Dylan showing off his giant tractor video game controller

Real Tractor Moonlights As Farming Simulator Controller

October 28, 2022 by 9 Comments

Around October, amid all the pumpkin spiced food and beverages, folks make their yearly pilgrimage to a local farm. They load themselves onto hay-filled tractor trailers and ride out in search of the perfect pumpkin to put on the front porch, and let it slowly decompose. The “closest” a video game has come to replicating this seasonal event is the annual Farming Simulator series. One modder, [Dylan], decided to add an extra level of authenticity to the Farming Simulator experience by controlling the game with an actual tractor.

The opportunity for the project presented itself thanks to a local Kiwi farmer (Kiwi as in New Zealand, not the fruit) who provided [Dylan] with access to a Case IH 310 Magnum CVT tractor. [Dylan] built a custom USB controller that mirrored the actual layout of the tractor’s control pad. Tilt sensors were wrapped around the tractor’s steering wheel and throttle to provide analog input for steering and speed control. After a number of hours tweaking the setup on site, [Dylan] live-streamed his Farming Simulator PC play session (video below) with the tractor itself left off for obvious reasons. Without tractor motor engaged there was no power steering, so he deserves a bit of extra credit for making it through multiple hours.

This certainly isn’t the first ridiculous controller project [Dylan] has taken on. He’s created a trombone controller to just to play Trombone Champ, a Nerf bow controller for Overwatch, and he even played through Hades using a literal pomegranate. You can watch more of [Dylan’s] custom controller projects on his Rudeism Twitch channel.

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Mini Mars Rover Runs On Pi Pico W

October 28, 2022 by 9 Comments

NASA’s Mars Rovers are robots that have inspired many budding engineers around the world. [Nikodem Bartnik] had a particular fondness for them himself, and set out to build a miniature version of his very own.

The Raspberry Pi Pico W is the brains of the operation, serving as both microcontroller and remote wireless link for control. The robot uses four mecanum wheels for locomotion, with each getting its own motor. This allows the robot to move in all directions simply by rotating the wheels in different configurations. On top, the rover sports a articulated robot arm controlled by servos, which allows it to pick things up and put them down. Plus, there’s an FPV camera on top that delivers a video feed so the robot can be driven remotely. This is achieved over WiFi, thanks to a bit of custom control code written in Python.

It’s a surprisingly capable bot on smooth surfaces, as the mecanum wheels allow strafing and other movements that regular wheels simply can’t do. It’s also fun having a bot that can interact with its environment, thanks to its motorized appendages.

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Cursive Out Loud: Dealing With Dragons

October 28, 2022 by 21 Comments

When we last left this broadening subject of handwriting, cursive, and moveable type, I was threatening to sing the praises of speech-to-text programs. To me, these seem like the summit of getting thoughts committed to what passes for paper these days.

A common thread in humanity’s tapestry is that we all walk around with so much going on in our heads, and no real chance to get it out stream-of-consciousness style without missing a word — until we start talking to each other. I don’t care what your English teacher told you — talking turns to writing quite easily; all it takes is a willingness to follow enough of the rules, and to record it all in a readable fashion.

But, alas! That suggests that linear thinking is not only possible, but that it’s easy and everyone else is already doing it. While that’s (usually) not true, simply thinking out loud can get you pretty far down the road in a lot of mental vehicles. You just have to record it all somehow. And if your end goal is to have the words typed out, why not skip the the voice recorder and go the speech-to-text route?

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Hackaday Podcast 191: Researchers Parse Starlink, Switches Sense Muscles, And LFT Plays The Commodordion

October 28, 2022 by 4 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney get together for a look at everything cool under the hardware-hacking sun.

Think you need to learn how to read nerve impulses to run a prosthetic hand? Think again — try spring-loaded plungers and some Hall effect sensors. What’s Starlink saying? We’re not sure, but if you’re clever enough you can use the radio link for ad hoc global positioning. Historically awful keyboards, pan-and-scan cable weather stations, invisibility cloaks, plumbing fittings for electrical controls — we’ll talk about it all. And if you’ve never heard two Commodore 64s and a stack of old floppies turned into an electronic accordion, you really don’t know what you’re missing.

Download it your own bad self!

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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ESP8266 Web Server Saves 60% Power With A 1 Ms Delay

October 28, 2022 by 42 Comments

Arduino has a library for quickly and easily setting up a simple web server on an ESP8622-based board, and [Tomaž] found that power consumption on an ESP-01 can be reduced a considerable amount by simply inserting a 1 ms delay in the right place. The reason this works isn’t because of some strange bug or oddball feature — it’s really just a side effect of how the hardware operates under the hood.

[Tomaž] uses the “hello world” example from ESP8266WebServer to explain. In it, the main loop essentially consists of calling server.handleClient() forever. That process checks for incoming HTTP connections, handles them, sends responses, exits — and then does it all over again. A simple web server like this one spends most of its time waiting.

A far more efficient way to handle things would be to launch server.handleClient() only when an incoming network connection calls for it, and put the hardware to sleep whenever that is not happening. However, that level of control just isn’t possible in the context of the Arduino’s ESP8266WebServer library.

So what’s to be done? The next best thing turns out to be a simple delay(1) statement right after each server.handleClient() call in the main loop.

Why does this work? Adding delay(1) actually causes the CPU to spend the vast majority of its time in that one millisecond loop. And counting microseconds turns out to be a far less demanding task, power-wise, than checking for incoming network requests about a hundred thousand times per second. In [Tomaž]’s tests, that one millisecond delay reduced idle power consumption at 3.3 V from roughly 230 mW to around 70 mW — about 60% — while only delaying the web server’s response times by 6-8 milliseconds.

For simple web server applications, this is is for sure a good trick to keep in mind. There are also much more advanced techniques for saving power on ESP8266-based boards; from boards that barely sip a single microamp while sleeping, to coin-cell powered boards that go so far as to modify the TCP/IP stack to help squeeze every bit of power savings possible.

This Week In Security: IOS, OpenSSL, And SQLite

October 28, 2022 by 13 Comments

Earlier this week, a new release of iOS rolled out, fixing a handful of security issues. One in particular noted it “may have been actively exploited”, and was reported anonymously. This usually means that a vulnerability was discovered in the wild, being used as part of an active campaign. The anonymous credit is interesting, too. An educated guess says that this was a rather targeted attack, and the security company that found it doesn’t want to give away too much information.

Of other interest is the GPU-related fix, credited to [Asahi Lina], the VTuber doing work on porting Linux to the Apple M1/M2 platform, and particularly focusing on GPU drivers. She’s an interesting case, and doing some very impressive work. There does remain the unanswered question of how the Linux Kernel will deal with a pull request coming from a pseudonym. Regardless, get your iOS devices updated.

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showing the connector after its torn down from the side of the wire solder points, showing how thin are the metal pads, and also that one wire has already broken off

NVIDIA Power Cables Are Melting, This May Be Why

October 28, 2022 by 57 Comments

NVIDIA has recently released their lineup of 40-series graphics cards, with a novel generation of power connectors called 12VHPWR. See, the previous-generation 8-pin connectors were no longer enough to satiate the GPU’s hunger. Once cards started getting into the hands of users, surprisingly, we began seeing pictures of melted 12VHPWR plugs and sockets online — specifically, involving ATX 8-pin GPU power to 12VHPWR adapters that NVIDIA provided with their cards.

Now, [Igor Wallossek] of igor’sLAB proposes a theory about what’s going on, with convincing teardown pictures to back it up. After an unscheduled release of plastic-scented magic smoke, one of the NVIDIA-provided connectors was destructively disassembled. Turned out that these connectors weren’t crimped like we’re used to, but instead, the connectors had flat metal pads meant for wires to solder on. For power-carrying connectors, there are good reasons this isn’t the norm. That said, you can make it work, but chances are not in favor of this specific one.

The metal pads in question seem to be far too thin and structurally unsound, as one can readily spot, their cross-section is dwarfed by the cross-section of cables soldered to them. This would create a segment of increased resistance and heat loss, exacerbated by any flexing of the thick and unwieldy cabling. Due to the metal being so thin, the stress points seem quite flimsy, as one of the metal pads straight up broke off during disassembly of the connector.

If this theory is true, the situation is a blunder to blame on NVIDIA. On the upside, the 12VHPWR standard itself seems to be viable, as there are examples of PSUs with native 12HPWR connections that don’t exhibit this problem. It seems, gamers with top-of-the-line GPUs can now empathize with the problems that we hackers have been seeing in very cheap 3D printers.