This Robot Picks Locks, If You’re Very Patient

May 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

We all know the Hollywood trope of picking a lock with a paperclip, and while it certainly is doable, most reputable locks require slightly more sophisticated tools to pick effectively. That’s not to say that wire is off the table for locksports, though, as this cool lock-picking robot demonstrates.

The basics behind [Sparks and Code]’s design are pretty simple. Locks are picked by pushing pins up inside the cylinder until they line up with the shear plane, allowing the cylinder to turn. Normally this is done a pin at a time with a specialized tool and with a slight bit of torque on the cylinder. Here, tough, thin, stiff wires passing through tiny holes in a blade shaped to fit the keyway are used to push all the pins up at once, eliminating the need to keep tension on the cylinder to hold pins in place.

Sounds simple, but in practice, this looks like it was a nightmare. Getting five wires to fit into the keyway and guiding them to each pin wasn’t easy, nor was powering the linear actuators that slide the wires in and out. Applying torque to the lock was a chore too; even though tension isn’t needed to retain picked pins, the cylinder still needs to rotate, which means moving the whole picking assembly. But the biggest problem by far seems to be the fragility of the blade that goes into the keyway. SLA might not be the best choice here; perhaps the blade could be made from two thin pieces of aluminum with channels milled on their faces and then assembled face-to-face.

The robot works, albeit very slowly. This isn’t [Sparks and Code]’s first foray into robot lock picking. His previous version attempted to mimic how a human would pick a lock, so this is really thinking outside the box.

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Put More Korry In Your Flight Sim Switches

May 3, 2024 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

Never underestimate how far some flight simulator aficionados will go with their builds. No detail is too small, and every aspect of the look and feel has to accurately reflect the real cockpit. As a case in point, check out these very realistic Korry buttons that [Santi Luib III] built for an Airbus A320 simulator.

Now, you might never have heard of a “Korry button” before, but chances are you’ve seen them, at least in photos of commercial or military aircraft cockpits. Korry is a manufacturer of switches and annunciators for the avionics industry, and the name has become shorthand for similar switches. They’ve got a very particular look and feel and are built to extremely high standards, as one hopes that anything going into a plane would be. That makes the real switches very expensive, far more so than even the most dedicated homebrew sim builder would be comfortable with.

That’s where [Santi] comes in. His replica Korry buttons are built from off-the-shelf parts like LEDs and switches mounted to custom PCBs. The PCB was designed for either momentary or latching switches, and can support multiple LEDs in different colors. The assembled PCBs snap into 3D printed enclosures with dividers to keep light from bleeding through from one legend to the other.

The lenses are laser-cut translucent acrylic painted with urethane paint before the legends are engraved with a laser. The attention to detail on the labels is impressive. [Santi]’s process, which includes multiple coats of sealers, gets them looking just right. Even the LEDs are carefully selected: blue LEDs are too bright and aren’t quite the proper shade, so [Santi] uses white LEDs that are dimmed down with a bigger resistor and a light blue photographic gel to get the tint just right.

These buttons are just beautiful, and seeing a panel full of them with the proper back-lighting must be pretty thrilling. If civil aviation isn’t your thing, check out this A-10 “Warthog” cockpit sim, and the cool switches needed to make it just right.

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Tiny Prisms Let You See What Lies Beneath A BGA Chip

May 1, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Compared to through-hole construction, inspecting SMD construction is a whole other game. Things you thought were small before are almost invisible now, and making sure solder got where it’s supposed to go can be a real chore. Add some ball grid array (BGA) chips into the mix, where the solder joints are not visible by design, and inspection is more a leap of faith than objective proof of results.

Unless, of course, you put the power of optics to work, as [Petteri Aimonen] does with this clever BGA inspection tool. It relies on a pair of tiny prisms to bounce light under one side of a BGA chip and back up the other. The prisms are made from thin sheets of acrylic; [Petteri] didn’t have any 1-mm acrylic sheet on hand, so he harvested material from a razor blade package. The edge of each piece was ground to a 45-degree angle and polished with successively finer grits until the surfaces were highly reflective. One prism was affixed to a small scrap of PCB with eleven SMD LEDs in a row, forming a light pipe that turns the light through 90 degrees. The light source is held along one edge of a BGA, shining light underneath to the other prism, bouncing light through the forest of solder balls and back toward the observer.

The results aren’t exactly crystal clear, which is understandable given the expedient nature of the materials and construction employed. But it’s certainly more than enough to see any gross problems lying below a BGA, like shorts or insufficiently melted solder. [Petteri] reports that flux can be a problem, too, as excess of the stuff can crystalize between pads under the BGA and obstruct the light. A little extra cleaning should help in such cases.

Haven’t tackled a BGA job yet? You might want to get up to speed on that.

Simplest Speaker Oscillator, Now Even Simpler

April 30, 2024 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

It never fails. Lay down some kind of superlative — fastest, cheapest, smallest — around this place and someone out there says, “Hold my beer” and gets to work. In this case, it’s another, even simpler audio oscillator, this time with just a loudspeaker and a battery.

Attentive readers will recall the previous title holder was indeed pretty simple, consisting only of the mic and speaker from an old landline telephone handset wired in series with a battery. Seeing this reminded [Hydrogen Time] of a lucky childhood accident while experimenting with a loudspeaker, which he recreates in the video below. The BOM for this one is even smaller than the previous one — just a small speaker and a battery, plus a small scrap of solid hookup wire. The wire is the key; rather than connecting directly to the speaker terminal, it connects to the speaker frame on one end while the other is carefully adjusted to just barely touch the flexible wire penetrating the speaker cone on its way to the voice coil.

When power is applied with the correct polarity, current flows through the wire into the voice coil, which moves the cone and breaks the circuit. The speaker’s diaphragm resets the cone, completing the circuit and repeating the whole process. The loudspeaker makes a little click with each cycle, leading to a very rough-sounding oscillator. [Hydrogen Time] doesn’t put a scope on it, but we suspect the waveform would be a ragged square wave whose frequency depends on the voltage, the spring constant of the diaphragm, and the spacing between the fixed wire and the voice coil lead.

Yes, we realize this is stretching the definition of an audio oscillator somewhat, but you’ve got to admit it’s simple. Can you get it even simpler?

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Hackaday Links: April 28, 2024

April 28, 2024 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Well, it’s official — AI is ruining everything. That’s not exactly news, but learning that LLMs are apparently being used to write scientific papers is a bit alarming, and Andrew Gray, a librarian at University College London, has the receipts. He looked at a cross-section of scholarly papers from 2023 in search of certain words known to show up more often in LLM-generated text, like “commendable”, “intricate”, or “meticulous”. Most of the words seem to have a generally positive tone and feel a little fancier than everyday speech; one rarely uses “lucidly” or “noteworthy” unless you’re trying to sound smart, after all. He found increases in the frequency of appearance of these and other keywords in 2023 compared to 2022, when ChatGPT wasn’t widely available.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 268: RF Burns, Wireless Charging Sucks, And Barnacles Grow On Flaperons

April 26, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Not necessarily the easy way to program an EPROM

Elliot and Dan got together to enshrine the week’s hacks in podcast form, and to commiserate about their respective moms, each of whom recently fell victim to phishing attacks. It’s not easy being ad hoc tech support sometimes, and as Elliot says, when someone is on the phone telling you that you’ve been hacked, he’s the hacker. Moving on to the hacks, we took a look at a hacking roadmap for a cheap ham radio, felt the burn of AM broadcasts, and learned how to program old-school EPROMs on the cheap.

We talked about why having a smart TV in your house might not be so smart, especially for Windows users, and were properly shocked by just how bad wireless charging really is. Also, cheap wind turbines turn out to be terrible, barnacles might give a clue to the whereabouts of MH370, and infosec can really make use of cheap microcontrollers.

Grab a copy for yourself if you want to listen offline.

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AI System Drops A Dime On Noisy Neighbors

April 25, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

“There goes the neighborhood” isn’t a phrase to be thrown about lightly, but when they build a police station next door to your house, you know things are about to get noisy. Just how bad it’ll be is perhaps a bit subjective, with pleas for relief likely to fall on deaf ears unless you’ve got firm documentation like that provided by this automated noise detection system.

OK, let’s face it — even with objective proof there’s likely nothing that [Christopher Cooper] is going to do about the new crop of sirens going off in his neighborhood. Emergencies require a speedy response, after all, and sirens are perhaps just the price that we pay to live close to each other. That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to monitor the neighborhood noise, though, so [Christopher] got to work. The system uses an Arduino BLE Sense module to detect neighborhood noises and Edge Impulse to classify the sounds. An ESP32 does most of the heavy lifting, including running the UI on a nice little TFT touchscreen.

When a siren-like sound is detected, the sensor records the event and tries to classify the type of siren — fire, police, or ambulance. You can also manually classify sounds the system fails to understand, and export a summary of events to an SD card. If your neighborhood noise problems tend more to barking dogs or early-morning leaf blowers, no problem — you can easily train different models.

While we can’t say that this will help keep the peace in his neighborhood, we really like the way this one came out. We’ve seen the BLE Sense and Edge Impulse team up before, too, for everything from tuning a bike suspension to calming a nervous dog. Continue reading “AI System Drops A Dime On Noisy Neighbors” →