Day: April 1, 2022

3D Printing A Guitar Neck

April 1, 2022 by 11 Comments

A lot of first-time guitar builders focus on making the body and skip the neck, which has lots of tricky dimensions to get right to if you want a nicely playable instrument. However, [Jón Schone] of Proper Printing wanted to start with the hard part on his guitar building journey, and set about 3D printing a guitar neck in one piece.

Designing a neck might sound difficult on the surface of it, but the Marz Guitar Designer plugin for FreeCAD helps make whipping one up a cinch. Once imported into Fusion 360, the geometry is tweaked for 3D printing, particularly to fit the truss rod inside. Printed on a Creality CF30 belt printer (which interestingly enough, has been mounted to the wall) in green PLA, the resulting neck can be spotted as a non-traditional design from a mile away. With a truss rod hammered in, frets installed, and hardware attached, it’s mounted up to a cheap kit guitar for testing.

The printed neck works, and it’s given a proper shakedown with some appropriate riffs to put it through its paces. It’s reportedly a bit on the flexible side, but remains playable and is surprisingly normal in its performance. [Jón] now plans to continue the project by 3D printing the rest of the guitar.

Meanwhile, if you’re sick of tuning your own guitar, consider building a robot tuner to help out. Video after the break.

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This Week In Security: More State-Sponsored Activity, Spring4Shell

April 1, 2022 by 4 Comments

[Editor’s note: There is a second, fake iteration of this column out today. This is obviously the real column.]

An alert from CISA, combined with an unsealed pair of indictments, sheds some new light on how Russian hackers pursue high-value targets. The key malware here is Triton, essentially a rootkit designed for the Tricon safety systems, widely deployed at refineries and other infrastructure facilities. One of the early deployments of this was to a Saudi oil plant in 2017. This deployment seems to have been botched, as it caused malfunctions and shut the plant down for about a week.

The new information is confirmation that the same operators, out of the “Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics”, attempted to target US facilities with the same campaign. The Wired coverage initially struck me as odd, as it detailed how these Russian attackers researched US refineries, looking for the most promising targets. How exactly did US intelligence agencies know about the research habits of agents in Russia? The details of the indictment has the answer: They were researching US refineries by downloading papers from the US Department of Energy. As the IP addresses of this Russian research group is known and tracked, it was easy enough for US agencies to make the connection.

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This WeeΚ In Security: Hackerman, Twitter’s Best, And Signs To Watch Out For

April 1, 2022 by 6 Comments

[Editor’s note: There is a second, fake iteration of this column out today. This is obviously the real column.]

First off, there’s an amazing video tutorial from [Hackerman], embedded below the break. It’s a beginners guide to temporal displacement through GPU accelerated, cellular-connected partition board. The central flaw that makes this possible is a segmentation violation, accessible through a mode 6 cursor address reset. Watch out, though, because many mainframes actually have a core terminal capable of shutting such an attempt out of the grid altogether.

It’s a great guide, and definitely worth a watch if temporal security tickles your fancy. Watch out, though, because everyday objects can apparently act as bridges, infecting even users with temporal effects.

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An M-Core module plugged into its devboard. Around it are Ethernet, HDMI, Type-C, two USB-A ports, one MicroSD card socket and one unpopulated footprint for a WiFi module

MangoPi To Bring A SD-Card-Sized Linux Module

April 1, 2022 by 14 Comments

Today’s Diminutive Device is a small castellated System-On-Module (Twitter link, nitter proxy) from [MangoPi] called M-Core, with a quad-core A53 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. As such, it’s very capable of running Linux, and even sports an HDMI output! Taking a closer look at the devboard picture, we can spot traces for three USB 2.0 ports, what seems to be two SDIO interfaces for MicroSD or WiFi cards, and an Ethernet MagJack with its termination network. This is a decent set of interfaces, rivaling what we’d expect out of a Pi Zero!

More importantly, this module is as small as an SD card itself – or as an OLED display that we hobbyists sprinkle onto our projects. Having power of Linux in such a small footprint is certainly something to behold! The back of the module is mostly flat, save for a few decoupling capacitors on the other side of the CPU – it seems, an Allwinner H616. On top of it, we can see the CPU itself, a small buck regulator and a DDR3 RAM chip, as well as tightly-packed passives. There’s even an unpopulated footprint for a DFN8 QSPI flash chip – with a lightweight enough OS build, you could perhaps dedicate your MicroSD card to storage only.

The devboard for uses the “FlexyPins”-like connectivity technique we’ve covered recently, and [MangoPi] say they bought those pins on TaoBao. We can’t help but be a bit amused at the thought of putting HDMI through such connections, but it seems to work well enough! Castellated modules like these are relatively easy to work with, so it shouldn’t be hard to literally pop this module out of the devboard and figuratively pop it onto your PCB. Next step is, reportedly, porting Armbian to this board, likely solving quite a few software support hurdles.

MangoPi have been posting updates on their Twitter page over the last few weeks, and, as it comes with the format, a lot of questions are left unanswered. Why does the devboard only show a single linear regulator of the kind we typically expect to deliver 1 A at most? Will we get higher-RAM versions? What’s the price going to look like? Will this module ever get to market? We can only hope, but if it does indeed, we are sure to see a few projects with these, whether it’s smart glasses, smart displays, phones, handhelds or malicious wall chargers. As usual, community makes or breaks an SBC, and we shall watch this one closely.

We thank [WifiCable] and [DjBiohazard] for sharing this with us!

The Tracer board strapped to the frame of a bicycle with a red Velcro strap

Tracer, A Platform For All Things Movement Logging

April 1, 2022 by 2 Comments

[elektroThing] is building a lightweight, battery-powered board to track and measure movement of all kinds, called Tracer. Powered by an ESP32, it has a LSM6DSL 6DoF accelerometer & gyroscope sensor, and a VL53L0X Time-of-Flight sensor. A small Li-ion battery in a holder reportedly provides for 5 hours of streaming data over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) at 100 Hz. It’s essentially a wireless movement sensor platform to be paired with a more powerful computer for data logging and analysis. What’s such a platform good for?

They show it attached to a tennis racket, saying you could use the data to, for a start, count the strokes done in a given match. They’ve also strapped it to a bicycle’s crankshaft and used it as a cadence sensor – good for gauging your cycling efficiency! But of course, this can be used in more applications than sport. A device like this could be used for logging movement of any relatively nearby objects, be it your cat, an office chair, or a door someone might slam a bit too hard at times. Say, you wanted to develop a sleep tracker and were to collect some data for defining your algorithms and planning your hardware requirements – this would work wonders.

There’s already available example code for streaming data into the Phyphox data logging and graphing app, as well as schematics – hopefully, the full board files will be available soon. A worthy open-source opponent to commercial devices available for similar purposes, this platform is good news for any hacker that wants to do motion measurement projects without reinventing quite a few wheels at once. We are told this board might get to CrowdSupply soon, and we can’t wait! Platforms like these, if done well, can grow an offspring of new projects for us to have fun with, and our paid projects get all that much easier to work on.

We’ve shown projects with such sensors before – here’s one that helps your rifle aim by giving you data to debug your last-second rifle movements, and another that logs movement data from inside a football. There’s a million endpoints you could stream your data into, and we are told you could even use Google Sheets. Just a year ago, we held our Data Logging contest and the entries we received will surely point out quite a few under-explored areas in your daily life!