Supercon 2024: An Immersive Motion Rehabilitation Device

May 9, 2025 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

When you’ve had some kind of injury, rehabilitation can be challenging. You often need to be careful about how you’re using the affected parts of your body, as well as pursue careful exercises for repair and restoration of function. It can be tedious and tiring work, for patients and treating practitioners alike.

Juan Diego Zambrano, Abdelrahman Farag, and Ivan Hernandez have been working on new technology to aid those going through this challenging process. Their talk at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon covers an innovative motion monitoring device intended to aid rehabilitation goals in a medical context.

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Building A DIY Chicken Incubator

May 6, 2025 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

If you want to keep eggs warm to hatch, you’ll need an incubator. You could buy one off the shelf, but they’re not so complex — just a nicely-controlled warm box you could easily whip up yourself. As it turns out, that’s precisely what [RCLifeOn] did.

The incubator is built out of wooden panels screwed together to make a simple box. The frame of the front door is also wood, but it features 3D printed hinges and handles, because that’s the easiest way to make hardware when you’re a printing wizard like [RCLifeOn].

The box is fitted with controls for humidity and temperature to ensure the best possible conditions for hatching chicken eggs inside. As you might have guessed, a heated bed from a 3D printer was used to control the temperature inside. As for humidity, a sensor tracks the conditions in the box, and triggers an ultrasonic mister to increase the level as necessary. There’s also a little motion introduced via a moving platform run by a motor and some step-down gearing, which apparently aids in the hatching process.

[RCLifeOn] calls it “a machine that creates life,” and that honestly sounds about fair. We’ve seen similar projects along these lines before, too.

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Hardware Built For Executing Python (Not Pythons)

May 6, 2025 by Lewin Day 42 Comments

Lots of microcontrollers will accept Python these days, with CircuitPython and MicroPython becoming ever more popular in recent years. However, there’s now a new player in town. Enter PyXL, a project to run Python directly in hardware for maximum speed.

What’s the deal with PyXL? “It’s actual Python executed in silicon,” notes the project site. “A custom toolchain compiles a .py file into CPython ByteCode, translates it to a custom assembly, and produces a binary that runs on a pipelined processor built from scratch.” Currently, there isn’t a hard silicon version of PyXL — no surprise given what it costs to make a chip from scratch. For now, it exists as logic running on a Zynq-7000 FPGA on a Arty-Z7-20 devboard. There’s an ARM CPU helping out with setup and memory tasks for now, but the Python code is executed entirely in dedicated hardware.

The headline feature of PyXL is speed. A comparison video demonstrates this with a measurement of GPIO latency. In this test, the PyXL runs at 100 MHz, achieving a round-trip latency of 480 nanoseconds. This is compared to MicroPython running on a PyBoard at 168 MHz, which achieves a much slower 15,000 nanoseconds by comparison. The project site claims PyXL can be 30x faster than MicroPython based on this result, or 50x faster when normalized for the clock speed differences.

Python has never been the most real-time of languages, but efforts like this attempt to push it this way. The aim is that it may finally be possible to write performance-critical code in Python from the outset. We’ve taken a look at Python in the embedded world before, too, albeit in very different contexts.

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3D Print Your Own Injection Molds, Ejector Pins And All

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

3D printing is all well and good for prototyping, and it can even produce useful parts. If you want real strenght in plastics, though, or to produce a LOT of parts, you probably want to step up to injection molding. As it turns out, 3D printing can help in that regard, with injection molding company [APSX] has given us a look at how it printed injection molds for its APSX-PIM machine.

The concept is simple enough—additive manufacturing is great for producing parts with complex geometries, and injection molds fit very much under that banner. To demonstrate, [APSX] shows us a simple injection mold that it printed with a Formlabs Form3+ using Rigid 10K resin. The mold has good surface finish, which is crucial for injection molding nice parts. It’s also fitted with ejection pins for easy part removal after each shot of injection molded plastic. While it’s not able to hold up like a traditional metal injection mold, it’s better than you might think. [APSX] claims it got 500 automatic injection cycles out of the mold while producing real functional parts. The mold was used with the APSX-PIM injection molding machine squirting polypropylene at a cycle time of 65 seconds, producing a round part that appears to be some kind of lid or gear.

This looks great, but it’s worth noting it’s still not cheap to get into this sort of thing. On top of purchasing a Formlabs Form3+, you’ll also need the APSX-PIM V3, which currently retails for $13,500 or so. Still, if you regularly need to make 500 of something, this could be very desirable. You could get your parts quicker and stronger compared to running a farm of many 3D printers turning out the same parts.

We’ve seen similar projects along these lines before. The fact is that injections molds are complicated geometry to machine, so being able to 3D print them is highly desirable. Great minds and all that. Video after the break.

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Round Displays Make Neat VU Meters

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

You can still get moving-needle meters off the shelf if you desire that old school look in one of you projects. However, if you want a more flexible and modern solution, you could use round displays to simulate the same thing, as [mircemk] demonstrates.

At the heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, chosen for its fast clock rate and overall performance. This is key when drawing graphics to a display, as it allows for fast updates and smooth movement — something that can be difficult to achieve on lesser silicon. [mircemk] has the ESP32 reading an audio input and driving a pair of GC9A01 round displays, which are the perfect form factor for aping the looks of a classic round VU meter. The project write-up goes into detail on the code required to simulate the behavior of a real meter, from drawing the graphics to emulating realistic needle movements, including variable sweep rates and damping.

The cool thing about using a screen like this is the flexibility. You can change the dials to a different look — or to an entirely different kind of readout — at will. We’ve seen some of [mircemk]’s projects before, too, like this capable seismometer. Video after the break.

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What Happened To WWW.?

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 60 Comments

Once upon a time, typing “www” at the start of a URL was as automatic as breathing. And yet, these days, most of us go straight to “hackaday.com” without bothering with those three letters that once defined the internet.

Have you ever wondered why those letters were there in the first place, and when exactly they became optional? Let’s dig into the archaeology of the early web and trace how this ubiquitous prefix went from essential to obsolete.

Where Did You Go?

*The first website didn’t bother with any of that www. nonsense! Credit: author screenshot*

It may shock you to find out that the “www.” prefix was actually never really a key feature or necessity at all. To understand why, we need only contemplate the very first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990. Running on a NeXT workstation employed as a server, the site could be accessed at a simple URL: “http//info.cern.ch/”—no WWW needed. Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web, and called it as such, but he hadn’t included the prefix in his URL at all. So where did it come from? Continue reading “What Happened To WWW.?” →

Rayhunter Sniffs Out Stingrays For $30

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 40 Comments

These days, if you’re walking around with a cellphone, you’ve basically fitted an always-on tracking device to your person. That’s even more the case if there happens to be an eavesdropping device in your vicinity. To combat this, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created Rayhunter as a warning device.

Rayhunter is built to detect IMSI catchers, also known as Stingrays in the popular lexicon. These are devices that attempt to capture your phone’s IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) number by pretending to be real cell towers. Information on these devices is tightly controlled by manufacturers, which largely market them for use by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

To run Rayhunter, all you need is an Orbic RC400L mobile hotspot, which you can currently source for less than $30 USD online. Though experience tells us that could change as the project becomes more popular with hackers. The project offers an install script that will compile the latest version of the software and flash it to the device from a computer running Linux or macOS — Windows users currently have to jump through a few extra hoops to get the same results.

Rayhunter works by analyzing the control traffic between the cell tower and the hotspot to look out for hints of IMSI-catcher activity. Common telltale signs are requests to switch a connection to less-secure 2G standards, or spurious queries for your device’s IMSI. If Rayhunter notes suspicious activity, it turns a line on the Orbic’s display red as a warning. The device’s web interface can then be accessed for more information.

While IMSI catchers really took off on less-secure 2G networks, there are developments that allow similar devices to work on newer cellular standards, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own projects built around cellular security, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!