Many people find themselves working in confined spaces every day, whether it be in sewer systems, drains, or other tight spots. These areas come with their own unique risks to life and limb that must be carefully considered in order to avoid disaster.
To this end, the Worker’s Compensation Board of British Columbia, known as WorkSafe BC, produced a video on the dangers of working in these areas. Confined Spaces, Deadly Spaceshighlights how these areas can kill, and the right way to work around these hazards.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look back on a great week of hardware hacking. What a time to be alive when you can use open source tools to decode signals from a probe that has long since left our solar system! We admire two dirt-cheap builds, one to measure current draw in mains power, another to mill small parts with great precision for only a few bucks. A display built from a few hundred 7-segment modules begs the question: who says pixels need to be the same size? We jaw on the concept of autonomous electric cargo ships, and marvel at the challenges of hitting an asteroid with a space probe. All that and we didn’t even mention using GLaDOS as a personal assistant robot, but that’s on the docket too!
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!
How far would you go for your cup of tea? [samsungite]’s missus doesn’t like clutter on her countertops, so away the one-cup kettle would go back into the cupboard for next time while the tea steeped. As long as there’s room for it in there, why not install it there permanently? That’s the idea behind RoboTray, which would only be cooler if it could be plumbed somehow.
RoboTray went through a few iterations, most importantly the switch from 6mm MDF to 4 mm aluminum plate. A transformer acts as a current sensor, and when the kettle is powered on, the tray first advances forward 7 cm using a 12 VDC motor and an Arduino. Then it pivots 90° on a lazy Susan driven by another 12 VDC motor. The kettle is smart enough to turn itself off when finished, and the Arduino senses this and reverses all the steps after a ten-second warning period. Check it out in action after the break.
If [samsungite] has any more Arduinos lying around, he might appreciate this tea inventory tracker.
A particularly nasty 0-day was discovered in the wild, CVE-2021-40444, a flaw in how Microsoft’s MSHTML engine handled Office documents. Not all of the details are clear yet, but the result is that opening a office document can trigger a remote code execution. It gets worse, though, because the exploit can work when simply previewing a file in Explorer, making this a potential 0-click exploit. So far the attack has been used against specific targets, but a POC has been published.
It appears that there are multiple tricks that should be discrete CVEs behind the exploit. First, a simple invocation of mshtml:http in an Office document triggers the download and processing of that URL via the Trident engine, AKA our old friend IE. The real juicy problem is that in Trident, an iframe can be constructed with a .cpl URI pointing at an inf or dll file, and that gets executed without any prompt. This is demonstrated here by [Will Dormann]. A patch was included with this month’s roundup of fixes for Patch Tuesday, so make sure to update. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Office 0-day, ForcedEntry, ProtonMail, And OMIGOD”→
The dramatic price reductions we’ve seen on resin 3D printers over the last couple of years have been very exciting, as it means more people are finally getting access to this impressive technology. But what newcomers might not realize is that the cost of the printer itself is only part of your initial investment. Resin printed parts need to be washed and cured before they’re ready to be put into service, and unless you want to do it all by hand, that means buying a second machine to do the post-printing treatment.
Not sure he wanted to spend the money on a dedicated machine just yet, [Chris Chimienti] decided to take an unusual approach and modify one of his filament-based 3D printers to handle wash and cure duty. His clever enclosure slips over the considerable Z-axis of a Anet ET5X printer, and includes banks of UV LEDs and fans to circulate the air and speed up the drying process.
Looking up into the curing chamber.
The curing part is easy enough to understand, but how does it do the washing? You simply put a container of 70% isopropyl alcohol (IPA) on the printer’s bed, and place the part to be washed into a basket that hangs from the printer’s extruder. Custom Python software is used to generate G-code that commands the printer to dip the part in the alcohol and swish it back and forth to give it a good rinse.
Once the specified time has elapsed, the printer raises the part up into the enclosure and kicks on the LEDs to begin the next phase of the process. The whole system is automated through an OctoPrint plugin, and while the relatively low speed of the printer’s movement means the “washing” cycle might not be quite as energetic as we’d like, it’s definitely a very slick solution.
[Chris] provides an extensive overview of the project in the latest video on his YouTube channel, Embrace Racing. In it he explains that the concept could certainly be adapted for use on printers other than the Anet ET5X, but that it’s considerable build volume makes it an ideal candidate for conversion. Of course it’s also possible to use the foam board enclosure by itself as a curing chamber, though you’ll still need to wash the part in IPA ahead of time.
This is perhaps one of the most unusual wash and cure systems we’ve seen here at Hackaday, but we appreciate the fact that [Chris] based the whole thing on the idea that you’ve probably got a FDM printer sitting nearby that otherwise goes unused when you’re working with resin. If that’s not the case for you, putting together a more traditional UV curing chamber is an easy enough project.
[Matt] from [DIY Perks] has made a name for himself building nice custom computing machines, and his latest triple-monitor luggable PC (video after the break) is sure to give most high-performance desktop machines a run for their money.
The large central monitor folding laptop monitors mounted vertically on either size look impressive, but only just scratches the surface of this build. Hidden behind aluminum panels are Ryzen 5950X CPU and RTX 3080 GPU with water cooling, 64 GB of RAM, and two 8 TB SSDs. A set of high-quality speaker drivers, subwoofer, and audio amps is also included. All this hardware pulls about 600 W of power from a large DC-DC converter block, which in turn receives power from either a pair of onboard AC-DC converters or a 16 V – 63 V DC source, like a battery system.
To mount everything to the back of the main monitor, [Matt] created 3D printed adaptor blocks with threaded inserts which slide under existing hooks on the back of the monitor. Aluminum angles screw to these blocks to cover the edges of the display panel, together with a large mounting plate with pre-drilled holes to mount all the components on standoffs. A set of adjustable and removable legs mount to the side of the PC. A hinged door in the back cover allows storage space for a keyboard and mouse during transport. When folded, the laptop monitors don’t fully cover the main monitor, so [Matt] created a leather cover that doubles as a cable and accessory organizer.
Nothing quite says vintage computer like a dedicated glass terminal. We enjoyed [Adam]’s restoration of an Acorn CRT monitor. The 14 inch display had a common problem: a defective power switch. Replacing a switch shouldn’t be a big deal, of course, but these old CRT monitors have exciting voltages inside and require special care.
One common issue, for example, is the fact that the old CRTs are really large capacitors and can hold a dangerous charge for some time. The easiest way to handle the potential problem is to make sure the device is unplugged, ground a screwdriver blade, and push the blade under the second anode cap. Most of the time, nothing happens. Once in a while, though, you’ll hear a loud pop and you just saved yourself a nasty shock.
Even though the actual repair was pretty mundane, the teardown was a great nostalgia trip and while we don’t want to give up our LCD, we do like the old glass. CRTs have a long history and came a long way before their last gasps. They even took a turn as mass storage devices.
