Sound And Light Play Off Acrylic And Wire In This Engaging Circuit Sculpture

February 18, 2022 by 3 Comments

It’s no secret that we really like circuit sculptures around here, and we never tire of seeing what creative ways people come up with to celebrate the components used to make a project, rather than locking them away in an enclosure. And a circuit sculpture that incorporates sound and light in its design is always a real treat to discover.

Called “cwymriad” by its designer, [Eirik Brandal], this sound sculpture incorporates all kinds of beautiful elements. The framework is made from thick pieces of acrylic, set at interesting angles to each other and in contrasting colors. The sound-generating circuit, which uses square wave outputs from an ESP32 to provide carrier and modulation signals for a dual ring modulator, is built on a framework of tinned wires. The sounds the sculpture makes have a lovely resonance to them, like random bells and chimes that fade and mix together. There’s also a matrix of white LEDs that form a sort of digital oscilloscope that displays shifting waveforms in time with the music.

While we like the way this looks and sounds, the real bonus here is the details of construction in the video below. [Eirik]’s careful craftsmanship working with multiple materials is evident throughout; we were especially impressed by the work needed to drill holes for the LED matrix, any one of which slightly out of place would have been painfully obvious in the finished product.

This is far from [Eirik]’s first appearance on these pages. His vacuum tube and silicon “ioalieia” was featured just a few weeks back, and “ddrysfeöd” used the acrylic parts as light pipes in a lovely way.

Continue reading “Sound And Light Play Off Acrylic And Wire In This Engaging Circuit Sculpture” →

This Week In Security: Chrome 0-day,Cassandra, And A Cisco PoC

February 18, 2022 by 7 Comments

Running Chrome or a Chromium-based browser? Check for version 98.0.4758.102, and update if you’re not running that release or better. Quick tip, use chrome://restart to trigger an immediate restart of Chrome, just like the one that comes after an update. This is super useful especially after installing an update on Linux, using apt, dnf, or the like.

CVE-2022-0609 is the big vulnerability just patched, and Google has acknowledged that it’s being exploited in the wild. It’s a use-after-free bug, meaning that the application marks a section of memory as returned to the OS, but then accesses that now-invalid memory address. The time gap between freeing and erroneously re-using the memory allows malicious code to claim that memory as its own, and write something unexpected.

Google has learned their lesson about making too many details public too early, and this CVE and associated bug aren’t easily found in in the Chromium project’s source, and there doesn’t seem to be an exploit published in the Chromium code testing suite. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Chrome 0-day,Cassandra, And A Cisco PoC” →

Bionic Eyes Go Dark

February 18, 2022 by 49 Comments

If you were blind, having an artificial retinal implant would mean the difference between seeing a few hundred pixels in greyscale and seeing all black, all the time. Imagine that you emerged from this total darkness, enjoyed a few years of mobility and your newfound sense, and then everything goes dark again because the company making the devices abandoned them for financial reasons.

This is a harrowing tale of close-source technology, and how a medical device that relies on proprietary hard- and software essentially holds its users hostage to the financial well-being of the company that produces it. When that company is a brash startup, with plans of making money by eventually pivoting away from retinal implants to direct cortical stimulation — a technology that’s in it’s infancy at best right now — that’s a risky bet to take. But these were people with no other alternative, and the technology is, or was, amazing.

One blind man with an implant may or may not have brain cancer, but claims that he can’t receive an MRI because Second Sight won’t release details about his implant. Those bugs in your eyes? When the firm laid off its rehab therapists, patients were told they weren’t going to get any more software updates.

If we were CEO of SecondSight, we know what we would do with our closed-source software and hardware right now. The company is facing bankruptcy, has lost significant credibility in the medical devices industry, and is looking to pivot away from the Argus system anyway. They have little to lose, and a tremendous amount of goodwill to gain, by enabling people to fix their own eyes.

Thanks to [Adrian], [Ben], [MLewis], and a few other tipsters for getting this one in!

Commodore 64 Monitor Traces I/O Calls, Eases Debugging

February 18, 2022 by 7 Comments

Developing for the Commodore 64 can be a rewarding retrocomputing experience, and thanks to [Dave Van Wagner], things are easier with his C64 IO_Monitor project, which opens the door to logging and tracing Kernal I/O calls for closer inspection. That’s not a typo, by the way. Kernal is what handles the C64’s low-level OS routines. Amusingly, as the story goes, it did in fact originate as a misspelling of kernel, but the name stuck.

What [Dave]’s program does is trace and log all input and output calls going through Kernal, which includes just about any function one might imagine. Things like keyboard input, screen output, and disk or tape I/O are all dutifully counted and logged, allowing one to really peek under the hood at a low level when doing any kind of development work. This kind of tool has turned out to be pretty handy given [Dave]’s penchant for porting Commodore emulators to a variety of (sometimes unusual) platforms.

Interested in giving it a spin? Head to the project’s GitHub repository for all the necessary files as well as some usage details, and enjoy making debugging and development a little less opaque than it otherwise would be.

Building A High-Capacity Linear Servo Actuator

February 17, 2022 by 19 Comments

Linear actuators are useful things, moving things in straight lines rather than annoying circles like so many motors. [Retsetman] recently built a linear servo actuator of his own design with accurate positional control.

The design relies on a carriage that moves along a threaded rod, perhaps the most rudimentary design of linear actuator. A large brushed DC motor is used to turn the threaded rod through a 3D-printed 9:1 herringbone geartrain, shifting the actuator back and forth. End stop switches are used to disengage the motor to avoid damage to the mechanism. Feedback is via a ten-turn potentiometer driven off the output geartrain to match the range of the actuator to the rotational range of the pot.

The final build has a stroke of approximately 100 mm, and can lift and hold a 15 kg weight with ease. In a pull test, the actuator failed at a load just shy of 100 kg. If you’re looking for something smaller, though, you can try building a linear actuator out of old DVD drive parts instead. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Building A High-Capacity Linear Servo Actuator” →

Hello (Many Quantum) World(s)

February 17, 2022 by 9 Comments

Historically, the first program you write for a new computer language is “Hello World,” or, if you are in Texas, “Howdy World.” But with quantum computing on the horizon, you need something better. Like “Hello Many Worlds.” [IonQ] proposes what that looks like and then writes it in seven different quantum languages in a post you should check out.

Here’s the description of the simple program:

The basic quantum program we’ll write is simple. It creates a fully-entangled state between two qubits, and then measures this state. This state is sometimes called a Bell State, or Bell Pair, after physicist John Stewart Bell.

The measurement results for this program should give us 0 for both qubits or 1 for both qubits, in equal amounts. When running these, we’ll be able to tell that we’re running on real hardware because that’s not always what we get! These errors are what currently limit quantum computers, but the first steps to overcome this with quantum error correction have already begun.

Continue reading “Hello (Many Quantum) World(s)” →

Infinity Mirror Hypercrystal Is As Beautiful As It Sounds

February 17, 2022 by 4 Comments

Sometimes, we feature projects that are full to the brim with advanced functionality or solve some tricky little problem for the end-user. Other times, we feature stuff that just looks super damn cool, and the Infinity Mirror Hypercrystal is firmly in that latter category.

This show-stopping build comes to us from [Inanna Malick], who put together the design using algorithmic and generative art techniques she’s been working on for years. The form is a non-symmetrical, non-platonic solid, with each of its eight faces laser cut from mirrored acrylic. Plywood sections are used to hold together the structure.

Initially, the build was illuminated from within by white LEDs, but [Inanna] wasn’t satisfied with the look, which was too rooted in regular human technology. They were instead covered up with transparent dichroic tape, creating the lurid shifting colors that do so much to add to the mystery of the legendary Hypercrystal.

The result is an infinity mirror piece that looks more advanced, more alien, and more luridly enticing than most we’ve ever seen. The dichroic shift placed on the LEDs goes a long way to elevating this sculpture to new aesthetic heights. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Infinity Mirror Hypercrystal Is As Beautiful As It Sounds” →