The post The Open-V, World’s First RISC-V-based Open Source Microcontroller appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Wednesday, November 30
The Open-V, World’s First RISC-V-based Open Source Microcontroller
Incredible discovery of 40,000-year-old tools for art and engineering
Evidence from a cave in eastern Ethiopia has revealed something extraordinary about the origins of symbolic thought among humans. Forty-thousand years ago, Porc-Epic Cave was surrounded by lush grassland full of lakes and rivers. It was home to a thriving community of people who devoted considerable time to processing ochre, a reddish powder used for variety of things including paint. Writing in PLoS One, anthropologists Daniela Eugenia Rosso, Africa Pitarch MartÃ, and Francesco d’Errico describe how they worked with the National Museum of Ethiopia to analyze these Middle Stone Age people's ochre-making tools. What they found was this workshop's artisans produced a far more complicated array of substances than anyone had understood before. Some were used for art and decoration, and others were used for engineering better weapons.
Anthropologists often use ochre processing as a proxy for the origins of human symbolic thought. That's partly because ochre is relatively difficult to make, requiring a few steps and at least two kinds of tools. As the researchers write, ochre comes from "rocks containing a high proportion of iron oxides, often mixed with silicates and other mineral substances, which are red or yellow in color, or are streaked with such shades." Ochre itself is made by pulverizing the rock with one kind of tool and then reducing it to a powder between two grindstones.
There are many aesthetic uses for ochre, including as fabric dye, paint for cave walls, or a stain for rocks and other materials. All these artistic or cosmetic uses imply symbolic thought. But early humans also used ochre for utilitarian purposes too. The powder was mixed with other adhesives to keep weapons snugly attached to their hafts. Put simply, ochre was a key ingredient in glue.
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Tor releases urgent update for Firefox 0day that’s under active attack
Developers with Tor have published a browser update that patches a critical Firefox vulnerability being actively exploited to deanonymize people using the privacy service.
"The security flaw responsible for this urgent release is already actively exploited on Windows systems," a Tor official wrote in an advisory published Wednesday afternoon. "Even though there is currently, to the best of our knowledge, no similar exploit for OS X or Linux users available, the underlying bug affects those platforms as well. Thus we strongly recommend that all users apply the update to their Tor Browser immediately."
The Tor browser is based on the open-source Firefox browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla officials said on Tuesday they were in the process of developing a fix that presumably included mainstream versions of Firefox, but at the time this post was being prepared, a patch was not yet available. Mozilla representatives didn't respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this post.
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What we’ll be looking for in laptops for 2017
Certain pieces of technology tend to stick around. USB has been the connector of choice for all manner of peripherals for two decades, and ATA hard disks, first parallel and now serial, have a history back to 1986. Over the last few years, however, we've started to see real alternatives to these technologies hit the market, with NVMe storage and Thunderbolt 3 for attaching devices.
Similarly, touchpads have gone from dumb mouse emulators (often using the venerable PS/2 interface) to complex multi-finger pressure sensing devices with the Precision Touchpad specification.
We've also seen formerly niche capabilities, such as biometric authentication, move into the mainstream. Both facial recognition and fingerprints continue to become familiar parts of the hardware landscape.
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Tesla Coil Powered Film Canister Gatling Gun
What do you get when you combine a Tesla coil, 315 film canisters and a fortune wheel? The answer is of course a film canister Gatling gun. [ScienceBob] has taken the simple film canister cannon hack to a whole new level. The idea is simple, the film canister has a lid that fits tight and allows pressure to build up, so if you fill it with alcohol vapor and ignite it with a spark gap, you get a small explosion that sends the can flying away.
[ScienceBob] uses 21 rows of fifteen canisters each around the wheel. There is a spark gap for each canister, and all the spark gaps in the same row are in series. You need a lot of volts to turn on fifteen spark gaps, and that is why the Tesla coil is part of the game. When the outer end of the wire in one row passes near the Tesla coil, a spark jumps and fires all the spark gaps, igniting the alcohol vapor and fifteen cans are expelled from the wheel. The wheel rotates until all rows are fired.
While this nice piece of artillery is sure a lot of fun to fire, but don’t ask us to reload it! If you want more power, check this Gatling gun that fires crossbow bolts, or the Gatling water pistol.
Filed under: classic hacks, misc hacks
Dealmaster: Cyber Week continues with deals on Dell Latitude 15, XPS 13, and more
Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we're back with more Cyber Week deals for you. This entire week you can save a lot of money on a bunch of electronics, including the Dell Latitude 15 3000 laptop with a Core i7 processor and an Nvidia GPU or Dell XPS 13 laptops with Kaby Lake processors and 8GB of RAM, just to name a few. Below is a huge list of deals on desktops, TVs, smart home devices, and more, and you can check out even more Cyber Week Deals at TechBargains.
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Software-defined sports coupé: Testing the 2017 Infiniti Q60
Jonathan Gitlin
Infiniti's 2017 Q60 sports coupé exemplifies a trend that's been underway for some time in the auto industry: the software-defined car. The car—Infiniti's answer to a BMW 4 Series—is completely drive-by-wire. Yes, the throttle and brakes are all controlled by electronics, but so too is the steering, which operates without a mechanical linkage to the front wheels. The flick of a switch reconfigures the Q60's systems, changing the car's behavior to suit one's mood and the road conditions. This is fast becoming normal throughout the automotive marketplace, but it represents a sea change compared to cars from just a few years ago.
The Q60 fills an important niche in Infiniti's lineup. The brand had a lot of success with the rear-wheel drive G35 and then G37 coupés here in the US, and Infiniti wants to rekindle that, drawing away sales from BMW and Audi. That means this car ought to look good inside and out, pack a punch under the hood, and provide the kind of driver feedback (read, excitement) that encourages the owner to think about taking the long—and twisty—way home instead. To find out if that's the case, we spent a week with one—a 3.0t Premium rear wheel drive model.
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Founding A Company In Shenzhen For Eight Days
Nadya Peek is one of the hackers that should require no introduction for the regular Hackaday reader. She is a postdoc at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab. She’s responsible for Popfab, a CNC machine that fits in a suitcase and one of the first implementations of a Core XY stage we’ve seen. Nadya has joined the ranks of Rudolf Diesel, Nikola Tesla, Mikhail Kalashnikov, and George W.G. Ferris by having a very tiny piece of the Novena laptop bear her name. She’s built cardboard CNC machines, and taken the idea of simple, easy to build printers, routers, and drawbots worldwide. She just defended her thesis, the gist of which is, ‘How to rapidly prototype rapid prototyping machines.’ She’s also one of this year’s Hackaday Prize judges, for which we have the utmost appreciation.
This year, the organizers of the Fab 12 conference on digital fabrication in Shenzhen turned to Nadya and her team to bring their amazing experience to conference attendees. A workshop was in order, but Nadya didn’t have time to organize the logistics. The conference organizers made a deal: the Center for Bits and Atoms would teach a workshop, but getting all the materials and electronics was the responsibility of the organizers.
Upon arriving at the Shenzhen Sheridan, Nadya found the organizers didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. The cardboard, motors, electronics, and glue were nowhere to be found. A “rider” doesn’t quite translate from English, it seems. This is Shenzhen, though, where you can buy all the cardboard, motors, electronics, and iPhone clones you could imagine. What was the solution to this problem? Founding a company in Shenzhen for eight days.
Half a tourist’s guide to Shenzhen and half a deconstruction of what goes into cardboard CNC, Nadya’s talk for the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference covers what happens when you have a week to build a company that will build machines that build machines.
Our Capabilities Are Your Possibilities
In Shenzhen, purchase orders and invoices are the domain of companies. To gather all the parts for this workshop conference, Nadya and the rest of the Bits and Atoms team founded a company, Gestalt Solutions Co. Ltd., with the motto, “Our Capabilities Are Your Possibilities”.
Despite multiple problems, the conference went off without a (visible) hitch. All this, of course, was due to being at the only place on the planet where you can buy components to build assemblies to build robots that can build robots in three days… and having the skills to pull it off.
We’re pretty keen on engineering war stories, and there were plenty of them at the Hackaday SuperConference, but Nadya’s talk goes above and beyond what we usually hear. It’s something that could only happen in Shenzhen, and we’re glad she could make it out and reminisce about the bots of days past.
Filed under: cons, Hackaday Columns, robots hacks
DiResta Picks the Contents for the Latest Maker Box
The post DiResta Picks the Contents for the Latest Maker Box appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Cop filmed killing fleeing suspect testified he felt “total fear”
Excerpts from Michael Slager's testimony.
A white South Carolina police officer on trial for shooting an African-American man in the back—in a video of the killing that has been watched millions of times online—took the witness stand in his own defense and said he was gripped with "total fear."
Michael Slager, a 35-year-old North Charleston officer, is on trial for killing Walter Scott, 50, who was pulled over in April 2015 for a routine traffic stop. Scott, who had a warrant for his arrest, fled the Mercedes-Benz he was driving, was chased into a field, and was then shot and killed as a passerby secretly captured the shooting on video. The footage prompted the police to change their response to the killing, and charges were eventually levied.
"In my mind at that time was, people don't run for a broken tail light. There's always another reason," he testified Tuesday, sometimes in tears. "I don't know why he ran. It doesn't make any sense to me."
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The ESP: A New 1kB Contender Appears
The ESP8266 is officially checking into the Hackaday 1kB Challenge. Doing something meaningful in 1kB of compiled code is tricky; modern SDKs like the ones often used for ESP8266 compile even the simplest programs to nearly that size. If you want to use this hardware in your 1kB Challenge entry, I have a solution for you!
The ESP8266 now has a barebones build environment focused on minimizing code size, as little as 131 bytes to boot up and blink an LED. It also “supports” some new, insane clock rates (like 346 MHz) and crazy development cycle speeds. The WiFi is stuck in “airplane mode,” but it will be worth your time to consider the ESP for the next non-WiFi project you’ll be doing.
Far too often, we follow design patterns that ‘just work’ instead of looking for the ones that are optimal because we’re afraid of wasting time. The benefits of keeping code tight and small are frequently overlooked. When code is small and environments minimal, RAM and FLASH become easier to come by, compiled binaries shrink and time wasted by compiling and flashing can decrease by an order of magnitude! We rarely see just how much value is added when we become a good engineer: being done only when there’s nothing left to remove from a design. Nosdk8266 will let you see what it’s like to test out code changes several times a minute.
Just a month ago, when preparing the ESP8266 for a USB bootloader, I had to make a stripped-down environment for it. It’s not based on the Official Non-OS SDK or the RTOS sdk, but an environment that can boot up and blink an LED. Not just blink an LED, but tweak the clock in some totally unexpected ways and even run the I2S bus (used for espthernet and Color NTSC Broadcast Video). If you’re not at the submission phase for your 1kB challenge, you can even use the mask ROM for printf! Now you can tweak your code and — in under 2 seconds — see what the new code does!
Even in PICO mode, the part still has to use the mask ROM to be loaded, but thankfully, the 1kB Challenge has added an exception for unavoidable bootloaders. No longer bound by the shackles of WiFi, I can’t wait to see what you’ll do with the ESP8266. Just beware that the processor may not work reliably when overclocked at 346 MHz (332.5%,) and you’ll certainly be voiding any warranties you may have. Sounds like fun, right?
Editorial Note: This is a guest article from Charles Lohr, aka [CNLohr]. Although he has written a few other guest articles, he is not a regular contributor to Hackaday and therefore, this article does not disqualify him from entering the 1kB Challenge. We felt it more fair to publish this article which shares the tools he’s using to make code smaller, rather than to keep them to himself for fear of disqualification. While we have your attention, we wanted to mention one of Charles’ articles which was published on April 1st — we still think there’s a lot of people who don’t realize it wasn’t a prank.
Filed under: contests
Silicon Wafer Transfer Machine Is Beautifully Expensive
There’s nothing more freeing than to be an engineer with no perceptible budget in sight. [BrendaEM] walks us through a teardown of a machine that was designed under just such a lack of constraint. It sat inside of a big box whose job was to take silicon wafers in on one side and spit out integrated circuits on the other.
[BrendaEM] never really divulges how she got her hands on something so expensive that the engineer could specify “tiny optical fiber prisms on the end of a precision sintered metal post” as an interrupt solution for the wafer. However, we’re glad she did.
The machine features lots of things you would expect; pricey ultra precise motors, silky smooth linear motion systems, etcetera. At one point she turns on a gripper movement, the sound of it moving can be adequately described as poetic.
It also gives an unexpected view into how challenging it is to produce the silicon we rely on daily at the ridiculously affordable price we’ve come to expect. Everything from the ceramic plates and jaws that can handle the heat of the silicon right out of the oven to the obvious cleanliness of even this heavily used unit.
It’s a rare look into an expensive world most of us peasants aren’t invited to. Video after the break.
Filed under: misc hacks
6 Common Problems to Avoid When Building a Strandbeest
The post 6 Common Problems to Avoid When Building a Strandbeest appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Ghosts, Magic, and a Kraken… Check Out the Winners of Our Halloween Contest
The post Ghosts, Magic, and a Kraken… Check Out the Winners of Our Halloween Contest appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Convert Scientific Data into Synthesized Music
The post Convert Scientific Data into Synthesized Music appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Treadmills to endless hallways, tech has some sick solutions for VR nausea
Tom Atkinson
OXFORD, England—I first met Dr. Charles King at his ‘graduation’ from Richard Branson’s Virgin Media Techstars accelerator. The pitch he delivered to a packed audience in London described how ROVR—the company he started in 2012 with co-founder Julian Williams—was addressing a fundamental problem with the much-touted Virtual Reality boom: No matter how fun your content is, if it makes people throw up, it’s probably an experience they can do without.
According to King, two-thirds of us experience some degree of discomfort in VR even if we don’t quite “sell the Buick” as he so colorfully puts it. But Simulator Sickness (SS) is no laughing matter. A handful of experts say that exposure to some forms of VR can be as disorientating as getting drunk, and they call for headsets such as the Oculus and HTC Vive to be banned until more research is done on the long-term effects this has on our eyes and brain.
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Dawn of the Tripteron 3D Printer
Cartesian 3D printers were the original. Then delta printers came along, and they were pretty cool too. Now, you can add tripteron printers to the mix. The tripteron is an odd mix of cartesian and delta. The system was invented at the robotics laboratory at Université Laval in Quebec, Canada. The team who created it say that it is “isotropic and fully decoupled, i.e. each of the actuators is controlling one Cartesian degree of freedom, independently from the others.” This means that driving the bot will be almost as simple as driving a standard X/Y/Z Cartesian printer. The corollary to that are of course delta robots, which follow a whole different set of kinematic rules.
[Apsu] admits that he still has a way to go in his research – especially improving the arm and joint implementation. However, he’s quite pleased that his creation has gone from a collection of parts to a new type 3D printer. We are too — and we can’t wait to see the next iteration!
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks
Lighthouse Locates Drone; Achieves Autonomous Battery Swap
The HTC Vive’s Lighthouse localization system is one of the cleverest things we’ve seen in a while. It uses a synchronization flash followed by a swept beam to tell any device that can see the lights exactly where it is in space. Of course, the device has to understand the signals to figure it out.
[Alex Shtuchkin] built a very well documented device that can use these signals to localize itself in your room. For now, the Lighthouse stations are still fairly expensive, but the per-device hardware requirements are quite reasonable. [Alex] has the costs down around ten dollars plus the cost of a microcontroller if your project doesn’t already include one. Indeed, his proof-of-concept is basically a breadboard, three photodiodes, op-amps, and some code.
His demo is awesome! Check it out in the video below. He uses it to teach a quadcopter to land itself back on a charging platform, and it’s able to get there with what looks like a few centimeters of play in any direction — more than good enough to land in the 3D-printed plastic landing thingy. That fixture has a rotating drum that swaps out the battery automatically, readying the drone for another flight.
If this is just the tip of the iceberg of upcoming Lighthouse hacks, we can’t wait!
We loved the Lighthouse at first sight, and we’ve been following its progress into a real product. Heck, we’ve even written up a previous DIY Lighthouse receiver built by [Trammell Hudson]. It’s such an elegant solution to the problem of figuring out where your robot is that we get kinda gushy. Beg your pardon.
Filed under: drone hacks, robots hacks
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