Today Is My Last Day At Hackaday; Thanks For All The Hacks!

December 10, 2021 by Mike Szczys 119 Comments

I have decided to make a career move and have accepted a position as Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth.io. I’m happy to announce that Elliot Williams will be the next Editor in Chief of Hackaday.

Right now I’m in my 13th year at Hackaday, having started in the summer of 2009. But like all of the Hackaday writing crew, I began as a loyal reader of the site. I remember hearing about Hackaday when Kevin Rose mentioned in on an episode of the old CNET TV program The Screensavers early in 2005. Having already been building robots and just starting on 8-bit AVR microcontrollers, Hackaday was exactly the source of new and interesting projects I was looking for.

Remember when all Hackaday photos looked like this? This one is actually the first time I had a project featured on the site!

An enormous amount has changed since then. When I started as a writer we had just stopped using black and white photos. A few articles later, we removed the CSS that forced all articles to be lowercase. When I became head editor in 2013 we stopped calling it Hack a Day in favor of Hackaday, and about a year later we overhauled the site, moving from green-on-black to yellow-on black and expanding the 470 pixel content width to 800. Progress.

What hasn’t changed is how we stay fresh. Hackaday has always trusted our writers to guide us by following their own interests. The people who write for Hackaday have far better things to do, but they use their writing as a creative outlet to focus on leveling up their skills, to discover new uses of available technology, and to share that energy with the greater Hackaday community. They live all over the world and work in many different fields. These experiences come together in there collective writings. I’m lucky to have this great group of writers, and so are you. When their time has ended, the hope is that a new group of readers will step up to the plate and make sure the good times never end.

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Hackaday Podcast 148: Pokemon Trades, Anniversary IPod Prototype, Stupid Satellite Tricks, And LED Strip Sensors

December 10, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. People go to great lengths for video game saves, but this Pokemon hack that does hardware-based trade conversion between the Game Boy’s Pokemon 2 and Pokemon 3 is something else. Why do we still use batteries when super capacitors exist? They’re different components, silly, and work best at different things. Turns out you can study the atmosphere by sending radio waves through it, and that’s exactly what the ESA is doing… around Mars! And will machined parts become as easy to custom order as PCBs have become? This week we take a closer look at prototyping as a service.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (55 MB)

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DIY Analog Synth Looks Like Fun

December 10, 2021 by Rich Hawkes 11 Comments

The relative ease of building the individual components that make up an analog synth make it very tempting to DIY your own. That’s what [Albert Nyström] did and the result is this great looking, and great sounding, analog synth.

The VCOs in his monosynth are based around the AS3340 VCO chip, which is a clone of the Curtis Electromusic Specialties‘ CEM3340 chip (used in machines such as the Oberheim OB-Xa, the Roland Jupiter-6, and the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 among others.) The voltage controlled filters are based on Moritz Klein’s VACTROL based VCF circuits, and the envelopes based on Thomas Henry’s 555 envelope circuits (Google searches will dig those up pretty quickly, as well as schematics for builds using the CEM chip.) Finally, the keyboard is a donor from an Arturia Keystep. While there are no step-by-step build instructions, or a schematic, we do have some info about the instrument. As you can see from some of the gut shots, it should be fairly easy to figure how [Albert] has put everything together. Or not.

Even if the internals are a bit wild, the end result is a great looking monophonic synth that does pretty much everything you’d need. If you feel the itch to wire a bunch of components together and make one yourself, there are messier ways to go about it. Or maybe you’d prefer to go the digital route? Either way, synths are a ton of fun to build and to play.

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This Week In Security: Printing Shellz, Ms-officecmd, And AI Security

December 10, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 18 Comments

Researchers at f-secure have developed an impressive new attack, leveraging HP printers as an unexpected attack surface. Printing Shellz (PDF) is a one-click attack, where simply visiting a malicious webpage is enough to get a shell and reverse proxy installed to a printer on the same network. The demo below uses a cross-site printing (XSP) attack to send the malicious print job to the printer without any further interactions.
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Digital Painting On An IPad With Real Brushes

December 10, 2021 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Drawing tablets are a great way to make digital art, and iPads and other tablets are similarly popular in this area. However, they all typically involve using some sort of special stylus for input. [Richard Greene] developed another method, with Light Strokes for the iPad letting one “paint” with real paint brushes instead!

The system uses a Fresnel prism in view of the iPad’s camera. This allows the camera to see only the parts of a paint brush, sponge, or other implement, as they make contact with the surface of the prism itself. This is via the principle known as total internal reflection.

Thus, simply wetting a paintbrush, sponge, or even a finger, allows one to paint quite authentically on the surface of the prism. The corresponding Light Strokes app on the iPad turns this into the pretty pixels of your creation. The app also allows one to experiment with all manner of fancy brush effects, too.

The build requires some finesse, with the lamination of the special Fresnel film onto glass using liquid optically clear adhesive, or LOCA. A series of mirrors are then assembled in an enclosure, allowing the iPad to be mounted with the camera having a good view of the glass painting area.

The project takes advantage of a simple physical effect in order to create a great artistic tool. Alternatively, if you prefer to draw directly, consider whipping up your own screen-based drawing tablet. Video after the break.

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3D Printing Delivers “Glass” Eyes In Record Time

December 10, 2021 by Al Williams 13 Comments

Obviously, losing an eye would be bad for your vision. But if you think about it, it is also a detriment to your appearance. You might not need a prosthetic eye, and you can certainly rock an eye patch, but a lot of people with this problem get an artificial or “glass” eye. These glass eyes are hand-painted disks that fit into the eye socket. However, a British man now has a new kind of eye prosthesis that is 3D printed, a technology that can potentially cut waiting time for patients in half.

The existing process is lengthy because it requires taking a mold of the eye socket and manually matching the remaining eye with the new artificial eye. With the 3D printed technology, scans of the eye socket and the other eye make this process much simpler.

Moorfields Eye Hospital, the source of the eye, says that a conventional eye takes about six weeks, but the new ones take no more than three weeks. The patient only needs to spend about a half-hour doing the scans before the wait starts. We presume it can be made for less cost, as well.

Medicine is embracing 3D printing and we’ve seen a 3D ear. We are waiting for our personal exoskeleton. Some of the medical 3D printing we’ve seen is for the birds.

Sound-Reactive Mannequin Arms Make For Creepy Lounge Decor

December 9, 2021 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Music visualizers were all the rage back in era of Winamp and Windows Media Player. They’re even cooler when they don’t just live on your computer screen, though, as [Emily Velasco’s] latest project demonstrates.

The build consists of two mannequin arms on a board mounted on the wall. The arms were sourced for just $5 from a Sears that went out of business, and originally fastened to the mannequin thanks to magnets inside. Thus, putting two steel plates on the board allowed the arms to be attached, and they can be freely arranged as [Emily] sees fit.

The ESP32-based Pixelblaze LED controller serves as the brains of the operation, controlling LEDs mounted inside the arms themselves. Using a dedicated controller makes working with addressable LEDs a cinch. As a further bonus, the board serves up a web interface, allowing patterns to be changed without having to hook up a cable to the device. Meanwhile, a sensor board inside the arms uses a microphone to enable the light show to react to sound and music.

It’s one of the more obscure uses for an old mannequin, but definitely one that appeals to our love of everything that flickers and glows. It’s a build very much up [Emily’s] alley; as a prolific maker, she loves to build weird and wonderful creations, as shared during her talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference. Video after the break.

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