Extracting Power From USB Type C

For the last decade or so, we’ve been powering and charging our portable devices with USB. It’s a system that works; you charge batteries with DC, and you don’t want to have a wall wart for every device, so just grab a USB hub and charge your phone and you headphones or what have you. Now, though, we have USB Type C, with Power Delivery. Theoretically, we can pull a hundred Watts over a USB cable. What if we could tap into that with screw terminals?

That’s the idea behind [Jakob]’s entry to the Hackaday Prize. It’s a USB 3.1 Type C to Type A adapter, but it also has the neat little bonus of adding screw terminals. Think of it as jumper cables for your laptop or phone, but don’t actually do that.

[Jakob]’s board consists of a USB Type C receptacle on one end, and a Type A plug on the other, while in between those two sockets is an STM32G0 microcontroller that handles the power negotiation and PD protocol. This gives the USB Type C port dual role port (DRP) capability, so the power connection can go both ways. Add in a screw terminal, and you can theoretically get 20 Volts at 5 Amps through a pair of wires. Have fun with that.

Right now, [Jakob] has all the files in a Gitlab with the schematic and layout available here. It’s an interesting project that has tons of applications of USB hackery, and more than enough power to do some really fun stuff.

Make The Product By Hacking The Catalogue

We’ve all had that moment of seeing a product that’s an object of desire, only to realize that it’s a little beyond our means. Many of us in this community resolve to build our own, indeed these pages are full of projects that began in this way. But few of us have the audacity of [vcch], who was so taken with the QLockTwo expensive designer word clock that they built their own using the facsimile of its face on the front of QLock’s own catalogue. The claim is that this isn’t an unauthorized copy as such because no clock has been copied — as far as we’re aware there’s nothing against taking the scissors to a piece of promotional literature, and it certainly differs from the usual word clocks we’ve seen.

So how has this masterpiece of knock-off engineering been performed? The catalog cover has a high-quality cut-out rendition of the clock face, and the pages behind are thick enough to conceal an addressable LED. By cutting slots through the pages enough space is created for strips of LEDs, which are then hooked up to a Wemos D1 that runs the show. The software is provided, et voila! A faithful facsimile of the original QLockTwo, in part produced by QLock themselves. We applaud the ingenuity involved, but like [vcch] we’d say that if you like the QLockTwo then perhaps you’d like to consider buying one.

Who will wake up from a coma? Electrical jolts in the brain offer hints

Build Your Own Selfie Drone With Computer Vision

In late 2013 and early 2014, in the heady days of the drone revolution, there was one killer app — the selfie drone. Selfie sticks themselves had already become a joke, but a selfie drone injected a breath of fresh air into the world of tech. Fidget spinners had yet to be invented, so this is really all we had. It wasn’t quite time for the age of the selfie drone, though, and the Lily camera drone — in spite of $40 Million in preorders — became the subject of lawsuits, and not fines from the FAA.

Technology marches ever forward, and now you can build your own selfie drone. That’s exactly what [geaxgx] did, although this build uses a an off-the-shelf drone with custom software instead of building everything from scratch.

For hardware, this is a Ryze Tello, a small, $100 quadcopter with a front-facing camera. With the right libraries, you can stream images to a computer and send flight commands back to the drone. Yes, all the processing for the selfie drone happens on a non-flying computer, because computer vision takes processing power and battery life.

The software comes from CMU’s OpenPose library, a real-time solution for detecting a body, face, or hands. With this, [geaxgx] was able to hover the drone and keep his face in the middle of the camera’s frame. While there’s no movement of the drone involved — the drone is just hovering and rotating to the left and right — it is a flying selfie stick without the stick. You can check out the video below and check out all the code on [geaxgx]’s GitHub here.

Easy-to-make thermal chameleon fades into the background

Turn a Ceiling Fan Into a Wind Turbine… Almost

It’s not uncommon to drive around the neighborhood on trash day and see one or two ceiling fans haphazardly strewn onto a pile of garbage bags, ready to be carted off to the town dump. It’s a shame to see something like this go to waste, and [Giesbert Nijhuis] decided he would see what he could do with one. After some painstaking work, he was able to turn a ceiling fan into a wind turbine (of sorts).

While it’s true that some generators and motors can be used interchangeably by reversing the flow of electricity (motors can be used as generators and vice-versa) this isn’t true of ceiling fans. These motors are a type called induction motors which, as a cost saving measure, have no permanent magnets and therefore can’t simply be used as a generator. If you make some modifications to them, though, like rewiring some of the windings and adding permanent magnets around them, you can get around this downside of induction motors.

[Giesbert] does note that this project isn’t a great way to build a generator. Even after making all of the changes needed to get it working, the motor just isn’t as efficient as one that was built with its own set of magnets. For all the work that went into it, it’s not that great of a time investment for a low-quality generator. However, it’s interesting to see the theory behind something like this work at all, even if the end result wasn’t a complete wind turbine. Perhaps if you have an old ceiling fan lying around, you can put it to better use.

Connecting New York City To The Backbone: Meet NYC’s Mesh Network

Access to fast and affordable internet is a big issue in the USA, even in a major metropolis such as New York City. Amidst a cartel of ISPs who simply will not deliver, a group of NYC inhabitants first took it upon themselves to ease this situation by setting up their own mesh-based internet connections way back in 2013. Now they will be installing a new Supernode to take the installation base far beyond the current 300 buildings serviced.

As a community project, NYC Mesh is run as a non-profit organization, with its community members supporting the effort through donations, along with partnerships with businesses. Its router hardware consists out of off-the-shelf equipment (with a focus on the Ubiquiti NanoStation NSM5) that get flashed with custom firmware containing the mesh routing functionality.

As this article by Vice mentions, NYC Mesh is one of 750 community-led broadband projects in the US. Many of those use more traditional fixed wiring with distribution lines, but NYC Mesh focuses fully on wireless (WiFi) links with wireless mesh networking. This has the obvious benefit that given enough bandwidth on the Supernodes that hook into the Internet exchange points (IXP) and an efficient mesh routing protocol, it’s quick and easy to hook up new clients and expand the network.

The obvious downsides of using WiFi and RF in general is that they are not immune to outside influences, such as weather (rain), RF interference (including from other WiFi stations) and of course fairly limited range if there’s no direct line of sight. In a densely populated city such as NYC this is not much of an issue, with short hops between roof tops.

Building A DIY Desktop-Sized Arcade Machine

Full-sized arcade cabinets are undeniably cool, but take up a lot of space and can be somewhat of a handful. [PleaseNoFisticuffs] desired something a little more fun-sized, and so built a desktop arcade machine that has some serious style.

It’s a build that’s remarkably accessible for even the inexperienced builder. Paper templates are used to cut out the plywood parts for the cabinet, and the electronic components are all off-the-shelf items. Assembly is readily achievable with high-school level woodworking and soldering skills. Like most similar builds, it relies on the Raspberry Pi running RetroPie, meaning you’ll never run out of games to play.

Where this project really shines, however, is the graphics. Cribbed from Mortal Kombat II and looking resplendent in purple, they’re key to making this cabinet a truly stunning piece. The attention to detail is excellent, too, with the marquee and screen getting acrylic overlays for that classic shine, as well as proper T-moulding being used to finish the edges.

We’d love to have something like this on our desk, though we’d likely get far less work done in such an event. For another take on an arcade build, check out this impressive Undertale pinball cabinet.

 

An SDR Transceiver The Old-School Way

Automatic Cut-Off Saw Takes The Tedium Out Of A Twenty-Minute Job

For [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle], the question was simple: Do I spend 20 minutes slaving away in front of a bandsaw to cut a bunch of short brass rods into even shorter pieces of brass rod? Or do I spend days designing and building an automatic cutoff saw to do the same job? The answer is obvious.

It’s only at the end of the video below that [TCME] reveals the need for these brass bits: they’re for riveting together the handles of knives he makes and sells. That makes the effort that went into his “Auto Mega Cut-O-Matic” a little easier to swallow, although we still think he ran afoul of this relevant XKCD. The saw is built out of scraps and odd bits using angle iron as a base and an electric die grinder to spin a cut-off wheel. A small gear motor feeds the brass rod down a guide tube until it hits a microswitch stop, which starts the cut cycle. Another motor swivels the saw to make the cut then moves it out of the way so the stock can advance. The impressive thing is that the only control mechanism is a series of microswitches, cams, levers, and springs  – no Arduino needed. Heck, there’s not even a 555, which we find a refreshing change.

Yes, it’s overkill, but he had fun and made something pretty ingenious. [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle] always has something interesting going on in the shop, and we couldn’t help but notice him using his aluminum-melting tea kettle to make some parts for this build.

The Flat-Pack 3D Printed Model

For a hundred years or thereabouts, if you made something out of plastic, you used a mold. Your part would come out of the mold with sprues and flash that had to be removed. Somewhere along the way, someone realized you could use these sprues to hold parts in a frame, and a while later the plastic model was invented. Brilliant. Fast forward a few decades and you have 3D printing. There’s still plastic waste in 3D printing, but it’s in the form of wasteful supports. What if someone designed a 3D printable object like a flat-pack plastic model? That’s what you get when you make a Fully 3D-printable wind up car, just as [Brian Brocken] did. It’s his entry for the Hackaday Prize this year, and it prints out as completely flat parts that snap together into a 3D model.

This 3D model is a fairly standard wind-up car with a plastic spring, escapement, and gear train to drive the rear wheels. Mechanically, there’s nothing too interesting here apart from some nice gears and wheels designed in Fusion 360. Where this build gets serious is how everything is placed on the printer. Every part is contained in one of two frames, laid out to resemble the panels of parts in a traditional plastic model.

These frames, or sprue trees, or whatever we’re calling this technique in the land of 3D printing, form a system of supports that keep all the parts contained until this kit is ready to be assembled. It’s effectively a 3D printable gift card, flat packed for your convenience and ease of shipping. A great project, and one that proves there’s still some innovation left in the world of 3D printing.

Lighting Tech Dives into the Guts of Laser Galvanometers

There’s something magical about a laser light show. Watching that intense beam of light flit back and forth to make shapes and patterns, some of them even animated, is pretty neat. It leaves those of us with a technical bent wondering just exactly how the beam is manipulated that fast.

Wonder no more as [Zenodilodon], a working concert laser tech with a deep junk bin, dives into the innards of closed-loop galvanometers, which lie at the heart of laser light shows. Galvos are closely related to moving-coil analog meters, which use the magnetic field of a coil to deflect a needle against spring force to measure current. Laser galvos, on the other hand, are optimized to move a lightweight mirror back and forth, by tiny amounts but very rapidly, to achieve the deflection needed to trace out shapes.

As [Zeno] explains in his teardown of some galvos that have seen better days, this means using a very low-mass permanent magnet armature surrounded by coils. The armature is connected to the mirror on one end, and a sensor on the other to provide positional feedback. We found this part fascinating; it hadn’t occurred to us that laser galvos would benefit from closed-loop control. And the fact that a tiny wiggling vane can modulate light from an IR LED enough to generate a control signal is pretty cool too.

The video below may be a bit long, but it’s an interesting glimpse into the day-to-day life of a lighting tech. It puts a little perspective on some of the laser projection projects we’ve seen, like this giant Asteroids game.

Thanks to [Alan Green] for the tip. He found it while researching his own laser galvo clock project, which you should definitely check out.

Tic-Tac-Toe, In TTL

We’ll all be familiar with Tic-Tac-Toe, or Noughts and Crosses, a childhood pencil-and-paper diversion which has formed the basis of many a coding exercise. It’s an easy enough task to implement in software, but how many of us have seen it done in hardware alone? That’s just what [Warren Toomey] has done using TTL chips, and his method makes for a surprisingly simple circuit.

At its heart is an 8 kB ROM that contains precomputed move sequences that are selected via an address composed of the game states for both player and machine. A series of flip-flops control and buttons to make the board, and a 555 provides a clock.

The technique of using a ROM to replace complex logic is a very powerful one that is facilitated by the low price of relatively large devices that would once have been unaffordable. We’ve seen the technique used elsewhere, including as an ALU in a TTL CPU, and even for an entire CPU in its own right.

You can see the result in operation in the video below the break, and should you wish to have a go for yourself all the relevant information can be found in a GitHub repository.

In book form, Stranger Things’ Jim Hopper becomes a fun Law & Order hero

• 

  Behold, Stranger than fiction. [credit: Nathan Mattise ]

Back in the summer of 2016, Netflix wasn't Netflix, TV Industry Conquerer™ just yet. Long before Russian Doll, The Crown, or choose-your-own adventure bonanzas, Netflix made a bunch of "eh" originals following their initial Orange Is The New Black/House of Cards splash. But then, the company's "green light all the things" strategy struck unexpected gold with an '80s adventure homage set in fictitious, rural Indiana. Suddenly, pulsing vintage synths could be heard everywhere.

A few years can really make all the difference. Entering 2019, maybe only Game of Thrones' final season had more hype within the TV landscape than Stranger Things' two-years-in-the-making third season (and we all know how things went in Westeros). And new-school Netflix has leveraged this anticipation in a very old school way: tie-in novels. A hallmark of beloved franchises from Star Wars to Star Trek, a handful of "Official Stranger Things novel" offerings have arrived this spring and summer to satiate rabid fans ahead of a July 4 S3 premiere. But none immediately sent us to the "pre-order" button faster than author Adam Christopher's Darkness on the Edge of Town, an old-fashioned crime novel featuring Chief Jim Hopper's pre-show adventures.

Is this another kids v. D&D villain story?

Released at the start of June, Darkness on the Edge of Town takes place back in 1977 within a pre-Giuliani gritty, grimy, and gang-y New York (a setting that may be familiar to any fans of HBO's The Deuce as the most recent of many fictional examples). The country dealt with Vietnam fallout, the city dealt with crime headlined by the Son of Sam killer, and fictional cops like Hopper dealt with internal monologues about war changing people, the nature of good and evil, or how doing one's job may be the only shot at cleaning up the city.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Taser maker says it won’t use facial recognition in bodycams

June was a busy month for in-the-wild Mac malware—here’s a rundown

A Doom-esque Port To The ATmega328

Doom holds a special place as one of the biggest games of the 1990s, as well as being one of the foundational blocks of the FPS genre. Long before 3D accelerators hit the market, iD Software’s hit was being played on computers worldwide, and later spread to all manner of other platforms. [David Ruiz] decided to build a cutdown version for everyone’s favourite, the ATmega328.

Due to the limited resources available, it’s not a direct port of Doom. [David] instead took some sprites and map data from the original game, and built a raycasting engine similar to that of Wolfenstein 3D. Despite the limited memory and CPU cycles, the basic game can run at between 8-11 FPS. There are fancy dithering tricks to help improve the sense of depth, a simplified enemy AI, and even a custom text library for generating the UI.

It’s a great example of what can be done with a seemingly underpowered part. We’ve seen similar work before, with Star Fox replicated on the Arduboy. A hacker’s ingenuity truly knows no bounds.

 

Parallel Processing Was Never Quite Done Like This

Parallel processing is an idea that will be familiar to most readers. Few of you will not be reading this on a device with only one processor core, and quite a few of you will have experimented with clusters of Raspberry Pi or similar SBCs. Instead of one processor doing tasks sequentially, the idea goes, take a bunch of processors and hand out the tasks to be done simultaneously.

It’s a fair bet though that few of you will have designed and constructed your own parallel processing architecture. [BB] sends us a link which though it’s an old one is interesting enough to bring you today: [Michael] created a massively parallel array of Parallax Propeller microcontrollers back in 2008, and he did so on a breadboard.

The Parallax Propeller is an 8-core RISC microcontroller from the company that had found success in the 1990s with the BASIC Stamp, the PIC-based board that was all the rage before Arduino came into the world. In the last decade it was seen as an extremely exciting prospect, but high price and arcane development tools compared to a new generation of low-cost and easy to code competitors meant that it never quite caught on and remains today something of an intriguing oddity. So today’s value in this project lies not in something that you should run out and do yourselves, but instead in what the work tells us about the nuts and bolts of parallel processing architecture. It involves more than simply hooking up a load of chips and hoping for the best, and we gain some insight into the different strategies involved.

The Propeller certainly wasn’t the first attempt at a massively parallel microcontroller, and we doubt it will be the last. We’re certainly seeing microcontrollers with more than one core becoming more mainstream even in our community, but even with those how many of you have made use of the second core in your dual-core ESP32? Is a multicore microcontroller a solution searching for a problem, or will somebody one day crack it and the world will never be the same again? As always, the comments are below.

Electronic Candle Charges Inductively

Humans like things that look like other things. A great example are faux LED tea light candles, with a plastic “flame” and flickering orange LED to recreate the effect of their waxy brethren. [gzumwalt] wanted to take the concept a little further, however, and got down to work.

The design harvests the orange LED and flame lens from an existing LED candle, but the rest is all original. [gzumwalt] printed a full-size candle, and fitted it with inductive charging hardware and a lithium-polymer battery. A corresponding charging base is used to supply power to the candle when it’s not in use. This is all handled automatically, with neodymium magnets used to activate reed switches to turn the charger on and the LED off.

It’s a tidy build that can be easily replicated with a 3D printer and some off-the-shelf parts. It’s also less wasteful than using disposable batteries, and safer than using real candles – so if you find yourself routinely shooting candle scenes in your budget film studio, it might be worth printing up a set of these.

LED candles range from the basic to the extreme – we’ve seen builds so realistic, you can light them with a match.

A Super Tidy School Bus RV Conversion

Many of us have seen an old bus for sale for a tantalizingly low price, and begun thinking about the possibilities. [EpiclyEpicEthan1] is someone who took the next step, bought the bus, and got to work converting it to an RV, with impressive results.

The bus in question is a 2002 International RE3000, which in its former life had helped move school children and barrels of pool chemicals to and fro. The project began, as many do, with a full teardown of the interior. With this done, the floor was treated to remove rust and repainted. Insulation and new plywood boards were then installed, and the fit-out began.

The amount of work involved in the build is immense. There’s a master bedroom, auxiliary bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen area. It’s a fully featured RV in every sense of the word, and yes, there is hot water. There was also significant work done to improve the driving experience, with switches relocated, lights added, and a reversing camera installed for easier parking.

Overall, it’s an impressive project that should serve as great inspiration to anyone wanting to attempt something similar. Then again, if your means are a little more limited, you could always go for a Corolla build.

Syringe Pump Turns CNC Machine Into A Frosting Bot

“Amazing how with only the power of 3D-printing, two different computers, hundreds of dollars in CNC machinery, a lathe, and modern microcontroller magic, I can almost decorate a cupcake as well as a hyperactive ten-year-old.”  We can think of no better way to sum up [Justin]’s experiment in CNC frosting application, which turns out to only be a gateway to more interesting use cases down the road.

Granted, it didn’t have to be this hard. [Justin] freely admits that he took the hard road and made parts where off-the-shelf components would have been fine. The design for the syringe pump was downloaded from Thingiverse and does just about what you’d expect – it uses a stepper motor to press down on the plunger of a 20-ml syringe full of frosting. Temporarily attached in place of the spindle on a CNC router, the pump dispenses onto the baked goods of your choice, although with an irregular surface like a muffin top the results are a bit rough. The extruded frosting tends to tear off and drop to the surface of the cake, distorting the design. We’d suggest mapping the Z-height of the cupcake first so the frosting can dispense from a consistent height.

Quality of the results is not really the point, though. As [Justin] teases, this hardware is in support of bioprinting of hydrogels, along with making synthetic opals. We’re looking forward to those projects, but in the meantime, maybe we can all just enjoy a spider silk beer with [Justin].

Is there something in the water? Third Florida city hit by ransomware

New Hobbs and Shaw trailer stars a McLaren 720S and Hobbs’ mom

When it comes to action movies, I have a few rules of thumb—one of them concerns the Rock (Dwayne Johnson, not the movie). If he's in a film, odds are high it'll be good even if the starting material is Baywatch or Jumanji. I've got a similar rule about Jason Statham, who in recent years has embraced a similar willingness to engage in a bit of tongue-in-cheek (though 2015's Spy is worth watching solely to see him chew every bit of scenery in sight). Obviously, all this means the summer movie I'm looking forward to above all others is Hobbs and Shaw, the latest installment from the Fast and Furious universe starring both Johnson and Statham. That anticipation has only increased with the release of a third and final trailer on Friday.

Much of the footage in this new trailer has been seen before, but it feels quite different in tone compared to the longer one that dropped in April. The new clip comes across as more light-hearted, and at one point I could swear Statham is channeling his Rick Ford character from the aforementioned Spy. There's a little more of Hobbs' mother (played by Lori Pelenise Tuisano), too, who reacts with glee to her son's plan to stop Brixton, Idris Elba's evil villain.

• 

  Supercars don't come much better than the McLaren 720S. [credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures ]

We also get to see a little more of the McLaren 720S chase through the streets of London. As with previous movies in the franchise, the key to enjoying it is to mentally wall off the well, actually region of your brain. For example: modern-day supercars don't get much better the 720S, but I've driven that car. It has exactly two seats, and they place driver and passenger closer together than probably any other car you can buy. I only bring this up because Johnson is, well, massive. And Statham is not exactly waif-like. So I'm trying not to think too hard about how the two of them and Vanessa Kirby, who plays Shaw's sister Hattie, all manage to fit inside as the trio are pursued by some futuristic motorcycles.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Fish Hooks Embedded in Robot Toes Make Them Climb Like Cockroaches

Take a dozen or so fish hooks, progressively embed them in plastic with a 3D printer and attach them to the feet of your hexapod and you’ve got a giant cockroach!

A team of researchers at Carnagie Mellon University came up with this ingenious hack which can easily be copied by anybody with a hexpod and a 3D printer. Here you can see the hooks embedded into the ends of a leg. This ‘Microspine technology’ enables their T-RHex robot to climb up walls at a slightly under-whelming 55 degrees, but also grants the ability to cling on severe overhangs.

Our interpretation of these results is that the robot needs to release and place each foot in a much more controlled manner to stop it from falling backwards. But researchers do have plans to help improve on that behavior in the near future.

Sensing and Closed Loop Control: As of now, T-RHex moves with an entirely open-loop, scripted gait. We believe that performance can be improved by adding torque sensing to the leg and tail actuators, which would allow the robot to adapt to large-scale surface irregularities in the wall, detect leg slip before catastrophic detachment,and automatically use the tail to balance during wall climbs.This design path would require a platform overhaul, but offers a promising controls-based solution to the shortcomings of our gait design

No doubt we will all now want to build cockroaches that will out perform the T-RHex. Embedding fish hooks into plastic is done one at a time. During fabrication, the printer is stopped and a hook is carefully laid down by human hand. The printer is turned on once again and another layer of plastic laid down to fully encapsulate the hook. Repeat again and again!

Your robot would need the aforementioned sensing and closed loop control and also the ‘normal’ array of sensors and cameras to enable autonomy with the ability to assess the terrain ahead. Good luck, and don’t forget to post about your projects (check out Hackaday.io if you need somewhere to do this) and tip us off about it! We’ve seen plenty of, sometimes terrifying, hexapod projects, but watch out that the project budget does not get totally out of control (more to be said about this in the future).

[Thanks to Qes for the tip]

Mitch Altman Mentors Manufacturing With Hackaday Prize Expert Session

“We need to up our game”—DHS cybersecurity director on Iran and ransomware

Apple moves Mac Pro production from Texas to China

Guidemaster: Is Valve Index the best virtual reality system to buy in 2019?

Building a Foam Machine from a Leaf Blower and a Water Pump

Spoofing car AI with projected street signs

Hackaday Podcast Ep25: Of Cheese Graters, Fauxberries, Printed Gears, Power Latching, and Art-Loving AI

Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams dish their favorite hacks from the past week. Seems like everyone is trying to mill their own Mac Pro grille and we love seeing how they go about it. Elliot is gaga over a quintet of power latching circuits, Mike goes crazy for a dough sheeter project, and we dig through the news behind methane on Mars, the Raspberry Pi 4 release, and spoofing Presidential text alerts with SDR. If you like mini-keyboards you need to see the Fauxberry, Artificial Intelligence became an art critic this week, and poorly-lit rooms have been solved with a massive mirror system.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

And note: next week we’re taking a break to go outside and shoot off some 4th of July fireworks, so there will be no podcast and you’ve got some time to listen through our 24 previous episodes for anything you’ve missed.  You’ll hear from us again the week after.

Direct download (59 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 025 Show Notes:

New This Week:

• NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life
• Raspberry Pi 4 Just Released: Faster CPU, More Memory, Dual HDMI Ports
• Impersonate The President With Consumer-Grade SDR
  • You’ll Really Want An “Undo” Button When You Accidentally Send A Ballistic Missile Warning

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• The Quest For Perfect Croissants Via A DIY Dough Sheeter
  • Home Made Gears Save This Shredder
  • 3D Printed Gears, Pulleys, and Cams Contest Entries
• Ditch The Switch: A Soft Latching Circuit Roundup
  • Nos amis les MOSFET / HK-012 / Hackable / Connect – Edition Diamond
    (French language, Google Translate link)
• Everyone’s trying to mill their own Mac Pro grilles:
  • Does The Cheese Grater Do A Great Grate Of Cheese?
  • The Cheese Grater In Fusion 360
  • The Process Behind Manufacturing That Mac Pro Grille
  • Grate Design On This Cutting Edge Raspberry Pi Case
• AI And Art Appreciation
• The Feather “FAUXBERRY” Is Now A Real Thing
  • Feather Plus Blackberry Equals Open Source Fauxberry
• A Rough And Ready Pan & Tilt Mirror
  • The Giant Sun Mirrors in Rjukan

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Everything You Probably Didn’t Know About FOV In HMDs
  • Accurate Time On Your Pi, The Extreme Way
  • The Practical Approach To Keeping Your Laser In Focus
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • This Upgraded Power Wheels Toy Is Powerful Enough To Need Traction Control
  • Split Flap Clock Keeps Time Thanks To Custom Frequency Converter
  • Booting The Game Boy Advance Into Bluetooth

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Reverse Engineering Cyclic Redundancy Codes
• Snoopy Come Home: The Search For Apollo 10

Renewable electricity beat out coal for the first time in April

Be On Twitter Without Being On Twitter

Social media can connect us to a vibrant worldwide community, but it is also a huge time sink as it preys on both our need for attention and our insatiable curiosity. Kept on a leash by those constant notification sounds, we can easily look up from our phones to find half a day has gone and we’re behind with our work. [Laura Lytle] has a plan to tackle this problem, her OutBox project involves a single button press machine that posts a picture to Twitter of whatever is put in it. It’s not just another gateway to social media addiction though, she tells us it follows Design For Disuse principles in which it must be powered up and adjusted for each picture, and that it provides no feedback to satisfy the social media craving.

Under the hood of the laser-cut housing reminiscent of an older hobby 3D printer is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ and a webcam, with a ring of LEDs for illumination. On top is the only interface, a small “arm” button to set things up and a big red arcade button to do the business. The software is in Python, and provides glue between resizing the photo, uploading it to a cloud service, and triggering ITTT to do the Tweeting. You can see the whole thing in the video below, and the result is a rather eye-catching device.

Of course, there are other ways to keep yourself off social media.

Author pulls software that used deep learning to virtually undress women

No more lumps: Let physics be your guide to making the perfect crepe

This Week in Security: Invalid Curve Attacks, OpenSSH Shielded, and More Details on Coinbase

AMD Epyc processors support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), a technique that prevents even a hypervisor reading memory belonging to a virtual machine. To pull this off, the encryption and decryption is handled on the fly by the Platform Security Processor (PSP), which is an ARM core that handles processor start-up and many security features of modern AMD processors. The vulnerability announced this week is related to the encryption scheme used. The full vulnerability is math heavy, and really grokking it requires a deeper understanding of elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) than your humble author currently possesses.

During the process of starting a virtual machine, the VM process goes through a key-sharing process with the PSP, using an ECC Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Rather than raising prime numbers to prime exponents, an ECC-DH process bounces around inside an elliptical curve in order to find a shared secret. One of the harder problems to solve when designing an ECC based cryptographic system, is the design of the curve itself. One solution to this problem is to use a published curve that is known to be good. AMD has taken this route in their SEV feature.

The attack is to prime the key exchange with invalid data, and observing the shared key that is generated. A suitably simple initial value will leak information about the PSP’s secret key, allowing an attacker to eventually deduce that key and decrypt the protected memory. If you’d like to bone up on invalid curve attacks, here’s the seminal paper. (PDF)

OpenSSH Shielding

[Damien Miller] of OpenSSH was apparently tired of seeing that project tied to vulnerabilities like Rambleed and Rowhammer, so added a technique he’s calling key-shielding. OpenSSH now encrypts private keys in memory using a 16 kB pre-key. While an attacker with full knowledge of the process’s memory wouldn’t be deterred, the error rate of Rambleed and similar attacks is high enough that the 16 kB of randomness is likely to thwart the attempt to recover the secret key.

Firefox and Coinbase

We mentioned Firefox vulnerabilities and updates last week, and as anticipated, more information is available. [Philip Martin] from Coinbase shared more information on Twitter. Coinbase employees, as well as other cryptocurrency companies, were targeted with fishing emails. These lured employees to a malicious page that attempted to exploit a pair of Firefox vulnerabilities. Coinbase has a security system in place that was able to prevent the exploit, and their security team was able to reverse engineer the attack.

The first vulnerability has been dissected in some detail by a Google security researcher. It’s a weakness in Firefox’s Javascript engine related to type handling. An object is created with one data type, and when that data is changed to another type, not all the data handlers are appropriately updated. Under the hood, a value is assumed to be a pointer, but is actually a double-length value, controlled by the attacker.

The second vulnerability is in the functions used to prompt for user interaction. Specifically the call to “Prompt:Open” isn’t properly validated, and can result in the un-sandboxed Firefox process loading an arbitrary web location. I suspect the sandbox escape is used to run the initial exploit a second time, but this time it’s running outside the sandbox.

Odds and Ends

[Tom] wrote a great intro into how to Impersonate The President With Consumer-Grade SDR, go check it out!

Another city, more ransomware. Riviera Beach, Florida was hit with a ransomware attack, and paid $600,000 in an attempt to get their data back. For a city of 35,000 inhabitants, that’s $17.14 in ransom per man, woman, and child. According to the linked article, though, the city was insured.

Go big and go home: The BMW X7 reviewed

• 

  A classic SUV profile [credit: BradleyWarren Photography ]

Back in the days when BMW attended auto shows, it would show off a dizzying array of vehicles. Coupes, roadsters, hybrids, SUVs, fastbacks—you name it, and BMW sold it. Yet there was one glaring omission as one wandered through BMW's cornucopia of cars: a three-row SUV. If you were a fan of the Ultimate Driving Machine but had outgrown the X5 due to an accumulation of children and/or stuff, there was no choice but to look elsewhere for your luxury SUV needs. With the launch of the full-size, three-row X7, BMW has not only given its fans a reason to upgrade—it has built an SUV that anyone looking at a GLC, Q7, XC90, or Range Rover Discovery should look long and hard at.

At first glance, the X7 cuts a familiar profile. It has the same general outlines as the compact X3 and mid-size X5, but this vehicle has nicer proportions than either. At the front is a super-sized kidney grille bracketed by a pair of slim LED headlights. It's classic SUV silhouette from the side, with the most noticeable feature being the longer rear doors, designed to make entry into the third row easier. The back side sports slim LED lights and a chrome bar that spans the rear liftgate, a design feature borrowed from the 7-series sedans.

No matter what your viewing angle is, one thing is crystal clear: this is a serious, full-size SUV built for doing full-size SUV things. For most folks contemplating full-size SUVs, that means being able to transport six or more passengers in ample comfort. The X7 excels here. But what about going off-road?

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

NASA’s restored Apollo Mission Control is a slice of 60s life, frozen in amber

• 

  Standing at the top row of the MOCR looking forward. The consoles are all lit via internal LEDs powered by a Crestron commercial lighting system, and the positions are all dressed to appear as if the controllers had all gotten up mid-shift and walked out and left all their stuff behind. [credit: Lee Hutchinson ]

HOUSTON—Following the completion of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar restoration, NASA's historic Apollo Mission Operations Control Room 2 ("MOCR 2") is set to reopen to the public next week. The $5 million in funding for the restoration was partially provided by NASA, but the majority of the money was donated by the city of Webster, the Houston suburb where the Johnson Space Center is located. Another half-million in funding came from the general public via a Kickstarter campaign (disclosure: your humble author was a backer).

For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere's Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.

Ars was invited to view the restored MOCR 2 last week as the final finishing restoration touches were still being applied. We conducted some interviews and shot some photos while technicians and construction workers bustled around us, hammering and screwing the last bits and bobs into place. The room's lighting system was in the process of being worked on, and the room flickered several times between fully illuminated daytime lighting and dim twilight—providing an even more accurate glimpse of what it might have looked like during an actual mission.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Rocket Report: Catching a falling fairing, where’s China’s biggest rocket?

Power To The Pi 4: Some Chargers May Not Make The Grade

The Raspberry Pi 4 has been in the hands of consumers for a few days now, and while everyone seems happy with their new boards there are some reports of certain USB-C power supplies not powering them. It has been speculated that the cause may lie in the use of pulldown resistors on the configuration channel (CC) lines behind the USB-C socket on the Pi, with speculation that one may be used while two should be required. Supplies named include some Apple MacBook chargers, and there is a suggestion is that the Pi may not be the only device these chargers fail to perform for.

Is this something you should be worried about? Almost certainly not. The Pi folks have tested their product with a wide variety of chargers but it is inevitable that they would be unable to catch every possible one. If your charger is affected, try another one.

What it does illustrate is the difficulties faced by anybody in bringing a new electronic product to market, no matter how large or small they are as an organisation. It’s near-impossible to test for every possible use case, indeed it’s something that has happened to previous Pi models. You may remember that the Raspberry Pi 2 could be reset by a camera flash or if you have a very long memory, that the earliest boards had an unseemly fight between two 1.8 V lines that led to a hot USB chip, and neither of those minor quirks dented their board’s ability to get the job done.

Mistakes happen. Making the change to USB-C from the relative simplicity of micro-USB is a big step for all concerned, and it would be a surprise were it to pass entirely without incident. We’re sure that in time there will be a revised Pi 4, and we’d be interested to note what they do in this corner of it.

Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like FPGAs

When the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails. And if your goal is to emulate the behavior of an FPGA but your only tools are FPGAs, then your nail-and-hammer issue starts getting a little bit interesting. That’s at least what a group of students at Cornell recently found when learning about the Xilinx FPGA used by a researcher in the 1990s by programming its functionality into another FPGA.

Using outdated hardware to recreate a technical paper from decades ago might be possible, but an easier solution was simply to emulate the Xilinx in a more modern FPGA, the Cyclone V FPGA from Terasic. This allows much easier manipulation of I/O as well as reducing the hassle required to reprogram the device. Once all of that was set up, it was much simpler to perform the desired task originally set up in that 90s paper: using evolutionary algorithms to discriminate between different inputs.

While we will leave the investigation into the algorithms and the I/O used in this project as an academic exercise for the reader, this does serve as a good reminder that we don’t always have to have the exact hardware on hand to get the job done. Old computers can be duplicated on less expensive, more modern equipment, and of course video games from days of yore are a snap to play on other hardware now too.

Thanks to [Bruce Land] for the tip!

Scripting Language Rapidly Develops A Clock

In the past, you might very well have started programming in Basic. It wasn’t very powerful language and it was difficult to build big projects with, but it was simple to learn, easy to use, and the interpreter made it easy to try things out without a big investment of time. Today you are more likely to get started using something like an Arduino, but it is easy to miss the accessible language and immediate feedback when you are doing simple projects. Annex WiFi RDS (Rapid Development Suite) is a scripting language for the ESP8266 that isn’t quite Basic, but it shares a lot of the same attributes. One example project from [cicciocb] is a scrolling dot matrix LED clock.

The code is really simple:

' Simple program using Annex and a MAX7219 dot matrix module
' by cicciocb 2019
'Set 4 8x8 displays with GPIO15 as CS pin
MAXSCROLL.SETUP 4, 15
INTENSITY = 5
'Set the first message with Annex
MAXSCROLL.PRINT "Annex"
MAXSCROLL.SHOW 31, INTENSITY
PAUSE 1000
'Set the refresh rate of the display (50 msec) - lower values -> scroll faster
TIMER0 50, SCROLLME
WAIT

SCROLLME:
'Scroll the display with the intensity defined before
MAXSCROLL.SCROLL INTENSITY 
' Set the text with the Date and Time
MAXSCROLL.TEXT DATE$ + " " + TIME$
RETURN

Of course, one reason it is simple is that Annex has a built-in set up for the LED drivers (MAXSCROLL). It also integrates with a remote web browser very easily, so you can embed HTML output in your projects.

If you look at the project’s main page, there is support for a lot of things including devices such as Neopixels, servos, LCDs, and temperature sensors. There’s also support for a lot of protocols and algorithms ranging from MQTT to PID controllers.

If you really miss Basic, you can use it on the web. Not to mention, that QuickBasic is still floating around.

Magnetic Attraction Of Microduino mCookie Modules

We’ve seen countless different robot kits promoted for STEM education, every one of which can perform the robotic “Hello World” task of line following. Many were in attendance at Maker Faire Bay Area 2019 toiling in their endless loops. Walking past one such display by Microduino, Inc. our attention was caught by a demonstration of their mCookie modules in action: installing a peripheral module took less than a second with a “click” of magnets finding each other.

Many Arduino projects draw from an ecosystem of Arduino shields. Following that established path, Microduino had offered tiny Arduino-compatible boards and peripherals which connected with pins and headers just like their full-sized counterparts. Unfortunately their tiny size also meant their risk of pin misalignment and corresponding damage would be higher as well. mCookie addresses this challenge by using pogo pins for electrical contacts, and magnets to ensure proper alignment. Now even children with not-quite-there-yet dexterity can assemble these modules, opening up a market to a younger audience.

Spring loaded electric connections are a popular choice for programming jigs, and we’ve seen them combined with magnets for ideas like modular keyboards, and there are also LittleBits for building simple circuits. When packaged with bright colorful LEGO-compatible plastic mounts, we have the foundation of an interesting option for introductory electronics and programming. Microduino’s focus at Maker Faire was promoting their Itty Bitty Buggy, which at $60 USD is a significantly more affordable entry point to intelligent LEGO creations than LEGO’s own $300 USD Mindstorm EV3. It’ll be interesting to see if these nifty mCookie modules will help Microduino differentiate themselves from other LEGO compatible electronic kits following a similar playbook.

Jony Ive will depart Apple to start his own company

Trump tweets will get warning labels if they break rules, Twitter says

New ransomware infections are the worst drive-by attacks in recent memory

Tax-exempt hospital sues thousands of poor people while making millions

id Software’s origin story set to become USA Network TV series

Custom Machined Pump Keeps CNC Lubrication Under Control

Rub two pieces of metal against each other hard enough, and it won’t be long before they heat up sufficiently to cause problems. That’s especially true when one is a workpiece and one is a tool edge, and the problems that arise from failing to manage the heat produced by friction can cost you dearly.

The traditional way of dealing with this is by pumping heavy streams of liquid coolant at the workpiece, but while that works, it creates problems of its own. That’s where minimum quantity lubrication comes in. MQL uses a fine mist of lubricant atomized in a stream of compressed air, which saves on lube and keeps swarf cleaner for easier recycling. The gear needed for MQL can be pricey though, so [brockard] decided to add homebrew MQL to his CNC router, with great results.

The video below shows the whole process, from raw metal to finished system – skip ahead to about 12 minutes if you just want to see final testing, but be warned that you’ll be missing some high-quality machining. The finished pump is a double-piston design, with each side driven by a cam rotated by a servo. An Arduino controls the speed of the motor based on the current settings; the pump is turned on and off through G-code control of a relay.

The lubricant stream is barely visible in the video, as opposed to the sloshing mess of traditional flood coolants, and seems much more suitable for a hobbyist-grade CNC setup. Need to build a CNC router before you build this? You can do much worse than this one.

Thanks for the tip, [Jasper Jans].

Debunking science denialism does work—but not perfectly

Indie developers suggest Steam Summer Sale confusion is hurting their games

Replacement Batteries For The Sony Discman

Some of the first Sony Discmans included rechargeable batteries. These batteries were nickel metal hydride batteries (because of the technology of the time) and are now well past their service life. The new hotness in battery technology is lithium — it offers greater power density, lighter weight, and a multitude of ready-to-go, off the shelf cells. What if someone were to create a new battery pack for an old Sony Discman using lithium cells? That’s exactly what [sjm4306] did for their entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The Discman [sjm] is working with uses a custom, Sony-branded battery based on NiMH technology with a capacity of around 500 mAH. After carefully measuring the dimensions of this battery, it was replicated in plastic with a 3D printer. This enclosure was then stuffed with a small lithium cell scavenged from a USB power bank.

The only tripping points for this build were the battery contacts. The originally battery had two contacts on the end that fit the Discman exactly; these were replicated with a small PCB wired up to the guts of the USB powerbank. The end result is a direct, drop-in replacement for the original Discman battery with a higher capacity, that’s also rechargeable via USB. It’s a fantastic project, with the entire build video available below.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Dealmaster: Prime members can get one year of Audible for $119

Brett Smith Makes Your Life Easier With Hidden Microcontroller Features

Gmail’s API lockdown will kill some third-party app access, starting July 15

House votes to block Ajit Pai’s plan to kill San Francisco broadband law

Taking a spin on WireGuard’s Windows pre-alpha

• 

  WireGuard 0.0.14 pre-alpha, running on an x1.small machine at packet.net. It's uploading across a WireGuard tunnel at 1.2 Gbps to a Linux machine, also at packet. [credit: Jim Salter ]

WireGuard is a new peer-to-peer VPN technology that has the potential for greater speed, smaller attack surface, and easier configuration than commonly used and better-established VPN platforms such as OpenVPN and IPSec. It has been available on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Android, and even iOS for quite some time now, with Windows being the one platform frustratingly missing. There are good reasons for that—lead developer Jason Donenfeld didn't want to inherit the problems of OpenVPN's OpenTAP adapter code, and when he investigated Microsoft's built-in VPN API, he didn't like that either. So his first move was to take a giant step backwards on the Windows platform and develop an extremely simple virtual adapter that could be used not only for WireGuard, but also for other projects that might need the same kind of very basic, socket-and-tunnel functionality. This became Wintun.

For the moment, WireGuard for Windows is still in what creator Jason Donenfeld refers to as "pre-alpha," with an alpha build due out sometime in the next week or two. The good news is, it's an easy install now, with no dev-fu required to get it running happily on a Windows 10 (or Server 2016, as seen below) system. There are self-contained, signed MSI installers for both 64-bit and 32-bit builds there; downloading and running them just works, with no complaints from Defender about unsigned or untrusted anything. I was curious about what makes v0.0.14 "pre-alpha" rather than merely "alpha." Donenfeld told me one reason he called it pre-alpha was to keep journalists like me (as well as the generally unadventurous) from writing about it before it's ready.

Pressed for more detail, it became clear that he's laser-focused on security—and Windows as a platform diverges far more radically from Linux, Android, macOS and iOS in that regard than any of them do from one another. There's no access to Windows kernel source code, and the documentation is insufficient for his needs. As a result, he has spent hundreds of hours in a disassembler, reverse-engineering ntoskrnl.exe and ndis.sys to make absolutely sure he understands exactly what's going on at an extremely low level most developers never bother with.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ford is laying off 12,000 workers in Europe

Deadly, drug-resistant fungus drips off its victims to spread to others

Testing Brushless Motors With A Little Help From The ESC

These days, brushless motors are the go-to for applications requiring high power in a compact package. It’s possible to buy motors in all manner of different configurations off the shelf, and the range available is only getting better. However, sometimes getting something truly optimal requires a bit of customization. With motors, this can involve swapping magnets or hand-winding coils. In these cases, it can be useful to test the modified motor to determine its performance. [JyeSmith]’s ESC tester is capable of just that.

Fundamentally, the ESC tester is a simple piece of hardware. It uses a microcontroller to speak the Dshot protocol. This protocol is typically used to communicate between multi-rotor flight controllers and ESCs. In this case, the Dshot telemetry is instead displayed on a small OLED screen. This enables the user to read off KV values, as well as other useful data such as current draw and RPM. This can help quantify the effects of any modifications made to a motor, as well as prove useful for learning about parts of spurious origins.

It’s a device that should prove useful to those trying to eke out every last drop of performance from their multi-rotor builds. We expect to see more similar projects emerge as drone racing continues to increase in popularity. If you’re still trying to learn the theory behind the technology, you can always build your own brushless motor. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Keegan for the tip!]

Reverse Engineering Cyclic Redundancy Codes

AC/DC: It’s Tesla duking it out with Edison in The Current War trailer

Benedict Cumberbatch and Nicholas Hoult play arch-rivals Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, respectively, locked in a race to electrify the world in The Current War.

In The Current War, brilliant inventors and arch-rivals Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) engage in increasing vicious tactics in the battle to determine whether direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC) technology will ultimately bring electricity to the world at large. The film is based on an especially riveting period in the history of science: the so- called "war of the currents."

Produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, The Current War actually premiered in 2017 at the Toronto Film Festival, and the Weinstein Company signed on as distributors. But then Harvey Weinstein was credibly accused of sexual abuse and stepped down from the company. The Current War was shelved and eventually sold off when the company declared bankruptcy, ending up with 101 Studios. And now it will get a broad theatrical release, in a slightly different form. Per Gomez-Rejon, he has had added five additional scenes and trimmed ten minutes from the runtime.

In the late 19th century, most motors still ran on DC power, and attempts to create an AC version had failed. In 1882, while working as an electrical engineer with an Hungarian telephone company, Tesla conceived of a rotating magnetic field produced by two or more alternating currents out of step with each other—a sort of magnetic whirlwind that could be used to drive an electric motor.  Within a few months he'd sketched out plans for all the components of a full power generating system.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Digital Polaroid SX-70

What do you do if you own an iconic and unusual camera from decades past? Do you love it and cherish it, buy small quantities of its expensive remanufactured film and take arty photographs? Or do you rip it apart and remake it as a modern-day digital camera in a retro enclosure? If you’re [Joshua Gross], you do the latter.

The Polaroid SX-70 is an iconic emblem of 1970s consumer technology chic. A true design classic, it’s a single-lens reflex design using a Polaroid instant film cartridge, and its party trick is that it’s a folding camera which collapses down to roughly the size of a pack of 1970s cigars. It was an expensive luxury camera when it was launched in 1972, and today it commands high prices as a collector’s item.

[Joshua]’s build is therefore likely to cause weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth among vintage camera enthusiasts, but what exactly has he done? In the first instance, he’s performed a teardown of the SX-70 which should be of interest to many readers in itself. He’s removed the mirror and lens, mounted a Raspberry Pi camera behind the lens mount, and a small LCD monitor where the mirror would be.

A new plastic lens in the original lens housing completes the optics, and the electronics come courtesy of a Pi Zero, battery, and USB hub in the space where the Polaroid film cartridge would otherwise be. Some new graphics and a fresh leather cover complete the  build, giving what we’d say is a very tidy electronic Polaroid. On the software side there is a filter to correct for fisheye distortion, and the final photos have a slightly Lomographic quality from the plastic lens.

We like what he’s created with his SX-70 even if we can’t help wincing that he did it to an SX-70 in the first place. Maybe it’s less controversial when someone gives the Pi treatment to a more mundane Polaroid camera.

LED Matrix Becomes Fun Tetris Clock

Sometimes a project is borne simply out of the fact that some interesting parts have been left sitting around too long. Of course, this is as good a reason to build as any other, and can often lead to some interesting results. [Jorj Bauer]’s Tetris Display is one such project.

The project started because [Jorj] had an 8 x 32 WS2812 LED array laying about, and it was high time it got turned into something cool. The resulting display has several features, making it a welcome piece around the home. It can act as a clock, with automatic compensation for daylight savings and brightness control depending on the time of day. It can also serve as a text scroller, and of course, the party piece – it can play Tetris. It all runs on an ESP-01, with a second device acting as a remote to control the game.

Rather than simply being another LED matrix project, [Jorj] put a little flair into things. A font was developed that allowed the time to be displayed in a pixel font composed entirely of Tetris pieces (or tetrominos). This allows the time to be displayed by pieces dropping from the top of the display. The Tetris implementation is solid, too – implementing the proper Super Rotation System that professionals would expect.

[Jorj] reports that this build was inspired by an earlier Tetris Clock featured in these very pages. It’s a tidy piece that we’re sure is a great addition to the mantlepiece. Video after the break.

Smart Bike Helmet Is Wireless

If you ride a bike, you probably share the road with a lot of cars. Unfortunately, they don’t always share the road very well with you. [Mech Tools] took a helmet, a few Arduinos, and some wireless transceivers and made headgear that shows when you stop and also shows turn signals. We were a little surprised, though, that the bike in question looks like a motorcycle. In most countries, motorcycle helmets meet strict safety standards and modifying them is probably not a good idea. However, it wasn’t exactly clear how the extra gear attached to the helmet, so it is hard to say if the project is very practical or not.

In particular, it looks as though the first version had the electronics just stuck to the outside of the helmet. The final one had things mounted internally and almost certainly had cuts or holes made for the lights. We aren’t sure which of those would be more likely to be a problem in the case of an accident.

However, as a concept, we liked the idea. It made us wonder if you could do the same thing to something a little less critical like a motorcycle jacket. After all, we’ve seen a lot of wearable gear lately.

We’ve seen similar projects before. Of course, it is probably safer and easier to add lights to the bike itself.

 

 

PackProbe Reports Laptop Battery Health

The 18650 cell has become a ubiquitous standard in the lithium battery world. From power drills to early Tesla vehicles, these compact cells power all manner of portable devices. A particularly common use is in laptop batteries, where they’re often built into a pack using the Smart Battery System. This creates a smart battery that can communicate and report on its own status. PackProbe is a software tool built to communicate with these batteries, and you might just find it comes in handy.

The code runs on the WiFi-enabled Arduino Yún by default, but can be easily modified to suit other Arduino platforms. Communicating over SMBus using the Arduino’s I2C hardware, it’s capable of working with the vast majority of laptop batteries out there which comply with the Smart Battery System. With that standard being minted in 1994, it’s spread far and wide these days.

It’s a great way to harvest not only the specifications and manufacturing details of your laptop battery pack, but also to check on the health of the battery. This can give a clear idea over whether the battery is still usable, as well as whether the cells are worth harvesting for those in the recycling business.

You’re not limited to just the Arduino, though. There’s a similar tool available for the ESP8266, too.

FCC lets Verizon lock cell phones to network for 60 days after activation

F1 2019 simulates the highs and lows of motorsport, on and off the track

• 

  F1 2019 has arrived a few months earlier than F1 games in years past. I think there are enough meaningful improvements to warrant a purchase. [credit: Codemasters ]

Coming up with something new to say about the annual update to a franchised sports game is probably almost as hard as being one of the developers who has to come up with something new to put in the game. Which is my inelegant way of saying that Codemasters' newest Formula 1 racing game, F1 2019, is here.

I don't envy the job of Lee Mather and his team at Codemasters. F1 2017 was a great racing game. F1 2018 was an extremely great racing game—and a wonderful interactive textbook focused on the evolution of Formula 1 cars from the early 1970s through today (as good a sequel to LJK Setright's excellent The Grand Prix Car, 1954-1966 as we're ever likely to see, but in video game form). Happily, F1 2019 is no turkey, adding enough that's new to make the game a worthwhile upgrade for the F1 fan.

The most immediately noticeable change is the inclusion of Formula 2. This, as the name suggests, is the feeder series into F1—the sport's version of baseball's farm teams or college football and basketball. As you fire up the game for the first time and start your career mode, you'll be faced with a series of different challenges as a young F2 driver hoping to move up to the big show. How you perform in these—working as a team player, dealing with a noxious rival, coping with adversity during a race—all influences the RPG elements of the game, which were first introduced in last year's installment.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Flying, insect-like robot flits closer to independent flight

Console makers warn Trump’s trade war could increase hardware prices 25%

Amino acids make beautiful music to design novel protein structures

There's an app for that: Android users can now create their own bio-based musical compositions.

Nearly seven years ago, MIT scientists mapped the molecular structure of proteins in spider silk threads onto musical theory to produce the "sound" of silk in hopes of establishing a radical new way to create designer proteins. That work even inspired a sonification art exhibit, "Spider's Canvas," in Tokyo last fall. Artist Tomas Saraceno created an interactive instrument inspired by the web of a Cyrotophora citricola spider, with each strand in the "web" tuned to a different note.

Now MIT materials engineer Markus Buehler and his colleagues are back with an even more advanced system of making music out of a protein structure—and then converting it back to create novel proteins never before seen in nature. The team also developed a free app for the Android smartphone, called the Amino Acid Synthesizer, so users could create their own protein "compositions" from the sounds of amino acids. They described their work in a new paper in ACS Nano.

Much like how music has a limited number of notes and chords and uses different combinations to compose music, proteins have a limited number of building blocks (its 20 amino acids) which can combine in any number of ways to create novel protein structures with unique properties. Furthermore, "Any genre of music has patterns," said Buehler. "You'll see universality in terms of sound, the tones, but you also see repetitive patterns, like motifs and movements in classical music. These kinds of patterns are also found in proteins."

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments