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https://hackaday.com/2024/02/25/what-is-x86-64-v3/ | What Is X86-64-v3? | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"x86_64"
] | You may have heard Linux pundits discussing x86-64-v3. Can recompiling Linux code to use this bring benefits? To answer that question, you probably need to know what x86-64-v3 is, and [Gary Explains]… well…
explains it
in a recent video.
If you’d rather digest text, RedHat has a recent article about their experiments
using the instructions set in RHEL10
. From that article, you can see that most of the new instructions support some enhancements for vectors and bit manipulation. It also allows for more flexible instructions that leave their results in an explicit destination register instead of one of the operand registers.
Of course, none of this matters for high-level code unless the compiler supports it. However, gcc version 12 will automatically vectorize code when using the -O2 optimization flags.
There’s a snag of course, that will make code incompatible with older CPUs. How old? Intel has supported these instructions since 2013 in the Haswell CPUs. Although some Atom CPUs have had v3 since 2021, some later Intel Atoms do not support it fully. AMD came to the party in 2015. There is a newer set of instructions, x86-64-v4. However, this is still too new, so most people, including RedHat, plan to support v3 for now. You can find
a succinct summary table
on Wikipedia.
So, outside of Atom processors, you must have some old hardware to not have the v3 instructions. Some of these instructions are pretty pervasive, so switching at run time doesn’t seem very feasible.
We wonder if older processors would trip illegal instruction interrupts for these instructions. If so, you could add emulated versions the same way old CPUs used to emulate math coprocessors if they didn’t have one.
Keep in mind that the debate about dropping versions before x86-64-v3 doesn’t mean Linux itself will care. This is simply how the distributions do their compile. While compiling everything yourself is possible but daunting, there will doubtlessly be distributions that elect to maintain support for older CPUs for as long as the Linux kernel will allow it.
Intel would like to drop
older non-64-bit hardware
from CPUs. If you want to sharpen up your 64-bit assembly language skills, try
a GUI
.
(Title image from Wikipedia) | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735315",
"author": "Billy Bob",
"timestamp": "2024-02-25T10:27:04",
"content": "Benchmarks?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6735334",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-02-25T12:03:38",
"content": "I am left with tw... | 1,760,371,997.584041 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/recreating-the-pop-ball/ | Recreating The Pop Ball | Kristina Panos | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"80s toy",
"flexible filament",
"injection molding",
"Pop Ball",
"Shore hardness",
"TPU"
] | Those who were kids in the 80s may remember a sweet little toy called the Pop Ball. A simple rubber hemisphere, this rubber cup could be turned inside out and thrown on the ground, where it would hit and bounce sky high whilst knocking itself right side out. The black ones worked particularly well, and were the first to be banned from [electrosync]’s school along with yo-yos, slap bracelets, and any number of toys that eventually became weaponized by enterprising children.
An industrial Vegemite injection-molded version that only kind of worked.
You can still find Pop Balls today, but they don’t work nearly as well as they did originally because of a lower Shore hardness in the rubber. Naturally, as an adult with futuristic toys at hand, [electrosync]
just had to try re-creating the ’80s version.
But it wasn’t easy.
They started by studying the patents and anything else they could find. They even managed to get a hold of Peter Fish, the original creator of the Pop Ball, to get some questions answered about the things. According to Peter, the black Pop Ball was made from recycled rubber and worked almost too well. Peter sent [electrosync] an old-stock Pop Ball, which they used to modify their CAD design.
It’s easy to root for [electrosync] throughout this journey, which consists of many failed prints and injection molding attempts. At last, they are able to at least recreate the snap of the modern Pop Ball once they finally found the right filament — the extremely elastic Recreus Filaflex 60A TPU. Of course, it wasn’t all lollipops and rainbows from there, because the filament is notoriously difficult to print with, but [electrosync] made it work. Check it out after the break.
Thanks to [Zane Atkins] for the tip! | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735282",
"author": "Zai1208",
"timestamp": "2024-02-25T06:30:27",
"content": "I have one called a ZeeBee. I am not from the 80s but can remember the fun of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6735283",
"author": "Zai1... | 1,760,371,997.117532 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/bit-serial-cpu-ultra-tiny-vhdl-based-cpu-with-forth-interpreter/ | Bit-Serial CPU: Ultra-Tiny VHDL-Based CPU With Forth Interpreter | Maya Posch | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"forth",
"softcore"
] | Soft cores for FPGAs come in many different flavors, covering a wide range of applications. The
Bit-Serial CPU
(bcpu) soft core presented by [Richard James Howe] is interesting for taking up just about the most minimal amount of resources (23 slices, 76 LUTs) while providing the means to run a Forth-based (
eForth
dialect) interpreter. To this CPU core a UART can be added (92 LUTs), as well as other peripherals.
As [Richard] states, the entire core with UART fits in 73 slices (220 LUTs) on a Spartan 6, while requiring a single port BRAM (block RAM). It features a 16-bit accumulator and lacks features such as interrupts, byte addressability and function calls, but those are not required to run the eForth interpreter. The main purpose of this soft core (other than the challenge) is to have a UART-programmable core that can be slotted in any FPGA design. For more serious requirements [Richard] also has the
H2 SoC
, which can run full-fat FORTH.
Being a bit-serial CPU, the bcpu is of course not particularly speedy, but that is the trade-off when going for maximum space savings. As noted in the project README’s ‘Use cases’, there are two use cases which the author had in mind. The first is as a CPU driving a software-defined, low baud-rate UART, the second as a controller for a VT100 terminal emulator. A VHDL test bench is provided, along with a C-based simulator, which require gforth and GHDL.
Image: Pedant01,
CC BY-SA 3.0. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735270",
"author": "DOugl",
"timestamp": "2024-02-25T04:23:18",
"content": "The Spartan-6, now that brings back memories. Something too many missed was the Papillio Pro from the Gadget Factory and the free DesignLab IDE. Was mind blowing to wire up a soft-core, design a circuit, de... | 1,760,371,997.16725 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/tetris-goes-round-and-round/ | Tetris Goes Round And Round | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"leds",
"tetris"
] | You’ve probably played some version of Tetris, but [the Center for Creative Learning] has a different take on it. Their latest version features
a cylindrical playing field
. While it wouldn’t be simple to wire up all those LEDs, it is a little easier, thanks to LED strips. You can find the code for the game on
GitHub
.
In all, there are 5 LED strips for a display and 13 strips for the playing area, although you can adjust this as long as there are at least 10 rows. The exact number of LEDs will depend on the diameter of the PVC pipe you build it on.
Using a PS2 controller, the games allow you to play a full-cylinder or in a half-cylinder mode. We were hoping they’d have put up a video showing the gameplay, but we couldn’t find it.
We couldn’t help but think that this would make an excellent display for many purposes. You might even be able to design different games for it.
We’ve seen
full-circle Tetris
, but it is hardly the same idea. If you want just plain Tetris, you could break out
your transistor tester
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735290",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2024-02-25T07:18:44",
"content": "They missed a trick that I saw back in the hacker village at 31C3.Rather than cutting the strip into rows and laboriously soldering them back together with jumper wires, the ones I saw just wrapped the tub... | 1,760,371,997.055026 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/tiny-motion-detection-alarm-does-the-trick/ | Tiny Motion Detection Alarm Does The Trick | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"alarm",
"esp32-C3",
"IMU",
"motion detection",
"motion detector",
"mpu6050",
"seeed xiao"
] | If you have mischievous children or forgetful elderly in your life, you might want to build a couple of these
tiny motion detection alarms
to help keep them out of harm’s way. Maybe you want to keep yourself out of the cookie jar. We say good for you.
But you could always put one of these alarms on a window, a drawer, or anything else you don’t want opened or moved. The MPU6050 3-axis IMU makes sure that any way the chosen item gets jostled, that alarm is going off.
As you may have guessed, there isn’t much more to this build — the brain is a Seeed Xiao ESP32-C3, and there’s a buzzer, a battery, a switch, and a push button to program it.
The cool thing about using an ESP32-C3 is that [gokux] can use these for other things, like performing a task when motion is detected. If you do want to build yourself a couple of these,
here are step-by-step instructions
.
If you’d rather detect motion in the vicinity,
here’s a PIR-based solution. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735195",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T21:31:30",
"content": "So, he pointed the antenna inwards?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6735355",
"author": "Leandro Heck",
"timestamp": "2024-02-25T14:01... | 1,760,371,997.481207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/apple-airtag-antitheft-or-antistalking/ | Apple AirTag: Antitheft Or Antistalking? | Dave Rowntree | [
"iphone hacks"
] | [
"AirTag",
"apple",
"hack",
"speaker"
] | Occasionally, the extra features added to a product can negate some of the reasons you wanted to buy the thing in the first place. Take, for example, Apple’s AirTag — billed as an affordable way to link your physical stuff to your phone. If some light-fingered ne’er-do-well wanders by and half-inches your gear, you get notified. The thing is, the AirTag also has an anti-stalking measure, which after a while, notifies nearby iPhones, should the tag move but not be near
your
iPhone!
In a recent video,
[David Manning] explains
that this feature is great for preventing the device from being used to track people. But it also means that if said thief happens to own an iPhone, they will be notified of the nearby tag, and can find it and disable it. So in the end, it’s a bit less useful as an anti-theft measure!
The solution is to pop the back off the tag and yank out the little sounder module from the rear plastic. You lose the ability to locate the tag audibly, but you gain a little more chance of returning your stolen goods. Apple could easily remove this feature with a firmware update, but it’s a matter of picking your poison: antistalking or antitheft?
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 37 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735132",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T18:03:13",
"content": "“Apple could easily remove this feature with a firmware update, but it’s a matter of picking your poison: antistalking or antitheft?”Society vs the individual, old as time, or recent as a pandemic.",
... | 1,760,371,997.653113 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/want-to-learn-binary-draw-space-invaders/ | Want To Learn Binary? Draw Space Invaders! | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"binary",
"Curiosity",
"learning",
"newsletter",
"persistence of vision"
] | This was the week that I accidentally taught my nearly ten-year-old son binary. And I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear.
It all started innocently enough. He had a week vacation, and on one of those days, we booked him a day-course for kids at our local FabLab. It was sold as a “learn to solder” class, and the project they made was basically
a MiniPOV
: eight LEDs driven by a museum-piece AVR ATtiny2313. Blinking lights make a pattern in your persistence of vision as you swipe it back and forth.
The default pattern was a heart, which is nice enough. But he wanted to get his own designs in there, and of course he knows that I know how to flash the thing with new code. So I got him to solder on an ISP header and start drawing patterns on grids of graph paper while I got the toolchain working and updated some of the 2000’s-era code so it would compile.
There’s absolutely no simpler way to get your head around binary than to light up a row of LEDs, and transcribing the columns of his fresh pixel art into ones and zeros was just the motivation he needed. We converted the first couple rows into their decimal equivalents, but it was getting close to dinner time, so we cheesed out with the modern
0b00110100
format for the rest. This all happened quite organically; “unintentional parenting” is what we call it.
While we were eating dinner, I got the strangest sense of deja vu. When I was around ten or eleven, my own father told me about the custom fonts for the Okidata 24-pin printer at his lab, because he needed me out of his hair for a while, and I set out to encode all of the Hobbit runes for it. (No comment.) He must have handed me a piece of graph paper explained how it goes, and we had a working rune font by evening. That was probably how
I
learned about binary as well.
Want to teach someone binary? Give them a persistence of vision toy, or a dot-matrix printer.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
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.
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!
(Art is from a much older POV project:
Trakr POV
— a hack of an old kids’ toy to make a long-exposure POV image. But it looks cool, and it gets the point across.) | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735084",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T15:19:36",
"content": "I recall drawing Karnaugh maps and logic gates on our family blackboard as a tween when my dad suggested I recreate a BCD-to-7segment decoder out of plain 74xx TTL, but it wasn’t until my 2nd or 3rd year of ... | 1,760,371,997.261754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/you-got-fusion-in-my-coal-plant/ | You Got Fusion In My Coal Plant! | Navarre Bartz | [
"Science"
] | [
"coal",
"electricity grid",
"electrification",
"energy transition",
"fusion",
"nuclear",
"nuclear fusion"
] | While coal was predominant in the past for energy generation, plants are shutting down worldwide to improve air quality and because they aren’t cost-competitive. It’s possible that idle infrastructure could be put to good use
with fusion instead
.
While we’ve yet to see a fusion reactor capable of generating electricity, Type One Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Oak Ridge National Lab have announced they’re evaluating the recently-closed Bull Run Fossil Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee as a site for a nuclear fusion reactor. One of the main advantages for siting any new generation source on top of an old one is the ability to reuse the existing transmission infrastructure to get any generated power to the grid.
Don’t get too excited as it sounds like this is yet another prototype reactor that will be the proof-of-concept before construction of a reactor that can produce commercial power for the grid. While ambitious, the amount of investment by government entities like the Department of Energy and the state of Tennessee (>$55 million) seems to indicate they aren’t just blowing smoke.
If any of this seems familiar, you might be thinking of the Department of Energy’s
report on placing advanced fission reactors on old coal sites
. A little fuzzy on the difference between a stellarator and a tokamak? Checkout this explainer on some of the
different ways to (non-explosively) do fusion on Earth
. | 48 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735062",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T13:44:04",
"content": "Lol “Coal is not Cost Effective”. Big old asterisk on that one, because the rest of the facts say “when compared to renewables”.HAD readers will probably quickly see the issue with that:1. Renewables can’t ... | 1,760,371,997.435289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/24/your-scope-armed-and-ready/ | Your Scope, Armed And Ready | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"vesa"
] | [VoltLog] never has enough space on his bench. We know the feeling and liked his idea of
mounting his oscilloscope on an articulated arm
. This is easy now because many new scopes have VESA mounts like monitors or TVs. However, watching the video below, we discovered there was a bit more to it than you might imagine.
First, there are many choices of arms. [VoltLog] went for a cheap one with springs that didn’t have a lot of motion range. You may want something different. But we didn’t realize that many of these arms have a minimum weight requirement, and modern scopes may be too light for some of these arms. Most arms require at least 2 kg of weight to balance the tensions in their springs or hydraulics. Of course, you could add a little weight to the mounting plate of the arm if you needed it. The only downside we see is that it makes it hard to remove the scope if you want to use it somewhere else.
Assuming you have a mount you like, the rest is easy. Of course, your scope might not have VESA mounting holes. No problem. You can probably find
a 3D printed design
for an adapter or make (or
adapt
) your own. You might want to print
a cable holder
at the same time.
Honestly, we’ve thought of mounting a scope to the wall, but this seems nicer. We might still think about 3D printing some kind of adapter that would let you easily remove the scope without tools.
Of course, there is
another obvious place to mount your scope
. Monitor arms can also
mount microscopes
. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735017",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T09:26:41",
"content": "I can’t put my old D43 on an arm – I count myself lucky to have a workbench that can support it.https://hackaday.io/project/171961-a-digital-camera-for-analog-oscilloscopesSteel frame, sheet steel hou... | 1,760,371,997.218285 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/moviecart-plays-videos-on-the-atari-2600/ | MovieCart Plays Videos On The Atari 2600 | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"atari",
"atari 2600",
"video"
] | The original Xbox and PlayStation 2 both let you watch DVD movies in addition to playing games. Seldom few consoles before or since offered much in the way of media, least of all the Atari 2600, which was too weedy to even imagine such feats. And yet,
as covered by
TechEBlog
,
[Lodef Mode] built a cartridge that lets it play video.
It’s pretty poor quality video, but it is video! The MovieCart, as it is known, is able to play footage at 80×192 resolution, with a color palette limited by the capabilities of the Atari 2600 hardware. It’s not some sneaky video pass-through, either—the Atari really is processing the frames.
To play a video using the MovieCart, you first have to prepare it using a special utility that converts video into the right format for the cart. The generated video file is then loaded on a microSD card which is then inserted into the MovieCart. All you then have to do is put the MovieCart into the Atari’s cartridge slot and boot it up. Sound is present too, in a pleasingly lo-fi quality. Control of picture brightness and sound volume is via joystick. You could genuinely watch a movie this way if you really wanted to. I’d put on
House of Gucci.
Thanks to the prodigious storage available on microSD cards, you can actually play a whole feature length movie on the hardware this way. You can order a MovieCart of your very own
from Tindie
, and it even comes with a public domain copy of Night of the Living Dead preloaded on a microSD card.
We don’t see a big market for Atari 2600 movies, but it’s neat to see it done.
Somehow it reminds us of the hacked HitClips carts from a while ago
. Video after the break. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734986",
"author": "Joseph Ruggiero",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T06:14:27",
"content": "This is both cursed and awesome at the same time",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6734988",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2024... | 1,760,371,997.527977 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/mirror-mirror-electron-mirror/ | Mirror, Mirror, Electron Mirror… | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"electron mirror",
"physics"
] | If you look into an electron mirror, you don’t expect to see your reflection. As [Anthony Francis-Jones] points out, what you
do see is hard to explain
. The key to an electron mirror is that the electric and magnetic fields are 90 degrees apart, and the electrons are 90 degrees from both.
You need a few strange items to make it all work, including an electron gun with a scintillating screen in a low-pressure tube. Once he sets an electric field going, the blue line representing the electrons goes from straight to curved.
The final addition is the magnetic field. A pair of coils do the job. When activated, the magnets deflect the electrons down as opposed to the electric field, which deflects them upwards. The mirror effect is caused when electrons under both forces move downward, seem to strike some invisible mirror, and then move upward again.
Why does it work? [Anthony] explains it very well at the end of the video. If you want to see what the big labs are doing,
try trapping electrons
. We’ve seen CRTs that use magnetic deflection (usually TVs) and electrostatic deflection (usually oscilloscopes). Other than the screen being the wrong way, it seems like you could do this with a CRT. Those tubes
had a long run
but are getting harder to find every year. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735064",
"author": "Prfesser",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T13:48:18",
"content": "If memory serves…an instrument called a double-focusing mass spectrometer uses essentially this same principle. There is a magnetic sector that separates ions based on mass, and an electric-field sector ... | 1,760,371,997.691148 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/reggaeton-be-gone-disconnects-obnoxious-bluetooth-speakers/ | Reggaeton-Be-Gone Disconnects Obnoxious Bluetooth Speakers | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"bluetooth",
"interference",
"machine learning",
"model",
"music",
"raspberry pi",
"reggaeton",
"sound",
"speaker"
] | If you’re currently living outside of a Spanish-speaking country, it’s possible you’ve only heard of the music genre Reggaeton in passing, if at all. In places with large Spanish populations, though, it would be more surprising if you
hadn’t
heard it. It’s so popular especially in the Carribean and Latin America that it’s gotten on the nerves of some, most notably [Roni] whose neighbor might not do anything else but listen to this style of music, which can be heard through the walls.
To solve the problem [Roni] is now introducing the Reggaeton-Be-Gone
. (
Google Translate from Spanish
)
Inspired by the TV-B-Gone devices which purported to be able to turn off annoying TVs in bars, restaurants, and other places, this device can listen to music being played in the surrounding area and identify whether or not it is hearing Reggaeton. It does this using machine learning, taking samples of the audio it hears and making decisions based on a trained model. When the software, running on a Raspberry Pi, makes a positive identification of one of these songs, it looks for Bluetooth devices in the area and attempts to communicate with them in a number of ways, hopefully rapidly enough to disrupt their intended connections.
In testing with [Roni]’s neighbor, the device seems to show promise although it doesn’t completely disconnect the speaker from its host, instead only interfering with it enough for the neighbor to change locations. Clearly it merits further testing, and possibly other models trained for people who use Bluetooth speakers when skiing, hiking, or working out. Eventually the code will be posted to
this GitHub page
, but until then
it’s not the only way to interfere with your neighbor’s annoying stereo
.
Thanks to [BaldPower] and [Alfredo] for the tips! | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734938",
"author": "JRM_67",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T00:38:00",
"content": "Just pointing out that a radio signal jammer of any kind is illegal in the US. Intentionally jamming someone’s Bluetooth signal even by overtaxing it falls under this law. If you get caught doing this, the... | 1,760,371,997.821127 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/op-amp-drag-race-turns-out-poorly-for-741/ | Op-Amp Drag Race Turns Out Poorly For 741 | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts"
] | [
"741",
"op-amp",
"oscillator",
"performance",
"slew rate",
"testing",
"TL081"
] | When it was first introduced in 1968, Fairchild’s 741 op-amp made quite a splash. And with good reason; it packed a bunch of components into a compact package, and the applications for it were nearly limitless. The chip became hugely popular, to the point where “741” is almost synonymous with “op-amp” in the minds of many.
But should it be? Perhaps not, as [More Than Electronics] reveals with
this head-to-head speed test
that compares the 741 with its FET-input cousin, the TL081. The test setup is pretty simple, just a quick breadboard oscillator with component values selected to create a square wave at approximately 1-kHz, with oscilloscope probes on the output and across the 47-nF timing capacitor. The 741 was first up, and it was quickly apparent that the op-amp’s slew rate, or the rate of change of the output, wasn’t too great. Additionally, the peaks on the trace across the capacitor were noticeably blunted, indicating slow switching on the 741’s output stage. The TL081 fared quite a bit better in the same circuit, with slew rates of about 13 V/μS, or about 17 times better than the 741, and nice sharp transitions on the discharge trace.
As [How To Electronics] points out, comparing the 741 to the TL081 is almost apples to oranges. The 741 is a bipolar device, and comparing it to a device with JFET inputs is a little unfair. Still, it’s a good reminder that not all op-amps are created equal, and that just becuase two jelly bean parts are pin compatible doesn’t make them interchangeable. And extra caution is in order in a world where
fake op-amps
are thing, too. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734905",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T21:40:03",
"content": "The video is exactly 7:41 long. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6735058",
"author": "Andrea Zan",
"timestamp": "2024-02-24T13:19:39... | 1,760,371,997.759506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/intuitive-machines-nova-c-makes-it-to-the-lunar-surface-in-us-return-after-half-a-century/ | Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Makes It To The Lunar Surface In US Return After Half A Century | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"lunar lander",
"nasa"
] | Intuitive Machines’ first mission (
IM-1
) featuring the Nova-C
Odysseus
lunar lander was launched on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 on February 15th, 2024, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). Targeting a landing site near the lunar south pole, it was supposed to use its onboard laser range finders to help it navigate safely for a soft touchdown on the lunar surface. Unfortunately, it was this component that was found to have malfunctioned as the spacecraft was already in lunar orbit. Fortunately, there was a workaround. By using one of the NASA payloads on the lander, the Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL), the mission could continue.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use of the NDL as a fallback option was considered before launch, and since its functionality overlaps with that of the primary laser range finders of Nova-C, it was pressed into service with a new configuration uploaded by IM operators back on Earth before Nova-C committed to a landing burn. Then, on February 22nd, the spacecraft began its descent to the surface, which also involved the Eaglecam payload that was designed to be released before snapping a self-portrait of the lander as it descended.
Following the landing, there was initially no signal from the lander, which had everyone fearing the worst. Then, a faint signal was detected, which
confirmed
that the lander had made it safely to the surface. This makes it the first US-built lunar lander in over half a century and the first privately funded US one. The following day, IM reported that they are still communicating with the lander, and everything looks good so far. This raises hope that it may complete its 7-day mission before lunar sunset, which silences Odysseus forever.
This apparent success of the IM-1 mission bodes well for NASA’s CLPS program after the earlier demise of the CLPS-1 mission involving Astrobotic Technology’s
Peregrine
spacecraft. | 57 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734880",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T19:38:11",
"content": "It’s now been over 18 hours with no video verification of lander health, status or orientation. I hope it’s all Bright Green but the low signal strength suggests a possible less than optimal antenna orie... | 1,760,371,997.908898 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/ask-hackaday-whats-in-your-garage/ | Ask Hackaday: What’s In Your Garage? | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"garage",
"innovation",
"invention"
] | No matter what your hack of choice is, most of us harbor a secret fantasy that one day, we will create something world-changing, right? For most of us, that isn’t likely, but it does happen. A recent post from [Rohit Krishnan] points out that
a lot of innovation happens in garages
by people who are more or less like us.
He points out that Apple, Google, and HP all started in garages. So did Harley Davidson. While it wasn’t technically a garage, the Wright brothers were in a bicycle workshop, which is sort of a garage for bikes. Even
Philo Farnsworth
started out in a garage. Of course, all of those were a few years ago, too. Is it too late to change the world from your workbench?
Basement
We’d argue basements are at least as important (although in southern Texas, they call garages Lone Star basements since no one has proper basements). The real point of the article, though, isn’t the power of the garage. Rather, it is the common drive and spirit of innovators to do whatever it takes to make their vision a reality. A few hundred bucks and an oddball space has given birth to many innovations.
So, what’s in your garage? Or where do you hack? And do you think innovation at that scale is still possible today? When all you needed to build a product that would launch HP was a few soldering irons and hand tools, it was a bit easier slope than standing up a semiconductor fab line.
Easier, Yet Harder?
Then again, some things are easier. Getting a PCB made and stuffed is orders of magnitude easier than it was two decades ago. Prototyping is trivial with 3D printing and CNC machining. Fielding a computer-based application that can scale to millions of users is cheaper and easier than ever, too. So, where are the garage innovators today? Are people no longer willing to work in a garage for little pay, hoping that it will pay off?
And of course, it doesn’t always pay off. You just hear about the ones that do. For every garage band that becomes Nirvana, The Ramones, or Creedence Clearwater Revival, there are probably hundreds like the Fugitive Five you probably haven’t heard of and hundreds more that you absolutely have never heard of. Even Walt Disney (who started in a garage, according to the post) went
bankrupt at least once
before hitting it big. As investors will attest, you can’t tell who will succeed until they do.
Get Innovating
For a while,
big labs
were the ones creating innovation, but that’s changed a lot in recent years. Small inventors disrupting the status quo
isn’t a new phenomenon
. We’d like to see more of it today.
We’re proud to see garage-scale innovation basically every day. Maybe the days when you could start Apple in your garage are gone. Certainly, you can’t actually launch a new personal computer like they did. But will garage innovators play a part in alternate energy, AI, or another nascent field? We hope so. Maybe you’ll be one of them.
Title image courtesy of [Cottonbro Studio] | 29 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734858",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T18:06:53",
"content": "My garages is home to a killer robot from the future:https://youtu.be/UupCyX_t1o8",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6734867",
"aut... | 1,760,371,998.324785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/hackaday-podcast-episode-259-twin-t-three-d-and-driving-to-a-tee/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 259: Twin-T, Three-D, And Driving To A Tee | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams sat down to compare notes on their favorite Hackaday posts of the week. You can listen in on this week’s podcast. The guys talked about the latest Hackaday contest and plans for Hackaday Europe. Plus, there’s a what’s that sound to try. Your guess can’t be worse than Al’s, so take a shot. You could win a limited-edition T-shirt.
In technical articles, Elliot spent the week reading about brushless motor design, twin-t oscillators, and a truly wondrous hack to reverse map a Nintendo Switch PCB. Al was more nostalgic, looking at the 555 and an old Radio Shack kit renewed. He also talked about a method to use SQL to retrieve information from Web APIs.
Quick hacks were a decided mix with everything from homemade potentiometers to waterproof 3D printing. Finally, the guys talked about Hackaday originals. Why don’t we teach teens to drive with simulators? And why would you want to run CP/M — the decades-old operating system — under Linux?
Download the file
suitable for listening, burning on CDs, or pressing on vinyl.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 259 Show Notes:
News:
Our Home Automation Contest Starts Now!
2024 Hackaday Europe Call For Participation Extended
What’s that Sound?
Know what it is?
Take your shot
, and you might win a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Compact Cycloidal Drive Lives Inside This Custom Brushless Motor
TOPS — Aaed Musa
Electrical Steel: The Material At Heart Of The Grid
Back To Basics With A 555 Deep Dive
Mapping The Nintendo Switch PCB
Steampipe: All SQL All The Time
No Inductors Needed For This Simple, Clean Twin-Tee Oscillator
Logic Noise: Filters And Drums
Pi Pico Enhances RadioShack Computer Kit
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Spectrum Analyzer Buyer’s Guide
LED Matrix Earrings Show Off SMD Skills
Stereo Photography With Smartphones Made Better With Syncing
A Classroom-Ready Potentiometer From Pencil And 3D Prints
Al’s Picks:
Sonolithography With The Raspberry Pi Pico
Canned Air Is Unexpectedly Supersonic
Extreme Waterproof 3D Prints
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Car Driving Simulators For Students, Or: When Simulators Make Sense
Fans Add Reality To Virtual Driving
Linux Fu: Forward To The Past! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734853",
"author": "LambdaMikel",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T17:44:31",
"content": "I think you guys are completely wrong about the Science Fair trainer – it was nothing like this. No reasonable electronics experiments or extensions are possible due to its completely closed architect... | 1,760,371,998.366204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/turing-complete-origami/ | Turing Complete Origami | Navarre Bartz | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"origami",
"turing complete",
"Turing machine"
] | Origami can be an interesting starting point for a project, but we weren’t expecting [Thomas C. Hull] and [Inna Zakharevich]’s
Turing complete origami computer
.
Starting with the constraint of flat origami (the paper folds back on top of itself), the researchers designed a system that could replicate all the functionality of the previously-proven
Turing complete
Rule 110 automaton. The researchers walk us through the construction of AND, OR, NAND, NOR, and NOT gates via paper as well as the various “wires” and “gadgets” that connect the operators or filter out noise.
Everything ends up a large mess of triangles and hexagons with optional creases to make the whole thing work. While the origami computer probably won’t be helping you slice 3D prints anytime soon, much like a
Magic computer
, the engineering and math involved may prove useful in other applications.
We’re no strangers to origami here, having covered
origami machines
,
medical robots
, or using a desktop vinyl cutter to
pre-score your project
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734457",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T04:52:44",
"content": "Such an amazing topic. For a moment I was surprised Eric Demaine wasn’t the lead author but of course other people need to discover things every once in a while :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,998.257246 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/floss-weekly-episode-771-kalpa-because-nobody-knows-what-hysteresis-is/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 771: Kalpa — Because Nobody Knows What Hysteresis Is | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"Kalpa",
"kde",
"linux",
"opensuse"
] | This week, Jonathan Bennett and
Dan Lynch
talk with
Shawn W Dunn
about openSUSE Kalpa, the atomic version of openSUSE Tumbleweed, with a KDE twist. What exactly do we mean by an Atomic desktop? Is ALP going to replace openSUSE Tumbleweed? Are snaps coming to Kalpa?
Shawn gives us the rundown of all the above, and what’s holding back a stable release of Kalpa, what’s up with Project Greybeard, and why Kalpa really doesn’t need a firewall.
https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Kalpa
https://github.com/sfalken
https://github.com/ProjectGreybeard
https://fosstodon.org/@Kalpa
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show
right in the Hackaday Discord
? Next week, we’re talking with Eben Upton about Raspberry Pi!
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734409",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T00:40:30",
"content": "Modern desktop environments are too heavy. They need to seriously cut back on the MBs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6734479",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,998.206401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/rebuilding-a-700k-refrigerator/ | Rebuilding A $700k Refrigerator | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"absolute zero",
"dilution refrigerator",
"equipment",
"fridge",
"helium",
"lab",
"pump",
"refrigerator",
"vacuum"
] | When cleaning out basements, garages, or storage units we often come across things long forgotten. Old clothes, toys, maybe a piece of exercise equipment, or even an old piece of furniture. [Ben] and [Hugh] were in a similar situation cleaning out an unused lab at the University of California Santa Barbara and happened upon an old refrigerator. This wasn’t just a mini fridge left over from a college dorm, though. This is a dilution refrigerator which is capable of cooling things down to near absolute zero,
and these scientists are trying to get it to its former working state
.
The pair are hoping to restore the equipment to perform dark matter experiments, but the refrigerator hasn’t been in use since about 2016 (and doesn’t have an instruction manual), which is a long time for a piece of specialty scientific equipment to be collecting dust. The first step is to remove wiring and clean it of all the grime it’s accumulated in the last decade. After that, the pair work to reassemble the layers of insulation around the main cooling plate and then hook up a vacuum pump to the device which also needed some repair work.
The critical step at this point is to evacuate the refrigerant lines so they can be filled with expensive Helium-3 and Helium-4. The problem is that there’s still some of this valuable gas in the lines that needs to be recovered, but the risk is that if any air gets into the cold section of the refrigerator it will freeze and clog the whole system. After chasing some other electrical and vacuum gremlins and discovering a manual from a similar refrigerator, they eventually get it up and running and ready for new scientific experiments. While most of us won’t discover a fridge like this cleaning out our attics,
this refrigerator powered by rubber bands
is a little more accessible to the rest of us. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734375",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T22:07:27",
"content": "From the thumbnail I thought it was part of a quantum computer, which I guess makes sense that those things would look pretty similar.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,998.467207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/spectrum-analyzer-buyers-guide/ | Spectrum Analyzer Buyer’s Guide | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"spectrum analyzer",
"test equipment"
] | Having a scope in a home lab used to be a real luxury, but these days, its fairly common for the home gamer to have a sophisticated storage scope (or two) hanging around. Dedicated spectrum analyzers are a bit less common, but they have also dropped in price while growing in capabilities. Want to buy your very own spectrum analyzer?
[Kiss Analog] has a buyer’s guide
for what to consider.
If you’ve already got a scope, it may have a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) function, and he talks about how it could be used in place of a spectrum analyzer or vice versa. But it really depends on what you’re planning on using it for. If you’re doing compliance testing for emissions, an analyzer is invaluable. If you like building transmitters or even just oscillators for other purposes, viewing the output on a spectrum analyzer can show you how well or poorly your design is performing. Any application where you need to visualize large swaths of the RF spectrum is a candidate for a spectrum analyzer.
Towards the end of the video, you’ll get to see some actual uses on a Uni-T UTS3021B. While those are at the higher end of the hobby price spectrum (no pun intended), it has many features that would have required an instrument ten times that price in years gone by.
There are also some
very inexpensive options
out there. While it is true, to a degree, that you get what you pay for, it is also true that even these cheap options would be amazing to an engineer from the 1990s. Yes, of course.
You could do it with a 555
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734332",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T19:58:15",
"content": "A UTS3021B is £1700.I bought a secondhand R+S CMU-300 for £300.It comes with a spectrum analyser function that can even take up to 50W RF on the input. It goes up to 2GHz as I recall.Also comes with an RF si... | 1,760,371,998.411137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/power-tool-packs-make-a-portable-powerhouse/ | Power Tool Packs Make A Portable Powerhouse | Jenny List | [
"Battery Hacks"
] | [
"battery pack",
"inverter",
"makita"
] | The revolution in portable and cordless appliances has meant that we now own far fewer mains-powered gadgets than we might once have done, but it hasn’t entirely banished the old AC outlet from our lives. Particularly when away from a mains supply it can be especially annoying, but now instead of a generator there’s the option of an inverter. [Thijs Koppen]
has made a very neat all-in-one mains power station
in a plastic flight case using the ubiquitous and handy standardized Makita power tool packs.
From one perspective this is a simple enough build, because wiring a battery to an inverter isn’t the most difficult of tasks. But he’s designed his own 3D printed Makita battery receptacles which should be of interest to plenty of readers, and with three packs in series he’s sourced an unusual 72 volt inverter to supply mains. The photo of him charging a Tesla with the result is probably more for show than practicality though.
We’ve featured quite a lot of cordless tool battery hacks over the years as their ready availability and quick interchangeability is attractive. If you ever fancy engineering your own mounting,
we’ve taken a look at someone doing just that
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734280",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T16:45:13",
"content": "It would be a good idea to add reverse diodes across each pack. Otherwise if the pack protection circuit cuts out, it will see the voltage from rest of the batteries in negative direction, which it might not ... | 1,760,371,998.777609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/car-driving-simulators-for-students-or-when-simulators-make-sense/ | Car Driving Simulators For Students, Or: When Simulators Make Sense | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"driving simulator",
"flight simulator",
"learning",
"safety",
"simulator"
] | There are many benefits to learning to fly an airplane, drive a racing car, or operate some complex piece of machinery. Ideally, you’d do so in a perfectly safe environment, even when the instructor decides to flip on a number of disaster options and you find your method of transportation careening towards the ground, or the refinery column you’re monitoring indicating that it’s mere seconds away from going critical and wiping out itself and half the refinery with it.
Still, we send inexperienced drivers in cars onto the roads each day as they either work towards getting their driving license, or have passed their driving exam and are working towards gaining experience. It is this inexperience with dangerous situations and tendency to underestimate them which is among the
primary factors
why new teenage drivers are much more likely to end up in crashes, with the 16-19 age group having a fatal crash nearly three times as high as drivers aged 20 and up.
After an initial surge in car driving simulators being used for students during the 1950s and 1960s, it now appears that we
might see them return
in a modern format.
Learn Or Die
Teenage motor vehicle crash deaths by sex, 1975-2021 (Source: IIHS)
As with many things, there is a big difference between knowing how to operate a vehicle and being capable of dealing with unexpected situations that may occur. Yet even when operating a car in regular traffic there are already many situations that require both knowledge and skill, such as navigating through narrow city streets or hurtling oneself into highway traffic at 120 km/h. While the former is usually done at lower speeds and mistakes generally aren’t fatal, the latter is very much unforgiving, even before considering overtaking other traffic and recognizing dangerous situations like getting too close behind a truck.
In 2020, among US teenagers motor vehicle crashes was the
leading cause of death
, surpassing both homicide and suicide, even if teenage motor vehicle crash deaths have declined significantly since the 1970s. It was incidentally this increase in teenage car crash deaths starting in the 1950s which prompted the introduction of car driving simulators. Of particular note here is the
Drivotrainer
, developed by Aetna, which as an insurance company had a financial incentive to
promote road safety
. The result was a range of simulators, with the Drivotrainer and its siblings using prerecorded film reels for the audiovisual element, and so-called ‘Aetnacars’ which the students sat in to provide them with the tactile experience of a real automobile.
For a long time, the Drivotrainer was considered to be the best way to get students to familiarize themselves with the controls and operating of a car before even getting behind the steering wheel of a real car and setting off into traffic. A demonstration of this can be found in the following 1967 British Pathé video:
Simulated Experiences Are Real
The motion base simulator was used by all 135 space shuttle crews to train for their missions between 1981 and 2011. (Image credit: collectSPACE.com)
There are many fields where the use of a simulator is an essential part, whether it’s an electronic device or a physical approximation like the pools used to train astronauts to deal with performing operations in zero gravity. The Space Shuttle had its own simulators, as do commercial jetliners, with simulator time counting towards the total flight time of airline pilots.
In the case of the Space Shuttle, there were
three simulators
, with the most impressive simulator probably the Motion Base Simulator as it resides on a fully articulated base (hence the name), to provide full haptic feedback as if the astronauts were truly undergoing the mission. This particular simulator can now be found at the
Lone Star Flight Museum
, along with many other examples of training and simulation equipment that astronauts used over the decades to prepare for missions on the real Space Shuttle.
Baltic Aviation Academy Airbus B737 Full Flight Simulator (FFS) in Vilnius (Credit: Baltic Aviation Academy)
Back on Earth, there are literally
countless examples
of how simulators are an essential part practically everywhere, ranging from the military to industry and of course aviation. Some of us are probably already familiar with the full
flight simulators
(FFS) that are now part and parcel of any commercial jetliner’s development, training and maintenance programs, as well as the occasional use by the NTSB to simulate certain conditions.
These flight simulators – when certified by the relevant authority – can be used for pilot training, which can include a rookie pilot getting their first lessons and familiarizing themselves with checklists and the basics of flying, navigating and communicating, as well as for experienced pilots to get rated for a new aircraft type, such as when switching from a 737-class airplane to a 787 or Airbus A320. Depending on how advanced the flight simulator is, they can be used for engineering tasks, or even as part of the airplane design process. These days it’s become quite simple to set up a home flight simulator, along with countless other types of simulators, making it both extremely common and very versatile.
The benefits of these simulators should be obvious, as they allow for pilots, drivers and other crew to go through the routines, while being exposed to the widest possible array of situations and emergencies, all without ever risking a real aircraft, space shuttle, or Formula One car. All of which serves to reinforce the dissonance when we look at student car drivers and consider how woefully unprepared they are.
Car Simulators In 2024
The car driving simulator as used by the Swedish test. (Credit: Thorslund et al.)
These days, a car driving simulator can consist out of little more than a computer with a decent graphics card plus some displays and the car controls like the steering wheel and pedals. This makes it both a very affordable setup for a driving school, and a highly interactive experience for a student. Questions still remain about the practical uses for such a driving simulator when it comes to teaching students how to drive a car, or filtering out those students who are prone to risky driving.
This is the gist of a
recent Swedish study
performed by B. Thorslund et al. which was published in the January 2024 issue of
Accident Analysis & Prevention
. In it, they used a simulator setup as described earlier and pictured here, with a static base and automatic transmission. A group of 70 students were tasked with completing a range of scenarios on which they would be judged, along with a questionnaire that would occasionally pop up to ask them what they thought of their own performance.
What was astounding about the results is that no fewer than 43 out of 70 failed the screening test, while 41 of them passed the subsequent on-road driving test. Of these 41, 71% had previously failed the screening test on the simulator, with of note being that the on-road driving test did not involve many of the scenarios seen with the simulated experience. Meanwhile of the 26 who passed the screening test, 14 would fail the on-road driving test, but for reasons which were not part of the simulator experience, namely level 1 of the
GDE matrix
, being ‘vehicle control and maneuvering’. Something isn’t carrying over correctly.
Coming To A Driving School Near You?
The major question of whether driving simulators could be useful for driving students would seem to be answered at this point. Unlike the 1950s-era technology with film projectors and a rather limited simulator experience, 21st century simulators are about as close to the real thing without growing wheels and driving off. With thousands of US teens dying on the roads each year, and the rate increasing again since 2019, it could be the ideal teaching tool for students to learn the hazards of the road, and the correct responses.
While this is unlikely to resolve all of the risk factors which the
CDC addresses
– like seat belt use, speeding and driving while intoxicated – many crashes can be prevented by well-trained reflexes from hours of simulator training. The scenarios used by Thorslund et al. are a good example of just how many different situations can suddenly pop up, ranging from slippery roads, a car suddenly pulling onto the road, to a child running in front of the car out of one’s blind spot. These are all things which you want to run through not just in a theoretical exam, nor while driving a real car, but in a driving simulator, where if you do careen off the iced-over road you can just reset the simulation and try again. | 69 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734246",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T15:16:22",
"content": "I’d be rather worried about the seniors/the elderly.Drivers 60+ should be required to go to driving schools every couple of years.Otherwise, they should lose their driver’s license.Because, reflexes and ey... | 1,760,371,998.682404 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/led-matrix-earrings-show-off-smd-skills/ | LED Matrix Earrings Show Off SMD Skills | Dan Maloney | [
"LED Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"Earring",
"jewelry",
"led",
"matrix",
"smd",
"wearable"
] | We’ll be honest with you: we’re not sure if the use of “LED stud” in [mitxela]’s new project refers to
the incomprehensibly tiny LED matrix earrings
he made, or to himself for attempting the build. We’re leaning toward the latter, but both seem equally likely.
This build is sort of a mash-up of two recent [mitxela] projects — his
LED industrial piercing
, which contributes the concept of light-up jewelry in general as well as the power supply and enclosure, and his
tiny volumetric persistence-of-vision display
, which inspired the (greatly downsized) LED matrix. The matrix is the star of the show, coming in at only 9 mm in diameter and adorned with 0201 LEDs, 52 in total on a 1 mm pitch. Rather than incur the budget-busting expense of a high-density PCB with many layers and lots of blind vias, [mitexla] came up with a clever workaround: two separate boards, one for the LEDs and one for everything else. The boards were soldered together first and then populated with the LEDs (via a pick-and-place machine, mercifully) and the CH32V003 microcontroller before being wired to the power source and set in the stud.
Even though most of us will probably never attempt a build on this scale, there are still quite a few clever hacks on display here. Our favorite is the micro-soldering iron [mitxela] whipped up to repair one LED that went missing from the array. He simply wrapped a length of 21-gauge solid copper wire around his iron’s tip and shaped a tiny chisel point into it with a file. We’ll be keeping that one in mind for the future.
Thanks to [spacedog], [hackbyte], and everyone else who spied this one for us. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734205",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T12:28:10",
"content": "What’s the power supply? Could they have used body voltage to power these LEDs?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6734217",
"autho... | 1,760,371,998.731298 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/pi-pico-enhances-radioshack-computer-kit/ | Pi Pico Enhances RadioShack Computer Kit | Bryan Cockfield | [
"classic hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"clock",
"computer trainer",
"pi pico",
"radio shack",
"raspberry pi",
"relay",
"texas instruments",
"TMS1100"
] | While most of us now remember Radio Shack as a store that tried to force us to buy batteries and cell phones whenever we went to buy a few transistors and other circuit components, for a time it was an innovative and valuable store for electronics enthusiasts before it began its long demise. Among other electronics and radio parts and kits there were even a few DIY microcomputers, and even though it’s a bit of an antique now a Raspberry Pi Pico is just the thing to
modernize this Radio Shack vintage microcomputer kit
from the mid 80s.
The microcomputer kit itself is built around the 4-bit Texas Instruments TMS1100, one of the first mass-produced microcontrollers. The kit makes the processor’s functionality more readily available to the user, with a keypad and various switches for programming and a number of status LEDs to monitor its state. The Pi Pico comes into the equation programmed to act as a digital clock with an LED display to drive the antique computer. The Pi then sends a switching pulse through a relay to the microcomputer, which is programmed as a binary counter.
While the microcomputer isn’t going to win any speed or processing power anytime soon, especially with its clock signal coming from a slow relay module, the computer itself is still fulfilling its purpose as an educational tool despite being nearly four decades old. With the slow clock speeds it’s much more intuitive how the computer is stepping through its tasks, and the modern Pi Pico helps it with its tasks quite well. Relays on their own can be a substitute for the entire microcontroller as well, like
this computer which has a satisfying mechanical noise
when it’s running a program. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734000",
"author": "LambdaMikel",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T16:46:08",
"content": "Hmm, I am not sure I get it. The problem with the Science Fair trainer is that you cannot really extend it – it’s an entirely closed system, one chip, no external address or databus to which you could... | 1,760,371,998.825968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/measuring-trees-via-satellite-actually-takes-a-great-deal-of-field-work/ | Measuring Trees Via Satellite Actually Takes A Great Deal Of Field Work | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"climate change",
"environment",
"Imaging",
"nasa",
"satellite",
"satellite imagery",
"trees"
] | Figuring out what the Earth’s climate is going to do at any given point is a difficult task. To know how it will react to given events, you need to know what you’re working with. This requires an accurate model of everything from ocean currents to atmospheric heat absorption and the chemical and literal behavior of everything from cattle to humans to trees.
In the latter regard, scientists need to know how many trees we have to properly model the climate. This is key, as trees play a major role in the carbon cycle by turning carbon dioxide into oxygen plus wood. But how do you count trees at a continental scale?
You’ll probably want to get yourself a nice satellite to do the job.
How Many Are There?!
Thankfully, some of the bright minds over at NASA are on the job. In partnership with an international team of scientists, they have been mapping out trees across vast tracts of Africa. The aim of the project was to get an idea of just how much carbon is stored across Africa’s drylands, as opposed to the dense tropical rainforests in the region.
To count the tree populations across such a wide area, the team relied on high-resolution satellite imagery from commercial providers. Once the purview of governments only, now it’s easy enough to stump up some cash and get all the high-resolution space photography you could possibly imagine. The team sourced a dataset of 326,000 satellite images from the QuickBird-2, GeoEye1, WorldView-2, and Worldview-3 satellites, all run by Maxar Technologies. The images had a resolution of 50 centimeters, allowing for the identification of individual trees.
Researchers then used an artificial intelligence algorithm to count trees in the images. This model had to be trained first, of course. A sub-team at the University of Copenhagen was charged with this role, using data from 89,000 individual trees to teach the AI how to identify trees and their carbon content from satellite images. The model was taught to identify trees by their crown of green leaves, along with an adjacent shadow. The latter detail is key to differentiating a tree from a small shrub or grass sitting at ground level. The machine-learning model had its output tested by comparing it with human assessors, with the model proving to be 96.5% accurate compared with human measurements of tree-crown area.
The study covered a broad swathe of Africa’s drylands. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Armed with the measurement of crown area, researchers can then extrapolate this with a statistical model to get an idea of how much carbon that given tree has stored. This statistical model was created by a group at the University of Toulouse, which assessed 30 unique tree species. By measuring the mass of leaves, wood, and roots, and comparing it to crown area, the team formed a model that could take crown measurements from satellite data and turn it into carbon storage figures. This took a great deal of work, involving going out to dig up and literally measure real trees in the field.
Speaking on the matter, lead scientist Compton Tucker noted this method has provided a far more accurate idea of carbon storage in the African drylands than was previously available. Earlier efforts had gotten confused between grass or shrubs and actual trees pictured in satellite images. “That led to over-predictions of the carbon there,” stated Tucker. In contrast, the researchers now had a much finer analysis. Our team gathered and analyzed carbon data down to the individual tree level across the vast semi-arid regions of Africa or elsewhere – something that had previously been done only on small, local scales,” said Tucker.
As you’d expect, most of the carbon is stored in the less arid regions. Further north, the continent becomes more arid, and it becomes more difficult for trees to survive in that environment. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
It might sound easy to simply download some satellite images, run an algorithm, and count some trees. The reality is far more complex. The scientists had to do plenty of work out in the real world to create the models that underpin this analysis. As a result, though, we now have a far better understanding of carbon storage across the drier parts of Africa. Researchers learned that while individual trees store somewhat less carbon than initially predicted, there are also a lot more trees out there than previously understood. The final estimate was that the trees of the African drylands store around 0.84 petagrams of carbon, or roughly 840 million metric tons. That’s approximately 926 million US tons, if you’re used to measuring continents worth of trees in imperial units.
The research team has openly shared its work, so you can
read the full paper
and
dive into the data
as you wish. This knowledge should help incrementally improve climate models for scientists around the world. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733974",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T15:27:51",
"content": "For comparison, at 400 ppm, Earth’s atmosphere contains 40 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare of land area. The study area shown is about 2000×6000 km = 1.2 B hectares.So the atmosphere over that study area... | 1,760,371,998.876958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/a-straightforward-ai-voice-assistant-on-a-pi/ | A Straightforward AI Voice Assistant, On A Pi | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"llama",
"llamafile",
"LLM",
"raspberry pi"
] | With AI being all the rage at the moment it’s been somewhat annoying that using a large language model (LLM) without significant amounts of computing power meant surrendering to an online service run by a large company. But as happens with every technological innovation the state of the art has moved on, now to such an extent that a computer as small as a Raspberry Pi can join the fun. [Nick Bild] has one running on a Pi 4, and
he’s gone further than just a chatbot by making into a voice assistant
.
The brains of the operation is a Tinyllama LLM, packaged as a
llamafile
, which is to say an executable that provides about as easy a one-step access to a local LLM as it’s currently possible to get. The whisper voice recognition sytem provides a text transcript of the input prompt, while the eSpeak speech synthesizer creates a voice output for the result. There’s a brief demo video we’ve placed below the break, which shows it working, albeit slowly.
Perhaps the most important part of this project is that it’s easy to install and
he’s provided full instructions in a GitHub repository
. We know that the quality and speed of these models on commodity single board computers will only increase with time, so we’d rate this as an important step towards really good and cheap local LLMs. It may however be a while before it can
help you make breakfast
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733981",
"author": "CH",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T15:55:31",
"content": "Needs some blinken lights!!I like the non-cloud based functions.. internet seems to be a Warzone and series change hands too frequently",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,999.003752 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/gold-recovery-from-e-waste-with-food-waste-amyloid-aerogels/ | Gold Recovery From E-Waste With Food-Waste Amyloid Aerogels | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"chelation",
"e-waste recycling"
] | A big part of the recycling of electronic equipment is the recovery of metals such as gold. Usually the printed circuit boards and other components are shredded, sorted, and then separated. But efficiently filtering out specific metals remains tricky and adds to the cost of recycling. A possible way to optimize the recovery of precious metals like gold could be through the use of aerogels composed out of protein amyloids to which one type of metal would preferentially adsorb.
According to a recent research article
in
Advanced Materials
by [Mohammad Peydayesh] and colleagues, such aerogels could be created from protein waste from the food industry.
The adsorption mechanism of the protein amyloids is a feature of these proteins which form
chelants
, which are structures that can effectively bond to metal ions. These are usually organic compounds, and are used in certain medical treatments where heavy metal poisoning is involved (chelation therapy). By having these protein amyloids in an aerogel structure, the surface area for adsorption is maximized, which in the research article is said to have an efficiency of 93.3% for gold recovery, while leaving the other metals in the aqua regia solution (nitric and hydrochloric acid) mostly untouched.
Of note here is that although the food waste protein angle is taken, the experiment used whey protein. This is also one of the most popular food supplements in the world, to the point that microbial production of whey is a thing now. Although this doesn’t invalidate the aerogel chelation approach to e-waste recycling, it’s a curious omission in the article that does not appear to be addressed. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733926",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T11:08:44",
"content": "see also “WHEY – The waste-stream that became more valuable than the food product”https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2021.08.025",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_... | 1,760,371,999.12182 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/making-the-commodore-sx-64-mini/ | Making The Commodore SX-64 Mini | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"commodore 64",
"e-waste recycling",
"Retro Hack Shack"
] | When you find a portable TV from the 1980s, and it reminds you of the portable Commodore 64, there’s only one thing to be done. [Aaron Newcomb] brings us
the story of taking an Emerson PC-6 and mating it to the guts of his THEC64 Mini
. It’s a bit of a journey, as the process includes modding the TV to include a composite input and trimming some unused PCB off the TV’s mainboard. Then some USB ports and a three-and-a-half inch floppy drive were shoehorned into the chassis, with the rear battery compartment holding the parts from THEC64 Mini.
The build was not entirely without issue. It turns out the degaussing coil connector can plug perfectly into the service port, and Murphy’s law proved itself true again. But no harm was done, and the error was quickly discovered. All that was left was to button the chassis back up and add some paint and 3d-printed trim details. The build looks great! Come back after the break to watch the video from the [Retro Hack Shack] for yourself. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733901",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T06:18:05",
"content": "The video is well done, I think.There’s just one thing that seems to be a bit wrong to me.“Composite” video is usually being associated with that yellow plug carrying a CVBS (Color VBS) signal.A black/whit... | 1,760,371,999.17757 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/forcegen-using-a-diffusion-model-to-help-design-novel-proteins/ | ForceGen: Using A Diffusion Model To Help Design Novel Proteins | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"diffusion model"
] | Although proteins are composed out of only a small number of distinct amino acids, this deceptive simplicity quickly vanishes when considering the many possible sequences across a protein, not to mention the many ways in which a single 1D protein sequence can fold into a 3D protein shape with a specific functionality. Although natural evolution has done much of the legwork here already, figuring out new sequences and their functionality is a daunting task where increasingly deep learning algorithms are being applied. As [Bo Ni] and colleagues
report in a research article
in
Science Advances
, the hardest challenge is designing a protein sequence based on the desired functionality. They then demonstrate a way to use a generative model to speed up this process.
They set out to design proteins with specific mechanical properties, for which they used the known unfolding characteristics of various protein sequences to train a
diffusion model
. This approach is thus more akin to the technology behind image generation algorithms like DALL-E than LLMs. Using the trained diffusion model it was then possible to generate likely sequences of which the properties could then be simulated, with favorable results.
As a large data set aid, such a diffusion model could conceivably be very useful in fields even beyond protein synthesis, automating tedious tasks and conceivably speeding up discoveries. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734011",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T18:08:29",
"content": "I was under the impression that a deep learning system had already “figured out” protein folding and now it’s being analyzed to identify the logic behind it’s shape predictions. Whatever the case, we reall... | 1,760,371,998.933409 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/watch-the-openscan-diy-3d-scanner-in-action/ | Watch The OpenScan DIY 3D Scanner In Action | Donald Papp | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d scanning",
"mesh",
"OpenScan",
"Photogrammetry"
] | [TeachingTech] has
a video covering the OpenScan Mini
that does a great job of showing the workflow, hardware, and processing method for turning small objects into high-quality 3D models. If you’re at all interested but unsure where or how to start, the video makes an excellent guide.
We’ve covered the OpenScan project in the past
, and the project has progressed quite a bit since then. [TeachingTech] demonstrates scanning a number of small and intricate objects, including a key, to create 3D models with excellent dimensional accuracy.
[Thomas Megel]’s
OpenScan
project is a DIY project that, at its heart, is an automated camera rig that takes a series of highly-controlled photographs. Those photographs are then used in a process called
photogrammetry
to generate a 3D model from the source images. Since the quality of the source images is absolutely critical to getting good results, the OpenScan hardware platform plays a pivotal role.
Once one has good quality images, the photogrammetry process itself can be done in any number of ways. One can feed images from OpenScan into a program like
Meshroom
, or one may choose to use the optional cloud service that OpenScan offers (originally created as an internal tool, it is made available as a convenient processing option.)
It’s really nice to have a video showing how the whole workflow works, and highlighting the quality of the results as well as contrasting them with other 3D scanning methods. We’ve previously talked about
3D scanning and what it does (and doesn’t) do well
, and the results from the OpenScan Mini are fantastic. It might be limited to small objects, but it does a wonderful job on them. See it all for yourself in the video below. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733921",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T10:41:37",
"content": "It’s great seeing these tools becoming ambiguous, with commercial tooling for sub €1k and this DIY approach for about half that. The tool is very useful for recreating obsolete mechanical parts,... | 1,760,371,999.07272 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/installing-steamos-and-windows-on-a-google-meet-video-conference-computer/ | Installing SteamOS And Windows On A Google Meet Video Conference Computer | Maya Posch | [
"google hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"chromebook",
"google meet"
] | The Lenovo Meet is a collaboration with Google to bring Google Meet to customers in a ready to install kit for conference rooms and similar. Also called the
Google Meet Series One
, it features a number of cameras, speakers, display and more, along with the base unit. It is this base unit that [Bringus Studios] on YouTube tried to install a different OS capable of running Steam games on in a
recent video
. Along the way many things were learned about this device, which is – unsurprisingly – just another ChromeOS box.
After removing the rubber bottom (which should have been softened with a hot air gun to prevent damage), the case can be opened with some gentle prying to reveal the laptop-like innards. Inside are an 8th gen Intel CPU (i7-8550U @ 1.8 GHz), a 128 GB SATA M.2, 2 GB DDR4 RAM, along with 2 more GB of DDR4 a MicroSD slot and a Google
Coral DA1 TPU
on the bottom of the mainboard. It should be easy to install Linux, Windows, etc. on this other than for the ChromeOS part, which locks down the non-UEFI BIOS firmware.
Flashing a ChromeOS-afflicted device back to something resembling a standard x86 PC can be done with a range of open source tools, but these do require a few prerequisites, including a non-write protected SPI BIOS ROM and a
‘SuzyQ’ cable
to gain debug access. The latter can be created yourself using a USB-C adapter and some resistors, but to gain write access to the SPI ROM, the WP pin had to be patched with a piece of wire to enable write access. This allowed the UEFI BIOS to be flashed at long last.
Another issue was the oddball power connector on the device, which accepts both 19V and 54V, but only needs one. This turned out to be a
Kycon KPJX-CM-4S
connector, which when combined with any random 19V laptop power supply is a lot cheaper than the genuine Lenovo part. With this resolved, the SATA M.2 SSD was upgraded to a 1TB NVMe SSD and the dual-channel 4 GB to single-channel 16 GB, before installing a new OS, starting with Bazzite.
Bazzite is a beryllium scandium cyclosilicate mineral,
but also an image
built on top of Fedora with a focus on Linux gaming. This installed without issues, but gaming performance with the anemic iGPU and single-channel memory was obviously terrible, and only CS2 and TF2 somewhat ran. In Windows 11, Steam worked much better, with even the newer Doom games running, albeit at 480p. Not a great gaming system, but after you hack away the ChromeOS nastiness, it could be an interesting system with less graphics-intensive tasks, and the built-in TPU could be useful for machine vision tasks.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733817",
"author": "Kryptylomese",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T21:30:38",
"content": "Hardware is becoming less and less of a blocker to running software. Sure RISC has benefits over CISC and GPU’s with RTX cores and lots of RAM can run large language models, but relatively cheap hard... | 1,760,371,999.409742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/steampipe-all-sql-all-the-time/ | Steampipe: All SQL All The Time | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Network Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"sql",
"sqlite"
] | Although modern Linux has slightly shifted, the old Unix mantra was: everything’s a file. With
Steampipe
, a better saying might be: everything’s a SQL table. The official tagline is “select * from cloud” which also works. The open-source program relies on plugins, and there are currently 140 sources ranging from GitHub to Google Sheets and more.
There are command line interfaces for the major platforms. You can also add the system to PostgresSQL or SQLite for even more SQL goodness.
Once you install the command line, you can install plugins using a simple command. We tried the RSS feed plugin. Unfortunately, many feeds are rate-limited, so if you botch one request, you are blocked for a while, so it is hard to experiment.
For example, try:
steampipe plugin install rss
steampipe query "select title, link from rss_item where feed_link='<some RSS URL>'"
For the URL, try
https://hackaday.com/rss.xml
or
http://comingsoon.net/feed
, for example. If you try to use some plugins, like GitHub, for example, you’ll need to put an access token into a configuration file. You can find the details in the documentation for the plugin (for example,
GitHub
).
What can you do with this?
You tell us
. We like SQLite, so this makes sense as version 2 of “Everything’s a file.” Need help getting a complex query right?
We do
, too, sometimes. | 23 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733797",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T19:48:27",
"content": "DB2 was AS-400’s native ‘file system’ 30+ years ago.It all worked, but you were in bed with IBM. Hence fleas, empty budgets and circling Nazgul.Also: Oracle had an internal email system that was essentially ... | 1,760,371,999.516538 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/linux-fu-forward-to-the-past/ | Linux Fu: Forward To The Past! | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"altair",
"CP/M",
"linux"
] | Ok, so the title isn’t as catchy as “Back to the Future,” but my guess is a lot of people who are advanced Linux users have — at least — a slight interest in retrocomputing. You’d like an Altair, but not for $10,000. You can build replicas of varying fidelities, of course. You can also just emulate the machine or a similar CP/M machine in software. There are many 8080 or Z80 emulators out there, ranging from SIMH to MAME. Most of these will run on Linux or — at the least — WINE. However, depending on your goals, you should consider
RunCPM
. Why? It runs on many platforms, including, of course, Linux and other desktop systems. But it also will work with the Arduino, Teensy, ESP32, or STM32 processors. There is also experimental support for SAM4S and Cyclone II FPGAs.
It’s pretty interesting to have one system that will work across PCs and embedded hardware. What’s more is that, at least on Linux, the file system is directly translated (sort of), so you don’t have to use tricks or special software to transfer files to and from CP/M. It is almost like giving Linux the ability to run CP/M software. You still have to have virtual disks, but they are nothing more than directories with normal files in them.
Goals
Of course, if your goal is to simulate a system and you want to have 180 kB floppies or whatever, then the direct file system isn’t a benefit. But if you want to use CP/M software for education, nostalgia, or cross-development, this is the way to go, in my opinion.
It isn’t just the file system, either. If you need a quick utility inside your bogus CP/M environment, you can write it in Lua, at least on desktop systems. On the Arduino, you can access digital and analog I/O. Theoretically, you could deploy an embedded Altair for some real purpose fairly cheaply.
Building and Running
You must build the project, which varies depending on where you want to target. For Linux, it is easy. Change to the RunCPM directory and type:
make posix build
Once you have an executable, it will expect to find subdirectories for each disk drive. In addition, user areas are mandatory, so it isn’t sufficient to have disk A. You need disk A/0, A/1, etc. Drive letters can be from A-P and user numbers are from 0-F.
In other words, if your executable is at
~/runcpm/RunCPM
, you should also have
~/runcpm/A/0
so there’s something in the A drive. You might also want other user numbers and drives (e.g.,
~/runcpm/B/4
).
The
GitHub repository
has a Zip file with a complete set of programs you can place in the A/0 subdirectory to get started. The author also has a comprehensive set of CP/M programs
you can use directly
. These are already organized into disks, so just download it to the right place, and you’ve got almost any CP/M application you can imagine.
In any event, when you run the program, you’ll see the subdirectories as disks. It is easy to copy things into the disk directories or your regular file system. Just be careful that everything is in uppercase. The shell will shift your input to uppercase, but it won’t shift file names, so if you can’t find a file you know is there, it may be because the file name is in lowercase. Symbolic links work, too.
If your memory of CP/M is shaky, here’s a very short reference:
Directory:
dir
Rename file:
ren new.txt=old.txt
Remove file:
era file.txt
Switch to disk F:
f:
Switch to user 4:
user 4
Copy file:
pip a:copy.txt=p:orig.txt
(or
pip a:=p:orig.txt
to keep the name)
Copy many files:
pip a:=p:*.txt
Copy files from user 4 to current user (spaces matter):
pip a:=p:*.com[G4]
Display file:
pip con:=afile.txt
Exit (specific to RunCPM; needs EXIT.COM):
exit
Limitations
Obviously, anything that knows about the CP/M disk structure, like MOVCPM or STAT, won’t work right. Anything that cares about terminal manipulation but doesn’t know how to work with a VT100 terminal won’t look right. You can’t use CP/M file attributes. I/O ports don’t exist as CP/M understands them.
It would be nice if you could somehow associate CP/M file types to simply execute from the Linux shell, but that’s not how it works. Instead, you must start a CP/M command processor and do it from there. On the other hand, with the submit system and some Lua code, you might be able to work something out. Or, of course, the source code is there, so knock yourself out, and let us know when you do it.
You can select several different command processors that allow for different amounts of memory or features. However, many of these present more memory than a real system would probably support. If you were trying to develop for real hardware, this could be a problem.
Why?
If you read Hackaday, you probably don’t need to ask why you would want to run a decades-old operating system. You either want ot or you don’t, and there’s no really good answer. I admit that I sometimes fire up Wordstar either to enjoy writing with it, keep my finger memory for its commands alive, or to read some super old document file I produced a very long time ago.
There were some excellent Forth systems that still work well. The C compilers are historically interesting, but not great. Using Wordstar or another text editor, you can develop 8080 or Z80 code destined for another piece of hardware efficienctly. Since the file system is transparent, you can even use your favorite code editor like Visual Studio, Vi, or Emacs. So while this isn’t something you’ll probably do every day, it is a very handy way to go back in time and compute like it is 1982.
There’s More
We’ve seen plenty of 8080/Z80 simulators, of course. We figure if you are going to emulate, you might as well stick with the Z80. The
number of emulators
out there is nothing short of staggering. We’ve built one with
FABGL on an ESP32
. You can even make one
in an Arduino shield form factor
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733789",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T18:50:40",
"content": "RunCPM also works on the Windows standard console, and I was using it a few years ago–until they added the user areas requirement. (Before, all that the folders needed was the drive letter.) It was a while be... | 1,760,371,999.45448 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/a-classroom-ready-potentiometer-from-pencil-and-3d-prints/ | A Classroom-Ready Potentiometer From Pencil And 3D Prints | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts"
] | [
"education",
"homebrew",
"pencil",
"pot",
"potentiometer",
"stem",
"teaching",
"variable resistor"
] | If you need a potentiometer for a project, chances are pretty good that you’re not going to pick up a pencil and draw one. Then again, if you’re teaching someone how a variable resistor works,
that old #2 might be just the thing
.
When [HackMakeMod] realized that the graphite in pencil lead is essentially the same thing as the carbon composition material inside most common pots, the idea for a DIY teaching potentiometer was born. The trick was to build something to securely hold the strip while making contact with the ends, as well as providing a way to wipe a third contact across its length. The magic of 3D printing provided the parts for the pot, with a body that holds a thin strip of pencil-smeared paper securely around its inner diameter. A shaft carries the wiper, which is just a small length of stripped hookup wire making contact with the paper strip. A clip holds everything firmly in place. The video below shows the build process and the results of testing, which were actually pretty good.
Of course, the construction used here isn’t meant for anything but demonstration purposes, but in that role, it performs really well. It’s good that [HackMakeMod] left the body open to inspection, so students can see how the position of the wiper correlates to resistance. It also makes it easy to slip new resistance materials in and out, perhaps using different lead grades to get different values.
Hats off to a clever build that should be sure to help STEM teachers engage their students. Next up on the lesson plan:
a homebrew variable capacitor
.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733769",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T17:20:02",
"content": "Wow! This is such a interresting concept! I am wondering if there is some other resistive element with better longevity than paper… I’ve heard about people using old VHS tapes for DIY ribbon potentiomet... | 1,760,371,999.628272 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-200-typewriter/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The 200% Typewriter | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"altoids tin",
"conjoined typewriter",
"dual typewriter",
"imperial dual typewriter",
"keyclicks",
"nice nano",
"raspberry pi",
"typewriter repair",
"ZMK"
] | Image by [jefmer] via
Hackaday.IO
You know, the really sad truth about cyberdecks and cyberdeck-adjacent builds is that many of them just end up on the shelf, collecting dust while waiting for the dystopian future. Well, not this one. No, [jefmer] says their
Portable Pi
sees daily use, and even comes along on the go.
Since [jefmer] is “temperamentally unsuited to 3D printing”, the Pi 4B and its accessories are nestled in a rugged, splash-proof case under some acrylic sheets. One of those accessories, the keyboard, is a KPrepublic BM40 with Gateron Yellows. In order to get used to the number and symbols layer, [jefmer] laid down some great-looking labels above the keyboard.
Although the build started with an SD card for storage, [jefmer] has since upgraded to a 120 GB SSD. This required a beefy battery pack, but the difference is that it gets around four hours of power versus five hours when using an SD card.
Young Typewriter Repairman Is In High Demand
Lucas Dul in his Downers Grove, IL repair shop. Image via
Chicago Sun-Times
It’s a sad state of affairs — most people think that typewriters are going the way of the buggy whip, if they haven’t already. But don’t try to tell that to Lucas Dul of Downers Grove, IL. He’s got a backlog of 70 writers, artists, and collectors
waiting for his typewriter repair services.
Lucas started repairing typewriters about ten years ago, at the age of 14. That’s when he found a 1930s Royal No. 10 and taught himself how to fix it. Eventually, he realized there was a need for his services outside of family and friends’ machines.
Lucas cherishes his time alone in the workshop with his tools — the hand-cranked drill, and the copper-headed mallet that’s easier on steel. Even so, he would like to open a brick-and-mortar shop. And boy, would I like to go there. Check out the very brief video of Lucas’ story below.
The Centerfold: Another One Joins the Club
Image by [Lamb_Sauce] via
reddit
It’s always unfortunate to have to welcome another person to the repetitive stress injury club, but you know I live to see
the various weapons they choose against pain and discomfort.
[Lamb_Sauce] went with a Keyclicks W-Ergo in clear acrylic and Gazzew White U4T Alpha switches for most, with Gateron Oil Kings for the Control keys. That macro pad is a DOIO KB16-01 with Gateron G Yellow pro linear switches and the same MT3 Susuwatari keycaps as the keyboard.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: Conjoined Typewriters Mean Double the Fun
The IBM Model C, tandem version. Just look at the size of that platen. Image via
The Typewriter Revolution
Before the invention of the the IBM Selectric with its easily-changeable type ball, you had to switch typewriters if you wanted more characters for scientific reports and the like. The problem was, you really risked mis-aligning the type.
To that end, IBM and a few others like Optima, Imperial, and Olivetti produced
these conjoined typewriters
with 200% keyboards and 30″ platens; one QWERTY, and one devoted to other alphabets and/or symbols.
If you only wanted a few extra characters, companies like Smith-Corona had your back with their
Changeable Type System
(PDF). All you had to do was slip a type slug on and change the keycap. Although this system was not as comprehensive as having two complete keyboards, it sure took up less desk space.
ICYMI: Altoids Tin Keyboard Is A Fresh Idea
Image by [flurpyflurples] via
reddit
Tired of using your phone’s janky software keyboard? You need something like [flurpyflurples]’
Mintboard
, a 40% Bluetooth keyboard in an Altoids tin. It even has a built-in cover. What more could you ask for?
This was originally going to be a 60% build, but the footprints of even the smallest available switches prevented that many keys from fitting in the given space.
In order for this to be Bluetooth, [flurpyflurples] went with a Nice!Nano and ZMK instead of their usual Arduino Pro Micro and QMK. I absolutely love those buttons and legends, which [flurpyflurples] cut with a Cricut and sealed with UV nail polish. The adorable symbols absolutely make this thing in my opinion.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733824",
"author": "crispernaki",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T21:54:23",
"content": "If one of those conjoined typewriters wasn’t featured in a Doublemint Gum commercial, it should have been.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "673382... | 1,760,371,999.570058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/not-a-frogpad-but-close/ | Not A FrogPad But Close | Al Williams | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"accessibility",
"frogpad",
"keyboard",
"one-handed keyboard"
] | While you might think one-handed keyboards are a niche item, if you have reduced function in one hand or you only have one hand, they are pretty important. [Kian] was getting ready for surgery that would put his left arm out of commission for a while, which spurred
the construction of a one-handed keyboard
inspired by FrogPad.
There was a time when creating a new keyboard would have been a significant task. These days, it is reasonably easy and [Kian] simply repurposed an existing kit for a split keyboard. Using just half the board was easy since it is made in two parts already.
There have been many attempts at building effective one-handed input devices over the years, and the circa 2002 FrogPad is one of the better devices. Like most one-handed keyboards, it uses layers. The top layer has the most common keystrokes to minimize the number of layer changes required to type common text.
The FrogPad had 20 keys; the half-keyboard had 24, so there was a little extra room. The keyboard uses the ubiquitous QMK firmware, so customizing the layout was not a problem.
In the end, [Kian] didn’t need to immobilize his arm after all (we’re glad about that), but he still used the keyboard just to rest the arm after the surgery. It is slower, of course, than a regular keyboard, especially at first. How slow? Well, [Kian] runs some typing tutor programs to show how much of an impact it has.
Taking
a split keyboard and repurposing it
isn’t a new idea. Accessibility
isn’t the only reason
people want one-handed keyboards. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733758",
"author": "fotoagogo",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T16:51:59",
"content": "I have a one-handed keypad. It’s called an iPhone. Never mastered the thumbs thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6733775",
"author": "Stephe... | 1,760,371,999.671143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/19/printable-keyboard-dock-puts-steam-deck-to-work/ | Printable Keyboard Dock Puts Steam Deck To Work | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Corne keyboard",
"dock",
"folding",
"portable",
"steam deck"
] | Whether or not you’re into playing video games, you have to admit, that the Steam Deck is a pretty interesting piece of hardware. We’ve seen hackers jump through all sorts of uncomfortable hoops to get Linux running on their mobile devices in the past. The fact that you can pick up a fairly powerful x86 handheld computer right now for a reasonable amount of money is certainly exciting. The Linux steam deck gets even more enticing when you consider the software support it enjoys thanks to its large and vibrant user community. No wonder we’ve started to see them dotting the workbenches during Hackaday Supercon.
If there’s a downside, it’s that the Steam Deck was very clearly designed to be a handheld gaming system, not a portable computer. Sure you can plug in an external monitor and keyboard, but things can quickly become ungainly. This is why a
printable dock from [a8ksh4] caught our eye
.
It’s officially designed to let you mate the Steam Deck with the Corne keyboard, a split ergonomic design that’s
graced these pages a few times in the past
. [A8ksh4] has included links for all the hardware you’ll need outside the printed parts, from the hinges and keyboard PCBs, all the way to the keycaps and stainless steel screws. If you’re looking for a turnkey experience, this is it.
But as nice as the final results are, we’re equally excited to see what kind of variations on this basic layout the community can develop. [a8ksh4] designed it so that the “Deck Clip” which latches onto the handheld is completely separate from the keyboard itself.
You can bolt anything you want onto the other side of the hinges — so not only are totally different keyboard layouts on the menu but so are mounts that let you attach the Steam Deck to your desk or 3D printer. The
design is available through OnShape
, so you can do your modifications right in the browser should you feel so inclined.
It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t the first time [a8ksh4] has used the Corne keyboard on a portable Linux machine — the
“Chonky Palmtop” from last year
combined the ergonomic keyboard and a Raspberry Pi 4 into a clever foldable form factor. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733741",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T15:45:01",
"content": "I have thought about doing this very thing for my Asus ROG Ally! Thank you for the inspiration!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6733747",
"a... | 1,760,371,999.798904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/solar-e-ink-weather-station-works-on-dark-days-too/ | Solar E-Ink Weather Station Works On Dark Days, Too | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"e-ink display",
"ESP32",
"solar",
"weather station"
] | One way to get through the winter doldrums is to take notice of the minuscule positive changes in weather as spring approaches. Although much of the US is experiencing a particularly warm month, that’s not the case in Germany where [rsappiawf] resides. Even so, they are having a good time charting the weather on their new
solar-powered E-ink weather station.
And in spite of the dark winter days, the device has been delivering weather updates for over a week on solar power alone. The brains of this operation is an ESP32 S3 Mini, which [rsappiawf] operated on a little bit. For starters, they removed the integrated RGB LED in order to save precious milliamps. Then they upgraded the voltage regulator to a TPS73733DCQR.
[rsappiawf] also has a TPL5110 power timer breakout module in the mix, which saves even more power by only turning on every once in a while according to the potentiometer setting, and only then turning on the project’s power. Check out the brief demo after the break, including the cool sliding action into the 3D-printed holder.
There’s a lot you can do to lower power consumption in a project like this.
Here’s one that will go 60 days on a charge. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734747",
"author": "0xfred",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T09:26:05",
"content": "Nice project, but the glass behind it is already doing an excellent job telling you if it’s raining with minimal power requirements.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,999.847565 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/the-book8088-gets-a-post-hype-review/ | The Book8088 Gets A Post-Hype Review | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8088",
"Book8088",
"V20"
] | Last year, a couple of rather unusual computers emerged from China: a 386sx-based palmtop and an 8088-based mini-laptop. The average person isn’t exactly clamoring for a DOS machine these days, but they attracted quite a bit of interest among the retrocomputing scene. Now the dust has settled, [The Retro Shack]
has taken a Book 8088 and given it an honest review
. Do you need portable 1980s computing in your life, and if so it this the machine to give you it?
The first impression of the machine is just how svelte it is, being like a small but chunky netbook. He explores the hardware and finds as expected an NEC V20 instead of the Intel part running the show, and what would have been a hugely expanded DOS PC back in the day with its VGA and sound card, not to mention a solid state hard drive.
We’re overcome with a bit of nostalgia here at the sight of DOS running
Lemmings
, and on a machine we’d have given anything to own back in the 1980s. His final conclusion is that it’s a very nice little PC but around $160 seems a little much for what is essentially a toy. We have sadly to agree with him though we really want one, though noting that such a machine would have retailed for a huge amount more than that in 1980s dollars and we’d have considered it a huge bargain then.
If you’re still curious,
we covered the arrival of these machines last year
. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734672",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T21:49:26",
"content": "let me know when they do a 486 retro thingy for less, the 90’s is the golden era, when all the buds from the 80’s blossomed into the garden before being clipped, trimmed & nerfed after the 00’s",
"parent_... | 1,760,371,999.955816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/2024-hackaday-europe-call-for-participation-extended/ | 2024 Hackaday Europe Call For Participation Extended | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 hackaday europe",
"berlin",
"cons",
"Supercon"
] | Good news, procrastineers! A few folks asked us for a little more time to get their proposals together for our upcoming 2024 Hackaday Europe event in Berlin, and we’re listening. So now you’ve got an extra week – get your proposals for
talks
or
workshops
in before February 29th.
[Joey Castillo]’s awesome custom touchpad
Hackaday Europe is a two-day event taking place April 13th and 14th in Berlin, Germany. Saturday the 13th is the big day, with a full day of badge hacking, talks, music, and everything else. We’ve got the place booked until 2 AM, so get your sleep the night before. Sunday is a half-day of brunch, lightning talks, and showing off the badge hacks from the day before. And if you’re in town on Friday the 12th, we’ll be going out in the evening for drinks and dinner, location TBA but hopefully closer than where we ended up last year!
The badge is going to be a
re-spin of the Supercon badge
for all of you who couldn’t fly out to the US last November. There are no secrets anymore, so get your pre-hacks started now. We’ve seen some sweet all-analog hacks, some complete revisions of the entire firmware loadout, and, of course, all sorts of awesome hardware bodged onto it. Heck, we even saw Asteroids and DOOM. But we haven’t seen any native
Jerobeam Fenderson-style oscilloscope music
. You’ve got your homework.
What to Bring?
A few other people have asked if they could bring in (art) projects to show and share. Of course! Depending on the scale, though, you may need to contact us beforehand. If it’s larger than a tower PC,
get in touch with us
, and we’ll work it out. Smaller hacks, projects in progress, and anything you want to bring along to show and inspire others with, are, of course, welcome without any strings attached.
What else might you need? A computer of your choice and a micro USB cable for programming the badge. There will be soldering stations, random parts, and someone will probably be able to lend you nearly any other piece of gear, so you
can
pack light if you want to. But you don’t have to.
If you’d like to attend but you don’t have tickets yet –
get them soon
! Space is limited, and we tend to sell out. Or better yet, submit a talk and sneak in the side door. We’d love to hear what you’ve got going on, and we can’t wait to see you all. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6735642",
"author": "Robear",
"timestamp": "2024-02-26T09:45:17",
"content": "Can I buy a ticket and have you send me the badge (USA)? I can’t attend, but just really want that badge!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6736163",... | 1,760,371,999.894247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/filters-are-in-bloom/ | Filters Are In Bloom | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"bloom filter"
] | If you are a fan of set theory, you might agree there are two sets of people who write computer programs: those who know what a Bloom filter is and those who don’t. How could you efficiently test to see if someone is one set or another? Well, you could
use a Bloom filter
. [SamWho] takes us through the whole thing in general terms that you could apply in any situation.
The Bloom filter does perform a trade-off for its speed. It is subject to false positives but not false negatives. That is, if a Bloom filter algorithm tells you that X is not part of a set, it is correct. But if it tells you it is, you may have to investigate more to see if that’s true.
If it can’t tell you that something is definitely in a set, why bother? Usually, when you use a Bloom filter, you want to reduce searching through a huge amount of data. The example in the post talks about having a 20-megabyte database of “bad” URLs. You want to warn users if they enter one, but downloading that database is prohibitive. But a Bloom filter could be as small as 1.8 megabytes. However, there would be a 1 in 1000 chance of a false positive.
Increase the database size to 3.59 megabytes, and you can reduce false positives to one in a million. Presumably, if you got a positive, you could accept the risk it is false, or you could do more work to search further.
Imagine, for example, a web cache device or program. Many web pages are loaded one time and never again. If you cache all of them, you’ll waste a lot of time and push other things out of the cache. But if you test a page URL with a Bloom filter, you can improve things quite a bit. If the URL may exist in the Bloom filter, then you’ve probably seen it before, so you might want to cache it.
If it says you haven’t, you can add it to the filter so if it is ever accessed again, it will cache. Sure, sometimes a page will show a false positive. So what? You’ll just cache the page on the first time, which is what you did before, anyway. If that happens only 0.1% of the time, you still win.
In simple terms, the Bloom filter hashes each item using three different algorithms and sets bits in an array based on the result. To test an item, you compute the same hashes and see if any of the corresponding bits are set to zero. If so, the item can’t be in the set. Of course, there’s no assurance that all three bits being set means the set contains the item. Those three bits might be set for totally different items.
Why does increasing the number of bits help? The post answers that and looks at other optimizations like a different number of hash functions and counting.
The post does a great job of explaining the filter but if you want a more concrete example in C, you might want to read
this post next
. Or search for code in your favorite language. We’ve talked about
Python string handling with Bloom filters
before. We’ve even seen a proposal to
add them
to the transit bus. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734626",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T17:41:46",
"content": "“…those who know what a Bloom filter is and those who don’t.”lol; perhaps should have been: “… those who [probably] know what a Bloom filter is and those who [definitely] don’t.”",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,372,000.003436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/using-gallium-oxide-as-a-resistive-memory-element/ | Using Gallium Oxide As A Resistive Memory Element | Maya Posch | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"RRAM"
] | Resistive random-access memory (RRAM) is a highly attractive form of RAM, as it promises low-power usage with stable long-term storage, even in the absence of external power. Finding the right materials to create an RRAM cell which incorporates these features is however not easy, but recently researchers have focused their efforts on gallium(III) oxide (Ga
2
O
3
), with a
research article by [Li-Wen Wang] and colleagues
in
Nanomaterials
describing a two-bit cell (MLC) based around an aluminium-gallium oxide-graphene oxide stack which they tested for an endurance of more than a hundred cycles.
Filament models of the Al/GO/Ga2O3/ITO/glass device. (Credit: Li-Wen Wang et al., 2023)
The way gallium-oxide works in an RRAM cell is by forming a conductive filament formed by oxygen vacancies. These vacancies and the resulting conductive path are controlled by an externally applied current via the top (Al) and bottom (ITO) electrodes, with the graphene-oxide (GO) layer acting as a source of oxygen ions.
In related research, [Zhengchun Yang] and colleagues described in
a 2020 article
in
Ceramics International
how they constructed a device consisting out of gallium(III) oxide RRAM data storage with a piezoelectric ceramic element that served both as pressure sensor and power supply. The current generated by the piezo element is used to power the memory device and record measurements.
Then there is the somewhat more wild
‘FlexRAM’ idea
pitched by [Ruizhi Yuan] and colleagues in
Advanced Materials
who describe how they created a device consisting out of flexible polymer called ‘EcoFlex’ with pockets in it for a ‘liquid gallium-based metal’ to create a flexible memory device. At millimeter-sized structures it’s hard to see practical applications for this technology, even if the
associated PR article
in
IEEE Spectrum
goes pretty hard on breathless speculation. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734535",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T12:09:41",
"content": "I know this is experimental, but a hundred cycles? That would last about a microsecond in a modern computer!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "673454... | 1,760,372,000.053702 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/unlimited-cloud-storage-youtube-style/ | Unlimited Cloud Storage YouTube Style | Al Williams | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"data storage",
"qr code",
"video"
] | [Adam Conway] wanted to store files in the cloud. However, if you haven’t noticed, unlimited free storage is hard to find. We aren’t sure if he wants to use the tool he built seriously, but he decided that if he could encode data in a video format, he could
store his files on YouTube
. Does it work? It does, and you can find the code on
GitHub
.
Of course, the efficiency isn’t very good. A 7 K image, for example, yielded a 9-megabyte video. If we were going to store files on YouTube, we’d encrypt them, too, making it even worse.
The first attempt was to break the file into pieces and encode them as QR codes. Makes sense, but it didn’t work out. To get enough data into each frame, the modules (think pixels) in the QR code were small. Combined with video compression, the system was unreliable.
Simplicity rules. Each frame is 1920×1080 and uses a black pixel as a one and a white pixel as a zero. In theory, this gives about 259 kbytes per frame. However, to help avoid problems decoding due to video compression, the real bits use a 5×5 pixel block, so that means you get about 10 kbytes of data per frame.
The code isn’t perfect. It can add things to the end of a file, for example, but that would be easy to fix. The protocol could use error correction and compression. You might even build encryption into it or store more data — old school cassette-style — using the audio channel. Still, as a proof of concept, it is pretty neat.
This might sound like a new idea, but people way back in the early home computer days could
back up data to VCRs
. This isn’t even the first time we’ve seen it
done with YouTube
. | 76 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734501",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T09:13:02",
"content": "Though I appreciate the hack, this seems like destructive tech in my mind, if widely used would help precipitate the sixth mass extinction event on planet earth. Data centers are consuming ever... | 1,760,372,000.418025 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/replacement-pcb-replicates-early-80s-modem/ | Replacement PCB Replicates Early 80s Modem | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"acoustic",
"dial-up",
"drop-in",
"hayes",
"internet",
"modem",
"networking",
"pcb",
"replacement",
"retro",
"retrocomputing"
] | It’s certainly been a few decades, but plenty of us remember a time before widespread access to broadband internet, when connections were generally made over phone lines using acoustic modems. In the 90s these could connect you to AOL and Napster well enough, but in the early 80s the speeds were barely enough to read text as it loaded. A company called Hayes set out to change this with some of the first useful, widely-available modems for the PCs at the time. While they couldn’t keep up with the changing times there’s still a retro community that has these antiques, and to modernize it a bit
this drop-in replacement for the PCBs
replicates these old modems almost exactly.
The new PCB is equipped with everything needed to get a retro computer online again, including all the ports to connect a computer without any further modifications. It houses a few modern upgrades beyond its on-board processors, though. Rather than needing an actual acoustic coupled phone, this one has an ESP32 which gives it wireless capability. But the replacement PCB maintains the look and feel of the original hardware by replicating the red status LEDs at the front, fitting into the original Hayes cases with no modifications needed at all, and even includes a small speaker through which it can replicate the various tones, handshakes, and other audio cues that those of us nostalgic for this new online era remember quite well.
For those looking for a retro feel without the hassle of getting antique networking equipment functional again, this type of upgrade that preserves the essence of the original hardware is an excellent way of keeping retro computers functional on modern networking equipment. But if you absolutely must get the networking equipment exactly right down to the last patch cable,
you might end up having to build your own ISP from scratch
. | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734468",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T07:07:28",
"content": "Looks like an ESP8266 to me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6734529",
"author": "ethzero",
"timestamp": "2024-02-22T11:31:35",
... | 1,760,372,000.285388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/double-fed-induction-motors-clever-motor-control-through-frequency/ | Double Fed Induction Motors: Clever Motor Control Through Frequency | Jenny List | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"ac motor",
"induction motor",
"motor"
] | Somewhere in most engineering educations, there’s a class on induction motors. Students learn about shaded-pole motors, two-phase and three-phase motors, squirrel cage motors, and DC-excited motors. It’s a pre-requisite for then learning about motor controllers and so-called brushless DC motors. [Jim Pytel] takes this a step further in
a series of videos, in which he introduces the doubly fed induction motor
. If a conventional three-phase motor can have its coils in either rotor or stator, here’s a motor with both. The special tricks with this motor come in feeding both rotor and stator with separate frequencies, at which point their interactions have useful effects on the motor speed.
There are two videos, both of which we’ve put below the break. Understanding the complex interaction of the two sets of magnetic fields is enough to make anyone’s brain hurt, but the interesting part for us is that the motor can run faster than either of the two drive frequencies.
Sadly we’re not aware of any easily available motors using this configuration, so we don’t think it will be possible to easily experiment. But if you want to amaze your friends with an in-depth knowledge of motors, take a look at the videos below. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733631",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T08:35:08",
"content": "So what are the upsides and downsides? Is it more cost effective to repurpose an induction motor to be a synchronous motor?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,372,000.48421 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/low-cost-saliva-based-biosensor-for-cancer-detection/ | Low-Cost Saliva-based Biosensor For Cancer Detection | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"biomarker",
"biosensor",
"cancer detection"
] | More and more biomarkers that can help in the early diagnosis of diseases like cancer are being discovered every year, but often the effective application relies on having diagnostic methods that are both affordable and as least invasive as possible. This is definitely true in the case of breast cancers, where the standard diagnostic method after seeing something ‘odd’ on a scan is to perform a biopsy so that a tissue sample can be tested in a laboratory. What [Hsiao-Hsuan Wan] and colleagues demonstrate in a
recently published research article
in the
Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B
is a way to use saliva on disposable test strips to detect the presence of cancer-related biomarkers. Best of all, the system could be very affordable.
The two biomarkers tested in this experiment are
HER2
(in 10 – 30% of breast cancer cases) and
CA 15-3
, both of which are indicative of a variety of cancers, including breast cancers. According to the researchers, the levels of these biomarkers in saliva can be correlated to those in blood serum. Where other biosensors may include the read-out circuitry – making those disposable and expensive – here the disposable part is the test strips which are plated with electrodes.
(a) Output drain voltage waveform for pure artificial saliva and HER2 protein diluted in saliva from 10−7 to 10−15 g/ml. (b) Output digital reading from PCB under different HER2 protein concentrations. (Credit: Wan et al., 2024)
Each test strip is processed by exposing it to monoclonal antibodies for the target biomarker. When the resulting strip is then exposed to a series of pulses, any antigen-antibody complexes will stretch and contract, causing a measurable change in the electrical signal. This signal is then amplified by a MOSFET, after which the data can be analyzed. According to the reported results, the experimental results matched with the (anonymized) samples from both healthy volunteers and patients with breast cancer.
Whether a saliva-based test like this will replace most biopsies remains to be seen, but if the saliva-blood serum correlation holds up in further testing, it might provide a quick and non-invasive way to test for these and other biomarkers, whether for cancer or other diseases. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733602",
"author": "Clueless",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T06:21:43",
"content": "Weird picture of the PCB. Many through hole components and the remarks don’t make sense. Did they just take a random PCB as picture and slap some random texts on it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,372,000.54012 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/hackaday-links-february-18-2024/ | Hackaday Links: February 18, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"ads-b",
"apple",
"Apple Vision Pro",
"ar",
"blender",
"doctorate",
"gut",
"hackaday links",
"headset",
"helicopter",
"phd",
"sensing",
"Taylor Swift",
"vr",
"WiFi jamming"
] | So it turns out that walking around with $4,000 worth of hardware on your head isn’t quite the peak technology experience that some people thought it would be. We’re talking about the recently released Apple Vision Pro headset, which
early adopters are lining up in droves to return
. Complaints run the gamut from totally foreseeable episodes of motion sickness to neck pain from supporting the heavy headset. Any eyeglass wearer can certainly attest to even lightweight frames and lenses becoming a burden by the end of the day. We can’t imagine what it would be like to wear a headset like that all day. Ergonomic woes aside, some people are feeling buyer’s remorse thanks to a lack of apps that do anything to justify the hefty price tag. The evidence for a wave of returns is mostly gleaned from social media posts, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. We wouldn’t expect Apple to be too forthcoming with official return figures, though, so the ultimate proof of uptake will probably be how often you spot one in the wild. Apart from a few cities and only for the next few weeks, we suspect sightings will be few and far between.
Whatever happened to the good old trick of spray paint on the lens? That’s one way to defeat a security camera, but perhaps not the most subtle as police deal with
waves of WiFi-jammer-assisted burglaries
. Thieves employing this technique typically wait for signs a house or business is unoccupied before deploying an easily obtainable jamming device to swamp WiFi signals. With the target network overwhelmed, cameras have a hard time connecting, sending any incriminating images off to the big bit bucket in the sky and allowing them to make off with the goods. WiFi jammers are illegal in the United States, but somehow this fact fails to deter burglars from procuring and using them, so if you’re relying on these cameras to catch a thief, you might want to consider wired cameras.
It seems like Jack Sweeney, the Florida college student who makes flight tracking data on the private jets of the rich and famous easily accessible, has run afoul of yet another billionaire. Previously having cheesed off Elon Musk, he’s now in the crosshairs of (the lawyers of) one
Taylor Swift
, who really, REALLY doesn’t like it when people know where she is. Her legal team has filed a cease-and-desist order that cites a laundry list of potential harms that could result from Sweeney continuing to provide publicly available ADS-B information to any and all. Given the lengths Ms. Swift goes to be seen and heard as much as possible, trying to keep the location of her jet a secret seems a bit disingenuous, to say the least.
How cool would it be to have a Ph.D. in hardware hacking? If it sounds as great to you as it does to us, you’ll want to check out
this scholarship
for “Repurposing Microelectronics for Gut Sensing, Delivery, and Sampling Devices.” The notice was sent to us by (Edwin) En-Te Hwu, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark who does some really cool work, including
making old DVD players into atomic force microscopes
and
low-cost nanopositioners
. We had him on the Hack Chat to talk about that last one and it was
a super-interesting chat
. The Ph.D. work sounds even more interesting since it involves developing ingestible devices for monitoring the intestinal tract. Check it out the video below for more coolness.
And finally, we wandered across a pretty cool YouTube channel that does a fantastic job
visualizing the inner workings of helicopters
. Through the magic of Blender, [Bzig] shows us how power is transmitted from a pair of gas turbine engines to both the main rotor and the tail rotor, no mean feat given the mechanical constraints and aerodynamic requirements. We’d always assumed that the swash plate mechanism would be the most interesting aspect of helicopter mechanics, but it turns out that the gear train has a lot going for it too. Especially fascinating was the freewheeling gears, which allow a failed engine to be decoupled from the rotor shaft, or both if autorotation is called for. Enjoy! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733559",
"author": "Thopter",
"timestamp": "2024-02-19T01:15:20",
"content": "“Any eyeglass wearer can certainly attest to even lightweight frames and lenses becoming a burden by the end of the day.”I dunno, I haven’t really noticed. The only time I really notice my glasses is when... | 1,760,372,000.691765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/no-inductors-needed-for-this-simple-clean-twin-tee-oscillator/ | No Inductors Needed For This Simple, Clean Twin-Tee Oscillator | Dan Maloney | [
"hardware",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"feedback",
"filter",
"MCP6002",
"notch",
"op-amp",
"oscillator",
"rc",
"twin-tee"
] | If there’s one thing that amateur radio operators are passionate about, it’s the search for the perfect sine wave. Oscillators without any harmonics are an important part of spectrum hygiene, and while building a perfect oscillator with no distortion is a practical impossibility,
this twin-tee audio frequency oscillator
gets pretty close.
As [Alan Wolke (W2AEW)] explains, a twin-tee oscillator is quite simple in concept, and pretty simple to build too. It uses a twin-tee filter, which is just a low-pass RC filter in parallel with a high-pass RC filter. No inductors are required, which helps with low-frequency designs like this, which would call for bulky coils. His component value selections form an impressively sharp 1.6-kHz notch filter about 40 dB deep. He then plugs the notch filter into the feedback loop of an MCP6002 op-amp, which creates a high-impedance path at anything other than the notch filter frequency. The resulting sine wave is a thing of beauty, showing very little distortion on an FFT plot. Even on the total harmonic distortion meter, the oscillator performs, with a THD of only 0.125%.
This video is part of [Alan]’s “Circuit Fun” series, which we’ve really been enjoying. The way he breaks complex topics into simple steps that are easy to understand and then strings them all together has been quite valuable. We’ve covered tons of his stuff, everything from
the basics of diodes
to
time-domain reflectometry
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733547",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T22:33:33",
"content": "HP-15C calculator on the bench there for the win!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6733738",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-0... | 1,760,372,000.585261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/3d-print-train-wheels-for-garden-railway/ | 3D Print Train Wheels For Garden Railway | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"backyard railroad",
"garden railroad",
"railroad",
"railway"
] | There’s something magical about a train, whether you call it a railway or a railroad, plenty of us have hankered after our own little piece of line on which to shunt wagons or chuff around our domain. Envy [Otis Rowell] then, because he’s made himself a garden railway with the laudable purpose of moving wood pellets for his heating. A mere garden railway may be cool but it’s not in itself special, so the reason we’re featuring it here comes from something else.
He’s making his rail wheels by 3D printing them with a normal printer
.
It’s important to understand that these wheels are not for a high-speed mainline express freight train but for a small flat car designed to carry a modest tub of pellets, thus they are less in need of high strength than their full-size cousins. But even a small car on garden railway-sized aluminum rails can exert significant force, so we would be fascinated to see how well these do. The write-up is a work in progress as this article is being written so we know there’s more to come, but there’s no harm in speculating as to how a better 3D-printed wheel might be made. We would be particularly curious for example as to whether a novel slicing regime could be used to make a stronger wheel.
If backyard railways interest you,
it’s not the first time we’ve seen one
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733504",
"author": "Sky",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T19:05:02",
"content": "“A mere garden railway may be cool but its not in itself special, so the reason we’re featuring it here comes from something else”Don’t gatekeep the trains. More custom trains plz.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,000.636688 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/doubling-the-cpu-speed-of-the-trs-80-model-100-with-a-mod-board/ | Doubling The CPU Speed Of The TRS-80 Model 100 With A Mod Board | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"m100",
"model 100",
"TRS-80 model 100"
] | The TRS-80 Model 100 was released in 1983, featuring an 80C85 CPU that can run at 5 MHz, but only runs at a hair under 2.5 MHz, due to 1:2 divider on the input clock. Why cut the speed in half? It has a lot to do with the focus of the M100 on being a portable device with low power usage. Since the CPU can run at 5 MHz and modding these old systems is a thing, we got a ready-made solution for the TRS-80 M100, as
demonstrated by [Ken] in a recent video
using one of his ‘daily driver’ M100s.
This uses the
board design
from the [Bitchin100] website, along with the
M100 ROM
image, as one does not simply increase the CPU clock on these old CPUs. The issue is namely that along with the CPU clock, connected components on the CPU bus now have to also run at those speeds, and deal with much faster access speed requirements. This is why beyond the mod board that piggybacks on top of the MPU package, it’s also necessary to replace the system ROM chip (600 ns) with a much faster one, like the Atmel AT27C256R (45 ns), which of course requires
another carrier board
to deal with incompatible pinouts.
After this, we find that the system RAM also has access speed issues, due to the power-saving logic that’s part of the original board. The mod board deals with this by bypassing part of the logic and triggering the power-up signal (A*) much sooner, so that even the original base system RAM can scrape by. This then only leaves the UART which objects to being fed a 5 MHz signal, as this ruins its clocking ability. For this, the mod board also has a fix: a 2.45 MHz output pad.
With the mod fully installed, and the model 100 closed up again, it is confirmed that the system is indeed faster. Unfortunately, it also breaks some games, like Starblaze 100, but since you can switch between 2.5 and 5 MHz mode on the command line, this may not be such a dealbreaker.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733494",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T17:17:18",
"content": "It would be interesting to know how much the power usage increased with the mod.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6733540",
"author": "Andrew",
... | 1,760,372,000.744181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/extreme-waterproof-3d-prints/ | Extreme Waterproof 3D Prints | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"drone hacks"
] | [
"dichtol",
"submersible",
"waterproof"
] | Since the crew at [CPSdrone] likes to build underwater drones — submarines, in other words — they need to 3D print waterproof hulls. At first, they thought there were several reasons for water entering the hulls, but the real reason was that water tends to soak through the print surface. They’ve
worked it all out
in the video below.
Since the printer is an FDM printer, it isn’t surprising that the surface has tiny pores; even the tiniest pores will let water in at high pressure. They tried using epoxy to seal the prints, which worked to some degree. They did tests using an example submersible hull
that you can try yourself
if you like.
It took quite a few tests to find leaks. At 10 cm of water pressure, the prints did well. However, the deeper you go, the more pressure is on the hull, and you get more water inside or, at least, soaked into the plastic. To figure out the difference, they repeated the tests with solid models and found that some water gets inside and some of it is soaked into the layers.
The next step was experimenting with dichtol, a smelly chemical that waterproofs prints via a soaking process. Repeating the experiment showed very little water ingress, even at high pressures. The dichtol soaks into the plastic like water and leaves behind a resin when it evaporates.
The final step was to try a resin print. The results were a little skewed because the hull was still full of resin, which didn’t allow for a full test. The resin wasn’t very strong. However, they also had some engineering plastic models made and — again — reran the experiment.
If you need to put things underwater, you’ll be interested in these results. We’ve seen the guys do
underwater drones before
. They
aren’t the only ones
, of course. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733415",
"author": "holysnippet",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T12:08:59",
"content": "xD",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6733429",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T13:16:10",
"content": "….. Now ... | 1,760,372,002.812022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/21/stereo-photography-with-smartphones-made-better-with-syncing/ | Stereo Photography With Smartphones Made Better With Syncing | Maya Posch | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"iphone hacks"
] | [
"stereo camera",
"stereoscopic"
] | Stereo photography has been around for almost as long as photography itself, and it remains a popular way to capture a scene in its 3D glory. Yet despite the fact that pretty much everyone carries one or more cameras with them every day in the form of a smartphone, carrying a stereo photography-capable system with you remains tricky. As [Pascal Martiné]
explains in a How-To article
, although you can take two smartphones with you, syncing up both cameras to get a stereo image isn’t so straightforward, even though this is essential if you want to prevent jarring shifts between the left and right image.
Custom made twin shutter. (Credit: Pascal Martiné)
Fortunately, having two of the exact same smartphone with the exact same camera modules is not an absolute requirement, as apps like i3DStereoid offer auto-adjustments. But activating the camera trigger on each phone is essential. The usual assortment of wireless remote triggers don’t work well here, and the twin-pairing in i3DStereoid had too much delay for dynamic scenes. This left the wired remote trigger option, but with a dearth of existing stereo trigger options [Pascal] was forced to make his own for two iPhones out of Apple Lightning cables and wired earbud volume controls.
Although the initial prototype more or less worked, [Pascal] found that each iPhone would often ‘decide’ to release the trigger at a slightly different time, requiring multiple attempts at the perfect shot. This led him down a rabbit hole of investigating different camera apps and configurations to make shutter delay as deterministic as possible. Much of this turned out to be due to auto exposure and auto focus, with enabling AE/AF lock drastically increasing the success rate, though this has to be done manually before each shot as an extra step.
With this one tweak, he found that most of the stereo photo pairs are now perfectly synced, while occasionally there is about a ~3 ms jitter, the cause of which he hasn’t tracked down yet, but which could be due to the camera app or iOS being busy with something else.
In the end, this iPhone-based stereo photography setup might not be as reliable or capable as some of the
purpose-built rigs we’ve covered
over the years, but it does get extra points for portability. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734162",
"author": "Carl Foxmarten",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T09:36:07",
"content": "My perfectionist ass would probably start with a battery (probably CR2032) through a button to a pair of transistors, each wired to the separate mic lines and the Common lines connected together to... | 1,760,372,002.558455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/mapping-the-nintendo-switch-pcb/ | Mapping The Nintendo Switch PCB | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"desoldering",
"high resolution",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Switch",
"photo",
"reverse engineering",
"software",
"soldering",
"testing",
"wiring"
] | As electronics have advanced, they’ve not only gotten more powerful but smaller as well. This size is great for portability and speed but can make things like repair more inaccessible to those of us with only a simple soldering iron. Even simply figuring out what modern PCBs do is beyond most of our abilities due to the shrinking sizes. Thankfully, however, [μSoldering] has spent their career around state-of-the-art soldering equipment working on intricate PCBs with tiny surface-mount components and was just the person to
document a complete netlist of the Nintendo Switch
through meticulous testing, a special camera, and the use of a lot of very small wires.
The first part of reverse-engineering the Switch is to generate images of the PCBs. These images are taken at an astonishing 6,000 PPI and as a result are incredibly large files. But with that level of detail the process starts to come together. A special piece of software is used from there that allows point-and-click on the images to start to piece the puzzle together, and with an idea of where everything goes the build moves into the physical world.
[μSoldering] removes all of the parts on the PCBs with hot air and then meticulously wires them back up using a custom PCB that allows each connection to be wired up and checked one-by-one. With everything working the way it is meant to, a completed netlist documenting every single connection on the Switch hardware can finally be assembled.
The final documentation includes over two thousand photos and almost as many individual wires with over 30,000 solder joints. It’s an impressive body of work that [μSoldering] hopes will help others working with this hardware while at the same time keeping their specialized skills up-to-date. We also have
fairly extensive documentation about some of the Switch’s on-board chips as well
, further expanding our body of knowledge on how these gaming consoles work and how they’re put together. | 22 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734131",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T06:24:55",
"content": "I know this isn’t directly related to computer security, but the lesson is clear: never underestimate the resourcefulness of someone with lots of free time and dedication to a task.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,372,002.759311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/new-modelling-shows-that-flat-protoplanets-might-be-a-thing/ | New Modelling Shows That Flat Protoplanets Might Be A Thing | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"computer model",
"discworld",
"protoplanet"
] | Surface density of the benchmark run disc (in g cm
−2
). The disc becomes gravitationally unstable and fragments. Four of the fragments or protoplanets are followed until they reach density 10
−3
g cm
−3
. (Credit: Fenton et al., 2024)
While the very idea of a flat planet millions of years after its formation is patently ridiculous, recent modelling shows that during the protostar phase – where material from a nebula is drawn around a hydrostatic core into an accretion disc – it is likely that many of of the protoplanets which form inside a fragmentary protostar accretion disc take on a strongly oblate spheroid shape, rather than a spherical one. This according to [Adam Fenton] and [Dimitris Stamatellos], who ran half a million CPU hours worth of simulation time at the UK’s DiRAC HPC facility, per the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan)
press release
.
The
research was published
in the February 2024 issue of
Astronomy & Astrophysics
, titled
The 3D structure of disc-instability protoplanets
.
Where this research is essential is not just in our understanding of how our own solar system came to be – including our own
oblate spheroid Earth
– but also in interpreting what we observe via the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope and others as we examine areas of the observable Universe such as the
Orion Nebula
, which is one of the regions with the most actively forming stars. By comparing these simulations with observations, we may find that the simulation matches perfectly, matches partially, or perhaps not at all, which provides data to refine the simulation, but also helps to reconsider how observations were previously interpreted. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734124",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T05:18:23",
"content": "In before someone claims this is proof Earth is flat! /s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6734158",
"author": "no-bug404",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,002.696798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/daisugi-growing-straight-lumber-without-killing-the-tree/ | Daisugi – Growing Straight Lumber Without Killing The Tree | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"arborist",
"bonsai tree",
"coppice",
"coppicing",
"daisugi",
"forestry",
"pollard",
"pollarding",
"tree",
"wood",
"woodworking"
] | In 14th Century Japan, there was a shortage of straight lumber for building and flat land on which to grow it. Arborists there developed a technique that looks like growing trees on top of trees,
called daisugi
.
Similar to the European practice of
pollarding
for firewood and basket materials,
daisugi
has been likened to bonsai on steroids. Starting with a Japanese cedar tree, one chops the top off the tree once it has grown to sufficient size to survive this initial shock. The following spring, you start carefully guiding the new growth through pruning to create tall, straight trunks on top of the “platform cedar.” Pruning takes place approximately every two years and harvesting every twenty. A daisugi tree can produce new shoots for several hundred years if properly maintained.
Although often used as a decorative technique today, it seems like an interesting way to grow your own perfect lumber if you have the room for it. We suspect the technique could be used on other species that lend themselves to pollarding like oak or maple, but harvest times and reliable straight trunks might vary. With sustainable production of wood for
cross-laminated timber (CLT) and other advanced timbers
being of growing importance, we wonder if these techniques could make a comeback? | 30 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734083",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2024-02-21T00:14:07",
"content": "FWIW pollarding is somewhat related, but they all fall under the idea of coppicing, which was practiced from the stone age onwards in many places across the world. Pollarding is when you did it up ... | 1,760,372,002.880288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/multicolor-resin-prints-give-it-a-shot/ | Multicolor Resin Prints: Give It A Shot | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"Multicolor 3D printing",
"resin"
] | [Thomas TEMPE] has been
making two-color resin prints
. While printing in multiple colors is old hat for FDM printers, the way resin printers work makes it a more difficult proposition. [Thomas] has a simple solution. First, he prints an item with a cavity where he would like the second color. Then, after printing, he fills the cavity with a different color resin using a syringe and cures it. Simple, really.
Of course, it is all about technique. For fine lines, you’ll want a smaller needle, and you flood the area with the alternate resin and wipe away the excess. For wider lines, you simply fill the cavity from a larger syringe.
Thomas uses this to produce high-contrast text. However, it occurs to us you could do anything that was embossed into the original print. It doesn’t have to be text. There’s also no reason you have to use only one color of fill resin.
We’ve seen resin used to smooth FDM prints. We wonder if you could print the base using FDM and use this technique to add colorful resin highlights. If you try it,
drop us a note
.
This would be great for
custom keycaps
. We’ve seen
keycaps
printed with an air-dry clay inlay. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734044",
"author": "MAC",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T21:27:04",
"content": "This would be great for multi-colored inlays in keycaps.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6734045",
"author": "MAC",
"timestamp": "2024-... | 1,760,372,002.324145 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/sketchy-logg-dogg-logging-robot-remote-control-hacking/ | Sketchy Logg Dogg Logging Robot Remote Control Hacking | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"mosfet",
"pwm",
"remote control vehicle",
"solenoid"
] | When we last left [Wes] amidst the torn-open guts of his Logg Dogg logging robot, he had managed to revitalize the engine and dug into the hydraulics, but one big obstacle remained: the lack of the remote control unit. In
today’s installment
of the Logg Dogg series, [Wes] summarizes weeks of agony over creating a custom circuit based around a microcontroller, a joystick and a lot of relays and other bits and pieces to drive the solenoids inside the logging machine that control the hydraulics.
Giving the remote controller a bench test before connecting to the logging robot (Credit: Watch Wes Work)
Most of the struggle was actually with the firmware, as it had to not only control the usual on/off solenoids, but also a number of proportional solenoid valves which control things like the track speed by varying the hydraulic flow to the final drives.
This requires a PWM signal, which [Wes] generated using two MOSFETs in a closed-feedback system, probably because open loop controls with multi-ton hydraulic machinery are not the kind of excitement most people look forward to.
Ultimately he did get it sorted, and was able to take the Logg Dogg for its first walk since being rescued from a barn, which both parties seemed to rather enjoy. The background details of this machine and the project can be found in
our first coverage
.
We’re looking anxiously forward to the next episode, where the controller goes wireless and the sketchiness gets dialed down some more. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734032",
"author": "Mojo",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T19:52:39",
"content": "Needs a seat!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6734051",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T21:43:55",
"content": "You ... | 1,760,372,002.501984 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/20/our-home-automation-contest-starts-now/ | Our Home Automation Contest Starts Now! | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News"
] | [
"Hackaday Contests",
"home automation",
"home sweet home automation"
] | Your home is your castle, and what’s better than a fully automatic castle? Nothing! That’s why we’re inviting you to
submit your sweetest home automation hacks
for a chance to win one of three $150 DigiKey gift certificates. The contest starts now and runs until April 16th.
[Matej]’s
Home Buttons
gets the job done in open-source style.
We love to play around with home automation setups and have seen our fair share, ranging from the simple “turn some lights on” to full-blown cyber-brains that learn your habits and adapt to them. Where is your project on this continuum?
Whether you’re focused on
making your life easier,
saving energy, gathering up all the data about your usage patterns, or simply stringing some random functions together and calling it a “system,” we’d like to see it. Nothing is
too big
or too small if it makes your home life easier.
Home is where the home automation is!
To enter, head over to Hackaday IO and start documenting your project there. We are, of course, interested in learning from what you’ve done, so the better the docs, the better your chances of winning. And if you need some inspiration, check out these honorable mention categories.
Honorable Mention Categories
Creature Comforts:
Does your system
make your house a home
? Maybe it turns on and off the heaters to keep rooms just right,
opens and closes the blinds for you
, or maybe it turns on the nightlights when you’re heading downstairs for a midnight snack. The Creature Comforts category is for you.
Efficiency:
Automation isn’t just about convenience, but can
help us save energy too
. If your machines
help you save money on your power and heating bills
, show us!
Rube Goldberg:
A “system” sounds so formal, but a lot of ad hoc home automation projects are
nonetheless super effective
. If your home system grew organically and maybe resembles
a collection of hacks
more than a carefully orchestrated plan, it could be a Rube Goldberg setup.
All the Data:
An automatic home makes a lot of data along the way. If you have a
slick system for displaying it
, or even just
collecting it all
, we’d love to see it.
Retrofit:
Not everything works like you’d want it to out of the box. Maybe you’ve
hacked into an air purification system
or your
washing machine
to get it to play along? That’s a home automation retrofit.
Thanks again to DigiKey for sponsoring this with three gift certificates! | 32 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734063",
"author": "Wim_the_ancient",
"timestamp": "2024-02-20T23:42:54",
"content": "Bonus points if it still works in -let’s say- 40 years, like a normal switch does. Or do you really want to start replacing things when you’re retired (and possibly not too fit anymore).",
"pa... | 1,760,372,002.635201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/wowmips-a-mips-emulator-for-windows-applications/ | WoWMIPS: A MIPS Emulator For Windows Applications | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Software Development"
] | [
"Microsoft Windows",
"mips",
"Windows NT"
] | When Windows NT originally launched it had ports to a wide variety of platforms, ranging from Intel’s x86 and i860 to DEC’s Alpha as well as the MIPS architecture. Running Windows applications written for many of these platforms is a bit tricky these days, which [x86matthew] saw as a good reason to
write a MIPS emulator
. This isn’t just any old emulator, though. It maps 32-bit Windows applications targeted at the MIPS R4000 CPU to an x86 CPU instead. Since both platforms run in a little-endian, 32-bit mode, this theoretically should be a walk in the park.
The use of the Windows PE executable format is also the same, so the first task was to figure out how to
load the MIPS PE binary
in a way that made sense for an x86 platform. This involved some reverse-engineering of the MIPS ntdll.dll file to figure out how relocations on that platform were handled. Following this, the
mapping of the instructions
of the R4000 CPU to the (CISC) x86 ISA was pretty easy. Only Floating Point Unit (FPU) support was left as a future challenge. Memory access was left as direct access, meaning no sandboxing or isolation, for simplicity’s sake.
The final task was mapping the
native API calls
, which call almost directly into the underlying host Windows OS’s API, with a bit of glue logic. With all of this done, Windows NT applications originally written for 1990s MIPS ran just fine on a modern-day x86_64 PC running Windows — as long as you don’t need an FPU (for now). | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733076",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T14:26:03",
"content": "I’m a huge fan of emulating old stuff. However, it seems like static recompilation is the more adventurous route that has great benefits. The downside being that you’re locked into the target architecture ... | 1,760,372,002.454993 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/salvaged-meter-movements-really-pop-in-this-diy-vu-meter-bridge/ | Salvaged Meter Movements Really Pop In This DIY VU Meter Bridge | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bridge",
"moving coil",
"NE5532",
"preamp",
"pro audio",
"VU meter"
] | If you’re going to build
a nice VU meter bridge for the recording studio
, the first thing you need is a nice pair of VU meters. But lest you think it’s as easy as putting some meters into a nice box and calling it a day, think again.
This project comes to us from [Frank Olson], whose projects usually incorporate wood as part of the mechanism, as with his famous
wooden ribbon microphone
. This build does indeed use wood, and to excellent effect, but only in the project’s final enclosure. Before that, [Frank] had salvaged a pair of good-looking moving coil meters from an old tape recorder. He muddled through some ideas before settling on a design. A NE5532 dual-channel audio buffer module is used as a preamp, with each channel feeding into a bridge rectifier before heading to the meter. Wisely, [Frank] chose to illuminate the meters with their existing incandescent bulbs, so a small DC-DC supply was added to provide the necessary 8 volts.
As for the enclosure, that’s where [Frank]’s experience working with veneers paid off. He chose mahogany, carefully cut all the pieces to shape with a knife, and glued it all up with CA glue — at least we assume it was CA; based on previous efforts, he uses a lot of the stuff. The tung oil finish looks fantastic, and the completed build aesthetic looks great! The video below shows it all.
If you need some backstory on the VU meter,
we can help with that
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733061",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T13:29:30",
"content": "V.nice, and a proper write up *and* a video for YT junkies to boot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6733176",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,002.28015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/sneaky-fix-gets-simon-back-up-and-running/ | Sneaky Fix Gets Simon Back Up And Running | Lewin Day | [
"Games"
] | [
"game",
"milton bradley",
"simon"
] | Simon
was a cutting-edge “computer controlled game” when it launched back in 1978. It would flash out a pattern of ever-increasing length and you had to copy it if you didn’t want to lose. The name, obviously inspired by the traditional folk game of
Simon Says.
[Robert] recently found an original vintage
Simon
game, but it had been non-functional for many years. However, with some astute analysis and repair,
he was able to get it working again.
Upon powering the unit up, the best [Robert] could get out of it was some flickering of the lights, nothing more. It wouldn’t start a game or respond to button presses. Eventually, probing around showed [Robert] that the TMS1000 microcontroller wasn’t running properly. It seemed to concern the connection to the “Game Mode” selector switch. Thanks to a fault and the multiplexed layout of the controls, it was appearing to the microcontroller that a button was always pressed at all times.
The solution [Robert] landed on was to separate out the signal from the Game Mode switch by socketing the TMS1000 and lifting the relevant pin. . The signal was then wired back up to the chip via diodes so that it wouldn’t interfere with the other outputs and inputs on the chip used to read the other buttons. This meant that the unit was locked into the single main game mode, but it did get it operational again.
It may not be a complete repair, but it nonetheless saved this unit from complete failure. Failing a repair of your own unit,
you can always build one with modern hardware instead
. Video after the break. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733034",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T11:28:41",
"content": "https://www.memozor.com/simon-games/simon-game",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6733081",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T14:45:16",... | 1,760,372,002.925213 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/bioluminescent-glowing-petunias-are-now-a-thing/ | Bioluminescent Glowing Petunias Are Now A Thing | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bioluminescence",
"plants"
] | Outside of the depths of the ocean, or cartoons, we’re not typically accustomed to plant life glowing or otherwise generating its own light. However, science is helping to change all that. Now, you can order some bioluminescent plants of your very own
from Light Bio.
Light Bio is a startup company working in the synthetic biology space. It’s not content to simply pursue research behind closed doors, and is now sharing its work with the public. It has announced it plans to start selling petunias to U.S. customers which literally glow with the magic of bioluminescence.
Petunias don’t normally glow, but with some modifications, it turns out they can be convinced to. It took a large team of 26 scientists to figure out
how to boost bioluminescence in plants
, by isolating and optimizing genes sourced from various glowing mushroom species.
The plants will be available from April, with Light Bio planning to sell them as “Firefly Petunias.” It might sound like
scary sci-fi tech
, but the USDA has apparently already signed off on Light Bio selling these to the public.
Something’s been bothering me, though. It’s at the edge of my memory… I think my old housemate played bass for
Glowing Petunias
back in 2015. Something like that, anyway… video after the break. | 45 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732956",
"author": "RWood",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T03:32:28",
"content": "There may be prior art… quick, call Veridian Dynamics!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5rAOitj5_8Just look out for the FireSquirrel…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,003.101828 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/deadblow-axe-splits-wood-with-minimal-rebound/ | Deadblow Axe Splits Wood With Minimal Rebound | Navarre Bartz | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"axe",
"cordwood",
"maul",
"splitter",
"wood",
"wood splitter"
] | Dead-blow hammers are well-known in the construction industry for minimizing rebound. [Jacob Fischer] is on a mission to
bring this concept to splitting axes
.
Over the course of several months, [Fischer] has been working on adding a dead-blow to a splitting axe. This fifth iteration uses a custom-forged head from blacksmith [Todd Elder] with a dead-blow box welded to the poll. The combination of the head geometry and the dead-blow distributing the delivery of force seems to result in a very effective splitting axe.
The dead-blow portion of the axe is a steel box filled with lead (Pb) BBs. Since the BBs are trailing the axe head within the box, the force from the BBs is delivered later than the initial impact of the steel axe head onto the block of wood, allowing the full force of the blow to be spread out over more time. Dead-blow hammers typically use polymers to further absorb any rebound energy, so there is some limit to the extent rebound can be reduced as seen in the testing portion of the video.
Looking for other ways to split wood? How about this
cross-bladed axe
or maybe a
log splitter
or
two
? If you’re curious about how they used to make axes in the old days,
we’ve got you covered there too
. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732923",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T01:35:07",
"content": "I couldn’t get 30 seconds into the video before plonking it, but my question was: What the heck kind of wood is he splitting that he needs to reduce rebound? Or is this thing just for the clicks?",
"par... | 1,760,372,003.152368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/sonolithography-with-the-raspberry-pi-pico/ | Sonolithography With The Raspberry Pi Pico | Lewin Day | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"pi pico",
"sonolithography",
"ultrasound"
] | You can do some wild things with sound waves, such as annoy your neighbours or convince other road users to move out of your way. Or, if you get into sonolithography like [Oliver Child] has,
you can make some wild patterns with ultrasound.
Sonolithography is a method of patterning materials on to a surface using finely-controlled sound waves. To achieve this, [Oliver] created a circular array of sixteen ultrasonic transducers controlled via shift registers and gate driver ICs, under the command of a Raspberry Pi Pico. He then created an app for controlling the transducer array via an attached computer with a GUI interface. It allows the phase and amplitude of each element of the array to be controlled to create different patterns.
Creating a pattern is then a simple matter of placing the array on a surface, firing it up in a given drive mode, and then atomising some kind of dye or other material to visualize the pattern of the acoustic waves.
It could be a useful tool for studying the interactions of ultrasonic waves, or it could just be a way to make neat patterns in ink and dye if that’s what you’re into. [Oliver] notes the techniques of sonolithography could also have implications in biology or fabrication in future, as well. If you found this interesting, you might like to
study up on ultrasonic levitation, too! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732890",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T23:50:59",
"content": "Is there a video link to see examples? Did I miss it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6732949",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T0... | 1,760,372,003.007152 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/change-the-jingle-in-your-makita-charger-because-you-can/ | Change The Jingle In Your Makita Charger Because You Can | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"battery charger",
"charger",
"drill",
"makita",
"tools"
] | Lots of things beep these days. Washing machines, microwaves, fridge — even drill battery chargers. If you’re on Team Makita, it turns out you can actually change the melody of your charger’s beep,
thanks to a project from [Real-Time-Kodi].
The hack is for the Makita DR18RC charger, and the implementation of the hack is kind of amusing. [Real-Time-Kodi] starts by cutting the trace to the buzzer inside the charger. Then, an Arduino is installed inside the charger, hooked up to the buzzer itself and the original line that was controlling it. When it detects the charger trying to activate the buzzer, it uses this as a trigger to play its own melody on the charger instead. The Arduino also monitors the LEDs on the charger in order to determine the current charge state, and play the appropriate jingle for the situation.
It’s an amusing hack, and one that could certainly confuse the heck out of anyone expecting the regular tones out of their Makita charger. It also shows that the simple ways work, too — there was no need to dump any firmware or
decompile any code
. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732799",
"author": "Max S.",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T19:48:05",
"content": "Oh my …. Makita means “Truthful – Without lies or deception”. If you spoof the jingle, they will have to change the name :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,003.832072 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/canned-air-is-unexpectedly-supersonic/ | Canned Air Is Unexpectedly Supersonic | Donald Papp | [
"Science"
] | [
"canned air",
"mach diamonds",
"Schlieren",
"shock diamonds",
"supersonic"
] | How fast is the gas coming out from those little duster tubes of canned air? Perhaps faster than one might think!
It’s supersonic
(video, embedded below) as [Cylo’s Garage] shows by imaging clear
shock diamonds
in the flow from those thin little tubes.
Shock diamonds
are a clear indicator of supersonic flow.
Shock diamonds, normally seen in things like afterburning jet turbine or rocket engine exhaust streams, are the product of standing wave patterns that indicate supersonic speeds. These are more easily visible in jet plumes, but [Cylo’s Garage] managed to get some great images of the same phenomenon in more everyday things such as the flow of duster gas.
Imaging this is made possible thanks to what looks like a simple but effective
Sch
lieren imaging
setup, which is a method of visualizing normally imperceptible changes in a fluid’s refractive index. Since the refractive index of a gas can change in response to density, pressure, or temperature, it’s a perfect way to see what’s going on when there’s otherwise nothing for one’s eyeballs to latch onto.
Intrigued by this kind of imaging? It requires a careful setup, but nothing particularly complicated or hard to get a hold of.
Here’s one such setup
, here’s a
Schlieren videography
project, and here’s
a particularly intriguing approach
that leverages modern electronics like a smartphone.
Thanks to [Quinor] for the tip! | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733397",
"author": "Erin",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T09:39:18",
"content": "That was a canned demo in my compressible fluids course at college; the professor called it “shockwaves in a can.” Glad to see other folks coming across it; I thought that I was late to the party there.",
... | 1,760,372,003.512482 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/metal-3d-printing-gets-really-fast-and-really-ugly/ | Metal 3D Printing Gets Really Fast (andReallyUgly) | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"3d printing",
"aluminum",
"glass beads",
"LMP",
"metal printing"
] | The secret to
cranking out a furniture-sized metal frame in minutes
is Liquid Metal Printing (LMP), demonstrated by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They’ve demonstrated printing aluminum frames for tables and chairs, which are perfectly solid and able to withstand post-processing like drilling and milling.
The system heats aluminum in a graphite crucible, and the molten metal is gravity-fed through a ceramic nozzle and deposited into a bed of tiny 100-micron glass beads. The beads act as both print bed and support structure, allowing the metal to cool quickly without really affecting the surface. Molten aluminum is a harsh material to work with, so both the ceramic nozzle material and the glass beads to fill the print bed were selected after a lot of testing.
This printing method is fast and scalable, but sacrifices resolution. Ideally, the team would love to make a system capable of melting down recycled aluminum to print parts with. That would really be something new and interesting when it comes to manufacturing.
The look of the printed metal honestly reminds us a little of
CandyFab
from [Windell Oskay] and [Lenore Edman] at Evil Mad Scientist, which was a 3D printer before hobbyist 3D printers or kits were really a thing. CandyFab worked differently — it used hot air to melt sugar together one layer at a time — but the end result has a similar sort of look to it. Might not be pretty, but hey, looks aren’t everything.
(Update: see it in action in
this video
, which is also embedded just below. Thanks [CityZen] for sharing in the comments!) | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733359",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T06:11:17",
"content": "CandyFab sounds like a sweet idea.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6733412",
"author": "discreetsecuritysolutions",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18... | 1,760,372,003.871965 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/a-badge-for-ai-free-content-100-human/ | A Badge For AI-Free Content – 100% Human! | Lewin Day | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"machine learning",
"not by AI"
] | These days, just about anyone with a pulse can fall on a keyboard and make an AI image generator spurt out some kind of vaguely visual content. A lot of it is crap. Some of it’s confusing. But most of all, creators hate it when their hand-crafted works are compared with these digital extrusions from mathematical slop. Enter the
“not by AI” badge.
Screenshot from
https://notbyai.fyi/business
Basically, it’s exactly what it sounds like. A sleek, modern badge that you slap on your artwork to tell people that you did this, not an AI. There are pre-baked versions for writers (“written by human”), visual artists (“painted by human”), and musicians (“produced by human”). The idea is that these badges would help people identify human-generated content and steer away from AI content if they’re trying to avoid it.
It’s not just intended to be added to individual artworks. Websites that have “at least 90%” of content created by humans are invited to host the badge, along with apps, too. This directive reveals an immediate flaw—the badge would easily confuse someone if they read the 10% of content by AI on a site wearing the badge. There’s also nothing stopping people from slapping the badge on AI-generated content and simply lying to people.
You might take a more cynical view if you dig deeper, though. The company is charging for various things, such as a monthly fee for businesses that want to display the badges.
We’ve talked about this before when we asked a simple question—
how do you convince people your artwork was made by a human
? We’re not sure we’ve yet found the answer, but this badge program is at least trying to do something about the issue. Share your human thoughts in the comments below. | 48 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733321",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T03:09:21",
"content": "Works great – until someone just puts it on AI generated content.The reason the ‘kosher’ or ‘halal’ or ‘UL’ tags work is because there’s a group that investigates and enforces the use of those marks – u... | 1,760,372,003.726661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/star-wars-inspired-cosplay-prop-uses-old-vintage-camera/ | Star Wars-Inspired Cosplay Prop Uses Old Vintage Camera | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cosplay",
"prop",
"star wars"
] | Lots of people make replica lightsabers from
Star Wars
or tricorders from
Star Trek.
Not so many people have tried to recreate the binoculars from
The Last Jedi
, but
[The Smugglers Room] whipped up a pretty rad pair from old parts.
It’s more of an
inspired
build rather than
screen-accurate,
but they’re still pretty neat. A Bell & Howell camera was the basis for the binoculars used in the film, in fact, and this build starts with the same tri-lens model. Found vintage objects are often used in sci-fi with some modifications, but more commonly in lower-budget productions.
Star Wars
can do it too, though, it seems.
Turning them into binoculars requires the construction of a viewfinder, which was made out of hand-cut Sintra PVC foam board. Lots of leather wrap had to be removed from the camera, too, which offered a happy accident—it left a heavily-weathered aluminum surface that looked great for a
Star Wars
prop. A few random controls were then added to disguise the camera as an advanced pair of futuristic binoculars. LED lighting was also installed internally to make the build glow as if it actually contained some powered sci-fi optics. It also got a hand-made leather strap for that rugged aesthetic so fitting for the film.
It’s not a functional build; we’d love to see someone build a set of AR or rangefinder binoculars that still look the part. However, this would be a great addition to any Poe Dameron costume you might have planned
for the next upcoming Comic Con
.
Here’s our question, though. Does it suck you out of your suspension of disbelief when filmmakers use found objects as the basis for props? Or is it a neat thing when you spot such an example? Video after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733301",
"author": "Brad Granath",
"timestamp": "2024-02-18T02:20:26",
"content": "Star Wars prop design is *entirely* found objects from around the time of the original production.See also: Luke’s lightsaber is a Graflex flash handle, ig88’s head is a flame tube from a jet, quigon... | 1,760,372,003.457067 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/back-to-basics-with-a-555-deep-dive/ | Back To Basics With A 555 Deep Dive | Dan Maloney | [
"hardware"
] | [
"555",
"back to basics",
"blinkenlights",
"deep dive",
"oscillator",
"should have used a 555",
"timer",
"tutorial"
] | Many of us could sit down at the bench and whip up a 555 circuit from memory. It’s really not that hard, which is a bit strange considering how flexible the ubiquitous chip is, and how many ways it can be wired up. But when was the last time you sat down and really thought about what goes on inside that little fleck of silicon?
If it’s been a while, then [DiodeGoneWild]’s
back-to-basics exploration of the 555
is worth a look. At first glance, this is just a quick blinkenlights build, which is completely the point of the exercise. By focusing on the simplest 555 circuits, [Diode] can show just what each pin on the chip does, using an outsized schematic that reflects exactly what’s going on with the breadboarded circuit. Most of the demos use the timer chip in free-running mode, but circuits using bistable and monostable modes sneak in at the end too.
Yes, this is basic stuff, but there’s a lot of value in looking at things like this with a fresh set of eyes. We’re impressed by [DiodeGoneWild]’s presentation; while most 555 tutorials focus on component selection and which pins to connect to what, this one takes the time to tell you why each component makes sense, and how the values affect the final result.
Curious about how the 555 came about? We’ve got
the inside scoop on that
. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733197",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T21:04:03",
"content": "Pah! Could have done it with, oh, wait.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6733208",
"author": "Vexer",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T21:20:... | 1,760,372,003.581418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/enthusiast-seeks-keycap-designer-for-alphasmart-neo/ | Enthusiast Seeks Keycap Designer For Alphasmart NEO | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3d model",
"AlphaSmart",
"AlphaSmart NEO",
"scissor switches"
] | If you were an American kid in the 1990s, chances are good that you may have been issued a little word processing machine by your school called an Alphasmart. These purpose-built machines created by an offshoot of Apple engineers were way cheaper than the average laptop at the time, and far more prepared to be handed over to the average child. The salesmen used to drop-kick them at trade shows to demonstrate their toughness.
Today, these machines are revered by writers, especially those who participate in NaNoWriMo, a yearly event in which people attempt to write the first draft of a novel during the month of November.
The Alphasmart NEO, NEO2, and Dana models are of particular note because they each have a really nice scissor-switch membrane keyboard. Yeah, that’s right. A really nice membrane keyboard.
The problem is that things wear out with time. As you may have guessed, Alphasmart is no longer around, and so they can’t offer replacement keycaps.
Can you help by creating a 3D model?
[E.F. Nordmed] and many others would sure appreciate it.
You may remember the Alphasmart NEO from these very pages.
We sure do love them for distraction-free writing. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733143",
"author": "stoneburner",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T18:21:08",
"content": "Maybe a better way to permanently fix the issue would be to create an custom replacement PCB with low profile mechanical switches, that way the keycaps can be easily replaced with current ones.Accordi... | 1,760,372,003.778672 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/17/wireless-all-the-things/ | Wireless All The Things! | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"newsletter",
"Rant",
"remote control",
"wireless"
] | Neither Tom Nardi nor I are exactly
young
anymore, and we can both remember a time when joysticks were actually connected with wires to the computer or console, for instance. Back then, even though wireless options were on the market, you’d still want the wired version if it was a reaction-speed game, because wireless links just used to be too slow.
Somehow, in the intervening years, and although we never even really noticed the transition as such, everything has become wireless. And that includes our own hacker projects. Sure, the ESP8266 and other WiFi-capable chips made a big difference, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for the nRF24 chipset, which made at least point-to-point wireless affordable and easy. Others will feel the same about ZigBee, but the point stands: nothing has wires anymore, except to charge back up.
The reason? As
this experiment comparing the latency of many different wireless connections
bears out, wireless data links have just gotten that good, to the point that the latency in the radio is on par with what you’d get over USB. And the relevant software ecosystems have made it easier to go wireless as well. Except for the extra power requirement, and for cases where you need to move a
lot
of data, there’s almost no reason that any of your devices need wires anymore.
Are you with us? Will you throw down your chains and go wireless?
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 48 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6733103",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2024-02-17T15:35:34",
"content": "No, Bluetooth latency is still lagging quite a bit behind, unless you manually adjust the delay.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6733109",
"au... | 1,760,372,003.953915 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/tool-demagnetizers-and-the-magnetic-stray-field/ | Tool Demagnetizers And The Magnetic Stray Field | Maya Posch | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"magnetism"
] | If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how those tool magnetizer/demagnetizer gadgets worked,
[Electromagnetic Videos] has produced
a pretty succinct and informative video on the subject.
The magnetizer/demagnetizer gadget after meeting its demise at a cutting disc. (Credit: Electromagnetic Videos, YouTube)
While the magnetizing step is quite straightforward and can be demonstrated even by just putting any old magnet against the screwdriver’s metal, it is the demagnetization step that doesn’t make intuitively sense, as the field lines of the magnets are supposed to align the (usually ferromagnetic) material’s magnetic dipole moments and thus create an ordered magnetic field within the screwdriver.
This is only part of the story, however, as the magnetic field outside of a magnet is termed the
demagnetizing field
(also ‘stray field’). A property of this field is that it acts upon the magnetization of e.g. ferromagnetic material in a way that reduces its magnetic moment, effectively ‘scrambling’ any existing magnetization.
By repeatedly moving a metal tool through this stray field, each time further and further away from the magnet, the magnetic moment reduces until any magnetization has effectively vanished. It is the kind of simple demonstration of magnetism that really should be part of any physics class thanks to its myriad of real-world uses, as this one toolbox gadget shows. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734854",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T17:47:31",
"content": "As long as it leads to good learning opportunities for the followers, who cares how these articles come to be?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6734871... | 1,760,372,004.001399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/this-week-in-security-wyze-screenconnect-and-untrustworthy-job-postings/ | This Week In Security: Wyze, ScreenConnect, And Untrustworthy Job Postings | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"screenConnect",
"spyware",
"Wyze"
] | For a smart home company with an emphasis on cloud-connected cameras, what could possibly be worse than accidentally showing active cameras to the wrong users?
Doing it again
, to far more users, less than 6 months after the previous incident.
The setup for this breach was an AWS problem, that caused a Wyze system outage last Friday morning. As the system was restored, the load spiked and a caching library took the brunt of the unintentional DDoS. This library apparently has a fail state of serving images and videos to the wrong users. An official report from Wyze mentions that this library had been recently added, and that the number of thumbnails shown to unauthorized users was around 13,000. Eek. There’s a reason we recommend picking one of the Open Source NVR systems here at Hackaday.
ScreenConnect Exploit in the Wild
A pair of vulnerabilities in ConnectWise ScreenConnect
were announced this week
,
Proof of Concepts were released
, and
are already being used in active exploitation
. The vulnerabilities are a CVSS 10.0 authentication bypass and a CVSS 8.4 path traversal bypass.
Huntress has a guide out, detailing how embarrassingly easy the vulnerabilities are to exploit. The authentication bypass is a result of a .Net quirk, that adding an additional directory on the end of a
.aspx
URL doesn’t actually change the destination, but is captured as PathInfo. This allows a bypass of the protections against re-running the initial setup wizard:
hostname/SetupWizard.aspx/literallyanything
The second vulnerability triggers during extension unpack, as the unzipping process doesn’t prevent path traversal. The most interesting part is that the unzip happens before the extension installation finishes. So an attacker can compromise the box, cancel the install, and leave very little trace of exploitation.
Chinese Spyware
A rather interesting story broke this week, where someone leaked documents to GitHub, detailing the capabilities of a Chinese spyware vendor. Unfortunately the repository has been closed, but efforts on X to analyze and archive the information is
enough to take a look at
.
#threatintel
someone just leaked a bunch of internal Chinese government documents on GitHub
https://t.co/BO8N64A7kF
— 安坂星海 Azaka 🐼 VTuber (@AzakaSekai_)
February 18, 2024
Some of the capabilities are interesting and yet straightforward, like capturing Twitter information, reading DMs, and posting on the victim’s account. The vendor boasts of a custom Remote Access Trojan for Windows, with all the normal features, from a remote shell to keylogging and fill access.
Things take a turn for the weird when we get to iOS support. The claim is that all versions are supported, and without any jailbreak it has access to GPS, files, contacts, and real-time audio.
Linux is supported, but CentOS 5-7 and Ubuntu 12 and 14. That’s some oddly specific, and oddly old distros. Some of the
other documents
seem to indicate this is a dump of some old data, with out-of-date interfaces shown in screenshots. Digging into the rest of the documents seems to indicate this data dump is from a small red-team that sold their services to regional Chinese government bodies. It’s unclear why the records were dumped online now, but it’s a fascinating look into how that particular part of the world works.
Don’t Trust North-Korean Job Postings
North Korean attackers have been known to reach out to vulnerability researchers under the guise of sharing research, only to send them “research” that’s actually malware, in an attempt to get access to zero-days. In a similar campaign, it seems these same actors are looking for software developers, and making fraudulent job offers. The hook here seems to be a coding test, that
requires the use of a specific malicious repository
.
The discovered malware seems to be the same or similar campaign to
one discovered by Unit42 in late 2023
. Most interesting is that the Phylum researchers have tracked activity in this campaign as late as February 21 of 2024. Malicious actors are moving repositories around, attempting to keep the campaign alive.
Bits and Bytes
The Yealink Configuration Encrypt Tool
used a single global AES key
to generate encrypted phone configurations. This means that all those “encrypted” configs are easy pickings for decryption. It also means trivial replacement of settings. Not great. Version 1.2 fixes the issue, but all those old config files are forever effectively in the clear.
Joomla has
fixed a quartet of medium severity issues
that could make for a nasty surprise for a Joomla admin. The most serious is a Cross-Site scripting flaw that allowed unsanitized addresses. There are technical details missing, including whether that’s e-mail or physical addresses. Either way, 4.4.3 and 5.0.3 are out with the fixes, so roll it out!
And finally, in the why-we-can’t-have-nice-things file, SSH Snake is now
being used by threat actors
in real attacks. We
covered this nifty tool
earlier this year, as a great way to audit how systems are tied together with ssh keys. And of course, Sysdig researchers have found it being used in the wild. I do regret their choice to call it a worm. And it’s probably doomed to be one of those tools that is perfectly legitimate, and yet is forever cursed to be flagged and blocked by security systems. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734818",
"author": "Leithoa",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T15:54:27",
"content": "FWIW Wyze released an experimental firmware that lets you use their cameras as a simple rtsp camera. The firmware is no longer supported but it’s still linked to on some of their forum posts.",
"paren... | 1,760,372,004.042016 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/your-noisy-fingerprints-vulnerable-to-new-side-channel-attack/ | Your Noisy Fingerprints Vulnerable To New Side-Channel Attack | Dan Maloney | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"AFIS",
"ai",
"fingerprint",
"friction",
"GaN",
"MasterPrint",
"MEMS",
"smartphone",
"spectrogram"
] | Here’s a warning we never thought we’d have to give: when you’re in an audio or video call on your phone, avoid the temptation to doomscroll or use an app that requires a lot of swiping. Doing so just might save you from getting your identity stolen through the most improbable vector imaginable — by
listening to the sound your fingerprints make on the phone’s screen
(PDF).
Now, we love a good side-channel attack as much as anyone, and we’ve covered a lot of them over the years. But things like exfiltrating data by
blinking hard drive lights
or
turning GPUs into radio transmitters
always seemed a little far-fetched to be the basis of a field-practical exploit. But PrintListener, as [Man Zhou]
et al
dub their experimental system, seems much more feasible, even if it requires a ton of complex math and some AI help. At the heart of the attack are the nearly imperceptible sounds caused by friction between a user’s fingerprints and the glass screen on the phone. These sounds are recorded along with whatever else is going on at the time, such as a video conference or an online gaming session. The recordings are preprocessed to remove background noise and subjected to spectral analysis, which is sensitive enough to detect the whorls, loops, and arches of the unsuspecting user’s finger.
Once fingerprint patterns have been extracted, they’re used to synthesize a set of five similar fingerprints using
MasterPrint
, a generative adversarial network (GAN). MasterPrint can generate fingerprints that can unlock phones all by itself, but seeding the process with patterns from a specific user increases the odds of success. The researchers claim they can defeat Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) readers between 9% and 30% of the time using PrintListener — not fabulous performance, but still pretty scary given how new this is. | 28 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734757",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T12:13:37",
"content": "“not fabulous performance, but still pretty scary given how new this is”A major pitfall in every new technology is assuming that its progress continues at the same rate. Ignoring the fact that everything has ... | 1,760,372,004.1782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/23/esp32-oscilloscope-skips-screen-for-the-browser/ | ESP32 Oscilloscope Skips Screen For The Browser | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"browser",
"ESP32",
"i2c",
"oscilloscope",
"remote",
"screen",
"test equipment"
] | An oscilloscope can be an expensive piece of equipment, but not every measurement needs four channels and gigahertz sampling rates. For plenty of home labs, old oscilloscopes with CRTs can be found on the used marketplace for a song that are still more than capable of getting the job done, but even these can be overpowered (not to mention extremely bulky). If you’re looking for something even cheaper, and quite a bit smaller, this
ESP32 scope from [BojanJurca]
might fit the bill.
The resulting device manages to keep costs extremely low, but not without a trade-off. For this piece of test equipment, sampling is done over the I2C bus on the ESP32, which can manage a little over 700 samples per second with support for two channels. With the ESP32 connected to a wireless network, the data it captures can be viewed from a browser in lieu of an attached screen, which also keeps the size of the device exceptionally small. While it’s not a speed demon, that’s more than fast enough to capture waveforms from plenty of devices or our own circuit prototypes in a form factor that can fit even the smallest spaces.
Of course for work on devices with faster switching times, it’s always good to keep a benchtop oscilloscope around. But as far as we can tell this one is the least expensive, smallest, and most capable we’ve come across that would work for plenty of troubleshooting or testing scenarios in a pinch. We’ve seen others based on slightly more powerful microcontrollers like
this one based on the STM32
and
this other built around the Wio Terminal with a SAMD51
, both of which also include built-in screens. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734742",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T09:07:43",
"content": "Genuinely one of the best ideas I’ve seen in a long while. Especially with the triggering I don’t think I’d often need anything else.All it needs is a JavaScript based asteroids implementation.",
"p... | 1,760,372,004.112042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/the-latest-advancements-in-portable-n64-modding/ | The Latest Advancements In Portable N64 Modding | Donald Papp | [
"classic hacks",
"Games",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"mod",
"n64",
"nintendo",
"portable"
] | [Chris Downing] has been in the mod scene a long time, and
his 5th GeN64 Portable
is his most modern portable Nintendo 64 yet. The new build has an improved form factor, makes smart use of 3D printing and CNC cutting, efficiently uses PCBs to reduce wiring, and incorporates a battery level indicator. That last feature is a real quality of life improvement, nicely complementing the ability to charge over USB-C.
What’s interesting about builds like this is that it’s all about the execution. The basic parts required to mod a classic games console into a portable unit are pretty well understood, and off-the-shelf modules like button assemblies exist to make the job far easier than it was back in the day when all had to be done from scratch. We’ve admired
[Chris Downing]’s previous builds
, and what differentiates one mod from another really comes down to layout and execution, and that’s where the
5th GeN64 Portable
shines.
[Chris] makes great use of 3D printing (both filament-based and resin) to make fantastic custom buttons as well as an effective enclosure that feels good to hold. The front screen protector combines color printing on adhesive vinyl with a CNC-cut clear panel for a clean look, but the real winner is the even more refined use of fabricated PCBs to put everything exactly where he wants it.
Modifying existing hardware into a different shape tends to involve a lot of wiring. Lots of wires in a space-constrained device eats up both time and space while introducing points of failure, and invites mistakes during assembly. PCBs (especially flexible PCBs) are a great way to solve these problems, and the fact that they are so readily available nowadays is fantastic. The
first link
at the top of this post has some great pictures and details of the build process, and you can see the finished unit showcased in the video, embedded below.
All of these advancements mean it’s so much easier to build and test compared to having to solder assemblies point-to-point. That’s a valid way to make something, but it can also lead to
a successful creation that one
never
wants to have to build again
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734810",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T15:15:55",
"content": "It’s impressive but at this point wouldn’t it just be better to simply make a full PCB then transplant a few key components?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,004.618975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/the-eliza-archaeology-project-uncovering-the-original-eliza/ | The ELIZA Archaeology Project: Uncovering The Original ELIZA | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"artificial intelligence",
"eliza",
"natural language processing"
] | Since ELIZA was created by [Joseph Weizenbaum] in the 1960s, its success had led to many variations and ports being written over the intervening decades. The goal of the
ELIZA Archaeology Project
by Stanford, USC, Oxford and other university
teams
is to explore and uncover as much of this history as possible, starting with the original 1960s code. As noted in
a recent blog post
by [Anthony Hay], most of the intervening ‘ELIZA’ versions seem to have been more inspired by the original rather than accurate replicas or extensions of the original. This raises the question of what the original program really looked like, a question which wasn’t answered until 2020 when the original source code was rediscovered.
A common misconception about ELIZA was that it was written in Lisp, but it was actually written in MAD-SLIP, with
MAD
being an ALGOL 58-inspired language and
SLIP
(Symmetric LIst Processor) an extension library written by [Weizenbaum], first for Fortran and then for MAD and ALGOL. Ultimately the original code was found in the bowels of the MIT archives, which is
now finally available
for the world to see.
This version of ELIZA is from 1965 and predates the publication of
[Weizenbaum]’s paper
(PDF) in the January 1966
Communications of the ACM
journal issue in which he details the workings of the code, as well as a partial listing. Thanks to some archive spelunking efforts, we can now once again see the full code as half a century of ELIZA history is being puzzled back together. Here project member [Jeff Shrager] would like to remind us that the team very much welcomes assistance from the community in this effort.
Thanks to [Jeff Shrager] for the tip, as well as his efforts on this archaeological project. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734722",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T05:06:14",
"content": "chatgpt is embarrassed by its primitive ancestors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6734725",
"author": "zeiche",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T06... | 1,760,372,004.511734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/22/making-wooden-shingles-with-hand-tools/ | Making Wooden Shingles With Hand Tools | Navarre Bartz | [
"home hacks",
"Retrotechtacular",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"axe",
"froe",
"roofing",
"shake",
"shingle",
"wood",
"woodworking"
] | While they have mostly been replaced with other roofing technologies, wooden shingles have a certain rustic charm. If you’re curious about
how to make them by hand
, [Harry Rogers] takes us through his friend [John] making some.
There are two primary means of splitting a log for making shingles (or shakes). The first is radial, like one would cut a pie, and the other is lateral, with all the cuts in the same orientation. Using a froe, the log is split in progressively smaller halves to control the way the grain splits down the length of the log and minimize waste. Larger logs result in less waste and lend themselves to the radial method, while smaller logs must be cut laterally. Laterally cut shingles have a higher propensity for warping and other issues, but will work when larger logs are not available.
Once the pieces are split out of the log, they are trimmed with an axe, including removing the outer sapwood which is the main attractant for bugs and other creatures that might try eating your roof. Once down to approximately the right dimensions, the shingle is then smoothed out on a shave horse with a draw knife. Interestingly, the hand-made shingles have a longer lifespan than those sawn since the process works more with the grain of the wood and introduces fewer opportunities for water to seep into the shingles.
If you’re looking for something more solarpunk and less cottagecore for your house, maybe try a
green solar roof
, and if you’ve got a glass roof, try cleaning it with
the Grawler
. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6734697",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2024-02-23T01:24:04",
"content": "I saw this and thought “wait, haven’t I seen this before?”Turns out yeah I did, the video is 6 years old.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6734701",... | 1,760,372,004.673145 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/slime-mold-powered-smart-watches-see-humans-fall-in-love-with-the-goo/ | Slime Mold-Powered Smart Watches See Humans Fall In Love With The Goo | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"medicine",
"mold",
"slime mold",
"tamagotchi"
] | Humans are very good at anthropomorphising things. That is, giving them human characteristics, like ourselves. We do it with animals—see just about any cartoon—and we even do it with our own planet—see Mother Nature. But we often extend that courtesy even further, giving names to our cars and putting faces on our computers as well.
A recent study has borne this out in amusing fashion. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that human attitudes towards a device can change if they are required to take actions to look after it. Enter the slime mold smartwatch,
and a gooey, heartwarming story of love and care between human and machine, mediated by mold.
Looking After You
Behavior of the slime mold over 20 hours. Credit:
research paper
The research was based around a simple watch-based heart rate monitor. When powered up, the watch displays the user’s heart rate. The twist is that the watch features a slime mold as a “living wire.” When healthy and alive, the slime mold can conduct a small amount of electricity that enables the heart rate sensor. When dried up and dormant, the mold doesn’t conduct, and the watch shuts down. The user must keep the slime mold by alive by caring for it. If the mold is neglected, the watch shuts off until care is resumed and the mold is resucitated.
The slime mold becomes a “living wire” when properly nourished, which enables the heart rate monitor. The slime mold doesn’t actually conduct all the power to the watch, just a low-current enable signal to an op-amp.
On the surface of it, it sounds very silly. It’s a heart monitor that’s more difficult to keep running than a normal one, which only requires infrequent battery changes. But the point of the study was to explore how the requirement to care for the mold influenced the human users of the device.
The study had users wear the watch for between 9-14 days. Over that time, the researchers found that humans formed a relationship with their watches, based around the fact that they were looking after a living thing. It inspired feelings of responsibility and affection towards the mold, spurring the users on to maintain and care for the mold.
Caring for the mold (
physarum polycephalum
) required regular attention. The mold needed oats provided every 2 days and droplets of water once or twice a day. The “living wire” simply connects power to the input of an op-amp which then enables the heart rate sensor on the smart watch.
The study involved five participants, four of whom expressed that they saw the slime mold as “a little friend and/or pet.” One participant noted that “carrying this little friend also made me feel happy and peaceful.” Another enlisted the help of her partner to maintain her slime mold while she was sick. “I was taking care of the slime and feeding it oats and stuff, my partner was also feeding me oatmeal because I was sick and so she was like you’re my little slime and I was like yeah, I am,” said the participant.
The slime mold in both conducting (left) and non-conducting (right) states. Note that the heart rate monitor is only available when the mold is nourished and grown.
As a part of the study, participants were also instructed to neglect the mold and let it dry out as it drew to a close. Interestingly, this inspired feelings of sadness or guilt for all participants. Several referred to the mold as “dead,” though the dried mold is actually only in a dormant phase in that state. One noted that she avoided looking at the mold in this state, noting it made her feel “a little bit sad.” When asked about how they would dispose of the watch, several participants talked about rehoming it like a pet, or considered continuing to look after the mold in the absence of the device.
By and large, humans don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the life and times of their smartwatches, nor slime molds, either. And yet, the combination of one with the other created a device to be cared for that inspired feelings of warmth and responsibility in study participants. The slime became anthropomorphised to some degree, despite lacking any real personality or character traits of a sentient being.
In much the same way people bonded with
Tamagotchi
digital pets way back when, it seems the same effect can be generated with a simple watch and some greeny-yellow goo. Tell people to look after something, even a mold, and it seems they’ll bond with it and form a connection. It’s an interesting trait of our species, and an inspiring one at that.
[Thanks to ElytraMithra for the tip!] | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732755",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T18:11:12",
"content": "This is the kind of experiment where they always know what message they want to put across before they do anything.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6732... | 1,760,372,004.569586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/hackaday-podcast-episode-258-so-much-unix-flipper-flip-out-and-the-bus-pirate-5/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 258: So Much Unix, Flipper Flip-out, And The Bus Pirate 5 | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi discuss all the week’s best and most interesting hacks and stories, starting with Canada’s misguided ban on the Flipper Zero for being too spooky. From there they’ll look at the state-of-the-art in the sub-$100 3D printer category, Apple’s latest “Right to Repair” loophole, running UNIX on the NES (and how it’s different from Japan’s Famicom), and the latency of various wireless protocols.
After singing the praises of the new Bus Pirate 5, discussion moves on to embedded Linux on spacecraft, artfully lifting IC pins, and the saga of the blue LED. Finally you’ll hear the how and why behind electrical steel, and marvel at a Mach 10 missile that (luckily) never needed to be used.
Grab a copy for yourself
if you want to listen offline.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 258 Show Notes:
News:
Canada Bans Flipper Zero Over What It Imagines It Does
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [Bobby Tables] who won a Podcast T-shirt by identifying the world’s longest echo.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
EasyThreed K9: The Value In A €72 AliExpress FDM 3D Printer
Apple Pushes Back On Right To Repair Bill Due To Parts Pairing
Benchmarking Latency Across Common Wireless Links For MCUs
How Different Are SpaceX Thermal Tiles From The Space Shuttle’s?
Running UNIX On A Nintendo Entertainment System
Hands On: Bus Pirate 5
How-to: The Bus Pirate, Universal Serial Interface
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Simple Magnetic Levitator
The Usage Of Embedded Linux In Spacecraft
Droplet Watch Keeps Time Via Electrowetting
Tiny Flip Display
Lift Those Pins With Ease
Tom’s Picks:
Memory Box Shows Photos Based On Fingerprint
AI-Powered Bumper Sticker Provides Context-Sensitive Urban Camouflage
Shuji Nakamura: The Man Who Gave Us The Blue LED Despite All Odds
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Electrical Steel: The Material At Heart Of The Grid
Sprint: The Mach 10 Magic Missile That Wasn’t Magic Enough | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732764",
"author": "(Little) Bobby Tables.",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T18:38:11",
"content": "So – how do I claim my T-Shirt",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6732790",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,004.450646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/compact-cycloidal-drive-lives-inside-this-custom-brushless-motor/ | Compact Cycloidal Drive Lives Inside This Custom Brushless Motor | Dan Maloney | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"actuator",
"BLDC",
"brushless",
"cycloidal",
"eccentric",
"robot",
"rotor",
"stator"
] | With the popularity of robot dogs, many people have gotten on the bandwagon and tried building DIY versions. Most of them end up attaching a gearbox to an off-the-shelf brushless motor and call it a day. Not everyone goes that way, though, which is why
this internal cycloidal drive actuator
caught our eye.
Taking design cues from the MIT Mini Cheetah, [Aaed Musa] approached his actuator from the inside out, literally. His 3D printed cycloidal gearbox is designed to fit inside the stator of a BLDC motor. And not just any BLDC motor, but one built mostly from scratch using a hand-wound — and unwound, and wound again — stator along with a rotor that started as a printed part but was eventually machined from steel. Apart from its fixed ring, the cycloidal drive was mostly 3D printed, with everything fitting nicely inside the stator.
The video below shows the design and assembly process as well as testing of the finished drive. It seems to do really well with speed and positional accuracy, and it delivers a substantial amount of torque. Maybe a little too much, though; testing it with a heavy weight on the end of an arm got the stator coils hot enough to warp the printed parts within. But no matter; this was only a prototype after all. [Aaed] says improvements are in the works, including replacing all the plastic parts with metal ones.
Need a little background on cycloidal drives?
They’re pretty cool
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732717",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T16:46:32",
"content": "How’s vibration?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycloidal_drive",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6732734",
"author": "Canuckfire",
"t... | 1,760,372,004.91138 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/this-week-in-security-filename-not-sanitized-monikerlink-and-snap-attack/ | This Week In Security: Filename Not Sanitized, MonikerLink, And Snap Attack! | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ClamAV",
"ntlm",
"snap",
"This Week in Security"
] | Reading through
a vulnerability report about ClamAV
, I came across a phrase that filled me with dread: “The file name is not sanitized”. It’s a feature,
VirusEvent
, that can be enabled in the ClamnAV config. And that configuration includes a string formatting function, where the string includes
%v
and
%s
, which gets replaced with a detected virus name and the file name from the email. And now you see the problem, I hope: The filename is attacker supplied input.
Where this really gets out of hand is what ClamAV does with this string.
execle("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", buffer_cmd, NULL, env)
. So let’s talk defensive program design for a minute. When it comes to running a secondary command, there are two general options,
system()
and the
exec*()
family of system calls.
system()
is very simple to use. It pauses execution of the main process and asks the operating system to run a string, just as if the user had typed that command into the shell. While this is very convenient to use, there is a security problem if any of that command string is user-supplied. All it takes is a semicolon or ampersand to break assumptions and inject a command.
To the rescue comes
exec()
. It’s a bit more complicated to use, requiring the programmer to manually call
fork()
and
wait()
. But it’s not running the command via the shell.
exec()
executes a program directly, totally eliminating the potential for command injection! Except… oops.
Yeah,
exec()
and related calls don’t offer any security protections when you use them to execute
/bin/sh
. I suspect the code was written this way to allow running a script without specifying
/bin/sh
in the config. The
official fix was to disable
the filename format character, and instead supply it as an environment variable. That certainly works, and that fix is available in 1.0.5, 1.2.2, and 1.3.0.
The real danger here is that we have another case where some hardware appliance manufacturer has used ClamAV for email filtering, and uses this configuration by default. That’s how we get orders from CISA to unplug your hardware, because it’s already compromised.
MonikerLink
Outlook
tries to protect its users
. You can click on an HTTP or HTTPS link in an email, and Outlook will launch a browser to handle it. There are other URI protocols. A bunch of them,
it turns out
. When you click a link using a different URI scheme, Outlook warns you. If that link is a remote SMB share, it’s blocked altogether. MonikerLink is the simple addition of an exclamation mark and some characters following, and it completely bypasses Outlook’s safeguard against these links.
The reason is that a link with an exclamation mark is seen as a “composite moniker”. In fact, the link is handled via the Component Object Model (COM), which has some interesting implications in Windows. The application that handles the link is actually run as a COM server, and in some cases runs in the background without any user-visible effect on the system. This works with Outlook’s Protected view, so is a relatively powerful primitive. It’s patched in the February round of Microsoft security updates.
There is an interesting tie-in with another bug fixed in the same Patch Tuesday fixes.
Microsoft Exchange was vulnerable to an NTLM relay attack
, and it was actively exploited before the patch. The flaw here is that a captured Net-NTLMv2 hash can be used in a pass-the-hash attack to authenticate with an Exchange server. And one way to obtain such a hash is to trick the target into making an SMB connection, just what MonikerLink enables.
Oh Snap!
Canonical has been pushing their Snap containerized apps in Ubuntu for several years now. A Snap is something of a cross between a Docker image and a flatpak. A Snap is an application that is bundled with its dependent libraries, to have much less dependencies on the end target’s system libraries. A snap can be a graphical application like Firefox or LibreOffice, but they can also be used for daemons and services, much like Docker. Snaps offer some impressive sandboxing support via AppArmor when used on Ubuntu systems. And while some applications suffer from a minor slowdown, particularly on first launching, the system seems to work well. But
there’s a caveat to be aware of
.
Ubuntu also has the useful command-not-found package that runs anytime an invalid command is run on the command line. This utility searches the system’s sources of packages for an executable that matches. What’s interesting is that command-not-found will also go looking for snaps that provide a matching application. And if a Snap runs in strict mode, and checks a couple other boxes, it doesn’t require a manual review. Combining that quirk with the ability of a snap to take any unclaimed application name, it’s pretty easy to get an arbitrary snap as the top suggestion for a command-not-found suggestion.
And while the sandboxing of snaps does help mitigate this significantly, it is interesting that we essentially have a typosquatting potential right on the desktop. There are some shenanigans a snap can pull off, especially when running on an X11 system. For instance, on X11, all desktop applications can see all the keyboard input. Stealth keylogger?
So, You Want to Smuggle Some JSON
We usually talk about HTTP request smuggling, but that’s not the only place data can get smuggled.
[Grimminck] introduces JSON Smuggling
, calling it “a far-fetched intrusion detection evasion technique”. The central concept here is that the JSON spec states that “Insignificant whitespace is allowed before or after any of the six structural characters.” That’s a space, tab, line feed, and carriage return. That’s an alphabet of four different characters to encode data, where no one would think to look. I don’t know that this exact technique is going to revolutionize the world of cybersecurity, but it’s the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that’s always interesting to take a look at.
Bits and Bytes
The explosion in popularity in Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought some clever not-quite-breaches, like convincing the LLM that it’s Dan, or a Linux command line. These pseudo jailbreaks are amusing and maybe useful, but it’s worth keeping in mind that LLMs are new web services, and it’s likely there are the same old security problems to be found. Like this one, where
way too much data was getting cached
. That cache lives behind a CDN, and there was a URL parsing confusion issue at play. Put simply, trick a ChatGPT user into visiting a malicious link, and their authentication token gets cached by the CDN, easily accessed by the attacker.
There have been serious vulnerabilities fixed in
Jetbrains TeamCity
, in the
SonicSall SonicOS
, and
Fortiguard’s FortiOS and FortiProxy products
. The FortiGuard issue is a remote unauthenticated code execution, while the other two are unauthenticated access and account takeover problems. All three are hair-on-fire issues, and need to get addressed right away. Not content with being the most severe, FortiGuard also reports that this is being exploited in the wild.
And finally, let’s talk about
a different sort of bounty
. The US Department of State has put a bounty of ten million dollars on the head of Hive ransomware leaders, and a mere five million dollars for information on anyone else involved in the group’s activities. Ransomware pays, but not that well. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732688",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T16:03:44",
"content": "No mention of the latest leak reported by Brian Krebs two days ago?“U. S. Internet”, whose Securance unit is supposed to provide email filtering for businesses, had an open web page that listedevery oneof the... | 1,760,372,004.951913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/the-latest-windows-11-release-might-not-work-on-your-oldest-machines/ | The Latest Windows 11 Release Might Not Work On Your Oldest Machines | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"microsoft",
"obsolescence",
"Windows 11"
] | Everybody knows you can’t install Windows XP on a 386, or Windows 95 on an original IBM PC. But for Windows 11, the goalposts seem to be changing with newer releases of the existing OS. As covered by
The Register,
it appears the latest Windows 11 24H2 update might be incompatible with older machines.
It’s all down to the POPCNT CPU instruction. As shared
on Twitter
by [TheBobPony], the instruction appears in a number of Windows 11 system files, including kernel and USB XHCI drivers. Thus, it appears that any CPU not able to run this instruction will not be able to boot Windows 11. POPCNT was first included in AMD’s Barcelona architecture in 2007, and Intel’s Core processors in 2008. It’s an instruction for counting set bits in a word.
Ultimately, the effect is that computers with older CPUs will no longer be able to run the latest version of Windows 11. It could be as simple as Microsoft engineers enabling more modern CPU instructions at compilation time. However, given affected hardware is more than 15 years old, it’s perhaps likely that Microsoft is perfectly willing to cut these machines off from using the latest versions of its main operating system.
We’ve talked about this phenomenon before, too.
In any case, keep a close eye on Windows update if you’re running super-old hardware. Let us know if you’ll be affected in the comments.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip! | 80 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732583",
"author": "Bob Thing",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T12:23:29",
"content": "One of the reasons for removing support for vaguely recent CPUs was the hardware vulnerabilities found in predictive branching. Patching against these in software added massive complexity and performanc... | 1,760,372,004.867264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/16/all-sky-camera-checks-for-aurora/ | All-Sky Camera Checks For Aurora | Bryan Cockfield | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Space"
] | [
"all-sky camera",
"aurora",
"camera",
"northern lights",
"plumbing",
"PVC",
"raspberry pi",
"wide angle lens"
] | The aurora borealis (and its southern equivalent, the aurora australis) is a fleeting and somewhat rare phenomenon that produces vivid curtains of color in the sky at extreme latitudes. It’s a common tourist activity to travel to areas where the aurora is more prevalent in order to catch a glimpse of it. The best opportunities are in the winter though, and since most people don’t want to spend hours outside on a cold night night in high latitudes, an all-sky camera
like this one from [Frank]
can help notify its users when an aurora is happening.
Because of the extreme temperatures involved, this is a little more involved than simply pointing a camera at the sky and hoping for the best. The enclosure and all electronics need to be able to withstand -50°C and operate at at least -30. For the enclosure, [Frank] is going with PVC tubing with a clear dome glued into a top fits to the end of the pipe, providing a water-resistant enclosure. A Raspberry Pi with a wide-angle lens camera sits on a 3D printed carriage so it can easily slide inside. The electronics use power-over-ethernet (PoE) rather than a battery due to the temperature extremes, which conveniently provides networking capabilities for viewing the images.
This is only part one of this build — in part two [Frank] is planning to build a system which can use this camera assembly to detect the aurora automatically and send out notifications when it sees it. Watching the night sky from the comfort of a warm house or sauna isn’t the only reason for putting an all-sky camera to use, either. They can also be used
to observe meteors as they fall
and then triangulate the position of the meteorites on the ground. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732558",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T11:13:57",
"content": "Nice little project, I’m always on the Aurora hunt. I am looking forward to reading the detection process, I assume it will be an area/colour based detector but maybe there’s a curve ball in there?",
"p... | 1,760,372,004.991583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/how-intel-gave-us-the-pci-bus-while-burying-vesas-vl-bus/ | How Intel Gave Us The PCI Bus While Burying VESA’s VL-Bus | Maya Posch | [
"History"
] | [
"intel",
"pci",
"vesa local bus"
] | Gigabyte GA486IM mainboard from 1994 with ISA, VLB and PCI slots. (Credit:
Rjluna2
, Wikimedia)
The early days of home computing were quite a jungle of different standards and convoluted solutions to make one piece of hardware work on as many different platforms as possible. IBM’s PC was an unexpected shift here, as with its expansion card-based system (retroactively called the ISA bus) it inspired a new evolution in computers. Of course, by the early 1990s the ISA bus couldn’t keep up with hardware demands, and a successor was needed. Many expected this to be VESA’s VLB, but as [Ernie Smith] regales us in
a recent article
in
Tedium
, Intel came out of left field with its PCI standard after initially backing
VLB
.
IBM, of course, wanted to see its own proprietary MCA standard used, while VLB was an open standard. One big issue with VLB is that it isn’t a new bus as such, but rather an additional slot tacked onto the existing ISA bus, as it was then called. While the reasoning for PCI was sound, with it being a compact, 32-bit (also 64-bit) design with plug and play and more complex but also more powerful PCI controller, its announcement came right before VLB was supposed to be announced.
Although there was some worry that having both VLB and PCI in the market competing would be bad, ultimately few mainboards ended up supporting VLB, and VLB quietly vanished. Later on PCI was extended into the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) that enabled the GPU revolution of the late 90s and still coexists with its PCIe successor. We covered making
your own ISA and PCI
cards a while ago, which shows that although PCI is more complex than ISA, it’s still well within the reach of today’s hobbyist,
unlike PCIe
which ramps up the hardware requirements.
Top image: PC AT mainboard with both 16-bit ISA and 32-bit PCI slots. (Credit:
htomari, Flickr
) | 39 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732440",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T08:01:37",
"content": "From what I remember, VLB was only meant to be very temporarily because it took too much time to deveop PCI. And the linked to Wikipedia confirms this:> The VESA Local Bus was designed as a stopgap soluti... | 1,760,372,005.072589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/you-could-be-relatively-cooler-in-diamond-coated-clothing/ | You Could Be Relatively Cooler In Diamond-Coated Clothing | Kristina Panos | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"clothing",
"cooling clothing",
"nanodiamonds"
] | We vaguely remember what we believe was a DuPont commercial in the late ’80s or early ’90s touting that one day, they would make clothing that could cool you. And sure, there is clothing that allows heat to escape — fishnet shirts come to mind most immediately — but a group of scientists at Australia’s RMIT University have applied a coating of nanodiamonds to cotton in order to make
fabric that goes a step further, drawing heat away from the body.
While you may be picturing blinged-out blouses, the truth is that nanodiamonds are cheap and non-glittery. They bear the same carbon-lattice structure as regular diamonds, which gives them great thermal conductivity.
In order to create cooling fabric, the scientists combined nanodiamond powder with polyurethane and a solvent, and applied the solution to one side of a sheet of cotton via electrospinning. This technique uses electric force to spin charged threads up into the diameters of fiber. The other side was left uncoated so that it doesn’t draw in heat.
Studies showed that the treated samples released 2 to 3 ºC (3.6 to 5.4 ºF) more heat via the coated side throughout the cooling period. While a couple of degrees may not seem like much, it could mean the difference between using a fan or using an air conditioner to cool off further.
Another application could be to keep buildings from overheating. We’ve seen developments in that area,
usually in the form of ultra-white paint
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732292",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T03:11:34",
"content": "Seeing ” treated samples released 2 to 3 ºC (3.6 to 5.4 ºF) more heat “, I had to go check the original source. Sure enough, that nonsensical statement is right from that fluff piece. Maybe something got l... | 1,760,372,005.181282 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/why-stealing-a-car-with-flipper-zero-is-a-silly-idea/ | Why Stealing A Car With Flipper Zero Is A Silly Idea | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"car theft",
"flipper zero"
] | In another regular installment of politicians making ridiculous statements about technology, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, [François-Philippe Champagne], suggested banning Flipper Zero and similar devices from sale in the country, while accusing them of being used for ‘stealing cars’ and similar. This didn’t sit right with [Peter Fairlie] who put together a comprehensive overview video of
how car thieves really steal cars
. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main method is CAN bus injection, for which a Flipper Zero is actually a terribly clumsy device. Rather you’d use a custom piece of kit that automates the process.
You can also find these devices being sold all over the internet as so-called ‘Emergency Start’ devices for sale all over the internet, all of which use weaknesses in the car’s CAN bus network. The common problem appears to be that with these days even the lights on the car being part of the CAN network, an attacker can gain access for injection purposes. This way no key fob is needed, and the ignition system can be triggered with the usual safeties and lockouts being circumvented.
Ultimately, although the Flipper Zero is a rather cutesy toy, it doesn’t do anything that cannot be done cheaper and more effectively by anyone with a bit of CAN bus knowledge and a disregard for the law.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732237",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2024-02-16T00:32:58",
"content": "Flipper Zero is a toy marketed as a bad-boy hacker tool. This marketing is going to come back to haunt Flipper, hopefully it won’t taint others in the process…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,372,005.130981 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/brushless-esc-becomes-dual-motor-brushed-esc-with-a-few-changes/ | Brushless ESC Becomes Dual-Motor Brushed ESC With A Few Changes | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"brushed motor",
"brushless motor",
"esc",
"motor"
] | What is a brushless ESC, really? Well, generally, it’s usually a microcontroller with a whole lot of power transistors hanging off it to drive three phases of brushless motor coils. [Frank Zhao] realised that with a little reprogramming, you could simply
use a brushless ESC to independently run two brushed motors.
Thus, he whipped up a custom firmware for various AM32-compatible ESCs to do just that.
The idea of the project is to enable a single lightweight ESC to run two brushed motors for combat robots. Dual-motor brushed ESCs can be hard to find and expensive, whereas single-motor brushless ESCs are readily available. The trick is to wire up the two brushed motors such that each motor gets one phase wire of its own, and the two motors share the middle phase wire. This allows independent control of both motors via the brushless ESC’s three half-bridges, by setting the middle wire to half voltage. Depending on how you set it up, the system can be configured in a variety of ways to suit different situations.
[Frank’s] firmware is available
on Github
for the curious. He lists compatible ESCs there, and notes that you’ll need to install the AM32 ESC firmware before flashing his version to make everything work correctly.
The
VESC project
has long supported brushed motor operation, too, though not in a tandem configuration. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own neat ESC hacks, don’t hesitate to hit us up
on the tipsline! | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732167",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T21:03:22",
"content": "There are already many stock ESC’s that do this already without changing any firmware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6732263",
"author": "pe... | 1,760,372,005.331533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/retrotechtacular-some-days-you-just-cant-get-rid-of-a-nuclear-bomb/ | Retrotechtacular: Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid Of A Nuclear Bomb | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"bomb",
"decommision",
"disassembly",
"dismantlement",
"nuclear",
"Pantex",
"Plutonium",
"retrotechtacular"
] | It may seem a bit obvious to say so, but when a munition of just about any kind is designed, little thought is typically given to how to dispose of it. After all, if you build something that’s supposed to blow up, that pretty much takes care of the disposal process, right?
But what if you design something that’s supposed to blow up only if things go really,
really
wrong? Like nuclear weapons, for instance? In that case, you’ll want to disassemble them with the utmost care.
This 1993 film
, produced by the US Department of Energy, gives a high-level overview of nuclear weapons decommissioning at the Pantex plant in Texas. Fair warning: this film was originally on a VHS tape, one that looks like it sat in a hot attic for quite a few years before being transferred to DVD and thence to YouTube. So the picture quality is lousy, in some points nearly unwatchably so. Then again, given the subject matter that may be a feature rather than a bug.
Despite the video quality, there’s a lot to learn from this film. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of nuclear weapons is how boring they look. The film is focused on the B61 thermonuclear gravity bomb, and to the untrained eye, it just looks like any other conventional bomb. We suppose that’s partly by design; it simply wouldn’t do to have a big “Plutonium Onboard” placard on the side. Also of interest is the fact that the “physics package” of the weapon, which only occupies a fraction of the space that the bomb’s parachute claims, is transported to a reinforced bunker for disassembly. Called a “Gravel Gertie,” the structure is a partially buried reinforced concrete room with about 20′ (7 meters) of loose gravel over it. The idea is to contain a conventional explosion, not a nuclear one, of course; if a little bit of gravel could defend against a nuke, there wouldn’t be that much to worry about.
We’re sure the film is heavily sanitized of any classified material, and it was likely well-choreographed to make it look like dismantling nuclear weapons is no big deal. But honestly, what we see in terms of tools and procedures doesn’t look all that different from what we see in aviation maintenance. And the exploded — ahem — shots of all 6,000 parts in the bomb are pretty sweet.
And bonus footage: if you’ve ever wondered how nuclear materials are transported around the country, check out
the second video below
, which is a training film for the Office of Secure Transport, the agents who drive the armored semi trucks needed for the job.
[Stephen Walters] spotted this one for us. Thanks for the tip! | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732142",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T20:00:34",
"content": "A friend of mine did his PhD thesis on modeling how a mistake that caused the conventional explosives to explode would propagate through the decommissioning site, where the shock wave would be letha... | 1,760,372,005.285455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/linux-fu-curling-c/ | Linux Fu: Curling C | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"curl",
"Linux Fu"
] | Sometimes, it pays to read the man pages of commands you use often. There might be a gem hidden in there that you don’t know about. Case in point: I’ve used curl (technically, cURL, but I’m going to stick with curl) many times to grab data from some website or otherwise make a web request. But what happens if you want to do the same thing from a C program? Well, you could be lazy and just spawn a copy of curl. But it turns out curl has a trick up its sleeve that can help you. If only I’d read the man page sooner!
First Things
The simplest use of curl is to just name a URL on the command line. For example, consider this session:
$ curl http://www.hackaday.com
<html>
<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
This isn’t so useful because it is a 301 response (to send you to the https server, in this case). The -L option will make curl go get the page instead of the redirect. Try:
$ curl -L http://www.hackaday.com
You probably want to pipe it through less or use the -o option to send the output to a file. If you want to see the details of the redirect, try:
$ curl -i http://www.hackaday.com
Jack of All
That’s just the very simplest thing you can do with curl. It can do a bewildering array of protocols, including FTP, SMB, POP3, IMAP, SFTP, and many more. It can form different requests and manipulate cookies, certificates, and many other things.
However, it turns out curl doesn’t really do any of those things. It just reads your input and manipulates libcurl which is where all the smarts are. If you have done much with Linux, then you realize that means you could use libcurl, too. But how?
Less Work, More Code
You could look up
the details of libcurl
. It isn’t a secret. In fact, there are two ways to use the library. The “easy” interface is quick to use and great for most things. If you need heavy-duty multiple transfers and other exotica, you might have to use the “multi” API, which is a bit more complex.
However, you don’t even have to start there. The curl program itself will help you. Here’s how it works. First, build a command line to get the results you want (just like we did earlier to read the front page of Hackaday). Then, add the –libcurl option to the command line along with the name of a C source file (that probably doesn’t already exist). The program will then write a skeletal piece of code to do the exact transfer you specified. You can compile in the usual way, just add -lcurl to the compile command.
You might have to tweak it a bit, and depending on your application, you might want to make some changes like modifying the URL. But you’ll get a great start.
For example, try:
$ curl -L -o output.txt http://www.hackaday.com --libcurl hackcurl.c
The skeleton will have a main function (you might want to change that if you are adding it to another program). In that main will be code reflecting most of the options you set on the command line.
There will also be a comment showing you some things you might want to set that it can’t figure out for you. Finally, there’s a little driver that just performs the operation, does some cleanup, and then exits with a status code. Here are the options the boilerplate code suggests:
/* Here is a list of options the curl code used that cannot get generated
as source easily. You may choose to either not use them or implement
them yourself.
CURLOPT_WRITEDATA set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_INTERLEAVEDATA set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_READDATA set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_READFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_SEEKDATA set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_SEEKFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_ERRORBUFFER set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_STDERR set to a objectpointer
CURLOPT_HEADERFUNCTION set to a functionpointer
CURLOPT_HEADERDATA set to a objectpointer
*/
An Example
The thing you’ll most often need to change is what happens to the data you read. The -o option isn’t what you wanted, probably, and so curl doesn’t build that into your C code. Of course, if you just wanted to send a request, that might be all you need. In my case, I will eventually want to know what the Hackaday server said back, so I have some work to do. Luckily, it isn’t much.
At the start of the code (
available online
). I added a section near the top that includes a few headers and defines a BUFFER structure. This is just a string with a length. I also made a simple function to create a buffer and another that libcurl can call to send me data (writefn).
That last function is the most complex of the custom code. It looks at how much data curl received, reallocates the buffer, and saves it. I didn’t intend this to be general purpose, so there’s no provision for fancy editing to the buffer. Things come in. The buffer grows. Stuff gets put on the end of the buffer. That’s all.
The next part of the custom code appears near the end. It tells libcurl about the
writefn
function and asks it to pass the address of
buff
(the buffer) to that function. Obviously, libcurl doesn’t care what that argument is. It just takes whatever you tell it and adds it to the call.
Once the boilerplate
curl_easy_perform
function returns successfully, the
buff
structure has the web page in it. For this example, I just print it out, which is boring, but you could, obviously, do whatever you wanted here.
That’s it, and you’ll find that for many tasks, this is sufficient. If it isn’t, the comments and the documentation suggest other ways to configure the library similar to how this example sets the write function.
More Curl Tricks
Need your current IP address (thanks, Amazon):
curl checkip.amazonaws.com
Want to check if a site is up?
curl -L -Is http://www.hackaday.com | head -n 1 | cut -d ' ' -f2
Need a QR code?
curl qrenco.de/www.hackaday.com
Can’t remember the definitions for the word inductor?
curl dict.org/d:inductor
Of course, you don’t need C code to call these. If you do a quick search, you’ll find there are tons of services that curl can easily access from the command line or, using libcurl, from your programs, too.
Want to test your
curl chops
? We’ve looked at g
rabbing Hackaday automatically
before. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732103",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T18:21:53",
"content": "I’ve seen commercial programs that use curl behind the scenes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6732114",
"author": "Josh",
"timest... | 1,760,372,005.233627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/a-1960s-plc-gives-up-its-secrets/ | A 1960s PLC Gives Up Its Secrets | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"electromechanical",
"motor controlelr",
"plc"
] | When it comes to process automation, the go-to part in most industrial settings is a Programmable Logic Controller, or PLC. These specialized computers will have a modern microcontroller running the show, but surprisingly the way they are programmed still has echoes of a time before electronic PLCs when such control would have been electromechanical.
[Thomas Scherrer] has an interesting design to tear down,
it’s a Siemens electromechanical motor controller from the early 1960s
. It’s not quite the huge banks of relays which would have made a fully-blown PLC back in those times, but it’s a half-way house with some simple programming capability in the form of several channels of adjustable time delay.
We’re partly sad to see this unit being subjected to a destructive teardown, but nevertheless it’s interesting to see all those very period components. The current sensor has a mechanism similar to a moving coil meter, and the four-channel timer is a mechanical sequencer with four adjustable cam-driven switches. We’re not sure we would be cracking open selenium rectifiers with such nonchalance though.
These units were built to a very high quality indeed, and though it’s obvious this one comes from a decommissioned installation it’s not beyond possibility to think there might be some of them still doing their job over six decades after manufacture. Have any of you seen one of these or something like it in operation recently? Let us know in the comments. Meanwhile the video is below the break. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732064",
"author": "nottinghamcitytraveller",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T16:38:47",
"content": "There are electro-mechanical relays all over the place making up protection systems in electricity substations in the UK at least, many of this vintage and some older. Quite complex arrang... | 1,760,372,005.618181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/electrical-steel-the-material-at-heart-of-the-grid/ | Electrical Steel: The Material At The Heart Of The Grid | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"hysteresis",
"iron",
"magnetism",
"material science",
"steel",
"transformer"
] | When thoughts turn to the modernization and decarbonization of our transportation infrastructure, one imagines it to be dominated by exotic materials. EV motors and wind turbine generators need magnets made with rare earth metals (which turn out to be
not all that rare
), batteries for cars and grid storage need
lithium
and
cobalt
, and of course an abundance of
extremely pure silicon
is needed to provide the computational power that makes everything work. Throw in healthy pinches of graphene, carbon fiber composites and ceramics, and minerals like molybdenum, and the recipe starts looking pretty exotic.
As necessary as they are, all these exotic materials are worthless without a foundation of more familiar materials, ones that humans have been extracting and exploiting for eons. Mine all the neodymium you want, but without materials like copper for motor and generator windings, your EV is going nowhere and wind turbines are just big lawn ornaments. But just as important is iron, specifically as the alloy steel, which not only forms the structural elements of nearly everything mechanical but also appears in the stators and rotors of motors and generators, as well as the cores of the giant transformers that the electrical grid is built from.
Not just any steel will do for electrical use, though; special formulations, collectively known as electrical steel, are needed to build these electromagnetic devices. Electrical steel is simple in concept but complex in detail, and has become absolutely vital to the functioning of modern society. So it pays to take a look at what electrical steel is and how it works, and why we’re going nowhere without it.
Iron vs. Steel
The idea for a feature about electrical steel came from
a story
bemoaning delays plaguing renewable energy projects in the United States, mainly due to supply chain issues with the transformers needed to upgrade and expand the electrical grid. Building wind and solar farms is one thing; connecting them to the existing grid is another, one that often requires building completely new substations and refurbishing existing ones to gather the output of geographically dispersed generators and boost it to an appropriate voltage for long-haul transmission. Substations need transformers, often lots of them, and transformers are large, complicated devices that more often than not are custom-built. Lead times on large power transformers now routinely exceed 150 weeks!
The root cause of the three-year wait for large power transformers comes down to raw material supply chain problems, particularly with electrical steel. The electrical steel market is global both on the supply and demand side, so disruptions in one part of the world can ripple through the entire market. The electrical steel market’s current disruptions can be blamed on a host of factors: pandemic-era shutdowns of mines and factories, international sanctions, tariffs and trade disputes, off-shoring of manufacturing, and probably about a dozen other things. What it all means, though, is too little of this specialized material to go around.
So what is electrical steel? In some ways, the name is a misnomer; while electrical steel alloys are formulated specifically to change their electrical characteristics, these changes result in different magnetic properties, which is the key to understanding what they are and why they’re important. Electrical steel, which is used in the cores of nearly every device that uses magnetism, is probably better called “magnetic steel.” The material does have a few other monikers that better reflect this, such as “relay steel” and “transformer steel,” but the name “silicon steel” is perhaps most chemically descriptive, for reasons that will soon become obvious.
All steels are simply alloys composed primarily of iron and carbon, and electrical steel is no different. Pure iron is quite soft and ductile; the addition of carbon in just the right amounts serves as a hardening agent that gives the alloy its increased tensile strength and other desirable properties. Being primarily composed of a metallic element, steel is a good conductor of electricity. That sounds like it would be a beneficial property, and indeed it can be, as in the case of automotive electrical systems, which often use the steel body and chassis as a low-impedance return path.
Hysteresis Control
However, in electromagnetic assemblies like motors, generators, and transformers, carbon steel’s conductivity ends up causing problems that need to be solved. This has to do with the ferromagnetic properties of the iron in the steel, such as magnetic permeability and magnetic coercivity. Magnetic permeability measures the degree to which an external magnetic field, such as from a coil of wire carrying an electric current, induces a magnetic field in a material. Permeability is what makes steel stick to a permanent magnet — the magnet induces a temporary magnetic field in the high-permeability steel, causing the two to stick together. Coercivity, on the other hand, measures the degree to which a ferromagnetic material can resist becoming
de
magnetized by an externally applied field.
Hysteresis loops for (a) soft magnetic materials like iron and (b) hard magnetic materials like steel. Electrical steel needs to lie somewhere between the two extremes. Source:
MikeRun
, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Electromagnetic components like transformers exhibit hysteresis, which just refers to how the history of a system can affect its current state. In an electromagnet, for instance, the core stays magnetic for a while after the current stops flowing in the coil. Likewise, in a transformer, the magnetic field created in the core by the alternating current passing through the coil doesn’t instantly collapse when the current reverses polarity. Rather, it lags somewhat, creating the characteristic shape seen on a hysteresis loop diagram, which maps the magnetic force applied by the coil against the magnetic field density in the iron core.
The details of why the magnetic hysteresis loop diagram looks the way it does aren’t really important to understanding electrical steel except to say that the narrower the loop, the more efficient the transformer (or motor or generator). This is because the induced magnetic field in the core spends less time opposing the magnetic field in the coils. But this leads to a paradox: pure iron has a very slender hysteresis loop, while alloying iron with carbon widens the loop. It seems like steel is therefore a poor choice for transformer cores than pure iron. What gives?
As with everything in engineering — and life in general — there are tradeoffs. While pure iron may be the best choice in terms of minimizing hysteresis losses, iron is a soft, ductile metal that would be difficult to form into mechanically stable transformer cores. The problem would be even worse in motors and generators, where rotors and stators need to stand up to the torque produced or applied. Steel is the material of choice for these applications, but the trick is to alloy it in a way that makes it mechanically strong while minimizing electrical losses.
Eddy Current Losses
Eddy currents still form in laminated cores, but the insulation between the layers limits the losses they produce. Source:
BillC
, CC BY-SA 2.5.
But wait — hysteresis losses aren’t the only losses electrical steel needs to deal with. There are also losses thanks to the familiar eddy currents, which are electrical currents induced in metals by magnetic lines of force passing through them. Eddy currents both physically oppose the torque of motors and generators, and dissipate electrical energy through heating. Since the magnitude of eddy currents is proportional to the area of the conductor — the iron core, in this case — it pays to reduce the size of the core. Or, as is more typically the case, to build cores from stacks of thin laminations, each electrically isolated from each other but which act as a monolithic component magnetically.
Also, eddy currents are inversely proportional to the resistivity of the core material. Put all these together and what you need is a material with the magnetic permeability and coercivity of pure iron, the structural properties of carbon steel, and electrical properties that land somewhere in between. That’s electrical steel.
The magic ingredient that gives electrical steel its desirable properties is silicon. Like all metals, iron is electrically conductive thanks to unpaired electrons in its outer orbital shells. Silicon, on the other hand, is a semiconductor with a higher resistivity (measured in ohm-meters, or Ω·m). When silicon is alloyed with iron and carbon at a concentration of between 3% and 6% by weight of finished metal, it increases the resistivity of the resulting steel. This occurs thanks to a combination of refining the grain structure (smaller grains mean higher resistivity) and forming a solid solution, where silicon dissolves into the iron-carbon matrix and reduces the number of free electrons available carry charge. The lower resistivity of silicon steel narrows the hysteresis loop and helps reduce the losses due to eddy currents compared to carbon steel, while maintaining a lot of the magnetic properties of pure iron and delivering the structural properties necessary for the application.
Going With The Grain
Because almost all electrical steel is used to make laminated cores, rotors, and stators, it’s usually manufactured as cold rolled coil stock less than 2 mm thick but sometimes as thin as 0.2 mm. Electrical steels are categorized by their grain structure and orientation. Non-oriented grain steels are cheaper to manufacture and have similar magnetic properties in all directions. This isotropism makes non-oriented grain steel more suitable for use in applications like motors and generators where the magnetic flux is constantly changing.
Close-up of grain-oriented silicon steel with coatings stripped off. Source:
Zureks
, CC BY-SA 3.0
For applications where the magnetic flux doesn’t change much with time, like the large power transformers that are in such short supply these days, grain-oriented electrical steel is desirable. The magnetic lines of force in transformers mainly line up with the long axis of the laminations, so core material needs to have greater magnetic permeability in that direction. Grain-oriented steels suit this application better because the magnetic moments in the metal line up in the direction of rolling, giving strongly anisotropic magnetic properties. The first person to make grain-oriented silicon steel was a fellow named Norman Goss, who in 1934 invented a method that alternates cold-rolling and heat treatment of silicon steel to produce a steel with grains lined up in the direction of rolling. The process results in steel with a distinctive appearance known as “Goss texture.”
Since most electrical steel is destined to be laminated, coil stock is also often coated with various non-conductive materials at the factory. Coatings can be as simple as varnish or enamel coating, which are often used for coil stock destined for rotors and stators, to glass and even ceramic coatings.
Only about 1% of the 2 billion metric tons of steel produced in 2020 was electrical steel. It’s an impressive amount, to be sure, but we’re going to have to find a way to keep up with demand for non-oriented electrical steel for hybrid and EV traction motors, as well as the grain-oriented steel needed to build all the new grid components and charging stations they’ll need. Here’s hoping manufacturers find a way to keep the magic going. | 32 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6732042",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T15:48:49",
"content": "Wow. Why is there no one-sentence-definition of steel in this thing? It is not that difficult.Steel is forgeable (!) iron with less than 2% carbon (a dram more for stainless steel).",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,372,005.69126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/make-your-bookshelf-clickable/ | Make Your Bookshelf Clickable | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"GPT",
"image processing",
"ocr"
] | We’ll confess that we have a fondness for real books and plenty of them. So does [James], and he decided he needed
a way to take a picture of his bookshelves and make each book clickable
to find more information. This is one of those things that sounds fairly simple until you decide to do it. You can
try an example of the results
and then go back and read about the journey it took to get there.
There are several subtasks involved. First, you want to identify each book’s envelope. It wouldn’t do to click on the Joy of Cooking and get information about Remembrance of Things Past.
The next challenge is reading the title of the book. This can be tricky. Fonts differ. The book could be upside down. Some titles go cross the spine, but most go vertically. The remainder of the task is fairly easy. If you know the region and the title, you can easily find a link (for Google Books, in this case) and build an SVG overlay that maps the areas for each book to the right link.
The optical character recognition is done with GPT-4. The prompt used is straightforward:
Read the text on the book spine. Only say the book cover title and author if you can find them. Say the book that is most promiment. Return the format [title] [author], with no punctuation.
With that information, a Google API will look up the book for you, and the rest is straightforward. You can grab the code
on GitHub
. We wonder how this method of OCR for difficult text would compare to
more conventional methods
. After all, OCR isn’t
a hard problem
. The complex problem is making it work well. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6731957",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T12:32:36",
"content": "“After all OCR isn’t a hard problem”Oh sweet summer child…OCR isn’t hard *now* because we have incredible amounts of computing power and hi-res image capture but by god it was difficult when PCs still had RA... | 1,760,372,005.528297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/15/lift-those-pins-with-ease/ | Lift Those Pins With Ease | Jenny List | [
"how-to"
] | [
"IC pin",
"rework",
"soldering"
] | Reworking is one of the regular tasks of anyone who is involved in an electronic design process, because try as we might, it’s rare to get a design perfectly right the first time. Some reworking tasks are more difficult than others though, and we have to admit that lifting an IC pin doesn’t always result in success. But
with this video from [Mr. SolderFix]
there’s hope for conquering the technique, as he takes us through the best pin-raising technique on a variety of packages.
The trick it seems is to lift the pin first without attempting to disengage it from the molten solder, then returning to it with some copper braid to remove the solder and leave it raised. Once the secret is revealed it’s so easy, something a Hackaday scribe should be able to do. He does sound a note of caution though, as some packages are prone to disintegrating when stressed. A broken SOT-23 is not something anyone likes to see through their magnifier.
His channel is full of such no-nonsense soldering advice, and should be a fascinating browse for many readers. Meanwhile we’ve covered quite a bit of rework technique ourselves, such as last year
when we looked at BGA work
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6731904",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T09:21:48",
"content": "good find, thanks",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6731932",
"author": "Chris Soukup",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T11:16:05",
"content": "I reme... | 1,760,372,005.577488 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/developing-in-pascal-on-the-commodore-64-with-abacus-super-pascal-64/ | Developing In Pascal On The Commodore 64 With Abacus Super Pascal 64 | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"abacus software",
"commodore 64",
"Pascal"
] | Abacus Super Pascal 64 for the Commodore 64.
Most people associate the Commodore 64 with Commodore BASIC and precompiled applications, but it also had a number of alternative development environments produced for it. One of these was Super Pascal 64 by Abacus. A solid introduction to this software package is provided in
a video tutorial
by [My Developer Thoughts] on YouTube. This uses the Abacus Super Pascal 64 software and manual from
the [Lyon Labs] website
, which incidentally has a lot more development environments and operating systems for the C64 listed for your perusal.
Abacus’ Super Pascal supports the official Pascal language, requiring nothing more than a Commodore 64 and two Commodore 1541 floppy disk drives to get started. One FDD is for the Super Pascal software, which boots into the development environment, the other FDD and the disks in it are the target for the current project’s source code and compiled binary. Although the lack of support for FDDs other than the 1541 is somewhat odd, this comes presumably from the operating system nature of the development environment and the 1541 being by far the most common FDD for the C64.
During the tutorial, it’s clear that keeping a copy of the Pascal User Manual and Report (
PDF version
) alongside it is necessary to explain some of the compiler messages, but this is probably a good reference to have within reach regardless. One of the example programs written in the tutorial is a benchmark application that runs through the alphabet (lower- and uppercase) in Pascal, which is compared with a Commodore BASIC version (see top image). The Pascal version is unsurprisingly much faster than the BASIC version, but then the inclusion of 6502 ASM within the Pascal code is demonstrated, with the resulting application zipping through the task in almost no time.
We recently
remembered
the life of Niklaus Wirth, who created the Pascal programming language, along with other languages and software which made much of modern-day computing possible.
Top image: Benchmark run comparison between Pascal and Commodore BASIC running through the alphabet.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6731935",
"author": "Chris Soukup",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T11:20:02",
"content": "I remember In the 80s everything was “super” and “deluxe”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6731942",
"author": "S",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,005.73693 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/shuji-nakamura-the-man-who-gave-us-the-blue-led-despite-all-odds/ | Shuji Nakamura: The Man Who Gave Us The Blue LED Despite All Odds | Maya Posch | [
"LED Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"blue LED",
"led",
"semiconductor"
] | With the invention of the first LED featuring a red color, it seemed only a matter of time before LEDs would appear with other colors. Indeed, soon green and other colors joined the LED revolution, but not blue. Although some dim prototypes existed, none of them were practical enough to be considered for commercialization. The subject of a
recent [Veritasium] video
, the core of the problem was that finding a material with the right bandgap and other desirable properties remained elusive. It was in this situation that at the tail end of the 1980s a young engineer at Nichia in Japan found himself pursuing a solution to this conundrum.
Although Nichia was struggling at the time due to the competition in the semiconductor market, its president was not afraid to take a gamble on a promise, which is why this young engineer – [Shuji Nakamura] – got permission to try his wits at the problem. This included a year long study trip to Florida to learn the ins and outs of a new technology called metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD, also metalorganic vapor-phase epitaxy). Once back in Japan, he got access to a new MOCVD machine at Nichia, which he quickly got around to heavily modifying into the now well-known two-flow reactor version which improves the yield.
A blue LED held up by its inventor, [Shuji Nakamura].
By the time that [Shuji] had returned to Japan, however, the old president had retired and his son had taken over, who was far less interested in risky ventures. When [Shuji] also sought to investigate gallium nitride crystal-based blue LEDs rather than the much more promising zinc-selenium, he got messages and calls from management to cease his research and focus on something more productive. Yet he knew that he was closing in on something, and worked tirelessly through solving the remaining issues with adapting the MOCVD machine, the interface layer to grow the GaN on, and so on.
Ultimately through an annealing process and the use of an indium gallium nitride-based electron well (with aluminium gallium nitride ‘hill’ as barrier) he managed to boost the brightness of the LED from an early 42 µW to 1,500 µW when the LED was presented to the public in 1992. Despite this success and the immense boost it gave Nichia’s fortunes, [Shuji] never got the acknowledgement from his employer, nor shared in the revenue.
Although [Shuji] is now clearly happily working in the US on semiconductor research and even started his own nuclear fusion undertaking, it remains a bitter note that the inventor of blue LEDs and thus LED lighting had to go through such an ordeal. The recognition from [Veritasium]’s interview and documentary is definitely welcome to somewhat right a historic wrong. | 68 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6731772",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T03:32:47",
"content": "I agree, Dr. Nakamura isn’t recognized enough for his efforts and ultimate breakthrough despite the forces and odds against him. His Nobel prize was well-earned.Nichia Corporation, on the other hand, ... | 1,760,372,006.164729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/floss-weekly-episode-769-10-more-internet/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 770: 10% More Internet | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Podcasts"
] | [
"David Taht",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"internet",
"ipv4",
"IPv6"
] | This week, Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with David Taht about the state of the Internet and, specifically, IPv4 exhaustion. We’re running out of IPv4 addresses! But we’ve been running out for something like ten years now. What gives? And why are nearly 20% of the world’s IPv4 addresses sitting unused? David has
a hack that would give the world 10% more Internet
, but Amazon might have something to say about it.
There’s even more, like Kessler Syndrome, some musing on what the Interplanetary Internet will look like, the worth of real paper books, and a long-term bet for some IPv4 addresses to come to fruition in 2038.
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show
right in the Hackaday Discord
? Next week, we’re interviewing Shawn Dunn about MicroOS and OpenSUSE Kalpa.
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": "6731743",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-02-15T01:45:41",
"content": "Thought the military was holding onto a lot of IP4 addresses?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6731828",
"author": "Steven Naslund",
... | 1,760,372,005.775318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/ring-around-the-inverter/ | Ring Around The Inverter | Al Williams | [
"Parts"
] | [] | [Dr. Shane] asks the question: what happens if you connect the output of an inverter logic gate back to the input? In theory, it doesn’t make sense, but depending on the gate’s physical construction, you’ll get into a strange state. The transistors within the gate
will behave differently
than they normally would, and you’ll wind up with an amplifier or an oscillator. You can see the results in the video below. In the second video, you can see what the odd connection does to the thermal properties of the inverter, too.
The CMOS inverter becomes biased in the active region, so it makes sense that it settles at the halfway point. The TTL inverter is slightly different, but the delay through the gate isn’t enough to produce a good oscillation. However, an odd number of inverters connected in a ring like this is one way to create a simple oscillator.
While we don’t suggest this method, it is interesting to see what happens when you bias different gates this way. We’ve certainly seen it done using a variety of different inverter types ranging from discrete transistor circuits to inverters on the die of an IC.
We’ve seen ring oscillators
in a number of forms
. Inverters can also make the
phase-shifting part of a crystal oscillator
. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6731637",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2024-02-14T21:27:44",
"content": "When you connect an inverter that way Michael J Fox’s siblings start to disappear from pictures.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6731650",
... | 1,760,372,006.000856 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/how-different-are-spacex-thermal-tiles-from-the-space-shuttles/ | How Different Are SpaceX Thermal Tiles From The Space Shuttle’s? | Maya Posch | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"Space Shuttle",
"starship",
"thermal tile"
] | When SpaceX first showed off the thermal tiles on its Starship spacecraft that should keep it safe when re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere towards the loving embrace of the chopsticks on the launch tower, some similarity to the thermal tiles on NASA’s now retired Space Shuttle Orbiter was hard to miss.
Electron microscope image of the fibrous part of a Starship thermal tile, showing very large fibers. (Credit: Breaking Taps, YouTube)
Yet how similar are they really? That’s what the [Breaking Taps] channel on YouTube
sought to find out
, using an eBay-purchased chunk of Shuttle thermal tile along with bits of Starship tiles that washed ashore following the explosive end to the vehicle’s first integrated test last year.
To answer the basic question: the SpaceX engineers responsible for the Starship thermal tiles seem to have done their homework. An analysis of not only the structure of the fibrous material, but also the black IR-blocking coating, shows that the Starship tiles are highly reminiscent of the EATB (introduced in 1996) tiles with TUFI (toughened unipiece fibrous insulation) coatings with added molybdenum disilicide, which were used during the last years of the Shuttle program.
TUFI is less fragile than the older RCG (reaction cured glass) coating, but also heavier, which is why few TUFI tiles were used on the Shuttles due to weight concerns. An oddity with the Starship tiles is that they incorporate many very large fibers, which could be by design, or indicative of something else.
Making your own pure silica thermal tiles with glass coating is exciting, but not that easy. (Credit: Breaking Taps, YouTube)
Details of these specific coatings and tile compositions for Shuttle missions can be found
in this NASA presentation
. Using spectral analysis on the tile fragments, the materials in each sample were analyzed, with molybdenum being clearly present in the Starship tile sample; although it’s hard to tell whether it’s at the same ratio as that NASA used it. The fibrous material making up the bulk of the tile showed the presence of silica, alumina-borosilicate and aluminium oxide, consistent with AETB. This strongly suggests that the Starship thermal tiles are based on the research done during the Shuttle program, which probably shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone.
As for making your own thermal tiles, this too is attempted in the video, with decent results. To make the most basic type of thermal tile, as used during the early years of the Shuttle program, all you need is silica fiber, colloidal silica, an appropriate oven, borosilicate glass, acid, and a few more ingredients along with another pass through the oven to get an HRSI (100% silica) base tile with RCG coating.
What this however shows is that although you can make your own thermal tiles with a half-decent lab setup, perfecting the process is indeed a decades-long process, as seen with the Space Shuttles. | 9 | 4 | [
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"content": "Ice and fragile where the biggest issues. Of course there’s no longer a big fuel tank for ice to fall off of.",
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