Two shots of a Thriller jacket with LED strips being worn by Louise Katzovitz, one from the front and the other from the back.

Thrills With An LED “Thriller” Jacket

October 11, 2022 by Abe Connelly 20 Comments

[Louise Katzovitz] has created a light-up jacket in the style of the jacket worn by Michael Jackson in the 1983 music video for “Thriller”. [Louise Katzovitz]’s Thriller jacket is the perfect example of combining sewing hacks and electronic hacks to make an awesome, wearable jacket.

A bomber jacket was used as the base form to layer on the sequins and LED strips. Instead of bands of metal studs, [Louise] used WS2812B 60 pixels/m LED strips. 3D-printed transparent PLA “gems” were placed on top of the LEDs to mimic the form of the metal studs in the original jacket and provide diffusion for the underlying LEDs.

Each LED strip was laid out on a piece of vinyl strip. Then, a top layer of vinyl was cut to allow each of the LEDs to poke through, with the 3D printed gems super-glued on top. The assembled LED bands are attached to the jacket by Velcro with the wiring fed behind the lining material, which can be removed easily via small hooks. The whole thing is driven by an Arduino Nano and a 5 V power bank.

With the details and process worked out, [Louise] even made a tiny version of the jacket for her dog. We’ve featured LED wearables and fashion before and [Louise]’s jacket is a great addition. These projects are perfect for anyone who wants to wow their friends this upcoming Halloween season. Video after the break!

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Seeing If Cheating At Chess The Hard Way Is Even Possible

October 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 35 Comments

With all the salacious stories about a cheating scandal rocking the world of championship-level chess, you’d think that we’d have delved into the story at least a bit here on Hackaday, especially given the story’s technical angle. But we haven’t, and it’s not because we’re squeamish about the details of the alleged cheat; rather, it’s because it’s just too easy to pun your way through a story like this. The lowest-hanging fruit isn’t always the sweetest.

But, we’ll give it a go, and play this one completely straight as we look at an experiment to determine if it’s even possible to cheat in the specific way that has been alleged. For the uninitiated, 19-year-old grandmaster [Hans Niemann] stands accused of cheating, possible through the use of a remote-controlled sex toy secreted in his rectum. The idea would be for an accomplice to use the toy, which contains a vibrating motor that’s controlled by an app either via Bluetooth or WiFi, to send suggested moves to [Niemann] based on a chess-playing AI’s analysis of the game.

Whether [Niemann] cheated or not is not the concern here, but rather [Captain Steel]’s experiment is just a first-pass look at whether it would be possible to cheat using the proposed technology — and most importantly, not get caught. He tried to replicate the scanning regime [Niemann] is now subject to at tournaments based on the allegations to see if a stand-in for the sex toy — a haptic motor attached to an ESP32 — would be detectable through various thicknesses of flesh. Rather than showing the same dedication to craft that [Niemann] is alleged to have shown, [Captain Steel] used slices of baloney as a stand-in for human flesh. He then tried scanning for RF emissions from the device through increasing layers of luncheon meat. We won’t spoil the results, other than to say that baloney turns out to actually be good for something.

We’ve covered another less-invasive method of cheating before, which given the results above is probably more likely to be discovered.

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ARM Programming By Example

October 11, 2022 by Al Williams 40 Comments

The ARM processor is popping up everywhere. From Raspberry Pis, to phones, to Blue Pill Arduino-like boards, you don’t have to go far to find an ARM processor these days. If you program in C, you probably don’t care much or even think about it. But do you know ARM assembly language? Well, if you look at it one way, it can’t be too hard. The CPU only has about 30 distinct operations — that’s why it is called RISC. Of course, sometimes fewer instructions actually make things more difficult. But you can get a great starting tutorial with the 21 programs on the ARM Assembly by Example website.

You need a 32-bit ARMv6 or better — so Raspberry Pi will work here. The compiler, of course, is gcc and all the associated tools. if you have the right hardware, there are sections on using the floating point unit and the NEON co-processor, too.

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Dumping An EMMC Chip With Many Bodge Wires

October 11, 2022 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

Sometimes, you know where the data you need is stored, you just don’t have a way to access it. In this case, [GetHypoxic] needed to rip data off an eMMC chip, salvaged out of a camera. With no desire to wait for an adapter to show up, it was time to bust out the bodge!

Once removed from the PCB, bodge wires were attached to the ball-grid array contacts on the bottom of the chip. Incredibly fine soldering was the order of the day to get these hooked up to the tiny pads, and we count 11 or 12 bodge wires in total. 1.8 volts was manually supplied to the eMMC chip, and it was directly wired up to the contacts of a built-in card reader out of an old laptop for reading.

Despite the rats-nest look of it all, and the yellow polyimide tape holding it together, [GetHypoxic] reported that it mounted successfully and got the job done. We’ve seen similar hacks before, too, wiring eMMC chips up to SD card adapters. It might look messy, but hey – it sure beats waiting for shipping!

An acrylic map of the state of Lagos. Each region is lit a different color by LEDs shining on the acrylic panels. The colors coorespond to the air quality index key which is lit in cooresponding colors to the value.

Hackaday Prize 2022: This Interactive Air Quality Map Makes The Invisible Visible

October 11, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 2 Comments

Air quality can have a big impact on your health, but it isn’t always something you can see. [Ahmed Oyenuga] wanted to make air quality something more tangible and developed an Interactive Air Quality Map.

Using addressable LEDs and acrylic panels, [Oyenuga]’s map lights up different regions of his state (Lagos) with colors that correspond to qualitative values of the air quality readings. The color key on the edge of the map becomes a readout when you touch a specific region of the map.

Most of the map’s functionality is handled by an Arduino WiFi 1010, but the capacitive touch is running on a custom board [Oyenuga] designed with an ATSAMD21J17. [Oyenuga] is getting air quality data via a DesignSpark Environmental Sensor Development Kit (ESDK) and then uses reverse geocoding to take the GPS data and turn it into a location the map will understand.

If you’re interested in different options for monitoring air quality that could feed into a map like this, why don’t you check out this LoRa Air Quality Monitor or even a Mobile Air Quality Monitor.

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2022 Supercon: More Talks, More Speakers!

October 11, 2022 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

Round two of the 2022 Supercon talks is out, and it’s another superb lineup. This round is full of high voltage, art, and science. If you’ve ever dreamed of starting up your own hacker company, making your own refrigerator, teaching your toaster to think, or just making your breath glow, then Supercon is where you want to be Nov. 4-6!

Supercon will sell out, so get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for the next and final round of talk reveals next week! Plus the keynote speaker reveal. Plus workshops. Oh my. Continue reading “2022 Supercon: More Talks, More Speakers!” →

A Cassette Interface For A 6502 Breadboard Computer, Kansas City-Style

October 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

It’s been a long time since computer hobbyists stored their programs and data on cassette tapes. But because floppy drives were expensive peripherals and hard drives were still a long way from being the commodity they are today, cassettes enjoyed a long run at the top of the bulk data storage heap.

Celebrating that success by exploring the technology of cassette data storage is the idea behind [Greg Strike]’s Kansas City decoder project, which he hopes to use with his [Ben Eater]-style 6502 computer. The video below explains the Kansas City standard in some detail, and includes some interesting historical context we really hadn’t delved into before. There are also some good technical details on the modulation scheme KCS used, which [Greg] used to base his build. After a failed attempt to use an LM567 tone decoder chip, he stumbled upon [matseng]’s KCSViewer project, which decodes KCS-encoded audio signals using nothing but discrete components.

[Greg]’s prototype has a comparator to convert sine waves to square waves, followed by pair of monostable timers, each tuned to either the high or low frequency defined in the KCS specs. A test signal created using Audacity — is there anything it can’t do? — was successfully decoded, providing proof of concept for the project’s first phase. We’re looking forward to the rest of the series, which will turn this into an actual decoder, and presumably add an encoder as well.

Listeners of the Hackaday Podcast may recall we experimented with using KCS to hide some data within an episode a few months back.

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