Hackaday Links: April 9, 2017

[Federico Musto], one of the Arduinos in the Arduino vs. Arduino saga (which finally came to an end last September) may have fabricated his academic record. This news comes from Wired, providing documents from the registrars at MIT and NYU stating [Musto] never attended these institutions. Since this story came out, [Musto] has edited his LinkedIn, listing his only academic credential as a kindergarten in Torino, Italy.

[shininglaser] built a tinnitus machine. What’s a tinnitus machine? It’s a device that, when activated, produces this sound: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. [shininglaser] built this tinnitus machine out of a pair of speakers, a cardboard box, a few batteries, and some sort of board with an epoxy-coated blob. We have no idea what the circuit looks like, but you could do this with any normal signal pulsing at around 15-18kHz (address pins on a CPU for bonus nerd cred) or a simple 555 timer.

This is a hackers bar. This bar in Roppongi, Tokyo is, “a place where you can enjoy live programming and business making…. The term ‘hacker’ is applied to someone who possesses top skills and knowledge to provide innovative and quick solutions even to the most difficult tasks.” It appears they have daily events/talks for JavaScript, Python, R, and Swift.

Captain Crunch needs our help. He’s facing some serious surgery, and even if it’s successful, there’s going to be a lot of stuff insurance doesn’t cover.

We can use Libreboot again. A few months ago, the Libreboot project left the GNU project after an issue with an employee at the Free Software Foundation. Hackaday chose not to report on this only because the accusations levied against the FSF were hearsay. I should emphasize this: the only reason we chose not to report on this is because the accusations were hearsay. Now the Libreboot project is under more democratic management and they’re working on the Thinkpad X220, the greatest Thinkpad of all time. Neat.

Here’s a quick and easy tip to get metal fume fever. Build a foundry out of a galvanized trash can! No, don’t worry about that galvanized coating, it’ll burn off. Oh, he’s doing this indoors. What’s carbon monoxide? Why am I sleepy?

35 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: April 9, 2017

    1. I’m not so sure.

      Judging by the tone it emits and the fact that it’s on Hack a Day, I would have guessed that it is a 32 bit RISC ARM processor running at over 100MHz combined as a System on a Chip with FPGA and several slices of DSP on which an emulation of a 555 is running at almost real time.

      1. No, being on Hackaday means it’s some sort of AVR programmed with the Arduino IDE. Either an ATmega328, a 32U4 or one of those 6-pin ATtiny chips which have no useful application apart from this and blinking LEDs.

  1. As someone who has tinnitus I would like to mention that this machine does nothing more than make an annoying sound and is nothing at all like tinnitus.

    Here’s a better explanation about tinnitus –

    First I will explain what a Dash 8 is – it’s an aircraft – a twin turboprop aircraft. The design concept was simple – get the largest engines you can find, bolt on some small wings and see what happens.

    The end result (of earlier models, as they tried to fix this issue) is an aircraft that makes earmuffs explode at V0.

    It so loud that it even re-defines the meaning of Vr.

    The take off is like this – full engine speed while stationary, a slight increase in prop pitch to send you down the runway. Speed is not important as it’s not the determining point for Vr. Now after a short period of time the engine noise will become so offensively loud that the planet will move away from the aircraft.

    This is what tinnitus is like. It took me three years to be able to understand speech again after I first had tinnitus.

    1. Though I can’t say anything about tinnitus, being a long time commuter on dash-8’s in and out of Philly (terminal F baby!) that you are spot on about their volume.

  2. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…
    Reminds me of my old TV.

    Wonder what some of the more rediculus ways to create an annoyance machine are. Motors in series to speaker, really cheap “rodent repellers” (they don’t work BTW).

          1. My favourite annoyance machine when I was a kid was my Gameboy. Pulling out the cartridge while it was running (it was the color version with no cartridge lock) caused it to either reset or crash and beep indefinitely.

  3. “[Frederico Musto], one of the Arduinos in the Arduino vs. Arduino saga (which finally came to an end last September) may have fabricated his academic record.”

    Well that’s one way to not go into financial debt for the rest of your life.

    1. Oops, now they’ll have to submit those requests to the MIT and NYU registrars all over again.

      In all seriousness though, props to Limor and Phillip. The abstract above doesn’t make it clear, but according to the Wired article they were the ones who figured out this guy was a fraud.

  4. Arduino is a house of cards. Do not care whether or not someone has a PhD from whatever; but do care that people supposedly running the show are not misleading us or are perpetuating some other scams. And why do we consider current-day Italy to be part of the western world?

    R-Pi/BBB/etc is not the Next Thing. Nor does the STM stuff seem to be the Next Thing. Perhaps it is time for Adafruit, Sparkfun, and PJRC to form a non-profit org that is the Next Thing before things implode in Italia. A happy result would be an end to the insane arduino IDE and build system.

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