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https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/raspberry-pi-scanner-digitizes-on-the-cheap/ | Raspberry Pi Scanner Digitizes On The Cheap | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"document scanner",
"Pi camera",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi 4B",
"Raspberry pi camera"
] | It’s pretty important in 2024 to be able digitize documents quickly and easily without necessarily having to stop by the local library or buy an all-in-one printer. While there are plenty of commercial solutions out there, [Caelestis Cosplay] has created
a simple document scanner that takes documents, as [Caelestis Cosplay] puts it, from papers to pixels.
The build is probably what you’re expecting — it’s essentially a Raspberry Pi (in this case a 4B), a V2 Pi camera, and a handful of custom 3D-printed parts. [Caelestis Cosplay] says they had never designed anything for printing before, and we think it looks great. There’s also a buzzer to indicate that the scan is starting (one beep) or has completed (two beeps), a ‘ready’ indicator, and a ‘working’ indicator.
Everything you’d need to build your own is available over on Instructables, including document scanner and controller scripts. Be sure to check it out in action after the break, and see it quickly scan in a document and put it on a thumb drive.
Looking for a 3D scanner?
Check out the OpenScan project. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751016",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T06:15:56",
"content": "What I really want from a digitiser (software really) is a way to integrate multiple scans into a single clean image.I typically make two scans, affine register them in GIMP and then paint each in and o... | 1,760,371,943.896106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/source-code-to-the-1999-fps-game-descent-3-released/ | Source Code To The 1999 FPS GameDescent 3Released | Maya Posch | [
"Games",
"News"
] | [
"classic gaming",
"first person shooter",
"source code"
] | On April 16th of this year, [Kevin Bentley]
released the source code
to the Sci-Fi FPS game
Descent 3
. Originally released in 1999 for Windows, the game has you control a flying ship which you have to guide through both in- and outdoor environments, while shooting at robots that have been infected with an alien virus as you try to save the solar system. It was later also ported to Mac OS and Linux, but was considered a commercial flop due to low sales.
As one of the original developers, [Kevin] explains that one of the goals of this code release is to give the game a second life, by cleaning up the C++ code and using new APIs. Original proprietary audio and video libraries from Interplay were removed, which means that some work is required before one can build a fresh copy of the game from this code base. That said, the released code is the latest 1.5 patch level, with the Mac OS and Linux support. Even if the original
Descent
games weren’t your cup of tea, it’s still great to see games being preserved and updated like this.
Thanks to [Phil Ashby] for the tip. | 48 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750996",
"author": "nerd65536",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T02:37:12",
"content": "Freespace 2, closely related to the Descent series, also had its code open-sourced, and it has a healthy community around it, continuously improving the engine.https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Sour... | 1,760,371,944.131131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/floss-weekly-episode-779-errata-prevention-specialist/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 779: Errata Prevention Specialist | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Podcasts"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"ham radio",
"linux distro"
] | This week Jonathan Bennett and
Dan Lynch
sit down with Andy Stewart to talk about
Andy’s Ham Radio Linux (AHRL)
! It’s the Linux distro designed to give hams the tools they need to work with their radios. What’s it like to run a niche Linux distro? How has Andy managed to keep up with this for over a decade? And what’s the big announcement about the project breaking today?
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 | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6751077",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-04-18T10:24:04",
"content": "What is the big announcement? No, I don’t want to listen to the podcast, sorry.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,943.557921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/this-go-kart-rides-on-a-pallet/ | This Go-Kart Rides On A Pallet | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"engine",
"four speed",
"go-kart",
"pallet",
"transmission",
"woodworking"
] | Many beginner woodworkers, looking to offset the introductory costs of starting a hobby, will source their wood from pallets. Generally they’re easily found and can be low or no cost, but typically require a bit of work before they’re usable in a project. [Garage Avenger] is looking to do something a little outside of the box with his pallet project, though.
He’s using raw pallets as a chassis for a four-speed go-kart
, partially for the challenge and excitement and also to one-up a Pinterest post.
Almost immediately, though, the other major downside of working with pallets arose which is that they’re generally built out of low-grade pine which is soft and flexible. Flexibility is generally not a good thing to have in a vehicle frame so plenty of the important parts of this build were strengthened with steel tubing including the rear axle, steering mounts, and a few longitudinal supports to strengthen the overall frame. After working out some kinks with ordering a few of the wrong parts, and mounting the steering box backwards, it was time to test out the four-speed engine (and brakes) on the the go-kart, making it nearly ready for the road.
To complete the build, some tidying of wiring and fuel lines was done, along with improving some of the non-critical parts of the build like the bucket seat. Of course, adding pallet spoilers and body kit puts the finishing touches on the build and the go-kart is finally ready to tear up the local go-kart track and the less-inspiring Pinterest projects. [Garage Avenger] is no stranger to strange vehicle builds, either. Although it’s a bit out of season for most of our northern hemisphere readers now,
his jet-powered street sled is still worth a view
. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750886",
"author": "Mayhem",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T20:56:47",
"content": "“Most pallets are made of pine which is flexible.” Most pallets are made of “swamp” oak. I dare you to try driving a nail into a hard oak pallet. The guys who repair pallets use fuel driven nail guns beca... | 1,760,371,943.664708 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/compiling-and-running-turbo-pascal-in-the-browser/ | Compiling And Running Turbo Pascal In The Browser | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"Pascal",
"turbo pascal"
] | When a friend of [Lawrence Kesteloot] found a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks, they found that it contained Turbo Pascal code which the two of them had worked on back in the Summer of 1989.
Amidst reminiscing
about the High School days and watching movies on VHS, [Lawrence] sought a way to bring these graphical applications once more back to life. Not finding an easy way to compile Turbo Pascal code on Mac even back in 2013 when he started the project, he ended up writing a
Turbo Pascal compiler in JavaScript
, as any reasonable person would do in this situation.
SPIDER.PAS in its full glory. (Credit: Lawrence Kesteloot)
As noted by [Lawrence], the compiler doesn’t implement the full Turbo Pascal 5.5 language, but only the subset that was required to compile and run these applications which they had found on the floppy disks. These include ROSE.PAS and SPIDER.PAS along with three others, and can also be found in the GitHub repository. As can be seen in the
online version
of the compiler, it captures the feel of programming Pascal in 1989 on the command line.
Naturally, the software situation has changed somewhat over the last decade. We’ve recently seen some promising
multi-platform Pascal compilers
, and of course you could even run Turbo Pascal in DOSBox or similar. That might make this project seem irrelevant, but being able to write and run Pascal applications in more ways and on more platforms is never a bad thing. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750858",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T19:33:46",
"content": "Neat! But JavaScript…. Yikes.I use Free Pascal and Lazarus on my Linux machines now for Pascal. It’s available on Windows too for those that are still on that platform. But Borland Pascal came out while... | 1,760,371,944.023692 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/vcf-east-2024-was-bigger-and-better-than-ever/ | VCF East 2024 Was Bigger And Better Than Ever | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"VCF",
"VCF 2024",
"VCF East",
"Vintage Computer Festival"
] | I knew something had changed before I even paid for my ticket to this year’s
Vintage Computer Festival East
at the InfoAge Science and History Museum in Wall, New Jersey.
Over the last couple of years, attendance has been growing to the point that parking in the lot directly next to the main entrance has been reserved for only the earliest of risers. That hasn’t described yours truly since the days when I still had what my wife refers to as a “real job”, so that’s meant parking in the overflow lot down the road and walking the half a mile or so back to the main gate. Penance for working on the Internet, let’s call it.
But this time, while walking along the fence that surrounds the sprawling InfoAge campus, I came across an open gate and a volunteer selling tickets. When commenting to her that this was a pleasant surprise compared to the march I’d anticipated, she responded that there had been so many people trying to get into the main entrance that morning that they decided to station her out here to handle the overflow.
I was a few steps past her table and into InfoAge before the implications of this interaction really hit me. Two entrances. How many attendees does there need to be before you setup a secondary ticket booth out by the reserve parking lot just to keep things moving smoothly? Well, I can’t tell you what the exact number is. But after spending the rest of the day walking between all the buildings it took to contain all of the exhibits, talks, and activities this year, I can tell you it’s however many people came to VCF East 2024.
Compared to its relatively humble beginnings, it’s incredible to see what this event has grown into. InfoAge was packed to the rafters, and despite what you might think about a festival celebrating decades old computing hardware, there were plenty of young faces in the crowd. I’m not sure exactly what’s changed, but the whole place was positively jumping. Perhaps it’s partially the generational nostalgia that’s kept Netflix cranking out new seasons of the 1980’s set
Stranger Things
. I’m sure attention (and attendance) from several well known YouTube personalities have played a big part as well.
Whatever the magic formula that’s turned what was once a somewhat somber retrospective on early desktop computers into a major destination for tech lovers, I’m all for it. Love Live the Vintage Computer Festival!
A Few of My Favorite Things
I’ve only rarely been confused with Julie Andrews, but I’ll do my best here to catalog some of my personal highlights from VCF East 2024.
This is in no way meant to be a comprehensive view of what was on hand over the weekend. I can’t stress enough how
absolutely impossible
of a task it would be to accurately record everything that was on display — and that’s not including the talks and classes that were happening at the same time. If you’re even remotely interested in vintage computing or rare and unusual tech, this is an event you absolutely need to see for yourself to truly appreciate.
COSMAC Elves on the Shelves
First described in a series of
Popular Electronics
articles in the back-half of the 1970s, the Elf was a simple homebrew computer based on the RCA 1802 Complementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer (COSMAC) chip. In the boilerplate configuration, it used a pair of LED hexadecimal displays for output and eight toggle switches for input. There was no ROM — programs were entered directly into memory using the toggle switches as God intended.
Different kit versions of the computer were sold over the years, and the community has produced countless spin-offs of the basic concept right up to the present day. For their exhibit
RCA COSMAC 1802 Computers
, Josh Bensadon and Walter Miraglia had a wide collection of these DIY machines on display, as well as a few commercial devices that used the 1802 such as the RCA Studio II.
Modern Art on Vintage Hardware
Although there’s a canvas print of one of Joe Kim’s pieces on the wall in my office, I wouldn’t say that I’m much of an art guy. But there was something about
The Plot Thickens: Pen Plotter History and Artistry
that I found fascinating. Paul Rickard was demonstrating how he uses modern Python code to generate algorithmic art which he then puts on paper with vintage plotters — machines he
lovingly refers to on his website
as “absurd and inefficient” in all the right ways.
Crank-Loaded Software
As the name implies, the exhibit
80’s Luggables
was intended to show off various mobile computers from the pre-laptop days, such as the Osborne Executive. But honestly, I thought the inclusion of an Altair 8800 and Macintosh SE muddied the waters a bit. Granted the Mac, with its handle and integrated display, might be on the borderline. But the Altair? If that’s portable, then pretty much every other computer ever made must be as well.
That being said, the Altair ended up being perhaps the most interesting piece of the exhibit, as it was fitted with a modern crank-operated paper tape reader. Attendees were able to toggle in the appropriate settings for the Altair’s Multi-Boot Loader (MBL) PROM, crank the tape through the reader, and then enjoy the fruits of their labor by playing the loaded game through the Osborne Executive that was acting as a serial terminal.
It was the sort of hands-on interaction with vintage hardware that you really only get to experience at an event like VCF, and many attendees walked away from their first experience loading software from paper tape with a much greater appreciation for the modern USB flash drive.
Towers of Power
TRS-80 Model II Boards Collection
was a simple exhibit, but it certainly caught the eye. Pete Cetinski took 28 different expansion boards (apparently a near-complete set) for Tandy’s classic machine, mounted each one next to a typed up description of what it does, and had them out for display. There was also a Model 16 with the lid off so attendees could better visualize how these boards would have been installed.
The Internet As it Once Was
As somebody who
fights
works with modern web technology on a daily basis,
The Serial Port
by Ben Grubbs definitely hit on a personal level. This exhibit was really in two parts — one half was showing off a Cobalt RaQ web server appliance from the 1990s, but a few steps away there was a desktop running an era appropriate version of Microsoft FrontPage that let you bang out a simple web page that would be served up from the RaQ.
This gave attendees a chance to experience what it was like on both sides of the fence back in the days when we thought flashing marquees were a neat idea. Another excellent interactive setup that was getting a lot of attention, especially from some of the younger folks who may not have even been alive when such simplistic sites ruled the net.
The Tip of a Vintage Iceberg
As I said before, there’s simply no way to do an event like Vintage Computer Festival East justice with a post like this. The exhibits took up four separate rooms spread out among multiple rooms, and the consignment area was even
larger and more popular than last year
.
Instead, consider this post something of a barometer for VCF — and perhaps the larger vintage computing community as a whole. If you had any concerns about this particular technological niche fading away into obscurity, I can give you from my first-hand experience that not only is it alive and well, but it’s growing into something truly remarkable. | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750832",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T18:46:51",
"content": "That was a fun show, thanks to everyone who took the time to stop in and show off some aging silicon. Extra points for the European contingents with all the non-US released hardware!",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,371,943.828718 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/custom-dog-door-prevents-culinary-atrocities/ | Custom Dog Door Prevents Culinary Atrocities | Bob Baddeley | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"cat poop",
"dog",
"dog poop",
"magnets",
"poop",
"reed switch"
] | Riley, an 8 lb pug, has more beauty than brains, and a palate as unrefined as crude oil. While we hate criticizing others’ interests and tastes, his penchant for eating cat poop needed to stop. After a thorough exploration of a variety of options, including cat food additives that make its excrement taste worse (HOW? WHY? Clearly taste wasn’t the issue!), automatic litter boxes that stow the secretions, and pet doors that authenticate access to the room with the litter box, [Science Buddies] eventually settled on
a solution that was amenable to all members of the family
.
The trick was in creating a door mechanism with a blacklist of sorts rather than a whitelist. As the cat didn’t like to push the door open itself, the solution needed to have the pet door open by default. A magnet on Riley’s collar would trip a sensor attached to an Arduino that would control servos to swing the door shut immediately if he attempted to access the defecated delights. Of course safety was a consideration with the door swinging in Riley’s face.
We’ve covered a few pet screeners, including
one for the same purpose that used IR sensors
(but a much bigger dog also named Riley), and a
flock of solutions for chickens
. We’ve also seen
[Science Buddies] in previous posts
, so they’re not on the
tips line
blacklist. | 32 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750758",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T15:52:56",
"content": "Put the litter tray on a platform where the can can get to with no problems, but where the pug cannot easily go.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,943.96604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/human-interfacing-devices-hid-over-i2c/ | Human-Interfacing Devices: HID Over I2C | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"device",
"hacking",
"hid",
"i2c",
"peripheral",
"reverse engineering"
] | In the previous two HID articles, we talked about
stealing HID descriptors
,
learned about a number of cool tools
you can use for HID hacking on Linux, and created a touchscreen device. This time, let’s talk about an underappreciated HID standard, but one that you might be using right now as you’re reading this article – I2C-HID, or HID over I2C.
HID as a protocol can be tunneled over many different channels. If you’ve used a Bluetooth keyboard, for instance, you’ve used tunneled HID. For about ten years now, I2C-HID has been heavily present in laptop space, it was initially used in touchpads, later in touchscreens, and now also in sensor hubs. Yes, you can expose sensor data over HID, and if you have a clamshell (foldable) laptop, that’s how the rotation-determining accelerometer exposes its data to your OS.
This capacitive touchscreen controller is not I2C-HID, even though it
is I2C.
By
[Raymond Spekking]
, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Not every I2C-connected input device is I2C-HID. For instance, if you’ve seen older tablets with I2C-connected touchscreens, don’t get your hopes up, as they likely don’t use HID – it’s just a complex-ish I2C device, with enough proprietary registers and commands to drive you crazy even if your logic analysis skills are on point. I2C-HID is nowhere near that, and it’s also way better than PS/2 we used before – an x86-only interface with limited capabilities, already almost extinct from even x86 boards, and further threatened in this increasingly RISCy world. I2C-HID is low-power, especially compared to USB, as capable as HID goes, compatible with existing HID software, and ubiquitous enough that you surely already have an I2C port available on your SBC.
In modern world of input devices, I2C-HID is spreading, and the coolest thing is that it’s standardized. The standardization means a lot of great things for us hackers. For one, unlike all of those I2C touchscreen controllers, HID-I2C devices are easier to reuse; as much as information on them might be lacking at the moment, that’s what we’re combating right now as we speak! If you are using a recent laptop, the touchpad is most likely I2C-HID. Today, let’s take a look at converting one of those touchpads to USB HID.
A Hackable Platform
Two years ago, I developed a Framework laptop input cover controller board. Back then, I knew some things about I2C-HID, but not too much, and it kinda intimidated me. Still, I wired up the I2C pins to an I2C port on an RP2040, wired up the INT pin to a GPIO, successfully detected an I2C device on those I2C pins with a single line of MicroPython code, and left sitting on my desk out of dread over converting touchpad data into mouse events – as it turns out, it was way simpler than I thought.
There’s
a specification from Microsoft,
and it might be your first jumping point. I tried reading the specification, but I didn’t understand HID at the time either, so that didn’t help much. Looking back, the specification is pretty hard to read, regardless. Here’s the deal in the real world.
If you want to get the HID descriptor from an I2C-HID device, you only need to read a block of data from its registers. Receiving reports (HID event packets) is simple, too. When the INT pin goes low, read a block of data from the device – you will receive a HID report. If there’s an RST pin, you will want to bring it down upon bootup for a few hundred milliseconds to reset the device, and you can use it in case your I2C-HID device malfunctions, too.
Now, there are malfunctions, and there definitely will be quirks. Since HID is ubiquitous, there are myriad ways for manufacturers to abuse it. For instance, touchpads are so ubiquitous that Chrome OS
has entire layers
dealing with their quirks. But here we are, and I have an I2C device connected to an RP2040, previous MicroPython I2C work in hand, some LA captures between the touchpad and the original system stashed away, and I’m ready to send it all commands it needs.
Poking And Probing
To read the descriptor, you can read a block from register 0x20, where the first four bytes define the descriptor version and the descriptor length – counting these four bytes in. When we put this descriptor into the decoder, we will get something like this:
[...]
0x05, 0x0D, // Usage Page (Digitizer)
0x09, 0x05, // Usage (Touch Pad)
0xA1, 0x01, // Collection (Application)
0x85, 0x01, // Report ID (1)
0x05, 0x0D, // Usage Page (Digitizer)
0x09, 0x22, // Usage (Finger)
0xA1, 0x02, // Collection (Logical)
0x09, 0x47, // Usage (Confidence)
0x09, 0x42, // Usage (Tip Switch)
0x15, 0x00, // Logical Minimum (0)
0x25, 0x01, // Logical Maximum (1)
[...]
That is a HID descriptor for a touchpad alright! Save this descriptor somewhere – while getting it dynamically is tempting, hardcoding it into your firmware also might be a viable decision, depending on which kind of firmware you’ll be adding I2C-HID support into, and, you’ll really want to have it handy as a reference. Put this descriptor into
our favourite decoder website,
and off we go! Oh, and if you can’t extract the descriptor from the touchpad for whatever reason, you can get it from inside a running OS like I’ve done
in the last article
– that’s what I ended up doing, because I couldn’t make MicroPython fetch the descriptor properly.
For some reason, Microsoft decided to distribute this spec as a .docx file, something that I immediately abused as a way of stress relief
Take a look at the report IDs – they can be helpful later. All reports coming from the touchpad will have their report ID attached, and it’s good to know just which kinds of events you can actually expect. Also, here’s a challenge – try to spot the reports used for BIOS “simple mouse” functionality, firmware update, touchpad calibration, and any proprietary features!
Now, all that’s left is getting the reports. This is simple too – you don’t even need to read a block from a register, just a block of data from the touchpad. First, you read a single byte, which tells you how many more bytes you need to read to get the actual packet. Then you read a byte once INT is asserted (set low). That means the touchpad has data for you. If your INT doesn’t work for some reason, as it was on my board, you could continuously poll the touchpad in a loop instead, reading a single byte each time, and reading out a full packet when the first byte isn’t
0x00
. Then, it’s the usual deal – first byte is the report ID, and all other bytes are the actual report contents. For I2C code of the kind that our last article uses, reading a report works like this:
while True:
try:
l = i2c.readfrom(0x2c, 1)[0]
if l:
d = i2c.readfrom(0x2c, l)
if d[2] != 0x01:
# only forward packets with a specific report ID, discard all others
print("WARNING")
print(l, d)
print("WARNING")
else:
d = d[3:]
print(l, len(d), d)
usb_hid.report(usb_hid.MOUSE_ABS, d)
except OSError:
# touchpad unplugged? retry in a bit
sleep(0.01)
Now, touch the touchpad, and see. Got a report? Wonderful! Haven’t received anything yet? There are a few things to check. First, your touchpad might require a TP_EN pin to be asserted low or high. Also, if your touchpad has a TP_RST pin, you might need to pull it low on startup for a couple hundred milliseconds. Other than that, if your touchpad is from a reasonably popular laptop, see if there’s any references for its quirks in the Linux kernel, or any of the open firmwares out there.
Further Integration
Theoretically, you could write a pretty universal I2C-HID to USB-HID converter seriously easily – that would allow things like USB-connected touchpads on the cheap, just like some people have been doing with PS/2 in the good old days. For me, there’s an interesting question – how do you actually integrate this into a keyboard firmware? There are a few options. For instance, you could write a QMK module for dealing with any sort of I2C-HID device, that’d pass through reports from the touchpad and generate its own reports for keyboard reports. That is a viable option for most of you; for me, C++ is not my friend as much as I’d like it to be.
There’s the MicroPython option we’ve explored last article, and that’s what I’m using for forwarding at the moment. This option needs the descriptor translated into TUSB macros,
which took a bit of time,
but I could make it work. Soon,
USB device support
will be added into the new MicroPython release, which will make my translation work obsolete
in all the best ways,
but it isn’t merged just yet. More importantly, however, there’s no stock keyboard code I could find that’s compatible with this firmware, and as much as it could be educational, I’m not looking into writing my own keyboard scanning code.
Currently, I’m looking into a third option,
KMK.
A CircuitPython-based keyboard firmware, it should allow things like dynamic descriptor definitions, which lets us save a fair bit of time when iterating on descriptor hacking, especially compared to the MicroPython fork.
All of these options need you to merge keyboard and touchpad descriptors into one, which makes sense. The only caveat is the question of conflicting report IDs between the stock firmware keyboard descriptor and the stock touchpad descriptor. For fixing that, you’d want to rewrite report IDs on the fly – not that it’s complicated, just a single byte substitution, but it’s a good caveat to keep in mind! My touchpad code already does this because the library does automatic report ID insertion, but if yours doesn’t, make sure they’re changed.
Even Easier Reuse
Now, all of this was about tunneling I2C-HID-obtained HID events into USB. Are you using something like a Raspberry Pi? Good news! There’s
i2c-hid support in Linux kernel,
which only really wants the IRQ GPIO and the I2C address of your I2C device. Basically, all you need to do is to add a device tree fragment and some very minimal data. I don’t have a tutorial for this, but there’s
some initial documentation
in the kernel tree, and grepping the device tree directory for the overlay name alone should give you a wonderful start.
This article isn’t long, and that’s because of just how easy I2C-HID is to work with. Now, of course, there are quirks – just check out
this file
for some examples. Still, it’s nothing that you couldn’t figure out with a logic analyzer, and now you can see just how easy this is. I hope that this can help you on your hacking forays, so whenever you next see a laptop touchpad, you know just how easy they can be to wire up, no matter if you’re using a microcontroller or a Raspberry Pi. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750750",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T15:15:22",
"content": "Excellent; I’d click a like button but we don’t have that.C++ wants to be your friend; be not afraid.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6750987",
... | 1,760,371,944.207695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/getting-started-with-radio-astronomy/ | Getting Started With Radio Astronomy | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"Radio Astronomy",
"society of amateur radio astronomers"
] | There are many facets to being a radio hobbyist, but if you’ve ever had the urge to dabble in radio astronomy, check out “
The Novice’s Guide to Amateur Radio Astronomy
,” a presentation at the 2024 conference of the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers. In that presentation (see the video below), [Nathan Butts] covers everything from why you should take up the hobby, how to set up a software defined radio (SDR) receiver, and how to repurpose old computers. This is just one of a series of videos recently posted from the conference — check out their channel to see them all.
Unlike optical astronomy, you can listen to the universe by radio during the day or night, rain or shine. You don’t need a dark sky, although these days, a quiet radio location might be hard to find. [Nathan] also points out that some people just want to crunch data collected by others, and that’s fun, too. There are many ways to get involved from designing hardware, writing software, or — of course — just listening.
It has never been easier to get involved. Cheap software-defined radios are perfect for this sort of work, and we all have massive computers and scores of small data-collection computers. Maybe you’ll be the next person to hear
a Wow signal
. If you are worried about fielding an antenna, many people repurpose
satellite dishes
. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750829",
"author": "Scotr",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T18:43:08",
"content": "Excellent article, It confirms my working theory of natural radio, I’ve made many recordings using a SDR and it really is transformative, I even stopped buying ABBA vinyl records for the summerScott, Neath"... | 1,760,371,943.614201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/17/a-rog-ally-battery-mod-you-ought-to-try/ | A ROG Ally Battery Mod You Ought To Try | Arya Voronova | [
"Battery Hacks",
"handhelds hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"battery swap",
"gaming console",
"handheld gaming console",
"ifixit",
"rog ally"
] | Today’s hack is an unexpected but appreciated contribution from members of the
iFixit
crew, published by [Shahram Mokhtari]. This is an ROG Ally Asus-produced handheld gaming console mod that
has you upgrade the battery
to an aftermarket battery from an Asus laptop to double your battery life (40 Wh to 88 Wh).
There are two main things you need to do: replace the back cover with a 3D printed version that accommodates the new battery, and move the battery wires into the shell of an old connector. No soldering or crimping needed — just take the wires out of the old connector, one by one, and put them into a new connector. Once that is done and you reassemble your handheld, everything just works; the battery is recognized by the OS, can be charged, runs the handheld wonderfully all the same, and the only downside is that your ROG Ally becomes a bit thicker.
The best part is, it’s hard to fail at applying this mod, as it’s documented to the high standards we’d expect from
iFixit
. The entire journey is split into detailed steps, there’s no shortage of pictures, and the group has also added warnings for the few potentially problematic aspects you want to watch out for. Plus, in the comment section, we’ve learned that there’s an entire community called
AllyMods
dedicated to ROG Ally modding that has spawned creations like
the dual display mod
, which is a joy to see!
This mod reminds us of the time someone
modified a Nintendo Game Boy
Advance SP with a thicker shell too, not just extending the battery, but also adding things like Bluetooth and 3.5 mm audio, USB-C and wireless charging. A worthy upgrade for a beloved device! | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750637",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T10:06:41",
"content": "Neat trick. I got a Steam Deck and when I travel, I use the ModCase and that comes with, what looks a bit like, a watch. That’s a mounting system that let’s me mount a battery bank to the back of ... | 1,760,371,944.260456 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/cyberpunk-guitar-strap-lights-up-with-repurposed-pcbs/ | Cyberpunk Guitar Strap Lights Up With Repurposed PCBs | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"7 segment leds",
"battery",
"Circuit Playground Express",
"RGB LEDs",
"sound reactive"
] | Sometimes, whether we like it or not, ordering PCBs results in extra PCBs lying around, either because of board house minimums, mistakes on either end, or both. What’s to be done with these boards? If you’re Hackaday alum [Jeremy Cook],
you make a sound-reactive, light-up guitar strap
and rock out in cyberpunk style.
The PCBs in question were left over from [Jeremy]’s
JC Pro Macro project
, and each have four addressable RGB LEDs on board. These were easy enough to chain together with jumper wires, solder, and a decent amount of hot glue. Here’s a hot tip: you can use compressed air to rapidly cool hot glue if you turn the can upside down. Just don’t spray it on your fingers.
The brains of this operation is Adafruit Circuit Playground Express, which runs off of a lipstick battery and conveniently brings a microphone to the table. These two are united by a 3D print, which is hot-glued to the guitar strap along with all the boards. In the second video after the break, there’s a bonus easy-to-make version that uses an RGB LED strip in place of the repurposed PCBs. There’s no solder or even hot glue involved.
Want to really light up the night?
Print yourself a sound-reactive LED guitar. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750681",
"author": "Jeremy Cook",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T12:11:06",
"content": "Thanks so much for the writeup!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6750797",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T18:01:45",
"conten... | 1,760,371,944.3027 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/still-up-and-coming-non-planar-fdm-3d-printing-with-3-or-6-axes/ | Still Up And Coming: Non-Planar FDM 3D Printing With 3 Or 6 Axes | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"non-planar 3D printing",
"non-planar layer FDM"
] | Printing the non-planar PLA part on top of the non-planar side of the PETG part. (Credit: Michael Wüthrich)
Most of the time FDM 3D printing involves laying down layers of thermoplastics, but the layer lines also form the biggest weakness with parts produced this way. Being able to lay out the lines to follow the part’s contours can theoretically strengthen the part and save material in the process. Recently, [Michael Wüthrich]
demonstrated
an approach that uses a modified Prusa Mini FDM printer to first lay out a part in PETG using non-planar printing, after which this PETG part was used to print on top of in PLA, effectively using the PETG as a ‘printbed’ from which the PLA can be easily removed and leaving the PLA part as fully non-planar on both sides.
The modification to the Prusa Mini printer is
covered on Printables
along with the required parts. The main change is to give the nozzle as much clearance as possible, for which [Michael] uses the
E3D Revo belt nozzle
. This nozzle requires a custom holder for the Prusa Mini. After this the printer is ready for non-planar printing, but as [Michael] notes in the Twitter thread, he did not use a slicer for this, as none exists. Instead he used Matlab, a custom script and a lot of manual labor.
Non-planar FDM printing
has been covered
by us before, along with
the need for slicers
which can handle such more ‘exotic’ tasks. Hopefully with efforts like this by [Michael] such a future may be a bit closer now. If the waiting for this takes too long, or 3 axis printers seem a bit old-school, we were reminded via a tip by [Keith Olson] that it’s always possible to double the number of axes for more freedom, as in this
video demonstration
by [Fergal Coulter] (also embedded below), of a 6-axis 3D printer which also prints on top of an existing substrate. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750555",
"author": "Alexander Pruss",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T02:21:31",
"content": "I wonder if a low-hanging fruit might not be non-planar infill for a slicer. The slicer could look for tall rectangular prism areas inside the object, and then add a bit of a non-planarity to the ... | 1,760,371,944.354226 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/more-microwave-metal-casting/ | More Microwave Metal Casting | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"brass",
"casting",
"ceramic",
"forge",
"investment",
"Kapton",
"microwave",
"silicon carbide",
"vacuum"
] | If you think you can’t do investment casting because you don’t have a safe place to melt metal, think again. Metal casting in the kitchen is possible, as demonstrated by
this over-the-top bathroom hook repair using a microwave forge
.
Now, just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s advisable. There are a lot better ways to fix something as mundane as a broken bathroom hook, as [Denny] readily admits in the video below. But he’s been at the whole kitchen forging thing since building
his microwave oven forge
, which uses a special but easily constructed ceramic heat chamber to hold a silicon carbide crucible. So casting a replacement hook from brass seemed like a nice exercise.
The casting process starts with a 3D-printed model of the missing peg, which gets accessories such as a pouring sprue and a thread-forming screw attached to it with cheese wax. This goes into a 3D-printed mold which is filled with a refractory investment mix of plaster and sand. The green mold is put in an air fryer to dry, then wrapped in aluminum foil to protect it while the PLA is baked out in the microwave. Scrap brass gets its turn in the microwave before being poured into the mold, which is sitting in
[Denny]’s vacuum casting rig
.
The whole thing is over in seconds, and the results are pretty impressive. The vacuum rig ensures metal fills the mold evenly without voids or gaps. The brass even fills in around the screw, leaving a perfect internal thread. A little polishing and the peg is ready for bathroom duty. Overly complicated? Perhaps, but [Denny] clearly benefits from the practice jobs like this offer, and the look is pretty cool too. Still, we’d probably want to do this in the garage rather than the kitchen. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750545",
"author": "todd3465",
"timestamp": "2024-04-17T01:27:02",
"content": "Going to have to try this one day soon (outside). Melting stuff in a microwave just says ‘Try me you know you want to’.Stupid question, Is the use of the word “forge” for a melting furnace a British Engl... | 1,760,371,944.400541 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/recycling-wires-for-breadboarding/ | Recycling Wires For Breadboarding | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"breadboard",
"breadboard hacks"
] | It is easy to take things for granted, but if you work with students, you realize that even something as simple as a breadboard needs explanation. [0033mer] recently shared a tip about how he wires both solderless breadboards and prototype boards on the cheap. Instead of buying special wires, he
salvages riser cables often found in scrap from demolished buildings
. These often have 200 or so thin solid wires inside. You take them apart, and, as he put it, if you have 15 feet of the stuff, that will last you the rest of your life. We hope you live longer than that, but still.
One advantage to doing this is you don’t feel bad about cutting the wires exactly to length which makes for neat boards. He has a tiny stripper that make it easy to remove the insulation during installation.
Of course, you’ve probably been salvaging wires from many sources for years. Still, this is a good reminder that you really don’t need to buy that pack of breadboard jumpers from Amazon. Not only will it cost more, the ones with the little tips are not amenable to being cut to size.
We’ve done something similar for years, but we prefer
thermal strippers
. If you want your entire breadboard from scratch, search through
some old magazines
. | 37 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750451",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T20:10:12",
"content": "I actually abandoned doing this after figuring out about the jumper wires sold in Aliexpress, at around 2013. Commercially made ones are much neater.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,371,944.985201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/the-next-evolution-of-the-raspberry-pi-recovery-kit/ | The Next Evolution Of The Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit | Tom Nardi | [
"Cyberdecks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"pelican case",
"portable computer",
"Recovery Kit",
"ruggedized"
] | At Hackaday, the projects we cover are generally a one-off sort of thing. Somebody makes something, they post it online, we share it with our audience — rinse and repeat. If a project really captures people’s imaginations, it might even inspire a copy or two, which is gratifying for everyone involved. But on the rarest of occasions, we run across a project like [Jay Doscher]’s Recovery Kit.
To say that the Recovery Kit was an inspiration to others would be putting it mildly. Revolutionary would be more like it, as it resulted in more “Pi-in-a-Pelican” builds than we could possibly count. So it’s only natural that [Jay] would return to the well and produce a
second version of his heavy-duty cyberdeck
.
Now, technically, there have been a few other variants of the original Recovery Kit since its release in 2019, such as the easier-to-build Quick Kit. If you want to get
really
technical, even the Recovery Kit is actually a do-over of sorts from his original
Raspberry Pi Field Unit from 2015
. But [Jay] says none of the refreshes or revisions he’s worked on previously were substantial enough to get the official “Version 2” stamp before this one.
So, what’s changed in this new version? For one thing, it’s been optimized for reproduction by others. All the pain points that folks reported while building their own Recovery Kits have been addressed, from the time it takes to print the parts to the availability of key off-the-shelf components. Not only are the parts easier to get your hands on, but they’re also easier to assemble, with the soldered links of the original now replaced with push-on connectors.
Designed around the
Raspberry Pi 5
, the new Recovery Kit has also received a considerable performance boost over the previous versions. This is further extended
by using a bootable NVME drive
rather than the dinky SD cards most Pi builds are stuck with. Despite the computational kick in the pants, [Jay] says he’s realized that the relatively low resolutions available for the type of displays that can be crammed into a build like this are pretty poor for most graphical environments, and recommends the user stick to the terminal.
In addition to the lengthy write-up about the design process behind the Recovery Kit Version Two, [Jay] has provided a comprehensive parts list with links to where you can pick up your own hardware. Having been burned by hard-to-source components in the past, this time, most of the hardware is from either Amazon or McMaster-Carr.
All in all, it’s a solid refinement of an already very well-engineered design. The only thing left now is to see if this new revision of the Recovery Kit can have the same impact on the community as its predecessor. No pressure. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750438",
"author": "Ethan Waldo",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T19:10:57",
"content": "With any luck, we’ll see a Raspberry Pi 5 update tohttps://hackaday.com/2015/06/20/the-first-pipboy-well-see-this-year/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,945.254375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/microsoft-killed-my-favorite-keyboard-and-im-mad-about-it/ | Microsoft Killed My Favorite Keyboard, And I’m Mad About It | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"dongle",
"keyboard",
"keyboards",
"logitech",
"microsoft",
"Rant",
"replacable"
] | As a professional writer, I rack up thousands of words a day. Too many in fact, to the point where it hurts my brain. To ease this burden, I choose my tools carefully to minimize obstructions as the words pour from my mind, spilling through my fingers on their way to the screen.
That’s a long-winded way of saying I’m pretty persnickety about my keyboard. Now, I’ve found out my favorite model has been discontinued, and I’ll never again know the pleasure of typing on its delicate keys. And I’m mad about it. Real mad. Because I shouldn’t be in this position to begin with!
T’is Better To Have Loved And Lost
I liked how the Sculpt design allowed my hands to lay naturally in line with my arms, with no splaying of the wrists.
After some research and a little trial and error, I found a keyboard that worked for me. I detest rectangular keyboards that forced my wrists into splay inwards in an unnatural way. It gave me all kinds of problems approaching the realms of RSI and carpal tunnel and other ugly things.
In turn, I came to love the delicate curves of the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop. Wireless, sleek, beguiling. With the keys laid out in delicate three-dimensional curves, the keyboard met my hands in their natural resting orientation, so perfectly I felt the keyboard had been made for me.
No more would my hands cramp and my wrists contort to find the keys. Instead, my fingers would simply dance a few millimeters, deftly finding the keys as I needed them. My typing was fast, clean, and my wrists barely moved an inch. They rested deftly in position ready to deliver. Oh, bliss.
Loving this keyboard as I did, I forgave it when it faltered just 6 months into ownership. Dropped keys and dropped connections I could not withstand, but I had the salve at hand. I’d kept the receipt like some paper-hoarding dragon, and returned to darken the door of the office supply once more. I suffered the side-eyes and probing questions and left with a new ‘board fresh in box. Our love affair would continue as I racked up tens, hundreds of thousands of words with my new ally. We wrote together, we gamed together, we moved house together. We were building a life together. My plastic friend was helping me pay my bills. Nothing could stop us. The words flowed and the cash flowed in turn. Such is the life of a writer.
Then came the break in.
Every computer I owned was stolen. Most of my guitars, too. Years of data, videos, photos, projects… all gone when they carried my desktop out the door. They hadn’t taken everything though. They’d left behind my TV, my kettle, my toaster. Oh, and my Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop. Mouse, keyboard, and even the separate numeric keypad. It was all there, except…
With the desktop, left the dongle. Sans the dongle, my friend was dead.
Irreplaceable
Talk to Logitech. They’ll sell you a keyboard, or a mouse, or fifteen of each. Swap them in and out as you like, you can pair them all to a single Unifying Receiver. Lose the dongle, and fear nothing. Just buy another one and re-pair your devices.
Microsoft couldn’t find the time to implement this on the Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop. Fashionable engineers with houses with light fixtures more expensive than my car were too busy to think of the consequences this would have on me, so many years and miles far removed.
I tried a mechanical keyboard, but the rectangular layout just wasn’t for me. Neither were the switches, and I didn’t fancy spending months trying to find what I liked.
In the wake of the robbery, I didn’t have time to mourn or weep. To a writer, time is words and words are money. I needed money. I threw a cheap machine on my credit card and got back to work. Now lean on funds, I had to economize on a new keyboard. I couldn’t afford another Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop. I had to make do with a $30 keyboard and mouse combo made of cheaper plastic than most Coke bottles. My new instrument was cheap. The same 101 keys, but the music they played wasn’t as sweet.
I rankled at having to buy a replacement. I still had a perfectly good keyboard right here, why did I need to buy a new one when only the dongle was missing? But alas, these are the ways of the Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop—the mouse, the keyboard, and the numeric keypad. One dongle to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
After 18 months, I relented. I could go on no more. Words had to flow, faster than before. I couldn’t rely on this cheap plastic from the store. I needed a better keyboard, my muse. I needed a faster way to pump out the news.
By now, the world had turned. The Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop was done, dusted. Discontinued forever. Mine was useless without the original dongle, and remaining stock online was retailing for $800. I’d have to move on.
Better, Somehow
It’s not as radical looking as the Microsoft design, but the fundamentals are there.
Thankfully, a blessed light shined from a local office store. Something akin to the glory of the Sculpt, but so slightly different. The Logitech Ergo K860 was designed with similar curves such that the keys meet the hand with a minimum of twist, with a supportive wrist pad to boot. It similarly had low-travel keys for a light, laptop-like typing experience. I tried it out and found it instantly familiar. My speed was up, mistakes down. My wrists once again enjoying the comfort courtesy of a quality keyboard.
Perhaps the greatest joy of the Logitech design, though, is that it dispenses with the ridiculous notion of a dongle paired for life. Instead, it’s more than capable of being paired with any Logitech Unifying Receiver out there. I can pair a mouse and a keyboard to a single receiver, using a single USB port, and if I want to swap either out, I can do so freely. There’s no lock-in, and I’m free to set up my desktop as I wish. If someone were to steal my computer again, I could simply buy a new dongle and keep on using my perfectly good keyboard the next day.
The Logitech has similarly magic curves.
As an engineer, I can perhaps understand why Microsoft didn’t go this route. Logitech had to develop a piece of software for pairing its dongles and peripherals, which takes engineering time. That software needs to be written, tested, and likely maintained over time to ensure it stays compatible with today’s ever-changing operating systems. Microsoft perhaps didn’t see the point in doing so.
At the same time, this is what separates Logitech from Microsoft in this regard. One is a dedicated manufacturer of quality peripherals to the exclusion of all else. The other does build hardware, but as a secondary consideration, seldom achieving the same focus as its rivals.
I still have my useless Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. DIY wired conversions exist. I wanna say that I’ll do that one day, but for a use with a laptop, it’s kinda too messy. Plus I always kinda hated how the wrist rest always looked dirty. Nevermind.
Ultimately, I’m happy that Logitech came through for me here. I needed a quality keyboard that fit me like a glove, and I have one once more. Plus, I don’t have to worry about the loss of a tiny USB dongle making my $200 keyboard worthless. That’s a plus. Overall, I’m about hardware that’s robust and reusable, not fickle and fragile. That’s what matters to me. | 74 | 36 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750397",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T17:22:42",
"content": "Now that you have a suitable replacement, I would suggest starting to set aside money to buy at least one more – perhaps two or three – and find some way of storing the spare(s) securely offsite. W... | 1,760,371,945.471271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/fail-of-the-week-can-an-ultrasonic-cleaner-remove-bubbles-from-resin/ | Fail Of The Week: Can An Ultrasonic Cleaner Remove Bubbles From Resin? | Donald Papp | [
"Fail of the Week",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bubbles",
"degas",
"epoxy resin"
] | [Wendy] asked a very good question.
Could putting liquid resin into an ultrasonic cleaner help degas it
? Would it help remove bubbles, resulting in a cleaner pour and nicer end product? What we love is that she tried it out and shared her results. She purchased an ultrasonic cleaner and proceeded to mix two batches of clear resin, giving one an ultrasonic treatment and leaving the other untouched as a control.
Sadly, the test piece had considerably
more
surface bubbles than the untreated control, as well as a slight discoloration.
The results were interesting and unexpected. Initially, the resin in the ultrasonic bath showed visible bubbles rising to the surface which seemed promising. Unfortunately, this did not lead to fewer bubbles in the end product.
[Wendy]’s measurements suggest that the main result of putting resin in an ultrasonic bath was an increase in its temperature. Overheating the resin appears to have led to increased off-gassing and bubble formation prior to and during curing, which made for poor end results. The untreated resin by contrast cured with better color and much higher clarity. If you would like to skip directly to the results of the two batches,
it’s right here at 9:15 in
.
Does this mean it’s a total dead end? Maybe, but even if the initial results weren’t promising, it’s a pretty interesting experiment and we’re delighted to see [Wendy] walk through it. Do you think there’s any way to use the ultrasonic cleaner in a better or different way? If so, let us know in the comments.
This isn’t the first time people have tried to degas epoxy resin by thinking outside the box. We’ve covered
a very cheap method
that offered surprising results, as well as a way
use a modified paint tank
in lieu of purpose-made hardware. | 23 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750372",
"author": "0xfred",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T15:33:16",
"content": "It also doesn’t work to agitate FeCl when etching PCBs – using a sealed plastic container in a water bath to protect the cleaner, obviously.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,944.912655 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/linux-fu-stupid-systemd-tricks/ | Linux Fu: Stupid Systemd Tricks | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"systemd"
] | Last time, I gave a whirlwind introduction to a very
small slice of systemd
. If you aren’t comfortable with systemd services, timers, and mounts, you might want to read that now. Otherwise, press on to see a few interesting uses for custom systemd units, including running a few things on a schedule and automatically mounting a Raspberry Pi Zero.
Can you do every one of these things in a different way? Of course you can. I’m not debating the relative merits of using or not using systemd. However, unless you totally control your own environment, good chance you are going to have to interact with systemd at some point.
Stupid Trick #1: Update Your IP Address
A few years ago, I talked about
updating your remote DNS server with your public IP address
. This lets you refer to a hostname like snoopy.hackaday.com and get back to your computer that often changes IP addresses. Sure, you can get services to do that for you, but you must either pay or agree to read ads on their site to keep your hostname going. This is all under your control. In the original post, I suggested using cron or NetworkManager to run the update script. I also hinted you could do it with systemd, but I didn’t tell you how. Let’s fix that.
Step one is simple: create a “one shot service” that executes the command required:
[Unit]
Description=Update IP via SSH (called by timer)
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh awce ./updateip - wd5gnr.com dyn E
WorkingDirectory=/home/alw/bin
You can read about why that works in the original post. This is an easy-to-understand unit. A one-shot service runs once and then it is done The rest is the program to run and the working directory. Piece of cake.
Next, you need a timer. The timer’s name is the same as the service except for the extension. That is,
updateip.service
and
updateip.timer
go together.
[Unit]
Description=Timer to update public IP via SSH
[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* *:01,16,31,46:00
Persistent=true
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
Here, we ask the system to run the code every hour of every day at minutes :01, :16, :31, and :46. It is persistent, so if a timer misses, it will run as soon as possible. In theory, we should make this all dependent on the network being up, but it doesn’t hurt to try and fail since if the network is down, this doesn’t matter.
Stupid Trick #2: Shut Up Baloo!
Recent versions of KDE love
Baloo
, the file indexer. While it is nice to instantly find files in your home directories, and it handles a few other tasks, it also is known to eat up system resources. I’ve used cgroups and other tricks to limit Baloo’s insatiable desire for CPU and I/O time. But what works best is to shut it down in the morning and let it start again late at night.
This is not quite the same as updating the IP address. For one thing, it happens at an absolute time. It would be easy, too, to have it do different times on the weekend, for example. The other thing to note is that this timer, as it is now, should probably not be persistent. It might be smarter to make it persistent and have one script that decides what to do based on the time, but I didn’t elect to go that way.
However, I did want to stop the timer from running if there was no GUI session. This is, it turns out, tricky. You’d think you could set the timer to be “WantedBy” the GUI target, but that’s not the case. Here’s how I turn off Baloo:
[Unit]
Description=Stop KDE's Baloo File Indexing Service
# Ensure this only runs in a graphical session by checking for the DISPLAY variable
ConditionEnvironment=DISPLAY
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/systemctl --user stop kde-baloo
Note that the service actually calls systemd again to stop the predefined kde-baloo service. The ConditionEnvironment line means it only does this if there is a DISPLAY variable set. That’s not foolproof, but it should work for most caes.
You still need a timer:
[Unit]
Description=Timer to Stop KDE's Baloo File Indexing Service Daily at 06:45
[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* 06:45:00
Persistent=true
Unit=baloo-off.service
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
Of course, the baloo-on pair looks just the same, with obvious changes to the service names and time specifications.
Stupid Trick #3: Automount your Raspberry Pi Pico
Another item systemd handles is mounting filesystems. What happened to fstab? Nothing. A
special program
reads fstab and creates systemd mount units for you automatically. The unit files wind up somewhere like /run/systemd/generator, at least on my system.
If you use the Raspberry Pi Pico, you’ve probably noticed that when it is in boot mode, it presents a different ID to the system each time. That makes it hard to tell the system to mount it automatically. However, it should have a constant label. Making systemd automount your Pi requires two files (in /etc/systemd/system). First, there is the .mount file:
[Unit]
Description=Mount Raspberry Pi Pico at startup
[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-label/RPI-RP2
Where=/media/alw/RPI-RP2
Type=vfat
Options=defaults
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Then there is a .automount file with the same base name:
[Unit]
Description=Automount Raspberry Pi Pico
[Automount]
Where=/media/alw/RPI-RP2
TimeoutIdleSec=0
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Speaking of the name, systemd expects a file that mounts at path /x/y/z to be named x-y-z.mount. That’s fine until you want to mount something at path /x/y-z. That’s because the name x-y-z.mount should go to /x/y/z, not /x/y-z. To solve this, the file name needs to have an escaped hyphen in it like this: media-alw-RPI\x2dRP2.mount. That backslash needs to actually be in the file name, so you’ll have to quote or escape it in the shell, too.
Now, when you boot the Pi into bootloader mode, the system will mount it at the designated location.
That’s a Wrap!
Actually, that’s not a wrap. This shows nearly the bare minimum of what you can do with systemd. There is a question if it is desirable for one thing to do so much, but I’m trying to ignore that elephant. For today, systemd is here, and we might as well use it. If you work with others or deliver software to other users, it is a good bet you’ll have no choice. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750349",
"author": "Brian Masney",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T14:35:39",
"content": "For #2 to turn of Baloo, I think you can run ‘systemctl –user mask kde-baloo’ and that should stop it from starting in the first place.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,945.113015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/why-pulse-current-charging-lithium-ion-batteries-extends-their-useful-lifespan/ | Why Pulse Current Charging Lithium-Ion Batteries Extends Their Useful Lifespan | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"lithium ion",
"Lithium-ion battery"
] | For as much capacity lithium-ion batteries have, their useful lifespan is generally measured in the hundreds of cycles. This degradation is caused by the electrodes themselves degrading, including the graphite anode in certain battery configurations fracturing. For a few years it’s been known that pulsed current (PC) charging can prevent much of this damage compared to constant current (CC) charging. The mechanism behind this was the subject of a
recent research article
by [Jia Guo] and colleagues as published in
Advanced Energy Materials
.
Raman spectra of a) as-cycled and b) surface-removed graphite anodes aged under CC and Pulse-2000 charging. FE-SEM images of the cross-sections of graphite electrodes aged with CC (c,d) and Pulse-2000 (e,f) charging. d,f) are edge-magnified images of (c,e). g) shows the micrograph and O and C element mapping of the surface of CC-aged graphite electrode. TEM images of h) fresh, i) CC, and j) Pulse-2000 aged graphite anodes. (Credit: Jia Guo et al., 2024)
The authors examined the damage to the electrodes after multiple CC and PC cycles using Raman and X-ray absorption spectroscopy along with lifecycle measurements for CC and PC charging at 100 Hz (Pulse-100) and 2 kHz (Pulse-2000). Matching the results from the lifecycle measurements, the electrodes in the Pulse-2000 sample were in a much better state, indicating that the mechanical stress from pulse current charging is far less than that from constant current charging. A higher frequency with the PC shows increased improvements, though as noted by the authors, it’s not known yet at which frequencies diminishing returns will be observed.
The use of PC vs CC is not a new thing, with the state-of-the-art in electric vehicle battery charging technology being covered in a
2020 review article
by [Xinrong Huang] and colleagues as published in
Energies
. A big question with the many different EV PC charging modes is what the optimum charging method is to maximize the useful lifespan of the battery pack. This also applies to lithium-metal batteries, with a
2017 research article
by [Zi Li] and colleagues in Science Advances providing a molecular basis for how PC charging suppresses the formation of dendrites .
What this demonstrates quite well is that the battery chemistry itself is an important part, but the way that the cells are charged and discharged can be just as influential, with the 2 kHz PC charging in the research by [Jia Guo] and colleagues demonstrating a doubling of its cycle life over CC charging. Considering the amount of Li-ion batteries being installed in everything from smartphones and toys to cars, having these last double as long would be very beneficial.
Thanks to [Thomas Yoon] for the tip. | 62 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750308",
"author": "cyclops",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T12:20:56",
"content": "This reminds me a little bit ofhttps://www.rctalk.com/dyna-pro-digital-discharger/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6750309",
"author": "thom",
... | 1,760,371,945.354606 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/analyzing-the-code-from-the-terminators-hud/ | Analyzing The Code From The Terminator’s HUD | Lewin Day | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"t-1000",
"terminator",
"the terminator"
] | The T-800, also known as the Terminator, was like some kind of non-giving up robot guy. The robot assassin viewed the world through a tinted view with lines of code scrolling by all the while. It was cinematic shorthand to tell the audience they were looking through the eyes of a machine.
Now, a YouTuber called [Open Source] has analyzed that code.
The video highlights one interesting finds, concerning graphics seen in the T-800’s vision. They appear to match the output of various code listings and articles in
Nibble Magazine
,
specifically its September 1984 issue
. One example spotted was a compass rose, spawned from an Apple Basic listing. it was a basic quiz to help teach children to understand the compass. Another graphic appears to be cribbed from the same issue in the MacPaint Patterns section.
The weird thing is that the original film came out in October 1984 — just a month after that article would have hit the news stands. It suggests perhaps someone involved with the movie was also involved or had access to an early copy of
Nibble Magazine
— or that the examples in the magazine were just rehashed from some other earlier source.
Code that regularly flickers in the left of the T-800s vision is just 6502 machine code. It’s apparently just a random hexdump from an Apple II’s memory. At other times, there’s also 6502 assembly code on screen which includes various programmer comments still intact. There’s even some code cribbed from the Apple II DOS 3.3 RAM Disk driver.
It’s neat to see someone actually track down the background of these classic graphics. Hacking and computers are usually portrayed in
a fairly unrealistic way in movies
, and it’s no different in
The Terminator (1984).
Still, that doesn’t mean the movies aren’t fun!
Thanks to [Stephen Waters] for the tip! | 39 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750117",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T15:53:07",
"content": "> It suggests perhaps someone involved with the movie was also involved or had access to an early copy of Nibble MagazineOr, hear me out, maybe the T-1000 is a time-traveler!",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,945.059819 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/remembering-peter-higgs-and-the-gravity-of-his-contributions-to-physics/ | Remembering Peter Higgs And The Gravity Of His Contributions To Physics | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Science"
] | [
"gauge boson",
"Peter Higgs"
] | There are probably very few people on this globe who at some point in time haven’t heard the term ‘Higgs Boson’ zip past, along with the term ‘God Particle’. As during the 2010s the scientists at CERN were trying to find evidence for the existence of this scalar boson and with it evidence for the existence of the Higgs field that according to the Standard Model gives mass to gauge bosons like photons, this effort got communicated in the international media and elsewhere in a variety of ways.
Along with this media frenzy, the physicist after whom the Higgs boson was named also gained more fame, despite
Peter Higgs
already having been a well-known presence in the scientific community for decades by that time until his retirement in 1996. With Peter Higgs’ recent death after a brief illness at the age of 94, we are saying farewell to one of the big names in physics. Even if not a household name like Einstein and Stephen Hawking, the photogenic hunt for the Higgs boson ended up highlighting a story that began in the 1960s with a series of papers.
Breaking Symmetry
Much of what we can observe around us is based around symmetry, whether it’s our own bodies, plants or planets. Yet the question that should be asked here is: symmetrical on what level? A tree branch is symmetrical, up till where it branches off, and its trunk is symmetrical except where it’s not. Similarly, our own bodies like to break symmetry so that we only have one liver and one heart, despite having two eyes and two brain hemispheres, generally speaking. This breaking of symmetry is something that can be observed on any level, including that of the Universe itself on a fundamental level.
When the Universe first came into existence, for a brief moment it would have existed in perfect symmetry in its high energy state, but as we can observe today this state did not persist. Rather than maintain this perfect state of symmetry, something caused this symmetry to
spontaneously break
and separate into areas of distinct mass. These areas would coalesce into nebulae, stars and ultimately the galaxies courtesy of which we are able to contemplate our place in the Universe today. Figuring out the exact nature of the symmetry breaking that led to this was the topic of much discussion among particle physicists during the 20th century.
Essentially, what could cause the continuous symmetry across spacetime to break? Of most importance here is gauge symmetry, which gives rise to the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces. The strong interaction is explained by quantum chromodynamics using the quark model. The weak (W and Z bosons) and electromagnetic (photons) forces are unified in the
electroweak interaction
, but these particles require an additional mechanism for their formation. Initially the Standard Model predicted the W and Z bosons to have no rest mass, while in reality they have quite significant masses. To resolve this, the
Higgs mechanism
was introduced, which involved the Higgs field and a short-lived scalar boson particle that had no spin, no charge, but a significant mass which could be imparted on gauge bosons by breaking electroweak symmetry.
Three Papers
The ‘Sombrero Potential’ as seen with the Higgs mechanism.
A fascinating aspect of the Higgs mechanism’s history is that the symmetry breaking aspect behind it was practically simultaneously explored by three different teams of physicists during the early 1960s and published in
Physical Review Letters
in 1964
. The
first article
was by François Englert and Robert Brout, titled
Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons
.
The second
was by Peter W. Higgs and titled
Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons
. Finally, the
third paper
was by Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK), and titled
Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles
.
Although these papers sound incredibly similar, they each propose a different approach to how mass could arise in vector gauges without breaking
gauge invariance
, i.e. the
Lagrangian
field of the system remains unchanged under local transformations (invariant Lagrangian). The basic theory behind spontaneous symmetry breaking had been published by Yoichiro Nambu in 1960, which led to this being worked into a mechanism which could resolve the mass-less W and Z boson conundrum. Of these, the Higgs and GHK papers contained the equations for a hypothetical field which would become known as the Higgs field, along with the newly proposed scalar boson. Here another major difference is that in the Higgs paper the scalar boson has a large mass, while in the GHK paper it is massless, akin to the
Nambu-Goldstone boson
quasi-particle proposed by Yoichiro Nambu.
After these papers, both Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam showed independently from each other in 1967 how the Higgs mechanism could break the electroweak symmetry, leading to the formulation of the Standard Model as we know it today. It also cleared the way for figuring out an experiment that could provide evidence for the existence of the Higgs field, using the mass of its associated boson.
Collision Debris
How do you detect a sub-atomic particle? The answer is clearly to build the biggest scientific instruments known to man, as it wasn’t until the Large Hadron Collider (
LHC
) with its 27 kilometer circumference finished construction in 2008 that humankind had a particle collider with enough energy behind it to conclusively test for the existence of the Higgs boson. With the first collisions in 2010, the race was on to detect this elusive scalar boson with its suspected massive mass. The only snag was that this boson was expected to exist so briefly that any detector used would only be able to detect its decay products.
Each decay process creates what is called a ‘decay channel’, which is effectively a particular signature. Because of how rarely a Higgs boson was thought to form, many collisions would be required for the two main particle detectors at the LHC (
ATLAS
and
CMS
) to collect enough of these signatures to establish with some certainty (typical five sigma rule) that the channels detected were indeed from this new boson. With the amount of data generated from each collision and the two particle detectors this was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack.
Then in 2012 the five sigma confidence level was reached and exceeded, leading to the aforementioned media frenzy, as many had caught on that something monumental was about to happen in the world of particle physics with potentially far-reaching consequences. As the Higgs boson’s ~125 GeV/c
2
mass was announced, the world had mostly moved on already, beyond understanding that the ‘god particle’ had been found. Yet to particle physicists this was a monumental event, even if many of those present during the days in the 1960s and 1970s when these predictions were laid were no longer around to witness it.
The Standard Model was now complete, other than the minor niggle of this ‘gravity’ thing and what might be gravitons.
Beyond The Physics
To Peter Higgs, the field of particle physics was much of his life, though he also enjoyed hiking and was outspoken in a number of areas. It was at the UK’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) that he met fellow activist Jody Williamson whom he’d end up marrying. He also was a member of Greenpeace and identified as an atheist, more interested in reality of science than any kind of ideology of dogma. This led him to quit CND as soon as they began to campaign against nuclear power (
“a really bad mistake”
) and similarly with Greenpeace when they began to oppose genetically engineered organisms (GMO). Calling their actions ‘hysterical’, he had to resign his membership.
This made it rough on him when the term ‘god particle’ began to buzz around. The term itself seems to come from Leon M. Lederman’s book
The God Particle
, due to how the Higgs boson is so elusive and yet essential to the very existence of the Universe and everything in it. Without the Higgs field and mechanism there would be no galaxies, no planets or suns, or life to wonder at its place in it all. As this name led to many confusing the scalar boson with something religiously profound, including evidence for the existence of one’s favorite deity or deities, it really rubbed Peter Higgs the wrong way.
With the subsequent years after the discovery of the Higgs boson even more details about it were filled in, cementing the Higgs mechanism’s place in the Standard Model and gave Peter Higgs the knowledge that his theories had indeed been correct, an honor which he shared with other physicists involved in the decades-long discovery. Although he won’t be around to see what comes next, it are the efforts from scientists like Peter Higgs which will inspire future generations of scientists for centuries to come. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750148",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T17:30:23",
"content": "“To resolve this, the Higgs mechanism was introduced, which involved the Higgs field and a short-lived scalar boson particle that had no spin, no charge, but a significant mass which could be imparted on gaug... | 1,760,371,945.587434 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/how-do-you-make-a-repairable-e-reader/ | How Do You Make A Repairable E-Reader | Jenny List | [
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"ifixti",
"kobo",
"repair",
"right to repair"
] | Mobile devices have become notorious for their unrepairability, with glued-together parts and impossible-to-reach connectors. So it’s refreshing to see something new in that field from the e-book reader brand Kobo in the form of
a partnership with iFixit to ensure that their new reader line can be fixed
.
Naturally, we welcome any such move, not least because it disproves the notion that portable devices are impossible to make with repairability in mind. However, the linked article is especially interesting because it includes a picture of a reader, and its cover has been removed. We’re unsure whether or not this is one of the new ones, but it’s still worth looking at it with reparability eyes. Just what have they done to make it easier to repair?
The first thing which strikes us is that the screws securing the board are larger than on many devices and positioned for easy access. Then the battery connector isn’t the tiny snap-in connector we’re used to seeing on phones, but wires and an easy-to-use small two-pin plug. The digitiser and screen cables remain flexible PCB connectors, but despite finding those flip-up latches to be fragile at best, we’re guessing there’s little alternative to be found there.
We hope that these readers will be successful enough that other manufacturers may take up the idea and even that it might educate the public that such a thing is possible. | 40 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750052",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T11:52:13",
"content": "I hope laptop follows this soon. Replacing a broken power connector shouldn’t require the use of 3 very small screwdrivers to remove 157 tiny screws, unplugging a few connectors (keyboard, trackpad, LCD, CPU... | 1,760,371,945.540713 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/waveform-generator-teardown-is-nearly-empty/ | Waveform Generator Teardown Is Nearly Empty | Al Williams | [
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"teardown",
"test equipment"
] | We always enjoy [Kerry Wong]’s insightful teardowns, and recently, he opened up a UTG1042X arbitrary waveform generator. Getting inside was a bit of a challenge since there were no visible screws. Turns out, they were under some stickers. We always dislike that because it is very difficult to get the unit to go back together.
Once open, the case reveals it is almost completely empty. The back panel has a power supply, and the front panel has all the working circuitry. The box seems to be for holding the foot and preventing the device from getting lost on your bench.
The power supply is unremarkable. There are a few odd output voltages. The main board is a bit more interesting, especially after removing the heat sink. There are two channels, but the board isn’t laid out, with a lot of segregation between the two channels. That makes sense with the output sections clustered together and the digital section with the CPU, FPGA, and the DAC in close proximity.
The other side of the board connects to a very simple display board. It would be interesting to compare this to a circa-1980s AWG, which would have been far more complicated.
Making a waveform generator with a microprocessor and a DAC isn’t hard
. The hard part is
the output stages
and maximizing the operating speed. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750034",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T09:35:53",
"content": "I find this trend quite annoying. A few years ago I was seriously considering to buy a desktop DMM, and those also have those big empty boxes. If someone would ask me, it’s time for the Test & measurement... | 1,760,371,945.646322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/a-buggy-entry-in-the-useless-robot-category/ | A Buggy Entry In The Useless Robot Category | Orlando Hoilett | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bugs life",
"happy birthday",
"robotics",
"useless machine",
"useless robot"
] | No one loves a useless robot more than we do here at Hackaday. But if anyone does it might be [ARC385] with her
Bug Bite Bot
.
A true engineering marvel, [ARC385]’s bug bot extinguishes the candle on its own little birthday cupcake. Yup. That’s it! Even more peculiar, (and to be fair, somewhat fittingly) before her bug releases its less-than-crushing bite, it plays itself a little Happy Birthday jingle. Seems legit.
If you choose to build this little bug yourself, you’ll be happy to know that the electronics on this build are pretty straightforward. Servo motors control the pincers and a photoresistor detects the flame. [ARC385] tried using a flame sensor instead of the photoresistor, but mentioned she couldn’t get consistent performance at her required sensing distance. She also mentions that you’ll probably need to calibrate the photoresistor to ambient light if for whatever reason you choose to embark on this build yourself.
[ARC385] did a pretty good job with the laser-cut plywood to construct the bug, but using plywood adds a few more question marks to this already puzzling build. She even mentioned having to modify the pincers so they wouldn’t
catch fire trying to extinguish the candle
.
Would be cool if the candle could rekindle itself, but we can’t possibly support making this hack even more of a
fire hazard
than it already is. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750303",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T11:58:53",
"content": "Absolutely amazing. It´s so mesmerizing, I´m flabbergasted!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,945.685541 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/voice-control-for-a-vintage-heathkit-radio/ | Voice Control For A Vintage Heathkit Radio | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"heathkit",
"teardown"
] | Most modern ham rigs have a voice activated transmission (VOX) mode, although we don’t know many people who use it often. When a transmitter is in VOX mode, it starts transmitting when you talk, and then, when you pause for a second or two, the transmitter turns off. Many old ham transmitters, though, didn’t support VOX, so Heathkit sold the VX-1 “electronic voice control” to add VOX to older transmitters. [Jeff Tranter] shows us inside
a clean-looking unit
.
These devices were sold from 1958 to 1960 and used tubes and a selenium rectifier. The device is connected between the microphone and the transmitter. It also sat between the receiver and the speaker to mute audio while transmitting. The original unit had a screw terminal to connect to the outside world, and some of the screws had live line voltage on them. The unit [Jeff] examines is modified to have phono jacks along with a few other repairs.
The wiring looks like a tube radio. Tubes are above the chassis, and point-to-point wiring is underneath. There is also an unusual sealed selenium rectifier. [Jeff] shows how the device works using just a receiver. A few minor repairs were needed.
If you are interested in
getting your ham license
, most modern radios support VOX out of the box — no rhyme intended. We do, however, love that
old Heathkit gear
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750094",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T14:17:34",
"content": "If you have a selenium rectifier and a low-enough resistance load that can also handle a lot of watts… you can make a really great e-incense.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,945.730207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/hackaday-links-april-14-2024/ | Hackaday Links: April 14, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"bridge",
"collapse",
"cvs",
"D-17",
"eclipse",
"flare",
"hackaday links",
"Minuteman",
"prominence",
"RCS",
"SCCS",
"solar",
"source control"
] | The Great American Eclipse v2.0 has come and gone, sadly without our traveling to the path of totality as planned; family stuff. We did get a report from friends in Texas that it was just as spectacular there as expected, with the bonus of seeing a solar flare off the southwest limb of the disk at totality.
Many people reported seeing the same thing
, which makes us a bit jealous — OK, a lot jealous. Of course, this presented an opportunity to
the “Well, ackchyually” crowd
to point out that there were
no solar flares or coronal mass ejections at the time
, so what people saw wasn’t an exquisitely timed and well-positioned solar flare but rather a well-timed and exquisitely positioned solar
prominence
. Glad we cleared that up. Either way, people in the path of totality saw the Sun belching out gigatons of plasma while we had to settle for 27% totality.
The eclipse also presented plenty of hacking opportunities for YouTubers in our community. Matthias Wandel went to great lengths on short notice to build
a solar tracker for photographing the eclipse
, while Gabe Emerson from “saveitforparts” threw
his little radiotelescope rig
in the car and drove down to totality to listen to the Sun during the eclipse. Jeff Geerling brought
three generations along for his eclipse party
, which resulted in some wonderful photographs and rubbing elbows with Destin from “Smarter Every Day.” Also interesting is
this analysis of internet traffic during the eclipse
by content delivery concern Cloudflare — or is that Cloud
prominence
? — which shows remarkable dips in internet use during totality. The dips tracked across the continent from Mexico to Canada and lined up perfectly with the Moon’s shadow.
In non-eclipse news,
someone crunched the numbers
on the forces involved when the MV Dali rammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, and — wow! Taking into account the mass of the loaded container ship and its change in speed during the collision, the vessel imparted something like 26 million pounds of force on the bridge. If our calculations are correct, that’s over 115 million newtons, which, as the article notes, is equivalent to 66 fully loaded semi trucks crashing into the bridge at highway speed all at once. No wonder it collapsed like it was made of toothpicks. Perhaps the most interesting thing we learned from this article was that there’s a standard reference value for the force exerted on a bridge abutment by a truck crash, and it’s 400,000 pounds.
Git is one of those things that’s so incredibly useful and so tightly integrated into our culture that it’s hard to remember what we did for source control before it came onto the scene. But source control goes way, way back, perhaps further than you realize, as
this series of articles on source control systems
documents. This article is the first of four parts and focuses primarily on SCCS and RCS. We were surprised to learn that source management only became a thing in the 70s when video terminals and magnetic mass storage became more ubiquitous. We’re looking forward to the second part, which covers the bad old days of CVS, SourceSafe, and ClearCase, which is where we first fell down the source control rabbit hole.
And finally, we wanted to share
this fascinating video
on the unlikely origins of the first desktop computer: the guidance computer of the Minuteman I ICBM. In 1962, computers filled entire rooms, but the Autonetics D-17B came in at a mere 28 kilos, a remarkable accomplishment in computer miniaturization. About 800 of the general-purpose digital computers were fielded, and when the Minuteman I gave way to other, more capable ICBMs, the decommissioned computers were distributed free of charge to universities and other institutions. The chief obstacle to putting one of these machines to work seems to have been coming up with a power supply, but once that was accomplished, a “Minuteman Computer Users Group” stood ready to help you get going. | 10 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749952",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T23:36:08",
"content": "” the vessel imparted something like 26 million pounds of force on the bridge.”For reference, the ship mass was 300 million pounds. The force exerted was less than ten percent of the mass of the ship.For th... | 1,760,371,945.775446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/porting-modern-windows-applications-to-windows-95/ | Porting Modern Windows Applications To Windows 95 | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Software Development"
] | [
".NET",
"windows 95"
] | Windows 95 was an amazing operating system that would forever transform the world of home computing, setting the standard for user interaction on a desktop and quite possibly was the OS which had the longest queue of people lining up on launch day to snag a boxed copy. This raises the question of why we still don’t write software for this amazing OS, because ignoring the minor quibbles of ‘security patches’ and ‘modern hardware compatibility’, it’s still has pretty much the same Win32 API as supported in Windows 11, plus it doesn’t even spy on you, or show you ads. This line of reasoning led [MattKC] recently to look at easy ways to
port modern applications to Windows 95
.
In the video, the available options are ticked off, starting with straight Win32 API. Of course, nobody writes for the Win32 API for fun or to improve their mental well-being, and frameworks like WxWidgets and
Qute
Qt have dropped support for Windows 9x and generally anything pre-Win2k for years now. The easiest option therefore might be Microsoft’s
.NET framework
, which in its (still supported) 2.0 iteration actually supports Windows 98 SE, or basically within spitting distance of running it on the original Win95.
An interesting point here is that .NET was never released for Windows 95 by Microsoft, which raises the question of whether there’s such a crucial difference between Windows 95 and 98 that would prevent the .NET framework from running on the former. As [Matt] finds out during his investigation, the answer seems to be mostly that Microsoft never bothered to fully test .NET on Win95 due to the low marketshare of Win95, ergo this just throws up an error message about an unsupported OS.
In order to get around this, [Matt] had to write his own .NET installer, which first led him down a maddening rabbit hole of the internals of the .NET runtime and its installer. That resolved running the custom installer on Windows 98, but even with custom function wrappers [Matt] was left with a series of exceptions to debug and resolve, including an SSE2-related one due to lack of SSE2 support in Windows 95. All of this without access to the JIT debugger that’d exist on Win98 and newer.
Eventually he did get it working, however, with the results available on the
GitHub project
page. Since backporting .NET 2.0 was so much fun, he next embarked on backporting .NET Framework version 3.5 as well, opening another series of .NET applications for running on an OS that’s now nearly thirty years old. Even if a practical use case is hard to make, it’s absolutely a fascinating in-depth look at what has changed over the past decades, and what we may have gained, and lost.
Thanks to [Jonathan Dziok] for the tip. | 82 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749913",
"author": "Jamie",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T20:07:49",
"content": "Windows 95 boot time: 2s to full operation. 99MHz 1st Gen single-core pentium with no graphics support, 8MB of ram and a couple meg HD.Windows 11 boot time: 1 minute+ to full operation. 4GHz i9 processor wi... | 1,760,371,945.88536 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/danish-vintage-lrc-meter-reveals-inside/ | Danish Vintage LRC Meter Reveals Inside | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"teardown",
"test equipment"
] | Modern test equipment is great, but there’s something about a big meter with a swinging needle and a mirror for parallax correction that makes a device look like real gear. [Thomas] shows us a
Danish LCR
meter (or, as it says on the front, an RLC meter). The device passes AC through the component and uses that to determine the value based on the setting of a range switch. It looks to be in great shape and passed some quick tests. Have a look at it in the video below.
An outward inspection shows few surprises, although there is an odd set of terminals on the back labeled DC bias. This allows you to provide a DC voltage in case you have a capacitor that behaves differently when the capacitor has a DC voltage across it.
Block diagram for the MM2
The circuit can measure — as the name implies — resistance, inductance, and capacitance. The manual shows a nice block diagram if you want to understand what’s going on.
Physically opening it up was a bit of a puzzle. That older gear was often well-constructed. Inside are some nice PCBs, a lot of transistors, and beautiful wiring harnesses. Someone took their time building this unit, and it shows.
Usually, when you see gear like this, it is a bridge, and you have to zero the meter, but not so with the MM2. These days, you are likely to use a microcontroller to measure the
charge and discharge rate
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749900",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T18:09:38",
"content": "I have an AVO Model 7 meter from the early 1950s that has a “Capacity” setting as well as the usual V and R. But you have to supply your own 50 Hz AC at “62V to 250V”, ie probably UK mains! First you apply you... | 1,760,371,946.296253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/the-bbc-micro-lovingly-simulated-in-vr/ | The BBC Micro, Lovingly Simulated In VR | Donald Papp | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"BBC Micro",
"emulator",
"vr",
"webxr"
] | The BBC Micro was many peoples’ first exposure to home computing, and thanks to [Dominic Pajak], you can
fire up this beloved hardware in WebXR
. Is it an emulator? Yes, but it’s also much more than that.
The machine, the CRT, the keycaps, and even the sounds of the original keypresses are all brought to life as accurately as possible. The result is not just an emulator. It’s a lovingly-made BBC Micro
simulator
you can use with a VR headset. Or just use your browser and type on your real keyboard if you like.
Virtual BBC Micro, complete with hand tracking and passthrough video.
This all started with [Dominic]’s previous project of
VirtualBeeb
, a web-based interactive model of a fully functional BBC Micro, complete with all the sights and sounds of the original hardware. [Dominic] later worked to bring it into 3D with the help of WebXR, aided by the rapid advancement of VR hardware and the excellent resources and functionality of
Three.js
, upon which the project was built.
[Dominic] shares the whole journey in a
fascinating blog post
that talks not just about creating a high-fidelity simulated BBC Micro but also what it was like to port it to a true 3D experience.
It’s a fantastic project that pays homage to a truly influential piece of vintage computing, so
brush up on BBC Basic
to deepen your appreciation. The BBC Micro, after all, was more than just a computer from the 80s. It was an integral part of the UK’s Computer Literacy Project, and in the 80s there was a realization that this was going to affect everyone. Wondering what that was like?
Browse those broadcasts online
and soak it all in. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749921",
"author": "LookAtDaShinyShiny",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T20:41:57",
"content": "chuckie egg in VR, how far we’ve come in 45 years…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6750010",
"author": "Axel",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,946.506322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/dump-a-code-repository-as-a-text-file-for-easier-sharing-with-chatbots/ | Dump A Code Repository As A Text File, For Easier Sharing With Chatbots | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ai",
"chatbot",
"coding",
"github",
"LLM",
"programming assistant",
"text file"
] | Some LLMs (Large Language Models) can act as useful programming assistants when provided with a project’s source code, but experimenting with this can get a little tricky if the chatbot has no way to download from the internet. In such cases, the code must be provided by either pasting it into the prompt or uploading a file manually. That’s acceptable for simple things, but for more complex projects, it gets awkward quickly.
To make this easier, [Eric Hartford] created
github2file
, a Python script that outputs a single text file containing the combined source code of a specified repository. This text file can be uploaded (or its contents pasted into the prompt) making it much easier to share code with chatbots.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that these tools represent more of an evolution than a revolution, and there are useful
roles chatbots can play in programming
. Some available chatbots have coding in mind. Others do not. But hackers being hackers we naturally want to experiment for ourselves regardless of a product’s intended uses, and a tool like this makes it easier to do that. Just remember their work — for now — is often at the
intern level
. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749876",
"author": "Hamish",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T13:26:44",
"content": "Doing this to a github repo makes sense, and is a definite hack for the current gen of LLM systems. I have a hotkey’d script in VS Code that copies every file with some specified extensions into the clipbo... | 1,760,371,946.245295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/14/a-slew-of-ai-courses-to-get-yourself-up-to-speed/ | A Slew Of AI Courses To Get Yourself Up To Speed | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ai",
"online learning"
] | When there’s a new technology, there’s always a slew of people who want to educate you about it. Some want to teach you to use their tools, some want you to pay for training, and others will use free training to entice you to buy further training. Since AI is the new hot buzzword, there are plenty of free classes from reputable sources. The nice thing about a free class is that if you find it isn’t doing it for you, there’s no penalty to just quit.
We noticed NVIDIA — one of the companies that has most profited from the AI boom —
has some courses
(not all free, though).
Generative AI Explained
, and
Augment your LLM Using Retrieval Augmented Generation
caught our eye. There’s also
Building a Brain in 10 Minutes
, and
Introduction to Physics-informed Machine Learning with Modulus
. These are all quite short, though.
Surprisingly, Google hasn’t been as successful with AI, but it does have some longer and possibly more technical topics in its
Google Cloud Skills Boost
program. There are actually several “
paths
” with AI content, such as “Generative AI for Developers.” If you prefer Amazon, they have a training center with many free courses, including those on AI topics like
Foundations of Prompt Engineering
. Of course, you can expect these offerings will center on what a great idea the Google systems or the Amazon systems are. Can’t blame them for that.
They are all, of course, playing catchup to OpenAI. If you prefer to see what classes they offer, you can check out their partner
DeepLearning.ai
. Many other vendors have training here, also.
If you want something more rigorous,
edX
has a plethora of AI classes ranging from Harvard’s CS50 introduction class that uses Python (see the almost 12-hour video below) to offerings from IBM, Google, and others. These are typically free, but you have to pay if you want grading and a certificate or college credit. Microsoft also offers
a comprehensive 12-week study program
.
Naturally, there are more. The good news is you have choices. The bad news is that it is probably easy to make the wrong choice. Do you have any you’ve taken that you’d recommend or not recommend? Leave us a comment!
We are always amazed at how much you can
learn online
if you are structured and disciplined about it. There is no shortage of materials from very
reputable schools
available. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749855",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T08:12:24",
"content": "I tried a few courses but I always abandon them when they finish teaching about linear regression and other basic stuff and tell you to import one of the example image data sets.That’s just disillusioni... | 1,760,371,946.348439 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/when-your-level-shifter-is-too-smart-to-function/ | When Your Level Shifter Is Too Smart To Function | Arya Voronova | [
"Parts"
] | [
"1.8v logic",
"level shifter",
"level shifting",
"logic levels",
"txb0104",
"txb010x"
] | By now, 3.3V has become a comfortable and common logic level for basically anything you might be hacking. However, sometimes, you still need to interface your GPIOs with devices that are 5 V, 1.8 V, or something even less common like 2.5 V. At this point, you might stumble upon autosensing level shifters, like the TXB010x series Texas Instruments produces, and decide that they’re perfect — no need to worry about pin direction or bother with pullups. Just wire up your GPIOs and the two voltage rails you’re good to go. [Joshua0] warns us, however, that
not everything is hunky dory
in the automagic shifting world.
During board bring-up and multimeter probing, he found that the 1.8 V-shifted RESET signal went down to 1.0V — and its 3.3 V counterpart stayed at 2.6V. Was it a current fight between GPIOs? A faulty connection? Voltage rail instability? It got more confusing as the debugging session uncovered the shifting operating normally as soon as the test points involved were probed with the multimeter in a certain order. After re-reading the datasheet and spotting a note about reflection sensitivity, [Joshua0] realized he should try and probe the signals with a high-speed logic analyzer instead.
At a high enough frequency, he’s found the signals constantly oscillating back and forth, as the shifter’s autosensing mechanism was being fooled into switching by the signal reflections at a fast enough rate to confuse the multimeter into reading the signals as being at an in-between voltage. It turns out that even with signals that are meant to change only once in a board’s bootup, these shifters might give you more trouble than they’re worth. Not to worry, however, as you still have myriad
ways
to
level
shift
any signal you want. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749844",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T05:46:39",
"content": "Usually the tolerances are wide enough that it doesn’t really matter. Maybe it would cause problems with some finicky and sensitive circuits, but most of the time things will still recognize the logic levels. ... | 1,760,371,946.551575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/m17-digital-communications-go-from-strength-to-strength/ | M17 Digital Communications Go From Strength To Strength | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"digital radio",
"m17"
] | The world of amateur radio is like many other fields in that there has been a move underway from analogue to digital modes. In fact, amateur radio has often led the way in digital innovation. There’s a snag, though: many of the digital speech modes are proprietary. To address this along comes
the M17 project
, an effort to create an open digital communication protocol for radio amateurs. We’ve looked at them more than once in the past few years, and as they’ve come up with several pieces of new hardware it’s time for another peek.
First up is the
Remote Radio Unit,
described as “a comprehensive, UHF FM/M17 “repeater in a box,” optimally designed for close antenna placement, enhancing signal strength and reliability.” The repeater forms the “other half” of the UHF handheld radio chain and will be crucial to the uptake of the protocol.
Then there’s
OpenHT
, their take on an SDR dual-band handheld radio for M17, and perhaps most interestingly for radio amateurs with existing radios, the
Module 17
and its miniaturised
Micro17
cousin, which are encoders and modems for any radio capable of handling 9600 baud serial communication.
You can read some of our previous M17 coverage here, and it’s very encouraging to see that this project is going places. If you want to see what they’ve been up to lately, check out their YouTube channel which has some older tests including the one below. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749871",
"author": "Hal",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T12:05:27",
"content": "“You can read some of our previous M17 coverage here”….. was the ‘here’ supposed to be a link or was that an invitation to search the archives?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,946.190193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/picontrol-brings-modern-controllers-to-atari-2600/ | PicoNtrol Brings Modern Controllers To Atari 2600 | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"atari 2600",
"bluetooth",
"game controller",
"pi pico"
] | While there’s an argument to be made that retro games should be experienced with whatever input device they were designed around, there’s no debating that modern game controllers are a lot more ergonomic and enjoyable to use than some of those early 8-bit entries.
Now, thanks to the
PicoNtrol project from [Reogen]
, you can use the latest Xbox and PlayStation controllers with the Atari 2600 via Bluetooth. Looking a bit farther down the road the project is aiming to support the Nintendo Entertainment System, and there’s work being done to bring the Switch Pro Controller into the fold as well.
Building your own version is about as easy as it gets. You need to get your hands on the appropriate 9-pin connector, which can be bought new or salvaged from an old controller, and solder it up to a Raspberry Pi Pico W.
These old-school digital controllers were extremely simplistic, with each pin in the connector corresponding to either a joystick direction or a button press. From the Pico side, that means virtually pressing a button on the controller is as simple as bringing the corresponding pin high. To complete the project, [Paul Taylor] designed a 3D printable enclosure that hides away the Pi Pico and all those solder joints.
Simple and effective. While we do enjoy diving into the big and complex builds,
the easy route certainly has its appeal
. We’ve seen
NES controllers grafted to the 2600 before
, but you could argue that’s not really an improvement. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749811",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T00:15:44",
"content": "im of the opinion that modern controllers are not very good. retrocontrollers are also not very good. there was a sweet spot somewhere around the mid to late 90s where you could get some really awesom... | 1,760,371,946.743045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/whos-afraid-of-a-crt/ | Who’s Afraid Of A CRT? | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"crt",
"high voltage",
"repair"
] | Older consumer electronic devices follow a desirability curve in which after they fall from favour they can’t be given away. But as they become rarer, they reach a point at which everyone wants them. Then, they can’t be had for love nor money. CRT TVs are now in the first stage, they’re bulky and lower-definition than modern sets, and thus thrift stores and dumpsters still have them in reasonable numbers. To retrogamers and other enthusiasts, this can be a bonanza, and when he saw a high-end late-model JVC on the sidewalk [Chris Person]
wasted no time in snapping it up
. It worked, but there were a few picture issues, so he set about fixing it.
The write-up is largely a tale of capacitor-swapping, as you might expect from any older electronics, and it results in a fine picture and a working TV. But perhaps there’s another story to consider there, in that not so many of us here in 2024 are used to working with CRTs. We all know that they conceal some scary voltages, and indeed, he goes to significant lengths to discharge his CRT. It’s worth remembering though, that there’s not always a need to discharge the CRT if no attempt will be made to disconnect it, after all the connector and cable to the flyback transformer are secured by hefty insulation for a good reason. It’s
a subject we’ve looked at here at Hackaday in the past.
You could argue that, in some ways,
newer TVs are harder to get into
than these old CRTs. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749785",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-04-13T20:24:11",
"content": "I’m a long way from that point mentioned. I have all sorts of retro stuff repaired and in working order, from 1950s valve/tube radios to 1970s hi-fi to 1980s home computers, but the one thing I do not miss is ... | 1,760,371,946.608338 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/delays-and-timers-in-ltspice-no-555/ | Delays And Timers In LTSpice (no 555) | Al Williams | [
"Parts"
] | [
"RC delay line",
"timer"
] | If you need a precise time, you could use a microcontroller. Of course, then all your friends will say “Could have done that with a 555!” But the 555 isn’t magic — it uses a capacitor and a comparator in different configurations to work. Want to understand what’s going on inside? [Mano Arrostita] has a video about
simulating delay and timer circuits
in LTSpice.
The video isn’t specifically about the 555, but it does show how the basic circuits inside a timer chip work. The idea is simple: a capacitor will charge through a resistor with an exponential curve. If you prefer, you can charge with a constant current source and get a nice linear charge.
You can watch the voltage as the capacitor charges and when it reaches a certain point, you know a certain amount of time has passed. The discharge works the same way, of course.
We like examining circuits for learning with a simulator, either LTSpice or something like
Falstad
. It is easier than breadboarding and encourages making changes that would be more difficult on a real breadboard. If you want a refresher on LTSpice or current sources, you can
kill two birds with one stone
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749857",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T08:20:53",
"content": "Oscillators take a bit of coaxing to get to working in LTSpice. Usually it involves setting the initial voltage of a node as 0V or skipping initial operating point evaluation",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,946.647088 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/__trashed-9/ | A Bend Sensor Developed With 3D Printer Filament | Jenny List | [
"Science"
] | [
"bend sensor",
"gray code",
"optical transmission"
] | PhD students spend their time pursuing whatever general paths their supervisor has given them, and if they are lucky, it yields enough solid data to finally write a thesis without tearing their hair out. Sometimes along the way they result in discoveries with immediate application outside academia, and so it was for [Paul Bupe Jr.],
whose work resulted in a rather elegant and simple bend sensor.
The original research came when shining light along flexible media, including a piece of transparent 3D printer filament. He noticed that when the filament was bent at a point that it was covered by a piece of electrical tape there was a reduction in transmission, and from this he was able to repeat the effect with a piece of pipe over a narrow air gap in the medium.
Putting these at regular intervals and measuring the transmission for light sent along it, he could then detect a bend. Take three filaments with the air-gap-pipe sensors spaced to form a Gray code, and he could digitally read the location.
He appears to be developing this discovery into a product. We’re not sure which is likely to be more stress, writing up his thesis, or surviving a small start-up, so we wish him luck. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749776",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2024-04-13T18:17:55",
"content": "I have seen experiments in fiber-optic gyroscopes and fiber-interfermeters where a loop is placed to adjust the polarization. I am unsure how new the method is. Also, the Sagnac effect might be an issue ... | 1,760,371,946.689792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/vintage-particle-counter-is-a-treasure-trove-of-classic-parts/ | Vintage Particle Counter Is A Treasure Trove Of Classic Parts | Dan Maloney | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"clean room",
"helium-neon",
"lasr",
"particulate",
"pm2.5",
"teardown",
"z80"
] | If you need a demonstration of just how far technology has come in the last 40 years, just take a look at
this teardown of a 1987 laser particle counter
.
Granted, the laser-powered instrument that [Les Wright] scored off of eBay wasn’t exactly aimed at consumers. Rather, this was more likely an instrument installed in cleanrooms to make sure the particulate counts didn’t come out of range. As such, it was built like a battleship in a huge case stuffed with card after card of electronics, along with the attendant pumps and filters needed to draw in samples. But still, the fact that we can put essentially the same functionality into
a device that easily fits in the palm of your hand
is pretty striking.
[Les] clearly bought this instrument to harvest parts from it, and there’s a ton of other goodness inside, including multiple copies of pretty much every chip from the Z80 family. The analog section has some beautiful Teledyne TP1321 op-amps in TO-99 cans. Everything is in immaculate condition, and obsolete or not, this is an enviable haul of vintage parts, especially the helium-neon laser at its heart, which still works. [Les] promises an in-depth look at that in a follow-up video, but for now, he treats us to a little tour of the optics used to measure particulates by the amount of laser light that’s scattered.
All things considered, [Les] really made out well on this find — much better than
his last purchase
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749860",
"author": "Fil Fer",
"timestamp": "2024-04-14T09:05:36",
"content": "Similar technology is also used to measure grain-size distribution f.ex:https://www.malvernpanalytical.com/en/products/technology/light-scattering/laser-diffractionwhich is quite important in civil engine... | 1,760,371,946.84158 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/hackaday-europe-2024-is-live/ | Hackaday Europe 2024 Is Live | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"2024 hackaday europe"
] | Hackaday Europe 2024
is on! We’re all here in Berlin, and the talks are about to begin.
If you’re not, you can join us in spirit on our livestream! And if you’re following along, drop comments here. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,946.873996 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/13/rabbit-sighted-in-the-wild/ | Rabbit Sighted In The Wild | Jenny List | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"CT2",
"phone",
"rabbit"
] | Here at Hackaday we’re suckers for old abandoned technologies, the more obscure the better. The history of the telephone has plenty to capture our attention, and it’s from that arena that something recently floated past our timeline. [IanVisits]
reports a sighting of a Rabbit in a London Underground station
. The bunny in question definitely isn’t hopping though, it’s been dead for more than three decades. It’s a base station for a failed digital mobile phone system.
We’ve had a look in the past at CT2
, the system this Rabbit base station once formed part of. It was an attempt to make an inexpensive phone system by having the handsets work with fixed base stations rather than move from cell to cell. It was one of the first public digital mobile phone systems, but the convenience of a phone that could both receive calls and make them anywhere without having to find a base station meant that GSM phones took their market.
The one in Seven Sisters tube station is a bit grubby looking, but it’s not the only survivor out there in the field. We have to admit to being curious as to whether it’s still powered on even though its backhaul will be disconnected, as in our experience it’s not uncommon for old infrastructure to be left plugged into the wall for decades, unheeded. Does anyone fancy sniffing for it with a Flipper Zero? | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749730",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2024-04-13T09:16:07",
"content": "Now turn the logo upside down.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749780",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2024-04-13T19:29:18",
... | 1,760,371,946.944987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/16/retrotechtacular-the-other-kind-of-fallout-show/ | Retrotechtacular: The Other Kind Of Fallout Show | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"atomic",
"cold war",
"dosimetry",
"Fallout",
"food safety",
"nuclear",
"polish",
"radiation",
"retrotechtacular",
"survival",
"water"
] | Thanks to the newly released Amazon Prime series, not to mention nearly 30 years as a wildly successful gaming franchise,
Fallout
is very much in the zeitgeist these days. But before all that, small-F fallout was on the minds of people living in countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain who would have to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.
“
Uwaga! Pył promieniotwórczy
“
(“Beware! Radioactive Dust”) is a 1965 Polish civil defense film from film studio
Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych
. While the Cold War turning hot was not likely to leave any corner of the planet unscathed, Poland was certainly destined to bear the early brunt of a nuclear exchange between the superpowers, and it was clear that the powers that be wanted to equip any surviving Polish people with the tools needed to deal with their sudden change in circumstances.
The film, narrated in Polish but with subtitles in English, seems mainly aimed at rural populations and is mercifully free of the details of both fallout formation and the potential effects of contact with radioactive dust, save for a couple of shots of what looks like a pretty mild case of cutaneous radiation syndrome.
Defense against fallout seems focused on not inhaling radioactive dust with either respirators or expedient facemasks, and keeping particles outside the house by wearing raincoats and boots, which can be easily cleaned with water. The fact that nowhere in the film is it mentioned that getting fallout on your clothes or in your lungs could be largely avoided by not going outside is telling; farmers really can’t keep things running from the basement.
A lot of time in this brief film is dedicated to preventing food and water from becoming contaminated, and cleaning it off if it does happen to get exposed. We thought the little tin enclosures over the wells were quite clever, as were the ways to transfer water from the well to the house without picking up any contamination. The pros and cons of different foods are covered too — basically, canned foods
dobry
, boxed foods
zły
. So, thumbs up for Cram, but you might want to skip the YumYum deviled eggs.
Dealing with the potential for a nuclear apocalypse is necessarily an unpleasant subject, and it’s easy to dismiss the advice of the filmmakers as quaint and outdated, or just an attempt to give the Polish people a sense of false hope. And that may well be, but then again, giving people solid, practical steps they can take will at least give them some agency, and that’s rarely a bad thing.
Thanks to [Patrym] for the tip. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750283",
"author": "tym0tym",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T09:13:34",
"content": "Some of this advice was implemented into practice on 29.4.1986 when Poland (without being informed by USSR what happened on the previous day) took some action. Among other measures, grazing cows outdoors ... | 1,760,371,947.041058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/alternate-threaded-inserts-for-3d-prints/ | Alternate Threaded Inserts For 3D Prints | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"threaded insert"
] | The usual way to put a durable threaded interface into a 3D print is to use a heat-set insert, but what about other options? [Thomas Sanladerer]
evaluates a variety of different threaded inserts
, none of which are actually made with 3D printing in mind but are useful nevertheless.
There are a number of other easily-available threaded inserts, including the
rivnut (or rivet nut)
, chunky hex socket threaded inserts intended for wood and furniture,
heli-coils
or helical inserts (which resemble springs),
self-tapping threaded inserts
(also sold as thread adapters), and
T-nuts
or prong nuts. They all are a bit different, but he measures each one and gives a thorough rundown on how they perform, as well as offering his thoughts on what works best.
[Thomas] only tests M5 fasteners in this video, so keep that in mind if you get ideas and go shopping for new hardware. Some of the tested inserts aren’t commonly available in smaller sizes. Self-tapping threaded inserts, for example, are available all the way down to M2, but the hex socket threaded inserts don’t seem to come any smaller than M4.
These threaded inserts might be just what your next project calls for, so keep them in mind. Heat-set inserts are of course still a great option, and our own Sonya Vasquez can tell you
everything you need to know about installing heat-set inserts into 3D printed parts
in a way that leaves them looking super professional. | 21 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750271",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T07:05:38",
"content": "Good point. Without watching the video I think we can all agree that the answer to the big question will be: “it depends…”. Another question is would be “is it really important”, but also that depends.",
... | 1,760,371,947.104379 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/building-a-tape-echo-in-a-coke-can-tape-player-that-doesnt-really-work/ | Building A Tape Echo In A Coke Can Tape Player That Doesn’t Really Work | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"cassette",
"tape",
"tape deck",
"tape echo"
] | Back in the 1990s, you could get a tape player shaped like a can of Coca Cola. [Simon the Magpie] scored one of these decks and decided to turn it into
a tape echo effect instead.
It didn’t work so well, but the concept is a compelling one. You can see the result in the video below.
The core of the effect is a tape loop, which [Simon] set up to loop around a pair of hacked-up cassette shells. This allows him to place one half of the loop in the Coca-Cola cassette player and the other half in a more conventional desktop tape deck. A 3D-printed bracket allows the two decks and the tape loop to be assembled into one complete unit.
The function is simple. The desktop tape deck records onto the loop, with the Coca-Cola unit then playing back that section of tape a short while later. Hey, presto — it’s a tape delay! It’s super lo-fi, though, and the tape loop is incredibly fragile.
There’s some charm in the warbly, weird sounds coming out of the Coca-Cola tape player. [Simon] turns this to his advantage and drops an incredibly catchy avant-garde pop hook with great results. It reminds us of some great DIY hardware we saw
many years ago
. We’ve been seeing a lot of
tape echos
lately, but we don’t know why. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750307",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T12:15:01",
"content": "Many years ago I had an Akai reel to reel tape deck that had a monitor loop. The sound would go on the tape at the record head and then play back a short time later through the playback head. I once cu... | 1,760,371,947.220799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/compaq-portable-iii-is-more-than-meets-the-eye/ | Compaq Portable III Is More Than Meets The Eye | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"compaq",
"compaq portable III",
"portable III"
] | The Compaq Portable III hails from the 386 era — in the days before the laptop form factor was what we know today. It’s got a bit of an odd design, but a compelling one, and the keyboard is pretty nifty, too. [r0r0] found one of these old-school machines and decided it was well worth refitting it
to give it some modern grunt.
The Portable III ended up scoring a mini-ITX build, with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and an AMD RX580 GPU. Cramming all this into the original shell took some work, like using a vertical riser to fit in the GPU. Hilariously, the RGB RAM sticks are a little bit wasted when the enclosure is closed.
For the purists out there, you’ll be relieved to know the machine’s original plasma display was dead. Thus, a larger modern LCD was fitted instead. However, [r0r0] did play around with software to emulate the plasma look just for fun.
It’s funny to think you could once score one of these proud machines
for free at a swap meet
.
https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1956008368550400/1.mp4
https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1956008368550400/2.mp4 | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750222",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2024-04-16T00:21:23",
"content": "Nice build! I was always envious of those “lunch box” form factors with amber plasma displays.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6750264",
"author":... | 1,760,371,947.264719 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/plasma-cutter-on-the-cheap-reviewed/ | Plasma Cutter On The Cheap Reviewed | Al Williams | [
"Reviews",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"plasma cutter"
] | If you have a well-equipped shop, it isn’t unusual to have a welder. Stick welders have become a commodity and even some that use shield gas are cheap if you don’t count buying the bottle of gas. But plasma cutters are still a bit pricey. Can you get one from China for under $300? Yes.
Do you want one that cheap?
[Metal Massacre Fab Shop] answers that question in the video below.
First impressions count, and having plasma misspelled on the unit (plasme) isn’t promising. The instructions were unclear, and some of the fittings didn’t make him happy, so he replaced them with some he had on hand. He also added some pipe tape to stop any leaking.
The first test was a piece of quarter-inch steel at 35 amps. The machine itself is rated to 50 amps. Sparks ensued, and with a little boost in amperage, it made a fair-looking cut. At 50 amps, it was time to try a thicker workpiece. It made the cut, although it wasn’t beautiful. The leaking regulator and the fact that he can’t run the compressor simultaneously as the cutter didn’t help.
From the look of it, for light duty, this would be workable with a little practice and maybe some new fittings. Unsurprisingly, it probably isn’t as capable as a professional unit. Still could be very handy to have.
It is possible to convert a
welder into a plasma cutter
. A handheld unit like this probably won’t benefit from a
Sharpie
. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750200",
"author": "quietfox",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T21:09:53",
"content": "Jared at Questionable Garage did a rundown of some inexpensive plasma cutters recently as well:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOdOSYH8Yww",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,371,947.176626 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/3d-printing-a-cassette-is-good-retro-fun/ | 3D Printing A Cassette Is Good Retro Fun | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"cassette",
"tape"
] | The cassette is one of the coolest music formats ever, in that you could chuck them about with abandon and they’d usually still work. [Chris Borge] recently decided to see if he could recreate these plastic audio packages himself,
with great success.
He kicked off his project by printing some examples of an open source cassette model he found online. The model was nicely accurate to the original Compact Cassette design, but wasn’t exactly optimized for 3D printing. It required a great deal of support material and wasn’t easy to customize.
[Chris] ended up splitting the model into multiple components, which could then be assembled with glue later. He then set about customizing the cassette shells with
Minecraft
artwork. Details of the artwork are baked into the model at varying heights just 1/10th of the total layer height. This makes it easy to designate which sections should be printed with which filament during his multi-colored print. And yet, because the height difference is below a full layer height, the details all end up on the same layer to avoid any ugly gaps between the sections. From there, it’s a simple matter of transferring over the mechanical parts from an existing cassette tape to make the final thing work.
It’s a neat trick, and the final results are impressive. [Chris] was able to create multicolored cassettes that look great. It’s one of the better uses we’ve seen for a multi-colored printer. This would be an epic way to customize a mixtape for a friend!
We’ve seen some great 3D printed cassettes before, too, like
these retro reel-to-reel lookalikes
. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750182",
"author": "Bear Naff",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T19:35:03",
"content": "The compact cassette was definitely superior in one fashion. You could replay them with a simple electromechanical system and they kept their place when power was lost – making them perfect for audio b... | 1,760,371,947.310483 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/logic-analyzers-decoding-and-monitoring/ | Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"logic analyzer",
"protocol decoder",
"pulseview",
"reverse engineering",
"sigrok"
] | Last time, we looked into
using a logic analyzer to decode SPI signals of LCD displays,
which can help us reuse LCD screens from proprietary systems, or port LCD driver code from one platform to another! If you are to do that, however, you might find a bottleneck – typically, you need to capture a whole bunch of data and then go through it, comparing bytes one by one, which is quite slow. If you have tinkered with Pulseview, you probably have already found an option to export decoded data – all you need to do is right-click on the decoder output and you’ll be presented with a bunch of options to export it. Here’s what you will find:
2521888-2521888 I²C: Address/data: Start
2521896-2521947 I²C: Address/data: Address write: 22
2521947-2521954 I²C: Address/data: Write
2521955-2521962 I²C: Address/data: ACK
2521962-2522020 I²C: Address/data: Data write: 01
2522021-2522028 I²C: Address/data: ACK
2522030-2522030 I²C: Address/data: Start repeat
2522038-2522089 I²C: Address/data: Address read: 22
2522089-2522096 I²C: Address/data: Read
2522096-2522103 I²C: Address/data: ACK
2522104-2522162 I²C: Address/data: Data read: 91
2522162-2522169 I²C: Address/data: NACK
2522172-2522172 I²C: Address/data: Stop
Whether on the screen or in an exported file, the decoder output is not terribly readable – depending on the kind of interface you’re sniffing, be it I2C, UART or SPI, you will get five to ten lines of decoder output for every byte transferred. If you’re getting large amounts of data from your logic analyzer and you want to actually understand what’s happening, this quickly will become a problem – not to mention that scrolling through the Pulseview window is not a comfortable experience.
The above output could look like this:
0x22: read 0x01 ( DEV_ID) = 0x91 (0b10010001)
. Yet, it doesn’t, and I want to show you how to correct this injustice. Today, we supercharge Pulseview with a few external scripts, and I’ll show you how to transfer large amounts of Sigrok decoder output data into beautiful human-readable transaction printouts. While we’re at it, let’s also check out commandline sigrok, avoiding the Pulseview UI altogether – with
sigrok-cli
, you can easily create a lightweight program that runs in the background and saves all captured data into a text file, or shows it on a screen in realtime!
Oh, and while we’re here, I’d like to show you a pretty cool thing I’ve found on Aliexpress! These are
tiny FX2 boards
with the same logic analyzer schematic, so they work with the FX2 open-source firmware and Sigrok – but they’re much smaller, have USB-C connectors instead of cable struggle that is miniUSB, and are often even cheaper than the ‘plastic case’ FX2 analyzers we’ve gotten used to. In addition to that, since you can see the exposed PCB, unlike with the ‘plastic case’ analyzers, you know whether you’re getting input buffers or not!
Boiling It Down
As an example, let’s consider
a capture of the I2C bus of the Pinecil soldering iron
. On this bus, there’s three I2C devices – a 96×16 OLED screen at the address
0x3c
, an accelerometer at
0x18
, and the FUSB302B USB-PD PHY at
0x22
. The FUSB302B is a chip that we remember from the USB-C low-level PD communication articles where we built our own PD trigger board. I could only have written those articles because I got the logic analyzer captures, processed them into transaction printouts, and used those to debug my PD code – now, you get to learn how to use such captures for your benefit, too.
If you open the above files in Pulseview – you will see a whole bunch of I2C traces. I wanted to zone in on the FUSB302, naturally – accelerometer and OLED communications are also interesting but weren’t my focus. You will also see that there’s a protocol decoder called “I2C filter” attached. Somehow, it’s been remarkably useless for me whenever I try to use it, not filtering out anything at all. No matter, though – right click on the I2C decoder output row (the one that shows decoded bytes and events), click “Export all annotations for this row”, pick a filename, then open the file in a text editor.
The view you get is a bit overwhelming – we get 22,000 lines of text, which is nowhere near the kind of data you could feasibly read through. Of course, most of that is LCD transfer data, and there’s a fair bit of accelerometer querying, too – you want to filter out both of these if you want to only see the FUSB302 transactions. Nevertheless, it’s a good start – you get a text file that contains all the activity happening on the I2C bus, it’s just too much text to read through on your own.
Here’s an example line:
2521783-2521834 I²C: Address/data: Address write: 30
. This is very easy to process, if you take a closer look at it! Each line describes an I2C event, and it starts with two timestamps – event start and event end, separated by
-
. Then, we get three more values, separated by spaces – decoder name, decoder event type, and the decoder event itself. This output format can be changed in Pulseview settings, if you’re so inclined, however, you can easily parse it as-is. For this format, we can simply split the string by space (not splitting further than three spaces), getting a timestamp, decoder name, decoder output type and decoder event.
I’ll be using Python for parsing, but feel free to translate the code into anything that works for you. Here’s a bit of Python that reads our file line-by-line and puts the useful parts of every line into variables:
with open('decoded.txt', 'r') as f:
line = f.readline()
while line:
line = line.strip()
if not line: # empty line terminates the loop, use `continue` to ignore empty lines instead
break
# ignoring decoder name and decoder output type - they don't change in this case
tss, _, _, d = line.split(' ', 3)
[ "do something with this data" ]
line = f.readline() # get a new line and rerun the loop body
Parsing lines of text into event data is simple enough – from there, we need to group events into I2C transactions. As you can see, a transaction starts with a
Start
event, which we can use as a marker to separate different transactions within all the events we get. We can do the usual programming tactic – go through the events, have one “current transaction” list that we add new events to, and an “all transactions so far” list where we put transactions we’ve finished processing.
The plan is simple – in the same loop, we look at the event we get, and if it’s not a
Start
event, whether it’s a write/read/ACK/NACK bit event, or
Stop
/
Start repeat
event, we simply put it into the “current transaction” list. If we get a new
Start
event, we consider this “current transaction” list finished and add it to our list of received transactions, then start a new “current transaction” list. While we’re at it, we can also parse address and data bytes – we receive them as strings and we need to parse them as hex digits, unless you change the I2C decoder to output something else.
Here’s a link to the relevant code section. I could talk more about what it does, for instance, it filters out the FUSB302 transfers by the address, but I’d like to cut to the chase and show the input lines compared to the output transaction list. You can get this output if you run
python -i parse.py
and enter
tr[0]
in the REPL:
>>> tr[0]
['start', 34, 'wr', 'ack', 'wr', 1, 'ack', 'start repeat', 34, 'rd', 'ack', 'rd', 145, 'nack', 'stop']
Now, this is a proper I2C transaction! All of these elements are things we can visually discern in the Pulseview UI. Mind you, this code is tailored towards the FUSB302 transaction parsing, but it should not be hard to modify it so that it singles out and parses accelerometer or OLED transactions instead. From here, it’s almost enough to simply concatenate the transaction list elements and get a semi-human-readable transaction, but let’s not stop our ambitions here – the FUSB302 has documentation available, and we can get to a perfectly readable decoding of what the code actually does!
I’ve scrolled through the datasheet, and put together a Python dictionary with a register address-name mapping. Using that, we can easily go through transactions, mapping them to specific register reads and writes, and convert the raw transaction data into lines of text that clearly tell us – first, we write this byte to SWITCHES0 register, then we write a this byte into POWER register, and so on. Here’s the code I wrote to make verbose transactions – and it helps you turn logic analyzer captures into Python code!
Say, you’re writing a replacement open-source firmware for something you own, or perhaps you’re poking around copying the implementation of some protocol for your own purposes, like I copied the Pinecil’s PD implementation to help me debug my own PD code. Here’s the cool part – you can translate this kind of output into your own high-level code near-instantly, to the point where you can even modify this decoding script to output Python or C code! This is just like decompiling, except you get a language of your choice, and a human-readable description of the code’s external behaviour, which is often what you actually want.
Here’s how a verbose transaction list looks:
[34, '0x22', 1, '0x01 ( DEV_ID)', 'rd', [145], '0x91 (0b10010001)']
. And, this is how I can format such a transactions, using a helper function included in the code I’ve linked:
>>> tr_as_upy(transactions[0])
i2c.readfrom_mem(0x22, 0x1) # rd: DEV_ID 0x91 (0b10010001)
>>> tr_as_upy(transactions[1])
i2c.writeinto_mem(0x22, 0xc, b'\x01') # wr RESET: 0x01 (0b00000001)
Such code allows you to rapidly reverse-engineer proprietary and open-source devices, while getting a good grasp on what is it specifically that they do. What more, with such a decoder, you can also write a protocol decoder for Sigrok so that you can easily access it from Pulseview! For instance, if you’re capturing reads/writes for an I2C EEPROM, there’s an I2C EEPROM decoder in Sigrok that you can add – and, there’s never enough Sigrok decoders, so adding your own decoder to the pile is a wonderful contribution to the open-source logic analysis software that everybody knows and loves.
Going Further With Commandline
This decoding approach gives you the most control over your output data, which massively helps if you have to process large amounts of it. You can also debug intricate problems like never before. For instance, I’ve had to help someone debug a web-based ESP8266 flasher that can’t flash particular kinds of firmware images properly, and for that, I’m capturing the UART data being transferred between the PC and the ESP8266.
There’s a problem with such capturing, too – during flashing, the UART baudrate changes, with the bootloader baudrate being 76800, the flashing baudrate being 468000, and the software baudrate being 115200. As a result, you can’t pull off the usual trick where you connect a USB-UART adapter’s RX pin to your data bus and have it stream data to a serial terminal window on your monitor. Well, with granular control over how you process data captured by the logic analyzer, you don’t have to bother with that!
Bytes received at 76800 marked in orange, bytes received at 11500 marked in greed; the exact commandline visible in the screenshot, too!
The idea is – you connect a logic analyzer to the data bus, and stack two UART decoders onto the same pin! Each decoder is going to throw error messages whenever the current signal is on a different baudrate than the decoder’s expected one. Now, Sigrok being a reasonably modular and open-source project, you can absolutely write a UART decoder for Sigrok that works with multiple baudrates. If you’re like me and don’t want to do that, you can also go the lazy way about it and mash the output of two decoders together in realtime, using error messages as guidance on where the switch occured!
For this kind of purpose, having realtime and text-only processing of Sigrok-produced data is more than enough. Thankfully, the FX2 analyzers let you capture data indefinitely, and Sigrok commandline lets you stack protocol decoders that will then run in realtime! So,
I’ve made a script
that you can pipe
sigrok-cli
output into, which compares decoder output to figure out which baudrate is currently being used, and outputs data from the decoder with the least faults. The code’s missing a smarter buffering algo, so the switching-between-baudrates moment is a bit troublesome, as you can see in the screenshot, but it’s working otherwise!
With this Sigrok commandline approach, you gain one more logic analyzer superpower! Since FX2 analyzers let you capture data indefinitely, streaming it to your PC as it is captured, a commandline decoder lets you wire up a FX2 analyzer to a Pi Zero – so you can build a tiny device capturing and decoding a data bus 24/7. Set the FX2 and Pi Zero combo near whatever you’re trying to tap into, run sigrok, have it save data with timestamps onto an SD card, and you can collect weeks of bus activity data easily! This is the kind of capability I wish I had when I was tasked with reverse-engineering a special piece of industrial machinery, controlled over CAN and using a semi-proprietary communication algorithm; having lots of data seriously helps in such scenarios and I was struggling to capture enough.
If you’d rather keep to low-depth GUI experiments, this kind of parsing is useful too – Sigrok protocol decoders are written in Python, which means you can also take your Python output-parsing code and turn it into Pulseview-accessible protocol decoder reasonably easily. All in all, this kind of experimentation lets you squeeze as much as possible out of even the cheapest logic analyzers out there. In the next article, I’d like to go more in-depth through other kinds of logic analyzers we have available – especially all the the cheap options. Given that Sigrok
has recently merged the PR with support for the Pi Pico
, there’s a fair bit you can get beyond what the FX2-based analyzers have to offer! | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6750161",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2024-04-15T18:08:32",
"content": "Thank you! IMO sigrock/Pulseview deserves much more attention here on Hackaday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6750225",
"author": "Steve",
... | 1,760,371,947.360547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/this-week-in-security-batbadbut-dlink-and-your-tv-too/ | This Week In Security: BatBadBut, DLink, And Your TV Too | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"BatBadBut",
"d-link",
"Libfreeimage",
"This Week in Security"
] | So first up, we have
BatBadBut
, a pun based on the vulnerability being “about batch files and bad, but not the worst.” It’s a weird interaction between how Windows uses
cmd.exe
to execute batch files and how argument splitting and character escaping normally works. And what is apparently
a documentation flaw in the Windows API
.
When starting a process, even on Windows, the new executable is handed a set of arguments to parse. In Linux and friends, that is a pre-split list of arguments, the
argv
array. On Windows, it’s a single string, left up to the program to handle. The convention is to follow the same behavior as Linux, but the
cmd.exe
binary is a bit different. It uses the carrot
^
symbol instead of the backslash
\
to escape special symbols, among other differences. The Rust devs took a look and decided that there are some cases where
a given string just can’t be made safe for cmd.exe
, and opted to just throw an error when a string met this criteria.
And that brings us to the big questions. Who’s fault is it, and how bad is it? I think there’s some shared blame here. The Microsoft documentation on
CreateProcess()
strongly suggests that it won’t execute a batch file without
cmd.exe
being explicitly called. On the other hand, This is established behavior, and scripting languages on Windows have to play the game by Microsoft’s rules. And the possible problem space is fairly narrow: Calling a batch file with untrusted arguments.
Almost all of the languages with this quirk have either released patches or documentation updates about the issue. There is a notable outlier, as the Java language will not receive a fix, not deeming it a vulnerability. It’s rather ironic, given that Java is probably the most likely language to actually find this problem in the wild.
D-Link E-Waste
A
Pair of Vulnerabilities
have been announced for D-Link NAS units, that together make for a trivial unauthorized Remote Code Execution (RCE) scenario. The four known-vulnerable models are all from the DNS-300 series, and
all of them are well beyond their End of Service dates
. These devices are on the Internet, and scanning and exploitation has started in the wild.
Due to the age of the units, D-Link will not be issuing patches for the hardcoded credentials and command injection issues that were found. And that puts these devices strictly in the Do Not Connect category. A terrifying snippet taken from the DNS-327L manual: “The DNS-327L supports UPnP port forwarding which configures port forwarding automatically on your UPnP-enabled router.” No wonder there’s nearly 100k of these devices on the Internet. The official D-Link advice is to retire and replace.
And Your TV, Too!
Multiple versions of the
WebOS TV firmware have a series of problems accessible over the local network
. CVE-2023-6317 is a fun one, where an account with no privileges can be silently created, and then the key generated upon account creation can be immediately re-used to create another account, with full permissions.
And then there’s a trio of vulnerabilities that allow for command execution. The good news is that it’s only accessible from the local network, and that TVs aren’t known for UPNP shenanigans quite like NASs are. And the real silver lining, if you have one of the vulnerable TVs? There’s a WebOS Homebrew scene!
Mostly Luck — And Curiosity
[Fang-Pen Lin] was working on a project using ZeroMQ, a universal message library. This led to excitement about CurveZMQ, which among other things, allows embedding arbitrary data into the metadata field of an authenticated message. And then curiosity forced the question, how much data can we put in there? To find the answer required a dive into the ZeroMQ source. And sure enough, there it was, a fixed-size static buffer, neatly defining how much data goes in the metadata field. But what would happen if we add a bit more data then we’re supposed to? Kaboom. The buffer overflows, the program crashes, and
that’s how [Lin] discovered a critical security bug in ZeroMQ
.
Now, this is more than just luck. It’s a combination of knowing enough to recognize the issue, and having the curiosity to look in just the right spot. The issue was rapidly fixed, and that was that,
way back in 2019
. Why are we talking about it now? Because that combination of skill, curiosity, and luck is how the XZ backdoor was discovered. And how pretty much every vulnerability or bug gets found and fixed. Follow the link for the rest of [Jin]’s thoughts on the matter.
Libfreeimage
The
Libfreeimage library has a pair of buffer overflows
, triggered by parsing malicious XPM images. In this case, it’s the color names in those files, which are copied into a fixed size buffer, and can be easily overflowed. And to make it worse, this can trigger an error message, which can lead to yet another overflow. It’s likely these issues could be used to achieve arbitrary code execution. This one could be quite a sneaky problem, as libfreeimage has been around for a long time, with the first release coming in January of 2000, and
the XPM loader getting added in 2003
. That’s a long time for a library to get built into other projects and binaries.
Bits and Bytes
Using the appropriate username of [1337_wannabe], a contributor to the Wordfence Bug Bounty Extravaganza
earned a cool $5500 for a pre-auth SQL injection
in the LayerSlider WordPress plugin. The was reported on March 25th, and a fix was pushed on the 27th, in an impressive show. Turns out you are pretty leet, [1337_wannabe].
On the other hand, when there’s no CVE,
companies don’t get in much of a hurry to push updates
. The Lighttpd lightweight web server pushed fixes for use-after-free bugs way back in 2018, but didn’t bother to get CVE numbers assigned, or make a big announcement of the vulnerabilities. This is typical for internally discovered issues like this. The problem here is that lighttpd gets bundled into other software, like Baseboard Management Controllers. And so for five years, Supermicro, Lenovo, and others have been shipping vulnerable BMC implementations, because nobody bothered to grab the latest version. On the plus side, these issues don’t lead directly to code execution, but they do result in data disclosure. The morals of this one? Update your code! And don’t put your BMC on the Internet!
And finally, in the funny-yet-problem category, the
Twitter to X rebranding process hit a snag
, when all domains ending in “twitter.com” were visually re-written as ending in “x.com”. AKA, a tweet with a link to netflitwitter.com would appear in the tweet as netflix.com, but still actually point to the bogus domain when clicked. Hilarious, and a real test-the-code-in-production sort of moment that I can really relate to. But it’s a problem particularly for the other brands that happen to end with an X, like Netflix and others, as this was prime phishing and spoofing risk while it was still a problem. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749577",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T14:07:06",
"content": "Find 99% of stupid exploits from C code:Find usage of strcat,strcpy or sprintf.Done. Shouldn’t be that difficult to find and fix.Usage of non-“n” C std buffer function should be punishable by law.",
"pa... | 1,760,371,947.442417 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/the-future-looks-bleak-for-alexa-skill-development/ | The Future Looks Bleak For Alexa Skill Development | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"News"
] | [
"alexa",
"alexa skill",
"amazon",
"smart home"
] | While the average Hackaday reader is arguably less likely than most to install a megacorp’s listening device in their home, we know there’s at least some of you out there that have an Amazon hockey puck or two sitting on a shelf. The fact is, they offer some compelling possibilities for DIY automation, even if you do have to jump through a few uncomfortable hoops to bend them to your will.
That being said, we’re willing to bet very few readers have bothered installing more than a few Alexa Skills. But that’s not a judgment based on any kind of nerd stereotype — it’s just that
nobody
seems to care about them. A fact that’s evidenced by the recent revelation that even Amazon looks to be losing interest in the program. In a post on LinkedIn, Skill developer
[Mark Tucker] shared an email he received from the mothership
explaining they were ending the AWS Promotional Credits for Alexa (APCA) program on June 30th.
For those that haven’t
tried their hand at developing an Alexa Skill
, there’s a frustrating amount of back-end stuff that needs to happen to enable even the most basic of functionality. Not surprisingly, a lot of it relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which in turn means somebody has to foot the bill for it. Up until now, Amazon was giving out AWS credits to Alexa Skill developers so this wasn’t as much of a concern. But now that the program is ending, developers will need to decide if its worth coming out of their own pocket to keep their Skills running.
That wouldn’t be such a problem, if it wasn’t for the fact that Alexa Skills are an absolute dumpster fire. The listing of the top Skills is a wasteland — if these are the best voice-enabled applications that have been developed after nearly a decade, we can see why Amazon is ending the gravy train. We’re talking BonziBuddy levels of utility here. Judging by their reviews, it seems even the people using the things hate them.
It’s still possible to self-host Alexa Skills for free, which is probably what most hackers would be doing anyway if they wanted to spin up one of their own. But this definitely isn’t good news for the long-term viability of Skills. One has to wonder how long Amazon will keep the lights on for this particular feature if the big name culturally relevant applications like
Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?
decide to bail. If all the blood, sweat, and tears that the developers of
Easy Yoga
shed to bring a solid 2.5 star experience to nearly 100 people can’t financially sustain itself, what have we been working towards all this time?
We love you too, Tommy.
Of course, Amazon can’t
completely
abandon Skills. There needs to be some kind of plugin system in place so companies can get their smart
crap
devices working with Alexa. But we wouldn’t be surprised if, within the next few years, they switch it over to some kind of curated collection. If Belkin is willing to pay Amazon to
keep their Wemo devices
working with Alexa, so be it.
But as much as we applaud the effort, we think the two of you that
developed Skills
just to
listen to the latest
Hackaday posts through your smart speaker might be out of luck. | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749538",
"author": "Darren duNord",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T11:40:11",
"content": "Those “two of you” could be disabled persons.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749603",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04... | 1,760,371,947.578297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/make-your-music-simpler-with-the-user-unfriendliest-cassette-deck-ever/ | Make Your Music Simpler With The User-Unfriendliest Cassette Deck Ever | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"cassette",
"UI",
"unfriendly",
"user friendly"
] | Call us crazy, but music was a whole lot more fun when it was on physical media. Or perhaps just easier to use, especially in the car. Whether your particular vintage favored CDs, cassettes, or even 8-tracks, being able to fish out that favorite album and slam it in the player while never taking your eyes off the road was a whole lot easier than navigating a playlist on a locked phone, or trying to control an infotainment system through soft buttons on a touch screen.
It seems like [Jarek Lupinski] is as much a Spotify Luddite as we are, since
his “tape-deck” project
is aimed to be as user-unfriendly as possible. It’s just an auto-reversing cassette deck movement stripped bare of all useful appurtenances, like a way to fast forward or rewind. You just put a cassette in and it plays, start to finish, before auto-reversing to play the other side in its entirety. It doesn’t even have a volume control — his cheeky advice is to “listen to louder or quieter albums” to solve that problem. Pretty easy, really, and not a EULA or advertisement in sight.
Build files
are available if you hate yourself enough to build one of your own.
All kidding aside, this is kind of a nice reminder of how much things have changed, and how much complexity we’ve layered onto the simplest of pleasures. If you like the minimalist approach of this project but not the deconstructed aesthetics,
we’ve got you covered
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749529",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T10:44:00",
"content": "Well, at least you don’t need to crank it with a pencil.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749539",
"author": "Jarek",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,371,947.629071 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/the-aimbot-v3-aims-to-track-terminate-you/ | The Aimbot V3 Aims To Track & Terminate You | Richard Baguley | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"bb gun",
"computer vision",
"robots"
] | Some projects we cover are simple, while some descend into the sort of obsessive, rabbit-hole-digging-into-wonderland madness that hackers everywhere will recognize. That’s precisely where [Excessive Overload] has gone with the
AimBot V3, a target-tracking BB-gun
that uses three cameras, two industrial servos, and an indeterminate amount of computing power to track objects and fire up to 40 BB gun pellets a second at them.
The whole project is overkill, made of CNC-machined metal, epoxy-cast gears, and a chain-driven pan-tilt system that looks like it would take off a finger or two before you even get to the shooty bit. That’s driven by input from the three cameras: a wide-angle one that finds the target and a stereo pair that zooms in on the target and determines the distance from the gun, using several hundred frames per second of video. This is then used to aim the BB gun stock, a
Polarstar mechanism
that fires up to 40 pellets a second. That’s fed by a customized feeder that uses spring wire.
The whole thing comes together to form a huge gun that will automatically track the target. It even uses motion tracking to discern between a static object like a person and a dart fired by a toy gun, picking the dart out of the air at least some of the time.
The downside is that it only works on targets with a retroreflective patch: it includes a 15 watt IR LED on the front of the gun. The camera detects the bright reflection and uses it to track the target, so all you have to do to avoid this particular Terminator is make sure you aren’t wearing anything too shiny. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749513",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T07:40:58",
"content": "H E A V YI’ll just wait until your arms are tired before shooting you :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749604",
"author": "TG",
"ti... | 1,760,371,949.545933 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/tearing-into-a-sparky-sandwich/ | Tearing Into A Sparky Sandwich | Navarre Bartz | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"Chevy Spark EV",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"Li battery",
"Li-ion",
"Li-ion polymer",
"Lithium-ion battery"
] | We’re still in the early days of modern EV infrastructure, so minor issues can lead to a full high voltage pack replacement given the lack of high voltage-trained mechanics. [Ed’s Garage] was able to source a Spark EV battery pack that had succumbed to a single bad cell and takes us along for the
disassembly of the faulty module
.
The Spark EV was the predecessor to the more well-known Chevy Bolt, so its nearly ten year old systems might not reflect the state-of-the-art in EV batteries, but they are certainly more modern than
the battery
in your great-grandmother’s Baker Electric. The
Li-ion polymer
pouch cells are sandwiched together with cooling and shock absorbing panels to keep the cells healthy and happy, at least in theory.
In a
previous video
, [Ed’s Garage] takes apart the full pack and shows how the last 2P16S module has assumed a darker color on its yellow plastic, seeming to indicate that it wasn’t receiving sufficient cooling during its life in the car. It would seem that the cooling plates inside the module weren’t quite up to the task. These cells are destined for other projects, but it doesn’t seem like this particular type of battery module would be too difficult to reassemble and put back in a car as long as you could get the right torque settings for the compression bolts.
If you’re looking for other EV teardowns, might we suggest this
Tesla Model S pack
or one from a passively-cooled
Nissan Leaf
? | 35 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749497",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T04:24:34",
"content": "Bad idea to wear ANY kind of jewelry when working with battery packs…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749505",
"author": "Manfred",
... | 1,760,371,949.613798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/small-quiet-air-compressor-puts-3d-printed-parts-to-best-use/ | Small, Quiet Air Compressor Puts 3D-Printed Parts To Best Use | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"air",
"compressor",
"delrin",
"piston",
"polyoxymethylene",
"pom",
"valve"
] | When the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. Similarly, while a 3D printer is a fantastic tool to have, it can make you think it’s possible to build all the things with printed parts. Knowing when to print ’em and when to machine ’em is important, a lesson that [Diffraction Limited] has taken to heart with
this semi-printed silent air compressor
.
The key to this compressor’s quiet operation is a combination of its small overall size. its relatively low output, and its strategic use of plastic components, which tend to dampen vibrations. The body of the compressor and the piston arms are the largest 3D-printed parts; the design calls for keeping printed parts in compression for longer life, while the parts of the load path in tension travel through fasteners and other non-printed parts. The piston design is interesting — rather than being attached to connecting rods via wrist pins, the machined Delrin pistons are solidly attached to the piston arms. This means they have to swivel within the cylinders, which are made from short pieces of metal tubing, with piston seals designed to move up and down in grooves on the pistons to allow air to move past them. The valve bodies atop each cylinder are salvaged from another compressor.
When powered by a NEMA23-frame BLDC motor via a belt drive, the compressor is remarkably quiet; not quite silent perhaps, but still impressively smooth, and capable of 150 PSI at low speeds. And as a bonus, the split crankcase makes it easy to open up and service, or just show off how it works. We’ve seen a variety of 3D-printed compressors, from
screw-type
to
Wankel
, but this one really takes the prize for fit and finish.
Thanks for the tip, [Whye Knott] — lol. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749468",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T23:42:59",
"content": "Having the electric motor in the base should make it stable, and fits the overall size of the crankcase.Elegant indeed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,949.30615 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/garage-door-automation-with-no-extra-hardware/ | Garage Door Automation With No Extra Hardware | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"garage door",
"home automation",
"home-assistant",
"microcontroller",
"shelly uni",
"wifi"
] | Home automation projects have been popular as long as microcontrollers have been available to the general public. Building computers to handle minutiae so we don’t have to is one of life’s great joys. Among the more popular is adding some sort of system to a garage door. Besides adding Internet-connected remote control to the action of opening and closing, it’s also helpful to have an indicator of the garage door state for peace-of-mind. Most add some sensors and other hardware to accomplish this task
but this project doesn’t use any extra sensors or wiring at all
.
In fact, the only thing added to the garage door for this build besides some wiring is the microcontroller itself. After getting the cover of the opener off, which took some effort, a Shelly Uni was added and powered by the 12V supply from the opener itself. The garage door opener, perhaps unsurprisingly, has its own way of detecting when the door is fully open or closed, so some additional wire was added to these sensors to let the microcontroller know the current state. Shelly Uni platforms have a WiFi module included as well, so nothing else was needed for this to function as a complete garage door automation platform.
[Stephen] uses Home Assistant as the basis for his home automation, and he includes all of the code for getting this platform up and running there. It wouldn’t be too hard to get it running on other openers or even on other microcontroller platforms; the real key to this build is to recognize that sometimes it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel with extra sensors, limit switches, or even power supplies when it’s possible to find those already in the hardware you’re modifying. This isn’t always possible, though, especially with more modern devices
that might already be Internet-connected but probably don’t have great security
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749449",
"author": "Concerned Reader",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T21:23:46",
"content": "“Garage Door Automation With No Extra Hardware”“a Shelly Uni was added”That’s the same as saying you’re making a shake without milk, then the first instruction is to add milk.",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,371,949.353147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/no-lathe-build-your-own/ | No Lathe? Build Your Own | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"lathe",
"woodworking"
] | If you need to make round things, you probably need a lathe. Can you build one as nice as one you can buy? Probably not. But can you build one that will work and allow you to do more things than having no lathe at all? [Mikeandmertle] say
absolutely
! You can see the contraption in operation in the video below.
The build is decidedly functional-looking and only requires a few parts. Most of the components are unremarkable, save for a threaded bar, a metal pipe, some bearings, and a few threaded inserts. Well, there’s also a drill chuck and two lathe centers. Those don’t have to be very expensive, but they may well be the bulk of what you have to spend to make this project.
The optional drilling of the wrong-size holes and subsequent repair made us laugh, but we suggest you skip that step. We thought this lathe would be like many we’ve seen and use an electric drill as a motor. Instead, this lathe uses an angle grinder. It does look easy to mount and, of course, has plenty of torque.
In the video, it looks like there is a little runout, but that isn’t particularly surprising. It still looks useful for something thrown together from mostly spare parts.
You probably can’t use this lathe for anything heavy-duty. You could graduate to a cheap lathe and
upgrade it
. If you do attempt the build, you might look at
a few other projects
and mix and match the best parts. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749723",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-04-13T07:15:20",
"content": "It’s a very simple project, and thus there is not much to write about it, but the design looks useful, and it’s probably designed around parts that were already available, but still…I’d prefer to use a ha... | 1,760,371,949.498292 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/git-good-by-playing-a-gamified-version-of-git/ | Git Good, By Playing A Gamified Version Of Git | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"Software Development"
] | [
"educational",
"game",
"Git",
"godot",
"open source"
] | What better way to learn to use Git than a gamified interface that visualizes every change? That’s the idea behind
Oh My Git!
which aims to teach players all about the popular version control system that underpins so many modern software projects.
Git good, with a gameified git interface.
Sometimes the downside to a tool being so ubiquitous is that it tends to be taken for granted that
everyone
already knows how to use it, and those starting entirely from scratch can be left unsure where to begin. That’s what creators [bleeptrack] and [blinry] had in mind with
Oh My Git!
which is freely available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
The idea is to use a fun playing-card interface to not only teach players the different features, but also to build intuitive familiarity for operations like merging and rebasing by visualizing in real-time the changes a player’s actions make.
The game is made with beginners in mind, with the first two (short) levels establishing that managing multiple versions of a file can quickly become unwieldy without help. Enter
git
— which the game explains is essentially a time machine — and it’s off to the races.
It might be aimed at beginners, but more advanced users can learn a helpful trick or two. The game isn’t some weird pseudo-git simulator, either. The back end uses real git repositories, with a real shell and git interface behind it all. Prefer to type commands in directly instead of using the playing card interface? Go right ahead!
Oh My Git!
uses the free and open-source
Godot game engine
(not to be confused with the
Godot machine
, a chaos-based random number generator.) | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749755",
"author": "Valentijn Sessink",
"timestamp": "2024-04-13T14:15:23",
"content": "It’s been made pretty well. The prompt is an actual prompt within a game-made git directory. Everything works – except you won’t be leaving the directory – probably to guard you from becoming lo... | 1,760,371,949.162623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/electromagnets-make-vertical-cnc-cutter-a-little-stickier/ | Electromagnets Make Vertical CNC Cutter A Little Stickier | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"electromagnet",
"LinuxCNC",
"plasma",
"sheet steel",
"torch"
] | Workholding is generally not a problem on a big CNC plasma cutter.; gravity does a pretty good job of keeping heavy sheet steel in place on the bed. But what if your CNC table isn’t a table? The answer:
magnets — lots of magnets
.
The backstory on this is a bit involved, but the condensed version is that [Lucas] needed a CNC plasma cutter big enough to cut full-sized sheets of steel, but lacked the floor space in his shop for such a beast. His solution was to build a custom CNC machine that stands more or less vertically, allowing him to cut full sheets in a mere fraction of the floor space. It’s a fantastic idea, one that he put a lot of effort into, but it’s not without its problems. Chief among them is the tendency for the sheet metal to buckle and bulge during cutting since gravity isn’t working for him, along with the pesky problem of offcuts slipping away.
To help hold things in place, [Lucas] decided to magnetize the bed of his cutter. That required winding a bunch of magnets, which is covered in the video below. Mass production of magnets turns out not to be as easy as you’d think. Also unexpected was the need to turn off magnets when the cutting torch is nearby, lest the magnetic field bork the cutting plasma. [Lucas] grabbed
some code
from the LinuxCNC forum that streams the gantry coordinates over serial and used an Arduino to parse those messages. When the torch is getting close to one of the magnets, a relay board cuts power to just that magnet. You can see it in action in the video below; at around the 18:15 mark, you can see the sheet bulging up a bit when the torch comes by, and sucking back down when it moves on.
The amount of work [Lucas] put into this project is impressive, and the results are fantastic. This isn’t the first time he’s relied on
the power of magnets
to deal with sheet steel, and it probably won’t be the last. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749695",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04-13T00:35:36",
"content": "The magnets messing up the plasma cutter is definitely the most interesting part. Pretty smart to just cram a cnc machine in vertically if you don’t have the shop space",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,949.258805 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/hdmi-ddc-keypad-controls-monitor-from-rack/ | HDMI DDC Keypad Controls Monitor From Rack | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"DDC",
"hdmi",
"keyboard",
"pic18"
] | Sometime last year, [Jon Petter Skagmo] bought a Dell U3421WE monitor. It’s really quite cool, with a KVM switch and picture-by-picture support for two inputs at the same time. The only downside is that control is limited to a tiny joystick hiding behind the bezel. It’s such a pain to use that [Jon] doesn’t even use all of the features available.
[Jon] tried
ddcutil
, but ultimately it didn’t work out.
Enter the rack-mounted custom controller keyboard
, a solution which gives [Jon] single keypress control of adjusting the brightness up and down, toggling picture-by-picture mode, changing source, and more.
How does it work? It uses the display data channel (DDC), which is an I²C bus on the monitor’s HDMI connector. More specifically, it has a PIC18 microcontroller sending those commands via eight Cherry MX-style blues.
Check this out — [Jon] isn’t even wasting one of the four monitor inputs because this build uses an HDMI through port. The finished build looks exquisite and fits right into the rack with its CNC-routed aluminium front panel. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.
Ever wonder how given keyboard registers the key you’re pressing?
Here’s a brief history of keyboard encoding. | 22 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749663",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T20:12:50",
"content": "Nice job on the rack mount faceplate!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749678",
"author": "Hirudinea",
... | 1,760,371,949.447709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/crank-powered-train-uses-no-batteries-or-plugs/ | Crank-Powered Train Uses No Batteries Or Plugs | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"generator",
"reed switch",
"relay",
"supercapacitor",
"train"
] | The prolific [Peter Waldraff] is at back it with
another gorgeous micro train layout
. This time, there are no plugs and no batteries. And although it’s crank-powered, it can run on its own with the flip of a switch. How? With a supercapacitor, of course.
The crank handle is connected a 50 RPM motor that acts as a generator, producing the voltage necessary to both power the train and charge up the supercapacitor. As you’ll see in the video below, [Peter] only has to move the train back and forth about two or three times before he’s able to flip the switch and watch it run between the gem mine and the cliff by itself.
The supercapacitor also lights up the gem mine to show off the toiling dwarfs, and there’s a couple of reed switches at either end of the track and a relay that handles the auto-reverse capability. Be sure to stick around to the second half of the video where [Peter] shows how he built this entire thing — the box, the layout, and the circuit.
Want to see more of [Peter]’s trains and other work?
Here you go. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749660",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T19:57:49",
"content": "He does such great work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6749682",
"author": "David Bower",
"timestamp": "2024-04... | 1,760,371,949.206822 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/hackaday-podcast-episode-266-a-writers-deck-patching-your-battleship-and-fact-checking-the-eclipse/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 266: A Writer’s Deck, Patching Your Battleship, And Fact-Checking The Eclipse | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Before Elliot Williams jumps on a train for Hackaday Europe, there was just enough time to meet up virtually with Tom Nardi to discuss their favorite hacks and stories from the previous week. This episode’s topics include the potential benefits of having a dual-gantry 3D printer, using microcontrollers to build bespoke note taking gadgets, the exciting world of rock tumbling, and the proper care and maintenance required to keep your World War II battleship in shape. They’ll also go over some old school keyboard technologies, DIP chip repairs, and documenting celestial events with your home solar array. By the end you’ll hear about the real-world challenges of putting artificial intelligence to work, and how you can safely put high-power lithium batteries to work in your projects without setting your house on fire.
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!
Direct download for off-line listening
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 266 Show Notes:
News:
Hackaday Europe Is Almost Here, Last Call For Tickets
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [Vinyl Ecstasy] for playing Final Fantasy and for getting picked by the random numbers!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
3D Printer Hot Off The Griddle
ESP32 Provides Distraction-Free Writing Experience
A Brief History Of Keyboard Encoding
Kid’s Ride Gets Boosted Battery, ESP32 Control
Vibratory Rock Tumbler Bounces On Printed Spring
How To Properly Patch Your Iowa-Class Battleship
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
A Spark Gap Transmitter, Characterized
Emergency DIP Pin Repair For Anyone
A Drone Motor Does E-Bikes
Tom’s Picks:
The Easy Way To Make A Smart Appliance
Double-Checking NASA’s Eclipse Estimate At Home
Comparing Desoldering Tools
Can’t-Miss Articles:
In A Twist, Humans Take Jobs From AI
Ask Hackaday: Why Are Self-Checkouts Failing?
Ultimate Power: Lithium-Ion Packs Need Some Extra Circuitry | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,949.388485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/12/beating-ibms-eagle-quantum-processor-on-an-ising-model-with-a-classical-tensor-network/ | Beating IBM’s Eagle Quantum Processor On An Ising Model With A Classical Tensor Network | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"quantum computing"
] | The central selling point of qubit-based quantum processors is that they can supposedly solve certain types of tasks much faster than a classical computer. This comes however with the major complication of quantum computing being ‘noisy’, i.e. affected by outside influences. That this shouldn’t be a hindrance was the point of an article published last year by IBM researchers where they demonstrated a speed-up of a Trotterized time evolution of a 2D transverse-field Ising model on an IBM Eagle 127-qubit quantum processor, even with the error rate of today’s noisy quantum processors. Now, however, [Joseph Tindall] and colleagues have demonstrated with a
recently published paper
in
Physics
that they can beat the IBM quantum processor with a classical processor.
In the IBM paper by [Yougseok Kim] and colleagues
as published in
Nature
, the essential take is that despite fault-tolerance heuristics being required with noisy quantum computers, this does not mean that there are no applications for such flawed quantum systems in computing, especially when scaling and speeding up quantum processors. In this particular experiment it concerns an
Ising model
, a statistical mechanical model, which has many applications in physics, neuroscience, etc., based around phase transitions.
Unlike the simulation running on the IBM system, the classical simulation only has to run once to get accurate results, which along with other optimizations still gives classical systems the lead. Until we develop quantum processors with built-in error-tolerance, of course. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749673",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-04-12T21:28:00",
"content": "It used to be that mathematicians could do calculus faster in their head faster than a computer compute it. Progress has a way of making claims of superiority by old means over a burgeoning technology seem... | 1,760,371,949.768325 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/cryo-em-freezing-time-to-take-snapshots-of-myosin-and-other-molecular-systems/ | Cryo-EM: Freezing Time To Take Snapshots Of Myosin And Other Molecular Systems | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"cryo-EM",
"cryomicroscopy",
"electron microscopy"
] | Using technologies like electron microscopy (EM) it is possible to capture molecular mechanisms in great detail, but not when these mechanisms are currently moving. The field of cryomicroscopy circumvents this limitation by freezing said mechanism in place using cryogenic fluids. Although initially X-ray crystallography was commonly used, the much more versatile EM is now the standard approach in the form of cryo-EM, with recent advances giving us unprecedented looks at the
mechanisms that quite literally make our bodies move
.
Myosin-5 working stroke and walking on F-actin. (Credit: Klebl et al., 2024)
The past years has seen many refinements in
cryo-EM
, with previously quite manual approaches shifting to microfluidics to increase the time resolution at which a molecular process could be frozen, enabling researchers to for example see the myosin motor proteins go through their motions one step at a time. Research articles on this were published previously, such as by
[Ahmet Mentes] and colleagues in 2018
on myosin force sensing to adjust to dynamic loads. More recently, [David P. Klebl] and colleagues
published a research article
this year on the myosin-5 powerstroke through ATP hydrolysis, using a modified (slower) version of myosin-5. Even so, the freezing has to be done with millisecond accuracy to capture the myosin in the act of priming (pre-powerstroke).
The most amazing thing about cryo-EM is that it allows us to examine processes that used to be the subject of theory and speculation as we had no means to observe the motion and components involved directly. The more we can increase the time resolution on cryo-EM, the more details we can glimpse, whether it’s the functioning of myosins in muscle tissue or inside cells, the folding of proteins, or determining the proteins involved in a range of diseases, such as the role of
TDP-43
in amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)
in a 2021 study
by [Diana Arseni] and colleagues.
As our methods of freezing these biomolecular moments in time improve, so too will our ability to validate theory with observations. Some of these methods combine cryogenic freezing with laser pulses to alternately freeze and resume processes, allowing processes to be recorded in minute detail in sub-millisecond resolution. One big issue that remains yet is that although some of these researchers have even open sourced their cryo-EM methods, commercial vendors have not yet picked up this technology, limiting its reach as researchers have to cobble something together themselves.
Hopefully before long (time-resolved) cryo-EM will be as common as EM is today, to the point where even a hobby laboratory may have one lounging around. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749440",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T20:19:58",
"content": "How tailored does the solution need to be towards the problem? That could limit commercial designs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6749446",
"a... | 1,760,371,949.728752 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/do-you-trust-your-cheap-fuses/ | Do You Trust Your Cheap Fuses? | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"fuse",
"protection",
"testing"
] | When a fuse is fitted in a power rail, it gives the peace of mind that the circuit is protected. But in the case of some cheap unbranded fuses of the type that come in kits from the usual online suppliers that trust can be illusory, as they fail to meet the required specification.
[Andreas Spiess] has used just these fuses for protection for years as no doubt have many of you, so it was something of a shock for him to discover that sometimes they don’t make the grade.
He’s taken a look at the issue for himself
, and come up with an accessible way to test your fuses if you have any of those cheap ones.
It’s an interesting journey into the way fuses work, as we’re reminded that the value written on the fuse isn’t the current at which it blows but the maximum it’s intended to take. The specification for fuses should have a graph showing how quickly one should blow at what currents above that level, and the worry was that this time would be simply too long for the cheap ones.
In the video below the break, he looks at the various set-ups required to test a fuse, and instead of a bank of large power supplies, he came up with a circuit involving an 18650 cell and three one ohm resistors in parallel. The resulting 1/3 ohm resistor should pass in the region of 10 A when connected across the 18650, so with a 5 A fuse in that circuit and a storage ‘scope he’s able to quickly test a few candidates. He found that the cheap fuses he had were slower to blow than a Bosch part but weren’t as worrisome as he’d at first thought. If you have any of these parts, maybe you should take a look at them too? | 34 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749388",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T16:22:28",
"content": "Wish some were cheap (use to be $8).* Fan goes through them quick.*https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TRXGVA/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,371,950.581646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/linux-fu-getting-started-with-systemd/ | Linux Fu: Getting Started With Systemd | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"systemd"
] | I will confess. I started writing this post about some stupid systemd tricks. However, I wanted to explain a little about systemd first, and that wound up being longer than the tricks. So this Linux Fu will be some very fundamental systemd information. The next one will have some examples, including how to automount a Raspberry Pi Pico. Of course, by the end of this post, you’ll have only scratched the surface of systemd, but I did want to give you some context for reading through the rest of it.
Like many long-time Unix users, I’m not a big fan of systemd. Then again, I’m also waiting for the whole “windows, icon, mouse, pointer” fad to die down. Like it or not, systemd is here and probably here to stay for the foreseeable future. I don’t want to get into a flame war over systemd. Love it or hate it, it is a fact of life. I will say that it does have some interesting features. I will also say that the documentation has gotten better over time. But I will also say that it made many changes that perhaps didn’t need to be made and made some simple things more complicated than they needed to be.
In the old days, we used “init scripts,” and you can still do so if you are really motivated. They weren’t well documented either, but it was pretty easy to puzzle out the shell scripts that would run, and we all know how to write shell scripts. The systemd way is to use services that are not defined by shell scripts. However, systemd tries to do lots of other things, too. It can replace cron and run things periodically. It can replace inetd, syslog, and many other traditional services. This is a benefit or a drawback, depending on your point of view.
(Editor’s note: And this logging functionality was exactly what was abused in
last week’s insane liblzma / ssh backdoor
.)
Configuring systemd requires you to create files in one of several locations. In systemd lingo, they are “units.” For the purpose of this Linux Fu, we’ll look at only a few kinds of units: services, mounts, and timers. Services let you run programs in response to something like system start-up. You can require that certain other services are already running or are not running and many other options. If the service dies, you can ask systemd to automatically restart it, or not. Timers can trigger a service at a particular time, much like cron does. Another unit you’ll run into are sockets that represent — you guessed it — a network socket.
Basics
If you haven’t used systemd, the main interface to it is systemctl (not sysctl, which is something different). With it, you can enable and disable “units,” which are usually “services.” So, for example, my ssh server is a service unit. By defining a unit, someone could say, “Well, if you are starting in multiuser mode, wait for networking to be available and run the ssh server.” Or, sort of like inetd, run the ssh server when someone opens a connection on port 22. Not all units are services. Some are network sockets, and some are timers. There are other kinds, too. A timer is like a cron job. You can set them up to run every so often.
Systemd maintains two sets of units. One set is for the system, and you need to be root to work with those. But it also manages user-level things. For example, your sound server, probably pulseaudio or pipewire, has a systemd service unit. Not only does it launch the service, it restarts it if it dies. If you change a unit file, you have to tell systemd to reread all the files with
systemctl daemon-reload
. You can enable, disable, start, and stop services and other units with the systemctl command, too. There’s also a way to mask and unmask units, which is like a super disable.
While the documentation has become better over the years, the format for the units is still pretty hairy because there are so many options available. Most of the time, you only need a small subset of the many available options.
For Example
Here’s a fairly simple service unit:
[Unit]
Description=OpenBSD Secure Shell server
Documentation=man:sshd(8) man:sshd_config(5)
After=network.target auditd.service
ConditionPathExists=!/etc/ssh/sshd_not_to_be_run
[Service]
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/ssh
ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/sshd -t
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/sshd -D $SSHD_OPTS
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/sshd -t
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
KillMode=process
Restart=on-failure
RestartPreventExitStatus=255
Type=notify
RuntimeDirectory=sshd
RuntimeDirectoryMode=0755
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Alias=sshd.service
You can probably puzzle most of that out. Here’s a very complicated service unit:
[Unit]
Description=Entropy Daemon based on the HAVEGE algorithm
Documentation=man:haveged(8) http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/
DefaultDependencies=no
After=apparmor.service systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
Before=sysinit.target shutdown.target
Conflicts=shutdown.target
# RNDADDENTROPY ioctl requires host-level CAP_SYS_ADMIN, fails in unprivileged container
ConditionVirtualization=!container
[Service]
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/haveged
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/haveged --Foreground --verbose=1 $DAEMON_ARGS
Restart=always
SuccessExitStatus=137 143
SecureBits=noroot-locked
CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_SYS_ADMIN
PrivateTmp=true
PrivateDevices=true
PrivateNetwork=true
ProtectSystem=full
ProtectHome=true
ProtectHostname=true
ProtectKernelLogs=true
ProtectKernelModules=true
RestrictNamespaces=true
RestrictRealtime=true
LockPersonality=true
MemoryDenyWriteExecute=true
SystemCallArchitectures=native
SystemCallFilter=@basic-io @file-system @io-event @network-io @signal
SystemCallFilter=arch_prctl brk ioctl mprotect sysinfo
[Install]
WantedBy=sysinit.target
This online form takes the tedium out of writing this purely fictional service (link in text).
Whoa! There’s a lot to parse there. You can find all the
documentation
, of course. But many people copy some starter service and modify it. Another option is to use a wizard to help you create your unit files. For example, you can find some
online
. Fill out the forms on the left and observe the file on the right. Installation instructions are up top. If you don’t know what a field asks for, there’s a little info button to give you some help text. You can often pick things from a drop-down. Sure, you can write it all yourself, but this does make it a little easier.
If you want to make a timer, you need a service file and a timer file. There’s an
online wizard
for that, too. It isn’t quite as helpful, and you need to understand how systemd represents
time intervals
. This is a bit more complicated than cron because you can set times relative to the timer’s activation, the time of system boot, or relative to the timer’s last activation. You can also set specific dates and times, add a random delay, or make timers persist.
That last option is like using anacron. Suppose you have a timer set to run at 1 AM daily on a laptop. The problem is that by 1 AM, the laptop is probably off. A persistent timer will realize that when you turn the laptop on at 8 AM that it should have run the 1 AM trigger, and then do so.
There’s More…
A similar web page can make your timers, too.
There is so much more to know about units. Some of that is related to features. Some of it is related to quirks. For example, comments can’t go at the end of a line — they have to be on their own line. For another example, special characters in the file names get hex escapes (this will be important later). To further complicate things, there are ways to make templates and add in pieces. All of that is beyond the scope of this post, but be aware, I’m painting the simplest possible picture of the systemd universe.
The other problem is exactly where to put your unit files. They are scattered everywhere, and while there is a good reason for where they live, it is still annoying.
The short version is you should probably put system units in /etc/systemd/system unless you have a good reason to put it somewhere else. Units for all users can go in /etc/systemd/user. If you want a unit just for one user, try ~/.config/systemd/user. If you are looking for the location of an existing unit, usually “systemctl status xxx.service” will tell you. Otherwise, try “systemctl show -P FragmentPath xxx.service.”
If you want to read the actual documentation:
System unit directories
The systemd system manager reads unit configuration from various directories. Packages that want to install unit files shall place them in the directory returned by pkg-config systemd –variable=systemdsystemunitdir. Other directories checked are /usr/local/lib/systemd/system and /usr/lib/systemd/system. User configuration always takes precedence. pkg-config systemd –variable=systemdsystemconfdir returns the path of the system configuration directory. Packages should alter the content of these directories only with the enable and disable commands of the systemctl(1) tool. Full list of directories is provided in systemd.unit(5).
User unit directories
Similar rules apply for the user unit directories. However, here the XDG Base Directory specification is followed to find units. Applications should place their unit files in the directory returned by pkg-config systemd –variable=systemduserunitdir. Global configuration is done in the directory reported by pkg-config systemd –variable=systemduserconfdir. The enable and disable commands of the systemctl(1) tool can handle both global (i.e. for all users) and private (for one user) enabling/disabling of units. Full list of directories is provided in systemd.unit(5).
Stupid Trick #0: Run Some Program on Startup
This isn’t really a trick, but I wanted at least one example this time to show you how simple a homebrew service can be.
In an earlier post, I used a cheap “smart display” to show
Hackaday’s RSS feed
. If you want that to run on startup — or you just want the normal Python code to get the system status display — you need to run it somewhere. Sure, you could execute it by hand or put it in your startup files. But the systemd way to do it is with a unit. Here’s mine:
[Unit]
Description=[Operate Smart Display]
[Service]
Type=simple
StandardOutput=journal
ExecStart=/home/alw/apps/turing-smart-screen-python-3.1.0/service
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
That’s easy enough. It defines a simple service that outputs to the journal. It starts by default. Piece of cake. Next time, we’ll see a few more simple examples and maybe that will spur you to write your own unit files. Watch for it! | 45 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749352",
"author": "Zoe Nagy",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T14:13:15",
"content": "Supervisord should be instead, it’s like cron for services, one file to overview.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749635",
"author": "It'... | 1,760,371,950.516769 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/wspr-to-the-wind-with-a-pi-pico-high-altitiude-balloon/ | WSPR To The Wind With A Pi Pico High Altitiude Balloon | Richard Baguley | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"baloons",
"gps",
"radio",
"wspr"
] | They say that if you love something, you should set it free. That doesn’t mean that you should spend any more on it than you have to though, which is why [EngineerGuy314] put together this
Raspberry Pi Pico high-altitude balloon tracker
that should only set you back about $12 to build.
This simplified package turns a Pico into a tracking beacon — connect a cheap GPS module and solar panel, and the system will transmit the GPS location, system temperature, and other telemetry on the 20-meter band using the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) protocol. Do it right, and you can track your balloon
as it goes around the world
.
The project is based in part on the work of [Roman Piksayin] in his
Pico-WSPR-TX package
(which we
covered before
), which uses the Pico’s outputs to create the transmitted signal directly without needing an external radio. [EngineerGuy314] took this a step further by slowing down the Pico and doing some clever stuff to make it run a bit more reliably directly from the solar panel.
The system can be a bit fussy about power when starting up: if the voltage from the solar panel ramps up too slowly, the Pico can crash when it and the GPS chip both start when the sun rises. So, a voltage divider ties into the run pin of the Pico to keep it from booting until the voltage is high enough, and a single transistor stops the GPS from starting up until the Pico signals it to go.
It’s a neat hack that seems to work well: [EngineerGuy314] has launched three prototypes so far,
the last of which traveled
over 62,000 kilometers/ 38,000 miles. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749306",
"author": "ubr",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T11:24:27",
"content": "The Github link seems to be broken.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6749307",
"author": "pe7er",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T11:26:19",
"content... | 1,760,371,950.372408 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/let-your-finger-do-the-soldering-with-solder-sustainer-v2/ | Let Your Finger Do The Soldering With Solder Sustainer V2 | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"extruder",
"feed",
"glove",
"solder",
"soldering",
"tool",
"wearable",
"wire"
] | Soldering is easy, as long as you have one hand to hold the iron, one to hold the solder, and another to hold the workpiece. For those of us not so equipped, there’s
the new and improved Solder Sustainer v2
, which aims to free up one of however many hands you happen to have.
Eagle-eyed readers will probably recall
an earlier version of Solder Sustainer
, which made an appearance in last year’s Hackaday Prize in the “Gearing Up” round. At the time we wrote that it looked a bit like “the love child of a MIG welder and a tattoo machine.” This time around, [RoboticWorx] has rethought that concept and mounted the solder feeder on the back of a fingerless glove. The solder guide is a tube that clips to the user’s forefinger, which makes much finer control of where the solder meets the iron possible than with the previous version. The soldering iron itself is also no longer built into the tool, giving better control of the tip and letting you use your favorite iron, which itself is no small benefit.
Hats off to [RoboticWorx] for going back to the drawing board on this one. It isn’t easy to throw out most of your design and start over, but sometimes it just makes sense. | 20 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749269",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T08:19:29",
"content": "That looks pretty neat and somehow even practical, bonus points for the futuristic and use of velcro.But… the PCB is dangling on the side and without proper strain relief on the wires, it’s a matter of very s... | 1,760,371,950.678618 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/exploring-the-bendix-g-15s-typewriter/ | Exploring The Bendix G-15’s Typewriter | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"Bendix",
"Electric Typewriter"
] | The Bendix Corporation’s Bendix G-15 was introduced in 1956 as an affordable system for industrial and scientific markets. As with any computer system, a range of peripheral devices for input and output were available, which includes an electric typewriter. Produced by IBM, this typewriter was heavily modified by Bendix, with the version
that [Usagi Electric] got their mittens
on being equipped with a gigantic 28″ platen. With just power applied to the machine it will even still work as a regular electric typewriter, but it can do much more.
The bits that make an IBM electric typewriter into a Bendix G-15 accessory. (Credit: Usagi Electric)
Most typewriters for the G-15 have a much smaller platen, as can be seen in the
brochures
for the system. The typewriter is connected together with other peripherals like plotters, card punches and tabulators via a coupler which uses a 5-bit interface. For the encoding on this interface no standard encoding is used, but rather 4 bits are used as data followed by 1 bit to indicate a command. In addition a number of other signal lines are used with the Bendix G-15, which allows control over the punch card reader and run status on the computer from the comfort of the typewriter’s desk.
In addition to the added electronics that communicate with the Bendix G-15, there are also solenoids and sensors which interface with the typewriter’s keyboard. This is what allows for command keys on the typewriter to be recorded separately along with the regular number and letter keys, in addition to the Bendix G-15 using the typewriter to automatically type on the paper. After a good cleaning session the typewriter’s basic functionality is restored, with the hope that once the Bendix G-15
over at the Usagi Farm
can power up its DC circuit both will happily chat with each other. Color us excited. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749386",
"author": "Kurt Freiberger",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T16:17:59",
"content": "I helped restore a CDC 1604-A at my university that used one of these. We cornered the market on 2N1711s. I was told it was an IBM “Soroban”. Narrow carriage. First job when we had it running... | 1,760,371,950.413781 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/synesthetic-clock-doesnt-require-synesthesia/ | Synesthetic Clock Doesn’t Require Synesthesia | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"ESP32",
"round display",
"rtc",
"synesthesia"
] | We often think of synesthetes as those people who associate say, colors with numbers. But the phenomenon can occur with any of the senses. Simply put, when one sense is activated, synesthesia causes one to experience an unrelated, activated sense. Sounds trippy, no?
Thankfully,
[Markus Opitz]’s synesthetic clock
doesn’t require one to have synesthesia. It’s actually quite easy to read, we think. Can you tell what time it is in the image above? The only real requirement seems to be knowing the AM color from the PM color. The minute display cycles through blue, green, yellow, and red as the hour progresses.
Behind that pair of GC9a01 round displays lies an ESP32 and a real-time clock module. [Markus] couldn’t find a fillArc function, so instead he is drawing triangles whose ends lie outside the visible area. To calculate the size of the triangle, [Markus] is using the angle function tangent, so each minute has an angle of 6°.
[Markus] created a simple but attractive oak housing for the clock, but suggests anything from cardboard and plastic to a book. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever used for an enclosure? Let us know in the comments.
Do you appreciate a good analog clock when you see one?
Here’s a clock that uses analog meters for its display. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749249",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T04:48:53",
"content": "I’m around 80% convinced that the grand majority of people self-reporting synesthesia are making it up",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749250",
... | 1,760,371,950.229387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/how-decs-lanbridge-100-gave-ethernet-a-fighting-chance/ | How DEC’s LANBridge 100 Gave Ethernet A Fighting Chance | Maya Posch | [
"History",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"DEC",
"ethernet",
"networking"
] | Alan Kirby (left) and Mark Kempf with the LANBridge 100, serial number 0001. (Credit: Alan Kirby)
When Ethernet was originally envisioned, it would use a common, shared medium (the ‘Ether’ part), with transmitting and collision resolution handled by the
carrier sense multiple access with collision detection
(CSMA/CD) method. While effective and cheap, this limited Ethernet to a 1.5 km cable run and 10 Mb/s transfer rate. As [Alan Kirby] worked at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in the 1980s and 1990s, he saw how competing network technologies including Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) – that DEC also worked on – threatened to extinguish Ethernet despite these alternatives being more expensive. The solution here
would be store-and-forward switching
, [Alan] figured.
After teaming up with Mark Kempf, both engineers managed to convince DEC management to give them a chance to develop such a switch for Ethernet, which turned into the LANBridge 100. As a so-called ‘learning bridge’, it operated on Layer 2 of the network stack, learning the MAC addresses of the connected systems and forwarding only those packets that were relevant for the other network. This instantly prevented collisions between thus connected networks, allowed for long (fiber) runs between bridges and would be the beginning of the transformation of Ethernet as a shared medium (like WiFi today) into a star topology network, with each connected system getting its very own Ethernet cable to a dedicated switch port. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749007",
"author": "Alex365",
"timestamp": "2024-04-10T05:06:04",
"content": "Now having read it, it’s rather obvious, but it hadn’t occured to me that the “Ether” part in Ethernet refers to the hypothetical ether. Learned something new again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,371,950.798557 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/emails-over-radio/ | Emails Over Radio | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"digirig",
"digital",
"email",
"ham radio",
"mobile",
"QRP",
"radio",
"uhf",
"VHF",
"Winlink"
] | The modern cellular network is a marvel of technological advancement that we often take for granted now. With 5G service it’s easy to do plenty of things on-the-go that would have been difficult or impossible even with a broadband connection to a home computer two decades ago. But it’s still reliant on being close to cell towers, which isn’t true for all locations. If you’re traveling off-grid and want to communicate with others,
this guide to using Winlink can help you send emails using a ham radio
.
While there are a number of ways to access the
Winlink
email service, this guide looks at a compact, low-power setup using a simple VHF/UHF handheld FM radio with a small sound card called a Digirig. The Digirig acts as a modem for the radio, allowing it to listen to digital signals and pass them to the computer to decode. It can also activate the transmitter on the radio and send the data from the computer out over the airwaves. When an email is posted to the Winlink outbox, the software will automatically send it out to any stations in the area set up as a gateway to the email service.
Like the cellular network, the does rely on having an infrastructure of receiving stations that can send the emails out to the Winlink service on the Internet; since VHF and UHF are much more limited in range than HF this specific setup could be a bit limiting unless there are other ham radio operators within a few miles. This guide also uses VARA, a proprietary protocol, whereas the HF bands have an open source protocol called ARDOP that can be used instead. This isn’t the only thing these Digirig modules can be used for in VHF/UHF, though. They can also be used for other digital modes like
JS8Call
,
FT8
, and
APRS
. | 38 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748967",
"author": "okto",
"timestamp": "2024-04-09T23:54:26",
"content": "Why use a proprietary protocol when AX.25 has already been the standard for thirty years? APRS has email entry nodes, doesn’t involve proprietary anything, and leverages an existing network of thousands of n... | 1,760,371,950.176148 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/soldering-the-elusive-usb-c-port/ | Soldering The Elusive USB C Port | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"hot air rework",
"hot air soldering",
"smd",
"USB C"
] | Many SMD components, including some USB C ports, have their terminals under the component. When installed, the pins are totally hidden. So, how do you solder or unsolder them? That’s the problem [Learn Electronics Repair] encountered when fixing a Lenovo Yoga, and he shows us
his solution
in the video below.
He showed the removal in a previous video, but removal is a bit easier since you can just heat up the area, yank the connector, and then clean up the resulting mess at your leisure. Installation is harder because once the socket is down, you no longer have access to the pads.
Unsurprisingly, the process starts out with plenty of flux and some hot air to preheat the pads. he then tins the pads with a conventional soldering iron. The penultimate step is to align the connector and preheat it almost to the melting point. Then hot air reflows the solder beneath the connector.
We were worried he might disturb the adjacent components, but he has a steady hand. We might have masked the area off with Kapton tape.
The result looked good. We’d encourage you to test for shorts or opens electrically where possible. High-end techs can inspect with X-ray, but most of us don’t have that kind of gear.
If you need some SMD practice, there are plenty of
kits to try
. Just remember that when doing SMD sometimes
less is more
. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748921",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-09T20:09:14",
"content": "That’s one of those areas of electrical/electronics that has a lot of room for implementation of different techniques; what I like to do is from time to time watch videos of people working (looking... | 1,760,371,950.625927 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/double-checking-nasas-eclipse-estimate-at-home/ | Double-Checking NASA’s Eclipse Estimate At Home | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"eclipse",
"home solar",
"nasa"
] | If you were lucky enough to be near the path of totality, and didn’t have your view obscured by clouds, yesterday’s eclipse provided some very memorable views. But you know what’s even better than making memories?
Having cold hard data to back it up
.
Hackaday contributor [Bob Baddeley] was in Madison, Wisconsin for the big event, which
NASA’s Eclipse Explorer
website predicted would see about 87% coverage. Watching the eclipse through the appropriate gear at the local hackerspace was fun, but the
real
nerding out happened when he got home and could pull the data from his solar system.
A graph of the system’s generated power shows a very clear dip during the duration of the eclipse, which let him determine exactly when the occlusion started, peaked, and ended.
What’s more, by comparing the output of the panels at their lowest with the pre-eclipse peak, [Bob] was able to calculate that the light falling on them dropped by roughly 87 to 90% — right where NASA pegged it. Similarly, the timing of the eclipse as experienced by his solar system lined up within a few minutes of what the website predicted.
That the world’s leading space agency was able to
properly model one of the biggest celestial events in recent memory
is perhaps not overly surprising. That’s part of what we’re paying them for, honestly. But it’s always good to run a second set of eyes over the numbers. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748895",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-09T19:03:53",
"content": "We had overcast skies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6748898",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,950.741561 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/on-cloud-computing-and-learning-to-say-no/ | On Cloud Computing And Learning To Say No | Maya Posch | [
"internet hacks",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"html",
"servers",
"web hosting"
] | Do you really need that cloud hosting package? If you’re just running a website — no matter whether large or very large — you probably don’t and should settle for basic hosting.
This is the point that [Thomas Millar] argues
, taking the reader through an example of a big site like Business Insider, and their realistic bandwidth needs.
From a few stories on Business Insider the HTML itself comes down to about 75 kB compressed, so for their approximately 200 million visitors a month they’d churn through 30 TB of bandwidth for the HTML assuming two articles read per visitor.
This comes down to 11 MB/s of HTML, which can be generated dynamically even with slow interpreted languages, or as [Thomas] says would allow for the world’s websites to be hosted on a system featuring single 192 core AMD Zen 5-based server CPU. So what’s the added value here? The reduction in latency and of course increased redundancy from having the site served from 2-3 locations around the globe. Rather than falling in the trap of ‘edge cloud hosting’ and the latency of inter-datacenter calls, databases should be ideally located on the same physical hardware and synchronized between datacenters.
In this scenario [Thomas] also sees no need for Docker, scaling solutions and virtualization, massively cutting down on costs and complexity. For those among us who run large websites (in the cloud or not), do you agree or disagree with this notion? Feel free to touch off in the comments. | 44 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748820",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-09T16:01:09",
"content": "Well, every technology has to have advantages over its competitors, otherwise why even bother? so I think both use cases are worthy and valid. Spending a bit more money to be on the safe (in this c... | 1,760,371,951.061089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/in-a-twist-humans-take-jobs-from-ai/ | In A Twist, Humans Take Jobs From AI | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"rants"
] | Back in the 1970s, Rockwell had an ad that proudly proclaimed: “The best electronic brains are still human.” They weren’t wrong. Computers are great and amazing, but — for now — seemingly simple tasks for humans are out of reach for computers. That’s changing, of course, but computers are still not good at tasks that require a little judgment. Suppose you have a website where people can post things for sale, including pictures. Good luck finding a computer that can reliably reject items that appear to be illegal or from a business instead of an individual. Most people could easily do that with a far greater success rate than a computer. Even more so than a reasonable-sized computer.
Earlier this month, we reported on Amazon stepping away from the
“just walk out”
shopping approach. You know, where you just grab what you want and walk out and they bill your credit card without a checkout line. As part of the shutdown, they revealed that 70% of the transactions required some human intervention which means that a team of 1,000 people were behind the amazing technology.
Humans in the Loop
That’s nothing new. Amazon even has a service called Mechanical Turk that lets you connect with people willing to earn a penny a picture, for example, to identify a picture as
pornographic
or “not a car” or any other task you really need a human to do. While some workers make up to $6 an hour handling tasks, the average worker makes a mere $2 an hour, according to reports. (See the video below to see how little you can make!) The name comes from an infamous 200-year-old chess-playing “robot.” It played chess as well as a human because it was really a human hiding inside of it.
Is that very common? Apparently, more than you would think. A company called Presto, for example, promises fast-food restaurants an AI order-taker. What could be better? The AI doesn’t get distracted by a cell phone, get into altercations with Karen, or call in sick. The problem is that
about 70% of the orders require human intervention by Presto agents in the Philippines
. They aren’t mentioned in the video below showing the system about a year ago, although the manager did mention he could intervene if necessary.
This has been going on for a while. You might remember Facebook’s announcement back in 2015 that they were testing an AI you could use with Facebook Messenger that would arrange your travel, place orders, and reserve restaurant tables. ChatGPT in 2015 (see the old Wall Street Journal video below)? Nope.
M used human operators
. They had bought the developer of the technology, Wit.ai, and shut down the test in 2018. Only 30% of user requests during the trial were handled without human intervention. Supposedly, the humans were training the AI, but it appears that M never really learned how to handle random requests. Not to be left behind,
Twitter did the same scam
as did lesser-known GoButler.
Does it Matter?
You might wonder why it matters. If you want flowers sent to a friend, do you care if a robot takes your request or a human? It depends. Suppose you call the florist or even walk into the shop. Sure, the kid working the counter might skim your credit card. It happens all the time. But if they do, you can hold the store accountable, and you presume they should have known the employee might be a little shady.
But imagine you go to a fast food place with a not-so-AI order taker. Some random person halfway around the world who gets paid a few cents per order might get access to your credit card. If something happens, do you think the restaurant manager has any idea about it? Or even the owners of the place? Probably not. Besides, one bad actor might get access to sensitive information from multiple places worldwide. Hard to track down and difficult to get accountability.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have people working with credit cards or other private information. But it does mean that maybe you shouldn’t pass them off as robots. Then, I get to decide how I share my information.
So while many people worry that they will think they’re talking to a person but it is really a computer — like Google
Duplex
that also relies on human intervention sometimes. However, we are also worried about the opposite case. We think it is great to create more jobs for more people.
But don’t turn people into fake AI bots
. We have enough of them already. | 41 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748790",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-09T14:16:20",
"content": "When it comes to humans, we will always need each other, be it to be served or directed. IMO assistive technologies like smart watches, cellphones, home assistants are still far far away from being... | 1,760,371,950.880826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/adjustable-lights-help-peer-inside-chips-with-ir/ | Adjustable Lights Help Peer Inside Chips With IR | Dan Maloney | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"angle",
"azimuth",
"ir",
"jubilee",
"microscope",
"motion control",
"reverse engineering",
"silicon",
"zenith"
] | If you’re used to working through a microscope, you’ve probably noticed that the angle of the light greatly affects how your workpiece looks. Most of us prefer the relatively flat lighting provided by a ring light, but
variable angle side lighting can be useful too
, especially when you’re peering inside ICs to make sure the silicon is what it’s supposed to be.
That’s what [Bunnie] is working on these days with his
Project IRIS
, short for “Infrared
in situ
,” a non-destructive method for looking inside chip packages. The technique relies on the fact that silicon is transparent to certain wavelengths of light, and that some modern IC packages expose the underside of the silicon die directly to the outside world. Initial tests indicated that the angle of the incident IR light was important to visualizing features on the metal interconnects layered onto the silicon, so [Bunnie] designed a two-axis light source for his microscope. The rig uses curved metal tracks to guide a pair of IR light sources through an arc centered on the focal point of the microscope stage. The angle of each light source relative to the stage can be controlled independently, while the whole thing can swivel around the optical axis of the microscope to control the radial angle of the lighting.
The mechanism [Bunnie] designed to accomplish all this is pretty complex. Zenith angle is controlled by a lead screw driving a connecting rod to the lights on their guide tracks, while the azimuth of the lights is controlled by a separate motor and pulley driving a custom-built coaxial bearing. The whole optical assembly is mounted on
a Jubilee motion platform
for XYZ control. The brief videos below show the lights being put through their paces, along with how changing the angle of the light affects the view inside a chip.
https://bunniefoo.com/iris/2024/final-loop.mp4
https://bunniefoo.com/iris/2024/gf180-5x-psi_small.mp4 | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748743",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2024-04-09T11:22:33",
"content": "The real trick with IRIS is that you don’t need to replicate Bunnie’s setup to validate your chips; it’s only needed to get good quality images of a known good IC for use in subsequent validation.Much crud... | 1,760,371,950.933064 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/floss-weekly-episode-778-octoprint-people-are-amazing-at-breaking-things/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 778: OctoPrint — People Are Amazing At Breaking Things | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d printing",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"Octoprint",
"raspberry pi"
] | This week Jonathan Bennett and
Katherine Druckman
sit down with
Gina Häußge
to talk
OctoPrint
! It’s one of our favorite ways to babysit our 3D printers, and the project has come a long way in the last 12 years! It’s a labor of love, primarily led by Gina, who has managed to turn it into a full time job. Listen in to hear that story and more, including how to run an Open Source project without losing your sanity, why plugins are great, and how to avoid adding a special services employee as a co-maintainer!
–
https://octoprint.org/blog/2020/07/29/automating-octoprints-release-tests/
–
https://foosel.net
–
https://octoprint.org
–
https://chaos.social/@foosel
–
https://octoprint.org/support-octoprint/
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 chatting with Andy Stewart about Linux and Ham Radio!
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 | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749255",
"author": "Thomas",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T05:41:39",
"content": "Thanks for all your work Gina!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749425",
"author": "Paul d'Aoust",
"timestamp": "2024-04-11T18:45:19... | 1,760,371,950.979015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/baseboard-heaters-get-automated/ | Baseboard Heaters Get Automated | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"baseboard heater",
"electric heater",
"ESP8266",
"heater",
"heating",
"home automation",
"hvac",
"line voltage",
"smart switch"
] | If you’re lucky enough to have central heating and/or air conditioning, with an automatic thermostat, you probably don’t have to worry too much about the outside temperature. But central HVAC is far from the only way of maintaining temperature in a home. From wood stoves to boilers there are many options depending on your climate and home type, and [Murphy’s Law] has a decentralized baseboard system instead of something centralized.
An ESP8266 solution was found that was able to tie them all together
.
There are other types of baseboard heaters, but in [Murphy’s Law]’s case the heaters were electric with a separate thermostat for each heater. Rather than build a control system from the ground up to replace the thermostats, turnkey smart wall switches were used instead. These switches happened to be based on the popular ESP8266 microcontroller, like plenty of other off-the-shelf automation solutions, which meant less work needed to be done on the line voltage side and the microcontroller’s firmware could be easily customized for use with Home Assistant.
While [Murphy’s Law] doesn’t live in the home with the fleet of electric baseboard heaters anymore, the new home has a single baseboard heater to keep a bathroom warm since the central heating system doesn’t quite keep it warm enough. This system is able to scale up or down based on number of heaters, though, so it’s still a capable solution for the single room and has since been updated to use the ESP32. All of the code for this project is
available on GitHub
as well, and for those of you attempting to add other HVAC components to a home automation system
this project that loops in a heat pump is worth taking a look at
as well. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749208",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-10T22:57:31",
"content": "So do countries that have gone ‘metric’ still read blood pressure in inches of mercury?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,951.666305 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/chandra-x-ray-observatory-threatened-by-budget-cuts/ | Chandra X-ray Observatory Threatened By Budget Cuts | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Chandra",
"Chandra X-ray Observatory",
"nasa",
"space telescope"
] | Launched aboard the Space Shuttle
Columbia
in July of 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the most capable space telescope of its kind. As of this writing, the spacecraft is in good health and is returning valuable scientific data. It’s currently in an orbit that extends at its highest point to nearly one-third the distance to the Moon, which gives it an ideal vantage point from which to make its observations, and won’t reenter the Earth’s atmosphere for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Yet despite this rosy report card, Chandra’s future is anything but certain. Faced with the impossible task of funding all of its scientific missions with the relative pittance they’re allocated from the federal government, NASA has signaled its intent to wind down the space telescope’s operations over the next several years.
According to their latest budget request
, the agency wants to slash the program’s $41 million budget nearly in half for 2026. Funding would remain stable at that point for the next two years, but in 2029, the money set aside for Chandra would be dropped to just $5.2 million.
Drastically reducing Chandra’s budget by the end of the decade wouldn’t be so unexpected if its successor was due to come online in a similar time frame. Indeed, it would almost be expected. But despite being considered a high scientific priority, the x-ray observatory intended to replace Chandra isn’t even off the drawing board yet. The 2019 concept study report for what NASA is currently calling the
Lynx X-ray Observatory
estimates a launch date in the mid-2030s at the absolute earliest, pointing out that several of the key components of the proposed telescope still need several years of development before they’ll reach the necessary Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for such a high profile mission.
With its replacement for this uniquely capable space telescope decades away even by the most optimistic of estimates, the potential early retirement of the Chandra X-ray Observatory has many researchers concerned about the gap it will leave in our ability to study the cosmos.
The Sky Through X-Ray Vision
Just a few years after the launch of the incredibly powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), it might seem odd that scientists are concerned about the fate of an observatory that was launched 25 years ago.
Remnants of supernova SN 1006, as
imaged by Chandra in 2023
But for all the capabilities of the JWST, making observations in the X-ray spectrum simply isn’t one of them. It was designed almost elusively for performing infrared astronomy, a specialization to which it
owes many of its unique design elements
. Other well known space telescopes, such as the
European Space Agency’s Euclid
or the legendary Hubble Space Telescope operate primarily in the visible spectrum.
It’s not that Chandra is the
only
space telescope capable of x-ray imaging — but it’s unquestionably the best we currently have. Of course, this was by design. While most of the other x-ray telescopes in space are either secondary payloads or otherwise relatively small, Chandra was designed and built as one of NASA’s flagship missions. Like Hubble it was part of the Great Observatory program, and was intended to push the state-of-the-art in detection technology for its particular slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, setting the standard for decades to come.
Compared to optical or IR telescopes, x-ray telescopes are ideal for directly imaging high-energy objects such as supernovas and galaxy clusters. It’s also possible to make indirect observations by studying how a given object reflects or absorbs ambient x-ray energy. X-ray telescopes are also key for studying what might otherwise be invisible, such as black holes and dark matter.
Rising Temps, Rising Costs?
According to the NASA budget request, winding down Chandra’s funding to what it calls “minimal operations” by 2029 isn’t just some arbitrary decision. The report specifically cites increased program costs directly related to the age of the spacecraft, or more specifically, the extra effort that’s now required to get usable data from onboard systems which are increasingly operating out of spec:
In a post titled
“
A Letter to the Chandra Community
“
, program director Dr. Patrick Slane addresses these NASA claims directly. While he acknowledges that Chandra has suffered system degradation, he points out that it’s hardly unexpected for a spacecraft of this age. Despite being designed for a planned mission duration of 5 years, Chandra is approaching 25 years in orbit. He also admits that it’s made observations more difficult than they were when the observatory was launched.
That said, Dr. Slane argues that Chandra’s rising operating temperature isn’t a new problem, and was first identified as far back as 2005. Over the years the teams have been able to characterize the temperature fluctuations, which vary depending on orbital position and spacecraft attitude, and develop new models that allow them to compensate for any thermally-induced shifts in the data. He says these efforts have been greatly successful, and that even today, Chandra’s observation efficiency “far exceeds the initial requirements for the mission.”
The documentation for this isn’t difficult to find. In the 2016 paper
“
Evolution of temperature-dependent charge transfer inefficiency correction for ACIS on the Chandra X-ray Observatory
“
, it’s explained how the responsiveness of Chandra’s Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) had changed since launch, and how teams on the ground were adjusting to the system’s new characteristics.
Even in 2015, the instrumentation’s temperature was clearly rising
While the paper notes that the ACIS had suffered some radiation damage, it identifies the reduced effectiveness of Chandra’s thermal control systems to have introduced the largest changes. At the time of publication, now nearly a decade ago, it was already clear that the ACIS temperature was on the rise. The paper notes that in 2000, 99% of observations were made at what it considers “cold” temperatures of below -119.2° C, but by 2015, that figure had dropped to just 33%.
The paper explains that, after gathering sufficient calibration data, algorithms were developed to compensate for the increasingly erratic ACIS temperatures. That said, it did note that the team’s initial assumptions that the temperature fluctuations would remain relatively minor were already being challenged. Should instrumentation temperature continue to climb higher, more data would need to be collected to verify their compensation software still worked as expected.
Still, the authors closed the paper with the belief that Chandra would still be able to meet its performance goals even in theis newly dynamic thermal environment.
The Fight Has Only Just Begun
Between the published data on telescope’s instrumentation, and the passionate response of Dr. Slane, it would seem the Chandra story isn’t quite over yet. There’s an excellent case to be made that the thermal issues with the observatory, while a valid and documented concern, are a largely solved problem that doesn’t require any additional financial outlay. Why the NASA budget request seems to indicate otherwise is beyond the scope of this article, but with the
ever-rising cost of the Artemis program
, it’s not hard to imagine that the agency is looking to justify cost cutting measures wherever it can.
At the end of his letter, Dr. Slane notes that the Chandra X-ray Observatory would be going through a review in April to further clarify its budgetary needs going forward. After giving the program a closer look, and perhaps after feeling a bit of pressure from the astrophysics community, NASA may yet change its plans for this valuable instrument. | 39 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749174",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-10T18:58:41",
"content": "Yep, all earthly problems that do need to be addressed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6749181",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,951.622477 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/homebrew-network-card-with-no-cpu/ | Homebrew Network Card With No CPU | Al Williams | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"ethernet",
"homebrew cpu",
"Network interface controller",
"nic"
] | A modern normal network card will have onboard an Ethernet controller which, of course, is a pre-programmed microcontroller. Not only does it do the things required to keep a computer on the network, it can even save the primary CPU from having to do certain common tasks required for communicating. But not [Ivan’s]. His homebrew computer — comprised of 7 colorful PCBs — now has an eighth card. You guessed it.
That card connects to 10BASE-T Ethernet
.
There’s not a microcontroller in sight, although there are RAM chips. Everything else is logic gates, flip flops, and counters. There are a few other function chips, but nothing too large. Does it work? Yes. Is it fast? Um…well, no.
The complete computer.
He can ping others on the network with an 85 ms round trip and serve web pages from his homebrew computer at about 2.6 kB/s. But speed wasn’t the goal here and the end result is quite impressive. He even ported a C compiler to his CPU so he could compile uIP, a networking stack, avoiding the problems of writing his own from scratch.
Some compromises had to be made. The host computer has to do things you normally expect a network card to do. The MTU is 1024 bytes (instead of the more common 1500 bytes, but TCP/IP is made to expect different MTU sizes, which used to be more common when more network interfaces looked like this one).
Even on an FPGA, these days, you are more likely to grab some “IP” to do your Ethernet controller. Rolling your own from general logic is amazing, and — honestly — the design is simpler than we would have guessed. If you check out [Ivan]’s blog, you can find articles on the CPU design, its ALU, and even a VGA video card all from discrete logic. The whole design, including the network card is up on
GitHub
.
We love the idea of building
a whole computer system soup to nuts
. We wish we had the time. If you need a refresher on what’s
really happening with Ethernet
, our [Arya Voronova] can help. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749136",
"author": "Les Wright",
"timestamp": "2024-04-10T16:10:26",
"content": "This is superb! With blinkenlights as well, absolutely fantastic!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6749166",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"t... | 1,760,371,951.370311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/get-todays-forecast-in-classic-90s-weather-channel-style/ | Get Today’s Forecast In Classic 90s Weather Channel Style | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cable",
"crt",
"forecast",
"Local on the 8s",
"modulator",
"raspberry pi",
"weather channel",
"zenith"
] | Remember when The Weather Channel actually had weather? It’s been a while, but we sure remember what a boon
Local on the 8’s
was when getting ready for the day. Not having to wait for the low-information national forecast on the morning shows or putting up with the antics of [Willard Scott] or [Al Roker] was just icing on the cake.
Recreating the retro look and feel of the Weather Channel experience is what
this 1990s-style weather feed
is all about, and we have to say that [Mitchell Scott] knocked it out of the park. Luckily, a lot of the heavy lifting was done already thanks to the WeatherStar 4000+ emulator project, which renders forecasts using online weather APIs in the distinctive retro graphics The Weather Channel used back in the day. He combined the graphics with the original smooth jazz soundtracks that TWC used back then;
they’re online
, because of course they are.
To really sell the look, [Mitchell] tracked down a period-correct Zenith TV with a 9″ CRT to display the feed from a Raspberry Pi 4’s composite video output. Why such a small screen? Easy. [Mitchell] wanted it on a shelf behind him to be visible during videoconferences. It’s a bit of a weird flex, but we respect it. Getting the composite video output working was a bit of a chore, as was tricking the TV into starting up on channel 14 so the feed is instantly visible.
The nostalgia is strong with this one, especially for weather geeks. For a more in-depth look at how The Weather Channel brought those local forecasts to cable, make sure you check out how
the WeatherStar box was reverse-engineered
.
Thanks to [USA-RedDragon] for the tip. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749099",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-04-10T12:46:19",
"content": "If you want the look but not the power drain then you can simply incorporate an NTSC simulator!https://hackaday.com/2022/12/25/encoding-ntsc-with-your-hands-tied/WeatherStar 4000+ emulator:https://github.c... | 1,760,371,951.415827 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/10/wozamp-turns-apple-ii-into-music-player/ | Wozamp Turns Apple II Into Music Player | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"apple",
"apple II",
"dac",
"media",
"mp3",
"music",
"retrocomputing",
"serial card",
"surl-server"
] | Besides obvious technological advancements, early computers built by Apple differed in a major way from their modern analogs. Rather than relying on planned obsolescence as a business model, computers like the Apple II were designed to be upgradable and long-term devices users would own for a substantially longer time than an iPhone or Macbook. With the right hardware they can even be used in the modern era
as this project demonstrates by turning one into a music player
.
The requirements for this build are fairly short; an Apple II with a serial card and a piece of software called surl-server which is a proxy that allows older computers to communicate over modern networks. In this case it handles transcoding and resampling with the help of a Raspberry Pi 3. With that all set up, the media player can play audio files in an FTP network share or an online web radio station. It can also display album art on the Apple II monitor and includes a VU meter that is active during playback.
Although the 11.52 kHz sampling rate and 5-bit DAC may not meet the stringent requirements of audiophile critics, it’s an impressive build for a machine of this era. In fact, the Apple II has a vibrant community still active in the retrocomputing world, with plenty of projects built for it
including others related to its unique audio capabilities
. And if you don’t have an original Apple II
you can always get by with an FPGA instead
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749060",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2024-04-10T08:29:51",
"content": "“You can enhance the experience further by replacing your serial cable with a gold-plated serial cable (*actual results may vary).”just might be one of the best thing posted on a web page in a long ti... | 1,760,371,951.310002 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/09/hackaday-europe-is-almost-here-last-call-for-tickets/ | Hackaday Europe Is Almost Here, Last Call For Tickets | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"2024 hackaday europe",
"berlin",
"hackaday europe"
] | By the time this post hits the front page, we’ll be just a few days away from the kickoff of
Hackaday Europe 2024
!
For those of you joining us in Berlin this weekend, we’ve got an incredible amount of content planned for you. Things get rolling on Friday with a pre-event meetup. But Saturday is when things really kick into high gear. Before the day’s out, we’ll have played host to
nearly a dozen speakers
and — literally — more workshops than
we could fit into the schedule.
Two workshops will be “floating” events that will happen once enough interested parties have congregated in one place. We’ll keep things going until well past midnight, which leads directly into Sunday. We want to get a few sessions of lightning talks packed in, so start coming up with your talk ideas now.
The
Vectorscope
will be making its European debut.
In addition, there will be food, music, camaraderie,
badge hacking
, and the general technolust surrounding a Hackaday event. In our humble and totally unbiased opinion, we put on some of the best and most unique hardware hacking meetups in the world — if you like reading Hackaday, you’ll
love
living it for a couple of days.
As of this writing, we still have a
very few
tickets for Hackaday Europe 2024 available. Want one?
Head over to the Eventbrite page
. But you better hurry. We’re talking a literal handful here, so don’t be surprised if they’ve dried up by the time you read this.
The workshops have all sold out, but as usual, we’ll be running a waiting list right up until the last minute: should anyone have to drop out of a workshop (which happens more than you might think), their spot will go to the person next in line. If you’d like to get on the list, email prize@hackaday.com with your name, ticket number, and the workshop you’re hoping to sneak into, and we’ll see what we can do.
But don’t let the workshops stop you. There’s still plenty to see, do, and experience. See you there! | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6749047",
"author": "oli",
"timestamp": "2024-04-10T07:33:37",
"content": "sigh… I´m unable to attend the event I booked. Got an early birdie ticket, and I´m willing to part it for same price i paid… but on the other hand I´d really love to have the goodies bag at least. Wenn jeman... | 1,760,371,951.546111 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/08/1950s-switching-power-supply-does-it-mechanically/ | 1950s Switching Power Supply Does It Mechanically | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"Mr Carlson",
"vibrator"
] | When you hear about a switching power supply, you think of a system that uses an inductor and a switch to redistribute energy from the input to the output. But the original switching power supply was the vibrator supply, which was common in automotive applications back in the middle part of the last century. [Mr. Carlson] has
a 1950s-era example of one of these
, and he invites us to watch him repair it in the video below.
Most of the vibrator supplies we’ve seen have been built into car radios, but this one is in a box by itself. The theory is simple. A DC voltage enters the vibrator, which is essentially a relay that has a normally-closed contact in series with its coil. When current flows, the relay operates, breaking the contact. With no magnetic field, the springy contact returns to its original position, allowing the whole cycle to repeat.
Opening the device requires a pipe cutter.
You might wonder why you want to make and break a DC circuit in that way. Simple. With a little filtering, you get some sort of AC output, and AC is manageable with transformers, another magnetic device. In a radio, the resulting AC might return to DC to provide plate voltage for tubes. This unit has an AC outlet, although we imagine the voltage coming out would be hard to predict.
In this case, the voltage coming out was easy to guess: nothing. Guessing that the vibrator itself was shot, he tested the coil inside and found it was probably working. However, the unit would not oscillate. Given that it is a 70-year-old mechanical device, this isn’t totally surprising. The next step was to use a pipe cutter to open the can. Cleaning the contacts resulted in the buzzing noise that gave the device its name.
We’ve written before about
vibrators
and their high-powered twin, the dynamotor (or MG set, if you learned it that way). Many
drug store tube testers
could also test vibrators. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748526",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T17:04:22",
"content": "A vibrator is in no sense what we would today call a switching power supply. It is a simple transformer AC inverter, same as the class D transistor based one that used to charge camera flash capacitor... | 1,760,371,951.730375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/08/heating-mars-on-the-cheap/ | Heating Mars On The Cheap | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"mars",
"science",
"terraforming"
] | Mars is fairly attractive as a potential future home for humanity. It’s solid, with firm land underfoot. It’s able to hang on to a little atmosphere, which is more than you can say about the moon. It’s even got a day/night cycle remarkably close to our own. The only problem is it’s too darn cold, and there’s not a lot of oxygen to breathe, either.
Terraforming is the concept of fixing problems like these on a planet-wide scale. Forget living in domes—let’s just make the whole thing habitable!
That’s a huge task, so much current work involves exploring just what we could achieve with today’s technology. In the case of Mars, [Casey Handmer] doesn’t have a plan to terraform the whole planet.
But he does suggest we could potentially achieve significant warming of the Red Planet for $10 billion in just 10 years.
Giga-Scale Production
Mars actually looks pretty livable in photos, but you’d die if you were standing there in the open. Credit:
NASA
, public domain
Handmer doesn’t hope to give Mars a comfortable climate and fully breathable atmosphere in one go. Instead, the idea is first to warm Mars up significantly and release additional carbon dioxide. The hope is that this would help create a warmer blanket around the planet as a starting point for further terraforming works. His plan involves no nuclear reactors, chemical seeding, or big mining operations. Instead, it’s about maximising the amount of heat pumped into Mars for the lowest cost.
The concept is simple. By increasing the amount of sunlight falling on to Mars, its temperature can be increased significantly. That additional warmth would ideally release CO2 from cold storage in carbonate deposits already on Mars. This would further accelerate warming just as it does on Earth
via the Greenhouse effect.
Ideally, pump enough heat in initially to get that CO2 into the atmosphere, and our favorite greenhouse gas might just do the rest.
To get more sunlight on Mars, Handmer proposes using
solar sails
. Not just one, or two, or a hundred, but solar sails in their billions. They would use light from the sun to travel from Earth to Mars on a timescale of months. When arriving at Mars, they would be stationed at the Sun-Mars L2 Lagrange point, where the required orbital corrections would be at a minimum. From that point, the solar cells would position themselves to reflect sunlight on to the Martian surface to provide heating.
The Martian atmosphere is made up of 95.32% carbon dioxide, 2.7% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, and just 0.13% oxygen. Atmospheric pressure is just 6.35 millibar, compared to 1013 millibar on Earth. That very thin atmosphere nonetheless gives Mars a nice tan sky.
The sun already provides energy on the level of roughly 600 watts per square meter on the Martian surface. That sums up to about 21,600 terawatts across the entire planet. Compare that to the 8 gigawatts or so put out by our largest nuclear reactor, and it’s easy to see the sun is providing a lot more energy than we could hope to achieve with any kind of operation on the Martian surface. Reflect more of that sun, and that number goes up nicely.
Large solar sails placed opposite the Sun and Mars could be used to increase the amount of solar radiation falling on the red planet. Credit:
Casey Handmer
Handmer notes that a reflector covering 1,000 square meters would reflect 600 kW of sunlight towards Mars. 1,000 sails of this size would effectively add a square kilometer of surface to Mars’s existing cross-sectional area of 36,000,000 square kilometers. That’s not really a whole lot.
As mentioned above, the key is to scale into the billions. The idea is that these simple solar sails could be manufactured on the cheap. Handmer posits that a 1,000 gram sail craft could cover the aforementioned 1,000 square meters. He estimates a production cost on the order of $100, roughly equivalent to a modern cellphone. For electronics, the sail would need a processor, a telemetry radio, a small solar panel, and a camera to act as a star tracker for navigation. It would then use LCD panels to act as reflectively-variable elements to change its direction under the influence of the sun. At that weight, launch costs would be around $2000. Add that on to the manufacturing cost, and you’ve got 1,000 square meters of Mars reflector for just $2100. Advances could shave manufacturing costs and weight down further, slashing launch costs which are heavily weight dependent.
After launching cheap solar sails high enough into Earth orbit, they would use light pressure from the sun to make their way to the Sun-Mars L2 point. Handmer believes such craft could be built as cheaply as $100 in grand numbers. Credit:
Casey Handmer
If these solar sails could be manufactured with the same efficiency we churn out smartphones, we could churn out hundreds of millions of these craft in a few years. Handmer suggests a decade of launches could net 1.5 billion sails in position around Mars, which would be good enough for increasing energy input to the planet by 4%. In turn, Mars’ thermal radiation would have to increase by 4% to balance this extra energy input, which suggests its basic temperature would rise from 210 K to 212 K—or roughly -61.15 Celsius. He costs all this out at around $10 billion, which sounds awfully cheap in the grand scheme of things.
Worth It?
Okay, so that still sounds terribly cold. And it is! But that rise of two degrees isn’t to be sniffed at. As Handmer points out, that’s more than we’ve achieved here on Earth in 250 years of rampant fossil fuel use. He also notes that the shining solar sails would make for a brilliant view from Mars’s surface, though it’s perhaps unlikely many humans would be there to see it, at such cold temperatures.
Further gains could be made with some strategy. If cold deposits of stored carbon dioxide were spotted on the surface, the sail network could ideally be aimed to some degree to prioritize warming of those areas first. Done right, this could speed temperature rises on Mars quite significantly.
Reality Check
The higher escape velocity of heavier planets allows them to hold on to an atmosphere more easily. Lower temperatures are a boost, too. If we warmed Mars to Earth’s temperature, it’s atmosphere would lose oxygen and nitrogen more quickly than it already does. We could end up giving Mars an atmosphere only to lose it in short order. Credit:
Cmglee, CC BY-SA 3.0
It’s a brilliant idea, and one we’d like to see explored further. At the same time, it’s unlikely to get real legs any time soon. There’s little will to terraform Mars right now, given we haven’t even sent a human over for look just yet.
Furthermore, even if Mars was warmed significantly, there’s still the question of whether the atmosphere and environment could be made livable. Humans need oxygen, and we like a certain atmospheric pressure and lots of water. Getting Mars into the right ball park on all these measures would be tough, and maintaining it would involve countering the effects of the solar wind, which has stripped the planet’s atmosphere in the past.
The plan also glosses over some finer points of the engineering required. It’s one thing to build 1.5 billion solar sails, and another thing entirely to launch them all and get them to Mars. Once there, they’d need to be very well organized to avoid crashing into each other and turning into one big tangled blob in orbit.
Handmer has put together a very compelling plan to warm Mars, and to do it on the cheap. Whether it would work is an open question, but this is the kind of wide-ranged blue-sky thinking that’s required to solve the space-based problems of tomorrow. Terraforming an entire planet isn’t something you do on the small scale; it’s something that requires the massed industrial outputs of entire societies. That’s a lesson we must learn, not just on Mars,
but on Earth. | 78 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748484",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T14:18:47",
"content": "April 1st was last week.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6748539",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2024... | 1,760,371,951.846566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/08/fortran-and-webassembly-bringing-zippy-linear-algebra-to-nodejs-browsers/ | Fortran And WebAssembly: Bringing Zippy Linear Algebra To NodeJS & Browsers | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"FORTRAN",
"wasm"
] | With the rise of WebAssembly (wasm) it’s become easier than ever to run native code in a browser. As mostly just another platform to target, it would be remiss if Fortran was not a part of this effort, which is why a number of projects have sought to get Fortran supported on wasm.
For the ‘why’,
[George Stagg] makes the point
that software packages like BLAS and LAPACK for Fortran are still great for scientific computing, while the ‘how’ is a bit more hairy, but getting better courtesy of the still-in-development LLVM front-end for Fortran (flang-new). Using it for wasm is not straightforward yet, due to the lack of a wasm32 target, but as [George] demonstrates, this is easily patched around.
We reported on Fortran and wasm back in 2016
, with things having changed somewhat in the intervening eight years (yes, that long). The Fortran-to-C translator utility (f2c) is effectively EOL, while LFortran is coming along but still missing many features. The Dragonegg GCC-frontend-for-LLVM project was the best shot in 2020 for Fortran and WebAssembly, but obsolete now. Classic Flang has been in LLVM for a while, but is to be replaced with what is now called flang-new. The wish by [George] is now to find a way to get his patched flang-new code for wasm support into the project.
In the article, the diff for patching the flang-new toolchain to target wasm is provided. During compilation of the standard Fortran runtime it was then found that the flang-new code assumes that target system
sizeof()
results are identical to those of the host system, which of course falls flat for wasm32. One more patch (or hardcoded hack, rather) later the ‘Hello World’ example in Fortran was up and running, clearing the way to build the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) and LAPACK (Linear Algebra Package) libraries and create a few example projects in Fortran-for-wasm32 which uses them.
The advantage of being able to use extremely well-optimized software packages like these when limited to a browser environment should be obvious, in addition to the benefit of using existing codebases. It is certainly [George]’s hope that flang-new will soon officially support wasm (32 and 64-bit) as targets, and he actively seeks help with making this a reality. | 15 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748439",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T12:08:55",
"content": "Oh God make it stop WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?Yet another opportunity to take Fortran behind the garden shed and put it out of its misery missed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,951.947569 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/08/kanachord-is-a-macro-pad-for-japanese-input/ | KanaChord Is A Macro Pad For Japanese Input | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cherry mx",
"macro keyboard",
"macro pad",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | There are various situations that warrant additional keyboards on your desk, and inputting a second language is definitely a good one.
That’s the idea behind KanaChord,
which generates Unicode macros to render Japanese Kana characters using chords — pressing multiple keys at once as you would on a piano.
The Japanese writing system is made up of Kanji (Chinese characters), Hirigana, and Katakana. Without going into it too much, just know that Hirigana and Katakana are collectively known as the Kana, and there’s a table that lays out the pairing of vowels and consonants. To [Mac Cody], the layout of the Kana table inspired this chording keyboard.
One of the great features of KanaChord is that it uses color to indicate character type, Kana mode, and even provide error feedback. Another is the slide switch that selects one of three Unicode key sequences in order to support different computer platforms.
The red light means an invalid combination was pressed.
The brains of this operation is a Raspberry Pi Pico, an extremely popular choice for keyboards. [Mac Cody] used an Adafruit NeoKey 5×6 Ortho Snap-Apart keyboard PCB to make things easy, plus thirty Cherry MX switches of unknown color. The enclosure and the keycaps are 3D printed. There’s a wonderful amount of detail in
the hardware section of the repo
, so dig in.
Right now, KanaChord only outputs Kana Unicode and not Kanji Unicode, which gives an incomplete input system for Japanese as-is. Don’t worry — [Mac] is working on the KanaChord Plus Keyboard, which will also output Kanji Unicode for over 6,000 commonly-used Kanji. | 13 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748399",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T08:46:56",
"content": "As Japanese would say: SUGO!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6748678",
"author": "Mac Cody",
"timestamp": "2024-04-09T05:03:41",
... | 1,760,371,951.896492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/fixing-an-expensive-smart-toaster-is-worth-the-time/ | Fixing An Expensive Smart Toaster Is Worth The Time | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"nichrome wire",
"toaster"
] | There was a time when the simplest and cheapest kitchen appliance you could think of was a toaster. Some nichrome wire, a spring, and a mechanical thermostat were all you needed. Those days are gone and today’s toasters are full of special features, network connections, and fancy cases.
Take [boilerbot]’s
Breville die-cast smart toaster
. The four-slice model is upwards of $200. As
Star Trek’s
[Mr. Scott] said, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.” That seems to be the case here. The toaster failed and while [boilerbot] did fix it, he got lucky. He mentions that if the damage had been lower in the toaster, getting to it would have been nearly impossible.
Like a cell phone, the grand toaster is impervious to normal tools. So the first order of business is to modify a screwdriver with a rotary tool to fit the screws. There’s also a very inconvenient wire holding the case on. It seems you could pull it off with no special tools, but putting it back is another story.
Hemostats saved the day, although long pliers would probably work, or maybe even tweezers if you are dexterous enough.
The problem was a broken heating element wire. Luckily, a crimp terminal fixed it. You don’t want to solder toaster wire. It gets hot in operation and you don’t really want to drip molten lead on your bagel. The wire was, unluckily, under a rivet, so the repair was a bit more involved than it would have been otherwise. However, as you can see in the video below, the toaster made a full recovery. Good thing, too. We hate to throw out a $20 toaster, much less a $200 one!
Although this is a smart toaster, it doesn’t appear to be
a pest like some smart toasters
. If your toaster is beyond repair and you miss your old screen saver,
we have a suggestion
. | 49 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748367",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T06:12:12",
"content": "Would you like some toast?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6748376",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T07:08:59",
... | 1,760,371,952.04087 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/a-spark-gap-transmitter-characterized/ | A Spark Gap Transmitter, Characterized | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"early radio",
"spark gap transmitter"
] | When we think of a spark gap radio transmitter, most of us immediately imagine an early twentieth century ship’s radio room or similar. Most of us know these transmitters as the first radio systems, and from there we’ll probably also know that they were phased out when better circuits arrived, because of their wide bandwidth. So it’s rare in 2024 to find anyone
characterizing a spark gap transmitter
, as [Baltic Lab] has.
The circuit is simple enough, a high voltage passes through an RC network to a spark gap, the other side of which is a tuned circuit. The RC network and the spark gap form a simple low frequency relaxation oscillator, with the C being charged until the spark gap triggers, forcing the subsequent discharge of the capacitor and causing the spark to extinguish and the cycle to repeat. The resulting chain of high voltage pulses repeatedly energizes the tuned circuit, with each pulse causing a damped oscillation at its resonant frequency. The resulting RF signal is a crude AM tone which can be received fairly simply.
The mathematics behind it all is pretty interesting, revealing both the cause of the bandwidth spread in the low Q factor of the tuned circuit, and the presence of a large spurious frequency spike on an interaction with the capacitor in the RC circuit. It’s all in the video below the break, and we have to admit, it taught us something about radio we didn’t know.
Meanwhile spark gaps weren’t the only early radio transmitter technology.
How about an alternator
? | 32 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748340",
"author": "Lynn Richardson",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T03:28:56",
"content": "In 1966 I used a 9000v neon sign transformer, it had 60ma current limiting built in. I used window glass and aluminum foil taped on both sides to make the capacitor, no antenna. Spark gap was a c... | 1,760,371,952.11051 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/hackaday-links-april-7-2024/ | Hackaday Links: April 7, 2024 | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | Folks with a bit of knowledge about network security commonly use virtual private networks (VPNs) when out and about. Whether you’re connecting to public WiFi or somebody passes you a questionable Ethernet cable at a hacker con, it’s nice to have a secure endpoint to tunnel all of your traffic. As a secondary bonus, connecting through a VPN can obscure your physical location. It’s that second feature that has a bunch of people jumping on the VPN bandwagon as
they try to dodge the recent porn age checks
that have gone into effect in a number of states. According to a recent article in
PopSci,
one particular VPN provider saw a 275% jump in demand on the
same day that PornHub cut off access to users in Texas
. While the debate over underage users accessing adult content is far outside of our wheelhouse, anything that gets more users connecting to the Internet via encrypted means is arguably a net positive.
If you wanted somebody from the Geek Squad to set up that VPN so you can get back
on PornHub
to work securely from the local coffee shop, you might be out of luck. Reports have been coming in that
Best Buy’s mobile nerd division is seeing sweeping layoffs
. Geeks were told to stay home on Tuesday and await a call from corporate, at which point many got the surprising news that they no longer had a job. The
/r/GeekSquad subreddit
has been a rallying point for staff who got the axe, with the user [jaym026] posting what we assume is an
AI-generated inspirational speech from Optimus Prime
. Of course, it sucks for anyone to lose their job, especially with the way things are these days. Still, we’re willing to bet almost none of those affected will look back on the day they were let go from an increasingly irrelevant brick-and-mortar electronics store as a low point in their professional careers.
Speaking of having your job eliminated… We recently came across a new AI project that’s sure to replace
somebody
— Loki, an
open-source tool for fact verification
from LibrAI. From the documentation, it looks like the project ingests various online information sources, filters out vague and ambiguous statements, and then runs your question through whatever’s left. It doesn’t just tell you when a statement is false. It can also provide a correction it can back up with multiple linked sources. Though we’re generally critical of relying on AI for anything serious, an open tool that can verify facts and provide references sounds much better than an IDE plugin that generates janky Python code.
In other software news, we hear that the
Team-Kodi PPA was unexpectedly retired last week
. This was a popular way for users on Ubuntu and related Linux distributions to access pre-compiled builds of the open-source entertainment hub that started life as a front-end for playing videos on the original Xbox. In its place, the team is looking to provide Kodi builds as a Flatpak, which, at least in theory, would apply to more Linux users since it doesn’t rely on any particular package format. While we imagine those looking to get Kodi installed on their device will figure it out one way or another regardless of how it’s packaged up, it’s an interesting data point for how software is being distributed on Linux these days. Love them or hate them, more and more big-name software projects are moving over to some type of universal containerized executable. Good thing
storage is cheap
.
Finally, we’d like to point out a particularly clever joke included in the April edition of the European Space Agency’s
Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) newsletter
. Noting that journalists take particular delight in comparing the size of space rocks to random Earthly creatures, the NEOCC recommended publications adopt the Standardised Giraffe Unit (SGU). The rest of the document lists the size of various near-Earth objects in the new standard. At the end you’ll find a handy conversion chat for those who are still thinking in the outdated corgi or duck metrics. We recommend updating your research papers accordingly. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748316",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2024-04-08T00:30:34",
"content": "The ducks seem to represent an outlier in the Anatidae family, and should be revised. Everyone knows that most duck species rarely excede two bananas.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,952.176621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/emergency-dip-pin-repair-for-anyone/ | Emergency DIP Pin Repair For Anyone | Jenny List | [
"Parts",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"IC pin",
"rework",
"soldering"
] | Who has not at some point in their lives experienced the horror of a pin on a DIP package breaking off? It’s generally game over, but what if you don’t have another chip handy to substitute? It’s time to
carefully grind away some of the epoxy and solder on a new pin
, as [Zafer Yildiz] has done in the video below the break.
The technique relies on the pins continuing horizontally inside the package , such that they provide a flat surface. He’s grinding with the disk on a rotary tool, we have to say we’d use one of the more delicate grinding heads for something more akin to a miniature die grinder.
Once the flat metal surface is exposed, the chip is placed in a socket, and a new pin is cut from the leg of a TO-220 power device. This is carefully bent over, inserted in the socket, and soldered into place. The whole socket and chip arrangement is then used in place of the chip, making for something a little bulky but one infinitely preferable to having to junk the device.
There are many useful skills to be learned when it comes to reworking, and we’ve covered a few in our time. Most recently we saw
a guide to lifting SMD pins. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748286",
"author": "some guy",
"timestamp": "2024-04-07T20:31:34",
"content": "This video and this guy, i won’t comment. I just want to say that having a rotating cutting/grinding disk next or even on top of your finger(s) is *probably* not a good idea… Use pliers or sth ffs!",
... | 1,760,371,952.282734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/squishy-miter-saw-shroud-spares-you-the-sneezy-bits/ | Squishy Miter Saw Shroud Spares You The Sneezy Bits | Sonya Vasquez | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"chop saw",
"dust",
"dust collector",
"miter saw"
] | Let’s be honest. When it comes to operating miter saws, these tools kick dust out the back like a spray paint can. Most of us have accepted this quirk as-is, but not [Inspire Woodcraft] who’s on a mission to achieve near perfect dust collection. And he nearly has it. With a
budget dust collection setup
, he’s able to eliminate over 90% of the dust from his cuts, and others who’ve adopted his setup can vouch for his results.
The solution comes in two pieces. First, he focuses on creating a new dust shroud or “boot” for collecting dust through the vacuum hookup on the back of the saw. What’s key here is that this dust boot is made from squishy silicone, enabling it to flare outwards and spread out as the saw travels downward into the material. It’s clear that [Inspire Woodcraft] has gone through dozens of material and shape iterations, but the result is sturdy enough to stay open with the vacuum running through the back hose attachment.
With the dust nearly perfectly funneled from the back, the second tweak focuses on rerouting stray dust away from the table and directly into this boot. [Inspire Woodcraft] later noticed that dust collection from the bottom of his miter saw simply didn’t exist, so dust would accumulate at his feet.
His solution? To create
a second shroud that fits under the throat plate
that takes sawdust once destined for the ground and ejects it backwards and straight into the dust collection boot.
Altogether, this setup solves a long-existing problem with a handful of commodity parts and a few 3D prints. [Inspire Woodcraft] has also chronicled his journey in such detail where you too could recreate his solution from the video. But if you’re feeling lazy, and you’re lucky enough to own the same Dewalt DW716 or DWS716 model miter saws, you can simply snag a kit from
his website
.
If all this talk of miter saws has your reaching for a screwdriver to see what modified mayhem you can unleash with yours, look no further than this
LED hack that adds a shadow line
to your cuts. | 8 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748231",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2024-04-07T17:15:06",
"content": "Using my non existent fortune telling powers, I can still see someone filling a patent for this in a few weeks time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,952.223154 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/the-easy-way-to-make-a-smart-appliance/ | The Easy Way To Make A Smart Appliance | Jenny List | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"home-assistant",
"IoT",
"rice cooker",
"smart plug"
] | It seems that finding an appliance without some WiFi connectivity and an app to load your laundry data into the cloud is an increasingly difficult thing to do in the 2020s. Many of us resolutely refuse to connect these smart appliances to the Internet, but not because we don’t see the appeal — we just want to do it on our own terms.
[Terence Eden] did just this with his rice cooker,
using a surprisingly straightforward approach.
He simply connected it to the mains via an energy monitoring smart plug, and that was the hardware part, done. Of course, were it that simple we probably wouldn’t be featuring this here, as the meat of this project lies in connecting it to his smart home systems and getting something useful from it.
He’s using
Home Assistant
, and after a bit of messing about had it part of his home automation system. Then it was time for
Appliance Status Monitor
, which allowed him to easily have the rice cooker send him a notification once it has done its thing by monitoring the power it was using. All online, part of a smart home, and not a byte of his data captured and sold to anyone!
This
isn’t the first home automation project
we’ve brought you from this source. | 32 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748192",
"author": "nottinghamcitytraveller",
"timestamp": "2024-04-07T14:12:07",
"content": "This is an interesting idea. Could be expanded to monitoring a washing machine by using a microphone and esp32. Maybe even a breath detector from a discarded e-cig could be sensitive enoug... | 1,760,371,952.355602 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/comparing-desoldering-tools/ | Comparing Desoldering Tools | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"desoldering station"
] | [Lee] has a Hakko FR301 desoldering gun and a Duratool knockoff. He freely admits that the Hakko is probably better, but he wonders if it’s
good enough to justify being four times as expensive
. He shows both of them off in a recent video that you can see below.
Often, desoldering doesn’t get as much attention as soldering, but for repairs or if you make mistakes — and who doesn’t — it is an essential skill. Many of the differences will be either good or bad, depending on your personal preference. For example, the Hakko is an all-in-one unit, so it doesn’t have a bulky box to sit on your bench. However, that also means the Hakko is larger and heavier. It also lacks controls and indicators the other unit has on the base station box.
What doesn’t come down to personal preference, though, is usability. The Hakko seems much easier to clean and if you’ve ever used a gun like this, you know how often you do have to clean it. If you ever forget to ream the nozzle out regularly during use, you probably won’t forget a second time because unclogging any of these guns can be a nightmare. We like to use a long, stiff wire to push through the barrel frequently when using a tool like this to prevent having to clear it like [Lee] did at the eleven-minute mark.
[Lee] mentions that the Hakko also has more suction and sustains it better. That seems like a clear win. We’ve had expensive guns and cheap ones, and if they don’t suck well or long, you are as well off with a spring-loaded solder puller. In fact, for our money, buying a high-quality hand unit is probably a better deal for most people. It is hard for the pumps to equal the amount of pull you get from a spring.
Nozzle changing is another area where the Hakko shines. Our impression is that the Hakko is clearly better when it comes to creature comforts. However, the real question is how they desolder. The end of the video shows a face-off, and while the Hakko does seem superior, the cheap gun certainly got the job done. [Lee] mentions it may come down to volume. If you desolder constantly, you will likely be happier with the Hakko. However, the cheap gun would be fine for occasional use. Or save your money and invest in a good spring-loaded sucker.
Of course, everyone has their own favorites. We’ve seen custom soldering iron tips that heat
whole areas efficiently
if you don’t want to use something like Chip Quik. We are always surprised we don’t see more
desoldering needles
. Meanwhile, if you want to examine all your options,
ask [Bil Herd] how he does it
. | 27 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748166",
"author": "Mcinsand",
"timestamp": "2024-04-07T12:54:15",
"content": "After 30 years of using a $10 Radio Shack spring-loaded desoldering tool, I bought an FR301 last year. The ‘301 is a bargain!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"c... | 1,760,371,952.659658 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/07/jpegli-googles-better-jpeg-and-possible-death-knell-for-webp/ | Jpegli: Google’s Better JPEG And Possible Death Knell For WebP | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"image compression",
"JPEG"
] | Along with the rise of the modern World Wide Web came the introduction of the JPEG image compression standard in 1992, allowing for high-quality images to be shared without requiring the download of a many-MB bitmap file. Since then a number of JPEG replacements have come and gone – including JPEG 2000 – but now Google reckons that it can
improve JPEG with Jpegli
, a new encoder and decoder library that promises to be highly compatible with JPEG.
To be fair, it’s only the most recent improvement to JPEG, with JPEG XT being introduced in 2015 and JPEG XL in 2021 to
mostly deafening silence
, right along that other, better new image format people already forgot about:
AVIF
. As Google mentions in their blog post, Jpegli uses heuristics developed for JPEG XL, making it more of a JPEG XL successor (or improvement). Compared to JPEG it offers a higher compression ratio, 10+-bit support which should reduce issues like banding. Jpegli images are said to be compatible with existing JPEG decoders, much like JPEG XT and XL images.
Based on the
benchmarks from 2012
by [Blobfolio] between JPEG XL, AVIF and WebP, it would seem that if Jpegli incorporates advancements from AVIF while maintaining compatibility with JPEG decoders out there, it might be a worthy replacement of AVIF and WebP, while giving JPEG a shot in the arm for the next thirty-odd years of dominating the WWW and beyond. | 56 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748131",
"author": "weewe45rt",
"timestamp": "2024-04-07T08:05:22",
"content": "very good is still ‘Real’ compression, why not put stream compresson (and stream change data, for example stock price changes every minutes in table), partial different compression (for example backgrou... | 1,760,371,952.592721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/06/inside-a-hisense-tv-repair-attempt/ | Inside A Hisense TV Repair Attempt | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"backlight",
"hisense",
"tv"
] | Many of us misspent our youth fixing televisions. But fixing a 1970s TV is a lot different than today — the parts were big and tubes were made to be replaced. Have you torn into a big flat screen lately? It is
a different world
, as [The Fixologist] shows us in the video below.
The TV in question was rescued from a neighbor who was about to throw it away. If you are like us, you’ll watch the first few minutes and see it powers up, but the screen is very dark. Back light problem, right? No problem. But it turned out to be more than we thought.
Honestly, we assumed it might be the power supply, and we would have put a power supply on the LED leads to test that first. That would have been smart because taking the panel off to reveal the LEDs was very difficult! There were two bad LEDs, though, so in the end you’d have had to do it anyway.
We were disappointed that after fixing the LED, he cracked the LCD panel during the reinstallation. So, in the end, this was more of a teardown video and not a repair video. He seemed to think a lot of the tape in the unit was to thwart repairs. That could be, but we wondered if it made manufacturing the TV easier which, after all, is mostly what they care about.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard people tearing into a TV and wondering if
the factory was against them
. We’ve considered it, but
we are pretty sure it isn’t the case
. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748124",
"author": "Mend It, Australia",
"timestamp": "2024-04-07T07:06:32",
"content": "Love the boro style patch on your jeans!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6748126",
"author": "Mend It, Australia",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,952.784268 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/06/how-to-properly-patch-your-iowa-class-battleship/ | How To Properly Patch YourIowa-Class Battleship | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"History"
] | [
"battleship",
"museum",
"US Navy",
"wwii"
] | There’s a saying among recreational mariners that the word “boat” is actually an acronym for “bring out another thousand”, as it seems you can’t operate one for long without committing to expensive maintenance and repairs. But this axiom isn’t limited to just civilian pleasure craft, it also holds true for large and complex vessels — although the bill generally has a few more zeros at the end.
Consider the USS
New Jersey
(BB-62), an
Iowa
-class battleship that first served in the Second World War and is now operated as a museum ship. Its recent dry docking for routine repair work has been
extensively documented on YouTube by curator [Ryan Szimanski]
, and in the latest video, he covers one of the most important tasks crews have to attend to while the ship is out of the water: inspecting and repairing the hundreds of patches that line the hull.
These patches aren’t to repair damage, but instead cover up the various water inlets and outlets required by onboard systems. When
New Jersey
was finally decommissioned in 1991, it was hauled out of the water and plates were welded over all of these access points to prevent any potential leaks. But as the Navy wanted to preserve the ship so it could potentially be reactivated if necessary, care was taken to make the process reversible.
Patches that project out from the surface are easier to remove.
Squatting underneath the 270 meter (887 feet) long battleship, [Ryan] points out one of these patches and explains how they were installed. Rather than welding a flat plate over the hole, the patch was boxed out from the surface so that it could be easily cut off without damaging the ship’s hull. A set of eyelets were also welded to the hull around the opening, as they would have been used to help hoist the heavy patch into position.
Once installed, a pressure gauge and an air hose would be attached to a opening built into the patch. Compressed air would be pumped in, and the pressure would be monitored to see if there were any leaks. Should the pressure drop, spraying soapy water on the weld seams would usually reveal where the air was dribbling out of.
According to [Ryan], only one of these patches is known to have developed a leak in the 32 years since the bottom of the ship was last inspected and serviced. But given the fact that the ship won’t be removed from the water again for the next several decades, the plan is to go around pressure testing the patches and repairing any welds that might not be up to standard.
The
Battleship New Jersey
YouTube channel is a phenomenal resource for anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts of warships, with videos covering everything from the
ship’s original WWII equipment
to the
modern electronic retrofits
made to the ship in the 1980s and 90s. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6748104",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2024-04-07T03:51:11",
"content": "Quick research:Original cost: about $100,000,000 1938 dollars2024 equivalent: about 2 billion dollars.Rule of thumb for boats: 10% of original cost/year in upkeep (freshwater).200 megabucks/year.They claim t... | 1,760,371,952.72838 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/05/a-simple-line-injector-shows-you-the-wonderful-world-of-psrr/ | A Simple Line Injector Shows You The Wonderful World Of PSRR | Arya Voronova | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"line injector",
"psrr"
] | [limpkin] writes us to show
a line injector
they’ve designed. The principle is simple — if you want to measure how much PSU noise any of your electronic devices let through, known as PSRR (Power Supply Rejection Ratio), you can induce PSU noise with this board, and then measure noise on your device’s output. The board is likewise simple. A few connectors, resistors, and caps, and a single N-FET!
You do need a VNA, but once you have that, you get a chance to peek into an entire world of insights. Does that 1117 LDO actually filter out noise better than a buck regulator? Is it enough to use a Pi filter for that STM32’s ADC rail, and do the actual parts you’re using actually help with that task? How much noise does your device actually let through in the real world, after being assembled with the specific components you’ve picked? [limpkin]
shows us a whole bunch of examples
– putting regulators, filters and amplifiers to the test, and showing us how there’s more than meets the eye.
Everything is open source, with full files available on the blog. And, if you want it pre-assembled, tested and equipped with the CNC-milled case, you can get it
on Tindie
or
Lektronz!
Of course, even without a tool like this, you can still get good filter designs done
with help of computer-aided modelling.
We thank [alfonso] for sharing this with us! | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6747869",
"author": "icehouse",
"timestamp": "2024-04-06T04:29:22",
"content": "such elegant simplicity! replicating the datasheet PSRR plot of the LT3045 makes me want to replicate their setup and try some measurements of my own",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,371,952.825165 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/05/3d-printer-hot-off-the-griddle/ | 3D Printer Hot Off The Griddle | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"heated bed",
"twin gantry"
] | If you look at [Proper Printing’s] latest video — see below — you’ll immediately get the idea behind his latest printer. There are
two heads on two separate gantries
, which, of course, opens up many possibilities. But when you think you’ve seen enough, you find out the heated bed is a kitchen griddle, and… well, for us, we had to keep watching.
The heated bed idea was interesting, although the flatness left something to be desired. While it is a simple idea, getting the two gantries to move reliably across the hotbed griddle took a lot of parts and a careful design. We wonder how evenly the griddle heats — ours definitely has hot spots when we cook with it.
While the video made it look smooth, he confessed that there were a few redesign cycles. We were curious about the electronics, and obviously, some of the more exotic uses for this will require customized software. The gantries use a core XY drive and it looks like there is still some work to do to perfect it.
We were also amused to see something we’ve seen a lot lately but would have never seen a decade ago. It is now so cheap to make a PCB that many projects, including this one, use PCBs with no traces to get precisely machined flat pieces made inexpensively.
There probably isn’t enough detail here to make an exact copy of the printer, but the real value here is the idea and if you have the interest, you can probably put your own spin on the system. Nothing seemed especially exotic.
If you learn nothing else, you’ll probably enjoy the field expedient filament holder that appears about 25 minutes into the video. Full disclosure: at the end of the video, he has only one gantry running, so clearly, this is a work in progress. But we do love
unique printers
. Especially those that have
odd form factors
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6747831",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2024-04-05T23:15:33",
"content": "For an earlier version of a more polished (and expensive) multi gantry setup look into the machine Titan Robotics made for Autodesk’s “Project Escher”. Was back about 8 years ago.Biggest issue from my und... | 1,760,371,952.871399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/05/esp32-provides-distraction-free-writing-experience/ | ESP32 Provides Distraction-Free Writing Experience | Tom Nardi | [
"Cyberdecks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"distraction free",
"handwired keyboard",
"ortholinear keyboard",
"writerdeck"
] | Writing out a few thousand words is easy. Getting them in the proper order, now that’s another story entirely. Sometimes you’ll find yourself staring at a blank page, struggling to sieve coherent thoughts from the screaming maelstrom swirling around in your head, for far longer than you’d care to admit. Or so we’ve heard, anyway.
Unfortunately, there’s no cure for writer’s block. But many people find that limiting outside distractions helps to keep the mental gears turning, which is why
[Un Kyu Lee] has been working on a series of specialized writing devices
. The latest version of the Micro Journal, powered by the ESP32, goes a long way towards achieving his goals of an instant-on electronic notebook.
The writing experience on the Micro Journal is unencumbered by the normal distractions you’d have on a computer or mobile device, as the device literally can’t do anything but take user input and save it as a text file. We suppose you could achieve similar results with a pen and a piece of paper…but where’s the fun in that? These devices are more widely known as writerdecks, which is an extension of the popular cyberdeck concept of hyper-personalized computers.
This newest Micro Journal, which is the fourth iteration of the concept for anyone keeping score, packs a handwired 30% ortholinear keyboard, a 2.8″ ILI9341 240×320 LCD (with SD card slot), ESP32 dev board, and an 18650 battery with associated charging board into a minimalist 3D printed enclosure.
Unable to find any suitable firmware to run on the device, [Un Kyu Lee] has developed his own open source text editor to run on the WiFi-enabled microcontroller. While the distraction-free nature of the Micro Journal naturally means the text editor itself is pretty spartan in terms of features, it does allow syncing files with Google Drive — making it exceptionally easy to access your distilled brilliance from the comfort of your primary computing device.
While the earlier versions of the Micro Journal were impressive in their own way, we really love the stripped down nature of this ESP32 version. It reminds us a bit of the
keezyboost40
and the
EdgeProMX
, both of which were entered into the
2022 Cyberdeck Contest
. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6747786",
"author": "Clovis Fritzen",
"timestamp": "2024-04-05T20:03:20",
"content": "Great hacking, put the available technology to a good use really.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6747977",
"author": "Un Kyu Lee",
... | 1,760,371,952.938861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/05/a-drone-motor-does-e-bikes/ | A Drone Motor Does E-Bikes | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"drone motor",
"e-bike",
"motor"
] | On paper, the motors from both an electric bicycle and a drone can both take about 500 watts or so of power. Of course, their different applications make them anything but equivalent, as the bike motor is designed for high torque at low speed while the drone motor has very little torque but plenty of speed. Can the drone motor do the bike motor’s job?
[Pro Know] makes it happen
, with a set of speed reducing and torque increasing belts.
The build takes a pretty ordinary bicycle, and replaces the rear brake disk with a large pulley for a toothed belt, which drives a smaller pulley, and through a shaft another set of pulleys to the drone motor. The bracket to hold all this and the very large pulley on the wheel are all 3D printed in PLA-carbon fiber mix.
When it’s assembled, it runs the bike from a small lithium ion pack. That’s not unexpected, but if we’re honest we’d have our doubts as to whether this would survive the open road. It’s evidently a novelty for a YouTube video, and we’d be interested to see how hot the little motor became. However what’s perhaps more interesting is the choice of filament.
Could carbon fibre PLA be strong enough to print a toothed belt pulley? We’d be interested to know more. We saw the same filament combo
being tested recently
, after all. | 37 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6747777",
"author": "dianea",
"timestamp": "2024-04-05T19:23:17",
"content": "Are there ESC modules that can do regenerative braking?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6747787",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,953.01275 |
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