Pie Stop For Emergency DNS Needs

November 24, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 37 Comments

The war on Internet ads rages on, as the arms race between ad blockers and ad creators continues to escalate. To make a modern Internet experience even remotely palatable, plenty of people are turning to DNS-level filters to stop the ads from coming into the network at all. This solution isn’t without its collateral damage though, as the black lists available sometimes filter out something that should have made it to the user. For those emergencies, [Kristopher] created the Pie Stop, a physical button to enact a temporary passthrough on his Pi-Hole.

While [Kristopher] is capable of recognizing a problem and creating the appropriate white list for any of these incidents, others in his household do not find this task as straighforward. When he isn’t around to fix the problems, this emergency stop can be pressed by anyone to temporarily halt the DNS filtering and allow all traffic to pass through the network. It’s based on the ESP-01S, a smaller ESP8266 board with only two GPIO pins. When pressed, it sends a custom command to the Pi-Hole to disable the ad blocking. A battery inside the case allows it to be placed conveniently anywhere near anyone who might need it.

With this button deployed, network snafus can be effectively prevented even with the most aggressive of DNS-level ad blocking. If you haven’t thought about deploying one of these on your own network, they’re hard to live without once you see how powerful they are. Take a look at this one which also catches spam.

Model Rocket Launcher Is So Serious, It Has A Briefcase

April 17, 2020 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

What could be more thrilling than launching a complex rocket that you built yourself? For starters, launching it with literally anything better than the stock ignition system would be a step in the right direction. How about a briefcase full of fantastically fun overkill?

[FastEddy59] is in the middle of building a model rocket complete with a Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system to help with stabilization. Much to our delight, he’s designed an equally ambitious controller to spice up the launch sequence with security codes and a physical key. And what’s a launch controller without a giant emergency stop button to shut down everything? Incomplete, if you ask us.

Under the carbon fiber-wrapped acrylic hood, there’s an Arduino MEGA engine and an NRF24 LoRa module for transmission to the rocket. There’s even a DHT11 temperature sensor to verify that launch conditions are ideal. It’s still a work in progress with plenty of features to come, like fancier labels and plenty of launch-appropriate sound files for the hidden speaker. There’s a lot to this case, and [FastEddy59]’s video brief is ready and waiting on the pad after the break.

[FastEddy59] plans to hold the first launch in a few months, and we sincerely hope he outfits the rocket with a camera.

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Physical Kill Switch For Rogue Applications

July 9, 2016 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

Necessity is the mother of invention, but sometimes frustration is as good a motivator. [Maciej] does a bunch of statistics in his day job using SPSS. Like most complicated pieces of software, it can get hung, and the only way to stop it is to manually kill the running processes. Apparently, that happened one time too many for [Maciej].

He took matters into his own hands, repurposing a big red emergency-stop button for the task. It’s mounted on a jar, and the microcontroller inside is configured as a USB keyboard. When he mashes the button, it opens the “Run…” menu and types out taskkill spssengine.exe for him.

We can totally see the therapeutic value of such a device. Plus, in case SPSS is gobbling up his system memory and everything’s approaching standstill, the vital seconds saved by the microcontroller’s quick-typing fingers could be a lifesaver.