Single Molecule Detects Light

June 23, 2016 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Everything is getting smaller all the time. Computers used to take rooms, then desks, and now they fit in your pocket or on your wrist. Researchers that investigate light sensors have known that individual diarylethene molecules can exist in two states: one where it conducts electricity and one where it doesn’t. A visible photon causes the molecule to be electrically open and ultraviolet causes it to close. But there’s a problem.

Placing electrodes on the molecule interferes with the process. Depending on the kind of electrode, the switch will get stuck in the on or off position. Researchers at Peking University in Beijing determined that placing some buffering material between the molecule and the electrodes would reduce the interference enough to maintain correct operation. What’s more the switches remain operable for a year, which is unusually long for this kind of construct.

Using chemical vapor deposition and electron beam lithography, the team produced over 40 working single molecule switches. These devices could be useful in optical computing and other applications. Future work will include developing multilevel switches comprised of multiple molecules.

If you want something more macroscopic, you might try using an LED to sense light. A switch is fine, but sometimes you want to generate a signal.

Books You Should Read: The Car Hacker’s Handbook

June 23, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 44 Comments

I just had my car in for an inspection and an oil change. The garage I take my car to is generally okay, they’re more honest than a stealership, but they don’t cross all their t’s and dot all their lowercase j’s. A few days after I picked up my car, low and behold, I noticed the garage didn’t do a complete oil change. The oil life indicator wasn’t reset, which means every time I turn my car on, I’ll have to press a button to clear an ominous glowing warning on my dash.

For my car, resetting the oil life indicator is a simple fix – I just need to push the button on the dash until the oil life indicator starts to blink, release, then hold it again for ten seconds. I’m at least partially competent when it comes to tech and embedded systems, but even for me, resetting the oil life sensor in my car is a bit obtuse. For the majority of the population, I can easily see this being a reason to take a car back to the shop; the mechanic either didn’t know how to do it, or didn’t know how to use Google.

The two most technically complex things I own are my car and my computer, and there is much more information available on how to fix or modify any part of my computer. If I had a desire to modify my car so I could read the value of the tire pressure monitors, instead of only being notified when one of them is too low, there’s nowhere for me to turn.

2015 was the year of car hacks, ranging from hacking ECUs to pass California emissions control standards, Google and Tesla’s self-driving cars, to hacking infotainment systems to drive reporters off the road. The lessons learned from these hacks are a hodge-podge of forum threads, conference talks, and articles scattered around the web. While you’ll never find a single volume filled with how to exploit the computers in every make and model of automobile, there is space for a reference guide on how to go about this sort of car hacking.

I was given the opportunity to review The Car Hacker’s Handbook by Craig Smith (259p, No Starch Press). Is it a guide on how to plug a dongle into my car and clear the oil life monitor the hard way? No, but you wouldn’t want that anyway. Instead, it’s a much more informative tome on penetration testing and reverse engineering, using cars as the backdrop, not the focus.

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150,000 Members Strong, Hackaday.io Flies Past Another Milestone

June 23, 2016 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

We’re growing so fast that soon your mom will be on Hackaday.io. That’s fine, everyone who loves hardware is welcome. 150,000 members have made Hackaday.io a home for their creativity — looking for inspiration in the work of others, sharing successes and temporary failures, and building their dream team to take on amazing new challenges. There is no place in the world that can come close to matching the Open Hardware ecosystem that is Hackaday.io.

What is in that one number, 150k? It is a monumental chunk of a much bigger picture: the thriving Hackaday ecosystem that spans from staking down your own workshop full of projects and skills, to following the editorial pulse of hardware used in new and creative ways. Looking over the last twelve months on all of the Hackaday sites we’ve seen about 18.5 Million visitors and registered nearly 85 Million views. Hackaday is not a passive community. We all have an insatiable hunger to delve into the next big trick, and to celebrate the accomplishments that made it happen.

Want to find a new and unique way to use the tech you find most interesting? Your leap forward needs input to pollinate the idea. Hackaday has a critical mass of hackers, designers, and engineers waiting with excitement to hear and help out in exploring and expanding the frontier. These interaction are what has packed Hackaday.io with interesting people. Most would say: I came for a specific hack or to see what a particular hacker was up to, but then I felt at home and decided to stick around and share what I’ve spent way to much time doing (but I wouldn’t have it any other way).

As we continue to knock down one membership milestone after another I want to thank you all for being involved, for valuing the free and open sharing of information and ideas, and for sharing your own time and talent. You are what moves this community of hardware hackers to dizzying heights of excellence and awesome.

This is all too good to be a secret. Talk to your hardware-loving friends, colleagues, family, and acquaintances and invite them to Hackaday.io if they’re not already with us.

Build A Shapeoko The Hard Way

June 23, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 8 Comments

[Caleb Peters] looked at the Shapeoko 3 CNC kit, a kit designed to make building an entry level CNC router a possibility for anyone, a kit to take the guesswork out of the equation, a kit that removes all those difficult technical barriers. He looked at all of that ease and thought, “nah.” He wanted to learn! So he decided to build one the hard way. Like the early American Pioneers, he’d build his Shapeoko from scratch, suffering piously all the while.

His goal was to build an improved iteration of the Shapeoko 3, for less than the price of the kit. The first problem was the rails the gantry would run on. Inventables wasn’t going to sell him the rails, and he wasn’t sure if the delrin wheels used would be able to hold the weight of his heavier design. After some strife he determined that aluminum hard coat rails and steel wheels should last long enough, and if the aluminum wore away, the more expensive steel rails were a drop-in replacement.

Similar problems were overcome at each step. He couldn’t exactly copy the Shapeoko design. The Shapeoko’s steel pieces can only be made on a larger machine like a waterjet or industrial laser. He did have a knee mill and managed to cleverly avoid the need with some slight redesign. He kept at it, doing cool things like drilling a hole through the housing of a wood router, used as the spindle, and putting a hall-effect sensor just behind the commutator and brush assembly to get a spindle rpm reading.

Fortunately for us, he documented it all very well and filmed a nine part video series; the last of which you can see after the break.

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A Robot In A Day

June 23, 2016 by James Hobson 5 Comments

While building a robot (nearly) from scratch isn’t easy, it needn’t be a lengthy process. Is it possible to build a bot in a single day? With some musical motivation (a 10 hour loop of the A-Team theme song), [Tyler Bletsch] answers with a resounding ‘yes’ in the shape of his little yellow robot that he built for a local robotics competition.

Designing and fabricating on the fly, [Bletsch] used Sketchup to design the chassis, and OpenSCAD to model the wheels while the former was being 3D printed. Anticipating some structural weakness, he designed another version that could bolt to wood if the original failed, but the addition of some metal support rods provided enough stability. Mouse pad material gave the wheels ample traction. An Arduino with the L298 control module receives input via an HC-06 Bluetooth board. Eight AA batteries provide 12V of power to two Nextrox mini 12V motors with an integrated voltmeter to measure battery life.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Reverse GPS

June 22, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

Every time you watch a SpaceX livestream to see a roaring success or fireball on a barge (pick your poison), you probably see a few cubesats go up. Everytime you watch a Soyuz launch that is inexplicably on liveleak.com before anywhere else, you’re seeing a few cubesats go up. There are now hundreds of these 10 cm satellites in orbit, and SatNogs, the winner of the Hackaday Prize a two years ago, gives all these cubesats a global network of ground stations.

There is one significant problem with a global network of satellite tracking ground stations: you need to know the orbit of all these cubesats. This, as with all Low Earth Orbit deployments that do not have thrusters and rarely have attitude control, is a problem. These cubesats are tumbling through the rarefied atmosphere, leading to orbits that are unpredictable over several months.

[hornig] is working on a solution to the problem of tracking hundreds of cubesats that is, simply, reverse GPS. Instead of using multiple satellites to determine a position on Earth, this system is using multiple receiving stations on Earth’s surface to determine the orbit of a satellite.

The hardware for [hornig]’s Distributed Ground Station Network is as simple as you would expect. It’s just an RTL-SDR TV tuner USB dongle, a few antennas, a GPS receiver, and a Raspberry Pi connected to the Internet. This device needs to be simple; unlike SatNogs, where single base station in the middle of nowhere can still receive data from cubesats, this system needs multiple receivers all within the view of a satellite.

The modern system of GPS satellites is one of the greatest technological achievements of all time. Not only did the US need to put highly accurate clocks in orbit, the designers of the system needed to take into account relativistic effects. Doing GPS in reverse – determining the orbit of satellites on the ground – is likewise a very impressive project, and something that is certainly a contender for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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Cheating At Video Games: Arduino Edition

June 22, 2016 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

[Javier] has put in his time playing Final Fantasy X. In the game, there’s a challenge where you have to dodge 200 consecutive lightning strikes by pressing a button at just the right time. [Javier] did this once, but when he bought a new PS Vita handheld, he wanted the reward but couldn’t bear the drudgery of pressing X when the screen lights up 200 times.

So he did what anyone would do: hooked up a light-dependent resistor to an Arduino and rubber-banded a servo to press the X button for him. It’s a simple circuit and a beautiful quick hack, all the more so because it probably only took him a half hour or so to whip up. And that’s a half hour better spent than dodging lightning strikes. According to his screen-shot, he didn’t stop at 200 dodges, though. He racked up 1,568 dodges, with a longest streak of 1,066. You can watch a video on his blog and pull the code out of his GitHub.

Why do this? Because that’s what simple computers are for. We hate these silly jumping mini-games with a passion, so we applaud anyone who cheats their way around them. And while not as hilarious as this machine that cheats at Piano Tiles, [Javier]’s hack gets the job done. What other epic video game cheats are we missing?