Tuesday, October 31
Making Braille Signs out of PCBs
[jg] recently passed some damaged Braille signs and took on the challenge of repairing them. Informed by his recent work on PCB lapel pins, [jg] immediately thought of using circuit boards for this project. He’d noticed that round solder pads made for uniform hills of solder, and this reminded him of the bumps in Braille.
He began by reading up on the standards of the Braille Authority of North America, which stipulates a dot height of 0.6mm. He loaded up the PharmaBraille font system and laid it out the dots in photoshop, then and imported it into KiCad and laid out the boards. When the PCBs had arrived from OSH Park, [jg] soldering up the pads (lead free, but of course) to see if he could get the hills to 0.6mm. He’s experimenting with different methods of melting the solder to try to get more even results.
Braille interfaces crop up a surprising amount in hacker projects. This refreshable Braille display and keyboard and the Braigo LEGO Braille printer are prime examples.
[thanks, Drew!]
Filed under: misc hacks
Dealmaster: Get a Dell laptop with a Core i5 chip for $550
Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have a new round of deals to share. Today's list is particularly heavy on laptop and TV deals, including a Dell Inspiron 14 with a Core i5 (7th-gen) chip and Nvidia GeForce GPU slashed down to $550.
You can take a peek at the full selection below.
Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.
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Homebuilt Laser Engraver Using Salvaged Parts
Now that anyone can go online and get a fairly decent 3D printer for around $200, they’ve officially fallen out of the “Elite Hacker” arsenal and are now normal, if perhaps highly specialized, tools. That’s great for the 3D printing community as a whole, but what about those who want to be on the fringe of technology? Telling people you have a 3D printer at home doesn’t get that wide-eyed response like it used to. What’s a “l33t” hacker to do?
Enter the laser engraver/cutter: it’s like a 3D printer, but easier to build and has a higher capacity for bodily harm! While there are a couple good options for kits and turn-key setups out there, just like the early days of 3D printers, some of the best machines are still home built. In his latest video, YouTuber [MakerMan] takes us through his build which features an impressively low part count.
For the laser itself, [MakerMan] is using a six watt PLH3D-6W-XF from Opt Lasers. This module features integrated driver and cooling, so all you need to do is provide it power and a stable means of moving it over the work piece. They even offer a magnetic “dock” which allows you to remove the laser from the mount without any tools for servicing or tool changes. [MakerMan] reports he’s been able to engrave stainless steel with this laser module, and cut thin wood.
This isn’t the first laser engraver we’ve seen built out of scrap parts, though if you want to save some work you could just upgrade a cheap commercial model.
Filed under: cnc hacks, laser hacks
How They Built That Levitating Star Wars Speeder Bike Costume
The post How They Built That Levitating Star Wars Speeder Bike Costume appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Mike Harrison’s Reverse Engineering Workshop
Hardware teardowns are awesome when guided by experts. One of our favorites over the years has been [Mike Harrison], who has conquered teardowns of some incredibly rare and exquisitely engineered gear, sharing the adventure on his YouTube channel: mikeselectricstuff. Now he’s putting on a workshop to walk through some of the techniques he uses when looking at equipment for the first time.
[Mike] will be in Pasadena a few days early for the Hackaday Superconference and floated the idea of hosting a workshop. We ordered up some interesting gear which he hasn’t had a chance to look at yet. A dozen lucky workshop attendees will walk through the process [Mike] uses to explore the manufacturing and design choices — skills that will translate to examining any piece of unknown gear. He may even delve into the functionality of the equipment if time allows. Get your ticket right now!
To keep things interesting we’re not going to reveal the equipment until after the fact. But follow the event page where we’ll publish the details of his reverse engineering work after the workshop.
[Mike] is the badge designer for this year’s Hackaday Superconference badge. Unfortunately Supercon is completely sold out (we tried to warn you) but you can check out the badge details he already published. And we will be live streaming the Supercon this year — more details on that next week!
Filed under: cons, teardown
Pumpkin Piano Promises a Gourd Time
Fall – it’s that time of year that brings falling leaves, Hallowe’en, and a pumpkin version of everything that you hold dear. In this case, it’s not a latte – it’s [Robert Vorthman]’s Pumpkin Piano.
[Robert] took a straightforward approach to the build, pressing a Raspberry Pi into service as the backbone of the operation. This is combined with an Adafruit breakout board for the MPR121, which is a chip that provides 12 capacitive touch-sensitive inputs. These are connected to the bountiful produce which make up the piano keys in this fun holiday hack. [Robert] uses some Python code that talks to fluidsynth, a software synthesizer that uses Soundfont files to create different sounds. It’s all wrapped up with some Neopixels that flash when each vegetable is triggered.
The build would make a great party piece for just about any fall gathering, and [Robert] has done a great job of rolling up all the hardware and software required in the write-up. For another take on a vegetable-based orchestra, check out last year’s Harpsi-gourd.
Filed under: Holiday Hacks
Review: IoT Data Logging Services with MQTT
For the last few months, I had been using Sparkfun’s Phant server as a data logger for a small science project. Unfortunately, they’ve had some serious technical issues and have discontinued the service. Phant was good while it lasted: it was easy to use, free, and allowed me to download the data in a CSV format. It shared data with analog.io, which at the time was a good solution for data visualization.
While I could continue using Phant since it is an open-source project and Sparkfun kindly releases the source code for the server on Github, I thought it might be better to do some research, see what’s out there. I decided to write a minimal implementation for each platform as an interesting way to get a feel for each. To that end, I connected a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor to a NodeMCU board to act as a simple data source.
What Makes IoT Data Logging Services Useful?
To start, I had three main requirements. First of all, the service would be primarily used for data logging , so a proper export feature is a must.
Second, it needs to support MQTT well, and be properly documented so that I can implement it on a wide variety of hardware. An Arduino library is useful, but not sufficient. We’ve previously covered the basics of MQTT if you need a quick refresh.
Finally, it had to be available at a reasonable cost. It did not have to be free of charge, as there are plenty of ways to make a reasonably priced service pay for itself in effort saved or actual income.
After that, there are a lot of things that were optional. A slick dashboard with live graphs is a great way to quickly share data and get people interested. Support for MQTT QoS level 2 (each datapoint is sent exactly once using a 4 way handshake) would be nice as some of the networks I’ll be using will not exactly be reliable and this means better quality data. Finally, if I can host it on my own VPS so that I can rent a server in the countries where I am collecting data, that would really improve reliability in my area.
After considering the above I found five options that seemed to fit the bill: Adafruit.io, Cayenne, Thingspeak, Thingsboard, and Ubidots. I also considered Blynk, but they don’t seem to have documentation available yet to use MQTT with their service. This is a shame because otherwise it looks pretty slick and has a neat smartphone app.
In each case I’ll explain the pros and cons from my standpoint, and provide an implementation example in Lua using a generic MQTT library (from NodeMCU). Most platforms also provide custom libraries or ready-made solutions for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others, however I wanted to investigate at a slightly lower level how each service works. As an added benefit, the code will run directly on NodeMCU firmware that supports MQTT.
One criteria not in consideration is security – these data loggers are collecting non-critical scientific data. They’re on an encrypted Wi-Fi network, and do not accept commands from the Internet.
Adafruit IO
I’ve always been impressed with Adafruit’s documentation, and Adafruit IO was no exception. The MQTT communication protocol was well-defined, it was clear how to set things up without any aspect ever feeling ‘dumbed-down’, and there were links to further reading.
Setting up a device in Adafruit IO starts with creating a feed in the user interface, which is easy on the eyes and well thought out:
Once you’ve created a feed, you’ll be able to add it to a dashboard if you wish. The collection of widgets is somewhat sparse compared to some other platforms, but all the necessary ones are there and they can be resized as you need:
To add data to a feed, you need to set your MQTT client to connect to io.adafruit.com, using your Adafruit account name as your username, and your AIO key (to the left in yellow when you log in) as your password. Note that if your device is not using SSL, these credentials can be intercepted, and that Adafruit IO supports SSL. If your device supports SSL, it’s a good idea to use it.
Once connected, the MQTT topic to publish to is simply your-username/feeds/feed-name. Even though JSON data format is supported, one caveat is that you can really only record one value at a time per feed. You can add latitude, longitude, and elevation to a single feed, but could not add temperature and humidity. By contrast, some platforms let you add more or less arbitrary amounts of variables inside a single feed, which I often find useful for things like weather stations. Nothing stops you from tying multiple feeds to a single dashboard, so I don’t see this as a major flaw. The only shortcoming I’ve been able to find is that Adafruit IO only supports MQTT QoS levels 0 and 1, with no support for 2.
Adafruit IO has convenient data management as well. You can manually add and delete values, a feature missing on some of the other platforms. Downloading the data from a feed is trivial, there’s a button for it when you are viewing a feed.
One truly excellent feature I would like to point out is that there’s an error console. Not only that, but the dashboard flags it red when there’s something new for you to see there. This feature combined with the excellent documentation made Adafruit IO the best platform to learn with — none of the complexity is hidden, but it’s documented and there are tools for debugging. Our sample code to try out this platform is below:
ClientID = 'put anything here'
username = 'your username here'
AIOkey = 'your key here'
m = mqtt.Client(ClientID, 120, username, AIOkey)
m:connect("io.adafruit.com", 1883, 0, function(client) print("connected") m:publish(username.."/feeds/temperature", temp, 0, 1) m:close() end)
function postThingSpeak(level)
m:connect("io.adafruit.com", 1883, 0, function(client) print("connected") m:publish(username.."/feeds/humidity", humi, 0, 1) m:close() end)
end
tmr.alarm(1, 5000, tmr.ALARM_SINGLE, function() postThingSpeak(0) end)
Cayenne
The interface in Cayenne is organized by device. Each device has channels that contain your data. When sending data to a channel, the device can indicate what type of data (e.g. humidity) is being sent to assist in processing. There are quite a few supported data types.
You can create different ‘projects’ that take data from channels on different devices and add them to a common dashboard. Each channel can be displayed as a graph of preset or custom time intervals. The graphs are clean, but are a bit on the small side for larger data sets, and have an odd smoothing effect that created curved lines that didn’t represent the data. I don’t like this feature at all as it makes it harder to see what’s really going on. What I would liked to have seen was an ability to turn off the trend line entirely or at least the smoothing feature.
On the graph view is a ‘Download Chart Data’ button that downloads the data as a CSV file.
Overall Cayenne checked all the boxes, but how easy is it to code for? As it turns out, it has one of the more unusual MQTT setups of the services I investigated. It requires a client ID, a username, and a password specified to connect, and the client ID and username specified again in the MQTT topic:
ClientID = ‘your client ID here’
username = ‘your username here’
password = ‘your password here’
channel = ‘your device channel’
m = mqtt.Client(ClientID, 120, username, password)
m:connect("mqtt.mydevices.com", 1883, 0, function(client) print("connected") m:publish("v1/"..username.."/things/"..ClientID.."/data/"..channel, "temp,c="..temp, 2, 1) m:close() end)
The channels added to each device are named in the web interface, and are simply identified with a number. For example your first channel would be v1//things/<ClientID>/data/0.
In the end, this worked fine and it even supported MQTT QoS level 2.
Thingspeak
First off, Thingspeak has integration with MATLAB. Being able to store, visualize, and analyze data in the same place seems like an excellent feature. I prefer to do hypothesis testing in Python but MATLAB is an excellent choice and all common statistical tests are available.
In Thingspeak, data is sorted into channels. Channels contain fields, and fields contain your data.
The graphs on Thingspeak are tidy and clearly show the data points. However, I couldn’t find a way to resize the graphs in the interface, which ought to be possible because they seem to be generated as SVG graphics.
One very interesting feature is the ability to generate an iframe from the graphs and include them on another website. I gave this a quick try, it worked like a charm. It would have been a neat add-on to this radiation detector.
The MQTT implementation at Thingspeak is dead simple, requiring only the channel ID and API key:
ChannelID='your channel ID'
apikey = 'your API key'
m = mqtt.Client(ClientID, 120)
m:connect("mqtt.thingspeak.com", 1883, 0, function(client) print("connected") m:publish("channels/"..ChannelID.."/publish/"..apikey, "field1="..temp.."&field2="..humi, 0, 0) m:close() end)
Unfortunately, Thingspeak only supports QoS level 0, which means data can be duplicated or missed on shaky Internet connections. I’m not sure how much this matters in practice, but given their focus on data analysis it would be nice not to have to deal with missing data points.
Thingsboard
Up to this point, we’ve only investigated externally hosted services. If you need something that you can host yourself, Thingsboard is worth checking out. Their setup is a little different from anything we’ve seen so far. Much of it is access control for different users, rule setup for raising alarms/actions, and exciting things that are beyond the scope of this article.
For our purposes in Thingsboard, devices contain telemetry data. Then widgets on dashboards are connected to the telemetry contained in devices. The dashboard creation workflow is convoluted compared to some other platforms, but they have by far the widest selection and coolest looking dashboard widgets I’ve seen, and each of them can be set to display full screen.
However, data export is somewhat inconvenient at first – there’s no download button but it can be done programatically via Curl. This way data export and backup can be automated (e.g. with cron), which suits me fine.
The MQTT implementation here is very straightforward and supports QoS level 2. An access token associated with a device is used on connect, and then any telemetry sent will belong to that device. A very important consideration is that you must not send integer or float data as a string – it will work on real-time displays such as gauges, but any graphs will fail to pull historical data correctly. In other words, do not send {"temperature":"57"}, be sure to send {"temperature":57}. Code example below:
ClientID = 'put anything here'
token = 'your token here'
m = mqtt.Client(ClientID, 120, token)
function postThingsboard(level)
status, temp, humi, temp_dec, humi_dec = dht.read(pin)
print(string.format("DHT Temperature:%d.%03d;Humidity:%d.%03d\r\n",
math.floor(temp),
temp_dec,
math.floor(humi),
humi_dec
))
print('{"temp":'..temp..',"humidity":'..humi..'}')
m:connect("demo.thingsboard.io", 1883, 0, function(client) print("connected") m:publish("v1/devices/me/telemetry", '{"temp":'..temp..’,"humidity":'..humi..'}', 2, 1) m:close() end)
end
tmr.alarm(1, 10000, tmr.ALARM_AUTO, function() postThingsboard(0) end)
Ubidots
Unlike the other platforms reviewed here, Ubidots does not offer a free account tier. That being said, new accounts start off with enough credits to operate a device for 5 months, and USD $5 will purchase enough credit for a device to run for 2 months.
In Ubidots, data is sent to variables, and variables exist within devices. You can create a dashboard by adding widgets and selecting a data variable. User interface is where Ubidots really shines; it has by far the best dashboard creation process and overall it’s immediately clear how to do everything you might need to do… with one exception.
The option to export all data from a variable is accessed by entering the variable, then clicking on ‘variable settings’, where the only two options are ‘Export to CSV’ and ‘Delete Values’ – neither of which are settings. Exporting all data from a device on the other hand is intuitively labeled, and where you would expect it to be, which I’ve indicated with a big red arrow:
As for the MQTT implementation, it’s a bit clunky in my opinion. You connect with your token as your username, and the way data is associated with a particular device is via the MQTT topic. The data keys in the JSON dictionary then have to exactly match the variable names set up in the user interface (which must be unique).
This strikes me as less easy to manage than some of the other platforms, where you specify a device-specific token, and you can use non-unique variable names. Perhaps I’m missing something, but if I’m logging the temperature of 30 different pipes I would personally find it easier to manage unique keys than unique variable names. It does support MQTT QoS level 2 though, which is nice:
clientID = 'anything can go here'
Token = 'your token'
Device = ‘your device name’
m = mqtt.Client(clientID, 120,Token)
m:connect("things.ubidots.com", 1883, 2, function(client) print("connected") m:publish("/v1.6/devices/"..Device, '{"Temperature":"'..temp..'","Humidity":"'..humi..'"}', 2, 1) m:close() end)
Summary
All of these platforms provide data capture, display, and export. They differ a little in their MQTT implementation, but not by very much. For datalogging purposes they’re all sufficient. After trying each of them, a few things stuck with me.
Adafruit IO was hands down the best platform to learn with. They had excellent documentation, data management, and an error console for debugging. The free account is enough to get started, and the paid account is reasonably priced and powerful enough to get a lot done. If I had to suggest a service to someone wanted to learn how to add IoT data logging to their projects, I would recommend Adafruit IO without hesitation.
Thingspeak integrated data analytics into their platform. I haven’t dug deeply into it, but the idea of having data acquisition, storage, analysis, and decision making in the same place and automated seems brilliant. Can it perform automated hypothesis testing and control systems based on rejection/failure to reject the null hypothesis? I’m not a MATLAB user, but on the surface it looks like it could. Just don’t tell any direct response marketing teams about that.
Ubidots has a slick user interface and is easy to understand. If I had to introduce IoT to children or managers without going into many technical details, this is what I would use. That’s not intended to be a snide remark, it’s just ideal for both groups for different reasons.
Finally, Thingsboard. I had no idea something this mature existed in the IoT space. The possibilities are staggering for both personal and commercial projects since it’s open-source and can be self hosted. To top it off, it has beautiful dashboard widgets that I can actually show clients. My reaction when I saw it was to immediately pick up the phone and start making calls. I don’t know what I’ll be doing yet, but it’s going to be fun, and I’ll try to share it here one day.
Filed under: Featured, reviews, Skills
Reuse Old Resistors as Jewelry Charms
The post Reuse Old Resistors as Jewelry Charms appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Check Out the New Maker Podcast “Make or Break”
The post Check Out the New Maker Podcast “Make or Break” appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Edible Innovations: A DIY Approach to Blending New Types of Tea
The post Edible Innovations: A DIY Approach to Blending New Types of Tea appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
10 Year Old Bug Crushed By Hacker on a Mission
PCI pass through is the ability of a virtualized guest system to directly access PCI hardware. Pass through for dedicated GPUs has just recently been added to the Linux kernel-based virtual machine. Soon afterward, users began to find that switching on nested page tables (NPT), a technology intended to provide hardware acceleration for virtual machines, had the opposite effect on AMD platforms and slowed frame rate down to a crawl.
Annoyed by this [gnif] set out to to fix the problem. His first step was to run graphics benchmarks to isolate the source of the problem. Having identified the culprit in the GPU, [gnif] began to read up on the involved technology stack. Three days of wrapping his head around technical docs allowed [gnif] to find the single line of code that resulted in a faulty memory set up and to implement a basic fix. He then passed the work on to [Paolo Bonzini] at patchwork.kernel.org, who released a more refined patch.
The bug affecting PCI pass through had been around for ten years and had received little attention from the manufacturer. It gained prominence when graphics cards were affected. In the end it took one very dedicated user three days to fix it, and then another day to roll out a patch for Open Source operating systems. In his notes [gnif] points out how helpful AMDs documentation was. With the right to repair in debate, DRMed technical docs and standards locked behind paywalls, [gnif]’s story is a reminder of the importance of accessible quality documentation.
Filed under: linux hacks, video hacks
Hoverboard Reborn For Electric Rollerblading
Rollerblading is fun, but who needs all that pesky exercise? Wouldn’t strapping on the blades be so much more tempting if you had an electric pusher motor to propel you along your way?
We’ve seen lots of transportation hacks before, from collapsible longboards to steam-powered bicycles, but this one is pretty unique.
Filed under: transportation hacks
An Amstrad PCW For The 21st Century
If you were a computer-mad teen in the late 1980s, you were probably in the process of graduating from an 8-bit machine to a 16-bit one, maybe an Amiga, or an Atari ST. For the first time though you might not have been the only computer owner in your house, because there was every chance your parents might have joined the fun with a word processor. Maybe American home offices during this period might have had PC clones, but for Brits there was every chance that the parental powerhouse would have been an Amstrad PCW.
Amstrad were the masters of packaging up slightly outdated technology for electronic consumers on a budget, and the PCW was thus a 1970s CP/M machine for the 1980s whose main attraction was that it came with monitor and printer included in the price. [James Ots]’ parents had one that interested him enough that he has returned to the platform and is documenting his work bringing it up to date.
It was the most recent progress in booting into CP/M from an SD card by hijacking the printer ROM that caught our eye, but reading all the build logs that is only the tip of the iceberg. He’s connected another monitor, made a joystick port and a soundcard, and added a memory upgrade to his PCW. Most of these machines would have only been used with the bundled word processor, so those are real enhancements.
We’ve featured quite a few projects involving Amstrad’s CPC home computers, such as this one with a floppy emulator. Amstrad are an interesting company for followers of consumer electronics of the ’70s and ’80s, they never had the out-there tech wackiness of their great rival Sinclair but their logo could be found on an astonishing variety of appliances. The “AMS” in Amstrad are the initials of the company founder [Alan Sugar], who is rather better known in 2017 as the British host of The Apprentice. It is not known whether he intends to lead the country.
Filed under: classic hacks
Quick and Easy Solar Hot Air Balloon
[Becky Stern] likes to harness the power of the Sun. Most of us will immediately think of solar cells and other exotic solar energy techniques. But [Becky] shows how to make a hot air balloon using nothing but tape and garbage bags.
The idea is quite simple. You form a large envelope from black trash bags and fill it with air. Becky does that by just running with it, tying it off, and topping off with a little manual blowing. Once the sun heats the black bag, it floats.
We were hoping she’d show us if there was any margin for payload, but she didn’t. However, electronics are getting smaller and lighter all the time. Sure, batteries weigh a lot, but maybe there would be an opportunity to mount some solar-powered device on the balloon to further harness the sun’s energy.
If you want to have a go at that, [Becky] has a free solar class that covers using the sun to engrave wood and using solar panels to charge a battery or power an Arduino.
We doubt this solar zeppelin will perform like a propane-powered balloon but it is still fun and educational. It doesn’t seem likely that you are going to reach space with it either.
Filed under: solar hacks
Download and Print Maker Mayhem, the Hackerspace Board Game
The post Download and Print Maker Mayhem, the Hackerspace Board Game appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Monday, October 30
Raspberry Pi Haunted Jack in the Box
The post Raspberry Pi Haunted Jack in the Box appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Scratchbuilt Cryptex Would Make Da Vinci Weep
Here’s a fun fact, the kind of thing that you might (but we definitely did not) find out when writing a blog post: Dan Brown actually made up the cryptex for his book, The Da Vinci Code. We therefore have Mr Brown, with a bit of help from the filmmakers over at Sony, to thank every time we see somebody make their own version. To follow that line of logic to its conclusion, we believe you’ll agree that the following is without question the greatest thing Dan Brown has ever done in his life.
Created by [Stephen Peduto] as a ring box for an exceptionally lucky young lady, it required an estimated 127 hours to complete over the course of two months. From the incredible job [Stephen] did photographing and documenting the build, we don’t doubt it for a second. Expertly combing milled aluminum and lathe-turned bocote wood, this has got to be the most gorgeous ring “box” ever made.
When the machining was all said and done, [Stephen] then switched over to the woodworking part of the project. Rather than numbers or letters for a combination, this cryptex uses the grain pattern in the turned piece of wood. This gives the final product a more organic feel, while at the same time avoiding the head-scratching problem of getting the characters printed or engraved into the wheels.
Towards the end of construction there was a worrying moment when the newly made wooding rings warped so badly that the aluminum inserts would no longer fit. As a last resort, the rings were placed in a box with a humidifier for a week and slowly worked back into shape. [Stephen] says he’s still surprised it worked.
Even if some may argue that a cryptex is nothing but a prettied-up bike lock, people sure do love them. We’re no stranger to high quality cryptex builds here, though even mere mortals can play along if they’ve got a well calibrated 3D printer.
Filed under: misc hacks
Pull Passwords Out of Silicon
[q3k] got tipped off to a very cool problem in the ongoing Pwn2Win capture-the-flag, and he blew it out of the water by decoding the metal interconnect layers that encode a password in a VLSI IC. And not one to rent someone else’s netlist extraction code, he did it by writing his own.
The problem in the Pwn2Win CTF came in the form of the design files for a hypothetical rocket launch code. The custom IC takes an ASCII string as input, and flips a pin high if it matches. Probably the simplest way to do this in logic is to implement a shift register that’s long enough for the code string’s bits, and then hard-wire some combinatorial logic that only reads true when all of the individual bits are correct.
(No, you don’t want to implement a password-checker this way — it means that you could simply brute-force the password far too easily — but such implementations have been seen in the wild.)
Anyway, back to our story. After reversing the netlist, [q3k] located 320 flip-flops in a chain, suggesting a 40-byte ASCII code string. Working backward in the circuit from the “unlocked” pin to the flip-flops, he found a network of NOR and NAND gates, which were converted into a logic notation and then tossed into Z3 to solve. Some cycles later, he had pulled the password straight out of the silicon!
This looks like a really fun challenge if you’re into logic design or hardware reverse engineering. You don’t have to write your own tools to do this, of course, but [q3k] would say that it was worth it.
Thanks [Victor] for the great tip!
Featured image by David Carron, via Wikipedia.
Filed under: hardware
Sony unleashes scores of new PlayStation trailers on Paris Games Week
With Los Angeles' E3 and Germany's Gamescom fading in memory, Sony used the opening of Paris Games Week today to reveal a bevy of new games for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR. The company also shared new footage of some anticipated, previously announced games. Most of these announcements came in the form of polished, non-interactive trailers, many of which provided very scant details of what the games themselves are actually like to play.
Above, we've captured a handful of representative shots from some of Sony's more interesting announcements along with what we can glean about the game's themselves. Click through to find out more, or just check out the trailers directly using the links below:
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Tap into Your Inner Maker at the Largest DIY Festival in Australia
The post Tap into Your Inner Maker at the Largest DIY Festival in Australia appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Mechanical Marvel Trades Courage for Chocolate
When we see what [Jason Allemann] does with LEGO, we wonder why more one-offs aren’t made this way. This time he’s made a Halloween mechanical marvel that will surely scare more kids than anything else they’ll encounter on their rounds — so much so that many may even decline the chocolate it dispenses. Who wouldn’t when to get it you have to reach over an animatronic skeleton hand that may grab you while a similarly mechanized spider may lunge onto your hand.
The chocolate dispensing, the hand and the spider are all animated using four motors, a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 brick to control them, and a touch sensor. When a kid presses a pumpkin attached to the touch sensor, the next chocolate candy is lowered by gravity onto a conveyor belt and carried forward to the awaiting child. That much is automatic. At the discretion of [Jason] and his partner [Kristal], using an infrared remote control and sensor, they can activate the skeleton hand and the lunging spider at just the right moment. We’re just not sure who they’ll choose to spare. It is Halloween after all, and being scared is part of the fun, so maybe spare no one? Check out the video below and tell us if you’d prefer just the treat, or both the trick and treat.
We do have to wonder if there’s any project that can’t benefit from LEGO products, even if only at the prototype stage or to help visualize an idea. As a small sample, [Jason]’s also made a remote-controlled monowheel and an actual working printer along with a Morse key telegraph machine to send it something to print.
Filed under: toy hacks
Maker Pro News: Maker Pros do B2B, Indiegogo Launches a Marketplace, and More
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MOVI Adds Voice Control to Arduino Projects
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The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads
One of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world wasn't contained in a nation or a city. It was a series of trade routes that crisscrossed Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Swahili Coast of Africa, and dubbed the "Silk Road" by modern explorers. For centuries, these routes passed through wealthy cities whose vibrant cultures were hybrids of Eastern and Western culture, joined by the spirit of trade and knowledge exchange. The Silk Road civilization thrived because it had no borders.
In this episode of Ancient People Did Stuff, we talk about some of the more unusual discoveries that archaeologists have made at excavation sites along the ancient Silk Roads. One of the great medieval cities of the Silk Road was Samarkand, located today in Uzbekistan. Its people were called Sogdians, and their language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road during roughly the 4th through the 8th centuries. And yet one of the only remaining examples we have of written Sogdian is in an angry letter that an abandoned wife sent to her husband, which was lost in a mailbag and found over a millennium later.
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PCB Tesla Coil Is Perfect Desk Toy
A Tesla coil easily makes it to the top spot on our list of “Mad Scientist” equipment we want for the lab, second only to maybe a Jacob’s Ladder. Even then, it’s kind of unfair advantage because you know people only want a Jacob’s Ladder for that awesome sound it makes. Sound effects not withstanding, it’s Tesla coil all the way, no question.
Unfortunately, winding your own Tesla coil is kind of a hassle. Even on relatively small builds, you’ll generally need to setup some kind of winding jig just to do the secondary coil, which can be a project in itself. So when [Daniel Eindhoven] sent his no-wind Tesla coil into the tip line, it immediately got our attention.
In such a low-power setup, [Daniel] was also able to replace the traditional spark gap pulse generator with a PIC18F14K50 microcontroller, further simplifying the design. An advantage of using a microcontroller for the pulse generator is that it’s very easy to adjust the coil’s operating frequency, allowing for neat tricks like making the coil “sing” by bringing its frequency into the audible range.
For those looking to build their own version, [Daniel] has put the PCB schematic and firmware available for download on his site. He also mentions that, in collaboration with Elektor magazine, he will be producing a kit in the near future. Definitely something we’ll be keeping an eye out for.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time [Daniel] has demonstrated his mastery of high voltage. He scared impressed us all the way back in 2010 with his 11,344 Joule capacitor bank, perfect for that laptop-destroying rail gun you’ve been meaning to build.
Filed under: classic hacks, hardware
This Drone Can Fly, Swim, and Explode….. Wait, What?
You’ve probably heard of micro-drones, perhaps even nano-drones, but there research institutions that shrink these machines down to the size of insects. Leading from the [Wiss Institute For Biologically Inspired Engineering] at Harvard University, a team of researchers have developed a miniscule robot that — after a quick dip — literally explodes out of the water.
To assist with the take off, RoboBee has four buoyant outriggers to keep it near the water’s surface as it uses electrolysis to brew oxyhydrogen in its gas chamber. Once enough of the combustible gas has accumulated — pushing the robot’s wings out of the water in the process– a sparker ignites the fuel, thrusting it into the air. As yet, the drone has difficulty remaining in the air after this aquatic takeoff, but we’re excited to see that change soon.
Looking like a cross between a water strider and a bee, the team suggest this latest version of the RoboBee series — a previous iteration used electrostatic adhesion to stick to walls — could be used for search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and biological studies. The capacity to transition from aerial surveyor, to underwater explorer and back again would be incredibly useful, but in such a small package, it is troublesome at best. Hence the explosions.
In larger drones, the challenges are a bit more forgiving, as seen here.
[Via The Wyss Institute]
Filed under: drone hacks, robots hacks
Scratch That SDR!
When you think of a software defined radio, what language might you consider reaching for to create the software part of the equation? C? C++, maybe?
How about Scratch?
“What, Scratch as in the visual programming language aimed at young people?”, we hear you cry incredulously. It’s not exactly the answer you’d expect for an SDR, but thanks to [Andrew Back]’s work there is now ScratchRadio, a set of Scratch extensions for software defined radio. Why on earth do this? The aim is to lower the barrier to entry for software defined radio as far as possible, and to place it in a learning environment such as Scratch seems an ideal way to achieve that.
Of course, Scratch itself isn’t powerful enough for the heaviest of heavy lifting, so in reality this is a Scratch wrapper for a LuaRadio backend. It was created with the LimeSDR Mini in mind, but given that LuaRadio is not specific to that hardware we’d expect it to work with other SDRs such as the ever-popular RTL chipset TV sticks. It gives an owner of a Raspberry Pi 3 the ability to experiment with SDR coding without the need for a huge level of experience, and that to our mind can only be a good thing.
If you fancy trying ScratchRadio, you can find the code in its GitHub repository, and take it from there. Meanwhile we covered LuaRadio last year, so if Scratch is a little basic for you and GNU Radio too advanced, give it a try.
Radio icon: [Sakurambo], (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Scratch cat logo: MIT Media Lab.
Filed under: radio hacks
Water Slide + Ferris Wheel = SlideWheel
This might be German engineering at its funnest. [Wiegand Maelzer GmbH] have created a new type of amusement park ride that combines the thrill of a water slide with the gentle revolutions of a Ferris wheel.
Inspired by the wish of a young Swiss boy in 2012, the whimsical feat of engineering known as the SlideWheel was realized this year. This is isn’t quite the giant sloshing drowning machine it appears to be on first blush, though. It begins and ends at the same shallow pool, where three- and four-person rafts are lifted into the ride by conveyor belt. What happens next is difficult to describe. It’s easier just to watch the first-person video below that demonstrates the pendulum-like motion that comes from floating while rotating.
SlideWheel moves at a modest 3 RPM, though this can be adjusted. Travel speed through the tube maxes out at 40 KPH/ 25 MPH, but will vary depending on the raft’s location, the position of the wheel, and gravity. The ride can handle up to three rafts at a time and delight 720 people per hour. A trip through the tube lasts a mere two minutes, but all those who’ve tried it say the experience seems much longer. [Wiegand Maelzer] have already received a few orders and are working on a dry version for malls and indoor amusement parks.
Not enough of an engineering feat, you say? Here’s a car-juggling robot.
Filed under: misc hacks
Sunday, October 29
Hackaday Links: 👻 🎃 Spooky Edition, 2017
A few links posts ago, we wrote something about a company selling huge LED panels on eBay, ten panels for $50. Those panels are gone now, but a few lucky hackers got their hands on some cool hardware. Now there’s a project to reverse engineer these Barco NX-4 LED panels. Who’s going to be the first to figure out how to drive these things? Doesn’t matter — it’s a group project and we’re all made richer by the contributions of others.
Prague is getting a new hackerspace.
A year and a half ago, a $79 3D printer popped up on Kickstarter. I said I would eat a hat if it shipped by next year. Seeing as how it’s basically November, and they’re not selling a $79 printer anymore — it’s $99 — this might go down as one of my rare defeats, with an asterisk, of course. I’m going to go source some very large fruit roll-ups and do this at Supercon. Thanks, [Larry].
Speaking of bets, this week Amazon introduced the most idiotic thing ever invented. It’s called Amazon Key. It’s an electronic lock (dumb), connected to the Internet (dumber), so you let strangers into your house to deliver packages (dumbest). CCC is in a few months, so I don’t know if Amazon Key will be hacked by then, but I’m pretty confident this will be broken by March.
The Lulzbot Taz is one of the best printers on the market, and it is exceptionally Open Source. The Taz is also a great printer for low-volume production. It was only a matter of time until someone built this. The Twoolhead is a parallel extruder for the Taz 6. Instead of one extruder and nozzle, it’s two, and instead of printing one object at a time, it prints two. Of course it limits the build volume of the printer, but if you need smaller parts faster, this is the way to go.
Hey, did you hear? Hackaday is having a conference the weekend after next. This year, we’re opening up the doors a day early and having a party at the Evil Overlord’s offices. Tickets are free for Supercon attendees, so register here.
At CES this year, we caught wind of one of the coolest advances in backyard astronomy in decades. The eVscope is ‘astrophotography in the eyepiece’, and it’s basically a CCD, a ton of magic image processing, and a small display, all mounted inside a telescope. Point the scope at a nebula, and instead of seeing a blurry smudge, you’ll see tendrils and filaments of interstellar gas in almost real-time. Now the eVscope is on Kickstarter. It’s a 4.5 inch almost-Newtonian (the eyepiece is decoupled from the light path, so I don’t even know how telescope nomenclature works in this case), an OLED display, and a 10-hour battery life.
Is the fidget spinner fad over? Oh, we hope not. A technology is only perfected after it has been made obsolete. Case in point? We can play phonographs with lasers. The internal combustion engine will be obsolete in automobiles in twenty years, but track times will continue going down for forty. Fidget spinners may be dead, but now you can program them with JavaScript. What a time to be alive!
Audio tomphoolery even an idiot tech blogger can see through! I received a press kit for a USB DAC this week that included the line, “…low drop out voltage regulators running at 3.3 V, meaning the 5 V USB limit is well preserved.” Yes, because you’re running your system at 3.3 V, you won’t draw too much current from a USB port. That’s how it works, right?
[Peter Sripol] is building an ultralight in his basement. The last few weeks of his YouTube channel have been the must-watch videos of the season. He’s glassed the wings, installed all the hardware (correctly), and now he has the motors and props mounted. This is an electric ultralight, so he’s using a pair of ‘150 cc’ motors from HobbyKing. No, that’s not displacement, it’s just a replacement for a 150 cc gas engine. On a few YouTube Live streams, [Peter] did what was effectively a high-speed taxi test that got out of hand. It flew. Doing that at night was probably not the best idea, but we’re looking forward to the videos of the flight tests.
Filed under: Hackaday Columns, Hackaday links
Magnetic Tape Storage May Not be Retro
Magnetic storage is quickly becoming an antiquated technology but IBM may have given it a few more years. Currently, magnetic storage is still manufactured as hard disk drives (HDDs) but you won’t find a tape drive in a modern consumer computer. That’s not likely to change but IBM is pushing the envelope to make a tape drive that will be smaller and more economical than other massive storage options. In many ways, they’re the antithesis of solid state drives (SSDs) because tape drives are slow to retrieve data but capable of holding a lot inexpensively.
Three advances are responsible for this surge in capacity. Firstly, the tape “grains,” where each bit is recorded, have been shrunk by sputtering metal to a film instead of painting it on. Secondly, better servo control allows the reading mechanisms to read those tiny grains with the necessary accuracy. Lastly, stronger computation is used to read the data by using error detection and correction because when your tape is traveling four meters per second, it takes a long time to go back and double-check something.
IBM’s tape drive won’t replace your hard drive but it could back it up daily, many times over.
Check this out if your wetware needs a memory boost or this if your breakfast needs a memory boost.
Filed under: computer hacks, hardware
Immersive VR with a 200-Degree Stereoscopic Camera
VR is in vogue, but getting on board requires a steep upfront cost. Hackaday.io user [Colin Pate] felt that $800 was a bit much for even the cheapest commercial 360-degree 3D camera, so he thought: ‘why not make my own for half that price?’
[Pate] knew he’d need a lot of bandwidth and many GPIO ports for the camera array, so he searched out the Altera Cyclone V SOC FPGA and a Terasic DE10-Nano development board to host it. At present, he has four Uctronics OV5642 cameras on his rig, chosen for their extensive documentation and support. The camera mount itself is a 3D-printed octagon so eight of the OC5642 can capture a full 360-degree photo.
Next: producing an image!
[Pate] is achieving the stereoscopic effect by mounting each camera 64 mm apart — the average distance between a person’s eyes — and blending the overlapping the fields of view of each camera. 
There are ways to capture stereoscopic images with only one camera, but it requires a little smoke and mirrors, or in this case, two cleverly mounted cameras with fish-eye lenses.
Filed under: FPGA, Virtual Reality
