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https://hackaday.com/2024/07/25/end-of-an-era-sony-cuts-production-of-writable-optical-media/ | End Of An Era: Sony Cuts Production Of Writable Optical Media | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Original Art"
] | [
"blu-ray",
"cd",
"CD-R",
"dvd",
"dvd-r",
"dvdr",
"optical media"
] | The 1990s saw a revolution occur, launched by the CD burner. As prices of writeable media and drives dropped, consumers rushed to duplicate games, create their own mix CDs, and backup their data on optical disc. It was a halcyon time.
Fast forward to today, and we’re very much on downward curve when it comes to optical media use. Amidst ever-declining consumer interest,
Sony has announced it will cut production of writeable optical media
. Let’s examine what’s going on, and explore the near future for writable optical discs.
Sony’s End
These will soon be a rarity.
Sony’s plant in Tagaze, Japan was the home of its optical disc manufacturing operation. The Japanese company has announced there will be 250 jobs lost out of 670 at the plant due to the end of writeable media production. The decision is being made to curtail production across CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray lines.
Notably, though, it’s believed this will not affect the production of pre-recorded pressed media, at least in the short term. However, reports
in the Japanese media
suggest the industrial giant will “gradually cease production of optical disc storage media,” including Blu-Ray products.
Regardless, for now, you can expect music, games, and movies to continue to be released on physical media. Local stores are still full of DVDs and Blu-Rays, and you can even get Taylor Swift and Doja Cat albums on CD if your car still has a CD player.
Plus, the big stores still carry titles for those gamers still hanging on to the disc-drive versions of modern consoles. Still, ask the average PC gamer the last time they handled an optical disc and they’ll probably say “What’s an optical disc?” That market moved on a long time ago.
The Disc World
While Sony is leaving the industry, other manufacturers remain in the market. Consolidation means that many brands are all manufactured by the same handful of companies. Notably, Taiyo Yuden, a company that worked on the invention of the recordable CD, checked out of the market in 2015. Mitsubishi and Verbatim went the same way. All three ended up sold to Taiwanese firm CMC Magnetics, which produces discs commonly rebranded as Memorex, Imation, HP, TDK, and others. The other remaining major player is Ritek. Both companies produce various lines of CD-Rs, DVD-Rs and DVD+Rs, and BD-Rs and BD-REs.
HP’s BD-R XLs are really made by CMC Magnetics. Credit:
CMC
You’ve probably got one question still itching away in your brain. Who is actually using optical media in this day and age? Most consumer use cases have dwindled to almost nothing. Few of us burn CDs for our cars anymore, now that aux ports, Bluetooth, and USB ports are all readily available. Similarly, moving data via sneakernet is more easily done by simple flash drives or larger portable hard drives, without the usual write-once limitation.
As it turns out, though, optical media remains a great solution for long-time archival use—if you get the right discs. Cheap CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are still a terrible choice, of course. However, so-called M-Discs are designed specifically for this task. Typically available in DVD and Blu-Ray formats, they’re so-called for their ability to store data for “up to 1000 years” according to some manufacturers. They achieve greater longevity through the use of a highly-stable inorganic glassy carbon layer which stores the disc’s data. This is far more stable than the organic write layers used in most writeable optical media. It’s believed this material could last for up to 10,000 years if stored in highly stable conditions. Sadly, the polycarbonate layer on top is only expected to survive for 1000 years at best.
When it comes to high-capacity cold digital storage, it’s hard to go past optical media. Tapes can compete on cost and data density, but falter in longevity. Where an M-Disc might last 100 or 1000 years, a tape might last 30 years at best. Recent users include members of Reddit’s
r/DataHoarder community
and
state government authorities.
Basically, if you’ve got a lot of data you need to keep for a long time, optical might appeal to you.
M-Discs are still desirable for long-term storage, in DVD and Blu-Ray formats. Credit:
Ritek
There are also some hopes that optical media could storm back on to the scene in a big way in future. Researchers in Shanghai have recently determined a way to construct an optical disk with that could store on the order of 200 TB, as per
The Register
. This would be achieved through the use of a nanoscale three-dimensional structure to reach never-before-seen storage densities. At such high capacity, the discs could be competitive with hard disks for certain applications. However, it’s early days yet, and limitations remain, including write speed. It’s not much good having a 200 TB disc if it takes forever to read and write the thing.
While optical media is no longer the mainstream darling it once was, it’s not dead yet. And hey, if vinyl and cassettes can come back in a big way, who is to say where the CD market will be in ten years? Human culture is a strange and wonderful thing. | 64 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779454",
"author": "clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2024-07-25T14:40:20",
"content": "Well just like cdr and dvdrSomeone else still makes them",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6779468",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,844.766497 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/25/retro-inspired-cyberdeck-scrolls-around-cyberspace/ | Retro Inspired Cyberdeck Scrolls Around Cyberspace | Tom Nardi | [
"Cyberdecks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"Raspberry Pi Zero",
"rotary encoder",
"scroll wheel"
] | It’s difficult to nail down exactly what counts as a “real” cyberdeck in this brave new era of bespoke computing. But at the minimum, most in the community would agree that a proper deck should have a non-traditional form factor, and be designed to meet the unique needs of the builder. If you’re looking for a fantastic example of both concepts, check out the
Cyberdore 2064 from [Tommi L]
.
At first glance the 3D printed enclosure of the Cyberdore looks a bit like a Speak & Spell, but it’s really more of an amalgamation of everything that made
1980s computers so unique
. You’ve got the vents, the chunky switches, the undersized display, and of course, the handle. The case might have been extruded in 2024, but it’s doing a fantastic impression of a piece of tech from 40 years ago.
One of the key external features of the Cyberdore 2064 is the side-mounted rotary encoder that allows for smoothly scrolling through online feeds (such as your favorite hardware hacking site) or long documents. The cheap and easy to work with KY-040 encoder has been converted to a USB input device by way of a Pi Pico, and has been paired with an over-sized 3D printed knob that really makes this build stand out — not only visually, but in terms of usability. These cyberdeck builds often rely on touch screens for input, but we always appreciate a physical interface.
Under the hood you’ve got a Raspberry Pi Zero and an 18650 cell to keep the whole thing running while on the go. Though the Zero is certainly showing its age compared to the more modern variants of the Pi, for a device like this, raw computing power isn’t really the driving concern. A mechanical keyboard usually rounds out these cyberdeck builds, but in this case, [Tommi] went with a fairly common Rii 518BT portable board that’s been skillfully integrated into the front of the Cyberdore.
All of the STL files necessary to print out your own Cyberdore 2064 are available on Printables, and while [Tommi] didn’t exactly provide build instructions, the write-up provides plenty of information to get you started.
So is it just us, or does looking at Cyberdore 2064 make you think it’s time for another
Hackaday Cyberdeck Challenge
? | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779429",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2024-07-25T12:21:47",
"content": "This thing seems pretty darn neat, somewhere between a calculator, portable terminal and just a regular computer… I can see something like that sitting on my desk and even though I hate those little key... | 1,760,371,844.503821 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/25/pnut-a-self-compiling-c-transpiler-targeting-human-readable-posix-shell/ | Pnut: A Self-Compiling C Transpiler Targeting Human-Readable POSIX Shell | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"shell scripting",
"transpiler"
] | Shell scripting is one of those skills that are absolutely invaluable on especially UNIX and BSD-based systems like the BSDs, the two zillion Linux distributions as well as MacOS. Yet not every shell is the same, and not everybody can be bothered to learn the differences between the sh, bash, ksh, zsh, dash, fish and other shells, which can make a project like
Pnut
seem rather tempting. Rather than dealing with shell scripting directly, the user writes their code in the Lingua Franca of computing, AKA C, which is then transpiled into a shell script that should run in any POSIX-compliant shell.
The transpiler can be used both online via the main Pnut website, as well as locally using the (BSD 2-clause) open source code
on GitHub
. Here the main limitations are also listed, which mostly concern the C constructs that do not map nicely to a POSIX shell. These are: no support for floating point numbers and unsigned integers, no
goto
and
switch
nor taking the address of a variable with
&
. These and preprocessor-related limitations and issues are largely to be expected, as especially POSIX shells are hardly direct replacements for full-blown C code.
As a self-professed research project, Pnut seems like an interesting project, although if you are writing shell scripts for anything important, you probably just want to buckle down and learn the ins and outs of POSIX shell scripting and beyond. Although it’s a bit of a learning curve, we’d be remiss if we said that it’s not totally worth it, if only because it makes overall shell usage even beyond scripting so much better. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779392",
"author": "Sravdar",
"timestamp": "2024-07-25T08:12:46",
"content": "This looks pretty usefull. Would be extra usefull If it were to compile into windows shell scripts as well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6779459... | 1,760,371,844.554484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/hacking-an-iot-camera-reveals-hard-coded-root-password/ | Hacking An IoT Camera Reveals Hard-Coded Root Password | Dan Maloney | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Binwalk",
"boot",
"camera",
"firmware",
"Ghidra",
"hash",
"IoT",
"ip address",
"linux",
"root",
"strings",
"uboot"
] | Hacking — at least the kind where you’re breaking into stuff — is very much a learn-by-doing skill. There’s simply no substitute for getting your hands dirty and just trying something. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something by watching, with
this root password exploit on a cheap IP video camera
being a good look at the basics.
By way of background on this project, [Matt Brown] had previously torn into a VStarcam CB73 security camera, a more or less generic IP camera that he picked up on the cheap, and identified a flash memory chip from which he extracted the firmware. His initial goal was to see if the camera was contacting sketchy servers, and while searching the strings for the expected unsavory items, he found hard-coded IP addresses plus confirmation that the camera was running some Linux variant.
With evidence of sloppy coding practices, [Matt] set off on a search for a hard-coded root password. The second video covers this effort, which started with finding UART pins and getting a console session. Luckily, the bootloader wasn’t locked, which allowed [Matt] to force the camera to boot into a shell session and find the root password hash. With no luck brute-forcing the hash, he turned to Ghidra to understand the structure of a suspicious program in the firmware called
encoder
. After a little bit of poking and some endian twiddling, he was able to identify the hard-coded root password for every camera made by this outfit, and likely others as well.
Granted, the camera manufacturer made this a lot easier than it should have been, but with a lot of IoT stuff similarly afflicted by security as an afterthought, the skills on display here are probably broadly applicable. Kudos to [Matt] for the effort and the clear, concise presentation that makes us want to dig into the junk bin and get hacking. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779379",
"author": "Reformed Astronomer",
"timestamp": "2024-07-25T06:23:31",
"content": "Not unexpected … The only cheap camera I have was found to have telnet ports open and a hardcoded root password – it was blank. it accepts a change via passed, until reboot when it becomes b... | 1,760,371,844.295339 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/manually-computing-logarithms-to-grok-calculators/ | Manually Computing Logarithms To Grok Calculators | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Software Development"
] | [
"logarithm",
"mathematics"
] | Logarithms are everywhere in mathematics and derived fields, but we rarely think about how trigonometric functions, exponentials, square roots and others are calculated after we punch the numbers into a calculator of some description and hit ‘calculate’. How do we even know that the answer which it returns is remotely correct? This was the basic question that [Zachary Chartrand]
set out to answer
for [3Blue1Brown]’s Summer of Math Exposition 3 (SoME-3). Inspired by learning to script Python, he dug into how such calculations are implemented by the scripting language, which naturally led to the standard C library. Here he found an interesting implementation for the natural algorithm and the way geometric series convergence is sped up.
The short answer is that fundamental properties of these series are used to decrease the number of terms and thus calculations required to get a result. One example provided in the article reduces the naïve approach from 36 terms down to 12 with some optimization, while the versions used in the standard C library are even more optimized. This not only reduces the time needed, but also the memory required, both of which makes many types of calculations more feasible on less powerful systems.
Even if most of us are probably more than happy to just keep mashing that ‘calculate’ button and (rightfully) assume that the answer is correct, such a glimpse at the internals of the calculations involved definitely provides a measure of confidence and understanding, if not the utmost appreciation for those who did the hard work to make all of this possible. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779341",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-07-25T02:13:46",
"content": "My high school math teacher taught how to calculate logs and trig functions using various series. I don’t remember anything about optimization though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,371,844.394563 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/a-lenticular-clock-spells-out-the-hours/ | A Lenticular Clock Spells Out The Hours | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"display",
"lenticular display"
] | So many are the clock projects which cross the Hackaday threshold, that it’s very rare indeed to see something that hasn’t already been done. We think we’ve not seen a lenticular clock before though, and we’re thus impressed by
this one produced by [Moritz Sivers]
.
You may well be familiar with lenticular images from toys and novelties, an animation is sliced into lines and placed behind an array of multi-faceted linear lenses. It gives the effect of movement as from different viewing angles a different frame of the animation is perceived. In this clock the animation is replaced by the clock digits, and by rotating the whole with a servo driven by an ESP8266 microcontroller it can display different digits to the viewer. The write-up and the video below are of value both for the clock itself and the description of how these animations are produced. The clock itself doesn’t sacrifice usability for all its novelty, and we can see this technique might find a place in other projects requiring custom displays.
The lenticular lenses used here are off the shelf, but if you are of an adventurous mind,
you could try printing some of your own
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779381",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-07-25T06:50:40",
"content": "cool, very cool concept… but not without issues.In fairy tales this all works fine, but in real life Snow White will read a different time value than the dwarfs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,371,844.140603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/a-puzzle-for-the-visually-impaired-or-blindfolded/ | A Puzzle For The Visually Impaired, Or Blindfolded | Kristina Panos | [
"Games"
] | [
"3d printing",
"puzzle",
"visually impaired"
] | There’s no reason why a visually impaired person can’t enjoy putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It just needs to look a little different.
Or, in this case, feel different
.
16-year-old [feazellecw] has come up with just the solution — a puzzle with pieces that have both a defining texture and a slant in the z-height to them. While there is no picture on the puzzle face to speak of, instead there is a satisfying end result. You could change it up and add a relief image if you wanted, as long as you still observed the diagonal lines, the z-slant, and the little hole in the bottom that helps differentiate it from the top.
As [feazellecw] says, it’s important to find a box to help keep the pieces together during assembly; a 3D-printed box would be a nice touch. Files for this 15-piece puzzle are available if you’d like to make one for yourself or someone else, but just the idea might inspire you to make your own variant.
Don’t like putting puzzles together?
Build a robot to do it for you
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779259",
"author": "Antoni",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T20:55:09",
"content": "meybe put transistor, battery, led and other electronic stuff and make a circuit electronic?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6779295",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,844.340533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/floss-weekly-episode-793-keeping-an-eye-on-things-with-hilight-io/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 793: Keeping An Eye On Things With Hilight.io | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"Highlight.io",
"Monitoring"
] | This week Jonathan Bennett and
Aaron Newcomb
chat with
Jay Khatri
, the co-founder of
Highlight.io
. That’s a web application monitoring tool that can help you troubleshoot performance problems, find bugs, and improve experiences for anything that runs in a browser or browser-like environment. Why did they opt to make this tool Open Source? What’s the funding model? And what’s the surprising challenge we tried to help Jay solve, live on the show? Listen to find out!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show Right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,844.435438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/supercon-2023-jesse-t-gonzalez-makes-circuit-boards-that-breathe-and-bend/ | Supercon 2023: Jesse T. Gonzalez Makes Circuit Boards That Breathe And Bend | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"pcbs",
"printed circuit boards",
"robot",
"robots",
"valves"
] | Most robots are built out of solid materials like metal and plastic, giving them rigid structures that are easy to work with and understand. But you can open up much wider possibilities if you explore alternative materials and construction methods. As it turns out, that’s precisely what [Jesse T. Gonzalez] specializes in.
Jesse is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and an innovator to boot.
His talk at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon
covers his recent work on making circuit boards that can breathe and bend. You might not even call them robots, but his creations are absolutely
robotic.
Be Flexible
Jesse has a section of “wall” in his apartment that can shift and change into different useful shapes.
Jesse begins by teaching us about robotic surfaces. He shows us a demonstration video, in which a metal ball is juggled around on a silicone bubble surface. Typically, we might model robot actuation in our heads as involving simple grippers on the ends of industrial robot arms, but that’s a limiting view. As the demo shows, even a
surface
itself can be robotic, and can be used to generate textures or manipulate objects, for example.
In his own apartment, Jesse has taken this idea a step further—creating the idea of a robotic environment. At his home, he walks in the door and is greeted by his robotic wall, which extends out to create a shelf for his shopping. Another part of the wall steps up to act as a coat hook. His very home itself has become roboticized to help ease his tasks of daily living.
He draws comparison to the Disney movie
Encanto,
which depicted a very house itself that was alive. And so many other films have shown us similar over the years. Walls that transform to reveal hidden doors, transforming desks and chairs and the like. Typically, these concepts are the preserve of mere cartoons, but there’s value in exploring whether we could make these things a reality.
He notes that building large interactive surfaces can be quite difficult, and that he didn’t produce this complex structure overnight. He returns to the example of the roboticized silicone bubble surface. Building a large bubble surface requires using a solenoid for each bubble section you want to actuate, he explains. This doesn’t scale well. However, if you could instead make a printed circuit board that featured the valves as an integral component, that would greatly simplify the assembly. Producing a larger PCB with more integral valves would be much simpler then endlessly wiring up more discrete valves.
Jesse developed an electrostatic air valve that could be readily produced in grand numbers on a PCB.
In Jesse’s pneuamtic bubble demo build, the valves work by electrostatic action, with a structure consisting of a PCB with electrodes and a conductive diaphragm. With no voltage applied, the valve is shut. Applying voltage across the PCB electrode and the diaphragm pulls the valve open, letting air through. Voltage can also be applied to an alternate electrode to attract the diaphragm the other way, sealing the valve shut. The valves operate with an actuation voltage of a few hundred volts, and can switch in 40 milliseconds or so.
The scalable PCB air valves have potential use in the creation of things like interactive surfaces and robotic structures.
The system was originally developed with the electrostatic diaphragm to act as a “lid” on a pressure port. However, the electrostatic force wasn’t strong enough to keep the simple valve design shut. Jesse realized flipping the design on its head was the way to go. Instead, the valves are naturally sucked closed by vacuum on the system. They can then be pulled open via electrostatic actuation.
The PCB-based assembly method allowed creating complex arrays of valves that could actuate all kinds of things. Examples demonstrated by Jesse include the aforementioned bubble surface, as well as a “wheel” that walks with pneumatically-actuated syringes.
Leaving The Plane
Jesse’s initial work in this space was all very planar. No surprise, given the PCBs he was using were rigid. However, he wanted to “leave the plane” to explore more complex geometries. With his collaborators Dr. Scott E. Hudson and Dr. Alexandra Ion, he figured that combining rigid plates with hinge joints was an easy way to create more three-dimensional structures through folding. Again, PCBs were at the heart of this work.
Moving the end points and changing the folds between each cell allows each column to take on different shapes.
The group wanted to explore this concept on architectural scales, imagining ideas like walls that could transform their entire form into new useful shapes. In time, they developed a wall surface with multiple columns, each composed of individual rigid cells that join to their neighbor with hinges. By the cells changing their orientation relative to each other, the whole column can change its shape. The cells are made of rigid plates of FR4. Each cell is joined to its neighbor with a semi-circular clamp actuated by a servo, flexible mylar hinges, and flat flex cables for electronic connections. By altering the orientation of the clamp, the cells can lock together in a rigid orientation, or allow the hinges to flex in a mountain or valley orientation.
For now, actuating the wall columns is mostly handled with pre-scripted actions. However, Jesse believes capacitive sensing or other technologies could make the wall more effortlessly interactive. In any case, even at its current level of sophistication, the living wall structure is serving as an excellent talking point in Jesse’s apartment.
Fundamentally, Jesse’s techniques are all about using PCBs in ways that make it easy to assemble adaptive structures at scale. It’s like taking a look at the nascent technology that seems to show up in so many science-fiction movies, where rooms and furniture seem to bend and change to their owner’s will. Perhaps one day, that could be more of a reality with techniques like these. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779158",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T17:35:18",
"content": "That reminds me of the guy who remodeled his apartment in the style of Enterprise 1701D.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,371,844.230986 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/exploring-soap-films/ | Exploring Soap Films | Al Williams | [
"Art",
"Science"
] | [
"fluid dynamics",
"science project",
"soap"
] | While fluid dynamics sounds like a dull topic,
SoapFilmScope
promises to make it fun by using your cell phone to observe the interactions between sound waves and liquid membranes. You can make your own with some PVC pipe, some 3D-printed attachments, a speaker, and a few other odds and ends.
If your PVC pipe doesn’t match [DaniloR29’s] exactly, no problem. The files are in OpenSCAD so you can easily change them to suit your needs. One end of the PVC tee dips into soap solution to form a film — think like a soap bubble before you blow it out of the bubble wand. The other ends have the speaker and the cell phone camera.
While the effect is entertaining, there’s real science behind it. You can learn about acoustic propagation, interference, and diphasic patterns, among other things. This would be a fun classroom project or just something to pass the time on a rainy afternoon. Be careful, though. Taking
these kinds of pictures
can be addictive. If you’d rather make bubbles, why not make
giant ones
?
If you enjoy this sort of thing, [Danilo] also built the
KaleidoPhoneScope
, which you can see in action in the video below. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779143",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T16:35:15",
"content": "“While fluid dynamics sounds like a dull topic,”Speak for yourself! =P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6779161",
"author": "The Commenter For... | 1,760,371,844.183668 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/the-rise-of-the-disappearing-polymorphs/ | The Rise Of The Disappearing Polymorphs | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science"
] | [
"chemical engineering",
"disappearing polymorphs",
"drug",
"drugs",
"medicine",
"paroxetine",
"paroxetine hydrochloride",
"pharmaceutical",
"pharmaceuticals",
"ritonavir"
] | Science and engineering usually create consistent results. Generally, when you figure out how to make something, you can repeat that at will to make
more
of something. But what if, one day, you ran the same process, and got different results? You double-checked, and triple-checked, and you kept ending up with a different end product instead?
Perhaps it wasn’t the process that changed, but the environment? Or physics itself? Enter the scary world of disappearing polymorphs.
Point of No Return
Imagine you’re working at a laboratory that creates pharmaceuticals. You figure out the reactants and the chemistry involved to make a new drug. You design a production line, and your new factory starts churning out the drug in mass quantities. This goes well for years, until suddenly, the drugs stop working.
You run an analysis, and the drugs coming out of the factory aren’t what you designed at all. They’re a weird new form of the same chemical with a different crystal structure, and they’re no longer working the same way. What happened?
You’ve probably come across the case of a disappearing polymorph. This is where the original version of a chemical’s crystal structure becomes impractical or impossible to produce. Instead, you tend to end up with a new version instead, typically a more stable, lower-energy version. The mere presence of this newer, more stable version tends to convert the original version into the new form quite easily. Since the new form is more stable, it tends to become difficult to convert the product back to the original form, or functionally, to produce it at all.
Paroxetine Problems
Paroxetine hydrochloride is one of the most well known drugs to have suffered a disappearing polymorph. Credit:
research paper
A great case study exists in paroxetine hydrochloride, an SSRI medication. The initial form of the drug was developed in the 1970s, and was known as paroxetine anhydrate. It was produced as a hygroscopic, chalky powder. However, in 1984, a new version spontaneously popped up at sites in the UK that were scaling up production. The new ‘hemihydrate’ crystal form was more stable. Drug in the anhydrate form would spontaneously convert into hemihydrate whenever the two came into contact in the presence of water or mere humidity.
The issue caused legal problems down the line. Years later, other drug manufacturers wished to produce paroxetine, too. The patent on paroxetine anhydrate had ran out, so generic manufacturer Apotex moved to begin production. The issue was that the company found it could not produce the original form. Instead, its product inevitably came out as paroxetine hemihydrate. It’s believed that the Earth’s atmosphere had functionally become populated by trace amounts of paroxetine hemihydrate, to the point where any paroxetine anhydrate would immediately be transformed into the new structure.
By this time, GSK was the company that held a still-active patent on paroxetine hemihydrate. It sued Apotex, arguing that its generic pills contained paroxetine hemihydrate that had been created through the atmospheric seeding process. The courts accepted GSK’s submission on this point, but ruled in favor of Apotex’s right to continue producing its generic pills. It was noted Apotex could not be held responsible for the issue of uncontrolled crystal seeding.
Later research saw two separate companies independently create another polymorph. Both Synthon and SmithKline Beecham sought patents for the production of polymorphs known as paroxetine mesylate. However, a similar problem cropped up shortly after. Any attempt to create the Synthon polymorph would end up creating the Beecham structure instead. This lead to much confusion over whether Synthon’s version was a new case of a disappearing polymorph, or whether the company had made errors in its patent work. Ultimately, no satisfying consensus was reached as to the truth of the matter.
Treatment Failure
Ritonavir started spontaneously assembling in the Form II crystal structure in 1998. This form was not medically useful and its spread ruined the effectiveness of the drug for some time. Credit:
research paper
Sadly, disappearing polymorphs can create more than legal woes. Ritonavir was released for public use in 1996, a crucial antiretroviral drug used in the fight against HIV. In its original crystal form, known as ‘Form I”, it was quite soluble and medically useful for treating the condition. However, in 1998, “Form II” was discovered. This was a more stable polymorph that existed at a lower energy level. The problem was that this crystal form was much less soluble. This made the drug less bioavailable, ruining its effectiveness at treating the disease.
The existence of Form II threatened the production of the useful form of the drug. Any laboratory that saw the introduction of Form II was unable to produce Form I afterwards. It was speculated
by researchers
that individuals that had worked in such labs could carry traces of the new form, and potentially poison facilities that were still producing Form I. In the space of a few weeks, everywhere that could once produce Form I was rapidly turning out only Form II instead.
Due to problems with production and the lack of efficacy of Form II ritonavir, the drug was pulled from the market. This lead to thousands of patients going without medication for their condition, and losses of over $250 million for the manufacturer, Abbott. The company held press conferences that highlighted the gravity of the issue.
“
This is why all of us at Abbott have been working extremely hard throughout the summer [of 1998], often around the clock, and sometimes never going home at night. We have been here seven days a week and we will continue to do so. We have cancelled vacations and asked our families for their understanding and support. This is not an issue that we take lightly.
”
Eventually, the problem was overcome. Researchers found a way to produce Form I under highly controlled conditions. The product had to be sold in a special refrigerated gel cap, compared to its original delivery form of a non-refrigerated capsule. Later developments included a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir that did not require lower temperatures to remain stable, and a new form of melt-extruded Form I ritonavir tablet that hit the market in 2010.
What Can Be Done
Scientists are some what at the mercy of nature when it comes to disappearing polymorphs. New polymorphs can pop up without warning, while tiny seed crystals can quickly contaminate entire labs, factories, and indeed, the world. There’s little defence. The only solution is doing hard chemistry—either to find ways to make original polymorphs survive the new world, or to find other new polymorphs that are still useful and still producible.
Ultimately, though, new polymorphs can be a pharmaceutical engineer’s nightmare. They can ruin a drug and ruin a factory overnight. Stories of ritonavir and other drugs will remain cautionary tales for this very reason. | 40 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779105",
"author": "garberPark",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T14:26:34",
"content": "I never knew. Brilliant and shocking. This is why HAD is must reading!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6779728",
"author": "12L14",
... | 1,760,371,844.854389 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/is-it-time-for-synthetic-diamonds-to-shine/ | Is It Time For Synthetic Diamonds To Shine? | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"chemical vapor deposition",
"diamond",
"lab-grown diamond",
"synthetic diamond"
] | The process of creating a diamond naturally takes between 1 and 3.3 billion years. Conversely, a lab-grown diamond can now be created in 150 minutes. But despite being an ethical and environmentally-friendly alternative to the real thing, the value of lab-grown diamonds has plummeted in recent years. Manufacturers are doing various things to battle the stigma and increase their value by being carbon neutral and using recycled metals.
About halfway through is where this article gets really interesting
. Swiss jeweler LOEV has partnered with lab growers Ammil to produce a line of Swiss-made jewelry by relying on renewable energy sources. 90% comes from hydroelectric power, and the rest comes from solar and biomass generation. Now, on to the process itself.
You can have your cake and heat it, too.
Growing a diamond starts with a seed — a thin wafer of diamond laser-shaved off of an existing stone, and this is placed in a vacuum chamber and subjected to hydrocarbon gas, high heat (900 to 1200 °C), and pressure.
Then, a microwave beam induces carbon to condense and form a plasma cloud, which crystallizes and forms diamonds. The result is called a ‘cake’ — a couple of diamond blocks. The excess carbon is lasered away, then the cake is processed and polished. This is known as the chemical vapor deposition method (CVD).
There is another method of growing diamonds in a lab
, and that’s known as the high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) method. Here, a small bit of natural diamond is used to seed a chamber filled with carbon, which is then subjected to high pressure and temperatures. The carbon crystallizes around the seed and grows around a millimeter each day.
As the industry evolves, lab-grown diamonds present a sustainable alternative to natural diamonds. But the consumer is always in charge.
Once you’ve got a stone, what then?
Just use 3D printing to help create the ring and setting
. | 38 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779058",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T11:29:44",
"content": "It’s not that surprising that synthetic diamonds aren’t comparable in value to naturally-occurring ones. When the main quality of something is its rarity, saying “Hey, look, these are just as good but not as... | 1,760,371,844.986845 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/24/tiny-games-challenge-a-retro-racing-game-on-a-16x2-lcd/ | Tiny Games Challenge: A Retro Racing Game On A 16×2 LCD | Dan Maloney | [
"contests"
] | [
"16x2",
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"lcd",
"racer",
"sprite"
] | Sometimes, all it takes is a change in perspective to take something boring and make it fun. That’s true about 16×2 LCD; in its usual landscape format, it’s a quick and easy way to provide a character-based display for a project. But flip it 90 degrees and use a little imagination, and it can become
a cool retro racing game
that fits in the palm of your hand.
[arduinocelantano] has made it a habit to press the humble 16×2 character LCD into service in ways it clearly wasn’t intended to support, such as playing
Space Invaders
and
streaming video
on it. Both of these projects seem to inform the current work, which was one of the first entries in our current
Tiny Games Challenge contest
. The racing game requires multiple sprites to animate the roadway and the cars, using six “layers” of eight custom characters and rapidly switching between them to create the appearance of movement. The video below has a brief sample of gameplay.
Flipping the display on its side makes for a somewhat limited game — it’s all straightaway, all the time — but that could probably be fixed. [arduinocelentano] suggests scaling it up to a 16×4 to include curves, but we’d bet you could still simulate curves on the upper part of the game field while leaving the player’s car fixed on a straight section. Higher difficulties could be achieved by moving the curved section closer to the player’s position.
Sure, it’s limited, but that’s half the charm of games like these. If you’ve got an idea for our Tiny Games Challenge, head over to
our contest page
and let us know about it. We’re keen to see what you come up with. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779065",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T11:55:31",
"content": "Tetris?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6779291",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T22:23:35",... | 1,760,371,844.900705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/need-a-tube-reach-for-plywood/ | Need A Tube? Reach For Plywood! | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"plywood",
"woodworking"
] | To be clear, when we are talking about tubes, we mean ordinary cylinders, not vacuum-amplifying elements. With that out of the way, when we need a tube like that, we usually think of PVC or some other kind of pipe product. Or maybe we’ll 3D print what we need. But not [GregO29]. He made his tubes
from plywood
.
You can make tubes as small as 12 inches in diameter, and [GregO29] made some that were 16 inches. The first step was to make a mold or form. In this case, he elected to make a form that the tube-to-be wraps around. The plywood is thin 2-ply white birch. This makes it easy to shape.
The basic idea is to wrap the wood around the form and glue it. You hold it together with a strap until it dries. Then, you can add more layers until it is the thickness you need.
The real problem turned out to be removing the form once it was done. Why make a tube like this? In [Greg]’s case, he’s building a telescope, which is as good a reason as any to have a tube, we suppose.
We build a lot of things, but we always forget about
plywood
. It even
mixes well with electricity
. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778997",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T05:27:34",
"content": "Looks like he used regular thin plywood. There are special plywoods available for bending. The grain in all layers runs in the same direction, instead of alternating perpendicular layers.",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,371,845.086583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/colour-film-processing-for-the-2020s-hacker/ | Colour Film Processing For The 2020s Hacker | Jenny List | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"colour film",
"film",
"film photography"
] | We’re now somewhere over two decades since the mass adoption of digital photography made chemical film obsolete in a very short time, but the older technology remains in use by artists and enthusiasts. There’s no longer a speedy developing service at you local mall though, so unless you don’t mind waiting for one of the few remaining professional labs you’ll be doing it yourself. Black-and-white is relatively straightforward, but colour is another matter. [Jason Koebler] has set up his own colour processing lab,
and takes us through the difficult and sometimes frustrating process
.
From an exhaustive list of everything required, to a description of the ups and downs of loading a Patterson tank and the vagiuaries of developer chemicals, we certainly recognise quite a bit of his efforts from the Hackaday black-and-white lab. But this is 2024 so there’s a step from days past that’s missing. We no longer print our photos, instead we scan the negatives and process then digitally, and it’s here that some of the good advice lies.
What this piece shows us is that colour developing is certainly achievable even if the results in a home lab can be variable. If you’re up for trying it,
you can always automate some of the process
. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778990",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T04:32:35",
"content": "Developing and digitalizing color film has been done by hobbyist millions of times. It’s pretty straight forward process and doesn’t contain any “secrets”. Even the chemicals today are pretty forgiving, qui... | 1,760,371,845.141903 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/workholding-options-for-the-beginner-cnc-operator/ | Workholding Options For The Beginner CNC Operator | Navarre Bartz | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"adhesive",
"clamp",
"cnc",
"cnc clamp",
"cnc workpiece clamp",
"Cutting and Machining",
"cyanoacrylate",
"glue",
"masking",
"superglue",
"tape",
"toe clamp",
"work fixing",
"workholding"
] | Designing a file to cut on a CNC is only part of the process. You also have to keep it in place while the machine does its work. [G
arrett Fromme
] walks us through
five different work holding techniques
.
Since every project is different and stock material can vary from thin veneer to much larger pieces, there’s no one right work holding method for every project, and not all methods are applicable to all materials. A vise is great for small projects that need to be held very securely and won’t be damaged, vacuum tables can make switching pieces quick in a production environment, fasteners will hold a piece securely at the expense of your spoil board, clamps are fairly versatile but fiddly to setup, and
tape and CA glue
are quick but require more consumables.
[
Fromme
] does a quick demonstration of setups with these different methods and their limitations, which is a great place to start for the beginner CNC operator. Just like 3D printers, CNCs are a far cry from the replicators in Star Trek that can automagically create what you ask it to, but proper workholding lets you waste less material and operate the machine more safely.
Our own [Elliot Williams] had a look at how
CNCs aren’t as automated as you think
. If you do need some CNC clamps, you might try these
printable parametric clamps
, or if you want something more beautiful, give these
metal toe clamps
a go. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779003",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T06:01:46",
"content": "If you need cutting from multiple sides of an object, cutting a jig in some scrap piece is very helpful. You can mill exactly the shape and size of the first side and the XYZ origin will be accurately in plac... | 1,760,371,845.038532 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/automatic-garbage-can-keeps-cooking-cleaner/ | Automatic Garbage Can Keeps Cooking Cleaner | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"distance sensor",
"garbage bin",
"garbage can",
"home automation",
"infrared",
"mircontroller",
"servo",
"ultrasonic"
] | Over the last decade or so, we’ve been inundated with appliances with wireless or “smart” technology that is often of dubious utility. No one really needs a tablet in their refrigerator or Wi-Fi on their coffee maker. A less glamorous kitchen appliance that actually might benefit from some automation and connectivity is the garbage can, or “bin” for those speaking the Queen’s English, and [Mellow_Labs]
is here to show off just how to get that done with this automatic garbage can lid
.
As he explains, the real impetus behind this build is to not have to touch a dirty lid while cooking to avoid having to take time to wash one’s hands again afterwards. There are a few other design criteria as well; it has to be roommate-approved so nothing permanently attached to the lid, overly complicated, or with an unnecessary amount of wires or other fixtures. A servo with an extension sits on the lid itself, and when activated forces the lid open. A distance sensor provides basic gesture recognition and a microcontroller with wireless connectivity controls both and provides home automation integration as well. With a 3D printed case that includes a quick disconnect function for easy cleaning of the lid, the build was ready to be put into service.
The first iteration used an infrared distance sensor, but placing it by an open window caused it to continuously open and close since sunlight has the same wavelengths of light the sensor is tuned for. A quick swap with an ultrasonic sensor solved the problem, and the garbage can is working flawlessly in the kitchen now. Another appliance that is generally not targeted by off-the-shelf automation solutions is the range fume hood,
but another build tackled that problem a while back
. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778903",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T20:09:02",
"content": "“nothing…overly complicated”Here in the UK we have had “pedal bins” since about 1950 so you don’t have to touch the lid.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,845.20832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/2024-tiny-games-challenge-improving-reaction-time/ | 2024 Tiny Games Challenge: Improving Reaction Time | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"ESP32",
"reaction time"
] | What lies at the heart of many games? In a sense, it’s your response time, which is a function of hand-eye coordination. Although the 2024 Business Card Challenge has come to a close, [gokux] tends to go small anyway, and has taken their miniature approach to the Tiny Games Challenge with
this awesome little reaction time game
.
It’s basically whack-a-mole, but instead of striking down fuzzy puppets, you get fast and furious on big buttons that light up. Press any button to start, and there is a 3-2-1 countdown to get you geared up for action. Once the screen says ‘GO’, you’re off to the races. Each of the four buttons will light up in random order, and your overall response time is taken as the average of these four.
While there are many microcontrollers that would work here, [gokux] chose the Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C3. If you want to make one of these for yourself, there are excellent build instructions waiting for you. Be sure to check it out in action after the break. Oh, and be sure to let [gokux] know if you can beat 220 ms. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6779005",
"author": "Sebastius",
"timestamp": "2024-07-24T06:24:48",
"content": "I love this game! Might actually duplicate it someday (and also make a large scale version with big buttons, not sure yet).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,845.252055 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-key-cap-map/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Key Cap Map | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Artsey",
"Artsey layout",
"key cap map",
"key cap world map",
"key caps",
"nicenano",
"vacuum forming",
"Zerograph"
] | So, [zyumbik]’s trademark seems to be sexing things up, and the Artsey layout did not escape their gaze.
This is the Sexy Artsey
. Let’s back up a bit.
Image by [zyumbik] via
reddit
Artsey
is a keyboard layout for chording, and this keyboard is built for it. It’s a one-handed keyboard meant for pressing multiple keys at a time to produce each character. With some use, [zyumbik] discovered that the Taipo layout might be a better fit, so there are currently some elements of both.
If you’d like to make this adorable keyboard,
everything is waiting for you to download
, including files for various thingamabobs you can stick on the side there where the rainbow is now. There’s also a groovy flower version of the knob.
Controller-wise, you can use a Seeed Studio Xiao in either BLE or RP2040 format, or the Waveshare RP2040 Zero. The firmware is written in ZMK.
Remember the death metal macropad?
(Who could forget that tentacled nightmare?) This is the same creator. Kind of hard to believe, innit? Well, except for the spikes. Apparently they’re for thumb discipline.
Via
reddit
Oooh, Dream Keyboard: I Believe You Can Get Me Through My Life
Perhaps the YouTube algorithm fed you this one the other day, too. As an iOS developer, [Christian Selig] spends all day typing, and has owned a lot of keyboards as a result. Like, a lot of keyboards. But, as you may have guessed, none of them fully satisfy.
Image via
YouTube
And so began the familiar hero’s journey of building something new, something perfect for them. A dream keyboard. Maybe it’ll be your dream keyboard, too.
[Christian] hid the nice!nano underneath the keyboard to make it as sleek as possible, almost as though Apple themselves designed an ortho split.
Of particular note here is that [Christian] used a nifty program called Ergogen to generate the both the PCB layout and the 3D-printable case with just a few lines of very readable “code”. Even so, [Christian] still got to play connect-the-dots in KiCad.
This is a great video all around. It’s low-level enough to be interesting to those who have already built a keyboard, but high-level enough to draw in new people who might just catch the bug.
Thanks to [Joey] and [foamyguy] for the tip!
The Centerfold: Keycap World Map
Image by [mathinpenn] via
reddit
Guess the number of keycaps correctly, and you win absolutely nothing but my excitedly raised eyebrows. At any rate, it would be nice to know approximately how many keycaps adorn the conference room wall of a certain hotel in Denver, CO.
Be sure to check out [mathinpenn]’s reddit post for the close-up shot
.
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 Zerograph
This is a machine that was quite far ahead of its time.
The Zerograph
could instantly transmit and print text, arguably making it the first Telex machine. The
patent language
declares it a printing telegraph.
Image via
Antikey Chop
But unlike most telegraphs, which transmitted dots and dashes, the Zerograph sent actual words, at the rate of 25 per minute. Not bad for 1895.
Its inventor,
Leonard “Leo” Ulrich Kamm
, was quite renowned for his work in the field of cinema, having created a film-less movie projector,
the Kammatograph
. Instead of film, it used a circular glass plate with images arranged in a spiral.
The Zerograph worked using a pendulum system. Actuate the pendulum of one machine, and a second, synced machine would match the distance of each swing. The second Zerograph would then map that distance to one of the 36 characters and type it.
Each swing was different for each character, but none took more than half a second. The pendulum returned to a zero position after each swing, hence the name Zerograph. So, why haven’t you heard of this machine before? History shows that Kamm invested zero effort in marketing and improving the thing, due to focusing his efforts on the Kammatograph instead.
ICYMI: Vacuum-forming Keycaps Sucks, But the Result is Slick
Image by [Drygol] via
Retrohax
While there are all kinds of keycap options out there, there’s nothing quite like a custom set. What’s interesting is the method that [Drygol] chose —
vacuum-forming several at once using a 3D-printed scaffold
.
The really neat part here is that the keycap is left intact underneath. So not only do the legends show through (provided you use the right type of vinyl), no keycaps are harmed during this process.
In fact, you could almost say they are being preserved under there. Good news for, say, an Amiga keyboard like the one pictured.
The process looks simple, but seems tedious: each one is carefully trimmed from the vinyl, and the edges are made triangular and folded neatly underneath. The end result is quite unique and stunning, though, so it seems worth it to me. If only I had a vacuum-forming table.
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
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778860",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T17:49:58",
"content": "Zerograph Not sure I read this correctly, but the description of using a pendulum on the transmitting end and a matched pendulum on the receiving end as a clock signal with the data transmission (character d... | 1,760,371,845.329731 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/could-carbon-fiber-be-the-new-asbestos/ | Could Carbon Fiber Be The New Asbestos? | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"asbestos",
"carbon fiber"
] | Could carbon fiber inflict the same kind of damage on the human body as asbestos? That’s the question which [Nathan] found himself struggling with
after taking a look
at carbon fiber-reinforced filament under a microscope, revealing a sight that brings to mind fibrous asbestos samples. Considering the
absolutely horrifying impact
that asbestos exposure can have, this is a totally pertinent question to ask. Fortunately, scientific studies have already been performed on this topic.
Example SEM and TEM images of the released particles following the rupture of CFRP cables in the tensile strength test. (Credit: Jing Wang et al, Journal of Nanobiotechnology, 2017)
While [Nathan] demonstrated that the small lengths of carbon fiber (CF) contained in some FDM filaments love to get stuck in your skin and remain there even after washing one’s hands repeatedly, the aspect that makes asbestos such a hazard is that the mineral fibers are easily respirable due to their size. It is this property which allows asbestos fibers to nestle deep inside the lungs, where they pierce cell membranes and cause sustained inflammation, DNA damage and all too often lung cancer or worse.
Clearly, the 0.5 to 1 mm sized CF strands in FDM filaments aren’t easily inhaled, but as described by [Jing Wang] and colleagues in a 2017
Journal of Nanobiotechnology
paper
, CF can easily shatter into smaller, sharper fragments through mechanical operations (cutting, sanding, etc.) which
can
be respirable. It is thus damaged carbon fiber, whether from CF reinforced thermal polymers or other CF-containing materials, that poses a potential health risk. This is not unlike asbestos — which when stable in-situ poses no risk, but can create respirable clouds of fibers when disturbed. When handling CF-containing materials, especially for processing, wearing an effective respirator (at least N95/P2) that is rated for filtering out asbestos fibers would thus seem to be a wise precaution.
The treacherous aspect of asbestos and kin is that diseases like lung cancer and mesothelioma are not immediately noticeable after exposure, but can take decades to develop. In the case of mesothelioma, this can be between 15 and 30 years after exposure, so protecting yourself today with a good respirator is the only way you can be relatively certain that you will not be cursing your overconfident young self by that time. | 54 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778814",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T16:08:37",
"content": "Rats!Now I need to cancel my order for the Koenigsegg!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6778829",
"author": "Jon Mayo"... | 1,760,371,845.430585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/you-can-use-leds-as-sensors-too/ | You Can Use LEDs As Sensors, Too | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"LED Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"forrest mims",
"led",
"led as a sensor",
"led sensor",
"light sensor",
"microcontroller",
"op-amp",
"photodiode",
"photosensor",
"sensor"
] | LEDs are a wonderful technology. You put in a little bit of power, and you get out a wonderful amount of light. They’re efficient, cheap, and plentiful. We use them for so much!
What you might not have known is that these humble components have a secret feature, one largely undocumented in the datasheets. You can use an LED as a light source, sure, but did you know you can use one as a sensor?
Dual-Use Devices
The concept of using an LED as a sensor is much like using a speaker as a microphone. Flip things around, and instead of emitting light, the LED senses it instead. You can see the effect quite simply by using a multimeter. Hook up the leads of a multimeter to your LED, and set it to measure current. Point the LED towards the sun, and you’ll likely pick up a reading. While the LED is sensitive to light, it’s usually on quite a small range of wavelength, unlike traditional photodiodes.
Forrest Mims liked to use op-amps to boost the output from LEDs used as sensors. Credit:
Forrest Mims via Make article
But how to use this effect? Well, you can go multiple routes. If you’re of the analog tilt, you can hook the LED up to the inputs of an op-amp, using the device to amplify the output if you so desire. Just about any garden-variety op-amp can be used in such a way that it produces a higher output voltage the more light falls on the LED.
Two tristate pins let you use an LED for emitting light and sensing it. Credit:
MERL research paper
However, you can go so much further, as the bright minds at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) determined
back in 2003
. Following their example, you might like to hook the LED up to a microcontroller. Setting it up in a “reverse biased” mode allows it to act as a sensor when attached to an IO pin, instead of acting as a light emitter. To do this, simply attach the LED’s anode to ground, while connecting the cathode to an I/O pin in a high state. This achieves the “reverse bias,” and charges the inherent capacitance of the LED. The capacitance is small, so this only takes a fraction of a second. Then, the IO pin can be switched to an input, and the capacitance of the LED will discharge into the microcontroller pin. The more light, the more current induced in the LED, and the faster the LED’s capacitance will discharge. Measure how long it takes for the voltage to drop below the IO pin’s digital logic level, and you can sense light levels with a simple IO pin.
Researchers were able to communicate between microcontrollers over a distance of a few centimeters using nothing but regular LEDs. Data rates reached 250 bits/sec. Credit: MERL,
research paper
In fact, the team at MERL realized that you could go even further. The humble LED could become a “last centimeter” communications device, used as both light transmitter and receiver. To achieve this, one simply had to insert the LED between two tristate IO pins on a microcontroller. With the anode driven high and the cathode driven low, the LED would light. Flipped the other way, and the LED would be reverse biased. Then, one of the tristate pins could be set to input mode to read the LED as a sensor.
As suggested by the team at MERS, LEDs can be used as sensors in all kinds of innovative applications. You could use a TV’s power LED to detect light levels, and thus adjust screen brightness appropriately. You can even do simple proximity sensing, using an array of LEDs to act as emitters and sensors in turn. You could even use status LEDs on small devices to do bidirectional communication if you were so inclined.
And yet! We almost never use LEDs for any of these things. Realistically, while LEDs are sensors, they’re not
excellent
sensors. We have far better phototransistors, photodiodes, and other sensors available these days. This technique
could
be useful to you, if you’re trying to design a device with the bare minimum part count or as cheaply as possible. Or, if you want to put surprise functionality into a device that has
just
an LED on board. But in the real world, this technique doesn’t get a whole lot of use. Futzing around with nifty LED tricks takes more engineering time than just speccing a proper sensor, after all.
Still, the technique has found some real applications. LEDs used in this way do have the benefit of being quite selective as to wavelength, and can be quite stable over time. The legendary
Forrest Mims
took advantage of this, putting LED sensors to use in a variety of scientific apparatus. Indeed, his ozone measurement device relied on this technique, and was so reliable it proved there was a drift error
in NASA’s own Nimbus-7 satellite.
Some researchers believe PerLEDs could enable the creation of touchscreen displays that don’t need additional sensor elements beyond the LEDs themselves. Credit: Bao, et al,
research paper
There’s also hope in the
rapidly-advancing field of perovskite technology
. Perovskite LEDs, or PerLEDs, could use advanced semiconductor materials to create devices that act as both good light sources and capable photodetectors. The hope is that they might be good enough to create touchable displays that need no additional sensor for touch. Instead, the PerLED array would act as both display and sensor. However, for now, the research is at an early stage, and the instability of perovskites means any practical applications are a long way off.
It’s also worth noting that this technique doesn’t work on a lot of modern LEDs. Namely, addressable LEDs, self-flashing LEDs, and anything of that ilk. That’s because this technique relies on hooking up a microcontroller directly to the LED die itself. Many modern “smart” LEDs don’t break out the pins themselves, only providing pins for the controller chip inside. Thus, don’t expect to use this technique with your NeoPixels, WS2812Bs, or anything like that.
Ultimately, using LEDs as a sensor is a fun technique. It’s also highly useful if you’re doing specific things with certain wavelengths of light. Barring that, though, it’s a great party trick to keep in your toolbox, because you never know when it’ll come in handy. | 69 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778777",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T14:18:17",
"content": "Do remember here that this is an unspecified and untested property of LED’s. Some do work quite well as light sensors, while others do not work at all as light sensors, even when they are just a bare die ... | 1,760,371,846.433895 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/photoresistor-based-single-pixel-camera/ | Photoresistor-based Single Pixel Camera | Alexander Rowsell | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"alt-azimuth",
"ESP32",
"numpy",
"Pandas",
"photoresistor",
"python",
"servo",
"single pixel camera"
] | [Hugh] has been going back through episodes of the Hackaday podcast, and Elliot mentioned in episode 67 that it can often be inspiring to go back through the archives of Hackaday to find ideas for new projects. Well, he did just that and came across a single-pixel camera made using an infrared photodiode. He decided to try and
hack together his own single-pixel camera,
but this time on the cheap and using an ever simpler component – a photoresistor!
His description of the project tickled me – “I’ve used an ESP32, MicroPython, two servos, a peanut butter jar lid, a toilet paper roll, a paper towel roll, magnets and scrap wood for this version.” That’s certainly a much simpler bill of materials than the original (which was
written up by Hackaday
way back in 2015), which used a nice metal frame to hold everything together. However, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with improvising with things you happen to have to hand.
The alt-az mechanism
In this case, the sensor is mounted at the back of a paper towel tube, with black tape covering the front and a tiny pinhole poked in the tape to act as the aperture. Similarly to the original, the sensor is scanned over the scene in an XY altitude/azimuth pattern to capture the samples one at a time. It takes just under eight minutes to capture 8100 “pixels” in a 90×90 grid. The servos are driven using a PCA9685 PWM/Servo driver, which makes motor control a lot easier. An important lesson [Hugh] learned during construction was that weak power supplies can cause all sorts of issues when motors or servos are involved. He had been encountering uneven rotation and random halting, but as soon as a beefier power supply was attached everything worked smoothly.
[Hugh] used a much more powerful ESP32 to do the actual gathering of the analog data, which is then sent over a serial port to a Python processing engine which uses Pandas, numpy and matplotlib to do the bulk of the image processing. The resulting processed photo is very recognizable, considering the differences in linearity and sensitivity between a photoresistor and the infrared photodiode used in the original project! It really is incredible what you can do with a few spare parts, some random construction materials, and a little bit of creativity. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778746",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T11:39:22",
"content": "photo‐elektrischer bildabtaster?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6778757",
"author": "Emrah özmen",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T12:37:31",
"c... | 1,760,371,845.541724 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/23/brain-implant-uses-graphene-instead-of-metal-probes/ | Brain Implant Uses Graphene Instead Of Metal Probes | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"brain implants",
"brain-computer interface"
] | Implantable electrodes for the (human) brain have been around for a many decades in the form of Utah arrays and kin, but these tend to be made out of metal, which can cause issues when stimulating the surrounding neurons with an induced current. This is due to faradaic processes between the metal probe and an electrolyte (i.e. the cerebrospinal fluid). Over time this can result in insulating deposits forming on the probe’s surface, reducing their effectiveness.
Graphene-based, high-resolution cortical brain interface (Credit: Inbrain Neuroelectronics)
Now a company called InBrain claims to have cracked making
electrodes out of graphene
, following a series of tests on non-human test subjects. Unlike metal probes, these carbon-based probes should be significantly more biocompatible even when used for brain stimulation as with the target goal of treating the symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s.
During the upcoming first phase human subjects would have these implants installed where they would monitor brain activity in Alzheimer’s patients, to gauge how well their medication is helping with the symptoms like tremors. Later these devices would provide deep-brain stimulation, purportedly more efficiently than similar therapies in use today. The FDA
was impressed enough
at least to give it the ‘breakthrough device’ designation, though it is hard to wade through the marketing hype to get a clear picture of the technology in question.
In their most
recently published paper
(
preprint
) in Nature Nanotechnology, [Calia] and colleagues describe flexible graphene depth neural probes (gDNP) which appear to be what is being talked about. These gDNP are used in the experiment to simultaneously record infraslow (<0.1 Hz) and higher frequencies, a feat which metal microelectrodes are claimed to struggle with.
Although few details are available right now, we welcome any brain microelectrode array improvements, as they are incredibly important for many types of medical therapies and research. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778741",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T10:58:20",
"content": "Interesting. It’s a start, I think. I had to sigh when I read “a company” though.I hope it’s not again some commercial venture that closes its doors soon and then leave patients (test subjects) on their ow... | 1,760,371,845.59317 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/exploring-cheap-tantalum-caps-of-mysterious-provenance/ | Exploring Cheap Tantalum Caps Of Mysterious Provenance | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts"
] | [
"AliExpress",
"capacitor",
"digi-key",
"equivalent series resistance",
"ESR",
"LCSC",
"mouser",
"parts",
"surplus",
"tantalum"
] | We’ve all heard about the perils of counterfeit chips, and more than a few of us have probably been bitten by those scruple-free types who run random chips through a laser marker and foist them off as something they’re not. Honestly, we’ve never understood the business model here — it seems like the counterfeiters spend almost as much time and effort faking chips as they would just getting the real ones. But we digress.
Unfortunately, integrated circuits aren’t the only parts that can be profitably faked, as [Amateur Hardware Repair] shows us with
this look at questionable tantalum capacitors
. In the market for some tantalums for a repair project, the offerings at AliExpress proved too tempting to resist, despite being advertised alongside 1,000 gram gold bars for $121 each. Wisely, he also ordered samples from more reputable dealers like LCSC, DigiKey, and Mouser, although not at the same improbably low unit price.
It was pretty much clear where this would be going just from the shipping. While the parts houses all shipped their tantalums in Mylar bags with humidity indicators, with all but LCSC including a desiccant pack, the AliExpress package came carefully enrobed in — plastic cling wrap? The Ali tantalums were also physically different from the other parts: they were considerably smaller, the leads seemed a little chowdered up, and the package markings were quite messy and somewhat illegible. But the proof is in the testing, and while all the more expensive parts tested fine in terms of capacitance and equivalent series resistance, the caps of unknown provenance had ESRs in the 30 milliohm range, three to five times what the reputable caps measured.
None of this is to say that there aren’t some screaming deals on marketplaces like AliExpress, Amazon, and eBay, of course. It’s not even necessarily proof that these parts were in fact counterfeit, it could be that they were just surplus parts that hadn’t been stored under controlled conditions. But you get what you pay for, and as noted in the comments below the video, a lot of what you’re paying for at the parts houses is lot tracebility. | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778720",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T08:15:17",
"content": "I once had a cheap Arduino Mega board with a tantalum input capacitor. I plugged in a heavy duty DC power supply. The inrush current made the capacitor explode with a loud pop. A fireball flew out and landed on... | 1,760,371,846.025248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/mechanical-intelligence-and-counterfeit-humanity/ | Mechanical Intelligence And Counterfeit Humanity | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"artifical intelligence"
] | It would seem fair to say that the second half of last century up till the present day has been firmly shaped by our relation with technology and that of computers in particular. From the bulking behemoths at universities, to microcomputers at home, to today’s smartphones, smart homes and ever-looming compute cloud, we all have a relationship with computers in some form. One aspect of computers which has increasingly become underappreciated, however, is that the less we see them as physical objects, the more we seem inclined to accept them as humans. This is the point which [Harry R. Lewis] argues in a
recent article
in
Harvard Magazine
.
Born in 1947, [
Harry R. Lewis
] found himself at the forefront of what would become computer science and related disciplines, with some of his students being well-know to the average Hackaday reader, such as [Bill Gates] and [Mark Zuckerberg]. Suffice it to say, he has seen every attempt to ‘humanize’ computers, ranging from ELIZA to today’s ChatGPT. During this time, the line between humans and computers has become blurred, with computer systems becoming increasingly more competent at imitating human interactions even as they vanished into the background of daily life.
These counterfeit ‘humans’ are not capable of learning, of feeling and experiencing the way that humans can, being at most a facsimile of a human for all but that what makes a human, which is often referred to as ‘the human experience’. More and more of us are communicating these days via smartphone and computer screens with little idea or regard for whether we are talking to a real person or not. Ironically, it seems that by anthropomorphizing these counterfeit humans, we risk becoming less human in the process, while also opening the floodgates for blaming AI when the blame lies square with the humans behind it, such as with
the recent Air Canada chatbot case
. Equally ridiculous, [Lewis] argues, is the notion that we could create a ‘superintelligence’ while training an ‘AI’ on nothing but the data scraped off the internet, as there are many things in life which cannot be understood simply by reading about them.
Ultimately, the argument is made that it is humanistic learning that should be the focus point of artificial intelligence, as only this way we could create AIs that might truly be seen as our equals, and beneficial for the future of all. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778681",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T02:54:19",
"content": "“I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is for the same reason that a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one.”and…“Artific... | 1,760,371,845.914413 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/cw-not-hard-enough-try-this-tiny-paddle/ | CW Not Hard Enough? Try This Tiny Paddle | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"continuous wave",
"cw",
"ham",
"morse",
"paddle",
"portable",
"pota",
"radio",
"small",
"SOTA",
"summits on the air",
"tiny"
] | For a long time, a Morse code proficiency was required to obtain an amateur radio license in many jurisdictions around the world, which was a much higher bar of entry than most new hams have to pass. Morse, or continuous wave (CW) is a difficult skill to master, and since the requirement has been dropped from most licensing requirements few radio operators pick up this skill anymore. But if you like a challenge, and Morse itself isn’t hard enough for you,
you might want to try out this extremely small Morse paddle
.
Originally meant for portable operation, where hiking to something like a mountain top with radio gear demands small, lightweight, and low-power options, this paddle is actually not too complex. It attaches to most radios with a 3.5 mm stereo cable and only has two paddles on flexible metal arms which, when pressed against the center of the device, tell the radio to either produce continuous “dits” or “dahs”. For portable use the key sits inside a tiny plastic case and only needs to be pulled out and flipped around to get started. And, while not waterproof, [N6ARA] reports that it’s so small you likely could just shield it from the rain with your other hand if you needed to.
Presumably, this paddle actually wouldn’t be that much different than using any other paddle except for the fact that it’s not heavy enough to resist the force of use, so you’d have to hold it with your other hand anyway. And, while this is a product available for purchase it’s simple enough that, presumably, the design could easily be duplicated with just a few parts. Paddles like this were made as an improvement to older technology like straight keys which require the operator to produce the correct lengths of tones for each character manually. While you can get higher speeds with a paddle,
there are still some dedicated CW operators using a straight key
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778656",
"author": "H",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T23:46:22",
"content": "For small messages?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6778739",
"author": "A ham",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T10:50:43",
"content": "... | 1,760,371,846.144959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/bluetooth-printer-works-with-appletalk/ | Bluetooth Printer Works With AppleTalk | Navarre Bartz | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"imac g3",
"mini printer",
"thermal printer",
"wireless"
] | For retrocomputing enthusiasts, getting old computers to work with newer peripherals can be an exciting challenge or horrible headache. If you need to print out receipts from an old Mac, you might just be in luck now that [Hamin Mousavi] has gotten
AppleTalk to work with cat printers
.
[Mousavi] uses a Raspberry Pi 4 here in his version of the hack, but any Bluetooth capable computer running Linux should work. His command line screenshots are from a Debian-based system, but you should be able to translate to other systems as needed.
Thanks to
previous work on these thermal printers
, drivers are available for them on many other systems, so the tricky part comes down to getting the web connection to the printer working through the Linux box and then getting the Mac (in this case an iMac G3) to recognize the printer as something to install.
We’ve seen people do some really interesting things with thermal printers like making them
D&D tools
, breaking their
paper DRM
, and even
black and white “Polaroids.
” | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778745",
"author": "Alexander Rowsell",
"timestamp": "2024-07-23T11:37:36",
"content": "I have one of the “cat” printers, and while you can do a lot of neat stuff with the official app, it would indeed be nice to control it directly. I am hoping to either build (or find) a solution... | 1,760,371,845.780856 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/a-throne-for-lego-baron-harkonnen/ | A Throne For LEGO Baron Harkonnen | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"automata",
"dune",
"lego",
"stepper",
"stepper motor"
] | If you’re both a LEGO and a
Dune
fan, unless you’ve been living in a cave on Mars with your eyes shut and fingers in your ears, you’re probably aware that LEGO released a set for the royal Atreides ornithopter. The blades flap and everything. Anyway, it comes with several minifigures, including one that doesn’t quite fit with the others — a full-length Baron Harkonnen.
Given that,
[gorkyver] decided to create a throne for the Baron that he could rise from
, just like in the movie, while delivering the iconic line. With no reference materials available other than pausing the movie, [gorkyver] created a throne from scratch in BrickLink Studio, which made it easy to generate both a parts list and step-by-step instructions.
At the heart of this build is an Arduino Nano, which takes input from the momentary push button and starts the show. The Baron slowly rises on a rack and spur gear connected to a stepper motor, and a DF Player Mini runs the audio through a 75 mm speaker.
Rather than just buying a big box store display case off of eBay, [gorkyver] recreated the skeleton in Fusion 360 and used a hairdryer to bend a sheet of PET-G around to enclose it. A couple of sweet adhesive graphics later, and it totally looks like a real set on display. Don’t miss the demo/build video after the break.
Did you hear? The European Space Agency
printed some bricks out of meteorite dust
, and there might be one on display near you. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778617",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T19:52:31",
"content": "Simple, elegant, and a satisfyingly polished build.Very nice. Not every project needs to be super technical or elaborate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,845.957189 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/small-mammals-appear-to-have-a-secret-infrared-sense/ | Small Mammals Appear To Have A Secret Infrared Sense | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [] | If you’ve ever watched
Predator
, you’ve noted the tactical advantage granted to the alien warrior by its heat vision. Indeed, even with otherwise solid camoflauge, Dutch and his squad ended up very much the hunted.
And yet, back in reality, it seems the prey might be the one with the ability to sense in the infrared spectrum. Research has now revealed this unique ability may all be down
to the hairs on the back of some of the smallest mammals.
Not By The Hair Of My Backy-Back-Back
Some marsupials and mammals seem to share similar “guard hair” structures, though they diverged evolutionarily as far back as the Jurassic period. Credit:
research paper
Small mammals, like shrews and rodents, have fur that combines multiple types of hair into a thick protective coat. The fur must keep the animal warm, relatively dry, and protect it from the elements. But what if it could also protect against predators? For amongst this fur lie special “guard hairs” which researchers now believe act as finely tuned infrared sensors.
Guard hairs only make up maybe 1-3% of the fur. They usually stick out straight, protruding to a degree from the rest of the coat. They also tend to feature a rather distinctive banding pattern not seen on other types of mammalian hair.
For years, the periodic banding patterns observed in the guard hairs of small mammals puzzled scientists. These hairs exhibit internal bands spaced at intervals of 6-12 micrometers. If you’ve recently been staring at a chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, you might realize closely aligning with the wavelengths of infrared radiation. This hinted at an unrecognized function—an ability to sense infrared light, perhaps. Indeed, those wavelengths cover the same part of the infrared spectrum used by heat-seeking missiles and thermal imaging devices.
This was a feature with clear survival benefits for nocturnal and heavily predated animals. It could give a small creature the ability to detect warm heat sources—like a predator—approaching from behind. No need to have eyes on the back of one’s head, nor be forever looking over one’s shoulder. If your thermal sense picks up something warm approaching from behind, it might be worth making a dash action.
Researchers focused their guard hair research on three species:
Mus musculus, t
he house mouse,
Antechinus agilis,
a mouse-like marsupial, and
Sorex araneus
, the common shrew. Despite the many differences amongst the species, the guard hairs share some similarities. Their findings showed that despite evolutionary divergences that stretch back millions upon millions of years, these species share highly similar microscopic hair structures that appear to be tuned to wavelengths between 8-12 um—perfect for thermal imaging.
The structure of a guard hair from the house mouse, Mus musculus. Similar guard hairs are found on other rodents. Credit:
research paper
Taking the house mouse as the main example, the hairs have a sophisticated structure. The wider sections of guard hairs, referred to as the the “shield,” are believed to act as infrared absorbers. They have a effectively two tubes joined by a membrane, with air cavities spaced at periodic intervals of approximately 10 um. Towards the base of the shield area, the hair narrows, and instead of air cavities, the hair features the characteristic dark bands with similar spacing. It’s believed the narrower sections help focus absorbed infrared energy into the base of the hair. A relatively variable “zipper” section then follows, with dark hemispheres arranged around the axis of the hair. This is believed to act as a “spectral filter” that radiates away wavelengths outside the 8-12 um band. Calculations suggest that the zipper filter means that infrared energy in that critical wavelength range makes up 72% of the “signal” reaching the base of the hair, rather than just 33% otherwise. The final section of the shaft has finer banding, at a spacing of just 6 um.
The structure of the hairs is likened to the structure of a Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG). Credit: Sakurambo,
CC BY-SA 3.0
It’s believed that hairs act akin to infrared antennas—with their stiff, straight alignment and periodic banding enabling them to act as thermal detectors. The bands themselves appear to be made of infrared-transparent biological material of varying refractive indexes. Researchers liken this to a man-made invention called a fiber Bragg grating, or FBG. This device uses periodic variation in refractive index of an optical fiber to create a filter for a particular wavelength. Guard hairs could use a biological version of the same mechanism to filter out the infrared wavelength of interest.
The “zipper” section of the hair is believed to act like a spectral filter, radiating out wavelengths that aren’t of interest. Credit:
research paper
Meanwhile, to pick up the signal, the animal would need some kind of sensor cell at the base of the hair. Indeed, researchers found that the house mouse does indeed have Merkel cells uniquely located at the base of guard hairs, arranged around the shaft. It’s believed these cells may be responsible for the actual infrared sense, with the hairs themselves just acting as antennas to focus the infrared energy to them.
The researchers also branched out, looking at whether predators may have adapted around this in turn. Notably, they found that cold-blooded snakes were virtually invisible in the thermal infrared range. Similarly, cats are relatively low in thermal emissions from the forward aspect. Both would thus have an advantage at hunting against mammals with a thermal sensing defence mechanism. And indeed, these creatures are particularly adept at hunting mice and other small mammals, as you’d expect!
Guard hairs appear to have different sensory connections compared to other hair types in given mammals. Credit:
research paper
The research is still at an early stage. Further work remains to confirm the true purpose of these guard hairs. Regardless, their complex microstructures do provide compelling evidence that they are indeed acting as antennas to capture infrared radiation for sensory purposes.
The discovery of these natural infrared sensors is not just a biological curiosity. It could also serve useful in the field of photonics. The guard hairs’ ability to act as finely tuned infrared antennas could potentially act as inspiration for new optical devices, or to improve on current technologies.
The marsupial Antechinus agilis has a similar structure in the shield area of the guard hair, though differs towards the base. It’s thought it uses the diamond cuticle section to pass infrared radiation around 10 um wavelength, while radiating other wavelengths away. Credit:
research paper
Additionally, this research could influence evolutionary biology, providing new insights into the ancient origins of mammalian and marsupial hair. Guard hairs’ resilience over millions of years suggests they played a crucial role in early mammalian survival, possibly dating back to the Triassic period.
In any case, certain tiny mammals have always been wildly capable at evading predators that sneak up from behind. We might now have a secret insight into this little party trick. Perhaps it was never their eyes, or a keen sense of vibration, but a hidden thermal sense that was lurking in the fur all along.
Featured image: “
Lab mouse mg 3263
” by [Rama] | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778582",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T18:02:56",
"content": "I used an IR led/sensor in a rodent trap. The video camera recorded one rat approaching in the dark, freezing and bolting away. No other beast ever came close again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,371,846.10004 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/making-a-solid-state-6ak8-tube/ | Making A Solid State 6AK8 Tube | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"fet",
"mosfet",
"tube"
] | [M Caldeira] had a project in mind: replacing a
common vacuum tube with a solid-state equivalent
. The tube in question was an EABC80 or 6AK8 triple diode triode. The key was identifying a high-voltage FET and building it, along with some other components, into a tube base to make a plug-in replacement for the tube. You can see a video about the project below.
These tubes are often used as a detector and preamplifier. Removing the detector tube from a working radio, of course, kills the audio. Replacing the tube with a single diode restores the operation of the radio, although at a disadvantage.
From there, he adds more diodes directly into the socket. Of course, diodes don’t amplify, so he had to break out a LND150 MOSFET with a limit of 500 volts across the device. It takes some additional components, and the whole thing fits in a tube base ready for the socket.
Usually, we see people go the other way using tubes instead of transistors in, say,
a computer
. If you want real hacking, why not
make your own tubes
? | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778533",
"author": "Sohere",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T16:35:35",
"content": "Article in QST from 1969 about replacing existing tube circuits with fetshttps://www.qsl.net/kh6grt/page4/tubesters/MOSFETs%20for%20Tubes.pdf",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},... | 1,760,371,846.198022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/reviewing-nuclear-accidents-separating-fact-from-fiction/ | Reviewing Nuclear Accidents: Separating Fact From Fiction | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"Chernobyl",
"Chornobyl",
"Fukushima",
"nuclear power",
"three mile island"
] | Few types of accidents speak as much to the imagination as those involving nuclear fission. From the unimaginable horrors of the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to the fever-pitch reporting about the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, all of these have resulted in many descriptions and visualizations which are merely imaginative flights of fancy, with no connection to physical reality. Due to radiation being invisible with the naked eye and the interpretation of radiation measurements in popular media generally restricted to the harrowing noise from a Geiger counter, the reality of nuclear power accidents in said media has become diluted and often replaced with half-truths and outright lies that feed strongly into fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Why is it that people are drawn more to nuclear accidents than a disaster like that at Bhopal? What is it that makes the one nuclear bomb on Hiroshima so much more interesting than the firebombing of Tokyo or the flattening of Dresden? Why do we fear nuclear power more than dam failures and the heavy toll of air pollution? If we honestly look at nuclear accidents, it’s clear that invariably the panic afterwards did more damage than the event itself. One might postulate that this is partially due to the sensationalist vibe created around these events, and largely due to a poorly informed public when it comes to topics like nuclear fission and radiation. A situation which is worsened by harmful government policies pertaining to things like disaster response, often inspired by scientifically discredited theories like the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model which killed so many in the USSR and Japan.
In light of a
likely restart
of Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the near future, it might behoove us to wonder what we might learn from the world’s worst commercial nuclear power disasters. All from the difficult perspective of a world where ideology and hidden agendas do not play a role, as we ask ourselves whether we really should fear the atom.
The TMI PR Disaster
Three Mile Island, including the training center and access road. (Credit: Groupmesa, Wikimedia)
What truly happened at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant’s #2 reactor on March 28 of 1979? The
technical explanation
is that the main feedwater pumps in the secondary, non-nuclear, coolant loop failed, which led to a shutdown of the reactor as a whole. As a pressurized water reactor (PWR), the primary coolant loop is pressurized, the levels of which began to increase due to the failed secondary coolant loop and loss of cooling capacity. This triggered a pressure relief valve, which should have closed again when pressure normalized, but due to a technical malfunction it remained open.
The resulting open valve led to a loss-of-coolant situation in the primary coolant loop that went unnoticed in the control room. Due to missing and conflicting information, the operators undertook improper actions that ultimately led to the core overheating and the fuel rods partially melting. During this process, some radioactive gases escaped via the relief valve into the environment surrounding the plant, mostly xenon and krypton isotopes. The effect of this on the local population was estimated to be at most 1.4 millirem (14 µSv), effectively half of a chest X-ray and a fraction of the average annual natural background levels in the US of 3,100 µSv, or ~1% of the local background radiation.
Ultimately, the #2 reactor was quite damaged, and it was decided to decommission it rather than try to repair the damage. Reactor #1 operated uneventfully until 2019 until it was shut down for economic reasons. The lessons learned from the 1979 accident were pivotal for nuclear safety in the US, and is a big part of why for the past decades, nuclear power in the US has been among the safest sources of power.
Objectively considered, the 1979 TMI accident was a big financial loss for the plant owner and investors, but no physical injuries or worse occurred. The real harm of TMI came not from the accident itself, but from the bungled interaction with the press by the people in charge of the accident response. This is excellently detailed in a documentary created by Kyle Hill, who also contrasts the real accident with the imaginary accident dreamed up in the 4-part Netflix series
Meltdown: Three Mile Island
.
As anti-nuclear groups swooped in on Three Mile Island to amplify their messaging, and panicked citizens as far as hundreds of kilometers away worried about having to evacuate and potential nuclear fallout, or even the plant somehow turning into a nuclear bomb, the federal and local official response was weak and incompetent, further adding to the narrative of a terrible disaster unfolding with unwitting officials unable to prevent the apocalyptic events that would inevitably follow.
The TMI accident didn’t kill or harm anyone, of course. Despite it being assigned an
INES 5
rating, it was inarguably less severe than the non-commercial accident at the
SL-1 reactor
, which killed three and caused massive contamination, albeit in a more remote location. SL-1’s accident was assigned INES 4 on this logarithmic scale. If anything, the only enduring legacy of the TMI Unit 2 accident was the toxic fallout of the PR disaster that still contaminates discourse on nuclear power to this day.
Substituted Soviet Reality
The New Safe Confinement in final position over reactor 4 at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
The one nuclear disaster that looms above all is of course that of Chernobyl, or rather the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (
ChNPP
, today the Chornobyl NPP) with its accompanying city of Pripyat. The city of Chernobyl, now Chornobyl, is located some distance from ChNPP in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, and unlike Pripyat was not fully abandoned after the events of April 26, 1986 when a complete lack of safety culture in the 1980s USSR combined with a sketchy turbine spin-up experiment using residual core heat culminated in what in hindsight was a
very much preventable accident
.
With Soviet leadership choosing to override any engineering concerns and technical issues that might be inconvenient to the USSR narrative, issues with the RBMK reactor design were classified as state secrets already years before the ChNPP Unit 4 accident. This left plant staff both uninformed and untrained about what was to come. Yet despite of the horrors of the immediate aftermath of the ChNPP Unit 4 reactor’s steam explosion, graphite fire and subsequent radioactive cloud, the worst harm was caused by the denial by Soviet authorities that anything was wrong, which resulted in delayed evacuations, the lack of distribution of iodine tablets to prevent harm from radioactive iodine-131 isotope, and the consumption of radiologically contaminated milk and other foodstuffs in the surrounding area rather than these being destroyed.
Yet despite the RBMK reactor design as at ChNPP being at best a sketchy hybrid military/commercial reactor, the world’s unquestioned worst nuclear accident led to only a few dozen attributable deaths, mostly among the first responders who were fighting the raging graphite fire in the exposed core when radiation levels from short-lived isotopes like iodine-131 were at their highest. Cases of thyroid cancer likely increased due to the exposure to iodine-131, but it’s hard to quantify exact numbers here, especially amidst the statistical noise of forced evacuations and the resulting stress and substance abuse, as well as the breakup of the USSR only a few years later.
As a comparison, in the US, parts of the populace got regularly exposed to iodine-131 during the 1940s through the 1960s courtesy of nuclear weapons testing, but despite a lack of precautions at the time a
causal effect is elusive
.
Sadly, when HBO chose to make a series about the ChNPP nuclear accident, it leaned heavily into the sensationalist angle, with many analyses showing just how it
plays it fast and loose
with
the truth
to create
a more exciting narrative
. Despite what the series claims, there was no surge in birth defects, only elective abortions, and no surge in cancer cases.
Today, many people remain jumpy about anything to do with ‘Chernobyl’, leading to panicked headlines in 2021 about a
‘neutron surge’ at the ChNPP
, which likely was just due to the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure above the #4 reactor blocking rainwater intrusion. As water is a neutron moderator, this consequently is merely a logical and totally expected result.
Similarly, when during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine Russian forces rolled heavy equipment into the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), there was again panicked reporting about ‘elevated gamma radiation levels’. Although occupying forces destroyed much of the forensic evidence including much of the sensor network, it’s likely that the high gamma readings observed on the public radiation monitoring dashboard were
spoofed or at least invalid values
, rather than actual readings.
Ultimately, the CEZ was a thriving tourist attraction until the Russian invasion, with no radiological hazard if you take basic precautions in the worst affected areas. Back in 2019 discussions were already underway to reduce the size of the CEZ due to decreasing background radiation levels. Rather than a monument to the hazards of nuclear power, ChNPP is a testament to its safety even when used by a totalitarian regime whose idea of ‘safety culture’ involves the KGB and vanishings of those lacking in loyalty.
Japanese Unsafety Culture
When in March of 2011 a massive tsunami slammed into the coast of Fukushima prefecture after the 9.0 level Touhoku earthquake, it led to 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured and 2,553 people missing but presumed killed and vanished with the water back into the ocean. There also were multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, after the tsunami’s water bypassed the inadequate tsunami defenses and submerged the basement which held the emergency generators.
The reactors all shut down as soon as the earthquake occurred, but required power for their cooling pumps. As external power was cut off and their emergency generators drowned in the basement, the first responders simply had to plug in the backup external power. Unfortunately, this procedure had never been practiced, they could not establish the physical connection, and the cores overheated, resulting in them melting and the corium solidifying in the core catchers. That’s when the lack of hydrogen vents in the spent fuel pools at the top of the buildings resulted in hydrogen – generated by the steam in the spent fuel pools reacting with the zirconium cladding – finding an ignition source and blowing off multiple roofs, spreading parts of the fuel rods on the plant’s terrain.
Some lighter radioactive isotopes were scattered further away from the plant, but ultimately nobody died or suffered injuries from radiation. Despite this, a large exclusion zone was established and thousands of people were evacuated for what turned out to be years. Government reports since 2011 have noted rampant mental health issues among these evacuees, as well as high rates of substance abuse and suicides. Meanwhile many questions have been raised about whether most of the evacuations and the in-progress top soil removal was ever needed.
Multiple cracks were found in the concrete of the plant, which allow for seawater to seep into the reactor buildings. This water consequently has to be pumped out before it is treated with
ALPS
(Advanced Liquid Processing System), which can remove all radioactive isotopes except tritium, as this is just a form of hydrogen and thus effectively impossible to easily segregate from hydrogen and deuterium.
The treated water has been released back into the ocean, which has led to much international outrage. This despite that the tritium levels in the treated and diluted water (as released) are lower than those of any nuclear plant operating today, and lower than the naturally produced tritium levels from the Earth’s atmosphere.
Ultimately, it was the botched evacuation and disaster response, per the
2012 Diet report
, that led to hundreds if not thousands of needless deaths. The flawed messaging around Fukushima Daiichi brings to mind the PR disaster around TMI Unit 2, with anti-nuclear groups hijacking the conversation and drowning any sensible communication that could have occurred with stress-inducing FUD when a calm and objective approach was needed. Unsurprisingly, the biggest outcome for Japan was the complete restructuring of its nuclear safety model, with the newly formed NRA, based on the US’s NRC, turning a whole new leaf in Japanese safety culture.
Today, many of the nuclear reactors that were shutdown after the 3/11 event are now either already back online, or are in the process of getting the last safety upgrades needed before receiving an operating license from the NRA. Despite middling enthusiasm for nuclear power in Japan, there’s an increase in support along with a move towards new reactor construction.
Radiophobia
Radiophobia
is defined as an irrational or excessive fear of ionizing radiation. It leads people to overestimate the health implications of radiation, suspect the presence of radiation where there is none, like microwaved food, and easily miss actual sources of radiation, such as taking an airplane flight, having a granite counter top, the presence of radon gas in the basement, inhaling cigarette smoke, or frequenting
certain Brazilian beaches
.
The TMI Unit 1 reactor restarting should be met with joy, as it means more reliable (95+% capacity factor) low-carbon electricity and well-paying jobs. The country to have suffered the worst nuclear disaster in history – Ukraine – is finishing construction on two nuclear plants today, and will be constructing many more. Japan is coming to terms with the reality of nuclear power, as it grapples with the economic cost of importing the LNG and coal that have kept its economy going since 2011.
If there is one thing that we can learn from nuclear accidents in this Atomic Age, it is that the fear of the atom has done more harm than respect for it. We can only hope that more people will learn this lesson. | 94 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778484",
"author": "SeattleSipper",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T14:24:52",
"content": "Separating fact from fiction, indeed. No mention of the costs to date of the partial cleanups. Dismissing the deaths caused. No mention of the fact that Chernobyl and Fukushima are not really cleane... | 1,760,371,846.576042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/fauxtrs-is-definitely-not-a-trash-80/ | FauxTRS Is Definitely Not A Trash 80 | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"emulation",
"recreation",
"trs-80"
] | Among the 8-bit home micro boom from the late 1970s through early 1980s, the introduction to computing for many wasn’t a pricey Apple or Commodore, instead it was the slightly lower budget machine from Radio Shack. The TRS-80 series of computers live on and have a loyal following among retro computing enthusiasts. But like all such machines the original hardware is harder to find in 2024, so how about the TRS-80 experience without the failing vintage parts?
The FauxTRS from [Jpasqua]
is just that, the feel of a Model 3 or Model 4, powered by a Raspberry Pi.
In a sense then, this is a very well-designed case for a Raspberry Pi that looks a lot like the Tandy of old. With a modern LCD and keyboard it could just as easily be a normal desktop machine, but when the emulator fires up it does indeed look very much like a small version of the real thing.
You can download the STL files from Printables
, and for the cost of a few extra parts you can have one too.
Alternatively, if a faux TRS doesn’t do it for you,
there’s always the chance of making a more real one
. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778454",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T12:59:58",
"content": "Guys, I really appreciate those model making efforts but after all those yeaes, could you please start to pay the CRT the tribute it deserves?Using an LCD as a substitute is all nice and soft and warm, bu... | 1,760,371,846.25802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/22/an-avo-8-teardown/ | An AVO 8 Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"analog meter",
"AVO"
] | AVO meters — literally amp, volt, ohm meters — are not very common in North America but were staples in the UK. [TheHWcave] found an AVO 8 that is probably from the 1950s or 1960s and
wanted to get it working
. You can see the project in the video below.
These are very different from the standard analog meters many of us grew up with. [TheHWcave] shows how the dual range knobs work together to set the measurement. There are three separate ohm settings, and each one has its own zero pot. We were surprised that the meter didn’t have a parallax-correcting mirror.
Other than dirty switch contacts, the voltage measurements still worked. After cleaning the contacts, most of the ranges worked well, although there were still some issues. Some of the resistor ranges were not working, either. Inside the case were an old D cell and a square battery, a B121 15 V battery. Replacing the 15 V battery with a bench supply made things better.
Some plugins are available to allow the meter to read low resistance or high currents. We thought using the soldering gun as a current source was clever. Once he gets it working, he opens the box around the 14:30 mark.
The inside was all hand-wiring and power resistors. Of course, there are also a ton of contacts for the switches. So it isn’t just an electrical design, but a mechanical one, too. The electrical design is also interesting, and an analysis of it winds the video down.
[Jenny List] has
a soft spot for these meters
, too. Why
use an old meter
? If you have to ask… | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778386",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T08:13:22",
"content": "“We were surprised that the meter didn’t have a parallax-correcting mirror.”I think it does, right at the bottom of the scale. In later models they moved it further up the scale because the curve of the scale ... | 1,760,371,846.687187 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/coax-stub-filters-demystified/ | Coax Stub Filters Demystified | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"bandpass",
"coaxial",
"filter",
"ham",
"impedance",
"matching",
"RF",
"stub"
] | Unless you hold a First Degree RF Wizard rating, chances are good that coax stubs seem a bit baffling to you. They look for all the world like short circuits or open circuits, and yet work their magic and act to match feedline impedances or even as bandpass filters. Pretty interesting behavior from a little piece of coaxial cable.
If you’ve ever wondered how stub filters do their thing, [
Fesz] has you covered
. His latest video concentrates on practical filters made from quarter-wavelength and half-wavelength stubs. Starting with LTspice simulations, he walks through the different behaviors of open-circuit and short-circuit stubs, as well as what happens when multiple stubs are added to the same feedline. He also covers a nifty online calculator that makes it easy to come up with stub lengths based on things like the velocity factor and characteristic impedance of the coax.
It’s never just about simulations with [Fesz], though, so he presents a real-world stub filter for FM broadcast signals on the 2-meter amateur radio band. The final design required multiple stubs to get 30 dB of attenuation from 88 MHz to 108 MHz, and the filter seemed fairly sensitive to the physical position of the stubs relative to each other. Also, the filter needed a little LC matching circuit to move the passband frequency to the center of the 2-meter band. All the details are in the video below.
It’s pretty cool to see what can be accomplished with just a couple of offcuts of coax. Plus, getting some of the theory behind those funny little features on PCBs that handle microwave frequencies is a nice bonus.
This microwave frequency doubler
is a nice example of what stubs can do. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778365",
"author": "Walrus",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T06:49:48",
"content": "No offense but this is literally RF 101 covered in the most basic of EM fields and waves classes and well known by high school diploma ham radio enthusiasts everywhere. Maybe better to tone down the comme... | 1,760,371,846.736348 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/cerametal-lets-you-print-metal-cheaply-and-easily/ | CeraMetal Lets You Print Metal, Cheaply And Easily | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D metal printer",
"3d printing",
"3d printing clay",
"metal"
] | 3D printing metal has been somewhat of a holy grail for the last decade in the hobby 3DP scene. We’ve seen a number of solutions, including using expensive filaments that incorporate metal into the usual plastic. In parallel, we’ve seen ceramic printers, and paste printers in general, coming into their own. What if you combined the two?
You’d get [Leah Buechly] et al’s
CeraMetal process
, which is the cheapest and
most straightforward metal printing method we’ve seen to date
. It all starts off with a custom bronze metal clay, made up of 100 g bronze powder, 0.17 g methyl cellulose, 0.33 g xanthan gum, and 9 g water. The water is fine-tuned to get the right consistency, and then it’s extruded and sintered.
The printer in question is
an off-the-shelf ceramic printer
that appears to use a pressurized clay feed into an auger, and prints on a linen bed. [Leah] had to write a custom slicer firmware that essentially runs in vase mode but incorporates infill as well, because the stop-start of normal slicers wreaked havoc with clay printing.
The part is then buried in activated carbon for support, and fired in a kiln. The result is a 3D printed bronze part on the cheap; the material cost is essentially just the cost of the metal powder and your effort.
We had never heard of metal clay before, but apparently jewelers have been using it for metals other than just bronze. The
Metal Clay Academy
, from the references section of the paper, is an amazing resource if you want to recreate this at home.
Paste printers are sounding more and more interesting. Obvious applications include
printing chocolate
and
printing pancakes
, but now that we’re talking metal parts with reasonably consistent shrinkage, they’ve got our attention. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778348",
"author": "Mhajicek",
"timestamp": "2024-07-22T05:45:14",
"content": "Seems you’d be better off printing a mold and pressing in your metal clay.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6778424",
"author": "Jan-Willem... | 1,760,371,846.646685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/hackaday-links-july-21-2024/ | Hackaday Links: July 21, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"AirTag",
"baseball",
"bsod",
"CrowdStrike",
"cybersecurity",
"deployment",
"fema",
"Find My Device",
"hackaday links",
"strike",
"Texas",
"umpire",
"Waffle House",
"Whattaburger"
] | When monitors around the world display a “Blue Screen of Death” and you know it’s probably your fault, it’s got to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at work. That’s likely the situation inside CrowdStrike this weekend, as engineers at the cybersecurity provider struggle to recover from
an update rollout that went very, very badly indeed
. The rollout, which affected enterprise-level Windows 10 and 11 hosts running their flagship Falcon Sensor product, resulted in machines going into a boot loop or just dropping into restore mode, leaving hapless millions to stare at the dreaded BSOD screen on everything from POS terminals to transit ticketing systems.
Tales of woe from the fallout from what’s being called “
the largest IT outage in history”
are pouring in, including this very bewildered game developer who while stranded at an airport had plenty of ponder about why CrowdStrike
broke the cardinal rule of software development by rolling a change to production on a Friday
. The good news is that there’s a workaround, but the bad news is that someone has to access each borked machine and manually delete a file to fix it. Current estimates place the number of affected machines at 8.5 million, so that’s a lot of legwork. There’s plenty of time after the fix is rolled out for a full accounting of the impact, including
the search for the guilty and persecution of the innocent
, but for now, let’s spare a moment’s pity for the devs who must be sweating things out this weekend.
Back in 2011, Craig Fugate of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said of disaster response in the southern US, “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad.” Thus was born
the “Waffle House Index,”
an informal measure of a natural disaster’s impact based on where individual restaurants in the chain that prides itself on always being open are actually up and running. With over 1,900 locations in 25 states, you’d think it would cover just about any emergency, but desperate Texans eschewed the index during the
recent extensive power outages in the Houston area
caused by Hurricane Beryl by inventing
the “Whattaburger Index.”
We haven’t had the pleasure of this particular delicacy, but it seems Texans can’t get enough of the hamburger chain, enough so that their online app’s location map provides a pretty granular view of a wide swathe of Texas. Plus, the chain thoughtfully color-codes each location’s marker by whether it’s currently open or closed, making it a quick and easy way to check where the power is on or off — at least during regular business hours. Hat’s off to the enterprising Texans who figured this out, and here’s hoping that life has returned to normal for everyone by now.
While we’re generally not fans of Apple products, which seem overpriced and far too tightly controlled for our liking, we’ve been pretty impressed by some of the results people have reported using their Apple AirTags to recover lost or stolen items — this recent discovery of
a cache of stolen tools
(fourth item) comes to mind. Results such as that require a “me too” response from the Android side of the market, resulting in the Find My Device network that, perhaps unsurprisingly,
doesn’t appear to work very well
. The test was pretty much what you’d expect — drop an Android-compatible tag in the mail along with an AirTag and track their journey. The Android tag only reported in a couple of times, while the AirTag provided a comprehensive track of the parcel’s journey through the USPS. Our first thought is that this speaks mostly to the power of being first to market, allowing Apple to have a more completely built-out infrastructure. But this may say more about the previously mentioned flexibility of Android compared to Apple; we know we noped the hell out of participating in Find My Device as soon as it rolled out on our Android phone. Seems like a lot of Android users feel the same way.
And finally, while we haven’t checked out comments on this week’s podcast, we’re pretty sure we’re getting raked over the coals for betraying our ignorance of and lack of appreciation for the finer points of soccer, or football. Whatever you call it, we just don’t get it, but we do understand and agree with our own Lewin Day’s argument that
instrument-enhanced officiating isn’t making the game any better
. Our argument is that in any sport, the officials are like a third team, one that’s adversarial to both of the competing teams, hopefully equally so, and that giving them super-human abilities isn’t fair to the un-enhanced players on the field/pitch/court/ice. So it was with considerable dismay that we learned that Major League Baseball is experimenting with
automatic umpires to call balls and strikes behind the plate
. While you may not care about baseball, you have to appreciate the ability of an umpire to stand directly in the line of fire of someone who can hurl a ball fast enough to hit a strike zone about the size of a pizza box the ball in less than 500 milliseconds. Being able to determine if the ball ended up in or out of that box is pretty amazing, not to mention all the other things an umpire has to do to make sure the game is played by the rules. They’re not perfect, of course, and neither are the players, and half the fun of watching sports for us is witnessing the very human contest of wills and skills of everyone involved. It seems like a bad idea to take the humans out of that particular loop. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778238",
"author": "Bruce.desertrat",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T23:07:25",
"content": "My",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6778247",
"author": "bruce.desertrat",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T23:33:53",
"cont... | 1,760,371,846.882764 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/a-modchip-for-a-fridge/ | A Modchip For A Fridge | Jenny List | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"555",
"fridge",
"modchip"
] | An annoying fridge that beeps incessantly when the door is open too long should be an easy enough thing to fix by disconnecting the speaker, but when as with [kennedn]’s model it’s plumbed in and the speaker is inaccessible, what’s to be done? The answer:
create a mod chip for a fridge
.
While the fridge electronics themselves couldn’t be reached, there was full access to a daughterboard with the fridge controls. It should be easy enough to use them to turn off the alarm, but first a little reverse engineering was required. It used a serial communication with an old-school set of shift registers rather than a microcontroller, but it soon became apparent that the job could be done by simply pulling the buttons down. In a move that should gladden the heart of all Hackaday readers then, the modchip in question didn’t even have to be a processor, instead it could be the venerable 555 timer. Our lives are complete, and the fridge is no longer annoying.
The 555 is unashamedly a Hackaday cliche, but even after five decades
it still bears some understanding
. | 52 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778191",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T20:46:57",
"content": "We use more ice in the summer than my fridge can make with it’s normal cycle. It can just barely keep up if I keep turning the fast ice setting on, but that turns off after 12-24 hours, even when th... | 1,760,371,846.822361 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/powering-biology-with-batteries/ | Powering Biology With Batteries | Navarre Bartz | [
"Science"
] | [
"ATP",
"bioelectrical",
"bioelectrocatalysis",
"biology",
"Chemistry",
"electrobiological",
"electrobiotechnology",
"enzyme",
"synthetic biology"
] | We’ve all been there — you forgot your lunch, but there are AC outlets galore. Wouldn’t it be so much simpler if you could just plug in like your phone? Don’t try it yet, but biologists have taken us one step further to being able to
fuel ourselves on those sweet, sweet electrons
.
Using an “electrobiological module” of 3-4 enzymes, the amusingly named AAA (acid/aldehyde ATP) cycle regenerates ATP in biological systems directly from electricity. The process takes place at -0.6 V vs a standard hydrogen electrode (SHE), and is compatible with biological transcription/translation processes like “RNA and protein synthesis from DNA.”
The process isn’t dependent on any membranes to foul or more complicated sets of enzymes making it ideal for
in vitro
synthetic biology since you don’t have to worry about keeping as many components in an ideal environment. We’re particularly interested in how this might apply to
DNA computing
which we keep being promised will someday be the best thing since the transistor.
Maybe in the future we’ll all jack in instead of eating our daily food pill? If this all seems like something you’ve heard of before, but in reverse, maybe you’re thinking of
microbial fuel cells
. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778144",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T18:08:00",
"content": "One step closer to becoming Borg!I welcome our new hybrid overlords!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6778156",
... | 1,760,371,847.32145 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/ask-hackaday-should-we-teach-basic/ | Ask Hackaday: Should We Teach BASIC? | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"basic",
"programming"
] | Suppose you decide you want to become a novelist. You enroll in the Hackaday Famous Novelists School where your instructor announces that since all truly great novels are written in Russian, our first task will be to learn Russian. You’d probably get up and leave. The truth is, what makes a great (or bad) novel transcends any particular language, and you could make the same argument for programming languages.
Despite the pundits, understanding the basics of how computers work is more important than knowing C, Java, or the language of the week. A recent post by [lackofimagination] proposes that we should teach programming
using BASIC
. And not a modern whizz-pow BASIC, but old-fashioned regular BASIC as we might have used it in the 1980s.
Certainly, a whole generation of programmers cut their teeth on BASIC. On the other hand, the programming world has changed a lot since then. While you can sort of apply functional and object-oriented techniques to any programming language, it isn’t simple and the details often get in the way of the core ideas.
Still, some things don’t change. The idea of variables, program flow, loops, and arrays all have some parallel in just about anything, so we can see some advantages to starting out simply. After all, you don’t learn to drive by trying it out in the Indy 500, right?
What do you think? If you were teaching programming today, would you start with BASIC? Or with something else? You can modernize a little bit with
QB64
. Or try
EndBasic
which just recently had a new release. | 184 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778076",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T14:07:49",
"content": "I have always thought that BASIC makes more sense to Arduino beginners than C++.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6778086",
"author": "Gunp... | 1,760,371,847.269685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/welding-wood-is-as-simple-as-rubbing-two-sticks-together/ | Welding Wood Is As Simple As Rubbing Two Sticks Together | Dan Maloney | [
"Science"
] | [
"Argon",
"biopolymers",
"friction welding",
"lignin",
"stir welding",
"vacuum",
"welding",
"wood"
] | Can you weld wood? It seems like a silly question — if you throw a couple of pieces of oak on the welding table and whip out the TIG torch, you know nothing is going to happen. But as [Action Lab] shows us in the video below,
welding wood is technically possible
, if not very practical.
Since experiments like this sometimes try to stretch things a bit, it probably pays to define welding as a process that melts two materials at their interface and fuses them together as the molten material solidifies. That would seem to pose a problem for wood, which just burns when heated. But as [Action Lab] points out, it’s the volatile gases released from wood as it is heated that actually burn, and the natural polymers that are decomposed by the heat to release these gases have a glass transition temperature just like any other polymer. You just have to heat wood enough to reach that temperature without actually bursting the wood into flames.
His answer is one of the oldest technologies we have: rubbing two sticks together. By chucking a hardwood peg into a hand drill and spinning it into a slightly undersized hole in a stick of oak, he created enough heat and pressure to partially melt the polymers at the interface. When allowed to cool, the polymers fuse together, and voila! Welded wood. Cutting his welded wood along the joint reveals a thin layer of material that obviously underwent a phase change, so he dug into this phenomenon a bit and discovered
research into melting and welding wood
, which concludes that the melted material is primarily lignin, a phenolic biopolymer found in the cell walls of wood.
[Action Lab] follows up with an experiment where he heats bent wood in a vacuum chamber with a laser to lock the bend in place. The experiment was somewhat less convincing but got us thinking about other ways to exclude oxygen from the “weld pool,” such as flooding the area with argon. That’s exactly what’s done in TIG welding, after all. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778056",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T11:52:12",
"content": "This also reminds me of making pellets from sawdust under high pressure. But I never looked into details of whether this should be called “welding” or if it’s more like “glueing” wood with it’s own lignin... | 1,760,371,847.045208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/21/all-about-pnp-transistors/ | All About PNP Transistors | Al Williams | [
"Parts"
] | [
"bipolar transistor",
"pnp transistor",
"transistor"
] | In the early days, PNP bipolar transistors were common, but the bulk of circuits you see today use NPN transistors. As [Aaron Danner] points out, many people think PNP transistors are “backward” but they have an important role to play in many circuits. He
explains it all
in a recent video you can see below.
He does explain why PNP transistors don’t perform as well as corresponding NPN transistors, but they are still necessary sometimes. Once you get used to it, they are no problem to handle at all. Common cases where you want a PNP are, for example, when you want to switch a voltage instead of a ground. There are also certain amplifier configurations that need PNP units.
Like an NPN transistor, a PNP can operate in saturation, linear operation, reverse active, or it can be cut off. [Aaron] shows you how to bias a transistor and you’ll see it isn’t much different from an NPN except the base-emitter diode junction is reversed.
As you might expect, current has to flow through that diode junction to turn the transistor on. The arrow points in the direction of the diode junction. If you want a refresher on
transistor biasing
, we got you. Sure, you
don’t need to do it every day
now, but it still is a useful skill to have. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778075",
"author": "akimmet",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T13:57:48",
"content": "NPN silicon transistors are more common simply because they are easier to manufacture, and therefore cheaper. With early germanium transistors, most devices were PNP for the same reason.",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,371,847.380587 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/using-femtosecond-laser-pulses-to-induce-metastable-hidden-states-in-magnetite/ | Using Femtosecond Laser Pulses To Induce Metastable Hidden States In Magnetite | Maya Posch | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"magnetite"
] | Hidden states are a fascinating aspect of matter, as these can not normally be reached via natural processes (i.e. non-ergodic), but we can establish them using laser photoexcitation. Although these hidden states are generally very unstable and will often decay within a nanosecond, there is evidence for more persistent states in e.g. vanadates. As for practical uses of these states, electronics and related fields are often mentioned. This is also the focus in the
press release
by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) when reporting on establishing hidden states in magnetite (Fe
3
O
4
), with the study
published
in PNAS (
Arxiv preprint
link).
[B. Truc] and colleagues used two laser frequencies to either make the magnetite more conductive (800 nm) or a better insulator (400 nm). The transition takes on the order of 50 picoseconds, allowing for fairly rapid switching between these metastable states. Naturally, turning this into practical applications will require a lot more work, especially considering the need for femtosecond pulsed lasers to control the process, which makes it significantly more cumbersome than semiconductor technology. Its main use at this point in time will remain a fascinating demonstration of these
hidden states
of matter. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,847.425678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/working-through-the-art-of-electronics-exercises/ | Working ThroughThe Art Of ElectronicsExercises | Al Williams | [
"Parts",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"Art Of Electronics"
] | [The Engineering Experience] has an ambitious series of videos. He’s working through circuit examples from the awesome book “
The Art of Electronics
.” In the latest installment, he’s looking at a
pulse generator
that uses bipolar transistors. So far, there are 43 videos covering different exercises.
If you’ve read the book — and you should — you know the examples and exercises sometimes have little explanation. Honestly, that’s good. You should try to work through them yourself first. But once you have an idea of how it works, hearing someone give their take on it may help you out. In fact, even if you don’t have the book, we’d suggest pausing the video and looking at the circuit to see what you can figure out before playing the explanation. You’ll learn more that way.
Admittedly, some of the early videos will be cakewalks for Hackaday readers. The first few, for example, walk through parallel and series resistors. However, if you are starting out or just want a refresher, you can probably enjoy all of them. The later ones get a bit more challenging.
If you want to double-check your work, you can
simulate the circuit
, too. Our simulation got 4.79 V and he computed 4.8, which is certainly close enough.
We do love “
The Art of Electronics
.
” The book’s author also enjoys
listening for aliens
. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6778034",
"author": "Steven Gates",
"timestamp": "2024-07-21T08:07:57",
"content": "I unfortunately never took up electronics (again) after retiring from the Air Force some 30 years ago. Before my stint in the Air Force, as a kid, I was all about electronics. Vacuum tube electronics... | 1,760,371,847.621466 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/new-additive-manufacturing-contenders-hip-and-centrifugal-printing/ | New Additive Manufacturing Contenders: HIP And Centrifugal Printing | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"Additive Manufacturing",
"sintering"
] | Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a field of ever-growing importance, with many startups and existing companies seeking to either improve on existing AM technologies or market new approaches. At the RAPID + TCT 2024 tradeshow it seems that we got
two more new AM approaches
to keep an eye on to see how they develop. These are powder-based Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) by Grid Logic and centrifugal 3D printing by Fugo Precision.
Grid Logic demo at RAPID + TCT 2024. (Credit: Ian Wright)
Grid Logic’s HIP
uses binder-less powders in sealed containers that are compressed and deposited into a HIP can according to the design being printed, followed by the
HIP process
. This is a common post-processing step outside of AM as well, but here HIP is used as the primary method in what seems like a budget version of typical powder sintering AM printers. Doubtlessly it won’t be ‘hobbyist cheap’, but it promises to allow for printing ceramic and metal parts with minimal wasted powder, which is a major concern with current powder-based sintering printers.
While Grid Logic’s approach is relatively conservative,
Fugo’s Model A printer
using centrifugal printing is definitely trying to distinguish itself. It uses 20 lasers which are claimed to achieve 30 µm accuracy in all directions with a speed of 1 mm/minute. It competes with SLA printers, which also means that it works with photopolymers, but rather than messing with FEP film and pesky Earth gravity, it uses a spinning drum to create its own gravitational parameters, along with a built-in parts cleaning and curing system. They claim that this method requires 50% fewer supports while printing much faster than competing commercial SLA printers.
Even if not immediately relevant to AM enthusiasts, it’s good to see new ideas being tried in the hope that they will make AM better for all of us. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777970",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T23:40:04",
"content": "> what seems like a budget version of typical powder sintering AM printers.NO. Not budget version AT ALL. Hot Isostatic Pressing involves pressures as high as 43000 psi at temperatures up to 2000°C. Th... | 1,760,371,847.478888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/this-vintage-computing-device-is-no-baby-food/ | This Vintage Computing Device Is No Baby Food | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"retrocomputer",
"tape drive"
] | Today, if you want a computer for a particular task, you go shopping. But in the early days of computing, exotic applications needed custom computers. What’s more is that with the expense of computers, you likely got one made that fit exactly what you needed and no more. That led to many oddball one-off or nearly one-off computers during that time frame. Same for peripheral devices — you built what you had to and you left the rest on the drafting table. [Vintage Geek] got his hands on what appears to be one of them: the
Gerber Scientific 6200
.
While Gerber Scientific is still around, we’ve never heard of the 6200. Based on the serial number, we would guess at least 62 of them were made and this one has an interesting backstory of living in someone’s home who worked at the Pentagon. We presume the tapes were erased before it was sold!
Design-wise, it is pretty standard stuff. A 19-inch rack, a standard tape drive from Kennedy, a power supply, and some cards. The box takes 240 V, so the computer didn’t get powered up, but an examination of the inside looked like this really was a one-off with handwritten labels on masking tape.
We couldn’t tell for sure if the device was a computer itself, or just a tape drive and maybe plotter interface for another computer. If you know anything about this device, we are sure [Vintage Geek] would like to hear from you.
If this does turn out to have a CPU onboard, we’d bet it is
bit sliced
. If you have a 9-track tape machine, you may have to
make your own tapes
soon. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777963",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T22:00:22",
"content": "So, we have to wait until the next video to see what’s going on in the back, and maybe the inside.I hope someone out there knows more about the machine.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,847.5263 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/2024-business-card-challenge-cardtunes-bluetooth-speaker/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: CardTunes Bluetooth Speaker | Donald Papp | [
"contests",
"Musical Hacks",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth speaker",
"business card",
"ESP32",
"fpc",
"wireless"
] | A business card form factor can be quite limiting, but that didn’t stop [Schwimmflugel] from creating
CardTunes
, an ESP32-based Bluetooth audio speaker that tried something innovative to deliver the output.
What’s very interesting about this design is the speaker itself. [Schwimmflugel] aimed to create a speaker out of two coils made from flexible circuit board material, driving them with opposite polarities to create a thin speaker without the need for a permanent magnet.
The concept is sound, but in practice, performance was poor. One could identify the song being played, but only if holding the speaker up to one’s ear. The output was improved considerably with the addition of a small permanent magnet behind the card, but of course this compromised the original vision.
Even though the concept of making a speaker from two flexible PCB panel coils had only mixed success, we love seeing this kind of effort and there’s a lot to learn from the results. Not to mention that it’s frankly fantastic to even have a Bluetooth speaker on a business card in the first place.
The
2024 Business Card Challenge
is over, but judging by all the incredible entries we received, we’re thinking it probably won’t be too long before we come up with another sized-constrained challenge. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777920",
"author": "PEBKAC",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T18:01:16",
"content": "I can’t help but think that the issue with the speaker was actually enclosure design.Having two diaphragms pushing/pulling on a tiny sealed(ish) volume of air just doesn’t leave much room for… Amplitude.Es... | 1,760,371,847.573022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/do-your-research/ | Do Your Research | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [] | We were talking about a sweet hack this week, wherein [Alex]
busts the encryption for his IP web cam firmware
so that he can modify it later. He got a number of lucky breaks, including getting root on the device just by soldering on a serial terminal, but was faced with having to reverse-engineer a binary that implemented RSA encryption and decryption.
Especially when they’re done right, and
written to avoid side-channel attacks
, encryption routines aren’t intuitive, even when you’re looking at the C source. Reversing it from the binary would be a tremendous hurdle.
That’s when [Alex] started plugging in strings he found in the binary into a search engine. And that’s when he found
exactly
the open source project that the webcam used, which gave him the understanding he needed to crack the rest of the nut.
Never forget! When you’re doing some reverse engineering, whether hardware or software, do a search for every part number and every string you find in memory. If you’re like me, it might feel like cheating a little bit, but it’s just being efficient. It’s what all your hacker heroes say they do, and if you’re lucky, it might just be the break you need too.
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
! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777876",
"author": "Nobody",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T14:43:31",
"content": "Pro Tip: If you want to know when someone is reverse engineering your firmware, add ‘interesting strings’ to your binary, and setup a web site indexed by the major search engines containing those strings. ... | 1,760,371,847.666565 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/sealed-packs-of-pokemon-cards-give-up-their-secrets-without-opening-them/ | Sealed Packs Of Pokémon Cards Give Up Their Secrets Without Opening Them | Donald Papp | [
"Machine Learning",
"Science",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"computed tomography",
"ct scanner",
"pokemon",
"x-ray"
] | [Ahron Wayne] succeeded in something he’s been trying to accomplish for some time: figuring out
what’s inside a sealed Pokémon card packet without opening it
. There’s a catch, however. It took buying an X-ray CT scanner off eBay, refurbishing and calibrating it, then putting a load of work into testing and scanning techniques. Then finally combining the data with machine learning in order to make useful decisions. It’s a load of work but [Ahron] succeeded by developing some genuinely novel techniques.
While using an X-ray machine to peek inside a sealed package seems conceptually straightforward, there are in fact all kinds of challenges in actually pulling it off. There’s loads of noise. So much that the resulting images give a human eyeball very little to work with. Luckily, there are also some things that make the job a little easier.
For example, it’s not actually necessary to image an entire card in order to positively identify it. Teasing out the individual features such as a fist, a tentacle, or a symbol are all useful to eliminate possibilities. Interestingly, as a side effect the system can easily spot counterfeit cards; the scans show up completely different.
When we first covered [Ahron]’s fascinating journey of
bringing CT scanners back to life
, he was able to scan cards but made it clear he wasn’t able to scan sealed packages. We’re delighted that he ultimately succeeded, and also documented the process. Check it out in the video below. | 32 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777845",
"author": "Slurm",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T11:40:43",
"content": "Reminds me of Q’s X-Ray Document Scanner from 1995 James Bond GoldenEye.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6777865",
"author": "Jack Meoff",
"tim... | 1,760,371,847.737119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/20/robot-seeks-and-sucks-up-cigarette-butts-with-its-feet/ | Robot Seeks And Sucks Up Cigarette Butts, With Its Feet | Donald Papp | [
"green hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"cigarette butt",
"robot",
"trash",
"vacuum"
] | It would be better if humans
didn’t
toss cigarette butts on the ground in the first place, but change always takes longer than we think it should. In the meantime, researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have used the problem as an opportunity to explore what seems to be a novel approach:
attaching vacuum pickups to a robot’s feet
, therefore removing the need for separate effectors.
VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot) is a robotic dog with a vacuum cleaner “backpack” and four hoses, one going down each leg. A vision system detects a cigarette butt, then ensures the robot plants a foot next to it, sucking it up.
The research paper
has more details, but the video embedded below gives an excellent overview.
While VERO needs to think carefully about route planning, using the legs as effectors is very efficient. Being a legged robot, VERO can navigate all kinds of real-world environments — including stairs — which is important because cigarette butts know no bounds.
Also, using the legs as effectors means there is no need for the robot to stop and wait while a separate device (like an arm with a vacuum pickup) picks up the trash. By simply planting a foot next to a detected cigarette butt, VERO combines locomotion with pickup.
It’s fascinating to see how the
Mini Cheetah design
has really become mainstream to the point that these robots are available off-the-shelf, and it’s even cooler to see them put to use. After all,
robots tackling trash
is a good way to leverage machines that can focus on specific jobs, even if they aren’t super fast at it. | 30 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777821",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T09:17:13",
"content": "Smokers always declare themselves as being very social, as they will chat with random other addicts in their designated smoking areas, sometimes even giving out their poison.If I look at how the floor looks... | 1,760,371,848.184682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/modern-in-circuit-emulator-for-the-6809/ | Modern In-Circuit Emulator For The 6809 | Alexander Rowsell | [
"ARM",
"computer hacks",
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"CoCo",
"in-circuit debugger",
"In-Circuit-Emulator",
"motorola 6809",
"Teensy 4.1",
"TRS-80 Colour Computer"
] | The Motorola 6809, released in 1978, was the follow-up to their 6800 from four years earlier. It’s a powerful little chip with many 16-bit features, although it’s an 8-bit micro at heart. Despite its great improvements over the 6800, and even technical superiority over the Z80 and 6502 (hardware multiply, for example!), it never reached the same levels of success that those chips did. However, there are still some famous systems, such as the TRS-80 Colour Computer, which utilized the chip and are still being hacked on today. [Ted] is clearly a fan of the 6809, as he used a Teensy 4.1 to
create a cycle-exact, drop-in 6809 emulator
!
A small interposer board rearranges the Teensy pinout to match the 6809, as well as translating voltage levels from 3.3V to 5V. With careful design, the Teensy matches the cycle diagrams in the Motorola datasheet precisely, and so should be able to run any applications written for the chip! A great test was booting Extended Colour BASIC for the TRS-80 CoCo 2 and running some test BASIC programs. Any issues with opcode decoding or timing would certainly be exposed while running an interpreted language like BASIC. After this successful test, it was time to let the Teensy’s ARM Cortex-M7 rip and see what it could do.
Simply removing the dummy cycles between opcode fetches (necessary in the original chip) led to an immediate speedup of almost 100%. For many computers that used the 6809, this effectively doubles the clock speed from a typical ~1MHz to 2MHz, which is a noticeable and welcome speedup. Mirroring the ROM and RAM inside the Teensy (apparently overclocked to 800MHz!) led to a ridiculous 800% improvement, making many applications and games essentially unusable – though probably breaking the record for the world’s fastest CoCo in the process.
The Teensy emulator plugged into a CoCo 2
The real power of in-circuit emulators is for debugging both software and hardware. In-circuit emulators were essential tools back in the day of 8- and even 16-/32-bit microprocessors. Being able to control the processor from an external machine allows you to view the internal state of the chip while stepping a single cycle at a time if needed. This can help expose issues with hardware surrounding the MCU, although many engineers would also use a large, multi-channel logic analyzer at the same time. Common emulators back then would consist of a large box full of many boards packed with circuitry, all connected to a card inserted into an IBM PC or similar. This could also remove the slow process of burning EPROMs and then having to wait for them to be UV erased during prototyping, as many emulators would include SRAM to act as ROM.
All in all, we think [Ted] did a terrific job and we are hoping to see
the project
expand, possibly with PC software to control the emulator and show the internal state, just like back in the 80s! | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777828",
"author": "MG",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T09:58:55",
"content": "Fun fact: The 6809 was also the backbone of the Fairlight CMI series, one of the first successful lines of sampling synthesizers. The CMI IIx, at least, used 3 of them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,848.110746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/the-continuing-venusian-mystery-of-phosphine-and-ammonia/ | The Continuing Venusian Mystery Of Phosphine And Ammonia | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"Phosphine",
"venus"
] | The planet Venus is in so many ways an enigma. It’s a sister planet to Earth and also within relatively easy reach of our instruments and probes, yet we nevertheless know precious little about what is going on its surface or even inside its dense atmosphere. Much of this is of course due to planets like Mars getting all the orbiting probes and rovers scurrying around on its barren, radiation-blasted surface, but we had atmospheric probes descend through Venus’ atmosphere, so far to little avail. Back in 2020 speculation arose of phosphine being detected in Venus’ atmosphere, which caused both excitement and a lot of skepticism. Regardless, at the recent National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2024) the current state of Venusian knowledge
was discussed
, which even got The Guardian
to report on it
.
In addition to phosphine, there’s speculation of ammonia also being detectable from Earth, both of which might be indicative of organic processes and thus potentially life. Related research has indicated that common amino acids essential to life on Earth
would be stable
even in sulfuric droplets like in Venus’ atmosphere. After criticism to the original 2020 phosphine article, [Jane S. Greaves] et al.
repeated their observations
based on feedback, although it’s clear that the observation of phosphine gas on Venus is not a simple binary question.
The same is true of ammonia, which
if present
in Venusian clouds would be a massive discovery, which
according to research
by [William Bains] and colleagues in
PNAS
could explain many curious observations in Venus’ atmosphere. With so much uncertainty with remote observations, it’s clear that the only way that we are going to answer these questions is with
future Venus missions
, which sadly remain rather sparse.
If there’s indeed life on Venus, it’ll have a while longer to evolve before we can go and check it out. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777796",
"author": "brucedesertrat",
"timestamp": "2024-07-20T02:31:06",
"content": "” like Mars getting all the orbiting probes and rovers scurrying around on its barren, radiation-blasted surface”Yeah, well there is the minor points of Venus having 92 atmospheres pressure, nearly... | 1,760,371,850.186121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/desiccants-tested-side-by-side/ | Desiccants, Tested Side By Side | Jenny List | [
"chemistry hacks",
"News"
] | [
"desiccant",
"drying",
"silica gel"
] | We’re so used to seeing a little sachet of desiccant drop out of a package when we open it, that we seldom consider these essential substances. But anyone who spends a while around 3D printing soon finds the need for drying their filament, and knowing a bit about the subject becomes of interest. It’s refreshing then to see [Big Clive]
do a side-by-side test of a range of commonly available desiccants
. Of silica gel, bentonite, easy-cook rice, zeolite, or felight, which is the best? He subjects them to exactly the same conditions over a couple of months, and weighs them to measure their efficiency in absorbing water.
The results are hardly surprising, in that silica gel wins by a country mile. Perhaps the interesting part comes in exploding the rice myth; while the rice does have some desiccant properties, it’s in fact not the best of the bunch despite being the folk remedy for an immersed mobile phone.
Meanwhile, this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at desiccants,
in the past we’ve featured activated alumina
. | 40 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777770",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T23:13:18",
"content": "One benefit for Team Rice is that it is relatively soft and unlikely to scratch up your phone if you just stick it in rice. Many other products will require proper protection of the phone or pouches for the... | 1,760,371,850.090026 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/watch-this-rc-jet-thrust-system-dance/ | Watch This RC Jet Thrust System Dance | Donald Papp | [
"drone hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"3d printed",
"EDF",
"jet",
"rc",
"Thrust vectoring"
] | An EDF (electric duct fan) is a motor that basically functions as a jet engine for RC aircraft. They’re built for speed, but to improve maneuverability (and because it’s super cool) [johnbecker31] designed
a 3D-printable method of adjusting the EDF’s thrust
on demand.
Before 3D printers were common, making something like this would have been much more work.
The folks at Flite Test released
a video
in which they built [john]’s design into a squat tester jet that adjusts thrust in sync with the aircraft’s control surfaces, as you can see in the header image above. Speaking of control surfaces, you may notice that test aircraft lacks a rudder. That function is taken over by changing the EDF’s thrust, although it still has ailerons that move in sync with the thrust system.
EDF-powered aircraft weren’t really feasible in the RC scene until modern brushless electric motors combined with the power density of lithium-ion cells changed all that. And with electronics driving so much, and technology like 3D printers making one-off hardware accessible to all, the RC scene continues to be fertile ground for all sorts of fascinating experimentation. Whether it’s
slapping an afterburner on an EDF
or putting an
actual micro jet engine on an RC car
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777768",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T22:48:58",
"content": "Nitpick warning.A typical quadcopter maneuvers by adjusting thrust. Here we have thrust vectoring. The term is used in both videos, so why not stick to it?Calling this “adjusting” thrust is technically co... | 1,760,371,850.422949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/how-ten-turn-pots-are-made/ | How Ten Turn Pots Are Made | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"10 turn pot",
"potentiometer",
"ten turn pot"
] | It is easy to think of a potentiometer as a simple device, but there are many nuances. For example, some pots are linear — a change of a few degrees at the low end will change the resistance the same amount as the same few degrees at the high end. Others are logarithmic. Changes at one end of the scale are more dramatic than at the other end of the scale. But for very precise use, you often turn to the infamous ten-turn pot. Here, one rotation of the knob is only a tenth of the entire range.
[Thomas] shows us what’s inside
a typical one in the video below.
When you need a precise measurement, such as in a bridge instrument, these pots are indispensable. [Thomas] had a broken one and took that opportunity to peer inside. The resistor part is a coil of wire wound around the inside of the round body. Unsurprisingly, there are ten turns of wire that make up the coil.
The business end, of course, is in the rotating part attached to the knob. A small shuttle moves up and down the shaft, making contact with the resistance wire and a contact for the wiper. The solution is completely mechanical and dead simple.
As [Thomas] notes, these are usually expensive, but you can — of course —
build
your own. These are nice for doing
fine adjustments
with precision power supplies, too. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777742",
"author": "0xdeadbeef",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T20:04:22",
"content": "It needs one more turn of wire, so that it can be turned up to 11. ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6777749",
"author": "john",
... | 1,760,371,849.746711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/supercon-2023-pierce-nichols-is-teaching-robots-to-sail/ | Supercon 2023: [Pierce Nichols] Is Teaching Robots To Sail | Navarre Bartz | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"cargo",
"cargo ship",
"catamaran",
"sail",
"sailboat",
"sailing",
"sails",
"shipping",
"upwind",
"wing sail"
] | Sailing the high seas with the wind conjures a romantic notion of grizzled sailors fending off pirates and sea monsters, but until the 1920s, wind-powered vessels were the primary way goods traveled the sea. The meager weather-prediction capabilities of the early 20th Century spelled the end of the sailing ship for most cargo, but cargo ships currently spend half of their operating budget on fuel. Between the costs and growing environmental concerns, [Pierce Nichols] thinks the time may be right for a return to sails.
[Nichols] grew up on a sailing vessel with his parents, and later worked in the aerospace industry designing rockets and aircraft control surfaces. Since sailing is predominantly an exercise in balancing the aerodynamic forces of the sails with the hydrodynamic forces acting on the keel, rudder, and hull of the boat, he’s the perfect man for the job.
While
the first sails developed by humans were simple drag devices, sailors eventually developed airfoil sails that allow sailing in directions other than downwind. A
polar diagram
for a vessel gives you a useful chart of how fast it can go at a given angle to the wind. Sailing directly into the wind is also known as being “in irons” as it doesn’t get you anywhere, but most other angles are viable.
After a late night hackerspace conversation of how it would be cool to circumnavigate the globe with a robotic sailboat, [Nichols] assembled a team to move the project from “wouldn’t it be cool” to reality with the
Pathfinder Prototype
. Present at the talk, this small catamaran uses two wing sails to provide its primary propulsion. Wing sails, being a solid piece, are easier for computers to control since soft sails often exhibit strange boundary conditions where they stop responding to inputs as expected.
In its first iteration,
Pathfinder
was controlled with
Ardupilot
and servos directly attached to the wing sails. For this application, [Nichols] and his team found that the program was unable to successfully navigate multiple points and was difficult to edit due to its monolithic nature. A rebuild of the boat with a new cellular modem instead of Wi-Fi, bigger batteries, and a power switch changed to
PX4
for control. They found that using cross-tack error, or the deviation from a straight line between waypoints works well for confined waters with well-documented hazards, but in open water “best velocity made good” can be more efficient.
With some experience under their belt, the crew was able to secure funding to build a larger test vessel. With a cheap catamaran and 400 square feet of rental space, this vessel was equipped with two wing sails on one of the hulls and commenced testing in the Puget Sound. Keeping the wing sails on a single hull keeps the deck clear for cargo without significantly affecting performance.
Despite some setbacks, like breaking apart and sinking, the new vessel is yielding lots of interesting data which will lead to the first operating full-scale vessels. These will be designed to carry one or two ISO standard shipping containers to rural locations. Current regulations require a small crew aboard the boat, but [Nichols] hopes that the research they’ve been doing on autonomous vessel control will lead to fully autonomous trips in the future to help make deliveries to Alaska or other remote places more economical.
Further down the line, larger vessels will be able to handle hundreds or thousands of containers. Toward the end of the talk, [Nichols] gave us a list of resources for anyone interested in pursuing nautical hacks including many works by
C.A. Marchaj
or looking into the
Amateur Yacht Research Society
to “do weird things with sailboats.” | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777695",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T17:33:12",
"content": "AIUI, sailing wessels are commonly used along the east coast of Africa extending to India.Having grown up far from “big water” I find the numerous sailing terms in the article ... | 1,760,371,849.950839 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/hackaday-podcast-episode-280-tv-tubes-as-amplifiers-smart-tech-in-sportsballs-and-adrian-gives-us-the-fingie/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 280: TV Tubes As Amplifiers, Smart Tech In Sportsballs, And Adrian Gives Us The Fingie | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Despite the summer doldrums, it was another big week in the hacking world, and Elliot sat down with Dan for a rundown. Come along for the ride as Dan betrays his total ignorance of soccer/football, much to Elliot’s amusement. But it’s all about keeping the human factor in sports, so we suppose it was worth it. Less controversially, we ogled over a display of PCB repair heroics, analyzed a reverse engineering effort that got really lucky, and took a look at an adorable one-transistor ham transceiver. We also talked about ants doing surgery, picking locks with nitric acid, a damn cute dam, and how to build one of the world’s largest machines from scratch in under a century. Plus, we answered the burning question: can a CRT be used as an audio amplifier? Yes, kind of, but please don’t let the audiophiles know or we’ll never hear the end of it.
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 280 Show Notes:
News:
Congratulations To The 2024 Business Card Challenge Winners!
Show Us Your Minimalist Games, And Win
Simple Version Of Pong Played On A Row Of LEDs
Time’s Up For Mbed
What’s that Sound?
First gravity wave detected by LIGO: Congrats to [Lil Trashpanda]
Keynote Video: Dr. Keith Thorne Explains The Extreme Engineering Of The LIGO Hardware
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Five Ways To Repair Broken PCB Traces
Build Your Own Hydroelectric Dam
Hacking An IP Camera To Run Your Own Software
You Can Use A CRT As An Audio Amplifier Tube
VFD As A Sound Amplifier
Flexures Make Robotic Fingers Simpler To Print
Print Your Own Flexures
3D Mouse With 3D Printed Flexures And PCB Coils
3D Printed Flexure Shows Precision In Action
How The Bell System Was Built
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Seiko Had A Smartwatch In 1984
A Look At The DEC VT220, A Proper Serial Terminal
Playing Rock, Paper Scissors With A Time Of Flight Sensor
Dan’s Picks:
Tiny Transceiver Gets It Done With One Transistor
Surgery — Not Just For Humans Anymore
Nitric Acid Is The Hot New Way To Pick Locks
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Embedded Python: MicroPython Is Amazing
Smart Ball Technology Has Reached Football, But The Euros Show Us It’s Not Necessarily For The Better
Germany vs. Denmark Highlights
(worked in the US at least; play in question is about 10 minutes in) | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777687",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T17:04:42",
"content": "Podcast came out late today — I lost about three hours worth of work because of a bizarre Audacity crash from which it never recovered. Grrr….Anyway, I bit the bullet and re-did it _all_. So enj... | 1,760,371,850.131056 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/so-you-can-tuna-fish/ | So YouCanTuna Fish | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"music",
"resistance",
"tuna fish",
"tune a fish"
] | You know what they say. But it’s 2024, after all. Shouldn’t you be able to tune a fish by now?
As [ChromaLock] shows us in the video below
, it’s absolutely possible, and has been all along.
Of course, you can’t possibly put a rainbow trout (or any other fish) under tension until it produces audible tones. So, how does it work? [ChromaLock] turned to the skin, which functions electrically much like ours does with different resistance values in different areas.
From there, it was a matter of hunting around for spots that produced different notes that sounded good, and marking them for later so it can be played like a potentiometer. But there were problems with this setup, mostly screeching between notes from stray voltages in the environment.
After a brief detour using a PS/2 keyboard with spray-painted keycaps, [ChromaLock] said to hell with it and unearthed a regular MIDI keyboard. Armed with a 3D printed jig to hold the probes, [ChromaLock] tested everything with a cucumber, and then out came the trout for its musical debut. Be sure to check it out after the break.
What else can you do with canned tuna and other fish?
Cook up some pyrolized bread, and you’ve got yourself a foundry and crucible
.
Thanks to [Zixxorb] for the tip! | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777667",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T16:06:36",
"content": "This reminds me of the makey makey I backed on Kickstarter in 2012",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6777668",
"author": "Tomsz",
"timest... | 1,760,371,850.288167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/this-week-in-security-snowflake-the-cvd-tension-and-kasperskys-exit-and-breaking-bsod/ | This Week In Security: Snowflake, The CVD Tension, And Kaspersky’s Exit — And Breaking BSOD | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Breaking BSOD",
"snowflake",
"This Week in Security"
] | In the past week, AT&T
has announced an absolutely massive data breach
. This is sort of a multi-layered story, but it gives me an opportunity to use my favorite piece of snarky IT commentary: The cloud is a fancy way to talk about someone else’s servers. And when that provider has a security problem, chances are, so do you.
The provider in question is Snowflake, who first made the news in
the Ticketmaster breach
. As far as anyone can tell,
Snowflake has not actually been directly breached
, though it seems that researchers at Hudson Rock briefly reported otherwise. That post has not only been taken down, but also
scrubbed from the wayback machine
, apparently
in response to a legal threat from Snowflake
. Ironically,
Snowflake has confirmed
that one of their former employees was compromised, but Snowflake is certain that nothing sensitive was available from the compromised account.
At this point, it seems that the twin problems are that big organizations aren’t properly enforcing security policy like Two Factor Authentication, and Snowflake just doesn’t provide the tools to set effective security policy. The Mandiant report indicates that all the breaches were the result of credential stealers and other credential-based techniques like credential stuffing.
Cisco’s Easy Password Reset
Cisco has patched a vulnerability
in the Smart Software Manager On-Prem utility, a tool that allows a business to manage their own Cisco licenses. The flaw was a pretty nasty one, where any user could change the password of any other user.
While there are no workarounds, an update with the fix has been released for free.
As [Dan Goodin] at Ars speculates
, full administrative access to this management console could provide unintended access to all the rest of the Cisco gear in a given organization. This seems like one to get patched right away.
Bye Bye Kaspersky
Kaspersky Labs has officially
started started winding down their US operations
, as a direct result of the US Commerce Department ban. As a parting gift, anyone who wants it
gets a free six-month subscription
.
Just a reminder, any Kaspersky installs will stop getting updates at that six-month mark, so don’t forget to go on a Kaspersky uninstall spree at that time. We’ve got the twin dangers, that the out-of-date antivirus could prevent another solution like Windows Defender from running, and that security products without updates are a tempting target for escalation of privilege attacks.
Uncoordinated Vulnerability Disclosure
Let’s chat a bit about coordinated vulnerability disclosure. That’s the process when a researcher finds a vulnerability, privately reports it to the vendor, and together they pick a date to make the details public, usually somewhere around 90 or 120 days from disclosure. The researcher gets credit for the find, sometimes a bug bounty payout, and the vendor fixes their bug.
Things were not always this way. Certain vendors were once well known for ignoring these reports for multiple months at a time, only to rush out a fix if the bug was exploited in the wild. This slapdash habit led directly to our current 90-day industry standard. And in turn, a strict 90-day policy is usually enough to provoke responsible behaviors from vendors.
Usually,
but not always
. ZDI discovered the Internet Explorer technique that we discussed last week being used in the wild. Apparently [Haifei Li] at Check Point Research independently discovered the vulnerability, and it’s unclear which group actually reported it first. What is clear is that Microsoft dropped the ball on the patch, surprising both research teams and failing to credit the ZDI researcher at all. And as the ZDI post states, this isn’t an isolated incident:
microsoft: Exploit Code Unporoven
me: i literally gave you a compiled PoC and also exploit code
m$: No exploit code is available, or an exploit is theoretical.
me:
pic.twitter.com/tIXJAbkRu4
— chompie (@chompie1337)
June 12, 2024
While these are Microsoft examples, there are multiple occasions from various vendors where “coordination” simply means “You tell us everything you know about this bug, and maybe something will happen.”
Bits and Bytes
Claroty’s Team82 has documented their rather impressive entry in the 2023 Pwn2Own IoT contest. The two part series starts with a WAN side attack, targeting a router’s dynamic DNS. We briefly discussed that last week. This week is the juicy details of an
unauthenticated buffer overflow
, leading to RCE on the device. This demonstrates the clever and terrifying trick of attacking a network from the Internet and establishing presence on an internal device.
There are times when you really need to see into an SSL stream, like security research or auditing. Often times that’s as easy as adding a custom SSL certificate to the machine’s root store, so the application sees your forced HTTPS proxy as legitimate. In the case of Go, applications verify certificates independently of the OS, making this inspection much more difficult. The solution? Just
patch the program
to turn on the
InsecureSkipVerify
feature. The folks at Cyberark have dialed in this procedure, and even have a handy Python script for ease of use. Neat!
Speaking of tools, we were just made aware of
EMBA, the EMBedded Analyzer
. That’s an
Open Source
tool to take a look into firmware images, automatically extract useful data.
Breaking BSOD
Just as we were wrapping this week’s column,
a rash of Windows Blue Screens of Death, BSODs, starting hitting various businesses
around the world. The initial report suggests that it’s a Crowdstrike update gone wrong, and Crowdstrike seems to be investigating. It’s
reported
that renaming the
C:\windows\system32\drivers\crowdstrike
folder from within safe mode will get machines booting again, but note that this is not official guidance at this point.
Something super weird happening right now: just been called by several totally different media outlets in the last few minutes, all with Windows machines suddenly BSoD’ing (Blue Screen of Death). Anyone else seen this? Seems to be entering recovery mode:
pic.twitter.com/DxdLyA9BLA
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt)
July 19, 2024 | 37 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777614",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T14:03:28",
"content": "Good thing I disabled Windows automatic update since Windows 7.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6777619",
"author": "shinsukke",
"... | 1,760,371,850.369721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/supercon-2023-bringing-arcade-classics-to-new-hardware/ | Supercon 2023: Bringing Arcade Classics To New Hardware | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"code porting",
"decompile",
"reverse engineering",
"Supercon 2023"
] | The processing power of modern game consoles is absolutely staggering when compared to the coin-op arcade machines of the early 1980s. Packed with terabytes of internal storage and gigabytes of RAM, there’s hardly a comparison to make with the Z80 cabinets that ran classics like
Pac-Man
. But despite being designed to pump out lifelike 4K imagery without breaking a virtual sweat, occasionally even these cutting-edge consoles are tasked with running one of those iconic early games like
Dig Dug
or
Pole Position
. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug…
As long as there are still demand for these genre-defining games, developers will have to keep figuring out ways to bring them to newer — and vastly more complex — systems. Which is precisely the topic of Bob Hickman’s 2023 Supercon talk,
The Bits and Bytes of Bringing Arcade Classics to Game Consoles
.
Having spent decades as a professional game developer, he’s got plenty of experience with the unique constraints presented by both consoles and handhelds, and what it takes to get old code running on new silicon.
Why Not Emulate?
For any reasonably tech-savvy person, the first thing that will come to mind when talking about bringing old games to new hardware is naturally going to be emulation. At first glance, it would seem to be the ideal solution: you don’t have to recreate the game from scratch, the gameplay should be exactly as players remember it, and there’s probably an open source emulator core out there already that you can port over to whatever your target system is.
Depending on the hardware, emulation isn’t always viable.
But as Bob explains early on in his talk, it’s not quite that simple in the real world. Sure, emulation
should
provide a perfect recreation of the game, but in practice, there are always differences that will manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Plus modern audiences are often going to expect enhancements (upgraded graphics, online play, etc) that are likely going to require some modification to the original game anyway.
There is also the issue of performance to consider. While this is going to be less of a problem on a modern console, you might be trying to bring the game over to something like a smartphone which may or may not have enough processing power to emulate the original system at the the speeds necessary to deliver the experience you’re aiming for.
To illustrate the point, most of Bob’s talk covers a particular project he was involved in back in 2001: bringing
Namco Museum
to Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance (GBA).
The Fine Art of Porting
Powered by an ARM7 CPU running at a little over 16 MHz, the GBA wasn’t exactly the ideal platform for emulation. At the same time, simply recreating the games included in
Namco Museum
from scratch wasn’t really an option either. Not only would it have been a considerable undertaking, but the final result would have been different enough from the originals that you’d lose that nostalgic charm.
The solution? Porting the games over to portable C code that could be compiled for the GBA. But even here, things wouldn’t exactly be smooth sailing. For one thing, Bob points out that you won’t necessarily have access to the original source code. So the first step is likely going to be extracting the binary and graphical assets from a ROM of the game — this could be pulled literally from an arcade cabinet and read into the computer, or if you’re pressed for time, perhaps downloaded from one of the seedier corners of the Internet.
After decompiling the game’s binary into Z80 assembly, Bob says the next step would be to convert that over to C. The results aren’t going to be perfect, but they’ll be better than nothing. The resulting C code certainly isn’t going to compile on the first go, but you’ll get plenty of error messages in the attempt, and that will tell you where you need to focus your attention on. Fixing these issues one-by-one is going to be time consuming, but will be worth the effort in the end. Eventually, you’ll get a binary that compiles and actually runs on your target system…but you aren’t done yet.
Up to this point you’ve just been worried about getting the code compiled and running. Whether or not it actually does what it’s supposed to do has been only a vague concern. So when you get this far, the binary you run likely won’t look or play anything like it’s supposed to. For one thing, the graphics are sure to be busted. You’ll need to go in there and rewrite the graphics functions so they’ll work on your target system while still taking the same inputs as the original versions. That’s going to include figuring out how to scale everything to fit your new target resolution.
You’ll need to do something similar for handling user input, as well. The original arcade cabinet probably had some memory mapped scheme where reading from an address in memory would tell it which physical buttons were being pressed, so that’s going to need to be modified to fit the game’s new home.
Keep knocking these issues out as they come up, and eventually you’ll have a working game. Sort of.
Getting Up to Speed
The final part of the process is optimization. Bob recalls that, after porting over the original Z80 code and getting it running properly on the GBA, some of the games would only run at a fraction of their original speed. It wasn’t because the GBA didn’t have the computational power to do the games justice, it’s just that the code wasn’t working to the system’s strengths.
Pole Position
running on the GBA.
One trick that Bob details is adding some code that will record each function called by the code, and have somebody play the game for a bit. After you’ve collected enough data, you’ll be able to identify the most commonly used functions and properly direct your optimization efforts.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet for code optimization. But Bob does mention some commonly used tricks, such as using pre-computed lookup tables instead of trying to do sine and cosine math in real-time. There’s also things the new hardware will be capable of that you might be able to put to use, even with an older game that wasn’t designed with it in mind.
Bob gives an excellent example of this in discussing the optimizations for
Pole Position
. Originally the background objects on the horizon were rendered in the same way the rest of the game was, but this proved to be slower on the GBA than anticipated. So the solution was to take the entire skyline, save it as a pre-rendered image, and use the GBA’s hardware scrolling capabilities to move it. Along with a few other tricks, this got the 1982 racer running at the proper 60 frames per second.
Not All Fun and Games
While Bob’s talk was focused on a very specific niche, many of the tricks and techniques he describes could be applied to other aspects of software development. Whether it’s taking old assembly code and turning it into C that your modern computer can run, or tracking down which functions are worth your time to refactor, there’s plenty in this presentation that you can use in whatever software project you might have going on.
Now whether or not your project is as much fun to bug-test as
Galaga
— well, that’s another topic entirely. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777344",
"author": "Buzz McCool",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T17:35:41",
"content": "Lost me at the convert the Z80 assembly over to C step.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6777356",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As ... | 1,760,371,850.238873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/this-modded-shopping-cart-probably-isnt-street-legal/ | This Modded Shopping Cart Probably Isn’t Street Legal | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"caster wheels",
"drift",
"drifting",
"go-kart",
"scooter",
"shopping cart",
"transportation",
"vehicle"
] | If you don’t count the high center of gravity, the weight limit, the weak chassis, or the small size, a standard shopping cart is an almost ideal platform for building a fun drifting kart. At least, that was [Garage Avenger]’s thought process
when he started this build to turn a shopping cart into the ultimate drift vehicle
.
The first thing on the list was to solve the issues with the high center of gravity and the fact that he couldn’t fit in the cart easily. Chopping out the back of the basket as well as everything beneath it solved both of these problems. From there a custom chassis could be fabricated from square steel tubing which includes a lever system which controls the rake of the caster wheels and thus their driftability. The power train and battery system for this build comes from a 2400 W electric scooter with a few modifications made to get it to fit on the new chassis.
After a test drive of the original prototype, a few modifications were made including using smaller caster wheels in the back, the addition of a spring to make the lever action for the rear wheels easier to engage, some front casters for stability, and a seat a little more substantial than the metal mesh of the cart. With all the electronics put into the cart, he’s ready to drift off into the sunset. This isn’t his first crazy vehicle, either. When winter rolls around
you’ll find him getting around in a jet-powered sled
instead. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777334",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T17:07:05",
"content": "He is making a Crazy Kart (X)XL. It is a commercially available ‘drift’ cart. Look up ‘Ken Box’ to see it doing its thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,371,850.000058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/secrets-of-the-old-digital-design-titans/ | Secrets Of The Old Digital Design Titans | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"digital design",
"karnaugh"
] | Designing combinatorial digital circuits seems like it should be easy. After all, you can do everything you want with just AND, OR, and NOT gates. Bonus points if you have an XOR gate, but you can build everything you need for combinatorial logic with just those three components. If all you want to do is design something to turn on the light when the ignition is on AND door 1 is open OR door 2 is open, you won’t have any problems. However, for more complex scenarios, how we do things has changed several times.
In the old days, you’d just design the tubes or transistor circuits you needed to develop your logic. If you were wiring up everything by hand anyway, you might as well. But then came modules like printed circuit boards. There was a certain economy to having cards that had, say, two NOR gates on a card. Then, you needed to convert all your logic to use NOR gates (or NAND gates, if that’s what you had).
Small-scale ICs changed that. It was easy to put a mix of gates on a card, although there was still some slight advantage to having cards full of the same kind of gate. Then came logic devices, which would eventually become FPGAs. They tend to have many of one kind of “cell” with plenty of logic gates on board, but not necessarily the ones you need. However, by that time, you could just tell a computer program what you wanted, and it would do the heavy lifting. That was a luxury early designers didn’t have.
Basis
How can you do everything with a NOR gate? Easy if you don’t mind spending gates. Obviously, if I need a NOR gate, I’m done. If I need an OR gate, I just feed the output of a NOR gate to all the pins of another NOR gate. The output of the second gate will be the OR of the first gate’s inputs.
DeMorgan’s theorem tells us that if NOT(A OR B) is the same as (NOT A) AND (NOT B). It is!
A
B
NOT A
NOT B
NOT(A OR B)
(NOT A) AND (NOT B)
0
0
1
1
1
1
0
1
1
0
0
0
1
0
0
1
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
0
So you can create a NOT gate with a NOR gate (or a NAND gate) and an AND/NAND gate by mixing up NOR and NOT gates. Conversely, you can create OR/NOR gates by mixing up NAND and NOT gates. So, either way, you are covered.
The only problem is figuring out how to express any arbitrary expression as a bunch of NOR or NAND gates. A common way to do this is to have a “product of sums” or “sum of products” arrangement. In this context, a product is an AND gate, and a sum is an OR gate. This also works with things where you use diodes and wired AND logic, such as those you find in a programmable logic array or open collector arrangements. Think about it. A bunch of open collector outputs tied to a pull up resistor acts like a giant AND gate. Any low input causes a low output.
Suppose you wanted to determine whether a two-bit binary number is odd or even. Yes, yes, there is an easy way to do that, but assume you don’t know that yet. Let’s assume the most significant bit is A and the least significant is B. Further, we’ll use the notation A’ for NOT(A). AB is A AND B, while A+B is A OR B. The two odd values are 01 and 11, so we can set up another logical Y that is true when we have one of those OR the other:
Y=A'B + AB
Troubleshooting
This works, of course. But if you are adept at troubleshooting digital logic, you might notice something — again, assuming that you don’t already know the answer to this problem. The output, Y, doesn’t really depend on A at all because we have A’B or AB together. So just intuitively, we know the real answer is Y=B. No gates are needed at all!
But how would we figure out a minimum in a more complex example? For instance, suppose you have a four-digit number and want to drive a seven-segment LED. Segment a, for example, is the top bar of the figure 8 that forms the display. It should be on for inputs 0, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Then, you need to do this for six other segments. Hard to see exactly how to decode that, right?
Methods
Before computers would do it for you, there were two common methods to resolve things like this without resorting to brute force. The most notable of these is the Karnaugh or K map. These are great for a small number of inputs. Let’s go back to the two-bit number. Our K map looks like this one.
A two-input K map
Each of these four cells containing a zero or one represents a single AND gate with A and B set as shown (that is, if A or B are true or false). The number in the cell is the output in that state. If you don’t care about an output given a certain state of inputs, you can put an X in that square and treat them the same as a 1 if you want to (but you don’t have to). By the way, these maps were made using
the very useful K map solver
you can find online.
Next, you circle all the 1’s that are next to each other in a rectangle including any that wrap around the edges. When you have a bunch of ones clustered together, you can wipe out the variables that change from 0 to 1 in the group.
In this case, the 1’s cover both A and A’, so we can easily see the answer is Y=B. Of course, we knew that already, but you can figure it out easily using a map like this, even if you don’t already know the answer.
For a map this small, you don’t have many options, but the number of 1s (or Xs) in an implicant — a group — must be a power of two. So you can draw a rectangle around two cells or four, but not three.
Bigger, My My…
A 3-input K map
Note that the values of A and B only change by one bit in adjacent cells. So, a 3-variable K map looks like this is the one adjacent. Note that the left-hand column reading from top to bottom goes 00, 01, 11, 10. So, only one bit changes at a time (like a grey code).
In this case, the prime implicants — the parts that matter — are A’B’ and B’C’. That’s because the top row strikes the C input when AB=00 and the top left 1 and the bottom left 1 join to cancel out A.
Two implicants: A’B’ and B’C’
Every rectangular grouping that covers a power of two cells is a prime implicant. Sometimes, a group will cover terms that other groups will also cover. In that case, that group is not an essential prime implicant but, rather, a redundant prime implicant. But if even one square only belongs to a group, then that group is an essential prime implicant and will have a role in the final result. Sometimes, you’ll have several prime implicants that cover each other so that you can pick one or the other, and it doesn’t matter which one. Those are known as selective prime implicants.
As you can see below, once you have four bits, the K map gets large. Beyond 4 bits, it is usually impractical without switching how you draw the map. Remember the 7-segment decoder example? Here is the K map for segment A of a decoder that accepts numbers from 0 to 9. Note the Xs for numbers larger than 9. If you draw circles around the groupings of 1s, you can develop the formula: Y=C+A +B’D’+BD. That’s much easier than trying to do it without a K map. The C is due to the right-hand columns (remember to include the Xs when it helps you). The A term is due to the bottom two rows. The other two terms pick up the stray 1’s not covered by those two groups. Of course, to design an entire decoder, you’d need six more K maps, one for each segment.
It is also possible to group the 0s instead of the 1s and obtain a product of sums. The process is similar but you use the 0’s and not the 1’s.
The real challenge is when you want to go beyond four bits. For that, you often go to a table-like format known as the Quine McCluskey method. Or just use a computer. We won’t judge.
Of course, if you want to make complex digital designs, you need a clock. But you can still use maps where you need combinatorial logic in a synchronous design. We mentioned you can make anything out of AND, OR, and NOT. But you can get those gates using
a multiplexer or even a relay
, which is, after all, just a mechanical multiplexer. Come to think of it, you can
make logic gates out of darn near anything
.
Banner image by [Kit Ostrihon],
demonstrating multidimensional K-maps
Thumbnail image: “
K-map 6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 anti-race
” by [Cburnett] | 46 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777284",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T14:28:00",
"content": "Okay, it’s kindof hilarious you start off by saying “you can build everything you need for combinatorial logic with just those three components” and promptly show how only 2 of the 3 are needed: it’s like the... | 1,760,371,850.520557 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/lasers-could-help-us-recycle-plastics-into-carbon-dots/ | Lasers Could Help Us Recycle Plastics Into Carbon Dots | Lewin Day | [
"green hacks",
"News"
] | [
"carbon dots",
"laser",
"plastic",
"recycling",
"science"
] | As it turns out, a great deal of plastics are thrown away every year, a waste which feels ever growing. Still,
as reported by
Sci-Tech Daily
, there may be help on the way from our good friend, the laser!
The research paper
from the
University of Texas
outlines the use of lasers for breaking down tough plastics into their baser components. The method isn’t
quite
as simple as fire a laser off at the plastic, though. First, the material must be laid on
a special two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide material
— a type of atomically-thin semiconductor at the very forefront of current research. When the plastics are placed under the right laser light in this scenario, carbon-hydrogen bonds in the plastic are broken and transformed, creating new chemical bonds. Done right, and you can synthesize
luminescent carbon dots
from the plastic itself!
“By harnessing these unique reactions, we can explore new pathways for transforming environmental pollutants into valuable, reusable chemicals, contributing to the development of a more sustainable and circular economy,” says Yuebing Zheng, a leader on the project. “This discovery has significant implications for addressing environmental challenges and advancing the field of green chemistry.”
Sure it’s a bit trickier than turning
old drink bottles into filament
, but it could be very useful to researchers and those investigating high-tech materials solutions. Don’t forget to read up on
the sheer immensity of the world’s plastic recycling problems,
either. If you’ve got the solution,
let us know! | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777224",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T11:39:30",
"content": "Just burn it. It’s made of oil.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6777242",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T12:17:04",
... | 1,760,371,850.574086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/are-hackers-the-future-of-amateur-radio/ | Are Hackers The Future Of Amateur Radio? | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"hackers",
"ham radio"
] | If amateur radio has a problem, it’s that shaking off an image of being the exclusive preserve of old men with shiny radios talking about old times remains a challenge. Especially, considering that so many amateurs
are
old men who like to talk a lot about old times. It’s difficult to attract new radio amateurs in the age of the Internet, so some in the hobby are trying new avenues. [Dan, KB6NU] went to the recent HOPE conference to evangelise amateur radio,
and came away having had some success
. We agree with him, hackers can be the future of amateur radio.
He’s put up the slides from his talk
, and in them he goes through all the crossovers between the two communities from Arduinos to GNU Radio. We don’t need persuading, in fact we’d have added UHF and microwave RF circuitry and pushing the limits of the atmosphere with digital modes such as WSPR to the list as our personal favourites. It seems he found willing converts, and it’s certainly
a theme we’ve featured before here at Hackaday
. After all, unless it retains its interest,
amateur radio could just die away
. | 120 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777175",
"author": "thedryparn",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T08:53:18",
"content": "Sadly that is how it is. I am an Electronics Engineer and have been a radio fan since I was 14. I got all the books and joined a course to get the HAM license i had longed for.After a while i grew sick... | 1,760,371,851.529166 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/free-and-open-e-reader-from-the-ground-up/ | Free And Open E-Reader From The Ground Up | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Kindle hacks"
] | [
"calibre",
"e-ink",
"e-reader",
"ebook",
"floss",
"foss",
"good display",
"hardware",
"kindle",
"open",
"open source",
"raspberry pi compute",
"server"
] | Although ebooks and e-readers have a number of benefits over reading an analog paper book as well as on more common electronic devices like tablets, most of them are locked behind proprietary systems like Kindle which make it difficult to take control over your electronic library. While there are a few off-brand e-readers that allow users to take a bit of control back and manually manage their files and libraries, there are few options for open-source solutions.
This project aims to provide not only a free and open e-reader from the hardware to the software, but also a server to host a library as well
.
The goal of most of the build is to keep everything as
FLOSS
as possible including the hardware, which is based on a Raspberry Pi compute module. The display comes from Good Display, which includes a built-in light and a touchscreen. There’s a lithium battery to power the tablet-like device with a number of support chips to charge it, handle the display, and interface with the Pi. On the software side, the system uses MuPDF which has support for most ebook file types while the server side is based on Calibre and the Open Publication Distribution System.
A subsection of the build log discusses a lot of how the code works for those looking to build their own similar system based on this project.
The project code is even hosted on GitLab
, a more FLOSS-y version of GitHub. Free and open ebook readers have been a goal of a number of builders for some time now, as
we’ve seen projects going back at least a few years now
and
others that hope to make the Kindle hardware a little more open
instead. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777140",
"author": "tindieuser",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T06:45:48",
"content": "Could you post it on tindie without rpi?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6777243",
"author": "drikti",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T12:18:20",... | 1,760,371,851.359038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/las-vegas-sphere-powered-by-nvidia-gpus-and-with-impressive-power-bill/ | Las Vegas’ Sphere: Powered By Nvidia GPUs And With Impressive Power Bill | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"las vegas"
] | A daytime closeup of the LED pucks that comprise the exosphere of the Sphere in Paradise, Nevada (Credit: Y2kcrazyjoker4, Wikimedia)
As the United States’ pinnacle of extravaganza, the Las Vegas Strip and the rest of the town of Paradise are on a seemingly never-ending quest to become brighter, glossier and more over the top as one venue tries to overshadow the competition. A good example of this is the ironically very uninspiredly named Sphere, which has both an incredibly dull name and yet forms a completely outrageous entertainment venue with a 54,000 m
2
(~3.67 acre) wrap-around interior LED display (16 x 16K displays) and an exterior LED display (‘Exosphere’) consisting out of 1.23 million LED ‘pucks’. Although opened in September of 2023, details about the hardware that drives those displays have now been published by NVidia in a
recent blog post
.
Driving all these pixels are around 150 NVidia RTX
A6000
GPUs, installed in computer systems which are networked using NVidia BlueField data processing units (DPUs) and NVidia ConnectX-6 NICs (up to 400 Gb/s), with visual content transferred from Sphere Studios in California to the
Sphere
. All this hardware
uses about
45 kW of power when running at full blast, before adding the LED displays and related hardware to the total count, which is
estimated
to be up to 28 MW of power and causing local environmentalists grief despite claims by the owner that it’ll use solar power for 70% of the power needs, despite many night-time events. Another item that locals take issue with is the amount of light pollution that the exterior display adds.
Although it’s popular to either attack or defend luxurious excesses like the Sphere, it’s interesting to note that the state of Nevada mostly gets
its electricity
from natural gas. Meanwhile the 2.3 billion USD price tag for the Sphere would have gotten Nevada 16.5% of a nuclear power station like Arizona’s
Palo Verde
(before the recurring power bill), but Palo Verde’s reactor spheres are admittedly less suitable for rock concerts. | 51 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777104",
"author": "SRSLY??",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T02:27:14",
"content": ">Meanwhile the 2.3 billion USD price tag for the Sphere would have gotten Nevada 16.5% of a nuclear power station like Arizona’s Palo VerdeDid I miss something somewhere?the Sphere was the brain child of,... | 1,760,371,851.055812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/carbon-cement-supercapacitors-proposed-as-an-energy-storage-solution/ | Carbon–Cement Supercapacitors Proposed As An Energy Storage Solution | Maya Posch | [
"Engineering",
"Science"
] | [
"concrete",
"supercapacitor"
] | Although most energy storage solutions on a grid-level focus on batteries, a group of researchers at MIT and Harvard University have proposed using supercapacitors instead, with
their 2023 research article
by [Nicolas Chanut] and colleagues published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(PNAS). The twist here is that rather than any existing supercapacitors, their proposal involves conductive concrete (courtesy of carbon black) on both sides of the electrolyte-infused insulating membrane. They foresee this technology being used alongside green concrete to become part of a renewable energy transition, as
per a presentation given
at the American Concrete Institute (ACI).
Functional carbon-cement supercapacitors (connected in series) (Credit: Damian Stefaniuk et al.)
Putting aside the
hairy issue
of a massive expansion of grid-level storage, could a carbon-cement supercapacitor perhaps provide a way to turn the concrete foundation of a house into a whole-house energy storage cell for use with roof-based PV solar? While their current prototype isn’t quite building-sized yet, in the research article they provide some educated guesstimates to arrive at a very rough 20 – 220 Wh/m
3
, which would make this solution either not very great or somewhat interesting.
The primary benefit of this technology would be that it could be very cheap, with cement and concrete being already extremely prevalent in construction due to its affordability. As the researchers note, however, adding carbon black does compromise the concrete somewhat, and there are many questions regarding longevity. For example, a short within the carbon-cement capacitor due to moisture intrusion and rust jacking around rebar would surely make short work of these capacitors.
Swapping out the concrete foundation of a building to fix a short is no small feat, but maybe some lessons could be learned from
self-healing Roman concrete
. | 29 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777565",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T11:15:10",
"content": "Previous article on the same subject:https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/mit-crack-the-concrete-capacitor/The biggest difference here is that there’s a direct link to the research paper. In the Hackaday... | 1,760,371,851.138311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/19/retro-calculator-panders-to-trekkies-or-trekkers/ | Retro Calculator Panders To Trekkies… Or Trekkers | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"calculator",
"star trek"
] | Back in 1976, when calculators were not common or cheap, a company named MEGO made the Star Trekulator: a calculator sporting a
Star Trek
theme. However, it was a bit odd since the calculator didn’t correspond to anything you ever saw on the TV show. It was essentially a very simple calculator with a
Star Trek
picture and some blinking LEDs. [Computer History Archives Project] has two examples of the rare calculator and
shows them off
, including the insides, in the video below. We’ve also included a vintage commercial for the device a little farther down.
Inside the 5-inch by 9.5-inch cabinet was an unremarkable printed circuit board. The main component was a TI calculator chip, but there were a surprising amount of other components, including three that [Computer History Archives Project] could not identify.
MEGO
was known for making
Star Trek
toys, including a cassette player that (sorta) looked like a tricorder and communicator walkie-talkies. We wish they’d made the calculator look like some sort of prop from the show, although the beeping noises, we suppose, were supposed to sound like the Star Trek computers.
Honestly, we want to 3D print a case to replicate this with modern insides that can drive a display to put different
Trek
clips and sound effects out. Now, that would be something. Maybe [Michael Gardi] can take a look at it when he’s got a spare minute. If anything, the calculator looks too advanced to be on the original series. They should have
gone VFD
. Although Mr. Spock has been seen with a flight slide rule (an E6-B, if we recall). We prefer
our props to look like the real ones
, thank you. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777569",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T11:39:22",
"content": "“They should have gone VFD.”It *does* use a VFD — plainly visible, espepcially around 6:15 in the video.Kinda surprised C.H.A.P. can’t identify an inductor or a resistor array package. Pretty common compone... | 1,760,371,851.689031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/mechanical-keyboard-laptop-clacktop/ | Mechanical Keyboard + Laptop = Clacktop | Kristina Panos | [
"laptops hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Laptop keyboard",
"lenovo yoga",
"mechanical keyboard"
] | What do you do when your laptop keyboard breaks for the second time? Well, most people might use an external keyboard until they couldn’t take it anymore and bought a new machine.
But [Marcin Plaza] isn’t most people.
It took more than twelve hours of CAD, but [Marcin] redesigned the case to be at least twice as thick as the Lenovo Yoga that inspired this project in order to accommodate a slimmed-down mechanical keyboard. Further weight-loss surgery was required in order to make the keyboard fit, but the end result is kind of a marvel of engineering. It’s marriage of sleek modernity and early laptop chonky-ness, and we love it.
Lacking a complete metal fab shop of one’s own, [Marcin] elected to have a board house fab it out of titanium and was quite surprised by the result. We really like the clear acrylic bottom, into which [Marcin] drilled many holes for airflow. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.
Did you initially wonder whether the new case was printed?
That’s totally a thing, too
.
Thanks to [Katie] for the tip! | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777513",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T06:09:19",
"content": "But can you type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6777519",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,851.1925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/retrotechtacular-ford-model-t-wheels-start-to-finish/ | Retrotechtacular: Ford Model T Wheels, Start To Finish | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"ash",
"bearing",
"felloe",
"ford",
"hickory",
"hub",
"manufacturing",
"model t",
"retrotechtacular",
"spoke",
"tire",
"wheel",
"wooden"
] | There’s no doubt that you’ll instantly recognize clips from
the video below
, as they’ve been used over and over for more than 100 years to illustrate the development of the assembly line. But those brief clips never told the whole story about just how much effort Ford was forced to put into manufacturing just one component of their iconic Model T: the wheels.
An in-house production of Ford Motors, this film isn’t dated, at least not obviously. And with the production of Model T cars using wooden spoked artillery-style wheels stretching from 1908 to 1925, it’s not easy to guess when the film was made. But judging by the clothing styles of the many hundreds of men and boys working in the River Rouge wheel shop, we’d venture a guess at 1920 or so.
Production of the wooden wheels began with turning club-shaped spokes from wooden blanks — ash, at a guess — and drying them in a kiln for more than three weeks. While they’re cooking, a different line steam-bends hickory into two semicircular felloes that will form the wheel’s rim. The number of different steps needed to shape the fourteen pieces of wood needed for each wheel is astonishing. Aside from the initial shaping, the spokes need to be mitered on the hub end to fit snugly together and have a tenon machined on the rim end. The felloes undergo multiple steps of drilling, trimming, and chamfering before they’re ready to receive the spokes.
The first steel component is a tire, which rolls down out of a furnace that heats and expands it before the wooden wheel is pressed into it. More holes are drilled and more steel is added; plates to reinforce the hub, nuts and bolts to hold everything together, and brake drums for the rear wheels. The hubs also had bearing races built right into them, which were filled with steel balls right on the line. How these unsealed bearings were protected during later sanding and grinding operations, not to mention the final painting step, which required a bath in asphalt paint and spinning the wheel to fling off the excess, is a mystery.
Welded steel spoked wheels replaced their wooden counterparts in the last two model years for the T, even though other car manufacturers had already started using more easily mass-produced stamped steel disc wheels in the mid-1920s. Given the massive infrastructure that the world’s largest car manufacturer at the time devoted to spoked wheel production, it’s easy to see why. But Ford eventually saw the light and moved away from spoked wheels for most cars. We can’t help but wonder what became of the army of workers, but it probably wasn’t good. So turn the wheels of progress. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777506",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2024-07-19T05:02:32",
"content": "If you enjoy and want to learn more how wheels are made i highly recommend EngelsCoachShop on youtube. He has made pretty much every type of wheel out there from small stuff to borax wagon wheels to ... | 1,760,371,851.585789 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/using-opencv-to-catch-a-hungry-thief/ | Using OpenCV To Catch A Hungry Thief | Alexander Rowsell | [
"Software Development",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"cat",
"cat food",
"FLIR Boson",
"motion detection",
"opencv"
] | Rory, the star of the show
[Scott] has a neat little closet in his carport that acts as a shelter and rest area for their outdoor cat, Rory. She has a bed and food and water, so when she’s outside on an adventure she has a place to eat and drink and nap in case her humans aren’t available to let her back in. However, [Scott] recently noticed that they seemed to be going through a lot of food, and they couldn’t figure out where it was going. Kitty wasn’t growing a potbelly, so
something else was eating the food
.
So [Scott] rolled up his sleeves and hacked together an OpenCV project with a FLIR Boson to try and catch the thief. To reduce the amount of footage to go through, the system would only capture video when it detected movement or a large change in the scene. It would then take snapshots, timestamp them, and optionally record a feed of the video. [Scott] originally started writing the system in Python, but it couldn’t keep up and was causing frames to be dropped when motion was detected. Eventually, he re-wrote the prototype in C++ which of course resulted in much better performance!
It didn’t take long to nab the thief — actually, thieves! It seemed quite a few different local animals had discovered Rory’s shelter and were helping themselves to her food. How rude! The first night detected a few different visitors. First, Rory’s local “boyfriend” stopped by to have a snack. Then within half an hour, an opossum (or possibly a small raccoon?) scarfed down what food was left. And within fifteen minutes of that visitor, a raccoon stopped by and was disappointed all the food was gone. Then, early in the morning. Rory arrives and is aghast that all her food is missing — again!
Rory’s “boyfriend” is the first thief to drop by
After analyzing all the footage, the solution, for now, is to feed Rory wet food twice a day and put just a little bit of kibble in her closet bowl in the morning for her to snack on throughout the day. In the future, [Scott] might use an RFID door to keep others out (though raccoons can be very smart and might be able to rip the door open), or possibly even something as simple as a magnetic collar and a Hall effect sensor to open the door or dispense food. Either way, the important thing is Rory is a happy cat and OpenCV rocks! | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777458",
"author": "TimT",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T23:21:15",
"content": "I had to battle raccoons once trying to keep them out of food I was putting out for a stray cat I was trying to rescue. I finally figured out racoons can’t really jump gaps like a cat and can’t climb a pole... | 1,760,371,851.79208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/single-stepping-the-6502-processor/ | Single-Stepping The 6502 Processor | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"6502",
"clock",
"cmos",
"data bus",
"debugging",
"flip-flop",
"registers",
"single-step",
"ttl"
] | Although marketing folk and laypeople may credit [Steve Jobs] as the man behind the success of Apple, those in the tech world know the real truth that without [Steve Wozniak] nothing would have ever gotten off the ground during the early days of the computer company. As an exhibit of his deep knowledge of the machines he was building, take a look at
this recreation of a circuit by [Anders]
which allows the 6502 processor to step through instructions one at a time, originally designed by [Woz] himself, even though there are still myths floating around the Internet that this type of circuit can’t work.
Like a lot of Internet myths, though, there’s a kernel of truth at the middle. The original 6502 from the mid-70s had dynamic registers, meaning they would lose their values if the chip was run below a critical clock speed. Since single-stepping the processor is much lower than this speed, it seems logical that this might corrupt the data in the registers. But if the clock is maintained to the registers the processor can be halted after each instruction, allowing even the original 6502 to go through its instructions one at a time.
[Anders]’s project sets up this circuit originally laid out by [Steve Wozniak] but updates it a bit for the modern times. Since the technology of the era would have been TTL, modern CMOS logic requires pull-up resistors to keep any inputs from floating. The key design of the original circuit is a set of flip-flops which latch the information on the data bus, and a switch that can be pressed to let the processor grab its next instruction, as well as a set of LEDs that allow the user to see the value on the data bus directly.
Of course, a computer processor of this era would be at a major handicap without a way to debug code that it was running, so there are even dedicated pins that allow this functionality to occur. Perhaps the Internet myth is a bit overblown for that reason alone, but [Anders] is no stranger to the 6502 and
has developed many other projects that demonstrate his mastery of the platform
. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777421",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T20:55:12",
"content": "Way back in the early 1980’s I worked at a place repairing the control boards for printers. The printers were wildly popular and I still see one in use here and there even today.On a lot of them the issue wa... | 1,760,371,851.64368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/18/a-nostalgic-look-at-a-kids-shortwave-resistor/ | A Nostalgic Look At A Kid’s Shortwave Receiver | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"shortwave"
] | [Mikrowave1] had a
Unelco shortwave receiver
as a kid. This was a typical simple radio for the 1960s using germanium and silicon transistors. It also had plug-in coils you had to insert into sockets depending on the frequency band you wanted to receive.
While simple AM radios were all the rage, they didn’t have to operate at higher frequencies. [Mikrowave1] shows some of the design tricks used to allow the radio to operate in the upper part of the spectrum. Otherwise, the radio is the usual superhet design using lower frequency germanium PNP transistors in the IF stage. You get a look inside the radio and a peek at a similar schematic along with notes on where the radio is different.
But how does it work? For an old single-conversion receiver, it works well enough. Of course, when the radio was new, there were many more interesting stations on shortwave. Today, he had to settle for some ham radio stations and CHU, the Canadian time and frequency station.
There were six pairs of coils built on top of tube sockets. The coil was actually more than a coil. There were other components in the case that adjusted other radio parameters based on the frequency.
[Mikrowave1] has been on
a toy kick lately
, and we’ve enjoyed it. This radio looks simple compared to the
Radio Shack one
that every kid wanted in the 1970s. Well. Every hacker kid, at least. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777371",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T18:36:44",
"content": "Shortwave resistor?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6777374",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,851.73575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/office-supplies-make-math-sculptures-if-you-know-what-youre-doing/ | Office Supplies Make Math Sculptures If You Know What You’re Doing | Lewin Day | [
"Art"
] | [
"binder clip",
"maths",
"office supplies",
"paper clip",
"paperclip"
] | Ever been fiddling around at your desk in the office, wondering if some grander structure might come from an assemblage of paper clips, pens, and binder clips? You’re not alone. Let your mind contemplate these beautiful maths sculptures
from [Zachary Abel].
[Zachary] has a knack for both three-dimensional forms and the artistic use of color. His
Möbius Clips
sculpture ably takes 110 humble pieces of office equipment in multiple colors, and laces them into a continuous strip that has beguiled humanity for generations. The simple paper clip becomes
a dodecahedron
, a
colorful spiralling ball,
or a
tightly-stitched box
. He does great things with
playing cards
too.
What elevates his work is that there’s a mathematical structure to it. It’s so much more than a pile of stationary, there’s always a geometry, a pattern which your mind latches on to when you see it. He also often shares the mathematical background behind his work, too.
If you’re fumbling about with the contents of your desk drawer
while another Zoom meeting drags on
, you might want to challenge yourself to draw from [Zachary’s] example. If you pull off something fantastical, do
let us know! | 7 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777083",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T00:51:23",
"content": "It must be nice to have a job that has so much free time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6777105",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,851.838314 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/digitally-reading-a-micrometers-output/ | Digitally Reading A Micrometer’s Output | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dial gauge",
"gauge",
"measurement",
"metrology",
"micrometer"
] | If you’re instrumenting your machine tools, or if you’re just curious, you might want to get granular access to the output of a digital micrometer or the like. [Tommy] set his mind to figuring out the communications protocol of the ClockWise Tools dial indicator for this very purpose.
And he succeeded!
Work began by finding the clock and signal lines for the gauge. With those identified, and the signals up on an AD2 logic analyzer, it was determined that once every 40 milliseconds, the device sent a data burst of six nibbles separated by 1.58 milliseconds apiece. The device communicates the absolute position of the gauge, and the data can be readily decoded with the aid of an op-amp to help boost up the 1.5-volt logic to a more reasonable level for a modern commodity microcontroller like the Arduino Nano. From there, the information can be trucked over serial to a PC, or you can do just about anything else with it besides.
We’ve seen similar hacks performed on calipers before, too,
making automated measurements a breeze.
If you’re working on something that needs precise measurements down to the, well… micrometer… this project might be just the thing you’re looking for. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777045",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T21:26:57",
"content": "It gives me hope that I can fix my broken 1 meter Mitutoyo caliper.Replacement circuit board is no longer available.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,371,852.161464 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/floss-weekly-episode-792-rust-coreutils/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 792: Rust Coreutils | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Coreutils",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"rust"
] | This week Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie chat with Sylvestre Ledru about the
Rust Coreutils
! Why would we want to re-implement 50 year old utilities, what’s the benefit of doing them in Rust, and what do the maintainers of the regular coreutils project think about it?
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show Right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777026",
"author": "AgainAgain",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T19:56:22",
"content": "the goal is to “rewrite it in x” is to move everything to permissive liscenses. then lock future changes away. just like every thing else “security” is used as pretext.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,371,852.111683 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/hacker-tactic-single-pcb-panels/ | Hacker Tactic: Single-PCB Panels | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"design",
"KiCAD",
"KiKit",
"panelization",
"pcb"
] | Ordering a PCB? Two of them? Three? Five? For about eight years now, I’ve been regularly ordering large numbers of different PCBs, and, naturally, have developed a toolkit to make things smoother. One trick is PCB panelization, and you should really know about it.
You might’ve encountered PCB panels already. Perhaps, if you order PCBA at a fab, you will get your board returned in a whole new form-factor, with rails on the sides that you have to snap off before your PCB is usable. Those rails are used so that your PCBs are easier to handle during assembly, but that’s far from the only reason why you would make a panel.
If you need multiple pieces of a PCB, your fab may say that building 50 pcs is classified as “large batch” and that takes longer than 30 days, which delays your entire PCB order. I’ve been there, five years ago, running out of time right before Chinese New Year. The fix was simple – I made a 2×2 panel and ordered that in quantity of 10-15. Panelization might be a little more expensive, or maybe even cheaper, but, most importantly, it will be faster.
In a few hours’ time, I sat down, figured out that KiCad has built-in features for panelization, and ordered panels instead of separate PCBs. Thanks to that, I made the Chinese New Year deadline that year and could successfully restock my store, letting me earn a fair bit of money instead of keeping a popular product out-of-stock – ultimately, helping my family stay up on rent that month.
Panelization lets you hack around many PCB ordering and assembly limitations, and I’ve only gotten started – there’s way way more! For now, let’s sort out panelizing multiples of the same PCB. As long as your boards are using KiCad (or KiCad-converted from Eagle/EasyEDA/Altium/gerbers), there’s no better software than KiKit.
KiKit Simply Rules
KiKit
is a KiCad plugin by [Jan Mrazek], and it’s had a ton of work put into it to make it a one-stop shop for KiCad panelization. Once installed, KiKit lets you do panelization from inside KiCad, with a nice GUI that lets you define all sorts of parameters. Install it and go wild. KiKit is a little tricky to install and there’s some slightly uncomfortable behaviour – in other words, just like the majority of the software we use, but it brings you massive benefits for some possible initial pain.
Open an empty board by opening
pcbnew
(PCB Editor) standalone, then, in the top toolbar, press the KiKit button on the right. Pick a board in “Input”, click “Output” and enter something like
panel.kicad_pcb
, set
rows
and
cols
to something like 2 and 3,
hspace
and
vspace
to 2mm, set Cuts=>
type
to mousebites, and press Panelize in the right bottom corner.
This is the most basic panel you could do, and if you ever have had to draw such a panel manually, you will notice that this just saved you a ton of work. This panel has no fiducials, no outer frame, no V-cuts, but all of these are just a couple dropdowns and digit fields away. Want to order a large number of PCBs? This is how you do it, and there’s a good few uses for this. One of them for me used to be decreasing prices at JLCPCB, but as they ramped prices up over the years, this benefit has faded – another PCB fabs might still give lower prices for panels for you, however, so watch out. There’s other uses that remain true, too.
Panels So Nice To Handle
I designed a large-ish capacitive touch panel a couple years ago, a pandemic-related project that would help mark your attendance of something like a hackerspace. It used a custom touch controller and giant electrodes: 2 cm x 2 cm PCBs with rounded edges. I wanted to have a dozen kits of them, which would’ve led to a batch size of 200 and increased production time that’d delay my entire order.
Instead of ordering 200 of a single PCB, I made 4×4 panels. They were way cheaper, quick to manufacture, and way easier to manage once received. I wanted to mail them out to some hackerspaces, and the panels also helped – instead of counting out 16 of them and then having them rattle around in an envelope, I could take a single panel and throw it into the package. A cherry on top is that your PCB’s recipient gets the satisfying task of splitting a V-cut panel into separate PCBs, too.
Here’s another example from the PCB design above. It’s a shim for a Linux-powered Raspberry Pi that lets you program SPI flash chips with the standard “SPI flash” pinout – SOIC-8, SOIC-8W, and DFN. With this shim, you don’t need to carefully match jumper wires – just desolder the chip in question, solder it onto the shim aided by elongated pads, then plug the shim onto a Pi header; it will hold onto the Pi GPIO header pins and make electrical contact thanks to
staggered holes.
This shim proved to be an indispensable tool for quickly dumping and reflashing SPI ROM chips, and I’ve been mailing these out to people as “throw in envelope” gifts. I’ve now run out, need to order more, and I see that I feel bad mailing just one of these – they’re incredibly cheap, easy to use, and very nice to have around. With panelization, I can order multiple and send out panels of a dozen at a time, they’ll remain incredibly cheap, and I can throw them into envelopes without any rattling action – plus, the recipients get to break away the tabs.
There’s more, of course – once you scale up a project of yours, you can easily do manufacturing with these, and, again, save a fair bit of money!
The Fab Wanted It, So I Improvised
For manufacturing, it’s common that your board needs a panel around it; specifically, a thin PCB frame with the board held inside by mousebite, with perhaps even on-frame fiducials for assembly positioning. This makes your possibly-unorthodox-shape board into a panel that an assembly house workers and their machinery can easily handle. Sometimes you can have the fab handle the panel stuff, but some assembly houses will want you to mail your files already prepared, rail added and all. KiKit makes such panels a breeze, as you might guess.
Want to save on PCBA? A KiKit panel might be exactly what you need;
here’s the
panel.json
for this specific panel
Once again, you can save a fair bit of money if you make such a panel. Take JLCPCB’s “economic” tier PCB assembly service – it’s notably cheaper than “standard”, but it has limitations on what you can do. For instance, you have to pick from a list of allowed PCB thicknesses and soldermask colours. I needed two-layer 1 mm thick black PCBs, but I wanted like 50 of them where economic assembly would only allow 30. On this board, having to use “standard” assembly would be a significant price jump with no benefit at all.
Instead, I made the PCB into 1 x 2 panels with KiKit and ordered 30 panels – each panel counts as a PCB for PCBA purposes. This let me order 60 pcs of an assembled PCB significantly cheaper, at the cost of some depaneling once the boards arrive, which, again, that’s just a fun thing to do. JLCPCB might clamp down on this and force you to use more expensive assembly, but, for now, you can easily fab 150 pcs of a small PCB while still keeping within economic assembly tier.
Once you’ve defined the frame for the PCB, KiKit will have some JSON that defines your panel’s parameters. Don’t just close the PCB editor you’ve been KiKit’ing in! Exporting KiKit’s JSON is vital, unless you want to re-configure the parameters every time you need to regenerate the panel; I usually save it as
panel.json
in the folder where the board file is. In fact, there should really be an autosave option – anyone up to do a pull request?
Naturally, with KiKit boards, you can easily export pick and place data – the end result is just a KiCad board, you can even edit it afterwards. I typically use a fab-aimed plugin when ordering PCBA, but you can also just export
.pos
and
.csv
BOM files the same way you would from any other KiCad PCB.
Tips And Tricks
V-cuts are pretty clean to handle: you just snap the boards apart. Mousebites are perhaps less so because they leave jagged edges on the PCB. Watch out here – using sandpaper on the edges is not the greatest idea, with this dust being both carcinogenic (it’s fiberglass dust, remember!) and abrasive. The resulting dust is going to go everywhere, it’s irritating in a literal sense, and you might even end up having to wash it off your PCBs. Instead, try using a box cutter with those snap-off blade sections, sliding it against the board outline – it should be able to cut off the jagged edges, leaving no dust, just slices of mousebite remains.
As a footnote, here’s a tactic I want to try out – using V-Cuts for making castellated modules on the cheap. I don’t want to pay a significantly higher price for a special castellated process, but I still want to PBCA like 100 pcs of a cool small module so I can throw it into postal envelopes and put it on my products; also, V-Cuts feels like you’d get nicer plated edges than milled. I don’t know if a fab would accept it, but
this article says it’d be okay to do
and such holes can work as inter-board interconnects. I’m out to try this trick out soon, and will report back!
We’ve panelized a single PCB today – which is cool and helpful, but there are even more exciting options. Next time, I’m going to show you how to save even more money and maybe make assembly even quicker, as well as save a fair bit on SMT stencils – stay tuned! | 35 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776988",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T17:45:18",
"content": "remember, you are paying them to throw away the material between the boards, do you really need gaps that big?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "677699... | 1,760,371,852.29052 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/making-art-with-maxwells-equations/ | Making Art With Maxwell’s Equations | Lewin Day | [
"Art"
] | [
"graph",
"maths",
"maxwell's equations"
] | When you think of art, you might think of portraiture, landscapes, or other kinds of paintings. But mathematics can feel artistic at times, too. We’ve all seen gorgeous Mandelbrot fractals, and less gorgeous Julia fractals, but that’s not all that’s out there. As [Prof. Halim Boutayeb] demonstrates,
Maxwell’s equations can show us some real beauty, too.
Find us a cooler graph than this one!
The work involves running simulations of multiple electromagnetic sources moving, bouncing around, interacting, and so on. The art comes in the plotting of the fields, in warm colors or just
outright rainbows.
The professor does a great job of pairing some of these videos with pumping electronic music, which only adds to the fun.
Of course, the colors are pretty, but there’s a lot of valuable physics going on behind all this. Thankfully, there are all kinds of
additional resources
linked for those eager to learn about the Finite Difference Time Domain method and how it can be used for valid simulation tasks.
Throw this kind of stuff on a projector at your next rave and you will not be disappointed. Video after the break. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777110",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2024-07-18T02:38:41",
"content": "There is a tree nursery near town on both sides of the road where they planted the trees rather precisely on a grid. When you drive by there is a stationary pattern across the whole “forest” of math mad... | 1,760,371,852.209726 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/fdm-filament-troubles-keeping-hygroscopic-materials-from-degrading/ | FDM Filament Troubles: Keeping Hygroscopic Materials From Degrading | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"FDM",
"hydrolysis",
"hygroscopic"
] | Despite the reputation of polymers used with FDM 3D printing like nylon, ABS, and PLA as being generally indestructible, they do come with a whole range of moisture-related issues that can affect both the printing process as well as the final result. While the concept of ‘baking’ such 3D printing filaments prior to printing to remove absorbed moisture is well-established and with many commercial solutions available, the exact extent to which these different polymers are affected, and what these changes look like on a molecular level are generally less well-known.
Another question with such hygroscopic materials is whether the same issues of embrittlement, swelling, and long-term damage inflicted by moisture exposure that affects filaments prior to printing affects these materials post-printing, and how this affects the lifespan of FDM-printed items. In a
2022 paper
by Adedotun D. Banjo and colleagues much of what we know today is summarized in addition to an examination of the molecular effects of moisture exposure on polylactic acid (PLA) and
nylon 6
.
The scientific literature on FDM filaments makes clear that beyond the glossy marketing there is a wonderful world of materials science to explore, one which can teach us a lot about how to get good FDM prints and how durable they will be long-term.
Why Water Wrecks Polymers
Although the effects of moisture exposure on FDM filaments tend to get tossed together into a simplified model of ‘moisture absorption’, there are actually quite different mechanisms at play for these different polymers. A good example of this from the Banjo et al paper is the difference between nylon 6 and polylactic acid (PLA). While nylon 6 is very hygroscopic, PLA is mostly hydrophobic, yet this does not save PLA from getting degraded as well from moisture exposure.
Molecular structure of base polymers nylon 6 and polylactic acid (PLA).
In the case of nylon 6 (C
6
H
11
NO), the highly polar functional groups such as
amides
(
−C(=O)−(N)
)
,
amines
(
−NH
2
) and
carbonyls
(
C=O
) make this polymer hydrophilic. As these functional groups are exposed to moisture, the resulting
hydrolysis
of the amide bonds gradually affects the material properties of the polymer like its tensile strength.
A few percent moisture in the polymer filament prior to passing through the hot extruder of an FDM printer will correspondingly cause issues as this moisture rapidly evaporates. And after printing a nylon object, moisture will once again hydrolyze the amide bonds, weakening the material over time. This is something that can be avoided somewhat by sealing the object against moisture intrusion, but this is rarely practical for functional parts. This degradation of polyamides can be observed by the cracking of nylon gears in toys gearboxes, servo motors, and similar high-stress applications.
In the case of
PLA
(
(C
3
H
4
O
2
)
n
), far fewer polar functional groups are present, making PLA effectively hydrophobic, although it is soluble in various organic solvents like
ethyl acetate
. PLA’s weakness lies in its ester bonds, which are subject to hydrolysis and can thus be broken like amides. This type of hydrolysis in PLA is very slow, however, with studies finding that it barely degrades even submerged in water. The often cited ‘composting’ of PLA thus requires chemical hydrolysis, making options like incineration the faster and easier route for disposal. As a result, for long-term stability PLA does rate highly, regardless of its other material properties.
Naturally, in the case of all hygroscopic polymers the rate of degradation depends on both the moisture content of the air, and the temperature. In the earlier referenced study by D. Banjo et al., the FDM printed samples were fully submerged into water to accelerate the process, with three types of polymers tested at 21 °C and 70 °C.
Freshly Baked Polymer
Drawing the moisture out of the polymer again can be done in a variety of ways, with applying heat over an extended period of time being the most common. The application of thermal energy motivates the water molecules to make their way out of the polymer again, but it is important to understand here that hydrolysis is a permanent, non-reversible process. This means that the focus is primarily on removing any absorbed water that can be problematic during extrusion, and to prevent further degradation of the polymer over time.
A
paper presented
by Xuejun Fan at the IEEE EuroSimE conference in 2008 titled “
Mechanics of Moisture for Polymers: Fundamental Concepts and Model Study”
covers the fundamental concepts related to moisture intrusion which ultimately enable the degradation. In particular it is of note that the effects of submersion (water sorption) versus exposure to the air (moisture sorption) lead to very different transport mechanisms, and that there’s a distinction between bound and unbound water inside the polymer. This unbound water is contained within microscopic pores that exist within the material, and would thus be a good target for forced eviction using thermal means.
Exactly how much heat has to be applied and for which duration differs wildly, based mostly on the type of material, with commercial filament dryers generally having presets programmed into them. Filament drying charts are available from a wide variety of sources, such as
from Bambu Lab
. They recommend drying PLA filament at 50 °C – 60 °C for eight hours, while Prusa recommends drying PLA for six hours at 45 °C (and PA11CF reinforced nylon at 90 °C). This highlights just how hard it is to make definite statements here other than not heating up a spool of filament to the point where it softens and sticks together. The question of ‘how long’ would be ideally answered with ‘until all the moisture is gone’, but since this is hard to quantify without specialized equipment, longer can be said to be better.
Perhaps the biggest take-away here is that preventing moisture from getting even near the polymer is by far the best option, meaning that keeping spools of filament in vacuum bags with desiccant gel between printing sessions is highly recommended.
Endurance
Flexural yield strength (σY) of 3D printed materials after immersion in DI water at 21 °C and 70 °C (a) Nylon (b) Nylon Composite (c) PLA. Error bars reflect one standard deviation of data. (Credit: D. Banjo et al., 2022)
If water molecules cause physical damage to the polymer structure, how severe is the impact? Obviously having unbound moisture in the filament is a terrible thing when trying to melt it for printing, but how long can an FDM printed part be expected to last once it’s finished and put into use in some kind of moist environment?
For PLA and nylon we can see the effects illustrated in the D. Banjo et al. study, with parameters like moisture absorption, crystallinity changes, and mechanical performance examined.
Perhaps most fascinating about these results is the performance of PLA, which at first appears to outperform nylon, as the latter initially shows a sharp decrease in mechanical properties early on. However, nylon stabilizes while PLA’s properties at either water temperature completely fall off a cliff after about a week of being submerged. This brittleness of PLA is already its main weakness when it’s not subjected to hydrolysis, and clearly accelerated aging in this fashion shows just how quickly it becomes a liability.
The big asterisk here is of course that this study used an absolute worst-case scenario for FDM-printed polymers, with water sorption in relatively warm to very warm water. Even so, it’s illustrative of just how much different polymers can differ, and why picking the optimal polymer for an FDM print completely depends on the environment. Clearly PLA is totally fine for many situations where its disadvantages are not an issue, while for more demanding situations nylon, ABS/ASA, or PC may be the better choice.
Keeping filament dry, vacuum-packed and far away from moisture will significantly improve printing with it as well as its longevity. Printed parts can have their surface treated to seal them against moisture, which can make them last much longer without mechanical degradation. Ultimately FDM printing is just a part of the messy world of materials science and manufacturing, both of which are simultaneously marvels of modern science while also giving engineers terrible nightmares. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776940",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T14:36:15",
"content": "“…the messy world of materials science and manufacturing, both of which are simultaneously marvels of modern science while also giving engineers terrible nightmares.”Amen.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,852.350031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/hacking-an-ip-camera-to-run-your-own-software/ | Hacking An IP Camera To Run Your Own Software | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"counterfeit software",
"encryption",
"ip camera",
"reverse engineering",
"rsa"
] | Ah, generic unbranded IP cameras. Safe, secure? Probably not. [Alex] has been hacking around with one of his very own,
and he’s recently busted the thing wide open.
Determining that the camera had a software update function built in, [Alex] saw an opening for hijinks. The first issue was that the camera only accepts encrypted update packages, which complicates things somewhat. However, through some smart reverse engineering, the format of the updates and their encryption method became obvious to [Alex]. Oh, and partly because there was a GitHub repository online featuring the source code used by the manufacturer to encrypt their updates. That definitely helped. It also led [Alex] to suspect the manufacturer may not have properly respected the open source license of some of the routines involved.
In the demo of the exploit, [Alex] has the camera reach out to
www.pudim.com.br
instead of the servers of the original manufacturer. That’s a pretty clear way to show that the camera has been owned.
We first featured [Alex]’s work in this space
all the way back in 2019
. It’s come a long way since then! | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776993",
"author": "Peter M Shipley",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T18:05:10",
"content": "been there done that 20 years ago with the original netgear IP camera.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6777099",
"author": "Anthony... | 1,760,371,852.681711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/17/a-look-at-the-dec-vt220-a-proper-serial-terminal/ | A Look At The DEC VT220, A Proper Serial Terminal | Tom Nardi | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"DEC",
"serial terminal"
] | If you’re reading Hackaday, we’re willing to bet that if somebody asked you about a serial terminal, you’d immediately think about a piece of software — a tool you run on the computer to communicate with some hardware gadget over UART. You might even have a favorite one, perhaps minicom or tio. You’d be technically correct (which we all know is the best kind of correct), but if you wind back the clock a bit, there’s a little more to the story.
You see, the programs we use these days to talk to microcontrollers and routers are more accurately referred to as serial terminal
emulators
, because they are doing in software what used to be the job of hardware. What kind of hardware? Why beauties like this
DEC VT220 for example
.
The [Vintage Apparatus] channel recently got their hands on a couple of these dedicated serial terminals, and thought it would be interesting to take modern audiences through a brief tour of how they worked and what they were capable of. Despite being built sometime around 1984, the simplistic nature of these devices make them highly reliable — so long as the power supply is good, there’s not a whole lot else that can go wrong.
That being said, using one wasn’t quite as bare bones an experience as you might think. As [Vintage Apparatus] demonstrates, you can press a key on the VT220’s keyboard to bring up a series of configuration menus that don’t look too far removed from what you might be used to from your modern software terminal. Familiar options like baud rate, parity, and local echo are accounted for, but then there’s also settings for connecting a printer up to the serial terminal should you need to bang out some hard copy.
Getting your hands on one of these decades old serial terminals isn’t always easy, but if you’re more interested in the retro looks than technical accuracy,
you can always 3D print yourself a replica
. | 52 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776859",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T08:29:43",
"content": "Looks cereal enough to me",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6776892",
"author": "David Given",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T11:33:... | 1,760,371,852.554533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/seiko-had-a-smartwatch-in-1984/ | Seiko Had A Smartwatch In 1984 | Lewin Day | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"seiko",
"smartwatch",
"watch"
] | You might think of the smartwatch era as beginning with Apple, relatively recently. Or, you might think back to those fancy Timex models with the datalink thing going on in the 1990s. Seiko can beat them all, though, with its UC-2000 smartwatch that debuted
all the way back in 1984.
The UC2200 was the bigger docking station of the two.
The UC-2000 very much looks cutting edge for its era, and absolutely ancient today. It featured a 4-bit CPU, 2 kilobytes of RAM, and 6 kilobytes of ROM. Display was via a simple 10×4 character LCD in a rectangular form factor, with four buttons along the bottom. Branded as a “personal information processor,” it was intended for use with the UC-2100 dock. This added a full physical QWERTY keyboard that interacted with the UC-2000 when the two were combined together. Alternatively, you could go for the UC-2200, which not only had a keyboard but also a thermal printer to boot. Oh, and ROM packs for Microsoft Basic, games, or an English-to-Japanese translator.
What could you do on this thing? Well, it had basic watch functions, so it told the time, acted as a stop watch, and an alarm, of course. But you could also use it to store two memos of up to 1000 characters each, schedule appointments, and do basic calculations.
The one thing this smartwatch was missing? Connectivity. It couldn’t get on the Internet, nor could it snatch data from the ether via radio or any other method. By today’s measures, it wouldn’t qualify as much of a smartwatch at all. Moreso a personal organizer that fit on the wrist. Still, for its day, this thing really was a whole computer that fit on your wrist.
Would you believe we’ve seen the UC-2000 before? In fact,
we’ve even seen it hacked to play
Tetris
!
Video of that wonderful feat after the break. | 32 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776838",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T05:36:43",
"content": "I am quite impressed with that. I had the Timex DataLink circa 1995, but this looks fantastic at a decade earlier.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "67768... | 1,760,371,852.629682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/remembering-seymour-cray/ | Remembering Seymour Cray | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cray",
"supercomputer"
] | If you think of supercomputers, it is hard not to think of Seymour Cray. He built giant computers at Control Data Corporation and went on to build the famous Cray supercomputers. While those computers aren’t especially amazing today, for their time, they were modern marvels. [Asianometry]
has a great history of Cray
, starting with his work at ERA, which would, of course, eventually produce the computer known as the Univac 1103.
ERA was bought up by Remington Rand, which eventually became Sperry Rand. Due to conflict, some of the ERA staff left to form Control Data Corporation, and Cray went with them. The new company decided to focus on computers to do simulations for things like nuclear test simulations.
To save money, the new company used out-of-spec transistors, pairing them so they’d work correctly. In 1960, the company delivered the CDC 1604, a million-dollar computer that ran at 200 kHz. It was the most powerful computer of its day. It was solid state with a 48-bit word. Core memory was 32K words (192 Kbytes). The company touted its “small size” (fits in a 20-foot by 20-foot room!).
Cray would eventually sour on CDC and founded Cray Research in 1972. Before long, though, Cray stepped down as CEO of Cray Research and founded the Cray Computer Corporation.
While early Cray designs were technically successful, growing technology allowed other companies to produce cheaper supercomputers. In addition, the need for supercomputers and how they were built was changing. Cray Computer Corporation went bankrupt in 1995. Cray Research continued without Cray at the helm, but attempts to access a broader market didn’t really work out.
Silicon Graphics bought Cray Research in 1996, selling some of it to Sun. That was the same year Seymour died in a traffic accident at age 71. By 2000, Cray Research was sold again to Tera Computer, which changed its name to Cray. However, they also had a rock road in the supercomputer market. They sold some assets to Intel in 2012 and in 2019 were bought by Hewlett Packard.
There is a lot of history in this video, and it would be amazing to see what Seymour Cray could have done with an unlimited budget and no business necessities.
Want to play with a Cray?
Simulation
is going to be easier than buying surplus. We’ve done our own
biography
of Mr. Cray, if you want some additional reading. | 28 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776815",
"author": "Glen Akins",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T02:08:17",
"content": "They were bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, not Hewlett Packard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6780706",
"author": "Jim",
... | 1,760,371,852.781618 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/dme-with-a-twist-of-limesdr/ | DME With A Twist Of LimeSDR | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"avionics",
"distance measuring equipment",
"DME"
] | Navigating aircraft today isn’t like the old days. No more arrows painted on a barn roof or rotating airway beacons. Now, there are a host of radio navigation aids. GPS, of course, is available. But planes often use VOR to determine a bearing to a known point and DME — distance measuring equipment — to measure the distance to that point. DME operates around 1000 MHz and is little more than a repeater. An airplane sends a pair of pulses, and times how long it takes for the DME to repeat them. [Daniel Estévez] has been
monitoring these transmissions with a LimeSDR
.
Like most repeaters, the DME transponders listen on one frequency and transmit on another. Those frequencies are 63 MHz apart. This poses a challenge for some types of SDRs which have limits on bandwidth.
The LimeSDR has two chains of onboard processing, but each is tied to its own ADC. No problem. Just split the antenna and feed the same signal to both ADCs. Problem solved. An LNA makes up for the splitter loss.
Once you have the signal, a GNU Radio setup can grab the data to do any final processing and recording. Analysis shows how DME sends 2,700 pulses per second no matter what. That’s because the transponder adjusts its squelch to make this true. When there isn’t much going on, the receiver will be squelched below the noise level and be very sensitive. However, if many aircraft are using the system, it will automatically adjust to only repeat the strongest pulses.
While this wasn’t trivial, it was much easier using modern SDR tools than it would have been when radios had to be built for specific purposes.
Want to see inside
a real DME receiver
? If you simulate the right pulses, you can
convert a DME into a clock
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,852.719405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/playing-rock-paper-scissors-with-a-time-of-flight-sensor/ | Playing Rock, Paper Scissors With A Time Of Flight Sensor | Lewin Day | [
"Parts"
] | [
"gesture recognition",
"rock paper scissors",
"time of flight",
"Time of Flight Sensor",
"tof sensor"
] | You can do all kinds of wonderful things with cameras and image recognition. However, sometimes spatial data is useful, too. As [madmcu] demonstrates, you can use depth data from a time-of-flight sensor for gesture recognition,
as seen in this rock-paper-scissors demo.
If you’re unfamiliar with time-of-flight sensors, they’re easy enough to understand. They measure distance by determining the time it takes photons to travel from one place to another. For example, by shooting out light from the sensor and measuring how long it takes to bounce back, the sensor can determine how far away an object is. Take an array of time-of-flight measurements, and you can get simple spatial data for further analysis.
The build uses an Arduino Uno R4 Minima, paired with a demo board for the VL53L5CX time-of-flight sensor. The software is developed using NanoEdge AI Studio. In a basic sense, the system uses a machine learning model to classify data captured by the time-of-flight sensor into gestures matching rock, paper, or scissors—or nothing, if no hand is present. If you don’t find [madmcu]’s tutorial enough, you can take a look at
the original version from STMicroelectronics, too.
It takes some training, and it only works in the right lighting conditions, but this is a functional system that can determine real hand sign and play the game.
We’ve seen similar techniques help more advanced robots cheat at this game before, too!
What a time to be alive. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6777061",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2024-07-17T22:14:32",
"content": "Nice….but can it play….Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock….?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6777063",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Kn... | 1,760,371,852.823535 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/cuda-but-make-it-amd/ | CUDA, But Make It AMD | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"amd",
"ATI",
"CUDA",
"general purpose gpu",
"gpgpu",
"radeon"
] | Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, is a software platform for doing big parallel calculation tasks on NVIDIA GPUs. It’s been a big part of the push to use GPUs for general purpose computing, and in some ways, competitor AMD has thusly been left out in the cold. However, with more demand for GPU computation than ever, there’s been a breakthrough.
SCALE from [Spectral Compute]
will let you compile CUDA applications for AMD GPUs.
SCALE allows CUDA programs to run as-is on AMD GPUs, without modification. The SCALE compiler is also intended as a drop-in swap for
nvcc
, right down to the command line options. For maximum ease of use, it acts like you’ve installed the NVIDIA Cuda Toolkit, so you can build with cmake just like you would for a normal NVIDIA setup. Currently, Navi 21 and Navi 31 (RDNA 2.0 and RDNA 3.0) targets are supported, while a number of other GPUs are undergoing testing and development.
The basic aim is to allow developers to use AMD hardware without having to maintain an entirely separate codebase. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s a promising tool that could help break NVIDIA’s stranglehold on
parts of the GPGPU market. | 40 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776730",
"author": "Kryptylomese",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T18:33:46",
"content": "Games and graphical applications run on both nVIDIA and AMD, on all the major operating systems. An abstraction layer for CUDA doesn’t seem impossible!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,371,852.91479 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/show-us-your-minimalist-games-and-win/ | Show Us Your Minimalist Games, And Win | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Tiny Games Challenge",
"contest",
"digikey",
"Hackaday Contests"
] | Sometimes the tightest constraints inspire the highest creativity. The
2024 Tiny Games Challenge
invites you to have the most fun with the most minimal setup. Whether that’s tiny size, tiny parts count, or tiny code, we want you to show us that big fun can come in small packages.
The Tiny Games Challenge starts now and runs through September 10th, with the top three entries receiving a $150 gift certificate courtesy of DigiKey.
We can’t tell you how much fun we’ve had playing
Twang
and a few derivatives thereof. It’s an amazing amount of fun to get out of just a springy door stopper, an accelerometer, and an LED strip. Pong is an evergreen game, and you might expect to see it
implemented on an LED strip
, but how about
on ten LEDs
? Or
Snake on a 16×2 LCD
? [Doug McInnes]’s
Hunt the Lunpus
runs on two seven-segment displays!
We’ve seen no end of small handheld game projects, ranging from the
Arduboy
to [Deshipu]’s
outstanding PewPew series of devices
. These projects have an incredible degree of finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from lashing up
a quick pocket gaming platform out of whatever you have on hand
.
Or maybe you want to have fun with the hardware? We’re absolutely interested in seeing the most innovative minimal controls you can come up with. Who knows, you might just invent the next
Playdate
!
No matter whether your game is small in scope, code size, build complexity, or form-factor, if you’ve got a Tiny Game, show us! Head over to Hackaday.io and create a project, use the pull-down menu on the left-hand side to enter, and you’re set. We’ll be judging on simplicity, fun, and the quality of your documentation, and the top three will get a $150 DigiKey shopping spree. Let the (tiny) games begin!
Honorable Mention Categories
One Dimensional:
Everyone has an LED strip kicking around somewhere. Show us how we can put that to use to make an engaging game that plays only in one dimension.
The Classics:
You know: Pong, Snake, Tetris, or maybe even Hunt the Wumpus. In this category, we’re looking for modern implementations of a classic tiny game of yesteryear.
The Controls:
With some games, it’s the controls that make them fun. If your tiny game has innovative user interfaces, this is for you.
Pocket Arcade:
You want to bring your games with you everywhere, right? This category is for DIY tiny games that you can carry around every day.
Fancy!:
This category is for the polish, the fit-and-finish, and the shininess. If your game looks fantastic, it’s fancy. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776705",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T17:15:59",
"content": "I think seeing Bedoiun children playing with pebbles was watching a minimalist game.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6776... | 1,760,371,852.979173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/giving-people-an-owl-like-visual-field-via-vr-feels-surprisingly-natural/ | Giving People An Owl-like Visual Field Via VR Feels Surprisingly Natural | Donald Papp | [
"Video Hacks",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"360 degree camera",
"perception",
"vr",
"VR camera"
] | We love hearing about a good experiment, and here’s a pretty neat one: researchers used a VR headset, an off-the-shelf VR360 camera, and some custom software to glue them together. The result?
Owl-Vision
squashes a full 360° of un-distorted horizontal visual perception into 90° of neck travel to either side. One can see all around oneself, without needing to physically turn one’s head any further than is natural.
It’s still a work in progress, and accessing the paper currently doesn’t have a free option, but the demonstration video at that link (also embedded below) gives a solid overview of what’s going on.
The user wears a VR headset with a 360° camera perched on their head. This camera has a fisheye lens on the front and back, and stitches the inputs together to make a 360° panorama. The headset shows the user a segment of this panorama as a normal camera view, but the twist is that the effect from turning one’s head is amplified.
Turning one’s head 45 degrees to the left displays as though one’s head turned 90 degrees, and turning 90 degrees (i.e. looking straight left) displays the view directly behind. One therefore compresses an entire 360 degrees of horizontal visual awareness into the normal 180 degree range of neck motion for a person, without having to resort to visual distortions like squashing the video.
In a way this calls to mind the experiments of American psychologist
George Stratton
, whose fascinating work in visual perception involved wearing special eyeglasses that inverted or mirrored his sight. After a few days, he was able to function normally. Owl-Vision seems very much along those lines, albeit much less intensive. It’s apparently quite intuitive to use, with wearers needing very little time to become accustomed. Messing with perception via VR has gone the other way, too.
Adding lag to real life
is remarkably debilitating for interactive tasks.
The short video demo for Owl-Vision also includes a driving simulator demo in which the driver shows off the ability to look directly behind themselves with ease.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ahs2024-40.mp4
[Video:
Owl-Vision
: Augmentation of Visual Field by Virtual Amplification of Head Rotation, Augmented Humans International Conference 2024] | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776671",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T15:56:26",
"content": "Next we start strapping these to owls so they can give their necks a break.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6776863",
"author": "Dan",
... | 1,760,371,853.137538 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/smart-ball-technology-has-reached-football-but-the-euros-show-us-its-not-necessarily-for-the-better/ | Smart Ball Technology Has Reached Football, But The Euros Show Us It’s Not Necessarily For The Better | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"adidas",
"ball",
"football",
"footballs",
"smart ball",
"smartball",
"soccer",
"var",
"video assistant referee"
] | Adidas brought smart balls to Euro 2024, for better or worse. Credit: Adidas
The good old fashioned game of football used to be a simple affair. Two teams of eleven, plus a few subs, who were all wrangled by a referee and a couple of helpful linesmen. Long ago, these disparate groups lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when VAR attacked.
Suddenly, technology was being used to adjudicate all kinds of decisions, and fans were cheering or in uproar depending on how the hammer fell. That’s only become more prevalent in recent times, with smart balls the latest controversial addition to the world game. With their starring role in the Euro 2024 championship more than evident, let’s take a look at what’s going on with this new generation of intelligent footballs.
The Balls Are Connected
Adidas supports the sensor package in the very center of the ball. Credit: Adidas
Adidas has been a pioneer of so-called “connected ball” technology. This involves fitting match balls with sensors which can track the motion of the ball in space. The aim is to be able to track the instant of player contact with the ball, for investigating matters like calls of handball and offside. The Germany first debuted the technology at the 2022 World Cup, and it showed up at the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2024 championship, too.
According to Adidas, an inertial measurement unit is suspended in the middle of the ball. This is done with a delicate structure that holds the IMU stably in place without impacting the performance of the ball from the player’s perspective. Powering the TDK ICM-20649 IMU is a small battery that can be recharged using an induction system. The IMU runs at a rate of 500 Hz, allowing hits to the ball to be measured down to tiny fractions of a second. The ball also features a DW1000 ultra-wideband radio system for position tracking, developed by Kinexion.
Connected balls allow the collection of statistics down to a very granular level, as seen here in the 2023 Women’s World Cup. Credit: Adidas
No more must match officials rely on their own perception, or even blurry video frames, to determine if a player touched the ball. Now, they can get a graphical readout showing acceleration spikes when a players foot, hand, or other body part impinges on the motion of the ball. This can then be used by the on-field referee and the video assistant referee to determine the right call more accurately. The idea is that this data removes a lot of the confusion from the refereeing process, giving officials exacting data on when a player may have touched the ball and when. No more wondering if this ball came close, or if that ball ricocheted based on a rough camera angle. What really happened is now being measured, and the data is all there for the officials to see, clear as day. What could be better, right?
Case In Point
A review of the incident showed the ball had grazed Andersen’s fingers, leading to a penalty declared for handball. via Optus Sport,
YouTube
The UEFA Euro 2024 championship was the latest battleground to showcase this technology. As the national teams of Europe went in to play critical matches, players and fans alike knew that this technology would be on hand to ensure the fairest playing field yet. You might think that it would leave everyone feeling happier about how their favored team got treated, but as always, humans don’t react so predictably when emotions are hot and national pride is on the line.
The match between Germany and Denmark was the perfect example of how technology could sway a game, one way or the other. The
Video Assistant Referee
killed Denmark’s first goal with a ruling from the Semi-Automated Offside Technology system, and the ball technology would soon curse the Danes, too. As Germany’s David Raum crossed the ball, it ever so slightly clipped the hand of Danish player Joachim Andersen. In the past, this might have gone unnoticed, or at the least unpunished. But in today’s high-tech world, there was data to reveal the crime in explicit detail.
As the video replays showed the footage, we were treated to a graph indicating the spike picked up by the ball’s sensors just as it clipped Andersen’s hand in the video. The referee thus granted a penalty for the handball, which has duly slotted home by German striker Kai Havertz. Germany would go on to win the match 2-0, with midfielder Jamal Musiala scoring the follow-up.
The incident inflamed fans and pundits alike, with the aftermath particularly fiery
on ITV
. “If he didn’t pay that, if he did pay that, we’d be saying, okay, he saw it that way,” said football manager Ange Postecoglou, noting that the technology was creating frustration in a way that traditional referring decisions did not. Meanwhile, others noted that the technology is, to a degree, now in charge. “[Referee] Michael Oliver cannot go to that monitor and say I refuse to take that recommendation,” said VAR pundit Christina Unkel. “This has been issued by FIFA as what he needs to take for consistency across the world.”
Fundamentally, smart ball technology is not so different from other video assist technologies currently being used in football. These tools are flooding in thick and fast for good reason. They are being introduced to reduce variability in refereeing decisions, and ultimately, to supposedly improve the quality of the sport.
Sadly, though, smart balls seem to be generating much the same frustration as VAR has done so in the past. It seems when a referee is solely at fault for a decision, the fans can let it go. However, when a smart ball or a video referee disallows a goal because of a matter of some inches or millimeters, there’s an uproar so predictable that you can set your watch to it.
Given the huge investment and the institutional backing, don’t expect these technologies to go away any time soon. Similarly, expect fan outrage to blossom most every time they are they used. For now, smart balls and VAR have the backing they need to stay on, so you’d best get used to them for now. | 56 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776631",
"author": "Doctor Wizard",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T14:27:51",
"content": "The way to end the controversy would be to eliminate referees entirely. Players must abide by the rules of the sensors, the technology, and the programming. Much like a video game. If the PlaySta... | 1,760,371,853.073415 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/times-up-for-mbed/ | Time’s Up For Mbed | Jenny List | [
"ARM",
"News"
] | [
"arm",
"mbed",
"microcontroller"
] | In a forum post has come the announcement that mBed, ARM’s accessible microcontroller development platform,
is to reach end-of-life in July 2026
. This means that the online platform and OS will no longer be supported by ARM, though the latter will remain an open source project. The website will be shuttered, and no new projects can be created after that date using ARM infrastructure.
mBed was originally launched back in 2009, as a competitor to the Arduino IDE for ARM’s chips. Its easy development made it attractive and there were soon an array of boards from different manufacturers supporting it, but perhaps due to its support for only the one architecture, it failed to find success. It’s certainly not the first time a single-architecture microcontroller development platform has been discontinued,
we need only look to the Intel Edison for that
, but given the success of ARM platforms in general it’s still something of a surprise. Perhaps it’s time to take the press release explanation that other platforms such as Arduino have simply been much more popular.
Will a community form around an open source mBed? Given that it’s been a definite minority among Hackaday projects over the years, while we hope it does, we’re not so sure.
mBed board image: Viswesr,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776586",
"author": "halherta",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T11:23:43",
"content": "mbed was a great idea but was marred by bugs, partial (undocumented) support for hundreds of boards and then the release of mbedos. If they stuck to supporting 1-5 boards, squashed bugs as soon as they a... | 1,760,371,853.503019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/flexures-make-robotic-fingers-simpler-to-print/ | Flexures Make Robotic Fingers Simpler To Print | Dan Maloney | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"anthropomorphic",
"biomimetic",
"compliant mechanism",
"finger",
"flexure",
"print in place",
"spring"
] | Designing an anthropomorphic robotic hand seems to make a lot of sense — right up until the point that you realize just how complex the human hand is. What works well in bone and sinew often doesn’t translate well to servos and sensors, and even building a single mechanical finger can require dozens of parts.
Or, if you’re as clever about things as [Adrian Perez] is, only one part.
His print-in-place robotic finger
, adorably dubbed “Fingie,” is a huge step toward simplifying anthropomorphic manipulators. Fingie is printed in PLA and uses flexures for the three main joints of the finger, each of which consists of two separate and opposed coil springs. The flexures allow the phalanges to bend relative to each other in response to the motion of three separate tendons that extend through a channel on the palmar aspect of the finger, very much like the real thing.
The flexures eliminate the need for bearings at each joint and greatly decrease the complexity of the finger, but the model isn’t perfect. As [Adrian] points out, the off-center attachment for the tendons makes the finger tend to curl when the joints are in flexion, which isn’t how real fingers work. That should be a pretty easy fix, though. And while we appreciate the “one and done” nature of this print, we’d almost like to see the strap-like print-in-place tendons replaced with pieces of PLA filament added as a post-processing step, to make the finger more compact and perhaps easier to control.
Despite the shortcomings, and keeping in mind that this is clearly a proof of concept, we really like where [Adrian] is going with this, and we’re looking forward to seeing a hand with five Fingies, or four Fingies and a Thumbie. It stands to be vastly simpler than something like
[Will Cogley]’s biomimetic hand
, which while an absolute masterpiece of design, is pretty daunting for most of us to reproduce.
Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for the heads up on this one. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776592",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T12:03:57",
"content": "“- right up until the point that you realize just how complex the human hand is. ”One fourth of the human bones are in the hands and feet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,371,853.357799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/sharing-3d-printing-with-kids/ | Sharing 3D Printing With Kids | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"kids"
] | If you have a hobby, it is natural to want to share it with kids. If you are interested in 3D printing, you may even have kids who want to try their hand at printing without prompting. There are a number of “kid printers” aimed specifically at that market. Are they worthwhile? How old is old enough? [Everson Siqueirar] tries out a
Kidoodle
with this 6-year-old daughter, and the results are good, as you can see in the video below.
Impressively, his daughter [Sophie] was able to set up the printer with a little help. The build plate is very small and not heated. Apparently, a glue stick is necessary for bed adhesion. The printer has WiFi but also has a collection of models you can print without any internet connection.
The results were good, and it looks like [Sophie] did all the work, which was impressive; she did a great job. While you could print some models locally and some on the network. You can also slice your own models, but if you use something like Cura or Slic3r, you’ll have to do some work to get a good profile. [Everson] tried it and managed to jam the printer. That requires adult intervention. But outside of that, [Sophie] was able to work on her own, even printing a few models while dad took a nap.
Technically, the printer has an enclosure, a large screen, and a direct drive extruder with an all-metal hot end. Not bad for a kid’s printer. It normally takes a small spool, but you can print an adapter for normal spools, although it was too fat for some spools and required a redesign.
We thought this printer was already out, but it is, alas, a Kickstarter. We’ve seen other printers try to
address this market
, including one from Mattel. You might argue that kids learn more from
building a printer
, but that has challenges, too. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776547",
"author": "Teds",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T06:44:05",
"content": "I like tech as much as anyone else here but do kids really need to be able to print lots of useless low quality plastic junk that will certainly end up in a landfill in less than 3 years ?Might get some flak... | 1,760,371,853.411366 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/turning-horrible-browser-controls-into-a-game/ | Turning Horrible Browser Controls Into A Game | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"breakout",
"browser",
"game",
"human interface device",
"javascript",
"knob-out",
"usb volume control",
"volume"
] | With all of the various keyboards, mouses (mice?), and other human interface devices (HID) available for our computers, there’s no possible way for developers to anticipate every type of input for every piece of software they build. Most of the time everything will work fine as long as some basic standards are kept, both from the hardware and software sides, but that’s not always the case. [Losso] noticed a truly terrible volume control method when visiting certain websites while also using a USB volume knob,
and used this quirk to build a
Breakout
game with it
.
It turns out his volume control knob would interact simultaneously with certain video players’ built-in volume control and the system volume for the operating system,
leading to a number of undesirable conditions
. However, the fact that this control is built in to certain browsers in the first place led to this being the foundation for the
Breakout
clone [Losso] is calling KNOB-OUT. Unlike volume buttons on something like a multimedia keyboard, the USB volume control knob can be configured much more easily to account for acceleration, making it more faithful to the original arcade version of the game. The game itself is coded in JavaScript with the source code available right in the browser.
If you’d like to play [Losso]’s game
here’s a direct link to it
although sometimes small web-based projects like these tend to experience some slowdown when they first get posted here. And, if you’re looking for some other games to play in a browser like it’s the mid-00s again, we’re fans of this project which
brings the unofficial Zelda game
Zelda Classic
to our screens. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776477",
"author": "Satacoy",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T02:54:20",
"content": "I enjoyed the Amiga Hyrbris or Battle Squadron sound samples.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6776483",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,853.450322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/low-cost-cryocooler-pumps-out-cheap-diy-liquid-nitrogen/ | Low-Cost Cryocooler Pumps Out Cheap DIY Liquid Nitrogen | Dan Maloney | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"Argon",
"compressor",
"condenser",
"cryocooler",
"ethylene",
"expansion",
"Joule-Thomson",
"nitrogen",
"propane"
] | A word of caution if you’re planning to try
this cryocooler method for making liquid nitrogen
: not only does it involve toxic and flammable gasses and pressures high enough to turn the works into a bomb, but you’re likely to deplete your rent account with money you’ll shell out for all the copper tubing and fittings. You’ve been warned.
In theory, making liquid nitrogen should be as easy as getting something cold enough that nitrogen in the air condenses. The “cold enough” part is the trick, and it’s where [Hyperspace Pirate]’s cryocooler expertise comes into play. His setup uses recycled compressors from cast-off air conditioners and relies on a mixed-gas Joule-Thomson cycle. He plays with several mixtures of propane, ethylene, methane, argon, and nitrogen, with the best results coming from argon and propane in a 70:30 percent ratio. A regenerative counterflow heat exchanger, where the cooled expanding gas flows over the incoming compressed gas to cool it, does most of the heavy lifting here, and is bolstered by a separate compressor that pre-cools the gas mixture to about -30°C before it enters the regenerative system.
There’s also a third compressor system that pre-cools the nitrogen process gas, which is currently supplied by a tank but will eventually be pulled right from thin air by a pressure swing adsorption system — basically an
oxygen concentrator
where you keep the nitrogen instead of the oxygen. There are a ton of complications in the finished system, including doodads like oil separators and needle valves to control the flow of liquid nitrogen, plus an Arduino to monitor and control the cycle. It works well enough to produce fun amounts of LN
2
on the cheap — about a quarter of the cost of commercially made stuff — with the promise of efficiency gains to come.
It does need to be said that there’s ample room for peril here, especially containing high pressures within copper plumbing. Confidence in one’s brazing skills is a must here, as is proper hydro testing of components. That said, [Hyperspace Pirate] has done some interesting work here, not least of which is keeping expenses for the cryocooler to a minimum. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776457",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2024-07-16T01:24:23",
"content": "Best intro paragraph on HaD ever. Definitely gonna read the rest!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6776734",
"author": "spaceminions",
... | 1,760,371,853.603847 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/how-the-bell-system-was-built/ | How The Bell System Was Built | Al Williams | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"att",
"bell",
"telephone"
] | We’ve often thought that while going to the moon in the 1960s was audacious, it was just the flashiest of many audacious feats attempted and accomplished in the 20th century. Imagine, for a minute, that the phone system didn’t exist today, and you stood up in front of a corporate board and said, “Let’s run copper wire to every home and business in the world.” They’d probably send you for a psychiatric evaluation. Yet we did just that, and, in the United States, that copper wire was because of
the Bell system
, which [Brian Potter] describes in a recent post.
The Bell company, regardless of many name changes and divisions, was clearly a very important company. [Brian] points out that in 1917, it was the second-largest company in the United States and continued to grow, eventually employing a whopping 1% of the entire U.S. workforce. That’s what happens when you have a monopoly on a product that is subject to wild demand. In 1900, Bell handled 5 million calls a day. By 1925, that number was over 50 million. In 1975, it was just shy of 500 million. If Wester Electric — just one part of Bell — was its own company, it would have been the 12th largest company in the U.S. during the 1970s.
From a technology point of view, the system was impressive in scale and rate of growth. In 1877, AT&T — the name after a restructuring — had 600 customers. A year later, it had 10,000. By 1881, that number was 100,000, and only 9 U.S. cities with more than 10,000 people lacked a phone exchange. By 1900, the 800,000 telephones in use required 2 million miles of wire!
That 2 million miles of wire had to go somewhere. New York City had hundreds of 90-foot poles, each carrying 300 wires, and people were complaining about the wires being in view. That caused AT&T to go underground. In 1888, a phone cable had 50 pairs of #18 wire. By 1939, #26 wire allowed 2,121 pairs of wires in a single cable.
Remember that the early phone system had no amplifiers. When tubes arrived, this allowed longer distances on smaller wires and radio links to reach the world. Bell’s monopoly allowed them to
innovate
but also hurt others
who wanted to innovate
. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776405",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T20:23:50",
"content": "Considering they are ripping out copper wire with gay abandon now you probably would be sent to the laughing academy if you suggested running copper to everyone in the country.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,853.550207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/congratulations-to-the-2024-business-card-challenge-winners/ | Congratulations To The 2024 Business Card Challenge Winners! | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"contest",
"digikey",
"hackaday"
] | When you ask a Hackaday crowd to design a business card, you should expect to be surprised by what you get. But still, we were surprised by the breadth of entries! Our judges wracked their brains to pick their top ten, and then we compared notes, and three projects rose to the top, but honestly the top ten could have all won. It was a tight field. But only three of the entries get to take home the $150 DigiKey gift certificates, so without further ado…
Blinkencard
BetaBoard
Brushless Motor and Driver Business Card Kit
Blinkencard – Pocket Altair 8800
[ajlitt]
built a full retrocomputer
, and a slick looking one to boot, in the size of a business card. Of course, you could run an Altair 8800 emulator on your cell phone, but without the entry buttons and real-live blinkenlights, it just wouldn’t be the same. What our judges loved most about this build was the use of an FPGA
and
and ESP32, for IO and storage, the reverse-mounted front PCB that doubles as a faceplate, and of course the nice 3DP bezel that hides the bodge wires from view.
BetaBoard – Tiny Particle Physics Lab
So you might have thought someone would put a retrocomputer on a business card, but
a working radiation detector
was not on our radar. [Tim – DJ8TK]’s entry makes use of not one, but six BPW34 PIN photodiodes, which have the benefit of being
well studied in the hacker radiation detection scene
. This project took a
ton
of design work, and our judges thought that the documentation along the way were as good as any physics lecture.
Brushless Motor and Driver Business Card Kit
And speaking of educational business card demos, [Andy Geppert]’s
motor driver card
not only teaches you how to wind your own coils and make a simple stepper motor, but also how to drive it. While [Andy] admits that the stepper motor design could use a few more poles for smooth operation, he also broke out the coil driver so that you can experiment by driving more professional brushless DC motors if you have them on hand. It’s a great demo, and being in a business card form factor, you can always have one on hand.
Honorable Mentions
As always, we have more awesome projects than we have prizes, so we thought we’d call out some standouts.
Wafer Thin
: [Chinchilla Optional] wowed us with
this amazing dead-bug style QR code made out of LEDs
. You know the card is thin when the LEDs are the thickest part. [erich.styger] contributed
these RFID tag cards
, beautifully laser-etched and made of 1 mm thick veneer. And bridging the Utility and Wafer Thin categories, [Maave]’s
credit-card sized door entry tool
needs to be thin if it’s going to work. Get this cut out of thin steel, and you’ll never get locked out again.
Aesthetics
: [BLANCHARD Jordan]’s
Weather Card
is cool on many fronts, but the resulting circuit sculpture combining the solar panel and the e-paper really won over our judges eyes with its understated form-follows-function beauty. On the opposite end of the spectrum, [Will Fox]’s
Foxie CardClock 2.0
goes overboard with the color LEDs, and it looks awesome.
Foxie CardClock 2.0
Credit card door entry tools
Deadbug Business Card
Wood you like my business card?
Weather Card
Madman Muntz
: Earl “Madman” Muntz was famous for cutting corners by removing parts until the thing broke, and we had a couple standout ultra-minimalist entries. [Adam Billingsley]’s
CH32V003 Business Card
targeted a $1 price tag, and this USB-capable, capacitive-touch card pulls out all the stops to get at least in the ballpark. Amazing. [Lincoln Uehara] cut corners by getting rid of the PCB entirely, and this makes his
Back-to-basics paper business card
friendly for younger builders too.
Fun and Games
: A business card with
a working 4×4 tic-tac-toe game
? [Esc]’s entry does double duty as a game and PCB design tutorial. Whether or not you should base your choice of a partner on skin resistance alone, [Un Kyu Lee]’s
Doctor Love
is a hilarious device, and background story. And finally, [Eontronics]’s
RetroMedleyCard
is an ambitious project to bring game emulation to your wallet. This project is insane, and it’s one to watch!
Utilitarian
: Our last category showcases useful cards of all sorts. From [Peter]’s
Pi Pico MSP430 Debug Probe
and programmable
4th Calculator
to [Gangwa Labs]’s
reflow hotplate
(!), there’s no shortage of function that you can pack into your pockets.
Reflow.Card
4TH Calculator
Pi Pico MSP430 Debug Probe
RetroMedleyCard
PCB Bussiness Card With 4*4 Tic Tac Toe Game
Back-to-basics paper business card
CH32V003 Business Card
Thanks to Everyone!
As always, we had more awesome entries than we have space to feature. You should go
check out all the entries over on Hackaday.io
. And thanks again to DigiKey for sponsoring these with prizes. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776390",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T19:56:45",
"content": "Congratulations to all the mentioned contestants!Some real ingenuity is shown in these cards!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,853.769666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/reverse-engineering-a-shahed-136-drone-air-data-computer/ | Reverse-Engineering A Shahed-136 Drone Air Data Computer | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Air Data Computer",
"drone",
"shahed"
] | Top of the air data computer module, with pressure sensors, RS232 driver and DC-DC converter visible. (Credit: Le Labo de Michel, YouTube)
An air data computer (ADC) is a crucial part of an avionics package that can calculate the altitude, vertical speed, air speed and more from pressure (via pitot tubes) and temperature inputs. When your airplane is a one-way attack drone like Iran’s Shahed-136, you obviously need an ADC as well, but have to focus on making it both cheap and circumvent a myriad of sanctions. As [Michel] recently found out
while reverse-engineering
one of these ADCs. Courtesy of the Russo-Ukrainian war, hundreds of these Shahed drones are being destroyed every month, with some making it back down again intact enough for some parts to end up on EBay.
The overall design as captured in
the schematic
is rather straightforward, with the component choice probably being the most notable, as it uses an STM32G071 MCU and Analog Devices
ADM3232
RS-232 driver, in addition to the two pressure sensors (by
Silicon Microstructures Inc.
, now owned by TE). The DC-DC converter is a Mornsun URB24055-6WR3.
With the board in working condition, [Michel] hooks it up to a test setup to see the output on the serial interface when applying different pressures to the pressure sensor inputs. This results in a lot of ASCII data being output, all containing different values that were calculated by the firmware on the STM32 MCU. In the drone this data would then be used by the flight computer to make adjustments. Overall it’s a rather basic design that doesn’t seem to have a dedicated temperature sensor either, though [Michel] is still analyzing some details. A firmware dump would of course be rather fascinating as well. | 22 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776365",
"author": "EH",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T18:11:12",
"content": "It’s not doxing when all the information is right on the data sheet. The maker of that DC-DC converter:Mornsun Guangzhou Science & Technology Co., Ltd.Address: No. 5, Kehui St. 1, Kehui Development Center, Sci... | 1,760,371,853.979123 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/nitric-acid-is-the-hot-new-way-to-pick-locks/ | Nitric Acid Is The Hot New Way To Pick Locks | Lewin Day | [
"News"
] | [
"germany",
"lock pick",
"lock picking",
"lockpick",
"lockpicking"
] | Lockpicking is a grand skill to have, and one that’s often presumed to be one of the dark arts of the burglar. However, a new technique has come to the fore in some European contexts. It appears
nitric acid is being used to damage locks
to allow criminals to gain entry into residential premises.
Germany’s
Bild
has covered this matter, as has
Feuerwehr Magazine.
The technique has apparently come to prominence in the last couple of years. Attackers pour the corrosive liquid into the keyway of a typical door lock. This damages the cylinder, and perhaps the pins inside as well. Once the metal has been eaten away and the structure of the lock is sufficiently degraded, it can presumably be forced open quite easily with hand tools. The technique is apparently especially effective in Germany, where locks are typically installed with the pins facing down. This makes it easy for any liquid trickled into the lock to eat away at the pins in the bottom.
German authorities advised people to be on the look out for discoloration around door locks. If seen, it’s important to avoid contact with any corrosive liquid that may have been used on the lock.
It’s a nasty technique that doesn’t just damage locks, but doors as well! Meanwhile, if you’re
learning the art of lockpicking
, just remember not to practice on any
important locks
you might actually need. More pictures after the break.
Wow new lockpicking meta just dropped? Nitric acid
https://t.co/rWHabR3HuY
https://t.co/O95nTlEOdd
pic.twitter.com/EVFWFwGLlQ
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity)
July 14, 2024 | 60 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776294",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T15:38:12",
"content": "picking locks does destroy them, unlike acid, so inaccurate headline",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6776296",
"author": "dudefrom... | 1,760,371,853.917227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-24-hour-macro-pad/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The 24-Hour Macro Pad | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"dyeing keycaps",
"Fifi keyboard",
"getting a win",
"Helios",
"Helios-Klimax",
"keycap dyeing",
"macro pad",
"macropad",
"Moonlander",
"PBT",
"Smart ring"
] | They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but
this great little music-controlling macro pad by [nibbler] actually was
. Why? Because as Hackaday’s own [Donald Papp] reminded us,
we all need a win sometimes
, especially as projects drag on and on without any end in sight.
Image by [nibbler] via
Toxic Antidote
As [nibbler] points out, what really constitutes a win? Set the bar too low and it won’t feel like one at all. Too high, and you may become too discouraged to cross the finish line. With that in mind, [nibbler] set the bar differently, limiting themselves to what could be done in the one day per week they have to devote time to electronic matters.
One-day turnaround usually means using parts on hand and limiting oneself to already-learned skills and techniques. No problem for [nibbler], who, armed with an Arduino Leonardo Tiny and a some colorful push buttons, set about designing a suitable enclosure, and then putting it all together. Was this a win? [nibbler] says yes, and so do I.
Keycaps To Dye For
Image by [Nosp1] via
reddit
When I saw
[Nosp1]’s reddit post about dyeing their Moonlander keycaps
, I remembered I was going to do that myself one of these days. While I was planning to use good ol’ Rit dye, [Nosp1] pointed to a video they watched that uses something called iDye Poly. Irritating name aside, this stuff looks like it does a fine job of dyeing keycaps evenly and vibrantly.
It’s important that you realize there is both iDye and iDye Poly out there, and the latter is what you want. The difference is mainly in the extra lump of stuff which is dubbed the color intensifier. You will also want a PBT keycaps for sure, not ABS, and a big strainer if you want to dye them more like Easter eggs.
Once you’ve gathered a pot to dye them in and some water, just turn up the heat to a simmer and stir in the iDye gunk until it dissolves. Throw in the keycaps, wait 10-15 minutes, and then rinse them off and let them dry and Bob’s your proverbial uncle. The chap in the video below only did a handful of caps, which looks pretty snazzy.
The Centerfold: Six Sides of Miss Fifi
Image by [pascuajr] via
reddit
Despite all the angles presented here (
and more here
), we don’t know a lot about [pascuajur]’s keyboard, but that’s okay. We do know that it’s a Fifi,
which is open source
, or you can buy one already made. It’s nice to imagine that those switches are whatever color you want, isn’t it?
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 Helios Typewriter
Image via
Antikey Chop
Some people like their keyboards small, like really small. So small that they end up with more layers than a fancy restaurant dessert. Apparently this has pretty much always been the case, as evidenced by
the Helios typewriter
introduced in 1908.
With just two rows of ten keys each, Justin Wilhelm Bamberger & Co.’s machine could output 80 characters total, thanks to a four-tier, cast-aluminium typewheel and three shift keys located to the left of the keyboard.
You can get a closer look here
, on a late model of the typewriter.
Operation looked like this: whenever a key was pressed, the typewheel would spin and move forward to strike the paper. Not a whole lot seems to be known about these little machines. By 1909, production had been taken over by the Kanzler typewriter factory in Berlin. Both companies eventually dissolved, and by 1915, the rights were acquired by A. Ney & Co. who renamed it the Helios-Klimax.
Via
reddit
ICYMI: ErgO, Computer Interactions Can Be Comfortable
Image by [Sophia] via
Hackaday.IO
Okay, so this is not a keyboard. But it’s definitely an input of interest.
ErgO is a smart ring that acts as an HID
to extend your keyboard and mouse with something much, much cooler. No longer will you be tied to the home row. Imagine sitting or standing in any position you want, controlling your computer with ease.
ErgO is built out of breakout boards, so it’s simple to recreate. It has a lot of features that you don’t get with standard equipment, like ultra portability
and
device-switching capability.
At the heart of this ring is the Seeed Xiao nRF52840, which of course controls Bluetooth communication with your computer. Add to that a clickable Pimoroni trackball and some capacitive touch sensors, and you have a really capable smart ring that should be fairly easy to build or remix thanks to [Sophia]’s detailed instructions.
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
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776298",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T15:50:08",
"content": "“Rome wasn’t built in a day…”But it was burned in one!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6776486",
"author": "crispe... | 1,760,371,853.81881 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/linksys-velop-routers-caught-sending-wifi-creds-in-the-clear/ | Linksys Velop Routers Caught Sending WiFi Creds In The Clear | Tom Nardi | [
"internet hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"linksys",
"plaintext",
"router"
] | A troubling report from the Belgian consumer protection group Testaankoop: several models of Velop Pro routers from Linksys were found to be sending WiFi configuration data out to a remote server during the setup process. That would be bad enough, but not only are these routers reporting private information to the mothership, they are
doing it in clear text for anyone to listen in on
.
Testaankoop says that while testing out the Pro WiFi 6E and Pro 7 versions of Velop routers, they discovered that unencrypted packets were being sent to a server hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). In these packets, they discovered not only the SSID of the user’s wireless network, but the encryption key necessary to join it. There were also various tokens included that could be used to identify network and user.
While the report doesn’t go into too much detail, it seems this information is being sent as part of the configuration process when using the official Linksys mobile application. If you want to avoid having your information bounced around the Internet, you can still use the router’s built-in web configuration menus from a browser on the local network — just like in the good old days.
The real kicker here is the response from Linksys, or more accurately, the lack thereof. Testaankoop says they notified them of their discovery back in November of 2023, and got no response. There’s even been firmware updates for the affected routers since then, but the issue is still unresolved.
Testaankoop ends the review by strongly recommending users avoid these particular models of Linksys Velop routers, which given the facts, sounds like solid advice to us. They also express their disappointment in how the brand, a fixture in the consumer router space for decades, has handled the situation. If you ask us, things started going downhill
once they stopped running Linux on their hardware
. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776109",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T12:02:28",
"content": "Correction, first it’s sent to NSA, then AWS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6776379",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T19... | 1,760,371,854.030565 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/07/15/simple-version-of-pong-played-on-a-row-of-leds/ | Simple Version OfPongPlayed On A Row Of LEDs | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"1D Pong",
"arduino nano",
"pong"
] | As far as video games go,
Pong
is already about as simple as it gets. But if even two dimensions is a bit more than you’re looking to tackle, [mircemk] shows how you can
distill the core gameplay of this iconic title
to its absolute minimum using an Arduino and a row of LEDs.
While [mircemk] brings their usual design aesthetic and flash to the project, this one could truly be done as a parts bin build. All you really need is a microcontroller with enough I/O pins (here, an Arduino Nano is used), a couple of buttons, and the aforementioned LEDs. A 16×2 LCD and a buzzer have been added to improve on the user interface a bit, but even that isn’t strictly required.
To play, each user holds their button and gets ready to hit it as soon as the LED closest to them lights up. Again, [mircemk] spruces this build up by offering both integrated buttons on the front panel of the game, as well as a pair of external “controllers” so you don’t have to crowd around the main unit. In this incarnation the score is shown on the LCD, but swapping that out for a pair of seven-segment LEDs could give the whole thing a bit more of a retro flair.
This isn’t the first time [mircemk] has tackled 1D Pong — if you can spring for addressable LEDs, you can
pull the whole thing off with significantly less wiring
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6776055",
"author": "Senile Data Systems",
"timestamp": "2024-07-15T10:05:56",
"content": "15 years ago I played PONG on a single character of that LCD. I’m collecting vintage video game consoles. Now one that I built myself can be considered vintage. Damn, time!I was sooo close to ... | 1,760,371,854.10419 |
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