Print Your Own Vertices For Quick Structural Skeletons

3D printing is great for a lot of things: prototyping complex designs, replacing broken parts, and creating unique pencil holders to show your coworkers how zany you are. Unfortunately, 3D printing is pretty awful for creating large objects – it’s simply too inefficient. Not to mention, the small size of most consumer 3D printers is very limiting (even if you were willing to run a single print for days). The standard solution to this problem is to use off-the-shelf material, with only specialized parts being printed. But, for simple structures, designing those specialized parts is an unnecessary time sink. [Nurgak] has created a solution for this with a clever “Universal Vertex Module,” designed to mate off-the-shelf rods at the 90-degree angles that most people use.

uvm_configurations

The ingenuity of the design is in its simplicity: one side fits over the structural material (dowels, aluminum extrusions, etc.), and the other side is a four-sided pyramid. The pyramid shape allows two vertices to mate at 90-degree angles, and holes allow them to be held together with the zip ties that already litter the bottom of your toolbox.

[Nurgak’s] design is parametric, so it can be easily configured for your needs. The size of the vertices can be scaled for your particular project, and the opening can be adjusted to fit whatever material you’re using. It should work just as well for drinking straws as it does for aluminum extrusions.

Strobe Light Slows Down Time

Until the 1960s, watches and clocks of all kinds kept track of time with mechanical devices. Springs, pendulums, gears, oils, and a whole host of other components had to work together to keep accurate time. The invention of the crystal oscillator changed all of that, making watches and clocks not only cheaper, but (in general) far more accurate. It’s not quite as easy to see them in action, however, unless you’re [noq2] and you have a set of strobe lights.

[noq2] used a Rigol DG4062 function generator and a Cree power LED as a high-frequency strobe light to “slow down” the crystal oscillators from two watches. The first one he filmed was an Accutron “tuning fork” movement and the second one is a generic 32,768 Hz quartz resonator which is used in a large amount of watches. After removing the casings and powering the resonators up, [noq2] tuned in his strobe light setup to be able to film the vibrations of the oscillators.

It’s pretty interesting to see this in action. Usually a timekeeping element like this, whether in a watch or a RTC, is a “black box” of sorts that is easily taken for granted. Especially since these devices revolutionized the watchmaking industry (and a few other industries as well), it’s well worthwhile to take a look inside and see how they work. They’re used in more than just watches, too. Want to go down the rabbit hole on this topic? Check out the History of Oscillators. Continue reading “Strobe Light Slows Down Time”

Making A Mobility Scooter Drastically More Mobile

Do you have a spare mobility scooter sitting unused in your garage? Or, maybe you’ve got a grandmother who has been complaining about how long it takes her to get to bingo on Tuesdays? Has your local supermarket hired you to improve grocery shopping efficiency between 10am and 2pm? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then the guys over at Photon Induction have an “overclocked” mobility scooter build which should provide you with both inspiration and laughs.

They’ve taken the kind of inexpensive mobility scooter that can be found on Craigslist for a couple hundred dollars, and increased the battery output voltage to simultaneously improve performance and reduce safety. Their particular scooter normally runs on 24V, and all they had to do to drastically increase the driving speed was move that up to 60V (72V ended up burning up the motors).

Other than increasing the battery output voltage, only a couple of other small hacks were necessary to finish the build. Normally, the scooter uses a clutch to provide a gentle start. However, the clutch wasn’t up to the task of handling 60V, so the ignition switch was modified to fully engage the clutch before power is applied. The horn button was then used as the accelerator, which simply engages a solenoid with massive contacts that can handle 60V. The result is a scooter that is bound to terrify your grandmother, but which will get her to bingo in record time.

Continue reading “Making A Mobility Scooter Drastically More Mobile”

Cutest Possible Atari Disk Drive

[rossumur]’s first computer was an Atari 400, and after riding a wave of nostalgia and forgetting the horrible keyboard found in the Atari 400, he decided it was time to miniaturize the venerable Atari 810 disk drive by putting an entire library of Atari games on a single microSD card.

SD cards have been slowly but surely replacing disk drives for just about every old computer system out there. You no longer need 400k disks for your old mac, and your Commodore 64 can run directly off an SD card. The Atari 8-bits have been somewhat forgotten in this movement towards modern solid state storage, and although a solution does exist, this implementation is a pretty pricey piece of hardware.

[rossumur]’s hardware for giving the Atari 8-bit computers an SD card slot is just one chip – an LPC1114 ARM Cortex M0. This, along with an SD card slot, 3.3V regulator, a LED and some caps allows the Atari to talk to SD card and hold the entire 8-bit Atari library on a piece of plastic the size of a fingernail.

Designing a circuit board doesn’t have the street cred it once did, and to give his project a little more pizzazz he chose to emulate the look of the very popular miniaturized Commodore 1541 disk drive with a tiny replica of the Atari 810 disk drive. This enclosure was printed at Shapeways, and with some enamel hobby paint, [rossumur] had a tiny, tiny 810 drive.

While this build does require the sacrifice of a somewhat rare and certainly old Atari SIO cable, it is by far the best solution yet seen for bringing a massive game library to the oft-forgotten Atari 8-bit home computers.

Thanks [lucas] for the tip.

IPhone Jailbreak Hackers Await $1M Bounty

According to Motherboard, some unspecified (software) hacker just won a $1 million bounty for an iPhone exploit. But this is no ordinary there’s-a-glitch-in-your-Javascript bug bounty.

On September 21, “Premium” 0day startup Zerodium put out a call for a chain of exploits, starting with a browser, that enables the phone to be remotely jailbroken and arbitrary applications to be installed with root / administrator permissions. In short, a complete remote takeover of the phone. And they offered $1 million. A little over a month later, it looks like they’ve got their first claim. The hack has yet to be verified and the payout is actually made.

But we have little doubt that the hack, if it’s actually been done, is worth the money. The NSA alone has a $25 million annual budget for buying 0days and usually spends that money on much smaller bits and bobs. This hack, if it works, is huge. And the NSA isn’t the only agency that’s interested in spying on folks with iPhones.

Indeed, by bringing something like this out into the open, Zerodium is creating a bidding war among (presumably) adversarial parties. We’re not sure about the ethics of all this (OK, it’s downright shady) but it’s not currently illegal and by pitting various spy agencies (presumably) against each other, they’re almost sure to get their $1 million back with some cream on top.

We’ve seen a lot of bug bounty programs out there. Tossing “firmname bug bounty” into a search engine of your choice will probably come up with a hit for most firmnames. A notable exception in Silicon Valley? Apple. They let you do their debugging work for free. How long this will last is anyone’s guess, but if this Zerodium deal ends up being for real, it looks like they’re severely underpaying.

And if you’re working on your own iPhone remote exploits, don’t be discouraged. Zerodium still claims to have money for two more $1 million payouts. (And with that your humble author shrugs his shoulders and turns the soldering iron back on.)

No Pascal, Not A SNOBOL’s Chance. Go Forth!

My article on Fortran, This is Not Your Father’s FORTRAN, brought back a lot of memories about the language. It also reminded me of other languages from my time at college and shortly thereafter, say pre-1978.

At that time there were the three original languages – FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL. These originals are still used although none make the lists of popular languages. I never did any COBOL but did some work with Pascal, Forth, and SNOBOL which are from that era. Of those, SNOBOL quickly faded but the others are still around. SNOBOL was a text processing language that basically lost out to AWK, PERL, and regular expressions. Given how cryptic regular expressions are it’s amazing another language from that time, APL – A Programming Language, didn’t survive. APL was referred to as a ‘write only language’ because it was often easier to simply rewrite a piece of code than to debug it.

Another language deserving mention is Algol, if only because Pascal is a descendant, along with many modern languages. Algol was always more popular outside the US, probably because everyone there stuck with FORTRAN.

Back then certain books held iconic status, much like [McCracken’s] black FORTRAN IV. In the early 70s, mentioning [Nicolas Wirth] or the yellow book brought to mind Pascal. Similarly, [Griswold, (R. E.)] was SNOBOL and a green book. For some reason, [Griswold’s] two co-authors never were mentioned, unlike the later duo of [Kernighan] & [Ritchie] with their white “The C Programming Language”. Seeing that book years later on an Italian coworker’s bookshelf translated to Italian gave my mind a minor boggling. Join me for a walk down the memory lane that got our programming world to where it is today.

Continue reading “No Pascal, Not A SNOBOL’s Chance. Go Forth!”

Check Out Who’s Speaking At The Hackaday SuperConference

The Hackaday SuperConference is just eleven short days from now! We’ve put together a conference that is all about hardware creation with a side of science and art. Join hundreds of amazing people along with Hackaday crew for a weekend of talks, workshops, and socializing.

Below you will find the full slate of talks, and last week we revealed the lineup of hands-on workshops. We’ve expanded a few of the more popular workshops. If you previously tried to get a ticket and found they were sold out, please check again. We know many of you are working on impressive projects in your workshops, so bring them and sign up for a lightning talk at registration.

This is a gathering of people who make the hardware world go round, and that includes you. Apply now to attend the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference.

 

2015 Hackaday SuperConference Talks:

Shanni R. Prutchi

Construction of an Entangled Photon Source for Experimenting with Quantum Technologies

Minas Liarokapis

OpenBionics: Revolutionizing Prosthetics with Open-Source Dissemination

Fran Blanche

Fun and Relevance of Antiquated Technology

Danielle Applestone

Founding a hardware startup: what I wish I’d known!

Luke Iseman

Starting a Hardware Startup

Grant Imahara

Recapping Mythbusters and his Engineering Career follow by a Fireside Chat

Noah Feehan

Making in Public

Jeroen Domburg

Implementing the Tamagotchi Singularity

Sarah Petkus

NoodleFeet: Building a Robot as Art

Alvaro Prieto

Lessons in Making Laser Shooting Robots

Zach Fredin

You Can Take Your Hardware Idea Through Pilot-Scale Production With Minimal Prior Experience And Not Very Much Money, So You Should Do It NOW!!

Kate Reed

The Creative Process In Action

Oscar Vermeulen

PiDP-8: Experiences developing an electronics kit

Reinier van der Lee

The Vinduino Project

Radu Motisan

Global environmental surveillance network

David Prutchi

Construction of Imaging Polarimetric Cameras for Humanitarian Demining

Rory Aronson

Why great documentation is vital to open-source projects

Jonathan Beri

I like to move it, move it: a pragmatic guide to making your world move with motors!

Neil Movva

Adding (wearable) Haptic Feedback to Your Project

Dustin Freeman

The Practical Experience of Designing a Theatre Experience around iBeacons

Kay Igwe

Brain Gaming