Day: September 24, 2024

A Space Walk Through ISS

September 24, 2024 by 14 Comments

The International Space Station (ISS) might not be breaking news, but this February, National Geographic released a documentary that dives into the station’s intricate engineering. It’s a solid reminder of what human ingenuity can achieve when you put a team of engineers, scientists, and astronauts together. While the ISS is no longer a new toy in space, for hackers and tinkerers, it’s still one of the coolest and most ambitious projects ever. And if you’re like us—always looking for fresh inspiration—you’ll want to check this one out.

The ISS is a masterpiece, built piece by piece in space, because why make things easy? With 16 pressurized modules, it’s got everything needed to keep humans alive and working in one of the harshest environments imaginable. Add in the $150 billion price tag (yes, billion), and it’s officially the most expensive thing humans have ever built. What makes it especially interesting to us hackers is its life support systems—recycling water, generating oxygen, and running on solar power. That’s the kind of closed-loop system we love to experiment with down here on Earth. Imagine the implications for long-term sustainability!

But it’s not just a survival bunker in space. It’s also a global science lab. The ISS gives researchers the chance to run experiments that could never happen under Earth’s gravity—everything from technology advancements to health experiments. Plus, it’s our testing ground for future missions to Mars. If you’re fascinated by the idea of hacking complex systems, or just appreciate a good build, the ISS is a dream project.

Catch the documentary and dive into the world of space-grade hacking. The ISS may be orbiting out of sight, but for those of us looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible, it’s still full of inspiration.

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A black and white line drawing of a vehicle interior showing the dashboard and. steering wheel. On the infotainment screen, the words "Selected Ad" are emblazoned in large letters.

Will You Need Ad Block For Your Car?

September 24, 2024 by 113 Comments

The modern web has become difficult to navigate without ad blocking software. Ford now has a patent application that would bring the ads we hate to your vehicle’s infotainment system. [via PCMag]

Ford has already replied to criticism with the usual corporate spiel of patents not necessarily being the direction the company will go with future products, but it’s hard to imagine that other automakers aren’t planning similar systems since they’re already charging extra for heated seats, EV range, and performance. Bringing ads to the captive audience of your personal vehicle and targeting them based on listening to the occupants’ conversations would be a new low. Maybe you’ll be able to pay an extra $100/month for the “ad-free experience.”

Instead of taking advantage of the EV transition to make better, simpler cars, automakers are using their highly-computerized nature to extract more from you and provide less when you drive off the lot. Enshittification has come for the automobile. Perhaps auto executives should read A Few Reasonable Rules for the Responsible Use of New Technology?

The first step of blocking these ads will likely be jailbraking the infotainment system. If that wasn’t enough, locking features behind a paywall has come for wheelchairs too.

Winamp Releases Source Code, But Is It Really Open?

September 24, 2024 by 58 Comments

The 1990s seem to have reached that point at which they are once more considered cool, and ephemera of the decade has become sought-after. One of the unlikely software hits from the period was Winamp, the MP3 player of choice in an era when time spent on dodgy file sharing sites or peer to peer sharing would snag you almost any music you wanted. Decades later its interface is still widely copied, but now you can try the original again as its source code has been made available. It’s not what we’d call open source though, even though they seem to be making an effort to imply as much with phrases such as “opening up its source code“.

If you’d like to have a go with it you can snag a copy from this GitHub repository, and you’ll need a particular version of Visual Studio 2019 to build it. Any celebrations will be muted though by paragraph five of the Winamp Collaborative License, which prohibits distribution of modified versions or forks, and stipulates that only the official maintainers can distribute it. This doesn’t sound like open source to us, indeed it seems they’re just looking for community maintenance for free, which probably isn’t too surprising from a brand which went all-out to join the NFT bandwagon a couple of years ago.

So have a look for nostalgia’s sake if you want, but we’d suggest going for something more community driven if you want to do anything with it.

Header: Christiaan Colen, CC BY-SA 2.0.

ESP32 Powers Custom Darkroom Timer

September 24, 2024 by 4 Comments

Developing your own film is an unabashedly analog process, which is one of the reasons people still gravitate towards it. After spending all day pushing buttons and looking at digital displays, spending some quiet time in the dark with pieces of paper and chemicals can be a way to decompress. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a bit of modern digital convenience.

Specifically, [John Jones] wanted a timer that offered more features than his old school analog model, so he decided to build one himself. He took the long away around to make sure the end result would be a tool he could rely on, which meant getting a custom PCB made, 3D printing a case to fit in with his existing workspace, and designing a control panel that he could operate in the dark.

The PCB plays host to an ESP32 development board and an I/O expander that connects up to the array of LEDs, switches, and buttons on the front panel. The bottom-half of of the 3D printed enclosure is pretty simple, but the control panel is quite a piece of work.

Borrowing a trick from the flight sim community, [John] switched over to a clear filament after laying down the first few layers of the panel. This essentially created an integrated light diffuser, and with the addition of a few red LEDs, he had very slick backlit labels on his panel with relatively minimal effort.

We’ve covered custom darkroom tools in the past, from this relatively simple enlarger to an automated system that will develop the film for you.

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3D Printing On Top Of Laser Cut Acrylic

September 24, 2024 by 8 Comments

[Julius Curt] needed to mark acrylic panels with a bit more clarity than the usual way of rastering the surface, so they attempted to 3D print directly to an acrylic sheet, which worked perfectly. The obvious way to do this was to bond the acrylic sheet to the bed with glue temporarily, but another way was tried, and it’s much less messy and precarious.

The bond between a 3D print and acrylic is very strong

The first step was to create a 3D model which combined a constraining ‘fence’ to contain the acrylic panel with the required artwork floating above. It was easy enough to run the print long enough to build the fence, then pause the print mid-way to add the pristine panel and restart after a quick re-prime and wipe.

There were a few simple takeaways from the video below. First, to ensure sufficient tolerance between the fence and the panel, consider the layer width (plus associated tolerance when printed) and the laser kerf of your machines to ensure a not-too-sloppy fit. Secondly, that hot nozzle won’t do the acrylic surface any favours during travel moves, so enabling Z-hopping is essential!

Another use for this simple technique is to fully incorporate an acrylic sheet within a print by pausing at an appropriate height again, dropping the panel in, and continuing the print. A degree of overlap will lock the panel tight, with the plastic bonding very firmly to the acrylic, as [Julius] demonstrates in the video.

It’s always a delight to see how techniques can combine to create the desired effects. Here’s how to use a color laser printer and toner transfer paper to apply designs to a 3D printing front panel. Whilst we’re thinking about the multitude of uses for hacking with acrylic, what about not doing that and using corrugated plastic instead?

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Supercon 2023: The Road To Writing Great Step-by-Step Instructions

September 24, 2024 by 6 Comments

IKEA is known as a purveyor of build-it-yourself flatpack furniture. LEGO is known as a purveyor of build-it-yourself toys. Both are known for their instructions. The latter’s are considered incredibly clear and useful, while the former’s are often derided as arcane and confusing—though the major difference between the two is color printing.

These two companies are great examples of why instructions are important. Indeed, Sonya Vasquez has learned this lesson well, and came down to Supercon 2023 to tell us all about it. Prepare to learn all about how to write great step-by-step instructions that enable greatness and never frustrate the end user.

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Most Powerful Laser Diodes, Now More Powerful

September 24, 2024 by 31 Comments

Many hobbies seem to have a subset of participants who just can’t leave well enough alone. Think about hot rodders, who squeeze every bit of power out of engines they can, or PC overclockers, who often go to ridiculous ends to milk the maximum performance from a CPU. And so it goes in the world of lasers, where this avalanche driver module turns Nichia laser diodes into fire-breathing beasts.

OK, that last bit might be a little overstated, but there’s no denying the coolness of what laser jock [Les Wright] has accomplished here. In his endless quest for more optical power, [Les] happened upon a paper describing a simple driver circuit that can dump massive amounts of current into a laser diode to produce far more optical power than they’re designed for. [Les] ran with what few details the paper had and came up with a modified avalanche driver circuit, with a few niceties for easier testing, like accommodation for different avalanche transistors and a way to test laser diodes in addition to the Nichia. He also included an onboard current sensing network, making it easy to hook up a high-speed oscilloscope to monitor the performance of the driver.

For testing, [Les] used a high-voltage supply homebrewed from a Nixie inverter module along with a function generator to provide the pulses. The driver was able to push 80 amps into a Nichia NUBM47 diode for just a few nanoseconds, and when all the numbers were plugged in, the setup produced about 67 watts of optical power. Not one to let such power go to waste, [Les] followed up with some cool experiments in laser range finding and dye laser pumping, which you can check out in the video below. And check out our back catalog of [Les]’ many laser projects, from a sketchy tattoo-removal laser teardown to his acousto-optical filter experiments. Continue reading “Most Powerful Laser Diodes, Now More Powerful” →