maintained. Once enough cell material has formed, they are moved to the next phase, which is where these cells will differentiate into both the muscle (myocyte) and connective (fibrocyte) tissues. Both will adhere to the bioreactor’s walls, and to each other, forming a multi-cellular tissue.
After this phase, the contents of this final bioreactor can be extracted and is essentially ready for preparation and consumption.
Growing Pains
As the saying goes, if something was easy, someone else would already have done it a long time ago. In the case of cultured meat most of the challenges lie in scaling up from a laboratory setting involving small batches of cell culture, to massive bioreactors capable of outputting thousands upon thousands kilograms of product.
Making sure that these bioreactors manage to keep the cells content as nutrients are added and waste products removed is one thing, but another is the entire supply chain surrounding the operation. At this point in time, there is no massive industry capable of delivering these nutrients on a scale required to replace a significant part of today’s meat consumption. All of these supply lines will have to grow along with this nascent cultured meat industry.
A major bottleneck and cost factor here is the growth medium, especially the growth factors that the cells require in order to multiply. Common sources for laboratories include
fetal bovine serum
(FBS) along with the serum from other animals. Generally
slaughterhouses
are the primary source of the blood from which the serum is extracted. Finding replacements for this serum and their growth factors is an ongoing topic, and one that is obviously highly relevant for cultured meat.
One alternative is made from human blood, called
hPL
(human platelet lysate). This is a substitute for FBS that is created from previously extracted platelets that have since expired. Since these were extracted from donated blood for transfusion purposes, hPL forms a cruelty-free alternative source. The main obstacles here are that the amount is only enough for small-scale laboratory settings, and there are issues with cost and consistency across batches.
An ideal alternative for FBS, hPL and similar would be a fully artificial, synthesized alternative, as this would alleviate any ethical and food safety concerns. Unfortunately, as also covered in a
2021 review
by Chelladurai et al. in
Heliyon
, a clear alternative does not exist yet. This reinforces the notion that finding a serum-free replacement for cultured meat is likely to form one of the major obstacles in the near future, both in terms of its ethical image and the sense of its ultimate price tag.
Still Worth It
Even with the clear challenges in scaling up cultivated meat products, there is no denial that its potential positive impacts can be massive. In a
2017 report
(PDF) by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), it is noted that agriculture is responsible for about 70% of global freshwater usage, a significant amount of which goes into feeding cattle — 15 ton of water per kilogram of meat — and other animals intended for meat production.
(Credit: FAO)
When there are approximately three chickens on this Earth for every single human (
~24B chickens
), with similar numbers for cattle and sheep, it’s not hard to see how the meat industry has somewhat of an impact on the environment, and correspondingly the climate. If we can over the coming decades remove the need for animals to be grown for the slaughterhouse, we stand to regain many thousands of square kilometers of pasture and farm land, with corresponding cuts in greenhouse gases.
By moving the entire meat industry into fully controlled, sterile factories, this would also essentially eliminate issues with contamination, such as salmonella in chicken meat. It’d alleviate the need for antibiotics and generally result in a safer, more predictable and consistent product, while still being the same meat. Just without the part where an animal is raised from a chick, calf or piglet before its demise in an abattoir.
Opinions Remain Divided
It should bear little repetition that not everyone agrees on the need for cultured meat, with alternatives based on plant proteins generally wheeled out as the obvious alternative to meat. Even though I’m a long-time vegetarian, the notion that not everyone will want to give up eating meat seems unavoidable. However, since the main issues with the meat industry are the aforementioned environmental impact, cultured meat would seem to be a more than acceptable solution there.
Assuming we can make cultured meat work by 2030, we may see a corresponding plunge in feed required for livestock, alleviating the pressure to produce enough food for an ever-growing human population, while still allowing those who can’t give up their meat habit to dig into a fresh chunk of genuine chicken or beef. All thanks to some scientists who tinkered with some animal tissues over a hundred years ago. | 105 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534345",
"author": "justsayin",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T15:06:39",
"content": "Idk, on the face of it this looks like a great idea.. but not gonna lie, I have to admit this creeps me out more than a little",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,372,490.519709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/move-aside-planar-im-slicing-my-cone-way/ | Move Aside Planar, I’m Slicing My Cone Way | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d model slicing",
"conical",
"slicing",
"slicing algorithm"
] | Fleetwood Mac puns aside, very little has changed about how we “slice” models for printers in the last 30 years. However, [Stefan Hermann] of CNC Kitchen
has a demo that tries to change all that by slicing conically
.
For the uninitiated in the dark arts of printing in the third dimension, the canonical definition of non-conical slicing has been to bisect the model at layer height intervals and generate the perimeter and the infill, then output that as g-code. This is easy to implement mathematically and works reasonably well, except when you have overhangs of more than about 60 degrees on most printers. The
idea of slicing in a cone
rather than a plane isn’t entirely novel as we
previously covered RotBot
, which offers a vertical axis of rotation and a print head at 45 degrees. What is extraordinary is that the technique [Stefan] walks you through is done with a stock printer without a complex 45-degree tilt and is a software modification rather than a hardware tweak.
[Stefan] references earlier work done by [Michael Wüthrich] of ZHAW School of Engineering, who wrote some scripts that apply the transformation. The slicer is
SuperSlicer,
a fork of the PrusaSlicer, which is itself a fork of slic3r. The modified g-code is exported and can be sent to a printer of your choice. He even has a
link to a pre-sliced model to try it out
.
Of course, different printers have different clearance levels, but the Prusa Mini he uses has 16 degrees of clearance with the sensor pushed up. The
code is on GitHub
. It’s fascinating to note how all these techniques and forks interact and build off each other. Whether tilted slices, conical slices, or something else ultimately becomes the de facto standard, we’re looking forward to more options for slicing.
Video after the break. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534320",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T13:29:42",
"content": "Another amazing amazing slicing innovation. There have been a lot in the last years.Now combine all these modern slicing possibilities into a finite analysis, probably AI-assisted engine that would :– impleme... | 1,760,372,490.888974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/homebrew-espresso-maker-modding-with-gaggiuino/ | Homebrew Espresso Maker Modding With Gaggiuino | Abe Connelly | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"advanced coffee machine",
"arduino nano",
"espresso",
"espresso machine",
"PID coffee machine",
"stm32"
] | For those that don’t know, Gaggia is a company that produces a line of affordable “entry-level” espresso coffee makers that offer good quality consumer espresso machines at reasonable prices. The entry level machines don’t offer fine grained control over temperature, pressure and steam which is
where the Gaggiuino project comes in
.
The Gaggiuino project is an “after market” modification of many espresso makers, such as the Gaggia classic and Gaggia classic pro. The main additions are a MAX6675 thermocouple module paired with a K-Type thermocouple sensor for closed loop control over the temperature. Options for adding an AC dimmer module that attaches to the pump motor and a 0 Mpa to 1.2 Mpa ranged XDB401 pressure sensor, installed in line between the pump and the boiler, provide further closed loop control over the pressure and flow profiling.
Load cells can be attached to the drip tray to allow for feedback about the pour weight with a Nextion 2.4″ LCD touchscreen provides the user interface for profile selection and other interactivity. The project offers a “base” modification using an Arduino Nano as the microcontroller, in line with its namesake, but has an option for an STM32 Blackpill module that can provide more functionality beyond the scope of the Nano.
The Gaggiuino project is open source with
code
and extensive
documentation
available on GitHub. There is also a
Discord community
for those wanting help with their build or that have the inclination to share their passion for DIY espresso modding with the Gaggiuino. Espresso machine hacks are a favorite of ours and we’ve featured many projects on espresso machine builds and mods ranging from
PID control of classic espresso makers
to
beautifully minimal closed loop homebrew espresso machines
.
Thanks to [Chempy] for the tip! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534099",
"author": "Experienced Experimenter",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T22:15:44",
"content": "I thought Turkish coffee was entry level espresso, or is it better described as cowboy espresso?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,372,490.837054 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/see-the-forbidden-cigarette-machine-in-action/ | See The Forbidden Cigarette Machine In Action | Elliot Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"mechanics",
"mechanism",
"packing"
] | [Fraens] has been designing a number of fantastic 3D printed machines and making great videos that demonstrate how they work. The last installment was an automatic cigarette stuffing machine, and it’s got a number of pretty complex motions, and somehow manages to get the job done.
While [Fraens] usually uploads STL files for all of his machines, this one is forbidden! Selling automatic cigarette loaders is illegal in Europe, and it’s not clear how close to the legal edge
posting them up on Thingiverse
is. So until the legal dust settles, you’re going to have to
be content with the fantastic video
, also embedded below.
But honestly, the devil’s sticks aren’t good for your health anyway, and you’re probably just in it for the mechanicals. Think for a moment about the problem – you’ve got a hopper of tobacco fibers that all like to stick together, and you need to pack them into an easily squished lightweight paper tube. These tubes aren’t easy to handle either. The solution to both of these calls for solenoid-powered tappers that agitate both into place.
There’s also a 3D printed rack and pinion to do the pushing, and a cool stepper-driven revolver mechanism to put the empty papers into just the right place. The machine leans heavily on 3D printing, but also on simple hardware-store parts like aluminum and brass tubes. [Fraens]’s builds are always simple but simultaneously very slick, and you’ll learn a lot from watching it all go together.
And when you’re done, check out some others from [Fraens]. We’ve been impressed by his
sewing machine
,
braiding machine
, and even a
power loom
. | 66 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533802",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T09:11:07",
"content": "There is an interesting band called “Cigarette Rolling Machine”, their latest album “Hysteria” is pretty good, if you like the style.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4yCOZcMEmwHowever I think they are talki... | 1,760,372,491.079142 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/colorful-split-keyboard-uses-vga-connections/ | Colorful Split Keyboard Uses VGA Connections | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"hand wired",
"keyboard",
"split keyboard",
"vga"
] | When it comes to building a split keyboard, you have a lot of options when it comes to the cable. Many will use a standard 3.5 mm TRRS cable, and others might use something more esoteric like RJ-45 to run between the halves. This only works if you’re using two controllers; if you only want one controller, you have to pass the matrix from one side to the other, which typically requires more than the four wires offered by the aforementioned choices.
While rummaging around, [Joe Scotto] found a VGA cable and thought, why not use that?
This lovely Barbie-themed peripheral is a split version of an earlier board he built called the ScottoFly, which is a monoblock split with a void in the middle. As with that one, this is hand-wired using thicc brass insulated with heat-shrink, uses a solid 3D-printed plate, and a printed case. And like a madman, [Joe] coiled the cable.
Unfortunately, this proved to be problematic in the wire breakage sense, or so he thought. The real problem turned out to be that the middle row of pins on a VGA connector all act like ground, so they can’t be used to pass rows and columns. However, there were still enough viable pins to send the 4×5 matrix across. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.
Via
KBD #103 | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533869",
"author": "Evaprototype",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T12:17:52",
"content": "Why would rj-45 be esoteric compared to vga db-15? Only the name would throw most but the connector Is easily tested and available and easy to make or purchased. My Walgreens sells cat5 Ethernet cabl... | 1,760,372,490.935904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/two-esoteric-programming-languages-one-interpreter/ | Two Esoteric Programming Languages, One Interpreter | Elliot Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"BrainF*ck",
"esoteric language",
"interpreter",
"programming"
] | Many of you will have heard of the esoteric programming language
Brainf**k_
. It’s an example language that’s nearly impossible to use because it’s
too simple
. It’s basically a Turing computer in code – you can essentially put characters into an array, read them out, increment, decrement, and branch. The rest is up to you. Good luck!
What could be worse? Befunge, a language that parses code not just left-to-right or top-to-bottom, but in any direction depending on the use of
^, v, >, and <
. (We love the way that
GOTO 10
looks like a garden path in the example.)
Uniting the two, [rsheldiii] brings us
BrainFunge
, a
Brainf**k_
interpreter written in Befunge. And surprisingly, the resulting write-up sheds enough light on both of the esoteric programming languages that they make a little bit of sense. If you try to read along, you’ll definitely be helped out by
Esolang Park
, which was new to us, and accommodates the non-traditional parsing while displaying the contents of the stack.
If you get a taste of the esoteric, and you find that you’d like a little more, we have
a great survey of some of the oddest for you
. After cutting your teeth on Befunge, for example, we bet you’ll be ready for
Piet
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533794",
"author": "Patrick",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T08:43:07",
"content": "The language is properly called Brainfuck, as always for those who are allowed in their jurisdiction to use any word without strange obfuscations.Hackaday has written about Brainfuck, and tags exist in ob... | 1,760,372,490.980747 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/open-source-passive-radar-taken-down-for-regulatory-reasons/ | Open-Source Passive Radar Taken Down For Regulatory Reasons | Arya Voronova | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"itar",
"KrakenRF",
"krakensdr",
"passive radar",
"RTL-SDR",
"RTLSDR"
] | Open-source technology brings a world that laws and regulations are not quite prepared for. As a result, every now and then, open projects need to work around governmental regulations. In today’s news,
KrakenRF team has stumbled into an arms-trafficing legal roadblock
for their KrakenSDR-based passive radar code, and is currently figuring it out. There’s no indication that there’s been any legal action from the USA government – the team’s being proactive,
as fas as we’re told.
KrakenSDR hardware, to simplify it a lot, is five RTL-SDRs on one PCB – with plenty of work put in to do it the right way. It gets you much further than a few dongles – there’s shielded case, suitable connectors, reliable power distribution, a proper USB hub, and importantly, receiver synchronization hardware. Naturally, there’s nice things you can build with such a hefty package – one of them is passive radar, which was a prominent selling point on both KrakenSDR’s
pre-launch page back in 2021,
and on
their crowdfunding page just a week ago
. How does that work?
There’s RF emissions floating around you in the air, unless you’re at sea or in the desert. Whether it’s airplane transponders, cell towers, or a crappy switch-mode PSU, the radiowaves emitted interact with objects all around you. If you have multiple receivers with directional antennas, you can catch waves being reflected from some object, compare the wave reflected wave to the wave received from the initial source, and determine the object’s properties like location and speed. If you’d like to know more, IEEE Spectrum has
covered this topic just a week ago
, and the previously-deleted
KrakenSDR wiki page
has more details for you to learn from.
Through exposure in IEEE Spectrum, the KrakenSDR work has received plenty of attention and comments. And this is where the
International Traffic in Arms Regulations
(ITAR) laws come in. We’re not lawyers, but
it
does
look like passive radar is on the list.
Today, the code repository and the documentation pages are scrubbed clean while the team is talking to legal experts.
Dealing with this is intimidating, and we wish them luck in clearing this with legal. In the bad old days,
certain encryption algorithms were famously in scope
, which appeared absolutely ridiculous to us at the time. The laws did eventually change to better reflect reality, but the wheels of justice turn slowly. | 92 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533652",
"author": "James Finch (@jafinch78)",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T00:12:43",
"content": "Of course! Why not? Especially if used to detect something some imbeciles want us to believe doesn’t exist that’s illegal (whether device(s) and/or act(s) using device(s)) and/or not to... | 1,760,372,491.209008 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/esp32-led-eyes-help-keep-toddler-in-bed/ | ESP32 LED Eyes Help Keep Toddler In Bed | Tom Nardi | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"Child",
"clock",
"ntp",
"toddler"
] | We’ve seen a lot of custom clocks here at Hackaday, many of which have pushed the traditional definition of the timepiece to its absolute limit. But for all their wild designs, most of them do have something in common: they assume you can actually read a clock and understand the concept of time. But what if you’re developing a clock for a toddler who’s only just coming to terms with such heady ideas?
The answer, at least for [Riley Parish] is a set of
3D printed eyes that are illuminated with either yellow or green LEDs
depending on whether or not it’s time to get out of bed. More than just the color of the light, the eye design (which is embedded into the rear of the front panel) switches between wide-open and tightly shut depending on the time of day.
Internally the device is very simple, with the 5 mm LEDs and their associated resistors connected directly to the digital out pins on an ESP32 development board. While the dual-core microcontroller is admittedly pretty overkill for flipping some LEDs every 12 hours or so, the firmware does at least pull the current time from NTP — plus the powerful MCU offers plenty of room to grow. A web front-end to configure the device or check its current status would only be a few more lines of code.
As it so happens, this isn’t the first toddler timepiece to grace these pages. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
those previous examples
also used changing color to
help indicate the passage of time
. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533626",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T21:26:10",
"content": "Could have used a 555.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6533632",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T22:12:49",
"... | 1,760,372,491.258696 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/the-barkhausen-effect-hearing-magnets-being-born/ | The Barkhausen Effect: Hearing Magnets Being Born | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware",
"Science"
] | [
"Barkhausen",
"ferromagnetic",
"magnet",
"noise"
] | The Barkhausen effect — named after German Physicist Heinrich Barkhausen — is the term given to the noise output produced by a ferromagnetic material due to the change in size and orientation of its discrete magnetic domains under the influence of an external magnetic field. The domains are small: smaller than the microcrystalline grains that form the magnetic material, but larger than the atomic scale. Barkausen discovered that as a magnetic field was brought close to a ferrous material, the local magnetic field would flip around randomly, as the magnetic domains rearranged themselves into a minimum energy configuration and that this magnetic field noise could be sensed with an appropriately arranged pickup coil and an amplifier. In the
short demonstration video below
, this Barkhausen noise can be fed into an audio amplifier, producing a very illustrative example of the effect.
One example of practical use for this effect is with non-destructive testing and qualification of magnetic structures which may be subject to damage in use, such as in the nuclear industry. Crystalline discontinuities or impurities within a part under examination result in increased localized mechanical stresses, which could result in unexpected failure. The Barkhausen noise effect can be easily leveraged to detect such discontinuities and give the evaluator a sense of the condition of the part in question. All in all, a useful technique to know about!
If you were thinking that the Barkhausen is a familiar name, you may well be thinking about the
Barkhausen stability criterion
, which is fundamental to describing some of the conditions necessary for a linear feedback circuit to oscillate. We’ve covered such circuits before, such as this
dive into bridge oscillators
.
Thanks to {Keith] for the tip! | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533599",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T19:36:50",
"content": "Back in Electronics school, instead of writing in my notes what was the Barkhausen effect,I drew a doghouse and a barking dog.IOW, I didn’t learn that part of the lesson.",
... | 1,760,372,491.406154 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/driving-e-paper-displays-with-memory-limited-mcus/ | Driving E-Paper Displays With Memory Limited MCUs | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"8 bit",
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"Electronic shelf label"
] | It’s easy to become jaded by modern microcontrollers: for just a few bucks you can get a MCU that’s powerful enough to give a desktop computer from the early 90s a run for its money while packing in contemporary technology like WiFi and Bluetooth. For many projects we don’t even have to consider optimizing our code, because we aren’t even scratching the surface of what the hardware is capable of.
But sometimes you don’t have the luxury of using the latest-and-greatest chip, and have to play the hand you’re dealt. That’s when folks like [Larry Bank] really shine.
In a recent write-up
, he goes over his experiments with driving e-paper displays (specifically, salvaged electronic shelf labels) with 8-bit MCUs that on paper shouldn’t have the resources to run them.
A similar trick can be used on OLEDs
The problem is that these displays generally expect to be handed a fully-formed image, which can easily exceed the free RAM on a low-end chip. For example, a 1-bit 128 x 128 image would consume 2 KB of RAM — more than four times the available memory on an ATtiny85.
As [Larry] explains, his alternate approach is to write data to the display in columns that are only one byte wide. Combined with his existing work with
image decompression on constrained hardware
, he’s able to rapidly draw out full-screen TIFF images using an Arduino UNO as demonstrated in the video after the break. He hopes the work will inspire others to experiment with what’s possible using the
dinky MCUs you generally find in second-hand shelf labels
. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534267",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T09:54:07",
"content": "“Salvaged” shelf labels?You mean stolen?I’ve yet to see one of these in the wild, BTW.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6534285",
"author": "klx"... | 1,760,372,491.46546 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/a-handy-oshw-usb-cable-tester-for-your-toolkit/ | A Handy OSHW USB Cable Tester For Your Toolkit | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"coin cell",
"test equipment",
"USB C",
"USB tester"
] | There’s no shame in admitting you’ve been burned by a cheapo USB cable — ever since some bean counter realized there was a few cents to be saved by producing “power only” USB cables, no hardware hacker has been safe.
But with this simple tester from [Álvaro Prieto]
in your arsenal, you’ll never be fooled again.
It’s about as straight-forward a design as possible, utilizing nothing more than a two dozen LEDs, their associated resistors, and a common CR2032 coin cell. Simply plugging both sides of your cable into the various flavors of USB connectors on the tester will complete the necessary circuits to light up the corresponding LEDs, instantly telling you how many intact wires are inside the cable. So whether you’re dealing with some shady cable that doesn’t have the full complement of conductors, or there’s some physical damage that’s severed a connection or two, you’ll know at a glance.
A sage warning for most of the devices we build.
Obviously the tester is designed
primarily for the 24 pins you’ll find in a proper USB-C connector
, but it’s completely backwards compatible with older cables and connectors. We appreciate that he even included the chunky Type B connector, which we’ve always been fond of thanks to its robustness compared to the more common Mini and Micro variants.
Keep in mind though that this tester will only show you if there’s a connection between two pins, it won’t verify how much power it can actually handle. For that,
you’ll need some extra equipment
. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534224",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T06:49:49",
"content": "I made one of these for testing trailer tailboards and for testing the trailer sockets, but i used toggle switches to detect shorts and cross wiring.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []... | 1,760,372,491.343751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/new-part-day-exotic-filament-for-rf-dielectric-structures/ | New Part Day: Exotic Filament For RF Dielectric Structures | Jenny List | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"dielectric",
"microave"
] | The world of microwave RF design appears to the uninitiated to be full of unimaginably exotic devices, as engineers harness the laws of physics to tame radio signals to their will. Among the weapons in their arsenal are materials of known dielectric properties, from which can be made structures with the desired effects on RF that encounters them. This has traditionally been a difficult and expensive process, but it’s one now made much easier by
the availability of 3D printer filaments with a range of known dielectric values
.
It’s best to think of the structures which can be designed using these materials as analagous to Fresnel lenses we’re all used to in the light domain. The example piece given by
Microwave Journal
is a metasurface for use in a steerable antenna, something that would be a much more difficult piece of work by more traditional means.
Normally
when we inform you of a new special filament
we’d expect it to be more costly than standard PLA, but this filament is in a class of its own at 275 euros per kilogram. So the interest for most readers will probably be more in the technology than the expectation of use, but even then we can see that there will still be microwave experimenters in our range who might be tempted by its unique properties. We look forward to what is developed using it.
Via
Microwave Journal
. Thanks to [Eric Mockler] for the tip! | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534265",
"author": "jwrm22",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T09:49:50",
"content": "While I don’t have a direct use for this filament. It’s very useful to know it exists. It can greatly reduce cost for the RF prototypes I’ve build in the past. Even better, removing unknowns and reduce the... | 1,760,372,491.690226 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/hackaday-links-november-20-2022/ | Hackaday Links: November 20, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"Artemis",
"broadcast",
"hackaday links",
"jwst",
"krakensdr",
"MIRI",
"moon",
"nasa",
"orion",
"passive radar",
"radar",
"sdr",
"sls",
"telemetry"
] | Lots of space news this week, with the big story being that
Artemis I finally blasted off for its trip to the Moon
. It was a spectacular night launch, with the SLS sending the crew-rated but vacant — well,
mostly vacant
— Orion spacecraft on a week-ish long trip to the Moon, before spending a couple of weeks testing out a distant retrograde orbit. The mission is already returning
some stunning images
, and the main mission goal is to check out the Orion spacecraft and everything needed for a crewed Artemis II lunar flyby sometime in 2024. If that goes well, Artemis III will head up in 2025 with a crew of four to put the first bootprints on the Moon in over 50 years.
Of course, like the Apollo missions before it, a big part of the crewed landings of the Artemis program will likely be the collection and return of more lunar rock and soil samples. But NASA likes to hedge its bets, which is perhaps why they’ve announced
an agreement to purchase lunar regolith samples
from the first private company to send a lander to the Moon. The Japanese start-up behind this effort is called ispace, and they’ve been issued a license by the Japanese government to transfer samples collected by its HAKUTO-R lander to NASA. Or rather, samples collected
on
the lander — the contract is for NASA to take possession of whatever regolith accumulates on the HAKUTO-R’s landing pads. And it’s not like ispace is going to return the samples — the lander isn’t designed to ever leave the lunar surface. The whole thing is symbolic of the future of space commerce, which is probably why NASA is only paying $5,000 for the dirt.
On the slightly more expensive side, a few weeks ago the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was
having some trouble with one of its main instruments
. Telemetry from MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, indicated that one of the wheels that rotate various filters into the optical path was experiencing higher-than-expected friction. Operators shut down MIRI, and while science continued on the other instruments aboard JWST, engineers looked over the telemetry data and came up with
a plan to get MIRI back online
. They determined that the friction is likely “increased contact forces between sub-components of the wheel central bearing assembly,” which we take to mean the filter wheel is just a little wonky. Since it only happens under certain conditions, they should be able to avoid this becoming a full-blown problem, and MIRI is slowly being returned to operation.
Bad news for KrakenSDR fans —
no more passive radar for you
! The five-channel coherent SDR receiver used to have a
passive radar
option, but an unnamed regulatory agency apparently decided that passive radar in the hands of plebes is a no-go. The KrakenRF folks are hashing it out with lawyers, but they say things aren’t looking good so far. On the plus side, they’re doing the right things and offering refunds to anyone who bought a KrakenSDR specifically for passive radar, so hats off to them for that.
And finally, passive radar depends on receiving reflections of high-powered broadcast signals off moving objects — something like the signals emanating from
the 1,000,000 Watt super tower seen in this video
. The acrophobic need not worry — this isn’t one of those POV videos made by a tower climber. Rather, Jeff Geerling and his dad take us on a tour of the really interesting bit: the stuff in the buildings at the foot of the tower. This particular tower hosts hundreds of customers, including several FM radio stations, and the engineering that goes into radiating that much power in a controlled manner is breathtaking. The amount of copper that went into those hardline coax sections alone is a little staggering, but those combiner boxes in the basement? Wow! We really enjoyed the fact that there’s a 50,000-Watt dummy load, too, and that it had to be mounted outdoors to save the building’s HVAC system. Really cool stuff. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534148",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-11-21T00:22:08",
"content": "Interesting he called it a supertower. Lived right next to an antenna farm. Great reception for what was on it. Drowned out some of the surrounding signals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,372,491.919075 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/this-standalone-camera-gets-the-picture-through-with-sstv/ | This Standalone Camera Gets The Picture Through With SSTV | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"baofeng",
"ESP camera",
"ESP-32",
"sdr",
"Slow-scan television",
"SSTV"
] | These days, sending a picture to someone else is as simple as pulling out your smartphone and sending it by email or text message. It’s so simple a child can do it, but that simple user experience masks a huge amount of complexity, from the compression algorithms in the phones to the huge amount of distributed infrastructure needed to connect them together. As wonderful and enabling as all that infrastructure can be, sometimes it’s just too much for the job.
That seems to have been the case for [Dzl TheEvilGenius], who just wanted to
send a low-resolution image from a remote location
. It turns out that hams solved that problem about 70 years ago with slow-scan television, or SSTV. While most of the world was settling down in front of “I Love Lucy” on the regular tube, amateur radio operators were figuring out how to use their equipment to send pictures around the world. But where hams of yore had to throw a considerable amount of gear at the problem, [Dzl] just used an ESP-32 with a camera and some custom code to process the image. The output from one of the MCU’s GPIO pins is a PWM audio signal which can be fed directly into the microphone input of a cheap portable transceiver.
To decode the signal, [Dzl] used one of the many SSTV programs available. There’s no mention of the receiver, although it could be pretty much anything from another Baofeng to an SDR dongle. The code is available in the article, as is an audio file of an encoded image, if you just want to play around with the receiving and decoding side of the equation.
We could see something like this working for a remote security camera, or even for scouting hunting spots. If you want to replicate this, remember that you’ll need a license if you want to transmit on the ham bands — relax,
it’s easy
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534080",
"author": "Antiemes",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T21:15:14",
"content": "I did something simar with a DRA818 module. (The PCB part is still unfinished.)https://github.com/Antiemes/SSTV/tree/master/code/esp-idf",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,491.644327 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/tinyllama-is-a-486-in-your-pocket/ | TinyLlama Is A 486 In Your Pocket | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks",
"Games",
"hardware",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"486",
"86Duino",
"Crystal Audio",
"does it run doom",
"doom",
"dos",
"midi",
"MT-32",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Zero 2",
"TinyLlama",
"vga"
] | We love retrocomputing and tiny computers here at Hackaday, so it’s always nice to see projects that combine the two.
[Eivind]’s TinyLlama
lets you play DOS games on a board that fits in your hand.
Using the 486 SOM from the 86Duino, the TinyLlama adds an integrated Crystal Semiconductor audio chip for AdLib and SoundBlaster support. If you populate the 40 PIN Raspberry Pi connector, you can also use a Pi Zero 2 to give the system MIDI capabilities when coupled with a GY-PCM5102 I²S DAC module.
Audio has been one of the trickier things to get running on these small 486s, so its nice to see a simple, integrated solution available. [Eivind] shows the machine running DOOM (in the video below the break) and starts up Monkey Island at the end. There is a breakout board for serial and PS/2 mouse/keyboard, but he says that USB peripherals work well if you don’t want to drag your
Model M
out of the closet.
Looking for more projects using the 86Duino? Checkout
ISA Sound Cards on 86Duino
or
Using an 86Duino with a Graphics Card
. | 39 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6534023",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T18:55:48",
"content": "But you won’t be able to get Linux for it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6534065",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-... | 1,760,372,491.863118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/20/cheap-display-fix-brings-thermal-camera-back-to-life/ | Cheap Display Fix Brings Thermal Camera Back To Life | Robin Kearey | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"display replacement",
"flir",
"right to repair"
] | When it comes to repairability of electronic devices, much depends on how helpful the original manufacturer is. Some make repairs very easy by publishing detailed service manuals and selling spare parts. Others keep everything under wraps to protect their intellectual property, turning even a supposedly simple fix into a reverse engineering ordeal. When [BuyItFixIt] got his hands on
a FLIR multimeter-thermal camera combination instrument with a broken display
, he quickly found that FLIR was firmly in the “all our designs are top secret” camp and wouldn’t even tell him what kind of display they had used.
Not to be deterred, [BuyItFixIt] took the meter apart and tried to find out what was going wrong. The signals from the microprocessor seemed to reach the display OK, so the fault was somewhere in the screen itself. The display’s part number didn’t return any useful results online, but AliExpress did have a very similar-looking display available with a slightly different part number. This display seemed to work at first, but the instrument then got caught in a boot loop.
Unlike FLIR, the supplier of the replacement display was happy to supply datasheets, and even had one available for the original FLIR part. With this new information [BuyItFixIt] was able to deduce that the new screen didn’t output one signal that the processor expected to see, causing it to reset itself. A simple workaround was to connect the corresponding pin to a PWM signal from the backlight controller, which fooled the CPU into thinking the proper display was connected.
In this case, a $12 display and a single piece of wire were enough to bring an expensive instrument back to life, but things are not always that simple. More complex machines
can take weeks to debug
, even if parts are available. If not, you might even need to
design your own
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533934",
"author": "Stanson",
"timestamp": "2022-11-20T15:23:32",
"content": "> he quickly found that FLIR was firmly in the “all our designs are top secret” camp and wouldn’t even tell him what kind of display they had used.I still remember times when electronic device schematic w... | 1,760,372,492.067293 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/brainstorming/ | Brainstorming | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3d printing",
"brainstorming",
"computer vision",
"newsletter",
"rants"
] | One of the best things about hanging out with other hackers is the freewheeling brainstorming sessions that tend to occur. Case in point: I was at the Electronica trade fair and ended up hanging out with [Stephen Hawes] and [Lucian Chapar], two of the folks behind the
LumenPnP open-source pick and place machine
that we’ve covered a fair number of times in the past.
Among many cool features, it has a camera mounted on the parts-moving head to find the fiducial markings on the PCB. But of course, this mean a camera mounted to an almost general purpose two-axis gantry, and that sent the geeks’ minds spinning. [Stephen] was talking about how easy it would be to turn into a photo-stitching macrophotography rig, which could yield amazingly high resolution photos.
Meanwhile [Lucian] and I were thinking about how similar this gantry was to a 3D printer, and [Lucian] asked why 3D printers don’t come with cameras mounted on the hot ends. He’d even shopped this idea around at the
East Coast Reprap Festival
and gotten some people excited about it.
So here’s the idea: computer vision near extruder gives you real-time process control. You could use it to home the nozzle in Z. You could use it to tell when the filament has run out, or the steppers have skipped steps. If you had it really refined, you could use it to compensate other printing defects. In short, it would be a simple hardware addition that would open up a universe of computer-vision software improvements, and best of all, it’s easy enough for the home gamer to do – you’d probably only need a 3D printer.
Now I’ve shared the brainstorm with you. Hope it inspires some DIY 3DP innovation, or at least encourages you to brainstorm along below.
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
! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533589",
"author": "j.beyer",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T19:06:18",
"content": "start by using a flir camera integrated in. it would allow material studies with data from the cooling print thermal density and load etc. this is brainstorming right, scrumming, punching the clown",
... | 1,760,372,492.112144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/at-a-loss-for-words-try-a-teleprompter/ | At A Loss For Words? Try A Teleprompter | Al Williams | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"teleprompter"
] | With everyone doing videos these days, you might want to up your narration game with a teleprompter. [Modern Hobbyist]
can help
. Since he does videos — like the one about the teleprompter below — we assume he built it out of his own need for the device. Actually, this is his second teleprompter. The first one was larger and not battery-powered, so this new version offers more portability. The camera shoots through the teleprompter screen so you can look right at the camera and still stay on script.
The project reuses some of the original teleprompter code, showing a text file via a Raspberry Pi. There’s also a control keyboard that lets you remotely control the scrolling speed. The real key to this project though is the 3D printed housing. Well, that and the reflective glass screen. Given that, you could do the actual text display in a number of ways.
Apparently, the portability of the build is limited somewhat by the weight of the camera. You could, of course, use something lighter or perhaps add some weight opposite to at least balance it a bit. The 3D printing files are on
Thingiverse
and the rest is on
GitHub
, so you can easily make changes if you want.
You would think we would see more teleprompter projects, and we
do see some
. We’ve also seen a hack to let you look through your
laptop screen on video conferences
. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533518",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T12:25:05",
"content": "Most prompters sit on a rail, carrying the camera and prompter in such a way the setup is balanced.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6533612",
... | 1,760,372,491.980801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/simple-mod-lets-quadruped-robot-stand-and-walk/ | Simple Mod Lets Quadruped Robot Stand And Walk | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"locomotion",
"mini cheetah",
"robot",
"standing",
"walker"
] | When it comes to locomotion, robots don’t typically do more than one thing at a time. Walkers stick to walking, and rollers stick to rolling. However, this
simple method of enabling a cheetah-style quadruped to stand and even walk a little
is pretty clever.
With just a couple of rigid struts attached to the shins of the rear legs, it becomes possible for the robot to lever itself up into a stable standing position, and even shuffle around a bit. Not bad for a couple bolted-on bits with no moving parts!
The robot style will look pretty familiar to some of our readers. It does resemble
Boston Dynamics’ Spot
but it’s closer to the MIT
Mini Cheetah,
whose design and brushless motors made for
eye-catching agility and speed
. It has inspired not just countless DIY efforts, but also
kits of parts from overseas sellers
.
The image here should make it clear how it works, but take a moment to also watch the short video embedded just below the page break, and see the process in action from beginning to end. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533522",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T13:05:05",
"content": "Clever, but creepy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6533557",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T16:05:22",
"content": "At th... | 1,760,372,492.028081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/real-minecraft-furnace-generates-electricity-from-coal/ | RealMinecraftFurnace Generates Electricity From Coal | Lewin Day | [
"Games"
] | [
"furnace",
"minecraft",
"thermoelectric generator"
] | There’s a furnace in
Minecraft
that is used to power all kinds of things in the game. [Joel] of
Joel Creates
decided he wanted to build a real-world replica,
and did exactly that.
The furnace consists of a 30 cm aluminium cube, inside which the coal is burned. Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) are then placed on the sides of the furnace to turn the heat into useful electricity. The TEGs are installed in a sandwich of aluminium plates designed to maximize heat transfer through the TEGs themselves. They’re fitted with heatsinks to help create the maximum thermal gradient for greater power output. The entire setup is housed in a larger aluminium cube that’s finished to look like the
Minecraft
furnace — achieved by using a CNC machine to draw on the aluminium with high-temperature Sharpies.
With the coal a-burning inside, the furnace was able to generate enough power to run its own cooling and exhaust fans. It even had a little power left over to charge a phone. Overall though, [Joel] hopes that with some improvement, it can one day power his
Minecraft
car replica up to its top speed of 25 mph. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533492",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T07:29:54",
"content": "Coal-fired power in Australia (50%, 2011)Coal power in the United States (30.4%, 2016)Not saying we can save the world, but keep going. Personally I’d rather have green Thorium molten salt reactors, but t... | 1,760,372,492.17321 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/diy-robotic-platform-aims-to-solve-walking-in-vr/ | DIY Robotic Platform Aims To Solve Walking In VR | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"locomotion",
"robotic platform",
"vr",
"walking in VR"
] | [Mark Dufour]’s
TACO VR project
is a sort of robotic platform that mimics an omnidirectional treadmill, and aims to provide a compact and easily transportable way to allow a user to walk naturally in VR.
Unenthusiastic about most solutions for allowing a user to walk in VR, [Mark] took a completely different approach. The result is a robotic platform that fits inside a small area whose sides fold up for transport; when packed up, it resembles a taco. When deployed, the idea is to have two disc-like platforms always stay under a user’s feet, keeping the user in one place while they otherwise walk normally.
It’s an ambitious project, but [Mark] is up to the task and
the project’s GitHub respository
has everything needed to stay up to date, or get involved yourself. The hardware is mainly focused on functionality right now; certainly a fall or stumble while using the prototype looks like it would be uncomfortable at the very best, but the idea is innovative.
When stowed for storage or transport, the system resembles a taco.
Locomotion issues as a whole are still not entirely solved problems in VR. It’s a space in which inspired hobbyists can absolutely experiment and innovate in a meaningful way. After all, the unique locomotion system in
Gorilla Tag
— a VR multiplayer game in which players are legless gorillas who move using only their arms — is a fantastic success and was the work of a single inspired developer. There’s definitely room for experimentation.
The TACO platform is a work in progress, but the pieces are coming together. You can see a test in the video below, in which two green markers represent a user’s feet. Watch the two platforms move and rotate as necessary to stay beneath the user’s (simulated) feet, meaning a user could walk normally, yet not move anywhere. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533469",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T03:56:23",
"content": "Scary to me, in a Kathy “Misery” Bates kinda way. Ankle twisting “never walk again” machine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6533470",
"a... | 1,760,372,492.312189 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/scramblepad-teardown-reveals-complicated-expensive-innards/ | Scramblepad Teardown Reveals Complicated, Expensive Innards | Donald Papp | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"7 segment",
"door access",
"number pad",
"reverse engineering",
"rfid",
"Scramblepad",
"security"
] | What’s a Scramblepad? It’s a type of number pad in which the numbers aren’t in fixed locations, and can only be seen from a narrow viewing angle. Every time the pad is activated, the buttons have different numbers. That way, a constant numerical code isn’t telegraphed by either button wear, or finger positions when punching it in. [Glen Akins] got his hands on one last year and figured out how to interface to it,
and shared loads of nice photos and details
about just how complicated this device was on the inside.
Just one of the many layers inside the Scramblepad.
Patented in 1982 and used for access control, a Scramblepad aimed to avoid the risk of someone inferring a code by watching a user punch it in, while also preventing
information leakage via wear and tear on the keys themselves
. They were designed to solve some specific issues, but as [Glen] points out, there are many good reasons they aren’t used today. Not only is their accessibility poor (they only worked at a certain height and viewing angle, and aren’t accessible to sight-impaired folks) but on top of that they are complex, expensive, and not vandal-proof.
[Glen]’s Scramblepad might be obsolete, but with its black build, sharp lines, and red LED 7-segment displays it has an undeniable style. It also includes an RFID reader, allowing it to act as a kind of two-factor access control.
On the inside, the reader is a hefty piece of hardware with multiple layers of PCBs and antennas. Despite all the electronics crammed into the Scramblepad, all by itself it doesn’t do much. A central controller is what actually controls door access, and the pad communicates to this board via an unencrypted, proprietary protocol. [Glen] went through the work of decoding this, and designed a simplified board that he plans to use for his own door access controller.
In the meantime, it’s a great peek inside a neat piece of hardware. You can see [Glen]’s Scramblepad in action in the short video embedded below. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533452",
"author": "The Womble",
"timestamp": "2022-11-19T02:10:07",
"content": "Been doing work in a building for a few weeks that has one of these mounted in the elevator, it’s long-disused from the looks of it, but the nasa spaghetti logo font and menacing robocop corporate desi... | 1,760,372,492.242039 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/augmented-reality-workbench-helps-you-to-debug-your-boards/ | Augmented Reality Workbench Helps You To Debug Your Boards | Robin Kearey | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Tech Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"augmented reality",
"debugging",
"lab bench",
"motion tracking"
] | No matter how advanced your design skills, the chances are you’ll need to spend some time chasing bugs in your boards after they come back from the assembly house. Testing and debugging a PCB typically involves a lot of cross-checking between the board, the layout and the schematic, which quickly becomes tiresome even for mildly complex designs. To make this task a bit easier, [Ishan Chatterjee] and colleagues at the University of Washington have designed
the Augmented Reality Debugging Workbench
, or ARDW for short.
The ARDW is a setup consisting of a lab workbench with an antistatic mat, a selection of measurement instruments and a PC. You can simply place your board on the bench, open the schematic and layout in KiCAD and start measuring and debugging your design as you normally would, but the real magic happens when you select a new icon in KiCAD that exports the schematic and layout to the ARDW system. From that moment, you can select components in your schematic and have them highlighted not only on the layout, but
on the physical board
in front of you as well. This is perhaps best demonstrated visually, as the team members do in the video embedded below.
The real-life highlighting of components is achieved thanks to a set of cameras that track the motion of everything on the desk as well as a video projector that overlays information on top of the PCB. All of this enables a variety of useful debugging features: for example, there’s an option to highlight pin one on all components, enabling a simple visual check of each component’s orientation. You can select all Do Not Populate (DNP) instances and immediately see if all highlighted pads are empty. If you’re not sure which component you’re looking at, just point at it with your multimeter probe and it’s highlighted on the schematic and layout. You can even place your probes on a net and automatically log the voltage for future reference, thanks to a digital link between the multimeter and the ARDW software.
In addition to designing and building the ARDW, the team also performed a usability study using a group of human test subjects. They especially liked the ability to quickly locate components on crowded boards, but found the on-line measurement system a bit cumbersome due to its limited positional accuracy. Future work will therefore focus on improving the resolution of the projected image and generally making the system more compact and robust. All software is freely available on
the project’s GitHub page
, and while the current system looks a little complex for hobbyist use, we can already imagine it being a useful tool in production environments.
It’s not even the first time augmented reality has been used for PCB debugging: we saw
a somewhat similar system
at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference. AR can also come in handy during the design and prototyping phase, as demonstrated by
this AR breadboard
. | 17 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533409",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T22:06:27",
"content": "Really cool idea, hope to see a version that requires less supporting hardware in the future",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6533422",
"aut... | 1,760,372,492.463614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/faceless-clock-makes-your-think-twice-about-how-it-works/ | Faceless Clock Makes You Think Twice About How It Works | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"clock",
"magnet",
"neodymium",
"worm gear"
] | We love projects that make you do a double-take when you first see them. It’s always fun to think you see one thing, but then slowly realize everything is not quite what you expected. And
this faceless analog clock
is very much one of those projects.
When we first saw [Shinsaku Hiura]’s “Hollow Clock 4,” we assumed the trick to making it look like the hands were floating in space would rely on the judicious use of clear acrylic. But no, this clock is truly faceless — you could easily stick a finger from front to back. The illusion is achieved by connecting the minute hand to the rim of the clock, and rotating the whole outer circumference through a compact 3D printed gear train. It’s a very clever mechanism, and it’s clear that it took a lot of work to optimize everything so that the whole look of the clock is sleek and modern.
But what about the hour hand? That’s just connected to the end of the minute hand at the center of the clock’s virtual face, so how does that work? As it is with most things that appear to be magical, the answer is magnets. The outer rim of the clock actually has another ring, this one containing a pair of neodymium magnets. They attract another magnet located in the very end of the hour hand, dragging it along as the hour ring rotates. The video below shows off the secrets, and it gives you some idea of how much work went into this clock.
We’re used to seeing unique and fun timepieces and other gadgets from [Shinsaku Hiura] —
this up-flipping clock
comes to mind, as does
this custom RPN calculator
— but this project is clearly a step beyond. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533366",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T19:11:08",
"content": "That is so subtle its extremely charming.Looks great, a fun and neat idea that doesn’t feel the need to attach neon signs pointing out its ‘impossible coolness’, Magic.",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,372,492.521516 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/hackaday-podcast-193-found-computers-internet-over-whatsapp-two-factor-c64-shifting-cars-and-self-shooting-fighter-planes/ | Hackaday Podcast 193: Found Computers, Internet Over WhatsApp, Two-Factor C64, Shifting Cars, And Self-Shooting Fighter Planes | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney review the literature on a hack-packed week of action. We’ll find a Linux machine inside just about anything, including curb-side TVs and surprisingly secure EV chargers. No Internet? No problem — just tunnel IP through WhatsApp! We’ll see that 3D printers can be repurposed for lab automation of the cheap, build the worst — but coolest — 2FA dongle of all time, and see how a teetering tower of cards can make your old motherboard think any ISA card is plugged into it. Worried that driving an EV is going to be a boring experience? Don’t be — maybe you’ll still get to jam through the gears. But if you do, rest assured there’ll be plenty of careful engineering done to see if it’s safe. Err, at least we hope so…
Download the podcast for safe keeping.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 193 Show Notes:
News:
Artemis 1 success makes SLS most powerful rocket ever to fly
electronica (where Elliot has been hanging out)
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [Leon E] for guessing that I was torturing a hobby servo.
[Elliot]’s
random image hash script
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Dial-Up Internet Over WhatsApp
GitHub – adiwajshing/Baileys: Lightweight full-featured WhatsApp Web + Multi-Device API
DNS Tunneling With An ESP8266
DNS Tunneling: Getting The Data Out Over Other Peoples’ WiFi
Tunneling IP Traffic Over ICMP
Generating Two-Factor Authentication Codes With A Commodore 64
TOTP Algorithm Explained – Protectimus Solutions
Inside Two-Factor Authentication Apps
Emulate Any ISA Card With A Raspberry Pi And An FPGA
Pi Pico W Does PCMCIA, Gets This IBM PC110 Online
Reverse Engineering Reveals EV Charger Has A Sense Of Security
Tricking A Smart Meter Into Working On The Bench
A Single Board Computer From A TV
chip_scavenger/src/scavenge at main · ninakali/chip_scavenger · GitHub
Thin Client And Smartphone Step In For 3D Printer’s Raspberry Pi And Touchscreen
3D Printer Repurposed For Light-Duty Lab Automation Tasks
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Bike-Riding Skeleton Stalks The Streets On Halloween
Pretty Petite Picolibc Powers Processors
Wearable Sensor Trained To Count Coughs
Rapid Prototyping To Measure Turbidity In Rapids
Dan’s Picks:
A DIY Equatorial Mount Using Harmonic Drives
Power Up Vintage Electronics Less Unsafely With A Dim-Bulb Tester
Getting To The Heart Of A Baofeng
Automatic Lens Cover Helps Cameras Cover Space Launches
Can’t-Miss Articles:
EV Sales Sticking Point: People Still Want Manual Transmissions
The Importance Of Physical Models: How Not To Shoot Yourself In The Foot Or Anywhere Else
Beware Common Sense Engineering | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533410",
"author": "Foley Matthews",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T22:12:59",
"content": "left wondering what the incorrect response to the mystery sound was. was it something un-podcast-able? couldn’t you use a euphemism?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,492.865511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/tiny-rc-truck-and-trailer-motors-around-tabletop/ | Tiny RC Truck And Trailer Motors Around Tabletop | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"attiny",
"bluetooth",
"R/C car",
"radio control",
"rc"
] | Most RC cars replicate real-world race cars or fantastical off-road buggies for outdoor escapades. [diorama111] is an expert at building tiny desk-roaming models, though,
and built this exquisite micro semi-truck and trailer.
Based on a 1/150 scale truck and trailer model, the build starts with the tractor unit. It’s disassembled, and its plastic wheels are machined on a tiny lathe so they can be fitted with grippy rubber tires carved out of O-ring material. The front wheels are given hubs and mounted to a motor-driven screw-type steering assembly. A photodetector is used to aid in self-centering. The rear axle is fitted with a geared drivetrain, running off a small DC motor. Multiple gear stages are used to give the build plenty of torque for pulling the trailer. Remote control of the model is achieved over Bluetooth, with an ATtiny3217 tucked inside with motor drivers to run the show.
The microcontroller also runs a full set of driving, tail, and indicator lights. The trailer is fitted with an infrared receiver and a battery of its own. It receives signals from an infrared LED on the tractor unit, which tell the trailer when to turn on the taillights and indicators.
There aren’t too many modelers working in the RC space at the 1:150 scale. [diorama111] has form here, though,
and we’ve featured a previous Toyota Crown build before. | 17 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533340",
"author": "Lee Hart",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T16:44:58",
"content": "Fantastic workmanship!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6533345",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T17:12:11",
"content": "That is... | 1,760,372,492.717212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/this-week-in-security-mastadon-fake-software-company-and-shufflecake/ | This Week In Security: Mastodon, Fake Software Company, And ShuffleCake | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"BIG-IP",
"mastodon",
"pixel",
"This Week in Security"
] | Due to Twitter’s new policy of testing new features on production, the interest in Mastodon as a potential replacement has skyrocketed. And what’s not to love? You can host it yourself, it’s part of the Fediverse, and you can even run one of the experimental forks for more features. But there’s also the danger of putting a service on the internet, as
[Gareth Heyes] illustrates by stealing passwords from, ironically, the infosec.exchange instance.
Every service that allows one user to input text, and then shows that text to other users, has to be hardened against cross-site scripting, XSS. That’s the attack where HTML or Javascript can be injected into another user’s experience. Usually this hardening is done with a filter than sanitizes user input. The two features that can trip this up are HTML elements that are allowed, and special parsing features. In this case, that special feature was the tongue-in-cheek “verified” icon that users could add to their display name, by adding a
:verified:
tag.
Mastodon replaces the tag with an HTML
img
block which includes double quotes to display the icon. It gets interesting when that icon is inside a user-supplied HTML field, like an
<ABBR title=""
tag. The double quotes of your ABBR code mismatches with the double quotes created by the verified icon, and you can suddenly inject all sorts of fun code. The door isn’t wide open, though, as Mastodon has a well-written Content Security Policy (CSP). It allows iframes, but other content cannot be loaded from outside domains. This defeats many of the normal attacks, but [Gareth] had a trick up his sleeve — invisible forms.
Password managers, like the one built into Chrome, are pretty aggressive about auto-filling forms, and there isn’t a check for whether those forms are visible. The only catch was how to submit the form. That has to be a user-initiated action. The solution here is to spoof a second message, and fake the toolbar between messages. It’s not a perfect 0-click exploit, but the results are pretty convincing.
[Gareth] reported the flaw to Mastodon and the Glitch fork, and both have issued patches to mitigate the elements of this attack, although core Mastodon wasn’t actually ever vulnerable because it doesn’t allow the
<ABBR title="">
attribute in the first place.
Pushwoosh
It’s pretty common for a company to be registered in one place, and physically do business in another. In the US, Delaware is a popular choice for filing articles of corporation. This is, by the way, why the Twitter vs Musk court case happened in the Delaware Court of Chancery — Twitter is a Delaware company. What’s less kosher is a company based in one country, and claims to be based in another, without the paper trail to disclose.
And that seems to be exactly what Pushwoosh is up to
.
This would be a relatively uninteresting story, except the fact that Pushwoosh seems to actually be based in Russia, and has taken contracts to do DoD work. It appears that some data handling happens on Pushwoosh servers, including collection of geolocation data. It’s not clear that anything malicious was going on, but this isn’t a risk the US Government is willing to take.
Shufflecake Brings the Deniability
Remember Truecrypt? It was disk encryption software that had some fancy extra features, like hidden volumes for plausible deniability. You could set up an encrypted volume that would show one set of files when given one password, and a different set with another. Development on Truecrypt was abandoned in a weird turn of events, years ago. There’s now a new project that looks to fill the plausible deniability gap,
Shufflecake
.
It’s open source, runs as a Linux kernel module and userspace tool, and supports nested hidden volumes 15 deep. The encrypted volume is stored in unused block device space, and is completely indistinguishable from random bits on the disk. The plausible deniability bit comes in when decrypting and mounting, as you can just decrypt the outer volume with one password, and it’s impossible to tell whether any additional volumes exists, until a valid password is given.
F5 BIG-IP CSRF
[Ron Bowes] at
Rapid7 has some fun research
that achieves Remote Code Execution on F5 BIG-IP and BIG-IQ devices. These are powerful network devices doing traffic shaping at ISP scales, and they run CentOS under the hood. Kudos to F5 for getting a lot right, like leaving SELinux enabled, which apparently made for much more difficult exploitation. The problem is an API endpoint that lacks Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protections, and these endpoints can be called from a script running on a visited webpage. The attack is to trick an admin into loading such a page, and then hijacking the existing session cookie to call the API.
To pivot into code execution, an RPM specification generator is abused, and a
%check
command is injected. This gets used in legitimate RPM packages to fire off post-install tests, but here is used to launch a webshell. A few other weaknesses are chained together to get to root-level access. The research was reported to F5, and fixes went out this week.
Pixel 6 Parts Two and Three
We covered
part one
and
part two
of this story, but to complete the circle,
part three
are now available, in the tale of how the Pixel 6 bootloader was cracked. The first hurdle here was finding a section of memory that was marked readable, writable, and executable. Then getting shellcode that will actually execute in this environment is a bit of a challenge, but just the write makefile wizardry generates the needed code. The set of three posts is a great primer on how to go about breaking Android bootloaders. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533320",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T15:15:05",
"content": "Mastodon like the extinct animal, not mast*a*don..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6533323",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-11... | 1,760,372,493.1002 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/supercon-balloon-continues-its-world-tour/ | Supercon Balloon W6MRR-26 Continues Its World Tour | Joseph Long | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"amateur radio",
"high altitude balloon",
"microcontrollers"
] | [Martin Rothfield] and other amateur radio operators from
San Francisco High Altitude Ballooning
(SF-HAB) treated conference attendees to the
2022 Hackaday Supercon
to the launch of two High Altitude Balloons (HABs). On the morning of November 6th, the two balloons were launched from a park across the street from Supplyframe DesignLab in Pasadena, California.
Seven days after its launch from Southern California, one of the balloons was over Tajikistan cruising eastward at an altitude of 42,000 feet (12,800 meters).
Balloon W6MRR-26
was already approaching China where it will continue its wonderful world tour to parts unknown. The second balloon (call sign W3HAC-11) landed in northern Arizona where it has continued transmitting whenever it receives power from the sun.
Each balloon carries a tiny payload — a printed circuit board powered only by small photovoltaic cells. The board includes a microcontroller, a GPS module, and a
Weak Signal Propagation Reporter
(WSPR) radio transmitter. The transmitted operates on the 20 meter amateur radio band at around 14 MHz.
WSPR beacons
can provide time, altitude, and location information. The WSPR telemetry is then relayed via WSPRgates using
Automatic Packet Reporting System
(APRS) onto the Internet. The collected information can be viewed and mapped on websites such as
aprs.fi
.
Map image from
LU7AA AMSAT Argentina | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533286",
"author": "Hans Summers",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T12:30:05",
"content": "Readers may be interested to know that my U4B high altitude balloon tracker is now available athttp://qrp-labs.com/u4b– weighing 1.8 grams and costing $56.09 it is both the lightest and cheapest trac... | 1,760,372,492.769256 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/18/pop-your-way-to-a-fresh-roast-coffee/ | Pop Your Way To A Fresh Roast Coffee | Jenny List | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"coffee roaster",
"hot air",
"popcorn machine"
] | The preparation and consumption of coffee has become something of an art from in our community, with many people going to extravagant lengths to achieve the perfect cup. [Eric Sorensen] was keen to roast his own beans, but given the price of a dedicated roaster, instead
made his own using a hot air popcorn popper
.
The story unfolds in several parts, and starts with disabling the thermal cutout on the popper to be replaced with thermal sensors. An Arduino controls both the fan and the heating coil to regulate and vary the roasting temperature over time. Perhaps it’s the software and user interface that most makes this project shine, with a graphical interface on a 320 by 240 pixel touch screen, and a graphing profile interface more reminiscent of a reflow oven than a kitchen appliance. The whole thing is neatly packed away with its power supply in a slimline case, and while we’re no bean experts, we appreciate the uniform brown of the finished product.
Coffee roasters have appeared here numerous times over the years. One of the more recent was
this wobble disk design
. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533295",
"author": "John Gadbois",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T13:16:41",
"content": "The type of SSR is only rated to 5A as used. To get the listed current rating (if above 5A) it needs to be attached to an appropriately sized heat sink. This mistake is very common in DIY projects.... | 1,760,372,492.664458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/17/building-a-lego-pneumatic-engine/ | Building A LEGO Pneumatic Engine | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"air engine",
"lego",
"pneumatic engine"
] | Pneumatic engines aren’t something we use every day, but they’re compelling things to see working in practice. [Nico71] built an eye-catching example out of LEGO Technic,
and it’s remarkably fully-featured.
The build relies on a single pneumatic cylinder driving a flywheel. Flow to the cylinder is determined by camshaft-controlled valves. The valves themselves are custom-built, composed of hose loops that are kinked to shut off flow. In addition to the basic operating components, the engine also features a throttle valve which uses the same kinked-hose principle. The main control valves are installed in a housing that can be rotated relative to the engine’s frame to vary the timing of the valves relative to the flywheel’s rotation. A gear system allows fine adjustment of the timing. The throttle and timing controls are accessible on a tidy control panel complete with a idle-adjust mechanism.
Those wishing to build one themselves can rejoice, for [Nico71] provides instructions
for a small fee.
We’ve seen other air engines before, too,
often of the 3D-printed variety
. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533266",
"author": "JanW",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T09:15:05",
"content": "This video is no nonsense, on point stuff. Nice!I especially like that he shows the single mechanisms and how they work in detail.Amazing stuff!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}... | 1,760,372,492.816332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/17/logic-via-dna/ | Logic Via DNA | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"dna",
"naughts and crosses",
"tic-tac-toe"
] | We often say you can make logic gates out of nearly anything. [Steve Mould] would agree as he just finished playing naughts and crosses (tic tac toe if you are an American) with
a tray full of DNA
. You can see the resulting game and how it works in the video below.
The use of DNA isn’t really significant as it simply implements a logic equation for each of the nine cells. So, for example, each cell is taken by an X (the DNA) only when certain other squares have been taken by O or not taken by O. So you essentially create an AND/OR gate using the state of each cell and its inverse.
Of course, the key is how do you input your moves and how does the DNA process the equations? The input is simple. You add a different solution for each move and turn to each cell. The processing requires a little lab work as explained in the video.
Honestly, this reminded us of a diode logic project from
1976
. It seems like a program, but really it is just a clever use of combinatorial logic. Practical? Maybe not, but it is illustrative of how things are different in the biochemical world. And as we always say,
practically anything can be a logic gate
.
Really
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533224",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T04:57:48",
"content": "The most important part when doing computing is reliability. Last I heard, a breakthrough made it so that errors only occurred once in ~3000 DNA logic gates. Good but still not good enough for computing.",... | 1,760,372,493.043975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/17/supercon-badge-reads-a-punch-card/ | Supercon Badge Reads A “Punch” Card | Dave Rowntree | [
"cons",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"badge",
"charlieplexing",
"optical",
"pixelblaze",
"punchcard"
] | This year’s Hackaday Supercon, the first since 2019 thanks to the pandemic, was a very similar affair to those of the past. Almost every hardware-orientated hacker event has its own custom electronic badge, and Supercon was no different. This year’s badge is a simulation platform for a hypothetical 4-bit CPU created by our own [Voja Antonic], and presented a real challenge for some of the attendees who had never touched machine code during their formative years. The challenge set was to come up with the most interesting hack for the badge, so collaborators [Ben Hencke] and [Zach Fredin] set about nailing the ‘expandr’ category of the competition with their
optical punched card reader bolt-on
.
Peripheral connectivity is somewhat limited. The idea was to build a bolt-on board with its own local processing — using a PixelBlaze board [Ben] brought along — to handle all the scanning details. Then, once the program on the card was read, dump the whole thing over to the badge CPU via its serial interface. Without access to their
usual facilities back home, [Ben] and [Zach] obviously had to improvise with whatever they had with them, and whatever could be scrounged off other badges or other hardware lying around.
One big issue was that most people don’t usually carry photodiodes with them, but luckily they remembered that an LED can be used as a photodiode when reverse-biased appropriately. Feeding the signal developed over a one Meg resistance, into a transconductance amplifier courtesy of a donated LM358 there was enough variation for the STM32 ADC to reliably detect the difference between unfilled and filled check-boxes on the filled-in program cards.
The CPU required 12-bit opcodes, which obviously implies 12 photodiodes and 12 LEDs to read each word. The PixelBlaze board does not have this many analog inputs. A simple trick was instead of having discrete inputs, all 12 photodiodes were wired in parallel and fed into a single input amplifier. To differentiate the different bits, the illumination LEDs instead were charlieplexed, thus delivering the individual bits as a sequence of values into the ADC, for subsequent de-serialising. The demonstration video shows that it works, with a program loaded from a card and kicked into operation manually. Such fun!
Punch cards usually have a hole through them and can be read mechanically, and are a great way to configure testers like this
interesting vacuum valve tester we covered a short while back
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6533292",
"author": "Winston",
"timestamp": "2022-11-18T13:02:06",
"content": "From a previous column about the badge:https://hackaday.com/2022/10/12/the-2022-supercon-badge-is-a-handheld-trip-through-computing-history/“Now, the best way to get one is to buy yourself a ticket and co... | 1,760,372,493.002239 |
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