jetlib.sec » Tags » hackaday

When it comes to architectural features, there are probably not many as quintessentially memorable as arches. From the simplicity of the curved structure to the seemingly impossible task of a supposedly collapsable shape supporting so much weight in mid-air, they’ve naturally fascinated architects for generations.

For civil engineers, learning to calculate the forces acting on an arch, the material strength and properties, and the weight distribution across several arches may be familiar, but for anyone with only a basic physics and CAD background, it’s easy to take arches for granted. After all, they grace the Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China, and are even present in nature at Arches National Park. We see them in cathedrals, mosques, gateways, and even memorialized in the case of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. Even the circular construction of watch towers and wells, as well as our own rib cages, are due to the properties of arches.

But what really goes into constructing a strong arch?

Basic Concepts

Arches share many key concepts with chains. For one, the weight of the arch does not contribute to its shape, but the distance between its ends does. Every shape formed within an arch of a certain length (measured by its circumference) is known as a catenary, with similarities to parabola.

[University of Waterloo]While not all arches are built from bricks, all arches do exhibit tension between points of contact of their construction material, forming a compression system of connectors pushing against each other. This works to a builder’s advantage, as the friction between materials coupled with this tension allows the materials to stay in place.

While arches do end up being durable and long-lasting structures, when they are not shaped appropriately for the loads they are meant to carry, they can collapse. Given the similarities between arches and chains, the angles needed to carry loads in the chain (a tension system) can be mirrored in the angles needed for an arch to carry the same loads.

Image source: [KK Clark]

The Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona uses the same techniques for its magnificent arches. Architect Antoni Gaudí initially built an upside-down model of the basilica, adding weights proportional to the roofs and other features he intended on adding to the structure. The resulting profile was the exact shape necessary for his arches to support the weight of the rest of the basilica.

For bridges, since there are not heavy static forces, so long as the arch has sufficient weight of its own, it does not need to take into account the position of its loads. This is due to the fact that similar to adding weights to a heavy or light chain, the heavier the arch, the less it transforms from the application of loads.

Modifying Arches

One interesting quandary for most people is figuring out which arches are able to support their own weight. University of Waterloo professor Wayne Brodland explains in his course on engineering models that as long as an arch is a mirror image of a chain of the same length hung from the same end points, then its shape is valid and can stand under its own weight.

This accounts for heavier semicircular arches, lighter arches with wider endpoints, and taller arches with closer endpoints and is known as the chain test. The test requires that a chain be able to fit within the arch when it is mirrored upside down. This also explains why thicker arches are able to adopt shapes that thinner arches cannot.

Another option is to adapt the shape of the chain to the shape of the arch. Since this requires outward forcing pulling on the chain, reversing these forces to push inwards on the arch allows it to hold up its shape.

[via University of Waterloo]The forces applied to the ends of an arch are vector forces: pushing not just down, but also out. These two forces are balanced out by the normal force perpendicular to the surface and the frictional force parallel to the surface. If the forces produced by the arch are greater than the forces balancing the arch, particularly if the horizontal force is greater than the friction force needed to keep the endpoints in place, then the arch can collapse. For this reason, increasing surface friction can help an arch stay in place. In construction projects, end supports for arches are often angled to better transfer the forces to the arch’s endpoints.

Arch Supports

Rather than simply modifying the end points, however, the horizontal forces can also be provided by the stuff that surrounds the arch. Often, this takes the form of bricks and concrete around bridge.

[via University of Waterloo]For multiple arches in a row, the horizontal forces at their ends can be made to balance, with each arch providing the necessary balancing forces for adjacent arches. The allows them to be supported by thinner columns.

In the case of the Hoover Dam, the shape of the structure holding back the water in the dam is shaped as an arch on its side, with the load against the top of the arch. In this example, it’s clear that the shape of the arch can be mirrored in the shape of a chain.

[via University of Waterloo]Not all arches are structural, however, and often times bridges will use arches simply as decorative features. Nonetheless, it’s clear that there’s a more to know about arches than we knew initially – maybe you’ll incorporate some of these concepts into your next build project!

[Thanks to Chris Lam for the tip!]

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, October 16 at noon Pacific for the Hacking Diabetes Hack Chat with Dana Lewis!

When your child is newly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (T1D), everyone is quick to point out, “It’s a great time to be a diabetic.” To some degree, that’s true; thanks to genetically engineered insulin, more frequent or even continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), and insulin infusion pumps, diabetics can now avoid many of the truly terrifying complications of a life lived with chronically elevated blood glucose, like heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, and amputations.

Despite these advances, managing T1D can be an overwhelming task. Every bite of food, every minute of exercise, and every metabolic challenge has to be factored into the calculations for how much insulin to take. Diabetics learn to “think like a pancreas,” but it’s never good enough, and the long-promised day of a true artificial pancreas always seems to remain five years in the future.

Dana Lewis is one diabetic who decided not to wait. After realizing that she could get data from her CGM, she built a system to allow friends and family to monitor her blood glucose readings remotely. With the addition of a Raspberry Pi and some predictive algorithms, she later built an open-source artificial pancreas, which she uses every day. And now she’s helping others take control of their diabetes and build their own devices through OpenAPS.org.

Join us on the Hack Chat as Dana drops by to discuss OpenAPS and her artificial pancreas. We’ll find out what her background is – spoiler alert: she wasn’t a hacker when she started this – what challenges she faced, the state of the OpenAPS project, and where she sees the artificial pancreas going.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 16 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

[Dana Lewis image source: GeekWire]

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Trouble in the Golden State this week, as parts of California were subjected to planned blackouts. Intended to prevent a repeat of last year’s deadly wildfires, which were tied in part to defective electrical distribution equipment, the blackouts could plunge millions in the counties surrounding Sacramento into the dark for days. Schools have canceled classes, the few stores that are open are taking cash only, and hospitals are running on generators. It seems a drastic move for PG&E, the utility that promptly went into bankruptcy after being blamed for last year’s fires, but it has the support of the governor, so the plan is likely to continue as long as the winds do. One group is not likely to complain, though;  California amateur radio operators must be enjoying a greatly decreased noise floor in the blackout areas, thanks to the loss of millions of switch-mode power supplies and their RF noise.

Good news, bad news for Fusion 360 users. Autodesk, the company behind the popular and remarkably capable CAD/CAM/CAE package, has announced changes to its licensing scheme, which went into effect this week. Users no longer have to pay for the “Ultimate” license tier to get goodies like 5-axis machining and generative design tools, as all capabilities are now included in the single paid version of Fusion 360. That’s good because plenty of users were unwilling to bump their $310 annual “Standard” license fee up to $1535 to get those features, but it’s bad because now the annual rate goes to $495. In a nice nod to the current userbase, those currently on the Standard license, as well as early adopters, will get to keep the $310 annual rate as long as they renew, and Ultimate users will see a $1040 price drop. As for the current base of freeloaders like yours truly, fear not: Fusion 360 is still free for personal, non-commercial use. No generative design or tech support for us, though.

You might have had a bad day at the bench, but was it as bad as Román’s? He tipped us off to his nightmare of running into defective Wemos D1 boards – a lot of them. The 50 boards were to satisfy an order of data loggers for a customer, but all the boards seemed caught in an endless reboot loop when plugged into a USB port for programming. He changed PCs, changed cables, but nothing worked to stop the cycle except for one thing: touching the metal case of the module. His write up goes through all the dead-ends he went down to fix the problem, which ended up being a capacitor between the antenna and ground. Was it supposed to be there? Who knows, because once that cap was removed, the boards worked fine. Hats off to Román for troubleshooting this and sharing the results with us.

Ever since giving up their “Don’t be evil” schtick, Google seems to have really embraced the alternative. Now they’re in trouble for targeting the homeless in their quest for facial recognition data. The “volunteer research studies” consisted of playing what Google contractors were trained to describe as a “mini-game” on a modified smartphone, which captured video of the player’s face. Participants were compensated with $5 Starbucks gift cards but were not told that video was being captured, and if asked, contractors were allegedly trained to lie about that. Contractors were also allegedly trained to seek out people with dark skin, ostensibly to improve facial recognition algorithms that notoriously have a hard time with darker complexions. To be fair, the homeless were not exclusively targeted; college students were also given gift cards in exchange for their facial data.

For most of us, 3D-printing is a hobby, or at least in service of other hobbies. Few of us make a living at it, but professionals who do are often a great source of tips and tricks. One such pro is industrial designer Eric Strebel, who recently posted a video of his 3D-printing pro-tips. A lot of it is concerned with post-processing prints, like using a cake decorator’s spatula to pry prints off the bed, or the use of card scrapers and dental chisels to clean up prints. But the money tip from this video is the rolling cart he made for his Ultimaker. With the printer on top and storage below, it’s a great way to free up some bench space.

And finally, have you ever wondered how we hackers will rebuild society once the apocalypse hits and mutant zombie biker gangs roam the Earth? If so, then you need to check out Collapse OS, the operating system for an uncertain future. Designed to be as self-contained as possible, Collapse OS is intended to run on “field expedient” computers, cobbled together from whatever e-waste can be scrounged, as long as it includes a Z80 microprocessor. The OS has been tested on an RC2014 and a Sega Master System so far, but keep an eye out for TRS-80s, Kaypros, and the odd TI-84 graphing calculator as you pick through the remains of civilization.

Tags:  hackaday links  

With microcontrollers growing ever more powerful each new generation, things that were mere pipedreams before are now readily possible. The Shapeshifter drum machine is a perfect example.

Shapeshifter’s design is open-source, with everything available on Github for the curious musical tinkerers out there. The device is built around a PCB with only through-hole components, making assembly easy for even the least experienced enthusiasts out there. A Teensy 3.6 is then slotted into the socket on the board, providing 180MHz of grunt to run the show. It’s an excellent choice, as the Teensy platform has a huge range of libraries which make it simple to work with audio.

Being open-source, not only is it a cinch to make your own, but there’s plenty of room to remix the design to your personal tastes. There’s even a breadboarding area and the capability to add an expansion card for even more possibilities. Some users have even gone so far as to add displays and filter mods to really open things up.

We love a good drum machine at Hackaday, from the Amstrad-based to pocket-sized wonders. If you’ve got a build of your own, be sure to drop it in the tips line.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a week full of hacks from the solar sailing RC plane that has zero power storage, to geeking out about lightning detectors and hacking Ikea LED controllers to unlock real dimming to building backyard wind turbines. We look up an IoT egg tray with appreciation not for the concept but certainly for the engineering, and scratch our heads on why one-hacker-smartwatch-to-rule-them-all seems like something that should happen but so far has only been a fleeting concept.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (68 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 039 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Saying Farewell To Another B-17 And Its Crew
  • A Virtual Tour Of The B-17
• Europeans Now Have The Right To Repair – And That Means The Rest Of Us Probably Will Too
• Mike Szczys – Maker Faire Rome

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• This Lightning Detector Is Remarkably Sensitive
  • New Lightning Detector for the Beginner
  • Lightning Detectors
  • An Introduction To Storm Detector Modules
  • A Cloud Of Lightning Detectors
  • Detect Lightning Strikes With Audio Equipment
  • Erratum: Square root of LC in the denominator.
• Hacking Diesel Engines and Vespas:
  • A Modular Ecosystem That Evolved Around A Simple Diesel Engine
  • Indonesian Jungle Vespas
• 2D-Scanner Records Surfboard Profiles For Posterity
  • Blog of Wei-Hsiung Huang: Using Digital Caliper For Digital Read Out (DRO) Applications
• Building A Wind Power Generator In Your Backyard
• Hacking The IKEA TRÅDFRI LED Power Supply
  • GitHub – basilfx/TRADFRI-Hacking: Hacking the IKEA TRÅDFRI light bulbs and accessories.
• Tacking Against The Sun: Flying A Batteryless Solar RC Plane Is Almost Like Sailing
  • Are You Down With MPPT? (Yeah, You Know Me.)
  • Soaring With The Sun: 4 Years Of Solar RC Planes

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Modular Camera Remote Is Highly Capable
  • Raspberry Pi Ham Radio Remote Reviewed
  • Introducing The First Cisco Certified Mixologist
• Mike’s Picks:
  • The Righteous Quest To Crack A Canon I9900
  • This Hurricane Uses A Novel Technique
  • Make “Wireless” Earbuds Truly Wireless

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Teardown: Quirky Egg Minder
• Ask Hackaday: What’s The Perfect Hacker Smart Watch?
  • OTA Flash Tool Makes Fitness Tracker Hacking More Accessible

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

A bug was recently fix in Signal that allowed a caller to force a call connection without any user interaction on the receiving side. We’ve seen this sort of problem in other chat applications, most recently the Zoom debacle.

The Signal client uses the same function to connect an outgoing call as an incoming call. This bit of code re-use allows a malicious client to initiate a call, and then send the “Accept Call” message. Because of the code re-use, this message triggers the same code as the accept call button on the receiving side. It’s as if the attacker uses reverse psychology to trick the other client into connecting.

It seems this bug only affected the Android client, and didn’t trigger a video call. It’s unclear whether the bug was discovered and exploited before it was fixed, but now that it has been announced, be sure to get Signal up to date.

WhatsApp Gif of Death

WhatsApp was discovered to be vulnerable to a malicious GIF image. This is a double-free vulnerability, triggered in the GIF processing library. The library allocates a buffer for the image frame, and re-uses that buffer for frames of the same size. In the event of GIF frames that are a different size, the library re-allocates the buffer to be the proper size. If a frame is set to zero size, reallocarray() is called with a new size of zero, which is undefined behavior. On Android, it has the effect of freeing the memory block, and returning a pointer to the now freed memory. Calling this again results in a double-free condition, also undefined behavior, which corrupts the memory management data.

Once this double-free operation has been carried out, the next two memory allocations of matching sizes will point to the same location. This means that the program acts as if it has two separate buffers, but they are actually one and the same, allowing the data from a GIF frame to overwrite a function pointer in the GIF data struct. A clever bounce through another function, and the GIF has suddenly run arbitrary code.

OAuth Fishing

You know it’s going to be an interesting day when Google warns you that your account is being attacked by a government entity. Amnesty International started the week off by describing a coordinated attack against several Egyptian organizations. This particular attack Isn’t the normal credential stealing attack, but instead tries to convince a user to authorize an OAuth application access to the account.

It may not be a particularly sophisticated attack, but the fact that the entire process happens while connected to the Google.com domain with a proper HTTPS certificate makes it just a little harder to spot. It does bypass two-factor authentication, in that once the malicious application has been given access to the account, no further logins are necessary.

Presidential Campaign Targeted

Microsoft has announced that one of the US presidential campaigns was targeted in an email compromise attempt. Nicknamed “Phosphorous”, the group’s attacks were simplistic, using personal data to attempt password resets and account recoveries. The fact that the attack included Iranian nationals living outside of that country leads one to suspect Iran as the sponsoring party.

We’ve briefly discussed attack attribution in the past, but this is a prime example of the difficulty of pinning down the people behind such an attack. What data does Microsoft have? The list of accounts targeted, the originating IP addresses, and perhaps some other metadata like browser user-agent strings. A naive look at that data would clearly reveal the attacker’s identity, but security, and history, should teach us not to take anything at face value. How difficult would it be for an attacker to include Iranian targets in their attack, launch from IP addresses that are associated with Iran, and spoof user-agents? It’s not likely, as this would be a more sophisticated effort than the attack itself, but such possibilities are extremely difficult to rule out.

These last two stories also touch on something else I found interesting. Apparently both Google and Microsoft have special procedures for dealing with state-sponsored attacks. It’s an interesting new world, when big companies are taking on nations, and vice-versa, for the sake of user security.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

When I die I hope be buried in the English rural churchyard that has been my responsibility as churchwarden, after a funeral service that has been a celebration of my life. I am neither an Egyptian pharaoh nor a Viking queen though, so my grave will not contain all my tools and equipment to serve me in the afterlife. Instead aside from my mortal remains it will contain only a suitably biodegradable coffin, and my headstone will be a modest one bearing perhaps a technical puzzle to entertain visitors to the churchyard.

My workshop, my bench, and my tools will be the responsibility of my nearest and dearest, and I hope I will have suitably equipped them for the task of their dispersal. But for anyone who has a sizeable collection of gear, have you thought of what would happen if someone else had to clean it all out? What is profession for some and hobby for others, we deal in specialization that might as well be tools of arcane magic to the uninitiated.

How Much Stuff Do You Have In Your Workshop? Just some of the donated tools I’ve seen arriving in MK

This is a sombre note upon which to start a Hackaday piece, but it’s also a serious point. We all amass a quantity of tools, instruments, and equipment as part of our work that can often amount to a significant value, yet how much of that information have we passed on to those around us? Some of us have partners who are as involved with making and building things as we are, but many of us do not, and our next of kin won’t necessarily know the difference in value between a $1000 oscilloscope and a $40 electric drill.

My makerspace in Milton Keynes is upstairs from a Men In Sheds, an organization that runs fully-stocked communal workshops, and through them I see this on a regular basis. Relatives of those who have passed away leaving behind a comprehensive home workshop are often at a loss to know what to do with its contents. Boxes and boxes of beautiful tools, equipment, and power tools arrive until even the Shed has nowhere left to store them. I know those of you involved in hackerspaces the world over have similar stores. This is very sad indeed, because among them are tools that have been loved and cared for, and I feel deserve some respect.

It’s worth taking a moment then to consider your inventory. Is anything particularly valuable? Sitting here it’s something I’ve never really done, and because my bench is a result of decades as a scavenger of the discarded I have few big-ticket items. My drill press, chop saw, and band saw were bought used and are all old and worn. Instruments? A collection of second hand kit some of which dates back to the 1950s, and a Rigol 1054z which though it wasn’t cheap new is hardly worth a fortune as a second-hand item.

… And Where Should It All Go? My Cossor ‘scope is very cool, but not worth much.

Then, where should things go? Some items I know would be cherished by the right people. My friend Bill for instance could probably use my stock of Triumph Herald spares — but how will someone cleaning out my shop know what they are, much less who will find them useful?

Perhaps the things that might fetch a few bob when sold should have clear instructions on where to sell them. In most cases that might be eBay, but sometimes there are specialist outlets. A decent quality anvil for example, I’d expect BABA members to be interested in. But imagine trying to list items for sale when you’re left to guess what the even are.

It sounds easy enough to say that it should be given away. But even then, to whom? I wouldn’t give woodworking tools to MK Men In Sheds for example, not because they aren’t a worthy cause but because they already have more than enough. Instead I’d suggest my partner go to one or other of the hackspaces I know haven’t got a decent woodworking area, because they’d really appreciate them. I’d hope a variety of potential recipients would receive my stuff, and be thankful for it.

The point I am trying to make here is that we never expect the inevitable to happen to us, and thus when it happens we often leave little preparation for it. I have seen the effect of this on loved ones through my time in the hackerspace community, and I’d like to urge everyone to give it some thought.

We spend a lifetime accumulating spare parts and the tools to work with them. It’s worth considering what we’ve gotten ourselves into and even to seek out advice on how to get it all organized. Just look around and you’ll realize the scale of the problem likely to land at the feet of your loved ones. Perhaps this autumn is a fine time to clean up, get organized, and to produce a set of destinations for your property when you meet your Maker. You’ll know that your tools and equipment will be appreciated when you are gone, and if heaven forbid you ever have to move your workshop you’ll thank yourself for the tidy organization.

I’d love to hear from you on this issue. How does your Hackerspace approach donations of entire workshops? Have you kept a detailed list of what you have in your shop and where it can find a home if needed? Join the discussion in the comments below.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Many of the biggest stars are hesitant to do sequels, believing that the magic captured the first time around is hard to reproduce in subsequent productions. As I’m known (at least around the former closet that now serves as my home office) as the “Meryl Streep of Teardowns”, I try to follow her example when it comes to repeat performances. But if they could get her to come back for another Mamma Mia film, I suppose I can take a look at a second Quirky product.

An elderly egg calls to inquire about euthanasia services.

This time around we’ll be looking at the Quirky Egg Minder, a smart device advertised as being able to tell you when your eggs are getting old. Apparently, this is a problem some people have. A problem that of course is best solved via the Internet of Things, because who wouldn’t pay $80 USD for a battery-powered WiFi device that lives in their refrigerator and communicates vital egg statistics to an online service?

As it turns out, the answer to that question is “most people”. The Egg Minder, like most of its Quirky peers, quickly became a seemingly permanent fixture of retailer’s clearance shelves. This particular unit, which I was able to pick up new from Amazon, only cost me $9.99. This is still more than I would have paid under normal circumstances, but such sacrifices are part and parcel with making sure the readers of Hackaday get their regular dose of unusual gadgetry.

You may recall that our last Quirky device, the “Refuel” propane tank monitor, ended up being a fantastically engineered and built piece of hardware. The actual utility of the product was far from certain, but nobody could deny that the money had been spent in all the right places.

What will the internals of the Egg Minder reveal? Will it have the same level of glorious over-engineering that took us by surprise with the Refuel? Will that zest for form over function ultimately become the legacy of these Quirky devices, or was it just a fluke? Let’s crack this egg and find out.

Separating the Yolk

The Egg Minder is held together with seven unnecessarily large screws, each hidden behind a rubber plug that blends in with the case so well that at first I thought they were potted in with some kind of epoxy. Curiously one of the screws had a T15 head, which I would normally attribute to some attempt at “security”, but it seems odd that Quirky would be worried about anyone taking a peek inside their electronic egg carton. There’s also a thick rubber gasket keeping the two halves of the plastic casing sealed, and a boot around the power switch. So far, that Quirky attention to detail is in full effect.

With the enclosure opened, we can see the bottom half is empty except for the battery compartment. I was actually a bit surprised they didn’t add some chunks of metal in there to give the device a bit more heft. The thing is responsible for holding your eggs after all, and keeping it more firmly planted to the shelf in the fridge seems like it would be worth the few cents to throw some ballast in there.

The top half was also a surprise: it’s not every day that you see the back of a single-sided PCB like this. Questions such as “Why?” and “How?” immediately came to mind.

Sunny Side Up

Flipping the PCB over, we can immediately see how they pulled it off. The board uses an incredible number of zero value resistors to “jump” over traces, allowing the entire circuit to be contained on the same side of the board. Rather than using a via to bring a trace to the other side whenever things got a little cramped, one of these resistors was used to physically lift the trace over its peers.

So now we know how they managed to contain such a complex SMD design on just one side of the board, but we still don’t know why. This is the part where we get to speculate a bit. The board has what is presumably a waterproof coating, but rather than being sprayed uniformly over the entire surface, it’s been carefully applied so as not to cover up any of the (numerous) surface mount LEDs.

If we imagine that a worker had to manually brush this coating onto the board, it makes sense that they’d want to keep everything on the same surface. Not only would it be faster for the worker, but it would allow the boards to be placed on their backs to dry rather than having to hang them and risk the coating running where it didn’t belong. But again, that’s just speculation. If somebody has a better theory, I’d love to hear it.

A Smart Egg

You may have noticed that, up until this point, I haven’t addressed how the Egg Minder actually works. That’s because, frankly, it doesn’t. Granted that might sound a little harsh, but the fact of the matter is that this device doesn’t actually tell you how old an egg is.

The optical sensor under each egg.

There’s no high-tech spectroscopy going on that can peer through the shell or anything like that. It simply keeps track of how many eggs are currently sitting in the fourteen openings on the top; it’s up to the user to accurately enter the date they were purchased into the smartphone application.

Accordingly, some of the reviews I saw online assumed that the Egg Minder was simply using pressure sensors to detect how many eggs were onboard. Which is certainly a logical enough conclusion. An array of microswitches that engage under the weight of the eggs is probably the most straightforward way to approach this problem, and is certainly how I would have tackled it if asked to come up with my own homebrew version.

But that’s not how Quirky did it. Their solution uses fourteen pairs of infrared emitters and sensors, complete with optics at the bottom of each egg cup, to detect the reflection off of the egg’s shell. At first glance it seems like overkill, but in all fairness, this method does allow detecting the eggs regardless of their weight. It could be that physical detection was found to be unreliable with eggs of various sizes, where as this optical method should work no matter how small the egg is.

Of course, there’s more to the Egg Minder than a bunch of IR sensors. At the heart of the device is an Electric Imp module, the same as we previously saw in the Refuel. Clearly Quirky was a fan of these modules, and at this point, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that all of their Internet-connected devices from this era are probably packing this same board. In a pre-ESP8266 world, the Electric Imp was a compelling way to jump on the IoT bandwagon without having to reinvent the wheel.

Hard Boiled

I couldn’t end this teardown without pointing out what’s easily my favorite aspect of the Egg Minder, and a perfect example of the sort of fanatical attention to detail that Quirky engineers had. Along the side of the device there’s a light sensor, which as far as I can tell, is there to determine when the plastic lid has been closed over the eggs. Though it may also be used to determine when the lights are off in the refrigerator, as presumably the Electric Imp will limit its attempts to communicate with the outside world once the refrigerator door is closed and it’s essentially locked inside of a Faraday cage.

In any event, the designers were apparently concerned that light emanating from inside the Egg Minder could interfere with the operation of this sensor. Considering each egg has not only an IR emitter under it, but LEDs indicate its relative age, it wasn’t an unwarranted concern. To prevent this they painted the area behind the sensor black and covered it with a piece of fabric, just to be extra sure that no light could bounce around and compromise their electronic egg counting device. Oh Quirky, we don’t deserve you.

Coming Full Circle (No Egg Pun)

In doing some research for this teardown, I found that this actually isn’t the first time the Quirky Egg Minder has graced the pages of Hackaday. Back in 2013, we wrote up a post about the then in-development Egg Minder, and asked readers to theorize how it might work and how they could build their own version.

With the final production hardware laid bare before us, it’s pretty interesting to go back and read those comments six years later. A number of folks guessed the device would be using an Electric Imp, and one commenter even correctly predicted it would come packed with lithium batteries due to the low temperatures it would need to operate in. A Quirky engineer even chimed in to say he was excited to see a project he was working on get picked up by Hackaday. Here’s hoping you’re still reading, Josh. You did us proud.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate and encourage women in the fields of science and technology.

It’s a perfect time to look back and catch up on biographies of some incredible people whose stories have been featured over the past year. You’ll find a ton of those below, but while we have your attention we wanted to make an appeal to help shine some light onto those stories we have yet to feature in our Profiles in Science series. Let us know about women whose stories you’d like to see on Hackaday in the coming year by leaving a comment below. Of course, it’s not just today, we’re always looking for suggestions and the tips line is always open.

Getting a rocket engine off of the launch pad is itself a tricky proposition, but reaching an orbital velocity is an entirely different story. During the space race, the US was on the lookout for a fuel that could do the trick, and the answers came from a chemist who grew up in a small town in North Dakota then started a college degree before for a job at Plumb Brook Ordnance Works. Mary Sherman Morgan came through with the formulation for Hydyne that powered the Redstone Rocket project.

Also working in the aerospace realm, Elsie MacGill was known as the Queen of the Hurricanes. It’s not a quip on the weather, but a title she earned through her breakthroughs on the production lines for the Hurrican fighter planes during World War II. Her aeronautical engineering skills super-charged mass production of these aircraft and she went on to “write the book” on manufacturing aircraft at scale.

When we think of studying animals in the wild, Dian Fossey’s legacy looms large. Her story is one of dedication to scientific study and advocating for wildlife conservation. The former was a groundbreaking set of techniques Dian developed to study primates in their natural habitats. The latter made her efforts known far and wide through the publishing of her book Gorillas in the Mist, which was adapted as a movie after her death.

Want to talk about a breakthrough so fundamental that we take it for granted every day? Alice Catherine Evans’ work to make pasteurization of all milk a given at a time when many thought a healthy-looking cow could be trusted to produce low-bacteria milk. Her science showed the fallacy of this assumption and saved lives by first leading to milk grading practices and later to nearly universal pasteurization.

Remember the third Curie? Not Marie or Pierre, but still a scientist who worked on radioactivity? It was their daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie who made breakthroughs in artificial radiation and went on to win the Nobel prize along with her husband and lab partner Frederic. This discovery was key in developing radioactive materials for medical use.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without electronic music, but the field is really only a few generations old. Daphne Oram saw the potential for electronic music early on and in the 1940s and 50s she made monumental advances in adapting the cutting edge in electronics to making music. From hacking on newly invented tape recorders to building some of the earliest synthesizers and what we would today call circuit bending, Daphne was driving the evolution of the earliest electronic instruments and techniques.

Everywhere you look there are fascinating stories on how we got here as a society. But as I said before, we need your help discovering the scientists, engineers, and hackers behind them. On this Ada Lovelace Day we invite you to leave a comment below about some of your favorite stories of women who have made an impact on the world. We’d love to dig into these stories as part of our ongoing Profiles in Science series.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Since Dick Tracy all the way back in ’46, smart watches have captured the public imagination. After several false starts, the technology has gone through a renaissance in the last 10 years or so. For the average consumer, there’s been a proliferation of hardware in the marketplace, with scores of different models to choose from. For the hackers, however, pickings are a little more slim. So what is the best smart watch for the tinkerers among us?

A New Offering These fears were allayed somewhat after a photo of an actual prototype was revealed.

Recently, Pine64 announced development of their PineTime smartwatch. Eagle-eyed spectators quickly identified that early photos seemed to be of an existing product from AliExpress, though Pine64 have said that their device simply takes advantage of an existing chassis and body to cut down on production costs.

Internally, the device is reported to feature either an nRF52832 or nRF52840 system-on-chip, containing a 64MHz ARM Cortex-M4F CPU core. This should provide plenty of grunt, and there’s Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy for connectivity purposes. Display resolution is 240×240, likely using an OLED screen.

It’s being touted as an open source project, capable of running various real-time operating systems. There’s been talk of implementing everything from FreeRTOS to Mbed, with the development community likely to shape the future of the platform.

Using a Photoshopped image of an AliExpress watch raised eyebrows on Twitter.

There’s a lot of optimism here and of course it’s hard to say if they can deliver on the features or stick to a suspiciously low price of $25 USD being floated this early in the process. That’s a fairly compelling price for a ready-to-go smartwatch platform capable of running homebrew code. Do you remember seeing the Chronos watch from TI hit the market at $49 ten years ago? That one never gained widespread tracking, but tomorrow’s a new day. Interested parties should make themselves familiar with the Pine Time specification sheet and start contemplating the possibilities.

Pour One Out For Pebble

Once upon a time, the hacker’s favourite was easily Pebble. As a relatively open platform, anyone could develop for the device with a minimum of fuss. Apps like AutoPebble helped thousands more get the most out of the device, especially when used in combination with Android favorites like Tasker. Pebbles got to work in areas as diverse as sailing and home automation, while the userbase was free to customise their own watch faces to their heart content.

Pebble smartwatches were loved for their simplicity and great usability. Unfortunately, the financial side just didn’t work out.

Unfortunately, it all went wrong. After a difficult few years, Pebble was bought out by Fitbit. This put an end to Pebble servers, as well as hardware production, with the ecosystem slowly dying off in the wake of the merger. Their innovative smartstrap hardware expansion system also failed to strike it big. A dedicated group remains, by the name of Rebble, that continues to hack on the platform in the absence of official company support. Through their work, it’s possible to keep using your Pebble despite the original servers shutting down in 2017. However, with no further units being manufactured, it seems unlikely for Pebble to flourish in the future.

There Are Other Options

We’ve seen other hacks for various smartwatches over the years, too. Way back in 2013, Sony put out a package of tools enabling developers to create their own firmware for its smartwatch at the time. We’ve also seen individuals take on the challenge, whether it was [Krzysiek] taking on the WeLoop Tommy or [Aaron] tinkering with the wide variety of NRF-based fitness bands available from AliExpress.

AsteroidOS is an open-source project targeting WearOS watches, in a similar way CyanogenMod did with Android phones.

Other projects consist of larger communities coming together with a common goal. AsteroidOS aims to create an open-source software ecosystem for Wear OS-based smartwatches. OpenWatch aims to do much the same thing. These projects promise to unlock the features of top-of-the-range commercial smartwatches for eager hackers to play with. However, much development lies ahead before full support is reached for most hardware.

These efforts can net great results, but often the limited resources of lone hackers aren’t enough to keep up with the release schedules of new hardware. Combine that with the ever-looming threat of restrictive firmware updates from some manufacturers, and hours of hard work can easily be for naught.

What’s Missing? While this interface gives us a headache, it’s a testament to the amount of functionality in the latest Apple Watch.

Early smartwatches of the modern era were little more than Bluetooth-connected displays, relying on the tethered smartphone to provide processing power and access to peripherals. Fast forward to today, and devices like the series 5 Apple Watch have plenty of processing power, along with full-blown cellular modems onboard and gigabytes of storage. This enables them to operate entirely independently. With heart rate monitors, step trackers, and all manner of other gadgets, there’s not a whole lot you can’t get in a wrist-mounted computer these days.

Normally, hackers are the first to set about bringing new functionality to the fore. The smartwatch formfactor poses some difficulties, though. Many watches come with cases that are near-impossible to open without damage, and even those that do get in are unlikely to find space for additional hardware. Regardless, there will always be those that try.

With so much packed into modern devices, it’s difficult to make a case for hacking further functionality into a device on a hardware level. Nine times out of ten, it would make more sense to simply upgrade to a more well equipped model, rather than void a warranty and risk damaging an expensive watch. It’s not to say its impossible, just that the bar is set rather high.

So What Is The Best Hacker Watch?

Given the difficulties of hacking smartwatch hardware, it’s likely that most tinkerers are more interested in the software side of things. With that in mind, what do you think is the best hacker watch? Is it a platform that’s open from the start, like the PineTime, or does Pebble’s diehard developer community still give it the lead? Perhaps your tastes are for ultimate performance, in which case only the cutting-edge Wear OS devices will do. Whatever your thoughts, be sure to share them in the comments below!

Tags:  Ask hackaday  

Join us on Wednesday, October 9 at noon Pacific for the Designing Sci-Fi Hack Chat with Seth Molson!

We all know the feeling of watching a movie set in a galaxy far, far away and seeing something that makes us say, “That’s not realistic at all!” The irony of watching human actors dressed up as alien creatures prancing across a fantasy landscape and expecting realism is lost on us as we willingly suspend disbelief in order to get into the story; seeing something in that artificial world that looks cheesy or goofy can shock you out of that state and ruin the compact between filmmaker and audience.

Perhaps nowhere do things get riskier for filmmakers than the design of the user interfaces of sci-fi and fantasy sets. Be they the control panels of spacecraft, consoles for futuristic computers, or even simply the screens of phones that are yet to be, sci-fi UI design can make or break a movie. The job of designing a sci-fi set used to be as simple as wiring up strings of blinkenlights; now, the job falls to a dedicated artist called a Playback Designer who can create something that looks fresh and new but still plausible to audiences used to interacting with technology that earlier generations couldn’t have dreamed of.

Seth Molson​ is one such artist, and you’ve probably seen some of his work on shows such as Timeless, Stargate Universe, and recently Netflix’s reboot of Lost in Space. When tasked to deliver control panels for spacecraft and systems that exist only in a writer’s mind, Seth sits down with graphics and animation software to make it happen.

Join us as we take a look behind the scenes with Seth and find out exactly what it’s like to be a Playback Designer. Find out what Seth’s toolchain looks like, how he interacts with the rest of the production design crew to come up with a consistent and believable look and feel for interfaces, and what it’s like to design futures that only exist — for now — in someone’s imagination. ​

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 9 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

“If you or someone you love has been exposed to questionable quality electrolytic capacitors, you could be entitled to financial compensation.” Perhaps that’s not exactly the pitch behind this class action lawsuit against capacitor manufacturers, but it might as well be. The suit claims that the defendants, a group of capacitor manufacturers that includes Nichicon, Matsuo, ELNA, and Panasonic, “engaged in an unlawful conspiracy to fix, raise, maintain, or stabilize the prices of Capacitors.” Translation: if you bought capacitors between 2002 and 2014 from a distributor, you paid too much for them. The suit aims to recover a bunch of money from the defendants and divide it up between all the class members, so make sure you go back through all your receipts from Mouser and DigiKey over the last 17 years so you can file a claim that could be worth several dozen cents.

When are people going to learn that posting pictures of their illegal activities online is an Official Bad Idea? One SpaceX fan earned a night in jail after posting selfies he took with Starhopper, the SpaceX test article currently residing at Elon Musk’s would-be spaceport at Boca Chica, Texas. JB Wagoner, a SpaceX super-fan, made the pilgrimage from California to Texas — in his Tesla of course — to see the recent Starship Mark 1 unveiling, and decided to take a side trip to see the Starhopper. He parked at a beach, climbed a dune, and was able to walk right up to Starhopper and go selfie-crazy. After posting the pictures on Facebook, he was arrested, interviewed by Homeland Security, charged with criminal trespass, and thrown in a cell overnight. Wagoner has since been bonded out, but the charges might not stick, since Texas trespassing law requires clear signage or verbal notification of trespass, neither of which Wagoner encountered. SpaceX had even let the fence between the beach and the Starhopper collapse, so Wagoner seems to have had no way of knowing he was trespassing. Still, posting the pictures online was probably asking for trouble.

As satire and dark comedy, the 1987 cyberpunk classic RoboCop can’t be beat. But it also managed to accurately foreshadow a lot of what was to come in the world in terms of technology. No, we don’t have cyborg law enforcement — yet — but we do have something predicted by one throwaway scene: robotic realtors. In the movie, kiosks were set up around Murphy’s old house to extol the various virtues of living there, which ended up triggering the cyborg and starting the film’s climactic rampage. The real-life robotic realtor is a little more flexible, more like a telepresence robot — described aptly as “a Segway with an iPad on top.” The robotic realtor is not autonomous; it only lets a remote realtor interact with potential homebuyers without having to travel to multiple homes. It seems a little gimmicky to us, but the robots are reported to have made 25 sales in their first year on the job.

We’ve been seeing a lot of cheap resin printers these days, enough to make us want to jump into the market and start playing with them. But the cheap ones are all cheap for the same reason — they’re so dang small! They all use LCD screens from phones to mask off the UV light used to cure the resin, and the resulting print volume is tiny. Clem Mayer from MayerMakes has bigger ideas, though: he wants to make a giant resin printer using an LCD monitor as the mask. It’s not as simple as using a bigger screen, though; the film used between the screen and the resin, a fluoropolymer film called FEP, gets deformed when used on larger screens. So Clem is looking at a new built-plate interface that floats the resin on a layer of denser, immiscible liquid. It’s an interesting idea that is still clearly in the proof-of-concept phase, but we look forward to seeing what progress Clem makes.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

A device that even DIY enthusiasts don’t usually think to DIY is the humble soldering iron. Yet, that’s exactly what one Hackaday.io user did by building a USB-powered soldering pen with better performance than a $5 Chinese soldering pen.

The project draws inspiration from another Weller RT tip-based soldering pen by [vlk], although this project has a simpler display than an OLED. Slovakia-based maker [bobricius] was inspired by the DiXi ATSAMD11C14-based development board. The project uses the same 32-bit ATMEL ARM microcontroller with a USB bootloader, which makes updating the firmware a lot easier.

Two buttons control the heat (+/-) and the jack for the Weller RT soldering tip controls the power out with PWM. For the display, 20 Charlieplexed 3014 LEDs are used to show the temperature from 0-399. The last missing LED is left out since 5 GPIO pins can only drive 20 LEDs.

Assuming that the main heating controls stay the same as [vlk]’s project, the pen uses a current sensor and heating controller for PID control of a heating module, which connects to the SMT connector for the Weller RT soldering iron tip. The temperature sensor uses a an op-amp for amplification of the signal from a type K thermocouple.

While there aren’t currently GERBER files for the PCB yet, the project is based on the open-source OLED display soldering pen project by [vlk], whose schematic for the device is published.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Hackaday Editors Tom Nardi and Mike Szczys comb through their favorite hacks from the past week. We loved Donald Papp’s article on considerations before making the leap from FDM 3D Printers to a resin-based process, and we solidify our thoughts on curing cement in low-gravity. Tom’s working on a Cyberdeck build, and he also found an ancient episode of an earlier and much different version of the Hackaday podcast. We’re impressed with a mostly 3D-printed useless machine, a thermal-insert press that’s also 3D-printed, and the Raspberry-Pi based Sidekick clone that popped up this week. A DIY wire-bending robot is an incredible build, as is the gorgeous wire-routing in a mechanical keyboard, and the filigree work on this playing card press. Plus you need to spend some time getting lost in this one hydrogen-line telescope project.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (53.5 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 038 Show Notes: New This Week:

• What On Earth Is A Pickle Fork And Why Is It Adding To Boeing’s 737 Woes?
• Superconference workshops went on sale and sold like crazy:
  • Here’s Your First Look At The Talks Of The 2019 Hackaday Superconference
  • Get Hands-On At Supercon: Workshop Tickets Now Available
  • Hackaday Superconference Tickets
• Tom’s thinking of building a Cyberdeck:
  • 3D Printed VirtuScope Is A Raspberry Pi 4 Cyberdeck With A Purpose
  • A Mobile Computer To Make William Gibson Jealous
  • Cyberdeck Discord Channel
• Second Annual Philadelphia Maker Faire
  • Larger-Than-Life Game Of Operation Is The Future Of Healthcare
• Hackaday had a podcast way back when and Tom found one of the ancient episodes:
  • Hackcast – Hackaday Podcast 2
  • Circa 2005: Hackaday Podcast Episode 2 (mp3)

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• A Useless Tomb Of Eternal Doom
  • Walking Pumpkin II
• The Zen Of Mechanical Keyboard Wiring
• Meet MutantC: Raspberry Pi Sidekick Complete With Sliding Screen, QWERTY
• 3D Print Your Own Thermal Insert Press
• PrintEye Gives You Stats In A Blink
• Silicone Injector Gives Parts Production A Shot In The Arm

Quick Hacks:

• Tom’s Picks:
  • Probe The Galaxy On A Shoestring With This DIY Hydrogen-Line Telescope
  • A Web API For Your Pi
  • The Clickspring Playing Card Press Is A Work Of Art
• Mike’s Picks:
  • Entombed Secrets Partially Unearthed As Researchers Dissect Clever Maze-Generating Algorithm
  • Using PoE With A Raspberry Pi 3 For About Two Bucks
  • Arduino Wire Bender Probably Won’t Kill All Humans

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• When Does Moving To Resin 3D Printing Make Sense?
• Off-World Cement Tested For The First Time
  • Living On Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Ever wondered what “cyberwar” looks like? Apparently it’s a lot of guessing security questions and changing passwords. It’s an interesting read on its own, but there are some interesting clues if you read between the lines. A General in the know mentioned that Isis:

clicked on something or they did something that then allowed us to gain control and then start to move.

This sounds very similar to stories we’ve covered in the past, where 0-days are used to compromise groups or individuals. Perhaps the NSA supplied such an exploit, and it was sent in a phishing attack. Through various means, the U.S. team quietly compromised systems and collected credentials.

The article mentions something else interesting. Apparently the targets of this digital sting had also been compromising machines around the world, and using those machines to manage their efforts. The decision was made by the U.S. team to also compromise those machines, in order to lock out the Isis team. This might be the most controversial element of the story. Security researchers have wanted permission to do this for years. How should the third parties view these incursions?

The third element that I found particularly interesting was the phase 2 attack. Rather than outright delete, ban, and break Isis devices and accounts, the U.S. team installed persistent malware that emulated innocuous glitches. The internet connection is extremely laggy on certain days, certain websites simply don’t connect, and other problems. These are the sort of gremlins that networking pros spend all day trying to troubleshoot. The idea that it’s intentional gives me one more thing to worry about.

Quantum Supremacy and the Death of RSA

Quantum Supremacy made the news, as Google announced they achieved the milestone in one of their research projects. Quantum supremacy is the term for the tipping point when quantum computers finally outperform classical computers. Google’s quantum computer performed a calculation in minutes, and they suggest that a mundane supercomputer would take thousands of years to perform the same process.

So that’s it, right? All our computers can be retired, RSA is dead, and prepare for the singularity. Not so fast. The problem solved was the “random circuit sampling problem.” Not familiar with that particular challenge? It could be thought of as a self-test for a quantum computer. In the theoretical realm, it’s still important, but doesn’t mean anything in the real world. While a few have claimed this to be the end of encryption, there are still years of work until quantum computing has a real world effect.

Encryption was again prematurely declared deceased by Crown Stirling, the creator of a brand new encryption technique, “Time AI.” The whole thing is predictably bogus. These are the guys that rented a sponsored time slot at Black Hat, got booed during their presentation, and proceeded to launch a lawsuit against the hecklers. Let’s just say that they aren’t the most well respected security company.

Local Accounts vs the Cloud

I’m not sure if you’ve installed Windows recently, but Microsoft has made local accounts even harder to create on Windows 10 installs. The stated reason for the Microsoft Account is security and convenience. It may be more convenient, but moving your account information into the cloud is certainly not more secure.

For your periodic reminder that the cloud is a hip way to describe somebody else’s computer: A Yahoo engineer has pleaded guilty to abusing his administrative privileges to access customer accounts, with the intent of gaining access to users’ compromising images. It’s a scary reminder that there are potentially malicious people working at the big companies we trust with our data.

Encrypted DNS

Google and Firefox have both begun rolling out encrypted DNS over HTTPS. This seems like an obvious security win for everyone, so why are several groups complaining and trying to block Google’s actions? The given reason is that Google is making a move to be the single centralized DNS provider. While Google’s DNS is indeed one of the most popular, the DNS over HTTPS support won’t materially increase Google’s DNS traffic.

So why the push back? The most plausible theory is that encrypting DNS will make data mining harder for ISPs, who currently use DNS lookups to monitor customers. Some of this monitoring is for positive reasons, like detecting malware infections. It’s possible that it’s also used for things like tailored advertisements.

On a technical note, even with DNS over HTTPS, domain names are still sent in the clear as part of the HTTPS handshake, in a TLS extension known as Server Name Indication, or SNI. This serves as a hint to enable a web server to serve the correct HTTPS certificate in the case of multiple web sites hosted from the same machine. Encrypted SNI is an experimental solution to this problem that is also being slowly deployed.

iOS Checkm8

[axi0mX] dropped the Checkm8 iOS vulnerability on Twitter just a few days ago. This vulnerability exists in the iOS bootloader, iBoot, all the way up to iPhone X devices. The release mentions that it’s a use after free bug in the bootloader’s USB stack, and depends on a race condition to trigger.

The sheer number of devices impacted by this vulnerability has alarmed some, but this is a tethered only attack, and on its own doesn’t break the secure enclave. What Checkm8 is useful for is jailbreaking iDevices. Apple designed their devices with hard-coded boot loaders as part of their security stack. There is absolutely no way to fix this vulnerability, so many many devices are now permanently accessible for jailbreaking. This has been called a renaissance in the iOS jailbreaking scene, and we’re sure to see many interesting ramifications from this vulnerability.

Android VoIP

On the other side of the mobile landscape, a set of Android vulnerabilities were just made public, all in the VoIP stack. The most serious, CVE-2018-9475, was patched in 2018. It was a simple buffer overflow: when the calling user name or number was longer than 513 bytes, a return address could be overwritten, allowing an attacker to jump execution into their own code.

Another interesting problem was that of a very long sip name. This is the name that would be displayed on screen for an incoming call. At the time, Android didn’t sanity check that name for length, so a long enough value would simply cover the interface and prevent answering or rejecting the incoming call.

The bugs were reported and fixed, so as long as your phone is running a reasonably recent Android version, all should be well. For those running devices that no longer receive security updates? Maybe it’s time to look at LineageOS, or one of the other 3rd party ROMs.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

There’s an old saying: Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. I’m guilty of this in a big way — I was never much on classroom learning. But if I build something or write some code, I’m more likely to understand how it works and why.

Circuit simulation and software workbooks like Matlab and Jupyter are great for being able to build things without a lot of overhead. But these all have some learning curve and often use clever tricks, abstractions, or library calls to obscure what’s really happening. Sometimes it is easier to build something in a spreadsheet. In fact, I often do little circuit design spreadsheets or even digital design because it forces me to create a mathematical model which, in turn, helps me understand what’s really going on.

In this article I’m going to use Google Sheets — although you could do the same tricks in just about any spreadsheet — to generate some data and apply a finite impulse response (FIR) filter to it. Of course, if you had a spreadsheet of data from an instrument, this same technique would work, too.

This is the first of a series about developing intuition and understanding of signal processing using — mostly — spreadsheets. You probably won’t get a lot of practical use out of this — although if you were logging data from a sensor into a spreadsheet and wanted to filter the readings, this might be your go-to technique. By necessity, we need to learn a bit about generating signals mathematically, but since that’s fairly easy, I’m going to put off the details for a future installment. However, for just about any signal processing job we want to do we’ll need filters. There are several kinds of filters we can have and this post is about the FIR filter.

About FIR

FIR stands for finite impulse response and it is a type of digital filter that might seem like magic. There are plenty of ways to explain it, but here’s the thing: making one is dead simple. The idea is to take a bunch of weights, multiply your data by the weights, and then sum it up. The weights are known as taps and they are just numbers. The more taps you have, the better filter you can make.

As a stupid example, suppose you had data and you had 3 taps of values: 1.1, -0.035, 0.336. These values are stored in an array called TAPS and are used along with another array called DATA. To run the calculation you skip over the first two time points (this calculation must have three data points) and start calculating with the third value:

FILTERED[2]=DATA[2]*TAPS[0]+DATA[1]*TAPS[1]+DATA[0]*TAPS[2]

That’s it. Instant filter. There are two things, though. One is, a real filter is going to have a lot more taps. That’s easy enough. The other thing is where do we get the value of the taps?

Turns out that’s an article all by itself. However, there’s a simple practical answer: ask the computer to solve it for us. There are plenty of programs that can compute taps and at least one neat web site called t-filter.

The Easy Way to Compute Taps

Let’s work out a silly example by hand. Open the t-filter web site and move to the bottom of the screen. The first thing to pick is the sampling frequency. Enter 2000 here. I’m going to keep the sampling rate low to make our spreadsheets more manageable.

You can add passbands or stopbands to the table at the bottom left, but instead, just pick “Low Pass” from the “predefined” dropdown. The page might ask your permission to continue. You’ll wind up with a stock low pass filter that has unity gain at up to 400 Hz and allows 5dB of ripple. There’s also a stopband of 500 Hz to 1000 Hz. Since the sample rate is 2 kHz, it doesn’t make sense to go past half of that. The “desired #taps” box should already say “minimum” and that’s almost always what you want unless you are trying to hit a lesser number of taps.

Change the 400 Hz “to” frequency to 100 Hz and press the big red button marked “DESIGN FILTER.” You’ll see seven numbers to the right along with a graph of the filter response. At the bottom, you’ll see that it took 7 taps and the actual ripple figures achieved.

Note the area between 100 Hz and 500 Hz is the “transition band.” The filter doesn’t have to meet any goals in that area. The narrower that transition band is, the more taps you are going to need, in general. For example, if you set a passband of 0 to 100 Hz and a stopband from 110 Hz to 1000 Hz, you’ll get 203 taps (and a long run time, too).

In addition to the taps, you can look at some example code for the filter implementation and the impulse response by using the tabs near the top.

Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Spreadsheet

If you click the “Source Code” tab on t-filter you get C code but that’s not what we are looking for this time. However,  we can easily map the calculations in a spreadsheet. I cooked up a spreadsheet on Google Sheets. The sample rate is over in cell J1. The first three rows let you set up to three sine waves that will mix together. You can set the frequency in column B, the amplitude in column F and the phase in column H. If you don’t want a particular frequency you can set its amplitude to zero.

In the spreadsheet, you’ll find two graphs (you might need to scroll right if you’re on a small monitor). The first chart shows the three signals — at least the first bits of them.

The second graph shows the sum of the three signals and the filtered output from column G. That data computes from the signal in column E and the taps in column F. You can copy and paste right from the t-filter site to column F. Using the INDIRECT function, the sheet is smart enough to compute the right value no matter how many taps you have. Here’s how that works (this is a random row from column G):

=IF(ROW()<$J$3,"",SUMPRODUCT(INDIRECT($K$3),INDIRECT("E" & ((ROW()+1)-$J$2 & ":E" & ROW()))))

The cell $J$3 is the first row that can have a valid output, so if we are earlier than that, the answer is nothing. This lets us get enough history to do the entire computation with all the taps.

However, if this cell is a live one, we get the indirect reference in $K$3. This is a reference to the filter taps and changes dynamically depending on what you paste in. The formula for K3 is simple: ="F5:F" & (J2+4)

J2 is the tap count (using the COUNT function) and the four is just a fixed offset since F5 is the first tap. There are no dollar signs on J2 here because I assume you won’t duplicate this formula, although they wouldn’t hurt. In the earlier formula, though, we don’t want the spreadsheet to adjust J2 relative to the new locations, so the dollar signs are needed there.

The same indirect trick computes the range in column E for the signal input. It starts at the oldest sample and runs to the current one, again using the length in J2. Once you have the two ranges set (the taps and the raw data) a simple call to SUMPRODUCT does all the math. That’s it. It really is that easy. The only hard part was accommodating the varying number of taps.

I added a few tabs that have taps for different filters: high pass, low pass, and bandpass. With the default signals (400 Hz, 150 Hz, and 30 Hz) you should be able to filter each one out successfully.

Catching a Wave

The wave generation part of the spreadsheet relies on the well-known formula: y=A(t)*Sin(ωt+Φ) that will be the topic of the next post.

In this formula, y is the output, t is the time, A(t) is the amplitude at time t (a constant, in our case), ω is the frequency in radians/second (the frequency in Hz times 2*π), and Φ is the phase in radians.

If you ever wanted to see what aliasing does when you try to output a signal higher than twice the sampling rate, here’s your chance. Try entering 2000 Hz in cell B1 and then change the phase to a few different values.

You would think you could export the spreadsheet to Excel, and you can — sort of. The graphs are a bit uglier, but even worse, the INDIRECT function chokes on column G in Excel 2007 and Excel Online. After a half hour, I figured out that sometimes (but only sometimes) using ROW() inside the INDIRECT call was causing a problem, but I finally gave up.

By the way, if you are more interested in why this kind of digital filtering works, you could do worse than to read this very intuitive paper from [Lavry Engineering]. If you prefer your filtering old school, check out our Don’t Fear the Filter features, along with [Bil’s] take on a universal analog filter.

Next spreadsheet up? Inside signal generation. Stay tuned.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

At the end of August I made the trip to Hebden Bridge to give a talk at OSHCamp 2019, a weekend of interesting stuff in the Yorkshire Dales. Instead of a badge, this event gives each attendee an electronic kit provided by a sponsor, and this year’s one was particularly interesting. The RC2014 Micro is the latest iteration of the RC2014 Z80-based retrocomputer, and it’s a single-board computer that strips the RC2014 down to a bare minimum. Time to spend an evening in the hackerspace assembling it, to take a look!

It’s An SBC, But Not As You Know It! The kit contents

The kit arrives in a very compact heat-sealed anti-static packet, and upon opening was revealed to contain the PCB, a piece of foam carrying the integrated circuits, a few passives, and a very simple getting started and assembly guide. The simplicity of the design becomes obvious from the chip count, there’s the Z80 itself, a 6850 UART, 27C512 ROM, 62256 RAM, 74HCT04 for clock generation, and a 74HCT32 for address decoding. The quick-start is adequate, but there is also a set of more comprehensive online instructions (PDF) available.

I added chip sockets and jumpers to my kit.

Assembly of a through-hole kit is hardly challenging, though this one is about as densely-packed as it’s possible to make a through-hole kit with DIP integrated circuits. As with most through-hole projects, the order you pick is everything: resistors first, then capacitors, reset button and crystal, followed by integrated circuits.

I’m always a bit shy about soldering ICs directly to a circuit board so I supplemented my kit with sockets and jumpers. The jumpers are used to select an FTDI power source and ROM addresses for Grant Searle’s ROM BASIC distribution or Steve Cousins’ SCM 1.0 machine code monitor, and the kit instructions recommended hard-wiring them with cut-off resistor wires. There was no row of pins for the expansion bus because this kit was supplied without the backplane that’s a feature of the larger RC2014 kits, but it did have a set of right-angle pins for an FTDI serial cable.

Your Arduino Doesn’t Have A Development Environment On Board!

Having assembled my RC2014 Mini and given it a visual inspection it was time to power it up and see whether it worked. Installing the jumper for FTDI power, I attached my serial cable and plugged it into a USB port.

A really nice touch is that the Micro has the colours for the serial cable wires on the reverse side of the PCB, taking away the worry of getting it the wrong way round. A quick screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200 to get a serial terminal from a bash prompt, hit the reset button, and I was rewarded with a BASIC interpreter. My RC2014 Micro worked first time, and I could straight away give it BASIC commands such as PRINT "Hello World!" and be rewarded with the expected output.

The SCM ROM monitor.

So I’ve built a little Z80 single board computer, and with considerably less work than that required for the fully modular version of the RC2014. Its creator Spencer tells me that the Micro was originally designed as a bargain-basement RC2014 as a multibuy for workshops and similar activities, being very similar to his RC2014 mini board but without provision for a Pi Zero terminal and a few other components. It lacks the extra hardware required for a more comprehensive operating system such as CP/M, so I’m left with about as minimal an 8-bit computer as it’s possible to build using parts available in 2019. My question then is this: What can I do with it?

So. What Can I Do With An 8-bit SBC?

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, how could it possibly compare this small kit that was a giveaway at a conference? Although the Sinclair included a black-and-white TV display interface, tape backup interface, and keyboard, the core computing power was not too far different in its abilities from this RC2014 Micro — after all, it’s the same processor chip. It was the platform that introduced a much younger me to computing, and straight away I devoured Sinclair BASIC and then went on to write machine code on it. It became a general-purpose calculation and computing scratchpad for repetitive homework due to the ease of BASIC programming, and with my Maplin 8255 I/O port card I was able to use it in the way a modern tech-aware kid might use an Arduino.

The RC2014 Micro is well placed to fill all of those  functions as a BASIC and machine code learning platform on which to get down to the hardware in a way you simply can’t on most modern computers, and though the Arduino represents a far more sensible choice for hardware interfacing there is also an RC2014 backplane and I/O board available for the Micro’s expansion bus should you wish to have a go. Will I use it for these things? It’s certainly much more convenient than its full-sized sibling, so it’s quite likely I’ll be getting my hands dirty with a little bit of Z80 code. It’s astounding how much you can forget in 35 years!

The RC2014 Micro can be bought from Spencer’s Tindie store, with substantial bulk discounts for those workshop customers. If you want the full retrocomputer experience it’s a good choice as it provides about as simple a way into Z80 hardware and software as possible. The cost of simplicity comes in having no non-volatile storage and in lacking the hardware to run CP/M, but it has to be borne in mind that it’s the bottom of the RC2014 range. For comparison you can read our review of the original RC2014, over which we’d say the chief advantage of the Micro is its relative ease of construction.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Back in the good old days of carburetors and distributors, the game was all about busting door locks and hotwiring the ignition to boost a car. Technology rose up to combat this, you may remember the immobilizer systems that added a chip to the ignition key without which the vehicle could not be started. But alongside antitheft security advances, modern vehicles gained an array of electronic controls covering everything from the entertainment system to steering and brakes. Combine this with Bluetooth, WiFi, and cellular connectivity — it’s unlikely you can purchase a vehicle today without at least one of these built in — and the attack surface has grown far beyond the physical bounds of bumpers and crumple zones surrounding the driver.

Cyberattackers can now compromise vehicles from the comfort of their own homes. This can range from the mundane, like reading location data from the navigation system to more nefarious exploits capable of putting motorists at risk. It raises the question — what can be done to protect these vehicles from unscrupulous types? How can we give the user ultimate control over who has access to the data network that snakes throughout their vehicle? One possible solution I’m looking at today is the addition of internet killswitches.

The Scope of the Problem

[Chris] and [Charlie] remotely hacked into a Jeep, disabling its brakes remotely and sending it careening into a ditch.As any hacker knows, a connected computer is a vulnerable computer. In vehicles, not only are the embedded systems connected to the internet, but they’re also capable of controlling vital safety systems. While many wrote off these concerns as unrealistic, the uncomfortable truth came home to roost in 2015. Security researchers [Charlie Miller] and [Chris Valasek] were able to remotely take control of a Jeep Cherokee, with just a laptop and a 3G data connection. The duo were able to scan the internet for further targets, and could even track various Chrysler automobiles around the country thanks to GPS and their in-dash entertainment systems.

This discovery led to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles, with Chrysler sending out firmware upgrades on USB drives to patch the vulnerability. Additionally, a change was made to lock down access to individual Jeeps over the Internet. This measure protects against the intrusion by itself, as the attack can’t proceed without a connection, a measure which will protect unpatched vehicles in the wild. This showed the value of cutting the data link in terms of making a vehicle resistant to attack.

While the hack was limited to Fiat-Chrysler automobiles fitted with Uconnect infotainment systems, it highlighted the broader risks to all connected vehicles. The fact that a hacker was able to remotely target a car over the internet, and interfere with the transmission, brakes, and other functions was a wake-up call for the industry. It made it clear to both automakers and the public that matters of cybersecurity are present on the open road.

A Potential Solution

Flawed code is everywhere, and it’s unrealistic to believe that automakers will ever be able to produce cars with zero vulnerabilities. While over-the-air updates and improved basic security practices will help stem the tide, there will always be the occasional zero-day exploit that sends everyone for a loop. For personal computers, this is considered an acceptable risk. However, a compromised car can put lives at stake. Additionally, while useful, an internet connection is not actually a requirement for a car to provide transportation.

Thus, a useful tool in defending against automotive cyberattacks could be a simple one — give the user the ability to disconnect the vehicle from the internet entirely. While this would shut down streaming radio services and certain other non-essential facilities, it would also make remote attacks impossible. All the tricky firmware hacks in the world are worth naught if you can’t make a connection to the vehicle to deliver the payload, after all.

In order to make this easy, vehicles could ship with an internet killswitch to shutdown all wireless and cellular communication to the vehicle’s systems. It would require a careful and considered design, and ideally would have a standardized form across manufacturers. Naturally, a concerted effort to educate the public in this device’s use would be required. Printing a small note in the back of a 200+ page manual simply won’t cut it.

Basic solutions exist to protect us against webcam hacks. A similar approach may be valuable in cars.

The benefits of such a device would be manifold, covering concerns of both security and privacy. In the event that an exploit is used in the wild, it would allow users to continue safely driving their cars while waiting for a patch to become available. Compare this to the current status quo where anyone wanting to disable wireless connections to their vehicle would need to navigate software menus different for each make (and possibly model) of vehicle, or go truly old school and start pulling fuses.

The simple fact is that the average person is unlikely to take their car off the road while manufacturers scramble to fix a problem; previous recalls have shown that people are complacent and will drive recalled vehicles with abandon. Some may even choose to drive with their car permanently offline, just in case — akin to those who tape over laptop webcams to evade snooping hackers.

Potential Downsides

Of course, there are potential drawbacks, too. Consumers are notoriously difficult to educate. It’s likely that many will inadvertently activate the switch, before rolling up to their dealership in a fury over their entertainment system which refuses to stream music, or fails to connect their phone for hands-free use. Any IT help desk worker will be familiar with the pain caused by hardware WiFi switches hidden on the sides of laptops, unbeknownst to hapless users. Additionally, if not placed in a clear and obvious location, or if the functionality is hidden deep in a menu system, many drivers will fail to use the system entirely.

Hacking one car is achievable; creating a zombie horde of vehicles remains unrealistic. That’s not to say nobody will try.

Despite this, it seems crazy that modern connected vehicles don’t have a way to quickly and easily shut down their wireless connections. In the same way the Firestone tyre controversy led to tyre pressure monitors becoming mandatory, it may take a widespread controversy to push governments into action. Short of driving around with a cellular jammer, there seems little the average motorist can do to protect themselves against vehicular cyberattacks. If automakers are unable to protect consumers, we may see the community find their own solutions, even if it’s as simple as not paying their cellular service bills.

In the meantime, we wait with bated breath for the next major automotive hack to hit the spotlight. Hopefully measures are in place sooner rather than later, lest we all succumb to hordes of zombie vehicles, a la the Fate of the Furious.

We’d like to hear what you have to say about. Do you think vehicles need a reliable way of toggling the data connections built into them? Is the automotive internet killswitch a reasonable option for mitigating exploits in automobiles or is it merely a bandage on a larger problem that’s not going away anytime soon? How do you think the average consumer would react to the appearance of an “internet off” button on the dashboard? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Tags:  Ask hackaday  

Join us on Wednesday, October 2 at noon Pacific for the Alternative Photography Hack Chat with Pierre-Loup Martin!

It seems like the physics of silicon long ago replaced the chemistry of silver as the primary means of creating photographs, to the point where few of us even have film cameras anymore, and home darkrooms are a relic of the deep past. Nobody doubts that the ability to snap a quick photo or even to create a work of photographic genius with a tiny device that fits in your pocket is a wonder of the world, but still, digital photographs can lack some of the soul of film photography.

Recapturing the look of old school photography is a passion for a relatively small group of dedicated photographers, who ply their craft with equipment and chemistries that haven’t been in widespread use for a hundred years. The tools of this specialty trade are hard to come by commercially, so practitioners of alternate photographic processes are by definition hackers, making current equipment bend to the old ways. Pierre-Loup is one such artist, working with collodion plates, hacked large-format cameras, pinholes camera, and chemicals and processes galore –  anything that lets him capture a unique image. His photographs are eerie, with analog imperfections that Photoshop would have a hard time creating.

Join us as Pierre-Loup takes us on a tour through the world of alternative photography. We’ll look at the different chemistries used in alternative photography, the reasons why anyone would want to try it, and the equipment needed to pull it off. Photography was always a hack, until it wasn’t; Pierre-Loup will show us how he’s trying to put some soul back into it.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 2 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

In a sure sign that we’ve arrived in the future, news from off-world is more interesting this week than Earth news. When the InSight probe landed on Mars last year, it placed the first operating magnetometer on the Red Planet. Since then, the sensitive instrument has been logging data about the planet’s magnetic field, and now there are reports that researchers have discovered a chain of pulsations in the magnetic field. Pulsations in planetary magnetic fields aren’t all that strange; pulse trains that occur only at Martian midnight are, though. Researchers haven’t got a clue yet about what this means. We assume they’ve eliminated artifacts like something on the lander being turned on at local midnight, so when they figure it out it should be fascinating.

In more news from the future, Boston Dynamics is trolling us again. We covered the announcement early this week that they’re putting their Spot quadruped robot on sale – sort of. Turns out you need to be selected to qualify based on the application you have in mind, plus have several Ferraris full of cash to spend. While everyone was watching the adorable antics of Spot as it wandered through improbably industrial vignettes, Boston Dynamics also released this slightly terrifying video of their Atlas robot running through a gymnastics routine.  It starts with a headstand and a front roll and ends with a slipt leap and whatever the gymnastics equivalent of a figure skating axel jump is. Yes, it has a special roll cage attached to make the tumbles a bit smoother, but it’s still some remarkable stuff.

How are your RF design skills? If they’re good enough to design an RF power amp, you might want to check out this homebrew RF design challenge. Put on by NXP Semiconductors, the design must use one of their new LDMOS RF power transistors. They’ll send you samples so you can build your design, and you stand to win up to $3000 plus $1000 worth of NXP products. The contest opened back in May but is running through the middle of November, so you’d better hurry.

Speaking of RF, wouldn’t it be interesting to see a snapshot of the RF spectrum over the entire planet? ElectroSense thinks so, and they’re working on a crowdsourcing model to set up a globe-spanning network of connected RF sensors. The idea is similar to what FlightAware does for monitoring the locations of aircraft with a distributed network of ADS-B receivers. But where FlightAware only monitors a narrow slice of spectrum, ElectroSense wants it all – DC to 6 GHz. You can build a sensor from an SDR and a Raspberry Pi and start contributing to the effort, which only has a handful of sensors at the moment.

Has affordable metal 3D-printing finally arrived? For certain values of affordability, it soon will, when One Click Metal launches their new selective laser melting printer. Thomas Sanladerer did a video with the principals, and the prototype looks promising. SLM is not a new process, but patents on the core process recently ran out, so startups like One Click Metal are jumping into the market. Their printer won’t be cheap — you’ll still need to write a check with many zeroes — but with more players, the price should come down.

And finally, what’s this world coming to when a startup specializing in building giant fighting robots can’t make a go of it? MegaBots is shutting down, and while that’s certainly bad news for its founders and employees, it’s great news for anyone in the market for used battle bots. The company’s flagship bot, the 15-ton Eagle Prime, is currently up for auction on eBay. Bidding started at $1 with no reserve, but if you were looking for a steal, you’re a bit late. The high bid is currently $100,100, which is still an incredible buy considering it cost $2.5 million to build. You’ll have to pay for shipping, but you’ll have a super-destructive mecha of your own to drive around. And think how cool you’ll look rolling into some kid’s backyard birthday party. Presumably one you’ve been invited to.

Tags:  hackaday links  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams take a look at the latest hacks from the past week. We keep seeing awesome stuff and find ourselves wanting to buy cheap welders, thermal camera sensors, and CNC parts. There was a meeting of the dog-shaped robots at ICRA and at least one of them has super-fluid movements. We dish on 3D printed meat, locking up the smartphones, asynchronous C routines, and synchronized clocks.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (60.0 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 037 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Is A Cheap Inverter Welder Worth It?
• Getting The Heat On With A Thermal Camera
• Lack Of Space Is No Longer An Excuse For Not Having A Pen Plotter
• Windows 3.1 Screensavers, Now On Twitter
• XScreenSaver: Screenshots

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Fighting Household Air Pollution
• Watch Legged Robot Run Circles Around Its Bigger Brethren
  • Robotic Cheetah Teaches A Motors Class
• How Would You Like Your Steak Printed?
  • Carbon Footprint of 5 Diets Compared
  • Environmentally Optimal, Nutritionally Sound, Protein and Energy Conserving Plant Based Alternatives to U.S. Meat
• IoT Safe Keeps Latchkey Kids’ Phones On Lockdown
  • Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast: 027 – The Box
• Asynchronous Routines For C
  • Protothreads – Lightweight, Stackless Threads in C
  • Coroutines in C
  • A new way to program microcontrollers
  • Duff’s device – Wikipedia
  • Tom Duff on Duff’s Device
• Fitness Tracker Hacked Into Optical Density Meter

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Finally, A Rotary Cell Phone With Speed Dial
  • Copying High Security Keys With OpenSCAD And Light
  • Hacked Tape Player Makes For A Unique Instrument
• Mike’s Picks:
  • Larger-Than-Life Game Of Operation Is The Future Of Healthcare
  • Helicopter Chain Saw
  • Magnets Make This Panda Move

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Ask Hackaday: What Good Is A Robot Dog?
• 100 Year Old Atomic Clock
  • The Best Pendulum Clock

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

So first off this week is something of a mystery. Microsoft released an out-of-cycle patch for Internet Explorer. The exploitability assessment from Microsoft indicates that this bug is under active exploitation, but not many details are available. Let’s take a look at what information has been released, and see what we can learn.

A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the way that the scripting engine handles objects in memory in Internet Explorer.

It’s a remote code execution vulnerability, it affects Internet Explorer, it’s in the scripting engine, and it happens due to objects in memory being mishandled. We could take some guesses, but later in this document we’re given a few other clues. The workaround is to disable jscript.dll, and the impact is limited, as jscript9.dll is the default JavaScript engine. jscript.dll is apparently a legacy JavaScript engine that a website can request.

“Jscript” is what Microsoft called their shameless copy implementation of JavaScript. The older jscript.dll seems to be present in newer versions of Internet Explorer for compatibility reasons. So it’s a problem in how the older JavaScript library handles objects. Any website can request this legacy engine, so the attack vector is basically unlimited.

The urgency implied by the out-of-cycle patch, combined with the otherwise eery silence surrounding this patch, suggests this 0-day was possibly being used in a targeted attack. We hope the details will eventually be revealed.

CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream

CentOS 8 was released this week, the community repackage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. In 2014, Red Hat announced that CentOS was officially becoming a Red Hat sponsored project. This week, CentOS Stream was also announced.

The Fedora distribution has long served as a test-bed for upcoming RHEL releases, with RHEL 8 being based on Fedora 28. CentOS Stream will serve as a “midstream” distribution, a rolling release that pulls updates from Fedora, and will eventually become future RHEL/CentOS releases. It remains to be seen exactly how far ahead of the main CentOS distribution Stream will stay. A long-standing problem with CentOS is that by the time a release hits end-of-life, some of the software versions are very old. Even though security fixes are quickly backported to these older versions, there are security issues that arise as a result. For example, CentOS 7 contains PHP 5.4 with no official path to installing a newer version of PHP. WordPress now requires PHP 5.6.20 as the oldest supported PHP version. Red Hat may backport fixes to PHP 5.4, but that doesn’t help the out-of-date installs of WordPress, running on otherwise up-to-date CentOS machines.

Hopefully CentOS Stream will provide the much needed middle-ground between the bleeding-edge pace of Fedora, and the frustratingly slow march of CentOS/RHEL.

Russian Surveillance

A Nokia employee accidentally backed up a company drive to his home storage device, which was unintentionally Internet accessible. The data contained on this drive was detailed information on Russia’s SORM (System for Operative Investigative Activities), the government’s wiretapping program. The amount of data revealed is staggering, 1.7 terabytes. Passwords, administrative URLs, and even precise physical locations were included. The breadth of information makes one wonder if it was actually an accident, or if this was intended to be another Snowden style data leak. Just an aside, it’s not clear that the revealed wiretapping effort is as broad or onerous as the one Snowden revealed.

PHPMyAdmin CSRF

Running PHPMyAdmin on one of your servers? You should probably go update it. Version 4.9.1 was released on Saturday the 21st, and contains a fix for CVE-2019-12922. This vulnerability is a Cross Site Request Forgery, or CSRF. A CSRF attack can be as simple as an image link on one site, that links to another site, and triggers an action on that second site. Let’s look at the PHPMyAdmin example:

img src="
http://server/phpmyadmin/setup/index.php?page=servers&mode=remove&id=1";
style="display:none;"

A hidden image will actually trigger an HTTP GET request, which asks for the server’s page, and tries to remove the first entry. If a user is logged in to the PHPMyAdmin server that the link is targeting, the command will silently complete. This is one of the reasons that HTTP GET requests should never make state changes, and only ever retrieve information. An HTTP POST message is much harder to generate in this way, though not impossible.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

When Kenyan engineer [Aloise] found out about the health risks of household air pollution, they knew there had to be a smart solution to combatting the problem while still providing a reasonable source of energy for families cooking without the luxury of cleaner fuels. Enter OpenHAP, a DIY household air pollution monitor that provides citizen scientists and researches the means to measure air particulates in developing countries.

The device is based on an ESP32 communicating with a ZH03B Particulate matter sensor over UART; a DS3231SN real-time clock (RTC), temperature and humidity sensor, and MLX90640 2D thermal sensor array over I2C; and wirelessly sending the data received to a Bluetooth low energy wrist-strap beacon and an Internet enabled phone. The device also uses a TCA9534 GPIO expander to control the visual and auditory notifiers (buzzers and LEDs) and to interface to a SD card.

The project uses the libesphttpd project modified for the ESP32 for the webserver, which is used to stream data to a mobile handset or computer using the WiFi capabilities of the ESP32. The data includes real-time sensor information, system status, storage media status, visualizations of the thermal array sensor data (to ensure the camera is facing the source of heat), and tag information to test the limits of the Bluetooth tag with regards to distance.

Power input is provided through a Micro-USB connector, protected with a TVS diode and a Schottky diode in series to prevent reverse power flow.

The project was tested in two real-life scenarios: one with a household in rural Kenya and another with an urban low-income family of four. In the first test, the family used a three stone open fire stove. A FLiR thermal camera captured the stove temperatures, while a standard camera was enough to capture the high levels of smoke inside the kitchen. The readings from OpenHAP were high enough to exceed the upper detection threshold for the particulate sensor, showing that the woman cooking in the house was receiving the equivalent of 8 cigarettes a day, about 8 x the WHO’s recommended particulate levels.

Within the second household, a typical energy mix of charcoal briquettes and kerosene was typically used for cooking, with kerosene used during the day and briquettes used at night. The results from measuring pollution levels using OpenHAP showed that the mother and child in the household regularly received around 1.5 x the recommended limit of pollutants, enough to lead to slow suffocation.

There’s already immense potential for this project to help researchers test out different energy sources for rural households, not to mention the advantage of having a portable low-energy pollution monitor for citizen scientists.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

We’ve all seen cheap welders for sale from the usual online sources, small inverter stick welders for a very tempting price. But are they any good? When my local supermarket had one in its offers aisle, I took the plunge and placed it in my cart alongside the usual week’s supply of Marmite. That was some time around the start of the year.

Does Your Supermarket Sell Welders? My Workzone welder from the supermarket.

What I’d bought from my local Aldi was a Workzone WWIW-80, an 80 A unit that had cost me somewhere just over £60 (about $75), and came with welding leads and a rather poor quality face shield. The German discount supermarket chains specialise in periodic offers on all kinds of interesting things, so a very similar unit has also been for sale with a Parkside brand from their competitor Lidl. These small inverter welders are fairly generic, so they can be found with a variety of brands and specifications at a lower price online if you don’t mind forgoing the generous Aldi 3 year guarantee. The cheapest I’ve seen was about £35, or $44, but that price included only the inverter, without welding leads.

As a working blacksmith my dad has had a high-quality inverter welder since the 1990s, so my frame of reference is based upon that. He tried one of the first tiny inverters when they originally came to market in the last decade, but it couldn’t take the demands of a professional welder and packed up. I thus didn’t have high expectations of this unit, but I needed one of my own and for the price it was worth the punt. I’ve used it for occasional general purpose heavy welding tasks, repairing bits of farm machinery and fittings, and rebuilding some steps on a narrowboat in 7 mm plate. It’s acquitted itself well in those tasks, in that I am not a skilled welder and my work isn’t the tidiest, but it’s allowed me to do a satisfactory job.

How Do These Welders Perform? This is a stick weld on 1mm thickness tube using a 2.5mm rod at 40A. It’s not the best weld you’ll ever see, but that someone with my limited skill could do this I find amazing.

It’s now a long time since inverter welders were new, so perhaps fewer readers will be using AC stick welders than might once have been the case. For me the comparison is one of smoothness, my relative lack of welding skill reveals itself in finding the inverter less easy to strike an arc than my dad would have, but once that arc is under way it’s so much easier to draw it and control it. I can fill holes with weld much more easily with an inverter welder, and the better control of current means that I can more easily deal with lighter work where someone of my abilities would normally be better served with a MIG welder.

To demonstrate this I decided to push the limit a little, and try the Workzone welder with some offcuts of 1 mm thickness square tube from my makerspace scrap bin. These had come from an office table leg, and were the type of stock that would push the boundaries with any stick welder. Because this is a relatively small welder, I use it with 2.5 mm rods, which as you’d expect will happily blow a hole in a 1 mm tube wall at higher currents. This is why you’d normally use MIG on a task such as this, and indeed at 80 A I was rewarded with something closer to cutting than welding. Dialing back the current to 40 A, I could easily rebuild the hole, and when trying to join two pieces at a right angle I could produce a smooth weld with good integrity. To me, the ability to weld this material is nothing short of amazing, as I’ve never managed to do that on such thin metal with a stick welder. That’s almost car bodywork thickness, I’d never have imagined even an inverter could come close. It’s worth saying as an aside that maintaining an arc at only 40 A is a little more challenging.

…And What Are Their Limitations?

I’ve described my Workzone then as a capable little welder that has served me well over the jobs I’ve used it for and which has even surprised me with its capabilities. Where are the deficiencies of it and welders like it, if they’re so good, why do better welders exist?

I’m fine with the electrode holder but the earth clamp could be more substantial.

Construction-wise, these units tend to be robust enough for serious casual users. A sturdy sheet-metal case with decent cooling apertures and a fan to stop overheating, and brass locking connections for the leads.They are nothing special if you are used to other switch-mode power supplies: the usual electronics and a toroidal transformer. The leads are substantial, and on inspection proved to have copper conductors rather than aluminium as I’d feared, and because this was sold through a European distributor everything bears the European standards markings. If you buy a similar welder from an online source it may not have these approvals, so beware appliances with lax safety standards.

Where they differ from professional grade welders is in their duty cycle, and probably also in some cases in their claimed capacities. This isn’t the welder you’d use for large-scale fabrication or to build ships, it’s the one you keep in the shop for short welding tasks, or perhaps you have as a lightweight and portable backup for jobs where your shop welder is just too big to get to. If I was to hazard a guess as to why my dad’s little inverter welder broke down, I’d put the finger on duty cycle: the demands of a blacksmith fitting a piece of work on-site were probably too much for it. So if you’re an occasional welder it’ll be fine, but if you’re using it all the time it might pay to invest a little more.

Then there are the sometimes optimistic specifications quoted on small inverter welders. The Workzone unit is comparatively modest in its capacity at 80i A, but it’s not uncommon to see similar models claiming to be capable of as much as 200 A. When something that only costs a few tens of dollars is promising capacities that seem unrealistic for its price, it’s not unreasonable to assume that exploring its limits will hasten its demise. You get what you pay for, and perhaps if your needs run to more substantial currents it would reward you to pay a little more.

Among the Hackaday readership will be people whose welding skill is far ahead of mine, as well as plenty of people with experience of similar cheap inverter welders. I hope sharing my experiences will help you decide whether or not to try one of these devices, and as always it would be great to hear your views in the comments.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, September 25 at noon Pacific for the High-Speed PCB Design Hack Chat with Bil Herd!

Printed circuits have become so commoditized that we seldom think much about design details. EDA software makes it easy to forget about the subtleties and nuances that make themselves painfully obvious once your design comes back from the fab and doesn’t work quite the way you thought it would.

PCB design only gets more difficult the faster your circuit needs to go, and that’s where a depth of practical design experience can come in handy. Bil Herd, the legendary design engineer who worked on the Commodore C128 and Plus4/264 computers and many designs since then, knows a thing or two in this space, and he’s going to stop by the Hack Chat to talk about it. This is your chance to pick the brain of someone with a wealth of real-world experience in high-speed PCB design. Come along to find out what kind of design mistakes are waiting to make your day miserable, and which ones can be safely ignored. Spoiler alert: square corners probably don’t matter.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 25 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Of all the stories we’d expect to hit our little corner of the world, we never thought that the seedy doings of a now-deceased accused pedophile billionaire would have impacted the intellectual home of the open-source software movement. But it did, and this week Richard Stallman resigned from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, as well as from the Free Software Foundation, which he founded and served as president. The resignations, which Stallman claims were “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”, followed the disclosure of a string of emails where he perhaps unwisely discussed what does and does not constitute sexual assault. The emails were written as a response to protests by MIT faculty and students outraged over the university’s long and deep relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late alleged pedophile-financier. This may be one of those stories where the less said, the better. If only Stallman had heeded that advice.

They may be the radio stations with the worst programming ever, but then again, the world’s atomic clock broadcasting stations can really keep a beat. One of the oldest of these stations, WWV, is turning 100 this year, and will be adding special messages to its usual fare of beeps and BCD-encoded time signals on a 100-Hz subcarrier. If you tune to WWV at 10 past the hour (or 50 minutes past the hour for WWVH, the time station located in Hawaii) you’ll hear a special announcement. There was also talk of an open house at the National Institute of Standards and Technology complete with a WWV birthday cake, but that has since been limited to 100 attendees who pre-registered.

For the machinists and wannabes out there, the Internet’s machine shop channels all pitched in this week on something called #tipblitz19, where everyone with a lathe or mill posted a short video of their favorite shop tip. There’s a ton of great tip out there now, with the likes of This Old Tony, Abom79, Stefan Gotteswinter, and even our own Quinn Dunki contributing timesaving – and finger saving – tips. Don’t stop there though – there’s a playlist with 77 videos at last count, many of them by smaller channels that should be getting more love. Check them out and then start making chips.

Most of us know that DLP chips, which lie behind the lens of the projectors that lull us to sleep in conference rooms with their white noise and warm exhaust, are a series of tiny mirrors that wiggle around to project images. But have you ever seen them work? Now you can: Huygens Optics has posted a fascinating video deep-dive into the workings of digital light processors. With a stroboscopic camera and a lot of fussy work, the video reveals the microscopic movements of these mirrors and how that syncs up with the rotation of a color filter wheel. It’s really fascinating stuff, and hats off to Huygens for pulling off the setup needed to capture this.

And speaking of tiny optics, get a load of these minuscule digital cameras, aptly described by tipster David Gustafik as “disturbingly small.” We know we shouldn’t be amazed by things like this anymore, but c’mon – they’re ridiculously tiny! According to the datasheet, the smaller one will occupy 1 mm² on a PCB; the larger stereo camera requires 2.2 mm². Dubbed NanEye, the diminutive cameras are aimed at the medical market – think endoscopy – and at wearables manufacturers. These would be a lot of fun to play with – just don’t drop one.

Tags:  hackaday links  

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys work their way through a fantastic week of hacks. From a rideable tank tread to spoofing radio time servers and from tune-playing vacuum cleaners to an epic camera motion control system, there’s a lot to get caught up on. Plus, Elliot describes frequency counting while Mike’s head spins, and we geek out on satellite optics, transistor-based Pong, and Jonathan Bennett’s weekly security articles.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (54 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 036 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Elliot’s working on the audio compression algorithms originally used by the Speak & Spell
  • Saving Old Voices By Dumping ROMs
  • Speech library for Arduino
  • Command line LPC analysis tool to generate bitstreams for the Texas Instruments TMS5220 chip
  • read-more-hackaday.hex

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Building Video Pong With Discrete Components
• Keeping Clocks On Time, The Swiss Way
  • GitHub – hzeller/txtempus: A DCF77, WWVB, JJY and MSF clock LF-band signal transmitter using the Raspberry Pi
  • No Signal For Your Radio-Controlled Watch? Just Make Your Own Transmitter
  • Build Your Own Radio Clock Transmitter
• Scratch Built Media Player Channels 1980s Design
• DJ Xiaomi Spins Beats And Brushes At The Same Time
  • GitHub – dgiese/dustcloud: Xiaomi Smart Home Device Reverse Engineering and Hacking
  • 34C3 Talk about Xiaomi Vacuums
• Speed Up Filming With This Jawdropping 8-Axis Camera Crane
• Frequency Counting A Different Way

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Handheld LoRa Joystick For Long-Range Bots
  • Rideable Tank Tread: It’s A Monotrack Motorcycle That Begs You To Stop Very Slowly
  • Is It A Boat? Is It A Hammock? No, It’s Both!
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Teaching A Vintage Line Printer To Make Music, All Over Again
  • Walking Arm Trebuchet Is Different, But Effective
  • Upping The Story-Telling Game With Dialog And The Å-Machine
    • Linus’ Craft Demo (from 11 years ago!)

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• This Week In Security: Simjacker, Microsoft Updates, Apple Vs Google, Audio DeepFakes, And NetCAT
  • Google’s Duplex Uses A.I. to Mimic Humans (Sometimes) – The New York Times
• Watching The Watchers: The State Of Space Surveillance

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

VoIP cameras, DVRs, and other devices running the Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WSDD) protocol are being used in a new type of DDoS attack. This isn’t the first time a zeroconf service has been hijacked as part of a DDoS, as UPnP has also been abused in similar ways.

Feel like alphabet soup yet? A Denial of Service attack is one where the target is simply made unavailable, rather than actually compromised. The classic example of this is the SYN flood, where an attacker would open hundreds of connections to a web server at once, exhausting the server’s resources and interrupting legitimate use of that server. As mitigations for these attacks were developed (SYN Cookies, for example), DoS attacks were replaced by Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. Rather than attack a weakness on the target machine, like available RAM or CPU cycles, a DDoS generally targets available network bandwidth by hitting the target website from many, many locations at once. No clever software tricks can help when your Internet connection is fully saturated with junk traffic.

And one way to get many, many computers to send traffic to the same IP is to run a botnet. Your five megabit upload bandwidth might not seem like much, but if a thousand computers are each saturating their 5 megabits, the resulting 5 gigabit attack is nothing to sneeze at. DDoS amplification is when a third party service is used as a part of an attack. Imagine sending a DNS request with a spoofed source IP address. A UDP connection doesn’t have the initial handshake of a TCP packet, so detecting a spoof of this sort is much more difficult. You send a relatively small DNS request, and a DNS server responds by sending a larger reply — not to your IP, but to the target IP that you spoofed. This sort of amplification is usually done as part of a botnet DDoS attack, resulting in even more attack bandwidth. The largest confirmed DDoS attack on record is a staggering 1.3 Terabytes per second, was aimed at Github, and used Memcached as the amplification vector.

Now back to Zeroconf. Zero-configuration networking is the idea that things should “just work” when plugged into a network together. When you have the option to send video to your Chromecast, or Windows shows you the list of all the other devices on your network, you’re seeing zeroconf in action. Zeroconf protocols like UPnP and WSDD are intended to run only over the local network, but vendors are notorious for mis-implementing standards, and here is no exception. WSDD as defined should only respond to multicast requests on UDP port 3702. Many vendors have built their WSDD support in such a way that devices will respond to WSDD requests from any IP address, multicast or not. The last key to this amplification technique is the actual amplification. How small of a packet can an attacker send, vs how big of a packet can this trigger in response. Researchers at Akamai identified an eighteen byte message that triggers a much larger response. They managed a 153x amplification factor, which is terrifying. Thankfully, active attacks are running something more like 10x amplification factors.

Lastpass Reveals Your Last Pass

Sometimes software names and the bugs that affect them are downright uncanny. The Lastpass plugin had an issue where a website could run some clever Javascript and retrieve the last password that Lastpass auto-filled. This worked because the Lastpass plugin uses Javascript on the web pages you visit, watching for password prompts to fill. It was discovered that the JS code of a malicious website could interact with the plugin’s code in unintended ways. Because the Lastpass pop-up could be referenced without calling an initialization function, data was still present from the last time that pop-up was shown. Lastpass fixed the problem in release 4.33.0.

More Data Breaches

This week there were two separate stories about very large data breaches. Though technically, neither is a breach so much as passwordless databases carelessly exposed to the internet. First is the more than 100 medical databases being served on the internet without proper security. So far there seems to be plenty of finger-pointing, but with that many security fails, there is plenty of blame to go around. It’s worth noting that each of those exposed databases is a HIPAA violation, and each carries the potential for a sizable fine.

The second is the records of essentially every citizen of Ecuador. An Elasticsearch instance was misconfigured and publicly accessible. While at first glance, this seemed to be yet another government database exposed to the Internet, there was something strange about this database. There was data from multiple sources. About half of the database was consistent with the idea of a government database, but the rest seemed to come from private entities. The researchers working on this story determined an Ecuadorian company named Novaestrat was hosting the vulnerable database.

The database was secured, and Novaestrat’s website has disappeared. There are still more questions than answers concerning this story. Was this database the combined storage for other data breaches? Regardless, the personal data of millions of Ecuadorians was exposed. Interestingly, Julian Assange was among the people with entries in this Database, as a result of his Ecuadorian asylum.

Both of these databases contained personal information, which is of course unchangeable. Millions of people have been doxxed by carelessness, and short of witness-protection-plan level measures, there is no undo button.

Windows Defender

Using Windows Defender? You might be in for a surprise next time you manually run a scan. Since the update this Tuesday, Windows Defender only scans a handful of files when manually running a quick or full scan. As is often the case, this bug was introduced when another problem was being fixed. If you use Windows Defender and want to run a manual scan, the custom scan does still work correctly.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

As flu season encroaches upon the northern hemisphere, doctor’s offices and walk-in clinics will be filled to capacity with phlegm-y people asking themselves that age-old question: is it the flu, or just a little cold? If only they all had smart thermometers at home that can tell the difference.

Typically, a fever under 101°F (38.5°C) in adults and 100.4°F (38°C) in children is considered low-grade, and thus is probably not the flu. But who can remember these things in times of suffering? [M. Bindhammer]’s iF°EVE is meant to be a lifesaving medical device that eliminates the guesswork. It takes readings via 3D printed ear probe mounted on the back, and then asks a series of yes/no questions like do you have chills, fatigue, cough, sore throat, etc. Then the Teensy 3.2 uses naive Bayes classification to give the probability of influenza vs. cold. The infrared thermometer [M.] chose has an accuracy of 0.02°C, so it should be a fairly reliable indicator.

Final determinations should of course be left up to a throat swab at the doctor’s office. But widespread use of this smart thermometer could be the first step toward fewer influenza deaths, and would probably boost the ratio of doctors to patients.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

In the older days of open source software, major projects tended to have their Benevolent Dictators For Life who made all the final decisions, and some mature projects still operate that way. Guido van Rossum famously called his language “Python” because he liked the British comics of the same name. That’s the sort of thing that only a single developer can get away with.

However, in these modern times of GitHub, GitLab, and other collaboration platforms, community-driven decision making has become a more and more common phenomenon, shifting software development towards democracy. People begin to think of themselves as “Python programmers” or “GIMP users” and the name of the project fuses irrevocably with their identity.

What happens when software projects fork, develop apart, or otherwise change significantly? Obviously, to prevent confusion, they get a new name, and all of those “Perl Monks” need to become “Raku Monks”.  Needless to say, what should be a trivial detail — what we’ve all decided to call this pile of ones and zeros or language constructs — can become a big deal. Don’t believe us? Here are the stories of renaming Python, Perl, and the GIMP.

A Renegade Python

Next year marks the end of life for Python 2 — and this time we mean it! Although usage statistics have shown a steady decline of Python 2 in favor of Python 3 over the last years, there is still a significant amount of Python 2 code out there. Expecting that every single one of those projects will migrate to Python 3 by New Years is unlikely. For one reason or another, it can be almost guaranteed that Python 2 will stick around for another while, officially supported or not. But its days are probably numbered.

Still, just suppose that a bunch of people teamed up around the idea of developing Python 2 further, for whatever reasons. After all, humans are complex, and someone out there was bound to lead a crusade against parentheses in print statements. And with the last official version of Python at 2.7, they might even be tempted to call their improved version “Python 2.8”.

This situation is not hypothetical, and when [Naftali Harris] proposed calling his modernized Python 2 branch  “Python 2.8”, the Python Software Foundation had a thing or two to say about it. The name has since been changed to Tauthon, but the remnants of the name clash are still to be found in the URL where it was announced. The Pythonistas, ever a witty bunch, decided that they’d better name-squat on “Python 2.8” to prevent any future misunderstandings. To quote: “The current un-schedule is: 2.8 final — Never”.

That’s the way forks are supposed to work after all. A project spins off of another and eventually develops enough of its own identity that it needs a new name to label the new contents. Whether Tauthon will gain any traction is beside the point. With a brand-new name, nobody is going to confuse it for mainline Python.

A Tale Of Two Perls

Similar to Python, Perl has had two major versions existing in parallel for a while now: Perl 5, which followed a natural version increase from its predecessor versions, and Perl 6, which always followed the goal to get rid of some old baggage, and has since grown into more of a sister language than a successor for Perl 5. A common statement is that “Perl 6 is not Perl”, and it’s largely true, except in name. Unlike Python, though, there is no community consensus that Perl 5 needs to be retired.

Logo for Camelia, Larry Wall’s code name for Perl 6

Will the new “Perl” need a new name? What happens when you type perl in the command line?

The old-school Perl community is not eager for Perl 6 to be seen as something “one better” than their beloved Perl 5. At the same time, the Perl 6 community wishes to get rid of the Perl 5 stench in their shiny new language. The situation with the two Perls is even more clear-cut than with the Pythons, except that Perl 6 has a larger following than Tauthon ever did.

The Perl 6 community has recently opened the discussion to find a new name for good, but somehow changing a name is harder than adding entirely new syntax to the language. If you need proof, try following the still ongoing discussion spanning several hundreds of comments — going in circles and full of everyone’s unique opinions — despite a consensus for Raku as new name. Clearly, there’s more to a name than meets the eye.

GIMP: Take It Or Fork It

Which brings us to the GNU Image Manipulation Program (the GIMP). People find this nickname offensive frequently enough that even its FAQ deals with it. Is it time for a name change? The official word on this is: the name will stay, but feel free to fork the project with your own name.

Well, a recent, unsuccessful attempt to request a name change challenging that very FAQ led in the end to just that: the Glimpse fork. Aiming not only for a new name, but having ambitious plans that include rewriting the GUI from scratch and adding their own set of features in the future. Time will tell how a community-driven development of this GIMP fork will prevail — for the time being, the main effort appears to unironically focus on, well, whether they should choose a different name. Oh no!

Who’s To Name Our Software Then?

We all know naming is hard, but in the grand scheme of any project, the name is really just one small detail. Yet somehow it’s emotionally laden. Here we have three examples: one of a single-author renaming that went fairly easily, one that should be smooth but is nonetheless heart-rending, and a third that’s a change in name only, for name’s sake. The renamings seem to be proceeding at speeds that are inversely proportional to the number of developers. One possible response to all of this is to throw up your hands and despair at the inefficiency of making decisions by committee, or even worse, by mob rule.

But maybe it’s also a heartening reminder than open-source software is made by many, many people who’ve put heart and soul into what they’ve created, to the extent that they identify with the work strongly enough to give it a name, like a dog or a sports team. Maybe it’s the purest sign of open-source love.

Or maybe it’s a tempest in a teapot. After all, what’s in a name?

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

At first glance, it might not seem to make sense to write shell scripts in C/C++. After all, the whole point to a shell script is to knock out something quick and dirty. However, there are cases where you might want to write a quick C program to do something that would be hard to do in a traditional scripting language, perhaps you have a library that makes the job easier, or maybe you just know C and can knock it out faster.

While it is true that C generates executables, so there’s no need for a script, usually, the setup to build an executable is not what you want to spend your time on when you are just trying to get something done. In addition, scripts are largely portable. But sending an executable to someone else is fairly risky — but your in luck because C shell scripts can be shared as… well, as scripts. One option is to use a C interpreter like Cling. This is especially common when you are using something like Jupyter notebook. However, it is another piece of software you need on the user’s system. It would be nice to not depend on anything other than the system C compiler which is most likely gcc.

Luckily, there are a few ways to do this and none of them are especially hard. Even if you don’t want to actually script in C, understanding how to get there can be illustrative.

The Whole Shebang

I’m going to assume your shell is Bash. There may be subtle differences between shells, but shells will typically support a way to launch scripts known as the shebang — it’s the use of the hash and exclamation characters (#!) you’ve probably seen at the top of scripts.

When Bash sees you are trying to execute a file, it tries to figure out what kind of file it is using a magic number lookup the way file does. The file command actually uses a library called “magic” to do this and you can run man magic to see a database of sorts that is at work. In theory, there’s a text representation and a compiled version, but many common distributions don’t install the source by default. Regardless, the database looks for certain magic numbers in files to determine their type — programs don’t need to rely on file extensions, for example.

The exact format isn’t important, but a typical entry has an offset to look inside the file and a number or pattern to match. In the case of a shell script the magic number is 0x23 0x21 which is, of course, #!. In particular, system calls that execute something can tell the difference between a shell script and just a random text file.

Normally, you’ll see something like #!/usr/bin/bash which causes the file to run as a Bash script. Of course, this hardcodes the location of the system copy of bash. Some argue this is good because you think you have a chance at getting a known copy of Bash. Others argue that if you have an upgraded copy of Bash in your personal directories it won’t use that. If you agree with the latter group, you can try #!/usr/bin/env bash — that still hardcodes a path, but that executable only sets up the environment.

The interpreter, though, doesn’t have to be Bash or even a proper shell. For example, an Awk program might have #!/usr/bin/awk -f as a first line. So one strategy would be to build a script that can “launch” the underlying C “script.”

That’s one approach, but I took a different one. My original thought was that since #! looks like a preprocessor statement, a script file might be directly usable to the C compiler. That might have been true in the past, but a modern preprocessor throws an error when it sees something it doesn’t expect.

Marking C Files as Bash Scripts

I wanted to keep things simple. The following lines at the very front of a stand-alone C file is enough to make things work:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#if 0
source cscript_simplec
#endif

The first line tells the system that this is a Bash script. You might be wondering why I would mark it as a Bash script when I’m trying to get to C. Well, the very next few lines are a Bash script. The #if and #endif statements are just comments to Bash. And the source command tells the shell to read cscript_simplec from somewhere on the directory path.

That source never comes back, so what’s after it doesn’t matter to Bash. However, this file will pass to gcc if the executable is out of date. Suppose this file is example.c. There will be an executable example.c.bin in the same directory. (This implies that the first person to run the script needs to have write permission to the directory.)

If the binary is newer than the source file, we simply run it using exec. This causes the program to overlay the current copy of Bash which saves a little memory compared to just running the new program. However, if the source is newer, the script rebuilds the binary first.

There’s a slight problem. Although most of the file will be legal C, the first line isn’t. Yet that line is crucial for the startup. The answer is to cut that line off. Here’s what cscript_simplec looks like:

if [ "$0" -nt "$0.bin" ]
then
  CCOPTS="${CCOPTS:--O3}"
  if ! tail -n +2 "$0" | gcc -x c "${CCOPTS}" -o "$0.bin" -
  then
    echo Compile Error on $0
    exit 999
  fi
fi
exec "$0.bin"

The final command on line 10 cuts off the first line and feeds gcc through the pipe. Because there’s no file name, we have to tell gcc that it is reading a C file (the -x option). You can set CCOPTS or it will default to -O3.

Of course, if you were going to send this out into the wild, you might want to just include this whole chunk — or something similar — in the script and forego the source command. That would work.

Complexity

It’s easy to change the code for something different like C++. Since this is scripting, it is pretty safe to assume there is one file and the executable is directly dependent on only the source file. However, if you want a bit more complexity — some would argue too much for a simple script too — you can turn to make.

Replace cscript_simplec with cscript_make if you want to try that. You’ll have to provide a makefile, too (example.c.make in this case). A suitable one is:

$(SCRIPT_OUT_NAME):$(SCRIPT_NAME)
       gcc -x c $(SCRIPT_NAME) -o $(SCRIPT_OUT_NAME)

Note you have to use $(SCRIPT_NAME) for the source file and $(SCRIPT_OUT_NAME) for the executable. This is a silly example, of course, but you could create a complex set of dependencies and compile options using a makefile. On the other hand, this seems to violate the simple principle, so you are probably better off just writing a normal C program at that point.

If you really need a high-level scripting language, you might consider Python or one of the many other interpreted languages available. However, understanding the mechanism and how to subvert the C compiler might still come in handy someday. After all, you can pull some ugly/beautiful hacks with the preprocessor and compiler.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The average first world household swims in an ocean of non-potable water from things like HVAC condensation, shower drains, and periods of rain. All of it just goes to waste. These same households pay the city to deliver drinkable water to places that don’t need it, like the toilet tanks. Isn’t it time to put all that perfectly good grey water to use? With a zero city water toilet, you can give that slightly-used H₂O one last hurrah before flushing it down the drain.

When the toilet is flushed, an ultrasonic sensor in the toilet tank monitors the change in water level and triggers a pump to fill the toilet back up from a barrel in the basement. A clear plastic tube inserted into the toilet tank does double duty as both the water source and tank overflow drain point.

The 55-gallon plastic barrel in the basement collects water from both a shallow well and condensation from [nodemcu12ecanada]’s gas furnace. A NodeMCU controls the 12V submersible pump to send water up to the toilet, and another ultrasonic sensor monitors the water level in the barrel.

This setup doesn’t require changes to any of the existing plumbing, and reverting back is easy. We particularly like the use of phone plugs and jacks as quick connectors, and will likely steal the idea. You can get more information about this and [nodemcu12ecanada]’s other home-automation projects here.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Join us on Wednesday, September 18 at noon Pacific for the Software Defined Radio Hack Chat with Corrosive!

If you’ve been into hobby electronics for even a short time, chances are you’ve got at least one software-defined radio lying around. From the cheap dongles originally intended to watch digital TV on a laptop to the purpose-built transmit-capable radio playgrounds like HackRF, SDR has opened up tons of RF experimentation. Before SDR, every change of band or mode would need new hardware; today, spinning up a new project is as simple as dragging and dropping a few blocks around on a screen, and SDRs that can monitor huge swaths of radio spectrum for the tiniest signal have been a boon to reverse engineers everywhere.

Corrosive is the handle of Harold Giddings, amateur callsign KR0SIV, and he’s gotten into SDR in a big way. Between his blog, his YouTube channel, and his podcast, all flying under the Signals Everywhere banner, he’s got the SDR community covered. Whether it’s satellite communications, aircraft tracking, amateur radio, or even listening in on railway operations, Harold has tried it all, and has a wealth of SDR wisdom to share. Join us as we discuss the state of the SDR ecosystem, which SDR to buy for your application, and even how to transmit with an SDR (hint: you’ll probably want a ham license.)

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 18 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

It’s probably one of the first lessons learned by new drivers: if you see a big, red fire truck parked by the side of the road, don’t run into it. Such a lesson appears not to have been in the Tesla Autopilot’s driver education curriculum, though – a Tesla Model S managed to ram into the rear of a fire truck parked at the scene of an accident on a southern California freeway. Crash analysis reveals that the Tesla was on Autopilot and following another vehicle; the driver of the lead vehicle noticed the obstruction and changed lanes. Apparently the Tesla reacted to that by speeding up, but failed to notice the stationary fire truck. One would think that the person driving the car would have stepped in to control the vehicle, but alas. Aside from beating up on Tesla, whose AutoPilot feature seems intent on keeping the market for batteries from junked vehicles fully stocked, this just points out how far engineers have to go before self-driving vehicles are as safe as even the worst human drivers.

The tech press is abuzz today with stories about potential union-busting at Kickstarter. Back in March, Kickstarter employees announced their intent to organize under the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU). On Thursday, two of the union organizers were fired. Clarissa Redwine, who recently hosted a Hack Chat, was one of those released; both she and Taylor Moore are protesting their terminations as an illegal attempt to intimidate Kickstarter employees and keep them from voting for the union. For their part, Kickstarter management says that both employees and two more were released as a result of documented performance issues during the normal review cycle, and that fourteen employees who are in favor of the union were given raises during this cycle, with three of them having been promoted. There will no doubt be plenty more news about this to come.

Would you pay $900 for a Nixie clock? We wouldn’t, but if you choose to buy into Millclock’s high-end timepiece, it may help soften the blow if you think about it being an investment in the future of Nixie tubes. You see, Millclock isn’t just putting together an overpriced clock that uses surplus Russian Nixies – they’re actually making brand new tubes. Techmoan recently reviewed the new clock and learned that the ZIN18 tubes are not coming from Czech Republic-based Dalibor Farný, but rather are being manufactured in-house. That’s exciting news for Nixie builders everywhere; while Dalibor’s tubes are high-quality products, it can’t hurt to have a little competition in the market. Nixies as a growth industry in 2019 – who’da thunk it?

We ran across an interesting project on Hackaday.io the other day, one that qualifies as a true hack. How much house can you afford? A simple question, but the answer can be very difficult to arrive at with the certainty needed to sign papers that put you on the hook for the next 30 years. Mike Ferarra and his son decided to answer this question – in a circuit simulator? As it turns out, circuit simulators are great at solving the kinds of non-linear simultaneous equations needed to factor in principle, interest, insurance, taxes, wages, and a host of other inflows and outflows. Current sources represent money in, current sinks money paid out. Whatever is left is what you can afford. Is this how Kirchoff bought his house?

And finally, is your parts inventory a bit of a mystery? Nikhil Dabas decided that rather than trying to remember what he had and risk duplicating orders, he’d build an application to do it for him. Called WhatDidIBuy, it does exactly what you’d think; it scrapes the order history pages of sites like Adafruit, Digi-Key, and Mouser and compiles a list of your orders as CSV files. It’s only semi-automated, leaving the login process to the user, but something like this could save a ton of time. And it’s modular, so adding support for new suppliers is a simple as writing a new scraper. Forgot what you ordered from McMaster, eBay, or even Amazon? Now there’s an app for that.

Tags:  hackaday links  

In the world of surfing, the equipment available is as diverse and varied as the enthusiasts themselves. Different boards are optimized for different conditions and styles, and the industry continues to innovate towards ever greater performance. [DARK-labs] aim to bring data analysis into the field to help create boards personalised to the individual.

The goal is to use a sensor network embedded in a surfboard to analyze the style of a particular surfer. This data is then used to identify characteristics such as stance and foot preference, which can then be used to optimize a board design to suit. Once a CAD model is created along these guidelines, it can then be CNC machined and turned into a finished board, ready to hit the waves.

It’s a project that we expect will capture the interest of many a surfer, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the concept take further strides in coming years. We’ve featured some other board hacks, too – this electric build is particularly compelling. 

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get caught up on the most interesting hacks of the past week. On this episode we take a deep dive into radiation-monitor projects, both Geiger tube and scintillator based, as well as LED cube projects that pack pixels onto six PCBs with parts counts reaching into the tens of thousands. In the 3D printing world we want non-planar printing to be the next big thing. Padauk microcontrollers are small, cheap, and do things in really interesting ways if you don’t mind embracing the ecosystem. And what’s the best way to read a water meter with a microcontroller?

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (63 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 035 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Meet The 20 Finalists In The 2019 Hackaday Prize
• Hackaday Superconference 2019

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Cryogenic metal treatment: Reducing Drill Bit Wear The Cryogenic Way
• 3D Printing that’s actually 3D:
  • How’s That 2.5D Printer Working For You?
  • Master thesis on non-planar printing: Arbeitsbereich Technische Aspekte Multimodaler Systeme
  • Excellent Moritz Walter article: 3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM
• Reading The Water Meter In A Literal Sense With An ESP8266
  • Reading Bingo Balls With Microcontrollers
  • Read Home Power Meters With RTL-SDR
• Everything You Wanted To Know About Padauk MCUs And More
• LED Cubes are taking over:
  • Tiny LED Cube Packs Six Meters Of Madness
  • Handmade LED Cube Is A Work Of Art
  • This LED Cube Is One Heck Of An ICEBreaker
• Geiger counters are also taking over:
  • You Didn’t See Graphite Around This Geiger Counter
  • DIY Scintillation Detector
  • Warwalking For Radiation
  • The Ins And Outs Of Geiger Counters, For Personal Reasons
  • Geiger Counter
    • Geiger counter kit schematic

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • One-Motor Domino Laying Machine Works For Tips
  • DIY Watertight Junction Box For Serious Outdoor Sealing
  • PCIe Multiplier Expands Raspberry Pi 4 Possibilities
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • SNES Drone Aims To Rock The SPC700
  • Putting 3D Printed Speaker Drivers To The Test
  • Cheap Stereo Microscope Helps With SMD

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Norovirus Smartphone: Using Megapixels And Microfluidics To Fight The Other Kind Of Virus Infection
  • Nitrocellulose slide – Wikipedia
• Why Ada Is The Language You Want To Be Programming Your Systems With

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Those beautiful and dangerous ocean waves that beckon us to the coast are more than just a pretty sight. They can tell us a lot about weather patterns and what the sea itself is doing. As vital as this information is, the existing methods of doing wave research are pretty expensive. The team at [t3chflicks] wanted to show it can be done fairly cheaply, to encourage more citizen scientists to contribute. More data means a better understanding, and open research benefits even those who don’t actively participate.

They have developed a smart buoy that collects wave data and transmits it back to a base station for real-time display. The buoy runs on a 18650 that gets recharged by four 5V solar panels situated around the top half of the 3D-printed hull. An Arduino inside the buoy controls the sensors, most of which are baked into the GY-86 10-DOF module. The antenna on top sends the data to back to a Raspi Zero base station, which charts wave height, wave period, wave power, water and air temperature, and barometric pressure in real-time on a spiffy Vue JS dashboard.

The team had their ups and downs during this project. They wanted to measure wave direction, but it proved a bit too complicated. And memory issues prevented them from backing up the data to an on-buoy SD card. You can catch the more in-depth hardware and software videos on their YouTube channel. We’ve got the smart buoy summary video tied up and floating just after the break.

Want to help buoy wave research, but don’t have a 3D printer? Sealed PVC makes a fine flotation device, as we saw in this water quality-sensing buoy.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

The Hackaday Prize is our global engineering initiative, now in its sixth year. For 2019, the focus is on product development: with great engineering and a working prototype, can you also go the distance to embrace the user’s needs and ensure the project can be produced in quantity? Throughout the Spring and Summer we’ve been watching as hundreds step into the spotlight to share their projects with the world. Now we’re in the final stretch as these twenty entries all try to claim the grand prize of $125,000. Let’s take a look!

All twenty finalists are listed below (in no particular order). But just for fun we wanted to share some of the cool things we’ve seen among these finalists.

You might think of billiards when we say “trick shot”, but in this case we’re talking about cameras. PiXPi is one smart camera controller.  While it’s common to see camera trigger projects that let you snap a picture with a remote, capture fast-moving objects based on a sound trigger or by breaking an IR-beam, or even freeze-frame a lightning strike, this controller seeks to be all things for all photographers. It has separate ports to trigger your camera and two flash units, inputs for multiple sensors, and it can even connect to your smartphone. The project page is vast, and just when you think you’ve seen everything it has to offer, there’s another project log showing off yet another peripheral design. Here’s one that captures the iconic lightbulb-breaking.

Speaking of interesting ways to add smarts, this prosthetic arm can see what it’s about to grasp. By embedding a camera in the palm, it uses computer vision to identify objects and select a relevant gripping pattern. There are numerous other features and the design is divided into different modules, making it reconfigurable for multiple needs.

Over the years, we’ve seen the rise of 3D rendering features in EDA tools, and this project shows the power of those tools. In working through at least eight different design iterations for breadboard-friendly bench power supplies, the OPEN Power project made numerous high-end renders to see exactly what the boards would look like before pulling the trigger on PCBs and components.

What you see here is the real, not rendered, version-1A providing Lithium battery-backed power for 3V, 5V, and adjustable rails, with USB charging that can be hotplugged. But make sure you check out version 3C, which has early prototypes but is still in renderings at this point, because the team has worked all the way up to full-featured PSU with color display and both logic analyzer and oscilloscope features.

All twenty competitors need your help. They have from now until October 1st to polish up their entries, putting their best product-development foot forward before our slate of engineering celebrity judges make the final decision. Get in there and see what each project is about, leaving your helpful comments in the process. Hackaday Prize is a marathon, but right now is the time for a sprint finish.

Twenty Finalists of the 2019 Hackaday Prize:

• 3D printed prosthesis with CV, BCI and EMG
• open hardware fast high resolution LASER
• Knobo
• Bobble-Bot
• DLT one – A Damn Linux Tablet!
• USB-C-PD Soldering Pen for Weller RT Tips
• PiXPi dslr camera controller
• Unfolding Space
• DrumKid: aleatoric drum machine
• SmallKat: An adorable dynamics oriented robot cat
• The Ifs – Coding: it´s child’s play!
• Axiom: 100+kW Motor Controller
• FieldKit
• Electronic Dice
• Blackbird Bipedal Robot
• HapticGames
• Upright Laser Harp
• uECG – a very small wearable ECG
• Prism
• OPEN Power

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

USB first hit the scene in the 1990s, and was intended to simplify connecting peripherals to PCs and eliminate the proliferation of various legacy interfaces. Over 20 years later, it’s not only achieved its initial goals, but become a de facto standard for charging and power supply for all manner of personal electronic gadgets. If you asked someone back in 1995 whether or not you could build a USB-powered soldering iron, they’d have politely asked you to leave the USB Implementers Forum. But times change, and Solder Ninja is just that!

With a maximum power draw of 40 W, the Solder Ninja required careful design to ensure practicality. It supports a variety of USB power standards, including USB-BC 1.2, USB Quick Charge, and USB Power Delivery. This enables it to draw the large amounts of current required for the heating element. To make it easy to use with a variety of chargers out in the wild, it displays the current negotiated voltage and maximum current draw. This enables the user to understand the varying performance of the device, depending on the charger it’s plugged into.

Given the multitude of different USB power standards, we imagine [Nicolas] has the patience of a saint to perfect a project like this. We’ve seen similar builds before, too. Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

 

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Just a section from a render of the board in question. It’s a daunting task for anyone facing it with a set of tweezers or a vacuum pencil.

A friend of ours here at Hackaday has an audacious design in the works that we hope will one day become a prototype that we can feature here. That day may be a little while coming though, because it has somewhere close to a thousand of the smaller SMD components in multiple repeated blocks on a modestly sized board, and his quote from a Chinese board house for assembly is eye-watering. He lacks a pick-and-place machine of his own, and unsurprisingly the idea of doing the job by hand is a little daunting.

We can certainly feel his pain, for in the past we’ve been there. The job described in the linked article had a similar number of components with much more variety and on a much larger board, but still took two experienced engineers all day and into the night to populate. The solder paste had started to spread by the end, morphing from clearly defined blocks to an indistinct mush often covering more than one pad. Our eyes meanwhile were somewhat fatigued by the experience, and it’s not something any sane person would wish to repeat.

Mulling over our friend’s board and comparing it with the experience related above, are we on the edge of what is possible with hand pick-and-place, or should we be working at the next level? Board assembly is a finely judged matter of economics at a commercial level, but when at a one-off personal construction level the option of paying for assembly just isn’t there, is there a practical limit to the scale of the task? Where do you, our readers, draw the line? We’d love to hear your views.

Meanwhile our friend’s audacious project is still shrouded in a bit of secrecy, but we’ll continue to encourage him to show it to the world. It’s not often that you look at a circuit diagram and think “I wish I’d thought of that!”, but from what we’ve seen this fits the category. If he pulls it off then we’ll bring you the result.

PCB image, Andrew Magill (CC BY 2.0).

Tags:  Ask hackaday  

We start this week with very sad news indeed. You may have heard about the horrific fire on the dive boat Conception off Santa Cruz Island last week, which claimed 33 lives. Sadly, we lost one of our own in the tragedy: Dan Garcia, author of the wildly popular FastLED library. Dan, 46, was an Apple engineer who lived in Berkley; his partner Yulia Krashennaya died with him. Our community owes Dan a lot for the work he put into FastLED over the last seven years, as many an addressable LED is being driven by his code today. Maybe this would be a good chance to build a project that uses FastLED and add a little light to the world, courtesy of Dan.

In happier news, the biggest party of the hardware hacking year is rapidly approaching. That’s right, the 2019 Hackaday Superconference will be upon us before you know it. Rumor has it that there aren’t that many tickets left, and we haven’t even announced the slate of talks yet. That’s likely to clean out the remaining stock pretty darn quickly. Are you seriously prepared to miss this? It seems like a big mistake to us, so why don’t you hop over and secure your spot before you’re crying into your Club-Mate and wondering what all the cool kids will be doing in November.

Of course one of the highlights of Superconference is the announcement of the Hackaday Prize winner. And while we naturally think our Prize is the best contest, that doesn’t mean there aren’t others worth entering. MyMiniFactory, the online 3D-printing community, is currently running a “Design with Arduino” competition that should be right up the alley of Hackaday readers. The goal is simple: submit a 3D-printed design that incorporates Arduino or other electronics. That’s it! Entries are accepted through September 16, so you’ve still got plenty of time.

Sometimes you see something that just floors you. Check out this tiny ESP32 board. It doesn’t just plug into a USB port – it fits completely inside a standard USB Type A jack. The four-layer board sports an ESP32, FTDI chip, voltage regulator, an LED and a ceramic antenna for WiFi and Bluetooth. Why would you want such a thing? Why wouldn’t you! The board is coming soon on CrowdSupply, so we hope to see projects using this start showing up in the tipline soon.

Here’s a “why didn’t I think of that?” bench tip that just struck us as brilliant. Ever had to probe a board to trace signal paths? It’s a common enough task for reverse engineering and repairs, but with increasingly dense boards, probing a massive number of traces is just too much of a chore. Hackaday superfriend Mike Harrison from “mikeselectricstuff” makes the chore easier with a brush made from fine stainless wires crimped into a ring terminal. Attached to one probe of a multimeter, the brush covers much more of the board at a time, finding the general area where your trace of interest ends up. Once you’re in the neighborhood you can drop back to probing one pad at a time. Genius! We’d imagine a decent brush could also be made from a bit of coax braid too.

Another shop tip to wrap up this week, this one for woodworkers and metalworkers alike. Raw materials are expensive, and getting the most bang for your buck is often a matter of carefully laying out parts on sheet goods to minimize waste. Doing this manually can be a real test of your spatial relations skills, so why not automate it with this cut list optimizer? The app will overlay parts onto user-defined rectangles and snuggle them together to minimize waste. The program takes any units, can account for material lost to kerfs, and will even respect grain direction if needed. It’s built for wood, but it should prove useful for sheet metal on a plasma cutter, acrylic on a laser, or even PCBs on a panel.

Tags:  hackaday links  

Construction is often a labor-intensive task, particularly in the developing world where access to electricity and machinery can be limited. As always, robots promise to help ease the burden. [Nishant Agarwal] is working on just such a project, known as ALEKYA.

The aim of ALKEYA is to make construction easier and more automated, with the help of robotics. We’ve seen large-scale concrete printers before, but ALEKYA takes a different tack. With a focus on making use of local materials, it combines two gantries on a single frame. One lays down a bead of mortar, before the other swoops in to drop bricks into position. This is followed by another layer of mortar, and the build continues.

By using this manner of construction, progress can be much more rapid compared to more traditional 3D printing techniques which must build up height layer by layer. Currently operating on a small scale, the next step for the project is the construction of a 20×20 foot version for creating full-sized buildings.

We think there’s definite promise in this hybrid approach, and can’t wait to see what comes next! Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys wish Hackaday a happy fifteenth birthday! We also jump into a few vulns found (and fixed… ish) in the WiFi stack of ESP32/ESP8266 chips, try to get to the bottom of improved search for 3D printable CAD models, and drool over some really cool RC cars that add realism to head-to-head online racing. We look at the machining masterpiece that is a really huge SCARA arm drawbot, ask why Hydrogen cars haven’t been seeing the kind of sunlight that fully electric vehicles do, and give a big nod of approval to a guide on building your own custom USB cables.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (54 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 034 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Happy 15th Birthday Hackaday!
  • Hackaday Celebrates 15 Years And Oh How The Hardware Has Changed

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Three ESP8266/ESP32 vulnerabilities have been found (and for the most part patched)
  • ESP8266 And ESP32 WiFi Hacked!
• Make your own USB cables like a boss!
  • The Ultimate Guide To Artisan USB Cables
  • Bradley Gawthrop: What You Need To Know About Wiring
• Satellite geeks figured out a lot from just one satellite image
  • Open Source Intel Helps Reveal US Spy Sat Capabilities
• Going the distance to let people race RC cars on the Internet
  • Race RC Cars From Anywhere On Earth
  • Super Off Road arcade game
• Big (and we mean big!) scara arm draws on A0 sized paper
  • Mechpen: SCARA Drawbot For The Big Picture
  • Here are some of those awesome graphics for Turtle simulator: Cubic cityscape #1
  • ServoEaser by TodBot smooths the jerkiness of servo start/stop:
    • ServoEaser: Arduino library for servo easing
• Super8 (and regular 8 if you try hard enough) film scanner:
  • 3D-Printed Film Scanner Brings Family Memories Back To Life

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • (Mis)use This Part To Attach 3D Printed Stuff To A Shaft
  • Your Arduino SAMD21 ADC Is Lying To You
  • Micropython And C Play Together Better
• Mike’s Picks:
  • Human-Powered Henhouse Keeps Chickens On The Job
  • Steampunk Radio Looks The Business
  • Kinetic Lamp Sheds Light On Scientific Principles

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• 3D Printering: The Search For Better Search
• Are Hydrogen Cars Still Happening?
  • A fictional, less-than-glamorous view on the future of car-sharing: Hyperloops And Robot Cars, A Glimpse Into The Future
  • Experimental Gases, Danger, and The Rock-afire Explosion

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, September 4th at noon Pacific for the Clean Water Technologies Hack Chat with Ryan Beltrán!

Access to clean water is something that’s all too easy to take for granted. When the tap is turned, delivering water that won’t sicken or kill you when you drink it, we generally stop worrying. But for millions around the world, getting clean water is a daily struggle, with disease and death often being the penalty for drinking from a compromised source. Thankfully, a wide range of water technologies is available to help secure access to clean water. Most are expensive, though, especially at the scale needed to supply even a small village.

Seeing a need to think smaller, Ryan started MakeWater.org, a non-profit program that seeks to give anyone the power to make clean water through electrocoagulation, or the use of electric charge to precipitate contaminants from water. There’s more to MakeWater than electrocoagulation kits, though. By partnering with STEM students and their teachers, MakeWater seeks to crowdsource improvements to the technology, incorporating student design changes into the next version of the kit. They also hope to inspire students to develop the skills they need to tackle real-world problems and make a difference in the lives of millions.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 4 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The sun may be spotless, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing interesting things. A geomagnetic storm is predicted for this weekend, potentially giving those at latitudes where the Northern Lights are not common a chance to see a cosmic light show. According to SpaceWeather.com, a coronal hole, a gap in the sun’s atmosphere that can let the solar wind escape, is about to line up with Earth. The last time this hole was on the Earth-facing side of the sun, the resultant storm gave aurora as far south as Colorado. So if you’re in any of the northern tier states, you might want to find somewhere with dark skies and a good view to the north this weekend.

It’s not only space weather that’s in the news, but weather-weather too. Hurricane Dorian will probably make landfall as a Category 4 storm, probably along Florida’s Atlantic coast, and probably in the middle of the night on Monday. That’s a lot of uncertainty, but one thing’s for sure: amateur radio operators will be getting into the action. The Hurricane Watch Net will activate their net for Dorian on Saturday afternoon at 5:00 PM Eastern time, ready to take reports from stations in the affected area. Not a ham? You can still listen to the live feed once the net activates.

Hams aren’t the only ones getting geared up for Dorian, though. Weather satellite enthusiasts are pointing their SDRs at the sky and grabbing some terrifyingly beautiful pictures of Dorian as it winds up. Some of the downloaded images are spectacular, and if you’ve got an SDR dongle and a couple of pieces of coat hanger wire, you too can spy on Dorian from any number of satellites.

Speaking of which, over on r/RTLSDR, someone has done a little data mining and shown that NOAA 15 is still very much alive. u/amdorj plotted the scan motor current draw and found that it steadily decreased over time, possibly indicating that the bearings aren’t as worn as previously thought. We recently covered the story of the plucky satellite that’s almost two decades past its best-by date; here’s hoping our report on its death was greatly exaggerated.

In one of the weirder bits of marketing we’ve seen lately, NASA decided to name a rock on Mars after septuagenarian rockers The Rolling Stones. The golf ball size rock was blasted about a meter across the Martian landscape when the Mars InSight lander touched down in 2018, leaving a small scar in the dust. The stone had obviously rolled, so phone calls were made and one thing led to another, and before you know it, Robert Downey Jr. is making the announcement before a Stones concert at the Rose Bowl, right in JPL’s backyard. There’s even a cute animation to go along with it. It’s a nice piece of marketing, but it’s not the first time the Stones have been somewhat awkwardly linked to the technology world. We dare you not to cringe.

We’ll finish up today with something not related to space. As Al Williams recently covered, for about fifty bucks you can now score a vector network analyzer (VNA) that will do all sorts of neat RF tricks. The NanoVNA sounds like a great buy for anyone doing RF work, but its low price point and open-source nature mean people are finding all kinds of nifty uses for it. One is measuring the length of coax cables with time-domain reflectometry, or TDR. Phasing antenna arrays? the NanoVNA sounds like the perfect tool for the job.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are back from Chaos Communication Camp, and obviously had way too much fun. We cover all there was to see and do, and dig into the best hacks from the past week. NASA has a cute little nuclear reactor they want to send to the moon, you’ve never seen a car phone quite like this little robot, and Ardupilot (Ardurover?) is going to be the lawn mowing solution of the future. Plus you need to get serious about debugging embedded projects, and brush up on your knowledge of the data being used to train facial recognition neural networks.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (64 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 033 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Chaos Communication Camp Badge: card10
  • GitHub – royrobotiks/card10_cover: A simple clip-on cover for the CARD10 badge, modeled in OpenSCAD
  • Badge developer IRC channel: irc://chat.freenode.net/#card10badge
  • Badge Talk

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Skid Steer Mows Airport Grass Autonomously
  • ArduRover Boat Uses Tupperware To Float
• The Tens Of Millions Of Faces Training Facial Recognition; You’ll Soon Be Able To Search For Yourself
• Secret Messages Could Be Hiding In Your Server Logs
• Debug Superpowers Bring An STM32 Back From The Dead
  • GitHub – libopencm3/libopencm3: Open source ARM Cortex-M microcontroller library
• Returning Digital Watches To The Analog Age: Enter The Charliewatch
  • Scratch Built Smartwatch Looks Pretty Darn Sharp With 3D Printed Case And Round LCD
  • TritiLED: Multi-year always-on LED replacements for gaseous tritium light sources
• A Car Phone — No, Not That Kind
  • Ask Hackaday: Why Aren’t We Hacking Cellphones?

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Giant LED Display Is 1200 Balls To The Wall
  • Hacked Hoverboards Become Potent RC Tank
  • Impractical Clock Uses Tuning Fork
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Everything You Want To Know About The Cheapest Processors Available
  • Candy-Colored Synth Sounds Sweet
  • GigaDevice Releasing RISC-V MCUs And Development Boards

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Pegleg: Raspberry Pi Implanted Below The Skin (Not Coming To A Store Near You)
• Kilopower: NASA’s Offworld Nuclear Reactor
  • 200 Years Of The Stirling Engine
  • Uranium-235 is refined from Uranium-238, leaving behind about 85% of the input material.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

We’ll start with more Black Hat/DEFCON news. [Meh Chang] and [Orange Tsai] from Devcore took a look at Fortinet and Pulse Secure devices, and found multiple vulnerabilities. (PDF Slides) They are publishing summaries for that research, and the summary of the Fortinet research is now available.

It’s… not great. There are multiple pre-authentication vulnerabilities, as well as what appears to be an intentional backdoor.

CVE-2018-13379 abuses an snprintf call made when requesting a different language for the device login page. Snprintf is an alternative to sprintf, but intended to prevent buffer overflows by including the maximum string length to write to the target buffer, which sounds like a good idea but can lead to malicious truncation.

The code in question looks like snprintf(s, 0x40, "/migadmin/lang/%s.json", lang);.
When loading the login page, a request is made for a language file, and the file is sent to the user. At first look, it seems that this would indeed limit the file returned to a .json file from the specified folder. Unfortunately, there is no further input validation on the request, so a language of ../../arbitrary is considered perfectly legitimate, escaping the intended folder.  This would leak arbitrary json files, but sincesnprintf doesn’t fail if it exceeds the specified length, sending a request for a lang that’s long enough results in the “.json” extension not being appended to the request either.

A metasploit module has been written to test for this vulnerability, and it requests a lang of /../../../..//////////dev/cmdb/sslvpn_websession. That’s just long enough to force the json extension to fall off the end of the string, and it is Unix convention is to ignore the extra slashes in a path. Just like that, the Fortigate is serving up any file on its filesystem just for asking nice.

More worrying than the snprintf bug is the magic value that appears to be an intentional backdoor. A simple 14 character string sent as an http query string bypasses authentication and allows changing any user’s password — without any authentication. This story is still young, it’s possible this was intended to have a benign purpose. If it’s an honest mistake, it’s a sign of incompetence. If it’s an intentional backdoor, it’s time to retire any and all Fortinet equipment you have.

Pulse Secure VPNs have a similar pre-auth arbitrary file read vulnerability. Once the full report is released, we’ll cover that as well.

Exploitation in the Wild

But wait, there’s more. Hide your kids, hide your wife. Webmin, Pulse Secure, and Fortigate are already being exploited actively in the wild, according to ZDNet. Based on reports from Bad Packets, the Webmin backdoor was being targeted in scans within a day of announcement, and exploited within three days of the announcement. There is already a botnet spreading via this backdoor. It’s estimated that there are around 29,000 vulnerable Internet-facing servers.

Both Pulse Secure and Fortinet’s Fortigate VPN appliances are also being actively targeted. Even though the vulnerabilities were reported first to the vendors, and patched well in advance of the public disclosure, thousands of vulnerable devices remain. Apparently routers and other network appliance hardware are fire-and-forget solutions, and often go without important security updates.

VLC is Actually Vulnerable This Time

The VLC media player has released a new update, fixing 11 CVEs. These CVEs are all cases of mishandling malformed media files, and are only exploitable by opening a malicious file with VLC. Be sure to go update VLC if you have it installed. Even though no arbitrary code execution has been demonstrated for any of these issues, it’s likely that it will eventually happen.

Gray Market IP Addresses

With the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, many have begun using alternative methods to acquire address space, including the criminal element. Krebs on Security details his investigation into one such story: Residential Networking Solutions LLC (Resnet). It all started with an uptick in fraudulent transactions originating from Resnet residential IP addresses. Was this a real company, actually providing internet connectivity, or a criminal enterprise?

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The Internet of Things will revolutionize everything! Manufacturing? Dog walking? Coffee bean refilling? Car driving? Food eating? Put a sensor in it! The marketing makes it pretty clear that there’s no part of our lives which isn’t enhanced with The Internet of Things. Why? Because with a simple sensor and a symphony of corporate hand waving about machine learning an iPhone-style revolution is just around the corner! Enter: Amazon Dash, circa 2014.

The first product in the Dash family was actually a barcode scanning wand which was freely given to Amazon Fresh customers and designed to hang in the kitchen or magnet to the fridge. When the Fresh customer ran out of milk they could scan the carton as it was being thrown away to add it to their cart for reorder. I suspect these devices were fairly expensive, and somewhat too complex to be as frequently used as Amazon wanted (thus the extremely limited launch). Amazon’s goal here was to allow potential customers to order with an absolute minimum of friction so they can buy as much as possible. Remember the “Buy now with 1-Click” button?

That original Dash Wand was eventually upgraded to include a push button activated Alexa (barcode scanner and fridge magnet intact) and is generally available. But Amazon had pinned its hopes on a new beau. Mid 2015 Amazon introduced the Dash Replenishment Service along with a product to be it’s exemplar – the Dash Button. The Dash Button was to be the 1-Click button of the physical world. The barcode-scanning Wands require the user to remember the Wand was nearby, find a barcode, scan it, then remember to go to their cart and order the product. Too many steps, too many places to get off Mr. Bezos’ Wild Ride of Commerce. The Dash Buttons were simple! Press the button, get the labeled product shipped to a preconfigured address. Each button was purchased (for $5, with a $5 coupon) with a particular brand affinity, then configured online to purchase a specific product when pressed. In the marketing materials, happy families put them on washing machines to buy Tide, or in a kitchen cabinet to buy paper towels. Pretty clever, it really is a Buy now with 1-Click button for the physical world.

There were two versions of the Dash button. Both have the same user interface and work in fundamentally the same way. They have a single button (the software can recognize a few click patterns), a single RGB LED (‘natch), and a microphone (no, it didn’t listen to you, but we’ll come back to this). They also had a WiFi radio. Version two (silently released in 2016) added Bluetooth and completely changed the electrical innards, though to no user facing effect.

In February 2019, Amazon stopped selling the Dash Buttons.

This is Hackaday, not Business Insider

Right, why are we eulogizing a corporate strategy on Hackaday? The Dash Buttons were a clever hack! In a post-ESP8266 world, hardware like the Dash Button is the standard home automation starter project. But in 2015 when the Buttons were released the ESP was just starting to make waves. Up until that point, WiFi meant an unusual device like an Electric Imp or expensive ICs with an image of Texas on them. The market for low cost internet connected devices was very different, and much more expensive, back then.

A device like the Dash button probably doesn’t make sense for Amazon to build if it costs more than a couple dollars to make, so a few tricks were played to keep costs down without compromising user experience.

Acoustic capture, courtesy of [Jay Greco]The clever hacks start with the pairing experience. Classical methods for attaching purely WiFi devices to a home network are typically a disaster of a user experience. Boot the device for the first time, wait for it to figure out it has no network connection and go into access point mode, open an app, manually open a settings page and connect to the new WiFi network, go back to the app, enter credentials, wait an interminable time for something to tell you it succeeded. And that only works if your phone doesn’t kill the app in the background or drop off the WiFi network because it doesn’t have an internet connection! At various points on Android the app developer may have been able to force a WiFi network switch without user intervention, but even in that case the experience between platforms is seriously inconsistent.

So what’s a hacker to do? Bluetooth works pretty well, but requires another radio. The previously mentioned Electric Imp uses a photosensor that you press against your phone screen while it spastically flashes in a pattern encoding the credentials. Devices could be preprogrammed, like Amazon does with a new Kindle and the purchaser’s Amazon account credentials, but this is an elaborate factory process and you still need a fallback for when networks change. Instead of these workarounds, Amazon chose something I’ve only ever heard as a joke; acoustic pairing.

Dash Button V1, from [Matthew Petroff]Both generations of Dash button include a single microphone which receives the user’s network credentials via frequency shift keyed acoustic tones a hair below 20 kHz. Why 20 kHz and not above? The acoustic pairing method is designed to work anywhere there is a mic and a speaker. These requirements are so easily satisfied that Amazon could write the pairing flow to work on more than just a native app, allowing people to use anything from a Chromebook with a desktop browser to another Amazon device to go through the flow. I’m not aware of them doing silent setup from a nearby Echo, but it would have been technically feasible and absolutely magical. With that scope in mind it needs to be in a frequency range that would always be reproduced accurately, which means the human auditory range. For more detail check out [Jay]’s awesome reverse engineering of the protocol (33C3 talk here).

V1 interior, from [Matthew Petroff]Moving into the device we are faced with an unusual sight; a AA battery! And not a rebranded “industrial” battery, a real consumer one with the branding intact, spot welded to its contacts. Huh? Well, apparently Amazon decided that a common coin cell wouldn’t afford a long enough service life, perhaps due to energy consumption during WiFi rejoin on wake, and a larger coin cell was probably significantly more expensive than a normal consumer battery. Though the battery is well captured by a plastic midframe (black oval, left) it’s unfortunately welded to the tabs, meaning the entire assembly would need to be replaced when the battery runs out after a thousand or so presses. We’d love to see someone find some compatible battery tabs on Digikey and start printing replacement cases!

What about the rest of the enclosure? It looks just about as simple as can be. There are screws to hold the PCBA to the top of the case, but everything else is glued or ultrasonically welded together. The shape of each plastic components also seems to be quite friendly for injection molding, with no overhangs and a curved geometry very amenable to hefty draft angles. All in all the device appears to be fast and easy (read: cheap) to manufacture, which isn’t a huge surprise.

Hackability

What hacks can you perform on a Dash Button? If people are going to begin throwing away these astonishingly cheap devices, can we give them another life?

Perhaps the first Dash hacks repurposed the devices without software or hardware hackery at all. When a Button is between presses, it is turned off to save power. Long term, even the occasional spikes to keep up with WiFi connection intervals would represent significant power consumption: the Dash Buttons are designed to last for years of normal usage, so they don’t stay connected. When you press the button, the device wakes up, toggles its LED to indicate liveliness, connects to WiFi, hits Amazon’s API, then drops back off the network and turns the lights out. When they connect to your local network they necessarily go through a few setup steps including broadcasting an ARP probe to make sure no one else is sharing the same MAC address.

Enterprising hackers realized that if you can watch traffic on your LAN then you can see these ARP probes, which include the device’s unique MAC address. And because of the very specific lifecycle of a Dash Button, if you can see the ARP probe then you can imply the device just woke up, which in turn means the button was just pressed. At that point doing something with that information is just plumbing. The first mention of this method that I’ve found is from [Ted] in this post. Even if Amazon’s back end eventually goes down there’s no reason this would stop working.

V1 full body shot, from [Matthew Petroff]Catching ARP probes works, but feels pretty rickety to me. These things have processors already so we should be able to make them do the talking themselves. What about programming the Dash Button? Unsurprisingly people have mapped out the board and established which test points go where. Neither version has particularly unusual parts: version 1 has a Broadcom Cypress BCM943362WCD4 module from the WICED family which is just an STM32F205 glued to a radio, for which a devkit is available. Version 2 seems to be an Atmel Microchip ATSAMG55 and an Atmel Microchip ATWINC1500B, with a Cypress CYBL10563-68FNXI Bluetooth radio for good measure. Interesting commentary about market consolidation aside, these are well documented ARM CPUs which are freely available.

And yet, despite availability of both demonstration hardware and Dash Buttons, no one seems to have gotten very far. It’s easy to find great tutorials on reflashing the device and blinking the LED or listening for button presses, but every tutorial I’ve found ends with the frustrating cliffhanger “from here, just figure out WiFi.” So yes they can be reprogrammed into weird little development boards, but we have yet to see someone fully control the device so we can access all the juicy functionality contained within.

What’s Next?

Before wrapping up, lets take a moment to alternatively commend and condemn Amazon here. “Small” hardware projects like the Dash Button and Wand are my favorite kind of corporate experimentation. I’m always excited when a company tries to make an usual hardware product. (The Dash Wand has an honest to goodness barcode scanner!!) This is much preferable to killing these sorts of ideas before they make it out of the lab.

On the other hand, the Dash Buttons are pretty wasteful. It’s fine that they are designed to have a limited lifespan but no markings are going to keep them from going into household garbage when they stop working. What else should Amazon expect users to do? The device obviously has a battery inside but with no clear reminders like a battery door, it’s not going to be obvious to users in the final moments of the device’s life that it should be sent for battery disposal. The use of a typical household battery was quite clever, but the right follow up would have been inclusion of some way to remove it, allowing for unlimited product life and more considerate disposal.

On a more positive note, we’re hoping it’s about to get very easy to pick up huge sacks of Dash Buttons! As they stop working we can break the e-waste cycle by collecting them and providing a new purpose.

Once we start seeing these show up in project drawers there are two paths of exploration worth following. One is finding a set of battery tabs which fit nicely on the existing PCBA so the batteries can be replaced, along with new housings amenable to printing with which to contain it all. At that point the Dash Button can escape the shackles of their finite design lifetimes and run as long as we want them too.

The other course of investigation is obvious: finally get the WiFi working! Though in my experience Broadcom’s WICED branded WiFi parts can get pretty complex, the WINC1500 doesn’t seem to be very exotic. As Adafruit noted in 2016 this module was actually used in the Arduino MKR1000 and WiFi Shield 101, as well as a series of Adafruit boards. So can this be figured out? We’d hope so! As always, if you find new life for an Amazon Dash Button with new enclosures, clever firmware, or anything else we’d love to hear about it!

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

It is easy to think that a Linux shell like Bash is just a way to enter commands at a terminal. But, in fact, it is also a powerful programming language as we’ve seen from projects ranging from web servers to simple utilities to make dangerous commands safer. Like most programming languages, though, there are multiple layers of complexity. You can spend a little time and get by or you can invest more time and learn about the language and, hopefully, write more robust programs.

Signals

If you are running a Linux program, even a shell script, it is subject to receiving a signal under certain conditions. For example, SIGINT, or signal 2, is what happens when you press Control+C. There are plenty of other signals, though. A very few signals, like signal 9 which is the SIGKILL will terminate your program no questions asked and you can’t stop it. But most of the other signals can be caught. You can either ignore them or take some action.

Some signals come from the system. Here’s a list of common signals and their number.

1- SIGHUP (Hangup)

2 – SIGINT (Interrupt; Control+C)

3 – SIGQUIT (Quit)

4 – SIGILL (Illegal instruction)

9 – SIGKILL (Kill)

If you want to see a long list, try trap - l from the command prompt. My system lists 64 different signal names.

You can use the kill or killall command to send signals to processes:

kill -1 4234
killall -9 emacs
kill -SIGHUP 3152

In addition to the standard signals, Bash has a few special ones, too. Here’s a list, but you should check out the Bash manual under trap to get the details:

• EXIT – When shell exits
• ERR – When an error occurs (see the Bash manual for specifics)
• RETURN – When a shell function or sourced script finishes
• DEBUG – Before each command executes

What Happens?

Most of the time, when your program or script gets a signal, it will stop. There are a few exceptions and it depends on other things. For example, using nohup will protect your program from SIGHUP.

In a shell script, you can use the trap command to “catch” a signal or a list of signals. You have three options:

1. Provide no action which sets the signal to the default handler
2. Provide an empty action (e.g., ”)  which sets the program to ignore the signal
3. Provide a bit of code to run if the signal occurs

For example, to ignore SIGQUIT and SIGHUP, you could write:

trap "" SIGQUIT SIGHUP

Or if you aren’t in the mood to ignore, you could write:

trap "echo Bye; exit" SIGINT

To return to the default, use:

trap SIGINT

Simple, right? Try this:

#!/bin/bash
trap "echo ; echo Bye ; echo ; exit" SIGINT
while true
do
   sleep 1
done

Run that and then press Control+C.

Easy, But…

That’s simple enough, but there is a slight inconvenience. If you trap more than one signal with the same code, you have no simple way to figure out which signal caused the trap. It would be nice if you could have a trap function that serviced a bunch of different traps that could understand which signal occurred using a case or if statement, for example.

This isn’t built into Bash, but you can do it with a little work. In fact, I wrote trappist to do just that for you. Here’s how it works: You include the trappist.sh file in your script and then write a function called trappist_trap. It will take a single argument that tells you what signal fired. If you don’t provide one, a dumb default will be there that you can override later.

You can call trappist_init in several ways. If you don’t provide any arguments, then all signals you can catch will direct to your trap function. If you like, you can pass an @ as the first argument, followed by a list of signal names with a + or – in front of them. Like this:

trappist_init  @ +SIGINT -SIGQUIT -SIGHUP

The order of the signals doesn’t matter. This command line catches all signals, but uses the default handler for SIGINT and ignores SIGQUIT and SIGHUP. You can also omit the @ sign if you like.

Another way to call the init function is with an equal sign:

trappist_init = SIGINT SIGQUIT +SIGHUP -SIGUSR1

In this case, only SIGINT and SIGQUIT will go to the trap function. SIGHUP will get the default handler and SIGUSR1 will be ignored.

A typical trap function might look like this:

function trappist_trap()
{
case $1 in
SIGALRM)
TRAP_DOWNCT=3 # After 10 seconds go back to 3
echo ^C reset
;; . . . 

Internals

The script is pretty easy to figure out. At the heart is a loop that adds traps to the system, one at a time, with arguments attached. The only two tricky things are how the script tries to detect your trap handler and you don’t have one, it uses eval to create a simple function for you.

The actual setup turns into:

trap "trappist_trap $t" $t

This line takes a signal named in t, traps it, and causes the correct signal name to pass as an argument. After that, it is pretty easy to see how things work.

If you think about it, the signals are a lot like interrupts, although some of them don’t fire right away — in other words, only a few of the signals mentioned occur immediately. However, by default, each “interrupt” has an entry in a vector table. Trappist populates the table to push everything to a single “interrupt service routine.”

Note that trappist wouldn’t be necessary if there was a way for the script to figure out the signal. You could write: trap trappist_trap SIGQUIT SIGINT SIGHUP … You would then have to figure out the signal in the trap function. Of course, if you want to treat all signals the same, you don’t have to worry about that.

We’ve talked about some of the ins and outs of stopping hangups before. We’ve also looked at scripting with binary files.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, August 28th at noon Pacific for the Parallax Update Hack Chat with Chip and Ken Gracey!

For a lot of us, our first exposure to the world of microcontrollers was through the offerings of Parallax, Inc. Perhaps you were interested in doing something small and light, and hoping to leverage your programming skills from an IBM-PC or an Apple ][, you chanced upon the magic of the BASIC Stamp. Or maybe you had a teacher who built a robotics class around a Boe-Bot, or you joined a FIRST Robotics team that used some Parallax sensors.

Whatever your relationship with Parallax products is, there’s no doubting that they were at the forefront of the hobbyist microcontroller revolution. Nor can you doubt that Parallax is about a lot more than BASIC Stamps these days. Its popular multicore Propeller chip has been gaining a passionate following since its 2006 introduction and has found its way into tons of projects, many of which we’ve featured on Hackaday. And now, its long-awaited successor, the Propeller 2, is almost ready to hit the market.

The Gracey brothers have been the men behind Parallax from the beginning, with Chip designing all the products and Ken running the business. They’ll be joining us on the Hack Chat to catch us up on everything new at Parallax, and to give us the lowdown on the P2. Be sure to stop be with your Parallax questions, or just to say hi.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 28 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Doesn’t the Z-axis on 3D-printers seem a little – underused? I mean, all it does is creep up a fraction of a millimeter as the printer works through each slice. It would be nice if it could work with the other two axes and actually do something interesting. Which is exactly what’s happening in the nonplanar 3D-printing methods being explored at the University of Hamburg. Printing proceeds normally up until the end, when some modifications to Slic3r allow smooth toolpaths to fill in the stairsteps and produce a smooth(er) finish. It obviously won’t work for all prints or printers, but it’s nice to see the Z-axis finally pulling its weight.

If you want to know how something breaks, best to talk to someone who looks inside broken stuff for a living. [Roger Cicala] from LensRentals.com spends a lot of time doing just that, and he has come to some interesting conclusions about how electronics gear breaks. For his money, the prime culprit in camera and lens breakdowns is side-mounted buttons and jacks. The reason why is obvious once you think about it: components mounted perpendicular to the force needed to operate them are subject to a torque. That’s a problem when the only thing holding the component to the board is a few SMD solder pads. He covers some other interesting failure modes, too, and the whole article is worth a read to learn how not to design a robust product.

In the seemingly neverending quest to build the world’s worst Bitcoin mining rig, behold the 8BitCoin. It uses the 6502 processor in an Apple ][ to perform the necessary hashes, and it took a bit of doing to port the 32-bit SHA256 routines to an 8-bit platform. But therein lies the hack. But what about performance? Something something heat death of the universe…

Contributing Editor [Tom Nardi] dropped a tip about a new online magazine for people like us. Dubbed Paged Out!, the online quarterly ‘zine is a collection of contributed stories from hackers, programmers, retrocomputing buffs, and pretty much anyone with something to say. Each article is one page and is formatted however the author wants to, which leads to some interesting layouts. You can check out the current issue here; they’re still looking for a bunch of articles for the next issue, so maybe consider writing up something for them – after you put it on Hackaday.io, of course.

Tipline stalwart [Qes] let us know about an interesting development in semiconductor manufacturing. Rather than concentrating on making transistors smaller, a team at Tufts University is making transistors from threads. Not threads of silicon, or quantum threads, or threads as a metaphor for something small and high-tech. Actual threads, like for sewing. Of course, there’s plenty more involved, like carbon nanotubes — hey, it was either that or graphene, right? — gold wires, and something called an ionogel that holds the whole thing together in a blob of electrolyte. The idea is to remove all rigid components and make truly flexible circuits. The possibilities for wearable sensors could be endless.

And finally, here’s a neat design for an ergonomic utility knife. It’s from our friend [Eric Strebel], an industrial designer who has been teaching us all a lot about his field through his YouTube channel. This knife is a minimalist affair, designed for those times when you need more than an X-Acto but a full utility knife is prohibitively bulky. [Eric’s] design is a simple 3D-printed clamshell that holds a standard utility knife blade firmly while providing good grip thanks to thoughtfully positioned finger depressions. We always get a kick out of watching [Eric] design little widgets like these; there’s a lot to learn from watching his design process.

Thanks to [JRD] and [mgsouth] for tips.

Tags:  hackaday links  

Do you want to be a better person? Maybe you want to curse less, drink more water, or post fewer inflammatory comments on the internet. You could go the old school route by wearing a rubber band around your wrist and snapping it every time you slip, or literally pat yourself on the back when you do the right thing. While these types of reinforcement methods may deter bad behavior and encourage good, they are quite lean on data. And who wants that?

After an unpleasant conference call, [Darian] cursed a blue streak that left his coworkers shocked and speechless. This inciting incident began the hero’s journey that will end with a kinder, gentler [Darian], as long as he has his trusty Be Better Bracelet. He tried involving Alexa when at home, and various apps elsewhere to track these venomous utterances, but he yearned for a single solution that’s always available.

The sole purpose of this bracelet is low-cost, unobtrusive habit tracking. Though tied to a phone, it won’t tell time, predict the weather, or alert the user to incoming what-have-yous. It will simply record button presses, which are assigned meaning in the app settings. It’s up to the user to set goals, analyze the data, and reward or punish themselves accordingly.

[Darian] is still working out the design kinks to make this as small and cheap as possible. If you have suggestions, let him know.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Of the $11.7 million companies lose to cyber attacks each year, an estimated 90% begin with a phone call or a chat with support, showing that the human factor is clearly an important facet of security and that security training is seriously lacking in most companies. Between open-source intelligence (OSINT) — the data the leaks out to public sources just waiting to be collected — and social engineering — manipulating people into telling you what you want to know — there’s much about information security that nothing to do with a strong login credentials or VPNs.

There’s great training available if you know where to look. The first time I heard about WISP (Women in Security and Privacy) was last June on Twitter when they announced their first-ever DEFCON Scholarship. As one of 57 lucky participants, I had the chance to attend my first DEFCON and Black Hat, and learn about their organization.

Apart from awarding scholarships to security conferences, WISP also runs regional workshops in lockpicking, security research, cryptography, and other security-related topics. They recently hosted an OSINT and Social Engineering talk in San Francisco, where Rachel Tobac (three-time DEFCON Social Engineering CTF winner and WISP Board Member) spoke about Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion and their relevance in social engineering.

Cialdini is a psychologist known for his writings on how persuasion works — one of the core skills of social engineering. It is important to note that while Cialdini’s principles are being applied in the context of social engineering, they are also useful for other means of persuasion, such as bartering for a better price at an open market or convincing a child to finish their vegetables. It is recommended that they are used for legal purposes and that they result in positive consequences for targets. Let’s work through the major points from Tobac’s talk and see if we can learn a little bit about this craft.

Reciprocity

One of the most common online dating tips is to start off conversations with information about yourself. If you open up to people, most of them will likely return with information about themselves.

There’s often a sense of social obligation that comes along with this — if someone pays for your meal, you feel obligated to pay for theirs the next time you go out. Likewise, once you start offering information about yourself over the phone with a member of customer support they will most likely feel more comfortable talking about themselves, establishing rapport early on in your conversation. This is true even if it’s fake information you made up for the purpose of vishing — the over-the-phone equivalent of phishing.

Commitment & Consistency

Most people don’t like to go back on something they’ve already agreed to. Starting off your conversation with your target in a friendly and helpful tone will allow the rest of your conversation to remain at the same level of amicability. Soft questions, such as asking them about their pets or finding things you have in common, are the easiest techniques for building up consistency for the future.

If you start off small, with subtle commitments, you can eventually build your way up to convince your target to download malware or visit a suspicious website.

Social Proof

We all have a tendency to trust larger groups, especially if these groups are our close family and friends. Even a stranger associated with a group that we’re close to will make us instantly more trusting of them.

One technique often used in social engineering attacks is name dropping a relative or coworker as a means of gaining the trust of the target. In the off chance that the target starts to press for more details than you prepared, re-direction (“Oh, I think I’m getting another call on my end… what were we talking about again, by the way?”) can be a good way to avoid suspicion.

Liking

For in-person social engineering attacks, imitating the body language, cadence, and even word choice of your target can put them at ease and lead them to be more trusting of you. Subtle factors — having similarities, giving them compliments, cooperating with them towards a mutual goal — can make you more likable, and thus easier to work with. Even for vishing attacks, using slang that your target uses or speaking in a similar tone as they speak in can help you be more relatable.

Authority

Stanley Milgram was a social scientist famous for experiments about peoples’ obedience to authority figures. He showed that people were willing to obey an authority figure in a white lab coat despite the morally questionable acts they were told to perform. When you start looking into it you may be surprised the lengths that we’ll go to obey authority. People are more likely to follow what credible experts and leaders tell them to do. In a company setting, employees are likely to do as they’re told if the instructions are coming from their boss or someone above them in the hierarchy of their workplace.

Scarcity and Urgency

If you rush someone at their job, they’re probably going to be less careful and make more mistakes, which is exactly what you want as a social engineer. Setting up situations conducive to this — such as pretending to be in an airfield waiting for your airplane to take off or in a house with a crying baby — can make your target more receptive to quicky doing as you tell them to do without question. In the video below, a DEFCON social engineer uses this technique quite effectively to perform a SIM swap and lock the journalist out of their phone.

OSINT Strategies

The vast amount of time spent on a vishing or in-person social engineering attack focuses on gather information ahead of time. This includes social media research (60% of a company’s sensitive information can be found on public Instagram posts), dorking (doing targeted searches on a company to find private documents and information), and picking a target.

Often, photos found by searching Instagram geolocations and hashtags can reveal information such as the operating system, email client, and antivirus used by a company. It can even reveal the landline phone and printer models used by the company, their office layout, and vendors they use (which can be spoofed to obtain information on the company’s finances).

Many times sensitive documents have accidentally made their way into search results. Google dorking — performing searches such as site:google.com filetype:pdf OR filetype:docx to obtain files that were not originally meant for public viewing — can help with uncovering internal company documents and policies. These can help an attacker establish general logistics about how the company works, how their IT and helpdesk is structured, and even lingo used inside the company.

Attachers often adopt the person of someone who actually works for the company, making it harder for the victim to figure out a social engineering attack is in progress through a quick search of who they claim to be. This can be accompanied by a spoofed telephone number (something easy to do for free online).

The workshop ended with an OSINT capture-the-flag, where teams of players were instructed to find as much information as they could about a target company from open-source information. Actually vishing a company, however, is against the law unless there are legal steps taken to ensure that the attacks are being done as a way for the company to pen-test their own security.

Defender Takeaways

From the perspective of a defender, this is all incredibly alarming information. Not only are good social engineers difficult to distinguish from actual employees, contractors, or HR professionals, but they’ll be armed with a toolbox of information to use to gain your trust and tap into your intuitive sense of safety.

[via @luza_jaramillo]One tactic that works against social engineers is asking to return the call or to send them an email. Because social engineers usually spoof their phone numbers, a quick call will reveal that they weren’t the person they were impersonating after all. Having a polite paranoia is especially important for client-facing employees, such as support staff and IT professionals.

Furthermore, having 2FA-protected accounts is important. In the case of busting a social engineer, soliciting a security verification — like asking them for a call or email back — can be the difference between being the victim of a hack and staying diligent in the face of cybersecurity threats.

If you have the chance to attend DEF CON, I’d recommend sitting in for one of the open SECTF challenges. It’s quite an experience watching ordinary competitors sit in a glass box and convince companies to give up their most sensitive information for a chance to make friends with ‘Sarah from HR’.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recorded this week’s podcast live from Chaos Communication Camp, discussing the most interesting hacks on offer over the past week. I novel locomotion news, there’s a quadcopter built around the coanda effect and an autonomous boat built into a plastic storage bin. The radiation spikes in Russia point to a nuclear-powered ramjet but the idea is far from new. Stardust (well… space rock dust) is falling from the sky and it’s surprisingly easy to collect. And 3D-printed gear boxes and hobby brushless DC motors have reached the critical threshold necessary to mangle 20/20 aluminum extrusion.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (41 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 032 Show Notes: New This Week:

• CCCamp 2019 Wiki

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Automatic Rewinder Makes Kite Retrieval A Breeze
  • DIY Wire Spooler With Clever Auto-Tensioning System
• Putting The Coanda Effect To Work On A Quadcopter
  • KFC Winged Aircraft Actually Flies
  • Compressed Air Levitation And The Coanda Effect
• Spin Me Right Round, Baby: Generator Building Experiments For Mere Mortals
  • DIY Coil Winding Machine Counts The Hacky Way
  • Delta Printer Morphs Into CNC Flat Coil Winder
• Behold The Crimson Axlef*cker (Do Not Insert Finger)
  • ODrive – High performance motor control
• The Thermochromic Display You Didn’t Know You Needed
  • See the Radioactive World with This Peltier Cloud Chamber
• ArduRover Boat Uses Tupperware To Float

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Uncovering The Echo Dot’s Hidden USB Port
  • Cramming Dual SIMs & A Micro SD Card Into Your Phone
  • MIDI Harp Looks Pretty Sharp
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Square Laser Harp Is Hip
  • A Range-Extended Electric Van
  • A Friendly Reminder That You Might Be In Danger

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Echos Of The Cold War: Nuclear-Powered Missiles Have Been Tried Before
  • Scramjet Engines On The Long Road To Mach 5
  • Independent: Radioactive sensors suddenly go offline two days after mysterious nuclear explosion in Russia
• Fantastic Micrometeorites And Where To Find Them
  • Finding meteorites in your gutters is easy

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

It’s time once again for another installment in “Milspec Teardown”, where we get to see what Uncle Sam spends all those defense dollars on. Battle hardened pieces of kit are always a fascinating look at what can be accomplished if money is truly no object. When engineers are given a list of requirements and effectively a blank check, you know the results are going to be worth taking a closer look.

Today, we have quite a treat indeed. Not only is this ID-2124 Howitzer Deflection-Elevation Data Display unit relatively modern (this particular specimen appears to have been pulled from service in June of 1989), but unlike other military devices we’ve looked at in the past, there’s actually a fair bit of information about it available to us lowly civilians. In a first for this ongoing series of themed teardowns, we’ll be able to compare the genuine article with the extensive documentation afforded by the ever fastidious United States Armed Forces.

For example, rather than speculate wildly as to the purpose of said device, we can read the description directly from Field Manual 6-50 “TACTICS, TECHNIQUES, AND PROCEDURES FOR THE FIELD ARTILLERY CANNON BATTERY”:

The gun assembly provides instant identification of required deflection to the gunner or elevation to the assistant gunner. The display window shows quadrant elevation or deflection information. The tenths digit shows on the QE display only when the special instruction of GUNNER’S QUADRANT is received.

From this description we can surmise that the ID-2124 is used to display critical data to be used during the aiming and firing of the weapon. Further, the small size of the device and the use of binding posts seem to indicate that it would be used remotely or temporarily. Perhaps so the crew can put some distance between themselves and the artillery piece they’re controlling.

Now that we have an idea of what the ID-2124 is and how it would be used, let’s take a closer look at what’s going on inside that olive drab aluminum enclosure.

A Veritable Fortress

All of the military hardware we’ve looked at over the course of this series has been built to meet the most stringent quality and reliability standards. Heavyweight enclosures and aerospace rated components are a given. But even still, the ID-2124 is on another level. Designed for external use in what’s likely to be an inhospitable environment, the enclosure is easily the most robust of any piece of equipment that I’ve ever disassembled.

So robust, in fact, that it actually took me quite some time to open it. After removing the six screws around the perimeter, I found the front panel remained firmly in place. As it turns out, it was also held in place with a glued gasket. This made the device impermeable to the elements, and it also did a fantastic job of keeping me out. With no way to get leverage on the recessed panel, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I didn’t want to use heat or do anything else that might mar the surface, so this device actually sat on a shelf for awhile until I came up with a solution.

The tight fitting front panel doesn’t leave much room for prying.

In the end, I tapped the holes in the front panel so that it would grip on screws that are slightly larger than the original ones. Threaded into the 8 mm thick panel, these screws gave me something to put some leverage on. With considerable force, I eventually broke the seal that was holding the two pieces together. While I don’t like to make any permanent alterations to the military hardware out of respect for the history involved, once the original screws are back in place you can’t tell the holes have been enlarged.

Inner Beauty Revealed

When I finally cracked the seal on the ID-2124 case and lifted the cover, I’ll admit an audible gasp might have snuck out. The board is absolutely gorgeous, and between the conformal coating and the fact it’s spent the last 30-odd years in a hermetically sealed box, it’s in pristine condition. It was literally like opening up an electronics time capsule. Although from when might be debatable; while the date codes on various components point to it being manufactured around 1987, the overall design looks closer to something from late 1970s.

I was somewhat surprised to find that the single PCB was all that’s inside the ID-2124, the majority of the enclosure is empty space. It’s possible that an earlier version of this device required more electronics to operate, while this later version managed to pack everything into one board. Though I couldn’t find any obvious evidence of that, such as unused mounting holes in the case.

With the PCB removed, we can see the only components below it are the controls and wiring lugs, which are connected via a flexible flat cable terminated with a delightfully chunky plug. There’s also a handwritten notation that lists the Federal Supply Code for Manufacturer (FSCM), the part number for the case itself, and the current design revision.

Electronics from Another Age

The PCB of the ID-2124 is unquestionably beautiful, but also somewhat alien to the modern eye. It’s not just the nearly translucent substrate, or the unapologetic use of the dreaded square trace. Even some of the components are strange. We can identify the resistors and crystal well enough, they just look like larger versions of what we’re used to. But there’s some genuine oddities here as well.

Chief among them is, unquestionably, the huge device in the middle labeled B4010089. It’s clearly a microcontroller of some type (to use the modern parlance), but I’ve been unable to find any information on it. In the diagrams I’ve found, the device is simply referred to as “LOGIC AND DISPLAY”, which seems to indicate there’s a display driver living inside that sealed metal package as well. Also note that it and the two resistors on either side have been attached to the metal bar with what appears to be a thermally conductive material. It’s probably safe to assume that this component gets rather warm during operation.

The display itself is another relic, though at least this time we can get a bit more information on it. The technical manual refers to this as the “OPTO DISPLAY #B4010133”, and a bit of searching online uncovers Plessey as the manufacturer. Given the somewhat unusual nature of the display, it would seem the 16 pin device was custom made for this application. Or at the very least, for similar military hardware.

Flipping the board over, it’s interesting to note how few pins appear to be required to drive the display. Sniffing the data passing between it and the controller chip with a logic analyzer could yield some useful information, but the aforementioned conformal coating on the board does make that sort of thing difficult. As it is, I couldn’t even get my multimeter probes through the coating to try and follow the continuity of traces.

Just Read the Instructions

As mentioned previously, there’s actually a decent amount of information about the ID-2124 to be found in unclassified documents floating around online. Field Manual 6-50 mentions it briefly in regards to setting up the artillery piece for use, and even provides a sketch of how two of these devices connect up to the weapon’s primary “Gun Display Unit”, or GDU.

It was nice to have some context for how the ID-2124 would have been used, but unfortunately it didn’t really delve into what kind of data the unit is actually expecting to receive. Though admittedly, given the intended audience for the document, it would have been pretty surprising if it actually had that level of technical detail.

For our purposes, far more interesting information is to be found in Technical Manual 11-7440-283-40P, “GENERAL SUPPORT MAINTENANCE REPAIR PARTS AND SPECIAL TOOLS LIST FOR COMPUTER SYSTEM, GUN DIRECTION AN/GYK-29(V)”. In this document, we get a much closer look at the ID-2124, including detailed diagrams of the PCB and its components.

Unfortunately, even this document doesn’t provide any circuit schematics, and still no protocol information. Clearly the ID-2124 is a digital device, and the fact it’s connected to the GDU through just three wires helps narrow things down a bit in terms of communication methods. But without a Howitzer GDU to sniff the data from, there’s no way to know what kind of signals it’s actually waiting for.

Surprisingly Simple

While the ID-2124 Howitzer Deflection-Elevation Data Display is certainly built tough, I’ll admit to being surprised by how straightforward the internals really were. Especially when compared to the monstrous complexity of something like the AH-64A Apache Data Entry Keyboard, which packed an Intel 8085 computer and regulated power supply into a box not much larger than this. Here there’s just a display, a control module, and a handful of passive components.

On the other hand, that might actually bode well for potential reuse of this device. Generally, the military hardware we’ve looked at has had no practical application outside of being an interesting conversation piece. But in this case, reusing the ID-2124 as a general purpose numerical display is just a matter of figuring out how to talk to it. The answer may yet be found in some arcane military technical manual, or it might even be locked away in the mind of one of our illustrious readers .

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, August 21st at noon Pacific for the Life at JPL Hack Chat with Arko!

There’s a reason why people use “rocket science” as a metaphor for things that are hard to do. Getting stuff from here to there when there is a billion miles away and across a hostile environment of freezing cold, searing heat, and pelting radiation isn’t something that’s easily accomplished. It takes a dedicated team of scientists and engineers working on machines that can reach out into the vastness of space and work flawlessly the whole time, and as much practice and testing as an Earth-based simulation can provide.

Arko, also known as Ara Kourchians, is a Robotics Electrical Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of NASA’s research and development centers. Nestled at the outskirts of Pasadena against the flanks of the San Gabriel Mountains, JPL is the birthplace of the nation’s first satellite as well as the first successful interplanetary probe. They build the robots that explore the solar system and beyond for us; Arko gets to work on those space robots every day, and that might just be the coolest job in the world.

Join us on the Hack Chat to get your chance to ask all those burning questions you have about working at JPL. What’s it like to build hardware that will leave this world and travel to another? Get the inside story on how NASA designs and tests systems for space travel. And perhaps get a glimpse at what being a rocket scientist is all about.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 21 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

To the surprise of nobody with the slightest bit of technical intuition or just plain common sense, the world’s first solar roadway has proven to be a complete failure. The road, covering one lane and stretching all of 1,000 meters across the Normandy countryside, was installed in 2016 to great fanfare and with the goal of powering the streetlights in the town of Tourouvre. It didn’t even come close, producing less than half of its predicted power, due in part to the accumulation of leaves on the road every fall and the fact that Normandy only enjoys about 44 days of strong sunshine per year. Who could have foreseen such a thing? Dave Jones at EEVBlog has been all over the solar freakin’ roadways fiasco for years, and he’s predictably tickled pink by this announcement.

I’m not going to admit to being the kid in grade school who got bored in class and regularly filled pages of my notebook with all the binary numbers between 0 and wherever I ran out of room – or got caught. But this entirely mechanical binary number trainer really resonates with me nonetheless. @MattBlaze came up with the 3D-printed widget and showed it off at DEF CON 27. Each two-sided card has an arm that flops down and overlaps onto the more significant bit card to the left, which acts as a carry flag. It clearly needs a little tune-up, but the idea is great and something like this would be a fun way to teach kids about binary numbers. And save notebook paper.

Is that a robot in your running shorts or are you just sporting an assistive exosuit? In yet another example of how exoskeletons are becoming mainstream, researchers at Harvard have developed a soft “exoshort” to assist walkers and runners. These are not a hard exoskeleton in the traditional way; rather, these are basically running short with Bowden cable actuators added to them. Servos pull the cables when the thigh muscles contract, adding to their force and acting as an aid to the user whether walking or running. In tests the exoshorts resulted in a 9% decrease in the amount of effort needed to walk; that might not sound like much, but a soldier walking 9% further on the same number of input calories or carrying 9% more load could be a big deal.

In the “Running Afoul of the FCC” department, we found two stories of interest. The first involves Jimmy Kimmel’s misuse of the Emergency Alert System tones in an October 2018 skit. The stunt resulted in a $395,000 fine for ABC, as well as hefty fines for two other shows that managed to include the distinctive EAS tones in their broadcasts, showing that the FCC takes very seriously indeed the integrity of a system designed to warn people of their approaching doom.

The second story from the regulatory world is of a land mobile radio company in New Jersey slapped with a cease and desist order by the FCC for programming mobile radios to use the wrong frequency. The story (via r/amateurradio) came to light when someone reported interference from a car service’s mobile radios; subsequent investigation showed that someone had programmed the radios to transmit on 154.8025 MHz, which is 5 MHz below the service’s assigned frequency. It’s pretty clear that the tech who programmed the radio either fat-fingered it or misread a “9” as a “4”, and it’s likely that there was no criminal intent. The FCC probably realized this and didn’t levy a fine, but they did send a message loud and clear, not only to the radio vendor but to anyone looking to work frequencies they’re not licensed for.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

If you have solar panels, you want soak up as much sunshine as you can to get your money’s worth. If you don’t have space for a lot of panels, the next best thing is repositioning the panels to catch the most rays. For his entry into the Hackaday Prize, [Frank] built a gorgeous solar tracker prototype to both validate his theories and to serve as a learning platform.

A solar tracker’s purpose is — you guessed it — tracking the Sun’s location to determine optimal positioning for solar panels and other sun-seeking payloads. In the latest revision, [Frank]’s tracker follows the Sun’s azimuth angle, aka its horizontal movement.

The Sun’s path is represented along a ring of 32 red/green LEDs. It moves around the ring as a green LED, according to a real-time clock and a set of pre-determined solar positions stored on an SD card.

Two red LEDs show the sunrise and sunset azimuth angles, and a third LED indicates North as detected with a magnetometer and adjusted for local magnetic declination. In the center of the ring, a stepper motor drives an arrow that always points at the Sun LED. As the tracker is moved around, all the LEDs shift around the ring to follow their targets.

Though it already shines, we think this ongoing project has a bright future. Be sure to check out the demo video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

You know, we hadn’t realized how tired we were of vertical laser harps until we saw [Jonathan Bumstead]’s entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize. It’s all well and good to imitate the design of the inspiring instrument. But the neat thing about synths is that they aren’t confined to the physics of the acoustic instruments they mimic. This project elevates the laser harp into functional sculpture territory. It’s a piece of art that produces art.

And this art harp is entirely self-contained, with built-in MIDI, amplifier, and speakers. The brains of this beauty are an Arduino Mega and an Adafruit music maker shield, which give it twenty different instrument voices. Each of the six layers has two lasers, two mirrors, and two photo-resistors mounted in the corners of the plywood skeleton. The lasers and photo-resistors are mounted back to back in opposite corners, with mirrors in the other two corners to complete the paths. [Jonathan] cleverly diffused the laser light with milky slivers of film canister plastic.

This isn’t [Jonathan]’s first optical rodeo. Previous experience taught him the importance of being able to readjust the lasers on the fly, because every time he moved it, the laser modules would go out of alignment. This time, he built kinematic mounts that let him reposition the lasers using four screws that each push a corner.

There are a lot of nice touches here, especially the instrument selector wheel. [Jonathan] explains it and the rest of the harp in a fantastic demo/build video that’s just burning a hole in the space after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Mike Szczys and Kerry Scharfglass recorded this week’s podcast live from DEF CON. Among the many topics of discussion, we explore some of the more interesting ways to move a robot. From BB-8 to Holonomic Drives, Kerry’s hoping to have a proof of concept in time for Supercon. Are you using On-Chip Debugging with your projects? Neither are we, but maybe we should. The same goes for dynamic memory allocation; but when you have overpowered micros such as the chip on the Teensy 4.0, why do you need to? We close this week’s show with a few interviews with badge makers who rolled out a few hundred of their design and encountered manufacturing problems along the way. It wouldn’t be engineering without problems to solve.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (41 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 031 Show Notes:

• Kerry Scharfglass built two versions of the Sympetrum badge:
  • Badge From Diamond Age Comes To DEF CON
  • Sympetrum-v3: The Dragonfly badge as seen at DEFCON26
  • Down The Rabbit Hole Of Electronics Manufacturing
• Interesting robot locomotion:
  • Driving BB-8: More Than One Way To Move This Bot
  • Holonomic (robotics) – Wikipedia
  • Swerve Central – DEW Robotics
• Embedded Systems topics :
  • Valgrind Home
  • New Teensy 4.0 Blows Away Benchmarks, Implements Self-Recovery, Returns To Smaller Form
• Unofficial DEF CON badges discussed on the show
  • Car Hacking Village Badge
  • Queercon Badge
• Manufacturing Snafu Stories:
  • DC Shoot Badge by @gigstaggart
  • Tron Badge by @Sodium_Hydrogen
    • DEF CON 27 TRON Indie Badge

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

On yet another one of those long, pointless road trips that seemed to punctuate my life starting when I got my license, I was plying the roads somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania with a friend. He told me that on long trips he’d often relieve the boredom by finding another car from the same state as his destination, and then just follow it. I wasn’t sure then how staring at the same car, hour after hour, mile after mile, would do anything but increase the boredom while making you look sort of creepy, but it seemed to work for him.

What works for college kids in cars also works for long-haul truckers, and the concept of a convoy has long been a fact of life on the road and a part of popular culture. Hardly a trip on the US Interstate goes by without seeing a least two truckers traveling in close formation, partly for companionship and mutual support but also for economic reasons. And now technology is poised to take convoying to the next level, as platooning becomes yet another way to automate the freight.

I’m Not Tailgating, I’m Drafting

The physics of platooning are simple: things moving through the air experience drag. Aerodynamic drag increases along with speed and directly correlates to the amount of energy needed to keep moving forward. The more surface area that a body presents to the air it’s moving through, the more drag it experiences.

Truckers have always taken advantage of drafting as a way to reduce their fuel costs. By driving in the partial vacuum in the slipstream of a lead vehicle, the following vehicle can realize significant fuel savings. The lead vehicle experiences reduced drag, too. This is because the drag-inducing wake turbulence normally present at the trailing edge of the semi trailer is transferred to the rear of the following vehicle. Drafting is an aerodynamic win for all the trucks that participate in a convoy.

But two vehicles operating in close proximity at high speeds can be a recipe for disaster, especially if the lead driver needs to stop quickly. That’s where platooning comes in. Platooning is really just drafting on steroids – a technology assist for what truckers are already doing. Multiple companies are looking into systems that coordinate platooning for long-haul truckers, and one, Peloton Technology, has fielded a working system:

The PlatoonPro system provides both the wireless systems needed to find platoon partners and coordinate them into position, and the sensor suite and vehicle controls needed to safely operate the platoon. It uses a dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) link to keep platoon members together and operate the vehicles safely. Platoons are prevented from forming in congested areas by geofencing, which is determined by a network operations cloud (NOC) that also serves to find platoon partners and to warn drivers of approaching road hazards.

Wherever You Go, I Shall Follow

PlatoonPro is currently commercially available and in use by six customers, and platooning is allowed by law in 18 states in the USA. But as impressive as PlatoonPro is, it’s really just an intervehicle cruise control system. While the fuel savings of platooning can be considerable — up to 7% between the platoon partners — both trucks in the platoon still require drivers.

As we’ve pointed out many times before in the “Automate the Freight” series, drivers are expensive; not only must the company pay their salary and benefits, drivers take sick time and vacation, are subject to quit at a moment’s notice, and potentially bring a raft of personal problems with them to the driver’s seat. From a trucking company’s point of view, the fewer drivers they have to employ, the fewer the headaches they’ll have. So while some companies are in pursuit of fully-autonomous long-haul trucks, Peloton sees value in replacing only half of them.

Enter automated following, recently announced by Peloton. In an automated following platoon, only the lead vehicle has a driver. The following vehicle, equipped with the same suite of sensors and linked to the lead through the same vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) system as PlatoonPro, is driverless. The following vehicle takes commands for accelerating, braking, and turning from the driver in the lead vehicle. An automated following platoon instantly doubles the freight a single driver can haul, halving personnel costs and still realizing the increased fuel economy of drafting.

SAE “Levels of Driving Autonomy.” PlatoonPro is a Level 1 system, while automated following qualifies as Level 4. Click to enlarge. Source: SAE International

While PlatoonPro qualifies as an SAE Level 1 or “driver assist” automated driving system, the fact that there’s no safety driver in the following vehicle makes automated following a Level 4 system. That’s a far cry from fleets of Level 5 driverless trucks plying the highways with cargo, but as Peloton points out, it’s far more doable in the short term.

There are clear benefits to a Level 4 system other than the fuel and personnel savings. Shipping companies will benefit from more flexible logistics, with follow-trucks teamed to multiple leads over the course of a long route. The lead drivers would benefit by operating shorter routes, which would increase recruitment and retention. In addition, the lead driver would need more training and accept more responsibility, and therefore command more in the way of compensation.

Automated following seems like a clear win for both shipping companies and drivers, at least those with the skills needed to adapt to the new system. It’s an interesting idea that should serve to bridge the gap between where automated shipping currently is and where it can be someday.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, August 14th at noon Pacific for the Homemade Integrated Circuits Hack Chat with Sam Zeloof!

While most of us are content to buy the chips we need to build our projects, there’s a small group of hackers more interested in making the chips themselves. What it takes the big guys a billion-dollar fab to accomplish, these hobbyists are doing with second-hand equipment, chemicals found in roach killers and rust removers, and a lot of determination to do what no DIYer has done before.

Sam Zeloof is one of this dedicated band, and we’ve been following his progress for years. While he was still in high school, he turned the family garage into a physics lab and turned out his first simple diodes. Later came a MOSFET, and eventually the Z1, a dual-differential amp chip that is the first IC produced by a hobbyist using photolithography.

Sam just completed his first year at Carnegie-Mellon, and he’s agreed to take some precious summer vacation time to host the Hack Chat. Join us as we learn all about the Z1, find out what improvements he’s made to his process, and see what’s next for him both at college and in his own lab.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 14 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

By the time this goes to press, DEFCON 27 will pretty much be history. But badgelife continues, and it’d be nice to have a way of keeping track of all the badges offered. Martin Lebel stepped up to the challenge with a DEF CON 27 badgelife tracker. He’s been tracking the scene since March, and there are currently more than 170 badges, tokens, and shitty add-ons listed. Gotta catch ’em all!

Nice tease, Reuters. We spotted this story about the FAA signing off on beyond-visual-line-of-sight, or BVLOS, operation of a UAV. The article was accompanied by the familiar smiling Amazon logo, leading readers to believe that fleets of Amazon Prime Air drones would surely soon darken the skies with cargoes of Huggies and Tide Pods across the US. It turns out that the test reported was conducted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks along an oil pipeline in the Last Frontier state, and was intended to explore medical deliveries and pipeline surveillance for the oil industry. The only mention of Amazon was that the company reported they’d start drone deliveries in the US “in months.” Yep.

Ever wonder what it takes to get your widget into the market? Between all the testing and compliance requirements, it can be a real chore. Nathaniel tipped us off to a handy guide written by his friend Skippy that goes through the alphabet soup of agencies and regulations needed to get a product to market – CE, RoHS, WEEE, LVD, RED, CE for EMC. Take care of all that paperwork and you’ll eventually get a DoC and be A-OK.

A French daredevil inventor made the first crossing of the English Channel on a hoverboard on Sunday. Yes, we know it’s not an “actual” hoverboard, but it’s as close as we’re going to get with the physics we have access to right now, and being a stand-upon jet engine powered by a backpack full of fuel, it qualifies as pretty awesome. The report says it took him a mere 20 minutes to make the 22-mile (35-km) crossing.

We had a grand time last week around the Hackaday writing crew’s secret underground lair with this delightful Hackaday-Dilbert mashup-inator. Scroll down to the second item on the page and you’ll see what appears to be a standard three-panel Dilbert strip; closer inspection reveals that the text has been replaced by random phrases scraped from a single Hackaday article. It looks just like a Dilbert strip, and sometimes the text even makes sense with what’s going on in the art. We’d love to see the code behind this little gem. The strip updates at each page load, so have fun.

And of course, the aforementioned secret headquarters is exactly what you’d picture – a dark room with rows of monitors scrolling green text, each with a black hoodie-wearing writer furiously documenting the black arts of hacking. OpenIDEO, the “open innovation practice” of global design company IDEO, has issued a challenge to “reimagine a more compelling and relatable visual language for cybersecurity.” In other words, no more scrolling random code and no more hoodies. Do you have kinder, gentler visual metaphors for cybersecurity? You might win some pretty decent prizes for your effort to “represent different terms and ideas in the cybersecurity space in an accessible and compelling way.”

Tags:  hackaday links  

Eric Weinhoffer has had plenty of experience in the product design arena, and this hard-earned knowledge is readily apparent in his mentor session for The Hackaday Prize. These serve to link up Prize entrants with industry experts in order to help them take their projects into production. You still have time to get in on the 2019 Hackaday Prize which is accepting entries until August 25th.

Eric’s work as a Prototype Engineer at Bolt stands him in good stead to deliver valuable advice on manufacturing techniques and prototyping. With projects as diverse as CNC milling machiness and ISS payloads under his belt, Eric was able to help out these entrants with a series of tricky problems that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to take a project out of the lab and into the market.

Let’s take a look at the projects and the advice that were shared during this session.

As Fast As A Speeding Bullet

Edgerton is the project of Tyler Gerritsen — a super-fast LED flash designed for high-speed photography. Specifically, he’s used the device to capture bullets in flight with an absolute minimum of motion blur, something not possible with a garden variety flash unit.

With plenty of testing under his belt, Tyler knows just how far he can push his hardware. However, the prototype uses a 3D-printed case that won’t cut it in the marketplace. Eric was able to shed some light on possible solutions for an attractive enclosure. From outsourced resin 3D printing to injection molding and thermoforming, there’s a variety of options out there depending on your specific needs and estimated production numbers.

A Controller With Serious Grunt

Axiom is an exciting project, inspired by the popular VESC brushless speed controller. Where Axiom differs, however, is in its sheer muscle — it’s designed to run 100kW+ electric vehicle motors at over 400 volts!

With EVs beginning to stack up in wrecking yards, there’s plenty of motors and batteries out there to be harvested, and Axiom might just be the perfect controller to drive them. However, most customers for controllers of this type expect certain levels of robustness. Marcos and the team have been investigating various avenues to construct appropriate enclosures for the hardware that meet expected vehicle standards for water resistance and general hardiness. Eric consulted with the team, discussing options for short-run machining along with various casting options, before covering potential connector solutions that will allow the team to meet these requirements.

Safety for Skaters

After a recent near-miss, samuraisnax was inspired to improve his visibility to traffic when skating at night. Enter the Longboard Light. Inspired by guitar pedals, it packs some high-brightness LEDs and a big meaty footswitch into a compact and removable package, which can be recharged when you’re not out skating the streets. Once again, environmental resistance came to the fore, with water ingress a potential pitfall for the light which runs close to the ground on often-wet roads. Leaning on his knowledge from past projects, Eric suggested installing a lens in front of the light elements which would make the enclosure easy to seal. Additionally, he shared a helpful tip on making sure screw holes and other case features don’t create leaks which can doom your hardware.

Build Your Own Appliances

The DIYson came about as an attempt to use hobby electronics to recreate the expensive designer vacuum cleaners that Britain is so famous for. With brushless motors and lithium batteries readily available, building your own cyclonic cleaner is actually pretty achievable. Madaeon was considering the possibilities of taking things to the next level, with the idea of branching out to a wider line of DIY-buildable appliances. With an eye to commercialization, Makerbot’s expansion after starting as an open-source company was cited as a great success in this area by Eric. The session also covered the possibility of selling construction plans for those interested in building at home, and the benefits this brings from not having to handle manufacturing and distribution.

This is the fifth in our series of Hackaday mentoring sessions, but not the last! Sessions are ongoing, so don’t be afraid to check out the list of mentors and sign yourself up!

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams curate the awesome hacks from the past week. On this episode, we marvel about the legacy RTL-SDR has had on the software-defined radio scene, turn a critical ear to 16-bit console audio hardware, watch generative algorithms make 3D prints beautiful, and discover why printer paper is so very, very bright white.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (58 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 030 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Orphaned Amazon Dash Buttons Ripe For Hacking
  • Hunz Dissects the Amazon Dash Button
• Breakfast At DEF CON This Sunday

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Disappearing Writing With UV Laser Reveals Whitening Agents In Myriad Products
  • Optical brightener
  • Fluorinert FC-40
• MDFourier Project Seeks The Genesis Of SEGA 16-bit Sound
  • Doing What Id Couldn’t: Returning Music To Jaguar Doom
• Computer Optimized 3D Printed Bookshelves
  • Topology optimization
  • There are open source options too:
    • ToPy Python Library
    • Various Consequences: Fully Scripted Open Source Topology Optimization
• Color Your World With This CNC Painting Robot
  • If Then Paint
• Ping-Pong Ball Makes Great PID Example
  • Control PID de Barra y Bola con Arduino – Estudio Roble
• Maybe The Oldest Computer, Probably The Oddest
  • Bi-quinary coded decimal – Wikipedia
  • Video (hear it in action): Working FACOM 128B Relay Computer

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Hold 3500 Volts Up To Your Eye
  • Simulate Climate With An Arduino
  • The Not Quite USB-C Of Nintendo Switch Accessories
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Ask Hackaday: How Would You Build This Flight Tracker For Kids?
  • Clicky Signspinner Works Just Like A Retractable Pen
  • Forming Fipples And Accompanying Accoutrements

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• A Trillion Trees – How Hard Can It Be?
• RTL-SDR: Seven Years Later
  • Universal Radio Hacker
  • Osmo-fl2k – osmo-fl2k – Open Source Mobile Communications

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Shop safety is important regardless of what kind of work you do. For those of us soldering, that means extracting the noxious fumes released by heating up the solder flux used in our projects. [yesnoio] brings to us his own spin on the idea of a fume extractor, and it pulls out all stops with bells and whistles to spare.

The Workbench Assistant bot, as [yesnoio] describes it, is an integrated unit mounted atop a small tripod which extends over the working area where you’re soldering. Inside the enclosure are RGBW lights, an IR camera, and an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express driving the whole show. Aside from just shining a light onto your soldering iron though, the camera senses thermal activity from it to decide when to ramp up the server-grade fan inside which powers the whole fume extraction part of the project.

But the fun doesn’t stop there, as [yesnoio] decided to go for extra style points. The bot also comes with an amplified speaker, playing soundbites whenever actions such as starting or stopping the fan are performed. These soundbites are variations on a theme, like classic Futurama quotes or R2-D2’s chattering from Star Wars. The selectable themes are dubbed “performers”, and they can be reprogrammed easily using CircuitPython. This is a neat way to give your little desktop assistant some personality, and a fun way to break up the monotony of soldering up all those tiny SMD components on your next prototype.

If even after all this you still need more than just a cute little robotic voice beeping at you to convince you to get a fume extractor for your bench, then maybe some hands-on results could give you that little push you need. And if you’re already convinced and want to build your own, there is no shortage of DIY solutions we’ve seen around here at Hackaday. Check out this one in action after the break!

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

At the top of the British electronic intelligence agency is the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a very public entity whose circular building can easily be found by any inquisitive soul prepared to drive just off the A40 in Cheltenham which is about two hours west of London. But due to the nature of its work it is also one of the most secretive of UK agencies, from which very little public information is released. With over a century of history behind it and with some truly groundbreaking inventions under its belt it is rumoured to maintain a clandestine technology museum that would rewrite a few history books and no doubt fascinate the Hackaday readership.

Perhaps the most famous of all its secrets was the wartime Colossus, the first all-electronic stored program digital computer, which took an unauthorised book in the 1970s to bring to public attention. Otherwise its historical artifacts have been tantalisingly out-of-reach, hinted at but never shown.

A temporary exhibition at the Science Museum in London then should be a must-visit for anyone with an interest in clandestine technology. Top Secret: From ciphers to cyber security occupies the basement gallery, and includes among other exhibits a fascinating selection of artifacts from the Government agency. On a trip to London I met up with a friend, and we went along to take a look.

Technology From Our Finest Hours The Fullerphone secure telegraph unit.

The first exhibition highlighted a fascinating aspect of World War I communications technology. In the trenches of the Western Front an intricate web of field telephone lines criss-crossed, and presented a easier evesdropping target than you might think. They used single-wire earth return and the enemy could use earth electrodes to sense their earth return currents.

The Fullerphone was built to defend against this It’s an ingenious telegraph that used a low-pass filter and electromechanical chopper to allow Morse code signalling with tiny currents that were so low as to be undetectable by the current sensing would-be interceptor.

When looking at the history of GCHQ it is inevitable that the path will lead to the WW2 codebreakers at Bletchley Park. There is the Enigma machine with an exploded view of a rotor, followed by a fully functional Enigma clone created by the prewar Polish codebreakers, and then a selection of exhibits dedicated to the vital work of the Poles who came to Bletchley to continue their work after the war had started. This echoes the sentiment of Bletchley’s prominent memorial to Polish codebreakers in acknowledging the importance of their work to the success of Allied codebreaking as a whole.

Part of the exhibit is dedicated to the Lorenz cypher, dubbed “Tunny” by the codebreakers. It is here that that we see the value of the GCHQ artifacts and get to lay eyes on some truly priceless relics.

Working with a captured German Lorenz machine, details of the cypher were pieced together, leading to the creation of Colossus. While we’re familiar with both the Bombe and with Colossus, it is only through replica units because the originals remained classified and were destroyed when they had outlived their usefulness.

GCHQ have loaned the Science Museum in London a genuine Bombe rotor, and a pair of original Colossus parts that appear to have at some point been turned into desk ornaments. Not even Bletchley Park themselves nor the National Museum Of Computing can match the importance of these artifacts, they are the Real Deal!

Cold War Tech At Its Chilliest: Suburban Spy Gear and Mechanical Cyphers The Kramers’ radio transmitter and Morse unit.

The Portland Spy Ring, exposed in 1961, was a spying network that passed Royal Navy secrets back to the Soviet Union. The news came with the revelation that its kingpins, a couple known as the Krogers, had been Soviet agents in deep cover as a respectable couple living in a suburban bungalow in a town just outside London. Learning that the People Next Door might be communist spies caused a sensation in the staid world of early-1960s Britain, and some of this gallery covers the public reaction to the case. Of technical interest are the Krogers’ radio transmitter and high-speed Morse sending unit, discovered concealed beneath their kitchen floor.

This exhibit includes a cross-section of encryption technology from the 1940s to the early 2000s in a series of glass cabinets. The existence of all of the machines on show have previously been classified, and in the case of the newest items though we are told their existence is no longer secret the technology they contain will remain so for a few more years.

Some of the earlier mechanical cyphers in the Enigma mould are not unfamiliar, but in these cabinets is plenty of gear never before shown in public. Everything from a super-secret 1950s Soviet mechanical cypher machine obtained after the fall of Communism to the Queen’s personal telephone encryption token is on show, and it was here that my friend and I lingered the longest.

While examining in detail the largest exhibit, a wartime rack-sized one-time-pad encryption system which appeared to have the pad encoded upon a paper tape, we were approached by and had an in-depth technical conversation with a Science Museum staffer. Was he simply someone who shared our interest in and knowledge of historical technology or had we been sounded out by one of the spooks themselves? Probably the former, but the prospect made us laugh. (As it happens back in the ’90s in one of my tech-related spheres it was intimated to me that somebody with my skillset at the time would find ready employment as a civil servant in Cheltenham, but I took a look at the salary as against the cost of housing in the city and decided against it. I suspect I would not have been good at the whole secret thing anyway.)

The Sinister Side Of The Spooks The New Statesman issue that blew the Zircon scandal wide open.

It’s fun to see this equipment, but also refreshing to see items that don’t paint a rosy picture of all intelligence operations. The exhibit also challenges the visitor think about the implications of surveillance and espionage.

On display is the tale of a 1980s political scandal when the existence of a huge covert budget unapproved by Parliament was revealed. Under the codename Zircon, these funds were allocated for a top-secret British spy satellite. The story was surfaced by the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell (who in 1976 had been the first to reveal publicly in a Time Out article the existence of GCHQ) when a British Aerospace press release accidentally let slip some details of the project. The whole affair concluded with Special branch raids upon Campbell and his associates, the offices of the BBC, and the Spectator newspaper.

The Good Guys in Cheltenham built up in the previous section of the museum are revealed as a cog in a machine that includes a far more sinister side. In an era when public access to information was much more tightly regulated than it is for us in the Internet age, this revelation rocked the Government to its core.

Educating The Public About Their Data Cayla, your wide-open and slightly creepy playmate.

The theme continues by introducing us to the world of Big Data and the threat that it poses. This should not be news to most Hackaday readers, but the general public remain largely unaware of the implications of so much information about them being available. There is an interactive artwork that mines Twitter and produces a mass of thermal printouts, and a 19″ rack full of what look like RAID units that we are told came from a Facebook data centre. Bringing us right up to date we have a look at the implications of IoT devices, including the infamous Cayla doll which had an unsecured Bluetooth connection.

It is here that the irony of the Museum entrance comes into focus. Entry to the gallery is free, but ticketed. At the barrier they ask you for a name and an email address, an early reminder of Big Brother’s eye on you. Is Mailinator still a thing I wondered, (it turns out, they are) as I remarked to the museum staffer the implications of starting a GCHQ exhibition with a data slurp.

An odd juxtaposition is provided by evidence of the community of GCHQ staff, in case we have reduced them to a shadowy faceless mass. We learn that the agency has a Lego club, and in a slightly surreal exhibit to prove it there are Lego models of the GCHQ building (complete with a laser-etched crest in the reception area) pictured at the top of this article. Something tells us that the model’s layout will not reflect the real thing.

The Guardian‘s destroyed Edward Snowden laptop.

Also on display are laptop parts from an episode in which technicians from GCHQ oversaw the destruction of computer hardware at the Guardian newspaper’s offices that had at one time held the revelations of the whistleblower Edward Snowden. The action that was symbolic at best in terms of its efficacy in destroying the data itself.

Then as you walk out the gift shop, displayed next to the GCHQ hoodie is a quantity of dust in a lighted frame. When GCHQ really want to ensure data never sees the light of day, they grind the machine containing it to a fine powder.

This Top Secret exhibition is only temporary. A fascinating way to spend about an hour and a rare chance to see some of GCHQ’s historical collection, as you might expect there’s nothing too secret in it but what’s there is still worth a side trip for anyone nearby. It runs until the 23rd of February 2020 so there is plenty of time left in which to see it, and there is enough in the rest of the Science Museum to detain a curious Hackaday reader all day. If you are visiting London, go along.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, August 7th at noon Pacific for the Kickstarter Hack Chat with Beau Ambur and Clarissa Redwine!

For many of us, magic things happen on our benches. We mix a little of this, one of those, and a couple of the other things, and suddenly the world has the Next Big Thing. Or does it? Will it ever see the light of day? Will you ever build a community around your project so that the magic can escape the shop and survive the harsh light of the marketplace? And perhaps most importantly, will you be able to afford to bring your project to market?

Crowdfunding is often the answer to these questions and more, and Kickstarter is one of the places where hackers can turn their project into a product. Beau and Clarissa, both outreach leads for the crowdfunding company, will stop by the Hack Chat to answer all your questions about getting your project off the bench and into the marketplace. Join us as we discuss everything from building a community that’s passionate enough about your idea to fund it, to the right way to share your design story.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 7 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Is the hacking community facing a HOPEless future? It may well be, if this report from 2600 Magazine is any indication. The biennial “Hackers On Planet Earth” conference is in serious financial jeopardy after the venue that’s hosted it for years, the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan, announced a three-fold increase in price. Organizers are scrambling to save the conference and they’re asking for the community’s help in brainstorming solutions. Hackaday was at HOPE XI in 2016 and HOPE XII in 2018; let’s HOPE we get to see everyone again in 2020.

If you’ve ever been curious about how a 1970s PROM chip worked, Ken Shirriff has you covered. Or uncovered, as he popped the top off a ceramic MMI 5300 DIP to look at the die within. Closeups of the somewhat cockeyed die reveal its secrets – 1,024 tiny fusible links. Programming was a matter of overloading a particular fuse, turning a 1 into a 0 permanently. It’s a fascinating look at how it used to be done, with Ken’s usual attention to detail in the documentation department.

We had a great Hack Chat this week with Mihir Shah from Royal Circuits. Royal is one of the few quick-turn PCB fabs in the USA, and they specialize in lightning-fast turnaround on bare PCBs and assembled boards. He told us all about this fascinating business, and dropped a link to a side project of his. Called DebuggAR, it’s an augmented reality app that runs on a smartphone and overlays component locations, signal traces, pinouts, and more right over a live image of your board. He’s got a beta going now for iPhone users and would love feedback, so check it out.

With all the cool things you can do with LoRa radios, it’s no wonder that wireless hobbyists have taken to pushing the limits on what the technology can do. The world record distance for a LoRa link was an astonishing 702 km (436 miles). That stood for two years until it was topped, twice in the same day. On July 13th, the record was pushed to 741 km, and a mere five hours later to 766 km. All on a scant 25 mW of power.

Linux distro Manjaro made an unconventional choice regarding which office suite to include, and it’s making some users unhappy. It appears that they’ve dumped LibreOffice from the base install, opting instead to include the closed-source FreeOffice. Worse, FreeOffice doesn’t have support for saving .doc and OpenDocument files; potentially leaving LibreOffice users stranded. Paying for an upgrade to SoftMaker’s Office product can fix that, but that’s hardly free-as-in-beer free. It’s kind of like saying the beer is free, but the mug is an upgrade. UPDATE: It looks like the Manjaro team heard all the feedback and are working on a selector so you can install the office suite of your choice.

Tragic news out of New Hampshire, as amateur radio operator Joe Areyzaga (K1JGA) was killed while trying to dismantle an antenna tower. Local news has coverage with no substantial details, however the hams over on r/amateurradio seem to have the inside line on the cause. It appears the legs of the tower had filled with water over the years, rusting them from the inside out. The tower likely appeared solid to Joe and his friend Mike Rancourt (K1EEE) as they started to climb, but the tower buckled at the weak point and collapsed. K1EEE remains in critical condition after the 40′ (12 m) fall, but K1JGA is now a silent key. The tragedy serves as a reminder to everyone who works on towers to take nothing for granted before starting to climb.

And finally, just for fun, feast your eyes on this movie of the ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft as is makes its flyby of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It’s stitched together from thousands of images and really makes 67P look like a place, not just a streak of light in the night sky.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

You’ve got to hand it to marketers – they really know how to make you want something. All it takes is a little parental guilt, a bit of technical magic, and bam, you’re locked into a product you never knew you needed.

This prototype flight tracking nightlight for kids is a great example. Currently under development by Canadian airline WestJet, the idea is to provide a way for traveling parents to let kids know how long it is until Mommy or Daddy gets home from their trip. The prototype shows a stylized jet airliner with Neopixel lighting in the base. A pair of projectors in the wings shine an animated flight path on the child’s darkened bedroom ceiling, showing them when the wayward parent will return. Get past the schmaltz in the video below, and perhaps get over your jealousy of parents with kids who still eagerly await their return, and it’s actually a pretty good idea.

Now for the ask: how would you go about building something like this? And more importantly, how would you make it work for any plane, train, or automobile trip, and not just a WestJet flight? A look at the “How it will work” section of the page shows several photos of the prototype, which suggests the hardware end is dead easy. A Raspberry Pi Zero W features prominently, and the projectors appear to be TI’s DLP2000EVM, which we’ve featured before, mounted to a riser card. The Neopixels, a 3D-printed case, and the superfluous flashlight fuselage would be pretty easy, too.

On the software side, a generic version that tracks flight from any airline would need an interface for the traveler to define a flight, and something to check an API like FlightAware’s, or similar ones for whatever mode of transportation you’re using.

Seems like a pretty straightforward project. WestJet claims they’ll have their Flight Light ready sometime this summer; think we can beat them to it?

Thanks to [Philippe] for the tip.

Tags:  Ask hackaday  

Before swearing my fealty to the Jolly Wrencher, I wrote for several other sites, creating more or less the same sort of content I do now. In fact, the topical overlap was enough that occasionally those articles would get picked up here on Hackaday. One of those articles, which graced the pages of this site a little more than seven years ago, was Getting Started with RTL-SDR. The original linked article has long since disappeared, and the site it was hosted on is now apparently dedicated to Nintendo games, but you can probably get the gist of what it was about from the title alone.

An “Old School” RTL-SDR Receiver

When I wrote that article in 2012, the RTL-SDR project and its community were still in their infancy. It took some real digging to find out which TV tuners based on the Realtek RTL2832U were supported, what adapters you needed to connect more capable antennas, and how to compile all the software necessary to get them listening outside of their advertised frequency range. It wasn’t exactly the most user-friendly experience, and when it was all said and done, you were left largely to your own devices. If you didn’t know how to create your own receivers in GNU Radio, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do other than eavesdrop on hams or tune into local FM broadcasts.

Nearly a decade later, things have changed dramatically. The RTL-SDR hardware and software has itself improved enormously, but perhaps more importantly, the success of the project has kicked off something of a revolution in the software defined radio (SDR) world. Prior to 2012, SDRs were certainly not unobtainable, but they were considerably more expensive. Back then, the most comparable device on the market would have been the FUNcube dongle, a nearly $200 USD receiver that was actually designed for receiving data from CubeSats. Anything cheaper than that was likely to be a kit, and often operated within a narrower range of frequencies.

Today, we would argue that an RTL-SDR receiver is a must-have tool. For the cost of a cheap set of screwdrivers, you can gain access to a world that not so long ago would have been all but hidden to the amateur hacker. Let’s take a closer look at a few obvious ways that everyone’s favorite low-cost SDR has helped free the RF hacking genie from its bottle in the last few years.

Hardware Evolution

Even though the project is called RTL-SDR, the Realtek RTL2832U chip is in reality just half of the equation; it’s a USB demodulator chip that needs to be paired with a tuner to function. In the early days, there were a number of different tuners in use, and figuring out which one you were getting was a pretty big deal. The Elonics E4000 was the most desirable tuner as it had the widest frequency range, but it could be difficult to know ahead of time what you were getting.

The packaging and documentation were all but useless; either the manufacturer didn’t bother to include the information, or if they did, it would often become outdated as new revisions of the product were produced. The only way to be sure about what you were getting was to see if somebody had already purchased that particular model and reported on their findings. Luckily, the tuners were cheap enough that you could buy a couple and experiment. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon to find RTL-SDR compatible devices for less than $10 from import sites.

Opening up a contemporary RTL2832U+E4000 receiver, we can see they were relatively simple affairs. The flimsy plastic case doesn’t do much to prevent interference, and the Belling-Lee connector connector is intended for use with a traditional TV antenna. Note this particular model features an IR receiver so the user could change TV channels with the included remote; a reminder of what this device was actually built for.

These days, you don’t need to wade through pages of nearly identical looking USB TV tuners to find compatible hardware. There are now several RTL2832U-based receivers which are specifically designed for RTL-SDR use, generally selling for around $30. These devices not only address the shortcomings of the original hardware offerings, but in many cases add in new capabilities that simply wouldn’t have made sense to include back when they were just for watching TV on your computer.

Here we have the “RTL-SDR Blog v3” receiver, which is one of the most popular “next generation” RTL-SDR receivers. The plastic case has been replaced with an aluminum one that not only reduces interference, but helps the board dissipate heat while in operation. The crystal has been upgraded to a temperature compensated oscillator (TCXO) which helps reduce temperature drift. The R820T2 tuner is paired with a standard SMA antenna connector, and both it and the RTL2832U have some unused pins broken out if you’re looking to get into developing modifications or expansions to the core hardware.

Software Library

The improvements to the base RTL-SDR hardware are welcome, and it’s nice to not have to worry about whether or not the receiver you’ve purchased is actually going to work with the drivers, but realistically those changes mainly benefit the more hardcore users who are pushing the edge of the envelope. If you’re just looking to sniff some 433 MHz thermometers, you don’t exactly need a TCXO. For most users, the biggest improvements have come in the software side of things.

For one, the RTL-SDR package is almost certainly going to be in the repository of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. Unless you need some bleeding edge feature, you won’t have to compile the driver and userland tools from source anymore. The same will generally be true for the SDR graphical frontend, namely gqrx by Alexandru Csete. Those two packages are enough to get you on the air and browsing for interesting signals, but that’s just the beginning. The rise of cheap SDRs has inspired a number of fantastic new software packages that are light-years ahead of what was available previously.

Certainly one of the best examples is Universal Radio Hacker, an all-in-one tool that lets you search for, capture, and ultimately decode wireless signals. Whether it’s a known protocol for which it already has a built-in decoder, or something entirely new that you need to reverse engineer, Universal Radio Hacker is a powerful tool for literally pulling binary data out of thin air. Those looking to reverse unknown wireless protocols should also take a look at inspectrum, another tool developed in the last few years that can be used to analyze captured waveforms.

Decoding a captured ASK OOK signal in Universal Radio Hacker

If you’re more interested in the practical application of these radios, there have also been a number of very impressive “turn-key” applications developed that leverage the high availability of low-cost SDRs. One such project is dump1090, a ADS-B decoder that was specifically developed for use with the RTL-SDR. With a distributed network of receivers, the software has allowed the community to democratize flight tracking through the creation of open data aircraft databases.

The Gift of Inspiration

In the years since its inception, the RTL-SDR project has become the de facto “first step” for anyone looking to experiment with radio. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and since the hardware is incapable of transmission, you don’t have to worry about accidentally running afoul of the FCC or your local equivalent. Honestly, it’s difficult to think of a valid reason not to add one of these little USB receivers to your bag of tricks; even if you only use it once, it will more than pay for itself.

Ultimately, this is the greatest achievement of the RTL-SDR project. It drove the entry barrier for radio experimentation and hacking so low that it’s spawned a whole new era. From the unique vantage point offered by Hackaday, we can see the sharp uptick of RF projects that correspond to the introduction of an easy to use and extremely affordable software defined radio. People who might never have owned a “real” radio beyond the one in their car can now peel back the layers of obscurity that in the past kept the vast majority of us off the airwaves. This is a very exciting time for wireless hacking, and things are only going to get more interesting from here on out. Long live RTL-SDR!

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

I have a problem. If I go to a swap meet , or even a particularly well stocked yard sale, I feel compelled to buy something. Especially if that something happens to be an oddball piece of electronics. While on the whole I’m a man of few vices, I simply can’t walk away from a good deal; doubly so if it has a bunch of buttons, LEDs, and antennas on it.

Table for one, by the window.

Which is exactly how I came into the possession of a Catel CPT300 restaurant paging system for just $20 a few months ago. I do not, as you may have guessed, operate a restaurant. In fact, as many of my meals take the form of military rations eaten in front of my computer, I’m about as far away from a restaurateur as is humanly possible. But I was so enamored with the rows of little plastic pagers neatly lined up in their combination charging dock and base station that I had to have it.

The man selling it swore the system worked perfectly. Even more so after he plugged it in and it didn’t do anything. But appearances can be deceiving, and his assurance that all the pagers needed was a good charge before they’d burst back to life seemed reasonable enough to me. Of course, it hardly mattered. The regular Hackaday reader at this point knows the fate of the CPT300 was to be the same whether or not it worked.

Incidentally, those cute little pagers would not burst back to life with a good charge. They may well have burst into something, but we’ll get to that in a moment. For now, let’s take a look at a gadget that most of us have used at one time or another, but few have had the opportunity to dissect.

But First, a Mystery

There’s not a whole lot to see on the outside of the CPT300 base unit. Sixteen slots in the top for charging the pagers, and a simple membrane keypad on the front that lets you select which unit you want to send a signal to. With nothing else of any great interest on the outside, I went right to removing the heavy metal plate that makes up the base of the unit.

I didn’t plan on stealing the Declaration of Independence today, but here we are.

Inside there were several pages of note paper folded up, along with a healthy application of red electrical tape. Presumably the PCB had been shorting out on the base’s metal plate, so somebody went in and added a bit of insulation. The pieces of paper were blank, except for one that had what appeared to be a street address and a phone number written on it.

The address had no city or state, but the area code for the phone number came up as being in Brooklyn, New York. That put us at an apartment building about a block away from the Coney Island Boardwalk. It’s probably safe to assume the CPT300 wasn’t in use there, but if we allow our imagination to wander a bit, maybe whoever lives in the apartment ordered some takeout from the restaurant this device came from. Perhaps the slip of paper with the address and number, as well as a few blank pages behind it, later caught the eye of somebody who was looking for an insulator to fix the intermittent short in their paging system. Of course we’ll never know for sure, but stranger things have happened.

A Barebones Base

With that bout of sleuthing behind me, I got back to taking apart the base of the CPT300. But as it turns out, there was probably more excitement to be had browsing Google Maps for restaurants in Brooklyn. The design and execution of this device could easily pass for a prototype or someone’s personal project, complete with overflowing solder and bodge resistors.

Functionally, the base station is very simple. Under the keypad there’s a STC15F204EA microcontroller that reads the status of the buttons to see which pager the user wants to wake up. Once you press a button, the corresponding binary sequence is sent to the bog-standard 433 MHz transmitter module located on the charging board. A simple four wire ribbon cable links the charging board with the control board in the top half of the case.

This ribbon cable makes a perfect place to attach the logic analyzer to snoop on the communication between these two devices. Using the On-off keying (OOK) decoder in PulseView, we can see the actual binary signal that will ultimately be sent out over the air for the pagers to receive.

After pressing a few buttons and comparing the intercepted binary, it was easy to find the device identifier. Only the final 4 bits ever changed, which gives us exactly 16 possible combinations; precisely how many pagers are supported by each CPT300 base station.

Puffed Up Pagers

With the base station thoroughly examined, it was time to turn my attention to the individual pagers. As mentioned previously, the pagers were all completely unresponsive even after being left to charge, so I was curious about what was keeping them all silent. My first assumption was that the base station simply wasn’t transmitting, but the logic analyzer seemed to indicate that it was. So why weren’t the pagers responding? As soon as I opened the first pager, I had my answer.

If you’ve spent any time working with lithium-ion polymer (LiPo) batteries, you’ll likely see the problem immediately. For those who haven’t, I’ll give you a hint: the battery shouldn’t be puffed up like a silver marshmallow.

We’ve previously talked about the chemistry involved, but the short version is that a mistreated LiPo can experience electrolyte decomposition which fills the pack with flammable gases such as hydrogen and oxygen. So not only are these batteries shot, but they’re dangerous and need to be carefully disposed of. I checked the rest of the pagers, and almost all the batteries are swollen to some degree. Suddenly that $20 seems like it might not have been such a great deal after all.

So what constitutes mistreatment of a LiPo battery? The usual culprits are overcharging or discharging too deeply. Since all of the batteries seem to have been damaged in the same way, that lead me to believe there was some flaw in the pager’s design. My first thought was that the batteries were getting overcharged, so let’s take a close look at the power circuitry and try to find out what’s going on.

Following the yellow traces from left to right, we see that the pager’s positive charging pad is connected to a 78M05 regulator (marked in purple). Rather than put the regulation in the charger itself, it was probably cheaper to put lower-capacity regulators in each pager. So while the voltage on the base station’s charging rails varies significantly depending on how many pagers are currently docked, the 78M05 in the pager makes sure it always has a stable 5 V. From there, it goes into a LTC4054-LTH7 (blue), which is a very common lithium battery charging chip that’s designed to run from 5 V USB. After the LTC4054, the trace connects to the same side of the slide switch that runs directly into the battery connector.

So the charger seems put together well enough, but what happens when the pager is removed from the base station and the battery starts discharging? With the switch slid to the on position, we see from the red traces that power goes directly into a 7333-A regulator (green) that provides 3.3 V for the pager’s electronics. Which means that as long as the switch is on, the regulator and everything it’s powering is connected directly to the battery.

Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t really be a problem. The electronics probably don’t draw a whole lot of current to begin with, and the pagers would be getting recharged every night anyway. Besides, the internal electronics on a quality LiPo battery pack should cut-out when the cells approach their design minimum voltage, usually around 3 V.

But when I tested a few of the packs, some had dropped all the way to 1.7 V. It could have been months, or even years, since anyone had tried to charge these batteries. Combine that with poor storage conditions (such as keeping them in a hot garage or attic), and you’ve got a recipe for irreparable damage.

Can You Hear Me Now?

So what else is inside one of these pagers other than a small explosive device? Not a whole lot. Half the board is entirely empty; it’s clear that these devices were made this size for user convenience rather than necessity. Each pager has a buzzer, array of LEDs, and a small pager motor at its disposal for notifications, and documentation from the Catel site says that you can configure which one it will use with a series of button presses.

I tip my crystal to you, m’lady.

There’s a 16 pin device which is clearly a microcontroller of some sort, but unfortunately it’s completely devoid of any markings. There’s an unpopulated four pin header right next to it though, so perhaps something interesting could be gleaned that way. Incidentally, the documentation says you can pair the pagers by holding a small button on the front until the LEDs begin to flash, so they don’t need to be physically reprogrammed if you wanted to switch their numbers around.

To pick up the signal from the base station, the pagers use a Micrel MICRF211 receiver operating at 433.92 MHz. One interesting thing to note is the rather jaunty position of the external 13.52127 MHz crystal. As best I can tell, it’s mounted this way because they realized it was positioned so close to the MICRRF211 and associated passives that they might short out against the can. Rather than redo the board, they just tipped the crystal over a bit. I checked the other pagers, and yes, they’re all like this.

Lessons Learned

I’ve ordered a handful of batteries for the pagers, and once installed, I’m fairly confident they’ll come back to life. When everything is working again, I think that the CPT300 would be an interesting subject for some further exploration. Specifically, I’d like to use it as a case study for working with unknown 433 MHz devices. For example, comparing what a logic analyzer on the board sees to an over the air capture from a Software Defined Radio. Most of my teardowns end up as a pile of spare parts but I think there’s still some life left in this one, so keep any eye out for its return.

More importantly, this teardown is a reminder that you need to be careful when picking up old devices that use internal lithium batteries. Putting these pagers back on charge without checking the health of the battery packs was a mistake, and could have started a fire if one of them ruptured. So if you’re looking at an interesting gadget that doesn’t have an easily accessible battery, assume it’s shot until you’re able to get inside it and verify its safe to use. A $20 swap meet find isn’t worth losing your house over.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

At one time or another, we’ve all suffered through working with a piece of equipment that didn’t feature a way to export its data to another device. Whether it was just too old to offer such niceties, or the manufacturer locked the capability behind some upgrade, the pain of staring at digits ticking over on a glowing LCD display and wishing there was a practical way to scrape what our eyes were seeing is well known to hackers.

That was precisely the inspiration for DoMSnif, the dot matrix LCD sniffer that [Blecky] has been working on. Originally the project started as a way to record the temperature of his BRTRO-420 reflow oven, but realizing that such a device could have widespread appeal to other hardware hackers, he’s rightfully decided to enter it into the 2019 Hackaday Prize. If perfected, it could be an excellent way to bolt data capture capabilities to your older devices.

The first phase of this project was figuring out how to capture and parse the signals going into the device’s KS0108 LCD. Getting the data was certainly easy enough, he just had to hook a logic analyzer up between the display and the main board of the device. Of course, figuring out what it all means is a different story.

After running the oven for a bit with the analyzer recording, [Blecky] had more than enough data to get started on decoding it. Luckily, the layout of this fairly common 128×64 pixel display is well documented and easy enough to understand. With a little work, he was able to create a tool that would import the captured data and display it on a virtual LCD.

Unfortunately, the Bluetooth part is where things get tricky. Ultimately, [Blecky] wants to ditch the logic analyzer and use a Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit to capture the signals going to the LCD and pipe them to a waiting device over Bluetooth. But his testing has found that the nRF52’s radio is simply too slow. The display is receiving data every 14us, but it takes the radio at least 50us to send a packet.

[Blecky] is looking at ways around this problem, and we’re confident he’ll crack it. The solution could be in buffering and compressing the data before sending it out, though you’d lose the ability to monitor the display in real-time. Even if he has to abandon the Bluetooth aspect entirely and make the device wired, we still think there would be a market for an easy to use hardware and software solution for scraping LCD data.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

The newest offering from the AND!XOR team is out and it delivered exactly what hardware badges were missing: light pipes. No joke, the DEF CON 27 edition AND!XOR badge will be most recognizable because of two arcs of light pipe material blinging RGB goodness in three dimensions. But if you can peel your eyes away from that oddity there’s a lot to love about the new design.

A Departure from Bender

Is this a Bender badge? Followers in the cult of #Badgelife will remember that the Bender character from the smash show Futurama has been the official mascot for the AND!XOR team since they began making badges. This badge goes away from that aesthetic and the design achieves a new depth with a gas-mask laden, hoodie-wearing character more reminiscent of Fallout.

Yes, there’s a snappy RGB matrix in the shape of goggles, but it is the art and how it is treated on this board that really catches my eye. This badge looks fantastic even if it’s not switched on. The art is by Kevin Pentecost, a fan of the team who gave them the illustration during last year’s DEF CON.

The familiar PCB color palette of black, white, and gold is at work here, but it’s easy to mistake how it’s put to use. In this case the white is the solder mask, indicated by the exposed gold on either side of the goggles which has white reflection marks on it. The black silkscreen is put to work as a very fine matrix of dots on the hoodie, giving it both an interesting hue to the eye, and a texture under your fingers. Both have a glossy, picture-perfect finish.

But look closely and you’ll see a new trick at work: stickers. The two canisters for the gas mask are stickers whose finish makes it easy to use the capacitive touch scroll wheels built into the board underneath. At the same time, this brings glow-in-the-dark phosphorescent material to the badge.

All past version of AND!XOR badges have included a screen, either OLED or LCD. This one moves away from that in favor of the RGB LED matrix. I most closely associate the goggle layout with the DC Furs badge from 2018. It was a great idea then and it’s a great idea now. Layout breaks up the monotony of a rectangle for an obvious reason, yet still allows scrolling characters as you would with a drab LED sign. Where you could have had a 7×17 matrix, you lose just 17 LEDs to the artistic shape for a total of 102 pixels. It’s the best of both worlds. I don’t miss screens at all here — how can a badge compete with what’s on your smartphone? This competes in a way no smartphone can begin to imagine.

There are two things I don’t like about the front of the badge: the add-on connector and the Rigado module, both near the top of the board interrupt the beautiful design of the rest of the board. There’s an easy solution for that: cover them up with an add-on. AND!XOR sent me all three modules they’ve been involved with this year, and that’s one of the most interesting developments this year.

When Add-Ons Outgrown Being Dependent on a Badge

Kudos to Hyr0n who stopped calling these “Shitty Add-Ons” and started calling them “Superior Add-Ons”. They went all-in on the designs and what we’re actually talking about are stand-alone mini-badges that happen to be compatible with plugging into other badges.

The team sent me all three add-ons. There’s the basic bender, the Audio Reactive SAO (rev 6), and the Doom SAO (rev 1) from AND!XOR’s newest team member, Parker Dillman. (You likely know Parker from the Macrofab podcast which is part of his day job.) All three have microcontrollers on board running the show, while offering access to the outside world through the I2C pins of the 3×2 header that is the SAO V1.69bis standard.

Bender does a great job of returning the team’s mascot and supplying classic bling of their first ever badge. At the same time, there’s a hidden serial output. If only you had something to read that output. Hey, you’re in luck! The AND!XOR DC27 badge itself is a hardware hacking tool that can sniff serial (I’ll get to that in a minute). Actually, the Doom SAO could do it too. In addition to returning a screen to the badge, the Doom guy SAO has a serial sniffer built in that can read the output of the Bender add-on. The third add-on has an electret mic and flashes its LED based on ambient noise.

A Lap Around the Hardware

Let’s take a step back and marvel at what we can do with a handful of ICs and very few passives. Driving the system is a Rigado BMD-340 module which is a familiar feature of the team’s 2017 badge. It runs an NRF52840 core and provides wireless connectivity for the botnet game played between these and other badges at the conference.

The bling is handled by an ISSI chip along with the help of five resistor networks. This year it’s the IS31FL3741. The routing of this display contains hidden beauty for those who look really closely. User for the badge input is handled by capacitive touch using the Azoteq IQS333 to monitor two scroll wheels and the center pad of the DC27 design shown here. All of this is powered by just two AA batteries thanks to the Skyworks boost converter (AAT1217-3.3).

This badge, and the Doom SAO, are pulling us into the 21st century with the use of USB-C connectivity. The tried and true LM1117 regulates incoming power from that connection. A beefy FTDI FT2232H makes two separate USARTs available for this board. I mistakenly tried out ttyUSB0 for my serial connection out of the gate and got a fat nothing-burger. That’s because the Alternate Reality Game is on USB1, the USB0 connection is for the in-built hacking tools.

I’m not entirely sure what I think of the light pipes on this badge. It’s certainly a useful trick to keep in mind for future designs. The plastic receptacles snap onto the board through two small holes each. Straddling an RGB LED on the face of the board, these provide a fixture for the flexible light-pipe material. As you can see in the image a the top of the article, they do a good job of diffusing some light out of the sidewalls of the tube, and if you look into the end of the pipe, the light emission is very strong.

The Lulz Lurk Inside

I like seeing consideration given to making these badges worth keeping around after the conference. (Who am I kidding, they’re works of art and everyone keeps them around.) For the DC27 badge, AND!XOR spent time making as much use out of the FTDI chip as possible and ended up with a multi-tool for hardware hacking that speaks serial, I2C, SPI, and even JTAG via OpenOCD.

Don’t want to deal with hardware protocols? You can bang your head against the digital wall trying to solve the Alternate Reality Game instead. Think Zork, but waaaay more snarky. This is the part of the AND!XOR universe that I always wish I spent more time in. When you terminal into the badge you can get a list of commands by hitting tab. (Protip: turn your caps lock on.) From there you can issue commands that may control the badge itself, the text-based story game inside of it, or the botnet being played wirelessly with other badges.

To be truly successful, you have to look around for tangential puzzles to solve, like the cipher on the back of the badge. I also noticed a peculiar flashing when the DC27 is displayed on the LEDs at startup and I’d wager there’s data hidden there. You’ll find clues in the launch video, on Twitter, and who knows where else.

The Magic is In How It’s All Pulled Together

All-in-all this a lovely piece of hardware, but the real magic is in the entire package the AND!XOR team manages to pull together for this and every previous year of their adventures. I’m amazed by their creativity in packaging along — last year they shipped in burlap bags and this year you get a sleeve in the style of the US Military “Meal, Ready-to-Eat”. Every year there is new hardware involved that I hunger to see as soon as the badge comes out — last year I ogled the GreenPAK NVM and the ISSI driver, this year it’s the light pipes and the stickers. And the alternate-reality game is beyond compare — AND!XOR did such great work with the wireless protocols that they’ve been adopted by numerous other badge makers over the years to join the botnet game, and the text-based realm within the badge is delightful and deeply engaging.

They have a huge following and are highly skilled at driving a whisper campaign that drops hints throughout the year and throughout the con. The media they put together around the project — from the stunning images and videos to the superb and thorough documentation — leave me dumbfounded. And this year they’re trying something new, offering up only about 25% of their badges to backers, which have already sold out. The cost of the other 75% of the badges has been covered by corporate sponsorship so the team will be giving away badges at DEF CON 27 and B-Sides Las Vegas for free with preference to people participating in the community nature of the events: speakers, people helping out, etc.

All of this adds up to something more than designing and selling badges. This is a movement that means something and stands for something. What that “something” is largely depends on who shows up and takes part, and I really like that.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday, July 31st at noon Pacific for the Quick-Turn PCB Fab Hack Chat with Mihir Shah!

We’ve all become used to designing a PCB and having it magically appear at our doorstep – after a fashion. Modern PCB fabs rely on economies of scale to deliver your design cheaply, at the expense of time – the time it takes to put enough orders onto a panel, and the time it takes to ship the finished boards from Far, Far Away.

Not everyone has that kind of time to burn, though. That’s where quick-turn fabs come in. These manufacturers specialize in getting boards to their customers as quickly as possible, helping them deal with sudden design changes or supporting specialty applications for customers.

It’s a niche industry, but an important one, and Royal Circuits is at the forefront. Mihir Shah is Director of Special Projects there, and he’s deep into the business of getting PCBs to customers as quickly as possible. He’ll drop by the Hack Chat to answer all your questions about how the quick-turn industry fits into the electronics manufacturing ecosystem, and to show off some of the tools of the future that they’re developing and investing in to streamline PCB design and analysis – from DebuggAR to PCBLayout.com, and more.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday July 31 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

It looks like Apple is interested in buying Intel’s modem chip business. Seriously interested; a deal worth $1 billion could be announced as early as this week. That might look like a small potato purchase to the world’s biggest company – at least by market capitalization – but since the technology it will be buying includes smartphone modems, it provides a look into Apple’s thinking about the near future with regard to 5G.

It turns out that Make Magazine isn’t quite dead yet. [Dale Dougherty], former CEO of Maker Media, which went under in June, has just announced that he and others have acquired the company’s assets and reformed under the name “Maker Community LLC.” Make: Magazine is set to resume publication, going back to its roots as a quarterly publication in the smaller journal format; sadly there’s no specific word about the fate of Maker Faire yet.

The hoopla over the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 may be over, but we’d be remiss not to call out one truly epic hack related to the celebration: the full restoration of an actual Apollo Guidance Computer. The AGC was from a test model of the Lunar Module, and it ended up in the hands of a private collector. Since November of 2018 the AGC has been undergoing restoration and tests by [Ken Shirriff], [Mike Stewart], and [Carl Claunch]. The whole effort is documented in a playlist by [Marc “CuriousMarc” Verdiell] that’s worth watching to see what was needed to restore the AGC to working condition.

With the summer sun beating down on the northern hemisphere, and air conditioners at working extra hard to keep things comfortable. [How To Lou] has a quick tip to improve AC efficiency. Turns out that just spraying a fine mist of water on the condenser coils works wonders; [Lou] measured a 12% improvement in cooling. It may not be the best use of water, and it may not work as well in very humid climates, but it’s a good tip to keep in mind.

Be careful with this one; between the bent spoon, the syringe full of amber liquid, and the little candle to heat things up, this field-expedient reflow soldering setup might just get you in trouble with the local narcotics enforcement authorities. Even so, knowing that you can assemble a small SMD board without a reflow oven might prove useful someday, under admittedly bizarre circumstances.

From the “Considerably more than 8-bits music” file, check out the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra’s “8-Bit Symphony.” If your personal PC gaming history included a Commodore 64, chances are you’ll recognize songs from titles like “Monty on the Run”, “Firelord”, “Green Beret”, and “Forbidden Forest.” Sure, composers like [Ben Daglish] and [Paul Norman] worked wonders with the three-channel SID chip, but hearing those tunes rendered by a full orchestra is something else entirely. We found it to be particularly good background music to write by.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams cover the most interesting hacks over the past week. So much talk of putting computers in touch with our brains has us skeptical on both tech and timeline. We celebrated the 40th Anniversary of the Walkman, but the headphones are the real star. Plus, Verilog isn’t just for FPGAs, you can synthesize 7400 circuits too! Elliot is enamored of an additive/subtractive printing process that uses particle board, and we discuss a couple of takes on hybrid-powered drones.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (62 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 028 Show Notes: New This Week:

• 5G Power Usage Is Making Phones Overheat In Warm Weather
• Notable Hackaday Deadlines:
  • One Week Left For Supercon Talk And Workshop Submissions
  • 2019 Hackaday Prize: Final month for entries!
• The South American Power Outage That Plunged 48 Million Into Blackout

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• External Buffer Boosts 3D Printer Filament Splicing On The Palette 2
  • Mosaic Palette: Single Extruder Multi-Color And Multi-Material 3D Printing
  • Josef Prusa: Multi Material Extruders For Amazing Color Prints
• Control Your Web Browser Like It’s 1969
  • Hacked Phone Runs Zork, Gets Lamp
• Breathing LED Done With Raw Logic Synthesized From A Verilog Design
  • Synthesis library by Dan Ravensloft: 74series.lib
• 3D Printer Meets CNC Router To Make Wood Prints
  • Laser Cut-and-Weld Makes 3D Objects
  • Industrial 3D Printing Uses Layers Like We’ve Never Seen Before
• Create A Low-Cost, High-Accuracy LCR Meter With An STM32 MCU
  • Circuit VR: Resistance Measurement With Four Wires
• Hybrid Drones Could Have Massively Extended Flight Times
  • Designing Compact Gasoline Generator Prototype For Drone Use
  • Unconventional Drone Uses Gas Thrusters For Control

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • A Drop-In Upgrade Module For Cheap Rotary Tools
  • DIY Teensy Looper Multiplies Music
  • Farting Baseball; From The Makers Of Self-Solving Rubik’s Cube
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Building A Bigger Cloud Chamber
  • I Love The Smell Of ABS Plastic In The Morning
  • Getting Hackers Excited About Cable Robots

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Forget The Walkman: It’s The Headphones
• Brain-Computer Interfaces: Separating Fact From Fiction On Musk’s Brain Implant Claims

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago, yet there are some people who don’t think it happened. This story is not about them. It turns out there was another great conspiracy theory involving a well-known astronomer, unicorns, and humanoids with bat wings. This one came 134 years before the words “We chose to go to the moon” were uttered.

The 1835 affair — known as the Great Moon Hoax — took the form of six articles published in The Sun, a newspaper in New York City. Think of it like “War of the Worlds” but in newspaper form — reported as if true but completely made up. Although well-known astronomer John Herschel was named in the story, he wasn’t actually involved in the hoax. Richard Adams Locke was the reporter who invented the story. His main goal seemed to be to sell newspapers, but he also may have been poking fun at some of the more outlandish scientific claims of the day.

A Telescope Beyond Belief and a Yarn Spun Out of This World

The first of the six articles touted that Sir John Herschel had made amazing discoveries at the Cape of Good Hope and that the articles originally appeared as a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science. If you want to read the original, you can find the text at the Museum of Hoaxes. However, here’s a short summary: Supposedly, Herschel had created a huge telescope using a new principle, shipped it to South Africa, and had visualized many amazing things with it.

In the story, the new telescope was supposed to be a large tubeless reflector, although later they talk about a giant lens. The image formed was further magnified by a water drop microscope. We think. Keep in mind, the thing didn’t really exist, and the text is hard to parse so some of it could be Star Trek-style technobabble. We especially liked “hydro-oxygen microscope.” We were also amused that when Herschel and David Brewer came up with the idea, Brewer reportedly said — we aren’t making this up — “Thou art the man!” We guess things haven’t changed so much over the last 200 years.

The final instrument was said to have a 24-foot diameter, weigh almost 7 tons, and could magnify up to 42,000 times. Supposedly, the new telescope had found planets around other stars and could see objects on the moon as clearly as you’d see something with your own eyes one hundred yards away. And what did he supposedly see? At first, there were reports of red flowers. There were also a number of types of lunar trees that eventually gave way to a lake.

Like all good stories, there was a slow reveal. They found slender pyramids — surely the sign of intelligent life. Then they observed animals of various types. There was something like bison and one animal described as a “monster” resembling a goat.

By the fourth installment, the scientists observed winged humanoids that appeared to engage in conversations complete with gestures. They named these winged people Vespertilio-homo (bat man — no kidding). They also claimed to find an abandoned temple made of sapphire. Near the temple lived a higher form of the bat people.

The downside to the giant lens was that the sun caused it to start burning down the building. The telescope was saved, though, and Herschel started looking elsewhere during the new moon. He found the rings of Saturn were from volcanic smoke. The paper supposedly omitted some other details as not interesting to the general reader.

Tall Tales Die Hard

The story spread, first across the country, and then throughout Europe. It took about a month for the New York Herald — a competitor of The Sun that had temporarily shut down due to fire — to call out the story as a hoax.

It is often claimed that the Sun’s circulation went up because of the hoax, but that may not be true. It is true, though, that they turned a great profit from the sales of a pamphlet with the story and lithographs. There is evidence that the paper sold 60,000 pamphlets in a single month. Today only sixteen of them are known to exist and they sell for a lot more than the original penny.

On the Hoax Museum site, they break down that about half the New York newspapers (other than The Sun) seemed to buy into the hoax, although half of those were skeptical about it. Perhaps the biggest tell was that the Edinburgh Journal of Science had not even existed for several years at the time of printing, having merged with another journal in 1833. The people who did realize it didn’t have a great way to tell everyone else, either, so it was largely ignored.

Herschel was at first amused by the attention. He really had been in South Africa at the time of the hoax. However, he later grew tired of people asking about his moon discoveries. But the story gets even stranger. Edgar Allen Poe, who had been a colleague of Locke, claimed the piece was plagiarized from his own work, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” which had appeared under a different title two months earlier in a literary magazine. Both because of the nature of the publication and the obvious satire, few if any people believed Poe’s account of a man flying a balloon to the moon and living there for five years.

In later years Locke did admit to writing the hoax, although he may not have worked alone. In addition to trying to sell more papers, there is some thought that he may have been poking fun at contemporary science reporting. For example, Thomas Dick wrote a popular book where he computed that the solar system had nearly 22 trillion inhabitants and the moon was home to over 4 billion. You might wonder how he arrived at such a number. Dick was a church minister and assumed that God would will that all his creation would be inhabited. That included asteroids, planetary rings, and moons. Computing the surface area of all those things and knowing the average population density in England led to his claim.

New Technology: Steam-Powered Printing Press

You usually think of the War of the Worlds hoax as an early mass media manipulations. That was almost 100 years after the Great Moon Hoax. But the technology of the relevant era drove both the hoaxes. In 1938, radio was a new medium and was in many people’s homes. In the 1830s the steam-powered printing press made it possible for The Sun to produce many copies of the paper cheaply and so the paper had a large readership ready to belive the story.

The Sun was the first successful penny paper — more affordable than the six-cent papers. With large cities, low prices, and steam-powered printing presses, the penny papers were the radio or TV of their time. They also tended to cater to more humble readers with crime reports, sensational stories like the moon hoax, and advertisements for things you wouldn’t see in the six-penny papers.

Where Will the Next Hoax Occur?

We would like to think that our technologically savvy population would laugh at something like the Great Moon Hoax today. Common knowledge and common sense have come an unfathomable distance since the 1830s. Now, most people would discount these claims at face value, and there’s a huge community of astronomers (both professional and hobbyist) around the world who would refute such claims.

It seems to us that while most of the world is worried about the rich getting very rich while the poor get very poor, we also worry about the divide between people who have basic science knowledge and critical thinking skills versus those who don’t. That divide seems to be getting bigger and in a world increasingly dependent on science and technology, that strikes us as dangerous. One thing we think helps is to normalize a deep interest not just in the results of science and technology, but in the fascinating details of each new discovery.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

We’ve all seen them, the rotary tools that look almost, but not quite exactly, like a Dremel. They cost just a fraction of the real thing, and even use the same bits as the official Bosch-owned version. At first glance, they might seem like a perfect solution for the hacker who’s trying to kit out their workshop on a tight budget. There’s only one problem: the similarities between the two are only skin deep.

Recovering components from the original controller

As [Vitaly Puzrin] explains, one of the big problems with these clones are the simplistic electronics which have a tendency to stall out the motor at low RPM. So he’s developed a drop-in replacement speed controller for his particular Dremel clone that solves this problem. While the module design probably won’t work on every clone out there in its current form, he feels confident that with help from the community it could be adapted to other models.

Of course, the first step to replacing the speed controller in your not-a-Dremel is removing the crusty old one. But before you chuck it, you’ll need to recover a few key components. Specifically the potentiometer, filter capacitor, and the motor terminals. You could possibly source the latter components from the parts bin, but the potentiometer is likely going to be designed to match the tool so you’ll want that at least.

The microprocessor controlled upgrade board uses back EMF to detect the motor’s current speed without the need for any additional sensors; important for a retrofit module like this. [Vitaly] says that conceptually this should work on any AC brushed motor, and the source code for the firmware is open if you need to make any tweaks. But hacker beware, the current version of the PCB doesn’t have any AC isolation; you’ll need to take special care if you want to hook it up to your computer’s USB port.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to buy a cheap rotary tool just to crack it open and replace the electronics, you might as well just build your own. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can always abandon the electric motor and spin it up with a tiny turbine.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Join us on Wednesday, July 24th at noon Pacific for the Crowd Supply Hack Chat with Josh Lifton!

When you’re ready to take your Next Big Idea from a project to a product, you face problems that don’t normally present themselves to the hobbyist. Building one of something is quite different from building many of them, and soon you’re dealing with issues with parts suppliers, PCB fabrication, assembly, packaging, shipping, marketing, and support.

It takes a lot to get your idea to market, and a guiding hand would be most welcome to the budding hardware tycoon. That’s the logic behind Crowd Supply, the Portland-based crowdfunding and mentoring company. Josh Lifton is its CEO, and he’ll drop by the Hack Chat to answer all your questions about how crowdfunding works, what Crowd Supply offers to help creators, and what the fundamentals of a successful project are.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday July 24 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

[Photo credit: Jon House, Portland Tribune]

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Ordering a PCB used to be a [Henry Ford]-esque experience: pick any color you like, as long as it’s green. We’ve come a long way in the “express yourself” space with PCBs, with slightly less than all the colors of the rainbow available, and some pretty nice silkscreening options to boot. But wouldn’t it be nice to get full-color graphics on a PCB? Australian company Little Bird thinks so, and they came up with a method to print graphics on a board. The results from what looks like a modified inkjet printer are pretty stunning, if somewhat limited in application. But I bet you could really make a splash with these in our Beautiful Hardware contest.

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing has come and gone with at least as much fanfare as it deserves. Part of that celebration was Project Egress, creation of a replica of the Columbia crew hatch from parts made by 44 hackers and makers. Those parts were assembled on Thursday by [Adam Savage] at the National Air and Space Museum in an event that was streamed live. A lot of friends of Hackaday were in on the build and were on hand, like [Fran Blanche], [John Saunders], [Sophy Wong], and [Estefannie]. The Smithsonian says they’ll have a recording of the stream available soon, so watch this space if you’re interested in a replay.

From the “Don’t try this at home” department, organic chemist [Derek Lowe] has compiled a “Things I won’t work with” list. It’s real horror show stuff that regales the uninitiated with all sorts of chemical nightmares. Read up on chlorine trifluoride, an oxidizer of such strength that it’s hypergolic with anything that even approaches being fuel. Wet sand? Yep, bursts into flames on contact. Good reading.

Continuing the safety theme, machinist [Joe Pieczynski] offers this lathe tip designed to keep you in possession of a full set of fingers. He points out that the common practice of using a strip of emery cloth to polish a piece of round stock on either a wood or metal lathe can lead to disaster if the ends of the strip are brought into close proximity, whereupon it can catch and act like a strap wrench. Your fingers don’t stand a chance against such forces, so watch out. [Joe] doesn’t share any gory pictures of what can happen, but they’re out there. Only the brave need to Google “degloving injury.” NSFL – you’ve been warned.

On a happier note, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to print water-clear parts on a standard 3D printer? Sure it would, but the “clear” filaments and resins all seem to result in parts that are, at best, clearish. Industrial designer [Eric Strebel] has developed a method of post-processing clear SLA prints. It’s a little wet sanding followed by a top coat of a super stinky two-part urethane clearcoat. Fussy work, but the results are impressive, and it’s a good technique to file away for someday.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Beau Ambur can often be found hosting hardware events and offering help all around the Bay Area. Now he’s turned it into a career and travels the west coast helping hackers and creators effectively leverage Kickstarter’s platform. Beau’s mentor session covers everything from, “is this project a good fit for venture capital?” to, “is open source a good fit for my project?”.

For this year’s Hackaday Prize we’ve found experts in a wide range of fields so you can take your entries to the next level regardless of the stage the project is in. The sessions are on a first come basis so sign up now for a chance to get some valuable feedback on your entry.

Your Robot Language Coach

The first project is a Personal English Trainer by the lonely programmer. As a student he noticed a need for a more interactive and portable language learning aid. Solutions do exist on the market but they are along the lines of a pocket dictionary, instructional phone app, or a full on translator. These break the flow of thought and conversation. The lonely programmer envisioned something that you can conversationally ask for help as you’re using a new language.

As many have discovered, the best way to see if there’s a need for something is to build a minimum viable product (MVP). The snips.ai platform offered the perfect foundation to quickly test out the idea. It’s working on a few words and he wants to get it ready for more people to play with the idea. The majority of the lonely programmer’s questions centered around making the project interesting for other hackers so that it could one day turn into a product.

Bolt-On Bike Assist

Rob and Shushanik are developing a project called BikeOn. It bolts to any bicycle and converts it to an electric assist bike without tools or replacing any components. BikeOn has already won some accolades such as Editors Choice at the last 2019 Makerfaire Bay Area. Rob had a few questions on how to transition a project from the proof of concept stage to the product stage. The discussion went over using open source as a tool for product promotion as well as getting funding for taking a hardware product to market.

He also wanted to know if there was anything the team could do to have a better shot at winning the prize. There were a few good tips such as directly focusing on the five categories the judges would be looking at: Concept, Design, Production, Benchmark, and Communication. It is also important to cover the development journey. Why did you make the choices you made when designing the project?

No-Spill Trash Can Concept

Rounding out this mentor session, Jeannie and her team of highschool students demonstrate SEAL. In the area around the Granada Hills Charter High School there are winds mighty enough to blow over full trashcans. This trash travels to the ocean and disrupts local ecosystems. The team is working on a device which can detect a tipping trashcan and keep the lid from opening.

Prototyping started with Arduinos, but they’ve already escalated to designing their own PCBs. Their hope is to produce a run of fifty devices and try them out with a local commercial partner. Beau recommended they look into the Micropython ecosystem. Not only would the students get the advantage of using the STM32 chips in their board layouts (reducing the number of support components they would need), micropython would make it easier for students to jump in and help rather than having to learn the nuances of C first.

The Hackaday Prize mentoring sessions continue through the summer so don’t forget to sign up and check out the list of mentors who are here to share their knowledge and experience.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

You know the funny looking side of the anvil? That’s where the best curves come from. It’s called the anvil horn and is the blacksmith’s friend when bending steel and shaping it into curves.

The principle of bending a piece of steel stock is very easy to understand. Heat it up to temperature, and hammer it over a curved profile to the intended shape. A gentler touch is required than when you are shaping metal. That’s because the intent is to bend the metal rather than deform. Let’s take a look!

Basics of Curves

Light the fire on your hearth as before, and take a piece of steel stock. I suggest a smaller size if you can get it for easier working, 8mm (3/8″) if it is available and over 500mm (20″) long to give you plenty of space for experimentation. You’ll need to position it in the heat such that  150 to 200mm (6″ to 8″) is brought to the usual orange-yellow heat.

On the anvil, place the heated part of your steel across the horn at right angles to it and hammer it over the curvature about halfway along the horn’s length. Depth of curve is controlled by moving along the horn. Working closer to the face of the anvil gives a shallower curve, towards the point gives a sharper one.

When shaping metal you hammer right on the face of the anvil like we did last time. But with curves you aren’t hammering against the anvil because this will change the shape of your work piece. Instead hammer a little distance out from the horn where your steel is in free space. Pretty quickly you’ll start to form a curve, and unless you’re very lucky you’ll probably see it also start to form a spiral. This is straightforward to rectify, simply hammer the developing spiral flat again on the face of the anvil.

Once you’ve got the hang of curves, this is where you can start to experiment and have some fun. Have a go at S shapes, compound curves, and even scrolls if you like. It’s easy enough to undo your experiments and try something else, simply hammer them out flat again on the face of the anvil and start again. Take your time, get creative, and get a feel for how the steel works on the anvil.

Better Put a Ring On It At first your right angle will look more like a tight curve, you’ll need to put in some extra hammering to tighten it up.

Having mastered bending metal, have a go at making a ring on the end of a piece of straight steel stock. You’ll be familiar with the relationship between diameter and circumference of a circle being Pi. Estimate a length that is about 3.141 times your desired radius of the ring. This 3:1 ratio is much easier to estimate than trying to envision the length of a finished curve.

The first part of making your ring is to put a right-angle bend in the steel to make an “L” shape for the base of the ring.

Making a right angle is easy enough, simply heat up the area about 25mm (1″) either side of the position you want to see the bend, lay the piece of stock across the face of the anvil, and hammer it down over the side of the anvil. You’ll have to do some hammering flat around the bend to make it a sharp 90-degrees, as it will at first try to be a sharp curve rather than a point. It may also “pinch” outwards at the corners or even bend outwards slightly away from the right angle, simply hammer that flat on the face of the anvil.

A Trip Around the Horn Forming the loop on the horn of the anvil.

Heat up the foot of the “L”, and take care not to heat up the steel beyond the right angle. You may wish to carefully quench any other parts that have been heated up, leaving only the foot of the “L” at temperature. Then lay the hot part across the horn of the anvil with the cold side of the right angle at 90 degrees to the horn, and hammer a curve round the horn. Continue it round until it touches the right angle. You may have created an oval or a spiral, but that doesn’t matter. You can flatten any spiral tendencies out of the plane of the ring on the face of the anvil, and the next step will render it into a perfect circle.

Your imperfect ring should now be heated up again, once more as much as possible keeping the heat from going up the shaft. Then place it over the end of the horn and hammer it to a circle around it. You may need a few cycles of hammering any spiral tendencies flat, or gently hammering a gap closed if one opens up, but you should eventually be able to make a pretty good circular ring on the end of your piece of bar.

A pair of slightly rough-and-ready rings made in this way.

This should provide plenty of scope for experimentation with curves and rings, but it’s by no means the entire scope. You might for instance want to decrease the size of the stock in a taper over 100mm (4″) or so (See the previous  piece on putting new profiles on a piece of stock or making a point for ideas how you might do that), and then create a decreasing radius curve with that. It’s not too difficult to create the traditional shepherd’s crook design in this way, for example, or to move towards the kind of decorative scrollwork you might see in blacksmith-made gates and railings.

There’s a wealth of interesting things to learn in the blacksmith’s shop and I plan to help demystify the craft and encourage readers to give it a go. Perhaps in a few decades some of you will be passing it on to a fresh cadre of interested hardware hackers. I’ll be back soon with another installment, I’m thinking of tackling the thorny subject of hardness, changing the properties of a piece of steel through heat. See you next time!

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

At the time of publication, Hackaday is of the understanding that there is no pro-wasp lobby active in the United States or abroad. Why? Well, the wasp is an insect that is considered incapable of any viable economic contribution to society, and thus has few to no adherents who would campaign in its favor. In fact, many actively seek to defeat the wasp, and [TegwynTwmffat] is one of them.

[Tegwyn]’s project is one that seeks to destroy wasps and Asian Hornets in habitats where they are an invasive pest. To achieve this goal without harming other species, the aim is to train a neural network to detect the creatures, before then using a laser to vaporize them.

Initial plans involved a gimballed sentry-gun style setup. However, safety concerns about firing lasers in the open, combined with the difficulty of imaging flying insects, conspired to put this idea to rest. The current system involves instead guiding insects down a small tube at the entrance to a hive. Here, they can be easily imaged at close range and great detail, as well as vaporized by a laser safely contained within the tube, if they are detected as wasps or hornets.

It’s an exciting project that could serve as a good model of how to deal with invasive insect species in the wild. We’ve seen insects grace our pages before, too.  Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

1

 

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Bandwidth is one of those technical terms that has been overloaded in popular speech: as an example, an editor might ask if you have the bandwidth to write a Hackaday piece about bandwidth. Besides this colloquial usage, there are several very specific meanings in an engineering context. We might speak about the bandwidth of a signal like the human voice, or of a system like a filter or an oscilloscope — or, we might consider the bandwidth of our internet connection. But, while the latter example might seem fundamentally different from the others, there’s actually a very deep and interesting connection that we’ll uncover before we’re done.

Let’s have a look at what we mean by the term bandwidth in various contexts.

Digital Bandwidth

Perhaps the most common usage of the term bandwidth is for the data bandwidth of digital channels, in other words, the rate of information transfer. In this case, it’s measured in bits per second. Your ISP might provision you 50/10 Mbps internet service for example, meaning you have 50 million bits per second of download capacity and 10 million bits per second of upload. In this case you would say that the download bandwidth is 50 Mbps. Measuring the digital bandwidth of a network channel is as easy as sending a fixed number of bits and timing how long it takes; this is what those broadband speed test sites do.

We’ll come back to digital bandwidth in a little while, to see how it’s connected to the next concept, that of signal bandwidth.

Signal Bandwidth

The term bandwidth is also used to describe the frequency range occupied by a signal. In this case, the bandwidth of the signal is defined as the maximum frequency contained in the signal minus the minimum frequency. If a signal has frequency components between 100 Hz and 300 Hz, we would say that the signal has a bandwidth of 200 Hz. As a concrete example, consider the medium-wave (aka AM) broadcast band in the US: each signal occupies a bandwidth of 20.4 kHz. So, a transmitter operating on the 1000 kHz channel should only output frequencies between 989.8 kHz and 1010.2 kHz. It’s interesting to note that an AM-modulated RF signal takes up twice the bandwidth of the transmitted audio, since both frequency sidebands are present; that 20.4 kHz RF bandwidth is being used to send audio with a maximum bandwidth of 10.2 kHz.

While the definition of bandwidth seems very straightforward, sometimes the application to common signals can be confusing. Consider an ideal square wave at 1 kHz. This signal repeats at a frequency of 1 kHz, so we might assume that it has a bandwidth of 1 kHz. In fact, an ideal square wave contains components at all odd multiples of the fundamental frequency, in this case at 3 kHz, 5 kHz, 7 kHz, etc. The practical upper limit, which determines the bandwidth of the signal, depends on how “ideal” the square wave is — in other words, the sharpness of the edges. While the amplitude of these components falls with increasing order, they’re important for properly constructing the original waveform. In fact, a common way to generate a sine wave is to filter out the higher-order components of a square wave signal.

Given a signal, how do we determine its bandwidth? The plain old telephone service (POTS) of my youth, for instance, passed frequencies between 300 Hz and 3000 Hz, which was found to be sufficient for voice communications; we might say signals passing through this system were limited to a bandwidth of 2700 Hz. While this would be true if the POTS system had sharp frequency edges, in reality, the signals passing through will have some small components below 300 Hz and above 3000 Hz. Because of this, it’s more common to define a non-zero threshold for the edges of the band. For instance, in measuring the highest and lowest frequencies in a signal, we might use the frequencies where the signal power is half of it’s peak value, or – 3 dB, corresponding to 70.71% in amplitude terms. While 3 dB is by far the most common value, you’ll find others used as well.

System Bandwidth

A third use of the term bandwidth is to describe the range of frequencies passed by a system, such as a filter, amplifier, or the telephone system described above. While a particular signal passing through the system may have a quite narrow bandwidth — a nearly-pure sine wave at around 2600 Hz with a bandwidth of just a few Hz, for instance — the system itself still has a bandwidth of 2700 Hz. As with signal bandwidth, system bandwidth can be measured at 3 dB points (where the signals passed by the system have dropped to half power), or using other thresholds — 6 dB and 20 dB might be used for certain filters.

As an example, I measured the response of a 1090 MHz filter for receiving ADS-B transmissions. The 3 dB response of this filter extends from 927.3 MHz to 1,181.8 MHz, for a 3 dB bandwidth of 254.5 MHz. On the other hand, if measured at the -20 dB points, the filter has a 312 MHz bandwidth.

For another practical example, consider an oscilloscope — the “X MHz” in the scope specifications refers to the bandwidth, and this is almost always measured at the -3 dB point. The front-end amplifier of a 100 MHz oscilloscope will pass frequencies between 0 Hz (DC) and 100 MHz with 3 dB loss or less. This means that a 100 MHz sine wave may only show 71% of its actual amplitude, but also that frequencies somewhat above 100 MHz can be viewed — they’ll just be reduced in amplitude even more. The other consequence is that a 100 MHz square wave will look like a sine wave on a 100 MHz scope; to get an accurate picture of the square wave, the scope must have a bandwidth greater than about five times the square wave fundamental frequency. The 100 MHz oscilloscope is best used for observing square waves of 20 MHz or less.

Oscilloscope bandwidth is commonly assessed by measuring the rise time of a very fast edge. Assuming the signal edge is much faster than the rise time of the oscilloscope, the bandwidth of the scope is BW = 0.35/t_rise, with bandwidth in Hz and rise time in seconds. A scope with a rise time of 1 ns, for example, has a bandwidth of 350 MHz. The 0.35 factor assumes that the frequency-limiting elements in the scope’s front end produce a Gaussian filter shape, although the result is almost identical for a first-order RC filter; scopes with a sharper “brickwall” response may have factors of 0.45 or more. For more information about oscilloscope bandwidth, check out this article by Jenny List.

Information Capacity

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned a connection between digital bandwidth and signal bandwidth: it turns out that the relationship between them is a cornerstone of information theory. Consider the question of what you can do with a channel of 1 Hz bandwidth. What’s to limit the amount of information that can be sent over this link? Claude Shannon was the first to solve this problem for an abstract communication system where symbols are sent over the channel. He came up with the Noisy-channel coding theorem, which showed that the maximum possible information rate depends on probability that a symbol gets corrupted in transmission. Channels which create more errors during transmission limit the rate that data can be transmitted, no matter how clever we get with error-correcting codes.

Later, the Shannon-Hartley theorem extended this result to less abstract signal channels where the error is due to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The net result is the same: it’s noise in the channel that ultimately limits the rate of information that can be transmitted. In the case a channel corrupted with AWGN, we have the following result.

The channel capacity, C, in bits/second, depends on the bandwidth, B, in Hz, and the ratio of the signal power, S, to the noise power, N, in the channel. This is the theoretical limit of the channel, and we may have to work very hard coming up with clever error-correcting codes to approach this limit in practice, but we can never exceed it.

Armed with this equation, we can return to the original question: how much information can we send over a 1 Hz channel per second? If the channel is noise-free, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is infinite, and we can send data at an unlimited rate — of course, this never happens. In the case of equal signal and AWGN noise powers, or a 0 dB SNR, however, the result shows that we can only send a maximum 1 bit per second. That’s a big drop from infinity! On the other hand, if we have a channel of 60 dB SNR, we can theoretically send a maximum of 19.9 bps in our 1 Hz bandwidth. Of course, if the noise level remains the same, we need to increase the signal power by 60 dB — a million times — to achieve this. And, the reality is that we can only approach these rate limits, and the codes which do so comprise a large body of research.

Bandwidth = Bandwidth = Bandwidth

Even though the term is used in different ways in different contexts, the concepts of bandwidth are very simple. In a nutshell, signal bandwidth is the amount of frequency occupied by a signal, system bandwidth is the range of frequencies passed by the system, and digital bandwidth is the rate at which information flows over a channel. But, connecting these simple concepts are some very interesting fundamental principles of information theory. We’ve only been able to scratch the surface of this fascinating area in this article; sound off in the comments below if you’d like to see more articles about information theory.

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The Arduboy is a tiny, credit-card sized sized video game console that you can build yourself. The Dreamcast VMU was also a tiny, pocketable video game system, but really that’s just where we stored our saves for Crazy Taxi. What do you get when you combine the two? [sjm] did just that, giving us an Arduboy tucked into a Dreamcast VMU.

The guts of the Arduboy is simply an ATMega32u4, the same chip found in many Arduinos, an I2C OLED, and a few other various electronics for USB, power, and battery protection. In short, it’s an easy circuit, and something just about anyone with the skills can build themselves. Since just anyone can get a PCB fabbed, and the Dreamcast already has nice silicone buttons built into the enclosure, it was a simple matter for [sjm] to create a Dreamcast VMU-shaped PCB with all the guts of an Arduboy. The only real difference is the size of the OLED — this one uses a 0.96″ 128×64 OLED, where the original used one with the same resolution but with a significantly larger size.

Yes, we’ve seen this same project before, but now thanks to the magic of the Hackaday Prize, it’s now in the running for the greatest hardware competition on the planet. You can check out the entire build video and a short demo after the break. Of course, this isn’t the first repurposing of the Arduboy circuit, we’ve seen a flex circuit version, and a version with a crank like the Playdate developed by Teenage Engineering and Panic.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Join us on Wednesday 17 July 2019 at noon Pacific for the Low-Level Analog Measurement Hack Chat with Chris Gammell!

A lot of electronics enthusiasts gravitate to the digital side of the hobby, at least at first. It’s understandable – an Arduino, a few jumpers, and a bit of code can accomplish a lot. But in the final analysis, digital circuits are just analog circuits with the mystery abstracted away, and understanding the analog side opens up a fascinating window on the world of electronics.

Chris Gammell is well-known around hacker circles thanks to his Amp Hour Podcast with Dave Jones, his KiCad tutorials, and his general hacker chops. He’s also got a thing for the analog world, and wants to share some of the tips and tricks he’s developed over his two decades as an electrical engineer. In the next Hack Chat, we’ll be joining Chris down in the weeds to learn the ins and outs of low-level analog measurements. Join us with your questions and insights, or just come along to peel back some of the mysteries of the analog world.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday July 17 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Is the second cheapest tool you can find any better than the cheapest one?

Readers with long memories will recall there was a time when I amused myself by tacking inexpensive tools or electronic devices to my various orders from the Chinese electronic Aladdin’s Cave. Often these inexpensive purchases proved to be as disastrous or ineffective as you might expect, but sometimes they show unexpected promise, true diamonds in the rough. It’s been a while and life has intervened over the last year, but it’s time to resume this harmless diversion.

Memories Of An Explosive Conclusion

A particularly memorable review came in April 2018, when I bought a five pound ($6.30) desoldering iron. I described it then as an “unholy lovechild of a cheap solder sucker and an even cheaper soldering iron“, and while that was an accurate portrayal it also showed promise as a useful tool that would fill a niche in my requirements. Desoldering is always slightly annoying, and a heated desolder pump genuinely does make a difference. Unfortunately for me, the cheap desoldering tool was not a product I’d recommend that anyone try for themselves. A combination of questionable electrical safety and a propensity to explosively deconstruct itself meant it has languished unused in my big box of cheap junk, and I’m still without a decent desoldering solution. It is time to buy something better, and in the rich tradition of reviewing inexpensive stuff I decided to pick up the next cheapest desoldering iron I could find. Eight pounds ($10) secured me a Shi Yi Tool Sy365-8, and I set to on this review.

The unit arrived in a blister pack along with a wire tool for clearing its nozzle and a metal pointy thing whose intended use is unclear. All the information on the pack is in Chinese, but with Google Translate it was revealed to be nothing more than the usual descriptive text. The iron itself is similar to the previously reviewed model, something like a chunky take on a cheap soldering iron with the plunger and button of a spring-loaded desoldering tool protruding from the handle. It also has the same arrangement of the power cord emerging from the side of the handle below the element, and the same American-style NEMA mains plug.

Commenters assured me last time that in China this is sometimes used as a 230V connector, however for UK mains I put a BS1363A plug on it.

Extra Insulation Gives Confidence The iron’s tip required tinning to be most effective.

Examining it more closely it was clear where at least some of my extra three quid had gone. The element and tip look very similar to those on the cheaper iron, but where the previous one’s mains cable had entered without sleeving right against the hot metal base of the element, this one has an extra insulating collar between handle and metalwork. It doesn’t have a double-insulated symbol anywhere on it, but unlike the other model it gives me confidence in its 3A twin wire no earth mains cable.

In use, the iron performed exactly as expected. A heated solder sucker is an effective tool, able to more efficiently remove solder than a separate iron and sucker. It smoked a bit on first use due to oil from manufacturing and it could use a bit more power than the quoted 36W because large joints needed a bit of time to get the heat into them, but otherwise it’s exactly the desoldering tool I expected for my 8 quid.

Will It Blow? Or Will It Suck? This plunger seems to be securely retained.

So to the most important paragraph of the whole review, the one with the answer to the question you’re all asking. Did this tool explosively deconstruct itself as its cheaper competitor had? That solder sucker had been fixed together by friction alone, its piston was a push-on fit, and a bit of usage had dislodged it. I’m pleased to say that this one appears to have a different design with a secure cap over the top of the piston, and try as I might I couldn’t launch its plunger off across the room.

In conclusion then, the Shi Yi Tool Sy365-8 desoldering iron is an effective tool for its size and power rating that appears to have been designed with some thought to electrical safety and which seems well-enough assembled that it remains in one piece during repeated use. It won’t replace your high-end desoldering station, but it’s a handy bench tool for the occasional desolderer.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The M5Stack is a plastic box loaded up with an ESP32, a display, some pin headers, and a few buttons. Why does this exist? It’s a platform of sorts, and we’ve seen people adding LoRa to the M5Stack as well as thermal cameras. Hot from random online retailers is the M5Stick, a smaller version of the ~Stack that still has a screen, still has pin headers, and still has an ESP32. It’s a new development platform that’s using a USB C plug (hot trends 2019), and it still has all the features of an ESP32.

Ever wonder how they put designs on skateboard decks, or graphic designs on luggage? That would be a UV printer — it’s basically an inkjet that uses UV-curing ink, but the print head has a Z axis, and the bed is usually huge. [Scotty] of Strange Parts recently took a look at a factory that makes UV printers. Yeah, there’s a lot of wiring that goes into these machines, and yeah, you can do a lot with them. Remember: the cheapest UV printers are about $3k, and yeah, you can print designs on PCBs with them.

Virgin Orbit is the Branson-branded take on the Stratolaunch; this is a rocket that uses a single 747 to loft a small rocket into the stratosphere and send it off into a sun-synchronous orbit. This week, Virgin Orbit has completed drop tests to characterize how the rocket falls away from the 747. This is also called ‘a bombing run’, and we could have used a few GoPros on the rocket itself.

Last weekend was ‘LeHack’, a French hacker/infosec conference. There was a coffee vending machine there, complete with touch screen and an offer to pay via your smartphone with an app. You know what happened. It turns out, you can take over all the accounts using the app. You can also brute force the user’s pins. Lesson learned? Why the hell does a coffee machine need an app?

The New Pallet Wood! First off, don’t make anything out of pallet wood unless you know what you’re doing; there’s some nasty chemicals in pallet wood. That said, you can make a fortune with pallet wood furniture on Etsy, and that’s doubly true if you make a pallet wood resin river table. This is the new pallet wood. Hollow core doors are easy to disassemble with a table saw, and provide two large sheets of plywood, and enough sticks to make a frame for something. What can you do with all this wood? Build a guitar, of course.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Robotic arms have found all manner of applications in industry. Whether its welding cars, painting cars, or installing dashboards in cars, robotic arms can definitely do the job. However, you don’t need to be a major automaker to experiment with the technology. You can build your own, complete with proper motion planning, thanks to Arduino and ROS.

Motion planning is important, as it makes working with the robotic arm much easier. Rather than having to manually specify the rotation of each and every joint for every desired movement, instead mathematics is used to figure everything out. End effectors can be moved, and software will figure out the necessary motions required to achieve the end results. This functionality is baked into Robot Operating System (ROS) and proves useful to this project.

The construction of this particular arm is impressive in its simplicity, too. It has 7 degrees of freedom, which is plenty to play with. The arm is built out of LEGO Technic components, which are attached to the servos with the addition of some 3D printed components. It’s a smart and simple way to integrate the servos into the LEGO world, and we’re surprised we don’t see this more often.

Robotic arms remain an area of active research; there are even efforts to allow them to self-correct in the event of damage. Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

With the proliferation of cheap screens for use with microcontrollers, we’ve seen a matching proliferation in small handheld gaming projects. Pick your favourite chip, grab a screen off the usual suspects, add some buttons and you’re ready to go. [bobricius] has put a unique spin on this, with an unconventional cartridge-based build.

The main body of the handheld is constructed from attractive black and gold PCBs, and features a screen, some controls and an on/off switch. There’s also a microSD socket is on the board, which interfaces with cartridges which carry the microcontroller. Change the cart, and you can change the game.

[bobricius] has developed carts for a variety of common microcontroller platforms, from the Attiny85 to the venerable ATmega328. As the microSD slot is doing little more then sharing pins for the screen and controls, it’s possible to hook up almost any platform to the handheld. There’s even a design for a Raspberry Pi cart, just for fun.

It’s an entertaining take on the microcontroller handheld concept, and we can’t wait to see where it goes next. It reminds us of the Arduboy, which can even do 3D graphics if you really push it. Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

If you use just about any modern command line, you probably understand the idea of pipes. Pipes are the ability to connect the output from one program to the input of another. For example, you can more easily review contents of a large directory on a Linux machine by connecting two simple commands using a pipe:

ls | less

This command runs ls and sends its output to the input of the less program. In Linux, both commands run at once and output from ls immediately appears as the input of less. From the user’s point of view it’s a single operation. In contrast, under regular old MSDOS, two steps would be necessary to run these commands:

ls > SOME_TEMP_FILE
less < SOME_TEMP_FILE

The big difference is that ls will run to completion, saving its output a file. Then the less command runs and reads the file. The result is the same, but the timing isn’t.

You may be wondering why I’m explaining such a simple concept. There’s another type of pipe that isn’t as often used: a named pipe. The normal pipes are attached to a pair of commands. However, a named pipe has a life of its own. Any number of processes can write to it and read from it. Learn the ways of named pipes will certainly up your Linux-Fu, so let’s jump in!

Quick Example: Building a Logging Script

Suppose you want to create a simple logging facility. Of course, making a daemon that runs all the time is an entirely different subject, but I’m just going to create a simple and non-robust script. A named pipe can accept the input lines from other programs and the daemon can timestamp each line and write it to a file. Here’s the daemon:

#!/bin/bash
mkfifo /tmp/nplogpipe
while true
do
  read LINE </tmp/nplogpipe
  echo $(date): "$LINE" >>/tmp/nplog.txt
done

The mkfifo command creates the named pipe (a first in, first out or FIFO). Older scripts might use mknod for this purpose and that will work, too. If the pipe already exists, the command will fail, but it won’t matter. After that, a read waits for input from the pipe. When it arrives, the script writes out a date and the line to a log file and goes back for more. To test out your quick and dirty logging system, run the script in the background or in one terminal window. Then in the foreground or in another terminal try this:

echo The first log entry >/tmp/nplogpipe
echo Read Hackaday every day >/tmp/nplogpipe

You can add a few more lines and then examine the /tmp/nlog.txt file. It should look something like this:

Sat Jun 29 07:37:44 CDT 2019: The first log entry
Sat Jun 29 07:39:57 CDT 2019: Read Hackaday every day

The Tricks are in the Details

One small point: in this case, the read command executes repeatedly in the loop, but in general when a sender process exits, it will cause the receiving program to also exit. That isn’t always the behavior you want. The usual way to deal with this is to open the pipe in a way that will hold the pipe open until it is closed.

To observe this effect, try this (with the daemon running):

ls / >/tmp/nplogpipe

The log will only get the first line of the ls. That’s because by the time it finishes processing the first line, the ls command exited and that clears the pipe. Now try this:

exec 3>/tmp/nplogpipe
ls / >&3
free >/tmp/nplogpipe
exec 3>&-  # close pipe

The first exec line holds the pipe open until the last line closes it. Once open you can refer to the pipe as &3 or by its full name. Now all the output will appear in the log file.

Another nuance is that the pipe sort of looks like a file. That means that programs that expect files can usually use pipes. It also means you can control access to a pipe using the same security mechanisms that work with files (e.g., chmod to set permissions for a specific user or group).

Why Use Named Pipes?

You might wonder what advantage these have compared to a regular pipe or a file. Unlike a regular file, the pipe doesn’t fill up. That also means it has more chance of staying in memory although, of course, it could get swapped out just like any other memory. In addition, it is easy to have multiple writers to a named pipe.

Of course, there are other issues to worry about. For example, if multiple programs are writing more than one line of data to the pipe at a time, you’d have to work out your own scheme to sort them all out. Still, for a quick way to push and collect data between possibly unrelated processes, named pipes are an easy way to go.

By the way, this is the twentieth installment of Linux Fu! The links below will take to the earlier postings and stay tuned for even more to come.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are back after last week’s holiday break to track down all of the hacks you missed. There are some doozies; a selfie-drone controlled by your body position, a Theremin that sings better than you can, how about a BGA hand-soldering project whose creator can’t even believe he pulled it off. Kristina wrote a spectacular article on the life and career of Mary Sherman Morgan, and Tom tears down a payment terminal he picked up in an abandoned Toys R Us, plus much more!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (48 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 026 Show Notes: New This Week:

• LineageOS Android Distribution
  • nexmon a Bluetooth and WiFi toolbox for Nexus 5
• “One of these days, I’ve gotta get myself organizized”
  • Video of function-specific desk arrangement
• Ask Hackaday: What Are Your Apollo Memories?
  • Project Egress

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• E-Book Reader Gets Page Turn Buttons, Is None The Wiser
  • DIY Multi-Touch All The Surfaces
• Build Your Own Selfie Drone With Computer Vision
• BGA Hand Soldering Uses Tombstone Resistor Technique, Demands Surgical Precision
  • 2-minute BGA soldering demo video: Greg Davill on Twitter
• Lighting Tech Dives Into The Guts Of Laser Galvanometers
  • DIY galvo drivers run this Laser Clock
• Hacked Calipers Make Automated Measurements A Breeze
• The Theremin Gets A Voice

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Trap Chess Keeps Players On Their Toes
  • Liquid Damaged MacBook Saved With A Keen Eye
  • 3D Printed Buttons, Printed As A Single Unit
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Old CDs Create A Haunting Rainbow Vortex
  • Wire Bender Aims To Take Circuit Sculptures To The Next Level
  • The Battery Is Part Of The Art
  • Building A DIY Desktop-Sized Arcade Machine

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Mary Sherman Morgan, Rocket Fuel Mixologist
• Teardown: VeriFone MX 925CTLS Payment Terminal

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

At a community meeting this week, Dale Dougherty, former CEO of Maker Media announced the relaunch of the Make brand. Maker Media is dead, but the brand may live on as Make Community, LLC. Dougherty will remain the CEO of Make Community, and Todd Sotkicwicz, former CFO of Maker Media, was identified as the current CFO of Make Community. This is the same organization that brought you Make Magazine and the Maker Faires gearing up to give you even more Make Magazines and more Maker Faires.

Early this year, we heard rumors about the future of Maker Media and its flagship Maker Faires. Then in May, just before the Bay Area Maker Faire, Dougherty told the San Francisco Chronicle that it was ‘quite possible this could be the last Bay Area Maker Faire’. The Bay Area Faire came and went, and early last month we received news that employees were let go and Maker Media had ceased operations.

Now, according to Dougherty’s summary at the meeting, what remained has now been reformed into a new LLC, Make Community, and he was holding this meeting to gauge how much the community would be willing to contribute. The official launch of Make Community will supposedly be next week, but you can check out the future home of the Make Community at make.co.

For this relaunch, Dougherty identified several things this new company could do that he said are low-risk and will help Make Community earn revenue. He said it would relaunch the magazine, to be published six times per year. From the website as it stands, it looks like this will consist of a “digital issue” and an opportunity to subscribe to a print edition. Dale said that the company can also still rely on the income from about 80 book titles that were published by Maker Media, and that the licensing of mini Maker Faires will carry on through Make Community.

From the website, it looks like the new revenue model for Make is also going to include annual memberships, with each tier granting additional perks. The paid levels offer digital access to Make’s magazine and video archives, plus a discount on the print version of the magazine. The most expensive membership offers discounts on the flagship Faire tickets, a percentage off of products from the Maker Shed, which appears to be closed at the time of writing, and a “FREE Make: Workshop”.

The Maker Community has consistently shown an outpouring of support for Maker Media. When asked if there will be another Maker Faire, Dougherty responded: “It has always been a cash-flow problem instead of a profitability problem” but they require a significant capital outlay to produce. When asked by a member of the community if Make Community can fundraise or crowdfund their way out of this problem, Dougherty replied with an emphatic, “yes”. Whether his enthusiasm is realistic remains to be seen. Dougherty estimates that it costs roughly $2,000,000 to produce either the Bay Area Maker Faire or the World Maker Faire in New York City.

Why did Make Fail?

Dougherty spent some time explaining what went wrong with Make’s old business model. Most damaging was the reliance on venture capital; Maker Media had raised $10 million in venture capital over the years. “This was not a good fit for venture capital,” Dougherty explained, “and the funding model did not make investors happy.” But he also blamed the failure of the Faires on falling corporate sponsorship:

Maker Faire was a victim of its success. The Faires were riskier to do and for us we were still a small company. What we’ve seen over the last year and a half is a decline in corporate sponsorship. And the way it kind of works is that corporate sponsorship kind of gave us the budget for the event, and ticket sales kind of pay expenses after it, and if there was a profit, we made some, but they’re both pretty volatile…. But there was not a significant drop off in attendance [of flagship Faires].

According to figures published by Maker Media, 2015 saw 145,000 makers attend the Bay Area Maker Faire, a slight increase over 2014 numbers. In 2016, Make reported attendance of 150,000, and in 2017 it was listed at 125,000. The number for 2018 was a mere 100,000. That’s still a lot of people, but in less than two years, attendance at the Bay Area Maker Faire dropped more than 30%.

The meeting still left us with open questions, however. If the Faires are profitable and the publications are easy methods to earn revenue, why did Maker Media become insolvent? We’ve reached out to Dougherty and to others involved for clarification. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we know more.

The recording and (partial) transcript of this meeting are up on GitHub. Pull requests for improved transcriptions are encouraged.

[Main image: Dale Dougherty toasting to Maker Faire along with the staff at the close of the 2019 Bay Area Maker Faire]

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

This month will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that brought to a successful conclusion the challenge laid down by President Kennedy only eight years earlier. Three men went to the Moon, two walked on it, and they all came back safely, in a dramatic eight-day display of engineering and scientific prowess that was televised live to the world.

If you’ve made more than 50 trips around the sun, chances are good that you have some kind of memories of the first Moon landing. An anniversary like this is a good time to take stock of those memories, especially for something like Apollo, which very likely struck a chord in many of those that witnessed it and launched them on careers in science and engineering. We suspect that a fair number of Hackaday readers are in that group, and so we want to ask you: What are your memories of Apollo?

A Real American Hero

My memory of the Moon landing is admittedly vague. I had just turned five the month before, hadn’t even started kindergarten yet, but I had already caught the space bug in a big way. I lived and breathed the space program, and I knew everything about the Mercury missions that were over by the time I was born, and the Gemini missions that had just wrapped up. Apollo was incredibly exciting to me, and I was pumped to witness the landing in the way that only a five-year-old can be.

The landing was probably the most exciting part of the mission for Armstrong and Aldrin, what with the two computer alarms during descent and having to burn almost all their fuel shopping around for a place to land that wouldn’t topple the LM. But for me, it was a bit boring – the part we see today with a camera looking out the LM window at the boulder-strewn surface of the Moon was not transmitted live. What we got were animated images and a countdown with Walter Cronkite’s play-by-play and astronaut Wally Schirra’s color commentary. Looking at it now, with the animation synchronized to the telemetry, it was actually a pretty slick way to show what was happening.

The first steps on the Moon would wait for another six and a half hours, during which time dinner was eaten, baths were had, and jammies donned. There was exactly zero chance of my falling asleep, though, and like most parents at the time, mine rightly concluded that this was something that my brother and I should witness, regardless of the hour. So we assembled before the black-and-white TV to watch the proceedings. My one vivid memory of the whole thing was having all my G.I. Joe action figures laid out before me, especially the one in the silver Mercury-era space suit. As Neil Armstrong came down the ladder and deployed the camera in the next bay over to show the first steps, I bounced my little astronaut along in time, mimicking the historic steps that were happening 238,000 miles away.

Your Turn

In the end, what exactly I and my PJ-clad peers around the country remember about that night in July a half a century ago is irrelevant, except perhaps to us. What does matter is that for at least some of us, the magic of watching ghostly images of a man bouncing about on another world was enough to launch us on paths that would lead to lives spent pursuing science and engineering. We would go on to build the world we now live in, for better or for worse.

Now it’s your turn. Were you there to see history made? What memories do you have of the event? I suspect that more than a few of our readers are older than me and have clearer memories of the lead-up to Apollo 11 and the saturation coverage of the landing. We’d love to hear your perspectives, and perhaps learn a little about how it shaped your life. We’d also love to hear from anyone who had a hand in the success; after all, it took hundreds of thousands of people to put just two sets of boots on the Moon, and they all have stories to tell. Did you miss out on the excitement altogether? We’d like to hear about that too, and how knowing about the Moon landing only as a historical event has shaped your perception of it.

Sound off in the comments below about your Apollo memories.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Many hackers have experimented with the persistence of vision effect. Whip around a bunch of LEDs, flash them at just the right times, and it’s possible to make images to appear to hang in the air. There’s plenty of ways to do this, whether by manually shaking the LEDs by hand, spinning them around, or even putting them on your bike wheels. [Carl Bugeja] went a different route, taking advantage of the possibilities created by flex PCBs.

[Carl]’s project goes by the name FlexLED. This aptly describes the build, which, in prototype form, mounts a single LED on the end of a flex PCB. The PCB itself has a pattern of traces creating a coil, which enable it to interact with magnetic fields more strongly. By passing the right current through the coil, the flexible PCB can be made to flap up and down, moving the LED on the end at a rapid rate. By then controlling the flashing of the LED, it’s possible to create a persistence of vision effect.

Currently fitted with only one LED, capable of 3 colors, the visual display of the FlexLED is somewhat limited. However, [Carl] reports the effect is more impressive in person than on camera, and is already working on plans to scale up the project to a multi-LED diplay.

POV technology can do some pretty impressive things – even volumetric displays are possible. If you’re working on something yourself, be sure to let us know. Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

 

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Given the sheer volume of science going on as the International Space Station circles above our heads every 90 minutes or so, it would be hard for any one experiment to stand out. ISS expeditions conduct experiments on everything from space medicine to astrophysics and beyond, and the instruments needed to do the science have been slowly accreting over the years. There’s so much stuff up there that almost everywhere you turn there’s a box or pallet stuck down with hook-and-loop fasteners or bolted to some bulkhead, each one of them doing something interesting.

The science on the ISS isn’t contained completely within the hull, of course. The outside of the station fairly bristles with science, with packages nestled in among the solar panels and other infrastructure needed to run the spacecraft. Peering off into space and swiveling around to track targets is an instrument with the friendly name NICER, for “Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer.” What it does and how it does it is interesting stuff, and what it’s learning about the mysteries of neutron stars could end up having practical uses as humanity pushes out into the solar system and beyond.

Of Neutron Stars and Pulsars

Of all the oddities out there in the universe, neutron stars surely number among the very oddest. A neutron star is the burnt-out core of a giant star whose outer layers have been blasted away in a cataclysmic supernova. Laid bare and immensely compressed by its own gravitation, the core retains all the original star’s angular momentum and so spins incredibly fast, up to 43,000 RPM, translating to a surface speed of nearly one-quarter the speed of light.

Neutron star schematic. If the spin axis and magnetic axis don’t align, the beam of electromagnetic radiation sweeps out across space like a lighthouse. Source: NASA

While most neutron stars are difficult to observe, some are blindingly obvious. Some neutron stars, called pulsars, emit powerful, tightly focused beams of electromagnetic radiation along the magnetic poles of the star. If the magnetic poles of the neutron star don’t align with its axis of rotation, the beam of energy sweeps around like a lighthouse, in time with the rotation of the star. It would seem rare that we’d get directly hit by this beam and be able to observe a pulsar, but with an estimated 100 million neutron stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, the odds that we here on Earth will be in the direct path of the sweeping beams of energy from some of them are good. In fact, something like 2,000 neutron stars, most of them pulsars, have been discovered in our galaxy.

The emissions from pulsars range across the electromagnetic spectrum from visible light to gamma rays. Some of the most interesting pulsars emit intense X-ray beacons, thanks to the acceleration of gasses from a nearby regular star as matter is sucked in by the gravitation of its ultra-dense neighbor. The rain of matter reaches relativistic speeds on its way to the surface of the neutron star, releasing X-ray photons as it accelerates.

Star Light, Star Bright

X-ray pulsars are among the brightest objects in the sky, and NICER was designed specifically to study them in depth. The business end of NICER is the X-Ray Timing Instrument (XTI), an array of 56 sensitive X-ray detectors. The detectors, along with shielding to protect from interference from nearby sources of radiation, are installed on a rigid optical bench about a meter square. Each detector is a silicon drift detector, or SDD, which are essentially slabs of ultra-pure silicon with concentric rings of electrodes. Incident X-ray photons create a charge within the depleted silicon that “drifts” toward a central anode, where an FET converts the current to a voltage. SDDs can be extremely sensitive both in terms of energy and the number of counts per second that can be registered.

Across from each SDD is an X-ray concentrator. About the size of a coffee can, each concentrator has a series of concentric gold-plated rings that filter out visible light, RF interference, and thermal energy. Each concentrator is individually adjustable, and the entire array was painstakingly adjusted and locked in place with epoxy prior to launch to ensure that they all point in the same direction. Coupled with receivers for time signals coming from the GPS satellites in orbit above the ISS, the complete XTI is essentially an exquisitely sensitive time-resolved X-ray spectrometer, capable of measuring both the energy spectrum of X-ray photons and resolving their time of arrival within 500 nanoseconds.

Night Moves

Once NICER was installed on the space-facing side of the ISS in September of 2017, it began to map the sky in X-ray. As the sun sets on every ISS orbit, NICER springs to life and scans the sky, capturing known X-ray sources and potentially discovering new ones. In doing so, NICER has generated stunning images of the X-ray universe, with bright spots connected by broad arcs. The spots are sources that NICER has tracked for long exposures, while the arcs of the background X-ray picked up while the instrument slewed across the sky to a new target.

Pretty pictures are hardly the point of NICER’s mission. By carefully recording the spectrum and timing of X-ray signals from known pulsars, NICER will provide the raw data astrophysicists need to determine the true nature of neutron stars. Measuring small frequency variations in pulsar signals will even allow for asteroseismology, perhaps finally revealing what happens inside an object with the mass of two suns crushed into something the size of a small city. And coupled with other instruments, like the Modulated X-Ray Source mounted at the other end of the ISS, NICER is helping to develop high-bandwidth X-ray communications for future deep space exploration. Nice!

[Featured images: NASA]

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Chess is a game that originated so long ago, we don’t have concrete information as to its origins. Rules have changed throughout history, and many continue to study and experiment with the game. [Yann Guidon] has a neighbour, [Bob], who is just one such enthusiast, and together, they built a working Trap Chess game.

What is trap chess, you may ask? It’s a variant of chess where pieces randomly fall into traps at the change of turns. This is easily to simulate in a digital game, but that wasn’t enough for [Bob]. Enlisting [Yann] for his electrical skills, the duo built a board with ten trapdoors built in. Whenever the timer is hit, there’s a chance a trapdoor can open, removing a piece from the game.

The build relies on a PIC16F818, an 8-bit microcontroller from Microchip. This helps interface between the timer and servos and generally runs the whole show. The board is built into a table, and we’re impressed by the fit and finish of the final product. From a distance, it’s difficult to notice anything is awry, and it would make a great prank when playing with an unsuspecting mark. Just make sure there’s no money on the table first.

We’ve seen other impressive chess hacks before — like this board that can move the pieces for you. Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Join us on Wednesday 10 July 2019 at noon Pacific for the Manufacturing in China Hack Chat with Jesse Vincent!

It started out where many great stories start: as a procrastination project. Open source developer Jesse Vincent decided that messing around with a new keyboard design was a better thing to spend time on than whatever he was supposed to be doing, and thus Keyboardio was born.

Their heirloom-grade keyboards of solid maple and with sculpted keycaps are unique to the eye and to the touch, but that’s only part of the Keyboardio story. Jesse has moved further down the road of turning a project into a product and a product into a company than most of us have, and he’s got some insights about what it takes. Particularly in climbing the learning curve of off-shore manufacturing, which will be the focus of this Hack Chat. Join us to learn all about the perils, pitfalls, and potential rewards of getting your Next Big Idea manufactured in China.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday July 10 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Like modular synths? Sure you do, and you need another hole to throw money into! For the last few months, Supplyframe has been hosting synthesizer and electronic music meetups in San Francisco. This week, the HDDG/Piqued meetup will have a great talk with the creator of VCV Rack. VCV Rack is an Open Source, virtual, modular synthesizer — basically a bunch of Eurorack modules inside a computer and it costs a whole lot less. The talk is this Thursday evening in SF. You should come!

The W600 is a new module (you can get it from Seeed, although it’s produced by Winner Micro in various formats) that is basically an ESP32, except it uses an ARM Cortex-M3 instead of a Tensilica core. [ultratechie] recently got their hands on one of these modules and got started with MicroPython. This seems like a capable module and it’s only three dollars, but will that be enough to catch up to the ESP32?

Purple gorilla enters art gallery. At the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam there is a new exhibit featuring the, ‘destructive beauty of the computer virus’. The curators are detailing the historical progress of the computer virus from innocent DOS viruses to Melissa to Stuxnet and ransomware.

USB C has been around for a while, but 2019 is the year everything started to become USB C. Case in point: the Raspberry Pi 4. The only problem is that the Raspberry Pi Foundation messed up their implementation of USB C. Not a problem, because here’s how you design a USB C power sink. Basically, you give each CC line its own resistor. Don’t even think about it, just copy the USB C spec. You don’t know more about USB C than the people who designed it, and you’re not really saving a ton of money by deleting one resistor. Just copy the spec.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Today, it can feel like you’re always connected to the grid. We’re constantly alerted to notifications from smart phones, smart watches, and our houses have begun to swell with all manner of internet-enabled devices. [Jake P] wanted a less connected lifestyle, and built a shelf to help realise that goal.

The idea of [Jake]’s Analog Smart Shelf is to serve as a digital check point in his home. It’s a name that more reflects the ethos of the shelf rather than the components. The shelf contains a Qi wireless charging platform, so smartphones can be placed on the shelf when entering the house and left to charge. The shelf also conceals an Amazon Fire tablet behind woodgrain veneer, which displays the time, weather, and basic notification data. This enables [Jake] to see relevant digital information at a glance, while being able to switch off from the online world by simply walking away.

It’s a well-executed project, which artfully blends wood, concrete, and epoxy to create an attractive final product. It also bears some similarities to smart mirror projects we’ve seen before. It’s a piece we’d be proud to see on our walls, and a great concept for managing one’s digital life, too.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Smart speakers have proliferated since their initial launch earlier this decade. The devices combine voice recognition and assistant functionality with a foreboding sense that paying corporations for the privilege of having your conversations eavesdropped upon could come back to bite one day. For this reason, [Yihui] is attempting to build an open-source smart speaker from scratch.

The initial prototype uses a Raspberry Pi 3B and a ReSpeaker microphone array. In order to try and bring costs down, development plans include replacing these components with a custom microphone array PCB and a NanoPi board, then implementing basic touch controls to help interface with the device.

There’s already been great progress, with the build showing off some nifty features. Particularly impressive is the ability to send WiFi settings to the device using sound, along with the implementation of both online and offline speech recognition capabilities. This is useful if your internet goes down but you still want your digital pal to turn out the lights at bed time.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a privacy-focused virtual assistant, and we hope it’s not the last. Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

It’s all well and good having a security camera recording all the time, but that alone can’t sound the alarm in the event of a crime. Motion sensing is of limited use, often being triggered by unimportant stimuli such as moving shadows or passing traffic. [TegwynTwmffat] wanted a better security system for the farm, and decided that neural networks would likely do the trick.

The main component of the security system is a Raspberry Pi fitted with a camera and a Movidius Neural Compute Stick. This allows the Raspberry Pi to run real-time object identification on video. The Raspberry Pi is programmed to raise the alarm if it detects humans approaching, but ignores the family dog and other false targets. In the event of a detection, the Raspberry Pi sends a signal over LoRa to a base station, which sounds an alarm. The pitch of the alarm increases the closer the target gets to the camera, thanks to some simple code with bounding boxes.

It’s a nifty way to create an intelligent security system, and all the more impressive for being entirely constructed from off-the-shelf parts and code. Neural networks have become increasingly useful; they can even tell when your cat wants to go outside. Video after the break.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

The 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing is rapidly approaching, and uber space-nerd Adam Savage is in the thick of the celebration of all the amazing feats of engineering that made humanity’s first steps out of the cradle possible. And in a grand and very hacker-friendly style, we might add, as his Project Egress aims to build a full-scale replica of the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia’s hatch.

A Hatch to be Reckoned With

A hatch might seem like an odd artifact to recreate, but considering its complexity, it’s the perfect target for such an effort. The hatch that Project Egress will be building is from Block II CMs, which was completely redesigned in response to the tragedy of Apollo 1. The fire that killed Guss Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee inside their Block I capsule was inescapable due to the design of the hatch, a two-piece plug that opened inward and was pushed firmly into its seals by the pressure difference between the capsule interior and atmospheric pressure. The three crew members never had a chance once the fire started, accelerated as it was by the pure oxygen atmosphere of the capsule.

Block II UCH. Source:

The Block II hatch, dubbed the “Unified Crew Hatch” or UCH, was designed with crew safety in mind. The design requirements stated that the hatch must be able to be opened by the crew within 3 seconds, and allow for complete crew egress in 30 seconds. They also wanted the hatch to open to a wider angle, and for it to be able to prop open for extended extravehicular activity. That last requirement added a lot of complexity, because making sure that the hatch latches securely again for re-entry is critical. Consequently, a backup latching mechanism had to be included in the UCH design.

To satisfy those requirements, the Block II UCH became a 225 pound (102 kg) beast. It had fifteen latches that could be simultaneously retracted with a few strokes of a handle on a hydraulic pump, or by use of the backup system. The UCH also had vents for rapidly equalizing cabin pressure to the ambient pressure, a special mechanism to open the outer boost cover hatch until it was jettisoned along with the escape tower, beefy hinges to keep the hatch propped open securely, and a gas spring counterbalance system to assist opening and keep the hinges from overextending. The Block II UCH was flown on all the manned missions and performed flawlessly.

This Way to the Egress

All this makes the UCH a great artifact to recreate, but it means that Project Egress is far too big a job for one person. To spread the work around and make the build more interesting, Adam has enlisted over 40 well-known makers and hackers and assigned them all a specific part to recreate. The list reads like a who’s who of the maker movement: Jimmy Diresta, This Old Tony, John Saunders at NYC CNC, Fran Blanche from FranLab, and our own Quinn Dunki, also known as BlondiHacks. The list includes DIYers, prop makers, cosplayers, 3D-printing nerds – the entire spectrum of maker genres is represented.

Here’s the really interesting part: each maker will choose the medium for their part. Some will work in metal, some in wood, and there will no doubt be 3D-printed parts too. Pretty much every method and material in the hacker armamentarium will come to bear, and the parts will be a mish-mash of everything that makes what we do every day so powerful and so much fun.

The Reveal

The culmination of Project Egress happens on July 18th when Adam will take the collection of parts to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and assemble them in front of a live audience. It’s not clear if there will be a live stream of the event, but it would be a crying shame if there isn’t. If you’re in the DC area, it’d certainly be worth dropping by.

We really like the sound of this event, and we can’t wait to see the builds that come out of it. Both Fran Blanche and Quinn Dunki have already posted their builds; Fran did videos on the design and build of one of the latch assemblies, rendered in wood, while Quinn machined a latch tie rod from aluminum.

Project Egress looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun, and hats off to Adam for coordinating it – and for giving up his annual trip to San Diego Comic Con in favor of the live build – and to all the hackers he has roped into the project. We’ll keep track of progress along the way, and hopefully be able to report on the big reveal at the end.

[Featured images: National Air and Space Museum]

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Across the Northern Hemisphere it is now summer and the growing season is in full swing. Vigorous plants that will soon bear tasty fruit are springing forth from the soil, but unfortunately so are a lush carpet of weeds that require the constant attention of the gardener. “If only there were a machine that could take that on!” she cries, and as it happens she’s in luck.

The FarmBot is an open-source robotic vegetable grower able to take care of all aspects of sowing and tending a vegetable plot. We first saw them five years as a semifinalist in the first Hackaday Prize. This is a CNC machine for the raised beds of your backyard garden. Give it power, water, and a WiFi connection, and FarmBot goes into service planting, watering, weeding, and monitoring the soil. Now they’ve shipped over a thousand of their Genesis model and today have announced of a pair of new models that promise to make their technology more accessible than it ever has been.

FarmBot has a tool changer. Soil moisture sensor and watering heads are shown here.

In a nod to Tesla, FarmBot is calling this their “Model 3 moment” — the new offering is smaller and leaner to appeal to a wider customer base than their well-heeled, CNC machine loving, early adopters. The new FarmBot Express and Express XL models are now shipped 95% pre-assembled to lower the bar on getting up and running.  They cover two sizes of planting bed: 1.2m x 3m or 2.4m x 6m, with an MSRP of $2295/2795 although there is currently an $800 launch discount available.

For us, FarmBot is the success story of an early Hackaday Prize entrant. From a great idea and a functional prototype, the project has successfully made the transition to commercial viability and holds a genuine promise of making the world a better place by helping people grow some of their own produce. Who knows, in five years time it could be your idea that’s reaching commercial viability, we think you should enter the Hackaday Prize too!

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

There’s been a lot of news lately about the Long Now Foundation and Jeff Bezos spending $42 million or so on a giant mechanical clock that is supposed to run for 10,000 years. We aren’t sure we really agree that it is truly a 10,000 year clock because it draws energy — in part — from people visiting it. As far as we can tell, inventor Danny Hills has made the clock to hoard energy from several sources and occasionally chime when it has enough energy, so we aren’t sure how it truly sustains itself. However, it did lead us to an interesting question: how could you design something that really worked for 10,000 years?

Why?

The first question might be why would you want to? We aren’t sold on the clock. But there are at least two easy answers for that: storing very bad things safely and generational starships. We are certainly generating nuclear and biological materials that need to be kept locked up for a long time. If we wanted to go to another star system today, we would have to build a ship that would get our descendants to even the nearest star. In both cases, things would have to last and either need no repair or be sustainable.

How Old is Old?

The clock appears to be mostly mechanical and we do have examples of purely mechanical things lasting a very long time, although not always in the best of shape. It doesn’t hurt that the clock ticks once a year.

The megalithic temples of Malta date back about 5,000 years — older than the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge. Dating back from around the same time is the Knap of Howar, an old Scottish farmstead and Newgrange, and Irish religious site.

Of course, those aren’t machines and they aren’t 10,000 years old. In Turkey, there are some ancient homes that are nearly 10,000 years old and some large megaliths, although they are hardly well-preserved. There are even parts of the Wall of Jerico that are about the same age.

For long-lived machines, the numbers are much worse. Some church clocks date back to the 1300s. That’s not even a blip on a ten millennia timeline. The oldest steam engine still around is even newer, dating to 1725. So building true machines to last on this scale is a relatively unproven idea. Granted, materials are better today, but then again things are more complex, too.

Problem #1: Power

This would be a big problem. It is easy to wave your hand away and call for nuclear power or batteries, but making those last a long time is an even bigger problem. True, nuclear batteries can last for a century or more, that’s still a far cry from 10,000 years. If you could make a reactor that lasted long enough, you’d still need to refuel it, although the half-life of uranium is in the millions or even billions of years (depending on the isotope), so that’s viable, but you’ll have to carry a lot and have a reliable way to refuel.

If you are Earth-bound, solar or geothermal or even wind might work. None of those would work well for an interstellar spacecraft, though. Molten salt batteries are known to have long shelf lives, but don’t usually last very long once activated.

At the University of Oxford, there are some bells that have been ringing on a single battery for nearly 200 years, but that’s a special and unusual case. So power seems to be a key problem. But it isn’t the only one.

Problem #2: Mechanics and Other Things that Age

Real-world parts wear. Springs get less springy. Magnets demagnetize. Electrolytic capacitors dry out. Metals in ICs electromigrate or grow dendrites. Moisture gets into packages. We don’t often have to deal with much of this because it happens over a long time scale to our normal usage. But those things — and probably more — would become problematic over a few thousand years.

Imagine a generation ship with switches. Mechanical switches. You’d have to carry a lot of spares or a shop for fixing or making new switches, along with the raw materials to do so. Could you do better? A touchscreen is probably too complex. What about an LED and a light sensor with a finger-sized hole? No mechanics, but you probably still won’t get that much life out of an LED, especially if it is on nearly all the time.

The nuclear waste vault is even more problematic because it should continue to function even if no one is around to take care of it. How do you leave a warning for the next wave of humans or cockroaches or whatever inherits what’s left?

Probably Not the Next Contest

At Hackaday, we love to spur innovation through contests. However, we don’t think we want to wait 10,000 years to judge your nuclear waste bunker, although time dilation might help with your spaceship if you can go fast enough.

Seriously, though, what kind of things would you do to ensure a design could run for a century? Or a millennium?  Or even 10,000 years? Is there a practical limit to how long an electronic device could last? Let us know in the comments.

We’ve seen old analog computers including the Antikythera mechanism, although they are in various states of disrepair. As for digital computers, WHICH was still operating last time we checked.

Tags:  Ask hackaday  

In our continuing series of, ‘point and laugh at this guy’, I present a Kickstarter for the, “World’s First Patented Unhackable Computer Ever”.  It’s also a real web site and there’s even a patent (US 10,061,923, not showing up on Google Patents for some reason), and a real product: you can get an unhackable laptop, and you can get it in either space gray or gold finish. This gets fun when you actually dig into the patent; it appears this guy invented protected memory, with one section of memory dedicated to the OS, and another dedicated to the browser. This is a valid, live patent, by the way.

The 2019 New York Maker Faire is off. Yeah, it says it’s still going to happen on the website, but trust me, it’s off, and you can call the New York Hall of Science to confirm that for yourself. Maker Media died recently, and there will be no more ‘Flagship’ Maker Faires. That doesn’t mean the ‘mini’ and ‘featured’ Maker Faires are dead, though: the ‘Maker Faire’ trademark is simply licensed out to those organizers. In the next few weeks, there is going to be a (mini) Maker Faire in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Gilroy, California, Edmonton, Alberta, Kingsport Tennessee, and a big ‘ol one in Detroit. This raises an interesting question: where is the money for the licensing going? I’m sure some Mini Maker Faire organizers are reading this; have your checks been cashed? What is the communication with Maker Media like?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. It’s valuable words of wisdom like that and can apply to many things. Commenting on blog posts, for example. Yes, you can throw sticks at a wasp’s nest, that doesn’t mean you should. Yes, you can 3D print Heely adapters for your shoes, but it doesn’t mean you should. It does look dope, though and you’re automatically a thousand times cooler than everyone else.

The C64 Mini is a pocket-sized Linux device with an HDMI port meant to play C64 games.   There were high hopes when the C64 Mini was announced, but it turned out the keyboard isn’t actually a mini keyboard. Now someone had the good sense to combine one of these ‘smartphone chips running an emulator in a retro case’ products with a full-sized keyboard. The C64 will be around by Christmas, and yeah, it has a full working keyboard.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

For the last decade or so, we’ve been powering and charging our portable devices with USB. It’s a system that works; you charge batteries with DC, and you don’t want to have a wall wart for every device, so just grab a USB hub and charge your phone and you headphones or what have you. Now, though, we have USB Type C, with Power Delivery. Theoretically, we can pull a hundred Watts over a USB cable. What if we could tap into that with screw terminals?

That’s the idea behind [Jakob]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize. It’s a USB 3.1 Type C to Type A adapter, but it also has the neat little bonus of adding screw terminals. Think of it as jumper cables for your laptop or phone, but don’t actually do that.

[Jakob]’s board consists of a USB Type C receptacle on one end, and a Type A plug on the other, while in between those two sockets is an STM32G0 microcontroller that handles the power negotiation and PD protocol. This gives the USB Type C port dual role port (DRP) capability, so the power connection can go both ways. Add in a screw terminal, and you can theoretically get 20 Volts at 5 Amps through a pair of wires. Have fun with that.

Right now, [Jakob] has all the files in a Gitlab with the schematic and layout available here. It’s an interesting project that has tons of applications of USB hackery, and more than enough power to do some really fun stuff.

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

For whatever you have built, there is someone who has done it longer, and knows more about it. That is the basic premise of expertise, and for this year’s Hackaday Prize we’re rolling out with a series of mentor sessions. These are master classes that match up experts in product development with the people behind the projects in the Hackaday Prize. We’ve been recording all of these so everyone can benefit from the advice, guidance, and mentorship presented in these fantastic recordings.

The DrumKid, a random drum synthesizer

Mitch Altman is someone who should be very familiar to all Hackaday readers. He’s the inventor of the TV-B-Gone, that wonderful device that simultaneously turns you into a hero and a villain in any sports bar. He’s the President and CEO of Cornfield Electronics and co-founder of the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. Mitch is an author and teacher, and seems to be at just about every conference and workshop around the world promoting hackerspaces, Open Source hardware, and mentorship where ever he goes.

The first hardware creator to meet Mitch is Matt Bradshaw, creator of the DrumKid. This is a pocket-sized drum machine that is heavily inspired by Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators. Years ago, Matt built a web app that generated drum tracks, and this project is simply taking that idea into the physical realm. For Mitch, this is well-tread territory; years ago, Mitch also built an Arduino-based synth, and for the most part, both Mitch and Matt’s projects are remarkably similar. There were, however, some improvements to be made with Matt’s circuit. The power supply was two AAA batteries and a switching regulator that introduced noise and added cost. Mitch suggested that the ATMega328 could be run directly from three AA batteries reducing the cost and the noise.

eAgrar, a system for monitoring conditions of plants and weather conditions at agricultural fields

The next project up for review is eAgrar, a system for monitoring conditions of plants and the weather in fields. This project comes from Slaven Damjanovic and Marko Čalić. They’ve been developing this device for almost two years building the entire system around the ATMega328. Slaven ran into a problem with this chip in that he didn’t have enough inputs and outputs. The firmware is already written, but thanks to the Arduino IDE, there’s no reason to keep using that ATMega. Mitch suggested using an STM32 or another ARM core. That’s what he’s using for one of his synthesizer projects, and you get more than enough inputs and outputs for the same price as an ATMega.

Finally, we come to Joseph, with his project, the Pilates Reformer. A Pilates Reformer is a bit of exercise equipment that’s only made by three companies and everything costs thousands of dollars. Joseph is bringing that cost down, but there’s a problem: how do you build a hundred or two hundred of these? Mitch suggested simply finding another manufacturer that could build this design, and not necessarily one that builds Pilates machines. This makes sense — if all you’re doing is cutting and connecting structural beams, any manufacturer can do this, that’s what manufacturers do.

This is the third in our series of Hackaday Prize mentor sessions this year, and we have far more we need to edit, and many more we need to record. That doesn’t mean you can’t get help from experts from your prize entry; we’re looking for people who need help with their project and we have a lot of mentors willing to dispense advice. If you’re interested in having someone look over your shoulder, sign up your entry.

[Main image: @matlman23]

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish their favorite hacks from the past week. Seems like everyone is trying to mill their own Mac Pro grille and we love seeing how they go about it. Elliot is gaga over a quintet of power latching circuits, Mike goes crazy for a dough sheeter project, and we dig through the news behind methane on Mars, the Raspberry Pi 4 release, and spoofing Presidential text alerts with SDR. If you like mini-keyboards you need to see the Fauxberry, Artificial Intelligence became an art critic this week, and poorly-lit rooms have been solved with a massive mirror system.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

And note: next week we’re taking a break to go outside and shoot off some 4th of July fireworks, so there will be no podcast and you’ve got some time to listen through our 24 previous episodes for anything you’ve missed.  You’ll hear from us again the week after.



Direct download (59 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 025 Show Notes: New This Week:

• NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life
• Raspberry Pi 4 Just Released: Faster CPU, More Memory, Dual HDMI Ports
• Impersonate The President With Consumer-Grade SDR
  • You’ll Really Want An “Undo” Button When You Accidentally Send A Ballistic Missile Warning

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• The Quest For Perfect Croissants Via A DIY Dough Sheeter
  • Home Made Gears Save This Shredder
  • 3D Printed Gears, Pulleys, and Cams Contest Entries
• Ditch The Switch: A Soft Latching Circuit Roundup
  • Nos amis les MOSFET / HK-012 / Hackable / Connect – Edition Diamond
    (French language, Google Translate link)
• Everyone’s trying to mill their own Mac Pro grilles:
  • Does The Cheese Grater Do A Great Grate Of Cheese?
  • The Cheese Grater In Fusion 360
  • The Process Behind Manufacturing That Mac Pro Grille
  • Grate Design On This Cutting Edge Raspberry Pi Case
• AI And Art Appreciation
• The Feather “FAUXBERRY” Is Now A Real Thing
  • Feather Plus Blackberry Equals Open Source Fauxberry
• A Rough And Ready Pan & Tilt Mirror
  • The Giant Sun Mirrors in Rjukan

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Everything You Probably Didn’t Know About FOV In HMDs
  • Accurate Time On Your Pi, The Extreme Way
  • The Practical Approach To Keeping Your Laser In Focus
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • This Upgraded Power Wheels Toy Is Powerful Enough To Need Traction Control
  • Split Flap Clock Keeps Time Thanks To Custom Frequency Converter
  • Booting The Game Boy Advance Into Bluetooth

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Reverse Engineering Cyclic Redundancy Codes
• Snoopy Come Home: The Search For Apollo 10

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

In every workshop ever, there’s a power tool that goes unnoticed. It’s the bench grinder. It’s useful when you need it, and completely invisible when you don’t. We take the bench grinder for granted, in part because we keep it over there with that box of oily rags, and partly because it’s so unassuming.

But you can really mess your hands up on a bench grinder. Words like ‘degloving’ are thrown around, and that doesn’t involve actual gloves. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Scott] is adding safety to the ubiquitous bench grinder. It’s called the Grinder Minder, and it aims to make the humble bench grinder a lot safer.

There are a few goals to the Grinder Minder, most importantly is DC injection braking. This stops the grinder from spinning, and if you’ve ever turned off a bench grinder and waited for it to spin down, you know there’s either a lot of energy in a grinder wheel. Grinder Minder also adds accidental restart protection and an actual ANSI-compliant emergency stop. All of this is designed so that’s it’s a direct drop-in electronics package for a standard off-the-shelf grinder.

The early prototypes for the Grinder Minder have the requisite MOSFETs and gigantic wire-wound resistors , but the team has recently hit an impasse. The current market research tells them the best way forward is designing a product for bigger, more powerful tools that use three-phase power. The team is currently researching what this means for their project, and we’re looking forward to seeing where that research lands them.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

When designing a printed circuit board, there are certain rules. You should place decoupling capacitors near the power pins to each chip. Your ground planes should be one gigantic fill of copper; two ground planes connected by a single trace is better known as an antenna. Analog sections should be kept separate from digital sections, and if you’re dealing with high voltage, that section needs to be isolated.

One that I hear a lot is that you must never put a 90-degree angle on a trace. Some fear the mere sight of a 90-degree angle on a PCB tells everyone you don’t know what you’re doing. But is there is really no greater sin than a 90-degree trace on a circuit board?

This conventional wisdom of eschewing 90-degree traces is baked into everything we know about circuit board design. It is the first thing you’re taught, and it’s the first thing you’ll criticize when you find a board with 90-degree traces. Do square traces actually matter? The short answer is no, but there’s still a reason we don’t do it.

RF and Capacitance Implications

When you ask someone why 90-degree traces on a printed circuit board is bad, the first reason given is RF interference.

The most-cited reason as to why you shouldn’t use square corners on traces is that electrons bunch up on the corners. This is impossible with our current understanding of physics and would break the universe. Fortunately for everyone, you can just rent test equipment that will test a circuit at 20 Gigahertz. If you’re really good, you can find that test equipment in the trash. Earlier this year, [Bil Herd] put square corners to the test by measuring the impedance of a trace that looked like a square wave. At 20 Gigahertz, the effect of square corners was minimal. At lower frequencies, the effect would be less. Don’t worry about square corners on your traces.

A younger Dave Jones, holding two boards with the same end-to-end resistance.

There are few, if any, implications for using 90-degree traces in respect to RF interference, but due to the nature of square corners on traces, we do bump up against the resistance of a trace. This resistance is a function of the shape of a trace, and this is known as sheet resistance. [Dave Jones] did a wonderful video on sheet resistance, and the big takeaway is that resistance of a trace is measured in Ohms per square. That’s Ohms per square, without any other dimension; a square of copper two millimeters on a side has the same resistance as a square of copper ten millimeters on a side. It’s counter-intuitive.

With that said, a 90-degree corner makes little difference in the resistance of a trace provided it is replaced with a 45-degree corner. That’s simply how triangles work. It does make a difference in the capacitance of a trace, although that effect is very minor. This has been covered by [Bil Herd] in his test of high-speed PCB design techniques and it’s been written up in EDN as a rule of thumb for high speed design. The takeaway is that square corners do effect capacitance, but it is not really an issue unless the rise time of the circuit is extremely low. The official rule of thumb is that a square corner will affect the circuit when the line width in mils is greater than five times the rise time in picoseconds. Unless you’re dealing with relatively high-speed signals — the black magic of RF or SPI busses on the order of 100 MHz, it doesn’t matter.

Acid Traps During Board Etching

Acid trap isn’t just the latest frontier of my Soundcloud, it’s also something you must take into account when manufacturing a circuit board.

A modern PCB undergoing fabrication. Acid traps are not a problem for the modern PCB manufacturer.

Most circuit boards begin their life as a sheet of fiberglass or other substrate covered with a layer of copper. This is the raw material for every board house, and although there are differences in the substrate, the amount of copper applied to a board, and whatever intermediary processes go into manufacturing a PCB, everything begins with copper bonded to some sort of non-conductive material. To turn this raw material into a board, a portion of the copper is masked off and the copper is removed. This can be done with laser printer toner or Ultraviolet-cured photomask, and the copper is then etched with a chemical, either Ferric chloride, Sodium persulfate, or Cupric chloride. There are many different ways to make a PCB, but they’re all strikingly similar.

When etching a board, it is possible a ‘puddle’ of the acid solution could collect at the corner of a trace. If this happens, it is possible the acid could eat away at copper underneath the photoresist. This, in turn, decreases the effective width of a trace, potentially breaking the trace entirely.

For all the tips and tricks presented to first-time board designers, the ‘acid trap’ explanation is the implicit reason for why you should not use 90-degree traces. The Eagle blog gives a top-ten routing tips for new PCB designers, and acid traps are the reason why you shouldn’t use 90-degree angles. ‘Ease of manufacturing’ is the reason for not using 90-degree traces on many articles for the tips and tricks of PCB design.

However, this tip for avoiding acid traps is decades old and the technology behind PCB manufacturing has improved greatly over the years. If your PCB fab is having problems with acid etching copper in a corner, you should probably find another board house.

So Why Does It Matter?

The know-how that goes into designing a PCB is a lot like driving a car. Anyone with a drivers license can get in a car, drive a few miles, and pick up some groceries. You can put some drinks in a cooler and go on a two hundred mile road trip no problem. The basics of driving a car are more than sufficient for 99% of your time on the road.

In driving and PCB design, there are exceptions to the majority. Popping down to Dollar General in a Chrysler Sebring is a lot different than taking your favorite supercar around the Nürburgring. Likewise, building a multi-Gigahertz circuit is much harder than connecting a Bluetooth module and an OLED display together to make a smartwatch.

The reason we don’t see square traces in most PCB designs is simply due to aesthetic convention. If it looks wrong, it is wrong. There is no specific reason why every circuit board design should shy away from 90-degree angles on traces, it’s just something that you shouldn’t do because it looks wrong.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

If you move as a hardware hacker through the sometimes surprisingly similar world of artists, craftspeople, designers, blacksmiths, and even architects, there’s one piece of work that you will see time and time again as an object that exerts a curious fascination. It seems that designing and building a chair is a rite of passage, and not just a simple chair, but in many cases an interesting chair.

An American-made Windsor chair from the turn of the 19th century. Los Angeles County Museum of Art [Public domain]Some of the most iconic seating designs that you will be instantly familiar with through countless mass-produced imitations began their lives as one-off design exercises. Yet we rarely see them in our community of hackers and makers, a search turns up only a couple of examples. This is surprising, not least because there is more than meets the eye to this particular piece of furniture. Your simple seat can be a surprisingly complex challenge.

Moving Charis From Artisan to Mass Market

The new materials and mass production techniques of the 19th and 20th centuries have brought high-end design into the hands of the masses, but while wealthy homes in earlier centuries had high-quality bespoke furniture in the style of the day, the traditional furniture of the masses was hand-made in the same way for centuries often to a particular style dependent on the region in which it was produced.

A Charles Rennie Macintosh chair from the turn of the 20th century in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0)

I’m at a hackerspace in the English county of Buckinghamshire, so for example the traditional local chair design here is the classic English Windsor chair pictured above. Its legs were hand-turned on a temporary pole lathe in the beech woodlands of the Chiltern Hills by a traditional craftsman known as a bodger. Its seat and chair back parts were made and assembled by other specialist craftsmen in an industry localised around the town of High Wycombe. Windsor chairs gained some features such as a steam-bent rear frame over the several centuries in which they were made in this manner, but they did not otherwise significantly change in design. They evolved to meet a need using the available materials of the region and stayed that way until the artisan industry died out in the face of mass production. In the case of Windsor chairs, the traditional trades have been revived in the last few decades, but if you buy a Windsor chair today the chances are it was made on modern machinery in a factory.

As furniture moved from being a bespoke product produced by local craftspeople into one of fashion and manufacture driven by an emerging consumer class, its design shifted from those craftspeople to a new breed of artists. Industrial design as we know it today might not have been formalised into a profession, but artistic movements such as the 19th century Gothic Revival and later Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements included furniture designers whose work had a heavy influence on the mass-produced pieces that would have graced the homes of the masses. My grandparents had more practical dining chairs with a visible mass-market influence from pieces of furniture in a similar style as the Charles Rennie Macintosh chair pictured here.

Modern Materials and Techniques Have Changed How We Sit

Arne Jacobsen’s 3107 chair, from 1955. Corvus [CC BY-SA 4.0]The design of domestic furniture might have traveled a long way from the artisan work of the chair bodgers in the Chilterns to the voluptuous curves of Art Noveau fantasy, but in materials it remained stubbornly wooden. The easy availability of new materials and manufacturing techniques in the 20th century gave designers a limitless palette to work with, and the Art Deco designers of the prewar period and the postwar Modernists ran with them and created the shapes, colours, and textures that are still with us today.

It is impossible to spend much time in the 21st century without seeing the influence of Arne Jacobsen’s 3107 chair; the original was manufactured using formed plywood and its echoes can be found in many others in different media. Stores such as IKEA have immersed us in high-quality design in cheap materials to the extent that we take it for granted, but somehow the signature form of the domestic industrial designer hasn’t made it into our world of makers and hackers. As an engineer I find this puzzling, because a chair is simultaneously a thing of universal need and engineering challenge.

There may be some left-field Hackaday editors who prefer to use a standing-up desk, but the majority of us spend our time seated. Our chairs need to be stylish, practical, and supremely ergonomic, while also being without inherent design flaws that might cause them to collapse while someone is sitting in them. If that doesn’t throw the gauntlet down to the hacker as much as to the architect or the industrial designer, I don’t know what does!

Chairs: Your Engineering Challenge

Robin Day’s HilleStack chair from 1964. Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation [CC BY-SA 4.0]So having proclaimed chair design to be a challenge, how might one approach it? For me, everything flows from the ergonomics, so of primary importance is understanding dimensions while seated. Thankfully there are modern tools for this.

You can use MakeHuman or similar modeling software can to create a virtual you. From there, detailed measurements of the seats you find most comfortable can be compared to your virtual MakeHuman character to establish guidelines for your most comfortable seating position. Choose your materials, and get started on the prototype.

I’m both a textilist and a metalworker so my ideal chair uses a forged and welded steel frame and an upholstered seat. Again, modern tools make this much easier than in the past as a 3D seat model can be flattened to produce a two-dimensional fabric patterns.

As the plan comes together you can even run finite element to design a steel framework without weak points such as the meeting of the two legs at the side of Robin Day’s HilleStack polypropylene and steel chair. The frame also must distribute weight evenly onto the floor such that it doesn’t damage the floorboards. I think I could do that, but I suspect the weight of a forged steel frame would make my particular dream chair less practical. And so you can see the challenges stack up: comfortable but beautiful, beautiful but strong, strong but not overly heavy.

Fine Examples of Hacker Chairs

I said we had a couple of examples in Hackaday’s library, and it’s worth bringing them up as a bit of inspiration. The first is Talon Pascal’s very well-executed copy of Henrik Thor-Larsen’s iconic Ovalia egg chair from 1968. This demonstrates very well that to have a design chair of your own you do not even have to design it, if there is an iconic seat that does it for you it’s always possible for you to make a copy. In Talon’s case the copy uses different materials from the original, instead of fibreglass he’s used thin strips of wood. This is hacking at its finest, and from what we can see we’d be hard-pressed not to believe it was the real thing.

Another standout project in the Hackaday ecosystem is Eberlin’s interlocking plywood chair. This is much more in the vein of the one-off design chairs listed above, and ticks all the boxes of using innovative manufacture and construction techniques. Having never sat in one I have no idea whether or not it is comfortable, but this chair could be manufactured and sold tomorrow drawing from just one single material. If it had come from a noted designer it would be instantly famous and considered a design classic, let’s hope by pulling it up in this article it gains a little bit more attention.

Having spent a while looking at chairs and understanding that there is more to them than meets the eye, I hope some of you have been inspired to follow in the footsteps of those famous designers and have a go at creating your own. This topic may not be the usual Hackaday fare of microcontrollers and robots, but that makes it no less worthy of your consideration. I look forward to seeing (and sitting in) your creations.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday 26 June 2019 at noon Pacific for the Preserving Computer History Hack Chat with Dag Spicer!

In our age of instant access to the seeming total of human knowledge at the swipe of a finger, museums may seem a little anachronistic. But the information available at our fingertips is often only the tip of the iceberg, and institutions like the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California are dedicated to collecting and preserving the artifacts of the information age, capturing the intellectual capital that went into making them, and perhaps more importantly, providing context and making everything accessible.

The CHM is an incredible resource for anyone doing research involving the early days of computing. Dag Spicer is the Senior Curator at CHM, or “Chief Content Officer” as he likes to put it. Dag has been collecting, cataloging, and overseeing the largest collection of computer artifacts in the world for almost 25 years, and he has some stories to tell. He’ll stop by the Hack Chat this week to share them, and to answer your questions about the history of computers and how studying the past shapes the future of computing.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday June 26 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

OpenSCAD has been updated. The latest release of what is probably the best 3D modeling tool has been in the works for years now, and we’ve got some interesting features now. Of note, there’s a customizer, for allowing parametrizing designs with a GUI. There’s 3D mouse support, so drag out that weird ball mouse from the 90s. You can export in SVG, 3MF, and AMF. Update your install of OpenSCAD now.

New Hampshire is the home of BASIC, and now there’s a sign on the side of the road saying so. This is a New Hampshire state historical marker honoring BASIC, invented at Dartmouth College in 1964. Interestingly, there are 255 historical markers in New Hampshire, usually honoring bridges and historical figures, which means there’s an off-by-one error depending on implementation.

Because robots a great way to get kids into technology — someone has to repair the future robot workers of the world — DJI has release the RoboMaster S1. It’s a robot with four Mecanum wheels, something like a Nerf turret, a camera, and WiFi. The best part? It’s programmable, either through Scratch or Python. Yes, it’s drag-and-drop programming for line following robots.

If you have a C by GE Smart Light Bulb and connect a new router to your home network, you will need to disassociate your C By GE Smart Light Bulb with your old network. To do this, you first need to turn your bulb on for eight seconds, then turn off for two seconds, then turn on for eight seconds, then turn off for two seconds. Then turn the bulb on for eight seconds, and finally turn the bulb off for two seconds. Finally, turn the bulb on for eight seconds, then turn the bulb off for two seconds. Your bulb should blink three times, indicating it has dissociated with the WiFi network. If this procedure does not work, your light bulb is running an older version of firmware. This is why you put a physical reset button on your stuff, people.

Have a lot of Raspberry Pi hats but you want to play around with the ESP32? No problem, because here’s a Pi-compatible GPIO ESP32 board. It needs a catchier name, but this is an ESP32 that’s mostly compatible with the 40-pin connector found on all Pis. Here’s a Crowd Supply link.

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Andrew “Bunnie” Huang’s mentor session for the Hackaday Prize shows off the kind of experience and knowledge hard to come by unless you have been through the hardware development gauntlet countless times. These master-classes match up experts in product development with Prize entrants working to turn their projects into products. We’ve been recording them so that all may benefit from the advice and guidance shared in each session.

The appealing little FunKey pocket gaming platform.

Bunnie is someone who is already familiar to most Hackaday readers. His notoriety in our community began nearly two decades ago with his work reverse engineering the original Microsoft X-box, and he quickly went on to design (and hack) the Chumby Internet appliance, he created the Novena open-source laptop, and through his writing and teaching, he provides insight into sourcing electronic manufacture in Shenzhen. He’s the mentor you want to have in your corner for a Hackaday Prize entry, and that’s just what a lucky group had in the video we’ve placed below the break.

While this session with Bunnie is in the bag it’s worth reminding you all that we are still running mentor sessions for Hackaday Prize entrants, so sign up your entry for a chance to get some great feedback about your project.

The first team to meet with Bunnie are FunKey, whose keychain Nintendo-like handheld gaming platform was inspired by a Sprite_tm project featuring a converted novelty toy. The FunKey team have produced a really well-thought-out design that is ready to be a product, but like so many of us who have reached that point they face the impossible hurdle of turning it into a product. Their session focuses on advice for finding a manufacturing partner and scaling up to production.

A prototype HotorNot Coffee Stirrer, showing their problem of having to maintain food-safe components.

HotorNot Coffee Stirrer is trying to overcome a problem unique to their food-related project. A hot drink sensor that has to go in the drink itself needs to be food safe, as well as easy enough to clean between uses. A variety of components are discussed including a thermopile on a chip that has the advantage of not requiring contact with the liquid, but sometimes the simplest ideas can be the most effective as Bunnie reminds us that a cheap medical thermometer teardown can tell us a lot about appropriate parts for this application.

The idea behing PhalangePad is an attractive one, but making those sensors reliable is no trivial eercise.

It’s another component choice problem that vexes PhalangePad, an input device that relies on the user tapping the inside of their fingers with their thumb. It’s a great idea, but how should these “keypresses” be detected? Would you use a capacitive or magnetic sensor, a force sensitive resistors, or maybe even machine vision? Here Bunnie’s encyclopaedic knowledge of component supply comes to the fore, and the result is a fascinating insight into the available technologies.

We all amass a huge repository of knowledge as we pass through life, some of the most valuable of which is difficult to pass on in a structured form and instead comes out as incidental insights. An engineer with exceptional experience such as Bunnie can write the book on manufacturing electronics in China but still those mere pages can only scratch the surface of what he knows about the subject. There lies the value of these mentor sessions, because among them the gems of knowledge slip out almost accidentally, and if you’re not watching, you’ll miss them.

This is the second in our series of Hackaday Prize mentoring sessions this year, but we have more already in the can and further sessions to record. We’re constantly looking for more participants though, so make sure if you haven’t already that you put your entry in for Hackaday Prize and check out the list of mentors who are here to share their knowledge and experience.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

If you’ve got some drone or FPV part lying around, this is the build for you. It’s a remote controlled tank, with a camera and video transmitter, that’s only 65 mm x 40 mm x 30 mm in size. Why on Earth would you ever build something so small? You can look around in your crawlspace, I guess. Any way you look at, this thing is tiny.

The tank has traditional tank skid steering through two brushless motors. The battery is one cell, as that’s just about the largest battery you can put in a vehicle so small, and the camera is just off-the-shelf quadcopter stuff set into a 3D printed enclosure. There are a few LEDs for lights. Other than that, it’s just so tiny and so cute.

The builder behind this tank, [honnnest], put up a video going through the build and demonstrating what kind of video you can expect from a tank this small. It’s a bit fast for a tank, and that’s not even considering the scale effects, but if the chassis is 3D printed, you can always print a few reduction gears, too.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

It is hard to remember that practical computers haven’t been around for even a century, yet. Modern computers have been around an even shorter period. Yet somehow people computed tables, kept ledgers, and even wrote books without any help from computers at all. Sometimes they just used brute force but sometimes they used little tricks that we’ve almost forgotten. For example, only a few of us remember how to use slide rules, but they helped send people to the moon. But what did database management look like in, say, 1925? You might think it was nothing but a filing cabinet and someone who knew how to find things in it. But there was actually a better system that had fairly wide use.

How Do You Sort Massive Amounts of Paper Records?

Not that people didn’t have filing cabinets. The problem with those is that you have a single primary key or you have a lot of duplication. Consider report cards for students. If they were in a filing cabinet, you’d probably want the folders to have student’s names. Or perhaps their grade. Or maybe their teacher. With a database table, that’s easy to just create a view based on a query for any of those items. In a filing cabinet, I’d need three copies of the report card — in a day when copies were hard to produce. Sure, you could come up with some scheme, like the class and teacher folders had lists of names, but that’s a hack and not in a good way.

Besides, what happens if someone wants the report cards for all girls in the 8th, 9th, and 10th grades? That’s a lot of manual selecting. Report cards are pretty simple, too. Imagine if you had a really complex data set.

The High-Tech of Cutting a Notch

The answer was in a type of punched card. Not the punched cards we know from vintage computers. These cards had holes punched around the edges. They were often called edge-punched cards or edge-notched cards. We’ve also heard them called “needle cards” for reasons that will soon become apparent. There were several well-known brand names including Cope-Chat, E-Z Sort, Flexisort, and McBee Keysort cards.

Let’s go back to our report card example. If your report card was on an edge-punch card there would be holes all around it with little labels. One might say 1st grade. Another 2nd grade. Another might say “male” next to one that said “female.” Whoever produced the card would use some tool to open up the holes that applied to that card. So if a card was for a girl in Mrs. Miller’s 4th-grade class, you’d open up the female, 4th grade, and Mrs. Miller notches.

Looking for punched holes isn’t really all that useful, though. You might as well just look for text on the card. The value is when you stack the cards.

Separating notched cards from those that are not. [Image source: Can You Believe]You can take the stack in any order and put a long needle — like a knitting needle — through, say, the 4th-grade hole. When you lift the needle, all the ones that have an intact hole in that spot will stay on the needle. Any that have the hole open will fall down on your desk.

Manual Logic Operations

Of course, the best queries have multiple parts. If you pick up the cards from your desk and repeat the operation with the “female” notch and the “Mrs. Miller” notch, you’ve done a logical and operation. You could also use multiple needles, but that gets hard to handle eventually. If you repeat the operations on the cards that stayed on the needle you are doing an or operation. If you want to logically invert, you just use the stack in your hand instead of the cards on your desk. Easy.

Of course, the cards are not going to stay sorted that way. In addition, like most things, the cards got more complicated as time went on.

Getting More Creative

Another common enhancement was to cut one corner of each card so that if a card were not lined up correctly in a stack, it would poke out (you can see a small corner at the upper right of the card in the picture). Some cards had two levels of holes so you could do a built-in AND operation.

Zatocoding was a way to solve a particularly difficult problem with the cards. For a school report card, you might have 12 grades and putting 12 holes in the edge of a card isn’t a problem. But suppose you were trying to do library book records (if you are old enough to remember a card catalog — another type of database). There could be hundreds of subjects. You can have a hole for history, electronics, horror, and the hundreds of other topics you might want to index.

Zatocoding came to the rescue on this problem. The key is to pick a pattern of multiple holes for each topic. American history might use 1, 5, and 15. Electronics might be 5, 12, and 16. By putting three needles in at one time, the cards that fall out would be for American history. Because some books could be in multiple categories, it is possible that some other books would fall out, too. For example, a book that fell into electronics {5,12,16} and two other categories {1,9,11} and {4,7,15} would fall out on searches for American history. You’d have to manually reject those.

The selection of how many needles and how the patterns created varied by scheme — Zatocoding was just one method. But the idea was to map a bunch of items onto a smaller number of holes. If you did it right, you’d eliminate or at least minimize the number of items you’d have to reject.

For numbers, you could use punches for 7 4 2 1 0 which would allow you encode any number from 0-9. If you understood binary you could do the job in 4 holes, but the 74210 system was more common. You can even sort numbers with a small number of operations.

There were apparently other similar systems that used punches over the entire surface of the card. There were also peek-a-boo cards that had a similar function. Suppose our library has 5,000 books and we have sheets with numbers 1-5,000 preprinted. On one page we write “American History” and punch out the books that apply. On another page, we write “Electronics” and punch out the books for that one. If we want to see if any books exist on Electronics and American History we simply put the pages together and hold it to the light. Any holes that go all the way through the stack match. Then you have to go find the books by number.

Try It Yourself

Want to try your hand at McBee cards? Or want to prepare for the zombie apocalypse? The video below shows you how to repurpose a spiral punch. We hear you can also take wire cutters to a spiral notebook to liberate punched paper.

[Main Image Source: National Endowment for the Humanities]

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us Wednesday at 5:00 PM Pacific time for the Easy EDA Hack Chat with Dillon He!

Note the different time than our usual Hack Chat slot! Dillon will be joining us from China.

Since the birth of electronic design automation in the 1980s, the universe of products to choose from has grown tremendously. Features from schematic editing to circuit simulation to PCB design and autorouting can be found in every permutation imaginable, and you’re sure to find something that fits your needs, suits your budget, and works on your platform.

Dillon He started EasyEDA back in 2010 with Eric Cui, and since then the cloud-based EDA tool has become a popular choice. From working across teams to its “run anywhere” capabilities, EasyEDA has become the go-to tool for hundred of thousands of designers. Dillon will drop by the Hack Chat to answer all your questions about EasyEDA — how it started, where it is now, and what we can expect in the future.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, June 19 at 5:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The twenty projects that won this year’s Hackaday Prize bootstrap competition have just been certified. The purpose of this is to help great examples of early entries offset the cost that goes into prototyping as they work on their projects throughout the summer.

We know this has had a big impact on entries in the past. When working on hard projects it’s easy to doubt yourself, but you can usually get over that with just a bit of outside validation. Alex Williams encountered this when he first entered his Open Source Under Water Glider into the 2017 Hackaday Prize. He wanted to show off his work but didn’t think there’d be much interest and wasn’t sure if he’d continue development. He was shocked by the number of people who were excited about it, continued working feverishly on it, and went on to win the grand prize.

You’ll find all 20 bootstrap winners listed below, but we wanted to feature a couple of examples to show the kind of work that is happening during the Hackady Prize. The results of the bootstrap competition have no bearing on the top prizes: they are all still up for grabs, so enter your project today!

The SierrOS team is hard at work building an automatic CPR machine. The four students from Lyon France are working on an all-in-one device that can provide both chest compressions and ventilation. Just two weeks ago they were at the Olympics of Engineering in Paris and placed 20th out of 1,500 teams. It’s exciting to see a sneak peek at the newest revision of the machine, and they promise to share more details soon. SierrOS secured $500 in the bootstrap round.

Pilates feels like a new development in personal fitness, but the practice harkens back to its founder who was born in 1883. Joseph Pilates invented a piece of equipment called the Pilates Reformer which is still in use today. But another Joseph, the hacker from Connecticut who submitted this project, seeks to design a more affordable version of the Pilates Reformer. We especially enjoyed seeing the video of him testing the shipping and assembly plan for this equipment. He had the idea to ship all the parts in a concrete forming tube is a clever one, and testing the assembly process is a big part of proving that your product fits your market. The Pilates Reformer project secured $408 in the bootstrap round.

Certified Bootstrap Competition Winners:

The Bootstrap Competition was determined by the number of “likes” on each Hackaday Prize entry prior to June 1st. The top twenty finishers received $5 per like with a cap of $500. Congratulations to each of these projects:

• Axiom: 100+kW Motor Controller
• ULX3S powerful ECP5 board for open source FPGA
• eAgrar – digital agriculture
• SmallKat: An adorable dynamics oriented robot cat
• BikeOn
• SierrOS – Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Device
• Leavening Cell
• The DIYson, an open source Cyclone vacuum cleaner
• Odinub
• null modular F(n)
• pcbtc (GaN edition)
• Park Asset and Condition Monitor
• BikePin
• Persistence of Vision Fidget Spinner
• Portable Retro Game Console with 7.9-inch display
• Lightning detector
• PiSugar Battery for Raspberry Pi zero
• Pilates Reformer
• DLT one – A Damn Linux Tablet!
• LedCade – µ arcade game cabinet – 8×8 LED matrix

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk news and great hacks from the past seven days. Sad word this week as Maker Media, the company behind Make Magazine and Maker Faire, have closed their doors. There seems to be a lot of news about broken hardware and software to discuss, with ADS-B problems grounding hundreds of flights in the US, Hackaday itself having a site outage, the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ can be bricked with a really easy mistake, and Lewin wrote a great overview of the Takata airbag debacle. Don’t worry there are still plenty of hacks as we look at old computers that sing, microcontrollers that chiptune, beat boxes that are actually boxes, and some very neat cartridge hacks for NES and Arduboy.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (60 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 023 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Maker Media Ceases Operations
• GPS And ADS-B Problems Cause Cancelled Flights
  • Collins GPS outage grounds regional flights
• The Day Hackaday’s Theme Was Broken

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Vintage Speech Synthesizer Croons The Oldies
• SOICbite: A Program/Debug Connector For An SOIC Test Clip
  • Tag Connect
  • Local Hacker Discovers Card Edge Connectors
• Play To The Beat Of This Robotic Drummer In A Box
• Doom On The NES
  • Reverse-Emulating NES: Nintendception!
• The ArduBoy Community Rolled Their Own Cartridge
• Unconventional Drone Uses Gas Thrusters For Control
  • Converting A Lawnmower Engine To Run On Compressed Air

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Spectrum Chiptunes On An STM
  • Assembling A Lathe From Not A Lot
  • 1980s Plotter Plays Flappy Bird
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • The Pianist Octopus
  • Creating A Laser Cutter From A 3D Printer
  • Captivating ESP32 Camera Hack

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Takata’s Deadly Airbags: An Engineering Omnishambles
• Shorting Pins On A Raspberry Pi Is A Bad Idea; PMIC Failures Under Investigation

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

For the past few months we’ve been running this series of Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated posts, exploring the art of forge work for a novice. It’s based upon my experience growing up around a working blacksmith’s business and becoming an enthusiastic if somewhat inexpert smith, and so far we’ve spent our time looking at the equipment you might expect to need were you embarking on your own blacksmith work. Having assembled by now a basic forge of our own it’s now time to fire it up and take to the anvil for our first bit of smithing.

Lighting a forge is easy enough. Some people do it with a gas torch, but I break a piece of firewood into sticks using a hammer with the fuller set in the hardy hole on the anvil as an impromptu splitter. Making a small fire by lighting some paper under my pile of sticks placed on the hearth next to the tuyere I start the blower and then pile coke on top of the resulting conflagration. After about ten minutes I will have a satisfying roar and a heap of glowing coals, and as they burn there will be some slag collecting in the bottom of the fire that I will eventually need to rake out.

Think About The Steel You Use This piece of steel has been left in the fire too long, and is burning like a sparkler.

For your first experiment, select a piece of steel stock about 10 mm (3/8″) in diameter, either square or round, it doesn’t matter. I suggest one 300 mm (1′) or more long, such that you can handle the cold end without needing tongs. You will no doubt try a variety of materials depending upon what comes your way and you will discover what works best for you. Harder steels are correspondingly more difficult to work, so sometimes lower quality stock may be better for experimentation.

If you place the end of it, about 25 mm (1″) or so, into the hottest part of the fire where it is bright yellow, you can watch as it comes up to temperature. Ideally you want it to reach the point of being nearly but not quite as yellow as the coals around it at which point you can withdraw it and start work. If you leave it in too long it will first start to burn such that it will be sparking like a firework sparkler when you withdraw it, and if you leave it in longer still it will start to melt.

Your First Stroke Of The Hammer Hammering a flat on the end of a piece of bar stock. Mine has by good fortune remained consistent, but don’t worry if yours has a slightly oval shape.

Given a piece of 10 mm steel with its end 25 mm yellow-hot, holding it by the cold end you can place it on the face of the anvil. Hammer the hot end repeatedly in the same place, and it will start to spread out.  You’re not making anything here, instead it’s a simple exercise in getting used to both the metal and the hammering motion. Instead of lifting the hammer high for each stroke in the stereotypical image of a blacksmith, you are aiming to create a rhythm with it in your lower arm and wrist, taking full advantage of the rebound we mentioned when we looked at what makes a good anvil. As you hammer, you will see the work lose temperature, it will change from yellow through orange and red to a dull red with grey seeping in. At this point you will need to put it back in the coals as described above to bring it back up to temperature, and repeat the process.

As you continue hammering, if you are consistent you will see the end of the stock flatten out until eventually it will be a flat piece of steel on the end of your stock. It probably won’t be a consistent shape and you haven’t yet made anything useful, but you’ve started to gain a feel for both the metal itself and the hammering motion required. Quench it in a vat of water so it is cool enough that you can handle it and you will see that some grey oxides have flaked off its surface, this is normal.

From Round To Square, Or Vice Versa I’ve squared off the end of my piece of round stock. The bright sunlight makes it difficult to see, but the metal is now a dull red and needs to go back in the fire.

Now you have a bit of a feel for the metal, it’s time to learn something a little more useful. Take the other end of your piece of stock whose end you’ve just flattened, and heat it up in the coals as before for about 50 mm (2″). If it’s a square piece of stock you’re going to make it round, and conversely if it’s round you’ll hammer it square. Lay it down on the face of the anvil, and give it a set of blows with the hammer evenly spread across its length. If you continued you would end up with a longer flattened piece of metal as before, but in this case you are going to turn the stock as you hammer.

If it is a round piece you’ll hammer one face until it starts to flatten slightly before rotating it through 90 degrees and hammering the other, while if it’s a square one you’ll first hammer it on its corners to round them off, and then consistently rotate it as you hammer to ensure that the blows are distributed evenly across its surface. You may find that it starts to bend as you do this, in that case simply lay it on the face of the anvil in the axis you want to straighten, and hammer it flat. Throughout this process you’ll need to continue to return it to the fire to heat it up again, and you may surprise yourself by discovering that a lighter touch is needed with the hammer than you expect.

Eventually you will find yourself with either a newly squared piece on the end of a round piece of stock, or conversely a rounded piece on some square stock. There’s no shame in getting it wrong and trying again multiple times, but you will get the hang of it before too long. You will have learned more about the feel of the metal and the hammer, and what kind of effort is required in the process.

Giving It All A Point Forging a point, the piece of stock is held at an angle to the face of the anvil and rotated, while it is hammered to the desired angle.

Finally for today, you’ll put a point on your newly squared-or-rounded piece of stock. Heat up the end 25 mm, and place its tip on the face of the anvil at an angle of about 20 degrees. Hammer at right angles onto its very end as you slowly rotate it, and you will see a point beginning to form. As you work the hammering back from the point it will become more pronounced. You’ll never get it to a pencil-like sharpness, but with a bit of practice you can produce a consistent result. Quench it, and all being well you should have a piece of stock with a leaf-like flat piece on one end, and a point on the other. You haven’t really made anything useful, but you have already learned quite a bit of basic blacksmithing.

This series will continue with more basic blacksmithing techniques, in the next installment we’ll have a go at bending steel, making curves, loops, and scrolls. You won’t be an expert blacksmith just yet, indeed though having grown up around expert blacksmiths I am not one of them either, however as you proceed you should amass a set of basic skills upon which you can build the ability to make more complex pieces of work.

My finished piece of work. It doesn’t have a use, but it shows all three techniques from the session.

My thanks to Henry List for taking the pictures used in this piece.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

It’s a truly exciting time for space enthusiasts. Humanity is finally shaking itself out of the half-century-long doldrums of deep space exploration and planning a return to the Moon and a push to Mars. Yes, exciting things have happened since the glory days of Apollo. We’ve reached out into the outer planets, drilled holes in asteroids, and made tracks across the face of Mars in an improbably durable rover. We’ve built magnificent space telescopes, created a permanent space station to replace a couple of temporary ones, and put an intricate constellation of satellites into service.

Those are all laudable achievements, but not a single living creature has intentionally achieved approached Earth escape velocity since three astronauts and five mice did it aboard Apollo 17 at 3:46 AM on December 7, 1972. Since then, we’ve all been stuck down here at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, with only a lucky few of us getting a tease of what space travel is really like with low Earth orbit (LEO) missions.

But if NASA has its way, and certain difficulties with launch vehicles can be ironed out, in 2020 Earthlings will once again slip the surly bonds and make a trip to deep space. Of course those Earthlings will just be cultures of yeast carried into orbit around the Sun on a cubesat, but it’s a start, and it’s a good bet that more complex organisms won’t be far behind.

You Go First… Artist’s impression of BioSentinel on station. Source: the indispensible Gunter’s Space Page

The baby step of returning to deep space by sending microorganisms as our proxy is probably wise. After all, we’ve had fifty years to lose our edge, and getting something expendable to go first makes sense. We’ve also lost the urgency that sent the Apollo astronauts lunging into the unknown in upgraded ICBMs, driven by an intense Cold War competition where success at the cost of human life was acceptable and even expected.

We won’t be so cavalier after fifty years, and making sure we get things right will be critical before humans get launched on deep-space missions. To that end, NASA proposes the BioSentinel mission. BioSentinel seeks to develop biosensors to measure radiation effects on living creatures in the space beyond LEO, a hostile environment that is difficult to simulate on Earth and in which no human has spent more than a week.

BioSentinel will use one of Earth’s oldest and tastiest model organisms, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast, to see just how much DNA damage deep-space radiation will cause during extended manned missions. The BioSentinel cubesat, a briefcase-sized solar-powered package, will head to the Moon for a lunar flyby, and from there it will enter into a heliocentric orbit for a mission duration of six to twelve months.

Artist’s rendition of cosmic ray vs DNA. NASA

The heart of BioSentinel is a deck of microfluidics cards – small plastic plates similar to microtiter plates. Each plate has 16 wells etched into it to hold genetically engineered yeast cells in a dried state. Half of the wells have a yeast strain where the RAD51 gene, which codes for enzymes important to repairing DNA from radiation-induced damage, has been deleted. The other eight wells have yeast with the wild type gene, which has a normal ability to repair radiation damage.

Once the cubesat has transitioned out of the protective environment of Earth’s magnetosphere, individual cards will be rehydrated. The yeast cells will remain largely dormant until radiation causes a double-strand break (DSB) in the DNA. If the break is successfully repaired, the yeast in that well will grow exponentially and become metabolically active, which can be detected by alamarBlue, an organic dye that turns from blue to fluorescent pink by reduction reactions within living cells. The viability of the cells is measured by pumping the media into a chamber with an RGB LED and a detector chip; the pinker the well, the more metabolically active the cells are.

Playing The Hole Card BioSentinel detector schematic. Yeast growth is assessed colorimetrically using RGB LEDs shining through a flow cell onto a detector. Source: NASA

The BioSentinel mission profile calls for periodically rehydrating cards, each of which lasts for about a week. Identical experiments aboard the ISS as well as two on Earth, one under typical Earth conditions and one in a space-radiation simulation chamber, will undergo identical experiments at the same time. This will provide controls as well as data to correlate LEO and deep-space exposure, and allow us to assess our ability to simulate deep-space radiation on Earth.

BioSentinel also contains electronic radiation sensors that can detect a powerful radiation storm known as a Solar Particle Event (SPE). If the satellite should wander into one of those storms, a card kept in reserve for just such an occasion will be rehydrated and measured, to assess the potential effects of a severe radiation storm, something that deep-space travelers will no doubt have to deal with.

The original plan was for BioSentinel to fly as a secondary payload on EM-1, the first Exploratory Mission for Space Launch Systems. But as we recently learned, funding for SLS was cut from NASA’s 2020 budget. EM-1 has been rebranded as Artemis 1, and BioSentinel is one of thirteen secondary payload cubesats slated for deployment aboard it. If all goes well, the SLS Block 1 rocket will take off from the historic Launch Complex 39B at Cape Kennedy in June 2020, and begin sprinkling its payloads into their orbits.

As uninspiring as it may be to follow a satellite stuffed with fungus into space, BioSentinel is poised to answer critical questions about long-duration manned missions in deep space. The DNA repair mechanisms in yeast are extremely well conserved genetically, and the genes they carry are almost the same as the genes human cells carry for DNA repair. What happens to them will likely happen to us, and sending them first makes sense. We need to characterize the radiation regime out there before we can effectively protect ourselves from it, and if it means a few million yeast cells make it back to deep space before we do, then so be it.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Windows 10 — the operating system people love to hate or hate to love. Even if you’re a Linux die-hard, it is a fair bet that your workplace uses it and that you have friends and family members that need help forcing you to use Windows at least some times. If you prefer a command line — or even just find a place where you have to use the command line, you might find the classic Windows shell a bit anemic. Some of that’s the shell’s fault, but some of it is the Windows console which is — sort of — the terminal program that runs various Windows text-based programs. If you have the creator update channel on Windows 10, though, there have been some recent improvements to the console and the Linux system that will eventually trickle down to the mainstream users.

What’s New?

So what’s new? According to Microsoft, they’ve improved the call interface to make the following things work correctly (along with “many others”):

• Core tools: apt, sed, grep, awk, top, tmux, ssh, scp, etc.
• Shells: Bash, zsh, fish, etc.
• Dev tools: vim, emacs, nano, git, gdb, etc.
• Languages & platforms: Node.js & npm, Ruby & Gems, Java & Maven, Python & Pip, C/C++, C# &
• .NET Core & Nuget, Go, Rust, Haskell, Elixir/Erlang, etc.
• Systems & Services: sshd, Apache, lighttpd, nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL

The changes to the console are mostly surrounding escape sequences, colors, and mouse support. The API changes included things like allowing certain non-administrative users to create symlinks. We’ve made X Windows work with Windows (using a third-party X server) and Microsoft acknowledges that it has been done. However, they still don’t support it officially.

Why, Why?

Linux follows — more or less — basic precepts set forth by the Unix operating system. While it has grown over time, Unix was built to run on computers that are not terribly different from a modern computer. True, the PDP-7 was an 18-bit computer but it didn’t have the stifling quasi-8 bit architecture that MSDOS grew up in. MSDOS, on the other hand, was battling quite a few hardware limitations. But MSDOS eventually got a shell called Windows. Then Windows turned the tables and became the operating system that could run MSDOS. But this led to a hodgepodge of issues, not the least of which is the shell was anemic. There have been several answers to this. Even back in MSDOS days, third-party shells like 4DOS were popular, not to mention Unix-like shells available with Cygwin, MKS, and similar tools. Modern Windows still has an anemic MSDOS shell, but also PowerShell and the WSL bash shell.

That different heritage has led to a pretty big disparity between the standard shell and even the simplest Linux shell. Of course, you can run Windows under virtualization on Linux or vice versa. This, however, should perform better since it is essentially reverse Wine (that is, a layer on Windows that runs Linux just as Wine is a layer on Linux that runs Windows).

Terminal Velocity

There’s also a new Windows Terminal application to manage all the shells with tabs and font support for emoji — because apparently, that’s important. You can see a flashy commercial for it in the video below.

Between having so many browser-based applications and now having a bash shell on just about everything, it is getting where you almost don’t care what CPU you are using or even what operating system. While that’s good for us, it probably isn’t good for Microsoft. Perhaps they figure they make most of their money from corporations and think this strategy will stop corporate developers from adopting open operating systems? We aren’t sure it is all that great for Linux, either, as it dilutes one of its big advantages — a wide range of tools for serious users and developers.

Just to head off the pedantic comments, we know that Linux is the kernel and the operating system is the kernel plus tools from GNU and others. But colloquially, people say Linux and so do we. While Linux is “free” — if you are supporting it and your time has any value, that’s not totally true. You can pay someone like Red Hat for your support, but then having Microsoft support is one of Windows selling points — most of the time.

If you are not running Windows 10, want painless X Windows, or just don’t want to use the Microsoft tools, there’s always Swan which is based on Cygwin. As for me? My main operating system is Emacs. Don’t tell Elliot.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday 12 June 2019 at noon Pacific for the Fusion 360 for 3D-Printing Hack Chat with Vladimir Mariano!

There’s no way to understate the importance of the design and manufacturing tools we now all use on a daily basis. What once took a well-equipped machine shop and years of experience to accomplish can now be designed using free software and built using 3D-printers and a host of other CNC tools, all right on the desktop.

The number of doors this manufacturing revolution has opened are uncountable, and through his popular Desktop Makes YouTube channel and other outlets, Vladimir’s mission is to help people navigate through this world and discover their inner maker. He co-founded the Fairfield County Maker’s Guild in Connecticut and founded the CT Robotics Academy. From 3D-printing and design to electronics and programming, Vladimir teaches it all. He’ll join us for the Hack Chat to discuss the desktop manufacturing revolution in general, plus answer your questions on his main tools, Fusion 360 and 3D-printing.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday June 12 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The Chicago Pile led to the Manhattan Project, which led to the atomic bomb. In Germany, there were similar efforts with less success, and now we have physical evidence from the first attempted nuclear reactor in Germany. In Physics Today, there’s a lovely historical retrospective of one of the ‘fuel cubes’ that went into one of Germany’s unsuccessful reactor experiments. This is a five-centimeter cube that recently showed up in the hands of a uranium collector. In the test reactor, six hundred of these cubes were strung along strings and suspended like a chandelier. This chandelier was then set inside a tub surrounded by graphite. This reactor never reached criticality — spectroscopy tells us the cube does not contain fission products — but it was the best attempt Germany made at a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

The biggest failing of the Arduino is the pinout. Those header pins aren’t all on 0.1″ centers, and the board itself is too wide to fit on a single solderless breadboard. Here’s the solution to that problem. It’s the BreadShield, an Arduino Uno-to-Breadboard adapter. Plug an Uno on one end, and you get all the pins on the other.

There’s a new listing on AirBnB. this time from NASA. They’re planning on opening the space station up to tourism, starting at $35,000 USD per night. That’s a cool quarter mil per week, launch not included. The plan appears to allow other commercial companies (SpaceX and whoever buys a Boeing Starliner) to accept space tourists, the $35k/night is just for the stop at the ISS. Costs for launch and landing are expected to be somewhere between $20 and $60 Million per flight. Other space tourists have paid as much: [Dennis Tito], the first ‘fee-paying’ space tourist, paid $20M for a trip to the ISS in 2001. [Mark Shuttleworth] also paid $20M a year later. Earlier space ‘tourists’ paid a similar amount; Japanese journalist [Toyohiro Akiyama] flew to Mir at a cost of between $12M and $37M. Yes, the space station is now an AirBnB, but it’s going to cost twenty million dollars for the ride up there.

We’re getting into conference season, and there are two hardware cons coming up you should be aware of. The first is Hardwear.io, keynoted by [Christopher Tarnovsky], famous for DirecTV hacks. There will be other talks by [@TubeTimeUS] on cloning the Sound Blaster and [John McMaster] on dropping acid. All of this is going down this week at The Biltmore in Santa Clara, CA. The second upcoming conference of note is Teardown, the hardware conference put on by Crowd Supply. That’s in Portland, June 21-23, with a presence from the Church of Robotron.

Tags:  hackaday links  

You wake up in the morning, and check Hackaday over breakfast. Then it’s off to work or school, where you’ve already had to explain the Jolly Wrencher to your shoulder-surfing colleagues. And then to a hackspace or back to your home lab, stopping by the skull-and-cross-wrenches while commuting, naturally. You don’t bleed red, but rather #F3BF10. It’s time we talked.

The Hackaday writing crew goes to great lengths to cover all that is interesting to engineers and enthusiasts. We find ourselves stretched a bit thin and it’s time to ask for help. Want to lend a hand while making some extra dough to plow back into your projects? We’re looking for contributors to write a few articles per week and keep the Hackaday flame burning.

Contributors are hired as private contractors and paid for each article. You should have the technical expertise to understand the projects you write about, and a passion for the wide range of topics we feature. You’ll have access to the Hackaday Tips Line, and we count on your judgement to help us find the juicy nuggets that you’d want to share with your hacker friends.

If you’re interested, please email our jobs line (jobs at hackaday dot com) and include:

• One example post written in the voice of Hackaday. Include a banner image, at least 150 words, the link to the project, and any in-links to related and relevant Hackaday features. We need to know that you can write.
• Details about your background (education, employment, interests) that make you a valuable addition to the team. What do you like, and what do you do?
• Links to your blog/project posts/etc. that have been published on the Internet, if any.

What are you waiting for? Ladies and Gentlemen, start your applications!

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

If you’re in a relatively urban area and your destination is within a reasonable distance, it’s hard to argue against riding your bike rather than taking a car. It’s a positive for the environment, and great way to exercise and keep active. But some of us, say folks who write for the Internet full-time, might appreciate a little electromechanical advantage when the going gets tough.

In an effort to make electrifying your bike as easy as possible, [Shushanik] and [Aram] are working on a product they call BikeOn which they’ve recently entered into the 2019 Hackaday Prize. Thanks to some very clever engineering, this small unit can clamp onto the frame of a standard bicycle and transfer the energy from its 350 watt motor directly into the rear wheel; all without any tools or permanent modifications.

In the video after the break, [Aram] demonstrates how the user can install the BikeOn motor assembly in literally just a few seconds. Naturally there’s a beefy battery that needs to get attached to the frame as well, but even that has been made modular enough that it can attach where many bikes have their water bottle holder.

The attentive reader will likely notice that there’s no obvious control mechanism for BikeOn. Instead of having to fumble around with it manually, BikeOn uses a combination of torque sensor, accelerometer, and gyroscope to intelligently determine when the rider could use a boost.

BikeOn nabbed Editor’s Choice award at Maker Faire 2019, and now that it’s in the running for the Hackaday Prize, we’re excited to see more information on the product as it moves towards commercial release.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

In several decades of hanging around people who make things, one meets a lot of people fascinated by locks, lock picking, and locksport. It’s interesting to be sure, but it had never gripped me until an evening in MK Makerspace when a fellow member had brought in his lockpicking box with its selection of locks, padlocks, and tools. I was shown the basics of opening cheap — read easy from that— padlocks, and though I wasn’t hooked for life I found it to be a fascinating experience. Discussing it the next day a friend remarked that it was an essential skill they’d taught their 12-year-old, which left me wondering, just what skills would you give to a 12-year-old?

Your Skills Are Most Numerous When You Try To Remember What They Were The pic of a reader from George Dobbs’ Learnabout Simple Electronics, that we reviewed last year. This was the peak of my 12yo electronics attainment.

My instant thoughts turned towards the practical, and what I could do back when jumpers were goalposts, which probably wasn’t as much as I would like to think it was, and certainly didn’t include lock picking. Aside from the stuff a British village primary school teaches you I could solder, badly, I understood the basic electronics of germanium transistors and regenerative AM radios, I could code in Sinclair Basic and elementary Z80, and I could inexpertly bash nails and saw pieces of wood to assemble rudimentary constructions for outdoor forts and the like in the recesses of farmland hedges. All practical skills, and in more developed forms later in life those which have stood me in good stead.

But what I missed in that round-up were a load of other skills I had that are every bit as lifetime-useful as those I listed. I was a voracious reader, which set me up for a lifetime of literacy, a career in publishing companies, and ultimately to write for Hackaday. I had all the farm-bred mix of curiosity and practicality, which breeds an innate knowledge that you can make or fix anything. And I could grow things, my sisters and I had been tending our little vegetable plots since early childhood. There is nothing quite like eating a tomato that you have grown, when you are a kid.

Clearly the question of what skills a 12-year-old should have is a lot more complex than at first meets the eye, so in my musing I asked the rest of the Hackaday team what they thought of it.

Enough To Be Dangerous In As Many Broad Areas As Possible It is embarrassing how bad Anglophones are at other languages, something driven home at international hacker camps such as SHA 2017.

Probably the best single quote came from Jonathan Bennett: “Enough to be dangerous in as many broad areas as possible“, Which made me laugh, but has a basis in truth. What was particularly interesting was that it was an even mix between the type of practical skills I first launched into, and more life-skill type of knowledge. Both Al and Mike homed in on something I’ve struggled to achieve at a basic level in the years since my twelfth birthday, to learn a second language. We Anglophones are bad at that, and I am constantly shamed by my Continental and other friends with their perfect English. I speak French and Welsh badly after enormous effort, and I am diligently studying to add Dutch to that list. If I had a twelve-year-old, I would do everything I could to expose them to languages as early as they can hear them.

A common concern was skills that you might loosely term as essential for surviving a zombie apocalypse. Whether or not this relates to any real feeling that an apocalypse will soon be upon us or not is moot, but it could also touch on the pervasive sense that as a society we are losing touch with those basic skills that our ancestors might have taken for granted. Though it might be beyond a twelve-year-old, a modern twist came in one of those skills being the ability to synthesize or extract essential drugs such as insulin in the manner of Eva and Victor Saxl in wartime Shanghai.

We had quite a discussion on this matter, and came up with far too many ideas to easily condense into a single article. But it’s an interesting exercise whether you have kids or not, because it combines both nostalgia for your own past and the chance to assemble your perfect future — and make no doubt that the needs of the future are constantly changing.

Tell us in the comments what you’d equip your twelve-year-old with, but as you do so be careful. Your parents probably also saddled you with things you’d prefer not to have, make sure you don’t follow their example.

Tags:  Ask hackaday  

Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys dig through the most interesting hacks from the past week. On this episode we take a look at a portable power bank build that defies belief. We discuss an all-in-one SDR portable, messing with restaurant pagers, and the software that’s common to both of these pursuits. There’s a hopping robot that is one heck of a PID challenge, and another robot that does nothing but stare you down. We bring it on home with great articles on pianos with floppy disks, and that satellite cluster you should be watching for in the night sky.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (48 MB of sweet, sweet audio)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 022 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Elliot’s making mechanical keyboards and so is Kerry Scharfglass. Check out Kerry’s talk from KiCon:
  • “Alternative User Interfaces for KiCad” – Kerry Scharfglass (KiCon 2019)
• Mike’s been playing Zork on his phone using the Text Fiction app.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Mobile SIGINT Hacking on a Civilian’s Budget
  • Universal Radio Hacker: investigate wireless protocols like a boss
  • TempestSDR: Remote video eavesdropping using a software-defined radio platform
  • Elliot loves TEMPEST
• Solder SMDs With A Pan O’ Sand
  • Guide from commenter Tom G: Assembling PCBs With Surface Mount Components
• Motion Tracking Face Really Does Follow You Around The Roo
• One-Legged Robot Does the Hop
• Overengineering The Humble USB Power Bank
• Your Table Is Ready, Courtesy Of HackRF
  • DCSR: A simple DSP library and command-line tool for Software Defined Radio.

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Gamifying Household Chores Helps Get The Kids to Pitch In
  • glScopeClient: A Permissively-Licensed Remote Oscilloscope Utility
  • The Automated Solution To Your Unpopularity
• Mike’s Picks:
  • Casting A Cannon Is A Lot Harder Than You Think
  • Postal-Themed Rat Rod Mower Really Delivers
  • Paper Strandbeest Is Strong Enough To Walk

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Repairdown: Disklavier DKC500RW Control Unit
  • Tom is at work reverse engineering the protocol
  • We also saw an article this week on Recovering Data From Floppies With Errors
  • Elliot wants Tom’s brother’s disk-drive adapter
• See Starlink’s “Space Train” Before it Leaves the Station

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

For the last few years now, we’ve all had access to tiny, affordable Systems on a Module. These wunderchips are complete Linux systems with WiFi, a halfway decent GPU, and enough memory to run a real system. This is the perfect platform to base a tablet build on, the only problem is that someone has to actually do it. The DLT One is the ‘Damn Linux Tablet’ from [Prof. Fartsparkle]. It’s the answer to the question of when someone is going to build a tablet computer around one of these cheap Systems on a Chip that are floating around.

With many modules to choose from, the first task is actually choosing one of these Linux modules. [Fartsparkle] ended up with the Nvidia Jetson Nano, an impressive little board that has one distinct advantage: it’s drop-in compatable with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, the Raspberry Pi-on-an-SODIMM. Given a single chassis, [Prof. Fartsparkle] can simply upgrade his tablet by getting a newer version of the Jetson Nano (or the Compute Module).

The current state of the board is basically an SODIMM socket on a board, with breakouts for Ethernet, a power jack, USB, and HDMI. That’s all there is to it, and design on the tablet chassis is ongoing.

Future updates for this tablet build will include USB-C PD, an mPCI-E connector that would allow for M.2 storage, LTE in some form or another and a dock that would allow you to turn this into a Surface-like laptop. It’s an amazing build, and one of the best entries we’ve seen in this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

Several months ago, a strange Kickstarter project from ‘Team IoT’ appeared that seemed too good to be true. The Atomic Pi was billed as a high-power alternative to the Raspberry Pi, and the specs are amazing. For thirty five American buckaroos, you get a single board computer with an Intel processor. You get 16 Gigs of eMMC Flash, more than enough for a basic Linux system and even a cut-down version of Windows 10. You have WiFi, you have Bluetooth, you have a real time clock, something so many of the other single board computers forget. The best part? It’s only thirty five dollars.

Naturally, people lost their minds. There are many challengers to the Raspberry Pi, but nothing so far can beat the Pi on both price and performance. Could the Atomic Pi be the single board computer that finally brings the folks from Cambridge to their knees? Is this the computer that will revolutionize STEM education, get on a postage stamp, and sell tens of millions of units?

No. The answer is no. While I’m not allowed to call the Atomic Pi “literal garbage” because our editors insist on the technicality that it’s “surplus” because they were purchased before they hit the trash cans, there will be no community built around this thirty five dollar single board computer. This is a piece of electronic flotsam that will go down in history right next to the Ouya console. There will be no new Atomic Pis made, and I highly doubt there will ever be any software updates. Come throw your money away on silicon, fiberglass and metal detritus! Or maybe you have a use for this thing. Meet the Atomic Pi!

x86? In My Single Board Computer Ecosystem? It’s More Likely Than You Think.

At first glance, the Atomic Pi doesn’t look like your usual single board computer. There’s no power jack or USB port, something that we’ve come to expect on all our little electronic baubles. It seems the Atomic Pi is simply a module meant for a larger product. With this many JST connectors, you would just assume this is a module custom-built for a larger product. Probably not something relating to automotive tech, but at the very least some sort of IoT home goods product. Maybe even a robotic juicer.

Speculation is one thing, and proof is another. Here’s the FCC documentation for the Atomic Pi. This thing was originally designed for the Kuri robot, a ‘home robot’ that was launched at CES in January, 2017. The robot originally cost $700, and was described as, ‘an Amazon Echo with wheels and eyes’.

Amazon will be releasing their own ‘Echo duct taped to a Roomba’ in the next year or so, and the Kuri robot was before its time. Mayfield Robotics, the makers of the Kuri, paused operations. But they still had some hardware sitting around, notably some fancy single board computers loaded up with an x86 chip. These modules went on the auction block and Team IoT snapped them up and put together a Kickstarter. This is the Atomic Pi. It is industrial surplus repackaged as a novelty device marketed towards people who ‘do things’ with single board computers. What kind of things? I have no idea. Emulators? Home automation? A magic mirror?

Only about 28,000 Atomic Pis will ever be produced. They’re already made, and right now the ones that haven’t been shipped are sitting in a warehouse, ready to be flashed with the latest OS. Atomic Pi has misrepresented themselves by saying they ‘built’ several thousand units already. This is incorrect, the only engineering that has gone into the Atomic Pi is the power adapter and breakout board.

The people behind the Atomic Pi are working on an Atomic Pi 2, or something of that nature, and while there are very few details, we do know this will cost significantly more than $35. In the meantime, we have something that is a surplused bit of an unsuccessful product. Again, less than thirty thousand Atomic Pis will ever be produced, a fraction of the number of Ouya consoles ever built. The Raspberry Pi sold 100,000 on the first day, and I haven’t even seen an old Pi with a 26-pin header and a real RCA jack in ages.

I could very easily say this is the Silicon Valley ideal of repackaging literal garbage and selling it as a groundbreaking disruption, but I don’t write for Slate or The Atlantic. No, the Atomic Pi is what you get when you try to fill an existential void by buying stuff. The Atomic Pi fills a market need for guys who think the ability to install Kali Linux constitutes a personality.

The Review

The Atomic Pi features an Intel Atom x5-Z8350, a quad-core SoC designed for Windows tablets. This is a three-year-old chip clocked at 1.44 GHz (base, up to 1.92 GHz) with 2 GB of RAM. There’s a DirectX 11.2-capable GPU, and overall you’re looking at a system that would have been more than acceptable for desktop use in 2010, sufficient for Outlook and Word in 2015, and something that’ll run emulators in 2020. In other words, if you put this into the context of a desktop computer, you’ll be getting something that plays Fallout 3. Maybe Fortnite. The GPU (Cherry Trail) is supported by Linux, and has support for OpenGL and video decoding. We’re not dealing with a crappy Mali GPU here; this one actually works.

The Atomic Pi isn’t being sold as a tiny brick of a desktop computer with a huge heatsink. This is a single board computer, and any review must place it in the context of being a single board computer. This means it must have some GPIO pins, or some way to blink an LED from the command line. Here, the Atomic Pi is sufficient for limited applications: you get six GPIOs and two UARTs. There are a few additional GPIOs and other ports sprinkled around the board, including a few USB ports on JST connectors. In terms of support for add-ons, external coprocessors, and other connectivity, the Atomic Pi is sufficient. There will never be an entire ecosystem built around add-on boards for the Atomic Pi, but that’s what happens when you only make a few thousand of something.

Power draw topped out right around 7 Watts. I’d suggest at least a 10 Watt / 2 Amp supply.

In terms of software support, the Atomic Pi ships with Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS; this is simply what you do when you ship a plain vanilla single board computer with Linux — just grab the latest Ubuntu LTS and call it a day. WiFi and Bluetooth work in Linux, although you will need antennas, and neither the WiFi or Bluetooth RF section of the board have metal RF shields installed.

The real question: does the Atomic Pi do Windows? Yes, however Windows 10 is tight on 16 GB of eMMC. To do anything useful, you’ll need to install from an SD card, and with that comes the problems of running an OS from an SD card we see in all single board computers.

Finally, the big question. The question everyone wants answered. Does the Atomic Pi do emulation? It doesn’t matter: google analytics data tells me that you’re probably reading this on a desktop or a laptop, not a mobile device. You therefore have access to a much more powerful computer that is capable of emulating N64 and Playstation games. Don’t bother with emulation on the Atomic Pi. According to the community, emulation is a waste on both the Atomic Pi and the Raspberry Pi.

Atomic Pi: Should You Bother?

No, you shouldn’t bother. You just wasted precious moments of your life reading this review. Sorry about that.

Any review, or any consideration at all of the Atomic Pi, must take into account that it will ultimately be a passing mention in a footnote of the history of single board computers. There is no future when there are no more than thirty thousand of these boards to go around. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as many impressive builds have started off by finding some discarded equipment on the side of the curb, left out for the trash. But a single board computer is ultimately defined by its ecosystem. With a baked-in production limit, there can be no community. Without a community, there is no future.

If you want a toy, sure, pick up an Atomic Pi. Here’s the link. If it’s out of stock, there’s probably going to be more. But the selling points the Atomic Pi offers — an x86 machine for cheap, with HDMI, that can run Windows — is satisfied by better machines. Take a look at the AcePC T11. This is an x86 box that uses the same chipset as the Atomic Pi, has double the amount of RAM, more eMMC, and support for a SATA drive. It only costs $130, and that gets you a power supply, more than one USB port, WiFi and Bluetooth antennas, and an enclosure. You also get a power supply. Did I mention the AcePC 11 includes a power supply?

Alternatively, if you want the same Intel chip in a pocketable form factor, the AcePC T5 plugs right into an HDMI port. It uses the same Cherry Trail CPU as the Atomic Pi and comes with WiFi and Bluetooth antennas. The AcePC T5 also comes with a power supply and costs only $100.

The price reference for the single board computer market has been set by the Raspberry Pi, and that means thirty five dollars. Right now, I can buy a Pi 3 Model B+ for thirty seven dollars and seventy eight cents, with free one-day delivery from Amazon. Any competitor to the Raspberry Pi must beat it on either price or performance. The OrangePis and their ilk compete on price. The Atomic Pi certainly beats the Pi on performance and meets it on price. However, this is a false economy, as the Atomic Pi is one-off industrial surplus. If that’s your thing, and you need a cheap x86 system, go for it. But there are better options, and you will only save money by confabulating your own power supply if you value your time at zero.

 

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

When debugging ordinary low-voltage circuitry, you’re pretty safe: unless you have some really power-hungry devices that need a ton of current, there aren’t that many truly bad things that can happen, so you can take a lot of liberties with electrical-safety rules. With mains-powered devices, you don’t have this luxury, and a lack of knowledge, sloppy work practices, or simple mistakes can cost you — and your project — dearly. While you still need to know what you’re doing and use the requisite caution, [Yann Guidon]’s latest project — and entry in the 2019 Hackaday Prize —  a mains protection box, might keep simple mistakes from becoming a disaster.

There are a number of precautions you can take when working with mains power. We’ve all used the simple in-line power strip so you can quickly switch off the current, but [Yann] has included a number of devices that can be configured in different ways to experiment with mains-powered devices safely. Built into a sturdy open-topped wooden box with carry handles, the project evokes the traditional breadboard in appearance and functionality. A number of different devices are included, which could be re-configured into different topologies if needed.

[Yann] included an isolation transformer, which can be useful not only for protection against shock in case of accidentally grounding, but also for noise suppression. There is also a variac, which allows the output voltage to be adjusted over a wide range for testing. Of course, circuit breakers are a must, and current and voltage meters keep you informed about what’s going on. A big, easy-to-access switch cuts the power quickly when needed.

The (maybe) final touch is an adjustable output current limit, which is still a work in progress. Built around a current-monitoring relay and a DPDT relay wired as a latch, this allows the output to be disconnected if it draws more than a specified current, equivalent to between 10 W and 100 W. This is the perfect thing for initial testing of new projects.

So, if you’re thinking of working on mains-powered projects, have a close look at what [Yann] has assembled, and learn proper safety procedures before you begin. One place to start is with a great series by our own Jenny List about mains safety: part one and part two. Stay safe out there!

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize  

If you want to measure resistance and you know Ohm’s law, it seems like you have an easy answer, right? Feed a known current through the thing you want to measure and read the voltage required. A little math, and that’s it. Or is it? If you are measuring reasonably large resistance and you don’t mind small inaccuracies, sure. But for tiny measurements or highly accurate measurements, you’d be better off using the four-wire method. What’s more is, understanding why you want to use the four-wire method is a great example of using an understanding of electronics to find solutions to problems.

The Usual Suspect

Let’s look at the normal case first.

This is pretty simple. 3.3 / 0.001 = 3,300 and that’s the answer. But real life is a little more complicated. After all, in the simulation everything is perfect, but in reality, wires are not perfect and neither are measuring devices.

Suppose the leads going to the resistor are fairly long. In fact, let’s say they add an ohm of resistance on each leg. So now instead of 3.3 kΩ you have 3.302 kΩ. That’s hardly any difference — about 0.06%. Note that measuring the voltage at the output now gives the correct result for the entire resistance, not just the resistance we are interested in.

That doesn’t seem like a big deal, right? But it could be. Imagine if the unknown resistor was very small. Even, say, 1 Ω. Now we are off by a large factor! A conventional analog meter makes you zero out the probe resistance by shorting out the probes. But that requires some complexity if you are trying to get the right result to display digitally. In other words, with the perfect setup, you could put a digital panel meter that reads the voltage in the circuit, and read the resistance directly. Zeroing it out would require more effort to get the meter to read zero volts instead of the 0.002 V it would currently read with a short circuit.

Real Life

Let’s add a second voltmeter. Since the wires going to the voltmeter are perfect, we’ll also add our 1 Ω resistance to those wires. The voltmeters are perfect, too. In real life they might have a shunt resistance of a megaohm or more. You’ll see in a minute that doesn’t matter very much. But the imperfect wires do have an impact. For now, we’ll live with the perfect voltmeters.

Now the right-hand voltmeter reads correctly, despite the extra resistors. These resistors don’t matter much because the voltmeter is essentially an open circuit. No current flows so, therefore, there’s no voltage drop across the leads. In reality, there’s probably a resistance of 1 megaohm or even more across the voltmeter, but that doesn’t really make any significant difference. The reading drops to .999997 mV. Modern devices probably have at least 10 times that resistance which makes the difference truly negligible.

This is the basis of the four-wire, or Kelvin measurement. Two wires push current through the device under test and two more wires measure the voltage while transporting as little current as possible. The result is a highly accurate resistance reading.

You often hear the current carrying wires referred to as the force wires and the other pair as the sense wires. Typically the sense wires are placed between the two force wires to prevent any additional wire or trace resistance from influencing the measurement. When dealing with small measurements, it isn’t unusual to see the force wires much thicker than the sense wires. After all, the sense wires will carry very little current, but with a 0.01 Ω resistor under test the force wires will have quite a bit of current flowing.

Not just for Resistance

To recap, we wanted to measure a voltage, but were stymied by the voltage drop across the finite resistance of our current-carrying sense wires. Reducing the voltage drop, without resorting to jumper cables, means reducing the current flowing where we’re taking measurements, and the solution is to split into force wires and sense wires. Understanding the relationships intuitively about how changing one thing affects another can help you produce better designs.

This four-wire trick is useful even if you don’t want to measure resistance with precision. For example, high-current or high-accuracy regulated power supplies use the same trick. If your power supply measures voltage at the output terminals, it suffers from the same issues. Sure, you regulate to 5V at the output terminals. But a 1 Ω connector to the load drawing 2A means only 3V gets to the load!

The answer is the same. All regulated power supplies have some version of feedback coming in from the output. A remote sensing power supply will have a pair of small sense wires that connect directly to the load. Just like in the previous case, the sense wires carry very little current so they don’t suffer from as much measurement error. The voltage at the output terminals may be higher than you set the regulator, but the output across the load should be correct.

Many commercial meters — especially the bench type — offer a four-wire measurement option. Now you know how it works and why you’d use it.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Join us on Wednesday 5 June 2019 at noon Pacific for the Disrupting Cell Biology Hack Chat with Incuvers!

A lot of today’s most successful tech companies have creation myths that include a garage in some suburban neighborhood where all the magic happened. Whether there was literally a garage is not the point; the fact that modest beginnings can lead to big things is. For medical instrument concern Incuvers, the garage was actually a biology lab at the University of Ottawa, and what became the company’s first product started as a simple incubator project consisting of a Styrofoam cooler, a space blanket, and a Soda Stream CO2 cylinder controlled by an Arduino.

From that humble prototype sprang more refined designs that eventually became marketable products, setting the fledgling company on a course to make a huge impact on the field of cell biology with innovative incubators, including one that can image cell growth in real time. What it takes to go from prototype to product has been a common theme in this year’s Hack Chats, and Noah, Sebastian, and David from Incuvers will drop by Wednesday to talk about that and more.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday June 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

If you’ve been kind enough to accompany me on these regular hardware explorations, you’ve likely recognized a trend with regards to the gadgets that go under the knife. Generally speaking, the devices I take apart for your viewing pleasure come to us from the clearance rack of a big box retailer, the thrift store, or the always generous “AS-IS” section on eBay. There’s something of a cost-benefit analysis performed each time I pick up a piece of gear for dissection, and it probably won’t surprise you to find that the least expensive doggy in the window is usually the one that secures its fifteen minutes of Internet fame.

DKC500RW installed on right side.

But this month I present to you, Good Reader, something a bit different. This time I’m not taking something apart just for the simple joy of seeing PCB laid bare. I’ve been given the task of repairing an expensive piece of antiquated oddball equipment because, quite frankly, nobody else wanted to do it. If we happen to find ourselves learning about its inner workings in the process, that’s just the cost of doing business with a Hackaday writer.

The situation as explained to me is that in the late 1990’s, my brother’s employer purchased a Yamaha Mark II XG “Baby Grand” piano for somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000. This particular model was selected for its ability to play MIDI files from 3.5 inch floppy disks, complete with the rather ghostly effect of the keys moving by themselves. The idea was that you could set this piano up in your lobby with a floppy full of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits, and your establishment would instantly be dripping with automated class.

Unfortunately, about a month or so back, the piano’s Disklavier DKC500RW control unit stopped reading disks. The piano itself still worked, but now required a human to do the playing. Calls were made, but as you might expect, most repair centers politely declined around the time they heard the word “floppy” and anyone who stayed on the line quoted a price that simply wasn’t economical.

Before they resorted to hiring a pianist, perhaps a rare example of a human taking a robot’s job, my brother asked if he could remove the control unit and see if I could make any sense of it. So with that, let’s dig into this vintage piece of musical equipment and see what a five figure price tag got you at the turn of the millennium.

Beauty is Only Skin Deep

The look and feel of the DKC500RW reminds me of a DVD player from the early 2000s, back before they started selling them at grocery stores. It’s got a nice solid construction, and all of the buttons and controls feel pretty much like what you’d expect for a piece of gear that cost as much as a car. Yamaha made sure this thing had all the trappings of an expensive piece of electronics, at least externally.

On the inside though, it looks for all the world like a cheap VCR. The half-populated tan PCB and haphazard wire routing immediately reminded me of the dusty thrift store gadgets that I occasionally strip for components in the post-RadioShack era. In general, the inside of the device is sloppy and looks like it was thrown together at the last minute. Very disappointing.

One Size Fits Most

I wasn’t able to find any useful information from the various numbers on the silkscreen, but I get the distinct impression the main PCB in the DKC500RW would have been shared among other devices in the Disklavier family. In that case, the other PCB is something of an afterthought; a shim necessary to get the primary board working in this particular configuration. Certainly the differences in build quality and board complexity are night and day.

There’s also a large number of unused connectors, which would potentially link up to alternate control panels or storage devices. From the research my brother did, it seems that some of the control units featured optical drives and even hard disks. I’d love to get a look inside one of the higher-end models to see how they compare.

The star of the show here is the Hitachi SH7032, a 32-bit RISC processor running at 20 MHz. Incidentally, it looks like this chip (or at least a similar variant) is supported by Rockbox, an open source firmware for digital audio players. So if you’re looking for a challenge and see one of these control units at a swap meet, you might try your hand at getting it to run DOOM.

Looking around the board we also see an M38881M2, an 8-bit microcontroller from Mitsubishi, which is connected to a few 74AC574 flip-flops. It seems this chip is in charge of interfacing with the front panel controls on behalf of the SH7032. Next to the ribbon cable heading to the floppy drive, there’s also a HD63266F floppy disk drive controller. A lot of the other chips have their markings obscured, but it doesn’t seem like there’s many surprises to be had in any event.

The Floppy Root of the Problem

The first step to figuring out what was wrong with the DKC500RW was getting it powered on. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a pinout for the DE-15 connector that linked it to the host piano, nor did I know what voltage to give it. But I did see a LM7805 with a beefy heatsink on the main board, and after hooking the adjustable power supply to the input and ground legs, it fired up without any complaints.

I tried a few of the disks intended for the system, and sure enough the device reported they were unreadable. Even blank disks caused an immediate error message on the screen. Looking through the settings, I noticed it had a function to format the disk. Curious about what would happen, I gave it a blank disk and waited for it to finish. Once formatted, the DKC500RW recognized the disk immediately. Uh-oh.

You’re not fooling me, Yamaha.

Now there’s probably a large number of people reading this who’ve never worked with a floppy drive before, and wouldn’t know why this turn of events is significant. Basically, it’s not unheard of for a floppy drive to become so physically out of alignment that the only disks it can read are the ones it formatted itself. If you’ve got the magic touch it’s possible to realign a drive in this condition, but I don’t know anyone who’s ever pulled it off personally.

My brother had already got a quote of several hundred dollars for a replacement floppy drive from a company that still services these pianos, but looking at it, it didn’t seem like anything special to me. It appeared to be a basic laptop floppy drive, with some sort of pin-switching adapter attached to it. Taking it apart, I was eventually able to find markings on the drive that identified it as a Mitsumi D353F3. A replacement was sourced on eBay for the princely sum of $8 USD, and once installed, the DKC500RW was able to read every disk we threw at it.

Digital Archaeology

My brother took the DKC500RW back to his job, reinstalled it without issue, and now the sweet sounds of Copacabana can once again be heard wafting through the halls. He’s the big hero, and I toil away in obscurity. Such is life.

But there’s actually a bit more to the story than that. In the week or so it took the replacement drive to arrive, I started wondering if there was anything I could do with this stack of weirdo Yamaha MIDI disks before they had to go back. It turns out that as a rudimentary form of DRM, the disks have no boot sector or traditional file allocation table (FAT). Accordingly, any operating system that tries to mount them just sees them as corrupted.

However, with a hex editor and an amount of time I’d rather not admit to, I was able to figure out the structure of the disks. From there, I started work on a Python script which can list and extract the individual audio files from a disk image. In the exceedingly unlikely event you’re interested in ripping the MIDI files from your personal collection of Yamaha Disklavier 3.5 inch floppy disks, you can follow along with that project over at its Hackaday.io page.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

The works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes combined do not equal the genius of Rick And Morty. Actually, the word ‘genius’ is thrown around a bit too much these days. Rick and Morty has surpassed genius. This cartoon is sublime. It is beyond any art that could be created. Now, you might not have a high enough IQ to follow this, but Rick and Morty is, objectively, the best art that can be produced. It just draws upon so much; Rick’s drunken stammering is a cleverly hidden allusion to Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova, absolutely brilliantly providing the back-story to Rick’s character while never actually revealing anything. Now, you’re probably not smart enough to understand this, but Teenage Engineering is releasing a Rick and Morty Pocket Operator. Only the top percentages of IQs are going to understand this, but this is game-changing. Nothing like this has ever been done before.

The Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 is the high water mark of computer peripheral design. Originally released in 2003, the IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 was an instant classic. The design is nearly two decades old, but it hasn’t aged a day. That said, mouse sensors have gotten better in the years since, and I believe the original tooling has long worn out. Production of the original IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 stopped a long time ago. Microsoft tried to revive the IntelliMouse a few years ago using a ‘BlueTrack’ sensor that was ridiculed by the gaming community. Now Microsoft is reviving the IntelliMouse with a good sensor. The Pro IntelliMouse is on sale now for $60 USD.

It has come to my attention that wooden RFID cards exist. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone because wood veneer exists, thin coils of wire exist, and glue exists. That said, if you’re looking for an RFID card you can throw in the laser cutter for engraving, or you just want that special, home-made touch, you can get a wooden RFID card.

Lego has just released an Apollo Lunar Lander set, number 10266. It’s 1087 pieces and costs $99. This is a full-scale (or minifig-scale, whatever) Apollo LEM, with an ascent module detachable from the descent module. Two minifigs fit comfortably inside. Previously, the only full-scale (or, again, minifig-scale) Apollo LEM set was 10029, a Lego Discovery kit from 2003 (original retail price $39.99). Set 10029 saw a limited release and has since become a collectible: the current value for a new kit is $336. The annualized ROI of Lego set 10029-1 is 13.69%, making this new Apollo LEM set a very attractive investment vehicle. I’m going to say this one more time: Lego sets, and especially minifigs, are one of the best long-term investments you can make.

A Weinermobile is for sale on Craigslist. Actually, it’s not, because this was just a prank posted by someone’s friends. Oh, I wish I had an Oscar Mayer Weinermobile.

Rumors are swirling that Apple will release a new Mac Pro at WWDC this week. Say what you will about Apple, but people who do audio and video really, really like Apple, and they need machines with fast processors and good graphics cards. Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t build that anymore. The last good expandable mac was the cheese grater tower, retired in 2013 for the trash can pro. Will Apple manage to build a machine that can hold a video card?  We’ll find out this week.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Baltimore. The city was breached, crippled and held for ransom. The ransomware attack was discovered on May 7th, shutting down a major portion of the city’s infrastructure. The latest news is that an NSA-written tool, EternalBlue, is responsible for the attack. Except maybe it isn’t? First off, digging back through the history of an attack is challenging. It’s often hard to determine the initial attack vector with certainty.

The “initial attack vector” is the patient zero of the attack — how the first machine was compromised. An organization generally has a firewall separating the outside internet from the internal network. Once an attacker has found a way to access a machine inside the network, the separation is not nearly so strict. This takes many forms, but the most common is phishing. Close contenders are RDP and SMB (Remote Desktop and Windows File Sharing). A report at Ars Technica indicates that the initial vector into the Baltimore network was a phishing email.

The second step to consider is what’s called “lateral movement”, which describes an attacker using the compromised machine to target other machines in the organization. Often an attacker will have an entire toolkit of exploits to attempt to compromise other machines. One of the exploits used in this case was the same exploit contained in the NSA tool, EternalBlue. A clever program called psexec is usually part of any lateral movement campaign. While the exploit associated with EternalBlue was probably used to compromise a few of the machines on the Baltimore network, placing all the blame on the shoulders of the NSA is missing the point. The tool is only a small part of this attack.

MacOS and NFS Shares Inside Zipfiles

MacOS has a sometimes irritating feature, Gatekeeper, that only allows running signed binaries by default. The point of Gatekeeper is to prevent a user from running a malicious binary that has been downloaded from the internet. While it is sometimes an annoyance, it is helpful for some users. [Filippo Cavallarin] announced an exploit that completely bypasses Gatekeeper on the 24th. This exploit takes advantage of the fact that Gatekeeper considers network shares to be trustworthy, and doesn’t run the normal check before executing a binary located there. While interesting, this isn’t useful unless there is a way for an attacker to mount a malicious location as a network share. Enter the Mac’s ability to automatically mount network locations through the use of the /net path. The last piece of this puzzle is the fact that zip files can contain symbolic links. A zip file can be built with a link to the /net location, automounting an arbitrary NFS location. If binary files are located in this location, the OS will happily allow the user to execute those binaries whether signed or not.

This exploit may not be the most serious of the year, but it’s still a problem that needs fixing. [Filippo] contacted Apple back in February and disclosed the problem, even getting an assurance that they would fix it within 90 days. 90 days have passed, and Apple has begun ignoring his emails, so he has made the announcement and published steps to reproduce on his website.

There has been discussion in the comments of this column about vulnerability disclosure and publishing proof of concept code. This is a perfect example of why researchers publish their work. As far as [Filippo] knows, Apple has no intention of fixing the issue he discovered. He also has no reason to believe that no one else has stumbled on this discovery before he did. We mentioned EternalBlue above. The NSA discovered the SMB vulnerability that exploit targeted and used it silently for up to five years before it was stolen and finally disclosed to Microsoft and fixed. Make no mistake, public disclosures and proof of concepts get vulnerabilities fixed. For any given vulnerability, there is no guarantee that someone else hasn’t already found it.

Just a Little Document Leak

OK, maybe not so little. A Fortune 500 company, First American, managed to host millions of private documents in an accessible format. Imagine you upload a document to a company, and get a confirmation link that looks like “test.com/documents.php?id=0252234”. If you’re like me, you’re very curious what is at id=0252233. [Ben Shoval] is a real estate developer who apparently also wanted to know the answer to that question. To his surprise, millions of uploaded documents were available for anyone to view. He tried reaching out to First American, and when there was no response to his emails, he forwarded his findings on to Krebs on Security. After what was likely years of exposure, the database was finally taken offline Friday the 24th.

Walled Garden Monopolies

Staying on the Apple train, the App Store is pretty obviously a monopoly. Someone has finally asked whether it’s an illegal monopoly. As most of these questions go, it’ll take a drawn out court battle to decide. How is this security news? If the court finds that Apple has been violating antitrust laws, one possible remediation is to allow alternative app stores. While there is always the potential for a high quality alternative store like F-droid, sketchy app stores and downloaded are a real possibility. On the other hand, it would be nice to have an iOS app store that is compatible with the GPL.

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Mike Szczys is on a well-deserved vacation this week, so staff writer Dan Maloney joins managing editor Elliot Williams for a look at all the great hacks of the week. On this episode we’re talking about licensing fees for MIDI 2.0, a two-way fail while snooping on employees, and the potential for diagnosing Alzheimer’s with virtual reality. We also dive into the well-engineered innards of a robotic cheetah, a personal assistant safe enough for kids to use, and how listening to your monitor reveals more about you than you’d think. You don’t want to miss a space nerd’s quest for fire or a hacker’s guide to solder and soldering. And you’ve got to catch the story of a hapless hacker’s contact high from a vintage synthesizer. It’s quite a trip.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!



Direct download (56 MB of sweet, sweet audio)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 021 Show Notes: New This Week:

• Hackaday Superconference Tickets and Proposals are Live Right Now
• Off-Grid Solar Internet
• The $50 Ham
• Hacker Dosed with LSD While Restoring Historical Synth

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Please Meet ‘Capability Inquiry’, Part Of The MIDI 2.0 Standard
• Fail of the Week: How Not to do IoT Security
  • Get Your Internet Out of My Things
• Chatterbox Voice Assistant Knows To Keep Quiet For Privacy
• Robotic Cheetah Teaches a Motors Class
  • BuildIts in Progress: Hello There, Mini Cheetah
• Microphones Listen to Your… Monitor?
• • Tempest for Eliza

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • SerialPlot Does Exactly What You Think It Does
  • Go Back in Time with a Laser Cut Wood 3D Printer Kit
  • Easy DIY Gecko Tape
• Dan’s Picks:
  • A Stylish Solution for Bike Navigation
  • Piezoelectric Crystals Explained
  • Vintage Monoscope Tubes Generate Classic TV Test Patterns Once Again

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• There and Back Again: A Falcon 9 Launch Story
• The Fascinating World Of Solder Alloys And Metallurgy
  • What the Flux: How Does Solder Work Anyway?
  • Ask Hackaday: Get the Lead Out or Not?

Tags:  hackaday Columns  

Digital cameras have been around for forty years or so, and the first ones were built around CCDs. These were two-dimensional CCDs, and if you’ve ever looked inside a copier, scanner, or one of those weird handheld scanners from the 90s, you’ll find something entirely unlike what you’d see in a digital camera. Linear CCDs are exactly what they sound like — a single line of pixels. It’s great if you’re into spectroscopy, but these linear CCDs also have the advantage of having some crazy resolutions. A four-inch wide linear CCD will have thousands of pixels, and if you could somehow drag a linear CCD across an image, you would have a fantastic camera.

Many have tried, few have succeeded, and [heye.everts]’ linear CCD camera is the best attempt at making a linear CCD camera yet. It took a fuzzy picture of a tree, which is good enough for a proof of concept.

The linear CCD used in this project works something like an analog shift register. With a differential clock, you simply push values out of the CCD and feed them into an ADC. The driver board for this CCD uses a lot of current and the timings are a bit tricky but it does work with a Teensy 3.6. But that’s only one line of an image, you need to move that CCD too. For that, this project uses something resembling a homebrew CD drive. There’s a tiny stepper motor and a leadscrew dragging the CCD across the image plane. All of this is attached to the back of a Mamiya RZ67 camera body.

Does it work? Yes. Surprisingly yes. After a lot of work, an image of a tree was captured. This is an RGB CCD, and at the moment it’s only using one color channel, but it does work. It’s a proof of concept rendered in a 2000 x 3000 grayscale bitmap. The eventual goal is to build a 37.5 Megapixel medium format camera around this CCD, and the progress is looking great.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Tags:  the hackaday prize