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Hackaday Links: July 26, 2026

July 26, 2026 by 3 Comments

At a time when so-called “artificial intelligence” seems inescapable, we were encouraged to see news that Amazon will be cracking down on third-party sellers that use AI-generated images for their product listings. They won’t be prevented from using the images, but they will need to clearly indicate that they don’t represent reality and were produced via artificial means. This comes in response to a recently enacted New York law that requires the disclosure of AI in advertisements.

Will this be the end of the cat sleeping bag?

But it’s not quite a clear cut as it might seem on the surface, as the New York law is actually about AI-generated people rather than products. Specifically, it’s designed to make it clear when a “synthetic performer” has been used in place of a human actor. As such, it would appear that the easiest way for Amazon sellers to dodge the new rule is to simply not include any humans in their AI slop images and videos. In other words, they can continue to post fake pictures of products without having to inform the consumer so long as they don’t show a fake person holding it.

Under normal circumstances we’d leave something like this next one for our weekly security column, but the utter lack of security in the Pope’s official “Click To Pray” mobile application revealed by researcher BobDaHacker on Friday is just too good a story to pass up. For one thing, who knew that there was an “official” prayer app? We don’t dabble in theology around these parts, but we’re fairly sure the good book didn’t mention anything about requiring a smartphone to give praise.

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Filling High Pressure CO2 Tanks From Sugar Fermentation Gas

July 26, 2026 by 4 Comments

After previously using the fermenting of sugar to obtain ethanol fuel, [Hyperspace Pirate] figured that it’d be a waste to just blast the other half of the yeast production in the form of carbon dioxide into the air. This poses the slight problem that gaseous CO2 is fairly bulky, while compressing it into a liquid isn’t exactly for the faint of heart. This of course means that it’s a fun challenge, involving a beach ball, vapor-compression and various compressors.

Although at room temperature compressing CO2 into a liquid requires quite extreme pressures, if you lower it to freezing temperatures it becomes quite feasible to use more typical off-the-shell compressors.

In the video both oil-less and regular compressors are used, mostly because ultimately you want to get pure CO2 into the bottle, without oil or water. Here a few methods are explored, including a pre-cooler with the oil-less compressor as it cannot quite hit the same pressures. With a typical compressor linked to an oil-separator you can directly fill the tank, which is pretty nice, though even with this removal of water turned out to be a chore.

Desiccating the gas that comes out of the fermentation vat, is attempted using a converted water filter that’s filled with desiccant beads, but as the later tests show, this isn’t quite good enough to prevent moisture to make it into the bottle and clogging its nozzle. Of course, moisture here is more acceptable than oil for most applications, so with some more work this could be quite a feasible method to fill bottles with liquid CO2 for various nefarious applications like paintball guns and more.

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All the parts of a digital clock. Photo by Lee Hutchinson.

Ever Seen Claude Use Fusion 360?

July 26, 2026 by 9 Comments

We’ve all done it before: a simple project that escalated to the point of extreme overengineering.
But what’s less common is [Lee Hutchinson]’s digital clock, whose case is (somewhat-successfully) designed by LLMs!

A clock needs time synchronization, and a digital one needs some code to drive the display. An avid systemd user, [Lee] had no trouble at all setting up all the users and services needed to keep the time synchronized. Some rusty Python skills with some aid of the dreaded Claude Code later, [Lee] had a script to actually show the time too.

But now comes the interesting part: the case. Now, [Lee] isn’t really a mechanical engineer, and he doesn’t really like Autodesk Fusion’s UX. Most projects would see their creators just grit their teeth and get on with it. But here, in an experiment we haven’t often seen before, [Lee] connects LLMs to Fusion’s new MCP server feature! Did it work? Surprisingly enough, yes. Kind of. The local Qwen model got most of the way there on one request, but still made mistakes for the other. However, another pass with the more powerful Claude models got the job done.

But there’s much more to the story; [Lee] goes into more detail, and talks about the assembly process, over at Ars Technica.

Repairing A “for Parts” Canon 7D Mark II DSLR

July 26, 2026 by 8 Comments

The exciting part of buying a ‘broken, for parts’ off a site like EBay is that you rarely know exactly just how ‘broken’ it truly is. Even if the seller insists that it’s thoroughly buggered, you just might be able to eke out a fix with some out-of-the-box thinking and plucky ingenuity. Such was the case for [Dieter Vansteenwegen] who gambled on a cheap Canon 7D Mark II DSLR body that was sold for a mere €180 on account of broken condition.

After confirming that the DSLR’s condition was basically as described by the seller, with nothing on the LCD or HDMI output and the auto-focus not working while partially pressing the trigger button, but still taking a picture when fully pressed. Sometimes it would also show a standard maintenance message on the LCD, so clearly it ought to be working. Maybe the camera’s processor was just being chronically unhappy about something, in which case an easy fix might be possible.

As anyone who has ever taken a digital camera apart knows, you do not simply pop them open for a quick look. Somewhere in the nightmarish contraption of flatflex cables, PCBs and endless sub-assemblies there might be a fault, but where to start? Fortunately with some support from the custom Canon firmware community Magic Lantern and the website Photo Parts UA for reference images he was able to start tracing a number of pertinent signals.

With the auto-focus hint as guide, this was traced back to the MPU, which turned out to have a floating signal on the auto-focus pin that got interpreted as ‘active’. Likely the internal pull-up got damaged due to the use of an external trigger module as there’s no real protection on these lines. One bodge wire later to create an external 3.3 V pull-up the DSLR happily sprung back to life.

In terms of parts this definitely was a cheap repair, but it comes with the prerequisite of having the skills and equipment to perform said repair. Still, massive props and congratulations to [Dieter] for saving this DSLR from being merely a device to be picked over for parts.

Duplicating Parts Using Silicone Molds

July 26, 2026 by 6 Comments

[Do As I Do] had a simple task to complete. A couple of small parts needed to be duplicated in some quantity, with good dimensional accuracy and surface finish. There are a number of ways you might go about this, particularly if you have the original tooling or a machine shop on hand. In this case, however, the plan was to duplicate the parts with silicone molds.

The first step, naturally, was to produce the silicone molds. Doing this involved some craft supplies, with glossy paper and hot glue used to create a vessel for casting silicone around the original parts. The silicone itself was mixed carefully and poured into the vessels, and soon enough [Do As I Do] had a pair of negative molds that could be used to produce duplicates of the original. The original parts were removed, and the silicone molds were filled with resin over and over again to make as many duplicates as were needed.

This was a simple enough project with straightforward geometry that suited the process. More challenging parts would require more care in mold prep and more advanced techniques. Depending on material choice for the duplicate parts and other factors like intended final application, extra steps like degassing may be necessary, too. Still, for a quick guide on duplicating a simple plastic part, it’s hard to beat.

We’ve featured other silicone mold jobs before, like these impressive recreated tail light lenses. Video after the break.

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Delta Pen Plotter Draws In Multiple Colors

July 26, 2026 by 11 Comments

If you’re building your first plotter, or you just like thinking in right angles, you’d probably consider a Cartesian design for your build. [András Vujovits] went another route with his project, building an impressive delta pen plotter with a useful tool changer, to boot.

The build relies on a unique motion system, wherein two NEMA 17 stepper motors drive either side of the linkage to control the position of the end effector—in this case, a pen carriage. By controlling the position of each side of the mechanism, it’s possible to move the pen through XY space. Running the show is an Arduino Nano, fitted with a GRBL shield and appropriate stepper motor drivers.

The magnetic tool changer is particularly nifty, too. It allows the plotter to grab a different ink at will to add more color to the drawing. It’s well-designed, with the plotter able to change inks without losing accuracy or otherwise fumbling the switchover. The plotter uses Muji ball point pens, which are available in a range of colors and draw with slick, clean lines. It’s also quite a fast plotter, thanks in part to [András]’s efforts to keep the pen carriage light by using a smart mechanism to offload the pen lifting actuator to the main body.

[András] has plans available, but you’re going to have to pay for them. Still, it’s always nice to see a new machine in the wild. Video after the break.

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How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com Got Mauled By Bots

July 25, 2026 by 15 Comments

A lot has been made about the increase of automated traffic on the Internet, with the past years LLM-related crawlers having quite literally swarmed the picture here. Not only does this drive up traffic, it also increases load on web servers, whose owners find themselves faced with increased hosting costs. This recently led to The-Numbers.com going offline for a while as automated traffic was quite literally destroying their bottom line.

This saga is covered by [Stephen Follows], who had a chance to talk with the founder and CEO of the site, [Bruce Nash], after the site went basically offline for a few months. Since the website both licenses data for commercial purposes as well as offering the free access on its website, there were accusations of this being a ‘rug pull’.

The site was started in 1997, as a static HTML site on Geocities where [Bruce] provided box office analyses for investment purposes. Since that beginning traffic was generally polite, with human visitors and usually well-behaved search engine crawlers. Then around 2024 the first wave of scraper bots arrived, followed by a larger wave around December of 2025.

Despite implementing a few mitigations, such as LLM-targeted text, the increased traffic and the resulting load on a site architecture that was never designed for this ultimately led to a collapse. One of the major sources of traffic turned out to be from so-called ‘prediction markets’, like Polymarket, whose bots absolutely hammered the site.

Fortunately for [Bruce] and his team they do not rely on the free website for income, but they have had to massively rework the site’s architecture to bring back a semblance of the original features. As noted in the article, the amount of crawling traffic by these LLMs and ‘agentic AI’ tools is exponentially more than that for search engines, which makes this a major challenge.

Issues like these is why services such as Cloudflare are offering blocking features for such automated traffic. After all, unless such traffic is of use to you, you may as well treat it like a DDoS attack and cut it off at the root.

Thanks to [Ben] for the tip.