Grawler: Painless Cleaning For Glass Roofs
Part of [Gelstronic]’s house has a glass roof. While he enjoys the natural light and warmth, he doesn’t like getting up on a ladder to clean it every time a bird makes a deposit or the rainwater stains build up. He’s tried to make a cleaning robot in the past, but the 25% slope of the roof complicates things a bit. Now, with the addition of stepper motors and grippy tank treads, [Gelstronic] can tell this version of GRawler exactly how far to go, or to stay in one place to clean a spot that’s extra dirty.
GRawler is designed …read more
Mechanisms: Solenoids
Since humans first starting playing with electricity, we’ve proven ourselves pretty clever at finding ways to harness that power and turn it into motion. Electric motors of every type move the world, but they are far from the only way to put electricity into motion. When you want continuous rotation, a motor is the way to go. But for simpler on and off applications, where fine control of position is not critical, a solenoid is more like what you need. These electromagnetic devices are found everywhere and they’re next in our series on useful mechanisms. …read more
Explaining Efail and Why It Isn’t the End of Email Privacy
Last week the PGPocalipse was all over the news… Except that, well, it wasn’t an apocalypse.
A team of researchers published a paper(PDF) where they describe how to decrypt a PGP encrypted email via a targeted attack. The research itself is pretty well documented and, from a security researcher perspective, it’s a good paper to read, especially the cryptography parts.
But we here at Hackaday were skeptical about media claims that Efail had broken PGP. Some media reports went as far as recommending everyone turn off PGP encryption on all email clients., but they weren’t able to back this recommendation …read more
Video of the Arduino FPGA Board Demo at Maker Faire
This week, Arduino announced a lot of new hardware including an exceptionally interesting FPGA development board aimed at anyone wanting to dip their toes into the seas of VHDL and developing with programmable logic. We think it’s the most interesting bit of hardware Arduino has released since their original dev board, and everyone is wondering what the hardware actually is, and what it can do.
This weekend at Maker Faire Bay Area, Arduino was out giving demos for all their wares, and yes, the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 was on hand, being shown off in a working demo. We have …read more
InSight Brings New Tech to Mars
Unless you’ve got your ear on the launch pad so to speak, you might not be aware that humanity just launched a new envoy towards the Red Planet. Estimated to touch down in Elysium Planitia on November 26th, the InSight lander is relatively low-key as far as interplanetary missions go. Part of the NASA’s “Discovery Program”, it operates on a considerably lower budget than Flagship missions such as the Curiosity rover; meaning niceties like a big advertising and social media campaign to get the public excited doesn’t get a line item.
Which is a shame, because not only are there …read more
