Day: July 9, 2021

Eliminate Vertical Stabiliser With ArduPlane

July 9, 2021 by 5 Comments

Flying wings are popular options for fixed-wing FPV flying, but they have one rather annoying characteristic: yaw wag. The flying wing will wobble on the yaw axis while flying, and this side-to-side movement is visible on the pilot’s FPV video feed. With a combination of split rudders and ArduPilot, [Think Flight] eliminated wing wag without using any vertical stabilizers.

Yaw wag usually occurs on flying wings that use a pair of small winglets instead of a large vertical stabilizer on the centerline. Split rudders, also known as differential spoilers, can be used for active yaw control by increasing drag on either wing independently. However, this requires very rapid corrections that are very difficult to do manually, so this is where ArduPilot comes in. [Think Flight] used its yaw dampening feature in combination with differential spoilers to completely eliminate vertical stabilizers and yaw wag. This is the same technique used on the B-2 stealth bomber to avoid radar reflecting vertical stabilizers. [Think Flight] also used these clamshells spoilers as elevons.

Using XFLR5 airfoil analysis software, [Think Flight] designed built a pair of flying wings to use these features. The first was successful in eliminating yaw wag, but exhibited some instability on the roll axis. After taking a closer look at the design with XFLR5, he found air it predicted that airflow would separate from the bottom surface of the wing at low angles of attack. After fixing this issue, he built a V2 to closely match the looks of the B2 bomber. Both aircraft were cut from EPP foam with an interesting-looking CNC hot wire cutter and laminated with Kevlar for strength. Continue reading “Eliminate Vertical Stabiliser With ArduPlane” →

This Week In Security: Print Nightmare Continues, Ransomware Goes Bigger, And ATM Jackpots!

July 9, 2021 by 29 Comments

For the second time, Microsoft has attempted and failed to patch the PrintNightmare vulnerability. Tracked initially as CVE-2021-1675, and the second RCE as CVE-2021-34527. We warned you about this last week, but a few more details are available now. The original reporter, [Yunhai Zhang] confirms our suspicions, stating on Twitter that “it seems that they just test with the test case in my report”.

Microsoft has now shipped an out-of-band patch to address the problem, with the caveat that it’s known not to be a perfect fix, but should eliminate the RCE element of the vulnerability. Except … if the server in question has the point and print feature installed, it’s probably still vulnerable. And to make it even more interesting, Microsoft says they have already seen this vulnerability getting exploited in the wild. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Print Nightmare Continues, Ransomware Goes Bigger, And ATM Jackpots!” →

10 Gigabit Ethernet For The Pi

July 9, 2021 by 31 Comments

When people like Bell and Marconi invented telephones and radios, you have to wonder who they talked to for testing. After all, they had the first device. [Jeff] had a similar problem. He got a 10 gigabit network card working with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. But he didn’t have any other fast devices to talk to. Simple, right? Just get a router and another network card. [Jeff] thought so too, but as you can see in the video below, it wasn’t quite that easy.

Granted, some — but not all — of the hold-ups were self-inflicted. For example, doing some metalwork to get some gear put in a 19-inch rack. However, some of the problems were unavoidable, such as the router that has 10 Gbps ports, but not enough throughput to actually move traffic at that speed. Recabling was also a big task.

Continue reading “10 Gigabit Ethernet For The Pi” →

Zooming Through The Mandelbrot Set On An Atari

July 9, 2021 by 4 Comments

The Mandelbrot set, according to Wikipedia, is “the set of complex numbers c for which the function f_{c}(z)=z^{2}+c does not diverge.” Even if you don’t understand the mathematics behind it, you’ve likely seen the complicated fractal images generated by zooming in on the border of the Mandelbrot set. [Scott Williamson] not only got this set rendering on an Atari, but managed to create animated videos of the results. 

Emulators were key to the project’s success.

Doing the work was no mean feat. While it takes just 10 lines of Atari BASIC to render the set on an Atari 800, getting the animations made and into a modern video format took much effort. [Scott] used the Atari800Win-PLus emulator to zoom in on a variety of locations on the fractal curve and recorded the results over a weekend.

However, compositing the various frames into smooth-scrolling videos took more effort, with a Python script and ffmpeg required to stitch everything together into the results you see on YouTube. The final videos were combined with Atari chiptune music from [Adam Sporka] to help round out the presentation.

The result is reminiscent of an old-school demo, even if everything here was assembled slowly on modern computers from the raw Atari output. We’ve seen other great Mandelbrot feats before, too, like this real-time explorer built on an FPGA. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Zooming Through The Mandelbrot Set On An Atari” →