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https://hackaday.com/2024/08/28/the-commodordion-gets-a-big-usability-upgrade/ | The Commodordion Gets A Big Usability Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"accordion",
"c64",
"Commodordion",
"commodore 64",
"music",
"sid",
"sid chip",
"synth"
] | The chiptune scene is dominated by Game Boys and other Nintendo hardware, but one should never forget the gorgeous, beautiful tones that come from the hallowed Commodore 64. [Linus Åkesson] knows this well, and it’s at the heart of his work on the Commodordion.
Now, he’s built an even better version.
The original idea he had was to build an accordion-like control surface for the SID chip in a Commodore 64. The device is capable of creating beautiful accordion-like music with a simple 8-bit flair. He has since dubbed the original Commodordion the “bass Commodordion,” while the new version is classified as a tenor instrument.
The prime upgrades are ergonomic. The previous instrument was too heavy, with the left hand having to carry an entire Commodore 64 on its own. It was also hard to reach the keys. The new version is much lighter, with one of the two C64s of the original having been removed. The supporting electronics have been redesigned to more neatly fit into a space behind the bellows.
The result is a machine that’s far easier to play, and one that won’t injure the user in extended play sessions. “It’s now a pleasure, not a pain,” says [Linus]. The payoff in usability is obvious, and the tunes themselves are hauntingly beautiful.
We first covered the Commordordion back in 2022
, but it wasn’t the first time we saw one of
[Linus]’s impressive creations
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7729666",
"author": "MAC",
"timestamp": "2024-08-28T18:18:12",
"content": "And now, Weird Al will bang out his latest hit on his custom Commodordion – “I’m Coding Like a Rock Star!”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7736728",
... | 1,760,371,811.390185 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/supercon-2024-may-the-best-badge-add-ons-win/ | Supercon 2024: May The Best Badge Add-Ons Win | Tom Nardi | [
"contests",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"2024 Supercon SAO Contest",
"badge",
"badgelife",
"sao",
"Simple Add-On"
] | One of our favorite parts of Hackaday Supercon is seeing all the incredible badge add-ons folks put together. These expansions are made all the more impressive by the fact that they had to design their hardware without any physical access to the badge, and with only a few weeks’ notice. Even under ideal conditions, that’s not a lot of time to get PCBs made, 3D print parts, or write code. If only there was some standard for badge expansions that could speed this process up…
The SAO Wall at Supercon 2023
But there is! The Simple Add-On (SAO) standard has been supported by the Supercon badges since 2019, and the 2×3 pin connector has also popped up on badges from various other hacker events such as HOPE and DEF CON. There’s only one problem — to date, the majority of SAOs have been simply decorative, consisting of little more than LEDs connected to the power pins.
This year, we’re looking to redefine what an SAO can be with the
Supercon Add-On Contest
. Don’t worry, we’re not changing anything about the existing standard — the pinout and connector remains the same. We simply want to challenge hackers and makers to think bigger and bolder.
Thanks to the
I2C interface in the SAO header
, add-ons can not only communicate with the badge, but with each other as well. We want you to put that capability to use by creating functional SAOs: sensors, displays, buttons, switches, rotary encoders, radios, we want to see it all! Just make sure you submit your six-pin masterpiece to us by the October 15th deadline.
Best of the Best
What’s in it for the winners? Why, nothing short of Hackaday immortality: we’ll put the top SAOs into production and distribute them to each attendee at Hackaday Europe in 2025. Because we actually have to get these things made, entries will have to meet all of the manufacturing requirements outlined on the Hackaday.io page Contest page to qualify.
In addition to a single
Best Overall
winner, we’ll be picking a top entry for each of the following categories:
Functional:
This challenge is about pushing the envelope for SAOs, so for this category we’ll be looking for the most capable add-on.
Fine Art:
We’ve seen some absolutely gorgeous SAOs over the years, so even though we’re largely pushing for function over form this year, we still want to acknowledge the incredible artistry that goes into them.
Fun:
It’s not all about business. SAOs are often a bit tongue in cheek, with many referencing online memes or parts of hacker culture. If you want to win in this category, you’ll need to lighten up a bit.
Honorable Mention
We know this community too well to believe you’ll all stick to the predefined categories, so as usual in our contests, we’ll be keeping an eye out for entries that best exemplify the following Honorable Mention categories.
Coolest Toys:
We’re suckers for interesting parts, so the SAO selected for this category will be the one with the most unique or impressive electronic components onboard.
Light Show:
We want to challenge the idea that SAOs are just for blinking LEDs, so naturally, at least one of you is going to go against the grain and add as many LEDs as possible.
Most Ambitious:
Sometimes, it’s the thought that counts. Whether or not the final product worked as expected, the SAO selected for this category will be the one that took the biggest swing.
Best Communication:
Getting SAOs to talk to the badge and each other is what this contest is really all about, so we’re looking for the one example that really ran with the concept.
Least Manufacturable:
SAOs often employ design or assembly hacks (like mounting LEDs upside-down) that don’t scale well. In this category we’re looking for hand-crafted masterpieces. To quote Hunter S. Thompson, “A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.”
A Little Inspiration
There’s no shortage of gorgeous SAOs out there already, just search
Hackaday.io
or
Tindie
, and you’ll come up with dozens of badge add-ons that you didn’t even know you needed until right now. But as for examples of
functional
SAOs that do more than just blink LEDs…that’s quite a bit harder. We weren’t joking when we said they’ve been quite rare so far.
But we can point you towards a couple resources that should help you get started. Our own
[Arya Voronova] wrote up her tale
of creating a Jolly Wrencher SAO back in 2022 that goes over the basics, and we’d also recommend taking a look at her ongoing
“I2C for Hackers” series of articles
if you need to brush up on the communication side of things. If you need some pointers on the artistic front, you can’t go wrong following in the footsteps of [TwinkleTwinkie]. His
Supercon 2019 talk
PCB Art is Pain
is a fantastic look at pushing the envelope of PCB design and production, and his
Hackaday.io post about backlighting board art
is required reading around these parts. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7702288",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T18:51:42",
"content": "So, if an “Ambitious” SAO entry was too ambitious (i.e. doesn’twork), Hackaday will make it for distribution anyway?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,811.30399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/hidden-gutter-antenna-keeps-hoa-happy/ | Hidden Gutter Antenna Keeps HOA Happy | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"gutter",
"ham radio",
"HOA",
"radio",
"stealth",
"tuner"
] | The United States and a few other countries have an astounding array of homeowners’ associations (HOAs), local organizations that exert an inordinate influence on what homeowners can and can’t do with their properties, with enforcement mechanisms up to foreclosure. In the worst cases they can get fussy about things like the shade of brown a homeowner can paint their mailbox post, so you can imagine the problems they’d have with things like ham radio antennas. [Bob] aka [KD4BMG] has been working on
tuning up his rain gutters to use as “stealth” antennas
to avoid any conflicts with his HOA.
With the right antenna tuner, essentially any piece of metal can be connected to a radio and used as an antenna. There are a few things that improve that antenna’s performance, though. [Bob] already has an inconspicuous coax connector mounted on the outside of his house with an antenna tuner that normally runs his end-fed sloper antenna, which also looks like it includes a fairly robust ground wire running around his home. All of this is coincidentally located right beside a metal downspout, so all this took to start making contacts was to run a short wire from the tuner to the gutter system.
With the tuner doing a bit of work, [Bob] was able to make plenty of contacts from 10 to 80 meters, with most of the contacts in the 20 – 30 meter bands. Although the FCC in the US technically forbids HOAs from restricting reasonable antennas, if you’d rather not get on the bad side of your least favorite neighbors
there are a few other projects from [Bob] to hide your gear. | 142 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "7696944",
"author": "Aaron T.",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T15:35:02",
"content": "Another victim of over-zealous neighbours? I was only physically threatened by some for my antennas. There are not many hams left and I just want to be indoor in my A/C cooled room and do my milliwatt CW... | 1,760,371,811.788097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/whats-new-in-3d-scanning-all-in-one-scanning-is-nice/ | What’s New In 3D Scanning? All-In-One Scanning Is Nice | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d model",
"3D Printering",
"3d scanning",
"ir",
"Photogrammetry",
"structured light"
] | 3D scanning is important because the ability to digitize awkward or troublesome shapes from the real world can really hit the spot. One can reconstruct objects by drawing them up in CAD, but when there isn’t a right angle or a flat plane in sight, calipers and an eyeball just doesn’t cut it.
Scanning an object can create a digital copy, aid in reverse engineering, or help ensure a custom fit to something. The catch is making sure that scanning fits one’s needs, and isn’t more work than it’s worth.
I’ve previously written about
what to expect from 3D scanning and how to work with it
. Some things have changed and others have not, but 3D scanning’s possibilities remain only as good as the quality and ease of the scans themselves. Let’s see what’s new in this area.
All-in-One Handheld Scanning
MIRACO all-in-one 3D scanner by Revopoint uses a quad-camera IR structured light sensor to create 1:1 scale scans.
3D scanner manufacturer
Revopoint
offered to provide me with a test unit of a relatively new scanner, which I accepted since it offered a good way to see what has changed in this area.
The
MIRACO
is a self-contained handheld 3D scanner that, unlike most other hobby and prosumer options, has no need to be tethered to a computer. The computer is essentially embedded with the scanner as a single unit with a touchscreen. Scans can be previewed and processed right on the device.
Being completely un-tethered is useful in more ways than one. Most tethered scanners require bringing the object to the scanner, but a completely self-contained unit like the MIRACO makes it easier to bring the scanner to the subject. Scanning becomes more convenient and flexible, and because it processes scans on-board, one can review and adjust or re-scan right on the spot. This is more than just convenience. Taking good 3D scans is a skill, and rapid feedback makes practice and experimentation more accessible.
Features
The MIRACO resembles a chunky digital camera with an array of sensors at the front and a large touchscreen on the back. As a nice touch, the screen can be flipped out to let the scanner be used in “selfie” mode.
The structured light pattern as seen in IR, projected from the front of the device.
At its core, the MIRACO is a quad-camera IR structured light sensor. A pattern of infrared light is projected, and based on how this known pattern is observed by cameras to land on an object, the object’s topology can be inferred and eventually turned into a 3D model.
This method is sensitive to both exposure and focal distance, but the MIRACO tries to cover these bases by offering near and far focal modes (for small and large objects, respectively) as well as a live preview from which the user can judge scan conditions on the fly. Since the human eye cannot see IR, and most of us lack an intuitive sense of how IR interacts with different materials, this last feature is especially handy.
It’s worth mentioning that the models generated by the MIRACO’s scans are 1:1 with real-world dimensions. Having 3D models scaled to match the object they came from is stupendously useful when it comes to anything related to objects fitting into or around other objects.
Limitations
3D scanning is in general still not a foolproof, point-and-shoot process. As with photography, there is both a skill and an art to getting the best results. An operator has to do their part to give the sensor a good view of everything it needs.
Conditions Have to be Right
One needs to scan in an environment that is conducive to good results. Some materials and objects scan easier than others.
The scanner is particularly picky about focal length and exposure settings, and can be sensitive to IR interference and reflections. In terms of scanning with the MIRACO, this means the projected IR should be bright enough to illuminate the object fully while not being so bright that it washes out important features.
IR isn’t visible, so this isn’t easy to grasp intuitively. Happily, there’s a live display on the screen for both exposure and focus distance. This guides a user to stay within the sweet spots when scanning. Better results come easily with a bit of experience.
Scans Are Only as Good as the Weakest Link
The scanner only models what it can see. The holes in this 1-2-3 block for example are incomplete.
There is a long chain of processes to go from raw sensor data to finished 3D model, and plenty of opportunity for scans to end up less than ideal along the way.
3D scanners like to boast about scan quality with numbers like “0.02 mm accuracy”, but keep in mind that such numbers are best cases from the raw sensor itself.
When it comes right down to it, a generated model can only be as good as the underlying point cloud. The point cloud is only as good as the sensor data, and the quality of the sensor data is limited by the object and its environment.
Also, a scanner can only scan what it can see. If an internal void or channel isn’t visible from the scanner’s perspective, it won’t be captured in a scan.
It is not hard to get useful results with a little practice, but no one will be pointing a box and pressing a button to effortlessly receive perfect scans down to the last fraction of a millimeter anytime soon. Have realistic expectations about what is achievable.
Basic Workflow of a 3D Scan
Here is the basic process for scanning an object with the MIRACO that should give a good idea of what is involved.
Job Setup and Scan
A highly reflective object like a polished 1-2-3 block is best treated with a matte finish before scanning. Here I used
AESUB Blue
vanishing scanning spray, which evaporates in about an hour.
A scan begins by configuring the scanner via touchscreen with some basics like choosing Near or Far mode, object type, and whether to track features or markers. Because the scanner only sees a portion of the object at a time, the software stitches together many images from different angles to build the point cloud that is the foundation for everything else. Alignment of these partial scans is done on the fly either by tracking
features
(unique shapes on the object) or
markers
(reflective dots that can be applied as stickers, or printed on a mat.)
If an object is excessively glossy or reflective or otherwise difficult for the scanner to see properly, treat it with a surface coating for better results. One option is dusting it with talcum powder, another is a purpose-made 3D scanning spray like
AESUB
offers.
With object and scanner ready, The MIRACO is pointed like a camera and moved around the object (or the object spun on a turntable) while trying to stay an optimum distance away for best results. The screen gives feedback on this process, including a live display as the device stitches scans together.
Processing Results
Results can be viewed on the device, and generally speaking, if the scan quality is good then the automatic one-click model processing will easily generate a reasonable 3D model. If there’s a problem, one can continue scanning or try again.
Scans can be exported in a variety of formats via USB or over Wi-Fi. If Revopoint’s
Revo Scan software
is installed, additional editing and processing options are available such as merging multiple separate scans of an object or fine-tuning processing steps.
Using The Resulting Model
The resulting 3D model (a mesh output like
.STL
,
.3MF
, or
.OBJ
) may require additional processing or editing depending on what one wishes to do with it. A mesh editing program like
Blender
is full-featured, but Microsoft’s 3D Builder is pretty handy for many common tasks when it comes to editing and handling meshes. Most slicer software for 3D printers can handle basic things as well.
Example Scans and Projects
Here are a few scans and prints I did to illustrate the sort of results you should expect with a tool like this. Each of these highlights an important aspect of scanning from the context of part design and 3D printing. The MIRACO is also capable of scanning large objects, though I focus on smaller ones here.
Scanning a Part, Designing a Socket for that Part
This first example demonstrates scanning an object (in this case, a fan) in order to design a socket in another piece that will fit it perfectly.
To do this, I scanned the fan (including attached cable) then manually traced its vertical footprint in CAD. This created a sort of cutout object I could use to make a socket. Objects with more complex shapes can be cut into slices, and each slice traced individually.
I’d like to point out that because the scan is being used as a reference for a CAD sketch, imperfect or otherwise incomplete scans can still be perfectly serviceable as long as the right parts of the object are intact.
3D scanning fan with the help of a small turntable (not shown) and a tripod.
Left to right: Scanned 3D model with traced sketch, red “void” object, 3D printed piece with socket for fan.
The finished 3D printed piece, into which the fan slots perfectly because scans are scaled 1:1.
Scanning a Hole and Printing a Plug
This is a great way to show the different possibilities and features in action, such as the fact that scans are 1:1 with their real-world subject.
I roughly chopped a hole out of a chunk of packing foam, scanned the hole, then 3D printed a model of the hole to use as a plug. It fits perfectly, and its shape even accurately captured small details I hadn’t noticed.
Rough hole in foam is 3D scanned, and the model used to 3D print a matching anti-hole.
3D scan in progress. The central point cloud gradually fills in as the scanner is moved.
Generating a model on-device is convenient to confirm a scan is good.
A little editing of the 3D model for the hole yields an anti-hole.
The 3D-printed plug fits the hole perfectly.
Custom Ergonomic Grip
3D scanning is a great way to capture objects with complex shapes that cannot be modeled by calipers and squinted eyeballs alone. Wearables and handhelds are one example, and here I demonstrate creating a custom, ergonomic grip.
I use modeling clay to create a custom hand grip, then scan the result. The scan is easily edited in terms of separating into halves, making a central hole for mounting, and 3D printing the result.
Note that I scanned this object in color (which the MIRACO is capable of) but the color scan serves no real function here other than being more visual.
A complex shape like this is a good candidate for 3D scanning.
Resulting raw 3D scan, showing the stand used during scanning (easily edited out).
The cleaned-up model from the scan is trivially edited to split into halves and add a mounting void.
3D printed result, with black for contrast.
Assembled grip halves.
The printed version is a perfect match.
Remaining Challenges
So what’s
not
new in 3D scanning? The tools and software are certainly better and easier to use, but some things remain challenging.
Some Objects Scan Better Than Others
Scanning is still fussy about how a subject is framed and shot, as well as how reflective it is or isn’t. Taking these into account is part of getting good results.
3D Scanners Output Meshes, Not CAD Models
I’ve explained before how meshes are fundamentally different
from what one is usually working with in a CAD program when designing physical parts. “Widen this hole by 0.5 mm” or “increase this angle by 5 degrees” simply aren’t the kind of edits one easily does with a mesh.
Converting a Mesh to a CAD Format Remains Imperfect
Turning an
.stl
into an
.stp
(for example) still doesn’t have great options. Tools exist, but the good ones are mostly the domain of non-free CAD suites; the kind with hefty price tags on annual licenses.
The good news is that meshes not only 3D print just fine, they also work easily with basic Boolean operations (merge, subtract, intersect) and can be used as references when modeling a part. Having a scan that is scaled 1:1 to real-world dimensions is a big help.
What’s Your Experience?
3D scanning is still a process that depends on and benefits greatly from a skilled operator, but it’s getting easier to use and easier to experiment with.
Photogrammetry
is still an accessible way to do 3D scanning that requires no special hardware, but it lacks immediate feedback, and the resulting 3D model will not be a 1:1 match to real-world dimensions.
Have you found 3D scanning useful for something? What was the best part? The worst? We’d love to hear about it, so share your experience in the comments. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7698352",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T16:21:53",
"content": "If you dont like subscriptions,Rhino 8 bundled with Mesh2Surface will only set you back $2k and gives a pretty robust platform for scan processing and modelling in general.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,811.567258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/using-the-pi-pico-as-programmable-hardware-for-the-apple-ii/ | Using The Pi Pico As ‘Programmable Hardware’ For The Apple II | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"apple",
"apple II",
"pi pico",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | When we think of programmable hardware, we think of FPGAs. But they’re not the only option. [Oliver Schmidt] has been exploring how the Raspberry Pi Pico can serve in such a role for the classic Apple II. The talk was presented at the KansasFest event this year,
and it’s well worth diving into!
[Oliver] has developed
A2Pico.
It’s a series of Apple II peripheral cards that are based around the Raspberry Pi Pico, as you might have guessed. [Oliver] has been working in the area since 2021 with one [Glenn Jones], with the duo experimenting with connecting the versatile microcontroller directly to the slot bus of the Apple II. [Ralle Palaveev] then chimed in, developing the A2Pico hardware with solely through-hole components for ease of assembly.
A number of cards have been developed based on A2Pico, including a storage device, a Z80 CP/M card,
and a specialized card
to play Bad Apple on the IIGS. It’s all thanks to the versatility of the programmable I/O (PIO) peripheral inside the Raspberry Pi Pico. This device enables the Pico to be reprogrammed to handle all sorts of complicated tasks at great speed. This is particularly useful when using it to bit-bang a protocol or talk with another machine, and it serves perfectly well in this role. Basically, by reprogramming the Pico and its PIO, the A2Pico design can become any one of a number of different add-on cards.
It’s well worth diving into this stuff if you’ve ever contemplated building your own peripheral cards for 8-bit and 16-bit machines. We’ve seen
some other great add-on cards for vintage machines
before, too. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7693284",
"author": "David Given",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T12:00:05",
"content": "See also the neo6502, which is a minimal modern retrocomputer which is essentially a 6502 glued to a RP2040. The RP2040 bit-bangs the 6502’s address and data buses and emulates ROM, RAM and peripheral... | 1,760,371,811.200576 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/27/nice-retro-displays-set-this-watch-on-edge/ | Nice Retro Displays Set This Watch On Edge | Dan Maloney | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"led matrix",
"watch"
] | A common design language for watches has evolved ever since they first started popping up in the 1500s. Whether worn on the wrist or in a pocket, watches are relatively slim front to back, with the display mounted on the face. That’s understandable given the imperatives of human anatomy. Still, it’s not the only way to arrange things, as
this very cool LED matrix watch with an edge-mounted display
demonstrates.
True, the unique form factor of this watch wasn’t really the point of the whole project. Rather, [Vitali]’s design was driven by a couple of things. First off were the extremely cool Hewlett Packard HDSP-2000 displays, with four
5×5
5×7 LED matrices shining through the clear cover of a DIP-12 package. Also visible through the cover are the shift registers that drive the matrices, complete with gold bonding wires.
The main attraction for [Vitali], though, was the challenge of working within the limits of the ATtiny85 he chose to run the watch. The MCU’s limited IO made hardware multiplexing necessary, no mean feat given the limited resources and real estate available. He still managed to pack everything in, with the unique edge-mount display coming from the LEDs bridging the space between the two main PCBs. Everything fits into a nice wood veneer case, although we think it looks just fine without it. [Vitali] puts it through its paces in the short video below.
Hats off to [Vitali] for a great-looking project that pushed his limits. We just love these displays, too; of course, it’s
not the first time
we’ve seen them put to similar use.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/wrist_watch_HDSP2000_video.mp4 | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7693115",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T11:45:29",
"content": "Those sure look like 5×7 displays, not 5×5. So, 40% cooler.Back when digital watches were cool (late 70s), a couple of friends had side-looking (red) LED watches. Even more expensive than the (still expen... | 1,760,371,811.247318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/the-macintosh-plus-sounds-great-if-you-do-exactly-this-with-it/ | The Macintosh Plus Sounds Great If You Do Exactly This With It | Lewin Day | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Mac Plus",
"macintosh plus",
"music",
"music mouse",
"retrocomputing"
] | The Macintosh Plus is not exactly known as particularly relevant in the worlds of chiptune or electronic music more broadly. That’s not to say it can’t do
anything
that sounds cool, however. As [Action Retro] demonstrates, it’s got some really impressive tricks up its sleeve
if you know what you’re doing.
The video centers around “Music Mouse”, a piece of software created by Laurie Spiegel for the Macintosh Plus all the way back in 1986. Spiegel saw the Macintosh Plus as a potential instrument for musical expression, with the then-innovative mouse as the key human interface.
[Action Retro] shows off the software, which is able to create rather pleasing little melodies with little more than a swish and a swash across the mousepad. The software makes smart use of scales so you’re not forever dodging around dissonant notes, so it’s quite easy to play something beautiful. He then makes things more interesting by pairing the Macintosh Plus with his favorite guitar pedal—the Old Blood Noise Endeavors Sunlight. It’s a dynamic reverb that really opens up the sonic landscape when paired with the Mac Plus. If you’re looking for a weird avant-garde setup to take on stage at your next noise show, this has to be it.
We’re usually used to seeing
Nintendo
and
Commodore
products in the retro computer music space. The Mac makes a nice change. Video after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7694102",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T13:07:14",
"content": "Speaking of Music Mouse, there’s a Spiegel-approved web version.https://teropa.info/musicmouse/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7699765",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,811.155737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/robots-collaborate-to-localize-themselves-precisely/ | Robots Collaborate To Localize Themselves Precisely | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"algorithm",
"IMU",
"localization",
"Raspberry Pi 4",
"robot"
] | Here’s the thing about robots. It’s hard for them to figure out where to go or what they should be doing if they don’t know where they are. Giving them some method of localization is key to their usefulness in almost any task you can imagine. To that end, [Guy Elmakis], [Matan Coronel] and [David Zarrouk] have been
working on methods for pairs of robots to help each other in this regard.
As per the research paper, the idea is to perform real-time 3D localization between two robots in a given location. The basic idea is that the robots
take turns
moving. While one robot moves, the other effectively acts as a landmark. The robots are equipped with inertial measurement units and cameras in a turret, which they use to track each other and their own movements. Each robot is equipped with a Raspberry Pi 4 for processing image data and computing positions, and the two robots communicate via Bluetooth to coordinate their efforts.
It’s an interesting technique that could have some real applications in swarm robotics, and in operations in areas where satellite navigation and other typical localization techniques are not practical. If you’re looking for more information, you can
find the paper here.
We’ve seen
some other neat localization techniques for small robots before, too
. Video after the break. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7682914",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-08-27T02:58:37",
"content": "Next, do it like insects do and lay down a trail.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7692280",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2024-08-... | 1,760,371,811.341628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/fast-3d-printing-with-a-polar-four-quadrant-custom-machine/ | Fast 3D Printing With A Polar, Four Quadrant Custom Machine | Dave Rowntree | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"Multi material extrusion",
"multiple extrusion",
"polar coordinates"
] | 3D printing is all well and good for making low numbers of units, so long as they’re small enough to print in a reasonable time, but what if you want to go really big? Does a 35-hour print time sound like a fun time? Would it even make it that long? [Nathan] from
Nathan Build Robots
didn’t fancy the wait, so they embarked on a project to build a
huge parallel 3D printer with four independent print heads
. Well, kind of.
Checkout this cool multi-material print with this weird shimmering effect
The premise seems obvious at first glance: More print heads mean more plastic is laid down per unit of time. As long as you can maximise the nozzle diameter and machine speed, it should theoretically be possible to speed things up massively. But it doesn’t work like that. The custom machine they constructed utilises a polar coordinate system, with a rotating bed (the ‘theta’ axis) and four radial axis gantries arranged at 90 degrees to each other. Each gantry has its own independent extruder, so multilateral printing is also an upfront option. [Nathan] laments that the problem with constructing such a beast is not so much the mechanical aspects but the limitations in the current firmwares out in the wild. There are also more complex considerations at the slicing level, so getting the machine to operate as desired is quite a large programming task! Right now, this means that each radial axis must operate in lock-step, meaning objects to be printed must be rotationally symmetric of order four. Another option is to print four copies of a much smaller object in parallel, which has its use cases, but that’s not their end goal. [Nathan] says he was going for a record-breaking 20kg print. However, multiple issues with alignment over height and bed adhesion, not to mention keeping the extruders fed with fresh filament, scuppered this first attempt.
There are some large hurdles regarding alignment. The four corner verticals can be out of alignment with each other in all sorts of ways, causing the radial axis to shift as the Z axis moves. We suspect that’s just one glaring problem, and other more subtle issues are waiting in the wings to cause problems in the future, but we’ll keep an eye on this and see where it goes!
We covered a few projects turning up the 3D printing knobs lately. Here’s a
big printer, for big prints
. Our
thoughts about speed printing
and, lastly, a fascinating machine mod that optimises colour swapping by having
automated hot end swapping
. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7678429",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T23:31:02",
"content": "wild to me that someone would consider building such a beast and then consider writing new firmware for it as outside of the project scope :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,811.493105 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/turns-out-a-pcb-makes-a-nice-watch-dial/ | It Turns Out, A PCB Makes A Nice Watch Dial | Lewin Day | [
"Art"
] | [
"pcb",
"watch"
] | Printed circuit boards are typically only something you’d find in a digital watch. However, as [IndoorGeek] demonstrates, you can put them to wonderful use in a classical analog watch, too.
They can make the perfect watch dial!
Here’s the thing. A printed circuit board is fundamentally some fiberglass coated in soldermask, some copper, maybe a layer of gold plating, and with some silk screen on top of that. As we’ve seen a million times, it’s possible to do all kinds of
artistic things with PCBs
; a watch dial seems almost obvious in retrospect!
[IndoorGeek] steps through using Altium Designer and AutoCAD to layout the watch face. The guide also covers the assembly of the watch face into an actual wrist watch, including the delicate placement of the movement and hands. They note that there are also opportunities to go further—such as introducing LEDs into the watch face given that it is a PCB, after all!
It’s a creative way to make a hardy and accurate watch face, and we’re surprised we haven’t seen more of this sort of thing before. That’s not to say we haven’t seen other kinds of watch hacks, though; for those,
there have been many
. Video after the break. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7676112",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T21:46:36",
"content": "usually I have to speed up audio to compensate for the narration rate…. not here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7677693",
"author": "s... | 1,760,371,811.440095 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/experimenting-with-interference-on-thin-layers/ | Experimenting With Interference On Thin Layers | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Science"
] | [
"home science",
"interference",
"interference patterns",
"light",
"lightwaves",
"substrate",
"thin film"
] | [Stoppi] has taken on a fascinating project involving the
interference of thin layers
, a phenomenon often observed in everyday life but rarely explored in such depth. This project delves into the principles of interference, particularly focusing on how light waves interact with very thin films, like those seen in soap bubbles or oil slicks. The post is in German, but you can easily translate it using online tools.
Interference occurs when waves overlap, either reinforcing each other (constructive interference) or canceling each other out (destructive interference). In this project, [Stoppi] specifically examines how light behaves when passing through thin layers of air trapped between semi-transparent mirrors. When light waves reflect off these mirrors, the difference in path length leads to interference patterns that depend on the layer’s thickness and the wavelength of the light.
To visualize this, [Stoppi] used an interferometer made from semi-transparent mirrors and illuminated it with a bulb to ensure a continuous spectrum of light. By analyzing the transmitted light spectrum with a homemade spectrometer, he observed clear peaks corresponding to specific wavelengths that could pass through the interferometer. These experimental results align well with theoretical predictions, confirming the effectiveness of the setup.
If you like pretty patterns,
soap bubbles
are definitely good for several experiments. Don’t forget:
pictures or it didn’t happen
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,811.940712 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/supercon-2024-show-off-your-unique-display-tech/ | Supercon 2024: Show Off Your Unique Display Tech | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"call for participation",
"displays",
"exhibit"
] | If there’s a constant in the world of electronics, it’s change. Advancements and breakthroughs mean that what was once state-of-the-art all too soon finds itself collecting dust. But there are exceptions. Perhaps because they’re so much more visible to us than other types of components, many styles of displays have managed to carve out their own niche and stick around. Even for the display types that we no longer see used in consumer hardware, their unique aesthetic qualities often live on in media, art, and design.
This year, to coincide with Hackaday Supercon, the folks at Supplyframe’s DesignLab want to pay tribute to display technology past and present with a special exhibit — and they need your help to make it possible. If you have a display you’d like to show off,
fill out this form and tell them what you’ve got
. Just be sure to do it by September 16th.
For the larger specimens, it would be ideal if you’re somewhat local to Southern California, but otherwise, they’re looking for submissions from all over the world. The exhibit will open on the first day of Supercon and run throughout November.
Don’t worry. They’re only looking to raid your parts bin temporarily. Any hardware sent in to be part of the exhibit will be considered on loan, and they’ll make sure it gets back to where it belongs by January 31st, 2025. The goal is to show the displays on and operational, so in most cases, that’s going to mean sending over a complete device. But if it’s possible to isolate the display itself and still demonstrate what it would look like in operation, sending along just the bare display is an option.
Of course, there are examples where the display itself is so fundamental as to be inseparable; what would the Sharp EL-8 have been without that gorgeous vacuum fluorescent display (VFD)? In that case,
please
don’t tear apart some classic device on our account. Just explain what the device is, and the DesignLab will see if they can make the appropriate accommodations.
Looking for some inspiration? Here’s just a few of the different display types the DesignLab is looking for, in no particular order:
Nixie Tubes
Vacuum Fluorescent Displays (VFDs)
Plasma Displays
Color/B&W Cathode-Ray Tubes (CRTs)
Round Displays
Numitrons
Dekatrons
Color/Grayscale ePaper/eInk
Alphanumeric Segmented LEDs
Non-English Segmented LEDs
Flip-Disc/Flip-Dot
Refreshable Braille Displays
Volumetric Displays
Displays with Unusual Fonts
Keep in mind that the display doesn’t need to be commercially produced either. If you’ve built a custom display that uses any of these core technologies (such as a
homebrew segmented LED display
), we’d love to see it.
Spread the Word!
If you’re reading Hackaday, there’s an excellent chance you’ve got some cool hardware buried in your closet or stuffed in a drawer somewhere that’s been waiting for a moment like this to shine again. But even if you don’t, we bet you know somebody who does, so please share the submission form with any individuals or groups you think might be interested.
With the community’s help, this exhibit promises to be a fascinating addition to Hackaday Supercon. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7670562",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T17:43:30",
"content": "One display I didn’t see in the suggestions was the phosphorus painted wall clock that would be updated as the display fades. IIRC, Hackaday featured such a display years ago.... | 1,760,371,812.048237 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-folding-typewriter/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Folding Typewriter | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Corona 3 typewriter",
"dactyl",
"folding typewriter",
"macro pad",
"macropad",
"microclick",
"RGB LEDs",
"tiny keyboard",
"wedgetyl"
] | Have you built yourself a macro pad yet? They’re all sorts of programmable fun, whether you game, stream, or just plain work, and there are tons of ideas out there.
Image by [CiferTech] via
Hackaday.IO
But if you don’t want to re-invent the wheel,
[CiferTech]’s MicroClick
(or MacroClick — the jury is still out) might be just what you need to get started straight down the keyboard rabbit hole.
This baby runs on an ATmega32U4, which known for its Human Interface Device (HID) capabilities. [CiferTech] went with my own personal favorite, blue switches, but of course, the choice is yours.
There are not one but two linear potentiometers for volume, and these are integrated with WS2812 LEDs to show where you are, loudness-wise. For everything else, there’s an SSD1306 OLED display.
But that’s not all — there’s a secondary microcontroller, an ESP8266-07 module that in the current build serves as a packet monitor. There’s also a rotary encoder for navigating menus and such. Make it yours, and show us!
Presenting the Wedgetyl, and Lessons Learned
Believe it or not,
the Wedgetyl is [burbilog]’s first build
. If you can’t tell the lineage from the name or the photo, this is a dactyl manuform-like design with super wedgy bases and RP2040s for the brains, and Gateron clear switches.
Image by [burbilog] via
reddit
As this was a first build, there were plenty of lessons learned along the way, and that’s what the bulk of this post is about. While I won’t list all thirteen, here are some of the highlights including the revelation that finding the exact right location for the thumb cluster is the most difficult task of a project like this.
As far as building it goes, the hardest part might be the soldering/wiring, unless you use something like the Amoeba single-switch PCBs which allow for hot swapping. At first, the Wedgetyl had Cherry MX reds, but now it has those Gateron clears.
There are other gems in the post, like
all wiring guides on the Internet are crap
and
TRRS connectors are stupid
. While I’d love to see [burbilog] create the ideal wiring guide for at least this keyboard, I totally understand if that’s never going to happen. And apparently they fried some pins on the RP2040 trying to use a TRRS. There are a ton of options out there, and it seems [burbilog] already found one in the form of the 4-pin M8 connector. Great build, [burbilog], and I can’t wait to see your second one.
The Centerfold: Crowkb, Minus a Few Keys
Image by [CrackerRobot] via
reddit
This lovely little lavender number is the
crowkb_38
, which is a few keys removed from [CrackerRobot]’s original
46-key crowkb
. That
slammin’ desk mat
is from One of Zero, and the key caps are MBKs. See those pinky keys on the sides there? [CrackerRobot] has them set up as Esc and Enter. What would you use them for?
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Corona 3 Folding Typewriter
Image via
Antikey Chop
While folding keyboards are quite cool, they are really nothing new. (Are you surprised?) If you were a soldier or a journalist during WWI, or
happened to be named Hemingway
, chances are good that you would have used a
Corona 3 folding typewriter
.
Huff Post called it the first laptop
.
Few typewriters ever reach icon status, and the Corona 3 is one of them.
This extremely popular typewriter was made between 1912 and 1941
. The platen and carriage fold down over the keyboard, which makes it compact and more portable.
Each of the 28 regular keys has three characters on the type bar, so between lower case, upper case, and all the third functions, you have quite a full keyboard thanks to the layers you get with FIG and CAP.
You can see some rather nice pictures here
.
The Corona 3 was so successful that the Standard Typewriter company changed its name to the Corona Typewriting Company in 1914. The company merged with L.C. Smith & Brothers Typewriting to become Smith-Corona, and eventually Smith Corona Marchant (SCM) in 1958. After a couple of bankruptcies, the company settled on selling thermal paper.
ICYMI: Keyboard for Ants Gets RGB
Image by [juskim] via
YouTube
Aughhhh, it’s so tiny! You know I can’t resist things that are either way smaller or way larger than life, and my only regret is that I didn’t see
this tiny backlit keyboard
before [Lewin] did. Hey, at least I can write about it here.
This actually isn’t [juskim]’s first tiny keyboard, but as you’ll see in the video, it’s much smaller than the previous attempt. Even though it’s tiny, this 60% design is really inclusive, sporting a number row, a function row, and even +/-/= and square brackets.
You can see that it’s small, but if you want to make a maquette to really fathom the size of this thing, it measures 66 mm x 21 mm. Smaller than a Blackberry keyboard. And yes, you can actually type on it, because it’s a real, working keyboard with an ATmega32U4 brain and tiny 3D printed key caps. [juskim] managed to bang out 14 words per minute on it, which is pretty good considering the size.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7665018",
"author": "Just sayin'",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T14:03:57",
"content": "I can’t say exactly why, but everytime I see the title of this post, I want cookies made by small people who live in trees…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,371,811.999044 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/backlight-switch-for-a-better-multimeter/ | Backlight Switch For A Better Multimeter | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"backlight",
"digital multimeter",
"electronics tools",
"favorite tools",
"multimeter"
] | Frustrated by his Aldi multimeter’s backlight turning off after just 15 seconds,
[Steg Steg] took matters into his own hands
. His solution? He added a manual toggle switch to control the backlight, allowing it to stay on as long as needed. He began by disassembling the multimeter—removing the outer bumper and a few screws—to access the backlight, labeled “BL.” He identified the voltage regulator outputting 2.8 V, desoldered the red wire, and extended it to install the switch.
On his first try, he successfully drilled a spot for the SPST switch. To fit the switch into the multimeter’s rubber bumper, he used a circular punch, although his second hole wasn’t as clean as the first. Despite this minor setback, the modification worked perfectly, giving him complete control over his multimeter’s backlight without the original 15-second timeout.
This project follows a tradition of inventive multimeter hacks. Other enthusiasts have made similar upgrades. An older hack involves
adding an external display to a multimeter
. More recently, we wrote about
upgrading your probes
. Notably,
adding Bluetooth for data communication
showed how diverse and creative these modifications can be. | 28 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "7660328",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T11:16:32",
"content": "There is a reason why there are no metal parts protruding from stock multimeter cases. There can be major arcing inside and multimeter has CAT rating precisely because it can contain it without posing a... | 1,760,371,812.112505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/26/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-early-macintosh-floppies/ | Everything You Wanted To Know About Early Macintosh Floppies | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"floppy disk",
"macintosh 128k",
"Motorola 68000"
] | Using a disk drive today is trivial. But back “in the day,” it was fairly complex both because the drives were simple and the CPUs were not powerful by today’s standards. [Thomas] has been working on a 68000 Mac emulator and found that low-level floppy information was scattered in different places. So he’s
gathered it all for us in one place
.
Low-level disk access has a lot of subtle details. For example, the Mac calibrates its speed control on boot. If your emulated drive just sets the correct speed and doesn’t respond to changes during calibration, the system will detect that as an error. Other details about spinning disks include the fact that inner tracks are shorter than outer track and may require denser recordings. Laying out sectors can also be tricky since you will lose performance if you, for example, read sector one and then miss sector two and have to wait for it to come back around. Disk sectors are often staggered for this reason.
Adding to the complexity is the controller — the IWM or Integrated Woz Machine — which has an odd scheme for memory mapping I/O. You should only access the odd bytes of the memory-mapped I/O. The details are all in the post.
In a way, we don’t miss these days, but in other ways, we do. It wasn’t that long ago that
floppies were king
. Now it is a race to
preserve the data
on them while you still can. | 30 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7657294",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T08:42:00",
"content": "Floppy Disk",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7659325",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T10:43:28",
"content": ... | 1,760,371,812.179745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/simulating-air-flow-for-3d-printing/ | Simulating Air Flow For 3D Printing | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"simulation"
] | You’ve probably heard that a 3D printer is capable of producing its own replacement parts. Sometimes, that even includes upgraded or improved versions of the parts it was originally built with. But sometimes, it’s hard to figure out what improved really means. Think about air ducts that cool the part after printing. In theory, it should be easy to design a new duct. But how does it perform? Empirical testing can be difficult, but [Mike] shows how you can
simulate the
airflow so you can test design changes and validate assumptions before you print the actual part.
Of course, this wouldn’t only apply to printer ducts. You might also get some tips if you want to model airflow for PC cooling, hot air soldering, or other air-related projects. The free version of the software has some limitations, but it was surprisingly capable.
We also enjoyed how [Mike] used fluid to visualize the actual patterns and compared it to the simulation. The trick is
using a compound from a kid’s science project kit
, and it seems to work very well. Of course, you could just
grab your smartphone
. This might be worth thinking about if you are building a laser cutter
air assist
, too. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7641903",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T15:01:30",
"content": "I’ve been trying to setup simulations with ElmerFEM for a week now. Electrostatic sims seem to work fine but I couldn’t get anything else to work.Still its a brilliant tool with more options than I can ... | 1,760,371,812.220969 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/lunar-landing-lunacy-charles-duke-confronted-with-reality-deniers/ | Lunar Landing Lunacy: Charles Duke Confronted With Reality-Deniers | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"apollo 16",
"moon hoax",
"Moon landing",
"moon landing conspiracy"
] | Lunar Module pilot Charles Duke saluting the US flag during Apollo 16. (Credit: NASA)
Imagine: you spent years training for a sojourn to the Moon, flew there on top of a Saturn V rocket as part of Apollo 16, to ultimately land on the lunar surface. You then spend the next few days on the surface, walking and skipping across the lunar regolith while setting up experiments and exploring per your mission assignments. Then, you pack everything up and blast off from the lunar surface to the orbiting command module before returning to Earth and a hero’s welcome. Then, decades later, you are told to your face that none of that ever happened. That’s the topic of
a recent interview
which [Jack Gordon] recently did with astronaut [
Charles Duke
].
None of these ‘arguments’ provided by the reality-denying crowd should be too shocking or feel new, as they range from the amount of fuel required to travel to the moon (solved by orbital mechanics) to the impossibility of lighting on the Moon (covered by everyone and their dog,
including the Mythbusters
in 2008).
Of course, these days, we have lunar orbiters (LRO and others) equipped with powerful cameras zoomed in on the lunar surface, which have photographed the Apollo landing sites with the experiments and footsteps still clearly visible. Like today’s crowd of spherical Earth deniers, skeptics will denounce anything that doesn’t fit their ill-conceived narrative as ‘faked’ for reasons that only exist in their fevered imaginations.
A common objection we’ve heard is that if we went to the moon back then, why haven’t we been back? The reason is obvious: politics. The STS (Shuttle) project sucked up all funding and the USSR collapsed. Only recently has there been a new kind of ‘space race’ in progress with nations like China. That doesn’t keep countless individuals from dreaming up lunar landing conspiracy theories to file away with their other truth nuggets, such as how microwaved and genetically engineered foods cause cancer, vaccines are another government conspiracy to control the population, and nuclear power plants can explode like nuclear bombs.
Perhaps the best takeaway is that even if we have not found intelligent life outside Earth yet, for at least a few years, intelligent life was the only kind on Earth’s Moon. We wish [Charles Duke] many happy returns, with maybe a casual return to the Moon in the near future as well, to frolic once more on the lunar surface.
Not that there hasn’t been a
moon hoax
, just not lately. If you want to watch the old Apollo video, it has
been improved
in recent years. | 104 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "7629761",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T05:27:24",
"content": "Now I wonder. Do such people also believe the moon and the sun are flat?The biggest problem here I guess is that such people also have a right to vote. It’s also a simple failure of basic education, and t... | 1,760,371,812.498622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/using-a-2d-scanner-to-make-3d-things/ | Using A 2D Scanner To Make 3D Things | Dave Rowntree | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"flatbed scanner",
"tinkercad"
] | [Chuck Hellebuyck] wanted to clone some model car raceway track and realised that by
scanning the profile section of the track with a flatbed scanner
and post-processing in Tinkercad, a useable cross-section model could be created. This was then extruded into 3D to make a pretty accurate-looking clone of the original part. Of course, using a flatbed paper scanner to create things other than images
is nothing new, if you can remember to do it. A common example around here is scanning PCBs to capture mechanical details.
The goal was to construct a complex raceway for the grandkids, so he needed numerous pieces, some of which were curved and joined at different angles to allow the cars to race downhill. After printing a small test section using Ninjaflex, he found a way to join rigid track sections in curved areas. It was nice to see that modern 3D printers can handle printing tall, thin sections of this track vertically without making too much of a mess. This fun project demonstrates that you can easily combine 3D-printed custom parts with off-the-shelf items to achieve the desired result with minimal effort.
Flatbed scanner hacks are so plentiful it’s hard to choose a few! Here’s using a scanner to
recreate a really sad-looking PCB
, hacking a scanner to
scan things way too big for it
, and finally just using a scanner as a linear motion stage to create a
UV exposure unit for DIY PCBs
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7627207",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T02:15:40",
"content": "I’m surprised the tracks printed so well vertically. It’s a great idea to 3d print more track instead of buying more kits for just a few pieces.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}... | 1,760,371,812.267137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/meta-cancels-augmented-reality-headset-after-apple-vision-pro-falls-flat/ | Meta Cancels Augmented Reality Headset After Apple Vision Pro Falls Flat | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"augmented reality"
] | The history of consumer technology is littered with things that came and went. For whatever reason, consumers never really adopted the tech, and it eventually dies. Some of those concepts seem to persistently hang on, however, such as augmented reality (AR). Most recently, Apple launched its Vision Pro ‘mixed reality’ headset at an absolutely astounding price to a largely negative response and disappointing sale numbers. This impending market flop seems to now have made Meta (née Facebook) reconsider
bringing a similar AR device to market
.
To most, this news will come as little of a surprise, considering that Microsoft’s AR product (HoloLens) explicitly seeks out (government) niches with substantial budgets, and Google’s smart glasses have crashed and burned despite multiple market attempts. In a consumer market where virtual reality products are already desperately trying not to become another 3D display debacle, it would seem clear that amidst a lot of this sci-fi adjacent ‘cool technology,’ there are a lot of executives and marketing critters who seem to forego the basic question: ‘why would anyone use this?’
In the case of the Apple Vision Pro, the current debate is if augmented reality and spatial computing have any future at all, even as work on a Vision Pro 2 has been suspended. Meanwhile, Meta has decided to keep plugging away on its next VR headset (the predictably named Quest 4), as the VR consumer market so far is
relatively healthy
for a consumer product with limited mass-consumer appeal but with potential new use cases beyond games. | 50 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "7621185",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T23:20:35",
"content": "these hmds are kind of in fad territory. my quest2 lives in my desk most of the time. would rather see a 3d monitor tech boom frankly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,371,812.356664 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/comparing-aliexpress-vs-lcsc-sourced-mosfets/ | Comparing AliExpress Vs LCSC-Sourced MOSFETs | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"fake parts",
"mosfet",
"power supply"
] | The fake AliExpress-sourced IRFP460 MOSFETs (Credit: Learn Electronics Repair, YouTube)
These days, it’s super-easy to jump onto the World Wide Web to find purported replacement parts using nothing but the part identifier, whether it’s from a reputable source like Digikey or Mouser or from more general digital fleamarkets like eBay and AliExpress. It’s hardly a secret that many of the parts you can buy online via fleamarkets are not genuine. That is, the printed details on the package do not match the actual die inside. After AliExpress-sourced MOSFETs
blew in a power supply repair
by [Learn Electronics Repair], he first tried to give the MOSFETs the benefit of the doubt. Using an incandescent lightbulb as a current limiter, he analyzed the entire PSU circuit before putting the blame on the MOSFETs (IRFP460) and ordering new ones from LCSC.
Buying from a distributor instead of a marketplace means you can be sure the parts are from the manufacturer. This means that when a part says it is a MOSFET with specific parameters, it almost certainly is. A quick component tester session showed the gate threshold of the LCSC-sourced MOSFETs to be around 3.36V, while that of the AliExpress ‘IRFP460’ parts was a hair above 1.8V, giving a solid clue that whatever is inside the AliExpress-sourced MOSFETs is not what the package says it should be.
Unsurprisingly, after fitting the PSU with the two LCSC-sourced MOSFETs, there was no more magic smoke, and the PSU now works. The lesson here is to be careful buying parts of unknown provenance unless you like magic smoke and chasing weird bugs. | 26 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "7615914",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T21:08:08",
"content": "This is Hackaday, we are hackers, so of course we “like magic smoke and chasing weird bugs” – but only on our terms – like when we know we are experimenting with something we don’t fully understand or testi... | 1,760,371,812.606525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/flying-lotus-is-a-framework-powered-portable-all-in-one-computer/ | Flying Lotus Is A Framework-Powered Portable All-in-One Computer | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"all-in-one",
"Flying Lotus",
"framework",
"portable computer"
] | One of the things that we love about the modern era of computing is the increasing ease by which you can roll your own custom computer, as seen with the cyberdeck phenomenon. The
Flying Lotus
is another awesome build in this vein.
Built around the Framework ecosystem, this device was built to suit the very specific use case of its designer, [Carlos Aldana]. He found himself traveling a lot and that the ergonomics of a laptop left a lot to be desired, especially when in the air. Add to it the fact that he has trouble typing on typical laptop keyboards for any length of time, and you can see how an ergonomic keyboard plus a laptop just doesn’t really work on a tray table.
The Flying Lotus takes the screen, modular ports, and mainboard of a Framework laptop and puts them into a single computing block that can be hung from the clever tabs at the top or mounted on a stand that puts the screen at a more ergonomically ideal height from the work surface. [Aldana] describes it as an “iMac that’s portable.” Since it doesn’t have an integrated keyboard, you can run it with whatever keyboard you like from super duper ergo to a teeny game controller sized unit.
We’ve talked about
why we like Framework
so much before, and if you’d like another take on a modern portable computer, how about this
portable Mac mini
? | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7607870",
"author": "Nath",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T17:45:47",
"content": "Is it just me or the kits the guy is selling (see the link in the video description) are unavailable in Europe?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7611869"... | 1,760,371,812.542118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/compact-driver-powers-steppers-with-usb-c-pd/ | Compact Driver Powers Steppers With USB-C PD | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts"
] | [
"AS5600",
"closed loop",
"ESP32-S3",
"IoT",
"NEMA-17",
"stepper",
"TMC2209"
] | NEMA-17 steppers are (almost) a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere, they’re well-known to hackers and makers, and yet they’re still a bit hard to integrate into projects. That’s because the motor alone isn’t much use, and by the time you find or build a driver and integrate it with a microcontroller, you’ve probably expended more effort than you will on the rest of the project.
This USB-C PD stepper driver
aims to change that.
What caught our eye about [Josh Rogan]’s PD Stepper is his effort to make this a product rather than just a project. The driver is based on a TMC2209 for silent operation and a lot of torque thanks to the power delivery capabilities of
USB-C PD
. The PCB is very nicely designed and has an AS5600 rotary magnetic encoder for closed-loop operation. There’s also an ESP32-S3 on-board, so WiFi and Bluetooth operation are possible — perfect for integration into Home Assistant via ESPHome.
[Josh]’s mechanical design is top-notch, too, with a machined aluminum spacer that fits on the back of a NEMA-17 motor perfectly and acts as a heat spreader. A machined polycarbonate cover protects the PCB and makes a very neat presentation. [Josh] has kits available, or you can roll your own with the provided build files. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7602065",
"author": "DrewTheMachinist",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T15:18:38",
"content": "Only took 20 years of articles apparently to satisfy you? 😂This is indeed cool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7609428",
"author": "so... | 1,760,371,812.698771 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/a-simple-but-effective-receiving-loop-antenna/ | A Simple But Effective Receiving Loop Antenna | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"co-ax loop",
"magnetic loop"
] | There’s a joke in the world of radio that all you need for a HF antenna is a piece of wet string, but the truth is that rudimentary antennas rarely perform well. Random pieces of wire may pull in some signal, but along with it comes a ton of unwanted interference and noise. It’s thus worth putting in the effort to make a better antenna, and if you’re not fortunate enough to have a lot of space, your best choice may be a magnetic loop. [Robert Hart]
takes us through the design of
a receive-only coaxial loop. It’s referred to as a Moebius loop because the conductor takes a “twist” path between the inner and outer halfway around.
The idea of a loop antenna is simple enough. It’s an inductor intended to respond to the magnetic portion of the wave rather than the electric part. They’re normally made of a single turn of wire in a loop of diameter well below half a wavelength, and, in their transmitting versions, they are often tuned to resonance by an air-spaced variable capacitor. Coaxial loops like this one provide enhanced resistance to electrical noise. He’s using some rather expensive Andrews coax for its rigidity, but the less well-heeled can use cheaper stuff without penalty. The result, when put on a frame of PVC pipe and a speaker stand, is an excellent portable receiving antenna, and if we’re being honest, something we might also consider in our own shack.
This isn’t by any means the first magnetic loop we’ve brought you.
Have a look at this cleverly concealed one
. We recently looked at the
YouLoop
, a similar Moebius loop antenna. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7655749",
"author": "sp4swd",
"timestamp": "2024-08-26T06:20:39",
"content": "Rediscovery of PA0FRI antenna? Now add an active element to it.https://www.pa0fri.com/Ant/Active%20antenna/Active%20receiving%20%20loop%20antenna%20eng.htm",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,812.75261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/building-a-microcontroller-from-scratch-the-b4-thinker-project/ | Building A Microcontroller From Scratch: The B4 Thinker Project | Heidi Ulrich | [
"computer hacks",
"how-to",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"4-bit CPU",
"cpu",
"microcontroller",
"modular",
"modular computer",
"motherboard",
"motherboards"
] | [Marius Taciuc’s] latest endeavor,
the B4 Thinker
, offers a captivating glimpse into microcontroller architecture through a modular approach. This proof-of-concept project is meticulously documented, with a detailed, step-by-step guide to each component and its function.
Launched in 2014, the B4 Thinker project began with the ambitious goal of building a microcontroller from scratch. The resulting design features a modular CPU architecture, including a base motherboard that can be expanded with various functional modules, such as an 8-LED port card. This setup enables practical experimentation, such as writing simple assembly programs to control dynamic light patterns. Each instruction within this system requires four clock pulses to execute, and the modular design allows for ongoing development and troubleshooting.
While still in its draft phase with some incomplete components, the B4 Thinker project stands out for its educational value and the thorough documentation provided. This modular approach not only supports incremental improvements but also serves as a valuable learning resource for those interested in computer architecture and design.
It seems like four bits is the sweet spot of not to complicated, but not too simple. So we see a lot of
4-bit CPUs
. Some even use
discrete transistors
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,812.655529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/hackaday-links-august-25-2024/ | Hackaday Links: August 25, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"capstan",
"Doritos",
"hackaday links",
"ISM< 900 MHz",
"iss",
"LoRaWAN",
"roofing",
"scara",
"SDO",
"shingle",
"Solar Cycle",
"solar dynamics",
"space food",
"spectrum",
"sun",
"sunspot"
] | The Sun has been remarkably active lately, so much so that
it might have set a new sunspot record
. According to the sun watchers at the Space Weather Prediction Center, on August 8, the
Solar Dynamics Observatory
snapped a picture that was positively bedazzled with sunspots. Counting methods vary, but one count put the sunspot number at a whopping 337 that day. That would be the largest number since 2001, during the peak of Solar Cycle 23. The sunspot number is highly correlated with solar storms and coronal mass ejections; more spots mean more magnetic activity and more chance for something to go
very, very wrong
. We’ve been pretty lucky so far with Solar Cycle 25; despite being much more active than the relatively lazy Cycle 24 and
much stronger than predicted
, most of this cycle’s outbursts have been directed away from Earth or only dealt us a glancing blow. Seeing all those spots, though, makes us think it’s only a matter of time before we get hit with something that does more than
make pretty lights
.
Having done our share of roofing, we can safely say it’s a pretty tough job. Everything is heavy, it’s either boiling hot or freezing cold, and one moment’s inattention can make for a very bad day. Plus, the fiberglass shards in your skin at the end of the day can be incredibly annoying. On the other hand, a good roofing job is a thing of beauty, and there’s immense satisfaction in having been the one to do it. But, with apologies to Steve Miller, time keeps on slipping into the future, humans are expensive and unreliable, and someone will eventually try to automate humans out of pretty much every job.
It’s roofing’s turn now
with the aptly named Rufus auto roof robot. It’s a hybrid robot with a base unit containing a hopper for shingles and a SCARA arm that positions, aligns, and nails down the shingles. The base unit, in turn, is moved around the surface of the roof by a capstan-drive cable robot, with cables anchored to the corners of the roof.
It’s an interesting idea, but one that’s going to take some development to make it practical. For one thing, we can see safety regulators having a fit over those cables, which will be a tripping hazard for the workers who have to keep the bot fed with shingles and nails. Also, a roof that’s completely free of obstructions like vent stacks, skylights, or chimneys is a rare roof indeed, and it seems like the cable system would foul on such obstructions very easily. Still, you’ve got to start somewhere, and it’ll be interesting to see how this develops. Or
maybe we’ll just throw Atlas at it
.
Head up, hams —
another spectrum land grab
appears to be underway. This one is a little hard to follow, but what we see is that a company called NexNav, which is currently licensed for a Location and Monitoring Service in the 900-MHz band, wants to split the 902 MHz to 928 MHz band and start blasting out high-powered signals on the upper part of the band, apparently for a new 5G position system that will serve as a backup to satellite location systems like GPS. The problem is that amateur radio operators have a secondary allocation in that band, which, despite the company’s unsupported claims to the contrary, will most likely be swamped by their 2,000-watt effective radiated power signals. LoRaWAN fans might also take note of the proposed change, which would likely make life difficult for them and other ISM-band users. It might be time to write some strongly worded letters.
And finally, what a time to be alive! While Boeing has figured out how to turn the ISS into a low-earth orbit
Gilligan’s Island
by unintentionally extending an eight-day visit into an open-ended stay, down here on Earth, we’re tackling the real problems, like
how to safely eat Doritos in space
. Luckily, the food scientists at Frito-Lay put their top people on the problem and came up with “Cool Ranch Zero Gravity Doritos,” which substitute a flavored oil spray for the normal finger-staining powdered spice blend that would get everywhere in an environment where gravity doesn’t pull it down onto your shirt or into your neck-beard. And to keep cornmeal crumbs from getting loose, they shrunk the triangular chips down to about a third the size of a regular Dorito, so you can just stuff the whole chip in your mouth without biting it first.
We have many thoughts on this, primarily that being unable to stuff at least three regular-size Doritos in your mouth at one time should be grounds for disqualification from spaceflight and that they literally could have chosen any flavor to send to space, but they had to make it Cool Ranch, which raises many questions of its own. But mainly, we’re just sad that this is what has become of spaceflight — and yes, we know about Tang, but this seems a lot worse. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7650626",
"author": "18Lj",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T23:19:07",
"content": "Im already resigned to the inevitability that the next space station built is gonna be plastered with ads and branding with Pepsi™ and Frito Lay® all over the outside of the Geico ISS 2.0©",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,371,813.016872 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/3d-printed-electronics-breadboard/ | 3D Printed Electronics Breadboard | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"breadboard"
] | The printed breadboard cover as seen from the bottom. (Credit: CHEP, YouTube)
Does it make sense to make your own breadboards rather than purchasing off the shelf ones? As [Chuck Hellebuyck] notes in a
recent video
on DIY, 3D-printed breadboards, there’s a certain charm to making a breadboard exactly the size you need, which is hard to argue with. The inspiration came after seeing the metal breadboard spring clips
on sale
by [Kevin Santo Cappuccio], who also has a 3D printable
breadboard shell project
that they fit into. This means that you can take the CAD model (STEP file) and modify it to fit your specifications before printing it, which is what [Chuck] attempts in the video.
The models were exported from TinkerCAD to Bambu Lab Studio for printing on a Bambu Lab A1 Mini FDM printer. After a failed first print (which the A1 Mini, to its credit, did detect), a model was printed on a Creality K1 Max instead. Ultimately [Chuck] traced this back to the Bambu Lab Studio slicer failing to add the inner grid to the first layer, which the Creality slicer did add, caused by the ‘wall generator’ setting in the Bambu Lab slicer being set to ‘Classic’ rather than ‘Arachne,’ which can vary line width.
After this, the models printed fine and easily fit onto the spring clips that [Chuck] had soldered down on some prototyping board. A nice feature of these spring clips is that they have a bit of space underneath them where an SMD LED can fit, enabling functional (or just fancy) lighting effects when using a custom PCB underneath the contraption. As for whether it’s worth it depends on your needs. As [Chuck] demonstrates, it can be pretty convenient for a small breadboard on an add-on card (with or without custom lighting) like this, but it’s unlikely to replace generic breadboards for quick prototyping. We can, however, imagine a custom breadboard with mounting points for things like binding posts, switches, or potentiometers.
If we had that kind of custom breadboard, we
wouldn’t need these
. People were making
custom breadboards back in 1974
, but they didn’t look like these. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7651244",
"author": "Spacedog",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T23:56:28",
"content": "Ben Eater did a cool breakdown of the quality of certain types of breadboard clips here:https://youtu.be/fCbAafKLqC8?t=74if you can get quality clips and print custom boards cheaper than off the shelf on... | 1,760,371,812.967042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/a-simple-6dof-hall-effect-space-mouse/ | A Simple 6DOF Hall Effect ‘Space’ Mouse | Dave Rowntree | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3dconnexion",
"analog",
"arduino pro micro",
"space mouse"
] | The 3DConnexion Space mouse is an interesting device but heavily patent-protected, of course. This seems to just egg people on to reproduce it using other technologies than the optical pickup system the original device uses. [John Crombie] had a crack at
building one using linear Hall effect sensors and magnets
as the detection mechanism to good — well — effect.
Using the SS49E linear Hall effect sensor in pairs on four sides of a square, the setup proves quite straightforward. Above the fixed sensor plate is a moveable magnet plate centred by a set of springs. The magnets are aligned equidistant between each sensor pair such that each sensor will report an equal mid-range signal with zero mechanical displacement. With some simple maths, inputs due to displacements in-plane (i.e., left-right or up-down) can be resolved by looking at how pairs
compare to each other. Rotations around the vertical axis are also determined in this manner.
Tilting inputs or vertical movements are resolved by looking at the absolute values of groups or all sensors.
You can read more about this by looking at the project’s
GitHub page
, which also shows how the to assemble the device, with all the CAD sources for those who want to modify it.
There’s also a detour to using 3D-printed flexures instead of springs, although that has yet to prove functional.
On the electronics and interfacing side of things, [John] utilises the
Arduino pro micro
for its copious analog inputs and USB functionality. A nice feature of this board is that it’s based on the ATMega32U4, which can quickly implement USB client devices, such as game controllers, keyboards, and mice. The USB controller has been tweaked by adjusting the USB PID and VID values to identify it as a SpaceMouse Pro Wireless operating in cabled mode. This tricks the 3DConnexion drivers, allowing all the integrations into CAD tools to work out of the box.
We do like Space Mouse projects. Here’s a
fun one from last year
, an
interesting one using PCB coils and flexures
, and a
simple hack to interface an old serial-connected unit
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7645258",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T17:59:02",
"content": "I would’ve expected the Space mouse patents to have mostly expired by now. I’m sure they have added some new aspects to them, but all the early stuff that makes up the bulk of the ideas should be free game... | 1,760,371,813.164722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/v-slot-wheels-or-linear-rails/ | V-Slot Wheels Or Linear Rails? | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"linear rails",
"V-slot"
] | In the early days of 3D printers, most builds used smooth rods and bearings that rode on them. But these days, printers are shipping with either V-slot extrusions with Delrin wheels or linear rails. Which is best? Everyone seems to have an opinion, but [Spencer] decided to
compare them using some well-defined experiments
, and he shares his results in the video below.
Common wisdom is that linear rails create a better print quality, but [Spencer] didn’t really find that much difference. He does admit, however, that he isn’t an expert on setting up linear rails, so perhaps there’s something he could have done better. He did note that the rails were quieter but that, for both cases, the noise generated by the moving rails was only a small fraction of the total noise generated by the printer. The rails were also more stable in terms of resonance. Input shaping can help overcome that, though, so it probably isn’t that important in a modern printer.
What do you think? Are linear rail upgrades worth it? Let us know in the comments. We’ve been 3D printing long enough that we are hard-pressed to complain much about any of the prints we produce today on printers that cost a fraction of what we spent on our first ones.
Of course, you could go with
string
. Putting rails together with or without slots
is its own
art form. | 45 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "7640460",
"author": "Benik3",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T14:11:25",
"content": "One problem of V-rail is, that the rubber gears wear out, or In worst cases they are not perfectly round…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7642603",
... | 1,760,371,813.10531 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/25/talking-milk-jug-says-glug-glug-glug/ | Talking Milk Jug Says Glug-Glug-Glug | Kristina Panos | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"microsd card",
"sd card",
"sound module",
"tilt switch"
] | Children can be a great source of daily inspiration, especially when they are just beginning to speak in full sentences and starting to let their little personalities show.
[Franklinstein] has the cutest toddler, and she loves her toy espresso machine, especially the little milk carton that came with it. Well, one day, Daddy made a glug-glug sound that delighted her, and he was inspired to build
an entirely new milk jug
that would make that special sound whenever it was turned over.
In order to keep the build relatively simple, [Franklinstein] used a sound module with an SD card and a tilt switch to activate it. There’s not much else to the build, really — just the usual suspects like a boost converter, a charging module, and a speaker, of course. In case you couldn’t tell, the enclosure and the internal skid that the electronics assemble onto are 3D printed.
This is really cute, and [Franklinstein]’s daughter seems to love it. Everything is available, including some nice instructions if you want to make one of your own. Be sure to check out the neat build video after the break.
The
things we do for kids
.
Seriously
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7639607",
"author": "Tim Tower",
"timestamp": "2024-08-25T13:45:56",
"content": "Sweet idea, nice execution. 👏🏻What are the three switches on the sound module for?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7666368",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,813.216538 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/you-can-3d-print-yourself-some-simple-magnetic-switches/ | You Can 3D Print Yourself Some Simple Magnetic Switches | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"magnet",
"magnetic",
"magnets",
"switchable magnet"
] | Permanent magnets aren’t typically switchable. They’re always doing their magnet thing. However, if you align them with a bunch of
other
magnets in just the right way, you can create a permanent magnet that you can effectively switch on and off. [Andrew Klein] has done just that
with his 3D-printed magnetic switch design.
The concept is simple enough. The design consists of a 3D-printed housing in two parts, top and bottom. When set into one orientation, the housing holds two arrays of magnets in opposite orientations. This effectively cancels out their magnetic fields and allows you to move the assembly around as if it’s pretty much not magnetic at all. However, rotate the device to its alternative orientation, and the magnets poles are aligned. This effectively combines their magnetic fields and makes the assembly act as one big large magnet.
These devices are useful if you want to create magnetic clamps or fixtures that can be attached and detached at will from ferrous surfaces. Being able to effectively “switch the magnet off” is much easier than trying to wrench a powerful magnet from a metal plate, after all.
You can do something similar
with electromagnetic techniques, too
! Video after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7549778",
"author": "felix.domestica@kubycsolutions.com",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T20:49:53",
"content": "I would call those switchable magnets, to distinguish them from switches controlled by magnets. Your mileage may vary.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,813.262534 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/a-cheap-diy-plc-based-on-the-atmega328p/ | A Cheap DIY PLC Based On The Atmega328P | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"industrial",
"industry",
"microcontroller",
"plc"
] | If you’re running a big factory, you’ve probably got a massively expensive contract with a major programmable logic controller (PLC) manufacturer. One shudders to think about the cost of the service subscription on that one. If you’re working on a smaller scale, though, you might consider
a DIY PLC like this one from [Mr Innovative.]
PLCs are rarely cutting-edge; instead, they’re about reliability and compliance with common industry standards. To that end, this design features the ATmega328P. Few other microcontrollers are as well understood or trusted as that one. The device is compatible with RS232 and RS485 and will run off 24 VDC, both of which you would find in a typical industrial environment. It offers 24 V digital inputs and outputs, as well as analog inputs and outputs from 0 to 10 V. [Mr Innovative] demonstrates it by hooking up a DWIN human-machine interface (HMI) for, well… human interaction, and a variable frequency drive to run a motor.
If you want to run a basic industrial-lite system
but can’t afford the real industrial price tag
, you might enjoy tinkering around at this level first. It could be a great way to get a simple project up and running without breaking the bank. Video after the break. | 42 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "7547817",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T19:34:04",
"content": "Cheap industrial PLC can be had for 200 bucks already and, depending on vendor, the software for them can be free (e.g. ABB PLCs). There are even Arduino-based PLCs.No expensive subscription necessary.PLCs ma... | 1,760,371,813.350433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/a-field-guide-to-the-north-american-substation/ | A Field Guide To The North American Substation | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering"
] | [
"electrical grid",
"high voltage",
"SCADA",
"substation"
] | Drive along nearly any major road in the United States and it won’t be long before you see evidence of the electrical grid. Whether it’s wooden poles strung along the right of way or a line of transmission towers marching across the countryside in the distance, signs of the grid are never far from view but often go ignored, blending into the infrastructure background and becoming one with the noise of our built environment.
But there’s one part of the electrical grid that, despite being more widely distributed and often relegated to locations off the beaten path, is hard to ignore. It’s the electrical substation, more than 55,000 of which dot the landscape of the US alone. They’re part of a continent-spanning machine that operates as one to move electricity from where it’s produced to where it’s consumed, all within the same instant of time. These monuments of galvanized steel are filled with strange, humming equipment of inscrutable purpose, seemingly operating without direct human intervention. But if you look carefully, there’s a lot of fascinating engineering going on behind those chain-link fences with the forbidding signage, and the arrangement of equipment within them tells an interesting story about how the electrical grid works, and what the consequences are when it doesn’t.
From The Ground Up
The most basic function of a substation is to transform voltages, either stepping up the voltage from the point of production for efficient transmission over long distances, or stepping voltages down from transmission systems to feed regional or local distribution systems. That makes substations conceptually simple, but as is always the case in engineering, the details are where things get interesting.
While the equipment mounted above the ground is the easiest part of a substation to observe, what you don’t see is arguably far more important, at least in terms of safety. A note to frame the discussion: we’ll be concentrating on open-air substations, rather than substations that are inside a structure, which are an important and interesting part of the grid, but harder to observe casually.
Substations must have an extensive grounding system, both for worker safety and to provide the needed neutral reference. Most substations use a grid of thick copper conductors buried just below the surface, tied together at regular intervals to ground rods extending 25 feet (7 meters) or more into the soil below. Horizontal and vertical conductors are tied together with exothermically welded connections or cold-forged fittings to form low-impedance electrical connections between every element of the grid. The grounding grid spreads out under the entire area of the substation, and everything is bonded into the ground system by heavy, low-impedance braided straps.
Over the grounding grid is a layer of crushed rock about 6 inches (15 cm) thick. The gravel serves several functions, including aiding water drainage and inhibiting weed growth. But the main function is worker safety in the event of a ground fault, which could cause a lethal voltage difference between the above-ground equipment and the earth. The high resistivity of the gravel (3,000 to 5,000 ohm-meters) compared to the soil makes it less likely that a worker will conduct these voltages through their body. Also, gravel reduces the possibility of lethal voltages between one foot and the other while walking, or step voltages.
Every substation also has a fence or physical barrier of some sort. Most are imposing structures of heavy-duty chain-link topped with razor wire, but in some residential areas, a more decorative option might be used to appease the neighbors. Some substations also have sound barriers, to reduce the incessant 60 Hz hum of the equipment within that could annoy nearby residents. The characteristic hum has also been known to attract bears, who apparently think they’ve found the world’s largest beehive. A sturdy barrier is critical to avoiding unpleasant consequences for the bear, or for those with a greedy eye on the multiple tons of copper most substations contain.
Rule of Threes
Of the above-ground equipment in the substation, the most visually striking structures are those that support and terminate the wires coming into and leaving the yard. These are loosely referred to as “high side” and “low side” lines based on the voltages they carry. A substation might have a 345 kV high side to receive power from a transmission line and several 25 kV lines on the low side feeding different local distribution lines. Some substations will also have multiple high-side feeds from different transmission lines, or may have multiple low-side inputs from wind or solar plants that the substation will combine into one or more high-side transmission lines.
Overview of the high side of a wind farm substation. From the right: transformer with corona caps on output bushings; 3-phase circuit breakers; PTs and VTs for monitoring; high-side lines on tower with surge arrestors on each phase. Source: Adbobestock, by [JJ Gouin]
One way to tell the high-side and low-side lines apart is by the size of their insulating bushings. Bushings are used to electrically and physically separate conductors from enclosures and supports, and the longer the bushing, the higher the voltage. Bushings are made from ceramic, glass, or polymers, and generally have stacks of circular fins that reduce the possibility of electrical discharge from the line to something with a lower potential. The highest voltage bushings are often fitted with special corona caps, which are circular cages that reduce the possibility of corona discharges from the relatively sharp tip of the bushing.
Something that stands out about most substations is that there seem to be three copies of each piece of equipment. Each set of high-side lines comes into the substation in a set of three, there are often three transformers (or one transformer with three input bushings and three output bushings), and all of the gear between the input and the output seems to be in triplicate. This is thanks to the three-phase electrical system in North America. Electrical transmission and distribution systems are all three-phase power, and while residential customers rarely enjoy such service to the home, commercial and industrial installations almost universally have it.
While the high-side and low-side lines entering and leaving the substation are generally — but not always — overhead wires, inside the substation, most of the components are connected by a series of overhead busbars. Busbars are simply pieces of metal pipe, often galvanized steel or aluminum and usually in groups of three, which are attached to equipment bushings either directly or via jumper wires. Busbars have the advantage of not sagging or swaying in the wind, but do have a few disadvantages, too. When busbars get hot they expand, and since they’re rigid and supported firmly on each end they’ll either buckle or break their supports. That means busbars have to be provided with expansion joints.
A 3-phase SF
6
circuit breaker. The bushings on top bring power in and out, while the breaker contacts are in the horizontal cylinders, which are filled with sulfur hexafluoride gas. Source: Adobestock, by [sergbob]
Bus bars in a 345-kV substation. Expansion joints allow the bus bars to expand and contract with temperature without exerting force on anchor points or bushings. Source:
SpeedFreakLS1
.
Capacitively coupled voltage transformers (CCVTs) on the high side of a 138-kV substation. These measure the voltage on each phase to make sure everything is in balance. Source:
SpeedFreakLS1
Another potential failure mode for busbars is ice damage, which I witnessed back in the 1980s. During a late winter thaw, meltwater had accumulated in a busbar at a substation near my home. When the temperature dropped precipitously that night, the freezing water exerted enough pressure to burst the busbar, which caused a fault on one of the phases bad enough to trip the entire substation. This knocked out power to the entire town and resulted in the local utility asking for help from my volunteer fire company.
The substation techs used the enormous generator on our truck to power a welder so they could make an impromptu repair to the busbar and restore power. It was a long, bitterly cold night, but I got to walk around inside a substation and check things out. It was pretty cool.
Plenty of Protection
That brings up the topic of control and protection. The vast majority of the equipment inside a substation is devoted to circuit protection, in the form of circuit breakers, fuses, reactors, and capacitors, followed by the equipment needed to control and monitor the circuits. Lightning protection is also vital, since a nearby strike can induce currents that can permanently damage equipment. Protection starts at the top with static lines on the highest part of transmission towers that are designed to catch discharges and run them directly to ground. Static lines are now often hybrid cables called OPGW, or optical ground wire, which has one or more optical fiber pairs at its core. These fibers are used for control and communications between substations; some utilities even lease the extra pairs out to communications providers.
Circuit breakers play a last-ditch role in substation protection, and are capable of disconnecting the entire substation in a catastrophic fault. They’re pretty easy to spot thanks to their angled bushings, usually two per breaker with one breaker per phase, although some breakers have three bushings each. The breakers are just super-sized versions of those in your home panel and work in a similar way, albeit tripping at a much higher current — often 5,000 amps or more. They also have to switch very rapidly, a tough job when there’s enough voltage to keep an arc going between the contacts even when they’re fully separated. So circuit breakers are often filled with a dielectric gas such as sulfur hexafluoride (SF
6
), a liquid dielectric like mineral oil, or even evacuated completely. Air blast breakers which literally blow the arc out are also used.
A 3-phase voltage regulator. This one happens to be on a distribution system, but the regulators in a substation are basically the same. The dials on top of each tank show the percent boost of buck the regulator is currently set for.
Automated dissolved gas analyzer, which performs continuous gas chromatography on any gasses in the dielectric oil. Gas is sampled via the stainless steel tube on the left. Note the cylinder of carrier gas – probably helium – in the rear. Source:
SpeedFreakLS1
.
A pressure relief device (PRD) on top of a 138-kV transformer. The bell housing holds a spring-loaded diaphragm that pops open if the pressure exceeds 10 psi, raising the little yellow flag. Source:
SpeedFreakLS1
.
Another interesting bit of control equipment in the yard is the voltage regulators, which are essentially autotransformers that can adjust the voltage on a phase within a small percentage range. These are easily recognizable as a set of three tall cylinders, each bearing a large dial on the top. The dial shows how much voltage is being boosted or bucked, and is usually angled downward for easier reading from the ground. Substation switchyards also often contain banks of high-voltage capacitors, which adjust the power factor and compensate for noise on the line. Capacitor banks are usually located on the distribution side of a substation along with neutral grounding reactors, which are large, cylindrical inductors that are connected in series between the neutral of a transformer and ground and limit current if there’s a phase-to-ground fault.
Sprinkled liberally around the substation are instrumentation transformers whose entire job is to monitor the flow of current into and out of almost every piece of equipment. Current transformers, or CTs, are just permanently installed, beefed-up versions of the clamp meter you might use for measuring current in an electrical panel and work pretty much the same way, with current in the conductor under measurement inducing a proportional current in a toroidal coil. Voltages are measured with voltage transformers (VTs), the most common of which is the capacitive voltage transformer, or CVT. These use high-voltage capacitors as a voltage divider and a transformer to isolate and further step down the voltage to a reasonable instrumentation range. The outputs of instrumentation transformers are generally piped into a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system that remotely monitors and controls everything in the substation, right down to alarm contacts on the fence gates.
The Diva Treatment
Since the primary job of the substation is changing one voltage to another, the main power transformers are the centerpiece of the switchyard. In a lot of ways, transformers are the divas of the substation — they’re expensive to procure, require a lot of maintenance, and the show won’t go on until they’re happy. The transformers are easy to spot, since they’re generally the largest pieces of equipment in the yard. In keeping with the rule of threes, there are usually three identical units, one for each phase, although some transformers have windings for all three phases in a single massive enclosure.
138 kV transformer in a wind farm substation. High-side to the left, low-side to the right, with all three phases in a single enclosure. Note the cooling radiators on each side; the tank just visible at the back is an oil conservator, which is basically a pressurized reservoir for the oil to expand and contract. Source:
SpeedFreakLS1
.
Almost all substation transformers are filled with mineral oil, which acts as a liquid dielectric and helps cool the transformer thanks to giant radiators and fans for forced-air cooling. A large transformer can hold thousands of gallons of oil, an environmental disaster waiting to happen if there should be a leak, which given
some recent rural substation attacks
is not unthinkable. That makes secondary containment a necessity, with deep pits dug around the transformer foundation pads. The pits are lined with thick plastic sheets and backfilled with gravel. They’re designed to contain the entire volume of oil if necessary, and sump pumps with oil separators keep rainwater from accumulating in the pit.
In keeping with the diva treatment, transformers require constant monitoring to ensure they operate at their peak. Aside from the instrumentation used to measure their electrical status, transformers need to have their oil checked regularly for chemical changes that could indicate internal problems like arcing and overheating. This can either be performed by a technician visiting the substation and taking samples of the oil, or through online dissolved gas analysis (DGA), which uses a compact gas chromatograph to automatically sample the oil and measure the amount of acetylene, ethylene, and methane dissolved within it. Continuous measurements are collected via SCADA and provide a much more accurate picture of transformer health than monthly or quarterly sampling.
And finally, to push the diva metaphor even further, transformers are often provided with pressure-relief devices to protect the system in the event of an explosion within the transformer enclosure. PRDs can be as simple as a burst disc that shatters under increased pressure, but are more commonly sensors that detect and characterize the pressure wave from an internal explosion as it propagates through the oil. If the pressure wave looks like a catastrophic internal failure has occurred, the SCADA system will disconnect the transformer, in an attempt to save it from irreparable damage. | 15 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "7557660",
"author": "Dan Julio",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T23:47:24",
"content": "What we take for granted every day. Thanks for this. It is interesting to understand what’s in the ubiquitous stations.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,813.464999 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/citizen-scientists-spot-super-fast-moving-object-in-nasa-data/ | Citizen Scientists Spot Super Fast Moving Object In NASA Data | Lewin Day | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"citizen science",
"data",
"nasa",
"wise",
"WISE mission"
] | When you were five, you probably spotted your best friend running at “a million miles an hour” when they beat everybody at the local athletics meet. You probably haven’t seen anything that fast snice. According to NASA, though, a group of citizen scientists
spotted a celestial object doing just that!
The group of citizen scientists were involved in a NASA program called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They were working on images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer mission. Scanning through stored images, Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden identified a curiously speedy object termed CWISE J124909.08+362116.0. There are lots of fast-moving objects out in space, but few quite as fast as this one. It’s quite literally zooming through the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour.
It’s unclear exactly what the object is. It appears light enough to be a low-mass star, or potentially a brown dwarf—somewhere in between the classification of gas giant and star. It also has suspiciously low iron and metallic content. The leading hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 might have been ejected from a supernova, or that it got flung around a pair of black holes.
For now, it remains a mystery. It’s a grand discovery that really highlights
the value of citizen science
. If you’ve been doing your own rigorous scientific work—on NASA’s data or your own—
do let us know! | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "7543244",
"author": "wkpad",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T15:57:08",
"content": "The paper athttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.08578is quite readable. I liked the discussion of how it has an orbit in line with the galactic plane, which might be a clue to its origin.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,813.406622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/tech-in-plain-sight-speedometers/ | Tech In Plain Sight: Speedometers | Al Williams | [
"History",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"eddy currents",
"speedometer"
] | In a modern car, your speedometer might look analog, but it is almost certainly digital and driven by the computer that has to monitor all sorts of things anyway. But how did they work before your car was a rolling computer complex? The electronic speedometer has been around for well over a century and, when you think about it, qualifies as a technlogical marvel.
If you already know how they work, this isn’t a fair question. But if you don’t, think about this. Your dashboard has a cable running into it. The inner part of the cable spins at some rate, which is related to either the car’s transmission or a wheel sensor. How do you make a needle deflect based on the speed?
Mechanical Solutions
Early versions of the speedometer used a governor pulling against a spring. The faster it rotates, the more the two weights of the governor pull out against the spring, and the needle moves with the weights.
As an aside, this sort of centrifugal governor is also known as a fly-ball governor, and similar devices were commonly used to regulate the maximum throttle on steam engines. The arms of the governor would be fully extended once the engine reached its top speed, which lead to the term “balls-out” becoming used to describe a machine operating at its upper limits.
Another type of mechanical speedometer had an escapement like a watch. The time mechanism would move the needle back, and the rotation of the wheels would move it forward. The net result was a needle position that would increase with speed.
The Magnetic Approach
However, most cars use a magnetic type speedometer — although it doesn’t work in the way you might imagine. There’s no reed relay or Hall effect sensing the magnetic field. Instead, there is an aluminum cup attached to the speedometer needle and, nearby, a magnet that spins on a shaft moving at some ratio of the car’s speed. There’s no direct connection between the two.
Being a non-ferrous metal, aluminum is not generally something we think of being affected by magnets. Under normal circumstances that might be true, but a
moving
magnetic field will induce eddy currents in aluminum. This forms a field in the aluminum, too, and the spinning magnet tends to drag the cup, thereby deflecting the pointer.
A spring similar to one you might find in a mechanical clock or watch pulls back the pointer so the needle hovers at the point where the force of the magnet pulls against the spring. The pull on the spring has to account for the gear ratios and the size of the tires to accurately reflect the vehicle’s speed.
If you want to see an entertaining teardown of an old speedometer, [
Tubalcain/Mr Pete
] has you covered in the video below. He also shows how the odometer part worked, too.
Modern Times
Of course, these days you are more likely to pick up a pulse using a Hall effect or some other part of the vehicle and just count the pulses in the car’s computer. In fact, the pulses might be encoded at the source and travel over something like a CAN bus to get to the computer.
It is also possible to pick up speed from other tracking information like GPS, although that might not be as accurate. But if you have, for example, a mobile phone app that shows your speed, that’s probably what it is doing. The obvious way to do that is to take position measurements periodically and then do the math. However, more sophisticated systems can actually measure Doppler shift to get a more accurate reading.
We see a lot of
bicycle speedometers
for some reason. Eddy currents make induction cooktops work, too. Even
tiny ones
. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7541187",
"author": "Canuckfire",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T14:44:31",
"content": "I have also seen fly-ball governors on top of elevator cars to drive the braking system.I am not sure how common they might be, but I have seen quite a few.It makes perfect sense for that application t... | 1,760,371,813.534518 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/running-stock-ms-dos-on-a-modern-thinkpad/ | Running Stock MS-DOS On A Modern ThinkPad | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"dos",
"lenovo",
"ms-dos",
"thinkpad"
] | It might seem like the days of MS-DOS were a lifetime ago because…well, they basically were. Version 6.22 of the venerable operating system, the last standalone release, came out back in 1994. That makes even the most recent version officially 30 years old. A lot has changed in the computing world since that time, so naturally trying to run such an ancient OS on even a half-way modern machine would be a waste of time. Right?
As it turns out, getting MS-DOS 6.22 running on a modern computer isn’t nearly as hard as you’d think. In fact, it works pretty much perfectly. Assuming, that is, you pick the right machine.
[Yeo Kheng Meng] recently wrote in to share his experiments
with running the final DOS release on his Intel-powered ThinkPad X13 from 2020, and the results are surprising to say the least.
To be clear, we’re not talking about some patched version of DOS here. There’s no emulator at work either. Granted [Yeo] did embrace a few modern conveniences, such as using a USB floppy drive emulator to load the disk images instead of fiddling with actual floppies, and installing DOS onto an external drive so as not to clobber his actual OS on the internal NVME drive. But other than that, the installation of DOS on the ThinkPad went along just as it would have in the 1990s.
IBM’s 1984 luggable running the same OS as a modern ThinkPad
It’s impressive enough that MS-DOS can still be installed on such a modern machine. But what’s really surprising is how well it all works. [Yeo] reports that the bulk of the ThinkPad’s hardware worked as expected, although he did have to pull in some modern open source drivers such as
SBEMU
, which makes DOS think the laptop’s Intel HD audio chip is an old school Sound Blaster card. He was even able to get several different Thunderbolt-connected Gigabit Ethernet adapters working.
Not all of the DOS benchmark tools [Yeo] tried on the machine would actually run, but as you might imagine, the ones that did reported some fairly spectacular results. After all, a machine with specs like this would have been the stuff of science fiction when those tools were written.
So how is this all possible? [Yeo] notes that this is one of the final Lenovo laptops to support “Legacy BIOS” mode, as everything after this point is pure UEFI. This particular machine also features a “Thunderbolt BIOS Assist Mode” which makes connected devices seem like standard PCI cards.
In the end, the experiment shows that Intel and Lenovo have done an incredible job of maintaining backwards compatibility with their respective hardware. While it seems like this is the end of the road for your average consumer computer due to issues such as the UEFI switch over, don’t worry. You’ll still be able to
scratch that retro itch with the right hardware
. | 33 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "7536863",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T12:06:35",
"content": "If a device is supported by Coreboot, you can run SeaBIOS as payload.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7538434",
"author": "Yeo Kheng Meng",
... | 1,760,371,813.615939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/happy-birthday-to-dad-retrocomputer-style/ | Happy Birthday To Dad, Retrocomputer Style | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"audio",
"birthday",
"bit bang",
"cassette",
"retrocomputing",
"trs-80",
"Z-80"
] | For those of us who lived through the early 8-bit computing revolution — the tail end, in our case — it’s hard to believe that there’s a second wave of retrocomputing nostalgia underway. But as
this bit-banged TRS-80 birthday bonus pack
shows, the first generation did a pretty good job passing the retro torch.
With his father’s 70th birthday coming up and full of “borrowed nostalgia” for the good old days, [Josh Sucher] scored a TRS-80 off eBay and experimented with what could be possible. After 50-odd years, the machine needed a bit of TLC, including a new power supply, some keyboard repairs, and the usual recapping. He also had to soup the machine up a bit, given that its original capabilities were so limited.
Chief among these mods was a rudimentary IP stack thanks to a
TRS-IO
card, which emulates a lot of functionality of the original TRS-80 Expansion Module and adds an ESP-32 for WiFi capability. This allowed [Josh] to get a neat “Dadbot” chatbot going on the machine, using years of his dad’s text messages to train the model. There’s also a game of
Go
, an RPG based on his parents’ lives, and a local news and weather app. Most impressive, though, is the bit-banged audio app that uses the TRS-80’s cassette interface to play a passable rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” The video below has the full demo.
It’s clear that this lengthy project was a labor of love, and we approve of the results. It’s been a long, long time since we first caught wind of the TRS-80 through the Radio Shack catalog, and projects like this make us feel like scratching up one for ourselves to play with.
[via
Hacker News
] | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7549424",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T20:41:35",
"content": "I would say “How far we’ve come.” but then I remember Tik Tok and think “Can we go back?”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7565846",
"auth... | 1,760,371,813.743197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/ethernet-history-why-do-we-have-different-frame-types/ | Ethernet History: Why Do We Have Different Frame Types? | Maya Posch | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"ethernet"
] | Although Ethernet is generally considered to be a settled matter, its history was anything but peaceful, with its standardization process (under Project 802) leaving its traces to this very day. This is very clear when looking at the different Ethernet frame types in use today, and with many more historical types. While Ethernet II is the most common frame type, 802.2 LLC (Logical Link Control) and 802 SNAP (Subnetwork Access Protocol) are the two major remnants of this struggle that raged throughout the 1980s, even before IEEE Project 802 was created. An in-depth look at this history with all the gory details is
covered in this article
by [Daniel].
The originally proposed IEEE 802 layout, with the logical link control (LLC) providing an abstraction layer.
We covered the history of
Ethernet’s original development
by [Robert Metcalfe] and [David Boggs] while they worked at Xerox, leading to its commercial introduction in 1980, and eventual IEEE standardization as 802.3. As [Daniel]’s article makes clear, much of the problem was that it wasn’t just about Ethernet, but also about competing networking technologies, including Token Ring and a host of other technologies, each with its own gaggle of supporting companies backing them.
Over time this condensed into three subcommittees:
802.3: CSMA/CD (Ethernet).
802.4: Token bus.
802.5: Token ring.
An abstraction layer (the LLC, or 802.2) would smooth over the differences for the protocols trying to use the active MAC. Obviously, the group behind the Ethernet and Ethernet II framing push (DIX) wasn’t enamored with this and pushed through Ethernet II framing via alternate means, but with LLC surviving as well, yet its technical limitations caused LLC to mutate into SNAP. These days network engineers and administrators can still enjoy the fallout of this process, but it was far from the only threat to Ethernet.
Ethernet’s transition from a bus to a star topology was
enabled by the LANBridge 100
as an early Ethernet switch, allowing it to scale beyond the limits of a shared medium. Advances in copper wiring (and fiber) have further enabled Ethernet to scale from thin- and thicknet coax to
today’s range of network cable categories
, taking Ethernet truly beyond the limits of token passing, CSMA/CD and kin, even if their legacy will probably always remain with us. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7576834",
"author": "A scott",
"timestamp": "2024-08-23T16:42:34",
"content": "Bob Metcalf would disagree that what we call Ethernet today is Ethernet. He wrote in a column a number of years ago that Ethernet was CSMA/CD. Switched networking is not Ethernet.",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,813.699761 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/this-week-in-security-crash-your-iphone-hack-your-site-and-bluetooth-woes/ | This Week In Security: Crash Your IPhone, Hack Your Site, And Bluetooth Woes | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"RCE",
"This Week in Security",
"wordpress"
] | There have been some hilarious issues on mobile devices over the years. The HTC Dream had a hidden shell that was discovered when a phone rebooted after sending a text containing just the word “reboot”. iOS has gotten in on the fun from time to time, and this time it’s
""::
. Type the double quotes, a colon, and any other character, and
Apple’s Springboard service crashes
.
Another hacker
dug in a bit
, and realized that Springboard is trying to jump execution to a null pointer, leading to a crash. It’s very odd that user input breaks the query parser badly enough to jump to null like that. There are a couple interesting questions that we have to ask. Given that the crash trigger is quite flexible,
"anything goes":x
, is it possible to manipulate that function pointer to be something other than null? And perhaps more importantly, why is the code crashing, instead of an invalid address error as one would expect from a Pointer Authentication Code (PAC) violation? Regardless, the bug seems to be fixed in the latest iOS 18 builds.
Typing “”:: in various search bars (e.g. in Settings .app) on iOS, will cause a crash! ☠️
https://t.co/P4Ax0z9W9F
(by:
@lorenzofb
)
….let's dig into why 🧵
— Patrick Wardle (@patrickwardle)
August 21, 2024
OpenBMC
OpenBMC is something of a reference Baseboard Management Controller, and as such it’s the upstream for other implementations. And
it has a fairly serious issue, in the slpd-lite service
, which just happens to be installed and enabled by default. SLP is the Service Location Protocol, a service discovery protocol, which is something of a predecessor to Zeroconf. Slpd-lite has a pair of issues that result in trivial heap reads and writes, beyond the intended buffer.
The slpd-lite project patched the issues about a week after disclosure, back in May. In June, the patch and an advisory was applied to OpenBMC itself. Nice and speedy action. Now to get all the downstream vendors to apply it, too.
WordPress LightSpeed Falls to Weak Hash
The LightSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress does something really clever, but in a way that
managed to allow admin authentication bypasses
. To cache pages that a logged-in user would see, the plugin’s crawler simulates each user loading the site, and caches that. To protect that cache, a random string is generated. The problem is that this random generation is seeded using the current time, only the microsecond portion of the time. So one of only a million possible values. And while a million is a lot when talking about physical objects, it’s not nearly enough when talking about cryptography.
To log in as a user using this weak hash, an attacker only has to guess te proper user ID (usually 1 is an admin) and then hit the right hash value. Lightspeed hash released a fix, but this is a severe issue, and we should expect to see exploitation attempts —
And that didn’t take long
. This one could be nasty, as something like 3.5 million sites are still running the vulnerable version of the plugin. Wordfence has already blocked 48,500 in the first 24 hours of this attack being publicly known.
Insulin, Privacy, and Firewalls
[Remy] fron Greynoise Labs is on a bit of a crusade against insecure Bluetooth. And make no mistake, Bluetooth can be a problem. Case in point, the FDA has
issued a recall on a particular insulin pump
, because the iOS app could enter a crash loop, and the continual Bluetooth re-connections drained the device’s batteries. Battery drain may seem like a mild inconvenience, but apparently over 200 people have reported injuries as a result.
So in this push for more secure use of Bluetooth, [Remy] mined a collection of Android applications for Bluetooth UUIDs. Those are unique identifiers of what kind of device is advertising Bluetooth. With this new treasure trove of identifiers, it was only natural to write a Bluetooth UUID scanner. And this is where a bit of a bizarre coincidence took place. At the some moment [Remy] fired up this scanner, his local Internet access dropped. As a result, his Firewalla firewall started advertising a Bluetooth Low Energy interface. The database returned a hit, and [Remy] had the Android APK to look at.
The Firewalla scheme for authenticating that BLE interface was lacking, with a handful of possible issues, like only checking the first 8 characters of a UUID key. And once past that initial hurdle, further administration tasks are secured using a JSON Web Token. That token’s signing key was global for all Firewally devices, and trivially derived from either firmware or the Android APK. And that’s not even all, since there were also command injection issues over the same Bluetooth link. Firewalla has released version 1.979 to address these issues.
Moar Bluetooth
If that wasn’t enough Bluetooth,
the Zero Day Initiative has us covered
, with coverage of a pair of flaws in the Autel Maxicharger vehicle charging station. The first was a simple buffer overflow in the Bluetooth data handling, leading to possible Remote Code Execution (RCE). The second issue was the presence of “Backup credentials” in the firmware’s WiFi handling.
Bits and Bytes
“Insufficient sanitization” is not a feature you want in your microservices. Spring’s Cloud Dataflow is a tool to plug data flows in to various other applications. Before a recent patch fixed it, Dataflow was doing some basic checks on file uploads, like looking for nulls or empty files. The problem was
some very simple path traversal attacks
. Name a package name with
../../../poc
, and while the service may throw an error, it still creates the files as requested. 2.11.3 has shipped with the fix, so time to update!
And speaking of bypasses,
ingress-nginx has a validation bypass
, allowing unauthorized access to Kubernetes clusters using that controller. Kubernetes supports annotations as a sort of metadata system, and ingress-nginx was failing to properly validate those annotations, which could then be used for command injection.
And finally, I think I’ve played this video game. Except this time, someone
actually tried to hack himself out of existence
. The FBI discovered that a criminal had not only used stolen social security numbers to commit fraud, he had gone so far as to register his own death in a Government system, using stolen credentials. It didn’t turn out so well, as he was discovered alive, and sentenced to jail time for the effort. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7573999",
"author": "Zoe",
"timestamp": "2024-08-23T15:12:12",
"content": "Bluetooth and medical in same sentence??",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7574645",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"ti... | 1,760,371,813.78444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/the-famous-computer-cafe-has-now-been-archived-online/ | The Famous Computer CafeHas Now Been Archived Online | Lewin Day | [
"History",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"bill gates",
"history",
"jack tramiel",
"retrocomputing",
"robert moog",
"timothy leary"
] | You might think that TV stations or production houses would be great at archiving, but it’s not always the case. Particularly from the public access perspective. However, if you’re a fan of
The Famous Computer Cafe,
you’re in luck! The beloved series
has now been preserved on The Internet Archive!
If you’re not familiar with the show, it was a radio program broadcast from 1983 to 1986. It was pumped out of a variety of radio stations in southern and central California in the period. The creators making sure to keep a copy of each episode in reel-to-reel tape format. For years, these tapes were tragically lost, until archivist [Kay Savetz] was able to recover some of them from a recent property sale. From there, a GoFundMe paid for digitization, and the show has been placed on The Internet Archive with the blessings of the original creators.
This is quite the cultural victory, particularly when you observe the list of guests on the show. Timothy Leary, Bill Gates, Jack Tramiel, and even Douglas Adams made appearances in the recovered recordings. Sadly, though, not all the tapes have been recovered. Episodes with Gene Roddenberry, Robert Moog, and Ray Bradbury are still lost to time.
If you fancy a listen, 53 episodes presently exist
on the archive.
Take a trip back in time and hear from some technological visionaries—and futurists—speaking their minds at the very beginning of the microcomputer era! If you find any particularly salient gems, don’t hesitate to drop them
on the tip line. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7567851",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-08-23T11:53:23",
"content": "Oh they’re brilliant, a real piece of history and all the long gone companies mentioned…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7574798",
"author": "The Co... | 1,760,371,813.831359 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/a-simple-guide-to-rf-pcb-design/ | A Simple Guide To RF PCB Design | Dave Rowntree | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"groundplane",
"impedance",
"pcb",
"RF",
"transmission line"
] | [Hans Rosenberg] knows a thing or two about RF PCB design and has provided a
three-part
four-part video demonstration of some solid rules of thumb. We will
cover the first part here
and leave the other two for the more interested readers!
The design process begins with a schematic diagram, assuming ideal conductors. Advanced software tools can extract the resistive, inductive, and capacitive elements of the physical wiring to create a parasitic model that can be compared to the desired schematic. The RF designer’s task is to optimize the layout to minimize differences and achieve the best performance to meet the design goals. However, what do you do when you don’t have access to such software?
[Hans] explains that at low frequencies, return current flows through all paths, with the lowest resistance path taking most of the current. At higher frequencies, the lowest inductance path carries all the current. In real designs, a ground plane is used instead of an explicit return trace for the lowest possible impedance.
You really wouldn’t design an RF circuit like this.
[Hans] shows the effect of interrupting the signal return path on a physical test PCB. The result is pretty bad, with the current forced to detour around the hole in the ground plane. A nanoVNA shows a -20 dB drop at 4 GHz, where the ground plane has effectively become an antenna. Energy will be radiated out, causing signal loss, but worse, it will create an EMC hazard with an unintended transmission.
Additionally, this creates an EMC susceptibility, making the situation worse. Placing a solder blob to bridge the gap directly under the signal trace is all that’s required to make it a continuous straight path again, and the performance is restored.
Floating planes are also an issue in RF designs, causing signal resonance and losses. One solution is to pull back the planes near the signal or stitch them to the ground plane with vias placed closely on either side of the signal trace. However, such stitching may slightly affect transmission line impedance and require tweaking the design a little. The next two parts of the series expand on this, hammering home the importance of good ground plane design. These are definitely worth a watch!
PCB design is as much art as science, and we’ve discussed this subject a lot. Here’s our
simple guide to rocking RF PCB designs
. There’s also a lot of devil in that detail, for example when understanding
edge-launch SMA connectors
.
( Updated to add part 4. Thanks [MacGyverS2000] !) | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7564431",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-08-23T09:15:22",
"content": "In the last video would a “via shield” help? So many vias under the shield component to the ground plane at the bottom layer. And what about making a thin slot in the PCB and have the shield go through the PCB ... | 1,760,371,814.028755 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/portable-ps4-is-easier-to-move-than-a-regular-one/ | Portable PS4 Is Easier To Move Than A Regular One | Lewin Day | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"playstation",
"playstation 4",
"ps4"
] | The PlayStation 4 was a popular enough console, but it was a
home
console. If you wanted to play at a friend’s house, you had to unplug all your cables and haul the whole lot over there. Unless, that is,
you built something along the lines of [Rudd van Falier]’s Portable GameStation.
It’s not a super-complicated build, but it is a well-executed one. It combines laser cut acrylic with 3D-printed brackets to produce a housing that looks clean, sharp, and of almost commercial quality. That’s the benefit of laser-cutting—it avoids all the ugly problems of layer lines. From there, [Rudd] simply set about stuffing the PS4 motherboard inside, along with placing the relevant ports and vents in the housing where needed. A screen with inbuilt speakers was then attached to complete the build. The one thing it’s missing is a set of batteries for playing it on the bus. This thing needs mains power to run.
We’d love to see [Rudd] take another stab at the concept, making it fully independent from cables.
It’s definitely possible.
Who wouldn’t want to play some
Persona 5 Royal
on the train, anyway? Video after the break. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7573721",
"author": "kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang",
"timestamp": "2024-08-23T15:03:46",
"content": "What? A portable ps4 that is easier to move than a regular one? That’s nosense, portable things have to be harder to move than regular ones.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,813.869606 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/wardriving-tools-in-the-modern-era/ | Wardriving Tools In The Modern Era | Lewin Day | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"wardriving",
"wifi",
"wireless"
] | When WiFi first came out, it was a super exciting time. The technology was new, and quite a bit less secure back then—particularly if not configured properly. That gave rise to the practice of wardriving—driving around with a computer, looking for unsecured networks, often just for the fun of it.
[Simon] has been examining this classic practice from a modern perspective.
He’s been at the game for a long time—from back in the days when you might head out with a thick old laptop, a bunch of PCMCIA cards, and dangly antennas. It’s much more advanced these days, given we’ve got WiFi on all different bands and Bluetooth devices to consider to boot. Heck,
even Zigbee
, if you’re hunting down a rogue house full of Internet of Things gadgets.
Today, when he’s out researching the wireless landscape, he uses devices like the Flipper Zero, the Raspberry Pi, and a Google Pixel 5 running the WiGLE WiFi Wardriving app. [Simon] notes that the latter is the easiest way to get started if you’ve got an Android phone. Beyond that, there’s software and hardware out there these days that can do amazing things compared to the simple rigs of yesteryear.
If you’re out looking for free internet these days, wardriving might be a bit pointless given it’s available in practically every public building you visit. But
if you’re a wireless security researcher
, or just curious about what your own home setup is putting out, it might be worth looking at these tools! Happy hunting. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7560598",
"author": "RF Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-08-23T03:16:53",
"content": "Wardriving itself simply identifies WiFi signals in passing. It is possible to geolocate someone or something based on the WiFi SSID’s their device is observing. I’ve done Wardriving, and contributed ... | 1,760,371,814.208271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/second-human-neuralink-brain-implant-recipient-uses-it-for-cad-and-videogaming/ | Second Human Neuralink Brain Implant Recipient Uses It For CAD And Videogaming | Maya Posch | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"brain-computer interface",
"neural implant",
"neuralink"
] | As Neuralink works towards getting its brain-computer interface technology approved for general use, it now has two human patients who have received the experimental implant. The second patient, [Alex], received the implant in July of 2024 and is
said to be doing well
, being able to play games like Counter Strike 2 without using his old mouth-operated controller. He’s also creating designs in Fusion 360 to have them 3D printed.
This positive news comes after the first patient ([Noland Arbaugh])
suffered major issues
with his implant, with only 10-15% of the electrodes still working after receiving the implant in January. The issue of electrode threads retracting was apparently
a known issue
years prior already.
We
analyzed Neuralink’s claims
back in 2019, when its founder – [Elon Musk] – was painting lofty goals for the implant, including reading and writing of brains, integration with AIs and much more. Since that time Neuralink has been mostly in the news for the many test animals which it euthanized during its test campaign prior to embarking on its first human test subjects.
There also appears a continuing issue with transmitting the noisy data from the electrodes, as it is far more data than can be transmitted wirelessly. To solve this seemingly impossible problem, Neuralink has now
turned to the public
with its
Neuralink Compression Challenge
to have someone make a miraculous lossless compression algorithm for it.
With still many challenges ahead, it ought to be clear that it will take many more years before Neuralink’s implant is ready for prime-time, but so far at least it seems to at least make life easier for two human patients. | 55 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7556898",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2024-08-22T23:30:03",
"content": "“We analyzed Neuralink’s claims back in 2019, when its founder – [Elon Musk] ”He founded Neuraling in the same way he founded Tesla, by getting fanbois to edit the Wiki pages.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,814.11598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/remapping-hid-for-fun-and-well-fun/ | Remapping HID For Fun And… Well Fun | Al Williams | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"hid"
] | If you want to remap some mouse or keyboard keys, and you use Linux, it is easy. If you use Windows or another operating system, you can probably do that without too much trouble. But what if you use all of them? Or what if you don’t have access to the computer in question? Thanks to [jfedor2], you can
reach for a Raspberry Pi Pico
and make this handy key-and-mouse remapping hardware dongle.
But you can do more than just swapping control and caps lock because the software is pretty sophisticated. For instance, you can define layers like you might find in a custom keyboard setup — pressing one key can trigger a layer that redefines the functions of all of the other keys. There are programmable macros and a mechanism to differentiate between a key being tapped or held.
Since it also works with mice, you can trigger macros from mouse buttons, or remap your keyboard arrow keys to the mouse’s scroll wheel. And you can configure all of this from a web browser.
On the hardware side, the code supports several different off-the-shelf and custom boards. There’s also a nice enclosure to make it look like an off-the-shelf product. There are also serial and Bluetooth versions of the device, which map them to a USB HID connection.
This has applications for accessible devices. We can also envision it being useful with turnkey devices that you might want to customize without having to reverse-engineer the existing software. Because of the mouse/keyboard cross-functionality, this might have been just the ticket for
resurrecting an old light pen
, for instance. If you want to dive into the HID spec that makes this whole thing work,
we can help with that
. What will you do with it? | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7471754",
"author": "Handyman",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T19:41:41",
"content": "For me the killer app of Windows is not SolidWorks, Notepad++, Adobe CS6 or Steam games. It’s not ClearType combined with Consolas font. It’s AutoHotkey.Over the years I’ve managed to automate and improv... | 1,760,371,814.164014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/open-source-liquid-rocket-reaches-for-the-sky/ | Open Source Liquid Rocket Reaches For The Sky | Tom Nardi | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"amateur rocketry",
"liquid rocket",
"oxidizer"
] | Since the very beginning, solid-propellants have been the cornerstone of amateur rocketry. From the little Estes rocket picked up from the toy store, to vehicles like the University of Southern California’s Traveler IV that (probably) crossed the Kármán line in 2019, a rapidly burning chunk of solid propellant is responsible for pushing them skyward. That’s not to say that amateur rockets powered by liquid propellants are completely unheard of … it’s just that getting them right is so ridiculously difficult that comparatively few have been built.
But thanks to [Half Cat Rocketry], we may start to see more hobbyists and students taking on the challenge. Their
Mojave Sphinx liquid-fueled rocket
is not only designed to be as easy and cheap to build as possible, but it’s been released as open source so that others can replicate it. All of the 2D and 3D CAD files have been made available under the GPLv3 license, and if you’re in the mood for a little light reading, there’s a nearly 370 page guidebook you can download that covers building and launching the rocket.
Now of course we’re still talking about literal rocket science here, so while we don’t doubt a sufficiently motivated individual could put one of these together on their own, you’ll probably want to gather up a couple friends and have a well-stocked makerspace to operate out of. All told, [Half Cat] estimates you should be able to build a Mojave Sphinx for less than $2,000 USD, but that assumes everything is done in-house and you don’t contract out any of the machining.
The design is the result of years of research and development that was aimed at distilling a liquid-fueled rocket down to its most basic form. There’s no gas generator, no turbine, no pumps of any kind. Controlling the flow of propellants within the rocket requires only a pair of servo-actuated valves thanks to the ingenious use of dual-acting vapor pressurization. Put simply, the rocket uses one large vertical tank that’s internally divided by a movable piston, with the oxidizer — nitrous oxide — on one side and the fuel — nearly any flammable liquid, such as alcohol or gasoline — on the other. The high-pressure nitrous oxide pushes down on the piston, which in turn pressurizes the fuel.
To get the most out of your investment, the Mojave Sphinx is designed to be entirely reusable. Assuming it makes a soft enough landing, you just need to refill the tank and launch it again. In practice it’s a bit more involved than that, but the team of [Half Cat] say they’ve managed to fly the same rocket multiple times in a single day. The handbook even has a handy maintenance schedule that tells you how often you should check or replace different components of the rocket. For example, it advises replacing the propellant piston o-rings every third flight.
The downside? There’s only so much performance you can wring out a rudimentary propulsion system like this. When compared to more simplistic solid-propellant rockets, the higher mass of the Mojave Sphinx puts the maximum altitude of the 96 inch (2.4 meter) long rocket at around 10,000 feet (3 kilometers). Still, we know plenty of folks who would call that a worthy compromise for being able to say they built their own liquid rocket.
Thanks to [concretedog] for the tip. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "7463944",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T15:41:29",
"content": "That is pretty cool, but I would like to see an animation of how it works.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7465898",
... | 1,760,371,814.276812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/australia-didnt-invent-wifi-despite-what-youve-heard/ | Australia Didn’t Invent WiFi, Despite What You’ve Heard | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Australia",
"csiro",
"patent",
"wi-fi",
"wireless LAN",
"wireless networking"
] | Wireless networking is all-pervasive in our modern lives. Wi-Fi technology lives in our smartphones, our laptops, and even our watches. Internet is available to be plucked out of the air in virtually every home across the country. Wi-Fi has been one of the grand computing revolutions of the past few decades.
It might surprise you to know that Australia proudly claims the invention of Wi-Fi as its own. It had good reason to, as well— given the money that would surely be due to the creators of the technology. However, dig deeper,
and you’ll find things are altogether more complex.
Big Ideas
The official Wi-Fi logo.
It all began at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. The government agency has a wide-ranging brief to pursue research goals across many areas. In the 1990s, this extended to research into various radio technologies, including wireless networking.
The CSIRO is very proud of what it achieved,
crediting itself with “Bringing WiFi to the world.”
It’s a common piece of trivia thrown around the pub as a bit of national pride—it was scientists Down Under that managed to cook up one of the biggest technologies of recent times!
This might sound a little confusing to you if you’ve looked into the history of Wi-Fi at all. Wasn’t it the IEEE that established the working group for 802.11? And wasn’t it that standard that was released to the public in 1997? Indeed, it was!
The fact is that many groups were working on wireless networking technology in the 1980s and 1990s. Notably, the CSIRO was among them, but it wasn’t the first by any means—nor was it involved with the group behind 802.11. That group formed in 1990, while the precursor to 802.11 was actually developed by NCR Corporation/AT&T in a lab in the Netherlands in 1991. The first standard of what would later become Wi-Fi—802.11-1997—was established by the IEEE based on a proposal by Lucent and NTT, with a bitrate of just 2 MBit/s and operating at 2.4GHz. This standard operated based on frequency-hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum technology. This later developed into the popular 802.11b standard in 1999, which upped the speed to 11 Mbit/s. 802.11a came later, switching to 5GHz and using a modulation scheme based around orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).
A diagram from the CSIRO patent for wireless LAN technology, dated 1993.
Given we apparently know who invented Wi-Fi, why are Australians allegedly taking credit? Well, it all comes down to patents. A team at the CSIRO had long been developing wireless networking technologies on its own. In fact, the group
filed a patent on 19 November 1993
entitled “Invention: A Wireless Lan.” The crux of the patent was the idea of using multicarrier modulation to get around a frustrating problem—that of multipath interference in indoor environments. This was followed up with
a later US patent in 1996
following along the same lines.
The patents were filed because the CSIRO team reckoned they’d cracked wireless networking at rates of many megabits per second. But the details differ quite significantly from the modern networking technologies we use today. Read the patents, and you’ll see repeated references to “operating at frequencies in excess of 10 GHz.” Indeed, the diagrams in the patent documents refer to transmissions in the 60 to 61 GHz range. That’s rather different from the mainstream Wi-Fi standards established by the IEEE. The CSIRO tried over the years to find commercial partners to work with to establish its technology, however, little came of it barring a short-lived start-up called Radiata that was swallowed up by Cisco, never to be seen again.
Steve Jobs shocked the crowd with a demonstration of the first mainstream laptop with wireless networking in 1999. Funnily enough, the CSIRO name didn’t come up.
Based on the fact that the CSIRO wasn’t in the 802.11 working group, and that its patents don’t correspond to the frequencies or specific technologies used in Wi-Fi, you might assume that the CSIRO wouldn’t have any right to claim the invention of Wi-Fi. And yet,
the agency’s website
could very much give you that impression! So what’s going on?
The CSIRO had been working on wireless LAN technology at the same time as everyone else. It had, by and large, failed to directly commercialize anything it had developed. However, the agency still had its patents. Thus, in the 2000s, it contested that it effectively held the rights to the techniques developed for effective wireless networking, and that those techniques were used in Wi-Fi standards. After writing to multiple companies demanding payment, it came up short. The CSIRO started taking wireless networking companies to court, charging that various companies had violated its patents and demanding heavy royalties, up to $4 per device in some cases. It contested that its scientists had come up with a unique combination of OFDM multiplexing, forward error correction, and interleaving that was key to making wireless networking practical.
An excerpt from the CSIRO’s Australian patent filing in 1993. The agency’s 1996 US patent covers much of the same ground.
A first test case against a Japanese company called Buffalo Technology went the CSIRO’s way. A follow-up case in 2009 aimed at a group of 14 companies. After four days of testimony, the case would have gone down to a jury decision, many members of which would not have been particularly well educated on the finer points of radio communications. The matter was instead settled for $205 million in the CSIRO’s favor. 2012 saw the Australian group go again, taking on a group of nine companies including T-Mobile, AT&T, Lenovo, and Broadcom. This case ended in a further $229 million settlement paid to the CSIRO.
We know little about what went on in these cases, nor the negotiations involved. Transcripts from the short-lived 2009 case had defence lawyers pointing out that the modulation techniques used in the Wi-Fi standards had been around for decades prior to the CSIRO’s later wireless LAN patent. Meanwhile, the CSIRO stuck to its guns, claiming that it was the combination of techniques that made wireless LAN possible, and that it deserved fair recompense for the use of its patented techniques.
Was this valid? Well, to a degree, that’s how patents work. If you patent an idea, and it’s deemed unique and special, you can generally demand a payment others that like to use it. For better or worse, the CSIRO was granted a US patent for its combination of techniques to do wireless networking. Other companies may have come to similar conclusions on their own, but that didn’t get a patent for it and that left them open to very expensive litigation from the CSIRO.
However, there’s a big caveat here. None of this means that the CSIRO
invented Wi-Fi.
These days, the agency’s website is careful with the wording, noting that it “invented Wireless LAN.”
The CSIRO has published
several comics
about the history of Wi-Fi, which might confuse some as to the agency’s role in the standard. This paragraph is a more reserved explanation, though it accuses other companies of having “less success”—a bold statement given that 802.11 was commercially successful, and the CSIRO’s 60 GHz ideas weren’t. Credit: CSIRO website via screenshot
It’s certainly valid to say that the CSIRO’s scientists did invent a wireless networking technique. The problem is that in the mass media, this has commonly been transliterated to say that the agency invented Wi-Fi, which it obviously did not. Of course, this misconception doesn’t hurt the agency’s public profile one bit.
Ultimately, the CSIRO did file some patents. It did come up with
a
wireless networking technique in the 1990s. But did it invent Wi-Fi? Certainly not. And many will contest that the agency’s patent should not have earned it any money from equipment built to standards it had no role in developing. Still, the myth with persist for some time to come. At least until someone writes a New York Times bestseller on the true and exact history of the real Wi-Fi standards. Can’t wait. | 61 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "7458285",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T14:48:42",
"content": "Al Gore is Australian?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7461734",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,814.378154 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/learning-how-a-nuclear-missile-stays-on-target/ | Learning How A Nuclear Missile Stays On Target | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"Minuteman",
"missile"
] | In 1962, unlike today, most things didn’t have computers in them. After all, the typical computer of the day was a fragile room-sized box that required a gaggle of high priests to service it. But the Minuteman I nuclear missile was stuffed full of pre-GPS navigation equipment and a computer. In a few years, by 1970, the Minuteman III could deliver a warhead 13,000 km with an accuracy of 200 meters. Each one cost about a half million dollars, but that’s almost five million in today’s money. [Ken] takes on a
very detailed tour of the computers and avionics
that were nothing short of a miracle — and a highly classified miracle — in the 1960s.
The inertial navigation relied on a gyroscope, which in those days, were large and expensive. The Minuteman I required alignment with a precise angle relative to the North Star which naturally wasn’t visible from inside the silo. By the time Minuteman II arrived, they’d figured out an easier way to orient the missiles.
The name Minuteman, by the way, came from the weapon’s ability to launch in a minute. The gyros ran, more or less, all the time, and the solid-fuel rocket was always ready to go.
D-37 Computer
What really interested us, though, was the onboard computer. There was a basic model, the D17-B, in the Minuteman I. Later missiles used the D-37 computer. The D-17B was made to fit in a rocket casing and used a serial CPU, presumably to reduce “SWAP” (size, weight, and power). That means the 24-bit CPU was painfully slow, doing, at best, 12,800 additions per second.
The computer had no RAM, but did have a “disk” which was really more like a magnetic drum — common at the time — flattened out. The D-17B was made with discrete transistors — lots of them. The D-37 actually used integrated circuits. There is a picture of a D-17B looking like half of a washing machine tub alongside a D-37, about the size of a serious oscilloscope of those days. Fun fact: the surplus D-17B computers were given away to universities and other organizations for use as a general-purpose microcomputer.
There’s a lot more in the post. Be prepared to spend some time reading and looking at the detailed pictures. While we know nuclear weapons are frightening, we can’t help but admire a radiation-hardened computer built with ICs and able to withstand the shock of a rocket launch built back then.
If you want your own nuclear bunker keyboard,
we’ve seen one
. If you want to administer a Linux system with virtual counter-rotating keys, that’s
possible
, too. | 75 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "7451261",
"author": "thunderbird89",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T12:10:38",
"content": "Summary: “The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t. […]”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "745... | 1,760,371,814.549049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/close-up-on-the-rp2350-hstx-peripheral/ | Close-Up On The RP2350 HSTX Peripheral | Jenny List | [
"Parts",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"HSTX",
"raspberry pi pico 2",
"rp2350",
"serial"
] | The new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 with its RP2350 microcontroller has only been with us for a short time, and thus its capabilities are still being tested. One of the new peripherals is HSTX, for which the description “High speed serial port” does not adequately describe how far it is from the humble UART which the name might suggest.
CNX Software have taken a look at its capabilities
, and it’s worth a read.
With a 150 MHz clock and 8 available pins, it’s a serial output with a combined bandwidth of 2400 Mbps, which immediately leaves all manner of potential for streamed outputs. On the RP2040 for example a DVI output was made using the PIO peripherals, while here the example code shows how to use these pins instead. We’re guessing it will be exploited for all manner of pseudo-analogue awesomeness in the manner we’re used to with the I2S peripherals on the EP32. Of course, there’s no corresponding input, but that still leaves plenty of potential.
Have a quick read of
our launch coverage of the RP2350
, and the Pico 2 board it’s part of. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7446504",
"author": "Zoe",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T08:41:01",
"content": "Important part left out, no receive functionality.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7447056",
"author": "psyke",
"timestamp": "2024-08-2... | 1,760,371,814.437876 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/2024-tiny-games-contest-save-the-stranded-puppies-of-moon-base-p/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Save The Stranded Puppies Of Moon Base P! | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"ESP32"
] | Usually, if something is tiny, it’s probably pretty cute to boot. [Luke J. Barker]’s
lunar navigation game
is no exception to this unwritten rule. And as far as contest rules go, this one seems to fit rather nicely, as it is tiny on more than one level.
Moon Base P (for Puppies) is built upon a XIAO ESP32-C3, an SSD1306 OLED display, and a single button to keep the BOM tidy. In this riveting side-scroller which sort of marries Lunar Lander and Flappy Bird, the top bar is always yellow and displays fuel and such, and the bottom is a rough, blue lunar surface over which you must maneuver your lunar lander. Keep pressing the button to stay up and avoid mountains, or let off the gas to cool the engine.
Fly that thing over the terrain, avoiding stray meteors and picking up free fuel, and then land gently at Moon Base P to save the stranded puppies. But you must keep flying — touch down anywhere but where you’re supposed to, and it’s game over! Once you’ve picked up the puppies, you must fly them safely onward to the rescue pod in order to win. Don’t miss the walk-through and demo after the break. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7450752",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T12:00:21",
"content": "What an adorable game. However, since everything revolves around a single button, I feel that it should be a really nice switch. Non-representative value for the part shown could be 100 gf, while Cherry MX ... | 1,760,371,814.638624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/amiga-interrupted-a-fresh-take-on-amiga-os/ | Amiga, Interrupted: A Fresh Take On Amiga OS | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"amiga 2000",
"amiga os"
] | Serena OS is not just another operating system—it’s a playground for hackers, tinkerers, and Amiga enthusiasts pushing vintage hardware to new limits. Born from modern design principles and featuring pervasive preemptive concurrency and multi-user support,
[dplanitzer]’s Serena OS
is far from ordinary.
Running on Amiga systems with a 68030 or better CPU, it challenges traditional OS concepts by ditching threads in favor of dispatch queues, akin to Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch. The result? A dynamic, flexible kernel that combines forward-thinking design with retro charm.
The real innovation in Serena is its kernel, which uses a virtual processor concept to manage system resources efficiently. Instead of threads, Serena dynamically adjusts a pool of virtual processors based on dispatch queue needs, ensuring tasks are executed with precision and speed. Interrupt handling is also unique: interrupts are converted into semaphore signals, allowing the code to handle these signals at its convenience without missing any, making hardware interactions more controlled, especially where timing is critical.
For Amiga enthusiasts already customizing their setups, Serena OS offers new possibilities. It shares some spirit with projects like AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) but adds its own twist with object-oriented design and cross-platform goals. Whether you’re developing software for your classic Amiga or exploring new hardware interfaces, Serena OS provides a robust and adaptable foundation. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7447496",
"author": "RH",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T09:28:58",
"content": "The Amiga depicted in the article’s header image would not be able to run SerenaOS. The Amiga 2000 did not originally ship with a 68030-class CPU.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,814.599376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/21/ask-hackaday-how-can-we-leverage-tech-for-education/ | Ask Hackaday: How Can We Leverage Tech For Education? | Al Williams | [
"Rants"
] | [
"education",
"mathematics"
] | If you’re like us, you’ve studied the mathematician [Euler], but all you really remember is that you pronounce his name like “oiler” and not much else. [Welch Labs], on the other hand, not only remembers what he learned about logarithms and imaginary numbers but also has
a beautiful video
with helpful 3D graphics to explain the concepts.
This post, however, isn’t about that video. If you are interested in math, definitely watch it. It’s great. But it also got us thinking. What would it be like to be a high school math student today? In our day, we were lucky to have some simple 2D graph to explain concepts. Then it hit us: it probably is exactly the same.
Changing the Subject
Well, maybe not exactly, but the problem is, we are guessing that your math teacher — no offense to him or her — wasn’t the same kind of person [Welch Labs] is. To be fair, we couldn’t have produced that video either. So, the way we see it, you have a few choices.
First, maybe you get lucky and you happen to get a teacher (about math or any other subject) who is just awesome. We are lucky enough to know a few of these people, but you have to admit world-class teachers are rare, and even rarer outside of colleges and universities.
Second, maybe you have a teacher who is greatly engaged and goes out and finds material like this to share. We suspect that goes on a lot, but maybe not as much as it could. There is a whole industry, too, set up to provide
teachers with materials
for profit, but it often isn’t at the same quality level as something like this. That’s unsurprising. If you are a movie studio, not every movie wins the Oscar.
Third, if a student is motivated, you have an extraordinary research library at your fingertips. Individuals create amazing articles, videos, and even courses. Major universities have their course material online for anyone to use, in many cases. You just have to find it.
A Mixed Bag
This, too, is a mixed bag. While you have access to more information, you have to critically evaluate if it is correct or not. You could presume anything you found in a traditional library was probably not patently false. Not that everything in a library is true, but, statistically, the way books used to be produced and library collections created, it was far less likely than finding
false information on the Internet
. On the other hand, how motivated were you as a kid to do things like that? Well, being a Hackaday reader, you probably were. Maybe a better question is how many of your classmates were in the library while you were reading about computers?
In a way, it is like tech support. Sure, AI might not be the best of all possible tech support. But it might be better than
what you probably will get
. Realistically, every teacher can’t be the greatest, and even if they were, they probably don’t have the time to produce huge amounts of high-quality material for their classes.
The Answer? (Or, at Least, the Question)
So what’s the answer? That’s where you come in. How could we make sure that all students get access to high quality resources from everywhere? I frequently hear of kids using Khan Academy, for example, to explain things they aren’t getting from their teachers. But that’s just one resource. Are there curated lists of resources for each subject out there somewhere? If not, why not? What other ways could we get the serious educational material produced on the Web every day into the classroom? I’m sure there are lists, but we’re thinking about something with the go-to recognition of, say Wikipedia. Not just a random blog posting. Let us know what you think and what’s already out there.
Maybe the best scenario is when great teachers
share their materials with the world
. We just need to get the word out. Another good scenario is when great teachers
let their students take the lead
. If you want to see how not to produce educational videos, have a look at
this series of parodies of 1970-era science videos
. | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "7499903",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-21T14:07:10",
"content": "Since this is “Ask Hackaday”, does every comment have to include a question?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7501804",
... | 1,760,371,816.322773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/21/how-jurassic-parks-dinosaur-input-device-bridged-the-stop-motion-and-cgi-worlds/ | HowJurassic Park’sDinosaur Input Device Bridged The Stop-Motion And CGI Worlds | Maya Posch | [
"Art"
] | [
"cgi",
"computer generated imagery",
"stop motion"
] | In a double-blast from the past, [Ian Failes]’
2018 interview
with [Phil Tippett] and others who worked on
Jurassic Park
is a great look at how the dinosaurs in this 1993 blockbuster movie came to be. Originally conceived as stop-motion animatronics with some motion blurring applied using a method called go-motion, a large team of puppeteers was actively working to make turning the book into a movie when [Steven Spielberg] decided to go in a different direction after seeing a computer-generated Tyrannosaurus rex test made by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).
Naturally, this left [Phil Tippett] and his crew rather flabbergasted, leading to a range of puppeteering-related extinction jokes. Of course, it was the early 90s, with computer-generated imagery (CGI) animators being still very scarce. This led to an interesting hybrid solution where [Tippett]’s team were put in charge of the dinosaur motion using a custom gadget called the Dinosaur Input Device (DID). This effectively was like a stop-motion puppet, but tricked out with motion capture sensors.
This way the puppeteers could provide motion data for the CG dinosaur using their stop-motion skills, albeit with the computer handling a lot of interpolation. Meanwhile ILM could handle the integration and sprucing up of the final result using their existing pool of artists. As a bridge between the old and new, DIDs provided the means for both puppeteers and CGI artists to cooperate, creating the first major CGI production that holds up to today.
Even if DIDs went the way of the non-avian dinosaurs, their legacy will forever leave their dino-sized footprints on the movie industry.
Thanks to [Aaron] for the tip.
Top image: Raptor DID. Photo by Matt Mechtley. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7496596",
"author": "adobeflashater again",
"timestamp": "2024-08-21T12:04:21",
"content": "Don’t know what methods were used on Jurrasic 3 graphics, but when the somesortasuraus was ripping the plane fuselage apart?Ad a large, old school, stereo and it was danged entertaining to wa... | 1,760,371,816.652794 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/21/pulling-apart-a-premium-webcam/ | Pulling Apart A Premium WebCam | Al Williams | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"webcam"
] | Over at EDN, [Brian Dipert] has been tearing down web cameras. A few months ago, he broke into a bargain basement camera. This time,
he’s looking into a premium unit
. Although we have to admit from some of what he reports, we are a little surprised at some of the corners cut. For example, it’s a 4K camera that doesn’t
quite
provide a 4K image. Despite a Sony CMOS sensor, [Brian] found the low-light performance to be poor. However, it does carry a much larger price tag than the previous camera examined.
The interesting part is about half way down the page when he tries to open the unit up. It seems like it is getting harder and harder to get into things and this camera was no exception. The device finally gives up. Inside is a relatively unremarkable board with a host of unknown ICs. One interesting item is a gyro chip that determines if the camera is upside down.
[Brian] managed to get the camera back together with no harm. It is interesting to compare it to the
$15 camera he took apart earlier
.
If you want maximum cred, do your video calls
with a Game Boy camera
. Or, at least,
add your own lens
to a webcam. | 29 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7492519",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-08-21T09:04:00",
"content": "Does anyone know what the size is of that weird round coppery thing in half the pictures? This might help to judge the size of other things in those pictures.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,816.726181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/does-solar-energy-make-us-vulnerable/ | Does Solar Energy Make Us Vulnerable? | Al Williams | [
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"power grid",
"solar power"
] | Here’s a hypothetical situation. You decide to build your own steam generator plant and connect it to the electric grid. No matter where you live, you’d probably have to meet a ton of requirements from whoever controls your electric power, almost surely backed by your government. Yet,
according to a recent post by [Bert]
, a version of this is going on in Europe and, probably, in many more places: unregulated solar power inverters driving the grid.
If you have just a few solar panels hanging around, that probably isn’t a problem. But there are a sizeable number of panels feeding power — and that number seems to grow daily — having control of the inverters could potentially allow you to limit the grid’s capacity or — if the inverters allowed it — possibly take the grid down by feeding power incorrectly back into the grid.
According to [Burt], a small number of companies control most of the inverters in his country — the Netherlands — and there is virtually no regulation about how they operate. While we don’t think he’s suggesting they would act maliciously, you don’t have to search the news very much to find cases where companies have been hacked or made a mistake that caused major impacts to important systems.
Apparently, inverters in the Netherlands do have to meet certain technical standards, but the post since that’s widely unenforced. But the real point is that the companies managing the switches are not regulated or managed. [Bert] thinks that EU-wide legislation is needed to forestall some future disaster.
You might think this isn’t a realistic scenario, but you just have to think about
Crowdstrike
to realize it could happen. Or other
major network outages
. We aren’t usually fans of more regulation, but [Burt] makes some interesting points. What do you think? | 86 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "7488052",
"author": "tomás zerolo",
"timestamp": "2024-08-21T05:37:45",
"content": "Thanks for the heads-up.I’ve put some PV on my roof, with an inverter. Of course, I’ve yet refused to install any app. It seems to be quietly doing its job without any connectivity (unless it has hac... | 1,760,371,816.955079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/wow-it-wasnt-aliens-after-all/ | WOW! It Wasn’t Aliens After All! | Jenny List | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"Arecibo",
"Radio Astronomy",
"The Wow! Signal"
] | There may not be many radio astronomy printouts that have achieved universal fame, but the one from Ohio State University’s Big Ear telescope upon which astronomer [Jerry R. Ehman] wrote “WOW!” is definitely one of them. It showed an intense one-off burst that defied attempts to find others like it, prompting those who want to believe to speculate that it might have been the product of an extraterrestrial civilization. Sadly for them the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo
has provided an explanation
by examining historical data from the Arecibo telescope.
The radio signal in question lay on the hydrogen line frequency at 1420 MHz, and by looking at weaker emissions from cold hydrogen clouds they suggest that the WOW! signal may have come from a very unusual stimulation of one of these clouds. A magnetar is a type of neutron star which can create an intense magnetic field, and their suggestion is that Big Ear was in the lucky position of being in the right place at the right time to see one of these through a hydrogen cloud. The field would excite the hydrogen atoms to maser-like emission of radiation, leading to the unexpected blip on that printout.
There’s a question as to whether speculation about aliens is helpful to the cause of science, but in answer to that we’d like to remind readers that we wouldn’t be talking about magnetars now without it, and that the WOW! signal was in fact part of an early SETI experiment. Better keep on searching then!
Meanwhile readers with long memories
will recollect us looking at the WOW! signal before
. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "7483363",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2024-08-21T02:09:31",
"content": "Peter Hogarth antecipated that, and he was right! Thank you mr. Lem!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7483808",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,816.516695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/are-you-using-your-calipers-wrong/ | Are You Using Your Calipers Wrong? | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"calipers",
"measurement devices"
] | It used to be that calipers were not a common item to have in an electronics lab. However, smaller parts, the widespread use of 3D printers and machining tools, and — frankly — cheap imported calipers have made them as commonplace as an ordinary ruler in most shops. But are you using yours correctly? [James Gatlin] wasn’t and he wants to
show you what he learned
about using them correctly.
The video that you can see below covers digital and vernier calipers. You might think digital calipers are more accurate, in practice, they are surprisingly accurate, although the digital units are easier to read.
Regardless of how you read them, there are four main methods of using the device. The big jaws measure the outside of things, and the tips on the other side can measure inner spaces. The video shows how to line up for the best accuracy.
The depth and step measurements are also common features and require care to position correctly, depending on what you are measuring. The step measurement is one we always forget about.
We didn’t realize that when you see CE on the back of your calipers, it might mean “conformité européenne” to reflect standards compliance, or China Export which means… well, probably nothing other than it came from China. How do you tell the difference? The video shows you.
If you have digital calipers,
why not hack them
? There’s
more than one tweak
you can make to them. | 50 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "7478709",
"author": "Pudlo",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T23:22:17",
"content": "The “China Export” thing is a myth.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#MisuseThe [European] Commission responded that it was unaware of the existence of any “Chinese Export” mark and that, in its vie... | 1,760,371,816.60537 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/20/pulling-hydrogen-out-of-the-water/ | Pulling Hydrogen Out Of The Water | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"hydrogen"
] | In theory, water and electric current will cause electrolysis and produce oxygen and hydrogen as the water breaks apart. In practice, doing it well can be tricky. [Relic] shows an efficient way to produce
an electrolysis cell
using a few plastic peanut butter jars and some hardware.
The only tricky point is that you need hardware made of steel and not zinc or other materials. Well, that and the fact that the gasses you produce are relatively dangerous.
To that end, [Relic] includes an “I don’t want to explode switch” in the system by routing tubes of gas through a second jar filled with water so that the water will block its return.
Of course, we’ve seen the same setup created with a battery, two coils of wire, and some test tubes, but this can certainly produce more hydrogen faster. Like most of these designs, you can scale them by adding more steel parts. The more surface area, the more gas you’ll produce.
We’ve seen a number of
similar generators
before, but each one is a little different. If you want to get really fancy, you can turn to automation. | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "7472913",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T20:21:17",
"content": "When I made a hydrolysis machine when I was a teenager (13-14?) I had a lot of problems with corrosion. My solution was I pulled the carbon rods of the D cells. I very tightly tied stranded copper wire t... | 1,760,371,816.207528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/a-trackball-retro-laptop/ | A Trackball Retro Laptop | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"luggable",
"ortholinear keyboard",
"portable computer",
"track ball"
] | While track pads and mice dominate the pointing device landscape today, there was a time when track balls were a major part of the scene. In order to really sell the retro chops of his portable computer, [Ominous Industries] designed a
clip-on style track ball
for his retro Raspberry Pi laptop.
Starting with a half circle shape, he designed the enclosure in Fusion360 to house the guts of a USB trackball. Using the pattern along a path feature of the software, he was able to mimic the groovy texture of the main device on the trackball itself. Flexures in the top of the track ball case with pads glued on actuate the buttons.
We appreciate the honesty of the cuts showing how often the Pi can get grumpy at the extra wide display in this video as well as the previous issues
during the laptop build
. The bezel around the screen is particularly interesting, being affixed with magnets for easy access when needing to work on the screen.
Retro portables are having a moment. We just covered the
Pi Portable 84
and previously saw
one inspired by the GRiD Compass
. If you’re more interested in trackballs, maybe give this
trackball ring
or
the Ploopy trackball
a look? | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7461887",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-20T15:22:06",
"content": "My wife’s old laptop (1993 Toshiba 386 T4700 something) has a clip on trackball.Every now and then I look for a replacement floppy drive for it in order to be able to load a de... | 1,760,371,816.363597 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/cost-optimized-raspberry-pi-5-released-with-2-gb-ram-and-d0-stepping/ | Cost-Optimized Raspberry Pi 5 Released With 2 GB RAM And D0 Stepping | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"2GB",
"Pi 5",
"Raspberry Pi 5"
] | When the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC was released last year, it came in 4 and 8 GB RAM variants, which currently retail from around $80 USD and €90 for the 8 GB variant to $60 and €65 for the 4 GB variant. Now Raspberry Pi has
announced the launch
of a third Raspberry Pi 5 variant: a 2 GB version which also features a new stepping of the BCM2712 SoC. This would sell for about $50 USD and feature the D0 stepping that purportedly strips out a lot of the ‘dark silicon’ that is not used on the SBC.
These unused die features are likely due to the Broadcom SoCs used on Raspberry Pi SBCs being effectively recycled set-top box SoCs and similar. This means that some features that make sense in a set-top box or such do not make sense for a general-purpose SBC, but still take up die space and increase the manufacturing defect rate. The D0 stepping thus would seem to be based around an optimized die, with as only possible negative being a higher power density due to a (probably) smaller die, making active cooling even more important.
As for whether 2 GB is enough for your purposes depends on your use case, but knocking $10 off the price of an RPi 5 could be worth it for some. Perhaps more interesting is that this same D0 stepping of the SoC is likely to make it to the other RAM variants as well. We’re awaiting benchmarks to see what the practical difference is between the current C1 and new D0 steppings.
Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip. | 42 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "7422556",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T20:10:24",
"content": "Today I received an email from Seeed Studio announcing a 2Gb version of the Pi 5.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7425057... | 1,760,371,816.81475 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/historical-microsoft-and-apple-artifacts-among-first-christies-auction-of-living-computers-museum/ | Historical Microsoft And Apple Artifacts Among First Christie’s Auction Of Living Computers Museum | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"computer history museum",
"retrocomputing"
] | Recently the Christie’s auction house
released the list of items
that would be
going up for sale
as part of the first lot of Living Computer Museum items, under the banner “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection”. One auction covers many
‘firsts’ in the history of computing
, including a range of computers like an Apple 1, and a PDP-10, as well as early Microsoft memos and code printouts. The other auctions include such items like a Gemini Spacesuit as worn by [Ed White] and a signed 1939 letter from [Albert Einstein] to [US President Roosevelt] on the discovery by the Germans of a fissionable form of uranium from which a nuclear weapon could be constructed.
We
previously reported
on this auction when it was first announced in June of this year. At the time many were saddened at seeing the only computer history and its related educational facilities vanish, and there were worries among those who had
donated items
to the museum what would happen to these now that the museum’s inventory was being put up for sale. As these donations tend to be unconditional, the museum is free to do with the item as they see fit, but ‘being sold at auction’ to probably a private collector was likely not on their mind when filling in the donation form.
As the first auctions kick off in a few days we will just have to wait and see where the museum’s inventory ends up at, but it seems likely that many of these items which were publicly viewable will now be scattered across the globe in private collections.
Top image: A roughly 180° panorama of the “conditioned” room of the Living Computer Museum, Seattle, Washington, USA. Taken in 2014. (Credit: Joe Mabel) | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7422119",
"author": "Adrian",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T19:57:34",
"content": "The most depressing part is, that the proceeds will disappear in a “charity” (aka slush fund) of billionaire heirs. They probably don’t even pay taxes on it like us lowly Ebayers have to these days.",
... | 1,760,371,816.253496 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/portable-router-build-finding-an-lte-modem/ | Portable Router Build: Finding An LTE Modem | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"network",
"router"
] | Ever want your project equipped with a cellular interface for a data uplink? Hop in, I have been hacking on this for a fair bit! As you might remember, I’m building a router,
I told you about how I picked its CPU board
, and learned some lessons from me daily-driving it as a for a bit – that prototype has let me learn about the kind of extra hardware this router needs.
Here, let’s talk about LTE modems for high data throughput, finding antennas to make it all work, and give you a few tips that should generally help out. I’d like to outline a path that increases your chances of finding a modem working for you wonderfully – the devices that we build, should be reliable.
Narrowing It Down
If you look at the LTE modem selection, you might be a little overwhelmed: Simcom, Qualcomm, uBlox, Sierra, Telit, and a good few other manufacturers package baseband chipsets into modules and adjust the chipset-maker-provided firmware. The modems will be available in many different packages, too, many of them solderable, and usually, they will be available on mPCIe cards too. If you want to get a modem for data connections for a project, I argue that you should go for mPCIe cards first, and here’s why.
A typical mPCIe modem – despite the socket, it only requires a USB2 connection.
By [Dipl-Ingo],
CC BY-SA 3.0
A mPCIe or M.2 card is a standardized package with everything you need – just connect 3.3 V at about 1-2 A, your data link, and a SIM slot. It frees you up from wiring up everything needed for the bare module to work, soldering the modules that often come in LGA packages, routing antenna connector tracks with proper impedance and adding antenna matching networks, and – all you need is a mPCIe socket and some capacitors next to it.
Using a module makes sense if you’re making something really tiny – and even then, you should test with a mPCIe card in the first revision, which is why modem manufacturers usually have them available in the first place: mPCIe cards are testing platforms. A lot of mPCIe modules are also available cheaply, since they’re also used in laptops, so the second-hand market in your country is going to have some mPCIe cards you can try out, and so will eBay.
Then, there’s the interface question. You might have looked into embedded modem datasheets already. Often, you will see a UART interface, maybe SPI or even SDIO, and, invariably, USB. If you are doing low-throughput data, UART or anything else might just do wonderfully. For “building an LTE uplink router” purpose, the easiest interface to use is USB, and the reason is multi-fold. It’s the most popular path, so you will find more modem options, more documentation, more open-source support, and encounter fewer problems along the way.
Similar modem but in M.2, B-key as expected.
By [Smial]
USB has been the most convenient way to get an LTE uplink for a while now – and it’s what the industry has chosen. It’s a high throughput link, it’s standardized, and it has even been converging on open-source-friendly and well-travelled interfaces. If a particular USB modem doesn’t work out of the box, you are significantly more likely to find someone else having faced and solved the same problem, just because plugging a USB device into your port is easy.
If you’re using a M.2 modem, you might even find a USB3 option, in case you want your uplink to be seriously high-speed! In this prototype, I’m using a mPCIe breakout, and for testing out M.2 router cards, I am using a mPCIe to M.2 adapter.
All done? Nope. You do need testing, however, because you can’t just pick any modem. You might have to try one, two, or three different modems before you settle on a workable option, and the reason is simple.
Some Tailoring Required
Specifically, configuration interfaces are where things start to break. Older software modems use a virtual serial port over USB for both data and configuration. In slightly more recent times, you would get a combination of a virtual Ethernet card for data and a serial port for AT command configuration.
AT commands have gotten old, however, so interfaces like QMI have taken hold, and now you better use it, even though AT commands are the traditional way. QMI configuration is often needed for the new and relatively less explored interfaces. Sometimes a feature is broken when configured through UART, but works over QMI. Sometimes the UART connection bringup process is just not as well documented. It makes sense – at some point, we need to shed the cruft of the Hayes command set, so don’t get too comfortable. Firmware loading tools are another gotcha. With some old modems, like the Gobi cards, you need a loader script and a matching firmware to go with it. Be prepared to try out a firmware image or two before the modem works the way you need it to. And be prepared to hit dead ends.
This means that you will want to have a setup where you can try out a few different modems if needed. Thankfully, you have a mPCIe socket like I suggested, right? Again, it’s just USB and an amp at 3.3 V; you don’t even need any GPIOs to spare. Some modems even support direct power from a single-cell LiIon battery. This is explicitly stated in the M.2 standard, so if you opt for a M.2 B-key slot, you might be able to skip on a voltage conversion step.
Getting Antennas Quickly
Switching between M.2 and mPCIe can be done with a simple adapter. But beware – they will also use different antenna connectors, with mPCIe modems using uFL connectors and M.2 modems using wFL. So let’s talk about antennas.
You shouldn’t connect a modem to a network without an antenna attached. Chances are, your modem has antenna detection circuitry built-in, but there’s always the rare modem that will try to transmit out of an empty antenna socket and gets its signal reflected back into itself, possibly damaging its transmitter circuits. So, you have a mPCIe modem and it needs antennas that can work at LTE frequencies – how to proceed?
The simplest answer is to get some laptop WWAN antennas out of old laptops, or buy a set of replacement laptop WWAN antennas. These are the easiest two ways to find an antenna with a uFL connector that works for LTE. Don’t use WiFi antennas – they’re tuned for 2.4 GHz in a way that will likely make them useless for WWAN. The antennas that I currently use have been taken out of a Thinkpad that didn’t even have a WWAN card inside. These antennas tend to be designed to work from within the laptop chassis, sure, but they should be good enough outside of it. One nuance – they will have long cables, so you will want to shorten them to your liking or tuck them away somewhere.
Don’t have laptop antennas? Aliexpress will deliver, but you have to be careful there, as not all antennas sold as “LTE” are actually capable of working at these frequencies, mis-labelling and shoddy tuning is commonplace when it comes to hobbyists, because we often don’t really check. If you don’t have something like a NanoVNA, you will want to at least do some simple tests – buy a few antennas, swap them in one by one, remembering to power the modem down, and check the RSSI and the data rates. Otherwise, you can get antennas from specialty shops, but be prepared to pay a bit extra and maybe need some uFL to SMA adapters.
As long as you get the proper antennas and distinguish between wFL and uFL connectors when getting them, you should be in the clear, and that’s about all you need to have an LTE modem module used in your project.
Debug Interface For a Rainy Day
Here’s the last part to mind – you will want to make your initial prototypes flexible for debugging, especially for OpenWRT, which doesn’t have much of an onboard debugging toolkit. For instance, if you have a USB connection in your system, make it tappable so that you can plug a USB cable and have the modem be rerouted to an external device. A single USB2 2:1 mux and a USB-C connector should do wonders – two pairs of zero ohm jumpers are tempting but note that they increase the iteration time a lot when debugging.
Modems are tested on particular OSes, mostly Windows in practice, so when you’re facing a problem, you really want to be able to figure out if this a problem in your drivers, in your power supply, or in your modem’s firmware. How will you update your modem’s firmware for testing purposes, will you have to port a firmware update tool to OpenWRT, or will it be as simple as plugging a cable into a different computer? If your link is dropping out, can you easily check whether that happens if you use a full-fledged Linux computer with an Ubuntu install, or a Windows VM? These are good reasons to have a separate USB line.
So to sum up: use a socket like M.2 or mPCIe so that you can test modem compatibility and stability. Modems are black boxes with closed firmware, and you have to make sure you don’t lock yourself into a glitchy one by having designed a board for a bespoke footprint LGA or QFN-like module. When getting antennas, laptop antennas are an easy shortcut; otherwise, get a few different antennas and do some range tests. And finally, make your USB connection tappable because it helps for debugging.
The modem I went is the EC25 mPCIe card – it’s a card that was put into a lot of laptops, and it even has a GPS antenna hookup point, which is nice to have. Funnily enough, it appears to be at least somewhat compatible with the open firmware that the PinePhone EG25 modem has – we might talk about that in imminent future. Next time, I’d like to talk about OpenWRT and all the ways you can hack on it – it’s a wonderful Linux distribution, but it’s different from the others, and I hope that showing my workflow can help you! | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7418850",
"author": "Thorsten von Eicken",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T18:40:21",
"content": "I find the biggest hassles are getting a SIM card with good rate from a provider that allows data-only devices and then to ensure that the cellular network accepts the data-only device IMEI (V... | 1,760,371,817.014264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/get-more-freedom-with-this-guitar-pedal/ | Get More Freedom With This Guitar Pedal | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"axis",
"degrees of freedom",
"guitar",
"IMU",
"midi",
"music",
"pedal",
"pitch",
"Roll",
"rp2040",
"yaw"
] | When the electric guitar was first produced in the 1930s, there was some skepticism among musicians as to whether or not this instrument would have lasting impact or be a flash-in-the-pan novelty. Since this was more than a decade before the invention of the transistor, it would have been hard then to imagine the possibilities that a musician nowadays would have with modern technology to shape the sound of an instrument like this. People are still innovating in this space as well as new technology appears, like [Gary Rigg] who has
added a few extra degrees of freedom to a guitar effects pedal
.
A traditional expression pedal, like a
wah-wah pedal
, uses a single motion to change an aspect of the sound of the guitar, and is generally controlled with the musician’s foot. [Gary]’s pedal, on the other hand, can be manipulated in three different ways to control separate elements of the instrument’s sound. It can be pitched forward and back like a normal effects pedal, but also rolled side-to-side and twisted around its yaw axis. The pedal has a built-in IMU to measure the various position changes of the pedal, which is then translated by an RP2040 microcontroller to a MIDI signal which controls the three different aspects of the sound digitally.
While the yaw motion might be difficult for a guitarist to create with their foot while playing, the idea for this pedal is still excellent. Adding in a few more degrees of freedom gives the musician more immediate control over the sound of their instrument and opens up ways of playing that might not be possible or easy with multiple pedals, with the MIDI allowing for versatility that might not be available in many analog effects pedals. Not every pedal needs MIDI though; with the help of a Teensy
this digital guitar pedal has all its effects built into a self-contained package
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7413684",
"author": "Zoe",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T16:09:48",
"content": "Wrong side up, usb should be on bottom.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7414378",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T16:2... | 1,760,371,817.402251 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/this-is-not-a-laptop-its-a-kvm-combo/ | This Is Not A Laptop, It’s A KVM Combo | Donald Papp | [
"Crowd Funding",
"Featured",
"Reviews"
] | [
"kvm",
"laptop",
"portable monitor"
] | A spare monitor and keyboard are handy things to have around, but they’re a bit of a hassle. They are useful for hardware development, plugging in to headless servers, or firing up a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer (SBC). If that’s something you do and portability and storage space are important to you, then you may be interested in the
CrowView Note
.
I got an opportunity to test and provide feedback on an early version of this unusual device, which is functionally a portable spare monitor plus keyboard (and touchpad) without the bulk and extra cables. Heck, it’s even giving me ideas as the guts of a Cyberdeck build. Let’s take a look.
What It Is
It
really
looks like a laptop, but it’s actually a 14″ 1920 x 1280 monitor and USB keyboard in a laptop form factor.
There is also an integrated trackpad, speakers and mic, and a rechargeable battery. That makes it capable of providing its own power, and it can even function as a power bank in a pinch. There’s an HDMI input on one side, and on the other is a full-featured USB-C port that accepts video input via the DisplayPort altmode.
Pictured here is a Raspberry Pi 5 with optional PCB adapter to eliminate cables. The three ports (HDMI in, USB-C 5 V out, and USB-A for peripherals) provide all the board needs.
The CrowView Note is a pretty useful device for a workbench where one is often plugging hardware in for development or testing, because there’s no need to manage a separate monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
It is not a laptop, but attaching an SBC like a Raspberry Pi makes it act like one. The three ports conveniently located on the left-hand side (HDMI in, USB-C out for power to the SBC, and USB-A in for peripherals like keyboard and trackpad) are all that are needed in this case. Elecrow offers a “cable eliminator” PCB adapters to make the process of connecting a Raspberry Pi 5 or a Jetson Nano as simple as possible. The result is something that looks and works just like a laptop.
Well,
almost
. The SBC will still be a separate piece of hardware, whether connected by cables or by one of Elecrow’s PCB adapters. The result is OK for bench work, but especially in the case of the PCB adapter, not particularly rugged. Still, it’s a nice option and makes working on such boards convenient and cable-free.
What It Isn’t
Visually the CrowView note looks so much like a laptop that it bears repeating: this is not a laptop. There are no processing brains whatsoever inside. It’s a portable and rechargeable monitor, keyboard, mic, and speakers in a laptop form factor.
Also, it is not a laptop
kit
. It’s got all the right hardware to act like one, but there’s no way to truly securely or semi-permanently attach an SBC. Attaching an SBC like a Raspberry Pi 5 can be done with cables or one of Elecrow’s PCB adapters, but the result is more a convenience than something that would survive being loaded into a bag or backpack and carried around.
Use Cases, and Video Input Options
A device like this is handy for any situation that would require a spare monitor and keyboard, like configuring headless systems or working with development kits. An HDMI and USB cable are all that’s really needed to provide monitor and keyboard/touchpad functionality in this way, and the built-in rechargeable battery means it can power itself as well as attached hardware.
The USB-C port on the left is a 5 V output for exactly this purpose, but the one on the right side is a full-featured port that supports modes such as power delivery (PD) and DisplayPort video over USB-C. Devices that support video in this way include some mobile phones, and portable devices like Valve’s Steam Deck (shown here.)
The only catch for video over USB-C is that both the device
and
the cable must support it. The DisplayPort altmode is one of
USB-C’s high-speed interfaces
and requires the cable to have the right pairs connected, or it won’t work. (Since cables all look the same from the outside, this is where a
USB cable tester
comes in handy.)
The left side has HDMI input, USB-A for keyboard/touchpad, and a USB-C for 5 V out.
Right side USB-C port supports video, as long as both device and cable support it.
A USB cable tester comes in handy for confirming all the right pairs are connected.
The Electrow Note is rechargeable, light, and charges and handles just like a laptop. It’s far less bulky than a standalone monitor and keyboard/mouse. This makes it attractive for use on a crowded workbench, or in field work where portability is key.
Limitations and Quirks
In my testing of an early version of the device, I found a couple quirks that are worth keeping in mind.
One is that this device is a monitor and keyboard/mouse all in one, and they aren’t really completely independent devices. That is to say, if the monitor isn’t getting a useable video signal, the display goes to sleep and seems to take the keyboard and touchpad functionality with it.
For example, pressing CAPS LOCK won’t toggle the caps lock indicator light because the keyboard isn’t “awake” without a video signal. I was unable to use the device just as a USB keyboard/mouse and ignore plugging in the monitor. Similarly, with no valid input video signal functions like brightness adjustment or using the monitor’s OSD menu are inaccessible. (Input switching and battery level display do work, however.)
Related to the above, the interface for adjusting monitor functions is basic, and understanding how it works may save time and frustration. As with many laptops, the function key row doubles as device controls with F1 for video input selection, F5 and F6 adjusting brightness down and up, and so on. On the version I tested, the default configuration is to have the function key row act as monitor controls. To send a literal F1 keypress from the keyboard, one must press Fn+F1. It’s possible to swap this behavior, but the setting reverts at the next power cycle, which led to some head-scratching on my part while troubleshooting.
The CrowView Note’s interface — while functional — isn’t completely obvious at first. On a workbench, one might be plugging a device like this into hardware that may not be working as it should, and its quirks can compound troubleshooting headaches unless one knows what to expect.
Does It Have a Place On Your Workbench, Or In Your Next Project?
Tabletop space and storage space are at premiums for most of us. The CrowView Note is an attractive all-in-one alternative to separate devices, especially with its rechargeable battery. That it includes speaker and mic and can work as a USB power bank in a pinch is a nice touch.
Honestly, it is also giving me DIY
cyberdeck build
ideas. Monitor, keyboard, speaker, mic, touchpad, and a 5000 mAh battery with charging circuitry built-in? It’s not a bad bundle of hardware for $169 USD. Elecrow is currently
accepting pre-orders for the CrowView Note via a crowdfunding campaign
if you’re interested.
How often do you find yourself needing to break out a monitor and keyboard, and what’s your favorite solution? Do you see a device like this as a space-saving tool, or more the basis of a hardware project like a cyberdeck build? Could you or have you DIYed something like this on the cheap? Let us know in the comments. | 67 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "7409989",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T14:25:53",
"content": "So this is great but really reminds me of something that has been bugging me for years.. Why not implement a switchbutton on a regular laptop essentially opening up an HDMI IN and a USB for mouse and keyboa... | 1,760,371,817.628974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/building-a-paper-tape-reader-to-read-bytes/ | Building A Paper Tape Reader To Read Bytes | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"paper tape",
"punched tape"
] | Over at the
Usagi Electric
farm, [David Lovett]’s custom 1-bit, vacuum tube-based computer (UEVTC for short) has been coming along well the past years, matching and exceeding the Motorola MC14500B 1-bit industrial control unit (ICU) that it is heavily inspired by. What is still missing, however, is a faster way to get data into the computer than manually toggling switches. The obvious choice is to make a (punched) paper tape reader, but how does one go about this, and what options exist here? With a few historical examples as reference and the tape reader on the impressive 1950s Bendix G-15 which [David] happens to have lounging around, [David]
takes us in a new video
through the spiraling complexity of what at first glance seems like a simple engineering challenge.
Photodiodes in the tape reader of the Bendix G-15. (Credit: David Lovett, Usagi Electric)
Punched paper tape
saw significant use alongside punched paper cards and magnetic tape, and despite their low bit density, if acid-free paper (or e.g. mylar) is used, rolls of paper tape should remain readable for many decades. So
how to read
these perforations in the paper? This can be done mechanically, or optically, with in both case the feedrate an important consideration.
Right off the bat the idea of a mechanical reader was tossed out due to tape wear, with [David] digging into his stack of photodetector tubes. After looking at a few rather clunky approaches involving such tubes, the photodiodes in the Bendix G-15’s tape reader were instead used as inspiration for a design. These are 1.8 mm diameter photodiodes, which aren’t super common, but have the nice property that they align exactly with the holes in the paper tape.
This left building a proof-of-concept on a breadboard with some incandescent bulbs and one of the photodiode to demonstrate that a valid logic signal could be produced. This turned out to be the case, clearing the construction of the actual tape reader, which will feature in upcoming videos. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7405913",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T12:33:22",
"content": "Instead of reling on small photodetector that are not always available, use small leds, that are much more common, and a single photodetector.You can also use the LEDs as a photodetector.Both cases can b... | 1,760,371,817.354249 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/19/an-open-source-6kw-gan-motor-controller/ | An Open Source 6kW GaN Motor Controller | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware"
] | [
"driver",
"GaN",
"mosfet",
"motor"
] | We don’t know how you feel when designing hardware, but we get uncomfortable at the extremes. High voltage or current, low noise figures, or extreme frequencies make us nervous. [Orion Serup] from CrabLabs has been turning up a few of those variables
and has created a
fairly beefy 3-phase motor driver using GaN technology
that can operate
up to 80V at 70A. GaN semiconductors are a newer technology that enables greater power handling in smaller packages than seems possible, thanks to high electron mobility and thermal conductivity in the material compared to silicon.
The KiCAD schematic shows a typical high-power driver configuration, broken down into a gate pre-driver, the driver itself, and the following current and voltage sense sub-circuits. As is typical with high-power drivers, these operate in a half-bridge configuration with identical N-channel GaN transistors (specifically part
EPC2361
) driven by dedicated gate drivers (that’s the pre-driver bit) to feed enough current into the device to enable it to switch quickly and reliably.
The design uses the
LM1025 low-side driver chip
for this task, as you’d be hard-pushed to drive a GaN transistor with discrete components! You may be surprised that the half-bridge driver uses a pair of N-channel devices, not a symmetric P and N arrangement, as you might use to drive a low-power DC motor. This is simply because, at these power levels, P-channel devices are a rarity.
Why are P-channel devices rare? N-channel devices utilise electrons as the majority charge carrier, but P-channel devices utilise holes, and the
mobility
of holes in GaN is very low compared to that of electrons, resulting in much worse ON-resistance in a P-channel and, as a consequence, limited performance. That’s why you rarely see P-channel devices in a circuit like this.
Of course, schematic details are only part of the problem. High-power design at the PCB level also requires careful consideration. As seen from the project images, this involves heavy, thick copper traces on two or more heavily via-stitched layers to maximise copper volume and lower resistance as far as possible. But, you can overdo this and end up with too much inductance in critical areas, quickly killing many high-power devices. Another vital area is the footprint design for the GaN device and how it connects to the rest of the circuit. Get this wrong or mess up the soldering, and you can quickly end up with a much worse performance!
We’ve seen DIY high-power controllers here a few times. Here’s an
EV controller
that uses discrete power modules.
Another design we saw a few years ago
drives IGBTs for a power output of 90kW. | 35 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7401761",
"author": "ziew",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T10:03:25",
"content": "I never looked into GaN semiconductors, so I’m a bit confused. I was trying to find some beefy transistors on the rendered images to no avail. Are those tiny blue blobs actual transistors handling 70A of con... | 1,760,371,817.294069 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/machining-copper-from-algaecide/ | Machining Copper From Algaecide | Al Williams | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"algaecide",
"copper",
"machining",
"smelting"
] | We love it when we find someone on the Internet who has the exact same problem we do and then solves it. [Hyperspace Pirate] starts a recent video by saying, “Oh no! I need to get rid of the algae in my pond, but I bought too much algaecide. If only there were a way to turn all this
excess into CNC machined parts
.” OK, we’ll admit that we don’t actually have this problem, but maybe you do?
Algaecide is typically made with copper sulfate. There are several ways to extract the copper, and while it is a little more expensive than buying copper, it is cost-competitive. Electrolysis works, but it takes a lot of power and time. Instead, he puts a more reactive metal in the liquid to generate a different sulfate, and the copper should precipitate out.
As you might expect, the details are the problem here. He first tried scrap steel. It worked, but it took a long time. He switched to aluminum, which was faster but required some salt to strip off the oxide. Once he had 1 kg of copper, it was time to heat it up.
Melting it was another set of issues and solutions. He eventually gets a reasonable cube of copper. Then it was off to the CNC mill, which had its own set of issues. But in the end, it looked OK. Some chemical aging made it look interesting.
Honestly, maybe just buy copper, but it sure was interesting and educational watching it all work. As a bonus, he took the copper dust from machining and converted it back into copper sulfate, completing the circle.
Usually, our chemical interest in copper is
making it go away
. Or
plating it onto something
. | 5 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7410456",
"author": "velli",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T14:40:07",
"content": "Most of us might want to use old PCBs as a copper source:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214993722001130And those of us with too much algae might want to try reducing nutrient inputs... | 1,760,371,817.210075 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/quantum-sensor-uses-synthetic-diamond/ | Quantum Sensor Uses Synthetic Diamond | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"diamond",
"magnetometer",
"quantum"
] | Diamonds are nearly perfect crystals, but not totally perfect. The defects in these crystals give the stones their characteristic colors. But one type of defect, the NV —
nitrogen-vacancy
— center, can hold a particular spin, and you can change that spin with the correct application of energy. [Asianometry] explains why this is important in the video below.
Interestingly, even at room temperature, an NV center stays stable for a long time. Even more importantly, you can measure the spin nondestructively by detecting light emissions from the center.
There are obvious applications for quantum computing, but an even more practical application is sensing magnetic fields. These could replace SQUIDs, which are often used for sensitive magnetic measurements but require cold temperatures to support superconductivity.
Of course, you have to create a diamond artificially to get the NV centers the way you want and it turns out that semiconductor manufacturing tools can help produce the diamonds you need.
The last time we looked in on diamond defects, the proposal was to
use them for data storage
. It seems like this could be easier than holding out for
room-temperature superconductors
to improve SQUIDs. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7391473",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T03:11:54",
"content": "Actual link to information aboutnitrogen-vacancy center.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7394351",
"author": "tomás",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,817.161857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/hackaday-links-august-18-2024/ | Hackaday Links: August 18, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"74HCxx",
"autonomous",
"bicycle",
"bluetooth",
"derailleur",
"driverless",
"fft",
"fpga",
"hackaday links",
"horn",
"job",
"parametric",
"racing",
"san francisco",
"search",
"spreadsheet",
"tootle",
"vulnerability",
"Waymo",
"wireless"
] | They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of
honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning
. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in
a slow-motion ballet
of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to
tootle their horn trumpets melodiously
if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.
From the “Tech Doesn’t Make Everything Better” department, we’ve got news of
a vulnerability in high-end racing bicycles
that opens up a new vector for cheating. While our bike has been sitting sadly idle for the last twenty-odd years, apparently shifting technology has changed a lot, to the point where high-end derailleurs are no longer connected to handlebar-mounted shift lever by Bowden cables but now have servos that are linked to the shifters via Bluetooth. Anyone with more than a few minutes of experience with Bluetooth accessories and their default “123456” passwords can see where this is going. While there are no specific instances of cheating detailed in the story, one can imagine the hilarity to be had with a Flipper Zero while sitting on the side of a road at a course upgrade. To be sure, there are
other ways to cheat
, but we’re not sure we see the advantages of wireless shifting that offset the risks in this case.
Only 94 percent? A recent study claims to have
quantified business spreadsheet errors
, finding that 94% have critical problems. They came to this conclusion by mining literature from journal articles dating back to 1987, but rather than looking for papers with associated spreadsheets and analyzing them for errors, they looked for papers that discussed spreadsheet quality assurance. So this is sort of a meta-study, which makes us doubt the 94% finding. Still, we’d say it’s a safe bet that there are a lot of spreadsheets out there with critical errors, and that spreadsheet abuse is pretty rampant overall.
They say that if you’re not looking for your next job, you’re just waiting to get fired. That’s pretty much a tautology since there are only two — OK, three — ways out of any job, but it’s still good to always be looking for your next opportunity. So you might want to check out
eejobboard
, which allows you to do a parametric job search in the electrical engineering space. Pretty cool stuff.
And finally, we don’t have any information on this other than what you see in the video, but we’d love to learn more about these
hardware FFTs
. The video shows two implementations, one using a Zync 7020 FPGA, and one that uses over a thousand 74HC-series chips to do the same thing. If anyone out there knows the OP on this one, we’d love to get in touch. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7392603",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T03:44:54",
"content": "I can’t imagine running shifters off of coin ($$$) cells, tiny motors grit and gunk to save having anything outside of the tube frame. No cables inside either. If the shifters ran off a 18650 with wirin... | 1,760,371,817.718015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/2024-tiny-games-contest-coming-at-ya-with-zero-dimensional-pong/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Coming At Ya With Zero-Dimensional PONG | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge"
] | A decade is a long time to carry around a project idea in your head. Fortunately, the Tiny Games Contest happens to coincide with [Senile Data Systems]’s getting back into ATMega programming, so
they can finally make their zero-dimensional PONG dreams come true
(and have the chance at great prizes, too, of course).
If you don’t already get what’s going on here, zero-dimensional PONG takes 1D PONG and turns it on the short side. Imagine the light coming toward you, then moving away toward your opponent, and you have the basic idea. So, how is this done? Pulse-width modulation controls the brightness of the LED, and, well, you have to be pretty fast, although there is a small margin for the inevitable error.
In the video after the break, you can watch [SDS] play themselves using a red/green LED. Player one must press the button when red is fully lit and green is off, and player two goes when green is fully lit and red is off. The cool thing is that this game uses sockets, so it can use any LED. There are nine difficulty levels to control the PWM speed, so one can really test one’s reaction time.
If you want to build one of these, you’ll need an ATtiny2313 or something similar, a couple of buttons, a display, and the optional but fun buzzer. The
well-commented code
is available through [Senile Data Systems]’s site. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7391714",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T03:17:38",
"content": "Does luminosity count as a dimension?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7394635",
"author": "Shays",
"timestamp": "2024-08-19T05:45:53"... | 1,760,371,817.67376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/meta-doesnt-allow-camera-access-on-vr-headsets-so-heres-a-workaround/ | Meta Doesn’t Allow Camera Access On VR Headsets, So Here’s A Workaround | Donald Papp | [
"Software Hacks",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"mobilenet",
"object detection",
"Quest",
"vr"
] | The cameras at the front of Meta’s Quest VR headsets are off-limits to developers, but developer [Michael Gschwandtner]
created a workaround
(Linkedin post) and
shared implementation details with a VR news site
.
The view isn’t a pure camera feed (it includes virtual and UI elements) but it’s a clever workaround.
The demo shows object detection via MobileNet V2,
which we’ve seen used for machine vision on embedded systems
like the Raspberry Pi. In this case it is running locally on the VR headset, automatically identifying objects even though the app cannot directly access the front-facing cameras to see what’s in front of it.
The workaround is conceptually simple, and leverages the headset’s ability to cast its video feed over Wi-Fi to other devices. This feature is normally used for people to share and spectate VR gameplay.
First, [Gschwandtner]’s app sets up passthrough video, which means that the camera feed from the front of the headset is used as background in VR, creating a mixed-reality environment. Then the app essentially spawns itself a Chromium browser, and casts its video feed to itself. It is this video that is used to — in a roundabout way — access what the cameras see.
The resulting view isn’t really direct from the cameras, it’s akin to snapshotting a through-the-headset view which means it contains virtual elements like the UI. Still, with passthrough turned on it is a pretty clever workaround that is contained entirely on-device.
Meta is hesitant to give developers direct access to camera views on their VR headset, and while John Carmack (former Meta consulting CTO)
thinks it’s worth opening up and can be done safely
, it’s not there yet. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7364015",
"author": "N8bits",
"timestamp": "2024-08-18T16:55:40",
"content": "It’s ironic how they lock camera for devs, but they have all the access like “trust us bro”. I understand why they lock it, but it feels weird. I will be hacking my headset if I ever go back to Meta. At le... | 1,760,371,817.771378 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/reverse-engineering-the-amd-secure-processor-inside-the-cpu/ | Reverse-Engineering The AMD Secure Processor Inside The CPU | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"amd",
"reverse engineering",
"x86"
] | On an x86 system the BIOS is the first part of the system to become active along with the basic CPU core(s) functionality, or so things used to be until Intel introduced its Management Engine (IME) and AMD its AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). These are low-level, trusted execution environments, which in the case of AMD-SP involves a Cortex-A5 ARM processor that together with the Cryptographic Co-Processor (CCP) block in the CPU perform basic initialization functions that would previously have been associated with the (UEFI) BIOS like DRAM initialization, but also loading of encrypted (
AGESA
) firmware from external SPI Flash ROM. Only once the AMD-SP environment has run through all the initialization steps will the x86 cores be allowed to start up.
In a
detailed teardown
by [Specter] over at the Dayzerosec blog the AMD-SP’s elements, the used memory map and integration into the rest of the CPU die are detailed, with a
follow-up article
covering the workings of the CCP. The latter is used both by the AMD-SP as well as being part of the cryptography hardware acceleration ISA offered to the OS. Where security researchers are interested in the AMD-SP (and IME) is due to the fascinating attack vectors, with the IME having been
the most
targeted, but AMD-SP
having its own
vulnerabilities, including in related modules, such as an
injection attack
against AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).
Although both AMD and Intel are rather proud of how these bootstrapping systems enable TPM, secure virtualization and so on, their added complexity and presence invisible to the operating system clearly come with some serious trade-offs. With neither company willing to allow a security audit, it seems it’s up to security researchers to do so forcefully. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7355099",
"author": "Charon",
"timestamp": "2024-08-18T12:44:04",
"content": "“the workings of the CCP” ……. how apt , is IP theft in that bundle ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7387496",
"author": "Grr",
"ti... | 1,760,371,817.8227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/categorizing-steel/ | Categorizing Steel | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"machining",
"steel",
"tool steel"
] | In the movie
Conan the Barbarian,
we hear a great deal about “the riddle of steel.” We are never told exactly what that riddle is, but in modern times, it might be: What’s the difference between 4150 and 1020 steel? If you’ve been around a machine shop, you’ve probably heard the AISI/SAE numbers, but if you didn’t know what they mean, [Jason Lonon]
can help
. The video below covers what the grade numbers mean in detail.
The four digits are actually two separate two-digit numbers. Sometimes, there will be five digits, in which case it is a two-digit number followed by a three-digit number. The first two digits tell you the actual type of steel. For example, 10 is ordinary steel, while 41 is chromium molybdenum steel. The last two or three digits indicate how much carbon is in the steel. If that number is, say, 40, then the steel contains approximately 0.40% carbon.
A common example of a five-digit code is 52100 steel. That’s ball bearing steel, and it has 1% carbon. You’ll notice that of the first two digits, the first digit changes when the main alloying element changes. That is, 2000-series steel uses nickel while 7000-series uses tungsten.
Tool steel has a different system, with a letter indicating the type of steel and a number indicating its alloy properties. Tool steel can be quenched in oil, air, or water. It can also be hot or cold drawn, and the letters will tell you how the steel was made. As you might expect, each type has different properties, which you may care about in your application.
For example, type W — water-hardened — isn’t used much today because it warps and cracks more often than steel produced with oil quenching.
If you want
a list of steel grades
, Wikipedia is your friend. You’ll see there are a variety of letters you can throw in to indicate hardness, and things like boron or lead added to the alloy, but these aren’t very common. Stainless steel also has a coding system that the video doesn’t cover, but you can find more information on the Wikipedia page.
If you want to work with steel,
you’ll need heat
. Next time you use tungsten steel, marvel at the fact that the Earth’s crust has about
1.25 parts per million of the rare element
. Yet the world produces more than 100,000 tonnes of it a year. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7353362",
"author": "Prfesser",
"timestamp": "2024-08-18T11:14:34",
"content": "An L in the designation means “leaded steel”. Lead may be toxic but it certainly improves the machinability. Source: my lathe. ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,817.890578 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/simple-3d-printed-table-loom-for-complex-weavings/ | Simple 3D-Printed Table Loom For Complex Weavings | Heidi Ulrich | [
"classic hacks",
"how-to",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"looms",
"textile",
"textiles",
"weaving",
"yarn",
"yarn work"
] | The loom has been a transformative invention throughout history, shaping the textile industry from simple hand looms to complex, fully automated machines. Now, thanks to advancements in 3D printing, this age-old craft is being revitalized by modern makers. One such creator, [Fraens], has recently designed
a unique 3D-printed table loom
with eight shafts, offering a simpler yet innovative approach to weaving. This project is a fresh take on traditional looms, blending centuries of design knowledge with contemporary technology.
[Fraens], a longtime enthusiast of looms, has spent considerable time studying the countless designs that have evolved over more than 200 years. Drawing inspiration from these, he has crafted a more accessible version—a table loom that can be operated using levers to control the warp threads. Unlike larger, more complex looms, this 3D-printed model allows users to experiment with various weaving patterns easily, using different colors and sequences to create beautiful, intricate designs. [Fraens] provides guidance on how to adapt patterns meant for larger looms to this compact, lever-operated version on his website and in a detailed video tutorial.
This project is perfect for anyone interested in weaving or DIY technology. [Fraens]’ 3D-printed loom offers a new way to explore textile creation, making it both approachable and rewarding. To see this innovative loom in action and learn how to build your own, check out the video below. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7350552",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2024-08-18T08:13:31",
"content": "I would never do this but I think this a really cool. The design and building of the loom was awesome to see.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7352239",... | 1,760,371,818.05344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/retrotechtacular-powerline-sagging-and-stringing-in-the-1950s/ | Retrotechtacular: Powerline Sagging And Stringing In The 1950s | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"Bonneville",
"BPA",
"catenary",
"Columbia River",
"Coulee",
"distribution",
"grid",
"high voltage",
"retrotechtacular",
"transmission"
] | While high-voltage transmission lines are probably the most visible components of the electrical grid, they’re certainly among the least appreciated. They go largely unnoticed by the general public — quick, name the power line closest to you right now — at least until a new one is proposed, causing the NIMBYs and BANANAs to come out in force. To add insult to injury, those who do notice the megastructures that make modern life possible rarely take a moment to appreciate the engineering that goes into stringing up hundreds of miles of cable and making sure it stays up.
Not so the Bonneville Power Administration, the New Deal-era federal agency formed to exploit the hydroelectric abundance of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, which produced
this 1950 gem detailing the stringing and sagging of power lines
. Unsurprisingly, the many projects needed to wire together the often remote dams to the widely distributed population centers in an area that was only just starting to see growth began in the BPA’s offices, where teams of engineers hunched over desks worked out the best routes. Paper, pencil, and slide rules were the tools of the trade, along with an interesting gadget called a conductor sag template, a hardware implementation of the catenary equation that allowed the “sagger” to determine the height of each tower. The conductors, either steel-cored aluminum or pure copper, were also meticulously selected based on tensile strength, expected wind and ice loading, and the electrical load the line was expected to carry.
Once the engineers had their say, the hard work of physically stringing the wires began out in the field. One suspects that the work today is much the same as it was almost eighty years ago, save for much more stringent health and safety regulations. The prowess needed to transfer the wires from lifting sheaves to the insulators is something to behold, as is the courage required to work from ladders hanging from wires at certain death heights. But to our mind, the real heroes were the logistics fellows, who determined how much wire was needed for each span and exactly where to stage the reels. It’s worth sparing a moment’s thought for the daring photographer who captured all this action, likely with little more than a leather belt and hemp rope for safety. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "7345647",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-18T03:11:20",
"content": "Yeah, attached to a swinging ladder with a leather strap around the waist high above the ground.That’s a job I wouldn’t volunteer to do.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,371,817.996759 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/spy-tech-making-microdots/ | Spy Tech: Making Microdots | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"film",
"Microdot",
"microfilm",
"steganography"
] | It isn’t just a spy movie trope: secret messages often show up as microdots. [The Thought Emporium] explores the
history of microdots
and even made a few, which turned out to be — to quote the video you can see below — “both easier than you might think, and yet also harder in other ways.”
If you want to hide a secret message, you really have two problems. The first is actually encoding the message so only the recipient can read it. However, in many cases, you also want the existence of the message to be secret. After all, if an enemy spy sees you with a folder of encrypted documents, your cover is blown even if they don’t know what the documents say.
Today, steganography techniques let you hide messages in innocent-looking images or data files. However, for many years, microdots were the gold standard for hiding secret messages and clandestine photographs. The microdots are typically no bigger than a millimeter to make them easy to hide in plain sight.
The idea behind microdots is simple. They are essentially tiny pieces of film that require magnification to read. After all, you can take a picture of the beach and shrink it down to a relatively small negative, so why not a document?
The example microdots use ISO 50 film to ensure a fine grain pattern, although microfilm made for the task might have been a better choice. Apparently, real spies used special film that uses aniline dyes to avoid problems with film grain.
However you do it, you need a way to take high-resolution images, put them on film, and then trim the film down, ready to hide. While microdots were put on pigeons as early as 1870, it was 1925 before technology allowed microdots to hold a page in
only ten square microns
in a 10×10 micron square. This was a two-step process, so between the film and the single-step processing, these homemade microdots won’t be that dense.
If all this is too much trouble, there’s always
invisible ink
. Or use
a more modern technique
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7341734",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T23:19:07",
"content": "” technology allowed microdots to hold a page in only ten square microns”Please say more… this sounds improbable.It’s impossible to focus light to less than a wavelength or so spot, or 0.4 microns, effective... | 1,760,371,817.945199 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/olympic-sprint-decided-by-40000-fps-photo-finish/ | Olympic Sprint Decided By 40,000 FPS Photo Finish | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Current Events",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"computer vision",
"fps",
"frames per second",
"olympic",
"olympics",
"omega",
"Paris"
] | Advanced technology played a crucial role in determining the winner of the men’s 100-meter final at the Paris 2024 Olympics. In a historically close race, American sprinter Noah Lyles narrowly edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by just five-thousandths of a second. The final decision relied on an image captured by an Omega photo finish camera that shoots an astonishing 40,000 frames per second.
This cutting-edge technology,
originally reported by PetaPixel
, ensured the accuracy of the result in a race where both athletes recorded a time of 9.78 seconds. If
SmartThings’ shot pourer from the 2012 Olympics
were still around, it could once again fulfill its intended role of celebrating US medals.
Omega, the Olympics’ official timekeeper for decades, has continually innovated to enhance performance measurement. The Omega Scan ‘O’ Vision Ultimate, the camera used for this photo finish, is a significant upgrade from its 10,000 frames per second predecessor. The new system captures four times as many frames per second and offers higher resolution, providing a detailed view of the moment each runner’s torso touches the finish line. This level of detail was crucial in determining that Lyles’ torso touched the line first, securing his gold medal.
This camera is part of Omega’s broader technological advancements for the Paris 2024 Olympics, which include advanced Computer Vision systems utilizing AI and high-definition cameras to track athletes in real-time. For a closer look at how technology decided this historic race, watch the video by Eurosport that captured the event. | 55 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "7336650",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T20:10:44",
"content": "So, the camera scans only 1 vertical line at a time (very quickly) and the image is constructed from subsequent lines?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,818.342541 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/2024-tiny-games-challenge-its-2048-but-with-leds/ | 2024 Tiny Games Challenge: It’s 2048, But With LEDs | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"2048",
"ws2812"
] | Remember the game 2048? You slide numbered tiles around on a grid, combining them until you have one tile with a value of 2048 (although it’s possible to go higher). Legend has it that 2048 was created by a bored teenager in the space of a weekend to see if he could program a game from scratch.
It only took a couple of weekends for [David] to get
Tiny2048
up and running. In this version, each RGB value represents a number value, and input comes from a rudimentary gesture detector — tilt it this way and that to move the LEDs and combine the ‘numbers’. As you might imagine, it was a bit tricky to use colors to represent numbers, so each one had to be sufficiently unique.
[David] says that the LED matrix is a string of WS2812 LEDs in a grid formation, controlled by an ESP32-S3-MINI-1. Although this may be overkill, [David] broke out a bunch of IO at the top of the board so it can be used in the future as a dev board. Be sure to check it out in blinkenlight action after the break! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7336024",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T19:43:47",
"content": "That looks very fun. I think my spouse and kid might get me to build a larger version for them.🙂",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7336500",
"au... | 1,760,371,818.157793 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/your-data-in-the-cloud/ | Your Data In The Cloud | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"breach",
"newsletter",
"security"
] | I try not to go off on security rants in the newsletter, but this week I’m unable to hold back.
An apparent breach of a data aggregator
has resulted in a monster dataset of US, UK, and Canadian citizens names, addresses, and social security numbers. As a number of reports have pointed out, the three billion records in the breach likely contain duplicate individuals, because they include all the addresses where you’ve lived, and there have only been on the order of 450 million US social security numbers issued anyway.
But here’s the deal. Each of these data aggregators, and each of the other companies that keep tons of data on you, are ticking time bombs. Maybe not every one of them gets breached, but there’s certainly enough incentive for the bad guys to try to do so. (They are looking to sell the NPD dataset mentioned above for $3.5 million.)
My gut feeling is that eventually all of the information on everyone will be released. Maybe then it will cease to be interesting to new crops of crooks, because there’s nothing new to learn.
On the other hand, the sheer quantity of identity thefts that this, and future breaches, will unleash on us all is mind-boggling. In the case of legitimate data aggregators like this one, requesting to have had your data out of their dataset appears to have been a viable defense. But for every one legit operator, there are others that simply track you. When they get hacked, you lose.
This breach is likely going to end in a large lawsuit against the company in question, but it almost certainly won’t be big enough to cover the damage to everyone in the affected countries. Is it time that companies that hold large datasets will have to realize that the data is a liability as well as an asset?
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 33 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "7327191",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T14:17:21",
"content": "Maybe they can hide the data?https://thecyberguild.org/blog-posts/invisible-data-raise-the-bar-on-the-cyberspace-attacker/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,818.581775 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/a-journey-into-unexpected-serial-ports/ | A Journey Into Unexpected Serial Ports | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"garmin",
"rs232",
"serial",
"ttl"
] | Through all the generations of computing devices from the era of the teleprinter to the present day, there’s one interface that’s remained universal. Even though its usefulness as an everyday port has decreased in the face of much faster competition, it’s fair to say that
everything
has a serial port on board somewhere. Even with that ubiquity though, there’s still some scope for variation.
Older ports and those that are still exposed via a D socket are in most case the so-called RS-232, a higher voltage port, while your microcontroller debug port will be so-called TTL (transistor-transistor logic), operating at logic level. That’s not quite always the case though, as [Terin Stock] found out
with an older Garmin GPS unit
.
Pleasingly for a three decade old device, given a fresh set of batteries it worked. The time was wrong, but after some fiddling and a Windows 98 machine spun up it applied a Garmin update from 1999 that fixed it. When hooked up to a Flipper Zero though, and after a mild panic about voltage levels, the serial port appeared to deliver garbage. There followed some investigation, with an interesting conclusion that TTL serial is usually the inverse of RS-232 serial, The Garmin had the RS-232 polarity with TTL levels, allowing it to work with many PC serial ports. A quick application of an inverter fixed the problem, and now Garmin and Flipper talk happily. | 17 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7597557",
"author": "Stappers",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T11:21:58",
"content": "For what it is worth, the operating circuit athttp://www.1pico.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/MAX232.gifshows inverters. Yeah, assumed prior knowledge is knowing what the MAX232 chip does.",
"paren... | 1,760,371,818.408951 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/24/intuitive-explanation-of-arithmetic-geometric-harmonic-mean/ | Intuitive Explanation Of Arithmetic, Geometric & Harmonic Mean | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"mean",
"statistics"
] | The simple definition of a
mean
is that of a numeric quantity which represents the center of a collection of numbers. Here the trick lies in defining the exact type of numeric collection, as beyond the arithmetic mean (AM for short, the sum of all values divided by their number) there are many more, with the other two classical Pythagorean means being the geometric mean (GM) and harmonic mean (HM).
The question that many start off with, is what the GM and AM are and why you’d want to use them, which is why [W.D.]
wrote a blog post
on that topic that they figure should be somewhat intuitive relative to digging through search results, or consulting the
Wikipedia entries
.
Compared to the AM, the GM uses the product of the values rather than the sum, which makes it a good fit for e.g. changes in a percentage data set. One thing that [W.D] argues for is to use logarithms to grasp the GM, as this makes it more obvious and closer to taking the AM. Finally, the HM is useful for something like the average speed across multiple trips, and is perhaps the easiest to grasp.
Ultimately, the Pythagorean means and their non-Pythagorean brethren are useful for things like data analysis and statistics, where using the right mean can reveal interesting data, much like how other types using something like the
median
can make a lot more sense. The latter obviously mostly in the hazy field of statistics.
No matter what approach works for you to make these concepts ‘click’, they’re all very useful things to comprehend, as much of every day life revolves around them, including concepts like ‘mean time to failure’ for parts.
Top image: Cycles of sunspots for the last 400 years as an example data set to apply statistical interpretations to. (Credit: Robert A. Rohde,
CC BY-SA 3.0
) | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7599566",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T13:22:34",
"content": "The total resistance of a set of resistors in parallel is the harmonic mean. I’m surprised Maya didn’t mention this, given that it’s Hackaday.Additionally, we recently had an article asking about using tec... | 1,760,371,818.463733 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/a-game-of-snake-on-a-lego-mechanical-computer/ | A Game OfSnakeOn A LEGO Mechanical Computer | Dan Maloney | [
"Games"
] | [
"buffer",
"lego",
"logic",
"Pneumatics",
"snake",
"Technics"
] | Really, [OzzieGerff] had us at “LEGO.” But then he took it to another place entirely and built
a completely mechanical, nearly 100% LEGO version of
Snake
. And it’s just as cool as it sounds.
Mind you, it’s a little hard to grok how this whole contraption works, which has been in the works for a while, but we’ll try to summarize as best we can. The most important aspect of this build is that there are no electronics at all — everything is done with mechanical linkages, with some Technics pneumatic components and a couple of electric motors to provide the oomph. The three main components are the input section, which consists of a two-axis joystick, a tail buffer, which keeps track of the length of the snake’s tail as gameplay progresses, and the largest component, the 16×16 display.
The joystick translates user inputs into pneumatic signals which pass through a mechanical filtering unit that prevents the head of the snake from doubling back on itself. The filtered inputs then pass into the screen reader, a complex device that probes the status of a given pixel on the display and determines the status of the snake’s head. If it touches a snake pixel, the game’s over. Hitting a blank pixel moves the head of the snake by one and takes one pixel off the end, while a food pixel extends the snake’s length.
Keeping track of the length of the snake is the job of the buffer, which uses Technics tank tracks and levers. Setting a one is done by flipping the lever to one side as it passes under the write head; a read head further down the track senses which way the lever is flipped and translates it into a pneumatic signal. The buffer has four channels, one for each possible direction the snake’s head could be moving. The signals drive a screen writer, which moves a pyramidal follower across a series of push-rods that flip the corresponding pixel on the display to show the proper icon. Simplicity itself? No, but the video below will make things a lot clearer.
It doesn’t look like [Ozzie] is quite done with this game, as he doesn’t show any actual gameplay yet. We’d love to see and hear that — we suspect it’ll make quite a racket. We’ll be keeping an eye out for this one, but while we wait, check out
this rope braiding machine
or
watch Lego break steel
.
Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for spotting this one for us. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7593106",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T06:08:21",
"content": "I wonder if they actually intend to build this, or if it is just a design (and some per-component prototypes). The plans show it would take two cubic meters of space which sounds quite a challenge.",
"par... | 1,760,371,818.508521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/you-can-get-a-precision-instrument-guided-landing-even-in-antarctica/ | You Can Get A Precision Instrument-Guided Landing Even In Antarctica | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"airbase",
"airport",
"als",
"antarctica",
"instrument landing system",
"landing strip"
] | Traditional airports spend big money to install instrument landing systems (ILS) to guide planes in safely. In places like Antarctica, though, it’s simply not possible to permanently install a massive antenna array for localization, particularly with all the ice shifting about on the regular. As covered by
Flightradar24
,
the solution to this is to use a transponder landing system (TLS) instead.
Comparatively compact! Credit: ANPC
A TLS tracks planes by using multilateration—basically, transponder signals are picked up by multiple antennas and the time delays are used to figure out the position of the aircraft. It then sends the guidance signals a plane would normally expect to receive from an ILS transmitter array, for horizontal and vertical guidance. These signals appear to the plane to be coming from antennas located as per a typical ILS array, with the TLS able to generate signals from ‘virtual emanation points” as needed. This allows the TLS to generate different landing approaches to suit different planes and conditions. From the pilot and aircraft side, it’s all perfectly transparent.
In Antarctica’s McMurdo station, landings are handled by a TLS system that barely takes up more space than a single shipping crate. The system can be set up in just a few hours, unlike a traditional ILS which takes significant installation work spanning weeks or months at best. At the moment, though, the landing strip at McMurdo is stable enough that the system only needs periodic realignment every three years or so.
You might assume that if you’re approaching Antarctica by plane, everything would be on manual. However, the creature comforts of modern airports are available even at
one of the the most southerly airports on Earth! | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7594254",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T07:35:39",
"content": "I wonder why more airports don’t use them?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7598735",
"author": "lol",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T12:32:... | 1,760,371,818.6402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/creating-customized-diffraction-lenses-for-lasers/ | Creating Customized Diffraction Lenses For Lasers | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"diffraction",
"diffraction grating",
"film",
"laser",
"lens",
"light",
"point source",
"python"
] | [The Thought Emporium] has been fascinated by holograms for a long time, and in all sorts of different ways. His ultimate goal right now is to work up to creating holograms using chocolate, but along the way he’s found another interesting way to manipulate light. Using specialized diffraction gratings, a laser, and a few lines of code,
he explores a unique way of projecting hologram-like images
on his path to the chocolate hologram.
There’s a lot of background that [The Thought Emporium] has to go through before explaining how this project actually works. Briefly, this is a type of “transmission hologram” that doesn’t use a physical object as a model. Instead, it uses diffraction gratings, which are materials which are shaped to light apart in specific ways. After some discussion he demonstrates creating diffraction gratings using film. Certain diffraction patterns, including blocking all of the light source, can actually be used as a lens as the light bends around the blockage into the center of the shadow where there can be focal points. From there, a special diffraction lens can be built.
The diffraction lens can be shaped into any pattern with a small amount of computer code to compute the diffraction pattern for a given image. Then it’s transferred to film and when a laser is pointed at it, the image appears on the projected surface. Diffraction gratings like these have a number of other uses as well; the video also shows a specific pattern being used to focus a telescope for astrophotography, and a
few others in the past have used them to create the illusive holographic chocolate
that [The Thought Emporium] is working towards. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7588195",
"author": "Robert Lockwood",
"timestamp": "2024-08-24T01:56:37",
"content": "This is really cool.I first learned about diffraction in 1962 in my Light and Theoretical Optics course lab. As I recall we filtered and collimated light from a sodium vapor source (no lasers th... | 1,760,371,818.679078 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/tiny-custom-keyboard-gets-rgb/ | Tiny Custom Keyboard Gets RGB | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"atmega32u4",
"keyboard",
"rgb"
] | Full-size keyboards are great for actually typing on and using for day-to-day interfacing duties. They’re less good for impressing the Internet. If you really want to show off, you gotta go really big — or really small.
[juskim] went the latter route, and added RGB to boot!
This was [juskim]’s attempt to produce the world’s smallest keyboard. We can’t guarantee that, but it’s certainly very small. You could readily clasp it within a closed fist. It uses a cut down 60% key layout, but it’s still well-featured, including numbers, letters, function keys, and even +,-, and =. The build uses tiny tactile switches that are SMD mounted on a custom PCB. An ATmega32U4 is used as the microcontroller running the show, which speaks USB to act as a standard human interface device (HID). The keycaps and case are tiny 3D printed items, with six RGB LEDs installed inside for the proper gamer aesthetic. The total keyboard measures 66 mm x 21 mm.
Don’t expect to type fast on this thing. [juskim] only managed 14 words per minute. If you want to be productive, consider
a more traditional design. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7581871",
"author": "Jimbo the Annihilator",
"timestamp": "2024-08-23T20:06:10",
"content": "It’s very cute and a nice learning project, but would be nice to see something a bit more useful and less gimmicky… a portable keyboard could be a very useful thing and",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,371,819.551344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/23/hackaday-podcast-episode-285-learning-laser-tricks-rocket-science-and-a-laptop-thats-not-a-laptop/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 285: Learning Laser Tricks, Rocket Science, And A Laptop That’s Not A Laptop | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week on the Podcast, we have something a little different for you. Elliot is on vacation, so Tom was in charge of running the show and he had Kristina in the hot seat.
First up in the news:
the 2024 Tiny Games Challenge is still underway
and has drawn an impressive 44 entries as of this writing. You have until 9AM PDT on September 10th to show us your best tiny game, whether that means tiny hardware, tiny code, or a tiny BOM.
Then it’s on to What’s That Sound, which Tom and Kristina came up with together, so there will be no pageantry about guessing. But can
you
get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Now it’s on to the hacks, beginning with an open-source liquid-fueled rocket and a really cool retro trackball laptop. Then we’ll discuss screwdriver mange, the Wow! signal, and whether you’re using you’re calipers incorrectly. Finally, we look at a laptop that that isn’t really a laptop, and one simple trick to keep things aligned on your laser engraver.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in
DRM-free MP3
and savor at your leisure.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 285 Show Notes:
News:
Show Us Your Minimalist Games, And 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:
Open Source Liquid Rocket Reaches For The Sky
Laser Art Inspired By The Ford Motor Company
Learning How A Nuclear Missile Stays On Target
Fighting The Scourge Of “Screwdriver Mange”
WOW! It Wasn’t Aliens After All!
A Trackball Retro Laptop
Quick Hacks:
Tom’s Picks:
Are You Using Your Calipers Wrong?
Building A Paper Tape Reader To Read Bytes
Atari Announces The Atari 7800+ Nostalgia Console
Kristina’s Picks:
2024 Tiny Games Contest: Save The Stranded Puppies Of Moon Base P!
Help The LEGO Camera Become A Reality
2024 Tiny Games Contest: Coming At Ya With Zero-Dimensional PONG
Can’t-Miss Articles:
This Is Not A Laptop, It’s A KVM Combo
Laser Cutters: Where’s The Point? | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7771747",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2024-08-30T01:49:55",
"content": "Wind up torch/radio",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,818.828386 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/this-week-in-security-three-billion-ss-numbers-ipv6-rce-and-ring-2/ | This Week In Security: Three Billion SS Numbers, IPv6 RCE, And Ring -2 | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"data breach",
"IPv6",
"RCE",
"This Week in Security"
] | You may have heard about a very large data breach, exposing the Social Security numbers of three billion individuals. Now hang on. Social Security numbers are a particularly American data point, and last time we checked there were quite a few Americans shy of even a half of a billion’s worth. As
[Troy Hunt] points out
, there are several things about this story that seem just a bit odd.
First up, the claim is that this is data grabbed from National Public Data, and there’s even
a vague notice
on their website about it. NPD is a legitimate business, grabbing data on as many people as possible, and providing services like background checks and credit checks. It’s not impossible that this company has records on virtually every citizen of the US, UK, and Canada. And while that’s far less than 2.9 billion people, it could feasibly add up to 2.9 billion records as was originally claimed.
The story gets strange as we consider the bits of data that have been released publicly, like a pair of files shared with [Troy] that have names, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. Those had a total of 2.69 billion records, with an average of 3 records for each ID number. That math is still just a little weird, since the US has to date only generated 450 million SSNs and change.
So far all we have are partial datasets, and claims on the Internet. The story is that there’s a grand total of 4 TB of data once uncompressed. The rest of the details are unclear, and it’s likely to take some time for the rest of the story to come out.
Windows IPv6 RCE
Microsoft has patched a Remote Code Execution (RCE) in Windows 10, 11, and server systems. By all accounts,
it’s a nasty one
, but there’s a redeeming wrinkle to the story, that may also be bad news. It’s an IPv6 vulnerability. The actual details are scarce, for obvious reasons. By next week, I anticipate someone will have reverse engineered the patch enough to have some details on the flaw.
What we do know is that Microsoft scores this a 9.8 out of 10 for severity, and considers it a low complexity attack that is likely to be used in the wild. Trend Micro
considers it a wormable flaw
. The built-in Windows firewall doesn’t block it, because the vulnerability triggers before processing by the firewall. This leads to a theory that it’s another problem related to defragmenting incoming IPv6 packets, or a similar process.
The good news is that it requires actual IPv6 connectivity, which at least in my corner of the world is a rather rare thing. It’s hard to know definitively without more details, but it’s at least likely that a proper stateful firewall would block these unsolicited IPv6 packets from the wider Internet. There’s still a lot of room for trouble inside the network — where you probably have working IPv6 connectivity even without routable IPv6 from your ISP. In conclusion,
get this one patched ASAP
.
Considering its harm, I will not disclose more details in the short term.
— wei (@XiaoWei___)
August 14, 2024
Don’t Roll Your Own Crypto!
There’s a rallying cry, aimed at anyone responsible for build secure systems: “Don’t roll your own crypto!” But why? Surely a secret algorithm that only you understand is more secure, right? No. Particularly not when tools like Ghidra that put firmware reverse engineering within grasp of every security researcher. Case in point, the
Vstarcam CB73 security camera
that [Brown Fine Security] took a look at.
The first clue that somethign was wrong was that packets were being repeated, byte-for-byte identically. As [Brown] points out, a good cryptography scheme has some sort of protection against replay attacks. This one had none at all. Another issue with this homebrew crypto scheme is that it only has 256 possible internal states, and once you know the trick the whole thing is trivially decryptable, no key required. This is why you don’t roll your own crypto.
Old School CSS Trick
This
write-up from Adepts of 0xCC is a trip down memory lane
, to a time when browsers let websites get away with way more, like detecting whether links had been visited by detecting the style that the browser used to display them. Browsers eventually locked down those sorts of tricks, but what’s old is new again, with just a bit of cleverness. In this case, generate a captcha, and set the page’s CSS to make the visited links blend in with the background. The user completes the captcha, and based on which characters were typed, you have some basic history information. Clever!
Ring -2
The classic x86 architecture has a four ring system, where userspace applications run in Ring 3 and the kernel runs in Ring 0. But the sneaky truth is that our X86 processors are actually emulating the x86 instruction set, Rings 1 and 2 are never used, and there’s a CPU management engine running all the way down at Ring -3. This suggests to the security minded, that it would be particularly bad for something malicious to run at one of those hidden ring levels. And
that’s exactly what [jjensn] managed to pull off
.
In this case it’s in the motherboard firmware, in the System Management Engine. A bit of vulnerable code in a couple places allows writing data into protected SMRAM memory, into Ring -2. A bit of clever work corrupts the SMRAM just enough to jump into shellcode without crashing the machine. And suddenly an attacker can own a machine on a level two layers below the OS.
Bits and Bytes
Careful with your artifacts. Apparently quite a few Github CI scripts take the easy wqy out, and just
zip up the entire work directory as an artifact
. That’s not great, as generally artifacts are accessible to anyone with a GitHub account, and the .git folder very likely has a Github token in it.
Speaking of GitHub,
another Chrome type confusion vulnerability was written up there in detail
. As objects in JavaScript are manipulated, the engine is continually updating the underlying data structures. Cloning objects can be particularly tricky, and changing the properties of an object after a shallow copy can result in memory corruption. Memory corruption, fake objects, and finally code execution outside the JavaScript sandbox.
In Windows, the mark of the Web is rather important for security, warning users when they’re about to access or execute something from the Internet. It’s also been broken in many interesting ways over the years. Most recently,
Web-based Distruted Authoring and Versioning (WEBDAV) shares are used
, as they can be accessed by either the browser, or the Windows File Explorer. The most recent fix here adds Mark of the Web to files copied from WEBDAV shares using Explorer. Sneaky. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7307847",
"author": "ButterYourGhost",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T22:29:32",
"content": "Think I can offer some insight into those clearly misleading numbers.You are correct in your assumption that they are extremely high considering the number of active SSN in the USA. However having... | 1,760,371,818.869824 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/hackaday-podcast-episode-284-laser-fault-injection-console-hacks-and-too-much-audio/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 284: Laser Fault Injection, Console Hacks, And Too Much Audio | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | The summer doldrums are here, but that doesn’t mean that Elliot and Dan couldn’t sift through the week’s hack and find the real gems. It was an audio-rich week, with a nifty microsynth, music bounced off the moon, and everything you always wanted to know about Raspberry Pi audio but were afraid to ask. We looked into the mysteries of waveguides and found a math-free way to understand how they work, and looked at the way Mecanum wheels work in the most soothing way possible. We also each locked in on more classic hacks, Elliot with a look at a buffer overflow in Tony Hawks Pro Skater and Dan with fault injection user a low-(ish) cost laser setup. From Proxxon upgrades to an RC submarine to Arya’s portable router build, we’ve got plenty of material for your late summer listening pleasure.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Worried about attracting the Black Helicopters?
Download the DRM-free MP3
and listen offline, just in case.
Episode 284 Show Notes:
News:
Possible Discovery Of Liquid Water In Mars’ Mid-Crust By The Insight Lander
Superdeep Borehole Samples Create Non-boring Music
What’s that Sound?
Last week’s sound was the startup chime from an SGI Indigo. But nobody guessed it right!
Computer and Console Boot Sounds Compilation : Various : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Boot chime for an SGI O2
— Dan used to use an O2, but wouldn’t have gotten it either.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Kickflips And Buffer Slips: An Exploit In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
Building AI Models To Diagnose HVAC Issues
Inside The Mecanum Wheel
Laser Fault Injection On The Cheap
Low-Cost Nanopositioning Hack Chat
Tulip Is A Micropython Synth Workstation, In An ESP32
GitHub – shorepine/amy: AMY – the Additive Music synthesizer librarY
Generative Music Created In Minimalistic Javascript Code
Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone
The Waveguide Explanation You Wish You’d Had At School
Coax Stub Filters Demystified
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Cheap DIY Button Pad Uses Neat Punchcard Trick
RC Submarine Build Starts With Plenty Of Research
Moonbounce Music
Dan’s Picks:
Proxxon CNC Conversion Makes A Small Mill A Bit Bigger
Magnesium And Copper Makes An Emergency Flashlight
A Tiny Knob Keeps You In Control
For the curious
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Audio On Pi: Here Are Your Options
Portable Router Build: Picking Your CPU
Fail Of The Week: This Flash Drive Will NOT Self-Destruct In Five Seconds | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7300746",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T17:47:17",
"content": "Deep drilling on Mars? Ever deeper into the rabbit hole it goes for the drill gear that will have to be produced locally due to the absurd weight of it: “Metals extraction on Mars through carbothermic reduc... | 1,760,371,818.92015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/lunar-lander-game-asks-you-to-write-a-simple-autopilot/ | Lunar Lander Game Asks You To Write A Simple Autopilot | Donald Papp | [
"Games"
] | [
"game",
"javascript",
"lunar lander",
"Moon landing"
] | Everyone likes a good lunar landing simulator, and [Dominic Doty] wrote a fun take on the idea:
your goal is to write an autopilot controller
to manage the landing. Try it out!
Virtual landers are far cheaper than real ones, thank goodness.
[Dominic] was inspired in part by
this simple rocket landing game
which is very much an exercise in reflex and intuition, not to mention being much faster-paced than the classic 1979 video game (which you can
also play in your browser here
.)
[Dominic]’s version has a similar classic look to the original, but embraces a more thoughtful approach. In it, one uses plain JavaScript to try to minimize the lander’s angle, velocity, and angular velocity in order to land safely on the generated terrain.
Want to see if you have the right stuff? Here’s
a direct link to
Lunar Pilot
. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t succeed right away, though.
Moon landings have had plenty of failures, and are actually very hard
. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "7297396",
"author": "Neil Armstrong",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T15:38:41",
"content": "Pretty cool, but do not try to just write the wordprintin the editor LMAO",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7323274",
"author": "Mathi... | 1,760,371,819.180218 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/a-modern-take-on-an-old-language/ | A Modern Take On An Old Language | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"APL"
] | Some old computer languages are destined to never die. They do, however, evolve. For example, Fortran, among the oldest of computer languages, still has adherents, not to mention a ton of legacy code to maintain. But it doesn’t force you to pretend you are using punched cards anymore. In the 1970s, if you wanted to crunch numbers, Fortran was a good choice. But there was another very peculiar language: APL. Turns out, APL is alive and well and has a thriving community that still uses it.
APL has a lot going for it if you are crunching serious numbers. The main data type is a multidimensional array. In fact, you could argue that a lot of “modern” ideas like a REPL, list types, and even functional programming entered the mainstream through APL. But it did have one strange thing that made it difficult to use and learn.
[Kenneth E. Iverson] was at Harvard in 1957 and started working out a mathematical notation for dealing with arrays. By 1960, he’d moved to IBM and a few years later wrote a book entitled “A Programming Language.” That’s where the name comes from — it is actually an acronym for the book’s title. Being a mathematician, [Iverson] used symbols instead of words. For example, to create an array with the numbers 1 to 5 in it and then print it, you’d write:
⎕←⍳5
Since modern APL has a REPL (read-eval-print loop), you could remove the box and the arrow today.
What Key Was That?
Wait. Where are all those keys on your keyboard? Ah, you’ve discovered the one strange thing. In 1963, CRTs were not very common. While punched cards were king, IBM also had a number of Selectric terminals. These were essentially computer-controlled typewriters that had type balls instead of bars that were easy to replace.
With the right type ball, you could have 26 upper-case letters, 10 digits, a few control characters, and then a large number of “weird” characters. But it is actually worse than that. The available symbols were still not numerous enough for APL’s appetite. So some symbols required you to type part of the symbol, press backspace, then type more of the symbols, sometimes repeating the process several times. On a printing terminal, that works fine. For the CRTs that would soon take over, this was tough to do.
For example, a comment (like a REM in Basic or a // in C++) is represented by a thumbnail (⍝). In other words, this would be an APL comment:
⍝ This is a comment
To make that character, you’d type the “arch” part, backspace, then the “dot” part. Not very speedy. Not very practical on old CRT terminals, either.
The characters aren’t the only strange thing. For example, APL evaluates math right to left.
That is, 3×2+5 is 21 because the 2+5 happens first. You just have to get used to that.
A Solution
Of course, modern screens can handle this easily and most people use an APL keyboard mapping that looks like your normal keyboard, but inserts special symbols when you use the right Alt key (with or without the shift modifier). This allows the keyboard to directly enter every possible symbol.
Of course, your keyboard’s keycaps probably don’t have those symbols etched in, so you’ll probably want a cheat sheet. You can buy APL keycaps or even entire keyboards if you really get into it.
What’s GNU With You?
While there have been many versions of APL over the years,
GNU APL
is certainly the easiest to setup, at least for Linux. According to the website, the project has more than 100,000 lines of C++ code! It also has many modern things like XML parsers.
A US APL keyboard layout
The real trick is
making your keyboard work
with the stranger characters. If you are just playing around, you can consider doing nothing. You can see the keyboard layout by issuing the ]KEYBD command at the APL prompt. That will give you something like the adjacent keyboard layout image.
From that image, you can copy and paste odd characters. That’s a pain, though. I had good luck with this command line:
setxkbmap -layout us,apl -variant ,dyalog -option grp:switch
With this setup, I can use the right alt key to get most APL characters. I never figured out how to get the shifted alternate characters, though. If you want to try harder, or if you use a different environment than I do, you might read the
APL Wiki
.
An Example
Rather than do a full tutorial, here’s my usual binary search high low game. The computer asks you to think of a number, and then it guesses it. Not the best use of APL’s advanced math capabilities, but it will give you an idea of what it can do.
Here’s a survival guide. The upside-down triangle is the start or end of a function. You already know the thumbnail is a comment. A left-pointing arrow is an assignment statement. A right-pointing arrow is a goto (this was created in the 1960s; modern APL has
better control structures
, but they can vary between implementations). Square boxes are for I/O, and the diamond separates multiple statements on a single line.
∇ BinarySearchGame
⍝ Initialize variables
lower ← 1
upper ← 1024
turns ← 0
cheating ← 0
⍝ Start the game
'Think of a number between 1 and 1024.' ⋄ ⎕ ← ''
Loop:
turns ← turns + 1
guess ← ⌊(lower + upper) ÷ 2 ⍝ Make a guess using binary search
⍞ ← 'Is your number ', ⍕ guess, '? (h for high, l for low, c for correct): '
response ← ⍞
→ (response = 'c')/Finish ⍝ Jump to Finish if correct
→ (response = 'h')/TooHigh ⍝ Jump to TooHigh if too high
→ (response = 'l')/TooLow ⍝ Jump to TooLow if too low
→ InvalidInput ⍝ Invalid input
TooHigh:
upper ← guess - 1
→ (lower > upper)/CheatingDetected ⍝ Detect cheating
→ Loop
TooLow:
lower ← guess + 1
→ (lower > upper)/CheatingDetected ⍝ Detect cheating
→ Loop
InvalidInput:
⍞ ← 'Invalid input. Please enter "h", "l", or "c".' ⋄ ⎕ ← ''
turns ← turns - 1 ⍝ Invalid input doesn't count as a turn
→ Loop
CheatingDetected:
⍞ ← 'Hmm... Something doesn''t add up. Did you make a mistake?' ⋄ ⎕ ← ''
cheating ← 1
→ Finish
Finish:
→ (cheating = 0)/Continue ⍝ If no cheating, continue
→ EndGame
Continue:
⍞ ← 'Great! The number is ', ⍕ guess, '. It took ', ⍕ turns, ' turns to guess it.' ⋄ ⎕ ← ''
EndGame:
⍞ ← 'Would you like to play again? (y/n): '
restart ← ⍞
→ (restart = 'y')/Restart ⍝ Restart the game if 'y'
→ Exit ⍝ Exit the game otherwise
Restart:
BinarySearchGame ⍝ Restart the game
Exit:
⍞ ← 'Thank you for playing!' ⋄ ⎕ ← '' ⍝ Exit message
∇
What’s Next?
If you want to get an idea of how APL’s special handling of data make some programs easier, the
APL Wiki has a good page for that
. If you don’t want to install anything, you can
run APL in your browser
(although it is the Dyalog version, a very common choice for modern APL).
If you don’t want to read the documentation, check out [phoebe’s] video below. We always wanted the IBM computer that had
the big switch to go from Basic to APL
.
APL Keyboard image
via Reddit | 44 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "7295509",
"author": "Bill T",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T14:28:14",
"content": "In high school we had an IBM system card eating system with the selectric terminal.When we loaded APL, we would replace the type ball for the selectric with one with the APL character set, and had plastic ... | 1,760,371,819.278515 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/rebuilding-the-first-digital-personal-computer/ | Rebuilding The First Digital Personal Computer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"7400",
"integrated circuits",
"kenbak-1",
"pcb",
"period-correct",
"power supply",
"recreation",
"retrocomputing",
"transistors",
"ttl"
] | When thinking of the first PCs, most of us might imagine something like the Apple I or the TRS-80. But even before that, there were a set of computers that often had no keyboard, or recognizable display beyond a few blinking lights. [Artem Kalinchuk]
is attempting to recreate one of these very early digital computers, the Kenbak-1
, using as many period-correct parts as possible.
Considered by many to be the world’s first personal computer, the Kenbak-1 was an 8-bit machine with 256 bytes of memory, using
TTL
integrated circuits for the logic as there was no commercially available microprocessor available at the time it was designed. For [Artem]’s build, most of these parts can still be sourced including the 7400-series chips and carbon resistors although the shift registers were a bit of a challenge to find. A
custom PCB was built
to replicate the original, and with all the parts in order it’s ready to be assembled and put into a case which was built using the drawings for the original unit.
Although [Artem] plans to build a period-correct linear power supply for this computer, right now he’s using a modern switching power supply for testing. The only other major components that are different are the status lamps, in this case switched to LEDs because he wasn’t able to source incandescent bulbs that drew low enough current, and the switches which he’s replaced with MX-style keys. We’ll stay tuned as he builds and tests this over the course of several videos,
but in the meantime if you’re curious how this early computer actually worked we featured an emulator for it a while back
. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7294067",
"author": "Corey",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T13:18:17",
"content": "Not sure what the specs are on the bulbs he was looking for, but maybe look at 70’s home stereo equipment. The time period is roughly the same, so supply chains would have had similar bulbs available for R&... | 1,760,371,819.34017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/robust-speech-to-text-running-locally-on-quest-vr-headset/ | Robust Speech-to-Text, Running Locally On Quest VR Headset | Donald Papp | [
"Software Development",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"speech to text",
"transcription",
"vr",
"whisper"
] | [saurabhchalke] recently released
whisper.unity
, a Unity package that implements
whisper
locally on the Meta Quest 3 VR headset, bringing nearly real-time transcription of natural speech to the device in an easy-to-use way.
Whisper is a robust and free open source neural network capable of quickly recognizing and transcribing multilingual natural speech with nearly-human level accuracy, and this package implements it entirely on-device, meaning it runs locally and doesn’t interact with any remote service.
Meta Quest 3
It used to be that voice input for projects was a tricky business with iffy results and a strong reliance on speaker training and wake-words, but that’s no longer the case. Reliable and nearly real-time speech recognition is something that’s easily within the average hacker’s reach nowadays.
We covered
Whisper getting a plain C/C++ implementation
which opened the door to running on a variety of platforms and devices.
[Macoron] turned whisper.cpp into a Unity binding
which served as inspiration for this project, in which [saurabhchalke] turned it into a Quest 3 package. So if you are doing any VR projects in Unity and want reliable speech input with a side order of easy translation, it’s never been simpler. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "7286150",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T08:11:30",
"content": "This was indeed one of the first things I noticed with the 3, using voice commands is very reliable and fluid. Feels quite nice, it’s a really big improvement over the Quest 2",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,371,819.498041 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/15/uc-berkeley-prints-glass-nanoparticles/ | UC Berkeley Prints Glass Nanoparticles | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"fused silica",
"glass"
] | In a recent video, [Joel] of
3D Printing Nerd
interviews a researcher at University of California, Berkeley
about their work with glass 3D printing technology
. A resin is impregnated with tiny glass nanoparticles and produces green parts. An oven burns away the resin and then another heating step produces the actual silica glass part. You can see a video about the process below.
As you might expect with glass, the temperatures are toasty. The first burn is at 1100 C and the fusing burn is at 1300 C. The nanoparticles are about 40 nanometers across. The resulting parts are tiny with very small feature sizes. The technology to do this
has been around for a few years
, and the University continues researching this form of computed axial lithograph (CAL) 3D printing. These parts are so small that it uses an adaptation called microCAL that produces much smaller parts at high precision. However, the equipment available today won’t produce very large objects. The video talks about the uses for some of these small glass items.
We wonder how much the firings in the ovens change the tiny tolerances. They obviously work, so either they account for that or it doesn’t shrink much.
If you want your own 3D printed glass,
a laser system might be more practical
. If you just want transparent plastic, your FDM printer can do that.
Really
. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "7285829",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T07:57:20",
"content": "Could make some extremely intricate jewelry that will have future archaeologists scratching their heads",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7295451",
... | 1,760,371,819.456284 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/the-first-air-force-one-and-how-it-was-nearly-lost-forever/ | The First Air Force One And How It Was Nearly Lost Forever | Maya Posch | [
"History",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"airplane",
"restoration",
"us air force"
] | Although the designation ‘Air Force One’ is now commonly known to refer to the airplane used by the President of the United States, it wasn’t until Eisenhower that the US President would make significant use of a dedicated airplane. He would have a Lockheed VC-121A kitted out to act as his office as commander-in-chief. Called the
Columbine II
after the Colorado columbine flower, it served a crucial role during the Korean War and would result the coining of the ‘Air Force One’ designation following a near-disaster in 1954.
This involved a mix-up between Eastern Air Lines 8610 and Air Force 8610 (the VC-121A). After the
Columbine II
was replaced with a VC-121E model (
Columbine III
), the
Columbine II
was mistakenly sold to a private owner, and
got pretty close to being scrapped
.
In 2016, the plane made a “somewhat scary and extremely precarious” 2,000-plus-mile journey to Bridgewater, Virginia, to undergo a complete restoration. (Credit: Dynamic Aviation)
Although nobody is really sure how this mistake happened, it resulted in the private owner stripping the airplane for parts to keep other
Lockheed C-121s
and compatible airplanes flying. Shortly before scrapping the airplane, he received a call from the Smithsonian Institution, informing him that this particular airplane was Eisenhower’s first presidential airplane and the first ever Air Force One. This led to him instead fixing up the airplane and trying to sell it off. Ultimately the CEO of the airplane maintenance company Dynamic Aviation, [Karl D. Stoltzfus] bought the partially restored airplane after it had spent
another few years baking
in the unrelenting sun.
Although in a sorry state at this point, [Stoltzfus] put a team led by mechanic [Brian Miklos] to work who got the airplane in a flying condition by 2016 after a year of work, so that they could fly the airplane over to Dynamic Aviation facilities for a complete restoration. At this point the ‘nuts and bolts’ restoration is mostly complete after a lot of improvisation and manufacturing of parts for the 80 year old airplane, with restoration of the Eisenhower-era interior and exterior now in progress. This should take another few years and another $12 million or so, but would result in a fully restored and flight-worthy
Columbine II
, exactly as it would have looked in 1953, plus a few modern-day safety upgrades.
Although [Stoltzfus] recently passed away unexpectedly before being able to see the final result, his legacy will live on in the restored airplane, which will after so many years be able to meet up again with the
Columbine III
,
which is on display
at the National Museum of the USAF. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7329529",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T15:41:52",
"content": "No link to the story of the near accident?https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a20122/how-the-very-first-air-force-one-was-saved/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,819.408289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/laser-art-inspired-by-the-ford-motor-company/ | Laser Art Inspired By The Ford Motor Company | Al Williams | [
"Art",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"laser engraver"
] | Have you ever heard of Fordite? It was a man-made agate-like stone that originated from the Ford auto factories in the 1920s. Multiple layers of paint would build up as cars were painted different colors, and when it was thick enough, workers would cut it, polish it, and use it in jewelry. [SheltonMaker] uses a similar technique to create artwork using a laser engraver and
shares how it works
by showing off a replica of [Van Gogh’s] “Starry Night.”
A piece of Fordite on a pendant
The technique does have some random variation, so the result isn’t a perfect copy but, hey, it is art, after all. While true Fordite has random color layers, this technique uses specific colors layered from the lightest to the darkest. Each layer of paint is applied to a canvas. Only after all the layers are in place does the canvas go under the laser.
The first few layers of paint are white and serve as a backer. Each subsequent layer is darker until the final black layer. The idea is that the laser will cut at different depths depending on the desired lightness. A program called ImagR prepared the image as a negative image. Adjustments to the brightness, contrast, and gamma will impact the final result.
Of course, getting the exact power settings is tricky. The best result was to start at a relatively low power and then make more passes at an even lower power until things looked right. In between, compressed air cleared the print, although you have to be careful not to move the piece, of course.
There are pictures of each pass, and the final product looks great. If art’s not your thing, you can also do
chip logos
. While the laser used in this project is a 40-watt unit, we’ve noted before that wattage isn’t everything. You could do this—probably slower—with a lower-powered engraver.
Fordite image By [Rhonda]
CC BY-SA 2.0
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "7320576",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T09:20:08",
"content": "The paint mixing machines in hardware stores often have a “drip catcher” bucket. The pigment nozzles park over the bucket so the drops don’t make a mess.I’ve often thought there must be something art... | 1,760,371,819.599212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/a-usa-feature-for-a-europe-market-sony-receiver/ | A USA Feature For A Europe-Market Sony Receiver | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"av",
"network standby",
"sony"
] | A feature of many modern network-connected entertainment devices is that they will play streamed music while on standby mode. This so-called “network standby”is very useful if you fancy some gentle music but don’t want the Christmas lights or the TV. It was a feature [Caramelfur] missed on their Sony AV receiver, something especially annoying because it’s present on the US-market equivalent of their European model.
Some gentle hackery ensued
, and now the rece3iver follows its American cousin.
A first examination of the firmware found the two downloads to be identical, so whatever differences had to be in some form of configuration. Investigating what it exposed to the network led to a web server with device configuration parameters. Some probing behind the scenes and a bit of lucky guesswork identified the endpoint to turn on network standby, and there it was, the same as the US market model. Should you need it,
the tooling is in a GitHub repository
.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen identical hardware being shipped with different firmwares in Europe from that in the USA, perhaps our most egregious example was a Motorola phone with a much earlier Android version for Europeans. We don’t understand why manufacturers do it, in particular with such an innocuous feature as network standby. If you have a Sony receiver you can now fix it, but you shouldn’t have to.
RJ45, Devcore,
CC0
. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "7315688",
"author": "Schobi",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T05:16:49",
"content": "Just a wild guess:Ist this maybe related to standby power consumption? I remember some EU regulation for standby <0.x W and they could not meet this while the CPU keeps running? So – just disable that feat... | 1,760,371,819.66393 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/canadarm2-scores-milestone-with-catching-its-50th-spacecraft/ | Canadarm2 Scores Milestone With Catching Its 50th Spacecraft | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"canadarm2",
"international space station"
] | Recently Canada’s Canadarm2
caught its 50th spacecraft
in the form of a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo vessel since 2009. Although perhaps not the most prominent part of the International Space Station (ISS), the
Canadarm2
performs a range of very essential functions on the outside of the ISS, such as moving equipment around and supporting astronauts during EVAs.
Power and Data Grapple Fixture on the ISS (Credit: NASA)
Officially called the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), it is part of the three-part Mobile Servicing System (MSS) that allows for the Canadarm2 and the Dextre unit to scoot around the non-Russian part of the ISS, attach to Power Data Grapple Fixtures (
PDGFs
) on the ISS and manipulate anything that has a compatible Grapple Fixture on it.
Originally the MSS was not designed to catch spacecraft when it was installed in 2001 by Space Shuttle
Endeavour
during STS-100, but with the US moving away from the Space Shuttle to a range of unmanned supply craft which aren’t all capable of autonomous docking, this became a necessity, with the Japanese HTV (with grapple fixture) becoming the first craft to be caught this way in 2009. Since the Canadarm2 was originally designed to manipulate ISS modules this wasn’t such a major shift, and the MSS is soon planned to also started building new space stations when the first
Axiom Orbital Segment
is launched by 2026. This would become the Axiom Station.
With the Axiom Station planned to have its own Canadarm-like system, this will likely mean that Canadarm2 and the rest of the MSS will be decommissioned with the rest of the ISS by 2031.
Top image: Canadarm2 captures Cygnus OA-5 S.S. Alan Poindexter in late 2016 (Credit: NASA) | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "7319972",
"author": "Nobody",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T08:51:32",
"content": "Just wondering what the Canarm2 will evolve into when it starts using the captured junk to expand it’s size and capabilities.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,371,819.712113 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/roll-your-own-presence-sensor/ | Roll Your Own Presence Sensor | Al Williams | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"home automation",
"mmwave",
"person sensor"
] | [Mellow_Labs] wanted an Everything Presence Lite but found it was always out of stock. Therefore, he decided to
create his own
. The kit uses a millimeter wave sensor as a super-sensitive motion tracker for up to three people. It can even read your heart rate remotely. You can see a video of the project below.
There are a few differences from the original kit. Both use the C4001 24 GHz human presence detection sensor. However, the homebrew version also includes a BME680 environmental sensor.
If you haven’t seen a millimeter wave sensor—often written mmwave—before, it is essentially a tiny radar that can measure movement, acceleration, and angles very accurately. They are available at different microwave wavelengths and have onboard processing to easily provide useful information for a processor like the one in this project. The processor on board is an ESP32, which works well with [Mellow_Labs’] home automation system.
A 3D-printed case rounds everything out. Circuit-wise, there isn’t much going on since everything is on a module PCB. You essentially just have to connect everything together.
These sensors can do a lot of things. For example,
inspecting pipelines
. Another common way to detect people is to use
a specialized camera
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "7309431",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T23:37:31",
"content": "Multi-colored LEDs lighting up his parts bin, cool!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7313866",
"author": "m1ke",
"... | 1,760,371,819.758326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/fighting-the-scourge-of-screwdriver-mange/ | Fighting The Scourge Of “Screwdriver Mange” | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"ammonia",
"bleach",
"CAB",
"cellulose acetate butyrate",
"hand tool",
"plastic",
"polymer",
"tool",
"vinegar"
] | We’ve all got our favorite hand tools, and while the selection criteria are usually pretty subjective, it usually boils down to a combination of looks and feel. In our opinion, the king of both these categories when it comes to screwdrivers is those clear, hard acetate plastic handles, which are a joy to use — at least until the plastic starts to degrade and exude a characteristically funky aroma.
But perhaps we can change that if
these experiments on screwdriver “mange”
hold up. That’s [357magdad]’s unappealing but accurate description of the chemical changes that eventually occur in the strong, hard, crystal-clear handles of your favorite screwdrivers. The polymer used for these handles is cellulose acetate butyrate, or CAB, which is mostly the same cellulose acetate that replaced the more explode-y cellulose nitrate in things like pool balls and movie film, except with some of the acetate groups replaced with a little butyric acid. The polymer is fine at first, but add a little UV light and over time the outer layer of CAB decomposes into a white flaky cellulose residue while the butyric acid volatilizes, creating the characteristic odor of vomitus. Lovely.
In the video below, [357magdad] takes a look at different concoctions that all allegedly cure the mange. TL, DW; it was a dunk in household ammonia that performed the best, well ahead of other common agents like vinegar and bleach. The ammonia — or more precisely, ammonium hydroxide — works very quickly on the cellulose residue, dissolving it readily and leaving the handle mange-free and looking nearly new after some light scrubbing. None of the other agents came close, although acetone did manage to clear up the mange a bit, at the cost of softening the underlying CAB in a process that’s probably similar to
acetone smoothing ABS prints
.
As for the funky smell, well, the results were less encouraging. Nothing really got rid of the pukey smell, even a roll in baking soda. We suspect there won’t be much for that, since humans can detect it down to 10 parts per million. Consider it the price to pay for a nice-looking screwdriver that feels so good in your hand. | 46 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "7304558",
"author": "Just sayin'",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T20:15:16",
"content": "Wire brush works well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "7329542",
"author": "CSS",
"timestamp": "2024-08-17T15:42:19",
"... | 1,760,371,820.211295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/16/2024-tiny-games-contest-salsa-one-handheld-requires-no-pcb/ | 2024 Tiny Games Contest: Salsa One Handheld Requires No PCB | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"cr2032",
"oled",
"rp2040"
] | If you’re thinking about building a single tiny game or even a platform, you might be tempted to use a single button for everything. Such is the case with [Alex]’s
Salsa ONE minimalist game console
, which is inspired by both the Arduboy and the ergonomics of the SanDisk Sansa music player.
With Salsa ONE, [Alex] aimed to make something that is both simple and challenging. The result is something that, awesomely enough, doesn’t need a PCB, and can be comfortably controlled with just one thumb. There isn’t much to this thing, which is essentially an RP2040, an OLED, a vibration motor, a buzzer, a button, and a CR2032 coin cell. [Alex] chose to program Salsa ONE in MicroPython. Be sure to check it out in action in the brief demo after the break.
Have you got an idea for a tiny game? Don’t hesitate to enter the
2024 Tiny Games Contest
! You have until September 10th, so head on over to
Hackaday.io
and get started today. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "7301889",
"author": "That guy ¯\\(°_o)/¯",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T18:36:14",
"content": "but there’s a pcb on the LCD and the micro controller, and the perf board holding it together got printed at some point :p",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,820.092274 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/15/make-a-catch-with-a-3d-printed-rod/ | Make A Catch With A 3D Printed Rod | Jenny List | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"angling",
"finshing",
"fishing rod"
] | When we think of fishing rods, the image brought to mind is one of a tweed-clad fisherman in his waders in a wild salmon stream, his line whipping about as it guides the fly over the surface of the water. Angling is a pursuit with a heritage, and having a lengthy rod seems an essential for its enjoyment. But perhaps your tackle needn’t be such an important factor, and in that spirit here’s [3dcreation] with
a tiny but fully functional 3D printed fishing rod
.
If you’ve ever seen a fisherman working through a hole in the ice, you may have some idea of the type of rod in question, it’s a stubby affair half handle and half rod, with a rudimentary reel in the middle. In the pictures it’s loaded up with line, weight ready to go, so we can see how it’s supposed to work. We’re not anglers here though, so the question of whether it would indeed work is one for your imagination.
Perhaps surprisingly, few anglers find their way onto these pages. One of the few that has,
used a drone
. | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "7273366",
"author": "The Mighty Buzzard",
"timestamp": "2024-08-16T02:08:26",
"content": "You might be surprised how many of us like to wet a line now and then.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "7275803",
"author": "The Commen... | 1,760,371,820.25394 |
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