Day: September 15, 2020

GitHub’s Move Away From Passwords: A Sign Of Things To Come?

September 15, 2020 by 69 Comments

Later this month, people who use GitHub may find themselves suddenly getting an error message while trying to authenticate against the GitHub API or perform actions on a GitHub repository with a username and password. The reason for this is the removal of this authentication option by GitHub, with a few ‘brown-out’ periods involving the rejection of passwords to give people warning of this fact.

This change was originally announced by GitHub in November of 2019, had a deprecation timeline assigned in February of 2020 and another blog update in July repeating the information. As noted there, only GitHub Enterprise Server remains unaffected for now. For everyone else, as of November 13th, 2020, in order to use GitHub services, the use of an OAuth token, personal token or SSH key is required.

While this is likely to affect a fair number of people who are using GitHub’s REST API and repositories, perhaps the more interesting question here is whether this is merely the beginning of a larger transformation away from username and password logins in services.

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A Tentacle That’s A Work Of Art

September 15, 2020 by 8 Comments

We all bring our own areas of expertise to our work when we build the projects that find their way in front of Hackaday writers, for instance a software developer brings clever brains to their microcontroller, or an electronic engineer might bring a well-designed piece of circuitry. [Yvo de Haas] is a mechanical engineer, and it’s pretty clear from his animatronic tentacle that he has used his expertise in that field to great effect.

If you think it looks familiar then some readers may recall that we saw a prototype model back in February at Hacker Hotel 2020. In those last weeks before the pandemic hit us with lockdowns and cancellations he’d assembled a very worthy proof of concept, and from what we can see from his write-up and the video below he’s used all the COVID time to great effect in the finished product. Back in February the control came via a pair of joysticks, we’re particularly interested to see his current use of a mini tentacle as a controller.

At its heart is a linkage of 3D-printed anti-parallelograms linked by gears, with cables holding the tension and controlling the movement of the tentacle from a set of winches. The design process is detailed from the start and makes a fascinating read, and with its gripper on the end we can’t wait for an event that goes ahead without cancellation at which we can see the tentacle for real.

If you’d like to see more of [Yvo]’s work, maybe you remember his wearable and functioning Pip-Boy, and his working Portal turret.

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Let This Crying Detecting Classifier Offer Some Much Needed Reprieve

September 15, 2020 by 45 Comments

Baby monitors are cool, but [Ish Ot Jr.] wanted his to only transmit sounds that required immediate attention and filter any non-emergency background noise. Posed with this problem, he made a baby monitor that would only send alerts when his baby was crying.

For his project, [Ish] used an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense due to its built-in microphone, sizeable RAM for storing large chunks of data, and it’s BLE capabilities for later connecting with an app. He began his project by collecting background noise using Edge Impulse Studio’s data acquisition functionality. [Ish] really emphasized that Edge Impulse was really doing all the work for him. He really just needed to collect some test data and that was mostly it on his part. The work needed to run and test the Neural Network was taken care of by Edge Impulse. Sounds handy, if you don’t mind offloading your data to the cloud.

[Ish] ended up with an 86.3% accurate classifier which he thought was good enough for a first pass at things. To make his prototype a bit more “finished”, he added some status LEDs, providing some immediate visual feedback of his classifier and to notify the caregiver. Eventually, he wants to add some BLE support and push notifications, alerting him whenever his baby needs attention.

We’ve seen a couple of baby monitor projects on Hackaday over the years. [Ish’s] project will most certainly be a nice addition to the list.