Purpose-Built Plotter Pitches In To Solve Wordblitz On Your Phone

July 23, 2022 by No comments

It seems like most hackers have never played a game without at least wondering how to cheat at it. It’s not that we’re a dishonest lot, at least not as a rule. It’s more that most games hold less challenge for us than does figuring out how to reverse engineer the game’s mechanics. We don’t intend to cheat; it just sort of happens.

Or at least that’s the charitable way to look at such smartphone game cheats as this automated word-search puzzle solver. The game is Wordblitz, which is basically an implementation of classic Boggle along with extra features to release more dopamine and keep you playing. Not one to fall for that trick, [ghettobastler] whipped up a quick X-Y gantry from MDF using a laser cutter, added a stylus in the form of a cotton swab tipped with aluminum foil, and a vision system based on a simple web camera. The bed of the gantry has a capacitive plate so the stylus can operate the phone, along with a frame of ArUco fiducial marker to aid in locating the phone.

A Raspberry Pi handles the machine vision part of the process, which uses OpenCV to estimate the phone’s location and extract the current game tiles. The words in the game field are located by a solver that [ghetto] had previously written; a script then streams G-code to the plotter to peck out the answers at blazing speed, or at least faster than even [Peggy Hill] could manage. See the video below for a sample game being solved.

One word of warning if you choose to build this: [ghettobastler]’s puzzle-solving algorithm is based on a French dictionary, so you’ll have to re-teach it for other languages. But whatever language it’s in, this reminds us a bit of some of the Wordle solvers we’ve seen recently.

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Patents And The Missing Museum

July 23, 2022 by 38 Comments

A beautiful chapter of the history of invention in the United States ended with a fire in 1880. Well, the fire took place in 1877, but the wheels of government turn slowly. For the first 90 years that patents were granted in the USA, applications were required to be accompanied by a working model – to prove that the idea works and rule out “the perpetual motion cranks”.

During this time, the US Patent Office put all of these models on display, or at least as many of them as they could. The idea was that, alongside the printed documents, people would learn from seeing the inventions in the flesh. This tremendous resource got the Patent Office nicknamed the “Temple of Invention”, and rightly so. Many of the crucial innovations of the industrial revolution were there, in miniature. From Samuel Morse’s model telegraph, through Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, to more than a thousand inventions of Thomas Edison’s, working models were to be seen in the flesh, if in the small. We can only imagine how awe-inspiring it would have been to walk through those halls.

Two fires put significant dents in this tremendous collection. First in 1836, in a fire that consumed most of the approximately 10,000 patents that had been issued to that date, models and paper copies alike. Ironically, these included the patent for the first cast-iron fire hydrant. This fire was so devastating that it led to a dramatic patent reform in that same year, and to the building of a new fireproof Patent Office.

And the “new” Patent Office building still stands today, and proudly displayed patent models until the fire that broke out inside the building in 1877. (The contents of the building weren’t fireproof.) In this second fire, brave employees saved many of the works by staying and battling the fire from inside, but the second demoralizing beatdown, and the accelerating number of patent applications, it became obvious that there just wasn’t enough space to store a model of each patentable invention, and the requirement was dropped in 1880.

A small portion of the remaining patent models were put on display in one wing of the National Portrait Gallery, housed in the Patent Office building, and I had the wonderful opportunity to see it live in the early 2000s. I have no idea if the exhibit is still there – I’m guessing it’s not. The Smithsonian owns the lion’s share of the existing models, and we imagine they are in a warehouse somewhere, like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A shame, because seeing a real 3D model of a thing is different from seeing line drawings. Maybe in the future, 3D CAD drawings will take their place? They’d be a lot easier to save in event of a fire.

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Is 3D Printing Up To A Turntable?

July 23, 2022 by 20 Comments

Thanks to a feature by Prusament because it uses their filament, we’ve been interested to read about the SongBird turntable from the British outfit Frame Theory (Note: at time of writing, they have an expired certificate). It’s a commercial product with an interesting twist for the Hi-Fi business: buy the completed turntable or buy a kit of parts and print the rest yourself.

We’re always interested to see new things here at Hackaday but we’re not in the business of promoting commercial products without a tech angle. This turntable has us interested then not because it happens to be 3D printed but because it’s instantly raised our curiosity over how suitable 3D printing is as a medium for a high quality audio component. Without descending into audiophile silliness we cannot overstate the effect that rigidity and mass of turntable components has on its audio quality. Take a look at this one we featured in the past for an extreme example.

So looking more closely at the design, we find that the chassis is aluminium, which makes sense given its visibly thin construction. Close examination of the photos on their site also reveals the tonearm to be made of carbon fibre tube, so it’s clear that they’ve put some effort into making a better turntable rather than a novelty one. This does raise the question though: manufacturing practicalities aside could you 3D print the whole thing? We think that a 3D printed chassis could replace the aluminium one at the cost of much more bulk and loss of the svelte looks, but what about the tonearm? Would one of the carbon-fibre-infused filaments deliver enough stiffness? It would be particularly interesting we think, were someone to try.

Digital Measuring Wheel Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

July 23, 2022 by 11 Comments

You may have seen surveyors (or maths students) running around with measuring wheels, counting the clicks to measure distances. [AGBarber]’s digital measuring wheel works in much the same way, but with the convenience of a measurement you can read off a screen.

The design is simple, and relies on the outer wheel of the device turning a mouse encoder wheel. This is read by anArduino Pro Mini which runs the show and records the requisite measurements. It then drives an SSD1306 OLED display which shows the measurements to the user. It’s all wrapped up in a 3D printed housing that makes it easy to roll around the small handheld device.

The wheel’s maximum measuring length is 9999.99 cm, or just under 100 meters. Given the size of the device, that’s probably more than enough, but you could always build a bigger version if you wanted to measure longer distances.

Measuring wheels make it easy to measure along curves, and are just generally fun to play with as well. You could certainly use one to determine whether flat tyres are making your speedometer lie to you. Or, you could dive into this great talk on measurement from [Adam Savage].

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A small PCB with a microcontroller, two 7-segment LED displays, a speaker and some buttons

Hunt The Lunpus Is An ATtiny-Based Minimalist Game Console

July 22, 2022 by 9 Comments

In a world where game consoles come with ever-higher resolutions and ever-faster frame rates, it’s refreshing to see someone going in the opposite direction: [Doug McInnes]’s latest project is a tiny handheld game console with probably the lowest-resolution graphics possible. Hardware-wise, it’s a small PCB containing an ATtiny84, two seven-segment LED displays, a speaker and a handful of buttons. It’s the software that gives this project its magic, and all of it is available on GitHub, along with schematics and a PCB layout.

The game is called Hunt the Lunpus, and as the name suggests it’s inspired by the 1970s classic Hunt the Wumpus. The player moves through a maze of interconnected rooms, trying to avoid slime pits and marauding bats while searching for the Lunpus, a sleeping monster that will eat the player unless they defeat it first by shooting it with arrows. Four pushbuttons provide directional control, with a fifth serving as an “action” button to start the game and fire those arrows.

Whereas Wumpus was originally a text-based adventure game, Lunpus is fully graphical: the seven-segment displays indicate the cave’s walls, and flash in different ways to alert the player to the various hazards. [Doug] explains the events as they happen in the video embedded below; while it might take a bit of practice to find your way at first, we can already picture ourselves wandering through the caves with our quiver full of arrows, ready to hunt some Lunpus. Who needs 4K graphics, anyway?

If you’re into minimalist game consoles, there’s plenty to choose from: the LEDBOY renders Space Invaders on just a few LEDs, while TWANG needs nothing more than a single LED strip. You can also explore more mazes on this 8×8 LED matrix, or even hunt Wumpuses in a slightly-higher resolution.

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Color Us Impressed: Redbean Runs A Web Server On Six Operating Systems

July 22, 2022 by 20 Comments

The holy grail of computing is to have some way to distribute a program to any computer. This is one of those totally unachievable goals, but many have tried with varying degrees of success.  People naturally think of Java, but even before that there was UCSD’s P-code and many other attempts to pull off the same trick. We were impressed, though, with Redbean 2.0 which uses a single executable file to run a webserver — or possibly other things — on six different operating systems. If the six operating systems were all flavors of Linux or Windows that wouldn’t be very interesting. But thanks to APE — the Actually Portable Executable — format, you can run under Windows, Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.

This is quite a feat when you realize that most of these take wildly different file formats. There is one small problem: you can’t use much of anything on the host operating system. However, if you look at Redbean, you’ll see there is quite a lot you can do.

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SATAn Turns Hard Drive Cable Into Antenna To Defeat Air-Gapped Security

July 22, 2022 by 19 Comments

It seems like [Mordechai Guri]’s lab at Ben-Gurion University is the place where air-gapped computers go to die, or at least to give up their secrets. And this hack using a computer’s SATA cable as an antenna to exfiltrate data is another example of just how many side-channel attacks the typical PC makes available.

The exploit, deliciously designated “SATAn,” relies on the fact that the SATA 3.0 interface used in many computers has a bandwidth of 6.0 Gb/s, meaning that manipulating the computer’s IO would make it possible to transmit data from an air-gapped machine at around 6 GHz. It’s a complicated exploit, of course, and involves placing a transmitting program on the target machine using the usual methods, such as phishing or zero-day exploits. Once in place, the transmitting program uses a combination of read and write operations on the SATA disk to generate RF signals that encode the data to be exfiltrated, with the data lines inside the SATA cable acting as antennae.

SATAn is shown in action in the video below. It takes a while to transmit just a few bytes of data, and the range is less than a meter, but that could be enough for the exploit to succeed. The test setup uses an SDR — specifically, an ADALM PLUTO — and a laptop, but you can easily imagine a much smaller package being built for a stealthy walk-by style attack. [Mordechai] also offers a potential countermeasure for SATAn, which basically thrashes the hard drive to generate RF noise to mask any generated signals.

While probably limited in its practical applications, SATAn is an interesting side-channel attack to add to [Dr. Guri]’s list of exploits. From optical exfiltration using security cameras to turning power supplies into speakers, the vulnerabilities just keep piling up.

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