Hackaday Links: September 25, 2016

So you like watching stupid stuff? Here you go, a scene from Bones that tops the infamous ‘IP backtrace with Visual Basic’ or ‘four-handed keyboard’ scenes from other TV shows. Someone hacked the bones by embedding malware in a calcium fractal pattern. Also, when she uses the fire extinguisher, she doesn’t spray the base of the fire.

Raspberry Pi! You have no idea how good the term Raspberry Pi is for SEO. Even better is Raspberry Pi clusters, preferably made with Raspberry Pi Zeros. Here’s a Raspberry Pi hat for four Raspberry Pi Zeros, turning five Raspberry Pis into a complete cluster computer. To be honest and fair, if you’re looking to experiment with clusters, this probably isn’t a bad idea. The ‘cluster backplane’ is just a $2 USB hub chip, and a few MOSFETs for turning the individual Pis on and off. The Zeros are five bucks a pop, making the entire cluster cost less than two of the big-boy sized Pi 3s.

Do you think you might have too much faith in humanity? Don’t worry, this video has you covered.

Hacking on some Lattice chips? Here’s a trip to CES for you. Lattice is holding a ‘hackathon’ for anyone who is building something with their chips. The top prize is $5k, and a trip to next year’s CES in Vegas, while the top three projects just get the trip to Vegas. If you already have a project on your bench with a Lattice chip, it sounds like a great way to wait an hour for a cab at McCarran.

UPSat. What’s an upsat? Not much, how about you? The first completely open source hardware and software satellite will soon be delivered to the ISS. Built by engineers from the University of Patras and the Libre Space Foundation, the UPSat was recently delivered to Orbital ATK where it will be delivered to the ISS by a Cygnus spacecraft. From there, it will be thrown out the airlock via the NanoRacks deployment pod.

The Voyager Golden Record is a message in a bottle thrown into the cosmic ocean and a time capsule from Earth that may never be opened. Now it’s a Kickstarter. Yes, this record is effectively Now That’s What I Call Humanity volume 1, but there are some interesting technical considerations to the Voyager Golden Record. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever tried to extract the audio and pictures from this phonographic time capsule. The pictures included in the Golden Record are especially weird, with the ‘how to decode this’ message showing something like NTSC, without a color burst, displayed on a monitor that is effectively rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise from a normal CRT TV. Want to know how to get on Hackaday? Get this Golden Record and show an image on an oscilloscope. I’d love to see it, if only because it hasn’t been done before by someone independent from the original project.

21 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: September 25, 2016

  1. “The Contest is open only to current residents of California or Oregon who are at
    least eighteen (18) years of age as of the date of entry. No other person is eligible to enter or
    win.”
    That’s a bummer…

    1. Hi there, due to popular demand, Lattice is in the process of opening the contest to all residents of the United States. Stay tune for an announcement at the end of this week/early next week!

  2. Acquiring a real Golden Record would require an absurd amount of Delta-V or an amazing heist at the Air and Space Museum. Until someone pulls of either of those two stunts, there is a low-quality digitized version of the image audio on archive.org and soundcloud. Unfortunately it was sampled with AGC enabled and the record player used didn’t have very stable timing, so the resulting images are really messy. Here’s my small scripts to generate bitmaps based on the audio file and some heuristics – proper DSP would probably generate better versions: https://trmm.net/Voyager

      1. That not display the link that I wanted to show. I’ll link all images to text individually:
        https://i.imgur.com/03zPJ.png
        https://i.imgur.com/vaib6.png
        https://i.imgur.com/GKu00.png
        https://i.imgur.com/bWSdi.png
        https://i.imgur.com/WC5Sk.png
        https://i.imgur.com/FyQOS.png

        No where on the golden record does it teach letters. So it would be as useful as cuneiform writing to someone who could not interpretive its intention or meaning. But it it made the funding happen I suppose it served it’s purpose.

    1. There is a duplicate copy in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum which is in an annex at Washington Dulles International Airport in the Chantilly area of Fairfax County, Virginia.

      https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/record-cover-voyager-duplicate

      If only they did not explicitly say “Do not reproduce without permission from the Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum”

      Since it is out on display, you could in theory take a high definition video of the record ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Voyager_Sounds_of_Earth_record_-_Udvar-Hazy_Center.JPG ) And then process the video to extract more details than human eyes can perceive, maybe apply some super-resolution reconstruction – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_imaging

  3. Curse the practice of AGC on recorded anything. I got tired decades ago hearing the noise constantly being turned up and back down when there is louder sound. The damage is allready done on much “preserved” audio in historical archives. It’s hard to reverse, I know of no plugins to undo it in editing.

  4. I really really really liked the iphone headphone jack video. :P

    I’m going to wait for someone to post a link to the Golden Record. I thought for sure this had been done.– Want to see it!

    Nice links B!

  5. Mildly surprised Time Life or Franklin Mint didn’t do a few dozen “limited edition” runs of the golden record by now. Or any of the others that do heirloom quality collectibles that go for 10% of issue price on fleabay.

  6. What if, like those chinese characters tatoos that means “soup” or worse, the record source was switched by mistake and it’s a comercial, or a blank message, or worse?

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