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https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/build-your-own-tape-recorder-player/ | Build Your Own Tape Recorder/Player | Al Williams | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"tape deck",
"tape head",
"tape player",
"tape recorder"
] | If you want to read something from magnetic tape, you need a tape head, right? Or you could do like [Igor Brichkov] and
make your own
. It looks surprisingly simple. He used a washer with a small slot cut in it and a coil of wire.
The first experiment, in the first video below, is using a commercial tape head connected to a preamp. Music playing “through” the homemade head is readable by the commercial tape reader. This is a prelude to creating an
entire tape deck
using the head, which you can see in the second video below.
The homemade deck is a collection of small protoboards along with some hodgepodge components, a Bluetooth board, and aluminum foil shielding. One of the protoboards has a simple VU meter using eight LEDs.
We aren’t sure what possessed [Igor] to want to make a tape deck, and — to be fair — it looks like he borrowed the transport mechanism from a commercial player. But we never really need an excuse to build something cool, so we appreciate him sharing his DIY tape deck with us and the world.
If you want to know just about anything related to tape decks, we have some
suggested reading for you
. If you have trouble finding parts for your cassette collection, maybe
fire up your 3D printer
. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769627",
"author": "Senile Data Systems",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T23:15:51",
"content": "I recently built a tape player (just a player) out of a full logic car radio cassette player (no erase head, so no recording). The player mech was virgin but the radio was coded, so I reverse-... | 1,760,371,877.575106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/tiny-tapeout-4-a-pwm-clone-of-covox-speech-thing/ | Tiny Tapeout 4: A PWM Clone Of Covox Speech Thing | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware"
] | [
"ASIC",
"audio",
"dac",
"fpga",
"Github Actions",
"pwm",
"retrocomputing",
"synthesis",
"testbench",
"tinytapeout",
"verilog"
] | Tiny Tapout is an interesting project, leveraging the power of cloud computing and collaborative purchasing to make the mysterious art of IC design more accessible for hardware hackers. [Yeo Kheng Meng] is one such hacker, and they have produced their
very first custom IC
for use with their retrocomputing efforts. As they lament, they left it a little late for the shuttle run submission deadline, so they came up with a very simple project with the equivalent behaviour of the Covox Speech Thing, which is just a basic R-2R ladder DAC hanging from a PC parallel port.
The computed gate-level routing of the ASIC layout
The plan was to capture an 8-bit input bus and compare it against a free-running counter. If the input value is larger than the counter, the output goes high; otherwise, it goes low. This produces a PWM waveform representing the input value. Following the digital output with an RC low-pass filter will generate an analogue representation. It’s all very simple stuff. A few details to contend with are specific to Tiny Tapout, such as taking note of the enable and global resets. These are passed down from the chip-level wrapper to indicate when your design has control of the physical IOs and is selected for operation. [Yeo] noticed that the GitHub post-synthesis simulation failed due to not taking note of the reset condition and initialising those pesky flip-flops.
After throwing the design down onto a Mimas A7 Artix 7 FPGA board for a quick test, data sent from a parallel port-connected PC popped out as a PWM waveform as expected, and some test audio could be played. Whilst it may be true that you don’t have to prototype on an FPGA, and some would argue that it’s a lot of extra effort for many cases, without a good quality graphical simulation and robust testbench, you’re practically working blind. And that’s not how working chips get made.
If you want to read into Tiny Tapeout some more, then
we’ve a quick guide for that
. Or, perhaps
hear it direct from the team instead
? | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769711",
"author": "Benjamin HENRION",
"timestamp": "2024-06-22T10:13:37",
"content": "PC Parallel Port! Do you know if this card can be used for JTAG? I have old JTAG software that still require parallel port, but I see it requires an old 4.4 LTS Linux kernel:https://www.startech.... | 1,760,371,877.342787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/2024-business-card-challenge-integrated-game-card/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: Integrated Game Card | Dave Rowntree | [
"contests",
"Games",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge"
] | [Dan Schnur] has a simple strategy to ensure their
business card stays on the client’s desk and doesn’t just get lobbed in a drawer
: make it into a simple gaming platform. This entry into the 2024 Business Card Challenge is based around the
tinyjoypad
project, integrating an SSD1306 OLED display, joypad, and push button.
Powered by the superstar
ATTiny85
, the electronics are really not all that much, just a sprinkling of passives to support the display and the six switch inputs from the joystick and push button. Or at least, that’s how much we can glean from the PCB images, as the PCB design files are not provided in the
project GitHub
.
Leaving the heavy lifting of the software to the tinyjoypad project, the designer can concentrate on the actual job at hand and the reason the business card exists to stay at the forefront of the client’s mind. In the meantime, the card can be a useful distraction for those idle moments. A few such distractions include a tiny version of
Missile Command
(as shown above),
tiny tris
, and a very cut-down
Q-bert
. Sadly, that last game isn’t quite the same without that distinctive sound. | 10 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769589",
"author": "brad",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T19:56:56",
"content": "Cool swag to hand out.To a technical audience, though, use of a tired decades-old 8-bit MCU convey a bit of a stodgy / out-of-date image. If you’re trying to call out how cutting edge and innovative you are,... | 1,760,371,878.010339 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/23/nearly-30-years-of-freedos-and-looking-ahead-to-the-future/ | Nearly 30 Years Of FreeDOS And Looking Ahead To The Future | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"freedos"
] | Blinky, the friendly FreeDOS mascot.
The first version of FreeDOS was released on September 16 of 1994, following Microsoft’s decision to cease development on MS-DOS in favor of Windows. This version 0.01 was still an Alpha release, with 0.1 from 1998 the first Beta and the first stable release (1.0, released on September 3 2006) still a while off. Even so, its main developer [Jim Hall] and the like-minded developers on the FreeDOS team managed to put together a very functional DOS using a shell, kernel and other elements which already partially existed before the FreeDOS (initially PD-DOS, for Public Domain DOS) idea was pitched by [Jim].
Nearly thirty years later, [Jim]
reflects on these decades
, and the strong uptake of what to many today would seem to be just a version of an antiquated OS. When it comes to embedded and industrial applications, of course, a simple DOS is all you want and need, not to mention for a utility you boot from a USB stick. Within the retro computing community
FreeDOS
has proven to be a boon as well, allowing for old PCs to use a modern DOS rather than being stuck on a version of MS-DOS from the early 90s.
For FreeDOS’ future, [Jim] is excited to see what other applications people may find for this OS, including as a teaching tool on account of how uncomplicated FreeDOS is. In a world of complicated OSes that no single mortal can comprehend any more, FreeDOS is really quite a breath of fresh air. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769942",
"author": "Itsemast",
"timestamp": "2024-06-23T10:56:11",
"content": "Been using FreeDOS for ages, and sometimes it’s just the right too for the job. Recently, however, things like USB and networking started to be taken for granted, and on FreeDOS they require extra steps ... | 1,760,371,877.765801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/22/clearly-3d-printing/ | Clearly 3D Printing | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"mouse kit",
"transparent resin"
] | [Joel] picked up a wireless mouse kit. The idea is you get some 3D printing files and hardware. You can print the shell or make modifications to it. You can even design your own shell from scratch. But [Joel] took a different approach. He created a case
with transparent resin
. You can see the impressive result in the video below.
While the idea of buying the mouse as a kit simplifies things, we would be more inclined to just gut a mouse and design a new case for it if we were so inclined. We were more impressed with the results with the transparent resin.
Having transparent 3D printing capabilities opens up some artistic possibilities, like the benchy inside a glass bottle that makes a guest appearance on the video. The only limitation we can see is that your entire print has to be clear unless you do some
hacky workarounds
. For example, it would have been cool to have a mouse that was only transparent through a window. Short of painting the finished product, this would be tough to do with modern printers.
Even though you can get transparent filament, FDM printers have to work hard to get even sort of
transparent
. Even then, the results
can be impressive
, but nothing like what [Joel] is doing in resin, of course. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6770045",
"author": "Doug",
"timestamp": "2024-06-23T17:46:00",
"content": "So he used off the shelf transparent resin to print a premade model in a Form 4 printer? What is noteworthy about this? I wouldn’t even call the end result truly transparent as it still diffuses the light qu... | 1,760,371,877.392991 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/22/in-future-printer-documents-you/ | In Future, Printer Documents You | Al Williams | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"machine identification code",
"printers",
"steganography"
] | [Jason Dookeran] reminded us of something we don’t like to think about. Your printer probably adds barely noticeable dots to everything you print. It does it on purpose, so that if you print something naughty, the good guys can figure out what printer it came from. This is the machine identification code and it has been around since the days that the US government feared that color copiers would allow wholesale counterfiting.
The technology dates back to Xerox and Canon devices from the mid-80s, but it was only publicly acknowledged in 2004. With color printers, the MIC — machine identification code — is a series of tiny yellow dots. Typically, each dot is about 10 microns across and spaced about a millimeter from each other. The pattern prints all over the page so that even a fragment of, say, a ransom note can be identified.
Apparently, printers use different encoding schemes, but reading the dots is usually done by scanning them under a blue light.
The EFF has an
out-of-date list
that identifies many printers that track. But they point out that some printers may use a different method, especially those that can’t print yellow. They also mention that it is likely that “all recent commercial color laser printers” print some kind of code.
If you want to check your printer, [Jason] points out an
Instructable
and a website that can
decode
common patterns.
While we can think of times we are glad people can figure out the origin of a death threat or a ransom note, we can also think of times when we would like whistleblowers or people with different opinions to be able to print things without fear of retribution. But either way, the technology is an interesting real-world example of steganography.
We
prefer these yellow dots
. Yellow steganography reminds us of
turmeric
.
Title image: “Yellow dots produced by an HP Color LaserJet CP1515n”
CC BY-SA 3.0
by [Ianusisu]. | 76 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769877",
"author": "Haxor",
"timestamp": "2024-06-23T03:04:51",
"content": "At one point, all you had to do was switch to Overhead Transparency mode and the dots would not print.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6770292",
... | 1,760,371,877.961897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/22/an-arduino-nano-clone-in-a-dip-sized-footprint/ | An Arduino Nano Clone In A DIP-Sized Footprint | Dan Maloney | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"atmega328",
"ATtiny3217",
"dip",
"nano",
"smd"
] | Nobody doubts the utility of the Arduino Nano and its many clones, and chances are good you’ve got at least one or two of the tiny dev boards within arm’s reach right now. But as small as it is, the board still takes up a fair amount of real estate, especially on solderless breadboards during the prototyping phase of a project. Wouldn’t it be nice to shrink down the Nano just a bit and regain a couple of rows for plugging in components and jumpers?
It looks like [Albert van Dalen] thought so, and he managed to get
a Nano’s functionality — and then some — onto a DIP-26 footprint
. The aptly named “Nano DIP,” which at 33 mm x 10 mm — about the same size as the ATmega328 on the Arduino Uno — will tickle the miniaturization fans out there. The board is built around an ATtiny3217 and has almost all of the Nano’s features, like a USB port, reset button, built-in LEDs, 5 V regulator, and preloaded bootloader. Its big extra feature is the 350-kilosamples-per-second 8-bit DAC, while sacrificing external crystal pins and a 3.3 V regulator.
To make the board cheap enough to manufacture, [Albert] elected a minimum component size of 0402, which made squeezing all the parts onto the board challenging. The MCU barely fits between the header pin pads, and the Micro USB jack had to be a vertical-mount type. It does the business, though, so if you’re looking to free up a little breadboard space, check it out. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769855",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2024-06-23T00:13:58",
"content": "Doubted. And none of them in sight.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769864",
"author": "WacKEDmaN",
"timestamp": "2024-06-23T01:21:48",
"co... | 1,760,371,877.522369 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/22/uncovering-chatgpt-usage-in-academic-papers-through-excess-vocabulary/ | Uncovering ChatGPT Usage In Academic Papers Through Excess Vocabulary | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"artifical intelligence",
"ChatGPT"
] | Frequencies of PubMed abstracts containing certain words. Black lines show counterfactual extrapolations from 2021–22 to 2023–24. The first six words are affected by ChatGPT; the last three relate to major events that influenced scientific writing and are shown for comparison. (Credit: Kobak et al., 2024)
That students these days love to use ChatGPT for assistance with reports and other writing tasks is hardly a secret, but in academics it’s becoming ever more prevalent as well. This raises the question of whether ChatGPT-assisted academic writings can be distinguished somehow. According to [Dmitry Kobak] and colleagues this is the case, with a strong sign of ChatGPT use being the presence of a lot of flowery excess vocabulary in the text. As detailed in
their prepublication paper
, the frequency of certain style words is a remarkable change in the used vocabulary of the published works examined.
For their study they looked at over 14 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 obtained via PubMed. These abstracts were then analyzed for word usage and frequency, which shows both natural increases in word frequency (e.g. from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and Ebola outbreak), as well as massive spikes in excess vocabulary that coincide with the public availability of ChatGPT and similar LLM-based tools.
In total 774 unique excess words were annotated. Here ‘excess’ means ‘outside of the norm’, following the pattern of ‘excess mortality’ where mortality during one period noticeably deviates from patterns established during previous periods. In this regard the bump in words like
respiratory
are logical, but the surge in style words like
intricate
and
notably
would seem to be due to LLMs having a penchant for such flowery, overly dramatized language.
The researchers have made the
analysis code available
for those interested in giving it a try on another corpus. The main author also
addressed
the question of whether ChatGPT might be influencing people to write more like an LLM. At this point it’s still an open question of whether people would be more inclined to use ChatGPT-like vocabulary or actively seek to avoid sounding like an LLM. | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769835",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2024-06-22T22:10:53",
"content": "Interesting! I wonder if this can even distinguish different LLMs?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769838",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,877.453519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/22/2024-business-card-challenge-noisecard-judges-the-sound-around-you/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: NoiseCard Judges The Sound Around You | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Microcontrollers",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"noise",
"solar",
"stm32",
"STM32G031J6"
] | Let’s face it: even with the rise of the electric car, the world is a noisy place. And it seems like it has only gotten worse in recent years. But how can we easily quantify the noise around us and know whether it is considered an unhealthy decibel level?
That is where the NoiseCard comes in
. This solar-powered solution can go anywhere from the regrettable open office plan to the busy street, thanks to a couple of 330 µF capacitors. It’s based on the low-power STM32G031J6 and uses a MEMS microphone to pick up sound from the back of the card, which the code is optimized for. Meanwhile, the LEDs on the front indicate the ambient noise level, ranging from a quiet 40 dB and under to an ear-splitting 105 dB or greater.
When it comes to building something the size of a business card, every component is under scrutiny for size and usefulness. So even the LEDs are optimized for brightness and low power consumption. Be sure to check it out in action after the break in various environments. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769845",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2024-06-22T22:44:05",
"content": "I’m curious how you would calibrate something like this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769856",
"author": "Joseph",
"times... | 1,760,371,877.692881 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/22/thanks-for-the-great-comments/ | Thanks For The Great Comments! | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"comments",
"enclosures",
"newsletter"
] | Every once in a while, there’s a Hackaday article where the comments are hands-down the best part of a post. This happened this week with Al Williams’
Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?
. I guess it’s not so surprising that the comments were full of awesome answers – it was an “Ask Hackaday” after all. But you all delivered!
A technique that I had never considered came up a few times: instead of engraving the front of an opaque panel, like one made of aluminum or something, instead if you’re able to make the panel out of acrylic, you can paint the back side, laser or engrave into it, and then paint over with a contrast color. Very clever!
Simply printing the panel out onto paper and laminating it got a number of votes, and for those who are 3D printing the enclosure anyway, simply embossing the letters into the surface had a number of fans. The trick here is in getting some contrast into the letters, and most suggested changing filament. All I know is that I’ve tried to do it by painting the insides of the letters white, and it’s too fiddly for me.
But my absolute favorite enclosure design technique got mentioned a number of times: cardboard-aided design. Certainly for simple or disposable projects, there’s nothing faster than just cutting up some cardboard and taping it into the box of your desires. I’ll often do this to get the sizes and locations of components right – it’s only really a temporary solution. Although some folks have had success with treating the cardboard with a glue wash, paint, or simply wrapping it in packing tape to make it significantly more robust. Myself, if it ends up being a long-term project, I’ll usually transfer the cardboard design to 3DP or cut out thin plywood.
I got sidetracked here, though. What I really wanted to say was “thanks!” to everyone who submitted their awesome comments to Al’s article. We’ve had some truly hateful folks filling the comment section with trash lately, and I’d almost given up hope. But then along comes an article like this and restores my faith. Thanks, Hackaday!
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
! | 41 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769760",
"author": "Johnpauljones",
"timestamp": "2024-06-22T15:20:15",
"content": "The billboard in the artwork reminds me of the Led Zeppelin symbols.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769770",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"... | 1,760,371,877.653425 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/hackaday-podcast-episode-276-a-mac-on-a-pico-ropes-on-the-test-stand-a-battleship-up-on-blocks/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 276: A Mac On A Pico, Ropes On The Test Stand, A Battleship Up On Blocks | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | The week gone by was rich with fun hacks, and Elliot and Dan teamed up this time around to run them down for everyone. The focus this week seemed to trend to old hardware, from the recently revived
Voyager 1
to a 1940s car radio, a homebrew instrument from 1979, a paper tape reader, and a 128k Mac emulator built from an RP2040.
Newer hacks include a 3D-printed bottle labeler, a very hackable smart ring, and lessons learned about programming robots. We also took a look at turning old cell phones into Linux machines, making sure climbing ropes don’t let you down, and snooping on orbital junk with a cool new satellite.
We wrapped things up with a discussion of just how weird our solar system is, and Dan getting really jealous about Tom Nardi’s recent trip to see the battleship
New Jersey
from an up close and personal perspective.
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 276 Show Notes:
News:
2024 Business Card Contest
Voyager 1 Once Again Returning Science Data From All Four Instruments
What’s that Sound?
Galaga: Congrats to [DrJon] for guessing it right. With exclamation points.
Don’t get caught playing at work
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
New Part Day: A Hackable Smart Ring
Bluetooth Ring Hacking, OTA Firmware upload – YouTube
GitHub – atc1441/ATC_RF03_Ring: Findings and custom firmware for the Colmi R02 (and similar) Smart Ring with RF03 BlueX SoC
A Brief Look Inside A Homebrew Digital Sampler From 1979
Homebrew Circuit Explores The Mysteries Of Analog-to-Digital Conversion
Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?
PostmarketOS Now Boots On Over 250 Devices
Lindroid Promises True Linux On Android
Ask Hackaday: Why Aren’t We Hacking Cellphones?
Dan’s mom’s “danger pillow” phone
When Your Rope Is Your Life
Probably The Cheapest Mac Emulation Hardware
Programming Robots Is Hard, Figuring Out How To Make It Easier Is Harder
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Harmonic Table Keyboard Brings Old Idea Back To Life
Astroscale’s ADRAS-J Satellite Takes Up-Close Photo Of Discarded Rocket Stage
3D Printing A Bottle Labeling Assembly Line
Dan’s Picks:
Use Your Thinkpad X1 Tablet’s Keyboard Standalone
A 1940s Car Radio Receives Some Love
Homebrew Reader Brings Paper Tape Programs Back To Life
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Solar System Is Weirder Than You Think
Taking A Look Underneath The Battleship New Jersey
Megalophobia (Fear of Large Objects): Symptoms & Treatment | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,878.058891 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/see-them-knocking-with-a-doorbell-alert/ | See Them Knocking With A Doorbell Alert | Kristina Panos | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"555 timer",
"556 timer",
"9v",
"doorbell",
"led"
] | Picture it: you’re on the treadmill, running through a forest, sweating like a pig, and the doorbell rings because a package is being delivered. Would you even hear it? Chances are, if you’re rocking out to music on headphones and your treadmill is as noisy as [Antonio]’s, you wouldn’t, and you’d once again face the dreaded ‘we’ll try later’ slip.
What you need is
something that thing listens for the doorbell and flashes a giant 20 mm red LED
to alert you. Could this be done with a 555? Yes, in fact, [Antonio] used a pair of them in the form of the 556 on the alert side.
The first 555 is wired up in astable mode to control the tempo of the flashing light, and the second timer is in monostable mode to control the length of time the light flashes. Power comes from the doorbell’s 9V, which is wired up through an existing Ethernet jack.
Now whenever the doorbell rings, [Antonio] has 60 seconds of flashing light in order to react, stop the treadmill, and jump off to answer the door. To conserve power when [Antonio] is relaxing, there’s an on/off switch. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769516",
"author": "Misterlaneous",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T17:03:14",
"content": "This won’t help with all those times that they leave a slip and don’t even knock.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769533",
"author":... | 1,760,371,878.58539 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/this-week-in-security-chat-control-vulnerability-extortion-and-emoji-malware/ | This Week In Security: Chat Control, Vulnerability Extortion, And Emoji Malware | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"android",
"php",
"This Week in Security"
] | Way back in 2020, I actually read the proposed US legislation known as EARN IT, and
with some controversy
, concluded that much of the criticism of that bill was inaccurate. Well what’s old is new again, except this time
it’s the European Union that’s wrestling
with how to police online Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). And from what I can tell of reading
the actual legislation
(pdf), this time it really is that bad.
The legislation lays out two primary goals, both of them problematic. The first is detection, or what some are calling “upload moderation”. The technical details are completely omitted here, simply stating that services “… take reasonable measures to mitigate the risk of their services being misused for such abuse …” The implication here is that providers would do some sort of automated scanning to detect illicit text or visuals, but exactly what constitutes “reasonable measures” is left unspecified.
The second goal is the detection order. It’s worth pointing out that interpersonal communication services are explicitly mentioned as required to implement these goals. From the bill:
Providers of hosting services and providers of interpersonal communications services that have received a detection order shall execute it by installing and operating technologies approved by the Commission to detect the dissemination of known or new child sexual abuse material or the solicitation of children…
This bill is careful not to prohibit end-to-end encryption, nor require that such encryption be backdoored. Instead, it requires that the
apps themselves
be backdoored, to spy on users before encryption happens. No wonder
Meredith Whittaker has promised to pull the Signal app out of the EU if it becomes law
. As this scanning is done prior to encryption, it’s technically not breaking end-to-end encryption.
You may wonder why that’s such a big deal. Why is it a non-negotiable for the Signal app to not look for CSAM in messages prior to encryption? For starters, it’s a violation of user trust and an intentional weakening of the security of the Signal system. But maybe most importantly, it puts a mechanism in place that will undoubtedly prove too tempting for future governments. If Signal can be forced into looking for CSAM in the EU, why not anti-government speech in China?
This story is ongoing, with the latest news that
the EU has delayed the next step in attempting to ratify the proposal
. It’s great news, but the future is still uncertain. For more background and analysis, see our conversation with the minds behind Matrix, on this very topic:
Bounty or Extortion?
A bit of drama played out over Twitter this week. The Kraken cryptography exchange had a problem where a deposit could be interrupted, and funds added to the Kraken account without actually transferring funds to back the deposit. A security research group, which turned out to be the CertiK company, discovered and disclosed the flaw via email.
Kraken Security Update:
On June 9 2024, we received a Bug Bounty program alert from a security researcher. No specifics were initially disclosed, but their email claimed to find an “extremely critical” bug that allowed them to artificially inflate their balance on our platform.
— Nick Percoco (@c7five)
June 19, 2024
All seemed well, and the Kraken team managed to roll a hotfix out in an impressive 47 minutes. But things got weird when they cross referenced the flaw to see if anyone had exploited it. Three accounts had used it to duplicate money. The first use was for all of four dollars, which is consistent with doing legitimate research. But additionally, there were more instances from two other users, totaling close to $3 million in faked transfers — not to mention transfers of *real* money back out of those accounts. Kraken asked for the details and the money back.
According to the Kraken account, the researchers refused, and instead wanted to arrange a call with their “business development team”. The implication is that the transferred money was serving as a bargaining chip to request a higher bug bounty payout. According to Kraken, that’s extortion.
There is a second side to this story, of course. CertiK has
a response on their x.com account
where they claim to have wanted to return the transferred money, but they were just testing Kraken’s risk control system. There are things about this story that seem odd. At the very least, it’s unwise to transfer stolen currency in this way. At worst, this was an attempt at real theft that was thwarted. The end result is that
the funds were eventually completed
.
There are two fundamental problems with vuln disclosure/bounty:
#1 companies think security researchers are trying to extort them when they are not
#2 security researchers trying to extort companies
https://t.co/I7vnk3oXi5
— Robert Graham 𝕏 (@ErrataRob)
June 20, 2024
Report Bug, Get Nastygram
For the other side of the coin, [Lemon] found a trivial flaw in a traffic controller system. After turning it in,
he was rewarded with an odd letter
that was a combination of “thank you” and your work “may have constituted a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act”. This is not how you respond to responsible disclosure.
I received my first cease and desist for responsibly disclosing a critical vulnerability that gives a remote unauthenticated attacker full access to modify a traffic controller and change stoplights. Does this make me a Security Researcher now?
pic.twitter.com/ftW35DxqeF
— Lemon (@Lemonitup)
June 18, 2024
Emoji Malware
We don’t talk much about malware in South Asia, but this is an interesting one.
DISGOMOJI is a malware
attributed to a Pakistani group, mainly targeting government Linux machines in India. What really makes it notable is that the command and control system uses emoji in Discord channels. The camera emoji instructs the malware to take a screenshot. A fox triggers a hoovering of the Firefox profiles, and so on. Cute!
Using Roundcube to break PHP
This is a slow moving vulnerability, giving that the core is
a 24-year old buffer overflow in
iconv()
in glibc
. [Charles Fol] found this issue, which can pop up when using
iconv()
to convert to the
ISO-2022-CN-EXT
character set, and has been working on how to actually trigger the bug in a useful way. Enter PHP. OK, that’s not entirely accurate, since the crash was originally found in PHP. It’s more like we’re giving up on finding something else, and going back to PHP.
The core vulnerability can only overwrite one, two, or three bytes past the end of a buffer. To make use of that, the PHP bucket structure can be used. This is a growable doubly-linked list that is used for data handling. Chunked HTTP messages can be used to build a multi-bucket structure, and triggering the
iconv()
flaw overwrites one of the pointers in that structure. Bumping that pointer by a few bytes lands in attacker controlled data, which can land in a fake data structure, and continuing the dechunking procedure gives us an arbitrary memory write. At that point, a function pointer just has to be pointed at
system()
for code execution.
That’s a great theoretical attack chain, but actually getting there in the wild is less straightforward. There has been a notable web application
identified that is vulnerable: Roundcube
. Upon sending an email, the user can specify the addresses, as well as the character set parameter. Roundcube makes an
iconv()
call, triggering the core vulnerability. And thus an authenticated user has a path to remote code execution.
Bits and Bytes
Speaking of email, do you know the characters that are allowed in an email address? Did you know that the local user part of an email address
can be a quoted string, with many special characters allowed
? I wonder if every mail server and email security device realized that quirk? Apparently not, at least in the case of MailCleaner, which had a set of flaws allowing such an email to lead to full appliance takeover. Keep an eye out for other devices and applications to fall to this same quirk.
Nextcloud has a pair of vulnerabilities to pay attention to, with
the first being
an issue where a user with read and share permissions to an object could reshare it with additional permissions. The second is more troubling, giving an attacker a potential method to
bypass a two-factor authentication requirement
. Fixes are available.
Pointed out by [Herr Brain] on
Hackaday’s Discord
, we have a bit of bad news about the Arm Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE) security feature. Namely,
speculative execution can reveal the needed MTE tags
about 95% of the time. While this is significant, there is a bit of chicken-and-egg problem for attackers, as MTE is primarily useful to prevent running arbitrary code at all, which is the most straightforward way to achieve a speculative attack to start with.
And finally, over at Google Project Zero, [Seth Jenkins] has a report on a trio of Android devices, and
finding vulnerabilities in their respective kernel drivers
. In each case, the vulnerable drivers can be accessed from unprivileged applications. [Seth]’s opinion is that as the Android core code gets tighter and more secure, these third-party drivers of potentially questionable code quality will quickly become the target of choice for attack. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769480",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T14:21:32",
"content": "https://app.element.io>> Signal > Whatsup",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769490",
"author": "Anonymus",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T14:57:05"... | 1,760,371,878.298319 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/polyphase-wireless-ev-fast-charging-moves-forward/ | Polyphase Wireless EV Fast Charging Moves Forward | Navarre Bartz | [
"car hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"charging",
"electric vehicle charger",
"ev",
"high power",
"polyphase",
"Vehicles",
"wireless"
] | While EV charging isn’t that tedious with a cable, for quick trips, being able to just park and have your car automatically charge would be more convenient. Researchers from Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) and VW have
moved high-speed wireless EV charging one step closer to reality
.
We’ve seen
fast wireless EV chargers
before, but what sets this system apart is the coil size (~0.2 m
2
vs 2.0 m
2
) and the fact it was demonstrated on a functioning EV where previous attempts have been on the bench. According to the researchers, this was the first wireless transfer to a light duty vehicle at 270 kW. Industry standards currently only cover systems up to 20 kW.
The system uses a pair of polyphase electromagnetic coupling coils about 50 cm (19″) wide to transfer the power over a gap of approximately 13 cm (5″). Efficiency is stated at 95%, and that 270 kW would get most EVs capable of those charge rates a 50% bump in charge over ten minutes (assuming you’re in the lower part of your battery capacity where full speeds are available).
We’ve seen some
in-road prototypes of wireless charging
as well as some other interesting
en route
chargers like
pantographs
and
slot car roads
. We’ve got you covered if you’re wondering what the deal is with
all those different plugs
that EVs have too. | 85 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769420",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T11:14:08",
"content": "Well damn, 95% seems incredibly good.But at 270kW that’s still 13,5kW wasted (heat induced somewhere else?).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769431... | 1,760,371,878.532848 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/21/is-that-a-large-smartwatch-or-a-tiny-cray/ | Is That A Large Smartwatch? Or A Tiny Cray? | Al Williams | [
"FPGA",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"circular display",
"cray",
"fpga",
"Teensy",
"wristwatch"
] | While we aren’t typically put off by a large wristwatch, we were taken a bit aback by [Chris Fenton]’s latest timepiece — if you can call it that. It’s actually
a 1/25th-scale Cray C90 worn as a wristwatch
. The whole thing started with [Chris] trying to build a Cray in Verilog. He started with a Cray-1 but then moved to a Cray X-MP, which is essentially a Cray-1 with two extra address bits. Then he expanded it to 32 bits, which makes it a Cray Y-MP/C90/J90 core. As he puts it, “If you wanted something practical, go read someone else’s blog.”
The watch emulates a Cray C916 and uses a round OLED display on the top. While the move from 22 to 32 address bits sounds outdated, keep in mind the Cray addresses 64-bit words exclusively, so we’re talking access to 32 gigabytes of memory. The hardware consists of an off-the-shelf FPGA board and a Teensy microcontroller to handle mundane tasks like driving the OLED display and booting the main CPU. Interestingly, the actual Cray 1A used Data General computers for a similar task.
Of course, any supercomputer needs a super program, so [Chris] uses the screen to display a full simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons. The Cray excels at programs like this because of its vector processing abilities. The whole program is 127 words long and sustains 40 MFLOPs. Of course, that means to read the current time, you need to know where Jupiter’s moons are at all times so you can match it with the display. He did warn us this would not be practical.
While the Cray wouldn’t qualify as a supercomputer today, we love
learning about what was state-of-the-art
not that long ago. Cray was named, of course, after
[Seymour Cray]
who had earlier designed the Univac 1103, several iconic CDC computers, and the Cray computers, of course. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769412",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T10:46:10",
"content": "Wow, cray cray.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769511",
"author": "Rich Quackenbush",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T16:39:14",
... | 1,760,371,878.34244 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/the-80s-multi-processor-system-that-never-was/ | The ’80s Multi-Processor System That Never Was | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"berkeley",
"berkeley risc",
"lisp",
"multi core",
"parallel",
"research",
"risc",
"spur",
"uc berkeley",
"university of california"
] | Until the early 2000s, the computer processors available on the market were essentially all single-core chips. There were some niche layouts that used multiple processors on the same board for improved parallel operation, and it wasn’t until the POWER4 processor from IBM in 2001 and later things like the AMD Opteron and Intel Pentium D that we got multi-core processors.
If things had gone just slightly differently with this experimental platform
, though, we might have had multi-processor systems available for general use as early as the 80s instead of two decades later.
The team behind this chip were from the University of Califorina, Berkeley, a place known for such other innovations as
RAID
,
BSD
,
SPICE
, and some of the first
RISC
processors. This processor architecture would be based on RISC as well, and would be known as Symbolic Processing Using RISC. It was specially designed to integrate with the Lisp programming language but its major feature was a set of parallel processors with a common bus that allowed for parallel operations to be computed at a much greater speed than comparable systems at the time. The use of RISC also allowed a smaller group to develop something like this, and although more instructions need to be executed they can often be done faster than other architectures.
The linked article from [Babbage] goes into much more detail about the architecture of the system as well as some of the things about UC Berkeley that made projects like this possible in the first place. It’s a fantastic deep-dive into a piece of somewhat obscure computing history that, had it been more commercially viable, could have changed the course of computing. Berkeley RISC did go on to have major impacts in other areas of computing and
was a significant influence on the SPARC system as well
. | 25 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769343",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T05:38:43",
"content": "unless you count plan 9 which IMHO you should. It was an early adopter of a distributed OS and IIRC the original cisco pix used a modified version of plan 9. Granted it is not in the same CPU but it... | 1,760,371,878.403705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/first-hubble-image-taken-in-new-single-gyro-pointing-mode/ | First Hubble Image Taken In New Single Gyro Pointing Mode | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"Hubble Space Telescope"
] | After Space Shuttle
Atlantis’
drive-by repair of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in May of 2009, the end of the STS program meant that the space telescope had to fend for itself with no prospect for any further repair missions. The weakest point turned out to be the gyroscopes, with of the original six only three functioning until May 24th of 2024 when one failed and couldn’t be reset any more. To make the most out of the HST’s remaining lifespan, NASA decided to transition again to single-gyroscope operation, with the most
recent imaging results
showing that this enables HST to
return to its science mission
.
Although the HST has operated with a reduced number of gyroscopes before, while awaiting its (much delayed) 2009 Servicing Mission 4, this time around it would appear that no such aid is coming. Although HST is still very much functional even after recently celebrating its 34th year in space, there is
a lot of debate
about whether another servicing mission could be organized, or whether HST will be deorbited in a number of years. Recently people like [Jared Isaacman] have suggested ideas for an STS servicing mission, with [Jared] even offering to pay for the entire servicing mission out of pocket.
While there is an argument to be made that a Crew Dragon is a poor substitute for a Shuttle with its big cargo bay, airlock and robotic arm, it’s promising to see at least that for now HST can do what it does best with few compromises, while we may just see Servicing Mission 5 happening at some point before that last gyro kicks the bucket. | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769340",
"author": "schobi",
"timestamp": "2024-06-21T05:15:51",
"content": "As I understand, the gyros are used mainly for measuring and controlling during large scale orientation changes. This process now takes longer, as they rely on star trackers that were not fast enough and s... | 1,760,371,878.238338 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/adding-texture-to-3d-prints/ | Adding Texture To 3D Prints | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"blender",
"texture"
] | [3DJake] likes putting textures on 3D prints using things like patterned build plates and fuzzy skin. However, both of those techniques have limitations. The build plate only lets you texture the bottom, and the fuzzy skin texture isn’t easy to control. So he shows how to use Blender to
create specific textures
to produce things like wood-like or leather-like surfaces, for example. You can see how it works in the video below.
As [Jake] points out, you might be able to use other artistic programs to do this, but the kind of things we use like FreeCAD of Fusion360 aren’t going to cut it.
He uses a bag with a leather texture as an example. The resulting model is too detailed and contains around 1.4 million triangles. Your printer isn’t that detailed, and your slicer will probably choke on a model with that many triangles. Decimating the model makes it more manageable.
The resulting bags, when printed using TPU and painted, hardly look like 3D prints. Well, other than the strap, perhaps. The textures were just pulled from the Internet, so there are, potentially, many to choose from as long as they are seamless.
One interesting build plate texture is a
diffraction grating
. You can also add
special textures manually
. Textures are good at
hiding layer lines
, even just the fuzzy skin textures you find in many slicers. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769312",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T23:12:53",
"content": "I wonder if you could build a fabric texture like denim that intentionally used the layer lines as one axis of the weave.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,371,878.729614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/electronic-etch-a-sketch-no-microcontroller-required/ | Electronic Etch-A-Sketch, No Microcontroller Required | Dan Maloney | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"7400-series",
"demultiplex",
"discrete",
"encoder",
"etch a sketch",
"led",
"logic",
"matrix",
"multiplex",
"sram"
] | In a lot of ways, Etch-A-Sketch is the perfect toy; simple, easy to use, creative, endlessly engaging, and as a bonus, it’s completely mechanical. We find that last attribute to be a big part of its charm, but that’s not to say an electronic version of the classic toy can’t be pretty cool, especially when it’s done
without the aid of a microcontroller
.
This is one of those “because I can” projects that we always find so interesting, and more so because it wasn’t entirely clear to [BigZaphod] that he had the skills to pull it off. While his initial design centered around a bunch of 8×8 LED matrix displays and a 256×4-bit RAM chip, the rest of it was a lot of hand-waving. After a few experiments with addressing the LEDs, [Zaphod] started filling in the blanks with a refresh circuit using a 555 — naturally — and a pair of counters. Properly debounced encoders for the horizontal and vertical controls came next, along with more counters to track the cursor and a host of other circuits that ended up looking like a “one of each” selection from the 7400-series catalog.
While we do wish for a schematic on this one, it’s still a pretty enjoyable video, and the end product seems to work really well. The electronic version has a few features the original lacks, such as wrapping the cursor to the other side of the screen. We’d imagine that the buttons on the encoders could be put to work, too; perhaps a click could make it so you can move the cursor without leaving a trail behind. That might be a challenge to execute in logic, but then again, that was the point of the whole thing.
Still jonesing for that mechanical Etch-A-Sketch experience?
Not a problem
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769275",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T20:14:12",
"content": "looking at that mess of wires I’ll take the micro controller thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769279",
"author": "gfc",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,878.631345 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/arduino-tft-micro-star-chart/ | Arduino + TFT = Micro Star Chart | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"planetarium"
] | We always look at the round LCDs and wonder what to do with them other than, of course, a clock. Well, [shabaz] had a great idea: use it as
a star map display
. The project combines the Arduino, a round TFT, a GPS receiver, and some external flash memory to store data. You can get by without the GPS receiver or flash memory, but you’ll lose features if you do.
We like how he approached the problem. The project contains four major parts and he developed each part independently before integrating them into a whole. The four parts are: reading the GPS, driving the LCD, providing storage for star data, and determining the position of stars. The heavy lifting is done using some public domain code ported over. This code derives from a book called Astronomical Algorithms and uses the Yale Bright Star Catalog database.
The post mentions that the screen might well be a larger rectangular screen and we agree that would make this more usable. Now if you could cram it all into a watch, that might be different. If you want to play with the code, you can actually run the core on Linux. You’ll have to settle for a PNG output of the night sky, but that would be handy for debugging.
We have seen a
star chart in a watch
before. While this is more a star chart than a planetarium, we have no doubt the
early planetarium builders
would be suitably impressed. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769242",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T19:06:46",
"content": "I was thinking about using round LCDs as guages in a dashboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769252",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,878.676333 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/ask-hackaday-how-do-you-make-front-panels/ | Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels? | Al Williams | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"front panel"
] | We’ll admit it. The closer a project is to completion, the less enthusiasm we have for it. Once the main design is clearly going to work on a breadboard, we’re ready to move on to the next one. We don’t mind the PCB layout, especially with modern tools. However, once the board is done, you have to do the case. Paradoxically, this was easier in the old days because you just picked some stock box, drilled some holes, and while it looked terrible, it was relatively easy.
Today, the bar is much higher. You’ll probably 3D print or laser cut an enclosure. If it looks no better than what you did in the 1970s, you won’t win many admirers. We routinely cover projects that could easily pass for commercial products. So how do you do it?
The Parts
The
enclosure
may even be the easy part. There are plenty of scripts and generators that will make you a nice box that meets your specifications. You can probably even get the holes made as you build. Back in the day, it was a challenge to cut odd-shaped holes for things like serial port connectors. Now, no problem. The printer or laser will just make a hole with any shape you like. You may even want to
try a new angle on 3D printing
.
Mounting the PCB isn’t that hard, either. With 3D printing, you can create standoffs, but even if you laser cut, you can easily use conventional standoffs. In a pinch, we’ve used long bolts with nuts.
The real problem, it seems to us, is the front panel. Only Star Trek can get away with front panels containing a bunch of knobs and dials with no markings. And although we call them “front” panels, sometimes you need markings on the back or even the sides, too.
Front Panel Options
There are companies that will make front panels for you, and those are usually silk-screened with legends. You could, of course, silk screen yourself if you
have the ability to do that
. What are your other options?
Labels can’t match a laminated cover.
Labels aren’t going to cut it anymore. However, you can use rub on letters if you are very careful. We’ve used
water slide paper
— the same kind you see in model kits. You can find water slide paper that will run through computer printers.
Another option is to do the toner transfer trick you often see for PCBs, but use it on your front panel. Since that takes heat, it isn’t going to work on 3D-printed panels, though. For that matter, you can just use a PCB as a front panel and then make it the same way you make other boards. Silk screening is easy, then, and here’s a secret: you can make PCBs with no copper on them at all! You can even use them for
the entire enclosure
.
We have seen
good-looking laminated color prints
that look better than labels. If you don’t want to do your own printing, sign companies can print
Dibond aluminum
, which works well. You can laser engrave acrylic and fill the engraved areas with ink or wax for contrast or even use a two-tone material made for laser etching.
The video below uses multicolor 3D printing to create custom panels in a way we haven’t seen before. These panels go in an airplane simulator and are made to have good visibility in different lighting conditions.
Over To You…
What’s your go-to method for creating marks on panels? When do you go through the trouble? After all, if you are building a one-off piece of gear for your own use, maybe a label maker is all you really need. Let us know in the comments. The good news is that there are many ways to make great-looking panels now. The bad news is now we are expected to make them!
Featured image from
this sweet hack
. | 49 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769202",
"author": "Canuckfire",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T17:28:53",
"content": "Hey, this is me!I love the designing and building part, but I have a shelf of projects in antistatic bags and plastic bins that effectively died at the enclosure stage.I get the process to make an encl... | 1,760,371,879.205303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/watch-sls-3d-printed-parts-become-printed-circuits/ | Watch SLS 3D Printed Parts Become Printed Circuits | Donald Papp | [
"chemistry hacks",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"circuit board",
"copper clad",
"nylon",
"pcb",
"sls",
"soldering"
] | [Ben Krasnow] of the
Applied Science
channel recently released a video demonstrating
his process for getting copper-plated traces reliably embedded into sintered nylon powder (SLS) 3D printed parts
, and shows off a variety of small test boards with traces for functional circuits embedded directly into them.
Here’s how it works: The SLS 3D printer uses a laser to fuse powdered nylon together layer by layer to make a plastic part. But to the nylon powder, [Ben] has added a small amount of a specific catalyst (copper chromite), so that prints contains this catalyst. Copper chromite is pretty much inert until it gets hit by a laser, but not the same kind of laser that sinters the nylon powder. That means after the object is 3D printed, the object is
mostly
nylon with a small amount of (inert) copper chromite mixed in. That sets the stage for what comes next.
The results are durable as well; the effort needed to tear a battery holder off being at least as much as for a regular FR4 PCB.
Activating the copper chromite is all about dumping enough energy into the particles, and that gets done with a pulsed laser. This is how the traces are “drawn” onto the printed object, and these traces will be copper-clad in the next step.
Once the copper chromite catalyst is activated by the second laser, the whole 3D printed object is put into a chemical bath for electroless copper plating. Again, only the places hit by the pulsed laser end up plated. Places not hit by the second laser remain inert.
There’s an interesting side note here. Electroless copper plating is a well understood process used by every PCB manufacturer in the world. But the recipes are all proprietary and [Ben] tried without success to mix up an effective batch. In the end, a talk with OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped crack the case by suggesting a procedure that worked, saving [Ben] a ton of time. Skip to
8:10 in the video
if you want to know all about that.
The result is a 3D printed nylon object into which solder-able copper traces are well and truly embedded. The test pieces work out great, but even better, there’s no reason the objects and traces even have to be planar. All it would take is a pulsed laser able to focus on a curved surface in order to create curved traces on a 3-dimensional part.
We’ve seen
copper-plated 3D printed PCBs before
, but this is something very different and really elegant. The whole workflow has a lot of moving parts, but once controlled it’s remarkable repeatable.
[Ben] has actually tried putting copper traces on SLS printed parts before, but with only limited success. Recent advances in technology and tools have really made the process sing. Watch it all in action in the video, embedded below. | 38 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769161",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T15:42:24",
"content": "I hope this guy always uses his powers for good.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769170",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"t... | 1,760,371,878.8456 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/can-you-freeze-dry-strawberries-without-a-machine/ | Can You Freeze-Dry Strawberries Without A Machine? | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"cooking hacks",
"Featured",
"how-to",
"Skills"
] | [
"dry ice",
"freeze drying",
"strawberries"
] | Summer has settled upon the northern hemisphere, which means that it’s time for sweet, sweet strawberries to be cheap and plentiful. But would you believe they taste even better in freeze-dried format? I wouldn’t have ever known until I happened to get on a health kick and was looking for new things to eat. I’m not sure I could have picked a more expensive snack, but that’s why we’re here — I wanted to start freeze-drying my own strawberries.
While I could have just dropped a couple grand and bought some kind of freeze-drying contraption, I just don’t have that kind of money. And besides, no good Hackaday article would have come out of that. So I started looking for alternative ways of getting the job done.
Dry Ice Is Nice
Image via
Air Products
Early on in my web crawling on the topic, I came across
this Valley Food Storage blog entry
that seems to have just about all the information I could possibly want about the various methods of freeze-drying food. The one that caught my eye was the dry ice method, mostly because it’s only supposed to take 24 hours.
Here’s what you do, in a nutshell: wash, hull, and slice the strawberries, then put them in a resealable bag. Leave the bag open so the moisture can evaporate. Put these bags in the bottom of a large Styrofoam cooler, and lay the dry ice on top. Loosely affix the lid and wait 24 hours for the magic to happen.
I still had some questions. Does all the moisture simply evaporate? Or will there be a puddle at the bottom of the cooler that could threaten my tangy, crispy strawberries? One important question: should I break up the dry ice? My local grocer sells it in five-pound blocks, according to their site. The freeze-drying blog suggests doing a pound-for-pound match-up of fruit and dry ice, so I guess I’m freeze-drying five entire pounds of strawberries. Hopefully, this works out and I have tasty treats for a couple of weeks or months.
Preparation
In order to make this go as smoothly as possible, I bought both a strawberry huller and a combination fruit and egg slicer. Five pounds of strawberries is kind of a lot, eh? I’m thinking maybe I will break up the ice and try doing fewer strawberries in case it’s a complete failure.
I must have gotten rid of all our Styrofoam coolers, so I called the grocery store to make sure they have them. Unfortunately, my regular store doesn’t also have dry ice, but that’s okay — I kind of want to be ready with my cooler when I get the dry ice and not have to negotiate buying both while also handling the ice.
So my plan is to go out and get the cooler and the strawberries, then come back and wash the berries. Then I’ll go back out and get the dry ice and then hull and slice all the berries. In the meantime, I bought some food-safe desiccant packets that absorb moisture and change color. If this experiment works, I don’t want my crispy strawberries ruined by Midwestern humidity.
Hulling…
and slicing…
and throwing them in bags!
Actually Doing the Thing
So I went and bought the cooler and the strawberries. They were $2.99 for a 2 lb. box, so I bought two boxes, thinking that a little more poundage in dry ice than berries would be a good thing. I went back out to the other grocery store for the dry ice, and the person in the meat department told me they sell it in pellets now, in 3- and 6-lb. bags. So I asked for the latter. All that worrying about breaking it up for nothing!
Then it was go time. I got out my cutting board and resigned myself to hulling and slicing around 75 strawberries. But you know, it really didn’t take that long, especially once I got a rhythm going. I had no idea what the volume would be like, so I started throwing the slices into a gallon-sized bag. But then it seemed like too much mass, so I ended up with them spread across five quart-sized bags. I laid them in the bottom of the cooler in layers, and poured the dry ice pellets on top. Then I took the cooler down to the basement and made note of the time.
Since I ended up with six pounds of dry ice and only four pounds of strawberries, my intent is to check on things after 18 hours, even though it’s supposed to take 24. My concern is that the strawberries will get done drying out earlier than the 24-hour mark, and then start absorbing moisture from the air.
Fruits of Labor
I decided to check the strawberries a little early. There was no way the ice was going to last 24 hours, and I think it’s because I purposely put the lid on upside down to make it extra loose. The strawberries are almost frozen and are quite tasty, but they are nowhere near depleted of moisture. So I decided to get more ice and keep going with the experiment.
I went out and got another 6 lb. of pellets. This time, I layered everything, starting with ice in the bottom and ending with ice on top. This time, I put the lid on the right way, just loosely.
Totally Not Dry, But Tasty
Well, I checked them a few hours before the 24-hour mark, and the result looks much the same as the previous morning. Very cold berries that appear to have lost no moisture at all. They taste great, though, so I put them in the freezer to use in smoothies.
When I opened the cooler.
Barely frozen.
More frozen, but still completely full of moisture.
All in all, I would say that this was a good experiment. Considering I didn’t have anything I needed when I started out, I would say it was fairly cost-effective as well. Here’s how the pricing breaks down:
28-quart Styrofoam cooler: $4.99
4 lbs. of strawberries: $5.99
12 lbs. of dry ice at $1.99/lb.: $24
a couple of resealable bags: $1
Total: $36, which is a little more than I paid for a big canister of freeze-dried strawberries on Amazon that lasted maybe a week. If this had worked, it would have been pretty cost-effective compared with buying them.
So, can you freeze-dry strawberries without a machine? Signs still point to yes, but I’m going to go ahead and blame the Midwestern humidity on this one. You can bet I’ll be trying this again in the winter, probably with fewer berries and smaller cooler. By the way, there was a small puddle underneath the cooler when it was all said and done.
Have you ever tried freeze-drying anything with dry ice? If so, how did it go? Do you have any tips? Let us know in the comments.
Main and thumbnail images via
Unsplash | 45 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769127",
"author": "przemek",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T14:15:00",
"content": "I think you mostly just froze them; to dry out they would need to be frozen for longer and probably kept in some sort of partial vacuum, because water sublimation rate from ice is bound to be slow. I wond... | 1,760,371,878.957398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/probably-the-cheapest-mac-emulation-hardware/ | Probably The Cheapest Mac Emulation Hardware | Jenny List | [
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"hackintosh",
"Mac 128",
"pi pico",
"rp2040"
] | There are many ways to build your own Macintosh clone, and while the very latest models remain a little inaccessible, there are plenty of Intel-based so-called “Hackintoshes” which deliver an almost up-to-date experience. But the Mac has been around for a very long time now, and its earliest incarnation only has 128k of RAM and a 68000 processor. What can emulate one of those? Along comes [Matt Evans], with
a working Mac 128k emulated on a Raspberry Pi Pico
. Such is the power of a modern microcontroller that an RP2040 can now be a Mac!
The granddaddy of all Macs might have been a computer to lust after four decades ago, but the reality was that even at the time the demands of a GUI quickly made it under-powered. The RP2040 has plenty of processing power compared to the 68000 and over twice the Mac’s memory, so it seemed as though emulating the one with the other might be possible. This proved to be the case, using the Musashi 68000 interpreter and a self-built emulator which has been spun into a project of its own called
umac
. With monochrome VGA and USB for keyboard and mouse, there’s MacPaint on a small LCD screen looking a lot like the real thing.
If you want a 1980s Mac for anything without the joy of reviving original hardware, this represents an extremely cheap way to achieve it. If it can be compiled for microcontrollers with more available memory we could see it would even make for a more useful Mac, though your Mac mileage may vary.
Of course,
this isn’t the only take on an early Mac we’ve brought you
. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769093",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T12:50:18",
"content": "“over twice the Mac’s memory”Twice 128K is still a very small number.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769256",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
... | 1,760,371,879.016441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/20/uv-k5-all-band-mod-part-2-easier-install-better-audio-and-two-antennas/ | UV-K5 All-Band Mod, Part 2: Easier Install, Better Audio, And Two Antennas | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"firmware",
"ham",
"handy talkie",
"ht",
"Quansheng",
"uv k5"
] | OK, it’s official: the Quansheng UV-K5 is the king of hackable ham radios — especially now that
a second version of the all-band hardware and firmware mod
has been released, not to mention a new version of the radio.
If you need to get up to speed, check out
our previous coverage of the all-band hack for the UV-K5
, in which [Paul (OM0ET)] installs a tiny PCB to upgrade the radio’s receiver chip to an Si4732. Along with a few jumpers and some component replacements on the main board, these hardware mods made it possible for the transceiver, normally restricted to the VHF and UHF amateur radio bands, to receive everything down to the 20-meter band, in both AM and single-sideband modulations.
The new mod featured in the video below does all that and more, all while making the installation process slightly easier.
The new PCB
is on a flexible substrate and is considerably slimmer, and also sports an audio amplifier chip, to make up for the low audio output on SSB signals of the first version. Installation, which occupies the first third of the video below, is as simple as removing one SMD chip from the radio’s main board and tacking the PCB down in its footprint, followed by making a couple of connections with very fine enameled wire.
You could load the new firmware and call it a day at that point, but [Paul] decided to take things a step further and install a separate jack for a dedicated HF antenna. This means sacrificing the white LED on the top panel, which isn’t much of a sacrifice for most hams, to make room for the jack. Most of us would put a small SMA jack in, but [Paul] went for a BNC, which required some deft Dremel and knife work to fit in. He also used plain hookup wire to connect the jack, which sounds like a terrible idea; we’d probably use RG-316, but his mod didn’t sound that bad at all.
Keen to know more about the Quansheng UV-K5? Dive into
the reverse-engineered schematics
.
Thanks to [Sam] for the heads up on this one. | 48 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769071",
"author": "doppler",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T10:04:09",
"content": "Something tells me “Don’t do it!”. Could it be the transmit section spurs would be inadequacy of filters left over. ie: uhf, vhf high frequencies. Or big fines to the HAM’s for unknowingly transmitting... | 1,760,371,879.409124 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/what-you-can-see-with-a-sem/ | What You Can See With A SEM? | Al Williams | [
"Science",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"scanning electron microscope"
] | The last time we used a scanning electron microscope (a SEM), it looked like something from a bad 1950s science fiction movie. These days
SEMs
, like the one at the IBM research center, look like computers with a big tank poised nearby. Interestingly, the SEM is so sensitive that it has to be in a quiet room to prevent sound from interfering with images.
As a demo of the machine’s impressive capability, [John Ott] loads two US pennies, one facing up and one face down. [John] notes that Lincoln appears on both sides of the penny and then proves the assertion correct using moderate magnification under the electron beam.
Some electron microscopes pass electrons through thin samples much as light passes through a sample on a microscope slide. However, SEMs and REMs (reflection electron microscopes) use either secondary electron emission or reflected electrons from the surface of items like the penny.
You often see SEMs also fitted with EDS — energy dispersive X-ray spectrometers, sometimes called EDX — that can reveal the composition of a sample’s surface. There are other ways to examine surfaces, like auger spectrometers (pronounced like OJ), which can isolate thin films on surfaces. There’s also SIMS (secondary ion mass spectrometry) which mills bits of material away using an ion beam. and Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, which also uses an ion beam.
We keep waiting for someone to share plans to make a
cheap, repeatable SEM
. There are a
few attempts
out there, but we don’t see many in the wild. While the device is conceptually simple, you do need precise high voltages and high vacuums,. Also, you frequently need ancillary devices to do things like sputter gold in argon gas to coat nonconductive samples, so the barrier to entry is high. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769077",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T10:56:15",
"content": "I remember those great hulking cantankerous EMs too. But Hitachi (and others) have had nice tabletop SEMs for more than 25 years now. Originally looking like a cube minifridge back then, they are even smal... | 1,760,371,879.251789 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/mapping-litter-in-the-oceans-from-space-with-existing-satellites/ | Mapping Litter In The Oceans From Space With Existing Satellites | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"environmental monitoring",
"pollution"
] | Aerial drone image of a litter windrow in Bay of Biscay, Spain. Windrow width: 1-2 meters. (Credit: ESA)
Recently ESA
published the results
of a proof-of-concept study into monitoring marine litter using existing satellites, with promising results for the Mediterranean study area. For the study, six years of historical data from the
Sentinel-2
satellite multispectral imaging cameras were used, involving 300,000 images with a resolution of 10 meters. The focus was on litter
windrows
as common collections of litter like plastic, wood and other types of marine debris that float on the surface, forming clearly visible lines that can be meters wide and many times as long.
These were processed as explained in the
open access paper
in
Nature Communications
by [Andrés Cózar] and colleagues. As marine litter (ML) tends to be overwhelmingly composed of plastic, this eases the detection, as any ML that’s visible from space can generally be assumed to be primarily plastic litter. This was combined with the spectral profile of common plastics, so that other types of floating materials (algae, driftwood, seafoam, etc.) could be filtered out, leaving just the litter.
This revealed many of these short-lived litter windrows, with spot confirmation from ships in the area. Some of the windrows were many kilometers in length, with an average of around 1 km.
Although just a PoC, it nevertheless shows that monitoring such plastic debris from space is quite doable, even without dedicated satellites. As every day tons more plastics make their way into the oceans, this provides us with the means to at least keep track of the scope of the problem. Even if resolving it and the associated microplastics problem is still a far-off dream. | 25 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769003",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T02:21:46",
"content": "Skimmers make sense if this stuff forms strips. Real-time data and a robot could get a lot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769660",
"au... | 1,760,371,879.320114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/floss-weekly-episode-788-matrix-its-git-for-communications/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 788: Matrix, It’s Git, For Communications | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"matrix"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
and
Simon Phipps
chat with Matthew Hodgson and Josh Simmons about Matrix, the open source decentralized communications platform. How is Matrix a Git for Communications? Are the new EU and UK laws going to be a problem? And how is the Matrix project connected with the Element company?
–
https://matrix.org/blog
–
https://element.io/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show
right in the Hackaday Discord
? Have someone you’d like use 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 | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769002",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T02:21:00",
"content": "*sigh* People are always trying to reinvent IRC. Seriously, just use IRC, it’s a good system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769009",
"aut... | 1,760,371,879.503791 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/a-simple-laser-harp-midi-instrument/ | A Simple Laser Harp MIDI Instrument | Dave Rowntree | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"laser cut",
"laser harp",
"ldr",
"midi",
"perfboard",
"wemos d1 mini"
] | Craig Lindley is a technical author and a prolific maker of things. This simple project was his first attempt to create a
laser harp MIDI device
. While on vacation, Craig saw a laser harp with only three strings and decided to improve upon it by expanding it to twelve strings. The principle of operation is straightforward: twelve cheap diode laser modules aim a beam towards an LDR, which changes resistance if the light level changes when the beam is interrupted.
The controller is a simple piece of perf board, with a Wemos D1 mini ESP32 module flanked by some passives, a barrel socket for power, and the usual DIN connector for connecting the MIDI instrument. Using the ESP32 is a smart choice, removing all the need for configuration and user indication from the physical domain and pushing it onto a rarely-needed webpage. After a false start, attempting to use a triangular frame arrangement, [Craig]
settled upon a simple linear arrangement of beams held within a laser-cut wooden box frame. Since these laser modules are quite small, some aluminium rod was machined to make some simple housings to push them into, making them easier to mount in the frame and keeping them nicely aligned with their corresponding LDR.
Sadly, the magnetic attachment method [Craig] used to keep the LDRs in place and aligned with the laser didn’t work as expected, so it was necessary to reach for the hot glue. We’ve all done that!
An interesting addition was using an
M5 stack Unit-Synth module
for those times when a proper MIDI synthesiser was unavailable. Making this luggable was smart, as
people are always fascinated with laser harps
. That simple internal synth makes travelling to shows and events a little easier.
Laser harps are nothing new here; we have covered plenty over the years. Like this nice build, which is
more a piece of art than an instrument
, one which
looks just like a real harp and sounds like one
, too, due to the use of the Karplus-Strong algorithm to mimic string vibrations. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768977",
"author": "0xdeadbeef",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T23:15:53",
"content": "Why do I count 12 laser diodes in that pic at the top?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769037",
"author": "Dave Rowntree",
"tim... | 1,760,371,879.456797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/2024-business-card-challenge-pcb-business-cards-for-everybody/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: PCB Business Cards For Everybody | Dave Rowntree | [
"contests",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"enig",
"pcb",
"tips"
] | PCB business cards for electronics engineers might be very much old news in our circles, but they are still cool, not seen too much in the wild, and frankly inaccessible to those in other industries. For their entry into the 2024 Business Card Challenge, [Dima Shlenkevitch] is helping a little to alleviate this by providing a set of
design examples and worked costs with suppliers
.
Original green is still the cheapest option.
[Dima] lists key features every PCB business card should include, such as the expected thickness, restrictions for placing NFC components, and some aesthetics tips. Make sure to choose a supplier that allows you to remove their order number from the manufactured PCB, or it will look out of place.
Ordering PCBs with these specifications to keep costs reasonable requires effort, so [Dima] offers some example designs along with the results. If you want to have pretty gold lettering and graphics, you will need ENiG plating, increasing the price. Non-standard solder mask colors can also raise the price.
Will this help with the practical aspects of driving the PCB design software and actually placing the order? Obviously not, but the information provided gives you a leg up on some of the decisions so you don’t go down an expensive rabbit hole. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768929",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T19:35:45",
"content": "With exception of NFC you can do all that on cardboard, with more printing options, lower price and much reduced environmental impact. What is the advantage I am missing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,371,879.567768 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/taking-a-look-underneath-the-battleship-new-jersey/ | Taking A Look Underneath The BattleshipNew Jersey | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"battleship",
"preservation",
"restoration",
"tour",
"world war II"
] | By the time you read this the
Iowa
-class battleship USS
New Jersey
(BB-62) should be making its way along the Delaware River, heading back to its permanent mooring on the Camden waterfront after undergoing a twelve week maintenance and repair period at the nearby Philadelphia Navy Yard.
The 888 foot (270 meter) long ship won’t be running under its own power, but even under tow, it’s not often that you get to see one of the world’s last remaining battleships on the move. The
New Jersey’s
return home will be a day of celebration, with onlookers lining the banks of the Delaware, news helicopters in the air, and dignitaries and veterans waiting eagerly to greet her as she slides up to the pier.
But when I got the opportunity to tour the
New Jersey
a couple weeks ago and get a first-hand look at the incredible preservation work being done on this historic ship, it was a very different scene. There was plenty of activity within the cavernous Dry Dock #3 at the Navy Yard, the very same slip where the ship’s construction was completed back in 1942, but little fanfare. Staff from North Atlantic Ship Repair, the company that now operates the facility, were laboring feverishly over the weekend to get the ship ready.
While by no means an exhaustive account of the work that was done on the ship during its time in Dry Dock #3, this article will highlight some of the more interesting projects that were undertaken while it was out of the water. After seeing the thought and effort put into every aspect of the
ship’s preservation by curator Ryan Szimanski and his team
, there’s no doubt that not only is the USS
New Jersey
in exceptionally capable hands, but that it will continue to proudly serve as a museum and memorial for decades to come.
A Fresh Coat of Paint
The primary goal of putting
New Jersey
into dry dock was to repaint the hull below the water line, something which had not been done since the ship was deactivated by the US Navy in 1990. Under normal circumstances this is the sort of routine maintenance that would be done every few years, but for a static museum ship, the recommended dry docking interval is 30 years. There was no indication that the hull was in particularly bad shape or in need of emergency repair — most of the work done during this yard period was preventative in nature.
The first step in this process was to remove the old paint, along with any biological growth and rust. Unfortunately, there’s no “easy” way to do this. The entire surface area of the underwater hull, totaling roughly 125,000 square feet (11,600 square meters), was painstakingly cleaned using ultra-high pressure washers operating at approximately 30,000 psi. In some areas, getting close enough to the surface of the hull meant putting workers up on a lift, but for the ship’s relatively flat bottom, personnel had to squat down and spray the surface over their heads.
As the ship is resting on around 300 “keel blocks”, this process had to be done in two separate phases. First, the approximately 90% of the hull that was not covered by the blocks was stripped, painted, and given time to fully cure. Then the dry dock was flooded just enough to get the ship floating, so it could be pulled forward a few feet and dropped back down to expose the areas of the hull that were previously covered.
Checking for Leaks
Even though the steel of the hull itself might be intact, a large ship will have many openings under the water line that can leak if not properly maintained. According to Ryan the
New Jersey
has about 165 such openings, ranging from tiny drain lines to massive seawater intakes. While the ship was in operation each one of them would have served an important purpose, but as a floating museum with essentially no operating hardware onboard, they’re a liability.
The easiest solution would have been to simply weld plates over all of them. But part of the arrangement that allows the
New Jersey
to operate as a museum is that the Navy has the right to take the ship back and reactivate it at any time. Admittedly it’s an unlikely prospect, but those are the rules.
Permanently blocking up all those critical openings would make the ship’s reactivation that much more difficult, so instead, each one was “boxed over” with a custom-made steel enclosure. The idea is that, should the ship ever need to return to operation, these boxes could easily be cut off without damaging the hull.
Only one of these boxes was known to be leaking before pulling
New Jersey
out of the water, but out of an abundance of caution, the integrity of each one was manually checked by pressurizing them with air. If the box held pressure, it was good to go. If it lost air, then it was sprayed with soapy water and closely inspected for bubbles. If there were no bubbles on the outside that meant the air was leaking into the ship through whatever the enclosed fitting was — a problem the Navy might need to address in World War Three, but not something the museum needed to concern themselves with.
Swapping Out Anodes
To help fight off corrosion ships use a technique known as cathodic protection, which essentially turns the steel of the hull into the cathode of a electrochemical cell. The surrounding water serves as the electrolyte, and blocks made of a metal with a high ionization tendency are mounted to the ship to act as the anode. As electrons flow through this circuit, the sacrificial anode dissolves, sparing the hull and other underwater gear such as the propellers.
New Jersey
was fitted with 1,200 anodes when the Navy deactivated her, but unfortunately, they ended up being the wrong type. At the time it was assumed that the ship would be stored in a saltwater port as part of what’s known as the “Mothball Fleet”, so zinc anodes were used. There was no way to know that, a decade later, the ship would be transferred to the fresh waters of the Delaware River to live out the rest of its life as a museum.
These shouldn’t exist.
Because of this, the zinc anodes didn’t corrode away as was intended. In fact when the dry dock was drained, it was revealed that the anodes were in nearly perfect condition. You could even still read the manufacturing info stamped into many of them. On the plus side, they’ll make for excellent souvenirs in the museum’s gift shop. But in terms of corrosion protection, they didn’t do a thing.
Luckily, fresh water is relatively forgiving, so the battleship didn’t suffer too badly for this lack of functioning cathodic protection. Even so, it was decided to install 600 aluminum anodes in place of the originals, which are more suitable for the conditions the ship is stored in.
Closing Off the Shafts
Before
New Jersey
went in for this yard period, there was some debate about removing its propellers and drive shafts. The idea being that the huge openings in the hull which the shafts pass through were a long-term liability. But not only would this have deviated from the museum’s overall goal of keeping the ship as intact as possible, it would have been a considerable undertaking.
Instead it was decided to seal off where the shafts pass through the hull with custom-made steel enclosures, much like the other openings on the bottom of the ship. In addition, the shafts were wrapped with fiberglass where they pass through the support brackets on the rear of the ship. The fiberglass isn’t expected to be a permanent solution like the steel boxes around the shafts, but should provide at least some measure of protection.
Lots and Lots of Caulk
One of the surprising things discovered upon inspecting the hull of
New Jersey
was that caulking had been applied to all the seams along the riveted hull plates. At least in theory, this shouldn’t be necessary, as the overlapping plates are designed to be watertight. But if the Navy thought it was worth the time and expense to do it, there must have been a reason.
Sure enough, a dive into the ship’s onboard reference library revealed a document from October of 1990 that described a persistent water intrusion issue on the ship. Basically, water kept getting inside the hull, but they couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Although the Navy couldn’t actually find any leaks between the hull plates, the document went on to explain that the decision was made to caulk them all anyway in hopes that it would solve the issue.
Since the ship hadn’t been taking on any mysterious water while docked in Camden, it would appear the fix worked. As such, it was decided to re-caulk the roughly 18,000 linear feet (5,500 meters) of plate seams just like the Navy did in 1990. Since the manufacturer of the product was mentioned in the document, the museum was even able to get the exact same caulking used by the Navy 34 years ago.
Views From Dry Dock
Documentation for the Future
Walking along the ship’s massive hull, the projects I’ve listed here were the most obvious to even the untrained eye. But as I said at the start, this isn’t a complete list of the work done to the USS
New Jersey
during its dry docking. It’s hard to overstate the scale of the restoration work that was accomplished in such a short amount of time. It took years of planning by a team of very dedicated individuals to pull this off.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Ryan Szimanski and his team have done an incredible job of documenting the entire dry docking process on the
ship’s official YouTube channel
. Putting all of this information out for the public to view and learn from will undoubtedly inform the restoration efforts on other museum ships going forward, but even if you don’t have a battleship in your backyard, it makes for fascinating viewing. | 41 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768906",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T17:51:27",
"content": "…”sprayed with soapy water and closely inspected for bubbles”.I apply the same process when repairing a punctured inner tube on my bicycle.Bicycles and battleships are not so different…",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,371,879.661014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/open-source-your-air-ride-suspension/ | Open Source Your Air Ride Suspension | Navarre Bartz | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"active suspension",
"air ride",
"air suspension",
"lowrider"
] | Air ride suspensions have several advantages over typical arrangements, but retrofitting a system to a vehicle that didn’t come with it can get pricey fast, especially if you want to go beyond the basics. The
Open Source Air Suspension Management Controller
aims to give people a fully customizable system without the expense or limitations of commercial units.
The project started as an upgrade to a basic commercial system, so it assumes that you’re bringing your own “bags, tank, compressor, tubing and fittings.” The current board uses an Arduino Nano, but the next revision based on the ESP32 will allow for a wider feature set.
With a Bluetooth connection and Android app, you can control your ride height from a phone or integrated Android head unit. Currently, the app shows the pressure readings from all four corners and has controls for increasing or decreasing the pressure or airing all the way up or down to a given set point.
Want to know how air suspensions work? How about
this LEGO model
? If you want a suspension with active tuning for your bike, how about this
Arduino-powered mod
? | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6769044",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-06-20T07:06:50",
"content": "I can’t help thinking about this scene (Leslie Nielson in “Wrongfully accused”):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFHpCGbyalI",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,879.705102 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/linux-fu-kernel-modules-have-privileges/ | Linux Fu: Kernel Modules Have Privileges | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"linux",
"linux kernel modules"
] | I did something recently I haven’t done in a long time: I recompiled the Linux kernel. There was a time when this was a common occurrence. You might want a feature that the default kernel didn’t support, or you might have an odd piece of hardware. But these days, in almost all the cases where you need something like this, you’ll use loadable kernel modules (LKM) instead. These are modules that the kernel can load and unload at run time, which means you can add that new device or strange file system without having to rebuild or even restart the kernel.
Normally, when you write programs for Linux, they don’t have any special permissions. You typically can’t do direct port I/O, for example, or arbitrarily access memory. The kernel, however, including modules, has no such restriction. That can make debugging modules tricky because you can easily bring the system to its knees. If possible, you might think about developing on a virtual machine until you have what you want. That way, an errant module just brings down your virtual machine.
History
Some form of module support has been around since Linux 1.2. However, modern kernels can be built to include support for things or support them as modules. For example, you probably don’t want to put drivers for every single known video card in your kernel. But it is perfectly fine to build dozens or hundreds of modules you might need and then load the one you need at run time.
LKMs are at the heart of device drivers, file system drivers, and network drivers. In addition, modules can add new system calls, override existing system calls, add TTY line disciplines, and handle how executables run.
In Use
If you want to know what modules you have loaded, that’s the
lsmod
command. You’ll see that some modules depend on other modules and some don’t. There are two ways to load modules:
insmod
and
modprobe
. The insmod command simply tries to load a module. The
modprobe
command tries to determine if the module it is loading needs other modules and picks them up from a known location.
You can also remove modules with
rmmod
assuming they aren’t in use. Of course, adding and removing modules requires root access. You can usually run
lsmod
as a normal user if you like. You might also be interested in
depmod
to determine dependencies, and
modinfo
which shows information about modules.
Writing a Module
It is actually quite easy to write your own module. In fact, it is so simple that the first example I want to look at is a little more complex than necessary.
This simple module can load and unload. It leaves a message in the system messages (use
dmesg
, for example) to tell you it is there. In addition, it allows you to specify a
key
(just an arbitrary integer) when you load it. That number will show up in the output data. Here’s the code:
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/moduleparam.h>
#include <linux/printk.h>
MODULE_AUTHOR("Al Williams");
MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Hackaday LKM");
MODULE_LICENSE("GPLv2"); // many options, GPL, GPLv2, Proprietary, etc.
static int somedata __initdata=0xbeef; // this is just some static variable available only at init
static int key=0xAA; // you can override this using insmod
// Note 0644 means that the sysfs entry will be rw-r--r--
module_param(key,int,0644); // use module_param_named if you want different names internal vs external
MODULE_PARM_DESC(key,"An integer ID unique to this module");
static int __init had_init(void)
{
// This is the usual way to do this (don't forget \n and note no comma after KERN_INFO), but...
printk(KERN_INFO "Hackaday is in control (%x %x)\n",key,somedata);
return 0;
}
static void __exit had_exit(void)
{
// ... you can also use the pr_info macro which does the same thing
pr_info("Returning control of your system to you (%x)!\n",key);
}
module_init(had_init);
module_exit(had_exit);</pre>
This isn’t hard to puzzle out. Most of it is include files and macros that give
modinfo
something to print out. There are some variables:
somedata
is just a set variable that is readable during initialization. The
key
variable has a default but can be set using
insmod
. What’s more, is because module_param specifies 0644 — an octal Linux permission — there will be an entry in the
/sys/modules
directory that will let the root set or read the value of the key.
At the end, there are two calls that register what happens when the module loads and unloads. The rest of the code is just something to print some info when those events happen.
I printed data in two ways: the traditional
printk
and using the
pr_info
macro which uses
printk
underneath, anyway. You should probably pick one and stick with it. I’d normally just use
pr_info
.
Building the modules is simple assuming you have the entire build environment and the headers for the kernel. Here’s a simple makefile (don’t forget to use tabs in your makefile):
obj-m += hadmod1.o
PWD := $(CURDIR) # not needed in most cases, but useful if using sudo
all:
make -C /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build M=$(PWD) modules
clean:
make -C /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build M=$(PWD) clean
Once you build things, you should have a .ko file (like hadmod.ko). That’s the module. Try a few things:
sudo insmod hadmod.ko # load the module
sudo dmesg # see the module output
cat /sys/modules/hadmodule/key # see the key (you can set it, too, if you are root)
sudo rmmod hadmod.ko # unload the module
sudo insmod hadmod.ko key=128 # set key this time and repeat the other steps
That’s It?
That
is
it. Of course, the real details lie in how you interact with the kernel or hardware devices, but that’s up to you. Just to give a slightly meatier example, I made a second version of the module that adds
/proc/jollywrencher
to the
/proc filesystem
. Here’s the code:
#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/moduleparam.h>
#include <linux/printk.h>
#include <linux/uaccess.h>
#include <linux/fs.h>
#include <linux/proc_fs.h> // Module metadata
#include <linux/version.h>
MODULE_AUTHOR("Al Williams");
MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Hackaday LKM1");
MODULE_LICENSE("GPLv2"); // many options, GPL, GPLv2, Proprietary, etc.
static char logo[]=
" \n"\
" \n"\
" \n"\
" #@@@@@@ ,@@@@@@ \n"\
" &@@@@@* &@@@@@, \n"\
" @@@@@@% @@@@@@# \n"\
" @@ .@@@@@@@@@ .@@@@@@@@@ .@# \n"\
" &@@@& /@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@* \n"\
" @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@# @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@, \n"\
" &@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@* ,@@@@@@@@@@@@% &@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@* \n"\
" ,*. @@@@@@@@@@@/ .@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@& &@@@@@@@@@@# ** \n"\
" @@@@@@, &@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@, %@@@@@& \n"\
" ,@& /@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@ \n"\
" &@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@* \n"\
" %@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@. \n"\
" @@@@@@ #@@@@@@@. /@@@@@@ \n"\
" /@@@@& @@@@@@. @@@@@ \n"\
" ,@@@@% (@@@@@@@@@@&* @@@@@ \n"\
" @@@@@# @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@% @@@@@& \n"\
" /@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@, #@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ \n"\
" @@ *@@@@@@@@@@@@@& ( @@@@@@@@@@@@@@ .@( \n"\
" %@@@@@. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@% #@@@@@* \n"\
" (%&%((@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@% ,@@@@@@@@@@*#&&#/ \n"\
" @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@( @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@& \n"\
" @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@*@@@@@@/%@@@@@& *@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@# \n"\
" @@@@. @@@@@@@@@@@. .. . . (@@@@@@@@@@# /@@@* \n"\
" @, %@@@@@@@@ .@@@@@@@@. &# \n"\
" ,@@@@@( @@@@@@ \n"\
" *@@@@@@ (@@@@@@ \n"\
" @@@@@@, %@@@@@@ \n"\
" \n"\
" ";
static struct proc_dir_entry *proc_entry;
static ssize_t had_read(struct file *f, char __user * user_buffer, size_t count, loff_t * offset)
{
size_t len;
if (*offset>0) return 0; // no seeking, please!
copy_to_user(user_buffer,logo,len=strlen(logo)); // skipped error check
*offset=len;
return len;
}
#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(5,6,0)
static struct proc_ops procop = // prior to Linux 5.6 you needed file_operations
{
.proc_read=had_read
};
#else
static struct file_operations procop =
{
.owner=THIS_MODULE,
.read=had_read
#endif
static int __init had_init(void)
{
// This is the usual way to do this (don't forget \n and note no comma after KERN_INFO), but...
printk(KERN_INFO "Hackaday<1>; is in control\n");
proc_entry=proc_create("jollywrencher",0644,NULL,&procop);
return 0;
}
static void __exit had_exit(void)
{
// ... you can also use the pr_info macro which does the same thing
pr_info("Returning control of your system to you...\n");
proc_remove(proc_entry);
}
module_init(had_init);
module_exit(had_exit);
The only thing here is you have an extra function that you have to register and deregister with the kernel. However, that interface changed in Kernel 5.6, so the code tries to do the right thing. Until, of course, it gets changed again.
Once you load this module using
insmod
, you can cat
/proc/jollywrencher
to see your favorite web site’s logo.
Of course, this is a dead simple example, but it is enough to get you started. You can grab all the
source code online
. One great way to learn more is to find something similar to what you want to build and take it apart.
We don’t suggest it, but you can write an
LKM in Scratch
. If you really want to learn the kernel, maybe
start at the beginning
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768860",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T14:17:09",
"content": "I wonder what the heading (“Kernel Modules Have Privileges”) is trying to convey. It sounded like some kind of way to limit what kernel modules can do, which would be great for security, but apparently it is ... | 1,760,371,879.760418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/a-closer-peek-at-the-frame-ar-glasses/ | A Closer Peek At The Frame AR Glasses | Donald Papp | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"AI glasses",
"ar",
"augmented reality",
"smart glasses",
"wearable display"
] | The Frame AR glasses by Brilliant Labs, which contain a small display, are an entirely different approach to hacker-accessible and affordable AR glasses. [Karl Guttag] has
shared his thoughts and analysis of how the Frame glasses work and are constructed
, as usual leveraging his long years of industry experience as he analyzes consumer display devices.
It’s often said that in engineering, everything is a tradeoff. This is especially apparent in products like near-eye displays, and [Karl] discusses the Frame glasses’ tradeoffs while comparing and contrasting them with the choices other designs have made. He delves into the optical architecture, explaining its impact on the user experience and the different challenges of different optical designs.
The Frame glasses are Brilliant Labs’ second product with their first being the
Monocle
, an unusual and inventive sort of self-contained clip-on unit.
Monocle’s hacker-accessible design and documentation really impressed us
, and there’s a pretty clear lineage from Monocle to Frame as products. Frame are essentially a pair of glasses that incorporate a Monocle into one of the lenses, aiming to be able to act as a set of AI-empowered prescription glasses that include a small display.
We recommend reading the entire article for a full roundup, but the short version is that it looks like many of Frame’s design choices prioritize a functional device with low cost, low weight, using non-specialized and economical hardware and parts. This brings some disadvantages, such as a visible “eye glow” from the front due to display architecture, a visible seam between optical elements, and limited display brightness due to the optical setup. That being said, they aim to be hacker-accessible and open source, and are reasonably priced at 349 USD. If Monocle intrigued you, Frame seems to have many of the same bones. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768840",
"author": "Bill Gates",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T12:29:21",
"content": "reminds me somewhat of den-noh-coil [ the anime ] .Everyone wore those “AR” glasses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6768861",
"author": "Manf... | 1,760,371,879.905706 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/19/bent-shaft-isnt-a-bad-thing-for-this-pericyclic-gearbox/ | Bent Shaft Isn’t A Bad Thing For This Pericyclic Gearbox | Dan Maloney | [
"News"
] | [
"bevel",
"gear",
"nutation",
"pericyclic",
"power transmission",
"ring gear",
"torque"
] | With few exceptions, power transmission is a field where wobbling is a bad thing. We generally want everything running straight and true, with gears and wheels perfectly perpendicular to their shafts, with everything moving smoothly and evenly. That’s not always the case, though, as
this pericyclic gearbox demonstrates
.
Although most of the components in [Retsetman] model gearboxes seem familiar enough — it’s mostly just a collection of bevel gears, like you’d see inside a differential — it’s their arrangement that makes everything work. More specifically, it’s the shaft upon which the bevel gears ride, which has a section that is tilted relative to the axis of the shaft. It’s just a couple of degrees, but that small bit of inclination, called nutation, makes the ring gear riding on it wobble as the shaft rotates, allowing it to mesh with one or more ring gears that are perpendicular to the shaft. This engages a few teeth at a time, transferring torque from one gear to another. It’s easier to visualize than it is to explain, so check out the video below.
Gearboxes like these have a lot of interesting properties, with the main one being gear ratio. [Retsetman] achieved a 400:1 ratio with just 3D printed parts, which of course impose their own limitations. But he was still able to apply some pretty serious torque. The arrangement is not without its drawbacks, of course, with the wobbling bits naturally causing unwelcome vibrations. That can be mitigated to some degree using multiple rotatins elements that offset each other, but that only seems to reduce vibration, not eliminate it.
[Retsetman] is no stranger to interesting gearboxes, of course, with
his toothless magnetic gearboxes
coming to mind. And this isn’t the only time we’ve seen
gearboxes go all wobbly
, either.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768816",
"author": "Hopo28",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T10:36:00",
"content": "Looks like the same principal as Strain Wave Gearing in a different plane, I like it :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6768821",
"author": "Zoe ... | 1,760,371,880.027892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/human-brains-can-tell-deepfake-voices-from-real-ones/ | Human Brains Can Tell Deepfake Voices From Real Ones | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"Deepfake",
"fMRI",
"voice synthesis"
] | Although it’s generally accepted that synthesized voices which mimic real people’s voices (so-called ‘deepfakes’) can be pretty convincing, what does our brain really think of these mimicry attempts? To answer this question, researchers at the University of Zurich put a number of volunteers into fMRI scanners, allowing them to observe how their brains would react to real and a synthesized voices. The perhaps somewhat
surprising finding
is that the human brain shows differences in two brain regions depending on whether it’s hearing a real or fake voice, meaning that on some level we are aware of the fact that we are listening to a deepfake.
The detailed findings by [Claudia Roswandowitz] and colleagues
are published
in
Communications Biology
. For the study, 25 volunteers were asked to accept or reject the voice samples they heard as being natural or synthesized, as well as perform identity matching with the supposed speaker. The natural voices came from four male (German) speakers, whose voices were also used to train the synthesis model with. Not only did identity matching performance crater with the synthesized voices, the resulting fMRI scans showed very different brain activity depending on whether it was the natural or synthesized voice.
One of these regions was the auditory cortex, which clearly indicates that there were acoustic differences between the natural and fake voice, the other was the
nucleus accumbens
(NAcc). This part of the basal forebrain is involved in the cognitive processing of e.g. motivation, reward and reinforcement learning, which plays a key role in social, maternal and addictive behavior. Overall, the deepfake voices are characterized by acoustic imperfections, and do not elicit the same sense of recognition (and thus reward sensation) as natural voices do.
Until deepfake voices can be made much better, it would appear that we are still safe, for now. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768760",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T06:38:42",
"content": "OpenAI lawyers will be frantically taking notes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6768775",
"author": "ophelia vanity",
"timestamp": "2024-0... | 1,760,371,879.970512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/lindroid-promises-true-linux-on-android/ | Lindroid Promises True Linux On Android | Al Williams | [
"Android Hacks",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"linux"
] | Since Android uses Linux, you’d think it would be easier to run Linux apps on your Android phone or tablet. There are some solutions out there, but the experience is usually less than stellar. A new player,
Lindroid
, claims to provide real Linux distributions with hardware-accelerated Wayland on phones. How capable is it? The suggested window manager is KDE’s KWIN. That software is fairly difficult to run on anything but a full-blown system with dbus, hardware accelerations, and similar features.
There are, however, a few problems. First, you need a rooted phone, which isn’t totally surprising. Second, there are no clear instructions yet about how to install the software. The bulk of the information available is on
an X thread
. You can go about 4 hours into the very long video below to see a slide presentation about Lindroid.
While it appears Linux is running inside a container, it looks like they’ve opened up device access, which allows a full Linux experience even though Linux is technically, in this case, an Android app.
We are interested in seeing how this works, and when the instructions show up, we might root an old phone to try it out. Of course, there are other methods.
Termux
seems to be the most popular, but running GUI programs on it isn’t always the best experience. Not that we
haven’t done it
. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768725",
"author": "Greg Chabala",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T02:48:36",
"content": "Since Android uses Linux, I’m more surprised it’s not easier to run Android apps directly on Linux without a whole bunch of virtualization tooling.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,880.085984 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/programming-robots-is-hard-figuring-out-how-to-make-it-easier-is-harder/ | Programming Robots Is Hard, Figuring Out How To Make It Easier Is Harder | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"framework",
"product design",
"robotics"
] | [Benjie Holson] is an experienced roboticist and wrote an interesting article published on IEEE Spectrum about how
the idea most people have of non-roboticists is a myth, and efforts to target this group with simplified robotic frameworks tend to be doomed
.
Now, let’s make a couple things absolutely clear right up front: He is
not
saying robots shouldn’t be easier to program, nor is he saying that non-roboticists literally do not exist (of course they do.) The issues he’s highlighting really come down to product design.
[Benjie] points out that programming robots is super hard, but it’s also hard in more than one way and for more than one reason. And when people try to create a product to make it easier, they tend to commit two big product design no-no’s: they focus on the wrong hard parts, and they design their product for a vaguely-defined audience that doesn’t really exist. That group is the mythical non-roboticist.
These are actually very solid points to make in terms of product design in general. Designing a product that solves the wrong problems for a poorly-defined group isn’t exactly a recipe for success. [Benjie]’s advice on making a truly effective and useful API framework that genuinely lowers the bar of complexity in a useful way is similarly applicable to product design in general.
His first piece of advice is not to design for poorly-defined amorphous groups. Your product should serve actual needs of actual users. If you cannot name three people you have actually spoken to who would be helped by your product, you are designing for an amorphous (and possibly imaginary) group.
The second is to design as though your users are just as smart as you are, just less tolerant of problems stemming from rough edges like compatibility and configuration issues. Remove those so that your users can get useful work done without having to re-invent the wheel, or resort to workarounds.
Robotic frameworks like ROS
are useful and extensible, but whenever someone attempts to focus on creating a
simplified
framework, [Benjie] says they tend to step on the same rakes. It’s a mistake [Benjie] has committed himself, and see repeated by others. We think his advice is good product design advice in general, whether for designing APIs or something else. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768706",
"author": "Hank",
"timestamp": "2024-06-19T01:41:50",
"content": "That article makes a lot of good points. The section on BS complexity hits particularly hard. Anyone who’s worked on robotics shares this pain. I’ll work for 10 hours straight on a 3D transformation and mapp... | 1,760,371,880.442594 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/astroscales-adras-j-satellite-takes-up-close-photo-of-discarded-rocket-stage/ | Astroscale’s ADRAS-J Satellite Takes Up-Close Photo Of Discarded Rocket Stage | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"deorbiting",
"space debris",
"space junk"
] | Although there is a lot of space in Earth orbit, there are also some seriously big man-made objects in those orbits, some of which have been there for decades. As part of efforts to remove at least some of this debris from orbit, Astroscale’s ADRAS-J (“Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan”) satellite has been partaking in JAXA’s Commercial Removal of Space Debris Demonstration (CRD2). After ADRAS-J was launched by a Rocket Lab Electron rocket on February 18, it’s been moving closer to its target, with June 14th seeing an approach
by roughly 50 meters
, allowing for an unprecedented photo to be made of the H-2A stage in orbit. This upper stage of a Japanese H-2A rocket originally launched the GOSAT Earth observation satellite into orbit back in 2009.
The challenges with this kind of approach is that the orbital debris does not actively broadcast its location, ergo it requires a combination of on-ground and on-satellite tracking to match the orbital trajectory for a safe approach. Here
ADRAS-J
uses what is called Model Matching Navigation, which uses known visual information to compare it with captured images, to use these to estimate the relative distance to the target.
Although the goal of ADRAS-J is only to study the target from as closely as possible, the next phase in the
CRD2 program
would involve actively deorbiting this upper stage, with phase start projected to commence in 2026.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768618",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T21:18:59",
"content": "So the next mark of the satellite will have a stick to poke the debris into lower orbit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768643",
... | 1,760,371,880.386311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/recovering-an-agilent-2000a-3000a-oscilloscope-with-corrupt-firmware-nand-flash/ | Recovering An Agilent 2000a/3000a Oscilloscope With Corrupt Firmware NAND Flash | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"agilent",
"oscilloscope"
] | Everyone knows that you can never purchase enough projects off EBay, lest boredom might inadvertently strike. That’s why [Anthony Kouttron] got his mitts on an Agilent DSO-X 2014A digital oscilloscope that was being sold as defective and not booting, effectively just for parts. When [Anthony]
received the unit
, this turned out to be very much the case, with the front looking like it got dragged over the tarmac prior to having the stuffing beaten out of its knobs with a hammer. Fortunately, repairing the broken encoder and the plastic enclosure was easy enough, but the scope didn’t want to boot when powered on. How bad was the damage?
As [Anthony] describes in the article, issues with this range of Agilent DSOs are well-known, with for example the PSU liking to fry the primary side due to soft power button leaving it powered 24/7 with no cooling. The other is corrupted NAND storage, which he confirmed after figuring out the UART interface on the PCB with the ST SPEAr600 ARM-based SoC. Seeing the sad Flash block decompression error from the Windows CE said enough.
This led him down the rabbithole of finding the WinCE firmware images (nuked by Keysight, backed up on his site) for this scope, along with the InfiniiVision scope application. The former is loaded via the bootloader in binary
YMODEM
mode, followed by installing InfiniiVision via a USB stick. An alternate method is explained in the SPEAr600 datasheet, in the form of USB BootROM, which can also be reached via the bootloader with some effort.
As for the cause of the NAND corruption, it’s speculated that the scope writes to the same section of NAND Flash on boot, with the SPEAr600’s Flash controller documentation not mentioning wear leveling. Whether that’s true or not, at least it can be fixed with some effort even without replacing the NAND Flash IC. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768599",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T19:18:21",
"content": "Nice work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768617",
"author": "Anthony Kouttron",
"timestamp": "2024-0... | 1,760,371,880.207074 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/the-guinness-brewery-invented-one-of-sciences-most-important-statistical-tools/ | The Guinness Brewery Invented One Of Science’s Most Important Statistical Tools | Donald Papp | [
"Beer Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"beer",
"guinness",
"sampling",
"science",
"statistics",
"stout",
"t-test"
] | The Guinness brewery has a long history of innovation, but did you know that it was the birthplace of the
t
-test? A
t
-test is usually what underpins a declaration of results being “statistically significant”.
Scientific American
has a fascinating article
all about how the Guinness brewery (and one experimental brewer in particular) brought it into being, with ramifications far beyond that of brewing better beer.
William Sealy Gosset
(aka ‘Student’), self-trained statistician. [source: user Wujaszek,
wikipedia
]
Head brewer William Sealy Gosset developed the technique in the early 1900s as a way to more effectively monitor and control the quality of stout beer. At Guinness, Gosset and other brilliant researchers measured everything they could in their quest to optimize and refine large-scale brewing, but there was a repeated problem. Time and again, existing techniques of analysis were simply not applicable to their gathered data, because sample sizes were too small to work with.
While the concept of statistical significance was not new at the time, Gosset’s significant contribution was finding a way to effectively and economically interpret data in the face of small sample sizes. That contribution was the
t
-test
; a practical and logical approach to dealing with uncertainty.
As mentioned,
t
-testing had ramifications and applications far beyond that of brewing beer. The basic question of whether to consider one population of results significantly different from another population of results is one that underlies nearly all purposeful scientific inquiry. (If you’re unclear on how exactly the
t
-test is applied and how it is meaningful, the article in the first link walks through some excellent and practical examples.)
Dublin’s Guinness brewery has a rich heritage of innovation so maybe spare them a thought the next time you indulge in statistical inquiry, or in a modern “nitro brew” style beverage. But if you prefer to keep things ultra-classic, there’s always
beer from 1574, Dublin castle-style
. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768528",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T16:06:44",
"content": "I wonder if the history of the location influenced the MIT Media Lab when they set up Media Lab Europe across the street. Weird location to see them. I assumed it was just the proximity to the beer. It’s... | 1,760,371,880.499963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/design-review-switching-regulator-edition/ | PCB Design Review: Switching Regulator Edition | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"pdb design",
"review",
"switching regulator"
] | This article was prompted by a friend of mine asking for help on a board with an ESP32 heart. The board outputs 2.1 V instead of 3.3 V, and it doesn’t seem like incorrectly calculated feedback resistors are to blame – let’s take a look at the layout. Then, let’s also take a look at a recently sent in design review entry, based on an IC that looks perfect for all your portable Raspberry Pi needs!
What Could Have Gone Wrong?
Here’s the board in all its two-layer glory. This is the kind of board you can use to drive 5 V or 12 V Neopixel strips with a firmware like WLED – exactly the kind of gadget you’ll want to use for LED strip experiments! 3.3 V power is provided by a Texas Instruments
TPS54308 IC,
and it’s the one misfiring, so let’s take a look.
The design has an ESP32 on the opposite side of the switching regulator. For review purposes, let’s pull the regulator circuit out – disable all front layers (copper, silk, mask, courtyard and paste), hide vias, then box select the regulator circuit and move it out. I’ve also added net labels to the circuit – here’s a screenshot.
There are things done right here, for sure, and a few things that could be the culprit in improper regulation. If you want hints, you can see TPS54308 datasheet, page 22, for layout recommendations. Both SW and FB nodes are pretty long, and the FB trace goes right next to VOUT – before regulation.
Furthermore, from the pinout and also the layout recommendations, it appears this regulator is designed in a way that all switching circuitry can be routed nicely. Yet, this design has the inductor go all the way to supposedly sensitive side. Thankfully, this is easy to fix.
Refresher – FB and SW traces have to be as short as possible, inductor as close to SW as possible, and the VOUT to FB connection can be a separate tracks on the other layer. With that in mind, let’s move the inductor to the other side of the regulator, move the FB resistors to the FB pin, and see how far we get.
My Take Versus TI’s Recommendation
This is my take. FB resistors moved to one side, switching components to the other, VOUT track on another layer. Add capacitors and vias as necessary, and pull tracks under components to get extra ground connections if needed. Of course, ideally, SW would be a copper polygon, and so would be VOUT. I’m also showing how EN could be pulled out, in case you needed that – in this particular schematic, EN can be safely left floating, but most regulators will want you to pull it either to VIN or to GND.
Since this is a TI chip, it also has a diagram for the layout recommendation! Let’s take a look how far off the mark we are, and it appears we aren’t that far. Curiously, it wants us to put SW onto another layer. Having switching current pass through extra inductance doesn’t sit right with me, personally, but my guess is that they want to minimize switching current flowing under the regulator, as the recommendation suggests.
Another part that’s curious to me, is a suggestion for a Kelvin connection for the FB net’s GND pin. TI also publishes data for evaluation boards, and the TPS54308 has such a board indeed. Seeing on the page 13 of the evaluation board datasheet, I’m not quite seeing a Kelvin connection, unless Kelvin is the name of the engineer involved in designing the board. I do see that GND is tapped with a via far away from the area where switching happens, so it might just be that.
At this point, I’m curious whether my take is a dealbreaker, but since TI’s recommendations are available, I might just end up implementing exactly that and sending the files back. So, we take this circuit, implant it back into the board, order a new revision, and keep our fingers crossed.
A Pi-suited UPS, On A Stamp
A week ago, [Lukilukeskywalker]
has shared a board with us,
asking for a design review. The board is a stamp that houses a LTC4040 chip, and the chip itself is a treat. It takes 5 V, outputs 5 V, and when connected, it generates 5 V from a battery. It supports both regular LiIon, can do up to 2.5 A, and appears to be a perfect option if you want to power a Raspberry Pi or any other 5 V-powered SBC on the go.
There are a few small nits to pick on this board. For instance, the connector for the battery is JST-SH, 3-pin, with one pin for BATT+. 2.5 A at 5 V means 12.5 W means up to 4 A at 3.5 V battery level, which might just melt a JST-SH connector or the gauge of wire you can attach to a JST-SH-sized metal contact. However, it’s switching regulator time, so let’s take a look at that specifically.
Here’s another thing you might notice immediately – lack of ground path from the IC’s ground connections, all the way under the switching path. In particular, the switching path is broken by a few traces, and it doesn’t appear that these traces must be there! Page 22 in the LTC4040 datasheet, which lists the layout recommendations, also stresses upon this, elaborating that “High frequency currents in the hot loop tend to flow along a mirror path on the ground plane which is directly beneath the incident path on the top plane of the board”.
Well, there are only two tracks that really interrupt the switching path above them, and both could be moved to the left. One of them is for a resistor that sets the charging current limit, and another goes to a castellated pad. Moving the latter is going to break the symmetry, but remember – it’s okay for a stamp to be asymmetric, that helps you ensure it’s mounted on your board correctly!
Sadly, while Linear Tech makes fancy tech, their evaluation board data isn’t as available as TI’s – there’s a PDF with schematics, but no layout data I could find. However, comparing to the pictures, you can see that the general layout of the switching area is correct, our hacker correctly uses polygons, the feedback circuit is pretty nice – it’s just these two tracks that are a bit uncouth when it comes to the switching regulator part of it. As for reviewing the rest of the board, you can
read this article!
Towards A Powerful Future
Got switching regulator designs that didn’t quite work right when you put them to test, or that you’re yet to order and feel cautious about? Show them to us down below in the comments, and let’s take a look; your circuits deserve to operate at their best capacity possible.
And, as usual, if you would like a design review for your board,
submit a tip
to us with
[design review]
in the title, linking to your board files. KiCad design files strongly preferred, both repository-stored files (GitHub/GitLab/etc) and shady Google Drive/Dropbox/etc .zip links are accepted. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768473",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T14:44:57",
"content": "> it appears this regulator is designed in a way that all switching circuitry can be.Can be what? I think the end of this sentence got misrouted :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,880.652398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/tdk-claims-solid-state-battery-with-100x-energy-density/ | TDK Claims Solid State Battery With 100X Energy Density | Al Williams | [
"Battery Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"batteries",
"solid state batteries"
] | Regulations surrounding disposable batteries have accelerated a quiet race to replace coin cells, which on the whole are not readily rechargeable. TDK produces solid-state batteries and has
announced a new material
that claims an energy density of about 100 times that of their conventional batteries.
Energy density measures how much energy a system contains relative to its volume. The new battery has 1000 Wh/L. For comparison, old nickel-cadmium cells had about 150 Wh/L. A typical lithium-ion battery usually turns in about 200 – 250 Wh/L.
There aren’t many technical details, but a few things caught our interest. For one, it uses an oxide-based solid electrolyte and lithium alloy anodes. However, what really caught our eye was that it is “intended for use in wearables… that come in direct contact with the human body.” We don’t know if that means the material is safe for your skin or if it depends on being next to your body to operate.
While the energy density is high, keep in mind that the batteries of this type are usually tiny, so the total actual power available is probably not very high. Tiny batteries are
definitely a thing
. We are always
hearing about breakthroughs
, but we always wonder if and when we’ll see actual products. | 49 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768392",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T11:16:52",
"content": ">A typical lithium-ion battery usually turns in about 200 – 250 Wh/L.Nope. About 250–693 Wh/LThere’s two energy density metrics. By weight and by volume, and you’re mixing them up. Usually when you see publi... | 1,760,371,880.587107 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/18/mcdonalds-terminates-its-drive-through-ordering-via-ai-assistant/ | McDonald’s Terminates Its Drive-Through Ordering AI Assistant | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"News"
] | [
"McDonald's",
"voice assistant"
] | McDonald’s recently announced that it will be
scrapping the voice-assistant
which it has installed at over 100 of its drive-throughs after a two-year trial run. In the email that was sent to franchises, McDonald’s did say that they are still looking at voice ordering solutions for automated order taking (AOT), but it appears that for now the test was a disappointment. Judging by the
many viral videos
of customers struggling to place an order through the AOT system, it’s not hard to see why.
This AOT attempt
began
when in 2019 McDonald’s acquired AI company Apprente to create its McD Tech Labs, only to sell it again to IBM who then got contracted to create the technology for McDonald’s fast-food joints. When launched in 2021, it was
expected
that McDonald’s drive-through ordering lanes would eventually all be serviced by AOT, with an experience akin to the Alexa and Siri voice assistants that everyone knows and loves (to yell at).
With the demise of this test at McDonald’s, it would seem that the biggest change is likely to be in the wider automation of preparing fast-food instead, with robots doing the burger flipping and freedom frying rather than a human. That said, would you prefer the McD voice assistant when going through a Drive-Thru
®
over a human voice? | 72 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768365",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T08:21:37",
"content": "Another instance of why it’s a mistake to contract IBM to do anything, as they pay their lawyers to get out of their contract terms instead of paying their developers to do the job properly in the first pl... | 1,760,371,880.774341 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/a-brief-look-inside-a-homebrew-digital-sampler-from-1979/ | A Brief Look Inside A Homebrew Digital Sampler From 1979 | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"adc",
"dac",
"NMOS",
"oscilloscope",
"sampler",
"successive approximation"
] | While we generally prefer to bring our readers as much information about a project as possible, sometimes we just have to go with what we see. That generally happens with new projects and work in progress, but it can also happen with old projects. Sometimes very old indeed, as is the case with
this digital sampling unit for analog oscilloscopes
, circa 1979.
We’ve got precious little to go on with this one other than the bit of eye candy in the video tour below and its description. Luckily, we’ve had a few private conversations with its maker, [Mitsuru Yamada], over the years, enough to piece together a little of the back story here — with apologies for any wrong assumptions, of course.
Built when he was only 19, this sampler was an attempt to build something that couldn’t be bought, at least not for a reasonable price. With no inexpensive monolithic analog-to-digital converters on the market, he decided to roll his own. A few years back he recreated the core of that with
his all-discrete successive approximation ADC
.
The sampler shown below has an 8-bit SAR ADC using discrete CMOS logic and enough NMOS memory to store 256 samples. You can see the ADC and memory cards in the homebrew card cage made from aluminum angle stock. The front panel has a ton of controls and sports a wide-range attenuator, DC offset, and trigger circuit with both manual and automatic settings.
It’s an impressive build, especially for a 19-year-old with presumably limited resources. We’ve reached out to [Yamada-san] in the hope that he’ll be able to provide more details on what’s under the hood and if this still works after all these years. We’ll pass along whatever we get, but in the meantime, enjoy. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768340",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T05:05:09",
"content": "The most impressive thing is the lettering.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768357",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T07:0... | 1,760,371,880.834309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/the-us-surgeon-generals-case-for-a-warning-label-on-social-media/ | The US Surgeon General’s Case For A Warning Label On Social Media | Maya Posch | [
"internet hacks",
"News"
] | [
"internet",
"online safety",
"Social Media"
] | The term ‘Social Media’ may give off a benign vibe, suggesting that it’s a friendly place where everyone is welcome to be themselves, yet reality has borne out that it is anything but. This is the reason why the US Surgeon General [Dr. Vivek H. Murthy] is
pleading for a health warning
label on social media platforms. Much like with warnings on tobacco products, it’s not expected that such a measure would make social media safe for children and adolescents, but would remind them and their parents about the risks of these platforms.
While this may sound dire for what is at its core about social interactions, there is a growing body of evidence to support the notion that social media can negatively impact mental health. A
2020 systematic review
article in
Cureus
by [Fazida Karim] and colleagues found anxiety and depression to be the most notable negative psychological health outcomes. A
2023 editorial
in
BMC Psychology
by [Ágnes Zsila] and [Marc Eric S. Reyes] concurs with this notion, while contrasting these cons of social media with the pros, such as giving individuals an online community where they feel that they belong.
Ultimately, it’s important to realize that social media isn’t the end-all, be-all of online social interactions. There are still many dedicated forums, IRC channels and newsgroups far away from the prying eyes and social pressure of social media to act out a personality. Having more awareness of how social interactions affect oneself and/or one’s children is definitely essential, even if we’re unlikely to return to the ‘never give out your real name’ days of the pre-2000s Internet. | 68 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768302",
"author": "frozen rabbit",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T02:09:29",
"content": "a.k.a. communism",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768342",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T05:28:35",
"con... | 1,760,371,880.947231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/improving-wind-turbine-testing-with-a-better-air-source/ | Improving Wind Turbine Testing With A Better Air Source | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"laminar flow",
"toroidal propeller",
"wind energy",
"wind tunnel",
"Wind turbine"
] | When comparing the efficiency of different wind turbine blade designs, [AdamEnt] found using a hair dryer wasn’t the best tool for the job. Enter his new
3D-printed wind tunnel
.
After several prototypes, [AdamEnt] decided on a design that exploits slicer infill to create a flow straightener without having to do any tedious modeling of a lattice. Combined with a box on both ends of the straightener to constrain the flow, he has a more controllable air source with laminar instead of turbulent flow for testing his wind turbines.
The
BLDC motor
driving the air is attached to a
toroidal blade of MIT fame
. We get a little bit of the math behind calculating wind turbine efficiency and see a quick test of a blade placed next to the outlet of the air source at the end of the video.
If you’re planning on building your own wind tunnel, we’ve
covered a few
. We’ve even seen one that goes
up to Mach 20
, although that probably wouldn’t be useful for wind turbine design! | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768294",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-18T01:33:36",
"content": "I first saw the video was 14 minutes and thought, I don’t have the time for that.But I think he did a great job explaining the problems and solutions encountered, as well as th... | 1,760,371,881.000458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/harmonic-table-keyboard-brings-old-idea-back-to-life/ | Harmonic Table Keyboard Brings Old Idea Back To Life | Bryan Cockfield | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"axis-49",
"axis-64",
"c-thru",
"cherry mx",
"hall effect",
"harmonic table",
"harmonic table keyboard",
"midi",
"midi polyphonic expression",
"midihex",
"mpe",
"Teensy 4.1"
] | If you missed the introduction of the Axis-49 and Axis-64 keyboards by C-Thru Music, you’re definitely not alone. At the time it was a new musical instrument that was based on the harmonic table, but it launched during the Great Recession and due to its nontraditional nature and poor timing, the company went out of business. But the harmonic table layout has a number advantages for musicians over other keyboard layouts,
so [Ben] has brought his own version of the unique instrument to life
in his latest project.
Called the Midihex, the keyboard has a number of improvements over the version from C-Thru Music, most obviously its much larger 98 playable keys and five function keys. The keys themselves are similar to Cherry MX keys but which use Hall-effect sensors. This style of key allows the device to send continuous key position information to the host computer, and since this is a MIDI instrument, this capability allows it to support a MIDI protocol called MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) which allows each note to be more finely controlled by the musician than a standard MIDI instrument. The PCB is powered by a Teensy 4.1 at the core.
For any musicians that haven’t tried out a harmonic table before, an instrument like this might be worth trying out. The layout provides easier chord and scale patterns, and for beginner musicians it can have a much shallower learning curve than other types of instruments. If you can’t find an original Axis-49 or Axis-64 anywhere to try out, though,
we actually posted a teardown of one way back in 2009
when the company was still producing instruments. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768262",
"author": "Enkerli",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T20:38:16",
"content": "Unclear that this device complies fully with the MPE specs. Hope it does. There’s been a whole lot of confusion from improper use of the standard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,881.04423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/postmarketos-now-boots-on-over-250-devices/ | PostmarketOS Now Boots On Over 250 Devices | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Software Development"
] | [
"custom firmware",
"obsolescence",
"postmarketos",
"upcycling"
] | Every year, as consumers gobble up the latest Android devices, more old, but perfectly serviceable, units end up collecting dust in drawers. Or worse, they end up getting tossed in the trash. One of the most promising tools we have to help keep these older devices useful is postmarketOS, a full-fledged Linux distribution that provides a flexible and up-to-date software environment on devices that might otherwise be stuck with some old and unsupported version of Google’s mobile operating system.
As of the latest update on the postmarketOS blog, the team has announced an exciting milestone:
over 250 devices can now boot the stable release of the OS
.
Now to be clear, not all devices will be fully functional. In fact, the blog post clarifies that some of them only barely boot. But it’s progress, and now that these semi-supported devices aren’t hidden behind a development version of the OS, it means more folks will be able to put them to use.
For example, if you want to turn your old smartphone into a low-energy headless webserver, it doesn’t really matter if its display, touchscreen, or speakers are supported. You just need it to boot into Linux and fire up an SSH server so you can get in and start working.
But support for new devices is just one of the additions in this new v24.06 release. The blog post also points out several notable software upgrades, including the move to the 6.x branch of KDE Plasma Mobile. This brings with it a long list of improvements and changes, including a rewritten homescreen with enhanced customization options. If you prefer a more minimal GUI, don’t worry. This new release also updates Sxmo, which provides a menu-driven interface for both touch screens and hardware controls.
Among the newly supported devices is a generic x86_64 image that should work on a wide array of PCs. While obviously there’s no shortage of Linux distros you could run on your old computer, being able to install postmarketOS on it is definitely helpful for development purposes. There’s also a new Tegra ARMv7 target which brings a number of new devices into the fold, such as the Google Nexus 7, and Microsoft Surface RT.
Looking to run postmarketOS on your own hardware? The best way to start is to
check the Devices page
and see how many of those old gadgets you’ve got collecting dust in a drawer are compatible. | 43 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768237",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T18:42:07",
"content": "Cool! I just got a Surface RT at a yard sale a few weeks ago for $10. I hope the install process is straightforward.Looking forward to support for the Kindle Fire I got for $5 at the same yard sale.",
... | 1,760,371,881.225698 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/the-solar-system-is-weirder-than-you-think/ | The Solar System Is Weirder Than You Think | Elliot Williams | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"asteroid",
"centaur",
"comet",
"moon",
"Planet",
"Pluto",
"space"
] | When I was a kid, the solar system was simple. There were nine planets and they all orbited in more-or-less circles around the sun. This same sun-and-a-handful-of-planets scheme repeated itself again and again throughout our galaxy, and these galaxies make up the universe. It’s a great story that’s easy to wrap your mind around, and of course it’s a great first approximation, except maybe that “nine planets” thing, which was just a fluke that we’ll examine shortly.
What’s happened since, however, is that telescopes have gotten significantly better, and many more bodies of all sorts have been discovered in the solar system which is awesome. But as a casual astronomy observer, I’ve given up hope of holding on to a simple mental model. The solar system is just too weird.
The Ancients and the Asteroids
It’s probably all Plato’s fault. While all of the ancient astronomers, from the Babylonians to the Egyptians, had noticed that some of the stars seemed to wander around relative to the others, it was Plato who posited that the fixed stars were located on one sphere, and the planets on another. That’s about as simple as you can get.
Ptolemy noticed that some of the planets seemed to wiggle around in their wanderings, and broke the planetary sphere by claiming that
planets followed epicycles
, and that each planet had its own. Others proposed epicycles on the epicycles, fitting the data better, but making for a very complicated system. Copernicus later managed to shrink the epicycles, explaining the motion of the planets by putting the sun at the center of the solar system. But it wouldn’t be until Kepler that we had a truly simple system again: all six planets, now including the earth, all orbited the sun in ellipses. Neat and tidy; the opposite of weird.
When the seventh planet, Uranus, was discovered, it was only a minor complication: just one more of the same thing that we already understood. Ditto the eighth planet, Ceres, in 1801. And then the ninth, Pallas, in 1802. And then the tenth planet, Juno, in 1804 and the eleventh, Vesta in 1807. Wait, what?
From
this inspirational talk at 37c3
Today, we’d call these four planets “asteroids”, but for around 50 years, they were legit planets in their own right – except they all shared essentially the same orbit, which didn’t fit our mental schema at all. I don’t know if it was with relief or exasperation that as many, many more objects were discovered in the 1850, they all got collectively demoted from their “planet” status, and never spoken of in grade-school astronomy classes again. Our mental model of the solar system was simple once more.
But the asteroids are awesome. Vesta, for instance, suffered a gigantic collision, and over 15,000 tiny asteroids are thought to be chunks that split off,
some of which rain down on the earth as meteorites
. In that way, Vesta is the poster child of the weird solar system, even among the poster-children asteroids. And this is why NASA sending recent probes
to Psyche
and to
the Trojan asteroids
is particularly exciting.
Pluto and the TNOs
In the same era as the asteroid discoveries, the solar system’s eighth and outermost planet, Neptune, was discovered. The
geopolitics of its discovery are a fascinating subject
, but as far as our mental model of the solar system goes, it was just another planet.
Then comes Pluto. Discovered in 1930, it was a planet until 2006. It was a planet when I was a kid, and even though its orbit crossed inside of Neptune’s, we never gave it any thought. Its orbit takes it between 30 and 50 times as far from the sun as the earth and takes around 250 years. It’s a strange fluke of history that we discovered it just as telescopes were getting powerful enough, and as it was approaching closely. But for 76 glorious years, we convinced ourselves that it was a planet, because nine didn’t seem like too many.
Until, like with the asteroids, we discovered more of them. Telescopes and their sensors became powerful enough in the late 1990s and early 2000s to start to resolve more of what we now call trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).
And there are a lot of them
. There is a tremendous variety of objects out there in the Kuiper Belt – a disc like the asteroid belt, only something like 100 times more massive. The Kuiper Belt is home to things like the close comets that have incredibly elliptical orbits that bring them close enough in to us to be visible, but also dwarf planets that are large enough to be rounded by their own gravity, and some of which even have moons.
Arrokoth is weird
It’s only luck, and the fact that Pluto is very reflective, that we found it first. If human telescope development were delayed by a hundred years, it would have been further out, and maybe another TNO would have been discovered first. For instance,
Eris
is bigger, heavier, and
since New Horizons flew by Pluto
is the largest body in the solar system that we haven’t visited. (
Arrokoth
, another TNO, also got the New Horizons treatment, and is probably the strangest object that we’ve visited.)
The point with the TNOs: just outside the radius of what shows up on my son’s poster of the solar system are thousands of known objects, and potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of unknown objects that are big enough to be seen with today’s telescopes. Some are “planets” even if they’re not
planets
, some are comets, some need classification. But things are weird in the Kuiper Belt.
Centaurs
Closer to home, between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune, we find the
centaurs
, so named because they’re halfway between asteroids and comets, and halfway between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt.
Euler-Diagram bodies in the Solar System
by Holf Weiher
Like Pluto, the first centaur that was ever discovered was quickly called a planet in the popular press, upon its discovery in 1977. This “tenth planet” was named
Chiron
. (I take the irony that neither the ninth nor the tenth planet would hold up more than 30 years as strong evidence for the weird-solar-system hypothesis.) From recent telescope images, Chiron even looks like it has a ring system.
Like the TNOs, there are
very many known centaurs
, with the vast majority discovered since 2010. And like the TNOs, we owe our knowledge of the centaurs to increased telescope performance.
The Hawaiian Pan-STARRS project
has found about half of them. Some think that Saturn’s moon Phoebe is a captured centaur, or that the previously-eighth-planet Ceres used to be one.
With the discovery of the centaurs, the weird zones of the solar system were no longer limited to the asteroid belt in the middle and the Kuiper belt on the “outside”, but also the centaurs that are whizzing around between the two.
Strange Moons and Near-Earth Objects
Surely nothing is weird about the solar system closer to home than the asteroids, right? For instance, in our orbit it’s just us and the moon, right? Well, that depends on your definition of “moon”.
Kamoʻoalewa
appears to be a chunk of our actual moon that got chipped off millions of years ago, but has been trapped by Earth’s gravity for more than a century. Given the dynamics, Kamo’oalewa will be with us for at least another 100 years. China’s
Tianwen-2 mission
may go visit Kamo’oalewa, and then we’d know for sure if it’s made out of moon.
Kamo’oalewa isn’t our only quasi-satellite:
2023 FW13
appears to be circling the earth stably in an orbit that runs roughly between halfway to Venus and Mars respectively. (Note the Hawaiian names? That’s Pan-STARRS again.) So don’t say “moon”, but maybe “quasi-moon”. These weird objects are new enough that we don’t have a name pinned down yet, but we will almost certainly discover more of them in the near future.
Additionally, it turns out that of the roughly 12 million asteroids that we know the orbits for,
some 35,000 are on orbits that put them inside 1.3 AU of the sun
. (One astronomical unit is the radius of the earth’s orbit around the sun.) Of these,
roughly 1,600 have a non-zero probability of colliding with the earth
.
Indeed,
the second-closest flyby of the earth
took place just two weeks ago. (Spoiler: it missed.)
2024 LH1
was visibly spinning as it passed overhead, which was observed by it “blinking” 3.7 times per second.
The closest recorded approach was back in 2020
, and it missed us by only 370 km. It probably would have disintegrated in the atmosphere, but as with the TNOs and the centaurs, it’s a testament to our telescopes that this near miss was noticed at all. The fastest flyby? That would be
totally-not-a-spaceship ’Oumuamua
.
The Weird Universe
As with all simple models, the planets-orbiting-the-sun model of the solar system is incomplete. Over the past two hundred years,
more planets have been added and subtracted from the list than we have planets at all
. But it’s not just the planets – the reason for kicking Ceres, and later Pluto, off the list was the discovery of entirely new classes of objects that are hundreds to millions of times more numerous than just eight or nine planets. And we’re finding them everywhere we look, not just in the “belts”. As our observational astronomy gets better and better, the solar system gets weirder and weirder, and the last twenty years have seen the weirding accelerate.
And that’s just the solar system. Don’t get us started on
the rogue planets
that wander around completely untethered from any suns at all. There’s a lot more going on out there than we know, or than our orderly systems like to admit. At this point in astronomy, it’s more likely that we’ll discover an entirely new class of objects than a ninth planet. So, keep looking up and keep your mind open. Help keep the universe weird! | 50 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768207",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T15:56:16",
"content": "9-planet people are just parroting the narrative of yesteryear. i think the bigger problem is that the educational system still thinks making kids learn large tables of useless (sometimes incorrect) i... | 1,760,371,881.139121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/magic-cane-is-the-secret-behind-lightsaber/ | Magic Cane Is The Secret Behind Lightsaber | Elliot Williams | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"appearing cane",
"lightsaber",
"magic cane",
"prop"
] | Everyone has a lightsaber or two lying around the house, but
not
everyone has a lightsaber that extends and retracts automatically. And that’s because, in the real world, it’s not an easy design challenge.
[HeroTech]’s solution for the mechanism
is simple and relies on an old magician’s trick: the appearing cane. (Video, embedded below.)
An
appearing cane
is a tightly coiled up spring steel sheet that springs, violently, to its full length when a pin is released, but they can’t retract while the audience is looking. This is fine for magic tricks, but a lightsaber has to be able to turn off again. Here, an LED strip does double duty as source of glow but also as the cable that extends and retracts the appearing cane spring. A motor and spool to wind up the LED strip takes care of the rest.
There are still a number of to-dos in this early stage prototype, and the one mentioned in the video is a tall order. Since the strip doesn’t illuminate out the sides, the lightsaber has two good viewing angles, and two bad ones. The plan is to rotate the LED strip quickly inside the sheath: an approach that was oddly enough
used in the original movie prop
, as demonstrated in this documentary. Doing this reliably in an already packed handle is going to be a challenge.
If you’re thinking you’ve seen a magic-cane lightsaber before, well,
maybe you saw this video
. And if you want a light saber with real lasers, check out
this build that brings its own fog machine
. Take that, Darth Vader! | 23 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768153",
"author": "MrJohnsBlueEyedDevil",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T11:08:07",
"content": "“ancient weapons and hokey religions are no substitute for a good blaster at your side”….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768188",
... | 1,760,371,883.408812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/17/preview-markdown-in-the-terminal-with-bash/ | Preview Markdown In The Terminal With Bash | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"bash",
"Bash script",
"markdown"
] | Markdown has become an extremely popular way to document source code and other projects, thanks in no small part to how well web-based services like GitHub render it. Just sprinkle a few extra characters into a regular text file, and all of a sudden it looks like you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, there are some places where markdown won’t actually render, and you’ll be stuck looking at those extra characters.
But thanks to MarCLIdown
, the terminal doesn’t have to be one of those places. Written by [NihaAlGhul], this simple tool takes a given markdown file and spits out a fairly impressive rendering — and you don’t even need to have one of those fancy new GPU-accelerated terminals. Most impressively, the whole thing is implemented as a single Bash script.
How does it work? Some would say it’s magic. Others would point out the inline Perl, conditionals statements, and line after line of regular expressions. Ultimately, we’d argue they’re the same thing.
Definitely Dark Magic
As you can probably imagine not
everything
is supported by MarCLIdown, but the list of what’s currently working is already quite impressive. Headers, check boxes, lists, block quotes, links, all work and look pretty much as you’d expect. The biggest omission at this point is probably tables, but even that isn’t really a deal breaker.
MarCLIdown isn’t the first tool to try and visualize markdown in the terminal. Readers may already be familiar with
glow
, which is more mature and admittedly has the edge in terms of capability. But the fact that [NihaAlGhul] managed to get this far with just a single Bash script is a proper hack, and one we think worthy of some special consideration. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768142",
"author": "wrzwicky",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T09:02:23",
"content": "If I recall, “line after line of regular expressions” is one of the things Perl is designed for. So not really ‘dark magic’.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,371,882.995737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/3d-printing-a-bottle-labeling-assembly-line/ | 3D Printing A Bottle Labeling Assembly Line | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"assembly line",
"glue rollers",
"label",
"paper"
] | We’re not completely sure why [Fraens] needs to label so many glass bottles at home. Perhaps he’s brewing his own beer, or making jams. Whatever the reason is, it was justification enough to
build an absolutely incredible labeling machine
that you could mistake for a piece of industrial gear…if it wasn’t for the fact that majority of the device is constructed out of orange 3D printed plastic.
As we’ve come to expect, [Fraens] has documented the build with a detailed write-up on his site — but in this case, you’ve really got to watch the video below to truly appreciate how intricate the operation of this machine is. Watching it reminded us of an episode of
How It’s Made
, with the added bonus that you not only get to see how the machine functions, but how it was built in the first place.
Nearly every part of the machine, outside the fasteners, smooth rods, a couple of acrylic panels, and a few sections of aluminum extrusion, were 3D printed. You might think this would result in a wobbly machine with sloppy tolerances, but [Fraens] is truly a master of knowing when and where you can get away with using printed parts. So for example, while the glue rollers could be done in printed plastic, they still needed metal rods run through the middle for strength and proper bearings to rotate on.
Looking at the totality of this build, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been accomplished via traditional methods. Sure you could have sourced the rollers and gears from a supplier to save some plastic (at an added expense, no doubt), but there’s so many unique components that simply needed to be fabricated. For example, all the guides that keep the label heading in the right direction through the mechanism, or the interchangeable collars which let you select the pattern of glue which is to be applied. Maybe if you had a whole machine shop at your disposal, but that’s a lot more expensive and complex a proposition than the pair of desktop 3D printers [Fraens] used to crank out this masterpiece.
If the name (and penchant for orange plastic) seems familiar, it’s because we’ve featured several builds from [Fraens] in the past. This one may be the most technically impressive so far, but that doesn’t diminish the brilliance of his
vibratory rock tumbler
or
cigarette stuffing machine. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768122",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T06:20:00",
"content": "This kind of stuff is just plain fascinating. It makes me wish I had something that complex to figure out, design, and build, that was actually important enough to spend that kind of time on…I have no idea... | 1,760,371,882.945277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/siping-a-vintage-phone/ | SIPing A Vintage Phone | Jenny List | [
"hardware"
] | [
"SIP",
"telephone",
"wired phone"
] | Something that’s a bit of fun at hacker camps such as the recent EMF Camp is to bring along a wired phone and hook it up to the on-camp copper network. It’s a number on the camp network, but pleasingly retro. How about doing the same thing at home? Easy enough if you still have a wired landline, but those are now fast becoming a rarity. Help is at hand though courtesy of [Remy], who’s written about his experiences
using a 1960s Dutch phone as a SIP device
.
The T65 was the standard Dutch home phone of the 1960s and 1970s, and its curvy grey plastic shape is still not difficult to find in that country. The guide covers using various different VoIP boxes between such an old machine and the Internet, but there’s more of interest to be found in it. In particular the use of an inline pulse-to-tone converter, either the wonderfully-named
DialGizmo
, or perhaps closer to our world,
a PIC-based kit
.
So if you can lay your hands on a VoIP box it’s completely possible to use an aged phone here in 2024. Remember though,
a SIP account isn’t the only way to do it
.
J. de Kat Angelino,
CC BY 3.0
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768143",
"author": "Manfred",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T09:07:01",
"content": "I use an Auerswald COMpact 5020 VoIP. With that you can user virtually every phone. From a 70 year old W48 to a ISDN or VOIP phone.And it can connect to any type of landline.Also the 5020 is quite ancient... | 1,760,371,882.889397 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/hackaday-links-june-16-2024/ | Hackaday Links: June 16, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"chatbot",
"cons",
"facebook",
"hackaday links",
"HOPE XV",
"mouse jiggler",
"OpenSauce",
"RTO",
"scam",
"stl",
"teardown",
"usb",
"work from home"
] | Attention, slackers — if you do remote work for a financial institution,
using a mouse jiggler might not be the best career move
. That’s what a dozen people learned this week as they became former employees of Wells Fargo after allegedly being caught “simulating keyboard activity” while working remotely. Having now spent more than twice as many years working either hybrid or fully remote, we get it; sometimes, you’ve just got to step away from the keyboard for a bit. But we’ve never once felt the need to create the “impression of active work” during those absences. Perhaps that’s because we’ve never worked in a regulated environment like financial services.
For our part, we’re curious as to how the bank detected the use of a jiggler. The linked article mentions that regulators recently tightened rules that require employers to treat an employee’s home as a “non-branch location” subject to periodic inspection. More than enough reason to quit, in our opinion, but perhaps they sent someone snooping? More likely, the activity simulators were discovered by technical means. The article contains a helpful tip to avoid powering a jiggler from the computer’s USB, which implies detecting the device over the port. Our guess is that Wells tracks mouse and keyboard activity and compares it against a machine-learning model to look for signs of slacking.
Speaking of the intersection of soulless corporate giants and AI, what’s this world coming to when
AI walks you right into an online scam?
That’s what happened to a Canadian man recently when he tried to get help moving Facebook to his new phone. He searched for a customer service number for Facebook and found one listed, but thought it would be wise to verify the number. So he pulled up the “Meta AI”-powered search tool in Facebook Messenger and asked if the number was legit. “No problem,” came the reply, so he called the number and promptly got attacked by the scammers on the other end, who within minutes used his PayPal account to buy $500 worth of Apple gift cards. From the sound of it, the guy did everything he should have to protect himself, at least up to a point. But when a company’s chatbot system gives you bad information about their own customer support, things like this are going to happen.
Just a reminder that we’re deep into con season now. Open Sauce should be just about wrapped up by the time this gets published, and coming up the week after is Teardown 2024 in Portland.
The schedule
for that has been released, which includes a workshop on
retrocomputing with the “Voja4” Supercon badge
. A little further on into the summer and back on the East Coast will be
HOPE XV
, which still has some tickets left. The
list of speakers
for that one looks pretty good, as does
the workshop roundup
.
And finally, if you have some STL models in need of a little creative mutilation, try out
this STL twister online tool
. It’s by our friend [Andrew Sink], who has come up with a couple of other interesting 3D tools, like
the Banana for Scale tool
and
the 3D Low-Poly Generator
. The STL Twister does pretty much what it says and puts the screws to whatever STL model you drop on it. The MakerBot Gnome mascot that pops up by default is a particularly good model for screwifying. Enjoy! | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768077",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T23:17:20",
"content": "There are a number of the HOPE XV workshops I would love to attend!I hope (no pun intended) they will be available afterwards online.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,883.050458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/new-part-day-a-hackable-smart-ring/ | New Part Day: A Hackable Smart Ring | Arya Voronova | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"ring",
"Smart ring",
"wearable electronics",
"wearable ring",
"Wearables"
] | We’ve seen prolific firmware hacker [Aaron Christophel] tackle smart devices of all sorts, and he never fails to deliver. This time, he’s exploring a device that seems like it could have come from the pages of a Cyberpunk RPG manual — a shiny chrome
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) smart ring
that’s packed with sensors, is reasonably hacker friendly, and is currently selling for as little as $20.
The ring’s structure is simple — the outside is polished anodized metal, with the electronics and battery carefully laid out along the inside surface, complete with a magnetic charging port. It has a BLE-enabled MCU, a heartrate sensor, and an accelerometer. It’s not much, but you can do a lot with it, from the usual exercise and sleep tracking, to a tap-sensitive interface for anything you want to control from the palm of your hand. In the video’s comments, someone noted how a custom firmware for the ring could be used to detect seizures; a perfect example of how hacking such gadgets can bring someone a brighter future.
The
ring manufacturer’s website
provides firmware update images, and it turns out, you can upload your own firmware onto it over-the-air through BLE. There’s no signing, no encryption — this is a dream device for your purposes. Even better, the MCU is somewhat well-known.
There’s an SDK,
for a start, and a datasheet which describes all you would want to know, save for perhaps the tastiest features. It’s got 200 K of RAM, 512 K of flash, BLE library already in ROM, this ring gives you a lot to wield for how little space it all takes up. You can even get access to the chip’s Serial Wire Debug (SWD) pads, though you’ve got to scrape away some epoxy first.
As we’ve seen in the past, once
[Aaron] starts hacking on these sort of devices
, their popularity tends to skyrocket. We’d recommend ordering a couple now before sellers get wise and start raising prices.
While we’ve seen hackers
build
their own smart rings before
, it’s tricky business, and the end results usually have very limited capability. The potential for creating our own firmware for such an affordable and capable device is very exciting — watch this space!
We thank [linalinn] for sharing this with us! | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768071",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T22:34:38",
"content": "The trouble with rings is that one size does not fit all. Unlike watches, making them adjustable is difficult.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768081",... | 1,760,371,883.336433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/rc-batwing-actually-flies/ | RC Batwing Actually Flies | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"airplane",
"batman",
"batwing",
"EDF",
"electric ducted fan",
"model",
"rc",
"remote control"
] | Batman is a compelling superhero for enough reasons that he’s been a cultural force for the better part of a century. His story has complex characters, interesting explorations of morality, iconic villains, and of course a human superhero who gets his powers from ingenuity instead of a fantastical magical force. There are a number features of the Batman universe that don’t translate well to the real world, though, such as a costume that would likely be a hindrance in fights, technology that violates the laws of physics, and a billionaire that cares about regular people, but surprisingly enough his legendary Batwing jet airplane actually
seems like it might be able to fly
.
While this is admittedly a model plane, it flies surprisingly well for its nontraditional shape. [hotlapkyle] crafted it using mostly 3D printed parts, and although it took a few tries to get it working to his standards, now shoots through the air quite well. It uses an internal electric ducted fan (EDF) to get a high amount of thrust, and has elevons for control. There are two small vertical stabilizer fins which not only complete the look, but allow the Batwing to take to the skies without the need for a flight controller.
Not only is the build process documented in the video linked below with some interesting tips about building RC aircraft in general, but the STL files for this specific build are available for anyone wanting to duplicate the build or expand on it. There are plenty of other interesting 3D-printed models on [hotlapkyle]’s page as well that push the envelope of model aircraft. For some other niche RC aircraft designs we’ve seen in the past be sure to check out
this F-35 model that can hover
or
this tilt-rotor Osprey proof-of-concept
.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768092",
"author": "Dr. Livingston presumed",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T01:24:26",
"content": "All your englishes are belong to us",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6768119",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2024-06-17T05:29... | 1,760,371,883.097877 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/esp32-powers-single-pcb-zx-spectrum-emulator/ | ESP32 Powers Single-PCB ZX Spectrum Emulator | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"emulator",
"ESP32-S3",
"recreation",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | When word first got out that the Chinese board houses were experimenting with full color silkscreens, many in our community thought it would be a boon for PCB art. Others believed it would be akin to cheating by removing the inherent limitations of the medium. That’s not a debate that will be solved today, but here we have an example of a project that’s not only making practical application of the technology, but one that arguably couldn’t exist in its current form without it: a single-PCB
ZX Spectrum emulator developed by [atomic14]
.
There basics here are, well, they’re pretty basic. You’ve got an ESP32-S3, a TFT display, a micro SD slot, and the handful of passives necessary to tie them all together. What makes this project stand out is the keyboard, which has been integrated directly into the PCB thanks to the fourteen pins on the ESP32-S3 that can be used as touch sensor input channels. There are issues with detecting simultaneous keypresses, but overall it seems to work pretty well.
The keyboard matrix takes 13 of the 14 touch input pins on the ESP32-S3.
But what makes the keyboard
really
special is that [atomic14] has used the color silkscreen capability to put all the necessary labels directly onto the keys. Technically this could have been done using a traditional single color silkscreen, but it would have been a hell of a lot harder to fit all the necessary information on there while keeping it readable. Plus, you’d miss the little rainbow in the corner.
As good as it looks already, the project is still in the early stages of development. Some components, such as the TFT display, still need to be better integrated into the board. In terms of software, the board is running a ZX Spectrum emulator that [atomic14] developed previously. Judging by the gameplay in the video below, it’s doing a solid job of
bringing this classic system (and its games) back to life
. | 21 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6768009",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T15:22:22",
"content": "Nicely done, some Cherry keyswitches would be great though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768068",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,883.267418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/use-your-thinkpad-x1-tablets-keyboard-standalone/ | Use Your Thinkpad X1 Tablet’s Keyboard Standalone | Arya Voronova | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"HID keyboard",
"HID usb",
"tablet keyboard",
"thinkpad x1 tablet",
"USB HID Keyboard"
] | Some hacks are implemented well enough that they can imitate involved and bespoke parts with barely any tools. [CodeName X]’s
Thinkpad X1 Tablet Keyboard to USB adapter
is one such hack – it let’s one reuse, with nothing more than a 3D printed part and a spare USB cable, a keyboard intended for the Thinkpad X1 Tablet (2016 or 2017).
The issue is, this keyboard connects through pogo pins and holds onto the tablet by magnets, so naturally, you’d expect reusing it to involve a custom PCB. Do not fret – our hacker’s take on this only needs aluminum foil and two small circular magnets, pressing the foil into the pins with the help of the printed part, having the USB cable pins make contact with the foil pads thanks to nicely laid out wire channels in the adapter. If you want to learn more, just
watch the video
embedded below.
Of course, this kind of adapter will apply to other similar keyboards too — there’s no shortage of tablets from last decade that had snap-on magnetic keyboards. But watch out; some will need 3.3V, and
quite a few of them will use I2C-HID,
which would require a MCU-equipped adapter like
this wonderful Wacom rebuild
did. Not to worry, as
we’ve shown you the ropes of I2C-HID hacking
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767988",
"author": "Fosselius",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T12:16:42",
"content": "Now this is a hack :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6768001",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T14:34:11",
... | 1,760,371,883.207303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/16/early-computer-kit-really-just-a-fancy-calculator/ | Early “Computer Kit” Really Just A Fancy Calculator | Alexander Rowsell | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"calculator",
"early computer",
"magazine",
"vintage computer"
] | We’re big fans of calculators, computers and vintage magazines, so when we see something at the intersection of all three we always take a look. Back in 1966,
Electronics Illustrated
included instructions in their November issue
on building, in their words, a “Space-Age Decimal Computer!” using neon lamps, a couple of tubes, and lots of soldering. The article starts on page 39 and it’s made fairly clear that it will be an expensive and complicated project, but you will be paid back many times over by the use and experience you will get!
Our modern idea of a computer differs greatly from the definitions used in the past. As many readers likely know, “Computer” was actually a job title for a long time. The job of a computer was to sit with pen, paper, and later on electromechanical devices, and compute and tabulate long lists of numbers. Imagine doing payroll for large companies completely by hand, every month. The opportunity for errors was large and was just part of doing business. As analog and later transistor-based computers started to be developed, they replaced the jobs of human computers in calculating and tabulating numbers. This is why IBM was originally called the Computing, Recording and Tabulating Company!
So at the time this article was written, the idea of a computer as just a number-cruncher meant that for the magazine readers, a machine that could add, subtract, multiply and divide was for all intents a computer. The kit is a fairly clever but simple machine. A rotary telephone dial is used to enter numbers from 1 to 10 (with the 0 acting as 10). This sends pulses into a series of boards that represent decimal decades from 1s all the way up to 100000s. You use a rotary switch to select which decade to enter a number into. And then, just like manual addition, you dial in the second number, working from the units upwards. All carries are done automatically, and you have your result after entering each addend.
As the machine can only count upwards, subtraction is done by adding complements. This is all based on doing the 9s complement of the number to be subtracted, and the article goes into a lot of detail on the operation of the machine. Tricks like these were common when using electromechanical machines and would have been familiar at the time to many readers. Of course, multiplication and division are repeated additions or subtractions, and with long inputs, it could become very tedious. However, as long as the machine was carefully constructed and each number carefully noted down, it could be a very useful tool that would eliminate errors!
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip! | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767966",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T09:08:36",
"content": "semantics",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6769873",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2024-06-23T02:37:17",
"content"... | 1,760,371,883.163544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/uncovering-secrets-of-logitech-m185s-dongle/ | Uncovering Secrets Of Logitech M185’s Dongle | Arya Voronova | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Ghidra",
"hid",
"HID usb",
"logitech",
"logitech receiver",
"logitech unifying receiver",
"mouse",
"mouse receiver",
"telink",
"usb hid"
] | [endes0] has been hacking with USB HID recently, and a Logitech M185 mouse’s USB receiver
has fallen into their hands
. Unlike many Logitech mice, this one doesn’t include a Unifying receiver, though it’s capable of pairing to one. Instead, it comes with a pre-paired CU0019 receiver that, it turns out, is based on a fairly obscure TC32 chipset by Telink, the kind
we’ve seen in cheap smart wristbands
. If you’re dealing with a similarly obscure MCU, how do you even proceed?
In this case, GitHub had a good few tools developed by other hackers earlier —
a Ghidra integration
, and
a tool for working with the MCU
using a USB-UART and a single resistor. Unfortunately, dumping memory through the MCU’s interface was unreliable and frustrating. So it was time to celebrate when fuzzing the HID endpoints uncovered a memory dump exploit, with the memory dumper code helpfully shared in the blog post.
From a memory dump, the exploration truly began — [endes0] uncovers a fair bit of dongle’s inner workings, including a guess on which project it was based on, and even a command putting the dongle into a debug mode where a TC32-compatible debugger puts this dongle fully under your control.
Yet another hands-on course on
Ghidra,
and a wonderful primer on
mouse dongle hacking
– after all, if you treat your mouse’s dongle as a development platform, you can easily do things like
controlling a small quadcopter
, or pair the dongle
with a SNES gamepad,
or
build a nifty wearable.
We thank [adistuder] for sharing this with us! | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767948",
"author": "mini",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T05:17:05",
"content": "Some months ago in an attempt to not have to spend $20 on another unifying receiver, I tried to see if I can use an old, thumbdrive sized dongle that came with a Logitech KBM set.To my surprise it uses almos... | 1,760,371,883.483628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/educational-breadboard-synth-module/ | Educational Breadboard Synth Module | Alexander Rowsell | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"audio hack",
"audio synth",
"DIY synth",
"educational",
"eurorack",
"experimentation",
"vco"
] | Synth designers [Erica Synths] have devised a very cool, approachable way to get started with DIY synth hacking. Designed around a breadboard, the
EDU DIY LABOR
is a synth module with everything you need to get started. The Basic version comes with potentiometers, switches, and jack sockets, and is aimed more at those who likely already have a decent supply of parts on hand for experimentation. The Full kit comes with all that, plus a supply of resistors, capacitors, ICs and transistors so you can get up to speed, even as a beginner.
The device is supplied as a semi-DIY kit, with some soldering and assembly required. The kit was designed in collaboration with Dr. Shalom D. Ruben, a teaching professor of engineering at the University of Colorado. So it should be approachable for those with some soldering experience under their belt. Labor includes a multi-voltage power supply which supplies all Eurorack voltages, an oscillator section for both audible ranges and LFO, a full envelope control section, an output amplifier and more! Once assembled you can quickly start making bloops, beeps, and bzzts. You can easily design filters, oscillators, amplifiers, sequencers, and whatever else you can dream up!
However, the kit is designed to be more than just a synth playground – the idea was also to create an environment where you could learn the basics of electronics at the same time, in an approachable, fun way. This is reflected in the excellent user manual, which goes beyond just assembling the device and gives some example circuits, complete with wave diagrams and detailed working explanations. Great for beginners and experienced hackers who want to learn more about fundamentals and audio synthesis! | 11 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767939",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2024-06-16T03:20:58",
"content": "I have a Hive Mind Synthesis Pixie Dance Floor. Which is a DIY kit that gets a solderless breadboard onto a euroack module. It gets you some buttons and knobs and jacks, and makes it easy to build up a s... | 1,760,371,883.599007 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/when-your-rope-is-your-life/ | When Your Rope Is Your Life | Elliot Williams | [
"Engineering"
] | [
"climbing",
"kevlar",
"rope",
"test jigs"
] | Climbers care a lot about their ropes because their lives literally depend on them. And while there’s been tremendous progress in climbing rope tech since people first started falling onto hemp fibers, there are still accidents where rope failure is to blame.
This long, detailed, and interesting video
from [Hard is Easy] follows him on a trip to the Mammut test labs to see what’s up with their relatively new abrasion-resistant rope. His visit was full of cool engineering test rigs that pushed the ropes to breaking in numerous ways. If you climb, though, be warned that some of the scenes are gut-wrenchingly fascinating, watching the ropes fail horribly in well-shot slow-mo.
Long story short, some climbing ropes are strong but stiff. These are called static ropes, and they’re rated to hold a given weight, and tested to breaking under a static load. The thinnest and strongest static ropes are made of Kevlar, and they are correspondingly very abrasion resistant, but they hurt to fall into.
Dynamic climbing ropes have some stretch, and are rated both for how gently they let you down and their maximum breaking force. These are mostly made of nylon, and they are tested by dropping a mass with an accelerometer onto a slack rope — a pretty good simulation of falling back off of a flat face like at the climbing gym.
Now what if you wanted an abrasion resistant dynamic rope? A couple of manufacturers have created custom Kevlar-nylon filaments where the Kevlar is wrapped loosely around the nylon. This filament is abrasion resistant because of the Kevlar, but gives like a nylon rope because the Kevlar fibers have slack built in.
Testing these ropes involved creating a custom test that drops a mass onto the rope, but pulls it across a 45-degree granite edge as it falls. These tests absolutely shred the normal nylon dynamic ropes, but the Kevlar-reinforced ropes held fast. They’re both fun and terrifying to watch.
We’ve said it before, and it’s said a number of times in this video: “
you can’t improve what you can’t measure
“. In this context, it’s a little sobering is that there isn’t an industry standard test for abrasion resistance, but it’s cool to see the Mammut folks working on it. | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767922",
"author": "Sinep Gupta",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T23:27:28",
"content": "Catchy thumnail means video is no watchy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6767924",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T23... | 1,760,371,883.653628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/an-enigma-machine-built-in-meccano/ | An Enigma Machine Built In Meccano | Bryan Cockfield | [
"History",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"Cipher",
"code",
"enigma",
"erector",
"meccano",
"model",
"recreation"
] | As far as model construction sets go, LEGO is by far the most popular brand for building not only pre-planned models but whatever the builder can imagine. There are a few others out there though, some with some interesting features. Meccano (or Erector in North America) is a construction set based around parts that are largely metal including its fasteners, which allows for a different approach to building models than other systems including the easy addition of electricity. [Craig], a member of the London Meccano Club,
is demonstrating his model Enigma machine using this system for all of its parts
and adding some electricity to make the circuitry work as well.
The original Enigma machine was an electronic cypher used by the German military in World War 2 to send coded messages. For the time, its code was extremely hard to break, and led to the British development of
the first programmable electronic digital computer
to help decipher its coded messages. This model uses Meccano parts instead to recreate the function of the original machine, with a set of keys similar to a typewriter which, when pressed, advance a set of three wheels. The wheels all have wiring in them, and depending on their initial settings will light up a different character on a display.
There are a few modifications made to the design (besides the use of a completely different set of materials) but one of the main ones was eliminating the heavy leaf springs of the original for smaller and easier-to-manage coil springs, which are also part of the electrical system that creates the code. The final product recreates the original exceptionally faithfully, with plans to create a plugboard up next,
and you can take a look at the inner workings of a complete original here
.
Thanks to [Tim] for the tip! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767904",
"author": "David Kindltot",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T21:22:24",
"content": "I was confused, but I think that is because the later models ENIGMA used a plugboard as well, (basically old style phone jack jumpers or RCA cables is what they look like) as a further step of encr... | 1,760,371,883.696573 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/reverse-engineering-makita-batteries-to-revive-them/ | Reverse-Engineering Makita Batteries To Revive Them | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"battery",
"battery management system",
"cordless tool",
"makita"
] | Modern lithium-ion battery packs for cordless power tools contain an incredible amount of energy, which necessitates that they come with a range of safeties. Although it’s good when the battery management system (BMS) detects a fault and cuts power to prevent issues, there exist the possibility of false positives. Having an expensive battery pack brick itself for no good reason is rather annoying, as is being unable to reuse a BMS in for example a re-manufactured battery. This was the reasoning that led [Martin Jansson] down the path of
reverse-engineering Makita batteries
for starters.
After that initial reverse-engineering attempt involving a firmware dump of the NEC (Renesas) F0513 MCU, [Martin] didn’t get back to the project until recently, when he was contacted by [Romain] who donated a few BMS boards to the cause. One of these features an STM32 MCU, which made the task much easier. Ultimately [Martin] was able to determine the command set for the Maxim OneWire-based communication protocol, as was a hidden UART mode.
Due to the critical timing required, off-the-shelf programmers didn’t work, so an Arduino Uno-based programmer (ArduinoOBI) was created instead, which can be
found on GitHub
along with the Open Battery Information desktop application which provides access to these BMS features after connecting to the battery pack. Although only Makita is supported right now, [Martin] would like to see support for other brands being added as well. | 35 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767869",
"author": "Daniel Dunn",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T17:47:05",
"content": "OneWire is such a cool protocol. It’s a shame it never got an update, or much use, so many things that are currently done with just plain old “one wire per signal” could be OneWire if we had multimas... | 1,760,371,884.391462 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/giant-brains-or-machines-that-think/ | Giant Brains, Or Machines That Think | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"ancient technology",
"books",
"computers",
"newsletter"
] | Last week, I stumbled on a marvelous book: “
Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think
” by Edmund Callis Berkeley. What’s really fun about it is the way it sounds like it could be written just this year – waxing speculatively about the future when machines do our thinking for us. Except it was written in 1949, and the “thinking machines” are early proto-computers that use relays (relays!) for their logic elements. But you need to understand that back then, they could calculate ten times faster than any person, and they would work tirelessly day and night, as long as their motors keep turning and their contacts don’t get corroded.
But once you get past the futuristic speculation, there’s actually a lot of detail about how the then-cutting-edge machines worked. Circuit diagrams of logic units from both the relay computers and the brand-new vacuum tube machines are on display, as are drawings of the tricky bits of purely mechanical computers. There is even a diagram of the mercury delay line, and an explanation of how circulating audio pulses through the medium could be used as a form of memory.
All in all, it’s a wonderful glimpse at the earliest of computers, with enough detail that you could probably build something along those lines with a little moxie and a few thousands of relays. This grounded reality, coupled with the fantastic visions of where computers would be going, make a marvelous accompaniment to a lot of the breathless hype around AI these days. Recommended reading!
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
! | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767845",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T15:07:49",
"content": "Same with perceptron.https://youtu.be/e5dVSygXbAE",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6767925",
"author": "PJ57",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T23:37... | 1,760,371,884.061629 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/voyager-1-once-again-returning-science-data-from-all-four-instruments/ | Voyager 1 Once Again Returning Science Data From All Four Instruments | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"interstellar space",
"space probe",
"voyager"
] | As humanity’s furthest reach into the Universe so far, the two Voyager spacecraft’s well-being is of utmost importance to many. Although we know that there will be an end to any science mission, the recent near-death experience by Voyager 1 was a shocking event for many. Now it seems that things may have more or less returned to normal, with all four remaining scientific instruments now back online
and returning information
.
Since the completion of Voyager 1’s primary mission over 43 years ago, five of its instruments (including the cameras) were disabled to cope with its diminishing power reserves, with two more instruments failing. This left the current magnetometer (MAG), charged particle (LECP) and cosmic ray (CRS) instruments, as well as the plasma wave subsystem (PWS). These are now all back in operation based on the returned science data after the Voyager team confirmed previously that they were
receiving engineering data
again.
With Voyager 1 now mostly back to normal, some housekeeping is necessary: resynchronizing the onboard time, as well as maintenance on the digital tape recorder. This will ensure that this venerable spacecraft will be all ready for its 47th anniversary this fall.
Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767800",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T11:16:56",
"content": "The fact that it was possible to diagnose and repair a problem in something so old and so far away is breathtaking. Congratulations to the team who made it work, I rememeber the launch and never imagined i... | 1,760,371,884.201888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/15/homebrew-reader-brings-paper-tape-programs-back-to-life/ | Homebrew Reader Brings Paper Tape Programs Back To Life | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"altair 8800",
"paper tape",
"phototransistor",
"pwm",
"simulator",
"terminal",
"Wedge"
] | We may be a bit biased, but the storage media of yesteryear has so much more personality than that of today. Yes, it’s a blessing to have terabyte SD cards smaller than your pinky nail and be able to access its data with mind-boggling speed. But there’s a certain charm to
a mass storage device that can potentially slice off your finger
.
We’re overstating the dangers of the venerable paper tape reader, of course, a mass storage device that [David Hansel] recreated a few years back but we only just became aware of. That seems a bit strange since we’ve featured
his Arduino-based Altair 8800 simulator
, which is what this tape reader is connected to. Mechanically, the reader is pretty simple — just a wooden frame to hold the LEGO Technic wheels used as tape reels, and some rollers to guide the tape through a read head. That bit is custom-made and uses a pair of PCBs, one for LEDs and one for phototransistors. There are nine of each — eight data bits plus the index hole — and the boards are sandwiched together to guide the paper tape.
The main board has an ATmega328 which reads the parallel input from the read head and controls the tape motor. That part is important thanks to Altair Basic’s requirement for a 100- to 200-ms delay at the end of each typed line. The tape reader, which is just being used as sort of a keyboard wedge, can “type” a lot faster than that, so the motor speed is varied using PWM control as line length changes.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767792",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T09:11:08",
"content": "That doesn’t look too shabby. Our ICL1916 (I think, though it may have been 1915) reader back in the 1970s did 1000cps without motorised reels; the input tapes went into a compartment on the right that ha... | 1,760,371,884.252816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/easy-retro-3d-look-with-voxel-displacement-renderer/ | Easy Retro 3D Look With Voxel Displacement Renderer | Maya Posch | [
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"GLSL",
"voxel"
] | Voxels are effectively like 3D pixels, and they form an integral part of what is commonly referred to as a ‘retro 3D’ look, with pixelated edges sharp enough to cut your retinas on. The problems with modeling a scene using voxels come in the form of creating the geometry and somehow making a physics engine work with voxels rather than conventional triangular (or quad) meshes.
The same scene in Blender (above) and in the voxel-based renderer (below). (Credit: Daniel Schroeder)
The
approach demonstrated
by [Daniel Schroeder] comes in the form of a Voxel Displacement Renderer implemented in C++ and using the Vulkan API. Best part of it? It only requires standard meshes along with albedo and displacement maps.
These inputs are processed by the C++-based tools, which generate the voxels that should be rendered and their properties, while the GLSL-based shader handles the GPU-based rendering step. The pre-processing steps required make it a good idea to bake these resources rather than try to process it in real-time. With that done, [Daniel]’s demo was able to sustain a solid 100+ FPS on a Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU at 1440p, and 60+ FPS on a Steam Deck OLED.
In a second blog post [Daniel] goes through
his motivations
for this project, with it originally having been intended as a showpiece for his resume, but he can imagine it being integrated into a game engine.
There are still questions to be resolved, such as how to integrate this technique for in-scene characters and other dynamic elements (i.e. non-static scenery), but in terms of easing voxel-based rendering by supporting a standard mesh-based workflow it’s an intriguing demonstration. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767772",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T05:55:41",
"content": "Heretic would look great, it has the right kind of textures for this, there are even higher resolution textures like used in the deng (engine).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,884.002599 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/a-lego-cnc-pixel-art-generator/ | A LEGO CNC Pixel Art Generator | Jenny List | [
"cnc hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"lego",
"pixel art"
] | If you are ever lucky enough to make the trip to Billund in Denmark, home of LEGO, you can have your portrait taken and rendered in the plastic bricks as pixel art. Having seen that on our travels we were especially interested to watch [Creative Mindstorms]’ video
doing something very similar using an entirely LEGO-built machine
but taking the images from an AI image generator.
The basic operation of the machine is akin to that of a pick-and-place machine, and despite the relatively large size of a small LEGO square it still has to place at a surprisingly high resolution. This it achieves through the use of a LEGO lead screw for the Y axis and a rack and pinon for the X axis, each driven by a single motor.
The Z axis in this machine simply has to pick up and release a piece, something solved with a little ingenuity, while the magazine of “pixels” was adapted with lower friction from another maker’s design. The software is all written in Python, and takes input from end stop switches to position the machine.
We like this build, and we can appreciate the quantity of work that must have gone into it. If you’re a LEGO fan and can manage the trip to Billund,
there’s plenty of other LEGO goodness to see there
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767783",
"author": "Feinfinger (M-x totally-tame-mode)",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T07:36:32",
"content": "Sweet…Now make the canvas flexible in at least one dimension (like a wide paper loop) and build a scrollable lego colour graphics terminal. YAYYYY….Ok. Some research needed to... | 1,760,371,883.942884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/busted-toilet-paper-as-solder-wick/ | Busted: Toilet Paper As Solder Wick | Dan Maloney | [
"Tech Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"braid",
"busted",
"capillary action",
"debunk",
"desolder",
"flux",
"paper",
"solder",
"toilet paper",
"wick"
] | It didn’t take long for us to get an answer to the question nobody was asking: Can you use toilet paper as solder wick? And unsurprisingly,
the answer is a resounding “No.”
Confused? If so, you probably missed
our article a few days ago
describing the repair of corroded card edge connectors with a bit of homebrew HASL. Granted, the process wasn’t exactly hot air solder leveling, at least not the way PCB fabs do it to protect exposed copper traces. It was more of an en masse tinning process, for which [Adrian] used a fair amount of desoldering wick to pull excess solder off the pins.
During that restoration, [Adrian] mentioned hearing that common toilet paper could be used as a cheap substitute for desoldering wick. We were skeptical but passed along the tip hoping someone would comment on it. Enter [KDawg], who took up the challenge and gave it a whirl. The video below shows attempts to tin a few pins on a similar card-edge connector and remove the excess with toilet paper. The tests are done using 63:37 lead-tin solder, plus and minus flux, and using Great Value TP in more or less the same manner you’d use desoldering braid. The results are pretty much what you’d expect, with charred toilet paper and no appreciable solder removal. The closest it comes to working is when the TP sucks up the melted flux. Stay tuned for the bonus positive control footage at the end, though; watching that legit Chemtronics braid do its thing is oddly satisfying.
So, unless there’s some trick to it, [KDawg] seems to have busted this myth. If anyone else wants to give it a try, we’ll be happy to cover it. | 29 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767728",
"author": "Sheesh.",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T23:31:44",
"content": "LOL, seriously?You blob on solder till it’s flowing freely, then wipe the excess off the edge of the edge-connector, with TP. Simple.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,884.319742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/2024-business-card-challenge-baudi-o-for-the-audio-hacker/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: BAUDI/O For The Audio Hacker | Dave Rowntree | [
"contests",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"AD5252",
"audio",
"dac",
"digipit",
"LM4562",
"pcm2706",
"VU meter"
] | [Simon B] enters our 2024 Business Card Challenge with
BAUDI/O
, a genuinely useful audio output device. The device is based around the PCM2706 DAC, which handles all the USB interfacing and audio stack for you, needing only a reference crystal and the usual sprinkling of passives. This isn’t just a DAC board, though; it’s more of an audio experimentation tool with two microcontrollers to play with.
The first ATTiny AT1614 is hooked up to a simple LED vu-meter, and the second is connected to the onboard AD5252 digipot, which together allows one to custom program the response to the digital inputs to suit the user. The power supply is taken from the USB connection. A pair of ganged LM2663 charge-pump inverters allow inversion of the 5V rail to provide the necessary -5 V for the output amplifiers. This is then fed to the LM4562-based
CMoy
-type headphone amplifier. This design has a few extra stages, so with a bit of soldering, you can adjust the output filtering to suit. An LM1117 derives 3.3 V from the USB input to provide another power rail, mostly for the DAC.
There’s not much more to say other than this is a nice, clean audio design, with everything broken out so you can tinker with it and get exactly the audio experience you want. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767770",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-06-15T05:24:18",
"content": "Sorry i fail to understand how useful it as as a “audio experimentation tool”.The AT1614 used as VU-meter ?Or the second micro used to control the input level ?It’ s just a plain USB soundcard….",
"paren... | 1,760,371,884.442091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/rip-lynn-conway-whose-work-gave-us-vlsi-and-much-more/ | RIP Lynn Conway, Whose Work Gave Us VLSI And Much More | Jenny List | [
"Biography",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"Lynn Conway",
"obituary",
"vlsi"
] | Lynn Conway, American engineer and computer scientist,
passed away at the age of 86 from a heart condition on June 9th
, at her Michigan home. Her work in the 1970s
led to the integrated circuit design and manufacturing methodology known as Very Large Scale Integration
, or VLSI, something which touches almost all facets of the world we live in here in 2024.
It was
her work at the legendary Xerox PARC that resulted in VLSI
, and its subsequent publication had the effect through the 1980s of creating a revolution in the semiconductor industry. By rendering an IC into a library of modular units that could be positioned algorithmically, VLSI enabled much more efficient use of space on the die, and changed the design process from one of layout into one of design. In simple terms, by laying out pre-defined assemblies with a computer rather than individual components by hand, a far greater density of components could be achieved, and more powerful circuits could be produced.
You may have also heard of Lynne Conway, not because of her VLSI work, but because as a transgender woman she found herself pursuing a parallel career as an activist in her later decades. As an MIT student in the 1950s she had tried to transition but been beaten back by the attitudes of the time, before dropping out and only returning to Columbia University to finish her degree a few years later in the early 1960s. A job at IBM followed, but when she announced her intent to transition she was fired from IBM and lost access to her family.
Rebuilding a career as a woman after losing everything in this way is
hard
, and something at which many trans women have struggled, but she successfully ascended through Memorex in the early 1970s to her work at PARC by the middle of the decade. She went on to a position in academia at the University of Michigan, and when faced with being outed around the millennium, she chose instead to come out herself. Over the following decades she successfully advocated for the rights of transgender people, and particularly those in the engineering and technology industries.
All Hackaday readers owe her a debt for her contribution to the technologies we make our own, and those of us who are transgender owe her a special thanks for being our very public advocate. As for IBM,
they apologised for their treatment of her in 2020
, by our reckoning about five decades too late. | 47 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767669",
"author": "Guilherme Alvarez",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T17:48:02",
"content": "Great minds shunned like this is so sad. How many years of progress lost? How much earlier could we have reached certain technologies had our societies coped with simple tolerance and empathy? I... | 1,760,371,884.533233 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/hackaday-podcast-episode-275-mud-pulse-telemetry-3d-printed-gears-in-detail-and-display-hacking-in-our-future/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 275: Mud Pulse Telemetry, 3D Printed Gears In Detail, And Display Hacking In Our Future | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi for a review of the best stories to grace the front page of Hackaday this week. Things kick off with the news about Raspberry Pi going public, and what that might mean for everyone’s favorite single-board computer. From there they’ll cover the technology behind communicating through mud, DIY pressure vessels, pushing the 1983 TRS-80 Model 100 to its limits, and the reality of 3D printing how that the hype has subsided. You’ll also hear about modifying Nissan’s electric vehicles, bringing new life to one of the GameCube’s oddest peripherals, and an unusually intelligent kayak.
The episode wraps up with some interesting (or depressing) numbers that put into perspective just how much copper is hiding in our increasingly unused telephone network, and a look at how hardware hackers can bend the display technology that’s used in almost all modern consumer electronics to our advantage.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Grab the
Collector’s Edition MP3 of this week’s episode right here
. Certificate of authenticity not included.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 275 Show Notes:
News:
Raspberry Pi Goes Public
What’s that Sound?
Think you recognized this Week’s sound?
Fill out this form
for a chance to win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Bidirectional Data Transfer Through Mud?
Gas-Tight FDM 3D Printing Is Within Your Grasp
Studying The Finer Points Of 3D Printed Gears
ESP32 Powered Crunch-E Makes Beats On The Go
pocket operators
Can A Toy Printer Be Made Great?
THE 100 – The fastest 3D Printer
Gartner hype cycle – Wikipedia
Baldur’s Gate III Comes To The TRS-80 Model 100
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
From Nissan ICE Pickup To BEV With Nissan Leaf Heart
2024 Business Card Challenge: Who Do You Love?
AI Kayak Controller Lets The Paddle Show The Way
Tom’s Picks:
Donkey Kong Bongos Ditch The GameCube, Go Mobile
Baffle The Normies With This Binary Thermometer
OpenSCAD Cranks Out Parametric CNC Clamps
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Scrapping The Local Loop, By The Numbers
Displays We Love Hacking: DSI | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,884.578455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/how-good-or-bad-are-fake-power-semiconductors/ | How Good (Or Bad) Are Fake Power Semiconductors? | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"counterfeit parts",
"curve tracer",
"fake parts"
] | We all know that there’s a significant risk of receiving fake hardware when buying parts from less reputable sources. These counterfeit parts are usually a much cheaper component relabeled as a more expensive one, with a consequent reduction in performance. It goes without saying that the fake is lower quality then, but by just how much?
[Denki Otaku] has a video comparing two power FETs
, a real and a fake one, and it makes for an interesting watch.
For once the fact that a video is sponsored is a positive, for instead of a spiel about a dodgy VPN or a game involving tanks, he takes us into Keysight’s own lab to work with some high-end component characterization instruments we wouldn’t normally see. A curve tracer produces the equivalents of all those graphs from the data sheet, while a double pulse tester puts the two transistors through a punishing high-power dynamic characteristic examination. Then back in his own lab we see the devices compared in a typical circuit, a high-power buck converter. The most obvious differences between the two parts reveal something about their physical difference, as a lower parasitic capacitance and turn-on time with a higher on resistance for the fake is a pointer to it being a smaller part. Decapping the two side by side backs this up.
So it should be no surprise that a fake part has a much lower performance than the real one. In this case it’s a fully working transistor, but one that works very inefficiently at the higher currents which the real one is designed for. We can all be caught by fakes,
even Hackaday scribes
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767646",
"author": "brian",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T15:35:08",
"content": "just buy from mouser/digikey unless it’s some kind of unobtainium part",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6767889",
"author": "Jeff",
"t... | 1,760,371,884.629851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/this-week-in-security-unicode-strikes-again-trust-no-one-redditor-and-more/ | This Week In Security: Unicode Strikes Again, Trust No One (Redditor), And More | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Smishing",
"This Week in Security",
"unicode"
] | There’s a popular Sysadmin meme that system problems are “always DNS”. In the realm of security, it seems like “
it’s always Unicode
“. And it’s not hard to see why. Unicode is the attempt to represent all of Earth’s languages with a single character set, and that means there’s a lot of very similar characters. The two broad issues are that human users can’t always see the difference between similar characters, and that libraries and applications sometimes automatically convert exotic Unicode characters into more traditional text.
This week we see the resurrection of
an ancient vulnerability in PHP-CGI
, that allows injecting command line switches when a web server launches an instance of PHP-CGI. The solution was to block some characters in specific places in query strings, like a query string starting with a dash.
The bypass is due to a Windows feature, “Best-Fit”, an automatic down-convert from certain Unicode characters. This feature works on a per-locale basis, which means that not every system language behaves the same. The exact bypass that has been found is the conversion of a soft hyphen, which doesn’t get blocked by PHP, into a regular hyphen, which can trigger the command injection. This quirk only happens when the Windows locale is set to Chinese or Japanese. Combined with the relative rarity of running PHP-CGI, and PHP on Windows, this is a pretty narrow problem. The XAMPP install does use this arrangement, so those installs are vulnerable, again if the locale is set to one of these specific languages. The other thing to keep in mind is that the Unicode character set is huge, and it’s very likely that there are other special characters in other locales that behave similarly.
Downloader Beware
The ComfyUI project is a flowchart interface for doing AI image generation workflows. It’s an easy way to build complicated generation pipelines, and the community has stepped up to build custom plugins and nodes for generation. The thing is, it’s not always the best idea to download and run code from strangers on the Internet,
as a group of ComfyUI users found out the hard way this week
. The ComfyUI_LLMVISION node from u/AppleBotzz was malicious.
The node references a malicious Python package that grabs browser data and sends it all to a Discord or Pastebin. It appears that some additional malware gets installed, for continuing access to infected systems. It’s a rough way to learn.
PyTorch Scores a Dubious 10.0
CVE-2024-5480
is a PyTorch flaw that allows PyTorch worker
nodes to trigger arbitrary
eval()
calls on the master node
. No authentication is required to add a PyTorch worker, so this is technically an unauthorized RCE, earning the CVSS of 10.0. Practically speaking it’s not that dire of a problem, as your PyTorch cluster shouldn’t be on the Internet to start with, and there’s no authentication as a design choice. It’s not clear the the PyTorch developers consider this a legitimate security vulnerability at all. It may or may not be fixed with version 2.3.
Next Level Smishing
My least favorite term in infosec has to be “smishing”, a frankenword for SMS phishing. Cell phone carriers around the world are working hard to blocking spam messages, making smishing an impossible task. And that’s why it’s particularly interesting to hear about
a bypass that a pair of criminals were using in London
. The technical details are light, but the police reported a “homemade mobile antenna”, “illegitimate telephone mast”, and “text message blaster” as part of the seized kit. The initial report sounds like it may be a sort of reverse stingray, where messages are skipping the regular cellular infrastructure and are getting sent directly to nearby cell phones. Hopefully more information will be forthcoming soon.
Zyxel’s NsaRescueAngel
The programmers at Zyxel apparently have a sense of humor,
given the naming used for this mis-feature
. Zyxel NAS units have a bit of magic code that writes a password for the new user, NsaRescueAngel, to the shadow password file. The SSH daemon is restarted, and upnp is fired off to request port forwarding from the outside world. One of the script names, possibly from a previous iteration, was
open_back_door.sh
, which seems to be sort of
lampshading
the whole thing.
It’s presumably intended to be a great troubleshooting tool, when a customer is stuck and needs help, to be able to visit a web url to enable remote access for a Zyxel tech. The problem is that the Zyxel NAS already has an authentication bypass flaw, and while it’s been patched, it wasn’t patched very well, making this whole scheme accessible without authentication, just by slapping
/favicon.ico
onto the url. The additional problems have been fixed in a more recent update.
Russian Secure Phablet?
A Twitter thread tells
the story of a Russian secure device
, left behind on the back of a bus in England. That’s an interesting premise. But the thread continues, that ‘conveniently the owner also left a briefcase with design notes, architecture, documentation, implementation, marketing material and internal Zoom demos about “trusted” devices too!’ OK, now this has to either be a fanfic, or a fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck story. There’s some convincing looking screenshots, and even rom dumps. What’s going on here?
Nobody knew how the devices worked, conveniently the owner also left a briefcase with design notes, architecture, documentation, implementation, marketing material and internal Zoom demos about "trusted" devices too! We'd all have been lost without those.
https://t.co/LN7cTybxOV
pic.twitter.com/j5OCHprSie
— hackerfantastic.x (@hackerfantastic)
June 11, 2024
The most likely explanation is that somebody got their hands on a trove of data on these devices, and wanted to dump it online with a silly story. But fair warning, don’t trust any of the shared files. Who knows what’s actually in there. Taking a look at something untrusted like this is an art in itself, best done with isolated VMs and burner machines, maybe a Linux install you don’t mind wiping?
Bits and Bytes
Buskill just
published their 8th warrant canary
, a cryptographically signed statement attesting that they have not been served any secret warrants or national security letters that would undermine the trustworthiness of the Buskill project or code. In addition to a good cryptographic signature, this canary includes a handful of latest news headlines in the signed material, proving it is actually a recently generated document.
[Aethlios] has published
Reset Tolkien
, an open source tool for finding and attacking a very specific sort of weakness in time based tokens. The targeted flaw is a token generated from improper randomness source, like the current time. If the pattern can be found, a “sandwich attack” can narrow down the possible reset codes by requesting a reset code for a controlled account, requesting one for the target account, and then once again for the controlled account. The target code must come between the two known codes.
And finally,
TPM security is hard
. This time, the Trusted Platform Module can be reset by reclaiming the GPIO pins connected to it, and simulating a reboot by pulling the reset pin. This results in the TPM possibly talking to an application when it thinks it is talking to the CPU doing boot decryption. In short, it can result in compromised keys. Thanks to [char] from Discord for sending this one in! | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767651",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T16:07:24",
"content": "Well, at least smishing as a portmanteau is somewhat deciperable.I’ve seen others recently that need to web searched to know what they mean.And following the lampshading link…I... | 1,760,371,884.67992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/a-super-simple-standalone-wspr-beacon/ | A Super-Simple Standalone WSPR Beacon | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"atmega328",
"beacon",
"digital",
"gps",
"ham",
"SI5351",
"transmitter",
"weak signal",
"wspr"
] | We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: being able to build your own radios is the best thing about being an amateur radio operator. Especially low-power transmitters; there’s just something about having the know-how to put something on the air that’ll reach across the planet on a power budget measured in milliwatts.
This standalone WSPR beacon
is a perfect example. If you haven’t been
following along
, WSPR stands for “weak-signal propagation reporter,” and it’s a digital mode geared for exploring propagation that uses special DSP algorithms to decode signals that are far, far down into the weeds; signal-to-noise ratios of -28 dBm are possible with WSPR.
Because of the digital nature of WSPR encoding and the low-power nature of the mode, [IgrikXD] chose to build a standalone WSPR beacon around an ATMega328. The indispensable Si5351 programmable clock generator forms the RF oscillator, the output of which is amplified by a single JFET transistor. Because timing is everything in the WSPR protocol, the beacon also sports a GPS receiver, ensuring that signals are sent only and exactly on the even-numbered minutes. This is a nice touch and one that
our similar but simpler WSPR beacon
lacked.
This beacon had us beat on performance, too. [IgrikXD] managed to hit Texas and Colorado from the edge of the North Sea on several bands, which isn’t too shabby at all with a fraction of a watt.
Thanks to [STR-Alorman] for the tip.
[via
r/amateurradio
] | 26 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767607",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T12:23:25",
"content": "What am I missing, there doesn’t seem to be any filtering on the output to suppress harmonics which is decidedly antisocial, especially as the BS170 PA can make reasonable power into low VHF?",
"parent_i... | 1,760,371,884.740314 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/14/2024-business-card-challenge-t-800s-555-brain/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: T-800’s 555 Brain | Tom Nardi | [
"contests",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"pcb art",
"terminator"
] | In
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
it’s revealed that Skynet becomes self-aware in August of 1997, and promptly launches a nuclear attack against Russia to draw humanity into a war which ultimately leaves the door open for the robots to take over. But as you might have noticed, we’re not currently engaged in a rebellion against advanced combat robots.
The later movies had to do some fiddling with the timeline to explain this discrepancy, but looking at this
2024 Business Card Challenge entry from [M. Bindhammer]
we think there’s another explanation for the Judgement Day holdup — so long as the terminators are rocking 555 timers in their chrome skulls, we should be safe.
While the classic timer chip might not be any good for plotting world domination, it sure does make for a great way to illuminate this slick piece of PCB art when it’s plugged into a USB port. Exposed copper and red paint are used to recreate the T-800’s “Brain Chip” as it appeared in
Terminator 2
, so even when the board isn’t powered up, it looks fantastic on display. The handful of components are around the back side, which is a natural place to put some info about the designer. Remember, this is
technically
supposed to be a business card, after all.
This build is a great example of several badge art techniques, which we think is worthy of a closer look even if you’re not personally into the
Terminator
franchise. While it’s far from the most technologically advanced of the entries we’ve seen so far, it does deliver on a design element which is particularly tricky to nail down — it’s actually cheap enough that you could conceivably hand it out as a real business card without softly weeping afterwards.
Remember, you’ve still got until July 2nd to enter your own creation into the
2024 Business Card Challenge
. So long as the gadget is about the same size and shape as a traditional card, it’s fair game. Bonus points if you remember to put your name and contact info on there someplace… | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767594",
"author": "Markus Bindhammer",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T11:00:41",
"content": "Surprise at the end of the video…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6767600",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,884.926503 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/this-open-source-active-probe-wont-break-the-bank/ | This Open Source Active Probe Won’t Break The Bank | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"active probe",
"BUF802",
"buffer",
"jfet",
"op-amp",
"OPA140",
"probe",
"RF"
] | If you’re like us, the oscilloscope on your bench is nothing special. The lower end of the market is filled with cheap but capable scopes that get the job done, as long as the job doesn’t get too far up the spectrum. That’s where fancier scopes with active probes might be required, and such things are budget-busters for mere mortals.
Then again, something like
this open source 2 GHz active probe
might be able to change the dynamics a bit. It comes to us from [James Wilson], who began tinkering with the design back in 2022. That’s when he learned about the chip at the center of this build: the BUF802. It’s a wide-bandwidth, high-input-impedance JFET buffer that seemed perfect for the job, and designed a high-impedance, low-capacitance probe covering DC to 2 GHz probe with 10:1 attenuation around it.
[James]’ blog post on the design and build reads like a lesson in high-frequency design. The specifics are a little above our pay grade, but the overall design uses both the BUF802 and an OPA140 precision op-amp. The low-offset op-amp buffers DC and lower frequencies, leaving higher frequencies to the BUF802. A lot of care was put into the four-layer PCB design, as well as ample use of simulation to make sure everything would work. Particularly interesting was the use of
openEMS
to tweak the width of the output trace to hit the desired 50 ohm impedance. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767568",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T08:50:24",
"content": "Any rough estimates of BOM total cost?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6767571",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T09:04:56"... | 1,760,371,884.874622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/forsp-a-forth-lisp-hybrid-lambda-calculus-language/ | Forsp: A Forth & Lisp Hybrid Lambda Calculus Language | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"Forsp",
"forth",
"lisp"
] | In the world of lambda calculus programming languages there are many ways to express the terms, which is why we ended up with such an amazing range of programming languages, even if most trace their roots back to ALGOL. Of the more unique (and practical) languages, Lisp and Forth probably range near the top, but what if you were to smudge both together? That’s what [xorvoid] did and it resulted in
the gracefully titled Forsp programming language
. Unsurprisingly it got a very warm and
enthusiastic reception
over at Hacker News.
While keeping much of Lisp-isms, the Forth part consists primarily out of it being very small and easy to implement,
as demonstrated
by the C-based reference implementation. It also features a Forth-like value/operand stack and function application. Also interesting is Forsp using call-by-push-value (CBPV), which is quite different from call-by-value (CBV) and call-by-name (CBN), which may give some advantages if you can wrap your mind around the concept.
Even if practicality is debatable, Forsp is another delightful addition to the list of interesting lambda calculus demonstrations which show that the field is anything but static or boring. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767521",
"author": "Sinep Gupta",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T02:14:59",
"content": "While I find it adorable, I don’t consider it a pure implementation of lambda calculus because in the end it must operate on CPU that’s using on integer-based ALU instead of pure lambda expressions.",... | 1,760,371,884.975032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/shipping-your-illicit-software-on-launch-hardware/ | Shipping Your Illicit Software On Launch Hardware | Navarre Bartz | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"apple",
"graphing calculator",
"powerpc",
"retrocomputing",
"security",
"social engineering",
"software development"
] | In the course of a career, you may run up against projects that get cancelled, especially those that are interesting, but deemed unprofitable in the eyes of the corporate overlords. Most people would move, but [Ron Avitzur] just
couldn’t let it go
.
In 1993, in the midst of the transition to PowerPC, [Avitzur]’s employer let him go as the project they were contracted to perform for Apple was canceled. He had been working on a graphing calculator to show off the capabilities of the new system. Finding his badge still allowed him access to the building, he “just kept showing up.”
[Avitzur] continued working until Apple Facilities caught onto his use of an abandoned office with another former contractor, [Greg Robbins], and their badges were removed from the system. Not the type to give up, they tailgated other engineers into the building to a different empty office to continue their work. (If you’ve read
Kevin Mitnick
‘s
Ghost in the Wires
, you’ll remember this is one of the most effective ways to
gain unauthorized access to a building
.)
We’ll let [Avitzur] tell you the rest, but suffice it to say, this story has a number of twists and turns to it. We suspect it certainly isn’t the typical way a piece of software gets included on the device from the factory.
Looking for more computing history? How about a short documentary on the
Aiken computers
, or a Hack Chat on
how to preserve that history
?
[Thanks to Stephen for the tip via the
Retrocomputing Forum
!] | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767507",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T00:17:01",
"content": "Finding an empty office to continue working because they forgot to cancel your door badge: gutsy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,371,885.345188 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/marimbatron-a-digital-marimba-prototyping-project/ | Marimbatron: A Digital Marimba Prototyping Project | Dave Rowntree | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"flex PCB",
"marimba",
"piezoresistance",
"pressure sensor",
"prototyping"
] | The
Marimbatron
is [Leo Kuipers] ‘s final project as part of the Fab Academy program supervised by [Prof. Neil Gershenfeld] of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. The course aims to teach students how to leverage all the fab lab skills to create unique prototypes using the materials at hand.
The final polyurethane/PET/Flex PCB stack-up for the sensor pad
Fortunately, one of the main topics covered in the course is documentation, and [Leo] has provided ample material for review. The marimba consists of a horizontal series of wooden bars, each mounted over a metal resonator tube. It is played similarly to the xylophone, with a piano-type note arrangement, covering about five octaves but with a lower range than the xylophone. [Leo] converted this piano-type layout into a more logical grid arrangement. The individual pads are 3D printed in PETG and attached to a DIY piezoresistive pressure sensor made from a graphite-sprayed PET sheet laid upon a DIY flexible PCB. A central addressable LED was also included for indication purposes. The base layer is made of cast polyurethane, formed inside a 3D-printed rigid mould. This absorbs impact and prevents crosstalk to nearby sensors. The sensor PCB was initially prototyped by adhering a layer of copper tape to a layer of Kapton tape and cutting it out using a desktop vinyl cutter. While this method worked for the proof of concept, [Leo] ultimately outsourced the final version to a PCB manufacturer. The description of prototyping the sensor and dealing with over-moulding was particularly fascinating.
For the electronics, a modular approach was needed. Each row of ten sensors was daisy-chained to connect the LEDs, with an individual sense line passed down for each sensor to a common sensor PCB. This uses a SAMD21-series microcontroller with enough ADC channels to handle the task. This was initially prototyped using a micro-milled PCB and a laser-cut PET solder stencil. Once that was proven to work well, the sensible thing was done, and the final PCBs were ordered from a proper fab. Additionally, a user interface PCB was created to host a few pushbuttons and a Waveshare round LCD display. Finally, a main control PCB routes I
2
C to the sensor boards and interfaces to the SPI LCD. It also handles sending MIDI data over USB for playback on an external MIDI device.
Documentation and design data can both be found on the
project fabcloud page
. To dig into the Fab Academy courses,
wander over to the course archive
and get cracking.
This is the first marimba we’ve covered, so here’s a
mechanical xylophone instead
. Whilst we’re on the subject of mechanical music,
here’s a fun one
to go back over. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767476",
"author": "Nath",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T20:43:23",
"content": "Impressive! Congratulations",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6767539",
"author": "josemar1992",
"timestamp": "2024-06-14T05:38:05",
"content"... | 1,760,371,885.21817 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/a-1940s-car-radio-receives-some-love/ | A 1940s Car Radio Receives Some Love | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"car radio",
"Philco",
"tube radio"
] | The entertainment systems in modern vehicles is akin to a small in-dash computer, and handles all manner of digital content. It probably also incorporates a radio, but increasingly that’s treated as something of an afterthought. There was a time though when any radio in a car was a big deal, and if you own a car from that era it’s possible that you’ve had to coax an aged radio into life. [The Radio Mechanic] is working on
a radio from a 1946 Packard
, which provides a feast for anyone with a penchant for 1940s electronics.
The unit, manufactured by Philco, is an all-in-one, with a bulky speaker in the chassis alongside the tubes and other components. It would have sat behind the dash in the original car, so some external cosmetic damage is not critical. Less easy to pass off is the cone rubbing on the magnet, probably due to water damage over the last eight decades. Particularly interesting are the controls, as we’re rather enamored with the multicolored filter attached to the tone control. A laser cutter makes short work of recreating the original felt gasket here.
The video below is the first of a series on this radio, so we don’t see it working. Ahead will be a lot more cleaning up and testing of components, and we’d expect a lot of those paper capacitors to need replacement. We can almost smell that warm phenolic smell.
If tube radio work is your thing,
we’ve been there before
. | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767471",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T20:15:00",
"content": "When we commented recently about 8-track players, Bill Lear’s name came up.Lear also built the first commercial car radio, which he dubbed “Motorola”.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,885.137893 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/tds-744a-scope-teardown-fixes-dodgy-channel/ | TDS 744A Scope Teardown Fixes Dodgy Channel | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"NuColor",
"tektronix",
"test equipment"
] | There are a lot of oscilloscopes from around the 1990s which are still very much desirable today, such as the Tektronix TDS 744A which [DiodesGoneWild]
got his grubby mitts on
. This is a 500 MHz, 4-channel scope, with a capture rate of 500 MS/s (4 channels) to 2 GS/s (1 channel). It also has a color display and
even comes
with a high-density (1.44 MB) floppy drive. Unfortunately this particular unit was having trouble with its fourth channel, and its NuColor display had degraded, something that’s all too common with this type of hybrid CRT/LCD (LCCS) technology.
Starting with a teardown of the unit to inspect the guts, there was no obvious damage on the PCBs, nor on the acquisition board which would explain the weird DC offset on the fourth channel. After cleaning and inspecting the capture module and putting the unit back together, the bias seen on channel four seemed to disappear. A reminder that the best problems are the ones that solve themselves. As for the NuColor display, this uses a monochrome CRT (which works fine) and an LCD with color filters. It’s the latter which seems degraded on this unit, with a repair still being planned.
We
covered NuColor-based devices before
, which offer super-sharp details that are hard to capture even with modern-day LCDs, never mind the ones of the 90s. Fixing these NuColor displays can be easy-ish sometimes, as [JVG] found
when tearing apart
a very similar Tektronix TDX-524A which required a power supply fix and the removal of goopy gel between the CRT and LCD to restore it. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767426",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T16:31:33",
"content": "Hackaday article on the CRT/LCD (LCCS) technologyhttps://hackaday.com/2019/10/01/monochrome-crt-and-liquid-crystal-shutter-team-up-for-color-video/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,371,885.1738 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/pcb-design-review-a-5v-ups-with-ltc4040/ | PCB Design Review: A 5V UPS With LTC4040 | Arya Voronova | [
"Featured",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"battery",
"design review",
"Uninterruptible Power Supply",
"ups"
] | Do you have a 5 V device you want to run 24/7, no matter whether you have electricity? Not to worry – Linear Technology has made a perfect IC for you, the LTC4040; with the perfect assortment of features, except perhaps for the hefty price tag.
[Lukilukeskywalker] has shared a PCB for us to review
– a LTC4040-based stamp you can drop onto your PCB whenever you want a LTC4040 design. It’s a really nice module to see designed – things like LiFePO4 support make this IC a perfect solution for many hacker usecases. For instance, are you designing a custom Pi HAT? Drop this module to give your HAT the UPS capability for barely any PCB effort. if your Pi or any other single-board computer needs just a little bit of custom sauce, this module spices it up alright!
This one is a well-designed module! I almost feel like producing a couple of these, just to make sure I have them handy. If you like the LTC4040, given its numerous features and all, this is also not the only board in town – here’s
yet another LTC4040 board
that has two 18650 holders, and referencing its
PCB
design
will help me today in this review, you can take a look at it too!
Now, having looked at this PCB for a fair bit, it has a few things that we really do want to take care of. Part of today’s review will be connector selection, another would be the module form-factor, some layout, and some suggestions on sizing the passives – the rows of 1206 components are pretty, but they’re also potentially a problem. Let’s waste no time and delve in.
Battery Wireup And Formfactor
The battery connector uses JST-SH, one pin for VBAT and one for GND. The problem with this is that the module is capable of 2.5 A at 5 V = 12 W. At 3.6 V, that’s 4 A if not more and JST-SH is only rated for 1 A per pin. Using this module with a battery as-intended will melt things. You could add a bigger connector like the standard JST-PH, but that’d increase the module size, and my assessment is that this board doesn’t have to be larger than it already is.
Thankfully, this is an open-source module, so we can change its pinout easily enough, adding pins for the battery into the mix. Currently, this board feels breadboardable, but it isn’t quite – it’s pretty wide, so it will take two breadboards to handle, and a breadboard would also probably be disappointed with the pin amount required. With that in mind, adding pins at the top looks convenient enough.
In general, shuffling the pins around will help a fair bit. My hunch is to make the module’s castellations asymmetric, say, do 7-5-5-5 – one side with seven pins, three sides with five pins. It might not look as perfect, but what’s important is that it will be way way harder to mount incorrectly, something I’ve done with a module of my own design – that was not fun to fix. If you are worried about having enough pins to fill the resulting 22-pin combination, it’s always great to just add GND, doubly so for a power-related module!
Adding more castellations also helps us shuffle the pinout around, freeing up the routing – let’s go through the pins and see what that could help with.
Pinout Changes
The schematic is seriously nice looking – every single block is nicely framed and has its description listed neatly. Comparing it with reference schematic, it looks pretty good!
There’s a few nits to pick. For instance, BST_OFF and CHG_OFF need to be grounded for the IC to work – datasheet page 10. You could ground them through a resistor and pull them onto a castellation, but you can’t leave them floating. This is not easy to notice, however, unless you go through the pins one by one and recheck their wiring; I noticed it because I was looking at the board, saw two unconnected pins and decided to check.
My hunch is that, first, all the pins were given power names, and then two of them were missed as not connected anywhere, which is an understandable mistake to make.
Let’s keep with the schematic style – add two more connectors, one 5-pin and one 7-pin, rearrange the pinout, and keep them in their own nicely delineated area. The 7-pin connector gets the battery pins and a healthy dose of ground, and as for the 5 extra pins at the bottom, they’ll serve as extra ground pins, and give us shuffling slots for pins that are best routed southward.
Components And Placement
Having 1206 resistors on such a module is a double-edged sword. On one hand, given the adjustability, you definitely want resistors that you’d be able to replace easily, so 0402 is not a great option. However, 1206 can actually be harder to replace with a soldering iron, since you need to heat up both sides. The writing is more readable on 1206, no doubt, and it’s also nice that this module is optimized by size. Still, for the sake of routability, I will start by replacing the LEDs and LED resistors with 0603 components – those are resistors you will not be expected to replace, anyway.
Also, I have a hunch that a few components need to be moved around. First one is the RProg, no doubt – it’s in the way of the switching path, going right under the SW polygon. Then, I will rotate the Rsense resistor so that it’s oriented vertically – it feels like that should make the VIN track less awkward, and show whether there’s any space to be freed on the left.
Resistors replaced, a few components moved, and here’s where the fun begins. The IGATE track is specifically designated in the datasheet as pretty sensitive, to the point the PDF talks about leakage from this track to the other tracks – it is a FET gate driver output, after all. Having it snake all around power tracks feels uncomfortable I’d like to refactor these FETs a bit, and see if I can make the IGATE track a bit more straightforward, perhaps also make the space usage on the left more optimized. While doing that, I will be shuffling pins between the castellated edges every now and then.
After a bit of shuffling and component rerouting, it felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was time to try and reconstruct the circuit in the way it could make sense, prioritizing the power path and starting with it. For that, I pulled out both FETs, current sense resistor and the feedback divider out of the circuit, and tried rearranging them until it looked like they would work.
Following quite a few attempts at placing the components, I had to settle on the last one. I_GATE took quite a detour, though I did route it via-less in the end; VIN and CLN went on the bottom layer to give room to I_GATE (and be able to cross each other), and all the non-sensitive signals went into vias so that they could be routed outside of the switching area. It turned out the pinout is seriously not conducive to a neat layout; I suppose, some chips are just like that. Perhaps, it was that the gate driver only could’ve had been located on this particular, so that’s why the IGATE pin is on the opposite side of where the FET could be, instead of it, say, being next to V_SYS outputs.
Post-Redesign Clarity
Is the board better now? In many ways, yes; in some ways, no. I don’t know that it’s necessarily prettier, if that makes sense, there were certainly things about the board’s original state that were seriously nice. The package chosen for the FETs definitely didn’t help routing with my I_GATE target in mind, giving no leeway to route things between pins; if I were to change them to DFN8, I could indeed more easily provide a VSYS guard track that the datasheet suggests you use for I_GATE.
I’ve also rearranged the pinout quite a bit. That does mean the STATUS/POWER side distinction of the original board no longer works, but now pins don’t have to go across the board, cutting GND in half. After looking into the datasheet, I didn’t find any use for the CSN pin being broken out, since it’s just a sense resistor net; that space is now occupied by a GND pin, and there’s one less track to route out.
There’s now a good few GND pins on the board – way more than you might feel like you need; the right header feels particularly empty. If you wanted, you could add a Maxim I2C LiIon fuel gauge onto the board, since there’s now enough space in the top right, and quite a few free pins on the right. This would let your UPS-powered device also query the UPS’s status, for one. Of course, such things can always be added onto the actual board that the module would mount onto.
I also removed designators about things that felt too generic – specifically, resistors that only have one possible value and won’t need to be replaced, like LED resistors and pullups for mode selection jumpers. All in all, this board is now a little easier to work with, and perhaps, its ground distribution is a little better.
This module’s idea, and both its authors and my implementation are seriously cool! I hope I’ve helped make it cooler, if at least in the battery connector department. Both the pre-review and post-review versions are open-source, so you can also base your own castellated module off this board if you desire – it’s a good reference design for both LTC4040 and also self-made castellated modules. It’s only 30 mm x 30 mm, too, so it will be very cheap to get made. I hope my input can make this module all that cooler, and, at this point, I want to make a board around this module – stay tuned!
As usual, if you would like a design review for your board,
submit a tip
to us with
[design review]
in the title, linking to your board files. KiCad design files strongly preferred, both repository-stored files (GitHub/GitLab/etc) and shady Google Drive/Dropbox/etc
.zip
links are accepted. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767419",
"author": "solipso",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T15:49:45",
"content": "Unfortunately, the price of the LTC4040 is insane. In all my “UPS” needs I went the path of on-line topology with a step-down / charging converter and then a boost converter for the device to be powered. ... | 1,760,371,885.573047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/long-awaited-sls4all-3d-printer-now-shipping/ | Long-Awaited SLS4All 3D Printer Now Shipping | Dave Rowntree | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"2020 extrusion",
"diy",
"easyeda",
"galvo scanner",
"laser",
"open source",
"powder",
"SLS printer"
] | We touched on the open source
SLS4All DIY SLS 3D printer
a year or two ago when the project was in the early stages. Finally, version one is complete, with a parts kit ready to ship and all design data ready for download if a DIY build or derivative is your style. As some already mentioned, this is not going to be cheap: with the full parts kit running at an eye-watering $7K before tax. But it’s possible to build or source almost all of it a bit at a time for those on a budget.
Try printing THIS benchy on an FDM machine!
It’s important to note that to access the detailed information, you’ll need to create an account, which is a bit inconvenient for an open source design. However, all the essential components seem to be available, so it’s forgivable. In terms of electronics, there are two custom PCBs: the GATE1 (GAlvo and Temperature Control) and the ZERO1 (Zero-crossing dimming) controller. Other than that, all the electronics seem to be standard off-the-shelf components. Both of these PCBs are designed using EasyEDA.
Unfortunately we couldn’t find access to the PCB Gerbers, nor does there appear to be a link to their respective EasyEDA projects, just the reference schematics. This is a bit of a drawback, but it’s something that could easily be reproduced with enough motivation. Control is courtesy of a Radxa Rock Pi, as there were ‘problems’ with a Raspberry Pi. This is paired with a 7-inch touchscreen to complete the UI. This is running a highly modified version of the Klipper together with their own control software, which is still undergoing testing before release.
The laser head is built around a 10 W 450 nm laser module from China and a high-end galvanometer set. Two 200 W halogen tube heaters heat the print bed, and 200 W silicone heating pads heat both the powder bed and the print bed.
SLS printing has its own unique idea of a build plate
The upper and lower frames are basic boxes made from 2020 profile aluminium extrusions, with aluminium sheets for the panels. There are no big surprises here. As expected, numerous custom-made aluminium parts are involved, and this is where most of the cost lies. This might be a significant challenge for those who don’t have access to a CNC milling machine. The mechanics can be viewed in-browser via Fusion 360 Live or downloaded as a STEP model for later import.
We last checked in on this project
back in 2022
, and we’re glad to see it finally cross the finish line. Is this the first open source SLS printer?
Of course not
! But we’re always glad to see more options out there. | 35 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767277",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T11:38:40",
"content": "“aggresive nesting”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6767280",
"author": "Tim McNerney",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T12:05:08",
"content": "Thoug... | 1,760,371,885.419474 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/raspberry-pi-saves-printer-from-junk-pile/ | Raspberry Pi Saves Printer From Junk Pile | Al Williams | [
"Network Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"CUPS",
"linux",
"printer"
] | Around here, printers have a life expectancy of about two years if we are lucky. But [techtipsy] has a family member who has milked a long life from an old Canon PIXMA printer. That is, until Microsoft or Canon decided it was too old to print anymore. With Windows 10, it took some hacking to get it to work, but Windows 11 was the death knell. Well, it would have been if not for [techtipsy’s]
ingenuity with a Raspberry Pi
.
The Pi uses Linux, and, of course, Linux will happily continue to print without difficulty. If you are Linux savvy, you can probably see where this is going.
It is a simple task to connect the printer to the Pi, set up CUPS, and then share the printer over the network. While Windows doesn’t want to drive the printer directly, it is more than happy to talk to it as a network printer.
While [techtipsy] was happy enough just to use Linux to start with, not everyone appreciates that option either because they are familiar with Windows or there’s some reason (e.g., hardware or work rules) that requires Windows. Once the printer is set up with the Pi, it doesn’t require any special knowledge to use it.
We’ve thought about doing something like this to put
cheap thermal printers on the network
.
CUPS supports 3D printers
, too, but we’ve never seen anyone really using it that way. | 55 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767236",
"author": "Szaja",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T08:05:44",
"content": "I went the same route, but for whatever reason when I print a PDF document using CUPS 1/3 of the page (vertically) is left blank.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,371,885.503961 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/restoring-a-vintage-cga-card-with-homebrew-hasl/ | Restoring A Vintage CGA Card With Homebrew HASL | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"card edge",
"cga",
"desoldering braid",
"enig",
"gold",
"HASL",
"pcb",
"solder"
] | Right off the bat, we’ll stipulate that what [Adrian] is doing in the video below isn’t actual hot air solder leveling. But we thought the results of
his card-edge connector restoration
on a CGA video card from the early 80s was pretty slick, and worth keeping in mind for other applications.
The back story is that [Adrian], of “Digital Basement” YouTube fame, came across an original IBM video card from the early days of the IBM-PC. The card was unceremoniously dumped, probably due to the badly corroded pins on the card-edge bus connector. The damage appeared to be related to a leaking battery — the corrosion had that sickly look that seems to only come from the guts of batteries — leading him to
try cleaning the formerly gold-plated pins
. He chose naval jelly rust remover for the job; for those unfamiliar with this product, it’s mostly phosphoric acid mixed with thickeners and is used as a rust remover.
The naval jelly certainly did the trick, but left the gold-plated pins a little worse for the wear. Getting them back to their previous state wasn’t on the table, but protecting them with a thin layer of solder was easy enough. [Adrian] used liquid rosin flux and a generous layer of 60:40 solder, which was followed by removing the excess with desoldering braid. That worked great and got the pins on both sides of the board into good shape.
[Adrian] also mentioned a friend who recommended using toilet paper to wick up excess solder, but sadly he didn’t demonstrate that method. Sounds a little sketchy, but maybe we’ll give it a try. As for making this more HASL-like, maybe heating up the excess solder with an iron and blasting the excess off with some compressed air would be worth a try. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767214",
"author": "moo",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T05:50:30",
"content": "look up what phosphoric acid (main ingredient of naval jelly) does to gold.> blasting the excess off with some compressed air would be worth a try.did you seriously just suggest to your readers that they blas... | 1,760,371,885.635551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/startup-claims-it-can-boost-cpu-performance-by-2-100x/ | Startup Claims It Can Boost CPU Performance By 2-100X | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"architecture",
"flow",
"flow computing",
"gpu",
"parallel",
"performance",
"processor",
"startup"
] | Although Moore’s Law has slowed at bit as chip makers reach the physical limits of transistor size, researchers are having to look to other things other than cramming more transistors on a chip to increase CPU performance. ARM is having a bit of a moment by improving the performance-per-watt of many computing platforms, but some other ideas need to come to the forefront to make any big pushes in this area. This startup called Flow Computing
claims it can improve modern CPUs by a significant amount with a slight change to their standard architecture
.
It hopes to make these improvements by adding a parallel processing unit, which they call the “back end” to a more-or-less standard CPU, the “front end”. These two computing units would be on the same chip, with a shared bus allowing them to communicate extremely quickly with the front end able to rapidly offload tasks to the back end that are more inclined for parallel processing. Since the front end maintains essentially the same components as a modern CPU, the startup hopes to maintain backwards compatibility with existing software while allowing developers to optimize for use of the new parallel computing unit when needed.
While we’ll take a step back and refrain from claiming this is the future of computing until we see some results and maybe a prototype or two, the idea does show some promise and is similar to some ARM computers which have multiple cores optimized for different tasks, or other computers which offload non-graphics tasks to a GPU which is more optimized for processing parallel tasks.
Even the Raspberry Pi is starting to take advantage of external GPUs
for tasks like these. | 47 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767183",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-06-13T02:07:31",
"content": "Not sure if vaporware or we have reached glorious times where small startups are actually working on new silicon",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "67... | 1,760,371,885.717104 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/floss-weekly-episode-787-vdo-ninja-its-a-little-bit-hacky/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 787: VDO Ninja — It’s A Little Bit Hacky | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"open source",
"WebRTC"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
and
Katherine Druckman
chat with Steve Seguin about VDO.Ninja and Social Stream Ninja, tools for doing live WebRTC video calls, recording audio and video, wrangling comments on a bunch of platforms, and more!
–
https://docs.vdo.ninja/
–
https://docs.vdo.ninja/steves-helper-apps
–
https://docs.vdo.ninja/sponsor
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show
right in the Hackaday Discord
? Have someone you’d like use 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 | [] | 1,760,371,885.754236 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/tight-handheld-crt-asteroids-game-curses-in-tuscan/ | Tight Handheld CRT Asteroids Game Curses In Tuscan | Elliot Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"arduino",
"crt",
"lpc10",
"Speak and Spell",
"talkie"
] | How many Arduini does it take to make a tiny CRT Asteroids game? [Marco Vallegi] of MVV Blog’s answer: two. One for the game mechanics and one for the sound effects. And the result is a
sweet little retro arcade machine packed tightly into a very nicely 3D printed case
.
If you want to learn to curse like a Tuscan sailor, you can watch the two-part video series, embedded below, in its entirety. Otherwise, we have excerpted the good stuff out of the second video for you.
For instance, we love
the old-school voice synthesis sound of the Speak and Spell
. Here, playback is implemented using the
Talkie library
for Arduino, and [Marco] is using the
BlueWizard
software on a dated Macbook for recording and encoding. (We’d use the more portable
Python Wizard
ourselves.)
Check out [Marco] tweaking the noise parameters here
to get a good recording.
And since the Talkie Arduino library uses PWM on a digital output pin to create the audio, the high-frequency noise was freaking out his simple transistor amplifier. Here, [Marco]
adds a feedback capacitor to cancel that high-frequency hash out
.
The build needs to be quite compact, and the
stacked-Arduino-with-PCB-case design
is tight. And the 3D-printed case
has a number of nice refinements
that you might like. We especially like the use of thin veneers that cover the case all around with the build-plate’s surface texture, and the contrasting “Asteroids” logos are very nice.
All in all, this is a really fun build that’s also full of little details that might help you with your own projects. Heck, even if it just encourages you to play around with the Talkie library, it’s worth your time in our opinion. And while you’re at it, you can turn on the subtitles and pick up some vocab that’ll make your nonna roll over in her grave.
Part One: Rebuilding the CRT
Part Two: Adding Sound
Thanks [ZioTibia81] for the tip! | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767137",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T20:14:54",
"content": "Wouldn’t that voice synthesis be more appropriate for Gorf? Also I couldn’t understand a word he said, it was like he was speaking another language!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,371,885.795992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/the-worlds-first-diy-minicomputer-was-almost-australian/ | The World’s First DIY Minicomputer Was Almost Australian | Elliot Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"computer",
"educ-8",
"homebrew"
] | The EDUC-8, a DIY minicomputer design that came out in “Electronics Australia” magazine, was almost the world’s first in August 1974. And it would have been tied for the world’s first if inventor [Jamieson “Jim” Rowe] hadn’t held back from publishing to rework the design to expand the memory to a full 256 bytes. The price of perfectionism?
Flash forward 50 years, and [Gwyllym Suter] has taken on the job of
recreating the EDUC-8 using modern PCBs
, but otherwise staying true to the all-TTL design. He has all of his
schematics up on the project’s GitHub
, but has also sent us a number of beauty shots that we’re including below. Other than the progress of PCB tech and the very nice 3D-printed housing, they look identical. We have to admit that we love those wavy hand-drawn traces on the original, but we wouldn’t be sad about not having to solder in all those jumpers.
If you want to dig more into the EDUC-8, or the
8008-based Mark-8
that just nosed it out across the finish line, you can
find the original articles online
, or even
check one out in person at the Computer History Museum
. We wonder how many of these were ever made, and how many survive in the wild? | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767117",
"author": "B Bibby",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T18:41:06",
"content": "ATOM-8 was a minimal 8 bit CPU, designed by Mr. Tomisaki.Arata(富崎新) and published in a Japanese magazine; “トランジスタ技術”(Transistor Technology) in issue #5 of 1973. Issue #6 was general software and issue #7 ... | 1,760,371,885.861505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/supercon-2023-reverse-engineering-commercial-coffee-machines/ | Supercon 2023: Reverse Engineering Commercial Coffee Machines | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Slider"
] | [
"coffee",
"coffee machine",
"reverse engineering",
"Supercon"
] | There was a time when a coffee vending machine was a relatively straightforward affair, with a basic microcontroller doing not much more than the mechanical sequencer it replaced. A modern machine by contrast has 21st century computing power, with touch screens, a full-fat operating system, and a touch screen interface. At Hackaday Supercon 2023, [Kuba Tyszko] shared his adventures in the world of coffee,
after reverse engineering a couple of high-end dispensing machines
. Sadly he doesn’t reveal the manufacturer, but we’re sure readers will be able to fill in the gaps.
Under the hood is a PC running a Linux distro from a CF card. Surprisingly the distros in question were Slax and Lubuntu, and could quite easily be investigated. The coffee machine software was a Java app, which seems to us strangely appropriate, and it communicated to the coffee machine hardware via a serial port. It’s a tale of relatively straightforward PC reverse engineering, during which he found that the machine isn’t a coffee spy as its only communication with its mothership is an XML status report.
In a way what seems almost surprising is how relatively straightforward and ordinary this machine is. We’re used to quirky embedded platforms with everything far more locked down than this. Meanwhile if hacking vending machines is your thing,
you can find a few previous stories on the topic
. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767111",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T17:54:39",
"content": "“The coffee machine software was a Java app, which seems to us strangely appropriate” I see what you did here",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6767122",
... | 1,760,371,885.910555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/studying-the-finer-points-of-3d-printed-gears/ | Studying The Finer Points Of 3D Printed Gears | Dave Rowntree | [
"Parts"
] | [
"3d printing",
"filament",
"gears",
"strength of materials",
"testing"
] | [How to Mechatronics] on YouTube endeavored to create a
comprehensive guide comparing the various factors that affect the performance of 3D printed gears
. Given the numerous variables involved, this is a challenging task, but it aims to shed light on the differences. The guide focuses on three types of gears: the spur gear with straight teeth parallel to the gear axis, the helical gear with teeth at an angle, and the herringbone gear, which combines two helical gear designs. Furthermore, the guide delves into how printing factors such as infill density impact strength, and it tests various materials, including PLA, carbon fiber PLA, ABS, PETG, ASA, and nylon, to determine the best options.
The spur gear is highly efficient due to the minimal contact path when the gears are engaged. However, the sudden contact mechanism, as the teeth engage, creates a high impulse load, which can negatively affect
durability and increase noise. On the other hand, helical gears have a more gradual engagement, resulting in reduced noise and smoother operation. This leads to an increased load-carrying capacity, thus improving durability and lifespan.
It’s worth noting that multiple teeth are involved in power transmission, with the gradual engagement and disengagement of the tooth being spread out over more teeth than the spur design. The downside is that there is a significant sideways force due to the inclined angle of the teeth, which must be considered in the enclosing structure and may require an additional bearing surface to handle it. Herringbone gears solve this problem by using two helical gears thrusting in opposite directions, cancelling out the force.
Some key recommendations include increasing the wall count to five passes, and using a minimum infill of 35%. After testing a few filament types, it was somewhat inconclusive as each brand of filament has different breaking strengths due to factors such as age, moisture absorption, and color. It seems that using PLA is still a safe and cost-effective option compared to other fancier materials. The conclusion regarding gear type is to use herringbone gears whenever possible, but ensure the use of bearings that can handle the increased axial force compared to spur gears. | 34 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767074",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T15:56:21",
"content": "The reason his 100% infill ones weren’t stronger was because even at the lower infill percentages the gear teeth tips were solid already, due to perimeter counts. Even at fairly low infill you get solid ti... | 1,760,371,886.068142 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/displays-we-love-hacking-dsi/ | Displays We Love Hacking: DSI | Arya Voronova | [
"Featured",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"display",
"dsi",
"hardware"
] | We would not be surprised if DSI screens made up the majority of screens on our planet at this moment in time. If you own a smartphone, there’s a 99.9% chance its screen is DSI. Tablets are likely to use DSI too, unless it’s eDP instead, and a smartwatch of yours definitely will. In a way, DSI displays are inescapable.
This is for a good reason. The DSI interface is a mainstay in SoCs and mobile CPUs worth their salt, it allows for higher speeds and thus higher resolutions than SPI ever could achieve, comparably few pins, an ability to send commands to the display’s controller unlike LVDS or eDP, and staying low power while doing all of it.
There’s money and power in hacking on DSI – an ability to equip your devices with screens that can’t be reused otherwise, building cooler and cooler stuff, tapping into sources of cheap phone displays. What’s more, it’s a comparably underexplored field, too. Let’s waste no time, then!
Decently Similar Internals
DSI is an interface defined by the MIPI Alliance, a group whose standards are not entirely open. Still, nothing is truly new under the sun, and DSI shares a lot of concepts with interfaces we’re used to. For a start, if you remember
DisplayPort internals
, there are similarities. When it comes to data lanes, DSI can have one, two or four lanes of a high-speed data stream; smaller displays can subsist with a single-lane, while very high resolution displays will want all four. This is where the similarities end. There’s no AUX to talk to the display controller, though – instead, the data lanes switch between two modes.
The first mode is low-speed, used for sending commands to the display, like initialization sequences, tweaking the controller parameters, or entering sleep mode. You can capture this with a logic analyzer. If you’ve ever sniffed communications of an SPI display, you will find that there are many similarities with how DSI commands are sent – in fact, many SPI displays use a command set defined by the MIPI Alliance that DSI displays also use. (If your Sigrok install lists
a DSI decoder,
don’t celebrate too soon – it’s an
entirely different kind of DSI.)
The second mode is high-speed, and it’s the one typically used for pixel transfer. A logic analyzer won’t do here, at least not unless it’s seriously powerful when it comes to capture rate. You will want to use a decent scope for working with high-speed DSI signals, know your way around triggers, and perhaps make a custom PCB tap with a buffer for the the DSI signal so that your probe doesn’t become a giant stub, and figure out a way to work with the impedance discontinuities. Still, it is very much possible to tap into high-speed DSI, like
[Wenting Zhang] has recently demonstrated
, sometimes an approximation of the high-speed signal is more than enough for reverse-engineering.
Got a datasheet for your panel? Be careful – the initialization sequence in it might be wrong; if your bringup is not successful or your resulting image is weird, this just might be the culprit, so even if you have procured the correct PDF, you might still end up having to capture the init sequence with a logic analyzer. Whether your display’s initialization are well-known, or you end up capturing them from a known-working device, you will need something to drive your display with – a typical Arduino board will no longer do; though, who knows, an RP2040 just might, having seen what you all are capable of.
Ideally, you will want a microcontroller or a CPU that has a DSI peripheral, with decent documentation and/or examples on how to use it – that part is important. Linux-capable Raspberry Pi boards can help you here a surprising amount – you may remember the Raspberry Pi DSI header as being proprietary, but that was only true initially. With developments like
the official Raspberry Pi screen
and
open-source graphics drivers
aided by that $10k driver bounty they put out, it became viable to connect custom screens. WaveShare DSI screens are a known alternative if you want to get a DSI display for your Pi. On the regular Pi, you only get two lanes of DSI, but that is good enough for many a display. Funnily enough, you can get a third-party display for your Pi that uses the same panel, with two extra chips that seem to run the display without a driver like the official Pi display
(this thread on these displays is fascinating!)
; the display is still limited to the same resolution, the only advantage is a slightly lower price, and
the ability to overload your 3.3V rail
is a questionable benefit. It’s not quite clear why this display exists, but you might want to resist the temptation.
If you’re using a Pi Compute Module, you get entire two DSI peripherals to play with, one four-lane and one two-lane, and it doesn’t take long to find a good few examples of Raspberry Pi Compute Module boards with DSI screens. If you have a Compute Module and its devboard somewhere on a shelf, you can do four-lane DSI, with a Linux-exposed interface that works in the same way alternative OSes do on your phone.
Given that CMs are typically used for custom stuff and a hacker using one is more likely to have patience for figuring out DSI panel parameters, a Compute Module baseboard is a pretty popular option to hack on that one cheap DSI display from a tablet that caught your eye! Don’t have a baseboard? You can even etch one,
here’s a single-layer breakout with a DSI socket.
Not that you need a Compute Module if you’re doing two-lane DSI: a regular Pi will do.
So, get out there and hack – there is a ton of unexplored potential in the never-ending supply of aftermarket screens for older iPhone and Samsung models! Speaking of phones, they are the forefront of DSI hacking, as you might suspect, thanks to all the alternative OS projects and Linux kernel mainlining efforts. You can enjoy fruits of their labour fairly easily, sparing you a logic analyzer foray – reusing a seriously nice DSI display might be as easy as loading a kernel module.
Want A Panel? Linux Is Here To Help
There’s a fun hacker tactic – if you’re looking for an I2C GPIO expander chip, you can scroll through the
Linux kernel config file that lists supported GPIO expanders,
and find a good few ICs you’ve never known about! What’s great is, you know you’re getting a driver, too.
The same goes for DSI screens, except the payoff is way higher. If you’re on the market for a DSI screen, you can open the
list of Linux kernel drivers
for various DSI panels. Chances are, all you need is just the physical wireup part, maybe some backlight driving, and a Device Tree snippet.
Want a $20 1920 x 1200 IPS display for your Compute Module? Who doesn’t! Well, wouldn’t you know,
the Google Nexus 7 tablet uses one,
and the driver for it
is in mainline Linux
! Just solder together a small FPC-to-bespoke-connector adapter board (or order PCBA), add a Device Tree snippet into your configuration, and off you go; there are even
custom boards
for using this display with a CM4, it’s that nice.
New displays get added into the kernel all the time; all it takes is someone willing to poke at the original firmware, perhaps load a proprietary kernel module into Ghidra and pull out the initialization sequence, or simply enable the right kind of debug logging in the stock firmware. All of this is thanks to tireless efforts of people trying to make their phones work beyond the bloatware-ridden shackles of the stock Android OS; sometimes, it’s some company doing the right thing and upstreaming a driver for a panel used by hundreds of thousands of devices in the wild.
There are some fun nuances in the display scene, as much as of a “scene” it is – people are just trying to make their devices work for them, then share that work with other people in the same situation, figuring out a display is part of the process. It’s not uncommon that a smartphone will use slightly different screens in the same batch – this can be an issue with alternative OSes like LineageOS, where, say, 10% of your firmware’s users might have their panel malfunction because, despite the phone listing the same model on the lid, their specific phones use a display with a different controller, that only the manufacturer’s firmware properly accounts for.
Our DSI Role Models
These are the basics of what you need to reuse DSI displays as if effortlessly. Now, I’d like to highlight a good few examples of people hacking on DSI, from our coverage and otherwise.
Without a doubt, the first one that springs to mind is [Mike Harrison] aka [mikeselectricstuff],
from way back in 2013.
I’ve spent a lot of time with the exact iPod Nano being reverse-engineered, and [Mike]’s videos gave me insight into a piece of tech I relied on for a fair bit. For instance,
in this video
, [Mike] masterfully builds a scoping jig, solders microscopic wires to the tiny PCB, walks us through the entire reverse-engineering process, and successfully reuses the LCD for a project.
Following in [Mike]’s footsteps, we’ve even seen this display
reused in an ESP32 project
, thanks to a parallel RGB to DSI converter chip!
[Wenting Zhang]
reverse-engineering a Macbook Touchbar display
is definitely on my favourites list. In this short video, he teaches us DSI fundamentals, and manages to show the entire reverse-engineering process from start to end, no detail spared. Having just checked the video description,
the code is open-source
, and it’s indeed a RP2040 project – just like I forecasted a good few paragraphs above.
Are mysterious ASICs your vibe, and would you like to poke at some firmware? You should see
this HDMI-to-DSI adapter project,
then. The creator even turns it into
a powerbank with a built-in screen
as a demo – that’s a hacker accessory if I’ve ever seen one. More of a gateware fan? Here’s
an FPGA board
doing the same, and
another one,
that you can see here
driving a Galaxy S4 screen effortlessly
. Oh, and if you are friends with a Xilinx+Vivado combination, there are
DSI IP cores for you to use
with barely any restrictions.
The Year Of DSI Hacking
DSI is an interface that is becoming increasingly hacker-friendly – the economies of scale are simply forcing our hand, and even the microcontroller makers are following suit. The official devboard for Espressif’s ESP32-P4, a pretty beefy RISC-V chip, sports a DPI interface alongside the now-usual CSI for cameras. We will see DSI more and more, and I raise a glass of water for numerous hackers soon to reap the fields of DSI. May your harvest be plentiful.
I thank [timonsku] for help with this article! | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767081",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T16:08:14",
"content": "Thanks for the excellent overview Arya! Time to go dismantle some of my old tablets…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6767818",
"author... | 1,760,371,886.238931 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/baldurs-gate-iii-comes-to-the-trs-80-model-100/ | Baldur’s Gate IIIComes To The TRS-80 Model 100 | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"assembly",
"model 100",
"TRS-80 model 100",
"z80"
] | To say that Tandy’s TRS-80 Model 100 was an influential piece of computer hardware would be something of an understatement. While there’s some debate over which computer can historically be called the “first laptop”, the Model 100 was early enough that it helped influence our modern idea of portable computing. It was also one of the most successful of these early portables, due in part to how easy it was to write your own software for it using the built-in BASIC interpreter.
But as handy and capable as that integrated development environment might have been, it never produced anything as impressive as this
Baldur’s Gate III
“demake” created by [Alex Bowen]
. Written in assembly, the game’s engine implements a subset of the
Dungeons & Dragons
Systems Reference Document (SRD), and is flexible enough that you could use it to produce your own ASCII art role-playing game that can run on either a Model 100 emulator like Virtual-T or on the real hardware.
Don’t worry about not having enough experience with the Model 100’s hardware to conjure up your own fantasy adventure. Assembly is done through zasm, and even though the code is intended for the 8085 CPU used in the Model 100, it’s actually written in Z80 syntax. The assembler’s support for mapping unicode characters also allows you to get a serviceable preview of what the levels will look like on the Model 100’s display right inside of your editor.
As you might imagine, getting such a complex game running on the meager hardware of the Model 100 took considerable trickery. [Alex] goes into plenty of detail in the project’s documentation and the video below, but perhaps our favorite optimization is the text compression routine. A Python script ran through all of the text strings used in the game to identify the most commonly used character sequences, and then mapped them to values which could be used to piece together words and sentences. This saved approximately 1500 bytes, which might not sound like a lot to a modern game developer, but it’s much appreciated on a machine that’s only got 24 kilobytes of RAM to begin with.
We’ve seen a number of projects featuring the TRS-80 Model 100, but most of them involve
ripping out the original hardware
and
replacing it with something modern
. That said, if you’ve got a stock Model 100 and give this technical masterpiece a shot, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767139",
"author": "recook",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T20:21:15",
"content": "Respect!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6767170",
"author": "drall",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T23:36:53",
"content": "I’ll have to dig out... | 1,760,371,886.183629 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/12/remixed-pi-recovery-kit-v2-offers-another-path/ | Remixed Pi Recovery Kit V2 Offers Another Path | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"pelican case",
"Recovery Kit"
] | Just a few months after releasing the long-awaited second version of his Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit,
[Jay Doscher] is back with an alternate take
on his latest Pi-in-a-Pelican design. This slightly abridged take on the earlier design should prove to be easier and cheaper to assemble for those playing along at home while keeping the compromises to a minimum.
Probably the biggest change is that the Raspberry Pi 5 has been swapped out for its less expensive and more abundant predecessor. The Pi 4 still packs plenty of punch, but since it requires less power and doesn’t get as hot, it’s less temperamental in a build like this. Gone is the active cooling required by the more powerful single-board computer, and the wiring to distribute power to the Kit’s internal components has been simplified. The high-end military style connectors have been deleted as well. They looked cool, but they certainly weren’t cheap.
One of the most striking features of the original Recovery Kit was the front-mounted switches — both the networking type that’s intended to help facilitate connecting the Raspberry Pi to whatever hardware is left after the end of the world, and the toggles used to selectively control power to to accessory devices. Both have returned for the Recovery Kit 2B, but they’re also optional, with blank plates available to fill in their vacant spots.
Ultimately, both builds are fairly similar, but there’s enough changes between the two that it will have a notable impact on how much time (and money…) it would take you create one of your own. [Jay] has attempted to offer
less intimidating versions of his designs in the past
; while other creators take a “one and done” approach to their projects, he seems eager to go back and rethink problems that most others would have considered solved. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767162",
"author": "Michael C Brown",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T22:32:31",
"content": "Yes… Amazing specs and build.But what is the purpose of the Pi Recovery Kit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6767178",
"author": "T... | 1,760,371,886.137932 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/from-nissan-ice-pickup-to-bev-with-nissan-leaf-heart/ | From Nissan ICE Pickup To BEV With Nissan Leaf Heart | Maya Posch | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"bev",
"electric car"
] | First run of the motor with battery pack still externally connected.
Last year [Jimmy] got a request from a customer ([Dave]) to help convert a 1998 Nissan Frontier pickup into an electric drive vehicle, with a crashed 2019 Nissan Leaf providing the battery and electric motor for the conversion. He has
documented
the months-long journey with plenty of photos, as well as a
series of videos
over at the
[EVSwap Conversions]
YouTube channel. While the idea sounds easy enough, there’s a lot more to it than swapping out the ICE with an electric motor and sticking some batteries to the bottom of the car somewhere with double-sided tape. The pickup truck got effectively stripped down and gutted, before the 110 kW (150 HP) motor got installed using an adapter plate.
The donor Leaf’s battery pack came in at a decently sized 40 kWh, which should give the converted Nissan Frontier BEV a range of easily 100 miles. This pack was split up into two packs, which got put into a custom aluminium battery box, each mounted on one side of the driveshaft. The charging port got installed on the front of the car, next to the logo, discreetly behind a panel. The front of the car had much of the openings that were needed for the ICE’s radiator sealed up for reduced air friction, along with the new low-friction tires that got installed. Although this converted car still has a radiator, it only needs to assisting cooling the motor stack (including inverter and charger) when driving slowly or charging, making it far less demanding and thus allows for a more sleek front.
As a bonus, the car still has the manual 5-gear shift, just without a clutch, and the pickup bed can now also tilt, albeit with hydraulics (so far). Considering that it started with a decent 1998 pickup and totaled Nissan Leaf, this is among the cleanest conversions we have seen, not to mention a good use of a crashed BEV.
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767008",
"author": "Fred",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T08:20:22",
"content": "How does it work with a 5 speed manual without a clutch? Does it have a clutch pedal – to match the motor RPM to whatever the road speed and selected gear calculate at? Or it it a crash box? Or do you just s... | 1,760,371,886.546574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/maker-skill-trees-help-you-level-up-your-craft/ | Maker Skill Trees Help You Level Up Your Craft | Navarre Bartz | [
"Art",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"gamification",
"learning",
"skill tree",
"training"
] | Hacking and making are great fun due to their open ended nature, but being able to try anything can make the task of selecting your next project daunting. [Steph Piper] is here with her
Maker Skill Trees
to give you a map to leveling up your skills.
Featuring a grid of 73 hexagonal tiles per discipline, there’s plenty of inspiration for what to tackle next in your journey. The trees start with the basics at the bottom and progressively move up in difficulty as you move up the page. With over 50 trees to select from (so far), you can probably find something to help you become better at anything from 3D printing and modeling to entrepreneurship or woodworking.
Despite being spoiled for choice, if you’re disappointed there’s no tree for your particular interest (underwater basket weaving?), you can roll your own with the
provided template
and submit it for inclusion in the repository.
Want to get a jump on an AI Skill Tree? Try out these
AI courses
. Maybe you could use these to
market yourself to potential employers
or feel confident enough to
strike out on your own
?
[Thanks to Courtney for the tip!] | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766985",
"author": "paul_shallard",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T06:36:31",
"content": "I like this ideaThe hardest part of learning something new is knowing where to start.Go to a store, and they will tell you to buy the most expensive everything firstA few of the trees could do with ... | 1,760,371,886.593185 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/a-c64-sid-replacement-with-built-in-games/ | A C64 SID Replacement With Built-in Games | Alexander Rowsell | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"commodore 128",
"commodore 64",
"Commodore SID",
"pi pico",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"retro computer",
"sid chip"
] | Developer [frntc] has recently come up with a smaller and less expensive way to not only replace the SID chip in your Commodore 64 but to also make it a stereo SID! To top it off, it can also hold up to 16 games and launch them from a custom menu. The
SIDKick Pico
is a simple board with a Raspberry Pi Pico mounted on top. It uses a SID emulation engine based on reSID to emulate both major versions of the SID chip — both the 6581 and the 8580. Unlike many other SID replacements, the SIDKick Pico also supports mouse and paddle inputs, meaning it replaces all functionality of the original SID!
Sound can be generated in three different ways: either using PWM to create a mono audio signal that is routed out via the normal C64/C128 connectors, an external PCM5102A DAC board, or using a different PCB design that has pads for an on-board DAC and TL072 op-amp. While many Commodore purists dislike using replacement chips, the reality is that all extant SID chips were made roughly 40 years ago, and as more and more of them fail, options like the SIDKick Pico are an excellent way to keep the sound of the SID alive.
If you want to hear the SIDKick Pico in action, you can check out the samples on the linked GitHub page, or check out the video below by YouTuber Wolfgang Kierdorf of the RETRO is the New Black channel. To get your hands on a SIDKick Pico, you can follow the instructions on the GitHub page for ordering either bare PCBs or pre-assembled PCBs from either PCBWay or your board manufacturer of choice.
Thanks [Stephen] for the tip. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766950",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T04:22:44",
"content": "It never ceases to amaze me a dual core system on a chip is $5 (or pennies if you use the bare RP2040).I like seeing these kind of hacks that keep the system going transparently. Very nice.",
"parent_i... | 1,760,371,886.502056 |
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