35C3: A Deep Dive into DOS Viruses and Pranks

Oh, the hijinks that the early days of the PC revolution allowed. Back in the days when a 20MB hard drive was a big deal and MS-DOS 3.1 ruled over every plain beige PC-clone cobbled together by enthusiasts like myself, it was great fun to “set up” someone else’s machine to do something unexpected. This generally amounted to finding an unattended PC — the rooms of the residence hall where I lived in my undergrad days were a target-rich environment in this regard — and throwing something annoying in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Hilarity ensued when the mark next booted the machine and was greeted with something like an inverted display or a faked hard drive formatting. Control-G was good to me too.

So it was with a sense of great nostalgia that I watched [Ben Cartwright-Cox]’s recent 35C3 talk on the anatomy and physiology of viruses from the DOS days. Fair warning to the seasoned reader that a sense of temporal distortion is inevitable while watching someone who was born almost a decade after the last meaningful release of MS-DOS discuss its inner workings with such ease. After a great overview of the DOS API elements that were key to getting anything done back then, malware or regular programs alike, he dives into his efforts to mine an archive of old DOS viruses, the payloads of most of which were harmless pranks. He built some tools to find viruses that triggered based on the system date, and used an x86 emulator he designed to test every day between 1980 and 2005. He found about 10,000 malware samples and explored their payloads, everything from well-wishes for the New Year to a bizarre foreshadowing of the Navy Seal Copypasta meme.

We found [Ben]’s talk a real treat, and it’s good to see someone from the current generation take such a deep dive into the ways many of us cut our teeth in the computing world.

Report: Tesla has more than 3,300 Model 3s remaining in US inventory

The 18 Best Maker Faire Videos of 2018

A small panel of judges from Make: editorial and Maker Faire leadership spent some reviewing the 60+ videos produced from the 198 city-facing events in 44 countries that took place this year. Videos were primarily post-event documentation, but some were promo and one was even longer-form, real-time pace. What makes […]

Read more on MAKE

The post The 18 Best Maker Faire Videos of 2018 appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Break out the bubbly and reflect on the complex physics of the fizz

Bikes, bowling balls, and the delicate balancing act that is modern recycling

Video by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Update: It's New Year's eve and Ars staffers are enjoying a winter break (inevitably filled with some joy rides and whatever that choose-your-own Black Mirror thing is). As such, we're resurfacing a few favorites from the site archives appropriate for the occasion—like this tour of a facility that will inevitably be busy post-holidays. Our story on the Sims Municipal Recycling Center originally ran on December 7, 2015, and it appears unchanged below.

BROOKLYN, New York—A conveyor belt is keeping material flying past at speeds that require both concentration and rapid eye movement if you wanted to track a single item. Above the constant roar of all the heavy equipment, it's just possible to make out the brief hissing of jets of high-pressure air. Those jets are produced where the conveyor belt ends, and most of the material plunges onto a second belt below. Each hiss, however, causes a carefully chosen item to leap off the end of the belt and soar into a different collection area, where yet another conveyor belt takes it on its way.

The process of carefully choosing which items to sift out is all done without human intervention. It's based on how that object reflects light that's outside the range of human vision.

Read 45 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Art of Vacuum Tube Fabrication

Cybersecurity and Insurance

Insurance is a funny business. Life insurance, for example, is essentially betting someone you will die before your time. With the recent focus on companies getting hacked, it isn’t surprising that cybersecurity insurance is now big business. Get hacked and get paid. Maybe.

The reason I say maybe is because of the recent court battle between Zurich and Mondelez. Never heard of them? Zurich is a big insurance company and Mondelez owns brands like Nabisco, Oreo, and Trident chewing gum, among others.

It all started with the NotPetya ransomware attack in June of 2017. Mondelez is claiming it lost over $100 million dollars because of the incident. But no problem! They have insurance. If they can get the claim paid by Zurich, that is. Let’s dig in and try to see how this will all shake out.

That’s a Lot of Money

By anyone’s standards, $100 million is a pretty big wad of cash. Apparently, Mondelez uses Windows-based software for shipping and order fulfillment. By adding up property damage (lost hard drives, perhaps), supply and distribution disruption, customer order loss they came up with the $100 million figure.

You might argue if that number is really accurate. Hard drives could be reformatted, but then again that takes time so in the age of $80 hard drives, does that really make sense? If a supermarket got Oreos a week late, was that really more than an inconvenience? Were there penalties in their contracts with the customers or are they assuming that a huge number of store-brand cookies were sold when the Oreos ran out? We don’t know.

However, even if you deflated the estimate by an order of magnitude, you are still talking about a $10 million dollar loss. Not small change. Having lived through some major cyberattacks, I can tell you just the time spent in meetings between IT, executives, and lawyers can add up pretty quickly.

Loophole

As you can probably guess, Zurich isn’t wanting to pay the claim. Insurance companies have a reputation for being happier to take your payments than they are paying your claim, and things like this are why. On the other hand, insurance companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their other customers and their shareholders to not pay out any more than they have to, and we get that too. So other than the “We didn’t know you’d ask for $100 million dollars!” defense, how can Zurich not pay if they agreed to underwrite Mondelez against cyberattacks?

Many insurance policies have a clause in them that excludes things like acts of God and acts of war. Well, the technical term is “force majeure” but it covers things like earthquakes and other natural disasters. The theory is if a tornado comes and destroys 100s of cars it would be a burden on the insurance company to replace them all, so they’d have to charge you more. Since you don’t think that’s likely, you’ll take the force majeure exclusion and save a bit.

If you have a homeowner’s policy, you probably don’t want a force majeure exclusion. However, in the United States, you have to get an exclusion for flooding — the flood insurance is available through the government. In some areas prone to things like hurricanes, that will also be excluded and you’ll have to get a separate policy (usually issued by the local government) to cover that.

The act of war is a bit trickier. The logic is the same. If an army marches through your town and burns everything to the ground — or a nuke does the job remotely — the company would be on the hook for so much that they would have to raise premiums quite a bit. In the United States, though, the chances of that seem so slim that no one usually minds. If a nuke hits your house, you probably aren’t going to care anymore anyway.

State Sponsored

As usual, though, trying to apply old ideas to new technology causes problems. If a guy runs a truck into your house, that’s usually very clear it wasn’t an act of war. Of course, if that guy was a member of the Ejército Nacional de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela (that is, the Venezuelan army) and he’s just visiting his brother in your town, the insurance company could try to claim it was covered under the act of war exclusion, although we would bet you could win that easily in court, so they probably wouldn’t.

According to media reports, the exact language in the insurance policy covers “hostile or warlike action in time of peace or war” and includes any agent of any government (including a de facto government) or military force. So while the Captain on vacation driving his truck into your house is probably going to pay out, if the National Guard accidentally sends an RPG into your camper, you’ll have to take that up with them.

The problem is, in a world where the battlefield is the Internet, how does this apply. There is a lot of evidence that NotPetya was state-sponsored by Russia and targeted Ukraine. The fact that it spread globally may even have been a mistake. Russia, of course, denies this.

Lesson Learned

Not being a lawyer or an insurance expert, this whole thing made me think. If you are buying cybersecurity insurance, maybe you don’t want an act of war exclusion. That’s going to drive up costs, but nearly any widespread cyberattack from another country could be argued as an act of war. Especially since in so many cases, these acts are perpetrated by persons unknown. Did the Russians create NotPetya? Did they deploy it? Did they hire some hacker group to do it for them? Does that matter? What if a hacker did it and then says they were paid by some government? How would you ever prove one way or the other?

Or do you take the money you’d pay for insurance and pour it into better defenses? That would make sense except for one thing. In the modern world, the weakest part of your defense is usually people. People fall for phishing schemes. People write down passwords on sticky notes. People send their passwords in plain e-mails and use 1234 as PIN numbers. All the technical measures in the world won’t solve stupid. So while you can minimize problems, you can’t get to zero cyber incidents any more than you can get to zero car accidents as long as you let people drive cars.

Still, it makes you wonder why you would accept an act of war exclusion in a policy like this. Regardless of the actual cause of NotPetya, it is certainly easy to imagine a government launching a cyberattack. In fact, given the level of sophistication it takes to launch a major attack, it is almost more likely to be state-sponsored.

New Frontiers

While this is a hack in the sense that many people use the word, it isn’t one in our lexicon. However, Hackaday readers tend to be sources of technical information for their families, friends, and communities. We’ve seen how technology has impacted laws and customs over the years ranging from intellectual property to expectations of privacy.

One test I like to apply is what would happen if you took the tech aspect out of it. After all, there is no new cybercrime. Just old fashioned crime on the Internet. People have impersonated other people, run confidence games, and held things for ransom for centuries. It is just faster and easier on the Internet.

I’m not sure what the final answer is, at least not with the Internet the way it is today. However, I am willing to bet that whatever happens, some of our kind of hackers will be involved in the solution.

Accounting For Kerf: How Much Material Is Really Removed By Your Cutter?

“How did I screw up measuring everything by a quarter-inch? I must not be good at this!” Nope, you just didn’t account for kerf.

Read more on MAKE

The post Accounting For Kerf: How Much Material Is Really Removed By Your Cutter? appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Ion Powered Airplane: Not Coming to an Airport Near You

Not that we don’t love Star Trek, but the writers could never decide if ion propulsion was super high tech (Spock’s Brain) or something they used every day (The Menagerie). Regardless, ion propulsion is real and we have it today on more than one spacecraft. However, MIT recently demonstrated an ion-powered airplane. How exciting! An airplane with no moving parts that runs on electricity. Air travel will change forever, right? According to [Real Engineering], ion-propelled (full-sized) aircraft run into problems with the laws of physics. You can see the video explaining that, below.

To understand why, you need to know two things: how ion drive works and how the engines differ when using them in an atmosphere. Let’s start with a space-based ion engine, a topic we’ve covered before. Atoms are turned into ions which are accelerated electrically. So the ion engine is just using electricity to create thrust exhaust instead of burning rocket fuel.

The downside is that the thrust is very tiny. The upside is that, in space, that tiny thrust adds up so that in a few days or weeks you can be moving very fast. With no moving parts, keeping an ion engine running constantly is no real problem. Keeping a massive rocket burning fuel for months is problematic.

So the MIT flyer uses the same technology, right? Sort of. Spacecraft carry around their own ion fuel in the form of xenon (although some older engines used mercury). Xenon is good because it is relatively heavy which provides more thrust and is easy to store.

So what if you clamped an ion engine to an airplane? Well, you’ll need to put the xenon fuel tanks on it, too, which is going to make the plane heavier. You also have two problems. You need a certain minimum amount of speed to get your wings to create lift. In addition, your tiny thrust won’t add up like it does in space because of things like wind resistance. If a spacecraft’s engine stops it just stops accelerating but keeps going at its current speed and heading. If an aircraft loses power, that’s not the case.

Obviously, the MIT engineers had to create a very light airframe that could generate a lot of lift at low speeds. The resulting plane had a 5 meter wingspan and weighed less than 3 kilos. But what about fuel? A spacecraft carries their own, but an aircraft can consume nitrogen which is everywhere in the atmosphere. Sure, it doesn’t have the mass of xenon, but not having to carry your fuel is a big plus.

So why won’t you be boarding that midnight ion plane for Georgia anytime soon? Scale. The video does a good job of explaining the trades, but in the simple view a heavy plane is going to take more power and you get in a vicious spiral where more weight needs more power, but more power adds more weight.

You can see MIT’s video about their solid-state airplane (we like that name) after the first video, below. Sure, it is possible future advancements will make ion-powered aircraft more practical. But it probably won’t be in the next year or three. However, there are other ways to run an aircraft off of air, and you never know when some breakthrough will make something practical. After all, in 1950 who could imagine computers that cost a few hundred dollars and fit in your pocket?

Take a Mini Lathe for a Spin

[This Old Tony] is no stranger to quality tools, but he started on a mini lathe. Nostalgia does not stop him from broadcasting his usual brand of snark (actually, it is doubtful that anything short of YouTube going offline will stop that). He rates the lathe’s ability to machine different materials and lets you decide if this is an investment, or a money pit.

Lathe parts range from a chintzy start/stop button assembly that looks like it would be at home on a Power Wheels restoration project to a convenient cam locking mechanism on the tail stock which is an improvement on the lathe with which our narrator learned. We see the speed tested and promptly disproved as marketing hoopla unless you allow for a 40% margin of error. It uses a 500 watt DC motor, so don’t try correcting for mains power frequency differences. The verdict on the lead screw and thread dial is that you get what you pay for and this is demonstrated by painstakingly cutting threads into aluminum. Finally, we see torture tests on cold rolled steel.

Maybe someone from the mini lathe community will stop by with their two-cents. If you appreciate this introduction to lathes, consider [This Old Tony]’s guide to CNC machines or injection molding. But for us, [Quinn Dunki’s] series of machine tools has been a real treat this year.

 

Finding Bugs in Bluetooth

[Jiska Classen] and [Dennis Mantz] created a tool called Internal Blue that aims to be a Swiss-army knife for playing around with Bluetooth at a lower level. The ground for their tool is based in three functions that are common to all Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets: one that lets you read arbitrary memory, on that lets you run it, and one that lets you write it. Well, that was easy. The rest of their work was analyzing this code, and learning how to replace the firmware with their own version. That took them a few months of hard reversing work.

In the end, Internal Blue lets them execute commands at one layer deeper — the LMP layer — easily allowing monitoring and injection. In a series of live (and successful!) demos they probe around on a Nexus 6P from a modified Nexus 5 on their desk. This is where they started digging around in the Bluetooth stack of other devices with Broadcom chipsets, and that’s where they started finding bugs.

As is often the case, [Jiska] was just poking around and found an external code handler that didn’t do bounds checking. And that meant that she could run other functions in the firmware simply by passing the address. Since they’re essentially calling functions at any location in memory, finding which functions to call with which arguments is a process of trial and error, but the ramifications of this include at least a Bluetooth module crash and reset, but can also pull such tricks as putting the Bluetooth module into “Device Under Test” mode, which should only be accessible from the device itself. All of this is before pairing with the device — just walking by is sufficient to invoke functions through the buggy handler.

All the details of this exploit aren’t yet available, because Broadcom hasn’t fixed the firmware for probably millions of devices in the wild. And one of the reasons that they haven’t fixed it is that patching the bug will disclose where the flaw lies in all of the unpatched phones, and not all vendors can be counted on to push out updates at the same time. While they focused on the Nexus 5 cellphone, which is fairly old now, it’s applicable to any device with a similar Broadcom Bluetooth chipset.

Aside from the zero-day bug here, the big story is their Bluetooth analysis framework which will surely help other researchers learn more about Bluetooth, finding more glitches and hopefully helping make Bluetooth more openly scrutinized and more secure. Now anyone with a Raspberry Pi 3/3+ or a Nexus 5, is able to turn it into a low-level Bluetooth investigation tool.

You might know [Jiska] from her previous FitBit hack. If not, be sure to check it out.

RFID Doing More than ID

RFID is a workhorse in industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. Passive tags, like work badges and key fobs, need a base station but not the tags. Sensors are a big market and putting sensors in places that are hard to reach, hostile, or mobile is a costly proposition. That price could drop, and the sensors could be more approachable with help from MIT’s Auto-ID Lab who are experimenting with sensor feedback to RFID devices.

Let’s pretend you want to measure the temperature inside a vat of pressurized acid. You’d rather not drill a hole in it to insert a thermometer, but a temperature sensor sealed in Pyrex that wirelessly transmits the data and never runs out of power is a permanent and cheap solution. The researchers have their sights set on glucose sensing and that news come shortly after Alphabet gave up their RFID quest to measure glucose through contact lenses. Shown the top of this article is a prototype for a Battery Assisted Passive (BAP) RFID sensor that uses commodity glucose testing strips, sending data when the electrochemical reaction occurs. It uses six of these cells in parallel to achieve a high enough peak current to trigger the transmission. But the paper (10.1109/RFID.2018.8376201 behind paywall) mentions a few strategies to improve upon this. However, it does prove the concept that the current spike from the test strips determines the time the tag is active and that can be correlated to the blood glucose detected.

How many of our own projects would instantly upgrade with the addition of a few sensors that were previously unobtainable on a hacker budget? Would beer be brewed more effectively with more monitoring? How many wearables would be feasible with battery-free attachments? The sky is the figurative limit.

Thank you, [QES] for the tip [via TechXplore]

Pushbutton → Push Notification

How many mundane devices upgrade to IoT because they let you monitor a single data point or a variable? That little nudge over the communication precipice allows you to charge 500% more. Now, if you are as handy as a Hackaday reader, you can throw a lazy afternoon at the problem and get the same effect from a “dumb” appliance. If IoT is as simple as getting a notification when your laundry is dry, or your water is boiling, all you really need is a WiFi device and a push notification, right? Does it need to be more complicated than that? [Gianni] believes it is that simple (machine translation) and has built up an easy-to-implement version on Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and ESP8266.

[Gianni] leverages the aptly named Pushover (a paid app with a 1-week trial period) to convert your bits, bytes, words, or strings to a push notification. This idea is born of the desire for a home security system which doesn’t require constant monitoring but instead alerts you to problems. The minimum requirement you need is for your phone to chime with a notification saying, “Your front window sensor has been tripped.” Now it is time to launch your IP camera app or call someone nearby.

It’s not revolutionary, it may be the “Hello World” of IoT, but that is all some people need. The general idea is the same no matter the framework you want to use. For instance, if you Google Suite account, you can set up a chatroom just for your alert notifications; Google’s quickstart takes about 3 minutes to test it out in Python. The same setup is also available for Slack, and [Tom Nardi] did a guide for doing this with Discord. These tackle the receiving side, but the sending side is really flexible too — that MQTT broker you built could easily be the source of the alerts.

Build a handful of these in a weekend and keep them nearby to step up your next project to IoT status with a couple of solder joints. Maybe it will be a motion sensor for your own security system.

Offshore, Act Two: New owner repowers 20-year-old wind farm off Swedish coast

Starlite: Super Material That Protects Hands from Pesky Blowtorches

A super-material that’s non-toxic, highly flame resistant, and a good enough insulator, you can literally hold fire in your hand? Our interest was definitely caught by [NightHawkInLight] and his recent video about Starlite, embedded below the break.

Starlite was the brainchild of English hairdresser, [Marice Ward]. The famous demo was an egg, coated in Starlite, and blasted with a blowtorch for a full 5 minutes. After heating, he cracked the egg to show it still raw. The inventor died in 2011, and apparently the recipe for Starlite died with him.

[NightHawkInLight] realized he had already made something very similar, the Pharoah’s Serpent demonstration, also known as a black snake. In both examples, a carbon foam is produced, providing flame resistance and insulation. A bit of trial and error later, and he’s out doing the original Starlight demo, pointing the blow torch at his hand instead of an egg.

We’ve covered [NightHawkInLight]’s projects before. A couple favorites are his Propane-Powered Plasma Rifle, and wood gas-powered motorized bicycle.

The Very Slow Movie Player Does it With E-Ink

Most displays are looking to play things faster. We’ve got movies at 60 frames per second, and gaming displays that run at 144 fps. But what about moving in the other direction? [Bryan Boyer] wanted to try this out, so he built the VSMP, or Very Slow Movie Player. It’s a neat device that plays back a movie at about 24 fph (frames per hour) on an e-ink display to demonstrate something that [Bryan] calls Slow Seeing, which, he says “helps you see yourself against the smear of time.” A traditional epic-length movie is now going to run you greater than 8,000 hours of viewing.

Artistic considerations aside, it’s an interesting device from a technical point of view. [Bryan] built it from a 7.4-inch e-ink display from Pervasive Displays. The controller is connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero, which is running a Python script to convert a frame of the movie file into a dithered file, then send it to the display. Because the Pi Zero isn’t a very fast computer, this takes some time, and thus the slow speed of the VSMP. Originally, [Bryan] had set it up to run as fast as the system could manage, which was about 25 seconds per frame, or about 2 frames per minute. He decided to slow it down a bit further to the more attractive multiple of 24 frames per hour to contrast with the 24 frames per second of the original movie. He did this by using a CRON job that kicks of the conversion script once every 2.5 minutes and increments the frame counter. All of this is topped off with a nice 3D-printed case that has a lovely interference pattern to make a rather neat and intriguing project.

Perhaps the best part of this is see a time-lapse of the VSMP — life moves quickly around it while 2001: A Space Odyssey plays at normal speed.

Book tells the inside story of how Reddit came to be the Internet’s “id”

The 2018 Cars Technica cars and SUVs of the year

This Raspberry Pi Is A Stereo Camera And So Much More

Over the years we have featured a huge array of projects featuring the Raspberry Pi, but among them there is something that has been missing in all but a few examples. The Raspberry P Compute Module is the essentials of a Pi on a form factor close to that of a SODIMM module, and it is intended as a way to embed a Pi inside a commercial product. It’s refreshing then to see [Eugene]’s StereoPi project, a PCB that accepts a Compute Module and provides interfaces for two Raspberry Pi cameras.

What makes this board a bit special is that as well as the two camera connectors at the required spacing for stereophotography it also brings out all the interfaces you’d expect on a regular Pi, so there is the familiar 40-pin expansion header as well as USB and Ethernet ports. It has a few extras such as a pin-based power connector, and an on-off switch.

Where are they going with this one? So far we’ve seen demonstrations of the rig used to create depth maps with ROS (Robot Operating System). But even more fun is seeing the 3rd-person-view rig shown in the video below. You strap on a backpack that holds the stereo camera above your head, then watch yourself through VR goggles. Essentially you become the video game. We’ve seen this demonstrated before and now it looks like it will be easy to give it a try yourself as StereoPi has announced they’re preparing to crowdfund.

So aside from the stereophotography why is this special? The answer comes in that it is as close as possible to a fresh interpretation of a Raspberry Pi board without being from the Pi Foundation themselves. The Pi processors are not available to third party manufacturers, so aside from the Odroid W (which was made in very limited numbers) we have never seen a significant alternative take on a compatible Raspberry Pi. The idea that this could be achieved through the Compute Module is one that we hope might be taken up by other designers, potentially opening a fresh avenue in the Raspberry Pi story.

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module has passed through two iterations since its launch in 2014, but probably due to the lower cost of a retail Raspberry Pi we haven’t seen it in many projects save for a few game consoles. If the advent of boards like this means we see more of it, that can be no bad thing.

Mining company says first autonomous freight train network is fully operational

Uber, Tesla, and Waymo all struggled with self-driving in 2018

3D-Printing Wankel Engine from Mazda’s Beloved “Rotary Rocket”

Although there was briefly a company called Rotary Rocket, the term is much better known as a nickname for the Mazda RX-7 — one of the few cars that used a Wankel, or rotary, engine. If you ever wondered how these worked, why not print a model? That’s what [Engineering Explained] did. They printed a 1/3 scale model and made a video explaining and demonstrating its operation. The model itself was from Thingiverse, created by [EricThePoolBoy].

One thing we really liked about the model was the use of lights to show the different stages of combustion. Cool air intake is a blue light, hot air is red, and so on. It really helps visualize what’s happening. You can watch the video below.

If you haven’t seen a Wankel before, it is a clever design. It has very few moving parts and offers very smooth power transfer and high power to weight ratio. The downside, though, is that the engine deliberately burns oil to lubricate and seal, so it is difficult to meet emission standards and requires a lot of oil. The fuel efficiency of current designs is not very good either, especially since manufacturers will often trade fuel efficiency for better emissions.

If you’d like to read more about the Wankel, check out our earlier post (and the 165 comments attached). We also looked at — or rather through — another Wankel earlier this year.

Turning LEGO Blocks into Music with OpenCV

POV Tops Hobbyist Abilities

Sometimes a beautiful project is worth writing on that merit alone, but when it functions as designed,someone takes the time to create a thorough and beautiful landing page for their project, we get weak in the knees. We feel the need to grab the internet and point our finger for everyone to see. This is one of those projects that checks all our boxes. [Nathan Petersen] made a POV toy top called Razzler, jumping through every prototyping hoop along the way. The documentation he kept is what captured our hearts.

The project is a spinning top with an integrated persistence-of-vision (POV) display. That’s the line of LEDs that you see here. To sync up the patterns, the board includes an IMU, but detecting angular velocity with either gyroscope or accelerometer proved problematic. [Nathan’s] writeup of this is worth the read itself, but you’ll also enjoy the CNC workworking part of the project used to create the body of the spinning top.

This was [Nathan]’s first big solo project, and so many of the steps are explained by someone who just entered the deep-end very quickly. If you have experience, you may grin at the simplified reasonings, but for a novice, it makes for an approachable lesson. The way he selects hardware and firmware is pragmatic and perhaps even overkill, so you know he’s going into engineering. This overshot saved him when there were communication problems which needed a sacrifice of some processing power to run I2C on some GPIO.

We hope you enjoy reading about this combinations of POV, firmware (or is it?), and centrifugal force.

Infinity Cube Is Gorgeous Yet Simple

Typically when we hear the words “LED” and “Cube”, we think of small blinking devices on protoboard designed to flex one’s programming and soldering skills. However, while [Heliox]’s Cube Infini could be described as “a cube of LEDs”, it’s rather a different beast (video in French, subtitles available).

The cube starts with a 3D printed frame, designed in Fusion 360. The devil really is in the details — [Heliox] puts in nice touches, such as the artistic cube relief on the base, and the smart integrated cable management in the edges. The faces of the cube are plexiglass sheets, covered with a one-way reflective film that is applied in a similar manner to automotive window tint. For lighting, a high-density LED strip is fitted to the inside edges, chosen for maximum visual effect. It’s controlled by an IR remote and a cheap control module from Amazon.

While the build contains no particularly advanced tools, materials, or techniques, the final result is absolutely stunning. It’s a piece we’d love to have as a lamp in a stylish loungeroom or study. [Heliox] does a great job of explaining how the cube is designed and fits together, and it’s a testament to just what can be achieved with a little ingenuity and hard work.

Once you’re done here, check out this ping-pong based build.

[Thanks to Emile for the tip!]

Homemade Daft Punk Helmet

You may not be French, and you may not have had a series of hit records, but you can still have the blinky LED helmet, thanks to this build from [Electronoobs]. They have put together a neat Daft Punk helmet built from 3D printed parts, an Arduino, a Bluetooth module, a string of WS2812 addressable LEDs and a simple app. The helmet itself is 3D printed, and the Arduino, Bluetooth, and battery are mounted in the chin. The LED panel is a series of WS2812 LED light strips wired together in series. The whole thing is controlled over a Bluetooth connection to an Android app that was built with the MIT App Inventor.

It’s a nice, simple build, but as we’ve discussed before choosing diffusers is hard. We’re not sure if a thicker panel covering the LED strips, or flipping the LEDs over and adding a reflective layer would be the right moves to improve upon the diffused look. Either way, it’s a neat place to start with your own build and a good way to learn about how to have fun with LED strips.

We’ve seen plenty of similar builds in the past, including hand-soldered ones, iPhone-controlled ones, and a bar to hang out in while wearing it. This one is simpler than most, though, and using the MIT App Inventor makes controlling it from a mobile device simple as well.

Open Source IDE for FPGAs as QtCreator Learns Verilog

Classic battles: PC vs Mac, Emacs vs Vi, Tastes Great vs Less Filling, and certainly one that we debate around the Hackaday watercooler: command line or IDE? There’s something to be said for using good old command line tools, and even if you like to configure your favorite editor to be nearly an IDE, at least it is one you are familiar with and presumably leverage over several different uses.

Most commercial FPGA tools come with a heavy-weight IDE. The open source tools for Lattice (IceStorm) typically is driven by the command line or a makefile. Until now. [Rochus-Keller] released VerilogCreator which is a plugin for QtCreator.

We were impressed because as IDEs go, QtCreator is both useful and lightweight, two things that don’t go together for many similar tools. [FPGAwars] has had an IDE based on Atom (apio-ide) although it hasn’t been updated in nearly a year. IceStudio sees more updates, of course, but it isn’t so much an IDE as a GUI-based code builder.

[Rochus-Keller] says there’s more to come. However, even at this early stage the IDE does syntax coloring, tooltips, inline messages, and can analyze source code allowing you to cross-reference symbols as you’d expect. There are configurations for Icarus to do simulations or you can use Verilator or Yosys — the synthesizer behind IceStorm. It appears it can also interact with Tcl-based workflows like those used by most FPGA vendor IDEs.

There’s quite a bit still on the to-do list, so we are excited to see where this is going. QtCreator isn’t hard to learn and it doesn’t’ feel as bloated as some of the big IDEs like Eclipse. If you want a quick introduction to QtCreator, we did that already. If you want to draw boxes instead of writing Verilog directly, try IceStudio.

Voice Controlled Camera for Journalist in Need

Before going into the journalism program at Centennial College in Toronto, [Carolyn Pioro] was a trapeze performer. Unfortunately a mishap in 2005 ended her career as an aerialist when she severed her spinal cord,  leaving her paralyzed from the shoulders down. There’s plenty of options in the realm of speech-to-text technology which enables her to write on the computer, but when she tried to find a commercial offering which would let her point and shoot a DSLR camera with her voice, she came up empty.

[Taras Slawnych] heard about [Carolyn’s] need for special camera equipment and figured he had the experience to do something about it. With an Arduino and a couple of servos to drive the pan-tilt mechanism, he came up with a small device which Carolyn can now use to control a Canon camera mounted to an arm on her wheelchair. There’s still some room for improvement (notably, the focus can’t be controlled via voice currently), but even in this early form the gadget has caught the attention of Canon’s Canadian division.

With a lavalier microphone on the operator’s shirt, simple voice commands like “right” and “left” are picked up and interpreted by the Arduino inside the device’s 3D printed case. The Arduino then moves the appropriate servo motor a set number of degrees. This doesn’t allow for particularly fine-tuned positioning, but when combined with movements of the wheelchair itself, gives the user an acceptable level of control. [Taras] says the whole setup is powered off of the electric wheelchair’s 24 VDC batteries, with a step-down converter to get it to a safe voltage for the Arduino and servos.

As we’ve seen over the years, assistive technology is one of those areas where hackers seem to have a knack for making serious contribution’s to the lives of others (and occasionally even themselves). The highly personalized nature of many physical disabilities, with specific issues and needs often unique to the individual, can make it difficult to develop devices like this commercially. But as long as hackers are willing to donate their time and knowledge to creating bespoke assistive hardware, there’s still hope.

[Thanks to Philippe for the tip.]

EPA says regulation of mercury emissions not “appropriate and necessary”

The Orville blends science fiction and science fact into a winning mix

Adaptive Infotainment Plays Tunes To Match Your Dangerous Driving

Part of the fun of watching action movies is imagining yourself as the main character, always going on exciting adventures and, of course, being accompanied by the perfect soundtrack to score the excitement and drama of your life. While having an orchestra follow you around might not always be practical, [P1kachu] at least figured out how to get some musical orchestration to sync up with how he drives his car, Fast-and-Furious style.

The idea is pretty straightforward: when [P1kachu] drives his car calmly and slowly, the music that the infotainment system plays is cool and reserved. But when he drops the hammer, the music changes to something more aggressive and in line with the new driving style. While first iterations of his project used the CAN bus, he moved to Japan and bought an old Subaru that doesn’t have CAN. The new project works on something similar called Subaru Select Monitor v1 (SSM1), but still gets the job done pretty well.

The hardware uses an Asus Tinkerboard and a Raspberry Pi with the 7″ screen, and a shield that can interface with CAN (and later with SSM1). The new music is selected by sensing pedal position, allowing him to more easily trigger the aggressive mode that his previous iterations did. Those were done using vehicle speed as a trigger, which proved to be ineffective at producing the desired results. Of course, there are many other things that you can do with CAN bus besides switching up the music in your car.

Without question, these are 2018’s best space books for kids

Caltech scientists use DNA tiles to play tic-tac-toe at the nanoscale

Courtesy Qian Lab/Caltech.

Scientists at Caltech have created the world's smallest game board for playing tic-tac-toe out of DNA strands. What's more, it's possible to swap hundreds of DNA strands in and out at once to reconfigure the nanostructure at will, making it possible in principle to build complicated nanomachines in different custom patterns. The scientists described their work in a December paper in Nature Communications.

Back in 2006, Caltech bioengineer Paul Rothemund figured out how to fold a long strand of DNA into simple shapes, demonstrating this "DNA origami" technique by producing a smiley face. All you need is a long strand of DNA, plus several shorter strands ("staples"). Combine them in a test tube, and the shorter strands pull various parts of the long strand together so that it folds over into any number of simple shapes. DNA origami was a huge advance for nanotechnology, but to really achieve its full potential, scientists needed to be able to create larger and more complex structures.

Last year, Rothemund's Caltech colleague Lulu Qian introduced a cheap means of getting DNA origami to assemble itself into large arrays. The best part: you could create custom patterns. The array was a bit like a blank canvas, and Qian demonstrated the power of her technique (dubbed "fractal assembly") by creating the world's smallest version of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," visible only with atomic force microscopy.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Freeforming the Atari Punk Console

This stunning piece of art is [Emily Velasco’s] take on the Atari Punk Console. It’s a freeform circuit that synthesizes sound using 555 timers. The circuit has been around for a long time, but her fabrication is completely new and simply incredible!

This isn’t [Emily’s] first rodeo. She previously built the mini CRT sculpture project seen to the left in the image above. Its centerpiece is a tiny CRT from an old video camera viewfinder, and it is fairly common for the driver circuit to understand composite video. And unlike CRTs, small video cameras with composite video output are easily available today for not much money. Together they bring a piece of 1980s-era video equipment into the modern selfie age. The cubic frame holding everything together is also the ground plane, but its main purpose is to give us an unimpeded view. We can admire the detail on this CRT and its accompanying circuitry representing 1982 state of the art in miniaturized consumer electronics. (And yes, high voltage components are safely insulated. Just don’t poke your finger under anything.)

With the experience gained from building that electrically simple brass frame, [Emily] then stepped up the difficulty for her follow-up project. It started with a sound synthesizer circuit built around a pair of 555 timers, popularized in the 1980s and nicknamed the Atari Punk Console. Since APC is a popular circuit found in several other Hackaday-featured projects, [Emily] decided she needed to add something else to stand out. Thus in addition to building her circuit in three-dimensional brass, two photocells were incorporated to give it rudimentary vision into its environment. Stimulus for this now light-sensitive APC were provided in the form of a RGB LED. One with a self-contained circuit to cycle through various colors and blinking patterns.

These two projects neatly bookend the range of roles brass rods can take in your own creations. From a simple frame that stays out of the way to being the central nervous system. While our Circuit Sculpture Contest judges may put emphasis the latter, both are equally valid ways to present something that is aesthetic in addition to being functional. Brass, copper, and wood are a refreshing change of pace from our standard materials of 3D-printed plastic and FR4 PCB. Go forth and explore what you can do!

 

Laser Harp Sounds Real Thanks to Karplus-Strong Wave Equation

Can This Fire Fighting Robot Take The Heat?

Firefighting is a difficult and dangerous job, which puts humans on the front line to save life and property on a regular basis. It’s a prime candidate for some robot helpers, and [Ivan] has stepped in with a fun build that, while it won’t be serving in your municipal department any time soon, gets us thinking about the possibilities.

It’s a radio controlled robot with an Arduino Uno for the brains. A couple of motor driver boards are used to run four windscreen wiper motors for propulsion. Long before the days of online shopping, the wiper motor was a hacker staple – a cheap, readily available high torque motor that could be easily driven for a range of hobby projects. They say only 90’s kids remember.

As far as water delivery goes, this robot is a little short on credentials, carrying only 1 litre of water. However, we appreciate [Ivan]’s use of a Tupperware container as a tank – with a few add-on fittings, this could be a great way to hold water in other projects. The small DC-powered pump is controlled by an industrial solid state relay – a good choice for a robot that may get wet. There’s an onboard CO2 extinguisher as well, but it’s sadly not plumbed into anything just yet.

This build is an [Ivan] classic – big, fun, and 3D printed on a much larger scale then we’re used to. It’s a strong  follow up to his impressive tank build we saw earlier. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

 

See How Paper Maché Sculptor Uses Cloth for Tricky Spots

When is paper maché not paper maché? When it is cloth, of course. [Dan Reeder] has been putting his own spin on paper maché art since the 70s and demonstrates the technique of using cloth for tricky spots in his outstanding sculpture of an Ice Dragon. Thin strips of cloth are used just as paper would be, but give a much different structure and grant natural-looking folds to spots like eyelids, nostrils, and lips.

[Dan] feels that paper maché is an under-utilized and under-rated medium, and he puts out some stunning work on his blog as well as his YouTube channel. What’s great to see are his frank descriptions and explanations of what does and doesn’t work, and he’s not afraid to try new things and explore different ways to approach problems.

Enterprising hackers may not pick paper maché as their first choice to create creating custom enclosures, but it can be done and the accessibility and ease of use of the medium are certainly undeniable. One never knows when a tool or technique may come in handy.

Improved Controller For E-Skateboards

[Timo] recently purchased himself a Acton Blink Qu4tro electric skateboard. Performance-wise, the board was great, but the controller left a lot to be desired. There were issues with pairing, battery displays, and just general rideability. Like any good hacker, he decided some reverse engineering was in order, and got to work.

Initial results were disheartening – the skateboard relies on various chips of Chinese origin for which documentation proved impossible to come by. However, as it turned out, the board and controller communicated using the common NRF24L01+ transceiver.

Initial work focused on understanding the pairing process and message protocol. With that done, [Timo] decided the best course of action was to redevelop a controller from scratch, using an Arduino Nano and NRF24L01+ to do the job. [Timo]’s Open esk8 controller improves driveability by removing delays in message transfer, as well as improving on the feel of the controller with a 3D printed chassis redesign.

[Timo] now has a much more usable skateboard, and has racked up over 200 miles in testing since the build. However, if you fancy converting your existing board to electric, check out this project.

Residential batteries may save households money, but rarely reduce emissions

A Tesla Powerwall 2.

Another year, another reason to take the promises of residential home batteries with a grain of salt.

This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions—assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.

Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Dainty Delta Is About As Small As A Robot Can Be

There’s something mesmerizing about delta robots. Whether they are used at a stately pace for a 3D-printer or going so fast you can barely see them move in a pick and place machine, the way that three rotary actuators can work together to produce motion in three axes is always a treat to watch. Especially with a delta robot as small as this one.

[KarelK16] says this is one of those “just because I can” projects with no real application. And he appears to have been working on it for a while; the video below is from eight years ago. Regardless, the post is new, and it’s pretty interesting stuff. The tiny ball joints used in the arms are made from jewelry parts; small copper crank arms connect the three upper arms to micro-servos. The manipulator [KarelK16] attached is very clever, too – rather than load down the end of the arms with something heavy, a fourth servo opens an closes a flexible plastic grasper through a Bowden cable. It’s surprisingly nimble, and grasps small objects firmly.

There are certainly bigger deltas – much bigger – and more useful ones, too, but we really like this build. And who knows – perhaps model robotics will join model railroading as a hobby someday. If it does, [KarelK16]’s diminutive delta might be the shape of things to come.

Video: Astronaut Scott Kelly teaches orbital mechanics with Kerbal Space Program

Video shot and edited by Condé Nast Entertainment. Click here for transcript. (video link)

If you’re a frequent Ars reader, you’ve likely heard of Kerbal Space Program, the space flight/space crashing/space explosion simulator that lets you create your own vehicles, then fly them into orbit and perhaps even to other planets. Though silly and fun, KSP also works as a reasonably solid and wonderfully interactive demonstration of the vagaries of orbital mechanics—and that, dear readers, gave us an idea.

Astronaut Scott Kelly is most famous for spending an uncomfortably long time on the International Space Station, and he’s currently touring to promote his book about the experience. We got to talk to him briefly when he was at the office back in October, but I wanted to take things a little further. What if we could sit down with Scott—a real astronaut who has flown the space shuttle and everything—and get him to talk us through a (somewhat realistic, somewhat silly) launch in KSP?

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Not Bander-snatched: Black Mirror confirms fifth season plans

(credit: Netflix)

Netflix's latest Black Mirror "event," a film titled Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, launched on the streaming service on Friday. The film has garnered attention for its interactive elements, thus capitalizing on a decision-based system announced in June 2017, and fans of the dark-technology series may very well be excited to tap away and decide the film's fate.

One thing fans may be more confused about, however, is the series' murky fate in the wake of the film's launch. As conflicting reports began to circulate, we reached out to Netflix to confirm some good news: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is not the only Black Mirror episode in the series' "fifth season" order.

A lengthy New York Times feature about Bandersnatch's creation and production concludes with a particularly vague response to questions about future episodes: "We're doing more optimistic episodes and stories, rather than just dystopian and negative ones," Brooker said. "We want to keep the show interesting for us." He and Jones were, however, extremely hazy on when the next episodes would arrive. Bandersnatch consumed all their attention for a year.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New Horizons set for humanity’s first ever Kuiper Belt rendezvous

Ultima Thule is starting to stand out above background stars as New Horizons gets closer. Full image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Brian May (credit: NASA)

If you want your New Year celebrations to be truly out of this world, then you might consider stopping by the New Horizons website. Following on from its phenomenally successful flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft will perform its closest flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object at just after midnight in the US Eastern time zone—the one where the operations center of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is located.

Indications that New Horizons survived the flyby—rather than running in to a small moon or ring—will have to wait for the roughly six hours it takes light to travel from the location of 2014 MU69, the target of its attentions. Nicknamed Ultima Thule, the object is a small ball of ice in the distant Kuiper Belt, which is a large collection of small bodies that froze out of a disk of gas and dust early in the Solar System's history.

The full extent of our knowledge of Ultima Thule's surface is that it's about 30 kilometers across and not perfectly spherical, based on its occultation of a background star. It only reflects about 10 percent of the sunlight that reaches it, but imparts a reddish tint to what little light escapes. Beyond that, everything New Horizons sees will be a completely new discovery. NASA was still scanning Ultima for moons and rings in mid-December before committing to a flyby that will take New Horizons three times closer than it came to Pluto.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A Different Kind of Hand Controlled Vehicle

The 7400 Quad 2-Input NAND Gate, A Neglected Survivor From A Pre-Microprocessor World

People adopt made-up social rules to be part of a group

Rebuilding an Extremely Rare Twin Mustang Fighter

Why does flat Earth belief still exist?

Reality vs. belief about the shape of the Earth. Click for a full transcript.

There's no shortage of strange beliefs out there, and not all of them involve having a firm grip on reality. But it's truly bizarre to see one from the latter camp have a sudden surge in popularity and attention millennia after we knew it was wrong. But when it comes to the idea that the Earth is flat, centuries of:thu accumulating evidence don't make much of a difference—its adherents have centuries of history of ignoring it, along with at least one not-nearly-as-famous-as-it-should-be instance of threatening a prominent scientist along the way.

That was Alfred Russell Wallace, one of the two co-developers of the theory of evolution.

This is our first try of a new video format where we look at controversies that, well, really shouldn't be controversial. While we may get back to Wallace and his theory, for the most part we're going to focus on cases where the motivation for the controversy is a bit less obvious. What drives people to believe in ideas that are blatantly, obviously divorced from reality? Or to reject ones that have a solid foundation of evidence?

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

DooM Retrospective: 25 Years of Metal

Pre-Columbian pearl divers may have suffered from ear damage

PNC Bank testing dynamic CVV codes to combat online card fraud

Idemia

US-based PNC Bank is in the middle of a pilot project that aims to test out credit cards with constantly changing card verification values (or CVVs) to reduce online credit card fraud. The dynamic CVV is displayed on the back of such a card in e-ink, and changes according to an algorithm supplied by Visa.

Credit card fraud has long been a problem in the US. To stop thieves from re-using credit card numbers in brick-and-mortar stores, the US has been moving to chip-based credit and debit cards, which create a unique code for each transaction (although this transition to chip cards has been less successful than was hoped). But online credit card fraud is another beast. Once a fraudster has stolen a credit card number, they often can use the static number to make online purchases without being thwarted by chip complications.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments