Day: December 10, 2021

DIY Analog Synth Looks Like Fun

December 10, 2021 by 11 Comments

The relative ease of building the individual components that make up an analog synth make it very tempting to DIY your own. That’s what [Albert Nyström] did and the result is this great looking, and great sounding, analog synth.

The VCOs in his monosynth are based around the AS3340 VCO chip, which is a clone of the Curtis Electromusic Specialties‘ CEM3340 chip (used in machines such as the Oberheim OB-Xa, the Roland Jupiter-6, and the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 among others.) The voltage controlled filters are based on Moritz Klein’s VACTROL based VCF circuits, and the envelopes based on Thomas Henry’s 555 envelope circuits (Google searches will dig those up pretty quickly, as well as schematics for builds using the CEM chip.) Finally, the keyboard is a donor from an Arturia Keystep. While there are no step-by-step build instructions, or a schematic, we do have some info about the instrument. As you can see from some of the gut shots, it should be fairly easy to figure how [Albert] has put everything together. Or not.

Even if the internals are a bit wild, the end result is a great looking monophonic synth that does pretty much everything you’d need. If you feel the itch to wire a bunch of components together and make one yourself, there are messier ways to go about it. Or maybe you’d prefer to go the digital route? Either way, synths are a ton of fun to build and to play.

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This Week In Security: Printing Shellz, Ms-officecmd, And AI Security

December 10, 2021 by 18 Comments

Researchers at f-secure have developed an impressive new attack, leveraging HP printers as an unexpected attack surface. Printing Shellz (PDF) is a one-click attack, where simply visiting a malicious webpage is enough to get a shell and reverse proxy installed to a printer on the same network. The demo below uses a cross-site printing (XSP) attack to send the malicious print job to the printer without any further interactions.
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Digital Painting On An IPad With Real Brushes

December 10, 2021 by 8 Comments

Drawing tablets are a great way to make digital art, and iPads and other tablets are similarly popular in this area. However, they all typically involve using some sort of special stylus for input. [Richard Greene] developed another method, with Light Strokes for the iPad letting one “paint” with real paint brushes instead!

The system uses a Fresnel prism in view of the iPad’s camera. This allows the camera to see only the parts of a paint brush, sponge, or other implement, as they make contact with the surface of the prism itself. This is via the principle known as total internal reflection.

Thus, simply wetting a paintbrush, sponge, or even a finger, allows one to paint quite authentically on the surface of the prism. The corresponding Light Strokes app on the iPad turns this into the pretty pixels of your creation. The app also allows one to experiment with all manner of fancy brush effects, too.

The build requires some finesse, with the lamination of the special Fresnel film onto glass using liquid optically clear adhesive, or LOCA. A series of mirrors are then assembled in an enclosure, allowing the iPad to be mounted with the camera having a good view of the glass painting area.

The project takes advantage of a simple physical effect in order to create a great artistic tool. Alternatively, if you prefer to draw directly, consider whipping up your own screen-based drawing tablet. Video after the break.

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3D Printing Delivers “Glass” Eyes In Record Time

December 10, 2021 by 13 Comments

Obviously, losing an eye would be bad for your vision. But if you think about it, it is also a detriment to your appearance. You might not need a prosthetic eye, and you can certainly rock an eye patch, but a lot of people with this problem get an artificial or “glass” eye. These glass eyes are hand-painted disks that fit into the eye socket. However, a British man now has a new kind of eye prosthesis that is 3D printed, a technology that can potentially cut waiting time for patients in half.

The existing process is lengthy because it requires taking a mold of the eye socket and manually matching the remaining eye with the new artificial eye. With the 3D printed technology, scans of the eye socket and the other eye make this process much simpler.

Moorfields Eye Hospital, the source of the eye, says that a conventional eye takes about six weeks, but the new ones take no more than three weeks. The patient only needs to spend about a half-hour doing the scans before the wait starts. We presume it can be made for less cost, as well.

Medicine is embracing 3D printing and we’ve seen a 3D ear. We are waiting for our personal exoskeleton. Some of the medical 3D printing we’ve seen is for the birds.