The post 8 Festive Projects to Ring in the New Year appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Saturday, December 31
8 Festive Projects to Ring in the New Year
Move A Robotic Hand With Your Nerve Impulses
Many of us will have seen robotics or prosthetics operated by the electrical impulses detected from a person’s nerves, or their brain. In one form or another they are a staple of both mass-market technology news coverage and science fiction.
The point the TV journalists and the sci-fi authors fail to address though is this: how does it work? On a simple level they might say that the signal from an individual nerve is picked up just as though it were a wire in a loom, and sent to the prosthetic. But that’s a for-the-children explanation which is rather evidently not possible with a few electrodes on the skin. How do they really do it?
A project from [Bruce Land]’s Cornell University students [Michael Haidar], [Jason Hwang], and [Srikrishnaa Vadivel] seeks to answer that question. They’ve built an interface that allows them to control a robotic hand using signals gathered from electrodes placed on their forearms. And their write-up is a fascinating read, for within that project lie a multitude of challenges, of which the hand itself is only a minor one that they solved with an off-the-shelf kit.
The interface itself had to solve the problem of picking up the extremely weak nerve impulses while simultaneously avoiding interference from mains hum and fluorescent lights. They go into detail about their filter design, and their use of isolated power supplies to reduce this noise as much as possible.
Even with the perfect interface though they still have to train their software to identify different finger movements. Plotting the readings from their two electrodes as axes of a graph, they were able to map graph regions corresponding to individual muscles. Finally, the answer that displaces the for-the-children explanation.
There are several videos linked from their write-up, but the one we’re leaving you with below is a test performed in a low-noise environment. They found their lab had so much noise that they couldn’t reliably demonstrate all fingers moving, and we think it would be unfair to show you anything but their most successful demo. But it’s also worth remembering how hard it was to get there.
We’ve covered a huge number of robotic and prosthetic hands here over the years, but it is a mark of the challenges involved that we’ve covered very few that are controlled in this way. Even those that have are usually brain-controlled rather than nerve-controlled, and are thus considerably more complex. We applaud this team for their achievement, and we hope others will pick up on their work.
Filed under: Medical hacks
Anti-Emulation Tricks on GBA-Ported NES Games
Emulation is a difficult thing to do, particularly when you’re trying to emulate a complex platform like a game console, with little to no public documentation available. Often, you’ll have to figure things out by brute force and dumb luck, and from time to time everything will come unstuck when a random piece of software throws up an edge case that brings everything screeching to a halt.
The Classic NES series was a handful of Nintendo Entertainment System games ported to the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s. What makes them unique is a series of deliberately obtuse programming decisions that make them operate very differently from other titles. These tricks utilize advanced knowledge of the way the Game Boy Advance hardware operates and appear to have been used to make the games difficult to copy or emulate.
The games use a variety of techniques to confuse and bamboozle — from “mirrored memory” techniques that exploit addressing anomalies, to putting executable code in video RAM and writing to the audio buffers in unusual manners.
Even more confusingly, these techniques only appear to have been used in the Classic NES series of games, and not other Game Boy Advance titles. It’s not obvious why Nintendo went to special effort to protect these ports over other titles; perhaps the techniques used were for other reasons than just an attempt at copy protection. Speculate amongst yourselves in the comments.
This isn’t the first time we’ve discussed emulation of Nintendo systems — check out this effort to reverse engineer the Sony Pocketstation.
[Thanks to [[[Codifies]]] for sending this in!]
Filed under: handhelds hacks, nintendo gameboy hacks
PSA: Don’t Let Kids Eat Lithium Batteries
We get a lot of press releases at Hackaday, but this one was horrific enough that we thought it was worth sharing. Apparently, some kids are accidentally eating lithium coin cell batteries. When this happens with bigger cells, usually greater than 20 millimeters (CR2032, CR2025, and CR2016) really bad things happen. Like burning esophaguses, and even death.
The National Capital Poison Center has done some research on this, and found that 14% of batteries swallowed over the past two years came from flameless candles like the ones above. We know some of our readers also deal with batteries in open trays, which are apparently pretty dangerous for children.
The National Capital Poison Center’s website has an entire page dedicated to battery safety, which is probably worth a read if you deal with batteries and small children on a regular basis. Should an incident occur, there’s even a hotline to call for assistance.
So, please, don’t swallow batteries, or let children put them in their mouths. After the break, a Canadian PSA song about not putting things in your mouth.
Filed under: Medical hacks
Weekend Watch: William Osman Has Lasers and Laughs
The post Weekend Watch: William Osman Has Lasers and Laughs appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
8008 Exposed
[Ken Shirriff] is no stranger to Hackaday. His latest blog post is just the kind of thing we expect from him: a tear down of the venerable 8008 CPU. We suspect [Ken’s] earlier post on early CPUs pointed out the lack of a good 8008 die photo. Of course, he wasn’t satisfied to just snap the picture. He also does an analysis of the different constructs on the die.
Ever wonder why the 8008 ALU is laid out in a triangle shape? In all fairness, you probably haven’t, but you might after you look at the photomicrograph of the die. [Ken] explains why.
He also explains a bit about how PMOS works and the history of the design, including why it was in the odd 18-pin package. At the end, he talks about how he decapsulated the part and got the pictures, in case you ever want to try that yourself.
As a personal aside, I used to do this at Motorola and I think [Ken] was wise to stick to the ceramic packages since you can mechanically decapsulate them. With an epoxy part, you can use a Dremel or similar tool to mill out some epoxy (just don’t go too deep), put the chip on a hot plate (a copper bar helps carry the heat up to the package), and then fill the milled cavity with fuming nitric acid. But you shouldn’t be doing that without a lot of protective equipment including vent hoods, safety showers, and experience storing, handling, and disposing of nasty acids. I have a feeling [Ken] could pull it off, but it isn’t something you just want to try on a whim.
[Ken] has done this kind of thing before. If you are wondering what kind of computer you could build with such a tiny device, we just saw one the other day. Of course you already saw [Ken’s] talk about his process at this year’s SuperCon, right?
Filed under: Microcontrollers
Some perspective on our place in the Universe from the high Chilean desert
ESO
The best observatory in the world is arguably divided among three sites in northern Chile—La Silla, Paranal, and Chajnantor. Each location in the high, arid Atacama desert offers excellent dark and clear skies for the European Southern Observatory's suite of telescopes. At 2,635 meters in elevation Paranal boasts the best instruments, with four 8.2-meter telescopes combining to make up the Very Large Telescope.
Now more than 50 years old, the observatory has played a principal or significant role in a number of major astronomical landmarks, including the discovery of dark energy, finding Proxima b around Proxima Centauri, the observation of stars orbiting the Milky Way Galaxy, and much more.
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Hacked CCFL Inverter becomes an Arc Lighter
[GreatScott!] needs to light off fireworks with an arc rather than a flame, because “fireworks and plasma” is cooler than fireworks and no plasma. To that end, he attempted to reverse engineer an arc lighter, but an epoxy potted high-voltage assembly thwarted him. Refusing to accept defeat, he modified a CCFL inverter into an arc lighter, and the process is pretty educational.
With his usual impeccable handwriting and schematic drawing skills, [GreatScott!] documents that his CCFL inverter is a resonant Royer oscillator producing a sine wave of about 37 kHz, which is then boosted to about 2400 volts. That’s pretty good, but nowhere near the 15 kilovolts needed for a self-sustaining arc across electrodes placed 5 mm apart. A little math told him that he could achieve this by rewinding the transformer’s primary with only 4 turns. After some testing, the rewound transformer was fitted back into the Royer circuit and with a few modifications the arc was struck.
It’s not a finished project yet, and we’re looking forward to seeing how [GreatScott!] puts this to use. For now, we’re grateful for the lesson is Royer oscillators and rewinding transformers. But if you’d rather hack an off-the-shelf arc lighter, there’s always this arc lighter pyrography pen, or this mini plasma cutter.
Filed under: misc hacks
Tiny Game of Simon on an ATtiny13
How much game can you get out of a chip with only 1 kB of flash memory and (five or) six free GPIOs? Well, you can get it to play the classic memory game, Simon. [Vojtak] is submitting this project for the 1 kB Challenge, but it looks like it’s already been used to teach simple microcontrollering to teenagers as well, so the code is actually straightforward to read, but full of nice features.
The board is easily solderable together as well. This is a fantastic beginner project, with details in the code that everyone can learn from. It’s a great game, and a great demonstration of what you can do with a dollar’s worth of parts and 1 kB of code.
If you have a cool project in mind, there is still plenty of time to enter the 1 kB Challenge! Deadline is January 5!
Filed under: ATtiny Hacks, contests
Cheap Cat Feeder Enhances Sleep
We’ll admit it: we sometimes overcomplicate things. Look at [Peter Weissbrod’s] automated cat feeder, for example. It isn’t anything more than a bottle, a servo, some odds and ends, and an Arduino. However, it lets him sleep in without his cat waking him for service.
We looked at the code and thought, “This thing will just dispense food all the time! That’s not what you want!” Then we looked closer. [Peter] uses a common household timer to just turn the device on in the morning, let it run for a bit, and then turns it off. You can see a video of the mechanism, below.
Honestly, we have mixed feelings. As we are sure someone’s already quit reading to comment: you don’t really need an Arduino for this. If it were doing the timing, that might make it more justifiable. Or perhaps have it sense daylight to feed in the morning. Still, Arduinos are cheap (we just picked up some tiny Pro’s for about $3) and it is a more flexible arrangement than, say, a 555 driving the servo.
We have seen many cat feeders over the years. Some of them use custom components. Others use whatever you have on hand (including another kitchen timer). However you do it, one thing is clear: When the aliens come and observe life on Earth, they will doubtless conclude that the cats are in charge.
Filed under: Arduino Hacks, home hacks
Smartphone Case For The Retro Gamer
A well-designed phone case will protect your phone from everyday bumps with only as much style flair as you’d like. While protection is usually the only real function of a case, some designs — like [Gabbelago]’s Emucase — add specific utility that you might not have known you needed.
Contrary to most cases, the Emucase fits over your phone’s screen, and the resulting facelift emulates the appearance of a Game Boy for easier — you guessed it — Game Boy emulation play on your smartphone.
Cannibalizing a USB SNES gamepad for its buttons and rubber contact pads, Gabbelago then threaded some wire through the contacts, securing it with copper tape and glue; this provides a measurable level of capacitance to register on the touchscreen. Using heat to bend the sides of the 3D printed case so it can attach to the phone is probably the trickiest part of this cool project. Check out his build instructions for any pointers you need.
Feel like you need some tactile feedback when texting or browsing? This QWERTY keyboard is another classically functional and excellent case.
[via /r/3Dprinting]
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, phone hacks
Friday, December 30
Sorting Resistors with 3D Printing and a PIC
If you aren’t old enough to remember programming FORTRAN on punched cards, you might be surprised that while a standard card had 80 characters, FORTRAN programs only used 72 characters per card. The reason for this was simple: keypunches could automatically put a sequence number in the last 8 characters. Why do you care? If you drop your box of cards walking across the quad, you can use a machine to sort on those last 8 characters and put the deck back in the right order.
These days, that’s not a real problem. However, we have spilled one of those little parts boxes — you know the ones with the little trays. We aren’t likely to separate out the resistors again. Instead, we’ll just treasure hunt for the value we want when we need one.
[Brian Gross], [Nathan Lambert], and [Alex Parkhurst] are a bit more industrious. For their final project in [Bruce Land’s] class at Cornell, they built a 3D-printed resistor sorting machine. A PIC processor feeds a resistor from a hopper, measures it, and places it in the correct bin, based on its value. Who doesn’t want that? You can see a video demonstration, below.
At first, it appears the device uses a rotary encoder as an input device. However, it isn’t an encoder. It is a 10-turn potentiometer. This is simple to read but causes some unique processing. For navigating the LCD, for example, the PIC looks at the rate of change of the pot value. However, if it sees the pot go to the end of travel, it moves the navigation fully in that direction.
We thought it would be cool to marry this with an OpenCV resistor reader to also identify out of spec or mismarked resistors. There’s actually a few phone apps that can do that with varying degrees of success.
Thanks to [Bruce] for the tip, and for launching so many young engineers.
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, Microcontrollers, tool hacks
Mike Szczys on the State of the Hackaday
Hey, that’s me! I had the honor of giving a talk at the Hackaday SuperConference in November about our editorial direction over the past year and looking towards the next. At any given time we have about 20-25 people writing articles for Hackaday. We depend on their judgment, experience, and skill to keep Hackaday fresh. It would be wonderful if you would join me in thanking all of the writers and editors for a great year by leaving your well-wishes in the comments.
Take a look at the video of the talk, then join me below for a few more thoughts.
In my talk, I walk through some of the articles and trends that I think were important over the past year. But in summary, I think this statement has the most power: Hackaday is Worth Reading.
The level of click-bait, invasive advertising, and advertorials seen throughout the Internet feels like it has really exploded this year. Hackaday remains steadfast in publishing content of both quality and interest. This benchmark warrants you spending your time to read and talk about what you see on these pages. It’s somewhat sad that this needs to be said, but important to recognize that people should be able to trust what they read, and that we see our community as far more important than a collection of clicks.
We publish articles that matter to anyone interested in engineering. It is our goal to look under the hood and discuss how an underlying technology is used. But it doesn’t end with the article. The people who make these discoveries, who built the first prototypes and have proven design in industry, show up in our comments section on a regular basis. This is a cool thing and I’m proud to be part of it.
We are facing a few challenges. One that we encountered over the past year is how to discuss topics of technology without getting bogged down in politics. This is a difficult dance and we’re still learning the steps. Another issue we’ve dealt with this year is how to love something and not be decried as publishing advertisements. Hackaday does not publish paid content — when you read an article here it is not an advertisement. Despite that, we are flush with accusatory comments that say otherwise. We’ve looked at this and have renewed our focus to ensure we are always thinking critically when covering new hardware and in writing reviews. On both of these topics please feel free to email [editor at Hackaday dot com] with your thoughts.
Thank you to all who spend their free time as part of Hackaday. I know many of you read from work, stay up way too late, and even check Hackaday as the first website of the day (I can check all those boxes for myself). You send us tips when discovering awesome hacks, and evangelize Hackaday to the chagrin of your friends and family.
We need your help to become even better. When you read an article that you love, please share it. Believe it or not, there are still a lot of people who haven’t yet discovered Hackaday, and your help in sharing the best of our content on social media and content aggregators will reach those who don’t yet know about us. In addition, send us your tips and convince your companies to tip us off early about new hardware (we respect press embargoes).
Hackaday is a huge family composed of everyone who spends time here to make it great. Thank you for creating a bright spot in my life in 2016. I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish together in the coming year.
Filed under: cons, Hackaday Columns
Fully 3D Printed Snow Blower
For anyone living in cooler climates, the annual onslaught of snow means many hours shoveling driveways and sidewalks. After a light snow, shoveling might seem a waste of time, while a snow blower would be overkill. If only there were a happy middle ground that required minimal effort; perhaps an RC snow groomer with a 3D printed snow blower would work.
We featured an earlier version of this project last year. This year’s model features a slipper clutch — combined with a differential from a heavy RC truck — to forestall damage to the attachment if you happen to hit any rocks or ice chunks. The blades are also thicker and lack teeth in this iteration, as they would catch on anything hard and shatter the blade more often than not. Designed by [Spyker Workshop] (aka [The_Great_Moo]) the snow blower attaches to the front of RC snow groomer — which is originally meant to act like a plow. Seeing the snow blower attachment in action, we’re inclined to believe that he may be onto something.
If you don’t have a snow groomer hanging around your shop, there are certainly other methods to clearing a recent snowfall with minimal effort.
[Thanks for the tip, Keith O!]
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, misc hacks
Counting Laps and Testing Products with OpenCV
It’s been about a year and a half since the Batteroo, formally known as Batteriser, was announced as a crowdfunding project. The premise is a small sleeve that goes around AA and AAA batteries, boosting the voltage to extract more life out of them. [Dave Jones] at EEVblog was one of many people to question the product, which claimed to boost battery life by 800%.
Batteroo did manage to do something many crowdfunding projects can’t: deliver a product. Now that the sleeves are arriving to backers, people are starting to test them in the wild. In fact, there’s an entire thread of tests happening over on EEVblog.
One test being run is a battery powered train, running around a track until the battery dies completely. [Frank Buss] wanted to run this test, but didn’t want to manually count the laps the train made. He whipped up a script in Python and OpenCV to automate the counting.
The script measures laps by setting two zones on the track. When the train enters the first zone, the counter is armed. When it passes through the second zone, the lap is recorded. Each lap time is kept, ensuring good data for comparing the Batteroo against a normal battery.
The script gives a good example for people wanting to play with computer vision. The source is available on Github. As for the Batteroo, we’ll await further test results before passing judgement, but we’re not holding our breath. After all, the train ran half as long when using a Batteroo.
Filed under: Crowd Funding, software hacks
Sansa MP3 Player Runs Doom Unplayably
DOOM, is there anything it won’t run on? Yes. Your front lawn cannot currently play DOOM. Pretty much everything else can though. It’s a testament to the game’s impact on society that it gets ported to virtually every platform with buttons and a graphical screen.
This video shows a Sansa Clip playing DOOM, but it’s only just barely recognizable. The Sansa Clip has a single color screen, with yellow pixels at the top and grey for the rest of the screen. The monochrome display makes things hard to see, so a dithering technique is used to try and make things more visible. Unfortunately it’s not particularly effective, and it’s difficult to make out little more than the gun at the bottom of the screen.
The stunt is achieved through the use of RockBox, a custom firmware for a wide variety of media players, from Apple to Toshiba. Through no small amount of effort, developers would reverse engineer different media players, often by disassembly of both hardware and firmware. Generally, the first steps involve determining the make and model of the controller, along with identifying how to access its programming pins & how to bypass any firmware protection that might be in place. Armed with this knowledge, they could then set about porting the RockBox code. The amount of effort poured into the project is staggering, as evidenced by this documentation for just one Rockbox port.
Rockbox also supports plugins to add functionality. One of these is Rockdoom, which acts as a basic DOOM engine that can load WAD files and play the game. Thus, if you’re keen to duplicate the hack, start out by porting Rockbox to your media player, and then download the Rockdoom plugin.
For another great example of custom firmware running on an obscure platform, check out [Sprite-TM]’s talk on hacking hard drive controller chips.
[Thanks to Itay for the tip!]
Filed under: portable audio hacks
NES Classic Edition – Controller Mod
The Nintendo Classic Mini took the world by storm this year — finally, an NES in a cute, tiny package that isn’t 3D printed and running off a Raspberry Pi! It’s resoundingly popular and the nostalgic set are loving it. But what do you do when you’re two hours deep into a hardcore Metroid session and you realize you need to reboot and reload. Get off the couch? Never!
[gyromatical] had already bought an Emio Edge gamepad for his NES Mini. A little poking around inside revealed some unused pads on the PCB. Further investigation revealed that one pad can be used to wire up a reset button, and two others can be used to create a home switch. Combine this with the turbo features already present on the Emio Edge, and you’ve got a pretty solid upgrade over the stock NES Mini pad. Oftentimes, there’s extra functionality lurking inside products that manufacturers have left inactive for the sake of saving a few dollars on switches & connectors. It’s always worth taking a look inside.
Now, back in 2006, the coolest hack was running Linux on everything — and somebody’s already trying to get Linux on the NES Mini.
Filed under: nintendo hacks
33C3: If You Can’t Trust Your Computer, Who Can You Trust?
It’s a sign of the times: the first day of the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress (33C3) included two talks related to assuring that your own computer wasn’t being turned against you. The two talks are respectively practical and idealistic, realizable today and a work that’s still in the idea stage.
In the first talk, [Trammell Hudson] presented his Heads open-source firmware bootloader and minimal Linux for laptops and servers. The name is a gag: the Tails Linux distribution lets you operate without leaving any trace, while Heads lets you run a system that you can be reasonably sure is secure.
It uses coreboot, kexec, and QubesOS, cutting off BIOS-based hacking tools at the root. If you’re worried about sketchy BIOS rootkits, this is a solution. (And if you think that this is paranoia, you haven’t been following the news in the last few years, and probably need to watch this talk.) [Trammell]’s Heads distribution is a collection of the best tools currently available, and it’s something you can do now, although it’s not going to be easy.
Carrying out the ideas fleshed out in the second talk is even harder — in fact, impossible at the moment. But that’s not to say that it’s not a neat idea. [Jaseg] starts out with the premise that the CPU itself is not to be trusted. Again, this is sadly not so far-fetched these days. Non-open blobs of firmware abound, and if you’re really concerned with the privacy of your communications, you don’t want the CPU (or Intel’s management engine) to get its hands on your plaintext.
[Jaseg]’s solution is to interpose a device, probably made with a reasonably powerful FPGA and running open-source, inspectable code, between the CPU and the screen and keyboard. For critical text, like e-mail for example, the CPU will deal only in ciphertext. The FPGA, via graphics cues, will know which region of the screen is to be decrypted, and will send the plaintext out to the screen directly. Unless someone’s physically between the FPGA and your screen or keyboard, this should be unsniffable.
As with all early-stage ideas, the devil will be in the details here. It’s not yet worked out how to know when the keyboard needs to be encoded before passing the keystrokes on to the CPU, for instance. But the idea is very interesting, and places the trust boundary about as close to the user as possible, at input and output.
Filed under: cons, security hacks
Thursday, December 29
Amazon’s demented plans for its warehouse blimp with drone fleet
Amazon has just gotten a patent for an "airborne fulfillment center utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for item delivery." Though the patent was granted in April 2016, the plans for it have just gone public on the US Patent and Trade Office website. What they describe sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.
Here's how it works. First, get a very large airship and float it above a city. Then attach a giant warehouse full of Amazon items to the bottom (actually, you should probably attach this before the floating, but the patent is vague on this point). This warehouse is constantly restocked by smaller airships, which bring personnel and supplies from the ground, as well as carrying away waste. People on the ground use their computers to browse items currently floating over their heads, and order whatever they want. Then drones grab the items, hurl themselves out of the airship, and engage their rotors as they approach the ground. The human receives his or her item from the drone, and the drone ascends back up to its floating palace of boxes and workers.
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Catch up on last season’s Ars Technica Live with our podcast!
Way back in February 2016, I had a crazy idea. Like many crazy ideas, it was partly the fault of Ars staffer Cyrus Farivar. We were hosting an Ars meetup at Longitude, a fantastic tiki bar in Oakland, California, when the event turned into an impromptu interview with Nick Farmer, the creator of the futuristic Creole language spoken by Belters in The Expanse series on Syfy. We had so much fun, I thought to myself: why don't we do this again sometime? Cyrus was easily persuaded to join in the madness. And so Ars Technica Live was born.
On the third Wednesday of every month, we returned to Longitude to interview interesting people who work at the intersection of technology, science, and culture. We talked to law professor Elizabeth Joh about the future of surveillance, and we talked to anthropologist Krish Seetah about the history of meat eating in human culture. Computer security researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire told us about defending journalists against state hackers, and space activist Ariel Waldman explained her role on the National Academy of Sciences Human Spaceflight Committee. We recorded everything (you can see video of the 2016 season here) thanks to videographer Chris Schodt and Ars' intrepid producer Jennifer Hahn. Ars editors Joe Mullin and Dan Goodin pitched in, too, bringing their expertise to discussions of patent reform and security. And luckily, Longitude bar owner Suzanne Long kept letting us come back. She seems to have a weak spot for nerds.
Now we're celebrating the end of 2016 and the dawning of our 2017 season by releasing all our interviews as podcasts. If you ever subscribed to the Ars Technicast, you may have already gotten these episodes in your feed. If not, now's the time.
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