Long-Term OctoPrint Stat Manipulation Uncovered

June 29, 2024 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

Developing free and open source software can be a thankless experience. Most folks do it because it’s something they’re passionate about, with the only personal benefit being the knowledge that there are individuals out there who found your work useful enough to download and install. So imagine how you’d feel if it turns out somebody was playing around with the figures, and the steady growth in the number of installs you thought your software had turned out to be fake.

That’s what happened just a few days ago to OctoPrint developer [Gina Häußge]. Although there’s no question that her software for remotely controlling and monitoring 3D printers is immensely popular within the community, the fact remains that the numbers she’s been using to help quantify that popularity have been tampered with by an outside party. She’s pissed, and has every right to be.

Continue reading “Long-Term OctoPrint Stat Manipulation Uncovered” →

Hosting Your Own PixMob Party Made Easy

June 28, 2024 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

Over the last few years, it’s been increasingly common for concertgoers to be handed a light-up bracelet from PixMob that synchronizes with the others in the crowd to turn the entire audience into a music visualizer. They’re a clever way of enhancing the concert experience, but unfortunately, they don’t do anything once you leave the show. Or at least, that used to be the case.

We’ve seen efforts to reverse engineer the IR (and occasionally radio) signals that drive these PixMob devices, but since we checked in last it seems like things have gotten a lot easier for the home gamer. [David Pride] has recently posted a brief write-up that shows how quickly and easily it is to get these devices fired up using nothing more exotic than an Arduino, an IR LED, and an audio sensor module.

With the audio sensor module connected to the Arduino’s digital input and the IR LED wired to digital out, all you need to do is flash firmware to the board and start playing some beats. The source code [David] has provided is a a remixed version of what’s previously been published by [Carlos Ganoza], which, in this case, has been tweaked to make the lighting patterns less random.

Presumably, this is to make the devices behave more like they do during an actual concert, but since nobody at Hackaday is cool enough to have seen a live musical performance in the last decade, we’re not really sure. All we can say is that the effect looks pretty sweet in the demo video.

Back in 2019, we saw a teardown of an early PixMob device, and by 2022, the efforts to reverse engineer their IR control protocol were well underway. We’re glad to see things have progressed to the point that you can piece together a transmitter from what’s in the parts bin, as it means at least some of these devices will have a lifespan longer than a single concert.

Solving Cold Cases With Hacked Together Gear

June 28, 2024 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

People go missing without a trace far more commonly than any of us would like to think about. Of course the authorities will conduct a search, but even assuming they have the equipment and personnel necessary, the odds are often stacked against them. A few weeks go by, then months, and eventually there’s yet another “cold case” on the books and a family is left desperate for closure.

But occasionally a small team or an individual, if determined enough, can solve such a case even when the authorities have failed. Some of these people, such as [Antti Suanto] and his brother, have even managed to close the books on multiple missing person cases. In an incredibly engrossing series of blog posts, [Antti] describes how he hacked together a pair of remotely operated vehicles to help search for and ultimately identify sunken cars.

Continue reading “Solving Cold Cases With Hacked Together Gear” →

ESP32 Brings New Features To Classic Geiger Circuit

June 24, 2024 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

There’s no shortage of Geiger counter projects based on the old Soviet SBM-20 tube, it’s a classic circuit that’s easy enough even for a beginner to implement — so long as they don’t get bitten by the 400 volts going into the tube, that is. Toss in a microcontroller, and not only does that circuit get even easier to put together and tweak, but now the features and capabilities of the device are only limited by how much code you want to write.

Luckily for us, [Omar Khorshid] isn’t afraid of wrangling some 0s and 1s, and the result is the OpenRad project. In terms of hardware, it’s the standard SBM-20 circuit augmented with a LILYGO ESP32 development board that includes a TFT display. But where this one really shines is the firmware.

With the addition of a few hardware buttons, [Omar] was able to put together a very capable interface that runs locally on the device itself. In addition, the ESP32 serves up a web page that provides some impressive real-time data visualizations. It will even publish its data via MQTT if you want to plug it into your home automation system or other platform.

Between the project’s Hackaday.io page and GitHub repository, [Omar] has done a fantastic job of documenting the project so that others can recreate it. That includes providing the schematics, KiCad files, and Gerbers necessary to not only get the boards produced and assembled, but modified should you want to adapt the base OpenRad design.

This project reminds us of the uRADMonitor, which [Radu Motisan] first introduced in 2014 to bring radiation measuring to the masses. This sort of hardware has become far more accessible over the last decade, bringing the dream of a globally distributed citizen-operated network of radiation and environmental monitors much closer to reality.

Continue reading “ESP32 Brings New Features To Classic Geiger Circuit” →

Bit Of OpenSCAD Code Caps Off Wiremold

June 23, 2024 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

Wiremold is great stuff — it’s relatively cheap, easy to work with, and offers all sorts of adapters and angle pieces which take the hassle out of running (and hiding) wires. But [Dr. Gerg] found a shortcoming of this otherwise very flexible product: since each run is intended to start and end in a surface mounted box, he couldn’t find an end cap that would let him close off a section.

The solution? A desktop 3D printer and a chunk of OpenSCAD code telling it what to extrude. When you break it down, the Wiremold profile is fairly straightforward, and can be easily described with geometric primitives. A handful of cylinders, a cube or two, tie it all together with the hull() function, and you’re there.

We’d say this would be a fantastic project to cut your OpenSCAD teeth on, but since [Dr. Gerg] was kind enough to share the source code, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. Though there’s still benefit in reading over it if you’re looking for some practical examples of how the “Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller” gets things done.

So why would you want a Wiremold endcap? In the case of [Dr. Gerg], it sounds like he was trying to cover up a short run of wire that was running vertically. But we could imagine other applications for this basic design now that it’s out in the wild. For example, a short length of Wiremold outfitted with a pair of printed caps could make for a nice little enclosure if you’ve got a small project that needs protecting.

Taking A Look Underneath The Battleship New Jersey

June 19, 2024 by Tom Nardi 40 Comments

By the time you read this the Iowa-class battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) should be making its way along the Delaware River, heading back to its permanent mooring on the Camden waterfront after undergoing a twelve week maintenance and repair period at the nearby Philadelphia Navy Yard.

The 888 foot (270 meter) long ship won’t be running under its own power, but even under tow, it’s not often that you get to see one of the world’s last remaining battleships on the move. The New Jersey’s return home will be a day of celebration, with onlookers lining the banks of the Delaware, news helicopters in the air, and dignitaries and veterans waiting eagerly to greet her as she slides up to the pier.

But when I got the opportunity to tour the New Jersey a couple weeks ago and get a first-hand look at the incredible preservation work being done on this historic ship, it was a very different scene. There was plenty of activity within the cavernous Dry Dock #3 at the Navy Yard, the very same slip where the ship’s construction was completed back in 1942, but little fanfare. Staff from North Atlantic Ship Repair, the company that now operates the facility, were laboring feverishly over the weekend to get the ship ready.

While by no means an exhaustive account of the work that was done on the ship during its time in Dry Dock #3, this article will highlight some of the more interesting projects that were undertaken while it was out of the water. After seeing the thought and effort put into every aspect of the ship’s preservation by curator Ryan Szimanski and his team, there’s no doubt that not only is the USS New Jersey in exceptionally capable hands, but that it will continue to proudly serve as a museum and memorial for decades to come.

Continue reading “Taking A Look Underneath The Battleship New Jersey“ →

PostmarketOS Now Boots On Over 250 Devices

June 17, 2024 by Tom Nardi 42 Comments

Every year, as consumers gobble up the latest Android devices, more old, but perfectly serviceable, units end up collecting dust in drawers. Or worse, they end up getting tossed in the trash. One of the most promising tools we have to help keep these older devices useful is postmarketOS, a full-fledged Linux distribution that provides a flexible and up-to-date software environment on devices that might otherwise be stuck with some old and unsupported version of Google’s mobile operating system.

As of the latest update on the postmarketOS blog, the team has announced an exciting milestone: over 250 devices can now boot the stable release of the OS.

Now to be clear, not all devices will be fully functional. In fact, the blog post clarifies that some of them only barely boot. But it’s progress, and now that these semi-supported devices aren’t hidden behind a development version of the OS, it means more folks will be able to put them to use.

For example, if you want to turn your old smartphone into a low-energy headless webserver, it doesn’t really matter if its display, touchscreen, or speakers are supported. You just need it to boot into Linux and fire up an SSH server so you can get in and start working.

But support for new devices is just one of the additions in this new v24.06 release. The blog post also points out several notable software upgrades, including the move to the 6.x branch of KDE Plasma Mobile. This brings with it a long list of improvements and changes, including a rewritten homescreen with enhanced customization options. If you prefer a more minimal GUI, don’t worry. This new release also updates Sxmo, which provides a menu-driven interface for both touch screens and hardware controls.

Among the newly supported devices is a generic x86_64 image that should work on a wide array of PCs. While obviously there’s no shortage of Linux distros you could run on your old computer, being able to install postmarketOS on it is definitely helpful for development purposes. There’s also a new Tegra ARMv7 target which brings a number of new devices into the fold, such as the Google Nexus 7, and Microsoft Surface RT.

Looking to run postmarketOS on your own hardware? The best way to start is to check the Devices page and see how many of those old gadgets you’ve got collecting dust in a drawer are compatible.