Feel Extreme Workbench Envy After Seeing The Tempel

July 4, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

For those of us with space to spare, our workbenches tend to sprawl. The others who are more space limited will certainly feel envy at [Love Hultén]’s beautiful Tempel workbench.

The workbench appears at first to be a modern interpretation of a secretary’s desk. There are some subtle hints that it is no ordinary piece of furniture. The glowing model of our solar system on the front, for example.

With the front folded down, rather than the expected leather writing pad and letter sized drawers, a few more oddities become apparent. The back is a pegboard which holds a small selection of tools. To the left, a checkered grid obscures speakers. Knobs control volume There are even USB ports. On the right sits another speaker. Banana jacks let you use the analog voltmeter. Most appealingly, the indestructible Hakko 936 soldering iron has been entirely integrated into the structure of the desk.

If you press the right button on the front, the desk will reveal its last secret. It contains an entire workstation somewhere behind the array of drawers on the front. A linear actuator pushes a computer monitor up from inside the cabinet, covering the pegboard in the back. Awesome.

There is a build log, but unfortunately it’s been imageshacked and only the words remain. We think [Love Hultén] has finally managed to build a soldering station that’s welcome in every room of the house except for the garage.

R/C Hot Rod Built Completely From Scratch

July 4, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 14 Comments

[ossum]’s R/C hot rod shows what’s possible when a talented hacker takes full advantage of all the modern resources available to them. The results are stunning.

[ossum] had a stack of Amazon and Shapeways credits lying around after winning a few competitions. He had this dream of building an R/C car for a while, and decided now was the time. After ordering all the needed parts from Amazon, he made an extremely nice model of the car in Fusion 360. The CAD model is a great learning resource. If you want to learn how to use reference photos, parts, and more to build a detailed and useful CAD model we recommend downloading it as a Fusion archive and scrubbing through the timeline to see how he did it.

Some of the parts were sent off for laser cutting. Others were 3D printed. The rest he made himself. Thanks to his model, they all went together well. You can see his R/C rod racing in the video after the break.

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The 2000GB IPod You Wished For In The 00’s Is An ISore

July 2, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 28 Comments

Remember those times we all said that we wouldn’t mind it if the iPod was three times as thick but could store a lot more songs and the battery lasted forever? Well, the I-Sore will let us truly consider our stance on the subject.

The iSore would have definitely made some of us the coolest kids on the yard in Jr. High (or at the engineering office) in the 00’s. At first glance we assumed it would be one of those fancy single board computers packaged with a big hard drive masquerading as an iPod. We were surprised to discover that [jimbone] was performing a classic iPod hack.

The ipod’s back is pried off and discarded. A ZIF to SATA adapter connects it to a significantly larger hard drive. The basic battery is replaced with an 8Ah pack. The USB ports are broken out. For the case there are a few options. There’s a 3D printed case, a wooden case, and even one that looks like a Lovecraftian horror.

[jimbone] claims 100 hours of playtime on a single charge. He hasn’t claimed bulking up a bit from carrying it around, but we can make our guesses.

Removing A Broken Tap From Something Really Really Expensive

July 2, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 70 Comments

What happens when you break a tap or a bolt in a component whose price tag sits in the tens of thousands. Just drilling it out and throwing in a nut insert stops being acceptable. Is there a way to remove the tap without damaging the master part at all?

Broken tap stuck in the hole it was threading

Well, that’s where [Tom Grafton] of Jerry’s Broken Drill and Tap comes in. He’s here to remove taps and chew bubblegum, and he’s definitely chewing bubble gum loudly the whole time. His primary work horse is a Metal Disintegration Machine.

A MDM is basically half of a typical wire EDM set-up. In EDM you used an electrode to punch a hole through the material. Then you thread a wire through the hole, thread it through a sometimes startling array of pulleys, and get going.

[Tom] used the MDM with an appropriately sized electrode to precisely disintegrate the middle of the tap out. After that it’s some careful work with a specially machined magnetic chisel. A quick chase of the threads with a tap and it’s back to the customer.

As you can see in the video after the break, the end result is a threaded hole that’s so indistinguishable from the rest he has to mark which one it was; presumably so the customer doesn’t forget why they’re paying him.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY Foot Orthotics

July 1, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 7 Comments

What does your gait look like to your foot? During which part of your gait is the ball of your feet experiencing the most pressure? Is there something wrong with it? Can you fix it by adding or removing material from a custom insole? All these answers can be had with an expensive system and a visit to a podiatrist, but if [Charles Fried] succeeds you can build a similar system at home.

The device works by having an array of pressure sensors on a flat insole inside of a shoe. When the patient walks, the device streams the data to a computer which logs it. The computer then produces a heat map of the person’s step. The computer also produces a very useful visualization called a gait line. This enables the orthotist to specify or make the correct orthotic.

[Charles]’s version of this has another advantage over the professional versions. His will be able to stream wirelessly to a data logger. This means you can wear the sensor around for a while and get a much more realistic picture of your gait. Like flossing right before the dentist, many people consciously think about their gait while at the foot doctor; this affects the result.

He currently has a prototype working. He’s not sure how long his pressure sensors will last in the current construction, and he’s put wireless logging on hold for now. However, the project is interesting and we can’t wait to see if [Charles] can meet all his design goals.

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Transcend Wifi SD Card Is A Tiny Linux Server

June 30, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 43 Comments

[jamesone111] bought a Transcend WifiSD card, presumably for photography, but it may just have been because he heard that they’re actually tiny Linux servers.

He read a post about these cards on the OpenWRT forums. They’re all a similar configuration of a relatively large amount of memory (compared to the usual embedded computer), a WiFi chip, and an ARM processor running a tiny Linux install. The card acts as a WiFi access point with a little server running on it, and waits for the user to connect to it via a website. It also has a mode where it will connect to up to three access points specified by the user, but it doesn’t actually have a way to tell the user what its IP address is; which is kind of funny.

[jamesone111] hacked around with the Transcend card for a bit. He found it pretty insecure, which as long as you’re not a naked celebrity, shouldn’t be a huge issue. For the hacker this is great as it opens up the chance of hacking the firmware for other uses.

Some have already pulled off some cool hacks with these cards. For example, [peterburk] hacked a similar card by PQI to turn his iPod into a portable file server.

Fail Of The Week (in 1996): The 7 Billion Dollar Overflow

June 30, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 50 Comments

The year was 1996, the European Space agency was poised for commercial supremacy in space. Their new Ariane 5 Rocket could launch two three-ton satellites into space. It had more power than anything that had come before.

The rocket rose up towards the heavens on a pillar of flame, carrying four very expensive and very uninsured satellites. Thirty-seven seconds later it self destructed. Seven billion dollars of RUD rained down on the local beaches near the Guiana Space Centre in ~~Southern~~ South America. A video of the failed launch is after the break.

The cause of all this was a single improper type cast in a bit of code that wasn’t even supposed to run during the actual launch. Talk about a fail.

There were two bits of code. One that measured the sideways velocity, and one that used it in the guidance system. The measurement side used a 64 bit variable, but the guidance side used a 16 bit variable. The code was borrowed from an earlier, slower rocket whose velocity would never grow large enough to exceed that 16 bits. The Ariane 5, however, could be described with a Daft Punk song, and quickly overflowed this value.

The code that caused the overflow was actually a bit of pre-launch software that aligned the rocket. It was supposed to be turned off before the rocket firing, but since the rocket launch got delayed so often, the engineers made it timeout 40 seconds into the launch so they didn’t have to keep restarting it.

The ESA never placed blame on a single contractor. The programmers had made assumptions. The engineers had made reasonable shortcuts to make their job easier. It had all made it through inspections, approvals, and finally the launch event.

They certainly learned from the event; the Ariane 5 rocket has flown 82 out of 86 missions successfully since then. It has at least five more launches contracted before it is retired in 2023 for the Ariane 6 rocket being developed now. This event also changed the way critical software and redundant systems were tested, bringing the dangers of code failure to the attention of the public for the first time.

If you want to read more, there is a great discussion on Reddit which tipped us off to this fail, a quite thorough Wikipedia article, and the original article that ran in the New York Times is mirrored here.

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