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https://hackaday.com/2024/09/07/building-a-diy-msx-mega-cartridge/ | Building A DIY MSX Mega Cartridge | Dave Rowntree | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cartridge",
"mapper",
"msx",
"retrocomputing"
] | [Mike] from Leaded Solder has a soft spot for old computers, and a chance encounter with a friend sent them deep down the deep hole that is the world of 80s and 90s-era Japanese home computers. Many people playing with these machines have all kinds of issues to deal with, such as rotting cartridges, failing components, and just dirt and mank in critical places. [Mike] decided that working on an
MSX-standard custom programmable cartridge
would be sensible, but then got stuck on how the MSX cartridge mapping works.
The Konami 128K scheme uses 4 to 4-of-8 mapping.
You may recall that the MSX platform is not a single computer but a standard to which many (mainly Japanese) manufacturers designed their products. This disconnected the software writers from the hardware makers and is essentially a mirror of the IBM-PC clone scene.
The MSX is based around the Z80, which has a 16-bit address bus, restricting it to 64K of ROM or RAM. The MSX has two cartridge slots, an ‘internal’ slot for the BIOS and RAM and a fourth for ‘misc’ use. Each of these is mapped internally into the physical address space. The cartridge slots have 64K of addressable space mapped into the Z80 physical space.
If this was not complicated enough, many MSX games and applications exceeded this restriction and added a layer of mapping inside the cartridge using bank switching. A register in the cartridge could change the upper bits of the address allowing ROMs larger than 64K.
[Mike] wanted to replicate the method Konami used for their games. Their first target was
The Maze of Galious
, which requires a 128K ROM. Their scheme requires additional hardware to map each of the four 16K slots in the cartridge interface to four of the eight 16K slots of the ROM chip. The game selects which bits of the ROM it needs as the game progresses. The implementation uses an old 74LS670, which can still be bought from old stock as a 4×4 bit register file and a two-way dip selector switch. This allowed [Mike] to fit four games into a single SST39SF040 4MBit parallel flash chip. After a few false starts with the details of address bit selection, they were rewarded by Galious booting up without any additional work needed. If you own an MSX-compatible machine and want to build one for yourself, the full KiCAD project is available on the
project GitHub page
.
The MSX isn’t a well-known platform in the West, and MSX hacks are a rarity here, but in the spirit of retro, here’s a hack to add
support for a retro gamepad to the MSX
. Also, if you can’t find a period MSX,
you can always build one
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8001304",
"author": "Skeptic dude",
"timestamp": "2024-09-08T02:39:16",
"content": "The MSX isn’t a well-known platform in the WestYou mean in the US, the MSX architecture was very popular in some Western countries: Spain and the Netherlands in Europe, Brazil and Argentina in South ... | 1,760,371,800.556405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/07/rendering-skin-transparent-using-the-food-dye-tartrazine/ | Rendering Skin Transparent Using The Food Dye Tartrazine | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"food dye",
"refractive index",
"tartrazine"
] | Although we generally assume that opacity is the normal look for animals like us humans, this factoid is only correct for as long as you maintain the dissimilar optical refraction indices of skin and the more aqueous underlying structures. What if you could change the refraction index of skin? If you could prevent the normal scattering at the interface, you could reveal the structures underneath, effectively rendering skin transparent. [Zihao Uo] and others demonstrate this in a paper
published
in
Science
.
The substance they used was the common food dye known as
tartrazine
, which also goes by the names of Yellow 5 and E102 when it is used in food (like Doritos), cosmetics, and drugs. By rubbing the tartrazine into the skin of mice, the researchers were able to observe underlying blood vessels and muscles. Simulations predicted that the dye would change the refraction index mismatch between lipids and water which normally causes the light scattering that creates the skin’s opaque appearance. With the dye rubbed into the skin, the effect worked to a depth of about 3 mm, which makes it useful for some research and possible medical applications, but not quite at the ‘jellyfish-transparency’ levels that some seem to have imagined at the news.
Researchers and medical personnel have long wished for this kind of in vivo tissue transparency. A
2019 review article
by [Mikhail Inyushin] and colleagues in
Molecules
provides an overview of the many possible ways, both genetic and chemical, that you might see through skin. Tartrazine has a significant advantage: it is generally considered to be a harmless food dye. In addition, reversing the effect is as simple as washing the dye off.
Naturally, human skin will be trickier than that of mice due to the varying presence of melanin. So it will take more work to use this technique on people, but there are many mice and other common lab test critters who are breathing a deep sigh of relief as the scalpel can be put away for some types of studies.
For now, better to stick with
MRI
. And fair warning: there’s no need to
rush out to rub Doritos on your PCB
— it doesn’t work. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7997859",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2024-09-07T23:31:06",
"content": "Sunburnt intestines! (or at least fat)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8039464",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2024-09-12T15... | 1,760,371,800.815144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/07/get-thee-to-git/ | Get Thee To Git | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"Git",
"software",
"version control"
] | While version control used to be reserved for big corporate projects, it is very mainstream these days. You can attribute much of that to Git, the software that has nearly displaced other version control. Git works well, it is versatile, and it scales well. It is easy to use as an individual developer or as part of a worldwide team. But Git is also one of those things that people don’t always study, they just sort of “pick it up” as they go. That motivated [Glasskube] to create “
The Guide to Git I Never Had
.”
If you are ready to click away because you are not a software person, hang on. Git is actually useful for many different kinds of data, and there are a number of hardware projects that use Git in some form. That’s especially true if the project has some code associated with it, but there are projects that consist of PCBs, reverse engineering documentation, or schematics.
Simplistically, Git tracks a bunch of files and lets you rewind in time to answer the question: what did this look like a month ago? Or a year ago? However, the real power lies in producing and merging branches.
For example, you might be working on a product and decided to add feature “A.” Meanwhile, your partner decides to work on feature “B.” No problem. You can each work in your own separate branch and get everything working. You don’t even have to be connected to a server until the very end.
When either of you are ready, you can merge your branch with the main branch. Often, this can be done automatically, but Git knows when it is in over its head and will ask for help. When you are both done merging, both of your changes are “live.” If you do it right, Git can also help answer the question: why did we make that change two years ago? It is surprising how often that’s important.
If you think Git is just for code, we can show you some
strange examples
. If you don’t fancy reading a blog post to learn Git,
would you like to play a game
? | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7994873",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2024-09-07T21:09:29",
"content": "While version control used to be reserved for big corporate projects, it is very mainstream these days.RCS was available to all in the early ’80s, CVS was released in the early ’90s. From my experience, by t... | 1,760,371,800.445022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/09/doom-on-a-volumetric-display/ | DOOMOn A Volumetric Display | Dave Rowntree | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"3d",
"doom",
"volumetric",
"volumetric display"
] | There’s something magical about volumetric displays. They really need to be perceived in person, and no amount of static or video photography will ever do them justice. [AncientJames] has built a few, and we’re reporting on his progress, mostly because he got it to run
a playable port of
DOOM
.
Base view of an earlier version showing the motor drive and PSU
As we’ve seen before,
DOOM
is very much a 3D game viewed on a 2D display using all manner of clever tricks and optimizations. The background visual gives a 3D effect, but the game’s sprites are definitely very solidly in 2D land. As we’ll see, that wasn’t good enough for [James].
The basic concept relies on a pair of 128 x 64 LED display matrix modules sitting atop a rotating platform. The 3D printed platform holds the displays vertically, with the LEDs lined up with the diameter, meaning the electronics hang off the back, creating some imbalance.
Lead, in the form of
the type used for traditional window leading
, was used as a counterbalance.
A Raspberry Pi 4 with a modified version of
this LED driver HAT is rotating with the displays
. The Pi and both displays are fed power from individual Mini560 buck modules, taking their input from a 12 V 100 W Mean-Well power supply via a car alternator slip ring setup. (Part numbers
ABH6004S
and
ASL9009
for those interested.) Finally, to synchronise the setup, a simple IR photo interrupter signals the Pi via an interrupt.
The second version running Doom
The base contains a DC motor driving the platform with a 224:20 reduction ratio using a GT2 timing belt to help reduce noise. [James] reports that running at 700 RPM was the limit for the current version, giving an acceptable update frame rate. Too high, and the vibration and chassis flex was excessive. The base does little else other than house that power supply and support a 400 mm acrylic garden light dome. We wouldn’t want to run this without such protection, which might not even be enough.
There are quite a few details to consider in such a build. One
is the need to
reduce
the angle of perception of the LED display using a 3D printed slat-type collimator in front of each unit. You only want to perceive the LEDs head-on
, or the POV effect is ruined. However, most of the details are in the software.
To that end, [James] took the entire game logic of the ‘Doom Generic’ port, removing the code that renders the 3D parts of the scene. The 2D menus and in-game panels are rendered by projecting the image onto a cylinder. That was easy. [James] took a minimalist path for the room scenes, as fully solid walls looked too busy. The viewport automatically zooms into any ongoing battles, so monsters zoom into focus if nearby, but objects behind closed doors and too far around corners are discarded. No spoiler alerts! The models were lifted from
Chello’s Voxel Doom mod
, giving a fitting 3D upgrade to gameplay. This is an ongoing project, so we’ll keep track and report back!
We’ve reported on a few volumetric displays over the years, like this
tiny one based on an OLED display
. Even a
volumetric CCTV system
. But they can’t run
DOOM
. Speaking of which,
here’s what it looks like ray-traced
.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8024976",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2024-09-10T02:17:34",
"content": "But can it run Crysis?Kidding aside, cool concept! I wonder if it’s possible to scale up the LED display to give a fuller look with more solid wall?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,801.07618 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-softguard-superlok/ | PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"copy protection",
"reverse engineering"
] | Many have sought the holy grail of making commercial media both readable and copy-proof, especially once everyone began to copy those floppies. One of these attempts to make floppies copy-proof was
Softguard’s Superlok
. This in-depth look at this copy protection system by [GloriousCow] comes on the heels of a part one that covers
Formaster’s Copy-Lock
. Interestingly, Sierra switched from Copy-Lock to Superlok for their DOS version of games like King’s Quest, following the industry’s quest in search of this holy grail.
The way that Superlok works is that it loads a (hidden) executable called
CPC.COM
which proceeds to read the 128 byte key that is stored on a special track 6. With this key the game’s executable is decoded and fun can commence. Without a valid ‘Play’ disk containing the special track and
CPC.COM
executable all one is instead left with is a request by the game to ‘insert your ORIGINAL disk 1’.
Sierra’s King Quest v1.0 for DOS.
As one can see in the Norton Commander screenshot of a Sierra game disk, the hidden file is easily uncovered in any application that supports showing hidden files. However,
CPC.COM
couldn’t be executed directly; it needs to be executed from a memory buffer and passed the correct stack parameters. Sierra likely put in very little effort when implementing Softguard’s solution in their products, as Superlok supports changing the encryption key offset and other ways to make life hard for crackers.
Sierra was using version 2.3 of Superlok, but Softguard would also make a version 3.0. This is quite similar to 2.x, but has a gotcha in that it reads across the track index for the outer sector. This requires track wrapping to be implemented. Far from this kind of copy protection cracking being a recent thing, there was a thriving market for products that would circumvent these protections, all the way up to Central Point’s Copy II PC Option Board that would man-in-the-middle between the floppy disk drive and the CPU, intercepting data and render those copy protections pointless.
As for the fate of Softguard, by the end of the 1980s many of its customers were tiring of the cat-and-mouse game between crackers and Softguard, along with issues reported by legitimate users. Customers like Infographics Inc. dropped the Superlok protection by 1987 and by 1992 Softguard was out of business. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8025073",
"author": "JFOC",
"timestamp": "2024-09-10T02:33:30",
"content": "This kind protections is popular on 80s&90s. I was able pass these kind protection at that time for testing purpose",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "80... | 1,760,371,800.617107 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/09/this-tiny-steam-engine-takes-a-watchmakers-skill-to-build/ | This Tiny Steam Engine Takes A Watchmaker’s Skill To Build | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts"
] | [
"Carbide",
"horology",
"HSS",
"lathe",
"micromachining",
"steam",
"steam engine",
"watchmaker"
] | When your steam engine build requires multiple microscopes, including those of the scanning electron variety, you know
you’re building something really, really tiny
.
All of the usual tiny superlatives and comparisons apply to [Chronova Engineering]’s latest effort — fits on a pencil eraser, don’t sneeze while you’re working on it or you’ll never find it. If we were to put the footprint of this engine into SMD context, we’d say it’s around a 2010 or so. As one would expect, the design is minimalistic, with no room for traditional bearings or valves. The piston and connecting rod are one piece, meaning the cylinder must pivot, which provides a clever way of switching between intake and exhaust. Tiny crankshaft, tiny flywheel. Everything you’d associate with a steam engine is there, but just barely.
The tooling needed to accomplish this feat is pretty impressive too.
[Chronova] are no strangers to precision work
, but this is a step beyond. Almost everything was done on a watchmaker’s lathe with a milling attachment and a microscope assist. For the main body of the engine, a pantograph engraving machine was enlisted to scale a 3D printed template down tenfold. Drill bits in the 0.3 mm range didn’t fare too well against annealed tool steel, which is where the scanning electron microscope came into play. It revealed brittle fractures in the carbide tool, which prompted a dive down the rabbit hole of micro-machining and a switch to high-speed steel tooling.
It all worked in the end, enough so that the engine managed 42,000 RPM on a test with compressed air. We eagerly await the equally tiny boiler for a live steam test. | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8023297",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2024-09-09T20:18:02",
"content": "I wonder how many times he dropped it and had to start from the beginning.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8024024",
"author": "Drone",
... | 1,760,371,800.688119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/09/one-giant-steppe-for-space-flight/ | One Giant Steppe For Space Flight | Michael Shaub | [
"Space"
] | [
"aerospace",
"cosmonaut",
"entry descent landing",
"Soyuz",
"space flight",
"The New Yorker"
] | In a recent
photo essay for the New Yorker magazine
, author Keith Gessen and photographer Andrew McConnell share what life is like for the residents around the launch facility and where Soyuz capsules land in Kazakhstan.
Read the article for a brief history of the Baikonur spaceport and observations from the photographer’s fifteen visits to observe Soyuz landings and the extreme separation between the local farmers and the facilities built up around Baikonur. A local ecologist even compares the family farmers toiling around the busy spaceport to a scene our readers may be familiar with on Tatooine.
We assumed Soyuz capsules splashdown somewhere near Russia just like the iconic images of Apollo capsules. While they can land in water, their 13 target landing sites are all on land in the sparsely inhabited Kazakhstan steppe (flat grasslands). According to
russianspaceweb.com
, the descent is slowed with a single large parachute. When the capsule is about one meter from the ground, solid rocket thrusters fire, “reducing the descent speed of the capsule to between 0 and 3 meters per second.” We learned that the rockets’ force, not the crumple zone on the capsule, causes so much stress that each is only suitable for a single use.
A typical final descent trajectory for the Soyuz spacecraft in Kazakhstan (courtesy russianspaceweb.com)
While there is fascinating engineering in the Soyuz landing, from the landing rockets mentioned above to parachute wires acting as antennae for transponders to the multiple automated and backup systems, there is some hacking by the local farmers as well. The cast-off parts of the single-use capsules become scrap metal for use around the farms, leading to haunting images that seem to come from a dystopian future where space flights are as common as commercial air travel but still out of reach for many. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8022871",
"author": "Doug",
"timestamp": "2024-09-09T18:45:19",
"content": "It’s a shame that you can’t look at the photo essay because the New Yorker requires a subscription to access the article. Booo, Hissss",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,800.749149 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/09/supercon-2023-ben-combee-and-the-hackers-guide-to-audio-video-formats/ | Supercon 2023: Ben Combee And The Hacker’s Guide To Audio/Video Formats | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"audio",
"format",
"latency",
"media",
"mp4",
"video",
"wav"
] | Media formats have come a long way since the early days of computing. Once upon a time, the very idea of even playing live audio was considered a lofty goal, with home computers instead making do with simple synthesizer chips instead. Eventually, though, real audio became possible, and in turn, video as well.
But what of the formats in which we store this media? Today, there are so many—from MP3s to MP4s, old-school AVIs to modern *.h264s. Senior software engineer Ben Combee came down to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon to give us all a run down of modern audio and video formats, and how they’re best employed these days.
Vaguely Ironic
Thanks to vectrexer, who raised the alarm that the stream’s sound needed to be kicked into gear.
Before we dive into the meat of the talk, it’s important we acknowledge the elephant in the room. Yes, the audio on Ben’s talk was completely absent until seven minutes and ten seconds in. The fact that this happened on a talk about audio/visual matters has not escaped us. In any case, Ben’s talk is still very much worth watching—most of it has perfectly fine audio and you can quite easily follow what he’s saying from his slides. Ben, you have our apologies in this regard.
Choose Carefully
You know the great thing about MP3? The patents expired in 2018!
Ben’s talk starts with fundamentals. He notes you need to understand your situation in exquisite detail to ensure you’re picking the correct format for the job. You need to think about what platform you’re using, how much processing you can do on the CPU, and how much RAM you have to spare for playback. There’s also the question of storage, too. Questions of latency are also important if your application is particularly time-sensitive, and you should also consider whether you’ll need to encode streams in addition to simply decoding them. Or, in simpler terms, are you just playing media, or are you recording it too? Finally, he points out that you should consider licensing or patent costs. This isn’t such a concern on small hobby projects, but it’s a big deal if you’re doing something commercially.
When it comes to picking an audio format, you’ll need to specify your desired bit rate, sample size, and number of channels. Metadata might be important to your application, too. He provides a go-to list of popular choices, from the common uncompressed PCM to the ubiquitous MP3. Beyond that, there are more modern codecs like AAC and Vorbis, as well as those for specialist applications like aLaw and uLaw.
Brightness is what humans notice most! That lets you do some neat things where you spend more data on brightness levels and less on specific colors.
Ben notes that MP3 is particularly useful these days, as its patents ran out in 2018. However, it does require a lot of software to decode, and can take quite a bit of hardware resources too (on the embedded scale, at least). Meanwhile, Opus is a great open-source format that was specifically designed for speech applications, and has low bitrate options handy if you need them.
When it comes to video, Ben explains that it makes sense to first contemplate images. After all, what is video but a sequence of images? So many formats exist, from raw bitmaps to tiled formats and those relying on all kinds of compression. There’s also color formats to consider, along with relevant compression techniques like run-length encoding and the use of indexed color palettes. You’re probably familiar with RGB, but Ben goes through a useful explanation of YUV too, and why it’s useful. In short, it’s a color format that prioritizes brightness over color information because that’s what’s most important to a human viewer’s perception.
Decoding video usually means storing multiple frames in memory.
As for video formats themselves, there are a great many to pick from. Motion JPEG is one of the simplest, which is mostly just a series of JPEGs played one after another. Then there are the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards from the 1990s, which were once widespread but have dropped off a lot since. H.264 has become a leading modern video standard, albeit with some patent encumbrances that can make it hard or expensive to use in some cases. H.265 is even more costly again. Standards like VP8, VP9, and AV1 were created to side step some of these patent issues, but with mixed levels of success. If you’re building a commercial product, you’ll have to consider these things.
Ben explains that video decoding can be very hardware intensive, far more so than working with simple images. Much of the time, it comes down to reference frames. Many codecs periodically store an “I-frame,” which is a fully-detailed image. They then only store the parts of the image that change in following frames to save space, before eventually storing another full I-frame some time later. This means that you need lots of RAM to store multiple frames of video at once, since decoding a later frame requires the earlier one as a reference.
Interestingly, Ben states that MPEG-1 is one of his favorite codecs at the moment. He explains its history as a format for delivering video on CD, noting that while it never took off in the US, it was huge in Asia. It has the benefit of being patent free since 2008. It’s also easy to decode with in C with a simple header called pl_mpeg. It later evolved into MPEG-2 which remains an important broadcast standard to this day.
Ben explains the nitty-gritty syncronization work he did in CircuitPython to sync audio with his custom Daft Punk word clock.
The talk also crucially covers synchronization. In many cases, if you’ve got video, you’ve got audio that goes along with it. Even a small offset between the two streams can be incredibly off-putting; all the worse if they’re drifting relative to each other over time. Sync is also important for things like closed captions, too.
Ultimately, if you’re pursuing an audio or video project and you’ve never done one before, this talk is great for you. Rather than teaching you any specific lesson, it’s a great primer to get you thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of various media formats, and how you might pick the best one for your application. Ben’s guide might just save you some serious development time in future—and some horrible patent lawsuits to boot! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8024227",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2024-09-09T23:29:38",
"content": "@Lewin Day said: “But what of the formats in which we store this media? Today, there are so many—from MP3s to MP4s, old-school AVIs to modern *.h264s. Senior software engineer Ben Combee came down to the 20... | 1,760,371,800.922903 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/09/the-science-of-coating-steel/ | The Science Of Coating Steel | Al Williams | [
"Parts",
"Science"
] | [
"corrosion",
"parkerization",
"steel"
] | [Breaking Taps] has a look at “
parkerization
” — a process to coat steel to prevent rust. While you commonly see this finish in firearms, it is usable anywhere you need some protection for steel parts. The process is relatively easy. It does require heat and a special manganese solution made for the purpose. You scuff up the surface of the steel and degrease and wash it.
Once the part is ready, you insert the part in hot solution which is manganese and phosphoric acid. Rinse and displace the water and you are ready to oil the part.
But what we really liked was the electron micrographs of the steel before and after the process. The phosphates formed in the solution cover the iron and hold oil to prevent oxidization. However, the first attempt wasn’t uniform so it wouldn’t work as well. [Breaking Taps] thinks it was a failure to rough up the piece sufficiently before starting. He also raised the temperature of the bath and got a better, but not perfect, result.
We miss having an electron microscope at work and we
really want one at home
! The last fun coating project we remember used
copper
in a strange and wonderful way. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8021878",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2024-09-09T15:47:05",
"content": "I am not saying this is exact same process as blueing. But seems quite similar (maybe except for the fact blueing uses iron oxide crystals instead of phosphate crystals). Are there any practical differe... | 1,760,371,800.506368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/09/reinforcing-plastic-polymers-with-cellulose-and-other-natural-fibers/ | Reinforcing Plastic Polymers With Cellulose And Other Natural Fibers | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"cellulose",
"composite filament",
"FDM"
] | While plastics are very useful on their own, they can be much stronger when reinforced and mixed with a range of fibers. Not surprisingly, this includes the thermoplastic polymers which are commonly used with FDM 3D printing, such as polylactic acid (PLA) and polyamide (PA, also known as nylon). Although the most well-known fibers used for this purpose are probably glass fiber (GF) and carbon fiber (CF), these come with a range of issues, including their high abrasiveness when printing and
potential carcinogenic properties
in the case of carbon fiber.
So what other reinforcing fiber options are there? As it turns out, cellulose is one of these, along with basalt. The former has received a lot of attention currently, as the addition of cellulose and similar elements to thermopolymers such as PLA can create so-called biocomposites that create plastics without the brittleness of PLA, while also being made fully out of plant-based materials.
Regardless of the chosen composite, the goal is to enhance the properties of the base polymer matrix with the reinforcement material. Is cellulose the best material here?
Cellulose Nanofibers
Plastic objects created by fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing are quite different from their injection-molding counterparts. In the case of FDM objects, the relatively poor layer adhesion and presence of voids means that 3D-printed PLA parts only have a fraction of the strength of the molded part, while also affecting the way that any fiber reinforcement can be integrated into the plastic. This latter aspect can also be observed with the commonly sold CF-containing FDM filaments, where small fragments of CF are used rather than long strands.
According to a study by Tushar Ambone et al. (2020)
as published
(
PDF
) in
Polymer Engineering and Science
, FDM-printed PLA has a 49% lower tensile strength and 41% lower modulus compared to compression molded PLA samples. The addition of a small amount of sisal-based cellulose nanofiber (CNF) at 1% by weight to the PLA subsequently improved these parameters by 84% and 63% respectively, with X-ray microtomography showing a reduction in voids compared to the plain PLA. Here the addition of CNF appears to significantly improve the crystallization of the PLA with corresponding improvement in its properties.
Fibers Everywhere
Incidentally a related study by Chuanchom Aumnate et al. (2021)
as published
in
Cellulose
used locally (India) sourced
kenaf
cellulose fibers to reinforce PLA, coming to similar results. This meshes well with the findings by Usha Kiran Sanivada et al. (2020)
as published
in
Polymers,
who mixed flax and jute fibers into PLA. Although since they used fairly long fibers in compression and injection molded samples a direct comparison with the FDM results in the Aumnate et al. study is somewhat complicated.
Meanwhile the use of
basalt fibers
(BF) is already quite well-established alongside glass fibers (GF) in insulation, where it replaced asbestos due to the latter’s rather
unpleasant reputation
. BF has some advantages over GF in composite materials, as per e.g.
Li Yan et al. (2020)
including better chemical stability and lower moisture absorption rates. As basalt is primarily composed of silicate, this does raise the specter of it being another potential cause of silicosis and related health risks.
With the primary health risk of mineral fibers like asbestos coming from the jagged, respirable fragments that these can create when damaged in some way, this is probably a very pertinent issue to consider before putting certain fibers quite literally everywhere.
A
2018 review
by Seung-Hyun Park in
Saf Health Work
titled
“Types and Health Hazards of Fibrous Materials Used as Asbestos Substitutes”
provides a good overview of the relative risks of a range of asbestos-replacements, including BF (
mineral wool
) and cellulose. Here mineral wool fibers got rated as IARC Group 3 (insufficient evidence of carcinogenicity) except for the more biopersistent types (Group 2B, possibly carcinogenic), while cellulose is considered to be completely safe.
Finally, related to cellulose, there is also ongoing research on using
lignin
(present in plants next to cellulose as cell reinforcement) to improve the properties of PLA in combination with cellulose. An example is found in
a 2021 study
by Diana Gregor-Svetec et al. as published in
Polymers
. PLA composites created with lignin and surface-modified nanofibrillated (nanofiber) cellulose (NFC). A
2023 study
by Sofia P. Makri et al. (also in
Polymers
) examined methods to improve the dispersion of the lignin nanoparticles. The benefit of lignin in a PLA/NFC composite appears to be in UV stabilization most of all, which should make objects FDM printed using this material last significantly longer when placed outside.
End Of Life
Another major question with plastic polymers is what happens with them once they inevitably end up discarded in the environment. There should be little doubt about what happens with cellulose and lignin in this case, as every day many tons of cellulose and lignin are happily devoured by countless microorganisms around the globe. This means that the only consideration for cellulose-reinforced plastics in an end-of-life scenario is that of the biodegradability of PLA and other base polymers one might use for the polymer composite.
Today, many PLA products end up discarded in landfills or polluting the environment, where
PLA’s biodegradability
is consistently shown to be poor, similar to other plastics, as it requires an industrial composting process involving microbial and hydrolytic treatments. Although incinerating PLA is not a terrible option due to its chemical composition, it is perhaps an ironic thought that the PLA in cellulose-reinforced PLA might actually be the most durable component in such a composite.
That said, if PLA is properly recycled or composted, it seems to pose few issues compared to other plastics, and any cellulose components would likely not interfere with the process, unlike CF-reinforced PLA, where incinerating it is probably the easiest option.
Do you print with hybrid or fiber-mixed plastics yet? | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8021656",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-09-09T15:13:59",
"content": "Reinventing HPL?But the resins used there are not very friendly for the environment (which also makes it long lasting). I sort of like the idea of natural fiber reinforced PLA.Recently I also read some sn... | 1,760,371,800.867067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/i2c-for-hackers-digging-deeper/ | I2C For Hackers: Digging Deeper | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"howto",
"i2c"
] | Last time, I gave you
an overview of what you get from I2C
, basics like addressing, interface speeds, and a breakdown of pullups. Today, let’s continue looking into I2C capabilities and requirements – level shifting, transfer types, and quirks like combined transfers or clock stretching.
Level Shifting
Today, the overwhelming majority of I2C devices are 3.3 V logic. but this wasn’t always the case. If you work with old tech or with I2C on VGA/DVI/HDMI ports, you will see 5 V I2C networks, and if you work with very new tech, you will see 1.8 V I2C networks; rarely, you might even see 2.5 V networks!
Interfacing 5 V devices with a 3. 3V controller, it might not be necessary to level shift. You need to a) wire pullups to 3.3 V, and b) win the device input tolerance lottery. Same goes interfacing 3.3 V devices with 1.8 V hosts – wire up pullups to 1.8 V and pray to the stars. It can work in production – here’s Adafruit taking the 3.3 V-pulled-up Raspberry Pi I2C bus, and connecting it to a 5 V-powered MCP23017 chip that drives a 5 V-connected HD44780 display.
If your arrangement is different, or you’re experiencing a problem, you will want a level shifter circuit. At their simplest,
two N-FETs like 2N7002
will do wonders. If you want smaller PCB footprint, better parameters, or more channels, there are level shifter chips, with many of them wonderfully suited for I2C (read the datasheet!). As we’ve featured before, some shifter ICs are
too smart for their own good,
while others will do just fine – if in doubt, remember to use your logic analyzer judiciously.
Two Ways To Talk
There are two kinds of I2C transfers you could expect to perform – I’d call them “simple transfers” and “register transfers”. With simple transfers, you send an address, and after the device ACKs, you either send or receive a single byte – it’s just like working with a shift register. With register transfers, you send an address, then a register number, and the device sends you the “contents” of that register – it’s more like working with an SPI display.
The PCF8574 is an I2C GPIO expander that does simple transfers. It has eight GPIO pins, and it only does simple transfers. How does that work, given it does both input and output? Well, the PCF8574 has only three possible states for all pin, with two of them combined together. The “Low” state (writing 0) is a hard pull down to GND. The “High” state (writing 1) is a weak pull to VCC – which also makes the pin work as an input with a pullup enabled. To check the input state, just read the expander state, and see if any of the pins you’ve set to 1 are now reading as 0. You can’t do a lot of high-side driving, sure, but you can still drive LEDs and check buttons, plus, this scheme is dead simple and covers a ton of use cases.
A good few I2C devices use simple transfers – the LM75 temperature sensor, for instance, only has to return temperature. You can read out multiple bytes at once, of course – simple transfers aren’t inherently limited to a single byte! PCF8575, the 16-bit sister of the PCF8574, has 16 GPIOs, I’ve used simple transfers with an ATMega328P keypard controller I created at some point – it would return keycodes, taken from a ring buffer. However, at some point, I decided to add more features to it, like ADC reading to help out a Pi Zero it was connected to, and had to upgrade it to register transfers.
The MCP23017 is a GPIO expander that uses register transfers. It has 16 GPIO pins, and a ton of features, each with their own register. Since one register contains 8 bits and we have 16 GPIOs, there are two registers per feature, and as such, there are two registers for pin directions, two for enabling integrated pullups, two for reading out input states, two for setting pins as outputs, and so on. They can even be arranged in two different ways, one backwards compatible with a different chip, by changing a bit in the status register! It’s a fair bit more complex chip than the PCF8574, but the complexity pays off where you need it.
I2C EEPROMs work with register transfers, too – some use 8-bit addresses, which allows for up to 256 bytes of storage. Higher-capacity EEPROMs use 16-bit (two-byte) addresses, where you’re expected to send in two bytes before you can read data out; if you try to read from such an EEPROM using two-byte addresses, you will just read back zeroes, so beware!
Quirks
But what if the device can’t keep up with the multi-byte transactions that your microcontroller is asking for? Maybe you have an EEPROM that needs time before it can read out a value from its internal memory so that it your MCU can receive it, maybe it’s a sensor that needs to average some values quickly and it just can’t catch up with even the lax timing requirements of 100 kHz I2C.
There’s a solution – it’s called clock stretching, and it’s basically an I2C device holding SCL low after receiving a byte, extending ACK state for a long time, until it can actually return meaningful data. As long as SCL is low, the controller should wait for the device. It’s essentially a way for a device to say “wait, not yet, I need some time before I can give you what you’re looking for”.
Raspberry Pi didn’t support clock stretching for the longest time due to a silicon bug. Every single Pi version before Pi 4 couldn’t handle clock stretching, including all of the Pi Zero versions released at the time of writing this article. The workaround, if you need one – use software I2C. It consumes more CPU since you have to use a kernel driver that bitbangs the bus, but it does have functional clock stretching. And of course the Raspberry Pi isn’t alone: if you are likely to need clock stretching, make sure that the microcontroller hardware peripheral supports it properly.
Next time, we dive into the physical layer, look at logic analyzer traces, understand how communication happens, and the ways it can break despite our best intentions. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7962574",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T14:26:19",
"content": "The first time I had to deal with clock stretching was when I was interfacing knoxkoff wii nunchuck controllers with a PIC microcontroller.It took me a while to realize the problem and after that I was s... | 1,760,371,801.14599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/getting-root-on-cheap-wifi-repeaters-the-long-way-around/ | Getting Root On Cheap WiFi Repeaters, The Long Way Around | Dan Maloney | [
"Network Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"curl",
"CVE",
"linux",
"openwrt",
"RCE",
"remote code execution",
"ssh",
"uart",
"wifi repeater"
] | What can you do with a cheap Linux machine with limited flash and only a single free GPIO line? Probably not much, but sometimes,
just getting root to prove you can
is the main goal of a project. If that happens to lead somewhere useful, well, that’s just icing on the cake.
Like many interesting stories, this one starts on AliExpress, where [Easton] spied some low-cost WiFi repeaters, the ones that plug directly into the wall and extend your wireless network another few meters or so. Unable to resist the siren song, a few of these dongles showed up in the mailbox, ripe for the hacking. Spoiler alert: although
the attempt on the first device
had some success by getting a console session through the UART port and resetting the root password, [Easton] ended up bricking the repeater while trying to install an OpenWRT image.
The second attempt, this time on a different but similar device, proved more fruitful. The rudimentary web UI provided no easy path in, although it did a pretty good job enumerating the hardware [Easton] was working with. With the UART route only likely to provide temptation to brick this one too, [Easton] turned to a security advisory about a vulnerability that allows remote code execution through a specially crafted SSID. That means getting root on these dongles is as simple as a
curl
command — no hardware hacks needed!
As for what to do with a bunch of little plug-in Linux boxes with WiFi, we’ll leave that up to your imagination. We like [Easton]’s idea of running something like Pi-Hole on them; maybe Home Assistant would be possible, but these are pretty resource-constrained machines. Still, the lessons learned here are valuable, and at this price point, let the games begin. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7961249",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T12:02:36",
"content": "Great, I hope more people will get their hands dirty with buildroot or yocto to own those cheap appliances !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7961491",
... | 1,760,371,801.430549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/tactile-communication-board-speaks-the-truth/ | Tactile Communication Board Speaks The Truth | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"AAC",
"ASSISTIVE TECH",
"assistive technology",
"augementative alternative communication board",
"Circuit Python",
"CircuitPython"
] | Sometimes, simple things can make a world of difference. Take for example a non-verbal person who can’t necessarily control a touch screen in order to tell someone else what they need or want or think.
This is where Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices come in. Recently tasked with building such a device,
[Thornhill!] came up with a great design
that houses 160 different phrases in a fairly small package and runs on CircuitPython.
Basically, the client presses the appropriate snap-dome button button and the corresponding phrase is spoken through the speaker. The 10×16 grid of buttons is covered with a membrane that both feels nice and gives a bit of protection from spills.
The buttons can achieve high actuation forces and have a crisp tactile response, which means they’re probably gonna go a long way to keep the user from getting frustrated.
This handy AAC board is built on the Adafruit RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather and two keypad matrices. If this weren’t useful enough as it is, [Thornhill!] also built an even smaller version with 16 buttons for the client to wear around their neck.
Did you know?
AAC boards aren’t just for humans
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7961059",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T11:36:53",
"content": "That is a nice looking build! I am wondering though, for some of the simple words or phrases like, “goodbye” or “thank you”, would it not be better to use sign language/gestures and save the board ti... | 1,760,371,801.294175 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/how-sony-mastered-the-transistor/ | How Sony Mastered The Transistor | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"history",
"sony",
"transistor radio"
] | When you think of Sony, you probably think of a technology company that’s been around forever. However, as [Asianometry] points out, it
really formed in the tough years after World War II
. The two people behind the company’s formation were an interesting pair. One of them was a visionary engineer and one was a consummate businessman.
While it is hard to imagine today, securing a license to produce transistors was difficult in the early days. What’s worse is, even with the license, it was not feasible to use the crude devices in a radio.
The devices were poor by today’s standards, and while transistors would work at audio frequencies for hearing aids, getting them to work at AM radio frequencies was a challenge. The Sony founders had to decide whether to use alloy transistors or grown crystal transistors.
Western Electric did not want to share its crystal-growing technology, so in 1954, the team created an alloy transistor. However, it failed to work well at radio frequencies, so they shifted to growing crystals, which seemed more amenable to scaling. One of the team tried using phosphorous and indium doping and created a transistor that could work at higher frequencies. But there was a problem.
Despite the transistor’s superior performance, they couldn’t make another one. Common wisdom at the time was that phosphorus doping was a dead end, but it had worked once. It just took time to find the right way to do it. By 1955, they produced usable transistors, even though the yield was at around 5%.
Texas Instruments beat them to market with a transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, in 1954, but in 1955, Sony produced the TR-55. Of the five transistors inside, some were alloyed transistors, and some were grown crystals. The factory had to hand-select crystal transistors to make each unit work. The radios were on sale for about 19,000 yen (the TR-1 cost about 50 bucks; recall that in 1954, that was nearly $600 in today’s money). Adjusting for inflation, in today’s money, a Japanese teenager would shell out about $850 for the TR-55.
The TR-55 wasn’t the first Sony radio to have transistors. The
TR-52
was a prototype, but it had case problems and never made it into the hands of the public. The radio didn’t make it to the United States until 1957. By then, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, and GE all had radios available, too.
It is a fascinating look into the history of an iconic electronics brand and a window into another world that, honestly, wasn’t that long ago. We couldn’t help but note similarities with Apple, who also had a businessman and
engineer
combination. Sony would go on to innovate in a number of areas, including
optical data storage
. | 35 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "7957941",
"author": "DV Henkel-Wallace",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T05:34:26",
"content": "A great Sony transistor story: in the 1960s Sony invented a very small transistor radio. So small it was portable! They wanted to emphasize how small it was so they decided to sell it in Ameri... | 1,760,371,801.36894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/floorboard-is-a-keyboard-for-your-feet/ | Floorboard Is A Keyboard For Your Feet | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"atmega32u4",
"foot keyboard",
"stomp switch"
] | Whether you have full use of your hands or not, a foot-operated keyboard is a great addition to any setup. Of course, it has to be a lot more robust than your average finger-operated keyboard, so
building a keyboard into an existing footstool is a great idea
.
When [Wingletang]’s regular plastic footrest finally gave up the ghost and split in twain, they ordered a stronger replacement with a little rear compartment meant to hold the foot switches used by those typing from dictation. Settling upon modifiers like Ctrl, Alt, and Shift, they went about designing a keyboard based on the ATmega32U4, which does HID communication natively.
For the switches, [Wingletang] used the stomp switches typically found in guitar pedals, along with toppers to make them more comfortable and increase the surface area. Rather than drilling through the top of the compartment to accommodate the switches, [Wingletang] decided to 3D print a new one so they could include circuit board mounting pillars and a bit of wire management. Honestly, it looks great with the black side rails.
If you want to build something a little different,
try using one of those folding stools
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7957425",
"author": "Kdawg",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T04:37:33",
"content": "Maybe one could use a foot tap then type in control to access the control panel that’s been baffling hack a day writers for a couple days now",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,801.230812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/humble-555-gets-a-boost-for-esr-meter/ | Humble 555 Gets A Boost For ESR Meter | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"555",
"ESR"
] | [Peter Demchenko] wanted to use a low power TS555 in an ESR meter design. The problem is, he needed to handle significant current sink requirements for cases where the capacitor under test had a low ESR. The
TS555 wasn’t up to the task
.
However, [Peter] made an interesting observation. the output pin of the device can sink or source current. However, the discharge pin is exactly the same output but can only sink current.
But what if you tied them together? Using some equalizing resistors, that’s exactly what he did, and this roughly doubles the rated current sink capability. According to [Peter], you do make the circuit more sensitive to power supply variations, but that could be an acceptable trade, depending on your application.
The meter schematic confused us for a moment because the R3 and R4 designations are corrupted. Both the equalizing resistors, it appears, are 110 ohms. The schematic legend should read “R3 110” not “3 110.” The same for R4 which appears as “4 110.”
We do love
unusual ways to use a 555
. If you need to read ESR, and you have one of those
ubiquitous component testers
handy, they will give you a reading of ESR, among other things. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7955326",
"author": "Kelly",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T01:17:38",
"content": "No mention of the actual test current and 12V is a lot for compliance voltage, no in-circuit testing for this meter. Many ESR meters use a transformer to achieve high test-current and diode-clamp for low pu... | 1,760,371,801.585801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/the-worsening-raspberry-pi-rp2350-e9-erratum-situation/ | The Worsening Raspberry Pi RP2350 E9 Erratum Situation | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"erratum",
"raspberry pi",
"rp2350"
] | There’s currently a significant amount of confusion around the full extent of the GPIO hardware issue in the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller, with [Ian] over at [Dangerous Prototypes] of Bus Pirate fame mentioning that deliveries of the RP2350-based Bus Pirate 5XL and 6
have been put on hold
while the issue is further being investigated. Recorded in the MCU’s datasheet as erratum RP2350-E9, it was originally reported as only being related to the use of internal pull-downs, but [Ian] has since demonstrated in
the primary issue ticket
on GitHub that the same soft latching behavior on GPIO pins occurs also without pull-downs enabled.
Ian from Dangerous Prototypes demonstrating the RP2350-E9 issue in a Bus Pirate prototype without pull-ups.
When we
first reported
on this hardware bug in the RP2350’s A2 (and likely preceding) stepping there was still a lot of confusion about what this issue meant, but so far we have seen the Bus Pirate delay and projects like [Agustín Gimenez Bernad]’s
LogicAnalyzer
have opted for taking the RP2350 port out back. There are also indications that the ADC and PIO peripherals are affected by this issue, with workarounds only partially able to circumvent the hardware issue.
In the case of the Bus Pirate a potential workaround is the addition of 4.7 kOhm external pull-downs, but at the cost of 0.7 mA continuous load on the GPIO when pulled high and part of that when pulled low. It’s an ugly hack, but at the very least it might save existing boards. It also shows how serious a bug this is.
Meanwhile there are lively discussions about the issue on the Raspberry Pi forums, both
on the E9 erratum
as well as the question of when there will be
a new stepping
. The official statement by Raspberry Pi is still that ‘they are investigating’. Presumably there will be a Bx stepping at some point, but for now it is clear that the RP2350’s A2 stepping is probably best avoided. | 48 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "7949002",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known as Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-09-04T20:33:00",
"content": "Was Crowdstrike involved with the 2350s release?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7961187",
"author": "Timo",... | 1,760,371,801.969484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/an-automatic-cat-feeder-built-with-a-4060-binary-counter/ | An Automatic Cat Feeder Built With A 4060 Binary Counter | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"4060",
"4060 binary counter",
"cat",
"cat feeder",
"pet",
"pet feeder",
"pets"
] | We’ve seen a great many cat feeders over the years. Some rely on the Internet of Things, and some rely on fancy microcontrollers. [Larry Cook], on the other hand,
built his using a simple 4060 binary counter chip.
The feeder is built out of old plywood, and the whole thing runs off an old 12-volt DC wall wart and a lead-acid battery to keep it going in a power outage. The dry cat food is stored in hopper above a drum, with the drum rotated by a 12-volt DC gearmotor. The gearmotor is activated on a schedule—either every 4 hours, or every 5.5 hours, depending on setting. There’s then a four-digit 7-segment display for counting the total number of feedings.
The manner of operation is simple. The 4060 binary counter slowly counts up to 8,196 on a 1.11 Hz or 0.83 Hz clock, for four hour or 5.5 hour operation respectively. When it hits that threshold, it fires the gear motor. The gear motor then rotates the drum for one revolution, dumping a preset amount of food. At the end of a revolution, it triggers a hall sensor which resets the circuit.
The best thing about this design? It’s been in service for
ten years.
[Larry’s] original video
is a big contrast to his latest one, but it shows the same feeder doing the same job, all this time.
We love a good cat feeder
, and it’s great to see one built with simple old-school parts, too. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Cprossu for the tip!] | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7984810",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T20:26:07",
"content": "You can use a 4060 counter but should use an MCU.You can pull screws with a coin but should use a screwdriver.Use the right tool for the jobb.And absolutely not a 555.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,801.642875 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/how-much-resolution-does-film-really-have/ | How Much Resolution Does Film Really Have? | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"analog film",
"camera",
"film",
"photo",
"photography"
] | Have you ever scanned old negatives or print photographs? Then you’ve probably wondered about the resolution of your scanner, versus the resolution of what you’re actually scanning. Or maybe, you’ve looked at digital cameras, and wondered how many megapixels make up that 35mm film shot. Well [ShyStudios] has been pondering these very questions,
and they’ve shared some answers.
The truth is that film doesn’t really have a specific equivalent resolution to a digital image, as it’s an analog medium that has no pixels. Instead, color is represented by photoreactive chemicals. Still, there are ways to measure its resolution—normally done in lines/mm, in the simplest sense.
[ShyStudios] provides a full explanation of what this means, as well as more complicated ways of interpreting analog film resolution. Translating this into pixel equivalents is messy, but [ShyStudios] does some calculations to put a 35mm FujiColor 200 print around the 54 megapixel level. Fancier films can go much higher.
Of course, there are limitations to film, and you have to use it properly. But still, it gives properly impressive resolution even compared to modern cameras. As it turns out,
we’ve been talking about film a lot lately
! Video after the break.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip! | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "7983885",
"author": "Tonton",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T18:55:37",
"content": "Twenty years ago SMPTE performed extensive testing about thematter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7984035",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,801.861436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/ask-hackaday-whats-next/ | Ask Hackaday, What’s Next? | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest"
] | [
"future",
"technology",
"what's next"
] | Writing for Hackaday involves drinking from the firehose of tech news, and seeing the latest and greatest of new projects and happenings in the world of hardware. But sometimes you sit back in a reflective mood, and ask yourself:
didn’t this all used to be more exciting?
If you too have done that, perhaps it’s worth considering how our world of hardware hacking is fueled, and what makes stuff new and interesting.
Hardware projects are like startup fads
When AliExpress has hundreds of kits for them, Nixie clocks are a mature project sector, by any measure.
Hardware projects are like startup fads, they follow the hype cycle. Take Nixie clocks for instance, they’re cool as heck, but here in 2024 there’s not so much that’s exciting about them. If you made one in 2010 you were the talk of the town, in 2015 everyone wanted one, but perhaps by 2020 yours was simply Yet Another Nixie Clock. Now you can buy any number of Nixie clock kits on Ali, and their shine has definitely worn off. Do you ever have the feeling that the supply of genuinely new stuff is drying up, and it’s all getting a bit samey? Perhaps it’s time to explore this topic.
I have a theory that hardware hacking goes in epochs, each one driven by a new technology. If you think about it, the Arduino was an epoch-defining moment in a readily available and easy to use microcontroller board; they may be merely a part and hugely superseded here in 2024 but back in 2008 they were nothing short of a revolution if you’d previously has a BASIC Stamp. The projects which an Arduino enabled produced a huge burst of creativity from drones to 3D printers to toaster oven reflow and many, many, more, and it’s fair to say that Hackaday owes its early-day success in no small part to that little board from Italy. To think of more examples, the advent of affordable 3D printers around the same period as the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and the arrival of affordable PCB manufacture from China were all similar such enabling moments. A favourite of mine are the Espressif Wi-Fi enabled microcontrollers, which produced an explosion of cheap Internet-connected projects. Suddenly having Wi-Fi went from a big deal to built-in, and an immense breadth of new projects came from those parts.
Tell us then, What’s new?
So back to 2024, and a Hackaday writer at her desk in the English countryside. 3D printers are still our bread and butter, but they’re on Amazon special offer these days. Small Linux boards are ten a penny, and microcontrollers that put the Arduino’s ATmega in the shade are only a few cents from China. It almost feels as though everything is mainstream, and all we’re getting are increments rather than huge leaps. I want new stuff again, I want
exciting
stuff!
Happily, the world of technology doesn’t stand still. We all know that the Next Big Thing is just around the corner, and our desire to make cool new stuff will be revitalised by it. But what will it be? My eyes are on ASIC fabrication, I think
Tiny Tapeout
must only be the start of perhaps the most exciting epoch of them all. But what do you think on the matter, where will your Next Big Thing come from? We’re really interested to hear your views in the comments.
Header image: The RepRap Mendel 3D printer, one of the more successful early affordable designs. Dkoukoul,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 39 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "7982858",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T17:21:11",
"content": "The wonder has gone because we have access to all info all the time, and even info that we don’t want to know, or haven’t had the opportunity to think about.Creativity stems from boredom, as does curios... | 1,760,371,801.732948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/hackaday-podcast-episode-287-raspberry-pi-woes-blacker-than-black-and-printing-with-klipper/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 287: Raspberry Pi Woes, Blacker Than Black, And Printing With Klipper | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Elliot Williams is back from vacation, and he and Al Williams got together to talk about the best Hackaday posts from the last week. Of course, the Raspberry Pi RP2350 problem generated a bit of discussion.
On a lighter note, they saw laser lawn care, rooting WiFi devices, and some very black material made from wood. Need more current-sinking capability from a 555? They talked about that, too, along with a keyboard you use with your feet.
The guys had a lot to say about Klipper, why you might want to move your 3D printer to it, and the FCC’s stance on ham radio antennas in restricted neighborhoods. Oh, and don’t forget to play “What’s that Sound?”
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
DRM? Who’s got time for that? Download our legally unencumbered MP3.
Episode 287 Show Notes:
News:
Tiny Games Challenge .io
Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-Ons Win
What’s that Sound?
Know that sound?
Submit your answer
for a chance at a Hackaday Podcast T-Shirt.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
The Worsening Raspberry Pi RP2350 E9 Erratum Situation
Hardware Bug In Raspberry Pi’s RP2350 Causes Faulty Pull-Down Behavior
RP2350 GPIO Pull-down Latching Bug
Mowing The Lawn With Lasers, For Science
Getting Root On Cheap WiFi Repeaters, The Long Way Around
College Gives You Practical Electronics
Digital Designer Teaches High School
Ultra-Black Material, Sustainably Made From Wood
The Current State Of The Black Market: You Can’t Buy Vantablack
Black 4.0 Is The New Ultrablack
Rothko Chapel
A Little Optical Magic Makes This Floating Display Pop
Two Way Mirror Improves Video Conferencing
What’s Inside A Neonode Laser Sensor?
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Tactile Communication Board Speaks The Truth
Humble 555 Gets A Boost For ESR Meter
Multi-Material Printing Enables Low Cost Silicone Prototypes
Your Name In Landsat
Al’s Picks:
Demonstrating The Photoelectric Effect Using Neon Lamps
A Non-Musical Use Case For 8-Track
Floorboard Is A Keyboard For Your Feet
Can’t-Miss Articles:
3D Printering: Klipper, The Free 3D Printer Upgrade
3D Printering: Switch And Klip(per)
Is That Antenna Allowed? The Real Deal On The FCCs OTARD Rule | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,801.78277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/an-electric-skateboard-for-the-dogs/ | An Electric Skateboard For The Dogs | Navarre Bartz | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"accessibility",
"adaptive device",
"dog",
"electric skateboard",
"lego",
"lego technic",
"simone giertz",
"skateboard"
] | What’s a dog to do if they want to do some accessible skateboarding? [Simone Giertz]’s three-legged pup, [Scraps], got the chance to
try a LEGO Technic board for her thrills
.
This electric LEGO skateboard features six motors and paw pedals to let [Scraps] steer while [Giertz] remotely controls the speed of the board. While it’s not a particularly fast ride, it does let [Scraps] live out her dreams of being a YouTube dog skateboard celebrity.
A video from [Giertz] wouldn’t be complete without a life lesson, and this time it was the importance of rest to the creative process. Sometimes when a solution eludes you, it’s just time to take a break. The steering mechanism, in particular, was giving her trouble but became simple the next morning. We’re also treated to an adorable shot of [Scraps] napping when the initial shoot of her riding the board wasn’t going as planned.
Want to try your hand at making your own skateboard? How about a
deck from recycled plastic
,
tank treads instead of wheels
, or is a
rocket-powered skateboard
more your speed? | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7981540",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T15:20:13",
"content": "Excellent video! A great way to start my day!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,802.012943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/this-week-in-security-eucleak-revival-hijack-and-more/ | This Week In Security: EUCLEAK, Revival Hijack, And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"EUCLEAK",
"Revival Hijack",
"This Week in Security"
] | [Thomas Roche] of NinjaLab is out with
EUCLEAK
, (
pdf
) a physical attack against Infineon security microcontrollers, and the security tokens that contain them. The name is a portmanteau of Euclidean and leak. And no surprise, it’s a data leak in some implementations of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm (EEA), a component of an Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).
OK, time to step back. Infineon microcontrollers are the digital smart parts inside popular security tokens like the
Yubikey 5
, some Java smart cards, and even the Infineon TPMs. These devices all serve a similar purpose. They store one or more secret keys, and are guaranteed to never disclose those keys. Instead, they use their secret keys to do cryptographic functions, like ECDSA signatures, and output the result. There’s even a special set of tests, the Common Criteria, that are intended to backstop these guarantees. What’s interesting is that an otherwise excellent product like the Yubikey 5, that passes all these auditing and certification processes, is still vulnerable.
The actual attack is to perform ECDSA signatures while monitoring the physical chip with
an electromagnetic probe
. This tiny directional antenna can pick up on EM noise generated by the microprocessor. That EM noise leaks timing information about the internal state of the cryptography, and the secret key can be derived as a result.
This process does require physical access to the token for several minutes. To get useful readings, the plastic case around the security token does need to be disassembled to get the probe close enough to pick up signals. From there it’s at least an hour of post-processing to actually get the key. And most of these security tokens intentionally make the disassembly process rather difficult. The point isn’t that it’s impossible to open up, but that it’s impossible not to notice that your token has been tampered with.
Infineon has updated their libraries, doing more active countermeasures to make cryptography state indistinguishable from other CPU activity noise. If you have one of the affected devices, if a firmware update is not an option, setting a PIN or other biometric is quite effective at preventing the attack.
What might be most notable about this attack isn’t the attack itself, but that none of the test and audit framework around these devices protected against it. Our take here isn’t that those things are without merit, but instead that no certification can anticipate every way such a system could go wrong.
Revival Hijack on PyPI
We’ve repeatedly covered Typosquatting in various repositories, and even the more subtle dependency confusion over the years. Revival Hijack probably isn’t completely new, but
researchers at JFrog have announced it
and taken a major step towards preventing it in the PyPI repository, partially in response to finding it in use in the wild.
The idea here is pretty simple. For various reasons, packages on PyPI get deleted. PyPI makes it abundantly clear to the dev deleting the package, that among other things, the package name will become available for others to register. If someone else registers that name, and releases a new build with a higher version number, pip will gladly perform the update where the old package is installed.
The danger, of course, is that this quirk will be used to ship malicious packages. That’s not a theoretical issue, either. The
pingdomv3
package was first published in 2019, retired and deleted in March 2024, and republished shortly after. Within a few days, the package was updated to include a malicious payload. Interestingly, the payload checked for a Jenkins environment, and downloaded and ran a script. JFrog’s automated monitoring caught the suspicious behavior, and PyPI removed the malicious package soon after. That one in particular got added to PyPI’s list of permanently retired package names.
Going forwards, JFrog is grabbing deleted package names with significant download counts, and holding them safely in a dedicated user account. It will be interesting to see if this attack or mitigations against it start showing up in other repositories.
SIM Card WiFi
WiFi security is a bizarre mish-mash of modern and legacy tech. Case in point,
you can use a RADIUS server and a 2G SIM card to handle WiFi authentication
. The authentication server generates a random challenge, and the SIM generates a signed response and temporary encryption key. It’s a cool, quirky idea, with a significant drawback. For effective authentication, the central server has to know the secret key of the authenticating SIM. Since that’s the primary thing SIMs are designed to prevent, the whole idea is of limited use, without a source for custom SIM cards.
Bits and Bytes
To really understand what a program is doing, running a system trace is hard to beat. That is a capture of every system call, which effectively captures every interaction with the rest of the system. The only real problem is that that much information is often like drinking from the firehose. To try to help with that problem, we now have
Traceeshark
, which loads system trace captures into Wireshark, which already has great tools for dealing with an overabundance of information.
And finally for this week, researchers at Praetorian took a look at the Rspack GitHub repository, and
found several GitHub Actions vulnerabilities
. GitHub Actions are automated actions in response to things like changes and pull requests. Projects often set up continuous integration pipelines in Actions, and run a test suite and build for each change. That does get a bit dicey, when running on pull requests from untrusted contributors. And that’s what was found at Rspack. New contributors could make pull requests that would automatically launch an Action run. From within the action, it was possible to leak both an NPM deployment token, as well as a GitHub Person Access Token. Whoops! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7981214",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T14:21:57",
"content": "So, TPM doesn’t just stand for Tire Pressure Monitor.https://www.tomsguide.com/news/what-is-a-tpm-and-heres-why-you-need-it-for-windows-11",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,371,802.05778 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/3d-print-yourself-these-mini-workshop-tools/ | 3D Print Yourself These Mini Workshop Tools | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printer",
"brushed motor",
"Machine tool",
"machine tools",
"tools"
] | Kitting out a full workshop can be expensive, but if you’re only working on small things, it can also be overkill. Indeed, if your machining tends towards the miniature, consider building yourself a series of tiny machines like [KendinYap] did. In the video below, you can see the miniature
electric sander
,
table saw
,
drill press
, and
cut-off saw
put through their paces.
Just because the machines are small, doesn’t mean they’re not useful. In fact, they’re kind of great for doing smaller jobs without destroying what you’re working on. The tiny belt sander in particular appeals in this case, but the same applies to the drill press as well. [KendinYap] also shows off a tiny table and circular saw. The machines are straightforward in their design, relying largely on 3D printed components. They’re all powered by basic DC brushed motors which are enough to get the job done on the small scale.
They look particularly good if
tiny scale model-making
is your passion. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7980315",
"author": "Jeffers",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T11:45:01",
"content": "If you like these, this person also makes mini tools but uses pvc pipe that they heat up and flatten!https://youtu.be/Z6JvAZHJCAo?si=JRJ1lLjfP5wL7b1H",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,371,802.270377 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/06/jump-cacti-with-an-ldr-and-a-pico/ | Jump Cacti With An LDR And A Pico | Kristina Panos | [
"Games",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"CdS cell",
"Google Chrome",
"ldr",
"light dependent resistor",
"offline dinosaur",
"photoresistor",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"t. rex game"
] | By now, probably everyone is familiar with the “You’re Offline” dinosaur that stars in Google’s T. Rex game. You know — jump cacti, avoid pterodactyls. Repeat until you lose, or, we suppose, make the leaderboard. Well, what if you theoretically couldn’t lose? That’s kind of the idea behind
[Bas BotBerg]’s cactus detection-and-avoidance scheme
(
translated from Dutch
).
Like many of us, [Bas] firmly believes that repetitive tasks should be automated, and that includes the controls of the famous T. Rex. Since the cacti are always dark gray and appear along the same plane, it’s easy to register the difference between cacti and screen electronically. In order to accomplish this, [Bas] is using a light-dependent resistor and a pull-up resistor to create a resistance bridge, which is then connected to an analog input pin on a Raspberry Pi Pico.
But [Bas] didn’t do this just to cheat at Offline Dinosaur. Really! It’s for educational purposes, to get people comfortable with embedded processing, sensors, and interfaces between different devices. Check it out in brief action after the break.
Once they get familiar with these concepts, maybe
introduce the ESP32 version of Offline Dinosaur
.
https://botberg.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Automatisch-Springen-in-de-T-Rex-Game-Cactussen-Detecteren-met-een-Raspberry-Pico-HID-controller-1.mp4 | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7980890",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T13:13:51",
"content": "Life is simply too short to have to jump cacti and pterodactyls on your own!Love the project and story. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7980937",
... | 1,760,371,802.104105 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/build-yourself-a-beautiful-interactive-light-toy/ | Build Yourself A Beautiful Interactive Light Toy | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable leds",
"arduino",
"arduino mega",
"diffuser",
"glowable",
"glowables",
"led",
"leds",
"light",
"light toy"
] | Sometimes, we build things with LEDs as indicator lamps or to illuminate something important. Sometimes, we build things with LEDs purely to glow and be beautiful.
This interactive light toy from [Jens] falls into the latter category.
The build uses a 16×16 addressable LED matrix. [Jens] then ported some “Bouncy Bubbles” Processing code from Keith Peters to the Arduino Mega, and set it up to display on the matrix. An accelerometer was used to control the bouncing ball animations, while a second Arduino was then tapped to act as a musical synthesizer to
add more vibes.
The whole kit was then built into a 3D-printed housing with a nice hazy diffuser to give the LEDs a smoother, even look. [Jens] steps through how he got the diffuser just right, including a support structure that made all the difference to the aesthetic of the finished product. Getting diffusion right is
key
to making a nice LED project, and [Jens] got it very right here.
It’s a nice little art piece that looks kind of relaxing to play with in a dark room.
We love a good glowable project here at Hackaday,
so if you’ve built your own—don’t hesitate to
let us know!
Video after the break. | 7 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7978665",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T08:27:39",
"content": "The diffusion is very nice, but the movement feels a bit jumpy. Maybe some anti-aliasing between neighboring LEDs would help?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,802.318243 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/build-a-super-cheap-rc-trainer-plane-with-foam/ | Build A Super Cheap RC Trainer Plane With Foam | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"foam",
"plane",
"radio control",
"rc plane",
"rc trainer",
"trainer",
"trainer plane"
] | Once upon a time, RC planes were expensive models that took months to build and big money to equip with electronics. Since the 20th century though, powerful batteries have become cheap, as have servos and radio controllers. Combine them with a bit of old packing material and
you can get a little RC trainer up and running for peanuts, as [Samm Sheperd] demonstrates.
[Samm] started referring to this as the “$5 trainer,” though he admits that it will cost more than that if you don’t have some bits and pieces laying around. He demonstrates how to cut cheap foamboard with a hot guitar string, and how to form it into a viable wing. That’s the most crucial part, with the fuselage and tail surfaces relatively simple by comparison. With that complete, it’s as simple as bolting on a motor, some servos, and control horns, and you’re up and running. You can even whip up a landing gear if you’re so inclined! Then, figure out your center of gravity, get it right, and then you’re pretty much ready to fly.
It’s a great primer on
how to build a basic RC model
, and if you do it right, it should have pretty forgiving handling, too. Plus, it’s so cheap that it should be easy to repair if you crash. Happy modelling! Video after the break. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7976112",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T04:33:50",
"content": "My basic trainer setup (all included) in the mid 90s was about $500, back then.Easily one of the the most fun per dollar spent though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,802.425291 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/its-spreadsheets-all-the-way-down-for-this-80s-handheld/ | It’s Spreadsheets All The Way Down For This 80s Handheld | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"80's",
"cassette",
"convergent",
"lcd",
"modem",
"programming",
"retrocomputing",
"spreadsheet",
"turing incomplete",
"workslate"
] | Unlike the today’s consumer computer market, the 1980s were the wild west in comparison. There were all kinds of different, incompatible operating systems, hardware, and programs, all competing against one another, and with essentially no networking to tie everything together. Some of these products were incredibly niche as well, only running one program or having a limited use case to keep costs down. Such was the Convergent WorkSlate,
a computer that ran only a spreadsheet
with any programs also needing to be built into a spreadsheet.
Upon booting the device, the user is presented with a fairly recognizable blank spreadsheet, albeit with a now-dated LCD display (lacking a backlight) and a bespoke keyboard and cursor that wouldn’t have allowed for easy touch typing. The spreadsheet itself is quite usable though, complete with formatting tools and the capability to use formulas like a modern spreadsheet program would. It also hosted a tape deck for audio and data storage, a modem for communicating with other devices, and an optional plotter-style printer. The modem port is how [Old VCR] eventually interfaces with the machine, although as one can imagine is quite a task for a piece of small-batch technology from the 80s like this. After learning how to send and receive information, a small game is programmed into the machine and then a Gopher interface is built to give the device limited Internet connectivity.
The investigation that [Old VCR] goes into on this project to get this obsolete yet unique piece of hardware running and programmed to do other tasks is impressive, and worth taking a look at especially because spreadsheets like this aren’t Turing-complete, leading to a few interesting phenomenon that most of us wouldn’t come across in the modern computing world. Since only around 60,000 units were ever made it’s difficult to come across these machines, but if you want to take a look at the spreadsheet world of the 80s without original hardware
you can still run Lotus 1-2-3 natively in Linux today
.
Thanks to [Cameron] for the tip! | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7974910",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2024-09-06T02:56:58",
"content": "Doing it with spreadsheets?That reminds me of the weird old days where we used to build truly horrendous things in Excel…I have some old character record sheets from 3.0 and 3.5 that were absolute monstrositi... | 1,760,371,802.36685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/high-speed-jelly-launcher-destroys-toast/ | High-Speed Jelly Launcher Destroys Toast | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"condiments",
"flywheel",
"jelly launcher"
] | You shouldn’t play with your food. Unless you’re designing some kind of portable cannon to fling it across the room.
That’s precisely what [Backhaul Studios] did.
The first step of designing the condiment cannon was deciding what it should fire. Little low-profile tubs of jelly ended up being the ideal. They were stout enough to survive high-speed flight, while their low height was good for aerodynamics. The cannon itself is built from metal and 3D-printed parts. Multiple iterations eventually landed on a flywheel launcher design with big brushless motors and large 6-inch discs. It sounds positively awful in action and can fling jam (jelly) packets at immense speed. From there, it was simply necessary to design a magazine feed system to enable high-speed full-auto jelly delivery.
If you’ve ever hucked ketchup packets at a brick wall, you’ve understood the joy of splattering condiments everywhere. This cannon is just a way to do that faster and more hilariously.
We’ve seen other fun builds along these lines before, too.
Video after the break. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7969873",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T20:48:41",
"content": "I didn’t know that PCBWAY did laser cutting!Were the final tests conducted using different jelly/jam types?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,802.474145 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/if-wood-isnt-the-biomass-answer-what-is/ | If Wood Isn’t The Biomass Answer, What Is? | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"biomass",
"green energy",
"wood pellets"
] | As we slowly wean ourselves away from our centuries-long love affair with fossil fuels in an attempt to reduce CO
2
emissions and combat global warming, there has been a rapid expansion across a broad range of clean energy technologies. Whether it’s a set of solar panels on your roof, a wind farm stretching across the horizon, or even a nuclear plant, it’s clear that we’ll be seeing more green power installations springing up.
One of the green power options is biomass, the burning of waste plant matter as a fuel to generate power. It releases CO
2
into the atmosphere, but its carbon neutral green credentials come from that CO
2
being re-absorbed by new plants being grown. It’s an attractive idea in infrastructure terms, because existing coal-fired plants can be converted to the new fuel. Where this is being written in the UK we have a particularly large plant doing this, when I toured Drax power station as a spotty young engineering student in the early 1990s it was our largest coal plant; now it runs on imported wood pellets.
Wood Ain’t What You Think It Is
An active coppiced woodland, this one looks about half way through its regrowth cycle. Martinvl,
CC BY-SA 4.0
The coal-to-wood story has a very rosy swords-into-ploughshares spin to it, but sadly all isn’t as well as it seems with wood biomass power generation.
Nature
has
a feature expressing concerns about it
, both over its effect on the areas from which the wood is harvested, and over the CO
2
emissions it creates. The problem is that it produces so much CO
2
with such a long renewal time of regrowing all those trees, that over the next century it’s likely to make the CO
2
problem worse rather than better. The article has provoked a storm of criticism of the biomass industry from environmentalists, but in doing so do they risk tarnishing the whole biomass sector unfairly?
A millennia-old sustainable farming practice is that of
coppicing
. This is the repeated harvesting of wood from the same tree in a continuous cycle of cutting and regrowth of the same trees, and a typical coppiced woodland will contain trees at all stages of the cycle. This is a very practical example of carbon neutral biomass production, but the problem is that for a power-station scale operation it becomes one of replacing older trees with hew ones. While a coppiced tree will take in the order of a decade to replace its growth, a new full-sized forest tree takes many decades to do the same. The establishment of a coppiced forest is a slow process meanwhile, so there’s little prospect of their soon achieving the scale to replace the traditional forests harvested by the power industry.
The Answer Lies Down On The Farm
Fortunately, wood represents only one sector of the biomass industry. There’s an alternative model to that of the enormous former coal plant burning wood pellets, and it comes in the form of much smaller local plants running on biomass crops or crop waste from farms, usually in the form of straw. It’s worth looking at these plants in order to remind anyone tempted to dismiss biomass as a whole based on the wood pellet plants that there is a more sustainable alternative.
A straw-fired power station in Cambridgeshire, UK. Michael Trolove,
CC-BY-SA 2.0
.
A feature of growing up in rural England before the end of the 1980s was that at this time of year the land would be enveloped in a curious smog. We produced much more straw than we could use as a country, and the surplus used to be burned where it lay in the fields. The resulting ash would return what nutrients it contained to the soil, and the land being blanketed by smoke was just part of life.
When the practice was banned it became the norm for combine harvesters to chop the straw and distribute it across the field, where it would be ploughed in to break down naturally. Naturally this represented a significant biomass crop going to waste, so as the demand for green energy rose there appeared local plants all across the country. These typically have a capacity in the tens of MW, and buy their straw under contract from farms within an easy transport radius. This is usually surplus straw from feed crops, but is sometimes also ones specifically grown for biomass such as rye or elephant grass. It’s something of a mark of the season, when the contractors turn up with their huge high-speed baler to process the crop.
In the second half of the 20th century we concentrated on the economies of scale offered by very large coal-burning plants because it was relatively cheap to move a trainload of coal from the colliery to the power station. It’s unlikely that we’d now build similar plants to burn wood unless we already had them left over from the coal era, so it’s important to remind anyone put off biomass power by concerns similar to those in the
Nature
article that it doesn’t need to be done that way. There is an alternative, it relies on biomass that grows back on a yearly cycle with the harvest, and it could be coming to your county if it hasn’t already.
“
Drax power station cooling towers
” by [Andrew Whale], CC BY-SA 2.0. | 120 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "7965780",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T17:11:38",
"content": "The worst issue with nuclear is it actually solves the problem and then you wouldn’t be able to generate jobs and salaries in a giant interconnected NGO network for generations, a climate-academic-industrial c... | 1,760,371,802.779249 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/05/launching-model-airplanes-with-a-custom-linear-induction-motor/ | Launching Model Airplanes With A Custom Linear Induction Motor | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"airplane launcher",
"electromagnetic",
"launcher",
"linear induction motor"
] | Launching things with electromagnetism is pretty fun, with linear induction motors being a popular design that finds use from everywhere in
hobby designs like [Tom Stanton]’s
to the
electromagnetic launchers
on new US and Chinese aircraft carriers. Although the exact design details differ, they use magnetic attraction and repulsion to create a linear motion on the propulsive element, like the sled in [Tom]’s design. Much like the electromagnetic catapults on a
Gerald R. Ford
-class carrier, electrical power is applied to rapidly move the sled through the channel, akin to a steam piston with a steam catapult.
Model airplane sparking its way through the launcher’s channel. (Credit: Tom Stanton, YouTube)
For [Tom]’s design, permanent magnets are used along both sides of the channel in an alternating north/south pole fashion, with the sled using a single wound coil that uses brushes to contact metal rails along both sides of the channel. Alternating current is then applied to this system, causing the coil to become an electromagnet and propel itself along the channel.
An important consideration here is the number of turns of wire on the sled’s coil, as this controls the current being passed, which is around 90 A for 100 turns. Even so, the fastest sled design only reached a speed of 44 mph (~71 km/h), which is 4 mph faster than [Tom]’s previous design that used coils alongside the channels and a sled featuring a permanent magnet.
One way to increase the speed is to use more coils on the sled, with a two-coil model launching a light-weight model airplane to 10.2 m/s, which is not only a pretty cool way to launch an airplane, but also gives you a sense of appreciation for the engineering challenges involved in making an electromagnetic catapult system work for life-sized airplanes as they’re yeeted off an aircraft carrier and preferably not straight into the drink. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "7963934",
"author": "Sok Puppette",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T15:48:31",
"content": "How is it an induction motor?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7964728",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2024-09-05T16:24... | 1,760,371,802.841876 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/floss-weekly-episode-799-still-open-source-at-percona/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 799: Still Open Source At Percona | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"database",
"FLOSS Weekly"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
chats with Lori Lorusso and Steve Hoffman, the Head of Community and SVP of engineering at Percona, the open source database experts.
https://www.percona.com/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show Right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,802.523937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/boss-byproducts-the-terrible-beauty-of-trinitite/ | Boss Byproducts: The Terrible Beauty Of Trinitite | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"History"
] | [
"atomsite",
"molten glass",
"nuclear blast",
"sand",
"Trinity",
"trinity test",
"Tritinite"
] | While
some byproducts recall an idyllic piece of Americana
, others remind us that the past is not always so bright and cheerful.
Trinitite
, created unintentionally during the development of the first atomic bomb, is arguably one of these byproducts.
A Trinitite pendant. Image via
Galactic Stone
Whereas Fordite kept growing back for decades, all Trinitite comes from a single event — the Trinity nuclear bomb test near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Also called ‘atomsite’ and ‘Alamogordo glass’, ‘Trinitite’ is the name that stuck.
There wasn’t much interest in the man-made mineral initially, but people began to take notice (and souvenirs) after the war ended.
And yes, they made jewelry out of it
.
Although there is still Trinitite at the site today, most of it was bulldozed over by the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1953, who weren’t too keen on the public sniffing around.
There was also a law passed that made it illegal to collect samples from the area, although it is still legal to trade Trinitite that was already on the market. As you might expect, Trinitite is rare, but it’s still out there today, and can even be bought from reputable sources such as United Nuclear.
The Formation Event
On that fateful day, the plutonium bomb nicknamed “Gadget” was strapped to a 100-foot tower atop a bed of sandy soil.
The detonation left a crater half a mile across and eight feet deep of radioactive glass
.
The Trinity blast. Public domain via
Wikimedia Commons
While at first it was assumed that the sand that became Trinitite melted at ground level,
it has somewhat recently been theorized
that the sand was sucked up into the fireball, liquefied, then rained down to form a sheet of glass of varying thickness, composition, and topology.
It’s estimated that the glass was formed by 4,300 gigajoules of heat energy, and the sand was exposed to a minimum temperature of 1,470 °C (2,680 °F) and super-heated for two or three seconds before solidifying into Trinitite.
In September 1945,
Time
magazine reported
that the site looked like “a lake of green jade”, with the glass taking strange shapes, like those of “lopsided marbles… broken, thin-walled bubbles, green, worm-like forms.” The marbles suggest that some material solidified in the air on the way down.
Not all Trinitite is bottle-green, although most of it is. Some red Trinitite was discovered in one part of the site, and there are rare black pieces that are thought to contain iron. It’s been theorized that green Trinitite gets its color from the material in the support tower, while red specimens include copper from the electrical wiring.
A Unique Composition
A stack of Trinitite. Image via
the University of New Mexico
Geologically speaking, Trinitite is made up of a chaotic mixture that varies both its structure and composition. A typical sample has been described as 1 to 3 cm thick, with a smooth side and a rough side from landing in a molten state on the desert floor. The upper surface is usually sprinkled with dust, while the bottom is thicker and grades into the soil it came from. Far from completely solid, it is estimated that around 30% of Trinitite is void space, and usually has cracks.
Optically, there are two forms of Trinitite with different refraction indices — the lower-index type is mostly silicon dioxide, while the higher-index glass has mixed components.
Although deemed safe to handle
, Trinitite is measurably radioactive. The level of radioactivity fluctuates based on the size of the specimen and its distance from ground zero.
The First of Many Atomsites, Unfortunately
As you might imagine, glassy residues remain wherever nuclear weapons detonate at or near ground level. Some scientists prefer to call all other glasses ‘atomsite’, although plenty of site- and creator-specific names have been given to the byproducts of other detonations. It was discovered in 2016 that, following the bombing of Hiroshima, between 0.6% and 2.5% of the sand on local beaches consisted of fused glass spheres that had formed. It has been called Hiroshimaite.
Trinitite is known as a melt glass or glass melt, which basically means that the silica from the ground bonded with surrounding minerals originating from both the tower and the bomb itself. While this formation process is a man-made one, there are similar natural processes that produce glassy byproducts. Stay tuned! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7944905",
"author": "Titus43",
"timestamp": "2024-09-04T17:09:15",
"content": "Possibly this will be the next article in the series. Definitely not safe for jewelry —>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobylite",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,802.907438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/3d-printering-switch-and-klipper/ | 3D Printering: Switch And Klip(per) | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3d printing",
"Fluidd",
"g-code",
"klipper",
"microstepping",
"Moonraker"
] | Last time I tried to convince you that, if you haven’t already, you should
try running your 3D printer with Klipper
. There are several ways to actually make it work.
The first thing you need is something to run the Klipper host. Most people use a Raspberry Pi and if you already have one that runs OctoPrint, for example, you might well use it. Just tuck your SD card away in case you give up and install a fresh Linux system on a new card.
The Creality Sonic Pad has issues, but it does work.
However, a Pi isn’t your only option. You should be able to make it work on nearly anything that runs Linux. We’ve even seen it
running on Windows under WSL
. If you have an old laptop that can run Linux, that would work, too. We’ve even heard it works on a Chromebook.
The other option is to get a “pad.” Several vendors make touchscreens with some Linux single-board computer bundled together with Klipper preinstalled. For example, there is the Creality Sonic Pad, along with similar devices from other 3D printing companies.
If you decide to go that route, you might want to make sure it is easy to install your own software easily. Some pads, like the Creality unit, are notorious for having so much customization that they don’t lend themselves to upgrades unless they come from the manufacturer. In some cases, you can wipe out the stock firmware and
install a normal operating system
, but at that point, you could probably just buy a Pi and a touchscreen, right?
Installation
If you use something like a pad, it probably has a menu option to provide prebuilt firmware for your printer. Typically, you let it save the code to an SD card or a USB stick and then you are expected to flash it to your printer which, of course, depends on what kind of printer you have.
If you are rolling your own, you use a menu configuration program something like building a Linux kernel. If you have a pre-built configuration file, it will probably tell you in its comments what things you should pick. You need to know, for example, the type of CPU your board has, the bootloader offset, and if you are connecting via USB or serial. You can find details on the
Klipper project pages
.
KIAUH makes installing Klipper and supporting programs painless.
Installing the Linux side is easy because there is a nice script called
KIHUH
. The easiest thing to do is clone the Git repository and run it. From there, you can install Klipper, Moonraker, Fluidd, Mainsail, and some other things, too.
The real trick isn’t installing the software. The challenge is creating a proper configuration file for your printer. If you have a totally stock and popular printer, you’ll probably be in luck. But, how many of us can say that?
Start with the
GitHub list
to see if your printer or board is there. Even if it isn’t an exact match for your hardware, it will give you a start. For example, my custom printer is a Fysetc Spider, but the canned configuration is for a core XY machine, which means I have to make changes.
Even if you get a pad that claims to be “plug and play,” don’t count on it. For example, a Creality Sonic Pad’s instructions for installing with a Creality Ender 3 first asks you to take the printer apart to determine the type of motherboard you have. That’s not really plug and play! Any deviation from the stock machine is likely to require you to change the default profile.
Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes
In addition to just setting things up to match my exact hardware, I also needed to adjust the extruder step count. That has to be simple, right? Most firmware requires you to plug in the number of steps per millimeter of filament.
Klipper, on the other hand, wants to know how many millimeters extrude from a full rotation of the stepper. If you know how many steps (and microsteps) your printer uses, you can easily calculate either number from the other. For example, if you have 200 steps per rotation and 16 microsteps, that’s 3200 steps total. If your current steps per millimeter is 100, then your Klipper “rotation distance” is 3200/100=32.
Configuration Example
I had another major change to make. My printers have a non-standard filament sensor that detects the filament moving. That way, it can detect not only broken filaments but jammed filaments, too.
To install it, I had to add a few lines to my printer.cfg file and restart Klipper. Since I have more than one printer with the same sensor, I put all the lines in a single file and then included it in each printer. So the printer.cfg change was very simple:
[include sfs.cfg]
Then the real work is in sfs.cfg:
[filament_motion_sensor SFS_T0]
detection_length: 10.00
extruder: extruder
switch_pin: ^PA4
pause_on_runout: True
event_delay: 3.0
pause_delay: 0.5
runout_gcode:
M117 Runout Detected!
[delayed_gcode DISABLEFILAMENTSENSOR]
initial_duration: 1
gcode:
SET_FILAMENT_SENSOR SENSOR=SFS_T0 ENABLE=0
[gcode_macro SFS_ENABLE] ; Add this to PRINT_START
description: Enable smart filament sensor
gcode:
M117 ENABLING the Smart Filament Sensor
G92 E0
SET_FILAMENT_SENSOR SENSOR=SFS_T0 ENABLE=1
[gcode_macro SFS_DISABLE] ; Add this to PRINT_END and PRINT_CANCEL
description: Disable smart filament sensor
gcode:
M117 DISABLING the Smart Filament Sensor
G92 E0
SET_FILAMENT_SENSOR SENSOR=SFS_T0 ENABLE=0
This defines a few macros you can use elsewhere. Like Python, the indentation matters. You can organize your files using [include], and that’s especially useful if you have multiple printers that can share files.
Reference
So, how do you know what’s available? The
Klipper reference
. It will show you all the configuration sections you can use and what can possibly go in them. Don’t forget that some features — like print status notifications — will be in the Moonraker configuration
which is a separate document
.
Since the system is in Python, you can hack on it to your heart’s content. Just
back up
first. For example, you can add some custom Python scripts in the klipper/extras directory, like the one
that can run arbitrary system commands
from G-code.
Tinkering is what most of us like the best, and there’s plenty of opportunity to tinker with here. Klipper is also a good way to put new life in a very old printer since what runs on the printer is very simple, and all the heavy lifting is done elsewhere.
Klipper can easily do
adaptive bed leveling
, for example. If you can work in Python, it is also easy to experiment with things like
exotic sensors
. | 13 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7942130",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2024-09-04T14:40:46",
"content": "This might sound like an advert, but trust me, it is not. Ender 3 V3 KE is insanely cheap at ebay for Germany buyers: 183 € with a discount code. You get an impressive tool. Really. Works well. Sprin... | 1,760,371,802.968904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/multi-material-printing-enables-low-cost-silicone-prototypes/ | Multi-Material Printing Enables Low Cost Silicone Prototypes | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts"
] | [
"3D printed parts",
"injection molding",
"mold",
"prototype",
"silicone"
] | While it’s the ideal choice for mass production, injection molding is simply no good for prototyping. The molds are expensive and time-consuming make, so unless you’ve got the funding to burn tens of thousands of dollars on producing new ones each time you make a tweak to your design, they’re the kind of thing you don’t want to have made until you’re absolutely sure everything is dialed in and ready. So how do you get to that point without breaking the bank?
That’s not always an easy question, but if you’re working with silicone parts, the team at OpenAeros thinks they might have a solution for you.
As demonstrated through their OpenRespirator project
, the team has developed a method of 3D printing single-use molds suitable for large silicone parts that they’re calling Digital-to-Silicone (D2S).
In the video below, [Aaron] and [Jon] explain that they started off by simply printing injection molds in the traditional style. This worked, but the molds can get quite complex, and the time and effort necessary to design and print them wasn’t a great fit for their iterative development cycle. They wanted to be able to do from design to prototype in a day, not a week.
Eventually they realized that if they printed the mold out of a water-soluble filament, they could simplify its design greatly.
They’ve documented the design process in detail
, but the short version is that you essentially subtract the 3D model of the design you want to produce from a solid shape in your CAD package, and add a few holes for injecting the silicone. Once the silicone has cured, the mold can be dissolved away in warm water to reveal the finished part.
They then took this concept a step further. Thanks to the multi-material capabilities offered by some of the latest 3D printers, it’s possible to print structures within the mold. Once the silicone is injected, these structures can become part of the finished part. For the OpenRespirator, this lets them add PETG stiffening rings around where the filters to snap into the silicone mask body.
As an added bonus, the video also goes over their method of prototyping pleated filters with 3D printed forms. After inserting the filter media, snap-in arms push it down into the valleys of the form to create the pleats. These are held in place with the addition of small metal rods that are attracted to the magnets embedded into the form. Once the top and bottom of the form have been closed over the filter, silicone is injected to create a ring around the filter and lock everything into place.
We often think of 3D printing as ideal for prototyping, but usually in a very direct and obvious way. You print out a part to see if it works the way you want, and then take the design and have it made out of something stronger. But this presentation from OpenAeros shows just how versatile the technology can be. With even a half-way decent desktop printer, the potential time and cost savings can be enormous. Something to keep in mind should one of your side projects turn into something bigger. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7938148",
"author": "eeucalyptus",
"timestamp": "2024-09-04T11:42:18",
"content": "While the aesthetics are… okay… I really like the design and the thoughts that went into it. I use 3M’s on a daily basis, because I suck at keeping re-usables clean. But from an ecological perspective... | 1,760,371,803.025882 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/04/openscad-library-creates-qr-codes-on-the-fly/ | OpenSCAD Library Creates QR Codes On The Fly | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"library",
"openscad",
"part numbers",
"qr code"
] | If you’ve been reading Hackaday for awhile, you’ll know we’re big fans of OpenSCAD around these parts. There’s a number of reasons it’s a tool we often reach for, but certainly one of the most important ones is its parametric nature. Since you’re already describing the object you want to generate with code and variables, it’s easy to do things like generate an arbitrary number of cloned objects by using a
for
loop.
There are a number of fantastic OpenSCAD libraries that explore this blurred line between code and physical objects, and one that recently caught our eye is
scadqr from [xypwn]
. The description says it lets you “Effortlessly generate QR codes directly in OpenSCAD”, and after playing around with it for a bit, we have to agree.
How effortlessly are we talking about? Take a look:
Yeah, that’s pretty damn easy. Even better, there’s no alphabet soup of libraries or APIs going on behind the scenes here. It’s just a single file you include in your OpenSCAD script. In fact, you don’t even need to go that far. As [xypwn] explains, the source for the library itself is just the one file, so you could just copy its code right into your project if you didn’t want to have to pull it in as an
include
. That could be especially handy if you’re deploying this code somewhere that doesn’t let you pull in external files, like Thingiverse’s Customizer.
Now, there’s all sorts of reasons you might want to create a QR code from within OpenSCAD. But one of first ones that popped into our heads is for the
purposes of part identification
. Forget simple version numbers, this library would let you physically embed all sorts of ancillary data into your printed components, like who rendered them and at what time. Or perhaps each printed part in an assembly could have a unique QR code that pointed to its respective page in your online documentation.
Got any interesting ideas? Let us know in the comments. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7936274",
"author": "Jan-Willem",
"timestamp": "2024-09-04T10:18:12",
"content": "This is a very cool project and it works very well! I’m a big fan of OpenSCAD which I use to build and iterate parts very quickly. It’s not too uncommon to design or edit a part and generate the g-code... | 1,760,371,803.164161 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/college-gives-you-practical-electronics/ | College Gives You Practical Electronics | Al Williams | [
"hardware"
] | [
"education"
] | While classroom learning isn’t for everyone, one awesome benefit of the Internet is that you have a variety of college classes available to you, even if they aren’t for credit. You can virtually audit classes from institutions around the world on just about any topic you can think of. Of course, the topic we think of is practical electronics and that happens to be the
title of a class from [Dr. Bill Newhall] of the University of Colorado
. You can watch the first part in the video below. So far, there are two lectures available but more are coming as the class is ongoing right now.
[Dr. Newhall] is one of us. He’s a ham radio operator and a pilot, as well as an electrical engineer. This class is aimed at others who need to understand electronics in another context. It reminded us of the genesis of one of our favorite books — also from a professor —
The Art of Electronics
.
The course material promises to cover topics ranging from solar and battery power sources, power conversions, IoT and RF communications, sensors, and DC motor control. Of course, there will also be sections on microcontrollers and associated hardware.
Just like a real class, the first lecture has a lot of housekeeping information, but you might want to skim it anyway. But if you want to get to the electronics, the second video won’t disappoint. While it covers a lot of ground that is probably familiar to most Hackaday readers, it is a good review and there’s more coming in the future lectures.
With all the resources online, you can easily
hack your own degree plan
together. Having access to instructors like [Dr. Newhall] is exactly the point we were making about how the Internet allows you to
leverage the best educational opportunities
no matter where you are. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7935686",
"author": "volt-k",
"timestamp": "2024-09-04T09:48:45",
"content": "I can’t help but cringe when I see a schematic without connecting dots AND with 4 way junctions. These are not good practices.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,371,803.096854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/a-nibble-of-core-memory-in-an-sao/ | A Nibble Of Core Memory, In An SAO | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"core memory",
"magnetic core",
"nibble",
"sao"
] | Core memory, magnetized memory using tiny magnetic rings suspended on a grid of wires, is now more than five decades obsolete, yet it exerts a fascination for hardware hackers still. Not least [Andy Geppert],
who’s made a nibble
, four bits of it, complete with interactive LED illumination to show state. Best of all, it’s on a badge Simple Add-On (SAO) for fun and games at your next hacker con.
Aside from it being a fun project, perhaps the most interesting part comes
in the GitHub repository
, where can be found the schematic for the device. He’s built all the drive and sense circuitry himself rather than finding an old-stock core memory driver chip, which gives those of us who’ve never worked with this stuff the chance to understand how it works. Beyond that it takes input from the Stemma or SAO ports to a GPIO expander, which provides all the lines necessary to drive it all.
To show it in action he’s posted a video which we’ve placed below. If you’re hungry for more,
it’s not [Andy]’s first outing into core memory
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7926986",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2024-09-04T02:54:15",
"content": "I think there is a minor misnomer in the title. It is four 1 bit memories which can also be read serially as 4 bits. Computer core memories are made with planes of cores with as many planes as bits in ... | 1,760,371,803.265711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/2024-tiny-games-contest-batch-craze-is-portable-charades-kind-of/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Batch Craze Is Portable Charades, Kind Of | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"Cheap Yellow Display",
"ESP32"
] | So there’s this commercial electronic game out there called Catch Phrase, which, as the game’s own catch phrase explains, is the game that’s played one word at a time. See, a word comes up on the screen, and you have to get the other person or team to guess what it is using gestures and such before the timer goes off. There are a bunch of rules, like you can’t say a word that rhymes, give the first letter, or the number of syllables.
Well, [ahixson1230] and company got their hands on the After Dark NSFW version but found it lacking in the edginess department. So naturally,
[ahixson1230] was inspired to build a better one
, with a touch screen in lieu of buttons, and a way for players to suggest words to be added to the list. In this version, a player presses anywhere on the screen to start the game, and a random word or phrase comes up. They act it out, get the other person to guess, and then pass the unit over to continue the fun.
Batch Craze is based on the Cheap Yellow Display, aka the ESP32-2432S028R, and [ahixson1230] highly recommends
[witnessmenow]’s excellent resource on the subject
. As of this writing, [ahixson1230] is still trying to get the speaker to work, and welcomes any help. Can you assist?
There’s still time to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until Tuesday, September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.IO and get started! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,803.208177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/a-clean-linux-installation-for-an-android-tv-box/ | A Clean Linux Installation For An Android TV Box | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"Android TV",
"armbian",
"emmc",
"linux",
"microsd",
"Rockchip",
"rockchip 3566"
] | Although Android technically runs on top of Linux, generally most Android devices abstract away the underlying Linux-ness of these machines. In theory this is a good thing; we wouldn’t necessarily want to live in a world where we have to log in to a command-line interface just to make a phone call. But too much abstraction often needlessly restricts the capabilities of the underlying hardware. [Murray] a.k.a [Green Bug-Eyed Monster] has an Android TV box with just such a problem, as the Android OS included with it allows for watching TV just fine,
but with a few tweaks it can run a full Linux installation instead
, turning it into a much more versatile machine.
This specific Android TV box is based on the Rockchip 3566, a popular single-board computer used in a wide array of products. As such it is one of the easier targets for transforming a limited TV machine into a fully capable desktop computer. The first step is to compile an
Armbian
image for the machine, in this case using an x86 installation of Ubuntu to cross-compile for the ARM-based machine. With a viable image in hand, there’s an option to either solder on a microSD slot to the included pins on the computer’s PCB or to flash the image directly to the on-board eMMC storage by tricking the machine into thinking that the eMMC is missing. Either option will bring you into a full-fledged Linux environment, with just a few configuration steps to take to get it running like any other computer.
[Murray] began this process as an alternative to paying the inflated prices of Raspberry Pis over the past few years, and for anyone in a similar predicament any computer with the Rockchip 3566 processor in it could be a potential target for a project like this. You might need to make a few tweaks to the compile options and hardware, but overall the process should be similar. And if you don’t have an RK3566, don’t fret too much. We’ve seen plenty of other Android TV boxes turned into similar devices
like this one which runs RetroPie instead
. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7917109",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T20:16:56",
"content": "I really like how the article explains concepts of installing Linux on a consumer TV device, and also digs into practical details and shows how to get things done. Good hack value :-)",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,371,803.417963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/mowing-the-lawn-with-lasers-for-science/ | Mowing The Lawn With Lasers, For Science | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"diode laser",
"laser",
"lawn mower"
] | Cutting grass with lasers works great in a test setup. (Credit: Allen Pan, YouTube)
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could cut the grass with lasers? Everyone knows that lasers are basically magic, and if you strap a diode laser or two to a lawn mower, it should slice through those pesky blades of grass with zero effort. Cue [Allen Pan]’s video on
doing exactly this
, demonstrating in the process that we do in fact live in a physics-based universe, and lasers are not magical light sabers that will just slice and dice without effort.
The first attempt to attach two diode lasers in a spinning configuration like the cutting blades on a traditional lawn mower led to the obvious focusing issues (fixed by removing the focusing lenses) and short contact time. Effectively, while these diode lasers can cut blades of grass, you need to give them some time to do the work. Naturally, this meant adding more lasers in a stationary grid, like creating a
Resident Evil
-style cutting grid, only for grass instead of intruders.
Does this work? Sort of. Especially thick grass has a lot of moisture in it, which the lasers have to boil off before they can do the cutting. As [Allen] and co-conspirator found out, this also risks igniting a lawn fire in especially thick grass. The best attempt to
cut the lawn with lasers
appears to have been made two years ago by [rctestflight], who used a stationary, 40 watt diode laser sweeping across an area. When placed on a (slowly) moving platform this could cut the lawn in a matter of days, whereas low-tech rapidly spinning blades would need at least a couple of minutes.
Obviously the answer is to toss out those weak diode lasers and get started with kW-level chemical lasers. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing those attempts, and the safety methods required to not turn it into a
laser safety PSA
. | 34 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "7915220",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T18:41:47",
"content": "Just crazy.Like fishing with explosives.It kind of works.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7916689",
"author": "MW",
"timestamp": "2024-... | 1,760,371,803.498061 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/supercon-2023-teaching-robots-how-to-learn/ | Supercon 2023: Teaching Robots How To Learn | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"algorithm",
"arduino",
"esp32s3",
"machine learning",
"reinforcement learning"
] | Once upon a time, machine learning was an arcane field, the preserve of a precious few researchers holed up in grand academic institutions. Progress was slow, and hard won. Today, however, just about anyone with a computer can dive into these topics and develop their own machine learning systems.
Shawn Hymel has been doing just that, in his work in developer relations and as a broader electronics educator. His current interest is reinforcement learning on a tiny scale. He came down to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon
to tell us all about his work.
Rewards Are Everything
Shawn finds reinforcement learning highly exciting, particularly when it comes to robotics. “We’re now getting into the idea of, can robots not just do a thing you tell them to, but can they learn to do the thing you tell them to?” he says. Imagine a robot copter that learns to fly itself, or a self-driving car that intuitively learns to avoid pedestrians. The dream is robots that do not simply blindly follow orders, but learn and understand intuitively what to do.
The reinforcement learning system for controlling an inverted pendulum.
Obviously, a great deal of machine learning research involves teams of PhDs and millions of dollars in funding. As an individual, Shawn decided to start smaller. Rather than try and build an advanced quadripedal robot that could teach itself to walk, he instead started with a simple inverted pendulum. It’s a classical control theory project, but he set about getting it to work with reinforcement learning instead.
Reinforcement learning is all about observation. The AI in charge of the inverted pendulum can see the position of the pendulum, and its angular velocity. It can also swing it around with a stepper motor, and knows the stepper motor’s angle and velocity. The reinforcement part involves setting a “reward” for the desired position of the pendulum—namely, when it’s balancing in the inverted position. Thus, over time, the AI learns which actions correspond to this reward, and it effectively “learns” how to control the system.
As is often the way, Shawn’s first attempts didn’t work. There was too much latency between the measurements from the inverted pendulum being sent from an Arduino via serial reaching the AI agent running on his computer’s GPU. Thus, he simplified things. Instead of trying to get the pendulum to balance, he decided to just try and teach an AI to swing it up vertically. He also decided to run the AI on a microcontroller, eliminating much of the latency involved in trying to train a model on his GPU. He also simplified the action space—rather than continuous control of the stepper, the AI was only able to make three actions. Either add 10 degrees, subtract 10 degrees, or do nothing.
The initial reward function is developed to optimize keeping the pendulum vertical and not moving.
This proved far more successful. He was able to train a model using the Stable Baselines3 framework that could successfully make positive actions towards flipping up the pendulum. Once trained using the actor-critic method, the actor half of the model could be deployed to a microcontroller and tested on the real system.
He used Edge Impulse to compress the model and ran it on a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3. The microcontroller no longer needs to run the reward function, as it’s already been trained on how to act to get the desired result. It just goes ahead and does its thing. The live demo worked, too — the model was able to swing the pendulum (briefly) into the vertical position.
Finding the Best Tool for the Job
Shawn notes that for reinforcement learning tasks like these, virtual training grounds can be of great value. They allow much training to happen much faster, often with thousands of iterations running in parallel. There’s also less hassle versus training models on real mechanical hardware, which can get damaged or require manual resets after each training run.
All this is not to say that reinforcement learning is the be-all and end-all of robotics these days. As Shawn explains, for many tasks, particularly straightforward and repetitive ones, classical control theory remains supreme. Just because you
can
do a task with machine learning techniques, doesn’t mean it’s the best way to go about it.
Ultimately, reinforcement learning can help a machine achieve all kinds of complicated tasks. The trick is to create the right reward function and measure the right parameters. As Shawn ably demonstrates, choosing an appropriately simple goal is also a great way to get started! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7914211",
"author": "could it keep learning?",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T17:25:33",
"content": "So, once it’s in actor half mode, it is no longer able to learn but only “remembers” what it had once learned. So it will never get smarter or better.“Once trained using the actor-critic m... | 1,760,371,803.543564 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/a-windows-control-panel-retrospective-amidst-a-concerning-ux-shift/ | A Windows Control Panel Retrospective Amidst A Concerning UX Shift | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"control panel",
"Microsoft Windows",
"user experience",
"user experience design"
] | Once the nerve center of Windows operating systems, the
Control Panel
and its multitude of applets has its roots in the earliest versions of Windows. From here users could use these configuration applets to control and adjust just about anything in a friendly graphical environment. Despite the lack of any significant criticism from users and with many generations having grown up with its familiar dialogs, it has over the past years been gradually phased out by the monolithic Universal Windows Platform (UWP) based
Settings app
.
Whereas the Windows control panel features an overview of the various applets – each of which uses Win32 GUI elements like tabs to organize settings – the Settings app is more Web-like, with lots of touch-friendly whitespace, a single navigable menu, kilometers of settings to scroll through and absolutely no way to keep more than one view open at the same time.
Unsurprisingly, this change has not been met with a lot of enthusiasm by the average Windows user, and with Microsoft now
officially recommending users migrate over to the Settings app
, it seems that before long we may have to say farewell to what used to be an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system since its first iterations. Yet bizarrely, much of the Control Panel functionality doesn’t exist yet in the Settings app, and it remain an open question how much of it can be translated into the Settings app user experience (UX) paradigm at all.
Considering how unusual this kind of control panel used to be beyond quaint touch-centric platforms like Android and iOS, what is Microsoft’s goal here? Have discovered a UX secret that has eluded every other OS developer?
A Simple Concept
The Windows 3.1 Control Panel (1992). (Source: ToastyTech.com)
Settings which a user may want to tweak on their computer system range from hardware devices and networks to the display resolution and wallpaper, so it makes sense to put all of these configuration options within an easy to reach and use location. Generally this has meant something akin to a folder containing various clickable icons and accompanying text which together make clear what settings can be configured by opening it. In addition, the same setting dialogs can be accessed using context-sensitive menus, such as when right-clicking on the desktop.
The Windows 98 Control Panel. (Source: ToastyTech.com)
It’s little wonder that for the longest time operating systems have settled for this approach, as it is intuitive, and individual items can have stylized icons that make it even more obvious what settings can be configured by clicking on it, such a keyboard, a mouse, a display, etc. As graphical fidelity increased, so did the styling of these icons, with MacOS, Windows, BeOS and the various desktop environments for OSs like the Linuxes and BSDs all developing their own highly
skeuomorphic
styles to make their UIs more intuitive and also more pleasant to look at. A good overview of the Windows Control Panel evolution can be found over
at the Version Museum
website.
The Windows XP Control Panel in ‘Classic’ view. (2001) (Source: suffieldacademy.org)
Coming from the still somewhat subdued style of Windows XP after years of Windows 9x and Windows NT/2000, Windows Vista and Windows 7 cranked this style up to eleven with the
Windows Aero
design language. This meant glass, color, translucency, depth and high-fidelity icons that made the function of the Control Panel’s individual entries more obvious than ever, creating a masterpiece that would be very hard to beat. The user was also given two different ways to view the Control Panel: the simplified category-based view, or the ‘classic’ view with all icons (and folders for e.g. Administrative Tools) visible in one view.
Windows 7 Control Panel (2009) in category view. (Source: techrepublic.com)
Meanwhile Apple did
much the same thing
,
leaning heavily
into their unique design language not only for its desktop, but ultimately also for its mobile offerings. Everything was pseudo-3D, with vivid colors adorning detailed renderings of various physical items and so on, creating a true feast for the eyes when taking in these lush UIs, with efficient access to settings via clearly marked tabs and similar UI elements.
The Mac OS X Panther System Preferences in 2003. (Source: Gadget Unity TV)
This way of organizing system settings was effectively replicated across a multitude of environments, with operating systems like
Haiku
(based on BeOS) and
ReactOS
(re-implementing Windows) retaining those classical elements of the original. A truly cross-platform, mostly intuitive experience was created, and Bliss truly came to the computing world.
Naturally, something so good had no right to keep existing, ergo it had to go.
The World Is Flat
The first to make the big change was Microsoft, with the release of Windows 8 and its
Metro design language
. This new visual style relied on simple shapes, with little to no adornments or distractions (i.e. more than a single color). Initially Microsoft also reckoned that Windows users wanted every window to be full-screen, and that hot edges and sides rather than a task bar and start menu was the way to go, as every single system running Windows 8 would obviously have a touch screen. Fortunately they did backtrack on this, but their attempt to redesign the Control Panel into something more Metro-like with the Settings app did persist, like an odd growth somewhere on a body part.
Windows 8’s PC Settings app (2012). (Source: softpedia.com)
Although the Control Panel remained in Windows 8 as well, the course had been set. Over time this small lump developed into the Settings app in Windows 10, by which time Metro had been renamed into the Microsoft Design Language (MDL), which got a recent tweak in what is now called the Fluent Design Language (
FDL
) for Windows 11.
Central to this is the removal of almost all colors, the use of text labels over icons where possible (though simple monochrome icons are okay) and only rectangles with no decorations. This also meant no folder-centric model for settings but rather all the items put into a text-based menu on the left-hand side and an endless scroll-of-doom on the right side containing sparsely distributed settings.
This led to the absolutely beautifully dystopian Settings app as it exists in Windows 10:
The Settings app in Windows 10 back in ~2015. Hope you don’t like colors.
All of this came as skeuomorphic designs were suddenly considered ‘passé’, and the new hotness was so-called
Flat Design
. Google’s
Material Design
as developed in 2014 is another good example of this, with the characteristic ‘flat UI elements adrift in a void’ aesthetic that has now been adopted by Microsoft, and a few years ago by Apple as well starting in 2022 with
MacOS Ventura’s System Settings
(replacing System Preferences).
Monterey’s General system preferences (left) are different from Ventura’s General system settings (right). (Credit: MacWorld)
Rather than a tabbed interface to provide a clear overview, everything is now a blind hierarchy of menu items to scroll through and activate to access sub-, sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub- items, and inevitably realize a few times that you’re in the wrong section. But rather than being able to click that other, correct tab, you now get to navigate back multiple views, one click at a time.
It isn’t just Windows and Apple either, but many of the big desktop environments
like Gnome
have
also moved
to this Flat Design Language. While various reasons have been provided for these changes, it’s undeniable that FDL makes a UI less intuitive (because there’s less useful visual information) and makes for a worse user experience (UX) with worse ergonomics as a result (because of the extra scrolling and clicking). This is especially obvious in the ‘independent applets’ versus ‘monolithic settings app’ comparison.
One-Track Mind
Imagine that you’re trying out a couple new wallpapers in Windows while keeping an eye on Windows Update’s latest shenanigans. You then need to quickly adjust the default audio device or another small adjustment unrelated to any of these other tasks. If you are using Windows 7 or earlier with the Control Panel applets, this is normal behavior and exceedingly common especially during hardware troubleshooting sessions.
If you’re using the Settings app, this is impossible, as only view can be active at a given time. You think you’re smart and right-click the desktop for ‘Personalize desktop’ so that the other Settings view stays intact? This is not how it works, as the Settings app is monolithic and now shifts to the newly selected view. Currently this is not too noticeable yet as many applets still exist in Windows 10 and 11, but as more and more of these are assimilated into the Settings app, such events will become more and more common.
It would seem that after decades of UI and UX evolution, we have now reached a definite point where UX is only getting worse, arguably around the release of Windows 8. With color banished, anything even remotely pseudo-3D frowned upon and UIs based around touch interfaces, there will soon be no difference between using a desktop PC, tablet or smartphone. Just in the worst way possible, as nobody has ever written about the amazing ergonomics and efficient UX of the latter two devices.
Perhaps our only hope may lie with the OSes and desktop environments that keep things real and stick to decades of proven UX design rather than give into Fad Driven Development.
Rest in peace, Windows Control Panel. We hope to see you again soon in ReactOS. | 154 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "7911291",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T14:25:30",
"content": "Yes indeed. I said farewell to windoze quite some years ago. Looking though some old notes yesterday, I discovered it was 2011. I got a free PC back then and it started with a screen full of blue rectangl... | 1,760,371,803.770387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/portable-multi-sdr-rig-keeps-your-radios-cool/ | Portable Multi-SDR Rig Keeps Your Radios Cool | Tom Nardi | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"air cooling",
"airflow",
"RTL-SDR",
"software-defined radio"
] | With as cheap and versatile as RTL-SDR devices are, it’s a good idea to have a couple of them on hand for some rainy day hacking. In fact, depending on what signals you’re trying to sniff out of the air, you may need multiple interfaces anyway. Once you’ve amassed this arsenal of software defined radios, you may find yourself needing a way to transport and deploy them. Luckily, [Jay Doscher] has you covered.
His latest creation, the SDR SOLO, is a
modular system for mounting RTL-SDRs
. Each dongle is encased in its own 3D printed frame, which not only protects it, but makes it easy to attach to the base unit. To keep the notoriously toasty radios cool, each frame has been designed to maximize airflow. You can even mount a pair of 80 mm fans to the bottom of the stack to really get the air moving. The current design is based around the RTL-SDR Blog V4, but could easily be adapted to your dongle of choice.
In addition to the row of SDR dongles, the rig also includes a powered USB hub. Each radio connects to the hub via a short USB cable, which means that you’ll only need a single USB cable running back to your computer. There’s also various mounts and adapters for attaching antennas to the system. Stick it all on the end of a tripod, and you’ve got a mobile radio monitoring system that’ll be the envy of the hackerspace.
As we’ve come to expect, [Jay] put a lot of thought and effort into the CAD side of this project.
Largely made of 3D printed components
, his projects often feature a
rugged and professional look
that really stands out. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7912692",
"author": "RoganDawes",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T15:41:35",
"content": "I was under the impression that USB2 bandwidth was a limiting factor when running a single RTL-SDR, I can’t imagine a hub running several makes that any easier?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,803.927643 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/03/3d-printed-rc-crane-has-epic-3-foot-reach/ | 3D Printed RC Crane Has Epic 3-Foot Reach | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"crane",
"ESP32",
"miniature",
"scale model"
] | Have you ever looked out the window at traffic and seen a giant crane driving alone the road? Have you ever wanted a little 3D printed version you could drive for yourself without the risk of demolishing your neighbors house? Well,
[ProfessorBoots] has just the build for you.
The build, inspired by the Liebherr LTM 1300, isn’t just a little RC car that looks like a crane. It’s a real working crane, too! So you can drive this thing around, and you can park it up. Then you can deploy the
fully working stabilizer booms
like you’re some big construction site hot shot. From there, you can relish in the subtle joy of extending the massive three-foot boom while the necessary counterweight automatically locks itself in place. You can then use the crane to lift and move small objects to your heart’s content.
The video describes how the build works in intimate detail, from the gears and linkages all the way up to the grander assembly. It’s no simple beast either, with ten gearmotors, four servos, and two ESP32s used for control. If you really need to build one for yourself, [ProfessorBoots] sells his plans
on his website.
We’ve seen great stuff from [ProfessorBoots] before—
he’s come a long way from his skid steer design last year.
Video after the break.
Thanks to [Hudson Bazemore] for the tip! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7904591",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T09:36:19",
"content": "Impressive. I wonder if there are electronic end stops or if there is current limit to prevent the short circuit in case the motors reach their limits.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,803.865035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/building-a-stylish-iphone-standby-dock/ | Building A Stylish IPhone Standby Dock | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"charger",
"dock",
"iphone",
"magsafe charger",
"phone",
"standby dock"
] | [Scott Yu-Jan] is a big fan of the iPhone’s standby mode. Put the phone on charge horizontally, and it looks all stylish, with sleek widgets and clocks and stuff showing you information you presumably care about. [Scott] enjoyed this so much, in fact,
he whipped up a custom charging dock to make the most of it.
The design was a collaboration with artist [Overwork], who mentioned the DN 40 alarm clock created by legendary designer [Dieter Rams]. [Overwork] sent [Scott] a draft inspired by that product, and he printed one up. It featured an integrated MagSafe charger to juice up the iPhone, and pressing into one side of the phone would pop it free. It was cool, but a little clumsy to use.
[Scott] liked the basic concept, but shows us how he iterated upon it to make it even
nicer.
He added in a wireless charger for AirPods in the back, gave the device adhesive feet, and a big chunky eject button to release the phone when desired.
You can also
grab the files to print your own
if you so desire! We’ve seen [Scott’s] work before, too, like
his neat 3D scanner build
. Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7908109",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T12:08:40",
"content": "sighI wish I was better at mechanical design. This is very cool!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7913566",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,803.815476 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/big-benchy-is-a-boat-that-really-boats/ | Big Benchy Is A Boat That Really Boats | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printer",
"Benchy",
"big benchy",
"boat",
"trolling motor"
] | Benchy is that cute little boat that everyone uses to calibrate their 3D printer. [Emily The Engineer] asked the obvious question—why isn’t it a real working boat?
Then she followed through on the execution.
Bravo, [Emily]. Bravo.
The full concept is straightforward, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. [Emily] starts by trying to get small Benchys to float, and then steadily steps up the size, solving problems along the way. By the end of it, the big Benchy is printed out of lots of smaller sections that were then assembled into a larger whole. This was achieved with glue and simply using a soldering iron to melt parts together. It’s a common technique used to build giant parts on smaller 3D printers, and it works pretty well.
The basic hull did okay at first, save for some stability problems. Amazingly, though, it was remarkably well sealed against water ingress. It then got a trolling motor, survived a capsizing, and eventually took to the open water with the aid of some additional floatation.
We’ve seen
big Benchys before,
and we’ve seen
fully functional 3D-printed boats before, too.
It was about time the two concepts met in reality. Video after the break. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7895598",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-09-03T02:15:56",
"content": "smashing a 3D-printed bottle of champagne over the hull * Benchy McBenchface",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7895697",
"author": "The Commenter For... | 1,760,371,803.980807 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/video-baby-monitor-repair-uncovers-private-data/ | Video Baby Monitor Repair Uncovers Private Data | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"baby monitor",
"digital forensics",
"firmware dump",
"firmware hacking",
"wireless camera"
] | As the name of the channel implies, [BuyItFixIt] likes to pick up cheap gadgets that are listed as broken and try to repair them. It’s a pastime we imagine many Hackaday readers can appreciate, because even if you can’t get a particular device working, you’re sure to at least learn something useful along the way.
But after recently
tackling a VTech video baby monitor from eBay
, [BuyItFixIt] manages to do both. He starts by opening up the device and going through some general electronics troubleshooting steps. The basics are very much worth following along with if you’ve ever wondered how to approach a repair when you don’t know what the problem is. He checks voltages, makes sure various components are in spec, determines if the chips are talking to each other with the oscilloscope, and even pulls out the thermal camera to see if anything is heating up. But nothing seems out of the ordinary.
The scope uncovers some serial data.
While poking around with the oscilloscope, however, he did notice what looked like the output of a serial debug port. Sure enough, when connected to a USB serial adapter, the camera’s embedded Linux operating system started dumping status messages into the terminal. But before it got too far along in the boot process, it crashed with a file I/O error — which explains why the hardware all seemed to check out fine.
Now that [BuyItFixIt] knew it was a software issue, he started using the tools built into the camera’s bootloader to explore the contents of the device’s flash chip. He uncovered the usual embedded Linux directories, but when he peeked into one of the partitions labeled Vtech_data2, he got a bit of a shock: the device seemed to be holding dozens of videos. This is particularly surprising considering the camera is designed to stream video to the parent unit, and the fact that it could record video internally was never mentioned in the documentation.
While copying the chip’s contents over serial would have been possible, [BuyItFixIt] instead pulled it out and physically dumped the whole thing with a reader. With a bit of Linux-fu, he’s able to mount the chip dump and confirm that the videos in question are of the previous owner’s infant. Yikes. Of course, he promptly deleted the files once he realized what the camera had stored, but it makes us wonder how many cameras like these are holding private video files waiting for a bad actor to uncover them. This is an important reminder of the
inherent dangers of tossing away “broken” smart devices
.
Dozens of videos featuring the parent and child were still stored on the device.
As for the repair itself, [BuyItFixIt] reasoned that some file — maybe the database of videos — must have been corrupted on the chip, so he took the nuclear option and wiped it all out. He had to use the bootloader commands to recreate the partition table, but once that was done, the firmware seemed to understand that it had been returned to a factory state and was finally able to boot up normally. He’s documented the commands he used to get it back up and running in the hopes he can help out somebody else with a similarly ailing camera.
We can
never get enough of this sort of firmware hacking
, and the fact that this particular bout opened up with a great real-world example of hardware diagnosis makes it all the better. This is a long video, but one that’s well worth your time to check out. If you’d like to see more repairs from [BuyItFixIt],
we’ve got you covered
. | 37 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "7892016",
"author": "Duh",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T23:33:17",
"content": "The only part that should be shocking about this is that it left behind evidence of its wrongdoings. Who knows what and when things like this upload to where.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,804.181889 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/a-digital-replacement-for-your-magic-eye/ | A Digital Replacement For Your Magic Eye | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"magic eye",
"tube",
"tubes"
] | Magic Eye tubes were popular as tuning guides on old-school radio gear. However, the tubes, the 6U5 model in particular, have become rare and remarkably hard to come by of late. When the supply dried up,
[Bjørner Sandom] decided to build a digital alternative instead.
The build relies on a small round IPS display, measuring an inch in diameter and with a resolution of 128×115 pixels. One can only presume it’s round but not perfectly so. It was then fitted with a 25mm glass lens in order to give it a richer, deeper look more akin to a real Magic Eye tube. In any case, a STM32F103CBT was selected to drive the display, with the 32-bit ARM processor running at a lovely 72 MHz for fast and smooth updates of the screen.
The screen, controller, and supporting circuitry are all built onto a pair of PCBs and installed in a 3D-printed housing that lives atop a tube base. The idea is that the build is a direct replacement for a real 6U5 tube. The STM32 controller receives the automatic gain control voltage from the radio set it’s installed in, and then drives the screen to behave as a real 6U5 tube would under those conditions.
By virtue of the smart design, smooth updates, and that nifty glass lens, the final product is quite a thing to behold. It really does look
quite similar to the genuine article
. If you’ve got a beloved old set with a beleagured magic eye, you might find this a project worth replicating. Video after the break. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7888075",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T20:33:02",
"content": "I’ve always liked the magic eye, even though i’ve never seen one live. It is just beautiful.This is a nice replacement in lack of a real one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,804.097197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/2024-tiny-games-contest-morse-quest-goes-where-you-do/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Morse Quest Goes Where You Do | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"morse code"
] | Do you know Morse code already? Or are you maybe trying to learn so you can be an old school ham? Either way, you could have a lot of fun with [felix]’s great little entry into the 2024 Tiny Games Contest —
Morse Quest
.
This minimalist text-based adventure game is played entirely in Morse code. That is, the story line, all the clues, and the challenges along the way are presented by a blinking LED. In turn, commands like LOOK, TAKE, and INVENTORY are entered with the slim key on the lower right side. A wee potentiometer allows the player to adjust the blink rate of the LED, so it’s fun for all experience levels. Of course, one could always keep a Morse chart handy.
The brains of this operation is an Arduino Nano, and there’s really not much more to the BOM than that. It runs on a 9 V, so theoretically it could be taken anywhere you want to escape reality for a while. Be sure to check out the demo video after the break. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7885721",
"author": "Lucas",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T18:46:12",
"content": "“Hackaday io tiny games chalenge” for those curious what te front says.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7885817",
"author": "_sol_",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,804.035353 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/spiders-are-somehow-hacking-fireflies-to-lure-more-victims/ | Spiders Are Somehow Hacking Fireflies To Lure More Victims | Donald Papp | [
"Science"
] | [
"firefly",
"research",
"spider"
] | What happens when an unfortunate bug ends up in a spider’s web? It gets bitten and wrapped in silk, and becomes a meal. But if the web belongs to an orb-weaver and the bug is a male firefly, it seems the trapped firefly — once bitten —
ends up imitating a female’s flash pattern and luring other males
to their doom.
Fireflies communicate with flash patterns (something you can
experiment with yourself
using nothing more than a green LED) and males looking to mate will fly around flashing a multi-pulse pattern with their two light-emitting lanterns. Females will tend to remain in one place and flash single-pulse patterns on their one lantern.
When a male spots a female, they swoop in to mate. Spiders have somehow figured out a way to actively take advantage of this, not just inserting themselves into the process but actively and masterfully manipulating male fireflies, causing them to behave in a way they would normally never do. All with the purpose of subverting firefly behavior for their own benefit.
It all started with an observation that almost all fireflies in webs were male, and careful investigation revealed it’s not just some odd coincidence. When spiders are not present, the male fireflies don’t act any differently. When a spider is present and detects a male firefly, the spider wraps and bites the firefly differently than other insects. It’s unknown exactly what happens, but this somehow results in the male firefly imitating a female’s flash patterns. Males see this and swoop in to mate, but with a rather different outcome than expected.
The research paper
contains added details but it’s clear that there is more going on in this process than meets the eye. Spiders are already fascinating creatures (we’ve seen an amazing
eye-tracking experiment on jumping spiders
) and it’s remarkable to see this sort of bio-hacking going on under our very noses. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7879517",
"author": "Sravdar",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T14:19:51",
"content": "Hackafirefly",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7879970",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known as Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T14... | 1,760,371,805.835311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/the-strangest-way-to-stick-pla-to-glass-with-a-laser-and-a-bit-of-foil/ | The Strangest Way To Stick PLA To Glass? With A Laser And A Bit Of Foil | Donald Papp | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"adhesive",
"aluminum",
"glass",
"laser welding",
"PLA"
] | Ever needed a strong yet adhesive-free way to
really
stick PLA to glass? Neither have we, but nevertheless there’s
a way to use aluminum foil and an IR fiber laser
to get a solid bond with a little laser welding between the dissimilar materials.
A piece of sacrificial aluminum foil bonds the PLA to glass with a form of laser welding, with precise control and very little heat to dissipate.
It turns out that aluminum can be joined to glass by using a pulsed laser process, and PLA can be joined to aluminum with a continuous wave laser process. Researchers put them together, and managed to reliably do both at once with a single industrial laser.
By putting a sacrificial sheet of thin aluminum foil between 3D printed PLA and glass, then sending the laser through the glass into the aluminum, researchers were able to bond it all together in an adhesive-free manner with precise control, and very little heat to dissipate. No surface treatment of any kind required. The bond is at least as strong as any adhesive-based solution, so there’s no compromising on strength.
When it comes to fabrication, having to apply and manage adhesives is one of the least-preferable options for sticking two things together, so there’s value in the idea of something like this.
Still, it’s certainly a niche application and we’ll likely stick to
good old superglue
, but we honestly didn’t know laser welding could bond aluminum to glass or to PLA, let along both at once like this. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7875766",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T11:36:45",
"content": "So, this is like reactive multi-layer foil welding(*). But, you know, without the reactive or multi-layer parts. Energy supplied by laser instead of chemistry.A lot simpler, provided at least one of your s... | 1,760,371,806.202175 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/02/ultra-black-material-sustainably-made-from-wood/ | Ultra-Black Material, Sustainably Made From Wood | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"Science"
] | [
"art",
"black",
"plasma",
"plasma etching",
"ultra-black",
"wood"
] | Researchers at the University of British Columbia leveraged an unusual discovery into
ultra-black material made from wood
. The deep, dark black is not the result of any sort of dye or surface coating; it’s structural change to the wood itself that causes it to swallow up at least 99% of incoming light.
One of a number of prototypes for watch faces and jewelry.
The discovery was partially accidental, as researchers happened upon it while looking at using high-energy plasma etching to machine the surface of wood in order to improve it’s water resistance. In the process of doing so, they discovered that with the right process applied to the right thickness and orientation of wood grain, the plasma treatment resulted in a surprisingly dark end result. Fresh from the plasma chamber, a wood sample has a thin coating of white powder that, once removed, reveals an ultra-black surface.
The resulting material has been dubbed Nxylon (the name comes from mashing together
Nyx
, the Greek goddess of darkness, with
xylon
the Greek word for wood) and has been prototyped into watch faces and jewelry. It’s made from natural materials, the treatment doesn’t create or involve nasty waste, and it’s an economical process. For more information, check out
UBC’s press release
.
You have probably heard about Vantablack (and how
you can’t buy any
) and artist Stuart Semple’s ongoing efforts at making
ever-darker and accessible black paint
. Blacker than black has applications in optical instruments and is a compelling thing in the art world. It’s also very unusual to see an ultra-black anything that
isn’t
the result of a pigment or surface coating. | 40 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "7873833",
"author": "doppler",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T08:44:17",
"content": "Nxylon is the new Black.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7878764",
"author": "Me",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T13:51:29",
"con... | 1,760,371,806.401202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/a-mini-nuc-rack-for-your-desktop/ | A Mini NUC Rack For Your Desktop | Kristina Panos | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"NUC",
"server rack",
"superglue tip"
] | We (well, some of us) are complete suckers for things that are both much smaller and much larger than life. And if that thing actually does what its supposed to?
Squee!
So naturally, we rushed to bring you news of
this mini NUC rack
designed by [Jeremy Weatherford].
Inspiration comes from a lot of places, often times from stuff that lives on your desk. [Jeremy] had a pile of NUCs and thought they resembled a mini rack already, so why not build them one to live in? It was the perfect excuse to learn CAD, so off [Jeremy] went. Although this is a mini rack, the parts were too big to print. Another opportunity presented itself, and [Jeremy] tried out an online service to get the acrylic cut.
Assembly may have been fiddly with super glue all over the nice black acrylic, but [Jeremy] learned an important tip: excess glue can be removed with vegetable oil. Once it was built, he decided to make it into a control system lab and even found a perfect little five-port switch to top it off. The logo plate, of course, is the icing on this cake.
If you prefer your tower of mini-computers to be extruded, we covered a
clever design from [Jay Doscher] back in May
. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7871317",
"author": "ytrewq",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T05:23:00",
"content": "My 1st impression: “cool, that’s a great way to reuse a 4U wall mount rack!”.I wouldn’t use acrylic, though: it’s brittle, it easily breaks and it can be dangerous.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,805.767973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/vr-headset-with-hdmi-input-invites-a-new-kind-of-cyberdeck/ | VR Headset With HDMI Input Invites A New Kind Of Cyberdeck | Donald Papp | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"pi400",
"Quest",
"raspberry pi",
"vr"
] | Meta’s Quest VR headset recently got the ability to accept and display video over USB-C, and it’s started some gears turning in folks’ heads. [Ian Hamilton] put together a quick concept machine consisting of a
Raspberry Pi 400 that uses a VR headset as its monitor
, which sure seems like the bones of a new breed of cyberdeck.
With passthrough on, one still sees the outside world.
The computer-in-a-keyboard nature of the Pi 400 means that little more than a mouse and the VR headset are needed to get a functional computing environment. Well, that and some cables and adapters.
What’s compelling about this is that the VR headset is much more than just a glorified monitor. In the VR environment, the external video source (in this case, the Raspberry Pi) is displayed in a window just like any other application. Pass-through can also be turned on, so that the headset’s external cameras display one’s surroundings as background. This means there’s no loss of environmental awareness while using the rig.
[Note: the following has been updated for clarity and after some hands-on testing]
Video over USB-C is technically
DisplayPort altmode
, and both the video source and the USB-C cable have to support it. In [Ian]’s case, the Raspberry Pi 400 outputs HDMI and he uses a Shadowcast 2 capture card to accept HDMI on one end and outputs video over USB-C on the other.
Here’s how it works: the Quest has a single USB-C port on the side, and an app (somewhat oddly named “Meta Quest HDMI link”) running on the headset takes care of accepting video over USB and displaying it in a window within the headset. The video signal expected is
UVC (or USB Video Class)
, which is what most USB webcams and other video devices output. (There’s another way to do video over USB-C which is technically
DisplayPort altmode
, and both the video source and the USB-C cable have to support it. That is not what’s being used here; the Quest does not support this format. Neither is it accepting HDMI directly.) In [Ian]’s case, the Raspberry Pi 400 outputs HDMI and he uses a Shadowcast 2 capture card to accept HDMI on one end and output UVC video on the other, which is then fed into the Quest over a USB-C cable.
As a concept it’s an interesting one for sure. Perhaps we’ll see decks of this nature in our next
cyberdeck contest
? | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7868240",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2024-09-02T02:16:29",
"content": "This is not a “new” breed of cyberdeck. This is a NORMAL cyberdeck. One of the few cyberdecks featured here that is ACTUALLY a cyberdeck. (Or a component of…)A cyberdeck is…1. A portable general purpose compu... | 1,760,371,806.090101 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/hackaday-links-september-1-2024/ | Hackaday Links: September 1, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"azure",
"body camera",
"boeing",
"color",
"dystopia",
"generative AI",
"hackaday links",
"helium",
"leak",
"LLM",
"openai",
"oscilloscope",
"polive",
"software",
"SpaceX",
"Starliner",
"subscription",
"Tek",
"tektronix",
"thruster"
] | Why is it always a helium leak? It seems whenever there’s a scrubbed launch or a narrowly averted disaster, space exploration just can’t get past the problems of helium plumbing. We’ve had a bunch of helium problems lately, most famously with
the leaks in Starliner’s thruster system
that have prevented astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from returning to Earth in the spacecraft, leaving them on an extended mission to the ISS. Ironically, the launch itself was troubled by
a helium leak
before the rocket ever left the ground. More recently,
the Polaris Dawn mission
, which is supposed to feature the first spacewalk by a private crew, was scrubbed by SpaceX due to a helium leak on the launch tower. And to round out the helium woes, we now have news that
the Peregrine mission
, which was supposed to carry the first commercial lander to the lunar surface but instead ended up burning up in the atmosphere and crashing into the Pacific, failed due to — you guessed it — a helium leak.
Thankfully, there’s a bit more technical detail on that last one; it seems that a helium pressure control valve, designated PCV2 and controlling helium to pressurize an oxidizer tank, got stuck open thanks to “vibration-induced relaxation” in threaded components within the valve. So, launch vibrations shook a screw loose inside the valve, which kept it from sealing and over-pressurized an oxidizer tank with helium to the point of tank failure — kablooie, end of mission. All of these failures are just another way of saying that space travel is really, really hard, of course. But still, with helium woes figuring so prominently in so many failures, we’re left wondering if there might not be an upside to finding something else to pressurize tanks.
Back on terra firma, we got a tip from a reader going by the name of [Walrus] who is alarmed by an apparent trend in the electronics testing market toward a subscription model for the software needed to run modern test gear. Specifically, the tip included a link to a reseller offering
a deal on an “Ultimate Software Bundle”
for Tektronix 4 Series Mixed-Signal Oscilloscopes. The offer expired at the end of 2023 and prices aren’t mentioned, but given that a discount of up to $5,670 with purchase of a scope was advertised, we’d imagine the Ultimate Software Bundle comes at a pretty steep price. The chief concern [Walrus] expressed was about the possibility that used instruments whose software is tied to a subscription may have little to no value in the secondary market, where many up-and-coming engineers shop for affordable gear. We haven’t had any personal experience with subscription models for test equipment software, and a quick read of
the Tektronix site
seems to suggest that subscriptions are only one of the models available for licensing instrument software. Still, the world seems to be moving to one where everything costs something forever, and that the days of a “one and done” purchase are going away. We’d love to hear your thoughts on subscription software for test gear, especially if we’ve misread the situation with Tek. Sound off in the comments below.
In this week’s edition of “Dystopia Watch,” we’re alarmed by a story about how police departments are experimenting with
generative AI to assist officers in report writing
. The product, called Draft One, is from Axon, a public safety technology concern best known for its body-worn cameras and tasers. Using Azure OpenAI, Draft One transcribes the audio from body cam footage and generates a “draft narrative” of an officer’s interaction with the public. The draft is then reviewed by the officer, presumably corrected if needed, and sent on to a second reviewer before becoming the official report. Axon reports that it had to adjust the LLM’s settings to keep AI hallucinations from becoming part of the narrative. While we can see how this would be a huge benefit to officers, who generally loathe everything about report writing, and would get them back out on patrol rather than sitting in a parking lot tapping at a keyboard, we can also see how this could go completely sideways in a hurry. All it will take is one moderately competent defense attorney getting an officer to admit under oath that the words of the report were not written by him or her, and this whole thing goes away.
And finally, getting three (or more) monitors to all agree on what white is can be quite a chore, and not just a little enraging for the slightly obsessive-compulsive — it’s one of the reasons we favor dark mode so much, to be honest. Luckily, if you need a screen full of nothing but #FFFFFF pixels so you can adjust color balance in your multi-monitor setup, it’s as easy as calling up a web page.
The White Screen Tool
does one thing — paints all the pixels on the screen whatever color you want. If you need all white, it’s just a click away — no need to start up MS Paint or GIMP and futz around with making it bezel-to-bezel. There are plenty of other presets, if white isn’t your thing, plus a couple of fun animated screens that imitate Windows update screens — let the office hijinks begin! You can also set custom colors, which is nice; might we suggest #1A1A1A and #F3BF10? | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7865618",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known as Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T23:58:44",
"content": "“hat have prevented astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from returning to Earth in the spacecraft,”Anybody else notice that many articles about the broken Starliner ofte... | 1,760,371,806.472837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/film-as-you-have-never-had-it-explained-before/ | Film, As You Have Never Had It Explained Before | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"16mm",
"3.5mm",
"film",
"movie film"
] | For all the advances in digital photography, there remains a mystique for photographers and filmmakers about chemical film. Using it presents an artistic and technical challenge, and it lends an aesthetic to your work which is difficult to find in other ways. But particularly when it comes to moving pictures, how many of us have ever ventured beyond the Super 8 cartridge? If you’re not lucky enough to have a Spielberg budget, [Stand-Up Maths] is here with
a video taking the viewer through the various movie film formats
. He claims it’s the first video shot for YouTube in 35mm, and given that his first point is about the costs involved, we can see why.
In particular it serves as an introduction to the various film terms and aspect ratios. We all know what full frame and IMAX are, but do many of us know what they really mean in camera terms. A particularly neat demonstration comes when he has two cameras side by side with the same stock as a split screen, one 35mm and the other 16mm. The cheaper smaller framed format is good quality, but using a profession resolution chart you can see some of the differences clearly. The full film is below the break, and we’d suggest you watch it in the full 4K resolution if you are able to.
Meanwhile, some of us have been known
to dabble in 8mm film
, and even
sometimes shoot footage with it.
Thanks [Jurjen] for the tip. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7861761",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T21:02:38",
"content": "It’s tagged 3.5mm, but that should be 35mm.Also in the video the guy says mil instead of mm. Which bugs me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7866649",
... | 1,760,371,806.144107 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/3d-printed-homes-are-all-the-hype-but-what-is-their-real-impact/ | 3D Printed Homes Are All The Hype, But What Is Their Real Impact? | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"3d printed house"
] | Additive manufacturing (AM) has been getting a lot of attention over the years, with its use in construction a recurring theme. Generally this brings to mind massive 3D printers that are carted to construction sites and assemble entire homes on the spot. That’s the perspective with which a
recent ZDNet article
by [Rajiv Rao] opens, before asking whether AM in construction is actually solving any problems. As [Rajiv] notes, the main use of such on-site AM construction is for exclusive, expensive designs, such as
ICON’s House Zero
which leans into the extruded concrete printing method.
Their more reasonable
Wolf Ranch
residential homes in Texas also use ICON’s
Vulcan II
printer to print walls out of concrete, with a roof, electrical wiring, plumbing, etc. installed afterwards. Prices for these Wolf Ranch 3 to 4 bedroom houses range from about $450,000 to $600,000, and ICON has been contracted by NASA to work a way to 3D print structures on the Moon out of regolith.
3D printed home by WASP out of clay. (Credit: WASP)
Naturally, none of these prices are even remotely in the range of the first-home buyers, or the many economically disadvantaged who make up a sizable part of the population in the US and many other nations in the Americas, Africa, etc. To make AM in construction economically viable, it would seem that going more flatpack and on-site assembly is the way to go, using the age-old pre-fabrication (prefab) method of constructions.
This is the concept behind the University of Maine’s
BioHome3D
, which mainly uses PLA, wood fiber and similar materials to create modules that contain insulation in the form of wood fiber and cellulose. These modules are 3D printed in a factory, after which they’re carted off to the construction site for assembly, pretty much like any traditional prefab home, just with the AM step and use of PLA rather than traditional methods.
Prefab is a great way to speed up construction and already commonly used in the industry, as modules can have windows, doors, insulation, electrical wiring, plumbing, etc. all installed in the factory, with on-site work limited to just final assembly and connecting the loose bits. The main question thus seems to be whether AM in prefab provides a significant benefit, such as in less material wasted by working from (discarded) wood pulp and kin.
While in the article [Rajiv] keeps gravitating towards the need to use less concrete (because of the climate) and make homes more affordable through 3D printing, AM is not necessarily the panacea some make it out to be, due to the fact that houses are complex structures that have to do much more than provide a floor, walls and a roof. If adding a floor (or two) on top of the ground floor, additional requirements come into play, before even considering aspects like repairability which is rarely considered in the context of AM construction. | 67 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "7856379",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T17:07:57",
"content": "What is the actual problem that they are trying to solve with 3D printed houses?Concrete slabs aren’t that expensive .. and only small part of budget what goes building a house.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,806.317128 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/swiss-researchers-may-have-solved-hydrogen-storage/ | Swiss Researchers May Have Solved Hydrogen Storage | Jenny List | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"hydrogen",
"hydron storage",
"iron oxide"
] | If you follow the world of clean energy, you will probably have read all about the so-called hydrogen future and the hydrogen economy. The gas can easily be made from water by electrolysis from green solar electricity, contains a lot of stored energy which is clean to recover, and seems like the solution to many of our green energy woes. Sadly the reality doesn’t quite match up as hydrogen is difficult to store and transport, so thus far our hydrogen cars haven’t quite arrived. That hasn’t stopped researchers looking at hydrogen solutions though, and
a team from ETH Zurich might just have found a solution to storing hydrogen
. They’re using it to reduce iron oxide to iron, which can easily release the hydrogen by oxidation with water.
Their reactor is simplicity itself, a large stainless steel tank filled with powdered iron ore. Pump hydrogen into it and the iron oxide in the ore becomes water and iron which forms the storage medium, and retrieve the hydrogen later by piping steam through the mixture. Hydrogen generated in the summer using solar power can then be released in the winter months. Of course it’s not perfectly efficient, and a significant quantity of energy is lost in heat, but if the heat is recovered and used elsewhere that effect can be mitigated. The hope is that their university might be benefiting from a pilot plant in the coming years, and then perhaps elsewhere those hydrogen grids and cars might become a reality. We can hope.
Meanwhile, in the past we’ve looked at
a not quite so green plan for a hydrogen grid
. | 104 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "7852964",
"author": "robert",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T14:38:40",
"content": "Hang on, this ends up storing the hydrogen as water? That means you’ll need to put just as much energy in again as you used during the initial electrolysis (ok maybe the presence of iron decreases this amo... | 1,760,371,806.631798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/make-your-own-point-contact-transistor/ | Make Your Own Point Contact Transistor | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"germanium transistors",
"point contact transistor",
"transistor"
] | Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history, going back through the silicon era to germanium junction transistors, and thence to the original devices. if you’ve ever looked at the symbol for a transistor and wondered what it represents, it’s a picture of those earliest transistors, which were point contact devices. A piece of germanium as the base had two metal electrodes touching it as the emitter or collector, and as [Marcin Marciniak] shows us,
you can make one yourself
(Polish language,
Google Translate link
).
These home made transistors sacrifice a point contact diode to get the small chip of germanium, and form the other two electrodes with metal foil glued to paper. Given that germanium point contact diodes are themselves a rarity these days we’re guessing that some of you will be wincing at that. The video below is in Polish so you’ll have to enable YouTube’s translation if you’re an Anglophone — but we understand that the contact has to be made by passing a current through it, and is then secured with a drop of beeswax.
A slight surprise comes in how point contact transistors are used, unlike today’s devices their gain in common emitter mode was so poor that they took instead a common base configuration. There’s a picture of a project using three of them, a very period radio receiver with bulky transformers between all stages.
If you’re interested in more tales of home made early transistors,
read our feature on Rufus Turner
.
Thanks [Dr.Q.] for the tip. | 22 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7813056",
"author": "GrzegorzBrzeczyszczyliewicz",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T14:30:23",
"content": "Nice, and Polish is not so hard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7813672",
"author": "Sok Puppette",
"timestamp": "2024-0... | 1,760,371,806.006923 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/universal-power-bank-customized-to-your-liking/ | Universal Power Bank Customized To Your Liking | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"battery bank",
"charge",
"open source",
"power",
"power bank",
"solar",
"usb",
"USB C",
"usb-a"
] | One of the most troubling trends of almost every modern consumer product that uses electricity is that the software that controls the product is likely to be proprietary and closed-source, which could be doing (or not doing) any number of things that its owner has no control over. Whether it’s a computer, kitchen appliance, or even a device that handles the electricity directly, it’s fairly rare to find something with software that’s open and customizable.
That’s why [Traditional-Code9728] is working on a power bank with an open-source firmware
.
From a hardware perspective the power bank is fairly open as well, with a number of options for connecting this device to anything else that might need power. It sports a bidirectional USB-C port as well as a DC barrel plug, either of which can either charge other devices or receive energy to charge its own battery. These ports can also accept energy from a solar panel and have
MPPT
built in. There’s also dual USB-A ports which can provide anywhere from five to 12 volts at 25 watts, and a color screen which shows the current status of the device.
While this is a prototype device, it’s still actively being worked on. Some future planned upgrades to the power bank include a slimmer design, charge limiting features to improve battery life, and more fine-tuned control of the output voltage and current on the USB-C port. With all of the software being open-source, as well as the circuit diagram and 3D printing files, it could find itself in plenty of applications as well. This power bank also stays under the energy limits for flying on most commercial airlines as well, but if you don’t plan on taking your power bank on an airplane then you might want to try out
this 2000-watt monster
instead. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7813405",
"author": "Manuel L",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T14:41:26",
"content": "I’m confused. This project is not finished and neither PCB nor code is shared.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7855374",
"author": "Tradit... | 1,760,371,806.685927 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/the-computer-we-all-wish-wed-had-in-the-8-bit-era/ | The Computer We All Wish We’d Had In The 8-Bit Era | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"74-series",
"isetta",
"retargetable microcode",
"ttl"
] | The 8-bit home computers of yore that we all know and love, without exception as far as we are aware, had an off the shelf microprocessor at heart. In 1983 you were either in the Z80 camp or the 6502 camp, with only a relatively few outliers using processors with other architectures.
But what if you could have both at once, without resorting to a machine such as the Commodore 128 with both on board? How about a machine with retargetable microcode? No, not the DEC Alpha, but the
Isetta from [RoelH]
— a novel and extremely clever machine based upon 74-series logic, than can not only be a 6502 or a Z80, but can also run both ZX Spectrum games, and Apple 1 BASIC. We would have done anything to own one of these back in 1983.
If retargetable microcode is new to you, imagine the instruction set of a microprocessor. If you take a look at the die you’ll find what is in effect a ROM on board, a look-up table defining what each instruction does. A machine with said capability can change this ROM, and not merely emulate a different instruction set, but be that instruction set. This is the Isetta’s trick, it’s not a machine with a novel RISC architecture like the
Gigatron
, but a fairy conventional one for the day with the ability to select different microcode ROMs.
It’s a beautifully designed circuit if you’re a lover of 74 logic, and it’s implemented in all surface mount on a surprisingly compact PCB. The interfaces are relatively modern too, with VGA and a PS/2 keyboard. The write-up is comprehensive and easy to understand, and we certainly enjoyed digging through it to understand this remarkable machine. We were lucky enough to see an Isetta prototype in the flesh over the summer, and we really hope he thinks about making a product from it, we know a lot of you would be interested. | 38 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "7803651",
"author": "WestfW",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T08:37:46",
"content": "Was it “Ohio Scientific” that sold a pc with both a z80 and a 6502?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7805120",
"author": "Martin",
"t... | 1,760,371,807.317202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/putting-a-pi-in-a-container/ | Putting A Pi In A Container | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"container",
"containerization",
"docker",
"hardware",
"image",
"raspberry pi",
"software",
"virtualization"
] | Docker and other containerization applications have changed a lot about the way that developers create new software as well as how they maintain virtual machines. Not only does containerization reduce the system resources needed for something that might otherwise be done in a virtual machine, but it standardizes the development environment for software and dramatically reduces the complexity of deploying on different computers. There are some other tricks up the sleeves as well, and
this project called PI-CI uses Docker to containerize an entire Raspberry Pi
.
The Pi container emulates an entire Raspberry Pi from the ground up, allowing anyone that wants to deploy software on one to test it out without needing to do so on actual hardware. All of the configuration can be done from inside the container. When all the setup is completed and the desired software installed in the container, the container can be converted to an .img file that can be put on a microSD card and installed on real hardware, with support for the Pi models 3, 4, and 5. There’s also support for using Ansible, a Docker automation system
that makes administering a cluster or array of computers easier
.
Docker can be an incredibly powerful tool for developing and deploying software, and tools like this can make the process as straightforward as possible. It does have a bit of a learning curve, though, since sharing operating system tools instead of virtualizing hardware can take a bit of time to wrap one’s mind around. If you’re new to the game
take a look at this guide to setting up your first Docker container
. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7801303",
"author": "Steve Balmer",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T06:10:10",
"content": "Hnm, not sure where the ansible relation comes from, but it has nothing to do with docker. Its a way to install a system, be it docker or bare metal.Also not convinced if thats the best idea to insta... | 1,760,371,807.022622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/symmetrical-gear-spins-one-way-harvesting-surrounding-chaos/ | Symmetrical Gear Spins One-Way, Harvesting Surrounding Chaos | Donald Papp | [
"Science"
] | [
"electrowetting",
"hydrophilic",
"hydrophobic",
"ratchet",
"wetting"
] | Here’s a novel ratchet mechanism developed by researchers that demonstrates how a single object — in this case a gear shaped like a six-pointed star — can rectify the disordered energy of its environment into one-way motion.
5x speed video of gear in agitated water bath.
The
Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet
has alternating surface treatments on the sides of its points, accomplished by applying a thin film layer to create alternating smooth/rough faces. This difference in surface wettability is used to turn agitation of surrounding water into a ratcheting action, or one-way spin.
This kind of mechanism is known as an active Brownian ratchet, but unlike other designs, this one doesn’t depend on the gear having asymmetrical geometry. Instead of an asymmetry in shape, there’s an asymmetry in the gear tooth surface treatments. You may be familiar with the terms hydrophobic and hydrophilic, which come down to a difference in surface wettability. The gear’s teeth having one side of each is what rectifies the chaotic agitation of the surrounding water into a one-way spin. Scaled down far enough, these could conceivably act as energy-harvesting micromotors.
Want more detail? The
published paper is here
, and if you think you might want to play with this idea yourself there are a few different ways to modify the surface wettability of an object. High voltage discharge (for example from a Tesla coil)
can alter surface wettability
, and there are
off-the-shelf hydrophobic coatings
we’ve seen used in art. We’ve even seen
an unusual clock that relied on the effect
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7799162",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T02:14:59",
"content": "Gotta be honest here: Feynman or not, this sure smells like a Maxwell’s Demon.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7800018",
"author": "TG",
... | 1,760,371,807.076828 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/dual-port-ram-for-a-simple-vga-card/ | Dual-Port RAM For A Simple VGA Card | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"Dual Port RAM",
"vga",
"vga card"
] | Making microcontrollers produce video has long been a staple of hardware hacking, but as the resolution goes up, it becomes a struggle for less capable silicon. To get higher resolution VGA from an Arduino, [Marcin Chwedczuk] has produced
perhaps the most bulletproof solution,
to create dual-port RAM with the help of a static RAM chip and a set of 74-series bus transceivers, and let a hardware VGA interface take care of the display. Yes, it’s not a microcontroller doing VGA, but standalone VGA for microcontrollers.
Dual-port memory is a special type of memory with two interfaces than can independently be used to access the contents. It’s not cheap when bought in integrated form, so seeing someone making a substitute with off-the-shelf parts is certainly worth a second look. The bus transceivers are in effect bus-width latches, and each one hangs on to the state while the RAM chip services each in turn. The video card part is relatively straightforward, a set of 74 chips which produce the timings and step through the addresses, and a shift register to push out simple black or white pixel data as a rudimentary video stream. We remember these types of circuits being used back in the days of home made video terminals, and here in 2024 they still work fine.
The display this thing produces isn’t the most impressive picture, but it is VGA, and it does work. We can see this circuit being of interest to plenty of other projects having less capable processing power, in fact we’d say the challenge should lie in how low you can go if all you need is the capacity to talk 74-series logic levels.
Interested in 74-series VGA cards?
This isn’t the first we’ve seen
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7800169",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T04:07:48",
"content": "Um, okay. Personally, I grew up with a different kind of VGA. I must be getting old..It was an ISA graphics card with planar video. Installed in a 386 or 486 PC.VGA hardware could do mainly graphics mode 1... | 1,760,371,806.963721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/realistic-steering-wheel-joystick-in-miniature/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Realistic Steering Wheel Joystick In Miniature | Bryan Cockfield | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"3d printed",
"controller",
"Joystick",
"miniature",
"pedals",
"racing",
"simulation",
"simulator",
"steering wheel"
] | For racing games, flight simulators, and a few other simulation-style games, a simple controller just won’t do. You want something that looks and feels closer to the real thing. The major downsides to these more elaborate input methods is that they take up a large amount of space, requiring extra time for setup, and can be quite expensive as well. To solve both of these problems [Rahel zahir Ali]
created a miniature steering wheel controller for some of his favorite games
.
While there are some commercial offerings of small steering wheels integrated into an otherwise standard video game controller and a few 3D printed homebrew options, nothing really felt like a true substitute. The main design goal with this controller was to maintain the 900-degree rotation of a standard car steering wheel in a smaller size. It uses a 600P/R rotary encoder attached to a knob inside of a printed case, with two spring-loaded levers to act as a throttle and brake, as well as a standard joystick to adjust camera angle and four additional buttons. Everything is wired together with an Arduino Leonardo that sends the inputs along to the computer.
Now he’s ready to play some of his favorite games and includes some gameplay footage using this controller in the video linked below. If you’re racing vehicles other than cars and trucks, though,
you might want a different type of controller for your games
instead. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7793367",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T20:23:41",
"content": "I saw this video the other day and A) was really impressed and inspired B) Made me remember the Namco NeGcon controller which makes me want one for playing Sessions/Skater XL for leaning my skater left and r... | 1,760,371,807.428437 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/an-attractive-magnet-insertion-tool/ | An Attractive Magnet Insertion Tool | Kristina Panos | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"inserting magnets",
"magnets",
"placing magnets"
] | Magnets are pretty nice little tools. [EmGi] has used them in many a cool 3D printed build with great success. But getting them where you want can be really tricky. More often than not, you end up with glue all over your fingers, or the magnets fly out of place, or they stick together when you don’t want them to.
Well, [EmGi] created
a mighty fine magnet insertion tool
that you can print for yourself. It’s finger-operated and uses a single embedded magnet to place magnets wherever they’re needed.
This thing went through several designs before [EmGi] ever printed it out. Originally, there were two magnets, but there was an issue where if the tool wasn’t lifted off perfectly, it would send the magnet flying.
But now it works great, and [EmGi] even deposited an array of 64 magnets without using glue to test it out before printing a second one to handle the other polarity. Check out the build/demo video after the break.
While you’re printing and placing magnets,
why not make yourself a couple of magnetic switches?
You can even
make ’em for keyboards
.
Thanks for the tip, [Keith]! | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7854025",
"author": "angryman77",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T15:23:11",
"content": "It would be great to be able to add this to a 3d printer for placing magnets inside prints.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7855656",
"author"... | 1,760,371,807.128353 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/01/cl-32-the-minimum-possible-for-a-useful-handheld-computer/ | CL-32: The Minimum Possible For A Useful Handheld Computer | Jenny List | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"e-paper",
"ESP32",
"handheld computer"
] | For almost as long as there have been microcomputers, there have been attempts with varying success to make tiny handheld microcomputers. Sometimes these have been very good, and other times they’ve missed the mark in some way. Latest to find its way to us is the
CL-32 from [Moosepr]
, it’s a handheld computer with an ESP32 as brains, an electronic paper display, and a QWERTY keyboard in its smart printed case.
The hardware is relatively standard, save for the keyboard which is a dome-switch design in which the membrane carrying the domes is hand-made. We like this, and don’t think we’ve seen anyone else doing that. Expansion is taken care of by a novel socket arrangement in which boards nestle in a recess in the surface. Some experimentation was required as always to drive the display, but the result is a functional computer.
Sadly there’s little detail in terms of what the software will be, and no hardware files as yet. But what we can see is promising enough to make this one to watch, so we’ll look forward to what they come up with. If an ESP32 OS is a problem, there’s always badge.team, who have been continuously improving theirs
since 2017
. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7847821",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T10:43:32",
"content": "There are no labels on the keys yet. The form factor reminds me of the Sharp calculators with a basic interpreter. (horrible language). The project has some pictures and info about the Sharp Memory LCD’s... | 1,760,371,807.382179 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/ccfl-scanner-bulb-makes-a-cool-desk-lamp/ | CCFL Scanner Bulb Makes A Cool Desk Lamp | Alexander Rowsell | [
"home hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"3d printed desk lamp",
"3d printing",
"desk lamp",
"scanner bulb",
"upcycling"
] | The bulbs inside scanners (before transitioning to LED, anyway) were cold cathode fluorescent tubes that emit a fairly wide bandwidth of light. They were purpose-built to produce a very specific type and shape of light, but [Julius Curt] has taken this in
a new, upcycled direction
. Instead of just producing light, the light itself is also part of the aesthetic. A very cool 3D printed case houses the bulb and power supply and smartly hides the connecting wires to achieve a very clean look.
Part of the design involves adding a DC-DC converter before the lamp driver, allowing fading of the light. This isn’t anything new in lamps, but [Julius] noticed an interesting effect when dimming the vertically oriented lamp: as the power was reduced, the column of light would start to extinguish from one end, leading to an elongated teardrop-shaped light source.
This leads to a very interesting look, and the neat case design leads to an extremely unique lamp! The emitted light’s color temperature seems to vary a bit as the voltage drops, going from what appears to be a pretty cold white to a slightly warmer tone.
The design process is detailed on the project page, with a quick look at the CAD design process for the case. A neat touch was using a greeble (part of a coffee grinder) to add some different textures and break up the plastic-only look. That’s one we’ll have to note in our design books! | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7840944",
"author": "Jan-Willem",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T07:04:36",
"content": "It’s a nice project as it makes good use of the CFL tube. However, you might not want to disassemble an old but still working paper scanner with a CFL tube. These old scanners usually have a CCD sensor... | 1,760,371,807.549864 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/your-name-in-landsat/ | Your Name In Landsat | Jenny List | [
"Space"
] | [
"landsat",
"nasa",
"Remote Imaging"
] | We’re guessing most readers can cite things from their youth which gave them an interest in technology, and spurred on something which became a career or had a profound impact on their life. Public engagement activities for technology or science have a crucial role in bringing forth the next generations of curious people into those fields, and along the way they can provide some fun for grown-ups too.
A case in point is from NASA’s Landsat engagement team,
Your Name In Landsat
. Type in a text string, and it will spell it out in Earth features seen by the imaging satellites, that resemble letters. Endless fun can be had by all, as the random geology flashes by.
No text emojis, boo hiss!
In itself, though fun, it’s not quite a hack. But behind the kids toy we’re curious as to how the images were identified, and mildly sad that the NASA PR people haven’t seen fit to tell us. We’re guessing that over the many decades of earth images there exists a significant knowledge base of Earth features with meaningful or just amusing shapes that will have been gathered by fun-loving engineers, and it’s possible that this is what informed this feature. But we’d also be curious to know whether they used an image classification algorithm instead. There must be a NASA employee or two who reads Hackaday and could ask around — let us know in the comments.
Meanwhile, if LANDSAT interests you,
it’s possible to pull out of the air for free
. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7837931",
"author": "beadon",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T05:14:35",
"content": "Wow that’s fun !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7847281",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T10:25:38",
"content": "Very cool.Mi... | 1,760,371,807.486444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/the-trashiest-of-mains-inverters/ | The Trashiest Of Mains Inverters | Jenny List | [
"Battery Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"inverter",
"mains inverter",
"rotary inverter"
] | Switch-mode technology has made inverters which take a low DC voltage and turn it into a usable mains voltage within the reach of everybody. But still, there might be moments when a mains supply is needed and you’re not lucky enough to have AliExpress at your fingertips, and for that, here’s [Rulof] with a mains inverter that is simultaneously awful and awesome.
He’s made a rotary converter, from trash and off the shelf parts
.
While a switch-mode converter operates using PWM at many times the output frequency for efficiency, we’re guessing that most readers will be familiar enough with how AC works to see how a low frequency converter turns DC into AC. A set of switches repeatedly flip the polarity, and the resulting square wave is fed into a transformer to step up to the final voltage. The switches can be mechanical as with old-style converters that used vibrating reeds or rotary armatures, or they can be electronic using power transistors. In this case they are a set of microswitches actuated by a set of cams on a shaft driven by a small motor, and the transformer comes from a surplus UPS.
We’re guessing that the frequency will be only a few Hz and the microswitches will suffer from switching such an inductive load, but as you can see in the video below the break it does light a mains bulb, and we’re guessing it would be enough to activate most wall-wart switching power supplies. We’re not so sure though about his use of the IEC sockets from the UPS to carry 12 volts, as the current may be a little much for them.
Meanwhile if you thirst for more of this kind of thing,
we have you covered
. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "7831592",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2024-09-01T01:15:07",
"content": "Those switches will burn up in no time. Also, that 50Hz transformer is not going to be very happy running at such a low frequency. It’s probably saturating and drawing a lot of current. It would work a lot b... | 1,760,371,807.611888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/2024-tiny-games-contest-attinyboy-does-it-with-tiny-cartridges/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: ATtinyBoy Does It With Tiny Cartridges | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"attiny85",
"cartridge"
] | What is it about tangible media? There’s just something neat about having an individual
thing
that represents each game, each album, each whatever. Sure, you can have a little console with a thousand games loaded on it, but what’s the fun in that?
Enter the ATtinyBoy
. [Bram]’s entry into the Tiny Games Contest is based on the ATtiny85, and the whole thing is smaller than a credit card. In fact, each little game cartridge contains its own ATtiny85, with the pins broken out into headers.
That is, although the schematic is based on
[Billy Cheung]’s gametiny
, which uses an ATtiny85 as the brain, ATtinyBoy’s brain is divided among each of the games.
This certainly checks a lot of boxes when it comes to contest rules and requirements, and it’s just awesome besides. We particularly like the custom box that holds ATtinyBoy and all his distributed knowledge. If you want to make one of your own, the schematic, code, and STLs are all available over on IO. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7826840",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T22:38:31",
"content": "Interesting idea having ATTiny hold game code and plugs into main console. But it is not new, Microvision (Milton Bradley) came out in 1979 and the main unit had only the control knob, LCD, speaker, and batt... | 1,760,371,807.661224 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/31/taking-a-spirograph-mill-for-a-spin/ | Taking A Spirograph Mill For A Spin | Navarre Bartz | [
"classic hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"gears",
"mill",
"spirograph"
] | Spirographs can make some pretty groovy designs on paper, but what if you want to take it a step further? [Uri Tuchman] has used the pantograph on his milling machine to
duplicate the effect in harder materials
.
[Tuchman] starts with a quick proof-of-concept using an actual plastic Spirograph toy to make sure it isn’t a totally unworkable idea. Unsurprisingly, the plastic is too flexible to give a highly detailed result on the MDF test piece, so he laser cut an acrylic version as the next prototype. This provided much better stiffness, but he needed to adjust gear ratios and ergonomics to make the device more usable.
The final iteration uses a combination of laser cut acrylic and machined brass components to increase rigidity where needed. A hand-turned knob for the crank adds a classy touch, as does the “Spiromatic 2000” brass plate affixed to the wooden base of the mechanism.
This isn’t the first spirograph-related project we’ve seen. How about one made of
LEGO Mindstorms
, another
using Arduino
, or one that makes these
patterns on your oscilloscope
?
Thanks to [DjBiohazard] for the tip! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7823669",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T20:57:07",
"content": "I love his videos",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7825267",
"author": "YaKnowWhat?",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T21:50:26",
"conten... | 1,760,371,807.699584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/hackaday-podcast-episode-286-showing-off-saos-hiding-from-hoas-and-beautiful-byproducts/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 286: Showing Off SAOs, Hiding From HOAs, And Beautiful Byproducts | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Even when the boss is away, the show must go on, so Dan slid back behind the guest mic and teamed up with Tom to hunt down the freshest of this week’s hacks. It was a bit of a chore, with a couple of computer crashes and some side-quests down a few weird rabbit holes, but we managed to get things together in the end.
Tune in and you’ll hear us bemoan HOAs and celebrate one ham’s endless battle to outwit them, no matter what the golf cart people say about his antennas. Are you ready to say goodbye to the magnetic stripe on your credit card? We sure are, but we’re not holding our breath yet. Would you 3D print a 55-gallon drum? Probably not, but you almost can with a unique Cartesian-polar hybrid printer. And, if you think running MS-DOS on a modern laptop is hard, guess again — or, maybe you just have to get really lucky.
We also took a look at a digital watch with a beautiful display, a hacked multimeter, modern wardriving tools, switchable magnets, and debate the eternal question of v-slot wheels versus linear bearings. And finally, you won’t want to miss our look at what’s new with 3D scanning, and the first installment of Kristina’s new “Boss Byproducts” series, which delves into the beauty of Fordite.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download the DRM-free MP3.
Episode 286 Show Notes:
News:
Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-ons Win
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to bmgxyz for guessing a hand-crank generator.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Nice Retro Displays Set This Watch On Edge
Supercon 2024: Show Off Your Unique Display Tech
Motorola MicroTAC – Wikipedia
Fast 3D Printing With A Polar, Four Quadrant Custom Machine
3D Printed Electronics Breadboard
Hackaday Prize 2023: Jumperless, The Jumperless Jumperboard
The Mind-Blowing Machines that Stamp Millions of Metal Parts – Smarter Every Day 288
Farewell Magnetic Stripe
Barcodes Enter The Matrix In 2027
The Barcode Revolution: Welcome To Our Automated World
Running Stock MS-DOS On A Modern ThinkPad
Hidden Gutter Antenna Keeps HOA Happy
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Using A 2D Scanner To Make 3D Things
V-Slot Wheels Or Linear Rails?
Wardriving Tools In The Modern Era
Dan’s Picks:
Backlight Switch For A Better Multimeter
It Turns Out, A PCB Makes A Nice Watch Dial
You Can 3D Print Yourself Some Simple Magnetic Switches
Shop-Built Fixtures Reveal The Magic Of Switchable Permanent Magnets
Can’t-Miss Articles:
What’s New In 3D Scanning? All-In-One Scanning Is Nice
Boss Byproducts: Fordites Are Pieces Of American History
Dan’s prized fordite key fob | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7821117",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2024-08-31T19:27:25",
"content": "What’s that sound, where’s the form? I’m here a day after the podcast streamed… and there’s already a winner?I was going to submit hand-cranked generator something… Radio or Flashlight perhaps? Fun choice of ... | 1,760,371,807.744605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/is-that-antenna-allowed-the-real-deal-on-the-fccs-otard-rule/ | Is That Antenna Allowed? The Real Deal On The FCCs OTARD Rule | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Radio Hacks",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"antenna",
"fcc",
"federal communications commission",
"ham",
"HOA",
"OTARD",
"tv",
"video",
"wireless"
] | The Hackaday comments section is generally a lively place. At its best, it’s an endless wellspring of the combined engineering wisdom of millions of readers which serves to advance the state of the art in hardware hacking for all. At its worst — well, let’s just say that at least it’s not the YouTube comments section.
Unfortunately, there’s also a space between the best and the worst where things can be a bit confusing. A case in point is
[Bryan Cockfield]’s recent article on a stealth antenna
designed to skirt restrictions placed upon an amateur radio operator by the homeowners’ association (HOA) governing his neighborhood.
Hiding an antenna in plain sight.
Putting aside the general griping about the legal and moral hazards of living under an HOA, as well as the weirdly irrelevant side-quest into the relative combustibility of EVs and ICE cars, there appeared to be a persistent misapprehension about the reality of the US Federal Communications Commission’s “Over-the-Air Reception Devices” rules. Reader [Gamma Raymond] beseeched us to clarify the rules, lest misinformation lead any of our readers into the unforgiving clutches of the “golf cart people” who seem to run many HOAs.
According to
the FCC’s own OTARD explainer
, the rules of
47 CFR § 1.400
are intended only to prevent “governmental and nongovernmental restrictions on viewers’ ability to receive
video
programming signals” (emphasis added) from three distinct classes of service: direct satellite broadcasters, broadband radio service providers, and television broadcast services.
Specifically, OTARD prevents restrictions on the installation, maintenance, or use of antennas for these services within limits, such as dish antennas having to be less than a meter in diameter (except in Alaska, where dishes can be any size, because it’s Alaska) and restrictions on where antennas can be placed, for example common areas (such as condominium roofs) versus patios and balconies which are designated as for the exclusive use of a tenant or owner. But importantly, that’s it. There are no carve-outs, either explicit or implied, for any other kind of antennas — amateur radio, scanners, CB, WiFi, Meshtastic, whatever. If it’s not about getting TV into your house in some way, shape, or form, it’s not covered by OTARD.
It goes without saying that we are not lawyers, and this is not to be construed as legal advice. If you want to put a 40′ tower with a giant beam antenna on your condo balcony and take on your HOA by stretching the rules and claiming that
slow-scan TV is a “video service,”
you’re on your own. But a plain reading of OTARD makes it clear to us what is and is not allowed, and we’re sorry to say there’s no quarter for radio hobbyists in the rules. This just means you’re going to need to be clever about your antennas. Or, you know — move. | 111 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "7790671",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T17:15:10",
"content": "I remember when OTARD was coming and the ARRL was all for it, then it was published and approved. I, and others were gravely disappointed when it was found not to address amateur radio at all.",
"pare... | 1,760,371,807.916201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/online-game-becomes-unexpected-pixelflut/ | Online Game Becomes Unexpected PixelFlut | Jenny List | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"checkboxes",
"pixelflut"
] | Blink and you could have missed it, but a viral sensation for a few weeks this summer was One Million Checkboxes, a web page with as you might expect, a million checkboxes. The cool thing about it was that it was interactive, so if you checked a box on your web browser, everyone else seeing that box also saw it being checked. You could do pixel art with it, and have some fun. While maintaining it, its author [eieio] noticed something weird, a URL was appearing in the raw pixel data. Had he been hacked?
Investigation revealed something rather more awesome
.
The display of checkboxes was responsive rather than fixed-width, on purpose to stop people leaving objectionable content. Any pixel arrangement would only appear as you made it to someone viewing with exactly the same width of checkboxes. But still, the boxes represented a binary bitfield, so of course people saw it and had fun hacking. The URLs appeared because they were ASCII encoded in the binary, and were left on purpose as a message to the developer inviting him to a forum.
On it he found a disparate group of teen hackers who’d formed a community having fun turning the game into their own version of a
Pixelflut
. If you’ve not seen the game previously, imagine a screen on which all pixels are individually addressable over the internet. Place it in a hackerspace or in the bar at a hacker camp, and of course the coders present indulge in a bit of competitive pixel-spamming to create a colorful and anarchic collaborative artwork. In this case as well as artwork they’d encoded the forum link in several ways, and had grown a thriving underground community of younger hackers honing their craft. As [eieio] did, we think this is excellent, and if any of the checkbox pixelflutters are reading this, we salute you!
Before he eventually took the site down he removed the rate limit for a while to let them really go to town, and predictably, they never gave up on the opportunity, and
didn’t let him down
.
Some people would call the activity discussed here antisocial, but in particular we agree with the final point in the piece. Young hackers like this don’t need admonishment, they need encouragement, and he’s done exactly the right thing. If you want to read more about Pixelflut meanwhile,
we’ve been there before
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7790044",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T16:35:47",
"content": "Pixelflut server plugins for smart TVs and popular STBs would be very handy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7791793",
"author": "Tim McNerney... | 1,760,371,807.999608 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/this-week-in-security-the-rest-of-the-ipv6-story-cve-hunting-and-hacking-the-tsa/ | This Week In Security: The Rest Of The IPv6 Story, CVE Hunting, And Hacking The TSA | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"IPv6",
"RCE",
"This Week in Security",
"wordpress"
] | We finally have
some answers about the Windows IPv6 vulnerability
— and a
Proof of Concept
! The patch was a single change in the Windows TCP/IP driver’s
Ipv6pProcessOptions()
, now calling
IppSendError()
instead of
IppSendErrorList()
. That’s not very helpful on its own, which is why [Marcus Hutchins]’s analysis is so helpful here. And it’s not an easy task, since decompiling source code like this doesn’t give us variable names.
The first question that needs answered is what is the list in question? This code is handling the option field in incoming IPv6 packets. The object being manipulated is a linked list of packet structs. And that linked list is almost always a single member list. When calling
IppSendErrorList()
on a list with a single member, it’s functionally equivalent to the
IppSendError()
in the fixed code. The flaw must be in the handling of this list with multiple members. The only way to achieve that criteria is to send a lot of traffic at the machine in question, so it can’t quite keep up with processing packets one at a time. To handle the high throughput, Windows will assemble incoming packets into a linked list and process them in batch.
So what’s next?
IppSendErrorList()
, takes a boolean and passes it on to each call of
IppSendError()
. We don’t know what Microsoft’s variable name is, but [Marcus] is calling it
always_send_icmp
, because setting it to true means that each packet processed will generate an ICMP packet. The important detail is that
IppSendError()
can have side effects. There is a codepath where the packet gets reverted, and the processing pointer is set back to the beginning of the packet. That’s fine for the first packet in the list, but because the function processes errors on the entire list of packets, the state of the rest of those packets is now much different from what is expected.
This unexpected but of weirdness can be further abused through IPv6 packet fragmentation. With a bit of careful setup, the reversion can cause a length counter to underflow, resulting in data structure corruption, and finally jumping code execution into the packet data. That’s the Remote Code Execution (RCE). And the good news, beyond the IPv6-only nature of the flaw, is that so far it’s been difficult to actually pull the attack off, as it relies on this somewhat non-deterministic “packet coalescing” technique to trigger the flaw.
CVE Hunting Made Easy
[Eddie Zhang] wanted to take the easy road to finding CVEs. To his immense credit, he did not ask ChatGPT to hallucinate vulnerabilities for him, but instead
built an automation chain to find possible vulns
. The idea is simple: Download as many WordPress plugins as he could, run Semgrep over the corpus, throw the results in a SQL database, and take a closer look at the most promising findings.
That starts by writing a SQL query, naturally. The interesting flaws were SELECTed, and then the different plugins run in a test bench setup to try to trigger actual vulnerable code. And it’s not a bad approach, judging by the 14 CVEs found in 3 afternoons of work.
Moodle
RedTeam Pentesting
got to have a field day with the Moodle platform
. Moodle is a web-based distance learning solution written in PHP. And to get the flavor of how this went, the test grading logic is written in PHP — and
eval()
‘d on the server during grading. Now it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. There is sanitization done, and the set of symbols, characters, and functions are rather limited.
PHP has a pretty interesting type system. Something like
acos(2)
, inverse of the cosine of 2, returns a result of Not a Number, or NAN. The dot
.
symbol does string concatenation in PHP, and putting those together,
acos(2) . acos(2)
results in a string,
NANNAN
. It gets better, as it’s then possible to do bitwise manipulation of those strings, eventually unlocking the entire alphabet. A few more tricks like PHP’s variable functions, variable variables, and other fun language contortions. Eventually we get to system() and escape into the system.
Hacking the TSA
[Ian Carroll] and [Sam Curry] bring
an unfortunate tale of clever hacking, cover ups, and incompetence
. The actual hack is pretty straightforward, a SQL injection in a login system. The real problem is that this login is in the official airline security systems that controls the Known CrewMember and Cockpit Access Security System. That’s the list of people that get to skip TSA checkpoints altogether, and that get access to airplane cockpits in flight. Not good.
The good news is that after disclosure, the Department of Homeland Security quickly secured the vulnerable site. The takes a turn for the worse, when it came time for disclosure. TSA issues a factually incorrect statement about what is required to use the KCM system. [Ian] and [Sam] reached out again to try to set the record straight about the severity of the finding. In response, the TSA quietly deleted the FAQ that spells out how bad the vulnerability could be. Not a great look.
Bits and Bytes
For your data and packet capture needs,
Wireshark 4.4 is out
. Among the normal improvements, there’s better VoIP support, a handful of new protocols, and some IPv6 tweaks to make life easier.
Ever wondered how to do effective sandboxing in Linux?
Hardened Linux has you covered
. There are some obvious things like limited filesystem access, but it might be more useful to read about seccomp to limit the available system calls to your sandboxed program. The article is an overview of the individual techniques, and then some of the more popular all-in-one solutions like firejail, bubblewrap, and landlock.
Volt Typhoon, a collection of hackers believed to be working on behalf of the Chinese government
has begun using a vulnerability in Versa Director to attack businesses
. Version 22.1.4 of the network management platform fixes the vulnerability, which allowed for executable java filew to be disguised as PNGs and uploaded to the platform.
And finally, one of the sneakier ways to stay on a Linux system is to
use udev
. For attackers, it’s always a challenge to make sure the malware starts up on each boot, and yet doesn’t attract any attention. There are plenty of places to hide a startup hook, but this one creates a udev rule to automatically run early in boot when the /dev/random device is created. How often do you audit your udev files? Sneaky! | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7792053",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T19:03:36",
"content": "re: Hardened Linux has you covered.Sadly most solutions are not implemented by the kernel itself by reply on BPF. Built with code that was never scrutinized by kernel developers, might even be closed so... | 1,760,371,807.958211 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/new-2-gb-raspberry-pi-5-has-smaller-die-and-30-lower-idle-power-usage/ | New 2 GB Raspberry Pi 5 Has Smaller Die And 30% Lower Idle Power Usage | Maya Posch | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Reviews"
] | [
"benchmark",
"delidding",
"overclocking",
"Raspberry Pi 5"
] | Recently Raspberry Pi released the 2GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 with a new BCM2712 SoC featuring the D0 stepping. As expected, [Jeff Geerling] got his mitts on one of these boards and
ran it through its paces
, with positive results. Well, mostly positive results — as the Geekbench test took offence to the mere 2 GB of RAM on the board and consistently ran out of memory by the multi-core Photo Filter test, as feared when we
originally reported
on this new SBC. Although using swap is an option, this would not have made for a very realistic SoC benchmark, ergo [Jeff] resorted to using
sysbench
instead.
Naturally some overclocking was also performed, to truly push the SoC to its limits. This boosted the clock speed from 2.4 GHz all the way up to 3.5 GHz with the
sysbench
score increasing from 4155 to 6068. At 3.6 GHz the system wouldn’t boot any more, but [Jeff] figured that delidding the SoC could enable even faster speeds. This procedure also enabled taking a look at the bare D0 stepping die, revealing it to be 32.5% smaller than the previous C1 stepping on presumably the same 16 nm process.
Although 3.5 GHz turns out to be a hard limit for now, the power usage was interesting with idle power being 0.9 watts lower (at 2.4 W) for the D0 stepping and the power and temperatures under load also looked better than the C1 stepping. Even when taking the power savings of half the RAM versus the 4 GB version into account, the D0 stepping seems significantly more optimized. The main question now is when we can expect to see it appear on the 4 and 8 GB versions of the SBC, though the answer there is likely ‘when current C1 stocks run out’. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7784624",
"author": "Sykobee",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T11:48:46",
"content": "35% smaller is a lot smaller, and given the lower power usage as well (I wouldn’t expect unused dark silicon to use much but it isn’t unlikely that power gating wasn’t present) I wonder if this is a 12nm ... | 1,760,371,808.049958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/30/adjustable-electric-hand-warmers/ | Adjustable Electric Hand Warmers | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"clay",
"nichrome",
"nichrome wire"
] | It may be the last gasp of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, but it’s always cold somewhere, whether it’s outdoors or inside. If you suffer from cold, stiff hands, you know how difficult it can be to work comfortably on a computer all day. Somehow, all that typing and mousing does little to warm things up.
What you need are hand warmers, obviously, and they might as well be smart and made to fit your hands
.
Fifteen-year-old [Printerforge] created these bad boys in an effort to learn how to code LCDs and control heat like Magneto controls ferrous metals. Thanks to digital control, they can heat up to specific temperatures, and they happen to run for a long time.
Power-wise, these warmers use a 18650 cell and a TP4056 charging module. Everything is controlled by an Arduino Nano, which reads from both a thermistor and a potentiometer to control the output.
[Printerforge] really thought this project through, as you’ll see in the Instructable. There’s everything from a table of design requirements to quick but thorough explanations of nichrome wire and basic electronic theory.
And then there’s the material consideration. [Printerforge] decided that polymer clay offers the best balance of heat conductivity and durability. They ended up with two styles — flat, and joystick grip. The best part is, everything can fit in a generous pocket.
Clay is good for a lot of things, like
making the perfect custom mouse
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7785092",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T12:09:11",
"content": "Can anyone tell me about their experience with electric hand warmers? They don’t sell in my part of the world even if its 0C or lower.Is the battery life enough?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,808.147365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/a-little-optical-magic-makes-this-floating-display-pop/ | A Little Optical Magic Makes This Floating Display Pop | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"beam splitter",
"display",
"holographic",
"retroreflector",
"TOF",
"VL53L0X",
"volumetric display"
] | If there’s a reason that fancy holographic displays that respond to gestures are a science fiction staple, it’s probably because our current display technology is terrible. Oh sure, Retina displays and big curved gaming monitors are things of wonder, but they’re also things that occupy space even when they’re off — hence the yearning for a display that can appear and disappear at need.
Now, we’re not sure if
[Maker Mac70]’s floating display
is the answer to your sci-fi dreams, but it’s still pretty cool. And, as with the best of tricks, it’s all done with mirrors. The idea is to use a combination of a partially reflective mirror, a sheet of retroreflective material, and a bright LCD panel. These are set up in an equilateral triangle arrangement, with the partially reflective mirror at the top. Part of the light from the LCD bounces off the bottom surface of the mirror onto a retroreflector — [Mac] used a sheet of material similar to what’s used on traffic signs. True to its name, the retroreflector bounces the light directly back at the semi-transparent mirror, passing through it to focus on a point in space above the whole contraption. To make the display interactive, [Mac] used a trio of cheap time-of-flight (TOF) sensors to watch for fingers poking into the space into which the display is projected. It seemed to work well enough after some tweaking; you can check it out in the video below, which also has some great tips on greebling, if that’s your thing.
We suspect that the thumbnail for the video is a composite, but that’s understandable since the conditions for viewing such a display have to be just right in terms of ambient light level and the viewer’s position relative to the display. [Mac] even mentions the narrow acceptance angle of the display, touting it as a potential benefit for use cases where privacy is a concern. In any case, it’s very different from
his last sci-fi-inspired volumetric display
, which was pretty cool too. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7774473",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T03:56:53",
"content": "That isn’t an equilateral triangle. It’s a right triangle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7789250",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timesta... | 1,760,371,808.095843 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/2024-tiny-games-contest-mini-cyclone-tests-reaction-time/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Mini Cyclone Tests Reaction Time | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"arduino nano",
"reaction time"
] | Round and round goes the red LED, and if you can push the button when it overlaps the green LED, then you win. Cyclone is almost too simple of a game, and that’s probably part of why it’s so addictive.
Want to make one for your desk?
All it takes is an Arduino Nano R3 or comparable microcontroller, an RGB LED ring with 12 LEDs, a 16×2 LCD, a buzzer, and a momentary push button switch.
Interestingly, there aren’t successive levels with increasing speed, but each round begins with a randomized speed value. Of course, this can all be easily changed in the code, which is modified from
[Joern Weise]’s original
.
This is a tinier version of [mircemk]’s original project, which uses a 60-LED ring and does contain levels. As usual with [mircemk]’s builds, this project is mounted on their trademark 3 mm PVC board and covered with peel-and-stick wallpaper. Be sure to check out the demo and build video after the break.
Don’t forget! You have until Tuesday, September 10th to
enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest,
so get crackin’! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7769309",
"author": "Dr. Cockroach",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T00:03:22",
"content": "This looks quite good. Hmmm, now you have me thinking about another Light Logic project :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7772387",
"auth... | 1,760,371,808.192745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/driven-to-over-engineer-a-kids-car/ | Driven To Over-Engineer A Kids’ Car | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Toy Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"mqtt",
"raspberry pi"
] | You know, it feels as though it’s getting more and more difficult to compete for Father of the Year around here. And [Jon Petter Skagmo] just laid down a new gauntlet —
the incredibly overly-engineered kids car
.
While the original plan was to build the entire car from scratch, [Jon] eventually opted to use an off-the-shelf car that had a dead battery.
While the original architecture was quite simple, the new hardware has just about everything a kid could want in a tricked-out ride, most of which is accessible through the really cool dashboard.
We’re talking headlights, a music player, a siren, a selfie video cam that doubles as two-way communication with the driver, and even a garage door opener that uses an MQTT connection.
Under the cute little hood is where you’ll find most of the electronics. The car’s brain is a Raspberry Pi 3B, and there’s a custom daughter board that includes GPS/GNSS. This was originally meant to geofence [Baby Girl Skagmo] in, but Dad quickly realized that kids are gonna kid and disabled it pretty soon after.
This
isn’t the first high-tech rebuild
of a kiddie car that we’ve seen here at Hackaday. Makes us wish we were quite a bit smaller… | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7764515",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known as Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T20:39:13",
"content": "Yeah! Shame me and my feeble attempts at being a father!B^)Great Build! And he finished it before she physically outgrew it!One question, are the tires the slippery plastic t... | 1,760,371,808.33704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/2024-tiny-games-contest-blind-maze-is-fun-for-all/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Blind Maze Is Fun For All | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"arduino nano"
] | If you think about it, even difficult mazes on paper are pretty easy. You can see all the places you can and can’t go, and if you use a pencil instead of a pen, well, that’s almost like cheating.
However, using a pencil is pretty much a necessity to play [penumbriel]’s
Blind Maze
. In this game, you can’t even see the maze, or where you are. Well, that’s not exactly true — you can “touch” the wall (or lack thereof) in front of you and to the sides, but that’s it. So you’re going to need that pencil to draw out a map as you go along.
This game runs on an Arduino Nano and a 18650 cell. There are three LEDs deep within the enclosure, which is meant to give the depth of walls. But, even the vision-impaired can play the Blind Maze, because there’s haptic feedback thanks to a small vibration motor.
If you want to play in hard mode, there’s a hidden paperclip-accessible switch that turns off the LEDs. This way, you have to rely on hitting the walls with your head. Be sure to check out the video below. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7761678",
"author": "jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T18:35:51",
"content": "Hunt the Wumpus is another game that benefits from drawing your own maps.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7761991",
"author": "CityZen",
"ti... | 1,760,371,808.433276 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/walking-the-plank-add-ons-for-the-bus-pirate/ | Walking The Plank: Add-Ons For The Bus Pirate | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"add-ons",
"bus pirate",
"Bus Pirate 5",
"expansion"
] | The Bus Pirate multi-tool has held a place of honor in many a hardware hacker’s toolbox for years, and the latest generation of the gadget powered by the Raspberry Pi RP2040/RP2350 offers significantly enhanced capabilities over the original PIC versions.
We took a look at the new Bus Pirate
when it started shipping back in February, and while the firmware was still in the early stages back then, it was already clear that creator [Ian Lesnet] and his team had put together a compelling product.
Over the last several months, the Bus Pirate software has improved dramatically. New features have started showing off the hardware’s capabilities, and the user experience is far improved over where it was at release. Following the firmware development is a roller coaster ride, with [Ian] sometimes pushing out several updates a day. Luckily, like the Pi Pico itself, updating the new Bus Pirate only takes a second.
But as impressive and important as those software updates have been, that’s not what we’re talking about today. In this post, we’ll take a look at one of the most exciting aspects of the new Bus Pirate — the ability to easily develop add-on modules for it.
Bus Pirate Versions
Before we get too far, I should mention that there are now a couple of new Bus Pirate versions on the market, which makes talking about the product a little confusing.
The new Bus Pirate 6
The Bus Pirate 5, which started shipping in February and remains available, is powered by the RP2040. It is the first major version of the hardware to see a wide release since the Bus Pirate 3. Since the team got early access to the RP2350 chip, they were also able to produce two new variants: the 5XL and the 6.
What are the differences between them all? The 5XL uses the RP2350A and is essentially just a faster version of the 5 thanks to the more powerful cores and additional RAM offered by the new Raspberry Pi silicon. The 6 is based on the RP2350B and takes advantage of the additional GPIO pins by deleting some of the I/O expander chips that were necessary on the 5 and 5XL. This not only makes I/O faster but frees up space on the board to implement a “follow along” logic analyzer that automatically records everything that’s happening on the bus.
All that being said, for the purposes of this article, it doesn’t actually matter.
One Port To Rule Them All
Regardless of which version of the Bus Pirate you get (5/5XL/6), they all feature the same 10-pin connector on the side. This is where you’d normally connect up your probes, and thanks to the display on the top of the Bus Pirate, you don’t even have to remember the pinout — when you switch modes on the device, the screen will be updated to show which pin does what.
This is where things start to get interesting. Since the connector on the side is nothing more exotic than a male 2.54 mm pitch header, interfacing with it through custom hardware is incredibly simple. You don’t need to hunt down some special connector — making a board that can plug into the BP5 (or beyond) can be as easy as soldering a female header onto a scrap of perfboard. Even better, since you don’t have to worry about creating a custom footprint, developing your own add-on PCBs is a breeze.
Designing Custom Expansions
Creating your own piece of hardware that plugs into the Bus Pirate is as easy as adding a right-angle 2.54 mm female header to the edge of your PCB. You might think the fact that the pinout changing depending on what mode the device is in would be a problem, but in practice, your add-on is likely going to require the user to set a corresponding mode anyway (I2C, SPI, UART, etc).
Over on the Bus Pirate forums, user [grymoire] is responsible for coming up with the idea of
calling these expansions “planks”
after drawing comparisons with the “hats” and “shields” used by other development boards. Why a plank? Well, for one, it fits the pirate theme. When plugged into the Bus Pirate, the expansions also look a bit like a plank hanging out over the side of a pirate ship.
As an example,
I recently put together the SAO Plank
: a small adapter that lets me connect three Simple Add-Ons to the Bus Pirate. This is not only a convenient way of powering the badge expansions and monitoring their current consumption using the Bus Pirate’s onboard display, but it also provides a way to debug and test I2C communications between several SAOs — a capability that will become more useful as we
get closer to Supercon 2024
.
There’s really not much going on in the SAO Plank, and frankly, I could have wired the thing up on a perfboard. Even the power LED I added is technically superfluous, as the technicolor lights produced by the Bus Pirate leave no question as to whether or not it’s turned on. But it was so cheap and easy to turn this into its own board, so why not?
I’m eager to see what the community comes up with when presented with such a low-friction path to coming up with custom Bus Pirate expansions.
Collect Em’ All
Bus Pirate planks aren’t just limited to DIY. Since releasing the Bus Pirate 5, a number of official planks have been introduced. Some of these are still in development, such as the “IR Toy” that
[Ian] has been documenting
in a thread on the forums. Others are already available for purchase, such as an
assortment of adapters
that make it easier to work with SPI flash chips and one for interfacing with SLE4442 Secure Memory Cards.
One of the advantages of the official planks is that the firmware is likely to get baked-in support for any special functions they may have. Even though the IR Toy hasn’t officially been released, last week a new mode was added to the stable build of the firmware that can interface with it and send NEC IR codes. Then again, as the firmware is open source, even DIY planks could get their own modes should somebody be so inclined to write the code for them.
Whether they’re an official product or a homebrew project from the community, the Bus Pirate Planks are a very exciting addition to an already fantastic tool. If you happen to see an interesting Plank in the wild, or end up making one yourself,
be sure to let us know
. | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7767173",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known as Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T22:28:05",
"content": "With the recent Hackaday article about the bug in the 2350, has the XL version overcome that?Pull-up resistors ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,808.384337 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/3d-printering-klipper-the-free-3d-printer-upgrade/ | 3D Printering: Klipper, The Free 3D Printer Upgrade | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3d printing",
"g-code",
"klipper",
"marlin",
"Moonraker"
] | I have several 3D printers, and I’ve always been satisfied with using either Repetier or Marlin on all of them. There are a few other firmware versions that could run on my hardware, but those two have been all I’ve needed. Sure, it was painful for a while having to juggle features to fit the firmware image onto the smaller microcontroller boards. Now that Marlin supports big 32-bit boards however, that hasn’t been a problem. But recently, I’ve been on a program to switch everything to Klipper.
In this post, I’ll tell you why I did it and give you some data about why you might consider it, too.
The Landscape
Marlin is written in C and burned into a 3D printer’s flash memory. It does a lot. It receives G-code commands, interprets them, and translates them to meaningful actions on the hardware. Modern versions handle automatic transformations to account for lumpy beds, input shaping to reduce shaking, and linear advance to produce better prints.
It might seem simple to control a 3D printer, but there are lots of little details to take into account. For example, if you are moving the head between two XY coordinates and you expect a certain flow rate, then you have to figure out how fast to turn the steppers to get the right amount of plastic out over that time. You also may have to retract before you start a move, make sure temperatures are stable, and transform the actual coordinates based on bed leveling data. There’s a lot going on.
Klipper does the exact same job, but it does it differently. On the 3D printer board is a tiny piece of software that does very little. It’s a bit like a device driver for the printer. All by itself, it does nothing. But it can handle very basic commands that describe how to move the machine.
All the rest of the processing you expect to happen now runs on some Linux computer. That is very often a Raspberry Pi, but it could be a spare laptop, your desktop computer, or anything that will run a reasonable Linux install. Several vendors even sell single-board computers with touchscreens made specifically for running this part of Klipper.
However, even though a screen is nice, you don’t really need it. I’ll talk about that more later.
The Problem
Historically, Klipper was a way to break out of the limitations of using tiny 8-bit controller boards with limited memory. These days, you can get plenty of powerful 3D printer controller boards, so that isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be.
Instead, I have another problem. The build. One of my printers is a custom printer that doesn’t really match any other printer in the world. So, I have to build my own version of Marlin. That’s actually not very hard to do. However, there are two things that are very annoying. First, you have to flash the firmware. The printer uses DFU, and I have brought out the “bootload” switch, but it is still a pain, and I possibly will brick the printer if I make a mistake. A recoverable brick, but still.
But the real problem is keeping my version of Marlin up to date with the official version. The version I have running now is old enough to not have some of the cool features, so I would have to merge the mainline in with my fork. Can it be done? Of course. But it’s awkward, and the longer you wait, the worse it gets.
For a recent 3D printing class I sometimes teach, I picked up two cheap printers that had great support for Klipper, so they were my guinea pigs before I attempted to switch over to the custom printer.
I should note that Klipper, I think, appeals to people who like tweaking settings and editing configuration files. Since you’re reading Hackaday, there’s a good chance that describes you. But if you despise opening a Bash shell and entering text, you might think about avoiding Klipper. While the UIs do a good job of protecting you from most of this, there’s going to be times when you’ll need to get your hands dirty.
Is Klipper the Solution?
You do have to flash a small program over to your board to run Klipper, but once you do it, you very likely will never do it again. If you are dissatisfied, you can flash Marlin back and there’s no harm done. Just make sure you can get your hands on a stock firmware image for your printer before you start making any changes. In my case, I do have the ability to go back to Marlin if I ever wanted to. But at this point, the only reason I’d make the switch back was if I planned on selling the machine to a beginner.
After that one flash, all the other setups for anything you want to do are done through Linux, mostly through a simple configuration file. There are also web-based and touchscreen-based GUIs, but everything is really in a file. The code, too, is mostly in Python, so making a change or adding something is relatively simple, especially if you are comfortable with Linux. The hardware stub and a small part of the host is in C, however.
If you aren’t comfortable with Linux, the user interfaces will help. You can even use them to edit your configuration files in your browser, so it is possible to have no idea how to use Linux and still get by.
Klipper Architecture
I was going to draw a diagram of the Klipper architecture, but
[Sineos] beat me to it
, so I borrowed this one from the Klipper discourse group’s documentation.
[Sineos] created this diagram for the Klipper knowledge base
At the top right is the Klipper firmware — that’s the stub that executes basic commands on the hardware. The box on the bottom right indicates that you can even treat the computer Klipper is running on as a hardware host, and — what isn’t shown — is that Klipper can manage multiple controller boards (more on that later).
The final red block is the host, and that’s where all the real processing occurs. It reads G-code and worries about bed level, temperature, and so on. One of the key features is that you control it with macros, which could look like G-code or something else.
Custom G-Code
For example, suppose you want to create a new G-code, say G12345. As far as I know, that’s not a legal G-code. But you can define a macro named G12345 and make it do whatever you want. You can also define macros for real G-codes if you want. So, defining G28 would allow you to take over how the printer homes itself.
You can also have a macro named HACKADAY_LOGO or FILAMENT_CHANGE and stick those in your G code to make Klipper do anything you want. You can even do programming language constructions like for loops and if/then/else in your macros.
Klipper is almost completely concerned with reading input codes and spitting out basic movements. A lot of system management falls to Moonraker, which talks to Klipper for you and communicates with the Web, MQTT, Home Automation, and more. A configuration file is also used to set up Moonraker. So for example, if you want a text message when your print is complete, Moonraker can do that. It also can keep your system up to date.
User Interfaces
It also communicates with user interfaces. For example, if you have a touch screen, it also talks to the system via Moonraker. However, the user interface is usually a web browser viewing pages provided by Fluidd or Mainsail. In fact, you can run both on different ports and use either one you like at any time. The browser doesn’t have to be on the machine you have Klipper on, by the way. In that way, it is like OctoPrint, which you can also use if you like.
OctoPrint has many features but can be heavy to run. For whatever reason, most people seem to run Fluidd or Mainsail, even though it is possible to use OctoPrint and benefit from its many plugins and features. Moonraker can even be made to mimic OctoPrint — so slicers that know how to send jobs to Octoprint can also send jobs to Klipper.
Here’s a look at part of Fluidd’s main page (you can, of course, configure and theme it):
Part of the Fluidd main page during a print.
The Next Trick… Juggling!
I mentioned earlier that Klipper can control multiple boards. Some new bed sensors, for example, are their own computers, and Klipper can talk to them directly.
For another example. Suppose you have a board with lots of stepper drivers, and you decide to build a printer with four extruders. Later, you decide you want filament run-out sensors for each one, but your board doesn’t have enough input ports. No problem! Just get a second cheap board, flash it with the stub firmware, and tell Klipper about it. There’s no reason those sensors have to be on the same board as the other electronics. If you are running on a Raspberry Pi, there may be times when you want the Pi to not only run the main Klipper code but also host I/O devices, and that’s the function of that bottom block.
Next Steps
In the next installment, I’ll tell you more about how you can get started and a few things to look out for. If you already use Klipper, let us know your favorite tricks in the comments.
We covered
Klipper
way back in 2017, and it has come a long way since then. Of course, there are other ways
to speed up your 3D prints
. | 33 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "7756322",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T14:25:13",
"content": "I’ve had switching to Klipper on my to-do list for years. It only hasn’t happened yet because ahead of it in the list are hardware changes that are taking me time to design parts for.I was disappointed ... | 1,760,371,808.519083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/reconfigurable-tracked-robot-has-some-neat-flexible-abilities/ | Reconfigurable Tracked Robot Has Some Neat Flexible Abilities | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"linked",
"robot",
"tracked",
"tracked robot",
"tracks"
] | When you think of tracked robots, you might think of bomb disposal robots or others used in military applications. You probably haven’t seen anything quite like this, however—
it’s a “reconfigurable continuous track robot” from researchers [Tal Kislasi] and [David Zarrouk (via IEEE Spectrum)
.
Neat party trick!
The robot looks simple, like some kind of tracked worm. As its motors turn, the track moves along as you would expect, propelling the robot along the ground. Its special feature, though, is that the track can bend itself up and down, just like a snake might as it rises up to survey a given area.
The little tracked robot can thus tilt itself up to climb steps, and even bend itself over small obstacles. It can even try and hold itself up high as it inches along to try and bridge its way over a gap.
The robot can selectively lock each link (or not) as it passes by.
How does it achieve this? Well, the robot is able to selectively lock the individual links of its outer track in various orientations. As the links pass over the front of the robot, a small actuator is used to lock each link in a 20-degree orientation, or a straight orientation, or leave them loose.
The ability to lock multiple links into a continuous rigid structure allows the robot to rise up from the ground, form itself into a stiff beam, or conform to the ground as desired. A mechanism at the back of the robot unlatches the links as they pass by so the robot retains flexibility as it moves along.
It’s a nifty design, and one we’d like to see implemented on a more advanced tracked robot.
We’ve explained the benefits of tracked drivetrains before, too. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7755922",
"author": "Mark Allen Miller",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T14:02:17",
"content": "Fantastic !!! Clearly great thinking. What would the version that can turn look like?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7788920",
... | 1,760,371,808.56961 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/29/adding-human-detection-to-home-automation/ | Adding Human Detection To Home Automation | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"home automation",
"LD2410B",
"millimeter",
"mmwave",
"radar",
"radio"
] | Radar made a huge impact when it was first invented, allowing objects to be detected using radio waves which would normally be difficult or impossible to observe through other means. Radio waves of all frequencies can be used for radar as well, whether that’s detecting ships beyond the horizon, tracking aircraft near an airport, penetrating the ground, or imaging objects with a high resolution. At the millimeter wavelength it’s fairly easy to detect humans with the right hardware, and using some inexpensive radar modules
[Tech Dregs] shows us how to add this capability a home automation system
.
Since these modules aren’t trying to image humans with fine detail or detect them at long range, the hardware can be fairly inexpensive. [Tech Dregs] is using the LD2410B modules which have not only an on-board microcontroller but also have the radio antennas used for radar built right onto the PCB. They have a simple binary output which can communicate whether or not a human is detected, but there’s also UART for communicating more details about what the module senses in the room. [Tech Dregs] is using this mode to connect the modules to Home Assistant, where they will be used to help automate his home’s lighting.
The only significant problem he had setting these modules up was getting them built into an enclosure. The short wavelengths used in this type of radar module don’t penetrate solid objects very well at all, so after trying to hide one behind an e-ink screen he eventually settled on hollowing out a space in a bezel with very thin plastic between the module and the room. If you need more out of your radar modules than object detection, though, you can always try building
a pulse compression radar which can provide much more accurate ranging of objects
. | 39 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "7749813",
"author": "Thomas Anderson",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T08:22:38",
"content": "Another problem I’ve had with these is they work through walls and doors. Makes finding a position for them fun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,371,808.700419 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/why-use-a-sensor-when-a-pseudo-sensor-will-do/ | Why Use A Sensor When A Pseudo-Sensor Will Do? | Lewin Day | [
"Parts",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"coca-cola",
"coca-cola freestyle",
"current sense",
"current sensor",
"development",
"freestyle",
"pressure sensor",
"psuedo-sensor",
"sensor",
"soda machine"
] | Usually, when you need to sense something in a project, the answers are straightforward. Want to sense air temperature? There’s a sensor for that. Particulate content in the air? There’s a sensor for that, too. Someone sneaking up on you? Get yourself some passive infrared sensors (PIRs) and maybe a smart camera just to be sure.
But sometimes you can be sneaky instead, saving the cost of a sensor by using alternative techniques. Perhaps there’s a way to use the hardware you already have to determine what you need. Maybe you can use statistical methods to calculate the quantity you’re looking for from other measurements.
Today, we’ll examine a great example of a “pseudo-sensor” build in an existing commercial device, and examine how these techniques are often put to good use in industry.
Case Study
When they were introduced in 2009, Coca-Cola Freestyle dispensers were a step change in the way soft drinks were dispensed. Suddenly, you weren’t limited to five or six choices on the soda fountain. You could instead sample virtually the entire Coca Cola range, all on one machine! If you’re a big soda head, this was a very rad thing. If you were a maintenance tech for Coca Cola, though, you probably saw the machine differently — not as some godly fount of soda, but as a machine to be troubleshooted, repaired, and improved. Over time, it became obvious that the Freestyle unit had a high rate of Flow Control Module (FCM) replacements in the field. And yet, 50% of the FCMs returned to Coca Cola weren’t faulty. There was something strange going on.
The problem,
as revealed in a presentation from the company
, was that the Freestyle machine didn’t have a dedicated pressure sensor in the fluid line. If a machine had an FCM fault or a pressure loss, it would present much the same way. Thus, techs would often swap out a perfectly good FCM when the problem was actually elsewhere. The solution was obvious: there needed to be a way to sense pressure in the system, so techs could determine if an FCM was faulty or if the problem was a lack of pressure upstream.
There’s a characteristic dip in the current flowing to the FCM valve when it opens—and it change with pressure.
To address this, an engineer might have specified an off-the-shelf pressure sensor, figured out how to retrofit it to the machine, and rolled them out in the wild. Instead, Coca-Cola developed an innovative (and presumably cheaper) solution: a pressure pseudo-sensor, largely using equipment already on the machine.
The pseudo pressure sensor operates by analyzing the relationship between electrical and mechanical work within the FCM. Basically, the FCM is a valve that opens to allow the flow of fluid through the machine. Thus, the pseudo-sensor monitors the current at which the valve starts to move, a value that correlates with the pressure inside the system. As pressure increases, a characteristic V-shaped drop in current is observed; this pattern shifts as pressure changes, allowing the system to estimate the pressure based on the observed current.
A complicated function ties pressure to the features of the FCM current curve.
To create the pseudo-sensor, a whole lot of data was collected from the Freestyle hardware. Over 5,000 drink pours were performed with a number of FCM modules, at pressures from 1 to 140 pounds per square inch (PSI) at 5 PSI intervals. The data collected during testing was then fed into MATLAB and Simulink in order to create a mathematical model. The aim was to link the peak size of the current feedback voltage dip measured by the current sensor, and link that to pressure. Sadly, a good reliable correlation was hard to come by.
More work ensued, which tied pressure to multiple timing and voltage features on the curve. These were fed into a multi-variable regression that spat out a monstrous model that calculated pressure from six features and 26 terms. It was messy, but far more accurate, and it did the job.
From there, it was a simple matter of deploying the model that measured FCM current and spat our pressure measurements. It was loaded on an ARM Cortex M microcontroller and put through 3,300 tests over 10 different FCMs and two different Freestyle controller boards. The model predicted the correct pressure within a bound of +/- 10 PSI a full 85% of the time.
Admittedly, that would be rubbish for a proper pressure sensor. However, for a simple pseudo-sensor that’s mostly just used to see if there’s pressure in the system? It’s pretty darn good. The pseudo-sensor software has since been deployed on Freestyle machines in the field, with work ongoing to further develop the system’s diagnostics using this new tool.
The pseudo-sensor actually does a pretty good job!
Other Examples
The simple fact is that you can often get by with indirect measurement techniques if you’re constrained by things like cost, complexity, or practicality. We’ve seen other work along these very lines before.
Back in 2022
, we covered the work of Brian Wyld, who wanted to measure the level of a body of water. Pressure and direct surface-level sensors were impractical, so he got creative. He built a rotating arm with a float on one side, and threw on a microcontroller board with an accelerometer included. The accelerometer readings were enough to allow him to figure out the angle of the float, and in turn, mathematically derive the water level as desired via simple geometry!
“We need to measure the water level but we only have an accelerometer!”
“No problem.” Credit: Brian Wyld
We’ve also seen how this can go wrong. For example,
capacitive sensors are often suggested for measuring soil moisture levels.
The idea is that by measuring the capacitance of the soil, you can measure how much water content there is. The only problem is that moisture isn’t the only thing that changes the capacitance of the soil.
For these indirect techniques to work well, what you’re measuring needs to have a fairly direct correlation with what you’re trying to find out. Hence why Wyld’s float was a success — because the float angle is directly relevant to the water level. Similarly, in Coca-Cola’s case, pressure was what determined the change in the current curve of the Freestyle FCM. If the curve also changed significantly with ambient temperature or some other factor, it wouldn’t be possible to measure it and get out a reliable pressure value.
Ultimately, pseudo-sensors can be a useful tool to have in your engineering toolkit. They can let you achieve surprising feats with some mathematical insight and basic equipment. Just make sure there’s a strong basis for what you’re doing so you don’t end up with junk outputs that cause you more harm than good. | 30 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "7723263",
"author": "Mmmm",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T14:12:00",
"content": "As an aside, check out what all those “flavors” do to the chromed plastic(?) of the ice dispenser on the Freestyle machine over time.. Scary!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},... | 1,760,371,808.913388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/demonstrating-the-photoelectric-effect-using-neon-lamps/ | Demonstrating The Photoelectric Effect Using Neon Lamps | Dave Rowntree | [
"LED Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"neon bulb",
"oscillators",
"photoelectric"
] | Neon lamps are fun to play with. These old-school indicators were once heavily utilized in many types of equipment for indication purposes but now seem largely relegated to mains voltage indication duties.
Here’s a fun video by [Ashish Derhgawen]
, discussing the photoelectric effect of neon lamps with some simple demonstrations.
Orange light makes it light!
[Ashish] demonstrates the well-known photoelectric effect by triggering a sub-biased neon lamp with visible light from an LED. Neon bulbs work on the principle of voltage-induced ionization, creating a visible glowing plasma. If the applied voltage is high enough, around 60 to 80 V, electrons get knocked off the neutral neon atoms. The now free electrons, roaming around highly energized, will eventually come across a neon ion (missing an electron) and recombine to make it neutral again.
The results are a lower total energy state, and the difference in energy is resolved by the emission of a photon of light, which, in the case of neon, is a dull reddish-orange. Nothing unusual there. However,
nothing will happen if the applied voltage bias is
just below
this device-specific threshold
. There’s not enough energy to strip electrons.
Apply an external light source, and this threshold can be exceeded. The photons from the LED are just energetic enough to strip a small number of electrons from the surface of the electrodes, and this causes a cascade, or avalanche effect, lighting up the plasma and turning on the neon lamp.
Take away the external light source, and it dies down and goes dark.
The video also shows an interesting effect due to the wavelength of applied light. The photon energy needed to release an electron depends on the atom it strikes. Neon bulbs have all manner of electrode materials. [Ashish] shows that a particular neon lamp can be excited to emit a specific wavelength corresponding to a certain energy level. With some materials science work, this can then be used to ascertain what the electrode material is. Finally, the video shows some simple astable and relaxation oscillators initiated by light, making us wonder if one neon bulb could activate some neighboring bulbs and create a neat wave propagation effect for some electrode material and bias levels? You can see in the video that when the spectrum thrown from the prism is passed over the bulb, it illuminates in the orange section. So this could work. If you know, then do let us know with some examples.
Neon light hacks are
plentiful around here. Neon lamps have
many other uses
beyond indication,
even detecting sound
. Of course, they look nice,
but driving them is a hassle. Why not just
fake the look with modern tech
? | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7719705",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T11:21:35",
"content": "This is basicaly a geiger “counter” :-) It will probably detect ionizing radiation. But it gets more practical if you wrap it in tin foil (or some similar material that blocks light to prevent discharge... | 1,760,371,808.780151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/proper-mag-lev-controller-makes-snail-lamp-much-cooler/ | Proper Mag Lev Controller Makes Snail Lamp Much Cooler | Lewin Day | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"coils",
"lamp",
"levitation",
"mag lev",
"Magnetic levitation",
"snail"
] | Magnetic levitation has not quite revolutionized the world of transit the way some of us might have hoped. It has, however, proven useful to [mrdiytechmagic], who has put the technology to grand use
in making his levitating snail lamp.
The build is actually relatively complicated compared to some levitating toys you might have seen before. It uses a number of coils to produce a magnetic field to levitate the 3D printed plastic snail which contains the lighting element itself.
The actively controlled levitation base uses a magnetic sensor to detect the changing field as the snail moves above it. It then varies the current going to the various coils to keep the snail balanced and in place. Power is transmitted with a further larger coil, much as in a wireless phone charger. This is picked up by a circuit in the snail, and used to power the LEDs inside.
It might not have been our first choice, but having seen it in action, we can’t deny a levitating 3D printed snail is pretty impressive. If you’d prefer something slightly more befitting such a high-tech looking presentation,
perhaps a hovering SpaceX Starship
would be more your speed. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7717705",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T09:49:11",
"content": "Similar but floating nixie clock:https://hackaday.com/2016/07/31/you-may-have-a-nixie-tube-clock-but-can-yours-levitate/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7... | 1,760,371,808.831315 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/exploring-pc-floppy-protection-formaster-copy-lock/ | Exploring PC Floppy Protection: Formaster Copy-Lock | Dave Rowntree | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"content protection",
"copy lock",
"floppy disk",
"IBM PC",
"kings quest"
] | [GloriousCow] has started working on a series of investigations into the various historical floppy disk copy protection schemes used in the early days of the IBM PC and is here with the first of these results, specifically
Formaster’s Copy-Lock.
This is the starting sector of track 6. It looks empty, but it’s not quite.
The game in question is
King’s Quest
by Sierra Entertainment, which used a ‘booter disk’ with the Copy-Lock protection scheme. Instead of having to boot DOS separately, you could just insert this disk and the game would launch automatically. Early copy protections often used simple methods, like adding sectors with non-standard sizes or tampering with sector CRC values to create disk errors. Copy-Lock employed several such tricks together, making it challenging for standard floppy disk hardware to replicate. In the case of Copy-Lock, Sector 1 on track 6 was intentionally written as only 256 bytes, with a 256-byte blank section to fill the gap. Additionally, the CRC was also altered to add another layer of protection.
When attempting to read the disk, the PC BIOS interrupt routine assumes it’s looking for a standard 512-byte sector, so when a “read sector” command is issued to locate the sector, it never finds it. To detect a dodgy copy, the game bypasses the BIOS and talks directly to the floppy disk controller using some custom code. The first part of the code uses the standard INT 13h routine to seek to track 6, sector 1, where it expects a fail since there is no valid sector there. Next, the floppy controller sends the “read track” command to perform a raw dump of all 512 bytes at this address and looks for a magic number, 0xF7, sitting in the final byte. That empty second half of the short sector is indeed not empty and is the check the game makes to determine if it was written with the Copy-Lock capable hardware. That last point is pertinent; you can’t create this disk structure with a standard IBM PC floppy disk controller; you need specialized hardware that can write different-sized sectors and incorrect CRCs, and that costs money to acquire.
We recently covered the copy protection scheme used for
Dungeon Master
on the Atari ST and the Amiga
. If you’re thinking less about how a floppy got cracked and copied and more about how to preserve these digital relics,
check this out
! | 35 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "7716469",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T07:50:28",
"content": "you can’t create this disk structure with a standard IBM PC floppy disk controllerThis sounds like a challenge :)(not picking it up though, have too many projects underway)",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,371,808.993052 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/decs-lan-bridge-100-the-invention-of-the-network-bridge/ | DEC’s LAN Bridge 100: The Invention Of The Network Bridge | Maya Posch | [
"History",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"ethernet",
"ethernet bridge"
] | DEC’s LAN Bridge 100 was a major milestone in the history of Ethernet which made it a viable option for the ever-growing LANs of yesteryear and today. Its history is also the topic of
a recent video
by [The Serial Port], in which [Mark] covers the development history of this device. We
previously covered
the LANBridge 100 Ethernet bridge and what it meant as Ethernet saw itself forced to scale from a shared medium (ether) to a star topology featuring network bridges and switches.
Featured in the video is also an interview with [John Reed], a field service network technician who worked at DEC from 1980 to 1998. He demonstrates what the world was like with early Ethernet, with thicknet coax (10BASE5) requiring a rather enjoyable way to crimp on connectors. Even with the relatively sluggish 10 Mbit of thicknet Ethernet, adding an Ethernet store and forward bridge in between two of these networks required significant amounts of processing power due to the sheer number of packets, but the beefy Motorola 68k CPU was up to the task.
To prevent issues with loops in the network, the spanning tree algorithm was developed and implemented, forming the foundations of the modern-day Ethernet LANs, as demonstrated by the basic LAN Bridge 100 unit that [Mark] fires up and which works fine in a modern-day LAN after its start-up procedure. Even if today’s Ethernet bridges and switches got smarter and more powerful, it all started with that first LAN Bridge. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7710736",
"author": "mark",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T02:19:03",
"content": "This is an important part of modern networkign",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7719063",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T10:... | 1,760,371,809.043235 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/hardware-reuse-the-pmg001-integrated-power-management-module/ | Hardware Reuse: The PMG001 Integrated Power Management Module | Dave Rowntree | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"lithium ion",
"power mangement",
"programmable"
] | Battery management is a tedious but necessary problem that becomes more of a hassle with lithium-ion technology. As we’re all very aware, such batteries need a bit of care to be utilized safely, and as such, a huge plethora of ICs are available to perform the relevant duties. Hackaday.IO user [Erik] clearly spent some time dropping down the same old set of ICs to manage a battery in their applications, so they created a
drop-in castellated PCB
to manage all this.
The little board, measuring just a smidge over 22 x 16mm, packs a fair amount of capability, with an
ATTiny1616
to make it customisable. The
Injoinic tech IP2312
, which is intended to be supplied from USB sources, takes care of charging with a programmable current set by a resistor, as is typical
. The battery output is switched by a beefy MOSFET, with the output first passing through a measurement resistor and being sensed by an
INA219 bidirectional current monitor
. This might be useful for monitoring charging via the microcontroller. An
APX803
low-voltage lockout/supervisor IC enables an
LD56100 LDO
to ensure no load is supplied to the battery below the low-voltage threshold. This is important! This provides a 3.3V rail to all the other ICs on the board, which is always on when the battery voltage is high enough. Utilising interrupts in the ATTiny firmware means the controller remains mostly asleep, consuming as little power as possible and preserving battery standby time. Temperature measurement is courtesy of the
TMP102
with a
ADS1015
quad channel 12-bit delta-sigma ADC also wedged in for some auxiliary sensing. These additional analog channels are not actually used by the module but are presented on the IOs. These could be very handy for detecting external inputs relevant to battery management with some custom Arduino-compatible firmware.
Implementation-wise, [Erik] provides PCB footprint details for both Eagle and KiCAD and an example application circuit detailing hookup and programming. So long as you ensure the UDPI pin in connected to a UART as shown in the application circuit, developing and uploading custom application code should be simple. Check out the
project GitHub
for more details.
Topics of power management and batteries are plentiful. Here’s a
nice, hackable power meter
for starters. Here’s an interesting story about extracting
perfectly useable LiPo cells from perfectly useless disposable vapes
and, finally, a possible
method for mitigating electrode damage due to constant current charging
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7708523",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T00:00:20",
"content": "Interested!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7708618",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,371,809.095219 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/building-a-small-gyro-stabilized-monorail/ | Building A Small Gyro Stabilized Monorail | Lewin Day | [
"Tech Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"control moment gyroscope",
"gyro",
"gyro monorail",
"monorail",
"reaction wheel",
"servo"
] | Monorails aren’t just the core reason why
The Simpsons
remains on air after thirty-six seasons, twenty-six of which are unredeemable garbage. They’re also an interesting example of oddball rail travel which has never really caught on beyond the odd gadgetbahn project here and there. [Hyperspace Pirate] recently decided to investigate the most interesting kind of monorail of all—the gyro stabilized type—
on a small scale for our viewing pleasure.
The idea of a gyro-stabilized monorail is to use active stability systems to allow a train to balance on a single very thin rail. The benefits of this are questionable; one ends up with an incredibly expensive and complex rail vehicle that must always run perfectly or else it will tip over. However, it is charming to watch in action.
[Hyperspace Pirate] explains how the monorail vehicle uses control moment gyroscopes to keep itself upright. The video also explains the more common concept of reaction wheels so the two systems can be contrasted and compared. It all culminates in a wonderful practical demonstration with a small 3D printed version of a 20th-century gyro monorail running on a 24″ track.
If you’re
studying mechanical engineering
this is a great project to pore over to see theoretical principles put into obvious practice. Video after the break. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7705245",
"author": "Jesse Jenkins",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T21:01:31",
"content": "I don’t get the Simpsons comment at the beginning?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7706625",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known ... | 1,760,371,809.14583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/a-non-musical-use-case-for-8-track/ | A Non-Musical Use Case For 8-Track | Bryan Cockfield | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"8-track",
"audio",
"cassette",
"eight-track",
"interactive",
"magnetic tape",
"music",
"tape",
"tracks"
] | There was a time in the not-too-distant past when magnetic tape was the primary way of listening to and recording audio. Most of us are familiar with the cassette tape, a four-track system that plays first one side of the tape, then the other. There was the eight-track tape as well which did not have quite as much popularity or longevity but did have a few interesting features that
[Serial Hobbyism] took advantage of to make an interactive game
.
The defining feature of the eight-track system, beyond the obvious eight tracks on the tape, is that the tape runs in a continuous loop, never needing to be stopped or flipped over. Instead, four buttons select pairs of the eight tracks, moving a head immediately to make the switch on-the-fly. [Serial Hobbyism]’s game plays a trivia-style audio recording and asks the player to answer questions by pushing one of the four “program” buttons to switch tracks. If the correct track is selected, the recorded audio congratulates the player and then continues on with the game. Likewise, if an incorrect track is selected, the recording notes that and the game continues.
Another interesting feature of this game is that it can be played without modifying an eight-track player, as the selectable tracks are a core function of this technology. They
can be used in a similar way as cassette tapes to store computer data
and
a data recorder similar to the eight-track system was used on the Voyager space probes
, although these only bear a passing resemblance. | 23 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "7746305",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T05:28:49",
"content": "Use case again. The wood case in the photo? The case for 8-track to be used in judging the case for 8-track? I can’t help it. It is just so sooo…… such a bad use case for the word use!",
"parent_id... | 1,760,371,809.206395 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/ibms-latest-quantum-supercomputer-idea-the-hybrid-classical-quantum-system/ | IBM’s Latest Quantum Supercomputer Idea: The Hybrid Classical-Quantum System | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"ibm",
"quantum computing"
] | Although quantum processors exist today, they are still a long way off from becoming practical replacements for classical computers. This is due to many practical considerations, not the least of which are factors such as the need for cryogenic cooling and external noise affecting the system necessitating a level of error-correction which does not exist yet. To somewhat work around these limitations, IBM has now
pitched the idea
of a hybrid quantum-classical computer (marketed as ‘quantum-centric supercomputing’), which as the name suggests combines the strengths of both to create a classical system with what is effectively a quantum co-processor.
IBM readily admits that nobody has yet demonstrated quantum advantage, i.e. that a quantum computer is actually better at tasks than a classical computer, but they figure that by aiming for quantum utility (i.e. co-processor level), it could conceivably accelerate certain tasks for a classical computer much like how a graphics processing unit (GPU) is used to offload everything from rendering graphics to massively parallel computing tasks courtesy of its beefy vector processing capacity. IBM’s System Two is purported to demonstrate this when it releases.
What the outcome here will be is hard to say, as the referenced 2023 quantum utility demonstration paper involving an Ising model was
repeatedly destroyed
by classical computers and
even trolled
by a Commodore 64-based version. Thus, at the very least IBM’s new quantum utility focus ought to keep providing us with more popcorn moments like those, and maybe a usable quantum system will roll out by the 2030s if IBM’s projected timeline holds up. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7756162",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2024-08-29T14:15:17",
"content": "it was about 25 years ago i went to a colloquium jointly hosted by the physics and CS departments. my physics knowledge is rudimentary but i perceived such an abundance of handwaving in the presentation t... | 1,760,371,809.274988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/swd-interface-simplifies-debugging/ | SWD Interface Simplifies Debugging | Navarre Bartz | [
"Microcontrollers",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"debugging",
"microcontrollers",
"SWD"
] | The proliferation of microcontrollers has made it easier than ever to add some smarts to a project, but sometimes there just isn’t enough space for headers on a board, or you feel a little silly soldering something that will get used to flash a program then languish inside your build. [Dima] wanted to make his boards easier to flash, and developed a
PCB footprint and flashing tool pair
that makes use of the mounting holes on his boards.
While some debugging tools might use a clamp or tape, [Dima] discovered that using sprung pins only on one side of the connector wedged his fixed locator pin (originally a 1 mm drill bit) into the hole removing the need for any other holding mechanism.
His original prototype worked so well that it took him some time to get back around to making a more reproducible design that didn’t involve fine soldering and superglue. After enlarging the contact pads and several iterations of 3D printing, he developed an interface connector that uses standard jumper wires and a steel rod to provide a sturdy and reliable connection for flashing boards with the corresponding footprint. He’s currently a little disappointed with the overall size of the connector though, and is soliciting feedback on how to make it smaller.
While [Dima]’s MCU of choice is the STM32, but this design should be applicable to any other microcontrollers using a five wire system, or you could take one off for USB. Having trouble finding the SWD points on an existing device?
Try this method
.
Thanks to [DjBiohazard] for the tip! | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7737466",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T23:41:54",
"content": "WR-WST (490107670612) has dimensions for debugging purposes and 50 mating cycles, while accepting standard ribbon cable or strips of ready-made Mini-PV patch cable. Probably worth considering under the cons... | 1,760,371,809.430137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/hardware-bug-in-raspberry-pis-rp2350-causes-faulty-pull-down-behavior/ | Hardware Bug In Raspberry Pi’s RP2350 Causes Faulty Pull-Down Behavior | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"rp2350"
] | Erratum RP2350-E9 in the RP2350 datasheet, detailing the issue.
The newly released RP2350 microcontroller has
a confirmed new bug
in the current A2 stepping, affecting GPIO pull-down behavior. Listed in the Raspberry Pi RP2350
datasheet
(page 1340) as erratum RP2350-E9, it involves a situation where a GPIO pin is configured as a pull-down with input buffer enabled. After this pin is then driven to Vdd (e.g. 3.3V) and then disconnected, it will stay at around 2.1 – 2.2 V for a Vdd of 3.3V. This issue was
discovered
by [Ian Lesnet] of [Dangerous Prototypes] while working on an early hardware design using this MCU.
The suggested workaround by Raspberry Pi is to enable the input buffer before a read, and disable it again immediately afterwards. Naturally, this is far from ideal workaround, and the solution that [Ian] picked was to add external pull-down resistors. Although this negates the benefits of internal pull-down resistors, it does fix the issue, albeit with a slightly increased board size and BOM part count.
As for the cause of the issue, Raspberry Pi engineer [Luke Wren]
puts the blame
on an external IP block vendor. With hindsight perhaps running some GPIO validation tests involving pull-up and pull-down configurations with and without input buffer set could have been useful, but we’re guessing they may be performed on future Pi chips. Maybe treating the RP2350 A0 stepping as an ‘engineering sample’ is a good idea for the time being, with A3 (or B0) being the one you may want to use in actual production.
In some ways this feels like déjà vu, as the Raspberry Pi 4 and previous SBCs had
their own share of issues
that perhaps might have been caught before production.
(Note: original text listed A0 as current stepping, which is incorrect. Text has been updated correspondingly) | 51 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "7732050",
"author": "Rekcufrehtom",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T20:04:34",
"content": "The Pi hasn’t been a good buy since the 3. They coast by now on brand recognition and people who don’t know any better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,371,809.521966 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/floss-weekly-episode-798-building-the-rust-desktop-with-cosmic/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 798: Building The Rust Desktop With COSMIC | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"COSMIC",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"system76",
"Wayland"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
and
Rob Campbell
chat with
Carl Richell
about System 76, COSMIC, Wayland, Rust and more! What was the “last straw” that convinced System 76 to write their own desktop environment (DE)? What’s the story with smithay, and why did that jump start the whole process? Listen to find out!
https://system76.com/cosmic
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show Right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,809.614943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/boss-byproducts-fordites-are-pieces-of-american-history/ | Boss Byproducts: Fordites Are Pieces Of American History | Kristina Panos | [
"Art",
"car hacks",
"Featured"
] | [
"automotive industry",
"byproducts",
"Fordite",
"lead paint",
"mineral",
"slag"
] | Some of the neatest products are made from the byproducts of other industries. Take petroleum jelly, for example. Its inventor, Robert Chesebrough, a chemist from New York, came upon his idea while visiting the oil fields of Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. It took him ten years to perfect his formula, but the product has been a household staple ever since. Chesebrough so believed in Vaseline that
he ingested a spoonful of it every day
, and attributed his 96-year longevity to doing so.
Well, some byproducts can simply be beautiful, or at least interesting. On that note, welcome to a new series called Boss Byproducts.
We recently ran an article about a laser-engraved painting technique
that is similar to the production of Fordite. I had never heard of Fordite, but as soon as I found out what it was, I had to have some. So, here we go!
Break Me Off a Piece of That Detroit Slag
Fordite slag, courtesy of
Fordite.com
Fordite is man-made agate that came from the automotive industry. But even though it’s called Fordite, Detroit Agate, and other names, it is not classified as a gemstone, although some call it a mineral.
In the early days, cars were hand spray-painted in the factory, and then sent into huge ovens to cure. The over-spray built up on the racks and skids that the frames were painted on, and it eventually became thick enough that it had to be chipped away.
Legend has it that some workers saw beautiful psychedelic agate in the built-up layers and decided that it simply had to be recycled. They found that the stuff polished up with relative ease, and started making jewelry out of it. Fordite got popular enough that rock hounds would show up to the factories to help chip away the paint.
Different Models of Fordite
The four types of Fordite, courtesy of
Fordite.com
The material is classified in several groups depending on how the paint layers settled, and the resulting color banding:
Type 1 has separated colors, with regular bands of grey primer between the color layers. The rest are color-on-color, with Type 2 focusing on opaques and metallics. These have limited colors.
Type 3 might be the most visually interesting. These are drippy and/or striped and sometimes contain lace and orbital patterns. Type 4 is back to opaques and metallics, but these have bleeding color layers and sometimes pitting from air bubbles.
Layers of History
Two Fordite cabochons showing the wide variation between pieces. Image courtesy of
National Jeweler
According to an article in the spring 2016 edition of
GIA’s Gems and Gemology
, it takes around 997 layers of paint to build up a 1-inch-thick slab of the stuff.
And, despite commonly being called Fordite, the material was salvaged from other plants as well, including the Corvette plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and there’s Lincoln-Mercury paint from Canada.
As you might imagine, paint from the early days of the automobile came in muted shades, but paint from the 60s and 70s is bright and colorful. Beginning in the 1980s, though, manufacturers stopped hand-spraying cars and started using an electrostatic method that binds the paint to the metal with little or no over-spray.
But there is plenty of Fordite to be had out there in all forms — raw material, polished cabochons, and finished jewelry pieces. Of course, many of those hardened enamel paints contain lead, so proceed with caution. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7728190",
"author": "Charles Lamb",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T17:31:14",
"content": "Many decades ago I visited a cabinetmaker’s workshop. In it was a spray booth with a bench with about 2cm of built up paint I used my pocketknife to carve out a beautiful piece.",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,371,809.580985 |
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