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https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/bikebeamer-adds-pov-display-to-bicycle-wheels/ | BikeBeamer Adds POV Display To Bicycle Wheels | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"battery",
"bicycle",
"bike",
"bikebeamer",
"ESP32",
"led",
"lighting",
"lights",
"pcb",
"persistence of vision",
"POV",
"spokes",
"wheel"
] | Unless you’re living in a bicycle paradise like the Netherlands, most people will choose to add some sort of illumination to their bicycle to help drivers take note that there’s something other than a car using the road. Generally, simple flashing LEDs for both the front and the rear is a pretty good start, but it doesn’t hurt to add a few more lights to the bicycle or increase their brightness. On the other hand, if you want to add some style to your bicycle lighting system then
this persistence of vision (POV) display called the BikeBeamer from [locxter] might be just the thing
.
The display uses four LED strips, each housed in their own 3D printed case which are installed at 90-degree angles from one another in between the spokes of a standard bicycle wheel. An ESP32 sits at the base of one of the strips and is responsible for storing the image and directing the four displays. This is a little more complex than a standard POV display as it’s also capable of keeping up with the changing rotational speeds of the bicycle wheels when in use. The design also incorporates batteries so that no wires need to route from the bike frame to the spinning wheels.
This is an ongoing project for [locxter] as well, meaning that there are some planned upgrades even to this model that should be in the pipe for the future. Improving the efficiency of the code will hopefully allow for more complex images and even animations to be displayed in the future, and there are also some plans to improve the PCB as well with all surface-mount components. There are a few other ways to upgrade your bike’s lighting as well,
and we could recommend this heads-up headlight display to get started
. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766875",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T21:13:00",
"content": "I know this isn’t BuyADay, but ~20 years ago, I bought at Goodwill an LED POV that clamps to bicycle spokes for about $2.But it took so many AAA batteries I never bothered to u... | 1,760,371,888.398593 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/2024-business-card-challenge-make-them-shake-your-handiwork/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: Make Them Shake Your Handiwork | Kristina Panos | [
"contests"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"attiny85",
"neopixel strip",
"persistence of vision",
"POV",
"RGB LEDs"
] | Before COVID, people traditionally sealed their initial introduction to each other with a handshake. Nowadays, that activity seems kind of questionable. But you can still give them something to shake if you build
this persistence of vision (POV) business card from [chaosneon]
to show your credentials in blinkenlights form.
As you might have guessed, the input comes from a tilt switch. The user simply shakes the card back and forth, and the sensor detects the direction and cadence of the shake. Cleverly, the pattern plays forward-ways on the swing, and backwards on the back stroke, which just reinforces the POV effect. Don’t worry about how slow or fast to shake it, because the timing adjusts for your speed.
The first version used individual white LEDs, hand-soldered to an ATtiny2313. Now, in the updated version which you can see in the demo video after the break, [chaosneon] is using an RGB NeoPixel strip, which only needs one data wire to connect to the microcontroller. Thanks to this, [chaosneon] was able to to downsize to an ATtiny85. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6767051",
"author": "herrmannc1899gmailcom",
"timestamp": "2024-06-12T12:32:22",
"content": "Oh no, you mentioned covid. Now the comment section is going to be useless!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6769193",
"author": "Mi... | 1,760,371,888.081237 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/raspberry-pi-goes-public/ | Raspberry Pi Goes Public | Elliot Williams | [
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"IPO",
"raspberry pi"
] | We’ve heard rumors for the last few months, and now it looks like they’ve come true: the business side of Raspberry Pi,
Raspberry Pi Holdings has become a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange
.
We heard rumblings about this a while back, and our own [Jenny List]
asked the question of what this means for the hobbyist and hacker projects that use their products
. After all, they’ve been spending a lot of money making new silicon, and issuing stock helps them continue. Jenny worried that they’d forget that what sells their hardware is the software, but ends up concluding that they’ll probably continue doing more of the same thing, just with better funding.
Raspberry Pi CEO [Eben Upton] said basically the same when
we asked him what a floatation would mean for the Raspberry Pi Foundation
, which is the non-profit arm of the Raspberry Empire, and which is responsible for a lot of the educational material and outreach that they do. (Fast-forward to minute 40.) Before the share issue, the Foundation wholly owned Holdings, and received donations to fund its work. Now that there has been a floatation, it looks like the Foundation will owns 70% of Holdings, and
will use this endowment to finance its educational mission
.
We don’t have a crystal ball, but we suspect this changes not much at all. Raspberry Pi Holdings Ltd is doing great business by producing niche single-board computers that appeal both to the hacker and industrial markets, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation now has a more concrete source of funding to continue its educational goals. But the future will tell! | 57 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766802",
"author": "Sinep Gupta",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T17:09:13",
"content": "At first everything will be fine (“embrace”). Then things will get even better for a while (“extend”). Long time R-Pi will become increasingly locked-down turd (“enshittify”).",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,888.536342 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/openscad-cranks-out-parametric-cnc-clamps/ | OpenSCAD Cranks Out Parametric CNC Clamps | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"clamp",
"cnc clamp",
"openscad",
"parametric"
] | If you’ve ever used a CNC router or mill, you’ll know how many little things need to go right before you get anything resembling acceptable results. We could (and probably should?) run a whole series of posts on selecting the correct bit for the job at hand and figuring out the appropriate feeds and speeds. But before you even get to that point, there’s something even more critical you need to do: hold the workpiece down so it doesn’t blast off into orbit when the tool touches it.
Now that might sound like an easy enough job, and for basic flat stock, it often is. But if you’ve got an oddly shaped piece of material, you’ll quickly realize how inadequate those trusty c-clamps really are. When you get to that point, it might time to check out these
OpenSCAD hold down clamps from [ostat]
. Thanks to its parametric nature, you can plug whatever dimensions you need into the script, and in a few seconds it will spit out an STL file for a bespoke clamp that you can print out and put to work.
As currently implemented, you can easily change the height, overhang, and angle of the front of the clamp. It’s also possible to adjust the parameters of the rear of the clamp, but you’ve got fewer options there. You can also dial in the parameters for the bolt that will attach the clamp to the bed, such as the diameter and cutout length.
If you have OpenSCAD installed you can do it all locally, but [ostat] also has the script working with
MakerWorld’s online customizer
if you’d rather go the web route.
Now, we know what some of you might be thinking — do I really want to hold down my work piece with a printed clamp? Having experienced first-hand the havoc that can be caused by a work piece coming loose during a milling operation, it’s a valid enough concern. But the beauty of being able to run these clamps off on your desktop 3D printer for a few pennies worth of plastic each is that you don’t have to limit yourself to just one or two. You know the saying: many printed clamps make light the work…or something like that. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766790",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T16:23:25",
"content": "Not even a washer under those screw heads with that small grip on plastic? It will get chewed up after a few times which I assume is what these custom made hold-downs are for. A square washer filling th... | 1,760,371,888.341047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/scrapping-the-local-loop-by-the-numbers/ | Scrapping The Local Loop, By The Numbers | Dan Maloney | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [] | A few years back I wrote
an “Ask Hackaday” article
inviting speculation on the future of the physical plant of landline telephone companies. It started innocently enough; an open telco cabinet spotted during my morning walk gave me a glimpse into the complexity of the network buried beneath my feet and strung along poles around town. That in turn begged the question of what to do with all that wire, now that wireless communications have made landline phones so déclassé.
At the time, I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew
what the answer would be
, but I spent a good bit of virtual ink trying to convince myself that there was still some constructive purpose for the network. After all, hundreds of thousands of technicians and engineers spent lifetimes building, maintaining, and improving these networks; surely there must be a way to repurpose all that infrastructure in a way that pays at least a bit of homage to them. The idea of just ripping out all that wire and scrapping it seemed unpalatable.
With the decreasing need for copper voice and data networks and the increasing demand for infrastructure to power everything from AI data centers to decarbonized transportation, the economic forces arrayed against these carefully constructed networks seem irresistible. But what do the numbers actually look like? Are these artificial copper mines as rich as they appear? Or is the idea of pulling all that copper out of the ground and off the poles and retasking it just a pipe dream?
Phones To Cars
There are a lot of contenders for the title of “Largest Machine Ever Built,” but it’s a pretty safe bet that the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is in the top five. From its earliest days, the PSTN was centered around copper, with each and every subscriber getting at least one pair of copper wires connected from their home or business. These pairs, referred to collectively and somewhat loosely as the “local loop,” were gathered together into increasingly larger bundles on their way to a central office (CO) housing the switchgear needed to connect one copper pair to another. For local calls, it could all be done within the CO or by connecting to a nearby CO over copper lines dedicated to the task; long-distance calls were accomplished by multiplexing calls together, sometimes over
microwave links
but often over thick coaxial cables.
Fiber optic cables and wireless technologies have played a large part in making all the copper in the local loops and beyond redundant, but the fact remains that something like 800,000 metric tons of copper is currently locked up in the PSTN. And judging by
the anti-theft efforts that Home Depot
and other retailers are making, not to mention
the increase in copper thefts
from construction sites and other soft targets, that material is incredibly valuable. Current estimates are that PSTNs are sitting on something like $7 billion worth of copper.
That sure sounds like a lot, but what does it really mean? Assuming that the goal of harvesting all that largely redundant PSTN copper is to support decarbonization, $7 billion worth of copper isn’t really that much. Take EVs for example. The typical EV on the road today has
about 132 pounds (60 kg) of copper
, or about 2.5 times the amount in the typical ICE vehicle. Most of that copper is locked up in motor windings, but there’s a lot in the bus bars and wires needed to connect the batteries to the motors, plus all the wires needed to connect all the data systems, sensors, and accessories. If you pulled all the copper out of the PSTN and used it to do nothing but build new EVs, you’d be able to build about 13.3 million cars. That’s a lot, but considering that 80 million cars were put on the road globally in 2021, it wouldn’t have that much of an impact.
Farming the Wind
What about on the generation side? Thirteen million new EVs are going to need a lot of extra generation and transmission capacity, and with the goal of decarbonization, that probably means a lot of wind power. Wind turbines take a lot of copper; currently, bringing a megawatt of on-shore wind capacity online takes
about 3 metric tons of copper
. A lot of that goes into the windings in the generator, but that also takes into account the wire needed to get the power from the nacelle down to the ground, plus the wires needed to connect the turbines together and the transformers and switchgear needed to boost the voltage for transmission. So, if all of the 800,000 metric tons of copper currently locked up in the PSTN were recycled into wind turbines, they’d bring a total of 267,000 megawatts of capacity online.
To put that into perspective, the total power capacity in the United States is about
1.6 million megawatts
, so converting the PSTN to wind turbines would increase US grid capacity by about 16% — assuming no losses, of course. Not too shabby; that’s over ten times the capacity of the world’s largest wind farm,
the Gansu Wind Farm
in the Gobi Desert in China.
There’s one more way to look at the problem, one that I think puts a fine point of things. It’s estimated that to reach global decarbonization goals, in the next 25 years we’ll need to mine
at least twice the amount of copper that has ever been mined in human history
. That’s quite a lot; we’ve taken
700 million metric tons of copper
in the last 11,000 years. Doubling that means we’ve got to come up with 1.4 billion metric tons in the next quarter century. The 800,000 metric tons of obsolete PSTN copper is therefore only about 0.05% of what’s needed — not even a drop in the bucket.
Accepting the Inevitable
These are just a few examples of what could be done with the “Buried Fortune” of PSTN copper, as Bloomberg somewhat breathlessly refers to it in the article linked above. It goes without saying that this is just back-of-the-envelope math, and that a real analysis of what it would take to recycle the old PSTN copper and what the results would be would require a lot more engineering and financial chops than I have. Even if it is just a drop in the bucket, I think we’ll probably end up doing it, if for no other reason than
it takes something like two decades to bring a new copper mine into production
. Until those mines come online and drive the price of copper down, all that refined and (relatively) easily recycled copper just sitting there is a tempting target for investors. So it’ll probably happen, which is sad in a way, but maybe it’s a more fitting end to the PSTN than just letting it sit there and corrode. | 57 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766753",
"author": "Sok Puppette",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T14:38:30",
"content": "I’m thinking 7 billion dollars isn’t evencloseto the cost of recovering all that wire from where it is. It’s not like it’s in convenient ingots in big vaults. It’s in fine wires spread out all over t... | 1,760,371,888.632704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/esp32-powered-crunch-e-makes-beats-on-the-go/ | ESP32 Powered Crunch-E Makes Beats On The Go | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"electronic music",
"ESP32",
"I2S",
"tracker"
] | There’s no shortage of devices out there for creating electronic music, but if you’re just looking to get started, the prices on things like synthesizers and drum machines could be enough to give you second thoughts on the whole idea. But if you’ve got a well stocked parts bin, there’s a good chance you’ve already got most of what you need to
build your own Crunch-E
.
A Crunch-E built from stacked modules
Described by creator [Roman Revzin] as a “keychain form factor music-making platform”, the Crunch-E combines an ESP32, an MAX98357 I2S audio amplifier, an array of tactile buttons, and a sprinkling of LEDs and passives. It can be built on a perfboard using off-the-shelf modules, or you can spin up a PCB if you want something a bit more professional. It sounds like there’s eventually going to be an option to purchase a pre-built Crunch-E at some point as well.
But ultimately, the hardware seems to be somewhat freeform — the implementation isn’t so important as long as you’ve got the major components and can get the provided software running on it.
The software, which [Roman] is calling CrunchOS, currently provides four tracks, ten synth instruments, and two drum machine banks. Everything can be accessed from a 4 x 4 button array, and there’s a “cheat sheet” in the documentation that shows what each key does in the default configuration. Judging by the demo video below, it’s already an impressively capable platform. But this is just the beginning. If everything goes according to plan and more folks start jamming on their own Crunch-E hardware, it’s not hard to imagine how the software side can be expanded and adapted over time.
Over the years we’ve seen plenty
of homebrew projects for
producing electronic music
, but the low-cost, simple construction, and instant gratification nature of the Crunch-E strikes us as a particularly compelling combination. We’re eager to see where things develop from here. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766754",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T14:40:41",
"content": "Person who doesn’t understand beats or music complains about something he doesn’t understand. we’ll bring you more news at 10, with our exclusive story about old men shaking their fists at clou... | 1,760,371,888.225983 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/11/2024-business-card-challenge-weather-or-not-you-get-the-job/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: Weather Or Not You Get The Job | Kristina Panos | [
"contests"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"ESP32",
"weather"
] | What’s the easiest way to break the ice with someone you’ve just met? If you’re not immediately talking shop, than it’s probably the time-tested subject of the weather. So what better way to get the conversation started than with
a lovely solar-powered circuit sculpture of a business card that displays the weather?
We love that the frame has a built-in stand; that’s a great touch that really turns this card into something that someone might keep on their desk long-term. The brains of this operation is an ESP32 TTGO E-paper board, which checks the battery voltage first before connecting to Wi-Fi and getting data from the OpenWeatherMap API. It displays the information and then goes to sleep for 15 minutes.
For power, [BLANCHARD Jordan] is using a 5 V solar panel and a small battery from an old vape pen. We love to see projects that keep those things out of the landfills, so don’t sleep on using them.
You have just a few weeks left to enter the 2024 Business Card Challenge, so fire up those soldering irons and get hackin’! | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766702",
"author": "Jean-Philippe BILLAUDEL",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T08:10:07",
"content": "Sympa !!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6766708",
"author": "Luke Davis",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T09:17:15",
"content"... | 1,760,371,888.12605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/donkey-kong-bongos-ditch-the-gamecube-go-mobile/ | Donkey Kong Bongos Ditch The GameCube, Go Mobile | Tom Nardi | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"donkey kong",
"gamecube",
"nintendo"
] | Historically speaking, optional peripherals for game consoles tend not to be terribly successful. You’ll usually get a handful of games that support the thing, one of which will likely come bundled with it, and then the whole thing fades into obscurity to make way for the next new gimmick.
For example, did you know Nintendo offered a pair of bongos for the GameCube in 2003? They were used almost exclusively by the trio of
Donkey Konga
rhythm games, although only two of them were ever released outside of Japan. While the games might not have been huge hits, they were successful enough to stick in the memory of
[bl3i], who wanted a way to keep the DK bongo experience alive
.
The end result is, arguably, more elegant than the hokey musical controller deserves. While most people would have just gutted the plastic bongos and crammed in some new hardware, [bl3i] went through considerable effort so the original hardware would remain intact. His creation simply snaps onto the bongos and connects to them via the original cable.
Internally, the device uses an Arduino to read the output of the bongos (which appeared to the GameCube essentially as a standard controller) and play the appropriate WAV files from an SD card as hits are detected. Add in an audio amplifier module and a battery, and Nintendo’s bongos can finally go forth into the world and spread their beats.
As far as we’re able to tell, this is the first time the Donkey Kong bongos have ever graced the pages of Hackaday in any form, so congratulations to [bl3i] for getting there first. But it’s certainly not the first time we’ve covered ill-conceived game gadgets — long time readers will perhaps be familiar with Nintendo’s attempt to
introduce the Robotic Operating Buddy (ROB) to households back in 1985
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766758",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T14:49:01",
"content": "i miss the paddle controller (rotary encoder) for atari 2600 pong-tennis sort of games.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6766792",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,888.436971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/ai-kayak-controller-lets-the-paddle-show-the-way/ | AI Kayak Controller Lets The Paddle Show The Way | Dan Maloney | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"Assist",
"IMU",
"kayak",
"machine learning",
"nrf",
"paddle",
"watercraft",
"waterproof"
] | Controlling an e-bike is pretty straightforward. If you want to just let it rip, it’s a no-brainer — or rather, a one-thumber, as a thumb throttle is the way to go. Or, if you’re still looking for a bit of the experience of riding a bike, sensing when the pedals are turning and giving the rider a boost with the motor is a good option.
But what if your e-conveyance is more of the aquatic variety?
That’s an interface design problem of a different color
, as [Braden Sunwold] has discovered with his DIY e-kayak.
We’ve detailed his work on this already
, but for a short recap, his goal is to create an electric assist for his inflatable kayak, to give you a boost when you need it without taking away from the experience of kayaking. To that end, he used the motor and propeller from a hydrofoil to provide the needed thrust, while puzzling through the problem of building an unobtrusive yet flexible controller for the motor.
His answer is to mount an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in a waterproof container that can clamp to the kayak paddle. The controller is battery-powered and uses an nRF link to talk to a Raspberry Pi in the kayak’s waterproof electronics box. The sensor also has an LED ring light to provide feedback to the pilot. The controller is set up to support both a manual mode, which just turns on the motor and turns the kayak into a (low) power boat, and an automatic mode, which detects when the pilot is paddling and provides a little thrust in the desired direction of travel.
The video below shows the non-trivial amount of effort [Braden] and his project partner [Jordan] put into making the waterproof enclosure for the controller. The clamp is particularly interesting, especially since it has to keep the sensor properly oriented on the paddle. [Braden] is working on a machine-learning method to analyze paddle motions to discern what the pilot is doing and where the kayak goes. Once he has that model built, it should be time to hit the water and see what this thing can do. We’re eager to see the results. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766679",
"author": "Le Gru",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T05:21:59",
"content": "That’s a really cool project and nice engineering.And it reminds me to get the Kayaks from the garage attic and bring them to a nice stream, again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,888.168121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/emo-alibabas-diffusion-model-based-talking-portrait-generator/ | EMO: Alibaba’s Diffusion Model-Based Talking Portrait Generator | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"Deepfake",
"diffusion model"
] | Alibaba’s EMO (or
Emote Portrait Alive
) framework is a recent entry in a series of attempts to generate a talking head using existing audio (spoken word or vocal audio) and a reference portrait image as inputs. At its core it uses a diffusion model that is trained on 250 hours of video footage and over 150 million images. But unlike previous attempts, it adds what the researchers call a speed controller and a face region controller. These serve to stabilize the generated frames, along with an additional module to stop the diffusion model from outputting frames that feature a result too distinct from the reference image used as input.
In
the related paper
by [Linrui Tian] and colleagues a number of comparisons are shown between EMO and other frameworks, claiming significant improvements over these. A number of
examples
of talking and singing heads generated using this framework are provided by the researchers, which gives some idea of what are probably the ‘best case’ outputs. With some examples, like [Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing] singing ‘
Unconditional
‘ big glitches are obvious and there’s a definite mismatch between the vocal track and facial motions. Despite this, it’s quite impressive, especially with fairly realistic movement of the head including blinking of the eyes.
Meanwhile some seem extremely impressed, such as in a
recent video
by [Matthew Berman] on EMO where he states that Alibaba releasing this framework to the public might be ‘too dangerous’. The level-headed folks over at PetaPixel however also note the
obvious visual imperfections
that are a dead give-away for this kind of generative technology. Much like other diffusion model-based generators, it would seem that EMO is still very much stuck in the uncanny valley, with no clear path to becoming a real human yet.
Thanks to [Daniel Starr] for the tip. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766636",
"author": "Neverm|nd",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T23:27:21",
"content": "I just think where this sort of technology could really be used is instead of translating simply to flat images, you work on translating a 3D mesh– I.e. for so long now the ‘lip-syncing’ of 3D character... | 1,760,371,888.286415 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/bidirectional-data-transfer-through-mud/ | Bidirectional Data Transfer ThroughMud? | Dave Rowntree | [
"Science"
] | [
"drilling",
"mud",
"oil exploration",
"science",
"telemetry"
] | We take easy communications for granted these days. It’s no bother to turn on a lightbulb remotely via a radio link or sense the water level in your petunias, but how does a drilling rig sense data from the drill head whilst deep underground, below the sea bed? The answer is with mud pulse telemetry, about which a
group of researchers have produced a study
, specifically about modelling the signal impairments and strategies for maintaining the data rate and improving the signal quality.
If you’re still confused, mud pulse telemetry (MPT) works by sending a modulated pressure wave vertically through the column of mud inside the drilling tube. It’s essential to obtain real-time data during drilling operations on the exact angle and direction the drill bit is pointing (so it can be corrected) and details of geological formations so decisions can be made promptly. The goal is to reduce drilling time and, therefore, costs and minimize environmental impact — although some would strongly argue about that last point.
One challenge with MPT is that the transmission media can be inconsistent. It may contain rocks and gas, leading to variations in physical properties like density, compressibility, and viscosity throughout the column, which can affect signal transmissibility. The MPT system includes a pressure transducer at the drill head that encodes data about local parameters such as temperature and pressure. The paper also describes other sources of noise that can distort the signal, including vibrations from the drill head and pressure pulses from the drilling mud pumps.
From what we can gather the MPT system is bidirectional, using mechanical means via ‘poppet valves’ to create positive or negative pressure pulses and a rotating slotted disk to generate continuous waves. It’s possible to achieve a data rate of 20 bps from depths of over 6 km. The paper also discusses other data transmission methods as part of the logging-while-drilling (LWD) system, some of which are used alongside MPT in specific circumstances. All of these methods face challenges when transmitting data through this complex medium.
We couldn’t find much on Hackaday about this topic, but we did recall an interesting piece about
dealing with oil spills
and who could forget this
one about fracking
?
Thanks to [Derek] for the tip!
The featured image is courtesy of Dynamic Graphics, Inc. | 30 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766590",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T20:14:49",
"content": "Another one in the series of “never heard of it before”. Amazing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6766596",
"author": "MudButt",
"time... | 1,760,371,888.714508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/2024-business-card-challenge-who-do-you-love/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: Who Do You Love? | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"galvanic skin response",
"gsr",
"nickel",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rp2040"
] | When you hand your new acquaintance one of your cards, there’s a chance you might feel an instant connection. But what if you could know almost instantly whether they felt the same way?
With the Dr. Love card, you can erase all doubt
.
As you may have guessed, the card uses Galvanic Skin Response. That’s the fancy term for the fact that your skin’s electrical properties change when you sweat, making it easier for electricity to pass through it. There are two sensors, one on each short end of the card where you would both naturally touch it upon exchange. Except this time, if you want to test the waters, you’ll have to wait 10-15 seconds while Dr. Love assesses your chemistry.
The doctor in this case is an RP2040-LCD-0.96, which is what it sounds like — a Raspberry Pi Pico with a small LCD attached. For the sensors, [Un Kyu Lee] simply used 8mm-wide strips of nickel. If you want to build your own, be sure to check out
the build guide
and watch the video after the break for a demonstration of Dr. Love in action. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766571",
"author": "Echo",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T19:42:10",
"content": "Whom do you love?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6766672",
"author": "Brendan Robert",
"timestamp": "2024-06-11T02:59:16",
"c... | 1,760,371,888.873023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/switching-regulator-layout-for-dummies/ | Switching Regulator Layout For Dummies | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Slider"
] | [
"howto",
"switching regulator"
] | Last time, we went over
switching regulator basics
– why they’re wonderful, how do you find a switching regulator chip for your purpose, and how to easily pick an inductor for one. Your datasheet should also tell you about layout requirements. However, it might not, or you might want to deviate from them – let’s go more in-depth on what those requirements are about.
Appreciate The Feedback
The two resistors on the right decide what your output voltage will be, and their output is noise-sensitive
There’s a few different switching regulator topologies. Depending on your regulator’s topology and how many components your chip contains, you might need some external components – maybe a Schottky diode, maybe a FET, or maybe even a FET pair. It’s often that the FET is built-in, and same goes for diodes, but with higher-current regulator (2 A to 3 A and above), it’s not uncommon to require an external one. For sizing up those, you’ll want to refer to the datasheet or existing boards.
Another thing is input and output capacitors – don’t skimp on those, because some regulators are seriously sensitive to the amount of capacitance they’re operating with. Furthermore, if you fail to consider things like capacitance dropping with voltage, you might make your regulator very unhappy – not that a linear regulator would be happy either, to be clear. We’ve covered an explainer on this recently –
do check it out!
One thing you will likely need, is a feedback resistor divider – unless your switching regulator is pre-set for a certain voltage or is digitally controlled, you need to somehow point it to the right voltage, in an analog way. Quite a few switching regulators are set for a certain voltage output, but most of them aren’t, and they will want you to add a resistor divider to know what to output. There’s usually a formula for resistor divider calculation, so, pick a common resistor value, put it in as one of the resistors into the formula, get the other resistor value out of that formula, and see what’s the closest value you can actually buy. Don’t go below about 10 kΩ so that you don’t have unnecessary idle power consumption, but also don’t go too far above 100 kΩ to ensure good stability of the circuit.
The datasheet gives example values that nicely sum up to around 1M,
but you can use a 470k/100k divider if you don’t mind the slightly higher quiescent current
Some datasheets might even have a table of pre-calculated values for you to use. In that table, they might call for a very specific resistor value, but you usually can tweak that for the cases where all of your components have enough leeway. Would you care if your output was 5.1 V as opposed to 5.0 V, or 3.5 V instead of 3.3 V? Usually, you wouldn’t, and it might even be a little better if you increase the voltage a tad, so feel free to substitute that 157 kΩ resistor for a 160 kΩ one – just run the datasheet formula calculations to make sure you know what you will actually get.
Respect The Layout
It’s not always that you have a layout example picture in the datasheet. For instance, it could be that you simply get a list of requirements for the layout, or even no requirements at all – sometimes
you’ll just be reverse-engineering a board.
Even if your datasheet is pretty good, sometimes, you will feel like deviating from the datasheet-provided example pictures. Here are some guidelines to know how to layout things safely.
For a start, when it comes to placement of the feedback resistors, you’ll want to put them both as close as possible to the FB pin – the midpoint connection between them (the FB-connected track) is the sensitive part, since it’s high-impedance. So, the FB connection ought to be very short, and, of course, the GND connection has to be good – having a via to the GND polygon at the FB-GND resistor is a good idea. On the other hand, it’s okay to pull the VOUT connection for the feedback divider on the opposite layer through vias, because that is a low-impedance connection and it’s less sensitive to noise. If feasible, connect the VOUT connection “after” the capacitors, too, so that it isn’t measuring the point between the inductor and the capacitors, where current flows back and forth.
It pays to ensure that there’s uninterrupted ground on the layer directly under your regulator, as clean as possible, save for maybe that VOUT track, but even that can be worth routing out of the way. Switching happens at high frequencies, anywhere from 100 kHz to 2 MHz, your regulator datasheet will say which,, and it’s a noisy process. Anything less than a full and accessible ground polygon under the switching areas can, in the worst case, turn your regulator into a full-on noise problem in your circuit.
Trying to layout a RT8078A intuitively – here’s the IC and its components
Inductor and feedback resistors aligned with the IC
Caps are aligned to VOUT and VIN
Filled zones on SW, VIN and VOUT
Vias for GND, and a VOUT-FB connection on the other layer
Datasheet recommendation -probably better
If your regulator has an ‘analog’ ground pad, respect that, and see what the datasheet says – the usual rule is to keep it away from the area where switching happens. Oh, and, it’s often that you need a ground fill directly under the regulator, on the same layer, too – for any switching that happens, whether it’s an internal FET and/or diode, or a driver for external FET gates. You can still try and protoboard a switching regulator circuit, but you’ll want to follow the next layout rule at the very least.
It’s important to put your inductor, diodes and all other components like capacitors as close to the switching regulator chip as you can. With current flowing through them at high frequencies, the connections between them can all become antennas, and the tighter you bundle all the components together, the smaller that antenna is – inducing less noise onto your circuit, which might interfere with WiFi or other wireless operation, analog measurements, or create weird faults in digital logic. Again, this is for you to mind in case there’s no layout recommendation – most often, there is one somewhere in the datasheet, so look out for it! As for traces, you want to provide a connection that’s as straightforward as possible. On connections where actual switching happens (the SW/LX connection from the chip to the inductor), use planes instead of tracks wherever you can.
In general, switching regulators are a bit of a noise source, so keep them away from analog parts; specifically, the SW/LX inductor-connected side. That’s not to say you can’t use switching regulators for anything where you do analog – a ton of modern microcontroller boards and circuits are using small switching regulators, including the Pi Pico. There will still be a bit of noise on the output compared to linear regulators, so if you want a low-noise rail in some part of your project, say, analog supply voltage for sensitive measurements, you can usually add a low-power linear regulator, or use a Pi filter, or combine both. Also, if you need to get plenty of low-noise 3.3V from a high voltage like 20V, you can also do conversion from 20V to 5V with a switching regulator, and then get 3.3V out of 5V with a linear regulator.
Having assembled your board, do you notice your regulator making audible noise? It’s usually not the inductor itself that’s to blame, since switching regulator frequencies are kept pretty high. More often, it appears that either the regulator’s duty cycle, or the capacitors are at fault, specifically, MLCCs, and the way they interact with your output load. It’s not an uncommon problem, though – here’s a
page from Murata
that tries to sell fancier “quiet” capacitors to you, a
fun appnote from TI,
and
a PDF from Monolithic Power
that suggests you treat your PCB as a musical instrument.
Make The World Go Round
Switching regulators are
very much a part of our arsenal
and
have been for a long time,
as they’re fundamentally friendly for many cases where linear regulators fail us. Raspberry Pi has famously gone from a linear regulator to a switching regulator, because the 1A-only 1117 regulator they used, turned out to be a bottleneck, and we’ve seen
quite
a few Pi mods
from before-2014 where people would replace the old linear regulator with a small switching regulator module for power savings and reduced heat. Another spot for switching regulators is battery-powered devices, where a linear regulator
is often not a good pick
because the wasted power decreases time on a single charge significantly.
It also pays to learn a bit how switching regulators work in principle, and, you can have some fun with the concept! Whether that’s making a switching regulator
out of an opamp,
using
an ATTiny to do switching regulator duty
, or repurposing the ubiquitous $1 switching regulator modules
into negative rail power supplies,
knowing the inner workings of a switching regulator makes your toolkit all that more rich. All in all, while a switching regulator might need a few more components, the extra effort is one hundred percent worth it, and if you have never added a switching regulator to your board before, your next design might be a good place to start!
Next time, let’s get down to business – pick a few switching regulators for common purposes, then pick components and do layout for a good few regulators at once, all done in an open-source design. After all, a picture speaks a thousand words, and I’ll make sure there are plenty of those. | 43 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766546",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T18:21:22",
"content": "“It pays to ensure that there’s uninterrupted ground on the layer directly under your regulator”The ground really wants to be right below the switch node, which goes from the regulator to the inductor. Obviou... | 1,760,371,889.057851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/a-peek-inside-apple-durability-testing-labs/ | A Peek Inside Apple Durability Testing Labs | Dave Rowntree | [
"handhelds hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"apple",
"drop test",
"durability",
"reliability engineering",
"repairability",
"robot arm",
"spray",
"vibration",
"water ingress"
] | Apple is well-known for its secrecy, which is understandable given the high stakes in the high-end mobile phone industry. It’s interesting to get a
glimpse inside its durability labs
and see the equipment and processes it uses to support its IP68 ingress claims, determine drop ability, and perform accelerated wear and tear testing.
Check out these cool custom-built machines on display! They verify designs against a sliding scale of water ingress tests. At the bottom end is IPx4 for a light shower, but basically no pressure. Next up is IPx5, which covers low-pressure ambient-temperature spray jets from all angles – we really liked this machine! Finally, the top-end IPx7 and IPx8 are tested with a literal fire hose blast and a dip in a static pressure tank, simulating a significant depth of water. An Epson robot arm with a custom gripper is programmed to perform a spinning drop onto a hard surface in a repeatable manner. The drop surface is swapped out for each run – anything from a wooden sheet to a slab of asphalt can be tried. High-speed cameras record the motion in enough detail to resolve the vibrations of the titanium shell upon impact!
Accelerated wear and tear testing is carried out using a shake table, which can be adjusted to match the specific frequencies of a car engine or a subway train. Additionally, there’s an interview with the head of Apple’s hardware division discussing the tradeoffs between repairability and durability. He makes some good points that suggest if modern phones are more reliable and have fewer failures, then durability can be prioritized in the design, as long as the battery can still be replaced.
The repairability debate has been raging strong for many years now. Here’s
our guide to the responsible use of new technology
.
Thanks to [Dan] for the tip! | 19 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766503",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T16:18:06",
"content": "Now I’m confused about the IPxx terminology.So far, I have only seen IP6x levels for water resistance.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,888.825552 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/8-tracks-are-back-they-are-in-my-house/ | 8-Tracks Are Back? They Are In My House | Kristina Panos | [
"Interest",
"Musical Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"8-track",
"8-tracks",
"capstan",
"pinch roller",
"wedding cake"
] | What was the worst thing about the 70s? Some might say the oil crisis, inflation, or even disco. Others might tell you it was 8-track tapes, no matter what was on them. I’ve heard that the side of the road was littered with dead 8-tracks. But for a while, they were the only practical way to have music in the car that didn’t come from the AM/FM radio.
If you know me at all, you know that I can’t live without music. I’m always trying to expand my collection by any means necessary, and that includes any format I can play at home. Until recently, that list included vinyl, cassettes, mini-discs, and CDs. I had an 8-track player about 20 years ago — a portable Toyo that stopped working or something. Since then, I’ve wanted another one so I can collect tapes again. Only this time around, I’m trying to do it right by cleaning and restoring them instead of just shoving them in the player willy-nilly.
Update: I Found a Player
I have since cleaned it.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at an estate sale and I found a little stereo component player and speakers. There was no receiver in sight. I tested the player with the speakers and bought them for $15 total because it was 75% off day and they were overpriced originally. While I was still at the sale, I hooked it up to the little speakers and made sure it played and changed programs.
Well, I got it home and it no longer made sound
or
changed programs. I thought about the play head inside and how dirty it must be, based on the smoker residue on the front plate of the player. Sure enough, I blackened a few Q-tips and it started playing sweet tunes again. This is when I figured out it wouldn’t change programs anymore.
I found I couldn’t get very far into the player, but I was able to squirt some contact cleaner into the program selector switch. After many more desperate button presses, it finally started changing programs again. Hooray!
I feel I got lucky. If you want to read about an 8-track player teardown,
check out Jenny List’s awesome article
.
These Things Are Not Without Their Limitations
This is what’s going on, inside and out. Image via
8-Track Heaven
, a site which has itself gone to 8-Track Heaven.
So now, the problem is the tapes themselves. I think there are two main reasons why people think that 8-tracks suck. The first one is the inherent limitations of the tape. Although there were 90- and 120-minute tapes, most of them were more like 40-60 minutes, divided up into four programs. One track for the left channel, one for the right, and you have your eight tracks and stereo sound.
The tape is in a continuous loop around a single hub. Open one up and you’ll see that the tape comes off the center toward the left and loops back onto the outside from the right. 8-tracks can’t be rewound, only fast-forwarded, and it doesn’t seem like too many players even had this option. If you want to listen to the first song on program one, for instance, you’d better at least tolerate the end of program four.
The tape is divided into four programs, which are separated by a foil splice. A sensor in the machine raises or lowers the playback head depending on the program to access the appropriate tracks (1 and 5, 2 and 6, and so on.)
Because of the 10-12 minute limitation of each program, albums were often rearranged to fit better within the loud solenoidal
ka-chunk
of each program change.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/8-track-program-change.ogg
For a lot of people, this was outright heresy. Then you have to consider that not every album could fit neatly within four programs, so some tracks faded out for the program change, and then faded back in, usually in the middle of the guitar solo.
Other albums fit into the scheme with some rearrangement, but they did so at the expense of silence on one or more of the programs. Check out the gallery below to see all of these conditions, plus one that divided up perfectly without any continuations or silence.
This one has a repeated track, presumably to fill out the thing so there’s no silence.
This one has 1:00 of silence at the end of program four.
This one has no silences or continuations between programs, but the track order has been rearranged. And of course, no gatefold cover.
This one has two continuations, but at least they didn’t do it to “Spinning Wheel” or “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”. Splitting hits totally did happen, though.
This one has THREE continuations! They really did Dolly dirty.
The second reason people dislike 8-tracks is that they just don’t sound that good, especially since cassette tapes were already on the market. They didn’t sound super great when they were new, and years of sitting around in cars and dusty basements and such didn’t help. In my experience, at this point, some sound better than others. I suppose after the tape dropout, it’s all subjective.
What I Look For When Buying Tapes
The three most important things to consider are the pressure pads, the foil splices, and the pinch roller. All of these can be replaced, although some jobs are easier than others.
Start by looking at the pressure pads. These are either made of foam that’s covered with a slick surface so the tape can slide along easily, or they are felt pads on a sproingy metal thing like a cassette tape. You want to see felt pads when you’re out shopping, but you’ll usually see foam. That’s okay. You can get replacement foam on ebay or via 8-track avenue directly, or you can do what I do.
Replacement pads!
This foam is trashed and needs replacing.
Dolly is missing both felt pads!
This original foam looks good, but I don’t trust it.
Bad vs. good pinch rollers.
After removing the old foam and scraping the plastic backing with my tweezers, I cut a piece of packing tape about 3/8″ wide — just enough to cover the width of some adhesive foam window seal. The weatherstripping’s response is about the same as the original foam, and the packing tape provides a nice, slick surface. I put a tiny strip of super glue on the adhesive side and stick one end down into the tape, curling it a little to rock it into position, then I press it down and re-tension the tape. The cool part is that you can do all this without opening up the tape by just pulling some out. Even if the original foam seems good, you should go ahead and replace it. Once you’ve seen the sticky, black powder it can turn to with time, you’ll understand why.
An example of what not to buy. This one is pretty much hopeless unless you’re experienced.
Another thing you can address without necessarily opening up the tape are the foil splices that separate the programs. As long as the pressure pads are good, shove that thing in the player and let it go until the
ka-chunk
, and then pull it out quickly to catch the splice. Once you’ve got the old foil off of it, use the sticky part of a Post-It note to realign the tape ends and keep them in place while you apply new foil.
Again, you can get sensing foil on ebay, either in a roll, or in pre-cut strips that have that nice 60° angle to them. Don’t try to use copper tape like I did. I’ll never know if it worked or not, because I accidentally let too much tape un-spool from the hub while I was splicing it, but it seemed a little too heavy. Real-deal aluminium foil sensing tape is even lighter-weight than copper tape.
One thing you can’t do without at least opening the tape part way is to replace the pinch roller. Fortunately, these are usually in pretty good shape, but you can usually tell right away if they are gooey without having to press your fingernail into it. Even so, I have salvaged the pinch rollers out of tapes I have tried to save and couldn’t, just to have some extras around.
If you’re going to open the tape up, you might as well take some isopropyl alcohol and clean the graphite off of the pinch roller. This will take a while, but is worth it.
Other Problems That Come Up
Sometimes, you shove one of these bad boys in the player and nothing happens. This usually means that the tape is seized up and isn’t moving. Much like blowing into an N64 cartridge, I have heard that whacking the tape on your thigh a few times will fix a seized tape, but so far, that has not worked for me. I have so far been unable to fix a seized tape, but
there are guides out there
. Basically, you cut the tape somewhere, preferably at a foil splice, fix the tension, and splice it back together.
Another thing that can happen is called a wedding cake. Basically, you open up the cartridge and find that the inner loops of tape have raised up around the hub, creating a two-layer effect that resembles a wedding cake. I have not so far successfully fixed such a situation, but I’ve only run across one so far. Basically, you pull the loops off of the center, re-tension the tape from the other side, and spin those loops back into the center. This person makes it look insanely easy.
Preventive Maintenance On the Player
As with cassette players, the general sentiment is that one should never actually use a head-cleaning tape as they are rough. As I said earlier, I cleaned the playback head thoroughly with 91% isopropyl alcohol and Q-tips that I wished were longer.
An early set of my homemade pressure pads. Not the greatest.
Another thing I did to jazz up my discount estate sale player was to make a capstan-cleaning tape per
these instructions on 8-Track Avenue
. Basically, I took my poor Dionne Warwick tape that I couldn’t fix, threw away the tape, kept the pinch roller for a rainy day, and left the pressure pads intact.
To clean the capstan, I took a strip of reusable dishrag material and stuffed it in the place where the pinch roller goes. Then I put a few drops of alcohol on the dishrag material and inserted the tape for a few seconds. I repeated this with new material until it came back clean.
In order to better grab the tape and tension it against the pinch roller, the capstan should be roughed up a bit. I ripped the scrubby side off of an old sponge and cut a strip of that, then tucked it into the pinch roller pocket and let the player run for about ten seconds. If you listen to a lot of tapes, you should do this often.
Final Thoughts
I still have a lot to learn about fixing problematic 8-tracks, but I think I have the basics of refurbishment down. There are people out there who have no qualms about ironing tapes that have gotten accordioned, or re-spooling entire tapes using a drill and a homemade hub-grabbing attachment. If this isn’t the hacker’s medium, I don’t know what is. Long live 8-tracks! | 56 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766438",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T14:07:08",
"content": "First time I am reading about this technology, did not know it. Seems fit for the time at least.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6766440",
... | 1,760,371,889.86258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/a-wireless-monitor-without-breaking-the-bank/ | A Wireless Monitor Without Breaking The Bank | Jenny List | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"hdmi",
"wireless hdmi",
"wireless monitor"
] | The quality of available video production equipment has increased hugely as digital video and then high-definition equipment have entered the market. But there are still some components which are expensive, one of which is a decent quality HD wireless monitor. Along comes [FuzzyLogic] with a solution, in the form of
an external monitor for a laptop, driven by a wireless HDMI extender
.
In one sense this project involves plugging in a series of components and simply using them for their intended purpose, however it’s more than that in that it involves some rather useful 3D printed parts to make a truly portable wireless monitor, as well as saving the rest of us the gamble of buying wireless HDMI extender without knowing whether it would deliver.
He initially tried an HDMI-to-USB dongle and a streaming Raspberry Pi, however the latency was far too high to be useful. The extender does have a small delay, but not so bad as to be unusable. The whole including the monitor can be powered from a large USB power bank, answering one of our questions. All the files can be
downloaded from Printables
should you wish to follow the same path, and meanwhile there’s a video with the details below the break. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766364",
"author": "Bo-Erik Sandholm",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T06:57:42",
"content": "Videos are useless. Spend the time once instead and write it up once. Instead of forcing hundreds of users to waste time looking at a video.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,371,889.270965 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/a-compact-electrohydrodynamic-pump-using-copper-and-tpu/ | A Compact Electrohydrodynamic Pump Using Copper And TPU | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"electrohydrodynamic",
"pump"
] | Electrohydrodynamics (EHD) involves the dynamics of electrically charged fluids, which effectively means making fluids move using nothing but electric fields, making it an attractive idea for creating a pump out of. This is the topic of a
2023 paper
by [Michael Smith] and colleagues in
Science
, titled
“Fiber pumps for wearable fluidic systems”
. The ‘fiber pumps’ as they call the EHD pumps in this study are manufactured by twisting two helical, 80 µm thick copper electrodes around a central mandrel, along with TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) before applying heat. This creates a tube where the two continuous electrodes are in contact with any fluids inside the tube.
For the fluid a dielectric fluid is required to create the ions, which was 3M Novec 7100, a methoxy-fluorocarbon. Because of the used voltage of 8 kV, a high electrical breakdown of the fluid is required. After ionization the required current is relatively low, with power usage reported as 0.9 W/m, with one meter of this pump generating a pressure of up to 100 kilopascals and a flowrate of 55 mL/minute. One major limitation is still that after 6 days of continuous pumping, the copper electrodes are rendered inert due to deposits, requiring the entire system to be rinsed. Among the applications
the researchers see
artificial muscles and flexible tubing in clothing to cool, heat and provide sensory feedback in VR applications.
While the lack of moving parts as with traditional pumps is nice, the limitations are still pretty severe. What is however interesting about this manufacturing method is that it is available to just about any hobbyist who happens to have some copper wiring, TPU filament and something that could serve as a mandrel lying around.
Thanks to [Aaron Eiche] for the tip. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766115",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-06-09T12:31:15",
"content": "Smithet al.are taking some confusing liberties with language here.di·elec·tric ˌdī-ə-ˈlek-trik: a nonconductor of direct electric current“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ... | 1,760,371,889.230959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/what-if/ | What IfThe MatrixWas Made In The 1950s? | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"generative AI",
"super panavision"
] | We’ve noticed a recent YouTube trend of producing trailers for shows and movies as if they were produced in the 1950s, even when they weren’t. The results are impressive and, as you might expect, leverage AI generation tools. While we enjoy watching them, we were especially interested in [Patrick Gibney’s]
peek behind the curtain
of how he makes them, as you can see below. If you want to see an example of the result first, check out the second video, showing a 1950s-era
The Matrix
.
Of course, you could do some of it yourself, but if you want the full AI experience, [Patrick] suggests using ChatGPT to produce a script, though he admits that if he did that, he would tweak the results. Other AI tools create the pictures used and the announcer-style narration. Another tool produces cinematographic shots that include the motion of the “actors” and other things in the scene. More tools create the background music.
Once you have all that, it is straightforward to edit it together as a video. If you want to try your hand, many of the tools have some free tier, although you might not be able to do everything you want in one shot with free tools. [Patrick] reports he spends about $70 a month to get full access to the tools he uses, but he also mentions some other alternatives.
You have to wonder how long it will be before you can just get an AI filmmaker tool that does the whole thing in one swoop. However, doing it in pieces like this does give you a bit more control. In particular, we were interested that some of the “secret sauce” was using negative prompts to prevent certain behaviors in certain tools.
We were hoping [Patrick] would send up Star Trek, but for that, we had to check out
[Rafa Reels]
. Of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to the 1950s. For example, [Patrick] also wondered what it would be like if Star Wars were made in the 1990s with [Sir Sean Connery] as [Obi Wan]. Thanks to him,
you don’t have to wonder
. | 30 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766062",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-06-09T08:55:13",
"content": "“If you want to see an example of the result first, check out the second video, showing a 1950s-era The Matrix.”Speaking of Matrix, there are other films like that. “The 13th floor” (1999) or “World on a W... | 1,760,371,889.336836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/oral-b-hopes-you-didnt-use-your-230-alexa-enabled-toothbrush/ | Oral-B Hopes You Didn’t Use Your $230 Alexa-Enabled Toothbrush | Maya Posch | [
"hardware"
] | [
"alexa",
"electric toothbrush",
"smart speaker"
] | With companies desperate to keep adding more and more seemingly random features to their products, Oral-B made the logical decision to add Alexa integration to its Oral-B Guide electric toothbrush. Taking it one step beyond just Bluetooth in the toothbrush part, the Guide’s charging base also acted as an Alexa-enabled smart speaker, finally adding the bathroom to the modern, all-connected smart home. Naturally Oral-B killed off the required Oral-B Connect smartphone app earlier this year, leaving Guide owners stranded in the wilderness without any directions. Some of the basics of this shutdown are covered in a
recent Ars Technica article
.
Amidst the outrage, it’s perhaps good to take a bit more of a nuanced view, as despite various claims, Oral-B did not brick the toothbrush. What owners of this
originally USD$230 device
are losing is the ability to set up the charging base as an Alexa smart speaker, while the toothbrush is effectively just an Oral-B Genius-series toothbrush with Bluetooth and associated
Oral-B app
. If you still want to have a waterproof smart speaker listening in while in the bathroom, you’ll have to look elsewhere, it seems. Meanwhile existing customers can contact Oral-B support for assistance, while the lucky few who still have the Connect app installed better hope it doesn’t disconnect, as reconnecting it to the smart speaker seems to be impossible, likely due to services shut down by Oral-B together with the old “oralbconnect.com” domain name.
We recently looked at a
WiFi-enabled toothbrush
as well, which just shows how far manufacturers of these devices are prepared to go, whether they intend to support it in any meaningful fashion or not. | 31 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766028",
"author": "Capo",
"timestamp": "2024-06-09T06:03:30",
"content": "It would be a good case for a class action lawsuit, except for the fact that this guy was probably the only person who bought this piece of junk. LOL",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,371,889.451944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/embrace-ipv6-before-its-too-late/ | Embrace IPv6 Before Its Too Late? | Dave Rowntree | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"home networking",
"ipv4",
"IPv6",
"router advertisement",
"SLAAC"
] | Many hackers have familiar sayings in their heads, such as “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and KISS (Keep it simple, stupid). Those of us who have been in the field for some time have habits that are hard to break. When it comes to personal networks, simplicity is key, and the idea of transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 addresses seems crazy. However, with the increasing number of ‘smart’ devices, streaming media gadgets, and personal phones, finding IPv4 space for our IoT experiments is becoming difficult. Is it
time to consider embracing IPv6
?
The linked GitHub Gist by [timothyham] summarizes the essential concepts for home network admins to understand before making changes. The first major point is that IPv6 has a vastly larger address space than IPv4, eliminating the need to find spare IPv4 addresses. IPv6 assigns multiple addresses to the same interface. The 128-bit addresses are split into a 64-bit prefix assigned by your ISP and a 64-bit interface identifier. Using SLAAC (Stateless Address Autoconfiguration), clients can manage their own addresses. You don’t have to use SLAAC, but it will make life easier. The suffix typically remains static, allowing integration with a local DNS server.
Another major concept concerns routing. IPv6 uses RA (Router Advertisement) instead of DHCP for address assignment. Local clients receive a globally routable prefix, meaning each device can communicate directly over the Internet without needing an intermediate WAN IP address like in the IPv4 system. However, a stateful firewall is still necessary for security.
Finally, we will assign
another
address to the local clients that need to communicate with each other; this is the ULA (Unique local address), which is the address given to your internal devices, such as printers, media servers, and your pile of IoT gadgets. You can grab a ULA prefix from a website such as
this one
, to generate a unique locally routable IPv6 prefix, then assign this to your clients and let them autoconfigure the suffix part. This new ULA is assigned to your local DNS server. So, it’s a lot of work, but with IPv4 running on borrowed time, we might be forced to switch eventually, and it’s better to have a head start, eh?
Need convincing that there really is an IPv4 addressing problem? Well, this side of the pond,
we ran out already
. In case this is all too serious for you, we discovered a hack from a few years ago that seriously abuses the IPv6 address space. Go
check this out
!
Header: Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine,
CC0
. | 96 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765997",
"author": "rusty cans",
"timestamp": "2024-06-09T02:23:04",
"content": "“finding IPv4 space for our IoT experiments is becoming difficult”Not if all your IoT experiments are on a local network behind a NAT’ed connection. Bucket loads of available IP addresses.",
"paren... | 1,760,371,889.618331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/screwless-eyeballs-are-a-lesson-in-design-for-assembly/ | Screwless Eyeballs Are A Lesson In Design-For-Assembly | Dan Maloney | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"animatronic",
"design for assembly",
"DFA",
"linkage",
"pivot",
"print in place",
"snap",
"toolless"
] | [Will Cogley] makes eyeballs; hey, everyone needs a hobby, and we don’t judge. Like all his animatronics, his eyeballs are wondrous mechanisms, but they do tend toward being a bit complex, especially in terms of the fasteners needed to assemble them.
But not anymore.
[Will] redid his eyeball design
to be as easy to assemble as possible, and the results are both impressive and instructive. His
original design
mimics real eyeballs quite well, but takes six servos and a large handful of screws and nuts, which serve both to attach the servos to the frame and act as pivots for the many, many linkages needed. The new design has snap-fit pivots similar to Lego Technic axles printed right into the linkage elements, as well as snap connectors to hold the servos down. This eliminates the need for 45 screws and cuts assembly time from 30 minutes to about six, with no tools required. And although [Will] doesn’t mention it, it must save a bunch of weight, too.
Everything comes at a cost, of course, and such huge gains in assembly ease are no exception. [Will] details this in the video below, including printing the parts in the right orientation to handle the forces exerted both during assembly and in use. And while it’s hard to beat a five-fold reduction in assembly time, he might be able to reduce that even more with a few
print-in-place pivots
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765971",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T23:37:58",
"content": "He ought to be using ABS for those parts.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765973",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T23:50:4... | 1,760,371,889.383445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/how-many-western-ics-are-there-in-russias-weapons/ | How Many Western ICs Are There In Russia’s Weapons? | Arya Voronova | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"military electronics",
"Russia-Ukraine",
"russian military",
"supply chain",
"ukraine",
"weapons"
] | Recently, the Ukrainian government has published
a database of Western components
being used in recently produced Russian armaments, and it’s a fascinating scroll. Just how much does Russia rely on Western manufacturers’ parts? It turns out, a surprising amount. For instance, if you are wondering which ICs are used to build Iran-produced Shahed drones, it seems that it’s
a whole
bunch of
Texas Instruments parts, as well as some Maxim, Intel, and Xilinx ones. Many of the parts in the lists are MCUs and FPGAs, but it’s also surprising how many of the components are jelly bean parts with multiple suppliers.
There appear to be
thousands
of
parts
listings
, compiled from a good few dozen pieces of equipment that volunteers appear to have taken apart and scrupulously documented – just take a look at the dropdowns at the top of the page. The Ukrainian government is advocating for parts restrictions to be implemented based upon this data – as we all remember, it’s way harder to produce hardware when you can’t buy crucial ICs.
Even for a regular hacker, this database is worth a scroll, if only to marvel at all the regular parts we wouldn’t quite associate with military use. Now, all that’s left is to see whether any of the specific chips pictured have been
sold to washing machine manufacturers. | 60 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765904",
"author": "I Alone Possess the Truth",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T20:04:20",
"content": "Any 555s?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765915",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T20:2... | 1,760,371,889.737783 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/comparing-those-ten-cent-microcontrollers/ | Comparing Those Ten Cent Microcontrollers | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"CH32",
"PY32",
"ten cent microcontroller"
] | If you follow the world of microcontrollers, then you’ll probably be familiar with the most recent crop of ten cent parts. They bring power and features previously the preserve of much more expensive chips into the super-budget arena, and they’re appearing in plenty of projects on these pages.
If you’re not familiar with them it can seem daunting to decide which one to use, so to help you [Zach of All Trades]
is comparing two of the more common ones
. The CH32V003 with a RISC-V core and the PY32F002 with an ARM Cortex M0+ core are both pretty similar on paper, but which should you use?
The video below gives a run-down of each part along with some demonstrations before making its conclusions. The ARM-based part isn’t as quick as the RISC-V one but has a slight edge on peripherals, while the support is where a potential winner emerges in the shape of the CH32. That should be the last word, but for that the PY32 has the distance advantage over its rival of ready availability.
So this look at two families of cheap microcontrollers reveals the pros and cons of each, but in reality it provides an introduction to two sets of powerful chips for pennies.
As we’ve observed before,
there are more chips to be found in this market
. | 64 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766415",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T12:00:06",
"content": "While not suitable for a real production environment, those are surely options for us hobbyists.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6766429",
... | 1,760,371,889.988485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/10/a-guide-to-running-your-first-docker-container/ | A Guide To Running Your First Docker Container | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"container",
"containerization",
"docker",
"docker compose",
"raspberry pi",
"self-hosted",
"server",
"virtual machine",
"virtualization"
] | While most of us have likely spun up a virtual machine (VM) for one reason or another, venturing into the world of containerization with software like Docker is a little trickier. While the tools Docker provides are powerful, maintain many of the benefits of virtualization, and don’t use as many system resources as a VM, it can be harder to get the hang of setting up and maintaining containers than it generally is to run a few virtual machines. If you’ve been hesitant to try it out,
this guide to getting a Docker container up and running is worth a look
.
The guide goes over the basics of how Docker works to share system resources between containers, including some discussion on the difference between images and containers, where containers can store files on the host system, and how they use networking resources. From there the guide touches on installing Docker within a Debian Linux system. But where it really shines is demonstrating how to use Docker Compose to configure a container and get it running. Docker Compose is a file that configures a number of containers and their options, making it easy to deploy those containers to other machines fairly straightforward, and understanding it is key to making your experience learning Docker a smooth one.
While the guide goes through setting up a self-hosted document management program called Paperless, it’s pretty easy to expand this to other services you might want to host on your own as well. For example, the
DNS-level ad-blocking software Pi-Hole
which is generally run on a Raspberry Pi can be containerized and run on a computer or server you might already have in your home, freeing up your Pi to do other things. And although it’s a little more involved you can always build your own containers too
as our own [Ben James] discussed back in 2018
. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766392",
"author": "Roger from Fulchester Hackerspace",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T10:35:37",
"content": "The containers in the main image for this article look a little strange. There’s containers of different widths and even seems to be one hanging in the air. Surely all containers... | 1,760,371,890.061913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/fixing-issues-with-knockoff-altera-usb-blasters/ | Fixing Issues With Knockoff Altera USB Blasters | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Altera",
"jtag",
"USB blaster"
] | Using an external MCU as a crude clock source for the Altera CPLD. (Credit: [Doug Brown])
One exciting feature of hardware development involving MCUs and FPGAs is that you all too often need specific tools to program them, with [Doug Brown] suffering a price tag aneurysm after checking the cost of an official Altera/Intel USB Blaster (yours for $300) to program a MAX 10 FPGA device with. This led him naturally down
the path of exploring alternatives
, with the $69 Terasic version rejected for ‘being too expensive’ and opting instead for the
Waveshare USB Blaster V2
, at a regretful $34. The amazing feature of this USB Blaster clone is that while it works perfectly fine under Windows, it works at most intermittently under Linux.
This led [Doug] down the path of reverse-engineering and diagnosing the problem, ultimately throwing in the towel and downclocking the Altera CPLD inside the adapter after finding that it was running a smidge faster than the usual 6 MHz. This was accomplished initially by wiring in an external MCU as a crude (and inaccurate) clock source, but will be replaced with a 12 MHz oscillator later on. Exactly why the problem only exists on Linux and not on Windows will remain a mystery, with Waveshare support also being clueless.
Undeterred, [Doug] then gambled on a $9 USB Blaster clone (pictured above), which turned out to be not only completely non-functional, but also caused an instant BSOD on Windows, presumably due to the faked FTDI USB functionality tripping up the Windows FTDI driver. This got fixed by flashing
custom firmware
by [Vladimir Duan] to the WCH CH552G-based board after
some modifications
shared in a project fork. This variety of clone adapters can have a range of MCUs inside, ranging from this WCH one to STM32 and PIC MCUs, with very similar labels on the case. While cracking one open we had lying around, we found a PIC18 inside, but if you end up with a CH552G-based one, this would appear to fully fix it. Which isn’t bad for the merest fraction of the official adapter.
Thanks to [mip] for the tip. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766408",
"author": "William",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T11:13:16",
"content": "It’s a bit different from power tools in that it really is possible to perform the needed task for $10, but the chip vendor decided that they would prefer to charge more for the board needed to do that. Y... | 1,760,371,890.255058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/a-lego-orrery/ | A LEGO Orrery | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"lego",
"orrery"
] | We aren’t sure how accurate you can get with LEGO, but a
building block orrery
looks cool, if nothing else. [Marian42] saw one done a few years ago and decided to build a version with a different mechanism. At first, the plan was to use some 3D printed fixtures, but the final product is made entirely from LEGO bricks. Very impressive. The video below shows that it has been complete for awhile, but the write-up that goes into great detail has only just arrived and it was worth the wait.
This is one of those things that seems simple if you don’t think too hard about it. However, when you sit down to actually do it, there are a number of challenges. For one thing, the Earth tilts at 23.5 degrees, and as the planet rotates, the tilt stays in the same direction, making it tricky to model mechanically.
The moon also has a 5.15 degree inclination, but since that’s hard to notice at this scale, the LEGO orrery exaggerates it. So, the Moon’s track has its own set of design problems. The whole thing has to rotate on a concentric shaft, which is also tricky to get right with kids’ building blocks.
Compared to the
last orrery
we saw, this one is huge. We’ve always been partial to ones that you
have to look up to
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766313",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-10T02:11:25",
"content": "Now it just needs the Sun to shoot stuff at the Earth on occasion.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6766341",
"author"... | 1,760,371,890.297287 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/hackaday-links-june-9-2024/ | Hackaday Links: June 9, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"AirTag",
"am",
"apollo",
"Bill Anders",
"broadcasting",
"Earthrise",
"ev",
"hackaday links",
"japan",
"obit",
"radio",
"shade",
"shadow",
"solar aspect",
"solar flare",
"theft",
"tools"
] | We’ve been harping a lot lately about the effort by carmakers to kill off AM radio, ostensibly because making EVs that don’t emit enough electromagnetic interference to swamp broadcast signals is a practical impossibility. In the US, push-back from lawmakers — no doubt spurred by radio industry lobbyists — has put the brakes on the move a bit, on the understandable grounds that an entire emergency communication system largely centered around AM radio has been in place for the last seven decades or so. Not so in Japan, though, as
thirteen of the nation’s 47 broadcasters have voluntarily shut down their AM transmitters
in what’s billed as an “impact study” by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The request for the study actually came from the broadcasters, with one being quoted in a hearing on the matter as “hop[ing] that AM broadcasting will be promptly discontinued.” So the writing is apparently on the wall for AM radio in Japan.
There was another close call this week with our increasingly active sun, which
tried but didn’t quite launch a massive stream of plasma
out into space. The M-class flare was captured in the act by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which keeps an eye on what’s going on with our star.
The video of the outburst
is fascinating; it almost looks like a CGI render, but it’s real imaging and pretty spectacular. The active region on the sun’s surface suddenly belches out a few gigatons of plasma, which quickly get sucked right back down to the surface. You can actually see the material following ethereal lines of magnetic force, and the way it splashes when it hits the surface is just beautiful. Seeing this puts us in the mood for a feature on the SDO and how it gets these fascinating images, so stay tuned for that.
Also in space news, we’re saddened by t
he sudden loss of yet another of the Apollo astronauts
. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot on Apollo 8, died Friday in a small plane crash off San Juan Island in Washington. Anders, 90, was piloting the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, a single-engine military trainer aircraft from the 1950s. Anders’ only trip in space was Apollo 8, but what a trip it was. Along with Commander Frank Borman and pilot James Lovell, they were the first humans to leave Earth’s gravity well and visit another world, riding the mighty Saturn V rocket all the way to the Moon for a ten-orbit visit that paved the way for the landing on Apollo 11. He is also officially the luckiest photographer in history, having been in
just
the right place at just the right time to snap
the famous “Earthrise” picture
that gave us for the first time a Moon’s-eye-view of our fragile little world:
Godspeed, Major General Anders.
In more mundane news, a story from Maryland that should give anyone who depends on tools for a living a moment’s pause.
Police cracked a massive tool-theft ring
thanks to the actions of a carpenter who, sick of having his tools ripped off repeatedly, stashed a couple of AirTags among his stock in trade. When the inevitable occurred and his tools took a walk yet again, he tracked them to a storage facility and alerted police. They in turn conducted an investigation and got search warrants for twelve locations, where the scale of this criminal enterprise became apparent. Check out the photos in the story; mountains of cordless tools sorted by brand, DeWalt yellow here and Milwaukee red there. There’s a surprising amount of puke-green Ryobi, too; are people really trying to make money with those tools? Between the piles of cordless tools and the rows of air compressors, the total value of the haul is estimated to be from $3 to $5 million. Hats off to the carpenter for running his own mini-sting operation.
And finally, from the Genuinely Interesting Apps files we have
ShadeMap
, which does exactly what you think it does: plot shade and shadow on a map. It has controls for time and date, and zooms down to a pretty fine level of detail, even for the free version. Shadows from buildings, terrain, and trees are calculated and displayed, making it perfect for surveys of locations for solar power installations. There’s also supposed to be a way to virtually remove shadow-casting features, although we couldn’t find it; perhaps in a paid version? That would be a handy tool indeed to see which trees need to be cut down or which buildings demolished to improve your solar aspect. YMMV on that last one, of course. | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766282",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2024-06-09T23:35:10",
"content": "The “Earthrise” picture, I think the most amazing part of that photo is that it was taken in lunar orbit.The Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, so one side of the Moon always faces toward Earth. There i... | 1,760,371,890.379258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/making-intel-mad-retrocomputing-edition/ | Making Intel Mad, Retrocomputing Edition | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"186",
"286",
"8088",
"arduino",
"emulator",
"ibm",
"nec v20",
"pc",
"retrocomputing",
"upgrade",
"V20"
] | Intel has had a deathgrip on the PC world since the standardization around the software and hardware available on IBM boxes in the 90s. And if you think you’re free of them because you have an AMD chip, that’s just Intel’s instruction set with a different badge on the silicon. At least AMD licenses it, though — in the 80s there was another game in town that didn’t exactly ask for permission
before implementing, and improving upon, the Intel chips available at the time
.
The NEC V20 CPU was a chip that was a drop-in replacement for the Intel 8088 and made some performance improvements to it as well. Even though the 186 and 286 were available at the time of its release, this was an era before planned obsolescence as a business model was king so there were plenty of 8088 systems still working and relevant that could take advantage of this upgrade. In fact, the V20 was able to implement some of the improved instructions from these more modern chips. And this wasn’t an expensive upgrade either, with kits starting around $16 at the time which is about $50 today, adjusting for inflation.
This deep dive into the V20 isn’t limited to a history lesson and technological discussion, though. There’s also
a project based on Arduino which makes use of the 8088
with some upgrades to support the NEC V20 and
a test suite for a V20 emulator
as well.
If you had an original IBM with one of these chips, though, things weren’t all smooth sailing for this straightforward upgrade at the time. A years-long legal battle ensued over the contents of the V20 microcode and whether or not it constituted copyright infringement. Intel was able to drag the process out long enough that by the time the lawsuit settled, the chips were relatively obsolete,
leaving the NEC V20 to sit firmly in retrocomputing (and legal) history
. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766231",
"author": "Cogidubnus Rex",
"timestamp": "2024-06-09T20:20:30",
"content": "“that’s just Intel’s instruction set with a different badge on the silicon. At least AMD licenses it, though”In the same way Intel licenses AMD64 instructions in their chips. So it’s about a 50:50 ... | 1,760,371,890.446123 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/09/can-a-toy-printer-be-made-great/ | Can A Toy Printer Be Made Great? | Jenny List | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer upgrade",
"easythreed",
"toy 3d printer"
] | Now that the bottom end of the 3D printer market has been largely cleared of those garbage “Prusa i3 clone” models which used to infest it a few years ago, a new breed of ultra-cheap printer has taken their place. EasyThreed make a range of very small printers pitched as toys, and while they’re no great shakes by the standards of most Hackaday readers, they do at least work out of the box. For their roughly $75 price tag they deliver what you’d expect, but can such a basic machine be improved with a few upgrades?
[Made with Layers] has taken a look
.
These printers have an all-plastic snap-together construction with a 10 cm by 10 cm bed and a set of small geared stepper motors driving their axes. He concentrates on stiffening the structure, upgrading those motors, and because he’s sponsored by a 3D printer electronics company, upgrading their controller.
The motors were replaced first with some NEMA 11 steppers, and then by some over-sized ones which maybe push the idea a little far. By moving the motors to a bracket he was able to free up their mountings to secure a 3D printed insert to stiffen the arms. Perhaps he’s pushing it a little for the video with the electronics upgrade, but we think there’s a happy medium with the smaller of the two motor upgrades and the stiffening.
So if you have an EasyThreed in your life it’s possible to upgrade it into something a little better, but it’s worth asking whether that $75 might be better spent in saving for a better machine in the first place.
We’ve been curious about these tiny printers for a while
though, and it’s interesting to have some more of our questions answered. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6766182",
"author": "Gunplumber",
"timestamp": "2024-06-09T17:24:33",
"content": "Hey, does anyone remember the Monoprice Select Mini? It’s back, in toy form!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6766184",
"author": "kaiden... | 1,760,371,890.616044 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/gas-tight-fdm-3d-printing-is-within-your-grasp/ | Gas-Tight FDM 3D Printing Is Within Your Grasp | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"gas tight",
"sealing",
"water tight 3D printing"
] | The widespread availability of inexpensive 3D printers has brought about a revolution in what can be easily made at home. However these creations aren’t perfect, particularly when it comes to the adhesion between their layers. Aside from structural failures along the layer lines there is also the question of those joins being permeable, limiting the possibility for waterproof or gas proof prints. It’s something [German Engineer] has tackled in a new video, in which he’s looking at the design and preparation of small propane tanks.
This is the frame at which the 3D printed tank explodes
The attraction of propane as a fuel is that it liquefies easily on compression, so a propane cylinder or tank will be an equilibrium of liquid propane with pressurized gas above it, whose pressure depends on the ambient temperature. This means that any tank must be expected to have a working pressure somewhere between 150 and 200 PSI, with of course a design pressure far exceeding that for safety reasons.
Filling a 3D printed tank immediately results in the propane escaping, as he demonstrates by putting one of his prints under water. He solves this with a sealant,
Diamant Dichtol
, which is intended to polymerize in the gaps between layers and create a gas-tight tank. A range of three tanks of different thicknesses are treated this way, and while the 1 mm thick variety bursts, the thicker ones survive.
It’s clear that this technique successfully creates gas-tight prints, and we can see the attraction of a small and lightweight fuel tank. But we can’t help worrying slightly about the safety, for even when the material is a lightweight 3D print, high pressure equipment is not to be trifled with. Tanks do burst, and when that happens anyone unfortunate enough to be close by sustains nasty, even life-threatening injuries. Use the technique, but maybe don’t hit it with high pressures. | 65 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765880",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T18:16:27",
"content": "“but maybe don’t hit it with high pressures”…It might be a good idea to define “high pressures”. Even in the range of 30 psi / 2 bar – a typical automotive tire pressure – a rupture with fragments ... | 1,760,371,890.557561 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/happy-birthday-tetris/ | Happy Birthday,Tetris! | Elliot Williams | [
"Games",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"anniversary",
"birthday",
"newsletter",
"tetris"
] | Porting
DOOM
to everything that’s even vaguely Turing complete is a sport for the advanced hacker. But if you are just getting started, or want to focus more on the physical build of your project, a simpler game is probably the way to go. Maybe this explains the eternal popularity of games like
PONG
,
Tetris
,
Snake
, or even
Pac-Man
. The amount of fun you can have playing the game, relative to the size of the code necessary to implement them, make these games evergreen.
Yesterday was
Tetris
’ 40th birthday, and in honor of the occasion, I thought I’d bring you a collection of sweet
Tetris
hacks.
On the big-builds side of things, it’s hard to beat these
MIT students who used colored lights in the windows of the Green Building
back in 2012. They apparently couldn’t get into some rooms, because they had some dead pixels, but at that scale, who’s complaining? Coming in just smaller, at the size of a whole wall,
[Oat Foundry]’s
giant split-flap display
Tetris
is certainly noisy enough.
Smaller still, although only a little bit less noisy,
this flip-dot
Tetris
is at home on the coffee table, while
this one by [Electronoobs]
gives you an excuse to play around with RGB LEDs. And if you need a
Tetris
for your workbench, but you don’t have the space for an extra screen,
this oscilloscope version
is just the ticket. Or just play it (sideways)
on your business card
.
All of the above projects have focused on the builds, but if you want to tackle your own, you’ll need to spend some time with the code as well. We’ve got you covered. Way back, former Editor in Chief [Mike Szczys]
ported
Tetris
to the AVR platform
. If you need color,
this deep dive into the way the NES version of
Tetris
worked
also comes with demo code in Java and Lua.
TetrOS is the most minimal version of the game we’ve seen
, coming in at a mere 446 bytes, but it’s without any of the frills.
No
Tetris
birthday roundup would be complete without mentioning the phenomenal “
From NAND to
Tetris
” course, which really does what it says on the package: builds a
Tetris
game, and your understanding of computing in general, from the ground up.
Can you think of other projects to celebrate
Tetris
’ 40th? We’d love to see your favorites!
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
! | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765870",
"author": "dropbear",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T16:55:03",
"content": "How could any list of Tetris hacks leave off Fire Tetris, built in Montreal and playable at Burning Man 2015:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-4QWnew5_mA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,890.667652 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/baffle-the-normies-with-this-binary-thermometer/ | Baffle The Normies With This Binary Thermometer | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"binary",
"charlieplexing",
"dht11",
"Digispark",
"thermometer"
] | We think it’s OK to admit that when someone puts a binary display on a project, it’s just a thinly veiled excuse to get more blinkenlights into the world. That and it’s a way to flex a little on the normies; you’ve gone pretty far down the tech rabbit hole to quickly decipher something like
this binary-display thermometer
, after all.
Don’t get us wrong, we think those are both perfectly valid reasons for going binary. And all things considered, a binary display for a thermometer like [Clovis Fritzen]’s is much simpler to decode than, say, a clock. Plus, it seems a bit that this build was undertaken at least partially as an exercise in
Charlieplexing
, which [Clovis] uses to drive the six-bit LED display using only three lines of GPIO from the Digispark ATtiny85 board running the show.
The temperature sensor is a DHT11, whose output is read by the microcontroller before being converted to binary and sent to the six-bit display. The 64-degree range is perfect for displaying the full range of temperatures most of us would consider normal, although we’d find 63°C a touch torrid so maybe there’s a little too much resolution on the upper end of the scale. Then again, switching to Fahrenheit would shift it toward the hypothermia end of the scale, which isn’t helpful. And you can just forget about Kelvin. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765802",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T11:45:01",
"content": "Nice job [Clovis]!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765883",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,371,890.762441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/08/the-cheap-cnc3018-gets-a-proper-revamp/ | The Cheap CNC3018 Gets A Proper Revamp | Dave Rowntree | [
"cnc hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3018",
"cnc",
"rebuild",
"spindle"
] | Many people have been attracted to the low price and big dreams of the CNC3018 desktop CNC router. If you’re quick, you can pick one up on the usual second-hand sales sites with little wear and tear for a steal. They’re not perfect machines by any stretch of the imagination, but they can be improved upon, and undoubtedly useful so long as you keep your expectations realistic.
[ForOurGood] has set about such an improvement process and documented their journey in a whopping eight-part (so far!) video series. The
video linked below
is the most recent in the series and is dedicated to creating a brushless spindle motor on a budget.
As you would expect from such a machine, you get exactly what you pay for. The low cost translates to thinner than ideal metal plates, aluminium where steel would be better, lower-duty linear rails, and wimpy lead screws. The spindle also suffers from cost-cutting, as does the size of the stepper motors. But for the price, all is forgiven. The fact that they can even turn a profit on these machines shows the manufacturing prowess of the Chinese factories.
We covered the
CNC 3018 a while back
, and the comments of that post are a true gold mine for those wanting to try desktop CNC. Warning, though: It’s a fair bit harder to master than 3D printing!
Thanks to [Thomas] for the tip! | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765790",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T09:18:13",
"content": "I’ve got the slightly smaller brother of this, and the biggest fundamental issue is getting the thing true. It lacks any mechanism to make accurate adjustments on the frame.After that, sure the frame would be... | 1,760,371,890.824607 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/the-end-of-blheli_32-long-live-am32/ | The End Of BLHeli_32: Long Live AM32? | Maya Posch | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"BLHeli",
"electronic speed control"
] | An essential part of drones are the Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) which translate the commands from the flight computer into responses by the connected brushless motors (generally BLDCs). As the ESC determines a lot of the performance characteristics of a drone, it has its own firmware, which for (FPV) drones is overwhelmingly BLHeli, specifically the 32-bit version (BLHeli_32). Now the Norwegian company (BLHeli AS) behind this closed source firmware has
thrown in the towel
, citing illegal use of its firmware by sanctioned countries like Russia for purposes like warfare. This news and its implications are covered in detail
in a video
by the [Mads Tech] YouTube channel, including the message sent to customers by the company’s lawyer.
So far the
GitHub repository
is still online, featuring binary images for BLHeli_32, as well as the open source BLHeli (8-bit Atmel/Silabs) firmware and BLHeli_S (multirotor 8-bit Silabs) firmware. Due to the open source nature of these earlier projects forks already exist, such as BlueJay for BLHeli_S, and with the
AM32 project
there is an open source 32-bit
ESC alternative
. For 8-bit platforms it would thus seem that even with BLHeli_32 vanishing there is no impact at all, while for 32-bit platforms AM32 seems to be largely a drop-in solution.
Regardless of the reasons behind BLHeli_32 vanishing like this, the community and businesses can now hopefully move their (financial) support over to the AM32 project, making this more of a blip than an outright disaster for those who are into their high-end multicopter drones.
Thanks to [Frank Zhao] for the tip. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765760",
"author": "Hank",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T06:40:46",
"content": "Ridiculous. Applying export restrictions to already ubiquitous technology.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765985",
"author": "Andy",
... | 1,760,371,890.714605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/make-your-code-slower-with-multithreading/ | Make Your CodeSlowerWith Multithreading | Dave Rowntree | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"futex",
"MULTITHREADING",
"mutex",
"Perf+",
"performance",
"profiling",
"spin locks",
"syscall"
] | With the performance of modern CPU
cores
plateauing recently, the main performance gains are with multiple cores and multithreaded applications. Typically, a fast GPU is only so mind-bogglingly quick because thousands of cores operate in parallel on the same set of tasks. So, it would seem prudent for our applications to try to code in a multithreaded fashion to take advantage of this parallelism. Or so it would seem, but as [Marc Brooker] illustrates,
it’s not as simple as one would assume
, and it’s very easy to end up with far worse overall performance and no easy way to fix it.
[Marc] was rerunning an old experiment to calculate the expected number of birthdays in a shared group of people using brute force. The experiment was essentially a tight loop running a pseudorandom number generator, the standard libc rand() function. [Marc] profiled the code for single-thread and multithreaded versions and noted the runtime dramatically increased beyond two threads. Something fishy was going on. Running perf, [Marc] noted that there were significant L1 cache misses, but the real killer for performance was the increase in expensive context switches. Perf indicated that for four threads, the was an overhead of nearly 50% servicing spin locks. There were no locks in the code, so after more perf magic, the syscalls taking all the time were identified. Something in there was using a
futex
(or fast userspace mutex) a whole lot.
After delving into the glibc source code, a comment said it all:
/* POSIX.1c requires that there is mutual exclusion for the `rand' and
`srand' functions to prevent concurrent calls from modifying common
data. */
__libc_lock_lock (lock);
(void) __random_r (&unsafe_state, &retval);
__libc_lock_unlock (lock);
By replacing the call to rand() with random_r(), the program’s performance with four threads improved dramatically. The runtime was reduced to a theoretical quarter of the single-thread version. As Marc summarizes, multi-threaded programming is not always as straightforward as one might think. While performance can be significantly worse in some cases, improvements are possible. However, this is not guaranteed to be the case in every situation.
The art of debugging and profiling code is complex, so here’s how to use
Valgrind to look for problems
you might not even know about. Even the humble Linux pipe needs to be
thought out to get decent performance
. What a surprise! | 51 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765718",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2024-06-08T02:14:22",
"content": "Next time, he should consider if the bofusenick is conflicting counter-contusively with the tordanula or if the massive rocwooselon buffer is full of trambignofast calls. 😆",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,371,891.142092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/an-mxm-take-on-the-3dfx-voodoo/ | An MXM Take On The 3dfx Voodoo | Arya Voronova | [
"laptops hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3dfx",
"mxm",
"voodoo"
] | [sdz] of Vogons forum brings us an unexpected device for the 21st century – a
3dfx Voodoo 4 card in MXM format,
equipped with 64MB of RAM. This isn’t just a showpiece – this card actually, properly works when installed into our hacker’s Dell Precision M4800, and [sdz] tells us more on how the card came to be.
Equipped with a VSA-100 GPU, this card has a whole lot of support components for adapting old interfaces to modern ones. There’s a PCIe-PCI bridge IC, an FPGA, HDMI muxes, and a Realtek scaler for video conversion. Handling all the MXM interfaces would’ve been downright impossible, so the card also holds an LVDS header for the M4800’s panel. Plus, for testing all of it, [sdz] has developed a PCIe to MXM adapter board with minimal circuitry needed to have the card work – this is a seriously involved hack and it’s executed remarkably well.
The forum post shows a whole lot of the journey, from receiving the PCBs to code and FPGA gateware bringup, as well as videos of
VGA
and
HDMI operation
. In the end, our hacker shows us a fully working setup, the 3dfx card inserted into M4800 and driving its display, as well as overclocking experiments; the author has promised to open-source the card files in due time, too. It’s seriously nice to see DIY MXM cards in the wild, and if you ever wanted to build one, we’ve got an article tells you
everything you could want to know
about the MXM standard.
We thank [Misel] for sharing this with us! | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765692",
"author": "Milo Bascombe",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T23:05:43",
"content": "I don’t know why you did it but AWESOME!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765693",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,890.992415 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/reverse-engineering-keeps-early-ford-evs-rolling/ | Reverse Engineering Keeps Early Ford EVs Rolling | Dan Maloney | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ev",
"ford",
"golf cart",
"instrument cluster",
"pic",
"reverse engineering"
] | With all the EV hype in the air, you’d be forgiven for thinking electric vehicles are something new. But of course, EVs go way, way back, to the early 19th century by some reckonings. More recently but still pretty old-school were Ford’s Think line of NEVs, or neighborhood electric vehicles. These were commercially available in the early 2000s, and something like 7,200 of the slightly souped-up golf carts made it into retirement communities and gated neighborhoods.
But as Think aficionado [Hagan Walker] relates, the Achille’s heel of these quirky EVs was its instrument cluster, which had a nasty habit of going bad and taking the whole vehicle down with it, sometimes in flames. So he undertook the effort of
completely reverse engineering the original cluster
, with the goal of building a plug-in replacement.
The reverse engineering effort itself is pretty interesting, and worth a watch. The microcontroller seems to be the primary point of failure on the cluster, probably getting fried by some stray transients. Luckily, the microcontroller is still available, and swapping it out is pretty easy thanks to chunky early-2000s SMD components. Programming the MCU, however, is a little tricky. [Hagan] extracted the code from a working cluster and created a hex file, making it easy to flash the new MCU. He has a bunch of other videos, too, covering everything from
basic diagnostics
to
lithium battery swaps
for the original golf cart batteries that powered the vehicle.
True, there weren’t many of these EVs made, and fewer still are on the road today. But they’re not without their charm, and keeping the ones that are still around from becoming lawn ornaments — or worse — seems like a noble effort. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765674",
"author": "akimmet",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T21:55:14",
"content": "It is an excellent example of how reverse engineering and documentation is important for automotive repair. Unfortunately this is becoming a losing prospect with most EVs and new combustion engine vehicle... | 1,760,371,891.318232 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/the-ibm-pc-brainchild-of-a-misfit/ | The IBM PC: Brainchild Of A Misfit | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ibm",
"IBM PC",
"pc"
] | We’ve read a number of histories of the IBM PC and lived through that time, too. But we enjoyed [Gareth Edwards’] perspective in a post entitled
The Misfit who Built the IBM PC
. The titular character is Don Estridge, a decidedly atypical IBM employee who was instrumental in creating the personal computer market as we know it.
It’s not that IBM invented the personal computer — far from it. But the birth of the PC brought personal computers to the mainstream, especially in offices, and — much to IBM’s chagrin — opened up the market for people to make add-on cards for printers, videos, and other accessories.
IBM was a computer juggernaut in the late 1970s. Its divisions were the size of other companies, and some have compared it to a collection of mafia families. The company was heavily invested in big computers, and management was convinced that personal computing was, at most, an avenue to video games and most likely a fad.
Known as a conservative company, the PC project drew from a number of corporate misfits who had been technically successful but often punished for coloring outside the lines. They developed a prototype. The post quotes one of the people involved as saying, “The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, and it would show a picture of a rocket ship blasting off the screen. We decided to show the Management Committee the rocket ship.” Wise choice.
That’s just the kind of tidbit in this post, and if you have any interest in computer history of the 1980s, you’ll definitely want to check it out. Estridge died in 1985, so he didn’t get to see much of the result of the market he opened up. Of course, there were many other players who appear in this story. The PC has many parents, as you might expect.
We’ve done our own
recounting of this story
. However, we tend to obsess more
over the internals
. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765629",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T17:50:01",
"content": "“The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, and it would show a picture of a rocket ship blasting off the screen. We decided to show the Management Commit... | 1,760,371,891.477758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/hackaday-podcast-episode-274-capstan-robots-avionics-of-uncertain-purpose-and-what-the-frack/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 274: Capstan Robots, Avionics Of Uncertain Purpose, And What The Frack? | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | What do capstans, direct conversion receivers, and fracking have in common? They were all topics Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams found fascinating this week. If you wonder what makes an electrical ground a ground, or what a theodolite is, you should check it out.
This week, the hacks came fast and furious. Capstans, instead of gears, work well for 3D-printed mechanisms, a PI Pico can directly receive radio signals, and the guys saw a number of teardowns and reverse engineering triumphs. You’ll also find solid-state heat pumps, flying wings, spectroscopy, and more.
The can’t miss articles this week? Learn about theodolites, a surveying feat from ancient Greece, and how fracking works.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what we’ve mispronounced — or any other thoughts on the episode — in the comments!
Download an archival copy for your personal collection
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 274 Show Notes:
News:
Hackaday Supercon 2024 Call For Participation: We Want You!
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [Ferric Bueler] for identifying last week’s sound, which was the XDR cassette code. The rest of you, come back next week for your chance to win.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Gears Are Old And Busted, Capstans Are Cool
Capstan Drive Is Pulling The Strings On This Dynamic Quadruped
This 3D Cable Printer Remixes The Delta
Marionette 3D Printer Replaces Linear Rails With String
Cable Driven Robotic Joint
Stanford: Applied Robot Design (CS235)
Ham Busts The Myth Of Ground
The Pi Pico, An SDR Receiver Front End
Inside A Mystery Aerospace Computer With [Ken Shirriff]
Old Dot-Matrix Displays Give Up Their Serial Secrets
Mechanic Prince Of Tides
Tide Predicting Machines
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Thermoelectric Module Keeps Printer Filament Cool And Dry
The Dyke Delta: A DIY Flying Wing Fits Four
GlowBlaster Uses 405 Nm Laser To Make Its Mark
Gamma Ray Spectroscopy The Pomelo Way
Al’s Picks:
Old Knobs With A Cast Of Thousands
VFD Tube Calculator Shows Off Wide Array Of Skills
Turbocase Generates A PCB Shell For You
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Tech In Plain Sight: Theodolites
Earth’s circumference – Wikipedia
Mining And Refining: Fracking | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,891.273617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/comparing-x86-and-68000-in-an-fpga/ | Comparing X86 And 68000 In An FPGA | Dave Rowntree | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"68000",
"fpga",
"iCE40",
"RISC-V",
"x86"
] | [Michael Kohn] started programming on the Motorola 68000 architecture and then, for work reasons, moved over to the Intel x86 and was not exactly pleased by the latter chip’s perceived shortcomings. In the ’80s, the 68000 was a very popular chip, powering everything from personal computers to arcade machines, and looking at its architecture and ease of programming, you can see why this was.
Fast-forward a few years, and [Michael] decided to
implement both cores in an FPGA to compare real applications
, you know,
for science
. As an extra bonus, he also compares the performance of a minimal RISC-V implementation on the same hardware, taken from an
earlier RISC-V project
(which you should also check out !)
Utilizing their
‘Java Grinder’ application
(also pretty awesome, especially the retro console support), a simple Mandelbrot fractal generator was used as a non-trivial workload to produce binaries for each architecture, and the result was timed. Unsurprisingly, for CISC architectures, the 68000 and x86 code sizes were practically identical and significantly smaller than the equivalent RISC-V. Still, looking at the execution times, the 68000 beat the x86 hands down, with the newer RISC-V speeding along to take pole position. [Michael] admits that these implementations are minimal, with no pipelining, so they could be sped up a little.
Also, it’s not a totally fair race. As you’ll note from the RISC-V implementation, there was a custom RISC-V instruction implemented to perform the Mandelbrot generator’s iterator. This computes the complex operation Z = Z
2
+ C, which, as fellow fractal nerds will know, is where a Mandelbrot generator spends nearly all the compute time. We suspect that’s the real reason RISC-V came out on top.
If actual hardware is more your cup of tea, you could
build a minimal 68k system pretty easily
, provided you can find the chips. The current ubiquitous x86 architecture,
as odd as it started out
, is here to stay for the foreseeable future, so you’d just better get
comfortable with it
! | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765603",
"author": "Megol",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T16:17:50",
"content": "According to the description the X86 implementation uses an 8 bit bus and processes instructions in 8 bit chunks, while the 68k implementation uses a 16 bit bus and processes instructions in 16 bit chunks.N... | 1,760,371,891.236846 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/this-week-in-security-recall-modem-mysteries-and-flipping-pages/ | This Week In Security: Recall, Modem Mysteries, And Flipping Pages | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Copilot+",
"CVEs",
"recall",
"This Week in Security"
] | Microsoft is racing to get into the AI game as part of Windows 11 on ARM, calling it
Copilot
+. It’s an odd decision, but clearly aimed at competing with the Apple M series of MacBooks. Our focus of interest today is Recall, a Copilot+ feature that not only
has some security problems
, but also triggers a sort of visceral response from regular people: My computer is spying on me? Eww.
Yes, it really sort of is. Recall is a scheme to take screen shots of the computer display every few seconds, run them through character recognition, and store the screenshots and results in a database on the local machine hard drive. There are ways this could be useful. Can’t remember what website had that recipe you saw? Want to revisit a now-deleted tweet? Is your Google-fu failing you to find a news story you read last week? Recall saw it, and Recall remembers. But what else did Recall see? Every video you watched, ever website you visited, and probably some passwords and usernames you typed in.
Now to their credit, the folks at Microsoft knew this could be a problem, and took some steps to keep this data safe. The huge win here is that Windows 11 with Copilot+ will run an Azure AI instance right on the laptop, to do all the AI processing without sending any private data up to the cloud. And then on top of that, Recall data is encrypted at rest, which Microsft claims is enough to keep attackers and other users out. The problem there is that
encryption at rest only protects data from a physical, offline attack
. And even that is incredibly hard to get right.
So let’s cut to the chase. How bad is it? [Kevin Beaumont] took a look, and
the results aren’t pretty
. The description sounded like Recall uses a per-user encryption system like
EFS
to keep the data safe. It’s not. Any admin user can access all the Recall databases on the machine. And of course, malware that gets installed can access it too. There’s already a tool available to decode the whole database,
TotalRecall
.
Recall is only planned to run on these Copilot+ devices, and can be turned off by the end user. Some of the security problem can be fixed, like the cross-user availability of the data. It’s going to be much harder to fix the privacy and malware issues.
Modem Mystery
This is sort of a two-part story,
starting with a real mystery
. [Sam Curry] was doing some research on a vulnerability, and noticed something odd when sending HTTP requests from his home network to a test server. Each HTTP request was sent a second time, from a separate IP address. That’s odd. A bit of investigation discovered that these were HTTP packets that were sent through his cable modem, and the mystery IP was a DigitalOcean VM. The culprit was a compromised cable modem, but it’s still an open mystery, what exactly the purpose was of mirroring HTTP traffic this way. [Sam] went to his cable company to request a new modem, and turned the compromised unit over in the exchange, ruining his chance to figure out exactly what was on it.
The second part of this story is that curiosity about exactly how malware ends up on a modem eventually led [Sam] down the rabbit hole of Cox APIs and TR-069, the protocol that allows an ISP to manage devices at scale. The Cox API used a reverse proxy that could be tricked into showing a Swagger-ui page, nicely documenting all the API endpoints available. That API had a quirk. Send the same request multiple times, and it’s eventually accepted without authorization. That was the motherload, allowing for arbitrary access to customer devices via the TR-069 support.
So mystery solved? Was this how [Sam]’s modem was hacked? Cox responded very rapidly to the vulnerability report, closing the problematic APIs within hours. But the vulnerability just wasn’t old enough. The original modem malware was in 2021, and this API didn’t launch til 2023. The mystery continues.
Linux Flipping Pages in the Wild
CISA has
added another two vulnerabilities
to the their list of known-exploited. One is the Check Point arbitrary file leak that we covered last week, and the other is t
he Flipping Pages vulnerability
in the Linux kernel, made public back in March, with the fix predating the announcement, in February.
The core bug itself is pretty simple. A NetFilter chain in the kernel can return one of multiple values, to indicate how to handle an incoming packet. The
NF_DROP
target drops the packet, frees the memory, and returns a user-supplied error value. The quirk here is that errors are negative values, and the rest of the NetFilter actions are positive values. And NetFilter allows a user to set that error value as a positive value, enabling an odd state where the packet is both dropped and accepted at the same time. The specific bug is a double free, which enables the Dirty Pagetable technique to overwrite arbitrary memory and trigger elevation.
That vulnerability became more important to get patched, once a
Proof of Concept (PoC) was published
, allowing for easy use. And it’s apparently getting used, given the CISA announcement.
Binding Android
Up next is
a nice walk-through of an Android vulnerability
making use of the Binder Inter-Process Communication (IPC) device. As all the apps on Android run sandboxed, Binder is both an important part of the OS, and very accessible to apps — and hence not a good place for a vulnerability.
On the other hand, Binder is fairly complicated. It’s doing memory management, connects multiple processes, transferring arbitrary data, and just generally has a difficult dance to do. It’s not surprising that there are vulnerabilities in that code. This one is a logic flaw in error handling, where an error can trigger the cleanup function to clean up unallocated objects. That results in a dangling pointer, which can be used for all sorts of things.
The first step in actual exploitation is to use the dangling pointer to leak a few bytes from kernel heap memory. That data can be used to build a fake binder object in the space, and then a delete function called on that fake object results in an “unlink”, or a way to modify kernel pointers. That unlink can be abused to build an arbitrary read primitive, by unlinking a fake pointer. The last trick is a cross-cache attack, where multiple objects are created and freed, to trick the allocator into putting something important under the dangling pointer. Putting it together, it allows a process to overwrite it’s own credentials struct, setting ID to root.
Make it a 9.8
When a company typos their latest CVE score, reporting it a full point worse than it is, what’s a researcher to do? In this case,
put the time in to find a way to make the severity rating worth it
. It’s a Remote Code Execution in the Progress Report server. The initial vulnerability report listed it as a post-authentication RCE.
The report server takes reports, and turns it into pretty graphs and charts. Those reports are in the form of a serialized stream. And yes, the flaw is a deserialization attack, a ridiculously deep chain that finally ends in loading an arbitrary .NET type, which leads easily to a process start command.
The vulnerability requires some sort of authenticated user to trigger. We’re looking for pre-auth exploitation here. How about a first-run endpoint that doesn’t have any authentication code applied, and doesn’t go away after the server is configured. It’s not the first software to fall to this trap, and won’t be the last.
Bits and Bytes
The Chrome Root Store is
kicking out a trusted Certificate Authority
. It doesn’t happen often, but one of the tools to keep CAs behaving is the threat of removing them the browser certificate store. “e-commerce monitoring GmbH” has been trusted for right around three years, and was
fraught with problems
from the very beginning.
Tavis has
the rest of the Libarchive story
. Why does Libarchive implement the RarVM, and why did Rar use a bytecode VM? Historical reasons.
The libarchive e8 vulnerability is actually really cool, but the ZDI advisory doesn't explain why it's so wild lol. For some reason, I know about RAR filters, so let me provide the background. 🧵 1/n
— Tavis Ormandy (@taviso)
June 6, 2024
The Internet Archive is
under attack by a Distributed Denial of Service attack
(DDoS). It’s unclear exactly where the attack is coming from, but it is making the archive and the Wayback machine a bit spotty to access these days. And as the post says, it’s not just cyber-bullies trying to mess with our favorite library.
Extra Credit:
Crypto is hard
. This one takes a bit of time to work through and understand, but the gist is that one of NIST’s cryptography recommendations had a bit of an oversight in it. The scenario is that Alice and Bob both provide key material to produce an agreed upon shared key. When one party gets to pick some of the initialization data, as well as one of the keys used for this multi-key system, careful selection can lead to way too much control over the final produced key. The example given is an encrypted message app, that has a sneaky backdoor. This was discovered, never actually implemented that anyone knows of, and has been fixed in the NIST recommendation. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765627",
"author": "gudenau",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T17:44:55",
"content": "Twitter isn’t a source anymore, it’s impossible to view that thread.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765640",
"author": "Gravis",
... | 1,760,371,891.523308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/interfacing-a-cheap-hdmi-switch-with-home-assistant/ | Interfacing A Cheap HDMI Switch With Home Assistant | Arya Voronova | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"hdmi",
"hdmi switcher",
"homeassistant",
"infrared receiver"
] | You know the feeling of having just created a perfect setup for your hacker lab? Sometimes, there’s just this missing piece in the puzzle that requires you to do a small hack, and those are the most tempting. [maxime borges] has such a perfect setup that involves a HDMI 4:2 switch, and he brings us a write-up on
integrating that HDMI switch into Home Assistant
through emulating an infrared receiver’s signals.
The HDMI switch is equipped with an infrared sensor as the only means of controlling it, so naturally, that was the path chosen for interfacing the ESP32 put inside the switch. Fortunately, Home Assistant provides the means to both receive and output IR signals, so after capturing all the codes produced by the IR remote, parsing their meaning, then turning them into a Home Assistant configuration, [maxime] got HDMI input switching to happen from the comfort of his phone.
We get the Home Assistant config snippets right there in the blog post — if you’ve been looking for a HDMI switch for your hacker lair, now you have one model to look out for in particular. Of course, you could roll your own HDMI switch, and if you’re looking for references, we’ve covered
a good few hacks
doing that
as part of building a KVM. | 40 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765511",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T11:15:33",
"content": "“got HDMI input switching to happen from the comfort of his phone.”Using a remote is surely better and faster than turning on the phone, opening an app and so on.That is not home automation.On the other ... | 1,760,371,891.707585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/07/a3-audio-the-open-source-3d-audio-control-system/ | A3 Audio: The Open Source 3D Audio Control System | Dave Rowntree | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"3d audio",
"open source control",
"osc",
"raspberry pi",
"spatial",
"Teensy"
] | Sometimes, startups fail due to technical problems or a lack of interest from potential investors and fail to gain development traction. This latter case appears to be the issue befalling
A
3
Audio
. So, the developers have done the next best thing, made the project open source, and are actively looking for more people to pitch in. So what is it? The project is centered around the idea of spatial audio or 3D audio. The system allows ‘audio motion’ to be captured, mixed and replayed, all the while synchronized to the music. At least that’s as much as we can figure out from the documentation!
The system is made up of three main pieces of hardware. The first part is the core (or server), which is essentially a Linux PC running an OSC (
Open Sound Control
) server. The second part is a ‘motion sampler’, which inputs motion into the server. Lastly, there is a Mixer, which communicates using the OSC protocol (over Ethernet) to allow pre-mixing of spatial samples and deployment of samples onto the audio outputs. In addition to its core duties, the ‘core’ also manages effects and speaker handling.
The
motion module
is based around a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Teensy microcontroller, with a 7-inch touchscreen display for user input and oodles of NeoPixels for blinky feedback on the button matrix. The
mixer module
seems simpler, using just a Teensy for interfacing the UI components.
We don’t see many 3D audio projects, but this neat implementation of a
beam-forming microphone phased array
sure looks interesting. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765461",
"author": "honestopinion",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T08:08:43",
"content": "I honestly don’t understand still what this does. Specially, how much of 3D spatial audio there is into it, and why the setup helps or is any different to others.Website and Github are even less mea... | 1,760,371,891.572495 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/hands-on-inkplate-6-motion/ | Hands On: Inkplate 6 MOTION | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Interest",
"Microcontrollers",
"Slider"
] | [
"development kit",
"e-paper",
"ESP32",
"hands on",
"Inkplate",
"stm32"
] | Over the last several years, DIY projects utilizing e-paper displays have become more common. While saying the technology is now
c
heap
might be overstating the situation a bit, the prices on at least small e-paper panels have certainly become far more reasonable for the hobbyist. Pair one of them with a modern microcontroller such as the RP2040 or ESP32, sprinkle in a few open source libraries, and you’re well on the way to creating an energy-efficient smart display for your home or office.
But therein lies the problem. There’s still a decent amount of leg work involved in getting the hardware wired up and talking to each other. Putting the e-paper display and MCU together is often only half the battle — depending on your plans, you’ll probably want to add a few sensors to the mix, or perhaps some RGB status LEDs. An onboard battery charger and real-time clock would be nice as well. Pretty soon, your homebrew e-paper gadget is starting to look remarkably like the bottom of your junk bin.
For those after a more integrated solution, the folks at Soldered Electronics have offered up a line of premium open source hardware development boards that combine various styles of e-paper panels (touch, color, lighted, etc) with a microcontroller, an array of sensors, and pretty much every other feature they could think of. To top it off, they put in the effort to produce fantastic documentation, easy to use libraries, and free support software such as an online GUI builder and image converter.
We’ve reviewed a number of previous Inkplate boards, and always came away very impressed by the attention to detail from Soldered Electronics. When they asked if we’d be interested in taking a look at a
prototype for their new 6 MOTION board
, we were eager to see what this new variant brings to the table. Since both the software and hardware are still pre-production, we won’t call this a review, but it should give you a good idea of what to expect when the final units start shipping out in October.
Faster and Stronger
As mentioned previously, the Inkplate boards have generally been differentiated by the type of e-paper display they’ve featured. In the case of the new MOTION, the theme this time around is speed — Soldered says this new display is capable of showing 11 frames per second, no small feat for a technology that’s notoriously slow to refresh. You still won’t be watching movies at 11 FPS of course, but it’s more than enough to display animations and dynamic information thanks to its partial refresh capability that only updates the areas of the display where the image has actually changed.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/inkplate6m_demo.mp4
But it’s not just the e-paper display that’s been swapped out for a faster model. For the 6 MOTION, Soldered traded in the ESP32 used on all previous Inkplates for the STM32H743, an ARM Cortex-M7 chip capable of running at 480 MHz. Well, at least partially. You’ll still find an ESP32 hanging out on the back of the 6 MOTION, but it’s there as a co-processor to handle WiFi and Bluetooth communications. The STM32 chip features 1 MB of internal SRAM and has been outfitted with a whopping 32 MB of external DRAM, which should come in handy when you’re throwing 4-bit grayscale images at the 1024 x 758 display.
The Inkplate 6 MOTION also features an impressive suite of sensors, including a front-mounted APDS-9960 which can detect motion, proximity, and color. On the backside you’ll find the SHTC3 for detecting temperature and humidity, as well as a LSM6DSO32 accelerometer and gyroscope. One of the most impressive demos included in the 6 MOTION’s Arduino library pulls data from the gyro and uses it to rotate a wireframe 3D cube as you move the device around. Should you wish to connect other sensors or devices to the board, you’ve got breakouts for the standard expansion options such as I²C and SPI, as well as Ethernet, USB OTG, I²S, SDMMC, and UART.
Although no battery is included with the 6 MOTION, there’s a connector for one on the back of the board, and the device includes a MCP73831 charge controller and the appropriate status LEDs. Primary power is supplied through the board’s USB-C connector, and there’s also a set of beefy solder pads along the bottom edge where you could wire up an external power source.
For user input you have three physical buttons along the side, and a rather ingenious rotary encoder — but to explain how that works we need to switch gears and look at the 3D printed enclosure Soldered has created for the Inkplate 6 MOTION.
Wrapped Up Tight
Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t go into so much detail about a 3D printed case, but I’ve got to give Soldered credit for the little touches they put into this design. Living hinges are used for both the power button and the three user buttons on the side, there’s a holder built into the back for a pouch battery, and there’s even a little purple “programming tool” that tucks into a dedicated pocket — you’ll use that to poke the programming button when the Inkplate is inside the enclosure.
But the real star is the transparent wheel on the right hand side. The embedded magnet in the center lines up perfectly with a AS5600 magnetic angle encoder on the Inkplate, with an RGB LED just off to the side. Reading the value from the AS5600 as the wheel rotates gives you a value between 0 and 4048, and the library offers macros to convert that to radians and degrees. Combined with the RGB LED, this arrangement provides an input device with visual feedback at very little cost.
It’s an awesome idea, and now I’m looking for an excuse to include it in my own hardware designs.
The 3D printed case is being offered as an add-on for the Inkplate 6 MOTION at purchase time, but both the STLs and Fusion 360 files for it will be made available with the rest of the hardware design files for those that would rather print it themselves.
An Exciting Start
As I said in the beginning of this article, the unit I have here is the prototype — while the hardware seems pretty close to final, the software side of things is obviously still in the early stages. Some of the libraries simply weren’t ready in time, so I wasn’t able to test things like WiFi or Bluetooth. Similarly, I wasn’t able to try out the MicroPython build for the 6 MOTION. That said, I have absolutely no doubt that the team at Soldered Electronics will have everything where it needs to be by the time customers get their hands on the final product.
There’s no denying that the $169 USD price tag of the Inkplate 6 MOTION will give some users pause. If you’re looking for a budget option, this absolutely isn’t it. But what you get for the price is considerable. You’re not just paying for the hardware, you’re also getting the software, documentation, schematics, and PCB design files. If those things are important to you, I’d say it’s more than worth the premium price.
So far, it looks like plenty of people feel the same way. As of this writing, the Inkplate 6 MOTION is about to hit 250% of its funding goal on Crowd Supply, with more than 30 days left in the campaign. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765295",
"author": "Grawp",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T18:03:32",
"content": "Is anybody here like me – interested in eink because it so nice to read from (compared to even those crap memory in pixel reflective lcds) and not because of low power capabilities?I dream of a time when ei... | 1,760,371,891.627472 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/tarzan-lost-since-1983-swings-back-onto-the-atari-2600/ | Tarzan, Lost Since 1983, Swings Back Onto The Atari 2600 | Jenny List | [
"Games"
] | [
"atari 2600",
"Coleco",
"tarzan"
] | Computer gaming history is littered with tales of fabled lost hardware and software. Some of them are very famous such as the
E.T.
cartridges buried in a desert landfill or the few prototype SNES/CD-ROM hybrid that Nintendo was developing with Sony before the introduction of the PlayStation, but others have faded somewhat into obscurity. Among these is
Tarzan
for the Atari 2600, a game which was never released due to the 1983 console crash, and which the [Video Game History Foundation]
have a report on its rediscovery and preservation.
The game was to be published by Coleco for their ColecoVision console as well as the 2600. The ColecoVision version was released and was apparently even fairly well reviewed, but the Atari port was canceled and its very existence eventually faded into obscurity.
Then a manual surfaced in 2011, and in 2022, a pair of prototype cartridges were sold off by a former Coleco employee. The write-up goes into great detail on the video game production and provides a fascinating snapshot of the turbulence in the industry at the time. But what really caught our eye were the two cartridges themselves. We have an obvious prototype board and a more professional looking example, both with a ROM and set of TTL chips used for bank switching. Interestingly the chips are different on each board, as well as the variety of manufacturers and date codes pointing to a hand-assembled board.
While the game seems quaint to modern eyes, it’s definitely pushing the boundaries of the console as much as any modern AAA game pushes that console under your TV today. If you’re thirsty for more tales of 1980s consumer computing, look no further than
our colleague [Bil Herd]’s account of his days at Commodore
. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765232",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T13:52:33",
"content": "Very interesting!I was reading through the article of gaminghistory and while reading, I’ve noticed that I was learning more about rational, emotionless business strategies in the US of the 80s than about ... | 1,760,371,891.764153 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/is-that-a-triboelectric-generator-in-your-shoe/ | Is That A Triboelectric Generator In Your Shoe? | Elliot Williams | [
"Parts",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"generator",
"triboelectric"
] | The triboelectric effect is familiar to anyone who has rubbed wool on a PVC pipe, or a balloon on a childs’ hair and then stuck it on the wall. Rubbing transfers some electrons from one material to the other, and they become oppositely charged. We usually think of this as “static” electricity because we don’t connect the two sides up with electrodes and wires. But what if you did? You’d have a triboelectric generator.
In this video
, [Cayrex] demonstrates just how easy making a triboelectric generator can be. He takes pieces of aluminum tape, sticks them to paper, and covers them in either Kapton or what looks like normal polypropylene packing tape. And that’s it. You just have to push the two sheets together and apart, transferring a few electrons with each cycle, and you’ve got a tiny generator.
As [Cayrex] demonstrates, you can get spikes in the 4 V – 6 V range with two credit-card sized electrodes and fairly vigorous poking. But bear in mind that current is in the microamps. Given that, we were suprised to see that he was actually able to blink an LED, even if super faintly. We’re not sure if this is a testament to the generator or the incredible efficiency of the LED, but we’re nonetheless impressed.
Since around 2012, research into
triboelectric nanogenerators
has heated up, as our devices use less and less power and the structures to harvest these tiny amounts of power get more and more sophisticated.
One of the coolest such electron harvesters is 3D printable
, but in terms of simplicity, it’s absolutely hard to beat some pieces of metal and plastic tape shoved into your shoe. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765159",
"author": "Ethan Waldo",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T09:10:26",
"content": "And don’t forget 3d printing a TENGhttps://hackaday.com/2023/12/31/3d-printing-your-own-triboelectric-generators/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,891.959811 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/usb-dongle-brings-python-controlled-gpio-to-the-desktop/ | USB Dongle Brings Python-Controlled GPIO To The Desktop | Dan Maloney | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arduino nano",
"dongle",
"gpio",
"python",
"usb"
] | Microcontroller dev boards are wonderfully useful items, in testament to which most of us maintain an ample collection of the things. But dragging one out to do a simple job can be a pain, what with making sure you have the whole toolchain set up to support the device, not to mention the inevitable need to solder or desolder header pins. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple plug-and-play way to add a few bits of GPIO to your desktop or laptop machine?
[Nick Bild] thinks so, and came up with
the USBgpio
. The hardware in the dongle is pretty much what you’d expect — an Arduino Nano 33 IoT. Yes, you could just bust out a Nano and do this yourself, but [Nick] has done all the heavy lifting already. Eleven of the Nano’s IO pins plus 3.3V and ground are broken out to header pins that stick out of the 3D-printed enclosure, and the dongle is powered over the USB cable. [Nick] also built a Python library for the USBgpio, making it easy to whip up a quick program. You just import the library, define the serial port and baud rate, and the library takes care of the rest. The video below shows a quick blinkenlight test app.
Earth-shattering stuff? Perhaps not; [Nick] admits as much by noting the performance doesn’t really dazzle. But that’s hardly the point of the project, and if you need a couple of pins of IO on the desktop for a quick tactical project or some early-stage prototyping, USBgpio could be your friend. | 25 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765131",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T08:12:52",
"content": "“Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple plug-and-play way to add a few bits of GPIO to your desktop or laptop machine?”Yep… there was, with the emphasis on “was” it was called the parallel port. Quick, eas... | 1,760,371,891.893112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/the-pi-pico-an-sdr-receiver-front-end/ | The Pi Pico, An SDR Receiver Front End | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"1-bit",
"pi pico",
"sdr"
] | Making a software defined radio (SDR) receiver is a relatively straightforward process, given the right radio front end electronics and analogue-to-digital converters. Two separate data streams are generated using clocks at a 90 degree phase shift, and these are passed to the software signal processing for demodulation. But what happens if you lack a pair of radio front ends and a suitable clock generator? Along comes [Mordae] with
an SDR using only the hardware on a Raspberry Pi Pico
. The result is a fascinating piece of lateral thinking, extracting something from the hardware that it was never designed to do.
The onboard RP2040 ADC is of course far too slow for the task, so instead an input is used, with a negative feedback arrangement from another GPIO to form a crude 1-bit ADC. A PIO peripheral is then used to perform the quadrature mixing, resulting in the requisite pair of data streams. At this point these are sent over USB to GNU Radio for demodulating, mainly for convenience rather than necessarily because the microcontroller lacks the power.
The result is a working SDR front end, demonstrated pulling in an FM broadcast station. The Pico has to be overclocked to reach that frequency and it’s more than a little noisy, but we’re extremely impressed with how much has been done with so little. Oddly it isn’t the first Pico SDR we’ve seen, but the previous one was
a much more conventional
and lower-frequency affair for the European Long Wave band. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765119",
"author": "Stappers",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T06:16:14",
"content": "Pretty cool what you can do that with a $1 general purpose microprocessor, two passive components and an antenna!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,371,891.827475 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/floss-weekly-episode-786-what-easy-install-script/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 786: What Easy Install Script? | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Brodie",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"linux",
"Wayland"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
and
Rob Campbell
chat with
Brodie Robertson
about Linux, Wayland, YouTube, Microsoft’s Windows Recall and more. Is Linux ready for new users? Is Recall going to kick off a migration? All this and more!
Main Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@BrodieRobertson
Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/@TechOverTea
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!
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 | [] | 1,760,371,892.14042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/old-knobs-with-a-cast-of-thousands/ | Old Knobs With A Cast Of Thousands | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"casting",
"knobs",
"resin casting"
] | You have an old radio — in the case of [The Radio Mechanic], a Stromberg Carlson — and it needs new knobs. What do you do? You can’t very well pop down to the local store and find any knobs anymore. Even if you are lucky enough to be around an electronics store, they aren’t going to have knobs to do justice to an antique radio. You could 3D print them, of course, but there are a number of issues with transferring the old knob to a CAD file for printing. So [The Radio Mechanic] decided to
cast them instead
.
He printed some fixtures to help with the molding using two-part molding silicone. He mounted the knob on a shaft in a jig, filled the jig with silicone, and lowered the knob into the mix. The next day, he had a good-looking mold.
The next step, of course, is to cast with resin. Admittedly 3D printing would have been faster, but would not have as nice a surface finish. The epoxy resin is clear, but he was hopeful that some caramel pigment would match the original knob color. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The resulting knob looked translucent, like a root beer barrel candy, rather than the brown sugar color of the original knob.
The knob needed a spring insert to hold the shaft, so he repurposed some from a different kind of radio. Overall, this is the kind of thing we always think we are going to do when we need something and then we rarely follow through. Then again, we rarely have the patience to wait as long as these two knobs took to make.
Of course, a
casting guerrilla
doesn’t have to make just knobs. You can even add metal powders to do
cold metal casting
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765058",
"author": "Tricon",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T22:24:38",
"content": "Robert Tolone has fantastic guides to resin casting on YouTube.I was advised to use printer toner by a supplier to enhance the depth of colour. I needed form not aesthetic so did not experiment.",
"pa... | 1,760,371,892.188924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/linamp-the-irl-winamp/ | Linamp, The IRL Winamp | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"mp3",
"player",
"Qt6",
"raspberry pi",
"spectrum analyzer",
"winamp"
] | Anyone who first experienced music on computers using Winamp probably shares a memory of seeing that classic UI for the first time. Everything about it was a step ahead of the clunky, chunky interfaces we were used to, and even though it was supposed to be unobtrusive, it was hard to tear your eyes off that silky-smooth spectrum analyzer bouncing out your favorite MP3s.
Recapturing a little of the Winamp magic is the goal of
Linamp
, an physical version of the classic media player. It reproduces the Winamp UI on a touchscreen LCD with a wide aspect ratio that almost perfectly matches the original layout. Behind the display is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 32 GB SD card, with all the important connections brought out to a board on the back of the case. The case itself is a treat, as it borrows design elements from another bit of retro gear, the mini-rack audio systems that graced many a bookshelf in the 1980s — and powered many high school parties too, if memory serves.
To recreate the case, [Rodmg] designed a sheet metal case and had it custom-made from anodized aluminum by PCBWay. He also printed a bezel for the display that looks very similar to the Winamp window border, complete with control icons. Where the build really shines, though, is with the work [Rodmg] put into the software. He matched the original Winamp UI very closely, both in terms of layout and performance. The pains he went to to get the spectrum analyzer working, including a deep dive into FFT, are impressive.
The results speak for themselves on this one, and hats off to [Rodmg] for the effort and the ride on the nostalgia train. We don’t know if
the recent announcement of Winamp’s impending open-sourcing
will have much impact on this project, but it might result in a flood of new Winamp builds. | 60 | 38 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765418",
"author": "Derek Tombrello",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T05:21:04",
"content": "That is freaking amazing! I must have!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6765419",
"author": "scolphoy",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T05:39... | 1,760,371,894.092855 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/using-kick-assembler-and-vs-code-to-write-c64-assembler/ | Using Kick Assembler And VS Code To Write C64 Assembler | Dave Rowntree | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"asm",
"c64",
"emulator",
"kick assembler",
"vice",
"visual studio code"
] | YouTuber [My Developer Thoughts], a self-confessed middle-aged Software Developer, clearly has a real soft spot for the 6502-based 8-bit era machines such as the Commodore 64 and the VIC-20, for which he has created several video tutorials while travelling through retro-computing. This latest instalment concerns bringing up the toolchain for using the
Kick Assembler with VS Code
to target the C64, initially via the VICE emulator.
The video offers a comprehensive tutorial on setting up the toolchain on Windows from scratch with minimal knowledge. While some may consider this level of guidance unnecessary, it is extremely helpful for those who wish to get started with a few examples quickly and don’t have the time to go through multiple manuals and Wikis. In that regard, the video does an excellent job.
VS Code is a great tool with a large user base, so it’s not surprising that there’s a plugin for using the Kick Assembler directly from the IDE. You can also easily launch the application onto the emulator with just a push of a button, allowing you to focus on learning and working on your application. Once it runs under emulation, there’s a learning curve for running it on native hardware, but there are plenty of tutorials available for that. While you could code directly on the C64 itself, it’s much more pleasant to use modern tools, revision control, and all the conveniences and not have to endure the challenges.
Once you’ve mastered assembly, it may be time to move on to C or even C++. The
Oscar64 compiler
is a good choice for that. Next, you may want to show off your new skills on the retro demo scene. Here’s a
neat C64 demo with a twist
. There is no C64.
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765505",
"author": "DST",
"timestamp": "2024-06-07T11:06:48",
"content": "I’m (sporadically) learning to program the C64, and wrote a little about my experiences, from the perspective of a life-long geek who really cut his teeth on PHP before going on to C and am making a living do... | 1,760,371,894.003197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/automating-3d-printer-support-hardware/ | Automating 3D Printer Support Hardware | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printer",
"automation",
"control",
"Monitoring",
"Octoprint",
"power supply",
"raspberry pi",
"relay",
"scalability"
] | While 3D printers have evolved over the past two decades from novelties to powerful prototyping tools, the amount of support systems have advanced tremendously as well. From rudimentary software that required extensive manual input and offered limited design capabilities, there’s now user-friendly interfaces with more features than you could shake a stick at. Hardware support has become refined as well with plenty of options including lighting, ventilation, filament recycling, and tool changers. It’s possible to automate some of these subsystems as well
like [Caelestis Workshop] has done with this relay control box
.
This build specifically focuses on automating or remotely controlling the power, enclosure lighting, and the ventilation system of [Caelestis Workshop]’s 3D printer but was specifically designed to be scalable and support adding other features quickly. A large power supply is housed inside of a 3D printed enclosure along with a Raspberry Pi. The Pi controls four relays which are used to control these various pieces hardware along with the 3D printer. That’s not the only thing the Pi is responsible for, though. It’s also configured to run Octoprint, a piece of open-source software that adds web interfaces for 3D printers and allows their operation to be monitored and controlled remotely too.
With this setup properly configured, [Caelestis Workshop] can access their printer from essentially any PC, monitor their prints, and ensure that ventilation is running. Streamlining the print process is key to reducing the frustration of any 3D printer setup, and this build will go a long way to achieving a more stress-free environment. In case you missed it,
we recently hosed a FLOSS Weekly episode talking about Octoprint itself
which is worth a listen especially if you haven’t tried this piece of software out yet. | 22 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765382",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T23:13:25",
"content": "Don’t know why people even bother upgrading anymore since Bambu labs crushes everything else out there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765384",
... | 1,760,371,893.907371 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/2024-business-card-challenge-tiny-midi-keyboard/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: Tiny MIDI Keyboard | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"arduino",
"finale",
"instrument",
"keyboard",
"midi",
"music",
"SAMD21",
"seeed studio"
] | The progress for electronics over the past seven decades or so has always trended towards smaller or more dense components. Moore’s Law is the famous example of this, but even when we’re not talking about transistors specifically, technology tends to get either more power efficient or smaller.
This MIDI keyboard, for example, is small enough that it will fit in the space of a standard business card
which would have been an impossibility with the technology available when MIDI first became standardized, and as such is the latest entry in our Business Card Challenge.
[Alana] originally built this tiny musical instrument to always have a keyboard available on the go, and the amount of features packed into this tiny board definitely fits that design goal. It has 18 keys with additional buttons to change the octave and volume, and has additional support for sustain and modulation as well. The buttons and diodes are multiplexed in order to fit the IO for the microcontroller, a Seeed Studio Xiao SAMD21, and it also meets the USB-C standards so it will work with essentially any modern computer available including most smartphones and tablets so [Alana] can easily interface it with Finale, a popular music notation software.
Additionally, the
project’s GitHub page
has much more detail including all of the Arduino code needed to build a MIDI controller like this one. This particular project has perhaps the best size-to-usefulness ratio we’ve seen for compact MIDI controllers thanks to the USB-C and extremely small components used on the PCB, although
the Starshine controller
or these
high-resolution controllers
are also worth investigating if you’re in the market for compact MIDI devices like this one. | 17 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765359",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T21:32:40",
"content": "I’m way behind the curve on this, I thought MIDI required a large DIN style connector.Neat little keyboard though!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,894.231504 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/foosbar-the-worlds-best-foosball-robot-from-scratch/ | Foosbar: The World’s Best* Foosball Robot From Scratch | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Games",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"foosball",
"linear actuators",
"Self-Playing"
] | [Xander Naumenko] is
back with another bonkers project
. This is the same creator that
built a working 32-bit computer inside a
Terraria
world
. This time it’s a bit more physical of a creation: a self-playing foosball table.
We’re not sure of the impetus for this idea, but we’re delighted to see the engineering it took to make it work. It
sounds
so simple. It’s just servos mounted on linear actuators, right? Oh, and some computer vision to determine where the ball actually is on the table. And the software to actually control the motors, pass the ball around, and play offense and defense. So maybe not so simple. All the code and some other resources are available under the MIT license.
As to while the claim of “best” foosball robot has an asterisk? That’s because, although we’ve
seen a few potential competitors over the years
, there isn’t yet a world foosball competition. We’re hoping that changes, as a tournament of robots playing foosball sounds like a sports event we’d show up for! | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765332",
"author": "Feinfinger (M-x butterfly)",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T19:35:00",
"content": "> a self-playing foosball tableI hoped for a completely human free self playing one for freeing humans to do more important things meanwhile…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,894.33797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/retrotechtacular-tvo/ | Retrotechtacular: TVO | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"farming",
"fuel",
"tractors",
"TVO"
] | Hardware hackers come from a variety of backgrounds, but among us there remains a significant number whose taste for making things was forged through growing up in a farm environment. If that’s you then like me it’s probable that you’ll melt a little at the sight of an older tractor, and remember pretending to drive one like it at pre-school age, and then proudly driving it for real a few years later before you were smart enough to realise you’d been given the tedious job of repeatedly traversing a field at a slow speed in the blazing sun. For me those machines were Ford Majors and 5000s, Nuffields, the ubiquitous red Fergusons, and usually relegated to yard duty by the 1970s, the small grey Ferguson TE20s that are in many ways the ancestor of all modern tractors.
The Black Art Of Mixing Your Own Fuel
There was something odd about some of those grey Fergies in the 1970s, they didn’t run on diesel like their newer bretheren, nor did they run on petrol or gasoline like the family Austin. Instead they ran on an unexpected mixture of petrol and heating oil, which as far as a youthful me could figure out, was something of a black art to get right. I’d had my first encounter with Tractor Vapour Oil, or TVO, a curious interlude in the history of agricultural engineering. It brings together an obscure product of the petrochemical industry, a moment when diesel engine technology hadn’t quite caught up with the on-farm requirement, and a governmental lust for a lower-tax tractor fuel that couldn’t be illicitly used in a car.
TVO is a fuel with a low octane rating, where the octane rating is the resistance to ignition through compression alone. In chemical terms octane rating a product of how many volatile aromatic hydrocarbons are in the fuel, and to illustrate it your petrol/gasoline has an octane rating in the high 90s, diesel fuel has one close to zero, and TVO has a figure in the 50s. In practice this was achieved at the refinery by taking paraffin, or kerosene for Americans, a heavier fraction than petrol/gasoline, and adding some of those aromatic hydrocarbons to it. The result was a fuel on which a standard car engine wouldn’t run, but which would run on a specially low-compression engine with a normal spark ignition. This made it the perfect tax exempt fuel for farmers because it could only be used in tractors equipped with these engines, and thus in the years after WW2 a significant proportion of those Fergies and other tractors were equipped to run on it.
When Diesels Were Still Slow-Revving
One might ask why post war tractors were not simply equipped with diesel engines, and the answer there comes with the state of diesel engine development in the mid-century. It’s easy to make a large diesel engine which can run at constant slow revs, but at the time it was not so easy to make one which was small, powerful, and responsive at different speeds. Thus there were tractors with huge single-cylinder diesels running their entire length which used to rock backwards and forwards with the revolution of their engines, but farmers would have to wait for widespread adoption of the swirl chamber on diesel engines through the 1950s before they’d get their responsive and higher-revving diesel tractors.
“
Ferguson TE20 2006
” by [Malcolmxl5]
It was in this window from the late 1940s into the 1950s then, that TVO was the farm fuel of the moment, until a new breed of diesel machines from the mid-50s onward made it less attractive. I can’t find a reference to when the last TVO tractor rolled off the production line, but the fuel was withdrawn from the UK market in 1974.
That was about the time a pre-school me was gazing up at my dad’s diesel Fordson Major, and our neighbour was mixing up fake TVO for his yard tractor. As far as I am aware the UK government still frowns upon illicit fuel mixing so there are official licenses to make your own TVO, and I understand the owners association for the grey Fergie has one so those over-restored examples at the village fete aren’t breaking the law.
I may no longer have a direct connection with farming, but I still from time to time get to sit in the cab of a modern tractor whose computer controlled turbo diesel engine and near-perfect transmission are up to any task. These machines are as far as it goes, perfected. But there’s still part of me that’s more at home with a clutch and two gear levers, and the sulphurous tang of 1970s tractor exhaust mixed with the smell of freshly turned earth. I must stay away from
Farmer’s Weekly
, or I could find myself mixing TVO for myself. | 19 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765302",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T18:14:45",
"content": "my tractor is a fordson major supper majorwhich was aquired in pieces,and it has a 3 point hitchdrawbar hitch,rear standard ptoside mounted flat belt ptoplanetary gear underdrive transmissionand half tra... | 1,760,371,893.969052 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/06/whats-the-difference-between-tang-9k-and-20k-it-isnt-11/ | What’s The Difference Between Tang 9K And 20K (It Isn’t 11…) | Al Williams | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"fpga",
"tang nano",
"verilog"
] | [Grug Huhler] has been working with the Tang Nano 9K FPGA board. They are inexpensive, and he noticed there is a 20K version, so he picked one up. Of course, you’d expect the 20K board has a different FPGA with more gates than the 9K, but there are also a number of differences in the host board. [Grug] was kind enough to
document the differences
in the video below.
In addition to the differences, there’s a good demo of the boards hosting a
system-on-chip design
. The little DIP package is handy for breadboarding. All of the 20K pins are 3.3 V, according to the documentation. The 9K does have some 1.8 V pins. There are more external devices on the 20K board but that eats up more uncommitted pins. Depending on your design, that may or may not be a problem.
We keep meaning to pick some of these up to play with. The Verilog is easy enough, and the tools look adequate. If you need a refresher on Verilog, we have
a boot camp
for you that would probably port easily enough to the Tang system. We’ve been following [Grug’s] work on these chips lately, and you should, too. | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765267",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-06-06T16:17:09",
"content": "Just received my 4k, looking forward to trying it out",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6765340",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,371,894.443987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/ham-busts-the-myth-of-ground/ | Ham Busts The Myth Of Ground | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"Ground",
"grounding"
] | Everyone who deals with electronics knows that grounding is important. Your house has a copper rod in the ground. But [Kristen K6WX] has news: the idea of ground is
kind of a myth
. She explained at a talk at the recent ARRL National Convention, and if you didn’t make it, you can watch it in the video below.
The problem is analogous to finding something that is standing still. You really can only talk about something standing still relative to something else. Sure, you might be standing still outside a building, but seen from the moon, you and the building are spinning around at about one revolution per day. If you were sitting on the sun and not burning up, you’d see lots of motion of everything, and, of course, the sun itself is moving in the right frame of reference.
So what’s ground? Just a common reference between two things. [Kristen] gets into RF grounds, DC grounds, and phasors. If you’ve ever wanted to ground your antenna or deal with RF interference, you’ll find a lot of information in this 45-minute video.
The name ground is, perhaps, unfortunate. You do want earth grounding for lightning protection, but what most of us think of as ground is just a convention. Need a -9V battery? Just reverse your meter leads, and there you go.
Getting a good common reference
can be maddening
. We’ve looked at way too many
ground loops
before. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764687",
"author": "bstriggo",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T03:02:49",
"content": "My boss at the 2-way radio shop used to say you’re better off not grounding anything. Since that’s not going to work, ground everything (within the limits of ground loop avoidance).",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,371,893.847086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/vfd-tube-calculator-shows-off-wide-array-of-skills/ | VFD Tube Calculator Shows Off Wide Array Of Skills | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"IV-12",
"veneer",
"vfd",
"woodworking"
] | With all the tools and services available to us these days, it’s hard to narrow down a set of skills that the modern hacker or maker should have. Sure, soldering is a pretty safe bet, and most projects now require at least a little bit of code. But the ability to design 3D printable parts has also become increasingly important, and you could argue that knowledge of PCB design and production is getting up there as well. With home laser cutters on the rise, a little 2D CAD wouldn’t hurt either. So on, and so on.
If you ever wanted an example of the multitude of skills that can go into a modern hardware project, take a look at this gorgeous
Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) tube calculator built by [oskar2517]
. As fantastic as the final product is, we were particularly impressed with everything it took to get this one over the finish line.
A .7 mm walnut veneer covers the pieced together plywood frame.
It’s got it all: 3D printed parts, a laser cut wooden frame, a custom PCB, and even a bit of old school woodworking. To top it all off, the whole thing has been meticulously documented.
But what’s perhaps most impressive here is that [oskar2517] was approaching most of these techniques for the first time. They had never before worked with IV-12 tubes, designed an enclosure in 3D, had parts laser cut, applied wood veneer, or designed a custom PCB. They did have solid experience writing code in C at least, which did make developing the Arduino firmware a bit easier.
Although they might
look outwardly similar
, VFD tubes like the IV-12 are
easier to work with
than Nixie tubes thanks to their lower operating voltage. That said, a look through our archives shows that
projects using Nixies
outnumber VFD tubes by nearly four to one, so there’s no shortage of folks willing to
take on the extra effort
for that sweet warm glow. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764811",
"author": "Raj",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T11:20:16",
"content": "I have a functioning VFD display calculator from about 1973! Brand Casio.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6764822",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly... | 1,760,371,894.394459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/the-dyke-delta-a-diy-flying-wing-fits-four/ | The Dyke Delta: A DIY Flying Wing Fits Four | Elliot Williams | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"aerodynamics",
"airplane",
"diy",
"experimental aircraft"
] | The world of experimental self-built aircraft is full of oddities, but perhaps the most eye-catching of all is the
JD-2 “Dyke Delta”
designed and built by [John Dyke] in the 1960s. Built to copy some of the 1950’s era innovations in delta-style jet aircraft, the plane is essentially a
flying wing that seats four
.
And it’s not just all good looks: people who have flown them say they’re very gentle, they get exceptional gas mileage, and the light wing-loading means that they can land at a mellow 55 miles per hour (88 kph). And did we mention the wings fold up so you can store it in your garage?
Want to build your own? [John]
still sells the plans
. But don’t jump into this without testing the water first — the frame is entirely hand-welded and he estimates it takes between 4,000 and 5,000 hours to build. It’s a labor of love. Still, the design is time-tested, and over 50 of the planes have been built from the blueprints. Just be sure to
adhere to the specs carefully
!
It’s really fun to see how far people can push aerodynamics, and
how innovative the experimental airplane scene
really is. The JD-2 was (and probably still is!) certainly ahead of its time, and if we all
end up in flying wings in the future
, maybe this plane won’t look so oddball after all. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764603",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T20:49:36",
"content": "If you fancy saving some hours (and likely money):https://sky4buy.com/144080149926/020298(Not sure if it’s still for sale.)Of course, buyer is responsible for making sure they are not inheriting the mistakes... | 1,760,371,894.300336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/tunneling-tcp-by-file-server/ | Tunneling TCP By File Server | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Network Hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"firewall",
"tcp/ip"
] | You want to pass TCP traffic from one computer to another, but there’s a doggone firewall in the way. Can they both see a shared file? Turns out,
that’s all you need
. Well, that and some software from [fiddyschmitt].
If you think about it, it makes sense. Unix treats most things as a file, so it is pretty easy to listen on a local TCP port and dump the data into a shared file. The other side reads the file and dumps the same data to the desired TCP port on its side. Another file handles data in the other direction. Of course, the details are a bit more than that, but that’s the basic idea.
Performance isn’t going to be wonderful, and the files keep growing until the program detects that they are bigger than 10 megabytes. When that happens, the program purges the file.
The code is written in C# and there are binaries for Windows and Linux on the release page. The examples show using shared files via Windows share and RDP, but we imagine any sort of filesystem that both computers can see would work. Having your traffic stuffed into a shared file is probably not great for security but, you know, you are already jumping a firewall, so…
Of course, no firewall can beat an air gap. Unless you can control the fans or
an LED
. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764575",
"author": "doppler",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T19:03:32",
"content": "I can see this used by the bad guy’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6764597",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T20:2... | 1,760,371,894.495311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/pasteurisation-probably-why-you-survived-childhood/ | Pasteurisation: Probably Why You Survived Childhood | Jenny List | [
"cooking hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"food preservation",
"milk",
"pasteurisation"
] | There’s an oft-quoted maxim that youngsters growing up on farms have a much stronger immune system than those growing up in cities. The idea is that they are exposed to far more dirt and eat food much closer to the field than their urban cousins. Without the help of a handy microbiologist or epidemiologist it’s difficult to judge its veracity, but personal experience suggests that the bit about dirt may be true at least.
It’s Dangerous To Idealise The Past.
It’s likely that the idea of rural kids seeing more bugs may come from the idea that those in the cities consume sterile processed food from the supermarket, it plays into a notion of an idealised past in which a somehow purer diet came more directly from its source. Somehow so the story goes, by only eating pasteurised and preserved foods, city dwellers are eating something inferior, stripped of its goodness. There’s a yearning for a purer alternative, something supermarkets are only too happy to address by offering premium products at elevated prices. So, was the diet of the past somehow more wholesome, and are those kids having their future health ruined by Big Food? Perhaps it’s time to turn back the clock a little to find out.
Even clean cows have bugs. Carolyn Parsons,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
It’s likely everyone knows that food spoils if left unattended for long enough. Some foods, such as grain, can last a long time if kept dry, while others such as milk will go bad quite quickly. Milk in particular goes bad for two reasons; firstly because it’s an excellent bacterial growth medium, and secondly because it contains plenty of bacteria by its very nature. Even very clean cows have bugs.
If you lived in most large cities in the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had likely placed you far enough from the nearest cow that your milk had a significant journey to make to reach you even with up-to-date rail transport. Without refrigeration, during that journey it had become a bacterial soup to the extent that even though it might not yet have gone sour, it had certainly become a bacterial brew. It was thus responsible for significant numbers of infections, and had become a major health hazard. So much for the purer diet consumed by city kids of the past.
Heat ( and Louis Pasteur) To The Rescue
The knowledge that heat can be used to preserve food can be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years, and by the nineteenth century that had been developed into the bottling and canning processes which we use today. These rely on sealing food into a container, and cooking it in the container by placing it in boiling water, with the result being a can of perfectly cooked and preserved food which only requires heating to serve.
Louis Pasteur, who probably saved your life. Paul Nadar,
Public domain
.
Canning and bottling then have solved food preservation, but only for cooked food. Foodstuffs such as milk or juice don’t survive the process very well, as they cook, and their taste and texture is altered. Think of the taste of condensed milk, for example, which doesn’t quite make an acceptable substitute for fresh milk. And here we come to pasteurisation, the process of heating to a lower temperature for long enough to deactivate bacteria but not long or hot enough to cook the foodstuff. It’s the invention of the French biologist Louis Pasteur, and though we now associate it with milk, it was devised to stop wine from spoiling as it aged.
The beauty of pasteurisation is that it does not require specialised machinery to work; while it’s achieved commercially by passing the milk through steam-heated pipes, it can even be done in a saucepan on a domestic stove. The aim is to heat it as hot as possible without cooking the milk, and the exact temperature depends on for how long it will be heated. The result isn’t the sterility of a high-temperature canned food, but the active bacteria have been removed and its shelf life increased significantly. My experience with the process comes from home-pressed apple juice, and the figure I remember was 67 Celcius, the exceeding of which would impart an apple sauce taste to the final product.
Pasteurisation then is a major contributor to our public health. Far from bring a process somehow denying the kids a more wholesome food, it’s one of the reasons why many of the diseases that haunted our great-grandparents generation are now just names in print. Examining the process has provided a window into the perception of food though, as someone who did grow up on straight-from-the-cow unpasteurised milk did I have a better start in life? Probably not, but it did give me a keen sense of smell for soured cream.
Header image: Agriculture And Stock Department, Information Branch, Photography Section,
Public domain
. | 124 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764540",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T17:44:36",
"content": "One of the major issues was handling: drinking milk from one cow wasn’t so much a problem even if the milk got shipped a ways. But once we got dairy cooperatives, the milk from thousands of cows go... | 1,760,371,894.670225 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/programming-ada-records-and-containers-for-organized-code/ | Programming Ada: Records And Containers For Organized Code | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ada",
"software development"
] | Writing code without having some way to easily organize sets of variables or data would be a real bother. Even if in the end you could totally do all of the shuffling of bits and allocating in memory by yourself, it’s much easier when the programming language abstracts all of that housekeeping away. In Ada you generally use a few standard types, ranging from records (equivalent to structs in C) to a series of containers like vectors and maps. As with any language, there are some subtle details about how all of these work, which is where the usage of these types in the
Sarge project
will act as an illustrative example.
In this project’s Ada code, a record is used for information about command line arguments (flag names, values, etc.) with these argument records stored in a vector. In addition, a map is created that links the names of these arguments, using a string as the key, to the index of the corresponding record in the vector. Finally, a second vector is used to store any text fragments that follow the list of arguments provided on the command line. This then provides a number of ways to access the record information, either sequentially in the arguments vector, or by argument (flag) name via the map.
Introducing Generics
Not unlike the containers provided by the Standard Template Library (STL) of C++, the containers provided by Ada are provided as generics, meaning that they cannot be used directly. Instead we have to create a new package that uses the container generic to formulate a container implementation limited to the types which we intend to use with it. For a start let’s take a look at how to create a
vector
:
with Ada.Containers.Vectors;
use Ada.Containers;
package arg_vector is new Vectors(Natural, Argument);
The standard containers are part of the
Ada.Containers
package, which we include here before the instantiating of the desired arguments vector, which is indexed using natural numbers (all positive integers, no zero or negative numbers), and with the
Argument
type as value. This latter type is the custom record, which is defined as follows:
type Argument is record
arg_short: aliased Unbounded_String;
arg_long: aliased Unbounded_String;
description: aliased Unbounded_String;
hasValue: aliased boolean := False;
value: aliased Unbounded_String;
parsed: aliased boolean := False;
end record;
Here the
aliased
keyword means that the variable will have a memory address rather than only exist in a register. This is a self-optimizing feature of Ada that is
being copied
by languages like C and C++ that used to require the inverse action by the programmer in the form of the C & C++
register
keyword. For Ada’s
aliased
keyword, this means that the variable it is associated with can have its access (‘pointer’, in C parlance) taken.
Moving on, we can now create the two vectors and the one map, starting with the arguments vector using the earlier defined
arg_vector
package:
args : arg_vector.vector;
The text arguments vector is created effectively the same way, just with an unbounded string as its value:
package tArgVector is new Vectors(Natural, Unbounded_String);
textArguments: tArgVector.vector;
Finally, the map container is created in a similar fashion. Note that for this we are using the
Ada.Containers.Indefinite_Ordered_Maps
package. Ordered maps
contrast
with hashed maps in that they do not require a hash function, but will use the
<
operator (existing for the type or custom). These maps provide a look-up time defined as O(log N), which is faster than the O(N) of a vector and the reason why the map is used as an index for the vector here.
package argNames_map is new Indefinite_Ordered_Maps(Unbounded_String, Natural);
argNames: argNames_map.map;
With these packages and instances defined and instantiated, we are now ready to fill them with data.
Cross Mapping
When we define a new argument to look for when parsing command line arguments, we have to perform three operations: first create a new
Argument
record instance and assign its members the relevant information, secondly we assign this record to the
args
vector. The record is provided with data via the
setArgument
procedure:
procedure setArgument(arg_short: in Unbounded_String; arg_long: in Unbounded_String;
desc: in Unbounded_String; hasVal: in boolean);
This allows us to create the
Argument
instance as follows in the initialization section (before
begin
in the procedure block) as follows:
arg: aliased Argument := (arg_short => arg_short, arg_long => arg_long,
description => desc, hasValue => hasVal,
value => +"", parsed => False);
This
Argument
record can then be added to the
args
vector:
args.append(arg);
Next we have to set up links between the flag names (short and long version) in the map to the relevant index in the argument vector:
argNames.include(arg_short, args.Last_Index);
argNames.include(arg_long, args.Last_Index);
This sets the key for the map entry to the short or long version of the flag, and takes the last added (highest) index of the arguments vector for the value. We’re now ready to find and update records.
Search And Insert
Using the contraption which we just setup is fairly straightforward. If we want to check for example that an argument flag has been defined or not, we can use the arguments vector and the map as follows:
flag_it: argNames_map.Cursor;
flag_it := argNames.find(arg_flag);
if flag_it = argNames_map.No_Element then
return False;
elsif args(argNames_map.Element(flag_it)).parsed /= True then
return False;
end if;
This same method can be used to find a specific record to update the freshly parsed value that we expect to trail certain flags:
flag_it: argNames_map.Cursor;
flag_it := argNames.find(arg_flag);
args.Reference(argNames_map.Element(flag_it)).value := arg;
Using the
reference
function on the
args
vector gets us a reference to the element which we can then update, unlike the
element
function of the package.
We can now easily check that a particular flag has been found by looking up its record in the vector and return the found value, as defined in the
getFlag
function in the
sarge.adb
file of Sarge:
function getFlag(arg_flag: in Unbounded_String; arg_value: out Unbounded_String) return boolean is
flag_it: argNames_map.Cursor;
use argNames_map;
begin
if parsed /= True then
return False;
end if;
flag_it := argNames.find(arg_flag);
if flag_it = argNames_map.No_Element then
return False;
elsif args(argNames_map.Element(flag_it)).parsed /= True then
return False;
end if;
if args(argNames_map.Element(flag_it)).hasValue = True then
arg_value := args(argNames_map.Element(flag_it)).value;
end if;
return True;
end getFlag;
Other Containers
There are of course many more containers than just the two types covered here defined in Ada’s
Predefined Language Library
(PLL). For instance,
sets
are effectively like vectors, except that they only allow for unique elements to exist within the container. This is only the beginning of
the available containers
, though, with the Ada 2005 standard defining only the first collection, which got massively extended in the Ada 2012 standard (which we focus on here). These include trees, queues, linked lists and so on. We’ll cover some of these in more detail in upcoming articles.
Together with the packages, functions and procedures covered earlier in this series, records and containers form the basics of organizing code in Ada. Naturally, Ada also supports more advanced types of modularization and reusability, such as object-oriented programming, which will also be covered in upcoming articles. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764519",
"author": "Mark Allen Miller",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T15:45:33",
"content": "So nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6764705",
"author": "TRL7",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T05:33:19",
"content": "What a fan... | 1,760,371,895.029081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/glowblaster-uses-405-nm-laser-to-make-its-mark/ | GlowBlaster Uses 405 Nm Laser To Make Its Mark | Tom Nardi | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"marksmanship",
"shooting gallery"
] | Ever wish you could do a little target shooting in a galaxy far, far away? Well then you’re in luck, as the
Star Wars
inspired
GlowBlaster designed by [Louis Abbott]
can help you realize those dreams with a real-life laser pistol — albeit a much weaker one than you’d want to carry into a Mos Eisley cantina.
Inside the 3D printed frame of the GlowBlaster is a 5 mW 405 nm module, an Arduino Nano, a speaker, a vibration motor, and a 9 V battery. When you pull the trigger, it pushes down on a 12 mm tactile button which causes the Arduino to fire the laser and sprinkle in a bit of theatrics by way of the speaker and vibration motor. There’s also a second button on the side of the blaster that lets you pick between firing modes.
The idea behind this project is that even a momentary blast from a 405 nm laser will excite a phosphorescent material enough that it will show a hit. So all you’ve got to do is draw a target on a glow-in-the-dark sheet, and you’ll be able to see where your shots land from clear across the doom. Admittedly it will have to be a dimly lit room, but still.
Technically that 5 mW figure puts the GlowBlaster’s output on par with a laser pointer, but in the documentation, [Louis] cautions that laser modules sourced online are often more powerful than their labels claim. So you, and anyone else around, would be wise to wear eye protection while the laser is being fired.
This is a far simpler solution than
previous laser marksmanship projects we’ve covered
, as the target side is totally passive. Although we have to admit, seeing the
target actually get knocked down
is a lot of fun. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764459",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T11:30:47",
"content": "Neat build! I probably would have used an 18650 or LiPo pouch instead of a 9V though, probably because I have a lot more of those than 9V batteries. You might want to add a disclaimer though since i... | 1,760,371,895.179949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/gamma-ray-spectroscopy-the-pomelo-way/ | Gamma Ray Spectroscopy The Pomelo Way | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Cesium Iodide",
"gamma ray",
"geiger",
"photomultiplier",
"scintillation",
"spectroscopy",
"spectrum"
] | Depending on the circumstances you find yourself in, a Geiger counter can be a tremendously useful tool. With just a click or a chirp, it can tell you if any invisible threats lurk. But a Geiger counter is a “yes or no” instrument; it can only tell you if an ionizing event occurred, revealing nothing about the energy of the radiation. For that, you need something like
this gamma-ray spectroscope
.
Dubbed the Pomelo by [mihai.cuciuc], the detector is a homebrew solid-state scintillation counter made from a thallium-doped cesium iodide crystal and a silicon photomultiplier. The scintillator is potted in silicone in a 3D printed enclosure, to protect the hygroscopic crystal from both humidity and light. There’s also a temperature sensor on the detector board for thermal compensation. The Pomelo Core board interfaces with the physics package and takes care of pulse shaping and peak detection, while a separate Pomelo Zest board has an ESP32-C6, a small LCD and buttons for UI, SD card and USB interfaces, and an 18650 power supply. Plus a piezo speaker, because a spectroscope needs clicks, too.
The ability to determine the energy of incident photons is the real kicker here, though. Pomelo can detect energies from 50 keV all the way up to 3 MeV, and display them as graphs using linear or log scales. The short video below shows the Pomelo in use on samples of radioactive americium and thorium, showing different spectra for each.
[mihai.cuciuc] took inspiration for the Pomelo from
this DIY spectrometer
as well as
the CosmicPi
. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6765048",
"author": "pingu98",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T21:07:17",
"content": "A fantastic project Mihai! I really like the way you draw the spectra on the screen with the device (and the computation that must go with it on an embedded platform). Also I appreciate the choice of SiPM... | 1,760,371,895.267878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/displays-we-like-hacking-hdmi/ | Displays We Like Hacking: HDMI | Arya Voronova | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"display",
"hack",
"hdmi"
] | I don’t like HDMI. Despite it being a pretty popular interface, I find crucial parts of it to be alien to what hackers stand for. The way I see it, it manages to be proprietary while bringing a lot of the old cruft in. It doesn’t have a native alternative like DisplayPort, so portable implementations tend to suffer power-wise; the connector situation is interesting, and the HDMI Foundation has been doing some weird stuff; in particular, they are
pretty hostile to open-source technology.
This article is not the place for such feelings, however, especially since I’ve expressed them enough
in the DisplayPort article.
We the hackers deserve to be able to handle the interfaces we stumble upon, and I firmly believe in that way more than in my right to animosity towards HDMI.
The HDMI interface is seriously prominent wherever you look, in part because it’s the interface created by the multimedia-involved companies for the multimedia-involved companies. Over the years we’ve had it, it’s been more than sufficient for basically everything we do video-wise, save for the highest resolutions.
It’s also reasonably simple to wire up, hack on, and even bitbang. Let’s go through what makes it tick.
The Core
HDMI is, at its core, three differential pairs for data, plus one pair to clock them and in the darkness bind them. It’s a digital interface, though it is a fun one. This makes it way more suitable for higher-distance video transmissions than interfaces like VGA, and as long as you stick to relatively low resolutions, HDMI won’t have as many asks in terms of PCB layout as DisplayPort might, thanks to HDMI link speeds scaling proportionally with the display resolution.
The three forms you will see encounter HDMI in, from “okay” to “oh no”.
By [SIMOBORTOLO],
CC BY-SA 4.0
As internals go,
HDMI is not that far from either VGA or LVDS aka FPD-Link – it’s still a constant stream of colours, respecting VSYNC and HSYNC. Unlike LVDS, however, bits are not quite transmitted directly – each 8-bit colour gets turned into a 10-bit packet. This scheme has been inherited from DVI, and HDMI has mostly built upon it, though things become more complicated in the latest HDMI generations.
You will see the three differential pairs referred as D0/D1/D2, but they do roughly correspond to blue, green and red color data streams in practice. That said, you couldn’t simply disconnect all of them and replicate the VGA cable missing colour effect – there’s more going on. HSYNC and VSYNC bring quite a bit of blank space with them, intervals where no pixel data is transmitted, and HDMI puts some more useful stuff into these intervals – like audio, which DVI couldn’t do, as well as some control messages, like the ones signaling HSYNC and VSYNC.
HDMI is reasonably simple. If you want to figure out clock frequency for a HDMI link, calculate the pixel clock for your resolution (as mentioned in the parallel RGB article), then multiply it by 10, due to the packing and encoding that has to happen; this is how HDMI signal on a Raspberry Pi
manages to jam WiFi
at a very specific resolution. This simplicity makes it all that easier to implement in your own project, whether you’re using an FPGA or a Pi Pico.
Side Channels
There are a few extra pins you will see in a HDMI connector pinout. These are way more fun than you might know of, and I’m not even talking about the I2C as some might guess. For a start, there is the simplest one – it’s called HPD, and it’s just hotplug detect. The lore goes, a HDMI display has to pull HPD up to 5V with a 10k resistor; I’ve had success just feeding 5V into it, but sticking to the spec is undoubtedly better.
Then, yes, there’s I2C, the SDA and SCL we all know and love. They’re level-shifted to 5V, but with just two FETs and four resistors, you can treat it as an I2C interface for all intents and purposes. On Intel and AMD computers, you can tap that I2C interface in Linux super easily, even if your GPU (external or internal) is pretty modern, and do things from hardware hacking to
driving a separate tiny 128×64 I2C OLED screen.
Nvidia proprietary drivers are a no-go because they don’t expose the interface, and same goes for Windows, unless you’re okay with paying a fair bit for a software suite from someone who’s reverse-engineered the internal interfaces.
I2C gives you access to EDID, a display configuration data blob that’s standardized by VESA and pretty hackable, as well as DDC – an I2C-exposed interface that lets you control your monitor programmatically. Yes, if you’re using Linux, there are a slew of utilities that let you turn your monitor on or off, switch inputs, control brightness and contrast, and a ton of other features you’d usually find in your display’s on-screen menu so often awkward to navigate.
I will not be taking questions at this time.
By [C0nanPayne]
, CC BY-SA 4.0
Then, there’s the less known but pretty fun feature called CEC (Consumer Electronics Control). It’s
a single-pin multi-drop data bus
for controlling over the HDMI cable, letting you do things like adjust volume sliders on your HDMI-equipped receiver, change channels, or much more. The interface and the protocol are standardized, but a ton of device-specific commands are not; that said, it’s
a reverse-engineering treasure trove.
Another fun pin is pin 14, known as HEAC. You might’ve heard of Ethernet over HDMI and HDMI ARC (Audio Return Channel), and this pin is used for both of these, together with the HPD pin that gets double duty. Last but not least, you get a pin that carries 5V, at, supposedly, 50mA. The 50mA limit is not always adhered to, as you might guess, but it’s enough to power a good few things nevertheless.
Hacking Galore
HDMI is simple enough and it’s seriously abundant, so there’s more than enough fun stuff you can do with it. For a start, there’s no shortage of projects that output HDMI, or help you output HDMI. From
open-source FPGA IP cores
to
the Pi Pico PIO trick
that is
now pushing 1080p,
from
fun ASICs that help us drive DSI screens
to homegrown HDMI to LVDS converters,
FPGA-backed
or
not.
Yes, you can use these diffpairs in your own projects, too!
By [123df]
, CC BY-SA 3.0
Both the I2C channel and CEC get their minutes of fame every now and then. It might happen that an IC in a product exposes a bootloader over the I2C channel, as
the Amazon Fire TV Cube did.
If you’re okay with wading through the labyrinth that is DDC (or reusing one of the existing libraries), you can
build a hardware keypad
for controlling your monitor setups. And, since a Raspberry Pi has CEC support exposed to us mere mortals, a Pi connected to your TV
can help you control anything else connected to it
, like we’ve seen [Victor] do – alternatively, you could implement CEC
on an ATTiny
or
on a PIC
for all your home entertainment mod needs!
The HDMI hardware abundance applies to capture cards, too, which is wonderful since
they’re a worthwhile tool for hackers
– we’ve even seen open-source ones,
as cheaply as $10,
and you could
build a KVM as cheaply,
too. If HDMI cables, as far as they go, are not long enough for you, there are plenty of HDMI to IP solutions, and we see hackers playing with them
every now
and then.
There’s also the part of HDMI known as HDCP, a video encryption standard that, in practice, means your display will be black if your hardware isn’t HDCP-blessed. The irritance factor makes it
a worthwhile bastion for hackers,
of course. That said, you don’t need a FPGA – if you simply want your hardware to work together without compatibility issues, there’s HDMI splitters you can get on Eastern markets, that strip HDCP on their input and conveniently forget to reapply it on one or both of their outputs. And, if your splitter is more conscientious than that, you can always
force it to mis-step.
Learn More…
This connector has a thousand part numbers.
By [Jdbcomputing]
, CC BY-SA 4.0
If you want to hack on HDMI or learn more in depth about what makes it tick, there’s a fair amount of resources we
have covered
and even
written ourselves
, and even more resources on the wider web. HDMI connectors and cables are available wherever you look, and if you get NDA requests or membership requirements when buying your HDMI-equipped chips in the West, you can always turn to Eastern markets.
HDMI is not about to leave our homes, and as long as it’s here, you deserve to know how to hack on it. It’s not the only interface that’s surprisingly prominent – in fact, next time, we ought to take a look at the DSI interface, surprisingly proprietary yet in everyone’s pocket, and a treasure trove waiting to be dug into. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764950",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T17:13:56",
"content": "How does the Xi3 Piston prototype “steam machine” jack that is both HDMI and DisplayPort work?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6764992",
"aut... | 1,760,371,895.516094 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/fourier-the-animated-series/ | Fourier, The Animated Series | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"fourier series",
"mathematics",
"visualization",
"waveforms"
] | We’ve seen many graphical and animated explainers for the Fourier series. We suppose it is because it is so much fun to create the little moving pictures, and, as a bonus, it really helps explain this important concept. Even if you already understand it, there’s something beautiful and elegant about watching a mathematical formula tracing out waveforms.
[Andrei Ciobanu] has
added his own take to the body of animations
out there — or, at least, part one of a series — and we were impressed with the scope of it. The post starts with the basics, but doesn’t shy away from more advanced math where needed. Don’t worry, it’s not all dull. There’s mathematical flowers, and even a brief mention of Pink Floyd.
The Fourier series is the basis for much of digital signal processing, allowing you to build a signal from the sum of many sinusoids. You can also go in reverse and break a signal up into its constituent waves.
We were impressed with [Andrei’s]
sinusoid
Tetris
, and it appears here, too. We’ve seen many visualizers for this before, but each one is a
little different
. | 7 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764929",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T16:31:00",
"content": "We may have “slashdotted” his site, the animations are jerky and sometimes go blank.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "67... | 1,760,371,895.221954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/mining-and-refining-fracking/ | Mining And Refining: Fracking | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"borehole",
"directional",
"drilling",
"fossil fuel",
"Fracking",
"hydraulic",
"methane",
"Mining and Refining",
"mud motor",
"natural gas"
] | Normally on “Mining and Refining,” we concentrate on the actual material that’s mined and refined. We’ve covered everything from
copper
to
tungsten
, with side trips to more unusual materials like
sulfur
and
helium
. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the geology and chemistry of the material while concentrating on the different technologies needed to exploit often very rare or low-concentration deposits and bring them to market.
This time, though, we’re going to take a look at not a specific resource, but a technique: fracking. Hydraulic fracturing is very much in the news lately for its potential environmental impact, both in terms of its immediate effects on groundwater quality and for its perpetuation of our dependence on fossil fuels. Understanding what fracking is and how it works is key to being able to assess the risks and benefits of its use. There’s also the fact that like many engineering processes carried out on a massive scale, there are a lot of interesting things going on with fracking that are worth exploring in their own right.
Fossil Mud
Although hydraulic fracturing has been used since at least the 1940s to stimulate production in oil and gas wells and is used in all kinds of well drilled into multiple rock types, fracking is most strongly associated these days with the development of oil and natural gas deposits in shale. Shale is a sedimentary rock formed from ancient muds made from fine grains of clay and silt. These are some of the finest-grained materials possible, with grains ranging from 62 microns in diameter down to less than a micron. Grains that fine only settle out of suspension very slowly, and tend to do so only where there are no currents.
Shale outcropping in a road cut in Kentucky. The well-defined layers were formed in still waters, where clay and silt particles slowly accumulated. The dark color means a lot of organic material from algae and plankton mixed in. Source:
James St. John
, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The breakup of Pangea during the Cretaceous period provided much of the economically important shale formations in today’s eastern United States, like the Marcellus formation that stretches from New York state into Ohio and down almost to Tennesee. The warm, calm waters of the newly forming Atlantic Ocean formed the perfect place for clay- and silt-laden runoff to accumulate and settle, eventually forming the shale formation.
Shale is often associated with oil and natural gas because the conditions that favor its formation also favor hydrocarbon creation. The warm, still Cretaceous waters were perfect for phytoplankton and algal growth, and when those organisms died they rained down along with the silt and clay grains to the low-oxygen environment at the bottom. Layer upon layer built up slowly over the millennia, but instead of decomposing as they would have in an oxygen-rich environment, the reducing conditions slowly transformed the biomass into kerogen, or solid deposits of hydrocarbons. With the addition of heat and pressure, the hydrocarbons in kerogen were cooked into oil and natural gas.
In some cases, the tight grain structure of shale acts as an impermeable barrier to keep oil and gas generated in lower layers from floating up, forming underground deposits of liquid and gas. In other cases, kerogens are transformed into oil or natural gas right within the shale, trapped within its pores. Under enough pressure, gas can even dissolve right into the shale matrix itself, to be released only when the pressure in the rock is relieved.
Horizontal Boring
While getting at these sequestered oil and gas deposits requires more than just drilling a hole in the ground, fracking starts with exactly that. Traditional well-drilling techniques, where a rotary table rig using lengths of drill pipe spins a drill bit into rock layers underground while pumping a slurry called drilling mud down the bore to cool and lubricate the bit, are used to start the well. The initial bore proceeds straight down until it passes through the lowest aquifer in the region, at which point the entire bore is lined with a steel pipe casing. The casing is filled with cementitious grout that’s forced out of the bottom of the casing by a plug inserted at the surface and pressed down by the drilling rig. This squeezes the grout between the outside of the casing and the borehole and back up to the surface, sealing it off from the water-bearing layers it passes through and serving as a foundation for equipment that will eventually be added to the wellhead, such as blow-out preventers.
Once the well is sealed off, vertical boring continues until the kickoff point, where the bore transitions from vertical to horizontal. Because the target shale seam is relatively thin — often only 50 to 300 feet (15 to 100 meters) thick — drilling a vertical bore through it would only expose a small amount of surface area. Fracking is all about increasing surface area and connecting as many pores in the shale to the bore; drilling horizontally within the shale seam makes that possible. Geologists and mining engineers determine the kickoff point based on seismic surveys and drilling logs from other wells in the area and calculate the radius needed to put the bore in the middle of the seam. Given that the drill string can only turn by a few degrees at most, the radius tends to be huge — often hundreds of meters.
Directional drilling has been used since the 1920s, often to steal oil from other claims, and so many techniques have been developed for changing the direction of a drill string deep underground. One of the most common methods used in fracking wells is the mud motor. Powered by drilling mud pumped down the drill pipe and forced between a helical stator and rotor, the mud motor can spin the drill bit at 60 to 100 RPM. When boring a traditional vertical well, the mud motor can be used in addition to spinning the entire drill string, to achieve a higher rate of penetration. The mud motor can also power the bit with the drill string locked in place, and by adding angled spacers between the mud motor and the drill string, the bit can begin drilling at a shallow angle, generally just a few degrees off vertical. The drill string is flexible enough to bend and follow the mud motor on its path to intersect the shale seam. The azimuth of the bore can be changed, too, by rotating the drill string so the bit heads off in a slightly different direction. Some tools allow the bend in the motor to be changed without pulling the entire drill string up, which represents significant savings.
Determining where the drill bit is under miles of rock is the job of downhole tools like the measurement while drilling (MWD) tool. These battery-powered tools vary in what they can measure, but typically include temperature and pressure sensors and inertial measuring units (IMU) to determine the angle of the bit. Some MWD tools also include magnetometers for orientation to Earth’s magnetic field. Transmitting data back to the surface from the MWD can be a problem, and while more use is being made of electrical and fiber optic connections these days, many MWDs use the drilling mud itself as a physical transport medium. Mud telemetry uses pressure waves set up in the column of drilling mud to send data back up to pressure transducers on the surface. Data rates are low; 40 bps at best, dropping off sharply with increasing distance. Mud telemetry is also hampered by any gas dissolved in the drilling mud, which strongly attenuates the signal.
Let The Fracking Begin
Once the horizontal borehole is placed in the shale seam, a steel casing is placed in the bore and grouted with cement. At this point, the bore is completely isolated from the surrounding rock and needs to be perforated. This is accomplished with a perforating gun, a length of pipe studded with small shaped charges. The perforating gun is prepared on the surface by pyrotechnicians who place the charges into the gun and connect them together with detonating cord. The gun is lowered into the bore and placed at the very end of the horizontal section, called the toe. When the charges are detonated, they form highly energetic jets of fluidized metal that lance through the casing and grout and into the surrounding shale. Penetration depth and width depend on the specific shaped charge used but can extend up to half a meter into the surrounding rock.
Perforation can also be accomplished non-explosively, using a tool that directs jets of high-pressure abrasive-charged fluid through ports in its sides. It’s not too far removed from water jet cutting, and can cut right through the steel and cement casing and penetrate well into the surrounding shale. The advantage to this type of perforation is that it can be built into a single multipurpose tool.
Once the bore has been perforated, fracturing can occur. The principle is simple: an incompressible fluid is pumped into the borehole under great pressure. The fluid leaves the borehole and enters the perforations, cracking the rock and enlarging the original perforations. The cracks can extend many meters from the original borehole into the rock, exposing vastly more surface area of the rock to the borehole.
Fracking is more than making cracks. The network of cracks produced by fracking physically connects kerogen deposits within the shale to the borehole. But getting the methane (black in inset) free from the kerogen (yellow) is a complicated balance of hydrophobic and hydrophilic interactions between the shale, the kerogen, and the fracturing fluid. Source:
Thomas Lee, Lydéric Bocquet, Benoit Coasne
, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The pressure needed to hydraulically fracture solid rock perhaps a mile or more below the surface can be tremendous — up to 15,000 pounds per square inch (100 MPa). In addition to the high pressure, the fracking fluid must be pumped at extremely high volumes, up to 10 cu ft/s (265 lps). The overall volume of material needed is impressive, too — a 6″ borehole that’s 10,000 feet long would take almost 15,000 gallons of fluid to fill alone. Add in the volume of fluid needed to fill the fractures and that could easily exceed 5 million gallons.
Fracking fluid is a slurry made mostly from water and sand. The sand serves as a proppant, which keeps the tiny microfractures from collapsing after fracking pressure is released. Fracking fluid also contains a fraction of a percent of various chemical additives, mostly to form a gel that effectively transfers the hydraulic force while keeping the proppant suspended. Guar gum, a water-soluble polysaccharide extracted from guar beans, is often used to create the gel. Fracking gels are sometimes broken down after a while to clear the fractures and allow freer flow; a combination of acids and enzymes is usually used for this job.
Once fracturing is complete, the fracking fluid is removed from the borehole. It’s impossible to recover all the fluid; sometimes as much as 50% is recovered, but often as little as 5% can be pumped back to the surface. Once a section of the borehole has been fractured, it’s sealed off from the rest of the well by an isolating plug placed upstream of the freshly fracked section. The entire process — perforating, fracking, recovery, isolation — is repeated up the borehole until the entire horizontal bore is fracked. The isolating plugs are then bored out, and the well can begin production. | 53 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764881",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T15:03:46",
"content": "A sentence got cut off short:“The advantage to this type of perforation is that it can be built into a single multipurpose tool which can”Can what?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,371,895.120164 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/thermoelectric-module-keeps-printer-filament-cool-and-dry/ | Thermoelectric Module Keeps Printer Filament Cool And Dry | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"cooler",
"dehumidifier",
"FDM",
"filament",
"peltier",
"TEC",
"thermoelectric cooler"
] | Anyone who has left their car windows open during a rainstorm will tell you the best way to dry the upholstery is to crank the AC and close the windows. A couple of hours later, presto — dry seats. The same can be said for 3D printer filament, and it’s pretty much what [Ben Krejci] is doing with
this solid-state filament dryer
.
The running gear for this build is nothing fancy; it’s just a standard thermoelectric cooling module and a fan. The trick was getting the airflow over the module right. [Ben] uses two air inlets on his printed enclosure to pull air from the cold side of the Peltier, which allows the air enough time in contact with the cold to condense out the water. It also allows sufficient airflow to keep the hot side of the module from overheating.
Water collection was a challenge, too. Water always finds a way to leak, and [Ben] came up with a clever case design incorporating a funnel to direct water away. The module is also periodically run in reverse to defrost the cold side heatsink.
The dehumidifier lives in a large tool cabinet with plenty of room for filament rolls and is run by an ESP32-C3 with temperature and humidity sensors, which allowed [Ben] to farm most of the control and monitoring out to ESPHome. The setup seems to work well, keeping the relative humidity inside the cabinet in the low 20s — good enough for PETG and TPU.
It’s an impressively complete build using off-the-shelf parts. For a different approach to solid-state filament drying, check out
[Stefan]’s take on the problem
. | 59 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764810",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T11:19:50",
"content": "“Anyone who has left their car windows open during a rainstorm will tell you…”Leaving the car windows open during a rainstorm only leaves the seats wet, but… leaving the car windows open during normal weather... | 1,760,371,895.448372 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/05/mechanic-prince-of-tides/ | Mechanic Prince Of Tides | Al Williams | [
"History",
"Science"
] | [
"analog computer",
"Lord Kelvin",
"tides",
"william thompson"
] | Lord Kelvin’s name comes up anytime you start looking at the history of science and technology. In addition to working on transatlantic cables and thermodynamics, he also built an early computing device to predict tides. Kelvin, whose real name was William Thomson, became interested in tides in a roundabout way,
as explained in a recent
IEEE Spectrum
article
.
He’d made plenty of money on his patents related to the telegraph cable, but his wife died, so he decided to buy a yacht, the
Lalla Rookh
. He used it as a summer home. If you live on a boat, the tides are an important part of your day.
Today, you could just ask your favorite search engine or AI about the tides, but in 1870, that wasn’t possible. Also, in a day when sea power made or broke empires, tide charts were often top secret. Not that the tides were a total mystery. Newton explained what was happening back in 1687. Laplace realized they were tied to oscillations almost a century later. Thomson made a machine that could do the math Laplace envisioned.
We know today that the tides depend on hundreds of different motions, but many of them have relatively insignificant contributions, and we only track 37 of them, according to the post. Kelvin’s machine — an intricate mesh of gears and cranks — tracked only 10 components.
In operation, the user turned a crank, and a pen traced a curve on a roll of paper. A small mark showed the hour with a special mark for noon. You could process a year’s worth of tides in about 4 hours. While Kelvin received credit for the machine’s creation, he acknowledged the help of many others in his paper, from craftsmen to his brother.
We actually did a
deep dive into tides
, including Kelvin’s machine, a few years ago. He shows up
a number of times
in our posts. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764803",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T10:56:58",
"content": "The German Wikipedia page has some pictures of those impressive mechanical calculators.https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezeitenrechenmaschine",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,894.987469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/the-amiga-we-all-wanted-in-1993/ | The Amiga We All Wanted In 1993 | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"motherboard",
"pci"
] | To be an Amiga fan during the dying days of the hardware platform back in the mid 1990s was to have a bleak existence indeed. Commodore had squandered what was to us the best computer ever with dismal marketing and a series of machines that were essentially just repackaged versions of the original. Where was a PCI Amiga with fast processors, we cried!
Now, thirty years too late, here’s [Jason Neus] with just the machine we wanted, in the shape of
an ATX form factor Amiga motherboard
with those all-important PCI slots and USB for keyboard and mouse.
What would have been unthinkable in the ’90s comes courtesy of an original or ECS Amiga chipset for the Amiga functions, and an FPGA and microcontroller for PCI and USB respectively. Meanwhile there’s also
a PC floppy drive controller,
based on work from [Ian Steadman]. The processor and RAM lives on a daughter card, and both 68040 and 68060 processors are supported.
Here in 2024 of course this is still a 1990s spec board, and misty-eyed speculation about what might have happened aside, it’s unlikely to become your daily driver. But that may not be the point, instead we should evaluate it for what it is. Implementing a PCI bus, even a 1990s one, is not without its challenges, and we’re impressed with the achievement.
If you’re interested in Amiga post-mortems,
here’s a slightly different take
. | 51 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764703",
"author": "makes you go hmmmm....",
"timestamp": "2024-06-05T05:18:42",
"content": "If not for Commodore’s misManagement the Amiga would have taken the Apples place in history.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6764813... | 1,760,371,895.985033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/glitching-an-atmega328p-has-never-been-simpler/ | Glitching An ATMega328P Has Never Been Simpler | Arya Voronova | [
"how-to",
"Microcontrollers",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"attack",
"EM injection",
"fault injection",
"glitch",
"glitching",
"voltage glitch",
"voltage glitching"
] | Did you know just how easily you can glitch microcontrollers? It’s so easy, you really have no excuse for not having tried it out yet. Look, [lord feistel] is
doing glitching attacks on an ATMega328P!
All you need is an Arduino board with its few SMD capacitors removed or a bare 328P chip, a FET, and some sort of MCU to drive it.
All of these
are extremely generic components, and you can quickly breadboard them, following [lord feistel]’s guide on GitHub.
In
the proof-of-concept,
you can connect a HD44780 display to the chip, and have the victim MCU output digits onto the display in an infinite loop. Inside of the loop is a command to output a smiley face – but the command is never reachable, because the counter is reset in an
if
right before it. By glitching the ATMega’s power input, you can skip the
if
and witness the
;)
on your display; it is that simple.
What are you waiting for?
Breadboard it up
and see for yourself, this might be the method that you hack your next device and make it do your bidding. If the FET-and-MCU glitching starts to fail you at some point, there’s fancier tools you can use, like
the ChipWhisperer.
As for practical examples,
[scanlime]’s elegant glitching-powered firmware hack
is hard to forget. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764207",
"author": "some guy",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T17:40:25",
"content": "> [scanlime]’s elegant glitching-powered firmware hackSpeaking about Micah [scanlime], does anybody know how she is going? Her last edited videos are from 3 years ago… Wish you the best Micah!",
"par... | 1,760,371,895.551765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/a-treasure-trove-in-an-english-field/ | A Treasure Trove In An English Field | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"electromagnetic field",
"emf",
"junk"
] | This is being written in a tent in a field in Herefordshire, one of the English counties that borders Wales. It’s the site of Electromagnetic Field, this year’s large European hacker camp, and outside my tent the sky is lit by a laser light show to the sound of electronic music. I’m home.
One of the many fun parts of EMF is its swap table. A gazebo to which you can bring your junk, and from which you can take away other people’s junk. It’s an irresistible destination which turns a casual walk into half an hour pawing through the mess in search of treasure, and along the way it provides an interesting insight into technological progress. What is considered junk in 2024?
Something for everyone
As always, the items on offer range from universal treasures of the I-can’t-believe-they-put that-there variety, through this-is-treasure-to-someone-I’m-sure items, to absolute junk. Some things pass around the camp like legends; I wasn’t there when someone dropped off a box of LED panels for example, but I’ve heard the story relayed in hushed tones several times since, and even seen some of the precious haul. A friend snagged a still-current AMD processor and some Noctua server fans as another example, and I’m told that amazingly someone deposited a Playstation 5. But these are the exceptions, in most cases the junk is either very specific to something, or much more mundane. I saw someone snag an audio effects unit that may or may not work, and there are PC expansion cards and outdated memory modules aplenty.
Finally, there is the absolute junk, which some might even call e-waste but I’ll be a little more charitable about. Mains cables, VGA cables, and outdated computer books. Need to learn about some 1990s web technology? We’ve got you covered.
All the memory you needed back in 2012
It’s not junk, it’s treasure!
The 1990s
A handy box of gears, has to be useful to someone.
Perhaps most fascinating is what the junk tells us about the march of technology. There are bins full of VoIP telephones, symptomatic of the move to mobile devices even in the office. As an aside I saw a hackerspace member in his twenties using a phone hooked up to the camp’s copper phone network walk away with the handset clamped to his ear and yank the device off the table; it’s obvious that wired handsets are a thing of the past when adults no longer know how to use them. And someone dropped off an entire digital video distribution system probably from a hotel or similar, a huge box of satellite TV receivers and some very specialised rack modules with 2008 date codes on the chips. We don’t watch linear TV any more, hotel customers want streaming.
Amid all this treasure, what did I walk away with? As I have grown older I have restricted my urge to acquire, so I’m very wary at these places. Even so, there were a few things that caught my eye, a pair of Sennheiser headphones with a damaged cord, a small set of computer speakers — mainly because we don’t have anything in our village on which to play music — and because I couldn’t quite resist it, a microcassette recorder. As each new box arrives the hardware hackers swarm over it like flies though, so who knows what treasures I’ll be tempted by over the rest of the camp. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764149",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T14:28:32",
"content": "After seeing the photo of the box of books, the song “Dreamweaver” is stuck in my head. B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,371,895.728318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/turbocase-generates-a-pcb-shell-for-you/ | Turbocase Generates A PCB Shell For You | Arya Voronova | [
"Lifehacks",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"case design",
"KiCAD",
"openscad",
"pcb case"
] | Our PCBs greatly benefit from cases – what’s with all the pins that can be accidentally shorted, connectors that stick out of the outline, and cables pulling the board into different directions. Designing a case for your PCB might feel like a fair bit of effort – but it likely isn’t, thanks to projects like
turbocase
from [Martijn Braam].
This script generates simple and elegant OpenSCAD cases for your KiCad PCBs – you only need to draw a few extra lines in the PCB Editor, that’s it. It makes connector openings, too – add a “Height” property to your connector footprints to have them be handled automatically. Oh, and there’s
a few quality-of-life features
– if your project has mounting holes, the script will add threaded-insert-friendly standoffs to the case; yet another argument for adding mounting holes to your boards, in case you needed more.
Installing the script
is a single line, running it is merely another, and that will cover an overwhelming majority of boards out there;
the code is all open
too, of course. Want some more customization? Here’s some general project
enclosure
tutorials
for OpenSCAD, and a KiCad-friendly
StepUp tutorial.
Oh, and of course, there’s many more ways to enclose PCBs – our own [Bob Baddeley] has written
a guide to project enclosures
that you are bound to learn new things from.
We thank [adistuder] for sharing this with us! | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764108",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T11:55:03",
"content": "Martijn Braam, I know who that is. He’s very active in the pine community. Super friendly guy. He is/was a part of the pinetab team, if my memory serves me right. He helped me get my pinetab up an... | 1,760,371,895.903723 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/using-the-moire-effect-for-unique-clock-face/ | Using The Moiré Effect For Unique Clock Face | Bryan Cockfield | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"clock",
"light box",
"moire",
"moire pattern",
"stepper motor"
] | If you’ve ever seen artifacts on a digital picture of a computer monitor, or noticed an unsettling shifting pattern on a TV displaying someone’s clothes which have stripes, you’ve seen what’s called a Moiré pattern where slight differences in striping of two layers create an emergent pattern. They’re not always minor annoyances though; in fact they can be put to use in all kinds of areas from art to anti-counterfeiting measures. [Moritz] decided to put a few together
to build one of the more unique clock displays we’ve seen
.
The clock itself is made of four separate Moiré patterns. The first displays the hours with a stretching pattern, the second and third display the minutes with a circular pattern, and the seconds are displayed with a a spiral type. The “hands” for the clock are 3D printed with being driven by separate stepper motors with hall effect sensors for calibration so that the precise orientation of the patterns can be made. A pair of Arduinos control the clock with the high-accuracy DS3231 module keeping track of time, and [Moritz] built a light box to house the electronics and provide diffuse illumination to the display.
Moiré patterns can be used for a number of other interesting use cases we’ve seen throughout the years as well. A while back we saw one that
helps ships navigate without active animations or moving parts
and on a much smaller scale
they can also be used for extremely precise calipers
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764059",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T08:48:04",
"content": "Interesting, it’s almost like a lenticular display.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6764075",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T1... | 1,760,371,895.782677 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/this-mobile-hackerspace-can-be-yours/ | This Mobile Hackerspace Can Be Yours | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electromagnetic field",
"hacker camp",
"mobile hackerspace",
"portable hackerspace"
] | Wandering round the field at EMF Camp, our eye was caught by an unusual sight, at least to European eyes. The type of campervan body which sits on the back of a pickup truck is not particularly common on this side of the Atlantic, but there one was, fitted out as a mobile makerspace. If that wasn’t enough, this one is for sale.
Here at Hackaday we’re neither estate agents or in the want-ads business, so we’re unaccustomed to property promotion. We’re still not immune to the attraction of a portable makerspace to take to events though, and this one provides a very practical basis. It started life as what Brits call a Luton van body, a box van, and inside it’s gained a small kitchen, benches and shelves either side, and up in the space over the cab, a double bed. Sadly the laser cutter and 3D printers aren’t included.
If you live in Southern England and you want to be the envy of everyone at your next hacker camp, an email to richjmaynard at gmail dot com with a sensible offer might secure it. We would be first in the queue if we had the space, because what Wrencher scribe wouldn’t want an office like this! | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764053",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T08:05:39",
"content": "I love the use of copper plumbing pipe for a curtain rail, seems very appropriate.Missed opportunity though to have a toaster that both makes toast and reflows PCBs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,895.846579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/building-and-testing-a-1912-style-radio/ | Building And Testing A 1912-style Radio | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [] | A glimpse at a high-end radio set, for 1912. (Credit: [glasslinger], YouTube)
Doing electronics in the 1910s was rather rough, with the radio probably the pinnacle of hi-tech. Despite this, with some know-how and basic wood- and metal-working skills you could get pretty far with DIY-ing a radio set. As [glasslinger]
demonstrates
in a YouTube video, you can even build your own set with your own crafted tube-amplifier. With items like a hand-crafted resistor and capacitor – as well as tuning elements and period-correct point-to-point wiring – it definitely has that retro vibe to it.
Such DIY projects used to be very commonly featured in electronics magazine, even after the transistor came onto the scene by the 1950s. The fancier designs use a regenerative design,
like this one
by [Dick Whipple] which provides not only some background theory, but also the full schematic and how-to in case you feel like giving it a shake yourself.
Even if you’re not into crafting your own basic electronic components, radios like these are a great introduction to a lot of RF theory and amplification basics. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764027",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T04:53:07",
"content": "I used to absolutely love glasslinger for being who they are, delightfully nerdy, amazingly skilled and sufficiently quirky… up until one relatively tame political joke shattered my image of them… just t... | 1,760,371,896.444956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/hackaday-links-june-2-2024/ | Hackaday Links: June 2, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"ai",
"AR3664",
"aurora",
"cyberattack",
"hackaday links",
"hype",
"infrastructure",
"malware",
"marketing",
"sewage",
"solar storm",
"space weather",
"sunspot",
"thermal paste",
"water",
"windows xp"
] | So you say you missed the Great Solar Storm of 2024 along with its attendant aurora? We feel you on that; the light pollution here was too much for decent viewing, and it had been too long a day to make a drive into the deep dark of the countryside survivable. But fear not — the sunspot that raised all the ruckus back at the beginning of May has
survived the trip across the far side of the sun and will reappear in early June
, mostly intact and ready for business. At least sunspot AR3664 seems like it’s still a force to be reckoned with, having cooked off an X-class flare last Tuesday just as it was coming around from the other side of the Sun. Whether 3664 will be able to stir up another G5 geomagnetic storm remains to be seen, but since it fired off an X-12 flare while it was around the backside, you never know. Your best bet to stay informed in these trying times is the indispensable
Dr. Tamitha Skov
.
Back here on our soon-to-be-incinerated planet, you know we’ve reached the peak of the AI hype curve when you see something like
AI competitive thermal paste
being hawked. That’s the marketing niche Cooler Master has staked out for its new Cyrofuze 5 thermal paste, which is supposed to somehow make your computer smarter by keeping it cooler? Or maybe not; it’s not really clear from
Cooler Master’s Chinese website for the product
what the AI advantages are, and sadly the Cryofuze 5 line doesn’t seem to be offered on the US site. Which is a shame, because the new smartening goo comes in six designer colors that for all the world look like a Bob Ross palette — it that alizarin crimson and phthalo blue? Who in their right mind wouldn’t want a chance to color coordinate their thermal grease while simultaneously making their machine more AI competitive?
Speaking of AI, we’ve covered a lot of interactions between humans and autonomous vehicles in this column, with most of them tending toward the violent. But we’ve finally got
a more heartwarming interaction
to report, where a pedestrian helped a stuck delivery vehicle out of a tough spot. The truck, which is really only a little bigger than those munchie-delivering robots that ply college campuses, maneuvered itself onto a driveway sporting a pair of speed bumps spaced almost exactly as far apart as the vehicle’s wheelbase. The front wheels made it over the first bump, but when it came time to climb both obstacles at the same time, the poor little truck just couldn’t manage it. The fact that the bumps were a significant fraction of the wheel diameter on the tiny truck likely didn’t help, but thankfully a pedestrian took pity and gave the little fella a push. The bot’s rear wheels seemed to be having trouble clearing the last bump, too; the video cuts off too soon to tell, but we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Victim blame is generally in bad form, but
if you don’t even bother to change the default password
, can you really call a cyberattack a “break-in”? That’s the question we have after learning of an alarming increase in cyberattacks against public infrastructure in the US, including public water supplies in Pennsylvania and Texas. While the separate attacks resulted in no damage to the physical plants, the article links to a report listing some attacks that did result in damage, including an intentional release of 800,000 liters of sewage in Australia in 2000.
And finally, speaking of cybersecurity, if you’ve ever procrastinated on keeping your OS patched,
what happened when a Windows XP machine was put online with no protection
should spur you into action. YouTuber Eric Parker put an XP machine on the raw internet — no router, no firewall, and no anti-malware software. It only took about ten minutes for the first signs of infection to appear, and things went downhill pretty fast from there. Parker notes that the same setup on a Windows 7 machine resulted in no major malware infections after several hours, which should be a gut punch to those who fought so long against updating from XP. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764003",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T01:05:35",
"content": "You mean the dark side of the Sun?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6764136",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,371,896.229982 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/04/old-dot-matrix-displays-give-up-their-serial-secrets/ | Old Dot-Matrix Displays Give Up Their Serial Secrets | Dan Maloney | [
"LED Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"display",
"dot matrix",
"GPD340",
"INA219",
"pico",
"Plessey",
"reverse engineering",
"serial"
] | If there’s one thing we like better around here than old, obscure displays, it’s old, obscure displays with no documentation that need a healthy dose of reverse engineering before they can be put to use.
These Plessey dot-matrix displays
are a perfect example of that.
We’re not sure where [Michael] scored these displays, but they look fantastic. Each 8-pin DIP has two 5×7-matrix, high-visibility LED displays. They bear date codes from the late 80s under the part number, GPD340, but sadly, precious little data about them could be dredged up from the Interwebz. With 70 pixels and only six pins after accounting for power and ground, [Michael] figured there would be a serial protocol involved, but which pins?
He decided to brute-force the process of locating them, using a Pico to sequentially drive every combination while monitoring the current used with a current sensor. This paid off after only a few minutes, revealing that each character of the display has its own clock and data pins. The protocol is simple: pull the clock and data pins high then send 35 bits, which the display sorts out and lights the corresponding pixels. The video below shows a 12-character scrolling display in action.
Plessey made a lot of displays for military hardware, and these chunky little modules certainly have a martial air about them. Given that and the date code, these might have come from a Cold War-era bit of military hardware, like this
Howitzer data display
which sports another Plessey-made display. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764440",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T09:07:55",
"content": "oooh these are cute!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6764445",
"author": "preamp.org",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T09:53:15",
"content": "You... | 1,760,371,896.2766 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/a-human-sized-strowger-telephone-exchange/ | A Human-Sized Strowger Telephone Exchange | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"mechanical exchange",
"strowger",
"telephones"
] | A large hacker camp such as EMF 2024 always brings unexpected delights, and one of those could be found in the Null Sector cyberpunk zone: a fully functional Strowger mechanical telephone exchange. Better still, this wasn’t the huge array of racks we’ve come to expect from a mechanical exchange, but a single human-sized unit, maybe on a similar scale to a large refrigerator.
[LBPK]’s PAX
, or Private Automatic Exchange, is a private telephone network, 1950s style.
It stood at the back of the container, with a row of four telephones in front of it. We particularly liked the angular “Trimphone”, the height of 1960s and 70s chic. You could dial the other phones in the network with a two digit number, and watch the exchange clicking in the background as you did so. Some of the sounds weren’t quite the same as the full-sized equivalents, with the various tones being replaced by vibrating reeds.
This exchange has an interesting history, being built in 1956 by “Automatic Telephone & Electric” for the Midlands Electricity Board, power generator for much of central England, where it served its commercial life. On decommissioning it went to the Ffestiniog narrow gauge railway, in Wales. He was lucky enough to learn of its existence when the Ffestiniog had no further use for it, and snapped it up.
We have to admit, we want one of these, however he makes clear that it’s an unwieldy machine that requires quite some attention so a Hackaday mechanical exchange will have to remain a dream for now. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764499",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T14:24:20",
"content": "I wanted to call in, but it’s just a recording. Well done, though!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6764513",
"author": "nottinghamcitytrave... | 1,760,371,896.102715 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/gears-are-old-and-busted-capstans-are-cool/ | Gears Are Old And Busted, Capstans Are Cool | Elliot Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"capstan",
"gearing",
"reduction",
"robots"
] | Zero backlash, high “gear” reduction, high torque transparency, silent operation, and low cost. What is this miracle speed reduction technology, you ask? Well, it’s shoelaces and a bunch of 3D printed plastic, at least in [Aaed Musa]’s
latest installment in his series on developing his own robot dog
.
OK, the shoelaces were only used in the first proof of concept. [Aaed] shortly upgrades to steel cable, and finds out that steel fatigues and snaps after a few hours. He settles on Dyneema DM-20, a flexible yet non-stretching synthetic rope.
Before it’s all over, he got a five-bar linkage plotting with a pencil on the table and a quadriped leg jumping up and down on the table — to failure. All in all, it points to a great future, and we can’t wait to see the dog-bot that’s going to come out of this.
There’s nothing secret about using capstan drives, but we often wonder why we don’t see cable-powered robotics used more in the hacker world. [Aaed] makes the case that it pairs better with 3D printing than gears, where the surface irregularities really bind. If you want to get a jumpstart, the
test fixture that he’s using is available on GitHub
.
If you want to learn more about capstan drives, you absolutely need to check out our own [Sonya Vasquez]’s
Cable Mechanism Maths
. She brought some demos of her gear reduction mechanisms to
Supercon
, and they just feel like butter. (If I were a robot, that’s how I’d want my knees to feel.) | 45 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764383",
"author": "Aaed’s website is awesome!",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T02:31:13",
"content": "On his website, he spells his name Aaed Musa.His website is awesome too!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6764531",
"auth... | 1,760,371,896.191438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/attiny85-mouse-jiggler-lets-you-take-a-break/ | ATtiny85 Mouse Jiggler Lets You Take A Break | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"mouse jiggler",
"usb hid",
"V-USB"
] | The good news is that more and more people are working from home these days. The bad news is that some of the more draconian employers out there aren’t too happy about it, to the point of using
spyware
software to keep tabs on their workers. Better make that bathroom break quick — Big Brother is watching!
One simple way to combat such efforts is a mouse jiggler, which does…well it does exactly what it sounds like. If you find yourself in need of such a device, the
WorkerMouse from [Zane Bauman]
is a simple open source design that can be put together with just a handful of components.
The WorkerMouse is designed to be assembled using through-hole parts on a scrap of perfboard, but you could certainly swap them out for their SMD variants if that’s what you have on hand. The circuit is largely made up out of passive components anyway, except for the ATtiny85 that’s running the show.
[Zane] decided to
embrace modernity
and couple the circuit with a USB-C breakout board, but naturally you could outfit it with whatever USB flavor you want so long as you’ve got a cable that will let you plug it into your computer.
The project’s C source code uses V-USB to connect to the computer and act as a USB Human Interface Device (HID). From there, it generates random speed and position data for a virtual mouse, and dumps it out every few seconds. The end result is a cursor that leaps around the screen whenever the WorkerMouse is plugged in, which should be enough to show you online while you step away from the computer. As an added bonus, [Zane] has put together a nice looking 3D printable enclosure for the board. After all, the thing is likely going to be sitting on your desk, might as well have it look professional.
If you’ve got the time to get a PCB made, you might also be interested in the
MAUS we covered last year
, which
also
keeps the ATtiny85 working so you don’t have to. | 54 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764361",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T23:46:36",
"content": "Ages ago i got a mouse wiggler thing that moves the cursor like one pixel every so often to counteract the frequent dangerous auto-log-offs of my work computer. Best $15 I ever spent. Huge quality of life i... | 1,760,371,896.545606 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/aikens-secret-computing-machines/ | Aiken’s Secret Computing Machines | Elliot Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"History"
] | [
"computer history",
"harvard",
"Howard Aiken",
"ibm",
"mark I"
] | This neat video from the [Computer History Archives Project]
documents the development of the Aiken Mark I through Mark IV computers
. Partly shrouded in the secrecy of World War II and the Manhattan Project effort, the Mark I, “Harvard’s Robot Super Brain”, was built and donated by IBM, and marked their entry into what we would now call the computer industry.
Numerous computing luminaries used the Mark I, aside from its designer Howard Aiken. Grace Hopper, Richard Bloch, and even John von Neumann all used the machine. It was an electromechanical computer, using gears, punch tape, relays, and a five horsepower motor to keep it all running in sync. If you want to dig into how it actually worked, the deliciously named patent “
Calculator
” goes into some detail.
The video goes on to tell the story of Aiken’s various computers, the rift between Harvard and IBM, and the transition of computation from mechanical to electronic. If this is computer history that you don’t know, it’s well worth a watch. (And let us know if you also think that they’re using computer-generated speech to narrate it.)
If “modern” computer history is more your speed, check out
this documentary about ENIAC
.
Thanks [Stephen Walters] for the tip! | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764323",
"author": "Peter Petit",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T21:30:12",
"content": "I was born in 1951, after the Aiken machines were built. I did not know about this part of history, and appreciate your bringing to life with this video.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,371,896.359422 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/intentionally-overly-complex-clock-is-off-to-a-good-start/ | Intentionally Overly-Complex Clock Is Off To A Good Start | Donald Papp | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"clock",
"laser cut",
"marble run",
"rube goldberg"
] | [Kelton] from
Build Some Stuff
decided to create a clock that not only had kinetic elements, but
a healthy dose of Rube Goldberg inspiration
. The result is a work in progress, but one that looks awfully promising.
The main elements of the design are rotating pieces that indicate the hours and minutes, but each hour is advanced solely by the satisfying physical culmination of multiple interacting systems. Those systems also completely reset themselves every hour.
Each hour, a marble run kicks off a short chain reaction that culminates in advancing the hour.
At the top of the hour, a marble starts down a track and eventually tips over a series of hinged “dominoes”, which culminate in triggering a spring-loaded ratchet that advances the hour. The marble then gets carried back to the top of the device, ready for next time. Meanwhile, the domino slats and spring-loaded ratchets all get reset by a pulley system.
There’s still some work to do in mounting the motor, pulley system, and marble run. Also, a few bugs have surfaced, like a slight overshoot in the hour display. All par for the course for a device with such a large number of moving parts, we suppose.
[Kelton] has a pretty good sense how it will all work in the end, and it looks promising. We can’t wait to see it in its final form, but the tour of clock so far is pretty neat. Check it out in the video, embedded just under the page break.
As for the clock’s inspiration, Rube Goldberg’s cultural impact is hard to overstate and
our own Kristina Panos has an excellent article about the man
that might just teach you something you didn’t know. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764376",
"author": "Cantina fan",
"timestamp": "2024-06-04T01:22:34",
"content": "Reminds me of the breakfast scene in Pee Wee Herman.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,896.704197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/03/tech-in-plain-sight-theodolites/ | Tech In Plain Sight: Theodolites | Al Williams | [
"Engineering",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"theodolite"
] | We take it for granted that you can look at your phone and tell exactly where you are. At least, as exact as the GPS satellites will allow. But throughout human history, there has been a tremendous desire to know where here is, exactly. Where does my farm end and yours start? Where is the border of my city or country? Suppose you have a flagpole directly in the center of town and a clock tower at the edge of town. You know where they are precisely on a map. You also know how tall they are. What you need is a theodolite, which is an instrument that measures angles very precisely.
Why?
A USDA surveyor using a modern theodolite (public domain)
Suppose you could measure the angle to the top of the flagpole from where you are standing. It is simple geometry to calculate how far away the flagpole is. You have a right triangle where you know two angles — 90 degrees and the measured angle — and you know one side, the height. Suppose the flagpole is 50 meters tall and the angle you measure is 40 degrees.
Since the total of the angles must equal 180, you know the other angle is 50 degrees (90+50+40=180). Using some ugly math, you can figure out the whole triangle from that. The part we are interested in is the base and the result is that it is 59.588 meters long. That’s how far you are from the flagpole.
Of course, that doesn’t give you a spot. It gives you a circle with the flagpole in the middle. Suppose you now measure the angle to the 100-meter clock tower. (This town has tall things.) You find it to be 30 degrees. Now you can draw a circle around the clock tower with a radius of 173.205 meters. Presumably, those circles will touch in two places. You are at one of those two places.
If you have some idea where you are anyway, you probably know which of the two points you are at. If not, you could sight a third thing. Of course, you have to be able to see the flagpole and other reference points. If you really want a stable reference, you can do the same trick with stars since you can look up exactly where they are over at a given time and their relative height.
In real life, over large distances, it is a bit trickier because the Earth is not flat — honest. So you can do even hairier math to compensate for that.
Measuring Angles
On ships, you often measure angles with a sextant. A theodolite is very similar but more suitable for making very precise measurements on the ground while a sextant measures the angle between two items, one of them usually the horizon. To the uninitiated, the device looks like a small telescope on a tripod. However, looking through the eyepiece will reveal a crosshair and some way to read the horizontal and vertical angles of the telescope. In the old days, this was probably just a pointer and scale but a modern device will have a digital readout.
Sometimes you hear these called transits. Actually, this is a special type of theodolite more properly known as a transit theodolite. The identifying feature is that the telescope is short enough to go full circle around the vertical axis. The idea is you could measure the angle one way, flip it around, and measure again. Averaging the results will reduce certain errors that have an opposite sign when you measure this way.
In addition to the telescope, there is a centering plate, levels, and a compass. (The centering plate is called a
tribrach
, which is an interesting instrument in its own right.) The idea is to be able to put the instrument in an exact place, level it, point it in a certain direction, sight and focus on a distant object, and then be able to read the azimuth and elevation to the target.
Grady at Practical Engineering will show you how surveyors use this instrument in the video below. He even gives you some homework to try if you want to get the topography of your backyard and don’t have a theodolite hanging around the garage.
History
Ramsden’s Theodolite from1787
The theodolite seems like an obvious idea, but there were problems in calibrating the scales precisely. Jesse Ramsden solved this problem in 1787 and his instrument would go on to complete the first high-precision survey of all of Great Britain and Ireland.
Earlier instruments like the groma and dioptra only did part of what a theodolite can do. Early forerunners go back as far as the 1500s when several measuring devices that could go in both orientations appeared. However, incorporating everything — the telescope, the spirit levels, and a compass would wait until Jonathan Sisson’s 1725 instrument. But Ramsden made one with high precision due to his dividing engine to create precisely spaced markings. His dividing engine used a tangent screw mechanism that his improved screw-cutting lathe produced and could achieve one arcsecond (4.8 microradians) division. That is, a full circle would divide into almost 1.3 million parts.
For many years, the basic design didn’t change much. Sure, there were slight improvements and even adaptations for special purposes. For example, Edward Ritchie developed a theodolite for use on water that employed a pendulum to counteract wave movement. The U. S. Navy used these to survey harbors in the 1870s.
But it would be the 1920s when
Heinrich Wild
provided an optical path for the readings so that both angle measurements were visible through the instrument’s eyepiece. This was easier to use and less prone to dust and rain problems on external measuring scales.
In Use Today
Of course, surveyors use these instruments. But they also find use in tracking weather balloons and construction. These days a “total station” will measure everything electronically. They may also measure the distance to the target. Even in 1986, you could get a total station, and the video below shows a Wild Heerbrugg T2000 from the inside out.
Back in the day, theodolites were important for
tracking rockets
. Of course, these days, you can often use other means to find things like rocket altitude or
exact locations
.
Featured image from “
Surveying & Mapping Technicians
“, a video produced by the US Dept. of Labor. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764208",
"author": "Cree",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T17:46:00",
"content": "Ah the memories… I used to help out my Dad every now and then for almost two decades. Me being the son (and him being the Boss) my job was to set up the Theodolite in the field so he could do the important s... | 1,760,371,896.773731 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/make-a-super-cute-lidar-measurement-module/ | Make A Super Cute LiDAR Measurement Module | Donald Papp | [
"Parts",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"distance sensor",
"TOF",
"VL53L0X"
] | This ultra-cute
tiny LiDAR rangefinder
project by [gokux] can be thought of as a love letter to the incredible resources and components hobbyists and hackers of all types have access to nowadays. In fact, it all stemmed from coming across a miniscule half-inch 64×32 OLED display module that was simply too slick to pass up.
USB connector for charging on the bottom, hole for distance sensor out the top.
To use it, one simply powers it on and the display will read out the distance in millimeters. The VL53L0X time-of-flight sensor inside works by sending out a laser pulse and measuring how long it takes for the pulse to bounce back. We hope you’re curious about what such a sensor looks like on the inside, because
here’s a nifty teardown of these fantastic devices
. The device can technically measure distances of up to 2 m, but [gokux] says accuracy drops off after 1 m.
The main components besides the OLED display and VL53L0X sensor are an ESP32-C3 board (which handily integrates battery charging circuitry), 3D-printed enclosure, tiny rechargeable battery, and power switch. The whole thing is under one cubic inch. Not bad, and it even makes a passable keychain. Parts list, code, and 3D model files, including STEP format, are all available if you’d like to spend an afternoon making your own. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6764006",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03T01:59:26",
"content": "Too bad the VLxxL0X’s API’s are such a mess (and not open).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6764076",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,371,896.82385 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/2024-business-card-challenge-snakes-on-a-business-card/ | 2024 Business Card Challenge: Snakes On A Business Card | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Games"
] | [
"2024 Business Card Challenge",
"business card",
"snake",
"snake game",
"stm32f0"
] | Once [Lambert the Maker] saw the Arduboy, he knew the thing was ripe for remixing into a business card with an 8×8 LED matrix instead of an OLED screen. [Lambert] already has a PCB business card for work, but it looks like it doesn’t do anything. So
this Snake-playing card is for their personal information
.
The brains of this operation is an STM32F0, which required a bit of finesse when it came to programming the LEDs. According to the datasheet, the max current through a given GPIO pin is 30 mA. The LEDs are running at 20 mA through the limiting resistor, so the code only turns on one LED at a time and makes sure the previous one is off first. The whole screen is updated every 125 ms, and persistence of vision takes care of making the animation look right.
In the short videos after the break, you’ll see a preview followed by brief videos on versions one and two. The prototype was built in 2020, when the board house only offered green PCBs with their assembly service. Fast forward to 2024, when the board house is now offering colors other than green.
Version two is actually thinner than a credit card, and features tiny buttons instead of cap-sense pads for input. [Lambert] also added a floating ADC pin that acts as a random number generator, placing the apple in a new location every time the game is powered on. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,896.865184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/micropython-1-23-brings-custom-usb-devices-openamp-much-more/ | MicroPython 1.23 Brings Custom USB Devices, OpenAMP, Much More | Arya Voronova | [
"Microcontrollers",
"News"
] | [
"hid",
"HID usb",
"micro python",
"micropython",
"Micrypython",
"python",
"usb hid",
"USB HID Keyboard",
"USB serial"
] | MicroPython is a wonderful Python interpreter that runs on many higher-end microcontrollers, from ESP8266 to STM32 to the RP2040. MicroPython lets you build devices quickly, and
its latest release, 1.23,
brings a number of improvements you should be aware of.
The first one is custom USB device support, and it’s a big one. Do you want to build HID devices, or play with MIDI, or do multiple serial streams with help of PIO? Now MicroPython lets you easily create USB devices on a variety of levels, from friendly wrappers for creating HID or MIDI devices, to low-level hooks to let you define your own USB descriptors, with user-friendly libraries to help all the way through. Currently, SAMD and RP2040 ports are supported in this part of code, but you can expect more in the future.
Hooray to 10 years of MicroPython!
There’s more –
support for OpenAMP,
an inter-core communication protocol, has received a ton of improvements for systems where MicroPython reigns supreme on some of the CPU cores but also communicates with different systems on other cores. A number of improvements have made their way through the codebase, highlighting things we didn’t know MicroPython could do – for instance, did you know that there’s a WebAssembly port in the interpreter, letting you run MicroPython in your browser?
Well, it’s got a significant overhaul in this release, so there’s no better time to check it out than now! Library structure has been refactored to improve CPython compatibility, the RP2040 port receives a 10% performance boost thanks to core improvements, and touches upon areas like PIO and SPI interfaces.
We applaud all contributors involved on this release. MicroPython is now a decade old as of May 3rd, and it keeps trucking on, having firmly earned its place in the hacker ecosystem. If you’ve been playing with MicroPython, remember that there are
multiple
IDEs
,
graphics
libraries,
and
you can bring your C code with you! | 25 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763871",
"author": "zit",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T14:25:27",
"content": "Does it have the pointers?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6763925",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T18:36:52",
"content": "Lets... | 1,760,371,896.945883 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/give-your-thinkpad-x1-nano-an-internal-usb-port/ | Give Your Thinkpad X1 Nano An Internal USB Port | Arya Voronova | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"logitech",
"logitech receiver",
"logitech unifying receiver",
"thinkpad",
"wireless mouse"
] | How hard could it be to add an extra USB port inside your laptop? As [Joshua Stein] shows, it can be decently hard, but you will have fun along the way.
His journey
involves a Thinkpad X1 Nano, and his tech setup means it’d be most comfortable for him to have a USB port inside its case, for a Logitech mouse’s USB receiver. It wasn’t smooth sailing all throughout, but the end result is no doubt beautifully executed.
M.2 B-key, A-key and E-key slots have USB 2.0 available on them – you’d think that’s perfect for such a receiver, and there’s even plug and play adapters for this on places like eBay. Unfortunately, none of these, as Lenovo implements wireless card whitelists to this day. Tinkering with the whitelist on [Joshua]’s laptop resulted in BIOS digital signature check failures, and the USB-connected fingerprint reader was ultimately chosen as the most viable path.
Initially, he’s tested the fingerprint reader with an FPC breakout, having the USB connection work – many a hacker would stop here, pulling a few bodge wires from the breakout. [Joshua], however, raised the bar, creating a flexible PCB that would pull the fingerprint connector signals to a spot in the case where the USB receiver could fit neatly, with a 5 V step-up on the board, too.
[Joshua] tops it off by showing a 3D-printed spacer that goes into now-vacant spot where the fingerprint reader used to be. This mod is not open-source as far as we can see, but it’s definitely an inspiration. Want to put even more USB devices inside your laptop? Perhaps
a tiny USB hub
would help, in line with
the EEE PC mods
that aimed to stuff the tiny laptop with the largest amount of USB
devices
possible. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763876",
"author": "Jens",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T14:49:09",
"content": "Well done but hard to believe all these dongles are still necessary.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6763913",
"author": "henningdkf29543cc0f"... | 1,760,371,897.063384 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/02/why-your-old-phone-sounded-the-way-it-did/ | Why Your Old Phone Sounded The Way It Did | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"exchange",
"mechanical telephone",
"telephone"
] | The mobile phone may be sweeping away the traditional wired phone, but that doesn’t change the fascinating history and technology of the older device. At [This Museum Is Not Obsolete] they have a fully functional mechanical telephone exchange as one of their exhibits, and
they’ve published a video examining the various sounds it’s capable of making
.
When a voice synthesiser was the stuff of science fiction, exchange status couldn’t be communicated by anything but a set of different tones. If you’ve ever encountered a mechanical exchange you’ll recognise the harsh-sounding low-frequency dial tone, and the various sets of beeps denoting different call status. These were produced with a set of oscillators being switched in and out by shaped cams, and the bank of these on their exchange is most of the subject of this video. The common ones such as the engaged tone and the dial tone are explained, but also some we’d never heard such as the one signifying the exchange as out of capacity.
We may never own a mechanical exchange of our own, but we’re glad that someone does and is sharing it with us. You can see the video below the break. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763827",
"author": "Ragnar",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T08:51:19",
"content": "I used to be in charge of the so called Ruf- und Signalmaschine in the early ’90. They came as a couple and got switched over daily, as it turned out if you use a main one and one just for backup, the back... | 1,760,371,897.006391 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/01/hands-on-with-the-electromagnetic-field-2024-badge/ | Hands-On With The Electromagnetic Field 2024 Badge | Jenny List | [
"cons"
] | [
"badgelife",
"electromagnetic field",
"Tildagon"
] | With every large event in our circles comes a badge, and Electromagnetic Field 2024 is no exception. We’ve told you about
the Tildagon
when it was announced, it’s a hexagonal badge designed with provision for user-created “Hexpansions”, which can be picked up at future camps. The idea of this badge is to make something with a lifetime beyond the one camp, and we’re interested to have received our badge. It’s unusual for a hacker camp badge in that it costs a little extra rather than just coming with the ticket.
This badge is not particularly difficult to assemble.
In a pair of anti-static bags are the front and rear PCB assemblies, a piece of ribbon cable, a couple of glue pads, and some screws. It could be bought with a battery, however since it’s compatible with the EMF 2016 and 2018 batteries we opted to use one of those instead. Assembly is a case of attaching the cable between the two boards, sticking the battery in place with the glue pads, hooking it up, and screwing the two together.
Looking at the boards, we find the ESP32-S3 microcontroller running the show, and the six sockets for the hexpansions. These last components as well as a set of metal threaded standoffs are evidently not cheap parts, and we’re guessing they’ve had quite some effect on the BOM. The front PCB has a round LCD display module attached, this is of slight interest because it’s done with a row of offset PCB holes rather than a socket. It appears to form a decent connection and hold on to the display adequately.
Never judge a badge by day one firmware
Software-wise, there’s the option for an over-the-air update, which we did through the camp network. There are a set of buttons round the points of the hexagon which form the interface, but sadly there’s little in the way of cues as to which does what and it’s a case of figuring it out for yourself. We managed to repeatedly crash our badge when we tried anything, however it’s not unusual for better working firmware versions to emerge hot on the heels of the badge itself.
We like the hardware of this badge, it’s robust and cleverly designed. We like the idea of a badge for future camps too, and the hexpansions are a pretty neat idea. It’s plain that the firmware version on the first day is a bit flaky, but especially since this is a badge for the long term we’re sure this will get better. All-in-all an eye-catching badge with a future! | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763865",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T13:43:57",
"content": "SAO sockets?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6764339",
"author": "Andy Piper",
"timestamp": "2024-06-03... | 1,760,371,897.163625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/01/use-that-one-port-for-high-speed-fpga-data-export/ | Use That One Port For High-Speed FPGA Data Export | Arya Voronova | [
"FPGA",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"data export",
"fpga",
"fpga interface",
"hdmi",
"hdmi capture card"
] | There’s a good few options for exporting data out of FPGAs, like Ethernet, USB2, or USB3. Many FPGAs have a HDMI (or rather, sparkling DVI) port as well, and [Steve Markgraf] brings us
the hsdaoh project
— High-Speed Data Acquisition Over HDMI, using USB3 capture cards based on the Macrosilicon MS2130 chipset to get the data from the FPGA right to your PC.
Current FPGA-side implementation
is designed for Sipeed Tang chips and the GOWIN toolchain, but it should be portable to an open-source toolchain in the future. Make sure you’re using a USB3 capture card with a MS2130 chipset, load the test code into your FPGA, run
the userspace capture side
, and you’re ready to add this interface to your FPGA project! It’s well worth it, too – during testing, [Steve] has got data transfer speeds up to 180 MB/s, without the USB3 complexity.
As a test, [Steve] shows us an RX-only SDR project using this interface, with respectable amounts of bandwidth. The presentation goes a fair bit into the low-level details of the protocol, from HDMI fundamentals, to manipulating the MS2130 registers in a way that disables all video conversion; do
watch the recording
, or at least
skim the slides!
Oh, and if you don’t own a capture card yet,
you really should,
as it makes for a wonderful Raspberry Pi hacking companion in times of need. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763892",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T16:09:43",
"content": "Long time ago I hoped Cypress FX3 USB3 bridge price would come down to earth into $10-20 range. No such luck :( leaving us with hacks like this one as the only reasonably priced option :/",
"parent_id... | 1,760,371,897.113837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/quick-capable-wifi-for-your-nice-power-supply/ | Quick & Capable WiFi For Your Nice-Power Supply | Arya Voronova | [
"Tool Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"lab automation",
"nice-power",
"power supply",
"psu",
"wemos d1 mini"
] | Rejoice, those of us who have purchased a Nice-Power lab PSU from an Eastern source. Yes, the name might sound like a re-brand of a generic product, maybe you will even see this exact PSU on a shelf at a physical store near you, under a more local brand name and with a fair markup. Nevermind the circumstances, the most important part is that [Georgi Dobrishinov] found a way to add an ESP8266 to the PSU by tapping its internal UART control interface, and wrote a web UI for all your Internet-of-Lab-PSUs needs, called
the PowerLinkESP project.
All you need is a Wemos D1 development board, or any other ESP8266 board that has UART pins exposed and handles 5 V input. [Georgi] brings everything else, from pictures showing you where to plug it in and where to tap 5 V, to extensive instructions on how to compile and upload the code, using just the Arduino IDE. Oh, and he tops it off with
STLs for a 3D printed case,
lest your Wemos D1 board flop around inside.
With [Georgi]’s software, you can monitor your PSU with interactive charts for all readings, export charts in both PNG and CSV, and access a good few features. Your ESP8266’s network uplink is also highly configurable, from an STA mode for a static lab config, to an AP mode for any on-the-go monitoring from your phone, and it even switches between them automatically! The firmware makes your PSU all that more practical, to the point that if you’re about to build an interface for your PSU, you should pay attention to [Georgi]’s work.
Lab PSUs with WiFi integration are worth looking into, just check out
our review of this one;
smart features are so nice to have, we hackers straight up
rewrite PSU firmware to get there
if we have to. Oh, and if you ever feel like standardizing your work so that it can interface to a whole world of measurement equipment, look no further than SCPI, something that’s
easier to add to your project
than you might expect, even with as little as
Python and a Pi. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763543",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-06-01T02:58:41",
"content": "After reading the blog, and the link, I still don’t know if the output is controlled via WiFi. (On/Off, voltage/current, etc.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,897.497627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/a-look-inside-the-geochron-clock/ | A Look Inside The Geochron Clock | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"analemma",
"clock",
"geochron",
"map",
"synchronous",
"world map",
"world time"
] | There are plenty of cool clocks out there, and maps by their very essence are cool, too. But
a map that’s also a clock
— or is it a clock that’s also a map? — has to be the coolest thing ever.
Of course we’re talking about the Geochron, a world clock that makes the relationship between the Earth and the Sun clear and has graced the offices of executives who want to impress visitors with the global nature of their importance for decades. [Attoparsec] has long coveted one of these electromechanical beauties, and when a used one popped up online for a pittance, at least compared to what they cost new, he jumped at the chance.
The Geochron he ended up with was in need of some TLC, but surprisingly little considering its mid-1980s vintage. The real treat in the video below is getting to see how these wonderful devices work. They’re basically simple slide projectors. While we here in the future would simply do everything in software on a nice flat-screen display, the base map, night-day terminators, and calendar are all contained on transparent elements that move under the power of a synchronous motor across a lighted platen. The analemma display is particularly cool; an indicator tracks the Sun’s position over the Earth with a cam that encodes the equation of time in its shape, moving through its familiar bi-lobed loop as the seasons progress.
Any clock that comes with a set of blueprints for installation purposes is alright in our book, and kudos to [Attoparsec] for landing this prize and getting it back in shape. His description of it as “the greatest clock of all time” is apt, but perhaps with
a little competition
. Or maybe
a lot
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763545",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2024-06-01T03:26:05",
"content": "also this?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIZG-0MhoOI",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6763557",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,897.436598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/ch32v003-makes-for-dirt-cheap-risc-v-computer/ | CH32V003 Makes For Dirt Cheap RISC-V Computer | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"assembly language",
"CH32V003",
"educational",
"RISC-V"
] | These days, when most folks think of a computer they imagine a machine with multiple CPUs, several gigabytes of RAM, and a few terabytes of non-volatile storage for good measure. With such modern expectations, it can be difficult to see something like a microcontroller as little more than a toy. But if said MCU has a keyboard, is hooked up to a display, and lets you run basic productivity and development software, doesn’t that qualify it as a computer? It certainly would have in the 1980s.
With that in mind,
[Olimex] has teased the RVPC
, which they’re calling the “world lowest cost Open Source Hardware All-in-one educational RISC-V computer” (say that three times fast). The tiny board features the SOIC-8 variant of the CH32V003 and…well, not a whole lot else. You’ve got a handful of passives, a buzzer, an LED, and the connectors for a PS/2 keyboard, a power supply, and a VGA display. The idea is to offer this as a beginner’s soldering kit in the future, so most most of the components are through-hole.
On the software side, the post references things like the
ch32v003fun development stack
, and the
PicoRVD
programmer as examples of open source tools that can get your CH32V computer up and running. There’s even a
selection of retro-style games
out there that would be playable on the platform. But what [Olimex] really has their eye on is a
port of VMON
, a RISC-V monitor program.
When paired with the 320×200 VGA text mode that they figure the hardware is capable of, you’ve got yourself the makings of an educational tool that would be great for learning assembly and playing around with bare metal programming.
It might not have the
timeless style of the Voja4
, but at least you can fit it in a normal sized pocket.
Thanks to [PPJ] for the tip. | 36 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763516",
"author": "Bert",
"timestamp": "2024-05-31T22:00:55",
"content": "I want one. If it prints my name infinitely down the screen, I will be in retro heaven.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6763520",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,897.709054 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/generating-a-lost-password-by-traveling-back-in-time/ | Generating A Lost Password By Traveling Back In Time | Jenny List | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"brute force",
"password",
"random number"
] | It’s probable that some of you reading this will have been approached in the past by people who’ve lost the password to their crypto wallets. They hear that you’re involved in some kind of “hacking”, and they cling to the forlorn hope that you might just be able to recover their lost wealth. For most of us there’s little chance we can help, but in [Joe Grand]’s case he has made it something of a specialism. He’s given
an account of how he and a friend recovered a particularly difficult password
.
The password in question had been generated by RoboForm, a long random string that was impossible for its owner to remember. The only chance of finding it lay in discovering a flaw in RoboForm, and that seemed hopeless until the discovery of a changelog reference to improving the random number generation of the software.
The video below details some of the detective work required to find the password, first reverse engineering an old version of RoboForm to find the flaw, and then the discovery that the random seed was derived from the system time. A range of passwords could be created for a given time frame, reducing the odds of finding the password considerably. The story is not without its twists, but it ends with the wallet’s owner rather theatrically being presented with a giant fake Bitcoin check. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763540",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2024-06-01T02:32:44",
"content": "time(NULL) is not the most secure method of seeding a PRNG, I think banging your fists on the keyboard would be more random. We can iterate through all times in a given range to find the state which corresp... | 1,760,371,897.563356 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/hackaday-podcast-episode-273-a-tube-snoot-dynamic-button-blobs-and-tokamaks-arent-whack/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 273: A Tube Snoot, Dynamic Button Blobs, And Tokamaks Aren’t Whack | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, it was Kristina’s turn in the hot seat with Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news: Germany’s solar and wind power generation have resulted in excess energy, which some people think is bad. In Hackaday news,
the entries
in
the 2024 Business Card Challenge
are really stacking up.
Then it’s on to What’s That Sound, which Kristina provided this week and managed to stump Elliot. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with an improved spectrometer that wasn’t easy, and a rotary phone kitchen timer that kind of was. We’ll talk about badges turned invitations, reinventing rotary switches, and dynamic button blobs. Finally, we get the lowdown on the state of nuclear fusion, and posit why chatting online isn’t what it used to be.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download and savor at your leisure
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 273 Show Notes:
News:
Germany’s Solar Expansion And The Negative Effects Of Electricity Overproduction
What’s that Sound?
Fill out this form with your best guess
, and you might win!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
An Improved Spectrometer, No Lasers Required
Rotary Phone Lives On As Arduino Kitchen Timer
Reinventing Rotary Switches With Stepper Motors
Adafruit Badges Turned Electronic Invitations
CampCrossing
Hunting For Part Numbers: Analyzing The Buck Converter On Mini 560 Modules
Dynamic Buttons Are Weird Blobs You Can Press
Lightweight Haptic Gloves With Electro-Osmotic Pump Arrays
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Connecting (And Using) High-Capacity Batteries In Parallel
How A DOS Format Blunder Revealed Some Priceless Source Code
One Man’s Trash Is… A Rare $60,000 Historical Computer
Kristina’s Picks:
Linear LED Clock Looks Decidedly Vintage
Oh Brother, Would You Look At This Cistercian Clock
Printing A Replacement Case For The ThinkPad 701c
The Secret Behind The Motion Of Microsoft’s Bendy Mouse
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Nuclear Fusion R&D In 2024: Getting Down To The Gritty Details
How Facebook Killed Online Chat
ICQ Will Shut Down On June 26 This Year | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763477",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-05-31T17:55:00",
"content": "Having negative prices for power is not a good thing, because the reason the price is negative is that someone is paying for the power anyways. That is the only reason the solar/wind producers are able to pu... | 1,760,371,897.618122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/a-scope-test-tool-you-can-build-with-just-a-pico/ | A Scope Test Tool You Can Build With Just A Pico | Arya Voronova | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"pi pico",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rp2040",
"signal generator",
"test equipment"
] | Ever wanted to see how well your oscilloscope adheres to its stated capabilities? What if you buy a new scope and need a quick way to test it lest one of its channels its broken, like [Paul Wasserman] had happen to him? Now you only need a Pi Pico and a few extra components to make a scope test board with a large variety of signals it can output, thanks to [Paul]’s
Sig Gen Pi Pico firmware.
Despite the name it’s not a signal generator as we know it, as it’s not flexible in the signals it generates. Instead, it creates a dozen signals at more or less the same time — from square waves of various frequencies and duty cycles, to a PWM-driven DAC driving eight different waveforms, to Manchester-encoded data I2C/SPI/UART transfers for all your protocol decoder testing.
Everything is open source under the BSD 3-Clause license, and there’s even
two PDFs with documentation
and a user manual, not to mention
the waveform screenshots
for your own reference.
It’s seriously impressive how many features [Paul] has fit into a single firmware. Thanks to his work, whenever you have some test equipment in need of being tested, just grab your Pico and a few passive components. | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763431",
"author": "Cornelius",
"timestamp": "2024-05-31T15:39:30",
"content": "A long time ago…… in a more civilized age, before the dark times…. Tek marketing would actually send you a little circuit board powered by a 9volt battery. The board would generate multiple waveforms th... | 1,760,371,897.836588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/this-week-in-security-operation-endgame-appliance-carnage-and-router-genocide/ | This Week In Security: Operation Endgame, Appliance Carnage, And Router Genocide | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Internet Appliance",
"Operation Endgame",
"This Week in Security"
] | This week saw an impressive pair of takedowns
pulled off by law enforcement agencies around the world
. The first was the 911 S5 botnet, Which the FBI is calling “likely the world’s largest botnet ever”. Spreading via fake free VPN services, 911 was actually a massive proxy service for crooks. Most lately, this service was operating under the name “Cloud Router”. As of this week, the service is down, the web domain has been seized, and the alleged mastermind, YunHe Wang, is in custody.
The other takedown is interesting in its own right.
Operation Endgame
seems to be psychological warfare as well as actual arrests and seizures. The website features animated shorts, a big red countdown clock, and a promise that more is coming. The actual target was the ring that manage malware droppers — sort of middlemen between initial shellcode, and doing something useful with a compromised machine. This initial volley includes four arrests, 100+ servers disrupted, and 2,000+ domains seized.
The arrests happened in Armenia and Ukraine. The messaging around this really seems to be aimed at the rest of the gang that’s out of reach of law enforcement for now. Those criminals may still be anonymous, or operating in places like Russia and China. The unmistakable message is that this operation is coming for the rest of them sooner or later.
Checkpoint CloudGuard
And now we turn to the massive number of security and VPN appliances that got detailed exploit write-ups this week. And up first is
the Watchtowr treatment of Check Point CloudGuard appliance, and the high priority information exposure CVE
. This vulnerability already has a patch, so the obvious starting point is patch diffing. Thanks to a new log message in the patch, it’s pretty clear that this is actually a path traversal attack.
The vulnerable endpoint is
/clients/MyCRL
, which is a file download endpoint used for fetching updates to the VPN client. Based on
Check Point’s CVSS string regarding this vulnerability
, that endpoint is accessible without any authentication. The thing about this endpoint is that it takes an argument, and returns the file requested based on that argument. There is a list of allowed files and folders, but the check on incoming requests uses the
strstr()
C function, which simply checks whether one string
contains
a second.
One of the entries on this list was the
CSHELL/
directory, which is the last piece of the puzzle to make for a nasty exploit. Send a POST to
/clients/MyCRL
requesting
aCSHELL/../../../../../../../etc/shadow
and the shadow password file is returned. This gives essentially arbitrary file read due to path traversal on a public endpoint.
Interestingly, the vendor states that the issue only affects devices with username-and-password authentication enabled, and not with the (much stronger) certificate authentication enabled.
There’s some definite weirdness going on with how the CVSS score was calculated, and
how Check Point opted to disclose this
. Cross-referencing from
another vendor’s statement
, it becomes clear that the fastest way to turn this into a full exploit is by grabbing the password hashes of users, and any legacy local users with password-only accounts can be mined for weak passwords. But make no mistake, this is an unauthorized arbitrary file read vulnerability, and the hash capture is just one way to exploit it. Attacks are ongoing, and the fix is available.
Fortinet FortiSIEM
One of my most/least favorite things to cover is trivial vulnerability patch bypasses. There’s nothing that disturbs and amuses like knowing that a Fortinet command injection in the NFS IP address was
rediscovered in the NFS mount point field of the exact same endpoint
.
If the botched fix wasn’t bad enough, the public disclosure was almost worse. There was over a month of lag between the disclosure and reproduction of the reported issue. Then Fortinet silently rolled out patches a couple weeks later, with no disclosure at all. The CVEs were eventually released, but then claimed to be a duplicate, and published in error. And now finally the whole story is available.
Ivanti Landesk
And rounding out the appliance vulnerabilities is
this one in the Avanti Landesk
, where a data flow can reach a
strncpy()
call, that takes user-supplied input for the number of bytes to copy, and a fixed buffer destination. Overflowing that buffer allows for function pointer overwrite, and writing even more data into this area eventually reaches a read-only section of memory. The write attempt triggers an exception, which bounces through a few functions, and eventually calls a pointer that has already been overwritten in the attack. A bit of Return Oriented Programming (ROP) magic, and the shellcode is marked executable and jumped into, for arbitrary code execution.
The flaw does require a low-privilege user account, and the vulnerable code hasn’t been in the product since the 2021.1 release. Ivanti has issued a CVE, but since the last vulnerable release is outside its support window, there won’t be any patches published.
Bricking 600,000 Routers
This one is just odd. Last year, the US ISP Windstream
had about 600,000 DSL routers crash and permanently die
over three days. The theory at the time was that this was a flubbed firmware upgrade, but researchers from Lumen did some quick detective work, and managed to snag malicious binaries that were actively flowing to the Windstream network.
It turns out that those routers were infected by the Chalubo malware, although the the initial infection vector is still unknown. Given the circumstances, it’s likely due to an internal breach at Windstream, possibly even an insider attack. Chalubo is designed to enable remote access, and can be used to launch DDOS attacks, among other capabilities. It’s not typical for this malware to immediately wipe devices, leading to the speculation that the malware was used for plausible deniability, to shield the actual perpetrators. This has signs of being an insider attack, by a disgruntled admin at Windstream, though there is not any hard evidence at the moment.
Bits and Bytes
Like a bad penny, North Korea has come back up with the FakePenny malware campaign. In Microsoft’s fun APT naming scheme,
this is the work of Moonstone Sleet
, whose usual strategy is to backdoor popular software and spread it however they can. In a major ransomware deployment, Moonstone Sleet requested $6.6 million in Bitcoin, which is quite the step up from previous campaigns.
And lastly, Ticketmaster seems to have
a 560 million user data breach on its hands
. Data brokers on the Breach Forums claim to have this in a 1.3 terabyte database, and is willing to part with it for merely half-a-million dollars. There is a bit of a backstory here, as Breach Forums is run by ShinyHunters, and the whole operation
was shut down by the FBI a couple weeks ago
. That didn’t last long, and it looks like they’re back, and back in business. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763602",
"author": "shod",
"timestamp": "2024-06-01T13:51:17",
"content": "Can anybody, anybody at all, I mean ANYBODY explain to me why paying ransomware isn’t illegal in every damn country and region in the world?And I don’t mean a BS story but the real reason.",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,371,897.764808 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/06/01/globetune-will-widen-your-musical-horizons/ | GlobeTune Will Widen Your Musical Horizons | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"internet radio",
"music",
"world music"
] | Are you tired of the same old music, but can’t afford any new tunes, even if they’re on dead formats? Boy, do we know that feeling. Here’s what you do:
build yourself a GlobeTune music player
, and you’ll never want for new music again.
The idea is simple, really. Just turn what we assume is a nice, clicky knob, and after a bit of static (which is a great touch!), you get a new, random radio station from somewhere around the globe. [Alexis D.] originally built this as a way to listen to and discover new music while disconnecting from the digital world, and we think it’s a great idea.
[Alexis D.] has production in mind, so after a Raspberry Pi Zero W prototype, they set about redesigning it around the ESP32. The current status seems to be hardware complete, software forthcoming. [Alexis D.] says that a crowdfunding campaign is in the works, but that the project will be open-sourced once in an acceptable state. So stay tuned!
Speaking of dead-ish formats,
here’s an Internet radio in a cassette form factor
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6763786",
"author": "philosiraptor117",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T04:50:27",
"content": "music potato. change my mind.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6763803",
"author": "Le Gru",
"timestamp": "2024-06-02T06:34:46",
... | 1,760,371,897.886056 |
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