Year: 2019

A Nexus 5 Smartphone Running PostmarketOS

PostmarketOS Turns 600 Days Old

January 17, 2019 by 18 Comments

PostmarketOS began work on a real Linux distribution for Android phones just over 600 days ago. They recently blogged about the state of the project and ensured us that the project is definitely not dead.

PostmarketOS’ overarching goal remains a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones. We previously covered the project on Hackaday to give an introduction. Today, we’ll concern ourselves with the progress the PostmarketOS team has made.

The team admits that they’re stuck in the proof-of-concept phase, and need to break out of it. This has required foundational changes to the operating system to enable development across a wide variety of devices and processor architectures. There’s now a binary package repository powered by builds.sr.ht which will allow users to install packages for their specific device.

Other updates include fixing support for the Nexus 5 and Raspberry Pi Zero, creating support for open source hardware devices including the Pine A64-LTS and Purism Librem 5. PostmarketOS now boots on a total of 112 different devices.

We’re excited to see the PostmarketOS project making progress. With the widespread move to mobile devices, users lose control over their computing devices. PostmarketOS gives us the ability to run code that we can read and modify on these devices. It’s no small feat though. Supporting the wide variety of custom hardware in mobile devices requires a lot of effort.

While it may be a while before PostmarketOS is your daily driver, the project is well suited to building task-specific devices that require connectivity, a touch screen, and a battery. We bet a lot of Hackaday readers have a junk drawer phone that could become a project with the help of PostmarketOS.

Breakfast Bot Does Eggs To Perfection

January 16, 2019 by 13 Comments

Breakfast is a meal fraught with paradoxes. It’s important to start the day with a hearty meal full of energy and nutrition, but it’s also difficult to cook when you’re still bleary-eyed and half asleep. As with many problems in life, automation is the answer. [James Bruton] has the rig that will boil your egg and get your day off to a good start.

The basic apparatus uses a thermostatically controlled hotplate to heat a pot of water. [James] then employs an encoder-controlled linear actuator from a previous project to raise and lower a mesh colander into the pot, carrying the egg. An Arduino is used to measure the water temperature, only beginning the cooking process once the temperature is over 90 degrees Celsius. At this point, a 6-minute timer starts, with the egg being removed from the water and dumped out by a servo-controlled twist mechanism.

Future work will include servo control of the hotplate’s knob and building a chute to catch the egg to further reduce the need for human intervention. While there’s some danger in having an automated hotplate on in the house, this could be synchronized with an RTC to ensure your boiled egg is ready on time, every day.

Breakfast machines are a grand tradition around these parts, and we’ve seen a few in our time. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

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RSA Encryption Cracked Easily (Sometimes)

January 16, 2019 by 32 Comments

A large chunk of the global economy now rests on public key cryptography. We generally agree that with long enough keys, it is infeasible to crack things encoded that way. Until such time as it isn’t, that is. Researchers published a paper a few years ago where they cracked a large number of keys in a very short amount of time. It doesn’t work on any key, as you’ll see in a bit, but here’s the interesting part: they used an undescribed algorithm to crack the codes in a very short amount of time on a single-core computer. This piqued [William Kuszmaul’s] interest and he found some follow up papers that revealed the algorithms in question. You can read his analysis, and decide for yourself how badly this compromises common algorithms.

The basis for public key cryptography is that you multiply two large prime numbers to form a product and post it publicly. Because it is computationally difficult to find prime factors of large numbers, this is reasonably secure because it is difficult to find those prime numbers that are selected randomly.

However, the random selection leads to an unusual attack. Public keys, by their very nature, are available all over the Internet. Most of them were generated with the same algorithm and random number generation isn’t actually totally random. That means some keys share prime factors and finding a common factor between two numbers isn’t nearly as difficult.

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The Embroidered Computer

January 16, 2019 by 5 Comments

By now we’ve all seen ways to manufacture your own PCBs. There are board shops who will do small orders for one-off projects, or you can try something like the toner transfer method if you want to get really adventurous. One thing we haven’t seen is a circuit board that’s stitched together, but that’s exactly what a group of people at a Vienna arts exhibition have done.

The circuit is stitched together on a sheet of fabric using traditional gold embroidery methods for the threads, which function as the circuit’s wires. The relays are made out of magnetic beads, and the entire circuit functions as a fully programmable, although relatively rudimentary, computer. Logic operations are possible, and a functional schematic of the circuit is also provided. Visitors to the expo can program the circuit and see it in operation in real-time.

While this circuit gives new meaning to the term “wearables”, it wasn’t intended to be worn although we can’t see why something like this couldn’t be made into a functional piece of clothing. The main goal was to explore some historic techniques of this type of embroidery, and explore the relationship we have with the technology that’s all around us. To that end, there have been plenty of other pieces of functional technology used as art recently as well, but of course this isn’t the first textile computing element to grace these pages.

Thanks to [Thinkerer] for the tip!

 

This Monowheel Is Bright Orange, And We Want One

January 16, 2019 by 24 Comments

Monowheels are a singular form of transport. Like electric scooters and the Segway, they are remarkably impractical for getting from point A to point B, are expensive to build or buy, and make you look faintly silly as you ride them down the street. However, we’d be hard pressed to find a member of the Hackaday team that wouldn’t at least want a go on one for half an hour. [MakeItExtreme] felt the same way, and built one of their own.

The build starts with a tube bender, used to form 40mm tubing into a continuous circle to form the main wheel. Teflon is then turned to produce several rollers that interface the main wheel to the inner frame. Several small motorbike tyres were cut apart to create the tread to provide some decent grip. Power comes courtesy of a 110cc four stroke engine, allowing this thing to go just fast enough to get the rider seriously injured in the event of an accident. The team reports stability is poor at low speed, but remarkably good once above 30 km/h.

The team did a great job, and we particularly enjoy the bright orange paint scheme and fetching decals that really finish it off well. The monowheel concept is remarkably similar to the diwheel, which we’ve seen applied to old Fords with somewhat terrifying results. Video after the break.

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Brush With The Power Of 3D Printing

January 16, 2019 by 23 Comments

When it comes to 3D printing, functional prints are still few and far between. Sure, you can print a mount for anything, a Raspberry Pi case, but there are few prints out there that are truly useful, and even fewer that are useful while taking advantage of the specific capabilities of a 3D printer.

The Bouldering Brush from Turbo SunShine turns this observation on its head. It’s a useful device for getting the grime, sand, and sweat out of handholds while rock climbing, and it’s entirely 3D printed using manufacturing techniques only 3D printers can do.

If you’re thinking you’ve seen something like this technique before, you’re correct. The Hairy Lion from [_primoz_] on Thingiverse used a fine mesh of bridging to create small fibers of filament emanating from the mane of a lion. While it’s not a gender-neutral print, this is one of the first objects to make it to Thingiverse that truly showcased the sculptural element of many thin fibers of 3D printed filament. With this Bouldering Brush, these fibers become much more useful and even functional. It’s still a great technique, and if you can get your printer set up correctly and the settings correct, this is an awesome print that will easily demonstrate the capabilities of your printer.

Like the Hairy Lion, the Bouldering Brush is two handles that are mostly solid, and fine filaments of extruded plastic connecting these handles. Take the completed print off the bed , cut down the middle of the bristles, and you have a functional, completely 3D printed brush. Just don’t brush your teeth with it.

Plastics: Acrylic

January 16, 2019 by 32 Comments

If anything ends up on the beds of hobbyist-grade laser cutters more often than birch plywood, it’s probably sheets of acrylic. There’s something strangely satisfying about watching a laser beam trace over a sheet of the crystal-clear stuff, vaporizing a hairs-breadth line while it goes, and (hopefully) leaving a flame-polished cut in its wake.

Acrylic, more properly known as poly(methyl methacrylate) or PMMA, is a wonder material that helped win a war before being developed for peacetime use. It has some interesting chemistry and properties that position it well for use in the home shop as everything from simple enclosures to laser-cut parts like gears and sprockets.

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