Author: Elliot Williams

1432 Articles

Open Microfluidics Instrumentation Playset

November 17, 2016 by 17 Comments

Micro-what? Microfluidics! It’s the field of dealing with tiny, tiny bits of fluids, and there are some very interesting applications in engineering, biology, and chemistry. [Martin Fischlechner], [Jonathan West], and [Klaus-Peter Zauner] are academic scientists who were working on microfluidics and made their own apparatus, initially because money was tight. Now they’ve stuck to the DIY approach because they can get custom machinery that simply doesn’t exist.

In addition to their collaboration, and to spread the ideas to other labs, they formed DropletKitchen to help advance the state of the art. And you, budding DIY biohacker, can reap the rewards.

In particular, the group is focused on droplet microfluidics. Keeping a biological or chemical reaction confined to its own tiny droplet is like running it inside its own test-tube, but because of the high rate at which the droplets can be pumped out, literally millions of these test-tubes are available. Want to grow hundreds of thousands of single cells, each in their own environment? Done.

The DropletKitchen kit includes an accurate pump system, along with high-speed camera and flash setups to verify that everything’s working as it should. Everything is open-source, and a lot of it is 3D-printable and written in OpenSCAD so that it’s even easy to modify to fit your exact needs. You just need to bring the science.

This is a professional-grade open source project, and we’re excited to see it when academics take a turn toward the open. Bringing cutting edge processing technologies within reach of the biohacker community is a huge multiplier. We can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

Supermoon? Or Just Another Perigee Syzygy?

November 14, 2016 by 27 Comments

The moon’s orbit is not circular. According to Wikipedia, the moon is closest at around 357,000 kilometers and farthest at 406,000: a difference of something like 13%. That’s a freakishly egg-shaped orbit compared to the earth’s orbit around the sun, for instance. And it moves between these extremes every month.

Tonight, the perigee (the close approach) corresponds with a full moon (a syzygy — when the earth, moon, and sun are all in a line). What does that mean? A brighter-than-average full moon! If you were around for the last “supermoon” in 2011, you’ll have heard that it was the closest/brightest since 1992, or something. Well, this one’s brighter.

But don’t freak out if the clouds are hanging in the sky wherever you live; there’s a perigee full moon every 411.8 days, and there’s going to be one next year too. Unless you’re taking repeated photographs with the same lens, you won’t be able to detect the size difference with your current wetware anyway, due to the aptly named moon illusion. You already perceive the moon varying in size by a factor of 1.5 when it’s on the horizon versus hanging overhead, so an extra few percent is going to be lost in the noise floor. And the difference between a hazy and clear night will easily swamp the difference in brightness.

superm_nAs usual, XKCD sums it up nicely. The “supermoon” is a perigee when the moon happens to be full. It’s a fairly frequent event, by celestial standards, and it’s underwhelming. If you want to see something really freaky, keep your eyes peeled for the total eclipse of the sun in August 2017.

Don’t get us wrong, we think that the moon is super! And there’s nothing wrong with going outside to have a peek at it. Just please, during this year’s perigee syzygy, spare us the hyperbole.

“Supermoon” versus “micromoon” comparison image courtesy [Stephan Sciarpetti].

Electronica 2016: Too Much Electronics

November 14, 2016 by 34 Comments

The Electronica trade show in Munich is so big that it only takes place once every two years. Every manufacturer, distributor, and maker of anything electronic is there. To get a feel for the scale of things, Electronica is spread out over twelve large exhibition halls and is served by two separate subway stations, one on either end. You wouldn’t think there would be so many inductor manufacturers in the world, but you’d be wrong.

dscf9020It’s a hardware geek’s paradise, even if it is aimed more at facilitating industry contacts than at serving the humble hacker. But it’s great to see what is out there, quiz reps of all our favorite chip manufacturers about what they’ve got going on, and just generally wander around. You might not get to play with the multi-gigahertz scopes on a day-to-day basis, but you can get hands-on with them at Electronica. And as cool as it is to talk directly to the representatives of our mega-manufacturers, it’s maybe more fun to check up on the creative fringe of companies that you’ve never heard of before, but who nonetheless have great ideas.
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A Truly Classy Metal-Framed Mini CNC

November 13, 2016 by 7 Comments

We’ve seen a number of DVD- and CDROM-based small CNC machines here, but few are as simply beautiful as this one by [julioberaldi] over on Instructables (translated from Portuguese here).

fbis2gciv0ajsdxWe’ll cut to the chase; it’s the frame. Cut from steel sheet scraps with a hacksaw, and welded or soldered together with “bar solder”. It looks like a lot of sanding, painting, and polishing went on. The result is something we’d be proud to have on our desk.

For now, it simply draws with a pen. But watch the video, embedded below, and you’ll see that it runs exceptionally smoothly. If we’re reading the Instructable right, the next step is to turn this into a CNC cutter. We can’t wait to see where the project goes from here.

Continue reading “A Truly Classy Metal-Framed Mini CNC” →

Pulling Music Out Of The Airwaves

November 13, 2016 by 21 Comments

RADIO WONDERLAND is a one-man band with many famous unintentional collaborators. [Joshua Fried]’s shows start off with him walking in carrying a boombox playing FM radio. He plugs it into his sound rig, tunes around a while, and collects some samples. Magic happens, he turns an ancient Buick steering wheel, and music emerges from the resampled radio cacophony.

It’s experimental music, which is secret art-scene-insider code for “you might not like it”, but we love the hacking. In addition to the above-mentioned steering wheel, he also plays a rack of shoes with drumsticks. If we had to guess, we’d say rotary encoders and piezos. All of this is just input for his computer programs which take care of the sampling, chopping, and slicing of live radio into dance music. It’s good enough that he’s opened for [They Might Be Giants].

Check out the videos (embedded below) for a taste of what a live show was like. There are definitely parts where the show is a little slow, but they make it seem cooler when a beat comes together out of found Huey Lewis. We especially like the “re-esser” routine that hones in on the hissier parts of speech to turn them into cymbals. And if you scan the crowd in the beginning, you can find a ten-years-younger [Limor Fried] and [Phil Torrone].

Continue reading “Pulling Music Out Of The Airwaves” →

Hackenings: KiCAD, Science, DevOps, And Cyber

November 12, 2016 by 4 Comments

This week in [Hackenings], we’ve got a full roster of interesting upcoming events scattered all over the world. Can’t afford airfare to India, but Dublin is in the next county over? We’ve got you covered.

KiCad in Bangalore

IKP EDEN, in Bangalore, is hosting an Introduction to KiCad workshop on Sunday, Nov 13 from 10:00-2:00 pm. If you’re just getting started with PCB layout, or just want a quickstart learning KiCad, Hackaday contributor [Anool Mahidharia] will be there to show you how! Sign up on the link above, and bring your laptop with KiCad already installed.

Science in Dublin

20151115_124704-e1476655395528_thumbnailTOG hackerspace in Dublin is putting on their fifth annual Science Hack Day, a 36-hour hardware and software hackathon on Nov 19 & 20th. Looking through their photos, past creations have included a laser mission-impossible crawl-through maze thing, some kind of freaky turtle, and many objects that move, make noise, or otherwise amuse.

“Each year we bring together, designers, coders, scientists, engineers and makers. Simply to make interesting things. Why? For adventure, for playfulness, for science!”

DevOppery (and Foppery) in Stuttgart

logo_webDo you have what it takes to meet the needs of DevOps, Agile, and Cyber in the Enterprise Environment? Interested in Disruptive Cloud Computing or Mobile First Growth Hacking? Can you rub two buzzwords together and come up with marketing gold? Then you might have a fun time at the shack hackerspace in Stuttgart on Nov. 19th, for the eloop 2016 conference (translated here).

A full day’s talks include topics such as “Enterprise Patterns”, “Good Enough”, and the “Cult of Done Manifesto” as it relates to computer security. “What’s discussed at eloop today moves the digital markets of tomorrow.” YOLO!

Vote for Swindon

If you’re a UK citizen, you can vote to get the Swindon Makerspace some community funding so that they can furnish a new space. Why not?

Game Retro

And if you’re in Huntsville, Alabama, or environs, don’t forget Makers Local 256’s Retro Gaming night tonight (Saturday, 12th).

Hackenings? Hackenings!

[Hackenings] is our weekly Saturday morning (US, Pacific Time) roundup of what’s going to be going on in the hackerspace world in the upcoming week. If you’d like us to cover your event, email us at tips@hackaday.com and put [Hackenings] in the subject so that we don’t miss it. Thanks!

ArduWorm: A Malware For Your Arduino Yun

November 11, 2016 by 24 Comments

We’ve been waiting for this one. A worm was written for the Internet-connected Arduino Yun that gets in through a memory corruption exploit in the ATmega32u4 that’s used as the serial bridge. The paper (as PDF) is a bit technical, but if you’re interested, it’s a great read. (Edit: The link went dead. Here is our local copy.)

The crux of the hack is getting the AVR to run out of RAM, which more than a few of us have done accidentally from time to time. Here, the hackers write more and more data into memory until they end up writing into the heap, where data that’s used to control the program lives. Writing a worm for the AVR isn’t as easy as it was in the 1990’s on PCs, because a lot of the code that you’d like to run is in flash, and thus immutable. However, if you know where enough functions are located in flash, you can just use what’s there. These kind of return-oriented programming (ROP) tricks were enough for the researchers to write a worm.

In the end, the worm is persistent, can spread from Yun to Yun, and can do most everything that you’d love/hate a worm to do. In security, we all know that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and here the attack isn’t against the OpenWRT Linux system running on the big chip, but rather against the small AVR chip playing a support role. Because the AVR is completely trusted by the Linux system, once you’ve got that, you’ve won.

Will this amount to anything in practice? Probably not. There are tons of systems out there with much more easily accessed vulnerabilities: hard-coded passwords and poor encryption protocols. Attacking all the Yuns in the world wouldn’t be worth one’s time. It’s a very cool proof of concept, and in our opinion, that’s even better.

Thanks [Dave] for the great tip!