Magnetic Vise Makes Positioning Your Workpiece Easier

February 14, 2025 by 12 Comments

[Chris Borge] was doing some fine tapping operations, and wanted a better way to position his workpieces. This was critical to avoid breaking taps or damaging parts. To this end, he whipped up a switchable magnetic vice to do the job.

The key to the build is that the magnetic field can be switched on and off mechanically. This is achieved by having two sets of six magnets each. When the poles of both sets of magnets are aligned, the magnetic field is effectively “on.” When the poles are moved to oppose each other, they effectively cancel each other out, turning the field “off.” [Chris] achieved this functionality with 12 bar magnets, 12 M12 nuts, and a pair of 3D-printed rings. Rotating the rings between two alignments serves to switch the set up on or off. The actual switching mechanism is handled with a cam and slider setup which allowed [Chris] to build a convenient vice with a nice large working area. He also took special effort to ensure the device wouldn’t pick up large amounts of ferrous swarf that would eventually clog the mechanism.

It’s a neat build, and one you can easily recreate yourself. [Chris] has supplied the files online for your printing pleasure. We’ve featured some other types of magnetic vise before, too. Video after the break.

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Original 3D Benchy boat on Thingiverse

3DBenchy Sets Sail Into The Public Domain

February 14, 2025 by 27 Comments

Good news for everyone who cannot get enough from improbably shaped boats that get referred to as a bench: the current owner (NTI Group) of the copyright has announced that 3DBenchy has been released into the public domain. This comes not too long after Prusa’s Printables website had begun to purge all derived models to adhere to the ‘no derivatives’ license. According to NTI, the removal of these derived models was not requested by NTI, but by a third-party report, unbeknownst to NTI or the original creator of the model. Recognizing its importance to the community, 3DBenchy can now be downloaded & modified freely.

NTI worked together with the original creator [Daniel Norée] and former Creative Tools CEO [Paulo Kiefe] to transition 3DBenchy and the associated website to the public domain, with the latter two having control over the website and associated social media accounts. Hopefully this means that the purged models on Printables can be restored soon, even if some may prefer to print alternate (literal) benches.

The unfortunate part is that much of this mess began courtesy of the original 3DBenchy license being ignored. If that point had been addressed many years ago instead of being swept under the rug by all parties involved, there would have been no need for any of this kerfuffle.

Satellite Internet On 80s Hardware

February 14, 2025 by 2 Comments

Portability has been a goal of a sizable section of the computing world for many decades now. While the obvious products of this are laptops, there are a number of “luggable” PCs that pack more power while ostensibly maintaining their portability. Going back in time past things like the LAN party era of the 90s and 00s takes us to the early era of luggables, with the Commodore SX-64 being one such machine of this era. Its portability is on display in this video where [saveitforparts] is using it to access the Internet over satellite.

The project uses a Glocom Inmarsat modem and antenna to access the internet through a geostationary satellite, but since this computer is about four decades old now this takes a little bit more effort than a modern computer. A Teensy microcontroller is used to emulate a modem so that the Ethernet connection from the satellite modem can be understood by the Commodore. There was a significant amount of setup and troubleshooting required as well, especially regarding IP addresses and networking but eventually [saveitforparts] got the system up and running well enough to chat on a BBS and browse Wikipedia.

One thing he found that might make a system like this relevant for a modern user is that the text-only mode of the Commodore significantly limited data use. For a normal Internet connection this might be a problem, but on a geostationary satellite network where the data is orders of magnitude more expensive, this can be surprisingly helpful. We might not recommend an SX-64 system specifically, but one inspired by similar computers like this text-only cyberdeck might do the trick with the right networking connections.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 308: The Worst 1 Ever, Google’s Find My Opened, And SAR On A Drone

February 14, 2025 by 6 Comments

It’s Valentine’s Day today, and what better way to capture your beloved’s heart than by settling down together and listening to the Hackaday Podcast! Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week’s roundup of what’s cool in the world of hardware. We start by reminding listeners that Hackaday Europe is but a month away, and that a weekend immersed in both hardware hacking and the unique culture offered by the city of Berlin can be yours.

The stand-out hack of the week is introduced by Elliot, Henrik Forstén’s synthetic aperture radar system mounted on a cheap quadcopter, pushing the limits of construction, design, and computation to create landscape imagery of astounding detail. Most of us will never create our own SAR system, but we can all learn a lot about this field from his work. Meanwhile Jenny brings us Sylvain Munaut’s software defined radio made using different projects that are part of Tiny Tapeout ASICs. The SDR isn’t the best one ever, but for us it represents a major milestone in which Tiny Tapeout makes the jump from proof of concept to component. We look forward to more of this at more reasonable prices in the future. Beyond that we looked at the porting of Google Find My to the ESP32, how to repair broken zippers, and tuning in to ultrasonic sounds. Have fun listening, and come back next week for episode 309! Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 308: The Worst 1 Ever, Google’s Find My Opened, And SAR On A Drone” →

Home Depot Lamp Gets A Rainbow Upgrade

February 14, 2025 by 14 Comments

Home Depot has at times sold a neat spiral lamp that relies on LEDs to supply its soothing white glow. When [Craig Lindley] saw some modified versions on YouTube he decided he had to build one himself. The result is a charming rainbow lamp that really lights up a room (pardon the pun).

[Craig] first set about stripping the lamp of its white LED strips, replacing them with addressable WS2812B LEDs. No more would the lamp just output white light—any color in the RGB gamut was now on the table.

A powerful 10 amp 5 volt power supply was then installed to provide the necessary juice. A Wemos D1 Mini was pressed into service as the controller, which was also hooked up to an HC-SR04 infrared motion sensor. This provided the capacity to trigger the lamp when it detects someone moving nearby.

Alternatively, the lamp was given a time-activated mode as well. Either way, when activated, the lamp displays a range of colorful patterns on its elegant spirals, all with the aid of the popular FastLED library.

The final result is impressive—it looks almost stock, except it’s far more colorful and interesting to look at than the original. It’s also amusingly hard to display in our usual image formats because it’s so tall and narrow. In any case, we’ve seen some great lamp builds before, too. If you’re working on your own charming illuminations, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

This Week In Security: The UK Wants Your ICloud, Libarchive Wasn’t Ready, And AWS

February 14, 2025 by 15 Comments

There’s a constant tension between governments looking for easier ways to catch criminals, companies looking to actually protect their users’ privacy, and individuals who just want their data to be truly private. The UK government has issued an order that threatens to drastically change this landscape, at least when it comes to Apple’s iCloud backups. The order was issued in secret, and instructed Apple to provide a capability for the UK officials to access iCloud backups that use the Advanced Data Protection (ADP) system. ADP is Apple’s relatively new end-to-end encryption scheme that users can opt-into to make their backups more secure. The key feature here is that with ADP turned on, Apple themselves don’t have access to decrypted user data.

If this order wasn’t onerous enough, it seems to explicitly include all ADP-protected data, regardless of the country of origin. This should ring alarm bells. The UK government is attempting to force a US company to add an encryption backdoor to give them access to US customer data. Cryptographer [Matthew Green] has thoughts on this situation. One of the slightly conspiratorial theories he entertains is that portions of the US government are quietly encouraging this new order because the UK has weaker protections against unreasonable search and seizure of data. The implication here is that those elements in the US would use this newfound UK data access capability to sidestep Fourth Amendment protections of citizens’ data. This doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

[Matthew] does have a couple of suggestions. The first is passing laws that would make it illegal for a US company to add backdoors to their systems, specifically at the request of foreign nations. We’ve seen first-hand how such backdoors can backfire once accessed by less-friendly forces. In an ironic turn of fate, US agencies have even started recommending that users use end-to-end encrypted services to be safe against such backdoors. Technically, if this capability is added, the only recourse will be to disable iCloud backups altogether. Thankfully Apple has pushed back rather forcefully against this order, threatening to simply turn off ADP for UK users, rather than backdoor the rest of the world. Either way, it’s a scary bit of overreach.

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Lathe And Laser Team Up To Make Cutting Gear Teeth Easier

February 14, 2025 by 25 Comments

Fair warning: watching this hybrid manufacturing method for gear teeth may result in an uncontrollable urge to buy a fiber laser cutter. Hackaday isn’t responsible for any financial difficulties that may result.

With that out of the way, this is an interesting look into how traditional machining and desktop manufacturing methods can combine to make parts easier than either method alone. The part that [Paul] is trying to make is called a Hirth coupling, a term that you might not be familiar with (we weren’t) but you’ve likely seen and used. They’re essentially flat surfaces with gear teeth cut into them allowing the two halves of the coupling to nest together and lock firmly in a variety of relative radial positions. They’re commonly used on camera gear like tripods for adjustable control handles and tilt heads, in which case they’re called rosettes.

To make his rosettes, [Paul] started with a block of aluminum on the lathe, where the basic cylindrical shape of the coupling was created. At this point, forming the teeth in the face of each coupling half with traditional machining methods would have been tricky, either using a dividing head on a milling machine or letting a CNC mill have at it. Instead, he fixtured each half of the coupling to the bed of his 100 W fiber laser cutter to cut the teeth. The resulting teeth would probably not be suitable for power transmission; the surface finish was a bit rough, and the tooth gullet was a little too rounded. But for a rosette, this was perfectly acceptable, and probably a lot faster to produce than the alternative.

In case you’re curious as to what [Paul] needs these joints for, it’s a tablet stand for his exercise machine. Sound familiar? That’s because we recently covered his attempts to beef up 3D prints with a metal endoskeleton for the same project.

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