Friday, March 31
If you loved The Fifth Element, there’s a new movie to make you rejoice
Thanks to the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, blockbuster sci-fi adventures can be trippy again. Bulbous monsters, sparkly outfits, zero-G hairstyles, starscapes that look like 1970s prog rock album covers—it's all cool now. And that means, strangely, that the world is finally ready for a movie based on the 1960s comic book that started the psychedelic sci-fi craze in the first place.
That's what you'll see in this first full-length trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the tale of Valerian and Laureline, two spacio-temporal agents hired to guard the universe's only intergalactic library in the insanely colorful cosmopolis Alpha. The film is directed by The Fifth Element mastermind Luc Besson, whose most recent movie was the transhumanist hit Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson. As for Valerian's plot, there's some kind of vague menace threatening not just the future of knowledge, but all of space-time.
The story looks fun, but the backstory is downright fascinating. Director Besson has been obsessed with the original French comic Valérian et Laureline for almost his entire career. Created in 1967 by French literature professor Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, the comic tackled social and philosophical issues with a strong dose of mid-century radicalism. What made it unique was the combination of political commentary with Mézières' crazy, colorful art. Mézières was a close friend of Jean Giraud, creator of influential sci-fi comic Mobius. Both Mézières and Giraud's work were the immediate forerunners of the sexy/otherworldly style found in Métal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) magazine.
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Transcranial Electrical Stimulation With Arduino, Hot Glue
The advance of electronic technology has been closely followed by the medical community over the past 200 years. Cutting edge electronics are used in medical imaging solutions to provide ever greater bandwidth and resolution in applications such as MRI machines, and research to interface with the human nervous system continues at a breakneck pace. The cost of this technology – particuarly in research and development – is incredibly high. Combine this with the high price of the regulatory approvals necessary for devices which deal in terms of life and death, and you’ll find that even basic medical technology is prohibitively expensive. Just ask any diabetic. On the face of things, there’s a moral dilemma. Humanity has developed technologies that can improve quality of life. Yet, due to our own rules and regulations, we cannot afford to readily distribute them.
One example of this is that despite the positive results from many transcranial electrical stimulation (TCS) studies, the devices used are prohibitively expensive, as are treatment regimens for patients. Realising this, [quicksilv3rflash] decided to develop a homebrew, open source transcranial electrical stimualtion device, and published it on Instructables. Yes, that’s the world we’re now living in.
It’s important to publish a warning here: Experimenting with this sort of equipment can easily kill you, fry your brain, or have any number of other awful results. If you don’t have a rock solid understanding of the principles behind seperate grounds, or your soldering is just a little sloppy, you don’t want to go anywhere near this. In particular, this device cannot be powered safely by a wall-wart.
To be honest, we find it difficult to trust any medical device manufactured out of modules sourced from eBay. But as a learning excercise, there is serious value here. Such a project requires mastery of analog design to avoid dangerous currents being passed to the body. The instructions also highlight the importance of rigorously testing the device before ever connecting it to a human body.
The equipment is based around an Arduino Nano receiving commands from a computer over serial, fed by an application written in Python & PyGame. To think, this writer thought he was being bold when he used it to control a remote control car! The Arduino Nano interprets this data and outputs it over SPI to a DAC which outputs a signal which is then amplified and fed to the human brain courtesy of op-amps, boost converters and sponge electrodes. The output of the device is limited to +/-2.1mA by design, in accordance with suggested limits for TCS use.
It should be noted, [quicksilv3rflash] has been experimenting with homebuilt TCS devices for several years now, and has lived to tell the tale. It’s impressive to see a full suite of homebrew, opensource tools being developed in this field. [quicksilv3rflash] reports to have not suffered injuries from the device, and several devices have been shipped to redditors. We’ve only found minimal reports on people receiving these, but nothing on anyone actually using the hardware as intended. If you’ve used one, get in touch in the comments.
It goes without saying – this sort of experimentation is dangerous and the stakes for getting it wrong are ludicrously high. We’ve seen before what happens when medical devices malfunction – things get real ugly, real fast. But hackers will be hackers and if you were wondering if it was possible to build a TCS device for under $100 in parts from eBay, well, yes. Yes it is.
Filed under: news
Tips of the Week: Holding Nuts with Tape, Paper Patterns and Templates, Acetate Over-Notes
The post Tips of the Week: Holding Nuts with Tape, Paper Patterns and Templates, Acetate Over-Notes appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Design the Worst Cup Ever to Compete in Our April Fool’s Contest!
The post Design the Worst Cup Ever to Compete in Our April Fool’s Contest! appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Gaming Beyond Retropie
Looking for something a bit more from your Raspberry Pi? Tired of the usual console and arcade games? Eltech’s Exagear Desktop is a virtual machine that runs on your Raspberry Pi and allows you to run x86 games. [Dmitry]’s done a write-up about running more modern games on your Raspberry Pi.
Up until now, the Pi has been a great platform for retro gaming. By running MAME or EmulationStation, you can play classic arcade games as well as the great console games you played as a kid. Exagear Desktop goes one further, allowing you to use Wine to play more modern PC games on your Raspberry Pi 3.
The Pi 3 is still a bit underpowered for bleeding edge games, but is powerful enough that it can play some of the PC games from a few years ago. [Dmitry]’s example shows how to get Arcanum, Disciples II, and Fallout running on the Raspberry Pi. In the second part of the write-up, [Dmitry] shows you how to get Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and Caesar 3 installed and running as well.
Obviously they will always lag behind today’s gaming machines, but the power now available in a computer the size of a credit card is pretty impressive. It’s nice to have a tool that allows one to play more than just the console games from years gone by — this opens up a whole range of great PC games to add to our library. Maybe it’s time to fabricate that new PC game controller. Or, if the Raspberry Pi seems like too much power, you could consider playing retro games on an Arduino.
Filed under: Raspberry Pi
Linux-Fu: Applications on the Web
Did you know you can run remote Linux GUI programs in a browser with HTML5 support? It’s even secure because you can use SSH tunneling and little trick that means you don’t even need to open additional ports. If this sounds like gibberish, read on, it’s actually pretty easy to get up and running.
I recently was a guest on a Houston-based podcast, and the hosts asked me if the best thing about writing for Hackaday was getting to work with the other Hackaday staff. I told them that was really good, but what I like best was interacting with people (well, most people) in the comments. That sometimes you’d post an article and someone would bring a topic up in comments that would really knock your socks off. This is how I wound up with this nearly ideal remote access solution, that requires nothing on the remote side but a web browser.
A while back I posted about keeping programs running after log off on a Linux box. The post was mostly about non-GUI programs but you could use NX or VNC to handle it. In the comments, someone mentioned how unhappy they’d been with recent copies of NX and another commentor called [Screen for X11] posted about a tool called xpra.
I had never heard of it, so I went to check it out. I was impressed. You could remote single applications (almost like doing an ssh -X; really nice if you are trying to use a little netbook into your massive desktop computer). You can also get a shadow copy of your normal desktop or create a new desktop. Performance was good and you could connect via ssh (or not), do certificate-based authentication, and more. Like many other similar solutions, you can exit and pick back up where you left off.
Without the Browser
The main emphasis seems to be using xpra as both a server and a client. You can find many examples of common usage on the project’s wiki. That’s a good place to start because the man page reveals an enormous number of options. You can provide read-only access, export sound, share printers, link clipboards, scale video, and more — if you have the patience to wade through the documentation.
There are versions for several operating systems, so even if you aren’t using Linux everywhere, you can still try it (honestly, though, I had some trouble getting the Windows GUI to work, although the command line was fine). I did find a version of xpra in the Ubuntu repositories, but it was out of date and didn’t want to work. It was much better to install from the project’s repositories.
Security
The biggest concern, of course, is security. You can set up xpra to use SSL authentication or passwords. You could also use a wrapper or port knocking to control access to a port. I decided to go a different route. I always have a firewall blocking ports that I don’t expect open on my Linux boxes. That way if something does try to open up a port I am not aware of it, it should break and in the process of fixing it, I will know what’s exposed to the outside world.
What I did was let the xpra server run on an unused port locally, but I did not open the firewall for that port. In theory, then, anyone who could log into the machine could access the remote applications, but given this is a server with just a small number of administrators, they could all get into anything, anyway. Of course, remote access only on the same machine isn’t the point, right? That’s why I use an ssh tunnel to get to that remote port. Granted, that makes the convenience of the browser-based client a bit less, but then again, ssh clients that can create tunnels are widely available, so for my case that was acceptable and it seems relatively secure. If someone breaks into the server, they will have access to everything anyway so the remote access won’t really expose anything new.
There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to security. Before you expose your Linux box to the world, be sure you understand how someone could break into it and take steps to protect yourself.
In Use
It wouldn’t be hard to use this to provide read-only access in a web browser to an application running on a Raspberry Pi. This wouldn’t need to be read only, either if you were sure of your security. A common fallacy is to think you don’t care about security because your Raspberry Pi just does something simple. But if it is on the Internet, people may want to take it over as a platform to launch attacks on other people using your hardware and Internet connection. Don’t ignore any connected device, no matter how trivial, when it comes to security.
Filed under: Featured, linux hacks, Skills
6 Projects We’re Excited for at Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire
The post 6 Projects We’re Excited for at Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
OpenAPS Offers Open Source Tools for Diabetes Management
The post OpenAPS Offers Open Source Tools for Diabetes Management appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
We may have just witnessed the dawn of truly commercial spaceflight
SpaceX
Elon Musk had himself a day Thursday. For the first time in history, his company launched a fully reusable first stage of an orbital rocket. Then, for good measure, SpaceX landed that rocket for a second time on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Finally—because why not, when you're on a roll—he attempted to safely return the $6 million payload fairing at the top of the rocket. Even that met with at least partial success. "This is a huge day," he commented later. "My mind's blown, frankly."
Many minds were blown on Thursday as the 10-story tall first stage launched for the second time, hefting a 4,300kg payload on its way to a geostationary orbit about 36,000km above the Earth, and then returning to the planet. Blue Origin has done this with the much smaller, suborbital New Shepard rocket. NASA's space shuttle was mostly reusable—but also the product of a multibillion government program. On Thursday a private company, having invested more than $1 billion of its own funds, reused a large, complicated rocket.
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The Right Circuit Turns Doppler Module into a Sensor
Can you buy a working radar module for $12? As it turns out, you can. But can you make it output useful information? According to [Mathieu], the answer is also yes, but only if you ignore the datasheet circuit and build this amplification circuit for your dirt cheap Doppler module.
The module in question is a CDM324 24-GHz board that’s currently listing for $12 on Amazon. It’s the K-band cousin of the X-band HB100 used by [Mathieu] in a project we covered a few years back, but thanks to the shorter wavelength the module is much smaller — just an inch square. [Mathieu] discovered that the new module suffered from the same misleading amplifier circuit in the datasheet. After making some adjustments, a two-stage amp was designed and executed on a board that piggybacks on the module with a 3D-printed bracket.
Frequency output is proportional to the velocity of the detected object; the maximum speed for the sensor is only 14.5 mph (22.7 km/h), so don’t expect to be tracking anything too fast. Nevertheless, this could be a handy sensor, and it’s definitely a solid lesson in design. Still, if your tastes run more toward using this module on the 1.25-cm ham band, have a look at this HB100-based 3-cm band radio.
Filed under: misc hacks, radio hacks
Ghost In The Shell film might be the most disappointing live-action reboot ever
The producers of this week's new Ghost In The Shell film must really believe nobody has seen its source material. That's the only way to enjoy this live-action reboot: oblivious to 1995's original anime film or its manga comic-book precursor. Scarlett Johansson runs around futuristic, CGI-filled worlds in a skin-tight outfit. She shoots guns, kicks faces, and beats the bad guys. Not bad.
But this pedestrian action movie looks nigh unbearable through the lens of the original series. Every bit of social commentary and science-fiction mystique that made the Japanese film and books so stunning has been wrung dry. Respect for the viewer goes into the garbage, replaced by an obnoxious, paint-by-numbers plot of good versus evil. And while I went into my screening ready to laugh off rumors of cast white-washing, I left the theater aghast at how blatantly that issue figured in the final product.
Major disappointment
When Ghost In The Shell reached theaters in 1995, it was one of the sci-fi film genre's only iconic combinations of high-action setpieces and "how tech influences our lives" plots. That, of course, changed once The Matrix entered the film lexicon, but Ghost In The Shell really nailed it first—and as an anime, it never quite reached the heights of popularity it deserved.
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Make a PVC Drill Press
There are two types of people in this world: people who think that PVC is only suitable for plumbing, and people who don’t even know that you can use PVC to carry water. Instructables user [amjohnny] is clearly of the latter school. His PVC Dremel drill press is a bit of an oldie, but it’s still a testament to the pipefitter’s art. And you can watch it in action in the video embedded below.
Things we particularly like about this build include the PVC parallelogram movement, springs around tubes to push the Dremel head back up, and the clever use of a T-fitting and screw plug to hold the press in its lowest position. We wonder how one could add a depth stop to this thing. No matter, we love watching it work.
Anyway, this is just one hack of many that emphasizes the importance of a drill press in basically anyone’s life, as well as the ease of DIY’ing into one. If you’re in the PVC-haters camp, but have some scrap wood and drawer slides or plastic offcuts lying around, you have the makings of a rudimentary press — a welcome tool in the shop.
Thanks [Itay] for the tip!
Filed under: tool hacks
Robot Arm From Recyclables
A robot assistant would make the lives of many much easier. Luckily, it’s possible to make one of your own with few fancy materials. The [circuito.io] team demonstrates this by building a robot arm out of recyclables!
With the exception of the electronics — an Arduino, a trio of servo motors, and a joystick — the arm is made almost completely out of salvaged recyclables: scrap wood, a plastic bottle, bits of plastic string and a spring. Oh, and — demonstrating yet another use for those multi-talented tubers — a potato acts as a counterweight.
Code for the project is available to download from their site. Given this straightforward tutorial, it’s hard to find a reason NOT to embark on building your first robot arm — if you haven’t already begun.
We at Hackaday love seeing projects that strive to reuse materials in inventive ways. That said, you needn’t rely on a shiny new Arduino for this robot arm. If you have an aging palm pilot kicking around, that will also do the trick.
Filed under: Arduino Hacks, hardware, robots hacks
Thursday, March 30
Making an Impressive Working Robotic Arm from Cardboard
The post Making an Impressive Working Robotic Arm from Cardboard appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
SpaceX may try a daring rocket fairing recovery tonight, too
SpaceX
SpaceX has long said it would like to make its entire Falcon 9 rocket reusable. Tonight at 6:27pm ET the company may take a key step toward that goal by reusing a first stage of the rocket that launched nearly a year ago. But SpaceX may also go for another "first" tonight—by recovering the payload fairing of its rocket.
In a Facebook post today Steve Jurveston, a venture capitalist and SpaceX investor, wrote from Florida, "At the historic Apollo 11 Pad 39A for the first reuse of a SpaceX booster (and first attempt at a fairing recovery)." SpaceX spokesman John Taylor would not immediately confirm the possibility of a payload fairing recovery.
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Creepy Tracking at the House of Mouse
If it’s been a few years since you’ve been to Disney World, you’re in for a surprise on your next visit. It seems the Happiest Place on Earth has become the Trackiest Place on Earth thanks to the Disney MagicBand, a multipurpose wristband that acts as your pass to all the Disney magic.
[Adam] recently returned from a Disney vacation and brought back his MagicBand, which quickly went under the knife for a peek at the magic inside. It turns out the technology is fairly mundane — a couple of flex PCBs with trace antennas and the usual trappings of an RFID transponder. But there’s also another antenna and a chip identified in a separate teardown as an NRF24LE1 2.4 GHz transceiver and microcontroller. The whole thing is powered by a coin cell, meaning the band isn’t just being interrogated by RFID – it’s actively transmitting and receiving.
What exactly it’s doing isn’t clear; Disney was characteristically cagey about specifics when [Adam] looked into the details, saying only that the bands “provide information that helps us improve the overall experience in our parks”. If you put aside the privacy concerns, it’s truly mind-boggling to think about the systems that must be in place to track thousands of these MagicBands around the enormous Disney property. And we can’t help but wonder if some of Disney R&D’s EM-Sense technology is at work in these wearables.
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip.
Filed under: wearable hacks
New discovery reveals Tyrannosaur faces for the first time
Dino Pulerà
New scientific discoveries about Tyrannosaurs have upended our understanding of the giant predators whose massive populations extended from Asia to the Americas. They had feathers. They ran like birds. And now, a new species that lived approximately 100-66 million years ago in Montana has given us our first real look at these dinosaurs' faces.
Carthage College paleontologist Thomas Carr and his team describe the scaly visage of Daspletosaurus horneri in a new paper from Scientific Reports. A typical member of this species would have been about nine meters long and 2.2 meters tall, with its large skull covered in bony ridges and different skin types. The researchers write that D. horneri is "critical to understanding the evolutionary transition from nonbeak to beak along the line to birds, since beaks are specialized epidermal structures." In other words, it's not just badass to reconstruct what a tyrannosaur's face looked like—it also gives us a glimpse of the in-between stages as snouts evolved into beaks.
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It’s official: Destiny 2 is coming to the PC
PC-exclusive gamers will have one fewer console-exclusive first-person shooter to be jealous of this year. Destiny 2, the recently announced sequel to Activision and Bungie's nearly three-year-old console MMO shooter, will be coming to the PC as well as the Xbox One and PS4 on September 8 following a beta test this summer.
The move, which has been rumored since September, comes after Activision cut off support for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Destiny last year. That clean break could help Destiny 2 target a higher level of performance on current consoles and high-end PC builds (not to mention the PS4 Pro and upcoming Xbox One "Project Scorpio") without the fear of pushing older console hardware too far.
It's unclear whether PC players will be able to play alongside their console brethren in the upcoming game or whether the platforms will be segregated to their own distinct online networks. Microsoft began pushing for cross-platform play between the PC and Xbox One last year, and the company recently opened up Gears of War 4 to allow for cooperative play regardless of the players' operating systems. Sony has been more reluctant to open up the PlayStation Network to connect widely with other platforms, though some PS4 MMOs have been cross-compatible with their PC versions. We've reached out to Activision for comment.
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