GhostSCAD: Marrying OpenSCAD And Golang

February 12, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 18 Comments

It’s been at least a couple of months since we’ve seen a different 3D modeling language project, so here’s [Lukasz Janyst] with GhostSCAD: a take on creating OpenSCAD models, using the Go language as the front end, bringing all the delights this modern modular language has to offer (and a few of its own idiosyncrasies.) As [Lukasz] says in the blog, from a programmer’s viewpoint, openSCAD has a number of failings that make it not necessarily hard, just kinda annoying to work with, due to the way the geometry tree works. The OpenSCAD way of working ends up with the programmer requiring knowledge of the internal workings of sub-modules, in order to work at the top level (assembly) which is not an ideal situation from a code reuse perspective.

A programmer would describe this problem as “abstraction leakage” and it doesn’t make modular, reusable coding easy to do without a lot of extra work. [Lukasz] says regarding the example GhostSCAD project, that some parts were modeled in a way that knowledge was needed of some mounting points of sub-modules, but those sub-modules had no way to expose this information to the outside world. GhostSCAD enables the programmer to define parts that expose specific parameters to the world that can be queried, for example, to produce a joining part, or an exploded assembly diagram. These properties can be interpreted without the querying module having any knowledge of the internal structure of the thing it’s working with. GhostSCAD provides a Java3D-like API for defining the geometry tree, which may be familiar to some.

Continue reading “GhostSCAD: Marrying OpenSCAD And Golang” →

This CRT-Style Pi Portable Gets All The Details Right

February 12, 2023 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

A quick glance at the “Pi Terminal” built by [Salim Benbouziyane], and you might think he pulled an old CRT monitor out of a video editing bay and gutted it. Which, of course, is the point. But what you’re actually looking at is a completely new construction, featuring a fully 3D printed enclosure, a clever PCB control panel, and some very slick internal engineering.

[Salim] started the design by recreating the principle components of the build, namely the 8 inch 4:3 IPS LCD panel and Raspberry Pi 4, digitally in CAD. This let him design the enclosure around the parts, rather than trying to cram everything in after the fact. After printing the case, which clearly took considerable inspiration from broadcast video monitors of the early 2000s, he then painstakingly post-processed the parts using tips and techniques picked up from prop builders. To really finish things off, he designed his control panel as a PCB so he could have it professionally fabricated, and used heat set inserts to hold everything tight. Continue reading “This CRT-Style Pi Portable Gets All The Details Right” →

Hackaday Links: February 12, 2023

February 12, 2023 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

So, maybe right now isn’t the best time to get into the high-altitude ballooning hobby? At least in the US, which with the downing of another — whatever? — over Alaska, seems to have taken a “Sidewinders first, threat identification later” approach to anything that floats by. The latest incident involved an aircraft of unknown type, described as “the size of a small car” — there’s that units problem again — that was operating over Prudhoe Bay off the northern coast of Alaska. The reason that was given for this one earning a Sidewinder was that it was operating much lower than the balloon from last week, only about 40,000 feet, which is well within the ceiling of commercial aviation. It was also over sea ice at the time of the shootdown, making the chance of bothering anyone besides a polar bear unlikely. We’re not taking any political position on this whole thing, but there certainly are engineering and technical aspects of these shootdowns that are pretty interesting, as well as the aforementioned potential for liability if your HAB goes astray. Nobody ever really benefits from having an international incident on their resume, after all.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 12, 2023” →

Picture of a DualShock 4 controller PCB, with two joysticks on the sides

Challenging A Broken DualShock 4 Controller To A Duel

February 12, 2023 by Arya Voronova 2 Comments

A broken PlayStation controller would normally be a bummer, and if the issue is losing calibration that’s stored in a non-documented format, you might as well bin it. For [Al] of [Al’s blog], however, it’s a challenge, turning into a four-part story – so far. The first installment was published January 1st this year, and seeing the pure enthusiasm [Al] has reverse-engineering the DualShock 4 controller, you might guess that this is a New Year’s gift from someone who knows [Al] very well. The list of problems with the joystick is numerous, to begin with – it’s easier to list all the things that work properly, and it isn’t many of them. Perhaps, the firmware problem is is the most interesting one to start with. Continue reading “Challenging A Broken DualShock 4 Controller To A Duel” →

RCA’s Clear Plastic TV Wowed Crowds In 1939

February 12, 2023 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

In the United States in 1939, television sets still had a long way to go before they pretty much sold themselves. Efforts to do just that are what led to RCA’s Lucite Phantom Telereceiver, which aimed to show people a new way to receive broadcast media.

Created for the 1939 World’s Fair, the TRK-12 Lucite Phantom Telereceiver introduced people to the concept of television. Production models were housed in contemporary wood cabinets, but the clear acrylic (itself also a relatively new thing) units allowed curious potential customers to gaze within, and see what was inside these devices.

One interesting feature is the vertically-mounted cathode ray tube, which reflects off a mirror in the top cover of the cabinet for viewing. This meant that much of the bulk of the TRK-12 could be vertical instead of horizontal. Important, because the TRK-12 was just over a meter tall and weighed 91 kilograms (or just over 200 lbs.)

Clearly a luxury item, the TRK-12 sold for $600 which was an eye-watering sum for the time. But it was a glimpse of the future, and as usual, the future is made available a few ticks early to those who can afford the cost.

Want to see one in person? You might be in luck, because an original resides at the MZTV Museum of Television in Toronto, Canada.

Deciphering Queen Of Scots, Mary Stuart’s Lost Letters

February 12, 2023 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

First part of the cypher used by Mary Stuart and Castelnau, showing the use of homophones, special characters and more. (Credit: Lasry et al., 2023)

Communications by important people over the past thousands of years have been regularly encrypted, making the breaking of this encryption both an essential and also a fascinating historical field. One recent example of an important historical discovery by codebreakers are letters dating back to 1578 through 1584 by Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots in the 16th century. While deemed lost for centuries, researchers came across them in a stash of encrypted letters that were kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s (BnF). After decrypting these 57 letters, they realized what they had come across.

Even in digitized form, they could not simply be OCRed, leaving the researchers to manually transcribe each character into the software they used to assist with the decrypting. Only during the decrypting process, they began to realize that these were not Italian communications – matching the rest of the collection of which they were part – but in fact letters by Mary and her allies. Of the 57 letters, 54 are from Mary to Castelnau, the French ambassador in London at the time.

Supporting evidence for these decrypted letters being from Mary and Castelnau came from British archives, which had clear text versions of some of the encrypted letters, dated to the years when a mole within the French embassy was leaking translated texts to the English, as part of the usual political pastime during those centuries of getting onto thrones and making other people leave them. Mary’s attempt to become not only the Queen of Scots but also Queen of England came to a tragic end with her execution in 1587 after a politically motivated show trial.

The software the researchers used primarily is called CrypTool 2, which is an open-source project that provides cryptoanalysis and related functionality. The access to the documents themselves was enabled via the DECRYPT project, resources which taken together enables virtually anyone to undertake such historical sleuthing from the comfort of their own home.

(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip)

Screenshot of Wireshark, showing that source and destination port for ArtNet packets are the same

ArtNet Not Going Through? Your Switch Might Be Protecting You

February 12, 2023 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

Cool technology often comes at a cost, and it’s not always that this cost is justified. For instance, [Rainfay] tells us about how the the ArtNet protocol’s odd design choices are causing incompatibility with certain Ethernet switches. ArtNet is a protocol for lighting control over DMX-512 – simply put, it allows you to blink a whole ton of LEDs, even literally. Unlike DMX-512 which can use different physical mediums, ArtNet uses Ethernet, taking form of the usual kind of network packets – and it does seem to do a great job about that, if it weren’t for this one thing.

For some reason, ArtNet connections are required to use the same destination and source port – unlike the usual network traffic, where the destination port is protocol-dependent and the source port is randomized. This behaviour violates RFCs, and not just in an abstract manner – such behaviour is indicative of certain kinds of attacks, that switches on the smart side are able and are supposed to prevent. As a result, ArtNet traffic actually triggers some protections on switches at the fancier end, specifically, so-called BLAT protection.

In short, if your ArtNet stream is mysteriously not going through and your switch is on the fancier side, [Rainfay] says you might need to disable some security mechanisms. Sadly, as she points out, this problem isn’t even a direct consequence of some inherent property of ArtNet, but merely a consequence of a bizarre design choice. Once you’re done disabling protections, however, do check out some ArtNet projects for inspiration – it’s a genuinely useful protocol supported in a ton of fancy software, and it might be that you want to use it in the firmware of your RGB strip controller board!