video of someone pushing the button to generate new art

AI Generating Paintings Off To A Flying Art

August 27, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 14 Comments

The philosophical question of “What is art?” has an ethereal, transient quality to it. A definition seems to slip away as you get close to an answer. Embracing that quality, [Max Fischer] has created an AI-powered painting that paints a new piece of art at the push of a button. When the button below the screen is pushed, a new image is generated and the old one is forever lost, which in a way, makes the frame a piece of art itself.

The really makes this project stand is the sheer quality of documentation on the GitHub repo. The instructions are incredibly detailed. Everything from setting up the Jetson to building the control box out of half-inch MDF (12mm for the sane part of the world) is laid out with copious pictures. Despite the ease of generating images ahead of time, [Max] took the ~~hard route~~ Hackaday route and did all inference locally and in real-time. To handle the processing requirements, an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX single-board computer was used. He trained StyleGAN with high-resolution abstract art that gets generated whenever the button below the screen is pushed. To prevent screen burn-in, a PIR was added to turn the screen off when no one is around.

Here at Hackaday, we’ve seen several projects putting old laptop screens or monitors into a nice wooden case and mounting them to the wall. Since 32″ laptops are rather hard to find, [Max] opted to take a different approach and instead got a 32″ Samsung Frame for relatively cheap.

For all their detail, [Max] did leave one thing out of the readme: the AI that generates the art. [Max] hints that he wants others to create their picture frames, but with their own art generation. So what are you waiting for? Go make some art.

Custom Soldering Fume Fan Doesn’t Skimp On Features

August 27, 2021 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Prolific maker [sjm4306] tells us the first iteration of his soldering fan was little more than some cardboard, electrical tape, and a hacked up USB cable. But as we all know, these little projects have a way of evolving over time. Fast forward to today, and his custom fan is a well-polished piece of kit that anyone with a soldering iron would be proud to have on their workbench.

Cardboard has given way to a 3D printed enclosure that holds the fan, electronics, a pair of 18650 cells, and a easily replaceable filter. Between the marbled filament, debossed logo, properly countersunk screw holes, and rounded corners, it’s really hard to overstate how good this case looks. We’ve shamefully produced enough boxy 3D printed enclosures to know that adding all those little details takes time, but the end result really speaks for itself.

Fan internals, with a look at the custom PCB.

The user interface running on the OLED is also an exceptionally nice touch. Sure the fan doesn’t need a graphical display, and [sjm4306] could have saved a lot of time and effort by using a turn-key speed controller, but the push-button configuration complete with graphical indications of fan speed and battery life really give the final product a highly professional feel.

In the video below, [sjm4306] reveals that while the finished product might look great, there were a few bumps in the road. Issues with clearance inside the case made him rethink how things would be wired and mounted, leading to a far more cramped arrangement than he’d anticipated. Part of the problem was that he designed the case first and tried to integrate the electronics later, rather than the other way around; a common pitfall you’d be wise to watch out for.

It’s been proven that, without some external input, solder smoke is going to go right in your face. Whether or not you need to do something this complex is naturally up for debate, but if you want to keep all that nasty stuff out of your lungs, you’d do well to outfit your workbench with some kind of fan.

Continue reading “Custom Soldering Fume Fan Doesn’t Skimp On Features” →

image of two floor lamps, one cool and one hot,

Customized Work-From-Home Lighting

August 27, 2021 by Chris Lott 7 Comments

[Jon] wants his home office lighting to mimic the light outside, at least from a color perspective. To that end, he has embarked on a design which monitors both the outdoor light and at his work station, and accordingly drives a pair of LED lamps of different colors. One lamp is rated at above 5000 K and provides “cool” lighting, , and the other is rated at less than 3000 K for “warm” lighting.

Commercial solutions do exist, but they are proprietary and do this within a single bulb and seem difficult to control in an orchestrated manner throughout the house. [Jon] plans for his approach to be scalable, eventually consisting of a variety of lighted areas of the house from a single microcontroller.

One of the design goals for this project is to create something that could disappear into the room, rather than the science fair aesthetic of my prior project.

One commenter on his project’s site asked why [Jon] is doing this, that is, what is the value of controlling the color of your indoor lighting? While [Jon] doesn’t have a specific goal in mind at the moment, he notes that these techniques could potentially be helpful for enhancing productivity, managing circadian rhythms, and as light therapy for seasonal depression.

We covered [Jon]’s science-fair-like project that in this writeup from last year. If the topic interests you, check out the white papers he links on his project page for further reading.

Ask Hackaday: What Is Amazon Thinking By Entering The Palm-Reading Business?

August 27, 2021 by Kristina Panos 60 Comments

Have you heard about this One? At least three United States senators have, and they want to know what Amazon plans to do with all the biometric data collected by the Amazon One program. It’s their new contactless payment method that uses your unique palm print instead of cards or phones to make purchases, gain access to venues of work and play, and enter or pay in whatever other spaces Amazon can invade down the line. The idea is that one day, we’ll all be able to leave our homes without any form of money or ID of any kind, because we’ll all be stored away in Bezos’ big biometric file cabinet.

We tossed this one around in the writer’s room back when the Amazon One concept was nothing but a pile of buzzwords and a render or two, but these kiosks are now active in 50+ Whole Foods and Amazon 4-Star locations across the US. Here’s the deal: you can only sign up at a participating store that has a kiosk, because they have to scan your palms into the system. We were worried that the signup kiosk could easily take fingerprint scans at the same time, but according to the gifs in Morning Brew’s review, it just uses another of their point-of-sale palm scanners along with a touch screen and a card reader. But you still have to hover your entire hand over it, so who’s to say that the scan ends where the fingers begin?

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: What Is Amazon Thinking By Entering The Palm-Reading Business?” →

Hackaday Podcast 133: Caustic Lenses, Not Ice-Cream Automation, Archery Mech Suit, And The Cheapest Robot Arm

August 27, 2021 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams wade into a week of wonderful hacks. There’s an acrylic lens that hides images in the network of caustics: the light rays that shine through it. Boston Dynamics is finally showing the good stuff; people wrenching on ‘bots, and all kinds of high-end equipment failure, along with some epic successes. Can you grow better plants by inferring what they need by accurately weighing them? In more turbulent news, a police drone slammed into a Cessna mid-flight, the ISS went for an unexpected spin, and McDonald’s not-ice-cream machines have a whole new layer of drama around them.

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 (60 MB or so.)

Continue reading →

Resin print before and after paint injection.

Resin 3D Prints Get A New Look With Paint Injection

August 27, 2021 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

As cool as resin-based 3D printers are, they’re not without their shortcomings. One sore point, especially for those looking to document their prints, is that the translucent resins often favored for stereolithography can make the finest details difficult to see. Injecting paint into the model is how [Andrew Sink] decided to attack this problem, and the results are pretty striking.

For sure, this isn’t a problem that everyone making resin prints is going to face. Some resins are nicely opaque, and the fine details of a print show up just fine. But transparent resins lend a nice look to some projects, and might benefit from [Andrew]’s technique. It’s pretty much as simple as it sounds: choose a hollow model — or modify an existing one — print it up in the usual way, and clean thoroughly inside and out with isopropanol before curing under UV. Using a curing station that can get UV light up into the voids is probably a smart idea.

To finish off, the cured model is injected with acrylic paint. Nothing special here, just craft store acrylic in a syringe. [Andrew] seemed to prefer a thicker paint; we don’t want to second guess, but intuitively a thinner paint would seem to have some advantages. In any case, be sure to provide adequate vent holes for the displaced air. The video below has a few before and after shots, and the technique really works well to show off surface detail. Plus it just plain looks cool.

This seems like a good technique to keep in mind, and might even work well for hollow FDM prints done with transparent filaments. Still on the fence about FDM vs. SLA? We can help with that.

Continue reading “Resin 3D Prints Get A New Look With Paint Injection” →

This Week In Security: Through The Mouse Hole, Zoom RCE, And Defeating Defender

August 27, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 9 Comments

Windows security problems due to insecure drivers is nothing new, but this one is kinda special. Plug in a Razer mouse, tell the install dialog you want to install to a non-standard location, and then shift+right click the Explorer window. Choose a powershell, and boom, you now have a SYSTEM shell. It’s not as impressive as an RCE, and it requires hands-on the machine, but it’s beautiful due to the simplicity of it.

The problem is a compound one. First, Windows 10 and 11 automatically downloads and starts the install of Razer Synapse when a Razer device is plugged in. Note it’s not just Razer, any branded app that auto installs like this is possibly vulnerable in the same way. The installation process runs as system, and because it was started automatically, there is no admin account required. The second half of the issue is that the installer itself doesn’t take any precautions to prevent a user from spawning additional processes. There isn’t an obvious way to prevent the launch of Powershell from within the FolderPicker class, so an installer running as SYSTEM would have to go out of its way to drop privileges, to make this a safe process. The real solution is for Microsoft to say no to GUI installers bundled with WHQL signed drivers.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Through The Mouse Hole, Zoom RCE, And Defeating Defender” →