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October 03, 2019
13:00
Saying Farewell To Another B-17 And Its Crew
» ‎ Hack a Day

The harsh reality of keeping historical airplanes airworthy and flying is that from time to time one will crash. Thus it was that on October 2nd a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress crash-landed after technical troubles. Incidentally, this is the very same airplane which we covered only a number of days ago. Painted to look like another B-17 of WWII (Nine-o-Nine, variant B-17G-30-BO), this late-model B-17G-85-DL aircraft wasn’t finished in time to join World War II, but instead spent its 74 years being a flying museum to these amazing airplanes.

Details about the cause of the crash are still scarce, but from radio communication between the crew and tower, it’s understood the B-17 was having having issues with the number 4 engine, which was seen sputtering and smoking by a witness. The airplane’s pilots tried to perform an emergency landing at Bradley International Airport, Connecticut, where it had taken off from only moments ago. Unfortunately the aircraft ran off the runway and struck a building, after which it burst into flames. The NTSB has indicated that they have dispatched a team to investigate the crash, and say that a preliminary report is likely two weeks away.

Of the thirteen people on board, seven died, with the remaining six surviving with injuries. One person on the ground was injured as well. The vintage bomber (civilian registration number N93012) has been all but completely destroyed in the fire, with only a section of the wing and tail remaining recognizable.

We feel terrible about such loss of life and hope the injured make a speedy recovery. The loss of yet another B-17 is also tough to swallow, as this leaves just ten airworthy B-17s. How long until we say farewell to this part of our history, with the final flight of a B-17, or its kin?

(Thanks to Pez for this update)

Tags: news
September 28, 2019
22:01
Chinese Radio Telescope Hopes to Find Exoplanets FAST
» ‎ Hack a Day

People who enjoy radio are constantly struggling to find a place to erect a bigger and better antenna. Of course it’s a different story and the most hardcore end of the spectrum: radio astronomers. The Chinese are ready to open up a new radio telescope called FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope). As the name implies, it is 500 meters in diameter which is about 1,600 feet — that five and a half American football fields or about four and half of the other kind of football field.

The new telescope will be the largest single-dish observatory in the world and will offer about twice the area of the next-largest single-dish instrument at Arecibo. The project is in a very remote location, presumably to reduce the level of local radio interference — it’s hard to find radio quiet zones in heavily populated areas.

Scientists hope the huge antenna will help solve the mystery of fast radio bursts and may even study exoplanets. In fact, earlier this year, the instrument detected hundreds of fast radio bursts from a source, many of which were too faint to be heard by lesser antennas. There are also plans to examine pulsars in an attempt to discover ripples in space-time. The location in the Dawodang depression of the Guizhou province uses about 4,400 panels and 2,000 mechanical winches to focus radio energy.

Other telescopes that use multiple dishes have more resolution and, in fact, FAST adds 3 dozen 5 meter commercial dishes to get an increase in resolution of 100 times. Of course, you could build your own, although to get up to 500 meters might be a stretch. If your backyard isn’t that big, you can build a tiny radio telescope too.

Tags: news
September 18, 2019
22:00
WiringPi Library To Be Deprecated
» ‎ Hack a Day

Since the release of the original Raspberry Pi single board computer, the WiringPi library by [Gordon] has been the easy way to interface with the GPIO and peripherals – such as I2C and SPI – on the Broadcom SoCs which power these platforms. Unfortunately, [Gordon] is now deprecating the library, choosing to move on rather than deal with a community which he no longer recognizes.

Among the points which he lists are the (commercial) abuse of his code, and the increasing amount of emails and messages on social media from folk who either failed to read the friendly manual, or are simply rude and inconsiderate. As [Gordon] puts it, WiringPi was never meant to be statically linked into code, nor to be used with anything other than C and RTB BASIC programmers. He never supported the use of the library with other languages, or having it statically integrated into some Java/JavaScript/NodeJS project.

As this secondary use is what’s draining the fun out of the project, he has decided to put out one final release, before making it a closed-source project, for use by himself and presumably paying clients. What the impact of this will be has to be seen. Perhaps a new fork will become the new ‘WiringPi’?

Suffice it to say, none of this is a good thing. The illegal use of open source code and the support nightmare that gets poured on the authors of said code by less than informed users is enough to drive anyone away from putting their projects out there. Fighting abuse and junking the ‘spam’ is one way to deal with it, but who has the time and energy (and money) for this?

What are your thoughts on this news, and this issue in general? How should an open source developer deal with it?

Thanks to [Dirk-Jan Faber] for sending this one in.

Tags: news
September 07, 2019
19:00
Anatomy Of A Power Outage: Explaining the August Outage Affecting 5% of Britain
» ‎ Hack a Day

Without warning on an early August evening a significant proportion of the electricity grid in the UK went dark. It was still daylight so the disruption caused was not as large as it might have been, but it does highlight how we take a stable power grid for granted.

The story is a fascinating one of a 76-second chain of unexpected shutdown events in which individual systems reacted according to their programming, resulted in a partial grid load shedding — what we might refer to as a shutdown. [Mitch O’Neill] has provided an analysis of the official report which translates the timeline into easily accessible text.

It started with a lightning strike on a segment of the high-voltage National Grid, which triggered a transient surge and a consequent disconnect of about 500MW of small-scale generation such as solar farms. This in turn led to a large offshore wind farm deloading itself, and then a steam turbine at Little Barford power station. The grid responded by bringing emergency capacity online, presumably including the Dinorwig pumped-storage plant we visited back in 2017.

Perhaps the most interesting part followed is that the steam turbine was part of a combined cycle plant, processing the heat from a pair of gas turbine generators. As it came offline it caused the two gas turbines feeding it to experience high steam pressure, meaning that they too had to come offline. The grid had no further spare capacity at this point, and as its frequency dropped below a trigger point of 48.8 Hz an automatic deloading began, in effect a controlled shutdown of part of the grid to reduce load.

This is a hidden world that few outside the high-power generation and transmission industries will ever see, so it’s very much worth a read. It’s something we’ve touched on before with the South American grid shutdown back in June, and for entirely different reasons in 2018 when an international disagreement caused the entire European grid to slow down.

Header image: Little Barford combined-cycle power station against the sunset. Tony Foster, (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Tags: news
September 05, 2019
2:57
Open Source Intel Helps Reveal US Spy Sat Capabilities
» ‎ Hack a Day

On the 30th August 2019, the President of the United States tweeted an image of an Iranian spaceport, making note of the recent failed Safir launch at the site. The release of such an image prompted raised eyebrows, given the high resolution of the image, and that it appeared to be a smartphone photo taken of a classified intelligence document.

Inquisitive minds quickly leapt on the photo, seeking to determine the source of the image. While some speculated that it may have been taken from a surveillance aircraft or drone, analysis by the satellite tracking community disagreed.
A comparison of the actual image, top, and a simulation of what a shot from USA 224 would look like. Ignore the shadows, which are from an image taken at a different time of day. Note the very similar orientation of the features of the launchpad.
The angle of shadows in the image was used to determine the approximate time that the image was taken. Additionally, through careful comparison with existing satellite images from Google Maps, it was possible to infer the azimuth and elevation of the camera. Positions of military satellites aren’t made public, but amateur tracking networks had data placing satellite USA 224 at a similar azimuth and elevation around the time the image was taken.

With both the timing and positioning pointing to USA 224, evidence seems conclusive that this KH-11 satellite was responsible for taking the image. The last confirmed public leak of a Keyhole surveillance image was in 1984, making this an especially rare occurrence. Such leaks are often frowned upon in the intelligence community, as nation states prefer to keep surveillance capabilities close to their chest. The Safir images suggest that USA 224 has a resolution of 10cm per pixel or better – information that could prove useful to other intelligence organisations.

It’s not the first time we’ve covered formerly classified information, either – this teardown of a Soviet missile seeker bore many secrets.

Tags: news
August 31, 2019
16:00
RISC-V Uses Carbon Nanotubes
» ‎ Hack a Day

In a recent article in Nature, you can find the details of a RISC-V CPU built using carbon nanotubes. Of course, Nature is a pricey proposition, but you can probably find the paper by its DOI number if you bother to look for it. The researchers point out that silicon transistors are rapidly reaching a point of diminishing returns. However, Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistors (CNFETs) overcome many of these disadvantages.

The disadvantage is that the fabrication of CNFETs has been somewhat elusive. The tubes tend to clump and yields are low. The paper describes a method that allowed the fabrication of a CPU with over 14,000 transistors. A wafer gets nanotubes grown all over it and then some of them are removed. In addition, some design rules mitigate other problems.

In particular, a small percentage of the CNFETs will become metallic and have little to no bandgap. However, the DREAM design rules can increase the tolerance of the design to metallic CNFETs with no process changes.

Before you get too excited, limitations in channel length and contact size keep the processor running at a blazing 10 kHz. To paraphrase Weird Al, your operating system boots in a day and a half. The density isn’t great either since working around stray and metallic CNFETs means each transistor has multiple nanotubes in use.

On the other hand, it works. New technology doesn’t always match old technology at first, but you have to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run.

We imagine you won’t be able to buy this for $8 any time soon even if you wanted to. At 10 kHz, it probably isn’t going to make much of a desktop PC anyway.

Tags: news
13:00
A Radio Transceiver From A Cable Modem Chipset
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s a staple of our community’s work, to make electronic devices do things their manufacturers never intended for them. Analogue synthesisers using CMOS logic chips for example, or microcontrollers that bitbang Ethernet packets without MAC hardware. One of the most fascinating corners of this field comes in the form of software defined radios (SDRs), with few of us not owning an RTL2832-based digital TV receiver repurposed as an SDR receiver.

The RTL SDR is not the only such example though, for there is an entire class of cable modem chipsets that contain the essential SDR building blocks. The Hermes-Lite is an HF amateur radio transceiver project that uses an AD9866 cable modem chip as the signal end for its 12-bit SDR transceiver hardware with an FPGA between it and an Ethernet interface. It covers frequencies from 0 to 38.4 MHz, has 384 kHz of bandwidth, and can muster up 5W of output power.

It’s a project that’s been on our radar for the past few years, though somewhat surprisingly this is the first mention of it here on Hackaday. Creator [Steve Haynal] has reminded us that version 2 is now a mature project on its 9th iteration, and says that over 100 “Hermes-Lite 2.0” units have been assembled to date. If you’d like a Hermes-Lite of your own it’s entirely open-source, and they organise group buys of the required components.

Of course, SDRs made from unexpected components don’t have to be exotic.

Tags: news
August 27, 2019
19:00
New Cray Will Reach 1.5 exaFLOPS
» ‎ Hack a Day

It wasn’t that long ago when hard drives that boasted a terabyte of capacity were novel. But impressive though the tera- prefix is, beyond that is peta and even further is exa — as in petabyte and exabyte. A common i7 CPU currently clocks in at about 60 gigaflops (floating point operations per second). Respectable, but today’s supercomputers routinely turn in sustained rates in the petaflop range, with some even faster. The Department of Energy announced they were turning to Cray to provide three exascale computers — that is, computers that can reach an exaflop or more. The latest of these, El Capitan, is slated to reach 1.5 exaFLOPS and will reside at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

The $600 million price tag for El Capitan seems pretty reasonable for a supercomputer. After all, a Cray I could only do 160 megaflops and cost nearly $8 million in 1977, or about $33 million in today’s money. So about 20 times the cost gets them over 9,000 times the compute power.

The computes use Cray’s Shasta architecture. Of course, at some point, it isn’t the computing but the communications which provides the limiting factor. Cray’s Slingshot connects the pieces of the computer together. The information about it on Cray’s website isn’t very technical, but we were struck with this passage:

Additionally, Shasta supports processors well over 500 watts, eliminating the need to do forklift upgrades of system infrastructure to accommodate higher-power processors.

We know we hate it when we want to upgrade our desktop and have to start up the forklift. Cray, of course, has a long history with supercomputers. You probably have a pretty good supercomputer hiding in your graphics card, by the way.

Tags: news
August 21, 2019
19:00
Largest Chip Ever Holds 1.2 Trillion Transistors
» ‎ Hack a Day

We get it, press releases are full of hyperbole. Cerebras recently announced they’ve built the largest chip ever. The chip has 400,000 cores and contains 1.2 trillion transistors on a die over 46,000 square mm in area. That’s roughly the same as a square about 8.5 inches on each side. But honestly, the WSE — Wafer Scale Engine — is just most of a wafer not cut up. Typically a wafer will have lots of copies of a device on it and it gets split into pieces.

According to the company, the WSE is 56 times larger than the largest GPU on the market. The chip boasts 18 gigabytes of storage spread around the massive die. The problem isn’t making such a beast — although a normal wafer is allowed to have a certain number of bad spots. The real problems come through things such as interconnections and thermal management.

The white paper is detailed while still managing to be a bit fuzzy. In addition to somehow solving the interconnect, packaging and thermal problems with using a whole wafer, the architecture of the cores is supposed to be amenable to sparse matrices and the specific types of algorithms necessary for deep learning.

There’s no word as yet on cost or specific availability, but we were hoping at least for an emulator. However, it is certainly big and if it lives up to its promise could drive new deep learning applications. We’ve seen neural network coprocessors before. We even had our own deep dive into them.

Tags: news
13:01
Russian Robot To Visit Space Station
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Russians were the first to send a dog into space, the first to send a man, and the first to send a woman. However, NASA sent the first humanoid robot to the International Space Station. The Russians, though, want to send FEDOR and proclaim that while Robonaut flew as cargo, a FEDOR model — Skybot F-850 — will fly the upcoming MS-14 supply mission as crew.

Defining the term robot can be tricky, with some thinking a proper robot needs to be autonomous and others seeing robotics under human control as enough. The Russian FEDOR robot is — we think — primarily a telepresence device, but it remains an impressive technical achievement. The press release claims that it can balance itself and do other autonomous actions, but it appears that to do anything tricky probably requires an operator. You can see the robot in ground tests at about the one minute mark in the video below.

The robot uses batteries from an Orlan spacesuit and will work in avatar mode — that is, requiring a human operator — during the initial flight. It is easy to see how using a remote control robot outside the station while the operator remains inside the station isn’t a bad idea.

The FEDOR robots were built for Earthbound rescue operations. However, there’s been a lot of interest in using it as a robotic astronaut. The Skybot F-850 has its own Twitter feed, too.

If you want to tour the ISS, you can from your PC or with some VR goggles. If outer space isn’t your thing, maybe you’d prefer the bottom of the ocean.

Tags: news
August 16, 2019
19:00
An (Almost) Free Apollo-Era Rocket
» ‎ Hack a Day

According to recent news reports, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama wants to give away a piece of history — an engineering test article of a Saturn I Block I booster. The catch? You’ll need to pay to haul it off, which will cost about $250,000. According to C|Net, the offer appears to be for museums and schools, but it’s likely that price tag would probably scare most private buyers off anyway.

On the other hand, if you are a museum, library, school, or university, you can score cheap or free NASA stuff using their GSAXcess portal. In general, you do have to pay shipping. For example, a flexible thermal blanket from the shuttle costs $37.28. A heat tile runs about $25.

The picture, by the way, is a 1965 shot of a test article at MSFC, so it is possible it is the very one that is up for grabs. You wouldn’t think there would be too many test articles still laying around from that era, so this is something of a rarity.

If you really want to buy old NASA gear — or possibly useful gear from other agencies — the GSA has several methods to take your money. A quick search on GSA Auctions found some sort of NASA control panel that was already up to about $1,300. On the other hand, a lot of two oscilloscopes (a Fluke and a Tektronix 425) was only up to $25. You can even buy a lighthouse, if you really want one.

Even though we’ve reported on the death of surplus, it is still around if you know where to look. While you might not find obsolete Russian tunnel diodes in a US gov’t auction, you might just find what you need. If what you need is a rocket engine.

Thanks for the tip [Allen M.]

Tags: news
August 03, 2019
1:00
Antenna Tuning For GHz Frequencies
» ‎ Hack a Day

Antenna tuning at HF frequencies is something that radio amateurs learn as part of their licence exam, and then hone over their time operating. A few basic instruments and an LC network antenna tuner in a box are all that is required, and everything from a bit of wet string to ten thousand dollars worth of commercial antenna can be loaded up and used to work the world. When a move is made into the gigahertz range though it becomes a little more difficult. The same principles apply, but the variables of antenna design are much harder to get right and a par of wire snippers and an antenna tuner is no longer enough. With a plethora of GHz-range electronic devices surrounding us there has been more than one engineer sucked into a well of doom by imagining that their antenna design would be an easy task.

An article from Baseapp then makes for very interesting reading. Titled “Antenna tuning for beginners“, it approaches the subject from the perspective of miniature GHz antennas for IoT devices and the like. We’re taken through the basics and have a look at different types of antennas and connectors, before being introduced to a Vector Network Analyser, or VNA. Here is where some of the Black Art of high frequency RF design is laid bare, with everything explained through a series of use cases.

Though many of you will at some time or other work with these frequencies it’s very likely that few of you will do this kind of design exercise. It’s hard work, and there are so many ready-made RF modules upon which an engineer has already done the difficult part for you. But it does no harm to know something about it, so it’s very much worth taking a look at this piece.

It’s an area we’ve ventured into before, at a Superconference a few years ago [Michael Ossmann] gave us a fundamental introduction to RF design.

Tags: news
July 12, 2019
19:00
You Are Probably Using NASA Technology
» ‎ Hack a Day

You often hear people — especially non-hacker types — complain that money spent on space travel would be better off spent here on Earth. Of course that ignores one big factor, that space programs have resulted in a host of spin off technologies, many of which you use every day. JPL has an infographic that covers twenty things we wouldn’t have without space travel, and while it could be said that some of these things might have been invented anyway it would doubtless have taken much longer without the necessity and the income from space programs. If you want more detail, Tech Briefs has an interesting interview on the subject of what tech spun off the Apollo program.

Some of the inventions are pretty obvious, and others are more refinements of things that already existed. We all knew NASA pioneered freeze drying for food, for instance. However, some of them are pretty surprising. For example, according to the infographic, NASA asking Black and Decker to develop a moon sample collector led to the Dust Buster.

We weren’t sure about some of the claims, as in when they seemed to be taking credit for the invention of the LED. However, on closer reading, they are claiming that special NASA-related LEDs are finding use in medical applications. We knew the story about how the computer mouse came to be, but we didn’t know there was a NASA connection.

Of course, every year about this time, we like to point out that the best spin off from space programs is kids awestruck by science and engineering. Tech Briefs is a good read even outside of the blog post on spin offs.

What’s your favorite of the NASA inventions? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: news
July 06, 2019
16:01
Earthquake Detection on a Chip
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve ever been in an earthquake you’d assume it would be pretty easy to detect one. If things are shaking, there’s an earthquake. In reality, though, a lot of things can shake a sensitive instrument that is detecting shaking, so — for example — mechanical sensors will produce a lot of false positives. Now, however, you can filter out errant vibrations and reliably detect earthquakes on a chip.

The Rohm BP3901 has two primary features. First, it supposedly eliminates false detections due to things like a heavy truck rumbling by. In addition, while most sensors must be mounted completely flat, the BP3901 has a compensation method for angle which lets you mount it as much as 15 degrees rotated in either direction and still get good results. That’s because the BP3901 is based on the combination of an accelerometer and a microcontroller in one package to detect movement, characterize it based on an algorithm and reacting through an I2C bus and an INT pin.

Rohm suggests you could power the BP3901 for about 5 years with two AA batteries with the example of averaging 10 three-minute wake up events a month. We aren’t sure why we want to detect an earthquake, but we think we do. Imagine a large sensor network sending back real-time data as an earthquake happens — something we saw last year using Raspberry Pi. That project used a Geophone as the detector, which could be replaced by this chip. Rohm plans to have “OEM quantities” for sale next month which we hope means we can get smaller quantities from distributors.

A lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about how to predict earthquakes, as we’ve seen before. Of interest, the ancient Romans may have had a way to deflect earthquakes, so they probably didn’t care as much about detecting them.

Tags: news
July 01, 2019
22:00
The Backbone Of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat
» ‎ Hack a Day

A story that has been on the burner for a few weeks concerns a proposal that will be advanced to the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference 2023. It originates with French spectrum regulators and is reported to be at the behest of the Paris-based multinational defence contractor Thales. The sting in its tail is the proposed relegation of amateur radio to secondary status of the widely used two-meter band (144 MHz) to permit its usage by aircraft. The machinations of global spectrum regulation politics do not often provide stories for Hackaday readers, but this one should be of concern beyond the narrow bounds of amateur radio.

Most parts of the radio spectrum are shared between more than one user, and there is usually a primary occupant and a secondary one whose usage is dependent upon not interfering with other users. If you’ve used 435 MHz radio modems you will have encountered this, that’s a band shared with both radio amateurs and others including government users. While some countries have wider band limits, the two-meter band between 144 MHz and 146 MHz is allocated with primary status to radio amateurs worldwide, and it is this status that is placed under threat. The latest ARRL news is that there has been little opposition at the pan-European regulator CEPT level, which appears to be causing concern among the amateur radio community.

Why should this bother you? If you are a radio amateur it should be a grave concern that a band which has provided the “glue” for so many vital services over many decades might come under threat, and if you are not a radio amateur it should concern you that a commercial defence contractor in one country can so easily set in motion the degradation of a globally open resource governed by international treaties penned in your grandparents’ time. Amateur radio is a different regulatory being from the licence-free spectrum that we now depend upon for so many things, but the principle of it being a free resource to all its users remains the same. If you have an interest in retaining the spectrum you use wherever on the dial it may lie, we suggest you support your national amateur radio organisation in opposing this measure.

Tags: news
June 28, 2019
4:00
Power To The Pi 4: Some Chargers May Not Make The Grade
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Raspberry Pi 4 has been in the hands of consumers for a few days now, and while everyone seems happy with their new boards there are some reports of certain USB-C power supplies not powering them. It has been speculated that the cause may lie in the use of pulldown resistors on the configuration channel (CC) lines behind the USB-C socket on the Pi, with speculation that one may be used while two should be required. Supplies named include some Apple MacBook chargers, and there is a suggestion is that the Pi may not be the only device these chargers fail to perform for.

Is this something you should be worried about? Almost certainly not. The Pi folks have tested their product with a wide variety of chargers but it is inevitable that they would be unable to catch every possible one. If your charger is affected, try another one.

What it does illustrate is the difficulties faced by anybody in bringing a new electronic product to market, no matter how large or small they are as an organisation. It’s near-impossible to test for every possible use case, indeed it’s something that has happened to previous Pi models. You may remember that the Raspberry Pi 2 could be reset by a camera flash or if you have a very long memory, that the earliest boards had an unseemly fight between two 1.8 V lines that led to a hot USB chip, and neither of those minor quirks dented their board’s ability to get the job done.

Mistakes happen. Making the change to USB-C from the relative simplicity of micro-USB is a big step for all concerned, and it would be a surprise were it to pass entirely without incident. We’re sure that in time there will be a revised Pi 4, and we’d be interested to note what they do in this corner of it.

Tags: news

June 27, 2019
8:47
US Government Cyber Security Still Inadequate
» ‎ Darknet

Surprise, surprise, surprise – an internal audit of the US Government cyber security situation has uncovered widespread weaknesses, legacy systems and poor adoption of cyber controls and tooling.

US Government security has often been called into question but we’d hope in 2019 it would have gotten better and at least everyone would have adopted the anti-virus solution introduced in 2013..

A committee report (PDF) examining a decade of internal audits this week concluded that outdated systems, unpatched software, and weak data protection are so widespread that it’s clear American bureaucrats fail to meet even basic security requirements.

Read the rest of US Government Cyber Security Still Inadequate now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: hacking news

June 25, 2019
7:30
Is 4 GB the Limit For The Raspberry Pi 4?
» ‎ Hack a Day

So you’ve rushed off to your favourite dealer in Raspberry Pi goodies and secured your shiny new Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe you’re anxiously waiting for the postie, or perhaps if you’re lucky enough to live near Cambridge you simply strolled into the Pi shop and bought one over the counter. You’ve got the best of the lot, the 4 GB model, and there’s nothing like the feeling of having the newest toy before everyone else does.
A scan of the Pi 4 user guide, with a tantalising 8GB at the bottom.
You open the box, pull out the Pi, and get busy. The instruction leaflet flutters to the floor, ignored and forgotten. If you’re our tipster [Eric van Zandvoort] though, you read it, notice something unexpected, and send a scan to your friends at Hackaday. Because there at the top, in the regulatory compliance information that nobody reads, is the following text:

Product name: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB + 8 GB variants.

It’s not the lack of an Oxford comma that caught his eye, but the tantalising mention of an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4. Could we one day see an extra model in the range with twice the memory? It would be nice to think so.

There are a couple of inevitable reactions when a new product comes out. First, everyone who has just bought the previous one will be upset, and second there will always be a group of people who say “Ah, don’t buy this one, wait for the super-duper upgrade model!” We’d like to suggest to anyone tempted into the latter group that this news should be no reason not to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 at the moment, because the prospect of an 8 GB variant should come as a shock to nobody.

It makes absolute sense that the Pi people will have equipped their SoC with as much address space as they can get into it, and equally as much sense that they will have fitted the final products with whatever memory chips keep it within their target price point. If you cast your mind back you’ll know that this isn’t the first time this has happened, early boards were shipped with 256 MB of RAM but later upgraded to 512 MB as the economics made it possible. Those with extreme knowledge of Pi trivia will also know that the original Model A was announced with 128 MB and released with 256 MB for the same reason.

There’s another question, would 8 GB make that much difference? The answer depends upon what you are doing with your Pi 4, but it’s worth remembering that this is no high-end workstation but a single-board computer with a stripped-down Linux distro for experimenters. You may be disappointed if you are pushing the limits of computational endeavour, but the majority of users will not be taxing Raspbian on the 4 GB model even if they install Chromium and open up all their favourite bloated social media sites. Perhaps we’ve become conditioned by the excessive demands of Windows on an x86 platform and forgotten just how powerful our computers really are. After all, as the apocryphal Bill Gates quote has it, “640k should be enough for anyone“, right?

We can look forward to an 8 GB Pi 4 then at some point in the future. We’d put our money on next year, since 2020 is a leap year and 2020-02-29 will be the Pi’s 2nd 8th birthday, it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to speculate around that date. But don’t bet on it, save your money for buying a 4 GB Pi 4 right now.

Tags: news
June 24, 2019
19:00
Small Lightsail Will Propel Cubesat
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you read science fiction, you are probably familiar with the idea of a light or solar sail. A very large and lightweight sail catches solar “wind” that accelerates a payload connected to the sail. Some schemes replace the sun with a laser. Like most things, sails have pros and cons. They don’t require you to carry fuel, but they are also maddeningly slow to accelerate and require huge sails since there isn’t much pressure produced by a star at a distance. So far not many real spacecraft have used the technique, IKAROS was the first back in 2010. However, this month should see the launch of a crowdfunded cubesat that will use a solar sail to move to a higher orbit.

The 5 kg satellite built by Georgia Tech students is about the size of a loaf of bread. Once in orbit, it will deploy solar panels and a square solar sail nearly 20 feet long on each side. Despite the nearly 350 square feet of area, the sail is less than 5 microns thick. You can see more details about the mission in the video below.

It is tempting to think of solar sails as a true analog to wind sails, but the analogy only goes so far. Tacking with a sailboat depends on the interaction between the wind pressure above and water pressure below. In space, there’s no other pressure to work with. However, according to the Solar Sails Wiki, you can change the angle of attack on the sail to cause your orbit around the sun to get bigger or smaller, which is a bit like tacking.

Since light pressure can constantly accelerate a sailing vehicle, you can achieve interstellar speeds with some patience. Then again, some people think alien light sails are already whizzing through our solar system.

Tags: news
June 23, 2019
1:00
Home Made Gears Save This Shredder
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s very likely that a majority of readers will have had a gear fail in a piece of equipment, causing it to be unrepairable. This is a problem particularly with plastic gears, which shed teeth faster than a child who has discovered the financial returns of the Tooth Fairy.

[BcastLar] has a shredder with a gear that has, well, shredded. He’s posted a video series over three parts that while ostensibly about fixing his shredder, is in reality a three-part tutorial on how to create custom gears using FreeCAD. While the principles of a gear are readily apparent to most observers their intricacies hide significant complexity which he does a great job of explaining. How to measure the parameters of a given gear, explaining mysteries such as pitch angle or beta, he breaks everything down in easy to understand steps.

His tool of choice is FreeCAD, and while he explains that FreeCAD has the ability to make gears from scratch the tool employed in the videos is the Gear Workbench plugin. He shows how this software removes the complexity of creating a gear, and shows the process on his screen as he creates the custom shredder part.

Finally, the process of 3D printing the gear is explained. You might ask why not machine it, to which he responds that tooling for non-standard gear profiles is prohibitively expensive. We’ve placed all three videos below the break, and we think you might want to make yourself a cup of tea or something and work through them.

Thanks [Andy Pugh] for the tip.

Tags: news
June 21, 2019
13:00
New Part Day: This $10 Rocking Single Board Computer Does Everything You Want
» ‎ Hack a Day

Single board computers are great, but what we really need are cheap single board computers. Running Linux on anything isn’t as good as running Linux on everything, and all that. To that end, here is the Rock Pi S, a $10 single board computer with Ethernet, WiFi, and it costs $10.

This one comes from the boffins at Radxa, already behind the footnote-worthy Rock Pi 4, a single board computer that appears to be heavily derived from the Raspberry Pi but with a 4 in the name so it’s obviously better. It also has 4 GeeBees of RAM, so it’s got that going for it too. Their latest product is the Rock Pi S, a board that seems as though it’s taking inspiration from the C.H.I.P.. The biggest selling point is of course the price: $10 for the version with 256MB of RAM and without WiFi or Bluetooth. Various other incarnations exist with permutations of 256MB or 512MB of RAM, and with or without WiFi and Bluetooth. The highest spec variant costs $16, but is sold out at the moment.

This tiny little single board computer fills a need in the marketplace; the Raspberry Pi Zero is cheap and small when it’s available, but sometimes you need Ethernet for various reasons and a real USB A port is great to have. We’re looking forward to the builds this tiny board enables and all the fantastic creations that will come from a community so very interested in single board computers.

Tags: news
June 18, 2019
16:00
Morse Code Catches Google Swiping Lyrics
» ‎ Hack a Day

We think of Morse code in terms of dots and dashes, but really it’s a kind of binary code. Those symbols might as well be 0s and 1s or any other pair of characters. That attribute is exactly what led to a sting operation a music lyric site called Genius.com pulled on Google. At issue was a case of song lyrics that had allegedly been stolen by the search giant.

Song lyric sites — just like Google — depend on page views to make revenue. The problem is that in a Google search the lyrics appear on the search page, so there is no longer much incentive to continue to the song lyric site. That’s free enterprise for you, right? It is, but there was a problem. It appears that Google — or, according to Google, one of their partners — was simply copying Genius.com’s lyrics. How does Genius know the song lyrics were copied? According to news reports in the Wall Street Journal and other sources, they used Morse code.

The company first became suspicious when they approached an artist for lyrics that are apparently difficult to understand, and once they had published them they found Google also had the correct lyrics. That’s not proof, of course, but the next step is where they got tricky. They used straight and curly quotes as dots and dashes to embed a Morse code message in several lyrics. The message? REDHANDED.

The quote patterns then reportedly started also appearing in Google search results. Legally though the picture is a little confusing, after all Genius doesn’t own the lyrics in question. It does remain pretty bad form though to take content from other web sites and use it to starve the same web site from traffic.

Google’s statements claim that the lyrics were sourced from a third party called LyricFind and that they would act against any supplier violating their agreements with the company. LyricFind responded to the Wall Street Journal article saying that Genius gets user-generated content which may originate elsewhere and that others may be scraping Genius data into sources that LyricFind then uses.

We aren’t lawyers, so we won’t really comment on the validity of either side’s case. But we did think it was interesting that the sting put Morse code and steganography to practical use.

Photo credit: Cassi Stewart

Tags: news
June 14, 2019
16:00
Bringing Pneumatics To The Masses With Open Source Soft Robotics
» ‎ Hack a Day

Soft robotics is an exciting field. Mastering the pneumatic control of pliable materials has enormous potential, from the handling of delicate objects to creating movement with no moving parts. However, pneumatics has long been overlooked by the hacker community as a mode of actuation. There are thousands of tutorials, tools and products that help us work with motor control and gears, but precious few for those of us who want to experiment with movement using air pressure, valves and pistons.

Physicist and engineer [tinkrmind] wants to change that. He has been developing an open source soft robotics tool called Programmable Air for the past year with the aim of creating an accessible way for the hacker community to work with pneumatic robotics. We first came across [tinkrmind]’s soft robotics modules at World Maker Faire in New York City in 2018 but fifty beta testers and a wide range of interesting projects later — from a beating silicone heart to an inflatable bra — they are now being made available on Crowd Supply.

We had the chance to play with some of the Programmable Air modules after this year’s Makerfaire Bay Area at Bring A Hack. We can’t wait to see what squishy, organic creations they will be used for now that they’re out in the wild.

If you need more soft robotics inspiration, take a look at this robotic skin that turns teddy bears into robots from Yale or these soft rotating actuators from Harvard.

See a video of the Programmable Air modules in action below the cut.

Tags: news
June 11, 2019
13:35
The Day Hackaday’s Theme Was Broken
» ‎ Hack a Day

Today at about 10:00 AM Pacific time, Hackaday’s site host had an outage. All websites on the WordPress VIP Go platform were down, and that includes Hackaday. For about 45 minutes you couldn’t load any content, and for a bit more than two hours after that all we could display was a default WordPress theme with an alarmingly bright background.

At first, we were looking at a broken home page with nothing on it. We changed some things around on the back end and we had a black text on white background displaying our latest articles. Not ideal, but at least you could catch up on your reading if you happened to check in right at that time.

But wait! Unintended consequences are a real drag. Our theme doesn’t have comments built into the front page and blog page views, but the WordPress stock themes do. So comments left on those pages were being blasted out to your RSS feeds. I’d like to apologize for that. Once it was reported, we turned off comments on those pages and deleted what was there. But if you have a caching RSS reader you’ll still see those, sorry about that.

As I type this, all should be back to normal. The front end was restored around 1:00 PM Pacific time. We’ve continued our normal publishing schedule throughout, and we hope you have had a good laugh at this debacle. It might be a few days before I’m able to laugh about it though.

Tags: news
June 06, 2019
1:00
Infineon Buys Cypress For $10B
» ‎ Hack a Day

Infineon will acquire Cypress Semiconductors for nearly $10 Billion dollars. This is the latest merger or acquisition in the semiconductor industry, and these mergers and acquisitions show no sign of stopping anytime soon.

Infineon’s market currently consists mostly of products aimed at the automotive market and power management and control. Cypress, likewise, has a wide portfolio of automotive electronics, from the guts of instrument clusters to the brains of infotainment systems. The automotive electronics industry is going gangbusters right now, and companies in the market are flush with cash; Infineon acquiring Cypress allows both companies to focus their R&D to develop products for the same market.

As with all mergers and acquisitions, there is the question of what may be lost, or what may go out of production. Cypress is most famous for their PSOC microcontrollers, but for now those uCs, and their CapSense capability, seem safe. Cypress is also noteworthy for manufacturing old-school memories, but again it looks like you’ll still be able to buy these years down the line; in any event, Alliance memory is still around stuffing DRAMs in DIPs.

This acquisition of Cypress by Infineon is one of the largest in recent memory. Apple recently bought a $600 Million stake in Dialog, and Microchip acquired Microsemi for $8.35 Billion. Tesla bought Maxwell Technologies for a mere $218 Million. This deal between Infineon and Cypress puts the company in the upper echelon of recent mergers and acquisitions.

Tags: news
May 31, 2019
1:00
Making Autonomous Racing Drones Lean And Mean
» ‎ Hack a Day

Recently the MAVLab (Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory) at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands proudly proclaimed having made an autonomic drone that’s a mere 72 grams in weight. The best part? It’s designed to take part in drone races. What this means is that using a single camera and onboard processing, this little drone with a diameter of 10 centimeters has to navigate the course, while avoiding obstacles.

To achieve this goal, they took an Eachine trashcan drone, replacing its camera with an open source JeVois smart machine vision camera and the autopilot software with the Paparazzi open UAV software. Naturally, scaling a racing drone down to this size came at an obvious cost: with its low-quality sensors, relatively low-quality camera and limited processing power compared to its big brothers it has to rely strongly on algorithms that compensate for drift and other glitches while racing.

Currently the drone is mainly being tested at a four-gate race track at TU Delft’s Cyberzoo, where it can fly multiple laps at a leisurely two meters per second, using its gate-detecting algorithms to zip from gate to gate. By using machine vision to do the gate detection, the drone can deal with gates being displaced from their position indicated on the course map.

While competitive with other, much larger autonomous racing drones, the system is still far removed from the performance of human-controlled racing drones. To close this gap, MAVLab’s [Christophe De Wagter] mentions that they’re looking at improving the algorithms to make them better at predictive control and state estimation, as well as the machine vision side. Ideally these little drones should be able to be far more nimble and quick than they are today.

See a video of the drone in action after the link.

Tags: news
May 28, 2019
19:00
Please Meet ‘Capability Inquiry’, Part Of The MIDI 2.0 Standard
» ‎ Hack a Day

It may have passed you by in the news, but the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) has recently unveiled more details about the upcoming MIDI 2.0 standard. Previously we covered the prototyping phase start of this new standard. The original Musical Instrument Digital Interface standard was revealed all the way back in August of 1983, as a cooperation between companies including Moog Music, Roland, Yamaha, Korg, Kawai and others. It was the first universal interface that allowed one to connect and control all kinds of musical instruments.

Over the years, MIDI has seen use with the composing of music, allowing instruments to be controlled by a computer system and to easily share compositions between composers. Before MIDI such kind of control was limited to a number of proprietary interfaces, with limited functionality.

The MMA lists the key features of MIDI 2.0 as: Bidirectional, Backwards Compatible, and the enhancing of MIDI 1.0 where possible. Using a new technology called MIDI Capability Inquiry (MIDI-CI), a MIDI 2.0 device can exchange feature profiles and more with other 2.0 devices. 1.0 is the fallback if MIDI-CI finds no new functionality. MIDI-CI-based configuration can allow 2.0 devices to automatically configure themselves for their environment.

Suffice it to say, MIDI 2.0 is a far cry from the original MIDI standard. By transforming MIDI into a more versatile, bidirectional protocol, it opens new ways in which it can be used to tie musical devices and related together. It opens the possibility of even more creative hacks, many of which were featured on Hackaday already. What will you make with MIDI 2.0?

See a brief demonstration of this feature of MIDI 2.0 in the below video:

Tags: news
May 23, 2019
13:00
Student Rocket Makes It To Space
» ‎ Hack a Day

Where does the Earth’s atmosphere stop and space begin? It is tempting to take the approach Justice Potter Stewart did for pornography when judging a 1964 obscenity case and say “I know it when I see it.” That’s not good enough for scientists, though. The Kármán line is what the World Air Sports Federation (FAI) defines as space. That line is 100 km (62 miles or about 330,000 feet) above sea level. A recent student-built rocket — Traveler IV — claims to be the first entirely student-designed vehicle to pass that line.

The students from the University of Southern California launched the rocket from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The new record is over twice as high as the old record, set by the same team. The rocket reached approximately 340,000, although the margin of error on the measurement is +/- 16,800 feet, so there’s a slight chance they didn’t quite cross the line.

As you might guess from the name, there were three other Traveler rockets. The 3rd one blew up spectacularly as rockets sometimes do. The other two also blew up, although somewhat less spectacularly. The successful rocket was 13 feet tall and 8 inches in diameter. The 11 minute flight accelerated at over 17gs to a top speed of 4,970 feet/second which is over Mach 5.

The line, by the way, is not universally accepted. NASA and the US Air Force award outer space wings at 50 miles above sea level — the rocket definitely crossed that line. We don’t think our water rockets will get there. The first man-made object to reach space, by the way, was the V2 rocket.

Photo credit: [Neil Tweksbury] via USCViterbi web site.

Tags: news
May 22, 2019
19:00
Wolfram Engine Now Free… Sort Of
» ‎ Hack a Day

You’ve probably used Wolfram Alpha and maybe even used the company’s desktop software for high-powered math such as Mathematica. One of the interesting things about all of Wolfram’s mathematics software is that it shares a common core engine — the Wolfram Engine. As of this month, the company is allowing free use of the engine in software projects. The catch? It is only for preproduction use. If you are going into production you need a license, although a free open source project can apply for a free license. Naturally, Wolfram gets to decide what is production, although the actual license is pretty clear that non-commercial projects for personal use and approved open source projects can continue to use the free license. In addition, work you do for a school or large company may already be covered by a site license.

Given how comprehensive the engine is, this is reasonably generous. The engine even has access to the Wolfram Knowledgebase (with a free Basic subscription). If you don’t want to be connected, though, you don’t have to be. You just won’t be able to get live data. If you want to play with the engine, you can use the Wolfram Cloud Sandbox in which you can try some samples.

If this were just another language it might be interesting, especially since it can do so much with math. but the real power is how it interprets things and can draw data from a variety of sources. For example, this query for flags of European countries:
A Wolfram query for flags of European countries.
There is no special library or database required. It just happens to know what a country is and what flag each country has and what “European” means. Naturally, it can read data from the web, make charts, and even do machine learning. If you’ve had trouble following machine learning code before, try this animal image recognition example:
Distinguishing between predators, with Wolfram.
We covered when the Wolfram language emerged in 2013. If you really have a thing for the notebook style of programming there is always Mathics, Jupyter, and even Fortran.

Tags: news
May 20, 2019
4:00
Wing Opens the Skies for Drones With UTM
» ‎ Hack a Day

Yesterday Alphabet (formerly known as Google) announced that their Wing project is launching delivery services per drone in Finland, specifically in a part of Helsinki. This comes more than a month after starting a similar pilot program in North Canberra, Australia. The drone design Wing has opted for consists not of the traditional quadcopter design, but a hybrid plane/helicopter design, with two big propellers for forward motion, along with a dozen small propellers on the top of the dual body design, presumably to give it maximum range while still allowing the craft to hover.

With a weight of 5 kg and a wingspan of about a meter, Wing’s drones are capable of lifting and carrying a payload of about 1.5 kg. This puts it into a category of drones far beyond of what hobbyists tend to fly on a regular basis, and worse, it involves Beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS for short) flying, which is frowned upon by the FAA and similar regulatory bodies. What Google/Alphabet figures that can enable them to make this kind of service a commercial reality is called Unmanned aircraft system Traffic Management (UTM).

UTM is essentially complementary to the existing air traffic control systems, allowing drones to integrate into these flows of manned airplanes without endangering either. Over the past years, it’s been part of NASA’s duty to develop the systems and infrastructure that would be required to make UTM a reality. Working together with the FAA and companies such as Amazon and Alphabet, the hope is that before long it’ll be as normal to send a drone into the skies for deliveries and more as it is today to have passenger and cargo planes with human pilots take to the skies.

Tags: news
May 06, 2019
4:00
Color-Tunable LEDs Open Up Possibilities Of Configurable Semiconductors
» ‎ Hack a Day

The invention of the blue LED was groundbreaking enough to warrant a Nobel prize. For the last decade, researchers have been trying to take the technology to the next level by controlling the color of emission while the device is in operation. In a new research paper, by the guys over Osaka University, Lehigh University, the University of Amsterdam and West Chester University have presented a GaN LEDs that can be tuned to emit different colors from the same substrate.

GaN or Gallium nitride is a wide band-gap semiconductor that has been employed in the manufacturing of FETs that are known to have higher power density due to its high thermal capacity while increasing efficiency. In the the case of the tunable LED, the key has been the doping with Europium for creating energy bands. When an electron jumps from a higher band to a lower band, it emits energy in the form of light and the wavelength or color depends on the gap of energy jumped as per Plank-Einstein equation.

By controlling the current density and duty cycle, the energy jumps can be controller thereby controlling the color being emitted. This is important since it opens up the possibility of control of LEDs post production. External controllers could be used with the same substrates i.e. same LEDs to make a lamp of different intensity as well as color without needing different doping for R,G and B emissions. The reduction in cost as well as size could be phenomenal and could pave the way for similar semiconductor research.

We have covered the details of the LED in the past along with some fundamentals on the control techniques. We are hoping for some high speed color accurate displays in the future that don’t break the bank on our next gaming build.

Thanks for the tip [Qes]

Tags: news
April 30, 2019
4:00
Fritzing Is Back, And This Time It’s Written In JavaScript!
» ‎ Hack a Day

Fritzing has been stuck in the mud for just over a year now. There were no updates for many months, and members of the community wondered what was going on. Now, things might be turning around: Fritzing is being rebooted by community members, and there’s a roadmap of upcoming features.

The biggest takeaway from the GitHub discussion is that there simply aren’t enough developers for Fritzing. Fritzing is written in C++ and Qt, and there simply aren’t enough skilled devs to work on it. Future versions of Fritzing will be written in JavaScript.

Other developments in store for Fritzing include clearing out the number of open issues, making a new alpha, generally clean up the entire codebase, and prepare for a release. To that end, there’s also the Freetzing community to rebase the entire project with an emphasis on modularity.

Yes, Fritzing died a terrible death due to legal and funding issues. That still doesn’t mean Fritzing isn’t a valuable tool, though. With these new developments, and entirely new generation of hardware makers can dip their toes into the world of hardware development the easy way, and an entirely new generation of Open Source developers can work on making Fritzing the best tool it can be. There’s never been a better time to get started in Fritzing.

Tags: news
April 26, 2019
16:00
Making A Three Cent Microcontroller Useful
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Padauk PMS150C is a terrible microcontroller. There are only six pins, there’s only one kiloword of Flash, 64 bytes of RAM, and it doesn’t do multiplication. You can only write code to this chip once, and the IDE uses 8-bit ints. [Anders] got his hands on some of these chips and decided to do something useful with them. It turns out that you can do a lot with minimal hardware, such as driving 300 RGB LEDs with a three cent microcontroller.

There’s some work trying to make an Open Source toolchain for these chips, but [Anders] decided to just go with the manufacturer IDE and programmer. What to do with a three cent microcontroller, though? Obviously something blinky. [Anders] connected this microcontroller to a strip of Neopixels, or WS2812Bs, but instead of driving them by giving each pixel a few bytes of RAM, the entire strip is being bitbanged one bit at a time. It’s some clever code, and even if [Anders] won’t be able to send images to a gigantic graphic display made of Neopixels, it’s still a neat trick.

At three cents and nearly zero associated hardware, this is the cheapest microcontroller we’ve ever seen. Even the minimalist PIC and AVR parts are on the orders of dozens of cents per part, and they still only have the functionality of this three-cent part. The manufacturer’s page has more details on the microcontroller itself including the data sheet, and you can check out the sizzle reel of this project below.

Tags: news
April 25, 2019
19:00
Scientists Create Speech From Brain Signals
» ‎ Hack a Day

One of the things that makes us human is our ability to communicate. However, a stroke or other medical impairment can take that ability away without warning. Although Stephen Hawking managed to do great things with a computer-aided voice, it took a lot of patience and technology to get there. Composing an e-mail or an utterance for a speech synthesizer using a tongue stick or by blinking can be quite frustrating since most people can only manage about ten words a minute. Conventional speech averages about 150 words per minute. However, scientists recently reported in the journal Nature that they have successfully decoded brain signals into speech directly, which could open up an entirely new world for people who need assistance communicating.

The tech is still only lab-ready, but they claim to be able to produce mostly intelligible sentences using the technique. Previous efforts have only managed to produce single syllables, not entire sentences.

The researchers worked with five people who had electrodes implanted on the surface of their brains as part of epilepsy treatment. Using the existing electrodes, the scientists recorded activity while the subjects read out loud. They also included data on physiological production of sound during speech. Deep learning correlated the brain signals with vocal tract motion and could then map brain patterns to sounds.

The results are not perfect, but 70% of the produced sentences were understood by test subjects — although the subjects had to pick words from a list, not just listen arbitrarily. Oddly, while the results were not quite as good, the process worked even if people read while moving their lips but not making actual sounds.

It appears that the training is specific to the speaker. The paper even says “…in patients with severe paralysis… training data may be very difficult to obtain.” It’s possible that this could limit its usefulness for people who already can’t speak, which coupled with the poor quality of the speech means this work remains unlikey to change anyone’s life in the immediate future. However, it is a great first step to both helping people with speech problems and of course for the dystopian future with that eventual brain interface that will supplant the cell phone.

This is more scientific than the last time we saw a brainwave talking apparatus. If you want to influence your brainwaves instead of reading them, we have been experimenting with that.

Tags: news
4:00
The Galaxy Fold, Or Why Flexible OLED May Not Yet Be Ready For Prime Time
» ‎ Hack a Day

Samsung’s fancy new high-end smartphone with a flexible, foldable OLED display has been failing in worrying numbers for the first reviewers who got their hands on one. Now iFixit has looked into the issue using their considerable amount of smartphone tear-down experience to give their two cents. They base many of their opinions on the photos and findings by the Verge review, who were one of the (un)lucky ones to have their unit die on them.

The Galaxy Fold was supposed to be this regular smartphone sized phone which one can open up fully to reveal a tablet-sized display inside. The use of a flexible OLED display was supposed to create a seamless display without the annoying center line that having two individual displays would produce. Unfortunately it’s this folding feature which produces issues.

As iFixit notes, OLEDs are rather fragile, with their own tear-downs of regular OLED-equipped devices already often resulting in the damaging of the display edges, which spells doom for the internals of them as oxygen and other contaminants can freely enter. This means that maintaining this barrier is essential to keep the display functioning.

This is probably the reason why Samsung chose to install a screen protector on the display, which unfortunately was mistaken for a protective foil as found on many devices. The subsequent removal of this protector by some reviewers and the mechanical stress this caused destroyed some screens. Others had debris trapped in the fold between both halves of the display, which caused visible bumps in the display when opened.

The relatively massive spacing between the hinge and the display seems almost purposefully engineered to allow for the ingress of debris. This combines with the lack of any guiding crease in the center of the display and the semi-random way in which humans open and close the Fold compared to the perfectly repeating motion of the folding robots Samsung used to test the display. It seems that Samsung and others still have some work to do before they can call folding OLED displays ready for production.

Finally, have a look at this video of Lewis from UnboxTherapy pulling a folding robot with opening and closing a Fold one-thousand times:

Tags: news
April 24, 2019
4:00
Stealing DNA By Phone
» ‎ Hack a Day

Data exfiltration via side channel attacks can be a fascinating topic. It is easy to forget that there are so many different ways that electronic devices affect the physical world other than their intended purpose. And creative security researchers like to play around with these side-effects for ‘fun and profit’.

Engineers at the University of California have devised a way to analyse exactly what a DNA synthesizer is doing by recording the sound that the machine makes with a relatively low-budget microphone, such as the one on a smart phone. The recorded sound is then processed using algorithms trained to discern the different noises that a particular machine makes and translates the audio into the combination of DNA building blocks the synthesizer is generating.

Although they focused on a particular brand of DNA Synthesizers, in which the acoustics allowed them to spy on the building process, others might be vulnerable also.

In the case of the DNA synthesizer, acoustics revealed everything. Noises made by the machine differed depending on which DNA building block—the nucleotides Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), or Thymine (T)—it was synthesizing. That made it easy for algorithms trained on that machine’s sound signatures to identify which nucleotides were being printed and in what order.

Acoustic snooping is not something new, several interesting techniques have been shown in the past that raise, arguably, more serious security concerns. Back in 2004, a neural network was used to analyse the sound produced by computer keyboards and keypads used on telephones and automated teller machines (ATMs) to recognize the keys being pressed.

You don’t have to rush and sound proof your DIY DNA Synthesizer room just yet as there are probably more practical ways to steal the genome of your alien-cat hybrid, but for multi-million dollar biotech companies with a equally well funded adversaries and a healthy paranoia about industrial espionage, this is an ear-opener.

We written about other data exfiltration methods and side channels and this one, realistic scenario or not, it’s another cool audio snooping proof of concept.

Tags: news
April 22, 2019
1:00
RIP Rex Garrod, Creator Extraordinaire
» ‎ Hack a Day

Earlier this month, the youth motocross champion, special effects creator, inventor, TV presenter, and Robot Wars competitor, [Rex Garrod] died at the age of 75 after a long battle with dementia. We do not often carry obituaries here at Hackaday, and it’s possible that if you are not a Brit you may not have heard of [Rex], but his work in the time before YouTube would have made him an international must-watch star had he been operating in the age of on-demand Internet video.

I first became aware of Rex when he appeared as assistant to [Tim Hunkin] on his Secret Life of Machines TV series in the late 1980s. He was the man whose job we all wanted, making the most incredible machines and operating them for our entertainment. Our Hardware heroes tribute to [Tim] has a picture of him operating the needle on a giant mock-up of a sewing machine, but he appeared in many more episodes. Of the many tributes to [Rex] that have appeared over the last few days it is [Tim]’s one that probably says the most about his appeal to our community. His propensity for picking up interesting parts from junkyards strikes a chord, and the tale of hugely overpowering car wiper motors by allowing them to be submerged in water is pure genius.

To a slightly younger generation he is best known for his appearances in the British Robot Wars series‘ with his Cassius series of fighting robots. He created one of the first really potent flipper robots in UK robotic combat, and incidentally the first effective self-righting mechanism. As one of the many members of the SMIDSY team that didn’t appear on the recorded TV series’ I encountered him only peripherally, but I remember his work being a major influence on SMIDSY’s run-any-way-up design. Meanwhile for a younger generation still he created the models for the popular children’s TV character Brum, an anthropomorphised scale-model Austin 7 car.

We’ll leave you with a couple of videos featuring [Rex]. The first is from The Secret Life of Machines, in which along with [Tim] he helps explain electronics from first principles, while the second is a fan-created medley of his Robot Wars appearances. Rest in peace [Rex], and thank you.

Tags: news
April 19, 2019
1:00
Forget Artificial Intelligence; Think Artificial Life
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you are a science fiction fan, you are probably aware of one of the genre’s oddest dichotomies. A lot of science fiction is concerned about if a robot, alien, or whatever is a person. However — sometimes in the same story — finding life is as easy as asking the science officer with a fancy tricorder. If you go to Mars and meet Marvin, it is pretty clear he’s alive, but faced with a bunch of organic molecules, the task is a bit harder. Now it is going to get harder still because Cornell scientists have created a material that has an artificial metabolism and checks quite a few boxes of what we associate with life. You can read the entire paper if you want more detail.

Three of the things people look for to classify something as alive is that it has a metabolism, self-arranges, and reproduces. There are other characteristics, depending on who you ask, but those three are pretty crucial.

The material is a biomaterial that emerges from its building blocks and arranges itself – first into polymers and eventually tiny shapes. Starting from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, the DNA molecules were multiplied to create tiny chains of repeating DNA.

The material was placed in a flow of chemicals — the equivalent of food for the synthetic beast — the DNA synthesized its own new strands, with the front end of the material growing and the tail end degrading simultaneously. The effect is that the “creature” moves against the flow like a slime mold does.

If you’ve just invented fake life and it will move, what do you do? Race them against each other, of course. That’s exactly what they did — you can’t make this stuff up.

Although the material uses instructions coded with DNA, it is still pretty crude, only lasting a few generations for now. The material also doesn’t respond to stimulus — another key indicator of life. Of course, because it is DNA-based, it is possible that they’ll succeed in making it do so or that it could mutate on its own. You can only wonder if life started with simple building blocks like this untold number of years ago.

We’ve seen DNA computation lately. We’ve even seen tiny voltmeters, too. Maybe DNA will be the next generation’s silicon.

Tags: news
April 16, 2019
11:30
Piezoelectric Antennas For Very, Very Low Frequencies
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you want to talk about antennas, the amateur radio community has you covered, with one glaring exception. Very low frequency and Extremely Low Frequency radio isn’t practiced very much, ultimately because it’s impractical and you simply can’t transmit much information when your carrier frequency is measured in tens of Hertz. There is more information on Extremely Low Frequency radio in Michael Crichton’s Sphere than there is in the normal parts of the Internet. Now there might be an easier way to play with VLF radiation, thanks to developers at the National Accelerator Laboratory. They’ve developed a piezoelectric transmitter for very long wavelengths.

Instead of pushing pixies through an antenna, this antenna uses a rod-shaped crystal of lithium niobate, a piezoelectric material. An AC voltage is applied to the rod makes it vibrate, and this triggers an oscillating electric current flow that’s emitted as VLF radiation. The key is that it’s these soundwaves bouncing around that define the resonant frequency, and the speed of sound in lithium niobate is a lot slower than the speed of light, but they’re translated into electric signals because of its piezoelectricity. For contrast, if this were a wire quarter-wave antenna it would be tens of kilometers long.

The application for this sort of antenna is ideally for where regular radio doesn’t work. Radio doesn’t work underwater, but nuclear subs trail an antenna out of the back to receive messages using Extremely Low Frequency radio. A walkie talkie doesn’t work in a mine, and this could potentially be used there. There is a patent for this piezoelectric antenna, so if anyone knows of a source of lithium niobate, put a link in the comments.

We’ve seen this trick before to make small antennas even smaller, but this is the first time we’ve seen it used in the VLF band, where it’s arguably even more impressive.

Tags: news
1:00
Go Subterranean With This DARPA Challenge
» ‎ Hack a Day

Whether it comes to rescuing people from a cave system or the underground maze of sewers, tunnels and the like that exist underneath any major city, having accurate maps of the area is always crucial to know what the optimal routes are, and what the expected dangers are. The same is true for combat situations, where such maps can mean the difference between the failure or success of a mission. This is why DARPA last year started the Subterranean Challenge, or ‘SubT’ for short.

This challenge seeks new approaches to map, navigate, and search underground environments during time-sensitive combat operations or disaster response scenarios, which would allow for these maps to be created on-demand, in the shortest amount of time possible. Multidisciplinary teams from the world are invited to create autonomous systems that can map such subsurface networks no matter the circumstances.

The competition has a ‘systems track’, which has teams developing physical systems that can perform their intended function in a physical environment, ranging from tunnels, urban underground to cave systems. The next qualification deadline is April 22, 2019, for the Tunnel Circuit in August.

In addition to the systems track, there’s also a software-only Virtual competition, which requires that algorithms and similar are developed which can successfully map a virtual environment. Both the systems and virtual tracks will have the final challenge day in 2021.

Also see the attached video trailer DARPA offers for this challenge.

If none of this tickles your fancy, there are also the US Government’s ‘Challenge’ website, which collects a range of challenges offered by government agencies, often for monetary awards.

Tags: news
April 11, 2019
16:00
Israel’s Moon Lander Crashed, and That’s OK
» ‎ Hack a Day

Some bittersweet news today as we get word that Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft unfortunately crashed shortly before touchdown on the Moon. According to telemetry received from the spacecraft right up until the final moments, the main engine failed to start during a critical braking burn which would have slowed the craft to the intended landing velocity. Despite attempts to restart the engine before impact with the surface, the craft hit the Moon too hard and is presumably destroyed. It’s likely that high resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will eventually be able to give us a better idea of the craft’s condition on the surface, but at this point the mission is now officially concluded.
The Beresheet Lander
It’s easy to see this as a failure. Originally conceived as an entry into the Google Lunar X Prize, the intended goal for the $100 million mission was to become the first privately funded spacecraft to not only touch down on the lunar surface, but navigate laterally through a series of powered “hops”. While the mission certainly fell short of those lofty goals, it’s important to remember that Beresheet did land on the Moon.

It didn’t make the intended soft landing, a feat accomplished thus far only by the United States, Russia, and China; but the fact of the matter is that a spacecraft from Israel is now resting on the lunar surface. Even though Beresheet didn’t survive the attempt, history must recognize Israel as the fourth country to put a lander on the surface of our nearest celestial neighbor.

It’s also very likely this won’t be the last time Israel reaches for the Moon. During the live broadcast of the mission, after it was clear Beresheet had been lost, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed his country would try again within the next two years. The lessons learned today will undoubtedly help refine their next mission, and with no competition from other nations in the foreseeable future, there’s still an excellent chance Israel will be able to secure their place in history as the fourth country to make a successful soft landing.
Beresheet’s view during descent
Of course you’ve got to get to the Moon before you can land on it, and in this respect, Beresheet was an unmitigated success. We previously covered the complex maneuvers required to put the craft into lunar orbit after riding to space as a secondary payload on the Falcon 9 rocket; a technique which we’ll likely see more of thanks to the NASA’s recent commitment to return to the Moon. Even if Beresheet never attempted to land on the surface, the fact that it was able to enter into a stable lunar orbit and deliver dramatic up-close images of the Moon’s surface will be a well deserved point of pride for Israel.

If there’s one thing to take away from the loss of Beresheet, it’s that travel among the stars is exceptionally difficult. Today we’re reminded that even the slightest miscalculation can quickly escalate into tragedy when we leave the relative safety of Earth’s atmosphere. In an era when a mega-rocket launching a sport’s car live on YouTube seems oddly common place, it can be easy to forget that humanity’s long path to space featured as many heartbreaking defeats as it does triumphant successes.

This won’t be the last time that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of high-tech equipment will be lost while pushing the absolute edge of the envelope, and that’s nothing to be upset over. Humans have an insatiable need to see what’s over the horizon and that means we must take on a certain level of risk. The alternative is stagnation, and in the long run that will cost us a lot more than a few crashed probes.

Tags: news
March 30, 2019
19:00
DNA Computers are in the Lab Now
» ‎ Hack a Day

Although it isn’t very real-world practical, researchers at Cal Tech have produced a DNA-based programmable computer. Spectrum reports that the system executes programs using a set of instructions written in DNA using six bits. Like any programmable computer, this one can execute many programs, but so far they have run …read more

Tags: news
4:00
Executing A Vehicle Keyless Entry Attack
» ‎ Hack a Day

You read about well-publicised security exploits, but they always seem to involve somebody with a deity’s grasp of whatever technology is being employed, as well as a pile of impossibly exotic equipment. Surely a mere mortal could never do that!

Happily, that’s not always the case, and to prove it …read more

Tags: news
March 28, 2019
4:00
Office Depot And OfficeMax Find Malware That Isn’t There
» ‎ Hack a Day

Sometimes we are rebuilding a RAID array or replacing a BIOS chip and we wonder how ordinary people keep their computes running. Then we realize that most of them come to someone like us for help. But what if you don’t have a family member or friend who is computer …read more

Tags: news
March 24, 2019
1:00
Air-Breathing Rocket Engine Promises Future Space Planes
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you are a certain age, you probably remember the promise of supersonic transports. The Concorde took less than 4 hours to go across the Atlantic, but it stopped flying in 2003 and ended commercial supersonic passenger flights But back in the 1970s, we thought the Concorde would give way …read more

Tags: news
March 20, 2019
19:00
Maritime Analog Computer From 1503 Is The Oldest Remaining
» ‎ Hack a Day

We might not think of analog computers as having existed in the 1500s, but in fact the astrolabe first appeared around 220 BC. However, as you might expect only a few very old ones still exist. Early astrolabes were often wooden and were difficult to use aboard ships, however brass …read more

Tags: news
March 18, 2019
19:00
You’re Listening To Quantum Radio
» ‎ Hack a Day

Researchers at Delft University of Technology have created a detector that enables the detection of a single photon’s worth of radio frequency energy. The chip is only 10 mm square and the team plans to use it to explore the relationship of mass and gravity to quantum theory.

The chip …read more

Tags: news
March 12, 2019
19:00
Finally, An Open Source Calculator
» ‎ Hack a Day

Microsoft has released the code for the Calculator app. This move is the latest in Microsoft’s efforts to capitalize on the Open Source community. Previous efforts have been the Open Sourcing of an extremely old version of DOS, and shoehorning Linux into Windows somehow in a way that’s marginally more …read more

Tags: news
February 21, 2019
22:00
Noise: It Turns Out You Need It
» ‎ Hack a Day

We don’t know whether quantum physics proves the universe is truly a strange place or that we are living in a virtual reality simulation, but we know it turns a lot of common sense into garbage. Take noise, for example. Noise — as in random electrical noise — is bad, …read more

Tags: news
February 20, 2019
19:00
Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows On Mars
» ‎ Hack a Day

NASA’s latest Mars lander has a very precise weather package, and you can check the daily conditions on Elysium Planitia online. The data however has apparently led to a bit of a mystery. According to Ars Technica, every day at 7AM and 7PM local time, there’s an unexplained atmospheric pressure …read more

Tags: news
February 13, 2019
8:30
Western Digital Releases Their RISC-V Cores To The World
» ‎ Hack a Day

What grew out of a university research project is finally becoming real silicon. RISC-V, the ISA that’s completely Big-O Open, is making inroads in dev boards, Arduino-ish things, and some light Internet of Things things. That’s great and all, but it doesn’t mean anything until you can find RISC-V cores in actual products. The great hope for RISC-V in this regard looks to be Western Digital, manufacturers of storage. They’re going to put RISC-V in all their drives, and they’ve just released their own version of the core, the SweRV.

Last year, Western Digital made the amazing claim that they …read more

Tags: news
February 05, 2019
9:00
Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic Call for Talks
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hackaday is known for having the best community around, and we prove this all the time. Every month, we hold meetups across the United States. This, in addition to conferences and mini-cons across the globe mean Hackaday is the premiere venue for technical talks on a wide variety of hardware creation. Everything from Design for Manufacturing, to the implementation of blinky bling is an open topic.

Now, we’re looking for the talk you can give. The Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic is a monthly gathering hosted by Supplyframe, the Overlords of Hackaday. It’s filled with the technical elite of San Francisco, …read more

Tags: news
February 04, 2019
20:31
Tesla Eyes Ultracapacitor Future With Maxwell Acquisition
» ‎ Hack a Day

As reported by Bloomberg, Tesla has acquired the innovative energy storage company Maxwell Technologies for $218 Million. The move is a direct departure from Tesla’s current energy storage requirements; instead of relying on lithium battery technology, this acquisition could signal a change to capacitor technology.

The key selling point of capacitors, either of the super- or ultra- variety, is the much shorter charge and discharge rates. Where a supercapacitor can be used to weld metal by simply shorting the terminals (don’t do that, by the way), battery technology hasn’t yet caught up. You can only charge batteries at a specific …read more

Tags: news
January 29, 2019
11:45
What Happens When A Regular Person Finds A Huge Security Flaw?
» ‎ Hack a Day

The biggest news in the infosec world, besides the fact that balaclavas are becoming increasingly popular due to record-low temperatures across the United States, is that leet haxors can listen to you from your iPhone using FaceTime without you even answering the call. There are obvious security implications of this bug: phones should only turn on the microphone after you pick up a call. This effectively turns any iPhone running iOS 12.1 or later into a party line. In response Apple has taken group FaceTime offline in preparation of a software update later this week.

So, how does this FaceTime …read more

Tags: news
January 28, 2019
10:00
The Cyborgs Among Us: Exoskeletons Go Mainstream
» ‎ Hack a Day

Every technological advancement seems to have a sharp inflection point, a time before which it seems like any early adopters are considered kooks, but beyond which the device or service quickly becomes so mainstream that non-adopters become the kooky ones. Take cell phones, for example – I clearly remember a news report back in the 1990s about some manufacturers crazy idea to put a digital camera in a phone. Seemingly minutes later, you couldn’t buy a phone without a camera.

It seems like we may be nearing a similar inflection point with a technology far more complex and potentially far …read more

Tags: news
9:31
Raspberry Pi’s Latest Upgrade: the Compute Module 3+
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve become so used to the Raspberry Pi line of boards that have appeared in ever-increasing power capabilities since that leap-year morning in 2012 when the inexpensive and now ubiquitous single board computer was announced and oversold its initial production run. The consumer boards have amply fulfilled their mission in providing kids with a pocket-money computer, and even though they are not the most powerful in the class of small Linux boards they remain the one to beat.

The other side of the Pi coin comes with the industrial siblings of the familiar boards, the Compute Module. This is a …read more

Tags: news
1:00
Tiny Voltmeter uses DNA
» ‎ Hack a Day

We use a lot of voltmeters and we bet you do too. We have some big bench meters and some panel meters and even some tiny pocket-sized meters. But biological researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University have even smaller ones. They’ve worked out a way to use a DNA-based fluorescent reporter to indicate the voltage across cellular membranes.

We don’t know much about biology, but apparently measuring the voltage on the membrane around a cell is easy, but measuring the voltages across membranes inside the cell isn’t. Previous work disrupted cells and measured potentials on isolated organelles. …read more

Tags: news
January 26, 2019
10:00
3D Printed Microscope Stage Offers Precise Movement
» ‎ Hack a Day

3D printing isn’t something you would usually associate with a high precision device, but this one shows that it can be used to create rather intricate things when needed. The Openflexure is a microscope stage that offers a mechanical stage that can be maneuvered precisely. The optics can be swapped out so it uses anything from a webcam to a very high-powered 100x magnification lens, but still move the stage smoothly and precisely. It can be driven by turning a knob or by three small motors. The plan is that the motors will eventually be driven by the software that …read more

Tags: news
January 23, 2019
16:00
Amateur Astronomers Spot Meteorite Impact During Lunar Eclipse
» ‎ Hack a Day

According to ancient astronaut theorists, the lunar eclipse this weekend had an unexpected visitor. Right around the time of totality, a meteoroid crashed into the moon, and it was visible from Earth.

Meteoroids crash into the Earth and Moon all the time, although this usually happens either over the ocean (70% of the Earth) where we can’t see it, on the far side of the moon (~50% of the Moon) where we can’t see it, or on the sunlit side of the Moon (another, different 50%), where we can’t see it. These meteoroids range from the size of a grain …read more

Tags: news
8:30
The Vectrex Projector We’ve Been Waiting For
» ‎ Hack a Day

Unlike most old consoles, the Vectrex is unique for having a vector-based display. This gives it a very different look to most of its contemporaries, and necessitated a built-in display, as regular televisions aren’t built to take vector signals. Not one to be limited to the stock screen size, [Arcade Jason] decided the Vectrex needed a projection upgrade, and built exactly that.

The build relies on a lens that [Jason] salvaged from an old rear-projection TV. These units used CRTs with big lenses which projected the image onto a screen. That’s precisely what is happening here, with a vector display …read more

Tags: news
January 21, 2019
1:00
The Greatest Computer Ever Now Gets A New, Injection Molded Clear Case
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Macintosh SE/30 is the greatest computer ever made. It was a powerhouse when it was launched almost exactly thirty years ago today. You could stuff 128 Megabytes of RAM into it, an absolutely ludicrous amount of RAM for 1989. You could put Ethernet in it. You could turn the 1-bit black or white internal display into an 8-bit grayscale display. I think there was a Lisp card for it. These were just the contemporaneous hacks for the SE/30. Now, people are actively developing for this machine and putting Spotify on it. There’s a toolbar extension for Macs of this …read more

Tags: news
January 20, 2019
22:00
Sly Guy Nabs Pi Spy
» ‎ Hack a Day

When one of [Christian Haschek’s] co-workers found this Raspberry Pi tucked into their network closet, he figured it was another employee’s experiment – you know how that goes. But, of course, they did the safe thing and unplugged it from the network right away. The ensuing investigation into what it was doing there is a tour de force in digital forensics and a profile of a bungling adversary.

A quick check of everyone with access to that area turned up nothing, so [Christian] shifted focus to the device itself. There were three components: a Raspberry Pi model B, a 16GB …read more

Tags: news
January 06, 2019
22:00
Manhole Covers Hide Antennas
» ‎ Hack a Day

5G is gearing up to be the most extensive implementation of mesh networking ever, and that could mean antennas will not need to broadcast for miles, just far enough to reach some devices. That unsightly cell infrastructure stuck on water towers and church steeples could soon be hidden under low-profile hunks of metal we are already used to seeing; manhole covers. This makes sense because 5G’s millimeter radio waves are more or less line-of-sight, and cell users probably wouldn’t want to lose connectivity every time they walk behind a building.

At the moment, Vodafone in the UK is testing similar …read more

Tags: news
January 05, 2019
19:00
Green Hacking: Overclocking Photosynthesis
» ‎ Hack a Day

We think of hacking as bending technology to our will. But some systems are biological, and we’re also starting to see more hacking in that area. This should excite science fiction fans used to with reading about cultures that work with biological tech, so maybe we’ll get there in the real world too. Hacking farm crops and animals goes back centuries, although we are definitely getting better at it. A case in point: scientists have found a way to make photosynthesis better and this should lead to more productive crops.

We learned in school that plants use carbon dioxide and …read more

Tags: news
January 03, 2019
19:00
Cheating AI Caught Hiding Data Using Steganography
» ‎ Hack a Day

AI today is like a super fast kid going through school whose teachers need to be smarter than if not as quick. In an astonishing turn of events, a (satelite)image-to-(map)image conversion algorithm was found hiding a cheat-sheet of sorts while generating maps to appear as it if had ‘learned’ do the opposite effectively[PDF].

The CycleGAN is a network that excels at learning how to map image transformations such as converting any old photo into one that looks like a Van Gogh or Picasso. Another example would be to be able to take the image of a horse and add stripes …read more

Tags: news
December 16, 2018
16:00
Hackaday Links: December 16, 2018
» ‎ Hack a Day

Microsoft is really leaning into vaporwave these days. Microsoft is giving away knit Windows sweaters to social media influencers. Is it for an ugly sweater contest? Maybe, or maybe Microsoft is capitalizing on the mid-90s ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ. Recently, Apple got back in their 90s logo game with the release of a few ‘rainbow Apple’ t-shirts. The spirit of the 90s lives on in tech culture.

Have a Hackerspace? Frack is organizing the great Inter-hackerspaces Xmas goodies swap! Since your hackerspace is filled with weird ephemera and random crap, why not box it up and send it out to another hackerspace? You’ll …read more

Tags: news
December 12, 2018
14:30
Intel Announces Faster Processor Patched for Meltdown and Spectre
» ‎ Hack a Day

Intel just announced their new Sunny Cove Architecture that comes with a lot of new bells and whistles. The Intel processor line-up has been based off the Skylake architecture since 2015, so the new architecture is a fresh breath for the world’s largest chip maker. They’ve been in the limelight this year with hardware vulnerabilities exposed, known as Spectre and Meltdown. The new designs have of course been patched against those weaknesses.

The new architecture (said to be part of the Ice Lake-U CPU) comes with a lot of new promises such as faster core, 5 allocation units and upgrades …read more

Tags: news
December 11, 2018
19:00
Improving Depth Of Field With Only 5 Phones
» ‎ Hack a Day

The hottest new trend in photography is manipulating Depth of Field, or DOF. It’s how you get those wonderful portraits with the subject in focus and the background ever so artfully blurred out. In years past, it was achieved with intelligent use of lenses and settings on an SLR film camera, but now, it’s all in the software.

For the Pixel 2 smartphone, Google had used some tricky phase-detection autofocus (PDAF) tricks to compute depth data in images, and used this to decide which parts of images to blur. Distant areas would be blurred more, while the subject in the …read more

Tags: news
19:00
Improving Depth Of Field With Only 5 Phones
» ‎ Hack a Day

The hottest new trend in photography is manipulating Depth of Field, or DOF. It’s how you get those wonderful portraits with the subject in focus and the background ever so artfully blurred out. In years past, it was achieved with intelligent use of lenses and settings on an SLR film camera, but now, it’s all in the software.

For the Pixel 2 smartphone, Google had used some tricky phase-detection autofocus (PDAF) tricks to compute depth data in images, and used this to decide which parts of images to blur. Distant areas would be blurred more, while the subject in the …read more

Tags: news
8:30
Off Road Vehicle has Six Wheels and Fluid Power
» ‎ Hack a Day

What has six wheels and runs on water? Azaris — a new off-road vehicle prototype from Ferox. Azaris has a rocker suspension modeled after the one on the Mars rover. The problem is, linking four drive wheels on a rocker suspension would be a nightmare. The usual solution? Motors directly in the wheels. But Ferrox has a different approach.

The vehicle has a conventional BMW motorcycle engine but instead of driving a wheel, it drives a pump. The pump moves fluid to the wheels where something similar to a water wheel around the diameter of the wheel causes rotation. The …read more

Tags: news
December 09, 2018
13:00
Bose Wants You to Listen Up for Augmented Reality
» ‎ Hack a Day

Perhaps it is true that if all you have is a hammer every problem you see looks like a nail. When you think of augmented reality (AR), you usually think of something like the poorly-received Google Glass where your phone or computer overlays imagery in your field of vision. Bose isn’t known for video, though, they are known for audio. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that their upcoming (January 2019) AR sunglasses won’t feature video overlays. Instead, the $200 sunglasses will tell you what you are looking at.

The thing hinges on your device knowing your approximate location and the …read more

Tags: news
December 08, 2018
22:00
Furby Plus Borges Equals Borgy
» ‎ Hack a Day

What do you get if you cross a Furby with a master of 20th Century literature? The Borgy. Argentinian hacker [Roni Bandini] found an old Furby and decided to hack it by altering its personality. His inspiration was the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges, one of the pioneers of surrealist writing. The idea is that, at random times during the day, the Borgy will share a bit of wisdom from Borges to inspire and enlighten.

[Roni] hacked the Furby to replace the speaker with a more powerful one, and built a base to hold the larger speaker and a switch …read more

Tags: news
December 07, 2018
4:00
5G Cellphone’s Location Privacy Broken Before It’s Even Implemented
» ‎ Hack a Day

Although hard to believe in the age of cheap IMSI-catchers, “subscriber location privacy” is supposed to be protected by mobile phone protocols. The Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol provides location privacy for 3G, 4G, and 5G connections, and it’s been broken at a basic enough level that three successive generations of a technology have had some of their secrets laid bare in one fell swoop.

When 3G was developed, long ago now, spoofing cell towers was expensive and difficult enough that the phone’s International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) was transmitted unencrypted. For 5G, a more secure version based on …read more

Tags: news
November 28, 2018
22:00
Mini Vectrex Prototype Restored By National Videogame Museum
» ‎ Hack a Day

The crash of the videogame market in 1983 struck down a slew of victims, and unique products such as the Vectrex were not immune to its destructive ways. The all-in-one console featured a monochromatic vector display and offered an arcade-like experience at home complete with an analog joystick controller. It sadly never made it to its second birthday before being axed in early 1984, however, thanks to the [National Videogame Museum] we now how a glimpse of an alternate history for the Vectrex. They posted some photos of an unreleased Vectrex prototype that was restored to working order.

Little was …read more

Tags: news
November 27, 2018
23:31
Amazon Creates Distributed Satellite Ground Stations
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here’s an interesting thought: it’s possible to build a cubesat for perhaps ten thousand dollars, and hitch a ride on a launch for free thanks to a NASA outreach program. Tracking that satellite along its entire orbit would require dozens or hundreds of ground stations, all equipped with antennas and a connection to the Internet. Getting your data down from a cubesat actually costs more than building a satellite.

This is the observation someone at Amazon must have made. They’ve developed the AWS Ground Station, a system designed to downlink data from cubesats and other satellites across an entire orbit. …read more

Tags: news
November 26, 2018
19:00
FCC Gets Complaint: Proposed Ham Radio Rules Hurt National Security
» ‎ Hack a Day

On November 10th, [Theodore Rappaport] sent the FCC an ex parte filing regarding a proposed rule change that would remove the limit on baud rate of high frequency (HF) digital transmissions. According to [Rappaport] there are already encoded messages that can’t be read on the ham radio airwaves and this would make the problem worse.

[Rappaport] is a professor at NYU and the founding director of NYU Wireless. His concern seems to relate mostly to SCS who have some proprietary schemes for compressing PACTOR as part of Winlink — used in some cases to send e-mail from onboard ships.

The …read more

Tags: news
November 17, 2018
19:00
Restoring An Apollo Guidance Computer
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Apollo Guidance Computer is a remarkably important piece of computing history. It’s the computer that guided the Apollo lander to land on the moon. We’ve seen a few replica builds over the years, but [CuriousMarc] got a closer look at one of the real things. In this video, [Marc] gets a look inside as his colleagues take apart one of the original AGCs and get a closer look at the insides of this piece of computer history.

Thanks to collector [Jimmie Loocke], they got to take apart AGO#14, one of the original flight computers from a Lunar Excursion Module …read more

Tags: news
November 15, 2018
11:30
Researchers Seek to Create the Digital Smell Interface
» ‎ Hack a Day

We hear digital audio, we see digital video, and we feel digital haptic feedback. However, we don’t have an analog for the sense of smell. [Kasun] and his team of researchers from the Imagineering Institute in Malaysia are in the midst of changing that reality. Their project aims to transmit fragrances via electronic stimulation. Though it’s really more of a step toward creating a multi-sensory internet.

The team’s “electric smell machine” consists of a variable power supply connected to silver electrodes wrapped around an endoscopic camera. The camera is necessary to ensure contact with the user’s olfactory bulb as electric …read more

Tags: news
1:01
The Smaller, More Powerful Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s that time of year again, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has some new hardware for you. This time, it’s an improved version of the Raspberry Pi Model A, bringing it the speed and power of its bigger brother, the Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+.

The Raspberry Pi Model A is the weird middle child of the Raspberry Pi lineup, or maybe it’s the Goldilocks choice. It’s not as powerful and doesn’t have the USB ports or Ethernet jack found in the latest revision of the family, the Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+, and it’s not as small or as …read more

Tags: news
November 11, 2018
1:00
Robot Never Misses Leg Day
» ‎ Hack a Day

We have heard bipedal walking referred to as a series of controlled falls, or one continuous fall where we repeatedly catch ourselves, and it is a long way to fall at 9.8m/s². Some of us are more graceful than others, but most grade-schoolers have gained superior proficiency in comparison to our most advanced bipedal robots. Legs involve all kinds of tricky joints which bend and twist and don’t get us started on knees. Folks at the Keio University and the University of Tokyo steered toward a robot which does not ride on wheels, treads, walk or tumble. The …read more

Tags: news
November 08, 2018
13:00
Did We Just Get Buzzed by Alien Space Junk?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Perhaps you heard about Oumuamua (don’t ask us how to pronounce that). The cigar-shaped object is the first item found by astronomers that is known to have come from outside the solar system and is continuing to pass through, not being captured by the sun’s gravitational field. A recent paper from [Shmuel Bialy] and [Abraham Loeb] from Harvard suggests that the thing could be a discarded light sail from an alien spacecraft.

Of course, it is fun to speculate that anything in space we don’t understand could be alien. However, the paper is doing more than just speculating. The rotation …read more

Tags: news
November 03, 2018
4:00
Who’s Going On Your Fifty?
» ‎ Hack a Day

You can tell a lot about a country, its history and its politics, by taking a look at its banknotes. Who features on them, or in the case of studiously engineered international compromises such as the Euro, who doesn’t feature on them. Residents of the UK have over the years been treated to a succession of historical worthies on their cash, and when a new revision of a banknote is announced you can be certain that the choice of famous person to adorn it will be front page news. Today we have a new banknote on the way, and this …read more

Tags: news
November 02, 2018
10:01
FT8: Saving Ham Radio or Killing It?
» ‎ Hack a Day

It is popular to blame new technology for killing things. The Internet killed newspapers. Video killed the radio star. Is FT8, a new digital technology, poised to kill off ham radio? The community seems evenly divided. In an online poll, 52% of people responding says FT8 is damaging ham radio. But ham operator [K5SDR] has an excellent blog post about how he thinks FT8 is going to save ham radio instead.

If you already have an opinion, you have probably already raced down to the comments to share your thoughts. I’ll be honest, I think what we are seeing is …read more

Tags: news
October 27, 2018
10:01
Travel to Mercury on Ion Power
» ‎ Hack a Day

Star Trek — as much as we love it — was guilty sometimes of a bit of hyperbole and more than its share of inconsistency. In some episodes, ion drives were advanced technology and in others they were obsolete. Make up your mind!

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo probe is on its way to Mercury riding on four ion thrusters developed by a company called QinetiQ. But unlike the ion drive featured in the infamous “Spock’s Brain” episode, BepiColombo will take over seven years to get to Mercury. That’s because these ion drives are real.

The craft is actually two spacecraft in …read more

Tags: news
October 26, 2018
9:01
Competitive Surface Mount Soldering Comes to Supercon
» ‎ Hack a Day

Who will show the best soldering skills at the Hackaday Superconference next week? We have a little — in fact, a very little — challenge for you: solder surface mount components down to a tiny 0201 package. This is the SMD Soldering Challenge and successfully finishing the board at all shows off the best of hand soldering skills, but during the weekend we’ll also keep a running leader board.

For the event we’re using the SMD Challenge board by MakersBox which utilizes a SOIC8 ATtiny85 to drive LED/resistor pairs in 1206, 0805, 0603, 0402, and 0201 packages. There will be …read more

Tags: news
October 21, 2018
7:00
HTTPS for the Internet of Things
» ‎ Hack a Day

Every day, we’re connecting more and more devices over the internet. No longer does a household have a single connected computer — there are smartphones, tablets, HVAC systems, deadbolts — you name it, it’s been connected. As the Internet of Things proliferates, it has become readily apparent that security is an issue in this space. [Andreas Spiess] has been working on this very problem, by bringing HTTPS to the ESP8266 and ESP32.

Being the most popular platform for IOT devices, it makes sense to start with the ESP devices when improving security. In his video, [Andreas] starts at the beginning, …read more

Tags: news
October 17, 2018
22:01
US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty; International Shipping Prices Expected to Rise
» ‎ Hack a Day

The United States has announced plans to withdraw from a 144-year postal treaty that sets lower international shipping rates. The US claims this treaty gives countries like China and Singapore an unfair advantage that floods the US market with cheap packages. The BBC reports the withdraw of this treaty will increase shipping costs from China by between 40% and 70%.

The treaty in question is the Universal Postal Union, which established that each country should retain all money it has collected for international postage. The US Chamber of Commerce has said this treaty, ‘leads to the United States essentially paying …read more

Tags: news
October 16, 2018
22:01
LibSSH Vuln: You Don’t Need to See my Authentication
» ‎ Hack a Day

Another day, another CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). Getting a CVE number assigned to a vulnerability is a stamp of authenticity that you have a real problem on your hands. CVE-2018-10933 is a worst case scenario for libssh. With a single response, an attacker can completely bypass authentication, giving full access to a system.

Before you panic and yank the power cord on your server, know that libssh is not part of OpenSSH. Your Linux box almost certainly uses OpenSSH as the SSH daemon, and that daemon is not vulnerable to this particular problem. Libssh does show up in a …read more

Tags: news
19:00
FIDO2 Authentication In All The Colors
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here at Hackaday, we have a soft spot for security dongles. When a new two-factor-authentication dongle is open source, uses USB and NFC, and supports FIDO2, the newest 2FA standard, we take notice. That just happens to be exactly what [Conor Patrick] is funding on Kickstarter.

We’ve looked at [Conor]’s first generation hardware key, and the process of going from design to physical product. With that track record, the Solo security key promises to be more than the vaporware that plagues crowdfunding services.

Another player, Yubikey, has also recently announced a new product that supports FIDO2 and NFC. While Yubikey …read more

Tags: news
October 15, 2018
19:00
Hams see Dark Side Of The Moon Without Pink Floyd
» ‎ Hack a Day

Ham radio operators bouncing signals off the moon have become old hat. But a ham radio transmitter on the Chinese Longjiang-2 satellite is orbiting the moon and has sent back pictures of the Earth and the dark side of the moon. The transceiver’s main purpose is to allow hams to downlink telemetry and relay messages via lunar orbit.

While the photo was received by the Dwingeloo radio telescope, reports are that other hams also picked up the signal. The entire affair has drawn in hams around the world. Some of the communications use a modulation scheme devised by [Joe Taylor, …read more

Tags: news
October 11, 2018
5:40
Soyuz Rocket Emergency Landing, Everyone OK
» ‎ Hack a Day

NASA spokesperson [Brandi Dean] summarized it succinctly: “Confirming again that today’s Soyuz MS10 launch did go into ballistic re-entry mode … That means the crew will not be going to the ISS today. Instead they will be taking a sharp landing, coming back to earth”. While nobody likes last-minute changes in plans, we imagine that goes double for astronauts. On the other hand, it’s always good news when we are able to joke about a flight that starts off with a booster separation problem.

Astronauts [Nick Hague] and [Aleksey Ovchinin] were on their way this morning to the International Space …read more

Tags: news
October 09, 2018
1:00
Is 2018 Finally the Year of Windows on the Robot?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Microsoft is bringing ROS to Window 10. ROS stands for Robot Operating System, a software framework and large collection of libraries for developing robots which we recently wrote an introductory article about, It’s long been primarily supported under Linux and Mac OS X, and even then, best under Ubuntu. My own efforts to get it working under the Raspbian distribution on the Raspberry Pi led me to instead download a Pi Ubuntu image. So having it running with the support of Microsoft on Windows will add some welcome variety.

To announce it to the world, they had a small booth …read more

Tags: news

October 08, 2018
8:17
HTTrack – Website Downloader Copier & Site Ripper Download
» ‎ Darknet

HTTrack is a free and easy-to-use offline browser utility which acts as a website downloader and a site ripper for copying websites and downloading them for offline viewing.

HTTrack Website Downloader & Site Ripper

HTTrack allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting all the HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer.

HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure, which allows you to simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link as if you were viewing it online.

Read the rest of HTTrack – Website Downloader Copier & Site Ripper Download now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: hacking news

October 07, 2018
1:00
Banksy’s Barely Believable Batteries
» ‎ Hack a Day

Nearly a decade ago my friend [Dru] gave me an unforgettable tour late at night of Stokes Croft, the inner suburb of Bristol known at the time for its counterculture and artistic scene. It’s a place dominated by building-sized graffiti and murals, and it has a particular association with the Bristolian street artist [Banksy]. If you’ve not seen a Banksy in the wild, the place to do it is by Bristol Saturday night street lighting to the sound of passing revelers and traffic on the A38.

[Banksy] is famous aside from his anonymity, for his pranks upon the art world. …read more

Tags: news
October 05, 2018
16:00
Build Your Next Dancing Robot From Empty Soda Bottles
» ‎ Hack a Day

When you think about the materials for your next large dancing robot build, soda bottles might not be the first thing that springs to mind. But they could work, according to TrussFab, a project from a group of students at the Hasso Plattner Instituit. Their system uses empty coke bottles and 3D printed connectors to build large structures, modeled in software that checks their load balance and safety. The team has modeled and built designs up to 5 meters high. Now, the project has taken a step further by adding linear actuators and hinges to the mix so you can …read more

Tags: news
October 03, 2018
19:00
Robot Solves Rubik’s Cube With One Hand Tied Behind Its Back
» ‎ Hack a Day

For all those who have complained about Rubik’s Cube solving robots in the past by dismissing purpose-built rigs that hold the cube in a non-anthropomorphic manner: checkmate.

The video below shows not only that a robot can solve the classic puzzle with mechanical hands, but it can also do it with just one of them – and that with only three fingers. The [Yamakawa] lab at the University of Tokyo built the high-speed manipulator to explore the kinds of fine motions that humans perform without even thinking about them. Their hand, guided by a 500-fps machine vision system, uses two …read more

Tags: news
September 28, 2018
19:00
Creating Antimatter On The Desktop — One Day
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you watch Star Trek, you will know one way to get rid of pesky aliens is to vent antimatter. The truth is, antimatter is a little less exotic than it appears on TV, but for a variety of reasons there hasn’t been nearly as much practical research done with it. There are well over 200 electron accelerators in labs around the world, but only a handful that work with positrons, the electron’s anti-counterpart. [Dr. Aakash Sahai] would like to change that. He’s got a new design that could bring antimatter beams out of the lab and onto the desktop. …read more

Tags: news
September 27, 2018
22:00
Antennas That You Install With A Spray-Can
» ‎ Hack a Day

With the explosion in cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, and other radio technologies, the demand for antennas is increasing. Everything is getting smaller and even wearable, so traditional antennas are less practical than ever. You’ve probably seen PCB antennas on things like ESP8266s, but Drexel University researchers are now studying using titanium carbide — known as MXene — to build thin, light, and even transparent antennas that outperform copper antennas. Bucking the trend for 3D printing, these antennas are sprayed like ink or paint onto a surface.

A traditional antenna that uses metal carries most of the current at the skin …read more

Tags: news
7:00
Can You “Take Back” Open Source Code?
» ‎ Hack a Day

It seems a simple enough concept for anyone who’s spent some time hacking on open source code: once you release something as open source, it’s open for good. Sure the developer might decide that future versions of the project close up the source, it’s been known to happen occasionally, but what’s already out there publicly can never be recalled. The Internet doesn’t have a “Delete” button, and once you’ve published your source code and let potentially millions of people download it, there’s no putting the Genie back in the bottle.

But what happens if there are extenuating circumstances? What if …read more

Tags: news
September 25, 2018
8:00
Buy A Baofeng While You Still Can? FCC Scowls at Unauthorized Frequency Transmitters
» ‎ Hack a Day

There was a time when a handheld radio transceiver was an object of wonder, and a significant item for any radio amateur to own. A few hundred dollars secured you an FM walkie-talkie through which you could chat on your local repeater, and mobile radio was a big draw for new hams. Thirty years later FM mobile operation may be a bit less popular, but thanks to Chinese manufacturing the barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been. With extremely basic handheld radios starting at around ten dollars and a capable dual-bander being yours for somewhere over twice …read more

Tags: news
September 16, 2018
19:00
iCub is the Robot that is Equally Cute and Creepy
» ‎ Hack a Day

We shouldn’t say iCub — the humanoid robot from Italy — is creepy. After all, human-like robots are in their infancy and an early computer or automobile would hardly be indicative of where those industries would take us. You can see the little guy in the video below.

The effort is open source and was part of an EU project that has been adopted by 20 labs around the world. The video just shows a guy in VR gear operating the robot, but the website has a lot of technical information if you want to know more.

The robot has …read more

Tags: news
September 14, 2018
19:00
AI Finds More Space Chatter
» ‎ Hack a Day

Scientists don’t know exactly what fast radio bursts (FRBs) are. What they do know is that they come from a long way away. In fact, one that occurs regularly comes from a galaxy 3 billion light years away. They could form from neutron stars or they could be extraterrestrials phoning home. The other thing is — thanks to machine learning — we now know about a lot more of them. You can see a video from Berkeley, below. and find more technical information, raw data, and [Danielle Futselaar’s] killer project graphic seen above from at their site.

The first FRB …read more

Tags: news
September 13, 2018
22:01
France Questions Russian Satellite with “Big Ears”
» ‎ Hack a Day

French Defense Minister Florence Parly took a page out of Little Red Riding Hood when she recently called out a Russian satellite for having “big ears”. While she stopped short of giving any concrete details, it was a rare and not terribly veiled accusation that Russia is using their Luch-Olymp spacecraft to perform orbital espionage.

At a speech in Toulouse, Parly was quoted as saying: “It got close. A bit too close. So close that one really could believe that it was trying to capture our communications.” and “this little Stars Wars didn’t happen a long time ago in a …read more

Tags: news
September 07, 2018
19:00
Unmanned Sailboat Traverses The North Atlantic
» ‎ Hack a Day

Sailboats have been traversing the Atlantic Ocean since before 1592, sailing through sunshine, wind, and rain. The one thing that they’ve all had in common has been a captain to pilot the ship across this vast watery expanse, at least until now. A company called Offshore Sensing has sailed an unmanned vessel all the way from Canada to Ireland.

The ship, called the Sailbuoy, attempted the journey last year as well but only made it about halfway before the mission was abandoned. This year, however, the voyage was finally completed, and this craft is officially the first unmanned ship to …read more

Tags: news
September 04, 2018
4:00
Pushing Tin Remotely: The Start of Flight Control in the Cloud
» ‎ Hack a Day

In a 1999 movie (Pushing Tin), a flight controller is a passenger on a plane and tells the flight attendant that he needs to speak to the person controlling the plane. The flight attendant tells him the pilot is very busy to which the controller responds, “…you really think the pilot is controlling this plane? That would really scare me.” We wonder what that fictional character would think flying into Loveland Colorado. Their Colorado Remote Tower Project. While there’s still a human flight controller, they aren’t physically located at the airport and rely on remote cameras and radar so the …read more

Tags: news
September 03, 2018
16:00
There Is A Cost To Extended Lifetime Products. It’s 7.5%.
» ‎ Hack a Day

Silicon and integrated circuits come and go, but when it comes to extended lifetime support from a company, it’s very, very hard to find fault with Microchip. They’re still selling the chip — new — that was the foundation of the Basic Stamp. That’s a part that’s being sold for twenty-five years. You can hardly find that sort of product support with a company that doesn’t deal in high-tech manufacturing.

While the good times of nearly unlimited support for products that are decades old isn’t coming to an end, it now has a cost. According to a press release from …read more

Tags: news
August 26, 2018
16:01
Rasberry Pi PoE Hat Released
» ‎ Hack a Day

It was announced at the beginning of March, but now the Raspberry Pi Power over Ethernet (PoE) hat is out. Thanks to the addition of a new 4-pin header on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, the Pis can get power from an Ethernet cable, provided you’ve got the setup to deliver PoE.

This is a remarkable bit of engineering, even though it’s just adding Power over Ethernet to a small single board computer. Mechanically, the PoE hat doesn’t increase the 3D bounding box volume of the Raspberry Pi at all. It adds cooling with a fan controlled over I2C. …read more

Tags: news
August 23, 2018
1:01
Memristor May be Fake News
» ‎ Hack a Day

The fundamental passive components of electronics are the resistor, the capacitor, the inductor, and the oscillator, right? Actually, no, oscillators aren’t considered fundamental components because they aren’t linear. Resistors, capacitors, and inductors are also irreducible. That is, you can’t combine other passive components to model them unlike, say, a potentiometer. In the last few decades, though, we’ve heard of another fundamental component — the memristor. [Isaac Abraham] asserts, though, that the memristor isn’t a new fundamental component, but just an active device.

To support that premise [Isaac] builds a periodic table of devices showing how components map to changing voltages …read more

Tags: news
August 19, 2018
4:00
NASA Wants You… to Design Their Robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

No one loves a good competition more than Hackaday. We run enough to keep anyone busy. But if you have a little spare time after designing your one inch PCB, you might check out the competition to develop a robotic arm for NASA’s Astrobee robot.

Some of the challenges are already closed, but there are quite a few still open for a few more months (despite the published closing date of and these look like great projects for a hacker. In particular, the software architecture and command, data, and power system are yet to start.

But don’t let the $25,000 …read more

Tags: news
August 14, 2018
16:01
Foreshadow: The Sky Is Falling Again for Intel Chips
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s been at least a month or two since the last vulnerability in Intel CPUs was released, but this time it’s serious. Foreshadow is the latest speculative execution attack that allows balaclava-wearing hackers to steal your sensitive information. You know it’s a real 0-day because it already has a domain, a logo, and this time, there’s a video explaining in simple terms anyone can understand why the sky is falling. The video uses ukuleles in the sound track, meaning it’s very well produced.

The Foreshadow attack relies on Intel’s Software Guard Extension (SGX) instructions that allow user code to allocate …read more

Tags: news
August 13, 2018
19:00
MIT Makes Washable LED Fabric
» ‎ Hack a Day

Let’s face it, one of the challenges of wearable electronics is that people are filthy. Anything you wear is going to get dirty. If it touches you, it is going to get sweat and oil and who knows what else? And on the other side it’s going to get spills and dirt and all sorts of things we don’t want to think about on it. For regular clothes, that’s not a problem, you just pop them in the washer, but you can’t say the same for wearable electronics. Now researchers at MIT have embedded diodes like LEDs and photodetectors, into …read more

Tags: news
July 31, 2018
9:01
Are Patent Claims Coming for Your WS2812?
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are some components which are used within our sphere so often as to become ubiquitous, referred to by their part number without the need for a hasty dig through a data sheet to remind oneself just what we are talking about. You can rattle a few of them off, the 555, the 741, the ESP8266, and so on.

In the world of LEDs, the part that most immediately springs to mind is the Worldsemi WS2812 addressable LED. This part consists of three LEDs in red, green, and blue, all in the same package with a serial interface allowing a …read more

Tags: news
July 26, 2018
8:01
Working on a Startup? New Fund is Building Portfolio from Hard Technology
» ‎ Hack a Day

Root Ventures just announced it has raised a second fund and is in search of startups to invest the $76,726,900 they now have burning a hole on their balance sheet. Their first fund of $31,415,926.53 went to some very cool hardware companies like Shaper, Particle, Plethora, and Prynt. For those keeping score, the first fund is Pi and the second is the speed of sound — it’s a geeky engineer thing.

This is a seed fund, and founding partner Avidan Ross described their role in your company as being the world’s “greatest sherpa to take you on a really tumultuous …read more

Tags: news
July 23, 2018
1:00
The Return of RadioShack?
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve been following the ups and downs of Radio Shack for a while now, and it looks like another chapter is about to be penned in the storied retailer’s biography – and not Chapter 11 bankruptcy this time.

According to the ARRL website and major media reports, up to 50 of the 147 US locations of HobbyTown, the brick-and-mortar retailer of RC and other hobby supplies, will soon host a “RadioShack Express” outlet. Each outlet will be up to 500 square feet of retail space devoted to electronic components that would be of use to HobbyTown’s core customer base, as …read more

Tags: news
July 11, 2018
4:00
Ham-designed Gear Used in Thailand Cave Rescue
» ‎ Hack a Day

Unless you live in a cave, you’ve probably heard a little about the thirteen people — mostly children — trapped in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in Thailand. What you may have missed, though, is the hacker/ham radio connection. The British Cave Rescue Council (BCRC) was asked for their expert help. [Rick Stanton], [John Volanthen] and [Rob Harper] answered the call. They were equipped with HeyPhones. The HeyPhone is a 17-year-old design from [John Hey, G3TDZ]. Sadly, [G3TDZ] is now a silent key (ham radio parlance for deceased) so he didn’t get to see his design play a role …read more

Tags: news
July 10, 2018
19:00
Flawed Synthetic Diamonds May Be Key For Quantum Computing
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve followed any of our coverage of quantum computing, you probably know that the biggest challenge is getting quantum states to last very long, especially when moving them around. Researchers at Princeton may have solved this problem as they demonstrate storing qubits in a lab-created diamond. The actual publication is behind a paywall if you want to learn even more.

Generally, qubits are handled as photons and moved in optical fibers. However, they don’t last long in that state and it is difficult to store photons with correct quantum information. The impurities in diamonds though may have the ability …read more

Tags: news
July 04, 2018
9:00
Friday Hack Chat: Fire and Cars
» ‎ Hack a Day

Summer is here, and it’s time for the question on everyone’s mind: how are they going to get the fuselage of a 747 from the California desert to Burning Man? You can’t put it on a train, and it’s much wider than any truck.

This Friday, we’re not going to be answering the modern-day riddle of the Sphinx, but we are going to the talking about other art cars. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be discussing dragons made out of school buses and pyrotechnics.

Our guest for this Hack Chat will be [Kevin Bracken], best known as …read more

Tags: news
July 01, 2018
19:00
Wave Goodbye To Honda Asimo, A Robot That Would Wave Back
» ‎ Hack a Day

Fans of technology will recall a number of years when Honda’s humanoid robot Asimo seemed to be everywhere. In addition to its day job in a research lab, Asimo had a public relations side gig showing everyone that Honda is about more than cars and motorcycles. From trade shows to television programs, even amusement parks and concert halls, Asimo worked a busy publicity schedule. Now a retirement party may be in order, since the research project has reportedly been halted.

Asimo’s activity has tapered off in recent years so this is not a huge surprise. Honda’s official Asimo site itself …read more

Tags: news
June 25, 2018
1:00
Nvidia Transforms Standard Video Into Slow Motion Using AI
» ‎ Hack a Day

Nvidia is back at it again with another awesome demo of applied machine learning: artificially transforming standard video into slow motion – they’re so good at showing off what AI can do that anyone would think they were trying to sell hardware for it.

Though most modern phones and cameras have an option to record in slow motion, it often comes at the expense of resolution, and always at the expense of storage space. For really high frame rates you’ll need a specialist camera, and you often don’t know that you should be filming in slow motion until after an …read more

Tags: news
June 20, 2018
4:00
Bunnie Weighs in on Tariffs
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bunnie] has penned his thoughts on the new 25% tariffs coming to many goods shipped from China to the US. Living and working both in the US and China, [Bunnie] has a unique view of manufacturing and trade between the two countries. The creator of Novena and Chumby, he’s also written the definitive guide on Shenzen electronics.
All the marked items are included in the new tariffs
The new US tariffs come into effect on July 6th. We covered the issue last week, but Bunnie has gone in-depth and really illustrates how these taxes will have a terrible impact on the maker community. Components like LEDs, resistors, capacitors, and PCBs will be taxed at the new higher rate. On the flip side, Tariffs on many finished consumer goods such as cell phone will remain unchanged.

As [Bunnie] illustrates, this hurts small companies buying components. Startups buying subassemblies from China will be hit as well. Educators buying parts kits for their classes also face the tax hike. Who won’t be impacted? Companies building finished goods. If the last screw of your device is installed in China, there is no tax. If it is installed in the USA, then you’ll pay 25% more on your Bill of Materials (BOM). This incentivizes moving assembly offshore.

What will be the end result of all these changes? [Bunnie] takes a note from Brazil’s history with a look at a PC ISA network card. With DIP chips and all through-hole discrete components, it looks like a typical 80’s design. As it turns out the card was made in 1992. Brazil had similar protectionist tariffs on high-tech goods back in the 1980’s. As a result, they lagged behind the rest of the world in technology. [Bunnie] hopes these new tariffs don’t cause the same thing to happen to America.

[Thanks to [Robert] and [Christian] for sending this in]

Tags: news
June 15, 2018
13:00
Making Electronics Just Got 25% More Expensive In The US
» ‎ Hack a Day

As reported by the BBC, the United States is set to impose a 25% tariff on over 800 categories of Chinese goods. The tariffs are due to come into effect in three weeks, on July 6th. Thousands of different products are covered under this new tariff, and by every account, electronic designers will be hit hard. Your BOM cost just increased by 25%.

The reason for this tariff is laid out in a report (PDF) from the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In short, this tariff is retaliation for the Chinese government subsidizing businesses to steal market share …read more

Tags: news
June 07, 2018
4:00
Indiegogo Calls Time On The ZX Vega
» ‎ Hack a Day

It has been an exciting time to be a retro computer enthusiast in recent years, and the availability of affordable single board computers, systems-on-chip, and FPGAs have meant that retro hardware could be accurately reproduced or emulated. A host of classic micros have been reborn, to delight both the veterans who had the originals, and a new crop of devotees.

Today we have news of the impending demise of one of the higher-profile projects. The ZX Vega+ is a handheld Sinclair Spectrum console bearing the Sinclair name that came with an impeccable pedigree in that it had the support of …read more

Tags: news
June 05, 2018
4:00
Microsoft Confirms GitHub Acquisition
» ‎ Hack a Day

After recent talks, Microsoft has now officially confirmed that it will be merging GitHub to master. The acquisition will cost $7.5 billion, and has received mixed reactions so far. A staple of the open source community, GitHub is well known to Hackaday readers, and has played a key role in developing an incredible amount of the software we use on a daily basis.

Microsoft has embarked on a community crusade of late, seemingly trying to win some respect from developers and makers. Under the encouragement of Satya Nadella, we’ve had Visual Studio Code, Typescript, the Ubuntu-on-Windows saga, and many more. …read more

Tags: news
June 03, 2018
16:00
Hackaday Links: June 3, 2018
» ‎ Hack a Day

All the Radio Shacks are dead. adioS, or something. But wait, what’s this? There are new Radio Shacks opening. Here’s one in Idaho, and here’s another in Claremore, Oklahoma. This isn’t like the ‘Blockbuster Video in Nome, Alaska’ that clings on by virtue of being so remote; Claremore isn’t that far from Tulsa, and the one in Idaho is in a town with a population of 50,000. Are these corporate stores, or are they the (cool) independent Radio Shacks? Are there component drawers? Anyone want to take a field trip and report?

A few years ago, [cnxsoft] bought a Sonoff …read more

Tags: news
May 25, 2018
4:00
NASA Remotely Hacks Curiosity’s Rock Drill
» ‎ Hack a Day

We have a lot of respect for the hackers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). When their stuff has a problem, it is often millions of miles away and yet they often find a way to fix it anyway. Case in point is the Curiosity Mars rover. Back in 2016, the probe’s rock drill broke. This is critical because one of the main things the rover does is drill into rock samples, collect the powder and subject it to analysis. JPL announced they had devised a way to successfully drill again.

The drill failed after fifteen uses. It uses two …read more

Tags: news
May 21, 2018
22:00
Dual SDR Receives Two Bands at Once
» ‎ Hack a Day

There was a time when experimenting with software defined radio (SDR) was exotic. But thanks to cheap USB-based hardware, this technology is now accessible to anyone. While it is fun to play with the little $20 USB sticks, you’ll eventually want to move up to something better and there are a lot of great options. One of these is SDRPlay, and they recently released a new piece of hardware — RSPduo — that incorporates dual tuners.

We’ve talked about using the SDRPlay before as an upgrade from the cheap dongles. The new device can tune either a single 10 MHz …read more

Tags: news
May 14, 2018
13:01
PGP Vulnerability Pre-announced by Security Researcher
» ‎ Hack a Day

From the gaping maw of the infosec Twitterverse comes horrifying news. PGP is broken. How? We don’t know. When will there be any information on this vulnerability? Tomorrow. It’s the most important infosec story of the week, and it’s only Monday. Of course, this vulnerability already has a name. Everyone else is calling it eFail, but I’m calling it Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Update: eFail site and paper now available. This was released ahead of Tuesday’s planned announcement when the news broke ahead of a press embargo.

Update 2: The report mentions two attacks. The Direct Exfiltration attack wraps the …read more

Tags: news
May 13, 2018
10:00
Flash Memory: Caveat Emptor
» ‎ Hack a Day

We all love new tech. Some of us love getting the bleeding edge, barely-on-the-market devices and some enjoy getting tech thirty years after the fact to revel in nostalgia. The similarity is that we assume we know what we’re buying and only the latter category expects used parts. But, what if the prior category is getting used parts in a new case? The University of Alabama in Huntsville has a tool for protecting us from unscrupulous manufacturers installing old flash memory.

Flash memory usually lasts longer than the devices where it is installed, so there is a market for used …read more

Tags: news
May 10, 2018
13:00
Google’s Duplex AI Has Conversation Indistinguishable From Human’s
» ‎ Hack a Day

Enclosure: [download]

First Google gradually improved its WaveNet text-to-speech neural network to the point where it sounds almost perfectly human. Then they introduced Smart Reply which suggests possible replies to your emails. So it’s no surprise that they’ve announced an enhancement for Google Assistant called Duplex which can have phone conversations for you.

What is surprising is how well it works, as you can hear below. The first is Duplex calling to book an appointment at a hair salon, and the second is it making reservation’s with a restaurant.
http://www.gstatic.com/b-g/DMS03IIQXU3TY2FD6DLPLOMBBBJ2CH188143148.mp3 http://www.gstatic.com/b-g/KOK4HAMTAPH5Z96154F6GKUM74A3Z1576269077.mp3
Note that this reverses the roles when talking to a computer …read more

Tags: news

May 03, 2018
9:51
Yahoo! Fined 35 Million USD For Late Disclosure Of Hack
» ‎ Darknet

Ah Yahoo! in trouble again, this time the news is Yahoo! fined for 35 million USD by the SEC for the 2 years delayed disclosure of the massive hack, we actually reported on the incident in 2016 when it became public – Massive Yahoo Hack – 500 Million Accounts Compromised.

Yahoo! has been having a rocky time for quite a few years now and just recently has sold Flickr to SmugMug for an undisclosed amount, I hope that at least helps pay off some of the fine.

Read the rest of Yahoo! Fined 35 Million USD For Late Disclosure Of Hack now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: hacking news

May 02, 2018
9:00
Friday Hack Chat: Building Robotics With The MeArm
» ‎ Hack a Day

Somewhere, in a storage closet used by every computer science or engineering program, is a robot arm. It’s there, you’ve probably never seen it, but it’s there. Originally, this hugely expensive robotic arm was intended to be a truly remarkable pedagogical tool, allowing students to learn about reverse kinematics and control systems. Now, most likely, that robotic arm is covered in dust, either because the arm itself is broken or because the only instructor that used it retired.

These days, robotic arms are within nearly everyone’s reach. Ben Gray’s MeArm is a popular robotic arm made out of laser cut …read more

Tags: news

April 28, 2018
11:31
MyEtherWallet DNS Hack Causes 17 Million USD User Loss
» ‎ Darknet

Big news in the crypto scene this week was that the MyEtherWallet DNS Hack that occured managed to collect about $17 Million USD worth of Ethereum in just a few hours.

The hack itself could have been MUCH bigger as it actually involved compromising 1300 Amazon AWS Route 53 DNS IP addresses, fortunately though only MEW was targetted resulting in the damage being contained in the cryptosphere (as far as we know anyway).

Read the rest of MyEtherWallet DNS Hack Causes 17 Million USD User Loss now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: hacking news

April 15, 2018
22:01
RIP DIP ARM
» ‎ Hack a Day

Every month, semiconductor manufacturers across the globe retire old devices. A product that has been superseded, isn’t selling well, or maybe whose application has declined, is removed from the catalogue and ceases to be manufactured. Usually these moments pass unnoticed, just one old device among many. Who is going to remark upon the demise of a chip for a VGA card for example, or a long-ago-left-behind Flash memory chip?

One has come to our attention that is pretty unremarkable, but that could concern some of our readers. NXP have stopped manufacturing the LPC810M021FN8. What on earth is an LPC810M021FN8, you …read more

Tags: news
April 12, 2018
0:30
Hackaday And Tindie Are Coming To London On Sunday!
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hackaday and Tindie have arrived in London at the weekend, fresh from our Dublin Unconference. Join us this Sunday afternoon, as we convene at the Artillery Arms, a pub on the northeastern edge of the City. It’s a free event, we ask though that you sign up for it via Eventbrite if you’d like to attend.

We’re following our usual Bring-a-Hack style format, so come along and hang out with members of the London Hackaday community, and if you have a project to bring along then don’t be shy as we’d love to see it. And especially if you have …read more

Tags: news
April 10, 2018
1:00
Leap Motion Announces Open Source Augmented Reality Headset
» ‎ Hack a Day
Leap Motion just dropped what may be the biggest tease in Augmented and Virtual Reality since Google Cardboard. The North Star is an augmented reality head-mounted display that boasts some impressive specs:
- Dual 1600×1440 LCDs
- 120Hz refresh rate
- 100 degree FOV
- Cost under $100 (in volume)
- Open Source Hardware
- Built-in Leap Motion camera for precise hand tracking
Yes, you read that last line correctly. The North Star will be open source hardware. Leap Motion is planning to drop all the hardware information next week.

Now that we’ve got you excited, let’s mention what the North Star is not — it’s …read more

Tags: news
April 07, 2018
10:01
Applications Open: Ada Lovelace Fellowships For 2018 Open Hardware Summit
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Open Source Hardware Association is now accepting applications for the Ada Lovelace fellowship which provides free admission to the Open Hardware Summit and a $500 travel stipend. One of OSHWA’s goals is to foster a more diverse community within open source. As part of this, Ada Lovelace Fellowships are open to women, LGBTA+, and people of color. There are a total of 10 fellowships available and applications are due by April 30th. The Open Hardware Summit will be held on September 27th at MIT.

The fellowship program, founded by Addie Wagenknecht and Alicia Gibb in 2013, builds on the …read more

Tags: news
April 04, 2018
11:30
The Amazing Hacks Of World Create Day
» ‎ Hack a Day

For this year’s Hackaday Prize, we started an amazing experiment. World Create Day organized hundreds of hackerspaces around the world to come together and Build Hope for the future. This was an experiment to bring community shops and workspaces together to prototype their entries for the Hackaday Prize, and boy was it a success. We had hackerspaces from Portland to Pakistan taking part, and these are just a few of the amazing hacks they pulled off.
Students In Canada Repairing LipSyncs!
The theme of this year’s Hackaday Prize is to Build Hope, and students in Burnaby, British Columbia worked on …read more

Tags: news
April 03, 2018
11:39
Is This The End For The C.H.I.P.?
» ‎ Hack a Day

There have been so many launches of very capable little single-board computers, that it is easy to forget an individual one among the crowd. You probably remember the C.H.I.P though, for its audacious claim back in 2015 to be the first $9 computer. It ran Linux, and included wireless connectivity, composite video output, and support for battery power. As is so often the case with ambitious startups, progress from the C.H.I.P’s creator Next Thing Co came in fits and starts.

In recent months there has been something of a silence, and now members of the community have discovered evidence that …read more

Tags: news
March 31, 2018
7:00
You Bring It, This Blings It: Retrofitting a Hot Foil Stamping Machine
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hot foil stamping is a method often used to embellish and emboss premium print media. It’s used on things like letterhead and wedding invitations to add a touch of luxury. The operation is actually quite simple, where a custom die is heated, pressed into a heat transfer foil, and then transferred on to the print media. Some of the very first manuscripts used gold leaf embossing to decorate intricate calligraphy. You can also see it often used to decorate the sides of religious texts.

Professional foil stamping machines are often pricey and the cheaper ones you can get from eBay …read more

Tags: news
March 30, 2018
4:00
Oracle v Google could Chill Software Development
» ‎ Hack a Day

Unless you’ve completely unplugged from the news, you probably are aware that the long-running feud between Oracle and Google had a new court decision this week. An appeal court found that Google’s excuse of fair use wasn’t acceptable and that they did infringe on Oracle’s copyrights to Java. Oracle has asked for about $9 billion in damages, although the actual amount is yet to be decided. In addition, it is pretty likely Google will take it up to the Supreme Court before any actual judgment is levied.

The news is aimed at normal people, so it is pretty glossy about …read more

Tags: news

March 25, 2018
8:34
Cambridge Analytica Facebook Data Scandal
» ‎ Darknet

One of the biggest stories of the year so far has been the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica that came out after a Channel 4 expose that demonstrated the depths they are willing to go to profile voters, manipulate elections and much more.

It’s kicking off in the UK and the US and Mark Zuckerberg has had to come out publically and apologise about the involvement of Facebook.

This goes deep with ties to elections and political activities in Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and Kenya.

Read the rest of Cambridge Analytica Facebook Data Scandal now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: hacking news

March 20, 2018
7:00
Uber Has An Autonomous Fatality
» ‎ Hack a Day

You have doubtlessly heard the news. A robotic Uber car in Arizona struck and killed [Elaine Herzberg] as she crossed the street. Details are sketchy, but preliminary reports indicate that the accident was unavoidable as the woman crossed the street suddenly from the shadows at night.

If and when more technical details emerge, we’ll cover them. But you can bet this is going to spark a lot of conversation about autonomous vehicles. Given that Hackaday readers are at the top of the technical ladder, it is likely that your thoughts on the matter will influence your friends, coworkers, and even …read more

Tags: news
March 19, 2018
19:00
All Your iPhone Are Belong To Us
» ‎ Hack a Day

Apple’s commitment to customer privacy took the acid test after the San Bernadino shooting incident. Law enforcement demanded that Apple unlock the shooter’s phone, and Apple refused. Court cases ensued. Some people think that the need to protect the public outweighs the need for privacy. Some people think that once they can unlock one iPhone, it won’t stop there and that will be bad for everyone. This post isn’t about either of those positions. The FBI dropped their lawsuit against Apple. Why? They found an Israeli firm that would unlock the phone for about $5,000. In addition, Malwarebytes — a …read more

Tags: news
March 16, 2018
11:30
Are you Dying to Upload Your Brain?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Cryonics — freezing humans for later revival — has been a staple of science fiction for ages. Maybe you want to be cured of something presently incurable or you just want to see the future. Of course, ignoring the problem of why anyone wants to thaw out a 500-year-old person, no one has a proven technology for thawing out one of these corpsicles. You are essentially betting that science will figure that out sometime before your freezer breaks down. A new startup called Nectome funded by Y Combinator wants to change your thinking about preservation. Instead of freezing they will …read more

Tags: news

March 07, 2018
10:33
Memcached DDoS Attacks Will Be BIG In 2018
» ‎ Darknet

So after the massive DDoS attack trend in 2016 it seems like 2018 is going to the year of the Memcached DDoS amplification attack with so many insecure Memcached servers available on the public Internet.

Unfortunately, it looks like a problem that won’t easily go away as there are so many publically exposed, poorly configured Memcached servers online (estimated to be over 100,000).

Honestly, Github handled the 1.3Tbps attack like a champ with only 10 minutes downtime although they did deflect it by moving traffic to Akamai.

Read the rest of Memcached DDoS Attacks Will Be BIG In 2018 now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: hacking news
February 03, 2018
3:54
0-Day Flash Vulnerability Exploited In The Wild
» ‎ Darknet

So another 0-Day Flash Vulnerability is being exploited in the Wild, a previously unknown flaw which has been labelled CVE-2018-4878 and it affects 28.0.0.137 and earlier versions for both Windows and Mac (the desktop runtime) and for basically everything in the Chrome Flash Player (Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS).

The full Adobe Security Advisory can be found here:

– Security Advisory for Flash Player | APSA18-01

Adobe warned on Thursday that attackers are exploiting a previously unknown security hole in its Flash Player software to break into Microsoft Windows computers.

Read the rest of 0-Day Flash Vulnerability Exploited In The Wild now! Only available at Darknet.

Tags: hacking news

January 01, 2013
11:21
This day in Hack a Day history: January 1st 2005
» ‎ Hack a Day

A new feature that we’re playing with is an occasional look back at this day in Hack a Day history. While we’re still hotly disputing exactly what, when, and how to show, we thought today would be a great day to introduce the idea. So, in on this day in Hack a Day history we’re [...]
Tags: day hack history january-1st new-feature news

December 24, 2012
5:47
Merry Christmas 2012 From Darknet
» ‎ Darknet

I’d just like to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas, that’s if you celebrate it – if you don’t enjoy the holiday anyway. Have a HO HO HO Happy Hacking Christmas and a Happy Holiday. The post Merry Christmas 2012 From Darknet appeared first on Darknet - The Darkside.

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk
Tags: darknet merry-christmas happy-holiday site news

December 19, 2012
8:21
Stellaris Launchpad and booster packs used as frequency analyzer
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Jordan Wills] got tired of being limited to eight pixels of resolution and having jumper wires littering his work space. He set out to upgrade his Stellaris Launchpad frequency analyzer project using booster packs. You may remember the initial iteration of the project which used an 8×8 LED matrix to map audio spectrum. With this [...]
Tags: launchpad booster stellaris jordan jumper-wires audio-spectrum frequency-analyzer news
December 18, 2012
8:54
Welding with over a hundred A123 Lithium cells
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Doctor Bass] needed to do some welding on his electric bicycle. The problem is that he’s never welded before and doesn’t have any tools for it. As you can see, that didn’t stop him. He used a bicycle battery made from reclaimed DeWalt A123 cells to power his diy welding rig. He has a huge [...]
Tags: bicycle lithium welding doctor-bass lithium-cells electric-bicycle a123 news
4:01
Tindie gets Fundraisers for kickstarting and group buys
» ‎ Hack a Day

The etsy of electronics project, Tindie, has a brand new feature: It’s a Kickstarter-esque endeavor called a Fundraiser that allows you to sell your projects to other electron enthusiasts. Of course the new Tindie Fundraisers may soon be just another Kickstarter clone for “exciting,” “new,” and “innovative” Arduino dev boards, something we’ve lamented before. We’re really interested in seeing [...]
Tags: group fundraisers tindie dev-boards etsy kickstarter news
December 11, 2012
12:01
Open Compute Project Hosts Hackathon
» ‎ Hack a Day

The folks at Open Compute Project are running their annual summit in January, but this year they’ll be adding a hardware hackathon to the program. The hackathon’s goal is to build open source hardware that can be applied to data centers to increase efficiency and reduce costs. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a foundation that develops open hardware for [...]
Tags: compute project open project-hosts open-source-hardware open-hardware news
November 28, 2012
10:01
Adding Node.js based sensors to the Parrot AR drone
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Max Ogden] wanted the option to add sensors to his Parrot AR Drone. This a commercially available quadcopter which runs Linux. This makes it rather easy for him to use Node.js to read the sensors from an Arduino board. The use of the Arduino is merely for easy prototyping. It is only needed to bridge the drone’s [...]
Tags: parrot node drone max-ogden prototyping sensors news
November 26, 2012
14:01
LEGO LP Player
» ‎ Hack a Day

This LP player is made entirely out of LEGO parts. It plays the songs encoded on each record, but not by using a stylus in a groove. Instead, each LP has a color code on the bottom of it which is interpreted by the optical sensors underneath. In addition to its functionality [Anika Vuurzoon] made [...]
Tags: lego player record lp-player optical-sensors news
November 17, 2012
6:46
Wii U to be released this weekend, Wii U GamePad to be torn apart on workbenches across the land
» ‎ Hack a Day

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, Nintendo will be releasing their next-gen console this weekend. It’s called the Wii U, and one of the most interesting features is the Wii U GamePad – the first controller to feature a full-color video screen right between the analog sticks. Needless [...]
Tags: wii land weekend u-gamepad workbenches video-screen news
November 16, 2012
15:44
The New Template Has Arrived!
» ‎ Hack a Day

When we decided that our template needed a remake several years ago, we knew it was going to be a long and difficult process. We offered you a chance to give us some input in a recent post and now we are releasing the first iteration of the new template. For those that saw the [...]
Tags: arrived new template new-template iteration news
November 06, 2012
11:01
Upverter 2.0 Launches
» ‎ Hack a Day

Disclosure: I currently work at Upverter We’ve featured Upverter here in the past. At that time, the EDA tool was capable of collaborative schematic capture. Today, Upverter is launching version 2.0 of their tool which includes many new features allowing for end-to-end electronics design. Upverter now has a PCB editor, allowing you to manufacture your designs. They [...]
Tags: launches tool upverter eda eda-tool pcb-editor schematic-capture news
November 05, 2012
15:01
Custom circuit drives a small round CRT display
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Svofski's] latest hack seeks to do no more than look cool on his desk. We’d say mission accomplished. He doesn’t even need anyone around to be proud of the small round CRT display unit he put together. Just having it hum away next to him will be more than enough to keep him going when [...]
Tags: display round crt crt-display hack desk news
November 02, 2012
8:02
Building a 100 MHz frequency counter
» ‎ Hack a Day

The great thing about building with gates is the crazy speeds you can achieve by using hardware directly (as opposed to working with simple microcontrollers). This 100 MHz frequency counter is a great example. [Michael] just finished building it using a Papilio board. Of course we’re not talking about discreet chips here. The Papilio is [...]
Tags: frequency mhz counter michael frequency-counter mhz-frequency gates news
October 22, 2012
9:01
Portal gun hack approaches 1.5 million views. More fun hacks to come!
» ‎ Hack a Day

The quick and simple portal gun hack was published a little ver a week ago and has cleared almost 1.5 million views. This is just a taste of things to come as we plunge into creating more fun original content for hackaday. If you haven’t yet, you should go subscribe to our youtube channel. [...]
Tags: gun fun portal hackaday 5-million hacks news
October 20, 2012
9:00
Continental Europe’s first Maker Faire
» ‎ Hack a Day

Continental Europe’s first official sanctioned Maker Faire is well underway in the Netherlands, tucked away at the Open Lab Ebbinge in the city of Groningen. Of course the Groningen Maker Faire will feature cool builds like the bike-mounted workshop built by [Bertoa] we’ve seen and a few wind-powered beach animals inspired by the work of [Theo Jansen]. Also [...]
Tags: maker continental faire theo-jansen the-netherlands groningen continental-europe news

October 15, 2012
18:45
Janis Sharp Hopes For Positive News On McKinnon Extradition
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Headlines

Janis Sharp Hopes For Positive News On McKinnon Extradition
Tags: sharp janis news positive-news mckinnon extradition

October 11, 2012
10:01
Acoustic barcodes deliver data with a fingernail and microphone
» ‎ Hack a Day

Either through QR codes, RFID, or near field communication, there seems to be some desire to share tiny pieces of data in a more physical and accessible form. [Chris Harrison], [Robert Xiao], and [Scott E. Hudson] of the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon have come up with a fairly interesting solution of making data more physical. [...]
Tags: acoustic fingernail microphone scott-e.-hudson robert-xiao chris-harrison hci-institute carnegie-mellon field-communication news
9:01
Hackaday’s portal gun actually levitates a companion cube
» ‎ Hack a Day

I was out to lunch with a couple friends, brainstorming ideas for fun projects when one of them says “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build a working gravity gun?”. We all immediately concurred that while it would in fact be cool, it is also a silly proposition. However, only a few seconds later, [...]
Tags: gun hackaday portal brainstorming-ideas couple-friends news
7:01
Stare deep into this well-lit interactive infinity mirror
» ‎ Hack a Day

[acorv] recently sent us a link to a cool, interactive infinity mirror (Translation) he built. He was originally a bit gun-shy about sending the project our way, but our recent Reddit AMA inspired [acorv] to submit it via our tip line, and we’re glad he did. Having been lucky enough to score $100 of gear from [...]
Tags: infinity acorv stare ama gun-shy tip-line reddit news
6:01
Nixie Clock Without a PCB
» ‎ Hack a Day

Looking for an artistic way to build circuits? Don’t want to design a PCB? The Lethal Nixie Tube Clock is a free form circuit that gives you the time one digit at a time. It uses a IN-1 Nixie tube to display the digits. This is driven by ten MPSA42 high voltage transistors. A IRF520 N-FET, inductor, and a [...]
Tags: pcb clock nixie don nixie-tube-clock irf520 inductor news
5:01
Motivating Engineering Students with Microcontrollers
» ‎ Hack a Day

We see a lot of microcontroller based hacks around here, and it’s not hard to see why learning how to use microcontrollers is valuable to prospective engineeer. Unfortunately, microcontroller courses are dreaded by students since they focus on theory instead of application. In The First Lecure, [Colin] talks to a class of engineering students about [...]
Tags: microcontroller engineering motivating colin engineering-students microcontrollers hacks news
October 10, 2012
16:01
Build your own water rocket launcher
» ‎ Hack a Day

We feel like the days when you want to play in the water are far behind us. But if you can still find a warm afternoon here or there this water rocket launcher build is a fun undertaking. We figure most of the time spent on the project will be in shopping for the parts. [...]
Tags: rocket launcher water water-rocket-launcher warm-afternoon undertaking news
15:01
Turning a plush Dalek into a WiFi enabled robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

You can now “EX-TER-MIN-ATE!” with one finger since this plush Dalek from Doctor Who has been turned into a wireless robot. The build started out with the toy whose only trick was to spout quotes from the popular science fiction television series. [Madox] took it apart to see how it worked, then added some of his [...]
Tags: robot turning dalek min doctor-who science-fiction-television-series science-fiction-television madox news
7:00
Free Software Foundation certifies hardware that Respects Your Freedom
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Free Sofware Foundation, the very same organization responsible for the GNU General Public License and open source advocacy on the part of the Free Software stalwart [Richard Stallman], has certified its first piece of hardware as Respecting Your Freedom. This new certification goes far beyond the goals of Open Source Hardware. In addition to providing documentation, schematics, and [...]
Tags: free Hardware Software richard-stallman open-source-advocacy free-software-foundation news
October 09, 2012
15:04
New Hackaday template coming soon. Here’s your chance to make it better!
» ‎ Hack a Day

<edit — Dark default layout (now shown above) with white option> We’re going to be implementing a new template soon. We’ve been wanting to do this for years and it is finally happening. There are many reasons why this is necessary from site load speed to better commenting. This will give use more control over [...]
Tags: new hackaday template load-speed new-template news
9:00
Hackaday AMA happening right now at Reddit.
» ‎ Hack a Day

Our AMA is live right now. Come ask us questions. You can ask here in our comments too, but frankly the Reddit system is better for at length nested discussion. Items to be discussed: -how to submit your story to hackaday -our new template coming soon Filed under: news
Tags: hackaday system reddit ama new-template news
5:01
Hackaday’s duelling marble mazes are dead
» ‎ Hack a Day

Well, the whole RedBull Creation contest has finally wrapped up. We’re back home and fully recovered from our weekend at MakerFaire. I want to thank the Redbull crew for making the weekend very fun and the crew from Squidfoo for being an awesome team. Now that all the “thank you” statements are out of the [...]
Tags: weekend redbull crew hackaday mazes news
September 29, 2012
4:46
Hackaday at the world MakerFaire in NY
» ‎ Hack a Day

For the next two days, [Caleb Kraft] and [Brian Benchoff] will be wandering around the World MakerFaire in NY. Primarily stationed at the booth meant to show off our winning entry into the Redbull Creation contest, we hope to find some interesting things for you to read about. We’ve already scoped out the MakerFaire and [...]
Tags: world hackaday makerfaire caleb-kraft brian-benchoff scoped interesting-things caleb news
September 26, 2012
4:01
Machine offers cheap advice – charges more for something profound
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Nick Johnson] recently wrote in, sharing a neat project he put together in his spare time. Our readers are most likely familiar with the ubiquitous “fortune” program that ships with many *nix distros, offering cheeky comments and quotes with the press of a button. [Nick] thought it would be cool to build a fortune telling [...]
Tags: advice fortune machine nick nick-johnson cheap-advice neat-project news
September 20, 2012
6:01
Makerbot, Occupy Thingiverse, and the reality of selling Open Hardware
» ‎ Hack a Day

Yesterday, Makerbot Industries introduced the Replicator 2, a very good-looking 3D printer that will is probably the closest thing we’ll see to a proper ‘consumer’ 3D printer for a year or so. There’s only one problem. The new Replicator 2 is rumored to be closed source. If that’s not enough, [Bre Pettis], co-founder and CEO [...]
Tags: printer makerbot replicator pettis-co replicator-2 open-hardware news
September 19, 2012
15:27
Introducing the Makerbot Replicator 2
» ‎ Hack a Day

A few short hours ago at press conference, Makerbot announced the release of their Replicator 2 3D printer. The original Makerbot Replicator was released earlier this year at CES and regaled by the press as a quantum leap in home manufacturing (a quanta is actually very small, guys) with and option for dual extruders and a rather large [...]
Tags: makerbot replicator press quantum-leap extruders quanta news

September 14, 2012
14:00
[web applications] - GentleSource News CSRF Vulnerability
» ‎ 0day.today (was: 1337day, Inj3ct0r, 1337db)

[web applications] - GentleSource News CSRF Vulnerability
Tags: news web gentlesource web-applications vulnerability

September 11, 2012
12:01
Preserve history and dispose of asbestos
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’ve ever visited Gettysburg, the turning point of the American Civil War, you’ve probably seen this illuminated topographical map. For years, it was housed in one of the many visitor centers in Gettysburg and demonstrated the progress of the 3-day battle with an amazing 1960s-era visualization using a 30 foot by 30 foot topographical map and [...]
Tags: map foot gettysburg american-civil-war topographical-map news
September 10, 2012
11:01
Kalman filter keeps your bot balanced
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re looking to improve the stability of your self balancing robot you might use a simple horrifying equation like this one. It’s part of the journey [Lauszus] took when developing a sensor filtering algorithm for his balancing robot. He’s not breaking ground on new mathematical ideas, but trying to make it a bit easier for [...]
Tags: filter robot bot kalman breaking-ground mathematical-ideas algorithm news
September 04, 2012
6:01
Tindie is growing up
» ‎ Hack a Day

Tindie, the etsy for electronics and DIY projects is growing up. After growing 300% in August, the creator of Tindie, [emile], is now working full-time as the head of Tindie, LLC. Intended to be a place to connect makers with homebrew project connoisseurs, Tindie is seeing new projects and builds added every day. [emile] figures since some [...]
Tags: etsy emile tindie homebrew-project diy-projects news
August 31, 2012
14:09
Hackaday Links August 31, 2012
» ‎ Hack a Day

Landing a fixed-wing through hotel balcony french doors As you can see, launching an RC airplane off of a hotel balcony is easy. But watch the video and you’ll find out trying to fly through the french doors for a landing is another story. [Team BlackSheep] hits (har, har) Thailand in this collection of breathtaking [...]
Tags: balcony hotel landing thailand hotel-balcony rc-airplane french-doors news
August 29, 2012
9:01
What does the government think about that drone in your home?
» ‎ Hack a Day

The world is buzzing about drones right now. Even we’re joining in the fun with some antics of our own. Right now, it is basically a legal free-for all since no one is enforcing regulation, but is that about to change? Should it? Lets start off by establishing the definition of a “drone”. For this [...]
Tags: government drone home drones antics news

August 25, 2012
14:00
[webapps / 0day] - Shopper News (Silver Lake Shopper News) Multiple Vulnerabilities
» ‎ 0day.today (was: 1337day, Inj3ct0r, 1337db)

[webapps / 0day] - Shopper News (Silver Lake Shopper News) Multiple Vulnerabilities
Tags: news day webapps silver-lake vulnerabilities

August 21, 2012
11:30
Building a resistor substitution decade box
» ‎ Hack a Day

[George] built an incredibly tidy resistor substitution decade box. These devices feature a pair of connections and a way to select the resistance between the two of them. In [George's] case it’s a pair of banana jacks and these eight thumbwheel switches. What you see above is the side of each thumbwheel switch. These are [...]
Tags: resistor substitution decade george banana-jacks thumbwheel-switches news
August 20, 2012
9:30
New and improved old hackaday store!
» ‎ Hack a Day

I am going to start off by saying our zazzle store was pretty sad. The prices were just way too high. I put that store into place because frankly, the one I was running was a pain in the butt. The good news is that I’ve got a new system in place. It is bright [...]
Tags: place new store pain-in-the-butt news

August 19, 2012
17:00
WordPress Image News slider Plugin Multiple Unspecified Vulnerabilities UPDATED
» ‎ SecuriTeam

Image News slider plugin for WordPress is prone to multiple unspecified security vulnerabilities.
Tags: news wordpress image security-vulnerabilities image-news slider

6:01
Real time GPS decoding with software defined radio
» ‎ Hack a Day

In case the Realtek RTL2832u-based USB TV tuner dongle isn’t useful enough, the folks behind a project to get a software defined GPS receiver off the ground successfully plotted GPS data in real-time with this very inexpensive radio. Previously, we’ve seen these dongles grab data from GPS satellites - useful if you’re building a GPS-based clock – [...]
Tags: gps radio Software usb-tv-tuner inexpensive-radio gps-satellites news
August 17, 2012
8:30
We’re getting an Oculus Rift Dev Kit
» ‎ Hack a Day

Before you get jealous of the massive amount of sway that hackaday must’ve tossed at these guys to get a dev kit, don’t be. We just funded the kickstarter like everyone else. This is exciting news though since, as you probably know, I’m very fond of immersive gaming and have always craved a strong VR [...]
Tags: dev oculus kit kickstarter exciting-news news
6:39
Inventor of the 555 timer passes away
» ‎ Hack a Day

August 15th 2012, the news was reported that [Hanz Camenzind], the creator of the 555 timer, has passed away. We are all familiar with 555 timer, but many of you may not be aware that [Hanz] also created the first class D amplifier. Actually, he had over 20 patents under his belt as well as [...]
Tags: timer inventor hanz class-d-amplifier news
August 12, 2012
8:01
Earthworm robot does what earthworms do
» ‎ Hack a Day

This earthworm robot comes to us from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is made up of mostly soft parts and manages to inch its way along the ground. The robot’s “skin” is made from a tube of polymer mesh that will hold up to an awful lot of bending and stretching. As with its [...]
Tags: robot massachusetts earthworm massachusetts-institute-of-technology earthworms news
August 11, 2012
12:01
Announcing: International Hack Day, August 11th.
» ‎ Hack a Day

There is no single and definitive definition of what hacking is. We all have different versions of similar ideas in our head, but depending on your background and area of enthusiasm, hacking means something different. While dictionary.com has many definitions of the word itself, none seem to cover what we see on a daily basis. [...]
Tags: international announcing hack definitive-definition daily-basis dictionary news
August 08, 2012
14:04
Sparkfun recognized for their growth
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Denver Business Journal has recognized Sparkfun Electronics as the 2nd fastest growing company in the Denver area (in the $17.5-$46million class). This is fantastic news, not only for Sparkfun, but for Open Source Hardware. Sparkfun is the worlds largest manufacturer of open source hardware, located right in the middle of the country, Boulder Colorado. [...]
Tags: sparkfun Hardware source boulder denver denver-business-journal open-source-hardware fantastic-news news
10:01
[Limor Fried] (Adafruit) up for Entrepreneur of 2012 award
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Limor Fried], the brains behind Adafruit is one of the five finalists for the Entrepreneur of 2012 award in Entrepreneur magazine. We’ve always been big fans of how she chooses to run her business. Adafruit supplies open source hardware and compiles tons of great tutorials on the pieces. Not only that but they have pushed [...]
Tags: limor entrepreneur adafruit limor-fried open-source-hardware entrepreneur-magazine news
August 05, 2012
3:20
Mars Science Laboratory lands today
» ‎ Hack a Day

Since launching on November 26, 2011, the newest Mars rover Curiosity has been speeding towards the red planet. Its days in the harsh vacuum of space are numbered as Curiosity prepares to land in just a few hours. The landing of Curiosity at Gale crater is scheduled to be received on Earth at Aug 5, 10:31 pm PDT [...]
Tags: curiosity science mars gale mars-science science-laboratory mars-rover news
August 03, 2012
9:01
Electromagnetic Field Camp
» ‎ Hack a Day

Emf Electromagnetic Field Camp is a three-day camping festival for people with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, geeks, scientists, engineers, artists, and crafters. There will be people talking about everything from genetic modification to electronics, blacksmithing to high-energy physics, reverse engineering to lock picking, crocheting to carpentry, and quadcopters to beer brewing. If [...]
Tags: electromagnetic festival field camp emf high-energy-physics inquisitive-mind electromagnetic-field news
July 28, 2012
6:01
The Minotaur’s Revenge: Dueling Labyrinths
» ‎ Hack a Day

In case you hadn’t noticed, we participated in a contest recently. The RedBull Creation contest. The basic idea was that they gave us 72 hours to build something based on a theme. The whole thing would be streamed live as the 12 teams competed. The theme was “game of games” and the rules were pretty [...]
Tags: contest theme minotaur labyrinths revenge news
July 23, 2012
6:00
Real Life Subtitle Glasses
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Will Powell] sent in his real-time subtitle glasses project. Inspired by the ever cool Google Project Glass, he decided he would experiment with his own version. He used two Raspberry Pi’s running Debian squeeze, vuzix glasses, microphones, a tv, ipad, and iphone as the hardware components. The flow of data is kind of strange in this project. [...]
Tags: real project subtitle ipad iphone google news
July 20, 2012
7:01
Cutting islands into copper-clad PCBs with a drill
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re looking to build some small radio circuits, or if you are simply seeking a new look for your PCBs, you might want to check out what YouTube user [AndyDaviesByTheSea] has been working on lately. He has been building RF circuits as of late and was searching for a better way to create islands [...]
Tags: radio drill look rf-circuits radio-circuits pcbs news
July 19, 2012
16:10
Hackaday RBC team live streaming NOW!
» ‎ Hack a Day

Live Stream upcoming events (Central Time): Currently: Sleepy Time! 0830: Start building again! Our Project: “Minotaur’s Revenge” (working title, subject to change) We are building two giant marble mazes. The maze itself is all mechanical, with a 2 person team controlling x and y axis. The fun happens though when you hit buttons to activate magnets and [...]
Tags: team rbc hackaday central-time-zone fire-breather zone-check news
16:08
Reclaiming the numpad for laptop users everywhere
» ‎ Hack a Day

We have to agree with NYCResistor, the exclusion of numeric pads from laptops is a real loss for productivity. Ever try to working with a huge spreadsheet ledger without a 10-key? Sure, there are usually function key alternatives hiding somewhere on those reduced keyboards. But that’s hardly the same thing. We think it’s time to [...]
Tags: numpad laptop reclaiming laptop-users spreadsheet news
July 18, 2012
8:01
Static testing hybrid rockets for a flight to space
» ‎ Hack a Day

A team of rocketry enthusiasts at Boston University have been working on a small hybrid rocket motor that serves as a test bed for a larger, yet-to-be-designed power plant that will hopefully launch a rocket into space. The static tests of the BURT Mk. II began last April with a series of tests using HTPB solid fuel and Nitrous Oxide [...]
Tags: space static rocket burt-mk hybrid-rockets rocketry-enthusiasts mk-ii news
July 11, 2012
8:02
Teaching a computer to learn
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Łukasz Kaiser] programmed a computer to play Tic-tac-toe. That doesn’t sound very remarkable until you realize he never told his computer the rules of Tic-tac-toe. The computer learned the rules by itself after watching a video of two people playing the game (link to actual paper - PDF warning). [Łukasz] wrote a small program in C++ to recognize [...]
Tags: ukasz tic-tac-toe computer game-link paper-pdf playing-the-game news
July 05, 2012
4:01
Library for driving SSD1289 LCD displays with small microcontrollers
» ‎ Hack a Day

[H. Smeitink] got his hands on a 320×240 color TFT LCD screen. He set out to drive it with a small PIC microcontroller but didn’t find a lot of help out there to get up and running quickly. This is surprising since it’s a really nice display for quite a low price (under $16 delivered [...]
Tags: lcd ssd library h.-smeitink pic-microcontroller color-tft lcd-displays news
June 28, 2012
9:01
MakerFaire K.C.: Incredible Wasp Wings
» ‎ Hack a Day

First off let me say that the Redbull contest has consumed ALL of my time and I haven’t been able to get these Makerfaire coverage posts out as quickly as I’d hoped. Please be patient, there are several more to come I promise. As I was walking around, I glanced up and saw a really [...]
Tags: wasp makerfaire wings news
June 27, 2012
11:01
An Etsy for electronics
» ‎ Hack a Day

A few months ago we caught wind of Tindie, a site that gives builders, tinkerers, makers, and hackers a place to sell their projects. Well, Tindie has gone live and it looks to be cooler than we expected. Already there are some pretty awesome projects available on Tindie such as a truly awesome MIDI keyboard, an [...]
Tags: etsy tindie wind midi-keyboard awesome-projects news

June 26, 2012
17:48
Cute News 1.4.7 Cross Site Request Forgery
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Exploits

Cute News version 1.4.7 suffers from a cross site request forgery vulnerability.
Tags: cross news cute forgery vulnerability

17:48
Cute News 1.4.7 Cross Site Request Forgery
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Recent Files

Cute News version 1.4.7 suffers from a cross site request forgery vulnerability.
Tags: cross news cute forgery vulnerability

17:48
Cute News 1.4.7 Cross Site Request Forgery
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Misc. Files

Cute News version 1.4.7 suffers from a cross site request forgery vulnerability.
Tags: cross news cute forgery vulnerability

17:00
SN News 'visualiza.php' SQL Injection Vulnerability
» ‎ SecuriTeam

SN News is prone to an SQL-injection vulnerability because it fails to sufficiently sanitize user-supplied data before using it in an SQL query.
Tags: news vulnerability sql sql-injection sql-query

June 25, 2012
21:08
Strange Login request at Hackaday.com
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve received numerous messages about this new login popup on our site. This is NOT our doing. It is most likely some ancient script from our ancient template that has finally become outdated or expired. We’re working on a resolution. If you hit cancel it will go away. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience [...]
Tags: strange request login ancient-script login-request sorry-for-the-inconvenience news
June 20, 2012
10:50
AVC from the vehicle’s perspective
» ‎ Hack a Day

Team 0×27 was the winner of this year’s AVC, the Autonomous Vehicle Contest put on by SparkFun Electronics. You’ll find video of the two runs from this entry (the third run did not finish). We love it that there’s an on-board camera recording both video and sound of the race from the vehicle’s point of [...]
Tags: video vehicle avc autonomous-vehicle board-camera news

June 18, 2012
7:00
Bugtraq: News Script PHP v1.2 - Multiple Web Vulnerabilites
» ‎ SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities

News Script PHP v1.2 - Multiple Web Vulnerabilites
Tags: news php script news-script script-php

June 17, 2012
14:00
[webapps / 0day] - PHP-Fushion (news.php) SQL Injection Vulnerability
» ‎ 0day.today (was: 1337day, Inj3ct0r, 1337db)

[webapps / 0day] - PHP-Fushion (news.php) SQL Injection Vulnerability
Tags: day news php-fushion news-php vulnerability

June 15, 2012
20:31
News Script PHP 1.2 Cross Site Scripting / SQL Injection
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Recent Files

News Script PHP version 1.2 suffers from cross site scripting and remote SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Tags: news php script news-script script-php php-version

20:31
News Script PHP 1.2 Cross Site Scripting / SQL Injection
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Misc. Files

News Script PHP version 1.2 suffers from cross site scripting and remote SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Tags: news php script news-script script-php php-version

17:00
SN News 'loger.php' Multiple SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
» ‎ SecuriTeam

SN News is prone to multiple SQL-injection vulnerabilities because it fails to sufficiently sanitize user-supplied data before using it in an SQL query.
Tags: news loger sql sql-injection sql-query

June 14, 2012
13:01
Mini Maker Faire in Eugene, OR this weekend
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Rick Osgood] wrote in to tell us about the Eugene, OR Mini Maker Faire going on this weekend. The event is being hosted on the grounds of the Science Factory with a lot of help from the Eugune Makerspace So far, Steamworks Cycles, the South Eugene Robotics Team, Oregon Rocketry and Eugene Rocketery will be at the [...]
Tags: maker faire mini eugene rick-osgood rocketry south-eugene oregon oregon-rocketry robotics-team news

June 13, 2012
21:35
[Audio] Fnord News Show
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Felix von Leitner Frank Rieger
Tags: culture
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 25th (25C3) 2008
Abstract: This year's apocalyptic Fnord-review will include the war in Georgia and the financial-crisis. We try to web the events into a kind of mega-conspiracy, so that only one group (or probably two or three) are guilty.
Tags: news audio fnord frank-rieger felix-von-leitner georgia chaos-communication-congress

June 12, 2012
10:01
Introducing Hack a Day: the retro edition
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hack a Day hasn’t change its format since 2004. Even though MAKE has gone Web 2.0 with buttons using mouseover, and Instructables has fancy drop-down menus, Hack a Day has been a constant black background, green text child of the web circa 2004. A while ago, we decided it was time for an update to our [...]
Tags: drop-down-menus black-background mouseover news
June 08, 2012
8:01
555 business card
» ‎ Hack a Day

After checking out a few beautiful business cards while working at his engineering co-op, [Cody] realized he would soon need his own. Instead of a card with subtle off-white coloring, a tasteful thickness to it, and even a watermark, [Cody] decided to make a 555 timer business card. [Cody] started his business card project by [...]
Tags: engineering-co business-cards business-card news

June 06, 2012
17:06
SN News 1.2 SQL Injection
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Exploits

SN News versions 1.2 and below suffer from a remote SQL injection vulnerability in visualiza.php.
Tags: injection news sql vulnerability

17:06
SN News 1.2 SQL Injection
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Recent Files

SN News versions 1.2 and below suffer from a remote SQL injection vulnerability in visualiza.php.
Tags: injection news sql vulnerability

17:06
SN News 1.2 SQL Injection
» ‎ Packet Storm Security Misc. Files

SN News versions 1.2 and below suffer from a remote SQL injection vulnerability in visualiza.php.
Tags: injection news sql vulnerability

9:01
Visual rain sensor — so you never have to look outside
» ‎ Hack a Day

Now you can find out how hard it is raining outside without leaving the confines of your mancave/womancave. Pictured above is the sensor portion of what [Frapedia] calls his visual rain sensor. Most rain gauges just use a graduated cylinder to capture water as it falls from the sky. That will give you a reasonably [...]
Tags: visual rain sensor rain-sensor graduated-cylinder confines news
May 30, 2012
5:00
[Ian Lesnet]‘s guide to the Bay Area Maker Faire
» ‎ Hack a Day

It may be a week after the fact, but former Hackaday alum and inventor of the Bus Pirate [Ian Lesnet] made a great guide to the Bay Area Maker Faire. The San Francisco-area Maker Faire attracts 100,000 makers, tinkerers, hackers, and general geeks to a bazaar of DIY and generally cool stuff. All the regulars were [...]
Tags: week faire guide ian-lesnet francisco-area-maker bay-area san alum regulars bazaar news
May 25, 2012
7:07
Lego for girls? [Limor] has some ideas.
» ‎ Hack a Day

When Lego announced that they were going to do a series of “Lego for girls”, many of us didn’t get it. When we were kids(get off my lawn!), legos were completely asexual. At least, that’s how my mind saw them, being a caucasian male. While the idea itself makes sense in marketing terms, the products [...]
Tags: lego limor series caucasian-male marketing-terms news
May 24, 2012
14:01
Hackaday Store: It exists again
» ‎ Hack a Day

We used to have a store. Actually, it was just me, pumping out shirts and stickers from my garage. However, I found that over time, I wasn’t particularly happy with the quality of the shirts. The vinyl would crack over time, and I wasn’t the fastest person in the world to get an order out [...]
Tags: stickers news
May 23, 2012
5:01
SpaceX finally launches, [Scotty] makes it to space.
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve been eagerly anticipating the first launch of our new space era. Like it or not, NASA isn’t going up anymore, so someone else has to. When we posted that the launch event was going to be broadcasted live (which ultimately failed), there was a lot of debate in our comments on the subject of [...]
Tags: launch-event nasa news
May 18, 2012
18:01
Reminder: SpaceX launch tomorrow. Watch it live!
» ‎ Hack a Day

There isn’t a hacker out there that isn’t interested at least a little bit in the prospect of building a mission specific rocket to explode someone off the face of the planet… without killing them. We got a tiny taste of what is coming when they let us watch their engine test a few weeks [...]
Tags: reminder isn spacex tiny-taste engine-test news
9:01
SparkFun gets a Subpoena for all orders; says nah
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s no secret that we’re fans of open source, and open hardware. And we have to applaud companies like SparkFun who also keep their customers in the loop about what’s going on with the business end of the company. For instance, they were recently contacted by a Sheriff’s office and asked for customer information and [...]
Tags: sparkfun nah subpoena open-hardware business-end news
May 17, 2012
5:01
Brawndo Drinking Fountain – It’s Got What Geeks Crave!
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re tired of drinking mere water, like from the toilet, then you should definitely install a Brawndo drinking fountain. Apparently, in addition to being what plants crave, geeks also enjoy this futuristic beverage. As with many hacks, this fountain started out with a broken piece of equipment – a water fountain. After searching unsuccessfully for [...]
Tags: brawndo fountain drinking drinking-fountain water-fountain hacks news
May 16, 2012
8:01
Sell your projects with Club Jameco
» ‎ Hack a Day

Everyone’s favorite electronic component distributor, Jameco, rolled out a new way for you to make a few bucks off of your projects. It’s called Club Jameco and looks like a great place to design, sell, and learn about new projects from around the Internet. The premise behind Club Jameco is simple. You send Jameco a short [...]
Tags: club everyone jameco electronic-component-distributor new-projects news
May 14, 2012
14:01
Graphic equalizer display flashes LED sign to the beat
» ‎ Hack a Day

Careful planning and a steady hand let [Leo Rampen] fit everything he needed to build a graphic equalizer display on his LED wall sign. There’s a lot of components that needed to fit on this board, and he decided not use to an etched board for the build. The idea for the project started off as [...]
Tags: equalizer led display leo-rampen steady-hand leo wall-sign news
9:01
Hackaday around the web and into the future
» ‎ Hack a Day

Like everyone else, we’re scattered all over the web. We would be silly not to be getting our information out there in as many ways as we can manage. We promise that the site always comes first, but you can also find us on Facebook, G+ (yes, we’re approved this time), twitter, and we even [...]
Tags: everyone web hackaday facebook twitter news
5:01
The making of a Vacuum Tube
» ‎ Hack a Day

With the death of Heathkit looming in our minds it’s high time for a a heartwarming story. [Ronald Dekker] has done a wonderful job documenting the history of the E1T beam counting tube, detailing everything from the work led up to the invention of the tube to the lives of the inventors themselves. For those who [...]
Tags: making vacuum tube ronald-dekker vacuum-tube heartwarming-story heathkit news
4:01
Amphi-Cycle lets you ride the trails, the waves, and back again
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hackaday regular [Berto] is always looking for new ways to get around, and wrote in to share his most recent creation, an amphibious bicycle. He bought an off-the-shelf inflatable boat and constructed a rig that allows him to stably mount the bike on it. Once [Berto] comes across a body of water he wants to [...]
Tags: cycle amphi berto body-of-water new-ways news

May 13, 2012
14:00
[webapps / 0day] - Media News Portal CSRF Vulnerability (Add Admin)
» ‎ 0day.today (was: 1337day, Inj3ct0r, 1337db)

[webapps / 0day] - Media News Portal CSRF Vulnerability (Add Admin)
Tags: news day media media-news vulnerability

May 12, 2012
11:01
Heathkit closes down, again.
» ‎ Hack a Day

With this rather large flip flop, Heathkit has closed its doors… again. The company that so many of us remember fondly from their myriad of electronics kits originally closed its doors in 1992. Last year, there was an announcement of a revival and a call for kit submissions. Unfortunately, it looks like that just didn’t [...]
Tags: heathkit company flop electronics-kits flip-flop myriad news
10:01
Destroying stuff for the good of all mankind
» ‎ Hack a Day

NC state’s constructed facilities laboratory is a place where things get broken for science. We’ve shared several videos lately of things being sliced, diced, sheared, exploded, and smashed, purely for the fun of it, and now we feel like we should compensate a little bit. No, we’re not going to undergo physical punishment, instead, we’ll [...]
Tags: destroying good stuff physical-punishment nc-state mankind news
May 10, 2012
4:01
Are your PCBs being tested as claimed?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Florin ordered some PCBs from Iteadstudio, a pcb prototyping service. As part of their service, they claim that all PCBs are tested before they are delivered. However, many have been bringing this claim into question. [Florin] found a complete lack of any markings indicating actual probes had been used on his boards. Though they claim [...]
Tags: service iteadstudio florin prototyping-service pcbs probes news
May 07, 2012
6:56
Two saxophone synthesizer builds for the price of one
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Bruce Land] has been sending in student projects from the electronic design course he taught at Cornell last semester. By a curious coincidence, two groups build saxophone synthesizers with the same key arrangement as a real sax. First up is [Brian Wang]‘s digital sax. There’s a small microphone in the mouthpiece and a series of [...]
Tags: sax saxophone synthesizer bruce-land brian-wang curious-coincidence mouthpiece student-projects news
May 03, 2012
11:01
Machine learning lets micro decode your handwriting
» ‎ Hack a Day

This rig will take the letters you write on the touchpad using a stylus and turn them into digital characters. The system is very fast and displays near-perfect recognition. This is all thanks to a large data set that was gathered through machine learning. The ATmega644 that powers the system just doesn’t have the speed [...]
Tags: decode machine system touchpad handwriting rig news
April 30, 2012
14:01
Tindie: an etsy for electronics
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you have a finished project you’re now bored with, here’s Tindie. It’s a one-man operation headed b [emile] that hopes to connect makers with people who think DIY projects are really cool and have money. There are already a few websites that cater to the builder who wants to sell projects: Kickstarter for one, [...]
Tags: etsy tindie project man-operation finished-project diy-projects news
April 28, 2012
11:01
Iron casting in the parking lot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here’s one good thing about the bitter cold Midwestern winter, it helps keep you from overheating when working around a hot furnace. Back in February this iron pour happened in the parking lot of the Madison, Wisconsin based Sector67 Hackerspace. Look, they’re making iron hearts! Now this isn’t just a bunch of members who got together and [...]
Tags: midwestern-winter making-iron madison-wisconsin news
7:01
Nuka-Cola prop looks deliciously radioactive
» ‎ Hack a Day

Yet another Fallout post here on Hackaday. This time, instead of the PIP-Boy, someone has built a fantastic prop for the iconic Nuka-Cola. The circuit is super simple, really just an LED array to light up the beverage just right. The construction of the base is quite nice though. If you’re a fan of functional [...]
Tags: post cola fallout nuka-cola pip-boy news
6:01
Retrotechtacular: Science fair robot ca. 1984
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Michael Surran] just came across this video from his seventh grade science fair project. He really had some fun building and showing off the robot and we’re glad the footage wasn’t lost in the annals of time. Take a look at the clip after the break. That’s not a robot peeing, it’s the ‘fire defense unit’ [...]
Tags: retrotechtacular science robot michael-surran seventh-grade-science grade-science-fair-project fire-defense news
April 27, 2012
16:01
Westport Mini Maker Faire is the first for Connecticut
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re in Westport CT, or within day-trip distance, you might want to check out the Mini Maker Faire happening there this weekend. Being held at the Westport Library & Jesup Green, there are going to be several interesting planned events, on top of the usual gathering of makers and hackers. Local hackerspaces will be [...]
Tags: maker westport mini connecticut westport-library westport-ct day-trip news
April 26, 2012
9:01
Modeling an object with internal IMUs
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Joseph Malloch] sent in a really cool video of him modeling a piece of foam twisting and turning in 3D space. To translate the twists, bends, and turns of his piece of foam, [Joseph] used several inertial measurement units (IMUs) to track the shape of a deformable object. These IMUs consist of a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis [...]
Tags: foam piece imus joseph-malloch joseph inertial-measurement-units axis-accelerometer deformable-object news
April 24, 2012
7:01
Report from RoboGames 2012
» ‎ Hack a Day

Last week we reported on the upcoming 2012 Robogames competition would be held in San Mateo, California. Nobody from the Hackaday staff could make it this year, but luckily [Sabrina Merlo] from the Make: blog was able to provide a full report of the spectacle of fire, sparks and pierced metal this year. For anyone [...]
Tags: year report robogames mateo sabrina-merlo san california san-mateo-california merlo news

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Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news

Tags: news