Watch NASA Crash A Probe Into An Asteroid Tonight

September 26, 2022 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

Got any plans for tonight? No? Well then you’re in luck, because NASA is just a few hours from intentionally smashing a probe into the minor planet Dimorphos as part of Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — marking the first time humanity has ever intentionally tried to knock a space rock off-course. If it works, we’re one step closer to having a viable planetary defense system in case we ever detect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. If it doesn’t work. . . well, we’ve still got time to come up with another plan.

To be clear, the 170 meter (560 feet) wide Dimorphos DOES NOT pose any threat to us, nor will it after NASA smacks it around with an ion-propelled spacecraft. This is simply a test to see if a small spacecraft impacting an asteroid head-on can slow it down enough to appreciably change its orbital trajectory. We won’t know for a week or so if the impact did the trick, but it should still be fascinating to watch the crash happen live.

We’ve embedded the two NASA streams below. The first one will start about a half an hour before impact and is going to show live navigational images of Dimorphos as the DART spacecraft zeros in on its target, and the second stream will cover the main event. Keep in mind this isn’t a Hollywood film we’re talking about — don’t expect any dramatic explosions when the clock hits zero. When the telemetry stops coming back, that means it was a bullseye.

Continue reading “Watch NASA Crash A Probe Into An Asteroid Tonight” →

When 3D Printing Gears, It Pays To Use The Right Resin

September 26, 2022 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

There are plenty of resins advertised as being suitable for functional applications and parts, but which is best and for what purpose?

According to [Jan Mrázek], if one is printing gears, then they are definitely not all the same. He recently got fantastic results with Siraya Tech Fast Mecha, a composite resin that contains a filler to improve its properties, and he has plenty of pictures and data to share.

[Jan] has identified some key features that are important for functional parts like gears. Dimensional accuracy is important, there should be low surface friction on mating surfaces, and the printed objects should be durable. Of course, nothing beats a good real-world test. [Jan] puts the resin to work with his favorite method: printing out a 1:85 compound planetary gearbox, and testing it to failure.

The results? The composite resin performed admirably, and somewhat to his surprise, the teeth on the little gears showed no signs of wear. We recommend checking out the results on his page. [Jan] has used the same process to test many different materials, and it’s always updated with all tests he has done to date.

Whether it’s working out all that can go wrong, or making flexible build plates before they were cool, We really admire [Jan Mrázek]’s commitment to getting the most out of 3D printing with resin.

Tiny Dongle Brings The Hard Drive’s Song Back To Updated Retrocomputers

September 26, 2022 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

Back in the “beige box” days of computing, it was pretty easy to tell what your machine was doing just by listening to it, because the hard drive was constantly thrashing the heads back and forth. It was sometimes annoying, but never as annoying as hearing the stream of Geiger counter-like clicks stop when you knew it wasn’t done loading a program yet.

That “happy sound” is getting harder to come by, even on retro machines, which increasingly have had their original thrash-o-matic drives replaced with compact flash and other solid-state drives. This HDD sound simulator aims to fill that diagnostic and nostalgic gap on any machine that isn’t quite clicky enough for you. Sadly, [Matthias Werner] provides no build details for his creation, but between the longish demo video below (by a satisfied customer) and the details of the first version, it’s easy enough to figure out what’s going on here. An ATtiny and a few support components ride on a small PCB along with a piezoelectric speaker. The dongle connects to the hard drive activity light, which triggers a series of clicks from the speaker that sound remarkably like a hard drive heading seeking tracks. A demo starts at 7:09 in the video below; the very brave — or very nostalgic — might want to check out the full defragmentation that starts at 13:11.

Sure, this one is perhaps a bit over-the-top, but in the retrocomputing world, no price is too high to pay in the name of nostalgia. And it’s still far from the most ridiculous hard drive activity indicator we’ve seen.

Continue reading “Tiny Dongle Brings The Hard Drive’s Song Back To Updated Retrocomputers” →

Linux Fu: Atomic Power

September 26, 2022 by Al Williams 12 Comments

People are well aware of the power of virtual machines. If you want to do something dangerous — say, hack on the kernel — you can create a virtual machine, snapshot it, screw it up a few times, restore it, and your main computer never misses a beat. But sometimes you need just a little shift in perspective, not an entire make belive computer. For example, you are building a new boot disk and you want to pretend it is the real boot disk and make some updates. For that there is chroot, a Linux command that lets you temporarily open processes that think the root of the filesystem is in a different place than the real root. The problem is, it is hard to manage a bunch of chroot environments which is why they created Atoms.

The system works with several common distributions and you install it via Flatpak. That means you can launch, for example, a shell that thinks it is running Gentoo or Centos Linux under Ubuntu.

Continue reading “Linux Fu: Atomic Power” →

Reverse Engineering Hack Chat With Matthew Alt

September 26, 2022 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, September 28 at noon Pacific for the Reverse Engineering Hack Chat with Matthew Alt!

Our world is full of mysteries, from the nature of time to how exactly magnets work. There are some things that we just have to accept that no matter how hard we look, we’ll never get a complete answer, especially in the natural world. The constructed world is another thing, though. It doesn’t seem fair that only a relatively few people have the inside scoop on the workings of everyday things, like network routers, game consoles, and even the vehicles we drive. Of course, the companies that make these things have a right to profit from their intellectual property, but we as consumers also have a right to be curious about how these things work and to understand what the software running on these devices is doing on our behalf.

Luckily, what can be engineered can be reverse engineered, if you have the right tools and the skills to use them. It can be a challenge, but it’s one Matthew Alt has taken on plenty of times. We’ve seen him deep-dive into JTAG, look at serial wire debugging, and recently even try some glitching attacks. In fact, he even taught a HackadayU course on reverse engineering with Ghidra. And now he’ll drop by the Hack Chat to talk all about reverse engineering. Join us with your questions, your exploits, and your ideas on how to go where no hacker has gone before.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 28 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Probably The Simplest Radiation Detector You Already Own

September 26, 2022 by Jenny List 78 Comments

Over the years we’ve featured quite a few radiatioactivity detectors, which usually include a Geiger-Muller tube, or perhaps a large-area photodiode. But in the event of radiation exposure from a nuclear attack, how does the man in the street gauge the exposure without owning a dedicated instrument? This was a question of note at the height of the Cold War, and it’s one that [Dr. Marshall Brucer] answered in a 1962 paper entitled “When Do You Leave A Fallout Shelter“. The full paper is behind a paywall but the part we’re interested in is on the freely available first page.

Dr. Brucer‘s detector is simplicity itself, and it relies on the erosion of a static electric charge by radiation. Should you rub a plastic comb in your hair it will accumulate enough charge to pick up a small piece of paper, and under normal background radiation the charge will ebb away such that it will drop the piece of paper after about 15 seconds. His calculation is that once the field reaches around 10 roentgens per hour it will be enough to erase the charge and drop the paper immediately. There’s a comtemporary newspaper report (Page 7, just to the left of the large advertisment) which tells the reader that since the exposure limit is 100 roentgens (one sievert), this test failing indicates that they have nine hours to create a better shelter. For obvious reasons we can’t test this at the Hackaday bench, but those of us who remember the days when such topics were a real concern will be searching for a handy comb anyway.

Thanks [Victor Matthew] for the tip.

Smart Pills Can Tell Your Doctor That You’ve Taken Them

September 26, 2022 by Lewin Day 50 Comments

We have many kinds of pills available these days to treat all kinds of different disorders. Of course, the problem with pills is that they don’t work if you don’t take them. Even Worse, for some medicines, missing a dose can cause all kinds of undesirable withdrawl effects and set back a patient’s treatment.

Smart pills aim to fix this problem with a simple monitoring solution that can tell when a patient has taken their medication. They’re now publicly available and authorized for use, so let’s look at how they work.