Arduino Drives A 600-Character Display

February 14, 2020 by 7 Comments

[Peterthinks] admits he’s no cabinet maker, so his projects use a lot of hot glue. He also admits he’s no video editor. However, his latest video uses some a MAX7219 to create a 600 character scrolling LED sign. You can see a video of the thing, below. Spoiler alert: not all characters are visible at once.

The heart of the project is a MAX7219 4-in-1 LED display that costs well under $10. The board has four LED arrays resulting in a display of 8×32 LEDs. The MAX7219 takes a 16-bit data word over a 10 MHz serial bus, so programming is pretty easy.

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This Week In Security: Robinhood, Apple Mail, ASLR, And More Windows 7

February 14, 2020 by 10 Comments

First off this week, a ransomware named Robinhood has a novel trick up its sleeve. The trick? Loading an old known-vulnerable signed driver, and then using a vulnerability in that driver to get a malicious kernel driver loaded.

A Gigabyte driver unintentionally exposed an interface that allows unfettered kernel level read and write access. Because it’s properly signed, Windows will happily load the driver. The ransomware code uses that interface to turn off the bit that enforces the loading of signed drivers only. From there, loading a malicious driver is trivial. Robinhood uses it’s kernel-level access to disable anti-virus applications before launching the data encryption.

This is a striking example of the weakness of binary signing without a mechanism to revoke those signatures. In an ideal world, once the vulnerability was found and an update released, the older, vulnerable driver would have its signature revoked.

The last Windows 7 Update For Real This Time, Maybe

More news in the ongoing saga of Windows 7/Server 2008 reaching end-of-life. KB4539602 was released this patch Tuesday, fixing the black background problem introduced in the last “final” round of updates. Surely that’s the last we’ll hear of this saga, right?

Not so fast. Apparently that patch has led to multiple Windows Server 2008 machines failing to boot after install. According to Microsoft, the problem is a missing previous patch that updates SHA-2 support. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Robinhood, Apple Mail, ASLR, And More Windows 7” →

A Little Rewiring Teaches A Creality Ender 3 New Tricks

February 14, 2020 by 36 Comments

The Creality Ender 3 is part of the new wave of budget 3D printers, available for less than $250 from many online retailers. For the money, it’s hard to complain about the machine, and it’s more than suitable for anyone looking to get make their first steps into the world of FDM printing. But there’s certainly room for improvement, and as [Simon] shows in a recent blog post, a little effort can go a long way towards pushing this entry-level printer to the next level.

The first step was to replace the printer’s stepper drivers with something a bit more modern. Normally the Ender 3 uses common A4988 drivers, but [Simon] wanted to replace them with newer Trinamic drivers that offer quieter operation. Luckily, Trinamic makes a drop-in replacement for the A4988 that makes installation relatively easy. You’ll need to change out a few caps and remove some resistors from the board to make everyone play nice, but that shouldn’t pose a challenge to anyone who knows their way around a soldering iron.

Beyond quieter running steppers, the Trinamic TMC2208 drivers also offer direct UART control mode. Of course the Ender’s board was never designed for this, so the MCU doesn’t have enough free pins to establish serial communications with the three drivers (for the X, Y, and Z axes). But [Simon] realized if he sacrificed the SD card slot on the board, the six pins that would free on the controller could be cut and rewired to the driver’s UART pins.

Combined with the Klipper firmware, these relatively minor modifications allows him to experiment with printing at speeds far greater than what was possible before. Considering the kind of headaches that a ~$200 printer would have given you only a few years ago, it’s impressive what these new machines are capable of; even if it takes a few tweaks.

$200 Resin Printer Reviewed

February 14, 2020 by 29 Comments

[3DPrintFarm] got an early version of the Phrozen Sonic Mini resin printer. If you look at the video below, he was very impressed with its build quality and results. The price is reported to be $200, although we have seen it on some web sites for a bit more. The build quality does look good, although you have to admit, the motion mechanism on a resin printer is pretty simple, since you just need to move up and down.

The printer uses a monochrome LCD which allows it to cure layers very fast (apparently, monochrome panels pass more ultraviolet light through). The panel also has a higher-rated lifetime than color LCDs

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Training A Dog To “Speak” With A Sound Board

February 13, 2020 by 44 Comments

The field of Augmentative and Alternative Communciation (AAC) covers communication methods used by those who are unable to otherwise produce or comprehend spoken or written language. Many will be familiar with the speech synthesizer used by Stephen Hawking as just one such example of AAC technology. [Christina Hunger] is a speech language pathologist, and is intimately familiar with such tools. She decided to use these techniques to teach her dog, Stella, to talk.

[Christina] began her project by implementing a button board which triggers various speech samples when triggered. There are plenty of typical words that a dog may wish to use, like beach, park, and ball – as well as words describing concepts, such as where, later, and come. Over time, she has observed Stella using the button board in various ways, that she claims indicate a deeper understanding and use of language than would normally be ascribed to a dog.

From the outset, [Christina] has been intentional in her methods, being sure to only demonstrate the use of the board to Stella, rather than simply pressing the buttons for her. The experiment has many similarities to the case of Koko the gorilla, known for learning symbols from American Sign Language. The project is also documented on Instagram, where she films Stella using the device and gives interpretations of the meaning of Stella’s button pressing.

Attemping to communicate on a higher level with animals has long been a mysterious and complex pursuit; one which we’re sure to see more of as various technologies continue to improve. We’d love to see a broader scientific study on the use of AAC tools to “talk” to animals. In such matters, context and interpretation play a large role, and thus it’s difficult to truly gauge the quality of understanding an animal may actually have. More research would be great to shed light on these techniques. Video after the break.

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Taking Pictures Of The Space Station With A Handheld Camera

February 13, 2020 by 15 Comments

It is easy to find out when the space station is passing overhead, and you may have run outside to see the blip of light moving at five miles per second. It turns out that some people make a hobby out of taking its picture, and if you have a pretty beefy telescope you can get some good shots. [Scott], on the other hand, wanted to take a handheld consumer-grade camera and try some pictures. His results show up in the video below.

If you look at the second video from [Thierry], you’ll see [Scott’s] videos are a far cry from state of the art. However, the [Thierry] photos essentially use a special telescope made to track the station very precisely. [Scott] is using a handheld, consumer-grade Nikon P1000.

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BBQ Burners Built From Scratch

February 13, 2020 by 23 Comments

Building a barbecue is a common DIY pursuit, and one that comes with a tasty payoff at completion. While many projects focus on charcoal or wood-fired designs, [Andrew] is more of a gas man. Not one to simply buy off the shelf, he designed his own burners from scratch.

This quest wasn’t just unnecessary yak shaving; burners to suit [Andrew]’s desired size and power simply weren’t available. The burner is designed around the Venturi effect, wherein the propane gas is passed through a small orifice, creating a jet and pulling air along with it as it enters the burner tube. This causes the gases to mix, and they can then be ignited when passing through the outlet holes of the burner. Get the orifice and outlet holes sized just right, and you’ll have a burner that produces a hot, blue flame, perfect for efficient cooking.

The orifice was produced with brass plumbing components, and hooked up to a valve rated for use with gas lines. The burner tube itself was created from stainless steel tube, with slots cut to act as outlet holes and with the end crimped and welded shut. A black iron pipe reducer was then used as the air inlet and orifice mount.

The final result is a powerful barbecue burner that is perfectly sized to [Andrew]’s needs. If you’re keen to build your own custom rig, you may find this a useful and cheap way to go versus sourcing parts off the shelf. We’ve seen [Andrew]’s work before, too. Video after the break.

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